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Nothing A Glass of Bourbon Couldn’t Cure

by digby

I got in late last night and was able to only muster a short spurt of lefty blogger vitriol for Richard Cohen before I collapsed, but I’ve had my coffee and I realize that I’m not finished with him.

First, let’s just stipulate that this “war” between the blogosphere, its readers and the mainstream media is completely understandable. People like Cohen’s only feedback for thirty years has been a letter or two from cranky old ladies in Bethesda and a good natured spirited debate about motherhood over a bottle of fine 1998 Hirsch Vineyard Pinot Noir at George Tenent’s house. He is out of touch. And that is the problem.

He believes that his angry readers of all political persuasions are crazy and violent because they are angry. Today he calls the lefty criticism a “Digital Lynch Mob.” When the right barraged him with criticism over a column about Bernard Kerik in 2004, he wrote:

I got a bucket full of obscene e-mails right in my face. I was denounced over and over again as a liberal who, moreover, never would have written something similar about anyone Bill Clinton had named. This would be news to Clinton.

What struck me about the e-mails was how none of these writers paid any attention to what I had to say. Instead, they preferred to deal with a caricature — someone who belonged to a movement, a conspiracy, and was taking orders in the service of some vast, nefarious cause. E-mails are the drive-by shootings of the common man. The face of the victim is never seen…We have become a nation of B-52 bombers, hitting targets we never see.

“The drive-by shootings of the common man.” My, my, my. One does tend to get a bit non-plussed when the hoi polloi forget their place, doesn’t one?

Critical Emails are neither ropes, rocks or drive by shootings. (And in this day and age foul language is not “obscene.”) They are the written opinions of Richard Cohen’s readers, many of whom until recently didn’t know what dreck the columnists for the Washington Post produced everyday. The internets have brought him legions of new readers — many of whom are appalled at what he writes.

This is why:

Even the after-hours camaraderie of Washington is gone. Republicans hang with Republicans, Democrats with Democrats — and they all get out of town as fast as possible. A little bourbon would do wonders for our dysfunctional government.

The reason I started with the startling scoop that George Tenet has a mother is that too often, especially in Washington, it is easier to avoid such humanizing touches than to deal with them. Like Will Rogers, I (almost) never met a man I didn’t like — and after that, honest, rigorous criticism becomes very hard indeed. It is easier by far to turn government officials from conscientious public servants, or even just hapless human beings, into mere celebrities. But they don’t make big money in their jobs (though some, of course, do later on), and they almost always work very hard. And when they screw up it often appears on the front pages of newspapers or on the nightly news. Sometimes, when things are dark and people are dying, they sit before the TV and watch what they have done — and cry. They do, and I know this for a fact.

Boo fucking hoo.

Damn that partisanship, and damn both sides equally for this sordid state of affairs. The fact that character assassination of Democrats is a fundamental tenet of the peculiar institution of the Republican party does not mean that it isn’t Democrats’ fault for not trying harder to be friendly. A little honey works better than vinegar, after all. Except … except, it actually doesn’t. The Republicans rolled them and rolled them and rolled them; the GOP took total control of the US government and then they rolled them again. All the while the alleged liberal Richard Cohen has been wandering through Georgetown drawing rooms having conversations about people’s mothers and, apparently, watching others weep as they confront the fact that they are responsible for killing people (which is, I agree, better than when the president lifted his fist and said “feels good!” in the moments before he ordered the invasion of Iraq.)

The media elite’s wide eyed shock that average Americans are angry about this state of affairs is simply mind-boggling. The polls show that it isn’t just the “angry” left, it’s the entire Democratic party, most of the independents and a growing number of Republicans too. Does he not know how his condescending elitism sounds to the people who read his column? (Joe Klein similarly goes on and on about populism in his new book Politics Lost, his tone dripping with contempt for the idea that common rabble are challenging those who know what’s best for them.)

We are dealing with a political culture so insular that that they no longer resemble the seat of power in a democracy but rather the court of Versailles. Richard Cohen and the rest of the professional political class in the capital are misreading what is happening just as Louis XVI did when he asked “This is a revolt?” —- to which the duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt replied, “No, sire. It is a revolution.”

For the first time, I’m truly feeling the democratizing power of the internet (and I’m realizing why the powers that be are trying to cut off its oxygen.) The beltway courtiers are nibbling idly at their cakes, unnerved by the unruly mob of common men committing drive-by emails and digital lynch mobs and storming the stifling, airless social club that has become the nation’s punditocrisy. They don’t realize yet that this isn’t a fringe group of long haired hippies (not that there’s anything wrong with that) who are going to make the whole country hate us for our unruly ways. It ain’t 1968. There’s a lot of water under that drawbridge.

And, of course, it wasn’t that simple anyway. Liberals of a certain age are just terrified of liberal passion because they believe that 60’s leftists destroyed the Democratic party. (I would argue that it was the overreaction — the pale, flaccid, politics of the Richard Cohen school that killed us.) In any case, they always failed to notice the lurking radical rightwing beast that was just as active during that radical period building a movement that was far more damaging to Democrats than anything the SDS ever dreamed up. (But then, they are nothing if not pathologically self-absorbed.)

The 60’s New Left is not particularly relevent to this debate. It’s time that establishment liberals exorcized those demons. The political architects of today’s political era are not FDR liberals, but Nixonian conservatives. It’s stunning to me that after all this time they still fail to recognize that.

We may win an election or two coming up. I fervently hope so. But if anyone thinks that the conservative movement is just going to shrivel up and die, they have another thing coming. We are still fighting on their turf and will be for some time to come. Worrying about offending the “silent majority” again is beside the point. Our little blogswarms can hardly cause a backlash that would rival the non-stop anti-liberal rhetoric that’s been spewed into the atmosphere for the last two decades. But it’s just possible that we might convince a few people out there that the Democratic party still has a pulse.

And as I wrote last night: there is no political downside to hating Richard Cohen. Everybody does. And why shouldn’t they? He stands for nothing. The problem is that he’s been sold as a liberal — which is why we are bothering with him at all. He’s the poster boy for flaccid, ineffectual progressive politics and we’re sick of it. He is not us.

Update: Swopa notices that Cohen’s latest trip to the fainting couch over the digital lynch mob is quite at odds with his earlier view that character assassination is the coin of the realm in DC — and that we who complained should grow up.

I can see why he thinks bourbon is the answer. He must need a lot of it to calm the competing voices in his head.

UpdateII: Jonathan Schwartz comments on Cohen’s equivalence theory. Check this one out too.

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Words Fail Me

by tristero

As Atrios says, Alphonso Jackson immediately must resign:

Once the color barrier has been broken, minority contractors seeking government work may need to overcome the Bush barrier.

That’s the message U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson seemed to send during an April 28 talk in Dallas.

Jackson, a former president and CEO of the Dallas Housing Authority, was among the featured speakers at a forum sponsored by the Real Estate Executive Council, a national minority real estate consortium.

After discussing the huge strides the agency has made in doing business with minority-owned companies, Jackson closed with a cautionary tale, relaying a conversation he had with a prospective advertising contractor.

“He had made every effort to get a contract with HUD for 10 years,” Jackson said of the prospective contractor. “He made a heck of a proposal and was on the (General Services Administration) list, so we selected him. He came to see me and thank me for selecting him. Then he said something … he said, ‘I have a problem with your president.’

“I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘I don’t like President Bush.’ I thought to myself, ‘Brother, you have a disconnect — the president is elected, I was selected. You wouldn’t be getting the contract unless I was sitting here. If you have a problem with the president, don’t tell the secretary.’

“He didn’t get the contract,” Jackson continued. “Why should I reward someone who doesn’t like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don’t get the contract. That’s the way I believe.”

Anyone want to calculate the odds Jackson will stay?

Feingold Talks Like A Democrat

by tristero

I’m sorry to say that this kind of genuine straight-talk is so rare it’s refreshing:

“We must get out of our political foxholes and be willing to clearly and specifically point out what a strategic error the Iraq invasion has been,” Feingold, D-Wis., told a National Press Club audience.

He said some Democrats in Congress gave in to “intimidation” by the Bush administration when they voted to authorize the war in 2002, and warned: “If we do not show both a practical and emotional readiness to lead in the fight against terrorism, we will lose in ’06 and we will lose in ’08, just like we did in ’02 and ’04.”

In March, Feingold called for the censure of Bush over the administration’s warrantless surveillance program. So far, only two Democrats, Tom Harkin of Iowa and Barbara Boxer of California, have signed on as co-sponsors.

Good for Feingold. However, I really would like to comment briefly on this next point of his, at the risk of being completely misunderstood:

Feingold, who also has proposed that U.S. troops leave Iraq by the end of the year, rejected criticism that such a move could lead to chaos.

“I believe the situation would probably get better” if U.S. troops left, he said. “The lesson of insurgency is when the occupying power leaves, it tends to lessen, rather than increase, the level of violence.”

I disagree and the reason I do is because the tragedy goes beyond the dichotomy of stay or leave.

The truth is that as long as Bush is in power, it doesn’t matter whether the troops leave or stay. If they stay, the Bush administration’s utter incompetence will ensure that the way in which they stay will be fine-tuned to maximize Iraq’s slide into disaster.

Likewise, if the troops withdraw, Bush’s incompetence will guarantee that the troops will be withdrawn in such a fashion as to all-but-guarantee they will leave a catastrophic situation in such a state that it will rapidly get much worse.

An effective approach towards confronting the problems in Iraq may, repeat may, be possible once Bush is no longer in office and a sensible administration is in charge. Until then, which will not be until 2009 at the earliest, the situation is tragically beyond relief. No matter what this US administration does, they will make the worst of it.

Therefore, Feingold’s prediction that things could improve if the troops leave strikes me as unfounded. He has not properly factored in how poorly the Bush administration would handle a withdrawal.

If a responsible, competent government were in place, I would immediately side with those demanding immediate withdrawal. But given Bush, I’m afraid in Iraq there is only disaster, death, chaos, and a slide into the abyss no matter course he chooses to take.

I realize this is a dreadful position to take, that nothing can be done until 2009. To be clear: I don’t want to see US soldiers killed or maimed – or killing and maiming in the pursuit of an insane, pointless war – anymore than anyone else does. And I also don’t want to see innocent Iraqis slaughtered and brualized, either by US troops, each other, or other countries. But if Bush keeps the troops in place the slaughter will continue to escalate. But if Bush withdraws the troops the slaughter will continue to escalate. I see nothing good coming of either as long as this malicious scoundrel is president.

A responsible approach to ending the misery in Iraq can only begin to be imagined after Bush is back at his lake doing what he loves – pretending to be a great fisherman – and the country (hopefully) is back in the hands of mature, responsible people.

Arguments that it is the troops’ presence that are the main problem strike me as not quite accurate. It is the troops presence plus Bush’s incompetence that are the main problem. Ditto, arguments that if the troops leave the problems will start to lift are not accurate. If Bush withdraws, given the near perfect storm he’s created in every area and around every issue and action, then increasing disaster is all but sure to follow because of the way the withdrawal will be run.

Put another way, step one for Iraq is that Bush must leave. Discussions of the relative worth of different approaches to Iraq are pointless until then. And I think Feingold runs the risk of being tragically contradicted because he misuderestimates Bush’s sheer incompetence.

The War On Fucking

by tristero

As the father of a 9 year-old daughter, I take this story personally. Turns out that Merck has developed a cervical cancer vaccine that is coming up for FDA approval:

Gardasil was developed by Merck in Montgomery County. It targets the human papilloma virus. Virtually all cervical cancers are caused by some strain of this virus, known as HPV. It’s very common among both men and women, and is transmitted by sexual contact.

Most women never know they’re infected with HPV until a suspicious Pap test…or worse.

Dr. Richard Boulay of Lehigh Valley Hospital says Gardasil breaks the infection chain.

Dr. Richard Boulay/Lehigh Valley Hospital: “Those that get the vaccine can expect greater than 90 percent protection&Many studies have shown 100 percent prevention.”

According to the current Discover Magazine (not yet on line) this could potentially save 2,500 lives. As Alan Kaye of the National Cervical Cancer Coaltion says in the article, “How could we deny our children and grandchildren awin against cancer…Why should we?”

Well, as it happens, our morally-stunted fellow citizens on the right have the answer to the questions. Turns out the the best time to administer the vaccine is when the girl is between 10 and 12 years old. And Hal Wallace, head of the anti-fucking activist group that’s deliberately mislabeleld as”Physicians Consortium,” believes that vaccinating an 11 year-old girl against cervical cancer would send a message “that you just take this shot and you can be as sexually promiscuous as you want.” And the equally loony Family Research Council (James Dobson’s band of self-righteous prigs) says “it would oppose any measures to legally require vaccination.”

Since it is likely to win approval (sounds like there’s at least some integrity left somewhere at the FDA), let’s assume here that the vaccine is as effective as Merck claims. And that it’s safe. It would border on the criminal to withold this vaccine, to ensure that every child receives it at the optimum age to guarantee efficacy. It would be simply insanely stupid to advocate such an idiotic reason as fear of increased promiscuity to oppose its administration to pre-pubescent girls. (Oh, for those of you who like to waste time refuting utterly stupid arguments with facts that are irrelevant to the stupid, it turns out, that according to Discover, there is proof that such vaccinations will not alter the sexual habits of the vaccinated. Duh.)

Obviously, if the vaccine is not as safe or effective as Merck claims, the case for widespread use becomes morally complex. But as it stands, the only reason to oppose this cancer vaccine is because you believe that fucking should harm, if not kill, you. Unless, that is, you refrain from sex until you’ve received a state license to procreate. And you don’t fuck anyone else. Especially if you’re a woman.

If these people have any moral values at all except for a belief in excrutiating punishment and death if you don’t agree to forgo all pleasure by debasing your mind and body by submission to their weird beliefs, I can’t see them. This isn’t morality. Opposition to the wide distribution of a cancer vaccine that is apparently both highly effective and safe is nothing but perversion, pure and simple. To knowingly deny a child prevention against a terrible disease flies in the face of everything I believe in.

[UPDATE: A Spork in the Drawer has some info on how a public discussion on the uselessness of “abstinence only” sex education – for which little positive can be said other than the composition of numerous bad jokes – was forced into a fake semblance of “balance” by Republicans.

Lapfull of Dick

by digby

Richard Cohen got 2,000 mean e-mails and this signals the end of the Democratic party. I’ll leave you to figure out why that should follow. In case Cohen hasn’t noticed nobody on the fucking planet likes squishy faux liberal courtiers. There’s no political downside to hating Richard Cohen.

I do have to highlight one particular passage of this waste of valuable Wapo real estate:

I said the man wasn’t funny and not funny has a bullying quality to it; others (including some of my friends) said he was funny. But because I held such a view, my attentive critics were convinced I had a political agenda. I was — as was most of the press, I found out — George W. Bush’s lap dog. If this is the case, Bush had better check his lap.

Where on earth would anyone get the idea that Cohen might be one of Bush’s lapdogs?

Given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush.”

Richard Cohen has been upset by the angry mob for some time. And when that happens he inevitably turns to the Republicans to set things right. They are, after all, the “conciliators.” But far be it for me to say he has a political agenda. I frankly don’t think he does. He is just easily upset by human beings who object to being treated like imbeciles by sniffing sycophants like Richard Cohen and don’t feel like taking his condescending shit anymore.

I’m not quite as old as Cohen but I lived through the same era. How pathetic now to see liberals of my generation get so exercised over a few hostile emails. It’s obviously been a while since they felt anything more strongly than irritation at too much foam on their cappucino. They sound exactly like the older generation sounded when we were young — afraid of change and seeing political passion as being “hateful” and dangerous. Baby boomer elites are now that creepy old guy muttering at the kids to stop walking on his lawn or he’ll call the cops.

And by the way, all that “hate ” in 1968 may have upset the Democratic party, but that misbegotten piece of shit war would still be going on if it hadn’t been for those “haters” who were willing to take on their own party when it behaved in an immoral fashion. Cohen’s hero George W. Bush and his followers are too busy playing one-handed “Kill the Islamofascist” XBox in their basements to fix the damned mess their brand name in a suit has made. We of the perpetually angry left will have to step up and do the dirty work one more time.

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Crawling With Liberals

by digby

You can’t make this stuff up.

Yesterday I wrote this:

Today, the CIA is crawling with liberals. The military is crawling with liberals. The Bush administration itself is nothing but a bunch of liberals as must be the GOP congress since they signed off on everything Bush has proposed. The media are, needless to say, nothing but squishy liberals.

The country is going to hell in a handbasket. The president and the congress and all their policies are dramatically unpopular. This, then, is just further proof of the failure of liberalism.

Today, the Nationl Review writes this:

Too often the agency has performed that job miserably, the greatest example being its gargantuan miscalculations about the Soviet Union. In retrospect, this is perhaps unsurprising. The CIA has always had a leftist bent, well represented in its upper echelons even under directors of staunchly anti-Communist and pro-national-security orientation.

And in a terrific rhetorical sleight of hand they then write this:

Porter Goss, a former Republican congressman who once served as an official in the CIA’s clandestine service, was named by President Bush to head up the agency 19 months ago. His primary task was to end its bare-knuckles insurrection and policy interference, and return it to the business of intelligence collection and analysis. His tenure was marked by non-stop turmoil and bickering, as he moved to root out the insurgents and they fought back with a vengeance.

Goss’s sudden ouster is, at best, ill timed. He had merely scratched the problem’s surface. Further, the lack of a clear explanation for his departure is extremely harmful. It is certain to be spun as a coup by the insurgents. Such a perception will only embolden them, laying the groundwork for more leaks—and more damage to national security.

Leftists = Insurgents, the term that is used interchangeably by Republicans with the word “terrorist.”

And by the way, it’s worth mentioning again and again that while the CIA was often wrong during the cold war, it never even came close to being as wrong as the conservatives and necons were wrong, which was completely and totally and comprehensively wrong in every single case. While they continue to conduct their Stalinist purge in the CIA, let’s not forget that.

Porter “Brownie” Goss is about to be succeeded by Michael “Andropov” Hayden. It never gets any better.

Hat tip to Glenn Greenwald for pointing me to this editorial.

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No… Wire… Hangers

by digby

Perhaps this has gotten wide distribution, but I hadn’t seen it before. It’s a personal account of an Ann Coulter appearance at Loyola University in Chicago. It’s amazing. Here’s just a little snippet:

I went to my seat and prepared myself mentally to take in Ms. Coulter objectively. The Loyola Anti-War Network protested her appearance by forming a chain in the back of the auditorium and facing the other way. As soon as Ms. Coulter came out she said, “Since you are feminists, standing makes your butts look really big.” I was a little upset by this comment, but I held my cool. I was stupid and had the college republicans seat me up close so I could get good pictures. Needless to say I was sitting next to some Coulter-lovers who were practically foaming at the mouth in ecstacy with all of Coulter’s comments. All of the protestors were taken out by security. This elevated the level of joy in the Coulter-supporters sitting around me.

Coulter of course went on her usual bloviating saying that Democrats have bumper stickers that say, “I heart partial birth abortion.”

[…]

he protesting from the balcony only increased with time with shouts of “ANN IS A RACIST” to even an immature, yet mildly amusing, call for “Show us your tits.”

Ann addressed her supporters in the crowd with this statement. “You’re men. You’re heterosexuals. Take ’em out.” She chided them further when they did not rise. Before you knew it there was about 25 students marching to the balcony to supposedly “take out” the protestors above. I saw a priest holding students back and deans and security warning the students to go back to their seats. Chaos erupted. Ann left after taking one question. The question was, “How can you justify the marginalization of women when you yourself are a woman?”.

To which Ann replied, “I don’t.”

Does anyone get the feeling that Coulter is on the verge of doing a Joan Crawford turn? Keep her away from the pruning shears.

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If You Build it, They Will Use It

by digby

As Bush continues to push his party over the cliff with this nomination of Michael Hayden, I’d like to look once again at the Hayden quote I posted over the week-end:

I’m disappointed I guess that perhaps the default response for some is to assume the worst. I’m trying to communicate to you that the people who are doing this, okay, go shopping in Glen Burnie and their kids play soccer in Laurel, and they know the law. They know American privacy better than the average American, and they’re dedicated to it. So I guess the message I’d ask you to take back to your communities is the same one I take back to mine. This is focused. It’s targeted. It’s very carefully done. You shouldn’t worry.

This same man, also quoted in that post, became indignant when asked if the NSA was spying on Bush’s political enemies. He seems to truly believe that the nation must trust him and all the other people in the government to do the right thing because they are good people. This is the same attitude we see coming from George W. Bush.

And yet history suggests that we have ample reason to suspect people of using the awesome power of government to spy on political enemies if they are allowed the latitude to do so. Totalitarian systems around the world do it. We’ve had ample evidence of such activity within my own lifetime — in this country. McCarthy, Hoover and Nixon all abused their power this way. General Hayden was alive during that period too. He must know this.

And then, you read things like this:

In the Atlanta suburbs of DeKalb County, local officials wasted no time after the 9/11 attacks. The second-most-populous county in Georgia, the area is home to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI’s regional headquarters, and other potential terrorist targets. Within weeks of the attacks, officials there boasted that they had set up the nation’s first local department of homeland security. Dozens of other communities followed, and, like them, DeKalb County put in for – and got – a series of generous federal counterterrorism grants. The county received nearly $12 million from Washington, using it to set up, among other things, a police intelligence unit.

The outfit stumbled in 2002, when two of its agents were assigned to follow around the county executive. Their job: to determine whether he was being tailed – not by al Qaeda but by a district attorney investigator looking into alleged misspending. A year later, one of its plainclothes agents was seen photographing a handful of vegan activists handing out antimeat leaflets in front of a HoneyBaked Ham store. Police arrested two of the vegans and demanded that they turn over notes, on which they’d written the license-plate number of an undercover car, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is now suing the county. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial neatly summed up the incident: “So now we know: Glazed hams are safe in DeKalb County.”

Glazed hams aren’t the only items that America’s local cops are protecting from dubious threats. U.S. News has identified nearly a dozen cases in which city and county police, in the name of homeland security, have surveilled or harassed animal-rights and antiwar protesters, union activists, and even library patrons surfing the Web. Unlike with Washington’s warrantless domestic surveillance program, little attention has been focused on the role of state and local authorities in the war on terrorism.

A U.S.News inquiry found that federal officials have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into once discredited state and local police intelligence operations. Millions more have gone into building up regional law enforcement databases to unprecedented levels. In dozens of interviews, officials across the nation have stressed that the enhanced intelligence work is vital to the nation’s security, but even its biggest boosters worry about a lack of training and standards. “This is going to be the challenge,” says Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, “to ensure that while getting bin Laden we don’t transgress over the law. We’ve been burned so badly in the past – we can’t do that again.”

Chief Bratton is referring to the infamous city “Red Squads” that targeted civil rights and antiwar groups in the 1960s and 1970s (Page 48). Veteran police officers say no one in law enforcement wants a return to the bad old days of domestic spying. But civil liberties watchdogs warn that with so many cops looking for terrorists, real and imagined, abuses may be inevitable. “The restrictions on police spying are being removed,” says attorney Richard Gutman, who led a 1974 class action lawsuit against the Chicago police that obtained hundreds of thousands of pages of intelligence files. “And I don’t think you can rely on the police to regulate themselves.”

Good or bad, intelligence gathering by local police departments is back. Interviews with police officers, homeland security officials, and privacy experts reveal a transformation among state and local law enforcement.

Read the whole article for a litany of abuses by state and local officials that will make your hair stand on end. Everything changed on 9/11 all right, not the least of which is the fact that the federal government began pouring huge sums of money into policing with no guidelines, no oversight and a simple directive to “find the terrorists.” The ramifications of this are potentially staggering.

And since big money is involved, you can bet that we are not going to find a lot of support from politicians of any stripe. This is totalitarian pork we’re talking about and there’s probably no putting the piglet back in the pigpen. This is “Jerry” Bremer’s CPA accounting methods brought home to America. The foundation of the American police state is in place.

We could, of course, demand that the feds issue strict guidelines, follow the money and ensure that civil liberties are not being abused thorough rigorous oversight and accountability. Needless to say, there is no leadership from the top about this. Bush’s choice to head the CIA is another guy who says “trust us” we’re good people who would never do anything wrong. His boss, John Negroponte, is a certifiable war criminal.

I’m sure this guy thinks he’s a good guy too:

The California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, a $7 million fusion center run by the state Department of Justice, also ran into trouble in 2003 when it warned of potential violence at an antiwar protest at the port of Oakland. Mike Van Winkle, then a spokesman for the center, explained his concern to the Oakland Tribune: “You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can almost argue that a protest against [the war] is a terrorist act.”

He was reprimanded by the Democratic Attorney General of California for saying this, but do you think he’s the only one who thinks this way? All you have to do is read Little Green Footballs to see that many people have that attitude. They celebrate when peace activists are beheaded in Iraq. Is it not entirely likely that there are thousands of cops throughout the country, armed with a ton of new toys and lots of funds, who are going to go “terrorist hunting” among the people that Rush Limbaugh and his compatriots make millions deriding as enemies of the state?

I don’t know whether Michael Hayden or any of the people who work for the NSA and CIA believe that those who protest the Iraq war can be seen as terrorists, but I’m quite sure that if they do, it would not alter their view of themselves as good patriots who are guarding the civil liberties of all Americans. That’s why it cannot be left in their hands, or the hands of the local police or the pentagon or anyone else to decide on their own what constitutes reasonable grounds to spy on their fellow citizens. You cannot judge such things based upon one man’s vision of himself as being a “good” person.

How utterly foolish Americans are if they are willing to depend solely upon the decency of people in power to protect them:

Civil liberties watchdogs like attorney Gutman, meanwhile, want to know how efforts to stop al Qaeda have ended up targeting animal rights advocates, labor leaders, and antiwar protesters. “You’ve got all this money and all this equipment – you’re going to find someone to use it on,” he warns

James Madison and others of his time were shrewd observers of their fellow men. He wrote this famous passage in Federalist 51:

What is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Update: Predictably, there also this: A Politicized Internal Revenue Service Examining Progressive Nonprofits

I’m sure the IRS cronies who have launched these probes all believe they are “good” too. No politics of any kind are being practiced. Move along.

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Krugman

by tristero

Fantastic:

But the administration officials who told us that Saddam had an active nuclear program and insinuated that he was responsible for 9/11 weren’t part of a covert alliance; they all worked for President Bush. The claim that these officials hyped the case for war isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s simply an assertion that people in a position of power abused that position. And that assertion only seems wildly implausible if you take it as axiomatic that Mr. Bush and those around him wouldn’t do such a thing.

The truth is that many of the people who throw around terms like ‘loopy conspiracy theories’ are lazy bullies who, as Zachary Roth put it on CJR Daily, The Columbia Journalism Review’s Web site, want to ‘confer instant illegitimacy on any argument with which they disagree.’ Instead of facing up to hard questions, they try to suggest that anyone who asks those questions is crazy.

Indeed, right-wing pundits have consistently questioned the sanity of Bush critics; ‘It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again,’ said Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist, after Mr. Gore gave a perfectly sensible if hard-hitting speech. Even moderates have tended to dismiss the administration’s harsh critics as victims of irrational Bush hatred.

But now those harsh critics have been vindicated. And it turns out that many of the administration supporters can’t handle the truth. They won’t admit that they built a personality cult around a man who has proved almost pathetically unequal to the job. Nor will they admit that opponents of the Iraq war, whom they called traitors for warning that invading Iraq was a mistake, have been proved right. So they have taken refuge in the belief that a vast conspiracy of America-haters in the media is hiding the good news from the public.

Unlike the crazy conspiracy theories of the left – which do exist, but are supported only by a tiny fringe – the crazy conspiracy theories of the right are supported by important people: powerful politicians, television personalities with large audiences. And we can safely predict that these people will never concede that they were wrong. When the Iraq venture comes to a bad end, they won’t blame those who led us into the quagmire; they’ll claim that it was all the fault of the liberal media, which stabbed our troops in the back.

Beautiful Monday

by digby

Here’s a little piece of news to start your week off with a bang. The good kind. (Well, not that good…)

From Newshounds:

TVNewser reports

“Young viewers just don’t watch The O’Reilly Factor like they used to. April marked Bill O’Reilly’s lowest-rated month in the 25-54 demographic since August 2001.*

His 415,000 demo viewers in March was a new low, but O’Reilly managed to lose a few more in April, averaging 412,000 in the demo. Here’s his post-Katrina track:

Sept: 1,115 / Oct: 518 / Nov: 468 / Dec: 460 / Jan: 472 / Feb: 458 / Mar: 415

But this trend started long before the hurricane. for O’Reilly, April’s numbers reflected his lowest demo rating in almost five years.

Among total viewers, O’Reilly delivered a respectable 2,102,000 million viewers for the month. But that, too, was low — the lowest, in fact, since July of 2004 (when he had 2,042,000). Click here to feast your eyes on O’Reilly’s monthly averages since 2001…”

* Notable that O’Reilly, like his president “Trifecta”, benefitted from the attacks of September 11th.

And in case you’re wondering, Keith Olbermann’s 25-54 numbers were up to 242,000 for April, continuing to climb. I’m just saying.

I’ve actually been tuning in once in a while because I don’t want to miss the inevitable full-on Howard Beale meltdown. They must be making book in Vegas.

More Fun:

Ever since Stephen Colbert opened his mouth at Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner and pointedly mocked Bush in front of Bush, online buzz on the fake newsman has reached scalding temperatures. The response started with a kind of did-he-really-do-that shock. Then it escalated into furious takes on whether Colbert was funny or not, why the mainstream media blew it off, and how the great blogosphere struck back—or just seized another opportunity to parade its own virtues.

There’s a boulder-coming-at-Indiana Jones quality to the story now. Searches on the eyebrow-raising comedian are up 5,625% this week and picking up speed. Trajectories for “Colbert speech” and “colbert video” are racing off the chart. And “The Colbert Report,” its fan site Colbert Nation, and the newly created ThankYouStephenColbert.org also launched upward in Buzz.

In one corner of the Search ring, we saw gratitude toward the Comedy Central smarty-pants. What’s in the opposite corner, looking to cuff him? We noted searches for “colbert roasts bush,” “colbert bush,” and “bush dinner.” But no DamnYouStephenColbert.org or “bush looks ready to throttle colbert” (although he did).

Two of the characters wielded by Colbert that night also jumped in Buzz. Veteran reporter and Bush haranguer Helen Thomas, who costarred in the performance-closing video, leapt in searches. And outed CIA agent Valerie Plame spiked 262%. So, will the White House get revenge against the fake pundit and his phony news show? Let’s just hope his wife is no undercover spook.

The word on the street is that Colbert is a MySpace phenomenon too, which may be part of what’s driving this. Whether or not you think it was funny — it has become a certified internet event. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

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