A Couple of Notes on KET

Not having been on a television interview show before, I was getting more and more nervous as Mrs. RSI and I were driving to Lexington.

But then I remembered that I couldn't possibly do worse than the interview show on politics I did just before the New Hampshire primary in 1992. Talk about blowing it. I blocked on Bill Clinton's name and then made a joke about how I had forgotten his name because he had no chance to win after the Gennifer Flowers fiasco.

Of course, it's not like my skills as a prognosticator have gotten any better.

Like everybody else, I had Hillary Clinton winning the Democratic nomination and the battle with Barack Obama as helping the eventual winner shape up for the general election. To the contrary, it looks like Hillary might concede tomorrow and that the nomination fight has at least temporarily created more bitterness within the Democratic Party than it has between Dems and Republicans.

Moving on.

I had prepared for the show by reading in Obama's two books--Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope. Dreams of My Father is an excellent book about Obama's developing identity as an African-American and I would recommend it to anyone. I can't say the same about Audacity of Hope though. It's basically the Obama version of political boilerplate. If you want to find out what Obama's campaigning on, read Audacity of Hope or Obama's web site. If you want trenchant analysis of American politics and society from an African-American perspective, pick up a book by bell hooks or Patricia Williams.

But my preparation strategy was completely wrong. Most of the material the host of "Kentucky Tonight," Bill Goodman, wanted to discuss had been gathered in the last couple of days. In hindsight, that was no surprise. Given that we were discussing current affairs, it was natural that Goodman wanted to be really up to date. Ironically enough though, I wasn't as prepared as I would have been otherwise because I was so busy doing the wrong kind of preparing.

Still, I had a really good time with the show. I very much enjoyed the other panelists. Bill Goodman manuevered the discussion with genial skill. I'd met Saundra Ardrey of Western Kentucky University several times and knew already that she's a great person. Actually, Prof. Ardrey and I fenced around pretty well about the general election in the sitting room before the show. A view of the pervasiveness of white racism makes her a lot less optimistic about Obama's chances in the fall than I am and we both moved in and out of the rationales for our positions.

I also liked State Sen. Robert Stivers who got appropriately angry about Appalachian stereotyping and State Sen. Gerald Neal who seemed to be both very decent and very smart.

I think I did all right as well and was somewhat reassured that my 13 year old daughter thought I did ok as well. She's a tough critic.

Thinking back on the show, I believe nerves might have caught up to my by the end. As I remember, I was having a little more trouble holding my concentration on the last couple rounds of questions.

Next time I'll do better.

Ted Kennedy Joins Hole in the Head Club

RSI wishes Ted Kennedy well in his recovery from brain surgery to remove a cancerous tumor.

We also welcome Sen. Kennedy to the "Hole in the Head" club.

Generally speaking, brain surgery requires drilling through a person's skull. Given that the hole created by the drilling never heals, the brain surgery patient has a permanent hole in their head.

I know this might surprise some people, but I've had a hole in my head for almost 54 years. As a stripling of 7 months, I had brain surgery to remove two blood clots that had developed after a fall off a bed.

When my skull was x-rayed after a concussion more than 40 years later, it turned out that I still had the hole from the brain surgery.

Since then, it's practically been raining brain surgery in Morehead. First, it was Rosemary Johnson's husband Donnie getting brain surgery to correct some wiring problems in his blood vessels. In rapid succession, Jason Holcomb needed brain surgery after getting tangled up in a dog leash and falling EXACTLY the wrong way while another friend needed to have brain surgery for much the same reason as Teddy Kennedy.

So, the "Hole in the Head Club" was born.

Brain surgery is much more routine now than when RSI had his done in 1954. At that time, the curmudgeonly Dr. King practically bragged to my parents that ninety percent of his patients died.

Great bedside manner there.

And now Ted Kennedy's in the "Hole in the Head Club" as well.

Maybe I should send him a t-shirt.

Florida, Michigan, and the Bamboozled Democrats

Yesterday, the Rules and By-Laws Committee of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) made decisions on Florida and Michigan which would not exactly have made Solomon proud.

DECISON ONE-FLORIDA. The Rules Committee decided to let the Florida results stand but only give the Florida delegates half a vote. Given that Hillary won Florida's outlaw Democratic primary, she would have received 38 more delegates than Obama if all the delegates had received their full votes. But Hillary's representatives caved and eventually agreed to the Solomonic decision to split the Florida vote in half.

The Democrats were bamboozled every step of the way in Florida. The Republican legislature and governor in Florida moved the Florida primary into January specifically in order to mess up the Democratic primary calendar.

And they succeeded.

First, the Dems made everybody in Florida angry by forbidding the candidates to campaign and nullifying the results of the primary. Then, they spent five months weaseling around the issue, and finally came up with an unsatisfactory compromise.

And I can't understand why the Hillary people caved here either. Her and Obama were both on the ballot even though they didn't campaign. Hillary won handily in January and still would have won handily today. She should have gotten the full share of convention votes for her victory.

DECISION TWO--MICHIGAN. Instead, the Hillary people decided to take a stand in relation to Michigan. Why, I'm not sure. The Michigan Democratic Party originally screwed up the Democrats by insisting on holding a primary in January after they had already agreed to a Feb. 5 primary. When the DNC retaliated by ordering the candidates not to campaign in Michigan, Obama and Edwards also took their name off the ballot while Hillary left hers. As a result, Hillary got 55% of the vote and Obama got nothing.

At least officially.

What the Hillary people wanted was the full delegation seated and for her to get 55% and Obama nothing. But back to the real world. In fact, Obama would have gotten a high percentage of the vote in Michigan. In fact, Obama's people campaigned to get Michigan Democrats to vote "uncommitted" if they wanted Obama and 40% of the Michigan vote went to "uncommitted." In relation to Michigan, Hillary's people seem to be bamboozling themselves as much as the Michigan Democrats. The best decision probably would have been to give Hillary about 10 more delegates than Obama. That's what the Michigan Democrats proposed. But the DNC only gave Michigan delegates half a vote. So, she only got five.

I'll admit that Hillary has half a beef with the Michigan decision, but getting all of the Michigan delegates would have been grossly unfair to Obama. Ultimately, the DNC decision was closer to fairness than what Hillary wanted.

THE UNDERLYING PROBLEM. The problem right now is with all the Hillary supporters who were so energetically protesting the DNC decisions. Where the Obama campaign had all the energy through Feb., Obama seemed to lose steam as a result of the Jeremiah Wright, bitter white people, and Michael Pfleger controversies. More of the mojo now seems to be with the Hillary campaign and Hillary partisans have all the passion that the Obama people had six months ago.

But it's too late for Hillary. Obama built up an early lead in the caucus states when the Hillary people didn't have their eye on the ball. Likewise, Obama did well enough on Super Tuesday to maintain his lead and was then able to beat Hillary decisively in North Carolina when he really had to. That makes Obama the winner and Hillary still behind at the end of the day. That's fine with me.

The Democratic partisan in me is quite willing to support Obama. But the political analyst in me finally sees where the Obama/Hillary split is going to cause trouble because the unsatisfactory DNC decision is very likely to be the prelude to a very unsatisfactory VP decision. If Obama nominates Hillary, a lot of Obama supporters are going to be very unhappy. If Obama nominates anybody except Hillary, a lot of Hillary supporters are going to be very unhappy. Nobody's going to be satisfied.

And Then There's David Frum REALLY Trashing Bush

Sure, Scott McClellan trashed George Bush in his yet to be published memoir of time in the Bush administration.

But former Canadian immigrant, former Bush speechwriter, and current neo-con columnist David Frum REALLY trashes Bush for hiring people like McClellan in the first place.

George W. Bush brought most of his White House team with him from Texas. Except for Karl Rove, these Texans were a strikingly inadequate bunch. Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzalez, Karen Hughes, Al Hawkins, Andy Card (the last not a Texan, but a lifelong Bush family retainer) — they were more like characters from The Office than the sort of people one would expect to find at the supreme height of government in the world’s most powerful nation. McClellan, too, started in Bush’s governor’s office . . . .

To be fair to Bush, bringing people in from one's own state is far from unusual. Jimmy Carter brought in Georgians like the late Hamilton Jordan. Bill Clinton surrounded himself with people from Arkansas, George Bush the Elder had Jim Baker, and Ronald Reagan brought in Ed Mease and other Californians.

But it wasn't the incompetence of the Bush team that galls Frum, it's the weird form of subservience that Bush enforced on the Texas group. On the one hand, Bush like to perpetrate petty little humiliations on the people close to him.

Bush demanded a very personal kind of loyalty, a loyalty not to a cause or an idea, but to him and his own career. Perhaps unconsciously, he tested that loyalty with constant petty teasing, sometimes verging on the demeaning. (Robert Draper, whose book Dead Certain offers a vivid picture of the pre-presidential Bush, tells the story of a 1999 campaign-strategy meeting at which Bush shut Karl Rove up by ordering him to “hang up my jacket.” The room fell silent in shock — but Rove did it.)

On the other hand, the "little abuses" would be followed up by "unexpected acts of thoughtfulness and generosity." Frum views the thoughtful gestures as compensations for the abuse. But the humiliations and teasing were really two sides of the same coin. The petty teasing, nicknames, and little abuses continually reminded people like Karl Rove that they were subordinate to George Bush while the little acts of thoughtfulness taught them to appreciate and even value their subordination. Bush was enforcing a peculiarly personal kind of subordination in which people like Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, and Harriet Miers all viewed their own sense of value as flowing directly from the magnanimous generosity of George Bush.

Obvious, working closely with George Bush was not a job for independent spirits or strong personalities.

Yet the combination of the demand for personal loyalty, the bullying and the ensuing compensatory love-bombing was to weed out strong personalities and to build an inner circle defined by a willingness to accept absolute subordination to the fluctuating needs of a tense, irascible and unpredictable chief.

. . . He created a closed loop in which the people entrusted with the most responsibility were precisely those who most dreaded responsibility — Condoleezza Rice being the most important and most damaging example.

Frum believes that George Bush chose such a poorly prepared inner circle because he put do much emphasis on personal loyalty and did not articulate "a compelling vision and ideal."

But this is mistaken. According to McClellan, Bush had "a compelling vision" of a democratic Middle East that he tried to bring to life through the invasion of Iraq.

Instead, the problem was that George Bush's personality doesn't have the kind of balance required for any kind of significant management position. What do I mean by "balance" in this context. I don't mean "unhinged" in the sense of having a psychological disorder. Instead, Bush has a strong, domineering personality but does not have great intelligence, overflowing knowledge, a great worth ethic, or any kind of specialized expertise. Bush relies on his "gut" because he doesn't have any other talents, skills, or expertise to rely on.

In fact, people with skills and expertise would be a constant threat to someone like George Bush because they would always have a dimension of superiority in relation to Bush. In this regard, I wouldn't be surprised if Bush hasn't always kept Rove on a short emotional leash. As talented and hard-working as Rove is, Bush probably needed to remind himself who was boss just as just as he needed to remind Rove. The same would be the case with anybody with real expertise around Bush. Either they had to be the kind of relatively weak personality that needed to be subordinate to someone like George Bush or they couldn't be allowed around his majesty.

Relying completely on personality (and his family name) himself, it can hardly be surprising that George Bush did not surround himself with the best people available.

RSI on KET next Monday

In one of the summer's biggest surpises, I got a call from Bill Goodman of KET to appear on a segment of "Kentucky Tonight" concerning Race and Politics in Kentucky. Goodman wanted to have professors on the panel but was having trouble locating people because of summer vactions, research trips, and traveling. I was probably in the third tier of prospects.

I'll be appearing with State Sen. Robert Stivers, R-Manchester, State Sen. Gerald Neal, D-Louisville and Saundra Ardrey of Western Kentucky University.

The broadcast will be Monday at 8pm.

Obama and Racism: Making the Implicit Overt

In The Race Card, political scientist Tali Mendelberg (who I knew somewhat when she was a grad student at Michigan) argued that implicit and indirect appeals to racial stereotypes were more effective at rousing racial resentment than overt kinds of racist messages.

Mendelberg's most controversial claim is that these ads work best when the appeal is implicit. If the appeal is explicit, she argues--that is, if politicians actually say that blacks are undeserving--then they lose support because they have violated the norm against racism. Although voters will respond unconsciously to an implicit appeal that they don't perceive as racist, they will recoil for reasons of conscience or social disapproval to an appeal that either is, or is seen as, racist. Mendelberg asserts that Bush actually lost support to Dukakis in the closing weeks of the 1988 campaign because, on October 21, Jesse Jackson denounced the Horton ad as racist and Dukakis's running mate Lloyd Bentsen followed suit two days later. That made explicit what had previously been implicit.

One possibility with Obama is that the success of his presidential campaign to date is inducing an unknown number of whites to be more explicit about their racial bigotry. That's certainly the case with my mother in upstate New York. She hadn't discussed race with me in any kind of extended way for twenty years or more, but became obsessed with black people after Obama's victory in the Iowa caucuses. Before Obama became a serious contender, my mother's attitudes toward race were characterized by good will toward the few black people she knew and a concern for fairness mixed with racial stereotypes and fond memories of growing up in a Pennsylvania town (Sayre) that (she said) had a law against blacks living there. When Obama emerged, my mother's dormant racism emerged quickly as the source of her animosity toward Obama.

One consequence of the Obama campaign is that it's making people think more seriously about race. But that's not always a positive thing.

The Big Tent in Obama's Head

Contrary to atheist writers Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, I don't think that religion is the source of all the world's problems.


But religion is certain the source for a lot of Barack Obama's problems.


Obama's church in Chicago, Trinity United Church, is back in the news for "controversial" comments given by a Catholic priest on white privilege and its relation to Hillary Clinton.


According to Father Michael Pfleger, this is the core of white privilege:

[Unintelligible] to address the one who says, “Well, don’t hold me responsible (gesticulating) for what my ancestors did. But you have enjoyed the benefits of what your ancestors did and unless you are ready to give up the benefits (voice rising), throw away your 401 fund, throw away your trust fund, throw away all the money you put into the company you WALKED INTO BECAUSE YO’ DADDY AND YO’
GRANDDADDY AND YO’ GREATGRANDDADDY–(screaming at the top of his lungs)–UNLESS YOU’RE WILLING TO GIVE UP THE BENEFITS, THEN YOU MUST BE REPSONSIBLE FOR WHAT WAS DONE IN YOUR GENERATION ‘CUZ YOU ARE THE BENEFICIARY OF THIS INSURANCE POLICY!

…We must be honest enough to expose white entitlement and supremacy wherever it raises its head.

I'm sympathetic to arguments concerning white privilege in the United States. There are a lot of ways that whites are privileged and probably the strongest is the substantial differential in wealth between middle-class whites and middle-class blacks.


Here's an illustration of what I mean. In my home town in upstate New York, the twelve children of an extremely poor African-American family, the McGruders, all got college degrees. Assuming that all the McGruder children attained middle-class status with those degrees, those adult children still would not have had the wealth of the average middle-class whites because they wouldn't have inherited any assets.


Because African-Americans in the United States have been historically excluded from wealth (by being denied credit, excluded from lucrative employment, denied permits, etc.), there is a real sense in which inherited wealth is a matter of "white privilege" as well as family accomplishment. This is what Father Phleger refers to when he views white people with trust funds, 401 K's, and other instruments of wealth as enjoying the benefits of historical racism.


But Father Phleger is also a demagogue who is using a legitimate argument to stomp on Hillary Clinton when she's down.

…When Hillary was crying (gesturing tears, uproarious laughter from audience)–and people said that was put on–I really don’t believe it was put on.

I really believe that she just always thought ‘This is mine’ (laughter, hoots). ‘I’m Bill’s wife. I’m WHITE. And this is mine. And I jus’ gotta get up. And step into the plate. And then out of nowhere came, ‘Hey, I’m Barack Obama.’ And she said: ‘Oh, damn!’ WHERE DID YOU COME FROM!?!?! (Crowd going nuts, Pfleger screaming). I’M WHITE! I’M ENTITLED! THERE’S A BLACK MAN STEALING MY SHOW. (SOBS!) SHE WASN’T THE ONLY ONE CRYING! THERE WAS A WHOLE LOTTA WHITE
PEOPLE CRYING!

Like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger strikes me as a self-centered asshole who's using the success of Barack Obama's candidacy to promote himself in a way that he knows will harm Obama.

But that's not my point. What's interesting to me is that it seems obvious that Trinity United Church in Chicago is a place where condemnations of whites were heard frequently and Barack Obama would have been a regular member of the audience and it seems like Obama would have had at least some sympathy with the message. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been close to Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

There's also the more moderate opinion of Jesse Jackson and black feminists like Angela Davis and Toni Morrison. In this view, American society is still powerfully shaped by the legacy of slavery and segregation but that moving forward would be possible if African-Americans can form alliances with poor whites, white women, and other marginalized groups.

I bet that Obama is sympathetic with this view as well. That was certainly his perspective in his Philadelphia speech on race relations.

But Barack Obama's brain also had room in it for a third view that the U. S. has made so much racial progress since the 60's that race shouldn't matter in a presidential campaign. Obama's views are close enough to the color-blind orthodoxy of race neo-cons like William Bennett that they've expressed positive perspectives on his campaign.

One of the things that makes African-Americans distinct from whites is that they can hold both "black-centric" and "maintream" views in their heads at the same time. Obama's head has been an especially big tent on issues of race and that's been an advantage so far in the campaign.

McClellan Spins Himself, Huff Should Do Same

Scott McClellan--I saw the video of Scott McClellan's interview with Meredith Viera of The Today Show. I don't remember Dick Cheney or Richard Perle ever getting grilled like that in the mainstream media. McClellan actually comes off pretty well in the interview--more an average, everyday guy who got to work for the White House than anything else. He wasn't particularly good at spinning when he was press secretary, but his relative awkwardness comes off well during the interview. Support for the war in Iraq has dropped from 70% right before the invasion to something like 30%. My take on McClellan is that he's gone through a version of the same process of gradually rejecting President Bush that 40% of the American public has also gone through. It's just that McClellan is going to get a fat royalty check for his trouble.

Blogger--Promote Thyself. Arianna Huffington wonders about McClellan's moral authenticity because McClellan came out against Bush's conduct of the White House five years after it would have meant anything.

It's George Tenet déjà vu all over again. How many times are we going to have a key Bush administration official try to wash the blood off his hands -- and add a chunk of change to his bank account -- by writing a come-clean book years after the fact, pointing the finger at everyone else while painting himself as an innocent bystander to history who saw all the horrible things that were happening but, somehow, had no choice but to go along?

But why bother? How many hidden saints have been serving at the top of the Bush administration anyway?

What Huffinton should be emphasizing is that war opponents and left-wing bloggers like herself have been right about the Bush administration's propoganda campaign to promote the war all along and that it's time for the mainstream media to end its near total embargo on war opponents.

Huffington gets in a little plug for herself in relation to McClellan's comments on the media.

McClellan points an accusatory finger at the mainstream media -- he calls them "enablers" and says they were too easy on the administration during the selling of the war:

"The national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. The collapse of the administration's rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. ... In this case, the 'liberal media' didn't live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served."

Great point, Scotty. We and many others made it back in 2003.

But that little shout out to herself isn't nearly enough and the fact that somebody as savvy as Huffington downplays such a key self-promotional moment is an indication of how far the left has to go in effectively promoting itself.

Texas: Next Stop Polygamy

MSNBC reports that the Texas High Court has ruled that all the 430 children fundamentalist Mormon children need to be returned to their parents.

In a crushing blow to the state's massive seizure of children from a polygamist sect's ranch, the Texas Supreme Court ruled Thursday that child welfare officials overstepped their authority and the children should go back to their parents.

The high court affirmed a decision by an appellate court last week, saying Child Protective Services failed to show an immediate danger to the more than 400 children swept up from the Yearning For Zion Ranch nearly two months ago.

All Texas needs to do now is to decide what to do about the polygamy--which I believe is against the law.

Crossing the Obama/Clinton Line

Hillary Clinton's arguments that she would make a stronger general election candidate than Obama were somewhat bolstered by some Gallup Poll research showing that she would do better in a number of crucial swing states than Obama.

Clinton's 2008 swing-state victories include Nevada, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Arkansas, and -- based solely on popular vote (not delegates) -- Florida and Michigan (her swing states total 105 electoral votes). Thus far in May, Gallup has found Clinton leading McCain in these states by six percentage points, 49% to 43%. McCain holds the slight edge over Obama in these states, 46% to 43%. Thus, as of today, Clinton is clearly the stronger Democratic candidate in this cluster of states where she beat Obama in the popular vote.

In other words, Hillary currently holds a six-point edge over Obama in a combination of eight swing states. That puts her over the edge of the margin of error for the swing states. So, the finding is statistically significant.

Still, it left me cold. The contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama was about primaries, caucuses, delegates, and super-delegates. As much as I preferred Hillary, I can see that Barack Obama, for all intents and purposes, has won the nomination and that this kind of at the margin argumentation by the Hillary camp isn't going to change the outcome.

So, I went out and stuck an Obama sticker on my car.

Obama Should Take Up McCain's Iraq Gimmick

I realize that John McCain's "Go with Me to Iraq" idea is just a campaign gimmick and I'm just as sure that McCain's Will come up with a lot of these gimmicks over the next six months. To a narcissist like McCain, running for President is all about drawing attention to his precious self and publicity-seeking gimmicks are an obvious way to attact attention.

If McCain wins, I'm sure he'd have the most gimmicky presidency of all time.

But I still think Obama should take McCain up on the challenge and go to Iraq with or without McCain himself.

Most importantly, it would be a tremendous opportunity for Barack Obama to look presidential. People in the U. S. are dying for some authoritative voice on opposition to the war and Obama could be that voice. Specifically, he could publicly inform Gens. Petraueus and Odierno that the American people oppose the war, he opposes the war, and that he would definitely order a withdrawal if he were elected president.

That would be a presidential moment that Obama could put in his campaign ads from now to the November election and probably use in his re-election campaign as well.

At the same time, Obama could press to meet with people who usually aren't part of the political briefing tour--including Iraqi President Talibani, Kurdish leaders, Sadrist politicians, and members of al-Sistani's Shiite clerical establishment. He could talk about the strength of the Shiite militias, the rampant corruption and the lack of electricity and basic services. Obama could also form opinions on what if anything is being done about it.

If Obama wants to do tours, he could do tours of Mosul, Sadr City, and Basra

It wouldn't hurt Obama to meet some of the thousands of Iraqis who have been falsely imprisoned as well.

When Obama comes home, he could then challenge McCain to travel with him in the United States and meet with the veterans who are being given shoddy health care, have attempted suicide, or have gone through painful divorces.

These men and women are going to be paying for the Iraq War the rest of their lives. Obama should challenge McCain to get to know them better.

Barfing Up Bush: Scott McClellan Aims for the Truth

America is barfing up Bush. Why shouldn't Scott McClellan?

Vomiting, puking, throwing up, retching, and barfing are all terms for the "forceful discharge of stomach contents through the mouth." Personally, I prefer "barfing" because its such a gutteral word that really gets at the discomfort of expelling things back through the mouth that have gone into the stomach. "Barfing" also captures the involuntary quality of the action as well as the feelings of disgust that accompany those discharges.

"Retching" is another good word, but I still think "barfing" hits the mark a little better.

Whatever its called, barfing is a sign that the stuff in your stomach is so intolerable or harmful that it can't be digested any further and has to be rejected back up through the mouth. Stomach bugs, carsickness, and chemotherapy make people barf because the stomach is in no condition to handle food. Too much alcohol makes people barf because it's too poisonous for stomachs to handle. Because a person's stomach just can't handle the awful stuff anymore, it makes a powerful effort to send it back to the world from whence it came.

That's what happened with President Bush and the Bush administration. At the beginning of Bush's first term, America more or less willingly swallowed George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice. President Bush's approval ratings shot up after the 9-11 terrorist attacks and most people bought into Bush administration rationales for invading Iraq. But since Bush's re-election in 2004, almost the whole country has been engaged in one long exercise in barfing up the Bush administration as being too arrogant, incompetent, dishonest, or absurd to hold down any longer.

The Bush administration is just so (fill in the blank) that everyone wants to throw up.

That appears to be what former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan is doing in his memoir as well--barfing up the Bush administration. Having defended and rationalized the Bush administration on a daily basis from 2003-2006, McClellan is now condemning everyone and everything he once defended. It's almost like he wants to get the Bush administration out of his system and out of his system for good.

President Bush?

"[Bush] and his advisers confused the propaganda campaign with the high level of candor and honesty so fundamentally needed to build and then sustain public support during a time of war."

Hurricane Katrina?

“One of the worst disasters in our nation’s history became one of the biggest disasters in Bush’s presidency. Katrina and the botched federal response to it would largely come to define Bush’s second term,” he writes. “And the perception of this catastrophe was made worse by previous decisions President Bush had made, including, first and foremost, the failure to be open and forthright on Iraq and rushing to war with inadequate planning and preparation for its aftermath.”

Rove, Libby, and Cheney?

“Neither, I believe, did President Bush. He, too, had been deceived and therefore became unwittingly involved in deceiving me. But the top White House officials who knew the truth — including Rove, Libby and possibly Vice President Cheney — allowed me, even encouraged me, to repeat a lie.”

The Bush-enabling corporate media?

“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq . . . The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

Barf, vomit, retch--McClellan is spewing out the Bush administration in all its messy, ugly, glory.
Asked to comment for Fox, Karl Rove thought that McClellan sounded like a "left-wing blogger." But that's actually not a good analogy. What sets left-wing bloggers apart is that they never bought into the Bush administration and therefore never had to barf them back up like Scott McClellan is doing. To the contrary, Scott McClellan is just a normal American who bit hard on the Bush administration and now feels an overpowering need to purge himself.

Who can blame him?

Whoa! Lunsford Leads in Rasmussen Poll

According to Rasmussen Reports, Bruce Lunsford is currently leading Sen. Mitch McConnell by 49 to 44%. This has to be disappointing to McConnell who is sitting on a huge campaign war chest and has been running apparently ineffective commercials for months.

Nobody should kid themselves about whether Mitch McConnell is a formidable opponent. He's one of the smartest people in American politics and he's served four terms in the U. S. Senate despite fundamentally unlikable, having little campaign charisma, and swimming against popular opinion. It's very odd to say this about someone who is a four-term Senator and major political figure, but my impression of McConnell is that he's never been very popular in Kentucky. He's just been a lot smarter and more effective than his Democratic opponents. What's been particularly distinct about McConnell's re-election campaigns in 1990 and 1996 has been his clever use of negative advertising to establish big leads over his opponents for re-election and then hang on as voters started turning to the Democratic candidate.

But the tide running against McConnell might be too strong this time. Now serving as Republican leader in the Senate, McConnell has become a point man for unpopular Bush administration positions on the war, economy, veterans legislation, corruption, and other issues. McjConnell is also a holdover from the big money politics and hyper-partisanship of the Newt Gingrich/Tom DeLay era in Republican politics. Today's Rasmussen survey looks like a sign that Sen. McConnell is not going to be able to use negative ads to jump out to a quick lead and that that he is going to have to go out and press the flesh and really campaign if he wants to hold on to his seat.

McConnel is already trying to tie Lunsford to Barack Obama, but it's not like Lunsford has Obama-type political skills or is a particlarly strong candidate. However, Lunsford has name recognition from previous campaigns for governor and also has access to plenty of money.

That might be enough.

Hard-Working White People, Part III

One of the major problems with almost all of the commentary on the 2008 presidential election is that writers only pose the advantages or problems of one side as determining the winner. In fact, however, Barack Obama and John McCain are going to be running against each other and have to be continually measured against each other.

Today, the focus on some of the liberal blogs is on the problems of Obama with white, working class voters. Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz writes in Huffington Post that Democrats are courting disaster in November because of Barack Obama's unpopularity among working-class whites.

A recent Gallup poll report has argued that claims about Obama's weaknesses among white voters and blue collar voters have been exaggerated - yet its indisputable figures showed Obama running four percentage points below Kerry's anemic support among whites four years ago.

Given that Obama's vote in the primaries, apart from African-Americans, has generally come from affluent white suburbs and university towns, the Gallup figures presage a Democratic disaster among working-class white voters in November should Obama be the nominee.

Much as I support Hillary, I don't view the nomination of Barack Obama as courting disaster at all. To paraphrase Bill Parcells, Barack Obama "is what he is." He's an African-American politician who exudes smarts and charisma and he's going to appeal primarily to African-Americans, suburban whites, liberals, gays, and women. He's aiming for the many of the same targets as George McGovern and Michael Dukakis, but Obama is a much more savvy politician than either of those two. He's also emerging as the winner of an extremely tough nomination battle with Hillary Clinton. Obama has a much better chance of hitting his targets and putting together a winning coalition of voters outside the white, working-class orbit.

In my opinion, the main questions for Obama is whether he can nail down enough of the suburban vote to take Virginia, build up enough of a majority among the Hispanic vote to take New Mexico and Colorado, and appeal enough to white working-class voters to win Ohio and hang onto Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Given that McCain is likely to run a weak and disorganized campaign, I believe that Obama can accomplish those goals and win handily. But Obama's campaign has to make it happen.

King Kagan's Disposable America

Anyone who has ever seen Frederick Kagan (pictured above) do an interview on television knows that Kagan oozes arrogant creepiness. A classic Limbaugh-like, dough-faced, weenie boy, Kagan calls on the U. S. to back up a bullying diplomatic policy with a state of permanent war, but looks like he himself is allergic to all forms of physical activity let alone military service.

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Kagan is also a machine for generating arguments in support of the Iraq War. Although most prominent now as the big thinker behind the surge, Kagan stays one step ahead of war critics by constantly thinking up new rationalizations for the American occupation.

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In today's New York Post, Kagan argues for an expansion of the U. S. Army and Marines to a force of one million men.

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For Kagan, that's one million very disposable men. Kagan wants a very "long war" in Iraq--a war with objectives of creating a "stable," "representative state" that "controls its territory," is "oriented toward the West," and is an "ally in the War on Terror." Given that the American military hasn't come close to accomplishing any of these things in five years, it will be a very long war indeed.

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On top of that, Kagan's idea of a long war includes regional engagement in places like Sudan, Pakistan, Iran, Columbia, and Venezuela.

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There's also guarding against the rising military power of China not to mention Russia.

Four thousand members of the military dead and thousands more injured in Iraq. For Kagan, those kinds of losses "would not have been surprising to the defenders of Bastogne, the armies at Antietam, or the servicemen and women in any other major war."

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Kagan views American resources as just as disposable. He wants $240 billion for his 800,000 man Army by 2017 which he views as really nothing within the context of the 21 trillion economy being projected for that time.

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In the final analysis, Kagan doesn't just view soldiers as disposable; he views the whole country as disposable in the same way that medieval kings viewed their domains as resources to be used for their wars.

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Long Live the King.

The Shadow of Assassination

One of the items that got lost in the Hillary/RFK nonsense was that Hillary Clinton has lived under the shadow of assassination threats just as much as Obama.

There's always been a danger that some jerk would try to get their fifteen minutes of fame by taking a shot at Hillary Clinton. Even before she became the first serious female contender for the presidency, Hillary was the target of an enormous amount of vitriol from the right. It's easy to think that someone could have taken right-wing smearing one step further and mounted an assassination attempt.

For the record, I don't think Hillary Clinton was referring to the possibility of Obama being assassinated at all. She probably worries a lot more about herself in that regard.

Turning Eleven

Last week, Miss Tween RSI turned 11 and her eleventh annual birthday party is today. She's full of legs, strong, finds school to be easy, likes National Treasure 2 and High School Musical more than any sane person could stand, gets car sick a lot during trips, and has a boyfriend who calls her every day.

Her mom and dad used to worry a lot about Miss Tween RSI because she was accident-prone in such dangerous ways. She seemed to have a special talent for hitting her head against things.

Now that Miss Tween's just accident-prone in the usual pre-teen ways, her parents no longer heave a sigh of relief and give a toast to having "kept her alive for another year." That makes the eleventh annual birthday party a lot more enjoyable.

P. S.--Advice to parents out there--if you don't have the first birthday party, you won't feel a bizarre obligation to hold the eleventh.

Bush Crime Watch, No. 2--Mukasey Plays Defense Attorney

According to the job description, the Attorney General of the United States is the "chief law enforcement officer of the federal government."

However, Michael Mukasey, the current Attorney General for the Bush administration, seems to view himself primarily as a defense attorney for Bush administration lawbreakers.

In a speech to law school graduates at Boston University today, Mukasey was very worried about the harsh public criticism received by Justice Department lawyers like John Yoo.

Today, many of the senior government lawyers who provided legal advice supporting the nation's most important counterterrorism policies have been subjected to relentless public criticism. In some corners, one even hears suggestions --suggestions that are made in a manner that is almost breathtakingly casual -- that some of these lawyers should be subject to civil or criminal liability for the advice they gave. The rhetoric of these discussions is hostile and unforgiving.

To the contrary, Mukasey believes that Justice Department lawyers should be exempt from civil or criminal liability for their actions because of the circumstances of the time:

those public servants were often working in an atmosphere of almost unimaginable
pressure, without the academic luxury of endless time for debate. Equally ignored is the fact that, by all accounts I have seen or heard, including but not limited to Jack Goldsmith's book, those lawyers reached their conclusions in good faith based upon their best judgments of what the law required.

But then again, Mukasey emphasizes that Justice Department attorneys believed themselves to be obligated to needed "to push to the limits of the law, to give policymakers and operators the most flexibility possible to confront the existential threat of international terrorism."

But this is precisely the question. Were Justice Department lawyers like John Yoo just giving legal advice concerning issues that were put to them in the course of their work on legal issues concerning national security? Or were Justice Department lawyers part of a larger effort on the part of the Bush administration to violate American and international law in their treatment of terrorist suspects and other matters.

Were Justice Department lawyers "pushing the envelope" in a good faith effort to be more effective in fighting terrorism or were they "pushing the envelope" in the sense of providing flimsy rationalization for clear instances of lawbreaking. In other words, were Justice Department lawyers giving ethical legal advice or were they acting like mob lawyers in providing justifications for routine lawbreaking.

Many facts have emerged which suggest that the Bush administration engaged in broad and systematic violations of legal prohibitions on torture and that lawyers like John Yoo were a part of both the conspiracy to break the law and perpetration of illegal acts. Facts concerning the use of waterboarding, severe sensory deprivation, and other forms of torture have emerged and it is evident that these practices are legally prohibited under several kinds of statutes. Moreover, top level officials of the Bush administration like Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and John Ashcroft met to consider which of these illegal practices would be used.

In this context, there is a question of whether John Yoo's legal memos were part of an honest effort to think through the law or whether they were part of a conspiracy to provide legal cover for crimes against humanity. At this point, I'm not completely sure. Given the involvement of Bush administration "principles" in approving torture, there's a chance that John Yoo's memos were insignificant.

How can all of these questions be answered? How can it be determined whether or not there is evidence that American interrogators were engaged in torture? Whether top Bush administration officials were directing criminal activity? Or whether John Yoo's memos were part of a conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity?

The best way to answer these questions is for Mukasey to act as an Attorney General. Mukasey should launch an investigation into possible criminal activity by the Bush administration and appoint an independent or special prosecutor to oversee the investigation. If the prosecutor finds evidence of crimes on the part of Bush administration officials, he or she should indict those involved and bring the case to trial where defense attorneys can present their own facts and interpretations of the relevant laws.

If Bush administration officials are innocent of crimes, the best way to clear their names is to have a full investigation of the facts surrounding the interrogation of terrorist suspects in the panicked aftermath of 9-11. If prosecutors are able to establish guilt according to the standards of American law, then they should be convicted and subject to punishment just like any other offender.

I understand that Patrick Fitzgerald is done with the Scooter Libby case. Mukasey should appoint him.

Now That's Subtle . . . And Effective!

TPM has an article on Hillary Clinton's finance chair Hassan Nemazee hinting, oh so subtly, that Hillary supporters might not be so enthused about Obama if Hillary is not his VP.

"There's a desire on the part of the party to come together under any circumstances, and Hillary and her supporters will do everything in their power to help Obama win, should he become the nominee, whether or not she's on the ticket," Nemazee said to me this morning."But there's a risk that if she isn't invited on the ticket, Hillary's political and financial supporters may not feel compelled to be as integrated and involved in the Obama campaign in order to provide the maximum support that he'll need to prevail in November."

I bet Obama and his top campaign staff will be "really" impressed with that and more likely to select Hillary as Obama's VP.

Just kidding.

If Hillary's campaign is thinking more about Hillary being VP than being president, she should just run up her white flag, acknowledge that she's lost, and drop out of the race.

If Mr. Nemazee wants to be smart about pushing Hillary for VP, he should keep his mouth shut except to say what a wonderful candidate Obama is and how glad he'll be to support him once Hillary drops out.

In that way, Mr. Nemazee's stupidity won't be reflecting on Hillary's ability as a leader like it is right now.

Smearkrieg No. 13--The Joy of Obama-Smearing

Up to Date Republican Smears. Digby has a long post today on the wratcheting up of the Republican/right-wing smear campaign for 2008. Now that the "Obama is a Muslim" smear has run its course, people on the right have put out the idea that Barack Obama is an "apostate Muslim" because he didn't follow the Islamic religion of his Kenyan father.

I'm a little bit shocked to see op-ed pieces appear in quick succession in two of the nation's most prestigious newspapers calling Barack Obama a "Muslim Apostate." They don't make the assertion that Obama is a Muslim, which he certainly isn't,
only that Osama bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalists consider him one since his father was "born a Muslim." This apparently means that bin Laden will be able to rally the Muslim world against America because Obama has abandoned the true faith.

The idea is that the smear artists have Obama both ways. Whether Obama's a Muslim or not, he's going to be smeared with Islam.

The Republican National Committee has also brought back Tim Griffin, the Bush/Cheney campaign's lead "oppo" researcher to dig up little nuggets about Obama that could be targets for various kinds of smear attacks.

In other words, the GOP is going to go into full smear mode now that the Democratic nomination has been pretty much decided.

Why They Smear. But Digby doesn't discuss why the Republican smear campaign is going to be so ferocious in 2008. The answer is obvious, but it's important to say it anyway. Smearing is all the Republicans are going to have going for them this year.

That's because John McCain is a weak presidential candidate. The only two things that McCain himself is good at are town hall meetings where he can put himself on display and talking with the press on the campaign plane. Otherwise, McCain is uncomfortable, wooden, and unconvincing. Discussing a recent McCain appearance in Kentucky, George Packard observed:

I had seen him in New Hampshire, where he gave off-the-cuff remarks with vigor; when he is stuck with a script, however, he is a terrible campaigner.

One of the many things that John McCain is really bad at is organizing a campaign. Even though McCain's had three months to set up his campaign, he still has less of a campaign organization than Obama. His general election campaign is also going to be underfunded.

Finally, McCain is going to be running as the "legacy candidate" of the Bush administration on the war in Iraq, not doing anything about the recession, privatizing social security, and kowtowing to the religious right.

As a result of his endless weaknesses as a presidential candidate, McCain's not going to "win" the election. himself. As a result, the only hope for the Republicans is to make Obama "lose," in other words make Obama look so strange and dangerous that people are unwilling to vote for Obama.

Obama's Been Warned. However, it's not like the Obama campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and liberal bloggers did not know that the Republicans were going to mount a ferocious smear campaign against either Hillary or Obama in 2008. People involved in the Democratic campaign might be morally outraged by the smears, but they should be getting beyond that moral outrage and thinking of creative ways to counter the smear attacks. If the Democrats are not ready to fight back, fight back hard, and win, the success of the smears will be partly our responsibility as well.

Our Monstrous Warmongers

Glenn Greenwald has such a good passage on our warmongering think-tank and pundit class that I'm going to quote it in full. Greenwald is referring to Michael O'Hanlon, Kenneth Pollack, Robert Kagan, and Frederick Kagan but his comments also apply to

Twenty years from now, the Michael O'Hanlons and Ken Pollacks and various Kagan Family members of today are going to be viewed the way the Robert McNamaras of the Vietnam era came to be perceived: as coddled, sheltered monsters who -- from a safe and sterile distance -- viewed and endlessly cheered on "war" as some abstract, intellectualized and fun game to play at think tank parties, totally oblivious to the savagery and havoc it wreaked on other people's lives. Perhaps in old age, they'll write some self-flagellating, McNamara-like mea culpa. But nobody else needs to wait until then to describe what they actually are.

The class of "coddled, sheltered monsters" also includes George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, John Yoo and hundreds more.

Hopefully, some of them will end up in jail where they belong.

The Zen of Sharp Elbows

The Dems Are Wimps. One of the sad things that has been revealed by the battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is that Democratic voters still need to be toughened up. Even after five years of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, waterboarding, extraordinary rendition, and Guantanamo, Democrats are still addicted to conflict avoidance. Committed to a politics of rationality and consensus, Democrats believe in social harmony and view almost any kind of political attack as unfair. For example, a majority of those who voted for Hillary Clinton in West Virginia and Kentucky believe that her criticisms of Barack Obama have been "unfair."

Even in a state Hillary Clinton appears to have won by 35 points, a majority of Kentucky voters say the New York senator attacked Barack Obama unfairly.

According to the exit polls, 54 percent of voters said Clinton launched unfair attacks on Obama, though that didn't seem to deter voters there from supporting Clinton — 55 percent of those who said Clinton attacked unfairly still voted for the New York senator.

Clinton faced a similar statistic in West Virginia last week. There she won by 41 points, but nearly 60 percent of voters said she made unfair attacks against the Illinois senator.

In other words, even the Dems who agree with Hillary's relatively attacks on Obama still don't the fact that she was doing it. In other words, we're all still wimps.

Our New Role Models: The San Antonio Spurs. Perhaps I'm biased in this regard but I'd like to see Democratic voters enjoy the rough and tumble of politics a lot more than we do. We should be hitting the right-wing harder than they hit us and we should be pushing the boundaries of political propriety when we attack them for their blundering imperialism, warmongering, bigotry, and general disgust with American society and culture. Likewise, we should be able to take the best shots that people like Dick Cheney, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh and laugh as we hold them accountable for their bad ideas. Why should we be outraged by the latest stupid comments to come from George Bush. Let's save our moral outrage for the destruction and suffering in Iraq or the terrible care received by wounded vets instead.

A good role model for a team that enjoys playing rough and has a lot of success with it is the San Antonio Spurs of the NBA.

The Spurs lately have mixed some unlikability into their formula . . . No stone unturned, no element left to chance, no rule unbent right up to the point of breaking. They let Stu Jackson and David Stern sort it all out in the league office, while taking a "If you don't get a ticket, then you weren't speeding" approach . . . .

For years, Bruce Bowen was San Antonio's lightning rod, a "defensive specialist'' to those rooting for him and his team but a knobby-kneed kickboxer to those rooting or playing against them. Bowen's knack for kicking, tripping, stepping on or otherwise clandestinely punishing the other guys' best players has been his brand, you might say, since he joined the Spurs seven years ago . . . More recently, it has been Robert Horry, "Big Shot Bob'' getting a makeover in late career from some critics as "Cheap Shot Bob'' after his second shady incident in two postseasons . . . . This time, in Game 6 against New Orleans, there was Horry forcefully bracing himself into David West's back, leaving the Hornets' power forward writhing face-down on the court after the hit aggravated the pinched nerve in West's back.

Like basketball, politics is a rough game and it doesn't hurt if you enjoy the suffering of your opposition a little. I'm sure "Big Shot Bob" Horry would have been worried about David West if West had been permanently injured. But "aggravating" a pinched nerve--that's just the breaks of the game and we really should be aggravating the injuries suffered by the right anyway.

Like a top NBA team, the Democrats face more than five months of playoff presidential politics against the Republicans and the right wing. We need to sharpen up our elbows and enjoy the give and take of taking down John McCain.

The Hillary Glass Runs Down

Hillary Wins. Hillary Clinton won today's Kentucky primary 65%-30%. It was a total win in the sense that Hillary won every county except Louisville and Lexington and came within ten points even in the cities. Out here in Morehead, she won 80-17 in our county (Rowan) with Obama only pulling down a little over 700 votes. It seems like Mrs. RSI and her legions of friends were the only Obama voters in town.

Hillary Pulls Ahead! Even with Obama's 57-42% win in Oregon, Hillary was still more than 180,000 votes up for the day. That means that she's ahead on two popular vote measures according to RealClearPolitics--popular vote with Florida and Michigan votes counted and popular vote with Florida, Michigan, and some of Obama's caucus states counted.

These measures don't mean anything in terms of who's being nominated. It's going to be Obama. But Obama's victory is starting to develop a little bit of a George Bush 2000 aura about it. Obama's getting nominated as a result of the caucus quirks in the system just as Bush was elected as a result of the quirks of the electoral college.

At the same time, Hillary's defeat is a little bit like the Mondale and Dukakis losses in that Hillary didn't hit her stride until it was too late.

The Bell Tolls After June 3. The last two primaries are on June 3 and I expect Hillary to end her candidacy fairly soon after that. Hillary's gotten more than 17,000,000 votes. I think she should be the VP nominee and that she would be the VP nominee if she weren't married to a loose cannon like Bill Clinton. What I hope is that her and Obama meet and see if they can't work out some basis for her to be No. 2. If they can't work out a mutually acceptable arrangement, then I can see Obama nominating someone like Ted Strickland. But I think they should try.

Best Wishes to Ted Kennedy

RSI wishes Ted Kennedy the best in his treatment for brain cancer.

I have to admit that I haven't been a fan of the Kennedy family since I was a kid. It's not like President Kennedy didn't do some admirable things. Getting the country through the Cuban Missile Crisis without a shot fired was certainly remarkable. But time has revealed that the Camelot aura was more a product of celebrity fluff and media promotion than anything else. The towering political figures of the sixties were Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson.

But I still have a soft spot for Ted Kennedy.

Having been given unlimited opportunity, Ted Kennedy finally started cashing in on his second chances later in life and really became what John McCain today called "the single most effective member of the Senate."

Good for him! In the final analysis, Ted Kennedy will probably emerge as the most significant of the Kennedy brothers.

I'd just like to live in a society where everybody got as many chances as Ted Kennedy.

They're Making a List, Checking It Twice

Digby has a report from Radar Magazine which argues that the Bush administration has been conducting data mining operations on domestic citizens under a top-secret "Continuity of Government" (COG) Program.

The concept behind COG is that the U. S. Government would need to prepare to maintain itself in case there were a catastrophic terrorist attack that killed millions of people and threatened the basic operations of American government. (Radar via Digby)

COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces—and effectively suspend the republic. In short, it's a road map for martial law.

It's reasonable to assume that COG has a number of dimensions, but what Digby picks out of the Radar article is that the Bush administration has been using data mining techniques to collect information on potential dissidents who could be considered a threat to the government (Rader via Digby).

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

It appears that the administration also wants to know about the friends of everyone listed in Main Core as well (Radar via Digby).

Another well-informed source—a former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence community—says this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets' behavior and tracks their circle of associations with "social network analysis" and artificial intelligence modeling tools.

In my mind's eye, I can see William Kristol claiming that Americans shouldn't worry about the government making up lists of domestic dissidents given that Santa Claus draws up universal lists of children.

He's Making a List and Checking It Twice
Gonna Find Out Who's Naughty and Nice.

George Packard writes in the New Yorker that conservatives

were not much interested in governing . . . They hadn’t made much of a dent in the bureaucracy, and they had done nothing to provide universal health-care coverage or arrest growing economic inequality . . .

True, conservatives prefer defense and foreign policy over health policy, disaster management, and banking. But the right-wing has been keenly interested in using the federal government and private institutions to suppress their liberal competitors ever since the end of WWII. In this sense, McCarthism was mostly about leveraging accusations of communism into a general effort to dampen New Deal liberalism, civil rights activists, feminists, and other liberal activists and conservatives were happy with the role of the FBI, CIA, and other federal institutions in collecting information on American liberals and radicals and disrupting their activities. They were even more happy to have the cooperation of labor unions, Hollywood, the television networks, newspapers, and other private institutions

From this perspective, the 60's not only meant the Great Society, the Civil Rights Movement, and the rise of the anti-war agitation, it also meant the dismantling of the whole apparatus for discouraging liberal activism. By the time Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the federal government was doing much more of the domestic policy administration that conservatives loathed and almost none of the "domestic security" work they wanted to see.

The irony of the Bush years is that the 9-11 attacks gave conservatives an opportunity to revive a version of neo-McCarthyite government in relation to the War on terrorism and the occupation of Iraq. Far from being disinterested in government, committed right-wingers like Dick Cheney, David Addington, Douglas Feith, and John Yoo were inspired to trash the laws governing the interrogration of terror suspects and create their kind of government.

Ironically, what's undone the Republicans has been their lack of interest in the non-repressive dimensions of domestic government within the United States. Because of their unwillingness to take health care, wealth disparities, Katrina, global warming, energy policy, and the rest of domestic government seriously, the right-wing is going to lose the national security state they really liked.

Santa Claus came to the American right on 9-11-01 but they blew it.

Kathleen Parker's Blood, Iron, and Soil

If I was king for the day in the liberal world, one of my first commands would be that all liberals "count to ten" before getting "outraged" over the latest conservative political or cultural stunt.

People on the left tend to hit the moral outrage button first whether it's Ann Couter referring to Democratic leaders as "faggots," George Bush talking about Barack Obama in terms of appeasement, or John Hagee's anti-Catholic bigotry.

And that's a big mistake.

In fact, "outrage" is such an emotional reaction that liberals often fail to investigate why conservative polemicists make these kinds of provocative statements. Conservatives are trying to sell books, market radio shows, pump up conservative candidates, and support right-wing causes. How does racist, religiously bigoted, and homophobic statements fit into the marketplace and political strategies of people on the right? How do these kinds of statements actually fit in the American cultural landscape? Because liberals are so quickly outraged by right-wing defiance of political morality, we often miss much of what's going on in the world of conservative polemics.

Perhaps the most important dimension of conservative polemics that liberals fail to understand is the significance of liberal outrage for conservatives. Conservatives make bigoted statements specifically with outraging liberals in mind. From the conservative point of view, Rush Limbaugh looked extremely clever when his "Barack the Magic Negro" caused so much outrage while they thought of the outraged liberals as "emotional," "effeminate" because they were so emotional, and gullible for falling into the outrage trap. Conservatives always see themselves as winning these kinds of controversies unless someone like Don Imus goes too far.

In this way, a clever conservative columnist like Kathleen Parker is neither surprised nor unhappy that a liberal blogger like Glenn Greenwald describes her "Getting Bubba" column with its testimony to the "blood equity" of rural whites as "one of the most repellant columns one would ever read" or a Chicago Tribune writer called it "shameful and insulting to Americans of every stripe in this country." Parker has written in defense of date rapists and mooned over George Bush's irresistible sexual attractiveness. So, she knows very well how to outrage liberals. She also knows that liberal outrage will increase her clout as a conservative and further her career as an op-ed columnist. For writers like Parker, there's career gold in outraging people on the left.

But Parker's "Getting Bubba" column is worth thinking and liberals would see the full depth of conservative cynicism if they looked closely.

Parker has two basic arguments. First, building on a remark by Josh Fry of West Virginia about wanting a "full-blooded American" as president, Parker argues that "white Americans primarily -- and Southerners, rural and small-town folks especially"-- should be seen as "full-blooded Americans" because they've built up a full "blood equity" in the United States through military service and agricultural labor. This is the point where liberals get outraged because Parker's rhetoric purposefully mirrors the "blood and soil" rhetoric that the Nazis used to promote the Third Reich.

But what was Parker trying to accomplish besides outraging liberals? By defining Southern, small-town, and rural whites as "full-blooded Americans," Parker is one of a long-line of polemicists who have been looking for a way to give white people a symbolic privilege as "real Americans" without using specifically racist language. Richard Nixon might have begun the trend when he used the term "silent majority" back in 1968. For the late Jerry Falwell, it was the "moral majority." "Mainstream," "normal," and "heartland," are among the many honorific terms have been used to characterize non-urban whites either.

None of the people who promote this kind of language will admite to being racist, but they all mean to convey that traditionalist rural whites are just more "special" than blacks, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans, and more "real" than urban whites or the white liberals in rural areas. According to Parker:

. . . so-called "ordinary Americans" aren't so easily manipulated and they don't need interpreters. They can spot a poser a mile off and they have a hound's nose for snootiness. They've got no truck with people who condescend nor tolerance for that down-the-nose glance from people who don't know the things they know.

Of course, this is all nonsense. People who live in small Southern towns like Morehead realize that an uncomfortable percentage of the "full-blooded Americans" in town are actually "full-blooded Confederates" who fly Confederate flags outside their homes, display Confederate flag bumper stickers, and refight the Civil War with any "Yankee" they see.

Those who live in small Southern towns also know that "heritage" often means isolation from the main paths of American progress. Whether it's isolation from transportation networks, isolation from large-scale industry and finance, or isolation from national trends, West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky and other rural areas in the South have often viewed themselves as separate from the rest of the United States. Kathleen Parker may represent whites in areas like Eastern Kentucky as "full-blooded Americans," but whites in this area are also painfully aware of the stereotypes of ignorant hillbillies, Elmer Gantry religious bigotry, and Deliverance-style deformity and violence that define rural Southerners as separate from the mainstream of American life.

Given the tenuous connections of this region to the rest of the country, the "American-ness" of Eastern Kentucky is always somewhat in doubt. In this context, Kathleen Parker's tribute to "full-blooded Americans" is not only a duplicitous play on racial bigotry, it's also a bitter irony to rural and Southern whites she's exploiting to make her point.

Parker's second argument is even more interesting. She claims that:

What they know is that their forefathers fought and died for an America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years. What they sense is that their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative. And they fear what else might get lost in the remodeling of America.

Here, Parker gets at real dangers with multicultural narratives because contemporary multiculturalism excludes Southern and rural whites. In multicultural narratives, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, the 180 languages in the Los Angeles School District, and global cities like Miami are the future while the traditions of Southern and rural whites are only seen as significant as sources of resistance to that future. Multi-cultural liberals have schooled themselves in recognizing the value of African-American, Islamic, and indigenous cultures while still engaging in condescension toward traditionalist white cultures in America.

Multi-cultural developments and the Obama candidacy in particular have the potential to create a much wider cultural mainstream in the United States. However, the fully potential of multi-cultural America will never be realized until the multi-culturalism and white rural America come to an accommodation.








through their hard work in clearing the forests, breaking the sod, tilling the soil, and growing the crops.

The Lost Empire of Caric

This was an interesting week for the Caric family. Currently owning about 16 acres of land within city limits of Morehead, KY, we were tantalized this week with the prospect of possessing much more land than we thought.

The circumstances were these. We got a call from some new neighbors on North Wilson Ave. about settling the boundary between our properties. Settling the boundary was the only way they would be able to close their mortgage and they were eager to wrap it up.

The usual problem with these kinds of situations is that people have conflicting claims about their land.

But our case was different and interesting because our neighbor's survey showed us owning 500 feet of land bounding their property that we didn't think we had.

What was tantalizing about this was that the people who sold us the property originally told us that we were getting 22 acres. Likewise, the old deeds to our property claimed that it was 35 acres "more or less."

Our empire was growing every time we looked at a new piece of paper.

But then we took our deed and walked our property with someone who knew something about surveying.

That's when our dreams of empire died. Their surveyor must have made a mistake in our favor.

We still have 16 acres.

But it was nice while it lasted.

John McCain's Quest: The Search for an Honest Republican

Today, Tom Loeffler was forced out of his position as John McCain's finance co-chair because of his on-going work as a lobbyist for the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Evidently, McCain posed Loeffler the choice of either resigning from his lobbying position or resigning from the McCain campaign.

[Loeffler] is the fifth person to sever ties with the campaign amid a growing concern about whether lobbyists have too great an influence over McCain and the campaign. Last week, campaign manager Rick Davis issued a new policy that requires all campaign personnel to either resign or sever ties with lobbying firms or outside political groups.

Like a lot of conservatives who prefer Israel to the U. S., Loeffler decided to cast his lot with the Saudis rather than McCain.

But that creates a problem for McCain. How does he replace the departed campaign staffers? How many potential Republican campaign officials are not compromised by their connections with the various parties who might offend McCain's sense of ethics? Are there any experienced and effective Republican campaign officials out there who aren't linked to foreign governments, 527 sleaze groups, right-wing hate churches, Exxon-Mobile, Ann Coulter or some other unsavory party?

I'm not so sure.

What's McCain going to do?

I think he can turn Republican lemons into campaign lemonade by searching for an honest Republican the way Diogenes searched for an honest man. McCain could visit the Republican National Committee and business-oriented think tanks with a lamp in his hand and search for an untainted man or woman to help him run his campaign. He could also visit the Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh.

I'm not suggesting that there are no honest Republicans. There must be a few men or women out there who could serve in McCain's campaign.

But he might have trouble finding them.

Hillary Shines in Kentucky

Today, I took my daughters with me to see Hillary Clinton speak at a rally at Kentucky State University in Frankfort, KY.


The rally was as interesting and impressive as the candidate. The RSI family arrived about an hour and fifteen minutes early after a ninety minute drive. All of the major Democratic presidential candidates have made appearances within driving distance of our home in Morehead and we've now seen John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton.

There was very little notice for the rally in Frankfurt. As a result, it was no surprise that there were fewer than 100 people there when we arrived. The initial group was older, relatively downscale, and feisty. There were a lot of women there in their sixties wearing sneakers, t-shirts, and lots of Hillary paraphernalia. Actually, I was wearing sneakers too.

Where the Obama crowd last August was well-healed and wore "dress casual," the early crowd at the Hillary crowd was so casual that it would be fair to say that they were ostentatious in their lack of concern for taste. The Hillary crowd also seemed more relaxed.

The early crowd had 10 or 12 African-Americans out of a hundred. So it looked like a representative group. But as the audience swelled to it's final size of 500 plus, the new arrivals were overwhelmingly white and a lot more prosperous and stylish looking. It was like an LA sports event where the cool people always arrive fashionably late.

Compared to the Obama event, Hillary's rally had bare bones organization. Where Obama's rally featured speeches from starry-eyed local high school students and a killer rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner that brought the crowd to their feet, Hillary was introduced by a couple of the usual lackluster Kentucky Democrats--Jerry Lundergan and an African-American state senator whose name I forgot.

Lundergan mentioned that Hillary had raised a million dollars for the Kentucky Democratic Party when they were almost bankrupt. Given that the Kentucky Democrats are almost always floundering and that I'm a Kentucky Democrat, I very much appreciated the help.

As a candidate, Hillary Clinton is very impressive in a different way from Obama. The Obama crowd was so jazzed up by the time Obama hit the stage that all the candidate had to do was hit his applause lines and the crowd went wild. Hillary was impressive in the sophisticated approach she took to her hour-long speech. During the first ten to fifteen minutes of her speech, Hillary was essentially campaigning for Barack Obama by focusing entirely on John McCain's wrong-headed ideas about tax policy, social security, health policy, and the war in Iraq. Without any seeming effort or segwe's, Hillary then transitioned into her own policy ideas giving patient and well-done explanations of how she would approach health insurance, energy independence, withdrawing from Iraq, and caring for veterans.

It wasn't "blow you away" kind of stuff, but Hillary was energetic, engaging, and effective in a way that led one to see her enacting these ideas as President of the United States.

Hillary's supporters are supposed to be a "low information" group, but Hillary's speech assumed that her audience was interested in policy, able to follow policy arguments, and viewed those policy arguments as important for their own lives. To the contrary, Obama speaks as though he believes that his upscale and impressively educated audiences have as little toleration for public policy as Chris Matthews or Bill O'Reilly.

Hillary Clinton was also impressive in the way she carried herself after the speech. Starting on the other side of the gym, she posed for pictures, shook hands, and small-talked her way over to us. At the beginning of this process, Hillary was working the crowd in the sense that she was initiating communication as much as others were communicating with her. Evidently tiring by the time she got to our end, Hillary allowed the crowd to "work her" for pictures, autographs, and brief testimonials about how much they loved her.

Liking attention but only liking "so much attention," Hillary was still determined to be warm, friendly, and giving even as it was wearing her out. The stereotype on Hillary is that she's supposed to be manipulative and controlling. But she seemed as genuine as the artificial situation and superficiality of contact allowed.

I was impressed.

Over all, Hillary Clinton showed how good of a president she could be. I'm voting for her next Tuesday in the Kentucky Democratic Primary.

John McCain: Maverick, Narcissist, or StudMuffin

Maverick vs StudMuffin. Dan Collins at the right-wing blog Protein Wisdom has taken to referring to John McCain as "Maverick."

Of course, there's a little irony there.

Conservatives don't like the deviations from the Republican Party line that gave McCain a reputation as a maverick during the Clinton and early Bush years. But "maverick" also has connotations of individualism, rebelliousness, and masculinity that the right-wing likes to project. Ultimately, Collins means it as a compliment.

But this goes to show that conservatives don't have enough respect for the sanctity of marriage. As this blog has observed, his wife Cindy likes to refer to John McCain as her "StudMuffin." If Collins respected the institution of marriage, he would follow suit.

John the Narcissist. Actually, I think "StudMuffin" captures McCain well as a tough guy who likes the world to revolve around, feed, nurture, and stroke him. Sure McCain's a man's man but he's also Cindy's little studmuffin to be coddled and waited on. A lot of traditional guys are like that in showing off their domineering macho but insisting on being constantly mommied by their girlfriends and wives at the same time. What makes John McCain different is that he insists on being mommied in his work as a national-level politician and expects the media, his fellow Senators, and everybody else he's around to treat him with the same kind of worshipful subservience that he expects from his wife. And when anybody fails to treat him as their StudMuffin, McCain throws a hell of a temper tantrum.

This brings to the narcissistic core of John McCain's presidential campaign. What McCain proposes is a kind of symbolic exchange. For his part, McCain will devote his presidential campaign to showing what a really extraordinary great guy he is. McCain has already done a tour of all the places that were so successful in "molding" his character as a patriot, public servant, and all around wonderful human being. That was followed up with a poverty tour that had everything to do with demonstrating that he is "a different kind of Republican" and nothing to do with addressing the problems of poverty.

But none of those manuevers held a candle to the narcissism of McCain's "State of the Union, 2013" speech where he declared victory in the Iraq War, celebrated the death of bin Laden, and congratulated himself on the success of his health care policies.

“By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom,” Mr. McCain said at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. “The Iraq war has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced.”

Who says McCain's going to be another four years of Bush. His "State of the Union, 2013" speech is an even bigger exercise in political fantasy than Bush's "Mission Accomplished" event. McCain projected all of his proposals as being enacted, all his ideas being effective, and almost all of our problems being solved. That's because McCain's a good man who's right about everything.

So what's the electorate's part of the exchange? The American public gets to recognize John McCain's greatness by electing him president and expressing our gratitude for the wonderful qualities that make John McCain such an extraordinary and extraordinarily successful man. In other words, John McCain's presidential campaign is giving American voters an opportunity to show their full appreciation for John McCain.

What a great guy! He makes me proud to be an American.

Working on the Heavy Joe Klein Bag

Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald eviscerated Joe Klein . . . again. Klein is one of the favorite targets for left-wing bloggers but Greenwald takes the prize for sustained ferocity. In general, it's Greenwald's unsurpassed ferocity that makes him such a valuable blogger.

Birthday Odds and Ends

They Say It's My Birthday. I was 54 years old today--54 born in 54. As always, I'm mostly happy to be alive and in decent health. I've got a great family, a job I love, and I'm living in a beautiful part of the world. Altogether life is good.

Blasts From the Past. Two of my undergraduate mentors Lew and Sandy Hinchman retired from their teaching jobs last week. They arrived at St. Lawrence University my senior year and pointed me in the direction of Hegel and Frankfurt School Marxism and helping me set my sails for a degree in political theory. They were unbelievably generous to me and gave me a lot of good advice that I wasn't able to take when I was in grad school. But I have tried to follow their examples and have done my best to be as generous to my students as they were to me.

I also heard from Tom McNeilus, a teacher in Virginia who grew up on my street in Waverly, NY. He was a really nice kid when we were growing up and he still seems like a really nice guy at the age of 54. Fifty-four!!!

Collapse of the Republicans? I talked with a conservative guy today who seemed convinced that the Democrats could finish off the Republican Party once and for all if they nominated Hillary Clinton this year. What he sees is that Hillary has a strong appeal to the white working-class conservatives and Reagan Democrats who the Republicans need to be competitive.

I'm not sure about this. After all, I know a lot of Democrats who say they'll vote for McCain if Hillary is nominated.

But the Republicans are on very thin ice. The GOP almost extinct in New England and have lost their base in the Northern suburbs. They're not competitive in the coastal areas on the Pacific and even less competitive with African-Americans, Hispanics, gays, and Jewish voters. Republican safe areas in the South (Virginia, North Carolina), Southwest, and Mountain States have become battlegrounds and the party is having trouble attracting viable candidates and raising money. My right-wing friend thinks that the GOP would fall through the ice and drown if they were deserted by Reagan Democrats.

My own thought is that an Obama win would cause something like a Republican collapse because it would signal a general refusal of the public to continue listening to the right. Having supported Hillary's candidacy up to last week, I still see an Obama win as really shifting the balance to the left in American politics.

More Important Than Hillary/Obama

Perhaps more important than the Hillary/Obama race in West Virginia is the run-off between Democratic candidate Travis Childers and Republican Greg Davis for an open Congressional seat in Mississippi.

The fact that Childers won 53-47 in a heavily Republican district means that Congressional Republicans are going to be worried sick about a total collapse in November. Childers is the third straight Democrat to win a seat in a heavily Republican district. Congressional Republicans haven't been successful at raising money, recruiting strong candidates, or generating any kind of interesting policy agendas.

Likewise it appears that GOP smear tactics might not even work among staunchly Republican voters this year.

All this adds up to a lot of Democratic confidence. Now, Democratic candidates have to go out and win the elections.

Hillary and Those Hard-Working White People, Part II

It looks like Hillary Clinton has won over those hard-working white people of West Virginia. With 63 per cent of precincts in, she's beating Obama 65-28.

Jinchi left a strong comment on Pmy Hillary and Those Hard-Working White People" post:

I'll agree that Hillary wasn't being deliberately racist, but you're giving her too much credit here. Hillary's comment was simply a continuation of the foolish Mark Penn strategy of dividing the electorate into finer and finer demographic categories (working class white voters without a college education). It has nothing to do with her view of America as a diverse society.

It is entirely about campaign tactics (who do we focus on, who do we ignore).I think this has been the fundamental flaw of the Clinton campaign and it appears so deeply ingrained in the thinking of her team that they've repeatedly alienated large segments of the Democratic base by publicly discussing it. This is where "insignificant states" and "latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock wearing, trust fund babies" comes from. It's where Geraldine Ferraro's nonsensical "luck black man" statement originated. It's why she didn't bother with caucus states (too many party activists) and it's why she gave up completely on black voters. She conceded entire groups forgetting that in the end, all the votes count the same. Obama was able to win by 30, 40, 50 points in key races because she didn't contest them. Meanwhile he kept her wins small by drawing just enough of "her" voters.

There's a lot that I agree with there and the agreement starts with the failure of Hillary's campaign strategy. In my opinion, the failure lay in refusing to take Obama's challenge seriously rather than in Mark Penn's (really Karl Rove's) micro-targeting ideas. Unwilling to believe that Obama could beat them, the Hillary campaign did not put people and money into the caucus states, did not do any campaign planning beyond Feb. 5, and did not commit themselves wholeheartedly to internet campaigning and fund-raising until it was too late. The Hillary campaign both under-estimated Obama's strength and over-estimated the solidity of Hillary's own support. As a result, Hillary's campaign didn't have the infrastructure needed to regain support after her initial poll numbers nose-dived in the wake of her "driver's licenses for illegal immigrants" gaffe.

Actually, I think that micro-targeting is a good idea in many circumstances. In 2004, Rove and the Republicans used micro-targeting as a way to appeal to narrow constituencies in terms of the interests and values of those constituencies as well as the broader themes of the campaign. For example, the Republicans identified "security moms" and "anti-abortion black ministers" as possible Republican voters and targeted their appeals in terms of the interests and values of those groups. Obviously, Rove was selling an ugly mixture of gay bashing, fear mongering, and war mongering. But micro-targeting was a way for the Republicans to add little streams of voters onto their core constituencies.

I don't think Mark Penn was doing much micro-targeting in Rove's sense. He certainly divided up the electorate into smaller and smaller groups as he try to rationalize Hillary defeats, but Penn never tried to add to Hillary's coalition by trying to split off groups that might be seen as Obama constituencies. For example, I don't know why Hillary's campaign didn't work on appealing to "working class African-American voters without a college education" as long as she was making class appeals or why she didn't do more stuff on women in order to broaden her appeal among white women even further. If I were a Hillary consultant, I would have used more black women as surrogates. That kind of additive campaigning would have been "micro-targeting."

Ultimately though, none of this is connected to Hillary's reference to whites as "white Americans." I still see that as taking white people off their racial pedestal and making them (us) just another group of hyphenated Americans. I doubt that Hillary meant the comment to be particularly meaningful but it still resonated as a matter of fact extension of multi-culturalism to white people.

I view that as a very progressive thing.

Life Under The Obama Rules

Commenting on a Newsweek article, Rich Lowry of the National Review Online is worried about the "Obama Rules" that Democrats hope and Republicans fear will limit right-wing smearing during the presidential campaign.

"The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968," [Newsweek] says, through "innuendo and code." McCain "may not be able to resist casting doubt on Obama's patriotism," and there's a question whether he can or wants to "rein in the merchants of slime and sellers of hate."

Here are the Obama rules in detail: He can't be called a "liberal" ("the same names and labels they pin on everyone," as Obama puts it); his toughness on the war on terror can't be questioned ("attempts to play on our fears"); his extreme positions on social issues can't be exposed ("the same efforts to distract us from the issues that
affect our lives" and "turn us against each other"); and his Chicago background
too is off-limits ("pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy"). Besides that, it should be a freewheeling and spirited campaign.

Needless to say, the Obama campaign isn't going to be able to put a lid on smearing. People on the right have a lot of money and a lot of ingenuity and they're going to be putting everything they have into developing the next the next Willie Horton or Swift Boat ad campaign. The right is going to be as vicious as they can be and some of the smears are going to hit the mark. The Obama campaign should expect that.

The question is whether anybody is going to take the onslaught of right-wing smearing seriously or whether the public has already tuned the right-wing out as a serious voice on American politics.

As a conservative, Lowry is pretty pessimistic on this point. In a telling reflection on how little confidence the right has in the conservative brand, Lowry demands that Obama refrain from calling John McCain a "conservative" or [labeling] him in any other way.

If "conservatism" has become such a negative brand that calling someone a conservative is a smear, the "Obama Rules" are just a reflection of how little the public wants to hear from the right.