Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Courtiers and Fools

Press The Meat today was one for the books. After a colorless exchange between the usual ineffectual Democrat and a looney tunes, delusional Republican (Joe Biden and Curt Weldon) Monsignor Lil’ Russ joined the roundtable where they ignored everything that had just been said to breathlessly offer their learned opinions on the runaway bride and Michael Jackson of the beltway — Hillary and Howard.

Gwen Ifill pointed out that while Dean is popular with the rank and file, the Washington Democrats are very upset. The Knights of the Botox all made it quite clear that while Bush catering to his base is a smart strategy, they agree with the DC Dems that catering to the filthy Democrat rabble is quite beneath any civilized politician. But then, as we all know, Bush’s base are Real Americans while the Democratic base consists of a bunch of godless, bi-coastal, terrorist sympathizers who are waaaay outside the mainstream. All 49% of ’em. No way are Judy, Gwen, Father Tim, and Dean Broder associated with those treasonous bastards. Why, everybody on Nantucket practically lives on pork rinds these days. (Atkins, don’t you know.)*

Woodruff pointed out that the Republicans have wisely learned to throw their red meat “below the radar” — through the local news and direct mail —while the Democrats haven’t. No comment on why the Republican red meat remains “below the radar” when the creme de la creme of Washington punditry clearly knows all about it. Nor was there any speculation about how it came to pass that Dean’s comments dominated the cable news networks with an obsessive glee usually reserved for Bill Clinton’s pants, while Tom Delay can put out a hit on federal judges and it gets a one minute segment betwen the blog report and Bay Buchanan.

Certainly, the press wasn’t in any way responsible. The news is apparently an organic thing, unconnected with those who report it. The subjects of the news determine how it’s going to be reported and evidently the Democrats consistently mishandle that responsibility quite badly. Dean was asking for trouble and he got it. As Ifil pointed out, Democrats need to learn to “act right all the time because someone’s always watching.” (Unless they can figure out how to cleverly stay “under the radar,” as those awesome Republicans do.)

The roundtable also agreed that Hillary Clinton’s comments this week about abuse of power and timid press coverage were simply silly little broadsides designed to get her elected in 2006 and 2008 and nothing more. Broder, especially, seemed miffed, saying that she needs to read some history books where she will see that this is common practice. As we all know, the only crime in Washington is when some cracker Rhodes Scholar and his smartmouth lawyer wife come to Broder’s town and “trash the place.”

All Hillary’s complaints are just typical Democratic carping, particularly the complaints about the press. What does she know from press coverage anyway? They used the Downing St. Memo as an example of how the press has been just as hard on Bush as they ever were on Clinton. I’m not kidding. Broder mentioned Walter Pincus’ front page article today to prove that the WaPo has been on Bush’s case about Iraq from the very beginning.

They all agreed, furthermore, that all of this had been amply dealt with during the election and that the public just didn’t think it was important. Strangely, however, the polls seem to suggest that they are beginning to care now. Why would that be? Nobody knew.

Their assessment of Bush’s tumbling poll numbers went like this. Broder said (and the bobble heads all nodded affirmatively) that if Clinton were in the White House they would be burning the midnight oil to change course. Bush doesn’t do that. He stands firm. His codpiece veritably bursts with confidence. All hail the massively unpopular George W. Bush.

And anyway, Democrats are icky and everybody knows they have no chance in 06 or 08, so whut-evuhr. Michael Moore is fat.

Christopher Isherwood once wrote:

“You have never seen inside a film studio before?”

“Only once. Years ago.”

“It will interest you, as a phenomenon. You see, the film studio of today is really the palace of the sixteenth century. There one sees what Shakespeare saw: the absolute power of the tyrant, the courtiers, the flatterers, the jesters, the cunningly ambitious intriguers. There are fantastically beautiful women, there are incompetent favourites. There are great men who are suddenly disgraced. There is an insane extravagance, which is a sham; and horrible squalor behind the scenery. There are vast schemes, abandoned because of some caprice. There are secrets which everybody knows and no-one speaks of. There are even one or two honest advisors. These are the court fools, who speak the deepest wisdom in puns, lest they should be taken seriously. They grimace, tear their hair privately and weep.”

The political press became a ranking member of the entertainment industrial complex some time ago. And the full flavor of the court Isherwood describes has returned to the seat of power in Washington DC. I’ll leave it to you to decide in today’s media and political world, which are the courtiers and which are the fools.

*In fairness, Ifil and the guy from the WSJ (can’t remember his name) mentioned that Dean has raised a lot of money and that this Dean flap is mostly a beltway game that will not have lasting impact as long as Dean doesn’t run for president. Ifil, in particular, made a point of puncturing the slavering Monsignor Tim’s balloon over a Harold Ford quote that he would not want Dean to come to Tennessee. Small favors.

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Nuh-uh, I Never Said That

I’m taking bets on how the wingnuts try to re-write this embarrassing history. You know they will have to eventually. They’ve had to rewrite their history for the last 60 years. (And in the case of the hard core confederates, the original “Ownership Society” — 200.) But it’s getting harder what with these internets and all.

This may be the ultimate reason why they have had to resort to the alternate discourses of “I know you are but what am I” and “You can believe me or you can believe your lyin’ eyes.” (Not to be confused with “the emperor is strutting around stark naked in the white house, but at least he isn’t getting a blow job.”)

Any thoughts on how Wolfie and his cadre are going to explain this to the children?

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The Coolest Robots In The World

I just saw Kraftwerk, the Beatles of electronica, outdoors at the Greek Theatre on a beautiful summer night in LA.

Sometimes life is really sweet.

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A Land Called Honalee

Those liberal activist judges are at it again. They really are. A majority, which includes the moderates on the court, just ruled that the federal laws against medical marijuana are constitutional (as opposed to federal laws against guns near schools or violence against women.) If this were a case about, say, a federal law that overrode state laws against gay marriage, I suspect you’d be seeing a slightly different reaction from the wingnuts and probably on the court. The moderates (there are no liberals) upheld federal power over states’ rights which is consistent with their position.

Rehnquist, Thomas and O’Connor dissented on the basis of states’ rights, which is also consistent with their position. Kennedy swung with the majority — he has no discernible position. The “surprise” is that Little Nino, who is proving himself to be more and more of a straight-up whore every day, voted with Ginsberg and Stevens and the rest. Not because he agrees with the legal doctrine involved — nothing in his judicial history would suggest that — but because he just doesn’t want people smoking pot. Or perhaps he just thinks that federal power is ducky when it’s in the hands of his friends. Either way, he’s intellectually bankrupt.

The court is operating on the same basis that the political system operates. The liberals and moderates in the minority play by the rules thinking that consistency and intellectual integrity are important and that people will hold it against them if they deviate from their stated position.( And, of course, they are right. Even when they haven’t actually deviated from their position they are accused of it and called “flip-floppers.”) The shrinking number of real conservatives pay lip service to their belief system as long as it won’t affect the outcome: they are subject to the same intimidation as the moderates and liberals if they don’t. The right wing radicals just power their way through using any means necessary, willingly taking the help of liberals and moderates who perform the function of useful idiots with their fealty to process and institutional integrity in a time of pure power politics. I’m sure they are greatly soothed by the fact that all good children go to heaven.

The good news is that, as Stevens says in the opinion, it preserves the right of federal legislators to change the laws, so that’s nice. When we finally get over our reefer madness in this country, which I expect to be in a couple of hundred years or so, maybe the Armageddon Party can join with the Theocrats and make it legal. But of course, it won’t be necessary because Pfizer will have found a way to perfectly re-create the effect of marijuana in a pill form and will have made millions selling it by prescription to those who can afford it — which is, after all, the whole point.

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The Drinking Debate

I hope that everyone is making a habit of checking out Harry Shearer’s column over on the Huffington Post because he’s got access to some of the most amazing footage you are ever going to see.

Check this out. George and Laura on Larry King talking about “the drinking debate” in South Carolina in 2000. As Shearer points out, the strange, mummified puppet who calls himself Larry King didn’t have the wherewithall to follow up. He was too busy pimping himself, as it seems he does constantly, to his guests.

Has anyone heard anything to the effect that everyone was drunk during the famous South Carolina debate between Mccain, Bush and Keyes? Oddly, Karen Hughes didn’t mention it in her memoir.

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Whose Party Is It Anyway?

Atrios is on fire today. This explication of the Democrats’ position and challenges on Iraq is spot on.

He mentions Matt Yglesias’ observation that the liberal hawks are unwilling to admit they were wrong because to do so would create a hit to their credibility. This is very interesting. We know that Bush and his cronies believe they will lose credibility if they admit they are wrong about anything and they are probably right. Without their claim to God-like infallibility, I suspect they know that their whole delicate house of cards might collapse. They do not want their base to ever get it in their heads that the emperor has no clothes and they will fight like hell to see that they don’t.

However, there are plenty of liberal hawks like Joe Biden, for instance, who also seem to be backed into a corner because they think that they will lose credibility with…who, exactly? Fred Hiatt? Tim Russert? Because they sure as hell won’t lose credibility with the base of the Democratic party — they’d be heroes. See, to us, admitting you were wrong about Iraq means that you gain credibility, not lose it. Indeed, the reality based community tends to believe that it’s important to admit when you were wrong. It’s all part of that whole godless scientific method, empirical data, age of reason, enlightenment lah-de-dah we hold so dear.

But then it’s obvious they have no respect for the base of the Democratic party. Just this morning, both Biden and Edwards dissed Howard Dean big time. While Bill Frist bumps and grinds the pole to James Dobsons’ every command three years before the presidential election, our presidential hopeful club is already running to the middle as fast as their chubby little legs will carry them. Or perhaps they are just running toward their nannies, the liberal punditocrisy who get ever so upset at the harsh rhetoric being flung by that rabble rouser, Dean:

Dean ”doesn’t speak for me with that kind of rhetoric and I don’t think he speaks for the majority of Democrats,” Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Sunday on ABC’s ”This Week.”

While discussing the hardship of working Americans standing in long lines to vote, Dean said Thursday, ”Republicans, I guess, can do that because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives.”

Oh mercy me, pass me ovah the smellin’ salts, daddy! I’m like to be bowled ovah with a feathah!

Dean’s words are actually quite powerful to anyone who isn’t a hypocrite, a member of the Sally Quinn circle jerk society or a paid spokesman of the RNC. It’s the kind of thing that real people say in real life. It’s authentic, Real Murica speak, not Washington pearl clutching bullshit. The presidential race is three long years away and Joe and John both should have laughed and said, “Howard was talking about the Republican leadership and their lobbyist buddies who can’t seem to get anything done for the American people — but they sure do take care of themselves. I think a lot of people probably agree with him on that.” Instead they twisted their little lace hankies like a couple of rich old biddies and sniffed and whimpered about how they don’t agree with such tawdry sentiment. It’s really a wonder we get any votes at all.

Which brings me to Rick Perlstein’s guest post on Political Animal the other night. I still haven’t received my copy of his new book, and I’ll discuss it in much greater depth when I have, but I think that Perlstein’s quite correct when he asks:

Here’s a riddle: what is a swing voter? More and more, it is an American who thinks like a Democrat but refuses to identify as one.

…If it is true that party identification — which, as Stan Greenberg argues, is a form of social identity that endures over the long term — is the best predictor of voter behavior, isn’t getting this selfsame public to identify with the Democratic Party much, much more than half the solution?

There is much more to his prescription, of course, than merely respecting the base. But if party ID is a form of social behavior that endures over the long term, it is a necessary first step. The grassroots of the Democratic Party were the ones who pushed for Howard Dean to become the chairman of the DNC. When you treat him like an unruly child or a slightly crazed relative, you are saying to the voters who have already committed to the party and strongly identify as Democrats that they are a bunch of losers. Why on earth would anyone join a party that does that?

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You Gotta Ask Me Nicely, Danny

This pretty much ruined my day. (Goes directly to taser video — not for the faint hearted.)

This woman was tasered with 50,000 volts by the police for not getting out of her car fast enough at a traffic stop. The officer waited less than 40 seconds before tasing her. Then she is tasered again for not responding properly after she fell out of the car and was writhing on the ground in pain.

I realize that police officers face a lot of danger. And this woman was driving with a suspended license. (They didn’t know this when they jolted her, however.) All they knew was that she was talking to someone on the phone and narrating what was happening to her and did not respond immediately to the officer’s demand that she get out of the car. She did not appear to pose any physical danger to them, only to their authority.

Evidently, because the officers had been tased in their training they believe that it isn’t “that bad.” (Someone needs to instuct them about pain threshholds and adrenaline and how it feels to fall from the open door of an SUV onto ashphalt with 50,000 volts coursing through your system and two angry cops pointing loaded guns at you.) Apparently, police credit the taser with preventing shootings, and perhaps they are right. But then so would simply bashing suspects over the head with a baton if they don’t cooperate within 30 seconds. Or shooting them. It certainly does make the job easier if you don’t have to evaluate the situation or try to talk sense into a young woman who is incooperative but instead can simply stun her into compliance like something out of a science fiction movie.

According to this series of reports by the Palm Beach Post, tasering is commonly used to shut up loudmouths. It’s “safe” you see. Doesn’t leave any marks and is considered perfectly legal.

The company that makes this convenient, lawful device is under intense scrutiny by authorities for securities violations as well as serious safety concerns:

Since the summer, reports in The Republic and the New York Times have brought to light contradictions about Taser’s claims of safety.

For years, Taser maintained that its stun guns never caused a death or serious injury. As proof, Taser officials said no medical examiner had ever cited the weapon in an autopsy report.

But Taser did not have those autopsy reports and didn’t start collecting them until April. Using computer searches, autopsy reports, police reports, media reports and Taser’s own records, The Republic has identified 88 deaths after police Taser strikes in the United States and Canada since 1999.

Of those, 11 autopsy reports have linked deaths to the stun gun. Medical examiners cited Taser as a cause or contributing factor in eight deaths and could not rule it out as a cause in three others.

The Republic has also reported that several police officers have sustained career-ending injuries that they attribute to being shocked with Taser.

In reports to bolster safety claims, Taser officials have said more than 100,000 police officers have been shocked during training exercises without suffering a serious injury.

In October, Taser issued a press release saying a Department of Defense study, whose full results have not yet been released, found that its guns were safe. But The Times reported that the Air Force researchers who conducted the study actually found that the guns could be dangerous and that more data was needed to evaluate their risks.

Of course, whether or not tasers inflict permanent damage or death is beside the point. They clearly administer terrible pain to people who are officially only suspects or witnesses and it’s clear that they are being used to simply make people behave in a docile manner when in the presence of police. It makes the policeman’s job easier. But again, so would hitting them over the head.

From yesterday’s Palm Beach Post editorial:

The review of three years’ use by police from Boca Raton to Fort Pierce, starting in 2001 when the weapon arrived in South Florida, revealed that one of every four suspects zapped was not armed, violent or posing any immediate potential threat to anyone, including themselves. In at least 237 incidents, the stun gun was used to achieve compliance from passively resisting or fleeing suspects — who often were not even arrested.

Police agencies recognize that they have a problem in their widely varying policies for recording and tracking Taser use, which often require no explanation for why officers fired the weapon. The manufacturers’ marketing also skates past questions about respiratory, cardiac, neurological, psychological and other effects, including the effect of being zapped multiple times.

There are reasons why it is a bad idea for police to be allowed to inflict pain on people who are uncooperative or disagreeable — the most important being that this means police are sanctioned to commit violence on the public under color of law in instances where their safety is not at issue. That’s one of the hallmarks of a police state not a free society. (And yes, I realize that Saddam pulled the legs off of puppies on Christmas morning and I’m damned lucky not to be living under that kind of hellish nightmare. But every lil’ totalitarian has to start somewhere.)

It’s not just Gitmo. Sophisticated torture techniques are becoming common policing and interrogation methods in America. I remember watching the excrutiating video of police meticulously applying q-tips dipped in pepper spray to the inside of logging protesters’ eyelids when they refused to unchain themselves from one another. It was explained that because they weren’t actually blinded or permanently harmed, this was really the humane way to get them to cooperate. The most chilling thing about this was the dry, benign way the police calmly went about methodically pulling the immobile protesters’ heads back and then their eyelids, to carefully daub the painful chemicals directly into the eye as they screamed in agony. Don’t ever think that the systematic “banality of evil” regime couldn’t happen here. The police didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves, nor were they bothered. It was just all in day’s work.

(It should be noted that police had dealt with this form of protest — in this case blocking a congressman’s office — many times before and had always simply cut the steel armbands with no ill effect. This was a method to force the protesters to willingly bend to the authorities’ will.)

They sued and had two hung juries, the first of which had the judge stepping in after the mistrial with a verdict for the defendants (“no reasonable person could conclude that this was excessive force.”) Many appeals followed, including the one that overturned that first judge’s unbelievable ruling and removed him from the case for bias. Just last April, they finally won on the third try. (I wonder if Abu Ghraib may have had an influence?)

The common rationale for the torture regime is that policemen must have the right to inflict great pain (if not permanent damage) on the spot, at their discretion, to gain the cooperation of suspects or witnesses because they have a dangerous job. Tasers have made that call a little bit easier because they allegedly cause no lasting damage. I would imagine that many people instinctively think that is not such a big deal. Until they get pulled over by a cop in bad mood who goes from 0 to 60 in 30 seconds and determines for whatever reason that you must be physically subdued. Or maybe he just doesn’t like your looks. After all it’s “not that bad.” No harm no foul. Why if it weren’t for the Bill of Rights we wouldn’t have to think about it at all.

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Expanding the Cult

Kevin at Catch catches Ben Stein deep throating Richard Nixon’s corpse again. Aside from peddling the latest Peggy Nooner dolphin fantasy — that Mark Felt is responsible for genocide because the Mahatma Nixon died for our sins, or something — he comes up with some especially colorful rhetoric to describe him:

Have you noticed how Mark Felt looks like one of those old Nazi war criminals they find in Bolivia or Paraguay? That same, haunted, hunted look combined with a glee at what he has managed to get away with so far?

He goes on to say how odd it is that Felt would betray the savior of the his people.

If he even knows what shame is, I wonder if he felt a moment’s shame as he tortured the man who brought security and salvation to the land of so many of his and my fellow Jews. Somehow, as I look at his demented face, I doubt it.

Click the link at Catch to read some of Isaac Bashevis Nixon’s inspiring words about the Jews.

I have once again misunderestimated Republicans. I had thought they had cast all their considerable historical revisionist desires totally into Saint Ronald. As the obsessive object of their fear and love had done with Lenin, I had assumed the Reagan cult would serve as the Republican historical example of perfect leadership and humanity. I was wrong. Being the great winners of ideological struggle apparently entitles them to raise all Republican leaders to the status of gods. In fact, there is no Republican leader on earth, from Joe McCarthy to Richard Nixon, who has not been entirely misunderstood until now. They have all not only been great warriors and leaders of men, they are also, each in their way, Jesus-like in their transcendent love for their fellow man and devotion to peace. All of them. Even the paranoid drunks and crooks.

Perhaps this is something necessarily present in the totalitarian mindset. The movement is infallible and all leaders of the cause must, therefore, be perfect. We’ve seen this before, of course. Caligula made his horse into a senator (and you know, Bill Frist does have a rather equine visage…) Still, it never fails to amaze me that somewhere along the line the right wing in America came to identify so closely with their left wing nemeses. Perhaps obsessing about communism all those years created a kind of mass Stockholm Syndrome. Whatever the explanation, they become more and more like them every day.

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Shoes Tumbling To The Ground

If any Democratic Senators are looking for a way to shine light on the Downing St Memo(and I’m not holding my breath) this may be the way to do it. And the beauty of it is that they can use that loudmouthed cretin John Bolton to do it:

John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal has since judged unlawful, according to officials involved.

A former Bolton deputy says the U.S. undersecretary of state felt Jose Bustani “had to go,” particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war.

[…]

The Iraq connection to the OPCW affair comes as fresh evidence surfaces that the Bush administration was intent from early on to pursue military and not diplomatic action against Saddam Hussein’s regime.

An official British document, disclosed last month, said Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed in April 2002 to join in an eventual U.S. attack on Iraq. Two weeks later, Bustani was ousted, with British help.

[…]

After U.N. arms inspectors had withdrawn from Iraq in 1998 in a dispute with the Baghdad government, Bustani stepped up his initiative, seeking to bring Iraq – and other Arab states – into the chemical weapons treaty.

Bustani’s inspectors would have found nothing, because Iraq’s chemical weapons were destroyed in the early 1990s. That would have undercut the U.S. rationale for war because the Bush administration by early 2002 was claiming, without hard evidence, that Baghdad still had such an arms program.

In a March 2002 “white paper,” Bolton’s office said Bustani was seeking an “inappropriate role” in Iraq, and the matter should be left to the U.N. Security Council – where Washington has a veto.

Bolton said in a 2003 AP interview that Iraq was “completely irrelevant” to Bustani’s responsibilities. Earle and Bohlen disagree. Enlisting new treaty members was part of the OPCW chief’s job, they said, although they thought he should have consulted with Washington.

Former Bustani aide Bob Rigg, a New Zealander, sees a clear U.S. motivation: “Why did they not want OPCW involved in Iraq? They felt they couldn’t rely on OPCW to come up with the findings the U.S. wanted.”

Bustani and his aides believe friction with Washington over OPCW inspections of U.S. chemical-industry sites also contributed to the showdown, which went on for months.

The article discusses at some length what an asshole Bolton was, menacing and inapprorpiate, but then what else is new. What is interesting is that the article connects the dots between Downing St and this explicitly.

This is an AP article. Unfortunately, it is also on the wires on Saturday where it is most likely to be overlooked. Unless we refuse to let it.

The media needs a hook to start talking about Downing St. I think Bolton’s toast, but if the nomination goes forward I would certainly hope that the Democrats would use this as an opening to start talking about it. If Bolton ends up withdrawing because of this (and he might) then the media also has an excuse to talk about it.

I wonder if Monsignor Russert will see fit to discuss this between Hail Mary’s on Press the Meat tomorrow morning?

Hat tip to samela

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What’s Good For The Goose Is Only Good For The Goose

It is interesting that the ACLU got a ruling requiring that all the Abu Ghraib pictures be released to the public. What is really interesting is that the government argued that releasing them would be contrary to the Geneva Conventions. (Via Talk Left)

“It is indeed ironic that the government invoked the Geneva Conventions as a basis for withholding these photographs,” said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney at the ACLU. “Had the government genuinely adhered to its obligations under these Conventions, it could have prevented the widespread abuse of detainees held in its custody in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.”

It’s nearly impossible to be as obtuse as is the Bush administration without having either some sort of cognitive problem or psychological impairment. I suspect it’s the latter.

This recent phony outrage about Amnesty International is another example of this pathology. They had no problem using Amnesty to buttress their case against Saddam, but balk at being called to task for our own very obvious and well known human rights abuses in Guantanamo. Of course, there is little mention of this (except by Jon Stewart) so it doesn’t matter. Patriotic correctness requires that any criticism of the United States be immediately struck down as treasonous, if not blasphemous.

If anybody still wants to know why they hate us, this would be a good place to start.

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