Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

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.

The Real Deal

I’d like to put in a little plug for my hometown paper the LA Times. Several days ago Robin Abcarian wrote the story that Jodi Wilgoren and Nedra Pickler were too busy taking dictation from Karl Rove to investigate and write about:

Candidates Strive to Overcome Privilege

…Indeed, the lives of both candidates, in broad strokes, paint a classic portrait of American privilege. “These people are definitely in the American hereditary upper class,” said Gary Boyd Roberts, a Boston genealogist who has traced Bush’s and Kerry’s lineages and discovered they are distantly related. (Branches of their family trees cross eight times, said Roberts; at the closest point, they are ninth cousins). They are also descended from medieval kings.

How has privilege played out in their lives? Very differently, as it turns out.

Bush, a true social and political aristocrat, has spent much of his life publicly distancing himself from his patrician roots, while quietly availing himself of family connections. “Privilege completely and utterly defines George Bush,” said his biographer, Texas journalist Bill Minutaglio. “I don’t think it’s pejorative to point that out.”

Kerry, whose family glory lies in an illustrious and historic past, has worked energetically to secure his place in the upper reaches of American society, and twice married heiresses. “His parents came from modest wealth,” said his biographer, historian Douglas Brinkley. “He was always a little cash-poor for the milieu he was running around in. He’s like the F. Scott Fitzgerald figure looking into that world with one foot in and one foot out.”

The novelist Christopher Buckley, an acerbic social observer who wrote speeches for Bush’s father when he was vice president, said of the two political rivals: “Bush set out to distance himself from the world of Eastern establishmentarian privilege…. The funny thing is that Kerry sort of looks more like the guy who was born with the silver spoon, but economically, his circumstances were far less golden. That’s the paradox.”

Now that’s interesting stuff. It required, you know, research and calling people up and asking them questions instead of regurgitating Republican talking points and hurriedly typing up the price of menu items from your expense account spreadsheet. But, in the end you come up with a real story filled with information and insight into the two men who are vying for the office of president.

This piece is not a hit on either men, although it is unflattering to each at times. Neither does it attempt to render a complete psychological protrait of them. What it does is take the campaign talking point that the Bush team is obviously pushing — that Kerry is Thurston Howell the third while Bush is Wyatt Earp — and examines the influence privilege, wealth and connections have brought to both men.

I realize that is a lot to ask of a busy journalist for the New York Times. So, I would suggest that we start to treat the Times‘ political coverage as nothing but party press releases and look elsewhere for journalism. It’s out there.

thanks Tommy

Windmills

I accept that Ralph Nader and his followers are a separate party with separate interests. I think it’s a shame because until the system is rather dramatically changed (IRF, disbanding the electoral college etc.) we will continue to have a two party system, which means that those who vote for third party candidates aren’t going to be represented. (Certainly, if the Nader vote is again decisive in such an extremely important election, then it will be clear that those voters are not interested in being represented by Democrats.) And, of course, in a close race, we certainly could use those Green and/or Nader votes.

However, it is obvious that if seeing first hand what the modern GOP is capable of when it holds all the levers of power isn’t enough to persuade the four to five percent consistently polling for Nader that they should vote for the Democrats — if only to save the country from total ruin — then I have to believe that they sincerely consider themselves to be outside the two party system that actually governs our politics.

Therefore, for electoral purposes, they must be considered part of the realm of non-voters who don’t participate. And because, for political reasons, they have consciously decided to stay outside the system as it exists, they are actually less persuadable than the apathetic many.

I respect their position, but that means that they are no longer particularly relevant to our immediate cause, which is getting Bush out of power. If they can’t see the necessity for that right now, they never will. So, the Greens and/or Nader voters, good people all, are off my political radar screen because they are not persuadable. Good luck to them and I mean that sincerely.

What to make of this, then?

Nader Urges Kerry to Pick Edwards

Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader was not content to simply pick his own running mate this week. On Wednesday, he weighed in on Sen. John F. Kerry’s deliberations, suggesting he tab Sen. John Edwards for the Democratic presidential ticket.

In an open letter to Kerry, Nader said Edwards had “already gone through a primary campaign and has his rhythm and oratory … all well honed.”

I have reconciled myself to this Nader run — and I don’t have a problem letting him in the debates, even — but if he’s going to run explicitly against our candidate, isn’t it a bit presumptuous to weigh in on who he should pick as a running mate? I have to assume that he wants Kerry to pick Edwards because he thinks Edwards would make him lose. Because Nader can’t possibly be intent upon helping Kerry or he wouldn’t be working feverishly to get himself on the ballot to run against him.

So, what can we make of Ralph Nader, folks? He and his followers have made it clear that they don’t respect Democrats any more than Republicans. Indeed, they made a decision to try to change the political system from outside the two parties because the system is so corrupt that neither party is worth being a part of. So, what in the hell is Ralph doing then with this silly dance?

Greens and Naderites, you’re going to have to decide what you are. If you want to play electoral politics from within, then join one of the parties and get your hands dirty with governance. But, if you want to create a real third party that exists to change the entire system, then tell your boy to mind his own fucking business.

If, on the other hand, this is all a ploy to get the Democrats to kiss Green and Naderite ass every five minutes, begging them to please vote for us, then I’d say it’s a waste of paper. At this point, the Democrats will have better luck persuading the growing numbers of aghast moderate Republicans to vote with us this time than getting the Nader vote to switch. The aghast moderate Republicans, after all, are people who after seeing the havoc that’s been wrought by the boy king are motivated to replace him for the good of the country. The Naderites, apparently, aren’t. That’s just the way it is. We’ve gotta go where the votes are.

If I Can Take It:

Rumsfeld scribbled a note on Haynes’ memo that said, “However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours.”

Gosh, while he stands is he also being interrogated naked, shackled, subject to “mild, non-injurious physical contact such as grabbing, poking in the chest with the finger and light pushing” with a vicious German Shepard trying to take a bite out of his privates? I had no idea that the culture at the pentagon was so like a concentration camp.

On the other hand, a similar note by Doug Feith was found questioning why prisoners shouldn’t be required to wear women’s underwear on their heads since he and Wolfowitz both wear teddies and garter belts underneath their Brooks Brothers.

See, it’s all in how you look at it.

Update: corrected grammatical error

Zero Sum Politics

I urge all four of my readers to read this great article by Paul Glastris in The Washington Monthly:

It is a cliché to observe that the parties have drawn further apart, the center no longer holds, and partisans on both sides have withdrawn further into mutual loathing and ever more-homogenous and antagonistic groupings. Where the analysis goes wrong is in its assumption, either explicit or implicit, that both parties bear equal responsibility for this state of affairs. While partisanship may now be deeply entrenched among their voters and their elites, the truth is that the growing polarization of American politics results primarily from the growing radicalism of the Republican Party.

In what is mostly an admonition to the press to open its eyes to reality and report what is actually happening, he outlines the history of this new GOP political radicalism (which goes hand in hand with its ideological radicalism), shows how the Democratic Party has responded over the course of this long transition and proves that the polarization about which all the scribes wring their dainty little hands can be laid squarely at the feet of the Republicans.

Although I’m an unreconstructed liberal, I am by nature and temperament a believer in bipartisanship. I don’t like the boot to the throat concept of governance, either as a member of the majority or the minority. I have a rather old fashioned belief that if everyone has a stake in decisions they tend to follow through and not hobble the process. To me, incremental progress doesn’t seem like a bad idea if it means that a substantial majority are happy with it in the end and the minority isn’t marginalized from the process. Government by consensus would always be my first choice.

However, that is simply not in the cards with the modern Republican party. As Glastris says, they see politics as a zero sum game and when you find yourself in a game like that you have to find a way to win outright or you don’t survive.

I’ve been hearing a lot of rumbling from the activist grassroots, for more than a year, that after holding their noses in this election, any patience they may have had with compromise has worn completely thin. I think it’s pretty clear that if Kerry wins he is not going to be given much slack from his left flank.

Therefore, there is little chance that Democratic centrists (which Glastris points out are pretty much the only centrists left) will have any room to maneuver in a close congress, whoever holds the majority, nor will Kerry be able to cut any deals. And, I doubt it’s even worth trying with these radicals anyway. They just move the goalposts. But what this means, for the first time, is all out partisan war with no quarter given.

The question is, if that happens, can we win? I’m interested in hearing thoughts on this because I honestly don’t know.

Start Making Sense

Lord Saletan tries to explain why his mishmash of a series on Kerry’s so-called “caveats and curlicues” doesn’t make sense to anyone. (Frankly, his explanation doesn’t make any sense either, but whatever.)

What he fails to admit is that the series is an extremely lame attempt by Slate at being “fair and balanced.” As seems to be the case across all of American journalism Slate apparently believes it is necessary that if one notices a certain politician doing something unusual — George W. Bush speaking in Martian rather than English, for instance — then it follows that in order to be fair, one must criticize his rival for the same thing.

The truth is that the “caveats and curliques” that Saletan finds so remarkable are the result of a political environment in which Kerry is required to speak in extremely precise terms because if he doesn’t, Ed Gillespie and his coven of shrieking talk show harpies will blast their faxes directly up his ass. (Ask Al Gore about that.) Bush, on the other hand, whom everyone knows is a total idiot, is applauded if he is able to string more than 5 words together without drooling on his tie.

The Kerryism thing isn’t working because Kerry just sounds like a hundred other Democrats who have to parse every single statement in order to avoid people like Saletan calling him a slippery, lying piece of shit (which Saletan calls him anyway.) Conversely, the Bushism series does work because it shows that the most powerful man in the world literally doesn’t make sense about half the time and the press rarely even mentions it. Now, that is noteworthy.

Maybe Saletan could try a series on Kerry’s hair or his eyebrows or his choice of athletic equipment. Oh wait. Kaus has already blown the lid off those scandals. Oh well. I’m sure he’ll think of something. Wouldn’t want to be unbalanced.

Update: The spelling of Saletan’s name has been corrected.

I’m An Excellent Driver

Kevin says: Please, dear god, make it stop