May 4, 2008

Distractions

Filed under: Republican Party, Democratic Party, News Media, elections — maha @ 10:30 am

Joan Vennochi writes in today’s Boston Globe:

THE REAL NEWS of April played second fiddle to the presidential campaign, the pope’s visit to America, and the Texas polygamy case.

The death toll for the US military in Iraq hit 49 in April, making it the deadliest month since September, according to the Associated Press. Around Iraq, at least 1,080 Iraqi civilians and security personnel were killed last month, an average of 36 a day, according to the AP tally. While that’s down from March’s total of 1,269, or an average of 41 per day, those casualties certainly don’t add up to a stable Iraq.

It’s not as if there is no news from Iraq, you know. Bradley Brooks reports for the Associated Press:

The US military fired guided missiles into the heart of Baghdad’s teeming Sadr City slum yesterday, leveling a building 55 yards away from a hospital and wounding nearly two dozen people.

Separately, the military said late yesterday that four Marines were killed on Thursday by a roadside bomb in Anbar Province. No other details were released, and the names of the Marines were withheld pending notification of their families.

The strike in Sadr City, made from a ground launcher, took out a militant command-control center, the US military said. The center was in the heart of the 8-square-mile neighborhood that is home to about 2.5 million people. Iraqi officials said at least 23 people were wounded, none of them patients in the hospital.

See Juan Cole for more details.

Similarly, awhle back John McCain came out with a health care “plan” that was such a bad joke it ought to have got him laughed out of the presidential race. It might have, had the American people heard anything resembling substantive discussion of it from news media. (See also Steve Benen.)

Instead, we get 24/7 coverage of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. As Eugene Robinson said,

There’s something maddening about this presidential campaign. It has become irrelevant whether anything the candidates say actually makes sense. All that matters is how their words will “play” with voters who are presumed to be too stupid to realize that they’re the ones being played.

Bob Herbert, yesterday:

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is no doubt (and regrettably) a big issue in the presidential campaign. But what we’ve seen over the past week is major media overkill — Jeremiah Wright all day and all night. It’s like watching the clips of a car wreck again and again.

We’ve plotted the trend lines of his relationship with Barack Obama over the past two decades. What did Obama know and when did he know it? We’ve forced Barack and Michelle Obama, two decent, hard-working, law-abiding, family-oriented Americans, to sit for humiliating television interviews, reminiscent of Bill and Hillary Clinton on “60 Minutes” at the height of the Gennifer Flowers scandal.

We’ve allowed the entire political process in what is perhaps the most important election in the U.S. since World War II to become thoroughly warped by the histrionics of a loony preacher from the South Side of Chicago.

There’s something wrong with us.

Frank Rich points out in his column today that the alleged craziness of anything the Rev. Wright said pales in comparison to the utterances of one Rev. John Hagee, whose affiliations with John McCain seem to be an issue only among us leftie bloggers.

Here Rich gets to the heart of the matter:

Mr. Hagee’s videos have never had the same circulation on television as Mr. Wright’s. A sonorous white preacher spouting venom just doesn’t have the telegenic zing of a theatrical black man.

Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell can blame America for the 9/11 attacks, and the Right blinks and yawns. Some obscure who-is-this-guy-again? college professor named Ward Chamberlain blames America for the 9/11 attacks, and the Right goes ballistic. Likewise, some redneck yahoos in Alabama get caught with an arsenal of explosives and weapons that included 130 grenades, an improvised rocket launcher and 2,500 rounds of ammunition, and it’s no big deal. But an exploding backpack in Las Vegas or, worse, the threat of homemade cherry bombs in Michigan causes Righties to beocme unglued if they suspect the perpetrator might be Muslim.

It’s all about fear. Righties base their political choices on what they fear. At the same time, they are drawn to what they fear; they obsess over what they fear. Because they are afraid of angry black men, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a big deal to them. He excites them because he vindicates them.

On the whole, the Left doesn’t react the same way to right-wing craziness. That’s partly because there’s so much of it, of course. We hear about a Republican politician associating with an extremist religious whackjob, and we think, What else is new? And news media, which has bought into the narrative that “religion” is something the Right holds a patent on, doesn’t ask questions about the religiosity of the Right. It’s only a “story” when it’s about the Left.

Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign continues to degrade everything liberalism stands for by sucking up to the Right. But I’ll have to save that for another post.

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April 30, 2008

The Joke Post

Filed under: Bush Administration, Iraq War, Health Care, Republican Party — maha @ 10:18 am

Here’s a joke for you. Doug Feith has published a book called War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism . Must be a laugh riot.

Here’s another joke: John McCain’s health care plan. As near as I can make out, he wants to “lure” people away from employer-based health plans by eliminating tax incentives to employers to offer those plans. Instead, people will get a $5,000 “family tax credit” that will enable them to purchase private insurance, he says, even though the actual average cost of health insurance for a family is way more than double $5,000. And he has little idea what to do about people with a pre-existing condition who cannot purchase health insurance at any price.

Hilzoy takes the plan apart so I don’t have to.

Steve Benen says the plan “probably won’t receive much in the way of scrutiny.” From the press it won’t, no, but that’s why the Dems need to purchase lots of advertising time to scrutinize it. I think if the public were to hear the details, that by itself would be enough to sink McCain’s chances to win in November.

Lorita Doan, who made herself a punch line by pressuring General Services Administration employees to “help” Republican candidates, and who threatened to sanction anyone who cooperated with an investigation of her, has stepped down from her position as chief of GSA. She blames political pressure and bad grammar.

And last but not least, Tom Friedman explains why the Clinton-McCain gas tax plan is a joke.

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April 4, 2008

Forty Years

Filed under: Republican Party, conservatism, Democratic Party, liberalism and progressivism, American History, big picture stuff — maha @ 1:47 pm

Today is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the web is brimming over with retrospectives. See, for example, Eugene Robinson.

I want to point in particular to E.J. Dionne’s column, however, because he plays one of my own recurring themes — the way the Right exploited racism to take over America. The column begins:

Forty years ago, American liberalism suffered a blow from which it has still not recovered. On April 4, 1968, a relatively brief but extraordinary moment of progressive reform ended, and a long period of conservative ascendancy began.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ensuing riots that engulfed the nation’s capital and big cities across the country signaled the collapse of liberal hopes in a smoky haze of self-doubt and despair. Conservatives, on the run for much of the decade, found a broad new audience for their warnings against the disorders and disruptions bred by reform.

It wasn’t just the riots. Much of white America was still simmering with resentment over court-ordered school desegregation. Also, Lyndon Johnson had initiated New Deal-style programs aimed primarily at relieving poverty among African Americans. Suddenly, whites who had had no problem with “entitlements” before — when benefits went mostly to whites — discovered the virtues of “self-reliance.”

It is easy to forget that the core themes of contemporary conservatism were born in response to the events of 1968. The attacks on “big government,” the defense of states’ rights, and the scorn for “liberal judicial activism,” “liberal do-gooders,” “liberal elitists,” “liberal guilt” and “liberal permissiveness” were rooted in the reaction that gathered force as liberal optimism receded.

Richard Nixon did a masterful job of exploiting fear and prejudice to lure white working-class voters away from the Democrats. And, of course, whites in the Deep South switched their allegiance from the Dems to the Republicans en masse.

The Right-Wing Narrative says that Democrats lost power because George McGovern opposed the Vietnam War, and the Dem Party was overrun by “peaceniks.” But this view of history doesn’t square with what really happened. McGovern’s stand on the Vietnam War was the least of the reasons he lost to Nixon in 1972.

And check out the acceptance speech Nixon gave at the 1972 Republican convention. The first half of the speech was all about race. It was in code, of course, but no adult alive at the time could have mistaken his meaning when he spoke of quotas and tied paying high taxes to the costs of “welfare.” And Republicans are still running on those themes today.

Just the other day, someone argued in the comments that the next Dem president would be punished for “losing Iraq” the way the Democrats were punished for “losing Vietnam.” Except that I don’t see how the Dems were punished for losing Vietnam. Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975; in 1976, America elected Jimmy Carter as president and gave the Dems a small increase in Congress, expanding the large increase the Dems had enjoyed in the 1974 post-Watergate midterms.

The fact is, once combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam and the POWs came home, America lost interest in Vietnam. The whole bleeping country developed amnesia over Vietnam (except for the extreme Right, a group of people who are never so happy as when they are nursing resentments). As I remember it, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the Narrative emerged about Dems losing elections because of Vietnam. But this was an important narrative for the Right, because it helped them paper over the real primary reason the Right gained and the Left lost in those years. And that primary reason was racism. There were other issues, too, but racism was the foundational issue upon which other right-wing issues would be built.

Right-wing politicians had employed Red-baiting with some success since the late 1940s. But the excesses of McCarthyism had turned off moderates, and the Kennedy Administration had ushered in a liberal resurgence. Eventually, racism would succeed where Red-baiting had faltered.

The success of the racism strategy in the 1960s and 1970s taught at least a couple of generations of right-wing politicians about the importance of wedge issues. As new issues came up — feminism, abortion, gay rights — right-wing politicians embraced them and followed the old racism scenario to exploit them. Meanwhile, the Left crumbled into confusion and single-issue activism.

And as right-wingers gained more and more power over the federal government, the federal government became less and less functional. Because wedge issues may win elections, but they don’t govern a nation.

E.J. Dionne continues,

Forty years later, is it possible to recapture the hope and energy of the days and years before that April 4? Has liberalism spent enough time in purgatory for the country to revisit how much was accomplished in its name and to acknowledge that the nation is better off for what the liberals did?

In “The Liberal Hour,” an important new history of the ’60s that will be published in July, Colby College scholars G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert S. Weisbrot note that for all its deficiencies, the period of liberal sway “demonstrated what democratic politics can produce when public consensus crescendos, when coherent majorities prevail, and when skilled leaders provide direction, inspiration, and relentless energy.”

In the U.S., public consensus, coherent majorities, and skilled leaders providing direction in a positive, not a destructive, way are things only us geezers dimly remember and the young folks have never seen.

And after a few years of near-total dominance by right-wingers of the federal government, 81 percent of Americans say the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction.

It’s 40 years since 1968. Now a black man and a white woman are competing with each other for the Dem nomination. They both face nasty bigotry barriers, and it would be a breakthrough if either were elected. Yet only one of these candidates has shown a real talent for building public consensus. The other one is running an increasingly bitter, and angry, wedge-issue style campaign. I think 40 years of that crap is quite enough.

Update: Wingnut priorities.

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March 25, 2008

Catching Up

Filed under: Iraq War, Republican Party, conservatism, Democratic Party, liberalism and progressivism, blogging — maha @ 10:36 am

The problem with getting behind in my blogging is that, when I do get back to the blog, so much stuff has happened that I don’t know where to start. And, unfortunately, I have a huge amount of Other work to do today and cannot linger here writing something artful. So I’m just going to sort of free associate for a bit and run through some current items.

Leila Fadel and Nancy A. Youssef write for McClatchy Newspapers, “Is ’success’ of U.S. surge in Iraq about to unravel?” I knew the surge — as a public relations tool, anyway — was in trouble last night, when I was half listening to Hardball. I heard Tweety ask something along the lines of “Is the surge working?” When Tweety’s catching on to something, you know it’s pretty damn obvious. See also Fester at Newshoggers.

The bobbleheads are beginning to write off the Clinton campaign again, for at least the third time. The Vegetable has her chances of winning the nomination at 5 percent, which makes it a near certainty she’s about shoot up in the polls.

Journalist and brother blogger Will Bunch scored a major coup yesterday with this story. (Senator Clinton is exaggerating? Who knew?) See also “Clinton: Pledged delegates are ‘like superdelegates.’ ”

I have to disagree with E.J. Dionne. He writes,

What’s the matter with conservatism?

Its problems start with the failure of George W. Bush’s presidency …

The problems of conservatism are intrinsic to conservatism. Bush’s failed presidency is just a manifestation of the internal failures of conservatism.

I don’t have any problems with what used to be moderately conservative positions, such as being cautious about raising taxes, spending the people’s money, and getting entangled in foreign problems we would do well to leave alone. A moderately conservative perspective needs to be represented in government as a counterweight to some of the flightier impulses of progressivism. By the same token, conservatism needs progressivism and its flightier impulses to keep it from being utterly stuck in the mud. And democratic government itself can only survive when it respects the values of liberalism.

The problem with conservatism is that, when taken to extremes and logical outcomes, it turns into a nasty, brutish thing that destroys everything it touches. And the problem with the Republican Party is that, in the 1970s, it was infiltrated and taken over by hard-core ideologues who were determined to take the GOP and the rest of the country to those extremes and logical outcomes.

And once the extremists had complete control of all branches of government, with no effective counterweights, they proceeded to destroy everything they touched.

You can argue — hell, I’ve argued — that any ideology, taken to extremes, will implode and self-destruct. Ideology is a bit like medicine; a bigger dose is not necessarily a better dose. One pill every four hours might cure you, but four pills every one hour might kill you.

Well, Other duty calls. Gotta go.

Spotlight

March 19, 2008

News Flash: Obama Won’t Get the Racist Vote

Filed under: Republican Party, Democratic Party, elections — maha @ 10:00 am

Jonathan Martin of The Politico says that Republicans see the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as their weapon for beating Obama, if he becomes the nominee.

In their view, the inflammatory sermons by Obama’s pastor offer the party a pathway to victory if Obama emerges as the Democratic nominee. Not only will the video clips enable some elements of the party to define him as unpatriotic, they will also serve as a powerful motivating force for the conservative base.

Yep, nothin’ like a scary angry black man to remind white folks where their priorities lie.

In fact, the video trove has convinced some that, after months of praying for Hillary Clinton and the automatic enmity which she arouses, that they may actually have easier prey.

“For the first time, some Republicans are rethinking Hillary as their first choice,” said Alex Castellanos, a veteran media consultant who recently worked for Mitt Romney’s campaign.

But what about the speech?

“It was a speech written to mau-mau the New York Times editorial board, the network production people and the media into submission. Beautifully calibrated but deeply dishonest,” said GOP media consultant Rick Wilson, who crafted the 2002 ad tying then-Sen. Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden. “Not good enough.”

Mau-mau the New York Times editorial board. OK.

Essentially, the video clips of Wright are giving the Right a way to enflame racist voters while pretending they aren’t enflaming racist voters. And they aren’t going to let go of this, no matter what Obama says.

However, it’s hard to see whether this will really make a difference. The voters who care more about whether Obama wears a flag pin than about what he might do with domestic policy, or believe he’s a Muslim (with a Christian minister?), or who will vote against him because he’s black … would have voted Republican, anyway. The only difference is that more of ‘em might get worked up enough to actually vote.

Update: Priceless reaction from Kevin Drum.

Update 2: Liza has another take on this post along with four words for the GOP — John Hagee, Ron Parsley

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March 13, 2008

Schandenfreude

Filed under: Republican Party — maha @ 4:29 pm

Paul Kane writes at the Washington Post:

The former treasurer for the National Republican Congressional Committee transferred as much as $1 million in committee funds into his personal and business accounts, officials announced today, describing a scheme that could prove to be one of the largest campaign frauds in recent history.

For at least four years, Christopher J. Ward, who is under investigation by the FBI, used wire transfers to funnel money out of the NRCC and into other political committees he controlled, then shifted the funds into his own personal accounts, the committee said.

“The evidence we have today indicated we have been deceived and betrayed for a number of years by a highly respected and trusted individual,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), NRCC chairman.

Heh. Enjoy.

Spotlight

February 23, 2008

McScandal: The Story Continues

Filed under: Republican Party — maha @ 10:54 am

See Emptywheel.

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February 21, 2008

McScandal?

Filed under: Republican Party — maha @ 2:50 pm

I’m still trying to piece together the backstory on this morning’s near-allegations that maybe John McCain had an affair with a lobbyist eight years ago. What I’ve seen of the backstory is a lot more interesting than the story, which does seem a tad thin.

Marc Cooper writes,

Everyone who knows anyone has been hearing about this story for some months. Back in December, Matt Drudge got wind of it from inside the Times and teased it at the top of his site. We all waited, but the shoe never dropped.

Under what is said to be intense pressure from McCain and prominent D.C. criminal attorney Robert Bennett, who was hired to help deal with the matter, the Times capitulated and held off on publishing the story - offering no explanation, then or now. And if you read through the piece just published, there doesn’t seem to be any new information that the Times couldn’t have had two months ago.

So what, you ask? Just one small detail: In the intervening weeks between the moment when the Times was first going to publish the story and finally did publish the story, the same New York Times endorsed John McCain! And while he’s described in the endorsement editorial as a “staunch advocate of campaign finance reform” he’s tagged in this Wednesday’s news piece as having accepted favors from those with matters that came before the very committee he used to push that reform. And many, many other favors.

More importantly, if the Times had published its expose when it first had it over Christmas, it would have preceded all of the Republican primaries and caucuses. To say it would have changed the dynamic of the GOP race is perhaps the understatement of the decade. You can bet Mitt Romney and even Mayor Rudy are up late tonight gnashing their teeth and pounding their heads against the wall over this one.

The Right, of course, is in Maximum Victimization Mode and whining that the New York Times is mean and out to get them. But Cenk Uygur argues that the New York Times is afraid of the Right.

Conservatives are now charging that the New York Times held off on the story until after McCain had wrapped up the nomination, so they could ruin his chances in the general election. First, this is wrong because if they wanted to hurt his chances of getting elected, they would have revealed this fact much closer to the general election. They couldn’t have done McCain a bigger favor than by waiting to release the piece until after the primaries and way, way before the general.

Since they endorsed McCain in January despite knowing this story - and the clear implications of hypocrisy on campaign finance reform, let alone the other implications - the most likely conspiracy would be that they favor McCain in the election. But I don’t think there is a conspiracy.

I think the far simpler answer is the correct one. The McCain campaign threatened and intimidated them as the Bush team has done on countless occasions and they gave in until someone else was about to release the story. The only thing worse than being bullied by Republicans is getting scooped by your competitors.

The story here isn’t that the NYT is trying to hurt conservatives, it’s the exact opposite - they’re afraid of them. On every occasion that they have had a major story like this, they have held it after being badgered by Republicans. They only print the stories when there are no other options left and the story is about to get printed elsewhere anyway.

See also Gabriel Sherman at The New Republic.

You’ll like the letter sent out by the McCain campaign –

Dear McCain Supporter,

Well, here we go. We could expect attacks were coming; as soon as John McCain appeared to be locking up the Republican nomination, the liberal establishment and their allies at the New York Times have gone on the attack. Today’s front-page New York Times story is particularly disgusting - an un-sourced hit-and-run smear campaign designed to distract from the issues at stake in this election. With John McCain leading a number of general-election polls against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the New York Times knew the time to attack was now, and they did. We will not allow their scurrilous attack against a great American hero to stand.

The New York Times — the newspaper that gave MoveOn.org a sweetheart deal to run advertisements attacking General Petraeus — has shown once again that it cannot exercise good journalistic judgment when it comes to dealing with a conservative Republican. We better get ready for more of the Democrats’ attacks over the coming months as the Democrats pick their nominee, MoveOn.org starts spending their unlimited soft money, and the liberal media tosses standards aside in an attempt to stop our momentum. We need your help to counteract the liberal establishment and fight back against the New York Times by making an immediate contribution today.

John McCain has a 24-year record of serving our country with honor and integrity. He has led the charge to limit the money and influence of the special interests in politics and stomp out corruption. His life and his record prove just how preposterous the smear by the New York Times really is.

Objective observers are viewing this article exactly as they should - as a sleazy smear attack from a liberal newspaper against the conservative Republican frontrunner. Sean Hannity said, after reading the article three times, “It was so full of innuendo and so lacking of fact, and so involved in smear, I came to the conclusion that the goal here was to bring up a 20-year-old scandal.” Washington attorney Bob Bennett, who was the Democrat counsel during the Keating investigation, said, “This is a real hit job.” Joe Scarborough called the allegations “outrageous.” Even pundit Alan Colmes — not known for his conservative leanings — concludes “this is a non-story.”

Yet, it is there, right on the front page of the New York Times. It is now dominating the cable news coverage. We can only expect these sorts of baseless attacks to continue as we move into the general election cycle. We are going to need your help today, and your continued help in the future to have the resources to respond. We’ll never match the reach of a front-page New York Times article, but with your immediate help today, we’ll be able to respond and defend our nominee from the liberal attack machine.

Sincerely,

Rick Davis

Rick Davis, Campaign Manager

In brief — whine, self-pity, resentment, paranoia, more self-pity, the Times always picks on us. Pathetic.

Spotlight

February 14, 2008

Ghoulish Old Party

Filed under: Republican Party — maha @ 12:39 pm

See John Aravosis.

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February 11, 2008

No, We Can’t

Filed under: Republican Party — maha @ 12:29 pm

This is bleepin’ brilliant –

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