Karl Rove and the Politics of Weenie Macho

One of the interesting cultural dimensions of the 2008 election is the two strands of dominant masculinity represented by John McCain's hot-tempered fighter jock and Barack Obama's androgynous, intellectual cool.

They might seem like opposites, but that isn't quite the case.

A tough-guy who likes to remind everybody how tough he is, John McCain's always bristled against, defied, and ignored the rules and expectations that were set for him. But McCain also had the savvy needed to realize his ambitions despite not toeing the line. McCain not only broke the rules at the Naval Academy, he in fact graduated. McCain might be cynical about his public image, but he's also worked hard enough to promote far-reaching proposals on areas as diverse as campaign finance reform, immigration legislation, and military affairs. In U. S. Senate terms, McCain's both a "work horse" and a "show horse," and he's been effective at both.

Barack Obama hasn't played by the rules either. Not that he had much choice. Being bi-racial, Obama had to feel his way gradually toward an African-American racial identity. Then, Obama was the "first black this" and "the first black that," but had the brains, flexibility, and equanimity needed to succeed in both the African-American world of people like Jeremiah Wright and the white worlds of Harvard Law School, Illinois politics, and the U. S. Senate. Where John McCain refused to play by the usual rules and won, Barack Obama couldn't play by the usual rules and still won.

Cue Karl Rove.

According to ABC's Christiane Klein, Karl Rove talked fairly extensively about Barack Obama's character at a Republican fund-raising breakfast.

"Even if you never met him, you know this guy . . . He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

Outside the "beautiful date" idea, the image is ridiculous. Judging by Michelle Obama, it's easy to see Obama as dating attractive women. But after that, it's all distortion. The Obamas of the world--the class presidents, big men on campus, the Harvard Law School editors, the stalwarts of the local mega-church-are well-liked by most people, and chat amiably with "everyone who passes by." Comfortable in their own skins, they're comfortable with other people and don't have the resentment level needed for constant snideness.

In his own way, the same is the case with John McCain.

Talking Points Memo thinks that Rove's image is portraying Obama as an "uppity," overly-ambitious black person. There's something to this. Like other conservative activists, Rove's been searching for a formula for casting aspersions on Obama's blackness while maintaining a "plausible deniability" about racism. Here Rove characterizes Obama as having a "cool arrogance" which I take as meaning that Obama has the "arrogant" presumption to think that he can socialize in "our" white clubs, date "our" white women," and still makes snide comments about "us" white people. Michelle Obama gets lots of criticism for her lack of "gratitude" for all her opportunities. Here, Rove is saying the same thing about Barack.

But Rove's has another layer of mendacity about Democratic politicians like Barack Obama.

Cue Jake Tapper.

In his column on Rove, Tapper asks where Karl Rove would be and poses possibilities such as "the brainy guy with all the sports scores" before getting to his cheeky bottom line that Rove would "be the guy who vandalizes your car and blames it on the kitchen staff."

But it seems more likely that Karl Rove would just be standing against another wall, wishing that he were dating a woman like Obama was dating, or dating any woman at all. Karl Rove's a dough-faced, homely kind of guy who's not comfortable with women (he barked "don't touch me" at Sheryl Crowe once when she touched his arm). Whether it's height, looks, maturity, having the easy confidence that impresses people, or being comfortable with themselves, there's a lot of guys who have a hard time getting ahead in high school, college, business, or the country club. They don't do well with people in general and don't interact comfortably with women in particular. In fact, these kinds of guys do their best at obsessive type things like video games, following professional wrestling, memorizing "all the sports scores," handling their guns . . . or politics.

In this sense, Karl Rove wouldn't just resent Barack Obama as a black guy, he's resent Obama as a guy who is too well-liked, overly comfortable with himself, and comes by his success with such apparent ease. Given that success didn't come nearly as easily for Rove, it ticks him off to think that Obama can just walk into the "club" and take it over.

Rove didn't like McCain either and did his best to destroy McCain's war hero reputation with an orchestrated campaign of innuendo during the 2000 South Carolina primary.

The right-wing and the Bush administration are filled with Rove-type guys--"weenies" for lack of a better word. George W. Bush didn't having the size, coordination, or self-discipline to be an athlete himself and embarrassed his father well into his father's presidency. Rush Limbaugh's idea of a good time with women is sex tourism in the Dominican Republic. And the list goes on. Tom DeLay and Scooter Libby are tiny little guys. So is Alberto Gonzales and Gonzales has a high, reedy voice to boot. Bradley Schlozman of fired prosecutor fame has such a high voice he sounded like he had been sucking helium before his Congressional testimony last year. In fact, one of the interesting dimensions of the fired prosecutor's scandal is that fired prosecutors like Bud Cummins and David Iglesias were conventional "big man on campus" types while the political appointees doing the firing looked like guys who didn't get dates.

How does the weeniness of someone like Karl Rove become a kind of macho politics? Rick Pearlstein claims in Nixonland that one of Richard Nixon's innovations in politics was his way of appealing to the men and women who were outside the magic circles of conventional ideals. The same is the case with Karl Rove and the contemporary right. During the late nineties and the early years of the Bush administration that the right invented a new politics of outsized macho gestures. Lining themselves up with the gestures of old westerns, professional wrestling, violent video games, trash-talking sports heroes, and action or horror movies, the Bush administration started bumping chests, relishing their opportunities to exchange threats with enemies like Kim Il-Sung and Mohammed Ahmadinejad, and calling out America's enemies with lines like "Wanted Dead or Alive" and "Bring it On."

For awhile, the politics of weenie macho succeeded as the right succeeded in making its fantasies of out-sized masculinity into the dominant image of political manhood in the United States. This is what killed Al Gore and John Kerry. Both Gore and Kerry were embodiments of conventional "big man on campus" masculinity. They were popular, relatively secure guys who were ambitious, served in the military, and worked their way up the ladder. With the cooperation of the media, however, the conservative weenies were able to trump the conventional masculinity of Gore and Kerry and make the "natural," "assumed" manliness of the Democrats look artificial, contrived, and effeminate.

But the relentless failure of the Bush administration has delegitimized the politics of weenie macho just as much as it's delegitimized the Republican Party and conservatism. Power is about to shift back to the guys like Obama and McCain who make it look too easy and part of the election is going to be about which form of the dominant masculinity people want to see in the White House.

Bummer: George Carlin's Dead

I just saw an announcement of the death of George Carlin due to heart failure. That's too bad. I thought I was going to die from heart failure once back in 1999 because I was laughing so hard at one of Carlin's HBO specials.

Luckily for Carlin and his fans, his death won't be greeted with the endless media blathering that accompanied the death of Tim Russert.

The Unofficial John McCain Campaign Song

One of my ideas for the campaign is to make suggestions about how John McCain can goof his campaign as badly as George McGovern blew it in 1972.

After all, if McCain's going to lose, he might as well lose big time.

So far, my suggestions have been limited to nominating really bad vice-presidential candidates like Karl Rove or Rudy Giuliani.

Today, I'd like to propose a tune that John could adopt as his campaign song. It's bold. It's brash. It also has the kind of not-so-deeply-embedded drug message that only John McCain would have the guts to adopt.

The John McCain Campaign Song
To the tune of Casey Jones (with major apologies to the Grateful Dead and their fans)

Flying that plane, high on McCain,
Hey Big John, you’d better watch your speed.
Flip flops ahead, no money behind,
And you know that notion just crossed his mind.

Running for office takes all his time,
Straight Talk Express leaves at quarter to nine,
Flying to Baghdad, St. Louis too
At a quarter to ten you know he’s flying again.

Flying that plane, high on McCain,
Hey Big John, you’d better watch your speed.
Recession ahead, failed war behind,
And you know that notion just crossed his mind.

Trouble ahead, there's crowded air space,
Deregulation ain't always so safe,
Pilots are Sleeping, Green Airline 02 is
in the wrong quadrant, now he's heading for you.

Flying that plane, high on McCain,
Hey Big John, you’d better watch your speed.
Obama’s ahead, bad poll numbers behind,
And you know that notion just crossed his mind.

Trouble with you is the trouble with me,
Big John’s flying but he still don’t see.
Too many townhalls, you know its the end,
John's down in a cornfield, straight-talkin' while dead

Flying that plane, high on McCain,
Hey Big John, you’d better watch your speed.
Flip flops ahead, no money behind,
And you know that notion just crossed his mind.

And you know that notion just crossed his mind.

McCain: It Is What It Is

This stage of the John McCain campaign is taking shape in interesting ways. Here are some key themes.

McCain: The Gimmicks. Taking the initiative is important in any contest whether it's sports, war, or politics. John McCain has been able to seize the initiative in not insignificant ways. First, he made news by challenging Barack Obama to travel to Iraq with him and set up a little countdown of the number of days since Obama has visited Iraq. McCain then made a little more news by challenging Obama to hold a series of ten weekly town hall meetings. It's all kind of gimmicky, but McCain is forcing Obama to respond to him rather than attack.

Expect more such gimmicks in the future.

McCain: The Schizophrenia. Republican insiders have been complaining to the media about McCain's inability to settle on a particular theme. Last week, McCain trumpeted that he had stood up to George Bush on global warming one day, then went out and called for more off-shore drilling the next. It looked particularly bad to insiders that Bush then rushed out to endorse McCain's drilling ideas.

"I'm baffled that the McCain guys have somehow managed to take a guy who practically had 'reform' tattooed to his forehead and turned him into the bastion of the status quo," said one Republican strategist, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The conflicting themes sound like political schizophrenia, but we'll probably be seeing a lot of this from the McCain campaign. Because Bush, Republicans, and conservatism are unpopular, McCain needs to convince voters an independent maverick willing to stand up to to Bush. But it's just as important for McCain to attack Obama as well. Given that McCain is hardly going to attack Obama from the left, he needs to push standard conservative views on the few issues where such views might be popular. Given $4.00 gas, there's a decent chance that McCain might be able to score some points by calling for more drilling. So he has to go for it.

This might sound inconsistent. It might sound schizophrenic, and it might sound like the kind of unprincipled flip-flopping that killed John Kerry.

But the McCain campaign needs to be brazenly inconsistent if McCain hopes to win. It all might sound schizophrenic, but "it is what it is."

McCain: The Man. Actually, the McCain campaign is pursuing the consistent theme that John McCain is a highly principled man and proven leader who will do what's right whatever other people think. To promote this image of McCain the Man, the McCain campaign relies heavily on McCain's image as a war hero, his reputation for having defied George Bush in 2000, and his affinity for Gen. Petraeus. It helps McCain that the mainstream media buys into this view and portrays McCain as a principled man who will be a strong leader in office even if he has to contradict himself and pander to get elected. Call it "principles pandering."

McCain: The Danger. But this is where McCain's gimmicks and schizoid inconsistency might wreck his campaign altogether. McCain's campaign is doomed if his pandering backfires in a way that sticks in the public imagination as their image of McCain the man.

This is essentially what happened to Rudy Giuliani. After months of dodging bullets on his arrogance and corrupt associations, Giuliani's front-running campaign fell completely apart when it was revealed that New York City police had provided security for his mistress. After that, it was impossible for opponents, the media, voters, or anyone else to take Giuliani seriously.

The same thing could easily happen to John McCain if he's not careful with strategies that are ultimately pretty risky.

The Real Obama Stands Up

Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope is the kind of book people buy without ever reading.

And there's good reason for that.

Written after Obama was elected to the Senate in 2004, The Audacity of Hope is political boilerplate on how Americans can do a better job of "coming together." The 60 or 70 pages I read aren't very insightful. Or very interesting. And I don't particularly regret not getting any further.

Still, there are a lot of progressives who would have done well to read The Audacity of Hope before they endorsed Obama for the Democratic nomination.

Liberal bloggers are up in arms that Barack Obama is supporting the "compromise" bill on wiretapping and telecom immunity that just passed the House of Representatives on Friday and will most likely be passed by the Senate early next week.

There are two major provisions in the bill.

The most important provision in terms of intelligence operations is that the president is required to obtain approval from a special FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court within a week of initiating a wiretap on communications between people in foreign countries and the U. S. They only had 72 hours of leeway under the FISA Act of 1978.

The second provision is probably the more controversial and contentious. The legislation also provides that telecom companies like AT&T that conducted illegal surveillance at the request of the Bush administration will get immunity from criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits.

Liberal bloggers are outraged because it has become evident that the telecom companies "data mined" the whole American system of telephone communication in search of "suspicious" patterns of phone calls at the request of the Bush administration. And they did so without any kind of warrant. Under the FISA Act of 1978 (which was designed to address the CIA abuses of the 50's and 60's), that kind of surveillance was illegal on the part of both the Bush administration and the telecoms and all parties engaging in such surveillance were subject to criminal penalties.

Even worse, "legal immunity" shields the Bush administration's conduct from scrutiny. More than 40 lawsuits have been filed against the telecoms and progressive activists had hoped that the telecoms would be forced to reveal what the Bush administration actually was doing as they responded to the lawsuits. Without the lawsuits, progressive activists have lost a major vehicle for determing the full criminality of the Bush administration's surveillance program.

To say that liberal bloggers are disappointed, enraged, and dismayed over the legislation and Obama's endorsement is to put the matter mildly. At Daily Kos, Hunter has a long diatribe on how Obama's statement on the legislation shows that he thinks most Americans are stupid. Salon blogging powerhouse Glenn Greenwald can't decide which is the worst thing about the surveillance legislation, the un-American character of the whole warrantless surveillance idea, Democratic leadership's lack of respect for the rule of law, the corruption of the Democrats in saving the bacon of big-time campaign contributors like the telecom companies, or the post hoc bragging by the Republicans that they got a lot more than they thought possible. Greenwald emphasizes that the Democratic Congress still hasn't stood up to President Bush on a major issue and views House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland as the primary agent of Democratic appeasement to the Bush administration and the Republicans.

And as a liberal blogger, I'm just as disgusted with the surveillance legislation as Greenwald and Hunter.

But I wonder how they can be surprised that Obama's supporting the bill.

Obama starts off his statement by saying:

Given the grave threats that we face, our national security agencies must have the capability to gather intelligence and track down terrorists before they strike, while respecting the rule of law and the privacy and civil liberties of the American people.

This is key. Obama views the Bush administration as addressing a legitimate concern for national security in its surveillance programs. Much of the point of the first few chapters of The Audacity of Hope is to argue that Republicans and Democrats have most of the same values, that the Republicans have legitimate points of view, and that the Democrats need to be less suspicious and more empathetic about Republican intentions. Obama specifically criticizes the harder edge of ideological partisanship represented by The Daily Kos and bloggers like Glenn Greenwald and myself.

I understand the frustration of these activists. The ability of Republicans to repeatedly win on the basis of polarizing campaigns is indeed impressive. I recognize the dangers of subtlety and nuance in the face of the conservative movement's passionate intensity. And in my mind at least, there are a host of Bush administration policies that justify righteous indignation.

Ultimately, though, I believe any attempt by Democrats to pursue a more sharply partisan and idological strategy misapprehends the moment we're in. I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. (Audacity of Hope, 40)

In other words, Obama is just like Rep. Steny Hoyer, Sen. Jay Rockefeller and other Democrats who view George Bush and Dick Cheney as having an honest belief that warrantless wiretapping is necessary for American national security. As Democrats, figures like Obama might disagree with Bush about the best way to balance national security and civil liberties and believe that the Bush administration has engaged in a number of abuses.

There is also little doubt that the Bush Administration, with the cooperation of major telecommunications companies, has abused that authority and undermined the
Constitution by intercepting the communications of innocent Americans without
their knowledge or the required court orders.

However, Barack Obama is like Steny Hoyer in believing that the Bush people are decent and being more than willing to compromise some of his values to get important legislation passed. For Obama, this is the only way to get out of what he views as the "either-or" (Audacity, 40) politics of the last eight years and the only way to generate the broad consensus needed for government to better serve the public interest.

That's a long way from my view and the views of the most prominent liberal bloggers. From the liberal blogger point of view, the Bush administration is a criminal enterprise that knowingly and purposefully violated the laws against warrantless wiretapping, crimes against humanity, and politicizing administrative entities like the Justice Department. The major figures in the Bush administration viewed all of these types of laws as "liberal legislation" and saw a willingness to break those laws as a test of political manhood. Likewise, once figures in the Bush administration committed their various crimes, they also engaged in a wholesale cover-up by "misplacing" e-mails, invoking executive privilege, refusing international agencies access to prisoners at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, etc.

While Obama believes that the Bush administration has been sincerely pursuing their ideas of national security even if he disagrees with those ideas, most of the prominent liberal bloggers have concluded that the Bush administration leveraged the national security crisis of 9-11 into the wholesale lawbreaking of laws they didn't like.

I agree with the bloggers and this fundamental disagreement with Obama is the primary reason why I supported Hillary Clinton almost to the bitter end.

Nevertheless, mostly because of their general disgust with the Clinton era and Obama's early opposition to the Iraq War, the activists at Daily Kos and MoveOn.org supported Obama.

Now that they can see the real Obama, liberal activists need to form a better understanding of what the Democratic nominee stands for.

They also need to read his book.

Caric's Election Prediction: Obama--57, McCain--43

The Prediction. My not-so fearless prediction for the presidential election is that Obama is going to win and he's going to win big--57-43. I say "not-so-fearless" because predicting such a big win for Obama makes me extremely nervous and . . . well, fearful.

There's so many unpredictable elements in the election that forecasting a landslide for Obama seems risky to the point of recklessness. Nobody knows how Obama's racial status as a mixed-race, African-American is going to play out. Nobody knows how the economy is going to look in October or what's going to be happening in Iraq. And nobody knows where the next Jeremiah Wright, lobbyist, drunk-driving, or patriotism scandal is going to come from.

But I'm still going with Obama 57, McCain 43.

The Reasons. There are several reasons why. John McCain is operating with several severe disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage for McCain is that most of the American public is sick of President Bush, Dick Cheney, and the Republican Party as a whole. Bush's approval numbers are in the 20's and not likely to get better as both gas prices and unemployment go up. Public opposition to the war in Iraq is rock solid at 60-65% despite the relative success of the surge and the financial and sex scandals of Congressional Republicans have branded Republicans as the party of greed, lust, and hypocrisy. Adding everything up, the Democrats have a 55-36 advantage in party identification and most people want to elect a Democrat as president.

There's more. Barack Obama is going to have a huge money advantage. There are some estimates that Obama will be able to raise $500 million for the general election campaign while McCain has taken public financing and is only going to be able to spend the $84 million the government gives him. (bias alert: I've kicked in $150 for Obama myself). What this means mostly is that Obama is going to be doing so much more television advertising that he'll be able to win previously red states like Virginia and Colorado and force McCain to invest scarce resources into "defending" states like North Carolina. The Obama campaign is even talking about putting traditionally Republican Alaska into play. As a result of his financial advantage, Obama will also have many more staffers in place (he already has 700), and will have a much more extensive get out the vote operation than McCain.


The huge financial advantage will work particularly well for Obama because he has a simple message that most Americans already believe--"a vote for a Republican is a vote for four more years of GOP arrogance, incompetence, and corruption."


Of course, McCain won't exactly be helpless. He'll get plenty of free media coverage from a press that genuinely likes him, financial help from the Republican National Committee and some assistance from "527 committees" running negative ads against Obama. But McCain will still be operating at a huge disadvantage at the same time that he has to communicate a set of complex set of "but" messages. McCain's has to convey that he's a straight-line conservative but not like Bush. He's also has to claim that he's a proud Republican but not like other Republicans, and that he's a strong supporter of the war but thinks the war's been conducted very badly.


That's much too much nuance for a budget of "only" 84 million.


The John McCain Problem. The other big problem for the McCain campaign is the candidate himself. McCain and his campaign manager Rick Davis have never been good at organizing campaigns. The McCain campaign was badly out-organized by Karl Rove in 2000 and consequently couldn't take advantage of McCain's big New Hampshire breakthrough. They haven't done any better this time. McCain had almost four months to present himself to the American public as the Republican nominee, build up a reservoir of good will, and motivate GOP activists for the fall campaign. But the McCain campaign frittered away the time by sending him overseas to show his "leadership," putting together a "character" tour of all the places where McCain had grown up, and sending him to poverty spots like Martin County even though McCain doesn't care much about poverty. It was all a waste. The McCain campaign wasn't much better prepared in June than it was in February and Republican insiders have been fretting about it to the media.


McCain also has a very narrow range of effectiveness on the campaign trail. He's great at mixing with the press in the back of the Straight-Talk Express or the campaign plane. He's also very effective in townhall settings. But John McCain is a very poor public speaker who has a ghoulish grin, does applause lines in the most awkward manner imaginable, and is extremely awkward with a teleprompter. McCain's speech in New Orleans on the night Obama clinched was an enormous embarrassment and McCain's speech-making looks particularly bad next to Obama's often inspirational oratory. I can't imagine Republicans are looking forward to his acceptance speech.


McCain's also beginning to slip up on basic facts and get irritable during interviews. The media has yet to put much emphasis on things like McCain referring to Vladimir Putin as the President of Germany or his irritable responses to a series of questions about Obama. But if McCain keeps it up, one of those gaffes might become a symbol of his inadequacy as a candidate.


One of the reasons why I'm predicting a big win for Obama is that McCain is such a weak candidate.


Party Activists. The final reason why McCain is going to lose big is that conservative GOP activists are so suspicious of McCain that they have to decide whether they're going to vote for McCain at all before they think about campaigning for him.


Bush barely won in 2004 because he had a highly motivated conservative and evangelical base. Unless McCain has that kind of excited conservative base in 2008, he won't even be able to keep it close. I don't see that conservative excitement as happening and I don't believe McCain will be able to keep it close.

The Polls. Barack Obama is current running 5.5 points ahead of McCain in the standard RealClearPolitics poll average. That's above the margin of error but still not a big lead.

Nevertheless, there are some indications that Obama has the potential for a big win. Newsweek came out with a poll today that has Obama in a 15 point lead--51-36. Dividing up 12% of the undecided vote evenly between Obama and McCain (leaving 1% for minor candidates) and that would come out as a 57-42 lead for Obama. Almost right on my prediction.

The Newsweek poll is clearly an outlier poll. The other polls give Obama a 4-6 point margin. As a result, the findings should be taken with a big grain of salt until they are further substantiated. However, the Newsweek findings are indirectly confirmed by the fact that Obama has gained considerable ground recently in battlefield states like Ohio (Obama +5.3), Pennsylvania (Obama, +7.3), and Florida (ARG survey, Obama, +5)and formerly red states like Virginia (Obama, +.5)and Georgia (McCain, +1).

If Obama really is only one point behind in Georgia, that's an indication that the landslide is probably already starting to turn significantly in his direction.

Conclusion. It's important to emphasize that Barack Obama is far from nailing down a landslide and John McCain is (still) far from goofing up his campaign on the scale of George McGovern's 1972 race (although I think he can).

But there's enough potential for a big win that I'm sticking with my 57-43 prediction and breaking out the lyrics for the Stevie Nicks classic "Landslide"--"The Landslide brought it down."

Even if I have a lot of trepidation in doing it.

An RSI Program Note

Beginning some time next week or the week after, political posts from RSI are going to be posted at the WEKU Electoral Page web site.

Consequently, I'm going to be reintroducing some basic RSI themes over the next few posts. My apologies to regular readers for the upcoming redundancy.

Obama Opts Out of Public Financing

The news is coming fast and furious this morning. It appears that the House Dems have caved on wireless wiretapping and telecom immunity.

But there is good news.

Barack Obama is opting out of the public financing system.

I'd like to support public financing, but Obama's fundraising might be the best thing to happen to American politics since the early 1980's.

The Obama campaign has created a small-donor river of money--95 million in February and March-- that will ultimately allow progressives to be competitive with corporate money in American politics.

If Obama had accepted public financing, the growing power of progressive politics in American society would have been stymied.

Refusing public financing was the right thing to do both for the current campaign and for the future of American politics.

Gas Prices: It is the Speculators!

Yes, there are evil speculators. It appears that we have speculators in oil futures to thank for gas at $4.50 a gallon.

According to an article by Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, brokerage firms like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs arranged a way for institutional investors to get around federal limits on oil speculation.

Before 2002, "the federal Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) sharply limited investments by those outside the (oil) business . . . " to prevent speculators from driving up oil prices.

However, the brokerage firms got around those policies by moving "their operations to London [and] setting up the International Commodities Exchange. Now they can buy all the oil futures they want."

As a matter of fact, speculation in oil futures is extremely cheap because the current rules call for only 5% in the way of margins.

As a result, the volume invested in oil futures has expanded from "$13 billion at the end of 2003 to $260 billion by March of 2008. Consequently, the oil futures market is beginning to look like the housing bubble or sub-prime market. Speculation that prices will continue to rise is the engine that fuels the influx of money that actually keeps prices rising.

Excess Profits Tax. In this context, an excess profits tax on the oil companies looks like a highly appropriate policy. Perhaps the oil companies are driving the speculation in oil futures themselves. But it's obvious that the oil companies are making huge profits off the current wave of speculation.

As a result, there's no connection between the extraordinarily high profits of the oil companies and their actual performance in the marketplace. That's a result that isn't good for the oil companies themselves let alone the American economy as a whole. Flush with "unearned" profits, the oil companies have little incentive to be careful, thorough, or smart in figuring out what they're going to do with all the money.

It's best for all concerned if the federal government takes a significant chunk of the current oil boondoggle and applies the money to investment in alternative energy, paying down the national debt, or withdrawing troops from Iraq.

Breaking the Speculators. The federal government also needs to take the further step of breaking the speculators in oil futures. And I mean break them--make sure the big players lose their jobs if not their shirts. The trick is to instantly increase the supply of oil and the best way to do that is to take oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and put it on the market.

Of course, it could be objected that the increase in supply from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve would be marginal.

And that's true.

But the oil futures bubble is like the housing and sub-prime bubbles in that it depends on investor confidence in infinitely increasing prices. Releasing oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve doesn't have to dramatically increase the supply of oil to bring the oil bubble crashing down. All it has to do is to shake speculator confidence that prices will continue to rise.

And the bubble will be killed.

The Eagerness of Bush Administration Torture Warriors

The Bush administration took a hard hit on torture today. In a report from the Physicians for Human Rights, former Major General Antonio Taguba is quoted as claiming that the Bush administration engaged in war crimes:

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes," Taguba wrote. "The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

Unfortunately, there is also the question of whether the obviousness of the Bush administration's war crimes will become as clear to the American public as it is to Gen. Taguba.

Today's McClatchey article contained another interesting statement from a general involved in the Bush administration's human rights situation.

Also this week, a probe by the Senate Armed Services Committee revealed how senior Pentagon officials pushed for harsher interrogation methods over the objections of top military lawyers. Those methods later surfaced in Afghanistan
and Iraq . . . .

There was no "bright line of abuse which could not be transgressed," former Navy general counsel Alberto Mora told the Senate committee.

In fact, the Bush administration was quite eager to cross those lines. Contemptuous of international law and equally contemptuous of the American legal system, the Bush administration was eager to establish its own version of lynch law for the War on Terror.

Israeli Appeasement?

So the Israelis came to a cease-fire agreement with Hamas, are talking up a storm with the Palestinians and Syrians, and are now proposing to talk with the Lebanese.

Talk about appeasement.

We know why the Bush administration tolerates all this negotiation. They're desperate for some kind of achievement before they leave office.

But why doesn't John McCain object.

Why Not Lieberman?

Speculation concerning a McCain/Lieberman ticket is starting to bubble up. I can see it. McCain loves Lieberman to death and trusts Lieberman more than anybody else in political life.

McCain would also be sure that Lieberman would have the political chops needed to stick to the McCain line on the campaign trail. That's important given that McCain changes his mind on so many issues.

Finally, nominating Lieberman would be a big-time maverick move.

According to Walter Shapiro of Salon, the big objection to a Lieberman nomination would be the unhappiness of social conservatives and the religious right.

ButShapiro isn't reading the situation accurately. I don't think the right objects to Lieberman nearly as much as they object to McCain himself. Where the right views McCain as a self-centered opportunist, they see Lieberman as an honest person and as a man of some political principle.

Personally, I think the right would swallow hard and buy Lieberman as long as Lieberman supports McCain on nominating far-right justices for the Supreme Court.

Boumediene, Rights, and Lynch Law

Notes on the Boumedienne case and the controversy surrounding it.

The Case. The issue was whether Boumediene, a detainee at Guantanamo, had a "habeas corpus" right under the U. S. Constitution to demand that the Bush administration show why they were detaining him.

A 5-4 Supreme Court majority held that Boumediene had that right and overtuned a section of the 2006 Military Commissions Act which denied habeas corpus rights to detainees.

The spin from the right and left isn't quite that simple.

Those Supporting the Court Decision include Barack Obama, Glenn Greenwald, and some conservatives like George Will and Steven Taylor. The core argument is that the whole Western legal tradition embodied in the Constitution and extending as far back to the Magna Carta stands against the kind of unlimited power to imprison people that the Bush administration claims in relation to terrorist suspects. A large number of the suspects held at Guantanamo were detained on bad tips, stereotypes, and bounties rather than anything approaching solid information and proved to be completely innocent. The fact that they were held incommunicado for years shows why habeas corpus rights are needed.

Those Opposing the Court Decision include war criminal John Yoo (of "torture memo" fame), George Bush, John McCain, and a host of right-wing commentators. The core argument on the right is that forcing the U. S. government to grant habeas corpus rights will result in known terrorists going free and continuing to fight against the United States. The strongest held subsidiary argument from the right is that the Supreme Court is once again acting as an "imperial judiciary" in overriding the presidency and Congress during a time of war. What the right means by "imperial judiciary" will be taken up later.

The War Crimes Sub-Text. But the spin doesn't get at the enormous can of worms under the surface of the Boumediene decision. The Bush administration has a lot reasons for their extreme reluctance to produce evidence and few of them have anything to do with the war on terrorism. The Bush administration does not want to reveal exactly how flimsy the evidence was for arresting people like al-Jazeera cameraman Sami al-Haj who was detained for six years before being released for lack of any evidence. That would be bad publicity for the United States both here and abroad. Given that a considerable amount of the Bush administration's "evidence" was tainted because of interrogration techniques (waterboarding, sensory deprivation, stressful positions, religious harassment, death threats, etc.) that have been traditionally defined as torture, the Bush administration has little confidence that the detentions would stand up to any kind of legal challenge.

Worse than that, the Boumediene decision also implies that the whole Bush administration apparatus for dealing with terrorist suspects is illegal. It appears that the Bush administration is in an awkward either/or situation with their strategies for dealing with terrorist suspects. Either extremely painful and humiliating interrogration techniques, keeping terrorist suspects on prison ships, transfering terrorist suspects to other countries to be tortured, refusing to allow terrorist suspects to have contact with relatives or international agencies, and the like are legal or those actions constitute a system of criminal activity. If the Bush administration has been engaged in systematic crimes against humanity, they should be held legally accountable.

And the question of the criminality of the Bush administration's approach gets down to rights. If detainees like Boumediene have rights, all those involved in the American detention apparatus from the interrogators to George Bush are vulnerable to prosecution as war criminals.

And the Supreme Court found that Boumediene has rights according to American law.

That's one of the reasons why the right has been so outraged over the Boumediene decision.

The Lynch-Law Subtext. One of the issues that left-leaning writers like Glenn Greenwald miss is the right-wing's contempt for the American legal system. In the U. S., the right has never accepted the legitimacy of Supreme Court decisions that expanded the rights of accused criminals to include a guarantee of legal counsel, insistence that accused criminals be informed of their rights, and protection against abusive interrogations and treatment.

According to John Yoo:

Judicial micromanagement will now intrude into the conduct of war. Federal courts will jury-rig a process whose every rule second-guesses our soldiers and intelligence agents in the field. A judge's view on how much "proof" is needed to find that a "suspect" is a terrorist will become the standard applied on the battlefield. Soldiers will have to gather "evidence," which will have to be safeguarded until a court hearing, take statements from "witnesses," and probably provide some kind of Miranda-style warning upon capture. No doubt lawyers will swarm to provide representation for new prisoners.

Evidence, proof, Miranda Rights, swarms of defense lawyers--Yoo has just as much contempt for them in the United States as he has for them in relation to the terrorist suspects.

But why is that the case? I would argue that the Bush administration, right-wing legal activists like Yoo, and conservative defenders of the Bush administration's treatment of detainees are heavily influenced by a second legal tradition that has been very powerful in American history but isn't generally acknowledged by legal theorists.

That's lynch law.

Lynch Law. Lynch law is most often identified with practices in which a black man or woman accused of a crime is apprehended by a crowd of white people and executed a trial, judge, or jury, or any other ability to defend themselves.

However, lynch law should be defined more generally. Lynchings per se were only the most flamboyant manifestation of a legal framework designed primarily to maintain the social system of white supremacy rather than adjudicate competing claims according to law.

There were several other elements in the lynch-law legal system of the American South during the segregation period. These include the exclusion of African-Americans from positions as police officers, lawyers, judges, and members of juries, ignoring evidentiary standards in making criminal accusations against African-Americans, using coercive techniques to gain confessions, and refusing to accept evidence from African-Americans against white people.

The guiding assumption of lynch-law as it applied to the white South was that the overriding goal of the legal apparatus was to maintain white supremacy and that African-Americans had no claims to "rights" that white police, sheriffs, courts, prisons, or crowds needed to recognize.

In this broader sense, lynch law can be said to apply at least partially to the rest of the United States. Authorities were engaged in lynch law to the extent that police authorities viewed the larger social imperative of controlling poor, working-class, Hispanic, or gay populations as overriding the individual rights. From this point of view, public officials and the police themselves believed that police could legitimately instigate conflicts with members of the "fringe" or "suspect" groups, arrest suspects on flimsy evidence, beat up the suspects they arrested, and coerce confessions. Lynch law was not as pervasive in the rest of the United States as it was in the South because it neither included lynchings per se or excluded members of fringe groups from voting or public office.

However, lynch law was the dominant mode by which authorities dealt with those who were outside the circle of social respectability.

Lynch Law vs the Imperial Judiciary. The right doesn't put it this way, but much of right-wing commentary on the post WWII legal system is animated by a nostalgia for lynch law. Most of what has made the Supreme Court an "imperial judiciary" is what the courts have done to de-establish white supremacy and social control as principles guiding the operation of the criminal justice system. In Gideon v Wainwright and Miranda v Arizona, the Warren Court compelled the legal apparatus to recognize members of suspect groups as having the same rights as respectable white people and creating a procedural apparatus to "guarantee" that those rights are recognized in practice. In doing so, the Court overrode the federal government, state governments, and public opinion, and, in that sense, acted as an "imperial judiciary." The same was the case in the South where courageous District Court judges acted to ensure enforcement of civil rights laws and court mandates against the will of governors, state legislatures, and white opinion as a whole.

However, neither the spirit nor the practice of lynch law have died in the United States. The police, conservative legal activists, and Republican administrations were offended by the original court decisions and have done as much to re-establish the original lynch-law system as they could. This includes the police practice of racial profiling (which conservative legal activists have defended to the hilt), efforts to overturn Miranda, introducing various rationales for curtailing Miranda rights, adopting stop and frisk techniques for controlling poor urban populations, etc. A good chunk of Supreme Court history since the 1970's has been taken up with adjudicating the efforts of the right to re-expand the privileges of the police in opposition to the rights of suspect groups.

Guantanamo and the Spirit of Lynch Law. Viewed in relation to this thumbnail sketch of American legal history, it would be fair to say that Bush officials viewed the whole question of how to treat detainees from the perspective of their disgust with the whole system of recognizing the "rights" of accused people according to American and international law. For David Addington (Dick Cheney's legal adviser), John Yoo, and other right-wing legal activists in the Bush administration, the treatment of detainees represented a golden opportunity for them to by-pass the "law of rights" and re-establish a version of lynch law for detainees.

In this context, the purpose of the Bush administration's legal initiative was to institute a system of detention at Guantamo systematically designed to abrogate any sense of individual rights, develop a variety of ways to hide the treatment of detainees from American and international scrutiny, and provide legal justifications for the system.

But the key to understanding the Bush administration's motivations is that they're not ignoring American and international law so much as they're rebelling against a human-rights oriented legal framework that they've never believed in.

In this sense, the Bush administration should be viewed as carrying on the very American tradition of lynch law.

Note: Links later.

The Frankly Futile Neo-Con Offensive

There are times when I wonder about the appropriateness of applying war metaphors to neo-conservatives like the Kagans, Robert Kaplan, Michael Yon, and the many laptop heroes of the Weekly Standard.

But the neo-cons are on the offensive again.

And, once again, it looks like they're going to lose.

Much like the neo-cons oversold the invasion in 2003, they're now overselling the surge.

According to the neo-cons, the surge is "oh so close" to securing "victory" in Iraq and they're united in frustration over the failure of the media to trumpet all the successes. For Frederick Kagan, this means that John McCain should become the next president because of his early advocacy of the surge.

What's happened in Kagan's mind is that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has become the Teddy Roosevelt of Iraq. Directing the Iraqi Army personally at one point, al-Maliki has pacified Basra and the Sadr City slum in Baghdad and is now moving on the last al-Qaida stronghold of Mosul. Added to the success of the Anbar Awakening in the Sunni area of Western Iraq and Kagan argues that the surge is meeting American objectives.

As a result, Kagan believes that Iraq has met the Bush administration's stated goals of being a sovereign country, having a democratic form of government, and being an ally of the U. S. in the war on terror.

In many ways, Kagan's position is just more of the same big lies. Certainly, violence is way down in Iraq and Iraq has come back from the state of Somalia-like anarchy that existed in late 2006. But it's also pretty much a mirage. The Maliki/American strategy in both Basra and Sadr City has been to have the Iraqi Army confront the Shiite Mahdi militia with ultimatums to stand down from their "normal" street patrols. What tilted the confrontation in the direction of al-Maliki was that the Iraqi Army was backed up by American military power that was threatening to turn Basra and Sadr City into Iraqi versions of Grozny and Sarajevo.

But the Mahdi Army is still organized and still armed. So are the Sunni militiamen in Anbar and the Kurds in the North. In other words, the U. S. military basically put a tight cover on the Iraqi pressure cooker. Much like the "phony war" in Europe in 1839-1840, Iraq now has a phony peace in which the Iraqi government has terrorized the Shiite population into acquiescence.

But I think neo-con overselling makes withdrawing American troops look like a better idea than ever. Taking the neo-cons at their word, we no longer need 150,000 troops in Iraq, and will consequently be able to withdraw over the next two years without negative consequences.

And that's what Barack Obama would do.

If Obama is elected, he'll begin withdrawing a brigade at a time 60 days after his inauguration and complete the withdrawal in 2010.

That means that the Iraqi government has two more years to prepare to handle their own affairs without their affairs without the iron fist of an occupation army.

Given the progress that the neo-cons are claiming, that should be no problem.

McCain's Worst VP Pick--Take Two

Sometime last week, I claimed that McCain should nominate Karl Rove for VP is he wants to have the worst presidential campaign since George McGovern in 1972.

But I think former Bush speechwriter David Frum might have one-upped me today by suggesting Rudy Giuliani as McCain's VP.

I have my own personal nomination for vice president for McCain. It's Rudy Giuliani, precisely because he shares the vision of a practical, reforming, war-winning Republican Party that inspires John McCain, plus the stronger-than-usual grounds for hoping that he might be the rare candidate who can make a difference in an essential state--in this case, New Jersey.

I would say that Frum can't be serious, but I know better. Giuliani was practically laughed out of the Republican primaries because of the images of NY cops helping his then mistress walk her precious little dog. The idea that Giuliani had enough gall to provide city security for his mistress encapsulated his over-the-top narcissism, , sleazy business practices, corrupt association with Bernard Kerik, and disgusting treatment of his ex-wife Donna Hanover.

GOP voters practically laughed Giuliani out of the primaries. If McCain was dumb enough to nominate Giuliani for VP, general election voters would be just as brutal with him.

But there is some indication that McCain actually is thinking of Joe Lieberman.

Presidential Historians Predicting Obama

Cheap gas, money, credit, peace, and honesty might all be scarce. But thank God there's no shortage of "presidential historians" analyzing the election for the media.

According to The Politico, Alan Abramowitz has an especially successful model for predicting outcomes.

“It is one of the worst political environments for the party in power since World War II,” added Alan Abramowitz, a professor of public opinion and the presidency at Emory University. His forecasting model — which factors in gross domestic product, whether a party has completed two terms in the White House and net presidential approval rating — gives McCain about the same odds as Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and Carter in 1980 — both of whom were handily defeated in elections that returned the presidency to the previously out-of-power party. “It would be a pretty stunning upset if McCain won,” Abramowitz said

I think Obama's going to win as well, but I can't help but wonder if Abramowitz has factored in the fact that Obama is an African-American into his model. Perhaps the African-American candidates for the two major candidates do better when the economy is growing. But African-American candidates might do worse when their party controls congress or when sales of Birth of a Nation dvd's are growing.

The 2008 presidential election is the first election in which one of the major parties has nominated an African-American. Anybody who wants to predict the outcome has to factor that into the equation.

Interesting Video on Creativity

The Atlantic has some interesting video from David Lynch on creativity.

Obama Gets Out of the Wimp Box

One of the interesting little questions about the presidential election is how difficult it's going to be for Barack Obama to get away from stereotypical expectations concerning Democratic presidential candidates.

To put the matter succinctly, Democratic candidates are expected to be kind of wimpy.

The Republicans are expected to be the tough-guy party of barrel-chested guys, big macho gestures, invading small foreign countries, vicious smear campaigns, and exuberant lying. Americans expect the Republicans to be arrogant, vicious, and dishonest.

Expectatations for the GOP smear campaign against the Democratic nominee for president have been building for at least two years. And people will be disappointed if the Republicans don't deliver. It's almost as if voters now want the Republicans to be the party of taboo-breaking nastiness and expect them to play that role.

To the contrary, the Democrats are expected to be the good-guy party--the party that acts reasonably, follows the rules, cares about diversity, shows good will toward everyone, and works for "peace, justice and the American way."

And that's what Barack Obama is supposed to be.

And Obama knows it.

At the beginning of the Democratic primaries, he was extremely effective at painting himself as the really "good" guy. It was Obama who was eloquent, inspirational, reaching out across all the lines that divide American society while Hillary was tainted by the "baggage" of the 90's.

Did Hillary get that baggage by engaging in the same kind of attack-dog partisanship as DeLay and Gingrich.

Hardly!

She got it by defending the Clinton administration, affirmative action, and abortion rights against the extremely aggressive partisanship of the Republicans.

But now it's Obama's turn to try breaking out of the Democratic "good guy," wimp box.

Today at a fund-raiser in my favorite city of Philadelphia, Obama vowed not to back down from the Republican smear machine:

"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," Obama said at a fundraiser in Philadelphia Friday, according to pool reports.

"We don't have a choice but to win," Obama said, joking that he has heard "folks in Philly like a good brawl. I've seen Eagles games."

What's interesting about this comment is that the "knife/gun" dichotomy has gang connotations that go all the way back to the "West Side Story" days of the forties and fifties. Where the Republicans employ military analogies and refer to theorists like Von Klausewitz and Sun Tzu, Obama is flashing a little street aggression that's mostly associated with black and hispanics. Even though there are millions of white brawlers out there (like my dad come to think of it), Obama is posing his willingness to fight in a particularly "black" mode.

We'll see how it plays. Obama is committed to the politics of reaching out, but he's also shown that he's a tough counter-puncher when other people attack.

The question is whether the media and the electorate will accept that from a Democrat.

Too Bad About Tim Russert, but . . .

We at RSI would like to extend our sympathies to Tim Russert's family, friends, and co-workers. The sudden death of a loved one is an extremely hard thing.

But I wonder if Tim Russert really was quite the titan of American politics and society that the instant eulogies say, or if his death really is 'A Loss for the Entire Nation' as claimed by the MSNBC headline.

Obviously, Tim Russert was a leading figure in the mainstream news media and I understand the shock and grief among his media friends and co-workers.

But there is also broad agreement that the news media is an unsatisfactory institution in a state of permanent decline.

And in many ways, Tim Russert embodied the worst features of the contemporary media and there's a long list of worst features. Russert was a big part of the whole media coziness with political elites, relentless focus on process and horserace stories, and obsession with celebrity over the substance of political issues.

Russert had a reputation as a tough interviewer, but his whole technique was to spring little gotcha questions on the people he interviewed. What did any of those interrogations accomplish anyway?

Certainly, the Bush administration thought that Russert was easily gamed.

Likewise, Russert was NBC's lead political analyst, but I can't remember reading of him ever saying anything that was very thought-provoking, memorable, or significant. If anything Russert seemed to embrace the least thought-provoking of the conventional wisdom.

Because Tim Russert managed to become a celebrity himself, he came to embody television news media as a whole.

But was serving as a living embodiment of television news such a great thing?

A Card for My Abusive Father

Today, I once again had to address the annual problem of how to deal with my father in relation to Father's Day. What makes it a difficult issue is that he spent my formative years terrorizing, beating, and abusing me.

Not to mention that he did the same thing to my seven younger brothers and sisters.

Or that he brutalized my mother.

Ultimately, my sense of being abused was strong enough that I decided to change my name rather than have my children grow up with my father's name.

Thus was born the Caric family.

Likewise, even though I''ve spent a lot of time in therapy dealing with the consequences of my abusive childhood, I still have symptoms that are best described as PTS--Post-Traumatic Stress.

Yet, the majority of the abuse was also long ago and I haven't received any abusive letters in more than fifteen years. True, I still have psychological symptoms, but I feel a lot less psychological pressure than I used to.

Plus, it's been a long time since I had nightmares of him torturing me.

The abuse of the rest of my family is also long past. My parents have been divorced for twenty years and have almost nothing to do with each other now. Only one of my other brothers and sisters has any contact with him. So there's nothing on that front either.

And now that I'm in my fifties, I find that I have some affection for him and have bought him Father's Day cards and Christmas cards for the last three years or so.

But what kind of card to get?

Most Father's Day cards have a lot of gooey sentimentality about how the son or daughter loves their father, everything their father taught them, all the wisdom their father has, and how much they owe their father.

I'm not going to send anything like that. I know the extent to which most of these kinds of sentiments are fake or rooted in wishful thinking. But I'm a million miles from even being able to fake such a huge lie.

What's more, looking through the sentimental cards was annoying because it was beginning to remind me of the atmosphere of lovelessness that my father actually enforced while I was growing up.

What I was looking for was something that said "Hi Dad--Happy Father's Day. I'm thinking of you" without saying anything about exactly what kind of father he'd been.

And I found it--the perfect card for someone who I want to acknowledge as my father without getting into too much reality about what his being my father means. I think the card even said "Thinking of You."

Now I'm thinking of giving him a call too.

Talk Radio, Fairness, and the Common Good

One of the moderate paranoias of the conservative movement is that a Democratic Congress will restore "the Fairness Doctrine" in relation to conservative talk radio.

And I'm actually sympathetic to them on this issue.

So what's the Fairness Doctrine?

The policy of the United States Federal Communications Commission that became known as the "Fairness Doctrine" is an attempt to ensure that all coverage of controversial issues by a broadcast station be balanced and fair. The FCC took the view, in 1949, that station licensees were "public trustees," and as such had an obligation to afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of contrasting points of view on controversial issues of public importance. The Commission later held that stations were also obligated to actively seek out issues of importance to their community and air programming that addressed those issues.

The fairness doctine was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1969 but was abandoned during the deregulation frenzy of the Reagan years. Talk radio hosts like Laura Ingraham and Tammy Bruce have been panicking for years about the idea of Democrats re-establishing the Fairness Doctrine. Given that non-stop advocacy of right-wing positions is the raison de etre of conservative talk radio, enforcing the Fairness Doctrine would mean the end of talk radio as it's currently known. Dick Durbin, John Kerry, and a few other Democrats have talked about reviving the doctrine, but the initiative right now is with conservative attempts to pass legislation to ban the Fairness Doctrine altogether. According to Townhall.com

Several high-profile conservatives gathered on Capitol Hill to rally support for the Broadcaster Freedom Act, a measure to block the government from any future
attempts to chill political speech on the airwaves.

Specifically, the legislation would kill the Fairness Doctrine, an old Federal Communications Commission policy to require broadcasters must provide equal time to both sides of a debate. Although abolished in 1987, several congressional Democrats have recently expressed interest in renewing the Fairness Doctrine.

It's important to emphasize that I see no real point in conservative initiatives to ban the Fairness Doctrine. Given that the Fairness Doctrine has not been a policy of the FCC for twenty years, there is nothing to ban. There is no FCC monitoring, no mechanism to file complaints about "unfairness" and no mechanism to enforce "fairness." The right seems to be worried about Congressional efforts to override the FCC and the Courts. But a more liberal Congress could also act to override the act that conservatives are now trying to pass.

But I'm also sympathetic to the position of the right on the substance of the Fairness Doctrine.

The bottom line from my point of view is the rise of the right-wing media has been good for the country. Before the late 1970's, there was relative little outlet for popular conservatism in the national media which meant that the right-wing was left to stew on its own as a set of discourses and opinions that was "split-off" from the rest of American society.

This was a dangerous thing.

The United States has a relatively large conservative population for an advanced industrial country and the nation wasn't going to progress as long as people of right-wing disposition were left alone with their military fantasies, misogyny, racism, homophobia, and religious fundamentalism.

What talk-radio accomplished was to bring the right-wing into the mainstream. This meant that the right-wing was able to generate more pressure to push the Republican Party in a more conservative direction, develop more aggressive military policies, seek to dismantle social security and Medicare, fight environmental legislation, and restrict abortion rights.

But that's democracy and people on the right are exercising a much citizenship now than they were in the 60's and 70's.

And that's a good thing because the public emergence of the right-wing has meant that conservative views are now subject to contestation. When broadcasters like Rush Limbaugh come out with racist material like "Barack the Magic Negro," they've been subject to a great deal of examination and criticism from the left. More specifically, they've been forced to debate the relative merit of their racial and homophobic stereotyes and innuendo and ultimately to temper themselves, backtrack, and occasionally apologize. Despite their worst intentions, the right-wing media has responded to broader social intolerance of racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc. by acknowledging the illegitimacy of these kinds of social bigotries.

This is not to say that the right isn't still racist, misogynist, and homophobic. But the fact that people like Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, the gang at Protein Wisdom, and others have had to testify to the appropriateness of civil rights ideals, deny and equivocate their social bigotries, and come up with non-bigoted rationales for conservative social initiatives has had a significant effect in bringing conservatives and conservative-leaning people into the American mainstream.

In other words, one of the "unintended consequences" of conservative talk radio has been their contribution to the liberalizing of American society.

Consequently, the Democrats should give up any effort to re-establish the Fairness Doctrine. The rise of conservative talk radio has ultimately been a real benefit to American society.

Obama v McCain: A Five-Month Chokathon?

A REAL CHOKATHON? Another day, another round of misstatements, gaffes, blunders, confusion, and tongue-tied responses from the two wobbly presidential candidates. The "Q School" tournament to qualify for the PGA tour is often described as an "annual chokathon" of double bogies and last-second collapses. It's starting to look the general election campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain is going to be five-months of political choking as the candidates blunder from one embarrassing moment to another.

Today, John McCain takes the cake for another unbelievably stupid and self-defeating remark about Iraq. As everybody who pays attention to the news knows, McCain answered a Matt Lauer softball about when the troops were coming home by saying:

[Lauer] "If it's working Senator, do you now have a better estimate of when American forces can come home from Iraq?"

McCain replied: "No, but that's not too important. What's important is the casualties in Iraq, Americans are in South Korea, Americans are in Japan, American troops are in Germany. That’s all fine. American casualties and the ability to withdraw; we will be able to withdraw. General [David] Petraeus is going to tell us in July when he thinks we are.

As TPM points out, McCain's actual opinion is that the United States needs to keep 100,000 plus troops in Iraq indefinitely to prop up the Iraqi government and intimidate Iran and other Islamic nations in the Middle East.

But McCain is still being monumentally stupid. McCain needs to convince voters to support him even though they disagree with him about the war. But he's acting as though he doesn't know that 2/3rds of the American public wants to bring the troops home within a year. More importantly, he's acting as though he doesn't care in a year when "Republicans Not Caring" isn't going to sell.

But it's not like Barack Obama's doing hugely better. Appointing a Democratic fixer like Jim Johnson to vet VP candidates was a bad idea even before it was compounded by the face that Johnson got shady loans from Countrywide Financial Corporation. That mini-scandal was itself compounded by Obama's halting and petulant reply to ABC News.

"Well, no," Obama said. "It becomes sort of a, um, I mean, this is a game that can be played - everybody, you know, who is tangentially related to our campaign, I think, is going to have a whole host of relationships -- I would have to hire the vetter to vet the vetters. I mean, at some point, you know, we just asked people to do their assignments . . .

"So this – you know, these aren’t folks who are working for me," Obama said. "They're not people you know who I have assigned to a job in a future administration and, you know, ultimately my assumption is that, you know, this is a discreet task that they're going to performing for me over the next two months."

And ABC was gracious enough to put every "um" and "you know" into the transcript.

There's also some YouTube video of Obama stumbling over some numbers at a townhall meeting in Bristol, VA.

WHAT'S IT ALL MEAN? As if to illustrate the dictum that life is not fair, the gaffes and blunders are a serious problem for John McCain but might not be a problem at all for Obama.

Why is that?

Obama is riding the wave of public opinion on most issues, he's an appealing figure, and it looks like he's getting the benefit of the doubt from most voters.

The right accuses him of being a hypocrite when he appoints a fixer like Jim Johnson, but the right also wants to portray Obama as a radical and appointing Jim Johnson makes Obama look anything but radical.

Jim Johnson's a wash.

And so what if Obama gets tongue tied occasionally. Obama's reputation for being smart and eloquent is so well established that the stumbles might make him look more human. Maybe Gore should have stumbled on his numbers every once in a while as well.

MCCAIN'S HILLARY/RUDY MASK. But John McCain is stuck in a no man's land between the Hillary and Rudy problems. Because McCain's is trying to buck public opinion on big issues like the war, his age, and his reputation for being temperamental, he's not getting the benefit of the doubt.

As was the case with Hillary and license plates for illegal immigrants, every one of McCain's gaffes and mistatements stick to him because they reinforce the impression that McCain is out of sync with the public.

But it's worse with McCain than it was with Hillary. There's a real danger with McCain that one of his dumb statements is going to be seen as so inept and ridiculous by the public that big chunks of voters just dismiss him out of hand. That's what happened to Rudy. The steady drip of revelations concerning Rudy's arrogance, weirdness, and association with Bernie Kerik didn't cut much into his support originally. But the revelations did create a situation where the public could decisively turn on Giuliani and they did when it was revealed that New York cops were supplying security for his mistress.

That's what McCain's getting into now. His misstatements about Iraq, Iran, and Putin being the president of Germany are eating away at his credibility to such an extent that the next embarrassment might finish his reputation off for good.

Dennis Prager's Identification of Freedom with Bigotry

"The Way We Were"

Memories,
Like the corners of my mind
Misty water-colored memories
Of the way we were . . .
Can it be that it was all so simple then?
Or has time re-written every line?
If we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me, would we? could we?

Against Nostalgia. I'm not a big fan of nostalgia. Having grown up in an abusive household, I don't have a lot of warm memories of my childhood and I can't remember which I wanted to leave more--my family, my hometown, or my adolescence. I can't stand to hear nostalgia about the fifties and I'm not that positive on warm tales about how good things were in the sixties either.

And then there's the fact that the movie "The Way We Were" pretty much cost me my first marriage. Actually, things were going that well for my first wife and I when we were in London anyway. But "The Way We Were" made it much worse. My first wife was extremely eager to see "The Way We Were" because she saw the movie as combining the all-encompassing sentimentality she craved with the radical politics to which we were both committed.

So, the movie was a big event in the hostel where we were staying while working on our dissertations.

But the movie was so ridiculously bad that the whole crowd roared with derisive laughter from absurd beginning to extremely forgettable end.

Except my wife who blamed it all on me. And what I can I say. It was horribly bad and I laughed my fool head off and it drove another wedge between us.

Getting to the Point. The conservative columnist and radio host Dennis Prager reminded me of my distaste for nostalgia today by writing about how "When I was a boy, America was a better place."

Prager was born six years before me in 1948 and would have graduated from high school in 1964 or so. Given that the culture of the fifties really extended into the early sixties, Prager is pretty much a child of the fifties.

And what he's mostly nostalgic about is a time when people could enjoy harassing women, African-Americans, gay people, Jews, Hispanics, and other groups without feeling guilty or fearing consequences.

From Prager's point of view, the freedom of bigots is freedom per se.

Think I'm kidding. Consider this from the beginning of Prager's column:

When I was a boy, America was a freer society than it is today. If Americans had been told the extent and number of laws that would govern their speech and behavior within one generation, they would have been certain that they were being told about some dictatorship, not the Land of the Free. Today, people at work, to cite but one example, are far less free to speak naturally. Every word, gesture and look, even one's illustrated calendar, is now monitored lest a fellow employee feel offended and bring charges of sexual harassment or creating a "hostile work environment" or being racially, religiously or ethnically insensitive, or insensitive to another's sexual orientation.

What's especially weird about this is that Prager was a boy at the height of McCarthyism when the political proscription of everyone on the left was the order of the day.

But let's follow Prager's line of thought. He claims that America was a freer society during the fifties than it is today because of all the "laws" governing "speech and behavior." The laws to which Prager refers are the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Fair Housing Act of 1968, and the various anti-discrimination statutes passed by local and state governments. Prager isn't very precise here, but he believes at the very least that a significant part of freedom is the liberty to make deprecating comments about another person's gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, or ethnicity. He seems nostalgic for a time when nobody really seemed to mind "catcalls" to women, forcing blacks to respond to racial stereotypes, or using the n-word or various pejorative terms for blacks, Jews, women, and gay people. From Prager's point of view, the people who engaged in that kind of discourse were speaking "naturally" (perhaps out of a "natural" sense of group loyalty) and their ability to do so meant that they were "free."

I'll give Prager credit for thinking that the racial discrimination of the segregation was wrong.

"With the important exception of racial discrimination -- which was already dying a natural death when I was young -- it is difficult to come up with an important area in which America is significantly better than when I was a boy."

But I'm not sure why he would.

What ties together all of the pejorative talk that Praeger identifies with freedom is the treatment of the target as less than a human being. All the pejoratives mentioned above mark black people gays, Jews, Hispanics, and gay people as having traits of ignorance, stupidity, filthiness, disease or as engaging in immoral or abominable conduct that puts them as outside the circle of humanity. Because the pejoratives mark target groups like African-Americans or women as less than human, they also indicate that these groups don't deserve rights even if they have some or all of those rights and can be legitimately treated as though they're less than human. Or less than free beings.

For Praeger then, a large part of freedom is the ability to treat other people as though they're less than free and his idea of a dictatorship is a society in which he can't use the n-word.

This is where Praeger is horribly mistaken in two readily identifiable ways.

Most importantly, free beings are expected to be willing able to defend their freedom. Therefore, it is no surprise that blacks, women, gay people, Jews, and Hispanics are willing to defend their human dignity against pejorative speech and actions. In fact, they wouldn't deserve their freedoms is they weren't willing to protect them.

At the same time, Western philosophers since John Locke have identified the ability to recognize other humans as free beings as an integral part of human freedom. For Locke, criminals and tyrants are not fully human because they do not have the rationality and the self-control needed to treat other people as beings with rights to their personal freedom and their estates. In this sense, American society can be seen as making significant progress because bigots have been forced to at least publicly treat traditionally stigmatized groups as human beings.

Too bad that Praeger and a lot of other conservatives are incapable of recognizing this.

The NBA: Fixed?

Oops! The big news out of the NBA today isn't game three of the Boston/LA series, it's whether NBA officials are trying to fix the series.

Corrupt former referee Tim Donaghy just came out with two accusations that get at the integrity of the NBA game.

According to Donaghy, undisclosed persons in NBA league management have worked through referees to manipulate the outcome of a 2002 playoff series between LA and Sacramento.

Court documents filed by Donaghy's lawyer detailed the "inner-workings" of a plot in which top league executives used referees to manipulate the games. Donaghy claims two referees were "company men" whose job was to extend a playoff series in 2002 to a seventh game.

The documents did not name the series, but the Lakers-Kings Western Conference finals was the only series in 2002 that went to a seventh game, with the Lakers winning both Game 6 and 7 to reach the NBA Finals.

There's a somewhat analogous accusation that appears to be connected to a Dallas/Houston series.

Donaghy also claims that a 2005 playoff series was improperly influenced, saying that referees were instructed to call illegal screens more strictly on a particular player after an opposing owner called to complain after falling behind 2-0 in the series.

Though the document again does not name anyone specifically, Mark Cuban did complain to the league that year about the officiating after his Mavericks fell behind 2-0 in their series with Houston. Dallas went on to beat the Rockets in seven games.

Given Donaghy's convictions for gambling on games and all around sliminess, it's hard to just take his word for anything.

But so many calls in college and professional basketball are just so obviously bad that any reasonable person would have to wonder if the refs are under instructions to rig the game.

Maybe the game is dirty.

McCain's Imperial Stupidity and Dumbo Boneheadedness. Plus, Is McCain Going to Nominate Karl Rove for Vice-President!?

John McCain's presidential campaign is starting to remind me of the George McGovern campaign in 1972.

In other words, McCain can't do anything right and can't catch a break.

Today's litany of gaffes and brain-dead manuevers includes referring to Vladimir Putin as the president of Germany and refusing to meet with Billy Graham.

I've seen blog comments about McCain being senile in getting Putin wrong right after goofing the al-Qaeda/Iran relation. That's nonsense and bigoted to boot. Sure McCain's 71 and kind of an old 71 because he's a physical wreck. But he was the sharpest guy in the room during the Republican debates. If McCain's senile, so are Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and hard-working Fred Thompson.

McCain's problem is more like "imperial stupidity"--not worrying about getting anything right because you think you rule the world.

It's been a common difficulty among neo-conservatives since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Blowing off Billy Graham is even worse. Billy Graham is exactly what McCain needs in an evangelical religious contact, someone who is both universally beloved and blandly generic in his religion and politics. Hell, I've even come to like Billy Graham. Compared to other evangelical religious leaders he's a tower of humanity, modesty, and decency.

Meeting with Billy Graham was exactly the kind of religious photo-op that McCain needs for his campaign. McCain's people should have jumped at the offer from Rev. Brian Jacobs to broker that kind of meeting. Instead, they basically sent Jacobs a form letter.

And then McCain's campaign topped off the disaster by lying about the whole. McCain's spokesperson claimed that the McCain campaign was trying to arrange a meeting with Billy Graham through the offices of Graham's son and evangelical heir Rev. Franklin Graham.

That would be a good story except that both Franklin Graham and Billy Graham deny that they've had any contact with the McCain campaign.

. . . Jacobs had also been in contact with senior members of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, including persons close to Franklin Graham, and was told they had heard nothing from the McCain campaign about a possible meeting.

On Monday, Larry Ross, a spokesman for Graham, issued a statement to the press confirming that Billy Graham was unaware of any communication between the McCain campaign and his office or his son's.

Lying about Franklin and Billy Graham is just egregiously stupid. Who are people going to believe when the conflicting stories come to the surface--super-prestigious religious figures like the Grahams or the McCain campaign?

But if McCain really wants to make his campaign a rerun of McGovern 1972, he has to nominate a particularly inappropriate vice-presidential candidate. How about Karl Rove? Rove's arrogance and bluster are exactly the qualities that you don't want to see in a VP. Likewise, he's almost as unpopular with Republicans as he is with Democrats and there's still a decent chance that Rove will end up in jail as a result of the various scandals with which he's associated.

If McCain was a real maverick, he'd nominate Big Karl.

Bay Buchanan Partly Nails It

While on KET last Monday, I argued that the presidential election is going to be about Barack Obama rather than John McCain.

Arch-conservative Bay Buchanan forcefully makes the same point.

In reality there is only one candidate. Barack Obama. In November he will win or he will lose. John McCain is relevant only in so far as he is not Barack Obama. The Senator from Arizona is incapable of energizing his party, brings no new people to the polls, and has a personality that is best kept under wraps.

Monday Update: Actually, I'd have to say that there are two ways that John McCain can make the campaign about him. First, he can pull various kinds of stunts like his trip to Baghdad, gas tax, and townhall proposals that have the potential to make him look clever. Second, McCain can make himself a negative spectacle by giving extremely poor speeches like his New Orleans speech last Tuesday, and committing little faux pas like refusing to meet with Billy Graham. Otherwise it's about Obama.

Is a Cranky McCain Suitable for the Presidency?

It sounds like John McCain isn't so happy about entering the "tunnel of unlove" of what's going to be an extremely tough 2008 election campaign. Jonathan Martin of the Politico has a story on how unhappy the McCain camp is getting over media coverage at the beginning of the general election campaign.

. . . [McCain's] campaign has spent the last several months finding ways to insert itself into a press narrative that’s been dominated by the just-ended Democratic fight. To that end, they picked up and extended the media-guilting campaign begun by Hillary Clinton and "Saturday Night Live" and sharpened their critique of Obama.

But in doing so, they’ve already raised the question of whether McCain can maintain his upbeat warrior image while running an uphill race against an opponent for whom the candidate can barely conceal his contempt, and covered by a press the campaign sees as biased.

The cranky edge in McCain's media demeanor can be seen in McCain's responses to questions about Obama in a Newsweek interview that's come up online. Concerning Obama's comments that he honored McCain's accomplishments even if McCain didn't honor his, McCain ended a long response by expressing resentment over Obama's treatment of him.

I think it's important to point these things out, and I will. And I don't believe it's disrespectful to do so. I think it's part of the evaluation process that the American people are doing.

By the way, do you think it's disrespectful for him to have distorted my comment about being in Iraq for a hundred years? Every objective organization in America said that's a false characterization of my remarks in the context of what's necessary to stop the casualties and have a victory, rather than saying we are going to be in a war for a hundred years. I have given other speeches saying we are going to win this
war, and we are winning it now, and he refuses to acknowledge that.

McCain could have stopped by arguing that he wasn't being disrespectful of Obama, but he just couldn't help express resentment over the pummeling he took for his "100 years in Iraq" remark. An underlying problem for McCain here is that the Newsweek interviewers were asking him a number of questions about his opinion of Obama. As spoiled as McCain has been by all the positive media attention he's received over the last ten years, it seemed like he was annoyed that the spotlight is now so much on Obama. Perhaps some of McCain's resentment is that "messiah" seems to outrank "maverick" with the media.

It isn't going to get any easier for McCain either.

Yesterday, the Mail had an online story about John McCain's first wife. Carol McCain was seriously injured by a car accident while McCain was a prisoner of war in Hanoi and ultimately needed 20 surgeries to address the problem. She was also permanently disfigured and it didn't take John McCain long to start sleeping around after he got back.

Ultimately, he traded up for his second wife Cindy.

In a lot of ways, I don't think the story of Carol McCain makes McCain look that bad. To me, the selfishness and immaturity is mostly just human. But the Mail story does take the glow off McCain's war hero image. and probably didn't do for his disposition.

To add insult to injury, Ross Perot (who helped Carol McCain financially while John was a prisoner of war) called up Newsweek to get some payback for old grudges by trashing McCain's character even more.

It makes you wonder how many other people have longstanding grudges against McCain.

In the final analysis, the question isn't about whether McCain can maintain his "upbeat warrior image." It's whether he has the emotional make-up needed to be president over the next four years. If he is elected, John McCain will have the shortest honeymoon since Lincoln's first inaugural. McCain would be facing enhanced Democratic majorities in Congress, an unpopular war and a potentially bad recession.

And he'll be responsible for all those problems from day one.

Aside from loyal supporters like Mark Salter, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham, John McCain will also be pretty much alone as president. Having never had political loyalty himself, McCain won't get any from either the Republicans who loathe him or the Democrats who would think he won because of racism.

The crankiness we see from McCain now will be ten times worse if he becomes president. The bottom line on McCain is that he just can't take the heat

Smearkrieg No. 14, Diet Smearing

Now that Obama has won the Democratic nomination, the Republican smear campaign is springing into life.

But how much life is there in the old smear machine? In terms of "smears and rumors of smears," the big item is a rumor. Right-wing bloggers are bragging that someone has dug up a video of Michell Obama using the term "whitey" in a public forum.

But so far no tape.

The Sean Hannity approach to smearing is to slime Obama as a "radical." Here are a couple of Hannity's comments from an article by Andy Ostoy in Huffington Post.

"I am telling you, Barack Obama will move this country in a direction that is so radical that it will shock your senses."

"He (Obama) has views that would probably shock the average American."

"He's a Radical left winger, to the left of George McGovern."

Hanity's even re-named his show The Stop Radical Obama Express. But we need to be careful in determining how calling Obama a radical is a smear. In many ways, it's logical for someone like Hannity to view Obama as "hardcore leftist." Hannity is so far to the right that he views Democratic proposals for national health insurance as "socialized medicine" and probably still believes that social security is part of the growth of "communism" in the United States. For Hannity, it takes a "radical left-winger" to contemplate NOT attacking Iran and Syria.

The smear lies in dredging up the names of "dangerously" left-wing or black nationalist "friends" of Obama, magnifying the significance of every direct or indirct connection Obama may have had with them--perhaps even fantasize some connections--and implying that their agendas have to be Obama's agenda. Here's the conservative blog Protein Wisdom flogging Obama's "radical connections" for all they're worth.

As to the only specific claim Ostroy raises, it is pretty easy to point toward Obama’s longtime personal and fundraising relationship with former PLO flack Rashid Khalidi, including the thousands Obama (and Ayers) helped funnel to the Arab American Action Network, run by Khalidi’s wife, which calls Israel’s founding a “catastrophe.” Indeed the evil Hannity covered this on television recently. Or one could point to to the high-level staffers who are Nation of Islam members, or to his past relationship with Palestinian activist and Islamist Ali Abunimah. Or to the longtime spiritual adviser who declared Israel a “dirty word,” gave Louis Farrakhan a Lifetime Achievement award, and reprinted a Hamas manifesto. Or to Obama’s coterie of advisers urging a more “even-handed” approach to the Israeli conflict, and his previously stated desire to unconditionally meet with with Iranian Pres. Ahmadinejad – who is known for denying the Holocaust and wanting to wipe Israel off the map. Indeed, Obama cannot help but echo Arab-Palestinian positions, even in trying to make himself appear pro-Israel.

If anyone can actually follow Protein Wisdom's tortured innuendo, the idea is that Obama's relationship with an unnamed spiritual adviser (Jeremiah Wright) implies that Obama approves of Louis Farrakhan. That is a smear. Obama doesn't approve of Jeremiah Wright's black nationalism let alone Farrakhan's. Protein Wisdom also implies in a smearing kind of way that Obama peddled a Hamas manifesto on the streets of Washington while he was a senator and wants to conspire with Ahmadinejad to wipe Israel off the map.

But this stuff is so thin that it might as well be called "diet smearing." What happened to the big, fat play to racial fears in the Willie Horton ads or the blatant lies of the swiftboating campaign against John Kerry? Why can't the GOP attack dogs claim that Obama is gay, that he has gang connections, or that he murdered somebody in Chicago? Republican smear artists portrayed Bill Clinton as a serial killer responsible for half the deaths in Arkansas as well as Vince Foster. Why can't they accuse Barack Obama of killing one person out of all the murders in Chicago last year?

Ultimately, it's just as tough an environment for right-wing smear artists as it is for the Republican Party in general. Yesterday's smears just don't cut it anymore. On the one hand, tolerance for the blatant kinds of racial stereotyping of the Willie Horton ad has decreased dramatically since 1988. Tolerance for gay stereotypes isn't that high either. Another problem for Republican smear artists is that the rise of liberal blogging means that any attempt at smearing is going to be met with a combination of moral outrage and ridicule by the left.

It also means that smears are going to be fact checked. So it's going to be a lot tougher to lie about Obama being a gang member than it was about the Clintons killing Vince Foster.

Because of the tough environment for high-profile smearing, right-wing smearing smearing has gone underground with conservatives spreading e-mail rumors that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Clearly these efforts have had an effect. Some of my daughter's eighth-grade friend now assume that Obama's a Muslim.

But the effect is primarily with voters who already oppose Obama. The GOP attack artists have not been able to come up with an approach to smearing Obama that "moves numbers" in the sense of convincing a significatnt percentage of voters to support John McCain.

Perhaps they won't.