Apparently, I have become the first person officially banned by Jeff Goldstein from commenting on his site. He cites as one of his main reasons that I tried to solicit a blowjob from his dog. At least that’s what I think he said, it’s kinda hard to tell with poor Jeff.
For the record, I want to state categorically I did no such thing (and what is it about rightwing nuts and their obsessions with man-on-dog?). I never met his dog and have no interest in doing so. Everyone knows I have far more kinky…proclivities.
Looks like the Iraqi police cannot protect themselves. Eighteen police officers died – eighteen! – when a police station – a police station! – was attacked.
But, as Tom Friedman says, where some see lemon, others see lemonade. The good news is that at least some business is thriving in Iraq: terrorism insurance. Now there’s a racket…sorry, career with a bright future.
Amy Sullivan responded, and graciously, to my open letter to her. Here are some excerpts, posted with her permission (spelling hers):
… It is good and right to criticize wacked-out crazy conservative religious beliefs. Yes, it is. If you follow *all* of my writing–not just the stuff that gets people hopped up–I do in fact critize all of those guys. Often. But you don’t say,”Boy, I hate that George Bush because he talks about Jesus all the time.” Or, “Man, the whole idea of faith-based initiatives is just religious crap.” Or, “We have a theocracy because Bush went into Iraq and that’s what the apocolyptic crazy Christian nuts want him to do.”
You say, “Bush can talk about Jesus all he wants, but he can’t base his policies on religion and he has to explain why he’s bringing religion into political debate.” And, “The faith-based initiative is a political sham; Bush hasn’t put any money into it because he doesn’t actually want to help poor people.” And, “Bush was wrong to go into Iraq, and those apocolyptic people are crazy, but those are two separate things.”
It may sound like I’m splitting hairs, but I’m not. If you don’t delineate, it’s easy for people to dismiss you because it’s sounds like you’re being reflexively anti-religion. And it makes it harder for you to have any credibility when you do go after them for trying to recruit churches to do GOP campaign work or for giving Dobson a say in picking justices or for wrapping themselves in the Christian flag without living up to any of the social gospel principles in the Bible.
In the sentence directly after the one you quoted, I went on to say that it’s perfectly appropriate to criticize them and I think that should happen. But I think people need to recognize that everything we say and do is scrutinized for evidence of religious hostility. That’s reality. So be smart about it. Give thoughtful religious moderates a reason to say, “Yeah, they’re right. These guys are a bunch of hypocrites. I belong over there instead.” Not, “Boy, those guys seem to hate people like me.” Because they’re NOT all fundamentalists.
Her point is clear and it’s one I, too, have made: focus your rhetoric. She’s right about that general point. There are just a few problems with her own rhetoric.
First, aside from a few village atheists with absolutely zero political power, like a few bloggers and commenters, no one has said any of the things she deplores. So I have to ask directly: Amy, who exactly among the important Democrats or commenters has made these kinds of intemperate comments? Where has, to use your earlier examples, Kevin Phillips or Bill Moyers talked that way?
Secondly, it is not the religious moderates in either party that provoke criticism. It is the genuine apocalyptic loons in the Republican party that have all of us, including Amy herself, alarmed. The serious problem, which Amy finesses, is that these people are in positions of immense power. In fact, the must-read article Amy references makes this abundantly clear. Brownback was appointed by Frist, himself a radical christianist as his remarks on AIDS, abortion, and Schiavo make abundantly clear. Brownback was influenced by Charles Colson, prays with Ed Meese. The man who mentored Pat Robertson has the power to send an envoy to the president of the United States to remind him to be more christianist.
Furthermore, the article describes what can only be characterized as a very serious and very secretive 25 year plus attempt to overthrow the Constitution of the United States and replace it with a theocracy, a conspiracy between Catholic and Protestant christianists (a “co-belligerency”) which, if they were, say communists and socialists, could only be described as treason.
Amy thinks there is no theocracy in the US and that Bush doesn’t want one. She’s right and she’s wrong, respectively. There is still religious toleration, but over the course of his career Bush has let slip several comments, about Jews for instance, that reveal his desire. The seriousness of what is going seems to escape her. Amy apparently misunderstands what is meant by the phrase “religious freedom” (as may Sharlet himself) when used by Brownback and his ugly ilk. She tends to think that this means that genuine Christians feel oppressed by a secularist society that is arrayed against them. Not so. “Religious freedom” is a term Rushdoony uses in “The Roots of Reconstruction” as an explict synonym for a christianist theocracy.*
No one has a problem with Colin Powell’s expression of religious beliefs. Or Christie Whitman’s. Or Chuck Hagel’s. And so on. Unfortunately, they are not at the very top of the Republican Party and the people who *are* are theocrats (political) as well as fanatics (religious). Yes, indeed, we need to hone our rhetoric. But not for a moment must we forget who these people are. Nor can we minimize their extremism. That is a serious mistake, and that is the mistake Amy makes when she criticizes “the left” for allegedly going after religious people when, in fact, that simply is not the case in the mainstream discourse.
[*Update: I am not, for a moment, suggesting that Bush subcribes to Dominionism or Christian Reconstruction. What I am asserting, and hope to demonstrate in some future posts, is that Reconstructionist objectives and language pervades the discourse of the radical right christianists, that Reconstructionist influence is direct via extensive associations with other sects and cults, such as Robertson’s and Dobson’s and that major effort is being expended to minimize these associations and to hide them from wider scrutiny. Bush desires a theocracy, it is true, but he is neither intellectually, morally, or emotionally equipped to understand or advocate pure Reconstructionist thought. He does, however, share many of the same obsessions and use many of the same tactics.]
Jessica T. Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, advocated “coerced inspections” of Iraq as an alternative to invasion and conquest. Time and again, she and other CEIP members warned against the dangerous illusion of forcing democracy at the point of a gun. In short, she and CEIP were among the majority of the world who needed to be taught no lessons on the perils of naive idealism (a la George Packer and the other liberal hawks), far right militarism (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al), or reality-deficient neo-conservatism (Wolfowitz, Kristol, etc).
There isn’t a chance in hell that the Bush administration will take what Jessica T. Mathews has to say about Iran seriously. But, by God, you should, and so should anyone who cares about constructing a sensible alternative to the slow-motion slide into nuclear catastrophe that is the current American foreign policy:
The administration must, finally, hold its nose and recognize that the nuclear challenge is the indisputable priority. It must get off the sidelines and into negotiations with Tehran. It must solidify agreement among its fellow permanent [United Nations security] council members by working closely with Russia, not least by concluding a long overdue pact on civil nuclear cooperation. Russian participation would make it possible to provide Iran with a credible international guarantee of uranium enrichment and reprocessing services.
With China and the others, the United States needs to make clear that the Security Council can resort to other steps besides economic sanctions to significantly raise the cost to Tehran of its continued defiance, beginning with making International Atomic Energy Agency inspections mandatory rather than voluntary.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (and her fellow foreign ministers from the council’s permanent members) should be flying to Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and other leading countries of the G-77 to explain why Iran is wrong to claim that the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty gives it the “right” to enrich uranium, and why Iran’s abuse of the treaty devalues each of their commitments to give up nuclear weapons.
Given the American record with Iraq and Iran, others will be skeptical that Washington has made a clear choice for nonproliferation and away from regime change. The message will have to be steady and unequivocal. If President Bush and Secretary Rice continue to say one thing and Vice President Dick Cheney and our ambassador to the United Nations, John R. Bolton, say another, the effort will quickly fail.
Members of Congress have a direct responsibility as well. Only they — especially the Democrats — can make such a policy change possible. They will have to forgo the indulgence of slamming the administration from the right and currying favor with pro-Israel voters by vying to see who can be the most anti-Iranian.*
All of this, and more, is what serious anti-nuclear diplomacy would look like. It has not yet been tried. Anyone who promotes the use of military force from the present position of American indecision and before the obvious political steps have been taken is repeating the error that led us into Iraq.
The international community’s record on Iran’s nuclear program (as on North Korea’s) has been feckless. Only the United States can change that. If we fail to pursue this effort with unwavering, clear-minded diplomacy, a nuclear-armed world will be the Bush administration’s chief legacy, no matter how the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism turn out.
Open memo to Kevin Drum and Matthew Yglesias: You all but dismissed Mathews in 2002/03. This time, boys, listen up. Once again, she’s absolutely right.
* Note to right-wingers, especially neo-conservatives: Jessica Tuchman Mathews is the daughter of Barbara Tuchman. Yes, THE Barbara Tuchman. This means that in addition to having one helluva brilliant mom, Mathews’ background is Jewish. So don’t even begin to try accusing her of anti-semitism merely because she places America’s interests above those of Richard Perle’s far right business friends in Israel.
Russ Feingold appeared on Charlie Rose and I suspect it may be what forced Bill Kristol to admit that he was “an impressive politician” who made the case very effectively.
Crooks and Liars has the video and I urge you to watch it all. He has his finger on the pulse of the Democratic base — which, by the way, represents the new majority.
Here’s a short excerpt. When Charlie asked about all the pearl clutching about his censure motions among the beltway courtiers, he replied:
Shades of October 2002. These are the same pundits, consultants, and spin miesters who said you’ve gotta vote for the Iraq war or George Bush is going to hang you out to dry and he’s gonna show that you don’t care about the troops and you don’t care about the fight against terrorism.
They pull it every time. And the Democratic insiders in Washington and the consultants fall for it every time. They don’t realize that the thing that bugs people about the Democratic party right now is that we don’t seem to stand strongly enough for what we believe in.
How can we be afraid at this point, of standing up to a president who has clearly mismanaged this Iraq war, who clearly made one of the largest blunders in American foreign policy history? How can it be that this party wants to stand back and allow this kind of thing to happen?
And then add to that the idea that the president has clearly broken the law — and a number of Republican senators have effectively admitted that, by saying “you know, we need this program so let’s make it legal,” — so they are admitting it’s illegal.
The idea that Democrats don’t think it’s a winning thing to say that we will stand up for the rule of law and for checking abuse of power by the executive — I just can’t believe that Democrats don’t think that isn’t something, not only that we can win on, but it does, in fact, make the base of our party, which is so important, feel much better about the Democrats. The Republicans care deeply about making the base of their party feels energized. What about the people of our party who believe in the Democratic Party especially because they fight for the American values of standing up for our rights and civil liberties?
There is no more reliable arbiter of beltway conventional wisdom than Cokie Roberts. Her entire career has been built on the idea that she knows what the establishment is thinking (which the establishment then inexplicably twists into what “the people” are thinking.) She has spent her life in Washington DC and is as much a part of the firmament as the Arlington cemetary. When she speaks, the poobahs have issued an verdict. This morning on NPR she said this:
Democrats are enjoying their miseries. Jack Reed of Rhode Island said to me this week-end “we have a strong wind at our back and all we have to do is get a sail up, any sail, some sail” but they haven’t managed to do that yet.
They were interested to see how Senator Russ Feingold’s call for censure worked with the blogosphere, mainly, and also in polls. Because Democrats backed away from his call just dramatically, even Democrats like Nancy Pelosi of California didn’t want anything to do with it. But a Newsweek poll out today shows 42% of the people supporting censure including 20% of Republicans. So Democrats are feeling pretty good about where they are in all this.
Apparently the establishment needed some numbers in order to know what to think. OK. As I wrote earlier, I think some of our leaders’ natural political instincts have been hobbled by an over-reliance on strategists and pundits. But I would remind the courtier class who are advising the Democrats of what Bill Kristol said this week-end: politics is not just about running on issues people already agree with, it is trying to change public opinion. Somebody had to jump start the debate about the president’s theory of presidential infallibility and abuse of power. It’s a huge issue to millions of Americans and it’s vital that politicians of both parties recognize this.
The Newsweek poll says that 53% of the people believe it is a political ploy, but I suspect that there are more than a few Democrats within that number who are vastly relieved to see a Democrat with enough imagination to try to seize the debate and change public opinion. One can call it a political ploy (although Fiengold is one of the few guys in the congress with a real reputation for integrity) but to the base it’s a political ploy in service of bedrock principle. Democrats cannot pass legislation. They cannot force the president to change his Iraq policy. They don’t have the power to call hearings or subpeona witnesses. Even when they have hearings, the Republican chairmen refuse to put the witnesses under oath.
Political ploys are the only way the minority can make its voice heard. I have the cable blathering on in the backround most days, much of the time tuned to C-Span. There are dozens of press conferences held each week on both sides of the aisle. It’s is a very rare one that anybody sees or hears. This is no way to get your message out.
I have no idea how many people might have favored censure before Feingold put it out there. But it’s amazing that without any prior discussion at all, this large minority, including a large chunk of Republicans, were ready to agree with his motion. Or perhaps it isn’t so amazing. Kos reminds us this morning:
The Alito filibuster was supposed to be a disaster for Democrats. Somehow, their numbers didn’t suffer. Murtha was going to kill Dems by making them “look weak on defense”. But somehow, people seem to agree with him. Now, Feingold’s censure resolution is supposed to be a disaster for Democrats. Yet if that was the case, why are Republicans reacting so virulently against it? Bill Kristol admits the censure motion is hurting Bush. Meanwhile, Brit Hume’s head exploded at the resolution. Not the action of a man confident that Feingold is hurting the Democratic Party.
That’s because they know that these things aren’t hurting the Democratic party. The only party hurting right now is the Republican party.
People want to know what Democratic base really stands for? The same thing that the majority of the country stands for. We believe in the rule of law, civil liberties, civil rights and supporting the troops — all of those things are embodied in the Alito filibuster motion, the Feingold NSA wiretapping resolution and the Murtha plan. None of them were done out of an expectation that they would win passage in the congress or force the president to change course. These actions, regardless of motive, have laid down the stakes in the next election, which is why Brit Hume had an aneurysm about the proposition that the NSA wiretapping issue might actually play to the benefit of Democrats.
If that’s so, then it’s true that Republicans are going to be in for a tough time under a Democratic congress. People need to prepare for the fact that accountability is going to be on the menu. Nobody is going to be impeached over silly blow-jobs but there are some very serious matters that the Republican congress has refused to deal with. If that stirs up the GOP base, then fine. It stirs up the Democratic base too.
In any case, the Republicans are going to move their base anyway, so there’s no margin in worrying about it. (Via Joe Gandelman) I see that Fred Barnes reports that aside from the usual labeling of Democrats as traitors and cowards, the Republicans are planning to begin another assault on civil liberties in order to turn out their conservative Christian voters.
There’s another part of the 2006 Republican strategy. This spring and summer, Republican leaders in the Senate and House plan to bring up a series of issues that are popular with the Republican base of voters. The aim is to stir conservative voters and spur turnout in the November election. Just last week, House Majority Leader John Boehner and Whip Roy Blunt met with leaders of conservative groups to talk about these issues.
House Republicans, for their part, intend to seek votes on measures such as the Bush-backed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, a bill allowing more public expression of religion, another requiring parental consent for women under 18 to get an abortion, legislation to bar all federal courts except the Supreme Court from ruling on the constitutionality of the Pledge of Allegiance, a bill to outlaw human cloning, and another that would require doctors to consider fetal pain before performing an abortion.
I assume that it will be successful with those voters, too. They tend to be very supportive of the party that articulates their views, and everyone agrees that they form an important component of the Republican base. The Republicans know what they are doing with this. They have a very sophisticated GOTV effort that significantly outperformed the Democrats in 2004:
It is … particularly disturbing that while both Republican and Independent turnout increased sizably from 2000 to 2004, Democratic turnout remained flat. We may have helped move a lot of unlikely voters, but we did not mobilize our base nearly as well as Republicans did.
Mid-terms are turn-out elections. It’s always lower than the presidential years. The Alito filibuster motion, the Murtha withdrawal plan and the Feingold resolution all serve to shake up the establishment and public opinion. But they also send a message to the base of the Democratic party that the party hears their concerns. The establishment at large can take them for granted if they choose. The Republicans won’t take their base for granted. They never do.
Here’s a reminder in case the Bush epoch has caused you to forget why you need a competent, knowledgeable administration and not a bunch of ignorant fools and top officials who value faith over facts. Someone has to make sure the right dots are getting connected. During the spring/summer of 2001, that did not happen:
“Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Clarke wrote, scowled and asked, ‘why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden.’ When Clarke told him no foe but al Qaeda ‘poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States,’ Wolfowitz is said to have replied that Iraqi terrorism posed ‘at least as much’ of a danger. FBI and CIA representatives backed Clarke in saying they had no such evidence.
‘I could hardly believe,’ Clarke writes, that Wolfowitz pressed the ‘totally discredited’ theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, ‘a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.'”
The FBI agent who arrested Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001 accused headquarters of criminal negligence for its refusal to investigate Moussaoui aggressively after his arrest, according to court testimony Monday.
Agent Harry Samit testified under cross-examination at Moussaoui’s trial that FBI headquarters’ refusal to follow up “prevented a serious opportunity to stop the 9/11 attacks” that killed nearly 3,000 people.
…
Under cross-examination by defense attorney Edward MacMahon, Samit acknowledged that he predicted in an Aug. 18, 2001, memo that Moussaoui was a radical Islamic terrorist in a criminal conspiracy to hijack aircraft. Moussaoui ended up pleading guilty to two specific counts that Samit had explicitly predicted in his Aug. 18 memo.
Despite Samit’s urgent pleadings, FBI headquarters refused to open a criminal investigation and refused Samit’s entreaties to obtain a search warrant.
“You needed people in Washington to help you out?” MacMahon asked.
“Yes,” Samit said.
“They didn’t do that, did they?”
Samit said no.
He confirmed under questioning that he had attributed FBI inaction to “obstructionism, criminal negligence and careerism” in an earlier report.
It makes me sick to read about this. How do these people sleep at night?
Someone finally asked George W. Bush the one question I’ve been wanting someone to ask since 9/11:
“Do you believe terrorism and the war in Iraq are signs of Armageddon?”
He sputtered and blinked, the audience laughed and he said: “I’ve never really thought about it that way” and “this is the first of heard of that, by the way.” And then he blathered on with his usual incoherent boilerplate, making no further reference to it openly or in religious codes speak, except to the extent he said we would militarily defend our ally Israel. I wonder how the Bosh loving legions of the Christian Right feel about that?
The questioning was quite pointed and he didn’t much like it, practically begging part of the way through for it to be over. (“How long do you people do questions around here?” and “Doesn’t anybody work in this town?”)
He claimed that he’d never said that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Where did people get the idea that it was, do you suppose?
I believe that he majored in history at Yale, which is something that Yale should be very concerned with in terms of recruitment. His understanding of 20th century European history comes in at about fifth grade level.
He has said that his job is “to protect you” about 50 times. Does anyone find this paternalistic “I will protect you” stuff as creepy as I do? I thought Americans were supposed to be self reliant. I think Democrats ought to consider saying that “the president doesn’t protect the American people all by himself. He isn’t our father or our nanny. The American people, working together, protect our country.”
What’s the difference between Iraq and Iran? With Iraq there were 16 UN resolutions. (Of course, the invasion resolution to actually invade didn’t pass, but who’s counting?) Apparently, invading Iran is just a matter of getting the paperwork in order.
I did enjoy the question about domestic policy in which the questioner said that American children were facing “terrorists” in the streets every day. And then mentioned the images from Katrina and poverty and wondered what Bush was going to do about it? What do you suppose he was talking about?
His adolescent sense of humor seems more and more out of place considering the state of the world — and his presidency. People still laugh, but it is awkward now.
When it was over he looked like he really, really needed a drink.
Oh and in case you haven’t heard, we’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here, the oceans don’t protect us anymore, we have an enemy that hides in cave and 9/11 changed everything. And his job is to make decisions and protect us.
Update: Jonathan Schwartz at A Tiny Revolution noticed a few months ago that Bush’s desire to protect us is very similar to Saddam’s professed desire to protect the Iraqi people. It’s one of those “I’m doing this for your own good, it hurts me more than it hurts you” kind of deals. no wonder I find it so creepy.
Welcome to another Monday in Bushland. Let’s catch up on two recent minor little incidents you may have missed celebrating three years of success in Iraq. What prevents either of them from being characterized a scandal of nation-shaking proportions should be patently obvious by now: neither involved, as far as we know, coitus per os.
The new account reveals the extent to which the unit members mistreated prisoners months before and after the photographs of abuse from Abu Ghraib were made public in April 2004, and it helps belie the original Pentagon assertions that abuse was confined to a small number of rogue reservists at Abu Ghraib.
n December, the New York Times disclosed the NSA’s warrantless electronic surveillance program, resulting in an angry reaction from President Bush. It has not previously been disclosed, however, that administration lawyers had cited the same legal authority to justify warrantless physical searches. But in a little-noticed white paper submitted by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to Congress on January 19 justifying the legality of the NSA eavesdropping, Justice Department lawyers made a tacit case that President Bush also has the inherent authority to order such physical searches. In order to fulfill his duties as commander in chief, the 42-page white paper says, “a consistent understanding has developed that the president has inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless searches and surveillance within the United States for foreign intelligence purposes.”
…
It could not be learned whether the Bush administration has cited the legal authority to carry out such searches. A former marine, Mueller has waged a quiet, behind-the-scenes battle since 9/11 to protect his special agents from legal jeopardy as a result of aggressive new investigative tactics backed by the White House and the Justice Department, government officials say. During Senate testimony about the NSA surveillance program, however, Gonzales was at pains to avoid answering questions about any warrantless physical surveillance activity that may have been authorized by the Justice Department.
…
At least one defense attorney representing a subject of a terrorism investigation believes he was the target of warrantless clandestine searches. On Sept. 23, 2005–nearly three months before the Times broke the NSA story–Thomas Nelson wrote to U.S. Attorney Karin Immergut in Oregon that in the previous nine months, “I and others have seen strong indications that my office and my home have been the target of clandestine searches.” In an interview, Nelson said he believes that the searches resulted from the fact that FBI agents accidentally gave his client classified documents and were trying to retrieve them. Nelson’s client is Soliman al-Buthe, codirector of a now defunct charity named al-Haramain, who was indicted in 2004 for illegally taking charitable donations out of the country. The feds also froze the charity’s assets, alleging ties to Osama bin Laden. The documents that were given to him, Nelson says, may prove that al-Buthe was the target of the NSA surveillance program. The searches, if they occurred, were anything but deft. Late at night on two occasions, Nelson’s colleague Jonathan Norling noticed a heavyset, middle-aged, non-Hispanic white man claiming to be a member of an otherwise all-Hispanic cleaning crew, wearing an apron and a badge and toting a vacuum. But, says Norling, “it was clear the vacuum was not moving.” Three months later, the same man, waving a brillo pad, spent some time trying to open Nelson’s locked office door, Norling says. Nelson’s wife and son, meanwhile, repeatedly called their home security company asking why their alarm system seemed to keep malfunctioning. The company could find no fault with the system.
In October, Immergut wrote to Nelson reassuring him that the FBI would not target terrorism suspects’ lawyers without warrants and, even then, only “under the most exceptional circumstances,” because the government takes attorney-client relationships “extremely seriously.” Nelson nevertheless filed requests, under the Freedom of Information Act, with the NSA. The agency’s director of policy, Louis Giles, wrote back, saying, “The fact of the existence or nonexistence of responsive records is a currently and properly classified matter.”
