Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Iraq: UPI Says It’s A Civil War

by tristero

Seems a reasonable conclusion to me. What makes naming it so important is that it would help articulate what an approriate US and international policy should be towards Iraq.

Please note: “would help.” That assumes a competent US administration, or even merely an administration with a toehold on reality. Since we have neither, whether we call the situation in Iraq a Civil War or just the absolute, tragically worst of the many fuckups that Bush directly created doesn’t seem to make much difference right now. Nothing rational will get through to them and the horrible truth is both Iraq and the rest of the world will just have to wait out the Bush presidency for things to have even a hope of being adressed in a sensible fashion. Maybe in 2009, when he’s gone, it will matter more what we call the civil war. But by then, what’s going on over there could have spread out into something far larger:

Despite President Bush’s repeated denials, the figures are clear: 900 sectarian killings in a single month in Iraq means a civil war is well under way.

Iraq is a nation of 25 million people. In the United States, that level of killing would proportionately equal almost 11,000 people killed in riots, reprisal killings and sectarian clashes in a single month.

By comparison, the 30 years of sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland from 1968 to 1998 saw 3,600 people killed in a small population of 1.5 million. Proportionately, that would equate to 60,000 dead over 30 years in Iraq, or 2,000 killed per year. Instead, if the current Iraqi violence simply stays at the current level and does not escalate any further, it will take 10,800 Iraqi civilian lives this year. That rate would be more than five times the average rate of the Northern Irish conflict.

The rate of killings in Iraq is already as bad as during the horrendous 1975-1991 Lebanese Civil War, in which 150,000 to 200,000 people were killed over 16 years — an average of between 9,375 and 12,500 people were killed there per year.

These comparisons, of course, can be misleading because in those conflicts, as in almost all civil wars, the rate of killing is not uniform but explodes in peaks and then settles down at lower levels for long periods of time.

But the comparisons are unfortunately revealing in another way — once the kind of polarizing aimless cycle of sectarian retaliatory killings between paramilitary forces in the two communities that have lived together for many centuries begins, it is often impossible to end it for decades, or before hundreds of thousands of people have been killed or, as was the case in Lebanon, both disasters have happened.

Armtwisting For Jesus

by digby

There’s lots of speculation about what “conservative organization” Tom Delay is going to work for in northern Virginia. Most people think he’s going to become a lobbyist, but I would imagine that someone with his legal problems is not going to do that under the advice of his lawyers.

Delay said in his interview with TIME:

DeLay:I made a speech last week, and that pretty much cinched it for me. A good friend of mine, Dr. Rick Scarborough, who started—and I urged him, and we’ve worked together over the years—an organization called Vision America, which is out recruiting pastors to get involved in the political arena. He asked me to come speak. He was having a conference on the war on Christianity. So I made a speech on Wednesday. It was covered by C-Span and, frankly, a bunch of cameras. I felt very good, very free about giving that speech. The reaction was incredible—just an outpouring of love and support from the audience. It was probably the one single event that convinced me: I can DO this. I could keep fighting for the things I believe in, outside of Congress.

TIME: What was it that made you feel free, and what was your main point?

DeLay:My main point was that this country was built on morals and religion. Our greatest leaders were very strong believers. There is a connection between religion and politics, and religion and government. There has to be for this country to have accomplished all it’s accomplished and for its future. How many times have the great leaders—Ronald Reagan, Roosevelt, Lincoln, George Washington—have said there is a connection between morals and religion. And there has to be. The people that go to church understand that a country has to be based on some sort of religion and fear of God because they understand that.

Christine DeLay: They’re accountable.

DeLay: Yeah. If you know that we’re all sinners, then you know that we have to work hard to have a moral foundation. So I felt very liberated in being able to say that. I didn’t have to worry about being the spokesman for the Republican Party and all that kind of stuff.

Christine DeLay: Plus, they were all your friends.

I know. It’s amazing.

I think Delay is going to join Vision America, his good friend Rick Scarborough‘s organization. He’s going to reinvent himself as a preacher. And I have a sneaking suspicion he’s going to be involved with this.

The interesting thing about this is that the religious right in general is a tiny bit spooked by this thing — not Scarbororugh, an operator who makes Elmer Gantry look like Ghandi. But Dobson’s dauchshund, Tony Perkins, was a little flustered last week in this interview:

MATTHEWS: So you want to identify with Rick Scarborough’s, Reverend Rick Scarborough’s claim that the reason Tom DeLay is in trouble with the courts, with the Democrats, with the media, is because he’s a Christian. Are you going to identify with that argument?

PERKINS: I would not say that in total.

MATTHEWS: But he did.

PERKINS: I’m just saying that I think that that has made him a target.

MATTHEWS: It has?

PERKINS: I think it has.

MATTHEWS: His religion?

PERKINS: The fact that he has been so out front on many of these issues. Now in terms of his legal problems or what he’s facing today, those stand on their own. But I think that clearly anyone who stands up and identifies with the evangelical community if a very pronounced way as he has and …

MATTHEWS: … Is Abramoff in trouble because of his religion?

PERKINS: No.

MATTHEWS: He just got five years and 10 months today.

PERKINS: No, and he’s pleaded guilty to committing crimes. Tom DeLay has not been convicted of anything, nor has he said.

Even if he’s convicted of crimes, he’ll just do a Chuck Colson. It’s quite the racket these rightwing Christians have going. When you think about it, it’s perfect for Tom Delay.

Oh and in case you wonder what Rick Scarborough’s all about, I think this says it all:

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The White House

April 18, 2005

Rove: White House ‘strongly’ behind DeLay
Bush aide says embattled House majority leader ‘a close ally’

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The White House stands “strongly” behind Tom DeLay amid ethical questions over the House majority leader’s fund- raising and overseas trips, deputy chief of staff Karl Rove said Monday.

Rove, the strategist who ran President Bush’s two presidential campaigns, said DeLay, a Texas Republican, has been the target of partisan attacks by “desperate” Democrats.

“Tom DeLay is going to continue to be a strong and effective majority leader for the Republicans in the House,” he said on CNN’s “Inside Politics.”

[…]

“We strongly support Tom DeLay. He’s a good man, a close ally of this administration,” Rove said in a rare television interview.

Newspaper articles have said that DeLay went on overseas trips paid for by lobbyists. That would be a violation of House rules if proved to be true.

The majority leader says he has done nothing improper and told CNN earlier this month that he was the target of a “liberal media” smear campaign. (Full story)

[…]

Rove said he was confident the questions surrounding DeLay would be “resolved to everybody’s satisfaction” by the House ethics committee.

[…]

“The issue here is the abuse of power — and it’s not just Tom DeLay,” said Hoyer, the House Democratic whip. “It’s Republican abuse of power. It’s abuse of power in the House rules. It’s abuse of power in the ethics process.”

Rove said Democrats are attacking DeLay because they have no ideas of their own.

“I think they’re just desperate,” he said. “They’re not offering ideas in the debate, they’re not being constructive, and so some of their members are taking potshots at Tom DeLay.”

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The Churches

Perkins Leads Salute to Tom DeLay with Prominent Conservative Groups

WASHINGTON, May 10, 2005 /PRNewswire/ — Family Research Council (FRC) PresidentTony Perkins will join an assembly of other prominent conservatives including, Ed Feulner of The Heritage Foundation, David Keene of American Conservative Union and Paul Weyrich of Free Congress Foundation, to pay tribute to Representative Tom DeLay of Texas.

“Tom DeLay has been a friend of the family in the Congress,” said Tony Perkins, President of Family Research Council.

“We are very privileged to have this opportunity to honor an upstanding member of the United States Congress. Tom DeLay has worked tirelessly to help the United States return to the respectful moral values that so many Americans treasure. I believe that Tom DeLay is a valuable asset to the United States Congress and in turn, a valuable asset to his constituents,” continues Perkins.

“I will proudly stand beside Tom DeLay and I commend him for his stalwart defense of American values in the face of criticism and threats to his elected office.”

The Movement

March 30, 2005

An Open Letter to Conservatives
by Morton C. Blackwell

Fellow Conservatives,

I’m writing to ask you to join me in doing something effective against the leftist organizations and liberal media who have launched truly vicious attacks on U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

They attack Tom DeLay for just one reason: Congressman DeLay is one of the most effective fighters for conservative principles.

Time and again, Majority Leader Tom DeLay manages the strategy which wins for conservatives in the narrowly divided House of Representatives.

I know personally that Tom Delay is almost obsessively careful to get good legal advice before he takes any step which might conceivably be questioned under the law or suspected as an infraction of House rules. None of the leftist uproar has contains any evidence he has done anything illegal or violated the House rules.

The only fire under all that smoke generated by the leftist attacks is their burning hatred of a good man.

Conservatives must respond with a richly deserved attack on leftist groups and liberal media trying to lynch Tom DeLay. That’s why I’m writing to you.

And you and I must do all we can to make sure any politician who hopes to have conservative support in the future had better be in the forefront as we attack those who attack Tom DeLay.

Media and organizations who would let left wingers get away with almost anything are trying to generate a feeding frenzy against DeLay. No matter what he does, they attack him. Not content to make mountains out of mole hills, they invent mole hills to make mountains.

If Tom DeLay preferred Fords to Chevrolets or Chevrolets to Fords, the leftists would gin up reasons to attack his preference either way.

Unscrupulous leftist media will huff and puff to breath life into any trivial or phony leftist complaint against any act of any powerful conservative, no matter how upright and innocent. And they’ll keep doing this until a public reaction begins to embarrass and damage those spreading the propaganda.

You’ve seen this all your life.

They tried without success to generate a feeding frenzy against Ronald Reagan for many years. They tried it without success against George W. Bush’s reelection. Now they’re trying it against Tom DeLay.

Prominent newspapers have run a dozen almost identical stories, re-hashing the same foggy complaints, each with a different headline. After all those outrageous, repetitious attacks, the liberal news media have the gall to say that he has become controversial.

It’s clear that major liberal print and broadcast media have assigned full-time reporters in this concerted effort to “get” Tom DeLay.

The “non-partisan” leftist groups that attacked President Bush all last year and those groups’ big donors are now pouring resources into the current anti-DeLay effort.

Make no mistake about it, their purpose is to damage or destroy any effective conservative. If the attacks succeed, the left eliminates an enemy and tends to discourage any other conservative who is effective.

You and I must not let the left get away with this.

That’s why I’m writing to you — to ask that you make an immediate and sustained effort to stop the left from destroying this outstanding, successful, honorable conservative leader.

Earlier this month, at my personal expense, I had printed up some hundreds of lapel stickers which read, “Hooray for DeLay.” I distributed them to eager conservatives at political meetings. But much more can and ought to be done.

Here are three important things you can do:

First, vigorously respond to the onslaught by leftist groups and the liberal media. Attack the attackers for their outrageous bias and point out the real reason they are attacking Tom DeLay: He is one of our most effective conservative leaders.

Second, ask the leaders of any conservative organization you know what they are doing to uphold Tom DeLay against the vicious attacks against him. They should activate their members, readers, donors, viewers, and listeners.

Even non-profit groups can do many things helpful to Tom DeLay without endangering their tax status.

Virtually every conservative cause has benefited greatly from the devotion and skill of Tom DeLay. He fights our battles beside us. We owe him our strongest support now.

Third, and perhaps most powerful, by letter, phone call, email, or personal visit, ask the Republican Members of Congress from your state and others Members you know what they are doing to attack those who are mounting the biased, unfair attacks on Tom DeLay. They will listen to you.

Ultimately, the purpose of all the left’s attacks is to remove Tom from his position of leadership. That’s why they are doing this. They must not succeed.

Please don’t get bogged down answering all the absurd, groundless attacks. The left can and will raise phony new issues faster than you can respond to the old ones. Congressman DeLay has fully and publicly dealt with these false or nit-picky issues.

Focus your attention on attacking his ill-motivated attackers — and encourage others to do what is right and stand beside Tom DeLay.

Morton C. Blackwell

The Loser

by tristero

Any day that begins with more tsouris for Tom DeLay is a good day in my book. But his resignation from Congress – that’s cause for celebration. A few points:

1. I don’t see any reason why DeLay can’t leave Congress today.

2. But if he must stay until May, then I strongly suggest that the Capitol police drop their attempts to arrest McKinney and instead devote a considerable amount of manpower to trailing DeLay until he’s out of there. Count the towels in the bathroom. Count the ashtrays and pencils. I’m not not kidding: if he came over to my house to do a fumigation job, I wouldn’t leave him alone for a second. Would you?

3. I once read that Bernard Herrmann asked Alfred Hitchcock what job he wanted if could have any job in the world. Without skipping a beat, Hitchcock dead-panned, “A hanging judge.” Well, I would make a lousy hanging judge, as I would a professor – the few times I’ve taught, my colleagues have had to spend serious time talking me out of giving automatic A’s. So I know this will anger a lot of you, but I care far less about punishing DeLay than I do about spending time and energy fixing all the disasters he caused. I firmly believe he should receive a fair trial before being sentenced (grin), but it’s more important that Texas recover from the DeLay gerrymandering, and that laws get passed to make the corrupt practices DeLay gorged on far more difficult to do.

DeLay is history. His legacy unfortunately is not. Now, when he is convicted, part of his sentence should forbid him can never to get close to any office or government official again, other than his parole officer. But the results of his awful deeds must be reversed as soon as possible, before it becomes in any way settled business. And we should not forget that while indulging in some genuinely justified schadenfreude.

[Note to the humor-challenged: Point 2 is satirical. That should be obvious, but the tip-off is the notion that I would hire DeLay to fumigate my apartment. I only hire people whose competence I can trust, thank you very much. The other points are serious, including that DeLay should be urged to leave immediately.]

The Winner

by tristero

Woo Hoo! Congratulations to Digby for his Koufax! Well-deserved and hard-earned by posting one splendid insight after another.

It is hard to believe what it was like back in the dark days of 2001 through early 2003. At that time serious liberal commentary was next to impossible to find. The only hint that there Others Like Me still alive in America was the bi-weekly Krugman column in the NY Times. Everyone else, including smart, close friends, had gone off the deep end, parroting one or another piece of nonsense from the Bush administration – “no way could Bush have prevented 9/11 by forcing the government agencies to be more vigilant” was the most prevalent, even among the most liberal people I know.

Somehow, I discovered the blogging world and Hullabaloo was one of the first I found. And there he was – I mean Howard Beale. Digby had read my thoughts: Some crazies had looked at “Network” – which was hilarious when it came out but had seemed slightly over the top, even a tad ludicrous back then – and mistook its satire for a how-to guide. Digby got it. I started reading him regularly, and linked to him often. HIs posts literally helped to get me sane as I watched my country go over a cliff at the whim of a clearly delusional frat-boy of a president. I’m thrilled he’s been recognized for his contribution to the left blogosphere.

Poster Boy

by digby

So Tom Delay is cuttin’ and runnin’. I’m sure he’d like to stay in Texas, but the minorities have taken up all the good slots in prison.

My question is how these guys are going to explain themselves now. 3/30/05

Conservative leaders are crafting plans to launch a public campaign to defend House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

The move follows a meeting last week among DeLay, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the chief deputy majority whip, and nearly two dozen conservative leaders, including David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; Morton Blackwell, president of the Leadership Institute; and Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation.

Perkins, Keene and Feulner called the meeting, according to participants.

“It was a rallying cry to our conservative community that we are under assault. We need to fight back. We’re going to have a challenging year with the judicial issue bubbling up in the senate and the impact it may have on our ability to get things done,” said Cantor, who said he described to the group how Democrats and liberal groups have waged a coordinated battle to raise doubts about DeLay’s conduct.

Several of the conservative leaders who met last week are planning to launch a grassroots campaign targeted at conservatives in the districts of House Republican lawmakers whose support for DeLay may be wavering.

“The various organizations probably represent 3 or 4 million people,” Keene said of the conservative groups in the meeting. “We’re communicating with them to ask them to support DeLay and point out what is going on here.”

What is going on, conservatives say, is a coordinated effort by liberals and Democrats to tarnish DeLay’s name to oust him as majority leader and regain control of the House. Keene and others want conservative groups to communicate that to their members and to have their members relay the message to GOP lawmakers who represent them.

[…]

Most of the conservative leaders at last week’s meeting who spoke to The Hill said support for DeLay at the meeting appeared to be unanimous. But one who requested anonymity said his group would likely not participate in defending DeLay, and he raised questions about the propriety of tax-exempt groups’ waging a political campaign on behalf of a lawmaker.

Conservatives at the meeting received GOP research and press reports on millions of dollars in grants that George Soros’s Open Society Institute gave to groups critical of DeLay. The materials also described how several of the groups’ board members gave tens of thousands of dollars to help Democratic candidates and little if anything to help Republicans.

[…]

“I think that conservative groups ought to be concerned,” said Donald Hodel, who recently retired as head of Focus on the Family, “If conservative politicians are singled out for attacks by groups that have allegiance to a different worldview, if [conservatives] leave attacks to the liberal groups, they’re not going to have conservative politicians working for them.”

Blackwell, of the Leadership Institute, hinted that conservative groups will turn the attack back on Democrats and outside groups that are criticizing DeLay’s conduct, issuing a stern warning to Republican lawmakers who hang back from the battle.

“Any politician that hopes to have conservative support in the future better be in the forefront as we attack those who attack Tom DeLay,” he said.

They claimed that Delay was the personification of conservatism and by God he is. He’s a crook and a coward. All these pontificating rightwing “moral majority” gasbags backed him to the hilt.

That’s your modern Republican Party for you. What’ll we tell the children?

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“I’d like to thank the craft service guy”

by digby

Congratulations everyone.

The Winners:

• Best Blog — Non Professional : Crooks & Liars
• Best Blog — Professional or Sponsored : Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo
• Best Blog Community : Daily Kos
• Most Deserving of Wider Recognition : Echidne of the Snakes
• Best New Blog : Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory
• Best Writing : moi
• Best Single Issue Blog : Jordan Barab of Confined Space
• Best Expert Blog : Pharyngula by P.Z. Myers
• Best Group Blog : Shakespeare’s Sister
• Best Post : Bag News Notes for Katrina Aftermath: And Then I Saw These
• Best Series : FireDogLake for Plame coverage
• Most Humorous Blog : Jesus’ General
• Most Humorous Post : Dood Abides for The Wizard of Oil
• Best State or Local Blog : Bluegrass Report and Tennessee Guerilla Women
• Best Commenter : Georgia10

I am gobsmacked. Writing this blog is not all that easy for me, unfortunately. I write slowly and laboriously, unlike a lot of my fellow bloggers who seem to have an endless supply of great ideas and words at the ready to apply to any subject. I get writers block way too frequently. But I’ve got this little bloggy monkey on my back that just won’t leave me alone (not that I really want him to.) Despite my limitations, blogging is incredibly fun. And getting approbation from readers is fantastic. Thank you.

This is a wonderful political community, constantly evolving and growing and moving in new directions. This year brought many new bloggers into the forefront, some of whom have small but loyal followings, like my friends at Bagnews and others who are blogging juggernauts like Jane and Christy at firedoglake and and John Amato at Crooks and Liars who are clear cutting new paths through the blogosphere. And blogs are starting to have a tangible impact; it’s exciting to be a part of it.

But I have to say that the reason the political blogs are changing things has far less to do with our entertaining writing or cogent analysis than with the fact that we provide a forum for citizens to interact and a system for interacting with each other. We bloggers set forth ideas and lead the debate, but our political power derives from our readers and commenters. Essentially, it’s a collaborative political media — and the political and media establishments are starting to notice that many thousands of average citizens are engaging. They aren’t stupid. They know that blog readers are all opinion leaders in their own lives who take the arguments and ideas that are hashed out on the blogs to water coolers, dinner tables, bars and churches everywhere. That’s some powerful mojo.

I probably should say something about pseudonymity since it’s come up recently. This tradition goes back to the early days of our nation in which the enlightenment belief that pseudonymous written argument, based in reason rather than authority, democratizes ideas and promotes freedom. Many of the writers and activists who fomented the American revolution used fictitious personaes or wrote pseudonymously — Sam Adams wrote under 25 different identities. The idea (aside from protecting themselves from charges of treason!) was that the written words standing on their own, without the edifice of credentialed expertise and social status — or grounding in the received word of religion — had the greatest persuasive power. (The best example of this, of course, is Publius, of the Federalist Papers.) Writing pseudonymously openly distinguishes between the private person and a citizen of the public sphere by removing all but the disembodied voice from the argument. I find that interesting.

Until recently it was rapidly becoming necessary for people once again to have money, status or specialized knowledge in order to engage in national civic life. TV had created a public sphere,to be sure, but it was one-way. The impotence I felt during the Clinton impeachment, in which a media and political elite hijacked the discourse against the public will, was excruciating. When the internet serendipitously came along at precisely that moment with it’s natural affinity for fungible “identities,” I found it irresistable to try to write pseudonymously and engage the debate in this unique fashion. I do not claim to have accomplished anything spectacular by doing this but I’ve found it suits my temperament and continues to challenge my thinking in ways I never anticipated. That others find it entertaining and edifying as well pleases me to no end. After all, it’s the (early) American way.

Thanks very much everyone, particularly my talented contributor, tristero, and the gang at Wampum who are kind enough to sponsor these awards for our community. I’m truly grateful.

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Short Sighted Strategery

by digby

Joe Klein is piling on Bill Frist, no doubt in anticipation of his future fellatory profile of the man of his dreams, John McCain. He’s just clearing the decks. It’s enjoyable watching Frist get skewered, of course, but did anyone ever believe that such a dry socket could become president? Seriously, he makes Evan Bayh seem like Mick Jagger.

The column is, therefore, as useless as most of his columns, but there is one throw away line that caught my attention:

A series of terrible leadership moves have ensued. There was Frist’s effort to deploy the “nuclear option” — that is, to perform radical surgery on the Senate’s filibuster rules in order to allow votes on President Bush’s more extreme judicial appointments. But the nuclear option was thwarted when 14 Senate moderates cut a deal to keep the rules and allow votes on some of the appointees. “We saved him on that,” said a G.O.P. staff member involved in the negotiations. “Frist never had the votes he needed for the nuclear option.”

Who saved him exactly? The seven Republicans or the seven Democrats who cut that deal?

In case you forgot:

* Joseph I. Lieberman, Connecticut
* Robert C. Byrd, West Virginia
* E. Benjamin Nelson, Nebraska
* Mary Landrieu, Louisiana
* Daniel Inouye, Hawaii
* Mark Pryor, Arkansas
* Ken Salazar, Colorado

So what are these seven extracting from Bill Frist for their trouble? Nothing? What an excellent deal it was then.

It’s a perfect example of Chuck Schumer’s “protect the marginals” strategy, which is revealed in all its glory in the most amazing piece of narcissistic premature chicken counting I’ve ever seen. Does anyone really think it’s a good idea for Shumer to give an in-depth interview at this point in the cycle outlining his cynical, unprincipled political strategy? Could he not keep his big mouth shut for a few months at least?

It’s disturbing to see that Shumer cares more about big donors and moving the party ever rightward than fulfilling the Democratic vision; there is ample reason to condemn him for some of his decisions and criticize his strategy, which I will discuss shortly. But it’s unbelievable to me that he is such an egomaniac that he cooperated with a story that will damn the Democrats as being phony and hypocritical — which they are if what he’s saying is true. The only earthly reason to discuss his strategy publicly and in such detail is to toot his own horn and bask in the approbation of political pundits and sleazy strategists. And to do this before he has won is simply inexplicable.

What is it about Democratic politicians that they cannot keep their pieholes shut about process and strategy? Note to Harry Reid: think twice about assigning camera hogs to do backround work.

On the substance, I can see both good and bad in his strategy. On the positive side, I think he’s probably been pretty good at attracting good candidates in red states and I think it was very smart to bribe the Democratic senators who were tempted to retire with whatever they needed. We cannot lose any more senators. And I think we all understand that Democrats running in conservative races around the country need to be given latitude to run in a different way than one would run in New York or California. It is an unpleasant reality that the Senate, being a basically undemocratic institution, overrepresents conservatives. It always has.

But there are signs that Shumer’s agenda is not merely to draw a defensive line around red state Democrats — it’s to actually change certain fundamental aspects of the Democratic platform in order to make his job easier. Recruiting anti-abortion candidates in states where being pro-choice is acceptable even for Republicans like Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, for instance, is very hard to reconcile unless there is some attempt to marginalize that issue in the caucus. That will not do. I realize that it is always better to have Democrats in power than Republican when it comes to preserving choice (although history suggests that it is not an inviolable rule — the Hyde amendment was passed by a Democratic congress and signed by a Democratic president.) But to try to undermine choice by actively recruiting candidates in Blue States who believe that abortion should be outlawed looks very much like a move to push the party into the anti-abortion camp. (And like the Democrats’ eventual endorsement of the death penalty, it will not accomplish anything politically in the long run except making abortion illegal. There’s always another issue for the right to demagogue.)

It’s possible that there are forces at work in those two cases of which I’m unaware, but this is how it looks to me out here in grassrootsland. Chuck Shumer seems to be bargaining away choice in order to win and from where I sit that’s no different than endorsing rolling back the voting rights act in order to win. This is a fundamental issue of civil liberties that cuts to the heart of what the Democratic party stands for. Being willing to create the illusion that the party is anti-abortion (when a majority of the population is clearly in favor!) makes it appear that the party will do anything to win. And that, in my view, is what’s killing us.

Shumer puts it this way:

Schumer knew that the full fury of pro-choice Democrats would rain down on him when Casey announced his candidacy. But that was exactly the point. By pissing off the party’s most loyal supporters, Schumer sent a message that he was serious about winning, one that rippled into other states and helped persuade reluctant recruiting targets to run. “I said, ‘Hey, we have to win!’ If we had 58 seats, maybe you wouldn’t do this, but our back is against the wall,” Schumer says.

58 seats! (I suppose we should be grateful to at least know what’s required before we can stand up for our principles.)

I can’t help but wonder, however, if people like Shumer are hoping to win this next election exclusively with Independent and Republican votes; this is a very dicey strategy to employ in a mid-term, which depends upon turn out. On the substance I think he’s wrong. On the politics, I think he’s insane to be saying this publicly. Does he think we can’t read?

I honestly can’t decide which is worse — Shumer doing what he’s doing or Shumer advertising what he’s doing. When you look at both the optics and the substance, I don’t think I’ve ever read an article that makes be feel more depressed about the direction of the Party.

The days of “Sistah Sojahing” the base are over. It was useful 14 years ago but it is deadly now. Democrats should be very congnizant that disrespecting their core voters at this point will produce a backlash. And they should also be cognizant that turn-out of the Democratic base in the fall is not guaranteed by Bush’s unpopularity. There is a strong sense out here that our participation is meaningless — we will have Bush for two more years no matter what and the congress is impotent and unwilling to challenge him no matter how unpopular he becomes. Clearly there will be no accountability for the last five years and the only change in policy the Democrats seem interested in is to bring the nation ever closer to making choice illegal. Why should the base bother to vote in this election?

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