The Sequel
From the great uggabugga:
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"what digby sez..."
Patrick Henry Democrats
by digby
As much as I appreciate all these Republicans offering us advice about how we are endangering our political prospects by not supporting illegal NSA spying, I have to wonder if they really have our best interests at heart. I just get a teensy bit suspicious that it might not be sincere.
The truth is that I have no idea where the NSA spying scandal is going and neither do they. The Republicans would like it to go nowhere for obvious reasons and so they are trying to psych out timid Dems. What I do know is that the most important problem Democrats have is not national security; it’s that nobody can figure out what we stand for. And when we waffle and whimper about things like this we validate that impression.
In Rick Perlstein’s book, “The Stock Ticker and The Super Jumbo” he notes that many Democrats are still reeling from the repudiation of the party by the Reagan Democrats. And while they continue to worry about being too close to African Americans or being too rigid on abortion or too soft on national security, they don’t realize that the most vivid impression people have of the Democrats is this:
“I think they lost their focus”
“I think they are a little disorganized right now”
“They need leadership”
“On the sidelines”
“fumbling”
“confused”
“losing”
“scared”
The reason people think this is because we are constantly calculating whether our principles are politically sellable (and we do it in front of god and everybody.) We’ve been having this little public encounter session for well over 20 years now and it’s added up to a conclusion that we don’t actually believe in anything at all.
Perhaps the NSA scandal is a political loser for Dems. We can’t know that now. But it is a winner for us in the long term. We believe in civil liberties and civil rights. With economic fairness, they form the heart of our political philosophy. If this particular issue doesn’t play well, that’s too bad. People who believe in things sometimes have to be unpopular. Over time, they gain the respect of the people which is something we dearly need.
A party that is described as fumbling, confused and scared is unlikely to win elections even if they endorse the wholesale round-up of hippies and the nuking of Mecca. People will listen to us if we can first convince them that we know who we are and what we believe in.
I’m of the mind to adopt “give me liberty or give me death” as my personal motto. If I have to kowtow to a bunch of childish Republican panic artists who have deluded themselves into believing that fighting radical Islam requires turning America into a police state, then it’s just not worth it.
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Imperial Nutball
Julia connects the dots on Michael Scheuer and concludes that he is a bit unhinged. I’m inclined to agree.
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No Likee
by digby
I know this will come as a great disappointment to Republicans who have taken to saying that the NSA spy scandal boosted Bush’s approval ratings ten points, but the new CNN/USA Today poll has his job approval rating at 41%, which is down a point from the last one. In fact, his rating has been pretty steady at around 40% since last August.
Just as point of contrast:
December 20, 1998
Web posted at: 10:48 p.m. EST (0348 GMT)(AllPolitics, December 20) — In the wake of the House of Representatives’ approval of two articles of impeachment, Bill Clinton’s approval rating has jumped 10 points to 73 percent, the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll shows.
Bush also hit a new low in “favorable opinion” down to 46%. Some might think he would be described as unpopular since they called him popular until he hit 48%. But no. He’s now “poised for a comeback.”
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Uh Oh
by digby
This gives me the creeps.
Via ReddHedd at firedoglake, the LA Times reports:
A little-noticed holiday week executive order from President Bush moved the Pentagon’s intelligence chief to the No. 3 spot in the succession hierarchy behind Rumsfeld. The second spot would be the deputy secretary of defense, but that position currently is vacant. The Army secretary, which long held the No. 3 spot, was dropped to sixth….
But in its current incarnation, the doomsday plan moves to near the top three undersecretaries who are Rumsfeld loyalists and who previously worked for Vice President Dick Cheney when he was defense secretary.
ReddHedd points out that this is taking cornyism to new heights, which it is. But, I got a sick little shiver when I read it. Do they know something? Failed military coup? Bin laden determined to strike in the United States, perhaps?
Under the new plan, Rumsfeld ally Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary for intelligence, moved up to the third spot. Former Ambassador Eric Edelman, the policy undersecretary, and Kenneth Krieg, the undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, hold the fourth and fifth positions.
If something happens, pray for Rumsfeld’s health because Cambone is an even wilder nutcase than Rummy is. Jesus. Three more years of this?
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Mistakes
by digby
The National Security Agency’s internet site has been placing files on visitors’ computers that can track their web-surfing activity despite strict federal rules banning most of them.
These files, known as “cookies,” disappeared after a privacy activist complained and The Associated Press made inquiries this week, and agency officials acknowledged Wednesday they had made a mistake. Nonetheless, the issue raises questions about privacy at a spy agency already on the defensive amid reports of a secretive eavesdropping program in the United States.
They say they are strictly listening to conversations between terrorists and their American friends who are plotting to blow up weddings. They don’t need anyone looking over the shoulders, not even a rubber stamp secret Star Chamber. They are professionals who aren’t interested in tracking people for any reason but terrorism. No oversight necessary, nosirree.
Yet we are supposed to believe they don’t know they have a fucking cookie allowing them to track every visitor to their web site and we are also supposed to believe that they aren’t making any other “mistakes” in their data mining of American citizens’ communications. The alternative, of course, would be to believe that they knew very well they had a cookie on their site and were, in fact, tracking the surfing habits of those who vistited it, in which case we know for a fact that they aren’t just monitoring communications with al Qaeda. Either way, I think this little episode proves that the NSA could use a little oversight, don’t you?
Maybe not. In a debate at the WaPo yesterday on the subject, a fine Republican wrote:
An al Qaeda operative can walk into any Radio Shack, buy X number of cell phones, activate them with an American company (thereby acquiring a US phone number), then take them to another country to use.
The Fourth Amendment offers protection to Americans against UNREASONABLE searches. Is it unreasonable, after 9/11, to monitor the phone calls of foreign al Qaeda operatives to those using cell phones with American numbers when we know in hindsight that Atta — while in this country preparing for the attack — communicated with al Qaeda’s leadership abroad? Is it unreasonable for the government to do whatever it can to intercept such conversations, knowing that Able Danger had identified Atta as an al Qaeda operative before the attack? What about the civil rights and liberties of those slaughtered on 9/11 by al Qaeda?
IF these phone calls really were domestic spying, I, too, would object. But, they’re not. They are international calls with one end outside the country. The remedy is simple and involves personal responsibility: If an American citizen does not want his calls monitored, then he shouldn’t be chatting with foreign al Qaeda operatives on the phone. And to me, it is that simple.
Simple.
But just in case the NSA is making more “mistakes,” (or fibbing just a little bit) the best thing to do to be perfectly sure the government isn’t spying on you is to not make any phone calls. Or surf the internet. Or leave the house. But the very best thing to do is vote Republican and support the war and you won’t have any trouble at all. (Shhhh. Don’t tell the terrorists.)
Update
To be clear:
All I’m saying is that if the nation’s premiere surveillance agnecy can make “mistakes” about something as simple as a cookie, they can certainly make mistakes about much more complicated and serious matters.
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Kept Down By The Pansies
by digby
Yglesias notes that Marshall Wittman is whining that liberal hawks get no respect. He points out that despite representing almost no actual Democrats, Democratic hawks have dominated the Democratic leadership in congress virtually forever. And that leadership has failed to win elections that would justify to liberals who were against the Iraq war that they should continue to support them.
They don’t deliver votes, they join in Republican calumny against the Democratic Party and they are wrong. Why, exactly should they have even more influence than they already do?
And what in the hell is up with these powerful conservatives of both parties who see themselves as constantly being beseiged by people who they simultaneously perceive as weak and useless? Does this make any sense at all?
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Hollywood Confidential
by digby
Matt Stoller has a very interesting post up over at MYDD. It’s written by his brother, Nick Stoller, a screenwriter whose new movie “Fun With Dick and Jane” has an extremely funny trailer, so I’m looking forward to seeing it.
I’ve always thought of the original “Fun With Dick and Jane” starring George Segal and Jane Fonda as the quintessential “malaise” movie. It was the chronicle of a middle class family who fell through the cracks in a harsh economy and ended up robbing banks. It’s a comedy, of course, but for those of us who lived through the late 70’s it had a bit of a bite. When I saw that it was being re-made I had one of those “of course” moments. I had just been reading about rising gas prices and GM lay-offs. Deja vu all over again.
Stoller’s post asks why Democrats don’t rely more on Hollywood for expertise instead of just fund-raising. I’ve been asking that question for years. Politics today requires narrative and stagecraft — and Hollywood knows from narrative and stagecraft. It’s about heroism, spectacle and soap opera. It’s about myth. I realize that this offends our wonky souls on some level but it’s a fact that the Republicans understand and exploit to their great advantage and we don’t.
In the final days of the presidential campaign as John Kerry was being introduced by Bruce Springsteen on the stump with a moody, soulful solo rendition of “No Surrender” (which I loved) George W. Bush was landing in stadiums at sunset on the Marine one helicopter to fireworks and the theme to “Top Gun” screaming from the speakers. Which one do you suppose felt more like a rally?
The Bush administration has been working with a very defective product as we all know; a barely literate ignoramus with dismal communications skills. Yet they were able to bring him close enough to steal it in 2000 and eke out a narrow victory in 2004. They did it almost entirely with image, iconography and an archetypal warrior/leader narrative. And they used professionals to pull it off:
Officials of past Democratic and Republican administrations marvel at how the White House does not seem to miss an opportunity to showcase Mr. Bush in dramatic and perfectly lighted settings. It is all by design: the White House has stocked its communications operation with people from network television who have expertise in lighting, camera angles and the importance of backdrops.
[…]
”They understand the visual as well as anybody ever has,” said Michael K. Deaver, Ronald Reagan’s chief image maker. ”They watched what we did, they watched the mistakes of Bush I, they watched how Clinton kind of stumbled into it, and they’ve taken it to an art form.”
The White House efforts have been ambitious — and costly. For the prime-time television address that Mr. Bush delivered to the nation on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House rented three barges of giant Musco lights, the kind used to illuminate sports stadiums and rock concerts, sent them across New York Harbor, tethered them in the water around the base of the Statue of Liberty and then blasted them upward to illuminate all 305 feet of America’s symbol of freedom. It was the ultimate patriotic backdrop for Mr. Bush, who spoke from Ellis Island.
For a speech that Mr. Bush delivered last summer at Mount Rushmore, the White House positioned the best platform for television crews off to one side, not head on as other White Houses have done, so that the cameras caught Mr. Bush in profile, his face perfectly aligned with the four presidents carved in stone.
And on Monday, for remarks the president made promoting his tax cut plan near Albuquerque, the White House unfurled a backdrop that proclaimed its message of the day, ”Helping Small Business,” over and over. The type was too small to be read by most in the audience, but just the right size for television viewers at home.
”I don’t know who does it,” Mr. Deaver said, ”but somebody’s got a good eye over there.”
That somebody, White House officials and television executives say, is in fact three or four people. First among equals is Scott Sforza, a former ABC producer who was hired by the Bush campaign in Austin, Tex., and who now works for Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director. Mr. Sforza created the White House ”message of the day” backdrops and helped design the $250,000 set at the United States Central Command forward headquarters in Doha, Qatar, during the Iraq war.
Mr. Sforza works closely with Bob DeServi, a former NBC cameraman whom the Bush White House hired after seeing his work in the 2000 campaign. Mr. DeServi, whose title is associate director of communications for production, is considered a master at lighting. ”You want it, I’ll heat it up and make a picture,” he said early this week. Mr. DeServi helped produce one of Mr. Bush’s largest events, a speech to a crowd in Revolution Square in Bucharest last November.
To stage the event, Mr. DeServi went so far as to rent Musco lights in Britain, which were then shipped across the English Channel and driven across Europe to Romania, where they lighted Mr. Bush and the giant stage across from the country’s former Communist headquarters.
A third crucial player is Greg Jenkins, a former Fox News television producer in Washington who is now the director of presidential advance. Mr. Jenkins manages the small army of staff members and volunteers who move days ahead of Mr. Bush and his entourage to set up the staging of all White House events.
”We pay particular attention to not only what the president says but what the American people see,” Mr. Bartlett said. ”Americans are leading busy lives, and sometimes they don’t have the opportunity to read a story or listen to an entire broadcast. But if they can have an instant understanding of what the president is talking about by seeing 60 seconds of television, you accomplish your goals as communicators. So we take it seriously.”
The president’s image makers, Mr. Bartlett said, work within a budget for White House travel and events allotted by Congress, which for fiscal 2003 was $3.7 million. He said he did not know the specific cost of staging Mr. Bush’s Sept. 11 anniversary speech, or what the White House was charged for the lights. A spokeswoman at the headquarters of Musco Lighting in Oskaloosa, Iowa, said the company did not disclose the prices it charged clients.
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”They seem to approach an event site like it’s a TV set,” said Chris Carlson, an ABC cameraman who covers the White House. ”They dress it up really nicely. It looks like a million bucks.”
Even for standard-issue White House events, Mr. Bush’s image makers watch every angle. Last week, when the president had a joint news conference with Prime Minister José Mariá Aznar of Spain, it was staged in the Grand Foyer of the White House, under grand marble columns, with the Blue Room and a huge cream-colored bouquet of flowers illuminated in the background. (Mr. Sforza and Mr. DeServi could be seen there conferring before the cameras began rolling.) The scene was lush and rich, filled with the beauty of the White House in real time.
”They understand they have to build a set, whether it’s an aircraft carrier or the Rose Garden or the South Lawn,” Mr. Deaver said. ”They understand that putting depth into the picture makes the candidate or president look better.”
Or as Mr. Deaver said he learned long ago with Mr. Reagan: ”They understand that what’s around the head is just as important as the head.”
Stoller asks:
Why didn’t Michael Bay direct an awesome action adventure ad where John Kerry singlehandedly blows up the terrorist insurgency with a solemn nod of his granite-chiseled chin? Why weren’t the writers of SNL and the Daily Show brought in to create hilarious, ruthless anti-Bush spots that would have been forwarded all around the internet? Why wasn’t James Brooks hired to create a touching, pull-the-heartstrings Kerry-Edwards-cares-about-the-voter commercial? This schlock works — remember that 9/11 Bush ad where he’s holding the crying girl? With the Hollywood talent the Democratic party has at its disposal, we could have blown that spot out of the water, made it look like a mediocre episode of Touched by an Angel next to our sinking of the Titanic. I don’t care if you think “I am king of the world” is a cheesy line — it made people cry. Nothing Kerry said made people cry. Except perhaps accidentally, out of boredom or pain.
[…]
In the end, there is no intersection between Hollywood and the Democratic Party (or none that I have noticed besides that of fundraising). This is a missed opportunity of gargantuan proportions. There are hundreds of writers and actors and directors who are angry and who want to do something besides give money. We are expert message machines offering our (generally overpriced) services for free and the Democratic Party does not use us. We create villains and good guys, we write America’s jokes, we create the narrative of America, the lines that are repeated by boys and girls, men and women, over lunch and the water cooler and we have been left completely un-consulted.
If I were to guess, I would suspect that it’s because political consultants believe that the liberal Hollywood elites don’t understand average Americans.
Think about that for a minute. The purveyors of television, films and commercials don’t understand average Americans. After all, only the brie ‘n cheese eating set watch any of that stuff, right? Everyone else in America does nothing but homeschool and pray in their free time.
If I’m right and political consultants tell their employers that they shouldn’t consult with professional show business, they should be fired. In today’s world if you ignore the show business aspect of politics you lose. The Republicans have been on to this for decades and it (at least partially) explains why they’ve become more successful despite the fact that a minority of people support their policies.
I’ll give you one word: Schwarzenneger. The man won the governorship of the most populated state by simply repeating the tag lines from his movies. Nothing else. He had no platform, no policies and no ideas. And latte liberals and anti-immigrants alike voted for him in droves. (Now, remember, I’m talking about getting elected here, not about governance — a whole different issue.)
The fact is that as much as endorsing an ideology, people cast the role of “Leader” and choose “Best Story” when they vote and it behooves us to recognize this. Our culture is awash in showbiz values. I’m not crazy about this development but it’s real and we ignore it at our peril.
Stoller also says:
Fun with Dick and Jane” (which, again, you should all see) has a relatively overt liberal message. However, that message has received none, or very little, mention in the press. Creatively, I discovered something interesting. At the beginning of the process, I was incredibly excited to fill the film with political message (like in Hal Ashby’s Shampoo). However, every Gore-Lieberman poster (the movie takes places in 2000) and Bush reference takes one out of the movie, distracts from the laughs. Movies are supposed to be entertaining. Anything that distracts from entertainment feels preachy and extraneous.
And that’s just fine, too. Regardless of whether the Democrats wise up and use its resources more wisely, Liberal Hollywood still provides an essential service by keeping our values, if not our politics, mainstream. There have always been Hollywood films with an overt political message, from “The Grapes of Wrath” to “Syriana.” But it’s the comedies like “Fun with Dick and Jane” that show the plight of the downsized or even an ostensibly “conservative” show like “Law and Order” which educates people about the legal system in a compelling and complex way, that really carry the liberal mail. “Will and Grace” goes into homes all over the country, not just San Francisco and it’s probably been more influential in mainstreaming gay life than any activism. “The Simpsons” and now “The Family Guy” are two of the most liberal subversive television shows in American history — and they are both on Fox.
And here’s the great thing about it. Nobody is selling this stuff out of the goodness of their hearts or for propaganda purposes (as the right does with its communistic subsidized media.) Hollywood produces this stuff because there is a massive audience for it. They must make money or die. And through this virtuous feedback loop our values of tolerance and freedom, social and economic justice are kept alive in a period of reactionary politics.
Why do you think the Republicans hate us Hollywood liberals so much anyway?
Update: I should also add that the GOP sadists who endorse torture should thank liberal Hollywood for mainstreaming it in endless shows that have cops routinely beating the shit out of suspects to get information. Nobody’s perfect.
Just Another Republican Hustler
by digby
IT WAS astounding enough for Washington’s political elite: last month they discovered that the man at the heart of a scandal over the planting of US propaganda in Iraqi newspapers was a dapper but unknown 30-year-old Oxford graduate who had somehow managed to land a $100 million Pentagon contract.
What is even more remarkable however, after an investigation by The Times, is that just ten years ago Christian Bailey, whose US company is under investigation for planting fake news stories in Iraqi newspapers, was a nerdy, socially awkward English school-leaver called Jozefowicz.
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The journey from the Royal Grammar School, Guildford, which Mr Bailey left in 1994, to the heart of K Street in Washington, the centre of money and influence in the US capital, has been remarkably rapid. Today he has a reputation in Washington for being a socialite with links to influential Republicans. He is a helicopter and aircraft pilot and his home is in a fashionable area.
Through a Lincoln Group spokesman, Mr Bailey answered questions from The Times to help to explain how, at just 30, he landed the Pentagon as an important client. He was born Christian Martin Jozefowicz on November 28, 1975, in Kingston upon Thames, to Jerzy and Anne Jozefowicz.
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In his third year at Oxford he hired an assistant to help him to run his first proper company, Linck Ltd, which sold self-help tapes. In 1998, he changed his name to Bailey. “Following his father’s death, Bailey assumed the name for family reasons, something which children commonly do,” a Lincoln Group spokesman said. In the late 1990s he moved to San Francisco to try his hand as a dotcom entrepreneur, and then to New York, where he became treasurer of the Oxonion Society, a club for intellectual Anglophiles. He became co-chairman of a networking group for young Republicans. With his Republican contacts growing, Mr Bailey moved to Washington, where he spotted a golden business opportunity: the looming war in Iraq. He formed a partnership with Paige Craig, a former US Marine who served in Iraq.
In early 2003, just before the invasion, Mr Bailey formed a Lincoln subsidiary, the Lincoln Alliance Corp, offering “tailored intelligence services [for] government clients faced with intelligence challenges”. He also formed another subsidiary, Iraqex, which won a $6 million Pentagon contract to launch “an aggressive advertising and PR campaign that will accurately inform the Iraqi people of the c oalition’s goals and gain their support”.
The big breakthrough came in June this year when the Pentagon awarded the Lincoln Group a contract worth up to $100 million over five years to support the US military’s “joint psychological operations”, known as “psyops”.
I think this guy has a future in the ministry.
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Stovepiping The Legal Findings
by digby
This review of John Yoo’s book in the New York Review of Books illuminated something that I hadn’t fully understood before:
Few lawyers have had more influence on President Bush’s legal policies in the “war on terror” than John Yoo. This is a remarkable feat, because Yoo was not a cabinet official, not a White House lawyer, and not even a senior officer within the Justice Department. He was merely a mid-level attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel with little supervisory authority and no power to enforce laws. Yet by all accounts, Yoo had a hand in virtually every major legal decision involving the US response to the attacks of September 11, and at every point, so far as we know, his advice was virtually always the same— the president can do whatever the president wants.
I hadn’t realized that Yoo was not a senior officer in the justice department. I guess I just assumed that he was quite high level. This makes me wonder if we are looking at another case of stovepiping and cherry-picking.
We know now that the pre-war WMD findings were subject to extreme pressure to conform to the administration’s desire to substantiate their claims of an Iraqi threat. It looks like they may have done something similar with the legal findings supporting the president’s desire to seize unprecedented power. They relied exclusively on the one guy who could be counted on to tell the president he could do anything he wanted.
The internal battles between and within the CIA, pentagon, state department and the white house have come to light because of the glaring reality that there were no WMD found. A mistake like that forces information out into the public domain as people step up to defend themselves. Up to now, despite a lot of controversy, that has not happened with the Justice Department. Perhaps it never will. It’s always possible that the administration never asked anyone but John Yoo and Alberto Gonzales for advice, both of whom they knew would radically expand presidential power. But if there was any dissension within the Justice Department, it may be time for certain fed-up lawyers to step up and set the record straight if they value their reputations.
This NSA spying scandal is the tipping point, in my opinion. It’s not the worst of the legal atrocities (I would argue that the sickening finding on torture remains the gold standard) but the culmination of all these revelations show that this president understood 9/11 to be a threat so dire that his vow to preserve and protect the constitution had been superceded by a new vow to protect the American people by any means necessary.
I know that the fevered warbloggers agree that the 9/11 attacks were the opening salvo in a war in which civilization itself is under attack by an unimaginable, all powerful evil. Others, not so much. To many of us who spent our childhoods diving under our desks in nuclear drills, the idea that the oceans had always protected us and this was the most frightening threat the world has ever known is ridiculous.
Frightened people overreacted to 9/11 and sought out people who would justify their actions. (All you have to do is look at the My Pet Goat footage of a paralyzed leader in a time of crisis to know it’s true.) John Yoo, with his radical, untested theories was there to provide them. The question now is whether there are any lawyers in the Justice department at the time who presented opposing views. If there were, perhaps these hearings won’t be the bust we are all expecting them to be.
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