Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

I’m Not Like Them. Really.

Perhaps I’m unduly cynical, but I simply cannot take this David Brooks column seriously. Brad Plumer and Mark Schmittt seem to think that he’s really on to something, while Matt Yglesias takes issue with it. I think it’s just the usual GOP projection bullshit combined with a little CYA sleight of hand.

I don’t think it’s wrong to say that Democrats should embrace the big ideas. I think we’ve all agreed that our approach has been a bit too long on programmatic details and a bit too short on the vision thing. But the mere idea that the Republicans derive their strength from diversity just cracks me up. Yeah. And FoxNews is fair and balanced. Tipsy disagreements at cocktail parties don’t count as diversity.

Brooks says that Republicans are strong because they argue all the time amongst themselves in a congenial way and everybody is open minded and understanding that they can’t have everything they want. It’s one big philosphy seminar over there in GOPland. Liberals, on the other hand, are so obsessed with our ever expanding list of big complicated government programs that we haven’t given a moment’s thought to the kind of big thinking that evidently goes on among cosmopolitan Republican intellectuals who represent all those heartland values we are supposed to revere.

Why, he asked the unnamed head of a big liberal think tank who his favorite philospher was and he never called him back with the answer. Imagine that. (And here I thought we all knew that the only appropriate response to that question was “Christ — he changed mah heart.”)

Brooks says that we should emulate the right’s unruly but friendly fractiousness and spend more time arguing philosophy. He says that’s what they did when they were completely out of power and it’s shown to be very healthy for their big happy tentful of civilized individualists. This entire discussion about media infrastructure and message discipline is wrong because that is not where the real strength of the right’s political dominance lies.

The rule of thumb for all Republicans giving advice to Democrats on op-ed pages is to assume the opposite. This means that message discipline and the right’s media infrastructure is exactly where the strength of the right’s political dominance lies. And I would argue that regardless of the friendly philosophy seminars in the break room at NR or The Weakly Standard, their governing philosophy can quite easily be summed up as a strong belief in no taxes on wealth, laissez faire capitalism, coercive Christianity and a huge police/military infrastructure. There are only a couple of philosophers who lead you in that direction, and it’s a place that I don’t think America knows it’s going.

He further says that we have a hard time understanding the big philosophical ideas because liberal theorists are so “influenced by post-modernism, multiculturalism, relativism, value pluralism and all the other influences that dissuade one from relying heavily on dead white guys.”

This means that we are on the right track because understanding post-modernism, relativism and the rest is the single most important key to understanding how the right is operating right now. Any party that can win the presidency by saying that hand counting uncounted votes is inherently unreliable compared to the machines that failed to count the votes in the first place cannot be said to be a party that doesn’t understand relativism. Michel Fouccault is a much better guide to modern politics in the radical Republican era than John Dewey could ever be. We should be dragging all those ivory tower Derrida-ites out of the classrooms and hiring them at think tanks to deconstruct Republican rhetoric. (In fact, the most valuable person in the Democratic party may be Michael Berube.)

It’s funny, the last I heard liberals were elitists for being a bunch of pointy headed intellectuals who spent too much time watching PBS and not enough time burning rubber and eating at Red Lobster. There was no end to the lectures telling us that we libs were out of touch with everyday real Americans and we should take our heads out of our nancy-boy literchur and open up the Bible for some real inspiration. And now Brooks says we should be holding a non-stop series of undergrad rap sessions. Man, it’s so hard to know what we should do to be more like Republicans. My head is spinning.

Brooks says that we should embrace disunity. Like the Republicans have. He must be talking about stuff like this:

Conservative leaders across the country are working now to make sure that any politician who hopes to have conservative support in the future had better be in the forefront as we attack those who attack Tom DeLay,” he said.”

I think that is what’s at work here. Brooks has been recently embarrassed by his GOP cronies in a number of ways and now he is trying to excuse his affiliation with them by saying that the Republican party is one big bunch of iconclastic thinkers so don’t even try to say that he’s like them. But hey, you hang around with mangy dogs you get it too. He’s one of them whether he likes it or not.

Update: Jonathan Chait says:

If you look at the major organs of conservative opinion, you’d start with the Standard and National Review, add in The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and probably include columnists like Brooks, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, and Robert Novak. You could toss in The Washington Times editorial page and, arguably, talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Depending on your definition, you could add or subtract from this group and have a good sense of all the opinion outlets that wield any significant influence over the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

So, what major issues do these conservative intellectuals disagree on? They all supported the Iraq war, with the exception of Novak, who has tellingly muted his criticism. They all supported every one of Bush’s tax cuts and Social Security privatization. They all clucked their tongues at Bush’s Medicare drug benefit but, like the White House, have refused to recognize any connection between the deficit and Bush’s tax cuts. They all passionately supported Bush’s judicial nominees. They all basically endorse Karl Rove’s political strategy. They all see Bush as a towering Churchillian figure of compassion, wisdom, vision, homespun virtue, and basic decency.

Basically, these organs agree on everything–certainly every major political issue of the last five years. Even if you follow Brooks’s bizarre definition and include Reason and The American Conservative, you’ll get some dissent on judicial nominations and the war and a less worshipful view of Bush as a man. But you’ll still have basic agreement on all the major domestic policy questions.

[…]

Brooks insists, “Conservatives have thrived because they are split into feuding factions that squabble incessantly.” In fact, on every important debate of his presidency, Bush has enjoyed a solid phalanx of conservative pundits all repeating the same talking points on his behalf. It’s a successful arrangement. It also worked for the Comintern, for a while. I’m sure the communist intellectuals who relentlessly backed Moscow’s every move liked to flatter themselves by insisting they were a bunch of squabbling freethinkers, too.

And Ezra adds:

…where’s the refusal to face up to big disagreements and ideas? For that matter, what serious factions are missing and therefore leaving converts no place to join up? Is there no DLC, no MoveOn, no place for liberals and greens and law-and-order types and moderates? Because, correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t Marc Cooper and Al From pledge allegiance to the same ticket every four years, but spend the intervening periods screaming at each other?

[…]

In recent months, various folks — notably Mike Tomasky — have called for liberals to learn or relearn their history, to understand their evolution. They’re right to do so. But they’ve been joined and, in some cases, mixed up with the David Brooks and Jonah Goldbergs of the world, conserva-scolds who wear their semi-functional knowledge of Hayek and Hobbes on their sleeves, all the better to allude to the moral and intellectual grounding they’ve got that progressives don’t. It’s ridiculous, and we shouldn’t buy into it. Knowing our history is critical to understanding the genesis and thus root causes of contemporary problems, but that imperative shouldn’t be expanded to transform politics into a game of trivial pursuit. If philosophers aid your understanding of your values, fine, great, I suggest you read them. But no Republican needs to know Burke’s views on the French Revolution in order to comprehend his movement and no liberal needs to rattle off philosophers to conservative columnists in order to have her beliefs judged legitimate.

Read thewhole thing. It sizzles.

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“You had to have a sit down, you had to have an OK, or….you’d be the one who got whacked.”

I think Yglesias exactly nails the brutish logic of Cornyn’s “warning” earlier today. These guys are selling protection, saying that they would hate to see something happen to these judges who won’t cooperate but sadly, unless they do there’s not much they can do about it.

His hope — along, it seems, though less clearly — with Tom DeLay’s is that judges will begin to operate under a cloud of intimidation. They may not like the idea of buckling under to whatever it is Cornyn wants them to do, but Cornyn is making it clear that he’s the judges’ friends. He doesn’t want to see them killed, or maimed, or assaulted. He’s trying to save them. Trying to warn them. Warning them that unless they change their ways someone — someone who has nothing to do with John Cornyn or the Texas cabal running the country, mind you — just might decide to do something crazy. But here’s Cornyn offering a safe harbor. Confirm all of Bush’s nominees, no matter how incompetent, corrupt, or inept they are, no matter how unsound their view of the constitution. And for the others, try to conform your views to those of Bush’s new appointees. Do it and you’ll be safe. If you don’t do it, well, then, certainly John Cornyn wouldn’t advocate killing you, he’s just pointing out that it will happen.

The term “Texas mafia” is no longer metaphorical.

I was particularly intrigued to see that Cornyn’s statement very specifically mentions the Supreme Court but makes no distinction amongst the Justices. He might want to start being a little bit more specific lest some anti-judicial activism nut fails to distinguish between the good guys and the bad and blows away the wrong judge. This is just sloppy, very sloppy.

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Back To The Future

I don’t know who this group of hippie protester strawmen are in Kevin Mattson’s cautionary tale in this months Prospect, but I’ve not had the pleasure. I don’t think there exists a vast number of nostalgic baby boomers and utopian youngsters out there who are planning to launch another Summer of Love, unless he’s specifically talking about the anti-Iraq war protests, which of course, he is, but won’t admit it. That’s because those war protesters weren’t trying to hop on a nostalgic magic carpet ride back to the days of Hanoi Jane, they were participating in a worldwide protest about a very specific unjust war being launched by an illegitimate president — a war which the “fighting liberals” like he and Peter Beinert foolishly endorsed. I suppose the fact that millions of people all over the globe also marched merely means that they too were recreating the alleged glory days of People’s Park.

People will always take protests to the streets from time to time. The 60’s liberals certainly didn’t invent the tactic and the fact that liberals are associated with protesting has a lot more to do with an image propagated by the right than any real danger of a resurgent Yippie movement.

My instinctive reaction to this entire line of paranoid ramblings about the wild and crazy lefites making a big scene and ruining everything is that if this guy thinks that a bloodless, wonkish liberalism is ever going to compete with the right wing true believers he’s got another thing coming. American liberalism grew out of a passionate progressivism and a worldwide union movement, both of which featured plenty of “protest politics” in their day. And if he thinks that the modern GOP’s political might hasn’t drawn much of its power from pulpits and talk radio demagoguery, then he hasn’t been paying attention. Nobody does political theatre better than the right wing.

He very generously offers that he doesn’t agree that Move-On should be purged from the coalition because they are, after all, learning that street protests are bad form. As long as they “behave” they can stay. (And all that money they raise can stay too, presumably.) The author fails to realize, however, that just as the rabble on the right took to the airwaves, the rabble on the left is taking to cyberspace. This ain’t no hippie protest movement, dude. It’s as modern as modern can get.

People need to feel things about politics, not just think. It’s a grave mistake for political types to insult and marginalize those who have passion and wish to express that publicly. These jittery fellows who are so afraid of “the left’s” overheated energy need to remember that their golden post war age was populated by a people who had just been through a crushing economic upheavel and a cataclysmic war. They were willingly docile and conformist for good reason. Don’t expect that to be present in other circumstances in a thriving democracy. It isn’t natural nor should it be desired. It only lasted a very brief time even then.

And remember, the favorite candidate of the wonkish cold war liberals was Adlai Stephenson who warmed the blood of at least 43 upper west side society matrons and a couple of college kids in Cambridge. Other than that, even in Stepford America of the 1950’s they picked the man who looked good in a uniform. All the wonky goodness in the world doesn’t necessarily translate into votes. You’ve got to resonate on a deeper level with people and while I appreciate the need for an elegant foreign policy argument, I frankly wonder if this public wonkfest isn’t just going to reinforce the Republican image of us as a bunch of weenies. In today’s political climate nothing spells defeat for Democrats more than the image of a bunch of fey, ivory tower eggheads running the military.

Furthermore, it should be remembered that until JFK’s assassination, there was plenty of theatrical and violent public rhetoric coming from the right. It may be that that violent impulse found its catharsis in the assassination, and massive social opprobrium required a severe ratcheting down of anti-communist demagoguery. Could it be that the benign institution building for which the Republicans are now being canonized as visionaries was actually a pragmatic reaction to the country’s disgust with their vocal extremism? Regardless, it’s ridiculous to completely place the Republicans as some sort of calm, reasonable suburbanites in contrast to us crazed extremists on the left then or now.

Please:

(link here for larger version)

Yes, the New Left was a bunch of wankers, but you know, that wasn’t news even at the time. And it’s true that much of the peace protesting of the 60’s were pretty much a reflection of a large youth demographic and an unpopular military draft. There was a lot of babble but in the end the radical political movement of Tom Hayden et al mostly collapsed because its raison d’etre, Vietnam, collapsed as an issue. But, underneath that Chicago convention circus a bunch of really important other things were happening that are glossed over by these newly minted men in the grey flannel suits with patronizing lip service to “idealism”. He acknowledges that the world before the 60’s was unequal and starkly illiberal for many people and says that nobody wants to go back to those days. But he then scribbles a long essay about how the protest movement was terrible for liberalism.

These critics of the unwashed rabble just can’t seem to recognize that with great prosperity and political power the time had come for liberalism to act on its long overdue responsibility to fully extend the rights and responsibilities of the American experiment to women and racial minorities — to use, as Dear Leader would say, its political capital. The social changes that were ratified in the 60’s and 70’s were arguably more important to the lives of more than 50% of Americans than anything that had happened in the previous century. That’s not hyperbole. The women’s rights movement alone is one of the greatest progressive leaps forward in human history.

My 36 year old mother couldn’t get a mortgage in her own name in 1955. She had to have her father sign the papers. Birth control was illegal in many parts of the country until 1965. Women were routinely denied slots in education and were openly and without shame discriminated against in employment. African Americans, we all know, could be denied the right to enter even public buildings in many areas of the country until 1964. Their “right” to vote was a joke. I needn’t even mention the fact that they were dismissed socially as second class citizens without a moment’s thought by very large numbers of Americans until quite recently.

That is the world that the “fighting liberals” were protecting. And that is the world that was changed irrevocably during this allegedly frivolous time of liberal protest politics in 1960’s. And it was done though the means that this writer seems to find so distasteful — while he perfunctorily agrees that the ends were all in all a good thing. I’m sorry if all those changes subsequently made it difficult for policy wonks to make a good national security argument, but you know, tough shit. Sometimes you have to do hard things and there is often a price to pay for it.

You don’t make radical quantum leaps in social equality without there being a reaction. The reverberations of all of that are still being felt in the culture wars of today and it has made things difficult for Democratic party politics. However, the energetic political activism of the 60’s resulted in tangible, everyday improvement in the lives of vast numbers of Americans who fought for and won the right to be equal under the law in this country. That betterment of real people’s lives is what liberalism is supposed to be about.

The lauded “fighting foreign policy liberals” of the 50’s were the dying dinosaurs of an establishment that was rapidly losing its energy in a stable, wealthy, globally dominant America. As the writer acknowledges, it was quite easy for them to ride the back of the liberal consensus because they were the inheritors of it — a condition that does not exist today. It’s harder now. That’s the reality that we are facing.

I don’t know where this vast horde of reborn hippies worshipping at the feet of Jerry Rubin are but I do not see them. What I do see is modern political activism that is demanding change in modern ways. It seems to me that it isn’t “the left” that is nostalgic for the past, it’s these centrists who for reasons I cannot fathom have decided that their grandfather’s political methods are the ticket to political dominance in the 21st century.

Sure, policy wonks should be developing a cohesive and persuasive voice on foreign policy. Have at it. But to try to create some quasi “movement” from a very brief and quite uninspired — even at the time — political era strikes me as strangely reactionary. As the author writes in his first paragraph, “examining … history can mean recycling good ideas and tactics. But what if it means recycling bad ones?” Excellent question and one that I would suggest he ask his colleagues in the “let’s take a trip back to 1948” club.

We’re progressives. We’re supposed to progress. We don’t do nostaligia. Let’s leave that to Pat Buchanan.

correction: hoard,horde,whored
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Teachable Moment

Via Kevin, I see that Andrew Sullivan’s question has been answered as to what the Republican party has in mind when it comes to personal freedom. He quotes Eric Cohen’s piece in the Weekly Standard in which he claims that “people cannot be allowed to revoke life simply because it is theirs’ to revoke.”

We still possess dignity and rights even when our capacity to make free choices is gone; and we do not possess the right to demand that others treat us as less worthy of care than we really are … [T]he autonomy regime, even at its best, is deeply inadequate. It is based on a failure to recognize that the human condition involves both giving and needing care, and not always being morally free to decide our own fate.

Sullivan adds:

So let us be plain: the theoconservative vision would remove the right of individuals to decide their own fate in such cases, and would exclude the family from such a decision as well. Indeed, the law might even compel the family to provide care as long as they were capable of doing so. My “what if?” is a real one. And the theocon right has answered it. They want an end to the “autonomy regime.” They have gone from saying that a pregnant mother has no autonomy over her own body because another human being is involved to saying that a person has no ultimate autonomy over her own body at all. These are the stakes. The very foundation of modern freedom – autonomy over one’s own physical body – is now under attack. And if a theocon government won’t allow you control over your own body, what else do you have left?

I would imagine that there are more than a few women who are slapping their foreheads at that and saying …”duh!” And there are probably some distressed “pregnant mothers” who would argue that it is quite strange to suggest their six week old fetus has more autonomy over the body it lives in than she does. Certainly the principle has never stuck me as particularly compelling.

The “autonomy regime” is not absolute, but it’s pretty damned clear that the government, with its grandstanding morons running for the microphones, is hardly equipped to make the delicate decisions at the margins. It’s been very convenient for politicians and self-righteous moralists to take pot shots at those who found themselves in the unenviable position of having to make such decisions as abortion. Perhaps now that the Schiavo case has filled in some of the blanks about what the “culture of life” really means, maybe a few people will understand why it is such a tremendous insult to women to tell them that Trent Lott and Pat Robertson are the ones who will decide what they can and cannot do with their own bodies.

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Helloooo DC!!!!

So I hear from Weldon Berger that the National Press club has had a change of heart:

John is welcome to attend, as are any bloggers, as long as they’re not going to disrupt the proceedings.

Well, yes, we simply can’t have anyone disrupt the gripping ass-fucking discussion.

Apparently bloggers really are considered the barbarians at the gates — unrefined, undisciplined and uncivilized. We can’t even be expected to behave like adults in public.

Isn’t that great? I always wanted to be a rock star.

BOO!

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Not Exactly “Swing Low Sweet Chariot”

The indispensible Crooks and Liars made me watch this thing and I’m pretty sure that that I’m now in a persistent vegetative state.
Randall Terry singing a soulful ballad at Terry Schiavo’s memorial service. It is so strange and creepy that I just feel dirty. I think FCC complaints should follow.

Here are the lyrics to what seems to me to be an incestuous love song. I don’t remember any hymns I sang talking about God caressing me and running his hands through my hair, but maybe I’m just out of date:

When I feel the waves crash over me
Father
And my heart is overwhelmed with pain
Help me, find me, seek me, hide me
In the scars you bear
Caress me in your embrace
Run your fingers through my hair
I believe in you

Thank You Jesus

Ok, I believe. I finally got that post posted, which I wrote yesterday afternoon and have been trying to post pretty much ever since then. Jayzuz. Blogger really wants us gone, don’t they? Too much traffic? Legal liability? Dearth of cute cat pictures?

I dunno, but they clearly are not interested in offering this free service anymore. Too bad.

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“It’s a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.”

Morton Blackwell, Republican National Committee member from Virginia and a member of ACU’s board, said Republicans are being told support for Mr. DeLay is mandatory if they want future support from conservatives.

“Conservative leaders across the country are working now to make sure that any politician who hopes to have conservative support in the future had better be in the forefront as we attack those who attack Tom DeLay,” he said.”

This Tom DeLay mess is really getting interesting, isn’t it? While I appreciate the “don’t fire ’til you see the whites of their eyes” strategy, after some thought I’ve decided that it’s probably a good idea for the Democrats to put pressure on Delay right now. As a matter of fact, I think it will ensure that the wingnuts continue to support him and that he stays in the news and in his post well into the 2006 election cycle. Nothing will make the radicals more vociferously defend their wounded leader than a bunch of Democrats attacking him. And I think that we want the extreme rightwing to be defending Tom DeLay, especially the Randall Terrys and the James Dobsons, as often as possible.

We especially want to see those guys on Fox News. A lot. And here’s why. Something happened during the Schiavo circus, I think, and it was something significant. But it wasn’t that the nation saw that politicians were all a bunch of craven opportunists. They already knew that. It was that the Republican professional class, the libertarians and some common sense types saw FOX News and talk radio as being full of shit for the first time. I have nothing but a handful of anecdotes to back that up, but I think Schiavo may turn out to be the first big tear in the right wing matrix.

For instance, a conservative doctor of my acquaintance was stunned by the Schiavo matter. This man watches nothing but Fox news and could not believe the anti-intellectual religiosity of their coverage. This is a matter that he knows intimately and he could see clearly that the coverage wasn’t “fair and balanced.” Indeed, it wasn’t true. It’s as if a veil fell from his eyes.

My conservative Rush loving neighbor was heard complaining the his hero didn’t know what he was talking about on the Schiavo case. That is a first. This guy is a true believer — who also has a very sick wife.

My nurse sister-in-law (also a born again Christian and avid FOX watcher) insisted that all the news be turned off in the house because she couldn’t stand the exploitation of the patient or the sideshow outside that hospice. She’s very depressed about all this.

See, the right isn’t like us. They think that the so called liberal media is irretrievably biased but believe what they see, read and hear on their own media. We on the left, on the other hand, have no faith in any mainstream media, really, or any alternative media either for that matter. We have developed the habit of culling from various sources and analyzing the information ourselves as best we can. Even then we are very skeptical. Nothing that the media could do would particularly shock or disappoint us. No so with the other side. A fair number of them are actually hurt and bewildered by what they saw in the Schiavo matter.

I suppose it’s possible that this will fade and that nobody will remember the bizarre spectacle of these urbane, cosmopolitan news celebrities on television spouting lines from Elmer Gantry or Rush clumsily sputtering about the culture of life, but once people have been shocked like this they don’t fully trust again. I think there may be quite a few Republicans who were surprised by the complete abdication of responsible coverage by their own trusted Wurlitzer.

It’s one thing to get behind jingoistic nationalism and shut your eyes and ears to anything that disturbs that vision of your government. Most wingnuts have a bizarre belief that the government must know best when it comes to national security, despite all evidence to the contrary. But, to see your trusted media blow it so hugely on a personal issue about which most of us have very definite opinions and are pretty well informed, must be quite jarring.

Liberals have been hung for decades with the alleged radicalism and extremism of the new left of 35 years ago. But it’s not as if we ever made Abbie Hoffman the majority leader of the House. Tom Hayden never ran for president. Today we have a corrupt GOP congressional leader who is now actively embracing a shift in the separation of powers and he’s being supported by an active extremist constituency inside the Republican party. The fringe appears to be wielding a tremendous amount of power.

Via Sandrover over at Kos I read that four senators have sponsored an act that “makes it possible for the Congress to charge any judge with a crime who disagrees with the concept that all law, liberty, and government comes only from God.”

“The Constitution Restoration Act of 2005 – Amends the Federal judicial code to prohibit the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal district courts from exercising jurisdiction over any matter in which relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government or an officer or agent of such government concerning that entity’s, officer’s, or agent’s acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.

Prohibits a court of the United States from relying upon any law, policy, or other action of a foreign state or international organization in interpreting and applying the Constitution, other than English constitutional and common law up to the time of adoption of the U.S. Constitution.Provides that any Federal court decision relating to an issue removed from Federal jurisdiction by this Act is not binding precedent on State courts.

Provides that any Supreme Court justice or Federal court judge who exceeds the jurisdictional limitations of this Act shall be deemed to have committed an offense for which the justice or judge may be removed, and to have violated the standard of good behavior required of Article III judges by the Constitution.

Co-sponsors:
Sen Brownback, Sam – 3/3/2005
Sen Burr, Richard – 3/3/2005
Sen Craig, Larry E. – 3/8/2005
Sen Lott, Trent – 3/8/2005

The House has 18 co-sponsors for their versions of the same bill.

As much as the Republicans may hate judges these days, this guy surely warms the cockles of their lil’ hearts:

“When someone walks by the commandments, they are not studying the text. They are acknowledging that the government derives its authority from God.”

Now if they can just pass that law that forces all judges to march to Uncle Nino’s tune then everything will just be hunky dory. Funny, I thought “we the people” were the sovereign source of law, liberty and government. Silly me.

Apparently, we are entering a new phase in the culture war that should be startling to even those who didn’t see that partisan witch hunts, bogus impeachments and stolen elections indicated a certain, shall we say, imaginative interpretation of our constitution and a willingness to radically exceed any previous limits on partisan power. As the brilliant Dahlia Lithwick puts it in her review of the latest bestselling Regnery toilet paper Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America (aka Thanks For Bush vs Gore But What Have You Done For Me
Lately?):

…Levin pays some lip service to the idea that the federal bench needs to be stacked with right-wing ideologues in his penultimate chapter. But he betrays early on his fear that even the staunchest conservative jurist is all-too-often “seduced by the liberal establishment once they move inside the Beltway.” Thus, his real fixes for the problem of judicial overreaching go further than manipulating the appointments process. He wants to cut all judges off at the knees: He’d like to give force to the impeachment rules, put legislative limits on the kinds of constitutional questions courts may review, and institute judicial term limits. He’d also amend the Constitution to give congress a veto over the court’s decisions. Each of which imperils the notion of an independent judiciary and of three separate, co-equal branches of government. But the Levins of the world are not interested in a co-equal judiciary. They seem to want to see it burn.

Now that these nutcases have political power it becomes clear that their beef with the judiciary has actually always been that it operates more or less independently of the political process and that means they cannot completely control it, which is the real problem. When you are running a strongarm operation, (“the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior”) partisanship or ideology really doesn’t matter anymore. It’s a pure power game and it clearly applies to conservative Republicans as much as it applies to liberal Democrats.

From a political perspective, this is very interesting. I don’t think that the Federalist Society Borg have quite come to terms yet with the monster they’ve unleashed. Neither has big business. These people may have a different vision of how the government ought to run than I have, but they must maintain a reasonable belief in a judicial system in which the various parties involved can have faith in the outcome. They are, after all, lawyers, judges and scholors. And business, particularly, simply has to have a system of arbitration that is considered fair and impartial or they are going to have a tremendous problem on their hands. It isn’t just a bunch of hippies filing bogus lawsuits in the courts. The vast majority of cases are businesses suing each other.

So, we are dealing with a very powerful constituency of religious nuts now doing the muscle work for a criminal political gang. And it would appear that nobody is safe, not even those who sign the blood oath to the Republican Party. The slimy criminals and the self-righteous religious zealots have formed their own power center right smack dab in the middle of the Republican Party.

I say let the games begin. This has been brewing for quite some time. This undemocratic streak in the GOP waxes and wanes but it has been dramatically on the upswing for the last decade or so. But this time the radical Republicans are piping their revolution straight into homes and cars and offices all over this country and it’s starting to freak out the normal people.

I’ve been shouting myself hoarse about this for more than ten years. These self-proclaimed revolutionaries are exactly what they say they are and they do not respect the spirit of democracy, the rule of law or our constitution. That they are supported by so-called conservatives just makes the irony that much richer.

Update: I think Jesse Lee’s analysis of the Delay political situation is probably quite right. But I think that if Rove is going to work any magic and dump Delay he’d better work quickly. It sure looks to me as if Delay has jumped directly into the arms of the religious right and they are more than happy to receive him. He’s always been a good extremist for their cause. Junior, on the other hand, is wobbly on gay marriage, as is Cheney. The zealots may very well feel they have a better chance with Delay.

Correction: Contrary to the quote above, the proposed law doesn’t give congress the right to charge judges with a crime. It provides for the removal of judges if they “exercise jurisdiction over any matter in which relief is sought against an entity of Federal, State, or local government or an officer or agent of such government concerning that entity’s, officer’s, or agent’s acknowledgment of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.”

So, People for the American Way or the ACLU would no longer be able to get a hearing in court on the constitutionality of Judge Roy Moore proclaiming from the bench — or a Mayor Osama bin laden, perhaps — that the law derives directly from God. This is spite of the fact that our constitution explicitly states that the government should establish no religion and that the law is derived from “we the people.”

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Why do you suppose they didn’t mention God in all that?

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This Week

This has been the worst week of blogging since I started. Blogger has been constantly bloggered and when it wasn’t, my cable has been offline. Since last Tuesday, I’ve barely been able to read Atrios, for gawds sake, much less post one of my own brilliant observances. I hate blogging in coffee shops, I just hate it. But I’m here and if I don’t keel over from caffeine poisoning before blogger eats my post, I’ll hopefully have something brilliant up soon. Or not.

The good news is that there has never been more riveting news coverage on television than these last few days, has there? I mean, who can take their eyes off of that spine tingling long shot of The Apostolic Palace with the three lit windows. I could stare at it for hours and hours and hours. And hours. Talk about a story made for TV.

And I don’t know about you, but after listening to the last three days of non-stop pre-eulogizing by such brilliant minds as Daryn Kagan and Miles O’Brien, the latter of whom seemed simply bowled over yesterday when informed that the Pope talked to Jews just like they were normal, I’m truly on pins and needles wondering what they will all say for the next week of ritual and observance. It’s been so spritually uplifting to listen to Kelly Wallace’s remembrances of things people passing on the street said about Pope John Paul. (They mostly liked him. Plenty.) And who can forget Lester Holt’s moving daily tribute to the Holy Father’s popemobile?

What can they possibly do to top themselves? I’m thinking Judy Woodruff and Aaron Brown could get into some serious self-flagellation. And I think Paula Zahn would look smashing in a hair shirt. (She looks good in anything.) And clearly, the only appropriately reverent response from Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity would be taking vows of silence. Since everyone on television agrees that the pope was the most awesomely terrific pope ever, I’m pretty sure that’s what he would have wanted. I know I’m praying for it.

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Expert Witnesses

I’ve been busy and bloggered for the last day or so and missed the latest blogging panel and GG kerfluffle. My goodness, the mainstream media certainly is having a difficult time understanding what both blogging and prostitution are. And you’d think they could figure it out since they practice certain elements of both pursuits on a daily basis. No wonder they don’t question the Bush administration’s lies. They just aren’t very bright, apparently.

Others have more than adequately discussed the usual frustrating lack of informed liberal bloggers on the panel and the absurdity of inviting GG to represent “blogging.” Clearly the press is having a little bit of difficulty understanding these internets and it’s going to take some time to educate the poor dears.

But this is not just another blogging confab, is it? Jimmy Jeff on the panel represents a unique opportunity to discuss some of this “new journalism” stuff if they really want to do it. It’s a blog that broke the Gannon story and it’s a blogger who knows all the details. John Aravosis owns this story and if GG is given a forum to tell his side of the story, Aravosis should be invited also to ensure that he isn’t allowed to continue to deny that he was a hooker who sold himself on the internet as a “military” man while he was “reporting” from the white house press room.

See, this is a real goddamned story that, for reasons that elude me, has become lost in some sort of Victorian delicacy that certainly wasn’t evident during the Monica Lewinsky scandal when reporters and pundits regularly speculated about whether the she and the president had both experienced orgasms during their trysts. I recall a panel on one of the shoutfests drawing pictures of penises to illustrate whether the president of the Unites States might suffer from Peyronie’s disease as Paula Jones alleged (wrongly it turned out) in her bogus lawsuit.

This is not a matter of intruding into someone’s private life. Guckert was selling himself on line for profit. Perhaps I missed it, but I am unaware of any interviewer who has pinned him down on that fact. Now, because they haven’t done their job, this guy is actually rehabilitating himself as a representative of “new media” and is called to discuss the role of the internet in modern journalism. It’s ludicrous. I’m beginning to think that the whole Jeff Gannon story is really a reality show cooked up by Hollywood to snooker the entire country. He’s really Jamie Kennedy.

Here’s the deal. Jim Guckert, male prostitute, operated as a reporter who got very unusual privileges in a Republican White House that is so enamored of the Christian Right that the GOP is now writing one time only laws on their behalf against the will of 80% of the American people. That’s what we are dealing with. And it is clear that the extremist minority that is basically running the country has not heard about this male hooker in the White House because Fox (purveyor of pornography) and Rush and Pat Robertson have not told them. Someone should. For the good of the country.

I’m glad to see that they’ve included Matt Yglesias who will likely make a persuasive case that blogging is merely a new technological tool for specialists and professionals to communicate, much as academics and journalists do now in their respective fields on paper. I don’t agree with that view, but I do think that it could provoke an interesting discussion at the blogging panels that we haven’t already heard a thousand times before from the usual suspects. And he is a real blogger who’s been writing serious political posts for years now. He might be able to at least school some of these bimbos in the press about what constitutes a real blog. Good luck to him.

However, by virtue of Guckert’s presence this blogging panel is probably not the place to discuss such dry academic subjects. While it is required by law evidently, that all blogging discussions include at least two panelists who write frequently about anal sex, this one actually features a guy who made a profit at it. Matt may not be able to add much to that discussion because I don’t think he’s been following that story very closely. Maybe Wonkette could be persuaded to pin old Jeff down on his professional activities, but she might be a bit too focused on the what, not the who. Or they could just invite Aravosis who might actually be able to get to the truth. If, of course, that’s what they’re interested in — a big if.

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