Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Time To Put On Your Game Face

I enjoy backseat campaign managing as much as the next person. And I admit that the press and our inability to manage it profoundly depresses me. But, I NEVER say we are going to lose. I love to analyze the race and offer my ideas, but it is never done in the spirit that the Kerry campaign are a bunch of losers. I cannot conceive of a more demoralizing and hopeless thing to read than something like this:

Some prominent Democrats are already grumbling privately that none of the people in Kerry’s communications operation should ever work on campaigns again, should Kerry lose. Given all the money Kerry, the DNC, and the 527s have raised and spent this time around, the typical Democratic lament of having been vastly outspent will ring hollow. If Kerry loses, it will not be because he was outspent; he will be because he was outfoxed.

There was a moment in the 1992 campaign, former Clinton-Gore ’92 communications director George Stephanopoulos told Frontline in 2001, where the staffers could suddenly feel the weight of what it was they were trying to do. Stephanopoulous talked about it in the context of the history of the War Room, and it’s quite illuminating:

Frontline: After the primaries in California, you then set up the war room. What are you trying to do?

Stephanopoulous: Not to be the Dukakis campaign, which a lot of us had worked in. And a lot of us felt we had been beat because the Republicans had laid out a pretty targeted, fierce assault on Dukakis that we didn’t answer. We were determined that if we were going to lose, we were going to lose fighting. We were going down fighting. In June, we were in third place, broke and we hadn’t gotten paid in two months. And Ross Perot was moving. And like I said, we were not going to go down without a fight.

And the war room was important, not just for the actual work it would do in answering the Republican charges and counterattacking, but the very idea of it was important — just having a war room so that Democrats, especially, but also others who were just going to start to pay attention to the campaign, would see that we weren’t like Democrats in the past. They’d see that we were different — not only because we were different on our ideas — but because we fight back when we’re hit.

Frontline: Later in the fall, polls were looking pretty good for you with Bush. Still, according to everything everyone had written, there’s a sense of fear that never goes away.

Stephanopoulous: It’s a different kind of fear. I remember the first time I ever really let myself believe we could win and we’re going to win. It was late September in the Washington Hilton on a Sunday morning, and Clinton was about to go give a speech in North Carolina on NAFTA. And he called me in and had his standard morning outburst on the speech and was yelling about it. And, but his heart wasn’t really in it, and I could tell. . . . And he suddenly stops yelling, looks me right in the eye and says, “You think we’re going to win, don’t you?” I said, “Yes.” And he goes, “I do, too.” And for me, that was just incredible. He was saying out loud what we all hoped for, but could never say. It would be like talking about a no-hitter in the eighth inning.

And from that moment on, inside we didn’t feel like underdogs anymore. We felt like we had this responsibility to win. And as a staffer, it was starting to get a little bit out of control, because I had never been through anything like that and nobody else had either. When you’re in a presidential campaign at its peak in the fall, all the sudden it’s not just 20 people in Little Rock sitting in a room. You’re representing a lot of people who have invested in you, and not just the money. People have just invested their hopes. The whole country is paying attention. There are millions. And we start to think, my God, if we blow it now, it’s all our fault. And we will have blown this opportunity that a lot of people are counting on us to carry out.

So the fear of making a mistake and letting these people down and thinking, basically, that you’re going to have to leave the country becomes tremendous. You just don’t want to blow it.

You have to wonder if the Kerry team is feeling that same fear right now, though, as they approach late September trailing rather than confident of victory. Because if they blow this one…

In late September of ’92 people were beginning to beg Perot to get back in the race and nobody knew what was going to happen. There was no empirical reason to believe that Clinton had it in the bag although I’m not surprised that he felt confident. That’s how competitors make themselves get up in the morning. That race was like a fucking bungee jump. And believe me, if you’d asked the same crew of sad sack Democratic insiders what they thought at the time they would have said that the sky was falling and that we were doomed, doomed, doomed and should have nominated Tsongas because he didn’t have a draft problem.

I’m as fond of Clinton hagiography as anyone on the planet, but a whole lot of this fuzzy nostalgia about ’92 is just crap. Bush senior was in free fall in the polls because he was widely considered to be out of touch on the economy, which was perceived to be very bad. Ross Perot had sucked all the oxygen out of the campaign for months and took the press’s eye off of the Bush assault on Clinton. Then he dramatically withdrew from the race during the Democratic convention saying that the Democratic party was “revitalized.” That was quite a gift and it gave Clinton a chance to re-start what had been a very anemic campaign.

He fought back, yes, by using the innovation of answering charges within the same news cycle. But, I watched that campaign more closely than any in my life and I can tell you that each one of those hits took another piece off of his hide. He didn’t lie down, and that was admirable, but that’s not why he won. He won because both he and Perot were hitting Senior hard on the economy while Senior and his crew were having to discredit both Perot and Clinton with character smears. Perot imploded, but by the time he did he had helped drive Senior’s negatives even farther into the dirt than Clinton’s and maintained a “movement” that siphoned off 20% of the vote when he got back in. It was one of the weirdest campaigns in American history and virtually no lessons can be drawn from it.

Kerry has every reason to be hopeful. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that Bush’s ephemeral lead is shrinking as we speak. It’s a nailbiter, but it is far from over.

I just wish that Dems could put on their game faces and try to sell the guy a little bit instead of constantly writing his epitaph. He’s really a good man, you know. He’s spent his life in public service, trying to do the right thing, working hard and carrying our agenda. He’s our most liberal nominee in decades. He’s smart and energetic and he’s never been tainted by corruption or scandal. Is it so hard for Democrats to get behind a man like this or are we just as shallow as everybody else? Would we too be happier with a brand name in a suit?

Poll Jumpy

DonkeyRising has a few more thoughts on the state of the race:

Well, those cards and letters keep coming in, so I thought I’d respond to a few of the most common questions that have been posed to me.

1. How can you deny that Bush is ahead?

I don’t. My view is that he is currently ahead, but only modestly, contrary to the tone of media coverage and the findings of some polls. I have tried to explain the reasoning behind this assessment, especially as it pertains to possible problems with contemporary polls.

It’s worth noting that the latest poll data on RVs–ending the night of the 12th–have Kerry up by 2 (IBD/CSM/TIPP) or Bush up by 4 (ICR). That averages out to a 1 point Bush lead, even without party-weighting the data. And Rasmussen LV data for the period ending the 12th also has Bush with a one point lead.

2. How is it possible for samples of RVs to suddenly have too many Republican identifiers? Aren’t voters just shifting their party identification?

It is certainly possible that we gone from, say, a 4-5 point Democrtic lead in party ID to a 4-5 point Republican lead in the space of the last month. But color me skeptical about this 8-10 point swing in a few short weeks.

A better explanation for this sudden shift in poll samples, in my view, is that when the political situation jazzes up supporters of one party, they are more likely to want to participate in a public opinion telephone poll and express their views. An increased rate of interview acceptance by that party’s supporters would then skew the sample toward that party without the underlying distribution having changed very much, if at all.

In this case, the Republican convention, coming on the heels of the Swift Boat controversy, may have helped raise political enthusiasm among Republican partisans, leading to more interview acceptances and a disproportionate number of Republicans in recent samples.

Do I know this for sure? No, I don’t, because we lack direct evidence that this is happening, just as we lack direct evidence that individual voters are suddenly and massively shifting their party allegiance. But I do know which of these explanations I find more plausible and consistent with other evidence about the general stability of party ID.

More here

My uninformed gut tells me that this race is, and will likely remain, close. I always thought it would be, as inexplicable as that is. I have been following this interesting theory by professor James Galbraith that Bush is on a slow trajectory to defeat for some time. Basically, he says that Bush has been artificially boosted above his natural level by three events, 9/11, Iraq and the capture of Saddam. He is fairly sure that it will take an October Surprise for Bush to win:

With about seven weeks to go, this equation suggests that if no new major episode occurs, Bush should lose about 2.1 percentage points between now and Election Day. In that case, he will face John Kerry with approval ratings very close to the lows of his presidency. And very close to the floor, below which he probably can’t sink.

The moral remains the same. As I’ve said in earlier columns, an “October surprise” could tip the balance. The country should be braced for news on the terror front from Pakistan or elsewhere. Or perhaps we’ll see the gift of a “You can go home soon” speech by Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. One hears, at this stage of the campaign, all kinds of rumors. They can’t be verified, but they gain weight from the fact that the Bush team tried to manipulate the terror war — ordering up well-timed arrests in Pakistan — to squelch Kerry’s convention bounce last July. Who knows what else they have planned?

On the other hand, it’s clear that Bush hasn’t put the contest away. Kerry can win this thing for sure.

True Lies

The truth of the Killian memos has been established, at least according to Andrew Sullivan in TNR. But, while simultaneously taking credit both for being a superior blogger and a superior journalist he explains that he is actually superior to everyone by telling them that they should all just stop being so superior. Meanwhile, he reveals that he is living on another planet.

There’s been a lot of hubris in the blogosphere about this, and, indeed, some blogs, most especially Power Line, should get the blog equivalent of a Pulitzer for their dogged pursuit of the truth. But the reality is far simpler and less flattering to bloggers. Journalism is not a profession as such. It’s a craft. You get better at it by doing it; and there are very few ground rules. By and large, anyone with a mind, a modem, a telephone, and a conscience can be a journalist. The only criterion that matters is that you get stuff right; and if you get stuff wrong (and you will), you correct yourself as soon as possible. The blogosphere is threatening to some professional journalists because it exposes these simple truths. It demystifies the craft. It makes it seem easy–because, in essence, it often is.

Blogging’s comparative advantage has nothing to do with the alleged superior skills of bloggers or their higher intelligence, quicker wit, or more fabulous physiques. The blogosphere is a media improvement because the sheer number of blogs, and the speed of response, make errors hard to sustain for very long. The collective mind is also a corrective mind. Transparency is all. And the essence of journalistic trust is not simply the ability to get things right and to present views or ideas or facts clearly and entertainingly. It is also the capacity to admit error, suck it up, and correct what you’ve gotten wrong. Take it from me. I’ve both corrected and been corrected. When you screw up, it hurts. But in the long run, it’s a good hurt, because it takes you down a peg or two and reminds you what you’re supposed to be doing in the first place. Any journalist who starts mistaking himself for an oracle needs to be reminded who he is from time to time.

This must be the bizarro world blogosphere where truth is decisively discovered by an objective judge (perhaps Sullivan himself) who hands down a final order when the facts have been established. In my blogosphere, nobody agrees on what color the sky is. And for some reason, the vaunted self correcting mechanism only seems to run one way. Why is that? For instance, the right spent two months swearing the John Kerry faked his medals in Vietnam and I haven’t read any “corrections” to that “simple truth.”

Here on planet earth even if writers correct their errors, readers pick and choose which versions to believe and continue to battle the arcane details long after everyone else has lost interest, clinging to their own version of reality as if it is a life raft. The “transparency” of the blogosphere is as clear as orange juice with pulp. Nobody gets stuff “right.” They just get stuff. Errors are sustained forever. The “collective mind” is schizophrenic. The blogosphere demystifies the craft of journalism all right and turns it into an endless self-referential loop of The Osbornes.

What an nice bizarro blogosphere it is indeed when you just dismiss fully half of it as “moonbats” in order to believe that you have achieved a pure and real set of facts. I’d like to go there. It sounds soothing. What’s the URL?

In Sullivan’s blogosphere, credibility is granted once everyone (who’s anyone) agrees. Therefore, the famous blogger hero Buckhead, who within seconds of the CBS broadcast, had “proven” the documents were forgeries, should be deemed credible for his other scoops as well, yes? Like this one:

The question on the table is going to be whether John Kerry was a witting or unwitting communist agent.

1. He traveled to Paris for illegal meetings with the communist enemy.

2. He comes back and in his Senate testimony gives them a major, major, major propaganda victory with his lies about war crimes.

3. He presents to the Senate and the country, and argues for, the communist proposal for giving them complete victory.

4. He attends, in leadership positions, meetings of the VVAW at which the assasination of American political leaders is openly discussed, and does not immediately disasssociate himself or do anything to report on this criminal conspiracy.

5. Post war he is lionized by the Vietnamese communists for his indispensable contributions to their victory.

135 posted on 09/02/2004 5:41:03 AM PDT by Buckhead

Just another credible blogger/journalist plying his craft. I’m sure Sullivan will get right on the case and fact check his ass.

Oh and by the way, I’m no expert mind you, but I’ve spend a bit of time on blogs and I’ve never come across Sullivan’s little insider “blogspeak” term for the mainstream media — MSM. Is this only for super bloggers who get more than 20K hits a day or something? I feel so small and insignificant.

Bringing The Two Together

The Decembrist makes an extremely valuable insight into the way the intersection between issues and character help people to make decisions. His advice to the Kerry campaign is, I think, very valuable:

I don’t think the problem with Kerry is that he talks about issues when he should be talking about character. That was Al Gore’s problem. I think the problem is that the Kerry brain has split into an issues half, and a character half, and the two sides aren’t communicating. The character half controlled the convention, and focused on Vietnam. Fine, but what did that say about how he would deal with Iraq? And the issues half has plans — entirely good ones, even for Iraq. But those proposals don’t reinforce any sense of the kind of person Kerry is, and how he would cope in a crisis.

I don’t know enough about the internal politics of the Kerry world (in which I know almost no one) to speculate whether one side is represented by Bob Shrum or Michael Whouley or John Sasso or whoever. But whatever the factions are, they have to get it together. The issues and scheduling side of the campaign has to stop picking an issue of the day, based on the polls. It has to start trying to choose some issues that really emphasize whatever it is that they want to say about Kerry as a person that contrasts him to Bush (honest, brave, forward-seeing, smart, common-sense, independent, cares-about-ordinary-people — pick one and reinforce it) and then use those issues to tell that story over a period of a week or more. And where they want to attack Bush on either character or issues, pick a point that best emphasizes a single point that they want to emphasize to draw the contrast with Kerry. That means, among other things, saying no to all the issue-advocacy groups that are besieging the campaign, brandishing polls and begging Kerry to devote a day to their cause.

The issue advocates need to be bum rushed out the door. Kerry is hanging in there in the polls (contrary to the news which has suddenly decided that outlying polls are the best guage of the state of play) but he needs some focus as we go into the stretch to pull this out. Relying on the debates isn’t enough because you simply cannot depend upon the press corpse to properly report the event. What they can do is try to find that sweet spot and hammer it home so that when the debates arrive your storyline has been set.

“Brave” is the quality I’d choose and I’d hammer Bush for not being brave enough to fight off the special interests, the neocons, the tax cut zealots and the extremists in his own party. Kerry volunteered to fight a war, take on criminals as a prosecutor and big corporate interests as a Senator and says “bring It on” to smear artists and dirty tricksters who’ve tried and failed to take him down. (You don’t even have to mention the guard stuff. The implication is clear.) You could tie this in to terrorism, health care, Iraq, the economy and judicial nominations. Any of those issues can be framed as Bush being unable to stand up and be his own man. You could even use the fact that he hasn’t vetoed one bill as evidence of his cowardice in facing the congress.

But, regardless of what character trait they choose to highlight, the key is to stick with it and hammer it home relentlessly. Bush is vulnerable on almost everything but I think it it could be quite helpful for Kerry to focus on one character contrast that can illustrate the whole enchilada.

What The White Men Want

Apparently most white guys are so egotistical that they think they could be president and so they want a president who is just as stupid as they are. People were offended by the title of Michael Moore’s book, but the truth hurts.

George W. Bush has it down: the “bring ’em on” macho sensibility, the public swagger, even the quick-draw High Noon cowboy stride. Call it the testosterone factor. It’s one reason Bush has maintained a strong appeal to white men throughout his presidency, especially in the South and Southwest.

[…]

“Part of it is a Republican thing,” says Rutgers political scientist Ross Baker, “but a good part of it is a Bush thing. For guys who drank and loafed their way through college, he’s a familiar figure.” And, it turns out, a popular one. In his early years, Bush was a likable party animal, seemingly committed to a lifestyle of making wisecracks, chasing women, and guzzling brew. He says he reformed two decades ago, giving up alcohol and becoming a born-again Christian. As president, he has come across in an equally comfortable way to white men–as a strong commander in chief and a conservative who seeks to return honor and responsibility to public life.

What works for most white men (as opposed, for example, to African-American men, who evaluate the president in starkly different terms) is Bush’s reputation as an “average guy,” says a senior White House official–the opposite of what California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger famously calls “girlie men.” Baker says Bush “has a down-to-earth quality that men find appealing. You know he won’t slip off to a quiet place and strum a six-string guitar.” And his support among white males has helped Bush open up a 52-to-43 percent lead over Kerry among likely voters, according to that Washington Post /ABC News poll.[bullshit ed.]

Vacillating. No Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of white male voters since Jimmy Carter in 1976. That’s partly because the party’s candidates have come across as vacillating on military issues and lenient on social concerns like crime and federal “giveaways” to the poor. Al Gore got only 36 percent of the white male vote in 2000; Bush pulled 60 percent. Bush now has about 57 percent support among white men to Kerry’s 39, according to GOP pollster Ed Goeas, and Bush appears to be gaining momentum on issues most important to those voters, such as making America safe and waging the war in Iraq Bush leads Kerry by 8 points among single white men and by 20 points among married white men, according to recent polling.

Adding to Kerry’s problems, if the Democratic challenger tries to court the white male vote too aggressively, he risks alienating white single women and minorities who are turned off by Bush’s macho tendencies. Joe Lockhart, former White House spokesman for Bill Clinton and now a Kerry adviser, says, “If you want the easiest way to define the Bush doctrine, it’s what I call the testosterone presidency. They’ve worked very hard making him look like Gary Cooper in High Noon. Why? Men have testosterone. Does that make good policy? No, of course not.”

But Bush advisers say the president’s big advantage in attracting the “white-guy vote” is that he can just be himself. Bush, like those in this core constituency, likes to watch sports on television, enjoys fishing, doesn’t take himself too seriously, and doesn’t express himself well. White males like to see themselves in what White House officials call Bush’s “moral clarity,” his attitude toward the war on terrorism, and his espousal of conservative values, such as opposition to gay marriage.

“Bush has his flaws,” says Ted Stout, 39, who runs a bus company in Scranton, Pa., where Bush and Kerry made stops after their respective conventions. “But there’s no question that when he says he’s going to do something, he does it. That’s what I like about him.” Stout, waiting to bowl on league night at Scranton’s Southside Bowl, adds: “He might seem a little dull-witted, but he’s an average person. He makes the right decisions when he needs to.”

Sporty. “We can’t be girlie men” about the war on terror, says Michael Bidwell, a 38-year-old Republican dining at Scranton’s Stadium Club with three male coworkers. “We need to go after terrorism. Terrorism isn’t going to go away, and we can’t put a blanket over it.” Bidwell says he has a son and a daughter serving in the Middle East and adds: “I don’t want to see them over there on a mission that’s not finished.” Steve Pasternak, a retired utility worker standing among “Sportsmen for Bush” signs at a pro-Bush rally in Johnstown, Pa., says he will vote for the president “because he thinks like sportsmen do. He’s a hunter going after the people who need to be hunted.”

Kerry has made a bid for white males by calling attention to his record as a Vietnam War combat hero. The Democratic nominee has also been emphasizing Bush’s poor record on job creation and improving the economy.

But so far, none of this has made much difference. “I’d rather vote for action than inaction,” says David Thorn, a 30-year-old communications representative from Overland Park, Kan., who sat in the dark-paneled comfort of O’Dowd’s Little Dublin, a bar in Kansas City’s upscale Plaza district. “And I’d rather stand for something than nothing. John Kerry doesn’t seem to stand for anything.” That’s not an enviable position to be in with the election less than two months away.

God, that’s depressing.

However, there is some good news. The GOP pollster who says that Bush has 57 percent of white males to Kerry’s 39% is full of shit. (Why this guy is the only one quoted for this article is anybody’s guess, but fair and balanced it ain’t.) This article by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira explains why. Iraq.

The Kennebunkport Project

Here’s Kitty:

While the Camp David coke party is getting the headlines, Kelley’s book is filled with many other tawdry stories about the Bush dynasty. Here is a family that looks ‘like “The Donna Reed Show,” and then you see it’s “The Sopranos,” Kelley tells Salon in the interview below. As Kelley tells it, the dynasty had respectable origins — in the form of family patriarch Prescott Bush, the distinguished, moderate Republican senator from Connecticut — but rapidly slid into cynical opportunism, skulduggery, and a mean-spirited sense of entitlement. The first President Bush is presented as a weak yes man, driven not by political vision but a savage preppy spirit of competition instilled in him by his whirlwind of a mother.

But it is his wife, Barbara (whom the ex-wife of White House counsel C. Boyden Gray calls “bull-dyke tough”), and their eldest son, George, who are the true pieces of work in Kelley’s book, a mother and son team brimming with such spite and ambition they would give the ruthless duo in “The Manchurian Candidate” the shivers. In one of the creepier passages of the book, a family gathering from hell at Kennebunkport, Maine, Barbara is shown mercilessly baiting her dry-drunk son, then governor of Texas, as a teetotaling “Chosen One,” while he keeps pleading to skip the cocktails and put on the feed bag, and his elderly father “drools over [TV newswoman] Paula Zahn’s legs.”

Isn’t it time the president came clean about his dysfunctionaL family?

Sticky Blogs

Chris Bowers at MYDD has a very interesting post about the right vs left Blogosphere. In the interest of not being too sticky, I will not discuss it, I will simply recommend that you go and read it.

Sharon’s Revenge

I don’t know how many people saw Kitty Kelley this morning on the Today Show, but it was interesting. She’ll be on a couple more days so tune in if you get up early. This morning Sharon Bush was on to refute the claims that she told Kelley that Junior was doing cocaine at Camp David during the 80’s.

She was pretty weak, mainly because she just couldn’t resist trashing the family about how they were treating her during the divorce. It was clear that she harbored enough resentment that she could have easily spilled the beans on little George during a contentious divorce case. It’s possible she lied but you’d think she would have come up with one that would be more current if she wanted to stick it to him. Regardless, it seemed clear to me that Kelley accurately quoted her. Here’s the publisher’s response to Bush’s appearance on the show:

Statement by Doubleday Regarding Kitty Kelley:

NEW YORK, Sept. 13 /PRNewswire/ — The following is a statement by

Doubleday regarding Kitty Kelley:

In an appearance on the Today Show on Monday, September 13, 2004, Sharon Bush repeated a denial she made earlier last week. After telling Kitty Kelley that she had knowledge of President George W. Bush “doing cocaine” at Camp David — “not once, but many times,” Mrs. Bush now denies that statement.

This denial has already been utterly discredited by a third party to the meeting at which Mrs. Bush made the statements. Doubleday and Kitty Kelley, author of “The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty,” firmly uphold the accuracy and veracity of reporting on this topic. Further, Doubleday and Ms. Kelley affirm that Mrs. Bush was read her comments on the day following the meeting in a telephone conversation, lasting over an hour, that was witnessed by Random House Vice President Peter Gethers — that those comments included her remarks on cocaine use at Camp David — and that she once again agreed that these comments were true.

The following are undisputable facts:

— Mrs. Bush confirmed that she was aware of cocaine use by President George W. Bush at Camp David when his father was President

— Mrs. Bush confirmed that such usage occurred on more than one occasion

— Mrs. Bush knew that Ms. Kelley planned on using this information in her book and was read the exact quotes that would be utilized

— Mrs. Bush continued to have a good relationship with Kitty Kelley — long after the meeting in April at which she confirmed the cocaine report

— Mrs. Bush called Ms. Kelley in May, 2004 after which there was a friendly correspondence.

Additionally, Today Show host Matt Lauer and Mrs. Bush suggested that Kitty Kelley had a “relationship” with Lou Colasuonno, a public relations executive who witnessed the April 1, 2003 lunch meeting between Kitty Kelley and Sharon Bush. Kitty Kelley had never met or spoken with Mr. Colasuonno prior to April 1, 2003. Kitty Kelley has never had and does not have any personal, social or financial relationship with Mr. Colasuonno.

Knowing the way Kelley operates, there are probably a few hidden bombshells that will come out over the next few days. Has anyone heard anything?

Free To Be Unemployed

For those who wonder if I am right in saying in my post below that your boss can fire you for your political beliefs, yes she can.

It seems reasonable to ask what business Michael Italie’s political convictions were to his employer. But when the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union looked into Italie’s case, it discovered, as Pastrana evidently had, that Goodwill was on strong legal footing. “There is no legal case to be brought,” explains Miami chapter president Lida Rodriguez-Taseff. “The law is pretty clear that a private employer can fire someone based on their political speech even when that political speech does not affect the terms and conditions of employment.” A public employer would be prevented from firing someone based on political speech (because that would constitute the government itself suppressing free speech). Rodriguez-Taseff briefly held out some hope that Goodwill could be challenged based on its government contracts. Apparently, though, the case law isn’t favorable for government contractors, either. Italie told Chatterbox that every lawyer he’s spoken with has told him essentially the same thing. Everyone who isn’t a lawyer, Italie said, is outraged. Chatterbox tested this hypothesis by describing Italie’s case to Ronald Radosh, the virulently anti-Communist writer. “Everybody has a right to run for mayor on the SWP ticket,” Radosh said. “That’s a clear-cut infringement of civil liberties.”

The irony is that one can make (and many have made) the case that people like Michael Italie shouldn’t be permitted to hold jobs in government, where at least in theory they have the power to subvert the U.S. system. Yet it is in government where Italie would be protected. In the private sector, where Italie is entirely harmless, he enjoys no protection at all.

If you refuse to swear fealty to your leige’s politics, you can be kicked out on your ass. If you wanna eat, keep your mouth shut. Freedom of speech only goes so far. Creepy, isn’t it?

Manly Men And Their STRONG STRENGTHLYNESS™

Gary Farber helped me to figure out why I’ve been having disturbing dreams of bouncing a tennis racket off of Scott McClellan’s face every night:

KERRY, BUSH’S STRONG STRENGTHLYNESS™, AND NORTH KOREA.

Yesterday:

On Sunday night, Scott McClellan, the president’s press secretary, told of Mr. Kerry’s comments, said: “Senator Kerry wants to return to the failed policies of the previous administration, where the U.S. was duped. We’ve been down that road before and we have no intention of letting it happen again.”

We are instead far better off with the failed policies of the current administration! Look how much safer we are, today, from the threat of North Korea achieving nuclear weapons, thanks to the Strength™ of the Bush Administration!

It’s just that simple. Anything else is just rhetoric.

Truly has there ever been a more arrogant administration? This, apparently, is a real step forward:

A mushroom cloud that towered over a remote corner of North Korea last Thursday was a result of a huge blast to prepare earthworks for a hydroelectric dam, the North said Monday.

Bill Rammell, a British Foreign Office official, met with Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun of North Korea to discuss the incident, according to a BBC correspondent in Pyongyang.”It was no nuclear explosion or an accident,” Rammell quoted Paek as saying. “It was a deliberate, controlled detonation to demolish a mountain in the far north. The Press Association of Britain gave similar details about the explosion in a pool report, and Xinhua, China’s press agency, quoted a North Korean Foreign Ministry official with the same explanation. In a pool report received by Reuters in London, Rammell noted that he had asked permission for “our ambassador and other ambassadors to be allowed to visit the scene of the explosion.” “I am very pleased the North Koreans have agreed to the request,” he said. North Korea’s neighbors, China, Russia and South Korea, have reported no increased radiation releases.

But five days after seismic detectors picked up the blast, there were as many questions unanswered Monday as after the train explosion on April 22 that leveled a railroad station and killed 171 people shortly after the passage of a train carrying Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s dictator, whose father was Kim Il Sung, the nation’s founder. If the government planned to blast apart a mountain on Thursday, the 56th anniversary of the founding of North Korea, why do it in the middle of night, when no heroic propaganda videos could be made?

The date was purely a coincidence, I’m sure. Clearly, the reality is that Kim Jong Il is so afraid of Crusader Codpiece that he is trying to get the American people to vote for his good friend John Kerry who will let him have all the nuclear bombs he wants. At least Senator Roberts thinks so:

SEN. PAT ROBERTS (R), KANSAS: It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if Kim Jong Il would think in some deranged way that if he had some kind of a test that that would affect the election. I don’t know if that’s the case, but that could be one of the conjecturing that is going on in the intelligence assessment.

BLITZER: What would be his motive in trying to affect the U.S. election, Senator Roberts?

ROBERTS: Oh, just to cause, you know, more concern in regards to possible terrorist attack, and they would then be the eighth nation that would have the kind of nuclear capability and what we’re working against.

We were able to convince Libya to, you know, go the other way; same thing with Pakistan; same thing with other countries. But it’s very hard to predict what Kim Jong Il will do. He’s just not very predictable.

BLITZER: Before we move on, are you suggesting he would like to see President Bush defeated?

ROBERTS: Well, I think that’s probably the case. I’m not going to go out on a limb and say he’s endorsing — or anybody that would want any kind of endorsement from Kim Jong Il.

I’m just thinking in terms of what he is up to, we have to very closely monitor it. And I’m saying the intelligence is mixed, and we’ll continue that monitoring.

Yeah, he’s obviously very afraid of Junior. That’s why he’s building nuclear weapons right in front of the whole world while John Bolton ineffectually shakes his tiny fist and Lil’ George pulls his proverbial pud. This is working out really well. I sure hope Bush gets elected. Maybe we can have a full fledged nuclear war. That’ll teach ’em who’s boss.