Month: August 2011

It’s kind of fascinating to follow the discussion about the scheduling of the president’s appearance before a Joint Session of Congress on Twitter. Think about this. The president finally did something really aggressive and partisan by requesting an audience with Congress at the exact moment of an already-scheduled Republican debate. A lot of progressives cheered. ‘Yay, the president is really sticking it to the Republicans and playing hardball.’

So, what happened? Speaker Boehner made up some procedural and security-related excuses and asked that the president appear the next day, during the first NFL game of the season. The president can’t force Congress to give him an audience because it requires a Joint Resolution of both branches of Congress. So, he had to back down. It makes him look weak.

This is something I’ve tried to explain repeatedly over the last two years. Asking for something that can be easily denied does not make you look strong. It doesn’t advance any cause. It just makes you look helpless and ineffectual. This is a huge part of the Republicans’ strategy. The president forgot that here and led with his chin.

I’m glad that he’s going to speak to Congress and lay out a jobs program. My concern is that they’ll simply say ‘no’ and make him look weak and ineffectual again. But you have to show some fight, too. You have to create some contrast. And you have to make your opponents show their cards to the American people.

In any case, when your opponents have the power to thwart you, you have to pick your battles carefully. Trying to step on the Republicans’ debate was a straightforward dick move, and the GOP broke all historical precedent by showing massive disrespect to the office of the president in retaliation. I know there is a debate over whether Boehner agreed to the date before he disagreed with it, but you can chalk that up to Boehner being an incompetent idiot.

The Texas Tribune reviews Rick Perry’s book Fed Up! so you don’t have to read it yourself. It appears to me that Mr. Perry is a socially-conservative libertarian of the worst sort. He wants the federal government to do practically nothing and the federal courts to shut their collective pie holes. Yet, he’s concerned about cuts in defense spending; he wants the government investigating every failed pregnancy in the country; and he thinks Texas should be able put people on trial for sodomy.

If you’re polling the issues, Mr. Perry seems to be on the minority side of pretty much everything. He dislikes everything that the government does that people value and respect, and he supports the kinds of things people don’t want the government doing, like inspecting their underpants.

Ask him how he’ll protect Social Security and Medicare and he’ll tell you that he’ll dissolve those programs and leave it to the states to provide for the dignity of the elderly.

Ask him how he’ll improve schools and he’ll tell you that he’ll get the federal government out of your business and leave it to local governments to worry about education.

Ask him how he’ll prevent another financial catastrophe on Wall Street and he’ll tell you that he’ll get the federal government off Wall Street’s back, and then he’ll blame Fannie and Freddie for making loans to black people.

Ask him if CEO-pay is too high and he’ll say it’s none of our business.

Ask him about climate change and he’ll say it’s a scam carried out by unethical intellectuals.

I don’t think a majority of the people support any of these positions.

He’s going to run on a platform of ‘Elect me and I’ll do nothing except spend money on bombs and miscarriage investigations.”

Doesn’t strike me as a winner.

I remember a Twilight Zone episode called “How to Serve Man.” Benevolent large-headed, bug-eyed, space creatures came to Earth to serve humanity. They cured diseases, improved the living standards of the planet, and in general took care of Earth’s inhabitants. They carried a book with the title How to Serve Man. Other than the title, the book was written in their language which took a long time to translate. Just as their ship carrying hundreds of humans back to their world to experience it for themselves, the show’s Earthling hero translated the book. Of course it was a cookbook.

I thought of this old TV show today when I read this article in the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram.

Since his first race for office more than a quarter century ago, Gov. Rick Perry has emphasized his roots as a rural farmer.

Yet Perry’s bank account no longer reflects those humble beginnings as his bottom line has soared in recent years, records show, thanks largely to a handful of real estate deals that critics allege were achieved through the presidential candidates’s political connections.

In just about every campaign Perry has run since 1989, allegations of his using his position for financial gain have come up. It’s an issue Perry long ago accepted would linger as long as he remains in the public eye.

Seems that Gov. Perry has made a number of astute real estate deals. He has on several occasions bought property an turned around and sold it at appreciated prices to some of his biggest political backers.

Didn’t Reagan amass considerable wealth this same way?

You haven’t seen much of me around these here parts lately, which some of you may consider a a blessing. The reason for my absence of posts is threefold. One, I became a more than a little burned out over the debt ceiling debacle. It’s hard to feel motivated and stay engaged when you feel you are fighting on two fronts, one a bunch of corrupt evil bastards and the other your putative ally, who seemed content with giving the evil bastards most of what they want even though it did not profit him or the country.

Two, this is the beginning of allergy season where I live and that means my immune system overreacts, causing me to feel constantly ill. Most days I wake up in the middle of the night, my back and ribs and knees in pain. A lot of pain. This does wonders for my sleep patterns as you might imagine. I’ll spare you a recounting of the rest of my symptoms as I’ve beat that horse to mostly dead. Anyone who doesn’t already know the story of my autoimmune disorder just Google TRAPS disease if you’ve got time to waste.

Third, I have been working on a novel for the last two years. It didn’t start as a novel but it ended upo that way. I am now in the process of tweaking it and trying to find a literary agent willling to take on an unknown author whose written a book that doesn’t fit into any of the the established commercial genres of “murder mystery,” “crime novel” “suspense thriller” “romance” “science fiction” or “Stephen King style horror.” I’d probably have a better chance publishing a self help book or “spiritual guide” or Christian Apocalypse Second Coming fiction (or “non-fiction”) but that wasn’t what interested me. I’ll see if it can interest anyone else who might be able to get it in print. Otherwise it will end up as an e-book in all likelihood.

So with my time and energy being limited, I’ve been posting less here. I could continue letting you know about our gradual slide toward a police state, the follies of the crazy Republican frontrunners, the financial Industry;s ongoing criminal activity, the utter failure to address climate change (which if you’ve been keeping up with folks like me who post on the subject has been accelerating while Big Oil doubles down on tar sands and hydrofracking technology while we choke on the toxic fossil fuel fumes) but there are lots of people who cover those beats and most write about them better than I do.

This isn’t to say I will be leaving Booman Tribune, only that my posting here will be less frequent at least until the election season gets serious (which may never happen considering how absurd our politics has become). If I had unlimited energy resources at my disposal I’d write 24/7 about everything in which I’m interested, but the flying spaghetti monster left my tank almost empty at the moment. Nevertheless, this is not a “goodbye cruel world” type of thing, it’s more an “I’ll see ya when I see ya.”

So, no cheers and huzzahs or crying and gnashing of teeth (depending on your particular opinion of me) is in order. Unless you can’t help yourself, that is.

Cheers,

Steve

I don’t want to overhype the developing divisions in Libya, but don’t say I didn’t warn you that tribal and regional factions would emerge and fight over the spoils of power once Gaddafi was driven out. It’s too early to predict a continuation of the civil war, but it remains a real risk. The capital remains relatively calm, which is a very positive sign. But it also seems unlikely that all the factions can be satisfied that they’re getting their fair share. I’m not going to pretend that I understand the dynamics in play, but that’s kind of the point. I highly doubt that our government knows who it wants to back and why they want to back them.

The country was little more than a loose federation of regions and tribes before Colonel Qaddafi came to power. His reliance on favoritism and repression to maintain control did little to bridge Libya’s regional, ethnic and ideological divisions. Nor did the rebels who ousted Colonel Qaddafi ever organize themselves into a unified force. Rebels from the western mountains, the mid-coastal city of Misurata and the eastern city of Benghazi each fought independently, and often rolled their eyes in condescension at one another.

An Islamist was named to head the new Tripoli Military Council and he appears to have the full backing of Qatar, which armed and trained the Tripoli Brigades during the war.

“This guy is just a creation of the Qataris and their money, and they are sponsoring the element of Muslim extremism here,” another council member from the western region said. “The revolutionary fighters are extremely unhappy and surprised. He is the commander of nothing!”

Mixed with the ideological concerns, however, was an equal measure of provincial rivalry over who did more to liberate Tripoli. Not only was Mr. Hasadi an Islamist, the council member argued, but he had done less than the western rebels in the fight for the capital.

“People in the west were saying to each other, ‘What? This kid? This is rubbish! What about our top commanders?’ ” the council member said.

I’m not saying that the case is proven that we should not have gotten involved in Libya’s internal affairs. But, at the same time, it is far too early for any triumphalism. The fighting might be over and the country could be headed for a bright future. But that is far from guaranteed. There is a lot of money on the line, and now there are a lot more guns, ammunition, and trained fighters to fight for that money.

Do you want to answer mistermix’s question? Should we give attention to right-wing blogs in order to correct their lies and distortions, or should we starve them off oxygen by ignoring them?

So, I finally received my hurricane-delayed MacBook Air today. Thank you all very much for your contributions. You’ve made me very happy and CabinGirl very jealous. She even waged a Facebook campaign to have this computer turned over to her for her enjoyment. It’s a really nice piece of equipment. I particularly like the backlit keyboard and faster internet loading time. It’s super lightweight and slick looking. And you can run Apps on it, which might or might not turn out to be a timesink for me. They actually gave me $100 worth of free Apps just to try to get me hooked. What’s the difference between Apple and a crack dealer?

There’s only one problem. I can’t really find anything I want to write about at the moment. Do I really want to grab at Politico’s bait and explain to them that Rick Perry doesn’t inspire panic on the left? He’s extremely radical. That’s precisely why he isn’t too awe-inspiring. The Republicans haven’t produced a plausible president. If this were 2004, it would be like Joe Lieberman was the great hope of the Washington Establishment but that he was struggling to match Maxine Waters’s level of support and trailing Dennis Kucinich badly. I don’t think the Bush/Cheney campaign would have been very worried, even with 9% unemployment.

Is it fair to compare Rick Perry to Dennis Kucinich? On one level it’s not. Perry’s experience as the chief executive of Texas probably trumps Kucinich’s experience as the Mayor of Cleveland. But if you want a candidate who holds positions that are considered out of the mainstream and on the far side of their party’s wing, Perry and Kucinich match up quite nicely. On most issues, I happen to agree with Kucinich, but I also recognize that the country isn’t very liberal and if I wanted to govern America, I’d have to moderate my platform. Rick Perry doesn’t realize that the country isn’t all that conservative and that they won’t elect some bum who thinks their Social Security check is evidence of a crime against the Constitution.

They call Social Security the Third Rail of American politics for a reason. Anyone who touches it is immediately burned to a crisp. That’s why Bush got nowhere when he tried to privatize the program in 2005. He’d destroyed any mandate he had for a second term before Hurricane Katrina put the nails in his coffin. But Rick Perry isn’t just saying he wants to change how the program is designed. He’s saying that the program should be destroyed because it is against the law. He says the same for Medicare. Serious candidates who expect to win don’t espouse views that the American people will reject out of hand and with extreme prejudice. If George McGovern was the candidate of Amnesty, Abortion, and Acid, then Perry is going to be the candidate of Abortion, Austerity, and Automatic Weapons.

A vanishingly small percentage of the public agrees with his extreme positions on religion, entitlements, or federalism. On religion, for example, a study by Profs. David Campbell and Robert Putnam recently found that the country is increasingly uneasy with the Christian Right.

So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.

More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And Tea Partiers continue to hold these views: they seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

This inclination among the Tea Party faithful to mix religion and politics explains their support for Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. Their appeal to Tea Partiers lies less in what they say about the budget or taxes, and more in their overt use of religious language and imagery, including Mrs. Bachmann’s lengthy prayers at campaign stops and Mr. Perry’s prayer rally in Houston.

Yet it is precisely this infusion of religion into politics that most Americans increasingly oppose. While over the last five years Americans have become slightly more conservative economically, they have swung even further in opposition to mingling religion and politics. It thus makes sense that the Tea Party ranks alongside the Christian Right in unpopularity.

Add to this the the obvious way in which Rick Perry’s speech, style, and swagger call to mind the utterly clueless and disastrous presidency of Bush, and you have the perfect candidate for Obama.

Perry’s positions and persona do unite the left in opposition, but that’s only icing on the cake.

Did I say I didn’t want to write about this? Well, with the sweet new machine, I had to write about something.

I thought Bill O’Reilly was a Catholic family man. What’s the Pope going to say about a divorce? I’m not surprised his wife started sleeping with another man after that whole falafel incident. But what about the whole ‘What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder’ thing? Isn’t O’Reilly supposed to grin and bear his wife’s infidelity? He’s got a 13 year-old daughter and an 8 year-old son. Aren’t their lives going to be ruined if they’re raised in a broken home? Didn’t O’Reilly tell us that half a million times? He can’t go through with it. He needs to put that wedding ring back on his finger and get some counseling.

Conor Friedersdorf does a great job of explaining why Americans loathe Dick Cheney. He touches all the obvious bases: the lies about Saddam, al-Qaeda, and WMD, Gitmo and indefinite detention, warrantless surveillance, authorizing torture, corrupt and unethical business practices, his theory of the Unitary Executive, and his treasonous relationship with Iranian-agent Ahmed Chalabi. Those are all good reasons to hate Dick Cheney, but it only really scratches the surface.

Dick Cheney might be the most aggressive politician this country has seen since Lyndon Johnson. That’s irritating in itself, but Cheney is wrong about every single issue facing the country. His record is as bad as any politician I have ever seen. It doesn’t matter that he lies as easily as he breathes, because even his lies only serve misguided goals. No human being in my lifetime has been as aggressively and consequentially wrong as Dick Cheney.

It’s this unmitigated track-record of non-stop failure that is the true cause of Cheney’s poor standing with the public. Even Bush eventually realized that he needed to stop following Cheney’s advice. The moment Dick’s ally Donald Rumsfeld was replaced by Robert Gates, everything began to improve in our foreign affairs and relations. In retrospect, the change represented the sidelining of Cheney and his neo-con confederates in favor of the realist school of Bush’s father. This didn’t prevent Bush from leaving a smoldering husk of a country to his successor, but it could definitely have been worse if Cheney’s influence had persisted.

Cheney lacks charm or warmth or any real sense of humor. He was willing to let his good friend and top assistant, Scooter Libby, go to prison for a crime he himself committed. Even his reputation for loyalty to Bush has been shattered by his new book, which makes Bush look bad on several occasions.

About the only thing there is to like about Cheney is his sheer aggression, if you’re into that kind of thing.

I think his contempt for the rule of law and the truth and the people far exceeds anything ever displayed by Richard Nixon. And Nixon was an able and competent president in both foreign and domestic affairs. Cheney was anything but able and competent.

It’s very interesting to see Marc Thiessen map out Mitt Romney’s strategy for taking down Texas Governor Rick Perry, but the result is a holistically incoherent message. If Romney attacks Perry from the left for opposing Social Security and Medicare, and from the right for being a lifelong creature of government, and then tries to defend his own record on health care by saying it’s a state-devised non-federal solution, while blasting Perry for being too radical about state-devised non-federal solutions, the average voter is going to have whiplash.

I don’t think the country’s most famous flip-flopper can succeed with a totally incoherent message. I know his opponents are pathetic, but how can this work for Romney?