The Writer’s Voice Visiting Author Series Presents:
Glenn Greenwald “How Would a Patriot Act?”
Saturday, June 17, 2006
8:00 PM
Reading/Discussion/Q & A
West Side YMCA– The George Washington Lounge
5 West 63rd Street (between Central Park West & Broadway)
~Admission Free and Open to the Public~
We are pleased to continue our partnership with 67Wine, who in part provide beverages for our readings, in order to make your experience here even more pleasurable. Please visit their web site.
Copies of “How Would A Patriot Act” will be available for sale from our good friends at BookCourt, from downtown Brooklyn.
Go drink wine with Glenn and buy the book if you haven’t already. You won’t be disappointed.
Wow. It’s rare to see conventional wisdom being created right before your eyes, but this Chuck Todd piece is a masterpiece. Cokie just got her cocktail party chatter in nice bullet pointed talking points:
“From 30,000 feet, all of the elements for a big Democratic triumph seem to be in place, but zooming in closer on the nation’s landscape reveals a Democratic Party that just isn’t sure enough of itself to lead.
Consider:
Ned Lamont’s Democratic primary challenge to Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman. (You’ve heard of “rose-colored” glasses; well, some in the party view everything through “war-colored” glasses.)
Pennsylvania Rep. John Murtha’s (D) incredibly premature bid for House “majority” leader against longtime party stalwart, Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md. That introduced a level of cockiness the party didn’t need, particularly after last week’s less-than-stellar performance. Moreover, challenges like this only serve to divide the party. At least Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is showing signs of knowing when a bad idea has been launched by squelching the Murtha campaign.
The rigorous “party credential” test Reagan Secretary of the Navy James Webb (D) was forced to undergo in Virginia. Republicans throw parades and clear primary fields for Democratic Party interlopers; former Reagan Navy secretaries-turned-Democratic Senate aspirants don’t grow on trees.
The tepid response Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., is receiving among liberal bloggers. Love her or hate her, it’s surprising that liberal activists seem to be turning their back on someone who has carried an enormous amount of water for the party.
The throwback ticket of statewide nominees California Democrats picked last week. There’s nothing like stunting the growth of the party in the biggest state of the union by nominating throwbacks. The biggest thing the party has to fear is a victory of the Democratic ticket.
Pelosi’s difficulty in purging her caucus of Rep. William “Freezer Cash” Jefferson, D-La. When are some in the party going to realize that not everything is about race?
Not one of these intraparty disputes is cause for alarm, but collectively, they paint a picture of a party that’s not yet ready to lead.”
I particularly like the phrase “throwback ticket” to describe progressives. And the biggest thing the party has to fear is victory. It just doesn’t get any better than that.
“The Democrats are not ready to lead.” I think we all know why, don’t we? The “war colored glasses” crowd is a terrible influence, don’t you know. We’re so out of control we are supporting a challenger in a Senate primary! Call out the guard!
The DC press corpse has been terribly distressed having to report so negatively about Republicans all the time. After all these years of being mau-maued by the right about being liberal I suspect the current political situation feels like their fur is being rubbed the wrong way. This Chuck Todd narrative gives them a much more comfortable way to report this.
And the best part is that if we win, they can use this narrative to describe us as immature and unready to govern right up through 2008, at which point they can deliver their favorite tough talker, John McCain, as the grown-up Daddy who will save us all.
You see, this “immature” label goes back a long, long way — all the way to the 60’s. It’s the standard baby boomer narrative that gets more absurd by the day as huge numbers of us greying lefties get closer to the grave. But I suspect it won’t die until we do, and maybe not even then. Liberals do tend to be idealists, which jaded insiders always find distasteful (unless it’s Junior Codpiece blathering on incoherently about the “Almighty’s gift of freedom” in which case they applaud wildly.)
Coverage of the Clinton administration from day one was all about the “undisciplined” atmosphere. Indeed, you’ll recall that the very last story of the administration was the RNC manufactured lies about the rampaging Clintonites trashing Air Force One. It was so silly it was hard to believe the press would go for it, but they did. Democrats, you see, are perpetual teen-agers. Cokie and her friends will tell you all about it, even as they gleefully rummage through underwear drawers and babble about haircuts and earthtones with all the gravitas of a seventh grade slumber party.
As much as Todd’s piece is pure CW drivel, he does make one point I think may be important. He notes:
…some realism has finally entered the equation when it comes to 2006, mostly based on one result — the Calif.-50 special election.
The race told us two things:
* There’s no extra excitement in the Democratic base, as there was no increase in the Democratic vote in Calif.-50. (The same was true of the entire state.)
* Immigration is an issue powerful enough to rally the Republican base.
These lessons run counter to the conventional wisdom from just two weeks ago that presumed Democrats were more fired up about the 2006 elections than Republicans, who supposedly were having their own problems firing up their base.
I don’t know if that race actually proves that, but I think the general observation may be correct. I have to agree that Democrats have yet to fire up the base enough. And the reason is that although many voters are unhappy with Bush they can’t see how things will be any different with Democrats in charge of the congress.
The Democracy Corps memo of a week or so ago said this:
Democrats have a strong and consistent lead in both the “real” Congressional vote and Senate races. In our latest survey, Democrats enjoy an 8-point advantage in the “real” vote for Congress and have led by an average of 9 points over the past three months. In the race for Senate, the Democrats hold an 11-point edge in the “real” Senate vote over the past three months and even more impressively, lead by 10 points in races with vulnerable Republican incumbents. These advantages are impressive, but they are not big enough for Democrats to recapture the House or Senate.
The Democrat’s current advantage in the “real” vote for Congress is still a couple points short of the swing needed to match 1994 and what the data says is possible for the party to achieve. On virtually every test of message and policy direction in this survey, the Democratic advantage is twice that of the current vote margin. The voters want to give the Democrats a bigger margin than they are currently achieving. If the challenger campaigns are effective, they can catch this wave.
If the Democrats and challengers fail to show voters something more, this disillusionment could show itself in fragmentation to smaller parties and more likely, a stay-at-home protest. The current measures of potential Democratic turnout and enthusiasm are not impressive. And while it is likely that a low turnout election will hurt Republicans more than Democrats, a stay-away protest vote could also cut into the margin Democrats might have achieved.
Democrats can ignore this and fret about the immature and distasteful grassroots — or they can start giving their base a reason to vote for them. Mid-terms are about turn-out. Until rank and file Dems see that their party won’t just excuse, enable and endorse GOP policies they have no reason to get off the couch.
Let’s be clear about this: if we lose this fall, it will not be because the “war colored glasses” crowd was immature and failed to behave properly at the debutante ball. It will be because the Democratic establishment blew off its own voters in order to please David Broder and the stale DC punditocrisy — the same thing they have been doing for more than a decade and losing.
Don’t look at us. We’re trying to get Democratic voters charged up about being Democrats again. Pissing and moaning because Joe Lieberman is facing a primary challenge is having the opposite effect. If we lose, it will be because the party establishment once more showed contempt for Democratic voters — a fatal error the Republicans never ever make.
Issue #1 is Bush. Issue #2 is everything else. Until Bush no longer has a Republican majority in the House and the Senate to rubber stamp nearly everything he wants, your opinions and ideas mean squat. No. Less than squat.
Make reining in Bush *the* issue. Republicans in Congress will do whatever Bush wants, but the country is fed up with what Bush wants. They’ve seen how much damage he causes. Only Democratic majorities in Congress can prevent him from wreaking even worse havoc on the country. Bush is the issue. And hoo boy! has Bush made the your job incredibly easy:
Remember: Bush really is incompetent. And the American public sees it now.
Remember: Bush really has governed above the law. And the the American public understands that now.
Remember: Bush has bogged this nation down in an insane war. And the American public understands that now.
Remember: Bush does not have a genuine plan to deal with Iraq, nor is he capable of creating and implementing one. People are dying because he doesn’t know what he’s doing. And the American public understands that now.
Remember: Bush’s supreme callousness and negligence led to the hiring of the incompetents in charge of FEMA during Katrina. And the American public knows it.
Remember: This is one helluva unpopular president. The American public has very good reasons for disliking him and his policies so intensely. They are all but begging you to stand up and refuse to go along with his incompetent, extremist, and unlawful behavior.
This is just awesome. The US found some al-Zarqawi documents that prove that we are smokin ’em outa their caves and that we’ve gottem on the run! And Bush was right all along! Yeaaaah!
A blueprint for trying to start a war between the United States and Iran was among a “huge treasure” of documents found in the hideout of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Iraqi officials said Thursday. The document, purporting to reflect al-Qaida policy and its cooperation with groups loyal to ousted President Saddam Hussein, also appear to show that the insurgency in Iraq was weakening.
The al-Qaida in Iraq document was translated and released by Iraqi National Security Adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie. There was no way to independently confirm the authenticity of the information attributed to al-Qaida.
Now, “some” might say since the Bush administration has been proved to be planting propaganda in both the Iraqi and US press, since we’ve “found” many spurious documents in Iraq before, and since they are lying scumbags about virtually everything including whether the sun came up this morning — that we should be skeptical of such things. I am not one of those people. Clearly, the war is won and we can bring the troops home.
I think it’s really lucky, though, that al-Zarqawi was keeping such meticulous notes and blueprints. Why do you suppose he was doing that? Was he required to send regular reports back to headquarters? A potential book deal perhaps? Maybe he was a blogger.
Anyway, note to revolutionaries, terrorists and insurgents everywhere: my mother told me many years ago, “never put on paper what the world can’t see.” You might want to think about that. Coz’ look what your sloppiness has done. Now the infidel knows all your plans and that you know they are winning. Gawd, how embarrassing! Moral is going to be shit after this.
While the coalition was continuing to suffer human losses, “time is now beginning to be of service to the American forces and harmful to the resistance,” the document said.
The document said the insurgency was being hurt by, among other things, the U.S. military’s program to train Iraqi security forces, by massive arrests and seizures of weapons, by tightening the militants’ financial outlets, and by creating divisions within its ranks.
[…]
According to the summary, insurgents were being weakened by operations against them and by their failure to attract recruits. To give new impetus to the insurgency, they would have to change tactics, it added.
Can you believe it? Why George W. Bush was right on every single thing! Boy, is my face red.
There’s a lot more at the link — example after example of how the insugency is being beaten down by the superior US battle plan. There can be no more doubts. We’ve turned the corner. When the evil mastermind himself writes on his blog that he is helpless in the face of your superior superiority and that he’s just about to give up because you are so much stronger and better and gooder — well, there can be no further doubt that the US has kicked some terrorist ass but good. It’s morning in America folks. The war is won!
Cool! It looks like Ed Helms, one of the funniest guys on tv, is set to play a bumbling White House counselor with a fear of flying in a 21st century remake of the Abrahams/Zucker masterpiece, Airplane! Man I can’t wait!
But who’s that guy next to Ed? It looks like it could be Moe Howard’s grandson. Better check the cast list…
This new Lieberman poll is an earthquake. Ned Lamont could win this thing. The word is that Lieberman is actually quite serious about leaving the party, but that’s not actually correct. Connecticut Democrats seem to be leaving him.
Naturally, this is just terrible. Who has ever heard of supporting a candidate in a primary to challenge an incumbent with whom you are unhappy? Why, it’s political terrorism, I tell ya!
“I think to be terrorized through the summer by an extremely small group of the Democratic Party, much less the voting population, is total insanity for a person who is a three-term senator,” Droney said.
Looks like that extremely small group of terrorists is on its way to becoming a majority of Democrats. How very untidy. Usurping a three term Senator simply isn’t done, you see. He’s been ordained by God.
Josh Marshall put it well in this post about the campaign from last week:
But what was Lieberman’s excuse [for refusing to back protecting social security]?
We went back and forth with him. I’d talk to his staffers and folks around him and work and work and work to get a straight answer, but just had the hardest time. It was always this statement or that that seemed to support Social Security but really left the door open to some compromise on phase out when you looked at it closely. On and on and on.
And what was the point of that? Certainly it wasn’t political, at least not in the narrow sense. Lieberman didn’t have anything to worry about in Connecticut. If it was ideological, what’s that about? It’s a core Democratic issue. Not a shibboleth or a sacred cow. But a core reason why most Democrats are Democrats.
In the end it just seemed like a desire to be in the mix for some illusory compromise or grand bargain, an ingrained disinclination to take a stand, even in a case when it really mattered. There’s some whiff of indifference to the great challenges of the age, even amidst the atmospherics of concern.
This of course doesn’t even get into everything on Iraq or the pussy-footing over running the Pentagon for President Bush.
I think the most generous read on Lieberman is that he’s just out of step with the parliamentary turn of recent American politics which I myself, Mark Schmitt and many others have discussed. But I think that’s too generous. The whining in Washington that it’s somehow an affront that Lieberman’s hold on his senate is being threatened is entirely misplaced, a good example of what’s wrong with DC’s permanent class.
Exactly. The establishment would obviously like to do away with primaries. They would prefer to simply tell the plebes for whom to vote and just take their money. But, that’s not the way it’s going to work anymore. It’s not just that politics have taken a parliamentary turn, which is quite true. It goes to the heart of why so many Americans don’t trust Democrats to lead: the spineless factor. It’s why the Democratic terrorists are going to take the radical step of trying to elect someone who doesn’t publicly kiss George W. Bush on the lips every chance he gets.
You don’t have to look any further than Joe Lieberman to understand why the entire world thinks Democrats are a bunch of chickenshit losers. We’re tired of being associated with someone who can’t even stand a fair fight in the Connecticut Democratic party without whining like snivelling schoolkid and threatening to take his ball and go home. Why should anyone trust such a gutless tool with the reins of government? I know I don’t. The party is on notice that this just won’t be tolerated anymore by leading Blue State Democrats.
Here’s the plan. First, the Democratic terrorists are going to kick Lieberman’s ass. After that, they are going to kick the Republican party’s ass. And finally they will kick bin Laden’s ass. We didn’t create this hard core political environment, the Republicans did, with the help of self-serving Dems like Lieberman. Now somebody has to clean up all these messes. The crazed Democratic terrorists who are willing to cast aside all morality by ruthlessly supporting a primary challenger (who is not a travelling Deadhead, but rather a middle of the road self made millionaire) seem to be the only ones who are willing to do it.
Schumer said that the DSCC “fully supports” Sen. Joe Lieberman in his primary bid, and he refused to rule out continuing that support if Lieberman were to run as an independent.
There were degrees of independence, Schumer said. “You can run as an independent, you can run as an independent Democrat who pledges to vote for Harry Reid as Majority Leader.”
Uhm, no. You don’t get to leave the party to avoid losing in a Democratic primary and then expect Democratic party financial support to run against the Democratic candidate. That’s just nuts. And it’s so disrespectful to the Democratic voters of Connecticut I can’t honestly believe he has thought this through.
If they do this, it will cause a full on backlash against the Democratic Party by the rank and file and the party elders like Shumer have no one to blame but themselves. Frankly, this arrogant dictatorial attitude would be a little bit easier to take if the party hadn’t given away the fucking store for the last quarter century and gotten exactly nothing in return. The last time I checked these people haven’t won anything in a long, long time. Why we are supposed to keep putting our faith in their greater capacity to win is beyond me. Certainly, the unmitigated gall of these goddamned losers lording over the voters like this is going to kill this party. A little humility is called for here.
This is probably going to be an interesting site. I haven’t had a chance to read it over very carefully (except to note that Elain Kamarck is openly suggesting that we run the Dukakis campaign again because it might work this time.) But I think it’s probably going to be a useful insight into the thinking of the strategic workings of the Democratic party.
I can’t help but wonder, however, why anyone would think that calling the thing “The Democratic Strategist” was a great idea? Talk about bad branding. If there is a more ridiculed and disrespected phrase in the party at the moment, I can’t think of what it would be.
Somehow, I have a feeling this wrong choice says something important. I can’t quite put my finger on what it might be …
Ana Marie Cox’s latest dispatch from YKOS online cautions all you funny little bumpkins who have never been to a political bash before to be careful of being co-opted by the elite. She’s been a real “journalist” for almost five minutes now so she understands how to handle being handled. You, on the other hand, are putty in their hands. Word to the wise.
But Cox is very confused about something else. She writes:
Many marveled that Warner would spend so much on bloggers — bloggers! — especially given that the progressive Internet movement has yet to claim a significant general election victory. But from publicity perspective, the campaign got a significant bang for its buck. “Think about it,” said a Warner staffer, “If we threw this kind of thing for the DNC [Democratic National Committee], it would be just another party.” As it was, the event’s buzz reverberated throughout the community and into the mainstream media.
Warner was the first Presidential hopeful to commit to coming to Yearly Kos. Jerome Armstrong, the co-author of “Crashing the Gate” with Yearly Kos namesake Markos Moulitsas, is the governor’s Internet consultant and unofficial blogger liaison. Clearly, the Warner campaign has great hopes for leveraging what convention-goers call “the netroots.” Yet to judge by Warner’s actual speech, the netroots are just another constituency, a Democratic special-interest group to be placated by a campaign promise or two. Aside from a warm-up that referenced the night’s festivities, Warner delivered his time-tested stump speech to the crowd, its paeans to the need for education and national security indistinguishable from what he might say to the Milwaukee teacher’s association or the Charleston VFW. This lack of special treatment—or absence of pandering—is either a sign of respect or confusion.
(Note that “many” marveled. Not the vague and ill defined “some” that that George Bush uses all the time, but “many.” How many, I wonder? And who? Were they really, really cool insiders who know about this stuff, or the hillbillies from Mud Holler who don’t know nothin’ bout no big time politickin’? Just curious.)
But that’s not why I highlighted this paragraph in her otherwise fairly uninformative and ennervating piece. Cox’s observations about politicians pandering to the netroots as a special interest show she misunderstands the meaning of both special interest and pandering.
A “special interest group,” by definition, has a special interest. Like the environment. Or gun rights. If Warner or any other candidate saw the netroots as a special interest group, what’s the special interest? Net neutrality? Free broadband? Censorship?
I’m not saying that we don’t have an interest in keeping the net free from government interference etc., but that’s just a basic necessity to keep doing what we’re doing. Our “special interest” is progressive politics — which is a pretty broad definition of “special.” We care about all the same stuff that Democrats everywhere do and we are perhaps even more interested than most in hearing the whole program, how it’s presented and what the priorities are, because we are a communication medium and we will be spreading the good news if we hear it. So, it’s wrong to say that Warner made a mistake in not tailoring a speech to the Netroots. There is simply no way to pander to our special interest because we have no special interest. The netroots are just grassroots progressives organized in a new way.
She goes on to claim that Dean, on the other hand, did pander to the conventioneers as a special interest group by giving a partisan speech. If the Chairman of the Democratic party is considered to be pandering when he gives a rousing pep talk to a group of hard core grassroots Democrats then let the panderfest begin. It’s part of the job description. (I’ll make sure to let the broadcasters know that when Bill Cohwer gives a halftime pep talk to the Steelers next season, they should refer to it as pandering.)
Cox spends the rest of her column observing that bloggers yearn to be mainstream journalists, but don’t have the skills. She may not know much about how politics work, but Cox’s current gig at TIME magazine as their ex-blogger expert shows her to be uniquely qualified to comment on that particular subject.
Update:
Cox was reportedly distraught that her notebook went missing during the convention. Somebody found it.
In comments to a previous post, NY Expat was correct that I had not read Kos’s description of a “Libertarian Democrat” worldview. Having now read it, I find it a brilliant example of framing a set of political beliefs in an attractive way. What Kos is describing, of course, is not so much a brand of libertarianism as it is a moderate form of contemporary liberalism (somewhat more moderate than my own, by the way, but certainly respectable and defensible).
If this kind of relabeling helps attract more voters, I’m all for it. Nevertheless, actual libertarianism – with its radical emphasis on the elimination of government regulation, coupled with a frankly naive attitude towards the obvious potential for such policies when implemented to create a profoundly illiberal society – remains a political philosophy which most liberal Democrats will find rather unhelpful. Liberal Democrats need to articulate a genuinely serious set of commonsense proposals to help this country regain its democracy and its stature, so majorly battered by the present Republican “mainstream” and other extremists on the right.
It is unclear to me what positive ideas libertarianism can offer to liberalism that are unique. For example, if affirmative action and Social Security are such cancers on the nation, what does a libertarian believe would be sensible improvements. Mere elimination of these programs will not responsibly address the underlying issues that led to their proposal in the first place.
Josh Marshall has a nice response up to Jonah Goldberg’s plaintive cry of “where can Rove go to get his reputation back?”
As Andrew Sullivan aptly quips, maybe Rove can go look for it in South Carolina. More to the point, let’s not forget the salient facts here. The question going back three years ago now is whether Karl Rove knowingly participated in leaking the identity of a covert CIA operative for the purpose of discrediting a political opponent who was revealing information about the White House’s use of intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq War.
That was the issue. From the beginning, Rove, through Scott McClellan, denied that he did any of that. There weren’t even any clever circumlocutions. He just lied. From admissions from Rove, filings in the Libby case, and uncontradicted reportage, we know as clearly as we ever can that Rove did do each of those things.
So he did do what he was suspected of and he did lie about it.
These things may not have risen to a level of criminality, but they were low-down political dirty tricks at the very least. We know this. And we know that Rove has done whisper campaigns about judges being pedophiles and governors being lesbians and war heroes being cowards. He plays a form of despicable hardball politics by character assassination. He makes no bones about it. These things are not illegal. But they are despicable and loathesome, nonetheless.
As Marshall points out, Fitzgerald gave up on charging under the leak statute early on. This has always been about perjury and obstruction. Whether Rove cut a deal or Fitz just couldn’t make a case for those two crimes is unknown. What is not unknown is whether Rove is a lying, scumbag piece of shit. He is.
And when the the Libby trial happens next winter, I suspect it will be spelled out in uncertain terms just how low these people are willing to go.
[Rove] also told the FBI, the same sources said, that circulating the information was a legitimate means to counter what he claimed was politically motivated criticism of the Bush administration by Plame’s husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Rove and other White House officials described to the FBI what sources characterized as an aggressive campaign to discredit Wilson through the leaking and disseminating of derogatory information regarding him and his wife to the press, utilizing proxies such as conservative interest groups and the Republican National Committee to achieve those ends, and distributing talking points to allies of the administration on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. Rove is said to have named at least six other administration officials who were involved in the effort to discredit Wilson.
Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten of the Los Angeles Times reported on July 18 that top White House aides were in a state of mania around this time two years ago, “intensely focused on discrediting” Joseph Wilson after he wrote his now-famous New York Times op-ed piece.
Hamburger’s and Wallsten’s sources tell them that Karl Rove’s animus toward Wilson was so intense that curiosity arose within the White House about it. When asked about this, Rove reportedly said, “He’s a Democrat.”
I’m sure that many Republicans feel that this was just great. It shows that Karl has the biggest balls in town. But I suspect there are others who aren’t quite so enamored of this petty political crapola when it comes to serious issues like why went into Iraq.
As I wrote earlier, Karl’s testimony should be very interesting.
