President Bush is greeted by enthusiastic crowds in Indonesia.
Respecting Life
Emptypockets has a long rumination about embryonic stem cell research at The Next Hurrah.
That subject of desecration and its relationship to organ donation is, I think, a more apt context for discussing embryonic stem cells than the abortion rubric under which stem cells are usually put. Unlike a fetus, which likely would become a person, an unimplanted blastocyst is terminal and the moral issues about how we treat it are closer to end-of-life issues than conception ones. At least, that analogy is more apt biologically — whether it is helpful politically, I don’t know.
What does emerge from this analysis is, for me, a better understanding of what may be on the minds of stem cell research opponents. The sanctity of life may mean, for them, not only the call to preserve life itself — something which is, for an unimplanted blastocyst, impossible — but the demand to treat the elements of human life with respect and dignity. Some opponents may be appalled not by the demise of a ball of cells, but by what they see as an undignified death, in the polished steel of a tissue culture hood with a lab-coated graduate student bearing a pipetteman in place of a funeral Mass.
Call it a desecration or just plain creepy, that cold alien-autopsy vision of life’s end may be what drives some segments of the opposition. It is partly relieved by shifting the view to patients the research might help, just as rabbis struggling with organ donation may yield most often when they confront the potential for saving another life. But it may also be partly relieved by writing into future stem cell legislation explicit language requiring the blastocysts be treated with respect, and by acknowledging in debate that scientists recognize this concern and are sensitive to it.
I doubt opponents of embryonic stem cell research will be appeased by promises to treat blastocysts “respectfully.” However —
I’ve gone on and on about life and the moral argument for embryonic stem cell research already, and I don’t want to repeat all that now. Let’s explode everyone’s head today and look at some undiluted Zen.
Living beings are the result of many factors and conditions. Some of these are the presence of sperm, an egg, the condition of fertility, and the presence of a being desiring a form. Once living beings are created, there are other conditions necessary for their survival, such as sunshine, warmth, air (or the absence of these) as well as water and food. Many of the things that make up our world were once alive and depended on these same conditions, like wood, paper, cotton, wool, and oil products. Even stones and diamonds, and the planet itself, are the result of many related factors. All causes and conditions are interrelated. Yet, because of our conditioning and our delusions, we are easily confused and distracted from seeing our true relationship to all things. I think the nature of delusion is that it makes us feel separate, giving the illusion of duality.
In Taking the Path of Zen, Aitken Roshi writes, “There is fundamentally no birth and no death as we die and are born. When we kill the spirit that may realize this fact, we are violating this precept. We kill that spirit in ourselves and in others when we brutalize human potential, animal potential, earth potential.”
In the first precept, the crucial section is, “In the sphere of the everlasting Dharma, Not nursing a view of extinction…†The Dharmakaya is complete, ultimate reality. It is selfless and empty and is the origin from which everything arises and to which everything returns. The Dharmakaya is never “born†into the world of appearances, so it cannot die. We arise, together with our world, as human beings. Each moment we arise from and return to unity with everything; we are all children of our common parent – the Dharmakaya. When we consider the questions of “killing†or “not killing†we have already divided our world into self and other. If we see our world only through human self-interest we will miss the underlying unity that is our common origin. When we are unaware of this underlying unity, the best that we can hope for is a respect for all life.
From this perspective, to deny the potential of a blastocyst to heal the sick — a blastocyst that would otherwise remain frozen until it had lost all potential — is not respecting life at all, but denying life. Belittling Michael J. Fox for the sake of keeping some cells frozen is not respecting life. Belittling, even lying about, the potential of embryonic stem cell research is not respecting life.
More:
The First Grave Precept is “Affirm life—do not kill.” What does it mean to kill the environment? It’s the worst kind of killing. We are decimating many species. There is no way that these life forms can ever return to the earth. The vacuum their absence creates cannot be filled in any other way, and such a vacuum affects everything else in the ecosystem, no matter how infinitesimally small it is. We are losing species by the thousands every year, the last of their kind on the face of this great Earth. And because someone in South America is doing it, that doesn’t mean we’re not responsible. We’re as responsible as if we are the one who clubs an infant seal or burns a hectare of tropical forest. It is as if we were squeezing the life out of ourselves. Killing the lakes with acid rain. Dumping chemicals into the rivers so that they cannot support any life. Polluting our skies so our children choke on the air they breath. Life is nonkilling. The seed of the Buddha grows continuously. Maintain the wisdom life of Buddha and do not kill life.
Treat the air respectfully, and the seas respectfully, and birds and bugs and everything else on the planet respectfully. And we should treat living beings respectfully. Picketing an abortion clinic while wearing shoes made with slave labor in a third world country is not respecting life. Opposing abortion by belittling the lives of women — screaming at women entering abortion clinics, for example, or calling them selfish — is not respecting life.
Making excuses for civilian deaths in Iraq is not respecting life.
More:
We can play around with the word “state.†“State†is a condition or manner of being. In Buddhism, mind-states determine our thoughts, words, and actions which in turn create karma and its fruits. In a worldly sense “state†means position or rank or class. It also means a polity or nation. America’s leaders point their fingers at an “axis of evil†states. As far as they are concerned, it is just fine to despise Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. They add other enemies like Cuba, Syria, and even France (without whom there would never have been a United States). Despising these states and the people who live in them goes against the spiritual reality that all beings are Buddha, all beings are God. They may as well be pointing at themselves. [p. 3]
Yes, of course we should treat the blastocysts with respect. This means freeing them from freezing and allowing them to be life — if not as an embryo, then as a treatment for a sick child or a crippled adult.
It’s all One.
Why John McCain Won’t Be President
Old Dogs
Following up the last post — a few rightie bloggers have commented on the Dean Barnett FAQ and the political effectiveness of the leftie netroots. On the whole my quibbles with their analyses are minor, but they all relate to one major point.
Alabama Liberation Front writes,
In the 2005-2006 election cycle, the three major GOP committees — RNC, NRSC and NRCC — collected more than $438 million dollars. How much of that money went toward cultivation of the blogs? Hmmm?
In context, he seems to be implying (without explicitly saying so) that the DNC, DCCC, etc. do give money to cultivate blogs. I assure you, they do not. However, I call your attention to the Garance Franke-Ruta article in the April 2005 TAP, “Blogged Down,” and her account of the Eason Jordan smackdown (emphasis added).
He was brought down not by outraged citizen-bloggers but by a mix of GOP operatives and military conservatives. Easongate.com, the blog that served as the clearinghouse for the attack on CNN, was helped along by Virginia-based Republican operative Mike Krempasky. From May 1999 through August 2003, Krempasky worked for [Morton] Blackwell as the graduate development director of the Leadership Institute, an Arlington, Virginia–based school for conservative leaders founded by Blackwell in 1979. The institute is the organization that had provided “Gannon†with his sole media credential before he became a White House correspondent. It also now operates “Internet Activist Schools†designed to teach conservatives how to engage in “guerilla Internet activism.â€
Indeed, Krempasky could be found teaching this Internet activism course one recent February weekend to about 30 young conservatives at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington. “He advocated that people write from their experience — and not necessarily as conservatives,†a Democratic consultant who attended the seminar incognito told me. For example, Krempasky told “a conservative firefighter†that he should write about firefighting because that would be of interest to readers. Using that angle, he could build an audience. And if push ever came to shove, he could respond to an online dogfight from the unassailable position of being a firefighter — and not as just another conservative ideologue. Krempasky then offered to help all the attendees set up their own blogs. “We’re definitely in serious trouble,†said the Democratic attendee.
The tactics Krempasky promotes are directly descended from those advocated by the late Reed Irvine of AIM, whose major funder was, for the past two decades, Richard Mellon Scaife. “Many bloggers and blog readers might not even know who Reed Irvine was, nor understand the debt we owe him as conservatives,†Krempasky wrote upon Irvine’s passing last year. “But that debt is tremendous.†In the late ’80s, Irvine had started the campaign to “Can Dan†Rather, coining the phrase “Rather Biased,†which became a rallying cry for anti-rather bloggers. Last fall, Krempasky was operating the main anti-Rather site, Rathergate.com, and organized a vast letter-writing and e-mailing campaign “to contact CBS and express themselves,†as he put it in an interview with Bobby Eberle of GOPUSA, an activist Web site founded by Texas Republicans and merged with one now owned by Bruce Eberle (no relation), the proprietor of a conservative direct-mail firm. “Conservatives have operated through alternative media for 40 years, direct mail being the first one,†Krempasky told me, sitting in the food court of the Ronald Reagan International Building as the CPAC wound down. “As far as the Internet goes, conservatives have largely been ahead of the left.â€
Also part of the Easongate.com team was La Shawn Barber, who writes a biweekly column for — again, the name pops up — GOPUSA and has written for AIM about “the Bush-bashing media.†Working alongside Krempasky and Barber was another site, RedState.org, “a Republican community weblog†registered with the Federal Election Commission as a 527. Krempasky helped found that site along with Senate staffer Ben Domenech, the chief speechwriter for Bush ally and Texas Senator John Cornyn; and former U.S. Army officer Josh Trevino, a conservative blogger who used to write under the name “Tacitus.†The goal of RedState.org? “[T]o unite … voices from government, politics, activism, civil society, and journalism†in service of the “construction of a Republican majority.â€
Power Line, another conservative blog deeply involved in the Rather controversy, helped push the Jordan story as well. Described by Time magazine as “three amateur journalists working in a homegrown online medium [who] challenged a network news legend and won,†Power Line was voted Time’s “2004 Blog of the Year.†In reality, its three writers are all fellows at the conservative Claremont Institute who attended Dartmouth College in the early 1970s and now work as attorneys; two of them have been writing articles as a team for conservative publications such as the National Review and The American Enterprise for more than 10 years.
“As far as the Internet goes, conservatives have largely been ahead of the left.†The VRWC — the conglomeration of think tanks, media, and astroturf organizations that work with the GOP — made Matt Drudge a Somebody back in the 1990s, for example. I believe the VRWC was attached to the unseen hands of Rathergate that took an anonymous post on Free Republic into national media in only 12 hours. The top tier of the Right Blogosphere contains a number of bloggers with long-standing affiliation with movement conservatism — in media, in think tanks, in the GOP. Michelle Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, Andrew Sullivan (who has fallen from grace lately, I understand), in addition to the above-mentioned RedState, PowerLine, and La Shawn Barber, were never just disgruntled citizens blogging in their pajamas. They are for the most part establishment operatives. Not always, but often.
And this takes us to the blind spot in rightie analyses (see also Jon Henke and Riehl World View). They do not see the extent to which the Republican establishment co-opted the Right Blogosphere from the beginning. Mr. Henke suggests that the Republicans should “develop strategies and hire experts to engage the blogosphere quickly and bumpily as happened with the successful Democratic engagement of the blogosphere.” The problem is (as Chris Bowers discusses) that the Right Blogosphere already has been integrated into the right-wing message machine. This is much less true on the Left Blogosphere, mostly since the Dems can’t seem to push a message any more than a squirrel can sing.
All along many Republican Party operatives have been using the Right Blogosphere the way they’d use any other mass medium — as a medium to disseminate talking points and reinforce narratives. But like any other mass medium, the conversation goes only one way — from the top of the power pyramid to the bottom.
This doesn’t mean the rightie blogs never go off message. They do, far more than a lot of us on the Left give them credit for. On two issues in particular, immigration and pork, they have been solidly critical of the Bush White House and the Republican Congress. It’s also pretty obvious that the Republican establishment doesn’t care what rightie bloggers think.
Does that mean that the Dems care what leftie bloggers think? A lot of them still don’t, but this year some of the fog between the Dems and the bloggers has lifted, and I know that some people on Dem payrolls really do read us. I credit Peter Daou for much of this development, and the organizational skills of Kos and Co. and the bloggers of MyDD, Swing State Project, and others were essential, also.
This didn’t just happen. If you go back to, say, 2002, the Left Blogosphere was not only critical of the Bush Administration and the Republicans. We lefties also badmouthed the Washington Dem establishment robustly. We wailed when, in October 2002, too many of them paid no attention when we hollered don’t vote for that bleeping war resolution! In 2003 we supported non-establishment candidates, notably Howard Dean and Wesley Clark, for the Democratic presidential nomination. Even though our guys lost, we got our virtual toe in the water. Mostly, we saw that the Dems were sorely in need of a major shakeup. We also realized that if we were going to become effective shakers, we couldn’t do it by marching in the streets with protest signs. What was needed was good, old-fashioned politicking — raising money and volunteers for Democratic candidates we thought would represent our point of view, as well as fighting the rhetorical fight here on the web.
Basically, we figured politicians would listen to us when they understood it was to their advantage to do so. Thus, leftie bloggers took the initiative and worked independently from the Dems to set up ActBlue and various GOTV projects.
The Right Blogosphere, on the other hand … well, check out this MyDD post by Matt Stoller, from February 2006. On the Right, it just ain’t happenin’, and the GOP can’t do it for the bloggers without running afoul of FEC and campaign finance law. (And as Matt says, the GOP sometimes needs tighter message control.)
If the Dems are starting to pay attention to bloggers, it isn’t because the Dems just took a mind to do so or are somehow less oblivious than Republicans. It’s because a lot of bloggers worked their butts off (some since 2002) to make it happen.
It might be that rightie bloggers will begin to organize and go down this same road. If they do, I wish them well. But a little introspection might be in order first.
More minor quibbles: Alabama Liberation Front continues,
They [leftie bloggers] developed an advertising network that enabled more bloggers to go full-time. They got Mark Warner to drop a huge chunk of cash on YearlyKos. And there was not a single significant Democratic candidate in 2006 who began a campaign without first hiring at least one blogger, and sometimes making payments to multiple bloggers.
I doubt that the Advertising Liberally network, of which I am a charter member, enabled any bloggers to go full-time who weren’t already full-time. Certainly it more than pays for bandwidth and the occasional new pair of shoes, but it’s not a living. And yes, Mark Warner threw a big party for us bloggers at YearlyKos, but my understanding is that YK (or DK, for that matter) could not accept money from him directly. Maybe some rightie bloggers are succumbing to the “grass is greener” syndrome, but I can tell you the grass ain’t all that green on this side of the fence, either.
Alabama continues,
Karl Rove’s top-down, manipulative, control-freak style — which he learned from Lee Atwater — is simply incompatible with the New Media regime. A more open, flexible and responsive approach is dictated by the very nature of the multi-source feedback system that the Information Age makes possible.
Exactly, and this is more or less what Joe Trippi figured out during the Howard Dean campaign, but most of the Dem establishment was (and still is) slow to catch on. Karl Rove is not the only control freak in Washington; the DNC and satellite organizations are just as bad, but without Rove’s relentless shrewdness. The only thing worse than a control freak is a control freak with his head up his ass. Bottom line, politicians in Washington of both parties and their overpaid consultants know all about waging mass media, top-down campaigns, but on the whole they haven’t figured out new media. They’re a bunch of old dogs who won’t learn new tricks.
And the moral is, if you want new tricks, you gotta do ’em yourself.
Under the Radar
Last week, as the mighty national MSM wagged its finger at Nancy Pelosi over the Murtha-Hoyer flap, another House leadership fight was being ignored. This was the fight between the Right Blogosphere and the Washington Republican establishment.
Oh, it wasn’t much of a fight. Rightie bloggers and other conservative activists put up their fists, and the establishment Republicans ignored them. But it reveals something about where the Right (and the Left) might be going.
Last week House Republicans kept John Boehner (Ohio) and Roy Blunt (Missouri) as their respective Leader and Whip, albeit changing from Majority to Minority in January. This was a rebuff of the bloggers, who championed Mike Pence (Indiana) and John Shadegg (Arizona). (For an explanation of the blogger position, see this article written before the House vote by Dick “The Other Dick” Morris.)
McQ at Q and O wrote,
The Arizona Republic pretty well expressed my feelings with their endorsement of Shadegg (who is, of course, a favorite son):
We’re going to learn very quickly, likely this week, whether a lick of sense has been pounded into the craniums of congressional Republicans following their midterm disaster last Tuesday….
…If House Republicans leave either of those gentlemen – Boehner or Blunt – in charge when they vote for new leaders later this week, they will be declaring themselves even more blithering than voters thought. And voters thought Republicans were pretty blithering this election cycle, if you hadn’t noticed.
A lot of times when you hear the coach of a losing team explain how he plans to get his team back on track, he says “we have to get back to basics”. Well that’s precisely what Republicans have to do. And that requires leadership which is actively committed to those basics and steering its members that way.
The results were even more lopsided than in the Hoyer-Burth contest. Boehner bettered Pence 168 to 27, and Blunt beat Shadegg 137 to 57. The Washington Post editorialized,
The results marked a setback for conservative activists who tried to wrest control of the party by arguing that it had lost its ideological moorings and that voters had signaled they wanted Republicans to renew the energetic, activist style that swept them to power in 1994. …
… Rather than retooling political concepts, GOP strategists say, they will focus on strategies that will promote their agenda of making tax cuts permanent, appointing conservatives to the federal bench, and making select spending cuts, while trying to foil many of the Democrats’ domestic proposals, to the extent that the Republicans’ new status allows.
Remember the GOP motto: It’s not what you do, but what you say, that counts.
While researching this development I found this intriguing FAQ by Dean Barnett at Townhall. It begins:
1) How could this have happened? The entire weight and heft of the right-wing blogosphere stood behind a campaign to change the House leadership and nothing happened. Kos holds a putz-fest in Vegas and virtually the complete Democratic establishment comes to kiss his ring. Is the right wing blogosphere only capable of getting congressional types to give us a few minutes of their time on conference calls?
The FAQ answer is “The right wing blogosphere has to deal with the facts. The politicians just aren’t that into us.” But this perception from the Right turns old leftie conventional wisdom on its head — we think they’re marching in lockstep with the GOP while we’re outsiders, crashing the gates of the Dem establishment. So which is it?
I think you can find part of the story in posts by Chris Bowers at MyDD. In fact, the titles of the posts in chronological order tell the story:
September 12, 2004: “Top-Down Right-Wing Blogosphere Growing Powerful.”
January 20, 2005: “Partisan Left-Wing Blogs Growing Far More Influential Than ‘Independent’ Right-Wing Blogs.”
June 12, 2005: “Aristocratic Right Wing Blogosphere Stagnating.”
March 21, 2006: “There Is No Right-Wing Blogosphere Anymore.”
Although the title of that last post may seem a tad premature, the point he makes is about the different natures of the Right and Left Blogosphere and the fact that the two halves of the blogosphere brain are not mirror images of each other.
In a nutshell — in the first post, Chris looked at traffic patterns on both sides of the blogosphere and explained why the Right was better at pushing that “one big story” and getting that story into the headlines than the Left. Back in the glory days of Rathergate, for example, we saw a story travel from an anonymous comment on Free Republic to national media in 12 hours. “The right-wing blogosphere has become integrated into the Mighty Wurlitzer,’ wrote Chris, “while we remain a loose confederation of outrage, analysis and action.”
In the second post, Chris noted that the righties were still better at getting and keeping the attention of news media than we were. But, under the radar, the Left Blogosphere was busy with other matters:
We raised well over a million dollars for Democratic candidates in the 2004 cycle whereas they did not even come close to 100K. We crushed Roemer’s candidacy for DNC chair and are on the verge of basically selecting the new DNC chair, whereas they said nothing about the RNC chair. We changed a law in Virginia, but I have never heard of them contacting lawmakers. We organized a challenge to the electoral vote certification, but I can’t remember the last time a Republican Senator did something on the urging of the right-wing netroots. We have significantly whipped our own party into line on Social Security, and there is nothing comparable on their side.
In the third post, Chris wrote about the growth of community on the Left Blogosphere and the lack thereof on the Right. On the Left, it’s much easier for new voices to join our discourse and introduce ideas that will be noticed throughout our side of the ‘sphere. The Right Blogosphere, however, is far more hierarchical, with a relatively small pool of über-bloggers dominating rightie web conversation.
And in the fourth and last post, Chris noted that those über-bloggers had mostly been absorbed into the conservative establishment.
Most major right-wing bloggers have now been incorporated into the established news media apparatus. Glenn Reynolds is a columnist for MSNBC. Andrew Sullivan is a columnist for Time. Michelle Malkin is a frequently published columnist in a number of offline outlets. And now, RedState co-founder Ben Ben Domenech has a regular column in the Washington Post.
We all remember that Ben Domenech didn’t last long in the WaPo position, for which he was colossally unsuited. Still, the fact that a 24-year-old pedestrian writer and college dropout was given such a position at all is wonderfully illustrative of how the Right is becoming a tad inbred; for more on this see DHinMI at Kos.
The many ties between conservative institutions (including media, think tanks, and the Republican Party) and the Right Blogosphere were documented by Garance Franke-Ruta in The American Prospect; see “Blogged Down” from the April 2005 issue. Please do take a look at this, because I don’t want to repeat it all here but it makes an important point about how the conservative establishment has been using the Right Blogosphere all along. There is little parallel with the Left Blogosphere. While some of us have received occasional media attention and gigs with campaigns after we got into blogging, only a handful of people on my blogroll had media exposure or establishment connections before blogging. Of course, what little progressive/liberal media-think tank infrastructure exists is no match for the Right’s.
And then go read (or re-read) Peter Daou’s original “Triangle” essay from September 2005. “[B]log power on both the right and left is a function of the relationship of the netroots to the media and the political establishment,” Peter wrote. Bloggers become effective at pushing a story or addressing an issue when blogs, media, and the political establishment form a power triangle and work together to promote that story or address that issue. And, until recently, the Right was a whole lot better at that than we were. Even before the political blogosphere took off, the establishment Right was incorporating the web into the triangle; think Drudge and the blue dress.
Chris continues,
The right wing tends not to build independent online communities, using their existing offline communities to generate web sites that reinforce their politics and their ideology.
Their web presence is nurtured by institutions and is part of the conservative, right-wing media machine. The Drudge Report, for instance, is one of the largest conservative sites and frequently receives its information from Republican operatives.
Most right-wing blogs reiterate talking points that are generated from inside formal conservative institutions; conversations center on feeling victimized for being right-wing, attacking and hating progressives, and attacking and hating the media….
… I feel it has developed to such a degree that the right-wing blogosphere itself has been all but annihilated … there is almost nothing in the way of an independent right-wing blogosphere operating outside of existing, established news media outlets. The days of the rise of Free Republic have long passed.
By “annihilated” Chris isn’t saying there is no Right Blogosphere, he’s saying there is no community of activist rightie bloggers independent from the conservative establishment that can effectively challenge the establishment. And that takes us back to Dean Barnett’s FAQ.
2) But how come the Democrats are so into the blogosphere and the Republicans aren’t? How come we don’t generate fear and respect like the Kosfather?
Because all we do is opine, and often in an annoyingly independent way. While all of us root for the Republican Party, we’re also pretty expressive when members of the party let us down. We might carry a little water, but as a group, I bet the Republican establishment thought of us as more as a pain in the neck than an asset during the last campaign season. I know I won’t be on George Allen’s Christmas card list.
3) And Kos is different?
Yes. Although he rips Democrats when he’s of a mind to do so, he also brings something else to the party. He brings volunteers and money and buzz. Although my modem might well explode as I type these words, Jon Tester would not be a senator starting in January if it weren’t for the Daily Kos. Same for Jim Webb. He never would have made it out of the primary.
It’s true that, all along, plenty of rightie bloggers have bucked Washington establishment opinion. Most of them hate President Bush’s immigration plans. Many have complained about Congress’s out-of-control spending. But they’ve done very little [*] counter-organizing or activism. They complain, and the establishment ignores them.
[*] One of the few independent rightie blog initiatives that has generated some heat is the Porkbuster project founded by NZ Bear and Glenn Reynolds.
Leftie bloggers on the other hand, began as outsiders, and we have been fighting our way in. A couple of years ago few in the Democratic Party gave us the time of day. Now we’re a force, although how much of a force is a matter of opinion. But the realization that it’s not wise to ignore the bloggers is slowly dawning in some inside-the-beltway Democratic heads.
Dean Barnett wrote of rightie blogs, “I bet the Republican establishment thought of us as more as a pain in the neck than an asset during the last campaign season.” Possibly less of a pain in the neck than dead weight. The Right Blogosphere did plenty of water-carrying for the GOP in the 2004 campaign. They were practically the right arm of the Swift Boaters, for example. Last month they worked mightily to inflate John Kerry’s flubbed joke into a substantial issue, and certainly they helped make it a bigger deal than it deserved to be. (Too bad for them that John Kerry wasn’t running; he would have lost again.) But they couldn’t sustain a power triangle strong enough to hold back the blue wave. This is not the fault of rightie bloggers alone, of course, but rather is symptomatic of a systemic weakening of the entire Right versus a rising tide of discontent across the land.
On the other hand, until recently most of the Democratic establishment did think we leftie bloggers were a pain in the neck, and some of it still does, and we leftie bloggers regard much of the Democratic establishment in the same light. This is an alliance born more of pragmatism than loyalty, although perhaps we’ll get chummier as we get to know each other.
The Right Blogosphere from the beginning was seamlessly integrated into the establishment Right’s message machine, whether the bloggers realized it or not. As long as rightie bloggers can be counted on to support the message or swift-boat attack du jour, the establishment can tolerate (and ignore) their grumblings about Roy Blunt as majority whip. It’s not their independence from the GOP but their lack thereof that makes them ignorable.
On the other hand, the Left Blogosphere did not sit around and wait for direction from the Dems, but worked independently from the Dems to become activists and organizers and influencers in our own right. The point of this is not to be tools of the Democratic Party, which overall has displeased us mightily in recent years. The point is to make the party a better tool for effecting a progressive agenda. And this is just part of a larger effort to heal America’s sick political culture. This effort has only just begun, and we’ve got a long way to go. But we’ve made a good beginning.
The challenge for us going forward is to work more effectively with the Dems without being absorbed into the existing Democratic Party establishment. The Right Blogosphere faces a different challenge, but that’s something they’ll have to figure out for themselves.
Why We Vote
Roxana Tiron of The Hill reports that Senate Dems plan to revise the Military Commissions Act in the next term.
Sen. Chris Dodd introduced a bill today that
… seeks to give habeas corpus protections to military detainees; bar information that was gained through coercion from being used in trials and empower military judges to exclude hearsay evidence they deem to be unreliable.
Dodd’s bill also narrows the definition of “unlawful enemy combatant” to individuals who directly participate in hostilities against the United States who are not lawful combatants. The legislation would also authorize the U.S. Court of Appeals for the armed forces to review decisions made by the military commissions.
In the next term Dodd will be the second ranking Democrat on the International Relations Committee. Sen. Patrick Leahy, the incoming Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, is also drafting changes to the Act that would reinstate habeas corpus. Incoming Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin and incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, say they plan to look into “extraordinary rendition.”
“I’m not comfortable with the system,” Levin said earlier this week. “I think that there’s been some significant abuses which have not made us more secure, but have made us less secure and have also perhaps cost us some real allies, as well as not producing particularly useful information. So I think the system needs a thorough review, and as the military would say, a thorough scrubbing.”
I’d like to point out that these guys are the Big Guns, so to speak. We don’t have a veto-proof majority, but thanks to the midterms we’re in better shape to put up a fight.
See also: “GTMO Report: Only 10 out of 440 Charged“; “Guantanamo prisoners routinely denied witnesses, evidence“; “Judge: Detainee Can’t Speak to Attorney“; “Presbyterians to witness against torture“; “The Road to Guantanamo.”
Awwwww
Congratulations to Josh Marshall on the birth of Samuel Allon Marshall.
They Said It
Via Atrios — President Bush actually said this in Vietnam.
The president said there was much to be learned from the divisive Vietnam War _ the longest conflict in U.S. history _ as his administration contemplates new strategies for the increasingly difficult war in Iraq, now in its fourth year. But his critics see parallels with Vietnam _ a determined insurgency and a death toll that has drained public support _ that spell danger for dragging out U.S. involvement in Iraq.
“It’s just going to take a long period of time for the ideology that is hopeful _ and that is an ideology of freedom _ to overcome an ideology of hate,” Bush said after having lunch at his lakeside hotel with Australian Prime Minister John Howard, one of America’s strongest allies in Iraq, Vietnam and other conflicts.
“We’ll succeed,” Bush added, “unless we quit.”
As the old punch line goes — who you callin’ “we,” kemo sabe?
Other interesting things wingnuts have said recently:
Glenn G. says Pam “Boobie” Atlas “called for the State Department to be bombed and for American diplomats to be murdered.” (Hat tip Avedon.)
Yeah, that ol’ ideology of freedom trumps the ideology of hate every time, don’t it, Pam?
Via Matt Yglesias, Charles Krauthammer explains what went wrong in Iraq.
I have my own theories. In retrospect, I think we made several serious mistakes — not shooting looters, not installing an Iraqi exile government right away, and not taking out Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army in its infancy in 2004 — that greatly compromised the occupation. Nonetheless, the root problem lies with Iraqis and their political culture.
That last quote might also be filed under “shit we should have noticed before we stepped in it.”
And Dick “the Other Dick” Morris called Jack Murtha an “ultra liberal”; see video at Crooks & Liars.
Update: If I were Glenn Beck’s boss, he’d be out of a job now. This is reprehensible.
Yes, He Did
You’re going to love this one, folks — Christopher Lee writes in the Washington Post —
The Bush administration has appointed a new chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as “demeaning to women.”
You can pause to reflect on this development, if you like. I’ll wait.
(whistling)
Ready now? We’ll continue —
Eric Keroack, medical director for A Woman’s Concern, a nonprofit group based in Dorchester, Mass., will become deputy assistant secretary for population affairs in the next two weeks, department spokeswoman Christina Pearson said yesterday.
Keroack, an obstetrician-gynecologist, will advise Secretary Mike Leavitt on matters such as reproductive health and adolescent pregnancy. He will oversee $283 million in annual family-planning grants that, according to HHS, are “designed to provide access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them with priority given to low-income persons.”
This appointment does not require Senate confirmation.
A bit of googling revealed that Keroack is also a Big Cheese in the “abstinence” movement who goes about lecturing people on “The Physical & Emotional Consequences of Pre-marital Sex.” Yes, just the guy you want in charge of a $283 million program to provide access to contraception.
One wonders where Bush’s head is, or if he has a head at all. Steven Thomma writes for McClatchy Newspapers:
President Bush made nice with the Democrats for the television cameras after they won control of Congress, complete with pictures filled with handshakes, smiles and vows of working together. He even tossed Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld over the side, making many people think that maybe he was going to move more toward the center and reach out for bipartisan openings.
But the agenda he’s sent to Congress since then is full of Republican proposals that have no chance of winning bipartisan approval, enrage Democrats, rally his conservative base and appear to be intended to paint Democrats as obstructionist.
When the President’s approval ratings are hovering in the low 30s, and the people just returned Congress to the Democrats, one wonders if the public will perceive Bush as being the “obstructionist.”
Bush has resubmitted several judicial nominations that had been blocked even before last week’s elections. He’s asked again that the Senate confirm John Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations. And he’s urged approval of warrantless eavesdropping on suspected terrorists without any accommodation to Democrats’ demands that a court sign off on the spying.
From an editorial in today’s New York Times:
The voters sent a clear message last week that they do not want the far right of the Republican Party calling the shots in Washington. But President Bush has ignored the message, resubmitting a group of archconservative, underqualified judicial nominees that Senate Democrats have already said are unacceptable. With the Democrats about to take control of the Senate, it is highly unlikely that these men will be confirmed. But the renominations suggest that when it comes to filling judgeships, Mr. Bush is still not looking for either excellence or common ground. …
… Beyond their ideology, these nominees embody values that the American people rejected in the midterm elections.
The editorial provides background on the nominees and explains why they are unsuited for the positions to which they were appointed. The interesting question, to me, is why is Bush still pulling this crap? Can he still believe that cater-to-the-whackjob-base, wedge issue politics is still a good strategy after the thumpin’ he just took? Or is it that he jus’ cain’t he’p bein’ an asshole?
Rosa Brooks writes in the Los Angeles Times:
THEY GOT HUMBLE on Nov. 8 — and stayed that way for four whole days, until President Bush announced that he was resubmitting the nomination of John “Mustache of Death” Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations.
For the normally bellicose Republican leadership, four days was actually a good long spell of humility. So long, in fact, that even some hardened veterans of the White House press corps briefly succumbed to the fantasy of bipartisanship, churning out stories of a chastened White House eager to reach out across the aisle and across the ocean, cuddling up to the multitude of lawmakers, citizens and foreign states it had so assiduously alienated in that long, dark era stretching from 2000 to Nov. 7, 2006 BT (Before Thumping).
But all good things come to an end.
Bolton was just a warmup. Bush quickly indicated that he also planned to renominate his most controversial and extremist judicial nominees, and he pointedly let it be known that he didn’t actually give a hoot what the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton commission recommended about Iraq, unless it happened to come up with a plan he already liked. Over in the Senate, unrepentant Republicans handed a coveted party leadership position to everyone’s favorite segregationist admirer, Mississippi’s Trent “They Don’t Call Me Minority Whip for Nothing” Lott.
Brooks points to a new Agriculture Department policy that 11 million Americans who are short of food are not “hungry”; they are experiencing “low food security.” She continues,
We should have known better than to take postelection Republican humility at face value. For the GOP leadership, calling for bipartisanship after the election was the political equivalent of the narcissist who, oozing sincerity, says, “But enough about me, tell me what you think of me.”
Translated out of Republicanese, “bipartisanship” means “but enough of me forcing my policies down your throats! Now it’s time for you to embrace my policies!”
For the past ten days conservatives have been consoling themselves with the belief that they lost the midterms because they hadn’t been conservative enough. Conventional wisdom on the Right says that “the base” (e.g., “white rednecks who go to church on Sunday“) didn’t turn out in sufficient numbers. I am not inclined to dissuade them of this notion. If anything, I’d like to suggest they dig faster and use bigger shovels. But that’s me.
The fact is, the “base” turned out just fine. The Right got shellacked because moderate, independent, and suburban voters ran from them, screaming. And they did so not just because Republicans were a tad loose with taxpayers’ money or got into some ethics jams. They also did so because the GOP just plain moved too far right on social, economic, and foreign policy issues for most Americans to stomach.
Back to Eric Keroack and the WaPo article linked above:
White House spokeswoman Dana M. Perino cautioned against reading a larger pattern into the recent moves, saying, “You have to look at these things in isolation.”
Translation: We don’t want you to notice the pattern.
She added: “The president has said we will look to reach common ground where we can find it.
Translation: Democrats can kiss my rightwing ass.
However, he’s not going to compromise on his principles.”
Bush has principles? Who knew?
Update: Keroack is too far right even for John Podhoretz:
K-Lo, there’s something thrillingly countercultural about the thought that the Bush administration has apppointed an opponent of contraception to a job at HHS dedicated to getting out the good word about contraception. The only thing better would be to appoint a vegan activist to the job of Chief Meat Inspector. That said, the statement you quote by Eric Keroack — “the crass commercialization and distribution of birth control is demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness” — is pretty astounding. It’s one thing to oppose the sexualization of teenagers, particularly teenage girls. But Keroack calls contraception “demeaning to women.” Sorry, but yes, I think that’s pretty crazy.
K-Lo (Kathryn Jean Lopez) had written,
Passing out contraception without any deeper context or conversation is degrading and disrespectful — to men and women. Tell me I’m crazy.
I was tempted post Ms. Lopez’s email address but decided to be a lady and abstain. It’s not hard to find, however.
Update update: See also Tristero.
Update update: See also Jessica at Feministing. Keroack is one creepy dude.
Another update: See Andrew Sullivan.
The Other “I” Word
Following up on this morning’s post, “Twenty Thousand Troops” … as a member of the Citizen’s Impeachment Commission I’ve been getting many earnest emails calling for a stepup in pro-impeachment activism. For example, AfterDowningStreet.org is promoting December 10 as “Human Rights and Impeachment Day.”
You probably heard that, before the midterms, Nancy Pelosi said that impeachment was “off the table.”
Pelosi called impeachment “a waste of time,” and suggested Republicans — who have controlled the House for 12 years — would make political hay out of it if Democrats tried to impeach Bush.
“Wouldn’t they just love it if we came in and our record as Democrats coming forth after 12 years is to talk about George Bush and Dick Cheney? This election is about them. This is a referendum on them. Making them lame ducks is good enough for me.”
I’m about to explain why I support impeachment, and why I think it’s a mistake to push for it right this minute.
I believe strongly that Bush and Cheney should not be allowed to serve to the ends of their terms if they continue to operate outside the Constitution and ignore the laws of Congress. Congress must not allow extra-constitutional precedents to be set, which is what they will be doing if they simply wait out Bush. For the sake of the Constitution, history, and future generations, proper separation of powers must be re-established in the next two years.
However, I’ve been around the block enough times to know that unless impeachment has widespread popular support, and support among a substantial number of prominent Republicans, there will be a nasty backlash that could put the wingnuts back in power. And as unpopular as Bush is, I don’t think the public or many Republicans are ready to get on board the impeachment bandwagon. Yet.
Here’s my plan:
Before we chant the “I” word, everyone interested in reining in Bush — whether you call yourself a liberal, progressive, leftie, Democrat, libertarian, neomugwump, whatever — should be chanting the other “I” word — Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.
Congress must confront Bush on Iraq. Congress must use all of its Constitutional authority under Article I, Section 8, paragraphs 11 -14, and insist that U.S. policy will be a withdrawal. No delays, no excuses, no signing statements. Bush should be given a deadline for the withdrawal to be completed, and that deadline should have a firm 2007 date.
Would Congress do this? I think that enough politicians in both parties want Iraq: The Issue to be defused before the 2008 campaign heats up. And the midterms proved that being perceived as an enabler of George W. Bush is political death. I think many Republicans who have supported the war up til now will be persuaded to grandstand against it if that will save their political butts in 2008.
So, Congress should make a bipartisan demand that Bush order a withdrawal from Iraq. And if he refuses — and I am certain he will — then impeach the bastard. Then American people will understand why it has to be done, and they will support it. And if the effort is seen as bipartisan — as was Nixon’s almost-impeachment back in the day — there won’t be much of a backlash. Instead of being viewed as just more tiresome partisan bickering, the effort will be remembered as one of America’s finest hours.
I guess you could say that we not only have to be on the high ground on this — I believe we are already — but before we can act, there has to be a broad, bipartisan recognition that we are on the high ground.
And if the ongoing investigations by Waxman, Conyers, et al. turn up half as many White House scandals as I think they will, Republicans will want to throw Bush under the bus. And a mighty chorus will break forth on Capitol Hill — impeach, impeach, impeach.