How quickly they change

Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich in their Sunday New York Times columns give two excellent examples of how smug dismissal of Sarah Palin can quickly turn into admiration. The Beltway Village during 2008 and mostly up until now was more concerned with Tina Fey's imitation of Palin than with what Palin and her supporters were about. Especially as that might be indicated by Palin's own neo-Confederate and theocratic ties.

Maureen Dowd is in her more liberal mode lately. Which is kind of hard to distinguish between her Bush-friendly mode. But her latest, Visceral Has Its Value New York Times 11/21/09, shows how the Village script of Palin as a ridiculous dummy can easily morph into appreciating her as the voice of Real Americans. And the Villagers all fancy themselves as in tune with Real Americans. You know, the ones for whom the federal budget deficit is the biggest problem the country has. (Yes, Village thinking is often quite bizarre and contradictory measured against normal standards of reality. But since they think the deficit is critical, they assume as always that the Little People think the same.)

MoDo, who likes to remind us that Obama is a girl (not a compliment in MoDo's gender obsessions), now admires Palin for "her visceral power," the inner energy she radiates (MoDo used a quotation to say that - I guess it sounded too New Agey to put in her own voice), her dynamism, her close contact with the grass roots, her exuberance, and "the good looks, the tabloid-perfect family, the Alaska quirkiness, the kids with the weird names." With a mixture of admiration and snotty condescension - who says in print that other people children have "weird names"? - MoDo manages to both pump up Palin's image and give cred to her the-elites-look-down-on-us-Real-Amurcans" schtick. Palin's neo-Confederate ties? Her theocratic, superstitious, extremist brand of Pentecostal Christianity? I suppose MoDo would find that sooo booo-oooring to write about. So instead she insults Palin's children's names.

Did I mention that MoDo is one of the star opinion "journalists" in what is still considered the leading "quality" paper in the United States?

She actually spends most of the column trashing Obama in various ways. Then at the end she kinda-sorta defends him. But does it in such a pitiful way all that she just reinforces the Republican and Broderian criticism of his being of Obama being supposedly "indecisive".

Frank Rich, who often writes some atrocious stuff, too, and has been recently taking the Republicans' bait to ridicule the Party base and their heroes, in The Pit Bull in the China Shop 11/21/09 actually manages to criticize other Villagers for delivering their authoritative opinions on Palin's book without actually having read it! Criticizing fellow Villagers is so rare that he at least deserves one hand clapping for that. (I would just note, without detracting from his unconventional stance, that one can certainly form a reasonable opinion about well-reported portions of a book without having read it cover to cover.)

Rich claims to have actually read her book. And coming from a guy who just a few columns ago was chortling over how the Tea Partiers (aka, Palin fans) were leading the Republican Party to a new 1964 landslide defeat, statements like this are another wonderful illustration how sanctimonious Village ridicule can quickly become star-struck admiration: "Palin is far and away the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama, and attention must be paid. Those who wishfully think her 15 minutes are up are deluding themselves."

Rich goes on to focus on what are the important issues - in the eyes of our Village Pod Pundits. Palin's show-business acquaintances. Levi Johnston.

Neo-Confederate ties? Theocratic Christianism? Rich doesn't get into those, either. The Village script still calls for leaving those out. Even though they are highly relevant to understanding her politics and what the Republican Party has become. And it's understandable. Facing up to what today's Republican Party is would make the practice of High Broderism, with his idolatry of bipartisanship (on the part of Democrats) nearly impossible to practice. Later on, he cities some polls showing that Palin is a Republican favorite in the polls for the 2012 Presidential nomination just behind Mike Huckabee, he doesn't cite any polling data to support his assertion that Palin "the most important brand in American politics after Barack Obama." If the polls he's using show Huckabee leading Palin among Republicans, wouldn't that make the Huck a more important brand at the moment?

Rich devotes a paragraph to pointless ridicule of a pious letter Palin wrote for her baby Trig that is reproduced in the book. He is ruffled that she worded the letter as a letter from God. Pop psychology, yes. Actual analysis of her theocratic religious ties? Not so much. The only exception is a really vague and speculative reference to Palin's "'rapture' theology" - to which Palin may or may not subscribe from anything we see in Rich's column.

Rich's utter helplessness is trying to actually analyze her appeal is illustrated by the following comment, which is correct: "The more she is attacked for not being in possession of pointy-headed erudition, the more powerful she becomes as an avatar of the anti-elite cause." But without understanding that in the context of the dominant Christian Right culture in the Republican Party, it tells us nothing. Except that Frank Rich is disturbed at the dumb masses he takes the Real Americans to be.

With all that fluff in his column, I do give Rich credit for at least mentioning the anti-gay position of the far-rightist Lynn Vincent who Palin chose for her ghost-writer.

And to top it all off, Rich manages to sing the praises of that greatest of all Mavericks, St. John McCain. Yes, that would be the St. McCain who made Sarah Palin a national figure by choosing her as his Vice Presidential nominee in 2008. Our pundits' love for the mavericky Maverick McCain is even greater than their love for Monica Lewinsky.

Maybe I'm getting a bit too deep into the weeds on this, too deep at least for my own comfort. But this David Sirota column that provides a refreshing trashing of Dean Broder and our Pod Pundits generally over the Afghanistan War, Intelligentsia against intelligence Salon, even he manages to embrace the notion that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are somehow harmless entertainment on the fringes of the Republican Party:

The trend is deeply disturbing. It's one thing for talk-show-host wannabe Sarah Palin or carnival-barking provocateur Glenn Beck to glamorize willful ignorance -- that's been the narcissistic act of celebrity court jesters since the dawn of history. But it's an entirely different thing when hostility to intelligence and to the basic process of thinking itself emanates from the very professional thinkers who lead the nation's intelligentsia. [my emphasis]

Our pundits, even supposedly solidly liberal ones like Frank Rich and David Sirota, are just having a hard time facing up to what the Republican Party has become.

Tags: frank rich, maureen dowd, sarah palin

Vietnam and Afghanistan

Reasoning by historical analogy is dangerous. But the American approach to counterinsurgency wars didn't spring full-grown from the brow of David Petraeus. It is heavily conditioned, if not completely dominated, by the experience of the Vietnam War.

I've seen a couple of good analyses lately of the Vietnam War that provide useful critical perspective on Obama's current decision on how much to escalate the Afghanistan War. One is Bill Moyers Journal of 11/20/09, this past Friday, which looks at Lyndon Johnson's decision-making process from November 1963 when he assumed the Presidency to the decision to Americanize the war in 1965 by committing to a direct US ground combat role. Some of the background assumptions and habits of the military establishment from those pre-Internet days sound awfully familiar today.

The other is The Fifty-Year War by Jonathan Schell The Nation 11/11/09 (11/30/09 edition). Schell looks at the decision-making on the Vietnam War against the background of the Cold War that after the fall of the Soviet Union morphed into the Long War. He calls special attention to the effect of McCarthyism and the Republican hysteria after 1949 over "who lost China", the "lost" referring to the victory of the Chinese Communists in 1949 in mainland China. He writes:

In short, in strictly political terms, the Vietnam dilemma has been handed down to Obama virtually intact. Now as then, the issue politically is whether the United States is able to fail in a war without coming unhinged. Does the American body politic have a reverse gear? Does it know how to cut losses? Is it capable of learning from experience? Or must it plunge unchecked over every cliff it approaches? And at the heart of these questions is another: must liberals and moderates always bow down before the crazy right when it comes to war and peace? Must presidents behave like Johnson, of whom his attorney general, Nicholas Katzenbach, later said, "It would not have made any difference what anybody advised him--he would have done what he did [in Vietnam].... It was fear of the right wing." What is the source of this raw power, this right-wing veto over presidents, Congresses and public opinion? The person who can answer these questions will have discovered one of the keys to a half-century of American history--and the forces that, even now, bear down on Obama as he considers what to do in Afghanistan. [my emphasis]

And because of that "right-wing veto", it appears that actually withdrawing from Afghanistan isn't even an option the White House is seriously considering.

William Polk in Let America be America, and Depart Afghanistan Informed Comment 11/22/09 writes about a different and more recent historical experience of counterinsurgency that is also worth considering around the American role in Afghanistan now. He's talking in particular about the historical role of village, tribal and national assemblies called jirga, or loya jirga at the national level:

The Russians were, obviously, opposed to the very concept of the loya jirga and managed to by-pass or suppress it. They did so, however, at great cost because without such a legitimating authority, they could not find an Afghan counterpart with which to negotiate an end to their occupation. The puppet government they set up lacked the imprimatur of the loya jirga and was not regarded by the people as legitimate. So the Russians left with their tail between their legs.

As the current Russian ambassador and long-time KBG expert on Afghan affairs, Zamir N. Kabulov, has commented, there is no mistake the Russians made that has not been copied by the Americans. He was right about the way we approached the jirga. In 2002, nearly 2/3rds of the delegates to a loya jirga signed a petition to make the exiled king, Zahir Shah, president of an interim government to give time for the Afghanis to work out their future. An interim government might have avoided the worst of the problems we have faced in the last seven years. But we had already decided that Hamid Kara was “our man in Kabul” and did not want the Afghanis [sic] to interfere with our choice. So, as Thomas Johnson and Chris Mason reported, “massive US interference behind the scenes in the form of bribes, secret deals, and arm twisting got the US-backed candidate for the job, Hamid Kara [Karzai], installed instead. [They] then rode shotgun over a constitutional process that eliminated the monarchy entirely. This was the Afghan equivalent to the 1964 Diem Coup in Vietnam; afterward, there was no possibility of creating a stable secular government.” While an Afghan king could have conferred legitimacy on an elected leader in Afghanistan; without one, as they put it, “an elected president is a on a one-legged stool.” Then, as Selig Harrison wrote in the New York Times, our proconsul, Zalmay Khalilzad, “had a bitter 40-minute showdown with the king, who then withdrew his candidacy.” [my emphasis]

Tags: afghanistan war, vietnam war

Who you callin' a socialist?

Claude Henri de Rouvroy Graf von Saint-Simon (1760-1825)

I must admit, even having as low a general opinion of the Republican Party as I do, that even I'm surprised at the popularity among the Republicans on the Know-Nothing usage that has become as common as dirt in which socialist, liberal, communist, fascist, and Nazi are used as interchangeable concept. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to it, members of Congress do it, "movement conservatives" with intellectual pretensions do it, and rank-and-file Republicans do it. I really wonder what they mean, what image in their minds those interchangeable words call up, other than something like "bad". And I know for the Christian Right they all mean something like "atheist", too.

But how crack-brained is that? Jon Stewart did a brilliant skit that was less a satire than just an imitation of Glenn Beck in which he said that Beck had had apendicitis. And he explained the significance of that: "Youre appendix is connected to your large intestine which is connected to your small intestine which is something that Karl Marx had." That kind of arbitrary association is what passes for thinking among many Republicans today.

How can someone even have a simple-minded understanding of the most basic events of the 20th century without having an elementary notion of the differences between those concepts? It would be pointless for anyone with that concept to try to understand the political process by which Adolf Hitler came to power, for instance, to take one of the more consequential events of the last century. Because, trust me: none of it will make jack for sense to you. Even though the Beckians love to compare Obama to Hitler.

Without knowing some basic facts about the split between the Social Democrats and Communists around the German Revolution of 1918-19, without knowing something about why the Nazis were fighting the Social Democrats and the Communists in street battles as well as in elections during the 1920s up until 1933, without understanding something about how the Nazis fit into the German rightwing and how their position meshed with the position of wealthy and powerful Germans opposed to the democracy of the Weimar Republic: forget it. Just memorize the fact that Hitler came to power in 1933 and don't give yourself a headache even trying to understand any of it.

What's even worse for our xenophobic Republicans, they would also have to understand the difference between what "liberal" means in most of the world and what it has meant in the US since 1920 or so. It was around that time that pro-labor activists who had called themselves progressive appropriated the word liberal to differentiate themselves from the dying Progressive movement as well as from, yes, communists and socialists.

As far as what "liberal" means in the rest of the world, I strongly advise that you not go look at the Web site of the Liberal International (LI), the Federation of European and other parties in the world that self-identify as liberal. If you go there and start reading, your head may explode. Or not, because it has nothing to do with whatever it may be that the Beckians and Limbaugh dittoheads, i.e., most Republicans, mean when they use the term "liberal". The affiliate of the LI in Germany is the Free Democratic Party (FDP). They are part of the current "center-right" coalition in Germany. The "center" part of that name refers to the conservative party, Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU); the FDP is the "right" portion. The FDP is anti-union. The CDU has a union "wing".

If you should stumble across their Liberal Thinkers section. You will find people listed there like Friedrich von Hayek, a hero of American economic "libertarians", i.e., advocates of de-regulated Killer Capitalism. And also (gulp!) Ayn Rand. Yes, the John Galt and Fountainhead Ayn Rand, guru of Alan Greenspan. And Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institute.

Carl Grünberg (1861–1940)

Anyway, I thought this post would be a good place to mention the real historical origin of the word socialism, based on a couple of articles from what is known as the Grünberg Archiv, after its editor Carl Grünberg (1861–1940). The publication was actually called Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung (Archive for the History of Socialism and the Workers Movement). Grünberg later became director of the Institut für Sozialforschung, better known as the Frankfurt School. These two articles from the Archiv deal with the origins of the words "socialism" and "socialist": Carl Grünberg, Der Ursprung der Worte „Sozialismus“ und „Sozialist“ 2/1912 and Ernst Czóbel, Zur Verbreitung der Worte „Sozialismus“ und „Sozialist“ in Deutschland and in Ungarn 3/1913.

The earliest usage of the words Grünberg found was from an Italian cleric in 1803, where it was used to refer broadly to the opposite of individualistic philosophies, which Grünberg describes as "a thoroughly different" meaning that the one it was to later acquire. He finds a French usage from 1831 of "socialisme" where it referred to ... the Catholic Church! In the sense of the Universal Church: Catholic theology emphasized the importance of community in contrast to the more individual-oriented Protestant theology.

The first use of "socialist" he identifies is in 1827 from the English Co-operative Magazine and Monthly Herald, a paper of Robert Owens' reform movement to describe the Owenites. This is essentially the first usage he finds of the word in the sense it came to be generally used in the 19th century. Although he notes the word didn't catch on for a while in England.

In 1831, he finds "socialisme" used in a French paper, Le Globe, where it is used to describe the Saint-Simonist reform doctrine in contrast to individualism. This is a very similar usage to that of the English Owenite paper in 1927.

So, in other words, the term socialist came into usage as a reference to the reformist doctrines that later came to be known as utopian socialist, particularly those associated with Robert Owen (1771-1858), Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Claude Henri Graf von Saint-Simon (1760-1825).

Grünberg and Czóbel find the first usages of the adjective form "sozialist" in German in 1840, though it's not clear which among them was the earliest, Fr. J. Buss in a speech of July 1840 or August Ludwig Churoa, writing under the pen name of Rochau, in the book Kritische Darstellung der Sozialtheorie Fouriers. Grünberg finds the first use of the noun form in German in an 1842 book by Lorenz von Stein (1815-1890), Sozialismus und Kommunismus des heutigen Frankreichs. Czóbel finds the earliest incidence of the word in Hungary in 1842.

In short, the use of "socialist" and "socialism" in the sense to which the world became accustomed in the 19th century began around 1830 and by the 1840s was beginning to come into general usage to describe utopian reform schemes like those of Owen, Fourier and Saint-Simon.

Tags: socialism, radical right, republican party

Saudia Arabia, Yemen and Shi'a-Sunni tensions

The Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly Online reports in Sectarian rifts appear by Omayma Abdel-Latif (11/19-25/09 edition) that Saudi Arabia's military campaign against Shi'a rebels in Yemen is really ticking off Iran and Saudi Shiites, the latter composing 1/3 or so of the Saudi population. It also says Al Qa'ida implicitly supported the Saudi attacks by issuing a statement condemning the Shi'a Al-Houthi group the Saudis are targeting.

Gee, hyper-Sunni cult Al Qa'ida hates Iranian-backed Shi'a group? Who could have guessed? (Yes, that's meant to be sarcastic.)

The Al-Houthis "are Zaidis, a branch of Shiism closest to Sunni doctrine". Like the other Shi'a, the Zaidis (also Zaidiya, Zaydīyah, Zaidīs, Zaydis) recognize the primacy of the fourth caliph ‛Alī ibn abī Tālib to follow the Prophet Muhammad as the leader of the Muslim community. But unlike most Shi'a, the Zaidis do not regard the first three caliphs, Abū Bakr, ‛Umar and ‛Uthmān, as usurpers.

The name of the sect comes from Zayd ibn ʿAlī (d. 740), the grandson of Shi'a martyr Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī (626-680), the son of the fourth caliph. The Zaidis are commonly known as the Fiver Shi'a because they recognize Zayd as the fifth Imam, which other Shi'a do not. Their interpretations of Islāmic law have often been close to those of Sunni jurists.

Oxford Islamic Studies Online gives this discription of Zaidi distinctiveness:

Although they have their own school of law based on the legal interpretations of Zayd and his successors, the Yemeni Zaydīs are otherwise the closest of all Shīʿī factions to the Sunnīs (and most particularly to the Ḥanafī school of Sunnī jurisprudence); this has often been interpreted by Western scholars to mean that they are “moderate” or practical. The Zaydīs differ from other Shīʿī denominations in that they accept the legitimacy of the caliphates of Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, and, at least partially, ʿUthmān. Moreover, in contrast to certain other Shīʿī groups, the Zaydīs do not view the imam as infallible, nor as a quasi-divine, inspired, or supernaturally endowed person representing God on earth, and, again unlike other factions, they do not require that he be divinely designated in any way. In Zaydī belief, the qualifications for the imamate include: descent from ʿAlī and Fāṭimah (though they do not require that it pass from father to son), absence of physical imperfections, and personal piety. The imam must be able to take up the sword, either offensively or in defense, which rules out infants as well as “hidden imams” of the type acknowledged by the Ismāʿīlīyah and the Twelvers. [my emphasis]

That latter point indicates that they also lack the messianic/apocalyptic element that characterizes Twelver Shiism. The Zaidis generally reject mystical approaches to the faith.

The article quotes the head of the Lebanese Hizbullah party on the sectarian implications:

Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah called for rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Nasrallah said there is a tendency today to put a gloss of sectarianism on every conflict in the region, and that this was meant to break up Muslim nations into small entities. This, he said serves Israel.

"Every conflict in our region is being interpreted only from the perspective of the Sunni-Shia divide," he said in his latest speeches commemorating the Day of the Martyr. "It is being said that Turkey, the Sunni state, is engaging in the Middle East to take the role of Iran, the Shia state." Nasrallah called on Iran to make a rapprochement towards Saudi Arabia and vice versa. "There should be an initiative from any Arab or Muslim nation to bring those two big and important nations together to dialogue in order to put out the sectarian fire."

The fighting has spilled over into Saudi Arabia, as reported in Saudi villages evacuated due to violence in Yemen, UNICEF says Today's Zaman (Turkey) 11/14/09.

Tags: iran,
islam, saudi arabia

The audacity of timidity

Paul Krugman assesses the consequences of having done too little in the spring to combat the economic crisis in The Big Squander New York Times 11/19/09:

Earlier this week, the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, a k a, the bank bailout fund, released his report on the 2008 rescue of the American International Group, the insurer. The gist of the report is that government officials made no serious attempt to extract concessions from bankers, even though these bankers received huge benefits from the rescue. And more than money was lost. By making what was in effect a multibillion-dollar gift to Wall Street, policy makers undermined their own credibility — and put the broader economy at risk.

For the A.I.G. rescue was part of a pattern: Throughout the financial crisis key officials — most notably Timothy Geithner, who was president of the New York Fed in 2008 and is now Treasury secretary — have shied away from doing anything that might rattle Wall Street. And the bitter paradox is that this play-it-safe approach has ended up undermining prospects for economic recovery. For the job of fixing the broken economy is far from done — yet finishing the job has become nearly impossible now that the public has lost faith in the government’s efforts, viewing them as little more than handouts to the people who got us into this mess. [my emphasis]

It's part of the Republicans' Predator State approach to government, in this case with the pattern on handling Wall Street bailouts continuing into the Obama administration: the bankrupt financial institutions get bailed out and their executives get paid billions in bonuses after bankrupting or near-bankrupting their companies, while most people see unemployment and mortgage payments both rising. And the Republicans have honed their methods over the decades for blaming the results on the Democratic Party and "gubment" in general. Unless the Obama administration starts trying to please those facing unemployment and reduced salaries instead of Wall Strett bankers and billionaires who want to abolish Social Security using the federal deficit as an excuse, the Republicans could be successful with those methods in 2010 and 2012. And the fact that Frank Rich thinks that Sarah Palin is an exotic extremist (which she is!) won't make any difference, except to encourage the Democrats in their foolish complacency.

Meanwhile, David "Bobo" Brooks, neocon warmonger and reliable belweather of "respectable" Republican opinion, thinks the Obama administration has done just fine on the economic bailout. Bobo is impressed with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's moderation: "prudence was the key to his effectiveness. In interviews and testimony, Geithner uses the word 'balance' a lot." This is the greatest compliment that the devotees of High Broderism can bestoy on a political figure, especially a Democrat. This gives Bobo hope for the future. Because the Obama administration confronts more economic problems. And which is foremost in Bobo's mind? Yes, it's a rhetorical question: "First, the need to reduce the deficits ..."

Tags: obama administration, us economy

Jerry Brown 1.0

"First, think clearly; then ask a lot of questions." - CA Gov. Jerry Brown, 1975

This seems like a good time to make use of one of the better brief descriptions I've seen of Jerry Brown's first Governorship of 1975-83. It comes from Neal Peirce and Jerry Hagstrom, The Book of America: Inside 50 States Today (1983). Jerry's second term ended in early 1983, so they were reviewing his whole governorship. He had run for the US Senate in 1982 on an assertively liberal program against Pete Wilson, who would later go on to brand the California Republican Party as the anti-Latino Party.

As they explain, Jerry was a leader in creating a post-Sixties version of progressive politics and programs. And, amazing as it seems now that California has turned into a model of dysfunctional state government, he was able to achieve some important innovations in environmental protection, supporting the farm workers' right to organize and bringing much greater diversity into state government. How some Democratic progressives today can look back at this record and see something other than a liberal Democrat, I'm not really sure:

Like his father, Jerry Brown was elected as a Democrat, but there the similarities stopped. The young bachelor Brown (he was born in 1938) refused to move into the huge governor's mansion Reagan had built, rode in a Plymouth instead of a chauffeured limousine, and occasionally retreated to a Zen Buddhist monastery to meditate (he had studied in a Jesuit seminary before entering Yale Law School). But despite this seemingly ascetic lifestyle, he also broke with politicians' conventional discretion to travel to Africa with his companion, rock singer Linda Ronstadt. Intellectually, Brown symbolized his generation's dissatisfaction with big institutions and megasolutions. He set up the nation's first Office of Appropriate Technology to explore and test such concepts as environmental and climatically designed buildings, including wind power and solar heating, bioconversion (using waste to produce energy) and home organic farming to increase people's self-sufficiency. He launched California onto an energy conservation path unequalled by any other state, consistently opposed nuclear power, maintained the nation's toughest air and water pollution standards and laws against toxic wastes, and created the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which leaned to the left in its regulation of farm-labor relations. He made precedent-shattering appointments of women, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, who received 50 percent of his 6,000-plus executive appointments and 40 percent of those he made to the courts. [my emphasis]

On Tuesday of this week, Attorney General Brown moved to take toys that could poison children out of stores as the holiday buying season descends upon us, as Mark Glover reports in Stores must remove lead-laced toys, says Attorney General Brown Sacramento Bee 11/19/09. He was aggressively pro-consumer as Governor, as well, as Peirce and Hagstrom describe:

The "old boy networks" of white males were closed out. Hundreds of laypersons were placed on California's 41 consumer boards, breaking the monopoly control of groups—from doctors to engineers—who've often used the state's regulatory boards for their professions' interests rather than the public interest. Brown ended up with five women in his ten-member cabinet — not to mention his highly controversial appointment of a liberal female lawyer, Rose Elizabeth Bird, as California's chief justice. In the last weeks of Brown's governorship, we asked him the rationale of his appointments approach. His reply: "to make government a mirror image of what society is" in a state with millions of working women and fast-rising numbers of minorities and the foreign born. His appointees' skills, Brown admitted, often weren't the highest. But the alternative was to leave a "dying" white male coalition in power. "I came down on the side of opening a window to the future." [my emphasis]

Rose Bird, California's first female chief justice, became a special target of Republicans because she led the State Supreme Court to hold that the death penalty violated the California state constitution and ended it. A ballot initiative later restored it, a measure that Jerry opposed despite its high popularity. Rose Bird later wound up being rejected for re-election to the Court in 1986. The Republicans led a high-visibility campaign against her, focusing on their objections to her decisions and her death penalty ruling, in particular. This San Francisco Examiner obituary for her gives more background: Ex-Chief Justice Rose Bird dies by Larry Hatfield 12/05/1999. The following year, conservatives whined mightily that the Democratic Senate rejected President Ronald Reagan's nomination of rightwing ideologue Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. After the right's aggressive pursuit of Rose Bird, I didn't feel the least sorry for them. Actually, the Republicans are still whining about Bork's rejection.

Rose Bird, California's first female chief justice, appointed by Jerry Brown

Ah, the memories: in those days, the Democratic Party was actually able to reject a poor Republican nominee to the Supreme Court. Hard to imagine, I know, but it actually happened! And even more amazing, six Republican Senators voted against St. Reagan's nominee! We've gone through the looking glass since then.

Jerry also made other reforms, including an effort to control rising medical costs:

Brown authored a state urban policy to revitalize inner cities and discourage wasteful sprawl — a first in any Sunbelt state. He inaugurated an energy and resources fund, financed from tidelands oil revenues, to foster California fisheries, reforestation, soil conservation, wetlands, and coastal protection. He cajoled government pension funds to invest mote (up to $900 million a year) in California housing and economic enterprises, rather than distant investments irrelevant to the state's economic future. Enamored of high technology, which he believed must be a linchpin of both California and national economic growth strategies, he created an industrial innovation commission (including many successful high-tech entrepreneurs), which recommended "a new governing coalition between business, labor, academia and government" to foster growth industries and dominate international markets in such cutting-edge areas as semiconductors, computers, telecommunications, robotics, and biotechnology. Brown argued that radically improved scientific education in schools and colleges, combined with ambitious workers retraining, was imperative for state and national economic survival. He gave energy and direction to a highly innovative California Conservation Corps for young people. Belatedly, he tried to tame soaring health costs through a "czar" to prenegotiate economical doctor and hospital rates, on a competitive basis, for patients of the state-subsidized "MediCal" system. [my emphasis]

Tags: jerry brown

Jerry Brown, presumed Democratic nominee for CA Governor in 2010

In addition to focusing more on comprehensive immigration reform, I also want to start paying closer attention to Jerry Brown's (officially undeclared) 2010 gubernatorial race. With his main presumed Democratic opponent for the Party nomination, Gavin Stevens Newsom, out of the running, Brown is the presumptive nominee.

I certainly haven't been making a secret of my general admiration for Jerry Brown, though I also generally think it's at least as important to be critical-minded about politicians you support as those you don't. And, yes, the rumors are true. I was once caught hanging out at his old commune in Oakland with Jerry, homeschoolers and Berkeley nudists. I can't deny it.

From following his career and from the limited in-person contact I've had with him, I would say that he's basically a pro-labor, pro-immigrant Democrat. He spent four years in a Jesuit seminary as a novitiate (studying for the priesthood), and the Jesuit approach to Catholic Christianity is a major influence in his thinking. I've sometimes said that one way to understand Jerry's sometimes challenging approaches is that he's a Jesuit who went into politics. That influence shows up in his work with Mother Teresa in India and in his friendship and intellectual engagement with the late Austrian Christian theologian-philosopher Ivan Illich (1926-2002). (Illich is commonly described as an anarchist but that's a very inadequate description.)

Jerry has also seriously studied Zen Buddhism, which emphasizes concepts such as living in the moment and playing the role appropriate to your life and your situation in the moment. He's also very ecologically minded, and his aggressive approach to environmental protection is the most important of his legacies from his first stint as California Governor in 1975-83. Along with more traditional influences like being part of a major political dynasty and his training in law, all this gives him a complex set of lenses through which to view politics. The results are sometimes surprising and even contradictory, though rarely if ever incoherent.

Jerry is currently viewed with suspicion by many Democratic activists who perceive him as insufficiently liberal, or not liberal at all. I can't say this is entirely surprising to me, but I also can't say I really understand why that is. Digby, one of my favorite bloggers, just posted a spirited defense of Jerry against some airhead Beltway Village idiocy (Moonbeams and Starshine Hullabaloo 11/18/09). But she also writes, "There are plenty of criticisms to be made about Brown, who in many respects is no longer even close to being a liberal."

That perception does puzzle me. I would say that Jerry in general is much more of a solid liberal/progressive than Barack Obama. As Attorney General, he's been aggressive in pursuing corporate misdeeds, companies who scammed consumers and investment frauds, a solid pro-consumer record. Brown has been articulating as much of a full-throated criticism of the arrogant financial elite as any Democrat I can think of. Just this week, he announced a $1.4 billion settlement against Wells Fargo: Wells Fargo to Pay $1.4 Billion in Auction-Rate Securities Settlement by Cheryl Miller The Recorder 11/19/09. Aren't these kinds of aggressive, pro-consumer actions what liberal Democratic activists would want a Democratic Attorney General to pursue?

Part of the concern may be more factional, i.e., Gavin Stevens until recently was expected to be Jerry's opponent in the 2010 Democratic primary. Gavin won the admiration of liberal activists by his aggressive stand on same-sex marriage. He also had made an effort to cultivate the netroots in a way that Brown seems not to have done. Gavin was a featured speaker at the 2008 Netroots Nation convention in Austin, for example.

But Jerry has a decent record on same-sex marriage, as well. As Attorney General, he took the very unusual step of opposing the state law against same-sex marriage established by Proposition 8 (aka, Proposition Hate). He was unsuccessful in his challenge to the law. But in making the case, he even relied on an unconventional Constitutional theory arguing that same-sex marriage should be considered a right guaranteed by the US Constitution that no state had the right to deny. That's a more pro-same-sex marriage position than any President Obama has taken.

This article gives a good overview of Jerry's current political situation: Why It’s Nuts for Dems to Want a Primary Fight Calbuzz 11/09/09.

I had a dialogue with David Dayen in the comments to his Roundup post of 10/30/09 FDL News Desk post, over Jerry's progressive politics or lack thereof. The folks at the Calitics blog, which included David until a couple of months ago, have been very skeptical of Jerry's candidacy for Governor.

Steven Harmon of the Contra Costa Times gives his take on why Liberals worry about Brown's move to 'center' 11/18/2009. This report by Martin Wisckol of the Orange County Register provides some items for concern, Jerry Brown shows O.C. his moderate, populist side 10/30/09. The article also uses the term "moderate populist", which I'm not sure I've ever seen before. It's a reflection of how near-meaningless the word "populist" has become in the American usage. (In Europe, it is used to mean rightwing demagogue, which is also a corruption of its meaning for the original Populist Party in the US.)

Reading the Brown Transcripts by Joe Mathews of the New America Foundation Fox & Hounds 11/11/09 provides a more nuanced view of Jerry than the Contra Costa Times and Orange County Register pieces might suggest. Matthews is also the author of the recent American Prospect's skeptical cover story on Jerry, See Jerry Run. Again. 09/24/09. That one is not a very good analysis of Jerry's career. Matthews almost seems to think that he was responsible for the property-tax-cutting initiate Proposition 13, writing, "As it happens, the only thing worse than Prop. 13 itself was its implementation." He doesn't even mention that Brown had earlier proposed a much more sensible property tax reform that the legislature foolishly rejected. Or that he very actively supported a competing and also sensible tax reform intiative in 1978 that unfortunately was defeating by Prop 13.

Yes, he had to implement it as Governor. And he did a good job of minimizing the damage. In fact, it was Prop 13 that created the situation that we still have today, in which the state government is forced to run chronically on the verge of bankruptcy. That's the conservative and Republican vision of government. And that's not the view of government that Jerry Brown represents. He does take government efficiency seriously, as distinct from Republicans for whom "eliminating waste, fraud and inefficiency" is nothing but a magical incantation. As Jerry once famously said before Prop 13, "I'm not conservative, I'm just cheap."

Jerry recently fired his spokesperson, who was revealed to have secretly taped interviews reporters had with Jerry. Secret taping of that kind is illegal in California. But it has produced this compilation of documents, most of which are transcripts from those interviews. This report describes them: Secrets of Secret Jerry Brown Tapes Revealed Calbuzz 11/10/09. Here is the 93-page PDF of the document itself, which give the reader an unusual chance to look at how Jerry processes information in that context. On page 5 of the PDF, he puts environmental concerns front and center when AP reporter Beth Fouhy asks him why he wants to run for Governor again:

That's the question. That is the question. I would say in response, that the state has lurched from crisis to crisis. The creativity that I saw in state government 25 years ago is not there and I do believe that I have the experience and the ability to attract very skilled and creative people that could make a major contribution both in education and renewable energy, prison reform and in dealing with the water crisis. These key challenges that the state has been facing since the time that I was governor are still continuing. For example, they haven't built a water project since my father was governor. [Pat Brown was Governor from 1959-1967.] The only one that's ever been proposed was blocked in a referendum. The high speed rail authority? I signed it 1982. The bonds were just passed in the last election and they're talking another 10 years. There are a lot of things I did as governor. For example, California introduced to [sic] the state energy commission which I started. It didn't have one employee when I was governor and we built it up to the major state energy authority of the country. California became the world leader in wind and other renewable energy sources. By the way, California now uses less electricity per person than the other states. We haven't even grown. Not only because of the renewable energy but the efficiency, the building codes, the appliances. I'm continuing that as attorney general[.] I'm pushing each of the local governments, of which they're hundreds, to adopt land use plans to reduce vehicles miles traveled and require energy efficient building materials. [my emphasis]

Tags: jerry brown

Around the bend on Palin

Maureen Dowd provides an example of why Sarah Palin is not only a star within the Republican Party. She also has the potential for a wider appeal.

MoDo's Palin piece is Rogue American Woman New York Times 11/17/09. There are two basic problems with MoDo's article. It treats Palin as a pop-culture celebrity, not as a politician with a potentially huge effect on public policy.

And in treating Palin's ghost-written memoir as something to be ridiculed, MoDo neglects to mention that the ghost-writer, Lynn Vincent, is a white supremacist - at a minimum she co-authored a book with one (Robert Stacy McCain) - a fact which might have alerted her readers to the genuinely ugly side of Palin's appeal. Vincent also ghost-wrote the memoir of Lt. Gen. William G. "Jerry" Boykin, the theocrat who assured his Christian Right finds that he knew his God was bigger than the Muslims' God. She's also known for her hostility to gays and argues that Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War (and by extension the US) was "a hapless puppet" of Joe Stalin. (Palin - or one of her speechwriters - has also shown questionable judgment in choosing a source for a cutesy quote.)

MoDo actually spends more of her column looking for cutesy commonalities with Palin. Her column comes off like a Republican parody of a sneering poo-bah of the Liberal Press Conspiracy. MoDo apparently intended the following to be obvious mockery of Palin/Vincent:

Here is what the former Alaska governor censoriously writes about “shenanigans” in two capital cities: “Politically, Juneau always had a reputation for being a lot like Animal House: drinking and bowling, drunken brawls, countless affairs, and garden variety lunchtime trysts. It’s been known at times to be like a frat house filled with freshmen away from their parents for the very first time. At other times, the capital city’s underside was even darker: clandestine political liaisons and secret meetings, unethical deeds and downright illegal acts.”

She concludes: “In short, it was a lot like Washington, D.C.”

Sure, it's a stereotypical rube's description of the sinful Big City. But that's the Republicans' general posture, not just Palin's: they aren't the servants of greedy CEOs, they're the champions of the regular folks against the swells and scary minorities in the big cities and dirty ghettoes.

Is Washington "like a frat house filled with freshmen away from their parents for the very first time"? I don't have that particular impression myself. But that is the kind of impression I get of MoDo and her fellow celebrity pundits when I watch them on the Sunday morining talk shows, or on the 24/7 cable channels. MoDo has so little self-reflection on own conduct and her pundit cohort's that she seems unaware of how credible a description that might seem to a lot of people. And because of that, she provides a half-plausible illustration of Palin's far-right posturing against the dreaded Liberal Elite.

Here's more information on Lynn Vincent you won't get from MoDo's column:

Palin co-author Lynn Vincent's inflammatory record Media Matters 11/13/09

Charles Johnson (a recovering Islamophobe), Sarah Palin's Book Ghostwritten by Associate of White Supremacist [Robert Stacy] McCain Little Green Footballs 09/29/09

John Cook, Sarah Palin's Ghostwriter Pals Around With Racists and Wackos Gawker 09/30/09

David Weigel, Robert Stacy McCain Responds to Gawker, Defends Palin Collaborator Lynn Vincent Washington Independent 9/30/09

Tags: maureen dowd, radical right,sarah palin

Tea party is over

I know that's kind of a groaner of a headline. What it means is that the hoopla from the Radical Right/Republicans over health care reform is likely to seem like a lower-case tea parties compared to the s**tstorm they are likely to kick up over immigration reform.

Pro-immigrant activists from Reform Immigration for America are sponsoring house parties for comprehensive immigration reform.

The xenophobia Tea Partiers are also gearing up for an anti-immigrant hate campaign, as Dave Neiwert reports in Teabaggers punk'd by anti-racists who get them to cheer rant against European-American immigrants Crooks and Liars 11/16/09.

Tags: immigration reform, radical right

Looking for Barry Goldwater - Democrats looking, that is

Barry Goldwater 1962

The references I'm seeing from liberals to the 1964 Goldwater movement are starting to worry me. Faced with an historic opportunity for progressive politics greater than any since 1965, some liberals and progressives seem to be getting stuck in the mud of decades past. On the one hand, there seems to be a fond illusion that the Tea Party movement represents a fringe crackpot movement that will bring electoral loss to the Republicans like in 1964. On the other, among some who recognize the potential majority appeal of a Jeb Bush or Sarah Palin, there's the panic that defending women's rights or the rule of law will make the Democrats lose on "culture war" grounds just like in 1968, or so that narrative goes. Maybe we're condemned to relive "the 60s" for decades more. But framing the present too strictly in terms of the past can be risky.

We saw Frank Rich doing this a couple of weeks ago, including a telltale quotation from Richard Hofstadter. Even Paul Krugman pulled out a Hofstadter quote in Paranoia Strikes Deep New York Times 11/09/09. His basic point is well taken. If the Republican Party nationally over the next four years shrinks to a chronically minority party, a rump party largely based on the votes of white Southern conservatives, they could adopt even more of a wrecker strategy than they currently follow. He uses California state government as an example of how that can happen, and how damaging that can be. But he also writes, "while the paranoid style [of politics] isn’t new, its role within the G.O.P. is." Krugman recognizes that even as a rump party, the Republicans can have a tremendously destructive effect, so he's not ready to indulge in Frank Rich's triumphalism. But he does accept the notion of the Sarah Palin/Tea Party types as a radical minority of a different kind than already runs the Republican Party.

Sarah Palin with her close ties to the neo-Confederate Alaska Independence Party and to "Third Wave" Pentecostalist theocratic religion does represent an intensification of the radicalization of the Republican Party. Max Blumenthal has a good piece on the appeal of Palin to the Christian Right base in How Sarah Palin Made Herself Indispensable While Destroying the Republican Party TomDispatch 11/15/09. The headline doesn't actually reflect his analysis. He writes, "If she doesn't prove to be the Party's future queen, she may have positioned herself to be its future king-maker - and potentially its destroyer." That is, unless conditions are such to make her an acceptable alternative on Presidential Election Day in 2012 or 2016.

Richard Kim and Betsy Reed in The Perils of Palinism The Nation 11/11/09 (11/30/09 issue) recognize that the Democrats are looking to Palin as the new "Goldwater":

In one way of looking at it, Sarah Palin is the best thing that ever happened to the Democratic Party.

Electorally, she is the GOP gift that keeps on giving. ...

With enemies like this, who needs friends? ...

It's tempting to cheer Sarah Barracuda on as she cannibalizes what remains of the Republican Party. The Going Rogue book tour, the 2010 targeting of moderates like Florida's Charlie Crist, a 2012 bid for the presidency--bring it on! While the percentage of Republican voters who say they would seriously consider voting for Palin for president stands at 65 percent, among all voters the figure is mired at 33 percent.

But they at least recognizes that in our current political culture - they don't mention the dysfunctional nature of our national press as a culprit - that some of Palin's most crackpot ideas get treated more seriously than their content deserves:

Those of us who reside in the parts of America Palin regards as unreal [i.e., not "real Americans"] may secretly enjoy watching the bubble bounce along, relishing her run-on sentences and looney-tunes lines. But the more we chuckle, the more indignant and impassioned the Palin army becomes. That's the bedeviling thing about Sarah Palin, and the secret to her success: neither the left nor the right can get enough of her.

Glenn Beck's current schtick also represents an intensification of the radicalization, with his promotion of outright John Birch Society style conspiracy theories, including those of the Bircher partisan Willard Cleon Skousen.

Greg Lewis in Following Limbaugh on his journey to the edge Media Matters 11/13/09 even suggests that Party chief Rush Limbaugh is going beyond what good loyal Republicans find acceptable! I would like to believe that is true.

The problem I see with all this is that while Palin and Beck may engage in a more crackpot form of marketing than we've seen previously, the radicalization of the Republican Party isn't new. Rush Limbaugh has been a commanding figure in the Party for two decades, even if his recent rhetoric is more rancid.

But, short of abolishing the Constitutional forms altogether, how much more radical can it get than the basic claims and many of the practices of the Cheney-Bush administration? Cheney's Unitary Executive theory was that the President can break any law and the Constitution itself as long as he claims it's for "national security" purposes. Their administration abandoned the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners of war, they instituted a blatantly criminal torture program, they set up a massive domestic surveillance program whose scope and nature we still don't really know, they instituted a pattern of partisan-political prosecutions, they invaded Iraq based on lies and in violation of international law and of the Congressional war resolution of October 2002. The Republican Party, including that bold Maverick John McCain and alleged "moderates" like Chuck Hagel and now-Democratic Arlen Specter, accepted a framework for authoritarian Party rule as well as the implementation of important elements of it during the Cheney-Bush years.

I want to repeat that because I don't mean it as hyperbole. Short of abolishing the Constitutional forms altogether, how much more radical can it get than the basic claims and many of the practices of the Cheney-Bush administration? Obviously, there are many worse things an administration can do to its own citizens than what happened during 2001-9. (Again the qualifier: we don't know the actual extent of the abuses.) But in terms of a theoretical/legal framework, and in terms of the Party accepting the authority of the Party above even the authority of the Constitution, how much more radical can it get?

Sarah Palin 2007

So Democrats and progressives should not be thinking or pretending to think that Palin and the Tea Partiers represent a radicalizing faction in a Party that is otherwise committed to democratic processes and concepts. Their version of the Party ideology would be a change in degree and in marketing, but not in kind. Even Beck's flirtation with isolationism doesn't change that. Old Right isolationism of the Beck/Bircher kind is just rabid nationalism and jingoism with different cosmetics.

In terms of understanding relevant political lessons of the 1960s, Frank Rich's triumphalist model based on a 1965 assumption of the political impotence of Goldwater-style "movement conservatism", is not a good one. Because the Republican resurgence began in earnest in mid-term elections of 1966, built on the basis of Goldwater's "movement conservatism". Not only did Republicans pick up impressive gains in Congress in 1966. Ronald Reagan also won the Governorship of California on a Goldwaterite platform, campaigning against rioting black people and stinking dirty hippies. One of his most Reagan and his "culture war" issues proved hard to ignore in the following years.

And neither Barry Goldwater nor Ronald Reagan espoused the Unitary Executive doctrine that is now the Republican template for Republican Presidents. Cheney and his faithful mouthpiece David Addington first elaborated that doctrine in the Republicans' minority report on the Iran-Contra Congressional investigating committee. The practice started as a major but isolated aspect of the Reagan administration's secret wars in Central America. But Reagan and his senior officials worried that he might actually be impeached and removed from office over the incident.

Today, the Republican Party is completely supportive of the Unitary Executive practice of the Presidency. We saw it during the Cheney-Bush administration where Iran-Contra was effectively the template for their entire foreign policy. A Sarah Palin-Liz Cheney administration taking office in 2013 will not have to worry about being impeached and removed from office for breaking the law if conditions remain the same as they are today.

Eric Boehlert in The GOP's looming (media) civil war Media Matters 11/10/09 makes a confusing argument. He argues that the FOXists and the OxyContin crowd are driving unable to nominate candidates who can win, using the recent example of Doug Hoffman in the New York 23rd district special Congressional election.

But he also points to John McCain's winning the Republican nomination in 2008 against the opposition of the most enthusiastic rightists as evidence that the FOXists are out of touch with the Republican base. But that doesn't set very well together with the other argument. After all, the supposedly less-rightist Republican base also nominated a candidate who lost.

He also mentions Barry Goldwater in 1964. Democrats in 1980 were also looking to the Republicans' 1964 fiasco for hope in the Reagan-Carter contest. Reagan had also been identified throughout his political career with the Goldwater wing of the Party. And he won the election.

Then we have Oliver Willis in Liberal Elitism? No. Some People Are, Sadly, Stupid Huffington Post 11/12/09 recognizing that radicalism doesn't mean that the Republican Party is doomed to disappear, arguing:

Far from the liberals in the '70s who were clearly not responsive enough to the middle class, leading to the rise of Nixon and resentment politics, today's left has gone to great lengths to be a big tent. So much so that some of our biggest fault lines are internal and don't involve the Republicans at all. But far from the pre-Clinton great society types, today's liberals understand that without blue collar people on our side we don't advance as a movement. ...

While the concerns of many white, middle-class people are worthy causes and should be addressed by liberals (and are), it is not elitism to treat this roving band of conspiracy nuts for the cretins they are or associate with. This would be akin to President Johnson in 1964 undertaking a federal committee to study the mind control powers of fluoridated water. That would be asinine.

Liberals have in the past allowed the ivory tower set to exert too much control over the Democratic party. [my emphasis]

All this sounds very Broderian and "sensible" by Beltway standards. But were Republican victories in 1966 and after because the Democrats were "not responsive enough to the middle class"? Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats got Medicare passed, which is one of the major government programs benefiting "the middle class" (a vague term in itself). Lyndon Johnson won his landslide victory in 1964 running against Goldwater primarily on two issues: support of civil rights for African-Americans and opposition to Goldwater's demands to escalate the Vietnam War.

It was probably inevitable in retrospect that there would be the famous "white backlash" against civil rights legislation. But if Johnson had withdrawn from Vietnam rather than escalated the war, the entire political scene would have looked different in both 1966 and especially 1968. I know this is "what-if" history. But Democratic Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey barely lost to Nixon. If it hadn't been for the war issue - or if Johnson had been willing to publicize what he knew about the Nixon campaign's interventions to delay the peace talks - it's very conceivable that Johnson could have won.

And when I see comments like, "But far from the pre-Clinton great society types, today's liberals understand that without blue collar people on our side we don't advance as a movement." If Oliver Willis thinks that Great Society "types", otherwise known as liberal, pro-labor Democrats were unaware of the need for blue collar voters or unresponsive to their economic needs, he needs to do more research. So far, the post-"great society types" in the Obama administration haven't been able to get health care reform passed, they are escalating a needless war in Afghanistan much like LBJ did in Vietnam, they're playing patty-cake with the fiscal hawks who want to phase out Social Security, and they are postponing (indefinitely?) fulfilling their pledge to Labor on the Employee Free Choice Act to facilitate union organizing and selling out women's rights to a handful of Blue Dog Democrats.

If there's a strategy by the Democrats that could make even Sarah Palin President in 2013, it would look a whole lot like this one of the post-"great society types". Willis sees that the new "Goldwaters" could threaten the Democrats. It's just his answer seems to be following policies that would toss independent voters into their laps.

My favorite media critic, Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby, seems to veer between taking civil-rights concerns seriously and worrying that they are a distraction from the important issues. This past week was a "bad hair week" for him in that regard. Scolding the hapless star pundit Ruth Marcus for just now noticing that the Republicans have been lying their hineys off about health care reform, he concludes:

Warning: If Marcus decides to address this disgrace, she’ll find herself with little help. Now that she is fully awake, she will see how much of our world is really about culture war - about looking away from corporate rule, about keeping us rubes entertained. [my emphasis]

Women's rights, immigrant rights and civil rights are not about "looking away from corporate rule". And if the Democrats want to build a long-term coalition that not only won't flinch at hearing the phrase "corporate rule" like our Blue Dogs would but actually do something to increase people's power against corporate rule, selling out the rights of women, Latinos and African-Americans - most of whom would count as "workers" by any reasonable definition and certainly as "middle class" and/or poor - isn't going to get them there.

I'm all for learning lessons from "the Sixties". But I prefer reality-based lessons, not Blue Dog ideology for keeping Republican policies dominant for decades to come.

Tags: democratic party, paranoid style, republican party, sarah palin