Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Response To Kevin Drum

by tristero

Kevin asks liberal bloggers to respond to a hypothetical and I will cheerfully do so, although my argument won’t please Kevin, I think:

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that we had pretty good intelligence telling us that a bunch of al-Qaeda leaders were in the house we bombed. And let’s also assume that we did indeed kill al-Masri and several other major al-Qaeda leaders. Finally, let’s assume that the 18 civilians killed in the attack were genuinely innocent bystanders with no connection to terrorists.

Question: Under those assumptions, was the attack justified? I think the answer is pretty plainly yes, but I’d sure like to see the liberal blogosphere discuss it. And for those who answer no, I’m curious: under what circumstances would such an attack be justified?

My answer, which will surprise no one who knows my writing, is that what Kevin has written is so loaded that it is utterly incoherent as a spur to an honest discussion of terrorism and what to do about it. The only appropriate way to answer is ask the questions that should be asked in the first place, the ones that are being sidestepped. To explain:

Although it seems there are two questions here, there are exactly no real questions being asked. In fact, Kevin simply has crafted a blunt accusatory phrased as a question which can only elicit one possible answer: his. He’s really saying, roughly, “You’d be out of your mind not to bomb them, even if 18 innocents died. Thousands, if not millions, of lives, will be spared.”

The question, “Was the attack justified?” is not meant to be seriously disputed and a little bit of thought will show that it never can be. Let’s just say you answer no and with tremendous eloquence you discuss the morality of it, invoking not only the Bible, but the Bhagavad Gita and a few scientific studies of moral dilemmas. It’s all meaningless, for all Kevin needs to do is follow up with, “Okay, let’s say the people in that building were putting the finishing touches on a plan to nuke Boston. Would you now say it’s justified?” And if that doesn’t change your mind, Kevin can simply continue to up the ante – in the house, say, was enough Chemical W to obliterate the Midwest for generations. Eventually, even you will be forced to abandon your objections.

But what happens if you agree with Kevin that the attack was justified? Well, an opponent can easily play this game, too. Simply respond with the opposite extension of the hypothetical. “Okay, let’s say those 18 killed included your Mom, your Dad, your brother, two sisters, and your favorite cousins. Was it still justified to attack that house?” And sooner or later you will end up saying, no it wasn’t justified.

And around and around you’ll go, fine tuning the hypothetical to provide you with exactly the answer you want. It only looks like a moral dilemma but really, it isn’t. A moral dilemma happens in the real world, not in hypothetical situations. Kevin’s hypothetical is a setup. In fact, and this really should be patently obvious, it isn’t even Kevin’s hypothetical, but the Bush administration’s, a hypothetical they are asserting actually occurred. And while they’re marketing it as likely fact, this situation doesn’t resemble genuine moral dilemmas I know, which are far more complex than a carefully constructed hypothetical which this clearly is. In other words, the story of the attack and its justification is a lie.

The question Kevin asked is precisely the one Bush wants us to ask. They have composed this “justification” for the attack which they expect will meet the minimum standards necessary for some dispassionate observers to conclude that yes, it just might be worth it to have unfortunately killed all those innocent civilians. But the closer you look at the story, how it developed, how it’s being described, the more bogus it seems. For example:

Mysteriously, the bodies of the targeted terrorists were removed before they could be identified. The US government, quite skillfully, has refused to confirm or deny the latest Pakistani story which originally contended it was al Zawahiri but now it’s a mad bomber genius, al Qaeda’s own Unabomber, who was – ever so ironically – blown to bits. Surely, that’s worth 18 innocent lives, yes?

And that, plus other peculiarities, is why I don’t believe a word of it. It’s too pat, too perfect a concretization of a carefully crafted arm chair accusatory skewed towards only one right answer – Bush’s – and as details emerge it can be easily adjusted to make that answer even more inevitable. And tellingly, the structure of the Pakistan assertion combined with a US refusal to confirm easily enables the story to be disowned a few months from now, when no one’s paying much attention.

Am I saying that there is no way in hell the story put out by the Pakistanis and the Bushies could be true? What I’m saying is this: the story of 18 innocents sacrificed to eliminate an Evil Bombing Genius is so perfectly tailored to fit the moral theorizing of amateur philosophers rather than any possibly real conflict with al Qaeda that it resembles more the fake Jessica Lynch heroism stories than the real Lynch story.

This is merely Bush propaganda at its most cynical and crude. Frankly, I’m amazed that Kevin asked precisely the question Bush wanted us to ask, a question posed only so that outrage over American bombing of civilians – a war crime if deliberate – would dissipate. I’m also amazed, in fact saddened, that PZ Myers didn’t realize this was was a con and chose to respond as if it were a serious question designed to “engage” a debate about national security and its tradeoffs. PZ didn’t realize the fundamental bogosity of the question.

But while Kevin may be naive when it comes to accepting the terms of the Bush administration for debate – and he is, as his pre-invasion support for the war shows – he is no Bushite. In fact he is probably after a deeper question here: How should al Qaeda be confronted? What techniques and strategies will not only neutralize al Qaeda’s ability to strike but eliminate al Qaeda-ism as a serious danger? That’s a question I’d like not only liberal bloggers to discuss; I’d like the government of the United States to address it directly instead of spewing an endless stream of third rate propaganda intended only to make it impossible for their domestic political opponents to object to their cockmamie plans.

Perhaps Kevin is also posing a meta-question here: How can liberals construct narratives that are rhetorically as slippery as the rightwing, like this one about the botched bombing? That is another very good question. Personally, I lean towards crisply telling the truth no matter where the chips land. I’m not sure much more is required to bring down Bush and Bushism for good. It would be nice if a political party did that in a consistent fashion, just as an experiment some time.

(updated immediately after posting to fix grammar and clarify some subsidiary points.)

The Best Response To The Democrats’ SOTU Response

by tristero

When you’re asked to donate to the Democratic party, just remember that your dollars are paying the salaries of the idiots who decided that this man was the appropriate person to deliver the response to Bush’s 2006 State of the Union address.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some great Americans in the Democratic party – Dean, Kerry, Pelosi, Obama – make your own list. But something is seriously – major seriously – askew with the plumbing behind the scenes. And Dean, even as head of the party, won’t be able to fix it. In short, Daou’s an optimist.

What to do? I suggest donating to another organization that recognizes exactly how serious a danger Bushism represents an organization that’s shown they will fight tooth and nail against it. I’m suggesting that such an organization could then use its financial and electoral clout to demand the Democrats fire every last strategist, consultant, and adviser who was involved in the inexcusable losses of the 2002 and 2004 elections and hire new people who are prepared to implement a winning strategy.

What NOT to do? Don’t forgo political donations – give them to groups that you think matter. Don’t drop out and refuse to vote – every vote counts. Most importantly, don’t, for a moment, hold on to the delusion that the Democrats, as presently run, are a viable national second party. They’re not, and we’re going to have to work like hell to create a national party that can confront the Republicans and marginalize the extreme right.

One personal note. I truly hate having to blog about this issue. I’m no purist, I’m not a Naderite, a radical. I’m a moderate liberal. I recognize that a national strategy opposed to Bush can’t possibly address many of the issues I care about. I understand that I will inevitably disagree with positions taken to attract a more conservative voter than myself.

But what the Democratic advisers are doing isn’t wise strategy designed to appeal to the center. It’s sheer stupidity and incoherence. And if bloggers don’t speak out – loudly – then no one will. Although our influence is genuinely trivial, it is not zero. And so we must protest in the hopes that someone, somewhere, will read what we say and perhaps try in some small way to turn the Democrats around so that the US can once again become a two party democracy.

Timing Is Everything

by tristero

It looks like some Gooper brownshirt was a bit ahead of his time in his offer of a $100 to any student willing to record the lectures of politically “suspect faculty.” Another few years, at the most, and CNN will instead describe them as “deviant faculty” and some earnest Ralph Reed clone will say that if professors have nothing to hide, then they won’t object to having their lectures taped and sold to watchdog organizations. And after a while, no one will care and eyes will roll at dinner parties if anyone is politically correct enough to question its morality.

One of The Boys

by digby

Just this morning, in honor of Matthews and Imus sharing masculine chuckles over “that movie” I took a little trip down Hardball lane and relived those glorious days of yore when Tweety and the Sycophants sang their song of manly love to Commander Codpiece and Big Dick Cheney.

A commenter later pointed out that Tweety has been socializing with GOP mouthpiece Ed Rogers, celebrating the impending nuptials of objective reporter Campbell Brown and her fiance Dan Senor, former professional GOP spokesliar for Viceroy Bremer. (He had been promoted from Ari Fleischer’s harem.) Tweety gushed at how much fun he’d had hanging with the wingnuts:

MATTHEWS: Dee Dee, you’re great to come on. Ed Rogers, same to you.

Thanks for the party the other night.

ROGERS: Enjoyed having you.

MATTHEWS: (inaudible) Brown and her husband about to be.

This was after a ridiculous segment in which Tweety let Rogers spin like Tonya Harding on meth about the goddamned plantation nonsense, while Dee Dee Myers (typically unprepared) apologized for Hillary and babbled nonsensically about Democrats being in the minority.

That’s all within a 24 hour period. But that wasn’t the end of it. Tonight he said that Osama bin Laden sounds like Michael Moore (via Crooks and Liars):

I mean he sounds like an over the top Michael Moore here, if not a Michael Moore. You think that sells…

Come on. This is ridiculous. This man is either working overtime to kiss right wing ass for some reason or he’s been paid off to do full-on GOP character assasination. This is exactly what the Republicans did to Tom Daschle and Max Cleland.

This comparing liberals to Osama bin laden has been going on long enough. We don’t want to subjugate women and kill gays. We don’t want to turn free societies into theocracies and inflict a particular religious doctine on everyone. We don’t see geopoliticc through the lens of religious revelation and compel others to act upon it. It is beyond absurd to keep comparing liberals, any of us, to religious fundamentalist terrorists.

Peter Daou calls for an apology and I agree that it’s long overdue:

Bin Laden sounds like Clint Eastwood” — “Bin Laden sounds like Ron Silver” — “Bin Laden sounds like Rush Limbaugh” — “Bin Laden sounds like Bill O’Reilly”– “Bin Laden sounds like Mel Gibson” — “Bin Laden sounds like Bruce Willis” — “Bin Laden sounds like Michelle Malkin”… Imagine the outrage on the right and in the press (but I repeat myself) if a major media figure spat out those words. Well, on Hardball, Chris Matthews just blurted out that Bin Laden sounds like Michael Moore. Simple: Matthews should apologize. On the air. This has NOTHING to do with Michael Moore and everything to do with how far media figures can go slandering the left. And last I checked, Michael Moore didn’t massacre thousands of innocent Americans.

Golly gee, I only wish that I had Monsignor Tim’s number and could call and report Tweety’s transgressions as Scooter Libby did. Scooter’s complaint got a call from the padre to the president of NBC news and I’m pretty sure Matthews got a trip to the woodshed.

But a few thousand emails from readers demanding an apology might just get somebody’s attention too:

Hardball@msnbc.com

MSNBC

www.msnbc.com
world@msnbc.com

One MSNBC Plaza
Secaucus, NJ 07094
Phone: (201) 583-5000
Fax: (201) 583-5453

NBC News

www.nbc.com

30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10112
Phone: (212) 664-5900
Fax: (212) 664-2914

By the way: Tweety’s tied to the Abramoff probe. He happily raised money for one of Casino Jack’s front groups. And he’s gone out of his way to trivialize the unprecedented bribery, shakedowns and protection racket his best pals have been engaged in. I’m just sayin’

Update: Thank you John Kerry.

“You’d think the only focus tonight would be on destroying Osama Bin Laden, not comparing him to an American who opposes the war whether you like him or not. You want a real debate that America needs? Here goes: If the administration had done the job right in Tora Bora we might not be having discussions on Hardball about a new Bin Laden tape. How dare Scott McClellan tell America that this Administration puts terrorists out of business when had they put Osama Bin Laden out of business in Afghanistan when our troops wanted to, we wouldn’t have to hear this barbarian’s voice on tape. That’s what we should be talking about in America.” — John Kerry

Update II: Americablog, Daily Kos, firedoglake, and MYDD have all issued a call for apology as well.

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Keepers of The Flame

by digby

Garance at TAPPED writes today about the Patriots to Restore Civil Liberties and cautions the Democrats not to get too excited about guys like Grover Norquist or Paul Weyrich leaving the Republican coalition over Bush’s disregard for civil liberties.

I have no idea if she was referring to my post among those she admonishes, but I think it’s worth clarifying anyway. My point was not that Grover and company were going to leave the Republican Party, but that they were laying the groundwork for purging others from the coalition. They will not do this while Bush is in office, for obvious reasons, but they are beginning to make the case that Bush was not a “real conservative” and therefore anything he did while in office cannot be defined as “conservatism.” They do this whenever a politican becomes unpopular.

I linked to Rick Perlstein’s post on HuffPo from a while back in which he tells of his speech to the conservative cabal that was meeting at Princeton late last year:

This past year, I interviewed Richard Viguerie about conservatives and the presidential campaign. I showed him an infamous flier the Republican National Committee had willingly taken credit for, featuring a crossed-out Bible and the legend, “This will be Arkansas if you don’t vote.” “To do this,” Viguerie told me, “it reminds me of Bush the 41st, and not just him, but other non-conservative Republicans.”

Republicans are different from conservatives: that was one of the first lessons I learned when I started interviewing YAFers. I learned it making small talk with conservative publisher Jameson Campaigne, in Ottawa, Illinois, when I asked him if he golfed. He said something like: “Are you kidding? I’m a conservative, not a Republican.”

But back to Viguerie’s expression of same. With a couple of hours’ research I was able to find a mailer from an organization that was then one of his direct-mail clients that said “babies are being harvested and sold on the black market by Planned Parenthood.”

Why not cut corners like this, if you believe you are defending the unchanging ground of our changing experience?

[…]

This part of my talk, I imagine, is long after the point a constitutive operation of conservative intellectual work has clicked on in your minds: the part where you argue that malefactor A or B or C, or transgression X or Y or Z, is not “really” conservative. In conservative intellectual discourse there is no such thing as a bad conservative. Conservatism never fails. It is only failed. One guy will get up, at a conference like this, and say conservatism, in its proper conception, is 33 1/3 percent this, 33 1/3 percent that, 33 1/3 percent the other thing. Another rises to declaim that the proper admixture is 50-25-25.

It is, among other things, a strategy of psychological innocence. If the first guy turns out to be someone you would not care to be associated with, you have an easy, Platonic, out: with his crazy 33-33-33 formula–well, maybe he’s a Republican. Or a neocon, or a paleo. He’s certainly not a conservative. The structure holds whether it’s William Kristol calling out Pat Buchanan, or Pat Buchanan calling out William Kristol.

Norquist, Weyrich and Keene (not Barr, who I think might be a principled libertarian) are all keepers of the flame. Their job is to maintain “Conservatism” the brand, the movement, the value. The Republican party is their beloved vessel, not their cause.

I doubt that anyone is suggesting that Grover Norquist is thinking of leaving the Republican coalition over this. He’s thinking ahead to the moment when it is clear that Bushism and DeLayism are so tainted that they will make “conservatism” look bad. That is when they will be revealed to have not been true blue in the first place. In fact they will have been traitors to the movement. Only “real conservatives” like Norquist and Weyrich and Keene can be counted upon to be pure keepers of the flame. Or so they say.

Garance points out that these “Patriots for Checks and Balances” aren’t actually doing anything, just sending out press releases. This is par for the course. They aren’t going to actually work to undercut the Republican Party. The party is one of their assets. What they are most concerned with is maintaining the value of their brand and that requires constant vigilance. Grover and his conservative “leave us alone coalition” aren’t worth much if they sign on blindly to illegal wiretapping, are they?

None of this means that Democrats could still not deftly exploit this for our own purposes. But that’s another story.

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Innoculation

by digby

Glenn Greenwald tells me that KellyAnn “I wish I were as cute as Ann Coulter” Conway and her little dog George have started a blog in which they are recapping the Cinton scandals for the folks. Glenn’s post does a smashing job of reminding us of the professional character assasins of the GOP, many of whom have been woefully underemployed since the GOP owns everything in town:

Examining filth-peddling relics of the 1990s like the Conways is not merely an exercise in masochistic nostalgia. As their new National Review blog demonstrates, lowly character smears are a quite current and integral weapon in the Republican arsenal. These gutter tactics and their vile purveyors haven’t gone anywhere. And it is beyond doubt that all of the Clinton smears which lowered our political discourse to the primordial level, along with many new ones, are being kept warming in the oven just in case Hillary gets anywhere near a Presidential election.

But the real reason to remember this despicable filth-peddling is because these same Republicans are being permitted by an amnesic and manipulated media to parade themselves around as the Paragons of Civility and Dignity. That Republicans can deliver dignity lectures to the media, which then dutifully reports them with a concerned face while repeatedly showing video of Sam Alito’s wife crying, is quite compelling evidence of just how wretchedly dishonest Republican moralizing is and, worse, how utterly dysfunctional our media has become.

There’s another reason they have trotted out the bitch-twins, as well. They are desperate to keep the public believing that the “culture of corruption” is bi-partisan. I have no doubt in my mind that Mighty Wurlitzer has employed Kellyanne and George for the specific purpose of recycling smears from the 90’s (that can be helpfully passed on to the right wing blogs, talk radio and TV pundits) in order to “remind” people how corrupt Democrat Clinton was. Look for the Conway crap to show up in the blogosphere before long and soon in the major media. We should be prepared for it.

In some ways, the Clinton scandals of the 90’s can be seen as innoculation for the Republican corruption that was rampant, even then. We all know that the charges against the Clinton administration were bullshit, but the non-stop pounding for eight long years is one of the main reason why the public sees corruption as bi=partisan in Washington today. They’ve been hearing about scandals pretty much non-stop for the last 14 years. I don’t believe this is an accident. These people are very good at this stuff. And we are very bad at seeing it coming.

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Tweety And His Hot Man Love

by digby

So I see from Atrios that Tweety was on Imus and the two of them shared a few manly laughs about “Brokeback Mountain” and praising the psychotic Michael Savage.

MATTHEWS (1/18/06): Have you gone to see it yet? I’ve seen everything else but that. I just—

IMUS: No, I haven’t seen it. Why would I want to see that?

MATTHEWS: I don’t know. No opinion on that. I haven’t seen it either, so—

IMUS: So they were—it was out when I was in New Mexico and—it doesn’t resonate with real cowboys who I know.

MATTHEWS: Yeah—

IMUS: But then, maybe there’s stuff going on on the ranch that I don’t know about. Not on my ranch, but you know—

MATTHEWS: Well, the wonderful Michael Savage, who’s on 570 in DC, who shares a station with you at least, he calls it [laughter]—what’s he call it?—he calls it Bare-back Mount-ing. That’s his name for the movie.

IMUS: Of course, Bernard calls it Fudgepack Mountain…

How droll.

Oopsie. Somebody’s glass house has a big fat crack in it. Let’s take a little trip down memory lane, shall we?

MATTHEWS: Let’s go to this sub–what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo of in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I’ve got to say.

Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on–onboard that ship loved this guy.

Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I’m not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn’t do it for me personally, especially not when he’s in a suit, but he arrived there…

MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.

Ms. KAY: …he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn’t he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.

MATTHEWS: I want him to wa–I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.

Mr. DOBBS: Well, it was just–I can’t think of any, any stunt by the White House–and I’ll call it a stunt–that has come close. I mean, this is not only a home run; the ball is still flying out beyond the park.

MATTHEWS: Well, you know what, it was like throwing that strike in Yankee Stadium a while back after 9/11. It’s not a stunt if it works and it’s real. And I felt the faces of those guys–I thought most of our guys were looking up like they were looking at Bob Hope and John Wayne combined on that ship.

Mr. GIGOT: The reason it works is because of–the reason it works is because Bush looks authentic and he felt that he–you could feel the connection with the troops. He looked like he was sincere. People trust him. That’s what he has going for him.

MATTHEWS: Fareed, you’re watching that from–say you were over in the Middle East watching the president of the United States on this humongous aircraft carrier. It looks like it could take down Syria just one boat, right, and the president of the United States is pointing a finger and saying, `You people with the weapons of mass destruction, you people backing terrorism, look out. We’re coming.’ Do you think that picture mattered over there?

Mr. ZAKARIA: Oh yeah. Look, this is a part of the war where we have not–we’ve allowed a lot of states to do some very nasty stuff, traffic with nasty people and nasty material, and I think it’s time to tell them, you know what, `You’re going to be help accountable for this.’

MATTHEWS: Well, it was a powerful statement and picture as well.

After the segment, Chris handed out cigarettes and ice cold bottles of evian to the panel. But they had rolled over and gone to sleep.

If there has ever been a more embarrassing display of repressed erotic longing on national television, I haven’t seen it. Oh, wait:

From May 13, 2003, Via The Daily Howler:

MATTHEWS: What do you make of this broadside against the USS Abraham Lincoln and its chief visitor last week?

LIDDY: Well, I– in the first place, I think it’s envy. I mean, after all, Al Gore had to go get some woman to tell him how to be a man [Official Naomi Wolf Spin-Point]. And here comes George Bush. You know, he’s in his flight suit, he’s striding across the deck, and he’s wearing his parachute harness, you know — and I’ve worn those because I parachute — and it makes the best of his manly characteristic. You go run those, run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman’s vote in the United States of America. You know, all those women who say size doesn’t count — they’re all liars. Check that out. I hope the Democrats keep ratting on him and all of this stuff so that they keep showing that tape.

“You know, it’s funny. I shouldn’t talk about ratings,” he [Matthews] said, also gazing at Bush’s crotch. “But last night was a riot because … these pictures were showing last night, and everybody’s tuning in to see these pictures again.”

I have no doubt that Chris watched those pictures again and again and again — until his hand got tired.

If ever there was a closet case, he is it. He routinely makes a fool of himself on national television, literally drooling over what he thinks are big masculine Republican men.

Remember this one?

MATTHEWS: Will the most powerful vice president in American history become the man who ramrods the rise of the new South and with it a legacy that could promote a draft for a Cheney presidency? The question is a big one. Is Cheney charging down South to serve as President Bush‘s executioner or full-fledged viceroy?

Oooh lala. The question is HUGE! Ramrodding the rise of the new south, indeed.

I suppose we should have some sympathy for Tweety. He probably felt all hot and confused and funny down there when he was talking to Don Imus. After all, Imus wears a cowboy hat and you know what those masculine symbols do to old Chris. I’m sure when he snuck in to see Brokeback Mountain in the suburbs last week, he was smart enough to carry a raincoat.

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Muddling The Message

by digby

I am a big fan of Harry Reid. I thought his op-ed the other day was masterful.

But watching him last night on the Lehrer News Hour made me realize that we are going to fail in making it clear that the Republicans are a criminal enterprise. In fact, we are probably going to get blamed for it. In the end, I wouldn”t be surprised if the Republicans don’t succeed in becoming the John McCain “party of reform” and we actually lose seats.

Here’s why:

JIM LEHRER: And now to the minority leader of the Senate, Sen. Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada. Senator welcome.

SEN. HARRY REID: My pleasure.

JIM LEHRER: First, why has it taken so long for everybody to move on lobbying reform?

SEN. HARRY REID: Jim, it’s taken a while for this culture of corruption the Republicans have developed to come into fore. The Republican leader in the House, four ethics convictions in one year, money laundering indictment, the Republican leader being investigated criminally and civilly, we have for the first time in 135 years, someone who works in the White House indicted. Safavian, who is in charge of government contracting, the president appointed him, hundreds of billions of dollars a year, led away in handcuffs because of sweetheart deals he had with Jack Abramoff and then you have, as has been talked about earlier in your program, the K Street Project.

Think about this, the “pay and play” program. You as a lobbyist, you pay, and we Republicans will take care of you legislatively. That’s why it hasn’t come to the forefront. The arrogance of power, the culture of corruption has not come to the attention of the American public as it has the past several months.

JIM LEHRER: But it’s been going on for years and years– the very things that you and the Republicans agree on to correct have been legal up till now. In other words, these are not the things that Abramoff is charged with or any of these people that you say are going off in handcuffs, right?

SEN. HARRY REID: Yes. But of course this culture of corruption, we need to change the rules and regulations that you talked about here on the program, but people are taking millions of dollars defense contractors, as one Republican was doing, and is now — pled guilty. The stuff that DeLay has done, you don’t need to change the rules.

JIM LEHRER: That’s my point exactly.

SEN. HARRY REID: The point is, he has already been in trouble. But I think it has shone a bright light on the abuses that have taken place that need to be corrected. And that’s what we want to do. We want to shine a bright light and make things better than what they were. We don’t think there should be a pay or play system. We don’t think this K Street Project, which they have worked on for a long time to get up to snuff — it was done with Abramoff; it was done with Norquist; and it was done with Ralph Reed. These are people who are in the political circles are famous for being infamous.

JIM LEHRER: But the specifics that are involved in the current situation aside, the practices of lobbyists taking people — financing trips abroad, taking people to meals — all of that — free airplane travel — all that sort of stuff has been common practice. Democrats and Republicans have been doing that for years, correct?

SEN. HARRY REID: Well, Jim, listen. The Jack Abramoff situation where he’s flying people around to golf tournaments in Scotland and other places, I don’t think that has been — if it has, I don’t know about it, but if it has been, it’s time to stop.

I just know that this is another one of the things that I didn’t take the time to mention that has been so abused, and the American people now see this.

JIM LEHRER: Okay. But members of Congress did not see it until the Jack Abramoff case came along?

SEN. HARRY REID: Of course, we as — friends have helped us; there have been criminal indictments. I’ve listed those.

JIM LEHRER: Right.

SEN. HARRY REID: We have had ethics committees who have met, and the Democratic — I’m sorry, pardon me. Strike that from the record, the Republican leader in the House four times convicted of ethics violations. I mean, we’ve had a little help bringing this to the attention of the American public.

JIM LEHRER: What I’m getting at, I think, Senator, is it’s a little bit of an “oh, I’m so shocked” element to this that a lot of people are having trouble understanding because this kind of practice of lobbyists trying to influence legislation is part and parcel of the system.

SEN. HARRY REID: Jim, your question is very valid, and I’m sorry I didn’t get to the answer sooner. Here’s the situation we have though. We are in the minority. There’s an arrogance of power here in Washington that is untoward. Republican White House, Republican House, Republican Senate. Seven of the nine members of the Supreme Court have been appointed by Republican presidents.

You know, you can’t get things done unless there’s a bipartisan movement, and I would hope that with this scandal, this Republican-driven scandal, we’ll get a few Republicans of goodwill to step forward and say we should have done this a long time ago, but we didn’t; let’s do it now. And that’s what I hope happens.

By coming up with this “reform package” we have managed to make people think this is about reforming arcane congressional rules when it is actually about a bribery and protection racket. And that is exactly what the Republicans wanted us to do. After all, if its only a matter of changing a few rules, they can do that themselves and just move along. Reid starts out with all the right rhetoric and then ends up calling for bipartisanship, for heaven’s sake.

The problem is that Democrats listen to conventional wisdom and bad strategists who all insist that you have to have a positive agenda or people will hate you. This is because when they do focus groups people always say they hate all the negativity and they just want politicians to tell us what they are going to do to fix things.

That is bullshit. People say that because they think that’s what they are supposed to say. They don’t know how much they are being manipulated by all the negative images and so they simply say they don’t like them. It doesn’t mean they don’t respond to them. It’s subliminal. The Democratic party needs to hire a top psychologist to explain this to them — or find a politician who has good instincts.

Here we have Harry Reid trying very hard to make Jim Lehrer see that this is a Republican scandal. But because he is focused on “lobbying reform” — just like the Republicans are — Jim doesn’t see the beef. Everybody knows that politicans and lobbyists are in each others’ pockets. This seems to him like a tempest in a teapot. (Or he’s pretending it does. Lehrer knows very well what the real story is.)

The problem is that Reid and the rest of the Democratic party believed that they had to “offer a solution” because otherwise the public would think they are just being negative. (And yes, the punditocrisy would have been all over them for not offering any solutions, just like they always are.) But had they simply said, “this is way beyond lobbying reform. Republicans like Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff have been running a criminal enterprise out of the US congress,” they could have framed the argument as Republican criminality instead of systemic problems that can be fixed with a few changes in the rules.

If Lehrer said, “isn’t this just the way business is done in Washington?” Reid could shoot back, “sorry Jim, this K Street project’s first order of business was to require the lobbying firms to hire only Republicans, many of them staffers from Tom deLay’s office, to pay off congressmen. The Democratic party is not perfect but we don’t operate like the mob.” If Lehrer had said, “well what do you propose to do about it?” Reid should have said, “I’ll let the criminal justice system do its work, and it has its work cut out for it. But it’s clear that we badly need checks and balances back in our system. Putting this country solely in the hands of the Republican Party has been a disaster.”

You could sense Reid’s frustration in the interview. He made many great points but they were all muddled by this stupid “reform plan” that Lehrer was obsessed with. And that’s because the Democrats had stepped on their own most potent argument — the Republicans are in charge and they are running a corrupt criminal enterprise out of the House and Senate. Even a Republican Justice department could not avert its eyes from the rampant criminality. Duke, DeLay, Abramoff, Rove, Libby, Safavian…. all of them and many more are either under indictment, pled guilty or remain under suspicion. This is not business as usual and the solution isn’t another package of rules changes about who buys the pizza.

I had grave doubts when I heard about the Democratic leadership’s plan to offer competing lobbying reform packages and keep harping on the “culture of corruption.” I knew the message was going to get muddled. We simply need to understand that being “negative” is a perfectly acceptable way of communicating …. about criminal behavior. (Duh.)

We cannot, as usual, depend on the press because they are incompetent. As this piece by Eric Boehlert points out, the press is “afraid of facts.”

The Democrats needed to Keep It Simple Stupid and do nothing but pound away that this was a Republican Criminal Enterprise. They should have swept aside all the DC punditry and stayed on message until they could see that they had traction. Only then should they have started thinking about a positive message — preferably a lot closer to the election, once people had absorbed the Republicans are crooks meme and were looking at the Democrats with a more open mind. Instead we just threw it all on the table in one big pile of mush.

Big mistake. Huge.

Read or watch the whole interview. It will make you hang your head in despair. I like Reid, but this was just terrible. The caucus needs to rethink both its message and its strategy.

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Backing Up Murtha

by digby

This op-ed in the NY Times from yesterday by James Webb, Reagan’s secretary of the Navy, in which he defends John Murtha against the latest swift boat smears, is a must read. I had occasion to bring this up with some Republican veterans recently and they were uncomfortable with the implications. Unlike Kerry, who they all agreed had joined up purely to advance his political career and was a total phony, Murtha isn’t so easy to peg. And when I asked if it was reasonable that every single Bush critic who is a veteran is either lying about his war record or crazy, much hemming and hawing ensued. And when I questioned their medals, they got angry.

At some point the military itself is going to have to defend itself against these attacks. Every time these swift boat assholes do this they call into question every medal that’s been awarded. If all these public figures could get away with this it’s only logical to assume that the military hands out a great many improper medals. After all, they couldn’t have known at the time that these particular men would someday be politicians. This would have to be a systemic problem.

Webb cautions about its effect on the military:

… in recent years extremist Republican operatives have inverted a longstanding principle: that our combat veterans be accorded a place of honor in political circles. This trend began with the ugly insinuations leveled at Senator John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries and continued with the slurs against Senators Max Cleland and John Kerry, and now Mr. Murtha.

Military people past and present have good reason to wonder if the current administration truly values their service beyond its immediate effect on its battlefield of choice. The casting of suspicion and doubt about the actions of veterans who have run against President Bush or opposed his policies has been a constant theme of his career. This pattern of denigrating the service of those with whom they disagree risks cheapening the public’s appreciation of what it means to serve, and in the long term may hurt the Republicans themselves.

[…]

A young American now serving in Iraq might rightly wonder whether his or her service will be deliberately misconstrued 20 years from now, in the next rendition of politically motivated spinmeisters who never had the courage to step forward and put their own lives on the line.

Rudyard Kipling summed up this syndrome quite neatly more than a century ago, writing about the frequent hypocrisy directed at the British soldiers of his day:

An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;

An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool – you bet that Tommy sees!

The Carpetbagger adds:

On a related note, still no word from the White House on whether the president is willing to denounce this baseless attack on a man Bush recently described as “a fine man, a good man, who served our country with honor and distinction as a Marine in Vietnam and as a United States Congressman.” Scott McClellan wasn’t asked about it at yesterday’s briefing. Maybe today the White House can do the honorable thing and publicly reject this nonsense.

I’m not holding my breath.

Via Jane over a Firedoglake, I see that a message board has sprung up for people to register their wish that Murtha give the Democratic response at the State of the Union. I think it is a teriffic idea and would be an excellent way to show these swift boating scumbags that the Democratic Party will not be intimidated by their smears.

Murtha is just terrific on TV. His grizzled countenance, his obvious sincerity and straighforwardness, his credibility make him the perfect person to speak for the Democrats on Iraq. Even my wingnut Dad has to say “well, he’s got a point.” After listening to the callow preznit spew out words he doesn’t even know the meaning of for an hour, Murtha would be like a breath of fresh air.

And Democrats need, right now with no further ado, to show this brave man that we have his back. By Democrats I mean both the rank and file and the leadership. If they can get away with swiftboating John Murtha, then there is simply no use in any Democrats bothering to speak the truth on national security. Everybody just get ready to fight useless wars whenever these bedwetters have a scary nightmare or need to prove their manhoods.

Here are a the e-mail addresses of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid

sf.nancy@mail.house.gov
Or here is her web page form you can use.

Reid only has the web page form.

If there was ever a time to show these Republican thugs that they can’t just swift boat every Democratic veteran and get away with it, it’s now.

Update: Never mind

National Democratic leaders today will ask Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine (D) to deliver the party’s response to the president’s State of the Union address, believing that the new governor can best deliver their 2006 message of inclusiveness, American values and high ethical standards.

Feel the magic.

Foiled Again

by digby

Via Kevin, I see that the Republicans have come up with a scathing attack on Harry Reid that is sure to blow the lid off the Democrats’ call for reform:

We are shocked, shocked to see that politics is going on here!

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