Steny's Doing His Job
Given the lionization of Jack Murtha as a lightning rod for antiwar sentiment in recent months, and the demonization of House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer by people like purge-meister David Sirota, I figured Murtha's announcement that he would challenge Hoyer for Majority Leader if Dems retake the House would ignite a widespread netroots campaign for the doughty Pennsylvanian.
So I was pleased to see a post today at MyDD by Jonathan Singer reminding his colleagues of the right measure for this position:Regardless of Hoyer's propensity to diverge from progressive talking points -- and indeed votes, at times -- he has been more effective in this respect than any other Democrat in the position in recent memory. According to a report by CQ in January, House Democrats were more unified in 2005 than at any other point since the periodical has tracked votes. Likewise, House Democrats more strongly opposed President Bush in 2005 than in any other year....
So unless Murtha can prove in some way that he would be more effective than Hoyer in wrangling together the disparate factions of the House Democratic Caucus, I just don't believe the Democrats would be best served by getting rid of Hoyer, whether they're in the majority or the minority.
Singer's exactly right. Hoyer has been an extraordinary Whip; his legacy is a far more united House Caucus than anybody had any reason to expect, and that shouldn't be an afterthought in determining whether he moves up in a Democratic-controlled House.
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Thursday, June 08, 2006
Zarquawi's Dead; Now What?
The death of Abu Musab al-Zarquawi, the murderous al Qaeda leader in Iraq, presents a clear example of how killing is sometimes necessary to protect life. This man represented the worst of a bad cause: a jihadist whose rage against the infidels extended to any Muslim who did not embrace his Salafist creed, including all Shi'a. His elimination by an American bomb was clearly the best gift our country has given Iraq since the capture of Saddam Hussein.
But the question has to be asked: now what? Will Zarquawi's death demoralize the Sunni-based insurgency, or al Qaeda itself?
Over at the New Republic's site, Spencer Ackerman suggests this event may actually help al Qaeda by erasing a controversial and counter-productive leader, and may hurt the U.S. by eliminating a scapegoat for all the violence in Iraq. Whether or not Ackerman is right, no one should harbor the illusion that Zarquawi's death will somehow "moderate" al Qaeda in anything other than a tactical way. It may actually parallel the destruction of the leadership of the Brownshirts in Nazi Germany in the famous "night of the long knives," which made Nazism ostensibly more respectable even as it solidified the power of the genocidal maniacs of the S.S.
Here in the U.S., the snuffing of Zarquawi may give the Bush administration a small and temporary lift, demonstrating that even a blind hog will find an acorn now and then. If, however, the violence in Iraq does not significantly abate, then all the administration's focus on Zarquawi may ultimately backfire. It's one thing to acknowledge that Bush got re-elected mainly because millions of Americans bought the idea that by fighting jihadists in Iraq, he was keeping them from perpetrating terrorist acts here; who could prove otherwise? But if things don't get better in Iraq now that Zarqauwi's gone, the administration's whole Iraq-War-Is-The-War-On-Terror argument will quickly unravel.
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Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Here We Go Again
The purpose of this week's gratuitious "debate" in the U.S. Senate on the so-called Defense of Marriage Amendment doesn't even qualify as an open secret: it's more like an open sore. A panicked GOP, under direct threats from self-appointed Christian Right leaders like James Dobson and unable to deal with any real issues, is trying to shore up its hard-line cultural conservative base by pretending to do something about the Awful Specter of Gay Marriage. You might even call it Rove's Last Stand: with growing majorities of Americans rejecting Bush and GOP policies on almost every conceivable subject, the idea is to repolarize the electorate with cultural wedge issues and reenergize the theocratic element of the God 'n' Mammon coalition that's been so noisily falling apart of late.
Tired and transparent as this ploy is, it does fit neatly into GOP plans to make the November elections not a referendum on Republican misgovernment, but a lesser-of-two-evils choice between the incumbent party of power and those crazy Christian-hating, terrorist-appeasing, Bush-impeaching Democrats.
Right on cue, the Right's most promiscuous slanderer, Ann Coulter, is coming out with a new book under the fair-and-balanced title Godless, which "exposes" liberalism as a vast and all-powerful conspiracy to ban Christianity, introduce mandatory Paganism, and reduce the human race to the status of beasts.
If you think I'm exaggerating, check out the excerpt from Godless posted at townhall.com, but you might want to keep some hand-sanitizer close by in case you accidentally touch your computer screen. Here's a characteristic passage:Liberalism is a comprehensive belief system denying the Christian belief in man’s immortal soul. Their religion holds that there is nothing sacred about human consciousness. It’s just an accident no more significant than our possession of opposable thumbs. They deny what we know about ourselves: that we are moral beings in God’s image. Without this fundamental understanding of man’s place in the world, we risk being lured into misguided pursuits, including bestiality, slavery, and PETA membership.
Those of you who have risked exposure to Coulter's nasty oeuvre will recognize in this last sentence her signature move of tossing a leaden "jest" into a series of gross calumnies, thus enabling her conservative defenders to excuse her as a practitioner of good, clean, hate-filled fun.
Normally I wouldn't pay any attention to Coulter's ravings; it's depressing enough to realize that Godless, like her earlier screeds, will probably wind up on bestseller lists. But a particular passage in the excerpt caught my attention:If Democrats ever dared speak coherently about what they believe, the American people would lynch them. So they claim to believe in God, much as Paul Begala claims to go “duck hunting” (liberal code for “antiquing”). At the beginning of the 2004 presidential campaign, the Democratic Leadership Council held briefings to teach Democratic candidates how to simulate a belief in God. To ease the Druids into it, the DLC recommended using phrases like “God’s green earth.” (The DLC also suggested avoiding the use of phrases such as “goddamned, motherf—ing Republicans!”)
The last paranthetical sentence, of course, is another Coulter bon mot. It does not seem to occur to this self-proclaimed Defensor Fidei that she should eschew violations of the Second Commandment (or, for that matter, that she is exceptionally ill-equipped to accuse Paul Begala of elitism). But the previous two sentences happen to refer to a quote from yours truly, delivered at a conference on cultural issues in Atlanta in the autumn of 2003. Since I was, you know, actually there, and know a lot more about what I was saying that Ann Coulter's research staff, I can report that the audience was a group primarily composed of southern state legislators, roughly half of them African-Americans. I strongly suspect none of them were tree-worshipping Druids, and moreover, that most of them have forgotten more about the theory and practice of Christianity than Ann Coulter will ever know. And in my remarks to the group, far from teaching anyone to "simulate belief in God," I was actually suggesting that people of faith who are Democrats shouldn't hide the fact, and could take a lesson from George W. Bush in how to weave scriptural language into policy discussions, especially insofar as W. seems to ignore half the Law and most of the Gospels.
This particular passage of Godless is just a wolf-cub in the snarling pack of Coulter's lies, but it does give you a sense of her respect for facts. I've personally been accused on occasion of indulging in unfunny humor, but to use another "bestial" metaphor, anyone who finds the Clown Princess of right-wing invective hilarious probably likes dead-kitten jokes, especially in the company of those PETA-loving liberal Druids.
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Monday, June 05, 2006
Primaries and Purges
Over at MyDD, Chris Bowers reacts to the DLC's recent argument against a nationally-driven purge of Joe Lieberman by shouting "hypocrites!" Where, he asks, are Lieberman's defenders when it comes to other primary challenges like Ed Case's against "the arguably more progressive" Sen. Daniel Akaka of Hawaii? Having firmly planted the axiom that the case for Lieberman is all about rejecting the very idea of primary challenges to incumbent Democrats, Chris fulminates for a while about "establishment" types trying to deny Democratic voters their legal right to choose their nominees for office.
I respect Chris Bowers, but this time he's missing a very basic point. The DLC is not arguing against the right to "primary" incumbents; if Connecticut Democrats want to replace Joe Lieberman with Ned Lamont or anybody else, that's fine by me. It's the national effort to dump Joe, evidenced by the heavy involvement of national organizations like MoveOn and Democracy for America, that's objectionable. And as Chris knows, much of the progressive blogosphere is nearly as obsessed with the Lamont candidacy as it is with delivering a Democratic Congress this November, for reasons that have zippo to do with the vindication of the sovereign rights of Connecticut Democrats to choose whomever they want (has anyone other than Ned Lamont himself pledged to support Lieberman if he does win the primary? If so, they're pretty quiet about it). The level of abuse being aimed at Lieberman is, quite frankly, a close second to the abuse being aimed at George W. Bush.
Comparing the national effort to get rid of Lieberman to Ed Case's primary challenge to Daniel Akaka is just weird. But Chris is determined to follow the line of argument. A few weeks ago, he said this:If anyone has the gall to claim that progressives are wasting Democratic resources in 2006 by challenging incumbents like Lieberman, just point to Hawaii where conservatives are doing the same thing. How dare the DLC waste Democratic resources like this! Don't they know the real target should be Republicans?
Upon reading this post at the time, my first thought was "Huh?" Aside from the fact that the DLC doesn't raise money or endorse candidates or recruit volunteers, I'm quite sure nobody at the DLC was more than dimly aware of the Case challenge to Akaka, which is apparently more about Akaka's age than anything to do with ideology. This is clearly not a "nationally-driven purge," just as it's equally clear the anti-Lieberman campaign is exactly that. And any "so's your old man" argument to the contrary is a bit like saying that Super Target is identical to Super WallMart because they sell some of the same items.
Primaries are fine. Purges are not, and I don't think there's much doubt which is which when it comes to the intraparty politics of 2006.
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Friday, June 02, 2006
White Rabbit Day
Yesterday the blogosphere was full of talk about Unity '08, a nascent third-party effort with a twist: the idea is to build a party online, agree on an agenda, draft candidates to run for president and vice president in 2008, and then get them on the ballot across the country.
I found the talk especially interesting because two ol' pols from my home state of Georgia, Ham Jordan and Gerald Rafshoon (both veterans of the Carter presidential campaigns) are in the forefront of the effort, along with Hotline founder Doug Bailey and former independent governor of Maine, Angus King. My old boss Sam Nunn is being mentioned as a possible candidate (don't hold your breath, folks; Nunn's got bigger fish to fry, like saving us all from loose nukes).
My colleague The Moose hailed the effort but warned it would have a hard time overcoming the various institutional barriers to a third party. Over at Daily Kos, diarist Redshift notes that Unity '08's "crucial issues" list looks a lot like that of Democrats.
My reaction was a little different: third-party efforts that begin with the concept of an agenda and the idea of a candidate tend to take its promoters through the looking glass in pursuit of White Rabbits they can never quite catch. Some of you may remember a similar effort back in 1995-96, organized by a group of former elected officials dubbed "the secret seven" (Bill Bradley, Dick Lamm, Tim Penney, Lowell Weicker, Paul Tsongas, Gary Hart and the self-same Angus King). Their deal was to promote "intergenerational equity," a bit of a code word for entitlement reform, and the press got all excited by the possibility that the group would run one of its number for president as a third-party candidate in 1996.
By a pure coincidence, I was moderating a panel at the Minnesota conference where Lamm, Tsongas and Penney showed up with the promise to reveal the "secret seven's" plans. After much hype, the three did a long presentation on the budget and entitlement spending, admitted they had no plans for a candidacy, and then basically disappeared from view as the horse-race-deprived political media lost interest.
My advice to the Unity '08 crew is that they better get some serious candidate possibilities out there to define their effort and make sure their interactive agenda-building initiative doesn't become a freak magnet. Otherwise, they'll be chasing White Rabbits until their potential constituency disappears through the looking glass.
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Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Will Tennessee Buy a Ford?
It's not a particularly penetrating analysis of the Tennessee Senate race, but Robin Toner's piece today in the New York Times on Harold Ford's campaign does supply one very interesting anectdote:Mr. Ford, a five-term congressman from Memphis, rouses his audiences, white and black, with little parables of political possibility: How he was driving back to Memphis one day on the campaign trail, fired up after a meeting at a church, and decided to stop and shake hands at a bar and grill called the Little Rebel. How he looked with some trepidation at the Confederate flag outside and the parking lot filled with pickup trucks, covered with bumper stickers for President Bush and the National Rifle Association.
And how he was greeted, when he walked through the door, by a woman at the bar who gave him a huge hug. "And she said, 'Baby, we've been waiting to see you.' "
That's actually an accurate parable of U.S. politics in Tennessee, the South, and America at large: voters are ready to fire the GOP, and Democrats simply need to seal the deal. The door is open; we have to take down the "Do Not Disturb" sign that has signalled voters Democrats only care about their own, and reach out aggressively to people who cast ballots for W., and regret it.
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Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Yet Another Shoe Drops On Ralph A year earlier [than Reed's mailer], the Department of the Interior -- which oversees federal policy toward the U.S. territory -- presented a very different picture of life for Chinese workers on the islands. An Interior report found that Chinese women were subject to forced abortions and that women and children were subject to forced prostitution in the local sex-tourism industry.
Tom Edsall's Monday Washington Post article about the latest controversy involving the Man Who Would Be Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, Ralph Reed, had the familiar sound of another predictable shoe dropping on the boon companion of Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist. Seems that back in 1999, Ralph got paid by Abramoff to do a direct mail piece to conservative Christians in Alabama urging them to contact then-Congressman Bob Riley (now the Republican Governor of that state) to get him to oppose legislation imposing federal wage and worker safety laws on the U.S. territory in the Northern Mariana Islands. Ralph's mailer focused especially on the concern that the legislation would restrict the recruitment of Chinese workers to NMI industries, denying these wards of the Godless Communist State access to the Word of God readily available in their new if temporary home.
Anybody familiar with the arcana of the ongoing Abramoff scandal will laugh and laugh at the mention of the Northern Mariana Islands, a favorite cash cow for Abramoff and company, and a strange pet cause of the conservative movement for much of the 1990s. Here's how Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, quoting my colleague The Moose, put it a while back:Marshall Wittmann, a conservative activist turned centrist, attended the first meeting in 1993 hosted by Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, to rally conservatives of different stripes around a common agenda. “There were about a dozen of us wanting to stop this or that Clinton plan,” says Wittmann. “When the Mariana Islands came up, I wondered how did this become a conservative issue?” The Northern Mariana Islands were the first big project that Norquist and Abramoff worked on together. An American protectorate in the Pacific Ocean, the government there wanted help to resist certain U.S. laws, like paying minimum wage. Norquist talked up the Marianas as a model of free enterprise, and Abramoff collected $9 million in lobbying fees, smoothing the way for members of Congress to take fact-finding trips to the islands and play golf.
“It was the first time I scratched my head and thought there’s something amiss here,” Wittmann told NEWSWEEK. “The seeds that were planted then developed into the fauna and flora we have now.”
Flora and fauna indeed. And it gets worse for Reed. Not only did his flacking for NMI entangle him even further with the Abramoff-Norquist money machine, but it turns out that great capitalist paradise in the Pacific engaged in practices even worse than U.S.-favored wage exploitation. Here's how Edsall explained it:
So it looks like maybe those Chinese workers in NMI weren't exactly exposed to the Gospel in action after all. But Ralph took Abramoff's bucks and did the sales job anyway, which might be described in biblical terms as trading his birthright for a mess of pottage.
It's still not clear how much damage all this accumulating flora and fauna of corruption is doing to Ralph Reed's campaign; he's still cashing his national chits and harvesting endorsements from people like Rudy Guiliani.
But all across my home state of Georgia, from the Rabun Gap to the Tybee Light, and from Waycross to Cartersville to Ralph's adopted home town of Toccoa, the shoes continue to drop. My guess is that sooner or later, the voters of this red state will recognize Ralph Reed as a classic Washington jiveass whose native son pretensions are as insubstantial as instant grits.
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