Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Incandescent With Horror

Howell Raines says that a lot of us Democrats are pining for the exuberant days and clarity of Bill Clinton’s campaign message. I know I greatly miss Howell’s exuberant obsession with David Bossie’s bait shop gossip and Clinton’s manly member and I’m sure he does too.

Yes, it was an innocent time, a time before people like Raines aided and abetted partisan witch hunts that led to impeachment for blowjobs, a time before electoral legitimacy was conferred by cronies instead of votes, a time before a president was allowed to walk the streets naked as powerful media figures like Raines exuberantly described the three piece suit he wasn’t wearing. It was a time before the country’s credibility had been shattered, the magnificent might of our military and intelligence strength had been exposed as a paper tiger and our allies and enemies alike hated us with an unmatched fervor. In fact, the only thing that can be compared to that time is the huge job losses and enormous budget deficits of both Bush presidencies.

Yes, it is indeed a new day. But as far as Howell is concerned Kerry is blowing it big time. And the thing is that he sounds like he cares deeply that Kerry wins. Howell, you see, a southern liberal of the new school, is just offering his heartfelt good advice to the campaign. As the former editorial page editor and then editor of The NY Times, he surely knows what he’s talking about. This was once the most powerful opinion leader in the liberal media.

First, he informs us that Bush and the Republicans are masters at “hammer-and-chisel” politics and shouldn’t be underestimated. Who can argue? I don’t recall ever reading anything like that during the 2000 election when Bush was receiving adoring front page profiles about how he fed his dogs and cats in the morning and travelled with his pillow, but I understand. Compared to the degenerate, corrupt treasonous incubus Bill Clinton and his sidekick, the mentally unstable Al Gore, Bush was a breath of fresh air.

Howell also informs us that despite Bush’s poll numbers, the news is really quite good for him and the Democrats ought to be shaking things up. Keep in mind that this is the analysis of one of the most powerful political opinion leaders in the country for the last decade:

While Bush’s poll figures look sickly to the unschooled eye, his 40% support level does contain some good news for him. It shows that his base of cultural and political conservatives is holding together – so far. White House strategists are betting that leaving Iraq in 30 days – no matter what chaos ensues in that country – will leave them time to revise history between now and election day and, more importantly, get on with the work of destroying Kerry’s image.

To the schooled or unschooled or homeschooled eye, a 40% approval rating for an incumbent president is sickly.

But, more importantly, when did the president announce that we are leaving Iraq in 30 days? Wow, what a scoop! When Johnny comes marching home, you just know that Bush is getting a big lift in the polls — and then they get on with the work of destroying Kerry’s image.

Frankly, I don’t see why they would bother. With good “liberals” like Raines around, it isn’t going to be necessary. For the rest of the article, Howell fills his British audience in on all of John Kerry’s hideous faults, faults which are so huge that even the fact that the incumbent is running at 40%, is barely hanging on to his base, has presided over more job losses than anyone since Hoover, and has single handedly destroyed this country’s hard won credibility, prestige and leadership around the globe — even despite all that, Kerry’s flaws are so huge that he will lose:

“…he rounded up a series of experienced hair-splitters from the Clinton years – Richard C Holbrooke, James Rubin, Sandy Berger – and they produced a script that would have played very well before the Council on Foreign Relations.

[…]

Every time I talk to a reporter who has covered him, new doubts creep in about his ability to connect with voters.

[…]

…he’s pompous in a way that Gore is not. With Gore, you feel that if he could choose, he would have been born poor and cool. Kerry radiates the feeling that he is entitled to his sense of entitlement. Probably that comes from spending too much time with Teddy Kennedy, but it’s a problem.

The TV camera is an x-ray for picking up attitudinal truths, and Kerry’s lantern jaw and Addams Family face somehow reinforce the message that this guy has passed from ponderous to pompous and is so accustomed to privilege that he doesn’t have to worry about looking goofy.

It’s as if Lurch had gone to Choate

Has anyone ever seen Mary Matalin and Howell Raines in the same room together? Just wondering.

And here’s a piece of political advice so bad, I can’t even caricature it:

Here’s what Kerry has to face up to and build upon. The difference between him and Bush is that Kerry represents the liberal, charitable wing of the Privilege party and George W represents the conservative, greedy wing of the Privilege party.

Reminder: For the last decade this man was the leading opinion maker of the “liberal” media.

Then Raines says that Kerry whiffed on Meat The Press because he didn’t stand behind his 1972 statement that some of the promoters of the Vietnam war should be viewed as war criminals

Kerry started crawfishing right away. The pity is, he was right. He could have named people starting with Robert MacNamara and McGeorge Bundy, and everybody in the country would have understood the point. That does not, I hasten to add, mean that he should have named those worthies.

Another excellent piece of advice from Howell. Kerry should have emphasized his past condemnation of the US as being war criminals. That’s a message that the NASCAR Dads who are so turned off by his plummy, Brahmin elitism will respond to.

Here’s what he should have done instead of apologising for the extremity of his language when in fact his language was common parlance at that time. He should have said: “Tim, what you see in that video clip is a young man fresh from the battlefield and incandescent with the horror he saw. I mourned deeply for my comrades who were killed and maimed. I felt moral conflict, as many of our soldiers and sailors did, about the civilian casualties all around us. I felt angry that our national leaders had put us into a war without an exit strategy or a way of defining victory.

“Those are the feelings aroused in me today when I see our young men and women dying in Iraq. I am older and I hope wiser and as the nominee of my party I have an obligation to use less colourful language. But my desire for a government that is both strong and wise in the use of that strength – that calls upon its young for necessary sacrifice, but does not gamble needlessly with their lives – is as deep today as it was then. I have seen the face of battle when it was my duty. That will make me a president who understands the cost of conflict, the need for judgment that balances our military power, the need for honesty with the American people about what we know and don’t know about where and when to go after terrorists …” And so on and so on.

Nothing pompous about that. The steelworkers in Pennsylvania are surely going to high five all the way down the bar when they hear the phrase “incandescent with horror.” That’s the message we’ve been looking for folks.

And, anyway, Kerry had already said earlier in response to a “gotcha” about his 1972 statement, “I’d like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations.”

:

SEN. KERRY: That’s one of those stupid things that a 27-year-old kid says when you’re fresh back from Vietnam and angry about it. I have never, ever, ever, in any vote, in any policy, in any speech, in any public statement advocated any such thing in all of the years I’ve been in elected office. In fact, I say the following and I say it very clearly, I will never cede the security of the United States to any institution and I will never cede our security to any other country. No country will have a veto over what we need to do to protect ourselves. But, that said, I will be a president who understands, as every president of the last century did, Tim, that multilaterism is not weakness, it is strength, and we need a president who understands how to reach out to other countries, build alliances. His father did a brilliant job of it. We need to do the kind of alliance-building that we have done traditionally.

You tell me which statement the “electorate schooled to respond to simple messages” is going to relate to.

If John Kerry, Purple Heart winner, can’t take that set of [chickenhawk] facts and handle Russert as well as Messrs Bush and Cheney do, he’s not likely to cause enough defections in the Christian bloc to defeat them.

First, what is this business where Raines thinks that Kerry has to get some defections from Bush’s Christian “bloc” to win? WTF is he smoking?

Second, I have to catch my breath at the idea that Bush “handles” Russert well. He is barely conscious and Russert simply doesn’t call him on it, that’s all. Cheney lies with impunity. If that’s “handling” Russert, then Kerry needs to get very,very stupid and start lying his ass off.

Which is exactly what Raines says he should do:

Kerry has to understand that when a cure is impossible, the doctor must enter the world of the deluded.

(That’s so weird I don’t even want to think about it. Read the piece to get the context, but it won’t help.)

What does this mean in terms of campaign message? It means that he must appeal to the same emotions that attract voters to Republicans – ie greed and the desire to fix the crap-shoot in their favour.

[…]

Using that promise as disinformation, he must now figure out a creative way to become a redistributionist Democrat.

[…]

…greed will make folks vote for Democrats if it’s properly packaged, just as it now makes them vote Republican, and in terms of the kind of voters Kerry must win away from Bush, I think the pot-of-gold retirement strategy is a way to work. Forget a chicken in every pot. It’s time for a Winnebago in every driveway.

This is quite the cynical worldview coming from the man who thundered from the editorial pages of the “liberal” New York Times against the venality and cravenness of Hilary Clinton’s 1978 cattle futures trades. The same man who almost single handedly enabled the destruction of a Democratic president because of his alleged dishonesty and personal corruption.

And this sage advice to fool the greedy rubes into voting Democratic comes from the man who in this very same column derides John Kerry for his sense of “entitlement.”

Howell Raines is the perfect representative of everything that is wrong with the SCLM. They aren’t really liberal and they aren’t really conservative. They are shallow, bitchy elitists. Suffice to say, any advice from this guy should be taken as a sign to do the opposite. Compared to pompous ass Howell Raines, John Kerry is Elvis Presley.

Thanks for the tip, Diane

Corrected for various spelling and other mistakes. Caffeine shortage this morning.

I Can’t Wait

Fahrenheit 9/11 Trailer

Via Suburban Guerrilla

Lou-seurs

Democrats lose even when they win, apparently. Here’s the headline on the NY Times article about Herseth’s win:

Could Herseth’s Victory in South Dakota Hurt Daschle?

Yeah. It was a huge mistake winning that seat. Silly Democrats.

The Abu Ghraib Scandal Cover-Up?:

Strong Leadership

…the White House seems to be constructing a legal moat around the president. Its argument is that Bush’s orders were simply disobeyed. Rice told the human-rights lawyers last week that the president’s clear directives on observing the Geneva Conventions and anti-torture laws were not followed

Ministry Of Fear

Defense Under Secretary Douglas Feith, who is in charge of setting policy on prisoners and detainees in occupied Iraq, has banned any discussion of the still-classified report on Abu Ghraib written by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, which has circulated around the world. Shortly after the Taguba report leaked in early May, Feith subordinates sent an “urgent” e-mail around the Pentagon warning officials not to read the report, even though it was on Fox News. In the e-mail, a copy of which was obtained by NEWSWEEK, officials in Feith’s office warn that the leak is being investigated for “criminal prosecution” and that no one should mention the Taguba report to anybody, even to family members. Feith has turned his office into a “ministry of fear,” says one military lawyer. A spokesman for Feith, Maj. Paul Swiergosz, says the e-mail warning was intended to prevent employees from downloading a classified report onto unclassified computers.

Pressure pushing down on me

Pressing down on you no man ask for

Under pressure

That burns a building down

Splits a family in two

Puts people on streets

That’s o-kay!

It’s the terror of knowing

What this world is about

Watching some good friends

Screaming let me out!

Pray tomorrow takes me higher

Pressure on people

People on streets

It’s Showtime

The Iraqi exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi — formerly a key ally of the Bush administration — is suspected of leaking confidential information about U.S. war plans for Iraq to the government of Iran before last year’s invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, government sources told NEWSWEEK

Somebody’s got a problem.

The article doesn’t go into any further detail on that, but it does feature a bunch of neocons (called here “political activists” which cracks me up) in high dudgeon screaming about “witch hunts.”

People might be able to chalk up all this espionage, treason type talk as partisanship or business as usual in the nation’s capital, except it’s got nothing to do with the Democrats!! This is a Republican show all the way and all we have to do is bring the popcorn.

Oh, and by the way:

President Bush also distanced himself from Chalabi, saying he had only met the Iraqi very briefly a few times.

Who is this Chalabi you speak of?

If that’s on camera, it would make a nice video companion to his notorious “I believe I met Mr Lay when he was working for my opponent.”

And I think the more pertinent question is how many times did President Cheney meet with Mr Chalabi, anyway.

Josh Marshall points out the ultimate paragraph of this piece which is a real killer:

One Bush administration official said that in addition to harboring suspicions that Chalabi had been leaking sensitive U.S. information to Iran both before and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, some U.S. officials also believe that Chalabi had collected and maintained files of potentially damaging information on U.S. officials with whom he had or was going to interact for the purpose of influencing them. Some officials said that when Iraqi authorities raided Chalabi’s offices, one of the things American officials hoped they would look for was Chalabi’s cache of information he had gathered on Americans.

I’m having milk duds too. This is going to be good.

Update:

Via Atrios, the actual Bush comments from yesterday:

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. Chalabi is an Iraqi leader that’s fallen out of favor within your administration. I’m wondering if you feel that he provided any false information, or are you particularly —

THE PRESIDENT: Chalabi?

Q Yes, with Chalabi.

THE PRESIDENT: My meetings with him were very brief. I mean, I think I met with him at the State of the Union and just kind of working through the rope line, and he might have come with a group of leaders. But I haven’t had any extensive conversations with him.

…

Q I guess I’m asking, do you feel like he misled your administration, in terms of what the expectations were going to be going into Iraq?

THE PRESIDENT: I don’t remember anybody walking into my office saying, Chalabi says this is the way it’s going to be in Iraq.

If you haven’t already seen it, go read the patented Eschaton takedown of this obvious lie.

Woolcott on Bush’s Women

Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott gives the women closest to President Bush a very rough going-over in the latest issue – portraying mom Barbara Bush as a nasty piece of work, wife Laura as timid and ineffectual, former Bush aide Karen Hughes as a wacko and a liar and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice as a weirdly worshipful “professional wife.” But, surprisingly, Wolcott concludes with a backhanded compliment for daughters Jenna and Barbara: “I’ve come to have a grudging regard for the Bush twins. Jenna and Barbara may be spoiled brats – tarty party girls – but at least they’re not perpetuating false pretenses, being used as attractive props and tweeting noises they don’t believe.”

I agree with this, actually. Those two girls may be spoiled little Paris Hilton wannabes but you have to give them credit for not buying into the phony sanctimony of their religious-right pander patsy of a father. They told him to go to hell. I’m not sure they’re Republicans.

Via the great Catch.com

Kinky

Chalabi, he pointedly noted, wasn’t the only Iraqi exile with White House connections. He added that the administration has “had relations with a number of groups previously that were intent on seeing Saddam Hussein’s regime removed from power.”

And he never asked anyone to lie. Not one time.

Just In Case

Bush Consults Lawyer in CIA Leak Case

President Bush has consulted an outside lawyer in case he needs to retain him in the grand jury investigation of who leaked the name of a covert CIA operative last year, the White House said Wednesday.

There was no indication that Bush is a target of the leak investigation, but the president has decided that in the event he needs an attorney’s advice, “he would retain him,” White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said.

The lawyer is Jim Sharp, Buchan said, confirming a report by CBS News.

“The president has said that everyone should cooperate in this matter and that would include himself,” the spokeswoman said.

She deflected questions about whether Bush had been asked to appear before a grand jury in the case.

If he’s called before the grand jury can he take Cheney with him?

Bremer’s Gone Mad!

Little Mikey on the big raid:

The early-morning raid on the home and office of Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi in Baghdad sends “the wrong message” to America’s would-be allies in the Arab world, former Pentagon official Michael Rubin tells Insight.

“This is a huge blow to America’s prestige,” he said. “The message we’ve just sent is that we do not stand by our allies, that the United States can’t be trusted. We’ve just told Arab liberals and democrats that it’s just plain crazy to work with America.”

Rubin, who served as an aide to Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, spoke with Sunni clerics, Shiite professionals and independent Kurdish businessmen in Iraq in the hours immediately after the Baghdad raid Thursday.

“Everyone in Iraq believes that because of U.S. actions, we are now heading for civil war,” he says. “We have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.”

Deeply involved in planning for the Iraq war, Rubin tells Insight that he left the government in April out of a sense of frustration.

“This administration has been taking so many hits, many of them based on outright fabrications or on information from ‘anonymous intelligence sources,’ that I felt I could be more effective on the outside,” he says.

Rubin now is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

[…]

American news reports yesterday gave several variants of the alleged charges against the Chalabi aides, ranging from corruption, fraud and vehicle theft to intimidation and blackmail. But INC sources and Rubin believe there is no doubt that U.S. civil administrator L. Paul Bremer ordered the raid.

“The decision to “cut Chalabi down to size” was taken in Washington,” Rubin said, “but the operation against Chalabi originated in Baghdad. There is no doubt that Bremer signed off on this. Basically, Bremer has gone mad. This raid shows the U.S. has not learned the lessons of Abu Ghraib, and is still trying to “humiliate” perceived opponents.

Attempts by Insight to reach Bremer for comment were unsuccessful.

At a press conference in Baghdad after the raids, Chalabi identified one of the individuals allegedly being sought as Aras Habib, his longtime security and intelligence chief. Before the U.S.-led invasion, Habib ran the INC’s network of informants within Saddam’s regime and identified defectors the INC ultimately helped to escape Iraq.

Chalabi’s detractors claim the intelligence provided by those defectors relating to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs was false or fabricated. But in fact, says Rubin, the INC provided intelligence and human sources at a time when the CIA has no assets inside Iraq at all.

“The CIA hates Chalabi because he comes out with information they do not have and that later gets confirmed,” Rubin says.

[…]

“The most virulent hatred of Chalabi comes from those who have never met him,” he [Rubin] says. “Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] and U.S. military commanders in Iraq who have worked with the INC have given them stellar reviews. They have used INC intelligence to stop operations by insurgents that were targeting Americans. They have caught insurgents red-handed because of information provided by Chalabi. [Secretary of State Colin] Powell and [Deputy Secretary of State Richard] Armitage appear to place greater value on winning bureaucratic battles in Washington than in saving American lives in Iraq.”

[…]

In citing [ormer DIA analyst Pat] Lang as an expert on Iraq, neither CBS nor the Washington Post ever has mentioned that Lang has registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for an Arab government.

“How can somebody working for an Arab government parade about as a neutral analyst?” asks Rubin.

What a good question.

Now, I ask you, does Rubin sound here like he might be a tippler? Or is just wired out of his mind on venti-quad-no-foam-lattes?

This article was written the day after the raid. Perhaps what seeps through here isn’t booze or caffeine. It sounds more like panic.

Thank You Joe Conason

Intriguing as her personal history may be, however, Ms. Miller’s troubles didn’t arise from mere ambition or poor manners. Instead, they reflected the reluctance of her editors to recognize that she was motivated by an ideology shared with her sources. Such ‘passions’ are far more common among mainstream journalists than they like to admit; indeed, strong beliefs are characteristic of many of the nation’s best journalists.

But by failing to exercise adequate control over Ms. Miller’s urge to propagandize, those editors allowed The Times to become an instrument for her neoconservative patrons in and out of government, and for their agenda of ‘regime change’ in Iraq and possibly elsewhere in the Middle East.

Miller is one of the rare reporters whose ideology was evident to practically everyone, which is why her “errors” have been attacked so relentlessly. You didn’t have to be a gernius to realize that this woman was pushing an agenda because she really didn’t make any effort to hide it.

But the fact is that even without a full-on GOP operative working as a reporter, The Times long ago became a willing tool of the right wing when the story was juicy enough. I don’t say that because I believe the editors sincerely want to promote right wing views. Some undoubtedly do, but most of these people are big city cosmopolitan types who probably hold fairly liberal beliefs in most areas. I think there is a much subtler and more sophisticated phenomenon at work.

We know about the “working the refs” angle. They have been affected subconsiously by the decades-long “liberal media” attack on their integrity and so they lend more and more credibility to right wing sources to achieve “balance.”

But, more than that, they have become dependent on the easy, stimulating, tittilating tabloid inspired “scoops” that the right wing propaganda shops learned they liked. The breathless, uncritical style of reporting that Miller personified, and the screaming headlines that accompanied her stories, were very similar in tone to the Whitewater and Wen Ho Lee series’. These were BIG stories about southern gothic corruption, lethal Chinese espionage and “smoking guns as mushroom clouds.” They were sensational. They had pulitzer written all over them if they panned out. But, they didn’t. They were false trails, propaganda and manipulation by people with a political agenda.

The paper has yet to grapple with the fact that they were used by political players. This means that they will remain subject to the same inducements. And they are not alone. Look at a respected TV journalist like Tim Russert. He can be indicted on exactly the same charges as the Times’ editors. He has accepted far too much information from right wing political operatives that turned out to be wrong to justify his continuing to use them. Yet, he obviously does and mostly uncritically. He uses their lies to confront the political opposition and force them to deny them without ever evidencing any qualms that he might be helping to spread falsehoods and wrong impressions by doing so.

The most important thing is for Democrats, particularly in Washington, to absorb the fact that they cannot count on these institutions to be objective. They must not give credence to stories just because they appear in The New York Times and they must not adhere to the “conventional wisdom” that often follows from those reports. As long as these bastions of “liberal media” are subject to right wing manipulation, belief in their credibility by Democrats perpetuates the Republicans’ brilliant use of subliminal anti-liberal cant to demoralize and disillusion us.

It’s a flavorless kind of kool-aid and we don’t even know we’re drinking it.