A Dark Day for the Republic

...and a black eye for the Democratic Party.

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

The Wages of Sin

While our bankrupt Congress delays its most recent bi-partisan sellout of the people’s right to be secure in their persons and effects so as to protect their corporate benefactors – whom they obviously consider to be their primary constituency - so that they may attend the funeral of an unapologetic southern white racist, race-baiter and homophobe, we take stock that their approval rating of just 18% as of one year ago has now been cut in half.

Just like American industry and the corporate press, they are reviled by their customers because it is quite obvious to them that none of America’s elites give a rat’s ass about public concerns, except as a means to protect and enrich themselves and their cronies.

So, what are you going to do about it?

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

Back At Ya Senator

The indispensable John Amato at Crooks and Liars has the video:

JOHN MCCAIN: “Now we’ve got the cables. We’ve got talk radio. We’ve got the bloggers. I hate the bloggers. We’ve got all kinds of sources of information.”

Shocking that the new titular leader of the Republican Party doesn't just find bloggers annoying or challenging, but actually detests the most dynamic and truly democratic forum mankind has ever devised.

Shocking.

Not really.

Gore, Nader, Bush...and Obama: What was the lesson of 2000? (POLL)

Mark makes some pretty good points below. This one jogged my memory:

We won't stay home, know better than to get burned by the Nader protest vote again in this lifetime, and don't have enough clout to bring about real change.

Ah, Nader. Let me ask you a question, Mark: Why did Al Gore not gain the White House in 2000? Was it that Bush stole Florida?

Or was it that Gore did not talk more about (for example) climate change, thereby drawing the Nader vote more decisively?

Or was Gore's problem something else: that he lost Tennessee, his own home state, because the voters there thought he was too liberal?

When you have the answers to these questions, then we can talk some more about Obama's conduct in this campaign.

In the meantime, I don't have any easy answers here. At best, I guess I could say that things would have been different had Gore v. Bush been run in the context of today's Blogville. So maybe we have more power now than we think.

On the other hand, campaigns are always about winning elections, not leading movements. The time to lead a movement is after you get elected -- otherwise it ends up meaning a whole lot less than we all hoped it would.


[cross posted at E Pluribus Unum]

It Is Not About You

It's next to impossible this Independence Day not to be reminded how far we still have to go in building this "more perfect union" when the leader of the more liberal political party, uhm . . . evolves his positions almost immediately upon securing the nomination -- something he accomplished in no small part due to the support of the most ardent progressives and the liberal online community.

And he's walking it back, all those things we "hoped" he would be, but really never was.

What really is mystifying, or rather simply infuriating is how easily and predictably we are again left at the alter. McCain, the "Maverick" has done somersaults moving to appease his extreme right base, and the Democrats tag along for the drift to the right as well, despite clear evidence that this of all years, such a "safe" move is unnecessary.

What the politicians don't see, because there is no contrary evidence to convince them, is that the "safe" move to the right is actually dangerous, if not to the nation then to their ambition. There are no consequences for the progressive movement being ignored. We simply aren't perceived as offering the same credible threat of backlash as do evangelicals or obsessive tax-cutters and militarists. Our attention to detail, engagement and enthusiasm present a different dynamic. We won't stay home, know better than to get burned by the Nader protest vote again in this lifetime, and don't have enough clout to bring about real change.

Today the blogosphere is abuzz with Barack Obama's online address on the FISA issue. This is promising, but not heartwarming.

Yes, he used our medium to talk directly to those of us who are most vocal in our opposition to his support of this obviously flawed position. But since he didn't change his stance, Glenn Greenwald thinks the statement was "worthless," Paul Rosenberg at Open Left doesn't think Obama's statement will fool any of us that are paying attention, and Marcy Wheeler doesn't think Obama knows what he's talking about.

I agree with them all, but unsaid is that Obama knows exactly who he's talking to, and it ain't you my dear over-informed blog reader. He's talking to the under-informed, as usual. This time he's just not doing it through the usual media filter. He added a step. But his target, ally and nemesis is always the Versailles Villagers on the Potomac -- or does Digby have to spell it out for you again?

And this is because our political narratives are written by corporate conservatives and disseminated by their rich celebrity employees who actually seem to believe their "values" are shared by Real Americans. One of the most brilliant narratives was the notion that "the left" is unpatriotic. After all, suppressing dissent on that topic has kept the bipartisan Military Industrial Complex gravy train rolling for more than 50 years. It's perfectly natural that the new Surveillance State would be folded into that at the first opportunity, and the corporations that provide all the technology would necessarily want a piece of that action. There's huge money to be made in government contracts and the idea that any corporation would do something to endanger such possibilities over something so trivial as the constitution is naive. They agreed to work together for very good reasons and they do not want any interference.

But it isn't just about money it's also about political power. The effect of this decades long propaganda program has been to inculcate the idea among many Americans that liberalism itself is unserious. It's become so reflexive that any Democratic politician is automatically granted respect from the political establishment for the mere act of defying his own voters. It is considered a sign of courage and gravitas and a necessary right of passage.

What Obama considers important is winning. Not your petty concerns about the rule of law or following the Constitution. It's not like he sat down and took on commenters in a free-for-all exchange at a site like Daily Kos -- and he would have been foolish to do so. He doesn't need to. What he does need to do is have the corporate media report that he engaged us laptop hippies, was nice enough to stoop to our level for which we should be duly impressed, and still supports the "adult" position. NAFTA, Iraq, the list of rightward tacking grows daily.

In a day and age when all of the collective members of the media informed the world exactly when and where the race for the Democratic nomination was over -- because the saintly Tim Russert said it was so -- the progressive online community has a long way to go to be more than a curiosity or a prop in their play.

The lesson is, we just have to keep plugging away.

Dude, This Thing Is Just Getting Started

GeeBus, is it possible that Armando is wrong again, as usual? He really needs to go back to strictly law blogging and leave the purely political analysis to someone who knows WTF they're talking about.

Believing McCain has more or less jumped the shark with his reverse swift boat maneuver on Wes Clark and Jim Webb, here's the latest wisdom from on High Atop the Big Tent, believing the faux outrage vis-a-vis "Ace" McCain's tendency to crash jets being a qualifier for the White House backfired, or at least it will.

The more I think about it, the more I think McCain may have lost all chance to win the election this week.

Me, I tend to be a bit more inquisitive before making pronouncements based on no more evidence than what emerges from my rectum, pointing at it and saying, "Eureka, a cure for cancer!" For instance, those who read tea leaves would be well advised to check out exactly what significance McCain's new campaign manager, a veteran smear merchant from the Rove/Atwater/Machiavelli school of goonery, might have on the tone of the campaign.

One might also ponder whether hitching up with the actual Swift Boat boys is a feature, not a bug, of the new direction McCain & Co. is going.

Ironically, Armando notes that McCain has no choice but to go seriously negative to have a hope. I agree, and evidently so do the Republicans. After all, it's what they do. But reading the tea leaves is not what Armando does well in any way whatsoever. Last February 10th, the very same day Hillary Clinton changed campaign managers, Armando had some Theories about how the nomination would play out. Maggie Williams taking over the campaign did not play into those predictions

Note that at that point, when Patti Stolis Doyle was ousted from the Clinton campaign and Obama was already ahead in the delegate count -- never to look back -- and in the middle of streak of eleven straight unanswered wins, Armando said, "Clinton is still the favorite for the nomination."

Fail!

Clinton was in trouble, and she knew it -- and went negative. McCain knows he's in trouble and just like he did when his primary run looked doomed he, like Clinton, changed campaign managers. He's doing it again and there is no doubt he'll be going more negative than Clinton did.

I'm not saying that going negative will win McCain the election. Boy I hope not. But it will serve, as it did Clinton, to keep him competitive. It's a desperate act to be sure, but it's been successful in the past.

I will put down my tinfoil hat long enough to say that the last week's distractions may have been more about keeping the rubes from really analyzing McCain's dismal military record than the start of the real mudslinging. There's no way they want to talk about McCain's tendency to crash planes and blow up aircraft carriers, and have his daddy the Admiral bail him out -- or his tendency to sing like a songbird whenever his captors fed him a cracker.

The GOP may have figured that the Democrats just don't have the stomach for a messy fight, and with this latest assault ensured that real scrutiny of McCain's military career is also "off the table" since it will make what they did to John Kerry seem even more outrageous -- if that's possible.

Even more amusement: Armando also predicted on February 10th that in 2012, Clinton will lose her reelection bid, after passing universal health care (What? Backlash for not waiting until the end of her second term like she promised?) to Bobby "The Exorcist" Jindal.

Interestingly enough, this came only two days after Jindal's name was first put out there by Rush Limbaugh as a possible VP choice for McCain. Now we know where Armando gets his talking points.

Feith, Rove, Just Full Of It

There are those who think that life has nothing left to chance
A host of holy horrors to direct our aimless dance

A planet of play things
We dance on the strings
Of powers we cannot perceive
'The stars aren't aligned
Or the gods are malign...'
Blame is better to give than receive


You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that's clear
I will choose freewill
Rush ~ Freewill

A tautology for the ages from the master of Teh Stupid:

A lot of poor commentary has framed the Iraq war as a conflict of "choice" rather than of "necessity." In fact, President George W. Bush chose to remove Saddam Hussein from power because he concluded that doing so was necessary.

Heh. Nice word play. Lemme see if I can do as well.

How about this: "In fact, President George W. Bush chose to conclude that it was necessary to remove Saddam Hussein from power." See? Easy and I used fewer words too!

After all this time, they're still offering up bullcrap arguments to justify the worst decision in American history. This ain't flying at all, and BooMan does an admirable job of explaining why.

Feith pushes a false narrative on us, but it's a familiar one. We had no reliable intelligence in 2001 that suggested that Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons programs. His armed forces were weak, disloyal, ill-paid, ill-equipped, and totally unable to project force towards any of his neighbors. Insofar as the Intelligence Community worked on the issue of Iraq, they were mainly concerned with an international disinformation campaign to heighten the threat from Saddam in order to maintain support for a crumbling sanctions regime. Belief in Iraq's WMD's was nothing more than a convenient case of believing our own hype. How many times did the Bush administration point to misinformation put out by the Clinton administration to bolster their case for war (and to justify their decision after the fact)?

But there is a key difference between the lies of the Clinton administration and the lies of the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) of Douglas Feith. Clinton administration lies were intended to keep Saddam Hussein from rearming and/or slaughtering internal dissidents. Bush administration lies were intended to justify actions that have now cost over 4,000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis their lives, created over 2 million refugees, and cost a trillion dollars.

That was a choice that George W. Bush made. He chose to lie in the service of a policy that created all this tragedy and waste. And to think that Feith would quote Rumsfeld's concern about the loss of a single pilot as justification for the necessity of doing this! No wonder General Tommy Franks said of Feith, "I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day."

As for Karl "The Math" Rove, well . . . other than still being worshiped by the likes of one of the most self-deluded bloggers in Reich Wing Blogistan, he not only fails completely of offer any analysis in his long-winded and tiresome essay other than how McCain and Obama are spending their money -- cuz it's all about the cash of course -- he can't even get the simple facts right about who's spending what, when.

Honestly I don't know if this is a deliberate fake-out, willfully ignoring the dynamic shifts in the electorate as a direct backlash against the dismal failures of Rove's former boss's administration because of their complete politicalization of public policy due mainly to Rove's own advice and advancement within the White House.

That or maybe Rove is just stupid too.

GPS Cells and Jumping the FISA/Telecom Shark.

I gotta agree with Nick Beaudrot at Cogitamus. This is a dumb battle.

Kevin Drum picks up the story from TChris at the Big Tent of Perpetual Outrage that the ACLU and the EFF folks have filed a FOIA suit to find out if and when and how often the government has used the GPS tracking information in your cell phone to monitor our locations.

(Okay, if that's too many abbreviations for you, then don't worry, you don't need to care.)

It's like this. Every modern cell phone has a little GPS transmitter (or something) and they can triangulate your position between cell towers (I guess). The ACLU and EFF and Kevin Drum want them to get warrants to find out -- where you are.

Drum must be a bit punchy from all the FISA/TeleGiant fighting lately, because frankly, he's better than this.

That cell phone tracking should indeed require a warrant hardly seems disputable. That the Department of Justice refuses to explain its policies hardly seems defensible. Good luck to the ACLU and the EFF.

Uhhm, nope.

It's not only disputable, it's dismissible and defensible.

Now just calm down and think for a minute.

• They could follow you without a warrant.
• They could ring your doorbell to see if you answer without a warrant.
• They can set up a stake out across your street and monitor your coming and going without a warrant.
• They can check your garbage and find out where you picked up the take out you had for dinner without a warrant.

If you leave your home, you are by definition "out in public." Where's the expectation of privacy when you are in public? If you're not out in public, you must be at home or where-ever you went when you left home and went out in public to get there.

Location is a status, not a thing to be seized or a conversation that can be intercepted. You don't need a warrant to find out someone's status: alive or dead, male or female, felon or clean record, physical description, valid or suspended license -- home or roaming the public streets.

If you do have an expectation of privacy when you are traveling around, in public, then you must be sneaking around -- so ditch the phone with the fancy chip in it that is probably eating your brain anyway.

Two Faces and No Brains

I wonder if the Village Gasbags will be able to figure out who is demeaning whose service?

“I can't speak for them, but we all know that General Clark, as high-ranking as he is, his record in his last command I think was somewhat less than stellar."
-- Orson Swindle, John McCain Campaign

Just in case there’s still some question what actually demeaning a war veteran’s service looks like:

Louis Letson: "I know John Kerry is lying about his first Purple Heart because I treated him for that injury."

Van O'Dell: "John Kerry lied to get his bronze star...I know, I was there, I saw what happened."

Jack Chenoweth: "His account of what happened and what actually happened are the difference between night and day."

Admiral Roy Hoffman: "John Kerry has not been honest."

Adrian Lonsdale: "And he lacks the capacity to lead."

Larry Thurlow: "When he chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry."

Bob Elder: "John Kerry is no war hero."

Grant Hibbard: "He betrayed all his shipmates...he lied before the Senate."

Joe Ponder: "He dishonored his country...he most certainly did."

Bob Hildreth: "I served with John Kerry...John Kerry cannot be trusted."

The plain fact is, the Gasbags have no moral or rational authority to judge the matter, they relinquished their credibility and responsibility to do so four years ago.

[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

Clark v. McCain: McCain's Losing & Here's Why

I like Chuck Todd (and his posse of deputies Mark Murray and Domenico Montanaro) but I think they're off in the tall grass on this:

[...[D]oes this entire episode remind anyone else of John Kerry’s botched joke before the 2006 midterms -- when Kerry’s mangled swipe at President Bush got twisted into a slap at US troops?

That's a misreading of what's happening here because Clark's point was made with far more intelligence and articulation than Kerry's (despite Obama calling it "inartful" but that's another story).

Here's how I see it:

McCain, trailing badly by most meaningful metrics, wants the Obama camp to hit him hard. Why? Three reasons:

1. So that he can get as much free media as possible, but more importantly...


2. So he can play the aggrieved victim, which leads to...


3. Drawing the Republican base closer to him (McCain) in his defense.

That's it. So how's he doing? Not so good.

Obama is not the candidate that will lash out at his opponents. McCain should know this by now -- Obama is preternaturally cool (for a national politician) -- it is McCain who is the hothead. Instead of lashing out, Obama has repeatedly stated how much he honors McCain's sacrifice, but...that isn't enough to qualify McCain to be president. The longer McCain strikes back, the weaker and more petty he looks.

I think I know what McCain is trying to do: he (consciously or otherwise) is trying to take a page out of Richard Nixon's campaign playbook circa 1967. Back then, Nixon was perceived as a has-been, a loser that no one in their right mind would listen to. But Nixon figured out that if he could goad LBJ into lashing out at him personally, he could elevate his stature to that of the sitting president. And (more importantly) he could paint himself as a victim/outsider being picked on by the bully/insider. Nixon understood the simmering resentment against Johnson and knew that as soon as Johnson struck back it would draw the Republican base closer to him. It worked for Nixon back then.

But it won't work for McCain today because Obama isn't a bully and McCain isn't an outsider. Oh, he'll draw the Republican base closer to him because these are the same people that give Bush a 60% approval rating and they'll believe just about anything. But as far as getting the independents and disaffected Democrats...not so much.

Furthermore, the free media thing isn't working out so well either. For one thing, Wesley Clark has made his point with clarity ... and humility: Clark honors McCain's sacrifice, but will not concede that it automatically makes McCain the superior candidate for president. In my book, this makes him a decent candidate for Secretary of Defense or Chariman of the Armed Services Committee ... but not Chief Executive of the United States. Of course, McCain's camp simply won't accept that and continues to play the "sacrifice card" and the "military experience" card. But that misses the point and gives Clark yet another chance to repeat his point.

And you know what? Every day that this story stays alive cuts against McCain by allowing Clark's argument to be discussed in greater detail. It gives Sen. Webb a chance to weigh in. It gives McCain another opportunity to screw up by bringing in the bad actors from the Swiftboats for Slime -- the guys who trashed Kerry by trashing his military career.

Bad move Senator McCain: now YOU look like the bully. Can't you see? No one is trashing your military career. Not Clark, not Webb, not Obama. They are simply making a simple case: Being a hero yesterday does not punch your ticket to the Presidency...tomorrow.

Everyday that this issue is discussed AGAIN is another day where we get to consider whether we elect a president based on his judgment instead of his sacrifice. Hillary tried to frame her fight with Obama in a similar way -- experience versus judgment. She lost. If McCain wants to fight that battle again, he's going to lose just like Hillary did.

Elections are about the future, not the past. If McCain doesn't know that by now, he's doomed.

(cross posted at E Pluribus Unum)