Ezra Klein makes an interesting point about political attacks in this post. First, he says that for a political attack to be useful, it must be accurate. Second, it must be politically accurate and third, it must be effective.
The first point may actually be debatable. For the most part, it seems to me that it only needs to be believable in order to resonate. Still, I would not suggest adopting the character assassination method of political attack. If it isn’t accurate, I’m against it.
His second point is really the one that caught my eye because I don’t think people understand this and it’s important that they do:
Political accuracy is a bit different. It relies on the American people being ready to believe something is true. In April, 45% of Americans said honest and trustworthy were not words that applied to Bush. With that in mind, I think the populace is primed for a discussion over whether or not he is a liar. It’s an argument I think we’ll win, which is why I advocate it. Now, if less than half think Bush is dishonest, it stands to reason that even fewer will be willing to call him — or hear him called — a criminal. That’s why I argue against that label. The general rule of thumb here is that levying the charge shouldn’t do us damage — if it does, we’re better off keeping our mouths shut.
Absolutely. Here among ourselves in the clubby left blogosphere we’ve been hurling every insult imaginable at Bush for so long that it’s almost impossible to believe that the public in general doesn’t see that we are dealing with the most dishonest president in American history, and that includes Nixon. But, until fairly recently, his image held up as the all-american “straight shooter.” Only now are they ready to hear the charge that we all know has been true for quite some time.
This is an interesting thing and it’s worth thinking about a bit. When, exactly, did the tide begin to turn on that and what precipitated it? How did we finally reach a point where a polemic like F9/11 could cross into mainstream popular culture and have such an impact? When did the public give itself permission to challenge the orthodoxy and why?
There are many possibilities, but I think it’s actually one specific event and one slow realization combining to bring people to that conclusion. The first was the strut across the deck of the aircraft carrier which, while it thrilled the punditocrisy and many partisans, also stunk to high heaven as a phony PR stunt. Straight shooters don’t play that way.
The second, of course, is the missing weapons of mass destruction. People may not consciously blame Junior for lying, but there is a strong sense of discomfort at the idea a president would say the words “I will disarm Saddam Hussein” about 4,752 times and it turns out there was nothing to disarm. The dissonance is palpable.
So, we seem to have reached a point at which the public is ready to hear that the Empty Codpiece is a liar without it shocking their emotional perception of him as a straightshooter.
But, Ezra’s point is extremely important. While those of us in the vanguard of leftwing politics are out there shaking our fists, which is as it should be, we must also recognize that politicians have to be aware of the greater public’s capacity to absorb that reality. They must be coaxed along, not bludgeoned by our leaders. The bludgeoning is our job.
American military police yesterday raided a building belonging to the Iraqi ministry of the interior where prisoners were allegedly being physically abused by Iraqi interrogators.
The raid appeared to be a violation of the country’s new sovereignty, leading to angry scenes inside the ministry between Iraqi policemen and US soldiers.
[…]
Iraqi ministry of interior officials admitted that around 150 prisoners taken during a raid four days before in the Betawain district of Baghdad had been physically abused during their arrest and subsequent questioning.
The men were captured in the first big Iraqi-led anti-crime and anti-terrorism operation, which took place a few days before the transfer of power, with US military police in support and using US satellite images.
Senior Iraqi officers described those captured as ‘first class murderers, kidnappers and terrorists with links to al-Ansar’ – a militant group in the former Kurdish no-fly zone – who had all admitted to ‘at least 20 crimes while being questioned’.
[…]
US military spokesmen would not comment. “We can’t confirm that this took place,” a spokesman said.
One of the prisoners bared his back after his initial arrest to reveal open welts allegedly caused by baton and rubber hoses.
A bodyguard for the head of criminal intelligence, Hussein Kamal, admitted that the beatings had taken place.
Nashwan Ali – who said his nickname was Big Man – said: “A US MP asked me this morning what police division I was in. I said I was in criminal intelligence.
“The American asked me why we had beaten the prisoners. I said we beat the prisoners because they are all bad people. But I told him we didn’t strip them naked, photograph them or fuck them like you did.”
We sure could use a big ole whiff ‘o that moral clarity right about now.
The author of Imperial Hubris is unmasked and says he fears for his job at the CIA, not for his life at the hands of Al Qaeda
BY JASON VEST
A Phoenix investigation has discovered that Anonymous does not, in fact, want to be anonymous at all — and that his anonymity is neither enforced nor voluntarily assumed out of fear for his safety, but rather compelled by an arcane set of classified regulations that are arguably being abused in an attempt to spare the CIA possible political inconvenience. In the Phoenix’s view, continued deference by the press to a bogus and unwanted standard of secrecy essentially amounts to colluding with the CIA in muzzling a civil servant — a standard made more ridiculous by the ubiquity of Anonymous’s name in both intelligence and journalistic circles.
When asked to confirm or deny his identity in an interview with the Phoenix last week, Anonymous declined to do either, and said, “I’ve given my word I’m not going to tell anyone who I am, as the organization that employs me has bound me by my word.” His publisher, Brassey’s, likewise declined to comment. Nearly a dozen intelligence-community sources, however, say Anonymous is Michael Scheuer — and that his forced anonymity is both unprecedented and telling in the context of CIA history and modern politics.
I’m in a bit of a mood today, so why don’t I take on the religion issue while I’m at it and piss off everybody I haven’t pissed off already?
Atrios takes umbrage with this Slate article that claims Kerry isn’t acting Catholic enough and, therefore, will lose the religious vote and the election. The author says, “if Kerry’s uncomfortable with religion then he’s uncomfortable with Americans…If Kerry’s really secular, he’s abnormal.” He quotes an anonymous Kerry aide telling the Washington Times,”Every time something with religious language got sent up the flagpole, it got sent back down, stripped of religious language.”
Uh huh. Certainly, anxious Democrats who anonymously talk to the Washington Times must be telling it just like it is.
This comes on the heels of an earlier article by Amy Sullivan chastising Kerry for not using values language and imagery and thereby alienating religious voters who might vote for him. In the course of her article, and this one in Slate today, it becomes clear that an even more significant problem for the religious left than John Kerry’s alleged lack of religiosity, is the aggressive secularism of the activist base of the Democratic party. They are rude to religious people, evidently, and this is seen as a serious threat to Kerry’s chances. (Both articles, by the way, mention how David Brooks really “gets it” in this NY Times column. Now, come on kids. David may be a nice guy, but he is not giving the Kerry campaign political advice out of the goodness of his heart. Think about it.)
Before we go any further, we should look at some actual data instead of relying on anecdotal tales of hurt feelings or bad communications. Ruy Tuxeira of Donkey Rising posted on this subject a month or so ago and reported some interesting numbers on the subject:
*Most progressives are religious. For example, in 2000, 81 percent of Gore voters professed a religious affiliation. That’s within shouting distance of the 89 percent of Bush voters who professed a religious affiliation (2000 National Study of Religion and Politics [NSRP]).
*It is true that progressives attend church less than conservatives. In the 2000 VNS exit poll, 33 percent of Gore voters said they attended church once a week or more, compared to 49 percent of Bush voters who said they attended church that often…
But the whole US population is trending toward less observance, not more. For example, in surveys taken over the last thirty years, it is the ranks of those who never or rarely attend church that have grown the most. According to a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study, those who said they never attended church or attended less than once a year went from 18 percent in 1972 to 30 percent in 1998. Confirming this latter figure, the National Election Study found that those who say they never attended was at 33 percent of the citizenry and 27 percent of voters in 2000. That is a group about twice the size of those who identify themselves as members of the religious right, and it is a group that has tended to vigorously support Democrats rather than Republicans.
Indeed, according to the NORC study, if you add to the 30 percent mentioned above those who say they attend church only once or a few times a year, it turns out that about half the US population attends church only a few times a year or less.
* In the 2000 VNS exit poll, it was widely noted that Bush won the support of voters who say they attend church more than weekly by 63 to 36 and voters who say they attend church weekly by 57 to 40 . And these voters make up 43 percent of the electorate. But even according to these unusually high VNS figures, the more observant groups were only a bit over two-fifths of the electorate. Each of the groups in the less observant three-fifths of voters those who said they attended church a few times a month, a few times a year or never–preferred Gore over Bush, with support particularly strong among never-attenders, who gave Gore a 61 to 32 percent margin.
[…]
* Conservatives and the GOP have made aggressive efforts to target Catholics. But there is no evidence that this targeting is actually working. “Traditional” Catholics, to be sure, are strongly supporting Bush (60-30), according to the 2004 NSRP data. But they are only 27 percent of all Catholics. The rest of Catholics — 73 percent — are supporting Kerry. The includes the “modernist” group (31 percent of Catholics) who support Kerry by a lop-sided 61-33 and the “centrist” Catholics — who are both the largest (42 percent) Catholic group and the real swing group among Catholics — who support him by 45-41.
More broadly, there is little evidence that centrist and modernist Catholics, which is the overwhelming majority of Catholics — including among Hispanics — are likely to vote the conservative social positions of the Catholic church on issues like abortion or gay marriage. That is what the GOP has been banking on, but it is highly unlikely to happen. Polling data suggest strongly that these Catholics are far more concerned and moved electorally by other issues, such as the economy, education, health care and so on.
There is also quite a large school of thought that even among those who report regular churchgoing that they “overrepresent,” due to social expectations and other pressures. In other words, they lie about how often they go to church. Furthermore, when pollsters ask about religion in specific terms it often turns out that people consider themselves very religious simply because they believe in God, or a Higher Power which actually falls under the secular category, not the religious category. In other words, the idea that there exists a huge monolithic number of highly religious Americans who will reject anyone who isn’t explicitly appealing to them in religious terms is probably a crock. Indeed, with the exception of those who “claim” to attend church once a week or more, the Democrats consistently pull even with the Republicans.
As it turns out even that gap has narrowed significantly in this cycle. The religion gap is highly overstated even among the super observant. According to the Pew Research Poll quoted by Tuxeira:
Another intriguing finding is an apparent narrowing of the “religiosity gap”–that is, the tendency for those who attend church more often to vote Republican with far greater frequency than those who attend less often. According to the Pew data, the gap in Bush support between those who say they attend church every week and those who attend seldom or never is now 14 points, compared to 27 points in the 2000 VNS exit poll.
There’s more here on the fact that Kerry is doing fine with Catholics.
So, what is this all about? Why are we having yet another interparty argument over something that isn’t even particularly relevant to our electoral chances?
Here’s the thing. This insistence that Democrats are disrespectful to religion is another one of those GOP propaganda ploys that we Democrats keep falling for. They have always claimed that we are godless heathens since back in the McCarthy era — of course, then it was godless communists. Nobody has ever believed it and from the polling, it doesn’t look like they do now. They have their bloc of extremely conservative Christians, but we have no hope of getting those votes even if we have Kerry wear a crown of thorns and flay himself on Meet The Press.
Besides, the entire argument validates this insulting notion that only very religious people can be elected to office in this country. In the Slate article, the author calls this new religious test “shorthand” for character. I think that’s exactly the association the Republicans want you to make.
All this infighting is, once again, playing into established GOP talking points to our own detriment. It simply is not true. Democrats are as religiously observant as Republicans and with the exception of the fundamentalists and extreme Christian conservatives, religious people vote with the Democrats as much as with the Republicans. (If we are going for Christian Right votes then might I suggest that we also adopt some racist rhetoric and promise to cut taxes for the rich. Those votes are ours for the taking.)
There has long been tension between the secularists and the religious in this country, but interestingly they have both fared well when they worked together to maintain the separation of church and state — as when the evangelicals and the secularists (which includes Deists) worked together to ensure the inclusion of the establishment clause in the bill of rights. (At that time evangelicals were a minority religion and in grave danger of being outlawed.) If one were to ask American Muslims and Buddhists today if they felt comfortable with all the religious talk in politics, I would imagine they’d say no. It’s all in where you’re sitting at the table, isn’t it?
I think it’s probably true that a lot of non-believers are rude about religion. But people need to grow up about this. The self righteousness of the religious believer has always inspired a certain, shall we say, ascerbic response. You want rude, I’ll give you rude — from two quintessential All-American boys:
“There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is – in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree – it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime- the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor His Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.”
Mark Twain
“Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world — a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious, surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench’d, holding possession, yet remains (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.” Walt Whitman
Ouch.
So, let’s be clear, here. Secularism is most definitely not abnormal. It never has been and it isn’t now. It is as American as apple pie and we will take our slice of the body politic, thank you.
Update: For an inspiring look at the good people of the religious left, check out this interview with the head of the National Council of Churches by my American Street colleague, Chuck Currie. I’m happy to be on the same political side as this man.
The Political Animal takes bloggers to task for being too hard on the liberal hawks and neocons who are now having second thought about the war. He says we should warmly embrace them to our side. Since I just wrote about this last night, I feel I should answer that complaint.
First of all, it would be a lot easier if they didn’t feel it was necessary to insult the millions of people who did make the right call while they are expressing their regrets. That indicates to me that they are not very likely to pay any heed to those voices in the future. But, that’s not the real problem.
In order to truly understand what went wrong with this war, you have to look at what was being said and what was being heard before we went into it. I’m not seeing a lot of that from the Mea Culpa singers. Peter Beinert (with whom I regrettably proved Kevin’s point by being deliberately snarky) was one of the few to actually examined his prejudices and preconceptions as a way of explaining why he came to the conclusions he did. As far as I know, he is the only one to do that. All the others are based upon misplaced trust in the administration and a shock that they could have been so dishonest/incompetent/incoherent. They have not grappled with the fact that they chose to ignore plenty of evidence prior to the invasion that should have tipped them off. I can think of a handful right off the top of my head, and I’m sure there are plenty more:
First and foremost was the fact that the primary forces agitating for the Iraq invasion had been agitating for it long before 9/11 and for entirely different reasons than those stated at the time. Indeed, those same forces had completely missed the threat of assymetrical terrorism as it grew up in the 90’s and essentially just piggy backed their pre-existing goals onto the terrorist threat after the attacks. This was evident even then — long before Richard Clarke started publicly talking about people’s hair on fire. There were people shouting into the wilderness about this absurd neocon notion of the Pax Americana and nobody was listening. There were those who noticed that belligerant unilateralism and the “preemption doctrine” which was supposedly in response to the attacks (“9/11 changed everything”) were, in fact, pillars of the neocon philosophy going back to the 70’s and had been heavily pushed since the end of the cold war. Someone might have asked if these beliefs were actually relevant or adequate to an entirely new threat paradigm.
Another obvious tip off was our abandonment of Afghanistan. There we had the heart of al Qaeda in our grasp and a democratic revolution and billions of dollars in reconstruction promised and yet once the war drums began pounding for Iraq, we dropped it all like a hot potato. A small, experimental version of the Iraq Democracy Project unfolded in real time, failed spectacularly and nobody noticed.
The fact that the US impeded the inspections process should have made people wonder about our true motives. Saddam let in the inspectors and they reported that he was being quite cooperative (by historical standards) and that they weren’t finding anything. Under those circumstances, the US refusing to give the locations of WMD to the inspectors to investigate should have set off some alarm bells.
Powell’s presentation to the UN was lame even before 99% of had been disproved. It was thin gruel to anyone who hadn’t already made up their mind that we were marching off to war, come what may. The whole thing was based upon his personal reputation and credibility. Big mistake and one that people should really think about going forward. This “trust us” business has been shown (as throughout history)to be a fools game.
The administration refused to discuss the potential costs of the war and publicly argued with the uniformed services about the necessary troop levels. This should have raised eyebrows. There were plenty of people who thought this was odd and questioned whether the administration knew what it was doing. The hawks didn’t take these opinions into account.
Most importantly, there were those like Wes Clark and others who warned that invading Iraq would exacerbate the terrorist threat and that we were making a grave mistake in not concentrating everything we had on al Qaeda. If the decision for war had been at all thoughtful on the hawk side there would have been a long and detailed debate about it because this wasn’t a hawk vs dove argument, it was a hawk vs hawk argument. That so many refused to listen even to their own kind on such a matter of huge importance to the security of the country is probably the biggest sin they committed.
As I wrote earlier, I think this invasion was mostly an emotional response to the attacks. And I would be remiss if I didn’t chide the prime mover behind the hysteria (aside from the admnistration, of course) which was the media. (Unbelievably, it was this hysteria that bush blamed for the flat economy a few months ago. Chutzpah, thy name is Junior)
9/11 was the story of a lifetime. It made overnight stars out of nobodies and gave huge amounts of face time to journalists. Indeed, it glamorized them in a way that hadn’t been seen since the days of Woodward and Bernstein. In the run up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration made the smartest decision they’ve made in their entire administration. The media were already primed for “9/11: The Invasion of Iraq” but as the administration made its case for war, they simultaneously began the process of training the reporters for their embedded assignments. They sent them to “camp” and brought them into their confidence and gave them a personal stake in the outcome of the war debate. (Read all about it, right here.) Imagine the disappointment if they’d had to turn in their khaki safari jackets and go back to reporting dull stories about medicare.
Many in the media itself admitted at the time that they were quite shocked at the numbers of people showing up to protest the war around the world. They didn’t even cover the story in the beginning. Yet, the polls consistently showed a large number of people even here in the US who were against the invasion and many more who wanted the administration to go much more slowly. This story was virtually ignored, and when it was covered, it was as if it was some sort of a sideshow.(Read this condescending piece of garbage, if you need a reminder — it’s about 3/4 of the way into the transcript.) From the moment the drums began in the summer of 2002 — certainly from the time that Cheney made his speech in late August — the war was treated as an inevitability by the media.
I realize how difficult it was to swim against that tide. It was exciting and difficult to resist, even for people like me. We were living history. But, at some point you had to step back and look at the magnitude of what we were contemplating — particularly the huge step away from our post war consensus against wars of aggression — and see that this thing was being rushed into production without adequate debate or planning. Saddam had been sitting there for a long, long time. There was no reason to believe that he couldn’t have sat there for a few more months until we exhausted all other options. The fact that Bush and Cheney refused to do that should have been the deal breaker.
It’s never easy to admit you were wrong. But, it is almost more important to realize why you were wrong than to admit it in the first place. If we could all wait to see how things turn out and then just say “whoops, sorry” and all would be well, then life would be pretty easy.
The fact is that the liberal hawks, especially, made the invasion palatable and acceptable to many people who trusted them. That is a heavy burden. I’m glad they’ve seen their error, but it doesn’t mean we’re on the same team, as Kevin seems to think. So far, I’ve seen little reason to believe they won’t do exactly the same thing again if their blood gets up and they decide the opposition consists of people they don’t wish to be associated with. I hope I’m wrong.
As attorneys for detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, began preparing the first of hundreds of expected lawsuits demanding that the government justify the detentions, senior administration officials acknowledged that they were unprepared for a rebuke in two landmark Supreme Court decisions that rejected the military’s treatment of prisoners in the war on terrorism.
[…]
“They didn’t really have a specific plan for what to do, case-by-case, if we lost,” a senior defense official said on condition of anonymity. “The Justice Department didn’t have a plan. State didn’t have a plan. This wasn’t a unilateral mistake on DOD’s part. It’s astounding to me that these cases have been pending for so long and nobody came up with a contingency plan.”
Apparently, this was because they were convinced they were going to win.
An internal Justice Department memo reviewed Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times outlining communications plans in response to high court rulings on the issue listed two pages of talking points to be used “in case of win,” and a page of talking points to be used “in case of win if some sort of process is required” — a partial victory. Yet, there was no category for action in the event of a broad defeat in the memo, titled “Supreme Court Decision Communications Plan.”
Few lawyers inside or outside the government doubted that the high court would allow the government the right to detain combatants during wartime, as has been allowed in every major war for two centuries. That option was upheld.
But the memo wrongly predicted an outright win in the case Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld, involving Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Louisiana-born man of Saudi descent captured in Afghanistan.
“The DOD/DOJ position on the detention of Hamdi will be decided in our favor as a clear-cut POW case,” the memo said, although Hamdi was not held as a prisoner of war.
The memo predicted a 5-4 vote in favor of the government in Rasul vs. Bush and Al Odah vs. United States. Justices in that case, involving 16 Guantanamo detainees seized in Afghanistan and Pakistan, found in the reverse, voting 6-3 that military prisoners who are not U.S. citizens cannot be held without access to American courts.
I’m not enough of a court watcher to decipher why they thought this when virtually everything I read in the last month indicated that the court was very likely to rule against the administration. (I do wonder what, if anything, this all has to do with Ted “Nasty, Brutish and Short” Olsen’s somewhat unexpected departure.)
Faith based justice sure isn’t what it used to be, is it?
If I might just add to Tim’s great post at the road to surfdom as well as DeLong’s here and Atrios’s ongoing frustration with the sorry warhawks’ excuses, I have to agree that this sad complaint that nobody could have known the Bushies would screw up Iraq this badly is total bullshit.
I am no psychic and I have no special insight that others don’t have. Yet somehow, I was able to see that the Bush administration was very likely to screw this up badly and so were millions of other people. (For one thing, at the time we were going into Iraq the abdication of our responsibilities in Afghanistan was already well under way.)
Back in my pre-blogging days, on the night the Senate passed the Iraq resolution Atrios published this:
Digby says, in Matthew Yglesias’s comments, in response to Yglesias saying “But if I don’t get what I want and it does come to war, you won’t see me out on the streets rallying for a Hussein victory either”:
I don’t think the pro-Saddam rally will be well attended.
But, there will be prayer vigils and sleepless nights on the part of those of us who hope that this incompetent administration doesn’t fuck it up so much that all hell breaks loose in the region, including the real possibility of nuclear war and many american and arab casualties. And we’ll be wishing fervently that terrorism on US soil doesn’t become something we’ll have to learn to live with because we just can’t seem to kill all the people who hate our guts and multiply exponentially with every aggressive action that we take. And we’ll sure hope that we can get some cooperation from the unstable regimes that finance them without having to invade and depose their leaders, too.
And, if everything works out, let’s keep our fingers crossed that we can turn the mideast into a democratic paradise quickly because judging from our experience in Afghanistan, our President meant it when he said he “wasn’t into nation building.” We really don’t need to fight this war again.
And I know that a lot of us will probably get together around the dinner table and water coolers to talk about the enormous sums of money remaking the mideast is costing and will continue to cost for years to come, while we worry about whether we’ll have jobs or health care or a chance of a comfortable retirement.
So, rather than attending pro-Saddam rallies, people who are against this war being waged by someone in whom they have no faith will be instead gathering together to fervently pray that his adventure goes perfectly every step of the way.
Those prayers were far from answered. In fact, I would say that my fears were downright prescient, including the ongoing and completely unresolved threat of terrorists and Islamic states with nuclear capability.
It wasn’t just me. Look at these poll results from that same week:
The public overwhelmingly wants to get the United Nations’ weapons inspectors back into Iraq and allied support before taking any military action. Americans also want a congressional vote before acting – and think members of Congress should be asking more questions about the implications of war with Iraq.
Americans are concerned about the wider implications of war with Iraq. They believe such a war will result in a long and costly military involvement; they believe it will lead to a wider war in the Middle East with other Arab nations and Israel; and that it could further undermine the U.S. economy.
Americans are also cool to the doctrine of pre-emption. They believe countries should not be able to attack each other unless attacked first – and less than half of Americans think the U.S., in particular, has the right to make pre-emptive strikes against nations it thinks may attack in the future.
This was just a year after 9/11. The public was far from convinced that Bush was doing the right thing. The press and the punditocrisy, on the other hand, just kept pushing and pushing and creating this sense of inevitablility about the war — much of it promoted by these hawks, both liberal and neocon, who insisted that we had no choice but to invade Iraq at the earliest possible time.
There really is no excuse but war fever. People chose to support that war, not because there was good evidence backing up the need for urgency. Indeed, there was plenty of evidence that we should be very cautious before we opened a front in the WOT right in the middle of the muslim holy land. But, the blood was pumping — people wanted a fight and the media wanted a show.
It’s really that simple. There was never any truly compelling reason to take on Saddam at just that moment and it didn’t take a genius (I’m certainly not one) to predict that Bush would make a hash out of it. I am tired of reading these mea culpas that are filled with invective toward those of us who were correct in our assessment of the motives and the competence of the administration. We weren’t a bunch of starry eyed hippies sitting around singing kumbaya — there was ample evidence and analysis that they simply chose to ignore.
In fact, it was the the neocons and the liberal hawks who decided that democracy is a matter of faith rather than reason and believed that if they just wanted it hard enough it would magically happen. The naive kumbaya chorus wasn’t on our side. It was the AEI and New Republic “Up With Democracy” singers who were the fools.
U.S. President George W. Bush has repeated a call for the European Union to admit Turkey, despite criticism by France’s President Jacques Chirac that he was meddling in EU affairs. Bush said Tuesday that Turkey belongs in the EU and that Europe is ‘not the exclusive club of a single religion’ in what amounted to a rebuff to the French leader.
[…]
He said that Turkish EU membership would be a “crucial advance” in relations between the Muslim world and the West because Turkey was part of both.
The main message in the U.S. President’s speech was a bid to mend relations between Muslims and Americans that were left tattered by the Iraq war.
“We must strengthen the ties and trust and good will between ourselves and the peoples of the Middle East,” he said.
Bush held up Turkey as an example of a Muslim democracy.
“Including Turkey in the EU would prove that Europe is not the exclusive club of a single religion, and it would expose the ‘clash of civilizations’ as a passing myth of history,” Bush said.
Somebody needs to get Bush’s people some time off because they obviously can’t take the stress. Publicly lecturing Europe about religious pluralism is about as obnoxious as an American president can get. And to use Europe as his whipping boy to mend fences with muslims (a totally incomprehensible strategy) is to basically say, “those Europeans make much better targets than we do, Osama. They hate yer muslim guts. Have at it.”
Who the hell do these people think they are? It’s not that we have no right to politely advocate for Turkey being admitted into the EU if we choose. It’s that we don’t do it by publicly insulting the EU for our own purposes. Where did these people learn their manners, Attica?
Chirac was, unsurprisingly, pissed:
“If President Bush really said that in the way that I read, then not only did he go too far, but he went into territory that isn’t his,” Chirac said of a remark Bush made over the weekend.
“It is is not his purpose and his goal to give any advice to the EU, and in this area it was a bit as if I were to tell Americans how they should handle their relationship with Mexico.
Oh, we won’t mind. That’s what we call the new “go fuck yourself” diplomacy. You’ll feel better, too.
Yglesias finds another dead fish wrapped in The Weakly Standard today. Apparently, we liberals had better get control of those violent thugs over at Move-On because the conservatives just can’t be responsible for what might happen if somebody “not so nice” came into power and felt like he had to teach us a lesson. (Matt takes them down quite handily.)
But, the article is also interesting for another reason. Here’s the passage that Matt highlights:
You can file the of Mussolini’s rise under “H” for Hegel, the idea that extreme movements always beget extreme counter forces. It was the far left, by relentlessly chipping away at the foundations of Italian life, that gave birth and power to the far right–as it did a decade on when Hitler rode nearly the same path under similar circumstances.
This is what seems most pertinent today, as “activist” groups like Moveon.org and demagogues like Michael Moore and angry men like Al Gore and George Soros rail so irrationally against both the president (comparing him to Hitler and Mussolini in a variety of contexts) and the structures of daily American life, including the legally adjudicated Supreme Court decision that ultimately decided the 43rd presidency in advance of a tedious recount that would’ve yielded the same outcome.
… Either this November or in four years, George W. Bush is going to be turned out of office; even the judge agrees with that. Someday, though, a populace provoked by the left’s constant fire-breathing may look for a dragon slayer who won’t go quite so easily.
Once again, we see the right’s blindness to its own actions over the last 15 years. I don’t disagree with their analysis of what contributed to the rise of fascism. The left was extreme and led to a counter response in equally radical terms. Ye olde pendulum swing.
They are perfectly right that the same exact thing may very well be happening here. But, apparently it doesn’t occur to these believers in civil discourse that their eliminationist right wing rhetoric of the last decade and a half — and a president who literally tells us to go fuck ourselves — is what has spawned this reaction from the left. (Not that I agree that Moore or Move-On say anything close to even a normal day’s Limbaugh/Savage blather, but in the interest of making my point I will stipulate that the left is mighty riled up.) They believe they’ve just been sitting around being polite and restrained and out of the blue the left has come out swinging.
This after we moved the party way to the center, gave them a successful moderate republican president for two terms who they then impeached and after they completely disregarded the disputed election returns and governed as if they had a mandate. I mean, I know we Democrats are the mommy party and all, but push mommy far enough and she becomes a screaming bitch on wheels. What did they expect?
Republicans seem to have a very serious problem seeing themselves as they appear to others. Perhaps this might give a clue to how we reached the point where liberals are fighting back with everything we have.
As you know, one of the key points in the GOPAC tapes is that “language matters.” In the video “We are a Majority,” Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates we have heard a plaintive plea: “I wish I could speak like Newt.”
That takes years of practice. But, we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.
[…]
Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.
abuse of power
anti- (issue): flag, family, child, jobs
betray
bizarre
bosses
bureaucracy
cheat
coercion
“compassion” is not enough
collapse(ing)
consequences
corrupt
corruption
criminal rights
crisis
cynicism
decay
deeper
destroy
destructive
devour
disgrace
endanger
excuses
failure (fail)
greed
hypocrisy
ideological
impose
incompetent
insecure
insensitive
intolerant
liberal
lie
limit(s)
machine
mandate(s)
obsolete
pathetic
patronage
permissive attitude
pessimistic
punish (poor …)
radical
red tape
self-serving
selfish
sensationalists
shallow
shame
sick
spend(ing)
stagnation
status quo
steal
taxes
they/them
threaten
traitors
unionized
urgent (cy)
waste
welfare
Duck. The pendulum’s about to hit you in the face, assholes.