Mitt and His Magic Moment

I wanted to write something witty and clever about Mitt's so-called "Kennedy Moment." However, since I lack cleverness or wit, I'll defer to the great Charles Pierce, who crystallizes my thoughts exactly:

Hey, Mitt. They think your religion is a cult and they think you're pretty much a foof. They're always going to think that, even when and if you're the nominee and some of them beg their Personal Lord And Strength Coach for permission to vote for you. Ain't going to be pretty, son. I feel for my former governor. I truly do. He's taking an unfair rap for his religion, and an unfair rap for his gardeners, all in the same week. However -- and it is a big However -- he's the one who decided to run for the nomination of a party that has enthralled itself to shoeless fundamentalist rubes and anti-immigration yahoos. He could have gone two ways. He could have stood against this and argued, correctly, that the GOP is on its way to becoming a regional, racialist-based, minority party. (The approach John McCain briefly tried on in the aftermath of the 2000 South Carolina primary, but which he thereupon abandoned for the next seven years.) He could have done us all a favor and Souljah'ed the lunatic portions of his base. He had the money and the record to do it. Instead, he pandered, over and over again, to the crazy people, and now the crazy people are acting like crazy people act, and all the chickens are coming home to roost on his handsomely chiseled head.

Further, the endless fake parallels to John F. Kennedy's speech to the Baptist ministers are as ahistorical as they are clumsily drawn. Kennedy was addressing a still-extant cultural anti-Catholicism in the South and nativist Know-Nothingism in the North that had remained virulent within his lifetime. He was addressing his speech to the entire country and, if you read it very carefully, you discover that he essentially was telling the Baptist ministers to go to hell, that they were crackpot religious bigots whom he very subtly marginalized from a changing political process. Most of what he told them they didn't really believe, and he knew it, and they knew it. Kennedy wasn't appealing for their support. He was warning them that their stale religious prejudices were being left behind in the New Frontier. As is plain from the text to everyone except, apparently, David Brooks, Romney's speech was narrowly aimed at garnering the support of an important slice of the base he needs to win his party's nomination. The deliberate misreading of the Constitution. The Meacham-esque blathering about the religiosity of the Founders. The monumentally indiscreet -- and philosophically risible -- equation of freedom with public god-babbling. This is all nothing except more pandering. And shouldn't someone making this facile comparison point out that Romney is a Mormon bishop and is thus tied more closely to his church's power structure than Kennedy ever was? I mean, Jack wasn't even a very good Catholic. Gene McCarthy was right about that.

That's pretty much it in a nutshell. That Mitt would say there should be no religious test, then would basically turn around and say that there should be a religious test and that he passes! is basically what I expected. This parallels the immigration debate, where Bush was hoping that he could bring the more socially conservative Hispanic vote to the Republican party and add to his base, forgetting that the odious Republican base doesn't like people who don't shimmer with lily whiteness, which, of course, is how the Republicans wanted it. They built their base, in large part, on racial and religious bigotry, and they still want to use it when it's convenient (like when there are Muslims afoot). Maybe this nonsense still speaks to them enough for Mitt the Duplicitous to win the primary (I doubt it, but what do I know? Little). But the coalition of pricks has been showing signs of fraying lately.

Our long national nightmare is over

Well, it's the season for Jesus Claus and Santa Christ. I am hoping to get through it without hearing too much of the yearly blather about the non-existent War on Christmas, a cousin to the shibboleth of Political Correctness that still seems to fuel the fires of conservative outrage (I suppose something has to, since things like Mike Huckabee's release of a serial rapist for political reasons and Rudy!s sex on the city raise nary a grumble on the right). Nothing ruins Christmas like Christians, of course, and over the last couple of years those of us with rational temperaments have had to endure a war on intelligence during the holiday season.

I worry no more. Bill O'Reilly has declared the war on intelligence a success. Christmas is saved from those "forces of darkness" that would allow businesses to cater to actual non-Christians during the holiday season by greeting people with "Happy Holidays" instead of "Get out of my store, you kike/raghead/atheist commie/dark person of indeterminate non-Christian religion-this is Our Time!" Or, well, whatever it was that privately-owned businesses were supposed to be forced to say to pay homage to the theocrats. Whatever. Anyway-to whom do Christians owe this overwhelming victory over the forces of almost nobody? Why, none other than-Bill O'Reilly himself! By jingo, Bill, you did it, with the strength of your hand and heart and your pure Christian spirit! Why, if it weren't for you, the overwhelmed, persecuted Christians would have had nowhere to turn, since they clearly have no power or support within our government or the media. But lucky for them, there was you, a man on a culture mission, making the world safe from licentious, amoral, sex-crazed anti-Christian liberals and their Christ-less allies. You know, when I think about it, that's probably the intersection between liberals and the terrorists. So, O'Reilly didn't really just save Christmas-he indirectly saved all of western civilizaion. That's quite a feat.

The War on the (non-existent) War on Christmas is stupid on so many levels that you could write a book about that alone and get a firmer understanding of the vapidity of the conservative Christian "movement." This, though, is a whole new level of dim. The ego of this man is stunning. The idea that America would become a Christmas-less nation (almost as though it were run by those anti-Christian heretics in Massachusetts) but for his tireless work is, well, ridiculous. For his support of this non-issue, he gives himself a public pat on the back. What I don't understand is, how can conservatives follow this nonsense? This little self-congratulatory wank inadvertently shows that his yammering about the non-existent War on Christmas was little more than cheap self-promotion. Beyond that, it has little meaning to him. You could say that about almost any subject he covers. Yet, he remains the idiot-king of the conservative talk-show world, the cubic zirconium in the Fox News tin crown. Liberals will generally eviscerate supposedly liberal pundits when they make fact-free or foolish assessments, or represent them poorly, as a quick Google search with the words "Joe Klein" will reveal. Yet, dunderheads like O'Reilly get a free pass, even though their ideology largely revolves around their wonderful selves and little else. When you're voting for a politician, you're forced to make a choice, even if it will be an imperfect one, and self-interest may be a part of the personality. That's just a part of the compromises one has to make in a democracy. But no one is forced to listen to a self-serving pudsmack like O'Reilly. That's a choice. That it's a choice conservatives make in such numbers is mightily revealing.

A long-winded post about Elite Mythology

I read this by Judith Warner in the New York Times, an article about the allegedly divisive, polarizing Hillary Clinton's surprising strength in this campaign, even when head-to-head against Rudy! Giuliani. I've never been quite as surprised as everyone else is that she might prove to be more popular than the punditocracy would believe-they mostly could never get their minds around the fact Bill Clinton was popular, either. While I don't plan to vote for her myself due to the fact I find her far too hawkish in her foreign policy, I can certainly see where she might be better liked by others.

There were a couple of things that stood out in the entry. There was this:

The “we” world of Tucker Carlson knew what they knew about Hillary Clinton — right up until about this week, I think — because they spend an awful lot of time talking to, socializing with and interviewing one another.

What they don’t do all that much is venture outside of a certain set of zip codes to get a feel for the way most people are actually living. They don’t sign up for adjustable rate mortgages, visit emergency rooms to get their primary health care, leave their children in unlicensed day care or lose their jobs because they have to drive their mothers home from the hospital after hip replacement surgery.

Hillary Clinton’s supporters, it turns out, do.

Alongside the newest set of poll results showing Clinton’s surprising levels of popularity among lower- and middle-class women, white moderate women, even black voters, was another story this week, based on a new set of data from the I.R.S.

It showed that America’s most wealthy earn an even greater share of the nation’s income than they did in 2000, at the peak of the tech boom. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, the Wall Street Journal reported, earned 21.2 percent of all income in 2005 (the latest date for which these data are available), up from the high of 20.8 percent they’d reached in the bull market of 2000. The bottom 50 percent of people earned 12.8 percent of all income, compared with 13 percent in 2000. And the median tax filer’s income fell 2 percent when adjusted for inflation (to about $31,000) between 2000 and 2005.

More and more people are being priced out of a middle class existence. Because of housing prices, because of health care costs, because of tax policy, because of the cost of child care, The Good Life – a life of relative comfort and financial security – is now, in many parts of the country, an upper-middle-class luxury.

Given all this, you would think that Clinton’s big policy announcement this week on improving life for working families would have been big news.

After all, it contained a number of huge new middle class entitlements: paid family leave and sick leave, most notably. There were a number of tried-and-true triggers for outrage from the right wing and the business community like government standards and quality controls for child care. There could have been debate stoked among the many childless workers who now feel parents are getting too much “special treatment” in the workplace (Clinton supports legislation to protect parents and pregnant women from job discrimination). At the very least, someone could have accused Clinton of trying to bring back welfare. (She supports subsidies for low-income parents who wish to stay home to raise their children.) Or someone could have questioned how realistic it really is to pay for all that – to the tune of $1.75 billion per year – simply by cracking down on the “abusive” use of tax shelters, as Clinton proposes to do.

snip

(“I do see you and I do hear you,” Clinton said in a speech on “rebuilding the middle class” earlier this month. “You’re not invisible to me.”)

In contemplating the disconnect, as I often have done, between Hillary and her upper-middle-class peers, I find myself thinking of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

In Maslow’s theory of human motivation, needs were mapped out in a pyramid form. The broad array of physiological needs was at the bottom, followed by the almost equally wide range of safety needs: things like bodily and financial security, secure physical health and work, and property ownership. Transcendent needs, like truth, justice, wisdom and self-actualization, were in the tiniest triangle up at the top. As their “lower-level” needs were met, Maslow theorized, people moved up the pyramid; they did not – unless the material circumstances of their lives changed dramatically – move back.

The American middle class, it seems to me, is looking to politicians now to satisfy a pretty basic – and urgent – level of need. Yet people in the upper middle class — with their excellent health benefits, schools, salaries, retirement plans, nannies and private afterschool programs — have journeyed so far from that level of need that, it often seems to me, they literally cannot hear what resonates with the middle class. That creates a problematic blind spot for those who write, edit or produce what comes to be known about our politicians and their policies.

Okay, I really pulled a lot from that. But the connection of ideas needed to be seen. The disconnect between the punditocracy, mostly upper middle to upper class, and the wider world outside of Washington is very real. It's utterly impossible to them to believe that Hillary Clinton might not be a harpy villainess in the eyes of the exalted salt-of-the-earth middle America. Nor are the upper classes classes going to be wildly thrilled with Hillary's appeal to lower middle class voters. Neither of those groups like her, in fact they tend to despise her, and yet there she is, positioned to win, pulling away against her Democratic foes and even, according to polling, winning in a general election, against all the conventional wisdom. Hillary is supposed to be a polarizing, unelectable bitch, and here she is, the strongest contender. It can't be explained as identity politics alone, since she leads Obama amongst African-Americans, and it can't be explained by anti-war sentiment alone, since she's always been rather hawkish and supported the Iraq war a long time, and remains hawkish towards Iran. It has to be, at least in part, because she's making her appeal to those caught trying to make it in a hardening economy, and it's working, in a way that it has not for, say, John Edwards. (All those stupid stories about Edward's haircuts seemed to work, except that they benefited not Rudy! or Mitt or St. McCain, they helped Hillary, who is hitting on some of those same two Americas themes. I can't tell you how funny I find that).

I don't think, at all, that the disconnect between the perception of upper class folk and lower class folk of Hillary, or any Democrat, is because of a wealth gap producing a blind spot, as Judith Warner puts it. A blind spot implies that if you merely could get such people to understand what it is like to live in harder circumstances, they would be less likely to dismiss politicians that appeal to people under duress. They might even develop sympathy for them. I see zero evidence of this. As the Frost family fiasco showed, even when presented with clear facts of the difficulties faced by middle and lower-middle income families, the right still reacts with crude, ugly personal attacks and claims that these "other" people are taking something that is rightfully the property of the elite. No, the disconnect stems from the great conservative myth of the Elite as Meritocracy.

I'm about to use anecdotal evidence to help make my point, so take that with the generous helping of salt it deserves. I grew up in an upper class community in the midwest (they do exist there). My own family is upper middle class, and certain branches of it fit into the upper class top 5% section of the economy. (I guess this makes me a limousine liberal or some such shit). I have seen, my whole life, this group of people as they are, not as they like to present themselves in public. A large proportion of the kids I grew up with stand to inherit large sums of money. Many of them were able, without any particularly special achievements, to go to elite universities, with all that entails. Some were accepted to these universities simply due to legacy, since they were not terribly high academic performers in high school. Many would have nice jobs waiting for them when they were done, either through family or connections with family or friends. Essentially, most of them were mini-George Bushes-not terribly talented, not terribly hard working, not terribly motivated born-on-third-basers. The one thing that really struck me about these people wasn't that they didn't understand the lives of less well-off people, though indeed they didn't (neither did I, at the time)-it was that they didn't understand they had not EARNED this lifestyle.

This is the wellspring from which this mentality really flows, an ignorance of their own passive acceptance of wealth with no work. They simply cannot accept the fact that they did not make this all happen, and thus feel that it is all deserved, as opposed to it being a gift. They really, really believe that their elite status stems from hard work and general personal worthiness, not lucky birth.

This misconception of their toil allows them to believe that they don't need to bother with those other people who haven't reached such heights. "Those people aren't rich, they aren't successful, they didn't go to the really good schools, etc...well, that's because they didn't work hard enough," they think. "Not like me. I did what needed to be done, and that's why I'm here." Thus rolls on the myth in their own mind.

I think that is what many liberals really don't get about these people. We tend to think they are nefarious plotters hatching manipulative schemes. And they often do. What we miss, though, is that they are also true believers-they really think their crony capitalism, avaricious tax cuts, corporate welfare, etc. are all the righteous and just rewards for the hard, hard work they put in to get there. This true belief has helped conservatives build the myth of the self-made bootstrapper, much to the Republican party's benefit. Ideologically, they have used it to manipulate middle and lower middle class voters, telling them that if they just work hard enough they can grab the brass ring--then, more importantly, telling them when they CAN'T that it's because some "other" person is TAKING it from them. That thief can be an immigrant, a woman, a black person through affirmative action, a lib'rul who taxes them, a commie, a feminazi, but someone is always ruining it for those people, who could have joined the elite if it weren't for those meddling darkies/women/immigrants/liberals/commies/feminazis/whoever. This is how they were even able to sweep up formerly Democratic constituencies like labor, selling them lies about how their success was being stunted by dark skinned devils and welfare queens, the lib'ruls are helping them do it, drop your union, vote Republican, tax cuts for the rich, this will help YOU succeed.

It's been difficult to pierce this haze. John Edwards has tried and tried and been childishly mocked for it, but the growing gap between the rich and poor, the disappearing middle class, the health care crisis and the failure of "movement" conservatism to improve life on a widespread scale are all combining to change people's minds about what the Elite as Meritocracy and Bootstrapper myths can really do for them.

And of course, there is the war. Not only is it bad and failing in and of itself, it also, as the most important manifestation of "movement" conservatism ever, calls into question the entire "movement" conservatism enterprise. And it is hard to position yourself as a supporter of regular, salt-of-the-earth people when your "movement" cuts veteran's benefits, or lets the VA hospital become a run-down hellhole, or keeps extending soldiers tours, or lets out of control mercenaries threaten soldiers, or loses millions of taxpayer dollars, all while being run by a fat, pear-shaped "elite" who will never face a shot fired in anger in their entire lives.

Yet this elite's self-image remains as it ever was; deserving, hard-working, and heroic, thus beyond any self-reflection. And so there is this disconnect, where people in this upper strata cannot for the life of them understand why Obama, or Edwards, or especially Hillary might actually appeal to people in, say, middle America. So, sure, maybe it is a blind spot. But if it is, it's a purposeful one. Calling it that gives them a little too much credit.

Then there was this:

Given all this, you would think that Clinton’s big policy announcement this week on improving life for working families would have been big news.

snip

But there was none of this. Clinton’s family policy speech in New Hampshire all but sank like a stone. If it was covered at all, it was often packaged as part of a feature on her attempts to curry favor with female voters. (“Clinton shows femininity,” read a Boston Globe headline.) It was as though the opinion-makers and agenda-setters, waiting with bated breath for Bill to slip up, just one more time, couldn’t see or hear the message to middle-class voters.

Well, anyone who has followed along with the news over the last 15 or so years would be familiar with that scenario. When it comes to reporting on politics, the "liberal" media cannot wait to disparage Democrats, and is impossibly vapid and out of touch. I urge anyone who is reading my incoherent tripe to read this. It is much better and covers most of this territory very well.

Friday Cat Blogging

Jackson.


Diego.

Diego looks surprisingly smug, considering the hat and all.

Christianist Third Party Possibilities

I agree with Mr. Matthew Yglesias here. It is my half-cocked opinion that pressure groups and special interest groups value their role as kingmakers more than they do as policy influencers (not an actual word, I know). The power (and money) they get from their supporters comes from their ability to get their chosen politicians to heel. Pro-choice cross-dressing serial cheaters/divorcees who win Republican presidential nominations obviously aren't counting on the fundamentalist vote, and if one Republican can win without them, it opens up the floodgates for all Republicans to win without them. Though this would hardly render them powerless in the future, it would prove once and for all that it is not necessary to kowtow to them to win, making them simply one more chattering voice in a crowd of them, instead of the all-important Leviathan they built themselves into over the years. Judging from the grassroots popularity of McCain in 2000, there might be a lot of Republicans who would like to boot the fundy vote if they could. Not that this will help the Republican party for the time being-losing that voting bloc will derail their party for a long time to come.

From another angle, it would seem that Rudy's Clash-of-Civilizations-Crusades nuttery isn't appeasing the Christianists, which would be his best hope of making them happy.

They are the wind beneath our wings

I am only a part time blogger. I'm not in an academic or politically connected field, so most of my day I can only barely keep up with current events. It makes my blog less satisfactory than I would like it to be. I would like to cover, for example, why libertarians and assorted Randroids give me a pain in my ass, or why I think the Straussian imperial project will suck America dry, or how I think the connection between private money, Christian fundamentalist theocracy, and the Republican party form a cancer on our political system. Doing that, however, takes a lot of time and research. I try, sometimes, but I have a hard time justifying to my employers why I am running down loopy documents from the AEI, for example, when I should be, you know, doing my work, which they pay me for. I have a lot of other commitments in my personal life, as well.

This leaves me only able to write, sporadically, about Republican windbaggery, hypocrisy, and assholery. Luckily for me, "movement" conservatives are the gift that keeps on giving, if by "gift" you mean chlamydia. Thus, within the last week or so we have had The Rush Phony Soldier Debacle, Tranny Annie Coulter's desperate wish to repeal the 19th Amendment, and my personal favorite, the smearing of a twelve-year-old boy. Smoove.

So, to recap: a man so cowardly he sent his maid to score his drugs for him in case the deal went bad chooses to disparage actual Iraq vets because they don't mindlessly follow the Dear Leader; right wing bloggers and politicians decide to attack the character of that highest symbol of political power in our world, a middle-school student; and, well, Chix-with-Dix Ann...what can you say? She is her usual asshat. These are amongst the leading voices of the right, lighting the way rhetorically for our great nation.

Movement conservatism is a cesspit.

Democracy at work, part II

Since the last couple of weeks have been the "Democrats as Spineless Curs" show, it will be interesting to see if they grow some testicles and do something about this:

Today, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) gave a speech on the Senate floor condemning Rush Limbaugh for calling troops who support American withdrawal from Iraq “phony soldiers.” He urged his colleagues — both Democratic and Republican — to sign a letter of disapproval to the CEO of Clear Channel.

Instead, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) — who voted to criticize MoveOn.org — has decided to commend Limbaugh. Today at 3:16 PM, Kingston introduced a resolution “[c]ommending Rush Hudson Limbaugh III for his ongoing public support of American troops serving both here and abroad.”

What Rush has done to "Support the Troops!" exactly, beyond being a loudmouth windbag Republican with a thing for Dominican sex parties, is beyond me. Anyway, given the bold, strong leadership style of the Democratic majority, I'm sure there is no way they will cower before a known Republican drug-abusing liar.

I am so glad our leaders are spending time on important tasks like this.

Confidence!!!

"I don't think Hillary will have me."

— Former Republican presidential candidate Tommy Thompson, in response to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's question about whether he would want to serve in the next president's cabinet.

Dick Cheney as Saruman

Whenever lib'ruls like me claim the Iraq war is about oil/rich guys or whatever, we're always told that we're moonbatty conspiracy theorists no one should take seriously. It would be a lot easier to accept that attitude if Republicans weren't always acting like a secretive conservative Legion of Doom.

Via a commenter at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

UPDATE: Via Digby, I see the plot thickens. A split like this would be disaster for the Republicans in 08. Obviously this is merely a guess, but I would see this trip as an effort to convince the fundies that whoever wins will toe the Christianist line just fine. Eventually, the limitations of associating with rigid, fundamentalist religionists was bound to show itself, and now it might just finally be happening. In any case, it's fun watching the conservatives eating themselves.

An Opportunity Denied

I see that Newt Gingrich is declining to run for President. That's too bad indeed.

As a committed lefty blogger of no consequence, I am truly disappointed. A Newt Gingrich Presidential run is a Christmas gift for those on the left. For me, it combines all the personal animosity I feel for his hand in foisting the Monica Lewinski "scandal" on me with the opportunity to rip apart his colossal ideas that the media is so infatuated with. He has it all, in abundance-hypocrisy, lunacy, cliche right-wing ideas masquerading as innovation, jowls-a lefty blogger's wet dream. If he had won the nomination, and been thumped as solidly in the general election as I'm certain he would have been, it would have left a whole pile of "conservative ideas" mouldering as a dung pile for years and years to come. As soon as I heard he was publicly making a play for the nomination, I started gathering ammunition. I know I was not alone.

And now it's over. Curse you, Newt!

As for this:

Rick Tyler said Gingrich realized he couldn't run a political action committee -- his American Solutions group -- and form an exploratory committee to run for president as well.

This sounds an awful lot like horseshit to me. Newt's self-regard is boundless. If he felt that he could manage to win, he wouldn't give it up to keep a comparatively small-time position leading a political action committee.

I think it probably has more to do with this. Scroll down and check out Newt's numbers. Newt may want to kiss himself, but the rest of the country will politely decline. I think his handlers got wind of the political realities and, realizing he might outdo even Fred Thompson for a sluggish campaign, put an end to things, lest this embarrassment give Newt's ego a terminal hematoma.

9/11 Forever

So, when Rudy takes a dump, is it because of 9/11?

Democracy at Work

Could this really, actually happen? I guess so...

Faced with the prospect of losing a committee vote, Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Richard J. Durbin Wednesday backed down a bit from their opposition to a Republican nominee to the Federal Election Commission accused of stymieing minority voting power.

Feinstein of California and Durbin of Illinois had expressed serious reservations over Republican Hans von Spakovsky’s nomination to a 6-year term on the FEC. And Feinstein, chairwoman of Senate Rules Committee, seemed to be setting the stage to vote against his nomination, signaling she would take the unusual step of seeking individual votes in her committee for von Spakovsky and three other pending FEC nominations – a Republican and two Democrats.

But Feinstein and Durbin on Wednesday joined a unanimous vote to move von Spakovsky’s nomination and those of the three others to the full Senate without recommendation.

Lithwick's article lays out most of Spakovsky's crimes. Spakovsky is one of the masterminds behind the "Voter Fraud" fraud, which was used to give intellectual cachet to the idea generally that voter fraud was widespread, and that specifically voter identification laws, targeted at minorities that usually vote Democratic, was the solution:

In support of his position that voter-ID laws did not unconstitutionally suppress the votes of poor and minority voters, Hearne cited the decision of the DoJ to approve the pre-clearance of Georgia's voter-ID law, and a law review article supporting such laws, written under the pseudonym Publius. Hearne didn't reveal that the decision on Georgia was made by political appointees of the DoJ over the strong objections of career attorneys there who believed the law was indeed discriminatory. Nor did he explain that (as I discovered and blogged about a few years earlier) Publius was none other than Hans von Spakovsky, then serving as one of the political DoJ officials who approved the Georgia voter-ID law. (President Bush later gave von Spakovsky a recess appointment to the Federal Election Commission.)

There is simply no way the Democratic Senate can let this slide. Spakovsky is a walking, talking affront to democracy. The Democrats approving this would be akin to a mass neutering. Of course, after that gutsy vote to condemn MoveOn.org for their ad in the New York Times, there's no telling what decision they might make.

My tax dollar at work

There is really nothing to say about this. Well, yes there is. It's stupid. What a colossal waste of time. One of my own Senators, Herb Kohl, voted Yea on this dog, instead of walking out, laughing, as he should have.

I guess I can expect to see John Cornyn pushing legislation condemning ads that impugned the character of Vietnam Vets John Kerry and Max Cleland coming right around the corner, right? Not something I would bet on.

While the blatant hypocrisy of the Republican party is as aggravating as ever, it comes as no surprise. Intellectual and moral consistency is not a conservative hallmark. What I don't understand is why the Democrats let this come to a vote at all. The "outrage" over this ad and the way it dared to "impugn" the mighty colossus Petraeus is a sideshow. Letting it happen at all validates this nonsense. Actually voting for it gives the Republicans political cover. Do they think they're going to get some kind of political capital out of this crap? The only thing I can think of is that they were actually worried that people would see Petraeus' shiny medals and be hypnotized into supporting the war. If so, that was a grave miscalculation. Americans still hate the war. They still want to leave. Shiny generals and rants about advertisements haven't changed any of that. Even though they are the majority party and are on the right AND popular side of the issue, they still lead frightened.

These attempts at some kind of short-term political gain always come at the expense of long-term victory, which is one of the reasons why I think the Republicans can always bully Democrats into nonsense storylines. When you're trying to do something good but difficult, sometimes you have to take some early hits. Trying to defuse the usual Republican you're-all-traitors-lefties-hippies-weaklings-pussies-blah-blah-blah by voting on useless crap won't work, because they'll do it anyway and when you really need to do something useful later, you'll have no credibility and thus, no influence. The Democrats are still trying to play by Republican rules. That's a losing proposition every time.

Blogging again

Well, looking at my blog entries it seems I have not blogged since July 21. A long time, that. I have to assume that my 3 readers have long since left and I am in essence starting from scratch. Almost 2 months have passed since I have bothered to write my usual pablum, and thus I feel disengaged from current events. It's taking some time to catch up.

The war plods predictably on. Since I started poking around news outlets and blogs again, it seems that a drawdown of troops is in the offing, which the MSM claims is a change of course by the Bushies. Unfortunately, the drawdown was inevitable-it had to happen because there are no more new troops to bring in once the current surge troops are done with their tours. So, not really a concession. No change of course. There never will be, as long as he is President. Keeping troops in Iraq, and hopefully expanding the war to Iran, Syria, wherever, establishing permanent bases, kicking the can, make the war someone else's problem, in 45 years people will say we were right you'll see, blah blah blah...in the two months that I shifted focus to my personal life and travelled abroad, there has been lots of heat and noise, but no essential change in the situation in even the smallest way.

To address the so-called "Anbar Miracle"...I'll start by saying that initially I thought some progress of some kind was being made, hence this post. I was wrong. I was wrong in the sense that it would clamp down on the violence in a meaningful way-the dip in violence is questionable, and even if it is kind of occurring, it isn't really MEANINGFUL-but I was also wrong in a more essential sense. I hadn't really given thought to the fact that the very Sunni militia members we were arming to fight AQI were the same insurgents that we were fighting ourselves not so very long ago. I hadn't given thought to the fact that by doing this, we were arming Sunni insurgents who would fight Shiite insurgents once we were out of the way. I hadn't given thought to the fact that this switch of convenience could and probably would be switched back if AQI were controlled. I hadn't really considered how this might play out with the Maliki government, arming Sunni insurgents in this manner-and of course, they would be a direct threat to the government Bush touted so highly before. In short, I didn't really think...I grabbed at any piece of news that might have seemed good or positive. And, worse yet, I realize now I did it so I wouldn't be a constant naysayer about Iraq. I was worried that the escalation might work and that I would be caught on the wrong side of it. I wrote stupid, thoughtless crap (as I often do) and didn't really bother to get a broader picture. And worst of all, I did this even though I have been against the war from the beginning. I had made it a point to disbelieve everything the Andover Cowboy and his crew of criminals have ever claimed since 2000 and never been disappointed, but as soon as I started writing it down someplace I cowered. Over time my mistake became clear to me, but I now see how easy it is to get sucked into intellectually-challenged mush, out of ego or fear or lack of original thinking. Without the existence of blogs, political websites, online news and reliable news outlets like McClatchy, I don't know if I would be any more reality -based than the average fundy I am so dismissive of. It's not a good feeling. I'll have to be more careful in the future to check myself.

My wife and I just returned from our honeymoon in Ireland, a country uninvolved in our war. For the first time since 2001, no constant barrage of the Republican cudgel known as 9/11, no surge, no Petraeus, no war. No one even asked us about it. Their newspapers front pages were often devoid of Iraq coverage, which was what I was hoping for on my honeymoon. This disconnection from the day-to-day news, spin, counterspin, posturing, etc. gave me a new perspective when I came home. I knew the war was a tragedy and a travesty, of course, but from a distance in seems blindingly absurd. At the time I arrived home, the talk amongst pundits and politicians was, essentially, that the deteriorating situation was the fault of Maliki. Christ Almighty, what? The plan was to depose and replace him. Details aside, what are we talking about here? We destroyed their country, it's businesses, infrastructure, it's basic services for living, it's army. We let the country slide into chaos. We were in charge. This mess is ours, no one else's. Furthermore, this governemnt is one Iraqis elected, for better or for worse. We mandated this happen, it did, this is what they chose. Whatever weaknesses it has, we helped to create, and in any case, it is ostensibly their country. Iraq is not the 51st state, or an errant colonial territory. Deposing their leadership when it displeases us or it's politically convenient is the hallmark of an imperial country kicking a puppet government in a satellite country, akin to the actions of the USSR-a country I was brought up to despise for exactly that. Coming back home to that, and the dog and pony show that was the Petraeus report, was like some kind of dark metaphor that escapes me right now. Whatever. I'm ranting in unsubstantiated fashion. I should really, really stop for now, and get some sleep.

World's Lamest Blogger Part Two

Well, I haven't done an entry in over a week. I will pick it up again, real soon like, but I am 1) helping plan my wedding 2) just sold my condo 3) just bought a duplex that 4) I have to move into in about a week and a half. All of the usual stuff that I do is being pushed to the side for the time being. I can't even do something as mindless as catblogging. Anyway, I will get back to my regularly scheduled left-wing puerility this upcoming week, for all two of my readers.

But it would be an American Theocracy, so it would be ok

I see the Christianists are showing their usual respect for our constitutional rights again:

Christian activists disrupt Hindu prayer in US Senate

WASHINGTON: Christian activists briefly disrupted a Hindu invocation in the U.S Senate on Thursday, marring a historic first for the chamber and showing that fundamentalism is present and shouting in the U.S too.

Invited by the Senate to offer Hindu prayers in place of the usual Christian invocation, Rajan Zed, a Hindu priest from Reno, Nevada, had just stepped up to the podium for the landmark occasion when three protesters, said to belong to the Christian Right anti-abortion group Operation Save America, interrupted him by loudly asking for God's forgiveness for allowing the ''false prayer'' of a Hindu in the Senate chamber.

"Lord Jesus, forgive us father for allowing a prayer of the wicked, which is an abomination in your sight," the first protester shouted. "This is an abomination. We shall have no other gods before You."

Democratic Senator Bob Casey, who was serving as the presiding officer for the morning, immediately asked the sergeant-at-arms to restore order. But they continued to protest as they were headed out the door by the marshals, shouting, "No Lord but Jesus Christ!" and "There's only one true God!"

Zed, sporting a saffron robe, a rudraksh mala round his neck, and a prominent tilak on his forehead, then nervously went through the invocation chosen from the Rig Veda and Bhagavad Gita.

"Let us pray," he began, "We meditate on the transcendental glory of the deity supreme, who is inside the heart of the earth, inside the life of the sky and inside the soul of heaven. May he stimulate and illuminate our minds.

"Lead us from the unreal to real, from darkness to light, and from death to immortality. May we be protected together. May we be nourished together. May we work together with great vigor. May our study be enlightening."

This was from "Operation Save America," an anti-abortion group. From their press release:

Theology Moved to the Senate and was Arrested

Theology has moved from the church house onto the floor of the United States Senate, and has been arrested.

Ante Pavkovic, Kathy Pavkovic, and Kristen Sugar were all arrested in the chambers of the United States Senate as that chamber was violated by a false Hindu god. The Senate was opened with a Hindu prayer placing the false god of Hinduism on a level playing field with the One True God, Jesus Christ. This would never have been allowed by our Founding Fathers.

"Not one Senator had the backbone to stand as our Founding Fathers stood. They stood on the Gospel of Jesus Christ! There were three in the audience with the courage to stand and proclaim, 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me.' They were immediately removed from the chambers, arrested, and are in jail now. God bless those who stand for Jesus as we know that He stands for them." Rev. Flip Benham, Director, Operation Save America/Operation Rescue

Well, at least they're not trying to be subtle or clever about establishing a theocracy. Too bad there is this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances

You'll note there is no asterisk there. No special "this does not count for non-Christian religions clause." No "except for atheists" addendum. Nope. It just exressly prohibits establishing a state religion, and prohibits others, including religious people, from preventing others from practicing theirs.

I know there will be caterwauling on the right wing and amongst the Christianists about their poor martyrs being hauled off to jail. Whatever. No one is going to try to stop them from being Christians. No one is forcing their religion on them in the form of specific laws designed to render them into second class citizens. They wish to do that. That's their thing. And in that vein, they tried to stop a ceremony not to their liking, as they would regularly do if their religion were the state one. How that isn't an attempt at a Christian Taliban I don't rightly know.

And of course, let's not forget which party scratches their back.

With people like this working for him we would definitely be in good hands

I see from Rick Perlstein's blog that Wisconsin hero Robert Kasten has joined Rudy's campaign team. He is racking up quite a crew of miscreants, isn't he?

Bourbon Bob in action:

Relates Badger State blogger Bill Christofferson, author of a biography of Gaylord Nelson, the great liberal senator and Earth Day founder Kasten knocked off on Reagan's coattails in 1980: "Kasten reportedly celebrated his victory over Nelson so hard that he was barely able to speak an intelligible word - or stand up - when it finally became clear he had won. He went on to distinguish himself as a drunk driver and, after losing to Russ Feingold in 1992, reportedly found work as an arms dealer."

Truth and Responsibility

"Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."

These are the handwritten words of Dwight Eisenhower, to be read to the world in case the D-Day invasion failed. As the Iraq war drags interminably on, it becomes clearer and clearer that victory, always a vaguely sketched concept with the Bush administration, is not to be. Our army is stretched thin, leaving us vulnerable; the costs are mounting, well beyond what we were first told; sectarian civil war has long since thrown the country into chaos; none of the goals of the latest surge have been met. No democracy. No stability. No WMDs. Al Qaeda in Iraq, where before the invasion they were not a presence, despite some high profile claims to the contrary. This brief sketch can't do justice to the damage done. With our military withering, we simply can't stay there forever. Our continued presence hurts both Iraq and the US, and sets us up for potential intractable conflicts of a different kind down the road. And the prospects for withdrawal look no less grim. Civil war will almost certainly intensify. Iran could become a hegemonic power in the region. Al Qaeda will claim victory. Instability will reign, for a potentially long time. It's not that I think withdrawal will bring rainbows and unicorns to Iraq. It's just that I think that we have no choice (and I am especially disinterested in any claims of "victory" Al Qaeda might make). A full withdrawal is going to have to happen, sooner rather than later. The longer we stay, the worse our position becomes.

In this entire fiasco, I think it is important to remember that the Bush administration and the Republican party have had no serious opposition to any of their Iraq policies at any point. Even after the 2006 elections, the victorious Democrats capitulated on war funding. Before that, Congress was a rubber stamp for whatever the Bush administration wanted to do. The Republicans beat the drums for this war, with the help of the press; they planned it, every step of the way; they executed it in every regard; there was, at no time, a constituency that diverted their plans in any way whatsoever. Every result of this war, and the GWOT generally, is their responsibility alone. Every decision, every one up to this point, has been theirs. This is their war. So, as it becomes clear that their war is the most egregious fiasco since Vietnam, who do conservatives blame?

The Defeatocrats! Of course.

Which brings me back to Eisenhower's letter. Eisenhower was well aware of the risks involved in the D-Day invasion. He considered it his decision to invade, and thus considered it his responsibility if it failed. I'll quote the last two lines again:

"...The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."

The consequences of failure would have altered world history for the worse (worst), yet he considered it his duty to shoulder the blame in that event, because he made the decision to do it. Try, try to imagine anyone in the Bush administration, at any level, taking on that kind of responsibility for their decision to launch this imperial war we have now. I can't do it.

I'm not a pacifist. I know America will have to fight wars in the future. We'll face threats, and we'll have to deal with them. I get that. But in the future, if some fool wants to puff up his chest and rattle sabers about how we have to go to war in some far off place (that he will probably never see), he had better be brutally honest about the consequences of potential defeat. And he had better be ready to shoulder the blame, unconditionally and completely, if we are defeated. If he (or she) is not willing to meet that standard, or talks of cakewalks and shows of power, then I simply will not support that war at all, immediately, because I will know that beneath all of the puffery and tough talk lies the heart of a coward.

140,000 Troops

I hestitated yesterday to jump on with a post about this:

140,000 Turkish Troops on Iraq Border

(BAGHDAD) — Turkey has massed 140,000 soldiers on its border with northern Iraq, Iraq's foreign minister said Monday, calling the neighboring country's fears of Kurdish rebels based there "legitimate" but better resolved through negotiation.

Largely because when read the first reports it seemed implausible. And the sources seem dubious:

In Washington, a Pentagon official disputed the claim by Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, a Kurd from northern Iraq, and said satellite photos indicated no such troop buildup.

It was unclear where Zebari got the figures. If accurate, Turkey would have nearly as many soldiers along its border with Iraq as the 155,000 troops which the U.S. has in the country...

...But in Washington, a Pentagon official disputed Zebari's assertion that troops were massing, saying no such movement has been picked up by U.S. satellites gathering intelligence there. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak on the record about the subject.

140,000 troops would nearly match our own. I would think that would be worrisome, to say the least, if it were true, even to the Bush administration. I suppose it could be true-after all, I am not there to see any of this, so I only know what I can read-but that would cause a pretty major reaction in Washington, as Turkish troops might come into conflict with our own. Seeing no such reaction, I just don't believe the claims.

Fantasy Debate

This comes as no particular surprise:

Official: Report will say none of Iraq’s goals met

WASHINGTON - A progress report on Iraq will conclude that the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad has not met any of its targets for political, economic and other reform, speeding up the Bush administration's reckoning on what to do next, a U.S. official said Monday.

This was, of course, utterly predictable, as is the next paragraph:

One likely result of the report will be a vastly accelerated debate among President Bush's top aides on withdrawing troops and scaling back the U.S. presence in Iraq.

Oh yes. Of course, there will be blistering debate about what to do next. The decision to draw down is just around the corner. Just like all of the other times before.

So the myth that "debate" over what to do in Iraq continues, even at this late hour. When a change in direction actually occurs, I'll believe it. Until then, I assume things stay the same because 1) the Bush administration is so tied to this war politically and "historically" they will never change course unless forced at gunpoint and 2) they know if they can simply limp to the end of this term, they can blame the failure on "Defeatocrats" and the press. Much easier to point fingers after they are gone than to admit that the single most important political decision of our time was a failure based on lies. So, despite the press' latest attempt to portray the Bush administration as though they are regular human beings, I loudly predict that this will change nothing, and that the war will drag on unless Congress can force the issue.

UPDATE: Of course, the context of "debate" in that paragraph could be between Bush and Democrats in Congress. If that is what the paragraph meant, then great. Although I am not sure that will lead to anything more concrete than the last Congressional challenge to Bush's war. In terms of internal debate within the Bush White House, that would all be for show, of course.

Friday Cat Blogging

Diego. Being a cat means daily humiliations like this.




Jackson makes love to the camera.

A Dim Argument

I don't want to be simple-minded about the subject of global warming, but I do wonder if global-warming "skeptics" who prattle on in the winter how it can't be happening, since there are parts of the country that are experiencing record cold, will reverse their opinion when parts of the country are experiencing record heat?

God, I feel stupid writing that. I can't believe people actually try to make arguments like that stick.

Bobo, Professional Idiot.

I could rant some more about the commutation of "fallen soldier" Scooter Libby (and I have!) but this does it much better. It also has a good run-down of the facts surrounding the case, in the event you have the misfortune of talking with a Bobo-Lite in your workplace and need some easily found ammo.

Reading Brooks without the retorts is depressing. Honestly, I don't know how people do it.

The Story They Won't Let Die, at All Costs

Can we drop the fucking haircut stories? Why do people get paid to write this shit?

I know the supposed narrative-how can Mr. Two Americas really care about the common man if he gets a $400 HAIRCUT? Whatever. After living through the 2000 campaign hearing about the Andover Cowboy's regular-guy bona fides-despite the fact that he was a rich boy from an East Coast WASP family of long standing and power-I realized that the media's interest in this subject matter was selective. You could point to any successful candidate, Republican, Democrat, or other, and find an example of artifice or vanity, if you really looked-perhaps, renting a red pickup truck and having one of your operatives drive it for you on the campaign trail, so that you look like a real southern man. None of them wants to suffer the Nixon 1960 fate, Republican or Democrat. So, they make themselves up for the camera and try to portray themselves as positively as possible. But for the media, this only matters when it is a Democrat, as we see regularly.

How about this: this story line is vacuous bullshit, as it applies to Republicans and Democrats both. Edwards' haircuts and Fred's truck fakery, in the end, mean nothing to me, and affect the state of the country not at all. Bush's cowboy posturing was not a positive for the country in the least. If Edward's became President, he wouldn't run up a deficit buying hair care products, and no Republican President will solve the problems of the world arm-wrestling or ripping off their shirts and flexing their (mythical) brawn WWE style. These aren't stories. They're piffle. It's the policies, what these people plan to do as President, that matter, because those are what will affect me and millions of other people, every day.

UPDATE: Contrast the storybook-tough guy imagery so favored by the media and the Republicans with the reality of what they actually DO, here.

More Fun with Kurds and Turks

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is agitating for some kind of crackdown on PKK rebels as elections near:

ANKARA, Turkey: Turkey's prime minister on Wednesday again called on allies to act on a promise to tackle separatist Kurdish rebels who have been staging attacks from bases in northern Iraq.
Turkey has long complained of U.S. inaction against the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party or PKK, and Turkish officials are debating whether to stage a military incursion into Iraq to hit the guerrillas who have escalated attacks on Turkey.

Erdogan said Turks no longer wanted to hear words of support against the PKK and expected action instead.

"We want them to move from words into action," Erdogan said at a speech to a meeting of trade chambers from more than 100 countries. "Turkey has joined the struggle against world terrorism. That's what we expect from those who appear to be our friends. That is our most natural right."

This is a problem that is not going away. While the recent flare-up has died down somewhat since the recent cease-fire in June, it clearly retains the potential to explode at any time-the political pressure to do something drastic is mounting, and the U.S. and Iraqi governments show little willingness to intervene, despite the administration's tough talk opposing terrorism of all kinds. The inconsistency of the Bush administration regarding the GWOT is apparently frustrating the Turks, especially Erdogan, who is in the difficult position of having to satisfy both an increasingly belligerent, invasion-minded military in his own country and the U.S., who desperately need to avoid this confrontation at all costs to avoid further disaster.

The presence of the PKK in northern Iraq is known of and understood by the administration. I hate to link to this article, as it is from National Review online and written by AEI operative Michael Rubin, which doesn't exactly recommend it to me. But, after wading through the dumb, there is some relevant, and revealing, information going back to 2004:

As war in Iraq approached, Turkish diplomats and generals both raised concern about the presence of the PKK. They have continued to do so since. American officials respond that Washington takes seriously Turkey's concerns. But, a gap remains between U.S. rhetoric and actions, severely straining Washington's credibility. "You guys simply don't understand how seriously we take this," a long-time Turkish diplomatic acquaintance told me at an Ankara teahouse last month.

According to both Turkish and U.S. sources, CENTCOM has promised to share with Turkey plans which address the PKK, but consistently fails to deliver. There may be legitimate reasons for planning delays, but CENTCOM leaves the impression that it is filibustering. "I can understand their concerns," said a Turkish general, acknowledging that rooting PKK out of inhospitable terrain is difficult, "But I can't understand why they won't be honest with us."

CENTCOM also suffers a credibility gap at home. Even as I was stopped by PKK fighters, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Joint Staff continued to claim ignorance of the PKK's exact location. This was dishonest or disingenuous. As we continued on from the de facto PKK checkpoint, we could see from the roadside a well-tended PKK graveyard and also a permanent PKK compound under camouflage, mesh netting. Twice rounding bends beneath high bluffs, we saw automatic weapon-toting PKK fighters over looking the road.

The Joint Staff's claims are more troubling given rumors that, last autumn, apparently without interagency authorization, some members of the 101st Airborne met with PKK representatives in Mosul, thereby legitimizing the terrorist group in direct contravention to the policy of the commander-in-chief...


...While I lived in Iraq, every few months I would visit Sidikan, a mountainous district northeast of Diana, sometimes spending the night on a floor of a mud brick farmhouse so as to not have to rush back to the CPA's hotel in Erbil. Local farmers would complain about the PKK, which extorts taxes and seizes land and property. "All of us know where the PKK is. Any of us could point out where they are, if the U.S. army asked," one old farmer said. It was a sentiment that was expressed by various elders in different villages. Karim Khan Bradosti, the tribal leader in the area, has repeatedly offered assistance and cooperation to American forces in the fight against the PKK.

Again, AEI...make of that what you will. Nonetheless, I see no reason to doubt the basic facts of the story. So the administration, despite hardline rhetoric they would like to apply to, say, Iran, is looking the other way when the terrorists in question are allied with our only friends in Iraq. And if the NRO article is any indication, those terrorists are not exactly good to the residents of the area.

I can understand the desire for a Kurdish homeland. They were promised one in the aftermath of World War I, in the Treaty of Sevres. Since that was scuttled in the Treaty of Lausanne, they have grown into the world's largest ethnic group without a homeland. This status ensures that they will agitate for some kind of independence for as long as they feel they have a chance to get it. So again, even if it cools down now, the Kurd problem isn't going away. These are the true fruits of military intervention where we should not have gone. While the Bush administration used simplistic rhetoric and clash-of-culture ideology to paint terrorists as a monolithic threat because they all "hate freedom," the fact is that the different ethnicities, sects and nations all have their own idiosyncratic aspirations and desires, which we will become involved in by our physical presence in the region. The neocon desire to control the region for their purposes, as if they can press certain buttons and get desired results through the mighty "show of strength," is a pure fantasy and always was.

The Mighty Rule of Law

Just like with the subpoenas, this comes as a total shock. Remember, they were not just going to do what was legal, but what was right.

UPDATE: Lucky for ol' Scoots he has Presidential pull in light of this, isn't it?

The Republican party is shameless.

UPDATE THE SECOND: In case an idiotic right-wing commentator tries to tell you differently.

Friday Cat Blogging

Diego crashes after a night of debauchery in various opium dens by the lakefront.


Jackson looks smug. He has just returned from a liaison with his prostitute girlfriend and is well satisfied.

But it has long since gone away. Hooray.

People I work with are prattling on, still, about Paris Hilton. Meanwhile, through Atrios feeding through Campaign for America's Future, I find out about this:

In September 2006, a group of African American high school students in Jena, Louisiana, asked the school for permission to sit beneath a "whites only" shade tree. There was an unwritten rule that blacks couldn't sit beneath the tree. The school said they didn't care where students sat. The next day, students arrived at school to see three nooses (in school colors) hanging from the tree.

The boys who hung the nooses were suspended from school for a few days. The school administration chalked it up as a harmless prank, but Jena's black population didn't take it so lightly. Fights and unrest started breaking out at school. The District Attorney, Reed Walters, was called in to directly address black students at the school and told them all he could "end their life with a stroke of the pen."

Black students were assaulted at white parties. A white man drew a loaded rifle on three black teens at a local convenience store. (They wrestled it from him and ran away.) Someone tried to burn down the school, and on December 4th, a fight broke out that led to six black students being charged with attempted murder. To his word, the D.A. pushed for maximum charges, which carry sentences of eighty years. Four of the six are being tried as adults (ages 17 & 18) and two are juveniles.

Much like the ongoing domestic, Christian-based terrorism aimed at abortion clinics, the existence of ugly, practical day-to-day racism is almost totally absent from our media or national discussion. Racism is a problem that has been solved, so how could there be any meaningful discussion of it? Meanwhile, voter fraud "reform" advocates try mightily to target minorities. War supporters and other assorted wingnuts cower in fear over the inevitable brown takeover of the world.

Racism helps to feed what is left of the odious Republican "base." The people who hang nooses from trees aimed at black students at a high school are the same people who enable the corrupt modern Republican party. They must be so very proud.

ADDENDUM: Let us not forget the lovely imagery conjured up by immigration "reform" advocates. Clearly, racism is dead.

It's like living in the '70s all over again

Here is a surprise...the White House is refusing to answer subpoenas.

Not much to say about it. I think everyone had to know this was coming. I can only hope that the real reasons for these investigations aren't lost in the constitutional fights to come. Otherwise the effects of the US Attorney purge and the attempt to gin up voter fraud therein will continue, regardless of the outcome of the upcoming confrontation.

A Figure of Fun

In one of my first posts, I mentioned the tiresome task of having to read tiresome "intellectuals" like the tiresome Jonah Goldberg. I think I may have to rescind that statement-his upcoming book looks like it will be brilliant comedy Iif in fact it is ever finished, or indeed, even started).

My favorite part of yesterday's blogospheric Jonah-kicking was his detailed, careful response to the fact that John Mackey is in fact a Libertarian:

He doesn't really seem to know what he's talking about (oh, and it's not like it's news to me that the owner of Whole Foods is a self-described libertarian but maybe the German obsession with organic food and environmentalism, for two examples, is news to Plumer). But that's okay, it's what I expected. To be continued, when the book comes out.

Breathtaking. A tortured, inane connection between German environmentalists, liberals and facism. I assume he is talking about 19th century German romanticism and its connection to the Nazis. Or something. In any case, now that this iron-clad connection has been made, I know that liberals like myself have been subconciously preparing for a supermarket Putsch. I can hardly wait.

The longer this book festers without being finished or published, the better it will have to be to avoid total ridicule. So many people are going to pick this thing clean that less talented writers like myself are going to have trouble getting in on the feeding frenzy.

I am a really lame blogger

I haven't had content in days. I will rectify this situation tomorrow, with more inane commentary on subjects I have no expertise in. I bet all none of my readers can hardly wait.

Stealthy Christianists

The other day I linked to this article in a post, from the New York Times:

Justice Dept. Reshapes Its Civil Rights Mission

WASHINGTON, June 13 — In recent years, the Bush administration has recast the federal government’s role in civil rights by aggressively pursuing religion-oriented cases while significantly diminishing its involvement in the traditional area of race.

Paralleling concerns of many conservative groups, the Justice Department has successfully argued in a number of cases that government agencies, employers or private organizations have improperly suppressed religious expression in situations canthat the Constitution’s drafters did not mean to restrict.

The shift at the Justice Department has significantly altered the government’s civil rights mission, said Brian K. Landsberg, a law professor at the University of the Pacific and a former Justice Department lawyer under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

“Not until recently has anyone in the department considered religious discrimination such a high priority,” Professor Landsberg said. “No one had ever considered it to be of the same magnitude as race or national origin.”

Cynthia Magnuson, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said in a statement that the agency had “worked diligently to enforce the federal laws that prohibit discrimination based on religion.”

It was really this part that got me in a snit:

The changes are evident in a variety of actions:

¶Intervening in federal court cases on behalf of religion-based groups like the Salvation Army that assert they have the right to discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money.

¶Supporting groups that want to send home religious literature with schoolchildren; in one case, the government helped win the right of a group in Massachusetts to distribute candy canes as part of a religious message that the red stripes represented the blood of Christ.

¶Vigorously enforcing a law enacted by Congress in 2000 that allows churches and other places of worship to be free of some local zoning restrictions. The division has brought more than two dozen lawsuits on behalf of churches, synagogues and mosques...

Earlier, I had posted about the way the Republican Party uses the AIDS issue to reward it's most important political supporting group, the religious right. There are the more obvious ways they attempt to do this, like nominating Supreme Court Justices who will chip away at Roe v. Wade, anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendments, ID in public schools, etc. These are the public faces of theocracy in America. Liberals in the past have made the mistake of deeming these bones to be thrown to the religious right, not to be taken seriously in any real sense. The chipping away at Roe by the Supreme Court proves this is baldly wrong, of course, but it is in these less-publicized sneak attacks that the most damaging Christianist inroads are being made, because it puts Christianists in positions of authority, where they can decide just exactly how to interepret whose civil rights to protect, and in what manner. The effects of this will last long after the administration that put them in power is gone

Friday Cat Blogging

Diego.Here, he whores for food. To make it more effective, he has turned the position of the photo around to give it a more "avant garde" feel.


Jackson.
He collapses after a monster workout, trying to get into shape for his afore-mentioned prostitute girlfriend.

If they're fashionable...

...do they have swinging parties? Are the chicks hot?

I am glad to see I wasn't the only one whom this article irritated. I didn't really know that there was a fashionable, intellectual left anymore. Maybe there is, and I'm just left out as always.

Anyway, the reaction of the right to Rushdie's knighthood is about what I would expect-a quick "congratulations" followed by a tirade about the Muslim reaction, blather about the left's wussified conciliatory attitude and it's supposed hypocrisy for supposedly not supporting Rushdie who fights the good fight against bigoted repression (just like those brave right wing constitutional heroes!) blah blah blah blah

Much is made of this quote by Ejaz-Ul-Haq-“The West is accusing Muslims of extremism and terrorism. If someone exploded a bomb on his body, he would be right to do so unless the British government apologizes and withdraws the ’sir’ title,” Mr. ul-Haq said.

It's a stupid comment, of course, and his little attempt at a save afterward doesn't cut it. The expected Muslim howling, riots, etc. will rightly be deplored. But expressions of violence like that are no stupider than, say, a multi-day celebration of a religious assassination in Milwaukee, for example . And, of course, they're only too happy to support denigration of Islam with a call to arms to protect civil liberties, freedom of speech, or whatever, but to do the same thing for someone insulting to Christians...not so much.

I was an atheistic teenager when Iran announced the Fatwa on Rushdie. Outraged by this kind of religious repression, I bought a copy of the book and immediately read it (take that, Iran! I'm sure the mullahs shake in fear knowing this). I still loathe this kind of mindless religious repression, and I support Rushdie's knighthood, even though I'm not a big fan of his actual writing. But it wasn't more than a year or two before this that I had to push through a Christian picket line to see "The Last Temptation of Christ," a movie that offended Christians, and they were no more open-minded about speech freedom than any Muslim fundamentalist. It wasn't long after that that abortion clinic bombings and threats entered my consciousness, and the news. Right-wing threats to all-powerful-activist-liberal-judges-who-try-to-ban-Christmas are greeted with a yawn by the right. The only reason that Christian Fundamentalist leaders haven't ordered Christian Fatwas, as far as I can see, is that they don't think they can get away it, not because they don't want to (oh, but wait, one DID kind of try).

This Christian Right-Wing outrage over the Islamic Fundamentalist Right-Wing outrage over the outrageous knighting of a mediocre writer is a bad-faith argument in the extreme. If I need my rights as an individual protected, I going to think twice before I turn to the political wing that brought us Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, Black Sites, the torture memo, trumped up charges of voter fraud as a means to fix elections, Constitutionally dubious signing statements, the stripping away of Habeas Corpus, illegal wiretapping, and a Justice Department that reshapes its mission so organizations can "discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money." I'm sorry, but this just isn't the group of people that I would trust to protect my rights, or those of anyone else, and no amount of pontificating about the repressive Muslims is going to change that.

UPDATE: I finally get a commenter, and it's because I acted like a knob. I linked to In The Name Of Towelie to prove my Very Important Point, insinuating they were right wing Christians and the like, and it turns out they are nothing of the sort. Apparently reading the clearly written explanation as to who they are and what they do there was beyond my limited skills.

Maybe I should just go back to lurking.

Fun with Ottomans Volume III

It seems the Turkish military pressure to invade Iraq and take out the PKK Kurds is mounting:

Turkey flirts with the Iraq quagmire
By Hilmi Toros

ISTANBUL - Turkey is beefing up military preparedness against Iraq-based Kurdish rebels as a prelude to a possible cross-border incursion that is opposed by the United States, the European Union and the Iraqi government.

Three Turkish provinces bordering Iraq have already been declared "special security" zones, limiting civilian access in the wake of an increase in bomb blasts in urban areas, including the capital Ankara and Istanbul, and attacks on the military. Although no one has claimed responsibility, official and public condemnation goes
to Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) insurgents slipping in from Iraq.
In addition, troops and military hardware are being amassed in Turkey's rugged and impoverished southeast, in the country's Kurdish-populated areas.

The daily newspaper Milliyet reported on Saturday that Turkish troops were already shelling PKK rebels in frontier areas within Iraq.

So far, despite public outcry for a decisive move against an estimated 3,000 secessionist PKK rebels holed up in Iraq, there has been no major incursion. But it has not been ruled out. And if it happens, it may have serious consequences for Turkey, Iraq and beyond.

Such an incursion is described as a "nightmare" scenario for the U.S. in Iraq:

The risk, analysts said, is that Turkey might become drawn into a wider conflict with Iraqi Kurds even if it initially sought to conduct a small-scale operation, and that other countries, including Iran, might also feel emboldened.

"It could open a Pandora's box for the quagmire -- the fiasco -- in Iraq to turn into a regional quagmire, with regional countries starting to fight wars on Iraqi territory," said Brookings Institution analyst Omer Taspinar.

Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the CSIS think tank in Washington, said, "A complete mess in the North of Iraq creates problems for everything we are trying to do in Iraq. It creates problems for our deep defense relationship with Turkey and it creates an even more chaotic situation in a part of the world where we are desperate for less chaos."

Not only would it put America at odds either with Turkey or Iraqi Kurds or both, it might spread into a couple of other potential sensitive areas:

While the current focus is on the PKK (listed by Turkey, the US and the EU as a terrorist organization), there exists a larger "Kurdish problem". Turkey, Syria and Iran also have sizable Kurdish minorities and have experienced occasional flare-ups of ethnic tensions.

The Laciner report also says that if any Turkish military action goes beyond flushing out PKK rebels to involve fighting with Iraqi Kurds, it may lead to pan-Kurdish solidarity that could spell trouble for Turkey, Syria and Iran, as well as Iraq. The main Turkish concern is that a strong Kurdish entity in northern Iraq, including an independent one in case of an Iraqi meltdown, could embolden its own Kurds to seek similar status.

So the whole situation could open up, in essence, another front in the Iraq war, one potentially more wide ranging and no less intractable.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is, for his part, in no hurry to send in the army. He faces opposition from NATO and America, and Turkey stands to lose economically in the event of an invasion. But the military in Turkey has a very strong hand, seeing itself as the guardian of the secular republic against Islamist or separatist threats. Their military has a long history, dating back to the Ottoman Empire days, of making its own political decisions and walking over (or killing) any political opposition. With an increase in Kurdish terrorist acts and a weak, vacillating, moderate Islamist government at the helm, they are already bolstering their position. Meanwhile, public support for them increases at the expense of the government:

ANKARA: Funerals for three soldiers killed in a roadside bombing set up by Kurdish rebels turned into anti-government protests Monday as thousands of mourners called on Turkey's leaders to resign over their failure to rein in the violence.

Many Turks are becoming increasingly angry over the mounting military death toll from attacks by Kurdish rebels, some of whom are believed to be entering the country from northern Iraq.

The three soldiers were killed Saturday in Sirnak, a southeastern province, and were buried in separate funerals in Istanbul, Ankara and Manisa. Thousands attended the ceremonies, carrying Turkish flags, shouting anti-government slogans and booing ministers and other government officials who were present. Military officials were greeted with applause.

In Ankara, about 10,000 people gathered at the city's largest mosque, shouting "Government resign!" as Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul and other officials arrived.

In Manisa, protesters booed the speaker of Parliament, Bulent Arinc, and denounced the United States and Kurdish separatists

Obviously, the situation is in and of itself bad. The surge has hardly clamped down on violence in Iraq as it is, and this is with the Kurdish areas relatively calm and violence free. The Turkish military's defiant position in the face of international and UN opposition to an incursion sounds, to my ears, strikingly familiar. The difference between the Turks and the U.S. in this equation is that while we could merely claim (wrongly) that we had evidence of WMD and that Iraq under Saddam was an imminent threat, the Turks can actually claim a real and current threat, right over their border. Bushco. can huff and puff about the wider consequences of a military incursion all they want, but that won't hold a lot of water with average Turks. The specter of terrorist attacks is no less frightening for Turkish citizens than it is for American citizens, and it is far more immediate. With every attack, it is going to be harder and harder for the already flaccid Turkish government to hold back.

In a wider sense, this is the very predictable consequence of attempting to build an empire. As anyone who has had the misfortune of reading through the PNAC website could tell you, the neoncons wanted to take over Iraq and establish a permanent American "footprint" long before 9/11. This is long established fact. When I put on my little tinfoil hat, I see a direct pipeline from PNAC to the "sea of oil" in Iraq. But even if you take their prattlings at face value and believe their quasi-Wilsonian nonsense about spreading democracy (without all of that wussy League-of-Nations stuff, however) it amounts to the same thing-they are going to impose their will on other sovereign nations for what they see as America's (or really, their) interests.

The problem is that other nations in the region, or anywhere, are going to have interests of their own-interests that probably will not coincide with Americas. In fact, they may be at cross purposes. Furthermore, the citizens of an invaded country will almost ALWAYS be at cross purposes with their occupiers, which makes surrounding countries even jumpier, since there will almost surely be some runoff into their borders. The presence of an outside, interloping military force planting itself permanently in the region is almost guaranteed to invoke hostility all of its own accord.

In the face of hostile natives and hostile nations surrounding our forces, we, or any occupying force, would of course have to make deals with anyone who will do so. But this means that as soon as we do, someone else might see this as being against THEIR interests. In this way, we become entangled with competing allies or allies who are aligned with our enemies. And ultimately, it could be no other way-despite all of the right-wing chest beating and shouting, we simply cannot control people through the force of our will or our military. The days of that kind of physical dominance are over, unless we would like to drop fistfulls of atomic weaponry (I know some on the right would gladly do so), which brings up its own set of problems.

This is ultimately an untenable situation, making our security far worse than even I, a terrible pessimist, could ever have foreseen. And yet, in many ways it was pretty damn predictable-in fact, many people did predict it, and were called traitors for the effort. Many of the self-proclaimed Real Americans who brought us to this point are still in charge. I hope they can find a way to pull us back from a further escalating disaster, but I doubt they even really wish to try. It's not an edifying thought that in this case, for a sane resolution, I have to depend on Islamist Tayyip Erdogan and the PKK to find a way to a ceasefire, but there it is.

Christian Charity

I am back from a week's absence, due to a ripping bad sore throat/fever thing I got from that petrie dish of an office that I work in. I tried to get up and blog a few times that week, between thrashing around in my bed in a pool of acrid sweat, with visions of nude Condoleeza Rice can-can lines dancing maniacally through my head. But I just didn't have the strength. Does that make me the world's lamest blogger? (I would contend that it is my weak, incoherent content, but this couldn't have helped).

Anyway, I am going to ease back into things here...

This, from Talk to Action:

The stacks of information about those worthy of consideration for Theocrat of the Week -- can get very high. But this week Our Distinguished Panel of Judges did not get far down the pile when they recognized the winners and stopped the competition.

Our winners this week plan to reenact the the actions of theocratic martyr Paul Hill next month in Milwaukee. On July 29, 1994 Paul Hill, who sought to set a good example for Christian theocratic revolutionaries, assasinated abortion provider Dr. John Britton and James Barrett one of his escorts, and seriously wounding another, June Barrett, outside an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida.

George L. Wilson of Children Need Heroes and Drew Heiss of Street Preach are planning to honor Paul Hill in a series of events called "Paul Hill Days" in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, July 26th - 29th -- "to honor him as God's man and our hero."

Why Milwaukee? Why not? There are people here who recognize Paul Hill as a hero, and we would love to welcome others from around the country who share our belief. Hopefully, in the future, others will host events in their cities.

Planned events include:

Activities at our two remaining killing centers

Literature distribution

Ministry at the Federal Courthouse

Reenactment of 7-29-1994

Paul Hill March

Ministry at other public forums

It should be noted that George L. Wilson, the proprietor of Children Needs Heroes, recognizes two other heroes he believes America's children should learn about: Shelly Shannon, who was convicted of the attempted assasination of Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas, among other serious crimes, including a series of arsons; and of course, James Kopp, who was convicted in the sniper assasination of Dr. Barnett Slepian in Amherst, New York. Kopp is also the chief suspect in several other shootings.

All three are recognized as Heroes of the Faith by the Army of God, members of which are likely to be on hand for the festivities.

This is jaw-dropping. There is going to be a celebration of home-grown terrorism, with a wonderful Christian bent. From the culture of life. This inspires awe in me. it really, really does. This naked disregard for life is nothing new, of course, and the hypocrisy of this kind of violence-celebrating hate-mongering is well noted in the blogosphere (if not the MSM, who assiduously avoid ever equating terrorists with good Christians). This kind of self-righteous posturing and celebrating of violence is part and parcel of the Christianists, and their benefactors look on with approval. It was exactly this kind of Christian hypocrisy that started my political awakening and pushed me to the left, back in the Reagan 80s, when they were just beginning to flex their muscles.

But this is more than just academic to me. I live in Milwaukee. This is personal, as I see it, an affront to the liberal traditions that long guided it's history. And even if you don't see that part of Milwaukee as valuable, the idea that this sleazy happening is coming here, and that they chose here to make this stand on behalf of domestic terrorism, is still appalling. Apparently, they think Milwaukee is filled with yokels slack-jawed enough to celebrate this kind of guns-n-Jesus idiocy (I especially love the "re-enactment." Perhaps Milwaukee can host re-enactments of other religiously-motivated killings for appreciative audiences-July 6, 1415 comes to mind.) At a time when our self-appointed daddy-leaders are foaming at the mouth to kill as many barbaric Muslims as they can have others bomb, the idea that this is mainstream Christianity is sickening.

I haven't heard of any kinds of counter-demonstration to this point. Obviously, in deference to the 1st Amendment the show can't be stopped, and that wouldn't help anyway, it would just add to their never-ending persecution complex. If anyone reads this, is there any place to potentially organize a counter rally or some such thing?

Hard Hitting Reporting is Awesome

Jamison Foser wrote well about Carl Bernstein's book A Woman in Charge, exposing the idiocy behind the "authenticity" storyline that so fascinates the MSM/punditocracy to the detriment of our society. I can't add much to that; I won't read the book. When it comes to coverage of the Clintons, brains shrivel up and die like a slug in the sun. I just don't have enough time in my life to waste with that, so thank God someone does.

I do have to highlight, for my own piece of mind, one bit, from an interview on O'Reilly:

O'REILLY: Did she break the law?

BERNSTEIN: Yes.

O'REILLY: OK. Good, I like this. How did she break the law?

BERNSTEIN: She broke the law if, indeed, she perjured herself.

O'REILLY: Well, you just said she did break the law.

BERNSTEIN: No. The special prosecutor determined that she did not. So he did not file the charge.

O'REILLY: So you think she did. But the special prosecutor, Ken Starr, said no.

BERNSTEIN: That is co -- you know what? Let me be really straightforward. I don't think she broke the law. I think there was a time that she did not tell the truth.

O'REILLY: Under oath?

BERNSTEIN: You know, I wasn't in the room.

What? What is that incoherent crap? "I think she broke the law. If she did. Which the special prosecutor said she didn't. But I think she did sometime. But I really don't know, because I wasn't there."

The MSMs coverage of Hillary Clinton, in a nutshell.