IF YOU'RE GOING TO DO THIS KIND OF THING, I SUPPOSE YOU SHOULD DO IT RIGHT

I can't help noticing that Turkey is massing as many as 100,000 troops on the border with Iraq. That's to fight a border war with the PKK -- which, Turkey estimates, has 3,000 rebels in Iraq.

Right now we have 165,000 troops in Iraq (plus a handful of troops from other countries). A year ago, our pals at the Brookings Institution estimated that there were 25,000 insurgents in Iraq, plus 1,350 foreign fighters. That number is nearly nine times the size of Turkey's estimate of PKK fighters in Iraq. And America isn't just fighting a border war -- it's trying to stabilize Iraq and quell a civil war (involving, per Brookings, 50,000 members of Shiite militias). Oh, and in 2005, the head of the Iraqi intelligence services said there were actually 200,000 people in the Iraqi resistance.

Think maybe our troop numbers have been a tad low? Think maybe, if you insist on fighting a war in this region, you should do it the way the Turks are doing it?

JUST TO STATE THE OBVIOUS

From the Carpetbagger Report:

Almost immediately after Bush asked for more Iraq money from Congress, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told the White House not to expect lawmakers to "rubber-stamp" the latest request. "In the coming weeks, we will hold it up to the light of day and fight for the change of strategy and redeployment of troops that is long overdue," Reid said.

Yup -- and then they'll rubber-stamp it.

THANK GOD REPUBLICANS AREN'T LIKE THOSE CELEBRITY-OBSESSED DEMOCRATS

The talk of the blogosphere right now is the endorsement of Mike Huckabee by none other than Chuck Norris.

I was going to write a post suggesting that this might require the GOP to hold a fight to the death, no weapons barred, between Norris and Ted Nugent, who endorsed Fred Thompson last summer -- but I see that earlier this month Nugent also endorsed Huckabee. Nice bet-hedging, Ted! So it appears that Huckabee has cornered the market on endorsements from stinking-rich faux-ordinary posturing-tough-guy GOP celebrities -- at least until the Nuge changes his endorsement again.

None of this means, of course, that it's OK for Democratic entertainers to endorse anyone or get involved in any campaign in any way. Don't get any ideas, you stinking hippies! And Bruce Springsteen, that means you! Just shut up and sing!

TRY TO CONTAIN YOUR EXCITEMENT

From Associated Press, another hint that the Democratic ticket may well be Clinton-Bayh:

Bayh nominated for vice president?

Bauer: Endorsing Clinton could make it possible.

INDIANAPOLIS -- Indiana House Speaker Patrick Bauer said he endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton for president at the request of Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh and because he believes it could lead to Bayh becoming the vice presidential nominee.

When asked whether Bayh told him that Clinton's nomination would help him become her running mate, Bauer said, "I can't say he said that exactly, but I know that's the case."

When asked exactly what he did say, Bauer said, "I think he says she's going to win and that he is very close to her and they work well together and hope to work very well together in the future." ...

Take this with a grain of salt, but, alas, it seems plausible. Hillary will pick something like the safe DLCer because she presumes the GOP and the press will be portraying her as a wild-eyed socialist radical next spring. She's right about that -- but if she thinks a Bayh pick will help, she's naive. Oh, and it would allow the press to say the Democratic ticket consists of two "dynasty" candidates. All Giuliani will have to do is pick a fellow first-generation pol (possibly someone who, like him, isn't of northern European extraction) and the GOP instantly wins the "diversity" battle.

I LOVE BEING REDUCED TO A CULTURAL STEREOTYPE

In an article in The Sunday Times of London entitled "Where Do You Stand in the New Culture Wars?," Sarah Baxter pats herself on the back for praising Christopher Hitchens and his new partner in Muslim-bashing, Martin Amis, quotes Amir Taheri as if he weren't a lying propagandist who told last year that Iraq had no refugee crisis, and declares, in essence, that you're not a liberal unless you support George W. Bush's foreign policy. Did you seriously think people like this were in retreat? In America, maybe -- but in England they appear to be roaring back, led by Amis, who's a celebrity in his native land and therefore is finding a wide audience for his increasingly Hitchensian bombast.

Here's the difference between "progressives" (yay!) and "the left" (boo!), according to Baxter:

Nick Cohen, whose book What's Left? has just been published in paperback, identifies progressives as antitotalitarian internationalists who subscribe to "some kind of universal values", as he puts it.

"The left are like old-style Tory imperialists, who believe rights are all very well for western Europe but not for Johnny Foreigner, and that the liberation of women is essentially for white-skinned women, not brown-skinned women," Cohen says.

Because, see, if you don't believe that it's appropriate to proclaim a war of (oh, what's our justification for the war this week?) liberation for brown people, bomb the crap out of the brown people's country, let looters run roughshod over it, then seize control of the country "temporarily" while failing to secure the peace as a civil war breaks out and a refugee crisis unfolds, then you hate brown people and think they don't deserve freedom.

And just in case you're not sure whether you're aiding and abetting the most monstrous evil in the universe, Baxter offers a short quiz:

...My own test for spotting a phoney liberal is as follows. If you think Bush is a fascist and Castro is a progressive, you are not a democrat. If you think cultural traditions can trump women's rights, you are not a feminist. And if you think antisemitic rants are simply an expression of frustration with American and Israeli policy, you have learnt nothing from history.

And my own test for spotting a liberal-bashing clone is as follows: If you think everyone who hates Bush loves Castro, if you believe that everyone who doesn't want to herd all culturally conservative Muslims into death camps actually admires the burka and suicide bombing, and if you think that anyone who doesn't want to bomb Iran back to the stone age approves of Ahmadinejad, then you pass the test. I'm sure Baxter does, with flying colors.

There's a longer quiz, in PDF form, linked to Baxter's article. It's all derived from the same nonsense -- that everyone who opposes the war loves Ahmadinejad and Castro and Che and Chavez and thinks genital mutilation and honor killing are the bee's knees. I think I get most of the right answers, but I am unabashedly a fascist in the eyes of Baxter, or whoever devised the longer quiz, with regard to question #3: "Is it acceptable to insist that a woman wears a veil?" Er, yeah -- it is acceptable for a religious faith to require this. Or do you not think it's acceptable for a religious faith to require a man to wear a yarmulke or earlocks, Sarah? If that's the case, who's being the anti-Semite now?

Thank you again, guest bloggers -- some great stuff this weekend.

(Scroll down to read it if you missed it.)

OH CRAP, NOT "EVIL" AGAIN

In today's New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin flogs the tired old line that we disgusting modern sophisticates don't adequately appreciate the word "evil":

Fearful as some of us are about exhibiting a too-primitive and "demonizing" attitude -- the kind of macho Us-versus-Them, Axis-of-Evil line of thinking that has made Bush and Company figures of easy derision -- we have become increasingly tentative about assigning this stark designation.... Few of us would be hesitant to use the word to describe the genocidal regimes, for example, of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Milosevic. But for the most part, we post-Manichaean postmodernists are more like Neville Chamberlain hoping to win over Hitler with a bit of coaxing than like Winston Churchill, who committed his country to fighting him. Given our a tradition of broad civil tolerance, it makes uneasy sense that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the half-buffoonish, half-demonic leader of Iran, was invited to speak at an ivy-towered bastion of learning, where he gave voice to his hate-mongering views.

Oh, give me a break.

You know what our problem with the word "evil" is -- or mine, at least? It's the fact that the word is no longer a noun or an adjective -- these days it's exclusively a rallying cry. The word is deployed by the likes of Bush and Reagan to get us to support policies that make us feel good, rather than the policies that might be most effective. These politicians know that if we get pumped up and feel hate, we'll respond to particular problems using emotion rather than reason -- and we'll be easy to manipulate.

I don't dislike the word "evil" because I'm a moral relativist. Recite the crimes of a child rapist, or a dictator who maintains a chain of torture chambers, and don't worry, I'll get it -- the facts speak for themselves; I don't need the word "evil" buzzing in my brain to make the judgment that the malefactor is a horrific individual. However, a recitation of the person's crimes still puts me in possession of my critical faculties. I can still recall that it's bad to have the rapist thrown to a pack of wild dogs without even the benefit of a trial (because a society that does that to criminals is well on its way to becoming becoming feral itself), and I still know that a war against the dictator may well be a cure that's far worse than the disease.

Use the word "evil," however, and the rapist or dictator becomes a primitive-brain monster I need to destroy in the most soul-satisfying way possible -- and if you're the one on the balcony leading the chants of "Evil! Evil!," I'm putty in your hands.

Sorry, but no thanks -- I don't want my interaction with my government to include Bacchic rituals of monsters' annihilation. We can talk all we want about whether evil exists, but the question of whether we should use the word evil comes down to precisely this.

LET'S CALL IT "FOX ANTI-DEMOCRAT CHANNEL II"

Why did Rupert Murdoch decide to start Fox Business Network now? It's not because (or not just because) he only now got hold of The Wall Street Journal -- he announced the startup of the channel long before he launched his bid for Dow Jones.

No -- I think the timing was (at least in part) about the election. Forget Murdoch as Hillary Clinton's pal -- he wants to beat the Democrats, and FBN is one more tool he's going to use to accomplish that goal.

In The New York Observer, Felix Gillette makes clear what's going on:

For Fox Business, Big Government Is Enemy Number One

... judging from its first day, for Roger Ailes and company, the real big game appears to be big government, not big media.

At one point, reporting from Washington, D.C., correspondent Adam Shapiro explained how federal earmarks to study shrimp and catfish showed that government spending has gotten out of hand. "Not that I have anything against shrimp and catfish," Mr. Shapiro hastened to add. "Good-tasting stuff ... but that's how these things grow."

Soon, the new network pulled out the big gun of economic conservatism: Grover Norquist.

For the next several minutes, Mr. Norquist -- the right-wing activist who once gleefully announced he'd like to get government down to a size where it could be drowned in a bathtub -- explained to FBN viewers how the various Democratic presidential candidates were likely to threaten the livelihood of Americans of all classes by repealing President Bush's tax cuts and further increasing federal spending.

"Obviously both Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Edwards are talking about spending perhaps two trillion dollars," he said. "Not just the one trillion on health care, but they've made a number of promises in addition to that."

..."President Reagan once said that the closest thing to immortality is a government program," said [FBC's Liz] MacDonald. "It's a super-size-me government going on, and I think it's a problem." As if viewers might not have gotten the message, she added: "Pat Buchanan said, 'Like Thelma and Louise, Social Security and Medicare are heading right for that cliff, and taxpayers are in the back seat.'"...

In yesterday's New York Times, Joe Nocera described the FBN pitch from Roger Ailes, who's running the channel. Here he's talking about the channel FBN is trying to knock off its perch, CNBC -- but his real target, I think, is the Vast Liberal Media/Cultural/Political Conspiracy:

"They've decided [at CNBC] recently that America is not such a terrible place and capitalism isn't so bad" -- another reaction, he seemed to be saying, to the prospect of some new pro-America competition. "They used to get really excited if a C.E.O. was going to jail and they got depressed if a company announced a profit. They are offended by rich people unless it's them." He paused before delivering the punch line. "That's because they all went to journalism school."

Now, anyone who has spent more than five minutes watching CNBC knows these allegations are laughable; it would be hard to imagine a channel more pro profit than CNBC. But Mr. Ailes needs a way to differentiate his new network, and this was one of his tried-and-true tacks: accuse the other side of a lack of patriotism. "We don't view capitalism, corporations or profits as the enemy," he said. "If the guys at Enron did bad, they paid for it," he added. "But there are 9,000 other companies whose executives go to church or synagogue, and make contributions, and want America to be a great country. And it is not treason to not treat them like bad guys." Et cetera.

It's the same old Murdoch strategy: rally people who hate liberals, get their eyeballs on your product, and feed them right-wing propaganda while making money off them. The specific message here is that capitalism is good and whoever runs on the Democratic line in '08 hates capitalism, as do all non-Fox-branded media outlets.

Will this work? Will it put FBN ahead of CNBC in the ratings? In a few years, yeah, probably. Will it help defeat the Democratic presidential nominee? Yeah, maybe.

****

UPDATE: Corrected because I was stupidly referring to "Fox Business Channel" and "FBC" rather than Fox Business Network and FBN.

Josh Levin of the Los Angeles Times writes:

The FBI is quietly reconstructing the cases against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and 14 other accused Al Qaeda leaders being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, spurred in part by U.S. concerns that years of CIA interrogation have yielded evidence that is inadmissible or too controversial to present at their upcoming war crimes tribunals, government officials familiar with the probes said.

The process is an embarrassment for the Bush administration, which for years held the men incommunicado overseas and allowed the CIA to use coercive means to extract information from them that would not be admissible in a U.S. court of law -- and might not be allowed in their military commissions, some former officials and legal experts said. Even if the information from the CIA interrogations is allowed, they said, it would probably risk focusing the trials on the actions of the agency and not the accused.

The FBI investigations, involving as many as 300 agents and analysts in a "Guantanamo task force," have been underway for as long as two years. They were requested by the Defense Department shortly after legal rulings indicated that Mohammed -- the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks -- and the other Al Qaeda suspects probably would win some form of trial in which evidence would have to be presented, according to senior federal law enforcement officials.

Think of it. Criminal suspects "winning" the right to have "some form of trial in which evidence would have to be presented"! No wonder it's not safe to let the kids play outside when evildoers are being coddled like this, huh?

With what we now think of as "normal" presidential administrations, including those of Bill Clinton and George Bush the Elder, there are always moments when you catch the leader of the free world pandering shamelessly to some demographic or other, trading in his principles for some teensy bit of electoral edge, and you have to wonder, How can he live with himself? With Bush the Younger and his merry band, the operative question more often than not has been, What were they thinking? Did it not occur to them that this would inevitably come back and bite them on the ass? Even if they're completely cynical and morally bankrupt, don't they have any sense!? Maybe this is what happens when you've got a president who thinks that the day his approval ratings hit 90% is the one day he's had when other people's opinions mattered and that, as for the rest--well, as Fidel Castro likes to say, history will absolve him, and if it doesn't, well, as George Jr. likes to say, who cares, we'll all be dead. (I tend to think that anyone who spends that much time trying to come up with beloved presidents who were less beloved in their own time to compare himself to must case more about history's judgement than he lets on, but what the hell.) The fact remains, for going on seven years now, these people have governed as if their parents were out of town for the weekend.

It takes a special kind of bullying weakling to want--to need-- to use a national tragedy as an excuse to overreach the way the Bushies did, to make the kind of grab for naked, unchecked and unreviewable power. They have nothing to show for it but a botched war, some tainted court cases, and a number of broken lives, but it's become ever clearer with each passing day that they never had any real idea of what to do with it; they just wanted it, the same way that Bush, with no policies to promote and without an idea in his head, still likes to appear before carefully selected cheering throngs, just so he can hear their applause and feel his gonads glow. The irony is that, having sacrificed our freedoms and made this country and much of the rest of the world less safe while using the military to give itself a contact high, the Bushies will spend this last decadent phase of their era hiding behind men with fruit salad on their chests, daring anyone to say anything about them that they can spin as an attack on the generals, at least those who aren't talking trash about them on various op-ed pages. For anyone who's tempted to respond to this line of defense with anything but a rude snort, it's worth remembering that the derisive and worried phrase "the military-industrial complex" wasn't coined by some hippie blowing his nose on the flag; it was made famous by Dwight Eisenhower, a man who had served in the military and seen combat and who, not coincidentally, was cautious about the use of force while taking a dim view of those who sought to reduce American political discourse to a saluting contest. If I might be allowed a modest proposal, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing if we could get back into the habit of entrusting the presidency to people who actually know a thing or two about what war looks like. For one thing, it would disqualify just about everyone of a hawkish bent in the current Republican party.

I'm Sure They'd be Glad To Buy It Back

Clarence Thomas says he keeps his law degree from Yale in the basement with a 15-cent price tag sticker on it. Seems he's still angry that Yale's admissions office decided to accept him back in the 1970's because it took him a few months to find a job after graduation in 1974. He thinks it's because he was an affirmative-action admission. I'm sure it had nothing to do with the less-than-great economic conditions in the early 70's or the racism that permeated hiring practices at the time. Gee, maybe it was the giant-size chip on his shoulder that persists to this day.

Thomas says the white people at the law firms where he interned while at Yale didn't believe he'd really earned his grades, and he blames that on affirmative action. What he refuses to see is that without affirmative action, the good to excellent students who happened to be black or female wouldn't have had the same opportunities that the white males did. I hate to break it to him, but there is something inherently unfair in insisting that only the most exceptional blacks and women could be admitted to the top law schools when mere mortals of the white, male, and frequently well-connected variety were admitted without question.

Of course the white attorneys of the day doubted his intelligence and abilities. They had, for the most part, been raised to think blacks were inherently inferior. If Yale hadn't given him the opportunity for an excellent legal education, he might not have been able to challenge their assumptions.

So apparently he's still mad that the system in the 70's was overtly racist -- and that Yale tried to change that, giving him a hand up and a chance to prove himself in the process. He won't even let the school hang his portrait along with other graduates who have become Supreme Court justices.

Justice Thomas, you are not an inferior black man who somehow fooled Yale and everyone else who ever gave you a shot. You are, however, a Whiny Ass Titty Baby^tm, and that designation knows no color. Get over it already.

Cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo.

PROBABLY NOT A GOOD SIGN FOR THE JENA SIX

It looks like Reed Walters may not have to wait too long before a sympathetic governor is in power in Louisiana:

MIAMI, Oct. 20 -- Rep. Bobby Jindal (R) became the nation's first Indian American governor Saturday, outpolling 11 rivals in Louisiana and drawing enough votes to avoid a runoff election next month.

[...]

Jindal, 36, was making his second attempt to become Louisiana's first nonwhite governor since Reconstruction. The last one was P.B.S. Pinchback, a black Republican who served briefly between 1872 and 1873, at a time when many white voters were disenfranchised.

Jindal, whose given name is Piyush, is the American-born son of Indian immigrants; his parents moved from New Delhi to Baton Rouge so his mother could take graduate classes at Louisiana State University.

"Bobby" Jindal thinks things shouldn't be about race. Which is why he changed his name to "Bobby" from "Piyush".

When he was 4, he decided to call himself Bobby -- after the youngest son on the "Brady Bunch" television show. In high school, he gave up Hinduism and became a Christian; and during his first year at Brown University, he was baptized as a Roman Catholic. His wife, Supriya, is also a Catholic convert.

On the campaign trail, his origins often aroused curiosity and comment. But Jindal sometimes deflected related questions.

"People want to make everything about race," he said during one of the debates. "The only colors that matter here are red, white and blue."

A fantastically circular argument, perfectly exemplifying Right wing ideas on race. A man who gave himself a whiter name arguing that race doesn't matter. Because to the Right, it doesn't--as long as you give appropriate deference to white cultural hegemony.

Not exactly Cassius Clay to Mohammed Ali.

More disturbing is how the new governor of Louisiana makes broad statements about how "race doesn't matter" in the state that brought us the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the Jena Six.

Mr. Jindal is another example of a cynical Right wing politician all to willing to take advantage of cultural prejudice. I don't believe for a second that Mr. Jindal, a Rhodes Scholar, believes the "theory" of intelligent design has any merit. But he's indicated a willingness to saddle that particular form of non-scholarship with public school students.

Especially with targeted audiences, Jindal could speak to the Republican base. He professed his opposition to abortion, signaled a willingness to consider the teaching of intelligent design, and discussed the need to cut taxes.

After all, if they're relying on public education, it must be because their parents are lazy or bad or something, otherwise they'd be sending them to private school. So why not teach them junk science?

Xposted at Too Sense

This morning we wake up into a new and strange world, a world that has no Sam Brownback presidential campaign in it. Given how long the presidential campaign season has already been going on, with only a few months left to go before the first primary, it is a big enough change in the world that many will find it unsettling. The dog may start barking excitedly at phantoms, the cat will get antsy. Adults who will be tempted to take to the bottle should think instead of how best they can help their children deal with their confusion. As the family gathers around the TV in gleeful anticipation of the next debate by the Republican candidates, the children's merry laughter may turn into something akin to a death rattle, as they scan the screen and their blood turns to ice. "But...but where," they will ask, "is the shifty-eyed man who looked as if he were waiting for the debate to end and for everyone else to clear out of the room so he could spray for bugs?" You will need to take them onto your lap and gently explain that while everyone wishes that presidential campaigns could go on forever and forever, sometimes God looks down and sees a campaign that for some reason displeases him, and He chooses to see to it that the campaign doesn't get to go on for as long as we might like, because no one will give it any money. We call this "Intelligent Design."

Brownback's fast fade is a reminder that the real key question of the 2008 campaign may well be, "What does the religious right want?" Well, what they want is another George Bush, Jr.--a true believer who they can easily tell is one of their own but who is accepted by the media and a mass of voters as both normal and likable, since that equals electability. But what will they settle for? Brownback was widely taken by the mainstream media as a poster boy for the religious right and conservative values voters, which is understandable but also shows just how little they understand just how picky these people can be. Yes, Brownback opposes abortion in all cases except to save the life of the mother. Yes, he's reliably crazy on such issues as gay marriage and gun control. He believes in a flat tax and would like to use the District of Columbia as a "test case" to see whether it works out great or just brilliantly. He does not believe that the U.S. Constitution supports privacy rights of any kind. He used one of his debate appearances to confirm that he doesn't believe in the theory of evolution, and then launched himself into a fine, defensive tizzy about it after he noticed people on TV snickering about it. But he also spends a lot of time on, and seems to actually care about, such issues as combating genocide and bringing "price transparency" to the medical industry, things that the true believers must see as frivolous distractions from the real work of making sure that same-sex couples can't leave the house without fear of a stoning.

And, most importantly, he supports offering illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. That, more than anything, is probably the real deal-breaker, just as it's done more to alienate the president's base than the war in Iraq or his letting his dog go on the Bill of Rights. Deranged political obsessions are cyclical, even ones that people insist they hold because God told them to. Nobody in the Moral Majority got upset when Ronald Reagan wanted to offer illegals a path to citizenship, and certainly none of today's inhabitants of Gantry Gulch took it as a sour omen in 2000 that Bush and his sidekick Rove sometimes went weeks without shutting up about how badly they wanted to open up the Republican party to Latin voters. But then after 9/11, these two geniuses decided that they could have their permanent Republican majority by encouraging everyone in the country to stay shit-scared and xenophobic, never thinking that they might have trouble getting their base to always check with them first about who they were supposed to hate. The current obsession among right-wing yahoos with illegal immigrants promises to also be an crippling speed bump for Mike Huckabee, who in most areas of the religious-right litmus test makes Brownback look like Oscar Wilde, but who has a history of advising white hammerheads to chill out on the subject, even going so far as to call attempts to cut off state benefits to illegal immigrants "un-Christian." (If you want to see a faith-based conservative go absolutely batshit, select some especially mean-spirited or bigoted opinion of his and tell him it's "un-Christian." You'll think you're in the climactic scene of Ol' Yeller.) However, not even the religious right can live on anti-immigrant racism alone, which is why hardly anybody's lying awake nights shivering in terror over the prospect of ever hearing the phrase "President Tancredo." Duncan Hunter--if this isn't your big chance, son, you ain't gonna get one.

cross-posted at The Phil Nugent Experience]

Being godless liberals, we naturally have no objection to people whose marriages have gone south on them seeking an escape route through divorce. Hell, sometimes we and our like-minded friends get married on slow weekends just so we can then get divorces and make the angels cry. So the news that French president Nicolas Sarkozy is divorcing his second wife, calling an end to their marriage of eleven years less than six months after he assumed stewardship of the Republic, moved us to nothing more dramatic than a sad shrug. We don't know how our conservative friends, the ones who care so much about how other people are handling their family values, are taking it, though. After all, in the wake of last year's midterms here at home and the continuing collapse of international respect for the Bush administration overseas, Sarkozy's election was greeted as a lonely ray of hope in a sky of inky blackness. Here, we were told by White House spokesmen and right wing editorial writers, was a new breed of French politician, a man who better reflected the values of conservative Americans, and whose election by a country full of beret-wearing surrender monkeys must be a sign that the universe was about to get with the program after all. But surely this is the kind of thing that smacks of the decadent European sophisticates of old, for whom our God-fearing American Republicans have expressed so much contempt. It has been reported that the soon-to-be former Madame Sarkozy didn't even bother to go to the polls to vote for her husband last May, which, if true, certainly puts Al Gore's much-criticized failure to carry his home state of Tennessee in some perspective. On the other hand, if Republican "values voters" can find it in themselves to remain unscandalized by the French leader's penchant for serial matrimony, that might be good practice for them if Rudy Giuliani grabs the presidential nomination.

What the hell?

First, our supposedly majority Democratic Congressional leaders decide to let Bush have his way with the Telecom Protection Act new FISA bill. Then Sen. Chris Dodd, who has made restoration of the Constitution a platform in his presidential campaign, announces that he'll put a hold on any bill that grants retroactive immunity to telecoms that went along with presidential orders to hand over their customers' calling records. Of course, Bush says the telecoms did nothing wrong, so why do they need immunity?

Now, it seems Harry Reid plans to ignore Sen. Dodd's hold, an unprecedented move, and bring up the bill in November. Gee, thanks, Harry. Way to stand up for the citizens you purport to represent.

UPDATE: Dodd says he'll filibuster the bill if Reid brings it to the floor. Go, Chris!


Cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo.

Evangelicals "Lukewarm" Toward GOP Field -- Even Though Every Candidate Except Guiliani Opposes Abortion and Gay Rights

What a hard group to please. Today's Wash Post and NYT dutifully report on the convening this weekend of the much ballyhooed "Values Voters Summit" in Washington, D. C. where leading right-wing activists and leaders will gather to wring their hands over the state of the Republican presidential field and the future of their precious authoritarian movement to coerce people into doing what they say but not as they do.

But the perplexing thing about all this evangelical pity-partying is that, at least until today, Christian fundamentalists had two bonified adherents and spokesman running for the nomination, Arkansas Governor Mike Hucklebee (who also happens to be an ordained Southern Baptist minister no less) and U.S. Senator Sam Brownback, who is dropping out of the race after dismal fund-raising efforts, poorly attended events, and a general lack of support, particularly from the people meeting today to complain about the lack of a consensus nominee.

If the evangelical right is worried about Guliani, and unhappy with Thompson, McCain and Romney for various reasons, why not support Hucklebee or Brownback? I can't imagine that either candidate fails any of the right-wing's theocratic litmus tests.

Not that I mind the fact that the Christian Fascists are splintered, unhappy and forming circular firing squads. But this media narrative that fails to critically assess just what it is that the evangelical, fundy right really wants is annoying. They have candidates. But those candidates are not doing well in general, and are mysteriously not getting attention and support from "values voters" in particular. Moreover, some, perhaps many, of the Christianist's movers and shakers are affiliated with one of the more "establishment" candidates. What does that say about the so-called "values voters" and their leaders?

Anyway, this "values voters summit" will apparently feature a straw poll tomorrow. Who's bringing pop-corn?

SEE YOU IN A FEW DAYS

I meant to post more today, but I had to wrap up a lot of things before taking off for a (long) weekend trip. It's going to be my first flight in a while (gosh, I'm so glad I spotted this headline on my way to work).

See you Sunday night or Monday. The relief team should be along soon....

*****

Oh, and if you missed it, go to the Newshoggers and read the Republicans' new "issues agenda."

EVERYTHING: STILL OUR FAULT

Shorter Mark Steyn:

America desperately needs a more civil political discourse, but the moronic scumbags on the other side won't allow that to happen.

That's really what he's saying. Here's the problem, according to Steyn:

A year before this next election in the U.S., the common space required for civil debate and civilized disagreement has shrivelled to a very thin sliver of ground.

And here's the cause:

... if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can't do that if the guy you're talking to doesn't believe there is a war on terror, only a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up the constitution.

... If you drive around an Ivy League college town -- home to the nation's best and brightest, allegedly -- you notice a wide range of bumper stickers, from the anticipatory ("01/20/09" -- the day of liberation from the Bush tyranny) to the profane ("Buck Fush") to the myopically self-indulgent ("Regime Change Begins At Home") to the exhibitionist paranoid ("9/11 Was An Inside Job").

...The grade schools no longer teach American history as any kind of coherent narrative. "Paint me warts and all," Oliver Cromwell instructed his portraitist. But in public education, American children paint only the warts -- slavery, the ill-treatment of Native Americans, the pollution of the environment, more slavery ... cumulatively, heroism comes to be defined as opposition to that towering Mount Wartmore of dead white males....

And that (and only that) is we don't talk anymore. How much is the right to blame? The right is absolutely blameless:

Well, it takes two to have a cold civil war. The right must be doing some of this stuff, too, surely? Up to a point. But for the most part they either go along, or secede from the system -- they home-school, turn to talk radio and the Internet, read Christian publishers' books that shift millions of copies without ever showing up on a New York Times bestsellers list.

Oh, is that all they read? Just cozy little inspirational texts that give offense to no one? They don't read, say, From New York to L.A., Liberals Are Evil? Or The Official Handbook of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy 2008: The Arguments You Need to Defeat the Loony Left This Election Year? Or Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party? Or Shut Up & Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN Are Subverting America? Or Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild? (I've limited myself to books Steyn ought to be familiar with, because they're recent and forthcoming books from his own publisher.)

Oh, never mind. Maybe I should just stop here and go listen to some of the pleasant, inoffensive talk radio that Steyn assures me has no negative effect on our discourse.

(Cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo.)

GIULIANI'S ONLY REAL HURDLE

A headline at the L.A. Times's Top of the Ticket blog is "New Iowa poll: Romney, Clinton lead, Rudy a poor fourth." In The New York Observer, former NYC public advocate and near-mayor Mark Green says a principal hurdle for Giuliani is that "it's hard to survive a fourth-place finish in Iowa."

If Rudy loses the nomination fight, this will be the reason. The press will certainly want to make the Iowa results a huge story -- not only the inevitable Romney win but any other other surprises (Huckabee third? Ron Paul over 1%?).

Alas, I think Rudy's going to beat this one. It helps that the guy who's going to win Iowa is a guy nobody likes anywhere else in America. Beyond that, I just think Giuliani has will -- and I'm deliberately using a word with a lot of unnerving connotations. I think he's just going to keep going, and he's going to declare that anyone who says the race is over after one state is an idiot, in that I'm not raising my voice and I'm using polysyllabic words but you know I'd smack you across the room if I could get away with it tone that routinely intimidates people -- and it will intimidate the press. And so the race won't be over.

Will is probably Republicans' most potent weapon -- when they seem in retreat, when it seems that all forces are trending against them, they just keep going, and eventually the conventional wisdom changes. Will is what Republicans in Congress had when they impeached Clinton after the '98 elections, and this eventually wounded Gore enough to put Bush in the White House. Will is what Bush had on Iraq after the '06 elections and the release of the Iraq Study Group report, and he got to keep his war, even through the supposedly magical month of September '07. Will is what the gun lobby has every time there's a firearms massacre. (And will, of course, is precisely what Democrats lack.)

It shouldn't routinely work, of course. The press should be able to look these guys in the eye and say, "Yeah, you're really sure of yourselves, but you're still wrong." But that rarely happens. Beltway journalists believe whatever they're told with absolute conviction.

As far as the nomination fight goes, I'm not saying Giuliani has a monopoly on will. Romney has it, too. (It's just about all he has besides money.) But Giuliani has will and the 9/11 myth and the myth that he single-handedly invented crime reduction and tamed the rabble in New York. Thompson and McCain and Huckabee don't seem to have will at all.

Republicans have willed themselves through many situations in which they were absolutely in the wrong. Rudy just has to will himself past a media-created bit of conventional wisdom -- that whoever wins Iowa is automatically the front-runner, even if the winner is extremely unpopular in the rest of the country. I fear he's not going to have much trouble pulling that off.

GUN CRAZIES WINNING AGAIN?

In the immediate aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, a bill was introduced in Congress that would strengthen our gun laws with the permission of the NRA:

House Democratic leaders are working with the National Rifle Association to bolster existing laws blocking mentally ill people from buying guns.

... The measure ... would require states to supply more-thorough records, including for any mental illness-related court action against a would-be gun purchaser.

Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., a strong NRA ally who has been a leading opponent of most gun control legislation, is negotiating with the group on the background-check bill....

I was skeptical. I wrote a post noting that the NRA supported the bill, but an even more hard-line pro-gun group, the Gun Owners of America, was opposed. "So who'll prevail in Congress, the NRA or the GOA? My money's not on the NRA," I wrote.

But then the bill passed the House. News reports said that it was expected to pass the Senate and that, according to a White House spokesman, "the president 'very much' supports the goals of the House bill." Silly me, always expecting the worst, right?

Maybe I wasn't being unduly pessimistic:

A gun-control bill that advocates say could have prevented the April killings of 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus has hit a roadblock in the Senate.

The measure would provide money to states to ensure that they properly update the national database of those prohibited to purchase weapons. It has support from both handgun control groups and the National Rifle Association but Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York says his colleague Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, has derailed any hopes of quick passage....

And yet another gun group, the National Association for Gun Rights, is announcing that Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina "is now publicly telling constituents he is opposed to HR2640, which means steam is gathering against this gun control scheme." (Oh, and Ted Nugent's opposed, too.)

These people never back down. No matter how horrible the atrocity, they just wait you out. And they always win.

ADORING A FASCIST

A right-wing blogger who calls himself Soccer Dad reads today's Maureen Dowd column more astutely than he realizes:

Maureen Dowd observes today("Rudy roughs up the Arabs") that candidate Rudy Giuliani is pro-Israel. And she makes it sound like that's a bad thing.

Rudy would probably only take the hand of an Arab leader to throw him down a ravine, or a wadi.

It's really hard to knock the column because she's correct. Rudy, at least on the face of it, is a pro-Israel candidate. Leave out verbs like "rant" and "preened" and I'd read the column as an endorsement.

I'd absolutely quibble with part of that -- Rather than "Rudy Giuliani is pro-Israel," I'd say "Rudy and his advisers hate any Arab or Muslim not named Chalabi" (if you doubt me, watch this scary Josh Marshall assessment of Rudy's foreign policy team, or read this or this).

But when Soccer Dad says at the end that he would "read the column as an endorsement," it's for a good reason -- the column basically is an endorsement.

The way you know is that Dowd's snark-generating skills are barely in evidence. There are no cute nicknames, no sentences that turn themselves inside out. We get this kind of prose instead:

...[Giuliani] went through his greatest hits: The time he yanked Yasir Arafat out of Lincoln Center during a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth. "The thing that really bothered me was, he didn’t have a ticket," Rudy recalled. "He was a freeloader!"

The time he tossed back a $10 million check for 9/11 families from the Saudi prince who urged America to "adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause."

"You know, Israel's not perfect, and America's not perfect, but we're not terrorist states," he said....

When Dowd gives the glibness a rest -- especially when her subject is a macho man (cf. her Schwarzenegger columns from 2003) -- you know she's impressed, even if she doesn't know it herself.

And at the end, we learn who else got "roughed up" by Giuliani:

Rudy lambasted Hillary and Obama for their "strong Democratic desire to negotiate, negotiate, negotiate and negotiate," and suggested again that he would be tougher on Iran than Hillary, and would never let it get a nuclear weapon.

Last night, when he and Judi were interviewed by Fox's Sean Hannity, Rudy ratcheted it up, saying that Hillary’s "ambiguity" and "shifting of position" on Iran was "a dangerous tendency, I think, in somebody that aspires to take on a position where you have got to be pretty darn decisive."

He also bored in where Obama has been skittish about going: her experience. "Honestly, in most respects, I don't know Hillary's experience. She's never run a city. She's never run a state. She's never run a business. She has never met a payroll. She has never been responsible for the safety and security of millions of people, much less even hundreds of people."

He assured everyone he'd learned how to put his cellphone on vibrate. But he left himself at full volume.

If you're waiting for a real Dowd punchline, one that reduces Rudy to a cartoon and a buffoon, well, don't hold your breath -- chivalrous guy that he is, he did her work for her, attacking her betes noires, Hillary and Obama. You can tell she's grateful to the big lug for that -- and you'll see her treat him with kid gloves repeatedly in the next year or so.