Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Exploding Bandwagon

Noam Scheiber, who I often endorse wholeheartedly on other issues, explicitly lays out the divide in the Democratic party as I did, as being between “social libertarians” and “communitarians” which is, in my opinion, a weasel word for “kinda socially conservative” in this context.

He says that Democrats began losing because they were perceived as being immoral and licentious, going all the way back to 1972’s “abortion, amnesty and acid.” It was, in his opinion, only when Bill Clinton said that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” that we began to lose that perception. But we’ve been backsliding ever since. Indeed, according to him, every election we have lost or won in the last 30 years has been because we are either perceived as moral or immoral to the moderates who swing elections.

I’ll leave it to others to analyze the election statistics to prove whether or not that last is true, but I will say that while we are concerning ourselves with how we are perceived, let us not forget that we have also been perceived as weak on defense. Also the party of racial and gender preferences. And perhaps most importantly, we have been portrayed for decades as the party of big government, the “nanny state” who want to regulate and tax everyone out of existence and force you to hang around with people you hate, eat foods you don’t like and quit smoking and drinking even though you hurt nobody but yourself. That’s as much of a critique of “do-gooder” Democrats as it ever has been of “law and order” Republicans, who traditionally made their argument on the basis of rampant crime, not telling people what they should do for themselves.

It’s always something, isn’t it? Those republican scamps have a handy critique for everything we believe. So, I would imagine just as we become the “communitarian” party of love for the weak and defenseless, you’ll be seeing a spirited defense of individual liberty coming from the other side. It’s kind of the way these things work. Karl knows this.

The thing is that rarely have I seen in my lifetime a situation in which the Republicans have been so soundly criticized by even their own constituency for being too intrusive and imposing their own values on others as we saw in the Schiavo case. It would seem a natural that Democrats would, out of pragmatism if not principle, see this as a way to drive a wedge into the Republican coalition by capitalizing on public opinion and characterizing the Republicans as being in the grip of a mad faction that wants to impose its religious values on everyone.

Apparently not. Instead we are going to drive a wedge into our own, against the will of the majority of both Democrats and Republicans. It’s an unusual strategy to say the least. Now is our chance to expose their extremism and it looks like we may just punt. How depressing:

When the Schiavo case began garnering national attention, Democrats’ first reaction was to press their social libertarian line. “Congressional leaders have no business substituting their judgment for that of multiple state courts that have extensively considered the issues in this intensely personal family matter,” House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi complained. Liberals became increasingly confident as polls showed the public overwhelmingly concerned about federal intrusion into a private family matter. Once again, Democrats risked reinforcing the perception they lacked core values.

Something interesting, however, was beginning to happen: Voices within the Democratic Party were genuinely agonizing over whether congressional intervention in the Schiavo case was truly so egregious. Almost 50 House Democrats voted in favor of the legislation authorizing the additional judicial review–many of them Southern moderates, but several of them liberal members of the Congressional Black Caucus. It was dawning on the party that there was an affirmative statement of values to be made, not simply a libertarian attack on government intervention.

The case of Terri Schiavo is incredibly complex. But the question of a government obligation to the weak, the sick, and the disabled is not–at least for Democrats. So it was reassuring to learn this week that congressional Democrats like Tom Harkin and Barney Frank are closing ranks behind legislation that would allow federal courts to review cases in which end-of-life choices are murky and the family is divided. Considered alongside Hillary Clinton’s efforts to reframe the pro-choice position as a communitarian belief that every child should be born into a loving, caring family, it looks as though we’re seeing the beginning of a new Democratic Party. It’s a party that appeals to core values, not one that allows itself to be caricatured by their absence. Let’s hope that party is here to stay.

Yes, by all means, let’s adopt the biggest political cock-up the Republicans have made in the last twenty years as our own. (And anybody who thinks that we can stop the Republicans from caricaturing us is fooling themselves. The key is for us to caricature them — and they are making it easy for us to do it if we have the guts.)

I sincerely hope that we are not dumb enough to portray ourselves as the party of the do-gooder church lady just when they are in the process of proving to the entire country that they are the party of nosy mother-in-law. I do not believe that we will get one more vote for it in the south, and we will lose any hope of gaining back some of the western red states that might be persuaded that all this holy roller nonsense has gone too far.

This is terrible, terrible politics. I don’t mind Hillary emphasizing birth control and sex education as a way to expose the religious right’s real agenda. I think that makes sense. But that is far different than joining the most far right of the far right in allowing the federal courts to dabble in individual end of life issues. If we do this I hope we are also prepared to give the right its cover as they continue their assult on the allegedly runaway “activist” judiciary — because that’s the basis for this ridiculous federal power grab. There was no reason for the federal courts to get involved with Sciavo because the state courts did NOTHING wrong. My God. Are we really willing to go down this road?

I sincerely hope Scheiber is wrong on this because if he isn’t it means that we are thinking of jumping on the right’s exploding bandwagon just as it’s careening off the edge of a cliff. I can’t think of a more self-destructive act.

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Heartsease

Go read this beautiful meditation and eulogy from the fine writer Meteor Blades at The Next Hurrah.

And by the way, Hugh Hewitt can once again kiss my ass.

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This, I’m Worried About

Honestly, people are killing their children with diets of disguting food. I recognize their freedom to do this if they want to, but it is a real problem nonetheless. I’d be a lot more sympathetic to their complaints about how difficult it is to raise kids in popular culture if they cared as much about this very serious physical health issue. I’m not a purist in this way. I like a Big Mac and fries now and again myself. And I’m not suggesting that everyone serve tofu and green tea to their toddlers. But from what I see at the grocery store — and the statistics on childhood obestity and diabetes bear this out — childrens’ health is becoming demonstrably compromised by the way they are eating and the sedentary lifestyle they are leading.

And the government could certainly help with this by forcing schools to limit the crap they serve kids at school, requiring physical exercize in the curriculum and instituting a major education initiative to get parents to feed their children correctly. This is a scientifically proveable problem, not some sort of vague unease about teen age sexuality (which, by the way, has had the older generation freaking out for my entire lifetime — it’s just that we are now the older generation.) The costs to society and to individuals of this health crisis, on the other hand, are going to be huge if something isn’t done to reverse this trend.

So, here we a have real, tangible problem for parents and children in desperate need of a solution. But neither party can even go near it because it will be greeted with fury by corporate America and will be perceived my most Americans as an elitist attack on their lifestyle. Instead we’re going to regulate cable TV shows because parents can’t be bothered to figure out how to program their V Chip. How fucked up is that?

Picture Via Tom Moody

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She Can Boast (lyingly)

Via DC Media Girl, I see that Ann Coulter has been named as one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people:

In her books, Coulter can be erudite and persuasive, as when she exposes the left’s chronic softness on communism. But her signature is her gleeful willingness to taunt liberals and Democrats, to say out loud what some other conservatives dare only think–that Bill Clinton is a “horny hick,” for example, and his wife “pond scum.” It’s what makes Coulter irresistible and influential, whether you like it or not.

Here’s the opening passage of Coulter’s “erudite and persuasive” exposure of the left’s chronic softness on communism in her influential book “Treason”:

Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason. You could be talking about Scrabble and they would instantly leap to the anti-American position. Everyone says liberals love American, too. No they don’t. Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence. The Left’s obsession with the crimes of the West and their Rousseauian respect for Third World savages all flow from this subversive goal. If anyone has the gaucherie to point out the left’s nearly unblemished record of rooting against American, liberals turn around and scream “McCarthyism!”

Liberals invented the myth of McCarthyism to delegitimize impertinent questions about their own patriotism. They boast (lyingly) about their superior stance on civil rights. But somehow their loyalty to the United States is off-limits as a subject of political debate. Why is the relative patriotism of the two parties the only issue that is out of bounds for discussion? Why can’t we ask: Who is more patriotic — Democrats or Republicans? You could win that case in court.

Fifty years ago, Senator Joe McCarthy said, “The loyal Democrats of this nation no longer have a Party.” Since then the evidence had continued to pour in. Liberals mock Americans who love their country, calling them cowboys, warmongers, religious zealots and jingoists. By contrast, America’s enemies are called “Uncle Joe,” “Fidel,” “agrarian reformers,” and practitioners of a “religion of peace.” Indeed, Communists and terrorists alike are said to be advocates of “peace.”

That first sentence isn’t a typo although when I first read it I thought for sure it was. It would make so much more sense if it said “Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of reason.” But, no. She means it.

I suppose one could agree that it is erudite (and unbelievably awkward) to use the word “lyingly” the way she used it, along with the word “gaucherie.”
But that’s nit picking. Her erudition on the subject of McCarthy is well — non-existent. She basically just made shit up. But, nonetheless it was apparently “irrestistable” to the great historical minds at Time magazine. They are evidently wingnut crackwhores over there.

Aside from her astonishing lack of historical knowledge, however, is it even remotely possible that anyone who isn’t already a true believer can make any sense of that mess? For instance, what could possibly be persuasive in this paragraph?:

Liberals invented the myth of McCarthyism to delegitimize impertinent questions about their own patriotism. They boast (lyingly) about their superior stance on civil rights. But somehow their loyalty to the United States is off-limits as a subject of political debate. Why is the relative patriotism of the two parties the only issue that is out of bounds for discussion? Why can’t we ask: Who is more patriotic — Democrats or Republicans? You could win that case in court.

Liberals invented the myth of McCarthyism to keep the other side from questioning their patriotism. Which is, of course, what McCarthy actually did and was eventually disgraced for doing. But whatever. Liberals also boast about their superior stance on civil rights — lyingly. How this related to the fact that we invented McCarthyism, I don’t know. And yet we “somehow” (by boasting “lyingly” about civil rights?) have made made it impossible to question our loyalty to the United States.

But lest we forget, Coulter isn’t actually talking about patriotism. She says that Democrats have a “preturnatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason,” which is actually many degrees worse than calling somebody a “cowboy” or referring to castro as “Fidel.” Indeed, it is a capital offense.

I guess this kind of intellectual incoherence is what makes Coulter so “irresistible” to TIME magazine which has decided to go back to its old 60’s ways when it was widely known to be a tool for the political establishment. Between naming Powerline blog of the year, Joe Klein calling the Democrats “undemocratic” and this, I think it’s fair to say that the Noise Machine has a proud new member — or maybe it’s actually a founding member that’s just recently decided to wear its stripes more proudly. Good to know.

I’m reminded of this passage from Allen Ginsberg’s great poem “America”

I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

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Prove It

Matt Yglesias and Atrios both got to this post by Amy Sullivan before I could, but since it’s one of my hobby horses, I can’t help but weigh in. Sullivan makes the case again that the Democrats could gain from bashing Hollywood because a lot of parents are uncomfortable with the sexual innuendo on “Friends”. Or something like that.

After the election we all argued quite a bit about this sort of thing because the religious right jumped on an initial bit of analysis that said that “moral values” were the primary reason people voted for Republicans. It turned out to be a lot more complicated than that, but it set off a division in the party, I think, between those who believe that we can achieve a majority by competing for social conservative type votes through religious rhetoric, those who believe that we will win a majority by competing for libertarian type votes through appeals to individual liberty, and those who believe we will win through a muscular foreign policy message.

In order to gain a political majority in this country we need 51%. We have 49%. This question of where we are going to get that majority could be answered in any number of ways or any combination of ways. But, you have to settle on some sort of strategy and mine comes down on the second option. It reflects my personal values and I think it presents a stark, clear choice between the two parties now that the Republicans are being shackled by their image as the party of the religious right extremists. I think it’s good policy and good politics both to embrace a “mind your own business” message in light of how far out the Republicans have become. Now is not the time, in my opinion, to blur the lines. It’s time to draw them clearly. All those people who watched FOXnews in disgust during the Schiavo matter are open to the argument that the Republicans are trying to impose radical religious values on the country.

But, others disagree and think that social conservatism is where the votes are and that’s where we should concentrate our efforts. I have serious doubts that attacking popular culture will be seen as anything more than pandering but there are ways to test this issue.

The fact is that if all these religious people stop watching these television shows they will be cancelled. The entertainment business is the most sensitive market in the world. They measure their product sales every single day and they will stop producing it if it isn’t selling. If you don’t like it, don’t watch it, and if there are as many religious people in this country as we are told, Hollywood will respond. Immediately.

A bunch of pulpits and righteous religious people, who are said to be legion in this country, can get something like this done without doing anything more than just saying no. Because right now a lot of these religious people do watch all this crap. The numbers do not lie. They are buying Britney CD’s and Grand Theft Auto for their kids. What they seem to want is for somebody else to make it easier for them to say no to their kids. I suggest that they say no first and popular culture will follow. If religion is as politically and culturally powerful as people keep saying it is, it should be able to persuade people to do this one simple thing.

Of course, there is the little problem that people lie about this stuff. They lie about going to church, and they tell pollsters they are unhappy with things on television — the very things they continue to watch. I imagine that many people think they need to say these things even as they spend Sunday watching the football game and Sunday night glued to “Desperate Housewives”. They refuse to use the V-chip that could keep their little kids from watching any channel they choose and they give their kids money to buy the junk that that they profess not to like. But I can’t say as I blame them. Hypocrisy is a requirement of American citizenship these days. Pity the person who admits out loud to being secular or unconcerned with current sexual morality. Better to pay lip service to the morals police than bring down their provincial ire on your head.

And it should be remembered that even if Democratic politicans could benefit from bashing Susan Sarandon and Janeane Garofolo, all of this pressure would likely go awry and we’d be seeing halter tops on the Venus de Milo. Neither politicans nor bureaucrats are capable of telling the difference between art and pornography and they will always err on the side of tight assed stupidity. Like this. And voluntary censorship is worse than government censorship. At least you can vote the censors out of office. If you leave it up to the corporations somebody’s mentally challenged nephew will be deciding that the word “but” is dirty.

And as Yglesias points out in his piece, this is all being done in an environment in which pregnancy rates are going down, youth violence is going down and a whole host of other youth pathologies are showing every sign of dissipating. Yet, the one thing that parents could really do to help their children — get them off the fucking couch in the first place and feed them some real, nutritious food — they evidently aren’t eager to do. Instead, I suspect that many of those who aren’t just saying what they think people expect, simply want politicians to make them feel that they are good parents by expressing their faux outrage for them — while they munch on their super-sized big macs and eagerly watch women metaphorically scratch each others eyes out competing for some zero in a hot tub on “The Bachelor.”

But like I said, all that needs to change things here is that these vast numbers of priests, pastors and preachers tell their tens of millions of obedient flocks to stop watching the bad stuff. The bad stuff will disappear if they do it, guaranteed. Take this message to the churches, not the politicians. If we are to believe that this country is awash in religiosity and that religious people make up the constituency that can make or break any political party, then I say prove it. Here’s your issue. Get your followers to stop watching all the shows on television that are allegedly polluting our culture and you will have shown once and for all that social conservatism is a majority position in America.

Update: For the record, I do not disagree that we should be addressing the needs of parents. The government can do many things to help people with this, from providing good schools to subsidising decent health care to dealing with as Yglesias calls it “the interesection of feminism and capitalism.” As a liberal I think the government has a vital role to play in economic issues, particularly those that help the middle class. That’s what we do.

But, by feeding into the myth that the biggest problem facing America is a decline in “values” — a decline which is promulgated by liberal elites (who, yes work for corporate masters) — we play into the the right wing’s game plan. They have created a myth that liberal values are the prime cause of people’s discontent instead of the very real pressures that people feel in the squeeze between work, family, consumerism, freedom and responsibility. Some of these things the government can help with, some of them they can’t. But the problem with the current formulation is that the Right has convinced everyone that the government should interfere in the ways in which it is most clumsy and ill equipped and abdicate it’s responsibility to do the things it can actually do pretty well.

Here’s the thing. Everytime we expolicitly play into this “oh the country’s values are going to hell in a handbasket” game, we are playing on GOP turf. I think Amy Sullivan is correct to say that we can use this issue as a way into the hearts and minds of overworked and worried parents. But not by joining with Joementum and condemning Hollywood or, as Amy Sullivan said, pulling a Sistah Soljah on Susan Sarandon. (And, why her? She won the Oscar playing a nun who fights against the death penalty. See what happens when you meddle in art and culture? The good gets all mixed in with the bad.)

The way you worm your way into this topic is by responding to people’s concerns about popular culture with an empathetic, “well we live in a free country and apparently a lot of people like that stuff or it wouldn’t be on. However, I think we should definitely try to find some ways for you to be able to spend more time with your kids so you can have at least as much influence as the television does.”

What you don’t do is allow their framing of the argument to stick. It only reinforces their message that liberalism is the cause of all evil. We just have to stop doing that. Whenever we find ourselves speaking in terms that could come out of a Republican’s mouth we should ask ourselves if it’s really common ground or just internalizing their criticisms of us. 90% of the time it’s the latter.

Update II: Julia discusses the strange hippie, liberal phenomenon called … parental responsibility.

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Now It’s A Democracy Not A Republic?

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.

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Poison Embrace

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.

Here’s a good quote we can use:

“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.

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Location Location Location

Kevin says something today that I think is odd:

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.

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Eine Kleine Mock Music

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.

Joe says:

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.

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Was Ken Mehlman The Maid Of Honor?

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.

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