Nancy Pelosi, The putative leader of the Democratic "Resistance" to Trumpism gave her weekly news conference today. It's safe to say it will send no one rushing to the barracades. Rep. Pelosi holds weekly news conference 06/14/2018:
She's still using the "Better Deal" slogan that apparently some Democratic marketing consultants came up with, presumably on the theory that boring voters to sleep is the best way to inspire midterm turnout this year.
Pelosi generally comes off as tired and bored. "Phoning it in" comes to mind when I hear her speak.
It's not so much that what she is advocating is bad. It's just that it's the stock conservative (yes, conservative) Democratic rhetoric that has become the standard language of the corporate Democrats. You won't hear any phrase like "single payer" or "Medicare for all" in this press conference. But she wants to give us a Better Deal on healthcare, somehow.
But even when she's talking about the scandalous separation of children from their asylum-seeking parents at the border and calling it "barbaric," she sounds like she's reciting dull talking points that really don't make much difference to her one way or the other. She'd rather be schmoozing with mega-donors.
She even sounds dull and unserious when she says, "I just don't even know why they aren't uprisings all over the country and maybe there will be, when people realize that this is a policy." (Just after 13:40)
In the real world, her response and that of her House Democratic Campaign Committee to the popular uprising against Trumpism in the surge of activist candidates has been ... to try to get more conservative, owned-by-corporate-donors candidates elected instead of people involved in "uprising."
But she does talk about "reducing the deficit" and "infrastructure." Both of which have been reduced to meaningless by endless and vapid repetition. And nobody really cares about the deficit anyway. Nor is there any particular reason to.
Sam Seder and one of his informed callers took an upbeat tone in talking about the possibility of high Democratic turnout in November, with particular reference to the June primaries in California, Republicans Should Be Terrified Of The Incoming Blue WaveMajority Report 06/12/2018:
But I must admit that the national Democratic establishment's unrepentent conservatism in the 2018 - and conservatism is the right word in this context - makes me dread that they will blow the chance for the much-discussed "blue wave" in November.
the single most discouraging sign to me was this: Pelosi, Hoyer Letter to Budget Committee Conferees on PAYGO 04/28/2018. Trump and his loyal Republicans passed a huge and unnecessary increase in the military budget without any "pay as you go" actions pared with it. And they spent even more on a gigantic tax cut for plutocrats, also without any "pay as you go" actions pared with it. Then the Republicans immediately started talking up cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid ("entitlements" in RepublicanSpeak) in order to deal with the looming budget deficit.
And what do the Democratic leaders in the House who style themselves as part of the "Resistance" to Trump do? They go full Simpson-Bowles and demand an end to deficit spending! from the Pelosi/Hoyer letter:
The House is strongly committed to passing statutory PAYGO. The President asked the Congress “to develop a PAYGO law that would help return the nation to a path of fiscal responsibility.” To achieve this objective, the House will attach statutory PAYGO to each of the four bills mentioned above or follow the House PAYGO rule. The House will not consider any conference reports on these four bills or any of them directly from the Senate unless these conference reports or bills include statutory PAYGO, the bills are fully offset under traditional scorekeeping, or statutory PAYGO has already been enacted into law.
Awesome. Awesomely conservative, that is. And remarkable politically-tone deaf. Because there aren't mobs in the street demanding cutting the deficit by flushing Social Security and Medicare down the toilet. Voters don't care about the deficit! Neither to Republicans politicians, who now only bother to pretend they do when they want to cut some program that doesn't primarily benefit the very wealthiest.
Look, and marvel at the leaders of the "Resistance" (Mike Lillis, Dem leaders embrace pay-goThe Hill 06/06/18 06:00 AM EDT):
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and other top Democrats are vowing to abide by fiscally hawkish pay-as-you-go rules if they seize the majority next year, rejecting calls from liberals who feel they’d be an impediment to big legislative gains.
Pelosi, who adopted “pay-go” rules when she held the Speaker’s gavel more than a decade ago, says she’ll push to do it again if the Democrats win the House in November’s midterm elections.
“Democrats are committed to pay-as-you-go,” Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said Tuesday, affirming the policy would be a 2019 priority. [my emphasis]
I internally flinch a bit when I hear Cenk Uygar say that the establishment Democrats are "paid to LOSE," paid by major campaign donors, that is. I always think he may be underestimating the fecklessness of the Democratic leaders when he says that.
But I have to admit, "they're paid to lose" fits the Occam's Razor criteria for explaining why the Democrats would choose to emphasize this in the middle of what is potentially a Democratic wave election this year.
In fact, it’s a stupid rule. It is entirely counter-productive to progressive policy goals. It puts the Democratic Party in conflict with the blog’s First Law Of Economics – Fck The Deficit. People Got No Jobs. People Got No Money – and it revives Zombie Simpson-Bowles to stalk the halls of Congress again. In case nobody in the Democratic leadership has noticed, the rising energy in the party is not coming out of the budget-hawk cryptkeepers. This takes seriously the laughable fiction that the Republicans care about deficits and will use them as an effective club on the Democrats. Right now, the country is giving serious consideration to things like Medicare-for-all and some sort of free college. This isn’t the time to go all Al From again. It also guarantees a serious intraparty skirmish that’s already underway.
As Jamie Galbraith explained in his 2008 book The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, the Keynesian notion that federal budgets need to be balanced over time, or over a business cycle, became obsolete with the end of the Bretton Woods system in 1973. Aside from the fact that a country borrowing in its own currency can't go bankrupt, US budget deficits are a result of the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency and the surplus recycling mechanisms in the world eocnomic system that developed after the end of Bretton Woods.
But instead of looking at the real world of the last 45 years, "Resistance" leaders Pelosi and Hoyer think Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning economics policies are the way to go.
Even a 2018 wave election won't save a Democratic Party with this kind of leadership.
Joy Reid of MSNBC's AM Joy is a reliable defender of the Democratic establishment. Given the current mood among the party's base voters, even Establishment Democrats have to put on a convincing show of partisanship right now. If the Obama years are any measure, as soon as corporate Democrats win back the Presidency, they and their media supporters will revert to defending the weakest "bipartisan" compromises that cater to Republican conservatives as three-dimensional chess that is part of a very clever long game to someday, somehow, start achieving the sort of things that Democrats put into their official primaries.
I'll confess again to being a bit of a Mugmump on the issue of replacing Pelosi as Democratic House leader. On the one hand, it probably would be a good idea to have a Democratic leader in the House who is not so identified with the Democratic politics of the Bush and Obama Presidencies. But as Jamal Simmons observes, Pelosi by most accounts has been effective in her job as Democratic House leader.
As a national spokesperson for the Democratic Party, I've been disappointed in the lack of clarity and focus that has sometimes affected her in interviews in which she was defending Democratic positions. But that's not a problem that affected her in her weekly news briefing today, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi holds news briefingPBS Newshour 06/29/2017:
But she also has the huge advantage of being a literal "San Francisco Democrat" from a safely Democratic district. That was and is a welcome departure from the long-standing Democratic approach of selecting top Congressional leaders from competitive districts, apparently on the theory that their ability to appeal to swing voters would be particularly helpful. But, as Pelosi herself is shown saying in the AM Joy segment, the Republicans are going to make a boogeyman (or woman) out of any Democratic leader. The Republicans just don't share the Democrats chronic desire to pursue "bipartisanship." Charlie Pierce gives his take on Pelosi's leadership in Okay, So You Kick Nancy Pelosi Out. Then What?Esquire Politics Blog 06/21/2017.
Joy begins the segment by calling Democrats who advocate a new House leader "haters and critics." She sets the segment up on the premise that Republicans demonized Pelosi's image, and now (progressive) Democrats have been naively suckered into carrying water for the Republicans' anti-Pelosi position. Joy cites as a major example of Pelosi's value to the Democrats the fact that she appointed Rahm Emmanuel to lead the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) during the 2006 eleciton cycle. Rahm is the poster-boy for the corporate Dem position, famously telling advocates of the public option for health care in 2009 that they were "f***ing retarded." (Was Rahm Right?In These Times 04/06/2011) Ryan Lizza wrote about interviewing Rahm in his office when he was Obama's first White House Chief of Staff, "I noticed that over his left shoulder, on the credenza behind him, was an official-looking name plate, which he said was a birthday present from his two brothers. It read, 'Undersecretary for Go Fuck Yourself.'" (The GatekeeperNew Yorker 03/02/2009).
As a sideline, I would note that if the ACA (Obamacare) had included the public option that most Democrats wanted and which Rahm so memorably condemned, it would almost certainly have been more popular than it clearly is now, less vulnerable to Republican Governors' sabotage, and more durable in the face of the current Republican efforts to repeal it. Although I'm relieved and a bit pleasantly surprised as how durable it's turning out to be in the first half of 2017.
The AM Joy segment features four guests: former RNC Chair Michael Steele, Nation journalist Joan Walsh, actor-commentator Jamal Simmons and Roll Call's Michele Bernard. Three of the four join with the host in ridiculing the idea of Democrats replacing Pelosi as the House leader. Joy doesn't probe Michael Steele's dubious-sounding claim to be a master of strategic branding who fought successfully against other Republicans to make Pelosi a major image of the Democratic Party. He even says he got them to focus on making Pelosi the main target of their attacks instead of Barack Obama. (Say what?!)
Simmons mentions vaguely that the Democrats need a stronger identification with economic issues. None of the panel, including Joy herself, gives much attention in this segment to the substantive criticism that some progressives have made, not least of which is that she's too much a part of the corporate-financed model of politics that has metastasized since the Citizens United decision in 2010.
Joan Walsh, after 10:00, says:
The whole battle in the party right now, which is a false battle in my opinion, but it's there, between 'identity politics' - so-called - and class politics, that's being fought here too, but in ways that people won't say. Because Pelosi is a associated with gay marriage, being from San Francisco, but also being staunchly for it. She's associated with feminism. She's associated with these things that certain elements of the party think should be downplayed to appeal to white men, white, you know, rather than focusing on the base of our party, which is women, and particularly women of color.
I often quote Joan's analysis, usually with approval. But that particularly comment is one that bothers me. In fairness, her target isn't entirely clear in the brief time she had to speak. The segment featured criticism of Pelosi from Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan, who unsuccessfully challenged her in the House for her leadership position. And Ryan has stressed a particular approach to criticizing Pelosi.
Ryan, who describes himself as “feisty,” has turned more aggressive in recent days. Though Ryan has criticized the party for prioritizing appeals to “subgroups” over a central economic message, his volleys against Pelosi veer close to an identity politics of his own—Make the Democrats Great Again—that relies on hackneyed imagery such as the beer drinker on Steel Street. “This election’s not going to be won at fundraisers on the coasts,” he told the Wall Street Journal, “it’s going to be won in union halls in the industrial Midwest and fish fries in the Midwest and the South.” Ryan also told me that his relative youth would serve the party well with millennials. (Ryan, 43, is not a millennial.)
The “union hall” thing did not sit well with Pelosi. “I’m not going to pay attention to, ‘I can’t step in a union hall.’ I’m a woman of steel in there,” Pelosi told the Huffington Post on Tuesday. “I’m constantly invited by the unions to go to their meetings. That’s just not, it’s just not true.” She also mocked Ryan for not being able to carry his district for Hillary Clinton, and she described his complaint that her proposed internal reforms would only strengthen her grip over the caucus as “pathetic.”
Back circa 1990, the major ideological fault line in the Democratic Party was understood to between traditional liberals of the Ted Kennedy/Walter Mondale mode and Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) that embraced neoliberal economics and hedged on "social issues" like abortion and even anti-discrimination issues. Bill Clinton was the embodiment of that approach. Any such broad distinction is inevitably oversimplified. The Republican were more than happy to portray Clinton as a flaming leftwing radical who was a wimp in foreign policy. And the labor movement nad the most prolabor Members of Congress were the bedrock of the defense of Clinton in the impeachment fight. Most DLC types didn't go as far off the tracks as Joe Lieberman eventually did. In fact, even the DLC got sick of Lieberman's antics sabotaging the Democrats before he left the Senate. On the other hand, the Democrats were all too eager to welcome Lieberman back into the Democratic Caucus after he actively campaigned for John McCain in the 2008 Presidential contest.
That traditional liberal/DLC-Blue Dog split among Dems doesn't describe the current major ideological fault line in the Democratic Party, which crystallized in 2016 in the Bernie-vs.-Hillary divide. At the moment, we can broadly describe the Bernie wing of the party as explicitly social-democratic, even militantly so. It's an outlook that openly embraces the spirit and content of the New Deal in a way even the liberal wing of 1990 was somewhat hesitant to do. On social issues, the Bernie wing is very much in favor of strong enforcement of anti-discrimination laws for racial minorities, women and the LGBTQ community. And supportive of a humane immigration reform that gives a straightforward path of citizenship to the millions of mostly Latino undocumented immigrants in the US. And though the foreign policy position of the Bernie wing may not be quite so consistent as on economic and social issues, it's broadly speaking a peace-oriented view with a healthy skepticism of US military interventions. And for the New Deal wing, campaign reform that's definitively overturns Citizens United is a major priority. Because, as Barack Obama himself said of the decision when it was first handed down:
This ruling strikes at our democracy itself.
This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.
I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest.
Unfortunately, Obama's sense of urgency proved to be relatively short-lived. But the New Deal Democrats tend to take those sentiments very seriously, even if Obama may not have.
In retrospect, Jerry Brown's Presidential campaign in 1992 was an early version of today's New Deal Democratic position, supportive of labor, minority rights, women's rights and immigrants, in favor of single-payer health care, and giving a central emphasis to reducing the role of money in politics. And that was 18 years before Citizens United! He was also in favor of a peace-oriented foreign policy that would take maximum advantage of the opportunites prsented by the fall of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union.
Today's corporate Democrats are not worrying about "Sister Soljah moments" or opposing same-sex marriage. On the contrary, they are straightforwardly in favor of women's rights and gay rights and minority rights. But they support neoliberal economic policies: deregulation, privatization (charter schools, private prisons, etc.), low taxes for the wealthy, international agreements to dergulate capital and corporations masquerading as trade treaties, praising of balanced budgets as an excuse to forgo Keynesian economic stimulus. They are also distinctly hawkish in foreign policy, though they typically rely more on "liberal internationalist" rhetoric than Cheney style neoconservative framing, though in practice they often come to the same thing. And they are comfortable with corporate-financed elections and supportive of them, despite ritual denunciations of Citizens United. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are outstanding current example of the corporate Democratic camp.
In this context, Joan Walsh's comment struck me. It almost sounded like she was identifying the New Deal/Bernie Sanders wing with the old DLC approach as though they were opposing minority and women's rights.
The reality is more that the corporate Dems emphasize those issues as a way to avoid advocating aggressively for prolabor economic policies.
Cenk Uygar of The Young Turks and Justice Democrats delivers a rant against establishment Democratic conservatism in the wake of the Jon Ossoff loss in Georgia's 6th Congressional district, Why Ossoff Lost and Democrats Can't Seem to Win! 06/21/2017:
But the upside of it is that the Democratic establishment was willing to spend significant amounts on a Congressional race in what had been considered a relatively safe Republican district. And a key part of the the 50 State Strategy when Howard Dean was DNC Chair involved trying to run Democratic candidates in every Congressional district, even in the "safest" Republican ones. There were several reasons for that: sometimes Democrats win in unlikely places; it's a way to build the Democratic Party organization; it gets the Democratic messaging and "branding" in front of more voters; and, at the very least, it forces Republicans to spend money to hold safe seats, funds that might otherwise go to other, more competitive races.
The Democratic Party is way too comfortable with losing, as a general matter. But not running candidates in Congressional races is a sign of laziness. In the sense that it takes time and, yes, losing some elections, to build the party nationally, in that way the Dems aren't comfortable enough with losing.
So, despite the richly deserved criticism being heaped on Ossoff's ConservaDem campaign by progressives, there is something encouraging in the experience of the Dems being willing to fight in the George-6 race. We can always hope that the experience of fighting Republicans will prove contagious for the Dems. But that's a bit like the cynical crack about second marriages, the triumph of hope over experience.
The biggest mistake the Ossoff campaign made was relying too heavily on the notion that there were Republican voters in that district that could be broken off from their party. This almost is never the case. Through decades of constant and unrelenting pressure, and through finagling with the franchise in a hundred ways in a thousand places, the Republicans have compressed the votes they need into an unmovable, diamond-hard core that will vote in robotic lockstep for whoever it is that wins a Republican primary. In American politics today, mindlessness is one of the strongest weapons you can have. Republicans vote for Republicans in Republican districts. Period.
Charlie seems to be having a why-can't-we-all-get-along moment when it comes to intra-Democratic Party strife: "Conclusion: I would like the 2016 Democratic primary elections to be over now."
One thing that this and the three other special Congressional elections this year bring to mind, also, is the obvious potential downside of the 50 State Strategy. Which is that contesting hard-for-Democrats-to-win Congressional seats also may gives the Democrats more elected Blue Dogs who think they need to hedge on Democratic commitments and values to stay competitive for re-election. Ossoff definitely sang from the Blue Dog hymnal: Greg Bluestein and Jim Galloway, Farewell to Jon Ossoff: Perhaps the last ‘cooperative’ DemocratAtlanta Journal-Constitution 06/21/2017.
I learned a new phrase from the coverage of the Ossoff campaign, "Panera Bread strategy." It refers to the currently preferred coirporate Dem strategy applied by Ossoff to appeal to upscale "Romney Republicans" who are fine with Trump's policies but find the man himself a bit uncouth. D.D. Guttenplan takes on that approach specifically in Jon Ossoff’s Loss Should Be a Lesson to Corporate DemocratsThe Nation 06/21/2017.
On a related point, I would like to see a more innovative, less donor-aligned Democratic leader in the House than Nancy Pelosi. But Pelosi does have two strong favorable features from a progressive point of view. One is that she has been effective at the management job of a Party leader in Congress, i.e., keeping the Democratic Caucus reasonably together on important votes. The other is that she's a literal "San Francisco Democrat," which means she has a safe Democratic seat. The demands of being the Party leader means that she's adopted a less progressive profile that she previous had. But the Democrats' previous idea for selecting Congressional Party leaders was to select people from "purple" districts on the theory that it would give the Democrats a friendlier image to swing voters. But it also meant that that they were in greater danger of being unseated and therefore not in the best position to take strong public stands on some issues that are important to the Democratic base nationally.
So, if Pelosi steps down, the Democrats will need someone who's also not at all likely to go full Blue Dog on major issues.
The Republicans have been a lot more intense in general than the Democrats for aquarter-century or more. Here's an example: Political Ad Uses Scalise Shooting As Its SubjectMorning Joe/MSNBC 06/19/2017:
The Democrats can certainly sling accusations. But in confronting the Republicans, corporate Democrats are used to coasting, “'History is on our side,' Pelosi told The Chronicle last week in an interview in her offices just outside the House chamber." (Carolyn Lochhead, Pelosi sees forces aligning to retake House in 2018 San Francisco Chronicle 06/18/2017)
History, and a majority of voters, were on Hillary Clinton's side in 2016, too.
Robert Reich recently warned about complacency on the Democrats' part (Don’t Slow Down on ImpeachmentYes! Magazine 06/09/2017:
Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) is already drafting articles of impeachment related to Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, believing there’s enough evidence of Trump’s obstruction of justice to begin an impeachment inquiry (not to mention Trump’s blatant violation of the Constitutions emoluments clause by profiting off his presidency, and much else).
But Democratic leaders are pushing back, warning there aren’t enough facts to justify an impeachment inquiry at this point, and, in any event, such an inquiry would politicize ongoing congressional investigations.
Reich's judgment of that approach by the corporate Dems: "Baloney."
The real reason Democratic leaders don’t want to seek an impeachment now is they know there’s zero chance that Republicans, who now control both houses of Congress, would support such a move. So why engage in a purely symbolic gesture?
Democratic leaders figure that between now and the midterm elections there will be even more revelations from non-partisan sources – future testimony by Trump operatives like Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, early reports from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and leaks to the press – that will build the case, and fuel more public outrage.
That outrage will give Democrats a strong chance of taking back the House and maybe even the Senate. Then they’ll really impeach Trump.
Reich is obviously more than skeptical about that approach. History is also on the side of such skepticism. After all, at this point in the Presidency of George W. Bush, there was also a good chance that the 2002 Congressional elections would swing the Democrats' way.
Then came 9/11, and the runup to the Iraq War, and supposedly cautious Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry decided the smart move was to vote for Bush's war resolution to invade Iraq. History was on the Dems' side then, too, but the vote didn't exactly look that way.
The Democratic vote actually caught up with History in being on the side of Democrats in 2006, when the Dems took the House. Then they spent two years hedging their fight against the Cheney-Bush Administration in order to not ruffle the feathers of Republican voters in the 2008 Presidential election. Since History brought us a recession in 2007 that flowered into spectacular financial crisis of 2008, the Presidential election did swing Obama's way that year and left the Democrats in solid control of both Houses of Congress. A majority the Democrats frittered away with the quixotic pursuit of Bipartisanship.
Carolyn Lockheed explains the way this plays into the chronic Democratic caution and temptation to keep their heads down and rely on inertia:
More than investigations or even impeachment, winning back control of the House in the 2018 midterms would disrupt the governing capacity of the Trump White House, just as the GOP takeover of the House in 2010 crippled President Barack Obama’s presidency and Democratic victories in 2006 paralyzed the remainder of President George W. Bush’s second term.
Democrats need a net gain of 24 seats next year to retake the House, and typically, when the president’s approval rating is below 50 percent, “the average seat gain for opposing party is 36 seats,” said Emory University political scientist Alan Abramowitz.
Trump’s popularity is a shade lower than Bush’s in the 2006 midterms, during the depths of the Iraq War. And it is substantially lower than Obama’s in the 2010 midterms. Both Bush and Obama were below 50 percent approval at the time, but Trump’s current 38 percent is a record low for a president just six months into his term.
But she also reports that "some analysts" say "the party’s Bernie Sanders liberal wing could undermine the advantage." Because obviously identifying too closely with the country's most popular politician (Sanders) and his program could sabotage History once again. Or something.
Reading things like this make me tempted to agree with Cenk Uygar's occasional comment that the Democrats are "paid to lose" by big donors.
As Pelosi was saying the country needs a “balance” between security and privacy, Marc Perkel, a 57-year-old activist from Gilroy, Calif., started shouting at Pelosi during her answer and was escorted out of the room.
"It's not a balance. It’s not constitutional!" he yelled. "No secret laws!"
Others in the room began shouting as well, saying things like "Leave him alone!" or "That's what a police state looks like right there!"
The moderator, Zerlina Maxwell, worked to quiet the crowd by saying audience members needed to submit questions via Twitter rather than shouting them out, but Pelosi said she didn't mind.
"I welcome the challenges that people pose because I think that those questions must be answered," Pelosi said.
She was further booed when she said Snowden did break the law by leaking the information he revealed.
"As far as Snowden: he did violate the law in terms of releasing those documents," she said.
Pelosi's appearance was set up as a question-and-answer format. At about 43:30, the interviewer/moderator, Zerlina Maxwell, asks about Edward Snowden and the NSA spying. After four minutes of a dissembling answer by Pelosi, at about 47:30 you here someone interrupt to try to focus her response, which Maxwell actually should have been doing. Security made the guy leave the hall, which was dumb. He was being technically rude but you hear Pelosi even say it's all right, and she was responding to his comment. (It's not as though Pelosi has never been mildly heckled in her career before. She's San Francisco's Congresswoman, for God's sake!) Her answer was Obama Party-line all the way, including on Snowden, with a few meaningless verbal nods to "transparency". I'm guessing the boos she gets on Snowden were as much directed toward security removing the guy as to her answer. The booing comes just after 50:30.
But I'm glad Pelosi caught some static at this from what is usually a naturally sympathetic audience for her. The Netroots Nation staff likes to schedule this kind of interview-style appearance with senior officials. But they're also tempted to put people who aren't really that good at it in charge of doing the questions and apparently give them direction to toss softball questions. Which particularly irritates me, because it's supposed to be a convention of us obnoxious bloggers who bitch about the mainstream media doing that kind of thing all the time. Maxwell pretty much went moot after the crowd got a little unruly there and hardly asked another question. Pelosi had to go extemporaneous for half an hour or so, which of course politicians are happy to do. (You can see my grouchy real-time tweets from the event here: http://twitter.com/brucemillerca)
It's not impossible to do. Joan McCarter from Daily Kos was the interviewer for Harry Reid in 2010. She was respectful but asked him appropriately challenging questions.
Appearances like that are a chance for the interviewer to raise concerns that are of particular interest to the netroots. And the Netroots Nation participants, if not always the staff, mostly understand themselves as progressives who are not only criticizing Republican obstructionists but pushing Democratic officials to take progressive stands on important issues. Anyone doing these "Ask The Speaker" type interviews need to press the official to address those kinds of concerns.
Because if a politician, even the most progressive ones, walk away from these events thinking, oh, these people are fine with how I'm handling things because they just applauded and nobody even offered challenging questions, they'll figure they have that constituency in their pocket. The good thing about that appearance with Pelosi is that she not only got some pushback directly from the crowd. But because Politico picked it up as "Nancy Pelosi booed, heckled at Netroots Nation 2013," at least for a few moments it will register on the minds of the Beltway Village and, more importantly, Members of Congress that this could become a political pain in the ass for Democrats. And that's a good thing!
Pelosi started off her presentation by talking about the amateurishness of the Congressional Republicans and their leadership over last week's farm bill vote. But she also has reason to complain about the amateurishness of Maxwell's moderation and the way security acted. I've been present at public meetings where a group directly intended to disrupt it. And in cases like that, yes, you do at some point have to require the hecklers to leave.
But this wasn't a public meeting where the local Tea Partiers for Militant Ignorance can just show up and try to shout the speakers down. People attending Netroots Nation have to pay a registration fee, $205 for the 2014 event if you register right now. And you have to show your registration tag to enter the events or even the exhibit hall. Participants also are typically flying to the convention location and paying for a three or four nights hotel stay. Many are sponsored in some way. But it means that the local shut-ins who spend their days listening to Rush Limbaugh and FOX News aren't going to be wandering into the speeches in large numbers to shout down speakers.
Throwing someone out for shouting out a relevant question or challenge when the speaker herself who is being heckled is saying that it's all right and she's responding to his challenge is just dumb. Amateur hour, as Pelosi was saying about the Republicans on the farm bill. So was Maxwell's scolding the heckler and later those who booed by telling them to fill out a question card. It came off the Netroots Nation equivalent of the suggestion box, the most basic of ways companies who don't give a flying flip about their employees' opinions but want to make the barest of pretenses of doing so.
Pelosi is obviously one of the top professionals in the political world. But compared to her peers, she typically not especially effective in interview situations. Plus, in her position as Minority Leader in the House, she's generally expected to reflect something like a consensus Party position on issues. That means that an interviewer in a Netroots Nation forum like that needs to be prepared both to keep her focused in her responses and to have some sense for her interviewing style. Maxwell didn't seem to be prepared on either count. And even to a casual observer, Pelosi's waving two pieces of paper that no one could read and explaining that Obama's spying is okay because he has some kind of secret warrant from a secret court for it was pretty lame. Maxwell should have stepped in after a minute or two of that rambling and asked, well, pretty much the question the heckler asked.
Netroots Nation needs to step up their game on that kind of appearance.
Or just let Joan McCarter do those interviews. She knows what she's doing and knows how to prepare for them.
Nancy Pelosi, who has publicly signed on to President Obama's proposal to cut benefits for Social Security, has the usual frivolous excuses for her support of this awful proposal, as Michael McAuliff and Sabrina Siddiqui report in Nancy Pelosi Says Social Security Cut Proposed By Obama Would 'Strengthen' ProgramHuffington Post 12/19/2012.
They point to one of the central problems in an argument that has become gospel - or at least acceptable in terms of cynical propaganda - among the Beltway Villagers:
Pelosi's reasoning on Social Security focuses on the costs of the program. Logically, a way to strengthen it even further would be to cut it much deeper. It's no coincidence that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who takes that argument to its logical extreme, also employs the term "strengthen" when talking about his plan, which slashes Medicare spending. While weakening a program to strengthen it may seem at first to be wholly counterintuitive, it begins to make sense from a different perspective. For beneficiaries, the program is weaker, as it pays out less. But for taxpayers, it's stronger, because the program can meet its obligations for a longer period of time without taxes being raised. The extra costs are borne instead by seniors.
That logic, however, is only ever applied to entitlement programs that have their own revenue streams. Nobody would attempt to argue that the military was strengthened by cutting its budget, or that education was strengthened by slashing funding for it.
Social Security was created in the 1930s to combat elderly poverty. It worked: Giving money to older Americans made them less poor. Shrinking benefits would correspondingly lower their standards of living. [my emphasis]
House Speaker John Boehner seems to be balking at Social Security opponent Obama's latest offer to solve the non-crisis of the "fiscal cliff" that includes reductions to Social Security benefits and $400 billion of unspecified savings in Medicare. (Nancy Cook, Fiscal Cliff Talks Devolve Into Day of Dueling Press ConferencesNational Journal 12/19/2012)
Once again, Obama looks to be back in President Pushover mode in negotiating with the Republicans.
Anyway, the President had to defend his latest offer, with its spending cuts commensurate in level with the sequester, benefit cuts to Social Security, concession on marginal tax rate increases by moving the dividing line to $400,000 a year and allowing open the opportunity for debt limit hostage taking down the road. And he basically bragged about the wise centrism of his offer. He called it the “largest piece of deficit reduction we've seen in the last 20 years” and said it would resolve out deficit and debt issues for the next 10 years. Because that’s how things work, right? Deficit scolds just go into hibernation once some mythical level of stabilization gets reached.
Obama basically ignored the implications of the benefit cut in Social Security, and ignored the regressive tax increase for everyone associated with the move to chained CPI. He mainly expressed puzzlement that Republicans haven’t taken his deal, since he’s gone "more than halfway" in their direction. Um, that answers his own question. If by doing next to nothing, they can watch the President give up on things he long demanded – he said he would veto anything that extended the Bush-era tax rates above $250,000, and that he would not "play the game" anymore on the debt limit – then why wouldn't they just keep sitting still and letting the President come to them?
Dayen mentions that Obama has already neutralized his post-election vow not to negotiate over the debt limit. : "The President says he won’t negotiate on the debt limit. By offering up this debt deal now, he’s actually in the process of doing that. And he’s basically setting up a debt default in 2014, or a major conflagration anyway, by not shutting this down immediately."
Markos makes a similar observation:
Obama isn't doing himself any favors by drawing lines in the sand and then inevitably capitulating. Republicans have learned that there isn't a negotiating stance that Obama won't compromise. That doesn't lend itself to smart negotiations. Rather, it creates unbalanced ones, as Republicans simply wait for Obama to cave on his demands. They've learned that for Obama, making a deal is more important than what's in the deal.
One of the bizarre aspects of these negotiations is that the Democratic "concession" most prized by the Republicans - cuts in benefits to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid - is one that the Republicans know Obama wants to give up. Four years ago, we could still reasonably hope that Obama's talk about controlling deficits as political posturing to make his proposed stimulus package more acceptable to skeptics. But since he not only offered benefit cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in 2011 but just since his re-election has again offered up cuts in benefits to Social Security and Medicare, his messaging on the subject four years ago looks like the expression of a real, hardcore goal of his.
Digby just reposted one of her early analyses of the Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Fiscal Madness 01/11/2009. Jane Hamsher, who has also been following the evolution of the Great Sellout to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, does a recap of Obamas history on the subject, Can We Please Stop Pretending Obama is "Capitulating" on Social Security?FDL Action 12/19/2012.
This doesn't invalidate the criticisms of his negotiating strategy, though. In fact, his negotiating is awful because he's trying to achieve the impossible. He wants to achieve an "end of ideology" state by agreeing to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and doing it in a way that Democrats will accept and even like. Only by achieving such an "end of ideology" can he be the great conciliator who makes no-red-America/no-blue-America a reality.
But the Republicans aren't interested in an end of ideology, they're interested in the victory of theirs. And that includes gutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But to make Democratic acceptance of that even remotely plausible, it has to be generally seen as the reluctant capitulation by Democrats to a Republican demand. And to do that, Obama would have to negotiate on the basis of Democratic priorities until the Republicans gave him a clear offer on rolling back Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on which he could agree to a less drastic version which he could then sell as stopping the Republicans from doing more harm.
This would also require the Republicans to be willing to make such an offer and own them as their demand. But they aren't willing to do so. They falsely charged Obama in 2010 and again in 2012 with cutting back Medicare on the basis of projected savings that did not involve benefit cuts.
Sheesh, why didn't Obama say something like, "I made a more than fair deal. The GOP rejected it. So now I'm pulling the offer off the table and waiting to see what the GOP has to offer. Clock's ticking!" Instead, the GOP will bank the concessions he's already made, then demand more. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.
The sad part, given Obama opposition to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, is that stalemate and no deal is one of the best options for the country.
Nancy Pelosi has become a disgrace to the Democratic Party and to California by endorsing Social Security opponent Obama's "chained CPI" proposal to cut benefits on Social Security, including for current recipients: Amanda Terkel and Sam Stein, Nancy Pelosi Predicts 'Democrats Will Stick With The President' On Fiscal Cliff DealHuffington Post 12/18/2012.
I hope this will become a serious inflection point in the history of the Democratic Party. This can become a dividing point for the labor/liberal/pro-Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid portion of the party, which reflects the views of the base, to become a serious opposition within the party that can successfully challenge the corporate wing, of which Pelosi with her public support of a cut in Social Security benefits now has to be considered a part.
It's hard to imagine that San Francisco Democrats would be unable to mount a substantial primary challenge to Social Security opponent Nancy Pelosi in 2014.
This is a great opportunity for aspiring Democrats, from whatever combination of principle and opportunism on which they operate to establish a distinct political profile for themselves as defenders of the very popular Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs against corporate Democrats like, I'm sorry to say, Pelosi and Obama.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Marvelous Maverick McCain spoke to the Al Jazeera U.S. Forum last week. Pelosi puts Aljazeera in the context of freedom of the press as incorporated in the US Constitution's First Amendment as well as of the era of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
The bold Maverick McCain's opens his presentation by a bad joke suggesting he would like to sleep with Nancy Pelosi. (?!?) Not that what he has to say about policy is especially more sophisticated. I guess you could call it "moderate", if a combination of neoconservatism (starting wars all over the place in the name of democracy) and neoliberalsim (making the world safe for plunder by big business). The Bold Maverick also talks about tweeting with Snooky. (!?!) And does he really get a lot of tweeted death wishes?
Why doesn't that mean old crank just retire? Sadly, even then they would still probably invite him onto Meet the Press every other week.
Another of the forbidden May 28 batch of Abu Ghuraib photos Correction 05/30/09: This photo had been previously published by Salon on 03/26/2006
Our national press corps truly is one of the strangest groups of people in the world. It takes a really superficial herd to decide that the villain of the torture policy is ... House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Maureen Dowd expounded her own raving, factually challenged version of the accusation in Cheney, Master of PainNew York Times 05/17/09. MoDo declared:
The stylish grandmother acted like a stammering child caught red-handed, refusing to admit any fault and pointing the finger at a convenient scapegoat. She charged the C.I.A. with misleading Congress, which is sort of like saying the butler did it, or accusing a generic thuggish-looking guy in a knit cap with gang tattoos to distract from your sin.
Yes, we live in a world where our leading celebrity pundits are aghast at the very notion that the CIA might lie about something like this.
MoDo does manage to say, after seven paragraphs trashing Speaker Pelosi as an utterly contemptible liar and pathetic phony - women in powerful positions always send MoDo's deeply strange gender obsessions into orbit:
Besides, the question of what Pelosi knew or didn’t, or when she did or didn’t know, is irrelevant to how W. and Cheney broke the law and authorized torture.
We should give MoDo and even the Villagers some credit here. It's now become acceptable for the Beltway Village to call torture by the name "torture", without the modifiers they've insisted on using up until the last week or so, e.g., "so-called torture", "what some describe as torture". And MoDo actually mentions the word "law", which is far more than you can say of the Shields-and-Brooks Clown Show of this past Friday.
But this is pretty faint praise of MoDo, whose column mainly reflects the obviously Republican-friendly meme that the Beltway Village has adopted wholesale, which is that Pelosi is a Big Liar and a terrible hypocrite. The fact is that we the public and presumably our so-called press corps don't have any solid evidence of what was said in those now-infamous briefings. Pelosi has said all along that she was not briefed in detail about what tortures the administration (specifically the CIA) was using, although the Village narrative that MoDo runs with as though it were Gospel truth is that Pelosi has been changing her story in some kind of guilty way.
Now, I'm obviously willing to defend Nancy Pelosi on this. The Republicans knew attacking her over this issue would appeal to the dysfunctions of what some describe as our press corps. Because it muddles that discussion about the fact that serious crimes were committed in the torture policy. It reassures the Villagers that all serious responsible people don't care whether crimes were committed in the torture policy, only "the left". Pelosi is also what the Democrats have badly needed in their Congressional leadership and urgently need in the Senate: a actual partisan leader. The Big Pundits think (Democratic) leaders in Congress should be "bipartisan" and should "reach across the aisle". Like Harry "I can't do anything until someone shows me we already have 60 votes" Reid.
It's also not clear to me that any of the Democratic and Republican members of Congress who received classified briefings on matters relating to the torture program committed any kind of crime by now trying to blow the lid off the program publicly. That doesn't necessarily make them profiles in courage. But part of the trap Cheney was setting with those selective briefings was that if the Dems exposed information from those briefings publicly, they could be accused of being unreliable with classified information, of endangering the troops, of committing treason, and so on. The danger of Republicans taking such a risk to expose the torture program they supported was negligible to the vanishing point.
If any Members of Congress committed actual crimes in connection with the torture program, they should prosecuted along with everyone else for whom there is good evidence of criminal behavior in that program.
But the accusations against Pelosi are based on a breathtakingly careless neglect of the facts in the public record up to this point. Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby is not a particular fan of Pelosi; he thinks she makes weak public statements for Democratic positions. In They sometimes invent your first time 05/16/09, he looks at the current popular press script against Nancy Pelosi and finds it to be fake. Part of the current anti-Pelosi script is that she has been guiltily changing her story about the briefings. He describes the particular journalistic infotainment technique involved:
[J]ournalists love the claim of "rolling disclosure" in a matter like this (though only if they want to make some pol a target, of course). Such belated disclosure is taken as a sign of the targeted pol’s bad faith. It’s a sign that the target had something to hide, that she wouldn’t be truthful until she was forced. Mainstream journalism of the 1990s is littered with episodes of this type. ...
Sad but true: When “journalists” get somebody in their sites, they simply luvv making this type of claim. Recent history teaches a grisly lesson: Even when rolling disclosure hasn’t occurred, “journalists” will sometimes pretend otherwise. They will sometimes ignore the very reports they themselves have typed in the past, so much do they want to pretend that their target never said this before. ...
In the world of love and romance, it’s said that you always remember your first time. In modern pseudo-journalism, they sometimes invent a pol’s first time, erasing her real first time in the process.
Actually, Somerby criticizes her for apparent carelessness in her comments on the CIA. I think he's being too critical of her on that point. But his is a reality-based criticism, based on his observations of how she frames issues as a key national Party leader. The Beltway Village practice is to fix on a script and squeeze the facts into it. Or, if necessary, just reinvent the facts.
Marcy Wheeler, who just won the prestigious Sidney Hillman Award for her investigative journalism online, has been following the torture crime story in great detail. She has been regularly challenging the current press corps narrative about that Vile Big Liar Pelosi on her Emptywheel blog, such as in The Two Torture Tape Suspects, the Pelosi Briefing, and the Panetta Statement 05/16/09. Marcy is an invaluable resource for those following this story. Indispensable at this point.
You will search MoDo's latest breakdown and the Meet the Press transcript in vain for anything remotely like the following explanation from Marcy referring to CIA Director Leon Panetta's letter which in the Village narrative was a decisive smack-down of Pelosi:
Panetta is stating two things:
The contemporaneous records (that is, the CIA briefer's own notes on the briefing) show that the briefers "briefed truthfully ... describing 'the enhanced techniques that had been employed'" on Zubaydah.
It is up to Congress to evaluate this evidence and "reach its own conclusions about what happened."
Now, first of all, Panetta is not saying (nor has anyone said, not even Porter Goss) that the briefers briefed Congress that these techniques had been used. I know this sounds weasely, but until someone says, in plain language, that the CIA told Congress those techniques had already been used on Abu Zubaydah, we should assume that's not what the notes reflect, because if they did, you can be sure both the briefing list and the public statements would say so. But no one is saying that. And against that background, Panetta is reiterating the statement that Congress should determine what happened--a reiteration of the admission that CIA's own briefing records are not the totality of the story.
The CIA briefing list records that the following people participated in the briefing: Nancy Pelosi, her staffer Michael Sheehy, Porter Goss, his staffer Tim Sample, briefers from the CounterTerrorism Center (CTC), and the Office of Congressional Affairs (OCA; elsewhere, we've been told four people, total, from CIA attended).
While CIA doesn't say it, the chances are very good that the head of CTC was among the four CIA officials who attended that briefing--he probably led the briefing. On September 4, 2002, the head of CTC was Jose Rodriguez.
Jose Rodriguez, you'll recall, is one of the key suspects in the torture tape destruction.
Marcy is still practicing what in most of the world is known as "journalism". She's not running beyond the available facts here, she's actually paying attention to them. She indicates what different kinds of claims would put the (real) story into a different light. Compare that one column of hers with media celebrity Maureen Dowd's. One is journalism, the other is raving, unhindered by facts.
It's not that Marcy's approach pretends to be neutral, objective or value-free. On the contrary, she practices advocacy journalism. She wants the perpetrators in the torture program charged and prosecuted. But that doesn't prevent her from having integrity in her reporting and writing. MoDo isn't advocating anything but Village idiocy. And her writing has no integrity whatsoever.
On the other side of the fog being kicked up by the Villagers, Marcy points out a particular reason why defenders of the torture program are coming after Pelosi so hard on those briefings: the crimes themselves are coming to light in very explicit ways now, and the torture-crime scandal is accelerating, despite the remarkable consensus among the political elites and the national press that the whole issue should go away and God forbid that any high-level criminals should be prosecuted over the torture crimes. And the various acts of deception used to cover them up until this point are also coming to light at a seemingly accelerated pace. The briefings to Congress are a key political defense of the program. If it is shown conclusively that the CIA or other intelligence officials were lying to the Congressional Democrats who are supposed to be part of their alibi, another big piece of the torturers' self-defense will have fallen.
In that light, Marcy gives this entirely plausible reading of Panetta's action in releasing the letter last week:
This is a statement reflecting not just the worries at CIA that they've been sold out again, asked to break the law, but then hung out to dry after the fact. This is a statement given at a time when the very people being investigated (probably)--Rodriguez and Goss--are two of the three key players in the briefing at the time.And this is a statement that narrowly affirms the accuracy of the briefing (given the briefing notes), while admitting that Congress should determine the full story. Yes, Panetta gives that narrow defense of CIA's statement. But the bulk of Panetta's statement implores the rest of CIA not to get hung up on the circus happening around them.
Panetta is doing two things. First, affirming that CIA has not misrepresented what got recorded in the briefing notes and that the language of the briefing notes is accurate--as far as that goes. And, at the same time, casting doubt on the full meaning of the statement while imploring the rest of CIA not to get distracted by yet another challenge to CIA's credibility.
This is not going away. Even in the best case - that perpetrators at all levels are prosecuted soon - the torture issue will haunt US policy for decades.
Glenn Greenwald has been a hardliner on legal accountability for Dick Cheney, George Bush and other officials of their administration over the torture program and other serious crimes of which their administration was guilty.
In Pelosi criticizes Truth Commission as inadequate, advocates criminal prosecutionsSalon 02/26/09, Glenn approves the statement that the House Speaker gave in an interview with Rachel Maddow to be broadcast Thursday evening, in which she not only endorses the idea of criminal prosecutions. She also expresses serious concern that a Truth Commission such as that proposed by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy.
Glenn has been friendly to the Truth Commission idea, which is prominently advocated by human rights attorney Scott Horton, as a useful preliminary investigative phase leading to prosecutions. He even has a post of the same date explaining that: Why a war crimes fact-finding commission could uniquely enable prosecutions.
Pelosi is also talking a little more about the Congressional briefings she and other received on at least aspects of programs like torture and mass surveillance that involved US officials committing crimes. We mostly heard the Republican side of this story, which suggested that knowing about it meant that those Democrats were complicit in the programs.
Which does remind me: I'm glad the Dems are gathering up the gumption to at least talk seriously about proceeding against Cheney-Bush administration criminals. But we urgently needed them to be doing this eight years ago and every years since then. The Scalia Five installing Bush as President in 2000 should have been a signal that the Republicans really, really didn't care about playing by the rules. And it should have set the Democrats to fighting them all the way. But better late than never.
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.
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.
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.
On the PBS Newshour Friday night, we had the usual liberal-conservative debate with Mark Shields and Rich Lowry sitting in for David Brooks. The liberal Shields repeated the Republican Party line on Pelosi's trip. Thenthe conservative Lowry repeated the Republican Party line on Pelosi's trip. Balance, the American media way. And this is the *quality* press, PBS, the bogeyman of the rightwing, not the straight-line partisans at FOX News, aka, Republican State TV. Here was Shields' sad version (Pelosi Travels to Syria; Candidates Release Fund-raising Numbers 04/06/07):
First, the criticism. I think it was a little over-reaction, but I want to defend the White House. If you had been through what they've been through the last six months, with losing the Congress, and the first White House official since the 19th century to be indicted convicted for crime, for a felony, to calls from Republicans for the resignation of the attorney general, to Walter Reed, the scandal of indifference, to wounded warriors, you know, you'd take every chance you could, and this was the first opening they'd had.
Nancy Pelosi had been remarkably sure-footed in her first weeks and months, I think, as speaker. I think this trip was ill-advised. It was legitimate. Republicans did not criticize her [?!?], and Frank Wolf and other Republicans went there.
But I think the fact that she went there and apparently slipped on the nuances of Middle Eastern policy and carrying a message, at least an alleged message, from the prime minister of Israel, who's on political life support. And as soon as she said that, he had to repudiate, for domestic political purposes, the message that he was willing to negotiate with Syria.
I don't think it worked. I think the principal, overriding concern of Democrats has to be a unified, united policy on Iraq. And while the other is legitimate and interesting, it is not important. And so I think it was a mistake.
We should give Judy Woodruff some credit. She did bring up the fact in that segment that Republican Congressmen had also travelled to Syria.
Well, there’s not going to be agreement on that [the Republican line that Pelosi's trip was a mistake]. I’m tempted to say that there’s more politics here because she did have a Republican - she would be more vulnerable if she had not had a Republican member of Congress with her in her own delegation. Three or four Republicans had already been to see the Syrian leader a few days before. Members of Congress go to visit unfriendly governments all the time. It happens practically every other week, Tim. And, and you’re going to have this disagreement. You’ve got Tom Lantos, who is the chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, saying what she did was, was perfectly fine, she represented the Israeli policy accurately, she didn’t step over the line. The White House says differently.
As Woodruff said, Tom Lantos - who was my Congressman for several years, I must have voted for him six times in general elections - defended the trip, in which he took part, as reported in Lantos lashes out at critics of Pelosi trip by Edward Epstein San Francisco Chronicle 04/07/07:
Bush administration criticism of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's trip to Syria this week is "hypocritical beyond belief," San Mateo Rep. Tom Lantos said Friday as he and the speaker prepared to return home from their nine-day trip with a congressional delegation to the Mideast.
Lantos, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the criticism from President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials and allies is particularly out of line because Republican House members also met Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus just before and after the delegation led by the Democratic speaker.
"The notion that members visiting Syria and having discussions (is) a unique Democratic strategy to undermine the Republican administration is absurd on it face,'' Lantos said in a telephone interview with The Chronicle from Lisbon, Portugal. ...
Pelosi, speaking Friday with the Associated Press, said her visit to Syria reinforced Bush's message to Assad, rather than sending mixed signals, as the president has said.
"Our message was President Bush's message," Pelosi told the Associated Press from Portugal. "The funny thing is, I think we may have even had a more powerful impact with our message because of the attention that was called to our trip. It became clear to President Assad that even though we have our differences in the United States, there is no division between the president and the Congress and the Democrats on the message we wanted him to receive."
On the statement by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert following Pelosi's meeting with the Syrian President Bashar Assad, see Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo 04/08/07.
Dear Leader Bush expounds on his version of "bipartisanship" in an editorial the Wall Street Journal, What the Congress Can Do for America 01/03/07, from the start of this year.
Bush's examples of previous "bipartisanship" are telling. The No Child Left Behind Act, where the Democrats gave Bush the nationwide testing requirements he wanted in exchange for higher funding levels in future years; the tests went into effect, then Bush and the Congressional Republicans refused to provide the additional funding, so that a genuine compromise wound up to be a one-sided partisan Republican result. The PATRIOT Act, where a panicked Congress went along with pretty much every authoritarian-state measure Bush and John Ashcroft demanded. Tax "relief", in which taxes were slashed for the wealthiest Americans thus quickly squandering the surplus that had taken both the Bush 41 and Clinton administrations so many years to achieve. This is such empty rhetoric it would be overly generous to call it a bad joke.
Marc Sandalow and Zachary Coile reported at the same time, Pelosi to strike fast on agendaSan Francisco Chronicle 01/03/07, "Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi is choosing accomplishment over accommodation".
Sounds good to me. And she's followed up on that successfully, so far. But most of Bush's article is taken up reporting on Republican whining that the Democrats are planning to run the House as though they won the election in November. The nerve of those uncivil Democrats!
If the Dems get effective ethics rules and processes functioning, and put limits on excessive lobbying practices, that will be a genuinely "bipartisan" benefit, whether or not the Reps support those changes or not. For the rest of the Republican whining, well, gosh, they have my sympathy. Maybe they should show their "bipartisan" goodwill by shutting up about it. That would be a "civil" gesture, huh?
