Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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.
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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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He Comes from Such A Nice Family, Too

The clueless Richard Cohen is predictably making the vapid cocktail party argument that Bush can’t be a racist because some of his best cabinet members are black and because he thinks little black children are just adorable. Here’s Cohen scolding those of us who suspect that all those black people down in Louisiana might be giving some red state Republicans the vapors:

We owe the poor our special consideration. We especially owe the black poor an appreciation of their plight and their dolorous history. But in general it was incompetence, not racism, that slowed the relief effort — incompetence on the local and state levels, too, and incompetence on the part of black as well as white public officials. The search for racist scapegoats does the poor no good. This relief effort ought to start, above all, with some clear thinking.

How about simple minded bullshit? Apparently, one can’t be racist and incompetent at the same time. Or racism is impossible if some of one’s best friends are black and you are kind to little black children when you see them. And if some black people are incompetent then whites can’t be racist. My goodness, just look at all the things that make it impossible for George W. Bush’s administration to have even one racist bone in its collective body! You have to be out of your mind to think that George W. Bush isn’t completely color blind.

Bush, in this case, was an equal opportunity bungler — but … it rests on a stereotype: Republicans tend to wear lime green pants in the summer and dislike black people all year round. There was more than a little truth to this at one time. The GOP, after all, became a safe haven for Southern bigots who fled the Democratic Party (as Lyndon Johnson knew they would) in the civil rights era. The fight for the rights of blacks turned Dixie as Republican as it once was Democratic. To its everlasting shame, the GOP continues to benefit from raw bigotry.

But Bush is not cut from that cloth. He is a contemporary Republican, a person of another generation who, you may have noticed, has a black woman as secretary of state and had a black man before her. Under him, the GOP began an outreach to black Americans, and unless the Democrats wake up it will ultimately succeed. As Karl Rove well knows, all he has to do is pick up a small percentage of the black vote and he ends the current 50-50 electoral split. Bush, who won an impressive 27 percent of the black vote in his reelection bid for Texas governor, could have been the man to do this. His task is a lot harder now.

That nice man George W. Bush is being unfairly tarred with all that old racist nonsense when all he wanted was to reach out. Damn you Kanye West, you little stereotyping bastard.

But it isn’t just Kanye, is it? The more than 90% of African Americans who vote for the Democrats also need to be schooled about what a nice friendly color blind party the GOP is. They seem to think that Republican racism still exists and that George W. Bush leads a party that could quite believably refuse to respond to a national disaster promptly because many of the victims were black. Somebody needs to clue them all in about how racism is dead and the Republicans have their best interests at heart. They don’t seem to have gotten the memo.

It’s guys like Richard Cohen, millionaire liberal beltway pundit who know the score. African Americans are the racists and it’s the millionaire conservative Republicans who are being unfairly stereotyped. He knows this because he knows George Bush. Like when he wrote:

Given the present bitterness, given the angry irresponsible charges being hurled by both camps, the nation will be in dire need of a conciliator, a likable guy who will make things better and not worse. That man is not Al Gore. That man is George W. Bush.”

He’s got quite the insight, doesn’t he?

Pay no attention to the fact that the modern Republican Party remains in the clutches of a strong minority of racists — potentially as large a faction as their conservative Christian base, which likely overlaps it. Bush may not personally be a racist, I have no way of knowing what’s “in his heart.” But he is quite well aware of the fact that all the racists in the country who voted, voted for him.

And this is what that racist constituency thinks of Bush’s famous choices of black faces for his cabinet:

Tokenism

to·ken·ism Pronunciation Key (tk-nzm)
n.

1. The policy of making only a perfunctory effort or symbolic gesture toward the accomplishment of a goal, such as racial integration.

2. The practice of hiring or appointing a token number of people from underrepresented groups in order to deflect criticism or comply with affirmative action rules: “Tokenism does not change stereotypes of social systems but works to preserve them, since it dulls the revolutionary impulse” (Mary Daly).

While Bush’s tokenism is designed to soothe gullible dipshit white urbanites like Richard Cohen it also placates the racist base with winks and nods. Cohen may not know tokenism when he sees it, but African Americans, neo-confederates and general bigots certainly do.

Tokenism does not mean that the token is unqualified. Condi Rice and Colin Powell were completely qualified for their jobs. But their purpose in this administration was to soothe the white Republicans who are uncomfortable with overt racism into believing that the Party is no longer affiliated with such unpleasantness.

We know exactly what game they are playing by simply observing that in South Carolina, George Bush made a trek to the notoriously racist Bob Jones University to make sure that certain people understood that his happy talk about Condi and compassionate conservatism wasn’t anything they had to worry about. They needed to make sure they stopped John McCain dead in his tracks and they did — with a purely racist appeal that included some very nasty stuff about his having a black daughter. This is the line they walk. The majority in this country are no longer comfortable with overt racism and frowns upon those who embrace it openly. But it is completely absurd to think that it has been eradicated or that the leader of the Republican Party rejects it. He can’t reject it, even if he wants to. Racists are a significant part of his constituency.

As to whether it affected the hurricane response, it’s highly unlikely that anyone sitting in Washington said, “take your time Brownie, it’s just a bunch o’ negroes.” I don’t know why people persist in thinking that this must work on the most obvious level in order to be true. It is, as I’ve written, far more likely that the response was delayed because the authorities in New Orleans at all levels held back out of fear of a black mob.

It’s what happens going forward that will really show how the lines are drawn. Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, after all, are red states. (Louisiana is only ever Democratic by dint of the African Americans in New Orleans — a problem that may have been solved by Katrina if Karl Rove has his way. ) These are his people and it’s the very heart of the Republican south; you had better bet that Haley Barbour expects him to deliver the goods. But he also has to be careful that this federal money isn’t seen as going to blacks at the expense of whites. So, they are sending signals, loud and clear, to anyone who’s paying attention.

For instance, the Section 8 issue. It seems that many Washington types still harbor some idea that if only the government would beef up Section 8 money all these displaced people in New Orleans could find apartments and there wouldn’t have to be any Bushville trailer parks built. And it is a nice thought. However, nobody wants to admit why it isn’t being pushed despite it’s long history of bipartisan support. It isn’t a big guvmint liberal program after all. It’s a voucher program, used in the private sector.

The reason the Bush administration is not pushing this is two-fold. The first, of course, is that the contracts for the Bushvilles are going to be very lucrative and Brownie’s bud Joe Allbaugh needs to deliver some love to his employers. The other is that Karl Rove knows very well that many people in the region are very hostile to the idea of all these black New Orleanians moving into their neighborhoods. Section 8 is one of those neat idealistic conservative ideas that comes smack up against long term racist attitudes. It’s all well and good in theory, but when it comes to living next door to these displaced victims, a lot of southern Republicans hit their limits. Yet these people have to live somewhere, hence the segregated Bushville trailer parks that will serve everyone’s needs very well — except, of course, the black citizens of New Orleans who have no place else to go.

One might also ask why are they making a show of eliminating affirmative action plans? It’s just a three month temporary exemption for certain small firms that have never worked for the feds before, yet the headlines are screaming. Why would they hit the hornets nest at a time like this for something so insignificant? Plenty of work is going to be available so there is no serious competition for jobs. But it does make a serious statement, doesn’t it, and one that seems inexplicable in light of the fact that there are so many poor black people who need jobs. Unless, of course, it’s to placate a base that wants federal money but believes that blacks are always the beneficiaries instead of them. This says that Bush is making sure the money is going to the “right” people — the ones who really deserve the jobs.

Richard Cohen does not want to believe that a nice well-educated baby boomer from a good family can be a racist. And when he sees that Bush can sit in the same room with the extremely well educated, accomplished Condi and Colin, he is assured that it is impossible for him to be one. But even if that were true, Richard Cohen needs to open his eyes and see that the Republican party’s base contains a significant faction of racists who must be catered to by the well bred son of the white pompadoured lady, Barbara Bush. It’s unpleasant. I understand that. But unless liberals at least learn to read the language these people are speaking we are never going to be able to combat it.

If we want to break the electoral hold the Republicans have on the south we had better recognise that listening to Mudcat Saunders wax on about fast cars and big guns doesn’t really address the problem. Bill Clinton had a good ear for this kind of thing and was able to make enough inroads in the south to eke out two wins in two three person races. But he was a very talented fellow who was able to walk a fine line, drawling a middle of the road code that leaned heavily on “welfare reform” and “putting 100,000 cops on the streets” to convince certain wafflers that he felt their pain. (Of course, his FEMA would have done a much better job of managing the recovery so perhaps he could have succesfully mitigated the knee jerk racist recoil against big guvmint.)

We will never get there as long as anyone on the planet thinks that the likes of Richard Cohen speak for the Democrats. As I’ve said before, guys like Cohen are what’s killing us. Here is exhibit #567.

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Pssssst

If you like Paul Krugman, Gary Farber has a post you need to read.

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Dubious Honor

Andrew Sullivan has named an award after Matt Yglesias for pointing out that the DHS was a stupid Democratic idea in the first place. Huzzah for Matt. Sullivan says:

Good stuff. Keep the honesty coming. If you see a right- or left-wing writer fessing up to their own side’s errors or mistakes, let me know. We need more of it.

He is going to be very, very busy. It seems that all I ever read on the left is complaints about how the Democrats are spineless, useless fuck-ups — which the right agrees with wholeheartedly. I could find endless examples every day of lefty bloggers howling complaints about the Democrats’ errors and mistakes.

I’ve got one. How about the amazingly stupid idea of the leadership of the Democratic Party supporting the Iraq war?

Or how about this one? All the wimpy Democrats who signed on to the Defense Of Marriage Act and the wimpy Democratic president who signed it?

I’ve got a million of them.

Do I win a prize?

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I Fear Huckabee and Other Blogger Laments

Along with MSNBC’s Tom Curry, CNN’s Jackie Schechner, the NYT’s Matt Bai and a sprinkling of party operatives and interest group reps, The Note attended a regular meeting of the Internet Left at Townhouse Tavern in Dupont Circle on Sunday. Here is what we took away:

1. Mike Huckabee instills fear.

2. Hillary Clinton provokes scorn.

3. Russ Feingold inspires passion.

4. And John Edwards’ early focus on poverty — coupled with Elizabeth Edwards’ statement of support for Cindy Sheehan — is getting him a second look from this crowd.

How typical that the Kewl Kidz at The Note need to attend a DC gathering of bloggers to find out what the Internet Left really thinks. Bloggers’ defining characteristic, after all, is that they write down every single passing political thought right on these here internets for everybody to see.

Or do they? This fear of Huckabee thing had me stumped. I haven’t heard anything about it, but then it’s always possible that the Internet Left is an exclusive club that someone such as I wouldn’t know about. I thought I did. I even get the e-mails. I spend neurotic amounts of time scouring the blogs for the latest news and here I find out that there’s a whole level of insight that apprently exists only at the elite personal Internet Left level.

So, left to my own out-of-it devices, I resorted to the outsider’s friend, Mr Google, and I find out that Mike Huckabee is running for president (or acting a lot like he is, anyway.) Here’s an editorial from the September 16, Arkansas Dem Gazette:

Having watched Mike Huckabee in action for nine years now, it’s clear the man has his priorities straightest when times are worst. The highlights of his career tend to coincide with lowlights: the day Jim Guy Tucker wouldn’t leave the governor’s post, the aftermath of 9/11, the ice storm, the 40 th anniversary of the Central High Crisis . . . .

Each time, Mike Huckabee stepped up. Big time.

How does he do it? It’s a simple formula, really: Do what’s right and worry about the bureaucratic red tape later. Or to quote Governor/still-Reverend Huckabee:

“What would Jesus do? What would Jesus do? I’ll tell you what he’d do. He would try to make sure these needs were met.”

This guy’s running for president and he appears to have all the rhetorical gifts of George W. Bush without the gravitas (although he did successfully manage Arkansas’ response to 9/11 and the 40th anniversary of the Central High Crisis Crisis so he’s a proven leader. Big Time.)

Ok. I’m on board with the Inner Internet Left’s fear of Mike Huckabee. Dear Gawd, save us.

Atrios has more today on the Karl Rove official fan club and fluffing society, otherwise known as The Note. This one’s a killer:

The press and the Democrats are still demonizing Karl Rove’s involvement in anything and everything, expressing shock and horror that a deputy White House chief of staff with wide-ranging applicable experience is helping to oversee the Katrina response.

Were the Kewl Kidz still tugging on their thongs at Club Med when the whole “Man Called Brownie” thing came down? Apparently so, or these astute observers of the political scene would notice that the optics of Bush putting his primo political advisor in charge of a massive reconstruction job might just look a little as if he’s putting politics over competence — again. But hey, there’s no margin in taking on the Rovester, at least if you want to be invited to insider fetes where the great man freely speaks his mind off the record:

Karl Rove, President Bush’s top political advisor and deputy White House chief of staff, spoke at businessman Teddy Forstmann’s annual off the record gathering in Aspen, Colorado this weekend. Here is what Rove had to say that the press wasn’t allowed to report.

On Katrina: The only mistake we made with Katrina was not overriding the local government…

On The Anti-War Movement: Cindy Sheehan is a clown. There is no real anti-war movement. No serious politician, with anything to do with anything, would show his face at an anti-war rally…

On Bush’s Low Poll Numbers: We have not been good at explaining the success in Iraq. Polls go up and down and don’t mean anything…

On Iraq: There has been a big difference in the region. Iraq will transform the Middle East…

On Judy Miller And Plamegate: Judy Miller is in jail for reasons I don’t really understand…

On Joe Wilson: Joe Wilson and I attend the same church but Joe goes to the wacky mass…

In attendance at the conference, among others were: Harvey Weinstein, Brad Grey, Michael Eisner, Les Moonves, Tom Freston, Tom Friedman, Bob Novak, Barry Diller, Martha Stewart, Margaret Carlson, Alan Greenspan, Andrea Mitchell, Norman Pearlstein and Walter Isaacson.

We have the president’s top advisor and political machine builder speaking before this group of media elites, all of whom are sworn to secrecy. We hoi polloi wouldn’t know anything about this if it weren’t for a wee whistelblower who told Arianna. Can we all see the problem here folks? (Hint: it ain’t partisanship.)

Which brings me to this very intriguing article in this week’s LA Weekly. Read it all, but this passage was particularly on point:

If big media look like they’re propping up W’s presidency, they are. Because doing so is good for corporate coffers — in the form of government contracts, billion-dollar tax breaks, regulatory relaxations and security favors. At least that wily old codger Sumner Redstone, head of Viacom, parent company of CBS, has admitted what everyone already knows is true: that, while he personally may be a Democrat, “It happens that I vote for Viacom. Viacom is my life, and I do believe that a Republican administration is better for media companies than a Democratic one.”

I don’t know how many of you have worked for a corporation, but those of you who have know what that means. If you want to make it in a big organization you listen when the big bosses say things like that.

Whoever wrote that little blurb on The Note about Karl Rove (this past week-end’s marquee entertainment for all the movers and shakers in Big Media) knows that his or her corporate bosses believe that Republicans are better for business — and they will appreciate any employees who recognise that corporate priorities are career makers. None of this has to be stated out loud. Any ambitious journalist who wants to sit at Tom Friedman’s table knows what to do without even being told. Indeed, he knows what to do without even consciously thinking about it. It’s the way the world works.

And as for the people listening to Uncle Karl regale them with delicious little tidbits about which they can only talk to other privileged establishment players and courtiers, well let’s just say that I cannot help but laugh out loud at the notion that they are committed to truth — or even reality. Indeed, it seems to me that we are living in entirely different worlds. They are not custodians of democracy, they are insider usurpers of it.

This is not to say that blogs are the answer to our woes. I recognise that blogs (such as Time’s blog of the year just today) are living in an echo chamber of a different sort — as do many of us on the left. But, I think we are, or have been, a populist voice which is at this point a very necessary counterpoint to the effete, arid babble of the insider cognoscenti. There is, at least, some fresh air to breathe in the blogosphere.

Peter Daou has written an extremely interesting piece that speaks to this today in which he reveals some of his travails as someone who tried to explain the emerging power of the netroots to the staid strategists of the Kerry campaign. Among other things, he concluded that blogs need to engage the mainstream media and the party structure in order to influence the conventional wisdom.

Should we conclude, then, that the inability of bloggers on the left and right to alter or create conventional wisdom means that they have negligible political clout? If the netroots can’t change CW without the mass media and the political establishment, and if the mass media and the political establishment can change CW without the netroots (which seems undeniable), then isn’t the blog world a relatively powerless echo chamber? The answer, of course, is no.

Bloggers can exert disproportionate pressure on the media and on politicians. Reporters, pundits, and politicians read blogs, and, more importantly, they care what bloggers say about them because they know other reporters, pundits, and politicians are reading the same blogs. It’s a virtuous circle for the netroots and a source of political power. The netroots can also bring the force of sheer numbers to bear on a non-compliant politician, reporter, or media outlet. Nobody wants a flood of complaints from thousands of angry activists. And further, bloggers can raise money, fact-check, and help break stories and/or keep them in circulation long enough for the media and political establishment to pick them up.

Consequently, bloggers, though unable to change conventional wisdom on their own, are able to use these proficiencies and resources to persuade the media and political establishment to join them in pushing a particular story or issue.

The blogosphere is full of calls to arms and polemics and analysis all of which are, to varying degrees, politically empowering. I’ve often said that we are the heirs to the revolutionary war era’s pamphleteers, only in electronic form and I proudly number myself amongst them. But, like Peter, I think that the blogosphere’s most important purpose at this point in its very new history is to serve as a check on the insular journalistic elites that make up the corporate media hierarchy and the DC beltway press. And I think we already do this in a couple of different ways, neither of which were invented by bloggers but which were made possible for the masses to participate in by technology.

I realize that he is long out of fashion and probably politically incorrect to evoke in these conservative times, but I think that bloggers can be, at our best, the heirs to IF Stone, who famously said that the Washington Post was an exciting paper to read because “you would never know on what page you would find a page one story.” Like Stone, we are always looking for the page one story that’s buried on page 15. Our capacity to use collective energy to scour newpapers and other publications for the small details that can lead to a bigger story is one of the innovations of blogging. We are using the modern investigative tools at our disposal to follow up on the “shirt tail hanging out” as he used to call it — the little detail that leads one to delve more deeply into the story and get to the larger truth. Technology, of course, is key — but so is the aggregate energy of thousands of individuals putting it to work.

And I also think we change the dialog in a way that’s too subtle to measure but is vital nonetheless. While we were unable to influence the media prior to the Iraq war, our arguments, honed over the course of two years of non-stop writing, analysing and fist shaking, meant that when the tide of public opinion began to turn, the media and at least some members of the public had an understanding of events that they wouldn’t have had if we had not been screaming into the void. I believe that the concentration of words that had been pushed into the ether helped opinion to move faster than it would have otherwise. And it prepared the press to finally admit what they saw with their own eyes when confronted with the Katrina cock-up.

Like Stone, who was an early skeptic of Vietnem, the bloggers of the left, operating outside any party hierarchy and completely outside the establishment, were the earliest off the mark on the debacle that has become Iraq. We were skeptical because we weren’t immersed in the conventional beltway wisdom that said we had to support the war. Unlike those who were angling for jobs or social approbation or credibility among the beltway elites, we just said what we thought. There is value in that.

We outsiders can probably be the worst cynics around — but I would say that when it comes to power, we are far more likely to be right than wrong. As Stone said, “If you want to know about governments, all you have to know is two words: Governments lie.”

For structural reasons as much as anything, the blogosphere is filling a void that IF Stone’s retirement left unfilled during those long years in which the right built up its media infrastructure. We are telling the truth as we see it. That’s not to say that it is always a pure and clear reflection of reality. But it is, at least, authentic and sincere which is something that one cannot say about the media elite or the climbers who aspire to it. There is value in that too.

In other blogging news:

EvolveTV, which many of my readers have asked me about about, and about which I knew absolutely nothing, is done teasing and has announced its intentions. It looks to be a lot of fun — a streaming TV show featuring all your favorite bloggers like Atrios, Kos, Juan Cole, PZ Myers etc. Check it out.

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Boondoggle Part Deux

Yesterday morning a friend sent me the following article from the Wall Street Journal:

After Katrina, Republicans
Back a Sea of Conservative Ideas
By JOHN R. WILKE and BRODY MULLINS
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 15, 2005; Page B1

Congressional Republicans, backed by the White House, say they are using relief measures for the hurricane-ravaged Gulf coast to achieve a broad range of conservative economic and social policies, both in the storm zone and beyond.

Some new measures are already taking shape. In the past week, the Bush administration has suspended some union-friendly rules that require federal contractors pay prevailing wages, moved to ease tariffs on Canadian lumber, and allowed more foreign sugar imports to calm rising sugar prices. Just yesterday, it waived some affirmative-action rules for employers with federal contracts in the Gulf region.

Now, Republicans are working on legislation that would limit victims’ right to sue, offer vouchers for displaced school children, lift some environment restrictions on new refineries and create tax-advantaged enterprise zones to maximize private-sector participation in recovery and reconstruction. Yesterday, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that would offer sweeping protection against lawsuits to any person or organization that helps Katrina victims without compensation.

“The desire to bring conservative, free-market ideas to the Gulf Coast is white hot,” says Rep. Mike Pence, the Indiana Republican who leads the Republican Study Group, an influential caucus of conservative House members. “We want to turn the Gulf Coast into a magnet for free enterprise. The last thing we want is a federal city where New Orleans once was.”

Many of the ideas under consideration have been pushed by the 40-member study group, which is circulating a list of “free-market solutions,” including proposals to eliminate regulatory barriers to awarding federal funds to religious groups housing hurricane victims, waiving the estate tax for deaths in the storm-affected states; and making the entire region a “flat-tax free-enterprise zone.”

Members of the group met in a closed session Tuesday night at the conservative Heritage Foundation headquarters here to map strategy. Edwin Meese, the former Reagan administration attorney general, has been actively involved.

Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R., Kan.) said that the plans under development “are all part of a philosophy of lowering costs for doing business.” He said southern Louisiana,Mississippi and Alabama offer a “microcosm” where new ideas can be applied to speed the rebuilding.

The proposals to cut taxes and waive regulations come after Congress quickly approved $62.8 billion in federal spending for the Gulf Coast, and is expected to approve further spending that will push the price tag above $100 billion.

Some of the proposals are attracting fire from Democrats. “They’re going back to the playbook on issues like tort reform, school vouchers and freeing business from environmental rules to achieve ideological objectives they haven’t been able to get in the normal legislative process,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D., Ill.)

In response, Democrats are pressing for other proposals that suit their ideology. Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois has suggested creating a national emergency airlift program so that U.S. airlines can help evacuate Americans from areas before a natural disaster strike. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Louisiana Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu unveiled a plan that would, among other things, preserve victims’ Medicaid health coverage, provide $2,500 education grants to displaced students and give victims a 180-day extension on outstanding loan payments.

Trial lawyers were quick to attack the bill the House passed yesterday on a voice vote to limit lawsuits against volunteers saying it prevents airlines, hospitals, stadiums, and bus companies from being held accountable for misconduct or negligence. In a statement, the Association of Trial Lawyers of America said, “If a nursing home resident evacuated from New Orleans to a nursing home in a neighboring state dies of untreated, infected pressure sores, the out-of-state home would be protected.”

The bill’s chief sponsor, Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, said in a statement that the legislation removes the “threat of legal fear that stands between many willing and able Good Samaritans and the victims of Hurricane Katrina.” The bill does permit lawsuits for injuries that were caused “by willful, wanton, reckless, or criminal conduct.”

Some conservatives expressed concern about the growing reach of the reconstruction effort. “Everyone is attaching their own agenda to this,” said William A. Niskanen, a former Reagan White House economic adviser now at the libertarian Cato Institute. “It’s being seen as a test of the conservative agenda, from enterprise zones to school vouchers and the repeal of labor laws, and these ideas deserve careful thought,” he said. “But [the massive spending] could also create expectations that we can do this every time a disaster hits.”

Some of the proposals are unlikely to win quick passage. But congressional tax-writing committees hope to approve legislation within days to offer $5 billion in
tax relief and other aid to residents of areas hit by the storm. The legislation would, among other things, let victims withdraw money from retirement accounts without penalty, give tax incentives to those who house evacuees and give companies incentives to hire displaced workers.

Republicans, meanwhile, say they will also press for a new round of energy concessions, including incentives to rebuild and expand offshore drilling and clear the way for new refineries that were dropped from a 500-page energy bill that passed last month.

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Joe Barton of Texas and Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman James Inhofe are working on bills that would encourage refineries to build new plants and expand existing ones by rolling back environmental rules and making it easier for refineries to navigate regulatory channels in Washington.

Republicans hope Hurricane Katrina prods Congress to approve a second energy
bill this fall that includes several provisions that were dropped from the first bill.

The National Petrochemical & Refineries Association would like lawmakers to reduce the depreciation period from 10 years to five years in order to stimulate investment. Some refineries are talking about reviving an effort to get liability protection for producing the fuel additive methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE. Both were dropped from the earlier energy bill at the insistence of Democrats.

Then last night Bush gave a speech which many liberals are lauding, and conservatives are decrying, as a capitulation to liberal ideals. They seem to be convinced that our man Bush has had a change of heart and is going to spend lots of money on big government programs to help the poor. And, by gosh, he even admitted that the history of racism in this country had contributed to African American poverty. Praise Jesus! He’s seen the light.

I missed the speech last night but I was on the road and tuned into KTALK shortly , the liberal talk radio station here in LA shortly after it was over and heard Johnny Wendell, whom I usually quite like, saying that he hadn’t heard a politician say anything like this in 30 years. And he thought that it was such good news that we should give George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt. It just proved that the era of Republican small government conservatism was over and liberalism was back, baby!

I was confused. I had read that article in the morning, after all. Then I came home and fired up the creaky computer and saw that Karl Rove was in charge of the rebuilding effort. Ah.

Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative” pushing the slogan of the very liberal Children’s Defense Fund as one of his signature issues (No Child Left Behind.) He’s always used liberal rhetoric and programmatic boilerplate to sell himself as a “new kinda Republican.” It’s just that being kinder and gentler has been out of fashion since he donned the codpiece after 9/11. There is nothing new in this. And it is in no sense some sort of capitulation. Republicans have been stealing liberal rhetoric for some time now, particularly when it comes to pretending to care about people they really don’t care about. Gingrich showed that hard edged conservative rhetoric is deeply unpopular. People want to hear their leaders pretend to care, even if they don’t. Karl Rove knows what works — and they know that the dipshit pundits love it when a Republican says it because anything counter-intuitive becomes “bold” and “politically courageous.”

And, I thought we all understood by now that there is no relationship between what the Republicans say and what they do.

The model we should look at is the Coalition Provisional Government in Iraq. That too was going to be a bold and courageous experiment in laissez-faire wet-dream governance. Instead it was the biggest boondoggle in history with more than 8.8 billion dollars officially unaccounted for and undoubtedly tens of billions more wasted on fraud and corruption. Bush’s base, by which I mean corporate America, did very, very well. They will undoubtedly do well in Boondoggle Part Two as well.

I cannot believe that any liberal in the country would take George W Bush’s word about anything at this point, but apparently we all haven’t learned our lesson yet. I’m not sure what it will take, to tell you the truth. But for those of you who believe he has somehow capitulated to liberal ideals, I would like to introduce you to a friend of mine from an African nation whose funds have been frozen ….

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