Oh, Happy Day!

The Bug Man has been convicted.

Former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay -- once one of the most powerful and feared Republicans in Congress -- was convicted Wednesday on charges he illegally funneled corporate money to Texas candidates in 2002.

Jurors deliberated for 19 hours before returning guilty verdicts against DeLay on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. He faces up to life in prison on the money laundering charge.

Prosecutors said DeLay, who once held the No. 2 job in the House of Representatives and whose heavy-handed style earned him the nickname "the Hammer," used his political action committee to illegally channel $190,000 in corporate donations into 2002 Texas legislative races through a money swap.

Such a nice thing to read in the paper.

Anglachel

Compromising Our Rights

Paul Krugman blogged:

My biggest concern about an Obama administration is that, in the end, he won’t make universal health care a priority. My second biggest concern is that “Unity” means never having to say you’re sorry: that in the name of putting past partisanship behind us, the next administration will sweep the abuses of the past 8 years under the rug, the same way Bill Clinton did in 1993; the result of that decision was that the very same people responsible for Iran-Contra showed up subverting our democracy all over again.

Obama’s support for the FISA bill intensifies my second worry. He did say some of the right things, promising to work to get rid of telecom immunity and hold people accountable. But caving on this bill is nonetheless not a good sign.

FISA

(My emphasis) Paul Krugman distills what I have been trying to say for months, which is probably why he is a world renown and internationally respected professor at Princeton and I'm just a cranky blogger in the hinterlands.

The problem with Democratic compromises is that they are over things that should never be bargained away, such as privacy, a social safety net, transparent government responsive to the citizenry, and other fundamental principles of liberal democracy.

Compromises are for making choices between acceptable outcomes, but where one may be more to the liking of one party than the other choices. Our rights, such as freedom from unlawful search and seizure, are not on the table.

Anglachel

National Fourth Amendment Defense Day

June does not have enough proper holidays. This one sounds just right. From Lambert on Corrente:

The Fourth Amendment, along with the other amendments to the Constitution that form our Bill of Rights, came into effect on December 15, 1791.

The Framers of our Constitution — and the voters in the states that passed the Bill of Rights — understood how tyranny worked, and they took a dim view of King George breaking into their homes, rummaging through their desks, opening their mail, and reading whatever the Fuck he wanted, whenever the fuck he wanted to, without going to a judge for a warrant, and without having to explain what he expected to find when the warrant was executed. The Framers had already had a bellyful of kings.

The Framers understood tyranny, even though they didn’t have computers in 1791. And if the Framers had computers, it’s plain as day they wouldn’t have wanted King George breaking into their hard disks, rummaging through their desktops, or reading their data—whether the data was email, documents on your hard disk, your telephone calls, your Google searches, or the sites that you surf.

Tyranny is tyranny, no matter the technology.

So it’s simple and crystal clear: The Fourth Amendment means that the government doesn’t get to read your data—to the Framers, “paper” without a warrant.

It’s simple. And anybody who tries to make it complicated is trying to fuck you.

Read the whole thing.

Anglachel

Media Whores Online

Whatever the benefits of a Democrat in the White House, this campaign is the furthest thing from a radical repudiation of what has become of the mainstream media I can imagine. A significant portion of the Left has wholly adopted not just the tactics but also the frames and content of the Right against itself.

The most radical part of the netroots has been its claim to oppose the media, both the right wing noise machine and the increasingly co-opted mainstream media. The Left was finally gaining the same critical distance from the major media as the Right had adopted years before, and with the advent of the Internet was also able to self-publish their alternative perspectives in a cost effective manner. This had always been a disadvantage vis-à-vis the Right because, until the Web, dissemination of information had been the difficulty. Now, anyone with access to a terminal at a public library and a willingness to experiment with these things called “blogs” could let their opinions be heard. I remember the thrill of discovering new blogs with great voices. Daily Howler and Media Whores Online were the cornerstones. On an old LJ page, I can still see other finds – Altercation, TPM, Opinions You Should Have, Common Dreams, Truthout. There still is no replacement for Bilmon and Whiskey Bar.

Looking back, there is a trajectory of the A list blogs starting in and around the advent of the Iraq War, rising to critical mass with the 2004 elections, hitting a golden period between 2004 and 2006, then starting to tilt away from “documenting the atrocities” to becoming participants in it. I really think the high point of the blogger influence has to be the battle against Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security, led by Josh Marshall. Since the 2006 Yearly Kos, however, anyone paying attention has been able to see where the big-name blogs were headed, and wasn’t to stay in opposition to the MSM.

One question that no one in the MSM or the “serious” blogosphere has tried to answer is why have so many hard-core Democrats, people in the party for decades, rallied so strongly to Hillary’s side, their support becoming stronger and more obdurate the more she was declared a failed candidate? In most political races, the perception of being a winner or a loser will usually sway the voters, emphasizing the upside – like Obama’s big bump after Iowa – or reinforcing the downside – like Edwards never recovering after losing in Iowa. Hillary’s support increased the more it was accepted by the media that she had already lost. Take this phenomenon seriously because it did happen. When else have we seen this pattern in the rank and file? When Bill was under impeachment. The regular Democrats evidently know when someone is being railroaded by the media and they push back.

The press did to her what it did to Al Gore in 2000, inventing faux scandals and alleging words and behaviors that never happened. The epistemological status of the “stories” spread in the news is exactly zero – they have no real, rational basis. It is interpretation based on flimsy (if any) evidence. It simply did not exist. The difference between the rightwing hunting of the president in the 90s and the wilding of Gore in 2000 is this time the allegedly opposition blogosphere and “left” media fell all over itself to lap up the sewage flowing out of the same sources that have been brutalizing the Democratic Party, the left, liberalism and, frankly, democracy, since Reagan’s ascendency in 1980. They have picked up the crap, eager gobbled it down, and have fully incorporated it into their perspectives, rhetorical methods, and standards of evidence.

The liberal opposition has disappeared, all too eager to do the Right’s work for it.

Why else is there no conception or acknowledgement that there is a crisis of legitimacy at the core of the Democratic Party right now? As long as the loser is a Clinton, who the hell cares? appears to be the rejoinder. Even today, in blogs, online magazines, print newspapers and TV shows that ostensibly have a liberal bent, the news of the day is how can be finally be rid of that bitch. That she exists at all is an affront to their sense of how the world should be - and that comes right out of Scaife's Arkansas Project.

So many of us who remember the 90s sit here, aghast, and watch the wholesale incorporation of the 90s rightwing narrative by the alleged left. Every last line of bullshit, right down to drug dealing in Arkansas and who killed Vince Foster. If this were a movie, it would be a comedy by Terry Gilliam, or maybe the Cohen brothers, one with a knife edge doing the tickling, and too many innocents destroyed. Why are these fiery liberal spirits so swift to join in the rightwing assault on their own side?

Part of the reason in the blogosphere is simply careerism. Josh Marshall, Matt Yglesias, Young Ezra, etc., are simply trying to jump in and get their careers going. I’ve written that up before. Bob Somerby does an even better job of this, documenting the eagerness of these Boyz to be agreeable and acceptable to the people who can pay their bills and give them celebrity. And thus you have WKJM shilling for a candidate whose chief economic advisor is comfortable with privatizing Social Security. I think that pretty much explains where Josh’s commitment to the left starts and ends. When WKJM is willingly taking his stories directly from Matt Drudge, where exactly is the line between the rightwing noise machine and the opposition?

But what of the people who aren’t careerists, at least in that way? Intra-party fighting can only explain so much, because there are some attack modes that they won’t jump into. There is something to it being class based, as I’ve discussed before and will continue to evaluate – a smug sense that somehow prejudice against lower class whites is justified, and thus you shouldn’t defend those kinds of people. It’s also not a mistake that the bulk of the people gulping this sewage are white and male. It would appear that the upper class white males of the Democratic Party have more in common with the upper class white male Republicans than they care to admit. It is not a mistake, I think, that the people on the left who responded best to the anti-Clinton spew of this round are socio-economically similar to those on the Right who share their taste in Drudge and sludge.

There was a time in the 90s and the early Uh-ohs that the left understood that the MSM had gone off the rails. The era of Murrow, Cronkite, Brinkley and Huntley (describing contrapuntally), John Chancellor, and other luminaries of post-war reportage was over, we knew it, and we knew that FOX was the enemy. It is a sad day when a lefty turns to FOX for news because at least you know the score with them. I remember the 1996 Republican convention (yes, I was there, it was in San Diego and I worked a booth there) when we were all giggling in anticipation of Pat Buchanan going off like a freak on national TV during prime time. It is weird now to think Pat Buchanan is the most sensible, rational person on the stage. Now, the more the media behaves in a way specifically designed to delegitimize our candidates, the more the left accepts and repeats what it hears. Bob Somerby and Paul Krugman are nearly alone in their insistence on telling the truth.

A few days ago I wrote up my disgust about the willingness of some people to go along with what seems a very clear ratfucking operation by the Republicans involving a tasty mix of misogyny, racism and anti-Muslim sentiments. What I also want to make clear is that should this particular attack continue – and it will – and should others of this kind surface and gain traction against Obama, then that part of the left that eagerly embraced a reprise of the MSM assault on the Clinton White House and the Gore presidential run have no ground to stand on. You whored your brains, your logic and your leftist credentials out to the bottom feeders of the right to try to gain a little advantage for your candidate and in the doing you have undermined him and every Democrat running for national office. You cried ”Yes, yes!” to painting millions of Americans as racists, you turned a blind eye to grotesque misogyny, you prostituted the corpse of a dead man to spread a lie, you eagerly defended nullifying votes of people in Michigan and denying full representation to Florida to rig the vote for your candidate, you continue to threaten to riot if anyone denies you what you want.

Here’s a little secret. If Obama has run an aboveboard campaign, if the Democratic Party leadership hauled off and slapped Chris Matthews et. al. silly for their Clinton Derangement Syndrome, had the Blogger Boyz been able to argue for their candidate without getting scoops from Matt Drudge, the chances are very good that he might have won in a squeaker. And then he would be poised to put together a Unity ticket, because the other candidate would not have been declared a monster and her supporters would, after the usual grumbling, have willingly thrown full support behind the ticket. At worst, he would have been second by a nose, and everyone would have been very happy to give him the VP slot.

Whatever one can say of Hillary, she was not and never has been the beneficiary of the rightwing noise machine. Obama has benefitted from the cooptation of the MSM and now the willing capitulation of the opposition netroots to that operation, behaving like extensions of Drudge, Scaife and Murdoch. If you support Obama, you are all right with that.

Well, are you?

Anglachel

Visceral Reactions

This post may get me kicked out of the PB 2.0 community, but I really don't give a damn.

First, this is Krugman from today:

Ugliness
Read the first paragraph of this, then read this, and you’ll have the essence of what happened in the Democratic primary campaign

A long and brutal game of "gotcha" at every turn, making every interview into a field strewn with landmines, pretending it is more important to catch a candidate in a verbal slip than to ask about their plans for governing. Most of all, the way in which an arrogant and right-leaning media decided that it would frame the way in which our candidates were presented. This interview was not just trying to trick Hillary into saying something that could be construed as her doubt about Obama's faith, it was also at the same time making his faith (which by definition cannot be known by anyone but the person) into a topic of discussion in the campaign. Go and read some of the comments to this blog post by Krugman. Think about the article by Stanley Fish on Hillary Hatred. Consider the ways in which misogyny is so casually mixed in with political hatred, and the level of fury that spills out across the page. Take seriously the effectiveness of the right to exploit deep fears and prejudices and their shameless zeal to call out the worst in everyone they touch.

I've waited patiently for several days to see if anything of substance would come out of the much ballyhooed announcement by Larry Johnson about a video that alleges Michelle Obama said something objectionable, possibly using a derogatory racial term. I posted a few cautions, and said I needed to see the evidence before making up my mind. This alleged scandal has been pushed for several weeks now, and there have been several days of explanations, each of them at odds in some way with the others. I've made up my mind on this matter.

It is a ratfucking operation by the Republicans and it has done exactly what it was intended to do - set Democrats at each others' throats, stir up racist and anti-Muslim sentiment, and encourage people to enagage in misogynist attacks on Michelle Obama.

At best, Larry Johnson is being played for a fool by these people. His desire to defeat Obama is coming out of a desire to get back at the radical left of the 60s. Obama is his access point to people like Ayers, Wright and Farrakhan, and he's grabbing for every rock that comes to hand, not paying much attention to the dynamite that is taking its place. That there is little to defend in that group does not excuse the irresponsible conduct by any number of people over at No Quarter. I admit to a certain grim satisfaction that two elements I don't much care for in American political life - the violent nihilists of the Left and their mirror-image Cold Warrior, red-baiting fellow nihilists of the right - are duking it out. Couldn't happen to a better pair. But what is spilling over from this decades old grudge match into the rest of the blogs is pure toxic waste - misogyny, racism and anti-Muslim calumny.

Let's get something clear. I do not give a flying fuck if Michelle Obama did say "whitey" in some video tape from whenever and wherever and with whomever she supposedly said it. Period. I sincerely doubt that anything we finally see will rise to the level of what we have been led to believe happened. Furthermore, I do not care if Michelle Obama is unpleasant, nice as apple pie, indifferent to the world, filled with petty resentment, serene and loving, or anything else about the state of her psyche. I'm willing to wager she is all of those things depending on where she is and who she's talking to, just as every major public female figure I have read about has had her inner soul meticulously dissected before the public eye and has been found wanting. The assault on Michelle Obama is exactly like the assault on Hillary Clinton when Bill was running for the White House. It is mean, vile, sexist, crude, derogatory and beneath contempt.

It has also become the ignition spark for a growing fire of racism in the comments, couched as opposition to Black Liberation Theology and to Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. The agitation for this hatred began on the right explicitly with their attacks on Wright's church, which has been part of the underground rightwing email war against Obama from the start. These are things the spousal unit and I were reading this time last year when it became clear Obama was going to try for a run at the Presidency. Ironically, it probably would have stayed in that sewer through the Democratic primary had not Obama decided that running on racism was a good idea. Once he opened Pandora's box, the Wright stuff began to be lobbed back at him. The connections with Farrakhan and with Tony Rezko have been used to tie him maliciously to Islam (and to rabble rouse about that religion in exactly the same way as I see people using "Israel" to indulge in some not very subtle anti-Semitism), pretending in wide-eyed innocence that it's all about his
"terrorist" ties.

Just in the way that misogyny made it easy to engage in the purely personal classist warfare and white-on-white bigotry against Hillary, misogyny is making it easy to batter Michelle Obama and slide in the other racial and religious attacks as well, all aimed at stirring up the most crude and hateful impulses in the readers.

Over the last week, I have watched this toxic brew spread out from No Quarter and into other blogs. The anger over the RBC decision and over the hostile and dismissive way Hillary has been treated in the last week of campaigning no doubt made it easier to rationalize dipping into the uglier phrases, the barely concealed slurs, the code words that Americans always use to describe the reviled Other when they are angry and want to rip something down.

We are seeing within the primary itself the misogynistic, racist, religion-bashing attacks that everyone expected to see in the general. The difference is that these accusations are coming out of Democratic mouths and are aimed at our Democratic candidates.

This is doing the Right's work for them.

I'm not giving "our" side a pass on this. No matter how unfair or vile the attacks on Hillary, she has never responded with anything but class. She has never stooped to "But they did it, too!" When people on her campaign tried to use the smears, she canned them.

I have not changed my mind on Obama as a candidate. He ran a dirty campaign, he had every external advantage and the DNC still had to rig the system to shove him across the line ahead of her by a nose. I have also not changed my mind about the wrong way to conduct any kind of political campaign, which is to employ the tactics of the Right. I will have a longer post this weekend on that point.

My screen name, Anglachel, refers to a sword in the Tolkien fantasy world. It was forged from meteoric iron by someone with a deep hatred of those around him, and it took on the deadly, twisted nature of Eol. It slew anyone who tried to weild it, turning on those who thought to use this fearsome weapon and destroying them. Its final possessor, Turin, committed suicide with it and it shattered beneath him.

Let that be a warning to anyone who believes they can use a weapon crafted from hatred to achieve anything lasting or good.

Anglachel

Oh My, Darling

(Updated at end)

There is a kind of seemingly pro-Obama argument that is actually nothing but Hillary bashing. It is the specious claim that Obama is "more electable" because too many people hate, hate, hate Hillary (Really! They *hate* her!) to allow her to win the general. So many people hate her, they are going to flood the polls for the chance to defeat her.

Most of this is based on "polls" somebody kinda sorta remembers reading sometime last year that conclusively proved that her "negatives" were sky high and insurmountable. In truth, Gallup came out with a poll in November of last year looking at the base of support for each candidate and found that Hillary had the largest dedicated base of any candidate in either party. Obama had the highest postive ratings, but most of it was soft support, that the respondent "would consider" voting for him. Another part of this argument is that Obama could expand the base and pull in Indpendents and moderate Republicans who would never consider voting for Hillary.

With Hillary currently showing herself to be highly competitive with McCain in battle ground states and wiping the floor with him in blue states, while Obama is losing ground in recent polls and showing himself to be less than appealing to many voting constituencies, it becomes harder and harder to sustain the argument that she is too divisive and polarizing to win. She is doing so quite handily in large state primaries while running a shoestring campaign, being outsepnt 4 and 5 to 1, and being pummeled unmercifully by the press and Blogger Boyz.

As Hillary supporters have patiently told her detractors on the left since Day One, her negatives will not go up, they will only come down. Those record turnouts in the primaries have been just as much for her as for Obama. Even contests where she was second, she usually garnered more votes than the Republican winner and several times with numbers larger than all Republicans combined. I suspect she has more people voting for her in this campaign than Bill did in 1992, but have not been able to track down state by state voting breakdowns. In short, there is nothing about the phenomenal turn out that indicates she has anything but enthusiastic support from millions of voters who will also show up at the polls in November. Obama's high levels of support are not depressing her levels of support, except among AA voters who, all campaign posturing aside, do not appear to be casting votes against anyone, but in proud support of Obama.

In short, the claim that Hillary can't win is being overturned by the fact that she is winning big and is fully competitive in one of the biggest, most energized, most expensive, most engaging primaries ever held. Ten million viewers on the last debate! A primary turn out in Pennsylvania that rivaled the Democratic turn out in the last gneral election! This is not the campaign of someone who is hated by voters, no matter what WKJM would like to argue.

The only valid version of the "high negatives" argument is the one put forward by BTD of TalkLeft, who makes a refreshingly cold and cynical claim - the constituency who matters most is the MSM, they hate Hillary and they love Obama; he is their Media Darling. Because they won't attack him the way they attack her, he may survive the general election battle and win. To the degree that BTD focuses on the actual source and distribution mode of most CDS, his argument has salience that simple assertions that Everybody Hates Hillary cannot. I've offered my own argument pointing out the fatal flaw of this one, namely that Obama is a media darling only as long as he can be used to defeat Hillary in the primaries and will revert back to being just another Democrat to bash once he's declared the nominee. *

Well, courtesy of SusanUnPC of No Quarter, I now have solid evidence for my argument and then some. She has posted a video clip from Lou Dobbs This Week along with excerpts and a link to the full transcript showing Dobbs and his guests discussing why it was a strategic error for Republicans to roll out anti-Obama ads in North Carolina because they needed him to take out Hillary, and then he'd be easy pickings in the general. The money quote is:

“DOBBS: I have to say that what I don’t understand. … With the antipathy towards Senator Obama that has built up over the last few weeks, for the life of me, I don’t understand why the … Republicans aren’t doing everything they can to get this man the nomination.”

Hello? Democrats? Left Blogistan? This is the MSM announcing that they are fully aware of Obama's weaknesses and that they are counseling the Republicans to not just hold their fire but to directly assist Obama to defeat the candidate who is a bigger challenge in the general.

The give away here is joining the growing antipathy towards The Precious with Republican strategizing for how to best position themselves for the general. Lou Dobbs put the right wing cards on the table by making it clear that Obama is the weaker candidate with high negatives who will be an easy target in the fall. The MSM has just confirmed that Obama is in truth what Hillary is alleged to be - unelectable. Read the entire post for a very succinct presentation on exactly how the campaign to take down Obama will be run in the fall. The narrative is ready to go, and the MSM will be only too happy to help spread it around.

Media darling? Hardly.

Anglachel

*I also disagree with BTD's unfounded assertion that Hillary is not electable merely because the MSM will attack. There is no evidence that their attacks can be effective. Why do I say that? Because they are already throwing everything at her and she is still winning and getting more popular the more she is attacked. Call it the Tweety Effect.

Update - I come back from dinner and find this posted by Jeralyn: Another Republican Attack Ad Airs Against Obama. This is the other part of Obama's electoral claim, that he would be better for downticket candidates. His political mistakes are going to be used directly and savagely against all Democrats. The day the Wright videos came out, Obama should have been invited to leave the race.

Allegedly, Donna Brazile said today that "there would be blood" if Obama was not handed the nomination. (I say alleged as I do not have a citation, only a comment in passing.) Update of update - commenter wasabi_cat says that Brazile did not state "there will be blood," in an interview, but that she made a reference to the *movie* There Will be Blood, after saying there would be problems if the nomination were given to Hillary. To which I respond, if the nomination is given to anyone, it is extremely problematic. However, since neither Obama nor Clinton can win the nomination in pledged delegates, the decision will be made by super delegates. This is part of the nomination process, and means that the final votes are cast by unpledged delegates who are supposed to vote in the best interests of the party. Dean himself stated that electability is a valid criterion for making that decision.

To repeat: The winner of the nomination will be decided by the super delegates. Their votes are as valid as those cast by pledged delegates.

The remainder of my comment remains. The Obama forces are the ones hinting at violence and bloodshed at the convention if the vote should not be in his favor. Her reference to the movie introduces the specter of violence should the nomination process not go as she desires. And what, exactly, does she expect that will do to the party's prospects (let alone The Precious) in November if there are thugs in the streets of Denver roughing up residents, smashing windows (think the anarchists in Seattle) and trying to turn over police cars? If the only way Obama can win is through threats, well, that kind proves that he hasn't really won, doesn't it?

Who Are They Trying to Convince?

My own reaction to Rev. Wright I'm going to keep to myself for a while longer.

For a candidate who allegedly has an insurmountable lead and who is all but guaranteed the nomination, Obama's campaign is behaving like an operation in crisis. Probably because it is. The Wright revelations are actually not new, but have finally escaped the right wing email circuit and hit the mainstream. This stuff has been percolating in Greater Wingnuttia for months.

Does everyone remember the flap last year about Robert Novak saying that the Clinton campaign had some deep dreadful oppo research on Obama, and how Obama challenged them to produce it or "retract"? I suspect this is the story Novak was alluding to, and that (given its nature), he hoped he could prod the campaign to let it slip, all to Hillary's detriment. I've always been curious about Obama's belligerent, almost hysterical behavior at that time. What on earth could be so bad (aside from dead girl/live boy) that he'd behave like that? Now we know. What we also know is that everyone in the game knew about this story - all the MSM players, all the Democratic candidates, all the kids in oppo - and everyone was breathlessly waiting for someone to spill the beans.

A veritable Sword of Damocles. (Note - I suggest that y'all go read up on the Sword of Damocles so you understand the full applicability of this anecdote.)

I don't own a TV so I read up on the atrocities via the web. When reading over the accounts of the Sunday talk shows today, what struck me was the way in which the Obama side simultaneously vehemently denied that Wright was a problem and just as aggressively tried to claim that the Hillary campaign was behind it all (just like with the Somali photo) and/or build up Gerry Ferraro as some purveyor of hate crimes. This follows on Obama himself trying to wiggle his way out of acknowledging the relationship on the Friday gab-shows, and is accompanied by an announcement that they are going to attack Hillary on several fronts. Armando/BTD has a good analysis on this here at TalkLeft.

Obama's defenders (Hillary's, too, for that matter) on the shows were really not talking to people like me, people who have already formed an opinion of Wright, who have already cast a primary vote, and who are not super delegates. They aren't talking to supporters or to detractors; the only audience is those who have not yet cast a ballot:

• Voters in the upcoming primaries who will choose a candidate and may change the pledged delegate allocation.
• Undeclared super delegates

To the average voter, the Obama angle is to tamp out the Wright debacle ASAP as a mentionable campaign issue and make it go away, hoping non-AA voters forget about it before Pennsylvania, the Michigan and Florida revotes (yes, I think they will both happen), and Kentucky. The danger here is that the combustible nature of Wright's speeches (and, no, I don't think that they are unrepresentative of the man's thought, though they may not be representative of his average sermon.) will outrage the core Democratic voter, the Reagan Democrat blue collar, "lunch bucket" person who isn't black and who is feeling a little worried about the economy.

The real target, though, was the undeclared super delegates, and the argument there was more like a performative - look, see how we are removing this as an issue from the table? You don't have to worry that this is going to impact us in the general. It was just a dirty campaign trick by Hillary and it will not be used against us by the republicans. Oh, please, pleeease believe us!

The trouble here is that this story has been peddled by FOX News and the Republicans, though at a very low volume, since last summer. It matters that Novak was trying to make HRC be the bagholder on this one, and her campaign is (very wisely) refusing this trap, even when they could probably exploit it in the upcoming primaries.

Watch for Obama's team to try even harder to prevent Michigan and Florida from revoting because then they will be passign judgment on him in light of this news, and their voters are not likely to view it with much favor. I also suspect that the Democrat for a Day schtick is going to backfire badly in Pennsylvania because of the combination of the economy and the offensiveness of Wright. Republicans who don't really support McCain and who are infuriated by the Wright video clips may line up behind Hillary, and in this case I think you will see a new breed of cross-over voter - Hillary Republicans. Unlike Obama's cynical "Dem for a Day," these are voters who will probably stick around, especially the women voters.

This is explosive, campaign ending stuff, and Obama knows it. This is real racism, not the BS jabs at white liberal guilt they've been pushing against Hillary, and is exactly what the Republicans want for the general, something they can use to push up their own turn out and get party members unenthused about McCain all riled up, just like they used the anti-gay measures last time. It is not a mistake that the incendiary ballot issues the Republicans are pushing this year are about affirmative action. The Wright videos are what they need to make it visceral. They won't have much convincing to do.

Obama is trying to convince the super delegates that he isn't a losing proposition in the general election, and his way to do it is to trash Hillary even more.

Anglachel

Fights Worth Having

The cross tabs tonight are actually pretty close to what they have been in every other primary: Whites and women vote strongly for Hillary, Independents and Republicans have crossed over to vote for Obama and try to defeat Hillary in the primaries, AAs vote for Obama, and he has yet to prove he can carry a large state with a minority Black Democratic constituency. All the votes of all the caucuses added together do not equal the turn out in just Florida, let alone California, so Hillary has still proved more popular with a wider swath and greater number of voters than Barack can dream of.

My mother is a strong Hillary supporter, but was too ill to attend the caucus in Washington last Saturday. She loathes Golden Boy Barry and detests his cultish followers even more. We talked for about 30 minutes tonight and she flatly said he was ripping the party apart with his self-centered, shallow, and arrogant campaign. You see, my mom was part of those 60s disturbances and an early feminist, and she knows that you don't get anywhere by refusing to defend what matters. She prefers Edwards to HRC (fair enough), but had no doubt who she would pick once Edwards dropped out. This is one life-long Democrat who will not cast a vote for Obama in November - she, like me and all our female relatives, will write in Hillary.

Why does Mom feel so strongly about this? She's a party-line voter and has been with a sole exception, to support Dan Evans as Washington governor in the 70s. She endured the tear gas in Berkley, she supported ERA, though she opposes abortion she defends a woman's right to choose, and she knows which political party supports her causes. Her support of Edwards was for his policies on the poor and disadvantaged and for his willingness to be the advocate of the "losers", the people America likes to pretend don't really exist.

One thing Hillary said in her Politico interview was that it's not clear what struggles of the last few decades Golden Boy Barry would consider worth his time. As I have asked over and over, just what is it that The Golden One offers Democrats? Be concrete. What fights is he going to wage for us? Taking troops out of Iraq? Uh, all the Dems say they will do so. Has he committed to what kind of judges he will appoint? What parts of Social Security are off limits to discussion? Holding the line against Republican intransigence? Saying unequivocally that the Democrats advocate what is right, good and for the betterment of the nation, and that the Republicans are fear-mongering cretins? Exactly what he will do to reverse the gutting of the Civil Rghts division of the DOJ? His policies on restoring privacy to the average American? Etc.

Hillary said something powerful in that interview that the A-List Blogger Boyz keep side-stepping in their fanatical promotion of all things Obama - there are fights worth having. Division can be constructive. Unity is self-defeating if it leads you to undermine the core beliefs that make you what you are. This is what Krugman and Perlstein get at, this is what my mother knows from having fought these battles in her youth and right through her life; it matters what we are for, what we are willing to stand up and defend.

Mom's memories of Kennedy aren't so much of JFK the sexy dude with the big speeches, though that is there. She talks of the day he was murdered. "They got him," she says, with disgust and anger, even today, "they knew they had to bring him down. Bobby, too." My mother looks up to Kennedy the martyr, the man who died because the right-wing in this country will literally kill to keep the world from changing around them. It goes beyond money or raw power or religion - these are markers of the root cause. It is the mix of hate and fear that powers fundamentalists around the world, allowing fanatics in the US to speak approvingly of al Qaeda's murder of thousands in the WTC. The pervs had it coming to them, praise the Lord! It is the impulse that powers the Republicans' Southern Strategy. Race may lead it, but the people who promote and support this mode of politics are opposed to anything that seeks to be open-minded, inclusive, ecumenical, and progressive. They are opposed to liberal democracy itself.

These are the battles that are fought when it seems we are just doing some policy wonkishness. The details matter. The concessions matter. There are points on which there cannot be compromise, where unity is not just undesireable but a mark of failure. Bashing the battles of the 90s, when the Movement Consevatives were ascendent, is not just stupid. It ignores the fundamental ground of the battles. Dismissing them all, as the Right so fervently wants to dismiss them, as some kind of character flaw of Bill Clinton, trivializes the brutal damage done to the fabric of the nation, turns us away from the sundering of judicial warp and legislative weft, and normalizes the assault upon reason, equality and justice conducted against the country by the Republicans since Goldwater.

It refuses to acknowledge that they will stop at nothing to turn our country into Nixonland.

The wine-track Left's fatal flaw is its distaste for politics, the dirty hurly-burly of trades and deals, scams and sales, scratching backs and twisting arms. It is the disdain of the philosopher kings for the agora. But the public good is just as much the public's bad (as Madison famously balanced out), and there is nothing pure or simple about that market. They keep wanting to pick a leader who will somehow transcend politics, change the tone of the dirty market traders, dare us to hope for a time when we will unite as a single people with a single vision and march forward into a better future.

It isn't so much liberal fascism as the fantasy of the zipless fuck.

One Obamabot in a Corrente comment thread whined that he wanted to win, not struggle, and so he was voting for Obama, demonstrating once again the deep stupidity of the Obamaphilic Left. There will always be a struggle as long as there is a right-wing. We cannot "win" by putting a single person into a single office because of his mad oratorating skillz. This has to be likened to fending off a tide that will always be moving against us, corroding our foundations even when it ebbs. The A-List Boyz, the ones so angry at Hillary Clinton for daring to stand up against the calumny thrown at her (and most especially the calumny that comes from their own, dear, sweet little sexist mouths) are all slavering and quivering over the prospect of a political zipless fuck, where they can have their philosopher king, and an election success and have sweetness and light magically transform and transcend the icky struggles of the Clinton era into a progressive wonderland.

Oh, and a pony, too.

Here's some real history, little boyz. The wins of the Left have come almost as afterthoughts to the struggles, and are inevitably tarnished and dimmed by them. That is the nature of the struggle of liberalism against fundamantalism, because our opposition literally will kill to preserve their way of being in the world. The victories of the 60s came through the blood of our leaders. We envy (oh, how we envy!) the seemingly teflon triumphs of the Right, their Saint Ronnie, their wiggling out of scandal after scandal, their ability to catapult the propaganda. We want that, too! We want to be able to do as we like and get away with it. That, deep down, is the fundamental appeal to Obama - that he might be a "media darling" and thus get away with it. We want our zipless fuck. It's part of the guilty pleasure of watching him bash the Clintons with the same arguments and tone that a McCain would do, because, to our assaulted senses, that's what winning looks like.

It is against these kinds of wins that our struggles take place. These are the fights worth having.

Anglachel

United to What End?

One of the things the spousal unit and I have discussed about Obama's mesage of unity is what exactly is it in the nation that requires unification?

Paul Krugman has consistently pointed out since W's election that the right wing movement conservatives want no part of unity. They want complete and utter authority. The overriding message of his book The Conscience of a Liberal is simply this: There's no working with these people. On the right, they make no secret of their contempt for liberal democratic rule (and I mean that in the formal, political theory sense of the term), far preferring autocracies like Franco's Spain.

As Bob Somerby pointed out over and over, the problem with Obama's Reno talk with the conservative newspaper editors wasn't really the overly adulatory comments about Reagan. It was his airy dismissal of the turmoil of the 60s as something the left got wrong. Wrong about civil rights? Wrong about women's rights? Wrong about protesting the Vietnam war? Just what national political contests were wrong? The other half of the uproar was his claim that over the last 15 years (which covers all of Shrub's presidency and much of Bill Cinton's) it was the Republicans who were the party of ideas, with the clear understanding that these were somehow good or commendable ideas.

Rick Perlstein has an op-ed in the Washington Post today, "Getting Past the '60s? It's Not Going to Happen", getting to the heart of why unity for unity's sake is not just gaseous, it is simply ignoring the fact that there are divisions in this nation that cannot be mediated - they can only be contested:

One of the most fascinating notions raised by the current presidential campaign is the idea that the United States can and must finally overcome the divisions of the 1960s. It's most often associated with the ascendancy of Sen. Barack Obama, who has been known to entertain it himself. Its most gauzy champion is pundit Andrew Sullivan, who argued in a cover article in the December Atlantic Monthly that, "If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today's actual problems, Obama may be your man."

No offense to either Obama or Sullivan, but: No he isn't. No one is.
...

The fact is, the '60s are still with us, and will remain so for the imaginable future. We are all like Zhou Enlai, who, asked what he thought about the French Revolution, answered, "It is too early to tell." When and how will the cultural and political battle lines the baby boomers bequeathed us dissolve? It is, well and truly, still too early to tell. We can't yet "overcome" the '60s because we still don't even know what the '60s were -- not even close.

Born myself in 1969 to pre-baby boomer parents, I'm a historian of America's divisions who spent the age of George W. Bush reading more news papers written when Johnson and Richard Nixon were president than current ones. And I recently had a fascinating experience scouring archives for photos of the 1960s to illustrate the book I've just finished based on that research. It was frustrating -- and telling.

The pictures people take and save, as opposed to the ones they never take or the ones they discard, say a lot about how they understand their own times. And in our archives as much as in our mind's eye, we still record the '60s in hazy cliches -- in the stereotype of the idealistic youngster who came through the counterculture and protest movements, then settled down to comfortable bourgeois domesticity.

What's missing? The other side in that civil war. The right-wing populist rage of 1968 third-party presidential candidate George Wallace, who, referring to an idealistic protester who had lain down in front of Johnson's limousine, promised that if he were elected, "the first time they lie down in front of my limousine, it'll be the last one they'll ever lay down in front of because their day is over!" That kind of quip helped him rise to as much as 20 percent in the polls.

...

A President Obama could no more magically transcend America's '60s-born divisions than McCarthy, Kennedy, Nixon or McGovern could, for the simple reason that our society is defined as much by its arguments as by its agreements. Over the meaning of "family," on sexual morality, on questions of race and gender and war and peace and order and disorder and North and South and a dozen other areas, we remain divided in ways that first arose after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. What Andrew Sullivan dismisses as "the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation" do not separate us from our "actual problems"; they define us, as much as the Great War defined France in the 1920s,'30s, '40s and beyond. Pretending otherwise simply isn't healthy. It's repression -- the kind of thing that shrinks say causes neurosis.

At least there's some comfort in knowing that our divisions aren't what they once were. Heck, in the 1860s, half the nation was devoted in body, mind and spirit to killing the other half; in the early 1930s, many sage observers presumed the nation to be poised on the verge of open, violent class warfare. We'll manage to muddle through again -- even burdened with mere flesh and blood human beings, not magical healing shamans, as our leaders.

There are decisions that face the nation, and anyone who leads it, that cannot be resolved through good intentions or thoughtful mediation or any other Kumbayah mechanism. These are divisions that are rooted in a constitution that declared part of our population to be less than fully human, and which will never be resolved as long as part of the population fundamentally does not regard that proposition as wrong, that entire categories of people (Blacks, women, gays, immigrants, Muslims, etc.) can be declared as less than fully members of this polity, and that it is right and good to do so. This is what the Movement Conservatives have laid bare in their march towards their goal - they simply do not believe in the promise of America that I and the majority of the nation hold dear, and that they have no compunction about destroying it root and branch as long as they remain in power.

Our divisions are not what they once were because of the contests that the Left won when rooting out the social, economic and political institutions that maintained the divisions in the first place - such as chattel slavery, legal apartheid, denial of full citizenship to women, and so forth. The last thing we need is to compromise those victories so that no one has to be exposed to public contestation of who we are and how we shall conduct ourselves as Americans.

Which is another reason why I support Hillary Clinton.

Anglachel

Time for No Tolerance

I've had two emails in the last 24 hours, one from an old friend, the other from a new interlocutor.

Fergus says,

OK, so the media lied their butts off about what Bill Clinton said or did. The impression is what matters. I came from a blog thread where a few people were making statements barely within the boundaries of civil discourse about black voters. I dont' even want to repeat the words, they made me so pissed off. What can be done about the way black (and female and gay and Latino and poor)voices are being stigmatized? What's old Big Dog going to do about that?

Francis Holland, in a comment to an earlier post, says,

I still strongly support the Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama presidential/vice presidential ticket, but there is only so much I can do for Hillary in the Black community if her campaign continues to engage in stereotypical color-associated attacks that denigrate ALL Black people.

She should also consider the fact that Blacks are inseparably associated with the public identity of the Democratic Party. To the extent that Blacks are besmirched, the Party itself loses popularity with the public. That makes it harder for Hillary Clinton to be elected in the fall.

If this seems ethereal, just remember how stereoypical portrayals of Blacks (Willie Horton) helped to doom Mike Dukakis' 1988 campaign. Fanning the flames of those stereotypes ultimately makes the Democratic Party less acceptable to white voters.

A word to the wise is sufficient. But a word to the wilfully deaf and ignorant is a waste of time. Let's see what whether the wise or the wilfully deaf will prevail.

I've spent a good amount of time here on this blog defending HRC against bogus claims of racism, and I've smacked The Golden One around for engaging in his own race-baiting, trying to milk liberal white guilt for all it is worth. But the fact is that when racism enters the conversation and settles its stinking, rotted carcass on the couch, it takes some ordinary extermination efforts to excise it from the body politic. I was particularly disturbed to read in more blogs and threads than I want to think about the number of people who talked about AA voters as having been "duped" (to either vote for or against HRC) or as "stupid" (for the same reason).

Paul Krugman, in The Conscience of a Liberal, speaks extensively about the way in which the Republican Party has made racism the foundation of their electoral success. There is no advantage to Democrats in touching this crap except to renounce it and denounce it in the most unequivocal terms. There is no ethical, legal, or electoral advantage to our party to engage in any kind of racial demagoguery.

To stigmatize or marginalize any constituency within our party makes the party weaker, and that is the way the Republicans continually try to portray Democrats - every Democrat is in the pocket of some "special interest." What is a "special interest"? Anyone who is not a wealthy WASP male and all groups such people belong to. The key point of congruence between New Hampshire and South Carolina was not the top two candidates - it was the derogatory way in which the media treated the winner's chief voting group. All the boo-hoo weepy, weak, wimmin for Hillary the Bitch and all those race-obsessed Black people voting for their homey Obama.

The media narrative was "Oh, man, neither of these candidates really appeal to white men all that much," as though this is A) true or B) meaningful. But this is how the media narative is shaping up. Hillary is the female candidate, Obama is the Black candidate and the lame-ass Republican who manages to stagger through to the nomination is going to be the "American" candidate.

Let's understand Krugman carefully: as he warns us, the Movement Conservatives want to roll back America to the 19th century. They want to destroy the economic gains and social equality that was a direct result of FDR's New Deal, and they are going to do this by racial and gendered attacks on our candidates, our policies and our governance. They want to eliminate equal rights and have no problem with apartheid. They want to roll back sexual equality. They are for eliminating rights to manage our own affairs, such as birth control and marriage, and want to remove the safety nets and legal safeguards that protect us from the selfish whims of the mega-rich.

The recent who's calling whom a racist shit has to stop.

I'm calling on the candidate I support, Hillary, to make it clear she will not tolerate any more questionable statements from anyone associated with her campaign, from Bill right down to the lowliest volunteer. She should refuse to answer race-baiting questions from assholes like Russert, and instead ask why the media is so determined to inject race into the campaign. And she has to make it clear who is and is not speaking for her campaign.

There is no person, no campaign, no victory that can justify deliberate use of racial divisions. Leave it to the Republicans to immolate themselves on the pyre of racism come November.

Anglachel

Krugman on Politics, Policy and Partisanship

Paul Krugman bestows a long needed whack up-side the head to all Democrats concerning the presidential campaign. He talks about the uncanny resemblance of Golden Boy Barry's campaign to the Big Dog's first run, right down to the message of "Hope" and promises of bipartisanship. Then he throws some cold water:

Whatever hopes people might have had that Mr. Clinton would usher in a new era of national unity were quickly dashed. Within just a few months the country was wracked by the bitter partisanship Mr. Obama has decried.

This bitter partisanship wasn’t the result of anything the Clintons did. Instead, from Day 1 they faced an all-out assault from conservatives determined to use any means at hand to discredit a Democratic president.

For those who are reaching for their smelling salts because Democratic candidates are saying slightly critical things about each other, it’s worth revisiting those years,simply to get a sense of what dirty politics really looks like.

Message to the Democrats, particularly the netroots screamers out to denounce the eeeeviiiilllll power-mad Clintons - the enemy is Movement Conservatism. Clinton failed because he wasn't prepared to deal with the utter, unhinged savagery of the right-wing attacks. Nothing was out of bounds, nothing to personal, too heinous, not even accusations of murder and drug-running.

Krugman then very specifically addresses the pitfalls of another point of congruence between the Big Dog and The Golden One, their comparably weak and vague health care policy plan. His objection to Obama's plan is based in the historical failure of Clinton's - too little, too late, too careful. It was a privately crafted wonk piece and not a sharp presentation, complete with drawn up battle lines, and specifics to be defended. Krugman provides a few lessons to all Democrats, but most specifically to the Clinton Haters:

So what are the lessons for today’s Democrats?

First, those who don’t want to nominate Hillary Clinton because they don’t want to return to the nastiness of the 1990s — a sizable group, at least in the punditocracy — are deluding themselves. Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false (at least not on Page 1).

The point is that while there are valid reasons one might support Mr. Obama over Mrs. Clinton, the desire to avoid unpleasantness isn’t one of them.

Second, the policy proposals candidates run on matter.

I have colleagues who tell me that Mr. Obama’s rejection of health insurance mandates — which are an essential element of any workable plan for universal coverage — doesn’t really matter, because by the time health care reform gets through Congress it will be very different from the president’s initial proposal anyway. But this misses the lesson of the Clinton failure: if the next president doesn’t arrive with a plan that is broadly workable in outline, by the time the thing gets fixed the window of opportunity may well have passed.

This cuts to the heart of Obama's two very serious weaknesses without letting Hillary off the hook. First is Obama's inherent claim that somehow the conservative battle is specific to the Clintons and that people will melt before his incredible awesomeness. No. They hate you, too, and you will end up as slimed and reviled as the Clintons. Probably more so. Don't believe me? Two words: Al Gore. Bob Somerby of The Daily Howler has documented those atrocities. And, Barry, they aren't going to wait for you to reach the White House. It will start the day you clinch the nomination.

The second weakness is your flaccid wonkery. Yeah, yeah, you charm and you promise, but you don't have the goods where it counts, hon. Hillary and Edwards both have you beat on detail and there ain't nobody in the race who knows more about the executive office than HRC. Experience does matter because the nation doesn't have time for a learning curve. It needs something ready to go yesterday, and it needs an advocate who has no illusions about nicing these people into agreement.

Krugman concludes with another solid slap to all participants, but most directly to Hillary. I think he's pretty much given up on Golden Boy Barry. John Edwards gets some Krugman approval:

My sense is that the fight for the Democratic nomination has gotten terribly off track. The blame is widely shared. Yes, Bill Clinton has been somewhat boorish (though I can’t make sense of the claims that he’s somehow breaking unwritten rules, which seem to have been newly created for the occasion). But many Obama supporters also seem far too ready to demonize their opponents.

What the Democrats should do is get back to talking about issues — a focus on issues has been the great contribution of John Edwards to this campaign — and about who is best prepared to push their agenda forward. Otherwise, even if a Democrat wins the general election, it will be 1992 all over again. And that would be a bad thing.

Quit the freaking hissy fits over who said what asinine thing to whom and start wonking up the place, dammit! Of course, Barry can't because he never has been able to, so it's up to Hillary to get her act together (and get Bill to back off a few steps for the good of the nation) and make this a campaign about issues, details, policy and plans.

The problem here, of course, is that Hillary is doing this. She bores the poor reporters to death with her incessant yammering on about the things only the unimportant plebes care about, like how to pay heating bills and what can be done to save your house. If the media will not report the issues, if they reward candidates who play the "Kill Hill!" demonization game (I'm looking at you, Obama), if they ignore the candidates when they discuss policy and planning (case study - Mr. Edwards), how can the progressive agenda be advanced?

Anglachel

No Agenda Except to Win

In the last week, I've heard a lot of depressing things about Golden Boy Barry:

• His backers in the Culinary Union in Vegas are threatening and intimidating union members to pre-pledge for Obama or else not be allowed to go to the caucuses.
• He has campaign organizers handing out flyers telling Republicans to change their party registration for a single day in order to vote against HRC. This evidently started last April in Florida, back when there was going to be a contested primary, and has surfaced again in Nevada. Where else has he been pamphleting?
• He had to admit in the debate on Tuesday that, yes, his campaign was deliberately stoking racial tensions by falsely accusing the Clinton campaign of using racist appeals and was deliberately misinforming the press and public.
• He also had to admit that the claims of "Bradley Effect" in New Hampshire (that racists told pollsters they would vote for Obama, then switched their votes to Clinton) never existed.
• He repeatedly dismisses and insults long-standing Democratic constituencies, such as womens groups and unions, who do not endorse him and reinforce his cult of personality.
• He thinks the preznit's job is to inspire people and have his hirelings do the tough job of bureaucratin'.
• He is eagerly and proudly praising one of the nastiest bastards ever in politics, Ronald Reagan, as someone who changed America for the better and who campaigned on wonderfully positive messages.

I spent my young life in Berkely, CA, in the 60s. I was tear gassed three times by the age of 6 because of Reagan's orders to gas residential neighborhoods in Berkely. Ronald Reagan was one of the primary agents of violence and uproar in California. Does Obama really not know of Reagan's infamous declaration? "If there has to be a bloodbath, then let's get it over with." He was referring to turning tear gas, truncheons and guns on non-violent protesters. If there was turmoil in the nation at that time, it was due in no small part to people like Reagan who seized it as an opportunity to do harm to political and cultural enemies.

All this ego, all this fanaticism to win and be named "#1", all this ruthless bludgeoning of the people who did the hard work through the long years of the conservative ascendency, all the pandering to precisely the elements and attitudes that have kept the conservatives in power and able to wreak their violence upon the world built by liberals, and for what?

What is it that Barack Obama, self-annointed next-president of the US, what is it precisely that he thinks to do with this position? He has no interest in the detailed wonk stuff, he doesn't think he should get deeply involved in anything, he has yet to articulate a single, true objective or goal or achievement for his tenure in office.

Hillary has two huge objectives - to implement national health insurance and to restore the national economy - and a list as long as her arm of things like raising minuimum wage, expanding citizen privacy rights, reversing the unconscionable expansion of executive power, and so forth. Edwards talks about restructuring power relationships. Biden spoke of resolving crisis in the middle-east and restoring American stature in the world. Dodd talked about fighting against the encroachments of state power on privacy. Even Kucinich has a list of to-do items, including promoting peace and turning back global warming.

Golden Boy Barry has nothing but his own awesomeness and a vague platform of feel good about being hopeful for, umm, something. His policy proposals, as Krugman has relentlessly documented, amount to little except watered down and incomplete versions of what he stole from Clinton and Edwards. He makes people feel dreamy, but he has no dream to articulate, except becoming the first black president. He is so determined to become that, he will crawl on his knees and beg Republicans, the party dedicated to disenfranchising minorities, degrading women and exploiting immigrants, to vote for him in order to get the margins in the primaries.

For me, I keep coming back to the demographics of who doesn't vote for him - Democrats. He is not very popular with the party he wants to lead because he is not promoting the interests of people who need the government to be squarely on their side. It is all about him, his desires, and a one-item agenda - vote for me because I say you should. It speaks volumes that his supporters are behind him more because they want somone to beat HRC than because he represents anything they actually support. People who don't actually need Social Security or FHA loans or health insurance have the luxury of voting Obama.

The rest of us are Democrats.

Anglachel

Krugman on Partisanship

Paul Krugman is always such a breath of fresh air in the miasma of creeping Broderism. His message is clear and simple - there can be no "bipartisanship" in Washington because the movement conservatives will not compromise on anything. They are the problem and they are out of step with the express wishes of the American public. Here are some key paragraphs from his latest opinion piece in the New York Times:

Yesterday The Times published a highly informative chart laying out the positions of the presidential candidates on major issues. It was, I’d argue, a useful reality check for those who believe that the next president can somehow usher in a new era of bipartisan cooperation.

For what the chart made clear was the extent to which Democrats and Republicans live in separate moral and intellectual universes....

In fact, however, except for Mike Huckabee — a peculiar case who’ll deserve more discussion if he stays in contention — the leading Republican contenders have gone out of their way to assure voters that they will not deviate an inch from the Bush path. Why? Because the G.O.P. is still controlled by a conservative movement that does not tolerate deviations from tax-cutting, free-market, greed-is-good orthodoxy....

So what does the conversion of Mr. McCain into an avowed believer in voodoo economics — and the comparable conversions of Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani — tell us? That bitter partisanship and political polarization aren’t going away anytime soon.

There’s a fantasy, widely held inside the Beltway, that men and women of good will from both parties can be brought together to hammer out bipartisan solutions to the nation’s problems.

If such a thing were possible, Mr. McCain, Mr. Romney and Mr. Giuliani — a self-proclaimed maverick, the former governor of a liberal state and the former mayor of an equally liberal city — would seem like the kind of men Democrats could deal with. (O.K., maybe not Mr. Giuliani.) In fact, however, it’s not possible, not given the nature of today’s Republican Party, which has turned men like Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney into hard-line ideologues. On economics, and on much else, there is no common ground between the parties.

The Great Divide

It really is this simple. The hyper-partisan movement conservatives have no interest in working with anyone who is not a lock-step believer in their rape-pillage-plunder agenda. They want permanent war, an obscenely wealthy upper class and a desperate, fearful, ignorant electorate.

Anglachel

The Vast Conspiracy

A few excerpts from Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal. I want to note these down before I go into a more theoretical post in the future. These are from Ch. 8 - The Politics of Inequality:

The nature of the hold movement conservatism has on the Republican party may be summed up very simply: Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy. That is, there is an interlocking set of institutions ultimately answering to a small group of people that collectively reward loyalists and punish dissenters. These institutions provide obedient politicians with the resources to win elections, safe havens in the event of defeat, and lucrative career opportunities after they leave office. They guarantee favorable news coverage to politicians who follow the party line, while harassing and undermining opposition. And they support a large standing army of party intellectuals and activists...

One last point; The institutions of movement conservatism ensure a continuity of goals that has no counterpart on the other side... In a now-famous 1983 article, analysts from the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation called for a "Leninist strategy" of undermining support for Social Security, to "prepare the political ground so that the fiasco of the last 18 months is not repeated." That strategy underlay George W. Bush's attempt to privatize the system -- and until or unless movement conservatism is defeated as thoroughly as pre-new deal conservatism was, there will be more attempts in the future.

This is what must be foremost in the minds of liberals whenever faced with a political choice. The right considers you an enemy that it is justified in exterminating. It does not want compromise, it will not honor any promises it makes, and it is dedicated to furthering its own agenda, period.

Anglachel

Obama's Cocoon

Here are two somewhat different observations on the flap over Obama's history of cocaine abuse. First, Eric Alterman:

I don't understand the problem with Billy Shaheen* saying that Obama's admission of drug use might turn out to be a problem in a general election. It's true, isn't it? It might be. Is it better to pretend that it won't and then find out later that you've just elected another right-wing extremist incompetent. The fact is we have no idea about any number of issues relating to Obama's potential vulnerabilities, and while I love the guy and think he would make one of the greatest presidents ever, I would like to have those answers sooner rather than later. Of course we'll never get them, but if anyone thinks that Republicans are only going to raise these issues because Clinton did, well, that person is stupid. It's rather childish to pretend that politics doesn't involve finding out bad things about your opponent and saying them. I say let's get everything on the table and let Obama deal with it.

You Take Sally, I'll Take Sue...

And then there is the far less sympathetic Charles Pierce:

I guess we're all supposed to be horrified this week that Hillary Clinton is acting like a tough political candidate. (If Matthews crosses his legs over his cojones any tighter, he's going to be doing the show as a soprano for the rest of his career.) I have grown a bit tired of the whole Obama-as-the-anti-Hildebeast meme, which the Obama people have determined is the non-Oprah key to his current surge. Indeed, Obama's campaign has begun to make my skin crawl a little bit. The we-are-the-world optimism that not only blinds him to the fundamental corruption of the regime he hopes to replace, but also makes you wonder if he's the guy to come in and throw daylight into all the dark corners of the past seven years. The willingness to employ Republican storylines on Senator Clinton and, far more seriously, on Social Security in an apparent attempt to win the vital Green Room Primary in Washington and to appeal to mythical "moderates" who don't exist and won't vote for him anyway. If we're ever going to get past the depredations of the Bush Administration -- many of which, I guarantee you, are still deeply secret -- it is an insufficient remedy to declare that the "politics of division" are now over and we will now reunite under a banner and move forward together. In the first place, there already is a conservative attack machine in place that will nuke whoever a Democratic president is the moment he or she lifts a hand off the Bible. Moreover, there must be an accounting if the corruption is to be cleansed and the constitutional order restored. There is no way to do this without an angry, bloody, and, yes, political process. The next president's most critical function in the early days is not to make us all feel good about our country again. It is to be the head of an informal national Truth Commission. I'm not sure if Obama even wants this job.
(My emphasis)

Neither of these writers is an HRC fan, though Eric distinguishes himself by always speaking of her calmly and deliberately, his praise as much as his criticisms grounded in demonstrable facts. What Eric and Charles both point to is the cocoon that Obama has spun around himself. With Obama, there is a presumption that everyone agrees that any negative press is always illegitimate and a signifier of his opponent's fundamental bad faith and duplicity, while his own comparable attacks (see eRiposte of Left Coaster's latest for the run-down) are necessary actions to defend himself.

More disturbing is the way in which Obama doesn't seem to grasp the real task that faces any Democrat who can get his or her butt into the Oval Office - use the power of politics to restore the republic, taking it back from C+ Augustus and his fascistic kleptocracy. He doesn't seem to grasp (or care) that the nation is indeed at war, but it is a slow moving civil war of a privileged class against the rest and of reason and humanity against fundamentalist apocalypticism.

Obama seems to think that it is enough that he "isn't Hillary" to justify his claim on the presidency. It is unclear exactly he wants it for, except to cap off his glorious career. This is a demonstration of narccissism as great as W's - beacuse I'm sexy and give good oratory and I've decided it should be mine.

We can see from his oppo attacks on his competitors that he is quite comfortable with ruthlessness when it is to benefit himself. He evidently conducts oppo research against progressive bloggers who might be tempted to criticize him, rather than meet the criticism head on. But he doesn't appear to have any great desire to fight the deep wells of corruption on the other side of the aisle, preferring to tout his equivocal opinion on Iraq from years ago (and never once mention his current voting behavior) to exploit netroots HRC hatred than to actually create and explain foreign policy that would deal with the situation on the ground today.

He and his supporters are living in a cocoon of Golden Boy Barry's wonderfullness. It is supported by the Republicans he says he's going to fight, and spun to ever more glorious heights of gilded perfection by the media that transformed Gore into a loser and Kerry into a coward and wimp. The same media that is doing its darndest to ignore the vacuity and savagery of the current Republican field.

For those of us who keep in mind the political strategy Lee Atwater bequeathed to the movement conservatives, we all know what will be launched at Obama. Black druggie from the big city who is a closet Muslim, supports violating electoral laws and stuffing ballot boxes, and who will give away tax dollars to welfare queens and wetbacks. Don't think for one second they won't, or that it won't work. Even if he gets to the White House, this will be the constant refrain, with demands that he "prove" he's not biased to blacks, "illegals" (read - Latinos who don't vote Republican), single mothers, etc., etc. - in short, that he will throw the Democratic majority under the bus.

The cocoon is the fantasy of a large portion of the left that somehow they can all sing Kumbayah together and yet retain power. If only we get rid of the "dirty" parts of the party, we'll win on our virtue! Even Obama doesn't really believe that, but that's the campaign he is running.

Anglachel

Obama All Talk, No Action, on Foreign Policy

The Obama campaign is getting silly with the hysterical screeches for HRC to "Take it back! Take it back!" on the drug issue. Well, duh, you pea brain. Of course the Republicans are going to make you into the dog's dinner over that one and why shouldn't your opponents nail you for it? Frankly, I've been around a lot of "recreational drug users," and I think a lot less of you for sticking blow up your nose. I prefer people who have the sense not to do drugs in the first place. Deal.

HRC has been accused of murders she didn't commit, thefts that didn't happen, skulduggery that never occurred and sexual proclivities we can only hope she took advantage of, and she's not whining about that. Every time someone waves a little negative press in your direction, you have the vapors. If you are such a freaking panty-waist that you can't stand the bald truth about the political disadvantages of your own drug adventures, step aside now.

Of course, the deep problem here is that Obama is little except his media facade, and if he loses that image of wonderfulness, he will drop like a rock. His big foreign policy claim to fame, having verbally opposed the Iraq War, is consistently shown to be worth very little. Susan UnPC, on Larry Johnson's No Quarter blog, has a long and detailed post about Mr. All Talk, No Walk. Some key paragraphs:

Obama is rising in the polls because he’s expressing FEELINGS that people WANT to hear. People are worn down by the last seven years, and they want to believe what they’re hearing from a hopeful, fresh candidate. The problem is, it’s just talk. Here are some pithy examples of (1) Obama as the triangulator extraordinaire, and (2) Obama as a do-nothing — yes, a do-nothing.

A do-nothing? You can’t even find it listed at his Senate Web site, but Sen. Obama is the chairman of the Subcommittee on European Affairs for the Senate Foreign Relations committee. That subcommittee oversees “U.S. involvement with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), relations with the European Union (EU), and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Matters relating to Greenland and the northern polar region are also the responsibility of this subcommittee.”...

Then there’s IRAQ, and Obama’s (and Oprah’s) incessant claim– as Oprah told the Des Moines crowd on Saturday, “long before it was the popular thing to do, he stood with clarity and conviction against this war in Iraq.”

In July of `04, Barack Obama, “I’m not privy to Senate intelligence reports. What would I have done? I don’t know,” in terms of how you would have voted on the war. And then this: “There’s not much of a difference between my position on Iraq and George Bush’s position at this stage.” That was July of `04. And this: “I think” there’s “some room for disagreement in that initial decision to vote for authorization of the war.” It doesn’t seem that you are firmly wedded against the war, and that you left some wiggle room that, if you had been in the Senate, you may have voted for it. (”Meet the Press,” 2004, via MyDD, Nov. 11, 2007)

“What would I have done? I don’t know” … “There’s not much of a difference” between him and George W. Bush … “some room for disagreement in that initial decision. …” If that’s not triangulation, I don’t know what is....

We Americans all love good orators. We yearn to feel our hearts soar with optimism. We flock to the “sunny” candidates like Ronald Reagan. We want to feel better about our country but — when we’re sober and reflective — don’t we really want the candidate who’s walked the walk.

Sen. Clinton has stuck her neck out — by voting against Gen. Casey’s confirmation, by voting against the attack-dog resolution against MoveOn.org and by voting on the Iran resolution. (Yes, the last was controversial, but remember that she was the first senator to warn Pres. Bush against taking military action against Iran and that she partnered with Sen. Jim Webb’s resolution to require Congressional authorization before any military action against Iran.)

Sen. Obama failed to show up for the MoveOn or Iran votes, and in effect lied when he lamely told Wolf Blitzer that he didn’t know the Iran vote was coming up and didn’t have time to get back from campaigning in New Hampshire. (In fact, all senators were informed the day before that the Iran resolution vote was to come up the next day.)

Obama Talks the Talk, But Where’s the Walk?

Read all of Susan's article. She goes into some detail about the lengths to which Obama has gone to avoid having any kind of political trail, and the ways in which he has failed to take a solid and defining role in foreign affairs, despite having been given a plum chairmanship of a foreign relations sub committee.

The opening point is very good and echoes what I said over a year ago in my post Avatar Politics from May 2006 - that what is fueling much of the netroots energy is a search for politicians who will become avatars of people's emotional reactions and act out in ways that give the spectator personal emotional satisfaction. Obama is surfing the upside of this desire, to find some actor on whom we can project our fantasized best self, and has everything to lsose should people stop doing this. He knows he has nothing to new or distinctive to offer on issues.

The point here is that Obama's campaign is keeping the media narrative on trivialities beacuse every time a substantive issue comes up, like health care or immigration or the future of Iraq, he has nothing worthwhile to say, just weaker versions of what every other Democrat is presenting. As long as the story is Mr. Wonderful vs. The Wicked Witch, he's got an advantage. When he stands up next to her and is forced to address policy, he too often sounds like the slow kid in the class. Biden and Edwards are far better off-the-cuff speakers and HRC is second to none in the ability to make very clear points about complex topics. All Obama can do is yell over and over that HRC is going negative.

I don't want "Hope" - I want a seasoned pol with a proven track record of supporting progressive domestic policies and initiatives at every stage of her public life.

Anglachel

Republican Dirty Tricks

My buddy Fergus, who is becoming quite the blog commenter, has brought an interesting below the MSM radar story to my attention. Here's the basic facts.

Someone is calling Democrats in Iowa and conducting a very weird "poll". One person who was polled, a prominent Democratic Party official and strong Edwards supporter, provides this account:

The caller asked for either me or my husband by name. First tip off. The poller said they were with Central Research. Asked the requiste who are you supporting? Who is your second choice?

Then why do you think Hillary Clinton is a weak candidate and gives 3 choices. A) Is a weak general election candidate. B)Is too dependent on lobbyist money. C) Won't bring change.

Then why do do think John Edwards is a weak candidate with 2 choices A) a weak general election candidate because his positions are too liberal B) He should be home with his wife who has cancer.

A lot of blog posts have been exchanged offering various theories as to which Democrat is behind this poll and why, generally tying themselves into knots to explain how it was the candidate they hate most who is responsible. I think all of this speculation is wrong.

One of the most complete accounts of the poll and of trying to track down where it came from can be found here at Taylor Marsh's blog. Today, Mark Blumenthal of pollster.com settled in to do some analysis from a pollster's perspective. Both of them arrive at roughly the same conclusion - this is a trick by the Republicans. Taylor has tracked things back to a company owned by a former Tom Delay staffer. Mark analyzes the questions themselves and says they simply don't make sense as any kind of Democratic attack because they do not map onto any of the effective approaches/attacks any have been using. Both point out that it is hard to see how any Democrat benefits from this.

Well, back to Machiavelli 101. Who benefits? Who gains power through these acts? Only the Republicans as a group. How do they gain power? By increasing what they have obviously been doing since the last Democratic debate - trying to put unbridgeable gaps between candidates and their loyalists, sow fear, uncertainty and doubt, and try to poison any kind of unity calls after the primaries are through. Further more, it is aimed at a specific candidate and his supporters.

Look at the questions. The questions about HRC are clearly aimed at eliciting the "fear" reaction that HRC won't be a liberal party loyalist. These questions may be obnoxious, but they are not unusual. However, they also aren't topical. They should be about immigration, Iraq/Iran, trade-policy, and other recent talking points. The three in the "poll" are just too general. This alone should clue us in that this is not your average negative campaign.

The questions about Edwards, though, those are of a kind we just haven't seen. Asking Democratic activists if a candidate is "too liberal"? Gimme a break. Then the revolting question about Elizabeth Edward's cancer. First of all, who the hell is that ghoulish except the political offspring of Lee Atwater?

The unasked questions are also telling. Why nothing on Obama? Why, to play up the suspicions of him as an underhanded back-stabber, something getting quite a bit of sotto vocce play in the blogs. His campaign is becoming notorious for character smears, and now there is a rumor about Joe Trippi, who works for Edwards, actually undermining his own candidate to improve Obama's position. The absence of Obama is meant to indict him.

Now, look at what just happened recently. Edwards has thrown down a gauntlet that he won't support the party if HRC gets the nomination, with the implicit threat that he will direct his supporters to withdraw their votes, which would probably be enough to throw the election to the Republican. So, what appears on the horizon? An ugly attack going after Edwards by taking a vile pot shot at him as a human being, intimating that he is ignoring an ill family member in favor of seeking personal glory.

This attack is meant to inflame. It is meant to hit hard in the gut and to get people's defense reactions cranked up high. It is meant to be the unanswerable "Who did this to John!?!" that will fuel the emotional rage sufficient to get his supporters to sit this round out. It is meant to fracture the Democrats enough in the general in enough close states to throw the election. Edwards is not going to win the nomination, but he has a big enough base to spoil the election for whomever does. And the Republicans are tying to make sure that happens.

There should be a non-stop call across the left blogosphere for exposure of who was behind this attack and get it settled definitively. Anyone with research skills and few interns at hand (TPM, hint, hint) could have a field day with this one.

Don't get Roved again.

Anglachel