John Warner says that DP World has agreed to transfer the operation of their US ports to a US “entity.” They are guaranteed, apparently, not to suffer any financial loss in the deal. One must wonder exactly how that will be accomplished — and who will be paying for it.
It appears on the surface that they are going to set up a shell company in the US in which the US taxpayer will guarantee DP World that it won’t lose money. Nice deal. It will be interesting to see if that passes muster with the public.
The steno-pads in the Washington press corps have covered the Dubai Port deal the way they cover everything else, like a herd of hamsters scurrying for space on the airless, cramped exercise wheel that serves as our national capital. The conventional wisdom has focused exclusively on only one aspect of the story, national security, conveniently overlooking the fact that the Bush White House owns the goddamned national security issue. It’s the one thing they can spin freely at Rovian whim, because they happen to have noticed that the inhabitants of Redneck Nation responded so warmly to Ronnie “working” at his “ranch” in his cowboy boots and western shirt and rolled up sleeves that Redneck Nation has collectively seized on the idea that anybody who spends lots of time “clearing brush” on his “ranch” in cowboy boots and western shirts with rolled up sleeves can be trusted not only with the Office of the President, but with our “security.”
As a sergeant from Tennessee of my acquaintance in the Army used to say every time the Captain would pass down some wisdom from on-high about what was necessary to become a combat-ready rootin’ tootin’ blood-thirsty warrior: whhuuuut th’ fuuuuuuk?
Here is a glimpse of what the Washington press corps steno-pads are failing to copy down:
Ask yourself why Bush suddenly found his Veto Stick and brandished it wildly at any legislation intended to stop the Dubai port deal. Ask yourself why he’s out there on the plank facing growing opposition within his own party to the deal. Was it because he believes canceling the deal would send the wrong message to all of our “friends” in the world– all three of them? Or maybe because he really believes it would be “unfair” to all those sheiks and emirs swathed in gold-embroidered robes having their toes sucked by Imported Blonde Virgins while they tap at their Blackberries, checking their stock portfolios for teeny little hundred-million dollar variances in their multi-billion dollar balances. I’ve got it! Bush is all upset with Republican Party congressional “leaders” because he’s absolutely convinced that Dubai Ports World Inc. — a national company wholly owned by the Emirate of Dubai — has been thoroughly and expertly vetted by some “interagency committee” neither he, Rumsfeld, Snow, Chertoff or anyone else ever heard of before last week.
There are a few problems with this interagency committee vetting thing, beginning with the fact that the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury who chaired the interagency committee that vetted Dubai Ports World is the same guy who vetted Dan Quayle as well qualified to be Vice President for Bush’s daddy when he was running for President in 1988. You read that right. His name is Robert M. Kimmitt, and believe-you-me, this man has a history of doing a hell of a job when it comes to being Bush Family Deputy-Expert Vetter. This is no doubt because he studied the fine art of vetting at the feet of Bush Family Master Fixer, Expert Vetter and Chief Water Carrier: James A. Baker III.
The Dubai Ports deal stinks to high heaven of tall Texan and master-fixer Baker. Robert M. Kimmitt, chair of the interagency committee that took something like 20 minutes to certify Dubai Ports as a worthy partner in running our ports — without even taking a vote — is a familiar name to me. He and I graduated in the same West Point class in June of 1969. Kimmitt, after serving in Vietnam, during which he was awarded three Bronze Stars, a Purple Heart, and an Air Medal, Kimmitt went to Georgetown Law School on the Army’s dime and after graduating in 1977, plunged himself immediately into finding his way along Washington’s corridors of power. As it happens, Kimmitt had some help reading the Power Map. His father was the man chosen by then Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson to replace Bobby Baker as the quietly powerful Secretary to Senate after Bobby Baker was discovered inflagrante in the bathroom of a gay porno theater. If anyone had the Power Map to the maze of corridors in our nation’s capital, it was Kimmitt’s daddy.
Kimmitt had also benefited from the careful guidance and ministrations of a powerful mentor with a big-time DC Power Job while he was still a cadet at West Point — loooong story…WAY too long for this brief screed — and now that he had in hand his Vietnam medals and Georgetown diploma and letters of recommendation from his DC Circuit Court of Appeals judge, whatdayaknow, but our boy Bobby immediately landed a job across town on the National Security Council at the White House. No stopping off to spend a couple of years rooting as an associate, around in a dusty law firm library for this boy! Nosiree! Robert M. Kimmitt knew there was one hell of a lot of vetting in his future, and where better to learn the fine art of vetting, but in the offices of the National Security Advisor to the President of the United States? There just wasn’t any better place, that’s what! So Kimmitt sets up shop on the staff of the NSC in 1978 and holds his breath and guts it out until that commie pinko peacenik Naval Academy grad and former nuclear submariner Jimmie Carter was ousted by cowboy boot and western shirt wearin’, brush clearin’ President Ronald Reagan, and he rolled up his sleeves and got busy. Busy doing what, you may ask? Easy! Bob Kimmitt got busy studying at the feet of his new mentor on the NSC — James A. Baker III, who was installed on the NSC as the Bush Family Master Fixer, Expert Vetter and Chief Water Carrier!
Now you may be thinking, what a lucky guy, this Bob Kimmitt. It’s 1978, he’s not even 30 years old, and he’s held only one real job in his life — junior officer in the Army — and there he is with his nose pressed not against the glass trying to get a glimpse of the Asshole of Power in Washington D.C., but on the other side of the glass, inside, really, really, really close to the Asshole of Power in Washington D.C., the one place where those words which ring in such dulcet political tones….national security…are not merely an aspect of policy, or a sideshow to the Real Deal, but the Real Deal Itself! Wow! National Security is right there in the title of the office where Bobby had his desk! And his phone! And his White House Pass! And his parking spot! Say it out loud! Listen!
National Security Council!
Double wow! Triple wow! No…whoopee! He’s made it! Across town, mentors and daddies are celebrating! They’re pouring tall tumblers of the Good Stuff out there on their patios! A Republican in the White House wearing cowboy boots and western shirts and clearin’ brush during those loooooong weekends out there at the Western White House — don’t ya love the sound of it? Western White House! And our boy Bob right in there with him, watching out for our security! Whew! Isn’t it great that we can relax out there on the back nine…swing that club a little looser…get that ball a little closer to the pin, maybe…now that Bob is in the White House making sure we’re safe?
It was a great time for golfers, those years when Bob Kimmitt was looking out for the safety and security of their country clubs and the skies through which they passed in their Lears and Gulfstreams. Kimmitt spent the years 1978 to 1983 as an NSC staffer, and then he was promoted, and the golf courses turned greener and the Gulfstreams flew faster! Yep! Jim Baker promoted Bob to be his Executive Secretary, and then he made Bob the General Counsel to the NSC! Quadruple wow! But…wait. There was a problem. Some guys down there in the bowels of the NSC, guys flew so close to the Asshole of Power that their noses got singed, guys like North and Poindexter and McFarlane, guys who were messing around with arms for hostages and Contras and so forth. Not only did their noses get singed, some of ’em even got convicted of some crimes! But not our Bobby. No sir. That whole Iran-Contra thing…that was a Reagan deal all the way. Well…sort of. There was one little hiccup, something about Bob and a license that was needed to ship some missiles or rockets or something or another, and Bob was interviewed by the Tower Commission, but he sailed through safely, and in 1985, our Bobby followed the Bush Family Master Fixer, Expert Vetter and Chief Water Carrier over to the Department of Treasury, where he was installed as General Counsel to the Department under Secretary Baker. Now that the golf courses were safe and the Gulfstreams were up there flying through our secure skies, it was time to Watch the Money, and where better to watch it than the place where it was printed and distributed.
Kimmitt remained at Treasury under Secretary of Money Watching Baker until 1988 when he followed Baker into Bush Campaign I, where he distinguished himself by being deputized by Expert Vetter Baker to check out the qualifications of Dan Quayle. But hell. Anybody can make a mistake when it comes to one of those loons from Capitol Hill, and besides, Quayle didn’t work out so badly. He turned into a kind of Agnew The Lesser, and baited the Dems and did what he was told, and down the road, he sure as hell wasn’t a threat to any of the Bush Boys when one of them decided to run for President!
With Bush I elected in ’88, Kimmitt followed the Master Fixer over to the Department of State, where he was made Under Secretary of State for Political and Military Affairs! Our boy Bob, who had toiled so long as a little-known player in the back rooms and basements of various government departments, was now up there on a High Floor at Foggy Bottom! And those golf courses and Gulfstreams and all that Republican money? Why, having Insured Security and Watched the Money for years, now Bob would move off-shore and do the same thing all over the world — making the International Skies safe for the Gulfstreams and Watching the Money as it moved back and forth between friendly companies and banks in the States to foreign countries and friends who could be trusted, because if they stepped out of line, Bob was there to see to it that their Gulfstreams wouldn’t be welcome in our skies, and their tacky golf shoes would not sully the groomed greens of our golf courses until they straightened-up and did the Right Thing with Our Money, which of course was to turn the Small Piles into Large Piles, and the Large Piles into Huge, Monciferous Piles of Crinkly-Smacking-Green Cash!
In 1991, Secretary of International Money Watching and Security Insuring Baker put in the fix so Bob was appointed Ambassador to Germany. He stayed in this post until Baker’s boss lost in ’92, and the Clinton people removed him in ’93.
Sigh. Bob was on the street…in a Republican sort of way, you understand. He held a series of big-time, big-bucks corporate jobs during the politically Lean Years of the Clinton Administration, and took a long-awaited and well-deserved vacation in a top job at Time Warner AOL during Bush II’s first administration. But recently jaws dropped on the E-ring of the Pentagon when word got around that Kimmitt was offered Secretary of the Navy, and to everyone’s surprise, turned down that plum for Deputy Secretary of the Treasury. Now, why would a Power Guy like Kimmitt turn down a job where you could hop in your own personal Navy Lear Jet and take off to “visit the fleet” in Honolulu for the weekend, and instead take a slot as a deputy to a Bush lapdog who’s still wandering the halls of the big building on 14th Street looking for his water bowl? There are probably some cynics who would call Kimmitt a footman riding the back bumper of the Bush Family Power Carriage, but I think of him simply as a wholly-owned subsidiary of James A. Baker III, Inc. Subsidiaries do what they’re told to do, and when a former Treasury Secretary drops a hint that there are Things to Do and Money To Be Watched over in a Deputy Secretary’s office at Treasury, why, what would you expect a good little Bobby to do, but listen to Duh Man.
When it comes to the Middle East — specifically, to the Oil Business in the Middle East — Baker is most assuredly Duh Man. Baker’s powerful Houston law firm, Baker & Botts, represents the oil interests of the Saudi Royal family and has a big satellite office in Dubai which does business, among other things, in pipelines, energy and trade. You will recall that in 2003, Bush Family Master Fixer Baker was appointed by Bush as the Special Envoy who “negotiated” Iraq’s huge debt, largely held by other Middle East oil-producing nations, including the UAE. Iraqi debt was reduced across the board. Does anyone think that the UAE just wrote off Iraq’s debt? Not on your life. They are getting paid off in other ways…such as having the US approve a deal to have the UAE’s Dubai company run six US ports, which will doubtlessly turn out to be hugely profitable to them, or else why would they be in the port business in a time when maritime trade is growing by leaps and bounds, and shipyards around the world can’t turn out container ships and tankers fast enough. And that doesn’t even get into Baker’s connections to the Carlyle Group, or Bechtel, which built the port of Dubai, or any of that boring stuff.
Even leaving the Carlyle and Bechtel Boys aside, it gets better. Another “protege” of Baker’s appears on the scene: Robert Zoellick, currently Deputy Secretary of State, but from 2001 to 2005, this country’s Trade Representative in charge, largely, of setting up free trade agreements such as CAFTA around the world. I guess it was little noticed in 2004 when Zoellick signed a TIFA — Trade and Investment Framework Agreement — with the UAE, a first step in the negotiations with the Sheiks of Dubai toward a FTA, a Free Trade Agreement, negotiations for which are ongoing. In a speech in Jordan that year, Zoellick described the UAE as a “very positive partner for free trade in the region. The impending FTA with the UAE follows on the heels of FTA’s already negotiated with Jordan, Egypt and Morocco. Trade ministers in the Middle East have described the free trade march of the US across the Middle East as picking off suckers one by one and an attempt to mollify Arab and Muslim nations with the carrot of trade while the stick of war is pounding Iraq. In fact, the several FTA’s already signed are the beginnings of a plan for an overall MEFTA — Middle East Free Trade Agreement — intended to cover up to 20 nations in the region which is planned for completion by 2013.
And who is Zoellick to James A. Baker III? Why, he was the guy walking behind Baker carrying the briefcase containing Baker’s Roman numerals, that’s who! His technical job title was Counselor to Treasury Secretary Baker in 1985, and then Deputy Treasury Secretary under Baker until 1988. Then he took a cab down the Mall to Foggy Bottom where he was stood guard as Counselor to the State Department, and then moved into a tidy office down the hall where he went about the business of American Business as Undersecretary of State for Economic and Agricultural Affairs.
You think our two Bobbys ran into each other in the Corridors of Power when they were working for Duh Man? Does “duh” work for you as an answer? You think that the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury and the U.S. Trade Representative might have, uh, talked about stuff over a couple of lunches or sixteen or thirty-three? You think they might have played a round of golf or anything like that? You think that the interests of Bobby The Kimmitt and Bobby The Zoellick might not only coincide, but resemble each other so much they would appear as twins?
Consider their mutual interests in the UAE: The UAE is our 3rd largest trading partner in the Middle East, behind only Israel and Saudi Arabia. The Port of Dubai is the 3rd busiest in the world and is Home Away From Home for US warships, not to mention airfields in the UAE serving the same function for US Air Force warplanes. Consider that the Bush Administration’s plans for a Free Trade Agreement with UAE are not just a foot but an entire leg in the door of an overall Middle East FTA slated for only 7 years down the road. You think there might be far more at stake with the Dubai Ports deal than our reputation with our “friends” in the world, or maybe even our “national security?” You think with two Money Watchers running things when it comes to Big Business and the UAE, that Bush might consider puttin’ on his boots and western shirt and rollin’ up his sleeves and brandishin’ his Veto Stick if those goofballs on Capitol Hill mess around with his deal? Huh? Ya think?
As usual with the Bush Family — with this Bush administration and the administration of Bush I — if you turn over a rock, you won’t find Weapons of Mass Destruction or Terrorist Connections or Osama bin Laden, but you will find a gigantic pile of Crinkly Greenbacks being overseen by our two Bobbies, dutifully carrying out their duties as Money Watchers, and buried in there amongst the grass-cuttings from the fresh-mown greens and a faint odor of kerosene dripped from topped-off wing tanks of the Gulfstreams…right down there next to the Veritable Bunghole of Power you will find evidence of fresh spittle from Bush Family Master Fixer, Expert Vetter and Chief Water Carrier James A. Baker III.
Most of you probably already know the name Lucian Truscott IV from the op-ed pages of the New York Times, stories in the Village Voice, novels like Dress Gray and Dress Blue or perhaps even the Sally Hemmings controversy in which Truscott, a Jefferson heir, insisted that Hemmings’ family be included in the yearly family reunions. Now he has reached the pinnacle of his career by appearing on Hullabaloo.
By the way, even though he has been publishing op-eds in the New York Times since they started the page, for some reason they weren’t interested in (the sedate NY Times version) of this essay. So he blogged it. Hah. —- digby
Correction: Bobby Baker was discovered running a call girl ring, not in a gay porno theatre. That was Walter Jenkins.
“I was basically so busy winning that I didn’t see what I was doing.” Jack Abramoff
There you have it. Winning is the only thing they really care about and the only thing they know how to do. Governing, as we’ve just had graphically illustrated, was not part of the program.
Jack Abramoff is one of the anointed princes of the second wave of the conservative movement. He came of age politically during the go-go Reagan years, along with his good friends Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist. They were renowned for saying things like:
“I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag.” (Reed: Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, November 9, 1991)
Abramoff’s personal credo was “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing.” As we know, Norquist just recently said: “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.” (All of us in the blogosphere have had to put up with the puerile troll taunt that begins, “Maybe when you start winning elections you can….” fill in the blank.)
This is the real modern Republican party in all its glory. It raised these guys from pups, nurturing their selfishness, their immaturity and their greed. They wanted to win by any means necessary and when you believe that you allow people like Reed and Abramoff to do what they need to do to make it happen. If you can skim some cream off the top, so much the better.
It’s great that they are all being exposed, but let’s not kid ourselves. They may be decadent and corrupt, but they do know how to win. I wouldn’t count on them just folding up their tent and going home. Winning is, after all, the only thing they know how to do.
Still, there is good reason to hope that they are going to start turning part of their firepower on each other, which is the best way to beat people like this. The Dubai port deal shows a huge divide between the rank and file who believed that crap about “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” and the big money boys who have already progressed past this old fashioned notion of the nation state to embrace the new borderless corporation paradigm. That crack in the coalition is becoming a fissure. There are a bunch of them.
But the crack that intrigues me the most is this one:
As the Jack Abramoff scandal unfolds, it is becoming increasingly clear how extensively he collaborated with the Christian right to advance his casino schemes. Ralph Reed was paid no less than $4 million by Abramoff and his Indian casino clients to serve as a liasion to the Christian right.
Reed managed to lasso Focus on the Family President James Dobson into a series of campaigns to stamp out competition to Abramoff’s clients. Though Senate subpeonaed emails seem to confirm that Dobson was manipulated by Reed and Abramoff, he and his employees have repeatedly claimed that his activism against rivals to Abramoff’s clients was a complete coincidence.
While I wrote about this for the Nation and Media Matters, there has been very little mainstream press interest on Dobson’s role in Abramoff’s schemes. So far, some of the best — and most adversarial — reporting on the Abramoff/Reed/Dobson saga is coming from the Christian media, namely from Marvin Olasky’s World Magazine. As the former welfare guru to Gov. George W. Bush, Olasky coined the phrase, “compassionate conservatism.” When Bush moved into the White House, he became the intellectual author of the Faith Based Initiative. Olasky’s World Magazine is one of the largest evangelical publications in the country.
On February 4, World published a critical expose of Dobson’s role in a 2002 Abramoff campaign to stop expansion of competition to his client, the Coushattas. A World reporter grilled Focus on the Family’s Tom Minnery about Dobson’s involvement. Minnery responded incredulously that Abramoff was “trying to take credit for” what Focus was supposedly already doing in Louisiana. He refused to criticize Reed, even though Reed clearly manipulated Dobson.
Two weeks later, Minnery and Dobson took to the airwaves in an attempt to defuse the conflict. Minnery claimed once again that “as it happens, we, Focus on the Family, we’re fighting this new Indian casino in Louisiana at the very same time. Not because Ralph Reed asked us. Not because Jack Abramoff asked us.” And he once again refused to criticize Reed. In fact, Minnery defended Reed, calling him “A wounded brother,” who “regretted what he did, that he wouldn’t do it again, and realizes that it was wrong.”
I was criticized once before for writing that this rift could potentially push some of the evangelical voters back to the non-voting population. These worldly complications, it seemed to me, might make some of these folks ask themselves if they really wanted to devote all this time and energy to something so morally flawed as politics. Some readers felt that I was suggesting that we “suppress” the evangelical vote. Well… I would never try to stop somebody from voting. But I am certainly not going to go out and drag Republicans to the polls. These voters provide a huge, built-in GOP political machine through those churches and it is in our best interest to see that machine break down. As far as I’m concerned if a fight between Olasky and Dobson helps that happen, then I’m all for it. They are always welcome to vote for Democrats, of course.
This updates the post below about whether women should be held legally liable for having an illegal abortion. Apparently this video made the rounds some months ago (and I missed it) in which anti-abortion protesters are asked that very question. Turns out most of them haven’t ever thought about it before. (Update: Apparently we crashed their server. Greg at the talent Show generously uploaded it on to his site here.)
That is as I suspected. It’s time we make them think about it. Most anti-abortion legislation makes no sense morally and these people need to be led through the various steps that will show them this. The cognitive dissonence was apparent on these people’s faces. It’s a question that everyone from the family pro-choice supporter to professiohnal interviewers should always ask.
Picture if you will a poll in which Americans are asked if women should be jailed for murdering their unborn child with an illegal abortion. What do you think they would say? Considering the fact that even the anti-abortion picketers in that video don’t know what to say, I think it’s fair to assume that it would be rejected by more than 90 percent of the population.
That’s because it’s clear that there is almost nobody who believes that abortion is murder in the legal sense of the word. How can there be a law against “murder” where the main perpetrator is not punished? How can it be murder if these people don’t believe that the person who planned it, hired someone to do and paid for it is not legally culpable?
The looks on these womens’ faces in that video were amazing: confusion, frustration, pain. Their position is untenable and they know it.
I’m reminded of this profoundly dishonest anti-abortion activist from Kansas that I wrote about a while back. There’s a reason why she obfuscates and dodges and lies:
BRANCACCIO: I don’t understand how Kansas wouldn’t– ban abortion quit quickly after that. What do you know about the state of that debate in your state…
MARY KAY CULP: It isn’t that. It’s just that I know how the political system works. Then you can have real discussion. Then every– both sides are gonna get aired, and if the media’s fair about it, both sides are gonna get aired. That– you know, that’s a question. But at least democracy will have a chance to work on it. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything either way.
She wants people to believe that this is going to be a very painless and simple debate in which the world will finally hear the pro-life side and be persuaded when the truth is that she and her fellow political operatives are working very hard to get these laws firmly in place before anyone has a chance to talk about it.
So I think we need to have this discussion. Let’s debate it out in the open and “air both sides” because from where I sit it’s the “pro-lifers” who haven’t thought this thing through. Nobody says they can’t agitate against abortion and stand out there with their sickening pictures and try to dissuade women from doing it. I will defend their right to argue against abortion forever. But when they use the law to enforce their moral worldview they need to recognize that they can’t have it both ways. If fetuses are human and have the same rights as the women in whom they live, then a woman who has an abortion must logically be subject to the full force of the law. It would be a premeditated act of murder no different than if she hired a hit man to kill her five year old. The law will eventually be able to make no logical moral distinction. Is everybody ready for that?
Thanks to David in the comments for the clip.
Update: Here’s an interesting exchange between Chris Matthews and Pat Toomey in 2004 on this very issue. Toomey was stumped.
The NY Times “trots out” a snotty piece today about how the Democrats are “trotting out” the fact that the Republicans have been lax on port security. That “record of failure” is apparently not convincing to the reporter since he/she puts it in “scare quotes.”
Democrats in Congress almost daily blame their GOP counterparts for security holes in the U.S. maritime industry.
They trot out votes that show the Republican-controlled House and Senate turned back more than a dozen Democratic efforts to secure millions of dollars more for port security since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
”When it comes to protecting the ports, Republicans really do have a pre-9/11 mind-set,” said Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind.
Among the votes:
–In 2003, House Republicans, on a procedural vote, agreed to kill a Democratic amendment that would have added $250 million for port security grants to a war spending package.
–Two years later, nearly all House Republicans voted against an alternative Homeland Security authorization bill offered by Democrats that called for an additional $400 million for port security.
–Senate Republicans stood together in 2003 to set aside a Democratic amendment that would have provided $120 million more for port cargo screening equipment.
–One year later, all but six Senate Republicans voted to reject a Democratic attempt to add $150 million for port security in a Homeland Security appropriations bill.
That “record of failure” presents “an important opportunity for Democrats to argue that they are the ones who have the right approach to protecting the country,” maintains Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster.
House Republicans were put on record again last week on port security when Democrats tried to force a debate and vote on legislation that would require congressional approval of DP World’s takeover. The effort failed. Only two Republicans voted with Democrats.
In defense, Republicans say Democrats always want to throw money at untested technology and that the GOP-led Congress has consistently given more money to port security than what the Bush administration has proposed.
For the second time in two months, a test of the national missile defense system has failed, Pentagon officials said Monday.[February 15, 2005]
Military technicians say they believe the failure of the $85 million test was caused by a problem with ground support equipment, not with the interceptor missile itself. A preliminary assessment indicated that the fault had occurred in the concrete underground silo, where a variety of sensors perform safety and environmental monitoring.
[…].
The program, by some accounts, has cost $130 billion and is scheduled to require $50 billion more over the next five years. Bush’s budget request for the 2006 fiscal year cut about 10 percent from this year’s funding of almost $10 billion.
Do Republicans have any good arguments anymore? Aside from leaving themsleves wide open with a charge like that about untested technology, the Republicans in congress are reduced to saying that at least they gave more money for port security than their “tax cuts for millionaires” obsessive president. They are starting to make it look easy and that’s never good for our side. I sincerely hope that Democrats are prepared and hungry enough to go for the jugular.
I have a question for the innocent life crowd: how come none of the proposed laws anywhere, as far as I can tell, believe that a woman should be tried for the murder of her child if she gets an abortion? Indeed, there is no penalty in the South Dakota law for the woman at all. She isn’t even charged as an accessory. Does that make sense? She could be tried for first degree murder for leaving a newborn baby to die on a church doorstep.
Doctors are targeted by all these laws; in South Draconian it’s a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. We normally give people life in prison or the death penalty for premeditated murder for hire in our system.
I remember once seeing Larry King, of all people, ask this question of a “pro-life” advocate. (He wasn’t laying a trap — he really wanted to know, you could tell.) The “pro-life” advocate sputtered for five minutes. It’s a question they need to answer. They’ve laid landmines everywhere with their hyperbolic nonsense about abortion being murder and “baby killing” and now they need to explain themselves.
If you ask most pro-lifers whether they think that women should be punished as murderers they say no. If you asked if they think women should be punished by the law at all, they say no. They don’t want to punish the father either. The proposed laws target only the doctor who performed the surgery (or dispensed the drug) and for much less time than they would receive for killing a child. Now that we are moving beyond the demagoguery of the pulpit and the sidewalk and into the legal arena I think we all have a right to know how these people made these distinctions and why.
As with the arguments about rape and incest, the “pro-life” argument that abortion is murder is morally inconsistent. And if it isn’t murder, then what is it?
Speaking of Amy Sullivan’s new article in the Washington Monthly about evangelicals leaving the Republican fold to join the Democrats, Kevin says:
Religion has been a big topic in liberal circles for a while now, and I have to admit that I always feel a bit like a bystander when the subject comes up. It’s not like I can fake being religious, after all. Still, no one is really asking people like me to do much of anything except stay quiet, refrain from insulting religion qua religion in ways that would make people like Brinson unwilling to work with us, and let other people do the heavy lifting when it comes to persuading moderate Christians to support liberal causes and liberal candidates. That’s not much to ask, and Amy makes a pretty good case that it would make a difference.
Sullivan’s article is only partially persuasive to me. I’m with Atrios on this. If people are voting on the basis of abortion or gay rights, then they are unlikely to switch because of the other party’s tax platform or approach to education. Those things are indicative of a certain view of personal autonomy in which compromise isn’t very likely. I have very little hope that all this tweaking around the edges of the abortion issue with talk of abstinence or birth control will make any inroads into the GOP coalition. (There is better picking in the western libertarian camp in my view.)
However, Sullivan’s article talks a lot about an educational program “presenting the Bible in a historical and cultural context—giving students a better understanding of biblical allusions in art, literature, and music,” and (assuming the curriculum doesn’t proselytise) I think it’s a terrific idea and I’m as secular as they get. Back in the day, it was part of plain old Western Civ. and wasn”t particularly controversial. I think that teaching other religions in those terms would be useful and enlightening as well. I’ve mentioned before that I took a year of comparative world religions in high school that was just great. It’s one of those subjects that can make a big impression on a young mind by showing that many religious beliefs are anchored in the same concepts. It promotes tolerance — which may be one reason why the Christian Right is against this new Bible curriculum. (What fun is religion without coercion?)
But I doubt that it will change anything politically. If there is a religious divide, it’s not about being religious per se. Almost the entire country considers itself religious to some degree or another. The parties are divided by religious intensity which is something else entirely. The big divide is between those who go to church more than once a week and those who don’t.
Sullivan says, however, that there are a whole bunch of evangelicals who are willing to jump:
But a substantial minority of evangelical voters — 41 percent, according to a 2004 survey by political scientist John Green at the University of Akron — are more moderate on a host of issues ranging from the environment to public education to support for government spending on anti-poverty programs. Broadly speaking, these are the suburban, two-working-parents, kids-in-public-school, recycle-the-newspapers evangelicals. They may be pro-life, but it’s in a Catholic, “seamless garment of life” kind of way. These moderates have largely remained in the Republican coalition because of its faith-friendly image.
I’d love to see some data to back that up. It’s possible, but I think it’s just as likely that they aren’t voting for Democrats because of taxes or gay marriage or simple tribal identity rather than because the Dems are great except they aren’t “friendly” to faith. After all, millions of religious Democrats don’t have this problem. The numbers indicate that the party already gets 48% of the “abortion should be mostly/always illegal” and 29% of the “gays should have no legal recognition” crowds. I think that is probably the maximum social conservative vote that the Democrats can expect to get. (Well, unless it plans to completely sell out its principles, which is always possible.)
That is why this part of the article made me cringe when I read it:
The immediate post-election conventional wisdom was that Democrats lost because they couldn’t appeal to so-called “moral values” voters. Democrats immediately embarked on a crash course in religious outreach and sought out people who could teach them about evangelicals. Brinson, who had caught the attention of the Democratic youth-vote industry, seemed like an obvious choice.
As for Brinson, when the Democratic chief of staff on the other end of the line asked whether the doctor would be willing to meet with some Democrats, he thought about his recent experiences with the other side and decided “maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to talk to these Democratic people.” In quick succession, the lifelong Republican found himself meeting with advisors to the incoming Democratic leaders—Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.)—field directors at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and aides to Howard Dean at the Democratic National Committee. What they found is that their interests overlapped: The Democrats wanted to reach out to evangelicals, and Brinson wanted to connect with politicians who could deliver on a broader array of evangelical concerns, like protecting programs to help the poor, supporting public education, and expanding health care. It had seemed natural for him to start by pressing his own party to take up those concerns, but Democrats appeared to be more willing partners. They even found common ground on abortion when Brinson, who is very pro-life, explained that he was more interested in lowering abortion rates by preventing unwanted pregnancies than in using the issue to score political points.
Those Democrats who had initially been wary about working with a conservative evangelical Republican from Alabama found Brinson convincing. They also realized that conservatives had done them an enormous favor. “Listening to him talk,” one of them told me, “I thought, these guys bitch-slapped him, and he’s willing to play ball.”
Who’s playing ball and who’s getting bitch slapped, again?
Hey if I were a social conservative who was trying to leverage some clout against the Republican party for failing to deliver on its promises while in power, I’d run right over to the Democrats too. After all, everybody knows that they have no convictions and are willing to do anything to win. Why not co-opt them with visions of retaking the red states with the evangelical vote? It worked for Republicans on race.
I guess we can all agree now that Dolly Parton isn’t a real American. She wrote a song about God and a transgendered person that didn’t condemn that person to hell.
Here’s the effete, latte swilling, NT Times reading, out of the mainstream, left wing elitist making excuses for herself:
KING: And the lyrics are directly for the film. Example, “I’m out here on my journey trying to make the most of it. I’m a puzzle. I must figure out where all of my pieces fit.” Did you like the movie?
PARTON: Well actually I thought it was very touching. It was very emotional to me to see someone, you know, that really frustrated with who they are and trying to become who they are and trying to become accepted and seen and loved for that.
And I really think Duncan, the director, handled it so well, all the parts of the movie. I was very, very touched with it. Even the son, little Kevin, I thought he was wonderful. I thought his part was great. And I think just all the ways that they all played together and how tastefully it was done for such a sensitive subject. I was real impressed with it all.
[…]
KING: Why have you been — you’ve been interested for a long time in gay/lesbian, transgender stories, why?
PARTON: Well, I’m not interested in anything. I haven’t made any efforts to do — I just am totally accepting of people. I really believed that everybody should be allowed to be who they are.
KING: That’s what I mean.
PARTON: Well yes, I’m very tolerant of just people in general. I believe we’re all God’s children. I think we all have a right to be who we are. I’m certainly — I’m not a judge and I’m certainly not God, so I just try to love the God core in all people. And I know that is in the center of us all, so I just try to accept people for who they are, whatever that is.
Typical liberal moral relativist. Wasn’t her most famous song called “In My San Francisco Russian Hill Home?” I think so.
Appropriately, Taylor Marsh has a nice post up today about movies. Tonight’s the big night in this town and if you are anywhere near downtown Hollywood you’ll see more limousines in one place than anywhere else on the planet. Until recently, the oscars were always on Monday, which was fun if you worked in the biz. There was a holiday feel to it and even if you weren’t going to the show there were parties all over the place so everybody left work early. Now it’s on Sunday and it’s a whole different deal.
It occurred to me today as I was making my predictions (I think “Crash” is going to win Best Picture) that three years ago I was disappointed in Hollywood and the music industry for its cowardice in the face of the Iraq invasion. I wrote a long post about how odd and disjointed I felt watching this glamorous show in which the war was barely mentioned while the invasion was being presented as an epic patriotic pageant 24/7. There were pictures of GI’s who had been captured all over the TV that day and I had been looking at the al Jazeera web-site pictures that were horrible:
… I’m disassociating from the reality. And, it occurred to me that maybe we are all doing that to some degree — maybe because we are biologically programmed to do so just to keep ourselves from going crazy in times of war…
So, when I watched the Oscars last night, something I normally enjoy and go out of my way to see, I was just hoping for someone to say something heartfelt about peace. I was actually hoping that a lot of them would say something about peace — not necessarily in the political sense, but in the universal value sense. Instead, sadly, most of them just pretended that nothing was happening.
But a few — foreigners mostly — did say some words about peace. Almodovar said, “I also want to dedicate this award to all the people that are raising their voices in favor of peace, respect of human rights, democracy and international legality. All of which are essential qualities to live.” (Thanks, Pete. At least the Europeans love us, even if our own timid political brethren want us to tone down the rhetoric and let Rush Limbaugh dominate the discourse.)
But then Adrian Brody, the guy nobody expected to win, came up and let himself be human and emotional — for his win, naturally, but also because of the the nature of the role he was being rewarded for playing. He said:
“My experiences of making this film made me very aware of the sadness and the dehumanization of people at times of war,” he said. “Whatever you believe in, if it’s God or Allah, may he watch over you and let’s pray for a peaceful and swift resolution.”
Dehumanization. That’s what I’m feeling when I see the scared faces of those POW’s and the horrors of decapitated children.
This is why civilization was supposed to be beyond the superficially logical rationalizations of “preventive war” and grand global ambitions of world domination through military force. While tallying up the 20th century’s horrific body count we were supposed to have recognized that war must be a last resort in the face of NO OTHER OPTION. There can be no excuse but immediate self-defense to justify it. If Vietnam didn’t teach us that, then it taught us nothing. Wars of aggression, by definition, cannot be glorious.
This war never met that test. And we have opened up Pandora’s Box.
The historians will sort out the rightness and the wrongness of the policy. But as I was watching that glamorous telecast being held just a few miles from where I live, I could not help but be struck, once again, by the fact that we Americans are the luckiest people on the planet. I hope that we stay that way. We are good people, decent people, but we are being led astray by a leadership that is perpetrating a wrong. We simply cannot expect to remain safe and prosperous if we create a world in which it is the prerogative of one country, our country, to decide that a potential future threat is enough to justify a war. It is a dehumanizing undertaking that devalues every single one of us. It is not the America I know.
Three years ago. And I am now desensitized to the images I wrote about in the beginning of that post, the war images and the pictures of death. And new awful images have come and gone since then. I now argue with people about whether it is acceptable to torture — a concept that would have been completely foreign to me three years ago. I would just as easily have believed we would be arguing about whether it is acceptable to molest children. I now accept that the president and his administration truly and deeply believe they are above the law, something I would have scoffed at not five years ago after the endless bellowing from the right during the Great Clinton Panty raid.
On the other hand, a lot has changed. Bush was a colossus, then. His approval rating was around 70%. The Dixie Chick boycott had just hit the news. It was a difficult time for dissent as I’m sure you all recall. The pressure on the media was perhaps exemplified most starkly by this:
A leaked in-house report said Phil Donahue’s show would present a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” The problem: “He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The danger — quickly averted by NBC — was that the show could become “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
The good old days. How nice then to realize that this year’s crop of socially conscious and politically themed movies must have been green-lighted right around that time. It usually takes between 18 months and forever to get a movie done. Therefore, while I was fretting about the movies losing their political voice because nobody spoke out at the Oscars, Hollywood was quietly setting about speaking out in a much more powerful way: through its art.
People can’t stop talking about how “unsuccessful” all the movies were this year and that everybody wants to watch nothing but re-makes of “the Sound of Music.” (See Wolcott for for a quick dispatch of that braindead trope.) But the truth is that all these movies succeeded as art, as politics and as popular works on their own terms. Hollywood made these films that are nominated this year because the artists involved had something to say, but they also made them for money. All of them were profitable, which is more than we can say for overpriced behemoths like that piece of shit “The Alamo” which lost 113 million or “Sahara” which lost 75 million and counting.
Perhaps it sounds silly to say that it took courage to make these movies, but I think it did. That night three years ago when I was watching the Oscars, I wondered if the new Republican reality would be with us forever. The shallow, fatcat, money grubbing studios made a bet that three years later this country would come to its senses and reject that awful craziness. Damned if they weren’t right. Bush and the Republicans are in deep, deep shit today, Iraq is a mess, race is once again a hot topic and the cause of civil rights marches on. Maybe those guys and gals are worth the ridiculous sums of money they are paid to predict the zeitgeist after all.
As most of you undoubtedly already know, Jane has been holding a “Joe Klein, in his own words” contest these last few nights and they’ve come up with some doozies. It’s down to the final round and I’m sorry to see that my favorite didn’t make the cut:
The Great Society was an utter failure because it helped to contribute to social irresponsibility at the very bottom.
If there is a prize for the political scam of the 20th century, it should go to the conservatives for propagating as conventional wisdom that the Great Society programs of the 1960s were a misguided and failed social experiment that wasted taxpayers’ money.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, from 1963 when Lyndon Johnson took office until 1970 as the impact of his Great Society programs were felt, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century.
Has there ever been a more useful Republican idiot than Joe Klein? I don’t think so. If you don’t believe me, check out the huge array of idiotic statements he’s written over at firedoglake. Jane says, “No one man can claim credit for the minority status of Democrats today, but Joe Klein can certainly rest easily knowing that he has done more than his fair share.” I think he and all his fake liberal pundit friends are the most responsible of all. They are killing us. People on both the left and the right confuse Joe Klein with a real Democrat and mistake his incomprehensible political philosophy for that of the Democratic Party. If there is nothing else that the liberal blogosphere can do, we must make it clear to the American people and the Democratic politicians that Joe Klein speaks only for his elite, insider cadre of cocktail weenie addicts. His opinions are irrelevant to serious Democratic politics.
