No Change of Direction for Conservatism

Here are a couple of articles that ought to be read together. The first is in today’s Washington Post, by Greg Anrig — “McCain’s Problem Isn’t His Tactics. It’s GOP Ideas.”

There’s so much of this I’d like to excerpt I have to ask you to read the whole thing. He begins by talking about how hard it has been in the past several years for progressives to get a word in edgewise in our national conversation. Righties just mocked us, interrupted us, and shouted to the world that government is the problem, all hail free markets.

But now, seemingly all of a sudden, conservatives are the ones who are tongue-tied, as demonstrated by Sen. John McCain’s limping, message-free presidential campaign. McCain’s ongoing difficulties in exciting voters aren’t just a tactical problem; his woes stem largely from his long-standing adherence to a set of ideas that simply haven’t worked in practice. The belief system and finely crafted policy pitches that enabled the right to dominate the war of ideas for the past 30 years have produced a relentless succession of governing failures, from Iraq to Katrina to the economy to the environment.

Right-wing “solutions” to the nation’s problems have failed. They have failed spectacularly. Righties can whine all they want to about how George W. Bush isn’t a “real conservative,” although they were happy to claim him while he was still popular. The fact is that the Republican Party had nearly total control of the federal government for long enough to put their “ideas” into effect. And their “ideas” don’t work.

So now what? In new books, two conservative stalwarts, former House speaker Newt Gingrich and the anti-tax guru Grover Norquist, don’t even bother wrestling with such failures. Instead, they argue for an even stronger dose of the medicine that has, so far, produced mainly toxic reactions. They owe their fame to denigrating the government, so one can hardly blame them for sticking with the program. For conservatives to abandon the arguments that have served them so well politically for so long would be akin to a Fortune 500 company dropping its core business when it recognizes that the market for its product is rapidly disintegrating.

It’s all these guys know. What else can you expect? A few moderate conservatives have argued for a somewhat more activist government and suggested the Right ought to stop trying to drown the government in a bathtub. Rush Limbaugh had a fit about this, of course.

“We have some Republicans who seem hell-bent in throwing away the one proven winning formula twice that won 49 states,” he said. “If you want to big-tent the Republican Party, go right ahead. You start big-tenting conservatism, and you’re going to have it end up meaning nothing.”

Here’s the real problem (emphasis added):

It’s bad enough that opening up the conservative agenda to energetic government would lose Limbaugh. Worse, it would alienate the wealthy business executives and scions who have financed the formidable network of right-wing institutions that includes think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, activist groups such as Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform and a plethora of conservative media outlets. That money flowed because its sources benefited directly and enormously from such policies as tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. Those sugar daddies are unlikely to find much to be enthusiastic about in a Grand New Party, and their money will largely determine whether and how conservatism will transform itself.

From here, head on over to The Guardian and read Ian Williams attempt to explain Rush Limbaugh to British readers:

A distinctively American phenomenon, his partisan rants would lose any British station broadcasting him its license.

Today is the official culmination of the Limbaugh dancing week – but meaner souls will think it overshadowed by last Sunday’s events, when Jim Adkisson, a Tennessee aficionado of conservative talkshows, took their hosts’ invective all too literally and shot up a “liberal” Unitarian Universalist congregation, killing two and wounding six congregants watching a children’s musical. Caught up in a world of conservative talk radio, he reportedly expected to be able to carry on shooting unimpeded by the spineless, gay-loving pacifists, and was surprised when they tackled him and brought him down. …

…For the Limbaughs of this world, gays, blacks, liberals, feminazis, Clintons, Obamas and all the rest of his Grand Guignol dramatis personae are unpatriotic, not real citizens, maybe not even human. They deserve neither rights nor respect. This is Bush’s Radio G’tmo. It epitomises the ethos of the age.

Here’s the critical part:

Rory O’Connor’s book Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio, details the right-wing talkshow universe and makes the point that it was not just Limbaugh’s native charm that got him launched on the airwaves. Rather, the concentration of media ownership, under a complaisant FCC, paved his way, along with the inspired political entrepreneurship of Fox CEO Roger Ailes, who offered the show free to local stations.

Adkisson and other angry listeners are more often than not the victims of precisely those unregulated concentrations of capital that put Limbaugh on the air, Chinese goods on the shelves of Wal-Mart and them on welfare. With Democratic leaders too wary to bite the hands that write the contribution cheques, but also too residually honest to invent scapegoats, no wonder an incisive populism can win listeners.

Where am I going with this? First, the Republican Party has boxed itself in. Having drummed the old Rockefeller Republicans out of the party in favor of dittoheads and Reaganobots, and dependent on deep-pocket hyperconservative donors and the media infrastructure they finance — the GOP can’t change. It doesn’t matter what the public wants and what opinion polls say; Republican candidates, especially on the national scene, can do no other than offer the same swamp water they’ve been offering for years.

So John McCain runs a content-free campaign that consists entirely of calling his opponent an empty suit (sotto voce — and he’s black!).

On the other hand, plenty of dimwits still buy whatever Faux Nooz and rightie talk radio are selling. People who are regular viewers of Faux or listeners of Rush are not likely to ever hear any other perspective. However, the dominance of Faux Nooz is eroding and more people listen to Rush’s commercials than they do to Rush.

However, I think as long as these losers have any following at all, they will not change direction. They’re going to have to be utterly abandoned by the public before they wake up and realize they’ve, y’know, been utterly abandoned. Then they’ll have to go through a phase of blaming liberals for their abandonment before somebody steps in and takes over the GOP.

The Anthrax Guy

You’ve probably heard by now that a suspect in the anthrax poisonings of 2001 committed suicide just before he allegedly was to be charged. How … convenient.

Glenn Greenwald covers this in minute detail, so I will lean on him for background. As Glenn says, it appears the anthrax was being dispersed from a top U.S. Army scientist working in a U.S. government lab. And the anthrax certainly added to the climate of fear that infested the nation after 9/11, which in turn benefited … well, you know. Y’all are champs at connecting dots; you don’t need me to do it for you.

Profiles in Courage

So last week John McCain stood up to China by getting his picture taken with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and this week President Bush stood up to China by inviting some Chinese dissidents to his White House residence for a private meeting with no reporters or photographers present.

Yeah, that’s showin’ ’em.

From an editorial in today’s New York Times:

Two weeks before he goes to the Beijing Olympic Games, President Bush remains unacceptably silent about China’s crackdown on basic human rights. Emboldened by the complicity of Mr. Bush and other leaders, China is harassing or locking up critics, threatening journalists and selectively denying visas. …

…The situation bordered on the absurd last week when Mr. Bush delivered a lengthy address on his “freedom agenda” for the world. He spoke loftily about the need for America to lead the cause of freedom and human rights, but he made only a brief reference to China. His insistence that those who “languish in tyranny” are not alone likely was little solace to Hu Jia and other imprisoned Chinese rights activists.

I am not sure of the exact figure, but China is holding something like $1 trillion in U.S. debt, which has gone a long way toward floating Bush’s war and his tax cuts. China owns his ass.

In recent weeks there have been reports in the European and Canadian press that most of the monks in the three biggest monasteries in Lhasa have been rounded up and sent to prisons or detention camps. The majority of these — approximately 1,000 monks — are simply being detained until after the Olympics, China says, but after the Olympics they will be returned to their home villages and not allowed to return to Lhasa. Another 500 or so monks probably have been accused of crimes and imprisoned, or at least they are unaccounted for. Only a handful of monks remain in each monastery. Oddly, one doesn’t hear about any of this from U.S. media.

Update: See also Glenn Greenwald, Those privacy-hating Chinese communist tyrants.

Questions for Monica G.

First off, I want to say that Monica Goodling’s standard interview questions creep me out, particularly this one:

[W]hat is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?

Yuck.

Eric Lichtblau writes in today’s New York Times,

The report released on Monday goes much further in documenting pervasive evidence of political hiring for some of the department’s most senior career positions, including immigration judges, assistant United States attorneys and even senior counterterrorism positions.

The pattern appeared most damaging in the hiring of immigration judges, as vacancies were allowed to go unfilled — and a backlog of deportation cases grew — while Mr. Gonzales’s aides looked for conservative lawyers to fill what were supposed to be apolitical jobs.

The inspector general’s investigation found that Ms. Goodling and a handful of other senior aides to Mr. Gonzales used in-person interviews and Internet searches to screen out candidates who might be too liberal and identify candidates seen as pro-Republican and supportive of President Bush.

One senior official, in describing Ms. Goodling’s strategy, likened it to a “farm system” used to fill temporary vacancies at the Justice Department with Republicans who could then move up.

I wish some reporter could flush Monica Goodling out of whatever hole she’s hiding in these days and ask her these questions:

  1. Do you understand why people are upset with you?
  2. Did you understand at the time that your hiring practices were deeply unethical and compromised our justice system?
  3. Did someone direct you to use such partisan criteria for hiring, or did you do this on your own initiative?
  4. If someone directed you, who was it?
  5. If this was on your own initiative, what made you think your hiring practices were appropriate or justified?

I’d be willing to bet money Ms. Goodling either had no idea that her hiring practices were in any way out of the ordinary, or else she sincerely believed she was serving some greater good.

Fairness and Flatulence

The McCain campaign claims that the New York Times rejected an op ed McCain wrote about Iraq. McCain’s campaign fed this to Drudge, who reprinted the op ed. I don’t link to Drudge, but you can find it if you really want it. The Times asked the McCain campaign to write a piece that “mirrored” the one they published by Obama a few days ago.

Remarkably, Daniel Finkelstein of the Times Online (UK) agrees with the New York Times‘s decision.

It wasn’t about Iraq. It was about Obama. If I received it I would have done exactly what the NYT did – send it back and ask them to redraft it so that it was about Iraq and was more, well, interesting.

Why was I only able to say I “think” they “may” be right? Because I don’t know exactly what they asked the Senator’s staff to do to the piece. But if they simply asked for a piece that matched Obama’s because, like Obama’s it was actually about his views on Iraq, well then I am right behind them.

Finkelstein is right that McCain’s op ed is just a big whine about Obama. I think he’s right about what the NY Times meant by “mirror,” also. That makes sense. The wingnuts, of course, think it means they want McCain to write a piece that agrees with Obama’s which does not make sense.

Rasmussen reports that there’s a growing belief reporters are trying to help Obama win. This is an opinion poll, mind you, not a report on the actual activity of journalism. 78 percent of Republicans think the press is trying to help Obama win.

What do you think? I don’t watch the entire media that closely any more. I check in with MSNBC in the evenings, scan through newspapers during the day, and that’s about it. I would say from what I’ve seen on MSNBC that their coverage is kinder to Obama than it was to Al Gore in 2000 or to John Kerry in 2004. Olbermann is unabashedly pro-Obama, of course.

At the same time, I haven’t seen MSNBC (except for Olbermann) be as harsh to McCain as it was to Gore in 2000 or Kerry in 2004.

Does this mean MSNBC on the whole is stumbling around somewhere in the general territory of “unbiased”?

It’s the Stupid (Republican) Economy

I think somebody ought to have an ad featuring these McCain quotes from a January 2008 debate running 24/7 —

Q: Are Americans better off than they were eight years ago?

A: You could argue that Americans overall are better off, because we have had a pretty good prosperous time, with low unemployment and low inflation and a lot of good things have happened. A lot of jobs have been created. … We need to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which I voted for twice to do so. … I think we are better off overall if you look at the entire eight-year period, when you look at the millions of jobs that have been created, the improvement in the economy, etc.

This should be juxtaposed with a clip from Dubya’s Tuesday press conference.

He’s not worried.

On a day that saw one economic bombshell after another, President Bush squinted, smirked and grimaced into the future Tuesday, declaring – contrary to a growing mountain of evidence – that the country’s financial system is “basically sound.”

“I’m an optimist,” a sometimes testy Bush said in his first White House news conference since April. “I believe there’s a lot of positive things for our economy.”

Dan Froomkin cites an AP poll that says “by a 2-1 margin, Americans believe McCain would generally continue Bush’s economic policies.”

Harold Meyerson has a must-read column on McCain’s economic policies in today’s WaPo.

… as McCain tries to balance the tattered libertarianism of Reaganomics with the financial exigencies of the moment, he and his campaign have moved beyond inconsistency into utter incoherence. He vows to balance the budget while also cutting corporate taxes and making permanent the Bush tax cuts for the rich — even though the rich and corporations made out like bandits during the Bush “prosperity,” while everyone else’s incomes stagnated. McCain squares this circle by vowing to cut entitlements, a move that would reduce, rather than enhance, consumer purchasing power at a time of economic downturn (or any other time, for that matter).

Whether Americans are even experiencing a downturn has been a matter of some dispute in the McCain camp, since former senator Phil Gramm, until last week one of McCain’s chief surrogates on economic issues, deemed America a nation of “whiners” mistaking subjective insecurity over the economy for an objective economic fact. For McCain, who had the misfortune to be campaigning in Michigan the day that Gramm’s remarks dominated campaign news, Gramm’s insensitivity was appalling. But McCain has never expressed any concern that Gramm wrote the legislation that enabled the $62 trillion credit default swaps market to remain unregulated, which, as David Corn documented in Mother Jones, meant that banks and hedge funds could accumulate liabilities that they could not cover if the markets — most particularly, the subprime mortgage market — went south. To the contrary, McCain has viewed Gramm as one of his economic gurus. “There is no one in America that is more respected on the issue of economics than Senator Phil Gramm,” McCain declared in February. …

…One problem is that McCain himself has no real ideas about how to fix the economy, which leaves his tetherless surrogates free to roam the policy landscape. An even deeper problem is that standard-issue Republican economic policy has run out of plausible mantras. The ritual extolling of markets and denigration of government make no sense at a moment when a conservative Republican administration is rushing to save the markets through governmental intervention.

Or, to use Reagan’s construction: Republican economics is not the solution to our problem; Republican economics is the problem — for our nation, surely, and also for candidate McCain.

Wingnut Hysteria

Updated Below

They really are like simple, but nasty, children.

Long, long ago, in those heady days just after the invasion of Iraq but before it all went sour — a very narrow period, to be sure — some Marines stumbled upon the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear program, at a site near Tuwaitha that had been bombed into rubble by Israel back in 1981. A whole lot of yellowcake uranium was stored there, all of which had been inspected and re-inspected by the IAEA many times over the years.

In fact, the IAEA had inspected the site several times before the Iraq War began in March 2003. The last inspection was on February 11, 2003. United Nations weapons inspectors had visited the facility in December, 2002. The yellowcake was all inventoried and stored in drums with IAEA seals. I wrote a lot about this back in 2003.

The critical point is that Saddam Hussein couldn’t do anything with this uranium because he lacked the equipment and technology to enrich it. So it had been sitting around for years in drums sealed by the IAEA. No nuclear program.

When the Marines found this cache of uranium in April, 2003, they were completely caught off guard. If anyone in the Bush Administration knew it was there, they didn’t bother to inform the military. So for a while the uranium became the vindication for the invasion, until finally someone admitted that, um, yeah, we knew it was there, and it was all still under IAEA seal as it had been for several years. No vindication.

The amusing part of all this is that every single time some part of that yellowcake uranium gets back into the news, the wingnuts get all excited about the “new” discovery and start celebrating that the invasion of Iraq is vindicated. This seems to happen every 18 months or so.

Well, folks, they’re at it again. There’s an Associated Press story (that I’m not linking to because it’s the Associated Press) that says the last of the yellowcake was removed from the former Tuwaitha nuclear complex. And they seem to think this is some brand new discovery.

Here’s the Idiot’s Hall of Fame:

American Thinker
Don Surber
Gateway Pundit
Pirate’s Cove
Neptunus Lex
Patterico’s Pontifications
Sweetness and Light

The accumulated IQ of the above bloggers adds up to about 47.

See also Daniel DeGroot, who is not an idiot.

Update:
Here’s another candidate for the Idiot’s Hall of Fame — Macsmind. That takes the accumulated Idiot IQ up to about 48.

Sample quote:

Of course Yellow Cake is harmless in itself but then it’s only a few steps away from becoming uranium.

Yellowcake IS uranium and is radioactive, but you can’t make weapons with it. It is not “only a few steps” from being weapons grade. It takes considerable refinement and considerable time, and it’s clear that Saddam Hussein lacked the means to refine it and wasn’t trying.

This story of course blows the Bush Lied/People Died story out of the water and puts to rest any question whether Saddam was seeking to build a nuclear program. In fact we know that Saddam did in fact have a WMD program.

Yellowcake uranium that had been stored in sealed drums for several years with no attempt to do anything with it does not constitute a “WMD program.”

Update: One more for the Idiot’s list:

Babalu Blog

This may push the collective IQ number above 50. It’s so hard to tell.

Update: Now Patterico Justine Levine, writing at Patterico’s Pontifications, says I am missing the point.

The debate isn’t about if Saddam was on the verge of obtaining nukes or not. Rather, it is about the fact that Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame are liars – something that most of the press refuses to acknowledge. Notably, Mahablog doesn’t mention the Joe Wilson controversy at all.

Please. The yellowcake in Tuwaitha is completely unrelated to Joe Wilson. The Tuwaitha yellowcake was [partly] the remnants of material from the defunct Osiraq reactor that Israel bombed in 1981 [the rest was purchased before the Gulf War]. The Tuwaitha yellowcake had been sitting in those drums, with the IAEA seals, at least since the end of the Gulf War. The IAEA had exhaustively inventoried it and monitored it from the beginning of the 1990s until inspections stopped in 1998, and when they went back in 2003 they found nothing whatsoever had changed — nothing had been added, nothing had been taken away. The same barrels were still there, with the same seals.

Wilson’s trip to Niger in 2002 was to investigate an alleged sale of uranium in the late 1990s. The alleged Niger uranium had nothing whatsoever to do with the Tuwaitha uranium.

In fact, one of my arguments all along about the 16 words and the alleged Niger yellowcake was that it made no sense for Saddam Hussein to purchase more yellowcake when he was already sitting on a huge pile of yellowcake that he didn’t have the technology to enrich.

Patterico just went into negative IQ points. The accumulated IQ drops to 38.

Shame

I would like to believe our country didn’t used to behave this way. Scott Shane writes in today’s New York Times:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

I say I would like to believe that our country didn’t used to behave this way. I was brought up thinking that everything we stood for was, um, against this. Maybe I was naive.

(Of course, you know what righties will say. It’s not torture. It used to be torture when Communists did it, but now it isn’t because it’s us doing it.)

See also “Truth Is Out on CIA and Torture” and the Talking Dog.