Question. Do repuglicans ever stop to consider whether their political strategies are actively harmful to America's national interest? Ever? NYT blurb:
Guantánamo Closing Hands Republicans a Wedge Issue
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Republicans in Congress started laying plans even before the inauguration to make the debate a question of local safety instead of one about national principles.
sgw: Its Going Down
I know several Republicans holding elected office have come out recently in support of Dick Cheney but as Colin Powell goes on "Face the Nation" tomorrow ostensibly to do some push back on his critics in the far right wing of the party including Cheney, will these same officials have to make a choice? Will they be made to choose between Powell's vision of the party going forward or Dick Cheney's? Remember Cheney himself said the other day "there is no middle ground".
Stay tuned because this may be the fight that ends up fracturing the party permanently.
Tim F.: Sorry Mr. Goldwater, You’re Not On The List
In my experience one of the great pleasures of modern life is to scan rightwing comment threads after a post about Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh. At least since Palinmania! the same scene replays itself almost every time. For a while the commenters mostly agree that liberals are worse than cancer. Sadly, the happy reverie breaks as soon as some well-meaning board regular gently suggests that lining up behind such obvious idiots may prove less than useful, even taking into account that they piss off liberals. Inevitably commenter X (let’s call him ‘David Frum’) supported Republicans all his life and voted for Bush twice, for all the good that does him. Without fail the thread devolves into a prolonged search for why X can be dismissed.
Almost invariably the true believers bring up a wingnut litimus test that I call The List. D.F. must simultaneously oppose abortion (always), support torture, wiretapping and aggressive war, question evolution and doubt global warming, fear muslims, hate taxes and really hate government healthcare. If D.F. fails a single point on the list then he’s clearly a bogus conservative, anathema and unwelcome to taint the pristine boards with his heterodoxy. The question of the day (e.g., did Sarah Palin harm the ticket) usually makes a guest appearance on The List, conveniently anathematizing anyone who disagrees with the putative topic of the thread.
The List has a life outside of the internet. Christopher Buckley, Colin Powell and, of course, David Frum faced more or less the same thing IRL. Heterodoxy is schism. That the DFs are perfectly right, and that true believers torment them for trying to save their own party* is what makes it so funny to watch.
In a deeper sense the funniest part of all is how little of The List is recognizably Republican. Other than the bit about taxes not one of those bedrock Republican principles stretches farther back than the Reagan administration. Not only are most of these points younger than most Republican voters (judging by recent polls, also younger than most of their kids) but more than half, for example the unprovoked wars and government surveillance stuff, would make William F. Buckley or Barry Goldwater spin so fast that their graves could change the rotation of the Earth.
What’s going on is kind of simple, and kind of terrible if you’re a Republican. Almost every bullet point on The List doesn’t come from the party’s core purpose. That would be protecting the money class from the danger of social mobility via Social Security, healthcare and progressive taxation. At this point almost all of The List comes from tactical decisions that Republicans made over the years to pad their vote share.
The muslim hate stuff would puzzle Republican leaders from Reagan to Norquist, and government surveillance and extralegal torture would probably kill Goldwater again. The story of the religious right is especially chuckleworthy. It dates from the Reagan era, when Republicans freaked out over Carter and MLK Jr. and made a cynical deal with some fringe religious leaders like Pat Robertson, whom they considered chumps to be milked for votes. Eventually ‘chumps’ claimed enough of the party to start demanding, and getting, more than insincere lip service, though that era is fairly recent. Naturally one of the first things that they demanded and got was Terri Schiavo. Brava.
The terrorism parts on the list are particularly comical, maybe because they’re so new. Scan the 2000 Republican party platform for relevant words. Bin Laden? Al Qaeda? Nada. Terroris* returns three hits**. Compare that with twenty hits for Iraq. It is even interestinger that al Qaeda blew up our buildings while Condoleeza Rice was in the middle of a speaking tour arguing that, contra Richard Clarke, Iraq was the looming imminent threat that Americans should pee their pants about. The torture and muslim hate stuff is just the usual ass-covering overreaction when a diminished person gets caught by surprise with his pants around his ankles.
Lunatics running the asylum has become cliche, but that is exactly what happened here. Republicans made a series of short-term grabs for this constituency or that for the votes to repeal the estate tax, kill Social Security and increase taxes on the poor/middle class, but somehow the chump constituencies got hold of the keys and took over the main office. Now the money class doesn’t trust Republicans and a drooling hodgepodge of xenophobes, nativists, torture fans, religious fanatics, racists and militiamen camped out in the cafeteria kicked Christopher Buckley to the curb.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
No, f*ck that. It is hilarious. I wish the GOP could keep dying forever.
Benen: BIRTHERS AND BILLBOARDS....
If the left were drawing up a script for the right to follow, which would make conservatively look hopelessly ridiculous, they might come up with something like this. (via John Cole)
The electoral system has failed to satisfy lingering questions about Barack Obama's eligibility to serve as president.
The press has failed to satisfy those questions. The courts have failed to satisfy those questions. The Congress has failed to satisfy those questions.
But the people are still asking.
That's how Joseph Farah, editor and chief executive officer of WND, explains the petition he initiated several months ago that has collected nearly 400,000 names of Americans demanding answers as to Obama's elidibility [sic] as well as the outpouring of financial support for his new campaign to erect billboards around the country asking the simple question: "Where's the birth certificate?"
In just five days, the billboard campaign has been backed by about $45,000 in donations.
Obviously, the Birthers' argument is nuts. But the fact that they're still at it, seven months after the election, is extraordinary.
For Democrats, it's extraordinarily helpful, in large part because it makes the president's detractors appear insane. Former Clinton White House press secretary Jake Siewert said a few months ago, "At some level, they're not that bad to have around because it reminds people that under the mainstream conservative press there's this bubbling up of really irrational hatred for the guy."
But that's just among those who hear about this. As DougJ noted, there's the inconvenient fact that most Americans will see a billboard that reads, "Where's the birth certificate?" and won't have the foggiest idea what that means.
That the right-wing website claims to have raised "about $45,000 in donations" is especially great for Democrats, since that means $45,000 from far-right donors that won't go to something that might actually matter.
For the left in general, it's a win-win: unhinged conservatives waste their time on a silly exercise, devoting time and money to a campaign that only makes the right look even more wacky. The DNC ought to send WND a thank-you note.
Think Progress: GOP lawmaker slams RNC video mocking Pelosi as ‘reprehensible.’
This past week, the Republican National Committee (RNC) released a web video comparing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to the James Bond villian Pussy Galore. Politico said that the video “implies that Pelosi has used her feminine wiles to dodge the truth about whether or not she was briefed by the CIA on the use of waterboarding in 2002.” Watch it:
Yesterday, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) sharply criticized the RNC’s video:
I thought it was reprehensible, irresponsible and unpersuasive. If we’re going to regain the credibility of the American people, we’re going to have to stop with silly antics like that. It may get a snide chuckle inside the Beltway, but it offends most people. We have to get away from the politics of personal destruction.
Benen: ROVE'S SKEWED REALITY...
In his speech on national security this week, President Obama noted that while it might be tempting to "start from scratch" when dealing with the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, that isn't an option. "We are cleaning up something that is -- quite simply -- a mess," Obama said, "a misguided experiment that has left in its wake a flood of legal challenges that my Administration is forced to deal with on a constant basis, and that consumes the time of government officials whose time should be spent on better protecting our country.
This seemed self-evidently true. There's an argument about whether the president's preferred method to clean up the mess is a good one, but that the system Bush/Cheney left in place is a legal, political, and practical morass seems uncontroversial.
Karl Rove doesn't quite see it that way.
"What's ironic to me is that yesterday he said 'this is a mess that was left to me by my predecessors.' No. This is a mess, to the extent that it is a mess, left to him by his friends and allies like Attorney General Eric Holder. Remember, there are DOJ appointees of this president who are in court arguing against the government's position on these kind of things. I mean, it is his friends and allies and in some instances, his appointees who are in court arguing for an expansion of the rights of the terrorists and arguing for an end to the military commissions."
Usually, when Rove is spouting nonsense, I can more or less figure out what he's trying to say. But this is just bizarre. It's almost as if he couldn't think of a real answer, so Rove just started making up new attacks off the top of his head.
As Satyam Khanna explained, "It's unclear what cases Rove is referring to. There has been no litigation on the military commissions since Obama took office in January. The lingering legal mess at Guantanamo, of course, was created by Bush."
What do you suppose the weather is like in Rove's reality?
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