Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Pro Choice Veterans For Truth

I am with Brad Plumer on this argument about NARAL. NARAL has a specific agenda and its only hope of keeping that agenda as strong as possible is to keep the Democratic party on the straight and narrow on abortion rights. From their perspective, it makes a lot of sense to endorse an occasional blue state pro-choice Republican — certainly against an anti-choice Democrat.

Brad says:

Call me cynical, but I don’t believe for a second that modern-day Democrats would think twice about selling out a constituency or interest group for the sake of electoral gain. Not a warm and fuzzy picture of the home team, but there you go. The moment NARAL gives the party reason to take pro-choice constituents for granted, they’ll get shafted. Look at black voters, or unions, over the past decade. Look at how the religious right has been roundly abused by the Republican Party. (When’s that gay-marriage amendment coming? Oh right, never. Chumps. Now keep voting for us.) Parties always pander towards groups that are in danger of defecting; they know they can screw over the loyal core somewhat, so long as there are no consequences. Unless NARAL shows that there are consequences, such as endorsing a pro-choice Republican in a blue state, they’ll get taken for granted. Maybe that’s due to sexism on the part of the Democratic leadership, but mostly it’s just the way coalitions work.

Now some have argued that NARAL should line up behind the party simply because any Democratic majority in Congress would best protect abortion rights. Kos: “When Democrats regain power, choice, the environment, worker’s rights — the whole gamut — will be protected.” I’m sorry, but bullshit. Hark back to 1976, when both houses of Congress, controlled by Democrats, passed the Hyde Amendment restricting federal funding for abortions. Gerald Ford signed it into law, but it was Jimmy Carter who had heartily endorsed the bill, and was ready to make it a campaign issue. A major, major victory for pro-lifers all-around, perhaps one of their biggest to date.

I understand that we all need to stick together, but if I were NARAL I’d be getting very, very concerned about some Democrats’ willingness to “soften” their stance on the issue of choice because it’s allegedly hurting the party — you know, moral values and all that. I might just think it’s smart to show some muscle. There is no way I’d blindly trust anyone in this environment to fight this battle for me.

There is a great example of how this works over the long haul and it comes from the grandaddy of all single issue groups — the NRA. They are certainly an indispensible and active part of the GOP coalition as they’ve always been, but they have plenty of Democrats on their side now too. And they did not get to where they are by being good little GOP soldiers. They fought every single battle on the gun issue alone and they insisted on every candidate they backed being on board. When they started their campaign it was not the default mainstream position in either party.

And they backed plenty of Democrats over Republicans if they had to. Sometimes they backed the losing candidates because they were in urban elections where the Republican couldn’t win without endorsing gun control. And if there ever existed a red state Republican who was for gun control you can bet that the NRA would back a Democrat who was against it — even if control of the Senate depends on one seat (which is not the case for Chafee.) In Illinois, for instance, Governor George Ryan was elected to office in 1998 over an NRA-backed Democrat. In the last election they didn’t endorse either senate candidate in Oklahoma because both had a 100% rating with the NRA. The issue was off the table and so were they. More often they support NRA Republicans over NRA Democrats, but that’s just smart politics considering who presently owns the government. They keep focused like a laser on what matters to them and they have done this during good times and bad for the GOP.

But does anyone believe that even though they are a single issue “special interest” that the NRA doesn’t help the Republican party in the most substantial way possible? They’ve pretty much killed us in the rural areas and turned the red states blood red. They’ve won. Except in big cities, this issue is dead. Republicans have nothing but respect for them — even if they backed a Democrat or two along the way. They know what they brought to the party.

Interest groups have always been around they can be very helpful to the political party that hews most closely to their agenda, as we’ve seen with the NRA. In fact, virtually everybody is a special interest of some kind — even bloggers, who are now representing the “netroots” who have their own concerns and issues they want addressed. These interest groups have infrastructure and loyalty — two things we still need. If there are certain people for whom choice is the defining political cause of their life, we want them. But no organization is going to be able to — or want to — sell their members a candidate who does not agree with their defining cause. They lose their credibility when they do that and then they lose their organization. We can’t afford to lose any sympathitic institutions– we barely have any as it is.

NARAL feels threatened and rightfully so. There are a lot of Democrats who seem to be awfully willing to consider jettisoning their cause. They are exercising their clout among pro-choice believers. And we need some people who are independent of the party apparatus to do certain things like this:

An advertisement that a leading abortion-rights organization began running on national television on Wednesday, opposing the Supreme Court nomination of John G. Roberts Jr. as one “whose ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans,” quickly became the first flashpoint in the three-week-old confirmation process.

Several prominent abortion rights supporters as well as a neutral media watchdog group said the advertisement was misleading and unfair, and a conservative group quickly took to the airwaves with an opposing advertisement.

[…]

A conservative group, Progress for America, said it would spend $300,000 to run ads, beginning Thursday, on the same stations on which the Naral ad is appearing. “How low can these frustrated liberals sink?” its advertisement asks.

Oh boo fucking hoo. I’m trying to remember how many veterans groups denounced the swift boat ads. Funny, I can’t think of any. Yet, the first thing out the timorous non-NARAL pro-choice community is how “intemperate” the ad is.

You want to see some aggressive progressives — here they are. NARAL. Fighting for what they believe in. They are getting this issue on the front page of the NY Times and they aren’t backing down. Good for them.

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Logical Dumbness

Bob Somerby has made a rare mistake in logic and since it is so rare, I feel compelled to point it out. He says:

For the record, we still haven’t seen a single scribe note the obvious problem with the Palmeiro story—the fact that you’d never take a heavy-duty roid in a year when you knew you’d be tested. What’s the missing piece of the puzzle? Sports scribes seem determined not to ask. But then, the human ability to look past the obvious has driven a wide range of public discussions in the years since we started THE HOWLER. Despite iconic claims about “man, the rational animal,” dumbness is part of our human inheritance.

For some reason Bob does not ascribe the same observation here to Palmiero. It’s true that dumbness is part of our human inheritance, which is why is just as possible that Raffy stupidly took steroids in a year he was going to be tested as it is that the press has not thought to wonder if Raffy could really be that stupid.

It has to be pointed out that drug tests are given all the time to people who know they are going to be tested — and they test positive. I can’t explain why they think they can get away with it, but they do.

Certainly Palmiero would have been dumb to take steroids right now, but he’s a major league player under a huge amount of pressure to perform. Maybe he got some bad information and thought this particular drug wouldn’t register. Maybe he was told by his team that they’d overlook it. It’s also possible that he was set up or the test was wrong. But really, it’s fairly common for people to fail scheduled drug tests, and for the most obvious reason of all — because they took drugs.

I don’t know if he did it or not. But I don’t think that the logic that it would be a dumb thing to do is a very convincing reason to flay the press for not being more skeptical of the charges. People do dumb things all the time. Especially the press — and sometimes even star athletes.

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Go Cindy

Head over to Joe Trippi’s place and listen to Cindy Sheehan’s blog call. She’s just great.

You’ll get to hear the mellifluous voices of some of your favorite bloggers, too…

Crude But Effective

I’m sure that US advisers counseled trumped-up impeachment or a bought-and-paid-for recall, but the Iraqis had no use for our “democratic” methods for removing the mayor of Baghdad from power. They just deposed him. Very efficient. Tom DeLay took notes.

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Playing For Time

Kevin wonders why the White House appears to be bobbling the Roberts nomination citing this article in the Washington Post this morning:

Thrown on the defensive by recent revelations about Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr.’s legal work, White House aides are delaying the release of tens of thousands of documents from the Reagan administration to give themselves time to find any new surprises before they are turned into political ammunition by Democrats.

[…]

While the White House plays catch-up in studying Roberts’s past, it is facing complaints from some of its conservative supporters about what they feel has been a stumbling campaign for the nominee.

Sean Rushton, director of the conservative Committee for Justice, said in the days after the nomination “there was a drop-off of message and focus.”

I think this is mostly kabuki. There had always been concern that Roberts was being nominated too early — a clearly political decision to take the heat off of the Plame investigation:

… a conservative icon in Washington is worried because the White House rejected his advice regarding the timing of its announcement of Roberts’ nomination to the Supreme Court. Free Congress Foundation founder and president Paul Weyrich says opposition groups will now have a month to rally their forces and voice their opinions on Roberts before hearings begin in late August.

“I pleaded with the White House not to make the appointment until the end of August because if it is made now, and Congress then goes out of session, you will have all the left-wing groups screaming about the appointee,” Weyrich says. That vocal opposition has already begun.

According to Weyrich, the White House response to his request was lukewarm. “You know, it was just a ‘thanks for your input’ type of thing,” he recalls. “I’m not sure they really comprehend what will happen to their nominee if the nominee’s good.”

Weyrich voices concern that the month-long interval before hearings begin will give those opposed to Roberts time to build their objections to a fever pitch. He says that happened once before to another Supreme Court nominee — Robert Bork.

They knew there was going to be time to sully Roberts which is why they have “just decided now” to thoroughly review all these documents before they can release them.

I don’t deny that there is probably some disarray at the White House. They have been off their game for a while. But I think they probably decided they could draw out the fact-finding enough through the month of August to make nominating him early worthwhile. It’s risky for them. Who knows what could seep out? But they are now in precarious enough waters that they have to take some political risks.

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Guerilla Blogging

For all of you who might be interested, check out this fascinating study on the progressive blogosphere written by Chris Bowers of MYDD and Matt Stoller of Blogging of the President.

They highlight the fact that local political blogging seems to be one area in which the conservatives are outpacing the progressives — which Bowers further expounded upon just the other day when he learned that an allegedly nonpartisan local Pennsylvania newsblog was actually a GOP front.

The local angle and the GOP front angle are connected. I’m not just being paranoid. There is evidence in plain sight that they have done this — the Thune bloggers are a perfect example — and that they are actively training people to do it:

From May 1999 through August 2003, Krempasky worked for Blackwell as the graduate development director of the Leadership Institute, an Arlington, Virginia–based school for conservative leaders founded by Blackwell in 1979. The institute is the organization that had provided “Gannon” with his sole media credential before he became a White House correspondent. It also now operates “Internet Activist Schools” designed to teach conservatives how to engage in “guerilla Internet activism.”

Indeed, Krempasky could be found teaching this Internet activism course one recent February weekend to about 30 young conservatives at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington. “He advocated that people write from their experience — and not necessarily as conservatives,” a Democratic consultant who attended the seminar incognito told me. For example, Krempasky told “a conservative firefighter” that he should write about firefighting because that would be of interest to readers. Using that angle, he could build an audience. And if push ever came to shove, he could respond to an online dogfight from the unassailable position of being a firefighter — and not as just another conservative ideologue. Krempasky then offered to help all the attendees set up their own blogs. “We’re definitely in serious trouble,” said the Democratic attendee.

I know that Krempasky is a big hero among some in the lefty blogosphere because of his bipartisan work with the FCC. I’m sure he is a great guy. He even linked positively to me once.

But he was trained by one of the master ratfuckers of all time — Morton Blackwell. “Guerilla internet activism” is high-tech ratfucking. I’m just saying.

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General Misconduct

I sure hope that General Geoffrey D. Miller isn’t putting his penis where it shouldn’t be. You can get in in real trouble for that kind of behavior.

[General] Byrnes, reached by telephone at his home yesterday, declined to comment. His defense attorney, Lt. Col. David H. Robertson, said the allegation against Byrnes involves an affair with a private citizen. Byrnes has been separated from his wife since May 2004; their divorce was finalized on Monday, coincidentally the same day he was relieved of command, Robertson said.

“The allegation against him does not involve a relationship with anyone within the military or even the federal government,” Robertson said, emphasizing that the allegations do not involve more than one relationship. “It does not involve anyone on active duty or a civilian in the Department of Defense.”

[…]

The Army has been hurt over the past year by detainee-abuse cases and has been accused of not going after top officers allegedly involved in such abuse. Army officials said relieving Byrnes was meant to show the public that the service takes issues of integrity seriously.

I guess Rush Limbaugh isn’t the only one who considers hauling a naked prisoner around on a dog leash to be a form consensual sex.

It should be noted that Geoffrey Miller didn’t actually fuck anyone personally, that we know of. He only created the torture and sexual humiliation regimes at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and lied to congress.

Naturally, he was promoted.

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Misdirection

In an effort to find out how we can win back the independent rural and red state Bush voter, Democracy Corps did some focus groups (pdf). They found that while there was deep dissatisfaction with the country’s direction, they still blame Democrats because Democrats are immoral. Or something like that.

I’m pressed for time today so I won’t be able to post much, but I do recommend that you read this report and contemplate the fact that it appears that the only way for Democrats to win these voters is to adopt fundamentalist religious views or wait for the Republicans to destroy the economy so thoroughly that they turn to the Democrats by default as they did in 1932. It’s quite obvious that nothing short of that is going to convince them to vote for us. These people cannot vote for us because we don’t share their moral and religious values — which if you believe the statistics on domestic violence, divorce, children born out of wedlock and and any number of other indicators of personal sexual morality — are totally incoherent, self-serving, and entirely without any practical basis.

They don’t care about issues — indeed, they think that moral values are the issues. Republicans are for (the right kind of) Christians therefore they are better at defending the nation and the economy. It’s a simple formula that doesn’t require much investigation and is validated and emphasized constantly by the predominant political influences in rural red states: churches and talk radio. (Re-read this most insightful article by Christopher Hayes from last year to more fully understand the fact that these people don’t even know what political issues are.)

Particularly among non-college voters, cultural issues not only superceded other priorities, they served as a proxy for many voters on those other issues. With most voters expressing little understanding of the differences between Democrats and Republicans or the relative merits of their positions on economic policy, health care, retirement security, and other issues, they felt it safe to assume that if a candidate was ‘right’ on cultural issues – i.e. opposed to abortion, but most importantly opposed to gay marriage and vocal about defending the role of faith and traditional Judeo-Christian values in public life – that candidate would naturally also come closest to their views on these other issues.

Here they are in their own words. (Or if you don’t like covers, just tune in to Fox or Rush Limbaugh for the original version.)

We should be able to put a manger in the city market. I believe that we are Christian and we should be able to put a manger there. They’re giving everybody else rights. But it’s the Christian that we’re not allowed to give. Everybody else can get what they want to.Look what’s on our money. ‘In God We Trust’ That’s right. No Ten Commandments in the court house and stuff. And no pledge of allegiance to the flag. We’re in America. (Little Rock, older noncollege women)

You know, in God we were built, our country was built on God’s principals. And if we’re to maintain that we need to maintain God’s laws along with it. It says it right on the coins. Yeah, you can’t pull that apart. And they’re trying to pull it apart; you know the separation of church and state. And Republicans tend to stay away from that and allow these things. It’s the Democrats that are pulling us away from having Ten Commandments in places. (Appleton, younger noncollege women)

My big thing is the moral issues that they stand for. Or the immoral. They’re for the abortion and the gay movements, and individuality, and do what you feel instead of the way it should be. (Appleton, younger non-college women)

It appears to me in the last few years the Democrats have been. I view them as more anti-religious, almost opposing any kind of religion or propagate religion, like what happened in Colorado Springs a few weeks ago. (Denver, younger college men)

I still think that the Democrats are too politically correct. They don’t want to step on anybody’s toes. Whatever you’ve done, you had the right to do it. (Louisville, older non-college men)

I would like to believe that they represent the interests of working people and the middle class but they don’t. Not anymore. I don’t think they do. They’re just out for their own personal gain themselves, the ones that are there. (Denver, older college women)

Their leaders always seem very weak and unprepared. I am never confident in a Democrat that comes up that he can handle the political issues that come up. Especially internationally or anything. I have just not been impressed at all with their capabilities. (Appleton, younger non-college women)

I think that they’re in complete disarray and there’s just no forward momentum to the Democratic Party right now. There’s a total lack of leadership. (Louisville, older non-college men)

I’m proud to be an American because of the way this country was founded. And they stand up for this nation’s Christian heritage. There’s no question that – I believe this with all my heart – that this country is blessed the way it has been for all these years because of the way it was founded. And God’s looked on us favorably. And I think Republicans have that at heart, most of them do. And it shows in the moral stance they take. Because you hear all the time that there are no absolutes, but there truly is, and I think that they recognize that and try to push that through in their agenda. (Little Rock, younger non-college men)

They seem kind of weak to me. Weaker on terrorism. They seem like they would be more eager to hold out the olive branch instead of recognizing the fact that this is my enemy. We need to defend ourselves. (Denver, older college women)

Quit criticizing so much and have a little bit more of your own direction. Whether it’s right or wrong, pick a direction and go…Be on the offense instead of thedefense. (Appleton, older non-college men)

The Democrats have opposed these efforts? Well, where is their great idea for protecting jobs? Where is their great idea for lowering health costs? They don’t have it. (Appleton, younger non-college women)

They want to point out the issues that go wrong that the Republicans are making. And yet, they don’t really have a solution of their own…That’s why they don’tever win now. (Little Rock, older non-college women)

The report concludes:

These findings are not surprising in the context of recent electoral trends, with Democrats making slow but steady gains among college-educated voters over the past decade while increasing percentages of non-college voters support Republicans, contrary to their own economic self-interest. We believe most Democrats share certain core beliefs about civil rights, opposition to government restrictions on individual liberties, and separation of church and state that are inviolable, and we would not in any way advocate that Democrats change these beliefs or seek to obscure them in an effort to reverse recent losses among rural and red state voters. At the same time, Democrats must recognize the dynamics behind these trends and find a strategic framework that combines these core beliefs with an aggressive ‘change’ agenda that taps into broad dissatisfaction with the current leadership in Washington.

Good luck threading that needle.

I am interested in any work people have done on the Paul Hackett campaign in which he apparently won the rural voters while losing in the more affluent exurbs. Something about him was able to transcend the christian right influence with the country folk. I suspect it was style, which when you think about it is the one thing that might just be able to pull some of these people away from their preacher proxy model. They have, after all, already demonstrated that they are entirely hueristic decisionmakers who are discontented with the direction the country is going but can’t rationally put that together with who is in charge. Hackett looks and sounds like a mans man who wasn’t “weak” — the constant refrain. (Good work Rush.) Maybe that’s all it really takes.

One final note: The GOP courting of conservative evangelicals began back in the 70’s. It was no an accident of fate. They knew that it was an untapped source of conservative non-voters who could easily be mobilized by their churches. It is a political machine.

The Republicans are not fucking around here. They are building an impermeable, corrupt political machine made up of cronies, employees and hangers-on the likes of which we haven’t seen since the 19th century. They are court-packing, gerrymandering, impeaching and recalling — not to mention electronically stuffing ballot boxes and throwing disputed elections to their handpicked Supreme Court judges. They control the DC lobbying process and own a rather large piece of the media landscape. They are not building their “permanent majority” through a civil, democratic process.

Trying to court their most borg-like constituency is really beside the point.

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Journalistic Performance Art

Via Americablog, I read from CJR that Michael Wolff has an article in Vanity Fair that *gasp* questions the propriety of the major news organizations withholding important information from the public for their own purposes:

Michael Wolff deals with the Rove/Plame/Miller fracas in this month’s Vanity Fair (the article isn’t available online). Wolff manages to find a unique approach to the issue, positing the thesis that the New York Times and Time magazine are complicit in the cover-up of the fudging of intelligence in the prelude to war in Iraq — in that they knew Rove was the source of the Plame leak intended to discredit Joe Wilson after he called the administration to account. “Not only did highly placed members of the media and the vaunted news organizations they worked for know it, not only did they sit on what will not improbably be among the biggest stories of the Bush years, they helped cover it up. You could even plausibly say that these organizations became part of a conspiracy — they entered into an understanding that, as a quid pro quo for certain information, they would refuse to provide evidence about a crime possibly having been committed by the president’s closest confidant.”

To Wolff’s mind, newspaper and magazine editors need to ask themselves an elementary question: “To whom do you owe your greatest allegiance: sources or readers?”

As Wolff sees it, by throwing their hand in with anonymous sources up to no good, instead of with readers, several distinguished media outlets let themselves become tongue-tied and thereby muffed an incendiary story that was in the palms of their hands.

“… [T]he greatest news organizations in the land had a story about a potential crime that reached as close as you can get to the president himself and they punted, they swallowed it, they self-dealt” — all to protect a dubious source.

It’s a novel take, but an intriguing one.

I don’t think it’s so novel. Many of us among the unwashed masses continue to scratch our heads in wonder as we watch guys like Tim Russert engage in this weird kabuki where he grills others about information pertaining to issues in which he is intimately involved — and never mentions that fact. James Carville goes on Imus and pontificates about all the rumors he’s hearing about the case and nobody asks him about his wife — who is part of the story and was called to the grand jury. Bob Novak snaps at his press interlocutor, “how do you know if I’ve been called to the grand jury or not?” His questioner, of course, doesn’t bother to follow up with the logical question, “Have you?”

I didn’t know what Walter Pincus knew until he wrote an obscure piece for the Neiman Foundation. Meanwhile I’ve been reading his stories for two years as he quotes “people who’ve been briefed on the case” and tells it as he’s phoning it in from Mt Olympus.

The NY Times rails against Karl Rove for not holding a press conference to tell what he knows while their reporter has never written a word about the same story — an act of non-journalism for which she’s in jail because she refuses to reveal her sources. Apparently, the NY Times feels that Judith Miller, a professional journalist, has no obligation to tell the public what she knows. Her only obligation, apparently, is to protect her source(s).

The media have become performance artists. And apparently they don’t even see how surreal this whole thing looks to those of us who aren’t involved. They all know a hell of a lot more about the story than they have revealed. And none of them (excepting perhaps Novak) have any personal legal liability stemming from the Fitzgerald investigation. They are simply protecting powerful government sources or each other or God knows what — and in doing that they have failed spectacularly to do the job they are supposed to do. Nobody is saying that they have to reveal who their sources are, which is what the reporter’s privilege provides. But is it too much to ask that they at least stop pretending that they aren’t part of the story? Or better yet, is it too much to ask that they just tell the public what they know?

This is a huge scandal, as Wolff says, that may reach as high as the president. Half the press corps know details that they haven’t written about. Yet, modern journalistic standards seem to indicate that if bodily fluids had been exchanged instead of classified information we would have gotten to the bottom of this a long time ago.

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Special Friends

So, that multi-millionaire asshole Tom Noe stole $10,000 from the disabled workers of Ohio to give to that multi-millionare movie star asshole Arnold Schwarzenneger — who only agreed to return the money after a big stink was made about it. (He’s hurting, you see. He had to cancel his lucrative 8 million dollar “supplement” payoff.) I guess it was hurting his image as a guy who would work against the “special interests.” Which he has done — except he thinks that firefighters and nurses are the miscreants. Crooked coin dealers are just “good friends.”

This is getting ridiculous. Are we so inured to their graft and corruption that we can’t make political hay out of the fact that the entire Republican party is nothing but a bunch of crooked greedheads? Jesus. They’ve had total power for less than five years and they’re bleeding the country dry.

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