Category Archives: blogging

Our Left Wing

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Sister blogger Maryscott O’Connor of My Left Wing is featured on the front page of the Washington Post today. The article, by David Finkel, is titled “The Left, Online and Outraged: Liberal Blogger Finds an Outlet and a Community.” Maryscott blogs about the writing of the article here.

I admit I had mixed feelings about the article when I read it. Maryscott is one of the smartest bloggers on the web, but the article focused on how angry she is. Lord knows she has a right to be angry. We’re all angry. But Maryscott is a lot better than just angry.

But then I thought, how many other angry people are out there who haven’t discovered the Blogosphere yet? If you aren’t absolutely enraged at what the Bushies and the VRWC are doing to our country, you’re an idiot or a rightie. But I repeat myself.

Sorry, couldn’t resist that one. Just funnin’ with ya, righties. But I hope that a lot of people who read that article will check out the Blogosphere and join in.

Predictable reaction from rightie blogs: We’re cool and intellectual, and those lefties are unhinged. I was checking out reactions on one rightie blog, where I found this comment:

“I don’t recall there being a vocal Right that was calling for the public lynching of President Clinton.”

Sorta takes your breath away, doesn’t it? I couldn’t read any further. Enough of that.

I’m going to ramble for a few paragraphs, but I will connect the ramble back to Maryscott and blogging, so please bear with me — Sam Keen wrote a book called Passionate Life — published in 1984 — in which he argued that adulthood is not the final and ultimate stage of life. I regret I don’t have the book at hand and it’s been a while since I read it, but I found the stages discussed online in this sermon. The five stages, Keen said, are (1) child, (2) rebel, (3) adult, (4) outlaw, and (5) lover.

As I remember it, Keen defined the adult stage as a time in which one’s values most closely reflect those of one’s society. Adulthood is the point at which we set aside adolescent rebellion and join the collective. We focus on careers and status as defined by our peers. If you are a standard middle class American adult, for example, your life’s quest becomes acquiring a fixed low-interest mortgage and a stock portfolio. The sermon linked mentions “constructing character armor,” which I remember as adopting the persona assigned to you by society, e.g., businessman, housewife, etc. Most people remain at adult stage for the duration of their lives.

The next stage, outlaw, happens to the lucky few who are separated from the collective. The separation may be caused by crisis or spiritual epiphany, but however it happens, the outlaw looks at the values of his society and sees a load of crap. “Successful” people who used to be role models seem more like zombies — the walking, soulless dead. And, like Cassandra, the more you rave about what crap it all is, the more the adults think you’re nuts. The only people who understand you are the other outlaws (or lovers). It can be very lonely.

For a good example of someone in the outlaw stage, check out the later writings of Mark Twain. His rantings were laced with wit, but if (for example) you read through this, the anger flames out at you suddenly, and you realize you are reading a very different essay from the one you thought you were reading.

Twain would have been one hell of a blogger.

One difference between the adolescent rebel and the post-adult outlaw is that the adolescent is mostly ego-driven — he’s rebelling because he wants something for himself — whereas the outlaw is less concerned about himself than about others. He wants others to see what he sees — the sham, the injustice — to make the world a better place. With luck the outlaw will eventually put aside his anger and become a lover, a person motivated by compassion to help mankind. Think Gandhi.

I’d like to add that sometimes the outlaw stage misfires and the person separated from the collective doesn’t become a true outlaw but just joins a different collective, or else works his butt off to be allowed back into the old collective. But that’s a different rant.

Anyway, with that context in mind — Maryscott O’Connor is an outlaw. And as such she’s a shining beacon for other outlaws. It’s good to be a beacon in a dark time.

Anger is nothing to be ashamed about. I like this quote from Keen:

Anger is a necessary part of the dance of love. Think of clean anger as the voice of the wise serpent on the early American flag who says, “Don’t tread on me.” Without anger we have no fire, no thunder and lightning to defend the sanctuary of the self. No anger = no boundaries = no passion.

Honor your anger. But before you express it, sort out the righteous from the unrighteous. Immediately after a storm, the water is muddy; rage is indiscriminate. It takes time to discriminate, for the mud to settle. But once the stream runs clear, express your outrage against any who have violated your being. Give the person you intend to love the gift of discriminating anger.

May all our anger be righteous.

Update: See also The Rude Pundit (who may be in a life stage unique to himself) and Mustang Bobby at Bark Bark Woof Woof.

Update update: One other thought about anger — right now, we’re on offense, and they’re on defense. Military historians say that attackers usually take more casualties than defenders, because the defenders are fighting from behind barricades or rocks or something, whereas the attackers have to expose themselves to fire to get to the barricades. Unless the attackers have artillery. Or maybe tanks. (Can we use tanks?) Anyway, as Maryscott says, we’ve been fighting from a position of powerlessness; therefore, we have to be more fierce. Let’s see how the Bush Bitter Enders act after the shoe’s on the other foot, eh?

Good Friday Links

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Murray Waas has a new installment of “As the Leak Drips” at National Journal. In this episode, we see Deadeye Dick leaking a still classified CIA report to Scooter so that Scooter can smear glam spy Valerie Plame.

At Unclaimed Territory, Glenn Greenwald wonders at the amazing ability of righties to delude themselves. Writing of rightie reaction to the protesting retired generals —

In response, Bush followers have publicly speculated about every defamatory motive which could be fueling these Generals — they have embraced every possible explanation except for the possibility that these Generals might actually hold these views sincerely. …

… The first objective — which worked very well for a good couple of years — was to prevent all dissenting views by labeling those who questioned the war or who opposed it as subversives, traitors, Friends of the Terrorists, America-haters, and crazed radicals. That took care of dissenting views for awhile, ensuring an echo chamber where the President’s views on the war were basically unchallenged. But the profound error of their judgments and the rank falseness of their claims could not be obscured forever, because the reality of the war slowly exposed the truth. But amazingly, facts do not deter them either.

Every fact that contradicts their initial premises is discarded as fiction or the by-product of malice. Every opinion that undermines their position can be explained only by venal and corrupt motives. Every event that transpires which deviates from what they predicted ends up being the fault of others. And any individual who questions their grand plan for epic and glorious triumph in a never-ending, all-consuming War of Civilizations is someone who is either weak-willed, weak-minded, or just plain subversive — whether that be life-long public servants like Richard Clarke and Joe Wilson (both of whom were smeared by Powerline in a separate post yesterday, which quoted RealClearPolitics calling them “Political hacks” and “fools” who “espouse positions publicly that they know to be untrue”); life-long conservatives like William Buckley or George Will, and even American military generals, including those who actually led ground troops in Iraq as recently as 2004.

From Kevin K, posting at firedoglake about righties:

They’re scared is all. They’re scared of a lot of things because they need to be scared of a lot of things. They lack purpose without things relentlessly scaring the shit out of them. And in order to distract the media from the fact that they’re more juiced up on fear than love for their country, they constantly try to frame liberals—who in their minds still wear patchouli, listen to Jefferson Airplane and love the fuck out of Jane Fonda—of being the cowards because, um, we’re “anti-war” (what fucked up times we live in where being “anti-war” is a “bad thing”) and we aren’t 100% freaked out that gay people, Mexicans, Arabs and the Dixie Chicks are roaming free in our streets. …

… I didn’t really follow the explosion of bedwetting blogs post-9/11 because I was too busy languishing in my pre-9/11 NYC liberal mindset, but apparently the blogosphere was flush with dorks in crouched-down, defensive positions who pecked away at something they called “warblogs.” These, ahem, “warbloggers” (must … stop … tittering) thought they were at war and no amount of fear of Blogger’s registration process and/or HTML interface was going to get in their way to fight the good fight. They were G.I. Jonesin’ for some seriously manly cutting ‘n’ pasting as they bravely stormed the frontlines of HyperText Transfer Protocol. And some of them, primarily “9/11 Republicans” and alleged libertarians, were so addicted to the notion that “everything changed after 9/11” that they discarded large, important chunks of their belief systems because they figured the “everything changed” doctrine applied to their very beings as well. A few of them have circled back to reality and well-earned rounds of raspberries, but a substantial number still cling to what are becoming increasingly razor-thin threads of dignity, and generally when you take it that far, you never come back because, let’s face it, it’s really, really embarrassing to do so. The Roger L. Simons and Charles Johnsons of today are the ex-lefty David Horowitzes and Michael Savages of tomorrow, except, as Pantload Media has proved, we don’t ever have to worry about Rog and Chucky being anywhere near as popular, successful or influential. Or handsome.

Larry Johnson posts on the “Throw Rummy from the Train Movement.” Stick a fork in Rummy, says Johnson. He’s done.

Rightie Watch

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A rightie blogger is outraged that Eleanor Clift, best known as the token liberal on “The McLaughlin Group,” is biased in favor of liberalism.

Any faithful watcher of “The McLaughlin Group” knows that one of the most transparently biased members of the antique media over the past two decades has been Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift. Week in and week out, Eleanor rips apart every Republican on the political landscape while oozing nothing but adoration for those on the opposite side of the aisle even when they are found guilty of serious transgressions.

The other regulars, including Tony Blankley, Pat Buchanan, and McLaughlin himself are, of course, the very measure of objectivity. Snort.

Clift’s op-ed posted at Newsweek’s website on Friday is a fine example. After somewhat misrepresenting the seriousness of the recent allegations that have emerged from Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff I. Lewis Libby concerning unclassified information from a National Intelligence Estimate by President Bush, Clift went right into a stump speech: “The only way the American people can stop Bush’s imperial expansion of power short is to turn out in massive numbers to take back one or the other body of Congress from Republican control.”

My goodness, Eleanor: You’re supposed to be a journalist. This isn’t reporting.

Of course it’s not reporting, you stupid twit. Newsweek clearly labels the op-editorial as “commentary” in big red letters. That means it’s the columnist’s personal opinion and analysis.

It won’t surprise you that the blogger who can’t tell the difference between commentary and reporting has dedicated his blog to “exposing and combating liberal media bias.” If you define liberal media bias as “everything I don’t want to hear because it contradicts MY biases,” and you’re an idiot to boot, there’s no question that liberal bias in media is as common as onions. People with functioning frontal lobes might not agree, of course.

The Clift op ed, btw, is pretty good. The first page, anyway. On the second page she devolves into Joe Biden apologia.

Yesterday I commented on this E.J. Dionne column about the ongoing crisis in American conservatism. Well, the same rightie genius linked above came up with this excuse:

I guess E.J. must have written this piece before this morning’s announcement by the Labor Department that the economy added more jobs in the past three months than in any first quarter since before the stock market bubble collapsed, and that over five million jobs have been added since Conservatives fought for tax cuts in 2003.

Conservatism’s dead, E.J.? Hardly.

About that announcement, see Hale Stewart, “Bush’s Job Creation Record Worst of Last 40 Years (Still).”

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research the last recession ended in November 2001. That means we have had 54 months of an economic recovery. First, notice how Bush uses May 2003 as the starting point of his comparison? Why is he doing this? Because May 2003 is the lowest point of establishment job creation in his administration. Since the actual trough in November 2001 Bush’s economy has created 4,083,000 jobs. At the same point (54 months) all other expansions of the last 40 years had created more jobs.

At 54 months,

The expansion starting in February 1961 created 6,550,000 jobs

The expansion starting in November 1970 created 6,240,000 jobs

The expansion starting in March 1975 created 13,565,000 jobs

The expansion starting in November 1982 created 12,366,000 jobs

The expansion starting in March 1991 created 8,718,000 jobs.

Therefore, Bush’s economy would have to create 2,157,000 jobs to be second to last on this list.

There is no way that Bush can create enough jobs to increase his rank to 4th on the list. At this point, he will go down as presiding over the weakest records of job creation of the second half to the 20th century.

The excitement when Bush’s economy squeezes out some jobs is akin to watching, say, a trained pig push a ball with his nose. The wonder is not that the pig is so skilled, but that it can do the trick at all.

Going Too Far

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Pity Debbie Schlussel. She thought she was leading a glorious charge, but she charged into a place so dank and unwholesome even the Nice Doggie wouldn’t follow. And when she looked she saw her rightie brethren not following her. Instead, they were staring. At her. With disgust.

Wow.

This means that somewhere in the confused and nebulous world righties seem to inhabit, there are edges. There are parameters and boundaries and signs that warn to stay on the path and be sure to wear clean, dry socks. This is good to know.

You might have seen this Schlussel post, which accused Jill Carroll of having “anti-American views” and implied that both Carroll “and those who are ‘elated’ about her release” are collaborating with terrorists. A newer post reveals that in Schlussel’s mind, “Islamist” (which is bad) and “Arabic” are synonyms. Schlussel found an article in a Jordanian newspaper (no link provided) that said (boldface is Schlussel’s)

From Arabic food to the Arabic language, Jill has always wanted to know and experience as much as possible about Arab identity, and she is keen on absorbing it, learning, understanding and respecting it.

She doesn’t just “like” Arab culture, she loves it. . . . It is simply unconscionable for any Arab to want to harm a person like her.

There is a direct connection between couscous and Osama bin Laden. Be warned.

But by Schlussel’s logic … the President is a terrorist.

Now Schlussel is snarling and snapping at her brother bloggers like a cornered wolverine, and some righties are wondering whether to back away or fetch a tranquilizer dart. Heh.

Last I checked neither Orrin Judd nor Alexandra the Dim had apologized for implying that Carroll was a terrorist collaborator (Judd) or a coward (the Dimwit), but now it seems they are in the minority even among righties. Jonah Goldberg finally issued a limp apology.

Now, I’m going to apologize to Captain Ed, because I took offense at the title of this post — it struck me as being patronizing — but on the whole the Captain has been fair and reasonable about the Carroll episode. So, Captain, I’m sorry I snapped at you.

Update: See Matt Stoller.

A Light Almost Dawns

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Adam Nagourney writes in tomorrow’s New York Times about using the Internets for political campaigning:

Michael Cornfield, a political science professor at George Washington University who studies politics and the Internet, said campaigns were actually late in coming to the game. “Politicians are having a hard time reconciling themselves to a medium where they can’t control the message,” Professor Cornfield said. “Politics is lagging, but politics is not going to be immune to the digital revolution.”

The professional politicians are losing control of the message. This is absolutely the best news I’ve heard in a long time.

I like this part, too:

President Bush’s media consultant, Mark McKinnon, said television advertising, while still crucial to campaigns, had become markedly less influential in persuading voters than it was even two years ago.

“I feel like a woolly mammoth,” Mr. McKinnon said.

The dominance of television and radio ads in political campaigns may be the worst thing that ever happened to American politics, IMO. The need to purchase big chunks of mass media time, as well as to produce slick ads, requires truckloads of money and has thoroughly corrupted the election process. Further, mass media communication is one-way — from the top, down. In the mass media age ordinary Americans lost their voices. Demagoguery got much easier. Smart people figured out how to use media to manipulate truth and manipulate voters — usually by appealing to prejudices and fears — into voting against their own interests. And there was no way to talk back.

The times they are a-changin’.

If you read the whole article is becomes apparent that Nagourney mostly doesn’t get it any more than the woolly mammoth consultants he interviews. Which is essentially the problem with the article. Nagourney interviews the woolly mammoths for their perspective of the cro-magnon cave men, but he doesn’t think to interview the cave men for their views of the woolly mammoths.

If you’re old enough, think back forty years and imagine Lawrence Welk discussing the Rolling Stones. Well, that’s Nagourney on blogging.

Like the old Buffalo Springfield song goes, “There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear …”

Bloggers, for all the benefits they might bring to both parties, have proved to be a complicating political influence for Democrats. They have tugged the party consistently to the left, particularly on issues like the war, and have been openly critical of such moderate Democrats as Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut.

Jane Hamsher adds,

… if Lieberman does in fact get tanked it will be because we’ve become adept at reverberating our message with local Connecticut media, something the Lamont campaign well understands and which the Elmendorfs of the world still charge a high price for having no fucking clue about. Neither, for that matter, does Nagourney. The game has so far outstripped and advanced any knowledge that either of them has of it, let alone the existence of the playing field, it’s rather pathetic.

“Elmendorf” is Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic consultant who told The Washington Post that bloggers and online donors “are not representative of the majority you need to win elections.”

John Aravosis has a vigorous response to Nagourney’s calling Lieberman a “moderate” Republican [oops; Democrat. Freudian slip.].

(singing)

I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound
Everybody look what’s going down …

Sorry, I’m having a nostalgia wallow.

April Fools

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No matter how vile and mean and ignorant righties can seem to be, they can still surprise me and get even more vile and mean and ignorant.

Yesterday I mentioned in “Crabs in a Barrel” that “John Podhoretz of the National Review criticizes the just-released Jill Carroll for not being anti-Muslim enough.” Podhoretz was just the beginning, however.

Yesterday Liberal Oasis described the “insidious reaction among certain conservatives to the release of Jill Carroll.” As usual when someone becomes a rightie hate target, righties don’t stop at criticizing something she’s said or done that offended them. Instead they are dissecting her like a pickled frog looking for anything about her they can hate.

What set off the feeding frenzy was a video she made while still a hostage in which she criticized George Bush. Christian Science Monitor reporter Dan Murphy interviewed Ms. Carroll’s father, who said making the video had been the price of her release.

Ms. Carroll had been their captive for three months and even the smallest details of her life – what she ate and when, what she wore, when she could speak – were at her captors’ whim. They had murdered her friend and colleague Allan Enwiya, “she had been taught to fear them,” he says. And before making one last video the day before her release, she was told that they had already killed another American hostage.

That video appeared Thursday on a jihadist website that carries videos of beheadings and attacks on American forces. In it, Carroll told her father she felt compelled to make statements strongly critical of President Bush and his policy in Iraq.

Even worse, in the eyes of righties, she was quoted as saying after her release that her captors hadn’t hit her and that she was “kept in a safe place and treated very well.”

“May as well just come right out and say she was a willing participant,” says rightie Orrin Judd. Meanwhile, rightie hate hag Debbie Schlussel accused Carroll of having “anti-American views” and strongly implied that both Carroll “and those who are ‘elated’ about her release” are collaborating with terrorists. And the ever-brainless Alexandra of All Things Hateful seconds Schlussel — “when you listen to the video, you know that parts of what she is saying, she actually believes, either that or she deserves an honorary Oscar for her convincing performance.”

Somehow, I suspect if Alexandra ever had a gun pointed to her head and was told to be convincing or die, she’d put out an Oscar-worthy performance, too. Right after she wet her pants.

But the lowest low probably came from Bernard McGuirk, who is Don Imus’s Executive Producer. You won’t believe this.

Murphy of the CSM continues,

“You’ll pretty much say anything to stay alive because you expect people will understand these aren’t your words,” says Micah Garen, a journalist and author who was held captive by a Shiite militia in southern Iraq for 10 days in August 2004. “Words that are coerced are not worth dying over.”

Most people understand that; clearly righties are not most people.

Shortly before her release, her captors – who refer to themselves as the Revenge Brigade – also told her they had infiltrated the US diplomatic compound in Baghdad, and she would be killed if she went there or cooperated with the American authorities. It was a threat she took seriously in her first few hours of freedom.

Carroll worked at the Wall Street Journal’s Washington office in early 2002 when that paper’s reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted and beheaded in Pakistan. “Many of her colleagues knew him and it was very emotional in the office,” Jill told her father. “She had that memory in the back of her head while she was being threatened.”

In making their last video, Mr. Carroll says her captors “obviously wanted maximum propaganda value in the US. After listening to them for three months she already knew exactly what they wanted her to say, so she gave it to them with appropriate acting to make it look convincing.“

Just how stupid and hateful do you have to be not to be able to understand that?

Oliver Willis takes on Captain Ed, who decided that the explanation of Carroll’s behavior in Dan Murphy’s CSM story was “good enough” for him: “Can you believe the hubris of these chuckleheads?”

Digby takes on Jonah Goldberg and gets to the heart of the matter: “He reminds of one of those guys who says a rape victim didn’t act traumatized enough for him, so she’s probably lying.” See also Jane Hamsher.

Credit where credit is due — a few rightie bloggers criticize their rightie brethren for being hateful idiots.

Be sure to read all of the Liberal Oasis post.

Carroll is the kind of war correspondent the Right claims to want.

Laura Ingraham was cheered by her fellow right-wingers last week when she returned from being escorted around Iraq to scold NBC’s David Gregory:

    Bring the Today show to Iraq … and then when you talk to those soldiers on the ground, when you go out with the Iraqi military, when you talk to the villagers, when you see the children, then I want NBC to report on only the IEDs, only the killings, only, only the reprisals…

    … to do a show from Iraq means to talk to the Iraqi military to go out with the Iraqi military, to actually have a conversation with the people instead of reporting from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs going off.

Of course, that’s exactly what Jill Carroll did: got out of her room and had a conversation with the people.

Except that she didn’t have a military PR person leading her by the nose or hovering over her conversations.

There’s no pleasing some people.

One other thing — this reaction from the Right may be part of another pattern. My observations here are purely subjective; I do not spend time performing analyses of what news stories the Right is blogging about. But seems to me that in recent weeks they’ve gotten themselves worked up over smaller and smaller issues. Today, for example, they’re swarming over the news that Rep. Cynthia McKinney had an altercation with capitol police.

(Note to the congresswoman: Everybody must go through security. No exceptions. There are reasons for this.)

I gave some other examples in the “Crabs” post yesterday. It seems to me that more and more often the righties are running away from big issues and instead are focusing on peripheral news items about awful things non-righties are doing and, of course, they’re still posting the usual knee-jerk excuses for whatever Bush is up to. As I said, this is purely subjective and maybe I’m wrong, but keep watch for it.

Update: Does this even make sense? See also David Ignatius.

Crabs in a Barrel

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At the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson writes about “The Meltdown We Can’t Even Enjoy.”

It’s frustrating. The three overlapping forces that have sent this country in so many wrong directions — the conservative movement, the neoconservative movement and the Republican Party — are warring among themselves, doing their best impression of crabs in a barrel, and sensible people can’t even enjoy the spectacle. That’s because it’s hard to take pleasure in the havoc they’ve caused and the disarray they will someday leave behind.

“Crabs in a barrel” — what perfect imagery! Can’t you just imagine all the righties, all the Bush culties and fundies and neocons and Big Gubmint-hating quasi-libertarians confined together within their shared lies and resentments? And as the reality of their failed ideologies closes in, see how they pull in their eyestalks and scramble for whatever crumbs of self-validation they can find?

Today the Right Blogosphere is swarming over the critical news that Borders Books refuses to stock a magazine that published the Danish Mohammed cartoons. Other recent blogswarms involved displays of the Mexican flag. For the past couple of days righties have labored mightily to assure themselves that the opinions offered by some retired FISA judges was the opposite of what the judges actually said it was. They’re still picking through the intelligence garbage dumped by John Negroponte. John Podhoretz of the National Review criticizes the just-released Jill Carroll for not being anti-Muslim enough. And for the past several days a number of them, led by John Fund, have been obsessed over a former Taliban member enrolled at Harvard.

Crumbs, I say. The same people who spent the past several years congratulating each other for their grand “ideas” are running (sideways) from big issues as fast as their scaly little legs can scramble. Robinson continues,

It would all be entertaining if the stakes weren’t so high. Iraqis and Americans are dying; the treasury is bleeding; real people, not statistics, are at the center of the immigration debate. Iran is intent on joining the nuclear club. Hallowed American traditions of privacy, fairness and due process are being flouted, and thus diminished.

Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution takes a gloomier look at the Big Pcture —

It’s not merely that the Bush administration has run aground on its own illusions. The real problem runs deeper, much deeper, and at its core, I think, lies the fact that out of fear and laziness we insist on trying to address new problems with old ideologies, rhetoric and mind-sets.

To put it bluntly, we don’t know what to do, and so we do nothing.

Run through the list: We have no real idea how to address global warming, the draining of jobs overseas, the influx of illegal immigrants, our growing indebtedness to foreign lenders, our addiction to petroleum, the rise of Islamic terror . . .

Those are very big problems, and if you listen to the debate in Congress and on the airwaves, you can’t help but be struck by the smallness of the ideas proposed to address them. We have become timid and overly protective of a status quo that cannot be preserved and in fact must be altered significantly.

The Republicans, for example, continue to mouth a cure-all ideology of tax cuts, deregulation and a worship of all things corporate, an approach too archaic and romanticized to have any relevance in the modern world, as their five years in power have proved.

The GOP’s sole claim to bold action — the decision to invade Iraq in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 — instead epitomizes the problem. The issue of Islamic terrorism is complex and difficult, and by reverting immediately to the brute force of another era, we made the problem worse.

Yet in recent years the Dems in Washington have offered little else but tweaks to the Republican agenda.

It’s not as if the big, bold ideas needed to address our real problems don’t exist. Sure, they exist — among people with no power to implement them. And thanks to the VRWC echo chamber, those people are painted as dangerous, radical, impractical loonies by just about everyone in both parties and in major news media. Eugene Robinson calls on the Dems to “put together an alternative program that will begin to undo some of the damage the conservative-neocon-GOP nexus has wrought.” But the party as it exists now hardly seems capable of such a challenge. It’s too compromised, too tired, too inbred.

What’s a progressive to do?

As a practical matter, the way Americans conduct elections makes third parties irrelevant. If we had run-off elections or a parliamentary system, I’d say abandon the Dems and form something new. But our system marginalizes third parties; there’s no way around that. Our only hope is to reform the Dems.

Meanwhile, conservatives are being challenged to choose between loyalty and principle. On the Blogosphere, loyalty seems to be winning out. And the righties scurry to hide inside fantasies that George W. Bush is a great leader, and the majority of the American people are still behind him. Snap snap snap.

Bad Web Day?

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I’m having a terrible time with the web today; it’s like half the internets are offline, including Google. But some sites are available, so I don’t think it’s a technical problem at my end. Are your links working where you are?

Update: Whatever the problem was has fixed itself. Carry on.

Truth by Proclamation

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The story thus far: Yesterday the New York Times published a story by Eric Lichtblau titled “Judges on Secretive Panel Speak Out on Spy Program.” In this story, Lichtblau described the testimony of four former FISA judges to the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding Bush’s NSA spy program. A fifth judge who was not at the hearing sent a letter to the Committee expressing his opinion.

The main point of the story, per Lichtblau, is that the judges testified “in support of a proposal by Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, to give the court formal oversight of the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping program.”

In support of the proposal, mind you. Take note of that.

Lichtblau also wrote that the judges

voiced skepticism at a Senate hearing about the president’s constitutional authority to order wiretapping on Americans without a court order. They also suggested that the program could imperil criminal prosecutions that grew out of the wiretaps.

Judge Harold A. Baker, a sitting federal judge in Illinois who served on the intelligence court until last year, said the president was bound by the law “like everyone else.” If a law like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is duly enacted by Congress and considered constitutional, Judge Baker said, “the president ignores it at the president’s peril.”

However, Lichtblau writes, the judges avoided the question of whether the NSA program is illegal.

The judges at the committee hearing avoided that politically charged issue despite persistent questioning from Democrats, even as the judges raised concerns about how the program was put into effect.

Judge Baker said he felt most comfortable talking about possible changes to strengthen the foreign intelligence law. “Whether something’s legal or illegal goes beyond that,” he said, “and that’s why I’m shying away from answering that.”

Now the plot thickens. Also yesterday, the Washington Times published an article by Brian DeBose about the same testimony. And this article was headlined “FISA judges say Bush within law.” Here is the lede:

A panel of former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges yesterday told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that President Bush did not act illegally when he created by executive order a wiretapping program conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).

The five judges testifying before the committee said they could not speak specifically to the NSA listening program without being briefed on it, but that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not override the president’s constitutional authority to spy on suspected international agents under executive order.

Clearly, one of these stories is wrong. The question is, which one?

Yesterday John Hinderaker of Power Line accused Lichtblau of having “a huge personal investment in the idea (wrong, I think) that the NSA program is ‘illegal.'” To prove this charge, Hinderaker linked to another Power Line post in which Hinderaker hectored Lichtblau for writing a story Hinderaker didn’t like. Since the story is not linked I can only guess at what’s going on here, but I infer that Lichtblau interviewed people who said the NSA program is illegal as well as people who said it isn’t illegal. Hinderaker objected, thus:

Here’s my problem with your coverage: as a legal matter, there isn’t any debate. The authorities are all on one side; they agree that warrantless surveillance for national security purposes is legal. I think your articles misleadingly suggest that there is real uncertainty on this point, when there isn’t.

So we’re all agreed it’s legal. Except for these guys. Oh, and some of these guys. And just about every constitutional scholar on the planet who is not a Republican Party operative has at least some doubts about the legality of the program. But they don’t count. Clearly, the only reason Lichtblau would have interviewed and quoted such people is that he has a huge personal investment in the idea that the NSA spy program is illegal. Hinderaker, on the other hand, clearly and objectively reasons that doubts about the program’s legality simply do not exist.

Anyway, taking their cues from Hinderaker, the Right Blogosphere declared the DeBose/Moonie Times story to be the correct one. And they would know, as they have no personal investment in any of this.

Unfortunately, the Anonymous Liberal had to go make trouble and read the transcript.

I’ve now read through the transcript, and not surprisingly, it’s clear that Lichtblau was awake during the hearing and DeBose was, well, very confused. …

… Okay, let’s review the facts. The transcript of the hearing–which is very long–is only available via subscription, so you’re going to have to take my word for now. A total of five judges testified in person, and one submitted written testimony. All of the judges made it crystal clear that they had no intention of opining on the legality of the NSA program (“we will not be testifying today with regard to the present program implemented by President Bush”). The judges were there to testify about FISA and about the merits of Sen. Specter’s proposed legislation to amend FISA.

The bulk of the testimony by the judges was in praise of FISA and in praise of Specter’s proposed bill (which is clearly why Specter called them to testify in the first place). Although the judges were careful not to opine about the NSA program specifically, it was clear from their testimony that they believe further Congressional authorization is necessary and desirable and that the judiciary has an important and indispensable role to play in overseeing domestic surveillance.

Their agenda, to the extent they had one, was to lobby for the continued relevance of the FISA court. …

…I can assure you, though, that at no point did any of the judges come anywhere close to saying that the president “did not act illegally” or that he acted “within the law” when he authorized the NSA warrantless surveillance program. So the Washington Times story is complete rubbish. It could not possibly be more misleading.

This is all very bothersome. The Right had agreed to and proclaimed what the truth is, and here’s this loony liberal muddying the water. No wonder we liberals are so unpopular.

Update: See also Glenn Greenwald, “This Week in the NSA Scandal.”

Update update: Hinderaker is still defending his claim that the New York Times article, not the Moonie Times article, was the one that got the story wrong. And now another of the Power Tools, Scott Johnson, defends Hinderaker’s defense of his claim in a remarkable exercise in intellectual dishonesty. I say “remarkable” not because Johnsons is being dishonest — one expects such things from the Tools — but because he’s so bare-assed about it. He’s claiming that people didn’t say what he quotes them as saying.

Johnson quotes a passage from the testimony that he says belies “the tenor of Lichtblau’s description of the judges’ ‘skepticism.'” This is followed by a passage from the transcript in which two judges say, in effect, that since they don’t know details of what the NSA is up to they can’t offer an opinion of whether what they are doing is illegal or not.

Which is what Lichtblau and the Anonymous Liberal said they said. It was the other story, by DeBose, that claimed the judges had declared the NSA wiretapping program to be legal, and the judges clearly didn’t say that. Yet in Rightie World Lichtblau is “misleading” but DeBose is as honest and straightforward as sunshine itself.

Further, the judges clearly say that what worries them is that the NSA might be picking up domestic communications, which would require a warrant. Get this bit that Johnson quotes:

Judge Baker: Senator, did the statute limit the President? You created a balance between them [in the FISA statute], and I don’t think it took away the inherent authority that Judge Kornblum talked about. He didn’t call it “inherent,” he doesn’t like that. But the whole thing is that if in the course of collecting the foreign stuff, you are also picking up domestic stuff, which apparently is happening, I don’t know that that’s–it becomes a real question, you know, is he under his inherent power? Is he running around the statute?

From which Johnson concludes:

Judge Baker — who observes that he does not think FISA “took away” the president’s inherent constitutional authority to order warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance — is the one judge Lichtblau actually bothers to quote as allegedly expressing skepticism regarding this authority. Did Lichtblau leave the hearing early?

I do not believe that anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the issues in this case has ever claimed that the feds need a warrant to do foreign intelligence surveillance. What people — including the retired FISA judges — are skeptical about is whether the NSA is really limiting its activities to foreign intelligence. Judge Baker just said as much. By essentially changing the subject — by implying that the issue was foreign intelligence surveillance, which it clearly wasn’t — the Tools are trying to wriggle out of having to admit they were wrong.

Johnson concludes,

In short, I don’t think that the judges can fairly be described as having voiced skepticism regarding the president’s constitutional authority to order the NSA surveillance program. Having reviewed the transcript of their testimony, however, I am voicing skepticism that Eric Lichtlbau and the New York Times are reporting on matters related to the NSA program in good faith.

Having reviewed the Power Line web site, however, I am voicing skepticism that the Tools would recognize intellectual honesty if it bit their butts.