Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Moral Hazards

As I sit here listening to two congressmen on Inside Politics drone on about how we must restore civility to politics (now that the GOP controls all branches of government) I’m experiencing one of those rare times when I truly understand why people become Republicans. It’s because they have political instincts and we don’t. If you are a political animal that is a very compelling trait.

Here is a pretty good example of how the right blogosphere is treating the Manchurian Beefcake story — from Jonah Goldberg :

Until Jordan quit on Friday, the lefty bloggers were dancing around the victory fire chanting in triumph over bagging this Jeff Gannon guy from Talon News. I’m extending this metaphor too far, I’m sure, but their celebration makes me wonder how so many brave warriors can eat their fill off the carcass of a chipmunk. I confess that at first I thought this sounded like a real story. But it’s turned out to be more than a little sad.

Paraphrasing a comment I read somewhere yesterday (apologies to the author) “pay no attention to the naked gay conservative male prostitute sitting in the middle of the family values white house living room.” Goldberg affects a jocular dismissiveness for a reason. He knows what a real story is and he knows how they work. And he is trivializing this one because it is actually quite dangerous.

Meanwhile, on the left we have much handwringing by commenters over this not being a “gay” story and how we should concentrate on the national security angle and how it’s really about access etc, etc. We too are ignoring the naked, gay conservative prostitute in the midde of the family values white house living room. And this is where they get us.

Perhaps it would be instructive to take another little trip down memory lane. Jonah knows very well what a real story is because he was up to his ears in one of the biggest political sex scandals in history. From Michael Isifkoff’s award winning MSM articles on the Lewinsky affair:

There was another guest at Jonah Goldberg’s house in the Adams Morgan section of Washington that day. For some months, Newsweek’s Isikoff had been in touch with Tripp – “hounding” her, Goldberg claims. Aware that Isikoff knew of rumors that Clinton was having an affair with a former White House staffer, Goldberg suggested to Tripp that she play the tapes for Isikoff. Uncomfortable with the whole taping process, Isikoff declined to listen and left Goldberg’s house.

In their many phone conversations that fall, Lewinsky complained to Tripp that she was being neglected by the president… By the fall of 1997, Lewinsky was complaining that Clinton’s ardor for her seemed to be cooling. He wasn’t calling her much, and he rarely returned her increasingly frantic calls. Lewinsky was restless and bored at the Defense Department.

Isikoff listened later, needless to say. So did the entire country. That little meeting at Jonah’s house led to the impeachment of the President of the United States. They came this close to forcing him from office. Goldberg and the entire GOP establishment knew without doubt that they had a story and they were not afraid to lead the media to it by the nose. And just look at what an oozing chunk of soap opera tabloid offal it was.

Fast forward seven short years. We have a man whose biggest cheers on the campaign trail in 2000 were when he would solemnly swear that he would “bring honor and integrity back to the White House” — and everybody knew very well that he was talking about fellatio in the oval office. After his recent reelection in 2004, stories abounded about how the issues of moral values, the impact of evangelical Christians and, most importantly, the movement to allow gays to marry had tipped the balance in what was a very close election. Now we find out that a conservative gay male prostitute was given highly unusual access to that same family values white house. There isn’t a story there?

I hear endless braying about how the Democrats have to “fight back.” And yet… we just don’t seem to to have the heart to play the raw political game they play.

A Republican’s political instincts would tell them instantly that this Manchurian Beefcake story presents an amazingly fertile opportunity to take the Bush White House off message in a way that they clearly despise, sow dissension within the GOP coalition, mitigate a growing moral hazard and most of all, make Republicans around the country examine once again whether their attitudes about gays are really what they think they are.

Number one, it is always a good thing to knock a white house off its message. To do it when the press secretary himself is involved, or seems to be, is even better. In shark infested political waters life doesn’t get any better than making phony family values hucksters endlessly repeat phrases like “we didn’t know he was a prostitute.” First rule — make them talk about stuff they don’t want to talk about. It’s very difficult to get them started, but if you get the media lemmings running in the right direction they’ll do it.

Second, didn’t the religious right just threaten Bush with witholding its support if he backed down on gay marriage? And didn’t the president then dutifully put it in the SOTU? Clearly, after Bush declared his support for civil unions and backed off the FMA after the election, the Christian Right is a little bit nervous about his bona fides on the issue. When Kerry and Edwards mentioned that Mary Cheney was a lesbian, a widely known fact, they were attacked in the most bizarre campaign kabuki in memory because the Republicans know that there is a huge chasm in their party developing on this issue. Lynn and Dick are like a lot of Republicans out there — they have gay family members. And only the most hard core authoritarians like Alan Keyes are willing to disown them for it. (Listen to Lynn Cheney twist herself into a pretzel and then get angry when she’s pressed on it here.)

This is an issue that threatens the GOP.The cosmopolitan conservatives and libertarians don’t have a problem with gays and yet The Christian Right is building a homophobic crusade. A lot of people in the middle don’t know what to think. A party with political instincts would exploit that. It’s not a new concept I’m advocating here. It’s called “divide and conquor.” The Right blogosphere sounds like a bunch of San Francisco ACLU liberals when the issue of Gannon comes up and the smart thing for the left to do is ask the Christian right if they agree with their fellow “conservatives.” (I believe that Aravosis has already discussed this.)

It wouldn’t be nice and wingnuts will call us hypocrites. (It’s a good thing hypocrisy was retired from the political dialog somewhere around the time Virtues “Czar” Big Bill Bennett was laying it all on red, Dave Drier was “dating” Doro Bush and Limbaugh was popping a fistfull of hillbilly heroin or we might have something to worry about.) When the wingnuts complain about how we hate gays, just say “No I don’t. And clearly, neither do you. But James Dobson does. Let’s go have a chat with him, ok?”

It might just force some of these chickenshit libertarians and GOP urbanites to show their true colors and get some GOP parents and siblings of gay people to face up to what they are doing. Can anyone believe that there is no value in showing the country that many of the highest level Republicans in the Bush Administration are actually quite tolerant of gays? Doesn’t that move our agenda forward?

I don’t believe that we advance the cause of gay rights by allowing the right to have it both ways, which they clearly do. We have a tittilating tabloid story, replete with nude pictures and prostitution, that illustrates the fact that they are merely pandering to the religious right on this issue. It would be too bad if we are too squeamish to pursue it because that is exactly what the other side is counting on.

Finally, the biggest reason to pursue this story is because we are creating a terrible moral hazard if we don’t. The Republicans have no incentive to stop the politics of personal destruction if we don’t hold them to their own standards and they continue to be rewarded. Pitchers, batters and Republicans understand this instinctively. So should we.

When I read things like this, I just despair. Folks we can put on a better show than this, we really can.

Update: And if anybody wants to know why this really, really matters beyond partisan politics and jockeying for power, I think Rude Pundit gets it right.

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You Like Me, You Really Like Me

Kevin Drum and Eugene Volokh wonder why actors can’t play smarter political activists. Kevin thinks they are lazy and cites the fact that they can’t be bothered to memorize and believably deliver the five or six lines they are given in an Academy Award nomination speech. I’ve often wonder why in the hell they can’t have somebody write them a decent acceptance speech and deliver it like an adult instead of a gushing 12 year old. I understand that it’s an emotional moment, but these people are supposed to professional performers. And they are being rewarded for being the best professional performers of the year for crying out loud. Halle Berry had me blindly reaching for the Pepto.

As to why they don’t seem to be able to play themselves as intelligent, thoughtful political pundits, that’s simple. They need writers and directors. Democrats, are you listening?

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Cagey

To all the wingnuts who’ve been bombarding me with puerile insults because I allegedly have my head up my keister for saying the JimJeff Gannon Guckert may have been a recipient of pillow talk on the Plame matter, here is why I said it:

GANNON: And the FBI did come to interview me. They were interested in where — how I knew or received a copy of a confidential CIA memo that said that Valerie Plame suggested that Joe Wilson be sent on this mission, something that everybody — they have all vigorously denied but is, in effect, true.

BLITZER: So they didn’t make you go testify before the grand jury?

GANNON: No.

BLITZER: Do you have to reveal how you got that memo?

GANNON: No.

BLITZER: They didn’t ask you?

GANNON: Well, the FBI kept asking. I said, well, look, I’m a journalist, I can’t —

BLITZER: You didn’t tell them?

GANNON: Yes. Can’t divulge that. And they accepted that, and I’ve never been asked again.

He’s acting mighty cagey for a guy who just reads the papers, don’t you think? My thought was that his “source” might just be across the pillow. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The pillow part anyway.

Now, the blabbing of confidential CIA memos to destroy a political enemy is just sleazy.

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Fine Whine

Sam Rosenfeld at TAPPED makes a good argument that phony sanctimony is part of the modern political playbook and it’s important that we play along or they’ll get their destructive talking points out there unrebutted. I agree. It’s distasteful but it must be done.

WHINING IS EVERYTHING. This is a minor point, but I take exception to one particular item in the two-party compare-and-contrast list compiled by The Note that Garance linked to on Friday:

One party never apologizes and never shows weakness; one party is on its fourth day of cry-babyish “defense” of its Senate Leader, after a run- of-the-mill GOP “attack.”

…In the modern rules of partisan warfare — which the Republicans largely wrote — complaining incessently about the illegitimacy of the other side’s attacks is as crucial a component as the actual attacks one’s own side lobs. When the Democrats close ranks behind Reid and condemn Republican efforts to smear him, they don’t really expect George W. Bush to heed their complaints and tell his party to call the dogs off. What they’re doing, instead, is making sure that the Republicans’ vilification campaign is recognized for what it is and discussed explicitly at the very outset. The mistake the party made with the Republicans’ campaign against Tom Daschle — which, let’s recall, really began in earnest in the winter of 2001 — was ignoring it for too long rather than making it an issue worthy of discussion (and press coverage) in and of itself. Thus the Republicans’ attacks had a cumulative effect, over the course of three years, of transforming popular perceptions of the Democratic leader without there being any popular awareness that a concerted campaign even existed.

It becomes more and more obvious that the “analysts” in the press are just clueless about the game they analyze. The Republican weeping and whining about “political hate speech” alone is enough to cause informed people to stick ice picks in their ears just to shut out the pain. You don’t have to be a highly paid insider to understand what game they are playing.

One of the main differences between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans simply don’t pay any attention to what the press says about them. They don’t care to be “understood” or “rational” by an institution that they consider tools. We are fools if we do not adopt that attitude. The media is not part of our coalition, it is not a bastion of rationality or objective truth. We have to tough out the kind of catty insults that The Note spits out as small arms fire in a much bigger battle. Caring whether the media respects us is part of why the other side is able to muster a majority in a country that doesn’t want its policies. We have to play them not pander to them.

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Oops

We’re changing the culture of this country from one that has said, if it feels good, do it, and, if you’ve got a problem, blame somebody else, to one in which each of us understands that we are responsible for the decisions we make. — President George W. Bush October 15, 2003

Inspiring words.

I don’t really know what to think about all this but I do have to marvel at, as Avorosis puts it:

“This is the same White House that ran for office on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. While they are surrounded by gay hookers?”

I personally have no problems with the Bush White House needing to blow off some consensual adult steam. It’s a stressful job. If gay hookers are going to help them relax then who am I to argue? I’m a liberal. I have nothing against gays or hookers.

But for a moment let me think as a Republican would, if the shoe were on the other foot:

So many questions so few answers. Just why did JimJeff get such special treatment? It’s not like they didn’t already have a bunch of ready made shills to ask softball questions. Les Kinsolving’s been throwing partisan bombs for years. They certainly didn’t need JimJeff to transcribe RNC talking points when they have the Beltway Boys to do it on national television.

Scotty said that the president called on JimJeff of his own volition. A coincidence? Or did someone request that JimJeff get a special treat that day?

And has it ever been logical that this nobody from a vanity web site would get access to the Plame story? Why him? JimJeff claims that he never actually saw the Plame memo, yet he clearly knew of it. Could it have been pillow talk?

I don’t have a clue. But, I do know that if this were 1998, we’d be knee deep in congressional investigations into the gay hooker ring in the White House. Every news crew in the DC area would be camped out on JimJeff’s front lawn. A wild-eyed Victoria Toensing and panting Kelly Ann Fitzpatrick would be crawling up on the Hardball desk rending their silk teddies and speaking in tongues while Matthews’exploding head spun around on his shoulders.

But, it isn’t 1998 and it will probably not even be mentioned. And I’m not a Republican so I don’t think, as they would, that it’s necessary to dig into every single White House staffer’s sex life to find out who leaked a confidential memo to a gay hooker.

As a Democrat, however, if gay hookers are running around the White House I do find it somewhat frustrating that we have to put up with this shock and horror bullshit from the right wing about average Joe and Jane gay person wanting to get married and have a family. Please.

And yes, I do think that Patrick Fitzgerald’s boys will probably be paying JimJeff another visit. Sadly, I think it’s entirely likely that they didn’t know about this until today. It is impossible to believe that the secret service and the FBI would allow a known prostitute to have access to the White House after 9/11. If they did, then our national security is in very deep shit. Come to think of it, it’s also pretty scary that they didn’t know. What’s up with that?

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Subversive Heroes of The Left

And the Grammy stiffs don’t have any idea…

Don’t wanna be an American idiot.
Don’t want a nation under the new media.
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mindfuck America.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Everything isn’t meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow.
Well that’s enough to argue.

Well maybe I’m the faggot America.
I’m not a part of a redneck agenda.
Now everybody do the propaganda.
And sing along in the age of paranoia.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Everything isn’t meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow.
Well that’s enough to argue.

Don’t wanna be an American idiot.
One nation controlled by the media.
Information nation of hysteria.
It’s going out to idiot America.

Welcome to a new kind of tension.
All across the alien nation.
Everything isn’t meant to be okay.
Television dreams of tomorrow.
We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow

Green Day rules.

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Off Limits

I see via TalkLeft that Instapundit believes that left wing bloggers have gone too far with this delving into the personal life of JD Guckert:

…it was the stuff about Gannon’s personal life that led to his resignation, and that there’s something rather sleazy about that. Backstage or not, targeting parts of people’s lives that don’t have to do with the story — like, say, Eason Jordan’s love life — seems inappropriate to me, and likely to lend support to the bloggers-as-lynch-mob caricature.

We don’t know that the reason Guckert “resigned” was because of the personal stuff. It’s just as likely he was asked to leave because he had brought attention to himself and embarrassed the White House. Who knows?

But I think we all can agree that publicly discussing people’s sex lives, really should be out of bounds. Sexual witch hunts are wrong. I just don’t know what’s come over people.

Of course it’s possible that some people came across this and just got inspired:

According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President had ten sexual encounters, eight while she worked at the White House and two thereafter.(35) The sexual encounters generally occurred in or near the private study off the Oval Office — most often in the windowless hallway outside the study.(36) During many of their sexual encounters, the President stood leaning against the doorway of the bathroom across from the study, which, he told Ms. Lewinsky, eased his sore back.(37)

Ms. Lewinsky testified that her physical relationship with the President included oral sex but not sexual intercourse.(38) According to Ms. Lewinsky, she performed oral sex on the President; he never performed oral sex on her.(39) Initially, according to Ms. Lewinsky, the President would not let her perform oral sex to completion. In Ms. Lewinsky’s understanding, his refusal was related to “trust and not knowing me well enough.”(40) During their last two sexual encounters, both in 1997, he did ejaculate.(41)

According to Ms. Lewinsky, she performed oral sex on the President on nine occasions. On all nine of those occasions, the President fondled and kissed her bare breasts. He touched her genitals, both through her underwear and directly, bringing her to orgasm on two occasions. On one occasion, the President inserted a cigar into her vagina. On another occasion, she and the President had brief genital-to-genital contact.(42)

Of course, that was an official government document so it was ok to disseminate those details to the entire world. And, remember it wasn’t about the sex, it was about the lying. Not like an evil liberal blogger lynch mob linking to underwear pics that someone who was writing under an alias for unknown reasons had plastered all over the internet. You simply can’t compare the two. Not at all. I don’t know what I was thinking.

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Dissent Is Good For You

Orcinus points to a lengthy list of rightwing academics who would be ripe for a Churchilling if there existed a left wing machine capable of doing it.

But even if we could, it would be self defeating to demand that they lose their jobs. Academic freedom demands that scholars with repugnant views be allowed to make their arguments so that an intellectual debate can take place. I think that the Right is making a mistake if they think that they’ll be able to hang on to power if they shut people up. One of the reasons they’ve been successful in selling their ideas is that they spent years honing their arguments. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and all that.

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What’s The Problem?

I’m fascinated by the fact that Eason Jordan was driven from his job for making a remark about the US targeting journalists when it seems clear that many on the right think that targeting journalists is actually a good idea. Why all the self-righteous Claude Rainsing about this? If you write or say publicly that it’s a good idea to kill journalists and someone else says we ARE killing journalists I don’t see why that person is considered a traitor.

The Pink Flamingo Bar Grill thinks the US Military should at least be able to target “enemy” journalists when we invade a foreign country. They aren’t really free anyway; unlike our journalists they are part of their government’s propaganda efforts and can, therefore, be considered part of the enemy force. Can we win this war (that “we are further away from winning than we are losing”) with our hands tied behind our backs? We are, after all, “at war with possibly the worst enemy we have ever faced.” We have to ask ourselves if we are prepared to do whatever it takes.

Apparently a BBC journalist by the name of Nik Gowing contributed a chapter to a book called Dying To Tell The Story in which he says that our military has already made that decision:(pdf)

There is evidence that media activity in the midst of real-time war fighting is now regarded by commanders as having ‘military significance’ which justifies a firm military response to remove or at least neutralise it. From the media’s perspective, the core guiding principles of reporting must remain accuracy, impartiality, objectivity and balance in a time of armed conflict.Yet if some worst case fears are shown to be justified, then on the political and military side some senior officials seem to view our 24 hour/7 day-a-week presence as a real-time military threat that on some occasions justifies our removal by the application of deadly force. Despite expressions of sympathy, the fact that journalists and technicians are killed or injured appears to be of barely marginal concern.

Captain’s Quarters goes to great lengths to debunk various charges in this book. But it gets a bit thick when they charge Gowing with using intemperate rhetoric (like that above) and say that CNN is now a “faith-based organization instead of a fact-finding media outlet” because its executives are under the sway of a writer whose work doesn’t stand up under scrutiny.

I just hate when that happens, don’t you?

Thanks RP. You can have all the profits.

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Hounds of Hell

Kevin is right that scalp collecting benefits the right, but it has nothing to do with bloggers or liberals’ willingness to engage in the game. It has to do with the fact that character assasination has been the political combat weapon of choice on the right for a long, long time. Hounding people from their jobs is one of their favorite tools of intimidation.

Remember Webb Hubbel, Bernie Nussbaum, Mike Espy, Henry Cisneros, Roger Altman blah, blah, blah? And let’s not forget that they spent 70 million taxpayer dollars trying to hound Clinton out of office. He just refused to go. The only difference now is that the target is the long-hated liberal media and bloggers have joined the assassination squad.

If liberal bloggers’ record of scalps is Trent Lott losing the leadership post that Bush wanted him out of anyway then we aren’t even in the same league. The Right Wing Noise machine is a group seasoned professionals made up of bloggers, newspapers, FOX, talk radio, and a direct pipeline to powerful Republicans in the government. We are Kos and Atrios et al. We are not equivalent.

Update: Kevin expands on his earlier post here and I think he makes some good points.
Frankly, I think the left blogosphere probably isn’t going to prosper through right wing style character assassination because we don’t have the megaphone to really make it work or a compliant media or the legislative clout to create psuedo scandals and investigations.

The left blogosphere, on the other hand, has already shown that it can effect change by bringing to bear the financial clout of the consumer. Sinclair. That’s the paradigm of lefty new media clout. It’s all we’ve got folks, but it’s a lot.

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