Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

America Inc. Downgraded

Please tell me again why capitalists support Republicans? It has been shown time and again that the markets do better under Democrats. And, it’s clear that Democratic administrations create a more broad based recovery from the inevitable downturns, which supports a stable, thriving middle class — also good for the economy.

And with globalization being an unstoppable force, it’s also logical that America’s image is important to our ability to conduct business internationally. The most powerful nation on earth behaving like a petulant bully does not inspire confidence:

After 14 years of regular travel to Brazil, Andrew Odell was thunderstruck by what he found there on a trip last month. “I have never run into such a consensus view on US politics,” says the contract negotiator and partner at Bryan Cave, a New York law firm. “People condemn the US [for its Middle East policy], and are frightened by the US.”

[…]

I would say it creates a backlash for everybody in an interdependent world,” says Bruce Patton, deputy director of the Harvard Negotiation Project in Cambridge, Mass. “If you’re a really big kid and you don’t lean over backward not to be coercive, people think you’re a bully…. If you get what you want just because you can, they hate you for it.”

That’s what appears to be happening with America’s image abroad. For example, only 15 percent of Indonesians felt somewhat favorable or very favorable toward the US, down from 61 percent a year earlier. The Roper survey of 30,000 people in 30 countries also found declines in non-Muslim countries: Russia, down 25 percentage points; France, down 20 points; Italy, down 10.

“Overseas, they perceive Americans as being aggressive and uncompromising,” says Sheida Hodge, managing director of the cross-cultural division for Berlitz International in Princeton, N.J. Ms. Hodge spent the last half of 2003 on the road. “Everywhere I went I heard the same thing: ‘Americans want to have their way.’ The Japanese tell you; the Chinese tell you; the French tell you.

How that political concern translates to the bottom line is debatable. For the first time since RoperASW began tracking it in 1998, America’s declining reputation was beginning to affect the appeal of US brands, its survey found.

The article indicates that the problem is still small and that most overseas consumers have not indicated any hostility to American brands. But, the problem does seem to be growing.

Unbelievably, there are some who believe that the neoconservative unilateralist bullying technique should work in business as well. This one’s from Florida — a Bush supporter, no doubt:

Instead of a softer stance, one emerging school of negotiating calls for tougher tactics. According to this view, the US is losing business because its win-win approach fails overseas.

“So often, especially where culture is used as a barrier, the excuse is that ‘Well, it’s our culture, so you have to give us something. It’s our culture, so in order for you to do business here, you’re going to have to compromise,’ ” says Jim Camp, a negotiating coach in Vero Beach, Fla., and author of the contrarian new book “Start with No.”

Mr. Camp, who has worked with nearly 200 public- and private-sector clients, cites a major American supplier to the photographic-instruments industry. The firm ships large, expensive machines abroad to firms that rely on them to operate. That ought to provide some leverage, Camp says, but it doesn’t.

“That American supplier has not had one year of profitability in the past nine years,” he says. “They’ve had a win-win mind-set, and they’ve compromised away their margins of profit.” The company, he says, has stayed in business by firing employees and outsourcing jobs.

Camp calls this a widespread syndrome. “It’s shocking to me the number of people who won’t even ask what the other side requires,” he says. “Instead, they’ll compromise before they even find out. They’ll cut their price trying to get someone to like them.

Was it Deming who said, “negotiating is for pussies?” I can’t remember.

I’m sure there is a nugget of truth in what he says. I have no doubt that some American businesses don’t negotiate very well. But, the condescending attitude expressed in his comment about culture says it all. He’s got the same disease as Cheney and Rumsfeld — hubris.

I think we have plenty of evidence of how well this negotiating style works from the Republicans in congress. It’s the Dick Cheney business model based upon the “go fuck yourself” principle. Very effective. Nothing is better for business than having your partners and customers hate you. After all, if they don’t want to buy our crap we’ll just invade their countries, kill their leaders and take everything they have. Simple.

Of course, if you aren’t in a position to do that, your overseas customers might just decide to do business with a bunch of freedom-fries munchers in Old Europe. Or maybe even those smiling backstabbers in Asia.

But other dealmakers aren’t panicked. Experts say that it’s still about individual relationships built on mutual respect and trust. And anecdotes suggest that America may still have some goodwill to draw upon

[…]

“People can separate what they feel about the current administration’s politics from their desire to do a deal,” says Keffer.

For now. If the American people validate this administration by sending it back for another four years, those furriners may decide that Americans aren’t the kind of people they want to do business with. If we elect politicians who don’t honor treaties, agreements and alliances, why should anyone think we’d honor a contract?

May I Have Some More Please?

Apparently, the NY Times just got its reporters brand new calculators/vanity mirrors because they seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time doing price checks on the Kerry campaign expenditures, barely able to contain their disgust at such conspicuous consumption:

John Kerry may be only a candidate for president, but he and his entourage travel like kings. A month ago, his campaign began chartering a gleaming 757, packed with first-class seats, fine food, sleeping accommodations – even a stand-up bar. They hardly shy away from fancy hotels, like the Four Seasons in Palm Beach and the St. Regis in Los Angeles.

Strangely, they weren’t so appalled back in 2000 when the Bush campaign feted them in high style on the Enron jet. In fact, as Bob Sommerby incomparably pointed out, Margaret Carlson wrote in her book that it was the gorging on imported chocolates and expensive entres (as compared to the cold box lunches provided by that lying Philistine Al Gore) that created the positive brown nosing that passed for coverage of candidate Bush:

“There were Dove bars and designer water on demand,” she recalls, “and a bathroom stocked like Martha Stewart’s guest suite. Dinner at seven featured lobster ravioli.”

[…]

Gore wanted the snacks to be environmentally and nutritionally correct, but somehow granola bars ended up giving way to Fruit Roll-Ups and the sandwiches came wrapped and looked long past their sell-by date. On a lucky day, someone would remember to buy supermarket doughnuts. By contrast, a typical day of food on Air Bush…consisted of five meals with access to a sixth, if you count grazing at a cocktail bar. Breakfast one was French toast, scrambled eggs, bacon…

Memo to the Kerry campaign. Be sure to throw the animals some of those $36.00 sand dabs. They get much more pliable if you buy them off with expensive food and toiletries. They are, after all, whores.

But, don’t kid yourselves. It will undoubtedly do only a tiny bit of good, if that. There’s something about the special taste of Republican largesse that really turns them on. Perhaps it’s the fact that they are required to take a little spanking with their lobster ravioli. (Imagine the revelry they could have enjoyed if multimillionaire Jack Ryan had ever run for president — truffles ‘n Dove bars ‘n handcuffs, oh my! Another dream shattered.)

Whatever it is, don’t expect too much from these people. As far as the media are concerned, rich or poor, northern or southern, Democratic candidates are lying, hypocritical scam artists and Republicans are hardworking, salt of the earth He-men. I doubt they are capable of changing that view no matter how much bearnaise sauce they have dripping from their chins.

Smackdown

In Today’s LA Times, the new editorial page editor outlines (in devastating terms) The Disaster of Failed Policy:

In its scale and intent, President Bush’s war against Iraq was something new and radical: a premeditated decision to invade, occupy and topple the government of a country that was no imminent threat to the United States. This was not a handful of GIs sent to overthrow Panamanian thug Manuel Noriega or to oust a new Marxist government in tiny Grenada. It was the dispatch of more than 100,000 U.S. troops to implement Bush’s post-Sept. 11 doctrine of preemption, one whose dangers President John Quincy Adams understood when he said the United States “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

[…]

The current president outlined a far more aggressive policy in a speech to the West Point graduating class in 2002, declaring that in the war on terror “we must take the battle to the enemy” and confront threats before they emerge. The Iraq war was intended as a monument to his new Bush Doctrine, which also posited that the U.S. would take what help was available from allies but would not be held back by them. It now stands as a monument to folly.

[…]

Two iconic pictures from Iraq balance the good and the dreadful — the toppling of Hussein’s statue and a prisoner crawling on the floor at Abu Ghraib prison with a leash around his neck. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 to a hero’s welcome and a banner declaring “Mission Accomplished.”

A year later, more than 90% of Iraqis want the U.S. to leave their country. The president boasted in July that if Iraqi resistance fighters thought they could attack U.S. forces, “bring them on.” Since then, more than 400 personnel have been killed by hostile fire.

[…]

The missteps have been many: listening to Iraqi exiles like Ahmad Chalabi who insisted that their countrymen would welcome invaders; using too few troops, which led to a continuing crime wave and later to kidnappings and full-blown terror attacks. Disbanding the Iraqi army worsened the nation’s unemployment problem and left millions of former soldiers unhappy — men with weapons. Keeping the United Nations at arm’s length made it harder to regain assistance when the need was dire.

It will take years for widely felt hostility to ebb, in Iraq and other countries. The consequences of arrogance, accompanied by certitude that the world’s most powerful military can cure all ills, should be burned into Americans’ memory banks.

Preemption is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster. The U.S. needs better intelligence before it acts in the future. It needs to listen to friendly nations. It needs humility.

Please read the whole thing, print it out and give it to anyone who dares tell you that the Empty Codpiece Doctrine should be used as anything but cat box filler.

Welcome To LA, Mr Kinsley.

Magically Delicious

If anyone hasn’t seen this utterly humiliating interview between the spoiled little Brat King and Carole Coleman of RTE, here it is. You might want to have a nice soothing glass of fine Irish Whiskey in your hand (I know it’s early — haven’t you ever heard of an Irish Coffee?) for the moments when you need a stiff belt to calm yourself when you realize that this major league fuckhead represents you around the world — and also to toast Ms Coleman for trying to get Bubbleboy to actually answer a question instead of ramble on with some nonsensical blather about freedom and compassion. His Highness doesn’t like his incomprehensible gibberish questioned. (And for every time she pisses off the prickly little moron for absolutely no reason, have another.)

It makes you proud to be an American, it does, to see our president act like a fucking, goddamned asshole on international TV. He is rude, thickheaded and childish, insisting that he be allowed to blather his incoherent and totally irrelevant talking points to eat up the clock and then getting mad when the reporter tries to get him to focus on the actual question asked.

Needless to say, they’ve retaliated for her misbehavior. Via Atrios I see that she has been punished. Our big strong decisive leader is nothing but a pussy.

If anyone would like to let the powers that be know how grateful we are for the heroic journalism practised by Irish television and Carole Coleman, my new idol, here is the e-mail address: newsdesk@rte.ie

You have to let journalists know when you appreciate their bravery in the face of the bullying White House.

You Feel Lucky, Punk?

I’m speechless.

Medicare is planning a lottery later this year for people with cancer, multiple sclerosis and several other diseases. For the 50,000 winners, the government will start helping pay for their medicine, but more than 450,000 others must wait until 2006.

[…]

However, the law limits the new program to 50,000 people and $500 million, at least $200 million of which must be spent on cancer drugs. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson estimated 500,000 to 600,000 Medicare recipients without prescription drug coverage are eligible.

“There’ll be a lottery to be chosen as one of 50,000 lucky individuals,” Thompson said.

Medicare will accept applications for the lottery from July 6 to Sept. 30, and will randomly select 25,000 cancer patients and 25,000 people with the other illnesses.

People who apply by Aug. 16 will be eligible for an early draw, with coverage beginning Sept. 1.

Sorry, honey, you didn’t win the big LIFE LOTTERY, brought to you by the Go-Fuck-Yourself Team of Bush and Dick. Try again next time on The Bill Bennett Big Spin. If you live that long.

Of course, you can’t blame the Bush administration. We just don’t have the money to provide life saving drugs to just everybody, fergawdsake. We have to make some tough choices here. Sacrifice. Tighten our belts. After all, Dick ‘n Bush have to scrape up several billion to pay Halliburton to ship fuel to Iraq:

Shortly before the Pentagon awarded a division of oil services contactor Halliburton Co. a sole-source contract to help restore Iraqi oil fields last year, an Army Corps of Engineers official wrote an e-mail saying the award had been “coordinated” with the office of Vice President Cheney, Halliburton’s former chief executive.

The March 5, 2003, e-mail, disclosed over the weekend by Time magazine, noted that Douglas Feith, a senior Pentagon official, had signed off on the deal “contingent on informing WH [the White House] tomorrow.”

“We anticipate no issues since action has been coordinated w VP’s office,” it continued.

Three days later, Halliburton subsidiary KBR was granted the contract, which was worth as much as $7 billion, according to information on the Army Corps of Engineers Web site. The first job under the contract was putting out oil fires. It was later expanded to include shipping fuel to Iraq, which led to Pentagon auditor charges that KBR had overbilled the government.

Sorry little Mikey. Guess it’s just not your day. Try to hang until 2006, ok? We’ll see if we can get you some chemo then. Here’s an aspirin. Drink your kool-aid.

Big Time Meltdown

Why is Cheney losing it? And it’s quite clear that he is. For anyone who missed the interview with Gloria Borger, you really have to witness how agitated and nervous he is to appreciate how close to the edge he’s walking these days. Overspun has the clip if you missed it (from the Daily Show — a joy in itself.) He either just downed a quad espresso or there is something wrong with him.

And, of course, there’s the now famous “fuck yourself” to Pat Leahy just yesterday.

So, what’s going on with Big Time? Anybody have a guess? There are so many crimes and dirty tricks he could charged with at any moment, it’s hard to narrow it down.

Here are a couple of ideas. The first is the remote possibility that somebody’s put a bug in Lil’ Crusader Codpiece’s ear saying that Big Time is the reason for all his troubles. (And I don’t think it was Joe Biden.) Junior has a nasty temper.

Another possibility is that the Plame investigation is scorching his backside. He was questioned back on June 6, but it had to make him frantic to think that Dim Son was left alone with a smart prosecutor for over an hour yesterday. You can see why he’d be nervous.

Of course, he seemed awfully testy about Halliburton…

And there’s the torture and mayhem stuff…

Outright lies about Iraq…

A glimpse of Lynn from the back…

Any of those things could have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Update: Attaturk has a most disturbing theory….

Character Flaw

Yglesias responds to this facile little formula of Max Boot’s in which he (Boot) has the dazzling insight that conservatives care about “character” and liberals care about “cleverness.”

Boot couldn’t even bring himself to phrase it properly. Even if this were true, it would go, “conservatives care about “character” and liberals care about “competence.” But, it isn’t and Matt explains why:

Or could it be that liberals and conservatives have different conceptions of what good character is. For some reason, some time in the past the country’s right wing took a fateful turn for the worse and decide that terms like “morality” and “character” related exclusively to a person’s conduct of their sex life. A good person was a person who had conducted himself way with regard to sex, and a bad person was one who did otherwise. A person who cheated on his wife and then, yes, lied about it was immoral. A person who didn’t think it mattered whether other people had sex with men or women was a moral relativist. And that was that. In an even worse turn of events, this lingo — where “x is a moral person” is true if and only if x led a traditional sex life — got picked up by the mainstream media despite the fact that, as everyone knows, people in the press don’t exhibit any sympathy for this fire and brimstone suff in their real lives.

But liberals care about character, too. We think that when a president submits budget after budget after budget based on deception, that that demonstrates poor character. We think that when the purpose of these budgets is to shift the tax burden off the wealthy of today to the poor of tomorrow that that demonstrates poor character. We think that when you promise a “Marshall Plan for Afghanistan” and don’t deliver that that demonstrates poor character. We think that when you de-fund housing vouchers while spending tens of billions on subsidies for large pharmarceutical companies and agribusiness concerns that that demonstrates poor character. And we think that when you launch a war of choice and then grossly mismanage it that that demonstrates, well, poor character. It is immoral — grossly immoral — to pursue policies that have made the lives of billions of people around the world worse than they could have been.

The term “character” has been completely bastardized by a bunch of sick old biddies who get their jollies sneaking into other people’s bedrooms and then professing shock at all the “perverted” acts they see inside. Which is to say the Republican term “character” is actually a new word for hypocrite. Like TV preachers, they always seem to have issues with the very thing that they so vociferously decry in others. And since sexual morality was the only thing they define as “character”, in truth they have no definition of character at all.

As tristero put it so succinctly:

The GOP: home of public sex orgy lovers (Ryan), high-stakes gamblers (Bennett), drug addicts (Limbaugh), adulterers (Gingrich, Hyde), avowed Hitler admirers (Schwarzenegger) and racists (Lott).

(I’d have to put the Governator in the public sex orgy lovers category as well…)

It’s pretty obvious that Republicans don’t actually care about sexual morality or any other measure of personal character. So, what do they care about? Easy. It’s power. All the rest is a sideshow.

Made Man

June 25, 2004

President Bush has decided he needs to choose a new CIA director to replace George J. Tenet before the election, and the leading candidate is House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter J. Goss, senior administration officials said yesterday

October 03. 2003

Rep. Porter Goss said Thursday that the uproar over allegations that White House officials purposely identified a covert CIA agent appears largely political and doesn’t yet merit an investigation by the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which he chairs.

Goss, who was a CIA agent himself from the early 1960s to 1971, said he takes such leaks seriously, but he distinguished between a willful violation of federal law and an inadvertent disclosure.

Goss also said no one from the intelligence agencies has raised the issue with him since syndicated columnist Robert Novak identified the agent in a column July 14.

“I would say there’s a much larger dose of partisan politics going on right now than there is worry about national security,” said Goss, R-Sanibel. “But I would never take lightly a serious allegation backed up by evidence that there was a willful — and I emphasize willful, inadvertent is something else — willful disclosure, and I haven’t seen any evidence.”

Goss said he would act if he did have evidence of that sort.

“Somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I’ll have an investigation,” Goss said.

Flying Parry

I thought everyone would enjoy this Kerry Campaign press release.

Washington, DC – Kerry campaign spokesperson Phil Singer made the following statement today in response to the Supreme Court’s decision on Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force:

“The Nixon legacy of secrecy is alive and well in the Bush White House. Americans shouldn’t have to rely on court orders to learn what special interest lobbyists are writing White House policies. The President should come clean and make this information public. George Bush and Dick Cheney have forgotten that the White House belongs to America, not Enron, and they owe it to the public to disclose this information.”

Bush, Cheney, Nixon and Enron all together in four short declarative sentences. Nice footwork.

Party Like It’s 1999

I’ve been as irritated as everyone else at the ridiculous right wing and media hissy fit over Clinton’s book. I too would have thought that in a sane world, after seeing what a truly morally corrupt president could do, that the media at least would have found some perspective. They have not, although just as it was during his term only they and the Clinton haters — a distinct minority — seem to feel that Big Bill’s lies about his penis amount to a federal case. (And believe me, nobody in the entire country understood what the hell Whitewater was about, and that most definitely includes the media.) What people do understand was that a devious, simpering fop by the name of Ken Starr was the type of guy nobody deserves to have digging around in their underwear.

And Clinton’s book is selling like crazy. (Let’s give capitalism, the free market and the American Way a big huzzah.) As Larry McMurtry said in the “rebuttal” review the NY Times was shamed into posting on its web site today:

The very press that wanted to discredit him and perhaps even run him out of town instead made him a celebrity, a far more expensive thing than a mere president. Clinton’s now up there with Madonna, in the highlands that are even above talent.

Indeed he is. He has transcended politics. He is a superstar.

Over at The American Prospect they asked several of their writers to weigh in on whether Clinton would hurt, help or have no effect on the Kerry campaign. The majority said it would hurt, for a variety of reasons. I suspect that most liberals and Clinton fans, like me, approach the whole thing with a mingling of delight and dread. Delight because we genuinely like the guy and respect his ability (and his willingness to face down the screaming harpies of the right) and dread because it is always so frustrating and infuriating to argue these bullshit issues.

I happen to think it’s a net plus for Kerry for reasons I cited earlier. But, the coverage over the past few days — from the downright embarrassing review by Kakutani in the NY Times to the patently absurd WaPo editorial of a couple of days ago — serves an entirely new purpose that I hadn’t anticipated.

The media, for reasons it would take a battalion of Freud’s and Jung’s to decipher, is partying like it’s 1999. They are gleefully attacking him, reprising all their golden hits about immorality and lying under oath and he’s deplorablereprehensiblerevoltingunforgivable blah blah blah.

This benefits Kerry because by beating up on their favorite whipping boy, the neurotic mediawhores can stop feeling unfair and unbalanced for reporting the crimes of the Bush administration. This is no small thing. You could sense that they were getting very nervous about being too rough on the lil’ guy and they were beginning to assert their [un]natural proclivity to call for civility whenever Rove signals that the liberals are getting uppity.

Nobody takes the slings and arrows of media hysteria like Clinton. He’s right out there now, saying “you want a piece ‘o me? Come get me,” (and do buy my book while you’re at it.) And they are taking the bait. Eviscerating Big Bill means they can rest easily at night knowing that they are fair and balanced if they have to perform unpleasant duties like reporting that the Codpiece is empty.

The good news for us is that Clinton isn’t on the ballot, Bush is. I urge the media to beat him up all they want if it makes them feel good about themselves and allows them to resist the need to soften their nascent criticism of the real criminal who’s in the White House as we speak.