From Joe Klein to Ed Koch to every wingnut in the land, the meme of the week is that Democrats are undemocratic because we believe in an independent judiciary and will use the illegitimate minority cudgel of the filibuster to thwart the will of the people. Shame, shame on us.
Yes, we do desire that judicial nominees not be ideologically so removed from our way of thinking as to turn the country in a completely different direction — like proclaim for the first time, for instance, that the government derives its authority from God rather than the governed. And yes, since the Republicans repealed all the tools they used to accomplished the same tempering of ideology when a Democrat was president, we have threatened to use the only tool at our disposal, the filibuster. This means we have no respect for the majority and are attempting to thwart the will of the electorate, who evidently voted en masse for a radical reform of the judiciary in the last election. Who knew?
Undemocratic. I wonder what one would call impeaching a twice elected president for a personal indiscretion would be? How about redrawing the electoral maps whenever it suits in order to establish a larger majority? Or how about staging a recall less than two years after a scheduled election just because the governor had hit a rough spot in public opinion? (The way Bush is going right now, I wish we had such a thing at the federal level. We could kick his unpopular ass out. But, surely that would be considered “undemocratic” wouldn’t it — if Democrats did it?)
The word “democracy” is sadly being bastardized to such a degree that it’s losing its meaning. It’s become like Jesus — a code word for Republicans to bash Democrats. But with all this talk of the filibuster being undemocratic, and it is, it certainly is no more undemocratic than the Senate itself. The Republican party currently represents a majority of states in the Sernate, but the Democrats represent a majority of people. What’s democratic about that?
Or how about that relic called the electoral college — you know the little anachronism that got Junior his first term? Talk about undemocratic. If we are going to start going down the road to a pure democracy then I would suggest that we should probably eliminate both of those institutions.
But it’s a funny thing. Whenever I’ve had conversations bemoaning the undemocratic streak in the GOP these last few years, what with its unprecedented blow job impeachments and recalls and district redrawings and the like, I’m always met with the standard wingnut line “the United States is a republic, not a democracy.” Suddenly, we’re hearing all this stuff about thwarting the majority. How convenient.
I get tired of pointing out the intellectual inconsistencies on the right. But it is so vast and fertile a subject that I come up against it again and again and again. This is way beyond something as prosaic as hypocrisy. They feel no shame in completely doing an intellectual 180 overnight when circumstances require it. They don’t even betray a rueful shrug of the shoulders with a “well you know, it’s politics.” They argue with the same supercilious, ferocious rudeness on whatever side of the argument serves them at any moment, without ever acknowledging (even, I suspect, to themselves) that just yesterday they were on the other side. Very, very weird.
Busy, Busy, Busy has this great screenshot of an ad by the wingnut “Moving America Forward” featuring those great conservatives Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, John Bolton and … Joe Lieberman.
It occurs to me that the Democrats should start doing the same thing to John McCain. If McCain runs in ’08, it would be nice to have him saddled with being the Democrats favorite conservative. Why take the chance that he could get the nomination? Let’s taint him.
“The politics of division and slander are not our values,” McCain said in Virginia. “They are corrupting influences on religion and politics and those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party and our country.”
That’s a message that could play well in the general election, where independents could go for him. Best make sure he doesn’t get the nomination. Let’s run some ads with McCain alongside Barbara Boxer and Hillary Clinton. That ought to finish him off.
As an aside, I don’t know if the Republican establishment is as convinced of this as Republicans of my acquaintance, but the ones I know really think that Lieberman could win. Really. They think he’s the only guy in the party who could get Republican votes. I think they are delusional. What Lieberman lacks in charisma he more than makes up for in lack of appeal. But these people really believe that Joementum is a threat.
Of course, he will never get the nomination, as we know. But we should ensure that McCain doesn’t get it either. Democrats have to win.
It’s one thing to stretch logic enough to conclude that a fertilized piece of DNA in the womb is a human life that deserves the full protection of the law, but it’s quite another to conclude that a fertilized piece of DNA in a petri dish is a human life that deserves the full protection of the law. Especially when the petri dish version might hold the key to curing grandpa’s Parkinson’s.
I actually think the opposite is true. If one concludes that these scraps of DNA have the rights of personhood depending on where they are located, I would think that logic would force you to choose the one that doesn’t conflict directly with the fully formed human being it’s living within — the woman. The controversy about abortion can be distilled to a conflict between what is, at the DNA scrap stage anyway, a “life” that is quite literally attached to and part of another life. If people want to decide that DNA scraps in petri dishes are full citizens with the right to vote and own condos in Miami, it’s stupid, but far more logical than it is when you tell a woman that the scrap of DNA inside of her body has the same equal rights under the law as she does.
Personally, I see scraps of DNA in petri dishes and wombs simply as scraps of DNA which do not hold human rights at all. I’m all for curing grandpa’s Parkinsons with the hundreds of thousands of discarded embryos from in vitro fertilization. That seems like common sense to me — maybe even God’s plan. But if we are going to go around bestowing human rights on DNA I think fully formed human beings should have at least a slightly superior claim to those rights than the microscopic scrap of DNA inside her body.
Would it be terribly politically incorrect of me to wish that Joe Klein would just succumb to his impending persistent vegetative state? I promise to let the Schindlers adopt him and they can pump his feeding tube full of homemade butterscotch puddin’ 24/7 if he will just shut his burbling piehole.
In spite of the fact that three quarters of the country were repelled by the Republican grandstanding in the Schiavo circus, Klein insists, as always, that it is the Democrats who have it wrong. We need to give “careful consideration to what thoughtful conservatives are saying about the role of the judiciary in our public life.”
Which thoughtful conservatives should we be listening to Joe? The ones who are directly threatening conservative and liberal judges who believe their job is to interpret the laws or the ones who merely understand why someone would be moved to threaten conservative and liberal judges who believe their job is to interpret the laws? Or maybe it’s this thoughtful conservative who heads the Coalition For A Fair Judiciary. Here’s what she thoughtfully had to say today, (via Sam Rosenfeld on TAPPED):
My job is stand in the breach between the left and the president’s judicial nominations . . . You know who they are. You’ve seen them. The pro-abortion fanatics and the radical feminists, the atheists who file lawsuits attacking the pledge of allegiance and the ten commandments, the environmentalist tree-hugging animal-rights extremists, the one-world globalists who worship at the altar of the United Nations and international law, the militant homosexuals and the anti-military hippie pieceniks, the racial agitators who believe we are all created equal but some are a little more equal than others, the union bosses and the socialists posing as journalists and college professors, the government bureaucrats and the tax-and-spend junkies, the Hollywood elitists, the air-headed actors and singers who think that we actually care what they think, the pornographers who fund the leftists and who won’t be happy until every Bible in every child’s hands is replaced with the latest copy of Hustler magazine, and of course the gun-grabbing trial lawyers and their willing accomplices in the United States Senate who won’t be happy until they disarm every last citizen down to the last bee bee and paintball gun.
Yes, I agree that I need to listen more to flaming fuckwads like that. Right after I pull the hot needles from my eyeballs.
The Schiavo case has provoked a passionate American conversation, which is taking place on a more profound level than the simple yes and no answers of the polls. Yes, the vast majority disdain the politicians who chose to exploit the case. And yes, a solid majority would not want their own lives prolonged in a similar situation. But the questions that cut closest to home are the family issues. What would you do if Terri Schiavo were your daughter? Why couldn’t Michael Schiavo just give custody over to the parents? What do we do about custody in a society where the parent-child bond is more durable than many marriages? The President’s solution, to “err on the side of life,” seems the only humane answer—if there is a dispute between parents and spouse, and the disabled person has left no clear instruction.
“The parent-child bond is more durable that many marriages?” And here I thought it was supposed to be the Democrats who infantilized adults. Or maybe it’s really just the infantilization of men. The old rhyme used to say that a “son is a son ’til he takes a wife, a daughter’s a daughter all of her life.” Now a son is a daughter all of his life too. I guess that’s a weird form of progress.
Klein’s insistence that the polls don’t acurately reflect the nation’s feelings on the matter is reminiscent of official Washington’s gobsmacked reaction to the public’s take on the Lewinsky scandal. Here’s how Klein himself explained it in “The Natural.”
When it has all been digested, public opinion has shifted not a whit. The President’s job approval ratings remained very high, in the 60 percent range — he would leave office with the highest sustained job approval ratings of any President since John F. Kennedy. His personal approval ratings were lower, of course. It was difficult to imagine any civilian answering in the affirmative if asked, “Do you approve of the President’s personal behavior?” Of course many secret sympathies were undoubtedly harbored, especially among those Clinton’s age, who had navigated themselves — shakily — through the uncertain moral shoals of the late twentieth century.
[…]
The Republicans suffered grievously. They lost five seats in the congressional elections that fall, which was very rare for a midterm election during a President’s sixth year in office. Newt Gingrich suffered and appropriately Jacobin fate, becoming as target of his own hotheads…His reign had lasted exactly four — entirely disasterous — years…A Harris poll showed that journalists were now held in the lowest public esteem of any professional group, lower even than lawyers.
This mystified Washington. William Bennett, the former Reagan education Secretary who had built a cottage industry out of books that compiles stories about “virtues” now hustled forth with a new book called “The Death of Outrage, and made a national tour lamenting the moral insensitivity of the American people. The editorial pages of both the New York Times and Washington Post had sounded, in the midst of the scandal every bit as intemperate as the editorial page of the Wall Street journal.
[…]
How then to explain the contrast between the intensity of outrage in Washington and the laissez-faire attitude toward the President’s immorality among the citizens of the most religious of Western democracies? It seemed an inprecedented disparity, and quite fascinating. It was especially entertaining to watch the commentariat — which had been predicting for months yhat the public would soon share its anti-Clinton obsession — try to explain why that hadn’t happened. Americans had judged the Lewinsky affair a delicious, disgraceful, exploitive and ultimately private act of consensual sex.
However you choose to characterize people’s reactions, the only one that matters politically is that they believed it was a private act and that the government had overstepped its bounds. But “the uncertain moral shoals of the late twentieth century” (and early 21st century) aren’t confined to whether middle aged men can keep it in their pants at the office. Lot’s of uncertainty these days Joe, except for one thing — nobody wants that moron George W. Bush defining what constitutes “erring on the side of life” any more than they wanted Ken Starr rifling through their panty drawers.
Speaking of the Democratic response he says:
…it was a curiously sterile pronouncement, bereft of the Congressman’s usual raucous humanity. It exemplified the Democratic Party’s recent overdependence on legal process, a culture of law that has supplanted legislative consideration of vexing social issues. This is democracy once removed.
Huh? The libertine left is now overly dependent on the rule of law? WTF? And who says that liberals are supplanting legislative consideration of vexing social issues? We are happy to pass laws on all these things. But, we just have a little expectation that these laws should be constitutional that’s all. We’re not in favor of inflicting particular religious doctine on those who don’t believe and we don’t think that the government should intrude on purely private matters. If that’s a “culture of law” count me in.
There must be some kind of computer program you can buy in DC that scolds Democrats like a drunk and bitter stepmother no matter what the circumstances. If there isn’t, I’m going to invent one so that Joe Klein can spend even more time kissing the flatulent asses of sanctimonious Republican gasbags who insist that James Dobson and his zombie nation represent “real” America
This month, Democrats may use procedural tricks to stop all Senate business and block a Republican effort to eliminate minority filibuster rights and jam through seven federal judges proposed by the President. The fight may be winnable, but it is a culture of law cul-de-sac. The Democrats will be shutting down the Senate over a matter of process rather than substance, a pinhead of principle most civilians will find difficult to understand. The Armageddon of confirmation battles—over the next Supreme Court Justice—will probably follow soon after, and it may cement a public impression of the Democrats as a party obsessed with the legal processes that preserve the status quo on issues such as abortion, gay rights and extreme secularism—and little else. The political damage may be considerable.
I’ll take my chances. Klein was among those he now mocks for assuming for months that Clinton would be forced from office. He has the political instincts of a dead cat. This judicial fight could have turned out the way Klein presents it. But Schiavo changed all that. Klein’s got it exactly backwards. The GOP let loose the hounds of hell and now they can’t get them back under control. We are better positioned than we have been since 9/11 to win one.
It’s not about Democrats being “obsessed with legal processes and little else.” It’s about a bunch of extremists pushing their agenda far beyond what the public is ready to accept. Nobody gives a shit what Barney Frank said about this matter. They haven’t even heard it. It’s what Bill Frist and Tom DeLay said that freaked them out.
Josh Marshall brought up an interesting point about this that hadn’t occurred to me before:
Was there any clear point in the legal history of this case at which, purely on legal intepretation grounds, any significant question should have been judged in a different manner?
I raise this because one of this site’s regular readers and correspondents just dropped me a note about some program he was watching on C-Span in which some staffer from the Hill was about to blow a fuse over unaccountable activist judges and how they all need to be impeached.
But if the answer to the question above is ‘no’, then isn’t the real beef of all these Schiavo-hounds that these judges aren’t activist enough in departing from the law to get results the hounds want?
Well that gets to Klein’s newfound embrace of the democratic process for resolving all these pesky social issues instead of relying on that musty old “culture of law” (aka the constitution of the United States.) Yes, it’s very easy for these “culture of life” zealots to complain, but it’s a little bit more difficult for them to actually step up to the plate and pass these laws in the way that Klein believes we all should. That’s because these ideas are unpopular, unconsitutional and completely out of the mainstream. (Here’s an interesting article in the St Petersberg Times that shows the great democratic and deliberative process that brought about “Terri’s law” — which was rightly declared unconstitutional by 7-0 margin in the Florida Supreme court and rejected for review by the US Supreme Court. Maybe if these people wrote literate legislation they’d pass muster. But then, perhaps they really don’t want to…)
It’s not that these judges are “liberal activists” — the main players in the Schiavo matter were conservative republicans, for God’s sake. It’s that the Republican legislatures both state and federal want to blame the judiciary for the fact that they cannot deliver on these repugnant, unamerican, demands from their extremist religious right constituency. They want something that both real “thoughtful” Republican judges and Democrats all agree is unconstitutional. They want to destroy an independent judiciary so they can pass unconstituional laws on a purely partisan basis with no review. Sorry, I just don’t see what’s so “thoughtful” about that.
Armando has a full detailed Klein take down in this post over on Kos. Check it out.
Atrios has posted a Drudge story about Arthur Finkelstein allegedly getting married in Massachusetts to his lover of forty years. The couple have two adopted children.
For those of you who don’t know the full extent of Arthur Finkelstein’s heroic self-loathing, read this article:
Finkelstein’s signature style emerges through the ads he creates. Two recent adds brand Democrats as liberals: “Call liberal Paul Wellstone. Tell him it’s wrong to spend billions more on welfare,” one ad states.
“That’s liberal,” says another. “That’s Jack Reed. That’s wrong. Call liberal Jack Reed and tell him his record on welfare is just too liberal for you.”
“That’s the Finkelstein formula: just brand somebody a liberal, use the word over and over again, engage in that kind of name-calling,” said Democratic consultant Mark Mellman.
Arthur Finkelstein, more than any other person in this country, is the one who made the word “liberal” into a dirty word.
In the end, I suppose it’s quite sweet, actually, that the rabid gay baiter Jesse Helms depended on the openly gay Finkelstein to consult on his racist and homophobic campaigns. What a big tent these mean and macho Republicans pitch when they let their hair down.
It would seem that they have no problem with gays marrying each other as long as they are willing to bash other gays who want to marry each other. Arthur’s still very much in the game. Here’s his latest little project:
Stop Her Now,” is the name of the new Web site soon to be launched by Arthur Finkelstein, the chief political guru of New York Governor George Pataki, and one of the country’s most successful yet least known political consultants/spin doctors. The “Her” at StopHerNow.com is New York Senator Hillary Clinton. According to the New York Post, Finkelstein, the longtime master of the political attack ad, hopes the site will raise as much as $10 million from Hillary-haters across the nation and provide a gathering point for conservative activists working to defeat her in next year’s Senatorial election. Hillary’s defeat would likely derail any presidential aspirations she might have.
It’s a mistake to think that Karl Rove is the evil puppetmaster of the GOP. It’s just that Rove had so little to work with that he’s considered something of a genius. There are a whole bunch of evil puppetmasters and they’ve been around for a long time. This modern GOP is Nixon’s party. They like to think they are Reagan’s party, but they are Nixon’s party. Dirty politics is their specialty. And Arthur Finkelstein is one of the Grand Vizier’s of the game.
According to TBOGG, Rush said this yesterday about the Darling Martinez memo:
What was wrong with this? What’s wrong with the Republicans having political strategy sessions? They didn’t in this case, but even if they had, so what?
Here’s what the future ex-Mrs Limbaugh (thanks GL) said:
Basically a political memo that said the fight over the removing Schiavo’s feeding tube is a great political issue, and a tough issue for Democrats. News of the day, comes out of Mel Martinez’ office. He’s fired an aide who allegedly wrote this. Ed Henry question — what’s the big deal?
For those who didn’t see the NPC blogging, ass-fucking and journalism panel this morning, the great Crooks and Liars has the highlights for you right here.
Gannon has quite the schtick going for him. I don’t know if it’s a natural gift or if he has had help, but he handled it all quite deftly, I thought. He makes absolutely no sense, wanders off into unrelated subjects, claims victimhood at every turn, avoids questions like a pro and appears to me to be incredibly stupid, arrogant and deluded all at the same time. A clown that nobody in their right mind could take seriously. In others words, meet the next GOP nominee for President of the United States.
I spent years right on this old blog screeching about George W. Bush being just as I described, assuming that any sentient person could see that he makes no sense, that he speaks in riddles that he is coached (badly) and that he has absolutely no idea that he is an idiot. It took me a long time realize that that is exactly what a lot of people like about him. He doesn’t need to make sense as long as he claims to represent the “real” people who are predisposed to support him against the pointy headed know-it-alls who lord over them. I have little doubt that they think Gannon really kicked ass.
“And why shouldn’t the president have one person who will tell his side of the story? Fox is fair and balanced, they have to tell all sides. It’s not right that president Bush has to spend tax payer money just to get his story told. I’m so sick of this liberal media.”
“You know he was a marine don’t you, Ethel?” “I heard that. He looks like one too.”
I think Gannon’s assertion that FOXNews is not conservative was his “Christ, he changed mah heart moment.” I expect that he’s on his way to a comeback. The right takes care of its own, even if they sell out the country to the Russian mob or advertise their prositution services with pictures of themselves pissing on the internet. It’s all good.
Matt Yglesias was just great and I especially enjoyed his incredulous amusement at Gannon’s nonsense. It is always difficult to argue with aliens from other planets, but I thought that Matt did it very well. It remains important that as we go into this bizarre new era of elastic truth and contrived alternate storylines that normal, intelligent people continue to operate within the bounds of verifiable reality. Somebody’s got to keep score.
And Wonkette was a big surprise. She was unrelenting with old JG and she came the closest to rattling his bizarre robotic composure. Maybe it takes an aggressive, unflappable female with a sense of humor to get to wierd gay Republicans like Guckert. I saw a little bitchy sneer on his face come forth as she was questioning him and it would have been interesting if she’d been allowed to continue. Unfortunately, all the timorous and delicate old ladies of the DC press club were willing to host a panel featuring a real mediawhore, but they weren’t willing to let the discussion go where it would naturally lead.
I’m not saying that they needed to spend the hour addressing the fact that Guckert has his pictures plastered all over the internet illegally selling his body for money, but it is such an amazing turn around from just a few years ago when the DC press corp had no compunctions whatsoever about spending month after month speculating about the sex lives of the president, first lady and Monica Lewisnky (plus all of her former lovers) without a minute spared as to whether the details were relevant to any particular public discussion. And to the best of my knowledge, there weren’t even any naked pictures.
It’s very nice that they have now decided that these private matters are off limits when it comes to male prostitutes in the white house press corps with connections to Republican operatives and born again Christians who believe that sexual morals should be policed by the federal government. It will be interesting to see if they hold to this new regard for personal privacy when the next GOP pimped sex scandal pops up.
In the end, these panels about “what constitutes journalism” will probably become perennial just as the “why can’t we stop ourselves from only covering the horserace” panels that crop up after every election. The internet is changing all of it and nobody knows where it’s going. All the talking in the world isn’t going to make a lick of difference. Everybody’s just along for the ride — bloggers, journalists and Republican male hookers alike.
Many of you have already read this amazing essay called “Life and Death” by a very interesting fellow named Chris Clarke. If you haven’t, you should. And then read his bio. Some people’s lives are a work of art.
After yesterday’s post on Powerline’s lack of even rudimentary knowledge of photography, I couldn’t believe it when I read all this over at Atrios’s place this morning. And apparently Highpockets still can’t admit that every document that sheds a bad light on Republicans isn’t a Democratic party forgery.
Someday someone is going to have to go back and examine again how they and the other wingnut bloggers also got every detail wrong on the Rathergate memos and still came to be lauded for their “investigation.” Why nobody has found the irony of that worth exploring I’ll never know.
Of course these “investigative bloggers” are full of shit. They are part of the right wing media and they are just doing what they all do. They have no credibility as “investigators” or analysts because they have no personal integrity. This is clear because they never, ever admit that they make a mistake. Sadly, because the mainstream media are so clueless about what “blogging” is, we all get tarred by the same brush as these GOP tools.
I don’t mind being called partisan because I am. I really makes me angry, however, to be called dishonest because these rightwing scumbags lie constantly and the media can’t be bothered to see what is right in front of their faces — that just like Rush and FoxNews and all the dirty tricksters and Regnery whores, the right wing blogosphere is full of people who just make shit up. It’s one of the things that distinguishes the right from the left generally — the blatent, in your face, “you can believe me or you can believe your eyes” dishonesty. There is nothing new about this but the fact that so many in the press still eat those lies with a spoon and never get tired of being played is just stunning.
Earlier today, Rush’s little galpal Daryn Kagan was questioning the CNN congressional correspondent about the Martinez memo. She said something to the effect of “aren’t people in this town a little too sensitive? What’s wrong with this memo, anyway?” The guy was a little taken aback (probably because he didn’t realize he now works for FOXNews) and patiently explained that it was a big deal because the Republicans had denied writing or seeing the memo and that they had insisted that the Schiavo case was a matter of conscience not politics.
This is what we are dealing with. And the fact that Hindquarter got it wrong again won’t matter at all. He’s in the club and he’ll be back with more ridiculous flights of logic and Howie Kurtz will kiss his ass because Time magazine named him and his partners in bullshit bloggers of the year. And the lines between the mainstream media and the right wing noise machine get blurrier and blurrier by the day.
KAGAN: The first one deals with this memo that we now know comes out of Senator Mel Martinez’ office. It goes back to the Terri Schiavo story, which you’re very familiar with, because you were in the state capital. Basically a political memo that said the fight over the removing Schiavo’s feeding tube is a great political issue, and a tough issue for Democrats. News of the day, comes out of Mel Martinez’ office. He’s fired an aide who allegedly wrote this.
Ed Henry question — what’s the big deal?
HENRY: The big deal here is that Republicans were really under fire when they were handling that emergency legislation, because this memo suggested that they were doing the Schiavo legislation for political purposes. As you mentioned, they kept insisting no, and they also suggested this have been a hoax, that maybe the democrats had a little political dirty trick here, and we’ve seen a lot of blogs out there saying that basically this was a fake memo, maybe it was like CBS documents on the National Guard story, and everyone was running around to figured it all out.
I think it’s a footnote to the entire Schiavo story. But it was a big political battle, and now we learned it, in fact, was a Republican talking points memo. It was drafted by an aide to Senator Mel Martinez, the former cabinet secretary. As you mentioned, that staffer has now resigned his job, and it’s a pretty big political black eye for the Republicans, and I think, again, it’s just going to be a footnote in the long run. But it’s not a good day for the Republicans on that.
KAGAN: But here’s what I don’t get it, when I look at it, it just seems — is this town just too sensitive. It just seems the fight over removing Schiavo’s tube, it was a political issue, it did come up, and the Democrats did have a tough time with it. I think a lot of people felt they didn’t speak up like they should have.
HENRY: The bottom line is that Tom Delay and other top Republicans who were pushing this legislation insisted that politics played no role in the debate. They were just trying to save Terri Schiavo’s life. This memo said Republicans felt, in fact, it was going to rally their political base. This was going to be a big issue for them in the 2006 election. The other flip side of this that’s kind of interesting, is that whether or not the Republicans intended it to be a political benefit, the polls now show that overwhelmingly across the country, the American people feel it was a big political loser for the Republicans; they should have stayed out of it. So sometimes the best-laid plans don’t exactly work out.
It sounds to me like the future Mrs Limbaugh’s been getting some very special talking points of her own.