David Brooks has a genius for not seeing things even as he looks at them. Today he writes,

Obama emphasizes the connections between people, the networks and the webs of influence. These sorts of links are invisible to some of his rivals, but Obama is a communitarian. He believes you can only make profound political changes if you first change the spirit of the community. In his speeches, he says that if one person stands up, then another will stand up and another and another and you’ll get a nation standing up.

The key word in any Obama speech is “you.” Other politicians talk about what they will do if elected. Obama talks about what you can do if you join together. Like a community organizer on a national scale, he is trying to move people beyond their cynicism, make them believe in themselves, mobilize their common energies.

Nice. But then the Vegetable writes,

His weakness is that he never breaks from his own group. In policy terms, he is an orthodox liberal. He never tells audiences anything that might make them uncomfortable. In the Senate, he didn’t join the Gang of 14, which created a bipartisan consensus on judges, because it would have meant deviating from liberal orthodoxy and coming to the center.

How do you build a trans-partisan coalition when every single policy you propose is reliably on the left?

Because, dear Vegetable, it’s not about ideology.

For the past several years, “bipartisan” has meant “agreeing with Republicans,” with Republican defined as “an ideologically blinkered whackjob who takes marching orders from Richard Mellon Scaife and who would sell out the Constitution in an eyeblink for the sake of more power and some tax cuts.” And the effect on America — nay, the world — of this “bipartisanship” has been devastating.

Now bobbleheads like the Vegetable are trying to redefine “bipartisan” as a requirement that right-wing ideology must be honored and included in all policy decisions, even though a majority of the American people are rejecting it wholesale. And we must do this because, you know, it’s nice. It’s like when you were seven and your mother made you share your toys with Cousin Maggie even after she deliberately popped the heads off all your Ken dolls.

Brooks’s idea is that, out of some sense of etiquette, politics and policies coming out of Washington must honor some ideological mean. Obama’s idea is that government ought to be responding to what a majority of Americans want it to do.

To me, that’s always been the foundation of progressivism — government that genuinely responds to the will of We, the People. It’s not about loyalty to a menu of policies like cutting or raising taxes or growing or shrinking government. If We, the People, genuinely want to starve government of tax revenues so it can be drowned in a bathtub, fine. If the majority really want our domestic needs ignored for the sake of becoming an unstoppable imperialist might, then so be it.

I have never believed a majority of Americans really wanted those things, though. I think for a time large numbers of people responded to those ideas because, as our national political culture and discourse had been hijacked by right-wing goons, those were presented as the only legitimate ideas patriotic Americans were supposed to have. But I think only a minority of badly socialized malcontents were fully committed to the right-wing agenda.

I wrote yesterday that I believed the mantle of “inevitability” that Hillary Clinton wore these past several years is part of her problem. It fed into the notion that Washington, and the national leadership of both parties, are more powerful than we are, and that we must accept whatever they choose to give us. The Obama phenomenon comes from a growing realization that we shouldn’t have to put up with this.

Many people have pointed out that Obama’s stated positions on policy are vague. I disagree with his approach to health care. But just as his appeal is not about ideology, it’s also not about policy. It’s about democracy that’s not in name only. As Digby wrote the other day,

When people say they want change it’s not because they are tired of “partisan bickering” (which basically consists of derisive Republican laughter.) They’re sick of a government that does exactly the opposite of what they want it to do.

The experience of the past several years is that Republicans expect to be congratulated for making government do the exact opposite of what you want it to do. Democrats may express regret for it, but government still does the exact opposite of what you want it to do. Senator Clinton seems to have found a niche in this environment, churning up a storm of little policies and positions that are incrementally better than what Republicans propose. But she’s not asking the fundamental question — why do we have to put up with the wingnuts and their failed policies at all?

Why can’t we just push Cousin Maggie down the stairs, so to speak, and be done with this nonsense?

I suspect the Obama surge isn’t about Obama. I think it’s about long-growing, pent-up frustration with unresponsive government. Obama is becoming the rallying point for people who want real change, dammit, not promises and apologies.

So maybe he is vague about what he might do as President. But it’s not his plans that matter, but ours.

Dan Froomkin:

With time running short on his presidency — and on the eve of a trip to the Middle East — President Bush seems to have overcome his aversion to talking about his legacy and is now speaking fervently about how he expects to be remembered.

As it turns out, the president sees himself as quite the heroic figure.

“I can predict that the historians will say that George W. Bush recognized the threats of the 21st century, clearly defined them, and had great faith in the capacity of liberty to transform hopelessness to hope, and laid the foundation for peace by making some awfully difficult decisions,” Bush told Yonit Levi of Israel’s Channel 2 News. Bush held several interviews with Middle Eastern journalists last week in anticipation of his trip to the region, which starts tomorrow.

“When he needed to be tough, he acted strong, and when he needed to have vision he understood the power of freedom to be transformative,” Bush said of himself to Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer of the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot.

As for the people of the Middle East, Bush told Hisham Bourar of al-Hurra Television: “I would hope that they would say President Bush respects my religion and has great love for the human — human being, and believes in human dignity.”

The Bush record, the president told Nadia Bilbassy-Charters of al-Arabiya Television, is one of liberation — “liberation, by the way, not only from dictatorship, but from disease around the world, like HIV/AIDS or malaria.”

On a personal basis, Bush told Bilbassy-Charters that he hopes that people would know “that he hurts when he sees poverty and hopelessness” and “that he’s a realistic guy.”

I just want to say that I hope he has years of robust good health after he’s out of the White House. I want him to live for many more years. I want him to live long enough to know his great-grandchildren. The longer, the better. I mean that. Because I don’t think that bubble is gonna last long once he’s out of office.

It’s Iowa Caucus Day. The circus has begun. Gail Collins writes about how absurd the Iowa Caucuses are and why no one should take them seriously. However, they will be taken seriously.

I got a kick out of David “Bwana” Broder’s take on Iowa versus New Hampshire:

That system empowers the activists and those with built-in organizational ties who can mobilize people to leave their homes for a couple of hours on a weeknight and motivate them to declare a public — not private — preference for a candidate.

On the Republican side, those networks belong principally to conservative Christian groups, antiabortion organizations, home-school advocates and some economic interests.

On the Democratic side, organized labor and the teachers boast the best networks, but the main impulse is a broader populist tradition that tugs the Democratic Party of Iowa to the left. That tradition may go back to the days of Henry Wallace, the Iowa-born vice president under FDR. But it has been embodied in recent decades by Tom Harkin, the longtime Democratic senator who ran for president himself in 1992 and quickly fell behind the more moderate Bill Clinton and Paul Tsongas.

Harkin has accustomed Iowa Democrats to a red-meat diet of anti-corporate rhetoric, a tradition he shared with the late Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. That theme was echoed this year and in 2004 by John Edwards and was imitated — with varying degrees of conviction — by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in the closing stages of the Iowa race.

It has been an Iowa pattern to tilt the Democratic race leftward and the Republican race to the right. And often it has been New Hampshire, where the primary turnout approximates the pattern of the overall electorate, that restores the balance and corrects for the distorting effects of the Iowa dynamic.

Populism clearly is distressing to Bwana. How he longs for the days when well-bred aristocrats in powdered wigs and satin coats gathered in tastefully decorated drawing rooms to make decisions on behalf of the simple peasants.

Forget about Christmas sneaking up on you. Do you realize the Iowa Caucuses are a week from tomorrow? Enjoy this holiday week as the calm before the storm. Unless you live in Iowa, of course.

Most recent poll results basically say all the races in Iowa are tightening up. One poll says that Mike Huckabee is losing support — mostly to Ron Paul — among male voters. It may be that Huckabee peaked a bit too soon. Although he may not win in Iowa, I still say Mitt Romney is the most likely eventual winner of the nomination, because he seems to be the GOP establishment’s choice.

Regarding Huckabee, Quinn Hillyer wrote a couple of days ago,

Amazingly, Huckabee remains at the top of the polls despite receiving strong and repeated criticism from the entire spectrum of conservative leaders (yes, there is a spectrum; these are people who on intra-conservative-movement issues often disagree with each other). Lined up as strong critics of Huckabee are George Will, Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, Robert Novak, Rush Limbaugh, David Limbaugh, Michael Reagan, Peggy Noonan, Phyllis Schlafly, Donald Lambro, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin; the vast majority of top conservative bloggers from sites such as Red State and Powerline; and most of the writers from the top conservative political magazines: the American Spectator, Human Events, National Review, and the Weekly Standard. National Review, the flagship of the great William F Buckley, has been particularly scathing about Huckabee, with Rich Lowry, Jonah Goldberg and Kathryn Lopez leading the way.

I wrote awhile back about Lowry’s consternation over Huckabee’s popularity. Hillyer continues,

The roots of this bizarreness lie in Washington. Since 1998, the majority of congressional Republicans have shown they have no clue about what motivates most right-leaning voters and even less of a clue about what constitutes good public policy. Pork-barrel spending that garners almost no votes, but plenty of campaign cash, still abounds. Ethical reforms are ignored or run around. With strong GOP support, Congress passes farm bills and energy bills and all sorts of other legislation that are monstrosities containing no internal logic, no discernible philosophical basis, and no serious provisions for efficiency or effective oversight. Meanwhile, President Bush never has been a fiscal conservative or a foe of big government, meaning the old Barry Goldwater wing of the party – still the largest subset of the conservative coalition – has had no champions in Washington except those toiling from the back bench.

Hillyer was writing for The Guardian of the UK; you don’t see this kind of bare-assed honesty about conservatism in US media.

It’s never been entirely clear to me what “big government” actually means. I infer from this Rich Lowry column from spring 2006 that “big government” means one with a big and inefficient bureaucracy. He argues that lean and efficient government would be stronger than cumbersome, bloated government. If those are your only two choices, then he’s probably right. However,

Some government programs actually promote strong government. A large, capable military is a foundation of national power. The Patriot Act and the National Security Agency spying program — by updating governmental capabilities to deal with a new national security threat — represent strong, flexible government. It is also possible to foster desirable values through government programs. Welfare reform promoted responsibility among welfare recipients.

On the other hand, spending money on domestic programs is bad.

It creates a self-perpetuating appetite for even more government. The prescription-drug plan hasn’t placated seniors, but whetted their appetite for an even more generous program. As spending increases, so does pressure for higher taxes.

Conclusion:

When the GOP begins its post-Bush departure — roughly after the midterm elections in November, when the 2008 presidential nomination race begins — “big-government conservatism” will probably end up on the ash heap. The party will have to relearn what it used to know: A strong government is a limited government [emphasis added].

Except we don’t want to limit spending that’s going into the pockets of corrupt government contractors, and we don’t want to limit government violation of citizens’ rights. Those parts of government must be unlimited, Lowry says. Perhaps you can see why I am confused about the “big government” thing.

Anyway, I think what Lowry et al. don’t get is that their “movement conservative” ideology never was as popular as they believed it was. Hard-core movement conservatism always was a minority faction in America. Conservatives won elections by whipping up hysteria on some issue or another to drive the soft-headed and under-informed to the polls. In my lifetime I’ve seen one scoundrel after another elected by means of anti-Communist hysteria, racist hysteria, religious hysteria, anti-abortion hysteria, anti-gay hysteria, and most recently terrorist hysteria. Many of the voters who gave winning margins to conservative politicians didn’t give a hoohaw about Lowry’s precious if inscrutable notions of “limited government.”

Last week Amy Goldberg pointed out that many of the same conservatives running away from Huckabee’s religiosity sang a different tune in the recent past.

Rather than wringing their hands about the decline of reason in our civic life, right-wing opinion-mongers have, until now, heartily celebrated the volkish virtues of an archetypal Nascar-loving, megachurch-attending, Darwin-denying Ordinary American. Noonan has been the high priestess of mawkish religio-nationalist kitsch, titling her collection of post-9/11 columns, A Heart, A Cross and a Flag: America Today. In one piece, lamenting the fate of a man she encountered on an airplane, she writes: “I bet he became an intellectual, or a writer, and not a good man like a fireman or a businessman who says ‘Let’s Roll.'”

Last year Lowry ridiculed a spate of books about the growing political power of the religious right (including, I’m flattered to say, my own): “When the theo-panic passes, maybe a few of them will regret their hysteria.” In defending Christmas against its supposed antagonists, Krauthammer has chastised “deracinated members of religious minorities” who “insist that the overwhelming majority of this country stifle its religious impulses in public”.

Krauthammer these days is twisting himself into rhetorical pretzels trying to explain why Huckabee’s religious expression goes too far.

Here Goldberg is brilliant —

As mainstream conservatives recoil from what they’ve created, their cynicism is revealed – to us, but also, perhaps, to themselves. Obviously, some right-wing leaders always saw the pious masses as dupes who would vote against their economic interests if they could be convinced they were protecting marriage and Christmas.

But there there’s also a certain species of urbane Republican who live in liberal bastions and, feeling terribly oppressed by the mild contempt they face at cocktail parties, imagine a profound sympathy with the simple folk of the heartland. They’re like alienated suburban kids in Che Guevara t-shirts who fantasize kinship with the authentic revolutionary souls in Chiapas or Cuba or Venezuela. Confronted with the actual individuals onto whom they’ve projected their political hallucinations, disillusionment is inevitable. Whatever their nostalgie de la boue, the privileged classes never really want to be ruled by the rabble. They want the rabble to help them rule.

Spot on. See also Jane Hamsher on the Huckabee-Limbaugh feud.

Anyway, now we have Rush Limbaugh. He’s been putting out the message on behalf of the GOP to millions of the AM radio faithful so long he thinks he’s one of them, a “man of the people,” or as he likes to say, “part of the Cape Girardeau [Missouri]-Middle America axis.”

But Rush is no such thing. Unless his audience is composed of a lot more people making $35 million a year than I’m aware of, he’s an ugly weld spot between the corporatists and the rank-and-file within the party. Huckabee knows that audience rather better than Rush does, at least the Southern contingent, and given the fact that the GOP has become largely a regional party, that’s a significant portion of Rush’s base.

The Limbaughs of Cape Girardeau have been wealthy and prominent going back many years, btw. Cape Girardeau may well be in the “heartland,” but the Limbaughs were strictly privilege bubble people.

Rush eats left-wing hate like candy. It only makes him more popular with the true believers — it’s tribal, a sign that he’s “one of them.” But when Rush wasn’t looking, the left crafted a narrative about him (in a swift akido move employing many of the themes Rush himself popularized) that has now been picked up by Huckabee, who has the ability to carry it into the heart of the beast. Huckabee is a messenger who will be taken seriously in a way the left never could, and I imagine also in a way that Rush is going to have a hard time competing with.

Rush is betting that his listeners will see him as “part of the Cape Girardeau [Missouri]-Middle America axis.” The GOP elite have told him to take down Huckabee, and his ego is so engorged with money and seven years of right wing hegemony he thinks he can win that battle. He doesn’t see the weld spot preparing to crack.

Anyway, I take it the Right is gearing up to run the 2008 campaigns on illegal immigrant hysteria rather than terrorism hysteria, which is bad news for Rudy Giuliani. We’ll see how it works for ’em.

Sarah Baxter writes for the Times of London:

THE CIA chief who ordered the destruction of secret videotapes recording the harsh interrogation of two top Al-Qaeda suspects has indicated he may seek immunity from prosecution in exchange for testifying before the House intelligence committee. Jose Rodriguez, former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, is determined not to become the fall guy in the controversy over the CIA’s use of torture, according to intelligence sources.

It has emerged that at least four White House staff were approached for advice about the tapes, including David Addington, a senior aide to Dick Cheney, the vice-president, but none has admitted to recommending their destruction.

Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA, said it was impossible for Rodriguez to have acted on his own: “If everybody was against the decision, why in the world would Jose Rodriguez – one of the most cautious men I have ever met – have gone ahead and destroyed them?”

That’s the downside of a life in a reviled lame duck administration — the fall guys stop falling.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer, believes the scandal could reach deep into the White House. “The CIA and Jose Rodriguez look bad, but he’s probably the least culpable person in the process. He didn’t wake up one day and decide, ‘I’m going to destroy these tapes.’ He checked with a lot of people and eventually he is going to get his say.”

Johnson says Rodriguez got his fingers burnt during the Iran-contra scandal while working for the CIA in Latin America in the 1980s. Even then he sought authorisation from senior officials. But when summoned to the FBI for questioning, he was told Iran-contra was “political – get your own lawyer”.

Not that I expect much to happen if Rodriguez does name Addington, but having facts on the record is better than nothing. Jeralyn at Talk Left has more analysis.

On the same subject — the Washington Post gives us a terrifying glimpse into the mind of Bob Novak. The Reptile writes,

Chairman Silvestre Reyes and other Democrats on the intelligence committee join Hoekstra in demanding investigation into the tape destruction in the face of the administration’s resistance, but the Republicans stand alone in protesting the CIA’s defiant undermining of President Bush. In its clean bill of health for Iran on nuclear weapons development, the agency acted as an independent policymaker rather than an adviser. It has withheld from nearly all members of Congress information on the Israeli bombing of Syria in September. The U.S. intelligence community is deciding on its own what information the public shall learn.

It appears that the Bush Administration was complicit in the Israel-Syria operation. One suspects someone in the Agency is still loyal to the Bushies.

The Reptile insinuates there are traitors in the CIA:

Intelligence agencies, from Nazi Germany to present-day Pakistan, for better or for ill, have tended to break away from their governments. The Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s World War II predecessor, was infiltrated by communists. While CIA tactics were under liberal assault in Congress during the Watergate era, current accusations of a rogue agency come from Republicans who see a conscious undermining of Bush at Langley.

Then the Reptile falls back on revisionist history.

The CIA’s contempt for the president was demonstrated during his 2004 reelection campaign when a senior intelligence officer, Paul R. Pillar, made off-the-record speeches around the country criticizing the invasion of Iraq. On Sept. 24, 2004, three days before my column exposed Pillar’s activity, former representative Porter Goss arrived at Langley as Bush’s handpicked director of central intelligence. Goss had resigned from Congress to accept Bush’s mandate to clean up the CIA. But the president eventually buckled under fire from the old boys at Langley and their Democratic supporters in Congress, and Goss was sacked in May 2006.

I’m sure you remember Porter Goss and The Saga of Dusty Foggo. Conventional wisdom says the primary reason Goss was fired was that he butted heads with John Negroponte. And I’m sure the Reptile knows this perfectly well. Yet he still spins the Goss episode into “evidence” that the CIA is disloyal to the Bush Administration.

Goss’s successor, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, restored the status quo at the CIA and nurtured relations with congressional Democrats in preparation for their coming majority status. Hayden, an active-duty four-star Air Force general, first antagonized Hoekstra by telling Reyes what the Democrats wanted to hear about the Valerie Plame-CIA leak case.

What Democrats wanted to hear? Like the truth, Bob?

There is no partisan divide on congressional outrage over the CIA’s destruction of tapes showing interrogation of detainees suspected of terrorism. Hoekstra agrees with Reyes that the Bush administration has made a big mistake refusing to let officials testify in the impending investigation.

Yes, Bob, the Bush Administration refused to let CIA officials testify.

Republicans also complain that the National Intelligence Estimate concluding that Iran has shut down its nuclear weapons program was a case of the CIA flying solo, not part of the administration team. …

…In a June 21 address to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Hayden unveiled the “CIA’s social contract with the American people.” Hoekstra’s explanation: “The CIA is rejecting accountability to the administration or Congress, saying it can go straight to the people.”

Bob is miffed because some parts of the Washington bureaucracy are no longer willing to lie, cheat and steal for his team, but have decided that the integrity of the nation is more important. See, Bob, ultimately the CIA does not work for the President, but for We, the People of the United States of America. And wouldn’t we all be better off now if the CIA hadn’t been such good team players before the invasion of Iraq?

Update: See also Larry Johnson at No Quarter.

Clarence the Angel shows George W. Bush (as George Bailey) what the world would be like if Bush had never been born, in It’s a Blunderful Life.

There are a couple versions of this concept kicking around on the internet, but I like the remake (if that’s the word for it) – above – the best. Enjoy.