And Then There's David Frum REALLY Trashing Bush

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RSI on KET next Monday

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

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

The broadcast will be Monday at 8pm.

Obama and Racism: Making the Implicit Overt

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

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

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

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

The Big Tent in Obama's Head

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


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


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


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

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McClellan Spins Himself, Huff Should Do Same

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Texas: Next Stop Polygamy

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

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

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

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

Crossing the Obama/Clinton Line

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

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

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

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

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

Obama Should Take Up McCain's Iraq Gimmick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Barfing Up Bush: Scott McClellan Aims for the Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

President Bush?

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

Hurricane Katrina?

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

Rove, Libby, and Cheney?

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

The Bush-enabling corporate media?

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

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

Who can blame him?

Whoa! Lunsford Leads in Rasmussen Poll

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

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

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

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

That might be enough.

Hard-Working White People, Part III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

King Kagan's Disposable America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Long Live the King.

The Shadow of Assassination

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

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

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

Turning Eleven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now That's Subtle . . . And Effective!

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

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

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

Just kidding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Monstrous Warmongers

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

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

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

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

The Zen of Sharp Elbows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hillary Glass Runs Down

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

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

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

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

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