I'm giving myself an imaginary Good Citizenship medal today because I actually got up and watched some of those Sunday morning shows where our nation's policies are supposedly set. I want to have gotten something out of it, and a nonexistent medal looks to be about it.

I'll admit that I was sort of looking forward to seeing David Brooks, Mr. "Conservative Voice So Reasonable That He Squats on the Op-Ed Page of The LIberal New York Times", defend his defense of the Libby pardon in the same room as people who've shared the Earth with him lo these past several years. For much of that time, Mr. Reasonable's official position on Impeachment Year '98 has been that while he doesn't think we ought to be impeaching people over their sex lives--Brooks can sometimes almost appear French in his depraved reasonableness--Bill Clinton committed perjury, which is a crime, and unlike your hippie types, Brooks is too good a man to ever think that shutting the country down for a year is too far to go in the pursuit of someone who has committed a crime. I have trouble connecting that cherished position to Brooks's continuing to say that the whole prosecution of Libby was a sham of a mockery of a travesty of a farce even though, as he conceded on the TV show, the guy was, you know, "guilty." Meet the Press has its own twist on the rountable format; even though the panelists are there together in the same room, the host takes them on one by one, so they don't get a chance to alert Brooks to possible holes in his argument by asking him, "What are you, nuts?" I do hope that at least the technicians had to edit out the choking laughter and fart noises.

Brooks reeled off the standard lies about how Libby has been disgraced and his career ruined and expressed the standard concern for his "family"--has anybody seen this remarkable family that melts the hearts of people who would normally argue that one of the best reasons for executing criminals is to stop them from breeding? Are the kids dipped in Swiss milk chocolate or what? Basically though, he seemed to think that LIbby shouldn't be punished because it would gladden the hearts of the wrong sort of person. In his op-ed, he referred to them--oh, hell, to us--as "howlers", as in "the howlers will howl" if Libby were pardoned but we'd howl anyway, as we "entered howling." It's not that much of a surprise that Brooks thinks that people who are upset that the White House conducted a smear campaign to silence a whistleblower with a serious case and exposed a covert intelligence agent in the process ought to just get over it, as Judge Scalia always advises on the subject of the 2000 election. But I was unprepared for his implicit judgement that while people who feel that way are a mad, slavering horde, the people who rigged Impeachment Year 1998 must have been meek-mannered sophists whispering sweet nothings in the ear of Lady Justice. I have to imagine that a mind and a moral compass that selective with regard to the facts must be a handy thing for a columnist to have, but I can imagine situations where it would get you in trouble. Here's hoping that Brooks knows enough to let his wife do the talking whenever he's approached by a cop with a breathalizer.

Over on Face the Nation, a small collection of journalists and journalist-flavored meat products were pointing out all the reasons that Hillary Clinton won't last till noon. She's been raking in the cash, leading in the polls, attracting whose crowds and radiating terrific energy--girl, just go home and bake some cookies, please! David Yepsen, a fellow from The Des Moines Register, taking the bait dangled at him by a host whose name I kept failing to catch, agreed that it might have been a sign of desperation that Hillary had Bill out there stumping for her "so early." I think we can all agree that he would have thought it was just as much a sign of desperation if she'd given Bill a plane ticket to Antarctica and a blow-up doll and told him to stay out of camera range until a year from this November. At one point the host described the Clinton campaign as "a political Rorshach test: if you like 'em, it's magic, and if you don't like 'em, this week was like watching a tired old act." That was honest of him, but he seemed to be citing it mainly to account for how either Clinton could appear in public and not be pelted with rotten vegetables.

I'm not ready to declare anyone a shoe-in or even a clear front-runner at this ridiculously early stage in the race; we are, after all, about six months away from the point where, in the 2004 race, the press started insisting that Howard Dean had it all sewn up. Still, with Hillary-hating at perhaps its lowest ebb ever (and probably more prevalent in hard-left circles than anywhere else), the media's devotion to it, and their constant insisting that her campaign song might as well be "Many Rivers to Cross," is beginning to seem not just stubborn but ungallant. At least it has its basis in sincere personal distaste. I'm not sure what to make of the media's continuing to do stories about the supposedly surprising failure of John McCain's campaign to catch fire, stories that are ludicrous on their face because they seem to assume that there was some point in our lifetimes where McCain stood as least as good a chance of somehow becoming president as, say, Ron Paul, or even Les Paul. (I'd say that he was never worse than neck and neck with RuPaul.) I used to think it was kind of sweet of the media to act as if McCain, who they like, had a snowball's chance in hell, but now it just seems mean. He's going to have to pay back some of that money, you know, and he'll never get back the wasted hours that he could have have spent with his family or building ships in bottles. We all know how this breaks down, right? By attacking the religious right and publically disagreeing with President Bush, McCain guranteed that he would never be able to get any more than a ragged handfuls of Republicans to vote for him. Then, having courted the very people whose minds were set in stone against him by giving in on things like torture and trying to kiss up to the religious right (by sucking up to the abandoned, discredited, dying Jerry Falwell--a pretty good example of how endearingly bad McCain is at pandering), he guaranteed that no one outside the ranks of the Republican hardcore would ever vote for him either. It's as elementary as political math gets, but the folks on Face the Nation nattered on about McCain's presidential viability as if it were something that had at one point existed. How dumb are they? Where do they get their information? What country do they think they're living in? Do they all routinely vote for Nader every four years?

On June 8, Fouad Adjami, one of the very special people who wrote letters to Judge Reggie Walton urging leniency for Scooter Libby, wrote an editorial for The Wall Street Journal that had the beyond-camp headline "Fallen Soldier." The editorial itself was written as an open plea to President Bush to do whatever it took to make sure that Libby would suffer no consequences from having lied and obstructed justice. Adjami wrote, "In 'The Soldier's Creed,' there is a particularly compelling principle: 'I will never leave a fallen comrade.' This is a cherished belief, and it has been so since soldiers and chroniclers and philosophers thought about wars and great, common endeavors... Scooter Libby was a soldier in your--our--war in Iraq" In the month since those words were first published, the op-ed has been much circulated, and Adjami has caught some flack for them. This has, if anything, accelerated since the president made his decision that Libby would never suffer a moment's unhappiness or inconvenience over his crime but would instead get to dip into the multi-million dollar "legal defense" fund his buddies threw together for him and move with silken ease into his new life of receiving fat checks and thunderous applause for appearing at Republican dinners, neocon picnics and Fox News to-dos. On MSNBC the yesterday, David Schuster had Adjami on and basically had him for lunch.

But the objections to what Adjami wrote are based on a misunderstanding. A lot of people took his editorial as an attempt to elevate Libby by comparing him to the soldiers serving in Iraq. But if anything, Adjami was graciously elevating the soldiers by suggesting that they deserve to mentioned in the same breath as the people he recognizes as the true patriotic heroes of our time--the politicians and other gasbags who, like himself, decide what they're afraid of and send other people's sons and daughter to get themselves wracked up so that our heroes can sleep a little better at night. These brave men and women--the George W. Bushes, the Dick Cheneys, the Richard Perles. the Paul Wolfowitzes, the Lewis Libbys, and, yes, the Fouad Adjamis--enjoy the military rhetoric and delight in draping themselves in it. Most of them have never served in the military and, indeed, would respond to the suggestion that they might ever have done so by shitting themselves in dismay over the sheer effrontery. These are people who "respect" our men and women in uniform in the exact same way that the president "respects" a handful of losers who couldn't even get out of jury duty, much less their obligations to the Texas Air National Guard. The Bushes, the Cheneys, the neocon professors have seen what actual military service does to a person. It gives him perspective, makes him a spoilsport liable to poke holes in some beautifully shaped abstract theory. Tommy Franks thought that Douglas Feith was the stupidest guy on the face of the earth, and in terms of things like seeing what was in front of his face and accurately processing information, Franks wasn't far off, but of the two, who had the more fun using a country and its population as his own personal Tinkertoy, and which one caught a lot of grief from trying to actually fix the mess? And do you have any doubt that Feith is the one who sleeps like a baby? Even Andrew Sullivan, back in his pro-war incarnation, used to express bewilderment over people who claimed to care that American soldiers were dying, because what the hell else were they there for? In a report from a National Review cruise in the current The New Republic, Dinesh d'Souza is described as announcing that the Democratic Party is the party of losers and the Republican Party the party of winners, and in this equation, who do you suppose are the people who might get killed?

"Scooter Libby was a soldier in your--our--war in Iraq." Who is the "our" referred to here? The answer that immediately leaps to mind is that it can't be the American people as a whole. I do think that every single one of us, whether we oppose the war or not, ought to feel that is somehow ours, in the sense that we can't escape responsibility for it and can't help being partly complicit in what it's doing to us and the rest of the world. It's killing Americans, and Americans will inevitably be caught up in the explosion of anti-American feeling and terrorist violence that it has inspired and will continue to inspire; and no American ought to be able to stand apart from the degradation of America's standing in the world that it has brought about, or can be fully indifferent to the ways in which it has sped up the process by which our country grows weaker, less secure. But that can't be what Adjami is getting at; the word "soldier" seems meant to refer to those who are active in keeping the war going. But more to the point, it refers to those who were so vital in getting the war started in the first place. The American public as a whole has no place here, really. When the White House first started hinting, in the days after 9/11, that it thought that a quick war in Iraq would be fun and give everyone a pick-me-up, the pollsters jumped on it, and the results came back loud and clear: most Americans felt that, yeah, it would be fun to do Desert Storm again, but we've just had a real terrorist attack from a serious enemy, maybe it's time to grow up and stop using the military for easy ego boosts, we'd really rather you concentrated on wiping out the Taliban and destroying al-Qaeda and bringing the people who did this to justice, how about we just agree that you could have done it much better than your father? The White House had to spend more than a year pounding away--look, it'll be so quick and so much fun, and I really will do it so much better than daddy did and I can't wait to spring that on him at Thanksgiving, and hey, if you're so hung up al-Qaeda, mmmmmwell, NigeruraniumyellowcakesecretmeetingSaddamsupportsterrorism, what do you say? Eventually, after this vigorous softsoaping, most Americans seemed to say yes, but we have now reached a point where more Americans have been opposed to the war for longer than more Americans supported it, whether or not you factor in that initial year of test-marketing. Adjami credits Libby with something that he and his fellows see as far more heroic and noble than the tacky "war" overseas where people without tenure are running around and getting shot and blown up. He's talking about the war for the war--the public relations battle to get the war off the ground, to keep it seen as legitimate as the worms started crawling out, and finally, the ongoing battle to paint its creators and proponents in the best of all possible lights, a war that will be going on from now until whenever every one of us is dead.

It is by recognizing that the war to create the war and to protect the reputations of those who created it is the real noble cause that Adjami can call the smirking serial killer Lewis Libby "an honorable man." He couldn't do that if he were using the phrase as it was once used, meaning a man of good moral character who can be trusted; Adjami is using it in as it is currently used, to mean "He's on my side so I don't care if he set his mother on fire." This is how Adjami can say that "this case rested on a political difference over the prosecution of the war, that Valerie Plame Wilson and Joseph Wilson were protagonists in a struggle over the conflict. It was then, it should be recalled, that you, Mr. President, said that any of your staff caught up in that case "would no longer work in my administration." And it was then that the Justice Department stepped out of the way to let a special prosecutor launch an investigation that would, by necessity, have to vindicate itself. The better part of wisdom was to see the matter for what it was--a policy difference over the war, a matter that should never have been criminalized." Nine years ago, some of us failed to get exorcised about Bill Clinton's lying about the workings of his genitals because we failed to see how either said workings or his lying about them had any impact on the workings of government, but I'm here to tell you, the man got a blow job. Libby lied about how government officials who might have been doing better things with their time conspired to cause pain to someone whose great crime was to tell the truth about one detail in which the White House arranged to talk us into war. There is no way to gloss over this in a way that does not make the White House officials look petty, disgusting, and committed to not just lying to get their way but actively opposed to truth itself. Which hasn't stopped many commentators from taking the tack that it was more morally repugnant for Joseph Wilson to tell the truth than it was for the White House to punish him for it, any more than it would ever give Adjami pause to casually refer to telling the truth and attempting to punish people for telling the truth as "a policy difference over the prosecution of the war."

If Adjami's little plea for mercy has stuck in the craw of many, it's because underneath its tear-stained surface is the full, seething ocean of contempt that the Bush people in general and the neocons in particular harbor for the American people, for everyone they depend on to put their little fantasy term papers into motion, and certainly for anyone who would hold them accountable for anything, as if they were goddamn commoners. It must strike them as unbelievably impertinent that circumstances have forced them to try and explain themselves now, or rather to come right out and point out to us thickies just how magnificent and above it all their kind are. They may actually lose some power now, but they'll always have each other, and can spend a jolly time in their dotage sitting around the think tanks, reading their latest papers aloud and complimenting each other on being brilliant enough to always agree with themselves. They'll go to their graves believing that they're the real heroes, the true patriots, and given that less than thirty percent of the country agree with them, I'd be happy to let them think what they want and leave it at that, if only the scaly bastards believed in democracy.

[x-posted at The Phil Nugent Experience]

CBC Still Pushing Fox Debate...Even Though No One Is Going

The CBC's defense of their partnership with conservative propaganda outlet Fox News Channel is becoming increasingly absurd:

"We're moving forward no matter what. We're definitely having a debate in Detroit in September," said CBC Chairwoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, who serves on the institute's board and represents Detroit in Congress. "We may change the format. We might have more than just the presidential candidates," she said.

Debates between minor candidates are not rare. Biden, Kucinich and Gravel discussed the Iraq war at a June 6 debate at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. But it is unusual for such events to enjoy the backing of a national cable news channel.

Under such circumstances, one might expect Fox News to be making for the studio exit. But a representative said the network is "moving forward with the debate as scheduled on Sept. 23."

So the lack of attendance at the debate is going to change the format of the debate so drastically that not just the tier 3 presidential candidates are going to be invited, but black people are still supposed to believe that a network that has gone out of its way to portray African Americans in a negative light is going to be one worth paying attention to? From what Congresswoman Kilpatrick is saying, it might not even be a "presidential debate" anymore.

Naturally, Fox is sticking to the deal. With Biden and Gravel attending, the opportunities to make Democrats look like lunatics will be endless.

Bennie Thompson (D-LA) still hasn't quite given up on convincing the front runners to attend.

Fox has been seeking to improve its relations with African-American groups, especially after an embarrassing incident last month when it mistook Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) for indicted Rep. William Jefferson (D-La.), another black lawmaker. Pulling out of the black caucus debate would likely jeopardize the network's outreach efforts.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), head of the CBC Institute, said he still held out hope that he could convince the front-runners to attend. He preferred not to dwell on the idea of a lonely stage with Biden, Kucinich and Gravel lobbing bombs at their absentee rivals.

"We're still working to get the other people to reconsider," Thompson said. "Their decision to make Fox News the issue is not a good idea. Whether you agree or disagree with [Fox], they have a viewership."

What an absurd argument. Every cable news station has a "viewership".

As frustrated as I may be with the Politico sometimes, they manage to mention something few people discussing the CBC debate have--that there is another debate scheduled that will air on CNN, rather than FOX.

Thompson said the CBC Institute would make debate viewers aware of the no-shows.

"There will be a direct effort to put in the minds of [viewers] that every candidate had more than enough time to put this on their schedule," he said.

But the major candidates are unlikely to face criticism from the black community for taking a pass on this one. Most have accepted an invitation to appear at another black caucus debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C., in January. That one is televised by CNN.

That fact preempts the kind of laughable criticism from FOX and their allies that Democratic candidates refusing to attend the debate on a racist network are simply unconcerned with issues facing African Americans. The problem, quite clearly, is the FOX News Channel.

The influence of African American voters in the Democratic primary has probably never been greater. Regardless of how one feels about Obama as a candidate, his presence alone makes competition for black votes more fierce, and forces the other major candidates to respect our concerns.

Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum think Fred Thompson is in big trouble, given the news that he was hired to lobby against the abortion gag rule back in 1991. I'm not so sure, given the reactions on the right. At Free Republic, the stories (here and here) play it as a hit piece; a typical Freeper comment is this one:

Hey, LA Slimes! Make that Hildabeast-supporting abortion group show us the billing records. Otherwise, it's just another lying liberal hit piece done for the Clintons against their strongest competition.

And that's the problem right there. Because the alternative epistemology of the wingnuts makes it possible for them to simply dismiss any news that comes from mainstream sources, Republican candidates are insulated from bad anything that might hurt them with the base as long as it's reported in the 'liberal media'. (If Drudge had reported this, it might get more traction.) Democrats are held accountable for consistency, because on the whole we believe in the existence of objective reality. Wingnuts don't; they believe that reality bends to Will, that they can create and live in their own wingnut-friendly reality.

It's a tremendous advantage for Republicans, because consistency simply isn't an issue where there is no shared reality. It's how Alito managed to lull Democrats without alienating the radical right; it's how Bush could project 'compassionate conservatism' without losing the base; it's how a Republican field with four divorces among the top three candidates (six divorces if you throw in Newt Gingrich) raises nary an eyebrow among the defenders of 'traditional marriage'.

And someone like Thompson is going to milk this advantage for everything he can.

Maybe Josh is right, and Thompson's denial really will come back to haunt him. I wouldn't bet on it.

Hertzberg on Cheney

There are plenty of reasons to love the New Yorker (Sy Hersh, Anthony Lane, Jane Mayer, James Surowiecki), but Hendrik Hertzberg's commentaries are high on my list. Reading them, I'm filled with admiration and despair--the former for Hertzberg's writing; the latter at the inadequacy of my own. Hertzberg's prose combines precision and clarity, dry wit, and a carefully controlled (but blistering) outrage. What crappy blockbusters are for Anthony Lane, the Bush administration is for Hertzberg: an inspiration to ever-greater heights of furious brilliance.

His latest commentary (on Cheney, prompted by the WaPo series) is a particularly stellar example. Here are some highlights:

It took thirty years for "Frost / Nixon" to reach Broadway. Assuming that civilization survives and the Great White Way remains above water, we can expect "Cheney / Bush" to mount the boards sometime in the late twenty-thirties or early twenty-forties. The playwright and the actors, whoever they are, will have plenty to work with. The story of the scowling, scheming, domineering, silently sinister Vice-President and the spoiled, petted prince who becomes his plaything is irresistible—set in a pristine White House, played against an ominous, unseen background of violence and catastrophe, like distant thunder, and packed with drama, palace intrigue, and black comedy.

And:

[F]or the past six years, Dick Cheney, the occupant of what John Adams called "the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived," has been the most influential public official in the country, not necessarily excluding President Bush, and his influence has been entirely malign. He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy, and ignorant President he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that can plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable "war on terror."

And:

That unfortunate day in the duck blind wasn't the only time the Vice-President has seemed more Elmer Fudd than Ernst Blofeld; last week, Cheney provoked widespread hilarity by pleading executive privilege (in order to deny one set of documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee) while simultaneously maintaining that his office is not part of the executive branch (in order to deny another set to the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives). On Cheney's version of the government organization chart, it seems, the location of the Office of the Vice-President is undisclosed.

Really, go read the whole thing. And if you're not already familiar with him, go browse his archived pieces. While you're there, don't miss this one, with the most devastating opening sentence I've seen in a long time:

The hanging of Saddam Hussein was meant to be, by the depraved standards of the Iraq war, something of a feel-good moment.

Moral clarity: the antidote to 'moral clarity'.

Damned Brits

LONDON, England (AP) -- An Iraqi doctor who allegedly berated others at Cambridge for not being devout Muslims is the first to be charged in connection with the failed car bombings in London and Glasgow, British police said Friday.

Bilal Abdullah, 27, arrested at Glasgow airport after the Jeep Cherokee he was riding in rammed into a terminal building, was charged Friday with conspiring to cause explosions, Scotland Yard said.

Seven other suspects remained in custody, including the alleged driver of the Jeep, hospitalized with severe burns.

-------------------

How are we supposed to win the war on terror if our supposed "allies" are responding to terrorism like it's a law enforcement matter?!

Immigration and Security

Victor Davis Hanson's latest, on immigration, is the usual mixture of dubious assumptions, half-truths, platitudes, misread polling data, and just plain craziness. You can skip all that. There's one line that encapsulates the nuttiness behind Hanson's (and the other wingnuts') nativist hysteria:

The public thinks anti-terrorism efforts are futile when hundreds of miles on our southern border are, for mysterious reasons, left wide open.

Yes, for reasons that are completely inexplicable, a 1,951-mile border between a wealthy country of 300 million people and a poorer country of 100 million has not been magically sealed so as to guarantee that nobody from the latter can ever enter the former illegally.

Go figure.

What Hanson never discusses is just what 'closing the border' would entail. A great big fence? As somebody or other said, if you build a 50-foot fence somebody else will build a 50-foot ladder. Massive troop deployment? I'm afraid our soldiers are otherwise occupied. Some kind of force field? Hasn't been invented yet.

The reality is that any solution that would be non-trivially effective would entail vast expenditures of money and personnel, neither of which would magically materialize; something else would have to be drastically shorted. In practice, 'closing the border' would make us less safe, not more, by diverting resources on a massive scale from more effective security measures (port safety, anyone?) to a hopeless and misdirected effort that even if it succeeded beyond the most improbable expectations would at best make us marginally less vulnerable in one particular aspect of the overal security situation.

In other words, 'closing the border' is exactly like 'victory in Iraq': an empty phrase that glosses over both the impossibility of the thing it describes and its irrelevance to the goals used to justify it.

Empty phrases, of course, are Hanson's shock troops in his own Global War on Liberal Ideas. For Hanson, for most of the wingnuts, there is no difference between an empty phrase and the thing it describes; to express the desire for 'victory in Iraq' is the same as achieving it. Practicalities aren't even an afterthought--they're not a thought at all, for Hanson. It doesn't matter that the war in Iraq has sown chaos across the Middle East, has weakened our military, has strengthened the very people who most want to attack us. What matters is that you use the right empty phrases to describe the thing.

What would really improve border security would be removing artificial barriers to legal entry. If the vast majority of people who want to come here to work could do so through official channels, the remainder would no longer pose the enforcement nightmare we have created for ourselves. The enormous resources we currently spend on catching people who have done nothing wrong beyond crossing an arbitrary and fictitious line in the sand could be redirected to real security measures. That's if, of course, we wanted to pursue a strategy based on practical effectiveness rather than conformity to the slogan du jour.

But then, if America wanted that, we wouldn't be in Iraq.

[Cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo]

BLOOMBERG: SLIGHTLY LESS FASCIST THAN GIULIANI

At least, that seems to be the selling point in this WaPo article on Bloomberg's possible entry into the race. The primary cause of the media fascination with Bloomberg is not his viability as a candidate, but the opportunities he gives media pundits to engage in wild speculation without accountability.

At any rate, this seems a stretch to me:

Giuliani is selling himself as a strong leader who achieved the impossible in bringing an ungovernable New York under control, even if it required some bruising confrontations along the way. But Bloomberg, his admirers say, has shown that the city of 8 million can be run successfully in a far more understated fashion -- that a mayor can reduce crime without cultivating a sheriff's swagger and antagonizing minorities, protect against terrorism without overly fixating on security, and tackle deeply rooted urban problems without getting into public spats with top appointees.

"Bloomberg shows it's possible to manage New York without offending people," said Peter Kostmayer, a former Democratic congressman who is president of Citizens for New York City, a nonprofit group. "His entrance would be a complete disaster for Giuliani, because then you're able to compare. You have one mayor who was successful and turned off lots of people and one who was successful and has turned on lots of people. "

Bloomberg didn't offend people? Really? because I was pretty turned off when Bloomberg used the racially charged word "thugs" to refer to the NYC Transit Union (otherwise known as the folks essential to making New York City able to function) during their strike last year.

Toussaint said he took issue with Bloomberg's earlier remarks that the union "thuggishly" turned its back on New York. He called the language "undignified and unbecoming."

"We are not thugs,'' Toussaint said. "We wake up at 3 and 4 in the morning to move the trains in this town. That's not the behavior of thugs and selfish people."

Many more people were "turned off" by revelations that Bloomberg enlisted significant resources to spy on political enemies of the Republican Party before their convention in New York in 2004.

CNN correspondent Tom Foreman reported on the May 17 edition of The Situation Room, that "the New York Police Department was secretly monitoring" protesters before and during the convention "and not just at public events." In March, Bloomberg had defended the surveillance activities, saying, "We were not keeping track of political activities. ... We have no interest in doing that." As a March 28 New York Times article noted, however, "the records [in federal lawsuits] show that the police did covertly monitor political activity. Virtually every intelligence report, even those about expressly peaceful groups, described the political viewpoints of the organizations."

I'd say the Bloomberg turns a great deal of people off. Apparently, few of those people are reporters. Even more frustrating, the media still seems to think it can offer the perspective of the black community simply by interviewing Al Sharpton.

The starkest contrast has come in dealings with minority neighborhoods. Giuliani feuded with several top African American elected officials, and was criticized for his handling of fatal police shootings of unarmed black men. Bloomberg can seem out of touch with the city's minority areas -- in 2001, he tried to connect with a Harlem congregation by marveling that his daughter's chief rival in equestrian racing was black. But he won nearly half of the black vote in his 2005 reelection. And when police killed an unarmed black man in Queens in November, Bloomberg moved to quell the uproar, going so far as to meet with the Rev. Al Sharpton.

"Giuliani had people suffer the illusion that meanness was tantamount to management," Sharpton said. "When people would say, why was he not reaching out to people who disagreed with him, he would justify that by saying that's not how you manage. Well, Bloomberg has reached out but managed anyway."

Bloomberg being an improvement over Giuliani is hardly a selling point for his candidacy in my view. But more importantly, since he hasn't declared or formed an exploratory committee, why is this article being written?

Fred Thompson, Nixon Mole

Boston Globe investigative reporter Michael Kranish has taken a look at Fred Thompson's role in the Watergate investigation, a gig that brought him into the national spotlight, and Fred's own account paints him as a mole for the Nixon administration.

WASHINGTON -- The day before Senate Watergate Committee minority counsel Fred Thompson made the inquiry that launched him into the national spotlight -- asking an aide to President Nixon whether there was a White House taping system -- he telephoned Nixon's lawyer.

Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, "At That Point in Time," Thompson said he acted with "no authority" in divulging the committee's knowledge of the tapes, which provided the evidence that led to Nixon's resignation. It was one of many Thompson leaks to the Nixon team, according to a former investigator for Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong , who remains upset at Thompson's actions.

"Thompson was a mole for the White House," Armstrong said in an interview. "Fred was working hammer and tong to defeat the investigation of finding out what happened to authorize Watergate and find out what the role of the president was."

Fred is unconcerned about the new story, treating the whole thing as a joke -- and possibly a way to jumpstart book sales.

Asked about the matter this week, Thompson -- who is preparing to run for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination -- responded via e-mail without addressing the specific charge of being a Nixon mole: "I'm glad all of this has finally caused someone to read my Watergate book, even though it's taken them over thirty years."

This despite his well-crafted image as a straight-shootin', outside-the-beltway kind of guy. But who cares? He's doing a damn good job of rewriting history:

The view of Thompson as a Nixon mole is strikingly at odds with the former Tennessee senator's longtime image as an independent-minded prosecutor who helped bring down the president he admired. Indeed, the website of Thompson's presidential exploratory committee boasts that he "gained national attention for leading the line of inquiry that revealed the audio-taping system in the White House Oval Office." It is an image that has been solidified by Thompson's portrayal of a tough-talking prosecutor in the television series "Law and Order."

Yep. Arthur Branch for President. That's what his campaign will be all about. It remains to be seen if the American public is dumb enough to fall for it.

Cross-posted at Birmingham Blues.

Okay, guest posting. I swear I didn't just invite myself in here. Anyway, I'm D. Sidhe, as you may or may not know, and Steve said I could post what I wanted, though he admittedly seemed a little alarmed when I noted that it might end up being a recipe for Pringles Mashed Potatoes, so I've decided to save that for later, and my own place. You're welcome.

So you're gonna get just the one attempt at blogging out of me here, I think, and I had some trouble deciding what it would be. I was going to talk about my and my partner's recent anniversaries in thwarting the traditional Christian Nation Focus on the Family paradigm (eighteen years together, not bad for a couple of inherently promiscuous poly open-relationship sorts!) but my partner has informed me that a single signature is all it'll take to cancel my health insurance, so I guess I'll keep it a bit more impersonal.

Without more ado, may I present the voice in my head that is apparently Bill "Culture Warrior" O'Reilly's biggest fan, and the Watch It Like A Wingnut movie review*.

Wow! We finally got to see the Transformers movie, and it just goes to prove everything I've believed all along! But first, a confession. My partner and I went to the theater in our brand new car, which is a tree-hugging hybrid, and a foreign car at that. I'm pretty sure this means my partner is a traitor to the idea of America. I'm so ashamed. And I was even more ashamed after seeing the movie because it is, quite simply, the most American movie… ever.

For starters, it's very pro-military. And even better, pro-defense spending. If we hadn't been pouring all that money into military research, we would never be able to defeat the evil alien robots, so thank God for that, and also for the NRA, which helps us all defend ourselves from evil alien robots.

The movie also makes the point that an alien invasion would establish the president's legacy as a take-charge, leadership, kicking-ass kind of guy. So I'm pretty much rooting for that now, since really, if you think about it there was very little collateral damage, so the president wouldn't even have to go to any funerals, and besides it just looked cool.

Now, there was a recruiting ad for the Marines before the movie, but that's okay because the movie itself proves what I've been saying all along: You don't have to enlist to fight in the War on Terror! The main character, some skinny nerdy guy whose name I can't remember, doesn't do that. Instead, he buys a car. A gas-guzzling, American car. Which turns out to be a cool alien robot who's both his bodyguard and a really good way to get the chick the guy wants. And with the help of the chick and the car robot and the other good robots (all of whom, I note, were good American cars and trucks, big ones, too, and none of those lame hybrids.) and a couple of military guys who were just sort of hanging around and a couple of hackers, the nerdy kid manages to save the world. How? By buying a car! And also by memorizing lines from cartoons.

Even the hackers helped save the world, so now when your mom tells you you'll never amount to anything just sitting in front of the computer eating Cheetos all day, tell her she's wrong. If alien robots come, you'll be needed to save the planet, which is way more important than sitting in a kiddy pool in the desert somewhere with all those other guys who got basically blown up when they weren't expecting it and none of their weapons helped very much, so you have to stay here and make sure you're safe, because if you enlisted and got your arms blown off, for example, the whole world would be destroyed when you couldn't type anymore. It's like that thing Spock was always saying about the good of the many. And anyway, one of the robots gets killed and another loses his leg, so it's not like we're not all on the frontlines in the War no matter where we are.

But, okay, at the beginning, in the opening credits, there's something about the movie being produced in association with Hasbro, and the whole audience started laughing, because Hasbro is a pretty funny word. And then there are the military guys in a helicopter, and one of them keeps speaking Spanish, I guess, which annoys the other guys because they don't and they know he speaks good English, so why is he doing that? He might be making fun of them, and how would they even know? So they keep yelling at him to speak English, which makes sense, and he won't, and I think he gets eaten or killed or something or maybe it was some other guy, I couldn't really tell them apart.

Anyway, at some point the military guys end up in an Iraqi village, and they yell at some kid's dad that they need a telephone, and he just points to it, so everybody in Iraq speaks English well enough, too. I think this just proves how stupid the Left is when they say things like, oh, but we should keep the Arabic translators, even if they do keep being gay. Clearly they just want to use the military as a social experiment to integrate the gays. Which is pointless because we don't need them anyway. I mean, even the robots speak English.

I won't ruin the movie for you, because you should totally go see it instead of giving your money to Michael Moore to see his stupid hypocritical movie (If he was really interested in health care, he'd lose weight!). But I want to tell you a few other really cool things about the movie. At some point the Secretary of Defense tells some weaselly guy who looks kind of Arabic to me that he should do what the military guys want because "Losing is not an option with these guys" or something like that, and the whole audience just cheered! So those polls about how Americans think we're losing in Iraq, I don't know who they're polling, maybe they're just calling up the offices of CounterPunch and The New York Times or something. Because where I was sitting in that theater, everybody thinks we have no choice but to win!

Also, and I don't want to ruin this, but I don't know how they did it, they made the perfect argument for pardoning Scooter Libby—sometimes you have to defend your friends or family out of loyalty, and it's not right that you should have to have a criminal record just for being loyal. Loyalty is supposed to be a virtue, after all.

I also want to point out that the movie makes a great point that you shouldn't go around destroying dams just because the fish-huggers think you should, because they might be there for a very good reason, and it would endanger us all if the government had to explain why they needed to leave any dam where it is. We should just trust them, since they know more about this stuff than we do. And while we're at it, it's clear evidence that Hollywood has finally rejected that failed "theory" of evolution—the aliens are cars, not dinosaurs!

And, really, I think the whole thing is basically an analogy for Iraq—part of it is even in Iraq—where the Autobots are America, and the Decepticons are Al Quaeda insurgents, and Optimus Prime is Bush. Because the Decepticons want to take over the planet to get something from us—just like the oil in Iraq—and they also think humans should be killed because they don't deserve freedom. So the Autobots have to fight them because they think that Iraq, or in this analogy the humans, should have freedom. So, really, the Megatron guy just hates us for our freedoms, which is what the president has been saying all along.

Finally, I just want to encourage everybody to go see it. At last, at long last, the liberal secular progressives who control Hollywood have given us a movie that's not about hating Christ or about loving anal sex, but is instead about patriotism. I haven't been this proud to be eat American theater popcorn since Independence Day came out and proved that guys with computers can defeat an alien invasion. Booyah!

*I wrote this yesterday, and decided to let it sit for a day and see if it would rise, and in the meantime, apparently, actual wingnuts actually have said some of the same actual things in all apparent sincerity. I gather parody is dead as an art form. Also, crossposted to my place.

Well this is pretty bad:

As The Los Angeles Times showed yesterday, Libby's prison sentence was not "excessive" by legal standards, but such a statement by the president is sure to be embraced by defense lawyers all around the country (experts have already dubbed such an argument "The Libby Motion"). They're also sure to mention Bush's assertion that Libby's sentence as it stands after the commutation ($250,000 fine and two years probation) is "harsh." Meanwhile, the Times reports, "Federal prosecutors said Tuesday the action would make it harder for them to persuade judges to deliver appropriate sentences." This from an administration that's continually and inflexibly pushed for truly harsh penalties. The New York Sun reports that the first such invocation of Bush's order might come from an alleged Hamas operative convicted of obstruction charges.

I doubt the Bush Administration is concerned. The entire reason the Libby case came to be is because the Bush Administration puts political goals before national security.

The new rhetorical strategy conservatives employ when dealing with the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Brown is the idea that the goal of Brown was to achieve a "colorblind" society. To say you "don't see someones' color" may seem like a compliment, but it's actually a patronizing insult. Not only is it dishonest, since to make such a comment you would have to be conscious of my color as a social factor to believe not "seeing it" is some kind of virtue, but what the philosophy of colorblindness actually says is that being black is somewhat like having a disability, it is something to be "overlooked", ignored, like the stump of a severed limb or an awkward lisp.

Of course, what conservatives mean by colorblindness is the removal of all cultural and historical context from matters of importance--not because such issues don't matter, but because it allows them to write their own prejudice out of history.

Take George Will's most recent column:

The court ruled 5 to 4 that Seattle, which never had school segregation, and Louisville, which did but seven years ago completed judicially mandated remedial measures, must stop using race in assigning children to schools to produce particular racial ratios in enrollments. How did we get from this: "Distinctions by race are so evil, so arbitrary and invidious that a state bound to defend the equal protection of the laws must not invoke them in any public sphere" (the NAACP's brief, written by Thurgood Marshall, in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case), to this: local public education establishments routinely taking cognizance of race in assigning children to schools?

[...]

reyer said that last week's decision abandons "the promise of Brown." Actually, that promise -- a colorblind society -- has been traduced by the "diversity" exception to the equal protection clause. That exception allows white majorities to feel noble while treating blacks and certain other minorities as seasoning -- a sort of human oregano -- to be sprinkled across a student body to make the majority's educational experience more flavorful.

This repulsive practice merits Clarence Thomas's warning in his opinion concurring with last week's ruling: Beware of elites eager to constitutionalize "faddish social theories." Often, they are only theories. As Roberts said, Seattle and Louisville offered "no evidence" that the diversity they have achieved (by what he has called the "sordid business" of "divvying us up by race") is necessary to achieve the "asserted" educational benefits.

Evidence is beside the point. The point for race-mongering diversity tinkerers is their professional and ideological stake in preventing America from achieving "a colorblind mentality."

Once again, someone hostile to integration has chose to quote Justice Thurgood Marshall in a lengthy and out of context manner, distorting his words to fit an essentially racist end.

The fundamental premise of Brown is simply this: "Segregated is inherently unequal."

By no measure are public schools in America either integrated, or equal in the education they provides their children. The Supreme Court case doesn't rely on Jim Crow to maintain segregation, but rather the cultural practice of racism that results in the de-facto segregation of residential areas. There is no need for Jim Crow when Americans segregate themselves voluntarily.

Since a significant portion of the American electorate still feels as though any effort to help African Americans gain access to adequate public education, the best way to create opportunities for minority children is to place them in schools where those opportunities exist--most of these schools are white schools. The goal of "colorblindness," a social farce; the only people who claim never to take race into account are those who do so without restraint. The purported goal of "colorblindness" is an attempt to distract from Brown's real goal, a goal the United States has failed, to give the same educational opportunities to black kids that it gives to white kids.

The court can choose to ignore the circumstances out of a desire for "colorblindness" but "colorblindness" has become a euphemism for "blind to the issues faced by people of color."

George Will gave us a taste of his conception of "colorblindness" last week when he wiped away the reasons for George Wallace's Presidential Campaign:

A candidate can succeed in giving an aggrieved minority a voice—e.g., George Wallace, speaking for people furious about the '60s tumults.

Any mention or understanding of he fundamental, the only purpose of Wallace's campaign, "Segregation Now, Segregation Forever" is eliminated from Will's account of his success in representing "an aggrieved minority".

This is the "colorblindness" conservatives are aiming for. One where racism is removed from all historical and social context; not to grant equality of opportunity, but to pretend that racism doesn't exist as social force, and never did. Not a world where race doesn't matter, but a world where you can't say that race matters.

The results of such a goal, not the elimination of Americas' racial prejudice but the willful ignorance of it, we can see, are not so different from those of Governor George Wallace.

The goal of those interested in eradicating racism should not be that society pretends racism does not exist, but rather, as Manning Marable puts it:

New formations composed primarily if not exclusively of racialized ethnic minorities have a special responsibility for crafting new strategies of political intervention and mobilization. What we should seek is not a color-blind society but a more democratic social order where race disappears as a fundamental category for the distribution of power, material resources and privilege.

That of course, as anyone who has read Will's column regularly knows, is the last thing he would ever want.

At the nadir of his presidency, George W. Bush is looking for answers. One at a time or in small groups, he summons leading authors, historians, philosophers and theologians to the White House to join him in the search. Over sodas and sparkling water, he asks his questions: What is the nature of good and evil in the post-Sept. 11 world? What lessons does history have for a president facing the turmoil I'm facing? How will history judge what we've done? Why does the rest of the world seem to hate America? Or is it just me they hate?

--Peter Baker, "A President Besieged and Isolated, Yet at Ease", The Washington Post, July 2, 2007

"All right, I guess we're all here. I want to thank you all for coming. Does everyone have a soda or a sparkling water? Good, good. Now, all of you have been included in some of our previous gatherings here at the White House during these days of confusion. And I've been especially impressed by the counsel I've received from each and every one of you. And it seemed like a good time to have you back and see if we can concentrate on some of these really pressing issues today, since it is after all the Fourth of July, which means, as you all know, there won't be anything good on television. Let me start with you, Magic 8-Ball. As you know, a lot of people out there are misunderappreciating me. They seem to be driven to criticize my presidency out of jealousy of my toughness and resolve. Will history prove me right in time for them all to realize how awful they're being to me?"

SIGNS POINT TO YES!

"Well, you're the objective party here. All I can do is take your well-considered opinion in the selfless spirit in which it is offered. Magic Mirror, is all the fault on their side of the ledger? Is there anything I could have done to enlighten these miscreants?"

"Romper, bomper, stomper, doo..."

"Please, Magic Mirror, this is a private gathering among equals. We can dispense with the formalities."

"Mister President, sir, there is no question that you are utterly and completely blameless in this matter! Your strength of character is matched only by the wisdom of your choices, again and again! The sureness of your judgement, the endless attention to detail..."

"Well, I don't really like to pay too much attention to detail. Wouldn't want to be like Clinton or somebody with the hands-on and the jumping in where we don't belong, like in New Orleans. You know what Ben Franklin said, the government that governs best is governed by somebody who spends a lot of time in the gym."

"Of course! I have stupidly misspoken! Please, I beg you, smash me! Use that poker by the fireplace."

"Now, now, anybody can make a mistake. Might be a little something in the sparkling water if you know what I mean. You just kick back there a sec and recover your train of thought. Bizarro, what do you think? Could anyone ever honestly detect any flaws in my handling of the crusade against Islamofascizzelism?"

"Bizarro love President Bush! President Bush great war president! Worst act of domestic terror in his country's history occur on his watch, which mean him the only man to stand up to terrorists! How Democrats could do that? If Democratics could protect us from terror, explain to Bizarro how nothing as bad happen under other Democratic president? Democrats so weak and cowardly that in both elections, President Bush defeat Democrat who served in war that President Bush fought by staying coked up in Texas. If Democrat could ever protect this country, then how explain why Democratic presidents led country in war that defeat Nazis. President Bush handling of war on terror conducted perfectly according to standards of Bizarro logic. Him say it war, need military to attack those who plot against us, so he send military to spend years and years fighting in country that not plot against us, led by man who terrorists not like. That a new one even to Bizarro. People of Bizarro World never really understand U. S. government before President Bush, but him set standard we can be proud to emulate. Every year we have big holiday to celebrate anniversary of him never catching Osama bin laden. Everywhere in Bizarro World, Bizarro people fight terror by seeing bombings on TV and going outside and retaliating by shooting their mailman. President Bush am welcome to visit Bizarro World anytime and sleep on presidential couch. Herbert Hoover can kiss Bizarro's ass."

"Thank you, Bizarro, and you tell the people of the Bizarro World that I am grateful for their loyal resolve in remaining part of the coalition of the willing. I wonder, though, if I should actually do anything about the management of the war or if it would be better to just sit here and make speeches about treason for the next year and a half and leave it all for the next president to sort out. Barney? Your thoughts?"

[silence]

"Barney? I'll tell you what. If you jump up as high as the hand in which I'm holding this puppy treat, I'll know that you're saying that I should just tough it out and leave it to the soldiers to win this war as best they can."

[silence]

"Huh. That's really weird. I sure thought somebody would like a nice puppy treat. But given the free-wheeling nature of these discussions, I don't suppose we should be surprised at the occasional ill-considered opinion. Colin Powell? Do you have any thoughts on this question?"

"Yeah, sure, whatever you say, you're the king of everything."

"That means a lot to me coming from you, General. But you know, speaking of my duly elected position as the king of everything, lately there's been some loose talk that Dick Cheney has too much power in my administration. General Powell, you used to work here in the White House. Did you ever get that impression?"

"Yeah, sure, or gosh, no, whichever you like, you're the boss and that's a good thing, for sure."

"Magic 8-Ball, the Cheney question. Your thoughts?"

ANSWER HAZY, REPLY LATER

"Sounds as if somebody's had a little too much sparkling water. Magic Mirror?"

"Oooooh, Dick Cheney is so smart and good and so incredibly munificent, he deserves to run the country, just so long as he doesn't overstep his bounds, which he could only do if you ever felt that's what was happening, since he has the mixed blessing of serving under the only man who deserves to be president than himself, which is of course you o magnificent one, and so whatever he does is fine and the country should be ever so grateful unless you ever decide otherwise, in which case I wouldn't want to be in his shoes!"

"Tough but fair. Which reminds me; earlier this week, I had to show that for all my toughness, I too can be fair and compassionate. My decision to demonstrate my respect for the legal process by commuting the sentence of Scooter Libby..."

[Growling and slavering, Barney suddenly jumps up from the floor and charges the president, jaws wide, aiming at his throat. In a flash, Bizarro leaps from his chair and grabs the animal, snapping its neck with a single twist.]

"Wow. That's gonna be hard to explain to the press."

"If President Bush like, Bizarro can take Barney home with him to Bizarro World. Him make fine pet for some little Bizarro who will love him and pet him while he lies there drawing flies."

"Yeah, that'd be real good, Bizarro. Why don't you do that? I think maybe it's time for the party to break up."

"Bizarro, speaking on behalf of all people of Bizarro World, pledge ever-lasting devotion and eternal loyalty to brave President Bush."

"You bet. Leave through the kitchen exit, okay?"

"Well, it has been fun..."

"Thanks, Colin. You want a blast for the road?"

"Nah, I'm just gonna pass by the secretary's desk and pick up my puppy treat, I mean, my check."

"I'll just walk you..."

"Thanks, I know the way to the kitchen. Hello, Madame First Lady."

"It's 'Laura', numb nuts. You guys been breaking out your secret decoder rings and having another pow-wow?"

"The president just wanted to confer with me on some special..."

"Un-huh, before you get in too deep, I should tell you that I just passed Lurch in the hallway. I take it we need to order another dog, George?"

"I'll take care of it, honey. The guy I know at the pound has the protocol down pat by now. See you later, General."

"'Night."

"So, Laura, I'm pretty much done for the day. How about you?"

"I've got my book club, George. The girls and I are discussing An American Tragedy."

"Cool title. Hey, it's not about..."

"No, George, it's not.

"Oh, okay, well, good. So, the girls, huh? All the girls? Including..."

"Hillary's coming, George, and she knows to come in through the kitchen."

"That'll work. So, I guess you'll be free in an hour or so, huh? And then, maybe, I was thinking, you know, maybe I could run a little bubble bath, and put some Dan Fogelberg on, and light some of those scented candles you like, and that then, maybe we could..."

"Why don't you call Scooter Libby and see if he'll come over, George?"

[x-posted at The Phil Nugent Experience]

Old-Time Freedom

It's Blog Against Theocracy time again. I just got back from my home town's 4^th of July parade. It was chock-full of local pageant winners, politicians, businesspeople, law enforcement and emergency responders, and even some people from Georgia Ghost Hunters (don't ask -- or if you must ask, click here). And church members. Lots and lots of church members, from different denominations, who wanted us all to know that God blesses America. See? They have the flag-draped floats to prove it.

Of course, church floats are a staple of small-town parades, and so is the unthinking allegiance to God and country that was on display today. Not unthinking because it's stupid; unthinking because it's been ingrained in us since birth. We've always done it that way, and most of us haven't spent a lot of time pondering the implications.

I don't believe there's a majority of people in the US who want a Christian theocracy. I do believe that there is a small but very committed and well-funded minority who would like nothing better and are actively working to make it happen. Well, yeah, you say, but it's just a few people. We don't need to worry. Except...

...I'm old enough to remember the Republican party of the 1970's. Despite some authoritarian aberrations (Richard Nixon, anyone?), its public face was one of fiscal conservatism and an otherwise live-and-let-live approach to government. Not perfect, by any means, but nothing like the party we see today, taken over by a cabal of religious conservatives and neocons who've made a devil's bargain to gain and maintain power. These people weren't the majority of Republicans; they were obscure but dedicated activists who were willing to do just about anything to achieve their goals -- on one side, a vision of American hegemony in the world; on the other, the imposition of a particularly censorious brand of Christianity.

We're living with the results of that movement: George W. Bush, self-proclaimed Christian conservative, and Dick Cheney, neocon. Candidates for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination are doing their best to out-Jesus each other, even as they speak and act in ways that the Jesus of the Gospels wouldn't recognize. Promoting war and violence, demonizing those who are different, lionizing wealth and power. This is, I'm afraid, what happens when a democratic government ties itself too closely to religion.

Yes, we are still free to vote these people out of office (and to that I say, without irony, thank God), but will we? That unthinking majority out there doesn't spend much time worrying about theocracy. Mention it to them and you'll get reactions ranging from, "You're crazy -- that will never happen," to "So what? This country could use a good dose of old-time religion." Of course, there are plenty of old-time Rockefeller Republicans who never believed the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson would rise to such powerful positions in their grand old party -- my father was one of them, who pooh-poohed the idea for years after it had become reality.

So it falls to a minority to be vigilant. A minority of citizens who believe passionately that our Founding Fathers intended for us to maintain that wall of separation between church and state. Who believe that the intertwining of government and religion benefits neither and can easily harm both. Who know that it can happen here -- if we don't pay attention.

Want to know more? Check out First Freedom First. Cross-posted at Birmingham Blues.

Hey NMMNB readers!

I'm dnA, and I'll be one of the folks guest blogging for Steve while he's away.

In the meantime...

I interrupt this No More Mr. Nice Blog post for a brief sequence of images containing the pudgy, youthful visage of Tucker Carlson.









Your previously scheduled No More Mr. Nice Blog post will now continue. From Media Matters:

On the July 2 edition of MSNBC's Tucker, host Tucker Carlson said of presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL): "He seems like kind of a wuss." Carlson made this comment after claiming that in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, "Someone's going to give the middle finger to the man," adding: "And the man in this case is a chick!" -- referring to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY).

And to think this comes only a few years after Tucker's mommy stopped dressing him.

Which might explain why he's so threatened by Hillary Clinton. The man clearly has mommy issues.

I've got some R&R coming up. While I'm engaged in frivolous pursuits, there'll be guest bloggers (including, I believe, some people who haven't posted here before). And I may drop by once or twice myself. Otherwise, I'll be back on July 11 or at the crack of dawn July 12.

TRANSVESTISM FOR JESUS

I'm probably reading way too much into this, but is the fact that writer/actor/comedy cross-dresser Tyler Perry is currently featured on the Web site of Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network part of an attempt to soften up Pat's audience for the cross-dressing of Pat's dear friend Rudy Giuliani?

(See this post and this one if you doubt that Pat thinks Rudy is awesome.)

At the very least, the fact that a guy like Tyler Perry can be featured on CBN at all tells you that drag is not going to be the deal-breaker for the fundies in Giuliani's case.

EVERYTHING IS OUR FAULT

Now Michael Medved says conspiracy theories are the fault of atheism.

... [One] factor fueling conspiracy theories involves the rise of secularism and atheism in the United States and, to a much greater extent, in Europe. Human beings feel a deep and perpetual desire to find some deeper meaning in the dramatic events around them. Religious believers can examine those developments and begin to discern God's will. Those without strong faith, however, may feel the need to explain these alarms and disasters with reference to diabolical human agents determined to play god....

If spectators to history can't pronounce the words "Thy Will Be Done" without having them stick in the throat, at least the formulation "The Conspiracy's Will Be Done" provides more satisfaction than an assumption of randomness.

G.K. Chesterton once observed: "The problem with those who reject God is not that they believe in nothing. It is that they believe in everything."

I'm sure that would be a surprise to those who know anything about, say, this guy:

Eric Rudolph, the U.S. white supremacist arrested over the weekend for four bombings, including an attack at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, was apparently motivated by an anti-Semitic ideology known as Christian Identity.

Rudolph, 36, also wrote a paper espousing Holocaust denial while in high school....

Jews came in for particular hatred, said his former sister-in-law.

Rudolph "hated Jews more than probably any other race," Deborah Rudolph, who is divorced from Rudolph's brother, Joel, told ABC's "Good Morning America."

He "felt that, you know, they've been run out of every country they've ever been in. They've destroyed every country they've ever been in. They have too much control in our country," she said.

He considered the TV "The Electronic Jew," she said in an interview a few years ago.

"You could be watching a 30-minute sitcom and the credits would roll and there'd be Jewish names and, excuse my expression, but he would say, 'You f------g Yids.' Any little thing and he would start," she said....

Oh, and I see Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described as a "devout" Muslim. Funny how that doesn't seem to interfere with his whole Holocaust denial thing....

ANGLER REDUX

By the way, regarding the Libby commutation -- well, so much for the diminished influence of Dick Cheney in the Bush administration.

Yet we're still being told Dick's star is on the wane, as in this New York Times article on the possibility that legislation will be drawn up to close the detention facility at Guantanamo:

One person close to the administration who is familiar with the thinking of those opposed to closing Guantanamo said "the people who are standing firm on this issue have either left" -- like former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- "or their bureaucratic influence has substantially waned, like Gonzales and Cheney." Those urging the closing of Guantanamo, like Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, "are ascendant," this person said.

Well, maybe. Maybe Cheney's lost his mojo -- but Libby's a free man and the Gitmo story is on page 10 of the Times, while the front page has yet another story about violence in Iraq being the work of those evil Iranians. I think reporters of Mr. Cheney's political death are a tad premature.

In fact, I were really paranoid, or maybe just Machiavellian, I might think that Cheney actually wanted The Washington Post to publish that series on him, and wanted his allies to cooperate with the Post on it. After all, there's a pattern in this administration: Frequently leaks suggesting a shift to centrism make their way into the papers, then the reported shift to the center fails to materialize. It's as if the leaks anger Bush and inspire him to cleave to the right wing (i.e., the Cheney wing). We saw this recently when word got out that Gitmo was on the verge of being closed and the administration denied the reports and canceled a Gitmo meeting. We see this in stories about troop withdrawals in Iraq (which, of course, never take place). Maybe Cheney wanted the Post to suggest that he needs to go because a media attack would help him win favor with Bush.

Regarding the Libby decision, there's this in the Post:

An unanswered question last night was Vice President Cheney's role in advocating leniency for his former chief of staff and alter ego....

One senior White House official said Bush consulted with counsel Fred F. Fielding, Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and his outgoing counselor, Dan Bartlett, but did not mention Cheney.

A spokeswoman for the vice president said she did not know what he advised.

So not only did Bush free Cheney's buddy, Cheney got Bush's spokeswoman to stamp the existence of any discussions between Bush and Vice TOP SECRET.

Still think Bush is going to do anything between now and 1/20/09 that Dick doesn't like?

OH DAMN, NOT AGAIN

We just lost Steve Gilliard and now we've lost Jim Capozzola of The Rittenhouse Review. He went way back -- if you go back in the history of rock and roll and find the people who influenced Elvis and Little Richard and the like, the people the pioneers considered pioneers, well, that's what Jim was in blogging. He was generous to this blog and to a lot of others, and now he's gone way too soon...

More from Susie and Julia.

WHY BUSH DOESN'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK

The headline of this Survey USA poll is "Most in USA Disagree with Bush Decision to Commute Libby Prison Sentence" -- but that's not quite accurate.

The key number is this: When asked, "Are you familiar with the legal case involving former White House employee Scooter Libby?," 45% of poll respondents say "No" or "Not sure."

Of the remainder, only 21% agree with the commutation -- but an additional 17% think there should have been a complete pardon, while 60% think the sentence should have stood.

That means fewer than a third of poll respondents think Libby got off easy. The rest fall into three categories: (1) pro-commutation, (2) pro-pardon, (3) don't know what the hell we're talking about.

That latter group is the biggest group, and Bush knows it. So he doesn't care about the people who are angry.

Look -- this never got onto most people's radar the way the war or Katrina or Terri Schiavo did. Maybe that would have changed if Patrick Fitzgerald had indicted someone most Americans had actually heard of, i.e., Rove or Cheney, but he didn't. So don't hold your breath waiting for the commutation to set off some sort of firestorm. (Huffing and puffing in the Beltway and the blogosphere don't count -- not if the anger doesn't spread to Main Street, which it won't.)

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AND, OF COURSE: How concerned is Fred Thompson about a possible anti-commutation backlash? So unconcerned that, just as he's entering the presidential race, he's issuing a statement praising the decision, thus reminding us that he's a prominent member of the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Trust committee. Wake me when that raises his negatives, even among Democrats.

WELL, THAT MAKES THINGS EASY

CNN:

A federal appeals court Monday rejected former White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby's request to remain free on appeal after his March conviction on federal charges stemming from the leak of a CIA agent's identity....

Barring further appeals, Libby's term will start when the U.S. Bureau of Prisons decides where he will serve his time and sets a date for him to surrender.....

That was timed perfectly for the White House. Expect Libby to be pardoned either Tuesday after 7:00 P.M. or Friday at the same time.

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UPDATE: Oops, never mind -- he already commuted the sentence. He's on vacation, so he assumes everyone is on vacation, and therefore none of us are paying attention.

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AND: Speaker Pelosi, how is the commutation a "betrayal of trust"? Trust in the Bush administration? Trust in the legal system? Trust in the legal system under Bush? Who still had any trust left to betray?

"THE LEGACY"

The Carpetbagger Report quotes this story and says it "sounds like it warrants some follow-up":

Two of the leading GOP presidential contenders took time out of their frenetic fundraising schedules late last week to address "Legacy," a group of wealthy conservative Christians that operate below the radar screen. Sen. John McCain spoke to a dinner gathering of the organization in Washington -- where they're meeting -- on Thursday night and former Gov. Mitt Romney addressed them at a lunch in the Willard hotel Friday afternoon, a member said....

By dint of their considerable wealth -- and access to the wealth of others -- they've made themselves into a political force in the GOP. But most members don't care to make themselves known to the broader public, so they've gone to lengths to avoid the sort of media attention that comes with a group influential enough to have presidential hopefuls come make their case -- and take questions.

Well, I don't have much to add, but I did find this Hotline story from early '06, written at the time of a Legacy conference (which had Mitt Romney as one of its guests):

...According to several participants in this week's conference -- one of whom is a member -- the Legacy's origins are humble. In 2003, a half-dozen conservative couples -- regular donors to conservative and Republican causes and campaigns -- decided to pull together a network of like-minded families. They were inspired by Pres. Bush's call for "compassionate conservatism," which they interpreted broadly. The group decided to convene private meetings, where candidates seeking their financial support would take questions on subjects ranging from the environment to the death penalty to slavery in the third world. And if candidates demonstrated their commitment to the same principles, the group would reward them by bundling donations from its members to their campaigns. In '04, the group steered money to Senate candidates John Thune in SD and Mel Martinez in FL. (A senior Republican campaign official says the group was a "great help.") This year, Sen. Rick Santorum and MD LG Michael Steele will get the bundled donations.

Doesn't sound too far off the right edge, by modern standards. But, er, the Legacyites won't say who the members are -- although Hotline confirmed that one member is "Walden Media billionaire Phillip Anschutz."

Who is Anschutz? Well, he's a principal funder of the Discovery Institute, which, of course, tries to put a scientific face on "intelligent design." (McCain has already delivered a speech at a Discovery confab). Bill Berkowitz notes that

Anschutz-related entities have helped bankroll a number of ultraconservative political organizations, including: Colorado for Family Values (CFV) -- the organization behind Amendment 2, Colorado's notorious anti-gay constitutional amendment approved by the voters in 1992 and later overturned by the US Supreme Court.

How do you get to be a member? Back to the Hotline:

Membership is uniquely restrictive. Applicants must be recommended by a current member, who must also vouch for their bona fides. Members must profess their belief in God and pledge their fealty to conservative principles guided by Judeo-Christian values. Most are Protestants; a majority is evangelical. Prospective members must agree to champion small government, a strong national defense and the free-market system. And applicants must be identified leaders in their chosen field, able to influence others and willing to devote themselves to the Legacy's mission. That usually means they are rich. Several conservatives familiar with the group say a proximate Legacy goal is to identify and nurture the next generation of conservative philanthropists -- the heirs to the Scaifes, the Bradleys and the Olins. Legacy intends for 80 percent of its membership to be under 50 years old, so it is always recruiting.

The conventional wisdom is that the religious right is dying because its leading figures are too old and new blood isn't coming in. This group clearly exists to reverse that trend. Expect "lite" Falwellism from them, as they try to maintain fundamentalism's grip on power.

YEAH, I BET THOSE QUESTION-AND-ANSWER SESSIONS ARE REALLY DEEP AND PROFOUND

From today's Washington Post:

At the nadir of his presidency, George W. Bush is looking for answers. One at a time or in small groups, he summons leading authors, historians, philosophers and theologians to the White House to join him in the search.

Over sodas and sparkling water, he asks his questions: What is the nature of good and evil in the post-Sept. 11 world?

Translation: "Terrorists are evil and I'm good, right?"

What lessons does history have for a president facing the turmoil I'm facing?

Translation: "Sometimes the real good guys don't look good till way later, right? Like Truman -- people hated him when he was president, right? But he was right about the communist menace, right? And the Brits voted out Churchill, right? That means I must be better than Churchill, because I won twice, right?"

How will history judge what we've done?

Translation: "Everything's gonna look 180 degrees different when this is all in the history books, right? 'Cause I'm right, right? I'm right and the terrorists are evil, right?"

Why does the rest of the world seem to hate America? Or is it just me they hate?

Translation: "They're just jealous, right? That's what my mom used to say when kids made fun of me at school -- 'Pay no attention, they're just jealous.' That's it, right?"

...Stelzer said Bush seemed smarter than he expected. The conversation ranged from history to religion and touched on sensitive topics for a president wrestling with his legacy. "He asked me, 'Do you think our unpopularity abroad is a result of my personality?' And he laughed," Stelzer recalled. "I said, 'In part.' And he laughed again."

Translation: "Well, that's just how I am, and if they don't like it, well, tough. Right? Right?"

Oh, to be a fly on the wall. Or maybe not.

POTEMKIN COMPASSION

On Friday, as part of an African tour, Laura Bush visited the Nelson Mandela Primary School in Bamako, Mali. Today, NPR's Addie Goss had a rather devastating story about how this rundown school in a very poor country was spruced up -- partially and temporarily -- for Mrs. Bush's visit (and the cameras):

... Heat, dust, and smog normally make the afternoons here unbearable. But, after weeks of work, the Nelson Mandela School felt like an oasis.

It was Thursday, only twenty-four hours left before the First Lady's visit, and a work crew from the U.S. embassy was installing electrical outlets in two classrooms. The next day, the outlets would power the fans to cool Mrs. Bush and the rest of the crowd. But, like most schools in Mali, the Mandela School doesn't have enough money for electricity, so the power cord from these new outlets led out the windows to a mobile generator the embassy brought over and hid out back.

Rebecca Rhodes is the project manager for the Teacher Training Via Radio program, which is entirely funded by President Bush's African education initiative. For two weeks, Rhodes has worked with White House security and communications crews to make the school picture perfect for the First Lady's visit.

REBECCA RHODES: So Mrs. Bush's limousine and the limousine of Mali's First Lady would come through the door there at the front of the school, and then she will walk down this lovely gravel (laughs) that we have just put down.

GOSS: About the gravel: USAID bought it so that the First Lady wouldn't slip on the mud in the courtyard. The gravel just covers the portion of the courtyard Mrs. Bush would see....

Demba Bundi is a high school teacher who works with the Teacher Training Via Radio program.... He was ... struck by some selective repainting on the walls surrounding the school.

DEMBA BUNDI: Only the entrance door has been painted new, because that's where everybody gets in, but the rest of the wall, it's dirty, and you have all these American gangster-boy kind of graffiti on the wall, and nobody seems to care about that....

Goss went back to the school yesterday, after the (brief) visit. She noted that the Americans and the press left behind water bottles and other trash -- they didn't clean up after themselves. Oh, but the embassy did remove the generator and the fans and the outlets -- heaven forbid they should provide amenities to the school after using it for a photo op (and heaven forbid they should paint the parts of the school that weren't in the pictures).

But when you look at the White House Web site, you've got to admit these phonies do a nice job making the place look photogenic.

U.K. TERRORISTS: AS STUPID AS BUSH AND BLAIR?

Bush, Blair, and their fans say we can never, ever leave Iraq because that would "send a message to the terrorists" about our "resolve"; what they mean is that it would tell terrorists that we actually don't care if they kill us in our beds. That's what the Iraq hawks have been saying for years, isn't it, when you get right down to it? It's preposterous, and it seems like something only Iraq hawks believe -- but I think the current round of terrorists in Britain believe it too.

They attacked just as Tony Blair left office in disgrace, as if they thought the great Iraq hawk's departure under a cloud was a sign that Britons' sense of self-preservation is weak. It's not weak -- Britons want these terrorists hunted down, and they'd support an effective anti-terrorist foreign policy. What they don't support is the wrong war fought badly and persisted in endlessly.

But, actually, I hope opposition to the Iraq War makes terrorists think we're weak, because I want terrorists to underestimate us. I want them to be as stupid as Bush and Blair and their fans -- I want them to think we won't fight hard against people who are actually trying to kill us. We will -- we absolutely have the resolve to do that. What we don't have the "resolve" to do is support stupid, futile policies that don't make us any safer. Bush can't tell the difference and neither could Blair -- and maybe the U.K. terrorists are just like them in that respect.

A FEW BAD APPLES ARE ALWAYS SPOILING IT FOR THE HONORABLE STATESMEN WHO MAKE UP OUR GOVERNMENT

Jennifer Steinhauer on the immigration bill, in today's New York Times:

...Hispanics may have been deeply alienated by the heated rhetoric that wound around the axle of the debate, most of it stemming from a few Republican opponents and the loud echo chamber of talk radio.

Oh, that's typical -- the Times says that everything should have been done in a nice, calm, rational way (because our system is made up of nice, calm, rational people), but, unexpectedly and bafflingly, anger slipped in and "wound around the axle of the debate," the work of "a few" Republicans and some talk radio hosts.

Excuse me -- just who does the Times think runs the modern GOP?

Demagogic radio hosts (and the demagogic elected officials who operate in lockstep with them) are the central force in the Republican Party. Talk radio listeners make up a nationwide Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, threatening Democrats, moderate Republicans, and others who deviate from Correct Thinking. The Bush administration knows this, as do GOP officeholders; usually Bush and the radio crowd are on the same side, stirring up the anger of the talk radio and right-wing cable audience to ensure that the GOP party line is the law of the land (and dissenters are marginalized). This time, however, Bush parted company with the mob -- and the mob punished him.

How long has the GOP been the party of wingnut anger? And when on earth will the Times grasp that fact?

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES RESOLVED

Damn Verizon.