Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Fighting The Narrative

Jonathan Chait has an interesting article in TNR in which he makes a good case that it’s Kerry’s to lose. He chalks it up to a better Democratic ground game and obvious Bush weakness.

But he says something at the end which I find kind of amusing:

The biggest mystery may be why most pundits haven’t noted how bad things look for Bush right now. Maybe the reason is that he’s built an aura of inevitability, starting with his 2000 victory and continuing through his legislative triumphs. The man just doesn’t seem to lose very often. And his campaign firmly believes in projecting an air of confidence in the belief that it’s self-fulfilling. (Remember Bush in late fall 2000, in an effort to show he was so confident that he could play for a landslide victory, devoting time and money to California?) The day before the 2000 election, a front-page headline in The Washington Times read, “Bush campaign says it’s in the bag; Top strategist sees 320 votes.” In retrospect, we now know that Bush’s victory was not exactly inevitable. So maybe it’s just hard to believe that Bush will lose, even if the data suggest he will.

Could Bush still win? Of course. I can think of three things that could intervene. First, Kerry is highly gaffe-prone. Roughly once a week he utters a statement–global test, terrorism as a nuisance–that plays right into his opponent’s hands and forces him to explain himself. Any day, he could utter a gaffe big enough to change the dynamics of the campaign. Second, whenever the terrorism threat level rises, Bush’s ratings go up. What are the odds we don’t have an elevated threat between now and election day? Right–pretty slim. And third, a terrorist attack within the United States would probably cause a major rallying effect for Bush. On top of all that, there are limits to our predictive ability. Elections can’t be forecast with perfect accuracy. It’s possible that there are other important variables that we don’t or can’t know right now that could swing the race toward Bush. But what we do know says a lot, and what it says is that Kerry looks like a good bet to win.

With the exception of a terrorist attack, every single point that Chait makes is a result of a flaccid, ineffectual and in-the-tank news media.

Why does Bush have an “air of inevitability?” Why, it’s because they have pretended in plain sight and the news media have either been too lazy or stupid to challenge it, despite the fact that in the paragraphs preceding this one, Chait just laid out a devastating case against Bush’s electability. The fact that an incumbent wartime president is in this much trouble two weeks before the election is a powerful story that the media just can’t be bothered to report. They are going to wake up on November 3rd scratching their heads and saying wtf because they aren’t paying attention to what is really going on. And then they’ll do it all again.

Furthermore, the idea that Kerry is “gaffe prone,” at least in comparison to the most inarticulate president in the history of the United States, is ridiculous. It’s not that Kerry is gaffe prone, it’s that the media are addicted to snotty GOP talking points and the GOP is quite adept in knowing how to frame these little gaffes and scandals in ways that appeal to their puerile worldview. They play willingly into the GOP’s hands by pimping stories they know very well are full of shit but thrill them in some way.

The terrorist alerts are a national joke and the mainstream media have done virtually no reporting on how this came to be. They behave as if these stupid color coded charts are some sort of third rail and as a result they have allowed the administration to manipulate the electorate over and over again. If they allow the administration to cry wolf again, they have no one to blame but themselves if it nobody pays attention and something horrible actually happens.

So, maybe it’s true that it’s Kerry’s to lose. But he is forced to anticipate the moves of a very powerful and dishonest GOP machine (and likely controversial election result) and at the same time he has to battle the silliest and most ineffectual political media in the world in order to win. Talk about a challenge.

I think we’ll do it anyway. But it’s a testament to Kerry’s skill as a politician, a great organization and more than half the country just getting sick and tired of this bullshit and coming out to vote. It really shouldn’t be this hard.

The Falafel Factor

Just in case you’d like to send Bill O’Reilly a sandwich or a nice little gift.

Dumboys

I don’t know how many of you are watching Crossfire, but Jon Stewart is on and he’s making both Tuckie and Paul a tad uncomfortable.

They seem to be unaware that The Daily Show is a parody of the news and that its mission is to make fun of them. And that’s because they are so insular and self-referential that they have no idea how the country really sees them.

They don’t like it. Especially the Tuckster who is plainly wants to scratch his eyes out.

Stewart is trying to make the point that they are contributing to the dumbing down of the discourse by presenting this fake news, or political theatre, that they pretend is news. He isn’t being funny and he isn’t doing the usual celebrity circle jerk and they are finding it very discomfiting.

Good.

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thanks to reader Gail S.

Anybody Got A Problem With This?

Via Josh Marshall:

As we told you a few days ago, six Republican party staffers and campaign workers in South Dakota resigned over a burgeoning voter fraud scandal. Chief among them was Larry Russell, head of the South Dakota GOP’s get-out-the-vote operation, the Republican Victory Program.

To date, no criminal charges have been filed. But the state Attorney General says the investigation is “continuing.”

Today comes news, however, that Russell — still under investigation in South Dakota — has been reassigned to run President Bush’s get-out-the-vote operation in Ohio. Russell will now “lead the ground operations” for Bush in Ohio, according to an internal Republican party memo obtained by the Sioux Falls Argus Leader.

And Russell’s bringing along with him to Ohio three of the five other GOP staffers who had to resign in South Dakota and are similarly under investigation in that state.

I can see that they are going to try to overwhelm us with dirty tricks all over the country and make it difficult to concentrate on any single thing. It’s clear that they are embarking on a concentrated battleground ratfucking effort on top of full-on voter intimidation combined with misdirection about vote fraud.

Is there anything to be done about this? Perhaps e-mailing the local media with the story and asking them to keep an eye on it? Maybe it’s time for some push polling on our side. “Would you be more or less inclined to vote for president Bush if you knew that his campaign brought in suspected criminals from South Dakota to run his get out the vote effort in Ohio?”

Semen Found On Karl Rove’s Tie!

Not really, but I thought it might get the mediawhores’ attention. There is some news but it doesn’t have anything to do with semen so it likely won’t require the Republicans to answer unwanted questions during the waning days of the presidential campaign about the president’s chief political strategist being called before a grand jury to testify in the matter of exposing an undercover CIA agent.

Still, you’d think Judy Blitzer and the gang might at least mention it…

Rove Testifies in CIA Leak Investigations

WASHINGTON – President Bush’s top political adviser, Karl Rove, testified Friday before a federal grand jury trying to determine who leaked the name of an undercover CIA officer.

Rove spent more than two hours testifying before the panel, according to an administration official who spoke only on condition of anonymity because such proceedings are secret.

Before testifying, Rove was interviewed at least once by investigators probing the leak. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell also have been interviewed, though none has appeared before the grand jury.

Try to imagine this circumstance happening in the Clinton, Gore or Kerry campaigns. Close your eyes and visualize the spitting, drooling GOP talking heads like Bay “of Pigs” Buchanan and Sean “pom pom boy” Hannity. Just think of what a thrilling final two weeks we’d have…

This seems like it might just be worth the Democrats making a bit of a fuss over. Bush’s brain just spent two hours in front of the grand jury in a criminal matter. Today.

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.