Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Noose Around The Hydra

Franklin Foer has written an absolutely must-read article this week in The New Republic (which, unfortunately, is subscription only.) He writes about the College Republicans, who are key to understanding the modern Republican party. I know that sounds absurd, but it is absolutely true. His thesis is that the operatives of the GOP learn to fight the Democrats by fighting with each other.

Before the election of new leadership this year, the College Republicans, fresh faced little gangsters that they are, had already been accused of corrupt fundraising by bilking little old ladies out of large sums of money. As with all College Republican elections, this one was distinguished by dirty tricks, betrayal and strong arm tactics:

Everyone who watched this summer’s race for College Republican National Committee (crnc) chair with any detachment has a favorite moment of chutzpah they admire in spite of themselves. Leading the count are the following: speaking sotto voce of your opponent’s “homosexuality”; rigging the delegate count so that states that support your candidate have twice as many votes as those that don’t; and using a sitting congressman to threaten the careers of undecided voters. I can understand the perverse appeal of each of these incidents. But I cast my vote for the forged letter.

He goes on to describe a beautiful little piece of ratfucking that will stand the victor in good stead when he’s called upon to destroy political opponents in the future. And there is much more. But the thing that is most interesting about this is that he points out what very few people seem to realize — that this is not just a bunch of kooky co-eds having fun. It is officially sanctioned and run by the Republican establishment. After all, it was the training ground for the entire political apparatus of the modern GOP — including a bunch of names we’ve seen a lot of recently in association with words like “arrest,” “indictment” and “federal investigation.” And there’s money involved, of course.

Behind the scenes, in the campaign war rooms, small armies of veteran Republican operatives and congressional staffers toil. That’s because there’s much more at stake in the elections than a swish post-college gig. After campaign finance reform, the College Republicans reinvented themselves as a big-time 527–a group legally allowed to spend an infinite amount of its own money on campaigns–with a budget of over $17 million. They have a massive network of operatives to send into the field to bolster candidates, and they have patronage to spread among friends and through direct-mail firms. In other words, it’s well worth tearing a Shermanesque path to the sea to control College Republicans, no matter the carnage–and no matter the expense. Michael Davidson said he spent an estimated $200,000–raised off high-rollers who normally sign checks to senators and presidential wannabes–trying to claim the grand prize.

But the significance of the crnc goes beyond that. The Committee is the place where Republican strategists learn their craft and acquire their knack for making their Democratic opponents look like disorganized children. Many of the biggest-brand Republican operatives–from Karl Rove and Lee Atwater, to Charlie Black and Roger Stone, to Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist–got their starts this way. Walking through the halls of the convention, it is easy to see the genesis of tactics deployed in the Florida recount and by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Republicans learn how to fight hard against Democrats by practicing on one another first. “There are no rules in a knife fight,” Norquist instructed the young conventioneers in a speech. And, while Norquist described a knife fight, the Gourley-Davidson rumble transpired around him.

[…]

… Gourley received the blessing of the outgoing chairman, Eric Hoplin. But, in reality, he had won the blessing of a force more powerful than a single politician. He had won the blessing of an entity that College Republicans speak of in hushed tones and that they compare to the Empire in Star Wars–the Establishment.

When College Republicans invoke the Establishment, they mean a clique of former College Republicans–now grown-ups playing politics at the highest level–who will trample anyone to maintain their clique’s control of the organization. Like all good cabals, it is hard to know exactly who belongs to the Establishment and how Machiavellian their meddling is. Before his tumble from grace, the lobbyist Jack Abramoff would lend College Republicans his skybox at the MCI center, donate money, and lead training sessions. (In 2002, the crnc paid Jack Abramoff for “accounting & legal services.”) Rove reportedly keeps tabs, and Norquist invites the group’s chair to attend his celebrated Wednesday gathering of conservative big shots. But the convention offered some more suggestive examples of the Establishment’s methodology. Just past 2 a.m. on Saturday, wavering delegates from Louisiana received calls from Morton Blackwell, the legendary veteran of the Goldwater and Reagan campaigns, urging them to vote for Gourley. It was a perfectly calibrated tactic. “A 19-year-old Republican will generally do whatever a demigod of the conservative movement like Morton tells them,” one Davidson supporter griped.

And they are even more likely to respond to entreaties from a congressman. Patrick McHenry, a dough-faced 29-year-old freshman representative from North Carolina and former crnc treasurer, went to war on Gourley’s behalf. “I got a call. They said, ‘The congressman is on the line,'” University of North Carolina junior Jordan Selleck told me. “He basically said that we’d be screwed if we didn’t switch to Gourley. Our careers in politics would be over.” As Jennifer Holder, who served as a state chair in the ’90s, lamented, “There are a lot of sharks infesting the kiddie pool.”

Does everyone remember how Bush was extolled as the guy who would bring honor and integrity back to the White House? How the grown-ups were in charge? These are his people:

Back in 1981, Abramoff and his campaign manager, Norquist, promised their leading competitor, Amy Moritz, the job of crnc executive director if she dropped out of the race. Moritz took the bait, but it turned out that Abramoff had made the promise with his fingers crossed. Norquist took the executive director job and named Moritz his deputy. That demotion didn’t last long, either. After discovering the talented Ralph Reed, Norquist handed the Christian Coalition godfather Moritz’s responsibilities and her office space. They placed all of Moritz’s belongings in a box labeled amy’s desk. Even 25 years later, she hasn’t shed her role as College Republican doormat. Abramoff used her think tank, the National Center for Public Policy Research, to funnel nearly $1 million into a phony direct-mail firm with an address identical to his own.

While College Republicans have a vague understanding of Abramoff’s ascent, they all can recite the ballad of Rove and Atwater–the ultimate object lesson in how the Establishment strikes back. In 1973, Rove was the Establishment candidate, and Atwater, the original Sun Tsu-quoting College Republican, was his prime campaign operative. They spent the spring of 1973 crisscrossing the country in a Ford Pinto, lining up the support of state chairs–basically the right-wing version of Thelma and Louise. But, in point of fact, Rove was hardly the right-winger in the race. His two opponents, Terry Dolan and Robert Edgeworth, were. And, when Dolan threw his support to Edgeworth, Rove had no other alternative. He had to cheat.

When the College Republicans gathered for their convention at the Lake of the Ozarks resort in Missouri, Rove and Atwater relentlessly challenged the legitimacy of Edgeworth’s delegates, even if the evidence did not justify their attacks. Because of Rove’s allegations, the convention ended in deadlock. In revenge, Dolan went to The Washington Post with recordings that captured training seminars where Rove boasted of his campaign techniques, including rooting through opponents’ garbage cans and other forms of campaign espionage. The Post broke the story under the headline “gop probes official as teacher of tricks.” The Republican National Committee chairman, one George H.W. Bush, however, didn’t punish Rove for his less-than-high-minded behavior. Instead, he gave Rove the chairmanship and sent Edgeworth a scathing letter accusing him of disloyalty. “He wrote me out of the party,” Edgeworth told James Moore and Wayne Slater, the authors of the biography Bush’s Brain.

(Where do you suppose anyone would get the idea that Karl Rove might be the type of person to purposefully out a CIA agent for political purposes?)

These tactics have worked well since the Nixon administration and those who use them are responsible for building the most powerful and successful political machine in the modern era. Way back when, in the glory days when Abramoff, Norquist and Reed ran the college Republicans, Norquist is quoted as saying:

[Stalin] was running the personnel department while Trotsky was fighting the White Army. When push came to shove for control of the Soviet Union, Stalin won. Trotsky got an ice ax through his skull, while Stalin became head of the Soviet Union. He understood that personnel is policy.

Brownie was no accident; the placing of hacks in positions of responsibility is not just ad hoc political payback. The cronyism is by design.

Needless to say, none of these people had a clue — or any interest — in actual governance. They are political hit men. But they control the party apparatus and when they finally achieved what they had been dreaming of for many years, they got greedy.

I wrote the other day about the idea that the only thing that can stop these people is the legal system. This is because the press and politics are too easily manipulated by entertainment values, spin and confusion right now. It’s a lot harder to bullshit someone who has the power to subpoena your records and arrest you for lying. Federal prosecutors squeeze anyone and everyone they can to get someone to flip on big fishes. And there are a lot of little fishes now. And medium sized fishes too.

Every one of these former college Republicans (the Establishment) are now in the cross hairs of the legal system. Norquist hasn’t been officially named, but his affiliations with all the people who are coming under legal scrutiny are so close that it’s just a matter of time. Safavian, especially, is an interesting connection because he also feeds into a nervousness among the fervent neocons about Grover’s unseemly closeness to Muslims:

Norquist has for some years now been promoting Islamist organizations, including even the Council on American-Islamic Relations; for example, he spoke at CAIR’s conference, “A Better America in a Better World” on October 5, 2004. Frank Gaffney has researched Norquist’s ties to Islamists in his exhaustive, careful, and convincing study, “Agent of Influence” and concludes that Norquist is enabling “a political influence operation to advance the causes of radical Islamists, and targeted most particularly at the Bush Administration.”

But if Norquist is indeed a convert to Islam, it could be that he is not just enabling the Islamist causes but is himself an Islamist. (April 14, 2005)

That’s Daniel Pipes, neocon prince. Norquist marrying a Palestinian American woman sent him into an absolute tizzy. But Norquist has been involved with the Muslim community for some time — for purely political reasons, in my opinion. Norquist’s cause and religion is Republicanism. He was just doing what he does — building the coalition. They’ve been courting Christians for decades and he thought he could court Muslims too — except he apparently couldn’t finesse the neocon fixation with Israel or the violent fixation of Osama bin Laden. The man is not a miracle worker after all.

Safavian is an Iranian American from Detroit, the home of the biggest Islamic population in the US. He’s a political hack in the Norquist/Abramoff posse. Still, it is more than amusing that Norquist’s ties to the Islamic community have been so well tolerated by all the right wing gasbags who have been one handedly typing the word “islamofascist!” for the past four years — amusing but not surprising. After all, nobody but a few cranks at Horowitz’s operation cared that Norquist and his pal Dana Rohrabacker were hanging out with the Taliban right up until 9/11.

But Norquist and Safavian (and Abramoff, the allegedly pious Jew) were involved with some unsavory characters that this scandal is going to bring to the surface. Grover may be in the kind of trouble his big brother Rove is in — national security style trouble. At the very least, his effectiveness is going to be curtailed as these investigations circle around him. Money people get nervous at times like this.

I have long agreed with the old saying that if you want to kill the snake you’ve gotta go for the head. In the case of the modern Republican Party, it’s a four headed hydra consisting of Karl Rove (strategy), Tom DeLay (party enforcer), Ralph Reed (christian right) and Grover Norquist (movement organizer.) They all interact with one another at the nexus of K Street and the RNC. They may be taken down by one guy — their good friend, ex uber-lobbyist, Jack Abramoff. (Uncle Karl, of course, is likely in even deeper shit.)

The Democrats have never exploited (or never been able to exploit) the sheer criminality of this gang. They all learned the ratfucking business while still little sprouts in the College Republican organization. According toe Rick Perlstein’s fine book about the Goldwater campaign “Before The Storm,” as early as 1964, college student Morton Blackwell — who later named the “Moral Majority” and ran Jeff Gannon Guckert’s alma mater, the (GOP) Leadership Institute — was sabotaging the competition at the GOP convention. They’ve been at this a long, long time.

Back in May, I wrote:

These are [Nixon’s] political heirs, raised and nurtured on the mother’s milk of corruption and dishonesty; scarred while very young by the ignominious downfall of their political father; driven to wreak revenge and recapture what they perceived as their rightful ownership of American politics. They are the spawn of Watergate resentment and this country will never be healthy until this group of radicals are removed from positions of power.

Watch this Abramoff scandal. It may go nowhere, but the potential for a lethal, if not mortal, wound to the conservative movement resides inside it.

The baby bad guys were on display at the College republican election — and the baddest baby bad guy won. But the article shows that the win was really accomplished with the collusion of the anointed bad boy with the professional operatives. If they go down this chain may be broken.

As I said, I don’t think that normal political processes will be able to deal with this gang of crooks. But it looks like greed and hubris may have pushed them into the sights of the justice system. There are no guarantees, of course, but it’s just possible that with this particular mob of political criminals under the gun — and some of them out of the picture — the Nixon era may finally come to a close.

.

Done Good

Congratulations to local boy Ezra Klein, for just graduating from UCLA (in three years,) while blogging like a maniac and maintaining a normal 21 year old’s social life. Political writer types were different in my day — unwashed, unpleasant to look at and unsocialized. These kids today, I tell you …

He’s already moved to DC and is blogging over at TAPPED. I’m going to take a nap.

.

Batten Down The Hatches

Bush is flying into San Antonio in the middle of the crisis and then going to Colorado to track the storm at NORAD (now Northcom.) He says he’s going to monitor the interaction between the military and the state and local authorities. He assured everyone that he’d make sure he and “his entourage” won’t get in the way. Sure.

He doesn’t need to be interfering with grown-ups who are trying to do their jobs under pressure. He has no more experience dealing with a large scale disaster than Brownie did. It’s bad enough that he interfered with the relief efforts in New Orleans and Mississippi after Katrina. To insist on photo-ops during the crisis itself is just unconscionable.

When people complain that Bush is disengaged it’s not because he isn’t staging enough political pageants. They don’t want him throwing on a flightsuit and putting on a show. They want him to go to his fucking office once in a while and do his fucking job. At the White House. Where the president is supposed to be during a crisis.

.

Pretzel Addiction?

Jeebus. It looks like Bush has another scrape on his face today. Left temple.

This is ridiculous. How often does this have to happen before people finally ask some serious questions? Falling on your face all the time is simply not normal.

And if he’s out falling off his bike again while the country is going to hell in a handbasket then people need to know that too.

Update: Maybe not. It could be something else. My bad.

On the other hand, he’s flexing his jaw like crazy in a strange repetitive way. Too much coffee this morning, perhaps.

.

.

Flaking Teflon

I have been annoyed over these past five years at how the tabloids have been so solicitous of Junior when they treated Bill Clinton and his family like they were coke addicted soap stars.

Seems the teflon is finally off the codpiece. The National Enquirer is featuring a story about Bush drinking again. I have no idea if it’s true — sometimes tabloid stories are, sometimes they aren’t. But they wouldn’t be printing it if they didn’t think it would sell…

.

The “F” Word

Andrew Sullivan has two posts today that it seems to me are interrelated, although I don’t think he meant them to be.

First he highlights a web-site that encourages soldiers fighting in Iraq to post sickening pictures of dead and wounded Iraqis in exchange for free (sexual) pornography. He writes:

If you send in pics of dead insurgents or Iraqis, you get free access to the porn part of the site. The pics that are appended have names such as “What every Iraqi should look like,” “DIE, HAJI, DIE,” and “Cooked Iraqi.” I would think this violates the Geneva Conventions, not that the U.S. under this president cares about those very much any more. But it’s also beyond depraved. Eric Muller sounded the alarm. Like the pictures from Abu Ghraib, these images are also a propaganda coup for Zarqawi and his monsters – a consequence of war in the Internet age. Have we really sunk to this?

I think Abu Ghraib pretty well settled that question. This psycho-sexual sickness has been officially sanctioned, at least when it comes to “interrogations,” and such behavior has been giddily celebrated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, who is beamed to the military all over the world on Armed Forces Radio. This is not an aberration; it is an ongoing feature of the war on terrorism.

Sullivan also links to an interesting critique that draws some very compelling comparisons between the Bush administration’s governance and fascism. Sullivan doesn’t use the “F” word himself, of course, but the article does:

Describing the President’s panicked political response to his falling poll numbers as “compassionate conservatism”, (as New York Times columnist David Brooks did last Sunday, “A Bushian Laboratory”, September 18, 2005), borders on the ludicrous. Mr Bush has now overseen the fastest increase in domestic spending of any president in recent history. Furthermore, he has never resolved the inherent contradiction between his so-called “compassionate” spending policy and his small-government tax policy (which was ostensibly designed to “kill the beast” of Big Government once and for all, according to the President’s conservative apologists). And his casual dismissal of the remnants of civilian authority in the Gulf basin – “It is now clear that a challenge on this scale requires greater federal authority and a broader role for the armed forces — the institution of our government most capable of massive logistical operations on a moment’s notice” – evokes something more along the lines of Mussolini-style fascism than any coherent, mainstream conservative, philosophy.

[…]

The reconstruction of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama provides a fascinating picture of how the Bush administration actually works. His government represents an odd melding of corporatism and cronyism, more in tune with the workings of 1930s Italy or Spain. In fact, if one looks at fascist regimes of the 20th century, it is appears that the Bush administration draws more from these sources than traditional conservatism. Dr. Lawrence Britt has examined the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia) and several Latin American regimes. Britt found 14 defining characteristics common to each:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism – Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights – Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause – The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military – Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism – The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Divorce, abortion and homosexuality are suppressed and the state is represented as the ultimate guardian of the family institution.

6. Controlled Mass Media – Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security – Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are intertwined – Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government’s policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is protected – The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is suppressed – Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts – Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts and letters is openly attacked.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment – Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption – Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections – Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

(Source: The Fourteen Defining Characteristics of Fascism, Dr. Lawrence Britt, Spring 2003, Free Inquiry)

Perhaps it is unfair to characterise the Bush Presidency in these terms, because it would imply the existence of a coherent governing philosophy.

Haha.

You cannot help but be struck by the similarities between our current political culture and that description of fascism. It should not be blithely dismissed. If it walks like a duck …

I realize that soldiers have been taking battlefield pictures since the dawn of photography. But I really don’t think we’ve seen the sick combination of sadistic battlefield gore, sexual humiliation and pornography since some very, very bad things happened in Europe in the middle of the last century. That was not mentioned in the list of fascist characteristics, but it was certainly present in the worst fascist governments. (Read about the sexual torture that was done in the Dirty War, for instance.) This melding of sex and violence is not unique, of course, in human psychology. But it is a rare society that officially sanctions its use by the military and an even rarer one that openly celebrates it.

I think the reaction to the stupid torture is an example of the feminization of this country.

[…]

The thing though that continually amazes — here we have these pictures of homoeroticism that look like standard good old American pornography

[…]

And these American prisoners of war — have you people noticed who the torturers are? Women! The babes! The babes are meting out the torture.

[…]

This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?

Update: Great minds and all that. I just noticed that Kevin Drum wrote about this too — and we even used the same headline.
.

Naive Allegations

I’ve been talking a lot about race since Katrina, and I talked about it during the election too. It’s not because I’m generally obsessed with the topic, but because I think it’s the most politically significant issue we never talk about seriously. What else is a personal soap box good for, if not that?

Matt Yglesias notices some intersting numbers today that speak to my point:

Apropos of nothing in particular, take a look at the exit poll data from Mississippi, where George W. Bush picked up the votes of 85 percent of the white population and just 10 percent of the African-American vote. In a state whose electorate is 65-percent white, that led to a hefty 60-40 win for the incumbent. Mississippi’s an unusually stark case, but not all that much of an outlier. Georgia saw 75 percent of whites and 12 percent of blacks pull the lever for Bush. It was 75-9 in Louisiana, 78-15 in South Carolina, and a comparatively minor 63-6 in Arkansas (generally speaking, whites are most monolithically Republican in the least-white states like Mississippi and more open to Democrats in whiter states like Arkansas).

All of which is just to say that an awful lot of the post-election talk about “culture” and its impact on voting serves to obscure the extent to which a lot of politics is about race. In Mississippi, Bush got a larger percentage of the vote from people who “somewhat dissaprove” of his administration than he did from black voters. He did better among self-identified Democrats than he did among blacks, and far better (23 percent against 10 percent) among self-identified liberals than with non-whites. I’m not sure exactly what follows from that, and I appreciate that commentators don’t like to raise the point in order to avoid just engaging in naive allegations of racism, but it’s really, really not possible to understand the politics of the South without delving into this stuff.

It’s also not possible to understand why the US is the only first world nation that has rejected national health care and a robust safety net without delving into it. And it’s not possible to explain these maps, in which we see the power of the southern based party having reasserted itself, without delving into it.

It’s fundamental to understanding our country, our politics and our culture. Unlike any other western country, we had to fight a bloody civil war to end slavery in the middle of the 19th century and we lived with segregation for another century after that. This is built into the fabric of our nation. It’s naive to ignore it.

.

A More Innocent Time

Speaking of corruption, here’s a little blast from the past:

1992 The House Banking Scandal

On this day in 1992, the House Ethics Committee released a list of the twenty-two most flagrant abusers of the defunct House bank. The bank, which had been closed in the fall of 1991, was not a financial institution, but rather served as a common place for legislators to tuck their paychecks. The representatives in question were accused of overdrawing on this collective account. But, though the legislators’ habit of overdrafting neither violated the bank’s rules nor led to the loss of federal money, it reeked of fiscal irresponsibility and stirred yelps of protest from the American public. The House Ethics Committee held that legislators who had overdrafted on their payroll deposits for a minimum of eight months out of a sample thirty-nine-month stretch were indeed in the wrong. The committee’s findings, as well as the decision to name names, sent Capitol Hill into a tizzy. A number of the legislators fingered on the list lashed out at what one accused representative deemed a “libelous indictment.” But, such protests did little to quell the controversy: during the ensuing months, the committee revealed that some 350 former and current House members had written bad checks. With the public outcry hardly abating, fifty-three representatives tendered their resignations by May 4 of that same year.

Man oh man. 53 representative resigned over that ridiculous trumped up scandal. And here we have the Republicans selling the government to the highest bidders.

I’m not hearing the public outcry. But it is a hopeful sign that Jack Cafferty just asked if Tom DeLay has been indicted yet.(Wolf, of course, giggled nervously and quickly shushed him.)

.

Running On Brownie

Elections are fought on many levels and events can always derail the best laid plans. However, it appears to me that the outlines of an effective national strategy are taking shape for next year and it’s long overdue.

Since the early days of the Bush administration — when it was revealed that Junior’s top campaign contributor was a crook who led his company into bankruptcy with an elaborate pyramid scheme — cronyism, political corruption and incompetence have been the lurking back-story of modern Republican governance. The media have been uninterested in pursuing this story for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was its childlike proclivity to fall for misdirection. (Flip Flop! Shiny!) The GOP’s thuggish political tactics were well known and apparently respected. Everybody loves a winner, I guess. But corruption, spin and flat out patronage of this vast a scale is unprecedented in the modern era. This combination has created a political machine of almost unlimited power, but it may collapse of its own weight as it finally hits the wall of the legal system.

The GOP has been successful the same way that Enron was successful. Kenny Boy created a series of companies and interlocking entities that were so complicated that nobody could understand how they worked. (In layman’s terms, it’s called dazzling them with bullshit.) Likewise, the Bush administration has created these alternate discourses, challenging the very nature of reality, using public relations and partisan media to confuse both the public and the press and make us all question whether we are seeing what we think we are seeing.

But as with Enron, as long as the party’s raging nobody sees the need to look too deeply, certainly not the corporate media who are benefitting from Republican governance. Like them, Wall Street was not kind, if you’ll recall, to the few analysts who dared to question whether what Enron was claiming in its financials made any sense. The day finally came, however, when the house of cards that Lay built blew apart. Reality hadn’t been repealed, after all, and two plus two equalled four again. Wall Street turned on its winner and turned it into a loser overnight.

Tom Delay, Gorver Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Bob Ney, Tom Davis, Ralph Reed, Karl Rove and a bunch of other high level Republicans have likewise built a byzantine corrupt political machine. And just as the laws of the financial markets cannot be suspended forever, rampant illegal political behavior will eventually bump up against the rule of law.

The legal system may be the last remaining institution that is not subject to the post modern manipulation of reality that has been the hallmark of Republican crooks like Ken Lay and Karl Rove for the past decade. Facts and conclusions are tested in a rather stringent system that requires, at least, that both sides get an equal hearing and where people are held accountable for what they say. Even if the legal system becomes rife with corrupt judges and prosecutors, and its rulings keep political criminals out of jail, its procedures alone guarantee that a certain threshold of factual reality at least be tested.

David Safavian apparently thought that he could get away with “spinning” the Republican Senate and the FBI under oath. He was only half right. There is a lot of speculation that Karl Rove did the same thing, probably believing that his position as the most powerful man in the US government protected him. Tom Delay and Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed and others may still believe they will get away with what they’ve done. And they may. We know they certainly would if it were left up to the press to pursue them on their own.

But you never know what a prosecutor will do and you never know what might offend a judge, no matter how politically powerful the subject is. Some of them might even feel they are an equal branch of government with their own perogatives. Juries are completely unreliable when it comes to understanding how powerful men should not be held liable for the same kind of crimes committed by the masses. Once inside the legal system, spin and PR lose a huge amount of their power. There is someone there whose job it is to unspin the spin and there are rules in place that force people to sit still and listen.

At some point the operators become lazy and hubristic and forget to cover their tracks and these corrupt pyramid operations lose their power when they come up against institutions based on reason and the laws of nature. Neither the financial markets or the legal system can sustain faith-based, marketing-style fantasies over the long haul. Reality is a tough competitor.

Howard Dean’s “culture of corruption” was prescient. Brownie and Karl Rove are the poster boys for a national congressional campaign in 2006.

.

Oppose John Roberts

Culture Kitchen has posted a letter from bloggers to the Judiciary Committee opposing the confirmation of John Roberts on the basis of certain rulings that make it clear he is hostile to Roe vs. Wade. I think it’s perfectly obvious that he’s going to vote to overturn and have, therefore, signed this letter.

I believe that a woman’s right to choose gets to the very heart of what it means to be an autonomous, free human being. Control of one’s own body is fundamental to individual liberty. If the church believes that abortion is morally wrong it should instruct its voluntary membership not to do it. Individuals must always be allowed to follow their own consciences. But there should be no legal coercion on such a personal matter.

The only issue the government could be called upon to arbitrate is if the fetus has an equal right to life as the woman in whose body it lives. But there is really no argument about that. There is almost nobody who believes that an abortion is wrong if the life of the woman is at stake. Indeed, the vast majority (80%+) of Americans believe that abortion should be available at least in cases of rape or incest, so it is clear that the “abortion is murder” argument is illegitimate. No one can believe that it is moral to murder a person because of the way he or she was conceived, or by whom.

Therefore, the right of the fetus is not the real issue — the reasons a woman wants an abortion are the issue. This leads us to ask which particular circumstances are so difficult for a woman that she may be allowed to have an abortion. 80% or so of Americans think that rape or incest are such circumstances. But how about a failing, abusive marriage? A terminal illness? Five other children and no job? Being 43 years old and carrying a child with serious birth defects? Being a foolish 15 year old girl in love? Should we make exceptions for some of those? Any of them? Who decides? You? Me? John Roberts?

This isn’t about murder and it isn’t about the right of the fetus. It’s clearly about controlling women’s personal moral behavior. I don’t think the government has any business doing that.

Unlike some others, I think it’s quite likely that the court will overturn with these two new Bush justices as soon as they get the right case. This is simply too vital to the conservative cause. The notion that they want to milk it is quite right, of course, but I think they will happily run on abortion in individual states for as long as they can. Milking the issue seems to me to be much more likely if it’s turned back to the states than if it’s not.

John Roberts is a professional movement conservative at the very top of the food chain. His wife is the president of “Feminists For Life.” He will vote to overturn and make women fight in more than half the states of this country for a basic right they’ve taken for granted for over a generation. It is depressingly likely he will be confirmed, but I’m glad to go on record opposing him.

.