Scraps. The oldest stratum in the geology of my parents' basement dates back a century and more. When my grandparents died—my mother's parents—and my great-aunt, my grandfather's sister, in the last few years of the eighties, what was salvaged from their houses on Carrie Ave. in the old, working-class St. Louis neighborhood of Baden joined the growing sedimentation downstairs: and stayed there, unrevisited, silted over. They were all born in the years around 1910, and some of what they had kept from their own parents, my great-grandparents, Irish and German laborers, survived their passing. Ceremonial old photographs and tintypes, ancient property records, the Mass cards of forgotten turn-of-the-century funerals. Much of it probably beyond the reach of living memory.

It's easy to get lost among such obscure stuff, and for all the hours I spent excavating over the weekend I did relatively little good in the actual, relevant task of freeing up space. We're maybe a couple of large trash bags and a few relocated boxes closer to a clear basement for my efforts, no better. So many scraps, and all of them have to be sifted for their significance, or lack of it: old tax records, old pharmacy receipts, valueless, unredeemed green stamp collections and expired Christmas club books. Stuff that someone, some decades past, wasn't for whatever reason quite ready to throw away, now long past expiration; small enough, any item of it, but in bulk an encumbrance.

And any item of it a piece of someone's, some loved one's, vanished life. Every item a small but possibly readable pattern of a world. The house has to be sold, for my Mom's sake, and to be sold has to be disencumbered, and this chaff has to go: but all weekend long I felt that I was consigning my grandparents, my aunts, in the material fragments of their memories and actions, to a second and more permanent oblivion. A deeper oblivion in its way than burial—every scrap let go was a lost knowing, a thought released that could never quite be thought again.

A shoebox full of matchbooks and B&W coupons left by my aunt, for decades until her death at 81 a two-to-three pack-a-day smoker. An insurance card clipped to a car-repair record: from the day in July, 1974 when a new driver made a bad, head-on left turn into my grandparents' car, while I rode in the backseat with them from Sunday dinner at the smorgasbord place on Halls Ferry. A receipt for a trolling motor my Grampa, a fisherman as long as I knew him, bought that same year with some of his retirement money. A warranty card from his police-band scanner: he'd been a fireman thirty years, and at night he'd park in his armchair and listen to the fire calls, like a man in some ill-understood limbo catching at echoes of his real life.

As much a presence as these people had been in my life, I felt that I had never known them well enough, never tried enough to learn what they knew. And yet what would it have done for them, even if it were possible, to have kept hold of these scraps? I came to see, as the weekend went on, that what I had to do now after all was the best thing I could do. I was taking however uncertain hold of what they had left after them—not deliberately but out of weariness or inattention—and calling them to mind as I passed it through my hands: honoring their castoffs by letting them say as much to me as they would, and no more. My imperfect understanding would be enough, because it had to be. I came to think of it, in a way, as a form of Zen practice. (However much the notion would have mystified those hard-nosed Catholic old-timers.)

Someday, the people I've left behind will have to deal with my scraps: my unconsciously assembled, haphazard second body. Things will get meaning from my absence that had no particular meaning to me. They'll think of me, and let go, as we all have to. What better respect is there to be paid to the dead?

posted by michael  10:50:56 PM  
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Suddenly feeling bereft of political energy—possibly because I'm going home this weekend to help (as much help as a weekend will give) cleaning and excavating my parents' house, which has been unlived-in since my dad's death nearly a year ago. Thirty years and more of accumulated stuff in that basement, a slow tide that rose to all but cover the suburban-obligatory pool table, and any of the spaces we played in as kids. It's the only house any of us ever lived in before adulthood, so the work ahead isn't just physically daunting.

In lieu of politics, then, another poem: one of mine, this time, that I got just this morning. Lighter than my usual thing, even romantic in a way. Yeah, I usually segregate this stuff to the Poetry Corner, but I don't feel like it this time.

newcomers

I'm on the southwest corner, across
the street, looking at you
through a hill of glass.  I'm eating
my soup with the giant tongs
of the setting sun.  I'm singing
"Sweet Caroline" at opera
volume to the passing
squad cars.  Someday, when I'm no longer
of earth, you'll rescue
this page from the dumpster
and go flying with it:  over houses
and Kwik Stops, over marketing scams,
over trees and the statues
of trees, as one of the
possessed:  and they'll send
for your husband and tell him
to take off work, because the traffic
lights are broken and the lake
is moving in from the shore.  Let me be you
a little while longer, as in truth
I was hardly ever
myself; let the clangor
of unresolved song subside
around you.  The day is being wheeled
into its vault, and across the street
the eyes of Paris
are open.  This is a swell world
still, for us newcomers to it.

posted by michael  7:50:14 PM  
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John Roberts: Totally not stuck-up. eRobin has the lowdown on the incisive, hard-hitting coverage the Tiger Beat NY Times Washington bureau is providing of the Roberts nomination. Best. Times critique. Ever. Just go read.
posted by michael  9:36:54 AM  
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How to know you've paid too damn much attention to the NYT. I'm flipping through the A section today, basically just scanning headlines, and this one, part of the interior omnibus dealing with the Roberts nomination, catches my peripheral vision just as I'm turning to the next section: "Nominee's Credentials 'Jumped off the Page'." And I thought, ah, the obligatory, predictable White House flackery. Bet I know who wrote that. And sure enough, I turn back, and there's the unholy byline of Elisabeth "Republicans say" Bumiller staring up at me. Don't even need to read the story: between headline and byline, I could write it myself.

Honestly, Lizzie, isn't the shtick getting a bit old?

posted by michael  10:39:27 PM  
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Though I came to him late, Alan Dugan is a favorite poet of mine: the genius of American poetry is in its cranks, its nonconformists, and Dugan, a leftist curmudgeon, is firmly in the American grain. I've been thinking lately about the irony of living, as a longtime anti-capitalist radical, in a country under the sway of radicals of the right, and of being forced to unlearn some of my radicalism (I have a newfound love of procedural democracy) as a consequence. Dugan was there before me: leafing through his volume of collected poems last night, I found this, from his 1974 collection, Poems Four, perfect for our own moment, which I offer in the brief calm before the SCOTUS storm:

Confession of Heresy

Once I demanded annihilation and frenzy.
I applauded the smiles of thieves and had
a passion for debris.  Lost in the traffic
of argument, I appraised skilled assassins
and preached the slaughter of the pure,
but now I'm scared and only critical
of what I once proposed to wreck:  I see
vandals at the monuments I hoped to save,
experts, who exceed in self my strong words,
and call themselves the business or the state.
They grow up in the rubble of our wreck,
kill with a purist's hatred of the strange,
and feed on death, until a liberal man
must blush like a rose for holding on to one,
turn grey, and learn to shout the slogans:
"Annihilation!", "Frenzy!", just to run
the gantlets of their streets in safety
from himself, them, or other enemies.

posted by michael  7:58:36 PM  
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Liz Bumiller—or whichever PR handler the White House assigned to water and mulch her this week—decided that it was time to look at the coming Supreme Court nomination battle from the woman's perspective. And by woman's, I mean lady's, since even though we're talking about the possibility of a woman replacing a woman justice, we're so in the fifties here. The burning issue that leads today's "White House Letter": what does Laura Bush know, and how does she know it?

When Laura Bush said in a television interview last week that she hoped her husband would name a woman to succeed Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, a lot of people saw it as a top item on the first lady's "honey-do" list. But Republicans close to the White House said that people had it reversed. Mrs. Bush, they said, was not so much nudging her husband as reflecting his thinking.

(Excuse me, but: "honey-do" list? Yeecch. Did Bumiller fall asleep last night on a stack of old McCall's or something?) The gender politics are head-spinning! Is Laura lobbying Dear Hubby, or is she leaking His most intimate cogitations? A nation waits with bated breath ...

For Lizzy Boo to split the difference.

"It says that they're looking very carefully at a woman," said a Republican with longtime ties to the White House. "I don't think she would have said it without knowing something." ...

This is not to say, the Republicans cautioned, that Mrs. Bush has no opinion. On the contrary, they said that she was probably the most influential voice pushing Mr. Bush—who has named women to top positions in his administration—in a direction he may have already chosen.

A strong influence on Dubya to do what he's already decided to do anyway. It's tough when you've got to go in two opposite propaganda directions at once, but that's Lizzy Boo for ya: she makes it look easy.

But what really sets this piece apart, for the conoisseur, is how thoroughly it illustrates the typical boldness and fluidity of the Bumillerian style. Let's take a look at the beating intellectual heart of the piece, with these excerpts from the beginning of each of its central nine grafs (more than half the article's extent), in order. Follow the bouncing leitmotif:

Republicans say there are three strong reasons to name a woman to replace Justice O'Connor.
First, they believe ...
Second, they believe ...
Third, and not least, Republicans say ...
Republicans add that a woman ...
Republicans close to the White House say ...[To be fair, this is from the second sentence of its paragraph. Lizzy throwin' in some flash, just to see if you're paying attention.]
"She may have been doing it to make the point ..." said the Republican with White House ties. ...
At this point, Republicans said ...

That, my friends, is some brave stenography.

Good thing we already live in a one-party state, huh? Imagine if there were an opposition, and Our Liz were to break a nail or something having to do (oh the humanity!) actual reporting.

posted by michael  7:24:51 PM  
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Ben Stein is a fucking prat. In his Everybody's Business column today, Ben Stein displays some unwonted sympathy for the workin' stiff, who he thinks "we" ought to have more consideration for:

We could live a little while without a stock market. It was closed for a time after the United States entered World War I and we survived, although I personally would not have liked it. But we could not live at all without those who earn modest wages and keep the whole system going - and whose risk does not involve being fired and getting a severance package if something goes wrong, but may mean a homecoming in a box or a life with a prosthesis.

Is Stein thinking of the Times' own Pulitzer-winning investigative series on death in the workplace? Has something touched a previous unreached moral core in Stein, made him think a bit about the way his wealth and the wealth of his class is built, even in these enlightened times, on dangerous, brutal, even killing human labor? Well, not exactly. Stein's only concerned with a special category of worker:

The men and women of Wall Street and of corporate America do their very important work - and it is vital work, indeed - inside a box of security and safety created by the courage of the men and women who wear battle dress uniforms and ride down the highway of death in Iraq in armored personnel carriers handling machine guns.

The men and women in the Armani suits, who get the huge paychecks - and who, again, do work I sincerely appreciate and admire - could not exist for long if they were not being shielded by the men and women in uniforms and boots.

And I do not mean only the military. I am also talking about the police officers, the firefighters and other first responders; the Department of Homeland Security folks; the airport security people; and the people in the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency. All of them offer their time and their lives and their families' sanity to protect the country.

That means, among other things, protecting the free markets in finance - and in ideas, religions and human feelings. There would be no finance section of the newspaper without the protection of those whose job is to protect and to serve.

Yes, God bless the patriotic defenders of the Republic Capital! They fight in Iraq so terrorists can't get to the Hamptons.

What's really disgusting about this—and it's certainly the most disgusting prose I've read in the Times in an age, managing as it does to celebrate military self-sacrifice and parasitic wealth on the very same plane—is that Stein seems actually to be coming over a little misty-eyed as he writes it. Nothing like being able to swallow your own sentimentalist bullshit.

Stein recommends that maybe (he doesn't want to tread too hard on the point) military pay should be increased. As for the non-uniformed: well, hell, if the suckers want to work for pennies, they deserve whatever screwing they get, don't they, Ben?

posted by michael  1:45:10 PM  
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See? Capitalism's not that hard to understand. From a Steven Greenhouse article in today's Times, focused on Costco CEO Jim Sinegal, we learn that Wall Street analysts don't think very well of the company (even though Costco's profits rose 22% last year, and its stock performance is making Wal-Mart look sick).

Emme Kozloff, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, faulted Mr. Sinegal as being too generous to employees, noting that when analysts complained that Costco's workers were paying just 4 percent toward their health costs, he raised that percentage only to 8 percent, when the retail average is 25 percent.

"He has been too benevolent," she said. "He's right that a happy employee is a productive long-term employee, but he could force employees to pick up a little more of the burden."

A burden which, of course, they would be lifting from the poor, stooped shoulders of the owners of capital.

posted by michael  1:14:32 PM  
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Plamegate: Cheney's revenge. A key fact of Plamegate, one that people keep failing to take sufficient account of, is that Rove et al. were quick—remarkably quick—on the trigger. I mean, cripes, they were in full gear within two days of the Wilson op-ed: which means that they had to have the smear in place, ready to launch on practically a moment's notice. I don't know why that doesn't tickle more peoples' funny bones. To me the crucial questions aren't about how Rove and Libby disseminated the smear once the op-ed showed them the greenlight (those are crucial questions, of course, but of a different order), they're about how the smear came into being in the first place, who conceived and authorized it.

Well, pay close attention to these posts from Digby and Josh Marshall, because to my eye, taken together, they draw a compelling outline of the genesis of the anti-Wilson campaign. Wondering about the June 2003 State Dept. memo reported on in new detail today in the Times, the one that's emerging as a crux of the investigation into the Plame distribution network, Digby cites this from Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard:

It was reported in the media and repeated by politicians that Cheney had asked the CIA to send someone to Niger to look into the matter. This is untrue. What did happen is that CIA officials, without the knowledge of Cheney or Tenet, dispatched a former ambassador, Joseph Wilson, to investigate. Columnist Robert Novak has reported that Wilson's wife, a CIA employee, recommended him for the job. Wilson traveled to Niger, interviewed current and former officials, and decided that no deal for uranium had been made with Iraq.

When Wilson returned, he gave an oral report to the CIA. But he didn't meet with Cheney or send him a written report on his trip. Cheney didn't learn of Wilson's trip until he read in the New York Times in May 2003 that an ex-ambassador had been sent. Cheney later received a document from an American diplomat who had debriefed Wilson. It was marked with a warning that the information might be unreliable. Leaders in Niger were not likely to admit to an American envoy that they'd violated United Nations sanctions by selling uranium to Saddam, it suggested.

Digby conflates the "document from an American diplomat" that Cheney received some unspecified "later" time after Nick Kristoff's column of May 6, 2003 with the State Dept. memo, and asks why Cheney would have had the memo written up when "there were earlier real-time documents that reflect Wilson's debriefing upon his return"? But my hunch is that we're talking about two different documents here—that the document Barnes mentions is, indeed, the contemporaneous Wilson debriefing, and that the now-contentious State Dept. memo was only ordered as a follow-up.

Here's relevant discussion from Josh Marshall, pegged to a short piece from June 15, 2003 by Walter Pincus on the CIA's critical self-assessment of its handling of (the yet-unnamed) Wilson's Niger evidence. Wilson, Josh notes, assumed his report made its way up the channel to Cheney; Pincus's Agency-sourced report, though, says that "the CIA did not pass on the detailed results of its investigation to the White House or other government agencies." Why not, asks Josh?

The explanation confected by the authors of the SSCI report was the rather contradictory one that either Wilson's trip generated no substantive information or that it in fact tended to confirm suspicions of an illict uranium traffic between the two countries. No one who's looked at the evidence involved believes that. Nor is that cover story compatible with the CIA's subsequent and repeated attempts to prevent the White House from using the Niger story.

Here in Pincus's reporting -- before the evidentiary and political battle lines were drawn -- is the answer: "Information not consistent with the administration agenda was discarded."

It never made it back to Cheney's office because it wasn't what Cheney's office wanted to hear. They were looking for evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program, not ambiguous data and certainly not evidence that contradicted the claim.

In this key respect, the dismissal of the information is displaced from the VP's office to the CIA. And the reason is that they already understood what was wanted and what wasn't.

Notice, from the end of the Barnes quote, that the debriefing was "marked with a warning that the information might be unreliable": suggesting precisely the self-censoring means by which Wilson's report was sidelined before it could raise Dick Cheney's blood pressure.

So let's put two and two together. When Kristoff mentioned the Niger mission of an unnamed former U.S. ambassador to Africa on May 6, it rocked Scooter Libby's world. There was a scramble: nobody in Cheney's office knew about the trip, and they were momentarily at a loss. Worse, they understood that somebody, some CIA or State dissident (Kristoff calls his source "a person involved in the Niger caper") had just fired a shot across their bow. And Dick Cheney—who seems to have had a weird emotional fixation on the Saddam nuke story, not to mention whatever involvement he might have had in the (separate but related case) of the forged Niger documents—was wicked pissed.

So the minions quickly filled in the story, and dug up the debriefing document that had eluded them the first time around. But of course that debriefing document would have made no reference to Valerie Plame. Maybe her (quite vestigial) role in Wilson's mission came up through the grapevine while Cheney's people were getting themselves up to speed in the immediate aftermath of Kristoff's column, maybe not. But certainly the State Dept. report, which put Plame front and center, was commissioned (perhaps out of Bolton's office) shortly thereafter as oppo research. An effort was commenced to establish—preemptively, as a contingency—a counterattack should Wilson or somebody in the CIA go public with the Niger info, as it must have been clear they were preparing to do. (And one wonders just exactly the sequence of events, on Wilson's side, that led to the op-ed being published: has Wilson ever spoken about that? I don't recall seeing anything.)

Which means that outing Valerie Plame wasn't Rove's revenge at all—something that never quite made sense to me, given the compressed timeline. It was Cheney's revenge, done on spec, and Rove (with Libby, with the WHIG) was charged to execute it when and if necessary. (Though, as I said earlier, the particular line taken bears the marks of having been of Rove's crafting.)

Granted, all this is just speculation. But it fits the facts as we've seen them emerge. I flatter myself that I have a good instinct for narrative: and the story of Cheney's revenge not only fits, it has a good shape, it satisfies. So I'll go with it for now: my theory, and what it is too.

posted by michael  2:53:26 PM  
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Judith Miller's culpability. OK, I kind of buried it in the last post, so just to make it prominent:

My guess is that Judy Miller was the cooperative press contact deputed to put Valerie Plame's identity in circulation in the media. (Which, incidentally, is precisely why she didn't write the story herself—so as to conceal her role. In fact, her unwillingness to pursue this particular scoop I take as supporting evidence to what I'm saying here.) She, and probably she alone, knows the name of the administration operative who passed the information along. That person—and probably that person alone—directly committed a crime in leaking the Plame info, and I'm betting it's someone who's never signed a waiver, or was ever asked to. It's someone whose name Patrick Fitzgerald doesn't know, or can't confirm, and that's why Judy's in jail: to shake it out of her. With that name in hand, Fitzgerald can then walk back the crime to the conspiracy to commit the crime, which is the real prize in this investigation.

Judy Miller's a martyr to nothing, and people who think she's representing some principle of press freedom are dupes. She's a quasi-spook and a conscious disinformation agent within the mainstream media. Her motive for sitting in a cell now, otherwise somewhat mysterious, is to protect a criminal conspiracy in which she's played a key part. She doesn't want to be exposed.

It's a shame, really, that her journalist cover makes it impossible to charge her with a crime in the Plame outing, because she deserves it. (And why Fitzgerald needs the name of her source: he can't hold a sentence over Miller's head to coerce cooperation, but her source will be a different matter.) And the Times deserves to blow sky-high when the truth about her work finally, incontrovertibly comes out. (And they thought Jayson Blair was bad ...)

posted by michael  11:51:58 AM  
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A chip off the workbench. Let's go back to Mike Allen, from the end of today's article on the Rove-Novak conversation:

Sources who have reviewed some of the testimony before the grand jury say there is significant evidence that reporters were in some cases alerting officials about Plame's identity and relationship to Wilson -- not the other way around.

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, has also testified before the grand jury, saying he was alerted by someone in the media to Plame's identity, according to a source familiar with his account. Cooper has previously testified that he brought up the subject of Plame with Libby and that Libby responded that he had heard about her from someone else in the media, according to sources knowledgeable about Cooper's testimony.

It doesn't sound at all like Scooter and Turd Blossom were operating from the same fucking playbook, does it?

Thing is, I believe them both, sort of. They did "learn" who Valerie Plame was from the media—in the sense that they made sure that such media contacts would be the only traceable route between them and that piece of knowledge. (Maybe they genuinely didn't even know her name, given how much emphasis has been placed on the name not having been uttered: maybe they insulated themselves from such details, for maximum deniability, or for extra protection from legal jeopardy.)

To my eye, as someone who came to political consciousness during Watergate, the Plame affair looks like nothing so much as another third-rate burglary. Much more significant than the burning of Valerie Plame was the conspiracy behind it, a conspiracy for which the Plame operation was nothing more than a small sideline, maybe somebody's pet revenge project—somebody, say, in or affiliated with the White House Iraq Group.

Digby, in that last link, mentions a paper written by Col. Sam Gardner, formerly of the National War College, contending that he'd found "50 instances of demonstrably false stories" planted in the press in the runup to war by the Iraq Group. (I hadn't noticed, when I first read Digby's post, that it was none other than Joe Wilson who began passing the Gardner paper around late last year. Tell me Wilson doesn't know what this is about.) Which is where the Plame investigation becomes directly linked to the controversy touched off by the Downing Street Memo. Outing Valerie Plame was a chip off the workbench, as it were, a political whack job forming just a (kind of castoff) piece of the much larger effort to "fix the facts and intelligence round the policy." And if we're lucky, and Patrick Fitzgerald has his eye on the ball, what we'll get out of all this is a detailed look at the sources and methods of the conspiracy: who the key players were on both sides (press and government), how the channels operated and how disinformation was laundered into the press.

The Plame story wasn't developed by Rove or Libby, and they didn't set the story in motion within the media. They almost had to be in on planning and approving the operation, but the details will have been left to some slightly lower-level operative, aka a Fall Guy—somebody whose job it was to develop the necessary intelligence and put the item in circulation. (My hunch would be that it's this Fall Guy, the only one who directly committed a crime and who can be walked back towards the conspiracy, that's the name Patrick Fitzgerald needs from Judith Miller—one possibly she alone knows. Which would mean that Miller was the chosen conduit for laundering the story into the media gossip-sphere, not by a long shot her only service in that role. Or even her most significant. Just in case there's any lingering idea that what Miller's really defending from her blessed incarceration is the First Amendment.) And Rove and Libby would then sit back, all innocence, and wait to pounce on the inevitable "Hey, did you hear"s coming from the useful idiots their friends in the press, and Joe Wilson and wife would be done.

And it would have worked fine, as it's worked in God knows how many other instances in the Propaganda Administration's tenure: except that there was an unambiguous crime involved, one that hit the CIA where it lived, and the Agency made a referral to the DOJ, and then along came a special prosecutor ... And all, ultimately (I'm betting), because Dick Cheney had a bug up his ass and couldn't be told no. Out of just such miscalculations do governments unravel.

posted by michael  11:22:43 AM  
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Two stories this morning, one in the Times, one in the Post, both anonymously single-sourced, telling nearly the same story about Karl Rove's conversation with Bob Novak about Valerie Plame's CIA affiliation. In both accounts, it's Novak who passes the name to Rove, rather than vice versa. Here's the Times lead:

Karl Rove, the White House senior adviser, spoke with the columnist Robert D. Novak as he was preparing an article in July 2003 that identified a C.I.A. officer who was undercover, someone who has been officially briefed on the matter said.

Mr. Rove has told investigators that he learned from the columnist the name of the C.I.A. officer, who was referred to by her maiden name, Valerie Plame, and the circumstances in which her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, traveled to Africa to investigate possible uranium sales to Iraq, the person said.

After hearing Mr. Novak's account, the person who has been briefed on the matter said, Mr. Rove told the columnist: "I heard that, too."

The previously undisclosed telephone conversation, which took place on July 8, 2003, was initiated by Mr. Novak, the person who has been briefed on the matter said.

There's already a fair amount of huffing and blowing about this, but Atrios is clearly wrong when he says that the WaPo piece is probably from the same anonymous source as sits behind the Times article. Mike Allen of the Post sources a "lawyer involved in the case," rather than Johnston and Stevenson's (ludicrously vague) "person briefed on the matter," and adds this:

The New York Times reported the conversation between Rove and Novak in its Friday editions. The lawyer confirmed that account and elaborated on it. The account suggests that Rove could not have been Novak's original source but may have been a secondary source. Novak has refused to comment about his sources or to say whether he has cooperated with prosecutors.

Allen wouldn't have used the bolded language if he was working from the same source that Johnston and Stevenson had. "Confirmed" means that Allen has made sure that his source isn't the same guy. (Specifically calling the source a "lawyer" means something, too, though I'm not sure what. Hard for me to believe that Allen's source comes from within Fitzgerald's operation, which has been really tight; but it seems unlikely he'd allow Luskin to speak off the record like this, not when he's been so vocal already.)

In any case, between them the Times and the Post have given us two, apparently independent, sources for the Rove-Novak conversation. Like it or not, the story looks pretty solid.

Nor does it surprise me. I never really bought the idea that Rove would be so careless, or (quite) so hubristic, as to leave obvious fingerprints on the effort to smear Wilson through his wife—as to make himself personally responsible for leaking Plame's identity and employment to reporters. Rove's not some monstrous political super-genius, as several people have pointed out of late (as Paperwight says, "a fairly bright bog-standard sociopath who found a vocation in Republican politics"): but he didn't get where he is now by taking unnecessary legal risks, either.

This is threatening to get long, and I'm a little worried about my connectivity, so I'll post now and complete my thought in a bit.

posted by michael  10:08:17 AM  
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You know you've reached a certain age when people who haven't seen you for a while feel compelled to say, often as a form of greeting, "You look good"—emphasis on good, as if they're a bit surprised at your continuing to cheat decrepitude.

It's started happening with some regularity lately. I'm not saying I don't look good—just that nobody seemed to need to remark on it when I was in my thirties.

posted by michael  8:45:45 AM  
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Guild mentality. Salon's readers have made it pretty clear that they think the magazine has its head firmly up its ass in its defense of Judith Miller's refusal to testify in the Plame matter.

It was reasonable to expect at least some anti-Miller letters in the wake of [Farhad] Manjoo's and freelance reporter Michael Scherer's Salon stories about the Miller case. Like virtually everyone else in every branch of the media, Manjoo and Scherer reported Miller's impending and then actual imprisonment as a dark day for press freedom. Also like almost everyone else in the media, both stories sought to put the bizarre details of Miller's dilemma in context, while dancing around its most uncomfortable elements: Miller's tarnished record and the presumed involvement of Rove, dark prince of the George W. Bush White House.

But it's safe to say that everyone here was surprised by the consistently enraged tone of the letters -- furious might be a better word -- and by the insistence of many writers that Salon's coverage had fundamentally missed the story. Of the dozens of letters we have received on this issue over the last few weeks, no more than a half-dozen have supported the general tenor of Manjoo and Scherer's reporting, or indeed have seen the Miller case as in any way a matter of fundamental freedoms.

So what's Joan Walsh go and do in the face of this reader outrage? Assign Andrew O'Hehir to try to push that melon a few more inches colonwards!

There's so much wrong in this piece that in the interest of time (and my own sanity) I'll just focus on what strikes me as the most wrong. The crux of O'Hehir's argument, if I can dignify it by calling it that, is that the Left has let its (admittedly justified) disgust for Miller's role in hyping the Iraq WMD story get the better of its commitment to First Amendment principle. (OK, just a nod to the second-most wrong thing. O'Hehir's bizarre insistence that Miller was no more than a patsy, "a skilled veteran reporter ... [who got] thoroughly hustled out of her shorts by a White House bagman," when everything we know says that she was a willing, highly networked, and ideologically committed participant in the WMD scam—well, I think that says something about O'Hehir's standard of argument here.) His counter-reference is to the ACLU's famous defense of Nazi marchers in Skokie:

It was back in 1977 when a small band of neo-Nazis from the South Side of Chicago launched a year-long legal battle by applying for a permit to march in Skokie, Ill., a suburban community with a majority Jewish population and a large number of Holocaust survivors. The neo-Nazis were a pack of losers with no coherent political ideology and little message beyond hate speech; their proposal to march in Skokie was pure provocation. But the various ordinances Skokie officials passed to try to stop the march were transparently unconstitutional, and the ACLU took the Nazis' case all the way to the Supreme Court, winning at every stage. Jewish members of the civil liberties group resigned by the thousands -- nationally, the ACLU lost 15 percent of its membership -- and some tension between Jewish organizations and the ACLU lingers to this day.

It should go without saying that for civil-liberties advocates and constitutional scholars, the issue was never whether the Nazis were repugnant (they were) or had anything to say (they didn't). Instead, it was a question of what legal precedent was being set. "If we had lost, a brand new set of First Amendment law would have been created," David Hamlin, then the executive director of the Illinois ACLU, said a few years later. "Any community in the country would have had the legal power to pass laws like Skokie's that would stifle not just Nazis but anyone they didn't like."

There's no need to draw the parallel out further, except to observe that the principle here is not approximately the same, but exactly the same. Even if you believe that Judith Miller is nothing more than "a shill for the Bush administration" (a Florida reader) or "a co-conspirator in a government coverup" (a Missouri reader), she's still entitled to the same constitutional protections as Greg Palast and Amy Goodman. Even, God help us, as Robert Novak, who seems to have peed his drawers and spilled the beans the moment the independent prosecutor rattled his cage. The First Amendment covers all members of the press, without regard to truthfulness, integrity or their perceived similarity to sub-reptilian life forms.

First of all, not even I think that Judith Miller is as repugnant as a bunch of Nazis low-lifes. But past that: how the hell does the Miller jailing in any respect, much less "exactly," raise the same principle as the Skokie march? O'Hehir asserts, but doesn't bother to explain—no need to "draw the parallel out further," apparently we're all just supposed to see it. Well, I don't. The Nazis had to be defended because their direct exercise of political speech, as well as their right to peaceably assemble, was going to be abridged, and for no better reason than community outrage. The outrage was more than justified: but if the First Amendment fails to protect provocative speech, then it fails to protect any politically meaningful speech. That's a clear and compelling principle, and David Hamlin is right, the ACLU had no choice but to defend it in Skokie.

What provocative exercise of speech is being penalized or abridged because Judith Miller is sitting in jail? She's asserting a privilege, nothing more: the privilege of maintaining promised confidentiality, at her own discretion and with no appeal from her judgement. (Which no doubt just seems the way things ought to work, to someone possessed of Judy Miller's ego.) We might argue about the utility of that privilege being given to journalists, for the sake of the public interest, we might argue about the proper latitude the privilege should be afforded in civil or criminal matters; I can't see how there's any argument, though, that what we're talking about rises to the level of constitutional principle.

It no doubt warms O'Hehir's cockles to think so, but the First Amendment is not a blanket grant of immunity to journalists. You don't magically become free of the ordinary responsibilities of citizenship, or the constraints of the law, just because you've got a J-school certificate. And in any case Judy Miller is not in jail because she exercised her constitutional rights (she didn't even write a story off the leak she was given), or even because she did her job in a way somebody powerful took offense at. (Miller's receiving the Plame leak isn't of itself something that puts her in jeopardy.) She's in jail because she is potentially a witness to a federal crime, and has refused to answer questions legitimately put to her by a prosecutor investigating that crime.

The one catch here is that the crime Miller may have witnessed not only occured in the course of her reportorial work: the crime was, precisely, commited by someone in the act of passing information to her in her capacity as a journalist. In that sense, whether she wrote a story or not is beside the point: if it's a crime to pass certain kinds of information to a reporter, that at least in theory places a burden on the free working of the press. But it's a burden that arises from the desire to uphold a competing public interest: a complete free-for-all on classified information might well cripple some operations of government. Which means that circumspection, considerable circumspection, is required on both sides of the equation. In Miller's case it's not as if there hasn't been plenty of care taken already. Since we're two years into an investigation that's only now reached this legal pass (per DOJ guidelines that reporters are not to be routinely subpoenaed in criminal investigations), and since the prosecutor's actions at every step have been overseen by the independent judiciary (the only other party so far privy to the facts gathered in the case), I think it's safe to say that characterizing Fitzgerald (as O'Hehir does at the end of the article, in an approving quote from another reader letter) as "out of control" is pretty well out of bounds. Any constitutional protection to which Judith Miller is entitled—given that there's no such thing as an absolute protection here—looks to have been pretty thoroughly honored in the judicial process.

But for journalists like O'Hehir, this really isn't about the weighing of different sorts of public interest, it's about the perception of a threat to what they consider their rightful privileges, as members of a special class. (Never mind that American constitutional law has never actually made journalists a special class: it's what they believe, part of the lore of the trade.) O'Hehir concludes his article with several concessory paragraphs about how "the public's baleful view of the press is not totally without merit." The Times WMD reporting gets in there, as does Jayson Blair, as does right-wing capring about liberal bias, media pack mentality, the tabloid race to the bottom, and so on. O'Hehir feels more journalistic self-criticism is in order to rectify the growing public mistrust: well, self-criticism begins at home, Andrew. Next time you make out a list like that, try adding your own guild mentality to it.

posted by michael  4:10:36 PM  
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Cooties. A small point, maybe, but it's been on my mind as I attempt to sort through the Rove-Plame scandal, and it may be the only thing I can say about the whole deal that I haven't seen somebody (or many somebodies) more informed than me say already.

Juan Cole offered this yesterday, ruminating about the motive for the burning of Valerie Plame:

The whole thing only makes sense if Rove is a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist to begin with. Why would it matter that Valerie Plame suggested to the CIA that they send her husband Joe Wilson to Niger? Wilson had excellent credentials for the mission, which the CIA immediately recognized.

Rove can only have thought it would discredit Wilson to associate his mission with the CIA if he viewed the CIA as the enemy. This is the Richard Perle line. If Wilson was sent to Niger on the recommendation of a CIA operative, then he was not an objective ex-ambassador but a CIA plant of some sort, attempting to undermine the Bush administration and the military occupation of Iraq.

Now, I have no doubt that Rove does, indeed view the CIA as the enemy (a position he shares with the Dick Cheney side of the operation, though I'd bet he's not as ideological about it as they are). But it seems clear to me that the line being taken in the Plame outing was not what Cole theorizes here, namely that it's the CIA part of the Valerie Plame association that was intended to discredit Wilson in the eyes of the world.

What was? Here's Walter Pincus last week:

On July 12, 2003, an administration official, who was talking to me confidentially about a matter involving alleged Iraqi nuclear activities, veered off the precise matter we were discussing and told me that the White House had not paid attention to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's CIA-sponsored February 2002 trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife.

(The date's important here because it signifies that the story line had already been established in advance of Novak's column, and was ready to launch as soon as publication of the column gave cover for it.) His wife got him the job. Remember the barbs thrown all last year at Theresa Heinz Kerry? Remember the continual, snickering deployment of tropes of effeminacy (many of them featured in the pages of the NY Times) against her husband, Fancy Pants John? His wife got him the job is a pure product of the Rovian imaginary, as clear an indication as possible that the White House had determined on waging a sneer campaign to turn Joe Wilson into a joke. Ol' Pussy-Whipped Joe? Why would we bother paying attention to him?

It's something of a handicap, for those on our side, that we just can't believe that they believe this shit: who among us would think that it discredited a man that he'd got a position on his wife's recommendation? As if such a thing gave him cooties? (And, for the record, Wilson insists persuasively that there was no recommendation; Plame merely offered her husband's name when the trip was being determined on.) And yet we've seen for years that this is exactly how the Rove GOP works, and how it thinks: repressive politics fueled by hysterical masculinity ("the butch issue," Richard Goldstein called it last year) is the center, and represents the limit, of its imagination.

What's more, the story tells us something about the press and its culture in GOP captivity. I think it may be a simulacrum of the truth, the Repulican talking point (via Ken Mehlman and others) that has Rove simply trying to warn Matt Cooper off the story. I don't think the sneer campaign was meant to discredit Wilson to the public: it was meant to discredit him to the press, to signal to the White House media lemmings that there was no need to take Joe Wilson seriously, no basis for it. To make Wilson too much an embarrassment for anybody to think of employing him as a source. Isn't that just the sort of gossip that must pass as currency within the D.C. press corps? Isn't it gossip, finally, that Rove was counting on to do his work in this case? (He only miscalculated, stupidly, the Agency-fueled storm that would greet the outing of an undercover operative.) Rove knows his audience, after all. They're the same people who'd get no end of chuckles out of exactly that kind of treatment, when it was meted out against the Democratic candidate for president a year later.

posted by michael  11:52:24 AM  
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Attention Comrades. Please note that the Party line on the London bombing has shifted over the weekend. In the immediate aftermath, we were all encouraged to celebrate the attack as a useful concentrator of minds: it being thought that faddish attraction to such "causes" as global warming or African debt relief was beginning to distract the masses and reduce their level of fear political seriousness. Criticisms from various degraded cosmopolitan elements of our "flypaper" policy, however, have led the Party dialectically to promulgate a new line, in which the attack is to be denigrated as the work of rootless incompetents, insufficiently fatal to deserve the attention fawning "liberals" would give it:

Investigators now think that the attacks were carried out by homegrown extremists using low-tech explosive devices.

The attacks of 9/11/01 were highly sophisticated and killed thousands. The attacks of 3/11/04 in Madrid were somewhat less sophisticated and killed hundreds. The attacks of 7/705 appear to have been the work of amateurs and killed dozens.

Anyone see a pattern here?

And so much for the theory (contained in a recently leaked CIA “assessment”) that the battlefields of Iraq are turning out the most highly skilled terrorists ever (while our forces, presumably, learn nothing).

Cliff May, NRO Corner

You’ve got how many millions of people running through this transit system in rush hour in the United Kingdom, and what do we have? We have 33 dead and 150 seriously wounded. I wouldn’t call this a successful terror attack. I would say these guys missed the boat...It’s like I said, 40 people dead, 150 seriously wounded, 1,000 wounded out of over a million people in that transit tube. It’s not a successful terrorist attack, folks. They didn’t succeed in doing anything.

Rush Limbaugh

[Your correspondent apologizes for culling these quotes from the writing of a notorious enemy of the people, but time is of the essence here.]

Update your discourse accordingly. In particular, the following comments, from Opinion Journal, alleging the efficacy of less powerful bombings:

That al Qaeda's tactics have changed to smaller bombings is notable, though of little comfort. As in Madrid, the London explosions lacked the diabolical audacity of flying planes into the Pentagon. But as allied defenses against major targets have been strengthened, the terrorists are striking soft targets with bombs that are very hard to detect.

For bin Laden and al-Zarqawi, the relatively small bombs they set off in Iraq or London are a second-grade weapon. Their large-bore weapons in the terror war are modern electronic news technology and, ironically, open democratic societies.

are to be purged, as no longer operative, and their authors assigned for reeducation.

posted by michael  4:00:49 PM  
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Scotty in a bad spot. This is kind of beautiful, from today's White House Press Briefing (aka the "Related to an Ongoing Investigation" Variations):

QUESTION: Do you stand by your statement from the fall of 2003, when you were asked specifically about Karl and Elliot Abrams and Scooter Libby, and you said, I’ve gone to each of those gentlemen, and they have told me they are not involved in this ? Do you stand by that statement?

MCCLELLAN: And if you will recall, I said that, as part of helping the investigators move forward on the investigation, we’re not going to get into commenting on it. That was something I stated back near that time as well.

QUESTION: Scott, this is ridiculous. The notion that you’re going to stand before us, after having commented with that level of detail, and tell people watching this that somehow you’ve decided not to talk. You’ve got a public record out there. Do you stand by your remarks from that podium or not?

MCCLELLAN: I’m well aware, like you, of what was previously said. And I will be glad to talk about it at the appropriate time. The appropriate time is when the investigation…

QUESTION: (inaudible) when it’s appropriate and when it’s inappropriate?

MCCLELLAN: If you’ll let me finish.

QUESTION: No, you’re not finishing. You’re not saying anything. You stood at that podium and said that Karl Rove was not involved. And now we find out that he spoke about Joseph Wilson’s wife. So don’t you owe the American public a fuller explanation. Was he involved or was he not? Because contrary to what you told the American people, he did indeed talk about his wife, didn’t he?

MCCLELLAN: There will be a time to talk about this, but now is not the time to talk about it.

QUESTION: Do you think people will accept that, what you’re saying today?

MCCLELLAN: Again, I’ve responded to the question.

QUESTION: You’re in a bad spot here, Scott… (LAUGHTER)

I'd say Scotty's pretty much figured that out by this point. Crooks and Liars has necessary links, including video—which is a must-see; the reek of awkwardness and pained discomfort coming from McClellan is really something to savor.

posted by michael  1:54:44 PM  
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Tom Friedman lays down the law. [This would have been better posted on Friday, when the column appeared, but I've had some connectivity issues.] Thanks to eRobin at Fact-esque, I see (since I never willingly read the stupid son of a bitch unless provoked) that Thomas Friedman has just written the latest chapter in his post-9/11 moral collapse. Having famously—or infamously—approved the war of opportunity in Iraq in the starkest kindergarten-playground terms ("we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could"), Friedman on Friday responded to the London bombing with another call to retailiatory violence:

Maybe the most important aspect of the London bombings is this: When jihadist-style bombings happen in Riyadh, that is a Muslim-Muslim problem. That is a police problem for Saudi Arabia. But when Al-Qaeda-like bombings come to the London Underground, that becomes a civilizational problem. Every Muslim living in a Western society suddenly becomes a suspect, becomes a potential walking bomb. ...

Because there is no obvious target to retaliate against, and because there are not enough police to police every opening in an open society, either the Muslim world begins to really restrain, inhibit and denounce its own extremists - if it turns out that they are behind the London bombings - or the West is going to do it for them. And the West will do it in a rough, crude way - by simply shutting them out, denying them visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven innocent.

I'm a little surprised that nobody else has taken much notice—perhaps its says something about our current climate of opinion—that a New York Times columnist has this immediately and unself-consciously advocated for what amounts to a program of collective punishment against Muslims in the West: not just Muslim immigrants, mind you, but against our own fellow citizens of Islamic faith. Of course, it may be that "advocated" is stretching a point. Friedman insists that the prospect of such a "rough, crude" program is "deeply troubling" and "profoundly disturbing"—but that just means that he's mastered the Instapundit trick of seeming to deplore an assault against civil liberties without bestirring himself to repudiate it.

It would be "a disaster" if "the West" were to react this way against its Muslim population, Friedman says: but responsibility for averting said disaster, in his book, doesn't lie with the ones doing the reacting—the self-governing peoples of Britain and America. No, it's up to "the Muslim world [to] wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst." Which means that not only is Freidman completely unserious about actual politics—the only politics a Times columnist can plausibly hope to affect—and about the workings of a democratic society: his "disaster" talk is just so much pious humbug. There's no content to it, no sense that Friedman thinks of it as something having consequences for him and his (as opposed to those Muslim Others)—he's just making an exercise in plausible deniability. After all, the program (retaliation against a ready-to-hand target, regradless of its having nothing to do with the thing you're retaliating against) is something Friedman already found to his taste once before, in the invastion of Iraq: his recurring to it here shows just how much this sort of thing is in his sweet spot. (Not to mention how little the last couple of years have managed to teach him.)

It's easy to have fun with Friedman's ineptitude—his absolute, unwavering ineptitude—as a writer. (Matt Taibbi sets the gold standard for it, here.) And it's on full, priceless display in Friday's column:

The Al Qaeda threat has metastasized and become franchised. It is no longer vertical, something that we can punch in the face. It is now horizontal, flat and widely distributed, operating through the Internet and tiny cells.

Somehow a cancer has started selling franchises, and in doing so fallen into a horizontal position, where it can no longer be punched in the face (but couldn't we then just kick it in the nuts?). If there were a Nobel Prize for metaphor mixing, Friedman wouldn't just win it, he'd lock it up for the duration of his natural life. (Not to mention how impressive his presence of mind is, to be able to work in a plug for his recent flat-world book while writing in the immediate aftermath of a shocking terrorist attack against a Western capital. Brit Hume's got nothing on our boy Tom.)

But the fun of this sort of thing rather curdles when you consider what it's in the service of. In fact, I wonder if Friedman's way with metaphor isn't something more than just a weird kind of literary anti-talent. It seems to have deeper roots than that: to be an index of his essential thuggishness. Friedman is a fantasist, like the neocons he apologizes for: like them, an intellectual mediocrity and a moral cretin, who nevertheless believes unreservedly that the world owes him the simple tribute of never ceasing to vindicate him. And when it fails—as it must, since it has the defect of being real—to match his fantasies, Friedman's characteristic, not to say his only, response is violence. It may be the violence against conceptual and rhetorical order that crops up everywhere in Friedman's prose: or it may be stupid, cowardly, scarcely veiled threats against people and "civilizations." Whatever has to give, will give; whatever it takes to keep Tom Friedman secure on his imagined perch, dictating terms.

Which, sadly, makes Tom Friedman a genuinely representative American of our moment.

posted by michael  10:56:43 PM  
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Object lessons.

They should know, and they do know now, that terrorism should be Number 1. But it's important for them all [the leaders attending the G8 summit] to be together. I think that works to our advantage, in the Western world's advantage, for people to experience something like this together, just 500 miles from where the attacks have happened.

Brian Kilmeade, Fox News

I wonder if this was timed to happen after the Olympic decision. If so, it would also be interesting to know if this sort of thing would have happened in Paris if they'd won -- or New York if we'd won. I kind of doubt it, but if these weren't suicide bombings, it would be nice if the culprits were subject to vigorous questioning to find out. Because if we could convince France that Paris narrowly dodged a bullet, that would be useful.

Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online

Fox viewers across the United States were shocked and vindicated this morning to learn that a significant Propaganda Opportunity had been catapulted in the heart of London. A coordinated attack, with at least four Reminders That the War on Terrorism Continues placed in tube stations and buses, led to a shutdown of the city's transportation system that forced millions of Londoners to Recognize the Danger of Wavering against the Enemy. Reaction was strong and immediate, as supportive expressions of Complete Agreement with Everything George Bush Has Ever Done poured in from all quarters of the Christian world.

Oh, and several dozen Object Lessons of the Evil of Islamofascism were killed, and several hundred more injured. The dead will be remembered for their usefulness.

posted by michael  8:39:47 PM  
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SCOTUS filibuster watch (Bring It On edition). Holy crap—or should I say, Holy Joe? Even Joe Lieberman's getting in on the "extraordinary circumstances" action:

Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political architect, said precedents from the most recent Supreme Court vacancies suggest that opposition-party senators have a responsibility to back a president's choice if they believe a nominee is qualified, even if they disagree with the person's views. He also maintained that a strongly held ideological stance would not amount to "extraordinary circumstances" justifying a Democratic filibuster under a recent bipartisan Senate deal.

But several Senate Democrats who co-authored that deal countered that ideology is a legitimate line of inquiry and potentially a reason to block a nomination. "In my mind, extraordinary circumstances would include not only extraordinary personal behavior but also extraordinary ideological positions," said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), a moderate the White House has been hoping to enlist to give bipartisan backing to the nominee.

The schism in interpretation suggested that the Senate filibuster deal crafted just two months ago to resolve an impasse over lower-court judicial nominations could unravel in the higher-stakes fight over the first Supreme Court vacancy in more than a decade.

Peter Baker and Charles Babington, " Are a Nominee's Views Fair Game?"

Babington co-authored the Steno Sue article I wrote about on Monday—an article which claimed, on the basis of Republican assertions and one, lonely, misread quote from a spokesman for Ben Nelson, that the filibuster deal had put the Democrats in a "bind" when it came to mustering opposition to an extremist Bush nominee on ideological grounds. That article dishonestly tried to play its paucity of sources as representing some kind of general view on the part of "key members" of the Gang of 14 that their deal militated against a Supreme Court filibuster. Freed from the GOP-mandated constraints of Steno Sue journalism, today's piece does actually interview more than one "key member," four of them to be exact, including Lieberman, in what amounts to a deliberate (though of course unacknowledged) walk-back of the earlier report.

Yet several key Democratic senators -- including some who helped craft the recent bipartisan deal -- said yesterday that a nominee's positions on issues would be part of the consideration. ... Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), one of the 14 who fashioned the agreement, said through a spokesman: "A nominee's political ideology is only relevant if it has been shown to cloud their interpretation of the law. . . . A pattern of irresponsible judgment, where decisions are based on ideology rather than the law, could potentially be 'extraordinary.' "

Sen. Ken Salazar (Colo.) rejected Republican assertions that he and other Democratic signers must accept a nominee as conservative as Janice Rogers Brown, now confirmed to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, because the agreement allowed her confirmation. "It didn't set a standard" for Supreme Court confirmations, Salazar said. "We would leave it up to each person to define what extraordinary circumstance means."

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), however, said judicial activism concerns him more than ideology. "Are they going to be an activist?" Nelson asked rhetorically in discussing what might cause him to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee. "Their political philosophy may not bother me at all if they're not going to be an activist."

And while none of these statements—especially Nelson's—is without its mush quotient (how is it possible that it's Joe Lieberman exhibiting the most spine here?), I'd say at this point there's just no room, on the evidence, to assume that Senate Democrats are inclined to pre-empt themselves when it comes to using every weapon they've got against a far-right SCOTUS nominee. More specifically, that the Gang of 14 Democrats are inclined to pre-empt themselves (or their colleagues). And that's good news.

posted by michael  1:11:40 PM  
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SCOTUS filibuster watch. Maybe they're going in alphabetical order. On Sunday—in the only actual piece of news in Sue Schmidt's much-discussed WaPo article, however drowned it was in Republican spin—Joe Biden said a knock-down-drag-out was likely if Janice Brown were to be nominated for the Supreme Court vacancy, despite her having been just lately approved under the Gang of 14 agreement for the appelate court, and intimated that (in the language of the agreement) the Supreme Court in itself represented an "extraordinary circumstance" and thus fair game for the filibuster. Now we've got Barbara Boxer (via Bitch, Ph.D.) doing the honors:

Democrats are prepared to filibuster to block any anti-abortion nominee proposed to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said Tuesday.

"The filibuster is on the table. It's been on the table for 200 years," Boxer said when asked what methods could be used to block a Supreme Court candidate who would seek to overturn Roe v. Wade, the three-decade old decision legalizing abortion. ...

Boxer called a threat to legalized abortion an "extraordinary circumstance." "It means a minimum of 5,000 women a year will die. So all options are on the table," she said.

Boxer, of course, is no moderate and no Gang of 14 signatory: so this doesn't tell us anything about how a filibuster threat will play out. Still, the more of this sort of language emerges from Senate Democrats, the more I take heart. Despite the fears of our more alarmist brothers and sisters, it doesn't look like the Dems are quite ready to succumb yet to Lindsey Graham's Jedi mind tricks.

posted by michael  11:08:06 AM  
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Hearts and minds and walls. James Glanz—who has been writing consistently, and impressively, about infrastructure and what can only laughably be called Iraqi reconstruction for some time now—has a nice piece today about a new feature of urban life in Baghdad: the fortified wall that's been built (by, as if you couldn't have guessed, Kellogg Brown & Root) around the Green Zone:

Sometimes likened to the Berlin Wall by those who are not happy about its presence, the structure cleanly divides the relative safety of the Green Zone that includes Saddam Hussein's old palace and ministry complex, now used by the American authorities and heavily patrolled by American troops, from the Red Zone - most of the rest of Baghdad - where security ranges from adequate to nonexistent.

" U.S. Walls Off Its Corner of Baghdad, Annoying Some Neighbors"

The "annoying" of the headline rather understates just how brilliantly our concentration on force protection is working to help win Iraqi hearts and minds:

Khalid Daoud, an employee at the Culture Ministry, still looks in disbelief at the barrier of 12-foot-high, five-ton slabs that cuts through his garden.

A few months ago, he said, the American military arrived with a crane and tore up the trees in his garden, smashed the low wall surrounding it, swung the slabs into place and topped them with concertina wire.

Later they put up a 24-hour guard tower and a brilliant floodlight on the other side. With their privacy gone, his wife and daughter must now tend the garden in their abayas, or cloaks, and the family no longer sleeps outside when electricity failures at night shut down the air conditioning.

"I feel like it's going to choke me," Mr. Daoud said of the wall.

See, how could ordinary Iraqis possibly find the American occupation of their country humiliating? Besides, the Wall seems to have had a real effect on security in the area immediately outside the Green Zone:

For all the problems faced by residents across the city, the neighborhoods within a few blocks of the wall have become a world apart. Mortar rounds and rockets fired at the Green Zone fall short and land there. Suicide bombers, unable to breach the wall, blow themselves up in shops just outside it. And the maze of checkpoints, blocked streets and American armor may be thicker here than anywhere else in Baghdad.

"We are the new Palestine," said Saman Abdel Aziz Rahman, owner of the Serawan kebab restaurant, by the northern reaches of the wall.

Nice to see how well we're doing reinforcing that Iraq = Palestine meme in the Arab mind. That's going to do us a lot of long-term good.

posted by michael  7:29:37 PM  
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Here's the key thing, to me, the put-it-all-in-perspective thing, about the Gang of 14 agreement:

The judicial filibuster hasn't yet been ruled out of order. The Senate opposition still has that weapon in its arsenal for the Supreme Court fight.

Doesn't anybody else think that that's huge? There seemed no question that the filibuster was going to go down at the end of May, that Frist had enough votes (just) to see the rule change through. The Gang of 14 agreement headed him off. How is the situation any worse now, with Senate Democrats having retained the filibuster threat, than it would be if the judicial filibuster had already been shut down six weeks ago?

OK, there's one way we might be worse off: if the Gang of 14 agreement had rendered the filibuster alive but impotent in practice, whose merely theoretical availability made a kind of taunt, an object lesson about the fecklessness and impotence of the Democratic party. That's certainly how Lindsey Graham wants to spin the agreement (not to mention a number of disappointed leftists)—but he'll only get his way if the Democratic signatories are fool enough to believe that they've bound themselves to oppose any filibuster undertaken against an ideological extremist solely on ideological grounds. And though it never pays to underestimate a Democratic centrist's willingness to cave, it seems to me that the agreement's deliberately ill-defined language of "extraordinary circumstances," not to mention its concluding (and contextualizing) exhortation to Bush about the need to consult with the Senate on judicial appointments, suggests that all the signatories, Democrats included, were looking to give themselves maximum wiggle room for just such a moment as we now face—were looking, in other words, to do exactly the opposite of binding themselves in any way to any particular understanding of their deal. I see no suggestion anywhere, Steno Sue notwithstanding, that the Gang of 14 Democrats are getting ready to let Lindsey Graham put them in harness. So on that score—and given how smooth an operator Harry Reid has proven to be to this point—I'm not going to worry until events force me to.

[Not to mention that if you've got Joe Biden, for Chrissakes, threatening a filibuster on ideological grounds—well, what does that tell you about how much resolve there must be in the ranks of the Senate Democrats? I take as much heart from that as from anything I've heard so far.]

Otherwise: I say it again, how are we worse off with the filibuster than without it? Discount it however you will, the threat means that there's at least a chance that the Supreme Court pick will end up being some non-destructive rightist, someone with at least a smidgen of intellectual honesty and an acceptable judicial temperament. That's the best we can hope for, and we'd have no room even to hope for that if Frist had already gone nuclear back in May.

The hard fact is, the Supreme Court is lost at this point; it was lost as of November 2004, and everything now is just the working-out of the details. I don't expect a non-destructive choice from Bush. I don't think the Republican Gang of 14ers will have the stones to force it from him, however much a lame duck he's become; the baying of the Dobsonian hounds is too loud and too insistent for any of those guys to be able to think straight. And Bush is hardly going to become magically less vindictive, less stubborn, now that his failures, like a multitude of ghostly Banquos, are beginning to crowd around him. No, it's going to be bad, and the filibuster won't be able to change that.

But the fight will further erode Bush's position, and the Republican party's with it. Which is the main thing. If the Bushies were smart, they'd find themselves a centrist and duck this contest—but they're not that smart, and their luck has run out: there's nothing they can do now anyway to avoid paying off the theocrats. Let Bush nominate a wingnut, an anti-Roe: let them violate Senate rules, let the Republicans tear up the Gang of 14 agreement, to kill a filibuster for the wingnut's sake: let the Senate erupt: it will be a teaching opportunity. Now, when the stakes are at their highest and attention at its maximum, there will be nothing to keep the country from witnessing just how tyrannous and unprincipled, how far from the mainstream, the Partei and the Cheney administration really are. The goal, after all—other than to start taking our government back in 2006 and 2008—is impeachment, and the worse the Republicans show themselves, the more Bush bleeds support away, the better our chances at making it happen. I firmly expect Bush to leave office (however he goes) as the most vilified president since Nixon, and I think the Supreme Court battle is going to play a significant role in the process.

posted by michael  3:39:55 PM  
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Digby reads this article in today's Washington Post (" Filibuster Deal Puts Democrats In a Bind") as confirming his suspicions about the worse-than-uselessness of May's "Gang of 14" agreement that halted Bill Frist's attempt to unleash the nuclear option on judicial filibusters.

Democrats' hopes of blocking a staunchly conservative Supreme Court nominee on ideological grounds could be seriously undermined by the six-week-old bipartisan deal on judicial nominees, key senators said yesterday.

With President Bush expected to name a successor to Justice Sandra Day O'Connor next week, liberals are laying the groundwork to challenge the nominee if he or she leans solidly to the right on affirmative action, abortion and other contentious issues. But even if they can show that the nominee has sharply held views on matters that divide many Americans, some of the 14 senators who crafted the May 23 compromise appear poised to prevent that strategy from blocking confirmation to the high court, according to numerous interviews.

The pact, signed by seven Democrats and seven Republicans, says a judicial nominee will be filibustered only under "extraordinary circumstances." Key members of the group said yesterday that a nominee's philosophical views cannot amount to "extraordinary circumstances" and that therefore a filibuster can be justified only on questions of personal ethics or character. ...

Under the "Gang of 14" accord, the seven Republican signers agreed to deny Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) the votes he needed to carry out his threat to bar judicial filibusters by changing Senate rules. The seven are implicitly released from the deal if the Democratic signers renege on their end. Yesterday, key players suggested the seven Democrats will automatically be in default if they contend a nominee's ideological views constitute "extraordinary circumstances" that would justify a filibuster.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), one of the 14 signers, noted that the accord allowed the confirmation of three Bush appellate court nominees so conservative that Democrats had successfully filibustered them for years: Janice Rogers Brown, William H. Pryor Jr. and Priscilla R. Owen. Because Democrats accepted them under the deal, Graham said on the Fox program, it is clear that ideological differences will not justify a filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee. ...

Sen. Ben Nelson (Neb.), a leader of the seven Democratic signers, largely concurred. Nelson "would agree that ideology is not an 'extraordinary circumstance' unless you get to the extreme of either side," his spokesman, David DiMartino, said in an interview.

The bar has been fatally lowered on the confirmation of "wignut freakshows" as a consequence of the Gang of 14 agreement, Digby laments. "I'm not sure what it will take to make Democrats understand that making a deal with Republicans is akin to stabbing themselves in the back. It never fails." And I say: hold up a minute there, Hoss, the game ain't over. There's much less to this article than meets the eye—especially when you realize that it's bylined to none other than the WaPo's champion GOP stooge, Steno Sue Schmidt.

Here's a question: how many times do you have to make some variation on the phrase "key senators" to convince readers you're serving up something other than the thinnest sort of thin gruel? (And let's not forget to add "numerous interviews" for good measure.) Schmidt's doing her best to obscure the fact that this piece of crap—judged A1-worthy, inexplicably—is nothing but a tired, tendentious rehash of the Sunday talk shows: on the evidence presented in the article, those "numerous interviews" (unless you're allowed to mark watching somebody being interviewed on TV to your credit) boil down to exactly one, and that not with a Senator but with a Senator's flunky, Ben Nelson's spokesman David DiMartino. And of all the names being tossed around in the article, exactly two—Graham and Nelson—are actual Gang of 14 signatories. (Which, by my math, leaves twelve senators whose opinions are currently unaccounted for—isn't that something of a majority of the group?)

Claiming, as Schmidt does, that Lindsey Graham is "positioned to dissolve the [Gang of 14] deal and thwart" the filibuster that Joe Biden is promising (in a scenario where Bush nominates Janice Brown for the SCOTUS vacancy) is nothing but hopeful rightist spin retailed as independent analysis. As ever, Schmidt's allowing herself to be used—and allowing the news columns of the Post to be used, not incidentally—in a transparent GOP effort to pre-empt and control the terms of the forthcoming debate. But in spite of all the huffing and blowing here about her prodigious reporting effort Schmidt doesn't know jack. Apparently, we're supposed to believe that Nelson's (spokesman's) comment indicates that Graham will have Democratic cover from within the Gang of 14 sufficient to abrogate the anti-nuke agreement if the filibuster threat is made good: though even the mushy Nelson statement reserves a considerable amount of territory when it allows "the extreme of either side" as an exception to the rule that ideology is off limits.

What's more, Graham is saying nothing remotely new: he started putting his chicken liver on display almost before the ink was dry on his Gang of 14 signature, insisting that the agreement made for just the "bind" on ideological questions that Schmidt has helpfully "demonstrated" with her "reporting" in today's article. Well, I'd say that very much remains to be seen. Given how craven Graham has proven in the aftermath—and considering that another "key member" of the Gang of 14 is John McCain, whose history of wetting his pants whenever Bush comes to shove is amply documented—I may have, shall we say, overinterpreted when I suggested that the anti-nuclear agreement gave the moderates the whip hand in requiring a consensus candidate from Bush. (When are any of these guys going to wake up to the fact that, barring some Osama ex machina, there's nothing to check the Cheney administration's slide toward utter repudiation?) But, even in the worst case, it's impossible from Steno Sue's article to say what the balance of forces in the nuclear truce is at this point, much less how a filibuster threat will actually play out. One of those Beltway productions, in other words, that leaves you knowing less when you've read it than you did going in—no doubt just the sort of accomplishment that makes a hack like Sue Schmidt proud.

posted by michael  12:39:49 PM  
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Rightful credit. Writing over at TPMCafe about the logic of the O'Connor replacement, Ed Kilgore expresses skepticism about a friend's theory that we're going to see Bush nominating Abu Gonzalez:

He said his hunch was that Bush would send up Alberto Gonzales. Sure, the Right would go nuts, but Bush's approval rating would jump ten points; a lot of Republicans would go along out of loyalty or even relief; and Democrats would be placed in the uncomfortable position of either eating the words they said about Gonzales' unfitness to serve as Attorney General, or making a confirmation fight based on Gitmo, an issue that the administration thinks still cuts in its favor. And if Gonzales went down to a Left-Right coalition, then Bush could shrug, say he tried to be reasonable, and then send up somebody really outrageous.

It's an interesting hypothesis, but I just don't buy it. This appointment represents the giant balloon payment at the end of the mortgage the GOP signed with the Cultural Right at least 25 years ago. Social conservatives have agreed over and over again to missed payments, refinancings, and in their view, generous terms, but the balance is finally due, and if Bush doesn't pay up, they'll foreclose their entire alliance with the Republican Party.

Sure, they care about other issues, from gay marriage to taxes to Iraq, but abortion is the issue that makes most Cultural Right activists get up in the morning and stuff envelopes and staff phone banks for the GOP. And for decades now, Republicans have told them they can't do anything much about it until they can change the Supreme Court. With a pro-choice Justice stepping down, the subject can no longer be avoided. And thanks to the Souter precedent (and indeed, the O'Connor and Kennedy precedents), there's no way Bush can finesse an appointment that's anything less than a guaranteed vote to overturn Roe.

Persuasive, and well put. There's just one small item I find missing from Kilgore's account: namely, that it's DLC hacks like Ed Kilgore himself—who have spent pretty much their entire careers shilling to create room in the so-called center for right-wing "culture" issues, who've pandered so long and so hard for accommodation to the right at the (ever-encroaching) margins, who've never seen a leftist they wouldn't jump the queue for the privilege of bashing—who bear a good measure of responsibility for legitimizing the rightist agenda in the national discourse, the fruits of which we're all getting to enjoy now.

That last 25 years you mention isn't a blank field, historically speaking: it took a lot of effort from a lot of parties, some of them less witting than others, for the Christianist culture warriors to get where they are today. "Mortgage" is a nice metaphor—but political IOUs don't always get paid, and it wasn't inevitable, by any means, that the fundies would find themselves in a position to exact payment on theirs. In other words, somewhere on that mortgage you lament being presented, Ed, if you look closely I think you'll see a few items bearing your initials, or the initials of your friends and patrons. Don't be so modest about claiming rightful credit for your work.

posted by michael  4:38:12 PM  
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Nasty partisans. Clicking around local Chicago TV news last night (I don't have cable), it was immediately apparent what the standard, lazy, corporate-journalist intro on the O'Connor resignation would inevitably be: something on the lines of, "A nasty partisan battle is to be expected as the two sides fight over President Bush's choice for a replacement."

Because, in Journo World, nobody actually creates "nasty partisan battles," or even especially puts the nasty in them (all partisan battles are nasty by virtue of being partisan, it's a rhetorical given): they're merely a feature of the landscape. (Treating such things as if they were geological deposits rather than the product of human agency seems to be pretty much exactly and only what "objectivity" means in contemporary American journalism.) I have yet to see it attested in the media—what is, after all, merely the plain truth of the matter, as Democrats are pointing out and must continue to insist on—that it is entirely at the President's choice as to whether his nomination process works toward consensus, or deals it another in a long series of GOP-administered death blows. The fight over O'Connor's successor is hardly a latter-day version of William Seward's irrepressible conflict, but you wouldn't know it from the coverage in the mainstream press. That the Rove administration knows no other governing plan (if it can be called that) than opening and amplifying the country's social and political divisions—much less that the logic of Bush' position with respect to the slavering theocratic right leaves him with little practical alternative to following their orders in the case of the SCOTUS vacancy: well, pointing out such a thing wouldn't be objective, would it? Not to mention how impolite it would sound.

And when it comes to Bush II no outlet is more objective, or more polite, than Bill Keller's New York Times. See if you can grasp the common line being taken in Richard Stevenson's lead article and Robin Toner's accompanying A1 "analysis" piece:

After months in which speculation about the Supreme Court focused on the likelihood of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist's stepping down, the retirement of Justice O'Connor, 75, caught much of Washington, including the White House and her colleagues on the court, off guard.

Even so, the armies of ideological activists from both sides who had massed in anticipation of a battle over replacing the chief justice, a reliable conservative, quickly pivoted to what they agreed was an even greater struggle for control of a seat that could alter the court's balance on an array of polarizing topics.

Richard Stevenson, "O'Connor to Retire, Touching Off Battle Over Court"

The retirement of Justice O'Connor, a moderate who has been a crucial vote for a constitutional right to abortion, began a struggle with incalculable political implications - for the interest groups, for the parties and for the president.

"This is the pivotal appointment," said Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Advocates on the left and the right, who had prepared for this moment since the last Supreme Court vacancy was filled 11 years ago, agreed that the ideological balance of the court was up for grabs. Advocacy groups bought advertising on television and the Internet, and issued millions of e-mail alerts, waves of direct-mail fund-raising appeals and pre-emptive blasts at those viewed by the groups as either obstructionist Democrats or extremist Republicans.

Robin Toner, " After a Brief Shock, Advocates on All Sides Quickly Mobilize"

Remarkably, it takes all of ten paragraphs for Richard Stevenson to quote Bush on the O'Connor vacancy, or for that matter to make him the subject of a sentence. And Toner—writing, let's emphasize, the Times' front-page analysis of the SCOTUS vacancy—can't be bothered to consider Bush's intentions, or the political constraints under which he operates, at all. As if the man who, in fact, controls the nomination process were somehow no significant part of the equation.

And—more to the point—as if those "armies of ideological activists" were not just the only political actors in this fight who mattered, but were equal, and evenly matched, opponents meeting on a level field. As they have to be, in Journo World: for reporters who believe themselves untainted by (and superior to) "ideology," who are content to operate within the thoughtless, slovenly anti-politics of the "plague on both their houses," the notion that there might be structural differences (in influence, in money, in media power) between the "two sides," and differences in their effect on political life at this juncture, simply doesn't compute. All you really need to know is that the partisans are gearing up (sigh!) for another of their endless series of contests.

Of course, not absolutely everything is equal: the Republicans are still our masters, after all, and hacks like Richard Stevenson are happy to see what they're told to see. Once we're outside the "plague on both their houses" frame, and on into "obstructing the agenda," things look a little different:

With memories still fresh among many conservatives of the Democrats' success in blocking the nomination of Robert H. Bork to the court in 1987, and with Capitol Hill still embittered over this spring's confrontation over the use of filibusters in judicial nominations, Mr. Bush effectively put the Democratic leadership on notice not to go to extreme lengths to reject his choice or turn the confirmation proceedings into a partisan free-for-all.

"The nation deserves, and I will select, a Supreme Court justice that Americans can be proud of," Mr. Bush said. "The nation also deserves a dignified process of confirmation in the United States Senate, characterized by fair treatment, a fair hearing and a fair vote."

Mr. Specter indicated that he would most likely hold confirmation hearings in September, though he did not rule out August, when Congress is scheduled to be in recess. Some conservatives have expressed concern about delaying confirmation hearings for too long, out of worry that it would give liberal groups more time to gather ammunition for an attack.

Lovely work, isn't it? In a season where the religious right, fully in charge of the White House agenda, is gearing up for another all-out assault on our sensibilities (and on sense), well naturally the concern that animates Richard Stevenson to censoriousness is that extremist liberals are going to hijack the discourse. "A dignified process," yes, at all costs dignity: free and open debate is just so beneath us in a democratic society. Stevenson may dislike "ideological activists" no matter what stripe, but that doesn't mean he can't tell which side his bread is buttered on: and thanks to the Times' official commitment to "diversity," he apparently feels that it's no longer necessary even to pretend that he's not rooting for it.

posted by michael  4:05:07 PM  
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Frame shop: leadership test. Via Jeralyn at TalkLeft, who has been very usefully on top of early public reactions to the O'Connor resignation (start here and work up), I see that—unsurprisingly—Howard Dean is very much on message:

President Bush should follow the example established by President Reagan when he nominated Justice O'Connor. President Reagan had the courage to stand up to the right wing extremists in his party by choosing a moderate, thoughtful jurist.

This is rhetorically and politically pitch-perfect. (OK, speaking any good of Reagan grates, but it's strategically useful here.) This is what Democrats should be emphasizing relentlessly: the coming Supreme Court nomination is a test of Presidential leadership. The onus is on Bush to demonstrate that he's his own man, not a tool of the Schiavo theocrats.

Narrative is everything. My criticism of the Lakoffian discourse of framing has always been that it misses the dimension of story: the way in which political orientation is produced, not by mere typology (frame-placement) but by the small, all but unnoticed mythic dramas that structure popular consciousness. Since 9/11, the irresistible kernel of story about the Bush administration has been, Strong enough to go it alone. Call it the PNAC myth: it was never true even in terms of American military hegemony, but it looked plausible (to the extend you focused on flight-suit theatrics), and it was allowed to ramify into domestic politics, to encompass the Republican refusal to treat the opposition as any kind of governing partner. It was a myth that entirely organized the corporate media's treatment of the 2004 election—the more so as mainstream political journalism is incapable of representing or judging elections on any axis other than weakness-strength.

As Dean seems to have recognized, though, Schiavo, the nuclear option, the Iraq-induced hammering Bush is taking in the polls, all these have combined to create perhaps the first significant opportunity we've seen for the dominant narrative to shift. Too weak to hold off the extremists: this is a neat reversal, especially as it invokes (by way of a disappointment a majority of Americans is beginning to feel) the Presidential Protector frame that's played so much to Bush's advantage these last few years. The longer and louder the theocratic right howls, the more the moderate American mainstream begins to feel that they need shielding as much from domestic as from foreign fundamentalists: and Bush, of course, is in the worst position in the world to do that job. As Bush loses the mantle of Protector, he loses, and his party loses, period.

It's a natural, common-sense proposition, one that plays to the American bias toward middle-of-the-roadism: a strong leader leads from the center, and doesn't let wackos drag him around by the nose. David Corn was worrying yesterday over that word "extremism" (via Susie Madrak):

In any event, the Democrats and progressives may be placed in the position of having to oppose an experienced jurist whose opinions they do not like on policy grounds. They should fight such a nominee vigorously, and they should be upfront about their reasons. Rather than label that person an "extremist," they ought to argue that the Senate ought not to confirm a nominee who is likely to vote to curtail or eliminate abortion rights, to favor corporate polluters over consumers, or to restrict the federal government's ability to advance social justice. The "extremist" strategy, I fear, is worn out and ineffective. It worked for Robert Bork, thanks to his too-honest writings and wacky beard. But most of the far-right jurists on the list of potential nominees will be able to appear before a Senate committee, not drool, answer questions about their opinions politely, and come across as intelligent and somewhat reasonable people, not extremist monsters plotting to lead America into a Time of Darkness. So progressives, beware, the E-word is probably not your friend.

And there's this to think of: Bush will probably get another Supreme Court pick soon. Perhaps real soon. Chief Justice William Rehnquist may not be there much longer--by choice or not. One smart move for Bush would be to nominate for the O'Connor vacancy a decidedly conservative person but one who is well-equipped to beat back the expected charges of extremism from the left and who goes on to be confirmed. (Does Gonzales fit this bill?) Next--for the Rehnquist opening--Bush could nominate a true conservative whacko, a Bork II. The Democrats and the left would have a tough time redeploying the extremist attack, even if it were warranted this time. Once more--from a political perspective--Democrats and progressives ought to think carefully about how and when they use the charge of extremism. They can only cry "wolf" so many times--even if Bush unleashes a pack of wolverines.

Now this is probably good tactical advice, as far as opposing specific Bush Court nominees might go. But I want to stress the difference between attempting to tar a given nominee as an extremist, versus insisting on the extremism of the forces that will be turning the nomination process itself into a shindig for the scary, religious-war right. There are drooling monsters aplenty in that crowd, and Democrats should be making sure they're front and center in the public consciousness—and that they're firmly and unshakeably tied to Bush's tail. (It won't even take much effort—the monsters want everyone to know that Bush owes them, and that they're sufficiently powerful to demand payoff.) Are you strong enough, for the sake of the country as a whole, to stand up to the bad elements in your own coalition, Mr. President? It's a winning question, Dems: follow Howard Dean's lead, and keep pounding on it.

posted by michael  12:32:45 PM  
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