Wow, now GOP strategists are equating Sarah Palin with Limbaugh and Cheney, and not in a good way. There may be some hope for the Republicans yet, if people are finally starting to speak out against the "conservatives."The Republican strategist who helped Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman prepare for a possible presidential run says the Republican party is in for a devastating defeat if its guiding lights are Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney. "If it's 2012 and our party is defined by Palin and Limbaugh and Cheney, then we're headed for a blowout," says strategist John Weaver, who advised Huntsman and was for years a close adviser to Sen. John McCain. "That's just the truth."
- Steve Benen adds:
This, not surprisingly, has not gone over well among many conservatives, including the blog at the Weekly Standard.
Seeing this reinforces one of the GOP's fundamental problems right now: it's a shrinking party, and the folks who are left like it just the way it is. Those who want to help drag Republicans back into the mainstream either leave or find themselves pariahs with no influence at all.
It becomes self-perpetuating. Palin, Limbaugh, and Cheney drive people away from the GOP, which in turn leaves Palin, Limbaugh, and Cheney with more power over the smaller, purer party. Their power further alienates those who aren't hard-core conservatives, which keeps the cycle going.
There's a Kevin Drum line from October that continues to ring true: "Sarah Palin isn't the future of their party, she's the future of mine."
Weaver seems to get this. His party is likely to ignore him.
Michael Reagan, conservative radio host and son of the former president, writes:
[Republicans] lost in 2006 and 2008 because they stopped listening to the “nostalgia” for the conservative principles which guided my dad’s administrations. ... If [they] want to know what the conservative majority among voters want and are thinking about, all they need to do is listen to Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and -- in all modesty -- Mike Reagan. Our voices are the voice of the majority of Republican voters and open-minded independents. We don’t have tens of millions of listeners every day because we have a message that contradicts the opinion of our audience...
He may have missed this recent poll by Fox News, which asked non-Democrats their preference for the 2012 GOP nominee. Palin ranked fourth among Republicans and nearly fifth among Independents. (But even if Reagan had seen the poll, or others like it, would his op-ed have changed?)
Think Progress: Rep. Tom Price: ‘It’s Not Up To Rush Limbaugh To Decide Who Ought To Be In The Republican Party’
Rep. Tom Price (R-GA) went on MSNBC’s Morning Joe today and publicly distanced himself from Rush Limbaugh’s version of the Republican party. Price said that “it’s not up to Rush Limbaugh to decide who ought to be in the Republican Party” and such exclusivity is “counterproductive.” He also said that Vice President Cheney was wrong in saying that Limbaugh is a better Republican than former Secretary of State Colin Powell:
SCARBOROUGH: Congressman, do you disagree with Rush Limbaugh that Colin Powell should leave the Republican Party?
PRICE: Look, it’s not up to Rush Limbaugh to decide who ought to be in the Republican Party. There are all sorts of wonderful folks across this land who hold dear the fundamental principles that we, as Republicans — [...]
SCARBOROUGH: Congressman, do you believe that Rush Limbaugh or Dick Cheney are better, quote — I’m just using terms that we hear every day on TV and radio — that they are somehow better Republicans than Colin Powell?
PRICE: No. Goodness.
Watch it:
Price has been called one of the “rising” stars in the conservative movement, so it’s interesting that he is so willing to buck Limbaugh and Cheney. The other Republican to do so recently was Rep. John Shadegg (R-AZ), who dismissed the hate radio host as just “a television personality.” (He has yet to apologize or backtrack, as so many of his colleagues have done.)
- BarbinMD (DailyKos): Anarchy!
This is anarchy! Over the course of the past few days, we've had two, count 'em, two Republican officials dare to suggest that Rush Limbaugh is not their conservative overlord.
First, from John Shadegg (R-VA):
SHADEGG: But Rush Limbaugh is a television personality. I don’t think he’s chairman of the Republican Party, last I looked.
And then, from Tom Price (R-GA):
SCARBOROUGH: Congressman, do you believe that Rush Limbaugh or Dick Cheney are better, quote — I’m just using terms that we hear every day on TV and radio — that they are somehow better Republicans than Colin Powell?
PRICE: No. Goodness.
That Shadegg and Price made the comments isn't the news here -- but the fact that they haven't backtracked and apologized for criticizing Limbaugh is. So, where did this new-found backbone come from?
Probably because they're not willing to be shown up by the 97-year old Roberta McCain (R-MOM):
I don't know what he is. But he does not represent the Republican Party that I belong to.
In a new Daily Beast column I argue that even though the right’s effort to change the subject on torture away from “what did the Bush administration do?”, to “what was Nancy Pelosi briefed about?” has been an incredible tactical success, it stands a huge chance of backfiring:
And here’s where the right’s tactical acumen comes up short. Various conservative commentators have expressed their hope that gunning for Pelosi will blunt progressive calls for a “truth commission” to thoroughly investigate what really happened on Bush’s trip to the “dark side”. Fox’s Neil Cavuto said we might be in a “Mexican standoff” wherein Pelosi would agree to drop the idea of investigations to prevent herself from attracting scrutiny. Steven Hayes, Dick Cheney’s official biographer, said, “Democrats who have been so enthusiastic about truth commissions have to be stopping and saying, OK, wait a second.” What conservatives are missing here is that this is a fight they were winning before they started gunning for Pelosi. Their best ally in this fight was Barack Obama, whose desire to “move forward” rather than focusing on the past had been the subject of much consternation. Had conservatives simply reached out to grab the hand that was being extended to them, they could have gotten what they wanted.
But in their zeal to score a tactical win, the right has made a truth commission more likely not less likely. Obama wanted to avoid a backward-looking focus on torture in part because it distracted from his legislative agenda. But if we’re going to be looking backward anyway, thanks to conservatives’ insistence on complaining about Pelosi, then the move forward strategy lacks a rationale. And far from forcing a standoff in which Pelosi will abandon her support for an investigation, the right has forced her into a corner from which she can’t give in to moderate Democrats’ opposition to such a move without looking like she’s cravenly attempting to save her own skin.
I’ve seen polling which suggests that the public is reasonably sympathetic to the pro-torture position. But I’m quite certain the public isn’t generally aware of facts that would certainly come out in a truth commission process. For example, that the Bush administration’s torture techniques were specifically modeled on techniques employed by Chinese forces during the Korean War for the purpose of extracting false confessions. That the experts in the techniques whose advice was sought in designing the torture program warned interrogators that the methods were illegal and unlikely to produce reliable information. That one principle purpose of the torture program appears to have been to generate false information about links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Or that abusive detention practices occurred far beyond Abu Ghraib and have led to the deaths of many people.
Benen: MR. SECESSION....
Over the weekend, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) had an op-ed explaining, "I have never advocated for secession and never will." He added that he's "simply sounding the alarm" about taxes, spending, budget deficits, etc.That Perry even found it necessary to write the op-ed suggests his secession talk in April did some fairly significant harm to his credibility as a governor. The rhetoric probably gave him a boost with the right-wing base in advance of his gubernatorial primary fight with Kay Bailey Hutchison, but Perry seems to realize there's no upside to being known as "the secession governor." (For the record, Perry specifically said last month that while he saw "no reason" to "dissolve" the union., "if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come of that."
And while all of this is interesting, reader P.B. reminded me of a Perry-related anecdote in Robert Draper's GQ piece on Donald Rumsfeld.
[Frances Fragos Townsend] had received a promotion -- to assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism -- yet was still unable to command Rumsfeld's respect. In the midst of Hurricane Rita, Townsend learned that Texas governor Rick Perry had signaled his willingness to cede control of the National Guard to the federal government. She called Rumsfeld's aide and was told, "The secretary and Mrs. Rumsfeld are at an event."
Townsend knew that. The event was an ambassadors' ball; she was supposed to be there but was instead dealing with the crisis. "Put me in to his detail," she ordered.
A minute later, Townsend was on the phone with Rumsfeld's security agent, who then spoke to the SecDef. "The secretary will talk to you after the event," she was told.
Later in the evening, her phone rang. It was Chief of Staff Andy Card. "Rumsfeld just called," said Card. "What is it you need?"
Livid, Townsend said, "I want to know if the president knows what a fucking asshole Don Rumsfeld is."
Now, the obvious takeaway from this is that Rumsfeld was impossible to work with. But there's also that other part -- Perry was willing to cede control of the Texas National Guard to the federal government? This from a guy who complains bitterly, "We think it's time to draw the line in the sand and tell Washington that no longer are we going to accept their oppressive hand in the state of Texas"?
hilzoy: Keeping Us Safe
I wanted to highlight one other bit of the GQ story on Rumsfeld. The author writes:
"What Rumsfeld was most effective in doing," says a former senior White House official, "was not so much undermining a decision that had yet to be made as finding every way possible to delay the implementation of a decision that had been made and that he didn't like." At meetings, he'd throw up every obstacle he could. "Rumsfeld would say, 'Golly, we haven't had time to read all of these documents! I mean, this is radical change!'" the official adds. "And then, if you suggested that maybe he should've read all the documents when everyone first got them a week ago, he'd say: 'Well! I've been all over the world since then! What have you been doing?'"
What a charmer. Here are some specific examples involving Russia:
"Rumsfeld's office cut against Bush's pledge of cooperation and transparency with Russia on "a whole host of things," says this official: the proposed Russian-American Observation Satellite, the Joint Data Exchange Center, plutonium disposition. By 2005 the Bush-Putin partnership had soured for a variety of reasons, including Russia's growing economic swagger and America's Iraq-induced decline in global prestige. But, the official observes, Rumsfeld "did not help the relationship; that's clear." Russia came to believe that the U.S. wasn't interested in cooperating, and Rumsfeld's actions "devalued what the president had originally said. It made the Russians believe he lacked credibility.""
If you're not an arms policy wonk, you might not recognize some of these examples. That would be a shame, since what this paragraph actually means is that Donald Rumsfeld slow-walked proposals designed to do two things that might strike the casual observer as quite important: keep weapons-grade plutonium out of the hands of terrorists, and prevent the accidental launch of nuclear weapons at our cities.
"Plutonium disposition" is part of the general attempt to secure and destroy Russian nuclear material. If you're worried about al Qaeda getting nuclear weapons, securing Russian loose nukes is the most obvious place to start: so obvious that our failure to prioritize this always struck me as one of the abiding mysteries of the Bush administration. There are nuclear weapons sitting around in enormously insecure locations. (Howard Baker: "I'm talking about finished weapons that are barely protected. I'm talking about doors that have an ordinary padlock on them and sometimes not even that." Quoted in Allison, Nuclear Terrorism, p. 74.)
Plutonium disposition is one part of securing loose nukes: the part where you take weapons-grade plutonium and render it unusable. As of mid-2003, here's what we had done:
"The entire nine year program to date has been focused on investing to prepare for beginning to reduce excess plutonium stockpiles in the future."
"Investing to prepare for beginning to reduce" -- that sounds promising! As of April 2007, things had not improved much:
"Although the original agreement called for each side to start off at a rate of two tons of plutonium a year and seek to move to four tons a year, the four-ton objective appears to have been largely abandoned, and the planned Russian program now stretches to 2040. (...)
A wide range of other obstacles have contributed to these slowing schedules and escalating costs. After delays resulting from a year-long Bush administration policy review, the Bush team delayed matters further by demanding that Russia accept liability provisions that would make Russia liable even for damage caused by intentional sabotage by U.S. personnel, a provision Russian negotiators predictably rejected. Because construction of the U.S. and Russian MOX plants had been linked, this dispute resulted in years of delay in both countries. A liability protocol for plutonium disposition, in which the Bush administration effectively abandoned its earlier demands, was finally signed in September 2006, ironically not long after the linkage between U.S. and Russian construction was dropped."
So that's what Rumsfeld dragging his feet on plutonium disposition meant: not helping to destroy weapons-grade material that was often stored in insecure locations, and which a terrorist might use to build a bomb. Thanks, Don.
Here's a description of the Joint Data Exchange Center from the joint US/Russian press release announcing it:
"This agreement (...) establishes a Joint Data Exchange Center (JDEC) in Moscow for the exchange of information derived from each side's missile launch warning systems on the launches of ballistic missiles and space launch vehicles.
The exchange of this data will strengthen strategic stability by further reducing the danger that ballistic missiles might be launched on the basis of false warning of attack. It will also promote increased mutual confidence in the capabilities of the ballistic missile early warning systems of both sides."
Basically, the fact that the US and Russia have nuclear missiles pointed at one another means that it's rather important to ensure that neither side mistakenly concludes that the other has launched a nuclear strike to which it must respond. After all, you don't want to get into a nuclear war over something like this:
"In 1995 the Russians mistakenly interpreted a Norwegian meteorological missile launch as a launch of a military missile, and the black case of the Russian President was activated for the first time since the end of the Cold War."
The JDEC is basically designed to help prevent that sort of needless catastrophe. But guess what?
"The agreement regarding the JDEC was first signed by Presidents Bill Clinton and Putin at their June 2000 meeting in Moscow. Over the next several years, implementation of the center fell prey to bureaucratic issues between Moscow and Washington such as the question of which side would pay for upgrading the school building that had been selected for the site. In addition, the general disinterest of the Bush administration toward negotiated agreements with Russia, especially when negotiated by earlier presidents, served to shelve the JDEC further. The agreement remains intact, however, and the center could be rapidly established as a venue for confidence building on missile defenses."
The next time you hear Dick Cheney talk about how the Bush administration kept us safe, don't just think about 9/11, the people who have died in the Iraq war, etc. Think about the fact that this administration slow-walked things like mechanisms to keep us from being incinerated because of a mistake and measures to destroy Russian weapons-grade plutonium so that it didn't fall into the hands of terrorists.
Ventura: How Hate Groups Went Mainstream
by David Neiwert, PoliPoint Press, 266 pages, $16.95David Neiwert's The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right arrives in stores as if conjured up by the zeitgeist. Since the inauguration of President Barack Obama, a culture of paranoia has hijacked the conservative movement. Examples of the hysterical style abound: Glenn Beck portraying Obama pouring gasoline on the American people; Rep. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota calling for "an orderly revolution" against the Democrats; a right-wing conspiracy nut killing three Pittsburgh policemen because of unfounded fears that the government was going to take away his guns. It seems among all segments of the conservative movement -- from the vanguard on the air, to the leaders in the Capitol, to the rank-and-file on the ground -- the mood is apocalypse now.
The thread that connects them is the subject of Neiwert's compelling new book. A journalist based in Seattle, Neiwert has for years been doing yeoman's work reporting on the extreme right. On his personal blog, Orcinus, as well as on Crooks and Liars, where he is managing editor, Neiwert has trained his focus on the extremist ideas of the right-wing fringe and the echo chamber that launders them for mainstream consumption.
Neiwert's paramount concern is the transformation of terrible thought to murderous deed. Richard Poplawski, the Pittsburgh man who killed those policemen last month, is the textbook example of the type Neiwert worries about. Poplawski liked to publish posts on Stormfront, the largest white-supremacist online forum, and visit Infowars, a Web site run by right-wing conspiracist Alex Jones. Poplawski believed that the Obama administration was out to get his guns, a baseless myth that nonetheless gets repeated again and again on conservative outlets -- and that, in his case, apparently inspired a violent spree.
But Neiwert argues that these tall tales are not confined to (or spread by) the fringe. "Transmitters" like Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing media figures circulate such conspiracy theories to a wider audience. The result is a feedback loop of paranoia and hysteria, as the transmitters "inject extremist ideas into the mainstream and … bring the two sectors closer together."
He offers the example of the Patriot movement, which thrived in the Northwest in the 1990s. According to Neiwert, the movement "provided most of the early audience for The Clinton Chronicles," a conspiracy documentary about Bill Clinton's alleged involvement in the death of his aide Vincent Foster as well as drug-running and murder in Arkansas. Although easily debunked, the wild accusations bounced around in the right's outer reaches long enough "that the claims obtained currency in the mainstream." That symbiotic relationship between shadowy fringe and conservative mainstream has only deepened in recent years, thanks to the rise of the Internet, a more entrenched right-wing echo chamber, and an even more rigidly ideological GOP caucus.
The Eliminationists attempts a grand theory of the right-wing mentality. "What motivates this kind of talk and behavior is called eliminationism: a politics and culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas in favor of the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through suppression, exile, and ejection, or extermination," he writes. Calling eliminationism "a signature trait of fascism," Neiwert offers a deft and scrupulous synthesis of academic research on fascism, which has been drained of its meaning from both liberal overuse (as Neiwert admits) and conservative up-is-downism.
Neiwert's commentary is depressingly timely. While paranoid and anti-intellectual rhetoric has long defined conservative media, the latest strain seems to be louder, meaner, and more pervasive. Where once the kind of hate talk Neiwert describes was confined to the fringes, it's now part of daily programming at Fox News. To a distressing extent, much of mainstream right-wing culture and politics is predicated on hatred and exclusion. Hardly a day goes by that an epithet isn't hurled against Hispanics, Muslims, immigrants, gays and lesbians, and other bêtes noire in conservative media and the right-wing blogosphere. And let's not forget the greatest enemy of all: liberals. More than low taxes, traditional values, or a hawkish foreign policy, hatred of liberals (as opposed to mere disagreement) is the one true unifier among conservatives. Neiwert sums up the right-wing mentality by citing a line from Benito Mussolini to a left-wing critic: "The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo." For many conservatives, the goal isn't so much to enact conservative policies as it is to vanquish the liberals in their midst.
At a brisk 266 pages (including notes), The Eliminationists serves as a useful primer on the violent and doomsday strain of American conservatism. At times, Neiwert's slim book can barely sustain its ambitious scope. More detailed dispatches from the ground from his experiences as a reporter would also have been welcome. The peeks at a subterranean and yet potentially dangerous world make up some of the book's most compelling passages.
But it's hard to deny the fundamental truth of Neiwert's argument. The recent departure of Republican Sen. Arlen Spector for the Democratic Party -- and the response by the right's standard bearers -- is only the latest illustration of Neiwert's thesis. As the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys cement their status as the party's de facto leaders, the GOP has become increasingly radicalized, alienating moderate Republicans like the Pennsylvania senator. Progressives have looked upon the radicalization of the right as a good thing for the left's political prospects -- the farther right the Republicans go, the smaller their tent becomes. But as Paul Krugman recently wrote, "In the long run, this is not good for American democracy -- we really do need two major parties in competition."
Neiwert also bemoans the radicalization of the Republicans and the refulgence of the fringe. He writes that the poisonous rhetoric that now dominates the right represents the "death of discourse itself" -- and possibly presages the coming of a new American berserk. Bookending The Eliminationists is the story of Jim Adkisson, a Knoxville man who killed two and wounded seven in a July 2008 shooting at a Unitarian Church. In a manifesto released in February, he wrote, "Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals. … Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book."
The scariest part of all this? We are just a few months into the Obama presidency. The ugliness has just begun. Neiwert's book should serve as a wake-up call not just for progressives and moderates but also for conservatives who still seek to participate in the American pluralist experiment. Some may want to brush off the Adkissons and Poplawskis as deranged aberrations, but that would be a dangerous temptation. As The Eliminationists persuasively argues, they are less anomalies than inevitabilities: the terrifying end products of a conservative movement that has nothing left to offer but the conspiratorial murmur and the rabble-rousing howl.
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