Friday's WaPo Russian hacking revelations

The Washington Post presented a new report on Friday about the Obama Administration's investigation and response to the intelligence of Russian hacking aimed at influencing the 2016 Presidential election, Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s election assault 06/23/2017.

For me, this one was stunning in a kind of numbing way.

For one thing, it reminds me again of how much of this story is based on leaked claims from sources not known to the public. That's especially concerning since I'm hearing Democrats more and more talking about the Russian hacking in 2016 as an "act of war." And if we're going to take the kind of measures against Russia that countries take in response to acts of war, it doesn't inspire a lot of confidence that we're not only so dependent on not just highly on very secret intelligence information but on a variety of unverified leaks from intelligence agencies and other anonymous sources.

It wasn't too difficult to believe that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor actually occurred. Or the bringing down of the Twin Towers in 2001.

Then there was a famous incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 whose exact nature is still in dispute. And it was still a long time untilt he covert American military actions that preceded it.

And of course, there were the famous "weapons of mass destruction" that made the invasion of Iraq necessary in 2003. The extent of the threat is still unknown, since none of those "WMDs" has yet to be found.

More recently, there was this: Seymour Hersh, Trump‘s Red Line Welt 06/25/2017. On April 4, the Syrians bombed a facility. On April 6, President Trump launched a Tomahawk missile launch on a Syrian Air Force base in retaliation. The justification was that Syria had used sarin gas in the April 4 attack:

Within hours of the April 4 bombing, the world’s media was saturated with photographs and videos from Khan Sheikhoun. Pictures of dead and dying victims, allegedly suffering from the symptoms of nerve gas poisoning, were uploaded to social media by local activists, including the White Helmets, a first responder group known for its close association with the Syrian opposition.

The provenance of the photos was not clear and no international observers have yet inspected the site, but the immediate popular assumption worldwide was that this was a deliberate use of the nerve agent sarin, authorized by President Bashar Assad of Syria. Trump endorsed that assumption by issuing a statement within hours of the attack, describing Assad’s "heinous actions" as being a consequence of the Obama administration’s "weakness and irresolution" in addressing what he said was Syria’s past use of chemical weapons. [my emphasis]

What Hersh reports, with sourcing to high-level, anonymous American sources, is that the US intelligence community (IC) had a high level of confidence in intelligence provided by the Russians indicating that the target was a meeting of opposition leaders - "radical Islamic terrorists" in the Republicans' conjuring formula. More specifically, "Ahrar al-Sham and the al-Qaida-affiliated group formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra." And he reports, "The advance intelligence on the target, as supplied by the Russians, was given the highest possible score inside the American community." Why that advanced intelligence was so important to evaluating the July 4 attack is something Hearst explains in the piece. Short version: the IC believed based on the information they had that the facility bombed had chemicals stored there that would have more plausibly accounted for the damage observed afterward than the assumption of a sarin gas attack.

After the July 4 bombing, Hearst reports, "A Bomb Damage Assessment (BDA) by the U.S. military later determined that the heat and force of the 500-pound Syrian bomb triggered a series of secondary explosions that could have generated a huge toxic cloud that began to spread over the town, formed by the release of the fertilizers, disinfectants and other goods stored in the basement, its effect magnified by the dense morning air, which trapped the fumes close to the ground."

As Hearst reports it, Trump was persuaded by the reports of a Syrian sarin gas attack, which according to the information Hearst reports, is unlikely in the extreme. He quotes a source he identifies as "a senior adviser to the American intelligence community, who has served in senior positions in the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency" describing Trump's reaction, which sounds pretty impulsive:

Trump, a constant watcher of television news, said, while King Abdullah of Jordan was sitting next to him in the Oval Office, that what had happened was “horrible, horrible” and a “terrible affront to humanity.” Asked if his administration would change its policy toward the Assad government, he said: “You will see.” He gave a hint of the response to come at the subsequent news conference with King Abdullah: “When you kill innocent children, innocent babies – babies, little babies – with a chemical gas that is so lethal ... that crosses many, many lines, beyond a red line . ... That attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me. Big impact ... It’s very, very possible ... that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much.”

Within hours of viewing the photos, the adviser said, Trump instructed the national defense apparatus to plan for retaliation against Syria. “He did this before he talked to anybody about it. The planners then asked the CIA and DIA if there was any evidence that Syria had sarin stored at a nearby airport or somewhere in the area. Their military had to have it somewhere in the area in order to bomb with it.” “The answer was, ‘We have no evidence that Syria had sarin or used it,’” the adviser said. “The CIA also told them that there was no residual delivery for sarin at Sheyrat [the airfield from which the Syrian SU-24 bombers had taken off on April 4] and Assad had no motive to commit political suicide.” Everyone involved, except perhaps the president, also understood that a highly skilled United Nations team had spent more than a year in the aftermath of an alleged sarin attack in 2013 by Syria, removing what was said to be all chemical weapons from a dozen Syrian chemical weapons depots.

And despite the paucity of evidence for the claim, "it was impossible for the experts to persuade the president of this once he had made up his mind."

After the strike, the rewards were rich in PR:

The next few days were his most successful as president. America rallied around its commander in chief, as it always does in times of war. Trump, who had campaigned as someone who advocated making peace with Assad, was bombing Syria 11 weeks after taking office, and was hailed for doing so by Republicans, Democrats and the media alike. One prominent TV anchorman, Brian Williams of MSNBC, used the word “beautiful” to describe the images of the Tomahawks being launched at sea. Speaking on CNN, Fareed Zakaria said: “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States.” A review of the top 100 American newspapers showed that 39 of them published editorials supporting the bombing in its aftermath, including the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. [emphasis in original]

How does this relate to the Trump-Russia scandal? In several ways.

One is that Russia is militarily involved in Syria. And that even under the Obama Administration, there was some level of cooperation between the US and Russia in the area, even though their end goals were different. Protocols were in place to minimize the likelihood of direct clashes between US and Russian forces. What Hersh's article describes is an impulsive President making a military decision with a great potential for risk and little if any positive return in that situation. Hersh says of Trump's missile strike on July 6, "All in all, it was little more than an expensive fireworks display."

Another is that the events and decisions described in Hersh's article don't fit any simple narrative of Trump as being beholden to Russia or reflexively supporting the Russian position. There are various speculations that could fit that situation. But it is notable that the Trump Family Business Administration spun it as a sign of Russia's perfidy:

Five days later [after the missile strike on Syria], the Trump administration gathered the national media for a background briefing on the Syrian operation that was conducted by a senior White House official who was not to be identified. The gist of the briefing was that Russia’s heated and persistent denial of any sarin use in the Khan Sheikhoun bombing was a lie because President Trump had said sarin had been used. That assertion, which was not challenged or disputed by any of the reporters present, became the basis for a series of further criticisms:

-The continued lying by the Trump administration about Syria’s use of sarin led to widespread belief in the American media and public that Russia had chosen to be involved in a corrupt disinformation and cover-up campaign on the part of Syria.

-Russia’s military forces had been co-located with Syria’s at the Shayrat airfield (as they are throughout Syria), raising the possibility that Russia had advance notice of Syria’s determination to use sarin at Khan Sheikhoun and did nothing to stop it.

-Syria’s use of sarin and Russia’s defense of that use strongly suggested that Syria withheld stocks of the nerve agent from the UN disarmament team that spent much of 2014 inspecting and removing all declared chemical warfare agents from 12 Syrian chemical weapons depots, pursuant to the agreement worked out by the Obama administration and Russia after Syria’s alleged, but still unproven, use of sarin the year before against a rebel redoubt in a suburb of Damascus.

The apparently false information given by the Administration to justify the Tomahawk strikes is also very relevant to the Trump-Russia story. Governments lie. And it's seriously discouraging to see that many leading Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, along with many of our star pundits and commentators, endorsed this strike and its justifications,without serious questioning. For the Trump-Russia investigation, that emphasizes yet again how important it is to have a credible investigation with relevant facts explained clearly to the public. If the IC is right in claiming that the Russians hacked US computers illegally - and I assume at this point that the basic story is correct - the public needs to know that the national government is doing something effective to protect critical election infrastructure from hacking attacks. And we need to know the real story behind the dealings of the Trump campaign with dubious Russian actors, including the kind of business ties he has with Russian companies through which he could receive emoluments. But, of course, if the information was falsified by the IC, that's something the public should know, too!

And just as the Hersh article contains material that troubles a simple Trump-is-acting-on-behalf-of-Putin construction, the WaPo piece also contains a kind of "poison pill" for the Democrats, as well. If the evidence was as clear to the IC as the report claims, they Obama's restrained handling of the information priority to the election looks all too much like more dysfunctional Bipartisanship on his part.

Trump himself is using the information to "gaslight" the Democrats, perhaps without fully realizing the extent to which he is conceding that there was serious Russian interference in the 2016 election:

Since the Obama Administration was told way before the 2016 Election that the Russians were meddling, why no action? Focus on them, not T!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2017

The "T" presumably meaning Trump.

Obama Administration official said they "choked" when it came to acting on Russian meddling of election. They didn't want to hurt Hillary?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2017

The reason that President Obama did NOTHING about Russia after being notified by the CIA of meddling is that he expected Clinton would win..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2017

...and did not want to "rock the boat." He didn't "choke," he colluded or obstructed, and it did the Dems and Crooked Hillary no good.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2017

The real story is that President Obama did NOTHING after being informed in August about Russian meddling. With 4 months looking at Russia...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2017

..under a magnifying glass, they have zero "tapes" of T people colluding. There is no collusion & no obstruction. I should be given apology!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2017

Democratic "Bipartisanship" is becoming a bit of a personal White Whale for me. But in thinking through ways that direct meddling with the voter counts can be countered, it seems obvious that some sort of required paper trail with follow-up audits would remove a lot of the potential for vote-manipulation through computer hacking. Like paper ballots that are counted by optical scan. Also, some standard national procedure for preventing hinky voter purges. The kind of stuff that would also put the kibosh on a lot of the segregationist voter-suppression mischief that the Republicans made part of their standard operating procedure years ago.

So if the Democrats, including the last Democratic President, had raised a lot more holy hell the last 10 years over segregationist voter suppression, there's some good chance that our national electoral system would be considerably safer against direct hacking from Russians or segregationists or crooked voting machine companies. But being rude like that might have disturbed the quest for ... Bipartisanship! Because the Republicans would have said the Mean Libruls weren't being nice to them. Republicans definitely need some manners lessons. But Democrats need some Malvina Reynolds lessons, provided here by Delila Paz.

Marcy Wheeler's commentary on the Trump-Russia revelations are always worth attention: The Compartments in WaPo's Russian Hack Magnum Opus Emptywheel 06/23/2017; Obama Worried Trump Would Warn the Russians About Their Compounds ... Did They? 06/26/2017

Perils of Democratic "bipartisanship"

I don't have any particular predictions for the Hillary vs. Trump debate tonight.

But one recent report on the Presidential race caught my eye.

It's this report which for me is nails on the blackboard: What President Hillary Clinton would do on Day 1 PBS Newshour 09/23/2016. It features two reporters, Lisa Desjardins of the PBS Newshour and Amie Parnes of The Hill, talking to John Yang about what they would expect from Hillary's early days as President:

"... bipartisan approach ... bipartisan ... they’re very much into working across the aisle, to extending an arm. ... She has a pretty good track record of working across the aisle with Republicans. She worked with Tom DeLay and other Republicans, so I think this is very much her approach. I think she’s very much a centrist and I think this is what she’s really looking to do when she takes the office. ... bipartisanship ...

"She has a commanding general coming into his own, Chuck Schumer. ... he’s becoming more bipartisan himself. ... reach across the aisle ... she’s going to have quite a little debacle, because she’s going to face some stress and some pressure from the left. [I hope!]

"They’re going to want her to not go with someone like Merrick Garland and pick someone who is a little more of their liking and of their ilk. [sic] ... it basically shows what she’s going to do with Republicans, if she kind of, you know, walks toward them a little bit and offers someone who’s more centrist. ... We know that Hillary Clinton has worked with Mitch McConnell in the past."

Bipartisanship and distancing herself from the "ilk" of her own party base. What could possibly go wrong?

Hillary herself is not talking this way in the campaign, so far as I'm seeing at the moment. But the Beltway press loves talk about Bipartisanship, and about Tip-'n-Ronnie fighting during the day and getting together for a beer in the evening.

The Republicans have used tactics like frequent redistricting, voter suppression and radial obstructionism in Congress to create a situation in which they have enormous ability to block Democratic programs that have enormous support.

And it allows the corporate wing of the Democratic Party to go along with conservative measures and argue to their constituents that it was the best they could do given Republican strength in Congress. So we get things like last year's Social Security changes, which included de facto benefits cuts that "will particularly hurt the middle class, women and families with disabled children." (Laurence Kotlikoff, The Budget Deal's Devastating Social Security Benefit Cuts Forbes 10/28/2015)

This situation also allows for Republicans to make attempts to degrade government services and then argue for further cuts and privitization because "gubment doesn't work." They have also been doing that with Social Security staffing and would like to keep doing it. (Eric Katz, Social Security Warns of Furloughs, Service Cuts if Congress Enacts Proposed Funding Government Executive 08/09/2016)

eMeg campaigns for Clinton

This is not the kind of story progressive Democrats like to see: Seema Mehta, Meg Whitman stumps for Hillary Clinton, demurs when asked about Cabinet post 08/30/82016. This is not the kind of thing I want to be hearing about a campaign that has a great chance to build a real public mandate for important progressive policy ideas which it (nominally?) supports:

Republican billionaire Meg Whitman, in her first appearance on the campaign trail for Hillary Clinton, wouldn’t rule out serving in a Cabinet position if the Democratic presidential nominee wins the White House in the fall.

“We’ll see what happens,” Whitman told KUSA-TV in Denver, adding that she enjoyed her life in California and was committed to Hewlett-Packard, where she is chief executive. ...

Whitman, who previously served on the GOP presidential campaigns of 2016 candidate Chris Christie, 2012 nominee Mitt Romney and 2008 nominee John McCain, praised Clinton’s “compassion, commitment and courage,” and told the crowd that Clinton would be the steward for the nation’s economy.

“If you are a lifelong Republican, it’s hard to come across [the partisan divide,]” Whitman said, according to the Denver Post. “But I decided that this year it was clear to me that Secretary Clinton’s temperament, leadership experience and commitment to America’s foundational values make her the far better choice for president.”

In interviews with local media, Whitman said she remained a Republican, and after voting for Clinton in November, she would work to rebuild her party.[my emphasis]

In the still-unlikely event that Hillary loses to Trump, her campaign will of course blame Bernie Sanders and his supporters, even though Sanders endorsed her and is campaigning for her. That's how it works with the establishment Democrats, the DFHs are always to blame.

Still, I have to wonder what her campaign thinks that she will get from having eMeg Whitman campaign for her. eMeg's major direct foray into politics was her ill-fated campaign for Governor against Jerry Brown in 2010. She outspent him by a large margin, tens of millions more. But she lost. She's spent much of her career giving speeches to corporate and investor audiences who were unlikely to press her on hot-button political issues. And she mostly went before FOX News and other friendly media during her campaign. It really showed in their debates, which sealed it for Jerry. Who, not incidentally, is a master debater.

But she was about as uninspiring a candidate as you could imagine. Unless you include that guy who ran against him in 2014 who nobody knew and nobody remembers. What does eMeg campaigning bring that's positive? It's not as though Hillary is in desperate need of shoring up the women's vote. Of course, if she plans to continue Obama's Bipartisan schtick after she wins...

But even that doesn't make sense. Republicans have not special fondness for eMeg, not even the ones who know who she is.

John Frank reported on eMeg's Denver appearance in Republican Meg Whitman makes campaign debut for Hillary Clinton in Colorado Denver Post 08/30/2016:

Clinton is the first Democrat for president that Whitman endorsed. She supported Al Gore in 2000 and has donated to various other Democratic politicians in recent years.

Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper introduced Whitman and suggested her endorsement of Clinton is “one of the most significant moments” in the effort to recruit support across the aisle.

“The business community has really turned out in force, again and again” for Clinton, he said. “It’s not surprising. … There’s not much of a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. What’s perplexing for some of us is there are still some business people out there who haven’t followed through on that.” [my emphasis]

After nearly eight years of President Obama confronting radical Republican obstructionism with tepid Bipartisanship, Democrats should be take talk of working "across the aisle" or reaching "across the aisle" or doing anything else "across the aisle" as a signal that the candidate doesn't take progressive Democratic positions seriously.

And having the Democratic Presidential campaign reach "across the aisle" also doesn't help much with inspiring Democratic turnout in the fall, turnout that is critical to building Democratic strength in the House and Senate.

The Democratic-Republican intensity gap

Rick Perlstein has a great piece on the intensity gap between the Democratic establishment, on the one hand, and the entire Republican Party, on the other, when it comes to "down ballot" elections. Hillary's GOP Sympathies Washington Spectator 08/22/2016.

The version at the National Memo is titled Don’t Save The Speaker—Let Him Go Down With The Trump Ship.

This section makes Perlstein's point dramatically with this series of flashbacksd:

You see the mid-1990s, when President Bill Clinton, kneecapped by his botched initiative to welcome gays into the military, the defeat of his healthcare plan in 1994, and the Republican takeover of Congress the same year, responded by taking Dick Morris’s advice and defining his administration via the neologism of “triangulation”—living halfway between the screaming lunacy of Newt Gingrich on the one side, and the Congressional liberals in his own party on the other, thus enshrining a false equivalency that Democrats fighting to preserve the social safety net and perhaps to even expand it must be, well, just as extreme as the guy who said, “I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.”

There was 2004, when John Kerry’s Democratic National Convention team—at the height of the Iraq debacle, a faltering economy, and a series of corporate scandals capped by the collapse of a fraudulent company called Enron, run by one of George Bush’s old pals - vetted all speeches to make sure they didn’t criticize George Bush. (“Bush will come up this week,” explained Kerry spokesman Stephanie Cutter, “but we don’t have to tell the story of George Bush because the American people are living it every day. What we’re talking about is the future.” Only old man Jimmy Carter, God bless him, exercising a former president’s prerogative, dared defy the ukase.)

Then there was 2008 when, waking up to the smoking ruins all around them, the American people repudiated conservatism so thoroughly that Republican pundits like David Brooks began opining that their party’s “stale, government-is-the-problem, you can’t trust the government” rhetoric was “a disaster for the Republican Party.”

And when, instead of throwing ’em anvils, our new president made Kerry’s 2004 mistake all-but-official party policy. As he put it of our friends on the other side of the aisle in 2010, “no person, no party, has a monopoly on wisdom,” and it was time to find “common ground.”

No wonder that so many Democratic base voters and activists are so tired of this "bipartisan" posturing by Democratic leaders.

A cynic might even suggest that this approach might have something to do with the preferences of the Democratic Party's corporate sponsors. It's convenient for them for a Democratic President to be able to say, gee, I'd like to do Democratic things, but I have to support all this conservative stuff because the Republicans control the House, or the Senate, or both, whatever.

Democratic passion for ... bipartisanship?

I believe it was Digby Parton who I first saw writing that when the Republicans lose, they decide it was because they weren't conservative and Republican enough. And the Democrats are the same; when they lose an election, they also decide it's because they weren't Republican enough.

This year's Democratic primaries have delivered a big shock to that sensibility. That doesn't mean the party establishment will actually change their trajectory. Don't get me wrong: they're going to have to, eventually. But "eventually" can be an awfully long time.

And this is the Democratic Party we're talking about here. They may even decide even when things are going well for them that they need to be more conservative and Republican!

Matt Taibbi certainly has the suspicion that Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie Rolling Stone 06/09/2016:

Politicians are so used to viewing the electorate as a giant thing to be manipulated that no matter what happens at the ballot, they usually can only focus on the Washington-based characters they perceive to be pulling the strings. Through this lens, the uprising among Democratic voters this year wasn't an organic expression of mass disgust, but wholly the fault of Bernie Sanders, who within the Beltway is viewed as an oddball amateur and radical who jumped the line.

Nobody saw his campaign as an honest effort to restore power to voters, because nobody in the capital even knows what that is. In the rules of palace intrigue, Sanders only made sense as a kind of self-centered huckster who made a failed play for power. And the narrative will be that with him out of the picture, the crisis is over. No person, no problem.

This inability to grasp that the problem is bigger than Bernie Sanders is a huge red flag. As [Paul] Thacker puts it, the theme of this election year was widespread anger toward both parties, and both the Trump craziness and the near-miss with Sanders should have served as a warning. "The Democrats should be worried they're next," he says.

But they're not worried. Behind the palace walls, nobody ever is.

Dan Roberts reports in Trump and Clinton on quest to woo Sanders fans and uneasy Republicans The Guardian 06/11/2016:

[Hillary] Clinton has also been stepping up her efforts to woo Republicans away from Trump too, particularly as it has become clear that victory in his party primary has not led to any tempering of that notorious rhetoric. ...

The Clinton campaign has even funded a website, RepublicansAgainstTrump.org, to seek – with tongue only half inserted in cheek – people to sign up to a pledge. “Donald Trump is not qualified to be president,” it reads. “He does not represent my beliefs as a Republican and, more importantly, my values as an American. He does not speak for me and I will not vote for him.”

It remains unclear how many will choose to actively vote for a Democrat instead, but some claim to have spotted the beginnings of a mutiny even in the US Senate. This week the New Yorker quoted Susan Collins, a moderate Maine Republican, saying she was so disgusted with Trump that she had not ruled out voting for Clinton – a scenario senator Collins was later keen to qualify as still “unlikely”.

Nonetheless, the notion that Trump’s belligerence will let Clinton peel off many moderate Republicans at the ballot box in November looks a good deal more likely right now than its opposite. Signs indicate no mass exodus of Sanders supporters willing to embrace Trump.

And, if Taibbi is correct, lots of Democrats are very inclined to believe that Hillary can "peel off many moderate Republicans at the ballot box in November."

And a campaign built around that premise is likely to result, at best, in a President Clinton with a "bipartisan" mandate for "competence," not a Democratic mandate for Democratic priorities - at least not for any progressive ones; maybe a narrow majority in the Senate with several Democratic Senators committed to the "bipartisan" mantra; and an obstructionist Republican-majority House. But President Clinton can still make bipartisan deals with such a Congress. And we know what kind of bipartisan deals those will be.

And, no surprise at all, there is already a narrative to say that any conservative position that Hillary adopts as a candidate or President is just a continuation of the famous three-dimensional chess Obama's supporters like to say he's playing in such situations, aimed ultimately at some momentarily obscure progressive goal: David Cole, The Progressive Case for Hillary Clinton’s Incrementalism The Nation 06/10/2016. If you're familiar with the standard Clinton campaign lines of the moment, the opening paragraph is easily recognizable as the stock dismissive, condescending line Hillary supporters use about Bernie's campaign, and have been pretty much the whole campaign:

You gotta love Bernie Sanders. He came from nowhere, a socialist, of all things, and managed to give Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president since Obama assumed office in 2008, a run for her money — literally. He succeeded because he spoke frankly and directly to the leading issues challenging our nation—unacceptable poverty amid unprecedented wealth, and the anxiety of those who can’t find jobs that pay a living wage. He addressed the need to reform campaign spending, halt global warming, advance racial justice, and rein in Wall Street. He had bold ideas and refused to trim his sails. In comparison to Hillary Clinton’s more cautious approach, Bernie was a breath of fresh air for many readers of this magazine, young voters, and progressives of all ages.

He doesn't say that Bernie supports a $15 minimum wage, which Hillary opposes; that he proposes breaking up too-big-to-fail banks ("systemically important" in the official jargon) which she opposes; that he supporters free public university education, which Hillary opposes; that he has a real plan to dramatically reduce student debt, which she opposes; or that he is insistent about reversing the Citizens United decisions which Hillary claims to favor just like Obama supposedly does though both seem in practice thoroughly comfortable with it. No, Bernie has "bold ideas" and doesn't "trim his sails." And the frivolous kids like him, too (as though any of the serious people care, nudge-nudge wink-wink).

And incremental change is the only kind that anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan can expect, children! And anyway, the Obama Administration is the best of all possible worlds, except that Hillary wants to give us a more "muscular" foreign policy. Besides, asking for radical banking reform makes no sense. Because, hey, it's not like the megabanks could cause radical problems like, what, crashing the whole world financial system or something? Ha! When has anything like that every happened? Only some BernieBro types could think such a thing!

This is the state of the real existing Democratic Party in the Age of Hillary Clinton. Apparently reality hasn't yet crashed into it hard enough yet.

And here's some real existing three-dimensional-chess incrementalism in practice: Nika Knight, Deeper and Deeper into War: Obama Authorizes More Military Force in Afghanistan Common Dreams 06/10/2016. Well, incremental military escalation, at least. Progressive reform? Not so much.

The glories of Centrism (with a capital "c"), or, the ecstasies of High Broderism

Paul Krugman sees an ominous sign for the future of Obama's Presidency: "Uh-oh. David Broder says the tax deal marks the beginning of Obama’s recovery. The president is doomed." (The Doom of Broder Conscience 12/12/2010)

The article to which he refers by The Dean Of All The Pundits is Centrist on the riseWashington Post 12/09/2010. To the Grand Master of the cult of High Broderism, Obama's collapse to the Republicans on the tax deal without any fight on his part visible enough that anyone noticed is the height of Democratic statesmanship and political wisdom:

In these past few days, he has regained the economic initiative from the victorious Republicans, separated himself from the left of his own party and staked a strong claim to the territory where national elections are fought and won: the independent center.

The key virtue here in the world of High Broderism is that Obama "separated himself from the left of his own party". Always a praiseworthy act on the part of Democrats in the value-system of the Beltway Village.

Obama now has a shot at winning over some Tea Party voters, the Dean pronounces. And, as Digby predicted, Obama's Tuesday press conference attacking the "sanctimonious" Democratic base was an orgasmic moment for the Dean:

Obama used his news conference Tuesday to define himself, more clearly than ever before, as a raging moderate - a man who recognizes that compromise is the key to serving a broad and diverse set of constituencies, rather than fit some ideological standard of intellectual purity.

This was the best showing for Obama in many months.

Broder does remind us what passes for Seriousness in the Village:

Also, the $900 billion this deal will add to the national debt increases the pressure on Obama and Congress to undertake the kind of tough-love budgetary changes outlined by the presidential commission on deficits.

You see, a deficit-increasing tax subsidy for billionaires is a good thing because it increase pressure to cut spending. Especially for Social Security, which does not contribute to the deficit at all.

Krugman also catches the Post's Dana Milbank rewriting the history of the health care reform debate to blame them thar libruls for delaying its passage, as Krugman explain in Orwellian Centrism Conscience 12/12/2010.

To add another groaner to the Post's record these last few days, we have Kathleen Parker in Can we become an America WikiLeaks can't assail? 12/12/2010, displaying her deep knowledge of the digital world, loosely basing her ramblings on the Wikileaks story:

It is convenient to blame poor little Julian Assange, the cyberkind who published the leaks that someone stole.

He is now a martyr to the brat brigades who occupy basements and attics, keeping the company of others similarly occupied with virtual life.

Assange is the king brat, but only du jour. He will be displaced soon enough by more ambitious hacks whose delinquent and, worse, sinister inclinations are enabled by technology. Alas, we are at the mercy of giddy, power-hungry nerds operating beyond the burden of responsibility or accountability.

Poor Kathleen is just struggling to her her mind around this here Internet thingy, it seems.

But the real problem in, well, whatever it is she's trying to talk about, is that Obama is a wimp making Amurica weak:

With the exception of our military, we are a flabby lot, and I'm not just talking about girth. We are merely disgusting in that department. I'm talking about our self-discipline, our individual will, our self-respect, our voluntary order.

Note the operative words: self, individual and voluntary. ...

It's still a jungle out there, however, and the weak lose every time. [my emphasis]

In more democratic-minded times, we might have called Parker's idolatry of the military just plain militarism. These days, it's stock Republican-friendly Village conventional wisdom, hardly meriting notice in respectable commentary.

Tags: bipartisanship, david broder, militarism

Some say the Earth is round, others say it's flat. Opinions differ.

This may be the most vapid segment of TV purporting to be news that I've ever seen in my life. Sadly, it's from our "quality TV" PBS Newshour. It was preceded in the 12/09/2010 broadcast by a segment reporting that the House Democratic Caucus had voted in a closed meeting to reject President Obama's horrible tax deal with the Republicans. For those of us not initiated into the advanced insights of High Broderism, that might suggest that most Democrats in the House think Obama caved in way too much to the hard right demands of the Republicans. And that they don't like a tax deal which heavily subsidizes billionaires, builds in even greater maldistribution of wealth through a low estate tax, and takes the first concrete policy step toward Social Security Phaseout via the "payroll tax holiday".

This is outgoing Senators Evan Bayh (D-Blue Dog) and Bob Bennett (R-Utah) joining interviewer Jim Lehrer in a High Broderism ceremony glorifying the virtues of Compromise and lamenting how terrible it is that the extremes "both parties" get in the way of doing what the Republicans want. Online they give it the Broderian title of Outgoing Sens. Bayh, Bennett: Political Extremes Are Out of Touch. At least they picked a diverse pair. One is a stodgy old conservative, the other is a stodgy middle-aged conservative.



This called to mind Digby's observation in responding to President's Obama's rant on Tuesday against his "sanctimonious" base voters.

Alluding to David Broder's idolotry of bipartisanship, which in the Beltway Village always means trashing "the left", she wrote, "Someone should check up on David Broder. I'm afraid the orgasm he just had may have given him a heart attack."

Tags: bipartisanship

Bipartisan harmony after the elections?

From Andy Barr, John Boehner: 'We will not compromise' Politico 10/28/2010

Here’s John Boehner, the likely speaker if Republicans take the House, offering his plans for Obama’s agenda: “We're going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell summed up his plan to National Journal: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” ...

“There will be no compromise on stopping runaway spending, deficits and debt. There will be no compromise on repealing Obamacare,” said Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) in an interview last week on conservative Hugh Hewitt’s radio show.

“There will be no compromise on stopping Democrats from growing government and raising taxes," added Pence, who may leave the House GOP leadership to prepare for a presidential run.

And many of the potential incoming Republicans have stated that they wouldn't budge in trying to meet Democrats halfway.

“When it comes to spending, I'm not compromising. I don't care who, what, when or where, I'm not compromising,” Ken Buck, the Republican Senate nominee in Colorado, told The Washington Post. [my emphasis]

President Obama, from Full Transcript Of President Obama's Meeting With Progressive Bloggers Oliver Willis 10/27/2010:

Q Mr. President, you’ve said that you want to work with Republicans after the election, but there’s probably a pretty good chance that they’re not going to advance with you. Is there sort of a breaking point you have of where you try to work with them and they just refuse to budge, which they’ve indicated so far? Is there a breaking point for you just like you’re going to have to go off on your own and find a way around them?

THE PRESIDENT: Look, the — I'm a pretty stubborn guy when it comes to, on the one hand, trying to get cooperation. I don’t give up just because I didn’t get cooperation on this issue; I’ll try the next issue. If the Republicans don’t agree with me on fiscal policy, maybe they’ll agree with me on infrastructure. If they don’t agree with me on infrastructure, I’ll try to see if they agree with me on education.

So I’m just going to keep on trying to see where they want to move the country forward.

In that sense, there’s not a breaking point for me. There are some core principles that I think are important for not just me to stick with but for the country to stick with. So if the Republicans say we need to cut our investments in education, at a time when we know that our success as a nation is largely going to depend on how well trained our workforce is, I’m going to say no. And there are going to be areas where, after working very hard, we just can’t find compromise and I’m going to be standing my ground, then essentially we debate it before the American people.

But I don’t go into the next two years assuming that there’s just going to be gridlock. We’re going to keep on working to make sure that we can get as much done as possible because folks are hurting out there. What they’re looking for is help on jobs, help on keeping their homes, help on sending their kids to college. And if I can find ways for us to work with Republicans to advance those issues, then that’s going to be my priority. [my emphasis]

From Michael Moore, A Boot to the Head Huffington Post 10/28/2010:

Yes, one big boot is poised to stomp out whatever hopey-changey thing we might have had two years ago and secure this country in the hands of the oligarchs and the culture police.

And if they win on Tuesday, they plan to show no mercy. They will not speak of bipartisanship or olive branches or tolerate any filibuster threats. They will come in and do the job with a mandate they'll perceive the electorate will have given them. They will not fart around for two years like the Democrats did. They will not "search for compromise" or "find middle ground." They will not meet you halfway on the playing field. They know that touchdowns aren't scored at the 50-yard line. ... [my emphasis]

Tags: 2010 elections, bipartisanship

The power of scripts: David Broder on the bold Maverick McCain

This dimwitted column from David Broder shows just how impervious to reality our Pod Pundits' favorite scripts can be: John McCain, your country is calling Washington Post 08/26/2010.

Broder, The Dean Of All The Pundits, is the highest high priest for the ideal of Potemkin bipartisanship. And Broder has been in love with McCain's maverick image for so long that apparently nothing can convince him that McCain isn't any kind of moderate, at least not by any meaningful definition of the word: not his hardline pro-Bush voting record, not his shameless warmongering, not his Mean Mister Mustard Presidential campaign, not his anti-immigrant demagoguery, not even McCain's own (false) insistence that he had never claimed to be a moderate.

The Dean declares of the bold Maverick McCain: "The reputation he established for independence -- for being his own man, no matter what the pressures -- has survived the vagaries of an exceptionally long career."

Because when you construct a phony script out of hot air and maintain it by wishful thinking, no vagaries of an exceptionally different reality staring you in the face is going to change that. For the Dean, McCain's the legendary Maverick. No matter what.

That's the kind of decisive analysis The Dean always brings to bear. Like in this Post column of 02/11/2010, Sarah Palin displays her pitch-perfect populism. ¡Caramba! The Dean's finely-tuned political ear knows that Sarah Palin is speaking to the soul of the Real Americans. Why, she's lots like George Wallace, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton! No, it doesn't make jack for sense. But The Dean just knows about these things.

Tags: bipartisanship, david broder, mccain

Bipartisanship, the health care summit and the deficit-

Robert Kuttner provides a good analysis of why Obama's Thursday summit to beg the Republicans one last time to support health care reform will be a Moment of Truth for his Presidency. (Huffington Post 02/21/10)

Robert Reich also weighs in at the Huffington Post, arguing It's Time to Enact Health Care Reform With 51 Senate Votes 02/21/10. Reich doesn't have even as much patience with this summit process as Kuttner, who himself has very little. Reich:

This week the president is hosting a bipartisan gab-fest at the White House to try to tease out some Republican votes for health care reform. It's a total waste of time. If Obama thinks he's going to get a single Republican vote at this stage of the game, he's fooling himself (or the American people). Many months ago, you may recall, the White House and Democratic party leaders in the Senate threatened to pass health care with 51 votes -- using a process called "reconciliation" that allows tax and spending bills to be enacted without filibuster -- unless Republicans came on board. It's time to pull the trigger.

But Reich's point about using the reconciliation process applies just as well to abolishing the filibuster, a badly needed reform: "The Constitution does not require 60 votes in the Senate to pass legislation. A majority will do. That's called democracy."

Kuttner also makes a point that makes me momentarily feel less concerned about Obama's bipartisanship deficit commission:

When Alan Simpson, the Republican co-chair, was in the Senate, privatization of Social Security was one of his big causes. Under the commission's rules, it will take 14 out of 18 votes to recommend a blueprint for budget reduction. I asked a senior member of Obama's economic team how they expected a commission to reach agreement with this kind of requirement, given that Republicans block all Senate action using a much more modest supermajority. He had no good answer.

It's still a seriously bad idea for Obama to be pandering to the neoliberal deficit fetish at a time when the Republicans are howling at the moon about how the deficit is going to destroy us all and using it to oppose Obama's own programs.

But then, Obama lately has been fitting the classic cynical comment about liberals usually credited to poet Robert Frost, that liberals are so open-minded they are unwilling to take their own side in an argument.

Paul Krugman also just did a don't-worry-too-much-about-it column on the deficit commission in the New York Times, The Bankruptcy Boys 02/21/10:

So the beast [government, as conservatives claim to see it] is starving, as planned. It should be time, then, for conservatives to explain which parts of the beast they want to cut. And President Obama has, in effect, invited them to do just that, by calling for a bipartisan deficit commission.

Many progressives were deeply worried by this proposal, fearing that it would turn into a kind of Trojan horse — in particular, that the commission would end up reviving the long-standing Republican goal of gutting Social Security. But they needn’t have worried: Senate Republicans overwhelmingly voted against legislation that would have created a commission with some actual power, and it is unlikely that anything meaningful will come from the much weaker commission Mr. Obama established by executive order.

Why are Republicans reluctant to sit down and talk? Because they would then be forced to put up or shut up. Since they’re adamantly opposed to reducing the deficit with tax increases, they would have to explain what spending they want to cut. And guess what? After three decades of preparing the ground for this moment, they’re still not willing to do that. [my emphasis]

Krugman's focus in this column is on the Republicans' unwillingness to actually propose specific spending cuts to get the balance budget they say they want. But in doing so, I worry that even Krugman manages to leave the impression that the deficits are a critical issue, though if you look closely he's talking about after 2020.

But the Democrats and progressives need to be demystifying the deficit scare whose purpose really is primarily to abolish Social Security and Medicare. That's what the deficit hawks are talking about when they discuss the supposedly vital need to cut back "entitlements".

Tags: bipartisanship, deficit spending

This is your Democratic Party on the "bipartisanship" drug

I'm not quite as pessimistic as Taylor Marsh is in her post Why the Current Conversation on Health Care is a Walk on the Hamster Wheel 02/20/10.

But I would be hard put to quarrel with this assessment of hers when it comes to domestic policy:

Never has a president and his political party been given so much and done so little with what they’ve been handed, which includes public support for a Medicare buy-in public option that would make the Democratic Party heroes for another generation and beyond, if they only had the guts to follow the public’s lead, leaving the Republicans and the fairy tale of bipartisanship behind.

Tags: bipartisanship, democratic party

Partisanship and its alternatives

Some of the best of the "usual suspects" in the liberal blogosphere have been recently poking holes in the punditocracy's reverence for "bipartisanship" - especially when the Republicans stand to benefit from the Democrats practicing it. I've linked to several of them at the end of this post.

But I want to call attention to somewhat different approaches to understanding the current nature of partisanship. One is highlighted by David Neiwert in two posts, Home for the Culture Wars FireDogLake 12/27/07 and Defending all things white Orcinus blog 12/28/07. Both of his posts remind us that racial hatred is an important motivator in the politics of the Republican base. The Democrats have to recognize this and learn to face it head-on. And hopefully not try to pander to it by appealing to the Confederate-flag bumper-sticker crowd (Howard Dean four years ago) or reminiscing about the good old days of the Confederacy (Joe Biden this past year). Democrats have talked that much about Obama as an African-American candidate. But rightwingers sure have. But whether Obama or another Democrat is the nominee, the racial themes will be played pretty heavily in e-mail and Internet viral channels, on Republican hate radio and to some extent by the official Republican campaigns.

Neiwert's FireDogLake post points out something that probably hasn't received nearly as much public attention by political and media analysts, pollsters and campaigns as it deserves. We all joke about the e-mail campaigns offering us the special chance to help the offspring of some African dictator get a bundle of money out of their country. I still get one about every other day.

But viral e-mails - ones that are forwarded endlessly with the original source often obscured - have also become a key way in which rightwing rumors are injected into the everyday consciousness of voters. The example on which he focuses is the Obama-is-a-Muslim falsehood. He calls this viral e-mail "one of the more unremarked, and yet more effective, components of the right-wing propaganda machine". And he cites an article by Christopher Hayes, The New Right-Wing Smear Machine The Nation (10/25/07; 11/12/07 issue) that discusses the phenomenon in more detail. He even cites a blog called MyRightWingDad.net, started by someone who decided he would post the rightwing e-mails his father passed on to him regularly.

Another perspective comes from Patriotic Dissent by Wendy Kaminer, which appeared in the 11/05/2001 issue of The American Prospect, an issue devoted to "War and Rebuilding" in the early days of the Global War on Terror (GWOT). In those weeks, "bipartisanship" and "national unity" were as much in vogue as they have been in decades. And hopefully more so than we will see every again for decades, or longer. Because Kaminer's non-"bipartisan" viewpoint sound far more sensible from today's perspective than the David Broders of the world would ever be willing to conceive. Here is part of what she wrote:

Public fear has immunized the president from criticism or even muted disapproval, as well as from satire. "Americans need to watch what they say," White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer has ominously observed. It's not that Bush has given people any new reason to trust his judgment or abilities. ... It's just that Americans are too frightened now to continue believing that the president is an inexperienced, shallow, spoiled man of average intelligence.

The hunger for leadership in times of crisis is always unsettling and afflicts nearly everyone. This is how my father, a staunch individualist with a fierce dislike of authority, once described the consolation he derived from Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats: "We felt that he was going to protect us, that he had the public at heart. We felt like we were listening to our father." George Bush is no FDR, but people need to see a bit of FDR, or Winston Churchill, in him. "He's our daddy in chief," one previous Democratic critic of Bush (interviewed on National Public Radio) said approvingly after Bush's September 20 speech before both houses of Congress. This suggests that we're a nation of children, in which case I can only hope that we'll soon start rebelling. Do we really need to be reminded that patriotism--fidelity to the nation's democratic values and respect for the obligations of citizenship--requires us to judge our leaders coolly and criticize or satirize them freely? ...

This is not to suggest that we should blindly oppose all new security measures any more than we should blindly support them. But when the government seeks to expand its power to spy on us, for example, it should be required to show how the loss of anonymity and freedom will make us safer. The FBI already enjoys the broad power to eavesdrop; according to government reports, it intercepts some two million innocent telephone and Internet conversations every year. The administration wants to expand its power to conduct surveillance by minimizing the role of the courts in monitoring it. Will this make us safer from terrorism or simply less safe from our government? ...

Attorney General Ashcroft keeps fear alive by reminding us that terrorists are lurking and planning more attacks: "Terrorism is a clear and present danger to America today," he told the Senate, carefully using the legal catchphrase that justifies the suspension of constitutional safeguards on government power. ...

But it's worth stressing that the administration is not seeking to expand the power of the government's executive branch solely for the sake of combating terrorism: The counterterrorism bill includes general expansions of federal prosecutorial power. And if enacted, many onerous new restrictions on liberty will not expire when the emergency that prompted them has passed. ...

We will all be under surveillance. We are all suspects now. (my emphasis)

Her description of the then-pending, Orwellian-named USA PATRIOT Act today reads, if anything, as too mild. And she was just looking at the law. This was before Cheney and Bush were openly claiming - or at least before our "press corps" or Congress noticed they were claiming - the unlimited power of the President and Vice President to ignore both the law and the Constitution. And before the early indications of the torture program had become clear.

She didn't get that perspective from honoring "bipartisanship" as the highest civic virtue. Or from idolizing Dear Leader Bush as "our daddy in chief". Yes, serious Democratic adults were actually saying things like that in 2001. And even after. It was the triumph of High Broderism - on the Democratic side. For the Republicans, it was the triumph of High Cheneyism. To them, "bipartisanship" just meant that the Democrats were obliged to go along with what Daddy-in-Chief Bush wanted. In other words, for the Republicans "bipartisanship" is identical to "unipartisanship" and the Unilateral Executive (when the Republicans are in power).

The latter is something that Glenn Greenwald's post linked below obscures. He gives a good explanation about how our political class is willing to embrace the notion that the wealthy and powerful are not obligated to obey the law. But he generalizes too much: "And thus we have a perfect oligarchical system in which, literally, our most powerful and well-connected elite are free to break the law with impunity, exempt from any consequences."

What this kind of formulation inevitably masks is the authoritarian nature of the Republican Party. As we saw during the Clinton years, the Republicans are more than willing to use the law as a club against the Executive. Even John Yoo, aka, Torture Yoo, one of the chief exponents of Cheney's Unilateral Executive theory of Presidential tyranny, argued during the Clinton years for a restrictive theory of the President's Constitutional power. Authoritarians can operate with a far higher level of inconsistency in such matters than others can.

We've seen that highly partisan approach to law in the Attorney General's office during Bush's Presidency, abetted in particular by those attorneys trained in Pat Robertson's Liberty University law school in the Christianist approach to law and ethics.

I'm not trying to make the Democratic Party sound like an old-fashioned workers' party. It's certainly not. In class terms, both the Democratic and Republican Parties are parties of big capital. But in the phenomenon that Greenwald is describing as the practice of an "oligarchical system", the current situation is that Republicans are willing to see Republican partisans operate outside the law, and Democrats have been far too willing in some cases to go along with it.

But today's authoritarian Republican Party is most definitely not willing to extend such immunity from the law to Democrats. On the contrary, just as in the days of Kenneth Starr and the Clinton impeachment, they are more than willing to use and misuse the law, the Constitution and ethical claims as partisan clubs against the Democrats. There is just not a mirror-image equivalence here. And that reality is not captured by describing the two parties as "a perfect oligarchical system in which, literally, our most powerful and well-connected elite are free to break the law with impunity, exempt from any consequences." Because Republicans do their very best to see that Democrats suffer consequences, even in some cases where there's no good reason to believe the Democrats have broken the law.

By the way, if anyone wonder why I normally give a long citation to sources rather than just a hyperlink, it's because I discovered fairly early in blogging that if you want to find a story whose URL may have changed, it's a heck of a lot easier to do if you have the name of the article or blog post.

David Broder (the Sultan of High Broderism), Bipartisan Group Eyes Independent Bid Washington Post 12/30/07.

Digby, Hullabaloo blog, Bipartisan Zombies 12/30/07

Glenn Greenwald, Oligarchical decay Salon 12/30/07

Paul Krugman, Progressives, To Arms! Slate 12/26/07

Lambert, Corrente Wire blog, Obama stump speech strategy of conciliation considered harmful 12/28/07

Josh Marshall, TPM blog, Lords of CW 12/27/07

Markos Moulitsas (Kos), Daily Kos blog, Partisanship has *increased* voter turnout 12/27/07

Matt Stoller, Open Left blog, Five Untouchable Symptoms 12/25/07

Mat Yglesias, The Case for Polarization TheAtlantic.com 12/28/07

Tags: authoritarianism, bipartisanship, david neiwert, racism, republican party, wendy kaminer

The state of American democracy

Fr. Charles Coughlin, the Rush Limbaugh of the 1930s

I watched and heard at least a couple of hours of the Congressional hearings Tuesday with Erik Prince, the Republican/Christian fundamentalist head of the Blackwater mercenary firm. Between Prince the Christianist acting surly and all but sneering his contempt for the Democrats on the Committee and several of the Committee Republicans bitching about MoveOn.org and whining that the Democrats support The Enemy and who criticizing Blackwater mercenaries was equivalent to blaspheming our Saviour-General Petraeus, we got a good glimpse at the thuggish side of today's authoritarian Republicans.

It gave extra resonance to some very recent blog posts, like Angry, hateful liberal bloggers by Glenn Greenwald Salon 10/02/07, Oprah the Nazi by Dave Neiwert Orcinus blog 10/02/07 and Stealing Fascism by Sara Robinson, Orcinus blog 10/01/07, all of which talk about manifestations of fanaticism that are becoming more and more "mainstream" in today's Republican Party. I'm surprised that none of the Democrats called out one or two of the Republicans on the Committee on their cracks, especially one of them who went on at some length about how the Democrats are supporting the Other Side.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's attempt to put the Republicans on the spot over Rush Limbaugh's trashy comment about soldiers who are critical of the Cheney-Bush war policies being "phony soldiers" didn't work out so well, it seems. As of Tim Grieve's post MoveOn, Limbaugh and how the game is played this morning, "Not a single Republican has signed Harry Reid's letter condemning Rush Limbaugh."

This new fad of having Congress pronounce official judgment on the propriety of statements by partisans in the course of normal political debate highlights one of the problems of democratic parties confronting a part that is becoming increasingly authoritarian, as today's Republican Party is. As disciplined as the often are, especially on supporting Cheney's foreign policies, the Republicans aren't quite a totally Leader-driven Party yet. As Ezra Klein points out in Immigration Issues: After Failure The American Prospect 09/24/07, the recent immigration reform bill was defeated by Republicans despite the President's support of the bill: "The legislation activated a large anti-immigrant bloc, whose primal scream, amplified into a Senate-shaking roar by conservative talk radio, doomed the bill". The aspirants to head the Party are carefully aligning themselves with their white nativist base on the issue, however.

Congressional declarations of what should be considered acceptable political speech is disturbing on a couple of levels. For one thing, it's embarrassing that one of the oldest democratically-elected legislative bodies in the world is reduced to such silly gestures. It's also an implied threat of legislative action, even though the resolution against MoveOn had no legal force.

Here the goals of the two parties are not mirror images of each other. On some issues, that's the case. On the Cheney-Bush torture policy, for instance, the Republicans with rare exceptions support it, while the Democrats oppose it. That's a difficult issue to craft a compromise over. Are they going to agree to only carry out mock executions by simulated drowning on Tuesdays and Fridays?

But in terms of regulating political speech, the goal of Republican authoritarians is to suppress pro-Democratic speech. Not (so far) by explicit bans but by stigma and quasi-legal means such as "free speech zones". As the late Molly Ivins put it, I thought the whole United States was a free speech zone. Also, it looks like the word "provocateur" is now a current part of our political vocabulary again. Anyone familiar with the Nixon administration's measures to suppress dissent could have guessed that some of this was going on. Cheney, after all, has sought to recreate the police-state features of the Nixon administration and take them much further. But this is the first concrete reference I recall coming across about the actual use of provocateurs against legal, peaceful protesters (though I obviously haven't been paying close enough attention), from The Mean Streets of the Homeland Security State-let by Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse, TomDispatch.com 09/30/07. Turse writes:

In 2005, the Times' Dwyer revealed that at public gatherings since the time of the RNC, police officers had not only "conducted covert surveillance… of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident," but had acted as agent provocateurs. At the RNC, there were multiple incidents in which undercover agents influenced events or riled up crowds. In one case, a "sham arrest" of "a man secretly working with the police led to a bruising confrontation between officers in riot gear and bystanders."

The Democrats, on the other hand, stand (I hope!) for a genuinely "liberal" notion of free speech.

That's why I have a lot of sympathy for Jane Hamsher's comment when she writes:

Rush [Limbaugh] may be [a] drug gobbling bloviator with a giant 4-F pustule on his butt, but his comments were well in line with what is considered free speech in this country, and that actually isn't any of the Senate’s business.

On the other hand, she says in the same post:

I really don’t know which is more exasperating — that our Senators think it is their job to tell people at large how they should exercise their right to free speech, or that they fire back at Limbaugh in such a weak and meaningless way. I suppose they have to do something or we will be treated to and endless parade of Cornyn bills where the Village Elders tell us all how displeased they are at our “uncivilized” rhetoric via fiat, and the failure of Republicans to sign on after voting to condemn MoveOn will serve up some campaign fodder. Would that their gesture was something more effective than watching them stomp their feet and shout “I know you are, but what am I?”

As long as Democrats are willing to sit at a Congressional hearing and listen to Republican blowhards call them traitors and claim they hate American soldiers and not at least respond that they are a bunch of lying sleazebags to say something like that, they aren't going to be able to respond to any of these attacks in a fully adequate way.

There is an attitude problem on the Democrats' part. And a big part of that problem is that they still find it hard to accept that today's Republican Party is an increasingly authoritarian institution that doesn't intend to play by either the formal or informal rules of democracy any more than they have to.

Wesley Clark's campaign to Dump Rush off Armed Forces Radio does make a lot of sense. Limbaugh not only trashes on-duty soldiers who don't agree with him. He regularly promotes bigotry directed not only against minorities and immigrants but against The Liberals. Not to mention that his relationship to factual accuracy is inconsistent, to put it nicely. Having a hate preacher like Limbaugh on Armed Forces Radio provides a kind of official endorsement he should not enjoy. Digby states the case for this move succinctly in Killing the King 10/02/07.

But this kind of dilemma will pop up more and more. And it is a real dilemma. When an authoritarian party dedicated to suppressing dissent against its policies is facing off against a party dedicated to a liberal democratic position on political speech, the pro-democracy party doesn't have the option of simply directing the same suppression tactics against the authoritarian party.

Complicating all this is the projection dynamic, in which affluent Republican white guys manage to define themselves as victims targeted by The Liberals to be suppressed. It seems bizarre for most people to imagine that Christians are being persecuted for their religion in the United States. But for white fundamentalists, that has been a standard assumption for years if not decades. Republican fundis are convinced that The Liberals and The Hollywood Crowd (i.e., "The Jews") are actively persecuting them in the United States. It's part of the craziness that comes with authoritarian fanaticism.

I've posted about this phenomenon several times in connection with the anti-Semitic "war on Christmas" nonsense that the FOXists have taken to promoting every year during the holiday season:

Whining by the "defenders" of Christmas 12/28/04
The (Christmas) war fraud 11/24/05
The fine old conflict over Christmas 12/08/05
Analyzing the phony "war on Christmas" 12/15/05
More on the bah-humbug war against the (nonexistent) "war on Christmas" 12/23/05

And as Digby points out, our Beltway press and pundits are heavily invested in not recognizing the evolution of the Republican Party and the American party system more generally (Village Parties 10/02/07):

... this fetish for bipartisanship is a [Washington Beltway] Village construct. They all live together. They want everyone to get along, like back in the good old days when Tip and Bob would fight it out on the floor and then head out and get shitfaced with Wilbur Mills and John Tower. In those days the parties were not aligned ideologically and there was great political utility in having an open line of communication.

We are in a different time, in which the parties have realigned along some old traditional lines. We are also dealing with the fact that one party was hijacked by a radical political movement that sought to take the country back to a 19th century economic system, an 18th century social system and a 1st century Imperial system. Many Americans disagree with that plan and are trying to bring the nation back to the present.

Tags: anti-semitism, authoritarianism, bipartisanship, establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press, republican party, rush limbaugh, war on christmas

Which side are you on? Do you even know?

I don't know who it was that first came up with the comment that is attributed to Robert Frost that liberals are so open-minded the refuse to take their own side in a debate. It may be like one of those fake Abraham Lincoln quotes, I don't know. Naturally, the rabid conservatives like to pretend that liberals take their own side so much they want to suppress all others. But that quote, bogus or not, sometimes comes to mind when I read things like this: Is there life after Bush? by Gary Kamiya Salon 02/20/07.

Kamiya does some good political analysis. But it's not evident in this piece. You can almost pick a paragraph at random and see how vapid it is. Writing about those vulgar bloggers, he says:

But having said that, it should also be said that the hate-Bush mind-set can spin out of control, leading to propagandistic thinking and a cynical ends-justify-the-means ethos. Faced with a triumphant administration and an army of right-wing media hacks, it's understandable that the left fought back with everything it had. But the obsession with victory can come at a dangerous price. Right now, the left - or at least some elements in the liberal blogosphere - have at times shown a disturbing tendency to close ranks and deny inconvenient truths. It should not still be necessary to point out that in battling a foe, you don't want to turn into him.

He rags on the "liberal" and/or "left" blogosphere - I envy the European publics who at least have some better common idea about who's liberal, conservative or left ("liberal" is not the same as "left" in most democracies in the rest of the world. But he doesn't give a single example of who these foaming-at-the-mouth lefties bloggers are. He gives a link of the phrase "deny inconvenient truths" to an article by Salon editor Joan Walsh, Fighting words 02/16/07. But Walsh's piece is more specifically about the tension that can arise between partisanship and factual reporting, a perfectly legitimate issue, and she is generally respectful to the bloggers she mentions even in criticizing them.

But Kamiya's piece is ditsy. He talks about Bush-haters that certainly exist in the fantasies of David Brooks, who's been beating the drum about this alleged malady for years. Now, when you're using generalities like talking about the dangers of "propagandistic thinking and a cynical ends-justify-the-means ethos", who can really argue with the abstract point? But who is he actually talking about? He doesn't say.

But what he does do is echo the same nonsense that, the sad characters who dominate our national "press corps" promote. See, for instance, Think Progress' report, Tony Snow and White House Reporters Slam The ‘Hateful,’ ‘Polarized’ Blogosphere 02/20/07.

Kamiya's piece seems to assume that after Bush and Cheney leave office, that things will revert to the 1970s or something, where you actually still had Republican "moderates" - real live ones, not the Maverick McCain and Chuck Hagel versions - and the bipartisanship so beloved by David Broder and all proper Big Pundits was actually feasible on major issues.

But the Republican Party isn't going to revert to some non-authoritarian form overnight. The Republicans, according to one count I've seen, have a higher percentage of their total Congressional seats coming from the Deep South than the Democrats ever had during the days of the "Solid South". And that Southern Republican base is essentially made up of conservative white people, heavily influenced by Christian Right appeals and policies.

They aren't going to suddenly decide to make nice in January of 2009. We saw how long their phony appeals for "bipartisanship" lasted after last November's elections. So Kamiya's apparent longing for a Broderian era of moderation and reduced partisanship starting in two years is unlikely to be fulfilled.

Tags: bipartisanship, gary kamiya, joan walsh