Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Man

Ezra Klein has written a beautiful piece making the affirmative case for John Kerry. There is much in it that is original and thought-provoking, but I particularly like the following reflection on the merits of flexibility in a good leader:

Righteousness, as a habit, rejects certainty; in fact, the angels have a troubling predisposition to wander around issues, which makes sticking in their camp a matter of ideological flexibility as much as judgment. There’s no chasm greater than the one Kerry bridged to go from Vietnam war hero to the war’s most prominent opponent, but he was right to serve his country and right to fight for an end to the misguided slaughter. It’s a lesson he’s refused to unlearn, and one he’s spent a lifetime applying. And we need it.

I also am enthusiastic about Kerry. It’s not an ABB thing for me and never has been. Kerry is the right man at the right historical moment. He’s uniquely equipped by temperament and experience to lead in this world at this time.

Back when he won the primaries and I was still smarting from the defeat of my chosen candidate, I spent on evening reflecting and reading about John Kerry, trying to see what it was that so many of my fellow Democrats seemed to get about this guy that I hadn’t seen until he was already half way there. After all, I’d once voted for the man and had plenty of respect for him. Indeed, by the time his nomination was clinched, I thought he was a gift in many ways. A liberal in the White House seemed almost too good to be true in this day and age.

I discovered that what the Democrats in places like Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina saw was a man who was tough enough to win and tough enough to take the slings and arrows of what was going to happen to him afterwards. That flinty, Yankee determination is an all-American trait more authentic than all the faux folksiness and phony posturing that two-faced cowpoke from Kennebunkport could ever hope to conjure. And it’s a trait that people understood was vital as we deal with threats to our democracy from abroad and from within.

That night I wrote an affirmative case for Kerry, more prosaic certainly than Ezra’s fine piece, but from the heart nonetheless.

Obviously, there are many reasons any person runs for president having to do with ego and accident. After observing him for a while, I think John Kerry is responding to the call in the 30 year political civil war with the Republicans. He understands that they have become dangerously radical and that it’s time to break their hold on power. He knows this territory.

In that sense, I confess I’m surprised that liberals aren’t taking more heart in the fact that John Kerry is a card carrying fighting Massachusetts liberal. We should be thrilled that somebody as liberal as Kerry has got a chance to be president. Because let’s not kid ourselves, anybody more liberal than John Kerry is unelectable…

He’s not a crook, he’s not lazy, he’s not stupid. He’s very accomplished, he’s highly experienced and he’s got good instincts. But, I’m convinced that the most important character traits in a successful President at this point in history are resiliance and cunning; even if we win the election, politics are going to remain a bloodsport. The Republicans aren’t going to fade away. This battle is ongoing and we must have someone who can withstand a punch and come back. It is going to be very, very difficult to govern. I think Kerry is running not because he’s “electable,” but because he’s one of the few Democrats of his generation who has spent his life preparing to govern in the face of a radical political opposition. The job is not for the fainthearted…

I believe that right now the Democrats are essentially the conservative party, which means as great an emphasis on preservation as progress. This comes as a result of the two party system that places us in contrast to the radical Republican party which seeks to overturn the New Deal and dissolve the international order of the last 50 years. By necessity, our candidates are not going to be able to run on as progressive a platform as many of us might wish. One has to take into consideration the nature of the opposition and the character of the body politic when framing a case.

Kerry is not a reformer as Dean was perceived to be, nor is he a champion of a particular constituency as Gephardt was. But, perhaps at a time like this it is more helpful to judge the candidate by the quality of his enemies than his friends. His career has been about fighting bad guys, from Vietnam to Dick Nixon to BCCI.

In light of that, I believe Kerry is running for the simple reason that this time and place requires somebody who has the experience and character to keep the country secure while fighting back a rabid political opposition at home and a series of difficult threats overseas. His life has uniquely prepared him for this political moment.

He is the man called by history to bring America from the brink of radicalism from within and without. I’m grateful that he’s willing to take on this thankless task. That’s real patriotism.

E-mail your friends and family this link so they can watch the video, too:

http://www.johnkerry.com/video/110104_your_stories.html

Notes on Turn-Out

George Stephanopoulos said earlier this morning that he had two veteran political operative sources, one from each party, who he trusts. He claimed that each were “eerily calm” about their candidates’ prospects tomorrow but each had entirely different beliefs about what would win it for them.

The Democrat believed that there was going to be a record turn-out that would sweep Kerry to victory. The Republican believed that there wouldn’t be a record turn out and that Bush’s base would win it for him.

The Democrat is right.

On NBC, Tom Brokaw just said that he’d talked to Rove who told him that he didn’t think that more than 110 million would vote and repeated his oft-repeated CYA trope about how two million evangelicals stayed home in 2000 because they were shocked that Junior the reformed drunk had once been caught driving while under the influence. He feels confident that they are back in the fold.

It ain’t gonna be enough. If Rove and the boyz are “eerily calm” it’s because they are either delusional, they are good actors or they feel confident that Diebold can steal it with voting machines because it’s already clear that the turnout is going to be phenomenal.

I also heard Tucker Carlson on the Chris Matthews week-end show say that he thought Kerry would win because people don’t stand in line for hours in the Florida sun to vote because they like a politician. People are willing to stand in line for hours because they are angry.

Tucker’s right, too.

There is a lot of handwringing among the gasbags about the fact that people allegedly aren’t voting “for ” Kerry but against Bush, as if the underlying reason for voter intensity matters. It doesn’t. If the Democrats come out in droves tomorrow because they loathe and despise President asterisk more than they love Kerry it doesn’t matter one iota. The result is the same.

The underlying fact that cannot be ignored by Democrats and moderates of all stripes is that they stole the goddam election last time and then governed like they’d won in a landslide. They rubbed our noses in it for four long years with a far right agenda, treating us like shit every single step of the way. Apparently, they believed their own ridiculous hype and convinced themselves that we would just roll over and take it. They were wrong.

It didn’t have to be this way. 9/11 could have wiped the whole thing out if Junior had behaved even slightly as the president of the entire country instead of just his base. They made their bed.

And, despite all the polarization and bad feelings I don’t actually think there is going to be a lot of disruption at the polls because there are just too many of us and we are organized and working together. For instance, in this story of predictably shameless (and ineffectual) GOP agit-prop (Via Atrios) we see the signs of an energetic, cooperative progressive movement at work to help people exercize their right to vote:

We followed the congregants of the Mt. Hermon AME to vote after their Sunday service. The Pastor gave a rousing speech that shook the walls about exercising one’s “God given right to vote.” Outside, there were vans waiting to take people over to an early voting station in Ft. Lauderdale at the African American Research Library, where many thousands of people have already voted in the past two weeks. This day was no different; the line stretched across the parking lot and off the grounds on the sidewalk on Sistrunk. It was 1pm, and as hot as the day was gonna get, which was burning. 85 degrees, a slight breeze but not enough to overcome the moisture — typical fall in Florida. People carried umbrellas, and fanned themselves with Kerry/Edwards paddles.

At first glance, it looked like the scene outside a stadium before an AC/DC show: too many cars trying to park; confusion in the line; people handing out water; everyone clutching their ID’s.

But the place was stamped with politics. Distributing the cold bottles of Zephyrhills were about dozen NAACP Voter Fund volunteers in yellow shirts. Others distributed folding chairs for people who wanted to sit in the line. An Election Protection corps in black uniforms passed out flyers printed with voting rights. A couple of Kerry/Edwards people handed out candy from plastic pumpkins.

As Harold Myerson wrote in this wonderful piece from the LA Weekly this week:

I have spent the past week observing the official Democratic Party and unofficial 527 field operations in the battleground states of Ohio and Florida. And I have found something I’ve never before seen in my 36 or so years as a progressive activist and later as a journalist: an effective, fully functioning American left.

If it is fear and loathing of George W. Bush that made that happen, so be it. The modern Republican Party will rue the day they pushed us to our limit. Their hubristic dreams of a permanent majority are dead. We are going to crush them with our numbers.

Here’s Johnnie!

Reason number 5,769,438 not to vote for George W. Bush:

They have already used the Justice Department in the pre-election legal challenges for partisan purposes.

CINCINNATI — As two federal judges in Ohio prepared to rule on lawsuits contending that the state’s procedure for challenging an individual’s right to vote is unconstitutional, the Justice Department weighed in with an unusual letter brief supporting the statute.

Assistant Atty. Gen. R. Alexander Acosta sent a brief during the weekend to U.S. District Judge Susan J. Dlott, who held a rare Sunday night hearing in one of the cases, a lawsuit filed late last week by Donald and Marian Spencer. The Spencers, an elderly African American couple, are longtime civil rights activists in Cincinnati.

The Spencers’ lawsuit contends that the Ohio procedure, which was enacted in 1886 and permits individuals to challenge the legitimacy of a voter at the polling place, is a vestige of “Jim Crow” laws and creates the possibility of disenfranchising a voter without due process of law.

[…]

Acosta’s letter urged the judge to heed the Help America Vote Act, or HAVA, which was passed in 2002 to help remedy some of the problems in the 2000 presidential election. In particular, the letter said HAVA permitted a voter whose “eligibility to vote is called into question” to cast a provisional ballot.

“We bring this provision to the court’s attention because HAVA’s provisional ballot requirement is relevant to the balance between ballot access and ballot integrity,” Acosta wrote.

“Challenge statutes, such as those at issue in Ohio, are part of this balance,” he added. “They are intended to allow citizens and election officials, who have information pertinent to the crucial determination of whether an individual possesses all of the necessary qualifiers to being able to vote, to place that information before the officials charged with making such determinations.”

Acosta’s letter also stated that “nothing” in the Voting Rights Act barred challenge statutes. Consequently, Acosta concluded, “a challenge statute permitting objections based on United States citizenship, residency, precinct residency, and legal voting age like those at issue here are not subject” to a challenge based on the language of the law alone, because those criteria are “not tied to race.”

Alphonse A. Gerhardstein, a veteran civil rights lawyer who represents the plaintiffs in the Cincinnati case, said he thought “the letter was highly irregular.”

“The Justice Department is not a party to the case. They have not filed a motion to intervene in the case or filed an amicus brief,” Gerhardstein said.

“They volunteered information that goes beyond any federal interest. It’s startling to say that challengers can bring information to [the official] poll watchers. That presumes they will bring in outside information. If you are a poll watcher, how are you going to evaluate that information on the spot?” Gerhardstein wondered.

Nice. John Ashcroft’s Justice Department inappropriately injects itself into a case on the side of the Republican Party.

They don’t even slightly care about appearances anymore. Here’s the good news:

A federal judge issued an order about 1:30 a.m. today barring political party challengers from polling places throughout Ohio during Tuesday’s election.

U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott found that the application of Ohio’s statute allowing challengers at polling places is unconstitutional. She said the presence of challengers inexperienced in the electoral process questioning voters about their eligibility would impede voting.

What you and I call common sense, the Republicans are calling a ruling by an “activist liberal judge.” Fuck ’em.

Loose Lips

From Salon.com:

Secretary of State Colin Powell has privately confided to friends in recent weeks that the Iraqi insurgents are winning the war, according to Newsweek. The insurgents have succeeded in infiltrating Iraqi forces “from top to bottom,” a senior Iraqi official tells Newsweek in tomorrow’s issue of the magazine, “from decision making to the lower levels.”

This is a particularly troubling development for the U.S. military, as it prepares to launch an all-out assault on the insurgent strongholds of Fallujah and Ramadi, since U.S. Marines were counting on the newly trained Iraqi forces to assist in the assault. Newsweek reports that “American military trainers have been frantically trying to assemble sufficient Iraqi troops” to fight alongside them and that they are “praying that the soldiers perform better than last April, when two battalions of poorly trained Iraqi Army soldiers refused to fight.”

If the Fallujah offensive fails, Newsweek grimly predicts, “then the American president will find himself in a deepening quagmire on Inauguration Day.”

It’s too late for Powell to redeem his reputation and it’s pathetic to watch him try. But, he’s probably right. When insurgents and terrorists are executing Iraqi soldiers fifty at a time it’s hard to expect the army to be loyal to an occupying force. I’ll be very surprised if they are able to maintain even a slightly cohesive force.

Baby It’s Cold Outside

For those of you who found my post from yesterday about Bush’s failure to understand the terrorist threat interesting, check out the transcript of the BBC show The Power Of Nightmares over on Silt:

In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this. But their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered to their people. Those dreams failed. And today, people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life. But now, they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand. And the greatest danger of all is international terrorism. A powerful and sinister network, with sleeper cells in countries across the world. A threat that needs to be fought via a war on terror. But much of this threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It’s a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media.

This is a series of films about how and why that fantasy was created, and who it benefits. At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neoconservatives, and the radical Islamists. Both were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world. And both had a very similar explanation for what caused that failure. These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they created today’s nightmare vision of a secret, organized evil that threatens the world. A fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful.

Wow.

Ground Game The Day After

At a prayer meeting here Wednesday night, Mr. Kulp led a dozen parishioners in thinly veiled prayers for President Bush’s re-election. He prayed that God might do “whatever it takes on Election Day,” including keeping some voters away while “bringing certain people to the polls.”

The Lord helps those who help themselves, doesn’t he?

An Observer investigation in the United States has uncovered widespread allegations of electoral abuse, many of them going uninvestigated despite complaints of what would appear to be criminal attempts to manipulate voter lists.

[…]

Although allegations of misconduct have been levelled at both parties recently, the majority of complaints that have been identified in The Observer’ s investigation involved claims against local Republicans.

The claims, made by the BBC’s Newsnight, follow alleged attempts by Republicans to illegally suppress the votes in key states. Republican spokesmen deny these allegations.

Check out eripost’s Vote Watch 2004 for dozens and dozens of stories that show the pattern all over the battleground states. There has been a campaign to send election literature to people’s homes and if it is returned it is used as a reason to remove the person from the rolls. In at least one case, the literature was consciously returned by Democrats in protest and in others it appears that merely failing to retrive an RNC registered letter from the post-office lands a Democrat in the fraudulent voter column.

It is now crystal clear that we are seeing a nationally coordinated vote suppression effort by the GOP. In many cases they have waited until the last possible moment to mount challenges such as trying to get voters removed from the lists for spurious reasons like not having an apartment number listed on their address. Much of this is designed to throw the electoral process into chaos in the days just before the election. Mostly, they are trying to set the stage to make voting so difficult that busy working people will not be able to stand in long tedious lines to vote.

The stories are all very similar. This is obviously coordinated at the national level.

So, ok, what do we do about it? The press is covering it in the local papers. And, if we win decisively, this whole thing may be moot.

However, if this election is as close as 2000 and legal challenges become necessary, we are going to have to be prepared with a coordinated media response. You can bet they’ve already got theirs planned out. And they have a problem, just like they had in 2000:

Baker spoke to the press loudly and often, and his message was Bush had won on November 7. Any further inspection would result only in “mischief.” Privately, however, he knew that at the start he was on shaky political ground. “We’re getting killed on “count all the votes,” he told his team. “Who the hell could be against that?”

They got around that when Gore was forced to follow Florida law and show cause in specific counties to request a recount. Then they were able to reframe that argument to “he wants to count only some of the votes.”

I think that the key for the Democrats is to find legitimate voters ready to go on camera on Wednesday and tell their stories of denial, intimidation, and waiting. I sincerely hope that they have a list of those who’ve had to defend their voting rights already and that they are prepared to line up all the voters who will be forced to stand in lines for hours because some RNC operative is holding up the line with challenges. And then there are the voters who have been challenged because of ridiculous technicalities. (This college professor is a good start.)

I hope they are prepared to write the same narrative in all the swing states where this coordinated attack occurs and will stick with their charges no matter how many times the other side dredges up Mary Poppins and Mickey Mouse. Indeed, we should point out that neither “Mary” or “Mickey” showed up to vote, since anybody can see that it was a joke, not an attempt at voter fraud.

Hopefully, none of this will be necessary. But, if we find ourselves in legal limbo, the key will be to show over and over again that legitimate voters were illegally denied the right to vote and many, many others had ridiculous roadblocks put in their way as part of a coordinated plan to slow down the voting process in highly populated areas.

Our response must be aggressive and coordinated and ready to go on Wednesday morning. You know the Republicans will be.

Poll Dancers

I just heard a world weary journalist ask whether it is reasonable to think that Kerry can win when all the polls show Bush with a slight lead. If anybody seriously believes that, they really need to go have a talk with ace reporter Wolf Blitzer. Via Kos here’s Wolfie on the day before the 2000 election:

BLITZER: And now, let’s take a look at the latest poll numbers. The new CNN/”USA Today” Gallup Tracking Poll results are being released at this hour. It shows George W. Bush with 48 percent, Al Gore 43 percent, Ralph Nader with 4 percent, Pat Buchanan with 1 percent.

And those numbers are similar to other tracking polls. Take a look: ABC’s poll has Bush at 49 percent, Gore at 45 percent; The Washington Post, Bush at 48 percent, Gore at 46 percent; the NBC-Wall Street Journal tracking poll, Bush at 47 percent, Gore 44 percent. And both the CBS and MSNBC-Reuters-Zogby tracking polls have Bush at 46, Gore at 44 percent.

It’s clear that when a race is this close you cannot precisely poll the election. The press corpse should understand this but apparently they don’t. Either that or they are listening to RNC spin which I’m sure they would never do. Right?

Bush’s Big Endorsement

This is getting ridiculous. The wing-nuts are going crazy with the idea that this tape means that bin Laden wants Bush to lose when it is obvious to any sentient being that the opposite is true.

Look, bin Laden is obviously very well connected to the American zeitgeist. He may be a nihilistic monster but he isn’t stupid. His little speech made it clear that he is quite aware of the various rhetorical tentacles in the election and even quoted some of them. He knows that he is a feared and hated figure in America and he knows that anything he says will be taken with a grain of salt.

But, he also knows that the conventional wisdom of the American media is that his mere appearance on the scene accrues to Junior’s benefit. There is nary a wingnut or gasbag who hasn’t said in the last few months that any kind of terrorist attack would automatically benefit Bush in the election. Only those who are comotose have failed to notice that his approval rating rises at least a couple of points with a heightened terror warning. Bin Laden knows nothing has to blow up. All he has to do is show up.

It is obvious that if bin Laden was trying to influence the election — and it’s hard to see by the timing that he wasn’t — then it is also obvious that his intent is to help elect Crusader Codpiece, the most hated man in the world.

George W. Bush is the single best recruiting tool that Islamic terrorism has ever had. The American media may be too dumb or too insular to know this, but he certainly does.

Don’t take my word for it though. Here’s a guy with a few years of expertise on the subject under his belt, Richard Clarke. He agrees with me:

AHMED: If president bush is re-elected, it helps osama bin laden. It helps president musharraf, the two enemies in that. It helps both of them. Because it secures musharraf in pakistan it secures osama bin laden, his base. He needs an america that is on the war path against him, to be able to say america’s attacking islam, in fact, so he’s twisting what is happening from america.

KOPPEL: Do you agree, Richard?

CLARKE: I do. I think it’s obvious he’s trying to affect the u.S. Election. This is the second audio/visual tape we’ve received in the last week from al qaeda, addressed to the american people. And he attacked the president in the way that, i think, is designed to get the american people to move to bush’s side. He’s a smart guy, osama bin laden, and he knows if he attacks bush that will strengthen bush. Why does he want bush as president? Because Bush, as president, gives him the symbol that gets all these people joining al qaeda. Bush is the symbol that has increased recruitment for al qaeda, and has increased money flow for al qaeda. Bush is the symbol for all of the jihadists throughout the muslim world who hate america.

Uncle Osama Wants You, Junior.

Update: Atrios is skeptical that bin Laden’s intention can be divined. I’m with Richard Clarke. I think it’s clear that he knows Bush is better for the terrorist business. And he’s right.

Bush Is Completely Wrong On Terrorism

There are so many reasons not to elect George W. Bush that it’s difficult to catalog them all. From the encroaching authoritarianism of its Justice department to the fiscal madness that has taken us from a record surplus to a record deficit in three short years due to immense tax cuts for the rich. But surely, the single most important reason to fire George W. Bush is his abject failure to properly comprehend the nature of the islamic fundamentalist threat. The re-emergence of Osama bin Laden is a stark reminder of why this is so.

Many people have been writing recently, and some of us quite some time ago, about the fact that the Bush administration, instead of seeing the assymetrical threat of terrorism for what it was, simply applied their cold war tenets of nation state rollback to the new threat. It is an intellectual failure of huge magnitude and it will haunt us for many years to come.

If you look back at the PNAC manifestos of the late 90’s that served as the guiding documents of Bush’s policy you will see that terrorism per se was not perceived as a threat. Indeed, it was hardly mentioned. Richard Clarke and others have verified that the Bush administration did not take it seriously. But, what is most distressing is that they refused to let go of their erroneous notions of state sponsored terrorism even after 9/11 which led to the mistaken belief that the key to defeating al Qaeda was to overthrow the Taliban, (thus freeing them to go after what they perceived to be a real threat, the totalitarian dictator Saddam Hussein.)

There has been a lot of discussion about the “faith based” nature of this presidency, drawing parallels to unquestioning fundamentalist religion and cults of personality. There are obviously elements of all of this in explaining why the Bush administration has made so many huge strategic errors that were entirely predictable before any action was taken. However, it’s more than that. You cannot explain neocon intellectuals like Wolfowitz away with fundamentalist religion and there is no reason to believe that men like Rumsfeld and Cheney are subject to any Bush cult of personality. But, they all have one thing in common that is demostrable throughout their public careers — their relentless adherence to their beliefs, no matter what the facts may seem to show. Going all the way back to TEAM B and the Committee for the Present Danger, these people have been proven wrong — proven, mind you — again and again and yet they maintain their bedrock belief that the threat of totalitarian nations is the singular overwhelming threat to our country and they must be defeated militarily wherever they occur. These people are stuck in a fringe cold war mindset that nothing can shake. 9/11, it seems, did not change anything.

For instance, their beliefs about Iraq sponsored terrorism were not solely fometed by Laurie Mylroie. She neatly piggybacked her theory that Saddam the Stalinist was the root of all mid-east terrorism onto an earlier theory promoted by Claire Sterling which posited that all terrorism was sponsored by the Soviet Union. Her book, The Terror Network from back in 1980 made the case that terrorism could not exist without the support of a state sponsor and that idea has guided the Republican foreign policy establishment even until this day. Just as it is said that Wolfowitz and Feith encouraged everyone in the DOD to read Mylroie’s book, William Casey responded to his analysts assertion that there was no Soviet terrorist conspiracy by saying,”Read Claire Sterling’s book and forget this mush. I paid $13.95 for this and it told me more than you bastards whom I pay $50,000 a year.” This is, then, an old story.

This is why we didn’t take out bin Laden. This is why we didn’t take out Al-Zarqawi. In the administration’s view, they were simple actors on behalf of totalitarian governments. Their idea of draining the swamp was to invade and occupy the source of their funding, which many of them convinced themselves had to be Saddam Hussein. Richard Clarke, in Against All Enemies quotes Wolfowitz as saying: “You give Bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don’t exist.”

The Bush policy on terrorism is based upon a false premise and nothing that has happened throughout this crisis has led them to reevaluate that premise and change direction. This is what they call “resolute” and “strong.” What it is, in fact, is a dangerous delusion born of outmoded cold war thinking that was wrong when it was conceived and remains wrong today.

This is really what this election is about. The administration made the wrong choices on 9/11. That is why bin Laden still runs free, able to make propaganda videos showing him healthy and robust three years after the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center. This is why Al Zarqahi is killing vast numbers of Iraqis and Americans even today. (That this enormous error is seen as George W. Bush’s primary strength is such a depressing comment on our media and my countrymen that I can’t even contemplate it.)They fit their threat assessment into the mold of anti-communism, fatally misunderstanding the nature of what we are facing. If they are given the chance to continue on this deluded path (and they have never changed course in more than 40 years, no matter what the facts present) then we can expect this situation to hurtle ever more out of control.