I just love this controversy over on World O’Crap about the scaredy cat little stewardi and their trembling passengers all excited by a bunch of “middle eastern” musicians talking to each other, not smiling and going to the bathrooms on an airplane. (Why did you know there is no law that mandates middle easterners should be required to eat with their hands?)
Personally, I think somebody needs to report these complainers to the TSA and get them on a no-fly list ASAP. They might be nice blond Murikans who could never harm a flea, but from the description they sound to me as if they could easily be Tim Mcveigh types who would be very happy to take down and airliner and blame it on the Syrian mandolin players. I don’t feel comfortable allowing people like that to eat their food with utensils or be allowed to whisper to one another privately on an airplane.
Someone should have the FBI look into this. Evil only prevails when good men do nothing. Just as the writer of this tale in the Women’s WSJ (what — is the regular one too, like, totally boring?) believes that her feelings are what should guide the actions of the police in matters of terrorism, I think mine should too. Paranoid white conservatives scare the shit out of me. I don’t want them on my airplane. After all, just as terrorists can learn to play instruments as a ruse, a home grown American terrorist can easily get hired on at Women’s WSJ to write silly, unbelievable essays. In fact, it’s the perfect cover.
Kevin at Catch has more on the chilling middle eastern flautists and Julia comments as only Julia can.
Obscenity charges will be dropped against a Burleson woman arrested last fall for selling sex toys to undercover police officers, her attorney said Saturday.
[…]
Pat Davis, president of Passion Parties Inc., the company that supplies Mrs. Webb with her erotic merchandise, said the decision to drop the case is overdue.
[…]
Mrs. Webb was arrested in October after selling erotic toys to a pair of undercover police officers. The state’s obscenity code forbids the sale of devices designed to stimulate the genitals, although some stores avoid prosecution by promoting the products as novelties.
I hear they’re going to outlaw hands and lips next session. Lord knows what people might do with those things.
In a powerful post, Brad DeLong brings up a point that I think needs to be said about current politics in the Democratic Party by simply juxtaposing Barbara Ehrenreich’s essays in support of Nader in 2000 and her repudiation of him in 2004.
Ehrenreich’s pro-Nader argument (or rather her anti-Democrat argument) from 2000 is truly puerile — but typical. I respect her for many things, but modern partisan politics is obviously not a field that she understands in the least. Her primary concern in the year 2000 was the perfidy of the centrist Democrats who had been leading the country, in her view, into ruin. Indeed, she seemed almost wholly unconcerned with what the Republicans would do with full control of the government, characterizing Junior as some kind of DLC Democrat who might try to place a couple of conservative judges on the Supreme Court but that’s about it. She was completely self-absorbed and laughably naive about the nature of the political opposition.
DeLong asks the question, “What changed between 2000 and 2004?” Commenters predictably said, “four years of George W. Bush.” And once again, I reply, “what in gawds name were you people doing for the previous eight years?” Apparently, many Democrats were watching their favorite infotainment programs and uncritically saw the partisan bloodshed of the 1990’s as some sort of sit-com instead of the bare knuckled, political power grab it was.
It was clear to many of us in 2000 that the Republican Party had completely run amuck and that George W. Bush was simply a brand name in a suit that the Party was putting forth to hide their essential ugliness from the American people. It was obvious to some of us that this was an unprecedented partisan battle and that this insular, myopic view on the left was going to hurt us very badly. I have little patience for the idea that it took this massive demonstration of GOP power under the Bush administration to convince people that the first, most important order of political business was to check the Republican power grab. It was obvious in 2000 to anyone who was paying attention.
Nowadays, I’m told it’s not that the Democrats are just corrupt but that they are corrupt pussies who never fought back until we gave them some spine. This is simply untrue. For a decade Democrats battled back a Republican juggernaut of unprecedented force (and a GOP landslide in 1994) while simultaneously fighting an extremely hostile media and a left wing faction that couldn’t deal with the fact that the Democrats, after 12 years of right wing ascendency, found a way to get elected and stop the inevitable slide to a permanent Republican majority. On that, (and not for the last time) they actually joined with the right wing in their loathing of the strategy that won elections in a conservative era and kept the Republicans from total political dominance. (This is not to say that the same strategy would work today. But, the argument of purism vs pragmatism hasn’t changed for the last thirty years, no matter what new strategy was proposed.)
Now that the purists have finally been sufficiently schooled in the consequences of letting Republicans have their way, I’m glad to see they are rejecting quixotic, third party politics for the time being. However, their view of modern partisan politics is as parochial as ever. For instance, I hear tell that we are going to finally “fight back.” And that seems to consist of charging mindlessly onto the battlefield, shouting slogans and beating our chests about taking our country back. It seems to be thought that if only we shout loudly enough, everyone on the sidelines will be impressed with our passion and join the fray on our side. And the Republicans, I guess, will be so shocked and awed that they will lay down their arms and capitulate.
I’m afraid that it’s far more likely that when the Democrats rush onto the field shouting our high minded slogans, the Republicans will simply explode a dirty bomb, killing untold numbers and scare the shit out of everybody else. The cable news ratings will go up and up and up as the media once again embeds itself on the side of the GOP in denouncing the “crazy” left wing terrorists.
Inchoate passion is not persuasive. And, to believe that “fighting back” consists of browbeating our elected politicians into standing up and denouncing Republican badness and wrongness is infantile. We grassroots types and bloggers and blowhards — as well as strong unelected voices like Gore, Dean and others — can stand up and give fiery speeches and have some effect if we’re willing to take some social heat for it. But in the real world of power and politics, passionate rhetoric is just one small piece of the puzzle.
The reason the Republicans have been as successful as they are, despite their policies being unpopular, is that they use their power to the nth degree, whether the public mandates it or not. They are confident in their ability to spin their partisan use of democratic institutions with bromides about values and morality and freedom and democracy. Underneath their rhetoric is a pure lust for power, but they have been very good at obscuring that by claiming victimhood and portraying themselves as the party of strong individuals speaking truth to(liberal) power.
Our problem is that we actually believe in democracy so we don’t think it’s right to shove our agenda down the throats of the American people without their permission (hence Clinton actually delivering on the centrist policies he ran and won on.) This means that in order to defend the country from impending fascism while we try to further a progressive agenda, we have to to protect democratic institutions, allow moderates a voice proportionate to their constituency and patiently try to bring the country around to our way of thinking.
Bill Sher at Liberal Oasis has been talking about this for months. As he says, liberals haven’t made the case that “liberal ideals are politically pragmatic” (and it’s not as if they weren’t given the opportunity during the primary campaign to do that.) Deluding yourself into believing that the public is just going to wake up one morning and reject this Republican image of us (and them) that’s been painstakingly stitched together for decades is wishful thinking. Only 20% of people people identify themselves as liberals and that should tell us something. We have a lot of work to do and it isn’t going to get done by standing around giving our politicians vague orders to “fight back” whatever that means.
Certainly, fighting back as a minority party is about as useful a pitting a high school baseball team against the New York Yankees. The first order of business to is win the presidency so that we can reverse this frightening foreign policy debacle and stop the bleeding on the domestic front. And that’s a big agenda at this point. But if we want to actually enact a progressive agenda it will not be enough to stand around and rail at the Democratic minority in congress for being unable to “win.” We need to be in a majority before anything gets done.
The fact that in one short three and a half year period this government has managed to spend the country into oblivion to the benefit of the very rich and has completely shot a half century of international leadership all to hell should, by all rights, translate into a landslide election for our side. And, yet it remains neck and neck. We have a Democratic base as fired up as any in my memory and yet we are still fighting among ourselves about the relative purity of our candidates and how if only they’d “fight” we’d win — as if we haven’t had some recent lessons in how certain satisfying fiery rhetoric is spun in the media to our extreme detriment. We can go down “fighting” like that or we can win by “fighting” using superior tactics and strategy.
And, yes we need to work to change this toxic political environment over the long term. We should use the newfound energy created by this Bush backlash and the new communications tools at our disposal. It was long past time that we created some political instutitons of our own to battle the political institutions of the right and groups like CAP and MoveOn and fledgeling efforts like Air America are our future.
But, right now we simply cannot forget that the single biggest problem we face is not our own lack of ballocks or the perfidious compromising DLC or the money that is required to run a modern political campaign. This country is in grave danger if the Republican Party maintains its grip on total institutional power. And they will not give it up easily and if they lose in the short term they will scratch and claw to get it back. They aren’t going away. Keeping them from total power must be our first priority, what ever it takes.
If Kerry wins, I’m sure that Barbara Ehrenreich and others will be upset that he is not sufficiently liberal. On the other hand, the right wing will be apoplectic that he is preparing to sell the country to the terrorists. The media will be slavering for anything juicy the David Bossies of the Mighty Wurlitzer will feed them. That is the nature of our politics today. That is the reality in which President John Kerry is going to be operating. And it would be nice if most Democrats didn’t put their sleep masks back on and pretend that John Kerry can be a super-hero who magically defeats terrorists and Republicans with one hand tied behind his back, while providing health care and prosperity for all — and then claim that he and the Democrats are pussies because they can’t perfectly accomplish all that in the face of a powerful and ruthless opposition.
It’s a new day, but the Republicans are hardly down and out. We need to get our priorities straight and start thinking like strategists instead of petulent teenagers. This notion that we will prevail if only our politicans will just speak up is to say that the problem has an easy, emotionally satisfying solution. It doesn’t. It’s a big, big deal and this party had better get its act together and figure out how to neuter this radical Republican Party before they immolate the lot of us.
Dave Johnson has some excellent advice on the kind of thinking that can actually defeat the GOP and pave the way to a new liberal ascendency. It’s a very good place to start. Also read the Republican Noise Machine by David Brock. Maybe it takes a former right wing operative to see that left still doesn’t understand the insidious nature of their opposition.
Update: Hats Off to Matt Stoller who is trying to do God’s work in bringing the fractious Democrats together. An e-mail exchange with him is what set me to thinking about this again. The pragmatists vs. the purists — the eternal battle for the soul of the Democratic party. It’s good to remind ourselves that our internecine battle is, and always has been, about the right strategy to get where we all agree we want to go.
There really is only one issue in this election. Since the Extended Florida Unpleasantness, this has been an Adminstration utterly unconcerned with any restraints, constitutional or otherwise, on its power. It has been contemptuous of the idea of self-government, and particularly of the notion that an informed populace is necessary to that idea. It recognizes neither parliamentary rules nor constitutional barriers. (Just for fun, imagine that the Senate had not authorized force in Iraq. Do you think for one moment that C-Plus Augustus wouldn’t have launched the war anyway, and on some pretext that we’d only now be discovering was counterfeit?) It does not accept the concept of principled opposition, either inside the administration or outside of it. It refuses to be bound by anything more than its political appetites. It wants what it wants, and it does what it wants. It is, at its heart, and in the strictest definition of the word, lawless. It has the perfect front men: a president unable to admit a mistake because he’s spent his entire life being insulated from even the most minor of consequences, and a vice-president who is viscerally furious at the notion that he is accountable to anyone at all. They are abetted by a congressional majority in which all of these un-American traits are amplified to an overwhelming din.
So, now we are faced with the question: Do you want to live in a country where these people no longer feel even the vaporous restraints of having another election to win?
Here we have a sample of the style of governance that has prevailed under Bush’s presidency. It’s not the sort of thing you would find in a civics textbook. Bush and his allies have been described as partisan or bare-knuckled, but the problem is more fundamental than that. They have routinely violated norms of political conduct, smothered information necessary for informed public debate, and illegitimately exploited government power to perpetuate their rule. These habits are not just mean and nasty. They’re undemocratic.
What does it mean to call the president “undemocratic”? It does not mean Bush is an aspiring dictator. Despite descending from a former president and telling confidants that God chose him to lead the country, he does not claim divine right of rule. He is not going to cancel the election or rig it with faulty ballots. (Well, almost certainly not.) But democracy can be a matter of degree. Russia and the United States are both democracies, but the United States is more democratic than Russia. The proper indictment of the Bush administration is, therefore, not that he’s abandoning American democracy, but that he’s weakening it. This administration is, in fact, the least democratic in the modern history of the presidency.
I think it’s very important to note that this is not something that’s confined to the Bush administration alone as if they are some sort of GOP anomalies. The fact is that this is an ongoing, serious problem of the modern Republican Party in general. They are congenitally opposed to compromise which leads inevitably to rule by force.
Chait argues that the Bush administration is not destroying democracy but rather weakening it. I would suggest that that adds up to the same thing. They are unlikely, except in a desperate situation, to attempt a military coup or do something dramatically attention grabbing like cancel the election. They aren’t that stupid. They can attain everything they want over time by simply eroding democracy to the point at which it has all of the trappings and none of the substance. That process has been going on for some time now and escalating gradually to the point at which we now find ourselves with a presidency (which has always been the repository of Republican ruling fantasies)that quite blatently declares that it has no responsibility to uphold the laws if it deems them an impediment to national security.
But it’s not the Bushies, it’s the party. Removing Bush will not solve this problem. Indeed, I’m sure the GOP congress would love to get back into action and resume its natural investigative role which they have been shut out of while Republicans are in the white house. Their egos demand a little bit of the spotlight.
I’m sure there are many Republicans who simply don’t see what is happening and would be horrified if they did. Not even the Democrats who have been on the receiving end of these undemocratic power plays seem to have been aware until recently of what has been going on.
I have been repeating this “undemocratic” mantra since the mid 1990’s. (You can google this blog for the word and you’ll see that I’ve done my best to bore everyone to tears with it.) It is a huge threat to this country — one that has been magnified a hundred fold by the events if 9/11. It’s not tin-foil kookiness and it’s not partisan angst. It’s real. And while I have little doubt that many reasonable sorts (which, by the way, I am also) will shake their heads sadly once again at my shrillness and hysteria for taking this view, I’ll continue to do it. The Emperor has no clothes. I see what I see. I’m glad to have some company.
Moscow and Washington are quietly negotiating a request by the Bush administration to send Russian troops to Iraq or Afghanistan this fall, Russian government sources tell Stratfor. The talks are intense, our contacts close to the U.S. State Department say, and the timing is not insignificant. A Russian troop lift to either country before the U.S. presidential election would give U.S. President George W. Bush a powerful boost in the campaign.
More at the link.
The U.S. inviting the Russians into Afghanistan to help us fight the Mujahadeen is so incredibly ironic I can’t even go there. A KGB agent rescuing the neocons is simply hysterical.
What do you suppose Pooty-poot will want in return?
More than half the Republicans in the House have signed a formal complaint to President Bush about the failure to give prominent conservative, pro-life party members even one prime-time speaking role at the Republican National Convention.
[…]
The pre-convention rebellion by so many conservative House members is driven by re-election concerns and frustration over policy differences with the White House in the past 31/2 years, Capitol Hill Republicans said privately.
Public revolt is the last thing the Bush campaign wants to see, after the Senate Republican leaders failed Wednesday to get even 50 votes to back a constitutional amendment against homosexual “marriages.”
Last month, Republican convention planners announced a prime-time speakers’ list, which was approved by chief Bush strategist Karl Rove.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, New York Gov. George E. Pataki, New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani — all of whom are pro-choice — are lined up for evening speeches.
[…]
“The most conservative speaker right now is John McCain, who is truly a fiscal conservative. But a lot of conservatives believe the conservative movement that got us here is being ignored at the convention,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican.
[…]
Mr. Pence said signers of his letter agreed that “millions of voters will be tuning into the convention to hear someone give voice to the traditional moral values that brought them to the Republican Party in 1980.”
“The strength of the Republican majority in America is not in the California governor’s office or in the moderate politics of George Pataki,” Mr. Pence said. “It’s in the millions of pro-family voters who will campaign for our candidates and turn out on Election Day.”
This controversy just guaranteed that Tom Brokaw and Wolf Blitzer will bring up the fact that Rove tried to keep the real conservatives off the podium at the one event at which they really wanted to appear moderate and mainstream. The bad news is that nobody’s going to watch the conventions who isn’t already decided. Still, it doesn’t hurt and it’s illustrative of the problem the administration is having with its base.
Karl Rove, special advisor to President Bush saying that Sen. John Kerry thumbed his nose to U.S. troops in Iraq at a political rally in Irvine, Calif., on Thursday, July 15, 2004.
“Human life is the gift of our creator, and it should never be for sale,” Bush said. “It takes a special kind of depravity to exploit and hurt the most vulnerable members of society. Human traffickers rob children of their innocence, they expose them to the worst of life before they have seen much of life. Traffickers tear families apart. They treat their victims as nothing more than goods and commodities for sale to the highest bidder.”
The president gave his brother, Florida’s governor, a verbal pat on the back, observing that Jeb Bush had signed a state law making such trafficking a felony.
Bush: “I had sexual intercourse with perhaps three or four, I don’t remember the exact number, women, at different times. In Thailand once, I have a pretty clear recollection that there was one time in Thailand and in Hong Kong.”
Brown: “And you were married to Mrs. Bush?”
Bush: “Yes.”
Brown: “Is that where you caught the venereal diseases?”
Bush: “No.”
Brown: ‘Where did you catch those?’
Bush: “Diseases plural? I didn’t catch…”
Brown: “Well, I’m sorry. How … how many venereal diseases do you suffer from?”
I just heard that Don Imus referred to Senator Clinton as a “fat buck-toothed crook introducing her rapist husband….” at the convention. (I don’t have a link, so it may be wrong.)
When asked to respond, Steve Schmidt of the Bush campaign said, “… there was a great deal of extreme venom and vitriol that spewed forth.”
Oh wait. That was about Whoopie Goldberg at a private fundraiser. This Imus comment only went out to tens of millions of people both on radio and television. It was just entertainment for the folks. Whoopie, on the other hand, made a lewd joke in front of Democratic partisans about Bush’s name (which, by the way, was hardly original — I had a bumper sticker that said “lick Bush in 88”)
Now, both Kerry and Edwards appeared on Imus yesterday, apparently. But then, they don’t tend to go around snuffling and whining every time somebody says something rude. That’s the specialty of little old lady quilting circle of the Bush administration.
