What Republicans Taught Me

During early voting, my wife described having the feeling that after eight, long years, the country's fever was beginning to break. But that's not the same as being healthy and whole again.

I've been following the discussions about what Obama and the Dems should do (or not do) about prosecuting people involved in the Bush torture program, and I realize that getting control of our country back is not the same as America being back. There is a lot to repair. Bush/Cheney is determined never to be held accountable, and they have good reason to believe they won't be.

Holding The Country Hostage

by digby

Jack Goldsmith tells us that if there are any prosecutions or further investigations into the torture regime the lawyers who give president's legal advice in the future will feel constrained and we'll all be killed in our beds. This is, of course, the same thing we were told about the warrantless wiretapping: we have to allow these telcom industries to have amnesty or they won't cooperate in the future and we'll all be killed in our beds. Or, as Goldsmith reiterates at some length, we have to let the CIA be immunized for torture and kidnapping because if we don't they'll be afraid to be "aggressive" and the terrorists will kill us all in our beds. Again and again, we are told that the only way to keep us "safe" is for the government to be allowed to "take the gloves off" and break the law with impunity. This is blackmail. Allow us to do whatever we want or the country gets it.

. . .

I do not accept this idea that in order to keep the country safe we have to allow all these people to break the law and suffer no consequences. It's a complete inversion of the entire system. The reason we have a constitution and a bill of rights in the first place is to keep the citizens safe --- from the government. If you can throw it out because some nutcase blows up a building it's very hard to see why the police can't throw it out when they are dealing with gang members or drug lords or common murderers. After all, their job is to "keep us safe" too. Why is that any different?

I see similar behavior even inside the Democratic Party, with those habituated to wielding power thinking they can get the rest to back down on command: Let us do what we want, or the Party gets it. Democrats have to do more than re-learn how to win. They have to re-learn how to fight for what's right when there may be a political cost. "All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing." -- Edmund Burke

Why can't we hold torturers accountable and still find out the truth?
By Dahlia Lithwick

And that's the crazy-making bit in all the talk of bygones and goodwill. Nobody is suggesting that those who authorized torture and wiretapping were sadists or brutes. But they did a lot worse than mix stripes and plaids. They broke the law. They violated domestic and international laws, and they committed war crimes. They did so deliberately and with the "cover" of cynically bad legal memoranda. And those who have been entrusted as the nation's top law enforcers now claim that public disapproval is punishment enough.

Digby again:

Torture Zombie

by digby

There is absolutely no reason to believe that the next time a Republican is elected to the presidency he or she won't pick right up where they left off. That is the story of the last 40 years and until there is some price to pay they will keep right on doing it, escalating each time. For all the Colin Powell's who have come over from the Dark Side, there a many more who were trained in this worldview during this long conservative era. At some point they will try to keep power permanently. All it would take is just the right kind of crisis for them to justify it. After all, the precedents are all lined up --- normalized and legalized each step of the way by Democrats who didn't want to spend their political capital to stop it.

And that's what I keep coming across now that it looks like Obama may be more bipartisan than transformational - the desire (in online progressive circles, anyway) for Democrats to stop being spineless, to stop going along to get along and stand up to these guys, to stop doing the smart, political thing and start doing the right thing again.

One thing I've learned from the last dozen years of watching Republicans is that they respect power and scorn weakness. Because Democrats tend to avoid conflict, the GOP sees them as weak and exploitable, featherweights who can't take a punch. Once you throw in the towel, you're their bitch.

The most miserable example of this was in 2005 when they got Sen. Dick Durbin to cry and apologize on the floor of the Senate for comments about prisoner treatment at Guantanamo. The right had gone into full torches-and-pitchforks mode over Durbin's comments. The point of the right's outrage was to get Durbin (and the Democrats) to roll over on their backs and pee in the air. With Durbin, they succeeded. And as long as they get away with it, they'll keep doing it, as Pres. Bill Clinton observed in 2004. It's about establishing dominance - a game of chicken - and they think Democrats will always blink first.

Jonathan Turley alluded to this behavior while on the Rachel Maddow Show discussing whether or not Democrats will pursue Bush officials over the torture program (emphasis mine):

TURLEY: No. I don't believe that anyone seriously believes in the administration that what they did was legal. This is not a close legal question. Waterboarding is torture. It has been defined as a war crime by U.S. courts and foreign courts. There's no ambiguity in it. That's exactly why they have repeatedly tried to stop any court from reviewing any of this. And so what's really happening here is a rather clever move at this intersection of law and politics, that what the administration is doing is they know that the people that want him to pardon our torture program is primarily the Democrats, not the Republicans. Democratic leadership would love to have a pardon so they could go to their supporters and say, "Look, there's really nothing we could do. We're just going to have this truth commission. We'll get the truth out but there really can't be indictments now." Well, the Bush administration is calling their bluff. They know that the Democratic leadership will not allow criminal investigations or indictments. And in that way the Democrats will actually repair Bush's legacy because he'll be able to say there's nothing stopping indictments or prosecutions but a Democratic Congress and a Democratic White House didn't think there was any basis for it.

Democrats have shown little stomach for prosecuting the Bushies, in part because Nancy Pelosi (and others) probably wears a scarlet "A" for Accessory underneath her business suit. They want this issue to just go away. Democrats want to play nice, all bipartisan and non-confrontational. The GOP knows this. And they've learned that by puffing and thumping their chests, they can get Democrats to roll over - for the good of the country, or whatever - should Democrats begin to grow spines.

The electoral smackdown earlier this month hasn't killed the zombie. It just stunned it. It has to be put down. That will take Democrats not just growing spines, but deciding that some issues are important enough that they stop acting like politicians and do the right thing. That's change America can believe in.

TURLEY: You know, Rachel, there has never been a brighter line. This has always been a crime. It's always been a war crime. It's always been immoral. The question is not whether the act is immoral, but whether moral people will stand forward and say, "We're not going to act like politicians for once. We're going to act like statesmen and we're going to stand by principle and we're going to say, 'Yes, let's investigate.' And if there are crimes here, let's prosecute."

Coming Down

Post-election, I don't come down from running on coffee, chocolate and little sleep until mid-November. I spent Friday afternoon and yesterday in bed trying to shake off the traditional post-election cold. My wife says, with Obama's election, it feels as if the country's long fever has finally broken.

But not completely. Stephen Towe's piece this morning in the Asheville Citizen-Times (sorry, no link) reminded me of what Bill Maher said Friday: "The hard core Republican base is like a stalker. Rejection just makes them crazier." Towe's probably out stockpiling guns.

Honestly, based on rhetoric I heard in the last weeks before Election Day - thoughtfully reprised by Mr. Towe - if Obama won, walls would bleed, closets would eat children, rivers would turn to blood, and we'd all spew pea soup. Well, none of those Election Night events were reported by the press. Leave it to an MSM in the tank for Obama to suppress the truth.

It's the GOP's turn to do some soul searching, if it still has one to search. Commenting on the Special Prosecutors and "trumped up" investigations of the Clinton years, Maher said, "If Republicans really want to look into something for the next four years, my suggestion, try a mirror."

Amen.

No Confidence

From today's NYT:

Two weeks after persuading Congress to let it spend $700 billion to buy distressed securities tied to mortgages, the Bush administration has put that idea aside in favor of a new approach that would have the government inject capital directly into the nation’s banks — in effect, partially nationalizing the industry.

As recently as Sept. 23, senior officials had publicly derided proposals by Democrats to have the government take ownership stakes in banks.

The Treasury Department’s surprising turnaround on the issue of buying stock in banks, which has now become its primary focus, has raised questions about whether the administration squandered valuable time in trying to sell Congress on a plan that officials had failed to think through in advance.

Six Degrees of Desperation

If you should receive any Bill Ayers/Obama e-mails/links, I'd like to see them. It's suddenly being talked about around my office. It seems to be part of a big push (by Palin, Rove, Davis & Co.) to knock the floundering U.S. economy off the front page. The Ayers/Obama "terrorist" connection is suddenly all over the Internet on conservative blogs, though not much in the MSM .... yet. (First Little Green Footballs, then the world!) They're obviously trying to earn free media for it. The Daily Show just called the ploy "Six Degrees of Desperation."

The McCain campaign is losing air like a sighing balloon. FiveThirtyEight.com now projects NC for Obama by +1.4 pts.

Creative destruction for the better half

From Greenwald:

Anyone arguing that [the people's] views should be ignored, that their judgment be overridden by the decree of the wiser, superior ruling class (see David Brooks and Kevin Drum as good examples), is simply endorsing the continuation of the predominant framework for how our country has been run for the last decade, at least. Whatever else that is, there's nothing "wise" about that framework. Even if one believes in principle that the country is best entrusted to the elevated wisdom of a magnanimous and superior ruling class, and that majoritarian opinion should be systematically ignored, our ruling class -- the one we actually have -- is anything but wise and magnanimous. It's bloated, incestuous, reckless, inept, self-interested, endlessly greedy and corrupt at its core. Ye shall know them by their fruits. It's hard to imagine anything less wise than continuing to submit to its dictates.

Liberation from -- one could say "destruction of" -- the system run by that ruling establishment class is of critical importance.

Yesterday was the first shot. Round one.

Tomorrow, the Senate.

"Why is McCain so mad?"

From a TPM post: My 8 Year Old Son's Debate Analysis

Wall Street's Lifeboat Ethics

I hear on the news that the Obama campaign already has an ad out using clips from last night's debate. Entitled "Zero," it highlights the fact that McCain never once used the words "middle class." Implication: The omission speaks volumes about McCain's priorities. That, and having his campaign staffed by lobbyists.

More striking was this clip of an exchange this week between Larry Kudlow (CNBC, National Review; formerly with the Reagan administration, Freddie Mac and Bear-Stearns) and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders:



Sanders mocks free-marketer Kudlow as a socialist for supporting the disaster capitalist bailout of Wall Street. Ordinarily, government expenditures designed to help Main Street pay bills or provide health care for families are non-starters for Kudlow and his fellows. Benefiting Main Street is irrelevant. Such actions are un-capitalist. They present a moral hazard and tilt the country towards socialism. Conservatives oppose such actions on principle. "Oh, no!" Sanders mimics. Yet here Kudlow argues, "Every twenty or thirty or fifty years, I'm okay with it." Yes, when it is his friends in peril.

Kudlow argues [1:59] that a taxpayer-funded bailout of Wall Street moguls will "first and foremost help Main Street, middle-class people." Why the sudden concern for you and me?

"Wall Street went bust! I mean, look what happened. Bear-Stearns went under. Lehman Brothers went under. Merrill had to sell," argues Kudlow [3:58]. When Wall Street is in trouble, government must not blink before rushing to the rescue.

Uh, huh. When New Orleans went under (water) and people drowned, conservative pundits and bloggers argued that taxpayers had no responsibility for bailing out people who "irresponsibly" lived in a town established below sea level in the eighteenth century. Bush promised help. New Orleans is still waiting.

These are Wall Street’s lifeboat ethics. As the titanic U.S. economy lists badly, Wall Street brokers, bankers and speculators of the second Gilded Age want those of us in steerage to buy them lifeboats - to the tune of $700 billion - promising to come back and pick us up after the ship goes down.

We have seen that movie.

If BS were currency

"If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself." - conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, National Review Online

Parker has thrown in the tiara, and calls for Palin to step aside for the love of her country and good of her party:

Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who Is Clearly Out Of Her League.

No one hates saying that more than I do. Like so many women, I’ve been pulling for Palin, wishing her the best, hoping she will perform brilliantly. I’ve also noticed that I watch her interviews with the held breath of an anxious parent, my finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Unfortunately, it often does. My cringe reflex is exhausted.

What Do You Say?

Paulson: "Drop your opposition! Now! You have no chance of escape! Come forward with the $700 billion! If you wish to save your economy! This is your last warning! The choice is yours!"

Colonel Trautman: "What do you say John?"

Rambo: [loading his gun] "Fuck 'em!"

What Have They Got That I Ain't Got? - Part 2

The Times of London has it straight from recent studies, that a person's positions on hot-button political issues "can be predicted accurately from the way their bodies respond to frightening stimuli."

The results, which are published in the journal Science, revealed significant differences in both responses, which corresponded with people’s political views. Those with “markedly lower physical sensitivity to sudden noises and threatening visual images” tended to support liberal positions, while those with strong responses tended to be more conservative.

This would fit with the hypothesis that people who have more fearful responses to perceived threats are more likely to be conservative, while those who have weaker responses develop more liberal views.

I have noticed an obsession with fear for some time now among leading conservatives. Weakness, especially showing weakness or fear is a cardinal sin. The world is a tough place, goes the thinking. So you'd better grow up quick and grow up mean, so your fists get hard and your wits get keen (a political philosophy with all the sophistication of "A Boy Named Sue"). Thus, the Bush/Cheney/Rove/Palin obsession with not "blinking" or "cutting and running," with issuing belligerent statements and making John Kerry seem "French," etc. It is a projection of their own weakness, something I was getting at (less scientifically than Science magazine) with this post from last week.

Been there? Done that?

"Losing your job is more than a state of mind. It means staring at the ceiling and wondering how in God's name am I going to pay the mortgage payment and not lose my house. It means looking at your pregnant wife saying how in God's name am I going to come up with the thousands of dollars just for a normal birth, and God forbid I have a premature child that's going to cost me $250,000 ... Ladies and gentlemen, it's not a state of mind. It's a loss of dignity. It's a loss of respect, the loss of more than just your economic well being." - Joe Biden, this week in MI. (19:25)

A record to run on

From Andrew Sullivan, 53% of Americans favor a ban on torture.

A new survey of global public opinion [PDF] reveals the appalling truth. Americans are now among the people on earth most supportive of government's torturing prisoners. The United States is in the same public opinion ballpark as some of the most disgusting regimes on the planet:

Support for the unequivocal position was highest in Spain (82%), Great Britain (82%) and France (82%), followed by Mexico (73%), China (66%), the Palestinian territories (66%), Poland (62%), Indonesia (61%), and the Ukraine (59%). In five countries either modest majorities or pluralities support a ban on all torture: Azerbaijan (54%), Egypt (54%), the United States (53%), Russia (49%), and Iran (43%). South Koreans are divided.

Biker for Obama

I stopped by the local Obama HQ yesterday to drop off the name of a volunteer who wanted to be on the e-mail list. A big biker with arms like hams walked in, smiling broadly. He was on his way home to Yancey County after his ride and had seen the Obama sign. He just had to stop in, he said.

At first, he said, he wasn't so sure about Obama (being a black man, and all). But he started listening to him and realized he was the man. Let's hope there are many more like him at home.

Conservative patriotism

We stopped for a half gallon of milk last night while walking home after eating cheap Mexican. My wife chit-chatted with the store manager and lamented the early appearance of Halloween candy.

“It all comes from China,” he explained. They have to order it early. It comes in shipping containers, and since the warehouse isn’t air conditioned, they end up with it in stores early to prevent it from melting. Christmas merchandise, too, comes from China and must be ordered early.

Sarah said it was a shame that we didn’t put more Americans to work in factories making it here instead of sending our money to a “communist” country. It seems like, for the cost of shipping, we could pay Americans to do it.

“We couldn’t get people to show up,” the manager explained, “and they expect too much money even before they prove what they can do.” On the other hand, Hispanics are hard workers, he observed. They’ll do anything you ask them. But they’re illegal. If we could just make them legal...

Let’s recap. All flag-pin rhetoric to the contrary:

• Americans workers aren’t the best, most competitive workers in the world.
• Americans workers are slothful and greedy.
• The immigration issue is about the legal risks for employers hiring illegals.
• Illegal workers are more desirable than American workers because they work hard, come cheap, and do what they’re told.

Conservative patriotism.

What Have They Got That I Ain't Got?

A guy I once worked with fancied himself quite the stud. Trim, he wore a combed-back, black mullet. In his cubical he kept photos of himself water skiing barefoot. He made guttural noises in his throat when women walked by his cube. He also made extra money on weekends as a male strip-o-gram. But walk by his desk and lisp, “Hey, sailor. How’s it hanging?” and he would jump right out of his skin, fists clenched.

Thong riding up there a little, cowboy?

Those obsessed with displays of manliness are sometimes, like the Cowardly Lion, deeply unsure of their own. The thing liberals never seem to grasp is that for leading conservatives and neocons these electoral contests are not about issues or what is best for the country. They are about seeing which dog can pee highest on the tree. Power is like heroin, and the only thing that keeps what they fear most at bay - and it is not liberals.

One word from Obama would set the neocons and their enablers into crimson-faced spasms of rage: COWARDS. Far more than al Qaida, the thing they fear most, the thing they cannot face in themselves nor abide in others is weakness. Weakness is unpardonable. It is why they take such delight in tactics meant to emasculate their rivals. Find an opportunity to drop the C-bomb and watch their heads explode.

Push the button, Barack.

Type, Baby, Type

Tom Friedman was just on Meet the Press, hawking his new book in his usual full-of-himself way. He said that the next, great revolution beyond the IT revolution will be the the ET revolution: Energy Technology.

We'll need a mix of technologies going forward, including oil (as everyone agrees). The GOP's mistake is placing oil at the center of their energy "plan." When the GOP convention exploded in chants of "Drill, Baby, Drill," he said, imagine how the Chinese, Venezuelans and Saudis would have responded had they been sitting in a sky box.

Conventioneers might as well have been chanting, "IBM Selectric Typewriters! IBM Selectric Typewriters!"

At the Fair

I walked the Hendersonville, NC Apple Festival parade route today beside Democratic senatorial candidate, Kay Hagan, and her daughter, and behind Congressman Heath Shuler, who walked carrying his daughter (at least part of the way). I've done the parade before, but this time I saw no "thumbs down" or scowls, and the only "boo" was kidding from somebody's friend. Still, I noticed that there was a good bit of applause heading into downtown. It tapered off and got quiet in the thicker crowds in the middle of Main St. Then the applause picked up again as we headed out of downtown. The folks on the fringes tended to look less well-to-do.

On the way back up the parade route, I got my first-ever glimpse of Sen. Elizabeth Dole. She was with Republican gubernatorial candidate, Pat McCrory, riding high above the street on a colorful float.

We walked. They rode.

Smears? You ain't seen nothin' yet!

Republican Group Releases Radio Ads Exposing Obama As A Radical

"We released these eye-opening ads," said the chairman of the National Black Republican Association (NBRA), Frances Rice, "because the 2008 election will be about character and judgment, and Senator Barack Obama's actions and record show that he is not fit to be our next president." Rice stated that the ads will be aired on radio stations which target African Americans, particularly in battleground states. )

Video, billboards, radio.

Chasing Spamalot

"THIS DEFINITELY WARRANTS LOOKING INTO."

Dr. Danielle Allen's investigation into e-propaganda, in a profile Saturday by the WaPo:

"What I've come to realize is, the labor of generating an e-mail smear is divided and distributed amongst parties whose identities are secret even to each other," she says. A first group of people published articles that created the basis for the attack. A second group recirculated the claims from those articles without ever having been asked to do so. "No one coordinates the roles," Allen said. Instead the participants swim toward their goal like a school of fish -- moving on their own, but also in unison.

Obama's campaign, for better or worse, is writing the manual on combating this new asymmetrical guerrilla warfare. Obama has not shied away from the rumors -- he mentions them frequently. "Before I begin," he told a pro-Israel group this month, "I want to say that I know some provocative e-mails have been circulating throughout Jewish communities across the country. . . . They're filled with tall tales and dire warnings about a certain candidate for president. And all I want to say is -- let me know if you see this guy named Barack Obama, because he sounds pretty frightening."

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

We are the microgeneration

A new government report to be released Monday mirrors a Conservative Party policy announced six months ago advocating "a decentralised energy revolution," according to The Independent of London.

The government-backed report, to be published tomorrow, says that, with changed policies, the number of British homes producing their own clean energy could multiply to one million – about one in every three – within 12 years.

These would produce enough power to replace five large nuclear power stations, tellingly at about the same time as the first of the much-touted new generation of reactors is likely to come on stream.

[. . .]

The 130-page report . . . has been produced by a consultancy, Element Energy, after a wide-ranging survey of public attitudes on installing household renewable energy systems. It has been financed, and steered by, 14 official and other bodies including DBERR, the official Energy Savings Trust, five regional development agencies, British Gas, the Micropower Council and the Ashden Trust.

After some hemming and hawing over energy policy in Britain, including entertaining building more nuclear stations and reducing support for microgeneration that leaves Britain well behind the rest of Europe, the report may offer a change of direction:

The report offers a very different future, as do the Tories, who see microgeneration as central to their philosophy of redirecting power to individuals. David Cameron sees "decentralised energy" as "a key part of our political vision, energy for the post-bureaucratic age". He believes microgeneration could make Britain, and individual communities, "self-sufficient in energy".

Post-bureaucratic? Decentralized? Self-sufficient? What kind of conservatives are they growing over there? Real conservatives know that the only way to cheaper gas and more freedom is drilling, drilling and more drilling. Clearly, British conservatives are a looney bunch of DFHs. Call Bill O'Reilly to have them arrested.