Top 4 GOP Candidates Refuse "Moral Values" Debate

Much as tonight's laughable GOP debate has garnered media and blogosphere attention today, it may have been easy to overlook yet another telling GOP debate story: the snubbing of a social conservative so-called "values voter" debate. This debate, scheduled for September 17th and hosted by ultra wingnutty ValuesVoter.org (I refuse to provide a link), will be attended by most of the 2nd-tier contenders for the GOP nod, but will be avoided by McCain (though he's pretty much 2nd-tier now), Romney, Giuliani and Freddy.

The Murdoch-infested New York Sun has the story:

If self-styled "values voters" have felt snubbed by the Republican presidential candidates this election season, that snubbing is now official.

Mayor Giuliani, Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, and Senator McCain are all declining to participate in a September 17 debate in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that's being hosted by an umbrella social-conservative group called ValuesVoter.org. Social conservatives will be upset; other conservatives might well be heartened by the waning power of the religious right.

A number of second-tier Republican candidates have confirmed attendance at the event, according to the news site WorldNetDaily.com, whose editor, Joseph Farah, is slated to moderate the debate. They include Rep. Duncan Hunter, Mike Huckabee, Rep. Tom Tancredo, Senator Brownback, Rep. Ron Paul, and John Cox.

Much as the top-tier GOP candidates scrambled tonight to please the Neanderthal Christianist mirror-image of the Taliban that comprises an increasingly large portion of the Republican base, their refusal to attend this event was extremely telling: several major players in the Christian Conservative movement including anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly will be asking questions, and the debate will be streamed over the Internet and on satellite television. In many ways--from media coverage to political environment (strong activist base), failure to attend this debate would be similar to a Democratic candidate refusing to attend YearlyKos. It's a duck of extremely significant proportions.

Not that Rudy McRomneyson aren't stuck between a rock and a hard place:

Without any of the top-tier candidates in attendance, the ValuesVoter.org debate is unlikely to garner much attention from the mainstream press. The question is whether skipping the debate will hurt the Big Four more with the base than attending it might have hurt them with the rest of the country. Given the agenda of those who will be asking the questions-- anti-abortion, anti-stem-cell-research, anti-judicial-independence, anti-immigration, and pro-censorship--it's likely the Fantastic Four made the right decision.

While they may have saved themselves from the stinging questions from these nuts, they haven't escaped the wrath of the base for evading the forum. Just look at the thread over at FreeRepublic:

Freeper Sun:

What a bunch of chickens.

Now we know that Rudy McRomney are part of the RINO establishment.

Freeper puroresu:

If social conservatives are losing power in the GOP, then the GOP is history and we’ll be a full socialist nanny state in twenty years.

Freeper jsdude1:

Lets see the Republican Party (and their liberal donors) Win without Christians..I WILL ACTIVELY PORTRAY THEM AS TRAITORS/AND CAMPAIGN FOR THE CONSTITUTIONL/LIBERTARIAN CANDIDATE-AGAINST THEM!! If they support a liberal RINO as Republican POTUS Standard Bearer-08.

Freeper Man50D:The Republican party has been incrementally replacing Conservative core values with Socialism for many decades. Conservatives are the minority RINOS because they have been pushed out of the party. Consequently the GOP and the Socialist Democrats are essentially one party. Conservatives only logical alternative is to leave the GOP and unite with the large number of unaffiliated Conservatives.

Freeper AD from Springbay:

If this: GOP Candidates Snub Social Conservatives is true in September of 2007 then this: GOP Candidates Fail to Win Election in December 2008. As a 'social conservative' I'm tired of being a Republican step-n-fetchit.

Of all the candidates to take heat from the Freepers, however, Freddy seems to have come off the worst, because he would have been expected to attend:

Freeper GhostofFreepersPast

That’s a deal breaker for me. Fred is on my won’t vote for list rigth along with Rudy McRomney. Game time is over. These are the issues I take most seriously.

Freeper puroresu:

Fred should participate. I don’t understand why he’d avoid this. The other three have good reason for being busy elsewhere that night.

Now, it is true that some have with some reason argued that the major candidates cannot attend every forum--but with base conservatives already worried that the probable do not respect them or their "values", every evasive move like this carries increased significance. Personally, I think it's extremely enjoyable to watch the "moral values" party of Vitter, Craig, and Mark Foley excoriate their head candidates as they attempt to dance on the head of a pin.

Pass the popcorn!

Also at MLW

The Economist: Republicans in Big, Big Trouble

After a long six and a half years of watching almost helplessly as the Republican Party loots, rapes and pillages everything from the Constitution to the middle class to non-threatening countries overseas, it's always satisfying to see rats call a spade a spade and jump off the pirate ship known as the modern GOP.

But rarely has the sense of schadenfreude been more poignant to me than when reading the latest Economist article today about the woes of the Republican Party and American conservative movement in general.

Today's article, titled The American Right Under the Weather, is but one piece in the new overall issue covering the leftward shift of American politics in recent months. As anyone who has read the magazine knows, the editorial staff of The Economist is certainly no friend to Democrats, favoring a decidedly corporatist agenda valuing "free trade over "fair trade" and a foreign policy usually at odds with progressive values. As a result, however, they find themselves increasingly at odds with the social conservatives who have all but taken over the Republican party's activist base: in fact, they say so directly in the cover article:

The Economist has never made any secret of its preference for the Republican Party's individualistic “western” wing rather than the moralistic “southern” one that Mr Bush has come to typify. It is hard to imagine Ronald Reagan sponsoring a federal amendment banning gay marriage or limiting federal funding for stem-cell research. Yet Mr Bush's departure hardly guarantees a move back to the centre. Social liberals like Mr Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger are in a minority on the right. On the one issue where Mr Bush fought the intolerant wing of his party, immigration, the nativists won—and perhaps lost the Latino vote for a generation.

As a result, The Economist's temporary post-mortem on the enthusiasm and dynamism of the American right is a strange mix of joy and tears: it contains equal doses of worried regret, tempered with palpable glee at the overreaching failures of the social conservatives whom they blame for much of popular rejection of Republican ideology. But it's nothing if not utterly brutal--and well worth the read.

The sheer numbers are staggering. Some key statistical points from the article include:

• 40% of Republicans think that Democrats will win the next presidential election, compared with only 12% of Democrats who think the reverse
• Q2 money to the Democratic presidential contenders nearly doubled that given to the Republican contenders
• As has been frequently mentioned by Markos, the DSCC and D-Trip are vastly outraising the NRSC and NRCC
• 61% of Democrats are happy with our choices of candidates, while only 36% of Republicans can say the same
• Young voters and Hispanic voters are trending overwhelmingly Democratic
• Registered Democrats and Democratic-leaners are now 50% of the population, while registered Republicans and Republican-leaners only comprise 35%--a strong swing from an equal 43%-43% tie in 2002.

And the list goes on and on. Things are so bleak for the pirates on Capitol Hill right now that many prominent Republicans are simply manning the lifeboats and looking for the best way to weather the storm. This little bit about former RNC chairman and self-hating closet-dweller Ken Mehlman is really poignant:

No wonder Ken Mehlman, a former Republican Party chairman who oversaw George Bush's 2004 victory, is now advising hedge funds on how to deal with a Democratic-leaning America.

Most intriguing, however, is the article's nearly ferocious rejection of the idea that GOP woes are entirely the fault of Bush, the occupation of Iraq, or the corruption of specific Republican party officials. Instead, the Economist is unafraid to lay the blame squarely where it belongs: the embrace of a hyper-conservative agenda of social moralizing, beyond-the-pale cronyism, an unhealthy dose of nativism and racism, corruption so blatant it has become institutionalized, a borrow-and-spend budgetary philosophy, and redistribution of wealth to the very rich that has appalled all but the Christianist right and some very wealthy allies:

In fact, the Republican Party in Congress is just as responsible as Mr Bush for most of the recent troubles. The Republican majority routinely appropriated more spending than the president asked for. It also larded spending bills with as much extra pork as possible. The number of congressional “earmarks” for projects in members' districts increased from 1,300 in 1994, when the Republicans took over Congress, to 14,000 in 2005.

The Republican majority also cheered Mr Bush all the way to Baghdad. Add to this the corruption of congressmen like Tom DeLay, a conservative hero, and the semi-corrupt institutional relationship that the Republicans formed with lobbyists, and you see that Mr Bush was only part of a much bigger problem.

Nor can conservatives claim that Mr Bush is a country-club Republican like his father. He has devoted his energies to giving “the movement” what it wants: the invasion of Iraq for the neoconservatives (who had championed it long before September 11th); tax cuts for business and the small-government conservatives; restricting federal funding for stem-cell research for the social conservatives; and conservative judges to please every faction.

This desire to pander to the conservative movement is partly to blame for the administration's practical incompetence. Mr Bush outdid previous Republican presidents in recruiting his personnel from the conservative counter-establishment. But this often meant choosing people for their ideological purity rather than their competence or intelligence. Some 150 Bush administration officials were graduates of Pat Robertson's Regent University, including Monica Goodling, who put on such a lamentable performance before a House inquiry into the firing of nine US attorneys. A more pragmatic president would surely have sacked many of the neoconservative ideologues who have made a hash of American foreign policy.

And as the editors astutely observe, the Republicans are now locked in a civil war for supremacy between their corporatist paymasters, the closely allied NeoCons, the Christianist base that actually mobilizes the votes, and the few die-hard libertarians who used to make up the bedrock of American conservatism and are the GOP's only hope of holding onto the rapidly changing West. Whoever prevails in that fight, however, two things are certain: the party will be weaker than it was before, andthe fight will be very, very ugly and very, very public. After all, there is no honor amongst thieves.

In the end, though, The Economist makes the excellent point that Democrats have yet to convince the American public that we are anything more than the lesser of two evils. Certainly, failing to stand up for progressive values such as we saw recently the with FISA capitulation won't do much to help that. Further, Republicans have always been more at home and more comfortable as a minority party than they have been in the position of actual governance. Like the moral and intellectual children they are, it's far easier to complain and snipe at those attempting to actually govern, than to attempt to put a failing ideology in place that gets the job done. Still, I would rather be in our shoes than in theirs. As the article correctly points out:

But even when you enter all the qualifications the right's situation is dire. It is a sign of weakness that the conservatives are retreating to their old posture as insurgents, and need a bogeywoman like Mrs Clinton to hold them together.

The Republicans have failed the most important test of any political movement—wielding power successfully. They have botched a war. They have splurged on spending. And they have alienated a huge section of the population. It is now the Democrats' game to win or lose.

Indeed. Things are looking extremely bleak for the GOP pirates, and it's fun watching the rats jump off the ship. Now all we have to do is stand for what we believe in and do the difficult work of holding ourselves accountable, standing in the way of Mr. 23% for the remainder of his term, and passing legislation that will benefit the American People for a change, rather than GOP monied interests.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the challenge.

Wtih Enemies Like These, Who Needs Friends?

Republicans and their allies just don't seem to get it. Nothing that they do actually works. Don't get me wrong--they can be successful in the short term at winning elections and enriching their fat-cat friends. They can scare and defraud enough people into voting them into office a couple of times; they can stop American action on global warming for a decade or invade non-threatening countries in the hopes of delaying peak oil.

But like a CEO who manages only with an eye toward better stock prices for the next quarter, everything that Republicans and their allies do is counterproductive over the long term--not only to the American people, but to their own interests as well. This is not only true of their self-destructive policies (the immigration disaster being chief among them), but even of their political tactics.

There's an old saying in politics: "You meet the same people going up the elevator that you do on the way down." The message? Be honest but civil; be direct but courteous; don't stab people in the back or subvert your alliances.

It's a message that has been completely lost on Republicans during the Karl Rove/Tom Delay era--presumably because they had themselves convinced that they would never be coming down that elevator again as they ascended toward a permanent Republican Majority. Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for the rest of us), the price of ignoring that wise dictum has been that their own greed and hubris has ensured the arousal of an activist, motivated population just itching bring them down a notch and see them fail. Now, like desperate villains trapped in quicksand, their every frantic move only hastens their own demise.

Nowhere is this more true than in the tactics of hatred, division and greed that they have used to earn their short-lived and ill-gotten gains. What used to work so well for them in the past now only brings them misery.

Three cases in point stand out most obviously:

1. The Joe Lieberman Fundraiser.

Republicans have been eager to use pathetic old Joementum as a wedge against Democrats. Joe's eager willingness to betray Democrats not only on policy but in the media has been legendary, and led to his eventual expulsion as the Democratic nominee in the Connecticut Senate race and his electoral rescue by the Connecticut Republican voters. The GOP and Lieberman apparently thought it would be a good idea for Joe Lieberman to host a fundraiser for the embattled Susan Collins, one of the two Republican and supposedly moderate Senators in Maine.

It was a severe miscalculation. Instead of turning into fundraiser gold and an opportunity to show the division among Democrats and the supremacy of Broderist/Mickey Kaus-style Centrism, it turned instead into a show of force by the progressive netroots for Collins' Democratic challenger, Tom Allen: by the time it was all over, MoveOn.org had raised over $355,000 for Allen, while a 24-hour ActBlue dkos fundraiser put on by multiple kossacks including myself netted over $23,000.

While no tally is available for the actual Lieberman-Collins fundraiser, it obvious that the event totally backfired on both Lieberman and the GOP, raising substantially more money for Collins' challenger than for Collins herself.

2. Coulter's vicious attack on John Edwards

By now everyone has heard of Ann Coulter's latest idiotic and nerve-wracking statements about John Edwards. First she famously called him a "faggot". Then two days ago in an interview which can be seen here, she said the following:

Coulter: Oh, yeah -- I wouldn't insult gays by comparing them to John Edwards. That would be mean. --laugh-- But, you know, around the same time, Bill Maher was not joking when he wished Dick Cheney had been killed in a terrorist attack. So I've learned my lesson: if I'm going to say anything about John Edwards in the future, I'll just wish he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot. --laugh--

Now, we can argue about whether this constitutes an actual threat to John Edwards or not. What is inescapable and unarguable, however, is the new publicity, positive imagery and fundraising ability it has given the Edwards campaign. John Edwards' much-beloved wife Elizabeth got the opportunity to attack Coulter on TV with much more restraint than I could have mustered; CNN has the story up on its front page; and the Edwards campaign is using Coulter yet again in fundraising letters as a method of propping up and increasing what would otherwise have been a middling Q2 report.

To make a long story short, the more Coulter and her ilk attack Edwards, the more likely they are to be saluting him as their next Commander-in-Chief.

3. The Money Game

Republicans have long been instrumental in ensuring that as much money as possible sloshes around Washington--the better to ensure corruption and hand-outs to their corporatist paymasters.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Capitol: conservative mismanagment of government has combined increased political activism made possible through the Internet and the appearance of increased numbers of small donors (as well as some very concerned big donors) to change the balance of power of money game.

Today, Democrats are not only outpolling the GOP in every way, we are also (with the lone exception of the RNC/DNC battle outraising them by substantial margins. As Markos says:

It's not just the DSCC kicking ass anymore. The DCCC is also running ahead of its Republican counterpart -- $26M to $23.6M. Throw in debts, and the NRCC is at negative $5M while the DCCC has nearly $7M -- a $12M advantage for the good guys.

Meanwhile, at the DSCC, the advantage is also big $22.7M versus $12.4 raised this year. And taking debts into consideration, the DSCC has about $9M compared to the NRSC's $4.3M.

Of course, one can hope that once Democrats are fully in power, we will drive the money out of politics through publically financed elections. Until that day comes, however, the Republican insistence on putting big money into elections has only helped ensure that Americans rich and poor alike are donating as much as their beleaguered wallets will allow toward the removal of said GOP operatives from public office.

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

Every day and in every way, it seems that the noose grows tighter and tighter around Republican necks. Worst of all for them, they don't seem to know any political tactics beyond those of hatred and division. Those twin tactics have now played themselves out to the point where every time they are used, they do little but backfire on their own kind, just as has happened with the deadly immigration football. Every political action they take generates as much blowback domestically as have their foreign policy actions in the Middle East. Just about everything they do, in fact, just puts them further and further into a corner.

I say, with enemies like these, who needs friends?

GOP lawmaker arrested for child rape, molesting of pages

It just seems that no matter where you turn, sexual corruption among those who claim the mantle of moral sexual behavior just keeps rearing its ugly head. From Randall Tobias to Ted Haggard, the ranks of GOP are filled with those who mask their own shame over their sexual behavior with authoritarian moralistic control over the sexual behavior of others. It's a common phenomenon that has been aggressively studied since at least the days of Sigmund Freud.

Then, of course, there are the even more sinister types: the Mark Foleys of the world, who combine this lurid sexual hypocrisy with the apparent need to abuse their power to exploit vulnerable minors. But at least Mark Foley never physically acted on his nefarious impulses. Former South Dakota State Rep. Ted Klaudt did, however. On multiple occasions.

Klaudt had to exit the state legislature in 2006 due to term limits, after having a lost a battle for state senate in that same year--but he sure had a doozie of a time while he was there. I learned of this particular piece of distasteful debauchery from Howie Klein's fantastic post on the subject at his blog Down With Tyranny. As Klein says:

Like so many tightly wound repressed and mentally ill Republicans, Klaudt was preaching the moral superiority of the far right while he was abusing molesting children-- his own foster daughters and 2 state legislative pages! He "faces a long list of charges: eight counts of rape, two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, two counts of witness tampering, sexual contact with a person under 16, and stalking." emphasis added

Yeah, that's right: eight counts of rape, two counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, two ocunts of witness tampering, sexual contact with a person under 16, and stalking. And just what was this guy doing to rack up all these charges? Well, according to KeloLand in Sioux Falls, he apparently "played doctor" with kids at a foster home he himself was running:

In the most disturbing accusation, the girls say Klaudt had them convinced they could earn up to $20,000 by donating their eggs to a fertility clinic. And even though he has no medical training, the girls say Klaudt did all the supposed "exams" and "procedures" himself....

The victims say Klaudt touched them while they were foster children at his home here in Walker. But the girls say the molestation also happened in Pierre during legislative sessions while some of them also served as pages.

Five different girls now say Klaudt did things ranging from manual "breast exams" to the painful procedure of actually going inside of them with a speculum and collecting body fluids. The girls say when they cried, Klaudt gave them a beer and told them to toughen up.

Yeah--this guy raped teenage foster children and pages in his care with a speculum, and then gave them beer to make them stop crying.

And what wonderful bills did this upstanding man of moral character sponsor during his time in the legislature?

A bill to establish a task force to study abortion and to provide for its composition, scope, and administration.

Two bills (here and here) to "prohibit the performance of abortions, except to save the life of the mother, and to provide a penalty therefor and to provide for a delayed effective date."

A bill to "support free religious expression in public schools": i.e., teach creationism.

A bill to deny gay marriage through an amendment to the state constitution.

A bill to revise certain provisions regarding the performance of abortions on unemancipated minors and those found to be incompetent.

Most ironically, we have this: a bill "Honoring Valerie Melmer for her outstanding commitment and dedication to the state legislative page program." Presumably for her ready provision of speculum-ready victims to Teddy himself.

Sounds like a guy with an unhealthy obsession with vaginas and underage girls to me. But I could be wrong.

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

Perhaps all these Biblical literalists should read their own texts: the GOP is filled to the brim with lecherous men who punish our modern-day Susannas while taking advantage of them. There is something deeply disgusting about a man who attempts to restrict abortions for minors while pretending to harvest the eggs of 15-year-old girls with a speculum, and gives them beer afterwards. But there are no Daniels within the Republican Party to call out the hypocrisy, end the treachery, and punish the moralistic hypocrites. It will take a flood of Democrats to wash away the stain of sexually repressive ugliness brought on the Republican culture of hypocrisy and corruption.

GOP Foreign Policy: A Study in Weakness and Cowardice

As our President prepares yet another address to the nation filled with talking points urging "determination" and "strength" in Iraq lest we lose faith in the Iraqi people, and Rudy Giuliani tours the country claiming that electing Democrats will lead to a new 9/11, it is appropriate to remind the nation of the fact that the Republican history of foreign policy at least since Ronald Reagan has been characterized by weakness, cowardice, and a lack of faith in the American values we all hold dear.

This idea really crystalized for me during a fantastic discussion between myself and clammyc on our Framework show at Political Nexus this week, dealing with framing on national security: the GOP is not just criminally belligerent and unbelievably inept in its foreign policy, but also incredibly weak and surprisingly lacking in faith for a party so filled with supposedly faith-based operatives.

clammyc's diary of yesterday, Destroying the "national security" meme, did a fantastic job of laying out the ways in which George Bush's GOP has failed to protect our ports and national security infrastructure, to respond adequately to terrorist threats, looked the other way or actively helped as hostile nations arm themselves to become our next enemies, voted against armor and benefits for our troops, dodged drafts, and otherwise behaved like sniveling cowards in the face of the tough national security challenges of the new millennium.

But really, it goes a great deal beyond even that. The reason Republicans are so weak on national security is that their entire outlook on national security is born of inherent weakness, fear and distrust in the righteousness of the democratic rule, self-determination and innovation so key to the American spirit--and it has been thus for decades.

This inherent weakness makes it all the more astonishing, frankly, that Democrats have been unable all this time to counter our single most significant political disadvantage vis-a-vis Republicans: that Republicans are somehow "strong" on national security, while Democrats are not. The GOP has been attempting to leverage this idea with the American public for well over half a century with figures as odious or extreme as Joe McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, but the hawkish stances of these figures backfired on Republicans as often as it succeeded until the era of Reagan and Jimmy Carter; meanwhile, the strength of figures such as FDR and JFK was enough to counter any notions of Democratic weakness in foreign policy.

It was only with the ascension of Ronald Reagan that the meme of Republican superiority in matters of national security truly took hold in a way that Democrats have been unable to counter; ironically, however, it is precisely with Reagan that the Republicans started a campaign of systematically demonstrating its own weakness in this area--weakness that Democrats have been unwilling or unable to exploit politically. Which is all the more pathetic, as the history of Republican foreign policy resembles that of a bully who lashes out randomly in terror of his own shadow. Consider some history:

--It was Republicans, led by the same convicted felon Ollie North who is currently a contributor to Fox News in a segment called "War Stories" (!), who were responsible for the Iran Contra debacle, wherein your and my government sold weapons to Iran in order to secretly fund murderous military insurgents in South America. These insurgents were led by the same villian currently responsible for suppressing insurgents in our ongoing occupation of Iraq. And let's really be clear about what this scandal was about: a Republican party so terrified of scary tin-pot socialists in banana republics that they were willing to sell high-level ballistic weapons to one of our greatest and most unstable international enemies--and so terrified of the opproprium of the American public that they found it necessary to do it in secret.

--It was Republicans who were in all probability involved in a deal with Iran to free the hostages only after their own election. If they were indeed guilty of doing this as common sense dictates and many respected experts continue to insist despite an utterly inadequate House investigation denying it, then they did so out of fear that they would not and could not carry the 1980 election on the merits of their own ideas--in spite of the major challenges facing Jimmy Carter's presidency.

--It was Donald Rumsfeld who shook Saddam Hussein's hand as the United States funded and aided him even after we were made well-aware of the man's brutality. We did this so that Saddam Hussein could weaken our declared enemy Iran--our enemy because they had taken our hostages (freed days after Reagan's inauguration), and because we were apparently terrified they would use against us the weapons we were selling them under the table--through an ugly war in which children were used to clear fields of land mines. Republicans were so terrified of Iran that they were willing to support a brutal dictator and allow children to clear land mines for them rather than face up to an enemy they were selling weapons to out of paralyzing dread of the banana republic socialists.

--It was Republicans in the United States who were so terrified of a teetering Soviet Union that had just made a desperate tactical mistake, that our CIA aggressively funded the Afghan mujahideen who would later become the Taliban--and quite possibly directly funded Osama bin Laden as well. Long after John F. Kennedy had done the real work of facing down the Soviets in the Cuban Missile Crisis (resolved through diplomacy rather than war, by the way), Reagan allowed Gorbachev to do the heavy lifting of glasnost while having so little faith in the superiority of the American way of life and economic system that he found it necessary fund those who would later cause more American deaths in one day than the Soviet Union had in decades.

--It was Republicans who, when faced with a rising drug problem, were so petrified of the possible consequences of having faith and trust the same system of regulation and taxation that had worked well for alcohol and cigarettes, decided to declare a "war on drugs" (the second stupidest phrase of GOP creation behind "war on terror") that has led to record incarceration rates and the easy availability of a black market living that is the greatest single factor in the ability of those living in ghettoes to find honest work. This strange preoccupation with a return to the days of Prohibition lest modern day Al Capones get high on marijuana instead of money has also helped contribute to the funding of Colombian death squads to the tune of $1.3 billion per year.

--It was Republicans who found it so necessary to maintain the American public's goodwill in a Gulf War necessitated by their own support of Saddam Hussein that they overstated the efficacy of Patriot Missiles, possibly resulting in the deaths of 28 American servicemen.

--It was Republicans who, from Reagan until today, have been so terrified of the prospect of change and so faithless in the American ability to create technological innovation that they have found it necessary to engage our nation in increasing disastrous oil wars in the Middle East over the last several decades.

--It was Republicans who claimed that Clinton was wagging the dog when he twice struck at Osama Bin Laden.

--It was Republicans who wanted to pack up with their tails between their legs and come home in the wake of Clinton's eminently successful, overwhelmingly internationally approved and relatively bloodless war in Kosovo.

--It was Republicans who were so petrified of phantom ICBMs coming from North Korea that they allowed 9/11 to happen on their watch, sending Condi Rice to give a speech on Missile Defense on 9/11 when it had been barely a month since the infamous August 6th Presidential Daily Briefing stating that Osama Bin Laden was determined to strike inside the United States.

--It was Republicans who were so terrified of military losses in Afghanistan that they sent corrupt Afghan warlords to do the fighting for them in Tora Bora, allowing the most wanted criminal in America's history to escape and remain unaccountable for his murderous deeds to this day.

--It was Republicans who were so terrified of the consequences of peak oil that they allowed energy companies and neoconservative kooks to ignore Afghanistan and instead engage in an immoral, unconscionable invasion and occupation of Iraq.

--It is Republicans who are so afraid of losing the oil contracts in Iraq that they are desperate to keep American troops as fodder in the area as long as possible, rather than trust that the Iraqi people can manage their own affairs. Indeed, as long as extremists like Al-Sadr can point to an outside enemy, the Iraqi people can see them as latter-day Robin Hoods, rather than as power-hungry villains; it is only when men like Al-Sadr are forced to govern that progress will be made in Iraq. Yet Republcians are so afraid of Al-Sadr and so desperate to keep their grubby hands on the oil out of fear that American technological innovation will be inadequate to solve our energy crisis, that they are willing to allow Bush to veto funding for their own troops in the field.

And there is so much more where that came from.

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It is a truly onerous list. And yet the Republican theme of "strength on national security" continues to earn dividends for them. It does so because Democrats are, by and large, afraid of going out on a limb and literally calling Republicans the petrified, terrified, corrupt liars that they are. Iran-Contra wasn't a "scandal"--it was treason predicated on cowardice. Arming Saddam wasn't a "mistake"--it was short-sighted stupidity borne of fear. Arming Bin Laden wasn't a "necessary evil"--it was myopic ineptitude created from panic. And the list goes on and on. Republicans have been unafraid to use the harshest possible language to slander Democrats on the issue of national security, and it is time we fought fire with fire.

This day, as President Bush prepares to deny funding to his own troops that he and his party have placed into harm's way due to fear and trepidation, it is time we brought their history of cowardice to mind--and to open the rhetorical floodgates against these sniveling bullies. No time like the present.

Orrin Hatch Slanders DailyKos with Lies on Senate Floor

For all the Kossacks out there, this one is hilarious and irritating all at the same time:

I know that most of us were watching CSPAN3 to see Fredo squirm before his questioners yesterday, but an interesting thing happened on the CSPAN2 while few others were watching.

Orrin Hatch (R-UT) was on the Senate floor on CSPAN-2 in the late afternoon, pontificating about the late-term abortion ban, and called out DailyKos, calling it the "online meeting place of the left." In so doing, he once again showed ignorance of the community and the way it works.

His first mistake was to mispronounce the "Kos" in DailyKos with the familiar "kaws" pronunciation--though he quickly corrected himself to say "or DailyKos [correct pronunciation] as I guess it's called."

But his second mistake was far more egregious. Though I don't have the transcript available (it just happened), he said that DailyKos was promoting anti-Catholic bigotry by harping about the Catholicism of a few of the Supreme Court Justices. Mr. Hatch said that this was an example of what he called the "radical, I mean progressive, left" taking extreme positions and acting out of what he called "hysteria" (an interesting choice of words by Hatch in this context, given its misogynistic etymology and origins.)

Needless to say, it wasn't difficult to do a search of diaries on dKos over the last three days for any mention of the word Catholic. And what do I find? JUST ONE DIARY ON THE SCOTUS RULING. One. That particular diary by Sociosam--the only one of hundreds of diaries on the topic to make any statements that could be construed as anti-Catholic--was further peppered with comment after comment after comment after comment upbraiding the diarist for attacking the justices on the basis of their religious affiliation.

Most importantly, though, no frontpagers or "those who officially speak for DailyKos" ever mentioned the word "Catholic" once during discussion of the issue. Not one. It is a flat-out lie to say that "DailyKos" promoted anti-Catholic bigotry--a bald-faced, flat-out lie that has become all too typical of Republicans in Congress.

Amusingly, Hatch then went on to attack another blogger (I don't remember whom) for saying that an anti-choice congress with an anti-choice President and an anti-choice Supreme Court passed this legislation, using the argument that Nancy Pelosi and the majority of Democratic Senators are pro-choice! As if the current make-up of Congress has anything to do with a law passed during the Republican-only one-party rule.

So once again, a prominent Republican lies, makes shit up, slanders this community, and makes himself look like an idiot in the process.

Typical.

The Biggest Loser Today? Senate Republicans

With news today of the passage of the Iraq Supplemental Bill has come a wide array of opinions from all sides of the political spectrum. The conventional wisdom on the supplemental goes something like this:

The battle is now joined between Democrats in Congress and President Bush; that Dems are playing a zugzwang on Bush, with three options:
1) Veto the bill, defunding his own war and setting up a battle royale before April 15, at which date the Occupation begins to be truly defunded;
2) Pass the bill, accepting the date-by-certains; or
3) Pass the bill, and simply "signing statement" away the oversight provisions.

But the truth is that the game is not really being played between Dems and President Bush, because everybody and their uncle who is being a realist about the situation knows that the bill will almost certainly not clear the Senate. And, of course, that's exactly what it has to do before it makes it to Bush's desk.

We can pressure as much as we want, but absent some very surprising shifts by some very key members of the Senate, Dems will not get the votes to pass this thing in its current form.

Johnson (D-South Dakota) is still recuperating from his illness, and will not be able to vote on the final bill. Thus, even if every Dem plus Sanders (and minus Lieberman) held their ground, the result in the Senate would be a tie--and ties are decided by Dick Cheney. Joe Lieberman (CfL-Connecticut) obviously won't vote for it. There will probably be at least one or two conservative Dems who bow to Administration and right-wing pressure, and perhaps even a progressive Dem (like Kucinich in the House) who think the bill isn't strong enough and vote that way. The GOP will stand as a bulwark of opposition to the bill, with perhaps one defection.

In other words, this bill is, barring a miracle, DOA in the Senate through Cheney's tiebreaking vote if nothing else.

But while this is bad news for our troops, for our country, and for Iraq, it's actually the best of all possible worlds politically. Here's why:

1) Bush is leaving office in 2008 regardless of what happens with this bill. His approval ratings are horrid, and there's very little he can do to make himself more odious, no matter what he does with this bill. There a presidential election on--and the GOP owns this war lock, stock and barrel. Furthermore, the Democratic and Republican nominees will be busy sniping at each other in 2008--not at Bush.

2) The Dem house has generated the headlines it needs to. While many of us feel the bill didn't go nearly far enough, to the average person not paying too much attention the news, it looks like Dems are standing very tough against Bush. This is a good thing.

3) The Senate GOP is extremely vulnerable in 2008--and unlike Bush, has to stand for re-election. They have a lot to lose--to the tune of 5 or 6 Democratic pickups or more. Senators are seen as national politicians, and the Occupation of Iraq is by far the biggest national issue.

If and when the Senate stands in the way of holding Bush accountable and setting timetables to end the war, it will not be Bush who stands in the crosshairs of the public's anger; it will be the Republicans in the Senate.

And the mantra, should the bill fail in the Senate, will be clear: as long as a Republican is president, the ONLY way to end the Occupation of Iraq is by getting rid of Senate Republicans. The election for President will stand and fall on its own merits, and that of the candidates (though any current Senators will be held to account for their own votes, of course). It is the Republican Senators, however, whose fate will be most impacted by this battle.

And here's a guarantee: if the vulnerable GOP Senators stand up for Bush and against the American people on this issue, they will be ousted in 2008 with near certainty. And that--if nothing else--is the most tangible accomplishment of today's victory in the House.

A Call for the Contempt of Silence

Have you no sense of decency sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

Joseph Welch, spoken to Joe McCarthy

In the lifecycle of every bully and pompous blowhard comes a special turning point.  After scowling, abusing and intimidating their way through life, generating the vilest of karma wherever they treat, there finally comes a point for such bullies that seems unthinkable during the heights of their influence and power--that time when people just.  stop.  listening.  The time when people are simply unfazed by even their heaviest bluster.

For Richard III, there finally came a time when no one would even lend him a horse to flee from certain death.  For Julius Caesar, the petulant request for just one demonstration of support even as he fell dying--returned only with a final dagger's thrust.  For Saddam Hussein, a shackled walk of ignominy out of courtroom even as he bellowed in protest about his Iraq.  For Joe McCarthy, disgrace came in the form of a simple question expressed from dismayed disbelief.

But when, at long last, will that moment come for the rabid ideologues of the right wing?  Our generation has been long in need of our own earthshattering moment of final disrespect; for  almost every word of disdain that can be uttered in response to these villains has been uttered at this point--save that of shocked silence, turned backs and averted gazes.

What else, indeed is left?

In today's National Review Online and Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes tells us that we should "not give up when victory is at hand" in Iraq.  This highly respected pundit and Fox News correspondent has the gall to write paragraphs like:

No one knows the tragic story of America in Vietnam better than Jim Webb, first as a Marine, then as a writer. So the newly elected Democratic senator from Virginia--a fierce opponent of the war in Iraq--wants to keep Vietnam out of the debate over Iraq. "As much as possible, we need to keep this debate away from Vietnam," Webb said last week. Iraq "is not a parallel situation." But Webb feared that many who supported the Vietnam war, and watched America abandon South Vietnam as it grew close to victory over the Communist forces of North Vietnam, might see similarities.

Indeed, they might, for certain parallels between Iraq and Vietnam are uncanny. A new general, David Petraeus, is taking over in Iraq with a credible new strategy, counterinsurgency. Four decades ago, General Creighton Abrams became the American commander in Vietnam, also with a new strategy. It called for taking and holding the villages and hamlets of South Vietnam. In a word, it was counterinsurgency, and it worked. Now in Iraq, Petraeus has as good a chance of success, starting with the pacification of Baghdad, as Abrams had. And the painful lesson of Vietnam applies in Iraq: Don't give up when victory is at hand.

What is one supposed to say to such baldfaced lies and atrocious propaganda?  There is no snark, no vehemence, no derision, no anger, no outrage that could fully do it justice.

What else is left but the contempt of silence?

What else is left for America's biggest bully, when he complains about the "militant left" conflating militant Christians with moderate ones--out of the same breath he uses to condemn all Muslims as militant?  What can one do but turn one's back, replicating one of the final and most powerful scenes of the play "Twelve Angry Men"?

What is one to say to stuffed shirt Dinesh D'Souza in response to a book with the title "The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11".  Can one do anything more than avert one's gaze, and hope people see through it for the utter crap that it is?

When Jonah Goldberg, widely published columnist and moron of the first degree, writes Liberal Fascism: Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton, are there truly any words that are appropriate?  Any that can be repeated in polite company, at any rate?

When America's #1 talk-radio host can say that "Pacifist kooks are as dangerous as Al-Qaeda" without shame; when America's #2 talk-radio host repeats debunked lies about one of America's most respected Senators having trained at a Wahhabists madrassa, when America's #3 talk radio host can say without shame about Democratic applause for healthcare during the SOTU that "Heathcare . . . Democrats stand first. They must like sick people more than Republicans"--when that's the case, is there anything to do but just turn off the radio?

When two of those assholes--Hannity and Beck--each get the 6pm primetime slot on the two most-watched cable news networks on television, is there truly anything to do but to stop watching altogether?

And don't even get me started on the quotes of the actual elected officials.

Because what, at long last, is left?  What, at long last, would they have to say before the public just started tuning out?  To what levels of depravity and lengths of wingnutty outrage would they have to stoop before people just started pulling the plug?  How wrong would they have to be before the media simply stopped giving them credence?

At what point, in short, do we stop even arguing with them, and start treating them with the utter contempt that they so richly deserve?

I'm beyond anger or outrage at this point.  I've moved into the realm of utter disrespect and sheer contempt.  The time is ripe for Democrats, progressives, realists, moderate Republicans, and true conservatives (as opposed corporate shills) to simply stand them down and shun them.

Give them no airtime.  Never appear on their shows.  Never respond to their insults, save possibly by telling them to go to hell.  If they buy time on the public airwaves to smear your name, treat them with the contempt they deserve.

The time for a devastating wall of silence for these people is long overdue.