Kos highlights an interesting story today about the fears among the political establishment of the of grassroots extremists:
While some view the evangelical church as above all a force for promoting conservative values, others see it as polarizing as well, fueling candidates who tap into the passions of activists and values voters but not the broader electorate.
“It’s great, because it creates a lot of energy and helps broaden a movement, but the downside is you can also get pulled in a more extreme direction,” said Erik Smith, who worked in the 2004 race for both Tom Coburn and a multimillion-dollar independent Republican ad campaign.
“There is real power there . . . but there are some real limits to it, and those limits have to be heeded,” said Jonah Seiger, an evangelical strategist.
The Republicans are very concerned about how they appear to the mainstream and worry incessantly about how these activists will pull the party too far to the right.
While some view the Internet as above all a democratizing force, others see it as polarizing as well, fueling candidates who tap into the passions of activists and ideological voters but not the broader electorate.
“It’s great, because it creates a lot of energy and helps broaden a movement, but the downside is you can also get pulled in a more extreme direction,” said Erik Smith, who worked in the 2004 race for both Dick Gephardt and a multimillion-dollar independent Democratic ad campaign.
“There is real power there . . . but there are some real limits to it, and those limits have to be heeded,” said Jonah Seiger, an Internet strategist who also heads the board of advisers for the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University.
Unlike Democrats, Republicans do not question whether it is a good thing to have hard working, committed activists. They just say thank you.
Rather than worry about being “pulled in a more extreme direction” they confidently accept support wherever they can get it and openly court their base. They proudly run on the label “conservative” and would not dream of marginalizing their most energetic partisans. Democrats, not so much.
Note to the clueless DC insiders: the blogosphere is only “extreme” to the extent it is extremely impatient with people like you. We believe that your strategy of caution has failed and we are agitating for a more aggressive Democratic politics. After a partisan impeachment, a stolen election in 2000, an illegal war and an unprecedented executive power play we think this is a pretty serious situation. In fact, we see this as political civil war. You apparently think that is “extreme.” We think it is common sense.
Perhaps it would be easier for these people to understand if we speak like Republicans and use stupid Civil War analogies to make a point, so here goes:
We believe that the DC establishment is running the war like George McClellan and we think his cautious strategy is losing us the war. It’s not because we aren’t all on the same side or don’t have the same goals. It’s that the McClellans of the establishment are temperamentally inhibited at a time when aggression is called for. We believe the party needs to fight like Grant.
If that civil war analogy is too complicated I’m sure I can find a cartoon or children’s book to illustrate it. We are not ideologues. We are simply demanding that elected Democrats stand firm on our convictions and be willing to go toe to toe with Republicans. It isn’t complicated. When Lincoln was asked to relieve Grant after Shiloh, he said, “I can’t spare this man — he fights.” That’s what we’re talking about.
I couldn’t live in South Dakota. It would hurt too much. I wonder where all this will lead. I live in California. I feel safe.
The sentiment is understandable. Why live someplace that seems hellbent on trumpeting its ignorance of reality? Why go somewhere that all but brags of its cruelty to the poor?
Indeed, that’s what pro-coathanger legislation is all about. The rich and the middle class will always have access to safe abortion. Making abortion illegal is quite simply class warfare, aimed at the poorest women and families.
That is all it is. It is one thing if your religious beliefs require you to bring a pregnancy to term. No one in the United States will, or should, stop you, It’s a very, very different situation to use your religion as a shield to deflect sharp criticism of your political activism and demand that abortion be made dangerous and illegal. That is not religious belief. That is simply heartless, cruel, and immoral politcking. The cynical operatives who demand that the state approve coathanger abortions by banning legal ones in no way can claim the moral high ground, America’s laws are very clear: no group has the right to inflict their religious proclivities on the rest of us.*
However, I think goodasgold is wrong, as the troll Par R, inadvertently, reminds us. Par R apparently lives in South Dakota and writes:
God bless and keep you safe in California, since we sure as Hell don’t want your type living among us up here! Thanks.
To translate out of Troll-ish, Par R is saying, “Ignorance and tyranny will flourish wherever liberalism is absent.” For that reason, it is vital that more liberals move to South Dakota, not less.
Liberals should move to South Dakota not to “impose” their values, of course. For as we all know, coercion is what religious nuts do, not liberals. Liberals have a long, consistent history of strong opposition to laws that force people to conform to a specific “politically correct” or “religiously correct” moral code. Nope, more liberals should move to South Dakota for one reason only: To become proud, loyal, and productive South Dakotans. The state simply needs more liberals if it is to become a better South Dakota and it needs less unprincipled politicians advancing an anti-American theocratic agenda.
Contrary to christianism, with its unhealthy obsession on deadly punishment and diseased sex, liberalism is a world view that is life affirming. It posits that human beings have the ability and the will to construct a moral life, and a happy, prosperous one in a civil community regardless of our differences. That is what is meant, in a political context, by “all men are created equal.” And liberalism has succeeded. It is in states where liberalism is in short supply that poverty reigns, and ignorance, and a great deal of crime.
The answer to South Dakota’s real problems is not tyranny, either religious or secular (and make no mistake: oppressing the poor, by denying them access to a safe medical procedure, certainly is tyrannical). Both are the desperate solutions of the ignorant and the fearful. No, the answer begins with informed, careful, and reasoned thought. In a word, the answer begins with liberalism. By contrast, nothing could be further removed from reality, nothing could be more irrelevant to the problems South Dakota faces than the thoughtless and clueless theocracy the pro-coathanger crowd desire. And that is why more liberals are needed in South Dakota.
Liberal South Dakotans surely hold different values than California liberals. Speaking for the moment as a New York liberal, I certainly hope so! (grin)
Therefore, more liberals in South Dakota will bring to the state a personal and civil philosophy that will make South Dakotans of all political stripes even prouder of their state than they already are. They will give all South Dakotans more genuine reasons to sneer at how awful and foolish life is in California (and New York), not less. More liberals in South Dakota will focus the state’s resources on genuine issues, not well-marketed faith-based cure-alls that cure nothing. Issues, like passing laws to ban abortion, are not only immoral because of their viciousness to the poor. They are immoral because they waste valuable time and resources better spent addressing real problems.
Liberalism – a philosophy of reason, compassion, tolerance, and hard-headed realism unemcumbered by utopianism – is the only civic philosophy that is flexible enough to encompass the wildly different needs of a wildly disparate America. The notion of a “godless” liberal is one more rightwing myth. The vast majority of American liberals agree that, on a personal level, the “good life” is lived with God’s help. They are also aware that what is meant by God or God’s will is no business of the state to define; one group’s position on God’s will can in no way be privileged in the business of an American polis. The sooner South Dakota’s legislature stops trying to to do so and gets down to the real business of running the state, the better. And that requires more liberals in South Dakota, not more theocrats thumping Bibles and obsessing about other people’s sex lives.
And so, goodasgold, start packing.
An apology: I haven’t addressed the right to safe and legal medical care very much in the past. The reason is that it is self-evident that all citizens have a right to such care, even if they are poor. Therefore, what’s there to argue over? The fury over the use of coat hangers has always puzzled me. Yes, honest people can come to radically different conclusions as to whether their pregnancy should or should not be terminated. But an American government clearly has no right to impose a conclusion. Therefore the politicization of the abortion issue has always struck me as a thinly disguised war against providing safe health care to the poor, especially women, rather than anything that engages a genuine moral issue which, in abortion’s case, is a private one.
I still think this is true. But it is becoming clear to me that, not only because the issue of safe medical care for all Americans is an important issue in itself but because the right to such care impacts many other important issues, all of us must once again speak out, loud, clear, and often in favor of Roe v. Wade.
True, I’ve done so several times before, and just as unequivocally as I’ve done so here. But I feel a need to speak out even more. I recognize that others have sensed this need long before I have. They were right, I was wrong and I apologize. To say that there were (and are) issues that were just as serious is no excuse, of course. But that was, and is, the case for me.
As I’ve said before, it has become very hard to be an American. The assault from the extreme right on American values has been relentless and highly organized since (at least) the second Clinton term. Nearly as bad, the Democrats have, as a party, failed miserably to stand behind its finest members – people like Kerry, Murtha, and Dean – or its modern principles, which are based in liberalism. The fact that being an American is very hard work these days also is no excuse. Please accept the apology and I’ll try to make up for it with more posts on the right of all Americans to safe, legal medical care. That care is dangerously undermined whenever the access to abortion on demand is challenged. The dangers of illegal abortion primarily fall on poor women (and honest, competent doctors who provide abortions despite the potential for imprisonment), but the dangers of making access to medical procedures contingent on religious correctness are dangers for everyone, including those who, for personal/religious reasons, will carry all viable pregnancies to term.
*Note to rightwing religious nuts: Disagree with me all you want, but don’t try to claim I am “prejudiced against religion,” yadda yadda because I would truly hate to embarass you. There is abundant public proof of my longstanding admiration and deep respect for religious observance and devout practice.
My contempt and disgust is focused entirely on political activists like bin Laden, Antonin Scalia, Randall Terry, or the late Meir Kahane, who hide behind the skirts of priests to advocate theocracy. (And yes, that is precisely Scalia’s agenda which is why he’s mentioned here in the company of his peers: his remarks here fall barely one or two commas short of advocating a full overhaul of American jurisprudence and the establishment of a christianist theocracy)
Now if you’re an extra crunchy and sleazy rightwing nut you might sneer, “What about Martin Luther King? You object to him speaking out when he saw injustice?” To which there is only one response:
Your comparison is deeply insulting. King’s peers are Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, so if you want to discuss him by comparing him to those other great human beings, I am only too happy to join you. But I will not demean KIng’s achievements by dignifying, with a response, any mention of him in the rhetorical company of cheap slimeballs like Pat Robertson or Rick Santorum. What next, shall we “discuss” whether FDR is the moral equivalent of Hitler? Or whether the Bible authorizes slavery? It’s still a free blogosphere so go somewhere else and spew.
This William Kristol quote from this morning is another step in the eventual disavowal of Bushism. You see, just as it was in Vietnam, the know-nothings in Washington won’t let the military leaders take the gloves off which is why we are having so many problems.
This will, of course, be folded into the standard one size fits all conservative whine that alleges conservatism cannot fail on its own terms. Not even neo-conservatism, which isn’t conservatism at all except to the extent it prefers war over other means of change.
Indeed, the neos have the civil war in Iraq already built into their utopian vision. Much as David Ignatius said that if in 30 years Iraq is doing as well as Lebanon is today then the invasion can be seen as a success, for years some neocons have held that in order to make a nice US dominated Iraq, the massive death and destruction of a war and then civil war might be just what the doctor ordered. From a very depressing article by Robert Dreyfuss:
In a paper for an Israeli think tank, the same think tank for which Wurmser, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith prepared the famous “Clean Break” paper in 1996, Wurmser wrote in 1997 : “The residual unity of the nation is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state.” After Saddam, Iraq would “be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families,” he wrote. “Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq’s] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition.” Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to “expedite” such a collapse. “The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance.”
Such black neoconservative fantasies—which view the Middle East as a chessboard on which they can move the pieces at will—have now come home to roost. For the many hundreds of thousands who might die in an Iraqi civil war, the consequences are all too real.
This is where the Straussian beast of neoconservatism rears its ugly head.[and says hello its mate, perverted trotskyism. ed] Their vaunted starry-eyed idealism about spreading democracy is a pile of crap. They, like all imperialists, seek domination. They went along with the cockamamie idea to give the Iraqi people the opportunity to surrender peacefully and do it our way. Those purple fingers should have made them feel really good about themselves. But they aren’t cooperating. Which means, sadly, that it’s time to accept reality. We tore the country apart, now we’ll let the crazy wogs have it out.
The big challenge now is to “limit and expedite the chaotic collapse in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance.” When you look at it that way, everything’s going according to plan. Too bad about all the dead people.
Meanwhile neocon shills like Kristol will soothe the rubes with tales of how the Bush administration tied the military’s hands. If they’d have let them go they could have gotten the job done in a couple of weeks. We could have bombed em back into the stone age if necessary. After all, everything turned out just great with Japan and Germany. But, no. They wouldn’t let our brave men and women get the job done. (Of course you can’t blame them too much. It was the dominant Democrat hippies who made them do it.)
It gives the Republicans a good excuse to run on “restoring honor” to the country. The rubes eat it up and get all excited about proving ourselves in the next war. A war we must fight for freedom and democracy, of course. Because we’re so good.
Kevin at Catch is calling it a day and now I have one less funny blogger from whom to steal great material. Damn. I hate when that happens. He is one of those guys who likes to go into the belly of the rightwing blogospheric beast and examine the entrails with insight and humor. It is a valuable service and I will miss him.
We met (virtually, of course) during the Wes Clark campaign when both of us were asked to do an online interview with the general. Back in those golden, olden days, that was quite an unusual thing. We were asked to submit five questions. Kevin and I both asked four probing, deeply complicated queries about long term foreign policy strategy and one fun “personal” question. They picked the personal questions, of course. Kevin’s was “what’s your favorite salad dressing” and mine was “of all your postings overseas, what country did you enjoy the most?” (answers: vinaigrette and Panama.) I was lucky enough to get one “real” question in the mix as well so I didn’t suffer the overwhelming disapprobation of the Clarkies who accused Kevin of wasting the general’s and the community’s time with this silliness. (Clarkies are a serious bunch.) We bonded.
Kevin may be leaving the blogosphere but he will be long remembered around these parts. His memorial is the term “bedwetters.” That’s what I call a contribution.
I assume that Kevin knows his great eye and superior snark are always welcome on this blog should he feel the overhwelming urge to post. And you know he will feel the urge eventually. It’s hard to go cold turkey. Yelling at the TV just doesn’t have the same kick. Plus it annoys people. Your loved ones quickly realize they didn’t miss you that much after all and are relieved to hear the sounds of your angry typing. I’m guessing. Not that I would know, of course. I’m very even keeled.
Now, I’m not saying that I completely agree with this, but I do think it is worthy of a full, thoughtful discussion.
Note to wingnuts: In case it is lost on you, the sentence above is one I have found on right wing discussion boards regarding whether gays are moral lepers, abortion doctors deserve the death penalty, or whether torture may be a good thing on occasion. In other words, this is satire.
Ever optimistic, the Times surveys opinions on what Civil War would be like in Iraqif civil war comes. While there is much that is interesting here, I am also struck by the amount of naivete on display* and the poor organization of the article. For example, this would appear to be perhaps the most striking and important “news” to impart to Americans:
[Kenneth] Pollack cautions that a civil war could prove especially painful for the Shiites. There is no reason, he says, to assume that they won’t fight among themselves. The three major Shiite movements each have militias. Sometimes they have clashed… “There are a thousand Shiite militias that could do battle against each other, splintering even the southern part of Iraq.”
The way the story’s usually been played in the US press is that it’s Shia vs. Sunni. Not so. The situation is far more complex. So where does the Times put this important information? Near the end of the article.
While Pollack is right to point out the dangers of infra-Shia strife, he is wrong elsewhere in the piece to claim that such strife is the first thing one would see in an Iraqi civil war – Sunnis may be a minority, but they were, and still are, a powerful minority. The first thing you’d see, obviously would be something close to what we are, indeed, seeing: increasingly violent actions between Shia and Sunnis. Nor is Pollack accurate in opining that “a civil war could prove especially painful for the Shiites.” If nearly any Shia faction wins a violent civil war, Sunnis will experience major league political repression. As in state sponsored torture and murder. If anything, it’s the Sunnis who will find a civil war “especially painful,” assuming they lose. And, among many other factors, it is their desperation – rightly, they don’t trust a “legit” Shia government to treat them well – that is behind their present attacks.
Pollack’s emphasis on Shia-Shia conflict seems an academic distortion, going for the unusual angle. But that’s nothing compared to this unattributed whopper:
Some experts, however, say Iran may understand the dangers of a war. Even President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s denunciation of the bombing of the Shiite shrine in Samarra last week, in which he blamed Zionists rather than Sunnis, could be seen as an act of restraint, these experts say — an effort to play to Shiite anger without fanning flames between Iraq’s Islamic communities.
Now this is such an unspeakably stupid analysis of what Iran is up to that it could only come from a high Bush administration official. I’m quite serious. Another clue it’s from a Bushite is its sense of loony “accentuate the positive” thinking. And indeed, the context gives a pretty clear clue where this idiocy probably came from. Backing up one paragraph we read:
While Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has proclaimed that the world has isolated Iran more than ever because of its nuclear ambitions, Iran has in fact tightened relationships with it local allies as events in Iraq have played out. In recent months, Iran has been deepening its alliance with Syria and the Shiite movement Hezbollah in Lebanon, and now it appears ready to strike up a friendship, backed by financing, with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.
Some experts, however, say Iran may understand the dangers of a war. Even President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s denunciation …
Am I saying Condoleeza Rice is the moron who sees hope in Iran’s anti-Zionism/semitism? No, not exactly. But anyone who is making the fundamental error Rice is making – focusing on Iran’s “world” isolation while downplaying its strengthening of regional ties, including to Hamas – is quite capable of misconstruing Ahmadinejad’s remarks to mean Iran is not doing whatever it can to grasp as much purchase within Iraq as possible. And if it came to a war that led to Iraq’s total disintegration, it is unclear what Iran stands to lose.
The article also floats the idea of a negotiated breakup of Iraq into three states. Good luck. Who gets the oil regions, boys and girls? Who gets the desert? And who moves? And who sez Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are just gonna twiddle their fingers and not interfere?
There is much more interesting speculation and detail about how truly incredibly complex the mess in Iraq is, and how few alternatives exist that won’t quickly lead to disaster for the people of the region, and the people of the United States. Will Turkey invade to defend the Turkomen against oppression if Iraq’s Kurds officially set up on their own? Will the Arab League step in to intervene? And looming above it all are nukes. Iranian nukes coming soon. Potential Sunni Arab nukes depending on how the situation worsens (calling Dr. A. Q. Khan!).
So, Mr. Tom Friedman, are you enjoying the real live political experiment now? So, Mr. George Packer, still think that those of us who absolutely knew Bush/Iraq would open the gates of hell have “second-rate minds?”
Hey, y’never know! Maybe Ahmadinejad really was sending a signal that Iran wasn’t interested in an Iraq civil war when he blamed Zionists – Israel -for the attack. True, that could be because he wants to attack Israel first, but at least it’s not supporting civil war in Iraq!
Yes, it’s possible. And maybe there really is a Bigfoot. And maybe tomorrow, cold fusion will work and, as Woody Allen predicted in Sleeper, cigarette smoking will turn out to improve your health and longevity. You never know…
*I am no expert on the Middle East. Why am I so confident many of the “expert opinions” in this article are naive? Here goes:
To be deemed an expert on the Middle East, one would assume that the prerequisite would be fluency in several dialects of Arabic, fluency in Persian, fluency in Hebrew, and considerable time spent living and working in the Middle East. But one would be wrong. Most American “experts” in the public domain -there are real experts in universities, I assume – know one of those languages. At best, two. Many can’t read or speak any of them, and rely on assistants and clipping services for information on Middle Eastern press and mass media. Incredibly, language fluency is still considered not a requirement for marketing yourself as a pundit whose specialty is the Middle East. And many people defend this.
In my book, there’s a word to describe anyone who claims expertise in Middle Eastern affairs who can’t read Iranian or Iraqi newspapers, or needs a translator to understand al Jazeera, or whose experience of the region is limited to a guided tour of the pyramids or an overnight stay at the King David Hotel: phony.
Simple commonsense tells me that Iran stands to gain quite a bit from Iraq’s disintegration and stands to lose little even if there is furious intra-Shia civil war in Iraq. Simple commonsense tells me that when Iran sends a message to the world that Zionists destroyed the Shiite shrine, they are clearly trying to unify Muslims against a common enemy – Israel – and they are not saying anything, one way or the other, about the desirability of Iraqi civil war. Commonsense also tells me that when Iran’s president sends a message to the world, that message is intended primarily for Muslims and that US analysts make a fundamental error when it assumes “the world” means us.
I’ll gladly defer to genuine expert opinion on any of this, but I doubt that any seriously real scholar would make assertions like the silly ones cited above. Pollack’s sense that Shias would endure “special pain” in a civil war is vacuous and dishonest, used only to hype his superior knowledge of the complexities, but shows not a trace of any superior understanding. For one thing, “speical pain” is empirically unverifiable. Furthermore, his argument is naive in its assumption that a Shia/Sunni strife can never get bloody enough to meet most standards for what is meant by the term “civil war.”I’m afraid we are seeing Pollack proved wrong on a daily basis right now.
As for the anonymous misconstrual of Iran’s remarks, that is less naive than it is delusional.
Update: Pardon our dust. Yes, I know it’s a bit of a mess. Please bear with me. People much smarter than I are working on bringing this site in to the second half of the ot years. Thanks you for your patience.
And, no. The new design will look nothing like the one some of you saw earlier. That was merely a placeholder.
Never mind
This is not a permanent template. Please don’t waste your time commenting on its terrible/wonderful look.
I’ll tell you when the real transition happens. And then you can complain all you want. Comments will return I promise.
If you haven’t had any fun today, click on Lou Dobbs arguing with Joe Klein about port security. Klein, the pretend liberal in a balanced group consisting of Republican David Gergen, Republican Ed Rollins and Republican Dobbs, insists that if we don’t let this Dubai deal go forward, we will be causing ourselves some real trouble in the arab world. They are very sensitive to this kind of disrespect, you see. Changing the rules midstream is going to cause more terrorists.
He’s so right. America should do everything it can not to foment terrorism.
The waves of vengeance have left the majority Shiite and the minority Sunni communities feeling victimized and deeply angry with each other. Both are also resentful of the United States, which has been working to ease the animosity and coax Iraq’s various ethnic and religious groups into a cooperative government.
“The Americans also abandoned us extremely. They could have put some of their vehicles to protect the mosques — they have the forces to do that,” Khalaf Ulayyan, general secretary of the Sunni Iraqi National Dialogue Council, said at a news conference. “How does a civil war start? It starts like this.”
What a shame.
But let’s keep our priorities straight here. What we need to do is make sure that Dubai’s feelings aren’t hurt or things might just hurtle out of control in the mideast. We wouldn’t want that.
Rita Cosby said that it’s wrong that the Republicans in South Carolina are asking for church rolls to target the evangelical vote but it’s just as wrong that Democrats are targeting the “hoodlum vote.”
Yes, the hoodlum vote. When a plainly confused Chris Matthews asked what she meant, she explained that Democrats were going through voter rolls to find felons to vote for them.