Edgewise

Republicans trying to have it both ways on race

Joshua Micah Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo is one of the best political blogs around, has a new column in The Hill. His first column takes on Republican tolerance of intolerance:

Critics on the left often wrongly claim that the Republican Party is some hotbed of crypto-racism, when, in fact, most Republicans are nothing of the sort. Many want to build a racially inclusive party. The problem is that too many Republican officeholders still believe it's important to keep the GOP a congenial home for all manner of unreconstructed yahoos and even downright racists.

Vonnegut, a pacifist, despairs

Says Kurt Vonnegut, in this short interview from In These Times: "I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers."

RoveWatch: Reich in TAP

Robert Reich dissects Rove's Machiavellian chops in "The Rove Machine Rolls On" in The American Prospect, detailing his techniques. Among them:

Count on the American public's (and the media's) inability to remember anything from one year to the next. The Rove machine gave Bush tough talking points on corporate fraud when the newspapers were full of Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom and Tyco, and when reporters were asking uncomfortable questions about Bush's and Cheney's own corporate dealings. Rove played for time, assuming that warmongering about Iraq (carefully orchestrated to begin just a few months before the midterm elections) would bury the issue. He was right. The administration dragged its feet on reform, and a year out almost nothing has changed. Another example: Rove sold the administration's $1.35 trillion tax cut in 2001 as a way to spur the ailing economy. Obviously it had no such effect, but Rove assumed no one would remember. Right again. Now the White House is selling the administration's 2003 tax cut as a way to spur the ailing economy.

Altered State of the Union

San Francisco based film maker and photographer Bijan Yashar will be projecting George W. Bush's State of the Union address in real time onto the wall of the Shell Station at Market and Sanchez. He will filter the live speech through a camera utilizing extreme and shifting angles to "reveal implicit perspectives and points of view inherent in political posturing and media constructions."

Tuesday, January 28 at 6:00 pm.

My country right or left

Matthew Riemer, writing in YellowTimes.org, debunks the notion that criticism of American foreign policy is inherently anti-American.

Worst... president... ever

The Daily Breeze quotes veteran White House journalist Helen Thomas (whose recently exchange with Ari Fleischer about unelected leaders made the rounds of the blogosphere) on the quality of the current presiding executive:

She seemed to have sympathy and affection for everyone but George W. Bush, a man who she said is rising on a wave of 9-11 fear—fear of looking unpatriotic, fear of asking questions, just fear. “We have,” she said, “lost our way.” ... As she signed my program, I joked, “You sound worried.”

“This is the worst president ever,” she said. “He is the worst president in all of American history.”

When is a quota not a quota?

Mark Kleiman unpacks the Big Lie in the way the right uses the poll-tested shibboleth word "quota" to oppose any and all affirmative action programs.

Left-wing Conservatives and Right-wing Liberals

The political spectrum here in the U.S. has become increasingly muddled over the years. Conservatives adopted the lingo and some of the verities of liberal progressive thought and more recently the rump of the left has toyed with attempting to coopt the aspects of right-wing thought it finds least unpalatable. We've got a darling of the right proposing a Wilsonian nation-building scheme in the middle-east and a reflexive left in bed with anti-American protest organizers.

So I've started a game. When I'm watching a politician (or, increasingly, an anchor or pundit) bloviating on the TV screen, I try to figure out if they're one of two new political species I've made up or identified: right-wing liberals and leftist conservatives. For example, when I find myself agreeing with Ann Coulter and Instapundit that Hillary Clinton has adopted the wrong argument in favor of affirmative action (claiming that by "the content of their character" Martin Luther King, Jr., was implicitly including the concept of race instead of excluding, when a stronger argument lies right there: they we de not yet live in the world that King dreamed of), I am forced to admit that Hillary is a left-wing conservative. She knows in her gut what side she is on and she will adopt inflexible thinking in order to seek the outcomes she favors.

Most of the libertarian types and people like David Brooks are Right-wing liberals. Joe Lieberman is a left-wing conservative. John McCain is a right-wing liberal. I'm not saying there aren't any pure lefties or righties anymore. Pat Buchanan is a right-wing conservative and Ralph Nader is a left-wing liberal, so these people exist, but they have become increasingly marginalized.

We have a left, such as it is, that harkens back to the days when it was in the vanguard, when Roosevelt cobbled together an unweildy coalition that did not fully spend its force until around 1994. They are conservative, in their desire to return to a time when liberal arguments circa 1949 could win just about any political argument.

Increasingly, it is the people whose views evolved from the right who are looking for new paths forward, but they are also in bed with those who would happily skip back through the '50s, past the '20s, and land us somewhere in the gilded age of the 1890s (again, we find the Ann Coulter type of right-wing reactionary in this camp).

So of course the spectrum is a muddle. People are spread out all over the various axes. The center shifts, it all depends on how you frame the issues and who did the last push poll. But I've got my eye on this weird new taxonomy, and I'm going to keep spotting these weird righty liberals an lefty conservatives when they show themselves.

Slip of the tongue?

Soundbite at the top of the Lehrer show today quotes W. warning Iraqi line officers from obeying commands to use biological or chemical weapons again us (just as last time they were warned and they apparently refrained from doing so — whether we poisoned our own troops with experimental prophylaxis is another question). Bush warns that after the overthrowregime change, they will be hunted down, "tried, and persecuted."

Did he really mean to say persecuted?

Irish Catholics have long memories

I'm sure an unnamed political advisor from the previous Bush administration is regretting his loose lips many years ago when he confessed to Maureen Dowd that his boss was surprised to find a person with her background covering the White House for the New York Times. The op-ed (deadly serious, as opposed to her frequently missing-the-mark unfunny flights of whimsy) also dredges up a revealing interview from that same period that shows how selective class-blindless trumps color-blindness any day with this crowd.

North Korea: What did they know and when did they know it?

Joshua Marshall has been burning up the wires lately at his Talking Points Memo blog site, holding the administration's feet to the fire on their utterly failed policies toward North Korea. TPM's recent post on the subject goes to the heart of the question of how long the Bush folks have been sitting on certain information about North Korean uranium-enrichment efforts. Read the entire sequence to get to the heart of this muddle.

Then read the rest of TPM's recent posts to learn that the Republican purge of racist party leaders is far from complete.

Ask Dick Cheney!

Dick Cheney may be hiding out in an undisclosed location unavailable to answer questions from the public (just as his boss ended the practice of holding press conferences back in February of 2001), but you can ask a simulation of Dick Cheney anything you like. My question: Will Halliburton benefit from the reconstruction of Iraq after Gulf War II? The Unofficial Official Simulator's answer here.

Class warfare? Bring it on!

Republicans hauled out "class warfare" talking point this week as they do every time one of their "tax relief" plans is challenged as extremely tilted toward the superrich. It must poll well for them.

If you're tired of hearing this feint or disappointed with the timid rigidity of the Democrats' response, Matthew Miller of Tribune Media Services offers some suggestions for alternative tax plans that take on the concept of class warfare with gusto.

Krugman's unanswered critique

I got to wondering why the voices raised in opposition to Paul Krugman's series of columns about the Bush presidency always seem to go for the ad hom argument, at times resorting to coordinated smearing and so rarely seem to engage with the substance of his (coherent, by way of contrast) lines of argument.

When I saw the URL for Krugman's column today on the political opportunism of the administration team in a friends's IM status message, we had this conversation:

xi: have you noticed that right-wing talking points always attack krugman personally, or question his biases, or nitpick about some fact-checking or matter of tone...

xi: but they never address the underlying "emperor has no clothes" analysis

btb: yeah...i like him...he is left leaning, but my god...i just can't get over how blatantly and patently stupid the bush plan (for everything) is

btb: it's embarrassing...for bush, and for us citizens that this can go on

btb: i mean, at least with reagan, love him or hate him, there was some underlying cohesive concept (supply side) behind his madness

btb: with bush, it's just grotesque pandering passed off as compassionate conservatism (aptly described by robin williams as being like a volvo with a gunrack)

xi: he leans left given these times, sure, but he has very traditional economic viewpoints about trade, macroeconomics, etc.

xi: what is the saying about "the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce"?

btb: i would argue that krugman is slightly left regardless of the times...which is ok...actually, left and right really don't apply to economists i suppose, there are schools of thought (fix/float; monetary/fiscal; demand side/supply side) that get taken up by pol parties at any given time to sharpen the ax in need of grinding at the moment, so then, yes, i guess you're right, at this time krugman's pov seems left cuz the right is so f-in dumb

xi: yeah. it's not like he's for socialism or collectivism or even protectionism. i'd say he is a "Libera

xi: l"

xi: oops

btb: yeah, but in today's bizzarro world a lot of bush's policies -- huge farm subsidies and steel tariffs-- seem like out-dated lefty protectionism, but so much so that post-clinton not even leftists would dare stand up in favor of tariffs and subsidies for dying industries..strange then that rove, uh, i mean bush, got those things thru

xi: yup. it's the ascendancy of marketing and PR. The salesmen have taken over.

Getting to the Brown and Root of things

This August, 2000 Austin Chronicle article (The Candidate From Brown and Root) connects the dots on Brown and Root, LBJ, Halliburton, and Dick Cheney.

John Edwards is the Grisham candidate

Too lazy to pad out to my front drive and pick up the Sunday Chronicle, I've been reading New York Times op eds and now skimming Slate. There's a tight little William Saletan article from Thursday, Wise Counsel: Edwards copies Clinton's message—in invisible ink, that makes the point that John Edwards has mastered the Clinton technique of putting the focus on the audience, the potential voter: "I will be a champion for regular people in the White House every day," he says.

This is also how he addresses the flak he will take for having amassed a fortune as a personal-injury lawyer (what Republicans like to call a "trial lawyer" to distinguish, I suppose from the corporate attorneys they have no problems with).

My gut sense is that Edwards appeals like the characters in John Grisham's novels: they are scrappy, cynical Southerners who end up championing the poor and helpless against large impersonal forces, usually corporations, and winning.

I've always thought that political campaigns, especially presidential elections, are about competing stories. People vote (those who do vote) for the narrative they prefer. If that's the case, then Edwards' version of "the people versus the powerful" may present a very compelling alternative narrative to the current administration's thumbnail sketch.

What has Iraq got that North Korea hasn't?

In his op ed today, A War for Oil?, Tom Friedman mentions the president's recent soundbite:

Mr. Bush's recent attempt to hype the Iraqi threat by saying that an Iraqi attack on America — which is most unlikely — "would cripple our economy" was embarrassing. It made the president look as if he was groping for an excuse to go to war, absent a smoking gun.