Monthly Archives: November 2006

There’s Stupid, and Then There’s …

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Violence is escalating in Iraq, and it’s the Democrats’ fault. Thought you’d like to know.

Update: See also Oliver Willis.

Update update: Glenn Greenwald —

So, to recap: when insurgents engage in violence before the elections, that’s the fault of Democrats because it’s done to help them win (and credit to Republicans because it shows how tough they are on The Terrorists). When the insurgents engage in violence after the elections, that’s also the fault of Democrats because they are excited by the Democrats’ success (and credit to Republicans because Republicans want to stay forever, which makes the insurgents sad and listless). And when there is no violence, all credit to Republicans because it shows how great their war plan is.

Update update update: One of the Jawa’s commenters writes,

I’m not the only American who would rather kick the teeth out of an America-last leftist than a jihadi. Something tells me this will become an everyday occurence in the near future. Tolerance isn’t infinite, not that any leftist knows the first thing about tolerance.

Ah, we come to it at last …

Happy Thanksgiving

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They’re bigger turkeys now than they were last Thanksgiving.

Enjoy your day!

Update: For your reading enjoyment:

Molly Ivins: Thanks—No, Seriously (and don’t miss the cartoon)

Bob Herbert: The Empty Chair

John Nichols: “Freedom, Brotherhood, and Justice…”

Update update: I notice Pajamas Media is linking to Franklin Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech, delivered on January 6, 1941. PJM of Seattle excerpted the parts about God and national defense. Here’s another part that I have quoted in the past:

For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
Jobs for those who can work.
Security for those who need it.
The ending of special privilege for the few.
The preservation of civil liberties for all.

The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

These are the simple, basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.

And these are, without exception, things at which the Bush Administration has failed, utterly. In some cases the White House has not just failed, but acted aggressively to set us all back.

FDR continued,

Many subjects connected with our social economy call for immediate improvement.
As examples:

We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.

We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care.

We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.

I have called for personal sacrifice. I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call.

A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my Budget Message I shall recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying today. No person should try, or be allowed, to get rich out of this program; and the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.

If the Congress maintains these principles, the voters, putting patriotism ahead of pocketbooks, will give you their applause.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression–everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way–everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want–which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

To that new order we oppose the greater conception–the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.

Again, consider how much of what FDR hoped for, and accomplished, has been lost by right-wing extremism. FDR’s corpse would do a better job running the government than the creature in the Oval Office now.

Sorry, I wasn’t going to rant today. It’s just that there’s something obscene about using the “Four Freedoms” speech to prop up imperialism, which seems to me is what PJM is trying to do.

JFK

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Bonnie reminded me that this is the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. Here is part of JFK’s legacy —

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label “Liberal?” If by “Liberal” they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer’s dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of “Liberal.” But if by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.”

But first, I would like to say what I understand the word “Liberal” to mean and explain in the process why I consider myself to be a “Liberal,” and what it means in the presidential election of 1960.

In short, having set forth my view — I hope for all time — two nights ago in Houston, on the proper relationship between church and state, I want to take the opportunity to set forth my views on the proper relationship between the state and the citizen. This is my political credo:

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man’s ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves.

I believe also in the United States of America, in the promise that it contains and has contained throughout our history of producing a society so abundant and creative and so free and responsible that it cannot only fulfill the aspirations of its citizens, but serve equally well as a beacon for all mankind. I do not believe in a superstate. I see no magic in tax dollars which are sent to Washington and then returned. I abhor the waste and incompetence of large-scale federal bureaucracies in this administration as well as in others. I do not favor state compulsion when voluntary individual effort can do the job and do it well. But I believe in a government which acts, which exercises its full powers and full responsibilities. Government is an art and a precious obligation; and when it has a job to do, I believe it should do it. And this requires not only great ends but that we propose concrete means of achieving them.

Our responsibility is not discharged by announcement of virtuous ends. Our responsibility is to achieve these objectives with social invention, with political skill, and executive vigor. I believe for these reasons that liberalism is our best and only hope in the world today. For the liberal society is a free society, and it is at the same time and for that reason a strong society. Its strength is drawn from the will of free people committed to great ends and peacefully striving to meet them. Only liberalism, in short, can repair our national power, restore our national purpose, and liberate our national energies. And the only basic issue in the 1960 campaign is whether our government will fall in a conservative rut and die there, or whether we will move ahead in the liberal spirit of daring, of breaking new ground, of doing in our generation what Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson did in their time of influence and responsibility.

Our liberalism has its roots in our diverse origins. Most of us are descended from that segment of the American population which was once called an immigrant minority. Today, along with our children and grandchildren, we do not feel minor. We feel proud of our origins and we are not second to any group in our sense of national purpose. For many years New York represented the new frontier to all those who came from the ends of the earth to find new opportunity and new freedom, generations of men and women who fled from the despotism of the czars, the horrors of the Nazis, the tyranny of hunger, who came here to the new frontier in the State of New York. These men and women, a living cross section of American history, indeed, a cross section of the entire world’s history of pain and hope, made of this city not only a new world of opportunity, but a new world of the spirit as well.

Tonight we salute Governor and Senator Herbert Lehman as a symbol of that spirit, and as a reminder that the fight for full constitutional rights for all Americans is a fight that must be carried on in 1961.

Many of these same immigrant families produced the pioneers and builders of the American labor movement. They are the men who sweated in our shops, who struggled to create a union, and who were driven by longing for education for their children and for the children’s development. They went to night schools; they built their own future, their union’s future, and their country’s future, brick by brick, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, and now in their children’s time, suburb by suburb.

Tonight we salute George Meany as a symbol of that struggle and as a reminder that the fight to eliminate poverty and human exploitation is a fight that goes on in our day. But in 1960 the cause of liberalism cannot content itself with carrying on the fight for human justice and economic liberalism here at home. For here and around the world the fear of war hangs over us every morning and every night. It lies, expressed or silent, in the minds of every American. We cannot banish it by repeating that we are economically first or that we are militarily first, for saying so doesn’t make it so. More will be needed than goodwill missions or talking back to Soviet politicians or increasing the tempo of the arms race. More will be needed than good intentions, for we know where that paving leads.

In Winston Churchill’s words, “We cannot escape our dangers by recoiling from them. We dare not pretend such dangers do not exist.”

And tonight we salute Adlai Stevenson as an eloquent spokesman for the effort to achieve an intelligent foreign policy. Our opponents would like the people to believe that in a time of danger it would be hazardous to change the administration that has brought us to this time of danger. I think it would be hazardous not to change. I think it would be hazardous to continue four more years of stagnation and indifference here at home and abroad, of starving the underpinnings of our national power, including not only our defense but our image abroad as a friend.

This is an important election — in many ways as important as any this century — and I think that the Democratic Party and the Liberal Party here in New York, and those who believe in progress all over the United States, should be associated with us in this great effort.

The reason that Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson had influence abroad, and the United States in their time had it, was because they moved this country here at home, because they stood for something here in the United States, for expanding the benefits of our society to our own people, and the people around the world looked to us as a symbol of hope.

I think it is our task to re-create the same atmosphere in our own time. Our national elections have often proved to be the turning point in the course of our country. I am proposing that 1960 be another turning point in the history of the great Republic.

Some pundits are saying it’s 1928 all over again. I say it’s 1932 all over again. I say this is the great opportunity that we will have in our time to move our people and this country and the people of the free world beyond the new frontiers of the 1960s.

— Sen. John F. Kennedy, acceptance of the New York Liberal Party Nomination, September 14, 1960.

Get a Grip

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I haven’t commented on either the recent O.J. Simpson or Michael Richards news stories because they’re outside the purview of this blog, but this column by Erin Aubry Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times is too stupid to be real. Kaplan compares the two news stories and argues they prove that Americans are more tolerant of a white man’s misbehavior than of a black man’s. No, really; I am not exaggerating. Sample paragraph:

I’m not equating racist invective with charges of double homicide. But the reality is that there is far more tolerance for a white person’s unseemly behavior than for similar behavior of somebody who isn’t white, especially if the unseemliness involves race. Richards’ “racist rant” has been described as a terrible but isolated incident. O.J., meanwhile, is condemned for his character.

I think committing a double homicide does speak poorly for one’s character, but that’s me. I haven’t been paying close enough attention to the Richards episode to have noticed anyone defending his character — I assume some of his friends have — but it’s obvious that in the court of public opinion Richards’s character has been found wanting.

I’m looking at the reaction to Richards’s rant, and I’m not seeing tolerance. I’m seeing shock and revulsion.

The truth is that Richards’s career, such as it was, is most likely over now. He can probably get gigs in dinner theater in the redneck circuit, but that’s it. I’ll be very surprised if he’s ever again booked into respectable venues in urban areas. I’m sure he gets some income from the perpetual syndication of the old Seinfeld series, but Richards’s outburst might even take the shine off that. (And hasn’t everyone who actually liked that series seen all the episodes three times already?)

I agree with Eugene Robinson when he says that recent episodes — Richards’s rant; the George Allen “macaca” moment — reveal a strong undercurrent of racism in America.

… as a society, we still haven’t purged ourselves of racial prejudices and animosities. We’ve buried them under layers of sincere enlightenment and insincere political correctness, but they’re still down there, eating at our souls.

Yes, but it’s also true that a big, multiracial cross-section of America were genuinely disgusted by both episodes, and both men are paying a price. Forty years ago these tirades wouldn’t even have been news; the nation has not been purged of racism, but it has largely repented of it, and that’s progress. And I’m more than a little disturbed when the actions of one individual — well, OK, two — are held up as being representative of the entire white population of North America. Particularly when much of said population expressed disapproval.

Richards’s behavior has caused him to be in the contemporary equivalent of the pillory. The whole country is throwing virtual rotten tomatoes at his exposed, racist head. And yes, a lot of those throwing tomatoes are just as guilty as he is. But a lot of us are really, truly sickened by what he did.

Good for Her

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Matt Apuzzo of the Associated Press reports:

Former Attorney General Janet Reno and seven other former Justice Department officials filed court papers Monday arguing that the Bush administration is setting a dangerous precedent by trying a suspected terrorist outside the court system.

It was the first time that Reno, attorney general in the Clinton administration, has spoken out against the administration’s policies on terrorism detainees, underscoring how contentious the court fight over the nation’s new military commissions law has become. Former attorneys general rarely file court papers challenging administration policy.

So far the righties have been fairly subdued, but one commenter to a rightie site couldn’t resist a walk down memory lane. He writes:

I am always amused by those on the Left crying about the Constitution.

1. Does anybody remember Ruby Ridge and a dead child and woman there?
2. Does anybody remember Waco – Branch Davidians and women and children killed there?
3. Does anybody remember Elian Gonzales being forcibly sent back to Communist Cuba?

It appears all children are at risk whenever Janet Reno is involved with any issue and she seems the forget about the Constitution herself from time to time!

How come these meatballs never remember that Ruby Ridge occurred during the George H.W. Bush Administration (August 1992)? Or that the investigation conducted by former Republican Senator Jack Danforth concluded the Branch Davidians shot their children and then each other?

I’m not sure that Elian Gonzalez’s issue was a constitutional one, as Gonzalez was a foreign national, but he wasn’t sent back “forcibly.” He was (willingly) returned to the custody of his father, who had plenty of opportunity to request asylum from Cuba, and did not. “Forcible” would have been taking him away from his father and making him stay.

Details, details.

And does anyone remember that the new RNC chair, Sen. Mel Martinez, made his bones with the GOP by attacking Janet Reno during in the Gonzalez Saga? You can read about it at Media Matters.

Sloppy Reporting in the New York Times?

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Anne Kornblut’s New York Times story on Senator Clinton’s 2006 campaign expenditures claims the Senator “blew” $30 million on her re-election campaign against a nominal opponent. Apparently the cable television bobbleheads are all over this story now, tossing out claims that the Senator’s campaign staff had predicted she’d have $50 million left over from the Senate campaign, when in fact she has $14 million. And Kornblut has been warbling about how much money the Senator’s campaign spent at Staples.

Per an email from Peter Daou:.

He says he does not believe anyone in the Clinton campaign had predicted ending the campaign with a $50 million warchest, or even a $20-30 million warchest.

As was mentioned several paragraphs into the article, part of the campaign money went toward building a massive list of small donor supporters around the country. One assumes this was in anticipation of a presidential campaign, although the Senator has not yet declared being a presidential candidate.

Kornbult’s article doesn’t mention the more than $2.5 million the Senator contributed to the DSCC and DCCC.

Expenditures Kornblut calls “consultant fees” went into advertising production, direct mail, polling, targeting, and phone calls.

On the other hand, David Sirota says some of that money could have been spent on other Senate and House races, which is a good point (although Senator Clinton did give more than $2.5 million to the DSCC and DCCC).

But my question is, why is this a story? For any reason other than, it’s Tuesday, so it’s time to smear Hillary! And will Chris Matthews obsess about it all through Hardball, which is about to start (please, no).

Happy Day

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Some good news this morning — the Houston janitor strike is over, and the janitors won. And the Dem party rose up and smacked down the forces of darkness (James Carville) who wanted to oust Howard Dean as DNC chair. Chris Bowers writes that even the Clintonistas sided with Dean. Apparently they didn’t want a backlash from the activist wing of the party.

Note that just a couple of years ago, they wouldn’t have given a thought to a backlash from the activist wing of the party. This is called “progress.” Remember that word; going forward, we may be using it a lot.

Chris writes (emphasis added),

Howard Dean’s base of support in the party has come primarily from two sources: state parties and the progressive movement. Although lacking in nuance, it would not be inaccurate to characterize the current modus operandi of the DNC as follows: small donations from progressive movement activists flow to the DNC in record amounts, and most of those donations end up being spent on direct grants to state parties and in the form of state-level field organizers. This is a novel path for Democratic money to take, especially since it generally bypasses both Washington, D.C. based consultants and wealthy donors. It is also exactly why Carville’s base of supporters hate Dean so much.

It would be premature now, but someday I hope to write a post about all the people who whined that the Democrats would never change — and how they were wrong.

Although this is obviously lost on most pundits and journalists, it is interesting how this seemingly odd alliance between state parties and the progressive movement is based not upon ideology. Rather, it is based upon both a shared strategic principle, the fifty-state strategy, and a shared chip on the shoulder: the sense that both have been long ignored by the party leadership. It is a sort of Alliance of the Ignored. When this alliance runs afoul of the Carville’s and Begala’s of the world, once gain it does so primarily because of strategic differences, not because of ideology. Carville and Begala generally represent an older tactical vision for the Democratic Party. This was a vision that was dominant from 1988-2004, when Democrats heavily employed triangulation, focused almost entirely on the narrow targeting of a few “swing” districts and demographics, and when television advertisements ad repetitious talking points aimed mushy-middle, low information voters where the primary tools utilized in all national Democratic campaigns. Wealthy donors and high-level consultants liked that strategy because it kept money flowing to the latter in the form of hefty commissions, and because it kept Democratic policy where the former would like it to be. Most state parties and progressive activists hated that strategy because it basically dictated that their electoral concerns were either not important, or something that the Democratic Party needed to actively distance itself from. Whatever ideological differences there may or may not be between the two feuding camps, ultimately their dispute is grounded in a difference in tactical vision: narrow targeting versus the fifty-state strategy.

If you want to extract somebody helplessly stuck in a rut, you can either haul them out forcibly or you can change the rut. I’ve been arguing for months now that the problem with Democrats isn’t (necessarily) the individual Democrats (there are exceptions), but the political cultures of Washington DC and the nation. And I’ve been arguing that even if you could rustle up a third party of honest progressive candidates and got them elected, unless the political culture of Washington changes they’d end up being just like the Dems.

Put another way, if the fish are sick because the water in the tank is foul, the solution is not to buy different fish (which will soon be just as sick) but to change the water. You might end up replacing some fish too, of course, but with new water some of the old fish might perk up and be just fine. Or maybe not. The reality is that we’re going to have to put up with some stinky old fish (Joe Lieberman; Joe Biden) for a while yet. There is still work to be done.

William Greider writes in The Nation (emphasis added),

Republicans lost, but their ideological assumptions are deeply embedded in government, the economy and the social order. Many Democrats have internalized those assumptions, others are afraid to challenge them. It will take years, under the best circumstances, for Democrats to recover nerve and principle and imagination–if they do.

But this is a promising new landscape. Citizens said they want change. Getting out of Iraq comes first, but economic reform is close behind: the deteriorating middle class, globalization and its damaging impact on jobs and wages, corporate excesses and social abuses, the corruption of politics. Democrats ran on these issues, and voters chose them.

The killer question: Do Democrats stick with comfortable Washington routines or make a new alliance with the people who just elected them? Progressives can play an influential role as ankle-biting enforcers. They then have to get up close and personal with Democrats. Explain that evasive, empty gestures won’t cut it anymore. Remind the party that it is vulnerable to similar retribution from voters as long as most Americans don’t have a clue about what Democrats stand for.

Conventional wisdom says that the only reason Dems won in the midterms is that Republicans lost. If you look at individual elections, that assumption doesn’t always hold water. These campaigns reveal a strong current of economic populism running through much of the country. Greider continues,

Both before and after the election, major media, led by the New York Times and Washington Post, repeatedly emphasized that no leftward ideological shift would occur, because Democrats are moving rightward. This was bogus, way too simplistic. It overlooked the fact that 100 or more candidates ran aggressively on liberal or populist economic issues–against unregulated free trade and the offshoring of American jobs, against special interests, corporate excesses and social abuses. The Blue Dog and New Democrat caucuses will expand, but the Progressive Caucus will, too, and will remain the largest–at seventy-one members.

The real contest among Washington Dems is not whether they will or will not impeach President Bush or how they will frame the abortion debate. It’s between the neoliberal “free traders” and the economic populists. Christopher Hayes writes,

At the national level, cable pundits almost immediately focused on a handful of winning Democrats with conservative stances on social issues–Jon Tester’s A rating from the NRA, Bob Casey’s opposition to choice and, obsessively, former NFL quarterback Heath Shuler, who defeated incumbent Charles Taylor in North Carolina’s 11th District while opposing abortion, gay rights and a guest-worker program for immigrants. But what the pundits didn’t mention was the role in Shuler’s victory of the district’s opposition to “free trade” deals. The area’s textile industry has been gutted by NAFTA, so when it came time to vote on CAFTA, Taylor was caught between his district, which wanted him to vote no, and the GOP House leadership, which wanted him to vote yes. So he skipped the vote altogether and CAFTA passed by one vote.

During the campaign, Shuler hammered Taylor for “selling out American families,” and he wasn’t alone in using trade as a wedge issue. A postelection analysis by Public Citizen found that campaigns cut twenty-five ads attacking free-trade deals, and that trade played a significant role in more than a dozen House races won by Democrats. In the entire election, Public Citizen noted, “no incumbent fair trader was beaten by a ‘free trader.'”

If the Dems are going to build on this month’s victories two years from now, I think they’re going to have to show real leadership — not just rhetoric and empty gestures, but leadership that effects tangible change — in two areas. And those areas are Iraq (as in “getting out of”) and economic populism (as in taking on globalization and corporate power and promoting economic fairness). In the latter area there is only so much a party can accomplish in two years, but I think it’s important that voters see they’ve made a start.

And, yes, there’s taking on Bush. Investigations, yes. Hearings, by all means. Drag all the dirt out into the sunshine so the American people can see it. If it leads to impeachment, grand. I suspect the issues of “Iraq” and “confronting Bush” will turn out to be of a piece, anyway. But the Dems must not forget economic populism. They’d better respond to the voters, or find themselves sinking again.