"Somebody who thinks like me"

If Democrats want a stronger hand in guiding America's future, they need to strengthen their brand identity among busy and beleaguered American voters.

For decades, too much emphasis has been placed promoting programs and policies -- or attractive personalities -- over deeper brand identification. There are a lot of folk myths about the 1950s, and maybe this is one of them, but I think I remember a time when brand loyalty made for Democrats' success. A time when, if someone mentioned a candidate's name, the first question someone might ask was, "Is he a Democrat?"

"Yes."

"That’s all I need to know." And that meant another vote for the Democrat.

Democrat meant, he thinks like me. He believes what I do. He’s on my side. You didn’t need to know his or her position on snail darters or NAFTA or gay rights. Or even his name. Democrat meant something.

But how many events have you been to where someone starts talking about what Democrats stand for? And they unroll a laundry list of programs and policies anywhere from forty to seventy years-old. It’s like a K-tel commercial for Democrats’ Greatest Hits. “Can anyone forget the rocking, G.I. Bill?” Proud accomplishments, okay? But they don’t say anything about the beliefs behind those programs, nothing about our passions or ideals, about who we are.

Coke, the Chicago Cubs, Nike, the Marines. Images, feelings and associations are more important in brand loyalty than particular features, and Democrats have neglected brand-building for too long. Behind the argument echoed in Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? -- that many working class voters vote Republican against their own economic interests -- is the assumption that economic interest is (or should be) the basis for casting a ballot and for party identification.

One of the disconnects in American politics between Democratic activists and typical voters arises from activists' focus on the wonky details of programs and policies that busy non-wonks haven't the time to master, even if they have the interest.

Early primary voting is underway here in NC, and yesterday my wife went out to vote with a group of friends. They turned to her to tell them who they should vote for on the down-ticket races. To some degree, they just wanted to vote for Clinton or Obama and the other races were afterthoughts. They wanted, at minimum, to do their civic duty, but were too busy be more informed. For that, they trusted her to advise them.

Why? Because they respect her, trust her judgment, believe she's like them and on their side. They identify with her. As a party, Democrats have to rebuild voters' confidence that that is just as true of the party as a whole.

Democracy isn't supposed to be easy, but with more and more Americans feeling as if they are treading water amidst a flotsam of bills, soccer practice, commuting and longer work hours, throwing them a candidate survey or a stack of position papers isn't helping. They need a lifeline. Like it or not, many voters just want some way to participate that doesn't require that they master the arcana of the legislative process. That's what they have representatives for. They just want some shorthand way of choosing candidates who will legislate in their best interests. A party they can trust. A party who thinks like they do.

That’s all they want to know.

A stark choice

A friend in the clergy just forwarded a noxious e-mail along with comments expressing his frustration and anger. The e-mail labeled that went out to NewsMax readers was labeled Christian Response (to Barack Obama). It was anything but (and not worth dignifying with a link). But then, what would you expect from the fine people who brought you the famous Willy Horton ad?

Future GOP leaders may see this year's attack ads as their "Civil Rights Act" moment, when they lost every minority voter in America for a generation.

Tactics like this one and the one mentioned above could easily backfire. The Roves and the Attwaters of the GOP have been feeding their attack dogs under the table for decades. But as these ads show, they won't be able to control them in 2008 if Obama is the Democratic candidate. Attacking a minority presidential candidate without alienating every minority group in our increasingly multiethnic country requires a scalpel. These guys carry bludgeons. They don't have much finesse.

Do we?

The trick for Democrats may be to not overreact. This is a change election and these tactics are anything but. It will take great confidence to stare down such opponents without becoming like them -- confidence the White House of Bush clearly hasn't shown in dealing with suspected terrorists. Democrats have to show integrity and strength in responding firmly, but also strength of character in not responding in kind. We may have to hold fire until our opponents begin to collapse under withering public outcry and plummeting poll numbers. With the GOP flogging the GWOT for all they're worth, it may look a bit "Gandhi" to frustrated activists itching for a fight, and to nervous pols anxious about looking tough for November.

But standing in the middle of the ring and drawing more blood than our opponents doesn't win elections. Winning over the crowd does. Americans are sick of the "fear and smear" politics of the last decade. If they are seeking a better alternative -- if enough are, that's the catch -- we have to show them we are it. Accentuate our positives, illuminate (but not flog) their negatives, and let the stark contrast speak for itself.

Let's hope it doesn't get much more stark than this.

“Psyops on steroids” - Col. Ken Allard

Awhile back I posted a letter at Salon about an article I'd received from David Horowitz's FrontPageMagazine. In June 2005, a week after Sen. Dick Durbin made a well-publicized criticism of conditions of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu (Ret.) was flown to Cuba on Vice President Cheney's plane with other retired military officers as part of a "Department of Defense trip." Upon returning, he wrote "What I Saw at Gitmo" -- consisting largely of what he'd been told at Gitmo.

The New York Times has a lengthy, front page piece this morning that mentions that flight in the summer of 2005:

Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the first of six such Guantánamo trips — which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.

These ' “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” ' in Pentagoneze were part of an "information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance," the Times finds.

... members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

You can find photos of Lt. Col. Cucullu being hosed here.

Bill Kristol's gift for spiritual discernment

In his NYT editorial, Kristol dissects Obama's "guns or religion" gaff. Quoting Marx and explaining how Obama's "mask slipped," Kristol peels away the layers of exoskeleton for us - a la Independence Day - to uncover the "real" Obama.

Andrew Sullivan punches back,

"Kristol is deliberately distorting to paint Obama as a cynical manipulator of religious faith for political ends, rather than as a genuine Christian. He's calling him a lying, Godless communist.

[. . .]

A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his own faith. That's where they've gone to already. And it's only the middle of April. What are they so scared of?"

Perhaps with "manipulator," Sullivan is lumping Kristol in with the likes of Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff-associate, Michael Scanlon, who reduced the GOP's attitude towards conservative Christians in America to this little nugget:

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them." The brilliance of this strategy was twofold: Not only would most voters not know about an initiative to protect Coushatta gambling revenues, but religious "wackos" could be tricked into supporting gambling at the Coushatta casino even as they thought they were opposing it.

Please, Bill. The mask is off, all right. And it's yours. Allen Raymond, one of your own, put it better than I could (after getting out of jail):

"When it came to playing in the gutter, we were the professionals—the Dems weren't even junior varsity."

What did you expect?

From corporate-bred politicians who view governing through a corporate lens?

WASHINGTON - Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques against suspected terrorists after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality, The Associated Press has learned. (Emphasis mine.)

And the president approved, telling ABC's Martha Raddatz on Friday,

"Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people." Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

As first reported by ABC News Wednesday, the most senior Bush administration officials repeatedly discussed and approved specific details of exactly how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA.

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

Glenn Greenwald cautions against placing too much emphasis on John Yoo's as the author of the just-released "torture memo" referenced at the top of the post. Yoo was doing what he was asked, to deliver a legal justification for illegal acts.

Yoo wasn't opining in a vacuum. He knew that these techniques were already being used and that the highest level of our Government wanted him to create legal protections for what had happened and to enable more of what they wanted to do. He bears substantial culpability, but certainly not exclusive or even principal culpability. (Emphasis mine.)

There is a pattern here.

Greenwald points to Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin's observation that the 2006 Military Commissions Act "effectively insulated government officials from liability for many of the violations of the War Crimes Act they might have committed during the period prior to 2006."

There is a pattern here.

It is the triumph of corporate thinking applied to governing. The corporation exists -- as a style of organizing a business -- to shield its principals from personal responsibility for actions they take on its behalf. Why wouldn't our CEO president and his board members take the same approach to their roles in the executive branch?

Spam, spam, spam, spam . . .

Friends at the Asheville Citizen-Times get lots of spam:

Now, people can believe what they want to believe; got no problem with that. The problem I do have is that the wild claims in chain e-mails keep popping up in letters to the editor or in calls to the newsroom carping, “Why aren’t you printing this?’’

Short answer: ’cause it isn’t true. Tracking down rumors about whether Barack Obama is Muslim or Target is unpatriotic is a public service, I suppose, but it eats up a lot of hours in the day during the political season, especially for letters editor Dave Russell.

I couldn't resist responding:

The saddest thing about what I call "right-wing spam" is that people who forward the e-mails don't care that they're lies. They have no skeptical "Sixth Sense" and don't want one. They only see what they want to see.

The irony is that in less time than it takes to attach that buddy list to the forward, you can debunk the majority of these things ... if the truth still mattered. Sadly, truth has become a casualty. Facts have such a way of messing up good propaganda.

I've seen a couple versions of Obama-the-Muslim-sleeper-agent. I expect any day now to get Obama's-Christian-church-hates-America -- forwarded without a hint of cognitive dissonance by the very same people who forwarded Obama-the-Muslim-sleeper-agent.

Outside the Bill Clinton event last week, two women in line told my wife that if Obama won the nomination, they would vote for McCain. See, they didn't like Obama's church because the choir wears African garb. His church isn't American enough.

[My wife] asked if they'd voted for Kennedy. They had. She didn't point out that, like him, I grew up in a church where the services were in a dead language and the clergy wore sacramental gear dating back to thirteenth-century Italy. They only see what they want to see.

[. . .]

One more thing. Have the people who forward these things never heard of a blind copy? Some of the mails I receive have as many as 75 addresses attached in the multiple forwards. And they wonder why they receive so much spam.

Limbaugh fans join Earth First and the Merry Pranksters

(I wonder who brought the drugs?)

A radio campaign by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce last year called voting "as sacred as the Constitution." Now Rush Limbaugh is using the public airwaves to urge listeners to join "Operation Chaos" and corrupt Democratic primaries. 4,000 Americans dead in Iraq to "plant democracy" in the heart of the Middle East. Limbaugh and his listeners honor that sacrifice by demonstrating to the world how sacred they think democracy is.

Thanks for something

Gordon over at Scrutiny Hooligans has a post up that lists the earmarks Congressman Heath Shuler has brought to NC-11. The first item grabbed my attention. So this, cross-posted at Scrutiny Hooligans:

$282,000 AdvantageWest (Henderson/Buncombe)

I thank the congressman for funneling some money to our local development agency. But I’ve had my eye on AdvantageWest for years. In my estimation, they have consistently underperformed in achieving their stated goals.

Chartered by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1994, AdvantageWest is a non-profit public-private partnership whose primary focus is marketing the North Carolina mountains to corporations seeking to relocate or open a new facility, expand an existing business within our region, and those who might otherwise improve the quality of life for citizens within our region through activities such as filmmaking, entrepreneurship and tourism.

Or maybe, they’ve simply underperformed in achieving attracting good-paying manufacturing jobs to this area (to replace the thousands we’ve lost).

I was [an observer] at AdvantageWest in 2004 when the governor parachuted in to take some of the credit for Jacob Holm locating a nonwovens plant on Sandhill Rd. 70 jobs - sweet. And since then?

Coats North America (Cherokee County): -98 jobs, 2008
Stanley Furniture (Graham County): -450 jobs, 2007
Western Forge (Cherokee County): -170 jobs, 2006

1,400 jobs were lost in 13 days in Haywood, Buncombe, McDowell and Mitchell back in 2004.

Recently, a friend who wants to start up a small CNC machine shop asked the Asheville Chamber of Commerce what help they could offer him. They offered him the door. Manufacturing, it seems, is too blue collar, and not the kind of “new economy” business they want within the city limits.

AdvantageWest, the Asheville Chamber and local leaders need to get a clue: thousands of laid-off factory workers won’t likely land filmmaking jobs, or “new economy” jobs writing software in trendy Biltmore Ave. storefronts. Our local economy is slowly being hollowed out to where only those who don’t need work (or bring theirs with them) can afford to live here.

Worst of all, that may not change until local moguls awaken to find a shocking shortage of waiters and housekeeping staff.

The guy can give a stump speech.

Former president Bill Clinton spoke in Asheville last night, promoting Hillary Clinton's bid for the White House. Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans:

Pres. Clinton was convincing, and sold Sen. Clinton well. Good speech and good points. Most telling was when Clinton asked for a show of hands: “Raise your hand if you know somebody without health insurance at all.” Somewhere from 40-50% of the crowd raised their hands.

Clinton surveyed the crowd and said, “This is the only country in the world where you could get that answer - the only rich country. This is the only country in the world where anybody could ask the question at election time.”

Mrs. Blue and I went without in 2003 and 2004 after I got laid off and COBRA ran out. He got me where I live.

I visited the new Obama HQ earlier in the day and was frank about going to hear Bill to fish for volunteers for the fall campaigns. 2500 potential volunteers in one place was an opportunity not to be missed. I’ll be at the Obama event at the Orange Peel on April 17 too, for the same reason.

Hillary Clinton supporters we met last night who said they would vote for McCain before they’d vote for Obama might want to think that through some. That goes equally for the Obama supporters who say the same. You want to shoot yourselves in the foot? I’ll loan you the gun.

Both our remaining candidates and their supporters owe this country better. We owe the world better. Republicans win when Democrats who don’t get their way take their balls and go home. Bill Bennett probably has probably placed bets on that happening - with good odds.

For all of the wonky policy talk to make any difference, we first have to win. We have to pull together when this nomination is resolved. And we have to work together to get out our vote.

Ideals are nice, but to both Obama and Clinton supporters I’m frustratingly practical. I don’t care that Obama has the chance to be the first Africa-American president. I don’t care that Clinton has the chance to be the first woman president. I don’t care which candidate claims the most experience, or who gives the best speech or whose husband does. They’re nice perks. But I want the candidate who has the most potential for energizing volunteers, for attracting new and crossover voters. I want the candidate who has the most potential for coattails, for helping new Democrats win office on the local, state and national levels. I want the Democrat who is going to make turning out our vote this fall the easiest. I want the candidate who is going to make the GOP’s job the hardest.

Elections are a numbers game. Bottom line: 50% + 1 wins. If on November 5th, there is a Republican president-elect, none of the trash talk about which Democrat is better or more qualified ain’t worth squat.

One step forward, two steps back

Study: N.C. family needs $42,841 a year

The average family of four in North Carolina requires $42,841 per year to provide for basic needs, according to a report from the N.C. Budget & Tax Center.

And it's even worse west of Statesville.

Although per capita income for the Asheville MSA for 2006 was approximately $30,789, the last time I looked it up, the breakdown showed that figure significantly inflated by rental, retirement and investment income. People earning wages earned proportionately less.

My guess is, that hasn't changed.

False Witness

As campaign season ramps up, we'll be seeing more and more political spam in our in-boxes. If my in-box is any indicator, 98% will be distortions and lies. What's increasingly disturbing about this information superhighway trash is what its proliferation says about our relationship with reality itself. Truth, it seems, is now an endangered species.

New York Times Magazine weighed in on Sunday, March 16. Internet rumors such as Obama-is-a-Muslim die hard:

The Obama-is-a-Muslim rumor does not seem to have hurt the candidate’s fortunes, at least not yet. But the myth’s persistence illustrates a growing cultural vulnerability to rumor. Journalists typically presume that facts matter: show the public what is true, and they will make decisions correctly. Psychologists who study how we separate truth from fiction, however, have demonstrated that the process is not so simple.

Psychologist Ian Skurnik studied the phenomenon at the University of Michigan, using health claims, finding . . .

. . . it helps to know how our brains suss out truth from fiction. To determine the veracity of a given statement, we often look to society’s collective assessment of it. But it is difficult to measure social consensus very precisely, and our brains rely, instead, upon a sensation of familiarity with an idea. You use a rule of thumb: if something seems familiar, you must have heard it before, and if you’ve heard it before, it must be true.

The rule obviously invites many opportunities for error. The seniors in Skurnik’s study couldn’t remember the context in which they had heard the health claims (research shows that we are quick to forget “negation tags,” like whether something is said to be false or a lie), so they relied, instead, on a vague sense of familiarity, which steered them astray. Repetition, psychologists have shown, easily tricks us. Kimberlee Weaver of Virginia Tech recently found that if one person tells you that something is true many times, you are likely to conclude that the opinion is widely held, even if no one else said a thing about it.

Some say, FoxNews?

But it's the enthusiastic distribution of scurrilous Internet rumors I find disturbing. Among the right wing, electronic poison pen letters go around like wildfire. Some I receive have had as many as seventy-five e-mail addresses attached. (Have none of you people ever heard of a blind copy? Your e-mail addresses are being compromised. Got it?)

After years of lies and propaganda from the highest levels, the ability to distinguish truth from fiction has itself been compromised. Point out that they're being used as propagandists by propagandists, and friends and relatives still persist in spreading lies. Either because they can no longer distinguish them from the truth, or because the lies are more fun, or because they just don't care what the truth is if it conflicts with what they'd rather believe.

As Rick Perlstein observes in his new book, we have arrived in Nixonland.

Nixonland, which will be published by Simon & Schuster, takes its title from a coinage of former presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, who once described “Nixonland” as a place with “no standard of truth but convenience, and no standard of morality except sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call.”

The greater irony is how many of our friends among the religious Right gleefully play along. You know, the people convinced that liberals are to blame for the decline of values in this country. The ones who quote Matthew and caution that we "become what we behold." The people obsessed with putting displays of the Ten Commandments in courthouses. Including the Commandment about not bearing false witness.

Until recently, what I receive came from the Right. But even that may be changing. This weekend a friend reported receiving one of the poisoned-Barak letters. Only not from a right-winger, from a relative.

After my friend pointed out that the entire thing was bogus, his relative replied, "I know, but I'm a Hillary supporter, so I forwarded it anyway."

Great.

The Man Between War and Peace

Thomas P.M. Barnett profiles head of U. S. Central Command, Admiral William "Fox" Fallon, in this month's Esquire.

With a cooler head than the administration's war cheerleaders, Fallon has earned the ire of the Bush administration for opposing Bush's Iraq "surge" and for not joining in on the saber rattling over Iran. (Emphasis mine.)

As with Pakistan, Fallon keeps his powder dry when he deals with Iran. He doesn't react like Pavlov's dog to inflammatory rhetoric from inflammatory little men.

Goodness, to whom could Barnett be referring?

Described by Secretary of Defense Gates as "one of the best strategic thinkers in uniform today," Fallon is too busy trying to find answers to problems than to demagogue them.

On this trip, he's been shepherding a new bridge that links isolated Tajikistan with Afghanistan. The potential here is huge: Tajikistan is 95 percent mountainous and extremely food dependent. Its main asset is its untapped hydroelectric capacity. Afghanistan presents just the opposite picture--food to export but most of the country lacks an effective electric grid.

So what should America be pushing first in both states? Free-and-clear elections for massively impoverished populations, or whatever it takes to get Tajikistan's resource with Afghanistan's resource? Which path, do you think, would scare the Taliban and Al Qaeda more? To Fallon, there isn't even a question to answer.

No wonder neocons don't like him.

Primary Calculus

One of those now-infamous Superdelegates emailed the other day asking for thoughts on who to vote for at the DNC convention, and received something much like this:

The outcome of this election will come down to turnout. The large primary turnout so far is no no indicator of success. The question for us is who is the most likely Democrat to win against John McCain? As much as we wish it were different, a candidate’s qualifications do us no good if they are not able to win.

Regardless of the Democrats’ candidate, John McCain is a negative for GOP turnout. The GOP’s base may not come out to vote for McCain, but they will come out in force to vote against Hillary Clinton. A Clinton nomination is a gift to a discouraged Republican base. It in no small measure erases McCain’s negatives and gives the GOP a fighting chance against us, as early polls show. It’s less clear that Clinton’s appeal to women voters is strong enough to pull GOP women to vote for her in numbers large enough to offset that.

The word from the streets suggests that the GOP base will not come out in the same numbers to vote against Barack Obama, an African-American Democrat, and in fact may simply stay home. Disaffected Republicans may even cross over to vote for him, fewer for Clinton.

Two days in a row this week, Sen. McCain tried to call down more exuberant members of his party for written and verbal attacks on Sen. Barack Obama. The hard Right will declare open season on Clinton if she's nominated. That's a given. But worse for both McCain and the GOP, these not-so-rogue elements spoon fed on Limbaugh, Drudge, Savage, Beck, Coulter, etc. will publicly expose the unflattering underbelly of the GOP in a way McCain and party leaders will be unable to contain or disguise. Whatever McCain may say, faced with the Democrats' first African-American presidential candidate, creatures of the GOP's own making will unwittingly aid Democrats and alienate droves of minority voters this year and for years to come.

On the Democratic side a critical question is, what will conservative Democrats do? If Hillary Clinton is the nominee, most will vote for her. But this may not offset the increased GOP performance generated by a Clinton nomination. A few Reagan Democrats may cross over to vote for McCain, but they will not stay home in a Clinton-McCain match-up.

If Barack Obama is the Democrats’ nominee, some conservative Democrats will vote for John McCain, as they would in a Clinton-McCain race. But since many registered Democrats in WNC tend to vote Republican in federal elections anyway, is not a net negative for Democratic performance.

Also heard on the streets, rather than vote for an African-American for president or for McCain, some Reagan Democrats will simply stay home, lowering Democratic performance.

The variables in this election season calculation will give fits to Las Vegas odds makers -- too many to manage. In the end, however, the Democrat/Republican performance ratio will favor an Obama candidacy, as early polls on a McCain match-up already show. In an election year in which voters are inclined to “turn the page,” Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton isn't a winning formula for Democratic success here or nationwide.

Then there is the "wow" factor an Obama candidacy has already generated. As the Democratic Party experiences a slow changing of the guard, engaging new, young voters generated by Obama’s candidacy is an opportunity for party building Democrats cannot afford to miss. We have a party to build and they want to help build it. Let’s welcome them by nominating a leader from a new generation.

Next man makes a move, the country gets it!

The new, improved GOP -- less reality-based than ever! Glenn Greenwald dissects the "Hollywood liberal" haters' new Hollywood-based Internet ad promoting the Protect America Act. All that's missing is Kiefer Sutherland:

Impressively, the ad dramatically packs every component of GOP politics into one minute: There are dark, primitively omnipotent Arab Terrorists lurking darkly and menacingly, planning to slaughter you and your whole entire family right now. You have only a few seconds to live, literally or metaphorically. The clock on your life is counting down right now. You are in severe danger.

We want more unchecked government power. You better give it to us, or else the Terrorists will kill you all. Give up more power to us, do what we say, and you can lay your head down on your pillow at night without a care in the world, knowing that we love you and are keeping you Safe and Protected -- Keeping America Protected -- like a baby snugly embraced in the womb. You want that, don't you? We want to give it to you. The House Democrats want you dead.

Come to think of it, alluding to Mel Brooks is too flattering. They've become more like campy, lipstick-smeared Tallulah Bankhead, the crazed religious fanatic out to "cleanse" others' sins and herself of self-loathing for her incestuous impulses.

Die! Die! My Darlings!

Come on Wall Street, don't be slow . . .

Why man, this is loans a-go-go!
There's plenty good money to be made
Enticing home buyers with adjustable rates...

Froma Harrop reminds us we've seen heard this song before (Originally Published on Thursday February 14, 2008):

Schemes We Have Seen

During the push to privatize Social Security, the idea's foes were accused of not trusting the American people to manage their own money. The naysayers prevailed, and aren't we glad.

How interesting that the buildup to the mortgage meltdown employed many of the same sales tactics as the Social Security privatization scheme. Resentment, fear, flattery and hype — plus scant details on fees and other costs — all went into the pitch.

When a former Fed official called for rules to tame the subprime mortgage business, the peddlers howled. This was an attack on low-income people, particularly those of color, they said. Without lax lending practices, fewer minorities would have enjoyed the blessings of homeownership.

(Worth reading in full, if the link lasts.)

So, hello subprime paradise.

Bye, bye, Miss American Pie.

Sunday Sermon

“The New Narcissism,” Peter Marin’s October 1975 opus in Harpers described the banality of the trendy human potential movement therapies on the rise in America in the 70s.

. . . I listen for two hours in a graduate seminar to two women therapists explaining to me how we are all entirely responsible for our destinies, and how the Jews must have wanted to be burned by the Germans, and that those who starve in the Sahel must want it to happen, and when I ask them whether there is anything we owe to others, say, to a child starving in the desert, one of them snaps at me angrily: "What can I do if a child is determined to starve?"

That, precisely, is what I am talking about here: the growing solipsism and desperation of a beleaguered class, the world view emerging among us centered solely on the self and with individual survival as its sole good. It is a world view present not only in everything we say and do, but as an ambience, a feeling in the air, a general cast of perception and attitude: a retreat from the worlds of morality and history, an unembarrassed denial of human reciprocity and community.

I re-read much of Marin’s 1975 piece after remembering how much the conservative obsession with personal responsibility mirrors the narcissism of the human potential and New Age movements.

“For if we are each totally responsible for our fate,” Marin wrote, “then all the others in the world are responsible for their fate, and, if that is so, why should we worry about them?” Writing about what is generally considered a liberal worldview, Marin observed:

That is what makes our new therapies so distressing. They provide their adherents with a way to avoid the demands of the world, to smother the tug of conscience. They allow them to remain who and what they are, to accept the structured world as it is-but with a new sense of justice and justification, with the assurance that it all accords with cosmic law. We are in our proper place; the others are in theirs; we may indeed bemoan their fate or even, if we are so moved, do something to change it, but in essence it has nothing to do with us.

It's the same disdain for the fate of others perceived as not as "responsible" as ourselves that is reflected in much of what I hear from conservative colleagues. It's dog whistle politics, code-speak for saying these Irresponsibles have made choices that place them outside the velvet ropes of middle-class convention, including - and rarely mentioned aloud - poor choice of parents, national origin, religion and skin color.

Bill McKibben’s “The Christian Paradox” in the August 2005 Harpers explored the political right’s amalgam of movement- and Christian-conservatism, noting the same self-referential, “I’m all right, Jack” morality:

. . . the softfocus consumer gospel of the suburban megachurches is a perfect match for emergent conservative economic notions about personal responsibility instead of collective action. Privatize Social Security? Keep health care for people who can afford it? File those under "God helps those who help themselves."

Popular megachurches preach a reassuring prosperity gospel which tells well-heeled believers that their good fortunes are a sign of God’s favor. Others’ misfortune is their own fault – the result of bad choices for which they alone must bear the weight of personal responsibility. How else will they ever learn and grow up to live lives of personal responsibility in 7500 well-earned, God-blessed square-feet on the seventh tee? Like moi?

McKibben observed,

How nice it would be if Jesus had declared that our income was ours to keep, instead of insisting that we had to share. How satisfying it would be if we were supposed to hate our enemies. Religious conservatives will always have a comparatively easy sell.

[. . .]

Taking seriously the actual message of Jesus . . . should serve at least to moderate the greed and violence that mark this culture. It's hard to imagine a con much more audacious than making Christ the front man for a program of tax cuts for the rich or war in Iraq. If some modest part of the 85 percent of us who are Christians woke up to that fact, then the world might change.

[. . .]

Since the days of Constantine, emperors and rich men have sought to co-opt the teachings of Jesus. As in so many areas of our increasingly market-tested lives, the coopters – the TV men, the politicians, the Christian "interest groups" – have found a way to make each of us complicit in that travesty, too. They have invited us to subvert the church of Jesus even as we celebrate it. With their help we have made golden calves of ourselves – become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols. It works, and it may well keep working for a long time to come. When Americans hunger for selfless love and are fed only love of self, they will remain hungry, and too often hungry people just come back for more of the same.

The left/right parallels are striking enough that McKibben accuses neither left nor right, but the culture at large,

These similarities make it difficult (although not impossible) for the televangelists to posit themselves as embattled figures in a "culture war"- they offer too uncanny a reflection of the dominant culture, a culture of unrelenting self-obsession.

And yet, that culture may be beginning to change as American wake up from the shell shock of the last eight years. It is the belated observation of the punditocracy that in this election year voters are hungry for authenticity again, for an America that is once more about something greater than ourselves.

Voters have had their fill of the slash-and-burn, divide-and-conquer, zero-sum politics of the last dozen years. They've seen their home values plummet and their purchasing power shrink along with America's middle class. Weary of being told whom to vote against, they desire something to vote for. Something better than business as usual.

“There’s no ‘business class’ in law enforcement." - ACLU

Au contraire.

First, there was Pinkerton. Now there's InfraGard!

[h/t A-TONE MUSIC]

"Living is easy with eyes closed...."

Received another of those right-wing pass-it-on emails today. It doesn't matter what the subject of these electronic tracts is. The object is to sow unreasoning fear, prejudice and distrust.

And what a patriotic thing ethnic hatred is when shared among friends. Just the way Tom Paine or Samuel Adams would have if they had had computers, the Internet and little knack for critical thinking.

A friend wrote to ask what I thought about these things, saying:

It makes me crazy.

During this election season, hatred and bigotry rise up from the mouths of people I have known and I am just shocked.

I guess I am just that naive to think that times have changed and that it shouldn't matter whether you are a man or woman or person of color when it comes to choosing a president to lead the nation.

It just makes me sad.

Indeed. The fact that this particular, unoriginal screed was attributed to some retired general who hadn't written it should surprise no one. As the Chicago Reader noted, the truth doesn't matter in Nixonland:

Nixonland, which will be published by Simon & Schuster, takes its title from a coinage of former presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, who once described “Nixonland” as a place with “no standard of truth but convenience, and no standard of morality except sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call.”

In Nixonland, presidential candidates of the Republican party that insists that the world irrevocably changed on 9/11 are falling over themselves to reinvent 1980s Reaganomics.

In Nixonland, Republicans who impeached a Democratic president accused of perjury allow a Republican president to decide for himself which laws he'll obey.

In Nixonland, two successive Bush Attorneys General refuse to answer whether waterboarding is a crime -- the same practice we prosecuted as a war crime when perpetrated by the Japanese in WWII. Say no, and the Republican A.G.s become international laughing stocks. Say yes, and they'll be asked why they haven't pursued Americans who have practiced it lately, and their own bosses who authorized it.

Comedian Lewis Black has observed:

... there has to come a point, where Democrats and Republicans, where we see a piece of footage and we just agree on what the fuck reality is. And the fact is you cannot shoot video of a Land Rover running over a cat and then say... the cat was trying to kill itself.

Unless you're a movement conservative ... and the truth is inconvenient.

This is what Barry Goldwater's party has become. Blogger and Goldwater expert Rick Perlstein writes about Allen Raymond's How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative. Raymond did jail time for jamming Democratic party and union firefighters' phones for the RNC -- arguably, under instructions from the White House -- in New Hampshire on election day, 2002:

"The mouth-breathers who decide GOP primaries might allow people who steal their money and send their children to impossible wars to get away with anything, but they'll cut no such slack for baby-killers," Raymond writes.

[snip]

If that's the contempt he harbors for RNC members—the party elite—you can imagine how he talks about "the Jesus-loves-guns crowd" with their "pro-life, snake-handling babble" and "religious doggerel." In one memorable phrase, he regrets he did it all just "so some platitude-spewing hack could be elected Grand Cyclops"—thus, from the inside, weighing in on the debate over whether today's conservative movement is racist or not: "Grand Cyclops" is the title for the leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

He's rather thrilled to be able to demonstrate just how authoritarian-minded these "knuckle-draggers" are, picking up his cell phone from the Republican convention, telling [a friend on the other end] to watch his TV set, then barking "U-S-A! U-S-A!" while pumping his fist in the air.

Soon the whole section has picked up the chant: "That shit's fucking scary, man!" his friend says. Responds Raymond: "What else do you want them to say?"

I'm reading the Raymond book now. It's reminiscent of Jack Abramoff colleague, Michael Scanlon's appreciation of the usefulness of getting unwitting "religious whackos" to do their dirty work. Perlstein writes:

... Raymond is quite explicit that "both sides do it" is a myth: " When it came to playing in the gutter, we were the professionals—the Dems weren't even junior varsity."

Raymond himself writes:

In GOP circles in 2002 it seemed preposterous that anything you did to win an election could be considered a crime. For ten years I'd been making phone calls with the intent to manipulate voters; hell, I'd been handsomely rewarded for it. In my business, communication devices were all lethal weapons—and every fight was dirty.... Even the guys who didn't expose undercover CIA operatives, proposition congressional pages, and send other people's children off to die in an impossible war wouldn't rat on the ones who did.... I was truly beginning to understand how few metaphysical limitations a person is up against once he decides that the truth is what he makes it. From then on, two plus two would equal whatever sum I found most useful."

The party that routinely accuses its Democratic rivals of advocating moral relativism has become, not just comfortable with, but skilled at situational ethics.

"Attempting to gill net bad guys"

Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein dissects the problem with FISA, and points to a New Yorker audio with The Looming Tower's Lawrence Wright, explaining how he himself fell under surveillance without a warrant, despite assurances to the contrary.

Electronic surveillance (and overdependence on it) is a kind of armchair way of gathering intelligence, and no substitute for "good human intelligence work out there — where the bad guys are."

CQ observes:

It’s just not true, no matter how many times administration officials say it, that critical operations to find the kidnappers of American soldiers in Iraq and an al Qaeda cell in Germany were held up by FISA regulations. McConnell himself said he was mistaken.

[. . .]

As former counterterror agent Michael Tanji put it on Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog: “It’s bad enough that the Director of National Intelligence is trotting out a bogus threat so the government can snoop on all Internet traffic. What’s worse is that this kind of mass surveillance is a pretty lame way to catch the honest-to-God bad guys.”

Tanji added, “The fact that we are essentially attempting to gill-net bad guys is a fairly strong indicator that the intelligence community has yet to come up with an effective strategy against information-age threats.”

Worth reading in full.

[h/t A-Tone Music]

FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3216737.ece

[h/t Crooks and Liars]