Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

More Of The Same

by digby

I initially had some second thoughts about this post from yesterday. I thought perhaps I was being to harsh in criticizing the Democrats for their response to this Republican trash talk on the war. But I posted it anyway because I honestly believed that they were in danger of screwing this up at a time when there is no reason for it and I feel almost apoplectic at the prospect.

I’m not the only one. From Josh Marshall:

Consider this post an open letter to Senate Democrats.

You’re really doing a poor job in the public debate over Iraq.

Luckily, unlike what’s imagined by the imbeciles who write The Note and others in Washington, reality is not simply a DC media and politics confection. The Dems can muff this several times before coming back and getting it right. And they’d still be more or less fine. Because the Iraq War is still really unpopular. And the great majority of the country has lost faith in President Bush’s conduct of the war.

But that’s still no excuse for handling this so poorly.

The Democrats have to be much more aggressive. But ‘more aggressive’ doesn’t mean a quicker withdrawal. It means making your point forcefully, on your own terms, repeatedly.

But they’re not doing that.

What I see is Republicans on TV repeating their ‘cut and run’ charges. And to the extent I see Democrats, it’s Democrats denying the charge. No, we’re not for cutting and running.

The president wants to stay in Iraq for at least three more years. It’s not that he won’t set a date to withdraw. He doesn’t even have a plan that gets to the point where the US could end the occupation. In practice he wants to stay in Iraq forever. What Repubicans are voting for is More of the Same, More of the Same failed policy.

More here.

The war is unpopular. It’s a quagmire. Yet, they change nothing. The only proposal they can come up with is to grant amnesty to the insurgents in the hopes they will be so grateful they will just give up. That’s it. This war just grinds on, nothing improves, they make no progress.

And they refuse to change course because the president sees everything in terms of losing face and covering ass. From what we’ve been reading this week, it’s his prime motivation for everything. He believes that if he loses face, the country loses face — l’etat c’est moi.

In the face of that, it doesn’t matter whther or not the Democrats all agree to the last comma on a plan for withdrawal. What matters, as Marshall says, is that we are against the status quo:

The thing is that the status quo is morally indefensible because it just means continue to burn through men and money for a failed policy because President Bush isn’t capable of admitting his policies have failed.

He’s like an owner of a business that’s slowly going under. He doesn’t know how to save the situation. So he won’t get more money or resources to fix the business. That’s throwing good money after bad. And he won’t just liquidate and save what he can, because then he’d have to come to grips with the fact that he’s failed. So his policy is denial and slow failure. Here of course the analogy to President Bush is rather precise since he only has to hold out until 2009 when he can give the problem to someone else, just as he did in his past life with other businesses he drove into the ground.

But for the country that’s not acceptable. We don’t have a policy except for slow burn and denial. And the president’s ego isn’t enough to ask men and women to die for. We need an actual plan. And the president doesn’t have one.

Democrats need to hammer this point again and again and not get tripped up in the president’s bully-boy rhetoric. The president has no plan. He wants to stay in Iraq forever. He says for at least three more years. All the Republicans agree they want more of the same.

The Republicans are like mortally wounded dogs who are barely standing but who bare their teeth and growl dangerously when you get too close. When that happens, if you are a responsible person, you don’t get afraid and run away. You get some help and you put the dog down.

They can hammer us with “cut ‘n run” all they want, but they can’t “cut n’ run” from the fact that they are telling the American people there is no end in sight and there is nothing they can do about it. That’s the reason why Dems must step up now and aggressively pound this message home that the president has no plan. In order to win, the people must believe that by electing Democrats they are taking action to change the status quo. Democrats need to hammer the fact that for all the president’s bluster — he’s paralyzed by his inability to admit that he’s made a mistake.

Democrats may not have all the answers. The administration has got us in a hell of a mess and it’s not easy to get us out of it. But the Republicans have made it quite clear that their intention is to keep doing exactly what they are doing until somebody stops them. Democrats need to stop them — and they need the American people to understand that they are the only ones who can stop them. The Republicans can’t stop themselves.

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Privacy For The Common Good

by digby

Kos wrote an interesting post yesterday that deserves some further discussion. He offered his thoughts on Hillary Clinton (which were right on the money in my opinion) and in the midst of it mentions something that Hillary did last week that has not gotten nearly enough attention. (I would suggest that it would have gotten a lot of blogospheric attention if she wanted to use this medium to promote her ideas. This speaks to us directly.)

Last week Hillary introduced what I think should be a primary plank of the the Democratic Party:A Privacy Bill Of Rights. Indeed, I think this is the most fertile territory out there to gain some disaffected Republican voters and put some of the mountain west in our electoral quiver. It’s smart politics.

I happen to be a believer in the Democratic strategy that includes pulling on the civil libertarian threads in our coalition to weave a bigger tent. I’m personally horrified by the excesses of this administration and terribly worried that the huge bureaucratic domestic surveillance apparatus they are building is going to be impossible to control. I hear tales from all over the country of wads of DHS pork going to local and state police departments to use to spy on their own citizens and we know that at the national level they’ve pretty much discarded the fourth amendment and have enabled both the foreign and military spy agencies to work within our borders. There’s a lot of money and power involved, it’s secret and it’s fundamentally anti-democratic. We are building a police state and I firmly believe that, politics aside, if you build it they will use it.

That all this has been done by the alleged libertarian small government Republicans is no surprise to me. They have always been about big bucks and authoritarianism over all else. But it seems to me that it may come as a surprise to people with a certain “don’t tread on me” kind of ethos, particularly in the west which has a long tradition of such sentiment. If these tribal divides about which I often write exist, then there is a big one here. And if politics need to play to the gut as much as the head and the heart, this issue is powerful. Democrats have an opportunity to craft a real message of American independence if they choose to take it — and it might just be the way to beat back the fear factor a little bit, which I think people are getting tired of.

But there is another aspect of this which is important, as well. Clinton’s privacy Bill of Rights includes a lot of consumer protections, which is something that I think is a truly sellable, populist idea. The intrusion into our private lives by government is a threat to our individual liberty. The intrusion (and collusion) by its ally, corporate America, is truly a threat to the fundamental definition of what it means to be an American. The ability to amass all this data and create profiles of us and put us into categories and label us as being one thing or another according to complex formulas, means that the great innovation of America — the ability to reinvent ourselves and take risks — will no longer be optional. The great nation of immigrants and hucksters and innovators will become a stratified society based on criteria that has nothing to do with our potential and everything to do with our past.

Hillary said in her speech the other day: “privacy is synonymous with liberty.” This is correct. We give it up far too thoughtlessly in our culture and its going to come back to bite us if we don’t wake to the fact that big powerful forces are poking into our lives in unprecedented ways and will use the information they get to force us into little boxes they design.

Democrats need to make some new arguments. They need to talk in terms that are relevant to today’s world. Progressives are about progress; we cannot only be concerned about maintaining what we’ve got. We must forge on. If we believe in the common good, which I do, it must be tempered with a healthy respect for individual privacy. Without that we will not have the freedom or the ability to come together to create a better world. We’ll all be too busy furtively looking over our shoulders to pay attention to the road ahead.

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x-posted for Jane on FDL

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Hoovering, In More Ways Than One.

by tristero

When I first saw the headline in the Times, “Bank Data Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror” I naturally assumed that Bush was sniffing through my bank account. After all, he’s listening to my phone calls. Why should my finances be any different? But then I read the article:

The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database…

The program is grounded in part on the president’s emergency economic powers, [Treasury Undersecretary] Levey said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans’ records.

Whew. Well, that’s reassuring. There’s really no potential for abuse. None. Just read the article.

I’m sure they have to obtain the proper warrants. And the outside firm that verifies there really is a good reason to examine the data has zero ties to the Republican party.

Look, it’s not as if there’s a systematic attempt on the part of the Bush administration to break down longstanding legal or institutional barriers to the government’s access to private information about Americans and others inside the United States. It’s only a temporary thing anyway, a response to a national emergency.

They’re not just turning on a vacuum cleaner and sucking in all the information that they can.

“Personal Psychodrama Seems To be Involved”

by digby

Gene Lyons has a great column up this week about Murtha and Karl Rove. You’ll enjoy it. I particularly liked this line:

Murtha didn’t say so, but there’s no chance of an Iraqi democracy friendly to the U. S. That’s a delusion. Bush’s photo-op visit merely underscored the point. Three years after “Mission accomplished,” and the mighty conqueror flies into the fortified “Green Zone” unannounced and can’t trust Iraq’s prime minister enough to give him, oh, an hour’s notice ? That’s not how Alexander the Great did it.

No it’s not. One of the most infuriating things about the triumphal coverage of the Baghdad trip is the fact that the media didn’t seem to think it was noteworthy that after all this time the president (or anybody else) still can’t make a planned visit because he can’t trust anyone and the situation on the ground is so dangerous. Why that’s considered “good news” for him is anyone’s guess. Rational people are right to conclude that there has pretty much been no progress since Bush dropped in exactly the same way for that stupid Turkey stunt. By this time we should have been able to have a state visit and a parade.

Gene brings up something else that I’ve been meaning to write about and keep forgetting:

For the record, Rove’s military experience, like Vice President Dick Cheney’s and that of virtually all the neo-conservative architects of this ill-conceived utopian fantasy, is absolutely zero.

Rove has an interesting story to go along with this, which I’ve not heard discussed and which I’m sure a lot of patriotic Republicans would be interested in rationalizing for us:

While Rove was in high school in Utah, a future president Bill Clinton, was finishing Georgetown University and then moving to England to attend Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. He escaped the draft and, in the famous ROTC letter, outlines his reservations: “The draft system itself is illegitimate. No government really rooted in limited, parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and kill and die in a war they may oppose, a war which even possible may be wrong, a war which in any case does not involve immediately the peace and fredom of the nation.”

Curiously, Rove’s view at the time was not so different, according to classmates. Rove had doubts about the war — which after all was being prosecuted by a Democrat, Lyndon Johnson. In any case he felt government had no right to require citizens to serve in the military.

He and classmate Mark Gustavson sat by the huge windows in the cafeteria discussing the issue. “He was opposed to compulsory service. He felt we don’t need the damn government telling us what to do. We can do it on our own.”

According to Gustavson, Rove had reached his conclusion not from the left, but the right — as an expression of libertarianism. Supporting the war was equivalent to supporting big government and the intrusion of big government, especially the bloated, post-New Deal government of LBJ and Hubert Humphrey and the rest of the liberal washington establishmnent. Whether guided more by the apprehension of being drafter or a commitment to individual liberty, Karl Rove was no fan of the war, or at least the draft.

He brought this passion to the topic of compulsory military service, winning debate after debate in classrooms of receptive draft-age young high school students. He used what he called the “mom, apple pie and flag,” defense meaning the position of the true American patriot. It was a fine piece of rhetorical jujiotsu, friends remembered, which allowed Rove to reconcile opposition to the draft with conservative principle. (Bush’s Brain p. 124)

Jujiotsu indeed. If my draft age brother had tried that argument on my Dad, he would have found himself face down in the dirt. Conservatives of that day didn’t buy it one bit. My father hated Frank Sinatra his whole life because he didn’t go overseas during the war and all the girls were drooling over him back home. (He wasn’t too thrilled with Reagan either, although he voted for them.) This was a big thing to the WWII generation wingnuts who were in charge of Rove’s GOP at the time. No excuses.

I think it’s just awfully interesting that he and Bill Clinton had he same rationale for being against the draft, don’t you? Yet I’ve never hear Karl speak out defending old Bill on this. And when the swiftboat liars were making John Kerry out to be an opportunistic coward in Vietnam, we now know that phony chickenhawk #2982 was a guy who contructed elaborate libertarian arguments to justify being against the draft and that same war. Oh my, he’s always been a slick one.

Lyons writes:

As history, this cut-and-run business is nonsense. It wasn’t Democrats who made peace in Korea. It was President Dwight Eisenhower. Democrats didn’t dispatch Henry Kissinger to whisper to China in 1972 that the U. S. could live with a communist Vietnam. President Richard Nixon did. He began the long, bloody retreat that ended with the North Vietnamese taking Saigon under President Gerald Ford.

Maybe the oddest thing about the legacy of Vietnam is that the worst thing that could happen, from a rightwing perspective, did happen. The U. S. lost the war. Communists conquered much of Southeast Asia. And the effect on national security ? Well, we got lots of good Vietnamese restaurants out of it. Otherwise, none.

The communists soon fell to fighting among themselves, with Vietnam invading Cambodia, China attacking Vietnam, and the Chinese and Soviet Russians entangled in a blood feud. Next, Russia invaded Afghanistan. Domestic fallout from that bloody fiasco helped cause the collapse of the U. S. S. R. and the demise of communism almost everywhere—also because nobody but a few crackpot professors in the West believed in it anymore.

Exactly why so many like Rove, Bush and Cheney, who avoided Vietnam, subsequently metamorphosed into countryclub Napoleons is mysterious. Personal psychodrama appears to be involved.

I don’t think there’s any doubt.

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More Brokeback Kossack

by digby

Until reminded by a Dave Weigel just now, I’d forgotten that the gay Kos bashing thing was actually used in a campaign mailer earlier this year down south. It’s actually quite hilarious.

Here’s a nice way to deal with it. Send a couple of bucks to Brad Miller, the jackass’s opponent. Let’s put our outrage and revulsion to work in a positive way shall we? Be sure to tell him Kos sent you…

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Downsizing The Punditocrisy

by digby

I’m much too disgusted to write about this stuff in any depth right now, but luckily Peter Daou has done it for me. He comments on the latest scribblings by Dame David Broder (thanks CP) and reminds us of a comment from a rightwing blogger acquaintance of his:

I got a call from a conservative blogger with whom I’m appearing at a blog workshop. He’d just read the Cohen piece and much as he said he enjoyed watching liberal bloggers get criticized, he articulated a response to Cohen that was far less polite (and shorter) than the one I intended to post: “Tough sh*t! So after thirty years of writing this stuff in a bubble, you’re finally getting feedback from people who are pissed off. Deal with it.”

Yes indeed. Change is painful. You can either fight it or you can find a way to adjust. But it’s happening. I’m sorry these people are upset about all the “vituperation.” But what the hell did they expect? They’ve been lounging around the beltway court of Versailles eating tarte tatin out of Grover Norquists’ chubby little hands for years now while the country is going to hell. And now the services of the punditocrisy are no longer necessary.

You’ve been outsourced fellas.

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We’re Not That Innocent

by digby

… at least I hope not.

This is a psych-out, Democrats. You know that don’t you?

… people who attended a series of high-level meetings this month between White House and Congressional officials say President Bush’s aides argued that it could be a politically fatal mistake for Republicans to walk away from the war in an election year.

White House officials including the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, outlined ways in which Republican lawmakers could speak more forcefully about the war. Participants also included Mr. Bush’s top political and communications advisers: his deputy chief of staff, Karl Rove; his political director, Sara Taylor; and the White House counselor, Dan Bartlett. Mr. Rove is newly freed from the threat of indictment in the C.I.A. leak case, and leaders of both parties see his reinvigorated hand in the strategy.

The meetings were followed by the distribution of a 74-page briefing book to Congressional offices from the Pentagon to provide ammunition for what White House officials say will be a central line of attack against Democrats from now through the midterm elections: that the withdrawal being advocated by Democrats would mean thousands of troops would have died for nothing, would give extremists a launching pad from which to build an Islamo-fascist empire and would hand the United States its must humiliating defeat since Vietnam.

It’s ballsy and it’s “bold,” but what would you expect from a party that is looking at losing its majority in the fall? Of course they are going to try to run on some faux, patriotic, don’t “cut n run” crapola. What else have they got? It’s their tried and true playbook and the best they can hope for is to trash talk the Democrats into cowering into the corner.

But just because they are running their game again that doesn’t mean that Democrats need to run theirs and get all flustered trying to find a way to appear to support whatever the Republicans say without actually supporting them so they don’tlook soft — and end up looking soft. That is losing politics and never more than now when we have these bastards on the run for the first time in decades.

As U.S. Grant famously said “it’s time to stop worrying about what Bobby Lee is going to do to us and start thinking about what we are going to do to him.”

Go on the offensive on the war, Democrats. Hard. Do not fall for this nonsense again. This is Karl Rove at his most obtuse and obvious. He is not magic (although his latest escape certainly adds to his mystique on that count) and he is not a genius. He’s a cheap thug who is going to try to squeeze one more narrow win out before he retires to teach and lecture younger cheap thugs in how to win by cheating and character assassination.

The best approval rating Bush gets on Iraq is below 40%. Independents are breaking heavily against his policies. There is nothing to be afraid of. The country’s desperate for some leadership. Give it to them. I’m begging you.

Update: I see that Greg Sargent at the Horse’s Mouth discussed this earlier from a different angle, by noting that the elite media always seem to categorize the Republicans as being on offense and the Dems as being on defense, when in fact the parties are attacking each other furiously.

This is an important observation. The problem has been that the Democrats have too often in the past reacted to the elite media and began to see themselves as being on the defensive. It’s a Dem disease. They seem to pay too much attention to the political press and don’t keep their ear to the ground very effectively out in the country.

They must resist this impulse. It is bullshit, particularly in this situation. This is Bush’s war, it’s dramatically unpopular, it’s a horrible meatgrinder and the country has grown tired of the lies. If anyone is on the defensive it’s Bush and his Eunuch Caucus who have made this war their pet cause. The press doesn’t want to report it that way because it feels uncomfortable for them to pile on Republicans. They get a lot of shit for it and are never happier than when they can align themselves with the establishment.

But no matter. The people were able to see through the gauzy, Woodward-created hagiography of Dear Leader after a while and they still do. The fall election is a turnout election. Rank and file Dems will support the party if the party supports them.

Let’s not lose our nerve here.

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Get It Out There

by digby

I’ve told this story before, but those of you who’ve heard it will just have to bear up. In the 1992 election when I was making volunteer calls for Clinton, Mary Matalin made a major gaffe she had to apologize for quite publicly. (Doesn’t matter what it was.) I was riding down in the elevator with a high level political consultant (who didn’t know me from Adam, of course) and I smugly mentioned that Matalin had really stepped in it. He looked at me like I was a moron and said, “she got it out there, didn’t she?”

Here’s another little pointer on wingnut gossip mongering and dirty politics. As you sling the shit with the biggest megaphone you can find, be sure to primly assert that you don’t believe a word of it and chastize those who are doing it on the victim’s behalf. It makes you look like a good guy even though your purpose is to spread the gossip far and wide.

In this case it doesn’t matter much because the “gossip” is irrelevant to normal people and would make no difference if it were true. This gossip is aimed solely at the wingnut doughboy losers who couldn’t manage to get laid at the Bunny Ranch with 5k in their pockets. Still, it’s nice of one of the leading voices in the blogosphere to spread it around, (while being above it all, of course.) It’s good practice for serious swift-boating.

Thank to Tristram Shandy

Update: Well that didn’t take long. From the comments I find that Little Green Footballs has taken the next step (no linky to exterminationist sites):

I can’t help noticing how much Moulitsas’ conspiracy-oriented mindset echoes the anti-rational paranoia of radical Islam.

Now that’s how a real smear is done folks!

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Good Argument For Gun Control

by digby

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Americans mistakenly worried the
United Nations is plotting to take away their guns on July 4 — U.S. Independence Day — are flooding the world body with angry letters and postcards, the chairman of a U.N. conference on the illegal small arms trade said on Wednesday.

“I myself have received over 100,000 letters from the U.S. public, criticizing me personally, saying, ‘You are having this conference on the 4th of July, you are not going to get our guns on that day,”‘ said Prasad Kariyawasam, Sri Lanka’s U.N. ambassador.

“That is a total misconception as far as we are concerned,” Kariyawasam told reporters ahead of the two-week meeting opening on Monday.

For one, July 4 is a holiday at U.N. headquarters and the world body’s staff will be watching a fireworks display from the U.N. lawn rather than attending any meetings, he said.

For another, the U.N. conference will look only at illegal arms and “does not in any way address legal possession,” a matter left to national governments to regulate rather than the United Nations, he added.

The campaign is largely the work of the U.S. National Rifle Association, whose executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, warns on an NRA Web site (http://www.stopungunban.org/) of a July 4 plot “to finalize a U.N. treaty that would strip all citizens of all nations of their right to self-protection.”

Sweet Jesus this country has a lot of stupid people in it.

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I Beg Your Pardon

by digby

I think it’s fairly obvious that this trial balloon over the week-end to pardon Scooter Libby is for real and we should all take it quite seriously. It wasn’t just Mr Joe DiToensing who said it, it was none other than William Kristol on Fox news:

[Fitzgerald] indicted one person, not for any underlying crime, but for allegedly mis-remembering a couple of conversations with reporters when talking about them to the grand jury — these were conversations that went nowhere. No one thinks Scooter Libby actually leaked Valerie Plame’s name, even if that were a crime, which is isn’t.

Bush should pardon Scooter Libby and get the whole thing over with…I am blaming Ashcroft for recusing himself. And the CIA was out to get people in the White House at that point. And Bush should pardon Scooter Libby.

Here’s a little reminder of our friend Kristol from a few years back:

What Republicans now need is the nerve to fight. They must stand for, to quote Helprin again, “the rejection of intimidation, the rejection of lies, the rejection of manipulation, the rejection of disingenuous pretense, and a revulsion for the sordid crimes and infractions the president has brought to his office.” (Weekly Standard, May 25, 1998, page 18.)

I guess it all depends on the gravity of the crime. Clinton as we know, was accused of lying in a civil case and covering up an extra-marital affair — by a flamboyantly partisan prosecutor who selectively leaked like a sieve. Libby, on the other hand, is accused of lying about whether he leaked the name of a CIA officer to the press — by a non-partisan, tight-lipped prosecutor who has been very conservative in developing this case (something for which Karl Rove should thank his lucky stars.) I’m not even going to make the argument as to why one is more deserving of approbation and legal consequence. It’s obvious.

As for a pardon, I realize that the administration believes in pre-emption, but this is ridiculous. As Elizabeth Edwards, writing today on her blog over at One America Committee pointed out:

Is there some greater benefit here to a pardon or some mitigating circumstances that make a pardon acceptable? The prosecution was not political; the defendant was knowledgeable about the law and the offense; the prosecution itself will not be disruptive to our national interest and in fact might give other potential leakers some pause before they use damaging information for political purposes. I think the only rationale for a pardon is that the inner political chicanery of the administration could be revealed during the trial of Libby.

Well, here’s a message: the country already knows. All a pardon does is confirm the perception that in addition to being a White House where the powerful think they can do what they want regardless of what is right or lawful, it is also a White House where responsibility and accountability (remember, those things they wanted from fourth grade public school teachers?) are nowhere to be found.

Thank you.

I wouldn’t put it past them to pardon Libby. After all, they’ve gotten away with pardoning themselves for their crimes for the past 30 years. Indeed, the precedent for this was set when Poppy pardoned Cap Weinberger et al on Christmas eve as he was leaving office. And nobody said a peep.

As Robert Parry wrote in this prescient piece:

In marked contrast to the continuing Republican investigations of President Clinton, the Democrats eight years ago cooperated with Republicans in shutting down substantive inquiries that implicated President George H.W. Bush in a variety of geopolitical scandals.

At that time, the Democrats apparently felt that pursuing those inquiries into Bush’s role in secret contacts with Iran – both in 1980 and during the Iran-contra affair – and getting to the bottom of alleged CIA military support for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the mid-1980s would distract from the domestic policy goals at the start of the Clinton presidency.

That judgment, however, has come back to haunt the Democrats. Clearing George H.W. Bush in 1993 ironically set the stage both for the Republican scandal-mongering against Clinton and for the restoration of the Bush family dynasty in 2000.

Certainly, the Democratic gestures of bipartisanship were not reciprocated by the Republicans. They opted for a pattern of aggressive politics that challenged the Clinton administration from its first days and has continued through the 2000 Election and into the new round of investigations of ex-President Clinton.

The Democrats have found themselves constantly on the defensive, sputtering about the unfairness of it all.

[…]

Beyond obscuring these important chapters of recent history and thus adding to the confusion of the American people, the Democrats discovered that their deferential strategy gained them nothing from the Republicans. If anything, the Democratic behavior was taken as a sign of weakness.

After the Democrats folded the Reagan-Bush investigations, the Republicans simply swept their easy winnings off the table and raised the stakes.

No kidding. These zombie Republicans just keep coming back, more crooked and more blatant about it every time. They just sweep their winnings off the table and raise the stakes.

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