What's with the obsession Democrats appear to have with the "leader" of the Republican Party? It's the focus of water cooler talk, uber-obnoxious banter between Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Joy Behar, and the focus of liberal news media coverage.Democrats have the executive branch and the majority in the House. They do not need Republicans at this particular juncture. For the first time in a long time, Republicans should be considered a non-issue. So, why the excessive interest?
Here's a theory; Democrats are starting their smear campaign before the Obamas even have a chance to get completely settled in. Much to the chagrin of any good Republican, Democrats are trying their damnedest to tie the Party tightly to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter.
With respect to Limbaugh and Coulter for their successes in the entertainment industry, neither is a politician with the experience or power to lead the Republican Party.
Government power based on political party goes in peaks and valleys, as it has for decades. The Democratic Party is far from stable and strong. Perhaps they should get passed their inferiority complex and concentrate on the task at hand. They have far more to be concerned about, what with this earmark bill they've created, than wasting time concerning themselves with what the Republicans are doing to reconstruct their Party.
13 comments:
I wouldn't call it an obsession - more like the curiosity of people driving by a major auto accident scene.
None of the guests seemed to be complaining, yet Michael Steele stood at a Fifth Avenue fund-raiser in New York on Wednesday evening and defended his month-old tenure as chairman of the Republican National Committee. His glasses had been askew since he pleaded his case on television that morning, and now he threw up his arms in admission.
Yes, some of his problems in the job were “self-inflicted,” he said, “but I do things to get a reaction.”
There is no wondering which things he meant. Since taking office, Mr. Steele has joyfully gone to war with his own party, often live on television.
Most chairmen wave the party flag; Mr. Steele smiles and shreds it. A man of constantly colliding analogies, he compares Republicans to drunks in need of a 12-step program and to the mentally ill. He has insulted Rush Limbaugh and moderate Republican senators alike, and he has promised a “hip-hop makeover” that would attract even “one-armed midgets” to his party.
Mr. Steele is the party’s first African-American chairman, his election a response to a history-making Democratic president. But now his performance is raising questions: Does he have a strategy, or is he simply saying whatever comes to mind? Republican moderates have staked hopes of reform on him, betting that his race and frank style will foster a new image of the party, but is this what they expected?
“I’m trying to move an elephant that’s become mired in its own muck,” Mr. Steele said in an interview last week in his sunlit Capitol Hill office, pausing whenever he appeared on the giant television close by his desk.
Yes, the republican party is in dire need of a leader, especially if they place a black man in the RNC chair as a response to a black president. The dems certainly don't need to worry - the republicans will continue to self-implode until Rush actually does take formal leadership responsibilities - qualified or not!
Dear CC:
The Dems could bury the GOP if they did only one (1) thing -- act responsibly.
But they have chosen to act poorly by ignoring the majority of their plebiscites. If the Dems would simply act in the best interests of the country (and not the hard left) they could rule for decades.
This has to be difficult for the “Blue Dog”, rational party of John Kennedy to watch Pelosi & company leave the door open for the GOP – but leave the door ajar is what they, the ultra – libs are doing.
Tiberius
Sorry but I just can't leave Palin alone if she plans to run for pres in 2012. I mean, how can you trust a lier as pres? Plus, she is just too gosh darn funny::::::
The Odd Lies Of Sarah Palin XXVIII: Meeting The Legislature
The special charm of Sarah Palin's congenital lying habit lies in the triviality of the usual matters at hand. Yes, her life is a Judge Judy episode - except she's not as good a liar as most of the participants in that show. So long ago, she insisted that she had not fired a librarian as mayor, even as he had her termination letter in hand. Or she insisted that she asked her daughters for permission to run for vice-president, even though her own office put out an itinerary and press release that proved that didn't happen. And so she still claims she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere, even though no sane person with access to Google believes her. And she kept saying she had provided medical records, when she never did. And on and on and on ... But the most amusing are the ones where the lies get really complicated really quickly, like a Ricky Gervais skit. So she said she wouldn't take all the federal stimulus money, then said she would, then said she'd never said she wouldn't. Still with me? So she scheduled a meeting with the legislature. Or did she? Let's break this one down, shall we? From the ADN:
[The issue] boiled over when Palin sent a statement to the press blaming the Legislature for the meeting falling apart. "Governor Sarah Palin was scheduled to participate telephonically in a meeting with legislative leadership today when legislative leaders cancelled the meeting to host their own press conference," it said.
The Senate president and House speaker said that is not true.
They did hold a press conference Thursday afternoon to announce a clearinghouse for people to find information about applying for stimulus grants. But they said that had nothing to do with the cancellation of their meeting with Palin.
Legislative staff said that Jerry Gallagher, the governor's legislative director, had told them Wednesday that Palin wouldn't even participate by phone. Gallagher contacted them again late Thursday morning and said Palin was available by phone but by that point the meeting had been canceled and it was too late, according to the speaker's office.
The iconic quote in the piece, the quote that tells you all you need to know about this politician:
Senate President Gary Stevens said the statement Palin sent to the press about what happened was "absolutely false, absolutely false." "Someone should be brought to task on that," the Kodiak Republican said.
Good luck with that.
Who wrote this? Please tell me it was a blogger because it's lacking in any journalistic integrity.
Yes, I recognize the irony...I write on a blog. I realize, though, that a blog is no subsitute for a respected media outlet.
By the way, why is it strange for Palin to have asked her girls if they are okay w/her running for VP? I think most politicians (who are also good family men/women) talk to their family before thrusting them all in the lime light.
Now you have proven without a doubt that you are emotional and that you don't always read what I offer up.
The article said: "Or she insisted that she asked her daughters for permission to run for vice-president, even though her own office put out an itinerary and press release that proved that didn't happen."
Palin is a bald-faced liar. Are you so blind or defensive that you cannot see that?
And if you're going to say something is lacking in journalist integrity you should probably also give specifics as to why; otherwise, you're doing the same thing. But perahps because you are a blogger you get a pass?
As far as respected media ouitlets, are there any? You say on one post that "the media" gave Obama the election and continues to give him a free pass. Is that your definition of respected media?
I think Chaney has a Napolean complex of his own.
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Scared Cheney puts his head in the noose
The former vice-president fears being held to account on torture and is lashing out
Barack Obama’s most underrated talent is his ability to get his enemies to self-destruct. It takes a lot less energy than defeating them directly, and helps maintain Obama’s largely false patina of apolitical niceness.
Obama is about as far from apolitical as you can get; and while he is a decent fellow, he is also a lethal Chicago pol. His greatest achievement in this respect was the total implosion of Bill Clinton around this time last year: Hillary was next. Then came John McCain, merrily strapping on the suicide bomb of Sarah Palin. With the fate of all these formidable figures impossible to miss, one has to wonder what possessed Dick Cheney, the former vice-presi-dent, to come lumbering out twice in the first 50 days of the Obama administration to blast the new guy on national television.
Growling and sneering, Cheney accused the new president of actively endangering the lives of Americans by ending the detention and interrogation programmes of the last administration, and vowing to close Guantanamo Bay. It’s hard to overstate how unseemly and unusual this was.
It is fine for a former vice-president to criticise his successor in due course. But there is a decorum that allows for a new president not to be immediately undermined by his predecessor. To be accused of what amounts to treason – a willingness to endanger the lives of Americans – is simply unheard of.
Former president George W Bush himself declined any such criticism. He told a Canadian audience: “I’m not going to spend my time criticising [Obama]. There are plenty of critics in the arena. He deserves my silence.” Last week Condi Rice echoed the same theme. “My view is, we got to do it our way,” she said. “We did our best. We did some things well, some things not so well. Now they get their chance. And I agree with the president; we owe them our loyalty and our silence while they do it.”
Cheney’s critique of Obama’s policies was also inaccurate. He claimed the new administration had abandoned the concept of a war on terror and returned to a pre9/11 law enforcement paradigm. But the noticeable thing about the new administration has been its retention of certain aspects of the terror war that are clearly about war and not law enforcement.
It has not abandoned rendition, while placing it under the restrictions followed by the Clinton administration; it has insisted it has the right to detain terror suspects under the laws of war, if the suspects are deemed a direct threat to security; it has increased troop levels in Afghanistan; it has decided to keep the US presence in Iraq as high as possible for the bulk of this year.
Some critics on the right have even accused Obama of simply continuing the Bush-Cheney mindset with mere window-dressing to appease the civil liberties crowd.
So what was Cheney thinking? My guess is that he fears he is in trouble. This fear has been created by Obama, but indirectly. Obama has declined to launch a prosecution of Cheney for war crimes, as many in his party (and outside it) would like. He has set up a review of detention, rendition and interrogation policies. And he has simply declassified many of the infamous torture memos kept under wraps by Bush.
He has the power to do this, and much of the time it is in response to outside requests. But as the memos have emerged, the awful truth of what Cheney actually authorised becomes harder and harder to deny. And Cheney is desperately trying to maintain a grip on the narrative before it grips him by the throat.
The threat, however subtle, is real. Eric Holder, the new attorney-general, while eschewing a formal investigation, has told Republicans “prosecutorial and investigative judgments must depend on the facts, and no one is above the law”. The justice department is also sitting on an internal report into the calibre of the various torture memos drafted by Bush appointees in the Office of Legal Counsel. The report has apparently already found the memos beneath minimal legal credibility, which implies they were ordered up to make the law fit the already-made decision to torture various terror suspects.
But the big impending release may well be three memos from May 2005, detailing specific torture techniques authorised by Bush and Cheney for use against terror suspects. Newsweek described the yet to be released memos thus: “One senior Obama official . . . said the memos were ‘ugly’ and could embarrass the CIA. Other officials predicted they would fuel demands for a ‘truth commission’ on torture.”
The narrative that has taken shape since Cheney left office and lost the chance to stonewall inquiries is damning to the former vice-president. It was not an accident, it seems to me, that Cheney went on CNN the morning The New York Times published leaked testimony from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The documents detailed horrifying CIA practices that the Red Cross unequivocally called torture – shoving prisoners in tiny, air-tight coffins, waterboarding, beatings, sleep deprivation, stress positions: all the techniques we have now come to know almost by heart. And torture is a war crime. War crimes have no statute of limitations and are among the most serious crimes of which one can be accused.
This is what Cheney is desperate to avoid. It is unclear whether he will actually ever be prosecuted, but the facts of his record will wend their way inexorably into the sunlight. That means he could become a pariah. Even though the CIA actively destroyed the videotapes of torture sessions, it could not destroy the legal and administrative record now available to the new administration.
So Cheney is reduced to asserting that what he did saved countless lives and averted many plots. He is reduced to asserting the same Manichean view of the world that gave us Guantanamo, Bagram and the Iraq war: fighting terrorism is “a tough mean, dirty, nasty business”, he told Polit-ico, an American political website. “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”
But no one is urging that we turn the other cheek: they are simply saying the West has to obey the laws of war and the rule of law in its battle against jihadist terrorism. By coming out so forcefully and so publicly so soon after he left office, Cheney is intent on asserting that the torture programme he set up was legal, moral and defensible. Like many of Obama’s former foes, he may come to regret making that move in his own defence.
www.andrewsullivan.com
Ron Suskind long ago reported that the torture of Abu Zubaydah gave us no intelligence worth anything. The WaPo confirms that today. Money quote:
In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said. Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. . . . None of [their earlier claims] was accurate, the new evidence showed.
Abu Zubaydah was not who president Bush wished he was. Bush had declared him chief of operations for al Qaeda, but Zubaydah was far more peripheral. But here's the critical dynamic for the use of torture:
As weeks passed after the capture without significant new confessions, the Bush White House and some at the CIA became convinced that tougher measures had to be tried. The pressure from upper levels of the government was "tremendous," driven in part by the routine of daily meetings in which policymakers would press for updates, one official remembered. "They couldn't stand the idea that there wasn't anything new," the official said. "They'd say, 'You aren't working hard enough.' There was both a disbelief in what he was saying and also a desire for retribution -- a feeling that 'He's going to talk, and if he doesn't talk, we'll do whatever.' "
This is the rabbit hole you disappear into once you bring torture into the equation. Notice how very far this is from any ticking time-bomb scenario, the one routinely hauled out by Bush apologists. Notice how revenge is never easily separated from intelligence-seeking when it comes to torture. Notice the unintended consequences. This particular torture led to the torture of another person, Jose Padilla, an American citizen who also turned out to be far less significant a figure than the Bush administration suspected. It also led to dozens of false leads, wasted time, and bad information. (Remember how the critical bad information that Saddam and al Qaeda were connected came from torture as well.) Cheney and his apparatchiks continue to insist that they got reliable and vital information from these torture sessions, but they can never verify it:
Since 2006, Senate intelligence committee members have pressed the CIA, in classified briefings, to provide examples of specific leads that were obtained from Abu Zubaida through the use of waterboarding and other methods, according to officials familiar with the requests. The agency provided none, the officials said.
We sold our souls for lies.
Those gosh darn silly republicans won't shake the Napoleon complex, either, apparently:
Texas Senator John Cornyn wins the overreacting award for threatening “World War III” if the Democrats try to seat Al Franken in the Senate before Norm Coleman can fully pursue his case through the federal courts. Even Cornyn admits that a federal challenge could take “years” to resolve. Meanwhile, Minnesota will be without one of their senators.
Recall that right after the election, when initial results showed Coleman slightly ahead, he declared that Franken should concede to save time and money. But after the recount put Franken ahead (and by a larger margin than Coleman’s earlier lead) he changed his tune. A state lawsuit has been dragging on ever since (almost 5 months now), but a ruling from the 3-judge state election panel is expected any day now. Everyone expects Franken to be declared the winner, but Coleman will undoubtably appeal to the state supreme court, and then to federal court, on up to the US Supreme Court. Years, indeed.
I guess this is the Republican way of saying that if they can’t win, they won’t let anyone play.
This was interesting. It begs the question, with no current leadership and impressions like this, does the republican party have a future?
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The Young And The Right, Ctd
It's worse than many think. A reader writes:
I was reading your blog the other day, when I saw a post called "The Young and The Right". It talked about how not only do the young have a high approval rating of Obama, but we have a distinctly low approval rating of the Republican leaders in congress. I'm two months from graduating High School in North Carolina, a 40 year Republican stronghold, and newly minted swing state. I've grown up with my only personal memories of politics being that of the Bush Administration.
Every friend of mine that registered to vote last year registered not as an independent but as a Democrat. Many more too young to vote told me they wanted to do the same. The lasting political effect of the Bush Administration is not only that's created a new generation of (for now) solid up-ticket to down-ticket Democratic voters, but a new generation of leftists.
What the Bush Administration has done is make words like "Statism" "Democratic socialism" and "Welfare State" spoken with praise by Teenagers in Western North Carolina.
All we know of the right is the Ultra-reactionary and barbaric performance of President Bush and the Congressional republicans, and, for the most part, all we've seen from the Left is dogged opposition to the right's inane or insane policies. Conservatism as a movement has lost its future, because it has, from what I can see, completely lost the young. The Hour is getting very late for the Right to talk about deficits or of social squabbles. It only reinforces their image to the young as the political group that has to be stopped. They are fast digging their own graves.
Until the right thoroughly accounts for what happened over the last eight years - and not in a perfunctory aside - they will have no credibility in reshaping their movement. And they should be ignored.
In one sense, it isn't hard to see why the Republican Party seems to be coming apart at the seams. When you get caught gutting the regulations that had kept us for 70 years from another stock market crash like the crash of 1929 and another collapse of the banking system like the one that occurred during the Great Depression, and when your policies throw millions of people out of their homes, jobs, retirement, and doctors' offices, the next bottle of elixir you sell is not likely to fly off the shelf, especially if it's the same whine in a new deCantor.
But at a deeper level, the modern conservative movement, which eventually came to define the GOP (to its benefit for many years), was built on an ideological foundation--and a coalition--that was fundamentally incoherent. It took a charismatic leader to bring it together (Ronald Reagan), a tacit agreement among its coalition partners to give each other what they wanted, and a message machine to start selling the idea that that there was coherence to a conservative "philosophy" that was anything but coherent.
Modern conservatism wove together five discrete strands and interest groups that couldn't coexist. What is remarkable is how well it held together despite the fact that those strands were actually difficult to interweave.
The first strand is libertarian conservatism, reflected in leaders from Barry Goldwater to Ron Paul. Libertarian conservatives believe government should be small and weak and kept that way through low taxes. From their point of view, the primary role of government is to police the streets, protect private property, and protect the country from external threats (although at times they can get a little histrionic about internal threats as well).
The second strand, with which libertarianism is entirely incompatible, is social conservatism, particularly Christian fundamentalism. Fundamentalists of any sort believe that they have privileged knowledge of God's Will and hence have the right to use whatever methods available--including the instruments of state--to impose that will on others. It is one thing to believe, as many democratic (and increasingly Democratic) evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics do, that life begins at conception. It is another to believe that because you believe that, you have the right to impose your interpretation of the books you consider holy on others who may not share your faith or your interpretation of Scripture. The fundamentalist politics practiced by the likes of Falwell, Robertson, and Dobson over the last 30 years should have been anathema to genuine libertarians, because they run against everything libertarian conservatives believe in vis-à-vis intrusive government. However, the two groups lived happily together as long as libertarians got to keep their taxes low and their rifles loaded and fundamentalists got to keep their kids from learning anything about birth control (leading the Bible Belt to have the highest rates of teen pregnancy and abortion anywhere in the country, although Sarah Palin seems to be leading a one-family crusade to recapture for Alaska the title of Miss Teen Pregnancy).
The third strand of conservatism is old fashioned fiscal conservatism--the kind that once led Bob Dole to garner his party's nomination for president but would make him unwelcome in the contemporary GOP. Fiscal conservatives are essentially soft New Dealers, who accept the premises of the New Deal--that we need a safety net, that when people lose their jobs because of economic downturns they shouldn't lose their homes, that people deserve some minimal degree of dignity in old age if they worked hard for 40 years--but prefer the safety net and tax codes to be thin. Fiscal conservatism bears no logical relation to social conservatism, and although it bears a superficial resemblance to libertarian conservatism, the two are fundamentally at odds, with one accepting the premises of the New Deal and the other rejecting them.
The fourth strand, national security conservatism, is a different breed. National security conservatives tend to be hawkish (although they have a curious habit of evading military service when it comes their turn), and they are generally quick to accuse others of being soft on the threat du jour (unless the other side happens to be in an interventionist mood, in which case they often morph into isolationists just for sport, as when George W. Bush attacked Clinton and Gore for "nation building" and then went on a six year binge of it). The militarism of national security conservatism is as far at odds from evangelical Christianity (and hence social conservatism) as it could be, given that Jesus preached most about the evils of war, poverty, and public expressions of piety, but somehow Christian social conservatives have found a way to rationalize militarism (not to mention ignore the plight of the poor or blame them for their poverty and build crystal cathedrals). Indeed, fundamentalist Christians were the strongest supporters of the Iraq War of any demographic group other than the Bush and Cheney families.
The final strand of conservatism is the one Nixon exploited with his Southern Strategy and the Republicans have exploited ever since, whether the issue is voting rights, "welfare queens," affirmative action, or the fate of "illegals": prejudice, whether conscious (as when Reagan and Nixon used, let's say, "colorful" terms, to describe those on welfare) or unconscious (as when Bob Corker ran a race against Harold Ford, a black Congressman from Tennessee, asking, "Who's the real Tennessean?", when what he was really activating in the back of voters' minds was, "he's not really one of 'us,' now is he"?). Given that most white Americans no longer see themselves or want to see themselves as racist, and that they actually consciously eschew racist sentiments and actions such as overt discrimination against people because of the color of their skin, emotional appeals to this segment of the conservative population tend to be strongest when a conscious "text" with some merit (e.g., we can't simply open the floodgates to all who would want to enter the United States and become citizens) is superimposed on the unconscious "subtext" of prejudice (the people flooding in happen to have dark skin). Although it's easy to localize this strand of conservatism as Southern, given that the GOP has become a regional party, it is important to note that had the Presidential election only included white voters (the Republicans' fantasy), McCain would have won in a 63-37 landslide over Barack Obama. But conservatives don't have much on their side on this one either, except to the extent that they can block the vote, because demographics are running in the wrong direction for them over the next 50 years.
I would never underestimate the ability of the right to find a way to stitch something back together, for two reasons. First, they're good at it. They're short on ideas, but they're long on selling ideas, however vapid. Second, Democrats are exactly the opposite: They're long on ideas but short on the ability to bundle them into coherent, emotionally compelling narratives that make people want to buy them--except when the GOP is so corrupt, inept, and/or bankrupt (or causing bankruptcy) that even moderate Republicans jump ship.
The reality is that it's going to be difficult to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and it's going to take someone with vision and charisma to figure out which aspects of conservatism to bring back into the center and which to catapult without losing a base that is now seriously out of step with mainstream America. I don't see that leader in Bobby "let me tell you a story about my dad and how in America, anything is possible" Jindal, Tim "let me tell you a story before you fall asleep and I have to certify Al Franken" Pawlenty, and Sarah "let me tell a lot of stories and hope no one checks the facts" Palin.
Faux tea parties aren't going to get them there, either (and if you ask me, they seem more than a little elite (tea?) and, well, gay (don't real men drink beer?) for a Party determined to "save the institution of marriage." But perhaps as they clink their porcelain cups in unison for high tea, they'll have an epiphany about how to replace their predictable and carping Constant Comments about taxes and deficits with a new blend. Perhaps they could borrow some green tea from the President.
Drew Westen, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University, founder of Westen Strategies, and author of "The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation."
Do they need to shake a "complex??
Check this out. The independents are now the largest party. For those of you that don't understand, these are the folks that associate with neither the dems or the republicans! and they probably only watch MSNBC or Fox News for a laugh.
http://www.pollster.com/polls/us/party-id.php?xml=http://www.pollster.com/flashcharts/content/xml/USPartyID.xml&choices=Democrat,independent,Republican&phone=&ivr=&internet=&mail=&smoothing=&from_date=&to_date=&min_pct=&max_pct=&grid=&points=1&lines=1&colors=independent-1B8F3E,Democrat-2247AF,Republican-BF0014
Interesting statistics from this week's The Economist. It would seem that the republican party is becoming a SAM (small, angry man) and is quickly developing a Napoleon personna of its own:
Mr Specter’s decision is yet more proof that the once mighty Republican Party is in a perilous state—abandoning the middle ground of politics to the Democrats and retreating into an ideological and regional cocoon. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll revealed that the proportion of Republicans had shrunk from 25% in late March to just 21% today, the party’s lowest figure for more than a quarter of a century. That compares with 35% for Democrats and 38% for independents. A recent Democracy Corps poll also shows that Mr Obama enjoys a 16-point advantage over the Republicans on the economy, a 24-point advantage on heath care and a 27-point advantage on energy policy.
Even these dramatic numbers may understate how bad the situation is for the Republicans. The party is rapidly disappearing in whole swathes of America. The proportion of Republicans among 20-somethings has reached its lowest ebb since records began to be kept after the second world war. Just two and a bit years ago Pennsylvania had two Republican senators. Today it has none, and there are precious few in the entire north-east.
Club for shrinkage
Mr Specter argued that he had almost no choice but to abandon an increasingly shrunken and hardline party. More than 200,000 Pennsylvania Republicans, most of them suburban moderates, shifted their party identification to the Democrats during the last election cycle, giving Mr Obama a ten-point victory in the state and leaving Mr Specter at the mercy of an ever-diminishing band of hardliners. Mr Specter’s particular nemesis, the Club for Growth, is proving to be a Club for Shrinkage.
The Republican Party would be wise to think carefully about its loss of Mr Specter, one of America’s best known senators, whose views are shared by many old-line business-friendly Republicans. Some clearly realise what a mess their party is in. Ms Snowe described his decision to jump ship as “devastating” both “personally and then for the party”. But all too many others were content to respond with lame jokes (“I read that he was switching parties, but was disappointed to learn he’s still a Democrat”) and even lamer declarations of ideological purity.
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