Sunday, January 18, 2004

Kennedy lambastes Bush   Of the many issues competing for attention in this new and defining year, one is of a unique order of magnitude: President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq. The facts demonstrate how dishonest that decision was….   There was no imminent threat. Hussein had no nuclear weapons, no arsenals of chemical or biological weapons, no connection to Sept. 11 and no plausible link to al Qaeda. We never should have gone to war for ideological reasons driven by politics and based on manipulated intelligence.   Vast resources have been spent on the war that should have been spent on priorities at home. Our forces are stretched thin. Precious lives have been lost. The war has made America more hated in the world and made the war on terrorism harder to win….   If Congress and the American people had known the truth, America would never have gone to war in Iraq. No president who does that to our country deserves to be reelected.   Dean, Clark, Kennedy… now where are the rest of the Democrats?   This will be the key issue come November, not “how was the war prosecuted” or “have we stabilized Iraq yet?” It’s about time the rest of the Dems figured this out.   Gephardt sold the rest of his party (and the country) down the river regarding the war in order to better pursue (so he thought) his presidential ambitions.   Kerry, Edwards, and Lieberman fell right into line, like good Vichy-crats.   This time we need someone who realizes that this is not just a game. Whether it’s Clark or Dean (and I’d be happy with both on the ticket), at least they both seem to realize the stakes, unlike the others.   It's not a question of policy differences, it's fundamentally about what kind of country this is going to be and to what degree democracy will continue to exist as a fact or merely in name only. 9:37:45 PM

Kevin Phillips’ book: American Dynasty   Click here to read the interview with Rolling Stone: …Phillips is no left-wing demagogue. He's not only a lifelong Republican, he's also the guy who literally wrote the book that became the blueprint for the party's dominance of presidential politics. Phillips served as the chief political strategist for Richard Nixon in 1968, and, in The Emerging Republican Majority, he formulated the "Southern Strategy" that helped hand the White House to the GOP for a generation. In his new book American Dynasty, Phillips lays out his almost visceral distaste for what he calls "the politics of deceit in the House of Bush," accusing the administration of dishonesty and secrecy that would make Tricky Dick blush. He traces the course of Bush's family over the past 100 years, detailing how they sought influence "in the back corridors" of the oil and defense industries, investment banking and the intelligence establishment. Elites, not elections, put Bush in power. "I'm not talking about ordinary lack of business ethics or financial corruption," says Phillips, who recently registered as an Independent for the first time. "Four generations of building toward dynasty have infused the Bush family's hunger for power and practices of crony capitalism with a moral arrogance and backstage disregard of the democratic and republican traditions of the U.S. government." As a result, he says, "deceit and disinformation have become Bush political hallmarks." Click here to read the interview with Buzzflash:   "Now what I get a sense of from all of this -- and then topped obviously by spending all the money in 2000 to basically buy the election -- is that this is not a family that has a particularly strong commitment to American democracy. Its sense of how to win elections comes out of a CIA manual, not out of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution." -- Kevin Phillips   6:41:45 PM

This guy gets it   Do you?   Most political reporting on the Democratic race, it seems to me, has gotten it wrong. Some journalists do, of course, insist on trivializing the whole thing: what I dread most, in the event of an upset in Iowa, is the return of reporting about the political significance of John Kerry's hair.   But even those who refrain from turning political reporting into gossip have used the wrong categories. Again and again, one reads that it's about the left wing of the Democratic party versus the centrists; but Mr. Dean was a very centrist governor, and his policy proposals are not obviously more liberal than those of his rivals.   The real division in the race for the Democratic nomination is between those who are willing to question not just the policies but also the honesty and the motives of the people running our country, and those who aren't.   What makes Mr. Dean seem radical aren't his policy positions but his willingness — shared, we now know, by General Clark — to take a hard line against the Bush administration….   That doesn't mean that the Democratic candidate has to be a radical — which is a good thing for the party, since all of the candidates are actually quite moderate. In fact, what the party needs is a candidate who inspires the base enough to get out the message that he isn't a radical — and that Mr. Bush is.  12:17:36 PM