What Digby says, post-election version

Digby writes of President Obama's re-election mandate (A liberal victory Hullabaloo 11/06/2012):

If the Obama team learned anything from all this it should be that they cannot be all things to all people. We disagree in this country and that's ok. This election wasn't about post-partisanship, bipartisanship or "changing the tone." This was a strictly partisan victory made up of the Democratic Party coalition.

The liberals were validated this election and it behooves the administration to strategize their next four years with that in mind.

He's run his last race and all he has left to worry about is properly governing the country and solidifying his legacy --- and that legacy will be made or broken on how well he fulfills the agenda of those who have voted for him in massive numbers. He has a right and an obligation to unapologetically work to enact the agenda those people elected him to enact.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, digby

Segregation, Tea Partying and Southern religion

Don't miss the excellent summary by Heather "Digby" Parton of the Republican segregationist strategy of voter suppression aimed at African-American, Latino and poor white voters, Vote suppression in the US revs up Al Jazeera English 09/19/2011.

I use the word "segregationist" literally, because this stuff is a direct lineal descendant of the Deep South segregation procedures used to disenfranchise black voters and poor whites there. Digby makes this connection explicit:

Voter intimidation and vote suppression had long been a part of Democratic politics in the South, in places where African-Americans had been granted an illusory right to vote. But as the South made its dramatic shift to the Republican Party in the wake of the Civil Rights Act, and as African-American voters in the North then shifted to the Democrats, the Republicans began to dominate the process and thus began the decades-long GOP project to suppress the vote. Along the way it has developed into a full-blown operation to undermine democracy in general, at whatever choke points are available. [my emphasis]

Hal Crowther, columnist for the Oxford American, writes about the not-always-enlightened nature of Southern Christianity and its political manifestations in A chorus of Global Village idiots 05/30/2011. The global village angle he explains this way:

The success of Egypt's current revolution has been credited to the Internet and the devices that connect its initiates. Popular movements learn, brainstorm, strategize, and raise money online. Even the implacable bullies who rule China and North Korea have been frustrated by technology that enables a freedom-starved younger generation to conspire without congregating. Still, there's a dark side of the Global Village, a wrong side of the global tracks. In Gainesville, Florida, a fundamentalist minister with a double-digit IQ burns a Koran, for the amusement of thirty malnourished peckerwoods who make up his congregation-and in Mazar-I-Sharif, Afghanistan, a mob of Muslim fanatics slaughters twelve United Nations workers to avenge this insult to the Prophet.

Pastor Terry Jones of the (ironically named) Dove World Outreach Center had the burning videotaped, of course, and streamed it on the church's website. In just ten days, this remote spark, launched online, became a conflagration halfway around the planet. The day after the massacre at the UN compound, thousands of protesters rioted in Kandahar. Nine more people died and eighty were injured. The final body count from Pastor Terry's stupidity may exceed American military casualties for the month of April.

It's not unfair to say that there are more and deadlier idiots in Kandahar than in Gainesville. But the point is that the Global Village harbors a million village idiots, and no idiot is an island. Not anymore.

"Peckerwoods" is an excellent Southern word I need to put back into my regular vocabulary.

Crowther also treats the phony white Christian whine about how ever'body's pickin' on 'em with the dignity it deserves:

Evangelical religion of an extreme stripe-fire and brimstone, biblical inerrancy-thrives in many far corners of the republic, but the South is its wellspring and its homeland. A county-by-county map of America constructed by Dante Chinni and James Gimpel for their book Our Patchwork Nation indicates that nearly all the counties colored yellow for "Evangelical Epicenters" are in the traditional South and the border state of Missouri. Feral religion has been the South's second greatest embarrassment, after race. Unfortunately, they've been closely linked. We can never afford to forget that those were crosses the Ku Klux Klan burned at their rallies and lynchings. And there's no denying that most segregationist Protestants of the Jim Crow generations believed that heaven itself was segregated.

When Rob Bell, the influential pastor of an evangelical Michigan megachurch, suggested in his new book Love Wins that it's high time Christians set aside archaic notions of a literal, sulfurous, demon-infested hell, all hell broke loose in the Southern synod. They cling passionately to their inferno, these least and cruelest of our Christian brethren, because there's no way on earth they can take adequate revenge on those of us who disagree with them-though they claim they love us and hope to save us in spite of ourselves.

Hell is the sturdy keystone of gloomy Calvinism. [my emphasis]

"Feral religion" is an inspired phrase that I'm also going to add to my vocabulary.

Check out both Digby's article and Crowther's. They're both mind-expanding.

Tags: digby, hal crowther, segregation, us south, vote suppression

The Deal, aka, the Bad Deal

As of 7:30PM PDT there was supposedly a deal between Obama and the Republican leadership on how badly to hammer the economy with massive budget cuts during what Paul Krugman is calling the Lesser Depression, to distinguish it from the Great Depression. The "Lesser" is quite bad enough already. And this deal, if enacted, will make it worse.

To start off, I hope that the Progressive Caucus in the House can round up enough votes to kill this deal. That would force Obama to use other methods, such as coin seigniorage (coining trillion-dollar platinum coins, basically) and his 14th Amendment obligations to keeping the federal government meeting its legal obligations. I'm as confident as the bond markets that this would work. If Obama is such a pushover for the Republicans, the Progressive Caucus should show they can be just as pushy as the Reps.

Speaking of Krugman and the bond market, he notes an important fact that helps show how the panic around the debt ceiling was largely contrived in When People Pay You To Take Their Money 07/31/2011. Inflation-adjusted interest rates on both the 5-year and 7-year Treasury bond has turned negative. That means, as his post title indicates, that investors are willing to take a small loss on their principal for the safety and security of US Treasury bonds. Which means that even in the last days of the supposedly great drama, bond investors were not worried about the potential for US default to any amount detectable in interest rates. Krugman:

Negative rates at 5 and 7 years; all of 0.38 percent on 10 years. Borrowing to spend on useful infrastructure, or even just to put people to work in ways that enhance revenue down the road, would almost surely improve the long-run fiscal picture. Conversely, austerity now almost surely hurts the budget as well as the economy.

And it will.

While I'm borrowing 30ish labels for stuff from my favorite bloggers, Digby used a play on the New Deal to describe Obama's deal as The Bad Deal Hullabaloo 07/31/2011. Digby's analysis of this whole process has been far more sensible that most we've seen from our professional punditocracy. She was writing before the supposed deal later in the day. But this will likely apply to what they came up with:

For me this isn't a shocking disappointment. I have felt that this whole process was a disaster from the beginning and it really doesn't matter to me if the Democrats eke out a couple of concessions about defense cuts or close a few loopholes "in return" for these cuts. That isn't "shared sacrifice," it's asking the poorest, oldest and sickest among us to give up a piece of their meager security in exchange for the wealthy giving up some tip money and the defense industry giving up a couple of points of profit. It's stripping the nation of necessary educational, safety and environmental protections while the wealthy greedily absorb more and more of the nation's wealth and the corporations and financial industry gamble with the rest.

The idea that they are even talking about this at a time of nearly 10% official unemployment with the economy looking like it's going back into recession (if it ever left) makes this debate surreal and bizarre. To cut the safety net and shred discretionary spending in massive numbers at a time like this is mind boggling. That it's happening under a Democratic President and a Democratic Senate is profoundly depressing.

But it's happening. And sadly, I still think it will be mostly Democrats who end up voting for it.

And by the way, David Plouffe and The President really, really need to stop saying that progressives should want to do this bullshit. It's insulting ... and blindingly infuriating. [her italics; my emphasis in bold]

My immediate reaction is more sad disappointment that fury. But that's in the context of already being disgusted with the Democratic President proposals to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. My understanding of the deal is that it doesn't include immediate cuts to Social Security and Medicare. But it sets up a so-called Super Congress to try to ram through cuts in those programs and others a year and a half from now.

There's a lot of uncertainty about what the deal contains. And it still has to pass Congress, of course. David Waldman takes a stab at understanding that part of the deal in Troubling thoughts about the 'Super Congress' Daily Kos 07/31/2011. I especially like this part of his post:

Lastly, a thought that's still a little too inchoate to warrant its own bullet point, I'll note that when Members of Congress (and particularly Senators) try to design a procedure for themselves that they hope (perhaps beyond all reason) will actually work, they design one without a filibuster. Last year, when reformers proposed that the rules of the Senate be revised in order to avoid potential catastrophes like this (and yes, we had the debt ceiling in mind, among other things), it was just too kooky to contemplate! What a bunch of idiots those Cheeto munchers are! [his italics]

Finally, Glenn Greenwald is more hopeful than I for some kind of left-right alliance to emerge, maybe some sort of third party. But he's accurate about the cynicism of the Obama White House in Democratic politics in a nutshell Salon 07/31/2011. Progressives, including serious New Deal Democrats, have to find a way to make the Democratic Party leadership more afraid politically of them than they are now afraid of Blue Dog Democrats and Republicans. I'm very dubious about the effectiveness of a third party. But the pro-Social Security, pro-Medicare left has to find a way to run a far more effective inside-outside strategy with the Democratic Party.

Tags: barack obama, debt ceiling, democratic party, digby, paul krugman, paul waldman

The grim debt-ceiling negotiations farce and the drowning of American democracy

David Dayen gives a savvy evaluation of the current state of the debt-limit negotiations in And for His Next Trick The American Prospect Online 07/13/2011. And Digby expands on it in Rooting For Mitch Hullabaloo 07/13/2011.

This is not the first time, to put it mildly, that the progressive blogosphere has provided more solid commentary than the run of the pundits. But with this farcical debt-ceiling negotiation, that has been particularly so. Because having a negotiation over it at all was a farce from the start, political Kabuki. The Republican leaders in both the House and Senate said months ago that they would have to raise the debt ceiling. Wall Street was always going to insist on it, and the Republicans are there to serve their Wall Street masters first and foremost.

The Republicans were always going to have to put up enough House votes to enact the debt-ceiling increase. The negotiations theater played out only because the White House wanted to have such a pageant to put through elements of the drastic, Herbert Hoover-style austerity program that they are apparently actually convinced is both good policy and good politics. This negotiation never had to happen, and the White House knew it.

But our Pod Pundits couldn't and mostly didn't say that. Because they love Washington Kabuki theater, with its back and forth about who is up and who is down in the game, who is clever and who's been had, and so forth. The important thing for the voters and citizens is that the whole negotiation was a political pageant that never had to take place. Obama, for whatever (bad) reason has hoped for a Grand Bargain that would mean the Democrats cutting Social Security and Medicare. What exactly he expected from the Republican side of the so-called "bargain" is entirely unclear.

Digby has been deconstructing this process for months now, as have David Dayen and others at Firedoglake. And because blogs, Facebook and Twitter allow for a much wider, quicker interchange of news and ideas about such events than was possible when print and TV news media were the near-exclusive gatekeepers for such commentary, it makes it harder for Obama to pass off his opposition to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as something forced on him by Republicans. Republicans did propose to cut Medicare - eliminate it, actually. But they managed to maneuver the Democratic President into proposed his own cuts to Medicare and to Social Security. Even the Ryan Plan doesn't go after the latter. And Obama has virtually unilaterally disarmed the Democratic Party from being able to use those two potent issues against the Republicans in 2012.

David in his article explains the point on which the pundit conventional wisdom of Tuesday was correct, the fact that Mitch McConnell's proposal Tuesday was an attempt to give the Republicans an "out" from an insupportable problem:

Washington is always a strange place, but this gambit from McConnell represents a complete inversion of the debate in the space of a few days. Once the hostage-takers, now the Republicans are the ones looking for an escape hatch. McConnell reportedly feels at the mercy of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Given that the fast-moving negotiations will generate a deal with so many discrete elements, OMB would have a lot of control over the final numbers. McConnell said yesterday there were only three options available to the GOP - "smoke and mirrors, tax hikes, or default." He obviously feels that any deal written in the White House will be tilted against his party.

And he notes, "for the first time in a while, you heard the words 'Republicans' and 'spineless capitulation' in the same sentence."

Yet if this is what winning looks like, Democrats can only cringe at the thought of what losing might be:

But if Republicans believe themselves to be without leverage, the Democratic President in the White House is in the opposite role. He's now the one using the debt limit to force a deal, one bigger than even his own party favors, with major cuts to cherished programs like Medicare and Social Security. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said in response to McConnell's plan that President Obama still wanted to "seize this unique opportunity to come to agreement on significant, balanced deficit reduction."

Given the righteous conservative anger at McConnell and Obama's preoccupation with a bipartisan deal, this doesn't mean we can close the book on this debt limit increase just yet. But even if McConnell?s plan passes, the legacy of what Obama put on the table for cuts in these talks will haunt Democrats for many years, and we'll see those proposals again — with lines like "Even Barack Obama supported ..." attached to them. It was a damaging strategy. [my emphasis; punctuation corrected]

Digby expands the thought:

Indeed it was. And any "pivot" to jobs has been severely hamstrung by the President's endless rhetoric about "belt tightening" and spending cuts. But at least they won't be cutting spending with over 9% unemployment at the same time, so if they do manage to get some infrastructure on the table they won't have already robbed Peter to pay Paul and destroyed any stimulative effects.

Of course, the negotiations aren't over yet. For the Democrats, it's been bad so far. And it could still go south from here.

And the truth is that US politics is at a particularly nasty point right now. As William Pfaff puts it in Robin Hood in Reverse Truthdig 07/12/2011:

By far the strangest thing about the American debate concerning national economic policy, currently concentrated on whether a law lifting the present limit on the deficit will or will not be passed, is that it has been conducted without discussion of the largest item in the budget. This is the aggregate cost of running military interventions of one or another kind in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia and sundry other unhappy and unlucky sites in the non-Western world, and that includes the global program of illegal individual assassinations by drones or dedicated military or civilian killer teams—all in democracy’s name. Cut that, even merely its blatant excesses, and the budget problem would disappear.

Instead the congressional debate is ideological: superficially about national economic policy, but actually all but totally committed to the issue of what level of taxation the smallest and most wealthy segment in the American population — its corporate leaders, heads of banks and private financial institutions, its hereditary rich and beneficiaries of market windfall gains — should be required to pay.

The second most passionate subject of debate is how much the government will reduce the country’s existing Social Security pension programs, for those individual Americans who throughout their lives have contributed to what they considered irrevocable contracts with their government, and the modest popular medical care programs that now exist for the middle classes, the old and the indigent. These are Medicare and Medicaid, plus the new health care program passed (barely) by the Barack Obama administration. These have all become "Entitlements" — a hateful word in the modern American political vocabulary.

The internal American debate may be said to center around how much to rob the poor, and how much to enrich the rich.

The current radical maldistribution of wealth and income in the US is a pathological situation for our society. And it has created a toxic politics for a democracy. And ours is being drowned in corporate money.

Tags: david dayen, digby, medicaid, medicare, social security, william pfaff

Public policies and religious arguments for and against them (2 of 2)

Continuing my comments on the discussion between Digby and Sarah Posner from Part 1 yesterday: The parts of their formulations I find problematic are these. Posner: "the debate about the role of government should rooted in policy, not theology." Digby: "using the Bible as the basis of any political argument is antithetical to enlightened democracy."

Okay, I'm an Enlightenment nostalgic of sorts. So I would rather that public debates be framed in terms of values and effects that were rooted in the material world and not directly referenced to religious concepts as such. But that's not the world we live in.

If we look at only the post-Second World War period, it's a fact that important parts of what we think of as liberal activism in the United States were based on religious understandings of social values. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a trained philosopher and a Christian minister, and described his program for civil rights in explicitly religious terms. George McGovern was a Methodist minister. Jimmy Carter was and is even now a very religious Baptist (though no longer Southern Baptist) layperson. Cesar Chavez understood his organizing for farmworkers and the poor in Catholic Christian terms. Jerry Brown is a former Jesuit seminarian who studied Zen Buddhism seriously, worked with Mother Teresa in her hospice services in India, and was heavily influenced by the late Christian philosopher Ivan Illich. Some of the key early activists for legalizing abortion in the 1960s were religious people concerned over the deadly realities of back-alley abortions.

Most Christians are not theocrats. Up until they got heavy into the white private school market after desegregation in the South, the Southern Baptists made a big deal of the principle of the separation of church and state, not least because they didn't want Catholic schools getting any public funds. Even the Catholic Church in the Second Vatican Council adopted the views of the American theologian John Courtney Murray that embraced modern democratic notions of freedom of religion, though the Church would still prefer Catholicism to be officially adopted as state religion.

And anyone with an adult notion of Christianity - and, yes, I'm passing a negative judgment on Christian fundamentalism in saying this - can understand that the Christian Bible doesn't provide a legislative guide book for particular laws. And they, like most other adults, can understand that there is a difference between personal morality and what law allows. A person can consider smoking cigarettes morally wrong but still make practical judgments about public policy based on what is a legitimate health-related public concern and discuss it with other citizens on that basis. Someone can consider abortion morally wrong and chose not to have it for themselves, but still recognize that public policy has to be dicatated by medical realities on the physical survivability of a fetus outside its mother's body, which hasn't changed since Roe v. Wade in 1973.

And the reality of American politics today is that the Republican Party endorses theocratic ideas in practice, though they insist on redefining the English language based on their marketing priorities on a given day and don't like to be called on it. The Democrats have to counter that in ways that disrupt the moral and religious claims of the fundis. The ad trashing Rand Paul over Aqua Buddha as a "heathen idol" didn't seem to work too well. (Although I admit I enjoyed that one!)

The reality of American Christianity today, too, is that most Christians don't want fanatical fundis smearing the Christian brand, either. It's a genuine religious scandal that the most solid block of torture supporters were regular church-going conservative evangelicals. If they believe the general Christian theology that God took human form as a Jewish holy man who was tortured to death by the Romans, then they should worry that the first thing they experience in the next life will be Jesus getting in their face and saying, "What the hell did you think you were doing calling yourself a Christian and supporting torture?" And "hell" in that context would sound a bit more serious than a casual swear word.

Sarah Posner and others are right to call so-called "Christian left" figures like Wallis to account for their lack of support for women's rights on abortion. But both secular Democrats and religious ones needed to disrupt the Christian Right messaging. Including with arguments over the Bible and theology, when appropriate.

Gene Lyons on Facebook recommends this piece by Andrew Sullivan addressing this broad topic: Heightening The Republican Contradictions, Ctd The Lift 06/06/2011. (Standard disclaimer: Sullivan has never to my knowledge fessed up to his disgraceful smearing of domestic critics of the Cheney-Bush Administration's War on Terror and the foreign invasions that went along with it.) It's a decent brief critique of Christian nationalism, though he doesn't use that term. And he has some thought-provoking observations: "The structure of modern America is therefore anti-Christian. Its worship of wealth and fame as the greatest of all things - yes, Palin comes instantly to mind - is the antithesis of Christianity."

Tags: christian left, digby, heather parton, sarah posner, andrew sullivan

Public policies and religious arguments for and against them (1 of 2)

Digby (Hullabaloo) and Sarah Posner (Religion Distpaches) had an interesting exchange about what is sometimes call the "religious left" in these posts:

Digby, Paul Ryan refuses a Bible 06/04/2011

Posner, Paul Ryan's Bible, Jim Wallis', Or None of the Above? 06/06/2011

Digby, A Justified Scold 06/06/2011

And a related post by Digby, False Idols 06/04/2011

The discussion is over Digby's Schadenfreude over Paul Ryan being embarassed at a religion-and-politics conference by a liberal activist trying to give him a Bible with passages in the Gospel of Luke highlighted relating to social concerns. Posner uses it as a taking-off point to remind us that the self-described "religious left" including leaders like Jim Wallis of Soujourners that have tried to offer a political counter to the Christian Right have been pretty disappointing to liberal activists:

As I argued last year, writing about liberal-leaning religious groups countering Glenn Beck's attack on social justice, the debate about the role of government should rooted in policy, not theology. As Peter Laarman has noted in these pages, in support of a robust defense of government, liberal and moderate Christian leaders "know in their heart of hearts that only government can take strong and decisive action to end poverty and mass suffering, but they are in some degree of denial about it, in part because. ... They, too, rather fancy the idea of an independent sphere for private faith-based charities - they mostly go along, after all, with the horrendously obfuscatory and constitutionally dubious Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Since the discussion covers both general concepts like applying the Bible and Christian theology to public issues to more concrete experiences in recent years with "common ground" efforts to reduce unplanned pregnancies running aground on the Christian Right's lack of interest and the anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-women's-rights positions of some "Christian left" figures like Jim Wallis, it's hard to say how much I'm agreeing or disagreeing with either of them.

Here is how I framed the issue in a comment to the second of Digby's posts cited above:

Sarah Posner's concluding sentence in that post is, "When you wave a Bible in someone's face, just remember that someone can wave one in yours, too."

I'm not much for literal Bible-waving, myself. But the Christian Right isn't going to stop waving their Bibles figuratively and literally in the faces of Democrats and mainstream Christians. And there has to be pushback in moral and religious terms to disrupt those messages.

What's wrong with liberals agreeing with Wallis on Medicare and disagreeing with him on women's rights? People can make moral, religious and practical arguments on the liberal side of both issues.

Honest religious arguments have their limits, because any honest believer would have a problem claiming that they knew for sure how God would want them to vote on a particular legislative bill or political candidate. But the Christian Right aren't making honest religious arguments when they lie to young women in their fake "pregnancy counseling" clinics about abortion. They're just lying to people who made the mistake of trusting them for honest medical advice. The public policy on how to deal with that kind of fraud may be complicated. But I have no trouble arguing on moral and religious grounds that that's just wrong.

And since the fundis are going to keep making their arguments in the "public square" (as they like to call it), I don't see how either secular liberals or Christians who don't support hate-mongering or torture or lying to pregnant teenagers in the name of Jesus can just avoid trying to counter the religious elements of those arguments. People can make religious arguments for or against a policy like the water torture, aka, waterboarding, without insisting on it as a purely religious policy.

Tags: christian left, digby, heather parton, sarah posner

Confederate "Heritage" Month Coming Early?

Since Jefferson Davis is no longer available, why not Ron Paul?

Every April since 2004, I've been celebrating Confederate "Heritage" Month by posting daily at Old Hickory's Weblog about various aspects of pre-Civil War history and the use in more recent times of Lost Cause dogma, aka, neo-Confederate ideology.

Ron Paul finally got the attention of a number of liberals when he came out last Sunday on Meet the Press as opposed to civil rights laws, accused Abraham Lincoln of starting the Civil War as part of his nefarious intent to destroy the Constitution and worried that the US had been way too hasty in abolishing slavery.

After that, liberals who can't figure out that the guy is a flaming rightwinger probably wouldn't be able to see it if he put together an ad campaigning featuring himself yelling, "I hate n*****s!" They would claim that, well, he's expressing a personal opinion, but he still supports the Constitution.

I'm going to link to a few posts that have come out in response to Paul's overt neo-Confederate stance. But I want to make the point first that, yes, politics makes strange bedfellows, I don't mind if he's against the war, some of his support up to now comes from his criticism of the Iraq War, and yadda, yadda. But not only is the guy a flaming rightwinger who panders to racists and nativists. His criticism of the war is poor quality. He says things like he's opposed to the war because it was fought to enforce UN resolutions, which is false and also echoes a stock prowar argument. Among the New World Order paranoids who are his most enthusiastic and longtime supporters, the UN is a particularly sinister element of the Jewish World Conspiracy against good Christian American white folks.

And what about his response to Business Week when asked how he would respond to a "hostile" action by Iran and he responded that he would treat it like Kennedy did the Cuban Missile Crisis? And we're supposed to think this guy is some kind of antiwar hardliner?

Josh Marshall at TPM picked up on Paul's pro-Confederate comments to Timmy Russert in You're No Abraham Lincoln 12/24/07, saying straightforwardly that what Paul said was "morally and historically wrong". TPM has the video clip, which I'm also including at the end of this post. Marshall also asks caustically, "Did Paul give in to the heavy media pressure to come up with a clear position on slavery and the Civil War?"

No, but he wanted to make sure his tribe of hardline rightwingers know that he's one of them, despite the praise he's been getting from liberals who should know better.

In a 12/26/07 post, Antipodes, he returns to the "alternative universe" of the Paulians. Here he grouses a bit along the lines of, why should I have to bother about Ron Paul one way or the other, because his poll showing is pitiful.

There are a couple of reasons. One is that Paul has been a chief conduit for mainstreaming themes from the white-supremacist, militia-type far right into the Republican Party, although admittedly it's increasingly jarring to see any form of the word "mainstream" in the same sentence with "Republican Party". In connection with that, the Old Right isolationist viewpoint that Ron Paul represents is working hard to appeal to today's peace movement. But their basic orientation is not fundamentally different than Dick Cheney's unilateralist nationalism, despite differences on specific policies. And I don't want to see the revived peace movement marginalize itself by embracing Old Right unilateralist approaches.

The other is what Taylor Marsh notes in a post at her blog that is otherwise way too generous to Paul (Mormons for Ron Paul 12/23/07), "If he'd run as an independent I believe all hell would break loose politically with Democrats jumping across to vote for him on the issue of Iraq and foreign policy alone." We won't know until after a few primaries whether Paul is interesting in such a move. But it's unthinkable that some Republican movers and shakers haven't toyed with that idea as a way to keep the White House in Republican clutches.

Jane Hamsher at FireDogLake writes on Russert Roasts Ron Paul on Meet the Press 12/23/07, observing that, "Russert expresses the outrage of the Village Elders at Ron Paul for being...well, Ron Paul. And rocking the Republican boat."

That's probably true. But not every "alternative" viewpoint to the press corps conventional wisdom is a good alternative. And within today's GOP, even though there's not much discussion among Presidential candidates of the Civil War, the neo-Confederate viewpoint is more-or-less respectable.

Glenn Greenwald continues to sing Paul's praises, although he has said that he's not supporting him or anyone else for President, in Various items Salon 12/24/07 (item 4).

Meanwhile, the invaluable Edward Sebesta at his Anti-Neo-Confederate blog makes his own debunking of Paul's pseudohistory in Ron Paul whistles Dixie 12/24/07.

Digby notes that Paul also embraces not just neo-Confederate pseudohistory but also creationist pseudoscience in Dogwhistling Into Hell Hulabaloo blog 12/23/07. She also points out that Paul is very much a mainstream Republican on creationism. Also, she looks at Paul's far-right affinities in Tucker And Air Force Amy 12/26/07. That report talks about conservative journalist Tucker Carlson observing during Ron Paul appearances that Paul's audiences typically responded most enthusiastically to a line about how the Federal Reserve Bank is unconstitutional, a longtime rightwing talking point and one of the John Birch Society's big causes. Digby observes, that...

... it should be of more than a passing interest to mainstream journalists who are writing about Ron Paul that his biggest applause lines are echoes of an underground right wing radicalism that's coming up to the surface. I don't know what it means, but it's usually not a good sign.

And Daily Kos (Markos Moulitsas) digs up a telling quote from Ron Paul from 1992, reflecting a position he's given us no reason to think he's changed, in The overt racist in the GOP field 12/26/07. As Moulitsas says with sarcasm, "But Paul is against the war in Iraq and he wants FREEDOM! So that must make his racism okay."

At the history-oriented Edge of the American West blog, a couple of recent posts challenged Paul's pseudohistory, Ron Paul: Very Gradual Emancipationist by Ari Kelman 12/23/07; Slavery did too cause the Civil War by Eric Rauchway 12/24/07; Ron Paul: Not a Third Party Candidate by Kelman (with a comment by me) 12/26/07; and, About forty-five years ago. When did you start? by Rauchway 12/26/07.

Shoot, with the post I already have in the can for April relating the Mexican War, aka, la guerra de los Estados Unidos a Mexico, I could fill up the whole month of Confederate "Heritage" posts just by quoting those posts linked here and commenting on them.

Ron Paul on the evils of Abraham Lincoln from his Meet the Press appearance of 12/23/07:



Tags: ari kelman, authoritarianism, digby, edward sebesta, eric rauchway, glenn greenwald, jane hamsher, josh marshall, lost cause, markos moulitsas, neo-confederate, neo-confederates, racism, ron paul, taylor marsh

Working out the recent past in the US

In my previous post, I ended by commenting that a real set of prosecutions is needed for criminal acts both in domestic affairs and foreign policy during the current administration. The Democrats shouldn't flinch from such a thing and the Democratic base needs to demand it.

Mark Kleiman in Truth and Reconciliation 12/17/07 at his Reality-Based Community blog suggests:

The new President should ask Congess to create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, empowered to subpoena records and witnesses, hold public hearings, and dismiss officials guilty of misconduct in office or appointed by improper means. And the Commission should have power to inquire into Congressional as well as Executive behavior, and to refer Congressional misconduct back to the Houses for appropriate disciplinary action. (That avoids the "speech and debate" problem.)

The key is using the criminal law only as a backstop: the Commission should be able to offer complete immunity from criminal prosecution for anyone who testifies fully and frankly, but impose complete liability for perjury or obstruction on anyone who fails to do so.

We don't really want to see Dick Cheney's ass in prison (well, part of me does, but not the better part of me); we want the wrongdoing of this crowd exposed and the civil servants they have "burrowed in" purged. We want a "lustration," a de-Ba'athification. Appointing T&RC does that. If the Republicans in Congress want to vote against "an end to the politics of personal destruction," they can be my guest. (my emphasis underlined)

I'm fully in sympathy with the notion that there needs to be some formal process involving the national government to promote real reflection and understanding about the Cheney-Bush period.

But what we do not need is some carefully-balanced "bipartisan" commission to has through these issues and have Bob Kerrey and Jim Baker come out at the end and say, "Problems occurred, and some unfortunate things were done. But now we need to look to the future and let the national healing begin." That's pretty much what happened post-Vietnam War and post-Watergate, under the great healer Jerry Ford and his chiefs of staff Rummy and Dick Cheney. All it did was keep the anti-Constiutional current in the Republican party robust and determined to get their chance to take the Nixon administration's authoritarian tendencies even further. The Cheney-Bush administration was the major result.

Yes, let's have Congressional investigations and maybe even "truth commissions" and historians' committees and so on. But Cheney and Bush and their administration have committed serious crimes in a wide variety of ways, from the Iraq War to the apparently unlimited electronic surveillance programs to the disgraceful torture policy. Those crimes should be investigated and prosecuted. If Bush hands out blanket pardons all around before he leaves office, refer the cases to the International Criminal Court where American law can't reach through the pardons. Without that or something very like it, the new Dick Cheneys and Karl Roves and Scooter Libbys and John Boltons will still be considered respectable citizens among their fellow Republicans and will work to bring back the current form of Republican rule in an even more virulent form as soon as they can.

No doubt, the Democrats were not nearly aggressive enough in fighting Cheney and Bush on their worst actions. But this is not a bipartisan problem that somehow affects every American equally. To genuinely avoid this happening again, it's very specifically the Republican Party and our pathetic mainstream press that have to come to a real recognition that preventive war and torture and illegal surveillance and outing CIA agents for cheap political payback and partisan prosecutions and all the rest of shameful behavior of this administration are wrong and it's their responsibility to defend Constitutional freedoms and the rule of law just as much as it is everybody else's.

We've seen in the last decade and a half how an authoritarian can override the checks and balances in the Constitution through a combination of party discipline, contempt for the rule of law and the massive use of fear. The Democrats need to learn how to fight this kind of thing better. The Republicans and the Establishment press need to learn that crime doesn't pay.

We need meaningful prosecutions, not just a nicey-nice commission to issue a toothless report with vague platitudes.

Digby in The Revenge Wing Hullabaloo 12/17/07 endorses Kleiman's truth commission idea. But she also states the problem much more directly:

But the truth is that we [Democrats] are actually just the same old civil libertarian, constitution loving, safety net promoting, tolerant, pluralist liberals we've always been. The problem is that the conservative movement went way too far these last 15 years or so and now the country needs to sort out the terrible mess they've made.

The Reps will scream that this is a "partisan" prosecution. But there are ways to avoid the substance of a partisan prosecution, such as the use of special prosecutors.

But when the actions at issue stem from Republicans overriding the law based on their partisan-political goals, the impact will fall largely on Republican perpetrators. But without that, they'll be back in business running an administration and setting policy, the way so many of the key players in the Iran-Contra scandal were in the current administration. This is serious stuff that goes to the heart of Constitutional government in the United Staes. Neither a formal "bipartisanship" nor the squeamishness of the national press corps about prosecutions against officials whose policies they often admired and abetted should prevent a Democratic administration from proceeding with serious criminal investigations.

I'm still stunned by Glenn Greenwald's recent defense of far-right Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul. But Greenwald is SADLY on the mark in The Lawless Surveillance State Salon 12/16/07 when he writes:

The very nature of our country and our government fundamentally transforms step by step, with little opposition. We all were inculcated with the notion that what distinguished our free country from those horrendous authoritarian tyrannies, both right and left, of the Soviet bloc, Latin America and the Middle East were things like executive detentions, torture, secret prisons, spying on their own citizens, unprovoked invasions of sovereign countries, and exemptions from the law for the most powerful - precisely the abuses which increasingly characterize our government and shape our political values. As but the latest example, read Mark Benjamin's superb though now-numbingly-familiar account of how we tortured Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah for 19 months and then just let him go once we realized that - like so many others we've detained and tortured - he was guilty of nothing.

This doesn't mean there is a complete erosion of freedom equal to all of those societies. Free speech still basically thrives; we elect our leaders; and individuals retain a fair amount of autonomy in their personal choices. But it is simply undeniable that many of the political attributes that were always used to define the oppressive societies against which we were supposedly fighting are now explicitly vested in our own government. By itself, the scope and breadth of domestic spying is just staggering, and much of it is illegal.

No speculation or inferences or rhetorical flourishes are necessary to reach these conclusions. Just go read what has been disclosed about what our government is doing in the dark, with no oversight and in violation of our laws - and the ways in which our political and media class work feverishly to defend and enable it all - and there really is no other conclusion which a rational person can reach. In a country that lived under minimal notions of the rule of law, the very idea of having Congress pass a special law to immunize retroactively an entire industry which illegally spied on us, on our own soil, for years would be inconceivable. Yet even in the face of these latest revelations of just how broad and brazen this lawbreaking is, that is, in the absence of unexpected developments, quite likely what is about to happen. (my emphasis underlined)

Fortunately, Chris Dodd's courageous opposition to the telecom amnesty bill has derailed that effort for the moment.

It will take many more actions like Dodd's to get the Consitutional system functioning correctly again. And a big part of that effort will be rolling back the open-ended sense of fear and permanent war that Cheney and Bush have made the center of their governing style.

Tags: authoritarianism, bush administration, digby, glenn greenwald, mark kleiman

Dems and the torture policy

The revelation that Democratic members of Congress were briefed in 2002 has raised questions about the conduct of those Democrats involved: Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002 by Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen Washington Post 12/09/07.

Digby has been coming down hard on Nancy Pelosi and other Dems at her Hullabaloo blog (Accomplices 12/09/07; Cards On The Table 12/10/07), as has Glenn Greenwald at his Salon blog ("Missing" evidence is familiar Bush pattern 12/07/07; Democratic complicity in Bush's torture regimen 12/09/07).

The torture issue is way bigger than either Party. So I'm generally sympathetic to this line of criticisms of Democrats involved. Their basic point is a very sound one. If Democrats learned from classified briefings that illegal acts were being committed, they both could and should have taken more substantial steps to bring them to a halt. The whole point of having Congressional oversight of intelligence agencies is to help ensure that the agencies are acting within the law.

But I'm also painfully aware of that powerful instinct among Democrats to form circular firing squads. So I'm not quite ready to blast the Dems, Pelosi in particular, quite as much as Digby and Greenwald are.

Spencer Ackerman has an update on Pelosi's version of the story: What Pelosi Knew About Torture in 2002 TPM Muckraker 12/1007.

We don't need to know about those briefings to know that Congress had every good reason even by late 2001 to be worried about what was going on with the Cheney-Bush administration's policies on torture and the application of the Geneva Conventions. There were massacres of prisoners committed in Afghanistan by the Northern Alliance warlords that the US was backing in the early weeks of the Afghanistan War. These were widely reported at the time.

In what's still to me one of the most remarkable moments of this administration, on 12/01/07, Robert Novak asked Rummy on CNN if it bothered him that some of our allied warlords weren't observing Geneva Convention rules. The great Rummy replied:

The fact that they [the Northern Alliance] don't happen to subscribe to some convention that we do or that other countries do is a fact. It is also a fact that we have to stop those terrorists from killing more Americans. And I don't feel even the slightest problem in working with the Northern Alliance to achieve that end. (my emphasis)

That should have been a screaming signal to Democrats and Republicans in Congress that something was going badly wrong in this rogue administration. Yes, even in those immediate post-9/11 months. Actually, especially in those post-9/11 months. And just to be clear on one point, yes, the Northern Alliance was obligated to observe the Geneva Conventions, Afghanistan is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, the Northern Alliance was recognized by the UN and the United States as the legitimate government of Afghanistan, and the applications of the basic Geneva Conventions and "customary international law" is not dependent on the country having specifically ratified the Geneva Conventions.

Even that much of his answer should have been cause for his immediate dismissal, let along the rest of it, especially his sneering contempt for the laws of war. And if the President didn't fire him, Congress should have impeached and removed him immediately.

We've come a long way since then. It seems downright "quaint" - as this administration considers the laws of war - to even suggest in the abstract that Dick Cheney and George Bush would have entertained the thought of firing Rummy over that for a moment. When typing the previous sentences, I also had to think whether it wasn't totally silly to suggest that Democrats and Republicans should have been concerned about it, in light of how faithfully we've seen the Republicans support the torture policy in the years since. Vapid commentators in those post-9/11 days talked about how America had lost its innocence for the umpteenth time. What we were really losing was our Constitutional government.

And in the conventional wisdom of the punditocracy, it must be that, "Liberals and conservatives are equally guilty." But it's not the case. However remiss Democrats may have been and are now about putting a stop to these criminal activities, it was the Cheney-Bush administration who made torture an official policy of the United States.

Even Glenn Greenwald qualifies his harshing on the Dems by saying, "I'm not pointing any of this out in order to try to persuade anyone that there are no meaningful differences between the parties or that it's irrelevant who wins in 2008." As illustrations, he links to tabulations of the key votes on the Military Commissions Act (Senate votes) and on warrantless eavesdropping (in the House). In both cases, the Republicans overwhelmingly supported them, the Democrats overwhelmingly opposed them.

One other thing from Afghanistan that was in the public record in 2001 was the serious question about how carefully US forces were following the law in the treatment of captured "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh. I've always been convinced that the main reason John Ashcroft's Justice Department was willing to allow Lindh to cop a plea - for a guy that was caught in a foreign army fighting against the United States - is that the administration feared that too much of what Cheney calls "the dark side" of the administration's handling would come to light if they proceeded with the trial.

So Democrats can legitimately be criticized for failing to do more even then to stop the excesses and criminal behavior that were already coming to light. Sure, the Republicans would have called them unpatriotic for doing so. So what else is new? Not doing more hasn't prevented a steady but growing stream of such accusations from the Reps.

But on the specific issue of those classified briefings to members of Congressional intelligence committees, I'm more reserved about jamming the Dems over those, because of the cynical way this administration has used government secrecy. We don't know what was in those briefings. Unless the administration agrees to declassify records of those meetings, or a court or the Congress forces them to, we can't tell how precise the information was. In Ackerman's article, a Pelosi spokesperson claims that the information she got in 2002 about torture techniques was presented as something that might be considered in the future, not as acts being committed at the time.

We don't know what we don't know. But that description in Ackerman's article is at least not implausible on the face of it. Democrats involved were in a tricky spot. Holding the briefings gave the administration a fallback to say, in effect, "The Democrats are to blame, too." That's how the Reps have used the October 2002 war resolution on Iraq to this day. (It's still astounding to me that Democrats aren't making the point constantly that Cheney and Bush violated that resolution when they invaded Iraq. But that's another story ...)

But if the Dems weren't told specifics that indicated laws were being violated, that placed them in an very awkward position. If they pursued specific investigations based on that information, the Reps could have accused them of undermining national defense. Although, again, what else is new? I'm just not clear at this point from what's in the public record, especially in Pelosi's case, that the Dems were quite so remiss in this particular instance as Digby and Greenwald seem to think.

So I don't want to volunteer for the circular firing squad just yet.

But I do want the Democrats to stop making excuses and pursue Congressional investigations into the torture program and other criminal activities that have come partially to light by now.

Tags: digby, glenn greenwald, nancy pelosi, robert novak, rumsfeld, torture