Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Moral Foundations

by digby

I see that Senator Lieberman is concerned about partisanship poisoning the atmosphere in Washington and he has some stern words for Democrats who insist on criticizing the president.

“It’s time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he’ll be commander-in-chief for three more years. We undermine the president’s credibility at our nation’s peril.”

For instance he really hates it when Democrats say things like this:

After much reflection, my feelings of disappointment and anger have not dissipated, except now these feelings have gone beyond my personal dismay to a larger, graver sense of loss for our country, a reckoning of the damage that the president’s conduct has done to the proud legacy of his presidency and, ultimately, an accounting of the impact of his actions on our democracy and its moral foundations.

The implications for our country are so serious that I feel a responsibility to my constituents in Connecticut, as well as to my conscience, to voice my concerns forthrightly and publicly. And I can think of no more appropriate place to do that than on this great Senate floor.

[…]

The president’s intentional and consistent statements, more deeply,may also undercut the trust that the American people have in his word. Under the Constitution, as presidential scholar Newsted (ph) has noted, the president’s ultimate source of authority, particularly his moral authority, is the power to persuade, to mobilize public opinion, to build consensus behind a common agenda. And at this, the president has been extraordinarily effective.

But that power hinges on the president’s support among the American people and their faith and confidence in his motivations and agenda, yes; but also in his word.

As Teddy Roosevelt once explained, “My power vanishes into thin air the instant that my fellow citizens, who are straight and honest, cease to believe that I represent them and fight for what is straight and honest. That is all the strength that I have,” Roosevelt said.

Sadly, with his deception, the president may have weakened the great power and strength that he possesses, of which President Roosevelt spoke.

I know this is a concern that may of my colleagues share, which is to say that the president has hurt his credibility and therefore perhaps his chances of moving his policy agenda forward.

[…]

That’s what I believe presidential scholar James David Barber (ph) in his book “The Presidential Character” was getting at when he wrote that the public demands quote, “a sense of legitimacy from and in the presidency. There is more to this than dignity — more than propriety. The president is expected to personify our betterness in an inspiring way; to express in what he does and is, not just what he says, a moral idealism which in much of the public mind is the very opposite of politics.”

Just as the American people are demanding of their leaders, though, they are also fundamentally fair and forgiving, which is why I was so hopeful the president could begin to repair the damage done with his address to the nation on the 17th. But like so many others, I came away feeling that for reasons that are thoroughly human, he missed a great opportunity that night. He failed to clearly articulate to the American people that he recognized how significant and consequential his wrongdoing was and how badly he felt about it.

Lieberman thinks that speeches like that are wrong — that Democrats should not go before the senate and speak about how the president has failed the nation, been dishonest, misled the people and undermined the nation’s moral authority. Unless, of course, there’s a blow job involved in which case Lieberman himself would feel compelled to lead the stampede to condemn and chastise him publicly.

But then, that was an issue of prime importance, unlike lying the country into a useless war of faux masculine vanity in which we are becoming a pariah nation known for torture, kidnapping, and disappearance. As long as Bush keeps his codpiece zipped and doesn’t let anybody see him playing Grand Theft Auto, he’s got Joementum on his side.

Putz.

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Vote For The Good Guys

by digby

I’m not sure what to make of this, but this blog seems to be nominated for a Weblog Award for “the best of the top 250 blogs” (I’m losing badly to that upstart whippersnapper, Jane Hamsher.) I had thought these were conservative awards, but apparently not. Anyway, there are a bunch of really good liberal bloggers nominated in various categories and you can vote once a day (!!?)

Check it out.

Update:

If you really love me, you’ll want to stuff your little stocking with some postage stamps or ornaments and shirts with a Digby snowman on them. I’m not kidding. Apparently you can now design your own stamps and Bo Zartz has done up a “holiday blog homage” featuring various liberal bloggers. (And naturally Jane Hamsher gets to be the angel.)They’re all fun, but I particularly like the one that says “Merry Fitzmas” which is guaranteed to piss off Bill O’Reilly six ways to Kwaanza.

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Aggrieved Conservatives

by digby

I have hesitated to link to Rick Perlstein’s Princeton speech, published here on Huffington Post, because he makes a very kind statement about me in it, and I sound like I’m tooting my own horn by posting about it. But, I decided to post about it anyway, because what he says is so important for people to understand: Republican intellectuals like to promote themselves as the party of Goldwater the principled conservative and Reagan the optimistic conservative, but they are actually the party of Richard Nixon, the aggrieved conservative. Their penchant for secrecy, their disdain for democratic processes, their lawless political tactics and their belief that might makes right are best understood by looking at them in that light.

The modern Republican party set about ruthlessly building a political machine while wearing the mantle of principle and morality after Nixon’s fall. A machine is all they really are, but they persist in this fiction that they have a deep intellectual philosophy — “the party of ideas” and all that. I assume that many of them believe this. But any person of ideas is only welcome as long as he or she is useful, after which he is thrown on the ever increasing pile of liberal traitors.

Here’s one example of a conservative intellectual (one of the fathers of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol) making the Straussian argument that religion is necessary to keep the masses in line, but unnecessary for the highly educated mandarins who actually run things:

Because of Strauss’ teachings, Kristol continued, “There are in Washington today dozens of people who are married with children and religiously observant. Do they have faith? Who knows? They just believe that it is good to go to church or synagogue. Whether you believe or not is not the issue — that’s between you and God — whether you are a member of a community that holds certain truths sacred, that is the issue.” Neoconservatives are “pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers.”

This noble hypocrisy on the part of intellectuals is required in order to encourage religious belief in ordinary people who would otherwise succumb to nihilism without it. In other words, Kristol believes that religion, which may well be a fiction, is necessary to keep the little people in line. This line of thinking has led him and other neoconservative intellectuals to attack Darwinian evolution because they fear it undermines religious belief.

(The author of this companion article writes, “ironically, today many modern conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is “the opium of the people”; they add a heartfelt, ‘Thank God!'”)

I’m sure that the DC Neocon elites feel very secure that they are the ones running things. But as with so many other intellectual conceits of the conservative movement, it is awfully convenient that their “ideas” track with the needs of a Repubublican political machine. Here’s how the man who identified the evangelical community as an untapped voting block, Paul Weyrich, saw it:

“We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of the country,” he declared. Weyrich describes his views as “Maoist. I believe you have to control the countryside, and the capital will eventually fall.” (David Brock, “Blinded by The Right” p.54)

I would submit that the Neos like Kristol and Podhoretz are just beltway pundit fodder for the Nixonian political machine. They think they are the mandarins but they are dupes too, of another sort, lending a phony intellectual heft to a movement that isn’t intellectual at all. Nixon would have hated them. Weyrich is his man. (Until he isn’t.)

I urge you to read Perlstein’s speech and description of what it was like to go into the belly of the beast and talk about this among the faithful. He’s got more guts than I do. Clearly he understands them better than they understand themselves:

The response to my address was, understandably, defensive. My co-panelist Stan Evans retorted that my invocation of Richard Nixon was inappropriate because Nixon had never been a genuine conservative. He added: “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate.” I responded: “Thanks for making my point.”

Everyone understands, I assume, that Bush, Delay, Norquist and Reed too, are morphing into liberals as we speak.

Update: I couldn’t, for thel ife of me remember where I had recently seen this Kristol article, so I Googled it. thanks to a reader, I was reminded that it was in this great post by James Wolcot.

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Nation Building

by digby

I was only half listening a minute ago as NBC’s Jim Meceda in Bagdad was describing how a woman was stripped and tortured and then taken to Abu Ghraib and terribly abused. I turned quickly to see who this latest person was who had come forward to accuse the US of inhumane treatment — only to find that it was a witness testifying at Saddam’s trial. Wow.

Until the past two years I never would have made that assumption, never, even though I’m quite aware of all the nasty things we’ve done around the world over the years, including My Lai. But when you read things like this, it’s natural to assume that any news of torture, Abu Ghraib etc. are reports of US behavior. These days, sadly, it usually is:

ABC News, citing unidentified current and former CIA agents, reported Monday night that 11 “high value” Al Qaeda terrorists had been held at a former Soviet air base in Eastern Europe and were spirited to a site in North Africa just before Ms. Rice’s arrival in Europe.

Of the 12 high value targets housed by the CIA, only one did not require water boarding [what the CIA describes as “an enhanced interrogation technique”] before he talked. Ramzi bin al-Shibh broke down in tears after he was walked past the cell of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the operational planner for Sept. 11. Visibly shaken, he started to cry and became as cooperative as if he had been tied down to a water board, sources said.

The problem for the US has been that, along with the disclosure of the existence of the “secret prisons,” there have been several high-profile cases that have highlighted US mistakes, such as US agents grabbing the wrong person, wrongly imprisoned subjects of rendition alleging they had been tortured in the countries where they had been taken, and allegations that the CIA lied to a European ally about a rendition.

The Washington Post reported Sunday on the case of Khaled Masri, a German citizen who had been the subject of a rendition and then wrongfully imprisoned for five months. When the US ambassador to Germany finally told the German interior minister about the mistake, the Post reports that he asked the German government not to disclose that it had been told about the US mistake, even if Mr. Masri went public with what happened to him. Apparently US officials feared exposure of the rendition program, and also possible legal action.

The Post reports that the Masri case shows how pressure on the CIA to apprehend Al Qaeda members after 9/11 led to an unknown number of detentions based on slim or faulty evidence, and just how hard it is to correct these mistakes in a system “built and operated in secret.”

One [US] official said about three dozen names fall in that category [those mistakenly detained]; others believe it is fewer. The list includes several people whose identities were offered by Al Qaeda figures during CIA interrogations, officials said. One turned out to be an innocent college professor who had given the Al Qaeda member a bad grade, one official said.

“They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association” with terrorism, one CIA officer said.

And there have been many other innocent people who have been rendered to countries and tortured, sent to Guantanamo or were wrongly imprisoned in Iraq since we began this practice. And the practice has led to more innocent people being imprisoned and tortured because those who are tortured tend to say anything they think you want to hear to make it stop. It builds on itself.

Saddam used this practice to terrorize the population to keep it in line. That is the only rational (if evil) purpose for such practices. I can’t figure out why in the hell we are doing it.

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Addressing The Legion

by digby

Watching these mini Nuremberg rallies with the president, and now the vice-president, using the troops to make political points I’m uncomfortably reminded that going back to Rome (and probably earlier) the point of having the troops assembled before the leadership was to make it clear that the military backed the leadership against all comers. Today this is slightly more subtly accomplished, but the motivation is the same. It is shamelessly done not just to convey the point that the military will follow the orders of the administration (which it is constitutionally required to do) but that it also politically backs the administration against its critics. These are political speeches done for the purpose of answering political critics.

If I didn’t know better and were to watch the majority of speeches from afar for the last six months, I would assume that the United States is a military dictatorship, so many uniforms have been present. Even the speech that Bush gave the other day on the economy featured a bunch of people dressed in the same clothes in the standard tableau behind him.

This is becoming a bit disturbing. The administration is giving the appearance of having control of the military in an inappropriate political way and they are doing it more and more. My only consolation is that, if press reports are true, the military brass does not seem to be as enthralled by Republican leadership as they once were. A badly conceived and executed war by fanatics will do that to you.

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Orwell’s Dog

by digby

President Bush is disturbed by the U.S. military’s practice of paying Iraqi papers to run articles emphasizing positive developments in the country and will end the program if it violates the principles of a free media, a senior aide said Sunday.

“He’s very troubled by it” and has asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to look into the pay-to-print program, national security adviser Stephen Hadley said.

That’s because he had ordered that all the unfriendly press operations in Iraq be bombed.

Christopher Hitchens is shocked, simply shocked to find out that we are doing this.

This time, someone really does have to be fired. The revelation that Defense Department money, not even authorized by Congress for the purpose, has been outsourced to private interests and then used to plant stories in the Iraqi press is much more of a disgrace and a scandal than anyone seems so far to have said.

[…]

… sometimes a whole new line is crossed and “propaganda” corrupts the whole process by becoming a covert operation against one’s “own” side. The worst violation so far has been the spreading of a falsified story about the death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan. Not only was he slain by “friendly fire” instead of by the foe—which is a tragedy in far more ways than just as a setback for recruitment—but the family and friends of this all-American hero were purposely deceived about what had really happened. It would be trivial to add that they were also pointlessly deceived (how long do the geniuses at DoD imagine that such a thing can be kept quiet?) except that it greatly added to the callousness of the thing, and except that this same pointlessness and moral idiocy are now apparent in the “good news” scandal in Iraq.

[…]

[J]ust picture the scene for a moment. An Iraqi family living in, say, Anbar Province, picks its way down the stoop to collect the newly delivered newspaper. This everyday operation is hazardous, but less so than going down to the corner to pick it up, because there are mad people around who do not believe that anything should be in print, save the Quran, not to mention nasty local potentates who do not like to read criticism of themselves. Further, the streets are often dark and littered with risky debris. The lead story, however, reports that all is well in the Anbar region; indeed, things are going so well that there is even a slight chance that they will one day get better. Who is supposed to be fooled by this? The immediate target is, one supposes, the long-suffering people of Iraq. But over time, the printing and dissemination of cheery reportage must have been intended to be picked up and replayed back into the American electorate. If done from state coffers, that is probably not even legal.

It is, anyway, not so much a matter of fooling people as of insulting them. The prostitute journalist is a familiar and well-understood figure in the Middle East, and Saddam Hussein’s regime made lavish use of the buyability of the regional press. Now we, too, have hired that clapped-out old floozy, Miss Rosie Scenario, and sent her whoring through the streets. If there was one single thing that gave a certain grandeur to the change of regime in Baghdad, it was the reopening of the free press (with the Communist Party’s paper the first one back on the streets just after the statue fell) and the profusion of satellite dishes, radio stations, and TV programs. There were some crass exceptions—Paul Bremer’s decision to close Muqtada Sadr’s paper being one of the stupidest and most calamitous decisions—but in general it was something to be proud of. Now any fool is entitled to say that a free Iraqi paper is a mouthpiece, and any killer is licensed to allege that a free Iraqi reporter is a mercenary. A fine day’s work. Someone should be fired for it.

For a guy who models himself on George Orwell he sure is a naive little thing, isn’t he? Where has he been?

The Bush administration doesn’t just believe this will work in Iraq. They think they can bullshit the American people into believing they are better off economically than they really are, too. Their entire agenda boils down to convincing the American people that they can believe them or they can believe their lying eyes. They’ve been doing this from the beginning and it worked for a while after 9/11 when Bush was riding around like country on his white charger and the press was holding his codpiece. It doesn’t seem to be working anymore.

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The ’05 Campaign

by digby

Atrios wonders why Bush is doing the happy talk thing about the economy when it won’t make anyone change his or her mind about it:

There are things which make sense in the context of a first term, a presidential campaign, a major policy to sell, or if there is an heir apparent (like Gore in 2000). But basically either people are happy with the economy or not and no speechifying by Bush is going to change their minds

I thought the same thing and then realized that he was just repeating his stump speech, slightly updated. (He even had the usual applause lines — tort reform! YEAHHHHHHHHH!) I should have known what was going on when he mentioned “his opponent” in a speech a couple of weeks ago.

Bush is running for president again. It’s really the only thing he knows how to do successfully. (And even then, only 50% of the time.) This time he’s running against himself — Bush the 35% loser.

Talk about the lesser of two evils.

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She Initiated It

by digby

A lot of bloggers have written today about the rape case in Oregon in which a young woman was found guilty of falsely reporting the rape based upon a judge’s impression that the “boys” were more credible and because the accuser allegedly didn’t act properly traumatized according to a detective and two friends. (Kevin Hayden has more here.)

I’m quite sure that rape is falsely reported from time to time. It only stands to reason that it would happen. However, this judge was apparently not relying on the kind of evidence that could have supported the charge — like testimony from a “co-conspirator” or a friend to whom she confessed to making it up, a blackmail attempt, stalking, a fight, nothing that concrete.

Despite what he describes as inconsistencies on both sides, he must have believed this in order to find her guilty:

The three men testified Thursday that the acts were consensual and at the girl’s initiation.

How likely is that? Here in the real world, how often does it happen that a 17 year old girl initiates group sex with a bunch of her boyfriend’s pals?

Again, I’m sure it happens. But this “porno star” defense is more common that you think and it works even in the face of documentary evidence. Here’s a similar story that played out along similar lines, although it was tried as a rape case:

The jury announced Monday that it was “hopelessly deadlocked” on all 24 counts.

Defense attorneys and a middle-aged male juror told CNN that 11 jurors voted “not guilty” on the first four counts — two counts of rape by intoxication and two counts of oral copulation by intoxication.

The alleged rape was videotaped by Haidl July 5, 2002, during a party at the home of his father, Don Haidl, a top-ranking sheriff’s official in Corona del Mar.

Prosecutors relied on the tape as the most critical piece of evidence, telling jurors throughout the trial that all of the crimes can be seen on tape.

The prosecution doesn’t feel it overestimated the impact the tape had with the jury, Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said Tuesday.

“It’s very clear what’s happening on the tape,” Rackauckas said. The alleged victim is “unconscious, she’s flopping around, out of control, being manipulated by these three individuals.”

But, Haidl’s attorney Peter Scalisi said “science and medicine backs” the defense’s contention that Jane Doe was conscious during the incident.

A neurologist hired by the defense testified that in reviewing the tape, he found her to be alert and with the presence of mind to say “no,” and yet she said “yes,” Scalisi said in an appearance with Rackauckas on CNN.

During the trial, defense attorneys portrayed Doe as a promiscuous, aspiring porn star who agreed to be videotaped.

Scalisi called the depiction “very fair” because that’s the way “she truly is.”

I don’t remember where I saw the footage, but I saw it, (with the body parts made hazy.) It was obvious that the poor girl was unconscious. She was like a rag doll, only making rare muffled sounds. And the criminals who were assaulting and humiliating her were laughing through the whole thing. I don’t care if she’d made a thousand porno movies, in this one she was clearly not capable of consenting. It was one of the most disturbing videos I’ve ever seen.

But there were people on that jury who were able to look at that footage and be convinced that she was consenting— evidently persuaded by her sexual history that even though she was clearly unconscious when the men inserted a lit cigarette, a pool cue and a Snapple bottle into her orifices, that somehow she wanted what was happening.(The case was retried and the punks were found guilty.)

I don’t know all the particulars in this case in Oregon, but I think it’s probably a good rule of thumb that when the defendant is a 17 year old girl accused of not only falsely reporting a rape but enticing her accused rapists into group sex, and there is no proof that she did all this other than the word of the boys and a vague observation that she didn’t “act right” then the burden of proof has not been met.

The lesson here for young girls is, don’t bother reporting a gang rape if you know the rapists. A good many people will believe that you are a sexually depraved black widow spider who lured the poor young fellas into your web and then tried to “kill” them with a false charge.

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Kipmas Is Coming

by digby

Everyone needs to go and over to The Poorman and vote for the Soggy Biscuit award for the year’s best circle jerk and the Purple Teardrop with Clutched Pearls cluster award for wounded feelings. The competition is very tough this year, vote early and vote often.

Also, seriously, throw some money to the gang at Wampum so that they can sponsor another great Koufax awards this year. It’s great fun and helps build the liberal blog community by introducing us to new blogs and overlooked posts. I’m the incredibly lucky recipient of two of those babies and am ridiculously proud of the achievement.

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Credibility Gap

by digby

A few people have e-mailed me today to tip me to this story in the NY Times about the NSC pollster who wrote the first draft of the president’s “victory” speech last week.

I try not to do this too much because, well, it’s stupid, but I can’t help but point out that I’ve been harping on this for months, as my regular readers know. In fact, I wrote about it again the day before Bush’s speech last week when I heard him say “We wanna WIN” at that press conference at the border. I am not in the least bit surprised that the speech originated with this fellow: they are desperate to believe that he’s right and all they have to do is sell victory to get their poll numbers back up.

This advisor, Peter Feaver and a partner Christopher Gelpi produced a study that purports to prove that Vietnam wasn’t “lost” because of mounting casualties; it was because the American people became convinced we were losing when the political leadership became irresolute. I’m not qualified to comment on the data which I haven’t seen anyway, except to say as someone who was there at the time that this is bullshit. The problem was the “credibility gap.” Ordinary citizens just didn’t believe a word the government said about the war after a certain point because it had been pumping the country full of horseshit happy talk for years. Nobody knew what the truth was, except that the war just seemed to go on and on forever, kids were dying in great numbers with no real progress and no real purpose.

Mr Feaver seems to believe that the country still trusts George W. Bush. But they have to be delusionary to believe they could sell a war on a “grave and gathering danger” of “a smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud” and then think that they could maintain their credibility when it turns out that there was actually — nothing. They shot the moon and lost.

In that respect, Iraq is quite different from Vietnam. Vietnam wasn’t based on one big huge lie, but a succession of lies over a long period that only came into focus over time. Iraq was sold as a dramatic necessity in a big, brash marketing campaign with slogans and theme songs in a very short period of time for specific and memorable reasons that still echo loudly just two years later.

THE PRESIDENT: This is a guy who was asked to declare his weapons, said he didn’t have any. This is a person who we have proven to the world is deceiving everybody — I mean, he’s a master at it. He’s a master of deception. As I said yesterday, he’ll probably try it again. He’ll probably try to lie his way out of compliance or deceive or put out some false statement. You know, if he wanted to disarm, he would have disarmed. We know what a disarmed regime looks like.
I heard somebody say the other day, well, how about a beefed-up inspection regime. Well, the role of inspectors is to sit there and verify whether or not he’s disarmed, not to play hide-and-seek in a country the size of California. If Saddam Hussein was interested in peace and interested in complying with the U.N. Security Council resolutions, he would have disarmed. And, yet, for 12 years, plus 90 days, he has tried to avoid disarmament by lying and deceiving.

Yes, John, last question, then we’ve got to go swear the man in.

Q Sir, if the Security Council doesn’t go along with you, what happens then?

THE PRESIDENT: I have said that if Saddam Hussein does not disarm, we will lead a coalition to disarm him. And I mean it.

You can’t convince the country that we are winning against all evidence to the contrary once you have been proven an ass on that scale. The game was up for Bush as soon as people fully realized that the WMD threat didn’t exist. Either Bush was a liar or an idiot. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen until after the last election.

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