Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Family Values

Apparently, the kewl kidz in the press tent all “gasped” when Kerry used the word “lesbian” the other night. And like their emotional role models, Beavis and Butthead, the mere mention of any word they associate with sex excited them a little bit. Because it did, and the Bush campaign sensed it, it’s become one of those faux outrage dances that the media and the Republicans perform so well together.

I just had the misfortune to see Mickey Kaus on Fox (playing the conservative, for once) discussing the Mary Cheney incident. He claims that Kerry and Edwards were making an “ugly” cynical outreach to homophobes. (The fact that gay people don’t see it that way should be telling, but no matter.) According to Kaus it’s clear that Kerry and Edwards are trying to pry the homophobes away from the Bush campaign.

This is such patent nonsense. If he outed Mary Cheney perhaps it would be worth a fuss, but the woman (who is 35 years old) has been out for years working explicitly on gay and lesbian issues. She’s the third most famous lesbian in America, fergawdsake. If Kaus thinks that Kerry is hoping to pry the homophobes away from the Republican party by outing an already famous lesbian he needs to think a little bit about how that might work.

On the other hand, it is perfectly fair to out the personal hypocrisy within an admininstration that, at the behest of its bigoted base, wants to enshrine discrimination against gay people into the constitution yet are quite tolerant of homosexuality in their personal lives.

This isn’t just a little game. It is a serious matter of equal rights under the constitution. And, the Cheneys’ behavior can be directly compared to the type of behavior that used to be tolerated from white men like Strom Thurmond who agitated for decades for Jim Crow and discrimination against african americans while privately being quite fond of his african american daughter. That goes beyond hypocrisy. For any enlightened person, it is intellectually and emotionally incoherent.

We, as citizens, are not in a position to pass judgment on how people deal with such issues in their personal lives. But those like Thurmond and Cheney publicly promote laws that discriminate against selected people in our society and in their own families. That is such a counterintuitive concept to most Americans that it deserves to be exposed and openly discussed.

I can certainly understand that the Cheneys are uncomfortable with this situation and are trying mightily to distract public attention from the fact that they are behaving in an incomprehensible manner. In their case, it is very confusing because they not only seem to tolerate their daughter’s orientation, they have welcomed her partner into the family on equal terms with other spouses and employ her in a public role in the campaign. It is not unreasonable to wonder how they square this with the Republican party’s open hostility to gay people, even to the extent that the Log Cabin Republicans made a very public break with the party in this campaign. What led them, and her, to accept the ignominy of not appearing on the stage with the entire family at the GOP convention?

It’s not surprising that Republicans would try to portray this as a Kerry campaign dirty trick, because it feels like that to them. The hypocrisy of the Cheneys is something they’d very much like to keep under wraps. And when they heard the gasp of arousal from the press corpse when Kerry said a “sex-word” they knew just what to do — launch one of their faux outrage campaigns that would allow the media to talk about “dirty” things all day while expressing their shock and awe at how terrible the Democrats are for bringing it up. Republicans never lose by tickling the pre-adolescent libidos of the political media.

Cheney and his erotically imaginative better half are really the ones on the hot seat with this but have successfully spun the press these last couple of days. However, as a very stupid man once said, they can run but they can’t hide. At some point, maybe not until they are on their deathbeds, they will have to face the fact that they betrayed their beloved daughter countless times by refusing to use their power for good and stand up for what they knew in their hearts to be right. It may not be on their gravestone, but that will be their true epitaph.

Guerilla Blogging

Check out all the Freeway Blogger pictures.

Good Work!

Inner Lives

Riffle found some rather surprising similarities between O’Reilly’s alleged phone porn and a hot and steamy shower scene in his hot and steamy novel:

Here are some snippets of O’Reilly’s [alleged] phone sex technique from the (real) lawsuit

O’Reilly: Well, if I took you down there I’d want to take a shower with you right away, that would be the first thing Id do… yeah, we’d check into the room, and we would order some room service and uh [….]

You would basically be in the shower and then I would come in and I’d join you and you would have your back to me and I would take that little loofa thing and kinda’ soap up your back.. rub it all over you, get you to relax, hot water [….]

[….] and then with my other hand I would start to massage your boobs, get your nipples really hard … ‘cuz I like that and you have really spectacular boobs….

So anyway I’d be rubbing your big boobs and getting your nipples really hard, kinda kissing your neck from behind ….

And here’s a bit from O’Reilly’s novel, Those Who Trespass:

The spray felt great against her skin as she ducked her head underneath the nozzle. Closing her eyes she concentrated on the tingling sensation of water flowing against her body. Suddenly another sensation entered, Ashley felt two large hands wrap themselves around her breasts and hot breathe on the back of her neck. She opened her eyes wide and giggled, “I thought you drowned out there snorkel man.”

Tommy O’Malley was naked and at attention. “Drowning is not an option”, he said, “unless of course you beg me to perform unnatural acts – right here in this shower.”

Who knew that Big Bill was so obsessed with erotic fantasy? (And, furthermore, who ever wanted to?)

Speaking of bodice ripping soft core fiction, considering the events of today, perhaps it’s time to revisit Lynne Cheney’s 1981 paeon to the love that dare not speak its name:

The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage — no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were. She felt curiously moved, curiously envious of them. She had never to this moment thought Eden a particularly attractive paradise, based as it was on naiveté, but she saw that the women in the cart had a passionate, loving intimacy forever closed to her. How strong it made them. What comfort it gave.

The young woman was heavily powdered, but quite attractive, a curvesome creature, rounded at bosom and cheek. When she smiled, even her teeth seemed puffed and rounded, like tiny ivory pillows.

Let us go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. We shall find ourselves a secluded bower where they dare not venture. There will be only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement. In the evenings I shall read to you while you work your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl.

You can understand why a younger, lubricious Lynne would have fantasized about getting away from the “anger and imperatives of men” and write adolescent novels about lovely young women. She was, after all, married to Dick Cheney. Sadly, she seems to have lost that adventurous turn of mind and decided to become an angry hypocrite instead. Too bad. She might have been worth knowing once.

Mud Wrestler

Well now. Just as I was basking in the glow of three successful debates and a nice sense of momentum, I finally got to read this seminal article about Karl Rove in The Atlantic, by Joshua Green and I realized that I was being far too complacent. I urge you to read the whole piece. Rove is not a magician and he is not omnipotent. But he is ruthless, particularly when he’s in a corner.

First of all, Rove’s history in tight races is very instructive. He will play very, very dirty, particularly in the last couple of weeks, and he will use some tactics that are extremely difficult to counter in a short period of time.

One of his favorites seems to be to smear his own candidate in order to make his opponent look like a dirty trickster. This is, of course, where the Rove/CBS memo theory comes from. But, Rove usually does this sort of thing very late in the game, so I would suspect that we will see something new in the next week or so if it’s going to happen.

The most instructive anecdote in the article is the one in which the race was so close that Rove insisted on a recount. It would sound very familiar except that in this case, his client was the challenger. This is likely to be a primer for what will happen if Kerry wins narrowly. Hooper was Rove’s Republican client. Hornsby was the Democrat:

Judicial races that no one had expected to be competitive suddenly narrowed, and media attention—especially to Hooper’s race after the “dialing for dollars” ad—became widespread. Then Rove turned up the heat. “There was a whole barrage of negative attacks that came in the last two weeks of our campaign,” says Joe Perkins, who managed Hornsby’s campaign along with those of the other Democrats Rove was working against. “In our polling I sensed a movement and warned our clients.”

Newspaper coverage on November 9, the morning after the election, focused on the Republican Fob James’s upset of the Democratic Governor Jim Folsom. But another drama was rapidly unfolding. In the race for chief justice, which had been neck and neck the evening before, Hooper awoke to discover himself trailing by 698 votes. Throughout the day ballots trickled in from remote corners of the state, until at last an unofficial tally showed that Rove’s client had lost—by 304 votes. Hornsby’s campaign declared victory.

Rove had other plans, and immediately moved for a recount. “Karl called the next morning,” says a former Rove staffer. “He said, ‘We came real close. You guys did a great job. But now we really need to rally around Perry Hooper. We’ve got a real good shot at this, but we need to win over the people of Alabama.'” Rove explained how this was to be done. “Our role was to try to keep people motivated about Perry Hooper’s election,” the staffer continued, “and then to undermine the other side’s support by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers, immoral—all of that.” (Rove did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.)

The campaign quickly obtained a restraining order to preserve the ballots. Then the tactical battle began. Rather than focus on a handful of Republican counties that might yield extra votes, Rove dispatched campaign staffers and hired investigators to every county to observe the counting and turn up evidence of fraud. In one county a probate judge was discovered to have erroneously excluded 100 votes for Hooper. Voting machines in two others had failed to count all the returns. Mindful of public opinion, according to staffers, the campaign spread tales of poll watchers threatened with arrest; probate judges locking themselves in their offices and refusing to admit campaign workers; votes being cast in absentia for comatose nursing-home patients; and Democrats caught in a cemetery writing down the names of the dead in order to put them on absentee ballots.

As the recount progressed, the margin continued to narrow. Three days after the election Hooper held a press conference to drive home the idea that the election was being stolen. He declared, “We have endured lies in this campaign, but I’ll be damned if I will accept outright thievery.” The recount stretched on, and Hooper’s campaign continued to chip away at Hornsby’s lead. By November 21 one tally had it at nine votes.

The race came down to a dispute over absentee ballots. Hornsby’s campaign fought to include approximately 2,000 late-arriving ballots that had been excluded because they weren’t notarized or witnessed, as required by law. Also mindful of public relations, the Hornsby campaign brought forward a man who claimed that the absentee ballot of his son, overseas in the military, was in danger of being disallowed. The matter wound up in court. “The last marching order we had from Karl,” says a former employee, “was ‘Make sure you continue to talk this up. The only way we’re going to be successful is if the Alabama public continues to care about it.'”

Initially, things looked grim for Hooper. A circuit-court judge ruled that the absentee ballots should be counted, reasoning that voters’ intent was the issue, and that by merely signing them, those who had cast them had “substantially complied” with the law. Hooper’s lawyers appealed to a federal court. By Thanksgiving his campaign believed he was ahead—but also believed that the disputed absentee ballots, from heavily Democratic counties, would cost him the election. The campaign went so far as to sue every probate judge, circuit clerk, and sheriff in the state, alleging discrimination. Hooper continued to hold rallies throughout it all. On his behalf the business community bought ads in newspapers across the state that said, “They steal elections they don’t like.” Public opinion began tilting toward him.

The recount stretched into the following year. On Inauguration Day both candidates appeared for the ceremonies. By March the all-Democratic Alabama Supreme Court had ordered that the absentee ballots be counted. By April the matter was before the Eleventh Federal Circuit Court. The byzantine legal maneuvering continued for months. In mid-October a federal appeals-court judge finally ruled that the ballots could not be counted, and ordered the secretary of state to certify Hooper as the winner—only to have Hornsby’s legal team appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which temporarily stayed the case. By now the recount had dragged on for almost a year.

When I went to visit Hooper, not long ago, we sat in the parlor of his Montgomery home as he described the denouement of Karl Rove’s closest race. “On the afternoon of October the nineteenth,” Hooper recalled, “I was in the back yard planting five hundred pink sweet Williams in my wife’s garden, and she hollered out the back door, ‘Your secretary just called—the Supreme Court just made a ruling that you’re the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court!'” In the final tally he had prevailed by just 262 votes. Hooper smiled broadly and handed me a large photo of his swearing-in ceremony the next day. “That Karl Rove was a very impressive fellow,” he said.

I had read a bit about this race, but until now it really hadn’t hit home that Karl Rove had single handedly orchestrated the Bush recount strategy in 2000.

This is going to be a very, very difficult couple of weeks and if we don’t win decisively, it’s likely to continue for quite a while. We cannot count on Republican shame to keep them from requesting hand counts or trying to block absentee ballots or behaving in any other hypocritical manner based upon their arguments in 2000. They have no shame and hypocrisy means nothing to them. So, we will have to be prepared to slug it out.

In the meantime, the blogosphere is going to have to help the media see what is happening when Rove launches his next slime attack. I suspect that the Mary Cheney brouhaha may be the first shot — it doesn’t make a lot of sense by itself, but perhaps as an introduction to a new character smear it might. Whatever it’s going to be it has something to do with Kerry being cruel and unfeeling.

Keep your eyes and ears open for signs in the next few days. When the going gets tough — and the going is certainly tough — Rove always resorts to ratfucking. As Josh Marshall says,

It’ll be like a ‘where’s Waldo’ thing: Karl Rove Dirty Trick’s Watch. (For examples, see the Green piece.) Who will be able to spot Karl’s dirty tricks first? Who has the sharpest eye? Sit back in your seat. Get out the popcorn.

Boyz Klub

Blitzer is framing the O’Reilly story as a brave man fighting back against a greedy employee. Guess those guys have to stick together.

Still, I’m looking forward to hearing about the kicking and biting among the networks for first dibs on the tapes. Solidarity amongs millionaire TV stars only goes so far. Nothing personal, Billy boy. It’s strictly business.

Live Long And Prosper

When did Mary Matalin decide to reveal herself as a Vulcan?

Slow Learner

James Wolcott gets to the nub of Bush’s problem:

Now that the three debates belong to history, furnishing boring anecdotes from Michael Beschloss and Doris Kearns Goodwin for years to come, I’m struck by a single defining element that permeated each encounter: Bush’s cavalier lack of preparation. Forget the cosmetics for a moment: the menagerie of mannerisms Bush displayed. He simply didn’t come loaded with ammo. I assumed that he’d have some killer line at the ready, some surprise dug up from Kerry’s record to spring, a practiced bit of eloquence that would lift the debate at a dramatic moment out of the recitation of facts and figures. He not only didn’t have the eloquence, he barely had the facts and figures. For some bizarre reason best left to future psychologists, Bush doesn’t seem to have approached these debates seriously. He refused to acknowledge he couldn’t get by with simply rehashing his stump speech. When I saw on the news that Bush has prepared for this final debate by rehearsing during his spare moments on the campaign trail in Air Force One and the limo drives, I thought: that’s now true preparation, that’s lazy last-minute cramming.

Read the rest here.

And what’s really galling is that he was not any better prepared in the debates in 2000, it’s just that the giggling schoolgirls in the media were so delighted with the political wedgie they were collectively administering to Al Gore that they overwhelmed the coverage and created an alternate reality (that Gore unfortunately acted upon instead of ignored.)

The problem for Bush is that he’s never really studied and in order to learn it is said that he prefers that concepts and ideas be presented to him because he doesn’t like to read. On top of that he’s an egomaniac who doesn’t LIKE to be told what to do:

There is to be no scowling this time, George Bush’s counselors told him, even if John Kerry attacks your mom. Campaign officials say it took Karen Hughes a good while to convince the Commander in Chief after the first presidential debate that he had looked irritated. “I was not irritated,” he told her, irritated. “Sir, you were,” she said. Hughes is one of the few who can tell the President what he might not want to hear and show him what he might not be able to see for himself.

If there is any further question as to why we are in a mess in Iraq, I think that should put it to rest. He doesn’t study on his own, he learns by listening but refuses to hear bad news.

Memorizing Their Lines

The indispensible Eric Boehlert writes in Salon:

The media reaction: Ho-hum, just a Kerry sweep

For Kerry, it’s a rather startling and completely unforeseen achievement, considering Bush entered the final stretch season with an unblemished career debate record and had been given high marks by the press for his debate message discipline and ability to connect with voters. Yet he went O for 3.

Despite the consistent polling results, most of the assembled television pundits Wednesday night considered the debate to be a draw and suggested it would, in the end, have little impact on Election Day. Again, it’s hard to imagine that the media response would have been so reserved if it were Bush completing a debate sweep.

Ain’t it the truth. When you think about it, it’s an amazing achievement that Kerry has been able to sidestep the simpleminded media narrative that had the triumphant King Junior astride his destrier riding to a devastating victory over the weak and silly Democrat. Kerry refused to play along and the American people haven’t been foolish enough to swallow it, thank Gawd.

But, the punditocrisy and the press corpse have not been willing to shake their preferred storyline, even in the face of an obvious digression to a totally new plot. Sadly, I don’t think that even a Kerry victory is going to change this derisive, condescending attitude toward Democrats until we confront the media with it head on and force them to see us differently.

This campaign, with the emergence of a rugged indefatigable candidate and a large, active grassroots with a mighty fundraising arm may just be the first step in proving to these insular elites that Democrats are fed up with this phony characterization of us and we’re going to be fighting it from now on. The media are going to have to face themselves, at least in part, because their audience is no longer a shouting mob on one side and an incredulous group of onlookers on the other. We are now engaged. And while we may believe in the virtues of tolerance and diversity and cooperation, it is a grave mistake to assume that makes us weak or passive.

We’re schooling them in this election about that and we’ll keep on doing it until they wake up to the fact that they’ve been duped by the Mighty Wurlitzer into writing a work of fiction that fewer and fewer people are willing to accept as fact.

Losin’ It

As I’m watching the mini frenzy over the trumped up “Mary Cheney” controversy, I am struck by how much the GOP is off its game.

Think about it. The morning after the final debate, they trotted out the wife of the vice president to attack John Kerry for being too mean —- about their gay daughter. What’s the plan? Are they trying to make a mad dash to the middle by portraying the “most liberal member of the senate” as being intolerant toward gays? Or is this supposed to enrage and energize the base — all of whom think that we should actually change the constitution to permanently discriminate against gay people. It’s weird and unfocused. It’s very hard for me to believe that they want to spend the day with the words “vice president’s gay daughter” being repeated over and over again on television.

Meanwhile, while Lynn Cheney is performing the role of rabid attack dog, the only sight we’ve seen of Commander Codpiece the Warrior King (looking even more dazed and confused than ever) was a brief uncomfortable interview on Air Force One where John McCain gave his best streetwalker impression and some woman (didn’t catch who she is) brought up Bush’s worst moment in the debate in which he said that the answer to those who had lost their jobs was to improve elementary school standards. “That’s just common sense” she said.

These guys are way off message.

Right Wing Victimization Watch

Lynn Cheney is all over the TV saying “as a mom” that Kerry used a “cheap and tawdry political trick” by mentioning her gay daughter. “He’s not a good man,” she says.

Suburban Guerilla reminds us of another politician using Cheney’s daughter as a — cheap and tawdry political trick:

“Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it’s an issue that our family is very familiar with. … With respect to the question of relationships, my general view is that freedom means freedom for everyone. People ought to be able to free — ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to.”

Remember Schieffer’s question?

Both of you are opposed to gay marriage. But to understand how you have come to that conclusion, I want to ask you a more basic question. Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?

Shocking for Kerry to bring up Cheney’s daughter in that context, eh? As Andrew Sullivan says this morning:

I keep getting emails asserting that Kerry’s mentioning of Mary Cheney is somehow offensive or gratuitous or a “low blow”. Huh? Mary Cheney is out of the closet and a member, with her partner, of the vice-president’s family. That’s a public fact. No one’s privacy is being invaded by mentioning this. When Kerry cites Bush’s wife or daughters, no one says it’s a “low blow.” The double standards are entirely a function of people’s lingering prejudice against gay people. And by mentioning it, Kerry showed something important. This issue is not an abstract one. It’s a concrete, human and real one. It affects many families, and Bush has decided to use this cynically as a divisive weapon in an election campaign. He deserves to be held to account for this – and how much more effective than showing a real person whose relationship and dignity he has attacked and minimized? Does this makes Bush’s base uncomfortable? Well, good. It’s about time they were made uncomfortable in their acquiescence to discrimination. Does it make Bush uncomfortable? Even better. His decision to bar gay couples from having any protections for their relationships in the constitution is not just a direct attack on the family member of the vice-president. It’s an attack on all families with gay members – and on the family as an institution. That’s a central issue in this campaign, a key indictment of Bush’s record and more than relevant to any debate. For four years, this president has tried to make gay people invisible, to avoid any mention of us, to pretend we don’t exist. Well, we do. Right in front of him.