Monthly Archives: May 2006

Religion v. Religion

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For the past several years conventional wisdom has said that Republicans/conservatives were “more religious” than Democrats/liberals. A report from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released late in 2003 seemed to back this up. The Pew poll used three questions to measure “religious”; 81 percent of self-identified conservatives scored three out of three, whereas only 54 percent of self-identified liberals hit the religious trifecta.

I’ve been complaining about the Pew poll since it was released. Pew’s questions for determining who is religious were (1) belief in the power of prayer, (2) belief in a final Day of Judgment, and (3) belief beyond doubt in the existence of God. These criteria reflect an understanding of “religious” common to the People of the Book — Jews, Christians, Muslims. But if you are, for example, Hindu or Buddhist, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press you are not religious at all.

Considering that His Holiness the Dalai Lama would possibly score zero for three on the Pew religion test (no better than one out of three, I’m sure), I submit there’s a flaw in the test.

The question about a final Day of Judgment seems especially problematic. Many conservative, evangelical denominations are essentially eschatological sects keenly focused on preparation for the End Times, which they expect any minute now. But liberal Christians are more likely to think the fire-and-brimstone stuff in Revelations is just a metaphor for something. (Exactly what is a matter of opinion. I’ve heard it argued that Revelations was not a prediction of the End of the World but of the fall of the Roman Empire.)

The older Christian denominations mostly teach that there will be a Second Coming of Christ. However, they also take the view that no mere human can predict when this will happen. So while one should always be prepared, don’t quit your day job. My understanding is that there are diverse views on the End Times within Judaism and Islam as well. Some religious people don’t spin their wheels over Judgment Day all that much, even if they believe there’s going to be one.

One major distinction between conservative and liberal Christians (and, I suspect, conservative and liberal Jews also) is that liberals are more likely to consider scripture to be metaphorical rather than literal. This may tie back to the psychological makeup of people prone to conservatism — conservatives don’t like ambiguity and are more likely than liberals to be dogmatic. I postulate that people who are drawn to conservative religion are also more likely to adopt a conservative political view. Both religious and political conservatives tend to be more rigidly dogmatic, more deferential to authority, and to see the world in black and white terms. Political and religious liberals, on the other hand, tend to be less judgmental, more tolerant of ambiguity, and more fluid in their beliefs.

Thus, a test of “religiousness” based on adherence to doctrine will be skewed in favor of conservatives. But adherence to doctrine and religious devotion are not the same thing. Some religions place a higher value on religious practice and on the spiritual journey than on blind faith in a belief system. It’s not what you believe, but what you do, that matters.

I bring this up because of an article in today’s New York Times, “Religious Liberals Gain New Visibility” by Caryle Murphy and Alan Cooperman. If you are as old as I am you remember a time when religious liberals were visible and politically active, but for the past twenty or so years conservatives have pretty much taken over the religion franchise and obtained a copyright on Jesus. But, say Murphy and Cooperman, “religious liberals across a wide swath of denominations are engaged today in their most intensive bout of political organizing and alliance-building since the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements of the 1960s, according to scholars, politicians and clergy members.”

Rightie blogger reactions to this article are dismissive. The Left is hostile to religion, they say. “The more Democrats try to appeal to religious voters, the more they’ll alienate a big chunk of their base,” says one. This guy may have a point, sort of. I think it would be a huge mistake for Dems to copy the crass religiosity of the Right in order to win the evangelical vote.

Those alien to Bible Belt culture (Howard Dean, I’m talking to you) often can’t talk about religion without visible squeamishness. This has nothing to do with lack of devotion, however. Many genuinely religious people are uncomfortable talking about their religious experiences for the same reason they’re uncomfortable talking about their sexual experiences — some things are too personal and intimate to flaunt in public. And I say, if that’s how you feel, honor that.

For some, religion is a kind of tribal identity, and their religious talk is a code to let others know they are one of your people. But that same rhetoric will alienate those who recognize the tribe doesn’t include them. This is, I think, where a lot of the Left’s so-called hostility to religion comes from. Most of the time it’s not religion lefties are hostile to, but the exclusionary implication of much religious talk — if you aren’t one of us we don’t like you and you’re going to hell. It’s a tad off-putting.

I will be very surprised if the religious Left makes the same kind of alliance with the Dems that the religious Right made with Republicans. I suspect the religious Left is less interested in electing Democrats than in taking religion back from the fundies. They may be very happy to work with Dems on certain issues, but I don’t see the religious Left becoming an auxiliary of the Democratic Party. Or vice versa. And that’s OK; only the most rigidly conservative seem to think everyone has to join the same tribe.

Speaking of tribes — according to Frank Rich, the marriage between the Christian Right and the Republican Party may be on the rocks.

Politicians, particularly but not exclusively in the Karl Rove camp, seem to believe that voters of “faith” are suckers who can be lured into the big tent and then abandoned once their votes and campaign cash have been pocketed by the party for secular profit.

Nowhere is this game more naked than in the Jack Abramoff scandal: the felonious Washington lobbyist engaged his pal Ralph Reed, the former leader of the Christian Coalition, to shepherd Christian conservative leaders like James Dobson, Gary Bauer and the Rev. Donald Wildmon and their flocks into ostensibly “anti-gambling” letter-writing campaigns. They were all duped: in reality these campaigns were engineered to support Mr. Abramoff’s Indian casino clients by attacking competing casinos. While that scam may be the most venal exploitation of “faith” voters by Washington operatives, it’s all too typical. This history repeats itself every political cycle: the conservative religious base turns out for its party and soon finds itself betrayed. The right’s leaders are already threatening to stay home this election year because all they got for their support of Republicans in the previous election year was a lousy Bush-Cheney T-shirt. Actually, they also got two Supreme Court justices, but their wish list was far longer. Dr. Dobson, the child psychologist who invented Focus on the Family, set the tone with a tantrum on Fox, whining that Republicans were “ignoring those that put them in office” and warning of “some trouble down the road” if they didn’t hop-to.

As I wrote here, Republicans face an agenda impasse. For years they’ve been making promises to social and religious conservatives to get their votes. This was grand as long as Democrats controlled at least part of the federal government so that the Republicans didn’t have to keep those promises. But now they don’t have an excuse, and appeasing the base will mean alienating the large majority of Americans who are not homophobic and misogynistic knuckle-draggers.

Unfortunately, some among the Dems aren’t learning the right lessons from the Republican experience. Rich continues,

The Democrats’ chairman, Howard Dean, who proved his faith-based bona fides in the 2004 primary season by citing Job as his favorite book in the New Testament, went on the Pat Robertson TV network this month and yanked his party’s position on same-sex marriage to the right. (He apologized for his “misstatement” once off the air.)

Not to be left behind, Senator Clinton gave a speech last week knocking young people for thinking “work is a four-letter word” and for having TV’s in their rooms, home Internet access and, worst of all, that ultimate instrument of the devil, iPods. “I hope that we start thinking some very old-fashioned thoughts,” she said.

Dear Lord, how can smart people be so stupid?

Update: See also Pastor Dan.

New York, New York

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Righties must think there are two New York Cities. The New York City attacked on September 11, city of the flaming towers and flag-raising firemen, glorified in ten thousand cheesy graphics with giant weeping bald eagles looming in the foreground, is one.

And then there’s the other New York City, populated by ultra-liberal moonbats who have forgotten September 11 and who roll over for terrorists and would surrender if attacked.

This may astonish righties, but it’s the truth: These two New Yorks are one and the same city.

I bring this up now because of reaction to the heckling of Senator McCain at The New School commencement yesterday. Righties are dismissing the heckling as the work of “moonbats” and “Marxists.” We find these comments at the rightie blog Daily Pundit:

So McCain is now to be characterized as a “conservative Republican?” Apparently the AP is already in the tank and lying to advance his candidacy.

Oh, and by the way – do you think it is accidental that McCain has taken to appearing at various outposts of Barking Moonbat Central, so that faux commie whackjobs can screech at him, thereby demonstrating his “conservative” credentials, if only in contrast?

Look for him to do more of it as his campaign rolls into high gear next year.

I’ll come back to the question of why it is conservatives refuse to acknowledge McCain’s clear conservatism in a minute. First, I want to remind the blogger, if indeed he ever realized, that The New School is in the same New York City that was attacked on September 11. Indeed, as most of the campus is south of 14th Street, it was within the area surrounded by police barricades for several days after the attack. The New School’s president, Bob Kerrey, said at the 2002 commencement:

Speaking of challenges, there are many challenges for higher education in the United States today, especially for a university located in New York City, inside the impact zone of the September 11th terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. …

… Students aren’t the only ones facing challenges at our university. It’s been an amazing 18 months for me as well. This is my second commencement and I have learned a lot since last year.

Most of all I have learned how much love there is between the students, faculty and staff of New School University. I have seen that love expressed by men and women who were willing to go above and beyond the call after the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. We were in the impact zone and most of our school was closed for a week. We couldn’t use our largest dormitory for 10 days, and our communications system was shut down for two weeks.

In the weeks after the disaster there were bomb threats that caused the evacuation of the subways used by many of our employees to get to work. Some of our students simply chose to leave fearing the worse. Our enrollments were down, our costs were up, we were struggling with the implementation of our new administrative computer system and our future seemed less than bright. What has happened since has been an inspiration to me. The men and women who have chosen to work and teach at this university simply decided to work a little harder, to sustain the effort through physical fatigue and in short do the one thing that has confounded skeptics over and over again: They refused to give up.

They refused to give up because they know that New School University is a special place, a unique institution of higher education. Thanks to their efforts, today our enrollments are back on target, our financial health has never been better, our Banner system is up and running, delivering more and better on-line services to our students, and I am optimistic about the future of the University, and about the city and the world its graduates will live in and shape.

Mr. Kerry doesn’t say this, but after the students returned to class that September the smells and burning, acrid air of Ground Zero permeated the campus. Students passed armed National Guard as they walked to and from classes. They also lived among the sidewalk memorials that sprang up all over the city in those days; street shrines with pictures of the dead tacked to scaffolding and lamp posts, and with flowers laid on the sidewalk below.

Most of the class who graduated this week are too young to have been enrolled at The New School that day. But The New School student body has nearly three times the number of adult and continuing education students (over 25,000) as degree students (9,300). This means an overwhelming majority of people taking New School classes are New York City residents. And a whopping large majority of New Yorkers are personally acquainted — at least — with people who either escaped the towers that day, or didn’t.

Why did New School students heckle McCain? Here’s a clue:

Noting that Mr. McCain had promised to give the same speech at all of his graduation appearances, Ms. Rohe, who was one of two students selected to speak by university deans, attacked his remarks even before he delivered them.

“Senator McCain will tell us today that dissent and disagreement are our civic and moral obligation in times of crisis, and I agree,” she said. “I consider this a time of crisis, and I feel obligated to speak.”

She continued, “Senator McCain will also tell us about his strong-headed self-assuredness in his youth, which prevented him from hearing the ideas of others, and in so doing he will imply that those of us who are young are too naïve to have valid opinions.

“I am young, and although I don’t profess to possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that pre-emptive war is dangerous and wrong,” she said.

She added, “Osama bin Laden still has not been found, nor have those weapons of mass destruction.”

On Thursday, September 13, 2001, I walked to Times Square, where much construction was underway. The construction workers had festooned their hard hats with American flags, and they had hung huge signs from the highest scaffolding calling for vengeance on Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden. Not Saddam Hussein, but Osama bin Laden.

I wonder what those guys would have said then had they known their president would, within a few short months, pull resources away from the hunt for bin Laden and instead bring the might of the United States military against another Middle Eastern bad guy who had had nothing to do with the attacks and who was no threat to the United States? And that, nearly six years later, bin Laden would still be free? What would they have said if someone predicted the President and his party would exploit the attacks shamefully for political advantage while doing next to nothing to make the United States better prepared for terrorist attacks? On that day, they would not have listened to such talk.

Well, folks, they’re listening to it now. Because that’s what happened. It isn’t New Yorkers who have forgotten what happened on September 11. It’s the brainwashed, wingnut, kill-the-Islamofascist Right who have forgotten what happened on September 11.

Righties simultaneously slam New Yorkers for being liberal wusses and soft on terrorism. But they are shocked when New Yorkers refuse to sit and listen politely to someone they associate with the escape of bin Laden and the exploitation of the September 11 dead.

And to those who are critical of the students for being intolerant — can you name any liberals, especially antiwar liberals, who were even invited to speak at conservative college graduations? Let me know when Liberty invites Ted Kennedy or Russ Feingold to be the commencement speaker, and then we’ll see how tolerant conservative students are.

Back to McCain’s conservative credentials — during the 2000 primaries the Bush campaign successfully painted McCain as “liberal” when in fact, based on his voting record, he’s one of the most conservative members of the Senate. Righties have a remarkable tendency to not only believe what they are told but to retain that belief for prolonged periods of time in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary. Michael Kinsley noted that because moderates find him likable, they persuade themselves that he agrees with them when, in fact, he does not. “He says plainly that he is for the war, or against abortion choice, and people hear the opposite. It’s a gift, I guess,” Kinsley says. Oddly, McCain is well-liked among people who disagree with him on nearly every issue, but disparaged among people who do agree with him on issues as “too liberal.” Go figure.

While I Was Out

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Ned Lamont is definitely on the Connecticut primary ballot. Read all about it at MyDD, also here. Lamont did better than expected; the Lieberman supporters are stunned.

I see that the other significant development today is that BellSouth wants USAToday to retract the story that the phone company provided records to the NSA. But TPMmuckraker explains how BellSouth could have made the data available, anyway —

A new Business Week article may help explain how AT&T and BellSouth can say they didn’t help the NSA, despite the spy agency having millions of their records showing the call details of Americans using their networks.

The magazine reveals a hidden corner of the telecommunications world: a small group of companies who specialize in granting the government access to telecommunications records, conversations and real-time data on behalf of the telecom giants.

That’s right: the government now makes so many requests for wiretaps, phone records and call information that an industry has sprung up to handle the load.

From the Business Week article:

The Departments of Justice, State, and Homeland Security spend millions annually to buy commercial databases that track Americans’ finances, phone numbers, and biographical information, according to a report last month by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Often, the agencies and their contractors don’t ensure the data’s accuracy, the GAO found.

Buying commercially collected data allows the government to dodge certain privacy rules. The Privacy Act of 1974 restricts how federal agencies may use such information and requires disclosure of what the government is doing with it. But the law applies only when the government is doing the data collecting.

“Grabbing data wholesale from the private sector is the way agencies are getting around the requirements of the Privacy Act and the Fourth Amendment,” says Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington and a member of the Homeland Security Dept.’s Data Privacy & Integrity Advisory Committee.

Oh, and I see there was a prison riot at Guantanamo

THE largest prisoner uprising yet at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre was reported by the US military yesterday as the UN watchdog on torture called for the camp to be shut down.

The revolt took place when ten terror suspects clashed with ten guards trying to prevent a detainee from hanging himself in a communal living space in a medium security section of the camp on Thursday.

Announcements

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Light blogging today — my baby boy graduates college. I’ll check back with y’all this evening. (With my luck, today will be Fitzmas. Well, I won’t mind.)

The Big Event today is the Connecticut Democratic party convention, which we hope will put Ned Lamont on the primary ballot. See also Kos.

Other interesting links: “‘Fairy Tales’:The (lack of) intelligence underpinning Bush’s Iraq policy” by Ken Silverstein; “Coming Down to Earth” by Paul Krugman; “In the Blackwater” by Jeremy Scahill; “KBR and the Laundry” by Bert Stover; and “A Right Turn Holds Perils For Bush” by E.J. Dionne. I hope that’ll hold you ’till I get back!

Comments

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I hate to do this, but I’m turning “comment moderation” back on. I’m getting slammed with ad spam today. I hope to be able to turn it off again in the future.

Update: OK, I’ve added an anti-spam plugin, so I’m going to turn of moderation to see if it works. Wish me luck.

Open Letter to the 101st Fighting Keyboarders

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Dear Bloggers de Guerre,

Like most of you, I’ve been a civilian all my life. Most of what I know about war I learned from books and movies. If you’ve never served in the military or lived in an active war zone (New York City doesn’t count), all you know about war you learned from books and movies. You may not wish to admit this; some of you seem to think you have superior insight into martial matters bestowed upon you by ideological grace. But I doubt that’s true, even if you’ve seen a lot more war movies than I have.

Like most of you, I have enormous respect and appreciation for the U.S. military. I realize that most of you think liberals by definition hate the military, because you have encountered some liberals who hated the military, and since we’re all just alike we must all hate the military. But in fact it doesn’t work that way. I believe most of us, in fact, do not hate the military. I am personally acquainted with at least one sure-enough liberal who was a career army officer. Believe it, or not.

I want to talk to you about the allegations that U.S. Marines deliberately killed more than a dozen Iraqi civilians last November 19. I take it most of you do not believe these allegations. Many of you are accusing Rep. John Murtha, who repeated the allegations on last night’s “Hardball” at MSNBC, of making wild accusations, of being anti-American, of engaging in a verdict first, trial later condemnation. Copious amounts of adjectives like “dishonorable,” “unconscionable” and “treasonous” are being heaped on Murtha’s name. Some of you concede there might be some truth in the allegations, but that Murtha should not have spoken out while investigations are ongoing.

Here’s what I say: As investigations are ongoing, we who were not there do not know what happened. OK, but that includes Murtha, you say. According to Drew Brown of Knight Ridder, however, Murtha said he learned what the investigation found from “military commanders and other sources.” He is known to be well connected to the career military guys in the Pentagon, so this is possible.

It can be argued that Murtha should not have spoken up until the investigation was complete. On the other hand, it’s possible that without some pressure on the Pentagon the results of the investigation will never be made public. Billmon:

I don’t know why Murtha went public (just as the right wingers don’t know) but I can make my own guess: He did it to try to prevent Rumsfeld’s toadies from classifying and then deep sixing the investigative report, as they tried to bury the Taguba report on Abu Ghraib. And if the past really is prologue, Murtha is probably speaking on behalf of some fairly senior Marine officers who either can’t abide a cover up, or who want to pin the blame on the people who created this mess, and left the jarheads in Haditha to deal with it, instead of on their beloved Corps.

Accounts of what happened on November 19 are heart-wrenching. This is from Nancy A. Youssef of Knight Ridder (April 8, 2006):

The Marines say they took heavy gunfire afterwards and thought it was coming from the area around Younes’ house. They went to investigate, and 23 people were killed.

Eight were from Younes’ family. The only survivor, Younes’ 13-year-old daughter, said her family wasn’t shooting at Marines or harboring extremists that morning. They were sleeping when the bomb exploded. And when the Marines entered their house, she said, they shot at everyone inside. …

… The events of last November have clearly taken their toll on Yaseen and his niece, Safa, who trembles visibly as she listens to Yaseen recount what she told him of the attack. She cannot bring herself to tell the tale herself.

Frightened, Safa fainted. She thought she had died. When she awoke, she remembered seeing her mother still lying in bed. Her head was blown open. She looked around and heard her 3-year-old brother, Mohammed, moan in pain. The blood was pouring out of his right arm.

“Come on, Mohammed. Get up so we can go to uncle’s house,” she told her brother. But he couldn’t.

In the same room where her mother, aunt and sisters lay dead, Safa grabbed the toddler, sat down and leaned his head against her shoulder. She put his arm against her chest and held it to try to stop the bleeding. She kept holding and talking to him until, like everyone else in the room, he too was silent. And then she ran next door.

Maybe Yaseen and Safa are lying. Maybe they’re confused. Maybe they aren’t.

I’m fond of reading about history, including military history. Incidents like those described by Yaseen and Safa happen in war. Exactly one century ago, in 1906, troops under the command of Gen. Leonard Wood massacred at least 900 (reported at the time as 600) Filipino Muslims on the island of Jolo. The dead included women and children, killed indiscriminately. Anti-imperlialists published pamphlets and distributed a photograph of the carnage.

The Filipinos of Jolo, fleeing gunfire, took shelter in the crater of a dormant volcano.

The Americans rigged a block and tackle to hoist their artillery up the last 300 feet, and, as the Moros fled over the lip, the Americans opened a barrage into the 50-foot-deep crater. With orders from Wood to “kill or capture the six hundred,” the American forces descended into the crater in an ever-shrinking circle. Wood wrote, “The action resulted in the extinction of a band of outlaws.” Fifteen Americans were killed in the fighting; all six hundred Moros died.

Mark Twain’s comments on the episode are here.

There have been other massacres by U.S. troops, such as Wounded Knee in 1890 and My Lai in 1968. In fact, the history of warfare around the world, through history, is riddled with accounts of atrocities. We who have not been at war might like to imagine that such acts are aberrations or only committed by our enemies, not us. But I suspect we are being naive.

Two centuries ago, the historians tell us, wars in western society were mostly fought in discrete battles by soldiers in pretty uniforms. Battles were horrific — mostly bayonet work, close up and bloody — but most of the time battles would last a day or two, and the soldiers had days or weeks or months of relative safety until the next battle. But since the dawn of trench warfare — by most accounts, Grant’s siege of Petersburg, Va., 1864-65 — soldiers in war face unrelenting stress for days, weeks, months on end. And in these days of “asymmetrical warfare,” when combatants blend in with civilians and death can come even at the hands of children, the stress must be a great deal more than the human nervous system was designed to bear.

Some soldiers are going to break down. This happens. We don’t know if it happened in Iraq on November 19, but it could have happened. The allegations may or may not be true, but they are not “outrageous.” They are serious.

If this massacre did occur as Yaseen and Safa described it, suppressing discussion of it out of some misguided notion of national pride isn’t doing the war effort a damn bit of good. Even if Americans never hear the details, Iraqis have heard the details. The rest of the Muslim world has heard the details. They heard the details months ago, long before Jack Murtha spoke of them on television. Denying what they know — or believe — to be true doesn’t make us more trustworthy in their eyes. If even those who might want peace and democracy believe they cannot trust the U.S. and our troops, there isn’t much point in our remaining in Iraq, is there?

If it happens that the allegations are not true, and we can prove it, we need to get our proof in front of the world as soon as possible. If we learn that the allegations are not true, we should reprimand Rep. Murtha. But if they are true, we should thank him. You should thank him, if you are serious about accomplishing anything positive in Iraq.

But most of all, those of you who supported, and still support, the invasion of Iraq, should grow up and face the truth that atrocities will happen in war, even at the hands of U.S. troops, because we are asking troops to endure unbearable stress for prolonged periods of time. This is one of several reasons why war should be a solution of last resort. It’s easy for those of us who are safe and protected here at home to talk about what is “honorable” and what isn’t. But those who are bearing the burden you asked them to bear are human beings, not movie characters.

You helped send our troops into a war that didn’t have to be fought. If the allegations are true, you bear some of the blame. If the allegations are true, you owe both the Marines and little Safa an apology.

See also: ” Escalating the rhetoric.”

Hayden’s Hearing

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The Big Event today is the Senate confirmation hearing for CIA director-nominee Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, a man with way too many prefixes. Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe writes that the White House is trying to separate Hayden from the NSA spy scandal in an effort to keep the Senators from dwelling on Hayden’s role at the NSA.

The Bush administration moved yesterday to separate General Michael Hayden’s nomination to be the next CIA director from discussion of the secret domestic spying programs that he designed as head of the National Security Agency, in a seeming reversal of the White House’s political strategy for today’s confirmation hearing.

In a prepared statement submitted yesterday to the Senate intelligence committee for release today, Hayden makes no mention of the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs, according to a former official who has seen the five-page unclassified document. Instead, Hayden focuses only on rebuilding the embattled Central Intelligence Agency.

And for the first time yesterday, the administration briefed every Senate and House intelligence committee member about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping efforts. The White House previously insisted that the program was too sensitive to disclose its details to the full committees, leading several senators to vow that they would use Hayden’s confirmation hearing to press for more information.

This is significant, because …

Together, the two events stood in contrast to the administration’s prior expressions of eagerness to turn Hayden’s confirmation hearing into a showdown with critics of the domestic surveillance programs Bush authorized following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Last week conventional wisdom said that Hayden was chosen as the nominee because Karl Rove wanted a public fight on the NSA. Frank Rich wrote,

This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security move. It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss’s appointment in the autumn of 2004.

Something happened to make Karl change his mind. The White House doesn’t want a fight over the NSA after all.

Of the White House decision to brief the intelligence committees, a Los Angeles Times editorial says,

Easing Hayden’s confirmation, apparently, is more of an inducement to openness for the administration than are legitimate questions in Congress and among U.S. citizens about the NSA’s surveillance of Americans. Confirmation for Hayden — whose nomination is problematic for several reasons — is not necessarily the price Congress and the American people should have to pay for more transparency about the administration’s domestic surveillance program.

Also at the Los Angeles Times, Laura K. Donohue writes,

The scrutiny of the NSA is deserved, but the Senate and the American public may be missing a broader and more disturbing development. For the first time since the Civil War, the United States has been designated a military theater of operations. The Department of Defense — which includes the NSA — is focusing its vast resources on the homeland. And it is taking an unprecedented role in domestic spying.

It may be legal. But it circumvents three decades of efforts by Congress to restrict government surveillance of Americans under the guise of national security. And it represents a profound shift in the role of the military operating inside the United States. What’s at stake here is the erosion of the principle, embedded in the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, that the U.S. military not be used for domestic law enforcement.

Interesting. Will the Senators be thinking about this?

On the other hand, will they, in Frank Rich’s words, “be so busy soliloquizing about civil liberties that they’ll fail to investigate the nominee’s record?”

It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 — “Tomorrow is zero hour” for one — and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden’s N.S.A. also failed to recognize that “some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose,” as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and “for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores.”

Senators, for once, do your job.

The Frankenstein President

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Last August, President Bush led Lance Armstrong on a two-hour bicycle tour of the Crawford ranch.

Bush stayed in the lead, mind you, by presidential order. Nobody passes Dear Leader on a bicycle. Most people would be thrilled to watch a world-class — nay, legendary — athlete in the practice of his sport. Most people would have wanted the athlete to show off his skill a bit, even for a little while. But nobody shows off in the presence of Dear Leader except, you know, Dear Leader.

I thought of that this morning when I read Thomas Friedman’s column, “Saying No to Bush’s Yes Men.”

It’s comical to think of this administration hoping to get a popularity lift from shaking up the president’s cabinet, considering the fact that it has kept its cabinet secretaries so out of sight — even the good ones, and there are good ones — so the president will always dominate the landscape.

When you centralize power the way Mr. Bush did, you alone get stuck with all the responsibility when things go bad. And that is what is happening now. The idea that the president’s poll numbers would go up if he replaced his Treasury secretary is ludicrous. Replacing him would be like replacing one ghost with another.

Even Friedman has his moments of clarity. Bush insists on dominating the landscape; on being the focus of attention. So since 2001, the whole world has been watching him. This amounts to a great deal more scrutiny than he’s ever gotten in his life. He was governor of Texas about as long as he’s been president, but a state governor doesn’t get the blazing spotlight than a president does. As governor, his every move wasn’t covered by news bureaus from all over the world. It was easier for Bush’s family, and then his loyal yes men, to cover for him and create the illusion of a decisive leader and competent executive that he very clearly isn’t.

And, as governor, he didn’t have the most powerful military the world has ever known at his disposal. He didn’t have a foreign policy. There was less opportunity to screw up.

Unfortunately for Bush, he bought into the illusion. He has no appreciation of his own limitations. He insists on dominating the landscape.

Dick Meyer of CBS:

Short of another disaster on the scale of 9/11, George Bush no longer has the power, credibility or ability to effectively govern for the rest of his term in office. Contrary to what you hear on television, governing remains more important than campaigning. Government is more important than elections — to the extent the two can be differentiated anymore.

Bush’s realm of efficacy will be limited to areas where he can make unilateral decisions, mostly in war and foreign policy. The tax cuts that oozed through Congress last week may well be his last “significant” piece of domestic legislation; I put quotations around significant because they are, in fact temporary. The entire menu of Bush tax tinkering is set to expire in 2010 on someone else’s watch, an apt metaphor for this administration.

The Bush administration is now locked in a triple-hammer hold that would defeat Houdini.

Long-time Republican Party leadership must feel like Victor Frankenstein when his monster broke loose to wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world.

In the late 1990s the Republican Party worked hard to promote Gee Dubya as a “centrist” candidate for the presidency. By 2000 they had successfully planted the meme that Bush was a “compassionate conservative,” not a hard-hearted radical. When John McCain became a serious threat and won the New Hampshire primary in 2000, the party saw to it McCain was kneecapped in South Carolina. The party threw every resource it had into, um, claiming the electoral win in Florida. The party and the whole VRWC echo chamber stopped at nothing to wrap their boy in glory after September 11. And Republicans in Congress dutifully took orders from Karl Rove and in effect became extensions of the White House staff. Bush wanted to dominate the landscape, and other Republicans stepped aside and let him do it.

Did they know they were creating a monster?

Dick Meyer continues,

The vaunted brilliance and corporate organization of Rove/Bush Inc. has been pretty much blown away in the second term. Rove is fighting off an indictment. From the Dubai deal to the Harriet Miers death march, the White House’s political ear seems to be getting tinnier. Porter Goss’ appointment to the CIA was a disaster not just politically but substantively. In his second term, the president has never reached outside his core circle for advisers, staff or ideas.

Of course not. New people might try to pass him.

In January Karl Rove proclaimed that the party would run on national security for the midterm elections, painting themselves as fearless defenders of the Homeland and Dems as weak, dreamy appeasers. But E.J. Dionne wrote yesterday that this plan may have changed. He wrote of Rove’s recent speech at the American Enterprise Institute:

In his speech yesterday, Rove shelved the world-historical perspective in favor of the staple issue of midterm politics, pleading with his audience to think kindly of the Bush economic record. He spoke at length about the mess the economy was in toward the end of Bill Clinton’s term (though he did not mention Clinton’s name), and how our economic problems were deepened by the consequences of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Bush’s economic policies, particularly his tax cuts, helped cure what ailed us, Rove said bravely. They “have strengthened the economy, increased productivity and created new jobs.”

That Rove needed to make this case in the first place tells you the trouble the administration faces. All the polls, which Rove played down but acknowledged reading avidly (“I love all these polls,” he said before dismissing the idea of poll-driven policies), show large majorities disapproving of Bush’s handling of the economy.

There is also a rather widespread sense that the economy did very well under Clinton — better than under Bush — and it’s doubtful that getting voters to think about the Clinton days will do Republicans much good in November 2006.

Karl may be some kind of political genius, but he’s not in Texas any more.

Karl’s new tactic is to emphasize the president’s likability. At the American Enterprise Institute he claimed that “some polls” show that up to 60 per cent of the people like the President. These polls must be highly classified, since no one has found them in the public record; maybe they exist only in Karl’s head. Lance Mannion suggests that Karl tried to copy the success of Ronald Reagan, who got away with just about anything because he was so darn likable:

It’d be no wonder if Karl Rove concluded from that likeability in a political leader was all, and no wonder yet again when he discovered that young George Bush was “likeable” that he decided that here was the man to take Karl Rove to the White House.

What Rove forgot to take into account was that he himself was warped.

What he found likeable was probably not going to be the same things that most normal people liked.

They don’t like bullies. They don’t like sarcastic twerps who can’t be bothered to remember their names and cut them off short whenever they try to say something. They don’t like angry drunks. They really don’t like angry dry drunks. They don’t like snotty rich kids who screw up again and again, blame everybody but themselves for their screw-ups, and let their daddies and their daddies’ friends clean up after them while they go on to make another mess somewhere else.

What will the Republicans do? They created the monster, but now the monster is running wild and wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting world. He wants to dominate the landscape, after all.

Backlash

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Richard Morin and Dan Balz write in today’s Washington Post:

Public confidence in GOP governance has plunged to the lowest levels of the Bush presidency, with Americans saying by wide margins that they now trust Democrats more than Republicans to deal with Iraq, the economy, immigration and other issues, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll that underscores the GOP’s fragile grip on power six months before the midterm elections.

Dissatisfaction with the administration’s policies in Iraq has overwhelmed other issues as the source of problems for President Bush and the Republicans. The survey suggests that pessimism about the direction of the country — 69 percent said the nation is now off track — and disaffection with Republicans have dramatically improved Democrats’ chances to make gains in November.

Democrats are now favored to handle all 10 issues measured in the Post-ABC News poll. The survey shows a majority of the public, 56 percent, saying they would prefer to see Democrats in control of Congress after the elections.

The catch, say Morin and Balz, is that the voters aren’t all that wild about Democrats either. There is widespread dissatisfaction with incumbents of all species. The numbers reflect a backlash against right-wing mis-government, not a conversion to the Democratic Party vision, whatever that is. Of those surveyed, 52 percent said they didn’t see much difference between the two parties.

Meanwhile the alleged front-runner for the 2008 Dem nomination, Senator Hillary Clinton, cautiously practices “tactical bipartisanship” to win approval of some mythical “center.” Robert Kuttner writes,

With the Republicans in free-fall, national problems continuing to mount, and a rising national chorus begging the Democrats to stand for something, Senator Clinton has come to epitomize why the Democrats may yet fail to rise to the occasion and lead. …

… If she keeps transparently cozying up to the right, Senator Clinton could easily lose what faltering affection she retains from Democratic voters, but without impressing the center. Democratic operative Donna Brazile contends, too charitably, that Murdoch’s support shows that Hillary has ”crossover appeal” (sure, as in crossing over to grab whatever isn’t nailed down).

Back to Morin and Balz. “The public mood indicates that the midterm elections are likely to be a referendum on the president and his party,” they write. But the GOP still has more than five months in which to demonize their opposition, a tactic that has worked brilliantly for them in the past. Once again, the Dems’ failure to define themselves give the GOP the opportunity to define the Democrats.

On the bright side, today the Hartford Courant is running an op ed by Lowell Weicker endorsing Joe Lieberman’s challenger, Ned Lamont. (Yay!) Writes Weicker,

The majority of Democrats say they support Sen. Joe Lieberman in spite of his backing the war, since Iraq, after all, is only one of many issues facing voters.

Hello! To characterize the most monumental screw-up of our times as “only one of many issues” is like admiring the theater marquees on Broadway with King Kong on the loose.

And here’s a big ray of hope — last night brother blogger Chris Bowers of MyDD won election to the Pennsylvania Democratic State Committee. Chris’s election means that an establishment Democrat has been replaced by a sure-enough leftie blogger. “The city, the state, and the nation will change as a result,” writes Chris. “I promise everyone that. … We will all win, eventually.” We just have to keep pushing.

Lowell Weicker quoted a couple of lines from the abolitionist poem “The Present Crisis” by James Russell Lowell, written in 1844. (Some readers might recognize the poem as the lyrics for “Once to Every Man and Nation,” sung to the tune of a Welsh hymn, “Ton-y-botel.” I think “ton-y-botel” means “tune in a bottle,” but I’m not going to swear to that.) If you think “Iraq” where Lowell wrote “slavery,” some of these lines seem appropriate now:

Slavery, the earth-born Cyclops, fellest of the giant brood,
Sons of brutish Force and Darkness, who have drenched the earth with blood,
Famished in his self-made desert, blinded by our purer day,
Gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey;-
Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play?

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and ‘t is prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,
And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

Cowards, stand aside.

Update: They’re starting to sound like us — this guy (a rightie) thinks it would be better for Republicans in 2008 if Dems take back Congress in 2006. Heh.