For Republicans, Bad News Is Good News. And Good News Is Good News.
by tristero
It’s been blogged around, but it’s too great to pass up. Jamison Foser::
…NBC’s Matt Lauer made an extraordinary claim this week. Referring to Bush’s approval ratings — which seem to reach a new low every day — Lauer asked Tim Russert:
LAUER: These approval numbers, Tim, are they in some ways a blessing in disguise for Republicans in these midterm elections? Because, basically, they can look and say, ‘Look, I don’t have a popular president here. I can turn my back on that president, or even oppose that president going into these elections and stem the tide of this voter anger.’
Think about that for a moment: Lauer suggests that Bush’s low approval rating is a good thing for Republican candidates, because now, they can run away from him. We assume Lauer would agree that it would be a positive for Republican candidates if Bush had a high approval rating. What, then, is left? Can anything be bad news for Republicans?
…
It’s about time media stop portraying every new controversy as a danger to Democrats, and start recognizing that these things are threats to Republicans: they’re the people in charge of a government widely seen as incompetent and corrupt; they’re the party led by a horribly unpopular president; and they’re the people who pushed a soundly rejected Social Security privatization scheme. And yet, media see everything as an opportunity for them, and a danger for Democrats. Osama bin Laden may be dead? Good news for Republicans: They got bin Laden! New tapes prove bin Laden is still alive? Good news for Republicans: It reminds people of the threat of terrorism! Democrats don’t criticize Bush? Good news for Republicans: Democrats are timid! Democrats do criticize Bush? Good news for Republicans: Democrats are shrill!
I’m glad to see Steve Clemons being quoted saying this in today’s harsh Philadelphia Inquirer editorial:
Before Iraq, said Steven C. Clemons, a useful mystique surrounded the strength of the United States. Clemons heads foreign policy studies at the New America Foundation.
Rogue nations such as Iran didn’t know the boundaries of our power. This blundering war of choice in Iraq has revealed them.
I’ve been saying this for a long time and it still seems to me to be the most salient strategic argument for not going into Iraq after 9/11. Back in February 2004 I wrote:
I get the impression from casual conversation and reading the papers that a lot of Americans understand that Junior lied to get us into Iraq, but they don’t think it really hurt anything. In fact, since Saddam was a prick and it didn’t really cost us much to take him out (well, except for the loss of life and the billions spent), it was a pretty good thing to do, on balance. Kicking a little butt after 9/11 probably sent a message we needed to send.
The problem with this is that they don’t understand what a huge error in judgment the Iraq operation was in terms of our long term security and readiness. Nor do they understand the extent to which we damaged our alliances and how dangerous it was to blow our credibility at a time like this.
[…]
… Wes Clark and others made the argument some time ago that Iraq was a distraction from the real threat and it has been said by many that the invasion would lead to more recruitment of terrorists. And, there have been other discussions about the effects of a stretched thin military of reserves and national guard troops. But, I haven’t heard any talk about what an enormous amount of damage has been done by the conscious exposure of our intelligence services as paper tigers.
Regardless of whether they hyped, sexed up or pimped out the intelligence on Iraq, the fact is that by invading Iraq the way we did and being proved complete asses now that no WMD have been discovered, one of our best defenses has been completely destroyed. It may have always been nothing but a pretense that we had hi-tech, super duper satellites with x-ray vision and all-knowing eavesdropping devices that can hear a pin drop half a world away but it was a very useful pretense. Nobody knew exactly what we were capable of. Now they do. It appears to everyone on the planet that our vaunted intelligence services couldn’t find water even if they fell off of a fucking aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.
It’s this kind of thing that makes really crazy wackos like Kim Jong Il make mistakes. When a hugely powerful country like the United States proves to the entire world that it is not as powerful as everyone thought, petty tyrants and ambitious generals tend to get excited. This is why mighty nations should never fight wars unless they absolutely have to. It is always better to have enemies wonder whether they are as omnipotent as they appear. They should not risk proving otherwise unless they have no choice.
The Bush administration (and frankly, many in the country) believed that it was necessary to make a strong show of force in order to deter more terrorist attacks.It didn’t matter where, just that it was done. But Rumsfeld and Cheney and Wolfowitz and others who had been nurturing ever more bizarre, ivory tower theories of American power over two decades believed that it would be better to do it with fewer troops than the professionals considered necessary. Not finding WMD was never considered a serious problem, because they had never really felt it would make a difference one way or the other. Indeed, on some levels, it was better if they didn’t. To prove to our enemies that even if we lie, even if we send in a handful of troops, even if we don’t prepare and even if we go it alone with only Great Britain and Poland as our allies, we still win — well, that’s power.
(They have used this theory of power quite effectively in domestic politics. They prefer to win with a slight majority and then declare a great victory, rub the other side’s nose in it, because it creates a sense of helplessness to constantly lose narrowly.)
Take another look at that famous comment by the anonymous Bush aide in the New York Times magazine article by Ron Susskind:
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
This was not metaphorical. They literally believed that they could create their own reality. I don’t think people really understand that. And why wouldn’t they? It’s what they had done for some years with great success in this country. It’s their worldview. They believe that if the act like victors, if they say they are strong, if they procalim victory — then it’s true.
The mantra on the right remains that everything changed after 9/11. (Dick Cheney said it again today.) Let’s assume that’s correct. If so, then undertaking this war was a recklessly dangerous experiment in psychological warfare that failed and left this country much weaker than it was before 9/11. All this money spent, all this fighting, all this messianic freedom rhetoric has actually made this country weaker than it has been at any time since the end of WWII. We have proven that we are a befuddled, undisciplined giant that allowed a radical political faction with half-baked delusions of grandeur to hijack the country. Either we make a precipitous course correction pretty soon, or the rest of the world will start banding together to get us under control.
In an otherwise uncharacteristically astute column, George Will writes:
But who, he wonders, will control the likes of Moqtada al-Sadr? Imagine, Ricks says, another cleric, the Rev. Al Sharpton, controlling the Bronx with a militia he can call into the streets at any time.
Writers at the Washington Post believe that the closest thing we Americans have to a violent radical cleric is a black liberal from godless NY city. (He didn’t even have to the good graces to pick Farrakhan, for god’s sake.) And here I thought liberals’ biggest problem was that we didn’t have enough of that old time religion.
I have news for both Ricks and Will. There are plenty of radical American clerics who I can imagine controlling large portions of the country with a well-armed militia, and none of them are black or liberal.
And why do you suppose an image of armed blacks came to mind when they wanted to evoke the boogeyman?
The last three years have shown how little our national leaders understood Iraq, and have reminded us how badly attempts at liberation from the outside have gone in the past.
We told you so. And we weren’t alone. The truth is that the majority of the entire world told you so. Long before March 19, 2003, a day as infamous as Dec 7, 1941. Or September 11, 2001 for that matter.
I’ll say it again. I have never felt worse about knowing I was absolutely right than I did about the March of Folly. This was a lesson only incompetents unfit for public service needed to learn.
Furthermore, it was – no, it is – inexcusable that the American press, including the New York Times, deliberately refused to report the real story of the run-up to war. They did so out of fear and out of greed. They were afraid of retaliation from the extreme-right Bush administration and their amen choirs. They were seduced with big bucks via increased ratings and sales from dramatic we-are-there imbedded coverage. There were also outright bribes.
But even if the Times now does get it, they still see fit to cut the man personally responsible for opening the Gates of Hell more slack than he deserves. They write, “Chances are that at the time George W. Bush did not have an inkling of how badly he was being served by the decision makers at the Pentagon.” Bullshit. Bush knew exactly what was going on. He knew he was being fed lies. And he knew he was deliberately feeding the American public lies. Look again at The Sixteen Words, my friends, every single syllable of which was carefully crafted to lie. Look at his body language as he told that lie and all the other ones.
Nope. Bush was in on the lying and inept planning from the start. As he was with the response to Katrina and every other disaster of his administration.
I’m not trying to get back into the religion debate tonight, but I do think that while we are talking about the Democratic wackos who the pundits believe are wildly out of the mainstream with their calls for censure, we shouldtake a little peek at some of the things that are happening on the other side. Right there in Washington.
How about this group, called the Justice House of Prayer in Washington SC:
The Justice House of Prayer (JHOP) exists to raise up a house of prayer to contend with every other house that challenges the Lordship and supremacy of Christ over all affairs.
Birthed out of theCall prayer assemblies and theCause prayer initiative, the Justice House of Prayer is a community of young and old who seek to lift a continuous (24/7) cry of worship and intercession for and out of our nation’s capitol.
The primary motivation of all that is done at JHOP is to pour out our extravagant love and devotion to Jesus Christ who is worthy of all praise and adoration.
At the same time, a unique and defining characteristic of JHOP is governmental intercession as delineated by the 1 Timothy 2 mandate. True reformation, revival, and revolution in our nation will only be born out of a spiritual shift and this can only occur when we have altered the spiritual atmosphere and power structure through sustained prayer and fasting. And to that end, JHOP was established.
Months before the recent shifts in the Supreme Court, the Lord made it clear through numerous prophetic voices that the composition of the Court was about to change and that if the Church would seize the window of opportunity that had been blown open, we could see “judges restored as at the first.”
Ok fine. If people want to do this, it’s their right. But check out this video from the ABC’s 20/20 showing the kids who come to Washington to pray 24/7. I realize that these kids are just doing the common behaviors of the charismatic churches, with the rocking, the speaking in tongues and the rest. But, no matter how much people want to pretend that this is mainstream, it ain’t. Particularly since these kids come from all over the country to do this praying in Washington with the express purpose of outlawing abortion.
These are the same kids who came up with this, during the Schiavo mess:
Again, they have a perfect right to do this. But all these pundits who insist that Democrats who want the president censured for abusing his office are “extremists,” need to take a closer look at the state of the nation and recognize that when it comes to extremism, the right is where the action is.
Eleanor Clift has penned a column that she clearly wrote while half in the bag after playing spin the Jameson’s with Chris Matthews and John McLaughlin at Bob Shrum’s St Paddy’s Day bash. A bigger puddle of misguided conventional wisdom I have not seen in quite some time.
Democrats must have a death wish. Just when the momentum was going against the president, Feingold pops up to toss the GOP a life raft.
*sigh* How many more years are we going to hear this tired nonsense from establishment pundits before people wake up and realize that ever since the Democrats took on this appeasment strategy they have been losing. I have written before that I was an enthusiastic New Democrat at one time — embracing all the stuff about modernizing politics and marginalizing the “crazies” and creating a new, technocratic party where our “competence” would so dazzle the population that we could set aside all that unpleasant passion and ideology and just simply run the government “the smart way.” Man, did I like the sound of that.
There was only one little problem, after we were done patting ourselves on the back for being more brilliant than everyone else in the room, the Republicans beat the crap out of us over and over again. And over time that vision has been whittled down to a belief that if we just wait them out, the country will wake up and realize that we aren’t really worse than the other guys so don’t make waves.
The conventional wisdom in DC has now ossified into a reflexive notion that Democrats must do nothing. Ever. They must hold back and say nothing when the Republicans are on top and they must hold back and say nothing when they are on the ropes.
Naturally, Clift turns to ex-Republican and current DLCer, Marshall Wittman:
To win in ’06, he says, “Democrats need to take the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm.”
To the Republicans.
But the scruffy, louts out in the country disagree that taking on the Republicans while they are down is bad politics. With a president at 33%, they wonder why in the hell they can’t do any harm? What kind of margin for error do we need, a president in the low 20’s? A negative 10? How low does a Republican have to sink before we aren’t afraid to take him on?
Clift assumes, without any kind of proof, that Feingold’s motion is going to help Republicans in the polls. Why? The polling suggests that there is a very sizeable minority, in one poll a plurality of people who favor censuring the president.
But nobody in DC even entertained the possibility before dismissing it out of hand. Jim Lehrer was gobsmacked last night when Tom Olipghant suggested that this wasn’t such a left field move after all:
JIM LEHRER: Before we go — quickly — what do you think of the Feingold — speaking — you mentioned Feingold — what do you think of the Feingold resolution to censure President Bush on the NSA surveillance thing?
DAVID BROOKS: I think the conventional thing, that Republicans — any time Democrats are in the news, Republicans feel good about it. When Republicans are in the news, they feel bad about it.
DAVID BROOKS: So, it was — it was good for the Republicans. And I think most Democrats acknowledge that.
TOM OLIPHANT: Yes, but a little polling data to end.
JIM LEHRER: Oh, my goodness.
TOM OLIPHANT: For censure or against it, American Research Group last week: for, 48, against, 43 — impeachment: against, 50, for, 43. There is…
JIM LEHRER: You mean this is a national poll?
TOM OLIPHANT: That’s right, 1,100 cases last week.
JIM LEHRER: OK.
TOM OLIPHANT: This — there are emotions out there in the country. Feingold did not make this up.
Brooks is right that most Washington Democrats “acknowledge” that this will hurt Democrats, but it is based on the fact that they have internalized GOP cant that says Democratic voters are extremists and the president is popular.
Just a couple of months ago Matthews was saying this:
“Everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs, maybe on the left.”
“I always thought Bush was more popular than his policies. I keep saying it, and I keep being wrong on this. Bush is not popular. I’m amazed when 50 percent of the people don’t like him — just don’t like this guy. Thirty-nine percent like him. Are you surprised? Does that fit with the world you walk in?”
Clearly it doesn’t fit in in the world Chris Matthews and Eleanor Clift walk in, which is the Republican establishment.
Clift writes:
The Democrats’ dilemma is how to satisfy a restive and angry base without losing the rest of the country. “If someone proposed stringing up Bush like they did Mussolini, that would have a lot of support in the base of the party, too,” says a Democratic strategist. “But it’s not smart.” Democrats want the November election to be a plebiscite on Bush’s job performance, not a personal vendetta. “Republicans will rally round him if they think it’s a personal attack just like we did with Clinton,” warns the strategist.
Clinton had an approval rating in the 50’s. The country was in the midst of the greatest expansion in history. The entire world looked to us to lead them through the post cold war world. Yet Republicans insisted on impeaching him for lying about a sexual indiscretion That’s a personal vendetta.
This president is in the low 30’s. Most Americans hardly feel the good news in the economy because the benefits have been rigged to go to those who make more than $250,0000 a year. He’s made a fetish out of abusing his power with a non-stop assault on the contitution, international law and civilized norms. He has asserted a principle of executive authority that says he does not have to abide by the law. And it’s extreme to think this deserves a mild rebuke from the body that writes those laws in the first place?
And I shouldn’t have to point out that since the Republicans impeached president Clinton, among other things, they have increased their majority in the congress, won two presidential elections, enacted every wet dream tax cut they ever had, rolled back every regulation they ever hated and installed two right wing ideologues on the court. And that doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Yes, the Republicans have certainly paid a steep price for impeachment, haven’t they?
Grover Norquist really understands Washington. When asked what he thought would create more social comity between the parties he wasn’t just being cute:
Rock-ribbed Republican Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, proffered a solution, tell[s] us that Democrats must accept the finality of their powerlessness. “Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they’ve been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don’t go around peeing on the furniture and such.”
He was showing a deep understanding of how today’s political establishment works. The DC pundit-strategist class have “accepted the finality of Democratic powerlessness.” People like Marshall Wittman and Eleanor Clift are telling the rest of us to do it too. Remember the GOP is the “daddy party” and you all know what he’s like when he get’s mad. Don’t make trouble.
Clift wrote:
“there is a vacuum in the heart of the party’s base that Feingold fills, but at what cost?”
Cost?
If the Democrats lose in November, I’m sure she’ll find plenty of reasons to blame Democrats, but it won’t occur to her that the reason people didn’t vote for the D’s was because the party listened to people like her and campaigned like a herd of neutered animals instead of listening to their hearts, their minds, their constituents and their leaders who were prepared to take a stand for what we believe in. No, they’ll blame the “extremists” who want a safety net and a sane terrorism policy — and leaders who defend the constitution. It couldn’t possibly be that their tired, stale reflexive passivity is to blame when half the base fails to turn out because they just. have. no. hope.
I can’t go. I’d probably have a thrombo, as Austin Powers sez. But if you live in New York, and you’re starting to feel much too calm and relaxed, you can get your blood racing on Monday night by going to a yak-fest at Miller Theater, Columbia U entitled Iraq: Three Years Later. The participants are Noah Feldman, Victor Davis Hanson, Joe Klein, Kenneth M. Pollack, and Andrew Sullivan.
It is bound to be a thoughtful, serious discussion. There will be no third-rate minds on hand – you know, the kind of childish, unimaginative mentalities that thought in 2002 that Bush’s invasion of Iraq was the stupidest fucking idea they’d heard in their lifetimes.
[Condoleeza Rice] said she “would call attention to the role that Iraqi Security Forces have played in this offensive,” which “demonstrates that Iraqi forces are indeed taking on more of the security side.”
…
The U.S. military last month said there were no Iraqi battalions capable of operating without support, a reduction from one battalion in September and three in June that were in the Pentagon’s top category of readiness, Level 1.
An Iraqi-U.S. operation targeting insurgents in the vast hardpan desert northeast of Samarra has led to the capture of a possible ringleader of the bombing of the Gold Mosque, Iraqi officials said today.
Of course, I could just be getting cynical in old age. I mean, what’s not to believe, right?
Josh Marshall has written a nice riposte to Peggy Noonan’s whiny lament about George W. Bush’s liberal betrayal. He writes:
I’m not sure what to say to erstwhile Bush supporters other than, ‘Nice try.’
In yesterday’s online WSJ Peggy Noonan asks readers whether they understood George W. Bush “to be a liberal in terms of spending” when he first came on the political scene in 2000.
I’ve been mulling over the last few days just how to characterize this: but it is certainly a muddled and bad-faith form of ideological projection mixed with evasion.
There really isn’t much point in trying to characterize it at all. As I’ve written before, it’s a common pathology among conservatives when their policies fail. When Bruce Bartlett’s book came out I wrote a post called Institutional Apostasy:
It’s not the lack of conservatism that makes a guy like Bartlett jump ship. It’s the failure. As long as Bush was riding high you heard almost nothing from these people. Oh sure there was a column or two from iconoclasts like Paul Craig Roberts or the occasional jab from Pat Buchanan. But there was no real outcry over the prescription drug benefit or the steel tariffs or the deficit during the entire time Bush has been in office. Certainly the anti-conservative notion of nation building, which Bush ran on, was totally jettisoned from conservative discussion. (We are all Wilsonians now.) Conservatives supported him so enthusiastically that they frequently compared his oratory(!) to Winston Churchill’s:
To a greater extent than any politician since Churchill, President Bush has set forth and defended his policies in a series of speeches that combine intellectual brilliance and philosophical gravity. Today’s speech in Latvia was the latest in this series, and, like the others, it will be studied by historians for centuries to come.
This was the cult of Bush. But, as with all modern Republican presidents who become unpopular, he will be ignominiously removed from the pantheon. They did it to Nixon, they did it to Bush Sr and they are now doing it to Churchill the second. It’s always the same complaint. They failed not because of their conservatism, but because they were not conservative enough.
Last fall as the rats were beginning to lurk around the deck of the sinking ship, I wrote:
Movement conservatives are getting ready to write the history of this era as liberalism once again failing the people. Typically, the conservatives were screwed, as they always are. They must regroup and fight for conservatism, real conservatism, once again. Viva la revolucion!
There is no such thing as a bad conservative. “Conservative” is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives’ good graces. Until they aren’t. At which point they are liberals.
Get used to the hearing about how the Republicans failed because they weren’t true conservatives. Conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed by weak-minded souls who refuse to properly follow its tenets. It’s a lot like communism that way.
Appropriately, modern conservatism turns out to be the first post-modern political movement.
