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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Anatomy Of A Smear

Dave at Seeing The Forest deconstructs the multi-pronged GOP campaign to smear Clinton for 9/11 and let Bush off the hook. As he says:

Republicans fight back with smears to discredit their accusers. They constructed a 3-part discrediting action that phased in, coming to a conclusion just before the commission releases its report.

For those of you who didn’t follow the previous Clinton smears in detail, this is a classic GOP operation. We have the merging stories of Gorelick, Wilson and Berger — a combination of character assasination, misrepresentation and the exploitation of unrelated credibility issues to form the basis of a counterfactual narrative that is much more juicy than the real thing. A dark conspiracy is set forth in the right wing press, then filters into the mainstream and tittilates the mediawhores with its more exciting version of events. Scoops are given to favored reporters and new facts dished out judiciously to keep the story going long beyond its natural life.

Read Dave’s post for the details. This is how its done.

Update: The incomparable Howler has more on this story. I realize that it’s long past time we asked just who in the hell is Kelli Arena and why is she always in the middle of these GOP psuedo-scandal pageants? Does anyone out there know who her special friend in the White House is?

King Of The Scumbags

I wrote sometime back about David Bossie over on the American Street. He’s always been one of the more shocking examples of Republican depravity and corruption, and not incidentally, a mediawhore favorite. Eric Boehlert has a bravura takedown of this little miscreant in today’s Salon.

Boehlert asks why Bossie is taken seriously in the press. It’s an excellent question, but it is silly to actually ask such a thing. Bossie has been doing this stuff for more than a decade and the media have never given a shit that he is a proven liar over and over again. And that’s because they never pay a price for sucking up his very juicy dictation:

For David Bossie, professional Clinton-era agitator and renowned Republican dirty trickster, these must seem like the good old days. During the 1990s Bossie, as a grass-roots activist and congressional staffer, was often at the epicenter of churning out stories about President Clinton, deftly feeding the press and Capitol Hill investigators outlandish — and usually unsubstantiated — assertions about White House wrongdoing

[…]

Bossie’s style during the investigation was to lob scattershot allegations toward an appreciative press corps that rarely seemed upset when the charges he gave them to amplify — that Whitewater was a criminal enterprise, for instance — failed to pan out as factual. As Democratic strategist James Carville once put it, “He made collective fools out of about 80 percent of the national press corps.” But none of this appears to have marred Bossie’s reputation with reporters, even when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich — no stranger to hardball partisan politics — reportedly ordered Bossie fired from his congressional staff position in May 1998. Bossie had overseen the bungled release of supposedly incriminating recordings of Whitewater figure Webster Hubbell’s jailhouse phone conversations with Hillary Rodham Clinton — recordings that had been edited, deleting obvious exculpatory remarks.

Now some critics wonder how a political prankster like Bossie has managed to maintain respectability in Washington, particularly among the press. A Nexis search retrieves more than 100 press references to Bossie this year, with MSNBC proving to be especially accommodating toward him. “Pat Moynihan had that wonderful phrase about defining deviancy downward. Now we’re defining credibility downward if we take David Bossie seriously,” says former Clinton aide Paul Begala. “There are a lot of credible critics of Democrats. David Bossie is not one of them.”

[…]

The press has also been hesitant to discuss, or dissect, Bossie’s current role. For instance, during the controversy surrounding the release of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” many news outlets, including the New York Times in a June 27 article, simply identified Bossie as the president of Citizens United. But the Times is well acquainted with Bossie’s modus operandi; he has boasted about feeding information to its reporters, especially Jeff Gerth, every step of the way in their ill-advised, and since discredited, Whitewater investigation. “We have worked closer [on Whitewater] with the New York Times than the Washington Times,” Bossie’s colleague Brown once bragged to the Columbia Journalism Review.

And as the Washington Times noted, Bossie made a deal to leak the Senate Whitewater Committee’s final report to the New York Times. Yet years later, when Bossie reemerges in the news as a critic of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” to unsuspecting Times readers he’s described simply as another grass-roots Republican activist.

“At the very least, you’d expect viewers and readers to learn Bossie was fired for doctoring tapes,” says David Brock, the president and CEO of Media Matters for America, a liberal online research and monitoring organization. “That doesn’t seem like the type of person whose words are worth much.”

“As a principle I’d agree readers ought to know where particular sources are coming from,” says Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, who has dealt with Bossie for many years. “On the other hand, I don’t think David Bossie makes any secret about what his agenda is and where he’s coming from.”

In the past, reporters who fed off Bossie’s wayward leaks were reluctant to shed light on his ability to engineer stories behind the scenes. In the early 1990s, the press printed and broadcast verbatim the Whitewater allegations being leveled by Citizens United and its ready-made press packets. Yet reporters rarely made public the source of their Whitewater leads. As the Columbia Journalism Review noted at the time, the press “has shamelessly taken the hand-outs dished up by a highly partisan organization without identifying the group as the source of their information.”

[…]

Bossie has generated unusual loyalty from some in the press corps. “Dave Bossie has never lied to me, and the Clinton White House has lied to me,” ABC News producer Chris Vlasto notoriously told the Washington Post in one of its several Bossie profiles in the 1990s. Vlasto, who did not return a call for comment, made that statement in 1997, five years after the accusations about Whitewater were first raised and two years after the Clintons were exonerated by the Resolution Trust Corp., whose conclusions were confirmed by every subsequent official investigation. “On this record,” the RTC reported, “there is no basis to charge the Clintons with any kind of primary liability for fraud or intentional misconduct … It is recommended no further resources need be expended on the Whitewater part of this investigation.” Yet those reporters who subsisted on Bossie’s handouts, including some at the New York Times, the Washington Post and ABC News, did not report the RTC’s vindication of the Clintons. ABC’s Vlasto, who had invested mightily in the Whitewater story, insisted, “If it comes down to a question of whom do you believe, I’d believe Bossie any day.”

[…]

In February 1996, Citizens United mailed out a fundraising letter bragging that it had “dispatched its top investigator, David Bossie, to Capitol Hill to assist Senator Lauch Faircloth in the official US Senate hearings on Whitewater.” Another mailing reported that Bossie was “on the inside directing the probe.” Democrats subsequently cried foul that a federal employee was actively raising money for a partisan group, so D’Amato forced Bossie to submit an affidavit proclaiming his independence from Citizens United.

In November 1996, Bossie improperly leaked the confidential phone logs of former Commerce Department official John Huang to the press. And he did that by deceiving other GOP congressional aides, according to an account published in Roll Call, which quoted one Republican aide comparing Bossie’s deceptive presence to “Ollie North running around the House.”

In July 1997, James Rowley III, the chief counsel to the House Government Reform Committee, which was investigating allegations of campaign finance wrongdoing by the Clinton administration, resigned his position after committee chairman Burton refused to fire Bossie. In his one-page resignation letter, Rowley, a former federal prosecutor employed by Republicans, accused Bossie of “unrelenting” self-promotion in the press, which made it impossible “to implement the standards of professional conduct I have been accustomed to at the United States Attorney’s Office.” (Bossie’s habit of self-promotion paid off; during one four-week stretch in early 1994, Bossie and Brown were profiled by the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times and the Washington Post, each marveling at the power the activists were wielding.)

The breaking point came in May 1998, when Bossie, then 32, oversaw the release of the doctored Hubbell tapes. As Roll Call reported at the time, “At Bossie’s request, Burton sat on the tapes for nearly a year until word started to leak that Hubbell might be indicted by [Kenneth] Starr for tax evasion. Bossie, who supervised the tapes along with investigator Barbara Comstock, oversaw the editing of Hubbell’s prison conversation[s] and decided to release them the day before Hubbell was indicted.” According to Roll Call, Bossie enjoyed unusually close working relations with Starr investigators.

The tapes were edited for “privacy” considerations, according to Bossie. But they were also edited to completely omit key exculpatory passages, including one in which Hubbell exonerated Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing. Gingrich ordered a reluctant Burton to fire Bossie.

Yet, in 1999, Bossie was given the Ronald Reagan Award by the Conservative Political Action Conference for his “outstanding achievements and selfless contributions to the conservative movement.” And it wasn’t just the conservative base that continued to embrace Bossie after the Hubbell tape disgrace; so did many in the Washington press corps.

[…]

when the Enron scandal broke, Bossie appeared on Fox News and repeated GOP talking points that both political parties deserved blame because, after all, Enron’s former CEO, Kenneth Lay, slept in the Lincoln bedroom once while Clinton was in office. But that in fact never happened. Also that year, Bossie appeared on TNN’S late-night show, “Conspiracy Zone With Kevin Nealon,” where he dissected, yet again, the supposed mysteries surrounding the suicide of Clinton aide Foster. Also that year, Bossie guaranteed that Sen. Hillary Clinton would run for president in 2004.

In early 2003, Bossie’s group released a pro-Iraq War commercial starring former Tennessee senator and “Law and Order” actor Fred Thompson — to “combat the left-wing propaganda” Bossie asserted was coming from Hollywood. Bossie also made TV appearances to rail against France for its Iraq stance and call for an American boycott of French products.

This spring Bossie returned to his roots, producing an anti-Kerry ad that used recent “priceless” MasterCard ads to parody “another rich liberal elitist from Massachusetts.” (According to Bossie, the ad’s light touch was meant to stand in contrast to the left’s “hate-filled speech and vitriol” aimed at Bush.) The spot, actually seen by very few TV viewers, produced a nice publicity bump for Bossie as the same network of reporters and pundits he’d cultivated for years with tips and leaks welcomed him into the unfolding campaign coverage. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews announced on “Hardball”: “Let me go to David Bossie. That ad is great, by the way.”

I especially like Michael Isikoff saying that everybody knows Bossie has an agenda as if a) “everybody” is a Washington insider and b) having an agenda is no different from being a lying sack of shit who worked as hard as he could to harrass a legally elected president out of office with the willing help of a criminally irresponsible press corps.

But then, that’s why we call them mediawhores.

Ouch

I get all these e-mail press releases from the Kerry campaign every day and they are quite amazing. Here’s one from earlier today:

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE REPUBLICAN PARTY PLATFORM

(1) PUT RIGHT-WING IDEOLOGY FIRST: We recognize that we need to cater to our right wing base rather than pesky moderates like Nancy Reagan and Orrin Hatch. Therefore will put ideology over science and deny all credible scientific evidence that stem cell research will save lives and that global warming exists.

(2) DENY A WOMEN?S RIGHT TO CHOOSE: We will continue, at all costs, to ensure that women are denied their Constitutional right to choose. We will appoint judges who will work to rollback that right and we will fight for legislation that infringes on this right.

(3) REWARD OUR WEALTHY CONTRIBUTORS: We will continue to pass tax cuts that benefit the wealthiest Americans who fund our campaigns and get us elected.

(4) NEW BUSINESS FOR OUR FRIENDS WITH NEW NO BID CONTRACTS: We will provide no-bid contracts to our closest friends to ensure they will receive the largest contracts possible. Also, we will relaunch our secret energy taskforce so we can add more loopholes for big oil.

(5) ADD $10 TRILLION IN DEFICITS: In the past four years, this Administration has successfully taken the country from a $5.6 trillion surplus to a $5 trillion deficit ? a $10 trillion loss of revenue. We want to take the next step by adding an additional $10 trillion to the deficits, leaving the burden on the next generation.

(6) HARM OUR ENVIRONMENT: We will rollback generations of environmental regulations that protect our air, land and water. We will poison our water with arsenic and mercury; we will allow drilling in our most pristine natural wilderness; and we will make sure taxpayers pay to clean up our toxic waste sites.

(7) CUT AID TO CHILDREN AND DECIMATE PROGRAMS FOR SENIORS: We will cut domestic programs that provide health care, early education and nutrition programs and after-school services to thousands of American children. We will continue to fail to live up to our commitment to fund our education mandate by $27 billion. We will also pass our $2 trillion plan to privatize Social Security.

(8) BREAK OUR COMMITMENT TO VETERANS: We will once again promise veterans will be provided for under a Republican administration. We will then fail to provide the funding veterans need for health care, cut 500,000 veterans from the system entirely and close veterans’ hospitals across the country.

(9) RUSH TO WAR IN IRAQ: We are proud that we stubbornly rushed to war in Iraq without our allies, sent our troops into combat without proper equipment, over-stretched our military, and failed to plan for the peace.

(10) LET AL QAEDA OFF THE HOOK: We will continue to divert our attention and resources from Afghanistan, break our promises to rebuild that nation. We let Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora to continue planning attacks against the U.S. from his hideout reportedly in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.

(11) LEAVE AMERICA VULNERABLE: We will under-invest in port, chemical and nuclear security, claiming the war in Iraq protects us here at home, and hope no one notices Ridge’s and Ashcroft’s warnings of an imminent attack on the homeland in the coming months.

www.johnkerry.com

I guess the gloves are off.

To GOP, He’s Dishonoring His Father

Politically, the booking is a triumph for the Democratic ticket of Sens. John F. Kerry and John Edwards, which promptly trumpeted its ability to attract ‘individuals from all political backgrounds.’ Affronted Republicans moved to discredit the famously renegade son, who often disagreed with his family’s politics and is an outspoken critic of President Bush.

‘I think his speech is a cute little story for convention coverage, but I don’t think it’s the sort of thing that will influence any voters,’ said Gary Bauer, a conservative activist and domestic policy advisor to President Reagan.

Summing up a sentiment widely held among conservative groups, Wendy Wright of Concerned Women for America called the planned public appearance ‘sad.'”

[…]

Although Michael Reagan has consented to appear at the GOP convention, Ron Reagan’s scheduled speech at the Democratic gathering is galling to many Republicans.

“Ron Jr. has either allowed himself to be used or he’s knowingly partaking in something whose purpose is to damage the party his father spent all of his adult political life in,” Bauer said.

Not quoted in the article was noted GOP strategist Richard Cohen who just last week declared Reagan a “grave robber,” a statement even Bauer rejected as insensitive. Bauer nonetheless complimented Cohen for his dedication to journalistic objectivity and invited him to the very exclusive Hannity and Colmes after party at Hue during the GOP convention.

Counterpunch

I know that many people believe that Kerry has not sufficiently come out swinging against Bush for his lies and distortions. It is said that if he would only look the American people in the eye and tell it like it is, he would win in a landslide. Like those before him he has simply refused to fight back.

Well, he has a new ad out and people should be relieved that he’s finally taking the fight to the Republicans. Here’s the transcript.

(Open on TV set showing Bush negative ad, camera pulls back)

“I’m fed up with it. I’ve never seen anything like it in 25 years of public life, George Bush’s negative TV ads. Distorting my record, full of lies and he knows it.

I’m on the record for the very weapons systems his ads say I’m against. I want to build a strong defense, I’m sure he wants to build a strong defense so this isn’t about defense issues. It’s about dragging the truth into the gutter. And I’m not going to let them do it. This campaign is too important the stakes are too high for every American family. The real question is will we have a president who fights for the privileged few or will we have a president who fights for you.

George Bush wants to give the wealthiest 1% of the people in this country a new tax break worth 30 thousand dollars a year. I’m fighting for you and your family, for affordable housing and health care for better jobs for the best education and opportunity for our children.

Its a tough fight. I know that. Up hill all the all the way. But I’m going to keep on fighting because what I’m fighting for is our future.”

You can see the ad here.

Plus Ca Change, Plus C’est La Meme Chose

Cover-Up

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.

Dirty Texans

Via Talk Left:

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.

Job One

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.

The Republican schism is much, much deeper.

They Don’t Like Democracy

Charles Pierce gets to the nub of the argument:

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?

BUSH-CHENEY UNLEASHED. Up or down? Yes or no?

There you have it.

Jon Chait in TNR amplifies this theme:

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.