Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Nixon’s Babies

It’s pretty clear to me that Beltway insiders are aware of the explosive “Watergate” style possibilities of the Tom DeLay scandal, but I don’t get the impression that anyone knows quite what to make of it or how to exploit it. And perhaps it’s one of those things that’s best left to unfold naturally. If it does unravel completely it could be the end of the ascendency of the conservative movement and we could, perhaps, get down to the important business of spending the next generation undoing all the damage they’ve done. It is, after all, out specialty.

Franklin Foer writes a very interesting article in this week’s TNR that gets to much of what’s important about Jack Abramoff and how he fits into the bigger scheme of things. It’s not just that he was a pal of Delay’s or that he was a crook himself. It’s much bigger than that; it touches upon important elements of the entire modern Republican Party and exposes the web of connections between the conservative movement, the right wing press, the Christian right and the Republican congress as entirely corrupt.

DeLay, though, was not the only prominent conservative to see Russia the Abramoff way. Two months before DeLay touched down there, Abramoff’s firm shepherded a contingent of Washington journalists and thinkers around Moscow–an itinerary of meetings and meals designed to please the trip’s funder, a Russian energy concern called NaftaSib. This journey included Tod Lindberg, then-editor of The Washington Times editorial page; Insight magazine’s James Lucier; and Erica Tuttle, The National Interest’s assistant managing editor at the time.

Such trips were essential prongs of Abramoff’s lobbying campaigns. The conservative movement’s think tanks, newspapers, and little magazines are filled with junketeers who have traveled the world on his dime. “It was like, you weren’t cool if you didn’t go,” remembers Marshall Wittmann, former legislative director of the Christian Coalition. And that’s precisely as Abramoff planned it. In a draft of a 2000 proposal to represent the Malaysian government, he and his colleagues boasted, “Our firm is one of the most expert in organizing effective trips to distant destinations, having already brought literally hundreds of such notables [as think-tank scholars and journalists] to destinations ranging from Pakistan to Russia to Saipan and within the U.S. mainland.” They told the Malaysians that these trips produce a “certain outcome”: “timely and powerful editorials and articles” conveying his clients’ messages. “Our firm has facilitated hundreds of such articles and editorials.”

It’s one thing to imagine that politicians, with their need for campaign cash, could be swayed by a lobbyist. Journalists and intellectuals, on the other hand, even those who admit their ideological predispositions, aren’t supposed to be so susceptible to influence-peddlers. Abramoff, however, proved otherwise. He understood how the universe of thinkers and activists associated with the Republican Party operated, how to manipulate them with ideological buzzwords, and how to influence them with access and money. Jack Abramoff didn’t just corrupt Tom DeLay. He helped corrupt the whole conservative movement.

Foer makes much of this idea that Abramoff corrupted the conservative movement, but I think the evidence show that the conservative movement was bound for corruption from the get-go. The modern Republicans, from their earliest incarnation in the 60’s, starting with still active operatives like Morton Blackwell and Karl Rove to the next generation of Abramoff, Norquist and Reed, have always operated as dirty tricksters, and corrupt power brokers. The modern Republican Party is not, and never has been, the party of Ronald Reagan, not really. It’s the party of Richard Nixon.

Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist came together as a power in the College Republicans during the Reagan years. Blackwell, Rove, Atwater, and many others powerful operatives and strategists had cut their teeth there, as well, but these guys came in at the beginning of the heady Reagan years and they were fueled by the belief that they were on the permanent winning side of history. The triumverate of Norquist, Abramoff and Reed is legendary — and they are all implicated in the burgeoning Jack Abramoff/Tom DeLay scandal.

They have come to represent the three most important wings of the modern conservative movement — the Christian Right (Reed), the movement ideologues (Norquist) and the big money boys (Abramoff.) They are the Republican party. And they are all corrupt.

Reed is a total phony. I had long assumed, as most people probably did, that he came up through the Christian Right, a conservative Christian who got into politics through religion. He sure does look the part, doesn’t he? This, of course, is not true. He wasn’t “born again” until 1983, long after he had committed himself to Republican politics and proved himself to be a ruthless, unprincipled operative. He helped to create the Christian Coalition, it didn’t create him. In fact, the Christian Right doesn’t really exist independently of the Party, it is a wholly owned subsidiary, consciously created and nurtured as a Republican voting block.
(Morton Blackwell famously gave the Moral Majority its name.) Ralph Reed is now entering electoral politics himself, making the big move. He’s probably the most dangerous Republican in America.

Norquist, as most people know is a great admirer of Stalin’s tactics. He’s quoted as saying to Reed back in the College Republican days:

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

To that end, Norquist more than anyone else has ensured through carefully constructed alliances that movement ideologues like himself peppered the Republican power structure to the extent that over time, they have come to define it. This is why people like John Bolton, who has no more business being a diplomat than the Rude Pundit does, have become mainstream Republicans, even though they are clearly radical. He has made sure that Republicans are interdependent on each other through money and influence and that the money and influence flow through him and his allies.

Norquist is the truest of true believers, but he understands the importance of certain other inducements to keep people in line. Tom DeLay and Norquist created the K Street project and it’s been a rousing success. Abramoff and DeLay were the guys who offered those needed inducements when true belief and solidarity weren’t enough. Delay wielded the hammer and Abramoff (among others) offered the goodies. This is how they hold the GOP majority together. Ask Nick Smith how that works.

It’s not surprising that Abramoff is the weak link in this. He was the front man back in the college republican days, but he doesn’t seem to have been a real strategist in the way that Reed, with his ruthless single mindedness was or Norquist with his long term Soviet style political vision. In fact, the strangest thing about Abramoff is his almost decade long movie producing career that resulted in only two movies being made — Dolph Lundgren’s “Red Scorpion” and “Red Scorpion II” — both of which were co-produced by his brother, a successful show business attorney. This is an odd chapter in Abramoff’s life. It’s hard to know why he was unable to parlay himself a real career in Hollywood, except to wonder if maybe Hollywood, for all its faults, just isn’t as easily bought off as his pals in the conservative movement. After all, these kind of perks are just standard in the Entertainment industry and can’t buy you much of anything at all (from Foer’s article in TNR):

Over time, Abramoff’s media management grew more sophisticated, and he dispensed largesse across conservative journalism. His junkets didn’t just comprise meetings and site visits, they also included plenty of recreation time. Trips to the Choctaw Reservation, for instance, featured gambling at the Silver Star resort and rounds on a lush new golf course. Clint Bolick recalls, “I left the trip early, because it seemed to be so much about golf and gambling, activities I’m not much into.” As an artful Washington schmoozer, Abramoff would go even further that. One former Washington Times staffer told me that Abramoff’s practice invited his family to watch the circus and a Bruce Springsteen concert from its box at the MCI Center. (By my count, six Washington Times editors and writers attended Abramoff trips.)

Abramoff came back to Washington when his pals came to power in 1994. They suddenly had it all; their triumphant public leader, Newt Gingrich, was even considering a run for the presidency in 1996. (The ever humble Newt was quoted as saying, “Am I going to have to get into this thing?”) This was the time to put into place their plans for a permanent Republican establishment (“personnel is policy”), with the power of big money behind them. The problem is that Abramoff got greedy, and so did his little college republican friends. Both Norquist and Reed have been named in the various scandals, right along with Delay. Everybody seems to be hold their breath waiting to see if this thing takes down The Hammer, but the undercurrent of excitement is really whether it will render Norquist, Reed and others impotent over time as the scandal unfolds. It’s possible. These guys have always had the problem of hubris and premature triumpalism. They operate on a very emotional level that is a weakness. And they are, of course, incredibly greedy.

Much of this information can be found in Nina Easton’s fine book “The Gang of Five” which you should read if you are interested in learning about the relationship between the players in this DeLay/Abramoff scandal. She thought in 2000 that these guys had already overreached, but clearly she was ahead of herself. And it should be noted that even if all three go down, the momentum of the conservative movement will only slow, not reverse itself. Barring a very serious crisis, it’s going to take a long time and a gargantuan effort to turn that ship around, if we can do it at all.

But if these guys are irreparably discredited as a result of their own arrogance and avarice, it will be the final nail, I believe, in the Nixon legacy. These are his political heirs, raised and nurtured on the mother’s milk of corruption and dishonesty, scarred while very young by the ignominious downfall of their political father; driven to wreak revenge and recapture what they perceived as their rightful ownership of American politics. They are the spawn of Watergate resentment and this country will never be healthy until this group of radicals are removed from positions of power.

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

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Ethical Misdirection

Adam Cohen wrote an interesting op-ed this week-end about ethics and it’s one I think that the people involved should take a long hard look at. He makes the following good points:

But more talk show hosts, and talk show audiences, are starting to ask whether at least the most prominent talk shows with the highest ratings shouldn’t hold themselves to the same high standards to which they hold other media…Many talk show hosts make little effort to check their information…They rarely have procedures for running a correction…The wall between their editorial content and advertising is often nonexistent…And talk show hosts and their guests rarely disclose whether they are receiving money from the people or causes they talk about.

Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the radio pundit pack deliver far more people “news” than the NY Times does every day. There’s a whole”fair and balanced” Network devoted to right wing opinion that often fails to correct itself. And the cable shoutfests that spend hours discussing delusional swift boat obsessions and Clinton’s manly member set the agenda for what will be covered and discussed for days to come. Perhaps it’s a good thing that the mainstream press has decided to demand that these quasi-journalistic venues are held to some ethical standard. After all, they’ve been getting away with murder for decades now.

Oh, and maybe once we get that all cleared up we can start talking about bloggers.

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Retro Wingnuttia

So The Huffington Post is up and right now it’s featuring Larry David at the top of the page supporting John Bolton. I guess he really is a conservative just like my favorite mainstream writers Ann Coulter and Tony Blankley said. First David Horowitz, now this. Where will it end, I ask you, where?

It is good to see that David Frum is seriously performing this week’s designated function of rewriting history in ways that would make Stalin proud. He claims that the cold war started on May 9th 1945 when the Russians inexplicably required that they be allowed to celebrate the end of the war on a different day than their allies. This is a new one on me. I had always heard from the wingers that the cold war started at the “sell-out at Yalta.” Frum sees this intransigence as another sign of foreboding which we presumably should have heeded and invaded Russia forthwith. (In any case, he thinks that it’s wrong that we haven’t established memorials to the Gulags in the same way that we established memorials to the Holocaust and I’m sure that liberals are to blame for this because you know how we love Gulags.)

Of course, this mainstreaming of standard John Bircher talk circa 1958 was actually validated by George W. Bush this week when he “apologized” for the so-called sell-out at Yalta in a speech that would have made Joe McCarthy proud as punch. Repeating that old canard was once considered the sign of an bloodthirsty moron who literally believed that it was better to be dead than Red and believed it would have been preferable to start dropping nukes on the Soviet Union at the earliest possible moment. (Think Jack D Ripper.) Hey the Soviets had already lost 20 million, what difference would a few more million make, right? Besides, they were commies, not humans. Lucky for the planet, seasoned battle hardened men instead of chickenhawk baby boomers were in charge at the time and cooler heads prevailed.

The most amazing response to this I’ve read is this one from The Belmont Club in which Bush’s apology was compared favorably to the apologies for slavery and Native genocide. Considering that slavery and native American genocide were perpetrated by Americans and sanctioned and financed by the American governments of the time it’s hard to make the connection between that and failing to invade Russia but I guess if you squint your eyes really hard you might be able to see some correlation. And, of course, one wonders whether we would have been able to actually occupy Russia as well as Europe and Japan, even after the inevitable nuking, but no bother. Russia had already been pretty much destroyed so we should have put the frosting on the cake of WWII and completely annihilated it in order to save it — our favorite rationalization for American bloodlust for the past fifty years. “We’re killing them for their own good.”

But my Gawd, the brass balls of Bush to make this fatuous boast:

We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations, appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability,” the president said. “We have learned our lesson; no one’s liberty is expendable. In the long run, our security and true stability depend on the freedom of others.”

Meanwhile:

Seven months before Sept. 11, 2001, the State Department issued a human rights report on Uzbekistan. It was a litany of horrors.

The police repeatedly tortured prisoners, State Department officials wrote, noting that the most common techniques were “beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask.” Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were boiled to death, the groups reported. The February 2001 State Department report stated bluntly: “Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state with limited civil rights.”

Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, however, the Bush administration turned to Uzbekistan as a partner in the global fight against terrorism. The nation, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, granted the United States the use of a military base for fighting the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan. President Bush welcomed President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan to the White House, and the United States has given Uzbekistan more than $500 million for border control and other security measures.

Now there is growing evidence that the United States has sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation, even as Uzbekistan’s treatment of its own prisoners continues to earn it admonishments from around the world, including from the State Department.

The so-called rendition program, under which the Central Intelligence Agency transfers terror suspects to foreign countries to be held and interrogated, has linked the United States to other countries with poor human rights records. But the turnabout in relations with Uzbekistan is particularly sharp. Before Sept. 11, 2001, there was little high-level contact between Washington and Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, beyond the United States’ criticism of Uzbekistan.

And, as we all know, that is only the tip of the iceberg. There is the AQ Khan debacle wherein we have let the man who sold nuclear technology to every Tom Dick and Harry who wanted one, skate. Why? Because our ally, the military dictatorship of Pakistan demanded it and in the interest of the GWOT, we have let it happen. We have the recent presidential “man-date” which just shows how far Bush will go to debase himself tip-toeing through the bluebells with Prince Abdullah for the trivial purposes of showing the people that he’s serious about gas prices. Clearly, the principle of freedom doesn’t weigh heavily in his decision making. And everybody on the planet except the 101st Fighting Keyborders and the rest of the right wing press know it.

This insufferable self-serving sanctimony about freedom and liberty is more than just annoying, however. It’s dangerous. We’re now goading Vladimir Putin in ways that don’t make make sense and he is clearly not impressed. Pretending now that the waging of the Cold War was a mistake, when it was clearly one of the wisest and most intellectually evolved thing a great nation has ever done, is unwise. After a little more than four years in office, the administration has managed to almost completely destroy this country’s hard won credibility and it appears that Junior and his neocon cronies will not rest until it is completely gone. And pathetically, they are now reduced to using old chestnuts from the National Review of half a century ago to do it. Even though we actually won the cold war, apparently it’s more important that William F Buckley be perceived as having been right.

The most astonishing thing about this is that it appears this actually is the product of 40 years of heavily subsidized college Republican bull sessions and right wing think tank white papers. Tired, warmed-over fifty year old McCarthyite crapola. I thought liberals were the ones who didn’t have any new ideas.

Update: I know the Larry David piece is satire. I was being ironic and clearly, it failed.

Update II: Fixed ridiculous error on date of Yalta conference. Never post while doing somethiung else.

Biddy Values

When exactly did Cokie “she who shall sit in judgement of all who are not perfect” Roberts retire and name Michelle Cottle as her replacement?

Let’s be clear: This isn’t a question of vengeance or even of teaching the batty bride a life lesson. It’s about actions having consequences and the misuse of public resources (something you can bet Sean Hannity would be ranting about if the bride in question had been some homely piece of trailer trash). Hell, if my centrally monitored fire alarm accidentally goes off more than a couple of times, the D.C. Fire Department will start charging me for the cost of needlessly dispatching its trucks to my house, regardless of whether I’ve made every effort to control my temperamental system. Will I be miffed if this happens? Sure. But the city has a right to expect me to take responsibility for tying up its trucks and personnel. I don’t see why the people of Duluth should expect any less from Wilbanks–especially given that her false alarm was deliberate and at least partially premeditated.

So let’s stop all the bloviating about prosecuting Wilbanks, and let the now-humiliated bride start working out how to repay her very real debt to the people of Duluth. Maybe then her neighbors will be able to begin forgiving and forgetting. After all, while Wilbanks unquestionably made a stupid mistake, it’s not as though she slept with an “American Idol” contestant.

Michelle and Cokie heard all about it when they were getting a wash and curl down at the beauty parlor. The neighbors aren’t going to be doing any forgivin’ and forgettin’ until that little tramp gets every single one of them tickets to Oprah and a spot on Katie Couric.

The nosy old biddies really are back in charge, aren’t they? And they aren’t all named James Dobson, either.

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The Age Of Stupidity

DC Media Girl says this interview proves that the inehritance tax needs to be raised to 95%. I’m sorry to say that I think I’ve been unfair to all the religious types who believe the Rapture is imminent. Clearly, this is the end of the world as we know it.

Q: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

HILTON: I don’t know. Married to my boyfriend with two kids and a house. Still acting and doing stuff.

Q: What kind of wife would you be?

HILTON: A good one. I’d cook and clean.

Q: What would your children’s names be?

HILTON: Paris and London.

Q: Paris for a girl? London for a boy?

HILTON: Yeah.

Q: Why are you so popular?

HILTON: I don’t know, because of who I am. I’m not like anybody else. I’m like an American princess.

Q: What would you be like if you were — I don’t know — Paris Smith?

HILTON: I’d be the same. Maybe I’d be a veterinarian.

Q: In your career, what are you most afraid of happening?

HILTON: I don’t know. Nothing.

Q: Nothing? What about in your personal life?

HILTON: I don’t know. Death.

Q: Why? What’s so scary about death?

HILTON: Because I don’t know what happens.

Remember. She’s a productive member of society who will have no choice but to stop investing if she has to pay taxes. The middle class should be proud to subsidize the government entirely in order that leaders like her be given the freedom to create more wealth. She is the engine that runs this economy of ours and we need many more of her. That’s what makes this country great.

She’s a lot like this guy:

Bob Woodward: How is history likely to judge your Iraq war?

President Bush: History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.

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Homos Everywhere!

Check out the video on Rev-Mykeru showing what Robertson says when he doesn’t realize he’s being taped.

Pat Robertson thinks he can tell if someone is gay by the sound of his voice on the phone. He must get awfully nervous when Gary Bauer and James Dobson call.

Via Big Brass Blog
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Reefer Madness

Well, this makes good sense.

The focus of the drug war in the United States has shifted significantly over the past decade from hard drugs to marijuana, which now accounts for nearly half of all drug arrests nationwide, according to an analysis of federal crime statistics released yesterday.

The study of FBI data by a Washington-based think tank, the Sentencing Project, found that the proportion of heroin and cocaine cases plummeted from 55 percent of all drug arrests in 1992 to less than 30 percent 10 years later. During the same period, marijuana arrests rose from 28 percent of the total to 45 percent.

Coming in the wake of the focus on crack cocaine in the late 1980s, the increasing emphasis on marijuana enforcement was accompanied by a dramatic rise in overall drug arrests, from fewer than 1.1 million in 1990 to more than 1.5 million a decade later. Eighty percent of that increase came from marijuana arrests, the study found.

The rapid increase has not had a significant impact on prisons, however, because just 6 percent of the arrests resulted in felony convictions, the study found. The most widely quoted household survey on the topic has shown relatively little change in the overall rate of marijuana use over the same time period, experts said.

“In reality, the war on drugs as pursued in the 1990s was to a large degree a war on marijuana,” said Ryan S. King, the study’s co-author and a research associate at the Sentencing Project. “Marijuana is the most widely used illegal substance, but that doesn’t explain this level of growth over time. . . . The question is, is this really where we want to be spending all our money?”

Sure. Let’s spend billions on arresting pot smokers for absolutely no good reason. They should taking the purple pill instead like Real Americans anyway.

There is a rather large minority of Americans (or so I’ve heard…) who smoke marijuana or who have smoked marijuana and the numbers have stayed pretty much the same from decade to decade since the 60’s. Every once in a while the government and the moralists get hysterical like today’s “this is your brain on pot, oh my God, it’s not Cheech and Chong’s marijuana — it will drive you mad, I say, mad!!!” — and then it all quiets down for awhile.

That is not to say that we don’t have a problem with the drug culture. However, the drug culture I’m talking about is the one that’s advertised incessantly on television that tells people they should eat pills from dawn to dusk. Hey, it’s a free country, but if you’re going to pass moral judgments, how about taking a little look at the chemically induced burgeoning erection business?

(Meanwhile, in Bobo’s world, half of the heartland is blowing themselves up in meth labs and screwing themselves to death. But I think they tend to vote Republican.)

Seriously, this is one reason why kids do dangerous drugs. They find out quickly that this stuff about pot is nonsense and people who say it is as dangerous (or more dangerous by implication) than cocaine or methamphetamine, then lose all credibility. If they’re lying about this, they’re probably lying about everything.

I don’t know what it is about pot that upsets some people so much but it always has. Associations with race used to be the thing; now I think it’s lazy pleasure. These people apparently believe that pleasure has to be mixed with violence or punishment. Certainly, the right’s foremost expert on drug abuse, Rush Limbaugh, seems to think so.

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A Moronic Proposal

From “the sage,” Larry Elder:

Weyco Inc. and Investors Property Management may be onto something. If employers seek to control costs, improve morale, boost the company image and reduce workplace drama [by not employing smokers], why not refuse to hire … Democrats?

Democrats — compared to Republicans — on average are less affluent, more unhappy, more prone to anti-social behavior, more prone to self-destructive behavior, and more likely to have been shot at, robbed or burglarized. More of them see X-rated movies, more of them smoke, and they’re less likely to be married and more likely to have separated or divorced.

George Washington University professor Lee Sigelman looked at 22 years of survey data collected by University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. Overall, he found Democrats less affluent, more distrustful, more sickly and more suicidal, and thus doomed to an earlier death. In short, Democrats as a class — like smokers — have, uh, issues. So let’s just extend this hiring ban to cover unhappy, anti-social, self-destructive, unhealthy Democrats.

And what about last year’s “Primetime Live” sex survey? It found Republicans, more than Democrats, to be satisfied with their sex lives, more likely to wear something sexy to entice their partner and more likely to be in a committed relationship, in which they claim to be very satisfied. The survey also found that Republicans are less likely to cheat on their partner or to fake orgasms. No wonder Democrats are unhappy, unhealthy and anti-social.

And then there was the follow-up study that showed Republicans have on average 20 fewer IQ points than Democrats and are pathological liars, which explained the results of the first one. (And anyone should be able to understand why Democrats would be depressed, if not suicidal, when people who exhibit these traits are running their country. It’s a miracle we can get out of bed in the morning.)

As for the sex satisfaction comparisons, let’s just say life is always simpler if you keep your expectations low. Rush Limbaugh, Daryn Kagan. Nuff said.

I should make it clear for the Ann Coulter fans, that I understand that Elder was attempting to make a swiftian argument against he idea of banning smokers from the workplace, a sentiment with which I happen to agree. But as with all conservative would-be satirists, he completely misses the point. In this case, it isn’t Democrats using Big Gubbermint to outlaw smoking in the workplace, its the free market that’s doing it. If we had national health care, which would be less expensive for these companies than the system we have now, this “incentive” to keep people with unhealthy habits out of your workforce will greatly dissipate. And anyway, Elder’s supposed to be a libertarian, so what’s he bitching about? John Galt can fire anyone he damn well wants to.

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While The DLC Slept

Matt Yglesias and Atrios both take issue with Marshall Wittman’s comparison of Move-on to Tony Benn, british lefty leader of the 70’s and 80’s. Yglesias ably proves that there is very little actual policy difference between Move-on and the DLC but he gives short shrift to what I think are the underlying reasons for the comparison — style and temperament. Benn wouldn’t sit down and shut up and it drove the other Labour leaders insane as they were trying to modernize their image and transition from mild market socialism to savvy free marketers. They didn’t like the resistence and felt it undermined their goals. In those days it seemed important that the left shed its radical image.

When the Labourites were trying to change the party image 20 or 30 years ago, the Tories were, by contrast, a group of prudent yet forward thinking conservatives who had long believed that free enterprise was being stifled by outdated socialist schemes. And the economy was sick and seemed to prove their point. After the worldwide youth movement of the 1960’s reached its apotheosis, it sounded quite good to have some “grown-ups in charge.” That was the environment in which Michael Foot asked Benn to stop with the rabble rousing. We underwent much the same thing here, a little bit later, which resulted in Bill Clinton being nominated and running as a centrist in 1992. Liberals everywhere were redefining themselves in the face of a conservative backlash of one degree or another.

But, that was then and this is now. We are no longer in a period in which liberalism must tone down its radicals and burnish its management credentials. If anything, we must prove that we even exist and beyond that, that we stand for something. Even the liberal eliminationist mantra on the right has begun to sound stale and decrepit — the evil strawman they’ve created is as lackluster and dull as we are. We are in danger of simply fading away if we do not pour some some blood and nerve into our politics.

Furthermore, the consensus style of politics that the DLC depends upon to deliver its centrist vision simply is not possible in this political environment. The right has become radical and uncompromising, each of its factions growing more and more demanding. There is no middle in American politics today, as much as we might wish it to be so — and it’s not because of positions on the issues, it’s because of the zero sum politics the Republicans are playing. In order to provide some ballast, we simply must have some weight on the liberal side of our arguments or they will carry us all further to the right than even the DLC can live with. That’s where Move-on and Michael Moore and the left blogosphere come in.

This is not the kind of politics I would prefer. It would be nice if we could have some civility and comity for awhile; this is exhausting and mostly unproductive. And people in hell want ice-water. It is what it is and if there’s one thing we should have learned over the past 15 years it’s that being conciliatory with the radical Republicans and allowing them to take us further and further right is a recipe for losing. We’ve lost it all for the moment and we are barely hanging on to the possibility of getting a piece of it back.

Ralph Reed, Christian choirboy and corrupt lobbyist used to exhort new College Republican recruits back in the early 80’s repeat the famous “Patton” speech only substituting the words Democrats for Nazis. “The Democrats are the enemy!” Wade into them! Spill their blood! Shoot them in the belly!”

That is what the Republicans have been doing for more than 20 years now. These are the times in which we live, unfortunately. We didn’t create this environment, but we cannot ignore it and pretend that we are back in the Truman administration. And, even then let’s not forget that the anti-communists of that era are the granfathers of today’s liberal haters. We should have learned.

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Tin Soldiers

Wow.

Apparently, that execratory slice of gelatinous offal, Ann Coulter, spews her Nazi vomit with police protection these days. And when some wiseacre on campus asks whether her views on gay marriage apply to men who only fuck their wives in the ass, he’s manhandled and arrested.

And, as we know, they are strip-searching 50-something female schoolteachers who protest Bush now, too.

Oh. And by the way, today is the 35th anniversary of Kent State.

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