The Bottom Line on Safety and Security

Troubled Torturers. Yesterday's article in the NY Times about the Bush administration's torture shenanigans prompted President Bush to make another one of his Orwellian "we do not torture" statements. It seems that the Bush administration engages in "humanitarian" waterboarding, extreme sensory deprivation, and extraordinary rendition to countries where suspects will be subjected to even more humanitarian treatment.

But the debate over torture brings us to a bottom line over the Bush administration in relation to national security. Here's Deputy Press Secretary Tony Fratto speaking today.

It's troubling . . . I've had the awful responsibility to have to work with the New York Times and other news organizations on stories that involve the release of classified information. And I can tell you that every time I've dealt with any of these stories, I have felt that we have chipped away at the safety and security of America with the publication of this kind of information.

Like Fratto, I reflect on the ways in which "the safety and security of America" is being compromised every time I see these stories. But I view the Bush administration and the right-wing as the ones who are chipping away at American security. The Bush administration's war in Iraq, refusal to cooperate with other American political institutions, and relentless defiance of American and international law have all served to strengthen global terrorism and weaken American capacities for dealing with global terror.

At the same time, the political fights over the Bush administration's conduct of the war on terror have revealed that the right-wing is more of a threat to American society than the global jihadis. What has emerged is that the right-wing has little respect for American democracy and that major figures on the right like Newt Gingrich and Thomas Sowell are thinking about how democracy can be overthrown in this country. With their ideas of creating military tribunals for trying and imprisoning war opponents, activists on the right have even worked out a "constitutional" mechanism for ending American democracy as we know it.

It's impossible to separate the Bush administration from the right-wing. Efforts by the Bush administration to nullify laws against torture show the same contempt for American democracy that's shown by the chatter on the right about military tribunals, one-man rule in this country, or curtailing the First Amendment. They represent an effort to chip away at the democratic character of Amerian government and society.

And it strikes me that the Bush administration's and the right's efforts to strike at democracy represent a greater threat to this country than global terrorism.

Bad News for Hillary Supporters: Hillary at 53%

Yesterday, a Washington Post/ABC poll came out with Hillary at 53% and Obama at 20%. Most of the time, political candidates consider it to be really good news if they make that kind of big leap in the polls.

But I think 53% is more Trojan horse than gift horse for the Hillary campaign.

Of course, the Post/ABC poll might be an outlying poll. Hillary might still actually be in the low 40's. That's still a very strong lead even if it's not overwhelming.

If the numbers are real, they might be a sign that Hillary is peaking too soon. That's especially because Hillary's going to become more of a target for negative media coverage and right-wing smears the farther ahead she gets.

If Democrats start listening to the negativity, the numbers will go back down.

Being so far ahead also creates the likelihood of complacency, decreasing creativity, and lower energies as candidates and their staffs sit on their huge leads.

That can also bring the numbers back down.

Even worse, a huge lead in the Democratic primaries means that Hillary might not fully prepared for everything the Republicans are going to throw at her in the general election. Obama's failure to fight now means that Hillary's not going to be in fighting trim next July.

Given the stakes in the 2008 presidentiail election, that's very unfortunate.

Cutting a Better Deal for Soldier Heroes

My good friends at Protein Wisdom insist on the value of right-wing irony. A good example of that kind of irony comes from the enthusiastic war-monger Robert Kaplan in today's Wall Street Journal online. What Kaplan is complaining about is the tendency of the media to "pity" American soldiers rather than lionize them as heroes.

As one battalion commander complained to me, in words repeated by other soldiers and marines: "Has anyone noticed that we now have a volunteer Army? I'm a warrior. It's my job to fight." Every journalist has a different network of military contacts. Mine come at me with the following theme: We want to be admired for our technical proficiency--for what we do, not for what we suffer. We are not victims. We are privileged.

I can see the battalion commander's complaint. In fact, there's relatively little coverage of day to day operations in Iraq outside ludicrous war-romantics like Michael Yon and his "al-Ameriki" schtick. When American troops are engaged with an enemy, they fight hard, fight effectively, and are almost always victorious. But the embedded reporters are gone, the romanticizing of military technology played out a long time ago, and most people became suspicious of heroism stories after the military lied about Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch.

It's really too bad.

But Kaplan's engaged in a pity story himself. He's essentially asking people to feel sorry for soldiers because they are not being treated as heroes.

What an irony!

If the U. S. were a better society, we indeed would be treating soldiers as heroes. Everyday American soldiers are doing remarkably well despite the campaign of deception that brought the U. S. into Iraq, the incompetence of the Bush administration, and the overall failure of the mission.

In fact, however, we in the United States don't value people who aren't being successful RIGHT NOW and the military mission in Iraq has been a failure for at least three years. As a result, American soldiers are stuck in the same "pity" rut as single black mothers working multiple jobs, cancer patients, students getting through college despite working 40-50 hours a week, and people successfully fighting off depression, anxiety disorders, and other mental health problems.

I see lots of these folks in my job as a college professor and I'm sometimes so awestuck by the energy, talent, and commitment of some of my students that I end up hero-worshipping them even as I'm supposed to be acting as a role-model.

Another irony!

But the best that any of these kinds of folks can do in the mainstream media is to be portrayed as "victims" and pitied. Oh, maybe there's some token stories about "everyday heroes," but the the overwhelming focus of the media is on the wealthy, celebrities, rock stars, and the titans of business. People who have to be heroic to either get by or move one step forward are lucky to avoid being stigmatized as failures, losers, whores, and rednecks.

That's the pitiable reality.

American soldiers in Iraq want more respect from the media.

And that's fine.

But it's unfortunate that they'll only get that respect if America becomes a better society at home.

The Dominatrix Right--Exploring A Conservative Fantasy

What would a right-wing life be without fear? Of course, the primary conservative fear used to be fear of blacks and black skin, black diseases, black sexuality, and black talk. But the right has branched out over the years to luxuriate in the fear of gays, women, Hispanics, crime, pedophiles, their kids being kidnapped, secular humanism, communism, Saddam Hussein, Ahmadinejad, and Hillary Clinton.

It goes without saying that fear is what makes life worth living for people on the right.

In fact, if the right has any kind of practical dictum at all, it's that "we have nothing to enjoy but our wonderful fears. "

This brings us to the fear du jour--fear of radical Islam--the idea, even the conviction, that radical muslims will be taking over the United States and introduce sharia law, make everybody convert to Islam, force everybody pray five times a day, and make "our women" wear burkas whenever they left the house.

The pervasive fear of radical Islam seems to derive from some statements that Osama bin Laden has made about destroying the West and forcing everyone to convert.

There seems to be an operant conditioning principle at work here: Osama speaks, conservatives fear.

Not that it takes the right much to be "afraid, very afraid" anyway.

Glenn Greenwald printed a stunning example of this kind of fear in his Salon blog yesterday. I'll quote at length.

Glenn -- just read your post about how we're all over-reacting to Islamic fundamentalism. How refreshing! I had no idea that our fears were so ill-founded. There I was, all set to actually believe the rhetoric of Al Qaeda and Iran and the countless video tapes of suicide bombers, not to mention the actual language of the Quran. In fact, I'd even begun to believe this poll, which says that quite a few American Muslims think that there is justification or strapping a bomb to yourself and walking into a mall . . . But who needs polls when I have Glenn Greenwald! Thank heavens we have you to balance all this with an argument that can basically be summed up as, "well none of these people who mocked Islam have been killed, so you all need to relax, OK?"

I picture this moment, Glenn, and it brings me a little chuckle. It's you, begging some terrorist for your life, pointing out all the wonderful things you wrote that undermined America's resolve to fight against Islamic terrorism. "Look," you say, pulling articles out of your pockets with shaking hands, "I have served you! Clearly this means that I deserve to be spared!" I won't tell you how it ends, Glenn.

I imagine this scenario brought Greenwald's correspondent more than a little pleasure. This person's imagined "terrorist" sounds more like a dominatrix than anything else as he holds a knife to Greenwald and makes him beg "to be spared" before slitting his throat. This kind of terrorism porn even has a connection to reality because it's fairly close to what happened to Danny Pearl when he was murdered in Pakistan.

When conservatives conjure up the "Coming Muslim Take-Over of America," they essentially envision terrorists holding a knife to the throat of all Americans and making us do their will. For some reason, they find this to be a really fascinating and exciting vision of their future.

But it's essentially a dominatrix-style pornography in which conservatives enjoy the thought of themselves and their fellow Americans being punished by our terrorist doms. We've been such bad boys and girls not to have supported the Bush administration.

Maybe this is why Ann Coulter is so popular on the right.

The next time you see a conservative, ask them if they're part of the "Dominatrix Right."

Jonah Goldberg on Clarence Thomas

Jonah Goldberg has this notable passage on Clarence Thomas in an article entitled "Clarence Thomas' Great American Story" at RealClearPolitics.

Thomas survived, of course, and if his opponents had been able to read this book
they would have known he would. My Grandfather’s Son is a tale of pride, determination and independence — from the constraints of discrimination and the deadening influence of group-think.

As I stated in my last post, there are good reasons for empathy towards Thomas. Much as someone should ask "how would I do in battle" before condemning soldiers, we should ask "how would I have done during the heat of desegregation" before condemning Thomas.

But the story of Clarence Thomas is the farthest thing from "a tale of pride, determination, and independence." I see a lot more self-pity than "pride" or "determination" in Thomas' story

I also wonder about Thomas' purported "independence" from the "deadening influence of group-think."

What was the "group-think" that Thomas liberated himself from? In the final analysis, the idea that Thomas rejected was the hundred-year struggle for racial integration by generation on generation of African-Americans. Far from being deadening "group think," the struggle for racial equality had an overwhelming rightness and nobility to it. Thomas rejects "the grand theorists" of the Civil Rights Movement like MLK and Thurgood Marshall and also rejects the thousands of African-American activists whose courage and daring finally succeeded in opening all of American society to the talent and energy of black people. For Thomas, what the Civil Rights Movement largely meant was that he was impelled to become a pioneer of integration at places like Yale Law School. In fact, the success of civil rights activism created the imperative that young black men and women perform the very painful chore of taking up all the new opportunities within a larger American society that was still hostile to black people.

And Clarence Thomas hated the burden of desegregation, hated that he had been led to take up that burden, and has resented the Civil Rights Movement and the relentless black push for desegregation ever since.

Ultimately, Thomas turned his back on "the Great American Story" of his generation for the very "deadening" world of carping about integration and being a black poster boy for conservative opposition to the black community. He's been called an "Uncle Tom" but that's an overly-generous term for what Thomas became.

I haven't walked in Clarence Thomas' shoes. So I don't know how I would have responded to the same pressures. Who knows? Maybe I would have done the same thing.

One thing's for sure though. Clarence Thomas was on the wrong side of history, political morality, and common decency when he turned against the century-long struggle of African-Americans for civil rights.

And anybody else who would have made that turn would have been just as wrong-headed as Thomas.

Clarence Thomas: Preliminary

I would read Clarence Thomas' memoir if I had time but know I'm not going to have the time this semester.

But I think I'm going to do a couple of posts on it anyway.

One of my conservative students did a senior seminar paper last semester comparing Clarence Thomas to Thurgood Marshall. It was obvious from the student's materials that Marshall was an even greater man than I had been lead to believe while Thomas is a self-pitying, bitter kind of guy.

Certainly Thomas did not measure up to Marshall.

Having said that, I think it would be absurd to blame Thomas for not being a great man. How many great men or great women are there anyway? I have a considerable amount of self-esteem but I wouldn't measure up to Thurgood Marshall either.

And I don't particularly blame him for being a self-pitying, bitter kind of guy. From his long interview with ABC News, it seemed that Clarence Thomas' main problem was the integration era and the fact that he was one of the black people moving forward to integrate schools, colleges, offices, and political institutions.

Thomas was not the kind of guy who was suited to being a pioneer, to being the only black person or one of the only two black people in high school, college, and work settings. Being "stared at," being the target of racist insults, and being painfully self-conscious all the time about what people were thinking about him were enormous burdens.

And Thomas found no solace with other black people because he was just as painfully self-conscious about what wealthier or lighter-skinned black people thought of him.

As the black feminist bell hooks once wrote, "racism hurts." And for Clarence Thomas, every dimension of the American racial system hurt.

And the people that Thomas blamed for the pervasive pain he felt were the "grand theorists" of integration who took him and others like him out of the segregated communities--people like Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernethy, the liberal judges who pushed desegregation, and the white social elites who supported them.

They were all great men and Clarence Thomas believed that their schemes demanded much too much of bright but not extraordinary young men and women, men like Clarence Thomas.

Thomas would find the conservatives who were suspicious of integration for other reasons to be much more congenial than the people who had pushed him into the cannon's mouth of integration.

But my impression is that Clarence Thomas was pretty much a broken man for a several years before he was nominated for the Supreme Court.

Ann Coulter: A Liberal's Best Friend

Ann Coulter has a passage in her new book where she gloats about the inability of liberals to destroy her career.

Uttering lines that send liberals into paroxysms of rage, otherwise known as “citing facts,” is the spice of life. When I see the hot spittle flying from their mouths and the veins bulging and pulsing above their eyes, well, that’s when I feel truly alive. This happens, I dearly hope, once a week when my column is released. But the public gnashing of teeth that I incite occurs approximately every six to eight months, which is rather peculiar, since I believe I annoy liberals much more often than that.

Coulter is an incredibly clever polemicist and provocateur and she's right when she claims that her writing sends liberals into "paroxysms of rage." And it reflects a weakness on the part of most liberals that they allow her to make them so angry.

But liberals really would be fools if they still wanted Ann Coulter to lose her writing gigs. After five books, hundreds of columns, and thousands of interviews, Ann Coulter has become an asset to political liberalism. That's because she really did go one step too far when she slandered the 9-11 widows in Godless.

As a result, public opinion has tipped against Coulter and she's become a living symbol of the right-wing's habitual venom and bigotry to mainstream America.

Now, Coulter's in the same league as Rush Limbaugh. When one of her outrages on Muslims, John Edwards, or the right of women to vote gets publicized, it's seen as an example of everything that's wrong with conservativism.

That makes Coulter a friend of the left. In fact, one of our best friends.

A Visit with Greg Goldey

Today, my wife and I traveled bearing the gift of lasagna to Winchester, KY to visit with Greg Goldey. Greg had been sleeping on the couch but got up quickly and was in good spirits. We talked about how he was feeling, discussed some shop issues, and had a generally good time.

Avoiding Faux Pas. Greg is very thin, thin enough that his face looks Lincolnesque because his ears stick out. The last time we visited, I mentioned his resemblance to Lincoln as a kind of joke. But it turned out to be not funny at all. Goldey's father-in-law is a strong believer that Lincoln was a warmonger and a tyrant and that Gen. George McClellan was a much preferable figure. My luck to be calling somebody Lincolnesque in the only household in America where McClellan is a hero.

But today I managed to avoid that kind of embarressment by keeping my historical references to myself. Of course, Greg still looks Lincolnesque.

Getting Better. Greg is getting stronger but in somewhat of an ironic way. After his first dose of chemo, Greg slept constantly. Weeks later, he's now strong enough that he can throw up a lot. That's very promising. Greg is also up and around, talking about department business, and getting a little heated in discussing things. In other words, he's improved to the point where he can throw up and be more himself. That's progress. Soon, he'll be able to cope with underachieving students.

No Stomach for Stomach Cancer. Given that Greg's cancer is in his abdomen, he still can't eat regular food even though he's tried some fruit. It will be a very good sign when he can eat regular food again. Right now, he's still got no stomach for it.

Not Voting Republican. Goldey and I didn't get a chance to talk politics or sports. Not talking sports was probably a good idea. He got his Ph.D. from Oklahoma and Oklahoma was upset yesterday by Colorado. As for politics, I'm pretty sure Greg's not going to come out in favor of a Republican. He can barely stomach the Democrats.

The Presidency 2008--A Four Way Race?

According to Salon, some of the big wigs on the religious right have been meeting in Salt Lake City to lay the groundwork for a third party candidacy should Rudy Giuliani win the Republican nomination.

The bottom line for James Dobson, Gary Bauer, and their colleagues is abortion rights. Giuliani supports Roe v Wade and the leaders of the religious right find that intolerable. James Dobson, probably the no. 1 leader on the religious right is particularly adamant in his refusal to even vote for Giuliani (or Fred Thompson) let alone give him his full-throated support. As a result, he's thinking about picking up their marbles and getting out of the Republican Party game.

Some of this is the fault of conservative religious leaders themselves. Dobson and Bauer have refused to back social conservatives Mike Huckabee or Sam Brownback because they viewed these guys as losers. But the refusal of the conservative religious establishment to endorse one of the social conservatives has meant that they had absolutely no chance whatsoever.

The religious right couldn't find it within themselves to hold their noses and support Mitt Romney either.

So now they're nowhere in the Republican Party.

But a third-party campaign from the right would be more of a body shot than a knockout punch to a Giuliani candidacy. That's because people on the left will probably launch a fourth party campaign if Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee. It's not like anti-war activists and anti-corporate crusaders (with whom I agree on almost all substantive issues) have been sitting on their hands. They've been supporting Edwards and to a lesser extent Obama. But they aren't winning either.

A fourth party presidential campaign from the left wouldn't be as strong as a religious right campaign from the right (unless Gore or Edwards were running). The left just has less money and less institutional infrastructure than the religious right.

Ultimately then, a third party campaign would hurt Giuliani more than a fourth party effort would hurt Hillary. It just wouldn't be a knock-out punch.

Smearkrieg No. 9--Why the Right Slanders the Military

How to respond to Rush Limbaugh's abuse of soldiers against the war as "phony soldiers?" Or Fox military expert Col. David Hunt's call for American generals to be court-martialed and imprisoned for their efforts to enforce military law?

Specifically, why is the right seeming to focus on attacking the military at a point when the conservative media is fully mobilized around the "Betray-Us" controversy? Is Greenwald right when he ridicules the Fox call for the arrest of American generals as hypocrisy?

What I've noticed is that right-wing figures like Ann Coulter really exult in attacking war hero types like John Kerry and John Murtha. Because the Democrats assumed that Kerry's heroism in battle and Murtha's medals would give them credibility as opponents of the Iraq War, the smear artists of the right took special pleasure in blowing up that credibility.

There's a logic to that. Warmongering is an important part of right-wing politics and it is very important for the right that they be associated with military power, military service, and military symbols. It is also important to the right that the military be seen as supporting conservative policies.

Going a little further, the cultural association between the American right and the U. S. military helps relieve the right's sense of cultural isolation. The right is intensely alienated from American intellectual and cultural life, hostile to American cities (especially those on the coast), and beginning to become suspicious of big business icons like Walt Disney and their growing tolerance for gays. As a result, the right-wing is associated primarily with an evangelical Protestantism, rural life, and the military.

And of those three, the military is the most prestigious.

But they also have to worry about the military. The military's far from being above suspicion. They've gone a considerable way toward integrating women into the military structure. The right-wing doesn't like that. After Vietnam, the military has also become relatively serious about prosecuting military abuses of Iraqi civilians. As David Hunt's article indicates, the right doesn't like that either. Moreover, having 160,000 troops in Iraq means that there are thousands of possibilities for infantry soldiers, officers, generals, and other military personnel to get "off message" and otherwise betray the political interests of the right.

As a result, the right believes that it needs to use all of their influence to ensure that they remain allied with the military.

That's whwere the smearing comes in.

Because the symbiosis with the military is so important to the right, conservative media figures are willing, even eager, to fight when they sense the connection being threatened. The right takes special pleasure in smearing former veterans who are speaking in opposition to the war or running for office as Democratic candidates. The same goes for Republican veterans who oppose conservative policies or anointed conservative candidates as well. The right loved attacking Max Cleland, John Kerry, John McCain, and John Murtha. And they're gleeful when they demean all the retired generals who've come out against the war.

Smearing feels good in these cases because it's a way for the right to defend their cultural and political territory.

And it feels especially good to the right because they have so little territory left to defend.

Smearkrieg no. 8: The Beginning of Hillary-Smearing Season

It looks like Hillary-Smearing Season is going to begin at about the same time as hunting season this year. According to Eric Kleefield at TPM:

A Republican group called Stop Her now is vowing to raise and spend between $500,000 and $600,000 in an all-out effort to derail Hillary's Presidential candidacy between now and February. "We expect we'll be much more intense in our efforts between now and Feb. 28," said Texas businessman Richard Collins, a leading organizer of the group. Among their efforts will be adding more mainstream humor — not just the right-wing kind — to their Web site and other efforts. In addition, another group called Citizens United is producing an anti-Hillary documentary, which backers intend to serve the same role as the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth campaign against John Kerry in 2004.

Generally speaking, the right-wing limits "Smearing Season" to the six to eight months between the springtime and election day during a presidential election year.

But it looks like Hillary-Smearing is going to start early this year.

Here's why:

1. THE EARLY LEADER. There's been a great deal of publicity about Hillary Clinton becoming the Democratic nominee over the last couple of weeks. Confident that they won't have to smear Barack Obama or John Edwards, the right-wing smear activists like Richard Collins have decided to attack Hillary early. These guys would have launched smear campaigns against any Democratic nominee. It just looks like Hillary's their girl at this point. Still, you have to wonder what the right would have done to "swift boat" Barack Obama.

2. SMEARING IS CRUCIAL. Given the tremendous handicaps of the leading Republican candidates for president, the Republicans are going to have to rely extra-heavily on their smear campaign against Hillary. Whether it's the Bush albatross, Giuliani's awful family life, or the problems Hard-Working Fred Thompson applying himself, the Republicans are going to have an uphill battle against someone as intelligent, hard-working and thorough as Hillary Clinton. As a result, they're going to have to smear Hillary overtime as a way to create a more level playing field.

3. OVERCOMING SMEAR IMMUNITIES. Another problem for the GOP is that the previous fifteen years of smearing Hillary have made her somewhat immune to the usual smearing tactics. She's already been accused of sleeping with Vince Foster, killing Vince Foster, staying with Bill Clinton solely out of a lust for power, being too hard-boiled, being too soft, being a lesbian, and being a hundred other things I'm not aware of. But none of this smearing has kept her from growing in popularity. As a result, Republicans are going to have to go well beyond their usual smear tactics. They'll have to engage in the equivalent of "nuclear smearing" if they expect any of their accusations to stick. In that context, GOP smear artists will have to start working early on their new, improved smears if they expect any of their smears to work.

Deer hunters will be bitterly disappointed that Hillary-Smearing Season is going to last a lot longer than dear season this year. But who knows? Maybe the smear artists will accuse Hillary of shooting Bambi's mom as well.

Rush Limbaugh's Phony Soldiers

TPM has a couple of reports of Rush Limbaugh calling soldiers who oppose the war "phony soldiers." All of the Democratic reactions run par for the course by calling Limbaugh a "chicken hawk" and demanding that he "apologize."

Here's Chris Van Hollen from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee:

“Rush Limbaugh’s personal attack on our men and women in uniform is reprehensible. It minimizes the sacrifice our troops in Iraq and their families are making and has no place in the public discourse. Rush Limbaugh owes our military and their families an apology for his hurtful comments that minimize their service to our country.”

And here's John Kerry.

"This disgusting attack from Rush Limbaugh, cheerleader for the Chicken Hawk wing of the far right, is an insult to American troops. In a single moment on his show, Limbaugh managed to question the patriotism of men and women in uniform who have put their lives on the line and many who died for his right to sit safely in his air conditioned studio peddling hate. On August 19th, The New York Times published an op-ed by seven members of the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division critical of George Bush's Iraq policy. Two of those soldiers were killed earlier this month in Baghdad. Does Mr. Limbaugh dare assert that these heroes were 'phony soldiers'? Mr. Limbaugh owes an apology to everyone who has ever worn the uniform of our country, and an apology to the families of every soldier buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He is an embarrassment to his Party, and I expect the Republicans who flock to his microphone will now condemn this indefensible statement."

What a lack of imagination. The Democrats seem to believe that people won't get the message until you say "chicken-hawk" 100,000 times in a row--or more. This is a mistake. Although literally true, the "chicken-hawk" characterization works better if it's associated with other reflections on Limbaugh. Here's some examples.

1. The pathetic weeniness that leads Limbaugh into macho posturing with cigars, flags, and tough-guy talk while he's basically afraid to come out of his room. There's lots of criticism of right-wing masculinity by left-wing bloggers. Use some of it.

2. Stress Limbaugh's perfect willingness to play warmonger for ratings and pile up the big bucks while soldiers and the families of soldiers suffer.

3. Connect Limbaugh's bigotry to dissenting soldiers to his racism and his misogyny

4. Find a synonym for chicken-hawk

The Democrats could also emphasize that MoveOn.org had the guts to pick on a four-star general at the height of his celebrity. Limbaugh's attack on privates is a good illustration of how gutless he is.

Finally, Limbaugh is obviously using the MoveOn controversy as cover for his attack on common soldiers.

But if the Democrats are smart, they shouldn't demand that Limbaugh be fired from his radio gig. Limbaugh's almost as big an asset for the Democrats as Dick Cheney and George Bush. He has tons of listeners on the right but he's just hated by about all the moderates I know.

Unfortunately, I expect to see stories about demands for Limbaugh's firing as soon as I wake up tomorrow.

Hillary Being Presidential?

I caught the last twenty minutes of the Democratic debate. Tim Grieve of Salon thought Hillary was acting presidential because she wasn't taking any guff from Tim Russert. I'll add that she looked very relaxed and comfortable up there as well. One of the things you have to like about Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate is that she's getting better at it all the time.

Needed: Master of Fluffness for Presidential Debates

At the end of the Democratic debate last night, somebody embarrassed herself by asking a question about the Red Sox vs the Yankees.

As if anybody outside the Beltway cared.

But that gave me an idea. Why not humanize the debates by having an inconsequential but mildly amusing fluff question at the end of every presidential debate. That way, everybody could be in a good mood as they turn to something else.

And I know who could come up with the questions-- the right-wing master of fluff himself--Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom.

Nobody does fluff better than Jeff.

The First Month of Christmas

Last year, Christmas decorations went up at our local Krogers on Sept. 30. We're eager to see if that's going to be a pattern.

In the first month of Christmas
My true love sent to me
A saxophone that I can call home

Maybe I might need a better last line there.

The Bedrock in Hillary's Front-Runner Status

The "big story" over the last couple of weeks has been Hillary Clinton moving further ahead of Barack Obama in the national polls. Now that Hillary's leading Obama by up to 20 points, the media is asking a lot of Hillary questions. How she got so far in front? Is she the presumed Democratic nominee? What do the other Democratic candidates have do to beat her, and how does she stack up against the Republicans.

Here, I want to briefly argue that Hillary's lead is real. Jay Cost of Real Clear Politics argues the opposite. Cost believes that the real campaign is only going to begin when Obama and Hillary spend their 60 mill on political advertising and that current public opinion is driven by the chatter from the media and political pros rather than the hardened opinions of voters. From this perspective, the voters won't make their decision until later.

But Cost underestimates the depth of Hillary Clinton's appeal. I don't have any polling data here, but I believe that the core of Hillary's appeal is the respect that people developed for her as a result of her conduct during the Lewinsky scandal and impeachment confrontation. Unlike some opinion, I don't think the Lewinsky scandal "humanized" or "softened" Hillary. Instead, Hillary came off as someone who was morally strong and self-respecting even while in the depths of intense personal crisis. For a lot of people, it was that perception of moral strength then began to make Hillary Clinton's widely acknowledged intelligence, policy knowledge, and political acumen look "presidential." Because of that bedrock perception, Hilalry was getting more than 40% support among everyday Democrats as early as spring 2005 while the media and political elites were still viewing her as suspiciously "polarizing" and likely to lose a general election.

What's happening is that Hillary Clinton's performance during the debates is reenforcing the bedrock perception that she would be the kind of strong, effective president that's now needed after our disastrous eight-year experiment in right-wing government. By referring to Hillary as the "best" or "best prepared" of the Democratic candidates, the media is beginning to catch up with popular opinion about Hillary.

But Hillary's ahead because of popular opinion rather than the media.

Interesting News from Alabama

The Republicans can't even get good news from Alabama.

According to a Rasmussen Poll listed in Talking Points Memo, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson are ahead of Hillary by 53-36 in Alabama.

That sounds like a safe margin.

But, George Bush beat John Kerry by 63 to 37 in Alabama in 2004. As a result, Giuliani and Thompson are ten points behind Bush's 2004 margin.

Perhaps the Republican nominee will clean up the whole 11% undecided vote. But he'll still be starting more than 10 points behind where Bush finished.

The American Right Tutors Ahmadinejad

According to Anne Applebaum, a conservative columnist for Slate, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accepted the invitation to speak at Columbia as a way to promote his idea that he is more of a democrat than his opponents in the West.

It's pretty obvious that Ahmadinejad got this idea from the American right. Maybe one of Karl
Rove's proteges is working for him as a consultant. That's because the right is always trying to argue that they are more liberal than liberals. The best-known gambit along these lines is William Bennett quoting MLK's "I Have a Dream Speech" and claiming with almost a straight face against almost any government action that would benefit African-Americans.

But smaller fish like Christina Hoff Summers claims that they are the real feminists because they reject the feminism of the last forty years in the name of Victorian-era feminism. An even smaller fish, Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom, claims to be "the real liberal" as he promotes the pointless war in Iraq, opposes feminism, opposes gay rights, and follows the William Bennett line on race.

In a way, you can't blame the right-wing for taking this approach. Given the close association of conservatism with slavery, segregation, opposition to voting rights for women, McCarthyism, the Scopes Trial, and many of the other shameful episodes of American history, it's no surprise that the right-wing is extremely quiet about their heritage as American conservatives.

But, if Bennett, Summers, and Goldstein are the real liberals, then Ahmadinejad is a real democrat.

A Brief Hillary

I don't think Hillary's the "inevitable" Democratic nominee. Almost any political candidate is only dumb comment away from losing a big lead. Hillary deserves the big lead she currently enjoys. She's the best of the Democratic candidates. But she's just as capable of blowing it with an off-hand comment or poorly calculated statement as anybody else.

But there is one sign of Hillary inevitability out there.

Conservatives like David Brooks and William Kristol have moved from wanting Hillary nominated because they think they can beat her to wanting her nominated because they think they can influence her.

Homecoming in Black and White

There's some good dancing from this Mid-South video from this high school band at a football game involving an African-American high school. In the South I guess.

It just so happens that I went to the homecoming football game at the local Rowan County High School in Kentucky last week. The football Vikings are bad enough that the players are said to bet on how badly they're going to get beaten. And they got beat 34-12 in a particularly dispiriting game.

My daughter is a percussionist in the band. In some ways, it was like the band at the African-American high school. The Rowan County Marching Band was in uniform, stationed in the far left of the bleachers, and sounding good.

No surprise there. Rowan County won the state high school band competition last year.

The Rowan County Marching Band didn't have the same kind of hard-driving dancers as the African-American band. In Rowan County's case, sexiness was limited to all the making-out that was going on while the band director was away.

Maybe I should have been in the band instead of playing football after all.

Celebrating Little Rock

INSPIRATION. I find myself inspired by the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Little Rock Nine and have always been glad to see the iconizing of the Civil Rights Movement. If anything, I wish that additional figures beyond MLK, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, and the Little Rock Nine were made into cultural/political icons. Why shouldn't Thurgood Marshall, Fred Shuttlesworth, the Freedom Riders, the students who did the lunch counter protests get the mythologizing treatment as well?

THE CIVIL RIGHTS LENS. The Civil Rights Movement is the most important modern window through which Americans can understand much of what's worthwhile in American history. By appropriately celebrating the Civil Rights Movement, we connect ourselves back to the fights over lynching, the work of the New England school marms celebrated by W. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folks, the abolitionist movement, Jacksonian Democracy, and the American Revolution. Because we still have a living connection to the civil rights era, we're still vitally linked to the expansions of civil and political freedom associated with the figures of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington.

REDEMPTION. I can't get the picture up yet, but I've always been fascinated by the famous picture of Elizabeth Eckford walking toward the school with the white woman barking racial insults in the background. The picture invites us to identify with the teen-age African-American girl and to view the white woman as a kind of moral monstrosity. Part of the horrible fascination of that image for me is that I have some female relatives who could have been that snarling white woman and most of my family would have sympathized much more with her than with the young black woman walking past her.

What makes the civil rights movement so unique as a moral/political movement is that MLK and many others urge us both black and white to fully identify ourselves with both Elizabeth Eckford and fully forgive and extend a love to the snarling white woman behind her. Like the Freedom Rides, the lunch-counter sit-ins, and Rosa Park's refusal to move to the back of the bus, Elizabeth Eckford's walk represents a peak moment in American history that all of us should consider our own. But the redemption of that walk would not be complete until history extended a hand to all the snarling racists and they can somehow be represented as joining the walk towards an equal society. I've heard Joseph Lowery (still the head of the SCLC I believe) make this point in relation to the Ku Klux Klan in 1978 and I still believe there's a profound truth there.

Smearkrieg no. 7: Nuclear-Smearing Rudy Style

THE HORSERACE. I still think that Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson are the horses in the race for the Republican nomination. If campaigns won nominations, Giuliani would be the favorite. Right now, Giuliani is playing all of his essential arguments very well. He's maintaining his moderate stance on social issues, can compete with Hillary Clinton in several blue states, and has successfully positioned himself as a tough guy on Iraq, Iran, and Israel. The Giuliani campaign has also shown that it can go after Hillary Clinton in its recent Hillary/Move-On ad. That's a lot better than the Fred Thompson campaign which seems to be content with making sure their candidate gets up in the morning.

THE LOGIC OF NUCLEAR SMEARING. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times argues that showing he can slap around Hillary Clinton is pretty much the only thing Rudy can do to promote his candidacy.

Giuliani has decided that the best way to win his primary is to show he can beat the woman on the way to winning hers. He can't campaign on family values or the sanctity of marriage. He can't whip up any fears on abortion or gays. He can't campaign on his plan to get out of Iraq because he doesn't have one.

He can't campaign as the tough-guy heir to Bush because nobody likes Bush. He can't campaign on attacking Iran because he'll sound like crazy Dick Cheney. He can't campaign on the economy because he's W. redux, facing a possible recession because of the mortgage crisis.

That's not quite right. Rudy's campaigning on the premise that he'll be tougher than George Bush on terrorism and even more crazy than Dick Cheney on Iran and other pseudo-enemies. Up until now, Rudy's foreign policy imagery has been all about race. Having apparently shown that he can "handle" African-Americans in New York, Giuliani promises to do the same with the Iraqis, Iranians, and any other non-whites who get in our way.

With the Hillary/Moveon ad, it's now about gender as well. The American right fears and loathes (and loves) Hillary Clinton much more than they fear Ahmadinejad or Hezbollah. By "slapping" Hillary around, Giuliani is putting down a down payment on his aggression toward the other enemies the right wants to launch wars against.

But Giuliani is going to have to do a lot more than slap Hillary Clinton around a little. Dowd is wrong to think that Giuliani just has to avoid gay rights, abortion, family issues, and the war. In fact, Giuliani has to smear Hillary enough to compensate for his sins against everyone's sense of decency. Smearing Hillary is going to have to be Giuliani's answer for questions about his corrupt association with Bernard Kerik, his three marriages, his stance on social issues, and his love nest at the World Trade Center.

If Giuliani wins the nomination, he would have to go into "nuclear smearing" to compensate for the unpopularity of the Bush administration, the floundering war in Iraq, and the declining prestige of the United States in the world. He'll also have to compensate for his general weirdness.

Given that Rudy Giuliani wouldn't change very many of Bush's policies, he won't be able to just slap around Hillary Clinton with his current smears. Rudy will have to try to blow her up. He'll have to go nuclear.

The Affirmative Action Notre Dame Coach

At 0-4 and getting throttled every time they play, Notre Dame is a really lousy team. Michael Rosenberg of Fox Sports and the Detroit Free Press sums up the situation nicely.

Notre Dame is on the hook for another $20-some-million to an offensive genius who can't pick up a first down, let alone a win. They are dead last in the country in total offense by a wide margin. They are staring 0-8 in the face.

The "offensive genius" is head coach Charlie Weis who now seems to have ridden Brady Quinn's coattails to bowl games in his first two seasons.

Notre Dame is one of the impatient programs that tires of coaches who can't win championships, gets itchy trigger fingers with coaches who go 10-2 but loses the big rivalry game, and fires anybody who goes 6-5.

The others include Ohio State, Oklahoma, Nebraska, LSU, Alabama, and Auburn.

With Charlie Weis at 0-4 and the team looking pathetic, one has to wonder why he hasn't been fired already.

Maybe Notre Dame is keeping him out of affirmative action considerations.

Did They Use Color-Blind Nooses in Jena?

COLOR-BLIND NOOSES. Somewhere between 30-60 thousand marchers went to Jena, Louisiana on Thursday to protest the treatment of six young black men accused of beating a white teenager. Racial tension had been developing at the local high school for a year after some white students hung nooses by their favorite tree to show their opinion of the black kids who also started sitting by the "white tree."

There's been an analogous problem at our local high school in Morehead, KY where white students brought guns to the school recently after a dispute with the very few black students at the school.

Funny though, all the white residents of Jena seem to think there's no racial tension in the town.

They have the freedom to march and freedom of speech, but our town is not racist like this is being depicted," said a white resident who would identify himself only as Jay. "The nooses were just a joke."

No officials of the town, which is 85 percent white, offered any comments about Thursday's march. In the past, they have angrily insisted that Jena suffers from no racial tensions.

Those must have been color-blind nooses.

SPEAKING OF NOOSES. It seems that nooses have become the symbol du jour for white racial hatred since the Michael Richards incident. A Waverly, Ohio student at Morehead State University told me that somebody put a noose up on the entrace to her town last December.

Perhaps Confederate flags are no longer an adequate expression for racist sentiment--not that the Confederate flags weren't symbolizing lynching among others.

NEW DIRECTIONS/OLD DIRECTIONS. The prosecutor abuse in Jena represented a reversion back to the traditional kinds of abuses that target the black population. Conservative critics of Michael Nifong's abuses during the Durham rape case must be relieved to see the Jena prosecutor go back to tradition.

However, the march on Jena manifested a new level of strength and influence among African-American bloggers who worked outside the traditional civil rights institutions to publicize the problems in Jena and get the march going.

If only there were more overlap between African-American bloggers and white progressive bloggers.

Reply From Bronze Trinity on BET and gansta rap

Below is Bronze Trinity's reply to a question I asked about the most important factors determining whether the Afro-Sphere's Accurate Images Campaign against BET and gansta rap will be a success:

The most important factors? Well, we are trying something new by appealing to bloggers and individuals to use their buying dollars to stop supporting gangsta rap because there are other forms of music (including hip hop) that does not portray harmful stereotypes in a way that can be construed as glorification. We want consumers to raise their voices by demanding more radio play for alternative music and less for gangsta rap. Gangsta rappers get a lot of media exposure and advertising because they have money. Positive artists do not have as much money or promotion. So to even the playing field we are asking bloggers to promote positive artists for free. Word-of mouth advertising could really help. Many people don't know that there are alternatives or that music executives give preference to gangsta rap (that is very racist and sexist) over music of the same style that is not racist and sexist.

We want them to call BET and request particular artists and types of programming. We want people to watch BET shows for the commercials and then contact the advertising companies telling them that they are sponsoring sexist and racist content. They may decide to advertise somewhere else. This was something that seems to have worked against the Hot Ghetto Mess TV show.

So we think that this will only be as big as people make it. It will be successful if people email the release, make blog entries, post Youtube commentaries on the issue, and actually take some of the recommended actions. We also think that getting sponsors to remove their advertisements from BET, BET websites, and gangsta rappers websites will pressure them to change. This is a new approach because instead of going to the channel or artists themselves (who tend to ignore our requests) we are threatening their source of income.

#1 album sales for Common and Kanye West outselling 50cent are signs that positive/conscious artists are bankable and that there could be a profitable shift in the music industry away from the stereotypes and sexism that is rampant in mainstream hip hop.

Giuliani's Tactical Stupidity on Israel

Visiting in London to be seen with Margaret Thatcher, Rudy Giuliani proposes to promote Israel for NATO membership. Giuliani has a rationale for this proposal in that Israel is a democracy and NATO is an association that includes a lot of democracies.

But the underlying logic of Giuliani's position is that he's trying to be provocatively stupid so that people on the right will think of him as a "true conservative" despite his support for abortion rights and gay rights.

Glenn Greenwald argues that Giuliani's proposal is "extremist" and irrational because it commits the United States to treat all of Israel's wars as American wars and would be yet another way to commit the United States to endless war against our own interest.

Greenwald believes that other presidential candidates would pounce on Giuliani for this kind of fringe position if we lived "in a rational world." However, nobody has objected because of what Greenwald sees as the exaggerated significance of Israeli lobbies and Jewish money in American politics.

These factors might explain the silence from Democratic candidates and the mainstream media, but why is Giuliani articulating a point of view that's so contrary to American interests in the first place?

Obviously, Giuliani's "Israel in NATO" proposal is designed as an "almost-new" way (actually the proposal has been around for awhile) for Giuliani to promote himself as a friend of Israel and enemy of Israel's enemies. In that sense, Giuliani is just trying to differentiate himself from the intensely pro-Israeli positions of Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Fred Thompson.

But Giuliani is also making a finer political calculation here. He's betting that Fox, conservative talk show hosts, the right-wing blogosphere and their audiences will absolutely love the "Israel in NATO." It's apparently new. It's provocative. It provides an occasion for the right-wing media to accuse anybody who disagrees with being anti-Semitic. Above all, the right likes the flamboyant stupidity of the idea--the way that Giuliani is brushing aside any notion of patiently or cautiously pursuing American interests and just throwing all our weight behind Israel.

In the comic book world of the American right, this kind of weenie-ish macho posturing trumps rational self-interest every time. That's a lot of the reason the right used to love George Bush.

I don't know if "Israel in NATO" is going to make a big splash on the right. But Giuliani and his campaign team have shown that they can find their way to the hearts of the GOP right.

Giuliani might be able to survive hard-working Fred Thompson after all.

The Day I Stood Up To NPR

There's an article in Time about bomb-throwing Republican senators Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint who take a lot of symbolic stands against spending. What makes them particularly annoying to other senators is that hold up legislation by refusing to join in the "unanimous consent" resolutions that allow a lot of routing legislation to get passed.

I'm sure they'll both be heroes to the right-wing because the Bush administration has shown that the right would rather throw impotent bombs than actually grow up and govern.

But I won't be too hard on Cobern and DeMint.

I've done the same thing.

When I was in faculty senate long ago, the chair was trying to get a motion passed unanimously to re-authorize $100,000 in funding to get NPR for our campus radio station.

But I can't stand NPR and thought that the campus radio station was pointless for students because it played classical music all day.

So I stonewalled, making several medium-length speeches characterizing NPR reporting as mass media "cliches in depth" and the general NPR approach as "popular culture for people who are too good for popular culture." The university had just downgraded it's football program from scholarship to non-scholarship because of lack of student interest. I argued that students were just as uninterested in NPR. I should have said that students were even less interested.

But the vote was 33-1 and I was the one. Even the token right-wingers supported the resolution because they didn't want to make tenured faculty mad at them. They were certainly mad at me and I was very much untenured.

But they didn't get their unanimous vote either.

Actually, the Senate Democrats could use a few bomb throwers besides Russ Feingold.

African-American Bloggers Against Stereotypes

The Afro-Sphere Bloggers Association has condemned BET and a number of famous rappers for purveying stereotypes of African-Americans.

According to Afro-Spear:

Gangsta rap regularly glorifies sexism, the n-word, profanities, violence, drug use and dealing, sexism, and the dehumanization of Black men and women. Gangsta rap videos and stereotype-filled shows are the programming staples of BET. “BET and hip hop have gone down hill. They were once inspirations. Now they purvey some of the most harmful anti-Black sentiments you will ever see or hear, and this has become a representation of mainstream Black culture,” says Bronze Trinity of the Afrosphere Bloggers Association (ABA). ABA is coordinating the Afrosphere Accurate Images campaign against BET and gangsta rap.

One of the students in my senior seminar last spring on African-American political thought emphasized his belief that African-Americans should take white conservative criticisms of black culture more seriously.

My thought, somewhat illustrated by the statement above, tends to be the opposite--that African-Americans writers are so brutally critical of every dimension of their own culture that white conservatives are superfluous.

The Blackwater Scandal: A New Round of Demoralization Begins

As everybody knows, the primary effect of Gen. Petraeus' testimony was to make Republicans and the right-wing feel better about the failed occupation in Iraq.

But that won't last long.

The unfolding scandal over the conduct of the Blackwater Security company in Iraq is a good bet to restart the process of Republican demoralization. According to Spencer Ackerman of TPM, the State Department has allowed Blackwater to operate with impunity beyond the reach of both Iraqi and American law. Last weekend, trigger happy Blackwater gunmen killed at least nine Iraqis and that might be only the tip of the iceberg.

If this scandal has legs, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice will eventually have to answer for it. But the right is the only part of the American public that's going to be surprised.

Everybody else already knows how bad it is.

Update: Hearings on Blackwater begin on Oct. 2.

Yglesias on Politicizing Petraeus

This a comment by Matthew Yglesias that I can endorse:

Meanwhile, Bush's disingenuousness in saying "It is one thing to attack me — which is fine" is just staggering. For years, the man took the view that criticism of his policies amount to criticism of the idea of freedom, that to disagree with his Iraq policy was racist and unpatriotic, and all the rest. Eventually, years and years of fruitless, bungled, unnecessary warfare caused him to become so unpopular that this line of counterattack became unviable. Thus, he hit on the strategy of finding a well-regarded media-savvy general and, in essence, appointing him front man for administration. For months and months and months the administration indicated that to question its policy was to question the Great Man Petraeus. So, naturally, people came to criticize Petraeus. If he doesn't like seeing a politicized officer's corps, he shouldn't have been hiding behind the generals in the first place.

The Bush administration is like an infectious disease. Because of their relentless dishonesty and mind-numbing incompetence, Bush and his people lost all their credibility. As a result, they set up Gen. Petraeus as the spokesperson for their failed war in Iraq. But in the process, the Bush people managed to infect Petraeus with their brand of dishonesty (not that he was unwilling) and destroy his credibility just as surely as they destroyed their own.

MoveOn was right to claim that Gen. Petraeus betrayed our country with his convuluted testimony before Congress. But he's only a pawn in the larger betrayal engineered by his bosses in Washington.

What the War Costs the Right

Right-wingers like Rush Limbaugh and Judge (and prolific author) Richard Posner are fond of saying that the Constitution is not a "suicide pact."

It's a cute phrase that's only meaningful to those who buy into the "be afraid, be very afraid" message of the American right on the war on terror, the Iraq War, Iran, health care, gay marriage, and other national issues.

But, it's the war in Iraq itself which has become a suicide pact for Bush administration, the Republican Party, and the right-wing. And they're suffering on a wide variety of fronts.

THE END OF THE AFFAIR WITH THE RIGHT. The war has already stripped the Bush administration and conservatism more broadly of its reputation. The main words people use to describe President Bush are insults like moron, idiot, and buffoon. My wife and I get regular congratulations for our bright yellow "W: Worst President Ever" bumper stickers. Conservativism in general seems to be sufferiong the same fate. The thirty years of hard-work that the right-wing put into building up the "conservative" brand is going down the drain as majorities of the American population as a whole and big majorities of African-Americans, Hispanics, women, young people, and gays identify themselves as Democrats.

It might not be that long before the only people who identify themselves as conservatives are folks with Confederate flag bumper stickers.

THE HARD AND SOFT MATH OF IT. The war has already cost the Republicans control over Congress and will probably ensure that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is sworn in as the next president. If it's a Hillary/Obama ticket, there's a decent chance that the Democrats will control the presidency for the next 16 years before the country finally gets over its "Iraq Syndrome" and begins taking the Republicans seriously again. At the very least, the Iraq War will be an albatross around the neck of whoever is unlucky enough to be the Republican candidate. That's because the numbers are very tough for the Republicans and the right. According to recent polling, people are somewhat more optimistic about conditions in Iraq but that a large majority disapproves of President Bush and a majority want the Democrats to expedite withdrawal. According to the Pew Research Center, these conclusions have been locked in since last January or February. As a result, war-mongering Republican candidates are going to have a hard time convincing anybody other than partisan Republicans of the wisdom of continuing high levels of troop deployments.

But there's also a "fuzzy math" at work here. There is no good option for the war. If the war in Iraq goes on as it has for the last year, many of the politicians associated with the war are going to have a lot to worry about. But, if the Bush administration caves on the war and accepts withdrawal, it will be even worse for conservative politicians because they'll be left holding the bag of a failed war. They won't have a war to defend. They won't have a policy to advance. They'll be stuck without a readily identifiable agenda outside well-practiced right-wing smearing tactics on gay marriage, abortion, and pedophilia. It's "soft" math because it's hard to translate lack of an agenda into the hard numbers of polling and election results. But a Bush administration "surrender" to the Democrats would be very bad for the Republicans.

EXPANDING DOMESTIC GOVERNMENT. Rich Lowry cautions conservatives to "be afraid" of Hillary Clinton's health care proposal. According to Lowry, HillaryCare 2.0 is different from Hillary's 1993 proposal in that it's merely the logical next step in government involvement in health care rather than a radical overhaul. Government already pays half of the cost of health insurance; government mandates on individual coverage aren't much of a step beyond that. And it's likely that a Hillary administration would take further incremental steps. According to Michael Cannon, "Clinton proposes widening the availability of every government health-care program at hand -- Medicare would be extended to the nonelderly; the S-Chip program for poor children would be extended to the middle class; and the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan would be extended to all."

If Hillary or Obama are elected president, they'll carry enhanced Democratic Congressional majorities with them and find a friendly legislative environment for these kinds of incremental proposals. The involvement of the federal government in the domestic economy will grow more extensive and most people who aren't right-wingers won't mind. Combined with the increased visibility of minority groups, feminists, and immigrants, and a general atmosphere of multi-culturalism and negotiated solutions, the election of a Democratic administration will make the country as a whole will be a less congenial place for conservatives. Conservatives had hoped that a long-term Republican domination would result in a radical re-orientation toward a market economy, an America First attitude, and a muscular, confrontational foreign policy.

But all of that might be lost and it might be lost for several electoral cycles.

And it will primarily be the result of the Iraq War.

NOT JUST ISOLATIONISM--ISOLATION. The creativity of the right-wing has been manifested in the formation of a series of alternative institutions ranging from conservative talk radio to Fox News, suburban mega-churches, and the proliferating Christian schools. However, a number of the political institutions and figures that served as bridges between conservative constituencies and the rest of the country are falling by the wayside. The Democratic Leadership Council, the mainstream media, and the New Republic are all good examples. All of these institutions used to take conservative ideas seriously, recast many of those ideas in liberal language, and show how conservative ideas could speak to liberal values. The war has both weakened these institutions and pretty much ended their bridging function.

The looming retirement of John Warner and Chuck Hagel, the rightward march of John McCain, and the electoral defeat of moderate Republicans like Lincoln Chaffee has reduced the number of electoral officials who could speak both conservative and liberal. These kinds of figures won't be replaced and moderate Republicans like Susan Collins are likely candidates for defeat in 2008.

The overall outcome is that conservatives are edging towards greater individual and group isolation within an American society that might explicitly reject them.

Once again, the main cause of this isolation will be the war they've cherished so much.

A Brokered Convention?

Michael Barone argues against the possibility of a brokered political party conventions on historical grounds. For Barone, brokered conventions like the Democratic convention that nominated segregationist John Davis in 1924 are relics of a pre-electronic era in which political operatives had to meet personally at conventions in order to iron out agreements.

Like a lot of these kinds of historical arguments, Barone's take on brokered conventions falls well short of being convincing. The problem concerns the failures of particular political systems. In 1924, the Democrats couldn't come to agreement between the urban machines and the Southern segregationists. That's why the convention needed 123 ballots to come up with a nominee.

In general, the American political system is not functioning very well at present. The hijacking of the Republican Party by the extreme right wing has introduced a destabilizing rigidity into every American political institution. Because the conservative movement has succeeded in making refusal to compromise or accommodate into a test of political manhood, everybody else has had to follow suit. As a result, getting anything done through the American political system has become a tremendous ordeal for everyone involved.

In this context, it's easy to see a day when a number of still viable candidates emerge from the primary electoral seasons of one or both parties. Such an outcome would result in a brokered convention of one kind of another. In fact, it might happen to the Republicans in 2008.

Of course, it's not written into stone that a brokered convention would come to agreement either.

Smearkrieg No. 6--"I've Not Yet Begun to Smear"

It looks like Ernie Fletcher wants to be the John Paul Jones of smearing.

Although Kentucky's Republican governor is running 19 points behind in the latest polling, he's extremely confident about his chances.

Just as John Paul Jones dismissed demands for his surrender by crying "I've not yet begun to fight," Fletcher dismisses the polls with a "we've yet to define our opponent."

In other words, Fletcher has "not yet begun to smear."

The usual formula for Republican candidates is to pile up an enormous amount of money and then spend it on negative ads the last two or three weeks before the election.

Unfortunately for Fletcher, it might not be possible to smear his problems away. Widely perceived as incompetent and corrupt, Fletcher has a lot of smearing to do before the public has as much contempt for Beshear as they have for Fletcher himself.

It will be interesting to see if Fletcher engages in creative smearing or decides to go with the old stand-by's of abortion, school prayer, and pedophilia.

Democrats: Suspend Your Campaigns!!

All the talk about Iraq last week boiled down to this: We're trapped in a h ydra-headed religious, ethnic civil war until Congress musters the will to change course.

The Sunday editorial of my local paper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, says it all. The Iraq war is going to go on its pointless way unless "Congress musters the will to change course."

And there's almost no confidence that Congress will muster that will.

The Democratic leadership in the House and the Senate might have enough confidence to pass more legislation with withdrawal deadlines. But neither Nancy Pelosi nor Harry Reid have shown any inclination to defy a Bush veto and cut off funding for the war.

However, continuing the war is bad policy, bad morality and bad politics wrapped into one. The Democrats should move to cut off funding and they shouldn't wait for a Bush veto to begin publicaly promoting their cause.

But the Democrats need to concentrate all of their energies if they are going to succeed in ending the war.

And that means temporarily calling off all the presidential campaigns. I mean it. The Democrats should suspend presidential campaigns.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards are three of the best known figures in the Democratic Party and they're all running hard-charging presidential campaigns. But the fact that they're all running to be elected president in November 2008 is draining the Democrats of a lot of their leadership ability, imagination, and firepower in the here and now.

Given the stakes of the upcoming fight over war funding, that's not an appropriate use of Democratic Party resources.

Instead of running for president, Clinton, Obama, and the rest should commit themselves to ending the war. There's no need for the candidates to cancel scheduled events. They should just stop treating those events as campaign events and begin to treat them as anti-war speeches and rallies. Their staffs should stop developing health care initiatives, education plans, and anti-poverty proposals and focus instead on proposals for troop withdrawals and post-withdrawal plans. Their campaigns should stop generating subtle little digs at each other and start cutting through the Bush administration's weak arguments for continuing the war.

In fact, the Democratic presidential campaigns should start cooperating with each other. The Hillary, Obama, and Edwards organizations should be organizing shows of unity among the candidates, coordinating their daily themes about the war, and sharing their ideas. They should be coordinating everything they do with the Democratic leadership.

Suspending their presidential campaigns would be a tremendously innovative political idea that would generate a lot of media buzz. It would jump-start the Democratic base and potentially turn popular anti-war sentiment into anti-war excitement. The Democrats would probably start drawing bigger crowds, raising more money, and getting better media coverage as well.

Suspending presidential campaigns would give everyone more confidence that the Democrats have the backbone to lead the country through difficult times.

People have felt good about the Democratic candidates. People would feel even better if the Democrats stopped campaigning.

But most importantly, the suspension of presidential campaigns would increase the chances that the Democrats could actually cut off funding for the war.

That means that suspending campaigns would be good policy, good morality, and good politics.

The Failed War for Oil

Alan Greenspan is going to claim in his memoir that the U. S. invaded Iraq because of oil. If that's the case, then the war for Mideast oil has also failed. The U. S. invasion of Iraq did not lead to increased Iraqi oil production, has partially destabilized Saudi Arabia, and seemingly put Iran and the U. S. on the road to a military collision.

Middle Eastern oil supplies are less stable than ever.

But perhaps the Bush administration wanted the Middle East to be less stable and wanted lower oil production as a way to jack up oil prices.

Yeah, that's the ticket.

The King of Kentucky

Hats off to Rich Brooks, football coach at the University of Kentucky. Last night's 40-34 win over no. 9 Louisville is yet more evidence that Brooks has done things the right way. Coming into a program that was on probation, Brooks has made gradual progress. Brooks hasn't been getting the 5 star recruits, but he's found 2 and 3 star guys who can make plays. Brooks has caught a couple of breaks. High School football has gotten a lot better in Kentucky since spring practice was instituted several years ago. As a result, UK has a better pool of players to draw from. Brooks was also lucky to have UK alum Joker Phillips on his initial staff. Now offensive coordinator, Phillips is a great recruiter who has a terrific knack for designing plays that work for his kind of players.

But it's Rich Brooks who defines success at UK. Willing to settle for measured progress instead of going for the home run, Brooks was patient with the program, realistic about the short-term prospects, and willing to make adjustments as he went along.

In other words, Brooks did things the right way.

As a result, UK football has gone from being a perennial sad sack to strong wannabe. Kentucky's still well behind top powerhouses like Florida, but they're on a level with Tennessee, Arkansas, and Georgia and deserve to be ranked in the top 20.

That makes Rich Brooks the King of Kentucky.

Smearkrieg No. 5--Faith in the Perfect Smear

Ron Brownstein has a useful column in the LA Times about GOP electoral confidence. What interests Brownstein is the failure of Republican candidates to tack back to the middle.

The fact that moderates voted overwhelmingly for Democrats (57%-39% according to exit polls) was a big factor in GOP setbacks in 2006. However, Republican presidential candidates are just as emphastic about conservative orthodoxy as ever. First tier Republican candidates Giuliani and Thompson are just as unbending in their support of the war as ever. So is the second tier of John McCain and Mitt Romney. Republican candidates also support Bush on privatizing social security, deregulating the insurance industry, health reform, and tax cuts for the wealthy. According to Brownstein, the only place where Republican candidates deviate from Bush is on immigration issues where Bush deviated from conservative ideology.

Brownstein also notices that Republican candidates have wratched up their rhetoric concerning the Democrats, with Republican candidates routinely calling Hillary Clinton's health proposals "socialized medicine." Second-tier warrior Mitt Romney even views Hillary Clinton's "economic agenda amounts to "out with Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx.'" Brownstein expects that "these early volleys will, in fact, echo through the 2008 election and produce a dynamic in which the Republican nominee consistently tries to ignite ideological firefights and the Democrat tries to extinguish them."

In other words, the Republican candidate is going to devote a great deal of his energy to an ideological smear campagin.

But Brownstein doesn't quite understand the relative weight of conservative orthodoxy and ideological smear tactics in Republican campaign plans. GOP consultants and strategists talk about their confidence in the popularity of conservative orthodoxy. But Brownstein seems to be mesmerized by the displays of confidence.

He shouldn't be. Republican leaders can read the polls indicating a leftward shift in the American public just as well as the Democrats. They know that the public supports abortion rights, wants national health care reform, opposes the war in Iraq, and wants more government regulation of the economy rather than less.

So why are the Republicans projecting so much confidence in conservative orthodoxy. There are a lot of reasons. First, there's the matter of habit. The Republican leadership has responded to all their setbacks of the last 15 years by moving farther to the right. If moving to the right worked in 1992 and 1998, why wouldn't it work now?

The Republican base has also moved much farther to the right and the Republican leadership needs to keep the base happy in order to succeed.

Given the overall incompetence of the Bush administration (FEMA, NASA, Gonzales, etc.) and the various on-going Republican scandals, there's also a sense in which conservative ideology is the only card the Republicans have to play.

In the final analysis though, what drives Republican confidence is not faith in ideology; it's faith in their ability to smear the Democratic presidential candidate into being so personally unpopular that people will vote for the Republican despite everything. If anything characterizes the Republican base, the right-wing attack media, and GOP consultants and media types, it's their love for the language of insult, innuendo, put-downs, and name-calling. Conservatives have an abiding faith in their ability to find the "perfect smear" that will "raise questions" about the Democratic candidate and get people to doubt policy ideas that they would favor in public opinion polls.

For the right, faith in smearing far outweighs their faith in conservatism and its that faith in smearing that gives them confidence going into 2008.

Faludi, Comic Book Styles, and Hillary Toughness

A Kentucky blogger (via BookerRising) from the comfortable college town of Danville flags a Glamour review of Susan Faludi's new book.

The 2001 attacks, she claims, made American feel vulnerable and created a longing for the good old days of 'manly men. As a result ...Female heroes were ignored ...Women vanished from TV talk shows ...Grieving widows became the feminine ideal ...June Cleaver replaced Carrie Bradshaw ...The national 'bump watch' began.

It will be interesting to see the book, but my initial reaction is that Faludi's at best simplistic and at worst just wrong.

There may have been an initial "longing for manly men," but nobody wanted the "good old days of manly men." There's no going back to the good old days of John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Clark Gable. It's a lot more exaggerated now--Wolverine, Rambo, Grand Theft Auto, wrestlers, and the thug universe. No more of that strong, silent type anymore. Any man who wants to be a man has to be big and loud or be fans of someone big and loud. There's no safety in current manhood styles. Because it's all about "taking names" and "kicking ass," there's a sense in which instability is needed and desired as the only way to prove your manhood. Far from being a cause of insecurity, 9-11 was seen more as an opportunity to assert manliness. We were going to kick their ass and grind them into the dust.

The longing for a reason for a lot of American men to kick ass was a good chunk of the predisposition in American culture to accept the Bush administration's campaign to promote the invasion of Iraq.

But the administration might also be killing the comic book versions of masculinity. As we draw to the end of the 9-11 decade, big talking guys like George Bush and Dick Cheney have become legendary as failures. The big-talking guys of the right couldn't cut it in the war, couldn't cut it on the home front, couldn't avoid corruption, and couldn't keep away from Congressional pages, prostitutes, and undercover cops. In the end, the only kind of manhood that the big-talking guys of the right had was talk.

That's why it looks like the decade is going to end with Hillary Clinton as our first female president.

Because of their pathetic failures, the Bush, Cheney, and the Limbaugh/Hannity posers on the right have de-legitimated the whole trend toward comic book masculinity that fueled the initial reaction to 9-11. If Hillary Clinton is elected, what the country is going to get is a different kind of toughness, a patient kind of aggressiveness that's capable of cleaning up the messes left by the Bush incompetents and making policies work. Hillary-brand toughness is something that men and women can both have. Therefore, it's not really a kind of masculinity at all.

For my money, the Bush administration has been such a spectacular failure that one of the promising outcomes of the 9-11 decade is a general disconnection of manliness from political toughness.

That's a good thing and we have the Bush administration and the right to thank for it.

Maybe I should write a thank you note to the president.

Boehner and the Big Price

Yesterday, John Boehner claimed in relation to Iraq that

We need to continue our effort here because . . . long term, the investment that we’re making today will be a small price if we’re able to stop al Qaeda here, if we’re able to stabilize the Middle East, it’s not only going to be a small price for the near future, but think about the future for our kids and their kids.

Predictably, Democrats like John Kerry and Howard Dean came up with the weak response of being "outraged" and demanding apologies. Other Democrats haven't responded at all. Among liberal bloggers, Greg Sergent of TPM does better than the politicians but still comes up short.

Boehner, like the White House and most Republicans, is willing to sink an untold number of American lives into the pursuit of the fantasy of a stable Middle East and into the illusion that civilization as we know it will come to an end if we don't defeat the ever omnipotent Al Qaeda.

Like Glenn Greenwald of Salon, Sargent gives the Republicans and the right too much credit for believing the delusions they promote concerning a stable Middle East, a free Iraq, the Muslim threat, or the omnipotence of al-Qaeda. Everyday conservatives may believe these things, but people like Boehner, Karl Rove, and Rush Limbaugh don't believe them any more than Nancy Pelosi or Cindy Sheehan believe them. What Boehner and the Republicans really can't stomach is the idea of caving in to the left on the war and they think that it's worthwhile to sacrifice "untold number[s] of American lives" as long as they have a hope of winning the presidency again in 2009. For the Republicans, carrying on with the pointless war is a "small price to pay" in the hope of avoiding defeat at the hands of their domestic enemies.

Apologies are really not enough.

George Will's Doubts About Hard-Working Fred

George Will seems to think that Fred Thompson is ignorant as well as lazy. I don't know why--just because Thompson doesn't understand campaign finance legislation he sponsored while in the Senate.

In other Fred news, Thompson's recent surge in the polls has come largely at the expense of Mitt Romney. Romney's fell back behind John McCain in the most recent RCP average and Mitt's at 9% (all in Iowa and New Hampshire) in an ARG poll out today.

Confronted with the choice between laziness and phoniness, Republican voters seem to be choosing lazy.

But it is a tough choice.

Torturing Women vs Torturing Dogs

George Cook of African-AmericanOpinion.com wonders whether there's going to be as much outrage over the kidnapping and torture of a 20 year old black woman in West Virginia than there is over Michael Vick's treatment of dogs.

Sadly, Cook already knows that the answer is no.

Part of the reason is racism. Black feminist writers like bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins have long argued that the stereotyping of black women in the mainstream mass media makes it more difficult to view black human as valuable and fully human beings. That will probably make it harder to sympathize with the victim.

Just as depressing is the role of the sheer volume of violent crimes against women in possibly militating against outrage. In some ways, the torture of dogs is a bit of a "man bites dog" story because violent crimes against dogs are (relatively) rare. But violent crimes against women are so pervasive that it may be more difficult for people to get outraged about these cases. I've even some some feminist writers pooh-pooh violence against women.

And, of course, there's no celebrity involvement. Reckless driving was a national crisis when Paris Hilton was the driver. The same with dogfighting when Michael Vick was bankrolling the action.

Much of the weight of American culture would militate against there much focus on this crime.

The Thompson Buzz: Giuliani in Better Position than Romney

There are a couple of comments on Yglesias and Talking Points Memo about Rudy Giuliani slipping in the polls and his campaign being in trouble.

But I don't believe it.

Right now, Giuliani's lead is slipping because of Fred Thompson's roll out. However, Giuliani had maintained his initial lead for months despite an enormous amount of adverse publicity about his ignorance of foreign policy, multiple marriages, and management of emergency policy in NY.

And it's not like Fred Thompson isn't going to slide himself after more comes out about his own laziness, lack of morality, and wayward thinking on hot-button issues for conservatives.

So, Giuliani is in strong over-all position even if he is weak in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

The person who should be worried is Mitt Romney. Right now, he's leading in Iowa and New Hampshire and has a ton of money. But Romney has a very thin regional base (Utah, Michigan, and parts of New England) and fairly weak personal appeal because of the widespread opinion that he's a phony. To the contrary, Thompson comes off to conservatives as authentic even though he's an archetypical Southern bullshit artist (thanks to Todd Mayo for the heads-up here) .

As a result, it's even harder to see Romney moving up to the first tier than it was before Thompson entered the race.

The Republican nomination might end up as a blue state/red state showdown between Giuliani and Thompson.

The odds might favor Thompson because of his broader Southern base, but Giuliani still has a very real shot at it.

Moving On From Petraeus

General Who? Well, Gen. David Petraeus is done with his second day of testimony and he's still had no effect on the debate. Because Petraeus could not project anything like "victory," the right-wing media apparatus is reduced to claims that the anti-war movement embarrassed itself. As if anybody really cared! The crucial thing is that the main question in the debate on Iraq remains "when are we going to leave?" Because the question hasn't changed, the Petraeus gambit has to be considered a defeat for the Bush administration, Republicans in Congress, and the right-wing. Of course, things will get even worse for them when Bush decides not to draw down the number of troops before the 2008 election.

Fred Breaks the Mold. Fred Thompson's response to the PhonyFred web site was a breath of fresh air for both the Republican and Democratic primary campaigns. There are a lot of good reasons why candidates on both sides have been avoiding the whispering campaigns, rumor-mongering, and lying that characterizes the KarlRovian "politics of repulsion." Well, it's repulsive and, even worse, it's not working any more.

As a result, however, the campaigns on both sides have been unnecessarily tame. Because no 2 candidates like Barack Obama and Mitt Romney (or John McCain) haven't been willing to go after the leaders, Hillary and Giuliani have gotten inappropriately easy rides for a crucial presidential election.

But the Thompson campaign's response indicates that the good times might be over. Thompson's spokesman Tod Harris not only criticized the PhonyFred site as "high-tech gutter politics" but he then went on to aim a stake at the heart of the Romney campaign.

This latest episode only serves to prove what many voters are already figuring out: Mitt Romney will do anything, say anything, smear any opponent and flip flop on any position in order to win.

It will be great to see what the Thompson guys have to say about Giuliani when they get a chance.

Two Steps Backwards. Of course, it wasn't a totally good day for Fred. Thompson also admitted today that he wasn't a churchgoer. No surprise there. Why would a good-timing, skirt-chasing, divorced, former lobbyist be wasting his time in church when he could spend his hangover time watching "NFL Game Day?"

And as an atheist myself, I have to emphasize that I have no problem with Fred's choices for Sunday activities. But that's not going to fly with the people on the religious right and Fred's going to score lots of hypocrisy points by saying that he's "right with God" anyway. It's hard to believe that there's going to be much excitement on the religious right for a Fred Thompson general election campaign.

But maybe they hate Hillary t-h-a-t much.

Altogether, another bad day to be a Republican.

The Petraeus Yadda Yadda

The Petraeus Disappointment. As RSI has been predicting, the testimony of Gen. Petraeus is the most widely hyped non-event since Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone's Vault. Petraeus didn't say anything significantly new to hype the surge. He didn't say what the Bush administration had been hyping in a dramatic way. He didn't humiliate the Democrats as they asked their questions and didn't do anything to antagonize war opponents. In other words, Petraeus was dull and plodding as well as unconvincing.

Perhaps the best way to measure the political failure of the general's testimony is to consult the conservative blogs that are most enthusiastic about promoting the war. Almost all of the right-wing commentary focused on nitpicking the Democrats rather than proclaiming Petraeus. Hugh Hewitt's blog dumped on obscure Congressional Democrats like Loretta Sanchez and Bob Wexler. Meanwhile, unexcited about what Petraeus had to say, Protein Wisdom and Ace of Spades felt compelled to defend the extremely minor point that Petraeus was making his own report rather than reading from a White House draft. In fact, Petraeus was so boring to Instapundit that Glenn Reynolds put up a link to Michael Yon saying that battalion commanders were the real guys to interview.

Perhaps more telling, the mainstream media highlighted Petraeus' promises to draw down the surge next spring (a promise I don't think he'll keep).

Petraeus yadda yadda. In fact, Gen. Petraeus did not claim much for the surge. As expected, he argued that things were great in Anbar, that violence was down in Baghdad, and that the Iraqi Army was more involved than it used to be. But those claims are all old news and they don't sound any more convincing coming from Petraeus than they would from Dick Cheney. As little buzz as Fred Thompson generated with the announcement of his candidacy, he still did better than Petraeus.

Even worse for the warmongers, what Petraeus claimed was not nearly as significant as what he could not claim. Petraeus could not claim that al-Qaeda was broken for good, that Baghdad was secure, that the Iraqi Army was an effective military force, or that the Baghdad government was an effective partner. Without being able to say any of those things, Petraeus' testimony was just a lot of yadda yadda that everybody's heard before.

The String Will Play Out. Unless Petraeus has a couple of dramatic cards up his sleeve, his testimony is already a dud and the string will play out concerning on the pseudo-battle between Congress and the President over Iraq funding. The only way Bush is going to get more funding for the war in Iraq is to once again play chicken with the lives of American troops and against the will of both Congress and the American public. Bush will win that battle again but it will be more an outcome of the disfunctional character of American government than anything else.

Petraeus Gets What He Wants--Republicans and Iran Pay Price

What Petraeus Reports. The slow-boring of bottom-up progress in Anbar. Shaky stats on violence in Baghdad. Unstable Iraqi government. Iraqi military, police, and hookers all making "progress," but only the hookers are expected to meet objectives within next decade. American assistance will be crucial to their success.

What Petraeus Wants. To keep his 160,000 troops until April. Get the American public to buy into "strategic patience." All he'll get is the troops

How the Dems will Respond. Treat Petraeus with exaggerated deference. Ask gentle questions about statistics. Rely on liberal bloggers to attack. Bloggers attack cowardice of Dems as well as Petraeus.

The Dems Want. Keep Petraeus from becoming a lightning rod for pro-war sentiment.

What Dems will do. The Dems will forget Petraeus as soon as he returns to Iraq. Then they will pass war appropriations measures that Bush will veto. They'll fight veto a little harder than last time. Then cave at the last moment. Again.

The Outcome. Another six-month wait until April 2008 when surge is supposed to end. But the surge won't end because Petraeus will recommend that units be extended again. That's a recipe for a Democratic landslide but all the Republicans think about is launching a new war against Iran.