Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

One Simply Doesn’t, Darling

I was so relieved to see another card carrying liberal standing up for what’s right against all this unseemly politicking by those nasty Democrats. And how very clever he is to use someone who isn’t actually a Democrat to do it. 

Ron Reagan also proceeds as something of a medium, channeling his father’s unknowable views on such matters as Bush’s very public religiosity. At Reagan’s interment in Simi Valley, Calif., for instance, he said, “Dad was also a deeply, unabashedly religious man, but he never made the fatal mistake of so many politicians — wearing his faith on his sleeve to gain political advantage.”

Let’s leave aside the implied accusation that Bush is publicly religious not out of conviction but “to gain political advantage” and question the appropriateness of the statement — at the burial and citing the dead Reagan. And let us also concede that if Ron Reagan were not his father’s son, not only would he not have been at that funeral — by virtue of what achievement? — but no one would have paid him any attention. He had, as he well knew, expropriated his father’s fame and stature for his own purposes.

It is the same with stem cell research. Once again, Ron Reagan will be speaking solely because of his name and because, by implication, he is articulating his dead father’s convictions. Maybe he is — I would like to think so — but there is no way of knowing where Ronald Reagan would have stood on stem cell research. He was not, to say the least, a rigorous thinker and might well have wound up in Bush’s corner. Who knows? “

Thank goodness, we have good, right thinking liberals out there who are willing to defend Crusader Codpiece’s religiosity as true and authentic, publicly opine that President Reagan would likely have backed Bush’s stem cell plan, call the anti-Bush son of the GOP icon a phony and a grave robber and generously compile a handy list of talking points that John Moody can simply xerox and pass out to the press.(“Even the radical leftist Richard Cohen said….”) And how terribly clever of him to criticize this “Jr” for shamefully appropriating his father’s name.  Ooooh, the Bushies must have gotten quite a giggle out of that one.

Left leaning pundits simply must carry water for Republicans whenever they can because  otherwise rude people would call into question their  superiority as individuals and we simply can’t have that. The rule is that you may be critical of Republicans one out of every three columns, but if you do more than that, people will begin to suspect your gentlemanly credentials. Why, how ever would one hold one’s head up over the vichyssoise at Sally’s if one could not believably titter condescendingly about the hapless Democrats?

I’m telling you, the Democrats’ worst enemies are the liberal punditocrisy. They are useful idiots at best and consciously social climbing at worst. They either don’t understand the game the GOP is playing or they are too self-absorbed to see it. Either way, their total co-option by the Mighty Wurlitzer agenda is truly impressive.

That Reagan Jr fellow has very bad manners. Just like the Democrats who are giving him a platform for his depraved body snatching speech. He may be right on the issue, but it’s so ill-bred for him to bring it up. I don’t want anyone to think that I don’t notice that. I simply must call things as I see them. That’s why I’m superior to the partisan rabble. Uhm, Sally this potage is just delicious. As are you, my dear.

Go Fukuyama Yourself:

Famous academic Francis Fukuyama, one of the founding fathers of the neo-conservative movement that underlies the policies of US President George W. Bush’s administration, said on July 13 that he would not vote for the incumbent in the November 2 US Presidential election.

In addition to distancing himself from the current administration, Fukuyama told TIME magazine that his old friend, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, should resign.

In other news, Dick Cheney admitted he’s always known that deep down he is really a woman and hell reported hail and freezing rain.

Thanks to Kevin at Catch

Wingnut Victimology

 

Thomas Frank’s op-ed in the NY Times:

 

Of course, as everyone pointed out, the whole enterprise was doomed to failure from the start. It didn’t have to be that way; conservatives could have chosen any number of more promising avenues to challenge or limit the Massachusetts ruling. Instead they went with a constitutional amendment, the one method where failure was absolutely guaranteed — along with front-page coverage.

Then again, what culture war offensive isn’t doomed to failure from the start? Indeed, the inevitability of defeat seems to be a critical element of the melodrama, on issues from school prayer to evolution and even abortion.

Failure on the cultural front serves to magnify the outrage felt by conservative true believers; it mobilizes the base. Failure sharpens the distinctions between conservatives and liberals. Failure allows for endless grandstanding without any real-world consequences that might upset more moderate Republicans or the party’s all-important corporate wing. You might even say that grand and garish defeat — especially if accompanied by the ridicule of the sophisticated — is the culture warrior’s very object.

The issue is all-important; the issue is incapable of being won. Only when the battle is defined this way can it achieve the desired results, have its magical polarizing effect. Only with a proposed constitutional amendment could the legalistic, cavilling Democrats be counted on to vote “no,” and only with an offensive so blunt and so sweeping could the universal hostility of the press be secured.

Losing is prima facie evidence that the basic conservative claim is true: that the country is run by liberals; that the world is unfair; that the majority is persecuted by a sinister elite. And that therefore you, my red-state friend, had better get out there and vote as if your civilization depended on it.

 

This really hits the nail on the head. The right’s sense of victimization is absolutely necessary to rally their faithful.  It’s the same thing, by the way, that fuels the islamic fundamentalists. Perceived humiliation. In her new book about terrorism, Jessica Stern writes:

 

To understand this, it is worth considering the causes of terrorism. Several possible root causes have been identified, including, among others, poverty, lack of education, abrogation of human rights, the perception that the enemy is weak-willed. I’ve been interviewing terrorists around the world over the past five years. Those I interviewed cite many reasons for choosing a life of holy war, and I came to despair of identifying a single root cause of terrorism. But the variable that came up most frequently was not poverty or human-rights abuses, but perceived humiliation. Humiliation emerged at every level of the terrorist groups I studied — leaders and followers.

The “New World Order” is a source of humiliation for Muslims. And for the youth of Islam, it is better to carry arms and defend their religion with pride and dignity than to submit to this humiliation. Part of the mission of jihad is to restore Muslims’ pride in the face of humiliation. Violence, in other words, restores the dignity of humiliated youth. Its target audience is not necessarily the victims and their sympathizers, but the perpetrators and their sympathizers. Violence is a way to strengthen support for the organization and the movement it represents.

The word humiliation, alas, is now coming up in Iraq as well. Baghdad is of profound symbolic importance to Muslims because it was the capital of the Islamic world during the golden age of Islamic civilization. Televised pictures of American soldiers and their tanks in Baghdad are a “deeply humiliating scene to Muslims,” explains Saudi dissident Saad al-Faqih, who calls the war in Iraq a “gift” to Osama bin Laden.

 

The GOP and its corporate masters have successfully used this perceived humiliation of the “salt of the earth” red staters for cynical, manipulative reasons for decades.  It has consolidated the power of the real elites by scapegoating “cosmopolitans” and modernity as the cause of the average Joe’s problems.  But, just like their counterparts in places like Saudi Arabia, in this process they have found it useful and necessary to empower racists, paranoids and religious fundamentalists, some of whom have violent tendencies.

 

This scheme is about to blow up the House of Saud to its own detriment and everybody elses. We’ve got to  short circuit it here. That means that the humiliation factor has to be neutralized.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beavis and Butthead in ’04

How embarrassing

“I will stay here until 2006. I will stay here, and I will fight like a warrior for the people,” he said. “And there is no one that can stop me. If anyone pushes me around, I will push back, including the Democrats and the special interests. Trust me.”

I know that Republican politicians  need to relate to the public on a personal level because their policies are so unpopular (and their constituency isn’t the brightest group either) but this is just ridiculous. First, they foisted that half-wit frat boy on the nation and then put a cartoon character in charge of California. Obviously, there’s no reason that The Poorman’s favorite Republican can’t take the seat in Illinois — gawd knows he has the codpiece.

It’s Their Party And Their Problem

 

Please Democrats, whatever we do, don’t let the Bush campaign convince even one of us that this election is “unique” in that the key is to excite the base and forget about the moderates and undecideds. It’s Rovian bullshit and Noam Scheiber explains why:

This explanation strikes me as a little convenient for the Bushies. While you obviously never want to ignore your base, the reason the Bushies are focusing so hard on their’s isn’t that they’ve carefully appraised the political landscape and concluded that this is their best strategy. They’re focusing on their base because they have to: Despite Karl Rove’s best efforts, the Republican base still isn’t shored up.

Rove’s grand plan was to spend the first three years of Bush’s term stroking conservatives’ erogenous zones–lots of tax cuts, conservative judges, regulatory rollbacks, and religiously hued social policy (the administration’s marriage initiative, its efforts to restrict access to abortion, its retrograde stem cell research policies, etc.). The idea behind this stuff was that it would give Bush the political capital to tack leftward during his re-election campaign.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the center: Rove discovered that conservatives don’t just want to win on some issues, they want to win on every issue. Conservatives went ballistic over last year’s Medicare prescription drug bill, over additional money for the reconstruction of Iraq, over the deficit and the failure to control spending generally, and over the administration’s perceived indifference to gay marriage. Equally maddening to conservatives were proposals like a manned mission to Mars and immigration reform. So rather than spend this year reaching out to moderates, as planned, Rove found himself in full retreat, junking Mars and illegal immigrants, embracing a constitutional ban on gay marriage.

Both sides of the partisan divide have their little problem with purism. The Nader factor is illustrative of ours. But, let nobody ever say that we are anywhere close to being as rigid and uncompromising as the right wing of the Republican party.

I wrote a piece on American Street sometime back called “Welcome To Our Nightmare Mr Rove”  in which I discussed this very problem with the wingnuts. Interestingly, it played off of another article by Scheiber in which he discussed the intractability of the right wing. I wrote:

His thesis, basically, is that Republicans are temperamentally unable to compromise because they see things in black and white,  manichean terms — otherwise known as Yer-With-Us-Or-Agin-Us, My-Way-Or-The-Highway or the I’ll-Hold-My-Breath-Until-I-Turn-Blue philosophy of politics. He further explains that Democrats’ collection of interest groups means that activists who agitate for certain issues like gay rights or choice are more willing to compromise because they are usually personally affected by government and are therefore, more apt to feel the immediate consequences of incremental change. (Regardless of the motivation, it seems to me that Democrats are just more “into nuance” e.g. smarter.)

What he does not point out, however, is that if this description of the Republicans political viewpoint is correct it illustrates why they are fundamentally unqualified to govern in a democratic system. If one is unwilling to compromise then any kind of bipartisan consensus is impossible and rule by force becomes inevitable.

This is undoubtedly why we have seen a steady encroachment of the constitution in the last few years. First came the impeachment, the nuclear option of partisan warfare. Then we saw the Supreme Court intervene in a presidential election despite a clear constitutional roadmap for dealing with just such a situation. Now they are pre-emptively endorsing the radical idea of a constitutional amendment to remedy a supposed problem that has not even been decided by more than two state supreme courts and one act of civil disobedience in California. (And, if California is any guide, amending the constitution will shortly become the default strategy for all of the right wing’s pet causes.)

Karl Rove, however, has to win this election in a system that requires that his boy at least feint to the middle. His strategy, as Schreiber delineates above, didn’t work. There is no pleasing the right wing and there is no room for compromise. And, he is learning, just as the centrist Dems learned in the 90’s when they tried to maintain a bipartisan consensus, that if you give these wing-nuts an inch, they’ll take a mile. The more you move to the right, the more they move to the right. There is no meeting half way.

Welcome to our nightmare, Mr Rove.

This problem is their problem in the election. (It will be our problem when we win and try, once again, to govern.) We Democrats have many issues, not the least of which is our unceasing ability to seize defeat from the jaws of victory. But, this uncompromising, black and white worldview isn’t one of them. We must not let them draw us blindly into a “battle of the partisans.” Bush and Rove are still having to cater to their base and that is their electoral nightmare. Let ’em have at it. We’ll go to the middle and win the election.

(Incidentally, to toot my own horn just a tiny bit, that piece from American Street was chosen by Barbara O’Brien of Mahablog fame as an excerpt in her new book called Blogging America. Buy the book. It features many great bloggers and is probably the first book published on the subject)

 

Update: Donkey Rising  crunches the numbers and comes to a similar conclusion. The independent and swing voters are looking to be ours for the taking if they keep this up.  

Good Timing

I think this new book by E.J. Dionne sounds just great. It’s all about how the Democrats are wimps and need to start fighting back the ruthless tough guys in the GOP. He thinks we need to frame the issues to our advantage instead of letting the Republicans do it for us.

I’m all for that. Maybe a good place to start would be for left wing pundits (who never said a peep about this for a goddamned decade thus enabling the wingnuts to completely dominate the discourse) to not write books called Stand Up, Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge during an election campaign in which the dominant theme set forth by the Republicans is how wimpy the Democrats are and how the world needs ruthless tough guys like them to defeat terrorists.

It’s just a thought.

Innocence Project

Here’s an interesting article on the brewing controversy over “Outfoxed” at Editor and Publisher.

I thought this was particularly revealing:

Fox was active on other fronts. Staffers showed other memos to USA Today writer Mark Memmott who suggested today that “Outfoxed” focuses only on the memos that uphold its view of rightwing bias at Fox. Other memos, he reported, included instructions to give Sen. John Kerry’s speeches equal weight with those of President George W. Bush, and to not go overboard covering criticism of Kerry by some of his former “swift boat” colleagues.

That’s just funny. Why would the “fair and balanced” network have to distribute memos to its staff reminding them to give equal time to Kerry? And, you have to wonder about why they would need to be told not to “go overboard” on the swift boat charges. I don’t suppose that would be because that entire line of criticism played into Bush’s lack of Vietnam service, would it?

Democratic Prospects

LiberalOasis has a very smart post up about how (not) to be a political base.

He’s absolutely right, especially this:

Kerry may have the toughest job of all, keeping a majority coalition together over something besides Dubya.

But as we tussle with fellow Dems, we will need to be careful not to repeat the mistakes of the GOP base.

It will behoove all of us to remember in the end, it’s not about one faction of the party triumphing over another.

Because when one faction is a loser, that faction could take its marbles and go home. And there goes the majority coalition.

Instead, from the liberal perspective, it’s about convincing the so-called moderates of the party that liberal ideals and views are also political pragmatic.

This is a necessary step for us.

Even though there are enough liberals who have financially backed the Kerry campaign to show that we cannot be ignored, there aren’t enough self-described liberals in the country to have earned the right to call the shots.

We cannot sit back and just expect Kerry to do what we want.

[…]

A healthy party needs a smart and savvy base — one that provides money volunteers and energy, one that doesn’t alienate the center but defines it — for long-term success.

Whereas a demoralized base kept at arms length by the Establishment may provide some short term wins, but cannot sustain in the long-term.

Similarly, a myopic base, as the right-wingers are showing themselves to be, can give away substantive gains and destroy trust within its party.

Along with spreading the good word that liberalism is not, as advertised, another word for deviant, I propose that a good first step would be to seriously propose and build a long term strategy to do away with the electoral college once and for all. It is fundamentally undemocratic and it hurts liberals, always has.

Billmon also has an interesting post up today about class warfare.

Even in the white-collar world of my day job, I’m surprised by the venom some of my fellow drones I now direct at our ridiculously over-paid corporate lords and masters. The last few years have been a real squeeze (at least by middle-class standards) in our office – no raises, shitty bonuses – and some of the guys who used to say they voted Republican (because “they keep the taxes down,” or “the Democrats will take away my guns”) aren’t talking that way now.

[…]

But saying the Republicans can’t win a class war isn’t the same thing as saying the Democrats can’t lose one. Populist messages delivered by angry voices rarely work with the political center. They scare more than they incite. Finding the right emotional pitch – optimistic, eloquent, passionate but not belligerent – is the key. FDR understood this instinctively; so did Hubert Humphrey. So did Paul Wellstone. Most Democratic politicians are too scared – or too compromised – to even try.

Personally, I’m all for it as long as it doesn’t require that we shitcan certain principles like minority rights as so often happens in American forays into populism.

Both of these posts are food for thought about how to win and how to govern. But, I’ve got a different question for anyone who cares to weigh in.

The polls continue to show a close race. I hope it isn’t and that we will all be breathing much easier come October. But, I’m afraid that a close election will again benefit those who hold the electoral apparatus in their grasp and that means most likely the Republicans. I’ve lately been entertaining the horrible prospect of what in hell to do if we lose.

Any thoughts?

Paul Revere Was Unpardonably Shrill

I see that level headed grown-ups are giving us looney leftists another lecture on shrillness. The Bush administration isn’t laying the groundwork for another undemocratic power grab with their discussion of postponing of the elections in the event of a terrorist attack. They are just being prudent. Everybody take a deep breath and calm your little selves down. This is silly.

It would be unforgiveably obnoxious to point out that little partisan impeachment episode and the very dubious election results in the state run by the president’s brother back in 2000 as evidence that the Republicans are generally willing to go to unprecedented lengths to attain and maintain power. Neither should we be suspicious of their motives after they plainly decided after the WTC attacks to continue to govern with no regard for their political opposition in the congress or their allies overseas. Taking the country to war based upon false information should not be seen as evidence of their perfidy. Some might even say that the Republicans have been systematically defining democracy down for quite some time, but it would be unattractively shrill to mention it publicly.

One could also question the timing of this newfound concern about election tampering, if one were to retreat into leftist hand-wringing. Seeing as 9/11 actually happened during the NY mayoral primary and there was much discussion of whether the city should extend the heroic Giuliani’s term, this concept of elections and terrorism is not new. One might wonder why nobody in this great country of ours this didn’t think of this sometime before now, what with all the discussion of Homeland Security and electoral reform. But, it would be crude to mention that such things are probably best debated in the US Congress outside the election season rather than dealt with by ad hoc committees just three months prior to a national election.

It is true that the many thoughtful, restrained pundits on the right have made the case that the Spanish elections were manipulated by the terrorists and certainly the administration has been far from reticent in setting forth the proposition that should a similar thing take place here it would be with the express purpose of electing the soft ticket of Kerry-Edwards. It would be unpardonably disrespectful to mention that this is crude political fear mongering for which theme the alleged antidote — postponing the elections in case of a terrorist attack — contributes mightily. (And it would be very, very silly to note that this campaign theme is illogical in the extreme because to do so would be to accuse the administration of being dishonest, which is much too hysterical.)

I know that I have been shrill in the past — as when I opposed the Iraq war because it was clear to me that the Bush administration was mendacious and incompetent to an extreme. And I was rude when I railed about the modern republican party’s undemocratic tendencies as they systematically destroyed all pretenses of bipartisanship and consensus in the pursuit of raw political power. When I have said that they are incrementally corrupting the system to such an extent that by the time we notice it will be too late, people find that to be overwrought. These observations are unattractive and uncomfortable for people of genteel disposition.

When it was revealed, for instance, that there were no WMD, that the president intended to govern radically as if he had a mandate instead of a very dicey claim to power or that his administration believed that the president has the right to ignore laws under his power as commander in chief, one would have thought that would serve as a cautionary tale about their intentions. But apparently there is still a tremendous reserve of trust in these people’s motives and our system’s magical ability to hold back every undemocratic urge with no necessity for public involvement.

Certainly, some believe that our past history of success at beating back bad political actors should be seen as a something of a guarantee that our system will always hold. But, if that’s so, it’s likely because of one little amendment to our constitution — the first one. Empowering the shrill is what keeps these people from going too far. Shut them down and the whole house of cards will fall apart.

Pavlov’s Heathers

“Kerry, Edwards show public affection”

By LIZ SIDOTI

ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

NEW YORK — Bear hugs. Pats on the back. Shoulder squeezes. John Kerry and John Edwards are all over each other. The two Democrats and one-time rivals have shared so much public affection since becoming a team Tuesday that the presidential candidate even joked about it in New York after Edwards introduced him at fund-raisers and rallies – and hugged him before turning over the podium.

Kerry grinned and shook his head. ‘There’s been a lot of hugging this week,’ the Massachusetts senator remarked with a chuckle Friday.

Later, Kerry mentioned that Jay Leno had teased the Democratic ticket for being so touchy-feely. Mocking the apparent chemistry between the candidates, ‘The Tonight Show’ strung together clips of the two in their first three days as running mates with Joe Cocker’s weepy 1974 hit single ‘You Are So Beautiful’ played in the background.

‘We make a great couple, ladies and gentlemen,’ Kerry joked as New York donors cracked up.

Hugging, kissing and squeezing has become a part of every event since Kerry and Edwards set off on the campaign trail with their wives, Teresa Heinz Kerry and Elizabeth Edwards, for the first time together Wednesday.

It doesn’t matter if Kerry is introducing Edwards, or vice versa, the scene is always the same, the lovefest playing out at rallies in Ohio, Florida, West Virginia, New Mexico and New York.

With a toothy smile, the North Carolina senator opens his arms wide and wraps an equally sunny Kerry in a bear hug. The two clap each other sometimes once, often twice, on the back with both hands. Pulling apart, they each drape an arm around each other. Kerry waves with his free hand, and Edwards pumps his fist in the air, thumb up. Sometimes the two tilt their heads together to make inaudible comments.

Often described as aloof, wooden and emotionally detached, Kerry now appears much more relaxed and affectionate, his style more closely resembling his younger Senate colleague.

Foes in the Democratic primary season, Kerry and Edwards were joined at the hip as they strode across the lawn of Kerry’s wife’s sprawling estate in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, making their first public appearance as running mates. Holding hands with their respective wives, the two walked side by side, grinning, laughing and leaning into one another to talk.

As Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico welcomed the ticket on stage in Albuquerque on Friday, Kerry and Edwards threw their arms around each other or patted each other five times in less than a minute, and then clasped hands and raised them above their heads.

It’s not just the candidates; their wives have been affectionate as well. On Friday, Heinz Kerry and Elizabeth Edwards embraced at three different venues.

And both men have covered their wives – and each other’s wives – with kisses and hugs. At an outdoor rally in Beckley, W.Va., Heinz Kerry introduced Edwards, saying: “We have two ‘Johnnys Be Good’ here. John, without much ado.” Edwards walked up and kissed her cheek.

Later in Albuquerque, Kerry returned the favor, leaning in and giving Edwards’ wife a peck after she offered words of praise for Heinz Kerry.

Last week I wrote that the absurdity of this “John-John” affection theme was designed to give the mainstream media a bitchy, elitist chortle so that they would be unable to resist passing on the not-so-subtle propaganda point that there is something ridiculous about the Democrats — particularly to those white males who have a long standing mistrust of liberals. It’s done as a joke, in the mode of puerile bully Limbaugh who often insults with a stab in the gut and then claims he is a victim of political correctness if anyone complains. This particular one is the familiar Gore character assassination technique. The idea is to make it just silly enough that to respond with any outrage makes you look ridiculously sensitive but to not respond is to allow this theme of “deviance” of some sort to travel through the body politic in a subliminal way. I heard someone laughingly remark about it in the line at Starbucks — “It’s kind of creepy.”

I don’t think it really has anything to do with gay rights or gay marriage, although the cruder Michael Savage sorts will take that shot. It’s actually subtler than that. It’s more about Kerry and Edwards being unserious, soft and strange. And, like the mindless little children they are, the press has run with it without ever questioning whether they might just be being manipulated. Again.