Dick the Dick predicts that the GOP will retain control of Congress after November.
This is great news! The Dems must be winning!
Category Archives: Congress
The Condi and Dennis Show
It’s a tossup in my mind as to whether it serves one’s interest in greater measure to be incompetent, dishonest, purposely ignorant, ideologically and/or religiously obsessed, cavalier about the loss of human lives and the destruction of tens and hundreds of thousands of families, fiscally promiscuous, or sexually promiscuous with innocent 16-year-olds, and hence, quite possibly guilty of statutory rape, to rise in the modern Republican Party. This sex scandal is a pretty good example of a Big Story to which I have absolutely nothing of use to contribute, though I did receive this kinda funny list in the mail this morning.
What is currently driving me the craziest, however, are the variations on this story. The upshot is this. Tenet briefed Condi Rice about a potentially catastrophic terrorist attack on the United States on July 10, 2001. Rice ignored the briefing, just as she and Bush both ignored the August 6 “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” memo, when Bush told the CIA briefer who delivered the memo to him that he had “covered his ass” and then went fishing for the rest of the day. Rice not only ignored the briefing, but also misled the 9-11 Commission and then lied when confronted with the evidence by Bob Woodward. Add her name to the long list of Bush administration officials who will leave office with the blood of thousands of innocents on her hands, and who was promoted by Bush for exactly that reason. Greg Mitchell has more here. Of course Rice should be fired, and perhaps tried, but instead she will be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom and Bush will run another campaign on how Democrats cannot be trusted to protect you from the terrorists he’s created.
Be sure to read Eric Alterman’s whole column.
Judging by Memeorandum, at the moment national security issues are being outblogged by the Foley scandal by a wide margin.
I think this could a mistake. I also wonder if someone in the White House (initials K.R.) had a hand in tipping off the press about Foley. Yeah, I know, it’s a stretch, and I’m paranoid. But from the Rove perspective, throwing some congressmen under the bus with a sex scandal might be better than having the nation’s attention on the Bush Administration’s flaming national security incompetence.
Although I also disagree with John Dickerson — Foley’s homosexuality is not the issue. And, at this point, Foley’s behavior is no longer a political issue, since he is no longer a congressman, and out-of-control sexual predation is not an exclusively Republican problem. The issue is whether other Republican congressman tolerated having a sexual predator in their midst. The issue is whether they knew about his behavior and looked the other way, even covered up for him. That cannot be tolerated.
And don’t miss Glenn Greenwald:
In need of moral absolution and support from a respected and admired figure who possesses moral authority among Hastert’s morally upstanding Republican base, to whom does Hastert turn? A priest or respected reverend? An older wise political statesman with a reputation for integrity and dignity? No, there is only one person with sufficient moral credibility among the increasingly uncomfortable moralistic Republican base who can give Hastert the blessing he needs:
Rush Limbaugh.
Too rich.
There’s a social-psychological phenomenon, I read somewhere, in which people who talk a lot about morality are perceived as being moral, even if their behavior says otherwise. Conversely, people who don’t talk much about morality are not perceived as being particularly moral, even if they’re as upright as the Washington Monument. I suspect the same phenomenon applies to people who talk tough.
Bottom line: the Republicans’ reputation as the guardians of moral values and the Republicans’ reputation as the guardians of national security are both so much fluff. All talk, no walk.
And, the more I think about it, the more I believe the Dennis Hastert story and the Condi Rice story are essentially the same story. It’s the story of people who, for whatever reason, were just plain not doing what they should have been doing, either to protect the congressional pages or the nation.
The difference is that, somehow, the Bush Administration managed to hide their failure and incompetence behind a facade of strength and resolve and toughness. And the very people whose foreign policy judgments have proved to be wrong, time and time again, continue to get away with painting their opposition as incompetent and untrustworthy.
The question of why these people failed interests me less than the question of how we change public perception. We can argue endlessly about whether the Bushies failed to act on the pre-9/11 warnings because they were incompetent (my choice) or whether they made a cold calculation that some domestic terrorism would work to their political advantage, or for some other reason we have yet to uncover. And I have no way to know if Dennis Hastert failed to separate Mark Foley from the pages because he didn’t care, or because he was more focused on keeping Congress in Republican hands, or out of the psychological fog that all too often causes people not to notice sexual predation.
What matters is that the Bush Administration has a history of really bad judgments on national security and foreign policy and do not deserve the nation’s trust to guard the nation. What matters is that Republicans are not uniquely virtuous and do not deserve the nation’s trust to guard moral values. (As if guarding moral values were the government’s job, anyway; I say it isn’t.)
Yesterday’s Countdown had a brilliant clip of rightie talking points on Foley (at Crooks & Liars, natch). They’re falling back on their traditional argument — The Dems did it too. The hard-core Right will buy this, of course, but I can only hope the bulk of American voters, looking on, see how truly pathetic this is.
But the most fundamental issue here is the misperception, the myth, of Bush Administration competence and Republican virtue. Are scales truly falling from eyes, or are we liberals still just talking to ourselves?
Why I Love Harold Meyerson
It is a mark of the sheer panic sweeping the ranks of Republican congressmen that one of their most levelheaded members, Ray LaHood of Illinois, has suggested that Congress abolish its page program altogether in the wake of the Mark Foley scandal.
What conclusion are we supposed to draw from LaHood’s proposal? That members of Congress cannot be trusted in the company of adolescents? …
… If LaHood believes that pages pose an irresistible temptation to his peers, there are surely solutions straight out of the Republican playbook that wouldn’t punish the victims. How about building a 700-foot fence around all Republican members of Congress?
Sounds like a plan.
Human Error
There’s something about the sexual exploitation of children that pushes a denial button. Too often friends, family, and associates of both the perpetrators and the victims avoid acknowledging the truth. Of course the perpetrators don’t want to admit to what they’ve done, but often the victims lock their victimization into the darkest corners of their minds and never speak of it, either. I don’t know why this is true, yet it happens time and time again.
We might be shocked that the Catholic Church covered up the pedophilia of some priests rather than deal honestly with it, but the same behavior can be found in families and any other group where adults and children form relationships. Nearly always the first reaction to evidence of sexual abuse is to pretend it isn’t happening. And even when there’s an acknowledgment it might be happening, the next reaction is to protect the perpetrator. People like to believe they would protect the child, but when confronted with reality they often hesitate to do so. This may be because they sincerely like the perpetrator and can’t believe he is some kind of predatory monster. Cognitive dissonance wins out over taking action to protect the child.
We’ve learned that Speaker Dennis Hastert was told of of allegations against Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) of improper contact with a young male page, which contradicts what Hastert said yesterday. Today Hastert and other Republican leaders are full of thundering indignation about Foley’s alleged acts. The lawmaker who oversees the page program says he knew about Foley’s “funny” emails a year ago. This fellow claims he “took immediate action,” even though the action seems to have had no effect or follow up. And in spite of all the thundering indignation, Majority Leader John Boehner of Ohio blocked a vote on a resolution offered by Nancy Pelosi “asking the House Ethics Committee to begin a preliminary investigation into Foley’s conduct and the GOP leadership’s response to it,” says CNN.
I sincerely hope that Foley’s conduct amounted only to inappropriate emails. Whatever it was he might have done, however, we’re likely to find out that lots of people either knew or suspected Foley’s behavior was inappropriate, yet they couldn’t bring themselves to confront him. Or if they did speak to him, they still covered up for him. This isn’t a Republican thing, it’s a human thing.
Today there’s considerable rib-nudging activity on the Left. As much as we all like to see hypocrisy outed, this isn’t something to joke about. Some on the Right are facing up to what happened, but others sniff about a setup or engage in some weird denial of the denials. I suggest it would be more helpful if everyone resolved to notice, acknowledge, and act upon inappropriate behavior between adults and children and not ignore it or cover it up. This doesn’t mean engaging in vigilante witch hunts; just stop the denial.
Update: Could somebody explain to Don Surber that sexual exploitation of a minor is not equivalent to alleged sexual harassment of an adult?
Ex-New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey made life hell for Golan Cipel, who became the object of his unwanted attention. Like Foley, McGreevey resigned. But unlike Foley, McGreevey’s resignation was timed to allow a Democratic successor without an election; looks like Republicans will lose Foley’s seat.
And unlike Foley’s target, Cipel was not a minor. Far from it.
Is Surber implying that, since Cipel was not a minor, what McGreevey allegedly did was worse (note that Mr. Cipel’s claims are uncorroborated)? How weird. I’m not saying either one is OK, but they are hardly equivalent. Adults don’t sustain the same kind of emotional and psychological damage and ought to be able to stand up for themselves better than a child can.
Also, I’m not aware that other Democrats in New Jersey had any idea that Mr. Cipel was feeling victimized until McGreevey spoke out about it, meaning that the New Jersey Democratic Party was not covering up for McGreevey. (I could be mistaken on that point; let me know if I am.)
I’d also like to point out to Mr. Surber and the other righties who are whining about a “setup” that had other Republicans in Congress dealt forthrightly with this matter a year ago, when they found out about it, it wouldn’t be coming up six weeks before an election.
Don’t blame the Dems for this mess, dude.
Update update: See John Nichols at The Nation for a different perspective.
Choices
Glenn Greenwald reads my mind.
… everyone has to answer for themselves these questions: (1) do you believe that the incalculable damage imposed on this country by the Bush administration and its followers (including in Congress) can be impeded and then reversed and, if so, (2) how can that be accomplished? For those who have given up and believe the answer to question (1) is “no,” then, by definition, there is nothing to discuss. You’ ve decided that there is no hope, that you’re done fighting and trying to defend any of your beliefs and principles, and you’re ready to cede the country to those who are in the process of destroying it.
And may I interject, if your answer is no, you may be right. Time will tell. But until time has told, I’m proceeding with yes. That’s the choice I’ve made. If your choice is no I’m not going to say you are wrong, but you might as well stop reading, because the rest of this post is devoted to yes options. And if all you have to add to the comments is no — don’t bother.
But for those who believe that the answer to question (1) is “yes” (and I believe that emphatically), then the answer to question (2) seems self-evidently clear. The most important and overriding mandate is to end the one-party rule to which our country has been subjected for the last four years. Achieving that is necessary — it is an absolute pre-requisite — to begin to impose some actual limits on the authoritarian behavior and unchecked powers of this administration — because, right now, there are no such limits.
And, independently, killing off unchallenged Republican rule is the only possible way to invade the wall of secrecy behind which this administration has operated and to find out what our government has actually been doing for the last five years. Shining light on the shadows and dark crevices in which they have been operating is vitally important for repairing the damage that has been done. If nothing else, a Chairman Conyers or a Chairman Leahy, armed with subpoena powers, will accomplish that.
This is a point I’ve tried to make many times, and it’s nearly always countered by a chorus of whining about how Dems are wusses and they always will be wusses and only idiots support them. Listen, nobody could possible be more frustrated with Dems than I am. But if we’re operating on the assumption of yes, we need the Dems, like it or not. And here’s why:
First, you cannot ignore parties. Political parties are intrinsic to how Congress functions. It matters enormously which party is the majority and which party gets to choose committee chairpersons and set agendas.
What about third parties? Bucking the two-party system isn’t an idea somebody came up with last week. Americans started complaining about the two-party system back when the two parties were the Democrats and the Whigs. Since about the 1830s vast numbers of Americans have worked their butts off to create viable national third parties. They have always failed. I don’t see a 180-year trend reversing itself in the next six weeks.
The reason third party candidates can’t win has to do with how we run elections, in particular the “winner take all” system in which whoever gets the most votes gets the prize. Countries with viable multiple parties have runoffs if nobody gets a majority, and that makes a world of difference. Go here and play with the demonstrations if you don’t understand why this is true.
Even if you could elect a third-party candidate, that person would be helpless to accomplish anything unless he became a de facto member of one of the two parties. And, frankly, even if we could scrape the Dems out of the picture entirely and start over with a dream party of fired-up progressives, given our poisoned political culture our dream party would end up being just like the Dems. We’re not going to get the party we want until we change the political culture, and we won’t get even a chance to do that until we break one-party Republican rule.
I know the Dems are flawed. But here’s an analogy: Let’s say you’ve got a job to do that ought to be done with a hammer. But you don’t have a hammer; all you have is a wrench. You can do the job with a wrench, but it’s going to take longer and the results will not be perfect. But without some kind of tool you can’t do the job at all.
In the real world you might choose to put off doing the job until you can get your hands on a hammer. But let’s say your life depends on doing this job right now. By the time the hardware store opens it will be too late. So are you still going to sit passively until you get a hammer, or do you wrench away?
I see a Dem takeover of Congress this November as a stopgap measure. Even if Dems take both houses of Congress we face enormous challenges to pull the nation back from the brink and restore our pathological political culture to something approaching health. But if the Republicans keep control of both houses of Congress, the task of saving our nation may become impossible.
Time is short. We cannot afford to sit on our hands and wait for the Messiah Candidate to come and save us. We’ve got to work with the tools we have. Once we’ve pulled back from the brink of disaster we can take steps to get better tools.
Here’s another analogy: Imagine you are stranded on your roof in rising floodwaters. Sooner or later you’re going to drown if you aren’t rescued. Yet you refuse to be rescued in an old rowboat because it might be leaky and you are waiting for a helicopter.
Well, folks, the Dems are the rowboat, and there ain’t gonna be a helicopter.
… a desire to see the Democrats take over Congress — even a strong desire for that outcome and willingness to work for it — does not have to be, and at least for me is not, driven by a belief that Washington Democrats are commendable or praiseworthy and deserve to be put into power. Instead, a Democratic victory is an instrument — an indispensable weapon — in battling the growing excesses and profound abuses and indescribably destructive behavior of the Bush administration and their increasingly authoritarian followers. A Democratic victory does not have to be seen as being anything more than that in order to realize how critically important it is.
If at this point you are still thinking you’d rather eat bugs than support the Democrats — fine, but if you answered yes, what options can you offer?
I’ve been reading through the comments on Glenn’s site. One person after another writes no way; Dems cave in time after time; how are they different from Republicans? But none of them can offer an alternative, other than armed rebellion. That amounts to a concession that the nation already is dead. Maybe it is. But armed rebellions are nasty and bloody, and armed rebellion likely would not bring the old government of 1787 back, no matter who wins. There’s no way to predict what will be left standing when the dust settles. I’d rather not go there, thanks.
In the real world, one has to either choose between two more years of uncontrolled Republican rule, or imposing some balance — even just logjam — on our Government with a Democratic victory. Or one can decide that it just doesn’t matter either way because one has given up on defending the principles and values of our country. But, for better or worse, those are the only real options available, and wishing there were other options doesn’t mean that there are any. And there are only six weeks left to choose the option you think is best and to do what you can to bring it to fruition.
That pretty much says it. If you still aren’t persuaded then — Canada is north.
Mean Jean, Fast Woman?
Former maha next-door-neighbor “Mean” Jean Schmidt, now a U.S. Congresswoman from Ohio, is being called out for possibly making false claims about how fast she can run a marathon. Matt Leingang writes for the Associated Press:
Republican Rep. Jean Schmidt is fast, capable of running a marathon in 3 hours, 19 minutes, 6 seconds.
At least that’s what a photo on the Ohio congresswoman’s Web site shows.
No way, says a rival who contends that the picture from the 1993 Columbus Marathon is doctored and complained to state election officials. A four-member commission panel ruled Thursday that there was enough evidence to look into the complaint.
Nathan Noy, who is running against Schmidt as a write-in candidate, says that Ms. Schmidt was the only runner in the photo who doesn’t cast a shadow. (Here’s the photo; seems to me one of the shadows could be hers.) Also, a newspaper story about the race does not list Schmidt among the top runners. Schmidt’s attorney says he has an official results book from the race that shows Schmidt’s official time as 3:19:09. (Read more about Noy’s allegations here.)
On her Web site, Schmidt, who is 54, said she has completed 59 marathons.
Now she’s saying 60 marathons since 1990. I seem to recall she was running marathons when I knew her 25 years ago, and I don’t think the photo was faked, so I’d be surprised if anything comes of this. However,
In April, she received a public reprimand from the Ohio Elections Commission for claiming on her Web site that she had two college degrees when she had only one.
She was doing good to get the one. A brain she’s not.
And then there was the famous Danny Bubp episode. As reported in the Cincinnati Enquirer:
Three days after Rep. Jean Schmidt was booed off the House floor for saying that “cowards cut and run, Marines never do,” the Ohioan she quoted disputed the comments.
Danny Bubp, a freshman state representative who is a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve, told The Enquirer that he never mentioned Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., by name when talking with Schmidt, and he would never call a fellow Marine a coward. …
… Schmidt – decked out in a red-white-and-blue suit that resembled the U.S. flag – went to the floor and quoted from a telephone conversation with Bubp: “He asked me to send Congress a message: Stay the course.
“He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message: That cowards cut and run, Marines never do.”
The comment drew a chorus of boos and shouting from Democrats.
It’s unclear whether Schmidt, who will start her 79th day in the House today, knew at the time of her remarks that Murtha had served 37 years in the Marine Corps and Marine Corps Reserve.
She immediately took back her remarks. It’s against House rules to refer to a fellow lawmaker by name or to criticize them.
Another Enquirer story said Schmidt’s constituents were embarrassed by the “coward” remarks. On the other hand, Schmidt “got a round of applause at a recent closed-door meeting of House Republicans. She’s even gotten several marriage proposals.”
There are some sick people out there, folks.
Jean barely squeaked by a Republican challenger in this spring’s primaries. Her Democratic opponent in the general election is Dr. Victoria Wulsin. I’m a bit put out that the netroots guys who organize these things didn’t crank up netroots support for Dr. Wulsin, who clearly would be a huge improvement. More here. But she’s not on the Official Netroots Act Blue page.
If you want to help her out, here is Dr. Wulsin’s individual Act Blue donation page.
Update: Mimikatz at The Next Hurrah says Schmidt’s seat is vulnerable.
Bad Actors
From time to time I rant about the Left’s stupid proclivity toward single-issue advocacy rather than working through coalitions or the Democratic Party. The most recent such rants are here and here.
Via Digby, Matt Stoller explains why it’s even dumber than I had thought. (emphasis added)
Every bill that comes before the House and Senate faces a clear set of right-wing pressure points. The first and most powerful one is the Republican K-Street Project, which can whip all Republicans very quickly and effectively in the House, and nearly as quickly in the Senate. This is the machine that forces Republicans to obey the wishes of a right-wing leadership class, through the carrot of cushy corporate jobs and the stick of vicious primary challenges from the Club for Growth.
On the Democratic side, the pressure is just as intense, but more subtle. When a bill is introduced, a network of consultants, most of whom have corporate clients, begin to chatter about how taking a liberal position could weaken the Democratic Party. This is supplemented with a strong PR strategy by right-wing temporary coalition groups who put out networks of surrogates and ads to create a powerfully framed environment. Then business lobbyists come and visit Congressional offices, and make threats, attempt legislative bribes, or put out false but extremely persuasive pieces of information. There is often little real counterpressure, because liberal single issue groups have decided not to hold politicians accountable and do not cooperate with each other on issues not directly related to their vertical.
Note to self: Do not donate money to any single-issue group ever again.
Within the Democratic party, resisting a bill is an exercise in holding the caucus together. The long minority status of the Democratic Party has allowed the development of bad faith actors within the caucus, who cut deals with right-wing groups and sabotage any possibility of resistance. Al Wynn is one such actor; Joe Lieberman is another. On key vote after key vote, these actors have sabotaged the progressive position through fake bipartisanship. It’s no surprise that Lieberman’s former chief of staff was a lobbyist for Enron; Lieberman himself is responsible for many of the corporate accounting scandals over the years because of his embrace of various financial lobbies.
Note to self: Volunteer to work for Ned Lamont in the general election.
One irony of the Lieberman race is that all the single-issue groups have endorsed Lieberman, and if you look at donations, so have the lobbyists. Indeed, this isn’t a fight between ‘the left’ and ‘the right’ as it is traditionally defined, since no one would put NARAL on the right or even in the center. This is about creating a disincentive towards bad faith actors and corrupt lobbyists on the left.
Note to self: Make a list of every single-issue group I have ever donated money to. Write them and ask for the money back.
The pervasive lack of accountability among Democrats is a real weakness for progressives, and the fact that there is some measure of accountability in the form of potential primary challenges means that there will be a behavioral change on the part of many members of Congress. No longer will they be able to listen to former staffers turned lobbyists, because they know that Lieberman’s example could be their own. No longer can they take for granted their safety in safe districts, because Donna Edwards isn’t the only principled and connected progressive around. And some of the tools and methodologies we’re developing can be used to effectively damage Republican candidates, as we saw with the internet’s mauling of George Allen after his macaca comments. Accountability works all around.
This, IMO, strengthens my argument that even if it were possible to elect third-party progressive candidates to Congress, they would prove to be just as ineffectual as the Dems have been for the past several years. It also strengthens my argument that single-issue advocacy groups are a big part of the reason why progressivism is dead in Washington.
The consultants who work for Democrats also work for corporations and they consistently pitch progressive ideas as being “too liberal” not necessarily because they are, but because these consultants have a conflict of interest that either makes them unable to see things clearly — or that makes them corrupt. In any case, they are giving bad advice to the Democratic party and it’s resulted in nice fat paychecks for them. Serving the public, not so much.
Here’s the sad truth about the single-issue groups:
This brings me to the special interests in whom I had placed so much faith to counter such corruption. I had resisted joining in the critique of these groups because I thought they had some basis for playing both sides over the long term. But I thought they knew which side their bread was really buttered on, even so. Apparently not. Stoller describes them as having been co-opted by the corrupt system and lazily enjoying the fruits of the spoils like everyone else. I have to admit that even the most generous view shows they have lost sight of their own goals.
As Digby says, NARAL’s endorsements are evidence that the organization is either corrupted or clueless. NARAL endorses Lieberman; Digby is betting money that, if Lieberman is elected in November, he will change his stance on abortion. That’s not a bet I would take. See also Jane Hamsher’s post from last February on endorsements by NARAL and Planned Parenthood.
Now, I’ve had a problem with NARAL for a long time. This is not because I don’t support reproductive rights; it’s because NARAL has been, IMO, ineffectual in supporting reproductive rights. Back in the 1970s and 1980s I used to send them small donations; I stopped when I got tired of waiting to see anything from NARAL except solicitations for more donations. I’m not talking about results; I’m talking about effort. I couldn’t tell they were doing anything except sitting in their Washington offices with their heads up their butts. I was living in Ohio at the time, and I saw anti-choice propaganda and activity on a daily basis. And I could tell most of this stuff was being coordinated by large organizations, somewhere. But NARAL was invisible.
Planned Parenthood is another matter. They’re on the front lines; I admire them enormously. But they’re not primarily an advocacy group. They actually do stuff.
Here’s an interesting editorial from Buzzflash:
[W]hy are groups like the Sierra Club and Naral continuing to support Chafee, a Republican pawn of the Busheviks in the most Democratic of states?
We’d suggest follow the money.
Advocacy groups need contributions from wealthy “moderate” Republicans, so they need to show that they will support a Republican now and then, even if is counterproductive to achieving the mission of the groups.
It’s not a question of abandoning their “bi-partisan principles” if they were to oppose Chafee. To the contrary, they are abandoning their principles BY supporting him. They are just using a fig leaf of “bi-partisanship” to justify appealing to Republican “moderates,” mostly women, who give money to the organizations.
In other words, they are undermining their own purposes to get more donations, to do what? Undermine their own purposes some more?
See also this recent Paul Krugman column, “Centrism Is for Suckers.” Krugman points out that right-wing groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business engage in knee-jerk support for Republicans even on issues that are counterproductive to their causes. And they do this because in the long run keeping a Republican majority in Congress serves their interests. Krugman continues,
Now compare this with the behavior of advocacy groups like the Sierra Club, the environmental organization, and Naral, the abortion-rights group, both of which have endorsed Senator Lincoln Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, for re-election. The Sierra Club’s executive director defended the Chafee endorsement by saying, “We choose people, not parties.†And it’s true that Mr. Chafee has usually voted with environmental groups.
But while this principle might once have made sense, it’s just naïve today. Given both the radicalism of the majority party’s leadership and the ruthlessness with which it exercises its control of the Senate, Mr. Chafee’s personal environmentalism is nearly irrelevant when it comes to actual policy outcomes; the only thing that really matters for the issues the Sierra Club cares about is the “R†after his name.
Put it this way: If the Democrats gain only five rather than six Senate seats this November, Senator James Inhofe, who says that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,†will remain in his current position as chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. And if that happens, the Sierra Club may well bear some of the responsibility.
Soon you’ll be getting fat envelopes full of pretty Christmas stickers and solicitations for money from these groups. Don’t give them any.
And let’s kick Joe Lieberman out of the Senate.
The Betrayer
Sidney Blumenthal explains why George Bush needs Joe Lieberman in the Senate.
Lieberman has become an active obstacle to Democratic victory and one of the key bulwarks for protecting Bush’s one-party rule, essential for him to remain unaccountable for the rest of his presidency. For Bush, that is the importance of Lieberman.
House of Lords
When did being a U.S. Senator become an entitlement? I thought senators served at the pleasure of voters. But somebody must’ve changed the rules while I was napping.
Today the Cabbage writes (behind the firewall; see also Raw Story) about Ned Lamont’s challenge of Joe Lieberman’s Senate seat:
This isn’t a fight between left and right. It’s a fight about how politics should be conducted. On the one hand are the true believers — the fundamentalists of both parties who believe that politics should be about party discipline, passion, purity, orthodoxy and clear choices. On the other side are the quasi-independents — the heterodox politicians who distrust ideological purity, who rebel against movement groupthink, who believe in bipartisanship both as a matter of principle and as a practical necessity. …
… What’s happening to Lieberman can only be described as a liberal inquisition. Whether you agree with him or not, he is transparently the most kind-hearted and well-intentioned of men. But over the past few years he has been subjected to a vituperation campaign that only experts in moral manias and mob psychology are really fit to explain. I can’t reproduce the typical assaults that have been directed at him over the Internet, because they are so laced with profanity and ugliness, but they are ginned up by ideological masseurs who salve their followers’ psychic wounds by arousing their rage at objects of mutual hate.
Those last couple of sentences could describe what’s written on the Internets about anybody in American politics. But I skipped over the part of Brooks’s rant that compares netroots activists to fascists —
In the 1930’s, the Spanish Civil War served as a precursor to the global conflict that was World War II. And in a smaller fashion, the primary battle playing out on the smiling lawns of upscale Connecticut serves as a preview for the national conflict that will dominate American politics for the next two years.
Seems to me that there’s plenty of mob psychology on Lieberman’s side. For all the hysteria you’d think this was the first time an incumbent Senator faced a primary challenge.
Jonathan Chait is on a similar tear:
… if Lieberman’s allies are irritating and often wrongheaded, alas, his enemies are worse. Lieberman recently declared, “I have loyalties that are greater than those to my party.” Markos Moulitsas, the lefty blogger from Daily Kos who has appeared in a Lamont commercial and has made Lieberman’s defeat a personal crusade, posted this quote on his website in the obvious belief that it’s self-evidently absurd. But shouldn’t we all have greater loyalties than the one to our party — say, to our country? Partisanship isn’t nothing, but must it be everything?
Is he saying that opposition to Lieberman is unpatriotic? Weird.
Their technique of victory-via-purge is on display in Connecticut. Although Lamont decided on his own to run, the left bloggers made his campaign their central cause. One result is that Lieberman has announced his intention to run an independent candidacy should he lose the primary. Moulitsas and other Lamont supporters are filled with outrage that Lieberman has opened up the possibility of splitting the liberal vote and letting a Republican win.
Well, OK, some anger is appropriate here. But doesn’t this suggest that the whole Lamont crusade has sort of backfired?
If Lieberman loses the primary and runs as an independent, then splitting the vote to let a Republican win — a likely outcome — is not the fault of Ned Lamont and his supporters unless you assume Lieberman is entitled to his Senate seat, and that there’s something wrong with another Democrat challenging him for it. Why isn’t it the case that if a challenger wins a primary against an incumbent, that must’ve meant the voters wanted a change? For whatever reason?
And surely Lieberman realizes that if he runs as an independent he will likely be handing the seat to a Republican. What does it say about him that he’d rather the seat goes to a Republican than to a rival from his own party? And doesn’t this prove that Lieberman is a liability to the party?
The whole anti-Lieberman blog campaign has a self-fulfilling quality: They charge that Lieberman isn’t a Democrat, they drive him from the party, and they declare themselves to be correct. The more ex-Democrats they create, the more sure of their own virtue they become.
First Chait says that Kos et al. are too partisan; next they’re not partisan enough. Weird.
I keep hearing is that activists are applying an Iraq War “litmus test” to Lieberman. Or that Lieberman should be admired and supported for taking a “principled stand” on Iraq. In reverse order:
Lieberman’s stand on Iraq may indeed be “principled,” in that he sincerely thinks the invasion was the right thing to do. But if the voters disagree with that position, why should Lieberman be rewarded for holding on to it? Politicians can hold all kinds of positions for principled reasons, but if those positions are way different from my equally principled positions, I’m not going to vote for those politicians, am I?
And anyway, it’s not about the war.
Let’s go to Cenk Uygur for a reality check:
I am constantly amazed by how uninformed people are when their job is to inform others. Every press article or editorialI have been a centrist all my life and I was a Republican until five years ago. Lieberman doesn’t offend my non-existent leftist ideology. So why would a centrist be so angry with a senator who claims to be a centrist and tries to find common ground between the two parties? Because the Republicans today are so far to the right that going over to their side is abandoning centrists in favor of siding with right wing zealots.
He knows. Lieberman knows that these are the same guys who have been unabashedly using 9/11 as a political tool. He knows these are the same guys who linked Iraq and 9/11 when there was absolutely no connection. He knows they campaign against gays, immigrants and anyone else they can focus people’s hatred on. He knows they have devolved into a party of misinformation, propaganda, ill-conceived wars and religious zealotry — and he still loves them.
He doesn’t just vote with Republicans, he relishes it. He talks like them, he walks like them, he is them. It’s not the Iraq War vote people care about nearly as much as when he said, “It is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be commander-in-chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war we undermine Presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.”
That’s going out of your way to support not just their ideology and their war, but to support their demagoguery. It’s ugly and it reeks. We get plenty enough of that from Republicans, we don’t need any of that from so-called Democrats.
I’ve seen on the Lieberman issue completely misses the point. We are not against Joe Lieberman because we are leftists who require ideological purity. We are against him because he aids and abets an out of control Republican Party.
What’s sad about Jonathan Chait’s op ed is that Chait almost gets it. He writes:
A good window into the competing mentalities can be found in two arguments, one by prominent Lieberman supporters, the other by a prominent critic. First, the supporters. Writing in the Hartford Courant, Marshall Wittmann and Steven J. Nider of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council complain that “far too many Democrats view George W. Bush as a greater threat to the nation than Osama bin Laden.”
Those loony Democrats! But wait, is this really such a crazy view? Even though all but the loopiest Democrat would concede that Bin Laden is more evil than Bush, that doesn’t mean he’s a greater threat. Bin Laden is hiding somewhere in the mountains, has no weapons of mass destruction and apparently very limited numbers of followers capable of striking at the U.S.
Bush, on the other hand, has wreaked enormous damage on the political and social fabric of the country. He has massively mismanaged a major war, with catastrophic consequences; he has strained the fabric of American democracy with his claims of nearly unchecked power and morally corrupt Gilded Age policies. It’s quite reasonable to conclude that Bush will harm the nation more — if not more than Bin Laden would like to, than more than he actually can.
This is what Lieberman and his backers don’t understand. They piously insist that “partisanship stops at the water’s edge” and that they won’t take political potshots at a Republican president when he’s waging a war in America’s name — as if Bush were obeying this principle, and as if Bush were just another Republican president rather than a threat of historic magnitude. Lieberman seems to view the alarm with which liberals regard Bush as a tawdry, illegitimate emotion.
Yes, exactly. But then Chait turns around and says the netroots activists who support Lamont are worse. So we agree that there’s a case to be made against Lieberman, yet somehow it’s wrong to challenge Lieberman’s Senate seat.
I ask again — when did being a U.S. Senator become an entitlement?
Update: See Greg Sargent.
Distinctions
Last night President Bush, at a fundraiser in the suburbs of St. Louis, attacked Democrats for “waving the white flag of surrender” in Iraq, even though they haven’t. And he slammed media for exposing secret intelligence programs, even though they haven’t.
Peter Baker writes in today’s Washington Post:
Bush’s tone has turned tougher as he appears at more political events. At a Washington fundraiser this month, he said it was important that lawmakers “not wave the white flag of surrender” without asserting that any of them were actually doing so. In his appearance in this St. Louis suburb, he said directly that some Democrats want to surrender, adopting the more cutting approach of his senior political adviser, Karl Rove.
(Bush was in Missouri to raise money for Senator James Talent, a reliable Bush sycophant, who is closely trailing his Democratic challenger Claire McCaskill. Talent has three times the campaign war chest that McCaskill has, Baker writes, so please send McCaskill a donation if you can.)
Joan Vennochi writes in today’s Boston Globe that Bush is successfully changing the subject. Vennochi notes, first, that General Casey’s noble and sensible “withdrawal” plan is pretty much the same thing as the Democrats’ reckless and cowardly “cut and run” plan. Bush has downplayed this lack of distinction by saying troop presence would be “based upon conditions on the ground.” Which by now we all know means “based upon political expedience.”
But this week the White House seized upon the New York Times‘s story about the SWIFT program as their means for changing the subject. By stirring up unwarranted hysteria over the Times story, Bush is changing the subject of the nation’s political discourse away from Iraq (which is, um, not a happy place) to the preferred topics of terrorism and treason.
Bush condemned the report as “disgraceful,” administration officials piled on, and the political right joyously joined the chorus. Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, accused the Times of “treason.” The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times also reported on the financial tracking program, but most of the vitriol is aimed at The New York Times, whose parent company owns The Boston Globe. …
…Overreaching allowed the conservative news and talk show radio circuit to churn once again over what they label the left-leaning media. These patriots of the political right are constantly reminding us that US troops in Iraq are defending our liberty. Yet, they demonstrate amazing disdain for one critical piece of liberty those troops are defending — freedom of the press.
Overreaching also accomplished what it was supposed to accomplish. It turned attention away from Iraq and from Casey, his troop reduction plan and its conceptual parallel to the Democrats’ proposal.
Vennochi sites the Bryan Bender article on the actual non-secret status of the program.
At the Washington Post, Charles Babington and Michael Abramowitz echo Vennochi.
Senior administration officials say the president was outraged by articles in the New York Times and other newspapers about a surveillance program in which the U.S. government has tapped international banking records for information about terrorist financing. But his comments at a Republican fundraiser in a St. Louis suburb yesterday, combined with new moves by GOP congressional leaders, showed how both are working to fan public anger and reap gains from the controversy during a midterm election year in which polls show they are running against stiff headwinds. …
… Republican House leaders introduced a resolution yesterday condemning leakers and calling on the media and others to safeguard classified programs. … Republicans said the resolution will allow their members to register support for Bush’s anti-terrorism efforts and the anger that many feel toward news organizations. They said it also is designed to force House Democrats to stand with the media or Bush’s criticism of it — a choice many would prefer to avoid.
Democrats are drafting their own resolution but conceded the Republicans probably won’t let them vote on it. This is an example of why a Democratic majority in the House would be a good thing.
House Republicans are in full-tilt pander to the base mode. They’ve trotted out an “American values agenda” that’s a potpourri of every social wedge issue they could think of — guns, abortion, gay marriage, human cloning, flag burning, the Pledge of Allegiance, the Ten Commandments, plus some tax cuts. Gotta have those tax cuts.
“Family, faith, patriotism and hard work bind us together as Americans. Our laws should reflect those priorities,” said Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri.
Meanwhile, Democrats work on proposals to raise the minimum wage and a reform the Medicare prescription drug program designed to lower costs and close gaps in coverage, even though these items don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing as long as Republicans control Congress.
Now, if I were a Democratic political consultant I’d suggest that the Dems make an all-out effort to draw the distinction between them — serious about governing, working on real nuts-and-bolts issues like making Grandma’s prescription drugs a little more affordable instead of junk issues like flag burning and cloning, for pity’s sake. But that will be hard for the Dems to do, because too many of ’em are still voting with the bleeping Republicans. Arianna Huffington writes,
Yesterday’s Senate debate on flag desecration showed that Democrats are as clueless as ever about who they are and what they should stand for. Case in point, Hillary Clinton’s ongoing attempt to rebrand herself as a red state friendly DLC Dem by supporting a bill that would have criminalized flag desecration while still holding on to her liberal bona fides by voting against the Constitutional amendment banning it.
Are we all agreed that Senator Clinton will not be the Democratic nominee in 2008?
And it wasn’t just Hillary. Kerry, Biden, Boxer, Durbin, Kennedy, Leahy, Levin, Lieberman, Obama, and Shumer all also voted against the amendment but for the criminalization bill because, according to the Times, “Democrats who voted for the [bill] in effect bought themselves the right to claim that they had voted against flag desecration, potentially inoculating themselves against possible charges of lacking patriotism in a general election campaign.” In other words, they earned the right to declare that they actually voted against flag desecration before they voted “for” it (by voting no on the amendment). Yep, that’s exactly the kind of pragmatic thinking that “wins elections for Democrats”!
Naturally, Anne Kornblut at the New York Times turned this into a story about the “rift” in the Democratic party.
The divergent views of her position reflect a broader rift in the Democratic Party over whether the key to electoral success rests in winning over centrists or by drawing clear distinctions with Republicans by staking out unapologetically liberal positions.
I don’t think they’d have to stake out “unapologetically liberal positions”; I think they could make a distinction by staking out positions on real issues instead of phony ones. But they can’t do that if there’s no clear distinction to draw.
Zack Exley writes in The Huffington Post that the American people are being misunderestimated by both parties, and that people — even red state people — are ready to follow leaders who offer substance instead of sound bites.
It’s stating the obvious to say that Democrats have been triangulating themselves to death. However, I guarantee you that we will wind up doing it one more time if our candidates don’t make a quantum leap this cycle and present America with a big, credible, challenging way to save itself — on the environment, as well as other issues.
Of all recent presidential hopefuls, McCain does the best with that kind of rhetoric. “People want to work for something greater than themselves.” However, his free market dogma guarantees that he and all other Republicans of this era will always come up empty on specifics. And empty rhetoric doesn’t work in this area. People do yearn for something greater than themselves, but they are very good at sniffing out the difference between something worth real sacrifice and nice-sounding lines written by a Senate staffer.
I suspect Exley is right, although it’s hard for me to tell from here in New York what’s going on in the rest of America.
When I still lived in Missouri, for example, it seemed to me Missouri voters were more pragmatic than ideological. I remember back in the 1970s some “tax reform” interest group that was probably a front for something else got a referendum on the ballot that would have repealed sales taxes on food and drugs. This was about the same time that California voted in the infamous (and ruinous) Proposition 13 to cut property taxes, and “supply side” tax cut theories were the new new thing. But Missouri voters defeated the referendum by a wide margin, as I recall. They figured the reduction in revenue would either cause the state to go broke, or the state legislature would just raise taxes on something else. Leave well enough alone.
So, I think, even in the Rush Limbaugh Age there must be a lot of voters, even in red states, who are ready to listen to substantive ideas about how to make the government work again instead of fluff and nonsense about flag burning.
But in our current political culture, it would be just about impossible for those substantive ideas to ever reach the voters. As soon as any proposal comes out of a Democrat’s mouth, Republicans in Congress find a way to mock it, and then the entire VRWC echo chamber twists and spins the proposal to death, so that only a cartoon version of the proposal reaches the ears of voters. What happened to Rep. John Murtha’s redeployment proposal is a classic example. Thus, empty theatrics trump substance, time and time again.
Anyone who dares criticize President Bush’s Iraq policy is a “cut-and-run” Democrat. The White House’s object here is not to engage in a real debate about an exit strategy from Iraq; that would require acknowledging some complications, like the fact that Gen. George Casey, commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, believes it’s time to start bringing some troops home. The object is instead to either get the Democrats tangled up in Kerryesque complexities on Iraq—or intimidate them into changing the subject to other, less-potent issues for fear of looking like unpatriotic pansies.
These are the stakes: if Rove can successfully con Democrats into ignoring Iraq and reciting their laundry list of other priorities, Republicans win. It’s shameful that the minimum wage hasn’t been raised in nine years and that thousands of ailing Americans will ultimately die because of Bush’s position on stem-cell research. But those issues won’t get the Congress back for Democrats. Iraq can.
I suspect he is right.
You would think it would be the GOP running away from the war. Instead, in gamblers’ parlance, Republicans “doubled down” on Iraq. After the good news about Zarqawi’s death, they bet that by uniting behind Bush, they would shift the blame to the squabbling Democrats, even though the Democrats have no power at all to change—or even affect—policy on the ground. Rove’s notion is that strong and wrong beats meek and weak.
Ah, yes. President Bush is always wrong, but he’s wrong with such resolve we’re supposed to admire him for it..
It almost worked. It looked recently as if Democrats were so fearful of being cast as war weenies that they would change the subject. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid & Co. held a press conference on the Democratic issues for the fall that barely mentioned Iraq. Hillary Clinton tried to focus on a lengthy list of worthy issues that, except for the mistreatment of veterans, had little to do with the war.
Yep, that’s our crew of spineless wonders in Washington. Yet Alter sees a ray of hope.
But then, some Senate Democrats got smart for a change. They recognized that the party out of the White House doesn’t need a detailed strategy for ending a war, just a general sense of direction. When Dwight Eisenhower ran for president in 1952, his plan wasn’t any more specific than “I will go to Korea.” When Richard Nixon was asked how he would end the Vietnam War in 1968, he said he had a “secret plan”—and got away with it. So now 80 percent of Senate Democrats are united behind something called the “Levin-Reed Amendment.” The details of it (begin withdrawal without a firm timetable for getting out completely; diplomacy with the Sunnis; purging the Iraqi military and police of bad guys) are less important than that they finally came up with something.
Of course parrying “cut and run” with “Levin-Reed” won’t suffice. But Sen. Joe Biden’s riposte to the GOP’s symbolic roll-call votes—”The Republicans are now totally united in a failed policy”—is a start. This isn’t rocket science. Unless things improve dramatically on the ground in Iraq, Democrats have a powerful argument: If you believe the Iraq war is a success, vote Republican. If you believe it is a failure, vote Democratic.
Dems, Alter says, should get up every morning, look themselves in the mirror, and say “It’s not about us. It’s about them.”
Go for it, Dems.
See also: Sidney Blumenthal, “House of Shame.”