Rep. Ellison: 'Gibbs Crossed The Line'

This was just dumb; alienating the liberal base months before an election. This is where Republicans beat us coming and going. They court their lunatic fringe. It keeps them in the fold, even when they don't get everything they want, and it keeps the Overton window moving farther and farther to the right. The "professional" Dems keep proving themselves to be idiots. They're still letting far right Republicans control the debate and control them.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Political Wushu II: Double Double Crossers

Appearing at The Blogging Curmudgeon, My Left Wing, and the Independent Bloggers' Alliance.

I was reminded today of a term I haven't thought about in a while, which is funny, because I coined the phrase: "political wushu." I introduced this concept on my blog here, and on My Left Wing here. Wushu means "Arts of War" and once described a body of serious martial arts disciplines in China. But under Mao it was stripped of any real fighting utility and became a dizzying acrobatic sport, which is, to this day, enjoyed as entertainment. Sadly, this is exactly what has happened to our representative democracy. What was once a brave experiment -- a practical application of principles rendered in the age of enlightenment -- is now an empty spectacle. The Democratic Party has put on something of a show of being an opposition party, but it is all part of a choreographed routine, in which the outcome is never in doubt. Their spears are flimsy tin. Their swords, dull.

Did we really expect Congressional Democrats to fight to the finish for timetables in Iraq? Did we honestly think they would put a stop to the madness of this Administration? No, friends. That's not how it was scripted. This week, the mighty Democrats took a dive.

Sure, opposition to this war is at an all-time high. Sure, three quarters of the country thinks the surge is a failure. The American people don't so much as pick out the music for these performances. We just stare slack-jawed from the audience and wait for the curtain to come down on yet another predictable denouement.

As David Sirota points out, Democrats are proud of their performances, and of their ability to dazzle and deceive.

And here's the worst part of it all - Democrats are now bragging about it. Not only have they sent out a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraising email attempting to confuse voters by claiming with a straight face that they really stood up to President Bush. But most insulting of all, they are actually running to reporters to pat themselves on the back for engineering a procedural pirouette designed to confuse the public. Here's the [Washington] Post again:

"But while protesters outside the Capitol condemned what they saw as a capitulation, Democrats inside were remarkably understanding of their speaker's contortions. Party leaders jury-rigged the votes yesterday to give all Democrats something to brag about...Democrats saw brilliance in the legerdemain. And with such contortions came more appreciation for the efforts Pelosi was making to fund the war in a fashion most palatable to angry Democrats. 'It was the responsible thing to do, and she's a responsible speaker,' said Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.)."

This is what we're dealing with folks. A party that runs to the press to brag about the brilliance of using their majority not to end the war, but to create a situation that makes it seem as if they oppose the war, while actually helping Republicans continue it.

Sleight of hand, indeed. Here, Sirota breaks down, step-by-step, the complex choreography of the Democrat's illusion.

...Every bill comes to the House floor with what is known as a "rule" that sets the terms of the debate over the legislation in question. House members first vote to approve this parliamentary rule, and then vote on the legislation. Today, however, Democrats are planning to essentially include the Iraq blank check bill IN the rule itself, by making sure the underlying bill the rule brings to the floor includes no timelines for withdrawal, and that the rule only allows amendments that fund the war with no restrictions - blank check amendments that House Democratic leaders know Republicans will have the votes to pass.

This means that when the public goes to look for the real vote on the Iraq supplemental bill, the public won't find that. All we will find is a complex parliamentary procedure vote, which was the real vote. Democratic lawmakers, of course, will use the Memorial Day recess to tell their angry constituents they really are using all of their power to end the war, that they voted against the Republican blank check amendment which the rule deliberately propels, and that the vote on the rule - which was the real vote for war - wasn't really the important vote, when, in fact, they know very well it is the biggest vote on the war since original 2002 authorization for the invasion. It is a devious, deliberately confusing cherry on top of the manure sundae being served up to the American public, which voted Democrats into office on the premise that they would use their congressional majority to end the war...

As I said here:

Establishment Democrats have long since ceased to be an opposition party. They are tools of a statist regime giving us all a good show, but stripped of any real power to stop a political juggernaut years in the making; one that would make kings of presidents and reduce Congress to a sad spectacle.

And so we are saddled with this war for the indefinite future; one that has claimed 3437 of our troops, as of this writing, and at a rate that spirals ever upward.

Today I learned that still greater horrors may await us, as the Bush Administration prepares to make its consolidation of power complete.

President Bush, without so much as issuing a press statement, on May 9 signed a directive that granted near dictatorial powers to the office of the president in the event of a national emergency declared by the president.

The "National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive," with the dual designation of NSPD-51, as a National Security Presidential Directive, and HSPD-20, as a Homeland Security Presidential Directive, establishes under the office of president a new National Continuity Coordinator.

What will the Democrats do? Will they stand and fight to the last for what is left of our tattered Democracy? Will they guard the gates to their dying breaths like the Spartans at Thermopylae? Or will they simply dance, dance, dance!

Impeachment Porn

Now there's a term. This is apparently the phrase of choice for the keepers of social norms at Daily Kos. Yes "impeachment" -- another verboten topic in the orange place. Here are some choice excerpts picked up by the folks at Mo Betta META.

Exhibit A:

Exactly what I did (0 / 0)

when I walked away from MLW and BT. And why I fervently hope the purveyors of impeachment porn at this site will get tired of it and go somewhere else, or else force Markos to boot them and ban that kind of mindless shouting at the rain.

When the signal-to-noise ratio drops to 1 or less, it’s time to move along. That hasn’t happened here yet, but it’s well past that at MLW and BMT–or was when I left both places.

So explain to me why I would particularly want to have them on “my” side? Especially since it just makes it easier for the MSM to mischaracterize blogs and bloggers as a temporary annoyance instead of a true threat to their traditional dominance of the field of news and opinion.

Michael
Musing’s musings

by musing85 on Mon Mar 05, 2007 at 11:15:49 AM MST

Exhibit B:

People that stand in the way of electing (1+ / 0-)
Recommended by:musing85

Democrats because of their addictions to drama and constant conflict have found their homes at MLW, Booman Trib, and other sites filled with malcontents that would like to collectively destroy dkos effectiveness and mission. The malcontents need to be shown the door so that they can not contaminate dkos.

Politics is the business of dkos, personality and discontent is the business of the sites Musing mentioned.

PaintyKat

WWYTR? “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend” MLK

by PaintyKat on Mon Mar 05, 2007 at 04:22:43 PM PST

Yes, if you're for enforcing the rule of law and impeaching the most criminal administration in American history, you're branded unmutual at Daily Kos. Well I don't want to live in a world where Booman is the gold standard for radical lefty.

Why the Democratic Party and its rabid enforcers in the blogosphere are so opposed to impeachment continues to baffle me. They are "outside the mainstream." Americans hate this President and want him gone yesterday. We're talking about a President who is polling at 29%, who was dissed by diners at a midwestern eatery, and who is considered worse than Satan and Osama bin Laden!!! The time for caution is long past. Impeachment! If Democrats would just demonstrate the political will to build it, trust me, they will come.

In other interesting news at Mo Betta META, it looks like the artist formerly known as Armando is finally being reined in. He has, once again, taken his ball and gone home. His GBCW diary contains this startling bit of honesty:

I am a narcissist to the end.

Yeah. No kidding.

See John Edwards Run

See John Edwards cave to right wing nut jobs. See John Edwards cower. See John Edwards lose my vote.

Well this thing over John Edwards's hiring of bloggers Amanda Marcotte (Pandagon) and Melissa McEwan (Shakespeare's Sister), has really turned into an embarrassing spectacle. There is so much about this that sickens me it's hard to know where to begin.

I was going to hold off on pronouncing my verdict on this whole brouhaha until Edwards made a statement, but since he and his staff have gone to the mattresses, I think I know all I need to know. He's a craven coward. Firstly, because he's allowing himself to be bullied by the likes of Bill Donohue and Michelle Malkin into even considering firing the two bloggers. Secondly, because he can't even be man enough to own up to a decision and make his promised statement.

It looks like the Edwards camp is in total disarray over this and that is a poor comment on how they will handle right wing aggression during the campaign or, god forbid, in office. He's a typical Democratic weathervane politician, and I'm done with the like. I'm with Booman on this. It was an opportunity for him to show some backbone and it turns out he's a slinky.

My disgust with Bill Donohue, Michelle Malkin, and the rest of the right wing noise machine that has stirred up this teapot tempest is fairly self-evident. For these people to accuse Marcotte or McEwan of hate speech doesn't pass the laugh test. As Salon points out, Malkin is associated with genuine hate groups:

Malkin, it should be noted, is hardly innocent of being involved with what ABC News' Terry Moran termed "hate speech" when applied to Marcotte. Malkin has long maintained ties to VDARE, a Web site tagged as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center that has published works by people like Jared Taylor, one of America's leading white supremacists, and Sam Francis, who was fired by the conservative Washington Times for his own white supremacist remarks, given at a conference held by Taylor's organization.

She's also noticeably insane, but that's a subject for a different discussion.

Media Matters has done an admirable job of cataloging Donohue's embarrassing verbal tics. Here's a tiny sample:

• "People don't trust the Muslims when it comes to liberty." [MSNBC's Scarborough Country, 2/9/06]


• Addressing former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) in a press release, Donohue said: "[W]hy didn't you just smack the clergyman in the face? After all, most 15-year-old teenage boys wouldn't allow themselves to be molested. So why did you?" [10/4/06]


• "Well, look, there are people in Hollywood, not all of them, but there are some people who are nothing more than harlots. They will do anything for the buck. They wouldn't care. If you asked them to sodomize their own mother in a movie, they would do so, and they would do it with a smile on their face." [MSNBC's Scarborough Country, 2/9/06]

As my husband, whose mother was almost a nun, said when he first saw the odious Donohue on "Hardball." "Who is this lunatic? Why is he on television? Why should anyone care what he thinks?"

That Edwards cares enough what these people bloviate about to be driven into total retreat speaks ill of him and of his campaign. But that's the good word from TPM. Of course Edwards is getting it from all sides. The media has jumped onto the non-story of the Catholic baiting bloggers with both feet. And the blogosphere Edwards was attempting to court with this hire, is in full attack mode. We might need a GPS tracker to locate him. I wonder if he left his cell phone on.

Meanwhile, the Edwards camp is under blogospheric siege from some quarters. Chris Bowers of MyDD is threatening not to support Edwards if the two bloggers are fired. He writes:

While there is no way I will support Edwards with Amanda and Melissa...fired, I will immediately become a staunch Edwards supporter if they are not fired. Consider the heinous reporting that is being done in this story, where bigot William Donahue is somehow an authority on what defines hate speech, it is clear that the Edwards campaign will take a lot of flack from outside the netroots if they do not fire Amanda and Melissa. Keeping them on would show a willingness to take risks and stand up to the media in a way that most Democrats just are not, all because the campaign will be doing so in order to defend the netroots.

If someone is willing to stand with us, that should mean something big, and should not go unrewarded.

Oh Mr. Bowers. You are a whore. A staunch Edwards supporter for no reason other than how he treats the netroots? So his creepy position on Iran... that's cool as long he backs bloggers? And this brings me to the final item of disgust in this whole affair. What this whole thing does to the credibility of the blogosphere.

That bloggers, myself included, are not practicing journalism, as in unbiased reporting, is clear to all but the most self-aggrandizing among us. We are at best advocacy journalists or self-appointed op-ed writers. And that's fine. Blogging has allowed average citizens a platform in a very large village square, from which to voice our opinions on the political process, form alliances, and step into greater rolls of civic responsibility. The power of such movements is diminished more than a little, as it becomes clear that our voices and passions can be bought and sold by political campaigns or anything else. At that point we aren't citizen journalists. We're publicists.

As skippy said in a post on this issue:

warning to bloggers: don't ever take a stand if you want to work for a candidate

If a blogger is doing his self-appointed job, he is probably taking a lot of stands that would come back to haunt him in the political arena. If a blogger isn't standing on principle and ruffling feathers, what the hell is he doing? There has been a fair bit of speculation that the reason Kos dissed the bulk of his blogroll, is that many of those bloggers aren't diehard supporters of the "my Democrat right or wrong" school of thought. And let's face it, all Kos is interested in at this point is positioning himself in the Democratic Party machine. That was obvious a long time ago, and it was the death knell for any credibility he had as an independent blogger in my opinion. As I've said before, the Democratic Party isn't courting bloggers because it wants to incorporate our issues and our voices into its vision. It's trying to buy our votes and manufacture consent. John Edwards will get neither from me.

Update: It appears that Mr. Edwards has issued a statement and that the bloggers jobs with his campaign are safe for now. This, even though he is "personally offended" by their religious commentary. Too little too late, imho. I don't care for the way the Edwards camp has handled this. His "fair shake" smacks of Donald Trump. And if he's going to let the wingnuts rock him back on his heels with their baseless attacks, it reads to me like a lack of character and conviction. His behavior leads me to believe that if he wasn't at risk of losing the bulk of the left wing blogosphere, he would have caved.

Joe Lieberman: Extortionist

It didn't take long did it?

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut said yesterday that he will caucus with Senate Democrats in the new Congress, but he would not rule out switching to the Republican caucus if he starts to feel uncomfortable among Democrats.

As I pointed out during the CT primary season, Joe Lieberman is not a "nice guy." He's an unbridled egotist who will stop at nothing to get his own way; a passive-aggressive whiner whose non-threatening, girl-haired, appearance, obscures a damaging visciousness.

In the primary he openly tried to extort Democratic voters. Now it's Senate Democrats whose narrow victory could be overturned with a flip of his bony wrist. He'll hold anyone hostage to his ambitions, whether its CT voters, Senate Democrats, or the entire, massive-change-wanting country.

Hillary's Cash & Carry Election

If you doubt that the US is devolving into an oligarchy where powerful corporations and other moneyed interests control the political process, look no further than New York state. There, an unholy alliance between Hillary Clinton and TimeWarner has seized control of the electoral process by taking away the microphone of her opposition. I first learned about this in Matt Taibbi's most recent take-down of the DLC.

Remember 2000, when Ralph Nader was not only not allowed to debate with Al Gore and George Bush, but wasn't allowed in the building -- not even allowed in a second, adjoining hall in the building, not even when he had a ticket? Well, we have a replay of that proud moment in our history going on now, with Hillary's Senate primary opponent Tasini being shut out of debates by New York's NY1 TV channel (owned by TimeWarner) which is insisting that qualified candidates not only reach 5 percent support in the polls (Tasini is at 13 percent and rising) but raise or spend $500,000. Said NY1 Vice President Steve Paulus: "All Tasini would need is for each [New York state registered voter] to send him a dollar. Right now, with the money he's raised, he does not represent the party he claims to represent."

So a war chest is now the standard for representation? In order to get on television, you need a dollar from every voter? (Are we electing a Senator or holding a Girl Scout raffle? What the fuck?) And this is decided by . . . an executive for a corporate television station?

This morning Buzzflash guest contributor Jeff Cohen connects the dots.

The cover story in the new issue of TIME, the flagship publication of the Time Warner media empire, informs readers that Hillary Clinton has "virtually nonexistent opposition for her senate seat."

Hold that phrase in your head. Because at another outpost of the Time Warner empire, decisions have been made that help ensure Sen. Clinton will have "virtually nonexistent opposition." Time Warner's NY1 TV news channel ("the CNN of New York")adamantly refuses to host a Democratic New York Senate debate. Despite protests over its decision, NY1 says it is giving incumbent Clinton a no-debate free pass because her antiwar challenger, union leader Jonathan Tasini, has not raised enough money; the channel arbitrarily set the bar at a half-million dollars. This despite the fact that Tasini has reached 13% in polls. (NY1 first announced its no-debate ruling just as Ned Lamont -- given no chance months ago -- was defeating pro-war incumbent Joe Lieberman in Connecticut's primary.)

Ironically, NY1 has already hosted and televised a Democratic New York gubernatorial debate between frontrunner Eliot Spitzer and a Democratic challenger who was at only 10% in the polls. But that candidate had raised about $6 million. So spending millions to get just 10% in popular support was rewarded by Time Warner's channel, while building a more effective grassroots campaign, largely of volunteers, was punished. (One wonders how much of the money went to NY1.)

Did I mention that Time Warner's PAC is one of the many corporate PACs that underwrites Hillary Clinton's reelection campaign against the "virtually nonexistent opposition"? Or that conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch has also raised funds for her reelection? Or that Hillary Clinton doesn't criticize a media system now dominated by a handful of (JonBenet-obsessed) entertainment conglomerates -- while Tasini wants to see those conglomerates broken up? [emphasis added]

And there you have it. Hillary is the TimeWarner candidate, not the people's. And, in a bout of unintentional honesty, TimeWarner has admitted what it thinks elections are about: Money.

Sore Loserman

I never thought I'd want repeat that slur, but what else can you say about a man so totally ungracious in defeat. My expectations of Lieberman are never high, but listening to his "concession" speech last night on the news, I couldn't believe my fucking ears. He dropped below even my lowest estimation of his character. It was a flagrant display of narcissism and naked self-interest.

The first red flag was dropped the minute he opened his mouth.

Thank you so much for standing by me in this tough race, for your all work, for all your confidence.

Joe still thinks this is about him. He doesn't understand that running for public office is about representing his constituents; "we the people." I heard more use of the word "me" in that speech than the New York Times included in its "excerpts" of the transcript, but even their abbreviated text stands as a testament to the man's self-absorption.

The only words I heard acknowledging the victor were:

Just before coming out to see you, I called Ned Lamont and congratulated him on his success today...

From there he immediately launched into his campaign speech. By barely acknowledging Ned Lamont's victory, he is disregarding the 52% of his own party who showed up at polling stations to vote their conscience. Well I'm sure they're all just far-left, wacko bloggers. They're not real people. They're not "Team Connecticut."

Lieberman came not to concede to Ned Lamont but bury him; to accuse him of polarizing rhetoric even as he vows to split his own party by running as an "independent Democratic."

I expect that my opponent will continue to do in the general election what he has done in the primary … partisan polarizing instead of talking about how we can solve people's problems, insults instead of ideas. In other words, more of the same old partisan politics that has assailed Washington today.

I will continue to offer Connecticut a different path forward. I went into public service to find solutions, not to point fingers. To unite, not to divide. To lift up, not to tear down. To make my community and country a better place to live and work.

It was a speech worthy of the hypocritical "I'm a uniter, not a divider" President to whom he has bowed and scraped since his premature concession in 2000. If that isn't the height of irony! Well actually, it isn't that surprising. Lieberman is fairly consistent in his distrust of anyone who raises legitimate questions about GOP ethics. So now we understand the Lieberman formula: Pointing out any wrongdoing of Republicans is divisive partisanship. Bashing members of his own party, like Clinton for instance, is brave and noble. Standing up to Lieberman, himself, is tempting the Lord Your God.

A gracious man would have conceded his loss last night, congratulated the victor, thanked his campaign team for their hard work (not for indulging his ego), and honored the voters who turned out to the polls. Even if he wanted to pursue an independent run, he would have alluded to it, and promised to expound on it at a more appropriate time. That's what a gracious man and a truly savvy politician would have done. Instead Joe Lieberman chose to insult every voter in Connecticut who did not invest in his personal ambition.

God Wants You to Vote for Joe Lieberman

As the New York Times reports:

“Joseph had faith that God will take care of the haters and I have a certain faith that this Tuesday God will take care of the voters.”

Yes, that' s right. God is on Joe Lieberman's side and will surely deliver the votes in the primary. So if you're planning to vote for Ned Lamont, be advised that you are falling for one of the Devil's many tricks.

Lieberman's campaign has been punctuated by one narcissistic, self-referential statement of victimhood after another. The Times article goes on:

When one preacher at the Bridgeport church asked, “Anybody going through hell right now?” Mr. Lieberman leaned over to tap a woman sitting to his left and began to nod his head with a smile.

Get it? Now he's Job, tried and tested by God. You get it woman sitting next to me? You get it members of the press? I'm being tested by God!!

A similar theme emerged in a Washington Post article a week ago, when Lieberman acknowledged the well-financed Ned Lamont, who is daring to run for his seat.

"I felt all along I would have a challenge," Lieberman quipped. "But I was hoping God would send me a poor one."

Yes, God is surely testing Holy Joe. But the Almighty is still on his side, making sure that Connecticut's Democratic voters -- the "most difficult part of the Connecticut electorate" for him -- do not have the temerity to vote their conscience.

The Real Joe Lieberman

As much as I hate to dwell on a political race I cannot vote in, I can't take my eyes off the spectacle of Holy Joe. As much as I despise his cheerleading for the illegal war in Iraq and his corporate toadying, I think what I hate most is his faux "nice guy" routine. He's a thoroughly smarmy, political animal and every so often the toothy veneer slips just enough to show the naked careerism that truly drives him. This morning's appearance on "This Week" revealed such a moment. He bobbed and weaved through George Stephanapolous's queries about his stated ambition to run as an independant if he loses the primary. Many bloggers have taken Lieberman to task for the utter disrespect for the democratic process evident in his disregard for the voters in his own party come primary day. But if his decision to keep running no matter what his party's voters want weren't enough, this morning he made a statement that could only be described as extortion, and I think it deserves a bit of examination. In attempting to brush off Stephanapolous's question, Lieberman retorted:

"Well on the last point I say to them, the way to overcome that concern is to make sure I get the Democratic nomination."

And there you have it; the real Joe Lieberman. The implicit threat: Vote for me in the primary or I will be a spoiler. Voting me out is not an option. The only way to get what you want is if you want I want, so you might as well lie back and enjoy it.

It's called extortion. He's attempting to hold Democratic voters hostage to his ambitions. It was all of a second in a slickly handled interview, but it gives the lie to every other high-minded thing he spouts.

Watershed Moment?

A page one story in the Sunday Washington Post raises the specter of a watershed moment for the Democratic Party. As I said before, the Lieberman/Lamont race in Connecticut is emblematic of the fundamental problem in the Party. Put simply it is about whether or not they continue to be the Republican Lite party. Lieberman is so much the embodiment of an opposition party in the thrall of Republican domination that the most right leaning of Republican activists are currently batting for his team and suggesting, as many Democratic voters have, that he simply switch parties. As The Nation explains, Tom DeLay, Bill Kristol, and Ann Coulter, have all come out swinging for Lieberman, so he's got that goin' for him.

The Post describes the collision of entrenched power and righteous anger.

The passion and energy fueling the antiwar challenge to Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman in Connecticut's Senate primary signal a power shift inside the Democratic Party that could reshape the politics of national security and dramatically alter the battle for the party's 2008 presidential nomination, according to strategists in both political parties.

A victory by businessman Ned Lamont on Tuesday would confirm the growing strength of the grass-roots and Internet activists who first emerged in Howard Dean's presidential campaign. Driven by intense anger at President Bush and fierce opposition to the Iraq war, they are on the brink of claiming their most significant political triumph, one that will reverberate far beyond the borders here if Lieberman loses.

As Chris Dodd, of all people, points out, this is more than simply opposition to an unpopular war. It's appeasement of Bush Administration radicalism that is driving a good part of the backlash from the netroots and beyond.

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) said it is a mistake to contend, as the Republicans are doing, that the Democrats have been captured by left-wing, antiwar activists, saying the Connecticut race most of all reflects discontent with Bush rather than an ideological awakening. "This is really about Bush," he said. "It's deeper than an antiwar thing."

The Democratic Party continues, at its peril, to underestimate how divisive a figure Bush is and how much resistance there is to the man and his policies. The disconnect between the party powerful and the people is growing and the Lieberman/Lamont showdown should be serving as a wake up call.

Arguing for the continuation of Republican Lite policies is, unsurprisingly, DLC operative Will Marshall.

"Candidates know they cannot appease [antiwar] activists if they are going to run winning national campaigns," said Will Marshall, president of the centrist Progressive Policy Institute. "It will intensify the tension inside the Democratic coalition as we head into two critical elections."

Let's rewind for a moment to reflect on who Will Marshall is and what he stands for. Marshall is quoted at some length in the Matt Taibbi column I referenced the other day, on "Why the Democrats are still doomed."

Marshall is the president of the DLC's Progressive Policy Institute and owns the distinction of being the first public figure to use the term "body count" in a positive sense with regard to the Iraq war ("Coalition forces still face daily attacks but the body count tilts massively in their favor"). He wasted no time in giving me the party line: "What we're seeing is an ideological purge," he said cheerily. "It's national effort by the left to get rid of somebody they've decided to demonize . . . we have concerns about narrow dogmatism. . ."

We went back and forth for a while. I noted that his conception of "narrow dogmatists" included the readers of Daily Kos, a website with something like 440,000 visitors a day; I also noted that recent Gallup polls showed that fully 91 percent of Democrats supported a withdrawal of some kind from Iraq.

"So these hundreds of thousands of Democrats who are against the war are narrow dogmatists," I said, "and. . . how many people are there in your office? Ten? Twenty? Thirty?"

"Well, it'd probably be in the thirty zone," sighed Marshall.

I asked Marshall if there was a publicly available list of donors to the DLC.

"Uh, I don't know," he said. "I'd have to refer you to the press office for that. They can help you there . . ." (Note: a DLC spokeswoman would later tell me the DLC has a policy of "no public disclosure," although she did say the group is funded in half by corporate donations, in half by individuals).

"So let me get this straight," I said. "We have thirty corporate-funded spokesmen telling hundreds of thousands of actual voters that they're narrow dogmatists?" [emphasis added]

He paused and sighed, clearly exasperated. "Look," he said. "Everybody in politics draws money from the same basic sources. It's the same pool of companies and wealthy individuals . . ."

"Okay," I said. "So basically in this dispute over Lieberman, we have people on one side, and companies on the other? Would it be correct to say that?" I asked.

"Well, I guess if you live in a cartoon world you could say that," he said.

That's the DLC in a nutshell, and sadly, because of the corporate money they bring in, it is also the voice of the Democratic Party establishment. When Lieberman and Lamont face off in the upcoming primary, Connecticut voters will have an opportunity to speak directly to the smug visage of a party that shows contempt daily for the voting public. As the Post points out, it's a message that may reverberate.

Taibbi Explains Why Dems Are Losing: It's Not the Sierra Club

Earlier today I went off on Paul Krugman for his Kosesque soliloquy on why the Sierra Club (NARAL and other left-leaning issue groups) should put aside their non-partisanship and stop endorsing non-Democrats. Krugman's point, like Kos's, is that we should support Democrats at all costs because Republicans are ruining the country. The reason I can't sign on to this idea, aside from the fact that it means asking organizations to violate their own charters and stated goals to become nakedly partisan, is that it ignores the fact that Democrats are also ruining the country. Krugman implies that Democrats keep losing because they are not mimicking the soul-less authoritarianism of the Republican party. When a reader responding to today's column writes that she's in a dilemma about voting her conscience because she likes Chafee's voting record but does not like the rest of the party or want it in power, Krugman responds:

The strength of the conservative movement is that it rarely agonizes about such things.

So the poltical left would be "stronger" if we stop voting our conscience and become mindless party cogs?

But my disagreement with Krugman on this is not simply about the importance of principle. I think he has misdiagnosed the cause of the Democrats losing streak. We need to stop blaming the voters for the manifold failings of the Democratic Party. Matt Taibbi absolutely nails the Democrat problem in the new issue of Rolling Stone. In his analysis of the Lieberman/Lamont race in Connecticut, he offers some of the most targeted, insightful analysis of the larger problem I've read to date. He pulls apart Lieberman's black church "I met Dr. King" stump speech and exposes the cynicism of his DLC, faux populism.

The scene says everything you need to know about the modern Democratic Party. It spends its weekdays sucking off the Pentagon and Wall Street and the pharmaceutical industry, and on the weekends it comes out and spends five minutes getting teary-eyed for the "I have a dream" speech and thinks you owe it your vote because of it. Some party members agree, but quite a few don't, which is why Joe Lieberman—the hawkish one-time vice-presidential candidate who has made himself the most visible symbol of the "new" Democrats—is facing a surprising primary challenge on August 8th. Like Lieberman himself, the "I was there in the Sixties" act is finally getting old.

"I hate the Sixties, and I'm tired of hearing about it—what have you done for me lately?" says Regina Meade, one of the churchgoers. She shakes her head. "I lost a cousin in the war. Twenty-nine years old. What about that? What about that?"

While Lieberman is one of the most vulnerable of the old guard Democrats, his campaign is emblematic of a much deeper problem. That so many beltway Dems have run to his rescue, despite his smooching with Bush, should tell us everything we need to know about where Democratic Party alliances really are. As Taibbi states, they're not with voters.

Of course it's fairly obvious where it's coming from. Even the most casual Democratic voters understand by now that there is a schism within the party, one that pits "party insiders" steeped in the inside-baseball muck of Washington money culture against . . . well, against us, the actual voters.

The insiders have for many years running now succeeded in convincing their voters that their actual beliefs are hopeless losers in the general electoral arena, and that certain compromises must be made if the party is ever to regain power. [emphasis added]

This defeatist nonsense is sold to the public in the form of beady-eyed party hacks talking to one another in the opinion pages of national media conglomerates, where, after much verbose and solemn discussion, the earnest and idealistic candidate the public actually likes is dismissed on the grounds that "he can't win." In his place is trotted out the guy the party honchos insist to us is the real "winner"—some balding, bent little bureaucrat who has grown prematurely elderly before our very eyes over the course of ten or twenty years of sad, compromise-filled service in the House or the Senate.

This "winner" is then given a lavish parade and sent out there on the trail, and we hold our noses as he campaigns in our name on a platform of Jesus, the B-2 bomber and the death penalty for eleven-year-olds, consoling ourselves that he at least isn't in favor of repealing the Voting Rights Act. (Or is he? We have to check.) Then he loses to the Republicans anyway and we start all over again—beginning with the next primary election, when we are again told that the anti-war candidate "can't win" and that the smart bet is the corporate hunchback still wearing two black eyes from the last race.

That's why the Democratic Party is imploding faster than a Republican Party that has detatched itself from discernable reality. Not because the Sierra Club, NARAL, and some kooky Independants aren't behind the Democratic Party right or wrong.

Taibbi goes on to describe, in dirty detail, Lieberman's corporate whoredom, but he could be describing any one of a number of beltway Democrats.

He is everything a Washington insider loves in a politician. He is pompous, pious and available. Routinely one of the very top recipients of campaign donations from the insurance, pharmaceutical and finance sectors, and a man whose wife, Hadassah, is a pharmaceutical-industry lobbyist for Hill and Knowlton, Lieberman has quietly become one of the greatest allies corporate America has in Washington.

For example, Lieberman, who as chairman of the DLC in the mid to late Nineties presided over an organization heavily subsidized by companies such as AIG and Aetna (the latter of which also contributes lavishly to his campaigns), sponsored a bill that limited auto insurance suits by permitting the offering of lower rates to consumers who forfeited their right to sue. He has fought for similar anti-lawsuit laws for tobacco, for HMOs, for pharmaceutical companies. Victor Schwartz, general counsel for the American Tort Reform Association, once bragged that "if it were not for Lieberman, there would never have been a Biomaterials Access Act"—a 1998 law that protected companies like Dow Chemical and DuPont (also big DLC contributors) from lawsuits filed for the production of defective medical implants. Yes, that's right: Joe Lieberman fought for the principle of manufacturing faulty fake tits with impunity.

In a move that was perfectly characteristic of everything he stands for, Lieberman in 2001 offered a piece of legislation, S. 1764, that purported to provide incentives to companies that develop medicines to treat the victims of bioterror attacks but, more important, extended the patent life of a wide range of drugs for several years, delaying the introduction of more cost-friendly generic drugs. Shilling for the socialist subsidy of drug companies while masquerading as a Churchillian, tough-on-security Democrat in the War on Terror age: That's Joe Lieberman, and the modern Democratic Party, in a nutshell.

Taibbi expounds further in the first installment of his new web-only column, in which he demonstrates the curious parallels between the DLC and neoconservatives like David Brooks. The column is worth reading if only for commentary like this:

Brooks worships the status quo because he has no penis and wants to spend the rest of his life buying periwinkle bath towels without troubling interruptions of conscience.

But his larger point, that the DLC has gnawed away the core of the Democratic Party and turned it into a party of corporate toadies, bent on convincing the 91 percent of Democratic voters who want us out of Iraq that they are the lunatic fringe.

The DLC are the lowest kind of scum; we're talking about people who are paid by the likes of Eli Lilly and Union Carbide to go on television and call suburban moms and college kids who happen to be against the war commies and jihadists. On the ignominious-sellout scale, that's lower than doing PR for a utility that turns your grandmother's heat off at Christmas. And that's pretty bad -- but with enough money and enough of the right kind of publicity their side still might win in the Lamont/Lieberman primary on August 8th.

Which tells you just about everything you need to know about the modern Democratic Party. Why is anyone surprised that the Republicans never lose?

I, for one, am less and less surprised. Mr. Krugman and Markos Moulitsas can blame the Sierra Club if they want, but it seems like a race to the bottom of the self-defeatism pond to me. We need to stop assuming voters are idiots who need to be shepherded into the Democratic flock, regardless of whether or not party leaders demonstrate that they can actually lead us back from the cliff.

Put it this way: If the Democrats gain only five rather than six Senate seats this November, Senator James Inhofe, who says that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” will remain in his current position as chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. And if that happens, the Sierra Club may well bear some of the responsibility.

Think about that for a minute. The Democratic Party can't win against a party represented by the obvious insanity of a Senator who compared environmentalism to Hitler's "big lie" and it's the Sierra Club's fault? A party that can't make hay of what Republicans have become and offer a reasonable alternative doesn't deserve to win.

Craven Dems Still Leaving Workers to be Flattened

I'd share David Sirota's disappointment if I had ever been optimistic about beltway Dems standing up for the American worker. Writes Sirota:

Last night, I wrote optimistically about the possibility of Democratic Party elites finally realizing the error of their ways in ramming corporate-written trade policies down the throat of average Americans. Though I noted that most of the key players are still comfortable in the minority, and still awash in Washington's pay-to-play culture, I cited some recent moves as evidence that they may at the very least realize that they no longer live in the go-go Clinton Era where rhetoric about the "booming economy" could paper over the very serious economic challenges faced by regular working folks.

Apparently, I was wrong. A stunning piece by Washington Post business reporter Steve Pearlstein today shows that the real agenda of these Big Money insiders is to pretend to care about stagnating wages, slashed pensions, and job outsourcing - but not actually be willing to attack the "free" trade policies that are causing those hardships.

Pearlstein's piece is an eye-opener and he puts trade policies in a broader context of the Democratic Party's political impotence.

Democrats now have a perfect opportunity to deliver what the business community wants -- and to demand in exchange programs designed to provide workers more economic security. But such negotiations will never succeed if influential Democrats give away the store in advance by signaling they support all trade liberalization, unconditionally.

No guarantees of health care, pensions, expanded unemployment insurance -- no more trade deals. It's a simple message even chief executives can understand. Voters, too.

To appreciate why reigning in free trade and standing up to corporations are winning issues for Democrats one need only listen to increasingly frustrated Americans whose earning power is not recovering with the economy. Our current trade policies are a key factor in our increasing income disparity. I've written before that wages for many Americans are stagnant. In fact they are worse than stagnant. Earlier this week the LA Times reported wages for college graduates have actually dropped a stunning 5.2% over the last five years. Consider that as those wages have fallen, the cost of living, particularly energy prices, has risen steadily.

The recent wage slump has affected a substantial part of the workforce. About 30 million Americans age 20 to 59 have a four-year degree and no advanced degree, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

The White House economists did not lay out wage trends for people with master's and other advanced degrees. But other studies have found that their inflation-adjusted wages were essentially flat between 2000 and 2004, and the studies have confirmed a decline for people with four-year degrees.

When wages for people with bachelor's degrees declined in the 1970s, the cause was a flood of baby boomers entering the job market.

This time, economists say, much of the blame goes to trends familiar to workers with less education, who are now creeping up the wage ladder.

Offshoring, which has shifted manufacturing and call-center jobs to such nations as Mexico and India, is increasingly affecting white-collar sectors such as engineering and software design.

And companies have continued their long effort to replace salaried positions with lower-paid, nonsalaried jobs, including part-time and freelance positions without benefits. Those contingent positions make up nearly half of the 6.5 million jobs created since 2001, said Paul Harrington, a labor economist at Northeastern University in Boston.

Harrington said the number of salaried jobs increased an average of 11.5% during the last five economic recoveries, compared with 2.5% during the current recovery.

"There's clear deterioration in the college labor market," he said. "The American economy just does not generate jobs the way it has historically."

As long predicted the repercussions of free market fundamentalism are affecting both white and blue collar workers. The benefits of our economic growth are concentrated in the hands of a very small group of people. As Paul Krugman wrote recently, workers across a broad economic spectrum are being left behind.

Here's what happened in 2004. The U.S. economy grew 4.2 percent, a very good number. Yet last August the Census Bureau reported that real median family income — the purchasing power of the typical family — actually fell. Meanwhile, poverty increased, as did the number of Americans without health insurance. So where did the growth go?

The answer comes from the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, whose long-term estimates of income equality have become the gold standard for research on this topic, and who have recently updated their estimates to include 2004. They show that even if you exclude capital gains from a rising stock market, in 2004 the real income of the richest 1 percent of Americans surged by almost 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average real income of the bottom 99 percent of the population rose only 1.5 percent. In other words, a relative handful of people received most of the benefits of growth.

There are a couple of additional revelations in the 2004 data. One is that growth didn't just bypass the poor and the lower middle class, it bypassed the upper middle class too. Even people at the 95th percentile of the income distribution — that is, people richer than 19 out of 20 Americans — gained only modestly. The big increases went only to people who were already in the economic stratosphere.

The other revelation is that being highly educated was no guarantee of sharing in the benefits of economic growth. There's a persistent myth, perpetuated by economists who should know better — like Edward Lazear, the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers — that rising inequality in the United States is mainly a matter of a rising gap between those with a lot of education and those without. But census data show that the real earnings of the typical college graduate actually fell in 2004.

In short, it's a great economy if you're a high-level corporate executive or someone who owns a lot of stock. For most other Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.

Free trade enthusiast Thomas Friedman claims that The World Is Flat and that it is incumbent on American workers to make themselves competitive in a global marketplace, but it would be fairer to say that American workers are being flattened by policies that do not serve them. Democrats could gain a real advantage this election year by demonstrating some moral courage, but it would mean biting the corporate hand that feeds them. As I wrote before, their surprising rectitude on the minimum wage is a start but it's a drop in the economic bucket. It allows them to demagogue about their concern for wage earners, while they scratch the backs of corporatocrats who are displacing increasing numbers of middle class workers. The Post's Pearlstein gives us a glimpse at the cynicism of Democratic big-wigs. I wish I could say I was surprised.

Reasoning with the Schoolyard Bully

Every smart kid learns at some point in his or her young life that you cannot reason with the schoolyard bully. The more sense you make the more he will hit you. This is the quandary Democrats, liberals, progressives, and all other opponents of the right wing juggernaut have been grappling with throughout the Bush years, and in the run-up to them that began around the time the first Bush presidency whimpered to its end.

With the ascendancy of right wing talk radio and the development of what David Brock would come to call the "right wing noise machine," Americans have been subjected to a level of pandering demagoguery that has often been understandably disregarded by people with triple digit IQs. People to the left of Rush Limbaugh have repeatedly made the grave error of not taking the threat posed by these juvenile tactics seriously enough. How exactly does one address political commentary that is often the rhetorical equivalent of, "I know you are but what am I?"

As we wend our way towards the mid-term elections, the name calling and stupidity are in high gear and right wing bullies are predictably beating the stuffing out of their favorite whipping boys, those weak-on-defense-liberal-weenies and the "librul" media.

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter offers some advice on "How to Beat 'Cut and Run'" which includes some very insightful analysis of the tactics of that master demagogue Karl Rove.

For more than a quarter century, Karl Rove has employed a simple, brilliant, counterintuitive campaign tactic: instead of attacking his opponents at their weakest point, the conventional approach, he attacks their strength. He neutralizes that strength to the point that it begins to look like weakness.

As a strategy this amounts to hitting your opponent in his "center of gravity." In warfare it would be the equivalent of wiping out the Command Operations Center, communications hub, or some other pivotal installation. Once accomplished you leave your enemy scrambling and uncoordinated. In Karl Rove's hands its things like the "Swift-boating" of John Kerry; turning a war hero into a coward to the point where the same knuckle-dragging troglodytes, who normally lionize the military, take to sporting band-aids with purple hearts on them in mockery of valor. It's an astounding feat on many levels; a triumph of brutal illogic over fact that Rove and his cohorts accomplish again and again.

After escaping indictment, Rove is focused again on what he does best: ginning up the slime machine. Anyone who dares criticize President Bush's Iraq policy is a "cut-and-run" Democrat. The White House's object here is not to engage in a real debate about an exit strategy from Iraq; that would require acknowledging some complications, like the fact that Gen. George Casey, commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, believes it's time to start bringing some troops home. The object is instead to either get the Democrats tangled up in Kerryesque complexities on Iraq—or intimidate them into changing the subject to other, less-potent issues for fear of looking like unpatriotic pansies.

Indeed "real debate" is never the object of the right wing noise machine. Put simply, they cannot win on facts; only by turning logic on its ear and inverting reality itself. Astonishingly they have been accomplishing just that for years, leaving those of us in the "reality based community" shaking our heads in wonderment... and getting pantsed.

As Frank Rich points out in today's New York Times, they are relying on that age old technique of tyrants: scapegoating. Just as Hitler blamed the Jews for every ill confronting post-WWI Germany, Bush's political machine is cleverly distracting from his collapsing foreign and domestic policies by vilifying the New York Times for its reportage.

The history of that scapegoating begins on the Friday morning, June 23, that The Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal all published accounts of the Swift program first posted on the Web the night before. In his press briefing that morning, Tony Snow fielded many questions about the program's legality. But revealingly, for all his opportunities, he never attacked the news media....

By Monday, the president had entered the fray and Mr. Snow was accusing The Times of putting the "public's right to know" over "somebody's right to live." What had happened over the weekend to prompt this escalation of hysteria? The same stuff that always happens when the White House scapegoats the press (or anyone else): bad and embarrassing news that the White House wants to drown out.

With the dramatic capture of the seven wannabe terrorists rapidly degenerating into slapstick comedy, General Casey drafting actual plans to "cut and run" from Iraq, and Lawrence Wilkinson testifying before Congress that his former boss Colin Powell's presentation in front of the UN in 2003 was "the perpetuation of a hoax," a political show of strength was urgently needed. For team Bush that means whipping it out in the locker room to show whose is bigger. And those pointy headed intellectuals at the New York Times were just asking for a wedgie.

As discussed here abusers abuse because they're abusers. It's really that simple. And fact based arguments alone won't disarm them. The only way to deal with a bully is to stand up to him. Or as Alter suggests:

We'll see this summer if Democrats begin to get up in the morning, look in the mirror and say, "This isn't about us. It's about them." We'll see if, when Karl Rove wants to talk about Iraq, the Democrats respond with three familiar words: "Bring it on."

Senate Democrats: Fighting Hard for Your Two Dollars

Senate Democrats have drawn a line in the sand and they're sounding like they mean it. After efforts to raise the minimum wage were stymied by those champions of the small businessman, Senate Republicans, Dems are talking like people who've had an infusion of spinal fluid. Harry Reid has vowed to block Congressional pay raises until a minimum wage increase is passed.

"We're going to do anything it takes to stop the congressional pay raise this year, and we're not going to settle for this year alone," Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said at a Capitol news conference.

Minimum wage workers haven't had a raise in 9 years. Our Congresspeople -- you know, the people that we pay with our tax dollars -- have had several. Their total "cost of living" increase works out to roughly $31,600 dollars. Having voted themselves increases that average out to about $15 per hour, granting minimum wage earners an increase of $2.10 over the next two years is the least they can do. Literally. In fact, as a remedy to the greater problem of poverty and wage disparity, it's fairly laughable. Tying together Congressional salaries and the minimum wage certainly makes for a great rhetorical hook, but it's also very safe political territory.

In contrast to the GOP leadership, the American public overwhelmingly favors a minimum wage increase. In fact, most Americans would be more likely to vote for a Congressional candidate who favors increasing the minimum wage.

I certainly hope they succeed in their efforts and put a little more money into the pockets of our lowest wage earners, but a little is exactly what it would be.

According to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis:

• The federal minimum wage has remained at $5.15 for nine years.
• Since its last increase in 1997, the minimum wage has lost 20 percent of its value.
• The minimum wage is at its lowest level in terms of purchasing power in fifty years.
• At 31 percent, the minimum wage is at its lowest as a share of the average American wage since 1947.
• It takes a full day of work for a minimum-wage worker to buy a tank of gas.

I just don't think incrementally raising the rate by a couple of dollars over the next two years will exactly lift people out of poverty. It is entirely possible that the price of gas per gallon, alone, will rise that much, or more, over the same time span.

I have, frankly, lost patience with rhetorical flourishes like this one from Charles Schumer:

"It is shocking that in this Republican do-nothing congress, even the minimum wage is something that they won't go for," Schumer said.

There are many terms I would use to describe the Republican controlled Congress, but "do-nothing" is not one of them. I can't help wondering what focus groups helped Schumer pick that particular turn of phrase, but it is typically tin-eared. The GOP has accomplished one of the most massive transfers of wealth in American history. That's sure as hell not nothing. Democrats have done little to stop and many have voted with them on numerous tax-cuts that have emptied the nation's coffers into the pockets of the very, very wealthy.

As American Prospect points out, while only 12 percent of Americans currently fall below the poverty level, the fortunes of most Americans are falling relative to increases in the cost of living.

Today, with only 12 percent of Americans officially poor, the challenge of leadership is more complex. Yet four Americans in five have had basically stagnant living standards since the mid-1970s. That's because three decades of economic growth have gone almost entirely to the top, not merely the top 20 percent but mainly the top 1 percent.

In other words it isn't trickling down. The gap between average workers and the upper echelons of management is ever-increasing.

Chief executive officers in the United States earned 262 times the pay of an average worker in 2005, the second-highest level in the 40 years for which there is data, a nonprofit think-tank said on Wednesday.

In fact, a CEO earned more in one workday than an average worker earned in 52 weeks, said the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

Economist Paul Krugman has long claimed that we may, in fact, be entering another Gilded Age, with a new class of robber barons. In this seminal piece originally published in the paper of record in 2002, he charts the thirty year rise of a new elite and the disappearance of the middle-class. To be super-wealthy is fashionable, once again, after a brief hiatus in the 50s and 60s. Sadly most Americans are in denial that these "tectonic shifts" have occurred. Says Krugman:

My sense is that few people are aware of just how much the gap between the very rich and the rest has widened over a relatively short period of time. In fact, even bringing up the subject exposes you to charges of ''class warfare,'' the ''politics of envy'' and so on. And very few people indeed are willing to talk about the profound effects -- economic, social and political -- of that widening gap.

Yet you can't understand what's happening in America today without understanding the extent, causes and consequences of the vast increase in inequality that has taken place over the last three decades, and in particular the astonishing concentration of income and wealth in just a few hands. To make sense of the current wave of corporate scandal, you need to understand how the man in the gray flannel suit has been replaced by the imperial C.E.O. The concentration of income at the top is a key reason that the United States, for all its economic achievements, has more poverty and lower life expectancy than any other major advanced nation. Above all, the growing concentration of wealth has reshaped our political system: it is at the root both of a general shift to the right and of an extreme polarization of our politics.

Last week the Washington Post reported on the disappearance of the middle-class neighborhood.

Widening income inequality in the United States has been well documented in recent years, but the Brookings analysis of census data uncovered a much more accelerated decline in communities that house the middle class. It far outpaced the decline of seven percentage points between 1970 and 2000 in the proportion of middle-income families living in and around cities....

The Brookings study says that much more research is needed to better understand why middle-income neighborhoods are vanishing faster than middle-income families. But it speculates that a sorting-out process is underway in the nation's suburbs and inner cities, with many previously middle-income neighborhoods now tipping rich or poor.

As the article states, there is research to be done on why middle-class neighborhoods are disappearing faster than middle-income people, but I could point to a couple of possible reasons not addressed by the Post. The most obvious is that housing prices are terribly inflated, with even those little suburban matchboxes from time of yore going for sums unaffordable to the average wage earner. Beyond that much of the housing boom has been of the McMansion variety, marketing well-appointed, pre-fab monstrosities to the extraordinarily well-heeled. Housing prices have outstripped income growth for the majority of Americans. So the rapid polarization of American neighborhoods doesn't surprise me all that much.

I was raised by one of those men in a "gray flannel suit," Krugman describes. My grandfather was one of those men for whom capitalism had worked; rising from a working class background to the level of a top executive. But the excesses of the modern CEO would have sickened him.

He housed his family in one of those suburban matchboxes that sprung from the ground like so many mushrooms after WWII. He ran a large division of a major corporation and, as such, was the chief executive of one of the major employers of our town. It was a puzzlement to many why so many of the men who worked for my grandfather, lived in houses so much larger and grander. My grandfather was not given to such pretensions and couldn't see the point in heating so much unnecessary house. He lived a modest, if very comfortable, life.

At the time of his retirement, CEOs were earning a little more than 20 times the salaries of working stiffs. He thought that was too grave a disparity and argued with his executive colleagues about it. He was a product of a bygone era and with the advent of the Reagan years I saw him struggle with a kind of culture shock, as he watched the world go mad. He had survived the Great Depression, pulled himself up by his bootstraps, and lived the American Dream, as the New Deal made the rise of the middle-class possible. He watched it begin to slip away and raged against the dying of the light. I am only grateful that he did not live to see the rise of this new plutocracy because it would surely have killed him. Though I cannot help but wonder what he would have made of the Senators of the Democratic Party, to which he donated lavishly in his day, quibbling over an all-be-it very necessary $2 wage increase, while the entire middle-class way of life is disappearing.

Battered Democrat Syndrome

Newsweek's Michael Hirsh speculates this week on a Democratic Party so paralyzed by fear that it appears the entire party needs therapy.

They resemble nothing so much as ill-adjusted adolescents, afraid of their own shadows, much less the presidency. What are they afraid of? Themselves, essentially: their past, their own left, the populist rhetoric of their leaders (Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Howard Dean, Al Gore), the left-wing loony stigma represented by “Fahrenheit 9/11” filmmaker Michael Moore (every Dem’s favorite bugaboo). Above all they fear seeming and looking soft. They are all afflicted with varying degrees of megalophobia, a fear of assuming power. Even Dr. Melfi of “The Sopranos” wouldn’t take this case.

This is not a new notion. Where Hirsh gets a little lost in the minutiae of political losses and labels that have rendered a Democratic establishment inexplicably cowed by a Republican Party in total disarray, a very good diagnosis came from one Mel Gilles over a year ago. The Democratic Party suffers from "battered woman syndrome."

Watch Dan Rather apologize for not getting his facts straight, humiliated before the eyes of America, voluntarily undermining his credibility and career of over thirty years. Observe Donna Brazille squirm as she is ridiculed by Bay Buchanan, and pronounced irrelevant and nearly non-existent. Listen as Donna and Nancy Pelosi and Senator Charles Schumer take to the airwaves saying that they have to go back to the drawing board and learn from their mistakes and try to be better, more likable, more appealing, have a stronger message, speak to morality. Watch them awkwardly quote the bible, trying to speak the new language of America. Surf the blogs, and read the comments of dismayed, discombobulated, confused individuals trying to figure out what they did wrong. Hear the cacophony of voices, crying out, "Why did they beat me?"

And then ask anyone who has ever worked in a domestic violence shelter if they have heard this before.

They will tell you, every single day.

What Hirsh misses is that the ostensible reasons that Democrats have been whipped into submission don't matter.

The answer is quite simple. They beat us because they are abusers. We can call it hate. We can call it fear. We can say it is unfair. But we are looped into the cycle of violence, and we need to start calling the dominating side what they are: abusive. And we need to recognize that we are the victims of verbal, mental, and even, in the case of Iraq, physical violence.

As victims we can't stop asking ourselves what we did wrong. We can't seem to grasp that they will keep hitting us and beating us as long as we keep sticking around and asking ourselves what we are doing to deserve the beating.

I have known some battered women. The shattering blows to the ego are often more crippling than the physical damage, and only serve to make the victims more dependent on their abusers. The parallels to our current political landscape are actually hard to miss. We now have an opposition party incapable of resisting a Republican Party which has demonstrated proficiency in only one thing: reckless assault on everything and everyone, foreign and domestic. And we have a Democratic Party that perceives itself as weak and therefore looks and acts weak.

Hirsh, much like Mollly Ivins did months ago, exhorts the Democrats to acknowledge and state the bleedin' obvious to a public long past ready to hear it.

No one looks like a wimp when he or she tells the truth. And the public is crying, pleading for someone to tell the truth.

MSOC in the Washington Post

Originally published: Saturday, April 15, 2006

Well of course the mainstream media wants to cast the lefty blogosphere as turgid with impotent rage. David Finkel paints a portrait of My Left Wing's Maryscott O'Connor as a woman animated by anger and venomous hatred of Bush in today's Washington Post. But then, that's how Maryscott characterizes herself.

"It has come to the point where the worst people on Earth are running the Earth." And now, "I have become one of those people with all the bumper stickers on their car," she says. "I am this close to being one of those muttering people pushing a cart.

"I'm insane with rage and grief.

"But I also feel more connected than I ever have."

That's the beauty of Maryscott's turn in the limelight. Even Fox's John Gibson can't define Maryscott as an angry liberal. She's beaten him to it, and completely disarmed him. She dominated this interview on "The Big Story." She showed all too clearly the difference between passionate conviction and the mealy-mouthed cautiousness that has come to characterize Party insiders. Democrats in both houses of congress and throughout too much of liberal blogosphere contort themselves into increasingly unrecognizable shapes, for fear some negative sounding label might attach itself. In the process they've forgotten how stand up straight for much of anything. Good for Maryscott for reminding them how it's done.

Can the Democrats do Better? Markos has a Vision!

Originally published: Thursday, March 09, 2006

"Together, America Can Do Better." That's the slogan the Democratic Party's brain trust has produced. Sadly, this weak, grammatically incorrect verbiage is appropriate to the current party backdrop. It's innocuous, meaningless, purposeless, and fairly inoffensive. Better relative to what? A Republican agenda that is driving the nation off a cliff? But according the Washington Post, Democrats are still foundering when it comes to articulating a unified strategy and compelling vision, even though they are faced with the most corrupt, incompetent, dangerous administration in American history. It should be a no-brainer, but they don't really want to differentiate themselves from Republicans on any of the important issues: the occupation of Iraq, corporate excesses, military adventurism, wholesale violations of civil liberties... In short they don't conflict with the dangerous vision of "American Empire." If they did they would have crafted an opposition by now. No. The Democrats just want to adminstrate that empire "better." How to market that idea? Well, you can see what they've come up with. I shudder to think what slogans didn't make the final cut: "Democrats: We're Not AS Bad" or "Democrats: The Slower Boat to Hell."

Meanwhile, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, whom Eleanor Clift once characterized as "Moses leading Democrats to the promised land," may have really hit on a strategy. It would not force Democratic candidates to address any of those hot button issues. It would be a full frontal assault on the "family values" meme we've all been beaten to death with. Kos, the man whose dis of the "sanctimonious women's studies set" and endless diatribes against NARAL sent women running in droves from his site; the man who said he would not be part of a party defined by abortion rights, has finally realized that the death spiral of Roe v. Wade could affect men.

Good point. No abortions means more 18 years of child support after a drunken "mistake". [sic] Choice isn't a woman-only issue.

Tracing back through the links, we find that the notion comes from Digby, via Atrios. Digby, to his credit, appears to have been directing this idea to some thickie who just hadn't considered the full ramifications of the South Dakota law and its portents for the future. There-in lies the marketing genius of Kos's revelation. What Kos understands innately is that all interest is self interest. He is now ready to begin Crashing the Gate with a new vision for the Democratic Party. Democrats must become the party of rabid self interest. "Ride the wave," my ass. Don't let Kos's claims that he's no leader fool you. The man who's said flat out that the reason he wrote his book was his desire to buy a house, is absolutely the man to craft this winning strategy.

Forget morality. Forget civic responsibility. Forget what we can do for our country. What can the Democrats do for ME? There's your '06 strategy. Reagan's "Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?" was clever but it didn't go far enough. Eight years of Reaganomics showed us that "greed" works as a political strategy, so why not "total selfishness?" And Democrats could finally win over that 18-34 white male demographic which has so long been a lock for Republicans. While we're at it we could really show the Bush family that they don't have the drunken frat boy vote sewn up. Let's try out some new bumper sticker copy shall we:

• "Democrats: Fighting For Your Right to Paaaaaarty!"


• "You Can't Spell Democrats Without ME"


• "Vote for [insert name of Democratic candidate here]: Because Everybody Makes Drunken Mistakes"


• "It's Spring Break Again in America."

Kos Defends Democratic Stupidity... Again!

Originally published: Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Kos has an interesting take on the Democratic Party's shafting of Senate contender Paul Hackett. In his official capacity as Party apologist, Kos insists that it's really a good thing that Hackett has cleared the field for Sherrod Brown. Hackett, a Marine and Iraq veteran who nearly won an upset victory against Republican congressional shoe-in -- and part-time harbor buoy -- Jean Schmidt, "didn't stand a chance."

Kos explains the logic of these wizards of statecraft:

But the party wasn't afraid of Hackett, they were afraid of an untested candidate in a high-profile Senate race. He'd have all the support in the world had he decided to run for OH-02. And he'd be able to build on that support for a Senate race in 2010.

Untested? He nearly won a congressional race in staunchly Republican district.

I don't think Hackett stood a chance in the primary. I think either candidate would be able to take DeWine. But Hackett had fallen woefully behind on the money and organizational races, and lacked Brown in name ID. It would've been a tough slog.

If Hackett had no chance of winning the primary, why the pressure to drop out? Maybe it's my youthful idealism talking, but I can't get past this crazy notion that elections are supposed to be about "we the people." Why not let voters decide who should stand against against DeWine in November? I just can't get it through my thick skull that money decides politics, not democracy.

Kos also engages in some revisionist history.

To be further clear, Brown announced his candidacy before Hackett did. Yes, Reid and Schumer were urging Hackett to run, but he wouldn't commit to running . Labor Day, the traditional announcement day for most candidates, came and went with Hackett refusing to say what his plans were. So after waiting and waiting and waiting, Brown essentially said "fuck it" and got in. It was only after news of Brown's impending announcement were leaked that Hackett decided to commit to the race.

Not so says Mother Jones.

Hackett met several times with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Chuck Schumer, chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), both of whom encouraged him to run for the seat of Ohio's senior senator, Republican Mike DeWine, in '06. Hackett said he would—after been told by Ohio Congressman Sherrod Brown that he wasn't planning to run—and on October 3 he publicly threw his hat in the ring.

Then, last week, his phone rang again. It was Sherrod Brown calling to tell Hackett he'd changed his mind: he was running after all. Then Schumer called, and this time he wasn't delivering a pep talk. Hackett got the distinct sense that he was being asked to make way for the party insider. "Schumer didn't tell me anything definitive," he says. "But I'm not a dumb ass, and I know what he wanted me to do."

It was Brown, not Hackett who hid behind the typical politician's excuse as he waffled about running.

Brown maintains that he was simply wrestling with whether to run because of family considerations. "If your readers or others can't understand that, then so be it, but my family comes first," the congressman says.

It looks like Hackett -- who says he's not just pulling out of the race, but out of politics -- has had his fill of backroom shenanigans and cut-throat party machinations. The Democratic Party has a penchant for driving off the refreshingly honest. They also have a penchant for losing elections.

Poltical Wushu: Exhibit A -- The Alito Filibluster

Originally published: Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Wushu is Mandarin for "arts of war." Today in China there exists a standardized school of Wushu based on many of its historical martial arts disciplines. You can occasionally catch exhibitions on ESPN. It looks very impressive. Practitioners are capable of dizzying acrobatic feats. They wield traditional weapons. They chop at the air and each other in tightly controlled movements that look more like an exotic dance than a fight. Wushu exhibitions are visually stunning. But today's Wushu has been emptied of its meaning. Lost are its deeper traditions and martial application. To serious martial artists, "wushu" is shorthand for spectacle without utility. The shiny weapons we see in exhibitions are hollow, light, and dull. Today the Shaolin monks, for instance, whose fighting styles are the stuff of legend, have been reduced to a cheap sideshow.

Wushu was neutered by the Maoist regime. The term was adopted by Chairman Mao and morphed from a fighting art into a physical fitness regimen. It became a tool of a statist regime intent on destroying all vestiges of traditional spirituality, culture, and independence.

Wushu is what came to mind as the Senate hearings for Samuel Alito unfolded. For all their long-winded speeches and affected gravitas, Democratic Senators were never really fighting to stop him. If they'd really wanted to block his confirmation, they could have. They would have taken their case to the people and built some momentum for a real show-down on the Senate floor. Polls show that roughly a third of the populace was undecided on Alito. That's what we call a "teachable moment." Conventional wisdom says that the committee hearings were a dud, with opposing democrats unable to lay a glove on the staid, confident Alito. But if Senate Democrats couldn't find a decent hook on which to hang Alito, how did the New York Times editorial board find so many?

Senate Dems would have you believe that this was an unwinnable fight. It was only unwinnnable because they were not fighting. They were exhibiting a kind of "sport politics" that Democratic Party insiders have come to excel in. They pander to C-Span cameras with a lot of sighing, grimacing, and verbal gymnastics, but when they cast their votes, they do so based on some vague perception of poltical safety.

The only real fight we saw in the face of this quiet killer came from the netroots, who shamed Kerry into backing up his rhetoric with action, and swamped the phone banks of waffling senators like Clinton, Feinstein, and Obama. But in the end, the last minute filibuster was a lot of filibluster. A little over half over of Senate Dems made a half-hearted attempt to stop our steady slide into one-party rule. What we saw yesterday was akin to an over-the-hill boxer taking a dive so he could still collect some mob money.

Establishment Democrats have long since ceased to be an opposition party. They are tools of a statist regime giving us all a good show, but stripped of any real power to stop a political juggernaut years in the making; one that would make kings of presidents and reduce Congress to a sad spectacle.

The Party You Have...

Originally published: Monday, January 30, 2006

I love AmericaBlog. It's bitchy, smart, and catches some great news items that would otherwise fall through the cracks. But I have to disagree with John Aravosis's fully articulated stand against filibustering Alito. Aravosis makes some strong points. The Dem strategy on this has been abysmal. John Kerry is most likely just grandstanding. This is where I take issue with Aravosis's entire thesis.

If you are going to support a filibuster, you support it because you think it is going to, on average, help and not hurt Democrats, when all is said and done.

No John. I support the filibuster in hopes of helping the country. To paraphrase a madman, you go to war with the party you have, not the party you might want or wish to have.

Have you called your Senator today?