Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Man’s Better Hells Angels

by digby

It appears that Judge Michael Luttig learned the hard way that believing certain men can be entrusted with extra-constitutional powers because they are “good” is foolish. You’d think that a member of the “Federalist Society” would have known better since the main author of The Federalist Papers made it pretty explicit that this was the reason for the three separate branches of government. Luttig got burned in the worst possible way; he put his reputation on the line and they used it like toilet paper and then threw it away. And predictably they are now busily smearing his character:

When the opinion was issued on Sept. 9, Judge Luttig delivered a coup: a unanimous opinion, written by himself, declaring that the president’s powers to detain those he considered enemy combatants apply anywhere in the world, including the U.S.

Judge Luttig, according to a person familiar with the court proceedings, put his own credibility on the line, drawing on his own experience in national-security law and confidence in Bush administration officials he knew. He argued to his colleagues that the government wouldn’t have sought such extraordinary powers unless absolutely necessary, this person says.

Then, in November, the administration suddenly announced that it didn’t consider Mr. Padilla an enemy combatant any more and would charge him in a regular federal court. The move came just two days before the government’s deadline to submit briefs to the Supreme Court, which was weighing an appeal of the Fourth Circuit’s September decision.

A person familiar with the judge’s thinking says it’s evident he felt the government had pulled “the carpet out from under him.” In an interview yesterday, Judge Luttig said, “I thought that it was appropriate that the Supreme Court would have the final review of the case.”

Attorney General Gonzales offered no explanation for the move, but critics accused the government of gaming the court system. By making the Supreme Court appeal moot, the government could avoid a possible reversal at the nation’s highest court while preserving the favorable Fourth Circuit ruling.

Instead of granting what the government considered a pro forma request to transfer Mr. Padilla to civilian custody, Judge Luttig ordered the parties to submit arguments over the question. On Dec. 21, Judge Luttig delivered a judicial bombshell: a carefully worded order refusing to move Mr. Padilla until the Supreme Court decided what to do. The order all but accused the Bush administration of misconduct.

“The government’s abrupt change in course” appeared designed “to avoid consideration of our decision by the Supreme Court,” Judge Luttig wrote. The government’s actions suggested that “Padilla may have been held for these years…by mistake” and, even worse, that the government’s legal positions “can, in the end, yield to expediency.” Such tactics, Judge Luttig warned, could exact a “substantial cost to the government’s credibility before the courts.”

A furious Bush administration asked the Supreme Court to overrule the Fourth Circuit. The ruling “second guesses and usurps both the president’s commander-in-chief authority and the Executive’s prosecutorial discretion in a manner inconsistent with bedrock principles of separation of powers,” Mr. Clement, the solicitor general, wrote.

The Supreme Court agreed to let Mr. Padilla move — he is now in a Miami jail — but the administration’s strategy of funneling war-powers cases to the Fourth Circuit was in tatters.

“Luttig’s parting shot as a judge may be the most defining opinion that he’s written,” says A.E. Dick Howard, who taught Judge Luttig at the University of Virginia School of Law and has been his friend since. Prof. Howard says the opinion reminds him of a line from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”: “Nothing in his life/ Became him like the leaving it.”

People familiar with Judge Luttig’s thinking say he knew his condemnation of the administration would bring a personal cost but he believes that judges must apply the law regardless of its political implications. These people say he has been disillusioned by the encroachment of politics on the judiciary — and the view that judges are on “our team” or “their team.”

People close to the Bush administration see it differently. They dismiss Judge Luttig’s opinion as a judicial tantrum, noting that it came after he was passed over three times for a Supreme Court position. President Bush nominated Judge Roberts, Harriet Miers (who withdrew) and Judge Samuel Alito.

Welcome to our nightmare, Judge.

And then, of course, we find out just today that the government has been lying through its teeth about its illegal wiretapping when they said it was carefully targeting to only Al Qaeda suspects making calls to or from a foreign country. Basically they’ve been gathering information about every American’s telephone and email habits. What they’ve done with all that information we do not know.

This is the same government that Michael Luttig told his fellow judges on the fourth circuit could be trusted because they would never do such things unles they absolutely had to … the same government that turned around and punked Michael Luttig by doing an end run around the Supreme Court which precipitated him leaving the court.

This is not an abstract argument anymore. It’s not just about what might happen if we slide down the slippery slope and somebody really bad takes power and uses these powers to do bad things. The people in power right now are doing bad things and lying about it, as Michael Luttig, one of their own, found out personally. They are the reason the Bill of Rights were written in the first place.

Look for Karl Rove and his band of media sycophants to start agitating for the Democrats to lay off this issue again because it will make them look weak on terrorism. Everyone needs to start asking themselves why Karl would be warning Democrats not to do something that he believes will benefit him.

.

I See Gandhi Peering Through Overton’s Window. And Weeping.

by tristero

I’d like to add some more thoughts to what Digby discusses here. First of all, while it may seem from a casual reading that Digby is endorsing Trevino’s concept of strategizing which he (Trevino) calls Overton’s Window, in fact he is not. Certainly the right has been remarkably effective at getting the screwiest ideas accepted. That doesn’t mean the way in which they go about it will work for un-screwy ideas. Like liberal ones. It would helpful, sez Digby, to discuss how we can think of modern day politics so that we can get those good ideas to become acceptable as policy proposals. That is a discussion well worth having. Boy do we need it!

That said, while (or since) Overton’s Window as described by Trevino (aka Tacitus, who is well known to many of us) is, I believe, a genuine rightwing strategy to advance an extremist agenda, I think it has limited usefulness for liberals. Short version: the Window is an approach that is optimized for inflicting deeply unpopular policies on a country that really doesn’t want them. Most liberal goals are far more popular, or have the potential to be popular, than the crackpot notions of the extreme right and there are more effective ways to formulate ideas that the majority of people actually like.

Nevertheless, it is vital that we understand what Republicans have been doing, be it the Wedge strategy of Intelligent Design, Frank Luntz and Newt Gingrich’s framing, or what Trevino says the think tanks are up to. And yes, the Trevino’s take on the Overton Window smells like the Right. It sounds superficially reasonable and plausible, the fruit of apparently careful thought by serious people. But it’s not.

Essentially, Trevino means moving a given idea slowly from the “unthinkable” to the “radical” to the “debatable” and through more steps into policy. In order to do this, you take a topic, say, use of force in foreign policy, and you arrange the possibilities as a continuum that is roughly far right to far left:

— Massive first-strike Hydrogen Bomb assault on dozens of cities with no warning.

— First-strike assault with atomic weapons on 5 cities. Two hours warning.

— First-strike tactical nuclear attack. Twenty-four hours warning.

[skipping across the continuum]

— Invasion, overthrow of the enemy government, and occupation of the country.

[Skip]

— Diplomatic efforts to defuse a serious crisis coupled with covert efforts to undermine the enemy regime.

— Diplomacy, no covert action.

And so on (for the purpose of illustration, as Trevino himself says, the details of what specific action is more right or more left are not critical.). Then you identify what the public will currently accept and that is the “window” in which there is an opportunity to move the debate in the direction several notches in the poltical direction you want.

In truth, this is a distorted, but operational, version of Gandhi’s famous quip,”First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

But this is the far right, after all, not Mahatma Gandhi. And what, in the hands of the Great Soul, was a strategy for liberation of an oppressed people becomes in the right’s grubby paws an excuse for blatant lying, outright deception, no-holds barred bullying, intimidation to the extreme of eliminationist rhetoric. As Trevino knows as well as anyone, the particular characterization of the “methodology” he extols for opening up “political possibilities” is actually a recipe for engaging in some seriously intense rightwing shit-slinging.

You see, what Trevino describes hinges upon vilifying and destroying the political center while portraying far right extremists as moderates. It simply cannot work without recasting the political center as extremist. And so, with a breathtaking cynicism for the truth and ethical principle, Trevino and his fellow Fellows – along with their less-privileged familiars in the rightwing punditocracy – have proceeded with tremendous enthusiasm to slime and smear their betters – decent politicians in the political mainstream like Kerry, Gore and many others with a lifetime of exceptional service to their country. These centrists are portrayed, by Trevino and his pals, as far-left extremists, corrupt liars, un-American cowards, and outright traitors. Moderately liberal pro-globalization economists such as Krugman are “quasi-socialist” and Powell is, of all things, a liberal one step removed from Vidal. Because it’s not just “liberals” they go after. Richard Clarke – no liberal – and the other mainstream conservative truth-tellers are rewarded for their decades of public service by having their reputation befouled by an unpricipled bastard like Rove. And when Trevino and fellow operatives like Krauthammer want to be charitable, these sensible, competent, centrists – many of whom, like Powell, have been seriously compromised in the past five years but whose service to their country is far greater than the chickenhawks – are described, with a resigned, pitying shake of the head, as hors de combat due to mental instability.

In Trevino’s world, prominent mainstream voices must be miscast as marginal lunatics because, as it happens – and many commentators have remarked upon this – the vast majority of the American people finds the view of America Trevino, et al subscribe to as a political vision that is quite revolting and frightening. Americans don’t think Social Security or Medicare weaken the moral fabric of the nation and lead to communism. The American majority has an abiding love for and desire to protect the environment. They also like sex a lot, and unlike poor Jeff Goldstein and the odious Rick Santorum, no dogs are necessary. Americans well know that stunts like Schiavo serve no purpose in illuminating the kinds of wrenching medical decisions real American families face but are just grotesque opportunities for sleazy Republican senators to wave Bibles about.

True, the American public may not support – yet – marriage rights for every couple in love. And yes, the American public still has, at best, an incomplete grasp of the sheer immorality and practical stupidity of the death penalty. (And let’s not mention how ignorant we Americans are of basic scientific fact and reasoning.) Even so, that doesn’t mean for a moment the majority of the country thinks the right’s screwy war-mongering, their cultural radicalism, their priggishness, and their greed is a Good Thing. They seriously don’t.

Yes, indeed. Quite a remarkable strategy Trevino depicts. To identify carefully then mischaracterize, mock and discredit many of the beliefs most Americans hold, all the while disguising an extremist agenda with hallucinated Orwellian language.

But enough abstraction, let’s get down to brass tackiness. For Overton’s Window to be effective in the rightwing way Trevino describes, it requires the GOP to brand a genuine war hero (and principled objector to the war in which he acted heroically) as a liar and a coward, while a rich young drunk who went AWOL becomes an American icon. For no other reason than that the war heroes beliefs are centrist and the drunk is a neo-Bircher who can be of use in moving the discourse right.

Make no mistake. For Trevino’s friends, because the war hero is a political centrist, a man far more dangerous than a genuine leftist or serious liberal, he must be utterly destroyed. Popular centrists – for some odd reason, Bill Clinton comes to mind – must be impeached, by any means necessary, no quarter given. Conversely, a genuinely vacuous, malicious coward like Bush – as extremist as any Bircher or Fundamentalist – must get packaged as a brave centrist with bold ideas. Hold their noses the thinktankers might have to do at Bush’s ignorance, but he is crucially important. So… that quip about wanting to become a dictator was just a joke, for heaven’s sake! He’s a regular guy and that’s how they talk.

Sure, Trevino & Co. are very educated people; why given half a chance, they’ll be happy to trot out their superior knowledge of Latin and Greek, which of course makes them quite trustworthy when they assert the solid reasoning behind the statistics in The Bell Curve. And yes, of course they know that arguing ad hominem is a crude rhetorical fallacy, but they also know it’s a very effective persuasive device that can utterly destroy an opponent if used with cunning and in an extreme fashion. And they are more than willing to do so.

Will Overton’s Window work for liberal and progressive causes as well? Not as Trevino describes it, it’s iliberal. (OTOH, Gandhi had a pretty smart attitude we could easily learn from. Let’s start there.)

Briefly, Trevino’s rightwing shtick isn’t necessary. True, liberals need to learn how to show the Trevinos of American politics no mercy; meaning it’s high time we treated them exactly they way they’ve treated America’s most mainstream (many of them superb) political leaders, from Powell to Feingold. And also true, liberals need seriously to polish their ideas and rhetoric.

But in no way does the task of competently advocating an intelligent commonsense (ie, liberal) agenda for the US require the lying and smearing of decent people and majority beliefs that follow from Trevino’s “methodology” as surely as pus flows from a deadly infection.

[UPDATE: Commenter Alyosha makes the good point that

The Overton Window is an extremely useful strategic idea; what you’re arguing about are the tactics, the implementation of how you follow the strategy.

I think it can be well adapted for liberal purposes. Instead of employing unethical right wing games and tactic, we use the power of truth, but in smart, tactical ways that fit the overall strategy.

The Overton Window acknowledges a simple fact that is true regardless the ideas you wish to promote, or the tactics you choose to use: people have to be prepared for new ideas, and there is an evolution in this readiness on the part of people to accept them.

Not quite, as I see it. In thinking about Gandhi’s remarks and the Window a little closer, they both count upon recasting majority opinion as inherently, deeply, profoundly, wrong.

But Gandhi depended upon targeting the actual racism and injustice of colonial rule. His goals were not to “move” the debate in a particular left/right axis, but rather to redress a wrong.

The Window as Trevino described it is a rightwing tactic, a deliberate and cyncial effort to reclassify mainstream political belief as extremist regardles of the contents of that belief. It is not about preparing people to accept new ideas but about eliminating mainstream discourse in order to consolidate/seize power.

Gandhi’s is a tactic to redress a substantive power inequality and therefore is liberal. It stops when the grievance has been addressed. The latter is a tactic to seize power, is inherently limitless, and is illiberal. They are very different. Even if it is difficult to quantify exactly where redressing ends and power grabbing begins in some cases, they are quite different in where they place their emphases.

CAVEAT: The only version of the window I know is Trevino’s. He may be seeing it through his own distorted lens but that is the version I object to. ]

Doctrine From Hell

by digby

Matt Yglesias recommends this new book by Will Marshall. It is, apparently, a series of essays by various writers critiquing the Bush administration’s foreign policy ideology and offering an alternative path for progressives in the liberal, internationalist tradition. It sounds interesting.

Yglesias says, however, they the book never mentions Iraq and wonders how any candidate can possible expect to get away with not addressing that vital question:

Obviously, any candidate for office in those elections is going to be expected to say something about Iraq. Among other things, we have over 100,000 soldiers currently fighting a war there, which is a situation being are going to be asked to comment on. And, of course, while one’s view of the wisdom of the initial decision to invade hardly determines one’s view of what should be done from here, the questions have a certain obvious interrelationship.

But beyond that narrow question, it’s extremely hard to analyze the GOP’s “flawed ideology” without saying something cogent about George W. Bush’s most high-profile national security initiative and his own characterization of the same. Democrats have gotten a lot of mileage out of — and achieved a reasonable degree of unity by focusing on — the question of Republican incompetence in managing the occupation of Iraq. But, as Ed says, it’s vitally important for progressives to be able to transcend this critique and say something about the failure of conservative ideology and the availability of a superior progressive alternative.

That requires one to take a stand on whether or not the invasion of Iraq is consistent with the “internationalist tradition” in which most Democrats situate themselves.

For me, this is a no-brainer. You either repudiate the Bush Doctrine or you don’t. And if you don’t, you will not get my vote.

This concept of preventive war (which is a term of art that as with so many other words, they simply cynically changed to “pre-emptive — probably because it sounded more truthy.)

Let’s reveiw the Bush Doctrine. Originally it was a simple-minded “if it looks like a terrist, if it harbors a terrist, if it smells like a terrist — it’s a terrist!”

It wasn’t long before it evolved into a full-on neocon wetdream that included preventive war (called “preemption”), which they characterized as self-defense in that we had a right to defend ourselves against something somebody might want to do in the future.

In other words, you can kill your neighbor “in self defense” because you know he hates you, he has weapons in his house (and has talked about getting some more!) and you can’t just wait for the smoking gun to be a mushroom souffle. Invade his home and kill him. (Oh and hold a gun to his kids’ heads and force them to pick a new daddy for the family. That way, it’ll be their decision.)

Which leads to the next part —- the United States is on orders from the Almighty to spread his gift of freedom and democracy to the world whether they want it or not. (They might get their hair mussed — a few hundred thousand, tops.)

The next pillar of the Bush Doctrine is that we can, and should, tear up any international law or treaty that we’ve signed that doesn’t suit our immediate needs. And we should work unilaterally if it’s more convenient rather than trying to get our stupid sluggish allies to pitch in. Fuck ’em. (And while we’re at it, let’s destroy every international institution we don’t care for too. It limits our freedom — and the Almighty’s against that.)

The final pillar of the Bush Doctrine is that the US must remain the world’s only superpower. Whatever it takes.

Now the democracy thing and the superpower thing aren’t new. They are part of what used to be a post cold war bipartisan consensus. I’m not sure anyone in the country knew that or that it was ever properly debated, but it’s not original. Nobody besides Junior took those concepts quite that literally, of course, but nobody else took John Wayne movies literally either.

The meat of the Bush Doctrine, and what must be repudiated by any Democrat, is the war of aggression (preventive war) part and the unilateral abrogation of all civilized law part.

It’s hard for me to believe that my country put those things on paper in the first place. And they just reiterated it last month, despite the iraq debacle, if you can believe that. Froomkin wrote about it at the time:

This morning’s news that President Bush is reasserting his doctrine of preemptive war is a bit of a surprise because, well, I think most people thought the Bush Doctrine was dead.

How can Bush still argue for attacking another country based on his suspicions about their intentions — when the first time he tried it, his public case turned out to be so utterly specious?

The idea that the American public or the international community would tolerate such behavior once again seems highly unlikely at this point in time. The American people, for one, won’t be keen on putting troops in harm’s way again on spec anytime soon.

Winning support for the application of a doctrine of preemption requires enormous credibility. It requires public trust in intelligence and motives. And that trust isn’t there.

The rearranging of the intelligence community’s deck-chairs has not resulted in any great surge of confidence in the nation’s intelligence gathering or, more importantly, any assurance that policymakers will not abuse that intelligence.

Yup. Which is why the proper approach to explaining the Democratic position on Iraq is by repudiating the Bush Doctrine, particularly as we see them ramp up for Iran.

Now, we know the Republicans will start jumping up and down like those monkeys at the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey” at the idea of Democrats fiddling with their macho foreign policy. They will try to psych out any Dem who says he or she would change it, painting him or her as a sissified Frenchie. The Democrats should not listen to this. This doctrine is what justified our invasion of Iraq and Iraq is not supported by a vast majority of the public.

Dems have to stop being afraid of this stuff. The people do not support the Bush Doctrine — it’s unamerican and people feel this on a fundamental level. They don’t think we should do it alone. They never did. And after not finding WMD after touting them as potentially being minutes away from dive bombing Manhattan with drone planes, the case that we “know” somebody is plotting against us in the future is not likely to be received with any credulity again for quite some time. (Indeed, Bush has fucked up our credibility so much that most people won’t believe our government if it said the Wednesday followed Tuesday.)

Democrats should run against the Bush Doctrine and use it to explain why we would never have gone into Iraq without it and why it will be tossed on the dungheap of history as soon as Democrats take power. (In fact, Bush is so spectularly unpopular that anything that has his name on it should be among those things Democrats run against.)

This is a bright line difference between the two parties on foreign policy, it seems to me, most importantly the unilateralism and the “pre-emptions” portions. Those two things are going to make being an American a very dangerous thing to be in this world if we don’t stop it now. (You don’t even want to think about this doctrine in the context of nukes — unless you are Joe Klein, of course, whose only problem with it is that Junior isn’t the right guy to pre-emptively drop one.)

I’m hoping that this isn’t even slightly controversial among Democrats in congress. Is that being naive?

.

Oh NO!

by digby

Howard Fineman writes:

The way I read the recent moves of Karl Rove & Co., they are preparing to wage war the only way open to them: not by touting George Bush, Lord knows, but by waging a national campaign to paint a nightmarish picture of what a Democratic Congress would look like, and to portray that possibility, in turn, as prelude to the even more nightmarish scenario: the return of a Democrat (Hillary) to the White House.

Rather than defend Bush, Rove will seek to rally the Republicans’ conservative grass roots by painting Democrats as the party of tax increases, gay marriage, secularism and military weakness. That’s where the national message money is going to be spent.

… before this election season is over, Republican and conservative voters are going to know a lot about Conyers. To hear the GOP tell it, the impeachment of the president will be the No. 1 priority if Conyers gets his say, which of course Rep. Nancy Pelosi will be only too happy to give him. The aim will be to rally the GOP base with talk of a political apocalypse.

The issue of gay marriage will play a part. So far this year, at least seven states will have on their ballots measures to ban same-sex marriage: Alabama, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin. There are citizen-led campaigns seeking to add the issue to ballots in Arizona, Colorado and Illinois.

[…]

Bush and Rove are daring the Democrats to turn the nomination of Gen. Michael Hayden as head of the CIA into a fight over the president’s secret eavesdropping program. That’s a fight they think they can win politically, by turning a legitimate constitutional issue into another Us vs. Them morality play.

Can someone please tell me how this differs from any Republican campaign of the last 25 years? Bush was at 70% in the last mid-term and the whole campaign was about how Democrats like Tom Daschle and Max Cleland were in cahoots with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. They always say we are going to raise taxes. They always say we are degenerates. If they can find a dark-skinned boogeyman, they’ll use that too.

The only new thing in this is the psych out in which they are supposedly “daring” the Dems to make a big deal out of the domestic spying stuff. You certainly can’t say they don’t have chutzpah. They are barely breathing and they are still issuing threats. (And the Dems should really wonder why they are so vocal about this. You’d think if it was such a winner for them they’d just let the Dems run with it, wouldn’t you?)

Overall, this is just a standard issue, off the rack Republican campaign. I’m sure this one will be even more excessively dirty than usual. And if they lose they will howl to high heaven that the election was stolen by illegal immigrant voter fraud. SOP.

Hopefully, the Dems are finally confident enough (31%!) to run their own campaigns and not worry about this stale, negative GOP cant. It’s all they know how to do. There’s nothing we can do about it.

.

Preparing The Ground

by digby

I’m sure that most of you read Daily Kos and have come across this diary by thereisnospoon, but if you don’t you really should check it out.

Do you see how this works? Systematically, piece by piece, the GOP takes what had been considered impossibly radical positions and makes them worthy of consideration just by talking about them–and then makes what had been considered outside possibilities truly possible. Now, I happen to believe that legalization of homeschooling is a good thing (though there should be oversight)–others may disagree.

But the important thing to remember is that the Republicans are carrying out this same exercise with every public policy debate today–from invading Iran to making birth control illegal to eliminating Social Security. The once unthinkable becomes possible–and they don’t care if they take some heat for it initially.

I would love to see bloggers on our side engage this issue because I think we might just be able to influence how certain ideas bubble up into the zeitgeist over the long haul, and this is a very interesting way to think about it.

I have long felt that one of the things the right does well is prepare the ground for ideas that are not considered mainstream. The ideas themselves … well, that’s another story and their ideas often fail on their own merit. But they are very good at bringing their ideas into mainstream dialog and making them sound comfortably familiar. And with each success, they move the goalposts farther to the right.

I was struck by this when I was reading an old article about Newt Gingrich from the mid-80’s. The writer went on at some length about his crazy, freaky idea to change social security to a privatized “IRA” type system. The tone was of stark disbelief that anyone could come up with such a crackpot scheme. But, of course, this idea became quite mainstream within a little more than a decade.

I just think there is merit in thinking about the right tactics for advancing big ideas that may not be on the radar screen right now, but could be if we are tactically intelligent about advancing them. And I think the blogosphere may be a good place to get these ideas percolating.

.

Extremes

by digby

I love Will Bunch’s post about Democrats being the new “silent majority.” Even if it weren’t true, which it is, it is just a terrific way to frame our political situation right now.

Many of my fellow baby boomer liberals believe that the country recoils from extremes and they are right. But they are stuck in a time warp. They don’t see that in 2006, the extremes don’t look like this:

They look like this:

.

Hit After Golden Hit

by digby

Atrios is doing a fun series on Richard Cohen’s greatest hits. If you haven’t been over there to read them, check them out. The man has a very interesting history. He thinks racial profiling is perfectly understandable — and really gets upset when his readers aren’t perfectly polite in their disagreement with him on that. He thinks that women are asking for it. They should be aware that it’s their fault if dirty old men like Cohen lose control when they think a woman is dressed provocatively in the office. (That’s why Allah invented the Burka!)

Yet people in Washington think of Richard Cohen and others like him are the kind of liberal whom they can really respect — not that icky uppity kind who insist that racism is wrong or that disgusting pigs like Richard Cohen don’t get to dictate the office dress code in order to keep themselves from acting out. This filters into the elected Democrat mindset. They spend time in the capital, they absorb this stuff.

And to the extent it filters out to the country and the media, people see a schizopherenic vision of liberals — wingnut radio says we are shrieking hippie communists who “smell” (a common rightwing moronic slogan) while the mainstream media reveres milquetoast apologists whom nobody really understands or respects except the beltway establishment. It’s a problem. And it’s a problem that winning this next election won’t solve.

.

That’s Our Fratboy

by digby

Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report caught this little gem. Those fancy pants Connecticut blue bloods sure do have lousy manners:

The AP ran a report last night on Bush visiting Florida to tout his Medicare prescription drug plan. It was mostly boilerplate stuff, with one exception.

He stopped by Broward Community College, where government officials set up tents and tables with laptops to help dozens of seniors there choose among the myriad plan options available.

Bush visited with some waiting in a courtyard where Frank Sinatra’s “Young At Heart” played on the loudspeakers, then he went indoors where people were looking over the laptops. He walked around giving handshakes and hugs to those who rose for his entrance, and greeted a man who remained sitting in a wheelchair with, “You look mighty comfortable.” (emphasis added)

Now, I realize the president was probably kidding. For all I know, the senior citizen laughed.

But I have to wonder what on earth Bush was thinking. Maybe the president has never had a friend or family member confined to a wheelchair, but as a rule, noting how “comfortable” they look is rarely a friendly way to start a conversation.

No it isn’t. But then neither is noting someone’s baldness or that they’ve gained weight and Junior does that all the time too. It’s his way of putting people off balance and getting everyone on his side to pile on another.

There’s an interesting simple psychology involved in such things. If someone can coerce those in a group to help him attack a single member they become his accomplices. For instance, getting everybody in the press corps to laugh at a reporter’s baldness makes those reporters part of the president’s gang. And, of course, it intimidates them. If they stray, they too will be subject to that kind of public humiliation. It’s the evil fratboy theory of social relations, very primitive stuff.

That Bush may be reduced to plying this unconsciously with senior citizens in wheelchairs is not surprising, given his poll numbers.

.

For History’s Sake

by digby

Ms. Harris was on hand this morning to meet President Bush as he stopped in Tampa en route to a Medicare event in this nearby, senior-rich town — just one day after Governor Jeb Bush said publicly that he did not believe Ms. Harris could win against the Democratic incumbent Senator here, Bill Nelson.

[…]

After saying hello to his brother and straightening his tie, the president shook hands with Ms. Harris and spoke with her for roughly 30 seconds, with Ms. Harris talking far more than the president, who did not kiss her or put his arm around her — or do anything more than pat her on the back.

An aide to the president said later that they were only speaking about “the weather,” and a spokesman for Ms. Harris refused to divulge the details of the conversation.

She knows a whole lot of details about what went down in Florida in 2000.

.

Getting Played

by digby

I certainly hope that Democrats aren’t going to follow John Dickerson’s tepid analysis that concludes they shouldn’t mention investigations or risk losing in November. They are being played.

Over at Political Animal, Zachary Roth writes:

It’s also worth noting that Republican attempts to highlight the investigations issue have come almost exclusively in fundraising emails. In other words, they’re using it as a tactic to gin up their plugged-in supporters, but not, so far, as a part of their broader message to ordinary voters. And when you think about it, you can see why they might not be too enthusiastic about a campaign message that draws voters’ attention, even obliquely, to the slew of scandals and screwups of the Bush years. After all, it’s not exactly inconceivable that voters might welcome the prospect of a party pledging to look into, and then fix, the policies of a president with a 32 percent approval rating.

Ya think? The Republicans are in free fall. Considering that, is it not possible that the American people would like to find out what happened to the billions missing in Iraq? That they would be happy to see the congress exercize its oversight of the executive branch? That looking into the hanky panky leading us into a dramatically unpopular war is good for the country? Hello?

Many in the establishment believe that Democrats are in grave danger if they ever show they give a damn about anything. It’s one of the reasons why people don’t feel anything for the Democrats. And for some, the strategy is always the same no matter what the circumstances: when the Republicans are popular, don’t make waves. When the Republicans are unpopular, don’t make waves.

But think about this. Do the Republicans really want all these scandals being brought up constantly during the campaign? I don’t think so. That’s why they are trying to manipulate the Democrats into keeping quiet about them. Any six year old could see through this cheap ploy.

Update: Yglesias has more on this, here. He makes the interesting point that “One of the main things those people might be hoping for from a Democratic congress would be a check on Bush’s power. Indeed, many of them may not be very interested in a progressive agenda for America at all, just scared of where the current crew is heading things. By promising oversight, Pelosi is re-iterating that though you can’t vote the unpopular Bush out of office, you can vote in a congress that will keep him under control.”

Update II: Billmon says Rove is smoking crack if he thinks ginning up the wiretapping is going to work:

The point is, when you get down to 31% approval in a Gallup Poll, and your disapproval rating is trying to poll vault over the record high set by Richard Nixon just before he resigned in disgrace, it means the American people essentially think you’re the political equivalent of crab lice. At that point, they’re probably going to hate anything and everything you do — even if they actually agree with it — just because you’re the one doing it.

Update III: Harold Meyerson writes:

…to stave off the specter of Democratic rule, Rove has decided that the only way to rally the Republican base is to invoke the specter of Democratic rule. Democrat John Conyers, who would become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has spoken of investigating the president for high crimes and misdemeanors. Henry Waxman and Ted Kennedy will get subpoena power if the Democrats win both houses. Unspecified horrors lurk behind every corner if the Democrats take control and hold hearings about the administration’s relations with the oil and pharmaceutical industries. A sea of partisan vendetta, Republicans prophesy, stretches to the horizon if the Democrats are allowed to win.

As a strategy, this has its shortcomings. It’s not clear how many independents, or even conservatives, will warm to a campaign that focuses on forestalling congressional oversight — not with gas prices soaring and the American military bogged down in a war with an increasingly undefinable mission.

Again, I think Rove is trying to mau-mau the Democrats and getting the always compliant press to help him do it. He’s shaping the battlefield the way he wants it. It won’t work unless Democrats take the bait.

.