The Word according to Dubya: 50 religious insights from George Bush.
Pastor Dan Rocks
Pastor Dan of Street Prophets is featured in the New York Times today. Go take a peek.
And I want to add that Pastor Dan’s Sunday morning service at Yearly Kos was a thing of rare beauty.
Update: Pastor Dan’s thoughts on the article.
Saturday Cartoons Plus
Don’t miss Bob Geiger’s Saturday cartoons.
If you’re near a newstand today, look for the September 2007 issue of The Atlantic Monthly (cover art: gray storm clouds over the White House). This is the “Lessons of a Failed Presidency” edition. I haven’t read it all yet, but I assure you Joshua Green’s “The Rove Presidency” by itself is worth the price of the issue. (If you’re already a subscriber, you can read it online here.) A few snips:
The story of why an ambitious Republican president working with a Republican Congress failed to achieve most of what he set out to do finds Rove at center stage. A big paradox of Bush’s presidency is that Rove, who had maybe the best purely political mind in a generation and almost limitless opportunities to apply it from the very outset, managed to steer the administration toward disaster.
In a nutshell, Rove believed he could create a political realignment like the ones brought about by the Civil War and the Great Depression.
Rove’s idea was to use the levers of government to create an effect that ordinarily occurs only in the most tumultuous periods in American history. He believed he could force a realignment himself through a series of far-reaching policies. Rove’s plan had five major components: establish education standards, pass a “faith-based initiative†directing government funds to religious organizations, partially privatize Social Security, offer private health-savings accounts as an alternative to Medicare, and reform immigration laws to appeal to the growing Hispanic population. Each of these, if enacted, would weaken the Democratic Party by drawing some of its core supporters into the Republican column. His plan would lead, he believed, to a period of Republican dominance like the one that followed McKinley’s election.
You’ll notice that most of these initiatives never came to pass, and the ones that did (like No Child Left Behind) are increasingly unpopular and will likely be axed once the Bushies are gone.
Rove’s vision had a certain abstract conceptual logic to it, much like the administration’s plan to spread democracy by force in the Middle East. If you could invade and pacify Iraq and Afghanistan, the thinking went, democracy would spread across the region. Likewise, if you could recast major government programs to make them more susceptible to market forces, broader support for the Republican Party would ensue. But in both cases the visionaries ignored the enormous difficulty of carrying off such seismic changes.
Green writes that Rove has vanity and hubris on an oceanic scale. In Rove’s World, his knowledge is infallible, his ideas are the only true ideas, and he demands deference even from senior members of Congress.
Rove’s behavior toward Congress stood out. “Every once in a while Rove would come to leadership meetings, and he definitely considered himself at least an equal with the leaders in the room,†a Republican aide told me. “But you have to understand that Congress is a place where a certain decorum is expected. Even in private, staff is still staff. Rove would come and chime in as if he were equal to the speaker. Cheney sometimes came, too, and was far more deferential than Rove—and he was the vice president.†Other aides say Rove was notorious for interrupting congressional leaders and calling them by their first name. …
… A revealing pattern of behavior emerged from my interviews. Rove plainly viewed his standing as equal to or exceeding that of the party’s leaders in Congress and demanded what he deemed his due. Yet he was also apparently annoyed at what came with his White House eminence, complaining to colleagues when members of Congress called him to consult about routine matters he thought were beneath his standing—something that couldn’t have endeared him to the legislature.
Rove pretty much had a free hand to run Bush’s domestic agenda — Rove’s agenda, really — just as Cheney was in charge of foreign policy while the Boy King rode his bicycle and took naps. But Rove ran White House policy like he ran his political campaigns, and that was his undoing. His style in campaigns was to be nasty and divisive, and that’s how he pushed the Bush domestic agenda — by division.
Rove, forever in thrall to the mechanics of winning by dividing, consistently lacked the ability to transcend the campaign mind-set and see beyond the struggle nearest at hand. In a world made new by September 11, he put terrorism and war to work in an electoral rather than a historical context, and used them as wedge issues instead of as the unifying basis for the new political order he sought.â€
“Rove’s style as a campaign consultant was to plot out well in advance of a race exactly what he would do and to stick with it no matter what,” writes Green. Going into Bush’s second term, Rove charged ahead with his well-plotted strategy and pushed Social Security reform. As support for the Iraq War soured, the Bush White House continued to put all of its energy into Social Security reform, utterly tone deaf to the changing national mood.
“The great cost of the Social Security misadventure was lost support for the war,†says a former Bush official. “When you send troops to war, you have no higher responsibility as president than to keep the American people engaged and maintain popular support. But for months and months after it became obvious that Social Security was not going to happen, nobody—because of Karl’s stature in the White House—could be intellectually honest in a meeting and say, ‘This is not going to happen, and we need an exit strategy to get back onto winning ground.’ It was a catastrophic mistake.†…
… The Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio says, “People who were concerned about the war, we lost. People who were concerned about the economy, we lost. People who were concerned about health care, we lost. It goes on and on. Any of those things would have helped refocus the debate or at least put something else out there besides the war. We came out of the election and what was our agenda for the next term? Social Security. There was nothing else that we were doing. We allowed ourselves as a party to be defined by—in effect, to live and die by—the war in Iraq.â€
Another factor: I’ve thought many times that the Bush White House has a weird inability to respond to unexpected events. Whenever something happens that was not on the schedule — like 9/11 or the tsunami or Hurricane Katrina or Dick Cheney’s hunting “accident” — they are flummoxed. Often they are slow to recognize the significance of an event until after everyone else on the planet has recognized it first. They are so focused on their pre-planned agenda they can’t see anything else. Green suggests this blinkered view is mostly Rove’s doing. In fact, Rove may have advised Bush to blow off Hurricane Katrina.
Hurricane Katrina clearly changed the public perception of Bush’s presidency. Less examined is the role Rove played in the defining moment of the administration’s response: when Air Force One flew over Louisiana and Bush gazed down from on high at the wreckage without ordering his plane down. Bush advisers Matthew Dowd and Dan Bartlett wanted the president on the ground immediately, one Bush official told me, but were overruled by Rove for reasons that are still unclear: “Karl did not want the plane to land in Louisiana.†Rove’s political acumen seemed to be deserting him altogether.
Most of all, Rove never seems to have figured out that at some point the White House had to put aside campaigning and start governing.
“It is a dangerous distraction to know as much about politics as Karl Rove knows,†Bruce Reed, the domestic-policy chief in Bill Clinton’s administration, told me. “If you know every single poll number on every single issue and every interest group’s objection and every political factor, it can be paralyzing to try to make an honest policy decision. I think the larger, deeper problem was that they never fully appreciated that long-term success depended on making sure your policies worked.â€
And, of course …
Rove has no antecedent in modern American politics, because no president before Bush thought it wise to give a political adviser so much influence. Rove wouldn’t be Rove, in other words, were Bush not Bush. That Vice President Cheney also hit a historic high-water mark for influence says a lot about how the actual president sees fit to govern. All rhetoric about “leadership†aside, Bush will be viewed as a weak executive who ceded far too much authority. Rove’s failures are ultimately his.
Now Rove and Bush are reduced to whining about how history will vindicate them. As if.
Freedom to Oppress?
I’m pleased that I got to meet and hang out with David Neiwert and Sara Robinson at Yearly Kos. It’s this sort of face-to-face time with smart thinkers and good people that makes YK (hence to be called Netroots Nation) so valuable.
Dave’s got a post up today that needs one little addition. Republican Rep. Bill Sali of Idaho “thinks Muslims should not have been allowed to say a prayer in the hallowed halls of Congress, nor should they even have representation there,” Dave writes, quoting this news story:
“We have not only a Hindu prayer being offered in the Senate, we have a Muslim member of the House of Representatives now, Keith Ellison from Minnesota. Those are changes — and they are not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers,” asserts Sali.
Not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers? “Well, perhaps they were, perhaps they were not,” writes Dave. “As far as anyone can discern, they were silent on the subject of Muslim American citizens. Some of them were in fact unrepentant racists, so seeking their advice may not be all that useful anyway.”
But what we do know about them is that they believed in the freedom of religion. It’s one of America’s true founding values. See, e.g., the First Amendment.
In fact, one of the Founders did speak to this. Thomas Jefferson wrote about this in his autobiography, discussing the adoption of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom:
The bill for establishing religious freedom, the principles of which had, to a certain degree, been enacted before, I had drawn in all the latitude of reason & right. It still met with opposition; but, with some mutilations in the preamble, it was finally passed; and a singular proposition proved that it’s protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word “Jesus Christ,” so that it should read “a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion.” The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.
Seems pretty clear to me. It’s a shame we elect people like Bill Sali who doesn’t share America’s true founding values, huh?
Update: Pastor Dan says Sali doesn’t know Scripture, either.
The Party’s Over
I’ve said before that people who praise “moral clarity” generally are neither clear nor moral. “Moral clarity” advocates are not into wrestling with the painful choices presented by complex moral issues; they just want a team to root for.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Stu Bykofsky, moral clarifier extraordinaire (hat tip to Will Bunch). Bykofsky thinks that what America needs is another 9/11.
Yes, you read that right. We need another 9/11 so that we can, once again, be united against the evil Other and stop bickering over minor destractions like the rape of the Constitution and the violation of every ideal Americans ever held dear. Bykofsky writes,
Because the war has been a botch so far, Democrats and Republicans are attacking one another, when they aren’t attacking themselves. The dialog of discord echoes across America.
Turn back to 9/11.
Remember the community of outrage and national resolve? America had not been so united since the first Day of Infamy – 12/7/41.
We knew who the enemy was then.
We knew who the enemy was shortly after 9/11.
Did we? Two years after 9/11, polls showed that nearly 70 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attaciks. Today, even after repeated debunking of that claim and an admission by George Bush that there was no Iraq-al Qaeda link, more than 40 percent of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was, somehow, involved. Last month Newsweek reported:
Even today, more than four years into the war in Iraq, as many as four in 10 Americans (41 percent) still believe Saddam Hussein’s regime was directly involved in financing, planning or carrying out the terrorist attacks on 9/11, even though no evidence has surfaced to support a connection. A majority of Americans were similarly unable to pick Saudi Arabia in a multiple-choice question about the country where most of the 9/11 hijackers were born. Just 43 percent got it right—and a full 20 percent thought most came from Iraq.
Bykofsky continues,
Because we have mislaid 9/11, we have endless sideshow squabbles about whether the surge is working, if we are “safer” now, whether the FBI should listen in on foreign phone calls, whether cops should detain odd-acting “flying imams,” whether those plotting alleged attacks on Fort Dix or Kennedy airport are serious threats or amateur bumblers. We bicker over the trees while the forest is ablaze.
Yes, these are sideshow distractions. The real issue is … what, exactly?
… we have forgotten who the enemy is.
It is not Bush and it is not Hillary and it is not Daily Kos or Bill O’Reilly or Giuliani or Barack. It is global terrorists who use Islam to justify their hideous sins, including blowing up women and children.
Yes, we don’t do things like blowing up women and children to justify hideous sins, huh?
Bykofsky continues,
What would sew us back together?
Another 9/11 attack.
The Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Rushmore. Chicago’s Wrigley Field. The Philadelphia subway system. The U.S. is a target-rich environment for al Qaeda.
Is there any doubt they are planning to hit us again?
If it is to be, then let it be. It will take another attack on the homeland to quell the chattering of chipmunks and to restore America’s righteous rage and singular purpose to prevail.
This is brilliant. We must unite against those who perpetrate mass destruction, and to do that we need more mass destruction. Bring it on. Just not New York City this time, OK? We’ve still got a hole in the ground from the last attack.
I remember after the 1991 Gulf War there was a flurry of news articles about post-war emotional letdown. Americans had rallied and cheered and tied yellow ribbons all over the bleeping landscape, yet after just a few days of cool shoot-’em-up television it was all over, and people had to take the ribbons down and go back to their humdrum, ordinary lives. I swear that I remember television interviews with people — not soldiers, mind you, just citizens who’d been watching the fun on television — who were tearful the party was over so soon.
Let’s face it: “national unity” is a high.
I think for New Yorkers the high was less pleasurable, because the grief was too deep. But even here, it was hard to let go. John Homans got to the heart of it in an absolutely brilliant essay in the August 21, 2006 issue of New York magazine:
In the city in the early weeks, a debate raged between those who resisted the emotional power of the event and those who gave in to it. People who’d seen World War II and Europeans, even rather hawkish and sympathetic ones, tended to wonder, after a while, whether it was time to get back to regular life again. One hated them at the time—their stiff upper lips were a luxury, and a vanity—but now, that argument is more interesting.
I like what Homans says above about the emotional temptation of September 11.
The memory of 9/11 continues to stoke a weepy sense of American victimhood, and victimhood, as used by both left and right, is a powerful political force. As the dog whisperer can tell you, strength and woundedness together are a dangerous combination. Now, 9/11 has allowed American victim politics to be writ larger than ever, across the globe. When someone from Tulsa, for example, says, “It’s important to remember 9/11 every day,†what he means is, “We were attacked, we are the aggrieved victims, we are justified.†But if we were victims then, we are less so now. This distorted sense of American weakness is weirdly mirrored in the woundedness and shame that motivate our adversaries.
Woundedness. Victimhood. Justification. Anger. Fear. Temptation. This is where Great Evil is born.
In our current tragicomedy of Daddy-knows-best, it’s a national neurosis, a perpetual childhood. (With its 9/11 truth-conspiracy theories, the far left has its own infantile daddy complex, except in that version, the daddies are the source of all evil.) No doubt, there are real enemies, Islamist and otherwise, more than ever (although the cure—the Iraq war—has inarguably made the disease worse). But the spectacular scope of 9/11, its psychic power, continues to distort America’s relationships. It will take years for the country to again understand its place in the world.
That’s why it’s such a temptation to stay in that place of false clarity, where the dull fabric of ordinary life has been ripped apart, and all become intoxicated on “righteous rage and singular purpose to prevail.” That was so much more satisfying than these “endless sideshow squabbles” about how to extract ourselves from Bush’s disastrous foreign policy or how to restore the constitutional balance of power. And what a drag it must seem to climb down from the dizzying heights of righteousness to consider whether we are, in fact, “safer.”
Yet those are the tasks in front of us — injecting sanity into our foreign policy, restoring the Constitution, establishing stronger national security. We all want parties to last forever, but they never do, and when they’re over there’s a mess to be cleaned up.
In fact, it was our national intoxication on the emotional high of September 11 that got us into most of the messes we face now.
Certainly, Islamic terrorists are a dangerous threat. They can crash airplanes and skyscrapers; they can bomb subways and commuter trains. But Islamic terrorists can’t destroy America. There aren’t enough of ’em to storm our capitol and occupy our land from sea to shining sea. Only we can destroy America, from within. And some of us are doing a heck of a job.
A year ago Steven Biel wrote for the Boston Globe:
The rhetoric about squandered national unity invokes a fleeting moment of bipartisanship and 90 percent presidential approval ratings. This apolitical golden age was supposed to be part of 9/11’s silver lining, along with the “end of irony” and the more enduring images and stories of heroism at the World Trade Center and on Flight 93. But less unity of this kind might have spared us some of the rancor and recriminations that make us seem so divided now.
Stu Bykofsky wants the party to resume. I say it’s way past time to sober up.
Elephants in Iowa
It says here “The musth can be defined as a periodical change of the behaviour of elephant bulls, which can last from some weeks up to some months. This change has got hormonal reasons. In the musth period a bull produces 40 to 60 times more of testosterone (male sex hormone) than in the non-musth time.” A bull elephant in musth exhibits “autistic behaviour” and will aggressively attack just about anything that moves.
“Bull elephants in musth” pretty well describes the Republican presidential candidates in Iowa.
Romney is ahead in Iowa, according to a new U. of Iowa poll, so let’s start with him. Yesterday Romney charged into Giuliani with a claim that as mayor, Giuliani turned New York City into a sanctuary for illegal immigrants. CBS News reports:
“If you look at lists compiled on Web sites of sanctuary cities, New York is at the top of the list when Mayor Giuliani was mayor,” Romney said at while campaigning in Iowa. “He instructed city workers not to provide information to the federal government that would allow them to enforce the law. New York City was the poster child for sanctuary cities in the country.”
Giuliani, also campaigning in Iowa, offered this response: “Frankly, that designation would not apply to New York City. What you got to look at in fairness to is the overall results — and no city in terms of crime, safety, dealing with illegality of all different kinds has done a better job than New York City.”
ABC News explains that New York became a “sanctuary city” by executive order signed by Mayor Ed Koch in 1989. But Giuliani did, in fact, maintain and defend the policy, and generally had a benevolent attitude toward illegal aliens who used city services.
The Republicans figure their best bet to hold down their losses in 2008 will be an all out Know-Nothing assault on immigrants and foreigners. They plan to demonize “illegal immigrants” day and night and stoke the flames of divisiveness and bigotry and hatred. The tactics often works for the right. But they’re not supposed to turn it on each other. Mormon Mitt couldn’t help himself. He had nowhere else to go. So today’s headlines are all about Giuliani’s catering and pandering to the hated and dangerous illegals.
Romney is being attacked in turn for his abortion stance, whatever it is. Iowans recently were “treated” to this robo-call, paid for by Brownback for President:
“Hello, this is an urgent alert for pro-life Iowa Republican voters. The Straw Poll is coming up in a few weeks and Mitt Romney is telling Iowans he’s firmly pro-life. Nothing could be further from the truth. As late as 2005, Mitt Romney pledged to support and uphold pro-abortion policies and passed taxpayer funding of abortions in Massachusetts. His wife Ann has contributed money to Planned Parenthood. Mitt told the National Abortion Rights Action League that ‘you need someone like me in Washington.’ Romney still supports life-destructive embryonic stem cell research and he still opposes the Human Life Amendment which is part of the Republican Party’s platform. Stand up for life and say no to Romney. This call has been paid for by Brownback for President.”
Mitt’s response: “I get tired of people that are holier than thou because they’ve been pro-life longer than I have.” (See also Joan Vennochi in today’s Boston Globe, who says that Mitt’s explanations for his pro-life past are, um, fanciful.)
Meanwhile, the Washington Times reports, “Mr. Paul’s campaign hands out fliers charging Mr. Brownback and Sen. John McCain of Arizona with having voted for a spending bill in 2005 that sends taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood.”
I’ll let DownWithTyranny explain Mitt’s other recent gaffe:
Yesterday Romney committed political suicide with his typically lame– though taped– answer to a question about why his very pro-war Mormon boys don’t serve in the military. The Republican base was stunned– and started gagging. Realizing the enormity of the screw-up of comparing his sons’ campaigning for their wealthy father to the sacrifice American families are making sending their sons and daughters to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Romney braintrust immediately started screaming “out of context.” They released the video, proving for everyone who didn’t witness it that it was totally in context and that Romney is just what he appears to be: just one of the bunch of pathetic pygmiesâ„¢ and the ultimate Empty Suit.
I don’t know if it’s possible for any of these clowns to commit political suicide. One of ’em could show up on the next nationally televised debate drunk and naked, and media would spin right over it. But let’s go on to …
Rudy! He’s number two. And the Washington Times says Rudy’s got an abortion problem.
In a state where “choose life” yard signs dot the mowed grass between the cornfields and country lanes, abortion can be a make-or-break issue for Republicans, both in the top tier and among those such as Mr. Tancredo looking to break out of the lower tier.
Dedicated pro-life voters make up more than 60 percent of potential Republican caucusgoers, and an even larger portion of the dedicated activists who get their family, friends and church members to turn out to vote. As a result, the issue has popped up continuously in the weeks leading up to Saturday’s Iowa Republican Party straw poll.
Rudy hasn’t even pretended not to support abortion rights. The Washington Times says “no such strong, credible [pro-choice] candidate has emerged in the modern era,” thereby admitting the GOP isn’t as open to pro-choice candidates as it claims to be. But since Rudy is the only pro-choice choice, maybe he’ll exceed expectations.
Several of the candidates are being attacked on religion. Mitt Romney has been blasted because of his Mormonism. And apparently being a Catholic or a Protestant isn’t safe, either. Wonkette:
There was a minor blow-up this past week between the two Republican candidates who are aiming for the religiouser-than-thou vote: Sam Brownback, a devotee of the one true Catholic and Apostolic Church, and Mike Huckabee, a adherent to a reformed and protestant sect of the Christian religion. See, Brownback used to be a protestant too, and an evangelical minister who converted the other way and is supporting Huckabee said in an obscure e-mail to nobodies that “I know Senator Brownback converted to Roman Catholicism in 2002 … Frankly, as a recovering Catholic myself, that is all I need to know about his discernment when compared to [Huckabee]’s.â€
This apparently was treated as the equivalent of calling Brownback a “mackerel-snapper†or some similarly comical 19th-century epithet, so Huckabee tried to defuse things by calling Brownback a “Christian brother†but then Huckabee’s (Catholic) campaign manager clarified that Brownback was a particularly whiny Christian brother. Then Brownback called Huckabee a “heretic†and Huckabee called Brownback a “pimp for the Whore of Babylon in Rome†and Brownback threatened to have Huckabee tortured to death by the Inquisition
I believe that last part was a tad exaggerated for comic effect.
.You know I’m not a Rudy Giuliani fan, but for once I’m going to defend him. This is from the New York Daily News:
Rudy Giuliani may be trying to woo religious conservatives, but the former mayor all but took an oath of silence yesterday when asked if he was a practicing Catholic.
“My religious affiliation … and the degree to which I am a good or not so good Catholic, I prefer to leave to the priests,” the Republican presidential hopeful told a voter at a forum in Bettendorf, Iowa.
Another questioner mentioned President Bush’s success among Catholics and urged Giuliani to explain his faith. Again, Giuliani took a pass.
“That’s a matter of individual conscience,” Giuliani said. “I don’t think there should be a religious test for public office.”
That’s the right answer. It may not be the politically smart answer, and it may be that he’s just covering up for not being a good Catholic. But it’s the right answer, even so. The GOP has made a big bleeping deal about how religious they all are compared to Democrats, and now they’re squabbling over religion. I believe this is what the Bard called “Hoist with his own petard.”
Some experts said the former mayor – who as a young man considered joining the priesthood – would be wiser to confront his struggles with his church head-on.
“It’s better to be straightforward and say, ‘I am not right with my church, and I understand that,'” said Prof. Charles Dunn of Regent University in Virginia, an expert on conservatism. “Honesty is the only policy, and with evangelicals that would play better.”
Did you know that Abraham Lincoln had no church affiliation at all? And that in 1860, nobody bleeping cared?
Fred Thompson, who is not officially running, is third. He’ll make his first trip to Iowa as an alleged campaigner this weekend. His campaign slogan is “I’m not one of these other clowns.”
Whoever wins this turkey shoot will at least be able to say he’s a big contrast to whoever the Dems nominate. Rudy Giuliani explained this at a dinner in Council Bluffs.
Giuliani called the Democratic field the party’s most liberal in memory.
“It’s beyond their just embracing loss in Iraq,” Giuliani said. “It sounds to me like they want to repeat the Clinton administration.”
Ah, yes, those eight long years of peace and prosperity. Such a trial.
Giuliani said he was struck by the far-left positions taken by all the candidates. On virtually every issue, Giuliani argued, Democrats have ceded the political middle and moved left to court key party interest groups.
Unlike the Republicans, who are too busy pandering to anti-immigrant and anti-abortion factions to worry about pandering to interest groups. Oh, wait …
Send in the clowns.
On Our Own
There are a couple of items in the news today reminding us that the conservative philosophy of government is not to govern at all.
Item one, an editorial in today’s New York Times:
Over the last several years, America’s imbalances in trade and other global transactions have worsened dramatically, requiring the United States to borrow billions of dollars a day from abroad just to balance its books.
The only lasting way to fix the imbalances — and reduce that borrowing — is to increase America’s savings. But the administration has steadfastly rejected that responsible approach since it would require rolling back excessive tax cuts and engaging in government-led health care reform to rein in looming crushing costs– both, anathema to President Bush. It would also require revamping the nation’s tax incentives so that they create new savings by typical families, instead of new shelters for the existing wealth of affluent families — another nonstarter for this White House.
Stymied by what it won’t do, the administration has gone for a quicker fix — letting the dollar slide. A weaker dollar helps to ease the nation’s imbalances by making American exports more affordable, thus narrowing the trade deficit.
But to be truly effective, a weaker dollar must be paired with higher domestic savings. Otherwise, the need to borrow from abroad remains large, even as a weakening currency makes dollar-based debt less attractive. That’s the trap the nation is slipping into today. Among other ills, it could lead to a deterioration in American living standards as money flows abroad to pay foreign creditors, leaving less to spend at home on critical needs. Or, it could lead to abrupt spikes in interest rates as American debtors are forced to pay whatever it takes to get the loans they need.
In volatile economic times like now, leadership is crucial — and notably absent with this administration.
I’d say what we’re really dealing with is not a lack of leadership, but negative leadership. By that I mean a stubborn refusal to deal rationally with the nation’s problems accompanied by an equally stubborn refusal not to let anyone else deal with those problems, either. The Bush Administration accumulates power and won’t share it with anyone, but neither will the Bush Administration use that power to anyone’s benefit but its own.
Item two is an article in today’s Washington Post by Spencer Hsu:
A decision by the Bush administration to rewrite in secret the nation’s emergency response blueprint has angered state and local emergency officials, who worry that Washington is repeating a series of mistakes that contributed to its bungled response to Hurricane Katrina nearly two years ago.
State and local officials in charge of responding to disasters say that their input in shaping the National Response Plan was ignored in recent months by senior White House and Department of Homeland Security officials, despite calls by congressional investigators for a shared overhaul of disaster planning in the United States.
“In my 19 years in emergency management, I have never experienced a more polarized environment between state and federal government,” said Albert Ashwood, Oklahoma’s emergency management chief and president of a national association of state emergency managers.
The national plan is supposed to guide how federal, state and local governments, along with private and nonprofit groups, work together during emergencies. Critics contend that a unilateral approach by Washington produced an ill-advised response plan at the end of 2004 — an unwieldy, 427-page document that emphasized stopping terrorism at the expense of safeguarding against natural disasters. …
…Testifying before a House panel last week, Ashwood and colleagues openly questioned why the draft was revised behind closed doors. The final document was to be released June 1, at the start of this year’s hurricane season.
Federal officials, Ashwood said, appear to be trying to create a legalistic document to shield themselves from responsibility for future disasters and to shift blame to states. “It seems that the Katrina federal legacy is one of minimizing exposure for the next event and ensuring future focus is centered on state and local preparedness,” he said.
We’re approaching the second anniversary of Katrina. Soon there will be a flood of retrospective articles documenting how little has actually been done to put New Orleans and other Gulf Coast communities back on their feet. As I wrote nearly a year ago, Bush said he wanted “local folks” to make decisions about how to proceed with recovery. But along with the fact that most of the big contracts were made between the feds and their pet contractors — local talent need not apply — the Bush Administration overrode many of the decisions those “local folks” made.
A year ago The Center for America’s Future released a report (PDF) documenting the failures of the Bush Administration to respond to Katrina. The Bushies failed to prepare, they failed to respond, and they have failed to rebuild. And behind these failures was more than just sheer incompetence; it was conservative ideology. The disabling factors were rightie disdain for government, their reckless determination to privatize core functions (placing blind faith in the market without oversight or accountability) and their fondness for “pay-to-play” politics, in which money capitalism and personal gain count for more than performance. These three “beliefs,” beloved of the extreme Right, are crippling America.
As I wrote yesterday, the Right was able to “sell” this extremist agenda to America by dominating media and the nation’s political culture, freezing out any point of view but theirs. The Right claimed the center and enforced that claim with bluster and intimidation. And for a time the majority of Americans more or less went along with the Right’s agenda, mostly because that was the only agenda presented to them. Finally people are waking up, but as long as the Bushies and their cronies hang on to power, America will continue to weaken from within and without.
In the last post I wrote that many on the Right Blogosphere sincerely believe America is being weakened by disloyalty to the President. Speaking out against him emboldens the enemy, you know. Never mind that a citizens’ right to speak out against incompetent and mismanaged government is what makes democracy possible. I said, “Right wingers hunger and thirst for authoritarianism, because real freedom scares them witless. They’re happier with a dictator telling them what to do, and they’re too cowardly to admit it.”
Naturally, some brainwashed twit came along and said, “Do you not find anything authoritarian about the Nanny State?”
Let’s think about this, people. In Rightie World, we must not be allowed to have government of the people, by the people, and for the people. We, the People must not elect leaders who will enact government services like Social Security or Medicare or safety net provisions or universal health care. Because, say righties, using elected, representative government to fulfill the mandate of the Constitution — “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” etc. — is totalitarianism.
On the other hand, enforcing knee-jerk loyalty to the President by either law or social pressure is what will safeguard our freedoms.
Can we say, these people are flaming lunatics? I believe so.
I fear that someday Americans will find themselves living in a post-industrial backwater, and our status as the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet will be a dim memory. Our only hope is to use the representative government established by the Constitution to restore sanity to government. But the right-wing crazies are doing their damnedest to destroy that, too.
Full Circle
You have to be old enough to remember the Second Red Scare to appreciate this. Or maybe not.
Lt. Gen. Ion Pacepa, a self-described “old KGB hand,” says liberals are destroying America.
Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels. This same strategy is at work today, but it is regarded as bad manners to point out the Soviet parallels. For communists, only the leader counted, no matter the country, friend or foe. At home, they deified their own ruler–as to a certain extent still holds true in Russia. Abroad, they asserted that a fish starts smelling from the head, and they did everything in their power to make the head of the Free World stink. …
…Unfortunately, partisans today have taken a page from the old Soviet playbook. At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, for example, Bush critics continued our mud-slinging at America’s commander in chief. One speaker, Martin O’Malley, now governor of Maryland, had earlier in the summer stated he was more worried about the actions of the Bush administration than about al Qaeda. On another occasion, retired four-star general Wesley Clark gave Michael Moore a platform to denounce the American commander in chief as a “deserter.” And visitors to the national chairman of the Democratic Party had to step across a doormat depicting the American president surrounded by the words, “Give Bush the Boot.”…
… For once, the communists got it right. It is America’s leader that counts. Let’s return to the traditions of presidents who accepted nothing short of unconditional surrender from our deadly enemies. Let’s vote next year for people who believe in America’s future, not for the ones who live in the Cold War past.
Now, let’s see if we’ve got this straight. According to Pacepa, Americans must give their leaders unquestioned allegiance, because to do otherwise weakens the nation. Questioning Dear Leader is an act of subversion. This is unlike commmunists, who deified their own ruler. Oh, wait …
Naturally, a whole bunch of right–wing blogs are linking to this with robust approval without noticing the essential un-Americanism of Pacepa’s point of view.
Once more, with feeling:
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“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” President Theodore Roosevelt, 1918.
McCarthyists and Red Baiters were so afraid of being defeated by a totalitarian police state that they wanted to turn America into a totalitarian police state for protection. They always reminded me of a herd of buffalo stampeding over a cliff. No amount of reasoning could get them to see that they were a more immediate threat to America’s freedoms than the Communists were.
Bottom line: Righties hate our freedoms. Right wingers hunger and thirst for authoritarianism, because real freedom scares them witless. They’re happier with a dictator telling them what to do, and they’re too cowardly to admit it.
Update: See Comments from Left Field.
Injustice in Indiana
This is heartbreaking. I don’t believe anyone sells Atkins Elegant Desserts hereabouts, but I’d boycott anyone who did.
Left Behind
Among the several people I met in Chicago was Ed Kilgore, former policy director of the Democratic Leadership Council and advocate for all things moderate. I wish I could tell you he told me something insider-y, but since we met at the Teamster “cookout” we were reduced to shouting over the Union loudspeakers, a circumstance not conducive to nuanced conversation.
However, I did get the impression that the DLC is feeling left behind.
Joe Klein wrote last week that none of the Dem presidential candidates visited the DLC annual meeting in Nashville. Not even Hillary Clinton, who is a prominent member of the DLC. And today Martin O’Malley and Harold Ford Jr., governor of Maryland and DLC chariman, have a whiny op ed in the Washington Post asking why no one likes them any more. It begins:
With President Bush and the Republican Party on the rocks, many Democrats think the 2008 election will be, to borrow a favorite GOP phrase, a cakewalk. Some liberals are so confident about Democratic prospects that they contend the centrism that vaulted Democrats to victory in the 1990s no longer matters.
This reminds me of George Bush’s straw man arguments.
“Some say, ‘Well, maybe the recession should have been deeper,’ ” Bush said last summer. “That bothers me when people say that. You see, a deeper recession would have meant more families would have been out of work.”
In Bush’s world, large herds of nameless people go about saying absurd things to which the President strongly disagrees. Some say “certain people” don’t want to be free. Some say we shouldn’t fight terrorists. Some say we should mix thumbtacks into our oatmeal. But I say we must be resolved to keep thumbtacks out of the oatmeal.
So now these same strange and nameless people are following Harold Ford about, also. Some liberals say that centrism no longer matters. Well, Harold Ford and Governor O’Malley disagree.
The temptation to ignore the vital center is nothing new. Every four years, in the heat of the nominating process, liberals and conservatives alike dream of a world in which swing voters don’t exist. … But for Democrats, taking the center for granted next year would be a greater mistake than ever before.
Ford and O’Malley whine along in this vein, talking about a “center” that wants “practical answers,” such as
… smart, New Democrat plans to cap and trade carbon emissions, give more Americans the chance to earn their way through college, achieve universal health care through shared responsibility, increase national security by rebuilding our embattled military and enable all Americans who work full time to lift themselves out of poverty.
And I say, WTF? Capping and trading carbon emissions is fine, but what does “earn their way through college” mean, exactly? Bigger and more glorious work-study programs? And “achieve universal health care through shared responsibility” sounds like “don’t get sick and you won’t mind not having health insurance.”
I looked on the DLC web site and found this:
What is missing today is the political imagination and courage to move to a new vision of universal health care — one in which government takes action in the public’s interest, without seizing control of the system. Such a vision would reject the false choices offered in the stultified left-right debate between those who seek a government takeover of health care and those whose veneration of free markets would leave individuals to fend for themselves. Instead, it would equip Americans with the tools they need to build the world’s best health care system from the ground up.
Translation: We’re not going to risk pissing of the health insurance industry, so you’re on your own.
And we need these people, why? Joe Klein offers this explanation:
In a way, this is just the latest edition of the fight between Northern liberals and Southern moderates that has befuddled the Democrats since… well, since Ted Kennedy challenged the incumbent President, Jimmy Carter, in 1980. But it’s also a consequence of the smug ideological xenophobia that currently afflicts activists in both parties—although, in fairness, the Democrats are playing catch-up to the wing-nut avidity cultivated by Karl Rove as a conscious governing strategy in the Republican Party. The Republicans don’t even have a DLC equivalent.
At the center of the controversy is a gentleman named Al From, a former Senate aide who helped found the DLC in reaction to the Walter Mondale presidential wipeout in 1984 and now serves as its CEO. From is a moderate who acts like an extremist. Early on, he gleefully picked fights with various crumbling pillars of post-Vietnam liberalism—trade unions, antiwar activists and ethnic pleaders. Many of these battles were worth waging, especially on social issues like crime and welfare reform, where Democrats had drifted into a slough of guilt and warped good intentions.
There is a germ of truth there, although you have to do some weeding to get to it.
There are many factors that came together in the 1960s and 1970s that resulted in a weakened, spineless, and soulless Democratic Party, and I explained these in some detail here. But there are three major factors I’d like to point out:
In the 1970s and 1980s, white voters left the Dem Party in droves and began to vote Republican, mostly because Nixon, Reagan, and others did a bang-up job exploiting racism. I think the racist backlash to Dem support of civil rights and antipoverty programs cost Democrats far more, in the long run, than the war in Vietnam did.
Second, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, New Left ideologies discouraged young activists from getting involved in party politics. Instead, progressivism broke up into single-issue advocacy movements that competed with each other for funds and attention.
Third, the New Deal coalition, which had sustained the Party from FDR’s day through the 1960s, dissolved. More critically, nothing took its place. Thus, the Democratic Party itself lost clear identity and purpose. But someone should explain to Joe Klein that trade unions are not vestiges of “post-Vietnam liberalism.” They were the cornerstone of the New Deal coalition, and the relationship between the unions and the Democratic Party goes back many, many decades. New Left activists, on the whole, were uninterested in labor issues.
And while the Democrats were in decline, the Right was busily establishing its almighty infrastructure of think tanks and media outlets. Mondale in 1984 and Dukakis in 1988 ran adequate campaigns for the pre-VRWC age. But the shift in political and media culture that the Right had imposed stymied both of them.
Al From and others found a strategy for playing by Right-wing rules and winning an election here and there. But they never confronted the real problem, which is that politics and media came to be dominated by a faction of Right-wing extremism subsidized by corporate power, making it nearly impossible for any voices but the Right’s to speak to the American people. The Right claimed the center and enforced that claim with bluster and intimidation. And for a time the majority of Americans more or less went along with the Right’s agenda, mostly because that was the only agenda presented to them.
Noam Scheiber wrote for the New York Times,
Before the Clinton presidency, the leadership council’s critique of the Democratic Party had merit. Many voters emerged from the 1970s and early ’80s deeply skeptical of liberalism. As Mr. Clinton put it in his 1991 speech, people who once voted for the Democrats no longer “trusted us in national elections to defend our national interest abroad, to put their values in our social policy at home or to take their tax money and spend it with discipline.â€
The council grew out of frustration with Walter Mondale’s crushing 1984 defeat. Mr. Mondale had maneuvered to win the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s endorsement during the Democratic primaries, but his victory was pyrrhic. The endorsement solidified Mr. Mondale’s reputation as the candidate of special interests. In order to shake the label, Mr. Mondale proposed raising taxes to cut the deficit, which only worsened his image among swing voters.
Let’s look at this more closely. What, exactly, had the Dems done to lose the nation’s trust?
The nation’s economy had stalled halfway through the Nixon administration, and stagflation reigned through the Ford administration. (Ford’s economic policy, as I remember, was handing out “Whip Inflation Now” pins.) President Carter, it is true, made little headway against the economic problems handed to him. But the problems were handed to him by Republican administrations, notice. Then in 1979 the Federal Reserve clamped down on the money supply, which whipped inflation. Reagan’s first term was marked by a deep recession that was especially painful for blue-collar Americans. Reagan’s economy heated up, then cooled off just in time for George H.W. Bush to take over. The Bush 41 years saw whopping income disparity and mass layoffs.
And dontcha love the part about trade unions representing “special interests”?
I’ve written at length about the charge that Dems are “soft” on security. See, for example, “Don’t Blame McGovern,” “Don’t Blame McGovern II,” and “How the Democrats Lost Their Spines.” This is a history that goes back to the end of World War II; in short, the Right took credibility on national security away from the Dems through years of hysterical charges and lies. And the Wingnut Generation (b. 1970, give or take) were heavily imprinted by Jimmy Carter’s failure to resolve the Iran Hostage Crisis and the perception that the nation had been made strong again by Reagan. The fact that Democrats saw the nation through World War II, and the way Democratic President John Kennedy stared down the Soviets in the Cuban Missile Crisis, were entirely forgotten. Carter-Reagan became the only recognized narrative for both parties.
So how did Mrs. Clinton respond in 1991? We’re sorry we’re such screwups. We promise to do better from now on. In other words, instead of correcting the narrative, the “New Democrats” validated the narrative and attempted to win elections by riding piggy-back on Right-wing propaganda. See? We can electrocute mentally retarded criminals and blame poverty on welfare queens, too! Can we say Republican Lite?
The DLC came along and had some success with a short-sighted strategy: Ignore the base, because they don’t have anyone else to vote for, and try to pick off “swing voters” by moving to the Right. But now the American people are desperate for someone to lead them away from the failed policies of the Right. As Ford and O’Malley say, “George W. Bush is handing us Democrats our Hoover moment. ”
Let’s see, what did Franklin Roosevelt do with his “Hoover moment”? Did he mince around and say, Don’t worry, I won’t do anything drastically different from what Herbert Hoover did. I’ll just institute a few tweaks. I don’t think so.
The base — and please note, Mr. Ford and Gov. O’Malley, we vote too — is sick to death of “leaders” who are too timid to lead.
Steven Thomma writes for McClatchy Newspapers:
The Democratic Party is growing more liberal for the first time in a generation. …
…The Democrats’ shift to the left carries some risk, but probably much less than it would have in years past. That’s because independent voters — the ones who swing back and forth and thus decide elections — also have turned against the war and in favor of many more liberal approaches to government.
“There is greater support for the social safety net, more concern for inequality of income,” said Andy Kohut, the president of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. “More people are falling into the liberal category based on their values.”
Dear DLC: Step aside, fellas. We’re doing the leading now.
Update: See also the BooMan, who was also in Chicago.