Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Accidental Radical

Nicolas Lemann’s article about Bush in this week’s New Yorker is a must read for any number of reasons. (No More Mister Nice Blog highlights perfect illustrations of his adolescent bloodlust and his perfidious backstabbing, just to name two.)

I thought what was most interesting, however, is that Lemann seems to have concluded that Bush himself was a radical who persuaded Cheney and the other “grown-ups” that he was serious about governing in the most ideological way possible:

Clay Johnson … [said] Bush had begun the Vice-Presidential selection process by offering the nomination to Cheney. “The now Vice-President declined the option, but did agree to head up the search committee,” Johnson said. “And then came back some months later and said that in fact he’d changed his mind and he would be willing to run — to be the President’s running mate.” Johnson said he had a hunch about what had changed: “Lynne Cheney told some mutual friends of ours that she and Dick decided that in fact they did want to join the Bush ticket, because they came to really like George and Laura, and the Vice-President came to realize that the President wanted to come up here to really make a difference. He was not going to try to play it safe. Not try to extend an easy, moderately successful four years into an easy, moderately successful eight years. He was going to try to come up here and make dramatic changes to the issues he thought needed to be addressed. And the Vice-President got very, very energized and excited about doing that. And so now we have Dick Cheney as Vice-President.”

In other words, the team that most people thought of as being made up of a moderate, conciliatory, relatively unambitious Presidential candidate and his bland, self-effacing, government technician of a running mate had thrown in together on the basis of a mutual decision to govern in pursuit of radical change. And they have done that.

Lemann goes on to predict that if Bush wins there is absolutely no reason to believe that he will be cowed by his failures or the impending disasters that await at every turn, but rather will use his power to enact the most sweeping revolutionary agenda in modern history — including the privatization of social security. He shows that in this way, Bush is predictable. When it comes to the most radical elements of the conservative agenda — creating a permanent GOP powerbase, foreign policy neoconservatism, tax cuts for the wealthy and starving the entitlement programs out of existence, he is perfectly serious. Bush has moved to the middle only as a feint to either buy time, appease certain constituencies or to placate a powerful insider like Powell (or maybe his father’s inner circle.) But, at heart, he is as rigidly ideological as a Norquist or Gingrich and even more determined to follow through.

Lemann knows all these people and has met Bush, so it’s probably wrong to second guess his interpretation. However, I find it very hard to believe that anecdote Clay Johnson tells about Lynn and Dick joining up to aid the cause, at least with respect to one important detail. I don’t doubt that Cheney didn’t particularly want to be involved in Bush II. Bush I was an ignominious failure for the true believers and he had no reason to believe that the sequel would be any better. But, I can’t help but be a little bit skeptical that the Cheneys were so impressed by Junior’s grand strategic vision and ideological committment to the cause that they couldn’t help but sign on.

What they realized was that Junior was easily manipulated with flattery and appeals to his manly prowess in contrast to his father and they could successfully push him to enact their grand strategic vision. Seriously, George W. Bush was barely a fully formed adult in 2000 — it is simply not believable that he was merely pretending to be this amiable doofus while hiding his secret plans to change American politics and the world.

None of that makes any difference in the results, however. They were able to persuade Bush to adopt their radical agenda without missing even a beat. Their most difficult challenge was dealing with institutional resistence from much of the governement (and even the GOP establishment) which was weak and ineffectual but still managed to muddy Bush’s image as a CEO manager over time. And, of course, the abject failure of policies that have Bush in a perilous re-election fight that should have been easy after the gift (a trifecta!) of 9/11.

Like Atrios, I believe that there is absolutely no reason to buy the nonsense that the “good” Republicans are going to step up in the next term and make sure that Junior’s little cabal is stripped of its power. They couldn’t if they wanted to and I’m not sure they do. Junior has never shown even the slightest indication that he’s displeased with his radical “achievments.” Indeed, if he wins, he will perceive it as a sweeping mandate and validation of all he’s done. That’s how he thinks.

Let’s hope that John Kerry will be able to penetrate Bush’s folksy facade one more time tonight and reveal the abstruse radicalism of his powerful advisory cabal’s true agenda. On these domestic issues, if people knew what they were truly planning, Bush would drop in the polls like a stone.

Brave Men

I don’t know if everybody has seen this ad, but it’s devastating. I was with a group of people when it came on a few minutes ago and it silenced the room.

Here’s the rundown from Salon:

It’s the obvious political ad that has just been waiting to be made — a young Iraq war veteran, missing a body part, talking simply and directly to the camera about the sacrifice he made in the service of official lies. The idea didn’t come from the Democratic Party, or MoveOn.org, or the Kerry campaign.

The new ad is the creation of a group of Iraq war veterans, most in their 20s, operating on a shoestring budget. Their organization, Operation Truth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group of 150 members, is dedicated to elevating the perspective of soldiers and holding elected officials accountable for their policy decisions.

“I was called to serve in Iraq because the government said there were weapons of mass destruction — but they weren’t there,” Spc. Robert Acosta, 21, who was an ammunitions specialist with the 1st Armored Division in Iraq, says in the thought-provoking ad. “They said Iraq had something to do with 9/11 — but the connection wasn’t there … So when people ask me where my arm went, I try to find the words, but they’re not there.” The ad ends with a shot of Acosta removing his prosthesis, revealing a stub where his right hand should be.

If you have any left, send these guys some money. They are the bravest group of young people in America — for what they are facing physically and for having the cojones to speak out politically. It’s never easy for soldiers to face the truth when their government lies to them.

Bravo.

Sherwood Like To See Some Results

Kevin at Catch the earliest muckraker on the “Stolen Honor” ratfuck way last summer, notes a delicious little tid-bit on Carlton Sherwood, the king of protester-porno.

Everyone knows by now that he was tapped to run the government web-site firstresponder.com. What’s interesting is that it is now seven months behind schedule. Maybe Carlton needs to concentrate on his day job for a while and put a hold on his dirty tricks fantasy life. Millions are being wasted. As Kevin says:

Apologies to the first responders (read: heros) for the delay (homeland security can wait, you whiners)

I know it’s not as important as “travelgate,” when Brit Hume and his pals fell into the vapors for months proclaiming that cronyism in the white house travel office was just short of satanic, but this still might deserve a tiny bit of attention.

Take a look at the web site. These are your tax dollars at work, folks.

I Won’t Be Ignoooored, Charlie

According to Wolf Blitzer, that bastard John Kerry was “really, really nasty” to poor little Junior in last week’s debate which is why he was so “anxious to respond.”

Media Matters reports that Blitzer asked Schieffer what he planned to do if Kerry pulled such a stunt again.

Here’s the really, really nasty debate exchange:

KERRY: Now, I’m going to add 40,000 active-duty forces to the military, and I’m going to make people feel good about being safe in our military, and not overextended, because I’m going to run a foreign policy that actually does what President Reagan did, President Eisenhower did, and others. We’re going to build alliances. We’re not going to go unilaterally. We’re not going to go alone like this president did.

GIBSON: Mr. President, let’s extend for a minute —

BUSH: Let me just — I’ve got to answer this.

GIBSON: Exactly. And with reservists being held on duty —

[crosstalk]

BUSH: Let me answer what he just said, about around the world.

GIBSON: Well, I want to get into the issue of the back-door draft —

BUSH: You tell Tony Blair we’re going alone. Tell Tony Blair we’re going alone. Tell Silvio Berlusconi we’re going alone. Tell Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland we’re going alone. There are 30 countries there. It denigrates an alliance to say we’re going alone, to discount their sacrifices. You cannot lead an alliance if you say, you know, you’re going alone. And people listen. They’re sacrificing with us.

My goodness, the Cheerleader in Chief is awfully sensitive if he thinks that saying he “went it alone” is “really, really nasty.” This, from John Edwards on The Tonight Show last night ought to send him into a complete tizzy:

“I run, I played a little football when I was in school. And the president, I think, was there at those football games too. He was, I think, on the side, maybe with his pompoms? Can you run fast with those cheerleading outfits on?”

Bada Bing.

As this piece in Rolling Stone pointed out, somebody has a very thin skin and somebody else is fully aware of it.

Talking In His Sleep?

Haaretz reports, “high-level terrorism suspects are being held in a top-secret detention facility in Jordan.” Bush had been so concerned about keeping their location a secret, he told the CIA not to tell him where they were.

No wonder he doesn’t know what’s going on. Evidently, he can’t trust himself not to blurt out top secret information.

Via The Progress Report

The Question No Reporter Dares Ask

Racicot, Mehlman, Eskew, Dyke, Bartlett:

We’ve always said it was going to be a close race.

Reporter With Balls:

Why is that, Mark, Tucker, Jim? President Bush had a ninety percent approval rating just a year and a half ago and you say the country still favors his policies. The president can’t think of any decisions he might have made differently. Yet, today he is fighting for his political life. What happened? Why did the president fall so far in the polls and why is he having such a hard time putting this one away?

All In The Family

Via Atrios I see that Raw Story found another connection between Sinclair and the Bush administration — a neat little company named Jadoo, that makes fuel cells and recently got a nice contract in the WOT.

It turns out that Jadoo has a close connection with another of Bush’s close coporate friends — Enron:

It wasn’t long ago that Jadoo—which gets its name from the Hindi word for magic—was doing business in a three-car garage next to a chicken coop outside Sacramento. Jadoo’s president, Larry Bawden, 45, learned about fuel-cell technology at Aerojet, based in Sacramento, where he worked as director of fuel-cell products. In 1995, Aerojet sold off his unit, and Bawden left with a golden parachute. Embarking on an around-the-world boat trip with his wife, he got as far as Australia before some former colleagues called. They persuaded him to return to become a vice president at a fuel-cell company they were starting called PowerTek. They’d soon lined up a huge customer—the energy giant Enron—but unfortunately it was about to collapse.

Good timing is everything in business. And fortunately for Bawden and two other colleagues at PowerTek, their point person at Enron, Jon [sic] Berger, was ready for a career move. They recruited him to join them in launching Jadoo in November 2001, just as he was starting at Harvard. After helping them write a business plan, Berger asked a classmate to critique it. The student was impressed enough to invest $200,000. The co-founders and four other employees put in more than $100,000. In the meantime Berger began approaching East Coast investors.

It didn’t take long for Jadoo to attract interest from some major players. Among them was Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns 62 local news stations in the U.S.; it was the lead investor in a $5 million round of financing last year. But Jadoo’s biggest coup came after President George W. Bush touted hydrogen as an alternative to foreign oil in his State of the Union speech last January. Jadoo, which had just released its first product—a long-lasting battery for the surveillance industry—was one of 22 fuel-cell companies invited to Washington to make a presentation to the White House. The others included giants like Ford and Motorola. Afterward, Jadoo was one of only seven firms invited to give one-on-one presentations to the President. The startup got some unexpected free publicity when Bush held a TV camera using one of Jadoo’s lightweight fuel cells on his shoulder as media photographers captured the moment. Jadoo plans to begin selling such batteries to the broadcast market early next year.

Unexpected free publicity huh? Right.

And that fresh-faced kid Berger, the partner from Enron? Get a load of this:

Mr. Berger has over eight years of experience in the energy industry, during which he managed energy trading books for Enron Corporation and initiated development of the new Enron Premium Power Division. As a Manager, he made the previously unprofitable southeast short term trading operation for the Enron East Power Trading Division profitable by approximately $30 million over a two year period. Under his management, the southeast short term trading operation successfully administered the largest long-term customer deal in the industry, and increased the average daily volume in the southeast trading hub by ten times the former volume. Mr. Berger also managed the Enron Hourly Trading Desk, and operated a utility system in the southeastern United States. At Enron Energy Services he led and developed Enron’s corporate strategy for new energy technologies and energy reliability financial products. In addition, Mr. Berger spearheaded development, investment, and partnership opportunities in fuel cell technologies.

During 2002 and 2003, Mr. Berger served as an advisor to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission where he drafted governance guidelines for the Regional Transmission Organizations and served as an advisor to the drafters of the Standard Market Design regulatory document that is currently before the United States Congress. He also advised the Commission on distributed generation, demand response, information gathering and application issues, investigations, and trade clearing/credit issues in the North American energy markets.

He’s one of the assholes who worked in the “screwing Aunt Millie” Enron business, albeit in the southeast. And they immediately hired him to work on the FERC. Unbelievable.

He’s quite the operator. When he was a Harvard, and also an executive with Jadoo, he organized the first Harvard Business School Energy Symposium. And waddaya know, guess who he invited?

Speaker Name: Larry Bawden

Speaker Title: CEO

Affiliation: Jadoo Power Systems

As the legend grew, Berger’s “business plan” for Jadoo so impressed an unnamed classmate that he and some of his friends invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in the company. (If the business plan said that one of the principles was an insider Bushie on the FERC and they could guarantee five million coming from a staunch Bush supporter plus a personal audience with the president, I’d take that bet too.) And the next thing you know, Bush is on television personally demonstrating the product and they have a nice fat contract with the DOD. Sweet.

What a cozy little circle jerk.

Update: Sid’s Fishbowl has the same story.

Dial It In

Kos has created a great database of Sinclair affiliate information so that you can conveniently call and write your local station and its advertisers. It’s best is you are actually a local to make an impact on local businesses. Kos also has a convenient list of natinal advertisers for all of us to contact.

I would suggest calling instead of writing, although a snail mail letter is very powerful too. To that end I’ve prepared a couple of introductory talking points to get you started if you aren’t comfortable with doing stuff like this.

First, don’t get mad. These people are very far away from the corporate decision and it serves no purpose to take out our anger on them. Tell them what you think and what you plan to do. Don’t get bogged down in talking about your feelings or how upset you are by this. Make sure you mention that you will not buy their product or patronize their business if they support this thing and tell them that you are planning to talk about this with others to spread the word.

Calling the station managers and telling them that you are going to call advertisers is a good first step. I imagine that they are no longer talking calls today, but you can leave a message. Then call your local advertisers and tell them what you think. Use words like “controversy”, “cheating”, “unfair”,”unbusinesslike”, “scam”, “fraud” — words with which businesses don’t like to be associated.

Stay calm and make your case. These businesses don’t want to deal with this crap and there’s no reason to preemptively punish them for the acts of Sinclair. Speak more in sorrow than in anger “that it’s come to this.”

Here are a few phrases you might find will help you get started. Write in more in the comments section if you think of them and I’ll pick the best ones and put them up too.

Sales managers:

Broadcast television stations have a unique responsibility to be guardians of the democratic process. You will not watch, nor will you patronize businesses that do not respect the rules and the law when it comes to fairness in elections.

You are going to call local advertisers and tell them that as long as they support this station’s controversial intention of showing a political advertisement as news, you are not going to buy their product or patronize their business. Sinclair is cheating and you don’t think that’s fair. This is too important.

Corporate headquarters coming in and telling local news departments what they have to call news is just wrong. You are going to tell the local advertisers how you feel about that too. Local communities should have a say in what is shown on their own television stations. This is a scam on the good people of ____.

Local advertisers:

You don’t care who somebody plans to vote for, but you think it’s cheating for stations to run controversial political advertisements for one candidate and call it news.

You won’t be able to support businesses that fund this kind of fraudulent and unbalanced partisanship.

After 2000, you realize that every vote counts and you think that elections are important enough to get involved with. You have a lot of friends who think the same way. This is something you feel strongly enough about to change your shopping habits over. This is unbusinesslike behavior and you don’t think you can trust people who are so partisan.

You think that local communities letting corporations from out of state come in and tell local stations what they have to run us just wrong and you can’t support that.

Josh Marshall says that station affiliates are asking callers to call Sinclair headquarters instead of advertisers.

Nice try, but we’re not Republicans.

Pouty Press Tarts

Atrios has posted an excerpt from this article in which McCurry discusses Bush’s obvious insecurity, an observation with which I concur. Everything about the man oozes insecurity and immaturity, always has.

This same article contains an interesting observation about the press corpse which I also think deserves some analysis:

In late september, i spent a week on the Kerry plane. Unlike the 2000 Bush plane, which became notorious for its party atmosphere — margaritas flowed at the end of the day and affairs among the press corps were widely rumored — the feeling on the Kerry plane is professional and businesslike. It soon became apparent that many members of Kerry’s traveling press make no attempt to hide their open dislike of the candidate. The morning after Kerry had addressed the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute gala on the evening of September 15th, two members of the press corps were talking on a campaign bus. “That event was stupid,” one said, referring to the previous night’s occasion — one of the largest Hispanic galas of its type. “A waste of time,” the other said.

Other reporters were just as dismissive. Kerry had gotten a series of impassioned standing ovations during his speech. But when Elisabeth Bumiller described the event in the New York Times, she said, referring to a moment when Kerry spoke an entire paragraph in flawless Spanish, “Kerry’s audience . . . listened in startled silence, then broke out into cheers and applause when he made his way through [the paragraph].”

But to report on these events accurately would mean you had to say something unqualified and positive about Kerry. This is something his traveling press corps has been — and still is — loath to do. On the evening of September 21st, outside an auditorium in Orlando, where inside more than 7,500 people were screaming wildly as Kerry spoke, Candy Crowley stood next to the venue and reported on CNN that Kerry was “trying . . . to rev up the crowd.” The implication was unmistakable: Kerry’s supporters in Florida were resistant, even standoffish. Just to make sure Crowley was able to get away with downplaying the event as she was, CNN never showed a wide shot of the large, cheering crowd.

As a result of the media bias against Kerry, there is an unmistakable disconnect between what you see on the trail when you travel with him and the way he is depicted in the media. On Mike McCurry’s first trips on the plane, the Thursday and Friday after Labor Day, he immediately identified the animosity that existed between Kerry and the press corps. Specifically, the traveling press were mad because Kerry had not given a press conference since August 9th, five days into the SBVT controversy. McCurry realized he needed to fix the problem at once.

But, that can’t be it. Bush never gives press conferences and he treats reporters like shit, yet the press has been fawning toward him since 2000. Why is it that the press corpse persists in treating Democratic candidates this way?

I don’t think it’s political. I think it’s an institutional habit of mind that they are too lazy or too self-absorbed to challenge. “The Democrat” is an object of derision and mistrust, no matter who he or she is. Like so many others in this country, the media have absorbed and internalized the right wing propaganda about the Democratic Party and their subconscious attitudes and behaviors are a reflection of that. It’s not an ideological or even a political bias. It’s a personal bias born of right wing cant. Reporters need to take a good hard look at themselves and recognize that they’ve been spun in the worst way possible and they need to unwind themselves from the bullshit.

It is quite a testament to Kerry’s political acumen and Bush’s ineptitude that we have managed to stay so close in the last two elections considering this pervasive media bias against Democratic politicians.

Kos discusses today the necessity of keeping up the fight even after we win this November — it’s a long slog, as Rummy memorably said. Trying to unspin the press from their toxic habits of mind is part of that process.

Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni

Via First Draft and Hesiod, here are the Sinclair online polls. Take just a moment to stop impending fascism, won’t you folks?

Las Vegas

Minneapolis

Flint

Buffalo

Las Vegas (second station)

Milwaukee

Oklahoma City

Pittsburgh

Raleigh

Rochester

Tampa

Update: Check out this post by Josh Marshall if you haven’t already. Airing your complaints to the local advertisers is a powerful way to put pressure on these stations.