During the Democratic primary season, President Bush had to call in then-Secretary of State Condi Rice to explain to him what the big deal was with Joe Biden calling Barack Obama "articulate and bright and clean."
Benen: NEVER LET 'EM SEE YOU SWEAT...
During the presidential campaign, we'd occasionally hear far-right Republicans insist that al Qaeda would be thrilled to see Obama win the White House. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) offered one of the more ridiculous examples, but he certainly wasn't alone.I think about those tirades every time al Qaeda gets a little more panicky about the Obama presidency.
Al-Qaida's deputy leader on Tuesday criticized President Barack Obama's upcoming speech to the Islamic world in Cairo, saying it will not change the "bloody messages" the U.S. military is sending Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. Al-Qaida has repeatedly lashed out at Obama since he was elected, a move some analysts believe indicates the terrorist organization is worried he will be effective in improving the U.S. image in the Muslim world.
Yep. These new audio messages, posted to militant web sites, continue to make the terrorist network sound rather desperate. In this new one, Ayman al-Zawahri urges Muslims to believe that the United States has launched a "war on Islam," and asks Egyptians to reject Obama as a "criminal." (He also hinted that the U.S. president might be a secret Jew, noting Obama's visit to the Wailing Wall in Israel: "[Obama] put on his head the Jew's cap and prayed their prayers, though he claims to be Christian.")
The new al Qaeda clip is the latest piece of a larger public-relations panic. Zawahri seemed desperate to convince Muslims how awful Obama is in April, and before that, in February. It's a reminder that while the terrorist group could exploit Bush's agenda and unpopularity to recruit, expand, and raise money, Obama puts al Qaeda in a far more difficult position.
Rita Katz, who created the Site Intelligence Group, a private company that monitors jihadist communications, recently said the terrorist's hysterical rants against the president show "just how much al Qaeda is intimidated by Obama."
Sargent: Yikes! Did Obama Really Call America A Muslim Country? Nope.
With President Obama set to depart for the Mideast, many will likely jump on him today for allegedly calling America a Muslim country on French television late yesterday.
Indeed, critics are already grabbing on to the comment as it was reported in the New York Times write-up:
In an interview with Laura Haim on Canal Plus, a French television station, Mr. Obama noted that the United States also could be considered as “one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” He sought to downplay the expectations of the speech, but he said he hoped the address would raise awareness about Muslims.
The Times piece is already spreading rapidly on the right. PowerLineBlog, for instance, asked: “In what possible sense can any rational person consider the United States to be a Muslim country?” But here’s what Obama actually said:
Now, the flip side is I think that the United States and the West generally, we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam. And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslims Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world. And so there’s got to be a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples.
Hard-core rhetoricians will note that Obama was employing an obscure tense known as the “conditional,” and an arcane rhetorical device known as a “hypothetical.” He said that if you were to take the number of Muslims in America, then one could see America as ranking up there with other Muslim countries — in numerical, hypothetical terms.
Sure, let’s fact-check the claim about the number of Muslims and analyze the policy implications. But come on, the man simply didn’t say America is a Muslim country. It’s going to be a long week.
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sgwhiteinfla | June 3rd, 2009 at 08:33 am
Greg
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I believe the NYTimes, knowing right wing a$$hats will never actually look up the text, translated Pres Obama’s words that way on purpose to start some sh*t and generate interest. There is no way an editor didn’t see that characterization of his words and didn’t know they weren’t true to what he had actually said. So much for our “liberal” media. I keep thinking any day now they will announce that Jeffery Rosen of TNR Sotomayor hit job fame has been given a column.
Sully: What American "Socialism" Looks Like
Obama's only been in office a few months in a steep depression but the ideological right already sees socialism here. For a little reality check, here's a chart from Conor Clarke of government control of the economy (click the link for the details):
Paul Waldman (TAP): Judicial Abstraction: Republicans talk so much about "judicial activism" because it's a dog whistle to the base. Too bad that base is increasingly small and irrelevant.
It is becoming clear that conservatives will be unable to torpedo Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court. What is also becoming clear is that they're losing an opportunity to convince the public that their vision of the courts is superior to that of progressives. And they have no one to blame but themselves.
Even before President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor, conservatives became incensed when Obama said that "empathy" was a key virtue he looked for in a justice. Empathy, they charged, was nothing but a "code word" masking Obama's true agenda. And these people know from code words. In fact, their biggest problem in this debate is that so much of the time, they themselves speak in code.
Granted, some of the attacks aimed at Sotomayor are straightforward, albeit idiotic and tinged with the eternal grievance of the subjugated white male. But these are mere sidelights and considered by most of the Republicans in the Senate with the power to actually hold up Sotomayor's nomination to be too dangerous to touch. They, along with many of the conservative groups opposed to the nomination, are sticking with the old standbys, particularly "judicial activism."
As has been noted many times before, a "judicial activist" is a judge who makes a ruling you don't like. Those who have attempted to quantify activism, by defining it as the propensity to strike down laws or regulations, for instance, have found that it's the conservative justices who are the most "activist." But the charge was always meant to be a dog whistle, a signal that only certain people were supposed to understand. To the conservative base, the charge that a judge appointed by a Democrat was a judicial activist meant that he or she would favor affirmative action, worker protections, equal rights for gays, the separation of church and state, and above all, Roe v. Wade. At the same time, the formulation was intended to say to the outside world that conservatives weren't concerned about particular outcomes at all but merely wanted the judiciary to stick to the law and the Constitution and not "legislate from the bench."
The problem with dog-whistle politics, however, is that it doesn't have the power to persuade those whose ears aren't attuned to the whistle. And anyone who will recoil in fear when told that Sonia Sotomayor is a "judicial activist" was opposed to her before they even knew who she was.
Conservatives have gotten so used to talking in code that they've forgotten who their audience is. Not that it hasn't been important for them in the past -- for instance, in one of his debates with John Kerry in 2004, President George W. Bush said that he would pick Supreme Court justices who "would not allow their personal opinion to get in the way of the law," and as evidence for the wrong approach he cited Dred Scott, the 1857 case that upheld slavery. "That's a personal opinion. That's not what the Constitution says," Bush said. Observers found the reference a bizarre non sequitur, until the rest of us discovered that anti-choice activists often compare Roe to Dred Scott. Bush was sending a signal to conservative Christians: Worry not, my friends -- I'll make sure that anyone I appoint to the Supreme Court will be a vote to overturn Roe.
But reassuring your supporters that you'll pick their kind of justice is not the same as persuading the broader American public that a president's nominee ought to be feared and hated. Those conservative Christian Republicans don't need to be persuaded to oppose Sotomayor -- they'd oppose any nominee offered by a Democratic president. It's the rest of the country that needs persuading. And a vague notion about adherence to the Constitution is simply not going to get the rest of the country's blood boiling.
Even as their arguments fall flat, it's hard to blame Republicans for staying at such an abstract level. Their problem is that if they actually got specific, they'd be even less persuasive.
Nowhere is this more clear than when it comes Roe v. Wade. Think of the lengths Republican nominees have gone to conceal their opposition to the decision, refusing to even talk about it in their confirmation hearings. The most laughable case was Clarence Thomas, who told the Judiciary Committee with a straight face that not only did he have no opinion one way or another about Roe, he had never in his life even participated in a conversation about the most contentious Supreme Court decision of our time (once on the Court, Thomas urged overturning the case in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, to no one's surprise). The two Republican nominees who followed Thomas did their best to imply that they might just uphold Roe. When asked about the case, both John Roberts and Samuel Alito talked at length about stare decisis, the doctrine that prior Supreme Court decisions should be respected. "There's nothing in my personal views based on faith or other sources that would prevent me from applying the precedents of the court faithfully under principles of stare decisis," Roberts said. Alito assured the committee he would approach any question on abortion with an "open mind." Virtually no one invested in the abortion debate believed either of them.
Why is this ridiculous charade necessary? For the same reason that conservative activists and politicians will never admit that what they mean by "judicial activist" is someone who supports Roe: because they know that they're on the wrong side of public opinion. A CNN poll taken two weeks ago asked whether people thought Roe ought to be overturned; 68 percent said no. Roberts and Alito certainly knew what they were doing; a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll taken while the Alito nomination was pending asked, "Suppose that after his confirmation hearings you were convinced Samuel Alito would vote to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision on abortion. If that were the case, would you like to see the Senate vote in favor of Alito serving on the Supreme Court, or not?" Only 34 percent of respondents said they would want the Senate to confirm him, while 56 percent said they would not.
And what else is on the conservative judicial agenda? It may have been best described by Jeffrey Toobin in a New Yorker profile of Chief Justice John Roberts:
"After four years on the Court, however, Roberts's record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation's seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party."That's as good a summary of what conservatives want out of the Supreme Court as you'll find. It also points to why Sotomayor is likely to breeze through her hearings, regardless of the screeching from the likes of Limbaugh and Gingrich. Were Roberts' views on things like the scope of presidential power discussed at dinner tables and water coolers during his confirmation? Only in rarefied circles. The broader public never considered the possibility that Roberts could be an ideological extremist, not just because the Democratic opposition to his nomination was so anemic but because he seemed so, well, nice. Polite, thoughtful, good-looking in a forgetful, local weather guy kind of way, Roberts gently batted away questions from Democratic senators on his way to an easy confirmation. Compare him to Robert Bork, he of the scowling visage and Mephistophelian goatee, who looked as if he could explode in anger at any moment.
And what is the public going to see in the Sotomayor hearings? An obviously well-qualified nominee, being questioned by a bunch of Republicans about "judicial philosophy" and "activism," abstract ideas with no apparent connection to people's lives. They won't be able to say what kind of rulings they're afraid Sotomayor might make and why she would be a threat. They won't argue that she'll be a vote to uphold Roe, or that she'll support workers like Lilly Ledbetter when they are discriminated against by their employers, or that she'll rule that the president's powers are not limitless. They will pretend to be investigating Sotomayor's record for sinister leanings, without ever admitting just what it is they hope to discover.
By repeating the mantra of "judicial activism" over and over, conservatives have made it easy for Sotomayor to respond. At some point in her confirmation hearings (probably more than once), some senator will ask her, "Judge, do you believe it's the job of a Supreme Court justice to apply the Constitution, or do you believe they should make the laws?" To which she will reply, "Senator, it's the job of the Supreme Court to apply the Constitution." Asked and answered. Since the "evidence" they have that Sotomayor is a secret activist is so pathetically thin, there won't be much more to say.
In a perfect world, the appointment of a new Supreme Court justice would be the occasion for a meaningful debate about the role the Court plays in our democracy and the different understanding of the Constitution, and justice itself, that the two parties hold. Alas, that is not the world in which we live. So we are treated to an endless argument about a single line, even a single word ("better") Sonia Sotomayor used in a speech eight years ago, alongside a series of increasingly ugly outbursts from the puffy blowhards of the right. They have certainly succeeded, for a brief moment anyway, in framing this debate around their own ugly identity politics. But when Republicans finally get the chance to question Sotomayor, they'll drone on and on about their opposition to "judicial activism." It's just about the only card they have to play. And it won't be enough.
Think Progress: Gingrich pretends to apologize to Sotomayor…and then claims that she betrayed America’s values.
Last week, Newt Gingrich said that Judge Sonia Sotomayor should withdraw her nomination because she is a “Latina woman racist.” Today, in what several commentators are characterizing as an apology or walk-back, Gingrich clarifies his comments. “The word ‘racist’ should not have been applied to Judge Sotomayor as a person, even if her words themselves are unacceptable,” Gingrich writes in the right-wing Human Events. Rather, Gingrich says, we should view Sotomayor’s words as revealing “a betrayal of a fundamental principle of the American system — that everyone is equal before the law.” Gingrich continues his apology by characterizing her as a “radical”:
So the question we need to ask ourselves in considering Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation is this: Which judge will show up on the Supreme Court, the radical from her speeches or the convention liberal from her rulings? [...]
Has President Obama nominated a conventionally liberal judge to a lifetime tenure on our highest court? Or a radical liberal activist who will cast aside the rule of law in favor of the narrow, divisive politics of race and gender identity?
If Gingrich thinks Sotomayor is going to have trouble putting aside “divisive politics of race and gender identity,” perhaps he can offer her a few pointers. After all, its something that Gingrich has apparently struggled with in the past. (HT: Karen Tumulty)
- Kurtz (TPM): Gettin' Hot in the GOP Kitchen
Newt backs off calling Sotomayor a racist -- just says she bases her judicial rulings on race.
Jeff Sessions is pleased, telling CNN:
"I'm very glad he backed off. I think that's unusual, that commentators do that, and I think it was very good that he did. I think that will help - help us. I think that will help us have a real good discussion about the serious issues that the nation faces and that the court faces. And there's some disagreements about that. "
Wonder what Sessions will think, publicly, about Pat Buchanan's latest on Sotomayor: "In her world, equal justice takes a back seat to tribal justice."
- Sargent: Rush: Newt Can Retract Sotomayor “Racist” Claim, But I’m Not Retracting Squat
On his show just now, Rush Limbaugh professed himself bewildered by Newt Gingrich’s retraction of his claim that Sonia Sotomayor is a “racist,” and reiterated that he’s not backing off the charge, putting the talk show host at odds with one of the few GOP leaders who’d been willing to keep up the attacks on Sotomayor in the face of mounting opposition.
“I just heard right before the show started,” Rush said, referring to the fact that Gingrich acknowledged today that he shouldn’t have described Sotomayor as a racist.
“I didn’t know why he retracted it and I still don’t,” Rush said.
As for his own claim that Sotomayor is a racist, Rush said: “I’m not retracting it, nobody’s refuting it…Nobody’s saying I’m wrong, nobody’s saying I’m making it up.”
“When she says, `she’d do a better job than a white guy,’ what is it? Racism? reverse racism?” Rush continued, according to our reporter, Beth Marlowe. “She’d bring a form of racism to the court.”
All in all, not a good day for the “Sotomayor is a racist” wing of the GOP, and yet another sign of the continued GOP disarray sparked by the attacks that some in the party have launched against Obama’s SCOTUS pick.
Benen: BECK, GOLDBERG, AND HITLER COMPARISONS...
On Monday's edition of Glenn Beck's hopelessly bizarre Fox News program, the host discussed General Motors' bankruptcy, and the federal intervention to save the company, with the National Review's Jonah Goldberg. If you're already thinking, "Uh oh," you still might not be surprised by their chat.
Beck began by explaining to viewers that "Liberal Fascism," Goldberg's book, is necessary to "understand" what has "destroyed our country." Beck added that Goldberg's book "began to open my eyes," and prompted the Fox News host to do "an awful lot of research."
The notion of Beck using "Liberal Fascism" as a springboard for genuine academic research is literally laughable, but let's move on.
Beck asked his guest if there are "any examples in history where this kind of stuff has happened -- what's happening today -- and what does it lead to?" He was vague about what "this kind of stuff" included, but presumably it dealt with the government rescue of GM. Goldberg responded with the comparison that Beck wanted to hear:
"Well, I mean, we saw -- I mean, it's funny. I mean, again, you know, I'm not calling Barack Obama a Hitler and I'm not calling him Nazis and all the rest. But, you know, in fascism, we saw the people's car. We call it the Volkswagen, where the state said what we're going to do is we're going to take over the auto industry -- government and business and unions are going to get together and we're going to create cars to fill a political need rather than a market need and give people these cars."
Any thought that begins, "I'm not calling Barack Obama a Hitler, but...." is a big hint that a lot of nonsense is sure to follow.
What does the GM rescue have to do with the Nazis and Volkswagen? Literally nothing, but Goldberg seemed quite pleased with himself for drawing the comparison, and Glenn Beck found all of this fascinating.
These guys really are beyond parody.
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