Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Pushn’ Polls

Josh and Atrios discuss the new polls showing Kerry falling behind even though Bush has had the worst couple of weeks of his presidency. Quite rightly, Democrats are asking, “what will it take?” Both bloggers ponder the idea that this is because “the president gains as national security and war issues become more salient, even if they are becoming more salient because of what seem to be objectively bad news about his policies.”

I think this is essentially correct. People associate war leadership with Bush and when the war is in the news some still feel a rally ’round the president effect. But more importantly, I think it is because John Kerry was becoming a cipher. Without him out there offering a strong rhetorical counter argument, people who don’t pay attention to the details get the impression that he’s not offering any alternative.

I said a couple of weeks ago:

It’s one thing for Kerry to allow Bush to swing in the wind on the pre-9/11 stuff. Let the widows and the whistleblowers take that on. The less partisanship the better. But, Iraq is something else entirely.

Iraq is a crisis and an ongoing problem and it isn’t enough for it to be seen blowing up on television. Kerry has got to convince people that Bush is the problem and that he can fix it. Instead, he’s acting clueless and disengaged.

A lot of my readers commented that he shouldn’t allow himself to get caught up in a specific plan and that his best bet was to lie low. I agree that he needn’t offer a specific plan, but I disagreed that he should lie low. I believe that he needs to offer some hot, critical rhetoric about Bush’s mistakes and that he should simply say, over and over again, that Bush can’t solve the problem because Bush is the problem. I suggested he say (among other things):

“…this crisis untimately requires a political solution and George W. Bush has run out of political options. A new president and a fresh start are what’s required to fix this problem. Only then can we rebuild the trust of our allies and go back to the drawing board with all the parties and set a proper course for a free and democratic Iraq.”

Not that I have any illusions that his people are reading this blog, but I was nonetheless I gratified to hear him on Russert and quoted in USA Today saying:

More U.S. troops and a new president could be needed to win international support for U.S. efforts in postwar Iraq, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said Sunday.The Massachusetts senator said President Bush has created a “quandary” for the nation by failing to develop a broad coalition to fight the war, to secure Iraq and to let countries that didn’t fight participate in rebuilding.

“It may well be that we need a new president, a breath of fresh air, to re-establish our credibility with the rest of the world” and bring other countries into Iraq, Kerry said on NBC’s Meet the Press.

If Kerry doesn’t make it clear that Bush is the problem, there are enough people out there who are likely to do a rally round the flag bit to swing the election. Saying “I’ve got a plan” every five seconds isn’t going to get the job done. It’s about framing the election in terms of Junior’s mistakes, which considering the news of the last few weeks shouldn’t be all that difficult. And it has to be done with the kind of rhetoric that makes the media focus on Kerry.

Up to now, Kerry’s people have been convinced that it wasn’t his responsibility:

A Kerry spokesman told Salon on Thursday that it’s incumbent on Bush — not Kerry — to address the crisis in Iraq. “What has the president said about this?” the Kerry spokesman asked. “He needs to explain what his policy is, what his plan is to address what’s going on right now. But he’s been down on his ranch in Crawford. The spotlight isn’t on John Kerry. The spotlight needs to be on Bush. He’s the president, and he’s the person who has carved out these policies.”

That was the problem. The spotlight is on Bush and unless Kerry sticks his neck out a little bit, Americans don’t even know he exists on the issue. People don’t have to know what he’s going to do in detail — in fact they don’t want to listen to it. But, they must be convinced that Bush has screwed up the War on Terror and that he is now the greatest impediment to fixing it before they will be persuaded to abandon the president in “wartime.” It’s Kerry’s job to make that case and then to persuade them that his experience, his philosophy and his leadership qualities make him the better man to get that job done. The Kerry campaign made a mistake in assuming that the press could do that for them. It appears they are changing course now. We’ll see if the polls improve.

Update:

Mistah Kurtz’s column explains some of the problem:

When President Bush delivered a routine stump speech to a group of New Mexico homeowners on March 26, CNN and Fox News each carried his appearance for 35 minutes, and MSNBC for 33 minutes.

When John Kerry gave what was billed as a major address on national security at George Washington University on March 17, he was knocked off the screen by a large explosion in Baghdad. CNN and Fox each dropped Kerry (who had been reduced to small box) after three minutes, and MSNBC never picked him up. But as the Iraq coverage continued, all three networks carried Vice President Cheney in California attacking Kerry as weak on national security — Fox for 28 minutes, MSNBC for 23 and CNN for 13.

In the daily battle for airtime, Bush has drawn more than three times as much live cable coverage as his Democratic challenger, yet another example of the advantages of incumbency.

A review by The Washington Post, using a video monitoring service, finds that the cable news networks have covered more Bush events and stayed with them longer. From March 3, the day after the senator clinched the nomination, through Friday, they have devoted 12 hours and 11 minutes to live appearances by Bush — including Tuesday’s prime-time news conference, which was also carried by NBC, CBS and ABC. Kerry’s live cable coverage during this period: 3 hours 47 minutes.

Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt calls the coverage “a testament to who’s making news. . . . We think being on the cable news programs is very important because people who follow politics and cover politics keep a close eye on their TVs during the day.”

[…]

MSNBC Vice President Mark Effron says that “we take more of President Bush when he’s acting in his legitimate role as president of the United States.” Yet even “if he’s in a plant talking about the economy, for our world, that’s news.” Kerry, says Effron, “hasn’t exactly been out there grandstanding and making a lot of news.” But most of these appearances generate newspaper stories.

Politics is TV with the sound turned off. For many Americans, if you aren’t on TV, you don’t exist.

Extension Chord

Via Catch.com, this e-mail (excerpted) from the wife of a soldier in Iraq. She describes how her husband’s company was literally waiting at the airport to leave for home when their tour was abruptly extended. Her husband briefly stayed behind but the rest of his unit was ambushed on their way back and one of the soldiers was killed:

This extension was a death sentence for that poor soldier. This extension cost three children their father. And it will cost much more. And now, to touchstone: My husband signed up so that he could go to college. If we would have forseen this, there is no way that he would have put his name on that dotted line. He has missed the birth of his third child…..he could die out there. He’s supposed to be sitting safe in Kuwait right now, but instead, he’s in a tent because their barracks were taken over by 1st Cavalry soldiers who went in to replace them. They haven’t got enough food right now, because there are too many soldiers on that base, and DoD was too short sighted to think that they might end up needing more troops. All their stuff is out to sea at the time being, so they are just sitting ducks waiting for their equipment to come back. This is a fiasco and a logistical nightmare. DoD and Rummy have been denying that there is a troop shortage for MONTHS! General Shinseki predicted this and was forced to retire. In November, Senator McCain called for at least 15,000 more troops. Well, shucks, seems they were right after all.

This is why grunts in the military coin phrases like FUBAR, although this ranks right up there with the FUBARest civilian brass in history. Rummy simply refused to entertain the idea that his RMA, electronic battlefield, third wave wet dream wasn’t working. Now, the shit comes down and you’ve got troops being extended at the very last minute and they don’t even have enough food.

I heard McCain on the radio yesterday saying something about mistakes are always made in battle and yadda, yadda, yadda. He cited McArthur’s gloriously successful Inchon landing maneuver which was followed by his absurd calculation that the Chinese wouldn’t push back into the south as an example of a major achievement followed by a major mistake. Of course, he fails to mention that McArthur followed up that major mistake by insisting that we should start WWIII, and got fired for it, so I’m not sure how much water that argument holds. In any case, we are reaching a point where somebody needs to be fired. For my money, if you want to take care of the ongoing FUBAR problem, that somebody should be George W. Bush.

You Can Believe Me or You Can Believe Your Lyin’ Eyes

Michael Tomasky gets to the point. It’s really very simple:

My overwhelming reaction to the 60 Minutes segment on Bob Woodward’s new book and the reports and leaks about the book over the weekend is that Woodward’s account shows a man who just doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to do this job. This may not strike some readers as a newsflash, I know, but Woodward does shed some new light on the question. Bush took this country in a radically new foreign-policy direction without really thinking through the consequences of his actions; without reckoning in a serious way with the question “What if we’re wrong?”; without seeking the input of aides who might have disagreed or painted a more complex picture than the one he wanted painted for him. It’s a profoundly irresponsible way to govern.

What his defenders will continue to call his “idealism” — the belief that God put him in the Oval Office to spread liberty’s bounty across the globe and so on — is in fact a rather shocking shallowness. It’s fine and indeed admirable for a world leader to speak this way, to aspire to greatness and fairness for his nation and for the world; Tony Blair did so in the run-up to the war, and his pro-war speeches were considerably more convincing than Bush’s. But clearly, Bush actually believes this and looks at global geopolitics this way. This, too, might be fine, if it were balanced by more hard-headed and skeptical assessments, but Bush seems to have embraced it as a totalizing explanation. And as such, it has barred other interpretations of world events at the door.

Even this might be fine, if the consequences had not been so tragic. But once Bush transformed himself in his mind into God’s messenger of liberty, things like the State Department’s multi-volume report on post-war Iraq — a report that predicted many of the tragedies that have come to pass — became irrelevant. What was the research of mere mortals next to the fiery inscriptions of God, emblazoned across his welcoming mind?

And so hundreds are dead today who didn’t need to die, because the possibility of their deaths was not supposed to be part of the great plan and therefore was not contemplated in its mandated fullness. There exists no acceptable definition of “idealism” by which the above qualifies as such. Neither is it quite malevolence. Dick Cheney is malevolent, all right, but he’s not the president, at least officially; not the one making the final call. It is incompetence. It is shallowness. To put it more colloquially, it?s trying to wish something true; we’ve all done it in our private lives, so we all know how irresponsible it is.

And it’s happening because the guy in charge doesn’t know any better. Our first impression was, catastrophically, right.

Yessiree. But to listen to bespectacled, waspy, Episcopalean beltway insider Fred “Nascar” Barnes, this is wrong because “real Americans” like him don’t need no stinkin’ Kissingerian nuance.

I’ll leave it to the inimitable Charles Pierce to retort:

One of the reactions to C-Plus Augustus’s prime-time blithering that makes me truly angry is the notion that only elitist Blue Staters expect the president to get from a subject to an object without breaking an ankle, but that the good plain-spoken average American doesn’t cotton to such book-larnin’, consarn it.

What a huge steaming crock of beans. One of the nice things about being a sportswriter is that you actually get to see a lot of the country and you get to meet a lot of its people, many of them living in places that people like David Brooks and the Crazy Dolphin Queen visit only in their smug condescension. I have seen the sun rise over the Piedmont and I have seen it set over the Mississippi Delta. I know the way Puget Sound looks on a clear morning, and the way the snow blows straight up off the surface of Lake Superior on a cold afternoon. I know how the Ohio sounds, and how it sounds different from how the Fox River sounds. I have played bingo in Wisconsin and I have played poker in Reno and I have gambled on horses in the sweet breezes of Keeneland. I’ve seen Tracy Chapman in a subway, and Muddy Waters on a midway, and Bob Dylan at Bally’s Grand on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. I have seen Michael Jordan play. I have been around.

Don’t tell me what this country and its people think — and, especially, don’t be using that “We” thing to do it. Don’t tell me that, as a nation, we can’t distinguish courage from stubbornness, philosophy from platitudes, and an empty suit from a full one. Don’t tell me we prize simplicity when you really mean we prize the simple. Don’t tell me about my country and my countrymen, you smarmy, honorarium-fattened, makeup-encrusted hyenas. Don’t you freaking dare. I been there.

And, by the way, all of her Beltway Heather pals should note that Peggy Noonan this week intimated that asking the president of the United States what in the hell he’s doing makes you less of a real American. Go on. Go on the shows with her again, and know the contempt she feels for your craft. Then, go home and break every damn mirror you own.

It is foolish for Democrats to buy into the notion that it is too dangerous to question Bush’s competence to do this job. That is blatent GOP propaganda designed to cow us into discarding a potent argument. The vast majority of American people don’t follow politics to the extent that we junkies do and they don’t care all that much about the details. But they are remarkably good at cutting through the bullshit when it’s right in front of them.

Throughout the 90’s the Republicans cried wolf on average of once or twice a week. Clinton was the anti-christ. A corrupt, murdering, philandering communist was running the country. When he was finally caught with his pants down (literally), the American people were fascinated but unmoved. His approval rating remained strong even through impeachment procedings. And that, of course, is what saved him.

And it was because they believed what they saw with their own eyes — a competent president caught in an entertaining political spectacle that didn’t affect their lives.

Bush is dumb. People can see that with their own eyes, too, and Fred Barnes knows it. That’s the real subtext of that whole “the grown-ups are back in charge,” nonsense. Most people thought that Bush was a middle of the road fella who would listen to his Dad if anything big came up and would calm the partisan waters. After all that wild sex with Clinton he was supposed to be the cigarette in the afterglow. But, they knew he was dumb. Times were so good that quite a few people didn’t think it mattered all that much who was president.

After 9/11, people wanted to believe that Bush had risen to the occasion because it was too frightening to think otherwise. The GOP successfully framed criticism as lack of patriotism. And, as with Clinton’s TV soap opera, the press liked the big budget war movie. So, for a short time Bush was seen as bold, resolute, strong, decisive, whatever. Unfortunately for him, he then made the huge mistake of selling a war on a demonstrably false premise. They can try to ignore that big fat GOP elephant in the middle of the room, but it isn’t going away. There are no weapons of mass destruction and Bush is babbling about turkey farms and mustard gas. He can’t testify before the 9/11 commission without Vice President Gepetto. Republicans are writing tell all books about his failures even before his first term is finished. Everyone is being reminded that he never was very bright.

Now, candidates and their surrogates can’t go around saying that too obviously because people will begin to feel sorry for him. But, they should be constantly talking about the complexity of the problems we face. They should discuss what leadership really is and tie it in to experience, maturity, trust and brains.

And the rest of us should use humor to hammer the point home. I’ll never forget Jon Stewert’s countdown of the biggest stories of 2000. The top story of the year was Florida, naturally. We’d been watching footage from the state for one reason or another for the entire 12 months. He ran down the story of the recount and the supreme court decision and then said something like “and at the center of the storm that was Florida this year was one small frightened little boy.” At which point he showed a picture of George W. Bush.

It was obvious then and it’s obvious now that Bush is in over his head. And Fred Barnes’s protestations to the contrary are as phony as Bush senior chomping on that bag of pork rinds.

Fools Rush In

The media reports of smiling Iraqis leading inspectors around, opening up buildings and saying, “See, there’s nothing here,” infuriated Bush, who then would read intelligence reports showing the Iraqis were moving and concealing things. It wasn’t clear what was being moved, but it looked to Bush as if Hussein was about to fool the world again. It looked as if the inspections effort was not sufficiently aggressive, would take months or longer, and was likely doomed to fail.

George W. Bush, Master and Commander of the Royal order of the Codpiece had sworn that you could fool him once, but fool him twice … won’t get fooled again. And Saddam was trying to fool him.

As we all know, this is total crap because VP Gepetto had told GWB that he was going to war over a year before. The president rather endearingly thought he was making a decision that had long ago been made. He’s so cute when he’s confused.

You can’t exactly blame the lil’ guy, though. Condi Rice, obviously suffering from a late night of single gal Pinot Grigios with Gwen Ifill, groaned this pile of nonsense when Junior asked her if we should go to war:

“Yes,” she said. “Because it isn’t American credibility on the line, it is the credibility of everybody that this gangster can yet again beat the international system.” As important as credibility was, she said, “Credibility should never drive you to do something you shouldn’t do.” But this was much bigger, she advised, something that should be done. “To let this threat in this part of the world play volleyball with the international community this way will come back to haunt us someday. That is the reason to do it.”

It isn’t about American credibility it’s about international credibility. Credibility shouldn’t drive you to do something you shouldn’t do, but if you don’t do this international credibility will suffer so you should do it.

This answer explains why Condi’s was the only opinion he sought. His poor head ached for days after that one.

He knew what Vice President Cheney thought, and he decided not to ask Secretary of State Colin L. Powell or Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

“I could tell what they thought,” the president recalled. “I didn’t need to ask them their opinion about Saddam Hussein. If you were sitting where I sit, you could be pretty clear. I think we’ve got an environment where people feel free to express themselves.”

Well, sort of:

In all the discussions, meetings, chats and back-and-forth, in Powell’s grueling duels with Rumsfeld and Defense, the president had never once asked Powell, Would you do this? What’s your overall advice? The bottom line?

Perhaps the president feared the answer. Perhaps Powell feared giving it. It would, after all, have been an opportunity to say he disagreed. But they had not reached that core question, and Powell would not push. He would not intrude on that most private of presidential space — where a president made decisions of war and peace — unless he was invited. He had not been invited.

Bush’s meeting with Powell lasted 12 minutes. “It was a very cordial conversation,” the president recalled. “It wasn’t a long conversation,” he noted. “There wasn’t much debate: It looks like we’re headed to war.”

The president stated emphatically that though he had asked Powell to be with him and support him in a war, “I didn’t need his permission.”

He’s so wonderfully masterful, isn’t he? Especially for someone with his cognitive handicaps. It reminds me of Junior’s quote in Woodward’s BlowJob Part I:

“I’m the commander. See, I don’t have to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”

He didn’t need to ask Powell for his opinion because he knew his opinion and anyway he didn’t agree with it. Why bother listening to him go on and on and be so, like totally boring? Cheney and Rumsfeld were both telling him he should do it so there was no reason to ask them. They made him feel like a man. However, he did have to ask one other very, very important and highly experienced person her opinion on the matter:

“I asked Karen,” the president recalled. “She said if you go to war, exhaust all opportunities to achieve [regime change] peacefully. And she was right. She actually captured my own sentiments.”

It’s pretty clear that Junior has no sentiments until he talks to Karen to find out what they are.

The only people Junior explicitly asked for opinions on whether to go to war with Iraq were Condi Rice and Karen Hughes. Both women told him he should do it — Condi babbling something confused about playing international volleyball and Karen basically telling him to look both ways before crossing the street.

Meanwhile Vice President Richelieu sits in the corner saying nothing except a well timed “Saddam’s toast” to our Secretary of Oil, Prince Bandar — who is informed of our decision to go to war before anybody tells the Secretary of State.

Oh, sorry. Bush had informed one other person over the holidays:

The president also informed Karl Rove, his chief political strategist, of his decision over the holidays. Rove had gone to Crawford to brief Bush on the confidential plan for Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign. While Laura Bush sat reading a book, Rove gave a PowerPoint presentation on the campaign’s strategy, themes and timetable.

Opening his laptop, he displayed for Bush in bold letters on a dark blue background:

PERSONA:

Strong Leader

Bold Action

Big Ideas

Peace in World

More Compassionate America

Cares About People Like Me

Leads a Strong Team

I don’t think even Shakespeare could do this farce justice.

Onward Christian Soldiers

In two interviews with Woodward in December, Bush minimized the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction, expressed no doubts about his decision to invade Iraq, and enunciated an activist role for the United States based on it being “the beacon for freedom in the world.”

“I believe we have a duty to free people,” Bush told Woodward. “I would hope we wouldn’t have to do it militarily, but we have a duty.”

The president described praying as he walked outside the Oval Office after giving the order to begin combat operations against Iraq, and the powerful role his religious belief played throughout that time.

“Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord’s will. … I’m surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case I pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for personal strength and for forgiveness.”

The president told Woodward that “I am prepared to risk my presidency to do what I think is right. I was going to act. And if it could cost the presidency, I fully realized that. But I felt so strongly that it was the right thing to do that I was prepared to do so.”

Wow, that’s quite a sacrifice. And hey, if it costs many thousands of other people their lives he’s prepared to do that too.

Asked by Woodward how history would judge the war, Bush replied: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”

Maybe sooner than we think.

An unelected simpleton feels strongly that he has a duty to free the world so the mightiest nation on earth has no choice but to do as he says.

Are freedom and democracy great, or what?

Comforting

David Brooks admits that he has always been wrong about everything, but he’s sure that in 20 years he will be right about something.

Freedom Crusade

Both TAPPED and the Political Animal praised Ron Klain’s admonition against making mock of President Bush’s invocation of religion in his press conference the other night. I think it’s probably true that his statement about the “Almighty” giving the gift of freedom to every human being is inspiring to many Americans and shouldn’t be laughed at. . However, Klain also seems to imply that the use of the term “unalienable” rights in the Declaration of Independence somehow justifies what appears to be a new global moral crusade to “bring freedom” to the world:

Rather than laughing at the president’s invocation of the notion of natural rights to justify his policies in Iraq, Democrats should make it abundantly clear that they share the president’s view that all humans are created free and are entitled to enjoy the benefit of that innate freedom. After all, wasn’t the idea of an “unalienable” right to liberty put into writing in 1776 by the father of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson? And more recently, haven’t these been the ideals that Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Gore pursued around the world — often with great derision from conservatives?

Instead of belittling the president’s reliance on the Almighty, Democrats should make clear that we share the president’s goals but think that his methods have been deeply flawed. The mission may be from above, but the planning has been from someplace else.

I don’t belittle his reliance on the Almighty, but straying from that to a messianic message of “spreading freedom” is quite obviously translating into the belief that the United States may use this as a pretext to invade countries irrespective of international law and civilized behavior. That kind of “liberation” is a goal I most vehemently do not share because the truth of the matter is that the United States is not imbued by the Almighty with omnipotence or any special claim to goodness and wisdom. Our crime statistics our justice system our poverty rate and any number of other serious flaws in our society prove this.

Freedom is a wonderful thing and I’m all for it, but I am a long way from being convinced that the United States of America is the best of all possible free worlds and I am deeply concerned by the idea that we are empowering leaders to take the position that we are so spectacularly superior to all other nations that it is an unalloyed good thing to “free” people around the world, including little children, even if it kills them. The price for this kind of liberation for many an individual is extremely high. It is very, very arrogant to assume that people are willing to pay it.

This is one good reason to have international institutions and a requirement for consensus before nations can go willy nilly “liberating” others. What we may see as “liberation” is oppression and exploitation to someone else, even within the US itself. We are not equipped either morally or intellectually to take this task upon ourselves. We simply do not have all the answers and Thomas Jefferson would be the first to admit that.

This is some dangerous shit, people. This is the kind of thing that makes people start humming “Ride Of The Valkyries,” and talking about Ubermenschen. I thought the shop worn myth of American Exceptionalism was disturbing but the “American Freedom Crusade” scares the hell out of me.

Bush and Blair Transcript

Q: Mr. President, some of your critics are saying that it’s a political ploy by you to stand firm to this June 30th deadline, especially that you don’t have an Iraqi organization to transfer power over to. What do you say to that? And what organization would you like to see transferred power over to – both of you, if you could answer that?

BUSH: The important thing to know is that if you look into an Iraqi soul you will see someone who doesn’t know what time it is. See, you have to remember these people come from a place where if you cut ‘n run you wind up raped in a grave, gassed and maimed and they can’t forget that so we have to be tough and stay the course. That’s why I will lead a coalition of the willing and I WILL disarm Saddam Hussein.

You have to understand that we don’t know what fear is because we are free. And we love freedom and being free and we want everybody to be free so they can love freedom everywhere where there can be freedom and people can be free. See, that means they’ll have hope. When they think we might cut ‘n run and not stay the course time goes by very slowly because you think there will be maiming and torture and killing and mass graves and gassing and then you won’t know what freedom is because you won’t be free like we are free and everyone else should be free. That’s why we will smoke ’em out o’ their caves, where the evil doers hide in spider holes hating freedom.

We are great countries because we believe that freedom is for everybody not just us so we will make everybody in the world free so the world will be a better place of peace and hope.

We will show these Iraqis that because they have been tortured and maimed and raped and gassed in massive rooms with their own people that what it takes to be civilized is a document we call the TAR. It’s a fantastic historic opportunity for them to learn how to protect tough minorities. I told the Iraqis we are giving them the freedom to be civilized and I meant it.

And the Palestinians have a fantastic opportunity for freedom at this historic moment, too, because they will have a solid foundation of big institutions instead of people just like us. They will live in security measures of peace and freedom. That means folks need to view it as a historic moment so the Palestinian state can live in peace with its neighbors. It’s a moment we’ve got to seize. Because final discussion will become a lot plainer once there’s a peaceful state full of hope and freedom. See, you have to understand that we think it’s possible because possible is what we think it is. If the Palestinians find peace and hope and the neighbors of the Palestinians will support the emergence of hope and peace in a peaceful state of hope it will be a fantastic opportunity to love their neighbors like they’d love to loved themselves.

This is a momentous, historic seizure. But, I don’t want to put words in the Prime Minister’s mouth:

BLAIR: Fuck. me.

Democratic Unity

Matt Stoller at The Blogging of the President has a very interesting post up about the “Democratic Coalition.” I urge everyone to read it because it discusses the challenge of governing if we do manage to wrest the presidency from Junior and the Retreads.

Matt sees the Party as being split between four groups. First, there is the party apparatus which consists of Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman and the writers of The Nation who are basically concerned with preserving their power. The second group is made up of those like Howard Dean and Al Gore who are forward looking and believe in refreshing the talent pool rather than clinging to outmoded power structures. Then there is group three who are essentially reformers first and politicians later, many of them the independents and third party types who might work with Democrats if they are willing to reform themselves in a way that pleases them. The fourth are leftist vanity players like Kucinich and Sharpton who are the poster children for what the wing-nuts describe as the deviant left.

I think that Matt may be a bit unnecessarily cynical about group number one and perhaps a bit naive about group number two, but aside from that, I think this is a good definition of a large portion of the party. I do think that you can’t discount the various constituency groups like unions, feminists, racial minorities and gays. This is an essential part of the coalition that is represented within our party for a reason — Democrats care about these people and Republicans don’t. Identity politics is a dirty phrase invented by the Wurlitzer to disparage Democrats.

I think that we will continue to have quite a bit of tension between all of these groups because well … we always have. The Democratic Party does not respond well to top-down hierarchical models of governance which makes us intrinsically at odds. Even FDR had a helluva time keeping it together and he had the mandate of all mandates. I can certainly understand the outrage of the Dean supporter at being asked to sign a “unity pledge” at a Democratic Meet-up:

I was and still am a Dean supporter. I cannot speak for supporters of Clark, Edwards, Gephardt, etc., but the pledge is clearly directed at those of us that did not support Kerry in the primary campaign. Apparently the Democratic Party thinks that it needs us to sign a unity pledge, to prevent us from peeling off into apathy or Naderland. I have been a Democrat all my life, and don’t feel that I need to sign anything to prove my loyalty, unity, status, etc.

Beyond that, I want to focus on the reason I was attracted to Dean in the first place. It was almost a year ago that I first saw Dean speak. He stepped up to the microphone and said “What I want to know is what all those Democrats in Washington are doing voting for George Bush’s [x, y, or z].” That hooked me! For the first time, here was someone that understood that for the past 25 years the Democratic Party has been bending over and accommodating the Republicans. We’ve been letting ourselves get steamrolled ever since Day One of the Reagan Administration, and Dean was calling the party out on it!

So I should not be expected to sign a unity pledge, or loyalty oath, or anything like it. Nor should Howard Dean. The people that should be signing the pledge, in a very public ceremony, should be Terry McAuliffe, Al From and the rest of the DLC, and all the Democrats in the House and Senate, including John F. Kerry, who voted for the Republican war in Iraq and the Republican Patriot Act, John Edwards, who voted for the Republican war in Iraq and the Republican Patriot Act, and Dick Gephardt, who co-wrote the Republican Iraq war resolution, and Wesley Clark, who had the audacity to run for the Democratic nomination for the presidency when he wasn’t even a Democrat.

Those are the people that need to be demonstrating that they will stand with the party!

Like I said, I would be outraged at being asked to sign any kind of “loyalty oath.” I hate stuff like that and I think it is antithetical to everything Democrats are supposed to believe in. But, surely we can all see the internal inconsistency of the argument as expressed here, can’t we?

“…The people who should be asked to sign a unity pledge …in a very public ceremony …are anybody…I … don’t…approve…of.

Matt says that this kind of rage is the result of a traditional party structure and he believes that someday the Party will “once again emerge as a source of self-expressive pride for a majority of the citizenry.” I don’t know that it ever has been that, really, but I certainly think it’s possible.

However, I will be my usual dark Cassandra in this argument and issue my standard warning. There is a great big political battle going on with a bunch of guys who take no prisoners. We are not dealing with our daddy’s Republican Party. They are not going to disappear and they are not going to allow us to enact a progressive agenda unimpeded. We’d best take that into account because simply reforming the Democratic Party into a fighting progressive voice for change ain’t gonna get it done. We need every last person for this battle from all those awful DLC’rs and Democrats in the House and Senate to John Edwards to audacious faux Dem Wes Clark to Howard Dean. We don’t have to sign any loyalty oaths but we do have to be serious and mature and understand how terribly difficult and how high the stakes are in trying to govern with the sort of opposition that puts a criminal like Tom DeLay into a leadership position. They will fight with everything they have.

If the Democrats take back the White House the Republicans are going to lose their minds, not because our party is faulty because theirs is. We need to remember that. We may be imperfect, but they are nuts.

Midterm Election Mistakes Redux

I’ve been supportive of John Kerry’s need to find an acceptable strategy for dealing with this mess in Iraq. The fact is that until we wean ourselves from our childish dependence on gas guzzling penis-mobiles, we are probably not going to be able to simply leave Iraq now that we have totally destabilized the region with Bush’s “call” to free the Iraqi’s from their lives. I do think that with a different president we might be able to summon up some sort of legitimate multinational commmitment to pour money and manpower into the country and at least make a serious attempt to help the Iraqi people create a decent political system. I don’t know if it will work, but I do know that it hasn’t been tried and it needs to be. Like it or not — and I don’t — unless we clean up this mess, the national security and economic ramifications are much more severe than I think people are willing to admit.

But, I also think Kerry’s framing and delivery of this message is just terrible. The choice in this is not between “cutting and running” and “staying the course” or between being “thoughtful” and “thoughtless.” It is between being honest and dishonest, persuasive and bullying, succeeding and failing. Kerry needs to sharpen his words and punch up his energy. This tepid me-tooism will not work. Having said that, I do think that Kerry is substantially right on the issue of Iraq.

On the other hand, this is simply mystifying:

“I think that could be a positive step,” the Massachusetts senator said, approving of the Bush-Sharon action regarding both refugees and Israel’s borders. “What’s important obviously is the security of the state of Israel, and that’s what the prime minister and the president, I think, are trying to address.”

I guess things just aren’t hot enough in the mideast right now.

Honestly, you can’t get any more cravenly chickenshit than this. Not only is it a monumental change in American foreign policy, it is a blatant domestic political maneuver at exactly the wrong moment.

There is a possibility that the action by Bush could further aggravate the situation in Iraq, just as Israel’s killing of a prominent Palestinian militant set off rioting in Iraq several weeks ago. Independent pollster John Zogby, who has surveyed extensively in the Arab world, said: “This is pretty much the final nail in the coffin of the peace process as far as Arabs are concerned.” He said his polling indicates the Palestinian cause is among the top three issues for 90 percent of Arabs in all Arab countries he has surveyed. “It’s not even a political issue, it’s a bloodstream issue,” Zogby said

[…]

“This will make it that much harder for John Kerry to win Florida,” said a Republican aide on Capitol Hill who refused to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue. Associates said Bush’s strategists believe that even small inroads into the Jewish vote could mean the difference between winning and losing Florida, and several Republicans believe the announcement could further inhibit Kerry’s fundraising in the Jewish community.

For one thing, for Kerry to agree that the Florida Jews — most of whom are retired New Yorkers — will vote for Bush because of this is to completely insult them. They aren’t drooling idiots like so many of the GOP’s blind followers. They have enough sophistication to understand the complexity of this situation, no matter how much they may yearn for Israel’s safety and security.

And they, of all people, have a mighty motivation to oust Junior from the oval office. He and his followers have been calling them idiots for the last three years for not being able to decipher Teresa LaPore’s ballot hieroglyphics. They wouldn’t vote for Bush if Kerry soul-kissed Yassar Arafat on Saturday night Live.

I suppose that it is possible Kerry genuinely believes that jettisoning any hope of getting rid of the settlements or even a symbolic right of return is a good idea. If so, then we have serious problems because he apparently believes that the best way to negotiate is to take all of your negotiating cards off the table. Regardless of where you hope the process wil eventually lead, this is not good. Bush got rolled and Kerry threw his arms around his neck and rolled with him.

I am honestly stumped by this. If Kerry plans to win the election by endorsing all of Bush’s insane foreign policy pronouncements then it’s lost before it’s begun. I don’t demand that he abandon all pretense of moderation or that he embrace some sort of isolationism. I wouldn’t support that much less do I think it would win the election. I do however expect him to at least object to the Bush administration’s crazy, fucked up neocon wetdreams that are likely to get a lot of people — including Americans — killed.

If this really is all about fundraising then I think Billmon has it right:

It strikes me that bin Laden has been going about this all wrong. If he’d just started his own PAC, and spread enough money around, he probably could have gotten Congress to vote to blow up the World Trade Center.