To Pardon or Not to Pardon

JUDGE WALTON DECIDES. As was expected, Judge Walton ruled today that he was going to remand Scooter Libby to prison now rather than let Libby wait till his appeals are exhausted before serving his 30 month sentence. Of course, "now" means six or eight weeks from now as Libby appeals the decision to send him to jail and gets his affairs in order.

That leaves President Bush six or eight weeks to decide whether to pardon him or not.

"MY ADMINISTRATION IS NOT FILLED WITH CROOKS." Like most observers on the left, I believe that Bush will pardon Libby. This would be primarily because refusing to pardon Libby for obstruction of justice and allowing him to go to jail would imply an admission on Bush's part that Libby in fact committed a crime.

Why is this significant? Columnists on the right have been emphatic that Libby did not obstruct justice. They believe that Libby just got mixed up about what he was telling which reporter.

Of course, the right-wing cover story is non-sense. As Patrick Fitzgerald claimed, Libby lied to the prosecutor to keep the investigation from reaching Dick Cheney.

But that's not the point here.

What would be important from President Bush's point of view is that his administration has been filled with actions that Republican appointees like Patrick Fitzgerald or Judge Walton could view as criminal behavior. These include his own decisions about interrogation techniques, indefinite detention, Guantanamo, extraordinary renditions, kidnapping people on foreign soil without any kind of due process, and the like. It also includes Karl Rove's apparently systematic efforts to violate the Hatch Act against political activity by Civil Service appointees, the efforts of Brad Schlozman and others in the Department of Justice to prosecute Democrats for non-existent vote fraud, and obstruction of justice in the firing of federal prosecutors.

If President Bush does not accept conservative rationalizations for Scooter Libby's criminal actions, he is leaving himself open to the slippery slope of having a big chunk of his administration considered a criminal enterprise.

In other words, Bush's pardoning of Scooter Libby is the equivalent of saying "my administration is not filled with crooks."

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE POLITICS? But the Libby pardon does raise a difficult political problem for the President. If President Bush does pardon Scooter Libby, it's a big nail in the coffin of Republican hopes for the 2008 election. Why? A Bush pardon would mean that all the Republican presidential candidates except Ron Paul would be called on to defend the pardon in a way that would tie them to Bush. However, if the reactions of Bush appointees like Patrick Fitzgerald and Judge Walton to Libby's claims are any indication, a big majority of the public is going to be just as disgusted with a Libby pardon as they are with the war in Iraq. By pardoning Libby, President Bush would be tying Republican candidates to the mast of yet another hugely unpopular Bush political decision and further damage their chances in a general election. I would bet my bottom dollar that Democratic political strategists recognize and are secretly hoping for a pardon.

Of course, letting Libby go to jail would leave Republican activists, op-ed writers, and bloggers extremely unhappy but it would be like the immigration battle in having the consequence of freeing them from George Bush. Ironically, Bush could help the Republicans best by sending Libby to jail and leaving them to their sense of betrayal, bitterness, and resentment.

IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS, Bush will pardon Libby. He'll probably think that he'll be defying the Democrats, the liberal media, bloggers, and anti-war activists by keeping Libby out of jail. In reality, he'll be taking one more step toward giving us almost complete control over the federal government.

The Surge is Failing!

MSNBC has a pretty good article up on the non-existent "surge" effect in Iraq. There are several negative trends since the beginning of the surge in February. There are more civilian deaths with more than 100 civilian casualties per day. Casualties for American troops are also up and that's no surprise given that the total number of attacks is also up and 75% of those attacks are directed against American troops.

But reading between the lines reveals that the surge is doing even worse than the numbers reveal. The key consideration is that the the number of attacks and casualties have risen despite the fact that Shiite militias have been relatively quiet. As a result, it is necessary to conclude that Sunni insurgents and al-Qaeda have become significantly more active since the beginning of the surge. One of the key objectives of the surge was to decisively weaken Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias. To say the military has failed in these objectives is an understatement. If anything the Sunni insurgents look stronger and the Shiite militias have not been affected at all since they've been out of the fight.

Another important consideration is that the American military has not been able to protect Shiite populations from Sunni attacks. The blowing up of the minarets on the Samarra mosque is yet another indication of the inability of the Iraqi government and the American military to provide security.

Advocates of the surge argued that increasing the American troop presence would provide the security space needed for Iraqi politicians to work out the compromises needed for national reconciliation. American troops aren't providing enhanced security and Shiite and Sunni politicians have failed to pass needed legislation and constitutional changes.

So far, the surge is failing all around.

Loosening the Noose Around Republican Necks

That sound you hear might be the loosening collars of Republican presidential candidates. From Rudy Giuliani to Pretty Boy Mitt and Fred Thompson, Republican candidates have worn the Bush legacy like it was a sadistic dog collar. GOP presidential aspirants would get zapped by the general public whenever they supported the president and zapped again by loyal Republican voters whenever they strayed from the Bush line. Who can blame Mitt Romney for focusing on his hair or Fred Thompson for working overtime on his manly bearing? They were the only things Republicans weren't being punished for.

But Bush's approval rating sank to 29% approval rating in the latest WSJ/NBC poll and his support among Republicans sank from 75% to 62%. If that finding holds up as the polls average out (the current RCP average for Bush is 32%), Republican candidates will get a little more breathing room.

Why?

As long as Bush has the overwhelming support of Republican voters, Republican candidates either have to defend Bush positions or avoid answering questions about a lot of issues. GOP voters and the right-wing media apparatus have defended Bush ferociously through the Iraq, Abu Ghraib, warrantless wiretapping, Katrina, the DeLay/Abramoff scandals, Scooter Libby, intelligent design, Terry Schiavo, and politicizing the Justice Department. As a result, there has been very little wiggle room for GOP candidates to pick and choose which parts of the Bush legacy they wanted to adapt for themselves. John McCain has talked about how badly the war was mismanaged before the surge and Romney did a little "me-too" on that point, but Republican candidates are often reduced to figuring out clever ways to pledge fealty to Bush's record even though they avoid mentioning Bush's name.

With Bush's support declining among Republicans because of immigration, Republican candidates might be a little more free to set their own agendas. In a way, this is what Newt Gingrich is trying to do in the drawn out "pre-candidacy" phase of his candidacy. Newt wants Republican candidates for all offices to reject the Bush legacy in the same way that Nikolas Sarkozy rejected the legacy of President Chirac even though they were from the same Gaullist Party. Other candidates might not want to accept Newt's agenda of further hyping the war on terror, adopting Engish as the official language, and privatizing social security and everything else, but Newt has freed himself to define his own agenda rather than defending Bush administration incompetence and malfeasance. But now that the polls might be giving them a little more breathing room, Republican candidates can do more to define themselves.

In a sense then, Bush's most recent decline in the polls might be at least marginally negative for Democrats because it tends to free Republican candidates from the Bush legacy.

Rudy Giuliani: The Paris Hilton Candidate

In a recent speech, Rudy Giuliani left the Iraq War out of the 12 priorities of his campaign. Just like Paris Hilton has "people" who read her mail, Giuliani expects "other people" to handle Iraq.

What I was trying to do was to look at the things, as best as you can predict it now, that are going to be there a year and a half from now,” he said. “Iraq may get better; Iraq may get worse. We may be successful in Iraq; we may not be. I don’t know the answer to that. That’s in the hands of other people. But what we do know for sure is the terrorists are going to be at war with us a year, a year and a half from now.

For Giuliani, the Bush administration is handling Iraq. Of course, there's a sense in which that is true. The Iraq War is in the incompetent hands of the Bush administration. But, Giuliani is using the Bush administration just like Paris Hilton used her publicist--as a crutch to absolve himself of responsibility for evaluating the military progress of the surge, commenting on the insurgency, or analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the Maliki government. In fact, Giuliani seems to see the Bush administration as an excuse for not thinking about the war. Sort of like Paris didn't want to think about her suspended license.

Maybe Giuliani should think about putting out his own line of perfume the next time he dresses up in drag.

Creating Continuously Rising Equality

In one of his "Altercation" columns, Eric Alterman summarizes information on income inequality in the U. S. that he gleans from a Larry Summers (ex-Treasury Secretary and failed Harvard president) article in the New York Times.

"[S]ince 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. Over the same span, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points. It's as if every household in that bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent." What's more, "In 2004, according to the Congressional Budget Office's latest official analysis, households in the lowest quintile of the country were making only 2 percent more (adjusted for inflation) than they were in 1979. Those in the next quintile managed only an 11 percent rise. And the middle group was up 15 percent. Do you sense a pattern? The income of families in the fourth quintile --upper-middle-class folks with an average yearly income of $82,000 -- rose by 23 percent. Only when you get to the top quintile were the gains truly big -- 63 percent." That one's here.

People like Summers, Alterman, and Paul Krugman have been producing statistics on growing income inequality for years but have been so tied up by conservative obfuscation that they almost never propose anything to correct the situation other than defeating the Republicans. I'm not an economist, but these are some ideas that I would propose to create greater equality in American society.

1. Bring together progressive tax rates with tax simplification principles. But instead of a flat tax, create a three-tier system with tax credits for poor people, a low rate for the middle class (8-10%), and a relatively steep tax rate on the wealthy, capital gains, and corporate wealth. If the deduction on home ownership is allowed to continue, set the tax rate for the middle class higher. If the deduction on home ownership is excluded, set it lower.

2. Punish corporations for overpaying executives. Enact a tax surcharge for firms or tax-exempt entities that pay top executives more than 60 times what they pay their hourly employees. This kind of measure would remove a lot of the incentives to reduce break unions, cut employee salaries, and eliminate benefits and create an incentive to increase employee compensation. For those who would want to maintain the simplicity of the tax sytem, there's the possibility of denying federal contracts to firms that overpay top executives.

3. Create disincentives for corporate mergers and buyouts. A lot of the extremely high corporate salaries and bonuses are related to executives playing the merger/buyout game. The best thing to do here would be to create a number of regulatory hurdles to mergers and buyouts. One thing to do would be for companies to be required compensate employees in anticipation of dislocations, layoffs, needs for retraining, and things like that.

4. Treat Personal Information as Property. I've never understood why information about my income, credit history, consumer patterns, and the like was not considered my property. If Google, Microsoft, or any other company wants to collect information about me, that's fine. But they should pay me a fee for the information before they sell it to other companies. Given the enormous volumes of information being processed, treating information about a person as that person's property would recirculate money from corporate hands to individual hands.

One could argue that instituting these kinds of measures would create dislocations and perhaps lead to negative growth. If that's the case, then the relevant legislation should establish a time-table for the legislation to be fully implemented--perhaps a five to ten year window.

A Culturally Conservative Moment, or Two

My family doesn't have television. Mrs. RSI and I decided that there was too much emotional intensity, too much sex, and too much violence on tv for kids. Too much for adults as well. I was particularly addicted to cop shows.

Since we got rid of television service, I've gradually lost my tolerance for a lot of the violence and humiliation motifs of movies as well. As a result, I've never been able to watch much of the Sopranos. It was too intense, too gruesome, too shocking, too humiliating.

And I'm glad I can't. There's been a lot of comment about Soprano nemesis Phil Leotardo's head being run over by a car in the final episode. In the final analysis, I'm a better person for no longer getting a thrill out of that sort of thing.

Today's Big Bill O'Reilly Lie

Bill O'Reilly on MSN "Lifestyle":

I'm not right-wing, I'm not left-wing. I want to get the best solution to the problem and use the solution that works. That drives people crazy because they try to pin an ideology on you.

And the Pope found the Asian version of the Book of Mormon while hiking in Siberia with his Bedouin guide.

Mudcat Saunders and the Dynamics of Regional Stereotyping

WHITE ON WHITE REGIONAL STEREOTYPING. One of the big stereotyes of Democratic reformers is that they are "liberal elites" who look down their long effete noses at rural America. For consultant Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, bloggers are only the most prominent current example of those liberal elites, what he calls the "Metropolitan Opera Wing" of the Democratic Party. For Mudcat, it's liberal elites who have been losing elections for the Democrats in the South because of their "intolerance," "arrogance," pseudo-intellectual pretentions, and relentless stereotyping of rural Americans and the working class.

MY BACKGROUND. Because I've lived mostly in rural areas in both the North and the South but have spent time in Philly and developed contacts in other cities, I have a lot of experience with rural/urban boundaries. There is a sense in which Mudcat Saunders is right. Urban liberals I've known do stereotype rural and Southern people. Here's a couple of examples. When I attended a college program as a high school student from upstate New York, my peers from New York City used to ridicule my rural jockishness by humming the theme song to Captain America when I went by. More seriously, when my first wife started school at the University of Michigan, someone asked her how she could sleep at night when she came from a state as racist as North Carolina. This was particularly tough for her because she had dated a black guy in high school.

URBAN LIBERALS AND STEREOTYPING. It is important to emphasize, however, that urban stereotyping of rural people is very weak compared to the animosity that rural areas have for the major cities. Places like NY, Philly, and DC are self-contained worlds in which people generally have little awareness of the adjacent rural areas. People I know in Philadelphia have no more idea of Pennsylvania outside their suburbs than they have of Kansas, Idaho, or Kentucky. There is more stereotyping of the South in places like Ohio and Michigan where large numbers of Appalachian whites have settled, but still not that much. To the contrary, one of the first things that strikes Northerners who move South is the intense awareness Southerners have of the North, Yankees and the Civil War. Whereas Northerners give little thought to the South, hostility to "Yankees" is one of the guiding stars of my North Carolinian brother-in-law's life. Another is his racism. Likewise, my own brother had so many arguments about the Civil War thrown at him by his new Southern friends when he started college in North Carolina that he felt obligated to read Shelby Foote's three volume history of the Civil War. Southerners have a lot of regional pride and much of that regional pride is focused on hostility to the North.

Why are rural people (at least in the East) and Southerners so worked up about an urban "pseudo-intellectualism" and arrogance they rarely if ever see. A lot of the angst stems from the history of slavery and segregation in the South and the intense consciousness that white Southerners have of the white South's monstrous conduct toward blacks. Another source of the hostility toward the North and especially Northern liberals comes from a continuing Southern and rural awareness of economic, educational, scientific, and cultural backwardness. Teaching at a regional state university in Eastern Kentucky, I see this all the time in students who assume that they're not smart enough, educated enough, or cultured enough to compete with their Northern and Eastern peers. People in Kentucky are far more invested in stereotyping themselves as ignorant hillbillies or uncivilized hicks than anybody outside the South. In fact, it could be said that people here are so aggravated by northern liberals because they attribute many of their obsessive self-criticisms to liberals in the North who actually don't really think about them.

THE SPECIFICS OF MUDCAT SAUNDERS' CRITIQUE. Mudcat Saunders claims that the "pseudo-intellectualism" of Northern liberals has destroyed the Democratic Party in the South. That's just not the case. In my state of Kentucky, the Democrats were so used to dominating state politics that they got extremely lazy and forgot how to compete. As a result, when a smart, ambitious Republican came alone in the form of Mitch McConnell, he was able to run rings around the Kentucky Democrats for years. In states like North Carolina, the Republicans were able to become competitive as a result of the politics of race and then were successful in adding gender, guns, God and gays to their menu of wedge issues. Local Democrats have never been able to match the Republicans in the politics of hate because they have large constituencies of black voters and because white Democrats in the South are now coming down on the tolerant side of social issues. The Republicans hammer away at the extremely loose associations between local Democrats and national Democrats, but Republican success is predicated entirely on stereotypes such as "Metropolitan Opera" Democrats rather than anything that urban liberals or liberal bloggers do.

Mudcat Saunders might not like Metropolitan Liberals but his distaste has little do with either cities or liberals.

IMPLICATIONS FOR NATIONAL POLITICS. Chris Bowers and Daily Kos point out that the Democrats are doing quite well these days despite the hand-wringing of conservatives like Mudcat Saunders, Mickey Kaus, and Dan Gerstein. The Democrats have become more liberal over the last two years and it has worked politically despite the doom-saying of those who want to follow the right in the culture wars. One of the things that strikes me as a college professor in Kentucky is that the liberal blogs have a national audience. Even though they're primarily written out of the Northeast, they don't have a specifically regional or beltway tone like Slate or the New York Times. Plenty of my students and people who read my own small blog at Red State Impressions also read Kos, Atrios, and MyDD. In this sense, the liberal blogs are a force in re-nationalizing liberalism.

That might be one source of the animus that Mudcat Saunders has for liberal blogs. Like mainstream journalists such as Joe Klein (hard to imagine a more arrogant and anti-populist journalist than Klein), Mudcat might be finding that he now has to compete with liberal bloggers for his audience.

George Bush: King of Tirana

Rob Reiner must have gotten a cheap thrill reading his morning newspaper. The welcome that President Bush got yesterday the capital of Albania was a replay of Spinal Tap's new popularity in Japan after they had bottomed out in the States. Bush's visit to Tirane had everything that he no longer receives in his home country-- cannons booming, flags flying, enthusiastic crowds lining the streets, and warm welcoming speeches.

People were especially grateful that Bush had called for independence for Kosovo the day before. Nothing like a little pandering to juice the gate in Eastern Europe.

Up next--the sold out tour of Chad.

What is the "Center" in American Politics?

THE CONTINUING COLLAPSE OF THE CENTER. Dan Balz and Joel Achenbach have done a lot of hand-wringing in the Washington Post about extremism, partisanship, red-meat politics, and "the collapse of the center."

But what is meant by "the center" in American politics? What is the "moderation" that would define the center and who are the "moderates" or "independents" who would push for centrist policies? And why is that center always collapsing? These turn out to be extremely dicey questions, primarily because "centrism" is much more of an ideal than a force in American politics.

THE MEDIA IDEAL OF MODERATION. I would argue that the "center" has two main constituencies for whom "moderation" is a governing ideal. The more active and commanding of these constituencies is the mainstream media of the television networks (outside Fox), the major newspapers, and newsmagazines. For the media, moderation is an ideal point between the two "extremes" of conservative and liberal activists. It is important to emphasize that the media follows the Aristotelian principle of believing moderation to be good in itself and the extremes to be morally questionable. In practice, the media ideal is so flexible that it allows for enormous contradiction. Somebody like Colin Powell is generally seen as a moderate because he frequently disagrees with the "extremists" or "ideologues" in the Bush administration. Powell's pitch today on Meet the Press for closing Guantamo can be seen as moderate in this way. The problem with viewing Powell as a moderate though is that war opponents are viewed as "extreme" when they argue for the same thing.

The shifting sands of moderation can be further illustrated by Joe Lieberman. Lieberman has long been viewed as a "centrist" because he has been a Democrat who often disagrees with liberals and leftists. This is still the case even though Joe Lieberman has emerged as a major neo-conservative foreign policy spokesman and he called for an attack on Iran today. Ironically, the treatment of moderation as a point between extremes means that Powell and Lieberman can both be viewed as moderates although they disagree strongly.

POPULAR MODERATION. Popular moderation is like media moderation in that it's pitched against both "extremes." But what popular moderation opposes the "extremism" of political activism more than any particular view. Popular moderation is suspicious of both big business and the unions, consumer groups, and environmental groups that oppose big business, the Bush administration's war in Iraq and those who protest the war, NAFTA and protests against NAFTA, intelligent design theorists and the mainstream scientists who advocate evolution. Popular moderation is also suspicious of the mainstream media for accentuating conflict.

Popular moderation strongly disapproves of the negative tone of politics, especially attack ads. At the same time, the basic negativity of moderates makes them a primary target for attack ads. One of the main goals of negative advertising is to convince moderates, swing voters, and indepedents to dislike your candidate's opponent more than they dislike your candidate. Republicans have become highly skilled at portraying Democratic candidates and proposals as being particularly ridiculous, dangerous, repugnant, and unworkable. It's called "defining your opponent before they can define themselves." Much of moderates hate negative politics, they are one of the main reasons why negative advertising is so pervasive.

Popular moderates have a permanent desire to see a "new" politics that is less partisan, less negative, and less identified with the conflicts of the current system. They want to stress the "person" rather than the party or ideology. That's one of the reasons why many moderate whites are excited about the candidacy of Barack Obama this year and why they were especially interested in a Colin Powell candidacy in 1996. It's also one of the reasons why the Republicans put so much stress on posing their candidates as charismatic or Reaganesque and the Democrats as being personally repulsive.

MAKING DEALS. The third dimension of moderation is the political moderates who are very much a declining force in American politics. On the Republican side, the Bob Michel type of politician who is willing to recognize the validity of the other side's arguments and make compromises is practically gone from the political scene. The only examples of this kind of moderation that I can think of are John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snowe in the Senate. Perhaps Jon Kyl as well. The Democratic leadership is still far more willing to engage in this kind of compromise (witness the debate over war funding), but Republicans have succeeded in defining Democratic compromises as "liberal" and "extreme" on the one hand and Democratic compromisers as unprincipled, cowardly, being "unwilling to stand up for what they believe in," on the other. After the 2004 campaign, "flip-flopping" has become a cardinal sin in American politics (unless it's being done by Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney).

THE MEDIA AND PRACTICAL BIPARTISANSHIP. The media is in an odd position in relation to political bi-partisanship. Journalists tend to be more liberal than the general population, but they've also accepted Republican definitions of what's personally attractive (Romney's "shoulders you could land a 747 on"), morally principled, and "practical." The media finds Republican personalities to be more attractive than Democratic or liberal personalities and the media tends to identify with Republican business and military interests and is fascinated in an anthropological kind of way by Christian evangelicals. To the contrary, the media finds Democratic interest groups like blacks, hispanics, anti-war activists, consumer groups, and environmentalists to be unattractive and interesting. Though barely on the liberal side themselves, media members view themselves as the farthest edge of legitimate left-wing politics and deeply resent organizations like MoveOn.org, blogs like the Daily Kos, and anti-war activists like Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan.

As liberal bloggers like Glenn Greenwald point out on a daily basis, the mainstream media accepts a largely Republican script for their analysis of American politics and they are already salivating over the "manliness" of Republican presidential candidates. One of the consequences of their acceptance of the Republican script, however, is that the media acts to discourage the kind of "moderate" political compromises that they idealize.

Moderation is a declining force in American politics. One of the main reasons that moderation is declining is that the peculiar alchemy of the media and moderate voters have acted to discourage the compromise that forms the core of moderate politics.

Some Generals Never Get the Message (revised)

Some people don't know when they're desperately not wanted.

American generals are beginning to plan for a summer 2008 drawdown if they can get the Bush administration to stopo being delusional. However, they persist in believing that anti-American Iraqis like Moqtada al-Sadr don't really want them to go.

U.S. officials also calculate that underneath the anti-American rhetoric, even Shiite radicals such as cleric Moqtada al-Sadr don't really want to see a total U.S. pullout, especially while they feel threatened by Sunni insurgents.

The generals are deceiving themselves! Al-Sadr really, really wants us to go. Sadr's militia went to war with American troops in 2004, Sadr knows that one of the primary objectives of the surge was to eliminate him and the Mahdi Army as a factor in Iraqi politics, and Sadr's just emerging from four months in hiding from American forces. Not surprisingly, Sadr has recently been sending signals to Sunni insurgents that he wants a common front against the American occupation.

Looking at the issue from another angle, Sadr probably feels much less threatened by Sunni insurgents when his own militia is operating freely. The death squads associated with the Mahdi Army put a lot more pressure on the Sunni insurgency in 2006 than the surge has generated in 2007. Iraqi Shiites as a whole will be more secure when American troops are gone.

So will Moqtada al-Sadr.

The Four-Point Fred Thompson (links in place)

Fred Thompson's unannounced but in the race. He's going to be a contender for the Republican nomination. What does he bring to the table for the Republican nomination? There are four big items.

1. THE SOUTHERN SLOT. There was no major Southern candidate for the GOP nomination. So Tennessee-born Fred Thompson filled a hole in the Republican field. Of course, Mike Huckabee, James Gilmore, and Ron Paul are Southern as well, but they're all minor candidates. From Thompson already had more support than the other three put together the day after he announced that he was thinking about running.

But the South is bigger and more heavily populated than most people think? As a result, Thompson's regional base is much larger than McCain's, Romney's, or Giuliani's. Generally, the South is thought of as the eleven former Confederate states plus the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland. But the stereotype is wrong. The South includes much of southern Ohio, southern Illinois, southern Indiana, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. Of course, some parts of the cultural and political South have defected, including the Washington, DC suburbs and the Miami region in Florida. Nevertheless, Fred Thompson's regional clout would be extensive in both the primary and the general election.

2. THE CORPORATE SHILL. Thompson was a corporate lobbyist for eighteen years and there are already reports that reducing corporate taxes is a significant part of his agenda. Like Mitt Romney then, Fred Thompson would be a candidate of big business and could be expected to pursue the tremendously profitable agendas of social security privatization, free market health plans, shifting the tax burden from capital to consumption, big-ticket defense spending, and reducing business regulation. Certainly, a Fred Thompson presidency would follow the Bush administration in making sure that unions, consumer groups, environmentalists, and victims of business abuse did not have a seat at the table. With this combination of big region affiliation and corporate backing, Thompson starts from a stronger base than the Arizona maverick John McCain even though McCain has a much more impressive political record. Although not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Fred Thompson inherits much of his political support.

3. THE RED-MEAT CONSERVATIVE. Thompson has also shown a lot of gusto for attacking conservative bogeymen like Hugo Chavez and Michael Moore in his radio commentaries and op-eds for TownHall.com, and blogging. Thompson tosses out red-meat to conservative activists better than the other Republican candidates. Pressing the pleasure buttons of the right will be a big advantage in Republican primaries because it's the right that provides a big chunk of the passion, the money, and the ground troops for Republican campaigns.

4. THE ACTOR. Conservative commentators focus a great deal on Thompson's charm and the idea of Thompson "looking" and "sounding" presidential. And Thompson's prospective candidacy is being pounded for its superficiality in the liberal blogosphere. Nevertheless, a candidate's ability to sell himself as a "man" is important to Republican chances in 2008. With the war in Iraq going badly, the on-going Justice Department and Jack Abramoff scandals, and the Bush administration's poor over-all reputation, any Republican candidate is going to have to sell something besides a Republican agenda to general election voters. With his actor's ability, Thompson stands a chance of selling his manly persona to enough weak Republicans, independent voters, and wayward Democrats to off-set popular hostility to the Bush administration. Selling themselves as men was important to the success of Ronald Reagan and George Bush. It will be even more important to any Fred Thompson candidacy.

Needless to say, Fred Thompson has a lot of negatives. Thompson had an indifferent Senate career and a reputation for a weak work ethic. Much of Thompson's lobbying career was spent chasing skirts and he's married to a woman who looks like a bimbo stereotype and is 25 years younger than him. Above all, Thompson would have the Bush albatross hanging around his neck. Whatever weaknesses Thompson has, however, he does have significant strengths and people on the left need to be aware of those strengths.

Paris Hilton and Equal Justice

Yeah, I'm obsessing over the Paris Hilton case. But what are blogs for? Today, I'm going to focus on the myth of equal justice.

The rationalization of Paris Hilton's original sentence and return to jail is that she should receive the same treatment as other, less privileged offenders. That's equal justice. As the co-authors of a Salon article put it, "let's just pray that those bad prison sheets scratch her tender white ass . . ." That's precisely the point. In the United States, we have a extremely harsh legal system that's designed to exercise surveillance over, disrupt, and incarcerate the African-American population. And if Hispanics and poor whites are swept up in the system that's fine as well.

The harsh treatment of Paris Hilton performs a couple of functions in relation to the racial legal system. Of course, putting Paris Hilton's "tender white ass" into a jail creates a high-profile example of a prominent white woman who got the same kind of sadism that's usually reserved for black people. In this sense, Paris Hilton is the rare example of "equal treatment" whose case justifies the on-going mistreatment of African-Americans. At the same time, reveling in the abuse or possible abuse of Paris Hilton provides an escape valve for the anger that all kinds of Americans--blacks, whites, liberals, conservatives-- feel in relation to contemporary politics. As Americans, we might not agree on much and we're all pretty pissed off about it. But we can all agree that Paris Hilton is getting what she deserves.

Needless to say, the collective sadism is an ugly thing.

Counting Down the Dry-Hole Presidency

Now that the immigration legislation is on a ventilator, the New York Times is saying that George Bush has entered his "lame duck period." There are signs of Bush's lame-ness both big and small. The small signs are at the CoffeeTree book store in Morehead, KY. A couple of days ago, I spent eight bucks to buy four "1-20-09" buttons for my family. On top of that, the book store also carried little calculators that enable you to determine exactly how many days Bush has left in office. When people are celebrating the end of your term, it's safe to call you a lame duck.

There are bigger signs of lame-duckness in Washington. For the New York Times, the fact that there were 39 Republican votes against bringing up the immigration legislation is an indication of Bush's diminishing clout. Actually, Bush might not have any clout at all. The major players in the immigration legislation have been Jon Kyl of Arizona, John McCain, Teddy Kennedy, and the Democratic leadership. The major player for the Republicans is minority leader Mitch McConnell who is viewing immigration in terms of the future of the Republican Party. A future without George Bush.

Finally, Bush is becoming a pariah in his own party. Republican candidates took a lot of shots at Bush during the last debate. Newt Gingrich is also arguing that the Republican Party is doomed unless they can separate themselves from the Bush administration and its litany of failures.

Needless to say, George Bush himself is oblivious to all this. As Bush's long-time friend Donald Evans says, Bush was "typically undaunted by “dry holes” when he was a failed oil man in Texas. Why would he be discouraged by his dry-hole presidency?

Are We Safer Now?

During the Democratic debate last Sunday, Hillary Clinton claimed that

I believe we are safer than we were . . . We are not yet safe enough, and I have proposed over the last year a number of policies that I think we should be following (via TalkLeft).

The idea that "we are safer than we were" has been widely criticized in the blogosphere even if it hasn't caused much of a stir in the mainstream media. In the final analysis, I think it's appropriate to stick with the standard Democratic line of thought that the Bush administration's initial actions in Afghanistan worked relatively well but that we've squandered whatever gains we madein Afghanistan through the invasion of Iraq.

In certain ways, the U. S. is safer from terrorist attack as a result of the Bush administration's initial response to 9-11 and the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The big plus is that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization was largely broken up. As a result, there is no more central planning of global terrorism, no large-scale training facilities, and a gradual decrease in the scale of terrorist attacks. If al-Qaeda in Iraq really has been as decisively weakened in Anbar province as the Bush administration has claimed for the last several months, that dramatically reduces the terrorist threats emanating from Iraq itself (and also eliminates one reason for the U. S. military to stay in Iraq).

The most important negative is that the invasion of Iraq inspired thousands of young Muslim men to travel to Iraq and fight American and Iraqi forces before returning to their home countries. As a result of those young men receiving military training and acquiring leadership skills, there will be a large pool of potential global terrorists in the Middle East, North Africa, Bosnia, and Chechnya for at least a generation. This is where the Madrid and London bombing came from as well as the recent conflicts in Lebanon. It is also out of this pool of battle-hardened fighters that future bin Ladens would emerge.

There are other ways that the situation is less secure than it was. Most importantly, hostility to the U. S. has increased dramatically among Muslim populations in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. There's also a real danger of non-Islamic terrorists launching major attacks in the U. S. Other negatives are less important. Our alliances are weaker than they were in 2001, but I think the decline of the alliances has not had a big impact on the security situation. I also believe that the problems with our alliances are temporary. Our major alliances can also be repaired once the Bush administration and their neo-con advisers were out of office.

The feckless effort to force a moderate, democratic regime on Iraq has also weakened the U. S. military, but that does not make all that much difference to the fight against global terrorism. Contrary to the Bush administration, the "war on terror" is mostly a police operation and is being fought through intelligence work, police forces, border patrols, and things like that. Given that terror is still the primary security threat to the United States, it would make sense to spend less on advanced fighters, aircraft carriers, and submarines and more on "policing" types measures.

On the whole, I think that Hillary is wrong but not that far off.

Breaking Paris Hilton

In the kids movie "Big Fat Liar," Kaylee made this final speech as the good guys were getting ready to ruin and humiliate the villain, Hollywood director Marty Wolfe (played by Paul Giamatti).

We are talking complete physical and psycho-emotional breakdown, people; I want to see a broken man; I'm talking broken like I just threw a baseball through your window broken. Snap him like a twig; Squeeze him like a bug; I want you to turn him into mincemeat and I don't even know what mincemeat is; I want him to scream for his mommy. Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!

I was reminded of this movie when I saw today's stories on Paris Hilton returning to jail. Just like the movie audience wanted to see Marty Wolfe's "complete physical and psycho-emotional breakdown," the television audience has wanted to see Paris Hilton broken. And that 's what we got today. She cried throughout the hearing called to determine whether she was going back. In fact, she was physically shaking. That sounds like "psycho-emotional breakdown to me." She even called "Mom" after the judge made his decision.

According to one of the city attorneys, Paris Hilton's “release after only three days erodes confidence in the judicial system.” Actually, the whole spectacle of receiving a 45 day jail term for violating probation for "reckless driving," remanded to home custody, and then dragged back to prison has been eroding my confidence in the judicial system.

Paris Hilton was on the mark when she yelled "it's not right" as she was led away. It's disgusting.

Are the Leading Republicans "Christians?"

CHRISTIANS AMONG THE DEMOCRATS. One of the interesting dimensions of the upcoming presidential campaign is that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama seem a lot more comfortable with religion than their likely Republican opponents. In fact, by some criteria, the two leading Democrats can be seen as the "Christian" candidates in the race while the Republicans seem like secularists.

THE DOBSON DEFINITION. The criteria I have in mind are those of James Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, the most important Christian conservative political group. Dobson claimed that Fred Thompson is not a "Christian" because he does not give public testimony to his Christian faith. Thompson's long history as a skirt chaser doesn't help in this regard either. The same applies to the declared candidates as well. Romney, McCain, and Giuliani all appear to be less religious than Clinton and Obama. Compared to the Democrats, they're also much less comfortable with religiosity in public. There may be political reasons for this. McCain, Giuliani, or Romney are all seeking to appeal to an evangelical Republican "base" although none of them are evangelical Protestants themselves like President Bush. As a result, Republican candidates have reason to play down their religious beliefs even as they are pandering to evangelicals on abortion and gay rights. Still, by Dobson's criteria, the leading Republican contenders are not "Christians."

WORRIES OF THE BROTHER. The situation with religion and the Presidential race is causing discomfort among conservative pundits. David Limbaugh (brother of Rush) has a weak article on Townhall.com. Limbaugh documents efforts by current Democrats to highlight their religiosity and Ed Rendell's argument that there are few Biblical passages on homosexuals or abortion in the Bible compared to the enormous number of passages on aiding the poor. Here Limbaugh's in trouble. In fact, "Jesus talked tirelessly about the poor." As a result, Limbaugh's only reply is a "me-too" claiming that conservatives care about the poor but don't believe "the best way to eradicate poverty is through government-coerced redistributions of wealth." This is very weak. In fact, Jesus was highly suspicious of wealth in general ("Ye cannot serve God and mammon") and demanded that the wealthy voluntarily redistribute their wealth by giving all of it away to the poor. Wouldn't government sponsored redistribution accomplish the goals of Jesus, and have the added benefit of saving the wealthy from an eternity of damnation as well?

In the final analysis, Limbaugh is driven back to pointing the figure at secular liberals as the enemy.

This is mistaken on several levels. The biggest part of the Democratic base and the strongest constituency for political liberalism is the highly religious African-American population. The Democrats are also very strong with the Catholic Hispanic population (70% in 2006). Likewise, white liberals (the only liberals for Limbaugh) are comfortable with the Quakers, Unitarians, and mainline denominations. A lot of white liberals do "look down their nose" at fundamentalists and evangelicals and are wrong to do so. Although I'm an atheist myself, I still think that Jesus' demand that people "love your enemies" is a worthy principle for all the difficulty of putting it into practice. Knee-jerk hostility toward evangelicals also contradicts the important liberal value of multi-culturalism. To be fair of course, evangelicals like Limbaugh don't love liberals any more than white liberals love them.

Democratic evangelicals also fail to explain liberals' high comfort level with secular values and their unmistakable hostility toward Christians, mainstream Christian values and, sometimes, the very concept of absolute truth. You might recall Democratic Senator (and presidential candidate) Joe Biden confessing, "We have too many elites in our party who look down their nose on people of faith."

In the final analysis, it's hard to see how David Limbaugh would count the leading Republicans as Christians either. When he claims that liberals have an "unmistakable hostility toward Christians," he defines "Christians" as evangelical, publicly professing, Protestants in the same way as James Dobson. By that definition, the only Christians among the major candidates are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Is There An Establishment to Tilt to Mitt?

Noam Scheiber has an interesting article in The New Republic (TNR) about how at least some parts of the Republican establishment are tilting toward Mitt Romney. Scheiber focuses on the support for Mitt that's developing among the evangelical establishment (Jeff Sekolow, Gary Bauer, and some people associated with Focus on the Family). But Scheiber also could have mentioned Wall Street where I recall that Romney's been cleaning up in fund-raising.

While acknowledging that Romney has received support from some parts of the Republican establishment, I don't believe that the Republican nor the Democratic establishments have been cohesive enough to create favorites for 2008. Since 1976, the Republican establishment has anointed favorites and had the muscle to push their candidates through the primaries. Democratic elites are much less cohesive than the Republicans but the Democratic establishment has been able to get their candidate nominated in 1984 (Mondale), 1988 (Dukakis), 1992 (Clinton), and 2000 (Gore). Paralyzed by the Bush ascendancy and the war in 2004, elite Democrats worked for several candidates as John Kerry pushed toward the nomination.

This year, the Republican establishment seems to be just as paralyzed by Bush's decline and the various candidates seem to be free to recruit consultants, financial backers, and local supporters on their own.

But the Democrats might have an even more interesting situation. They have three strong candidates, but my impression is that the Democratic establishment of Beltway figures, newspaper editors, DNC figures, and Hollywood money people don't particularly like either Hillary (too divisive), Obama (too black), or Edwards (too much of an insurgent). This isn't to say that any of these candidates don't have partial backing from the Democratic elite. However, I believe that the Democratic establishment as a whole would have preferred "safer" candidates like Evan Bayh or Mark Warner.

One of the outcomes of the 2008 election might be a president that much of the Democratic elite doesn't like--sort of like Jimmy Carter in 1976. That would be interesting.

Hooray! Paris Hilton's Out of Jail

Last night, dangerous criminal Paris Hilton was transferred from a county jail to home custody after serving three days of her 23 day sentence. If the entertainment media on MSNBC video and Bill O'Reilly of Fox are any barometer, the nation is "outraged" about the "favoritism" showed Ms. Hilton.

But of course, there wasn't any favoritism. According to John Patrick Dolan, anybody except Paris Hilton who was arrested in LA for violating a parole on a reckless driving charge would have been fined $100 and been able to go home. Paris Hilton got 45 days reduced to 23 days reduced to 3 days in jail and 40 days of home incarceration because she's Paris Hilton.

The whole Paris Hilton legal episode has been a show trial to demonstrate how tough we are on celebrities. Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Britney Spears are particular targets because the entertainment media has made the lives of these women into an on-going rape trial. Given that Ms. Hilton's guilt for "living like that" is assumed, it was inevitable that she would sooner or later run afoul of the law and that pressure would build for her incarceration.

But what has Paris Hilton done? She's essentially a model (check out the videos) who has built the circulation of a sex tape and "news" about her partying and dating into a consumer brand. Obviously Ms. Hilton has been an active participant in making her life a spectacle but she does no harm other than offending an audience that's looking to be offended.

I'm glad she's out.

That Ann Coulter, Such a Nice Girl!

NICE IMAGE FROM A NICE GIRL. Just in case anybody wasn't sure that right-wing opposition to the immigration bill is racist, here's Ann Coulter to set them straight:

And as long as we're adopting an open borders policy for immigration, how about Opening the borders for emigration? . . . You can leave the country, you can Renounce your citizenship -- but you still owe taxes for 10 years. The government does not allow us to stop supporting welfare recipients in America, millions more of whom it plans to import under Bush's bill. That's not a free market -- it's a roach Motel.

Immigrants as roaches. Our country as a roach motel. Such a nice image. It's also very striking because the racial power of roach motel imagery starts deep within Coulter's white-supremacist gut with its connotations of welfare in relation to African-Americans. She also catches up the whole range of non-whites in her list of the most prominent sources of immigrants: "Mexico (161,445), India (84,681), China (69,967), the Philippines (60,748), Cuba (36,261), Vietnam (32,784), the Dominican Republic (27,504), Korea (26,562), Colombia (25,571) and Ukraine (22,761)." In Coulter's eyes, they're all either non-white or non-Protestant (the poor Ukrainians)-- all like the African-American population in not sharing a British cultural base, all as much non-white "roaches" as she imagines African-Americans to be.

Given Coulter's flair for the outrageous, I'm surprised that she doesn't find a way to apply the "n-word" to all these groups.

NOT ANN COULTER'S AMERICA. For Coulter, open immigration is ruining the country. The white percentage of the population has slipped from 90% in 1960 to 65% and is slated to go below 50% by 2050. Note that Coulter could not bring herself to mention that more than 10% of the population has been black. From her point of view, blacks were never "real" Americans. Coulter doesn't believe a majority minority America is not really America. She quotes the conservative political scientist Samuel Huntington as asking"Would America be the America it is today if in the 17th and 18th centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico or Brazil." Or India. Or China. Or Vietnam. Or some combination of all of them.

AFTER THE ROACH MOTEL. Coulter can't abide that. For Coulter, open immigration is ruining the country and she wants out. "If these free-marketeers at The Wall Street Journal want the free movement of people, how about letting us freely leave after they've wrecked the country?"

But where's a nice racist girl to go if she emigrates from the United States? The logical choice for her would be a white, Protestant country in Europe. However, Great Britain, France, Germany, and the Scandanavian countries are all social democratic countries where even the conservatives reject the American right? There's so little interest in religion in these countries that they can barely call themselves Christian anymore. Even worse, they've all been letting in Muslim immigrants.

Personally, I think Ann might be happy with the Russians. True, they aren't Protestants, but it was the Russians who put the Caucasus in "Caucasian" and the Russians have the kind of government she likes--an elected autocracy that is flexing its muscles, expanding its power, and cracking down on soft-minded liberal dissent. What more could Ann want? But wherever Ann goes, we should wish her well as she flies off. Then we can have the pleasure of closing the door behind her.

Man-Loving Mitt (Revised)

ALL THE MAN-LOVE MONEY CAN BUY: Digby at Hullabaloo is a terrific blogger who's unfortunately confused about all the man-love that mainstream political journalists show the Republicans. According to Digby,

I honestly don't know what to make of all these men in the political establishment who insist on using their mancrushes as some sort of guideline for who is and is not "presidential."

Where Digby errs is in thinking that it's a largely heterosexual world with between 3-8% of the population being gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, or trans-sexual. It's a big mistake because it leaves out all the the men whose are erotically oriented toward other men even though they have sex with, get married to, and otherwise consort with women. The homoeroticism is all around. It's in the pornography (shared with other guys when its not autoerotic), trips to strip clubs (also shared with other guys), chest-bumping, butt slapping, "I love you man" testimonials, gaming networks, sports obsessions, workout addictions, poker marathons, nights out with "the boys," NBA players measuring each other's penises, and the like. When I asked a class how many guys had sex with women primarily so they could tell their guy friends, one male student answered something to effect of "100% of American males." A guy in another class referred to dating women as "gay."

Seen in this light, traditional masculinity is not just male about domination, it's about the domination of male-homoeroticism in most spheres of life outside the home. This reveals another dimension of the threat posed by second-wave feminism beginning in the seventies. Feminism wasn't just about female equality as feminists intended; it was about breaking the nexus of male-male relationships by integrating women into workplaces, traditionally male fields of study, and male preserves like sports. As a result of feminism, the spectre of heterosexual living has been haunting America.

EXAMPLES. As a result, the man-love tributes spotlighted by Digby are normal behavior in most ways.

Here's Roger Simon in the Politico, via Media Matters: From Simon's June 6 column: Here are the winners and losers of Tuesday night's Republican presidential debate, accurate to three decimal places. FIRST PLACE: Mitt RomneyAnalysis: Strong, clear, gives good soundbite and has shoulders you could land a 737 on. Not only knows how to answer a question, but how to duck one.

More from Roger Simon:

But Romney is so polished and looks so much like a president would look if television picked our presidents (and it does) that sometimes you have to ask yourself if you are watching the real deal or a careful construction. Romney has chiseled-out-of-granite features, a full, dark head of hair going a distinguished gray at the temples, and a barrel chest. On the morning that he announced for president, I bumped into him in the lounge of the Marriott and up close he is almost overpowering. He radiates vigor.

Howard Fineman and Chris Matthews also like to shower Mitt Romney and the other Republicans with as much man-love as they can.

SPECULATION AND ANALYSIS. Given the prevalence of man-love themes with the Republicans, it might be useful to speculate a little bit about the role of heterosexual male homoeroticism in presidential politics. In this context, it might be best to think of the President of the United States No. 1 Alpha Male in this country, a guy that American men can bond with as a role-model and identify with as an enhanced version of their own masculinity. Because Bill Clinton had a powerhouse lawyer-political figure as a wife, he was also extremely questionable from this point of view. Nevertheless, George Bush has been positively dangerous for traditional manhood because he embodied so many of the frat-boy, chest-thumping, big-talking American male gestures and he has failed so dramatically. In this sense, Bush's failure might be seen as a failure of "real guy" masculinity in general.

And as a result of Bush failure, the presidential link in the nexus of manhood is now being threatened by the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Traditional guys have long thought of Hillary Clinton as the "uber-bitch"--"sort of a Madame Defarge of the left" according to Chris Matthews-- and now it looks like she's getting ready to occupy the ultimate alpha male position. Because Hillary could upset the whole symbolic system around homoerotic masculinity, traditionalist reporters like Roger Simon, Chris Matthews, and Howard Fineman are bringing their homoeroticism out of the closet and into the open as they pump the Republican candidates.

If Hillary Clinton is nominated by the Democrats and elected as president, she would not only be a huge role model for women (I've already promised to take my 12 year old daughter to her inauguration if she wins), but her election also would represent an interesting leap forward in the "heterosexing" of American institutions.

Kentucky Comes to the Big Apple

No, I'm not referring to the star turn that Laura Bell Bundy (of Lexington, KY) is taking in Legally Blonde on Broadway. Instead, it's the invasion of Kentucky-style political corruption on the cheap. Former Brooklyn Supreme Court judge Gerald Garson got 3-10 years for fixing divorce cases in exchange for cigars. In the BOPTROT scandal in the early nineties, Kentucky legislative leaders corrupted themselves for steak dinners. Corruption is immoral--corruption for nothing (or almost nothing) is an embarrassment.

Romney: The Green Cheese Candidate

This is probably a sign that I'm spending too much time with my kids, but I'm starting to look at Mitt Romney as the "green cheese" candidate--the guy who would say that the moon was made of green cheese to get elected.

Romney's Distancing Act

Responding to a question about his Mormon faith at tonight's debate, Mitt Romney gave a brief testimony to his believe in God, his belief that Jesus was his savior, and his belief that individual rights are a gift from God. A nice testimony to Christian belief, but nothing particularly Mormon about that.

There was nothing particularly Mormon about his follow-up either. "There are some pundits out there who are hoping that I'm going to distance myself from my church to help me politically."

Of course, what Romney was doing was distancing himself from Mormonism by refusing to name it while still claiming that he would not "distance myself from my church."

It was a kind of slick manuever that Romney's so good at. But Romney's so transparently dishonest in his slickness that I bet people reach for their wallets when he's around to make sure he doesn't their pockets.

I have to admit that it's working for him though. I saw one poll where Mitt was up to 15% and had replaced McCain in third place.

Obviously, Republicans don't mind getting their pockets picked.

Bradley Schlozman: Another Helium-Sucking Bush Weenie Boy

Bradley Schlozman, who TPM refers to as "the chief vote suppressor and serial dissembler" in the Bush Justice Department, is getting grilled by Sen. Pat Leahy before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Like Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, D. Kyle Sampson, Tim Griffin, and every other Bush tough guy involved in the fired prosecutor scandal, Schlozman is a weenie-boy. In fact, Schlozman's voice is so high and sqeaky that he sounds like he was sucking helium before he took the stand.

Helium-sucking weenie-boy--yet another legacy of the Bush administration.

Is Scooter Only the First?

Scooter Libby got 30 months for obstruction of justice. One wonders, though, if one legacy of the Bush administration is going to be perpetual pressure to arrest leading figures like Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Yoo for human rights violations.

The Obama Contradiction

I'm supporting Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, but I also think highly of Barack Obama and believe that he would make a fine president as well. With that in mind, I'd like to discuss Obama's major strength is also a major weakness.

Much of Obama's appeal is his ability to project a vision of a "new politics" that would be more high-minded, more idealistic, and less negative than current political styles. However, that means that he can't go for Hillary Clinton's jugular during debates. Arianna Huffington argues that there were several occasions where Obama could have caught Hillary in contradictions concerning her position on Iraq. For example, Hillary argues that she voted for the bill to authorize war because she wanted to give the Bush administration a stronger hand in forcing Saddam Hussein to accept inspectors. However, she also voted against a Sen. Carl Levin resolution requiring "Bush to exhaust all diplomatic approaches before invading Iraq."

Likewise, Obama didn't challenge Hillary's claim that "we're more secure" in relation to the Iraq invasion when he certainly could have.

Huffington claims that Obama could have challenged Hillary more sharply without undermining his claim to be engaged in "a new kind of politics." That formulation doesn't quite hit it. In fact, Obama needs to be able to go for the jugular. Nobody who wants to be a successful president can get away without being able to strike at his opponent's weak arguments and peal away the opposition's marginal followers. Though Obama is impressive in many ways, I'm not sure he fully understands this.

A Nation of Murderers?

Sam Brownback hammered Mitt Romney today for refusing to call abortion "murder." But that makes me think. I've read that there have been 40 million legal abortions since Roe v Wade in 1973. If Brownback thinks abortion is murder, wouldn't he believe that all of the 30 million or so women who got abortions (accounting for repeat cases) and all the doctors who performed the abortions were murderers.

If Sam Brownback really believes that abortion is murder, wouldn't he want everybody involved in abortions arrested and subject to some sort of criminal trial or crimes against humanity proceeding?

If abortion is murder, certainly every woman who has had an abortion and every doctor who has performed an abortion should be arrested and tried for something. Someone might argue that abortion has been legal, but the murders of the Nazis were legal and Nazi leaders, camp commandants, and even concentration camp guards have been subject to arrest and trial. Why wouldn't the women and their doctors involved in abortion be subject to simialar kinds of arrest and prosecution under the pro-life version of international law?

Actually, tens of millions of Americans were involved in murder if abortion is defined as murderous. The population of murderers certainly would include the nurses who assisted in the surgery and the receptionists who processed the abortion patients when they came into the clinic. If a bank robber kills a teller during a hold-up, the getaway driver is just as guilty of the murder as the robber himself. Nurses and receptionists would be just as guilty of the murder of a "baby" during an abortion as the doctors and mothers.

What under Brownback's definition of murder, really mass murder, would prevent them from being arrested and tried?

And of course, hospital and clinic administrators would most likely be guilty of "conspiracy" to aid and abet large-scale murder as would the friends, relatives, and anyone else who assisted the woman in getting an abortion. It would be more of a stretch, but one could envision the politicians, feminists, and liberal political activists who have defended abortion rights being accused of "co-conspirators" in the holocaust of the unborn. Would they go unpunished?

Ultimately Brownback's definition of abortion as murder implies that the United States is a nation of murderers?

And conservatives have the nerve to say the left hates America.

Newt's Same Old Same Old

In an upcoming speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Newt Gingrich articulates a two-pronged strategy for creating a new Republican majority. But it's tepid stuff. First, he wants to emphasize symbolic issues like making English the official language of the United States and keeping "One Nation Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. Newt's idea here are that these are issues where people on the left disagree with the majority of the American public. But if Newt wants to have an impact, he'll either have to engage in issues that people see as important, like health care, global warming, or job security, or he'll have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on advertising to everyone that the wording of the pledge is one of the most important issues facing American society.

At the same time, Gingrich wants to go back to old fashioned fear-mongering about "the threat of the irreconcilable wing of Islam as well as resurgent Russian aggressiveness and the challenge of Chinese economic and scientific development." After four years of Bush blundering in Iraq, it's hard to scare anybody by waving the bloody shirt of Islamic terrorism. So Newt is throwing in the Russians and the Chinese as well. Of course, Newt conveniently ignores the problem of how to deal with the war in Iraq.

This makes me wonder if Newt is actually going to run. Gingrich is certainly preparing for a campaign, but I'd be surprised if even Newt is delusional or megalomaniacal enough to think he's going to win on a platform of making English the official language and baiting the semi-resurgent Russian bear.

Of course, I could be wrong about that.

All the Bad News on the Surge

To be honest, the surge is going better than I thought it would. I had thought that the surge would have led to a big blow-up among Shiites by now. But Baghdad hasn't exploded and both Americans and Shiites have acted cautiously to prevent a large scale confrontation. The leader of the Mahdi Army, Moqtada al-Sadr, cautiously decided that the beginning of the surge would be a good time to take a long vacation in Iran and ordered his militia underground. The American military matched Sadr's caution by limiting itself to a token show of force in the giant Shiite slum of Sadr city where the population is largely loyal to the Mahdi militia. As a result, the surge is not the disaster it could have been if both sides had been more aggressive.

But that doesn't mean the surge isn't failing.

According to the New York Times, American commanders thought they would have control over every Baghdad neighborhood by now. But they only have control over 1/3 and even that is uncertain.

The American military was counting on Iraqi Army and police forces to "hold" Baghdad neighborhoods after they had been cleared by Americans. But the Iraqi Army has disappointed again while the Iraqi police are still infiltrated by the Mahdi Army. There have even been a couple of incidents where Iraqi police have been involved in setting up roadside bombs to attack American soldiers.

The bottom line is that Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents are coming back into neighborhoods as the Americans move on to clearing new neighborhoods. Nothing has changed since 2004. The American military "clears" out neighborhoods, towns, and cities but there aren't enough American soldiers or reliable Iraqis to "hold" areas let alone engage in any economic reconstruction.

As a result, Baghdad is far from being "stabilized" in the way the Bush administration envisioned.

Actually, the New York Times is looking at things through the rose-colored glasses of the American military. Sunni insurgents are stronger than they were, they're launching more suicide bombings and attacks on American troops, and have made life more dangerous for the Shiites they're attacking. It looks like security forthe civilian population in Baghdad has deteriorated somewhat as a whole since the beginning of the surge.

American military officials don't think that Baghdad can be completely secured until September. Maybe they're right, but it sounds like they're being wildly over-optimistic again.

Who's More Individualistic?

One of the interesting conundrums of American political life is the different approaches to individuality in relation to group life. The standard formulation is that the right-wing values economic freedom but are more favorable toward government regulation of entertainment and sex. In this sense, conservatives emphasize group standards when it comes to regulating our social behavior.

To the contrary, the left supposedly values freedom in relation to sex, booze, and entertainment but believes in more government regulation of the economy. In other words, the nation or group as a whole should protect individuals from various kinds of economic abuses.

But I don't think that says it all and I'd like to formulate some rough points on the contrasting cultures of right and left here.

One of the things that's interesting to me is that conservatives have long had an edge in group consciousness. In the South especially, white conservatives have a thick knot of group loyalties. Conservatives are highly family conscious, very loyal to their churches, highly motivated to send money to the Jerry Falwells and James Dobsons of the world, and strongly identify themselves as "conservatives" and "Republicans." That's one reason why the Republicans have traditionally had an edge in small donor fund raising than the Democrats (although they started losing that edge in 2004). Everyday conservatives have much more of a group sense of themselves in relation to "conservatism" and the Republican Party.

On the other hand, I've always found white liberals and those on the left to be more individualistic in the sense that they see themselves primarily in terms of their "self" rather than group identity. and have a relatively "thin" and less intense set of group identifications. The main group reference of white liberals tends to be their nuclear families, but even there people on the left don't see "Family" as an group-identifying principle in the same way as conservatives. Generally speaking liberals have fewer religious, community, and other group affiliations and less of a group consciousness about the affiliations they have. For liberals, the primary fact of their group affiliations is their own "choice" rather than their loyalty to the group itself.

Three points.

First, I believe that the individualism of white liberals is one of the most important things that separates them culturally from African-Americans, gays, and union members. The African-American sense of being part of a collective blackness is especially foreign to the white liberal experience. The same thing is the case with gays in relation to heterosexual liberals and union members in relation to white liberal professionals and managerial types. This is one of the reasons why the Democratic common front on racial issues, the war in Iraq, and government involvement in the economy is like an alliance between foreign nations rather than participation in a common group endeavor. The parts of the Democratic coalition more motivated by group consciousness are affiliated with complete different and to some extent opposing groups while most white liberals tend not to affiliate much at all. The fact that the American left contains several different cultures that don't have a common bond has been a debilitating weakness.

Second, the group consciousness of the right gives them a decided edge in terms of small donor fund-raising, volunteering for political campaigns, going to see speakers, and things like that. Being more motivated by a group consciousness of conservatism, people on the right tend to do more for the conservative cause than white liberals especially

Third, there seems to be a shift toward more of a group awareness among white "progressives" as a result of the Iraq War. However, that still strikes me as being pretty weak. The big "netroots" web sites like Daily Kos have some group consciousness but it is also pretty weak and poorly coordinated with blacks, gays, and union members to the extent that it's coordinated at all.

I've posted extensively on what I think is going to be the big Democratic victory in 2008. At the same time though, I think the Democratic coalition would be stronger if white liberals developed more of a group consciousness among themselves and with other elements in the Democratic coalition.

Hillary Wins By Not Losing

I caught about half an hour of the Democratic debate on CNN. Bill Richardson looked like a deer in the headlights and sounded terrible. Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich got in some good points and John Edwards and Barack Obama had some informative exchanges.

But the clear winner was Hillary. She just didn't do anything that made her look bad or made her look like a questionable front-runner. Hillary is advancing a little bit in the polls while a little bit of the shine has come off Obama and Edwards. It looks like the Democratic nomination is hers to lose and she's so far refusing to lose it.

I have to admit that I like Edwards a little bit better after this debate than previously. He seems more like a real human being and less like a collection of up-by-the-bootstraps Southernisms.

Zakaria Forgets the Right

Faheed Zakaria has a lengthy, overblown, and insipid essay on what the United States has to do to solve it's foreign policy problems and regain it's standing in the world. The argument boils down to a single word--"confidence." Zakaria wants American to get over the paralyzing fearfulness that was engendered by 9-11 and regain the confidence to embody the values of openness, expansiveness, generosity, and tolerance once again. For Zakaria, it's not just George Bush or the Bush administration that's become rigid, fearful, and uncaring, it's American society as a whole.

Having spooked ourselves into believing that we have no option but to act fast, alone, unilaterally and pre-emptively, we have managed in six years to destroy decades of international good will, alienate allies, embolden enemies and yet solve few of the major international problems we face.

Matthew Yglesias writes that he agrees "with almost every word of Fareed Zakaria's latest essay on what the country needs to do, post-Bush, in terms of restoring America's position in the world."

To the contrary, I thought Zakaria's essay was crap even where I agreed with it. The problem is that Zakaria tries to be politically neutral. Zakaria is especially disturbed by the fear-mongering of Rudy Giuliani and other Republican presidential candidates, but he is almost as critical of the Democrats for playing "I'm tough too." But why do the Democrats have to play tough? Zakaria doesn't either ask or answer that question.

Likewise, Zakaria is disgusted with the Bush administration's lone wolf approach to foreign policy and views the values of negotiation and compromise as crucial to American foreign policy success. However, Zacharia also shows Broderesque even-handedness in giving Bush credit for developing a version of a more sensible "containment" policy toward Iran. But what about that lone wolf approach, the sneering at negotiations, the loathing of any kind of compromise, the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war, and the justifications of torture and secret prisons. Where did those elements in Bush administration policy come from? Zacharias neither asks nor answers these questions either. He seems to have little interest in how the United States got to a point where our primary political currency is fear and revulsion.

Of course, if Zacharia had asked these questions, he couldn't have been even-handed. He would have had to point an accusatory finger at the American right and the people who aid and abet the right-wing in the American media. Zacharia makes a lot of the fear-mongering of Rudy Giuliani, but fear-mongering has been the primary motif of Republican candidates going back to Richard Nixon's law and order campaign in 1968. The primary significance of Ronald Reagan was that he put a friendly, optimistic face on conservative fear-mongering about the Soviet Union, the civil rights movement, crime, feminism, and homosexuality.

Of course, it wasn't just Reagan. If the right-wing was promoting fear, the mainstream media was translating those fears from conservative political discourse into the common sense interpretation of the news. The media might have rejected Republican policy prescriptions on things like crime but they found the structuring of the news in terms of relentless litany of the horrors of urban crime, drugs, and pedophilia to be comfortable and profitable. Even specialized liberal media jumped on the right-wing bandwagon by translating the conservative world view into the language of liberal values on welfare, unions, NAFTA, the privatization of social security, and the debate over invading Iraq. With the rise of "neo-liberalism," the conservative world-view became the common sense of most of the American left as well as the right and Democratic politicians were reduced to advocating a "kinder and gentler" conservativism than their Republican opponents.

Without discussing the origins of the American fear-mongering, Zacharia's argument for a renewal of American confidence was just as empty as Julie Andrews singing "they'll have to agree that I have confidence in me" in The Sound of Music. If the United States is going to stop wallowing in fear after the Bush administration leaves office, we need to defeat the overly large right-wing in this country. Given the disastrous performance of the Bush administration, the opportunity to defeat the right lies at hand, but the left-wing blogosphere is the only part of American political discourse that specifically opposes the right. If mainstream journalists like Zacharias want the Democrats to stop being influenced by right-wing fear-mongering, the first thing they can do is cut themselves off from the right-wing. They can stop hiring personalities like William Kristol, stop taking the work of the lunatics at the American Enterprise Institute seriously, and start reporting seriously on the distortions in the right-wing media and blogosphere. The first step toward defeating the right-wing is to isolate the right within American society.

For Zacharia, that means acknowledging that the right-wing is the source of the fear-mongering that bothers him so much.

A Day Without Blogging

Yesterday was the first day I haven't posted in this blog for something like 11 months. It was mostly miscalculation. Mrs. RSI and I went to a 40th birthday party for a friend and colleague at a hotel that did not have free internet access. Not being willing to pay, I was unable to post.

The party was great! There were friends and relatives from all over the country--guys, women, straights, gays, white people, black people. Good people.

There was a lot of love for the birthday girl. Friendship and good feeling abounded with the rest of the party. Mrs. RSI and I even got out on the dance floor and shook it a little.

A good time.

GOP Raises Standards for 2008

According to Jonah Goldberg (on Townhall.com), one of the major advantages of Fred Thompson is the he can pronounce words correctly.

Most Republicans won't admit it, but Bush's trouble articulating his views . . . is a major irritation on the right. There's a reason that IMAO's No. 1 "Fred Thompson Fact" is "Fred Thompson has on multiple occasions pronounced 'nuclear' correctly."

After eight years of being embarrased by Bush, it seems that Goldberg wants Republican candidates to return to the simplest kinds of personal competence. Actually, that's not fair. Goldberg doesn't just want competence. He wants "conservative competence." Giuliani, McCain, and Romney might be competent but they aren't conservative enough from Goldberg's point of view. What Goldberg wants is basic personal competence from a real conservative.

And Fred Thompson's the guy. You can almost hear conservative pundits breaking into cheers over Thompson. "Fred, Fred, he's our guy/if he can't do it Newt will try." However, Goldberg is not so unreasonable that he's necessarily demanding that Thompson be competent in real life.

And Fred Thompson just seems so darn competent. Whether he's the ideal president or just plays one on TV remains to be seen. He's certainly typecast himself as the cocksure, wise, hands-on type in almost every movie role he's had and as the district attorney on "Law & Order."

And this sums up the basic conundrum of the Republican right. Association with the Bush administration, the Republican Congress, and lobbyists like Jack Abramoff has hallowed out the conservative activist wing of the Republican Party of potential presidential candidates. George Allen and Rick Santorum lost, Bill Frist opted out, the Bush cabinet is loaded with non-entities, and no generals have emerged as stars from the Iraq War. So conservatives are grasping at their last straw, a guy who plays a competent conservative on television.

But Thompson can pronounce "nuclear" and lots of other words. So the Republicans should be given credit for raising standards.

Neo-Cons Still Delusional

Neo-con stalwarts William Kristol and Frederick Kagan have a bizarre article in the Weekly Standard on the war in Iraq in which they don't refer to the war at all. It's like a theatrical set-piece in which the neo-cons introduce most of the characters involved in the war but don't seek to work out the consequences of the action on the ground in Baghdad, Diyala, Basra, and other parts of Iraq.

There's President Bush (right strategy), Congress (surrender deadline), General Petraeus (right general), the Syrians (letting in the jihadis), the Iraqi government, and all the foreign jihadis streaming into Iraq. However, there is no idea of how the war is going. The closest thing to reality is that "our victory there will be an important victory in the larger struggle against terrorism--and our defeat there would embolden and empower our enemies." But no idea of whether we're winning or whether progress is being made.

That might be because progress is not being made. Baghdad is not secure, terrorist attacks are exploding in places like Diyala, and Sunni insurgents have in fact become stronger now that the Shiite militias have gone underground. Moreover, the Maliki government has not been able to pass legislation needed for a compromise between Shiites and Sunnis and there is no immediate prospect of their doing so. Finally, American military casualties are rising but it's not because we are putting pressure on the enemy. Instead, there are just more American soldiers driving around to serve as targets for roadside bombs or ambushes. Far from making progress or gaining "an important victory in the larger struggle against terrorism," the surge seems to have resulted in further deterioration of the ground situation.

Like the big bad wolf, the neo-cons keep huffing and puffing. But their hot air does not make the situation in Iraq any better.

How To Be an Atheist and an Arrogant Prick!

Eric Alterman excerpted this dialogue from a Christopher Hitchens appearance at the David Horowitz Freedom Center in New York on May 1. Hitchens is well-known as a former left-wing writer for the nation who since has become a neo-conservative and has just published a book against religion.

Unidentified Audience Member: You know, I just have something to say. You know, I feel like I'm a bacteria here in this process. But what I know is that, as much as I know, I know nothing about the process of God and what have you. But I find your arrogance just overbearing. And I think that
--
Christopher Hitchens: I hear that all the time.
Unidentified Audience Member: -- I just -- I think someone needs to say that really, what we know is so little, and you pretend you know so much. And I just find it
offensive.
Christopher Hitchens: Well, no --
Unidentified Audience Member: Because I know so little. You know,
I've experienced things in study of Buddhism and what have you that have made me closer. But yet, I don't know anything. And I know a lot more than I think
perhaps you do. And I really -- I'm just offended by you. And excuse me for
--
Christopher Hitchens: Please. It takes a lot more than that to make my cry, or even turn over in bed, actually.
Unidentified Audience Member: You know what? You know what? I would say that -- I won't say it.
Christopher Hitchens: Go on.
Peter Collier [David Horowitz Freedom Center program director]: Okay.
Unidentified Audience Member: I won't say --
Christopher Hitchens: Do not be afraid of hurting my feelings, sir.
Unidentified Audience Member: No, I would just --
Christopher Hitchens: I promise you.
Unidentified Audience Member: I would just say you are probably the
most offensive person that I have come across of any --
Christopher Hitchens: That's better. That's much better.
Well, I couldn't care less what you think, as you can obviously tell.

Like Hitchens, I'm an atheist and a number of people have expressed dismay that I can hold my theological opinions with as much confidence as I do. Unlike Hitchens though, I'm very interested in what other people think when they disagree with me as profoundly as the audience member disagrees with Hitchens. What makes them do so? Mrs. RSI is a fairly orthodox liberal Catholic. I've always been interested in the mixture of Irish ethnicity, socialization, special circumstance, taste, and other factors that make her belief something that I find preposterous. Yet, Mrs. RSI and her liberal Catholic friends are all wonderful, warm, generous, loving people. If being good people were proof of the validity of Catholic Christianity, I'd line up to become Catholic.

Likewise, I'm also very curious about what would lead people to reject me to the extent that they would say something like "you are probably the most offensive person that I have come across." The fact that Hitchens has no such interest in the opinions of his fellow beings makes him an arrogant prick. In fact, Hitchens arrogant disdain for a guy who was obviously struggling makes him offensive in my eyes as well. Unfortunately, Hitchen's arrogance is an occupational hazard of being an atheist and in some ways of being a leftist as well. A lot of the atheists I know adapt a sense of superiority in relation to the religious people among us. Rejecting a mode of belief held by the vast majority of people in American society, they tend to reject the vast majority of society as not being worth their time or concern. That's how you can be an atheist and an arrogant prick.

Quarantining the Right-wing Base

There's been some noise lately about immigration reform dividing the Republican Party. Peggy Noonan (via Matthew Yglesias) is shocked at the disdain which Republican supporters of the bi-partisan bill hold conservative opponents of comprehensive reform. With Sen. Lindsey Graham referring to opponents as "bigots" and Michael Gerson (the guy who wrote all of Bush's more soaring speeches) calling those "who oppose the bill . . . "anti-immigrant" and [suggesting] they suffer from "rage" and "national chauvinism," Noonan is getting the idea that a desperate Bush administration finally feels free to vent their disgust the right-wing.

The White House doesn't need its traditional supporters anymore, because its
problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don't even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place. This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place.

Noonan's right. Neither the White House nor many Congressional Republicans care for the Christian conservatives (or religious kooks) to whom they've had pander on gay rights and abortion. I remember one gay Republican staffer referring to the campaign against gay marriage as "just politics." The White House doesn't care for anti-Muslim bigots like Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin, doesn't respect the relentless war-mongers of "Savage Nation," and doesn't respect itself in the morning after its efforts to screw black people and Indians out of the vote. The White House has been more willing to inflame the passions of the popular right about the war, gay rights, partial-birth abortion, vote fraud, and other wedge issues, but Bush, Rove, Josh Bolten and the rest of the White House political crew essentially agrees with American liberals that the right-wing base is defined by it's ignorance and bigotry.

However, the problem of the Republican Party is not that they're in danger of losing their base, it's that they're in danger of seeing their popular base isolated from the rest of society. The Bush White House has always been good at inflaming their base in ways that also resonate with other sectors of American society. With the failure of the war in Iraq and Katrina, however, the Bush administration lost its touch to such an extent that they've lost credibility themselves, lost the support of many neo-liberals who had been sympathetic with conservatives, and lost support in the mainstream media. The same isolation has also affected the conservative media machine and Republican base that have supported them. Moderate students who take my classes, even moderately conservative students, have such enormous contempt for the whole right-wing sector of American society that it's much more difficult for conservatives to identify "wedge" issues that could split the moderate vote. The problem with the Bush administration is not that they're breaking up the conservative coalition so much as they're making conservativism contemptible to everyone outside the right-wing.

Billy Donovan Moves On Down the Road

It looks like basketball coach Billy Donovan is moving a few miles south from the Florida Gators in Gainsville to the Orlando Magic. I wish Donovan well. He's one of the better people in the slime-filled world of major college basketball. But the transition from the NCAA to the NBA is extremely tough. Tim Floyd, Rick Pitino, Lon Kruger, and Mike Montgomery are only a few of the top college coaches who have failed recently in the NBA.

There are lots of reasons.

Billy Donovan is a god in Gainesville but he'll be a rookie coach working with players like Dwight Howard and Jameer Nelson who have already accumulated considerable NBA experience despite being in their twenties. They'll be judging Donovan a lot more than Donovan will be judging them.

Donovan won't be working with the cream of the athletic crop like he was used to working with either. At Florida, Donovan just had to figure out a way to get his assorted McDonald's All-Americans to assert their athletic superiority. Phil Jackson gets to do that with Kobe Bryant, but the Orlando Magic was mediocre even in the Eastern Conference. Donovan will have to coach them up the ladder as he's learning on the job. Ouch!

Likewise, one of Donovan's big skills is recruiting and there is no recruiting in the NBA outside recruiting free agents. And how many top level free agents are going to want to work for a rookie coach who hasn't proved himself.

Maybe Billy will do great but he might be in for a real "growth experience" as well.