Comics Friday: The Fringe Candidates

Hijinks Ensue

Must. not. blog. about. Palin.

Letterman jokes that Bristol was knocked up by A-Rod -- poor taste, not acceptable in our politics and worth criticizing him for -- and makes it even worse by telling the joke in a way that opens it up to the interpretation that he was talking about the 14 year old Willow -- incredibly stupid, but he did apologize -- and rather than accepting the apology at face value, Palin decides to imply that Letterman is a child molester.

Letterman jokes that she dresses like a slutty flight attendant -- poor taste, not acceptable in our politics and worth criticizing him for -- and she claims that her first thought was for the poor flight attendants who he had slandered.

Really? I mean, if Palin would just handle this like a human being I'd be on her side.

Adding: Accepting the apology at face value would mean accepting that Letterman meant to be joking about Bristol. It wouldn't mean saying that Letterman did nothing wrong.

Sotomayor messaging meeting (abridged)

GOP Thinker #1:Okay boys, we've got our nominee. Let's get to work. What have we got on...what's her name again?
GOP Thinker #2: Sotomayor.
GOP Thinker #6: I believe it's actually pronounced Sotomayor.
GOP Thinker #3: God help us, where do they get these people? Can't they just give us Garcia?
GOP Thinker #6: I wouldn't lead with that.
GOP Thinker #3: Did we ask you? Are you even in this meeting?
GOP Thinker #4: Cuervo.
GOP Thinker #3: What?
GOP Thinker #4: For her name. It would be funny if it were Cuervo.
GOP Thinker #6 (softly): Jesus.
GOP Thinker #1: Boys, come on now! What have we got?
GOP Thinker #3: She's a woman. Hispanic. Affirmative action hire.
GOP Thinker #2: Everybody hates affirmative action.
GOP Thinker #6: Her resume's a little deeper than that...
GOP Thinker #2: True.
GOP Thinker #6: Ivy League. Yale Law Review. It's not going to stick. We need to find cases. Who was on that?
GOP Thinker #11: I've got the summaries from the interns. Top line is solid work, unlikely to change the balance of the court.
GOP Thinker #3: What are you two even doing in this meeting? Jesus.
GOP Thinker #1: Guys! Let's get back on task.
GOP Thinker #2: That's right, back on task!
GOP Thinker #1: So what have we got?
GOP Thinker #4: I've got a speech where she says some things about how being ethnic makes her a better judge, a few other things like that.
GOP Thinker #3: There's the name. We can do a lot with the name.
GOP Thinker #2: Great ideas all around!
GOP Thinker #6: Are you people kidding? Do you understand that backlash politics won't work forever? The country is changing.
GOP Thinker #1: Really, how did you get into this meeting?
GOP Thinker #2: Yes, that's a good question.
GOP Thinker #3: Now we're getting somewhere!

Adding: Ta-Nehisi Coates has da rill shit.

Hmmm

Called "Daisy," The RNC's new 30-second Web ad uses footage of the now-infamous 1964 Lyndon Johnson commercial by the same name that showed a young girl picking off the pedals of a flower as a nuclear explosion is heard in the background.

That ad, which only ran once but was widely criticized as being extreme, ends with the image of a mushroom crowd and Johnson declaring, "We must either love each other, or we must die."

The New RNC ad splices the image of the girl with Obama's earlier declaration suggesting that closing Guantanamo Bay is "easy." This time the girl asks "To close it? To close it not?" as she picks off flower pedals.|CNN|

I don't see any way to read this except as an attempt to double-down on fear mongering. Maybe I'm biased. Anyhow, I tried to imagine what was going on in the room where they conceived the ad, but all I came up with was this:

GOP Thinker #1: We need a web ad for this Gitmo thing...
GOP Thinker #2: Got to drive home the message that the world will end if any of these guys are moved anywhere. Cuba, man, it's isolated. You can't even get a cigar out of there.
GOP Thinker #3: Man, all you have to do to get a cuban cigar is go to Canada.
GOP Thinker #2: Really?
GOP Thinker #3: Oh yeah. I've got a friend who crosses over from time to time and always brings a few back. Want me to get you a box?
GOP Thinker #2: Wow, that'd be...
GOP Thinker #1: Guys! On task, ok? We need fear, and the cigar angle isn't going to work.
GOP Thinker #2: Save the cigar angle for when Clinton runs!
GOP Thinker #3: Ha, ha, ha
GOP Thinker #1: Guys! Ah hell. Let's just recycle the daisy ad.
GOP Thinker #2: Chappaquiddick!

Bonus Content: Probably you'd like to watch the ad, so here it is.

Let's do it!

"I think that the House has an absolute obligation to open an inquiry, and I hope there will be a resolution to investigate her. And I think this is a big deal. I don't think the speaker of the House can lie to the country on national security matters," the [Gingrich] said in an interview with ABC Radio. |CNN|

The up-is-downism, the sheer chutzpah, the very idea of investigating Pelosi for allegedly lying about the content of secret briefings given during a period when the Bush administration was publicly lying the country into a war, well, you've got to admire it.

But since a thorough investigation will get more torture documents into the public record, I say go for it. And good luck arguing against those other investigations once the Dems prove willing to investigate their own leadership.

Adding: As long as I'm torture briefing blogging this morning, this is exactly right:

It can’t possibly be the operating assumption of the US government that members of congress and their senior staff are traitors. And if there’s something that genuinely needs to be kept secret for national security purposes, then you have to assume that honest and patriotic members of congress aren’t going to leak damaging information. But it’s clear that in the case of this waterboarding business, there was no real security need for all this operational secrecy. Instead, the Bush administration wanted to keep it secret because it was illegal and if people found out that it was happening they were likely to blow the whistle on the illegal torturing that was happening. But helping powerful people cover-up illegal activity is precisely what classification isn’t supposed to accomplish. |Yglesias|

How's that working out for you?

Remember how the Reagan administration became a laughingstock for allegedly trying to classify ketchup as a vegetable?

This week, the Obama administration warned that Cheerios are a drug. |The Fever Swamp|

To review the ketchup incident, what happened was that the Reagan administration, seeking to save money on free lunches for poor children, attempted to classify ketchup (and, it should be noted, pickle relish) as a vegetable. They were rightly criticized on the grounds that the point of the free lunch program was to ensure that those children had at least one nutritious meal a day. And, yes, they were ridiculed.

As for Cheerios:

In a warning letter, the FDA cited the claim that “you can lower your cholesterol by 4 per cent in six weeks” by eating Cheerios regularly.

It objected to Cheerios’ assertion that “eating two 1½ cup servings daily of Cheerios cereal reduced bad cholesterol when eaten as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol”.

The claims – a central plank of Cheerios marketing for more than two years – go beyond the tightly defined health benefit claim for foods with soluble fibres, such as Cheerios, approved by the FDA for use in food marketing.

Dr Steven Sundloff, head of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety, said the action was “not to impugn Cheerios”, which he called “a product that can be part of a healthy diet”.

But he said: “The packaging clearly carries a drug claim.”|Financial Times|

To get the reading comprehension business out of the way, the Obama administration is claiming that Cheerios are NOT a drug.

But let's not be fooled into thinking that the folks over at The National Review^[1] weren't able to figure that out. The point here wasn't to expose hypocrisy. They're following Alinsky's playbook, rule number five. In case you don't have the playbook memorized, that's the one about ridicule being your most powerful weapon.

Got doubt?: The very next entry over at the Swamp reads, verbatim and in full, "Naturally, the Internet has taken to the frying pan." Reading that, you might think that some fevered yet enterprising fellow traveler has almost instantaneously whipped up a this-is-your-brain-on-cheerios parody. But, no, the link is to a web video of somebody cooking Cheerios in a completely apolitical fashion.

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1 -- Have I, by referring to the NRO's daily blog as 'the fever swamp' contributed to the sense that they are imbecile's who shouldn't be expected to know their assholes from their eyeballs? Possibly.

The vandals took the handles

The Republican Party reminds me of a perverse version of Students for a Democratic Society circa 1969: a once influential and powerful organization falling apart over issues of ideology with each era of leadership demanding increasing radical ideological purity and purging those who do not follow the party line with proper rigor. That one was a group of radical students and the other has been the dominant political party in the United States for the last 30 years makes the comparison seem ridiculous, which reinforces just how insane the Republicans have actually become. |Alterdestiny|

(via)

How many trumpets was that?

I agree with the entire first paragraph of an editorial at the fever swamp, and can find very little to disagree with in the rest. I don't know that this has ever happened before.

Arlen Specter belongs to a type familiar to Congress: the time-serving hack devoid of any principle save arrogance. He has spent three decades in the Senate but is associated with no great cause, no prescient warning, no landmark legislation. Yet he imagines that the Senate needs his wisdom and judgment for a sixth term. He joined the Republican party out of expediency in the 1960s, and leaves it out of expediency this week. |The Fever Swamp|

Adding: While I think that the folks over at the fever swamp are completely right about Specter's defection, it's odd that conservatives are somehow able to see the truth about the shallowness of Specter's principles while remaining so blind to so much else. As insincere as Specter may be, he's not the only person who is reluctant to be identified as a Republican. That's the real problem, that Republicanism as it is currently practiced is desperately unpopular. That Specter is an opportunist using that situation to his own personal advantage is true, but that truth doesn't render the underlying problem non-existant.

So how do the geniuses at the fever swamp plan to deal with Republican unpopularity? Well, now that obstructionism is less viable, their idea is to be louder and more negative:

We can safely assume that the Republicans’ task, already difficult, just got harder. They will have less room to play an inside game of parliamentary maneuvers, and will therefore need even more to appeal to the public at large. They will, that is, have to work to make bad ideas unpopular ideas as well. Which is what their principal task was already. |The Fever Swamp|

Ok, then. Alternately they could look for common ground as a way of giving wayward Republicans suspicious of radical change a reason to come back to the party. But whatevs. It's their party, and they can die if they want to.

Krugman gets the last word:

...we have a party that seems to be in a death spiral: the smaller it gets, the more it’s dominated by the hard right, which makes it even smaller. In the long run, this is not good for American democracy– we really do need two major parties in competition. But I’ll settle for getting that back after we get universal health care and cap-and-trade. |Krugman|

Findings

Conservatives and liberals find The Colbert Report equally funny. They also agree that the humor is satirical, and that the character of Colbert is insincere. Conservatives think the real Colbert is a conservative and that they are in on the joke.

Update: The source.

Still thinking Specter

Specter says that the Republican party had changed. Fair enough. But the guy is 79 years old and has been in the Senate since 1980. Why not just retire?

I know, I know. Power. He says its for the people of Pennsylvania. Well, I just hope my state has a senior Senator when the immortality treatments come along.

Chew on this. Specter is the ranking member on the judiciary committee. Suppose he doesn't get that chairmanship. What does he get? Anything? Nothing??

Discussion of the defection's impact on the filibuster seems to be missing the point a little bit. Specter made it clear that he's still not obligated to vote for cloture. So the difference isn't that there can't be a filibuster.

The difference is that now a filibuster requires that Republicans talk to Democrats.

The Republicans are clearly the losers here, but that doesn't mean that the Democrats are the winners. The main winners, I think, are the self-styled moderates. Now the McCain-Lieberman gang of n are the defacto holders of the filibuster card.

Just saying.

Looking to 2010, the latest scuttlebutt is that Tom Ridge is nosing around and thinking about jumping into the race. Ridge is a moderate pro-choice Republican like Specter, but he was a popular enough governor and he's got some blood on his knuckles from his time at DHS. Given the presence of blood and the lack of baggage, you'd have to like his chances in the Republican primary. And then it's Ridge versus Specter in the general and a likely pick-up for the Democrats becomes a toss-up or worse. Wouldn't that just beat all?

All and still, as things stand it's a lost seat and the wingnuts don't seem too upset about it. They seem to prefer ideological purity, thinking that voters need to be assured that Republicans hew to a narrow ideological line.

Not an unreasonable view, if you don't mind being in the minority.

And maybe they don't.

It has occurred to me, while reading those awful torture memos, that in the Republican worldview control of the Executive Branch looms a lot larger than a Senate seat hear or there. And who's to say that being on the outs in Congress isn't going to give the next Republican candidate for President a leg up? It says here that Palin, at least, will be running against Washington.

Yeah, yeah, I should be a good Democrat and be happy. It's just that I don't much like Specter, never have, and never plan to.

Boom goes the dynamite

Specter switching parties.

Why? What changed? The obvious narrative is that Specter lost support of the death cult and was likely to lose to a primary challenger. On that story, this is all about holding on to the seat. And, based on what he said, the obvious story is true:

I take on this complicated run for re-election because I am deeply concerned about the future of our country and I believe I have a significant contribution to make on many of the key issues of the day, especially medical research. NIH funding has saved or lengthened thousands of lives, including mine, and much more needs to be done. And my seniority is very important to continue to bring important projects vital to Pennsylvania's economy.

I am taking this action now because there are fewer than thirteen months to the 2010 Pennsylvania Primary and there is much to be done in preparation for that election.|Specter|

And with regard to the issues we care about in these here parts:

My change in party affiliation does not mean that I will be a party-line voter any more for the Democrats that I have been for the Republicans. Unlike Senator Jeffords' switch which changed party control, I will not be an automatic 60th vote for cloture. For example, my position on Employees Free Choice (Card Check) will not change. |Specter|

Wingnuts, declaring their Obama hatred to be utterly incoherent and implacable, seek understanding from normal Americans, President

Adding: Yes, I know that's not how McWhorter meant it.

I know I yelled "fire", but you have to understand that the theater was crowded at the time

Item: The bloggers at the fever swamp were watching Fox News Sunday too. Richard Nadler decorated his post responding to Levin with the title Is the Constitution a suicide pact? Actually, that's not a fair summary. Nadler ignored everything Levin said, responding instead to Chris Wallace's questions, which Nadler took to be devastating and, apparently, unanswerable.

Item: Won't somebody please think of the interrogators?



Adding: I especially like the way that the Supporting-the-troops banner is literally (look at the picture!) a halo for the stab in the back doctrine. These Republicans, they take their symbols seriously, I tell ya.

The torture program, business as usual for Republicans

Little remarked in coverage of the torture scandal is the fact that running massive, and massively illegal secret programs of dubious merit and clear immorality is a hallmark of Republican governance. The torture program is an echo of Iran/Contra, an echo of all those dirty little wars south of the border, an echo of Nixon's FBI.

That's my Senator!

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Bonus Content: Bill Kristol calls for a public debate on torture with Dick Cheney up front and center. I'd say "Bring it on!", but Kristol already did and this is not a cheerocracy.

Pelosi's answer to the charge that she knew about torture

Below is a partial transcript of a press conference Pelosi gave a few days ago.

While there are some unverifiable factual claims here -- claims about the precise content of the briefing, for example -- it seems to me that Pelosi mounts a pretty strong defense to the charges. The story she tells is of a Congress trying to find ways to exercise oversight over an Administration that was committed to finding ways to evade oversight.

That's the world I remember living in.

Here's the text:

Q: "It does pretty specifically talk about the fact that Abu Zubaydah, they started using these tactics, including water boarding in 2002 and continued doing it in 2003 and 2004."

Pelosi: "I was not briefed on that."

Q: "And in the fall, 2002, after the use of interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah, CIA records indicate that the CIA briefed the chairman and vice chairman of the Committee on Intelligence."

Pelosi: "They didn't tell us that. They may have briefed us on something, but they did not brief us to that effect. They can say whatever they want, but the fact is they did not brief us in that regard.

"Now, people hear things and say, 'I would have concluded that they would have done that because the CIA, their business is deception.' And if Mr. Goss read something into it from his experience in the CIA, or what he learned later when he became Chair -- head of the CIA, that is something quite different than my experience, which is as a member of Congress I expect when somebody tells me something, they are telling me the truth."

Q: "Does this call into question the value of the briefing then, if they are not telling you fully?"

Pelosi: "I have questioned the values of the briefings over and over and over again. We only know what they choose to tell us and the manner and time in which they tell us. And that is why when people are talking about -- whether they are talking about torture, or whether they are talking about wiretapping, or whatever you are talking about -- we really have to have a change now in how Congress can do its oversight, because we expect and demand the truth.

"And that's why I, when I became speaker, established this joint committee between the Appropriations Committee and the Intelligence Committee, because the fact is they really were not fully briefing the Intelligence Committee. And they have to answer to the Appropriations Committee because that's where their funding comes from.

"It is a long story, it's an evolution. It used to be the Intelligence Committee -- you couldn't appropriate unless the Intelligence Committee authorized. It was almost effectively an appropriation. Over time the intelligence in the Bush years became part of supplementals so there was absolutely no sharing of information. They would just stick the request in the supplementals. We said, 'OK, if they are going right to Appropriations, we will have members of the Intelligence Committee serve in this hybrid committee, part Intelligence, part Appropriations.'

"But as we go forward, it is not just about torture. It's about how we collect intelligence to protect the American people. And that is a very serious responsibility of Congress to do the proper oversight and to work with the administration, whatever the party, in a very nonpolitical way to get this done."

Q: "At the time when you did receive these legal opinions, as you put them, did you raise any objections, legal, moral or otherwise?"

Pelosi: "That's not the point, Mike. The point is they come in to inform you of what they are doing. What my point was, are they doing this? No, they're not doing it. And then to leave there to see what recourse we had, which was none."

Q: "But certainly you had the right and even responsibility to."

Pelosi: "You would have to -- you would have -- same thing with wiretapping. This is what they're doing. That's all they do. They don't come in to consult. They come in to notify. They come in to notify. And you can't -- you can't change what they are doing unless you can act as a committee or as a class. You can't change what they are doing." |Source|

Adding: This WaPo article from December 2007, which is excellent and to be read, seems to be the primary source from which the Pelosi-was-complicit-in-torture charge draws most of its facts.

Loose torture ends: Pelosi and the criminalization of policy differences

Since it's torture week here at the blog of record, I thought it might be worth taking a few minutes to address a couple of wingnut talking points that have been making the rounds, but which haven't made their way into our exhaustive coverage.

Let's start with the claim that Democratic leaders in Congress -- and specifically Nancy Pelosi -- knew about the torture program and signed off on it. On one account, perhaps true and perhaps rumor, Pelosi even asked why we weren't using harsher techniques on men like Abu Zubaydah.

It's very difficult to know what precisely happened here. To read the wingnut blogs, Pelosi knew plenty at every step of the way and signed off without objection. That conclusion, however, seems to be based on a combination of cherry picked public statements by Pelosi and hearsay by the likes of Cheney. Perhaps more importantly, anything Pelosi knew about the torture program she would have known on the basis of briefings conducted by the Bush/Cheney executive branch. For my part, I'm not willing to assume that the information provided at those briefings was either true or complete.

But suppose we assume that the wingnut narrative is completely correct. Where does that leave us? It doesn't, I would say, leave us with the conclusion that the Democratic leadership in Congress bears the same kind of blame as those who designed, justified, oversaw, or ordered the creation of the torture program. A failure of oversight by Congress is not in the same league. Not even close.

All that said, if the wingnut narrative is correct, I'm more that willing to throw Pelosi under the bus. If she did, in fact, sign off without objection to the torture program while having a working knowledge of its operation, then she ought not to be in any kind of leadership position in the American government. And I say this as someone who has been impressed with her work throughout her tenure as Speaker.

Which brings me to the second wingnut talking point that I wanted to address. This is the one that says that any attempt to bring the architects of the Bush Administration torture program to justice would amount to the criminalization of policy difference. There is, to be sure, a coherent argument to be made on this general point. That argument would go roughly like this:

1. Laws do not interpret themselves, so each presidential administration must necessarily interpret the law and decide what practical constraints it places on action.

2. Separate administrations may disagree about the correct interpretation of law; in point of fact, a single administration may change its view over time even though there has been no change of law or facts.

3. Because administrations may disagree about the correct interpretation of law, any given administration may also sometimes interpret the law to allow policies which another administration might judge to be illegal.

4. To maintain that such policy differences could result in illegal acts would place in legal jeopardy officials who have done nothing other than what they must to fulfill the duties and obligations of their position.

5. Government officials ought not to be placed in legal jeopardy for fulfilling the duties and obligations of their position.

6. Thus, we ought not to maintain that policy differences resulting from competing interpretations of law could result in illegal acts.

Indeed, we wouldn't want something like an honest disagreement over whether CO2 falls within the scope of the EPA's enabling legislation to lead to criminal prosecutions. But what goes without saying in the argument, and ought to be able to go without saying in general, is that when presidential administrations interpret the law they have a duty to do their very best to interpret the law correctly. The crux of the complaint against the Bush Administration is that they manufactured specious legal justifications rather than interpreting the law in good faith. If that complaint is true, then the argument above would fail to go through. This is because officials who offer (or demand) specious justifications for clearly untenable interpretations of the law have not, in fact, "done nothing other than what they must to fulfill the duties and obligations of their position." On the contrary, they have knowingly and willfully subverted the law.

That's not a policy difference. That's a crime.

Adding: It's probably also worth noting that most of the actual arguments given for the criminalization-of-policy-differences claim are considerably less cogent than the one I've laid out above. Consider the following, posted earlier today at the fever swamp:

Whatever one's position on the propriety of the enhanced interrogation methods, there's no evidence that the use of the methods resulted in the death of a single American. On the contrary, several credible sources maintain that the methods kept Americans from being killed. Nonetheless, some partisans assert that those who crafted the enhanced interrogation policy should be imprisoned.

Contrast that with the position of those same partisans regarding the governmental officials who crafted the famous pre- 9/11 "Wall" — i.e., the Clinton-era policy that separated criminal investigations from intelligence operations, thereby impeding counter-terrorism investigations.

Among other things, the Wall prevented counter-terrorism investigators from accessing the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, days before 9/11. At the time one FBI investigator said, "Someday someone will die — and, wall or not — the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain problems."

The Wall went beyond what was legally necessary and indisputably rendered Americans more vulnerable to terrorist attacks (whether removal of the Wall would've prevented 9/11 can only be a matter of speculation). The Wall was kept in place by government officials who were on notice that terrorists planned to kill Americans. It was kept in place even after terrorists had succeeded — pre 9/11 — in killing Americans. Maintenance of the policy was reckless and inexcusable — some might even argue that it was criminal. |Peter Kirsanow|

Kirsanow has packed the nonsense so tightly here that he's risked the formation of a bullshit singularity. To pick out just one problem with the argument on offer, he's equivocating between standard and metaphorical uses of the word 'criminal'. The Bush administration knowingly and willfully subverted the law. The Clinton administration, in Kirsanow's own words, "went beyond what was legally necessary." These are different things, even if you work yourself up into a lather and declare that it's criminal to go beyond what is legally necessary.

Please, let's go there (another post about torture)

As Kevin Drum points out, the real hypocrisy here is coming from the right, not from the left. But if Joe doesn't agree, and would like to start a national conversation about this, I'm game. I, for one, would love to hear someone on the right explain to me precisely why the Starr investigation was justified but an investigation of the process by which the Bush Administration put in place their torture program would be completely out of bounds.

How to get yourself off the torture train

"I don't give a rat's ass if it worked. We are America. We don't fucking torture." -- Shep Smith, FoxNews Anchor

The quote is from a webcast, but still. HuffPo has the video, as well as video of an on-air segment which is pretty remarkable in its own right.

A few days ago, Neil Sinhababu wrote:

It used to be that we were worried about Fox News defeating us in elections, or beating the drums for another Bush Administration war. Winning by big margins is nice, because we don't have to worry about those particular horrors for at least a little while. But now we have to worry about how Fox and the rest of the right-wing noise machine are going to continually sustain a substantial minority of crazy people, preventing the formation of an anti-torture consensus, an anti-war-of-aggression consensus, and anti-warrantless-spying consensus. Even if there's majority support for these views, anybody scrapping for power within the Republican Party will find reason to oppose them, just to get a majority of Republicans. |Donkeylicious|

It now seems possible, with regard to this issue at least, that Shep Smith is the canary in the coal mine, and that those on the right who seek to justify torture aren't going to be able to keep their arguments animated. Truth will out, as they say, and most people -- even those who have poor taste in politicians -- are liable to be shocked and disgusted when confronted with the truth about the Bush Administration's torture program. That fact, rather than the bullshit we've been hearing, is why the the program was shrouded in secrecy.

Holy crap!

Jordan Barab, who ran the workplace safety blog Confined Space -- is the acting head of OSHA! More here, here, and here.