Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Religiosity Gap

I’m in a bit of a mood today, so why don’t I take on the religion issue while I’m at it and piss off everybody I haven’t pissed off already?

Atrios takes umbrage with this Slate article that claims Kerry isn’t acting Catholic enough and, therefore, will lose the religious vote and the election. The author says, “if Kerry’s uncomfortable with religion then he’s uncomfortable with Americans…If Kerry’s really secular, he’s abnormal.” He quotes an anonymous Kerry aide telling the Washington Times,”Every time something with religious language got sent up the flagpole, it got sent back down, stripped of religious language.”

Uh huh. Certainly, anxious Democrats who anonymously talk to the Washington Times must be telling it just like it is.

This comes on the heels of an earlier article by Amy Sullivan chastising Kerry for not using values language and imagery and thereby alienating religious voters who might vote for him. In the course of her article, and this one in Slate today, it becomes clear that an even more significant problem for the religious left than John Kerry’s alleged lack of religiosity, is the aggressive secularism of the activist base of the Democratic party. They are rude to religious people, evidently, and this is seen as a serious threat to Kerry’s chances. (Both articles, by the way, mention how David Brooks really “gets it” in this NY Times column. Now, come on kids. David may be a nice guy, but he is not giving the Kerry campaign political advice out of the goodness of his heart. Think about it.)

Before we go any further, we should look at some actual data instead of relying on anecdotal tales of hurt feelings or bad communications. Ruy Tuxeira of Donkey Rising posted on this subject a month or so ago and reported some interesting numbers on the subject:

*Most progressives are religious. For example, in 2000, 81 percent of Gore voters professed a religious affiliation. That’s within shouting distance of the 89 percent of Bush voters who professed a religious affiliation (2000 National Study of Religion and Politics [NSRP]).

*It is true that progressives attend church less than conservatives. In the 2000 VNS exit poll, 33 percent of Gore voters said they attended church once a week or more, compared to 49 percent of Bush voters who said they attended church that often…

But the whole US population is trending toward less observance, not more. For example, in surveys taken over the last thirty years, it is the ranks of those who never or rarely attend church that have grown the most. According to a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study, those who said they never attended church or attended less than once a year went from 18 percent in 1972 to 30 percent in 1998. Confirming this latter figure, the National Election Study found that those who say they never attended was at 33 percent of the citizenry and 27 percent of voters in 2000. That is a group about twice the size of those who identify themselves as members of the religious right, and it is a group that has tended to vigorously support Democrats rather than Republicans.

Indeed, according to the NORC study, if you add to the 30 percent mentioned above those who say they attend church only once or a few times a year, it turns out that about half the US population attends church only a few times a year or less.

* In the 2000 VNS exit poll, it was widely noted that Bush won the support of voters who say they attend church more than weekly by 63 to 36 and voters who say they attend church weekly by 57 to 40 . And these voters make up 43 percent of the electorate. But even according to these unusually high VNS figures, the more observant groups were only a bit over two-fifths of the electorate. Each of the groups in the less observant three-fifths of voters those who said they attended church a few times a month, a few times a year or never–preferred Gore over Bush, with support particularly strong among never-attenders, who gave Gore a 61 to 32 percent margin.

[…]

* Conservatives and the GOP have made aggressive efforts to target Catholics. But there is no evidence that this targeting is actually working. “Traditional” Catholics, to be sure, are strongly supporting Bush (60-30), according to the 2004 NSRP data. But they are only 27 percent of all Catholics. The rest of Catholics — 73 percent — are supporting Kerry. The includes the “modernist” group (31 percent of Catholics) who support Kerry by a lop-sided 61-33 and the “centrist” Catholics — who are both the largest (42 percent) Catholic group and the real swing group among Catholics — who support him by 45-41.

More broadly, there is little evidence that centrist and modernist Catholics, which is the overwhelming majority of Catholics — including among Hispanics — are likely to vote the conservative social positions of the Catholic church on issues like abortion or gay marriage. That is what the GOP has been banking on, but it is highly unlikely to happen. Polling data suggest strongly that these Catholics are far more concerned and moved electorally by other issues, such as the economy, education, health care and so on.

There is also quite a large school of thought that even among those who report regular churchgoing that they “overrepresent,” due to social expectations and other pressures. In other words, they lie about how often they go to church. Furthermore, when pollsters ask about religion in specific terms it often turns out that people consider themselves very religious simply because they believe in God, or a Higher Power which actually falls under the secular category, not the religious category. In other words, the idea that there exists a huge monolithic number of highly religious Americans who will reject anyone who isn’t explicitly appealing to them in religious terms is probably a crock. Indeed, with the exception of those who “claim” to attend church once a week or more, the Democrats consistently pull even with the Republicans.

As it turns out even that gap has narrowed significantly in this cycle. The religion gap is highly overstated even among the super observant. According to the Pew Research Poll quoted by Tuxeira:

Another intriguing finding is an apparent narrowing of the “religiosity gap”–that is, the tendency for those who attend church more often to vote Republican with far greater frequency than those who attend less often. According to the Pew data, the gap in Bush support between those who say they attend church every week and those who attend seldom or never is now 14 points, compared to 27 points in the 2000 VNS exit poll.

There’s more here on the fact that Kerry is doing fine with Catholics.

So, what is this all about? Why are we having yet another interparty argument over something that isn’t even particularly relevant to our electoral chances?

Here’s the thing. This insistence that Democrats are disrespectful to religion is another one of those GOP propaganda ploys that we Democrats keep falling for. They have always claimed that we are godless heathens since back in the McCarthy era — of course, then it was godless communists. Nobody has ever believed it and from the polling, it doesn’t look like they do now. They have their bloc of extremely conservative Christians, but we have no hope of getting those votes even if we have Kerry wear a crown of thorns and flay himself on Meet The Press.

Besides, the entire argument validates this insulting notion that only very religious people can be elected to office in this country. In the Slate article, the author calls this new religious test “shorthand” for character. I think that’s exactly the association the Republicans want you to make.

All this infighting is, once again, playing into established GOP talking points to our own detriment. It simply is not true. Democrats are as religiously observant as Republicans and with the exception of the fundamentalists and extreme Christian conservatives, religious people vote with the Democrats as much as with the Republicans. (If we are going for Christian Right votes then might I suggest that we also adopt some racist rhetoric and promise to cut taxes for the rich. Those votes are ours for the taking.)

There has long been tension between the secularists and the religious in this country, but interestingly they have both fared well when they worked together to maintain the separation of church and state — as when the evangelicals and the secularists (which includes Deists) worked together to ensure the inclusion of the establishment clause in the bill of rights. (At that time evangelicals were a minority religion and in grave danger of being outlawed.) If one were to ask American Muslims and Buddhists today if they felt comfortable with all the religious talk in politics, I would imagine they’d say no. It’s all in where you’re sitting at the table, isn’t it?

I think it’s probably true that a lot of non-believers are rude about religion. But people need to grow up about this. The self righteousness of the religious believer has always inspired a certain, shall we say, ascerbic response. You want rude, I’ll give you rude — from two quintessential All-American boys:

“There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is – in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree – it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime- the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor His Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.”

Mark Twain

“Science, testing absolutely all thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the world — a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most glorious, surely never again to set. But against it, deeply entrench’d, holding possession, yet remains (not only through the churches and schools, but by imaginative literature, and unregenerate poetry) the fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic, superstitious, untaught and credulous fable-loving, primitive ages of humanity.” Walt Whitman

Ouch.

So, let’s be clear, here. Secularism is most definitely not abnormal. It never has been and it isn’t now. It is as American as apple pie and we will take our slice of the body politic, thank you.

Shaun at Upper Left has some instructive comments on this topic, as well.

Update: For an inspiring look at the good people of the religious left, check out this interview with the head of the National Council of Churches by my American Street colleague, Chuck Currie. I’m happy to be on the same political side as this man.

Credibility Gap

The Political Animal takes bloggers to task for being too hard on the liberal hawks and neocons who are now having second thought about the war. He says we should warmly embrace them to our side. Since I just wrote about this last night, I feel I should answer that complaint.

First of all, it would be a lot easier if they didn’t feel it was necessary to insult the millions of people who did make the right call while they are expressing their regrets. That indicates to me that they are not very likely to pay any heed to those voices in the future. But, that’s not the real problem.

In order to truly understand what went wrong with this war, you have to look at what was being said and what was being heard before we went into it. I’m not seeing a lot of that from the Mea Culpa singers. Peter Beinert (with whom I regrettably proved Kevin’s point by being deliberately snarky) was one of the few to actually examined his prejudices and preconceptions as a way of explaining why he came to the conclusions he did. As far as I know, he is the only one to do that. All the others are based upon misplaced trust in the administration and a shock that they could have been so dishonest/incompetent/incoherent. They have not grappled with the fact that they chose to ignore plenty of evidence prior to the invasion that should have tipped them off. I can think of a handful right off the top of my head, and I’m sure there are plenty more:

First and foremost was the fact that the primary forces agitating for the Iraq invasion had been agitating for it long before 9/11 and for entirely different reasons than those stated at the time. Indeed, those same forces had completely missed the threat of assymetrical terrorism as it grew up in the 90’s and essentially just piggy backed their pre-existing goals onto the terrorist threat after the attacks. This was evident even then — long before Richard Clarke started publicly talking about people’s hair on fire. There were people shouting into the wilderness about this absurd neocon notion of the Pax Americana and nobody was listening. There were those who noticed that belligerant unilateralism and the “preemption doctrine” which was supposedly in response to the attacks (“9/11 changed everything”) were, in fact, pillars of the neocon philosophy going back to the 70’s and had been heavily pushed since the end of the cold war. Someone might have asked if these beliefs were actually relevant or adequate to an entirely new threat paradigm.

Another obvious tip off was our abandonment of Afghanistan. There we had the heart of al Qaeda in our grasp and a democratic revolution and billions of dollars in reconstruction promised and yet once the war drums began pounding for Iraq, we dropped it all like a hot potato. A small, experimental version of the Iraq Democracy Project unfolded in real time, failed spectacularly and nobody noticed.

The fact that the US impeded the inspections process should have made people wonder about our true motives. Saddam let in the inspectors and they reported that he was being quite cooperative (by historical standards) and that they weren’t finding anything. Under those circumstances, the US refusing to give the locations of WMD to the inspectors to investigate should have set off some alarm bells.

Powell’s presentation to the UN was lame even before 99% of had been disproved. It was thin gruel to anyone who hadn’t already made up their mind that we were marching off to war, come what may. The whole thing was based upon his personal reputation and credibility. Big mistake and one that people should really think about going forward. This “trust us” business has been shown (as throughout history)to be a fools game.

The administration refused to discuss the potential costs of the war and publicly argued with the uniformed services about the necessary troop levels. This should have raised eyebrows. There were plenty of people who thought this was odd and questioned whether the administration knew what it was doing. The hawks didn’t take these opinions into account.

Most importantly, there were those like Wes Clark and others who warned that invading Iraq would exacerbate the terrorist threat and that we were making a grave mistake in not concentrating everything we had on al Qaeda. If the decision for war had been at all thoughtful on the hawk side there would have been a long and detailed debate about it because this wasn’t a hawk vs dove argument, it was a hawk vs hawk argument. That so many refused to listen even to their own kind on such a matter of huge importance to the security of the country is probably the biggest sin they committed.

As I wrote earlier, I think this invasion was mostly an emotional response to the attacks. And I would be remiss if I didn’t chide the prime mover behind the hysteria (aside from the admnistration, of course) which was the media. (Unbelievably, it was this hysteria that bush blamed for the flat economy a few months ago. Chutzpah, thy name is Junior)

9/11 was the story of a lifetime. It made overnight stars out of nobodies and gave huge amounts of face time to journalists. Indeed, it glamorized them in a way that hadn’t been seen since the days of Woodward and Bernstein. In the run up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration made the smartest decision they’ve made in their entire administration. The media were already primed for “9/11: The Invasion of Iraq” but as the administration made its case for war, they simultaneously began the process of training the reporters for their embedded assignments. They sent them to “camp” and brought them into their confidence and gave them a personal stake in the outcome of the war debate. (Read all about it, right here.) Imagine the disappointment if they’d had to turn in their khaki safari jackets and go back to reporting dull stories about medicare.

Many in the media itself admitted at the time that they were quite shocked at the numbers of people showing up to protest the war around the world. They didn’t even cover the story in the beginning. Yet, the polls consistently showed a large number of people even here in the US who were against the invasion and many more who wanted the administration to go much more slowly. This story was virtually ignored, and when it was covered, it was as if it was some sort of a sideshow.(Read this condescending piece of garbage, if you need a reminder — it’s about 3/4 of the way into the transcript.) From the moment the drums began in the summer of 2002 — certainly from the time that Cheney made his speech in late August — the war was treated as an inevitability by the media.

I realize how difficult it was to swim against that tide. It was exciting and difficult to resist, even for people like me. We were living history. But, at some point you had to step back and look at the magnitude of what we were contemplating — particularly the huge step away from our post war consensus against wars of aggression — and see that this thing was being rushed into production without adequate debate or planning. Saddam had been sitting there for a long, long time. There was no reason to believe that he couldn’t have sat there for a few more months until we exhausted all other options. The fact that Bush and Cheney refused to do that should have been the deal breaker.

It’s never easy to admit you were wrong. But, it is almost more important to realize why you were wrong than to admit it in the first place. If we could all wait to see how things turn out and then just say “whoops, sorry” and all would be well, then life would be pretty easy.

The fact is that the liberal hawks, especially, made the invasion palatable and acceptable to many people who trusted them. That is a heavy burden. I’m glad they’ve seen their error, but it doesn’t mean we’re on the same team, as Kevin seems to think. So far, I’ve seen little reason to believe they won’t do exactly the same thing again if their blood gets up and they decide the opposition consists of people they don’t wish to be associated with. I hope I’m wrong.

Waddo We Do Now???

Detainees May Be Moved Off Cuba Base

As attorneys for detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, began preparing the first of hundreds of expected lawsuits demanding that the government justify the detentions, senior administration officials acknowledged that they were unprepared for a rebuke in two landmark Supreme Court decisions that rejected the military’s treatment of prisoners in the war on terrorism.

[…]

“They didn’t really have a specific plan for what to do, case-by-case, if we lost,” a senior defense official said on condition of anonymity. “The Justice Department didn’t have a plan. State didn’t have a plan. This wasn’t a unilateral mistake on DOD’s part. It’s astounding to me that these cases have been pending for so long and nobody came up with a contingency plan.”

Apparently, this was because they were convinced they were going to win.

An internal Justice Department memo reviewed Tuesday by the Los Angeles Times outlining communications plans in response to high court rulings on the issue listed two pages of talking points to be used “in case of win,” and a page of talking points to be used “in case of win if some sort of process is required” — a partial victory. Yet, there was no category for action in the event of a broad defeat in the memo, titled “Supreme Court Decision Communications Plan.”

Few lawyers inside or outside the government doubted that the high court would allow the government the right to detain combatants during wartime, as has been allowed in every major war for two centuries. That option was upheld.

But the memo wrongly predicted an outright win in the case Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld, involving Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Louisiana-born man of Saudi descent captured in Afghanistan.

“The DOD/DOJ position on the detention of Hamdi will be decided in our favor as a clear-cut POW case,” the memo said, although Hamdi was not held as a prisoner of war.

The memo predicted a 5-4 vote in favor of the government in Rasul vs. Bush and Al Odah vs. United States. Justices in that case, involving 16 Guantanamo detainees seized in Afghanistan and Pakistan, found in the reverse, voting 6-3 that military prisoners who are not U.S. citizens cannot be held without access to American courts.

I’m not enough of a court watcher to decipher why they thought this when virtually everything I read in the last month indicated that the court was very likely to rule against the administration. (I do wonder what, if anything, this all has to do with Ted “Nasty, Brutish and Short” Olsen’s somewhat unexpected departure.)

Faith based justice sure isn’t what it used to be, is it?

Bush Urges All Autocrats to Yield Now to Democracy

Or Else.

The Mea Culpa Singers

If I might just add to Tim’s great post at the road to surfdom as well as DeLong’s here and Atrios’s ongoing frustration with the sorry warhawks’ excuses, I have to agree that this sad complaint that nobody could have known the Bushies would screw up Iraq this badly is total bullshit.

I am no psychic and I have no special insight that others don’t have. Yet somehow, I was able to see that the Bush administration was very likely to screw this up badly and so were millions of other people. (For one thing, at the time we were going into Iraq the abdication of our responsibilities in Afghanistan was already well under way.)

Back in my pre-blogging days, on the night the Senate passed the Iraq resolution Atrios published this:

Digby says, in Matthew Yglesias’s comments, in response to Yglesias saying “But if I don’t get what I want and it does come to war, you won’t see me out on the streets rallying for a Hussein victory either”:

I don’t think the pro-Saddam rally will be well attended.

But, there will be prayer vigils and sleepless nights on the part of those of us who hope that this incompetent administration doesn’t fuck it up so much that all hell breaks loose in the region, including the real possibility of nuclear war and many american and arab casualties. And we’ll be wishing fervently that terrorism on US soil doesn’t become something we’ll have to learn to live with because we just can’t seem to kill all the people who hate our guts and multiply exponentially with every aggressive action that we take. And we’ll sure hope that we can get some cooperation from the unstable regimes that finance them without having to invade and depose their leaders, too.

And, if everything works out, let’s keep our fingers crossed that we can turn the mideast into a democratic paradise quickly because judging from our experience in Afghanistan, our President meant it when he said he “wasn’t into nation building.” We really don’t need to fight this war again.

And I know that a lot of us will probably get together around the dinner table and water coolers to talk about the enormous sums of money remaking the mideast is costing and will continue to cost for years to come, while we worry about whether we’ll have jobs or health care or a chance of a comfortable retirement.

So, rather than attending pro-Saddam rallies, people who are against this war being waged by someone in whom they have no faith will be instead gathering together to fervently pray that his adventure goes perfectly every step of the way.

Those prayers were far from answered. In fact, I would say that my fears were downright prescient, including the ongoing and completely unresolved threat of terrorists and Islamic states with nuclear capability.

It wasn’t just me. Look at these poll results from that same week:

The public overwhelmingly wants to get the United Nations’ weapons inspectors back into Iraq and allied support before taking any military action. Americans also want a congressional vote before acting – and think members of Congress should be asking more questions about the implications of war with Iraq.

Americans are concerned about the wider implications of war with Iraq. They believe such a war will result in a long and costly military involvement; they believe it will lead to a wider war in the Middle East with other Arab nations and Israel; and that it could further undermine the U.S. economy.

Americans are also cool to the doctrine of pre-emption. They believe countries should not be able to attack each other unless attacked first – and less than half of Americans think the U.S., in particular, has the right to make pre-emptive strikes against nations it thinks may attack in the future.

This was just a year after 9/11. The public was far from convinced that Bush was doing the right thing. The press and the punditocrisy, on the other hand, just kept pushing and pushing and creating this sense of inevitablility about the war — much of it promoted by these hawks, both liberal and neocon, who insisted that we had no choice but to invade Iraq at the earliest possible time.

There really is no excuse but war fever. People chose to support that war, not because there was good evidence backing up the need for urgency. Indeed, there was plenty of evidence that we should be very cautious before we opened a front in the WOT right in the middle of the muslim holy land. But, the blood was pumping — people wanted a fight and the media wanted a show.

It’s really that simple. There was never any truly compelling reason to take on Saddam at just that moment and it didn’t take a genius (I’m certainly not one) to predict that Bush would make a hash out of it. I am tired of reading these mea culpas that are filled with invective toward those of us who were correct in our assessment of the motives and the competence of the administration. We weren’t a bunch of starry eyed hippies sitting around singing kumbaya — there was ample evidence and analysis that they simply chose to ignore.

In fact, it was the the neocons and the liberal hawks who decided that democracy is a matter of faith rather than reason and believed that if they just wanted it hard enough it would magically happen. The naive kumbaya chorus wasn’t on our side. It was the AEI and New Republic “Up With Democracy” singers who were the fools.

What Gaul:

U.S. President George W. Bush has repeated a call for the European Union to admit Turkey, despite criticism by France’s President Jacques Chirac that he was meddling in EU affairs. Bush said Tuesday that Turkey belongs in the EU and that Europe is ‘not the exclusive club of a single religion’ in what amounted to a rebuff to the French leader.

[…]

He said that Turkish EU membership would be a “crucial advance” in relations between the Muslim world and the West because Turkey was part of both.

The main message in the U.S. President’s speech was a bid to mend relations between Muslims and Americans that were left tattered by the Iraq war.

“We must strengthen the ties and trust and good will between ourselves and the peoples of the Middle East,” he said.

Bush held up Turkey as an example of a Muslim democracy.

“Including Turkey in the EU would prove that Europe is not the exclusive club of a single religion, and it would expose the ‘clash of civilizations’ as a passing myth of history,” Bush said.

Somebody needs to get Bush’s people some time off because they obviously can’t take the stress. Publicly lecturing Europe about religious pluralism is about as obnoxious as an American president can get. And to use Europe as his whipping boy to mend fences with muslims (a totally incomprehensible strategy) is to basically say, “those Europeans make much better targets than we do, Osama. They hate yer muslim guts. Have at it.”

Who the hell do these people think they are? It’s not that we have no right to politely advocate for Turkey being admitted into the EU if we choose. It’s that we don’t do it by publicly insulting the EU for our own purposes. Where did these people learn their manners, Attica?

Chirac was, unsurprisingly, pissed:

“If President Bush really said that in the way that I read, then not only did he go too far, but he went into territory that isn’t his,” Chirac said of a remark Bush made over the weekend.

“It is is not his purpose and his goal to give any advice to the EU, and in this area it was a bit as if I were to tell Americans how they should handle their relationship with Mexico.

Oh, we won’t mind. That’s what we call the new “go fuck yourself” diplomacy. You’ll feel better, too.

Action, Reaction

Yglesias finds another dead fish wrapped in The Weakly Standard today. Apparently, we liberals had better get control of those violent thugs over at Move-On because the conservatives just can’t be responsible for what might happen if somebody “not so nice” came into power and felt like he had to teach us a lesson. (Matt takes them down quite handily.)

But, the article is also interesting for another reason. Here’s the passage that Matt highlights:

You can file the of Mussolini’s rise under “H” for Hegel, the idea that extreme movements always beget extreme counter forces. It was the far left, by relentlessly chipping away at the foundations of Italian life, that gave birth and power to the far right–as it did a decade on when Hitler rode nearly the same path under similar circumstances.

This is what seems most pertinent today, as “activist” groups like Moveon.org and demagogues like Michael Moore and angry men like Al Gore and George Soros rail so irrationally against both the president (comparing him to Hitler and Mussolini in a variety of contexts) and the structures of daily American life, including the legally adjudicated Supreme Court decision that ultimately decided the 43rd presidency in advance of a tedious recount that would’ve yielded the same outcome.

… Either this November or in four years, George W. Bush is going to be turned out of office; even the judge agrees with that. Someday, though, a populace provoked by the left’s constant fire-breathing may look for a dragon slayer who won’t go quite so easily.

Once again, we see the right’s blindness to its own actions over the last 15 years. I don’t disagree with their analysis of what contributed to the rise of fascism. The left was extreme and led to a counter response in equally radical terms. Ye olde pendulum swing.

They are perfectly right that the same exact thing may very well be happening here. But, apparently it doesn’t occur to these believers in civil discourse that their eliminationist right wing rhetoric of the last decade and a half — and a president who literally tells us to go fuck ourselves — is what has spawned this reaction from the left. (Not that I agree that Moore or Move-On say anything close to even a normal day’s Limbaugh/Savage blather, but in the interest of making my point I will stipulate that the left is mighty riled up.) They believe they’ve just been sitting around being polite and restrained and out of the blue the left has come out swinging.

This after we moved the party way to the center, gave them a successful moderate republican president for two terms who they then impeached and after they completely disregarded the disputed election returns and governed as if they had a mandate. I mean, I know we Democrats are the mommy party and all, but push mommy far enough and she becomes a screaming bitch on wheels. What did they expect?

Republicans seem to have a very serious problem seeing themselves as they appear to others. Perhaps this might give a clue to how we reached the point where liberals are fighting back with everything we have.

Language: A Key Mechanism of Control

Newt Gingrich’s 1996 GOPAC memo

As you know, one of the key points in the GOPAC tapes is that “language matters.” In the video “We are a Majority,” Language is listed as a key mechanism of control used by a majority party, along with Agenda, Rules, Attitude and Learning. As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates we have heard a plaintive plea: “I wish I could speak like Newt.”

That takes years of practice. But, we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. That is why we have created this list of words and phrases.

[…]

Often we search hard for words to define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party.

abuse of power

anti- (issue): flag, family, child, jobs

betray

bizarre

bosses

bureaucracy

cheat

coercion

“compassion” is not enough

collapse(ing)

consequences

corrupt

corruption

criminal rights

crisis

cynicism

decay

deeper

destroy

destructive

devour

disgrace

endanger

excuses

failure (fail)

greed

hypocrisy

ideological

impose

incompetent

insecure

insensitive

intolerant

liberal

lie

limit(s)

machine

mandate(s)

obsolete

pathetic

patronage

permissive attitude

pessimistic

punish (poor …)

radical

red tape

self-serving

selfish

sensationalists

shallow

shame

sick

spend(ing)

stagnation

status quo

steal

taxes

they/them

threaten

traitors

unionized

urgent (cy)

waste

welfare

Duck. The pendulum’s about to hit you in the face, assholes.

It’s Ring, you Moron

I hate to be pedantic, but this “let freedom reign” thing bugs the hell out of me.

The common phrase is “let freedom ring” not “let freedom reign.”

A Google search turns up 2,090 references to “let freedom reign” one of the top links coming from a white supremacy web site called “Panzerfaust Records” that features a bunch of racist lyrics. “My Country Tis of Thee” is not amongst them, as you might imagine.

On the other hand, “let freedom ring” turns up 72,700 references, number one being Sean Hannity’s dull as dishwater anti-liberal screed. (You’d think he’d be pissed that he lost the opportunity for such a nice cross-promotion.)

Of course, aside from the song lyric that every American schoolchild learns when he or she is about six years old, (“….from eh-everee-eey mountainside… le-et freedom ring,”) we have one of the most moving speeches ever made by anyone, anywhere, which is Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech:

This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.” And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

Now that would have been worth evoking in the moment that Iraq was allegedly given back its sovereignty. Instead, our illiterate president, or an illiterate member of his staff, evoked a phrase that sort of sounds like that one, but isn’t. Just like everything else with this godforsaken war, they screwed it up — even down to the note Junior wrote for posterity.

You Aren’t My Friend

Apparently, some of Rush’s callers weren’t all that happy about Big Time’s new “if it feels good, go fuck yourself” philosophy. They think it might not be the best message to send to their kids.

Rush tried to explain it but wasn’t quite coherent because the drugs do tend to make you hallucinate. In his case, he had a vision that the Democrats were actually Republicans. It’s very interesting:

RUSH: …Look, I just want to say. I’m going to repeat what I said at the beginning of the program when I talked about this because I think there’s a bit of a double standard here when people are expressing outrage about this. Don’t misunderstand. I am not for the word becoming part of the common, everyday vernacular, but it still is. You cannot turn on television today without hearing the word. You cannot go to the movies without hearing the word — unless you go to a kids’ movie, a G movie — and it is what it is and we can sit here and lament it and wring our hands all we want.

What we can do is have our own private conduct of standards and abide by them with our friends and people that we deal with and refuse to fall prey and join those in the gutter who are using the word in a guttural sense. I don’t think Cheney was using it in a guttural sense.

The point to me is this. The Democrats have wanted it two ways, both ways for the longest time. They want to be perceived by the vast majority of people as decent and calm and refined, and they’re the ones who have all the compassion and care. They’re out there every day, Senator Leahy among them, accusing Vice President Cheney of corruption, of actually getting Halliburton a gig in Iraq for his own personal gain. They are claiming that he and Bush started this war — when it wasn’necessary — for their own personal gain, that they are in cahoots with all of this prison abuse, doing it personally because that’s a kind of people they are. They are saying some of the most…

What is being said about Bush and Cheney by people like Senator Leahy from committees, on television, is far worse than Cheney using the F-word back to Leahy, because these people are into character and personal assassination.These people are trying to destroy George W. Bush, his reputation and his life, just as they are trying to do Vice President Cheney’s.

(Creepy, isn’t it? One of the most unpleasant characteristics of the modern Republican bully is his overarching sense of victimization. Combined with this very, very sick projection problem, you can see why he needs the little blue babies.)

Now, all you children out there listen up. This is how the grown-up Republicans behave:

Yet when Cheney shows up at the Senate, here’s Pat Leahy who wants to be all buddy-buddy and put his arm around him and get in the photo-op and act like they’re good buds, and Cheney — and this has been going on for far too long — and Cheney finally said F-you. You aren’t my friend.

What he was saying: You’re not my friend; I don’t want you in my company, and I’m not going to smile when I’m around you, because you don’t deserve my friendship. You haven’t earned my friendship. You are my enemy, and I’m not going to come here and put on a show, phony baloney show, that says like you and that we are convivial and that we are colleagues and all we do is disagree in the daytime but at night we go out and have a beer. F-you. I don’t want to have a beer with you. I don’t want to be anywhere near you. I don’t like you. You do not deserve my friendship, and don’t act like we’re friends here. Point made.

Amen. Hubba hubba. Home run, exclamation point. It’s about time this started happening because the Democrats are getting away with this two-faced behavior of theirs for way, way, way too many years.

That’s what they mean when they say they are “changing the tone,” kids. If Democrats say something bad about Republicans, they are bad. If Republicans something bad about Democrats, they are telling the truth. If Democrats have disagreements with you but still try to be friendly, they are being two-faced. You should tell them to go fuck themselves. That’s what grown-ups call “civility.” And you will feel so much better after you do it, too.

If that doesn’t work and you still feel bad, try one of these little blue babies. Uncle Rush and Uncle Dick are what we call “Republican role models.” We believe that if it feels good, do it. That’s what being a grown-up Republican is all about.

Thanks to kevin for the Catch.

More Cuttin’ ‘n Runnin’

Tristero links to Rhandi Rhodes saying that it is unconscionable that Bremer would cut ‘n run while a US marine was still being held by the evul terrists. The troops must be awfully pleased to see their Preznit now behaving as if he no longer has anything to do with what’s going on in Iraq. Some support for our boys, eh? Sneak outta town in the dead of night and leave them there to face the music.

Let freedom rain. Or is it, let freedom rein? Let freedom wring? I forget. Condi?