Category Archives: conservatism

Home Alone III

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The Bush Administration’s downward spiral continues. A new Washington Post/CBS News poll shows Bush’s popularity at another new low; 58 percent question his integrity.

The question at hand is: What’s he gonna do about it?

Many’s the cable news bobblehead who says that he can come back from such a popularity low. Reagan did it, they say. Other presidents have done it. It can be done.

Yes, it can be done. But not by George W. Bush.

Last May I wrote that Bush is a one-trick pony. Bush and his circle of enablers found a way to bamboozle the public into accepting a spoiled, lazy frat boy as their glorious leader. Their trick worked really well, for a long time. But now that the public is catching on, they don’t have another trick.

Five months ago Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei wrote at WaPo that Bush had spent his political capital. From May 31, 2005:

Through more than four years in the White House, the signature of Bush’s leadership has been that he does not panic in the face of bad poll numbers. Yet many Republicans on Capitol Hill and in the lobbyist corridor of K Street worry about a season of drift and complain that the White House has not listened to their concerns. In recent meetings, House Republicans have discussed putting more pressure on the White House to move beyond Social Security and talk up different issues, such as health care and tax reform, according to Republican officials who asked not to be named to avoid angering Bush’s team.

“There is a growing sense of frustration with the president and the White House, quite frankly,” said an influential Republican member of Congress. “The term I hear most often is ‘tin ear,’ ” especially when it comes to pushing Social Security so aggressively at a time when the public is worried more about jobs and gasoline prices. “We could not have a worse message at a worse time.”

Baker and VandeHei quoted conservative “pundits” who were as clueless as the White House. For example, Newt Gingrich advised that Bush focus harder on “personal” Social Security accounts, and Bill Kristol thought that pushing through John Bolton’s nomination for UN ambassador would be just the thing to rally the public. Can we say, “out of touch”?

The Bushies continued to party until Katrina broke in and flipped on the lights. Now we’re two months past Katrina, and the Bushies still show no signs of being able to update their act.

At Salon, Sidney Blumenthal writes that the Bush’s famous “bubble,” which protected him from all unpleasantness, has turned into a bunker:

His nomination of his White House legal counsel Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court was an acknowledgment of his sharply narrowed political space. Bush believed he could thread the needle with her because her record was unknown. While the Republican masses supported him, the Leninist right staged a revolt. In Bush’s cronyism and opportunism, they saw his deviation. He was the disloyalist. With the prosecutor’s indictment imminent, Bush withdrew Miers and caved. Broadly unpopular, he could not suffer a split right. His new nominee, federal Judge Samuel Alito, a reliable sectarian, is a tribute to his bunker strategy.

Hostage to his failed fortune, Bush is a prisoner of the right. His administration has become its own little republic of fear. Libby’s public trial will reveal the administration’s political methods. Cheney, along with a host of others, will be called to testify. Whatever other calamities may befall Bush, their specter harries him to the right. “Disunity, dissolution and vacillation” are hallmarks of “the path of conciliation,” as Lenin wrote in “What Is to Be Done.” The vanguard on “the path of struggle,” criticized for being “an exclusive group,” must oppose any retreat proposed by the “opportunist rearguard.” “We are marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand. We are surrounded on all sides by enemies, and we have to advance almost constantly under their fire.”

Bush’s last refuge is a place light years to the right of the American mainstream. From there, he has no where to go but down.

Also: Today’s Paul Krugman, online. You will enjoy this. Pass it on.

We Don’t Need No Steenkin’ Paternalism

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There was much arguing yesterday about the Casey decision, which struck down a provision requiring husbands to be informed of their wives’ plan to abort. SCOTUS nominee Alito didn’t have a problem with this. Several righties yesterday claimed we lefties were being hysterical when we said such a provision amounted to giving husbands a veto.

Here is an explanation of Casey by Ed Whelan of the very rightie National Review Online:

Subject to several exceptions, that provision required that a physician performing an abortion on a married woman obtain from her a signed statement that she had notified her spouse that she was about to undergo an abortion. Such notice was not required where the woman states that (a) her spouse is not the father of the child; (b) her spouse cannot be located; (c) the pregnancy resulted from spousal sexual assault that had been reported; or (d) that she has reason to believe that furnishing notice would likely result in the infliction of bodily injury on her (by her spouse or by any other person). Notice was also not required in the event of a medical emergency.

As I’ve written earlier, one of the most common qualities of rightiness is an inability to make a distinction between rhetoric and reality. In this situation, righties take the rhetoric at face value (See? She doesn’t have to get permission; she doesn’t have to provide a document if the husband might hurt her) and fail to comprehend how these little requirements might actually function in the real world, in real lives, in real marriages.

It’s not crystal clear to me whose signature would have been required. If she has to get her husband’s signature then we’re essentially looking at a permission slip; a husband who disagrees with the decision is likely not going to sign it. If the wife merely has to sign an affadavit stating that she informed her husband, then most wives who are afraid to speak to their husbands are simply going to lie and say they informed him when they didn’t. And that fear may not be that he will break her teeth; it’s just as likely she fears he will hate her if he found out, and the marriage would be damaged. And an emotionally abusive husband may not strike her but would find other creative ways to make her life hell.

Whelan continues,

All members of the panel agreed that the relevant question was whether the spousal-notice provision constituted an “undue burden” under the analysis that had been set forth in O’Connor’s opinions (which all agreed provided the governing legal standard). … Alito explained at length why the analysis that O’Connor had offered in her opinions established that the spousal-notice provision did not constitue an “undue burden”. … It is of course true that, in the subsequent Supreme Court appeal, O’Connor ruled that the spousal-notice provision did constitute an undue burden. But Alito’s opinion compellingly demonstrates that the body of O’Connor’s writings that was then available to him supported the opposite conclusion.

So a fair summary of Alito’s opinion is that he read O’Connor’s opinions to indicate that a spousal-notice provision that had all sorts of exceptions did not constitute an undue burden. No one should present the case as having anything to do with spousal consent rather than notice, no one should misrepresent the scope of the exceptions, and no one should read the case as expressing Alito’s own constitutional or policy views (as opposed to his reading of Supreme Court precedent) on any aspect of abortion.

Let it not be forgot that O’Connor is more conservative than anything else; just because she expressed a more liberal view in some opinions doesn’t erase the fact that her worldview is more rightie than leftie. In essence O’Connor tends to veer left in those cases in which she might have had some personal experience (such as sex discrimination) and therefore “gets it.” But like most righties, when she wanders outside the realm of her personal experiences the real world becomes a foreign place for her, a place she can’t even imagine. And the fact that Alito couldn’t see the burden is prima facie evidence that he can’t think outside a rightie box.

The only way the notification provision wouldn’t be burdensome to many women is if it wasn’t enforced. If the women could simply swear they spoke to their husband even if they didn’t, without fear of repurcussion, then perhaps it wouldn’t be all that burdensome. But the only purpose of such a law would be to cause the woman seeking an abortion more stress and grief. In other words, the essential point of such legislation is to be burdensome.

Righties tend to fall into the argument that the provision wasn’t burdensome because it was toothless, which ought to be a clue to them that the intent of the law was burdensome, indeed.

And if the lie was something that could come back to bite the wife someday, then it would be very burdensome. And it’s not clear to me if the wife or the medical facility that performed the abortion could face litigation from an angry husband who found out. Can of worms, people?

The provision represents another rightie tendency, which is that righties essentially distrust human beings to make their own decisions. We saw that during the Terri Schiavo flap, when all manner of legislation was proposed that would have allowed government to intrude in a family’s end-of-life decisions. To a rightie, human beings are mindless beasts who need to be controlled by Big Brother so they don’t make “bad” decisions; i.e., decisions with which the rightie disagrees. And righties always assume that people who make these “bad” decisions have done so because they don’t think. Notice all the legislation imposed by states intended to make women reflect on a decision to abort, as if women can’t think for themselves. It’s beyond their comprehension that most women who decide to abort do understand exactly what a pregnancy is and realize that abortion is a serious matter.

Their whole attitude is insulting to women and reeks of the vilest kind of paternalism. Which, frankly, pushes a lot of buttons. So some of us do find righties and their twisted idea that they should have the power to control the rest of us more than infuriating. This is not “hysteria.” This is anger. Righteous anger.

I suspect that most married couples discuss a decision to abort without having the law tell them to do so. I also believe that any woman who fears her husband needs to either get over her fear or get a divorce; that’s not the way any human being should go through her life. But these are matters people need to work out for themselves. Big Gubmint need not be involved.

Update: Emily Bazelon has an excellent explanation of the Casey decision at Slate.

…the [Supreme] court rejected Alito’s narrow reading of what sort of regulation constitutes an undue burden. O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter wrote: “A finding of an undue burden is a shorthand for the conclusion that a state regulation has the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus.” The definition of an undue burden on the right to abortion as a “substantial obstacle” wasn’t exactly what the pro-choice crowd wanted to hear. But it was a lot better than the “severe limitation” prohibition, or veto, that Alito had propose–definitions that would have allowed much more extreme restrictions.

The triumvirate also parted company with Alito entirely over his vision of the rights of husbands. The Constitution did not permit states to require wives to tell their husbands before getting an abortion, the Supreme Court majority found. The O’Connor-Souter-Kennedy opinion cited a lot of trial testimony about the prevalence and danger of domestic violence. Pennsylvania’s law exempted wives who’d been raped by their husbands, but not those who’d been coerced into “sexual behavior other than penetration,” the three justices noted. They continued:

In well-functioning marriages, spouses discuss important intimate decisions such as whether to bear a child. But there are millions of women in this country who are the victims of regular physical and psychological abuse at the hands of their husbands. Should these women become pregnant, they may have very good reasons for not wishing to inform their husbands of their decision to obtain an abortion. Many may have justifiable fears of physical abuse, but may be no less fearful of the consequences of reporting prior abuse to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Many may have a reasonable fear that notifying their husbands will provoke further instances of child abuse; these women are not exempt from [Pennsylvania’s] notification requirement. Many may fear devastating forms of psychological abuse from their husbands, including verbal harassment, threats of future violence, the destruction of possessions, physical confinement to the home, the withdrawal of financial support, or the disclosure of the abortion to family and friends.The dissenters, by contrast, adopted Alito’s sunnier, husband-centered version of marriage. Then Chief Justice William Rehnquist (joined by Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Byron White), emphasized “a husband’s interests in procreation within marriage and in the potential life of his unborn child.” Rehnquist paid Alito the high compliment of directly quoting his words about the good that could come from requiring women to talk to their husbands. “This participation might in some cases result in a decision to proceed with the pregnancy,” Rehnquist concluded.

Righties keep claiming that we who oppose the notification requirement are hopelessly ignorant when we say it might cause women to suffer harm. I guess three members of the Supreme Court are hopelessly ignorant. The justices, of course, assumed that women who fear their husbands would have complied with the law.

Home Alone II

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Nancy Gibbs and Mike Allen write in Time that George Bush has become estranged from his closest advisers:

“The problem is that the President doesn’t want to make changes,” says a White House adviser who is not looking for a West Wing job, “but he’s lost some of his confidence in the three people he listens to the most.” Those three are his Vice President, Dick Cheney, whose top aide, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, has been charged with brazenly obstructing the investigation into who leaked the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame; Bush senior adviser Karl Rove, who while not indicted has still emerged as a player in the scandal; and chief of staff Andrew Card, who gets some of the blame for bungling the response to Hurricane Katrina and even more for the botched Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers. “All relationships with the President, except for his relationship with Laura, have been damaged recently,” the White House adviser says. The closest aide who is undamaged is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice–who is off minding the rest of the world–and, of course, Bush himself. “The funny thing is everybody’s failing now, in which case perhaps it’s time to look at George Bush’s relationship with George Bush.”

According to Gibbs and Allen, some White House aides hope that this week’s crises have persuaded Bush that everything is not fine and that he must make changes, both in policy and in personnel. The plan is to re-launch brand Bush in January, repackaged with a new style, new policy ideas, and new members of the team.

That sounds grand, but the product will still be the same guy who won’t read newspapers and who abuses staff members who bring him bad news. And the old team primarily was expert at surrounding Bush with a perpetual, carefully crafted pageant that made him seem presidential even as he avoided doing the job of president. I believe that “Team Bush” is less a staff than a tightly knit web of codependence. Without his enablers, can Bush still be Bush? If not, just who or what will he be?

And even if Karl Rove escapes further legal problems and regains some of his old standing in the White House, there’s still the messy matter of Scooter Libby and his eventual trial. Last week some were speculating that Bush would issue pardons, but now it appears Scooter Libby will be excommunicated from BushWorld. John Dickerson wrote in Slate,

Scooter who? You may remember how George Bush’s friendship with Enron chairman Ken Lay evaporated when the energy company came under investigation. That looks likely to happen with Scooter Libby. Libby has resigned. Vice President Cheney has vouched for his patriotism and talents. And now the White House will attempt to change the subject.

The problem is that the Plame-Libby story is going to be stirred up again, and again, by the eventual trial. Also, Dickerson points out, the Bush base will likely want to rally around Libby, not shun him.

But as Bush plays down the scandal, he may be undermined by the kind of conservatives who recently pulled down Harriet Miers, and who may try to lead a more assertive political response. Karl Rove would prefer they stay quiet. He’d like it to become accepted wisdom that since Fitzgerald didn’t indict him today, he’s in the clear. Rove and his allies would like Patrick Fitzgerald’s 22-month investigation to become known as the Scooter Libby affair. Cheney, whose natural instinct would be to lash out at the prosecutor, is extremely unlikely to do so, given that the criminal investigation centered around his office is ongoing.

But will conservatives who revere the vice president and the hawkish worldview Libby was promoting go along? Many are instinctively inclined to rally around Libby the way they did around Oliver North during the Iran-Contra affair. Instead of seeing the evidence of Libby’s perjury, obstruction of justice, and false statements as efforts to protect his own skin, they’ll decry the “criminalization of politics,” and frame his actions in a patriotic narrative: Whatever lines Libby may have crossed, he was acting in the service of two noble goals. He was protecting his boss and defending the case for the war against Saddam Hussein. Supporters regard Libby’s obsession with refuting Joe Wilson as proper. They see him as merely fighting back against a partisan Democrat who lied about his mission and his findings.

Let’s face it; the extremist rightie “base” is bigger, stronger, and crazier than the Bush Administration. Bush’s position with the extreme Right is like that of a man gripping a venomous snake; if he loses control of the snake, it will bite. But it’s hard for other people to get chummy with a guy gripping a snake.

Also in Time–in his usual halfassed way, Joe Klein almost gets a clue:

Bush’s White House is a conundrum, a bastion of telegenic idealism and deep cynicism. The President has proposed vast, transformational policies—the remaking of the Middle East, of Social Security, of the federal bureaucracy. But he has done so in a haphazard way, with little attention to detail or consequences. There are grand pronouncements and, yes, crusades, punctuated with marching words like evil and moral and freedom. Beneath, though, is the cynical assumption that the public doesn’t care about the details—that results don’t matter, corners can be cut and special favors bestowed.

Klein, if you don’t know by now the idealism is an act, there’s no hope for you. Even though you write several good paragraphs later, such as:

Bush opposed a Department of Homeland Security, then supported it as a campaign ploy—and then allowed it to be slapped together carelessly, diminishing the effectiveness of the agencies involved.

The White House proposed a massive Medicare prescription-drug plan and then flat-out misrepresented the true costs (and quietly included a windfall for drug companies). Every bit of congressional vanity spending, every last tax cut, was approved. Reagan proved that “deficits don’t matter,” insisted Vice President Dick Cheney.

Like I wrote in the last post–Bushies are not serious about governing. And here Klein actually gets good–

Republicans seem better at campaigns, permanent and otherwise, than Democrats. It may be that conservatives just don’t take governance as seriously as liberals do, and therefore have more freedom to maneuver. Didn’t Reagan say government was “the problem, not the solution”? The very notion of planning for the common good, especially long-term planning, seems vaguely … socialist, doesn’t it? The Bush Administration is filled with hard-charging executives but bereft of meat-and-potatoes managers. Not much priority is placed on pedestrian things like delivering the ice to New Orleans or keeping the peace in Baghdad.

Klein goes on to describe the way everything about the Bush Administration, including war, is just part of their perpetual political campaign. It’s actually worth reading. This is Klein, of course, so he’ll be back to wanking in next week’s issue.

And finally–while you’re at Time, don’t miss their article on Patrick Fitzgerald. Makes me want to take the lad home and adopt him.

Michelle Malkin, Moran

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I’m sure Michelle Malkin would feel outraged if I said everyone of the pro-war Right was semi-literate, like the famous “morans” fellow. But Malkin assigns the following attributes to everyone on the antiwar Left:

These are people, remember, who liken Iraqi terrorists to America’s Minutemen during the Revolutionary War.

Who oppose not only the war in Iraq, but also the invasion of Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Who believe the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and at Shanksville, Pa., were a Bush conspiracy with Israel and/or Saudi Arabia.

Who applaud when left-wing professor Ward Churchill gloats about “chickens coming home to roost” and suggests that the peace movement should support the fragging of American troops. …

…Who believe Saddam Hussein should be freed and Guantanamo Bay emptied.

Who carry around banners that proclaim “WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS WHEN THEY SHOOT THEIR OFFICERS.”

I am sick to death of this crap. I consider myself to be firmly planted in the antiwar Left, and I do not endorse any of those allegedly “leftist” positions.

I haven’t met any leftie who advocates fragging American troops or who rejoices at their deaths. Last month I walked among the 100,000 + people who marched around the White House with Cindy Sheehan to protest the war, and I saw no such sentiment expressed. In fact, I suspect most of the marchers would have objected to the suggestion that troops be fragged.

I realize that, somewhere in America, there are a few people opposed to the Iraq War who want American troops to be killed. Human beings believe all manner of things–alien abductions, Scientology, Elvis sightings. There are even whackjobs who believe it is justified to round up unpopular minority groups and keep them in detention camps. There are outliers, and there is mainstream, and most thinking people recognize the difference.

But this exemplifies Malkin’s essential mendacity; she finds the most extreme and objectionable behavior of the leftist fringe and implies that everyone who opposes the war must also endorse these opinions. If there is one leftie on the planet who calls for the fragging of American troops, then all lefties must want the troops fragged. Well, then, if one rightie is an illiterate goon, then all righties are illiterate goons.

By the same logic, I can assume all righties belong to the Klan. And Malkin is a Nazi.

Regarding equating Iraqi “terrorists” to Minutemen–I think it would be wise to make a distinction between terrorists and insurgents, but let’s go on–I do not equate suicide bombers or anyone who targets civilians with the Minutemen. I don’t doubt someone on the Left has said something to that effect, but that was a stupid thing to say. Just as it was stupid when Ronald Reagan said of the Nicaraguan Contras:

They are our brothers, these freedom fighters, and we owe them our help. I’ve spoken recently of the freedom fighters of Nicaragua. You know the truth about them. You know who they re fighting and why. They are the moral equal of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French Resistance. We cannot turn away from them for the struggle here is not right versus left; it is right versus wrong.

You might remember the contras as the jolly crew who routinely sliced off women’s breasts, among their other gently persuasive techniques.

The part about 9/11 being a Bush conspiracy–yeah, I’ve run into them, too, but again we’re talking about a small minority. It’s an absurd idea; Bush isn’t competent enough to have pulled it off.

I’ve never met a leftie with any love for Saddam Hussein. Let the trial proceed. But for Guantanamo, to say that care should be taken that prisoners there are actually guilty of something, and treated humanely even if they are, is not the same thing as saying that Guantanamo Bay should be emptied. The day may come when Americans may be ashamed that it was not emptied, however, and I hope to live long enough to see that day. I hope Malkin lives long enough to see that day, too.

I know that some on the Left were opposed to military action in Afghanistan after 9/11, but I believe that was a minority position. If you know of a poll that says otherwise, let me know.

The line I ellipsed out, btw, is “Who use the names and images of dead American soldiers against their families’ wishes to propagate anti-Bush hatred.” Some on the Right consider any usage of the names and images of fallen soldiers, even in solemn remembrance, to be attempts to “propagate anti-Bush hatred.” This is their hangup, not mine. I’m opposed to using their names and images in any way that would be disrespectful to the dead. But if reminding people that Americans are being killed in Iraq amounts to propagating “anti-Bush hatred” — too bad.

Righties Don’t Get Racism

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Most righties appear to appreciate that racism is bad, but they have a remarkably crude understanding of what racism actually is.

Today’s illustration: This rightie blogger who accuses Steve Gilliard of “racism” for lampooning Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele. Lt. Gov. Steele is pictured in old-style minstrel show “blackface.”

“File under category of: ‘Racist Imagery — It’s OK If You Are A Liberal'” says the rightie.

A few commenters noted that Mr. Gilliard is, in fact, African American. This didn’t seem to make a dent in the outrage. “The idea that a person should be ‘allowed’ to say something only because he is part of a certain group is repugnant.”

I personally don’t see how putting Lt. Gov. Steele in blackface is as bad as, say, portraying Kerry and Edwards as the Ambiguously Gay Duo or ridiculing John Kerry by dressing him as a woman. These images are homophobic and sexist, respectively, because the only point to them is ridiculing the subjects by associating them with a “substandard” group.

But in the News Blog photo of Lt. Gov. Steele, the imagery has a more specific point. I take it that Lt. Gov. Steele has a history of being spineless on racism. And “blackface” has long symbolized African-American acquiescence to racial oppression. If you understand the symbolism, you appreciate that Steve’s imagery is making a statement in opposition to racism. And that would be true if a white blogger with Photoshop had put Lt. Gov. Steele in blackface.

They’re slow, I tell you.

Rosa Parks

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There’s little to say about Rosa Parks’s courage and the significance of her life that hasn’t already been said. Jeanne d’Arc is particularly eloquent.

Across the Blogosphere, left and right, bloggers are paying tribute to Mrs. Parks, who died last night at the age of 92.

Although mostly heartfelt, the praise from some rightie bloggers underscores what to me is the most amazing attribute of rightiness, which is the inability to apply lessons of history to the present. Although the faces and causes change, the American Right still reflexively smacks down anyone who dares to take a stand for the dignity of the individual or to speak a truth the Right doesn’t want to hear. Like Rosa Parks.

The liberal struggle for equality and individual rights versus the conservative struggle to keep power and privilege in the hands of a select few is the most persistent theme in American political history. Although slavery was the mother of all inqualities, abolition didn’t stop the struggle. New movements gain attention–labor, women’s suffrage, civil rights, women’s rights, native American rights, gay rights. Time and again, a segment of American citizenry rises up and declares it will sit in the front of the bus with The Man. And then we go through the same old dance–the Right lashes back, smears the instigators, swears that if X happens it will be the end of civilization as we know it, attempts to use law to hold back the liberal tide, fails, and then gradually loses popular support as people figure out the change wasn’t so bad after all. And two or three generations later, the Right declares it was for X all along.

And they cannot learn. Earlier this year I had a conservation with a rightie about “activist judges.” I mentioned Brown v. Board of Education, and the rightie lashed back in irritation — how come you lefties always bring up Brown? We bring it up because it exemplifies the same old learning curve we keep having to repeat. In fact, I believe the Right’s bugaboo about “activist judges” originated with the Brown decision. Later would come other decisions, such as Engel v. Vitale and Roe v. Wade, always followed by the same rhetoric. X is a threat to the American way of life. X takes rights (i.e., privileges) away from people. X is a usurpation by the federal government of states’ rights. And X will lead to moral depravity (e.g., miscegenation after Brown, godlessness after Engel, rampant promiscuity and a “culture of death” after Roe).

Same old, same old. When the privileged few are prevented from using state and local government as agents of oppression–whether oppression of racial minorities, religious minorities, women, or any other not-privileged group–they throw collective temper tantrums and whine that government is taking away their rights. And anyone who stands up for equal treatment under the law had better have a thick skin, because the Right will attack.

And the learning comes slow. After 40 years, there are still pockets of resistance to the Montgomery bus boycott. I found some on the blogosphere today. This blogger calls Parks a “pawn” of the NAACP, for example. (Fact is, Parks was a long-time NAACP worker who knew very well what she was doing when she sat on that bus; she was nobody’s “pawn.”) Although I was a toddler when the Brown decision was handed down, the resulting fight over school desegregation was still white-hot when I was high school. An all-white high school, btw. And the standoffs on school prayer and abortion seem not to have budged much after all these years.

This blogger writes, “The civil rights leaders of today pale in comparison to Parks and her compatriots.” That’s what they always say. In the 1950s, Parks and Martin Luther King were vilified soundly by the Right. As were Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass in their day.

Tweak the racial epithets, and the invective hurled at Rosa Parks in 1955 becomes the same invective hurled at Cindy Sheehan today.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Mired in Miers

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To tell the truth, I haven’t thought much about Harriet Miers. I figured (a) everything we are hearing about her is spin, and (b) her nomination could be withdrawn before there are hearings, so she’s a bridge we may never have to cross. Bloggers of the Right are thinking about her a lot, though. NZ Bear provides a table showing where righties are coming out on Miers–pretty solidly against.

And I’m wondering if one of those righties opposed to the nomination of Harriet Miers is … Harriet Miers.

Last week we heard that she gave half-assed answers to a questionnaire required by the Senate for federal judicial nominees. Embarrassing answers, in fact. David Savage wrote in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times that some scholars who saw her answers are shocked she made it out of law school.

At one point, Miers described her service on the Dallas City Council in 1989. When the city was sued on allegations that it violated the Voting Rights Act, she said, “the council had to be sure to comply with the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection Clause.”

But the Supreme Court repeatedly has said the Constitution’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” does not mean that city councils or state legislatures must have the same proportion of blacks, Latinos and Asians as the voting population.

“That’s a terrible answer. There is no proportional representation requirement under the equal protection clause,” said New York University law professor Burt Neuborne, a voting rights expert. “If a first-year law student wrote that and submitted it in class, I would send it back and say it was unacceptable.”

David Stout of the New York Times wrote last week,

The contentious nomination of Harriet E. Miers to the Supreme Court hit another snag this afternoon when both the Republican chairman and ranking Democrat of the Senate Judiciary Committee said her responses to senators’ questions had thus far been unsatisfactory.

The committee chairman, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said Ms. Miers should redo a questionnaire prepared by a bipartisan Senate panel because her initial responses had been insufficient on “many, many of the items.”

The ranking Democrat, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, agreed that Ms. Miers’s effort on the questionnaire had been “inadequate,” adding that some of his Senate colleagues had found her responses “ranged from incomplete to insulting.”

So what’s up with this? Surely Ms. Miers has noticed people are questioning her qualifications. You’d think she’d have tried a little harder.

But this morning on ABC’s “This Week,” David Brooks (whose New York Times column today is truly insipid but safely tucked away behind a subscription wall) said that he didn’t believe President Bush would allow Miers to withdraw even if she wanted to. I didn’t note down the exact quote, but Brooks said that if Miers went to Bush and told him she’d rather not go forward with the nomination, he’d say, forget it; we’re fighting this thing through.

I don’t remember where I read it, but somebody said last week that the Miers nomination was bordering on cruelty to Harriet Miers. She’s not ready for prime time, and everyone in America seems to know this but George W. Bush. Oh, and Hugh Hewitt. Not exactly the Brainiac Twins.

The sloppiness of Miers’s answers on the Senate questionnaire raises questions about how much she really wants the job.

Rightie blogger Stephen Bainbridge noted last week that Miers has a reputation for being meticulous about details, but her questionnaire answers said otherwise.

Matthew Scully wrote of SCOTUS nominee Harriet Miers that:

... Harriet Miers, in everything she does, gives high attention to detail. And the trait came in handy with drafts of presidential speeches, in which she routinely exposed weak arguments, bogus statistics and claims inconsistent with previous remarks long forgotten by the rest of us. If one speech declared X “our most urgent domestic priority,” and another speech seven months earlier had said it was Y, it would be Harriet Miers alone who noted the contradiction.

… It may be, in fact, that a details person is just what the Supreme Court needs right now. …

…Then David Hoffman found a puzzling conflation of venue and subject matter jurisdiction in Miers’ Senate Judiciary questionnaire. Next my friend and colleague Vic Fleischer parsed another section of the questionnaire and concluded:

I’m sort of amazed this woman made it through a clerkship. The most desperate cries for the red pen: “An example, of this distinction …” (delete the comma!), “position, we were against flag burning” (semi-colon or period, not comma), “requirements, as well” (awk).

… The problem goes beyond misplaced commas. Her answer sounds like that of an earnest (but not overly bright) high school student writing a practice essay for the SAT. “The Council was free to state its policy position, we were against flag burning.” Hmmm. Did the Council state its policy position, or did it enact a statute? Did the Council itself have an obligation to consider whether the ban was constitutional? If not, why not? Should the Council just enact whatever it wants, constitutional or not, and wait for the courts to knock it down?

The world is full of bright people who can’t spell and punctuate and whose prose is boring as turnips. But in general I believe that sloppy writing indicates sloppy thinking. People who think with precision usually write with precision, especially when they know the writing is going to be carefully scrutinized.

And if there is one thing a Supreme Court justice needs to be able to do it’s to think and write with precision. In controversial cases the written decisions of the justices are parsed to death by both the court-watching public and the entire judicial system. Regardless of Miers’s ideological predilictions, whatever they are, if she were to slap together written arguments as casually as she answered the questionnaire, her sloppiness could do considerable mischief.

(FYI, the famous Robert Bork WSJ essay on Miers’s writing inability is here.)

But is it possible she really could have done better on the questionnaire but chose not to? She may have consciously decided to do a poor job to poison her chances in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Or, it’s possible the fight for the nomination is so painful for her she couldn’t bring herself to spend time on the questionnaire, and raced through it to get it over with. (I have the same struggle every year with facing up to income tax forms, so I commiserate.)

The questionnaire raises another question, which is how much help Miers is (or is not) getting in the White House? From the David Savage article linked above:

Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, also an expert on voting rights, said she was surprised the White House did not check Miers’ questionnaire before sending it to the Senate.

“Are they trying to set her up? Any halfway competent junior lawyer could have checked the questionnaire and said it cannot go out like that. I find it shocking,” she said.

I’ve seen speculation that Bush charged ahead with the Miers nomination against the wishes of Cheney and Rove and other major players in the administration. Is it possible that the Miers nomination is so much Bush’s baby that administration officials are walking away from the fight? If that’s the case, the Bush White House has gone past “disarray” and is well on the way to “dysfunction.”

As long as we’re out on a limb, let’s go out a little further and consider the possibility that there are people in the White House who want the Miers nomination to be withdrawn to protect Bush. Recent news stories have told us some interesting things about Miers and her relationship to Bush. For example:

As Texas Lottery commissioner, Miers squashed an investigation into corruption at Governor Bush’s request. The following is from World Net Daily, believe it or not:

Larry Litwin was fired in 1997 as executive director of the Texas Lottery Commission because then-Governor George Bush wanted an investigation into possible criminal political-influence buying squashed, and then-commissioner Harriet Miers, a Bush appointee, complied with his wishes and terminated him – that is the story Litwin is prepared to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Litwin’s concerns over corruption in the agency he directed involved GTECH, the Rhode Island company that operated the lottery, prominent Texas lobbyists on GTECH’s payroll, and a laundry list of Texas politicians – Democrat and Republican. Those details and the facts surrounding his firing will be offered to the Senate Judiciary Committee as soon as GTECH delivers a letter to committee staff releasing him from a 1998 gag order negotiated to end his wrongful termination federal lawsuit against GTECH.

WND has learned Littwin’s testimony will disclose bi-partisan corruption, with money changing hands in a political influence buying scheme that spread Texas lottery money around widely, to Democrats and Republicans alike. Sources say Littwin’s testimony will put new light on the over $160,000 in payments the Bush gubernatorial campaigns made to Harriet Miers’ Locke Liddell law firm, including the $19,000 she was paid in 1995 to act as Bush’s personal emissary in a mission to make sure Ben Barnes kept the lid on George Bush’s explanation of preferential treatment he received when getting into the Texas Air National Guard ahead of a long list of other applicants.

Did that just say Bush got preferential treatment getting into the Texas Air National Guard? Hard to tell, if you get really precise about it. You could interpret this to mean there was a Ben Barnes story that Bush had to explain away. But the fact that World Net Daily published this is a sure sign of the Apocalypse. (Repent noooooooow!) And this is another issue I’m sure the Bushies would rather stay dormant.

And Miers may have some scandals independent of Bush, or at least without known connections to Bush. Jack Douglas and Stephen Henderson of Knight Ridder report:

Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers collected more than 10 times the market value for a small slice of family-owned land in a large Superfund pollution cleanup site in Dallas where the state wanted to build a highway off-ramp.

The windfall came after a judge who received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Miers’ law firm appointed a close professional associate of Miers and an outspoken property-rights activist to the three-person panel that determined how much the state should pay.

The resulting six-figure payout to the Miers family in 2000 was despite the state’s objections to the “excessive” amount and to the process used to set the price. The panel recommended paying nearly $5 a square foot for land that was valued at less than 30 cents a square foot.

Mediation efforts in 2003 reduced the award from $106,915 to $80,915, but Miers, who controls the family’s interest in the land, hasn’t reimbursed the state for the $26,000 difference, even after Bush appointed her to the Supreme Court.

At this point I’m opposed to Miers for the SCOTUS. And this would be true even if I had a memo from the spirit of Margaret Sanger telling me Miers was OK on Roe v. Wade. She’s just plain not qualified.

On the other hand, the hearings could be a ton of fun …

Update: Looks like the nomination’s days are numbered.

Ends and Odds

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Rumors are flying that Dick the Dick could resign. I think maybe we’re all getting a little overheated.

Also–via Kevin Drum, I see that Paul Waldman stumbled onto a truth I wrote about awhile back. A couple of truths, in fact. Waldman writes,

Yet Republicans (and more than a few Democrats) raise a caution. Americans, they argue, are pretty conservative; no matter what is going on this week or this month, conservatives far outnumber liberals, so Democrats always start at a disadvantage. Democrats who want their party to stand up for a strong progressive agenda, they claim, are barking up the wrong tree. Democrats must stick to the center, or lose.

Even those with impeccably liberal pedigrees are making this argument, such as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. “According to the network exit polls, 21 percent of the voters who cast ballots in 2004 called themselves liberal, 34 percent said they were conservative and 45 percent called themselves moderate,” Dionne wrote. … Michael Barone of the National Journal looked at the same numbers and pronounced us to have “a conservative electorate.” Evan Bayh, a probable candidate for president, cited the same figures to argue for a more centrist Democratic Party. “Do the math,” he said. Noam Scheiber of The New Republic pronounced the liberal/conservative/moderate split “the most important thing you need to know about contemporary politics.”


As I wrote earlier,

But the problem with this explanation is that the word liberal has been so demonized by the Right that even liberals don’t know what it means any more. I’d be willing to bet that a whopping large amount of people who call themselves “moderate” are liberals who don’t know it, or who would be liberals if someone could make a case for liberal government without some rightie goon dancing about shrieking “Tax and spend! Tax and spend!” …

….Frankly, I think genuine liberalism has been absent from public discourse and policy for so long that I think today’s voters might find it quite refreshing. Considering the younger ones have never been exposed to liberalism before, maybe we should call it something else and tell ’em it’s a new new thing. I bet they’d take to it like ducks to a pond.

Fact is, a lot of people who don’t call themselves liberals hold liberal ideas, whether they understand that those ideas are “liberal” or not. People don’t know what the word liberal means any more. The righties have done such a through job of demonizing the word that people are afraid of it. It’s like the hoards of people who say they believe in equal rights for women, “but I’m not a feminist.”

I smack such people whenever I meet one, btw, so if this applies to you, keep your distance.

Waldman writes that the “median voter” sure looks like a liberal.

At this moment in history, that voter is pro-choice, wants to increase the minimum wage, favors strong environmental protections, likes gun control, thinks corporations have too much power and that the rich get away with not paying their fair share in taxes, believes the Iraq War was a mistake, wants a foreign policy centered on diplomacy and strong alliances, and favors civil unions for gays and lesbians. Yet despite all this, those voters identify themselves as “moderate.”

And we know why this is true, don’t we? Waldman writes,

The answer lies in a decades-long campaign to make the word an epithet — from Ronald Reagan taunting Michael Dukakis as “liberal, liberal, liberal” to a host of Senate candidates who faced television ads calling them “embarrassingly liberal” or “shockingly liberal.” Through endless repetition, conservatives succeeded in associating “liberal” with a series of traits that stand apart from specific issues: weakness, vacillation, moral uncertainty, and lack of patriotism, to name a few.

For example,

Liberals may write best-selling books about why George W. Bush is a terrible president, but conservatives write best-selling books about why liberalism is a pox on our nation (talk radio hate-monger Michael Savage, for instance, titled his latest book Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder).

That’s exactly what I wrote here. I did a title search and found (as of May 2005):

Books by conservatives with the words liberal or liberalism in the title (not including the Michael Savage titles already named above):

* Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
* Ann Coulter, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right
* Ann Coulter, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter
* Mona Charen, Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First
* Mona Charen, Do Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (and the Rest of Us)
* Sean Hannity, Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism
* Sean Hannity, Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism
* John Podhoretz, How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane
* David Limbaugh, Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity
* Michael S. Rose, Goodbye Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption Into the Catholic Church
* Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Modern Liberalism and American Decline

If I expanded this search to include “The Left” I could list a great many more titles along the same lines, and most of them sold a respectable number of copies.

Now here’s my list of books by liberals with conservatives or conservatism in the title:

* Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

And that was the only title I found, unless you include:

* Michael Lind, Up from Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America

Mr. Lind is a recent convert from neoconservatism, and I don’t know for sure that he’s calling himself a liberal. So that title may not count.

As I wrote in an even earlier post, it’s easy to find broad-brush condemnations of liberalism coming from conservatism. But it’s remarkably difficult to find broad-brush condemnations of conservatism coming from liberals.

Sure, there was plenty of snarking about conservatism. But when liberals attack conservatives, liberals tend to be person- or issue-specific, and give reasons — This guy is a jerk because he did thus-and-so. This policy stinks because it’s going to have such-and-such effect.

Kevin suggests we fight back by “focusing on extremist conservative ideology, something we don’t do often enough.” We on the Blogosphere focus on it, but are we demonizing it the way the righties demonized liberalism? I’m not sure we’ve got it in us to do that. Although I’m willing to give it a shot.

But we’ve got to remember that conservatives are all about defending the Powers That Be–the corporations, the military-industrial complex, and various entrenched institutions dedicated to keeping the powerful in power and the playing field as uneven as possible. All they have to do to defeat us is make people afraid of us. Demonizing forces for change and real reform,* ensures that the status quo will win by default.

(*What righties call “reform” amounts to dismantling what’s left of the New Deal and reversing all civil rights case law since the McKinley Administration–“reforming” backward instead of forward, in other words. We might call that “unreform.”)

But liberalism has to do more than make people afraid of conservatives. We have to give people a vision of empowerment and hope, that government can be better, and can do better, to make America a better place for all of us.

And before we can do that we must neutralize what Steve M. calls the “Protocols of the Elders of Liberalism.”

Given that the Right pretty much controls mass media, that’s not going to be easy. But I believe we have to try. And maybe if enough people become disillusioned by the Right, they’ll be ready to listen to what we have to say.

The Coalition Crumbles

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Following up this post from Monday on the future (or lack thereof) of the conservative coalition, and yesterday’s post on The Tanking of the President— Kevin Drum has some thoughts I’d like to discuss–

The basic thesis of Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Off Center is that the Republican party has been taken over by its ultraconservative activist base, and this in turn has pulled the party far away from the center of the American electorate. Normally this would spell doom for a political party, but a variety of institutional controls have converged that are likely to keep Republicans in power for a long time despite their increasing distance from the mainstream. …

…the activist base of the Republican party is pretty far distant from the middle of American politics, and George Bush recognized this in his first term, mostly steering a center-right course. However, in his second term it’s all falling apart, just the way conventional political science suggests it should. The more that Bush panders to the Republican base (Social Security, Terri Schiavo), the more he loses the support of Middle America. At the same time, the more he tries to tack to the center (Katrina, Harriet Miers), the angrier his base gets. Centripetal forces are tearing the Republican coalition apart, and suddenly Beltway buzz suggests that Republicans might actually lose Congress in 2006.

This suggests two possibilities to me. The first is that conventional political science still has it right. It took a few years, but the radicalism of the Republican base is finally putting a stake through the heart of the party, just as you’d expect. The second possibility is that we wouldn’t even be talking about this if it weren’t for 9/11: Bush would have long ago lost control of his coalition and would have gotten clobbered in 2004. What we’re seeing today really is a special case, not a permanent realignment.

Then Kevin poses a question–is Bush going through a second-term slump that could blow over, or is the normal order of things finally reasserting itself?

First off, I think you have to separate Bush from the Republican Party and from the coalition. Both the party and the coalition have been forces in national politics long before Little Georgie decided to get into the family business. And they’ll still be around even if Little Georgie were to be abducted by space aliens and never seen again. It’s true they’ve been married to him for a while, but now they’re squabbling and heading for a nasty breakup. Even if they decide to stay married for the sake of politics, the marriage will never be what it was, and I doubt the Right will continue to rubber stamp Georgie’s every whim. I sincerely believe the Bush Era is over.

Now, what of the ultraconservative activist base? You might recall that, back in the 1970s, the Democratic Party for a brief time (notably the 1972 Democratic National Convention) was hijacked by what might be called an ultraliberal activist base. But the leftie activists never had any real power, and I can’t recall any of them being elected to Congress, never mind setting the agenda for the nation. The ultraconservatives have managed somehow to not only take over Congress and the White House, they press forward with their agenda as if a majority of Americans backed their agenda. Which, as was argued here, they don’t.

The ultrarighties have been able to do this because they have something the ultralefties did not–backing by a behind-the-scenes elite with considerable wealth and power. And with the backing of wealth and power the ultraconservatives have turned much of mass media into their own private echo chamber. Mass media genuflects to the ultraright agenda and treats it as if it were mainstream, whereas the ultraleft agenda has ever been greeted with jeers and scorn.

This, and the fact that most Americans, most of the time, do not pay much attention to what’s going on in Washington, enable the ultraright to treat Washington as its private playground. As long as the bulk of middle-class Americans are feeling secure and complacent, news from Washington is just so much elevator music.

However–and this is where we crank up the seeds-of-their-own-destruction theme–the ultraright agenda is a horrible blueprint for governing, and sooner or later the damage done will cause most middle-class Americans to feel a whole lot less secure and a whole lot less complacent. I believe that’s about where we are now.

It is possible, barring further scandals or disaster, the Bush-GOP-ultraright axis will hold together and keep Dems shut out of power, and with the help of mass media continue to bamboozle the American public. However, even if they get remarkably lucky, and Iraq becomes pacified, and the price of gas goes down, and Patrick Fitzgerald issues no indictments, the lives of ordinary Americans will continue to get harder and harder. Income will remain stagnant, jobs with decent wages and benefits will be increasingly scarce, states will continue to cut needed services, etc. That can’t change as long as the righties are in charge, because such are the fruits of rightie policy.

And, frankly, I don’t think they’re going to get that lucky.

Prediction: If the crunch comes the first thing the Right will do to save itself is throw George W. Bush overboard. We on the Left need to realize that the Right could survive a Bush denouement and maintain its grip on political power. In other words, we could utterly defeat the Bush-Cheney administration, even force them out of office, and still lose the war with the Right. We lefties need to be careful about that.

If Bush goes down the Right would have to find a new figurehead real fast, though, and it’s not clear to me who that might be. And if enough of their leadership (e.g., Frist, DeLay) is compromised and/or under investigation or indictment, it’s going to be very difficult for the Right to remain cohesive.

Unfortunately, the Right’s biggest asset through all this could be the inside-the-beltway Democrats, whom we can pretty much count on to fumble the opportunity. And the moneyed, powerful elite backing the Right and controlling mass media ain’t goin’ away anytime soon.

One more thought: We’d all love to see Bush and Cheney impeached and tossed out of office, but for a moment let’s be contrarian and consider if keeping a seriously lame duck Republican in office where citizens can see him and reflect on what a loser the once mighty Bush turned out to be could work to our advantage in the long run. And giving the GOP an opportunity to build new leadership in the White House before 2008 might work to their advantage. Just a thought.

Anyway, given our leadership vaccuum on the Left, it’s not clear to me how the Right’s crises will fall out. Feel free to make predictions in the comments.