Right Wing Nut House

That old saw which states “All politics are local” was first used (I believe) by former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill when pundits were predicting huge gains for Republicans in the 1978 elections. Jimmy Carter was as unpopular as George Bush and Republicans were rubbing their hands together in anticipation of picking off several Democrats. O’Neill, a burly, old-fashioned Irish pol with the charm of a snake oil salesman and the fighting instincts of a Doberman Pincher was whistling past the graveyard. The Republicans successfully made Carter’s incompetence an issue and picked up 15 seats in the House and 3 in the Senate.

The GOP now faces a similar situation with the Democrats trying to nationalize the upcoming mid-terms while Republicans seek to keep people’s focus on their own Congressional candidate. How successful can the Democrats be in pushing the President front and center in people’s minds? Michael Barone:

The slight uptick in Republican percentages in 2002 and 2004 can be explained by higher Republican turnout. Looking ahead to next November, there is reason to believe that the Republican base is turned off — by high spending, by immigration — and may not turn out as heavily. But if so, how much difference will that make?

Polls are not good predictors of turnout — only elections are. Last week, we had a special election in the 50th district of California, whose Republican congressman resigned in disgrace and went to prison. In 2004, the 50th district voted 55 percent for George W. Bush and 44 percent for John Kerry. Last week, the district voted 53 percent for Republicans (there were 14 candidates, the winner among whom goes on to a June 6 runoff) and 45 percent for Democrats. There were only two of them, and the leader, Francine Busby, got 44 percent of the vote — the same percentage as Kerry. That may be 1 percent higher when the last absentees are counted.

Barone’s reasoning is sound. Even though the “base” may be turned off or unenthusiastic, if relative turnout percentages remain basically the same, the Republicans will lose some ground but probably not the 15 seats necessary for Democrats to take control of the House.

But can one extrapolate a national result from looking at one pro-GOP district? Barone thinks that there are two general hypotheses that govern mid-terms:

Hypothesis One sees House elections as a referendum on the president and his party. If the president’s job rating is above 50 percent, his party tends to suffer only narrow losses or even, as in 1934 and 1998 — and almost in 1962 — makes gains. If the president’s job rating is significantly under 50 percent, his party tends to lose lots of seats.

[...]

Hypothesis One was developed by political scientists and psephologists over many years. Hypothesis Two is one I developed myself, and it’s based only on the elections of the last 10 years. In the five House elections from 1996 to 2004, there has been very little variation in the popular vote percentages for both parties. The Republican percentage of the popular vote for the House has fluctuated between 49 and 51 percent, the Democratic percentage between 46 and 48.5 percent

In other words, our politics has become so polarized that very few minds are changed despite all the Republican missteps thus making turnout the determining factor. And given the GOP’s record in the past 2 elections, this in fact bodes well for the party in November.

This could be especially true if Republicans carry through with their idea to energize at least a few more conservatives by playing the social issues card:

Protection of marriage amendment? Check. Anti-flag burning legislation? Check. New abortion limits? Check.

Between now and the November elections, Republicans are penciling in plans to take action on social issues important to religious conservatives, the foundation of the GOP base, as they defend their congressional majority.

In a year where an unpopular war in Iraq has helped drive President Bush’s approval ratings below 40 percent, core conservatives whose turnout in November is vital to the party want assurances that they are not being taken for granted.

Democrats have no comparable counter-play and must rely, as they did in 2004, on the anger and disgust of their base at the policies and personality of George Bush. This is because so few Republicans (relatively speaking) are willing to walk into a voting booth and pull the lever for the Democrats.

It’s their own fault. I daresay not too many people are willing to vote for a party that called Republican voters after the 2004 election “ignorant mouthbreathers,” or threatened to secede from the Union because they did not want to co-exist with people from the other party.

In fact, I’d say that’s the major difference between 2006 and 1994; it isn’t necessarily the rough percentages of people who identify themselves as Republican or Democrat it’s how many minds can be changed to vote for the other guy. It was even more pronounced a phenomena in the Watergate year of 1974 when the Democrats nearly destroyed the Congressional GOP party by picking up 49 seats in the House and 3 in the Senate (despite having to defend twice as many seats as Republicans). In that election, there were massive numbers of Republican defections. No such trend is possible today.

But can strong dislike for the President really make a difference?

The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll showed 47 percent of voters “strongly” disapprove of Bush’s job performance, vs. 20 percent who said they “strongly approve.”

In the recent past, this perennial truism of politics — emotion equals turnout — has worked more to the Republican advantage. Several weeks before the 2002 midterm elections, Bush had 42 percent of voters strongly approving of him, compared with 18 percent in strong opposition. Democrats were stunned on election night when Republicans defied historical patterns and made gains in the House and Senate. The president’s party usually loses seats during the first midterm elections after he takes office.

This number is a mirage. In strong Democratic districts, I daresay opposition to Bush this time around is as close to unanimous as you can get which would drive those numbers to their current stratospheric heights. In strong Republican districts, support for the President may have dropped but not enough to unseat the GOP incumbent. This leaves what the experts have been saying is about 35 seats that are “in play” and ripe for the picking if the Democrats field good candidates and can get out the vote.

So in the end, we’re back to turnout. And even though many Republicans may in fact stay home , they may be offset by an increase in movement conservatives that are energized by the prospect of Republicans dealing with issues near and dear to their hearts.

I am a lot less pessimistic about Republican chances in November now than I was during the winter. Unless things crash in burn in Iraq or some other calamity befalls us, it appears that the Republicans will hold on to their majorities. Their advantage may be cut in half in the House and they may lose 2-3 seats in the Senate, but as it stands now, politics will indeed be played out at the local level and the Democrat’s attempt to nationalize the election to their advantage will fail.

UPDATE

Jim Geraghty agrees with my final analysis and adds this caveat for Democrats:

You’ll recall that in 1996, Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle were saying, “We’re going to win back the House and Senate!” But they didn’t.

And in 1998, Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle were saying, “We’re going to win back the House and Senate!” But they didn’t. (Credit where it’s due, they closed the margin a bit.)

And in 2000, Dick Gephardt and Tom Daschle were saying, “We’re going to win back the House and Senate!” But they didn’t, until Jeffords switched parties.

And in 2002, Dick Gephardt said, “We’re going to win back the House!” And Daschle said, “We’re going to expand our majority in the Senate!” But they didn’t.

In 2004, Pelosi and Daschle said, “We’re going to win back the House and Senate!” But they didn’t.

So I’m not really all that surprised to hear Pelosi and Reid and Schumer saying this year, “We’re going to win back the House and Senate!”

Yes, sooner or later, they’re going to be right; it’s unlikely that the GOP will hold both houses of Congress for all eternity. And maybe this is the year. But can we have a little more skepticism? Some acknowledgement that we’ve been hearing these same confident boasts for a decade, and they’ve turned out, cycle after cycle, to be mostly empty bluster?

Do you mean to tell me that the mainstream press and the Democrats were confidently predicting victory just prior to the last 5 elections only to be totally, completely, 100% WRONG?

Never would have guessed it…

Are you going to be a “stay at home” Republican this November?

Those of us who have had nasty fantasies about stringing up some Republican leaders by their feet and slowly lowering them into a vat of boiling oil have found that idea more than a little tempting. D.J. Drummond argues strenuously against it:

If the Democrats gain control of the House of Representatives, their stated policies and intentions leave no doubt that they would harass Vice-President Cheney and President Bush, with a near-absolute likelihood that they would impeach President Bush, regardless of the fact that there are no valid grounds for such an action. If the Democrats gained control of the Senate, you could expect the end of any confirmation of any justice in the mold of Scalia, Roberts, or Alito. There can be no doubt that should the Democrats gain control of both bodies, they would work relentlessly to remove both Bush and Cheney.

A Democrat-controlled House would not only deny making the Bush tax cuts permanent, but would unquestionably increase taxes, as is the historical model. A Democrat-controlled Senate would demand the immediate retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan, while making sure to punish any nation brash enough to support American efforts in the past half-decade. A Democrat-controlled body, whether House or Senate, will immediately move to both make citizenship for illegal Hispanic aliens easier, and to grant voting rights to undeserving demographic groups, including convited felons and illegals who don’t even desire citizenship.

I agree to a certain extent with DJ, although I think the Democrats will be so busy investigating Bush they won’t have time to do much of anything else. All that pent up rage and hate carried around by the liberals for 6 years is more than likely to dominate every committee in the House and the Senate as various committee chairmen and sub-committee chairmen vie with each other to see which of them can generate the most anti-Bush, headline grabbing revelations in the shortest possible time. And since Republicans haven’t seen fit to practice any oversight on such matters as post war contracts in Iraq, Katrina relief funds, the role of the mercs in Iraq, the Pentagon’s post war planning, and on, and on, and on…Democrats should be able to keep themselves so busy that becoming a danger to the republic will be an afterthought.

That said, I think DJ loses me here:

And don’t think that we will just make things right in 2008. A Democrat-controlled legislative body can be sure to press for return of the “Fairness Doctrine”, which in practical application will be used to shut down effective Republican communication avenues, like Talk Radio and Conservative blogs. A clue to how this would be done can be found in a 2005 initiative from Google, which wanted to designate any blog which regularly linked to other blogs or its supporting evidence as a “spammer”, and thereby shut it down. Also, like taxation, the historical model for the Democrats’ desire to control information mediums is well-established.

Democrats may be expected to create yet another version of “campaign finance reform”, to maintain the control they hold and more, if the MSM can create the illusion of corruption in the GOP while covering up crimes by the Left, the resulting vacuum from shutting down Conservative sources would be filled as it was in the 1960s, by the sitting networks. This would be worth at least twenty points in the 2008 Presidential Election, which would be more than sufficient to place a Donkey in the Oval Office again. The results of adding illegals and felons to voting rolls can only strengthen the Democrat’s hold, and since we already know they will do anything to keep hold of power, there will doubtless be additional nasty tricks played to keep control once they have it.

That’s a tall order for Democrats to fill. Even if Democrats were serious about re-establishing the “Fairness Doctrine,” there’s no guarantee their caucus would be united in such an effort. Any attempt to shut down Rush Limbaugh et. al. would be met with extraordinarily serious opposition. The giant corporations that own talk radio stations would have something to say about it as well as both liberal and conservative bloggers. I daresay campaign finance reforms would meet a similar fate.

DJ has an excellent point about the issue of judicial nominees, however. But even if Republicans maintain control of one or both houses of Congress, judges will have a hard time getting confirmed as Democrats drag their heels even more than at present as they try to draw the process out through 2008 when they hope that a Democratic president would be able to reverse many of those nominations.

But “shutting down Conservative sources would be filled as it was in the 1960s, by the sitting networks?’ Sorry, that’s not in the cards. To say that network news (or even the cable outlets) will somehow gain massive numbers of viewers is wrong. For better or worse, TV news is going the way of the dinosaur and nothing and nobody can reverse that trend. They have been hemorrhaging viewers for 25 years both with the Fairness Doctrine and without it. It’s hard to see that changing what with the explosion of alternative media sources (unrelated to blogs) as well as a declining market for straight news to begin with.

However, I wanted to address DJ’s main thesis; that Republican voters who stay at home have only themselves to blame if Democrats take over the Congress in 2006. This goes to the very essence of what it means to live in a democracy and what an individual vote actually represents.

John Adams said “Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.” I wholeheartedly agree. There is no such thing as a “wasted” vote. A vote is a statement of one’s innermost and most passionately held beliefs. It cannot be “wasted” anymore than getting up at a PTA meeting to speak against an overwhelmingly popular motion is a wasted exercise. Being heard even if you are a lone advocate is what is important. And the fact that this right to be heard is protected and cherished in our republic is a true blessing, something we take for granted far too often.

If expressing opinions is the essence of democratic governance then casting a vote is the ultimate manifestation of the concept of free will; individuals make a choice on who they wish to represent their personal interests. By choosing someone who they believe reflects their personal opinions about issues important to them in a very personal way, voters seek to influence the course of events in their society in as direct a way as possible, given the enormous size of the United States. And in practical terms, living in a two party state has the advantage of maximizing the influence of a single voter by making one’s preference an either/or proposition.

But is influence the goal of voting? Or self-expression? I would argue that given that we live in a representative democracy, voting as a civic act is expressing a preference. Like a piano tuner wearing boxing gloves, a voter cannot fine tune his society by casting a ballot. He can, however, make noise like the piano tuner, pounding on either the higher register or lower sounding keys, making a generalized statement of being satisfied with the status quo or agitating for a change.

So if voting is a statement and you disagree with the way Republicans are running the country, why not just vote for the Democrat?

If you believe that the only way to express a preference is by voting, then casting a ballot for a Democrat is your only option. Thankfully, our Constitution didn’t make that necessary. No one is forcing you to vote. There is no Constitutional requirement that you express a preference at all. The reason is that despite all the cries of “dictatorship” and “fascism” by the left when railing against Bush and the Republicans, the Constitution was written in such a way that such an eventuality is well nigh impossible.

Remember all the cries against “gridlock” in the 1990’s? Many people believed that divided government - two parties controlling separate branches of government - was a catastrophe. George Will didn’t think so:

What is the worst outcome of politics? Tyranny. To what form of tyranny are democracies prey? Tyranny of the majority. Solution? Minimize the likelihood of durable oppressive majorities by maximizing the number of minorities — factions — that will coalesce only into unstable, transitory majorities.

Hence the revolution James Madison wrought in democratic theory: Democracy, far from requiring a small, homogeneous, faction-free society, will flourish in an “extensive” society with a saving multiplicity of factions. Hence government’s first duty (Federalist 10) is to protect the seedbed of factions, the “different and unequal faculties of acquiring property.” Furthermore, the Constitution’s separation of powers created a government of checks and balances, replete with blocking mechanisms, including supermajorities, vetoes, veto overrides, judicial review (it turns out) and, not least important, bicameralism.

The fact is, the “seedbed of factions” is missing today not because one party controls both houses of Congress and the Presidency but because many Republican legislators refuse to act in accordance with their beliefs and the beliefs of their constituents and instead act to maintain their influence and feather their own nests. They have lost touch with the people who elected them. In this respect, I prefer not to enable them further by casting my vote to encourage their profligacy nor to continue standby by idly watching them hand out my money to special interests in hundreds of projects that benefit the few while ignoring the many.

I have been a Republican since 1976 and have never contemplated voting for a member of any other party. But if voting is ultimately making a statement then not voting is making a statement as well. I know what Mr. Drummond is trying to say about the catastrophic consequences of a Democratic majority. In this, he may be correct. But at the moment, the Republican party from top to bottom is a broken instrument for reflecting the people’s will. And if the only way to fix it is to throw the rascals out by either casting your vote for another candidate or staying home, then it may be time to start thinking about those options.

There has been some soul searching on the left recently about whether or not the liberals love America. More specifically, whether one can love America while hating everything about her.

Joel Klein of Time Magazine started it all by saying out loud what many professional Democratic politicians have been saying privately for years; that “the hate America tendency of the [Democratic Party's] left wing’ had made it harder for Democrats to challenge Republicans on foreign policy.”

Klien specifically mentioned The Nation and Michael Moore in a great blog post at HuffPo entitled “The Crucial Difference Between Liberals and Leftists” which, for obvious reasons, did not sit well with the editor of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel who shot back with her own HuffPo piece ““The Crucial Difference Between Joe Klein and Reality.”

This is not just one more obscure lefty debate about some arcane detail of dogma that usually puts most everyone - including liberals - to sleep. It’s a discussion long past due and, from my point of view, is actually encouraging. For in shaping the parameters of the debate, what emerges is a clear separation between those whose vision of what America is all about matches that of the overwhelming majority of citizens and those who, while claiming to “love” America, actually love some other country, unrecognizable to all but the most deluded among us.

We on the right should probably stay out of this discussion - which, of course, is why I’m going to throw my two cents in. For in the end, it explains much of why the classic liberalism of a Robert Kennedy or Hubert Humphrey has become so marginalized and the dominant New Left Stalinists of The Nation , the Greens, George Soros, the Dean/Kerry axis, and the Hollywood elitists have become so important to the Democratic party.

The turning point of course, was Viet Nam. Opposition to that war energized the far left who themselves had been marginalized in the immediate aftermath of World War II as mainstream Democratic and liberal organizations like the ACLU and the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) fought and won internal power struggles against the pro-Moscow wing of the Democratic party. After a brief dalliance in trying to form their own political party in 1948 by nominating and running socialist Henry Wallace for President on the Progressive party ticket, the Stalinists were driven underground during the McCarthy excesses of the 1950’s. (Note: Wallace’s 1948 campaign should be seen as a turning point in American politics with regards to racial equality and applauded if for no other reason than the principled stand taken by the socialists on civil rights).

Viet Nam changed the entire internal dynamic on the left in the early sixties. Opposition to that war began even prior to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1965 among a small cadre of young radicals on campuses who saw the war as an issue to advance a revolutionary agenda. These New Leftists were unencumbered with the pro-Moscow “old left” political baggage and, in fact, had little or no connection with Gus Hall’s Communist Party USA that played such a large role in leftist politics in the 1930’s and 40’s. This group, later designated as “Trotskyites” were out to stop the war but were equally dedicated to overthrowing the establishment and bringing about a socialist revolution. The more rational among them like Tom Hayden and Al Lowenstein (an anti-communist seen by most of his contemporaries as “not radical enough”) wished to do this through the ballot box. Others had no such illusions and sought the violent overthrow of the government.

The Trotskyites, to some extent, eventually absorbed the old pro-Moscow left and this alliance of convenience formed the core of the anti-war left during the period of Viet Nam protests from 1965 onward.

It is important to point out that this group of “New Leftists” were not only opposed to conservative supporters of the war but also the classic liberals who backed the war in its earliest days. These liberals eventually turned against the war both as a matter of principle and politics, but it was they who were most eager to engage the Soviet Union in the Third World in what John F. Kennedy called “the long twilight struggle” against communism.

Our escalating involvement in Viet Nam could be called the greatest liberal impulse of the 20th century as for the first time, America confronted communism not only militarily, but on the battlefield of ideas as well. The New Left coalition opposed this approach because of the large pacifist element in their ranks and also because they hated what America stood for; individual rights and especially free market capitalism. Their vision of revolution did not include such selfish notions of personal freedom or the exploitive capitalistic system. In 1972, they succeeded in momentarily capturing the Democratic party and nominated quasi-socialist George McGovern for President, a disaster of historic proportions for classic liberals who were unfairly connected with the New Leftists in that overwhelming defeat.

In politics, losers don’t get to set the agenda. So while the Trotskyites proceeded to tear themselves to shreds in vicious, internecine battles over dogma and tactics (resulting in the formation of several violent offshoots), the old pro-Moscow left moved to the fore and appropriated much of the rhetoric and slogans of the New Left in a classic case of political absorption. Now in the mainstream of the Democratic party, the 1974 midterms saw many of the 72 freshmen Democratic Congressional candidates who won election successfully appealing to both the pro-Moscow left and classic liberals.

Because this “New” old left supplied the bulk of activists to work on campaigns (and in the years to come an increasing amount of money), the allegiance of these Congressmen turned more and more toward a radical redistributive social agenda and a less bellicose, more accommodating posture toward the Soviet Union. And as politics became more polarized in the 1980’s and 90’s, what was once the far left wing of the Democratic party went completely mainstream, shunning classic post World War II liberal ideals for what became known as “The Third Way” or a kind of democratic socialism as it was practiced in Europe.

Which bring us back to the Klein-Vanden Heuvel imbroglio that has the left in such a tizzy. Klein was trying to draw what I thought was a careful distinction between America as it is seen by classic liberals (who might even be considered “hawkish centrists” in the Democratic party as described by Vanden Heuvel) and leftists who reject the America as it is seen by the overwhelming majority of us in favor of a radically different country they have created out of whole cloth.

They hate the America you and I take for granted. Not the America of Bush or the Republicans. Not the America of most liberals who, while advocating solutions to our problems that we might disagree with nevertheless use basically the same frame of reference when talking and thinking about America as we do. The kind of America that liberals, conservatives, centrists, libertarians, and the rest of us believe in and work to better has at its core a strong, stubborn belief in the innate goodness of America and its people and a faith in the American “system:” free markets, free labor, and free men. While not a prerequisite, most of us also believe in American exceptionalism - whether that belief has a secular or religious foundation - that we are different from other nations on earth.

The leftover Stalinists and Trotskyites from the 1960’s that Klein was attempting to separate from the classic liberals might talk about being patriotic Americans in the same way that David Duke says he’s not anti-black, just pro-white. The Stalinists live in a country so radically different than the one you and I inhabit that they can’t for the life of them imagine (like Duke and other hatemongers) why anyone thinks them anti-American. They start from the premise that America is evil, “essentially a malignant, imperialistic force in the world and the use of American military power is almost always wrong,” as Klein so aptly points out. It doesn’t stop there, of course. They believe our history is a sham, our myths, destructive, our families, dysfunctional, and our educational system, laboratories for engineering social change.

It is perhaps unfair to say that this is the dominant culture in the Democratic party. But I believe it accurate to say that the majority of its activists and many of its big money contributors ascribe to this notion of America. Klein was correctly pointing out that this is the Democratic party that is successfully portrayed by Republicans as “mainstream” despite their small number because of how vocal and organized the Stalinists are compared to the rest of the party, particularly more moderate groups like the Democratic Leadership Council.

Is it unfair for Republicans to do this? No more so than it is unfair when Democrats try to portray the Republicans as a party of religious fanatics whose neoconservative leadership is the personification of evil. Politics is a full contact sport and trying to delineate what is “fair” or “unfair” is an exercise in futility.

On the other hand, it is unfair of us on the right to confuse the anti-American left with the mindless anti-Bush sentiment that prevails in the Democratic party. The question that has always troubled me is has this Bush Derangement Syndrome actually led Democrats to giving the appearance of anti-Americanism in their opposition to the war? The “Bush lied” meme has been a godsend to many Democrats who initially supported the war but, like their ancestors during Viet Nam, have since had a change of heart and have latched on to the idea that Bush tricked them into that support. And while their opposition obviously gives aid and comfort to the enemy who see their only way to victory in waiting until the political will for the war in America to evaporate, does it reflect political calculation or anti-Americanism? Or is it just one more unconscious manifestation of a virulent hate of the President?

It may be totally unnecessary for the Democratic party to sort this out since the Republicans seem intent on doing everything they can to lose control of the House and the Senate next November. But if the party cannot take advantage of such a deeply wounded opponent, what then? Will the majority of patriotic, America-loving Democrats be able to marginalize their crazies? Or will the Republicans continue to be successful in portraying the Democratic party as made up of radical, anti-American leftists?

This is a debate that bears watching. At stake is the future of both parties and a possible realignment with a decidedly more leftist tilt to our politics.

George McClellan was in a snit.

The Commander in Chief of the Army (circa 1862) had just returned from a meeting with a Congressman who was urging him to get the army moving toward Richmond pronto. It had been more than 6 months since the disaster at Bull Run and everyone in Washington was getting antsy, not least the President who quipped morosely that if McClellan was not going to use the army, then perhaps he (the President) might borrow it for awhile.

McClellan was feeling persecuted. Everyone in Washington was an armchair general, telling him how to win the war. The President, in a pathetically amateurish attempt to remedy his lack of military knowledge, was reading treatises on war by night and writing long, chatty letters by day telling him:

And once more let me tell you, it is indispensable to you that you strike a blow. I am powerless to help this. You will do me the justice to remember I always insisted, that going down the Bay in search of a field, instead of fighting at or near Mannassas, was only shifting, and not surmounting, a difficulty — that we would find the same enemy, and the same, or equal, intrenchments, at either place. The country will not fail to note — is now noting — that the present hesitation to move upon an entrenched enemy, is but the story of Manassas repeated.

I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now, nor with a fuller purpose to sustain you, so far as in my most anxious judgment, I consistently can. But you must act.

Lincoln wrote that letter as McClellan’s 100,000 man army sat in front of a Confederate battle line on the James Peninsula in Virginia that featured fake wooden guns and the theatrics of rebel General John Magruder who, in order to make his 15,000 man force appear to be a great host, continuously marched a brigade across the front of the Union lines, easily fooling the cautious McClellan into thinking he faced more than 100,000 men.

But that was in the future. The Congressman McClellan was so disgusted with was John Covode of Pennsylvania who sat on the most powerful Committee in the history of the United States Congress: The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Covode had just informed Little Mac that he was in danger of losing his command unless he got the Army of the Potomac up and moving toward Richmond and the General was in a foul mood. He sat down and wrote a letter to his wife complaining bitterly about the interference of the “rascals” in Congress who seemed more interested in assessing an officer’s anti-slavery credentials than in their military abilities. Despite being given more power than any general since Washington, McClellan felt hemmed in and hamstrung by a group of amateurs who were looking over his shoulder and criticizing every move he made or, in the present case, didn’t make.

The Joint Committee was born out of the frustration in Congress with Union setbacks in the early days of the war and what the radicals saw as insufficient zeal for victory on the part of some officers. If, as Clemenceau said “War is too important a thing to be left to the generals,” then the Committee felt perfectly comfortable in making it their business to meddle in the affairs of the army. Woe betide the luckless officer who got into their sights. Because America was fighting a civil war, even the loyalty to the flag of officers could be and was questioned.

Nothing illustrated this salient fact more than the case of General Charles P. Stone whose attack on a small rebel encampment near Leesburg ended up an unmitigated disaster. Not only did he lose the battle, but the man most responsible for the loss, a former United States Senator Edward Baker, was killed in action. The Battle of Balls Bluff was a minor skirmish by Civil War standards but its impact would be felt for the rest of the war. In response to the defeat, the Congress decided that the executive branch needed guidance in the prosecution of the conflict and the Joint Committee was born. Their first target was General Stone himself who, while never accused outright of treason, was nevertheless tarred by innuendo and gossip to the point that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered his arrest. For 189 days, Stone sat in a cell without being charged with any specific crime. He was finally released without apology and was never able to live down the cloud placed over him by Congress.

Whether it was the Committee’s intent or not, Union officers got the message. Headquarters operators like General Joe Hooker and Benjamin Butler cultivated Committee members, taking them into their confidence and lavishing praise on their activities. Combat officers like General Phil Kearny complained that the Committee’s second guessing was having a deleterious effect on an officer’s ability to carry out their duties.

Indeed, that was almost a universal criticism of the Committee’s investigations:

The Committee on the Conduct of the War was feared during its lifetime. Army commanders saw what was happening to their predecessors and let this influence the decisions they made on the battlefield. General Ambrose Burnside most certainly let the phantom of McClellan’s non-aggressive behavior color his judgment when he continued to send the waves of Union soldiers to their deaths up the slopes of Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg, and again when he moved his army out of their winter camps into the Virginia quagmire in the infamous Mud March. How many other general officers made decisions based not strictly on what was best for their commands on a given field, but rather on what was “safe” conduct as far as the CCW was concerned? George Meade knew what was happening when he testified to committee members at Falmouth, after the Fredericksburg defeat. In a personal letter he wrote, “I sometimes feel very nervous about my position, [the committee is] knocking over generals at such a rate.”

In fact, the Committee did an enormous service to the Union cause. More often than not, they were able to weed out incompetent officers who were usually replaced by competent ones. They cared not a fig if an officer had West Point credentials, something that the President seemed over awed with at times. In fact, the Committee saw West Point as something of a bastion of Southern sympathizers, so many of the US trained officer corps leaving the army to fight for Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy. And while it is true their meddling sometimes caused problems for armies in the field, their investigation into medical treatment of wounded soldiers led to the formation of the U.S. Sanitary Commission which forever changed the way the army cared for its wounded. And other investigations into corruption in the granting of military contracts as well as being out front in urging President Lincoln to recruit and train black soldiers proved to be tremendously helpful to securing victory.

Could such oversight by Congress have prevented Abu Ghraib and other prisoner abuses? Would such a Committee if in existence today insisted on more troops on the ground at the beginning of the occupation? Could Donald Rumsfeld have survived this long if Congress had been looking over his shoulder? Would 363 tons of $100 bills been flown into Baghdad - $12 billion dollars worth - and ended up with employees of the Coalition Provisional Authorities using the banded stacks as footballs?

The Republican Congress has failed. It is as dysfunctional a legislative body as has ever been elected in my lifetime. While individual members have shown brains, courage, and thoughtfulness, as a group - and especially its quiescent, arrogant, and clueless leadership - it has been a disaster. We on the right have acknowledged this fact in one way or another. There has been nary a commenter on this site (with the exception of the few hopeless partisans who still drop by now and again) who hasn’t pointed out with brutal clarity the shortcomings of our party’s elected representatives. We should now take the next step and set up the guillotine because its time for some heads to start rolling.

To the Republicans in Congress, I would say yes, investigating Administration shortcomings is a partisan undertaking and it is a given that Democrats will turn hearings on any wrongdoing involving the war be it corruption in contract letting or prisoner abuse into one long diatribe against George Bush and the war. But you are all big boys and girls and politics is a tough business. If you can’t take the heat, stand aside and let others take your place with more fortitude and a desire to do the job citizens elected you to do. The medicine will be strong. But not taking it will once again plunge Republicans into minority status and elevate people who, we all believe, would not do the job of protecting America in this critical hour.

If Congress had something like the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War today, I daresay not only Donald Rumsfeld, but also the self serving, ass covering Generals who have recently come out calling for his resignation would have been in the Committee’s sights from day one. Rumsfeld’s failures are their failures. The fact that they are too arrogant to see that says everything you need to know about their “confessions.”

I really am at a loss about what to do. Staying home on election day goes against everything I believe about Republicans and democracy. But I am coming around to the belief that if not voting is the only way to change the leadership dynamic of the Republican party so that honorable conservatives rise to positions of prominence, then so be it.

Yesterday, I did a post based on an article in Truthout.org regarding some “revelations” that Bush lied to the American people and may have lied to Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald when “the President was not only briefed that Joe Wilson was trying to discredit the Saddam/Niger uranium story by going public but also that he was told that Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame was a CIA agent and had recommended sending him on the Niger trip.”

OOOOPS! My bad!

Not only was the story written by an proven plagiarizer but it now appears that Fitzgerald himself, in one of the more careless and shockingly sloppy errors his office has made to date, included language in his court filing that was untrue and, given the significance of the subject matter, leaves he and his people wide open to charges of partisanship:

An embarrassing move this afternoon from CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. In his now-famous court filing in which he said that former Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby testified that he had been authorized to leak portions of the then-classified National Intelligence Estimate, Fitzgerald wrote, “Defendant understood that he was to tell [New York Times reporter Judith] Miller, among other things, that a key judgment of the NIE held that Iraq was ‘vigorously trying to procure’ uranium.”
That sentence led a number of reporters and commentators to suggest that, beyond the issue of the leak itself, the administration was lying about the NIE, because the African uranium segment was not in fact among the NIE’s key judgments.

[...]

A few hours ago, however, Fitzgerald sent a letter to judge Reggie Walton, asking to correct his filing. The letter reads:

We are writing to correct a sentence from the Government’s Response to Defendant’s Third Motion to Compel Discovery, filed on April 5, 2006. The sentence, which is the second sentence of the second paragraph on page 23, reads, ‘Defendant understood that he was to tell Miller, among other things, that a key judgment of the NIE held that Iraq was ‘vigorously trying to procure’ uranium.” That sentence should read, “Defendant understood that he was to tell Miller, among other things, some of the key judgments of the NIE, and that the NIE stated that Iraq was ‘vigorously trying to procure’ uranium.”

One can immediately see how the change in language affects what the President might have known regarding the leaking to reporters of the NIE and Niger uranium story. Since the Niger uranium portion of the report was not a “key judgment” it stands to reason that Bush would not have asked or known of anyone who would have leaked Plame’s name - whether he knew she was Wilson’s wife or not.

Bush still must respond to another charge in Mr. Leopold’s Truthout article about being told that Plame was Wilson’s wife prior to the information coming out in Novak’s article. That information in the article comes from Mr. Leopold’s “sources” and the information should therefore be weighted accordingly. If it were true, it would contradict what Mr. Bush told both the American people and the Special Prosecutor.

The Washington Post, New York Times, and most major publications used the misinformation in the court filing as fodder for their front pages. What do you think the chances are that the correction will go in the same place?

If you plan on perusing lefty websites today, I highly recommend you put on a hazmat suit and take along a Geiger counter. Also, please make sure you’re wearing a good pair of cowboy boots because not only is it getting thicker and deeper than usual in moonbat land, but many of the denizens of the fever swamps have detonated their own weapon of mass stupidity regarding the possible use of nuclear weapons by the United States to destroy the underground infrastructure of Iran’s nuclear program.

I personally think military action to take out Iranian nukes is self-defeating. But don’t tell the Iranians that. In fact, the more uncertain President Ahmadinejad is about our intentions, the better.

This little stratagem about keeping the Iranians guessing about our intentions seems to be lost on our rabid dog left wing who have swallowed what is almost certainly a deliberately planned leak on our military options against the mullahs and regurgitated the most hysterical nonsense this side of the Scooter Libby story:

John Aravosis: “Bush is out of control.”

Kevin Drum: “It may or may not be a bluff, but the PR campaign for an air strike against Iran is clearly moving into high gear.”

The Mahablog: “Our President, George W. Bush, has a messiah complex…”

HuffPo: “Imagine the unimaginable: George Bush becoming the first president to use nuclear weapons on another state since Harry Truman, and get this, without even declaring war.”

May we have a little sanity please? Dan Reihl:

To not plan for a possible military option as regards Iran’s nuclear program would be foolish. Emphasis my own, of course one plans for many contingencies. Said planning is as much a part of the diplomatic dialog as anything else and Think Progress and the AP are basically carrying the White House’s water by spreading the report. Too bad they can’t do it less sensationally.

Mr. Reihl tries valiantly to correct the record on what exactly Sy Hersh said in his anonymously sourced article but I fear he is getting the same result as whippoorwill singing in a whirlwind:

We don’t need mushroom clouded brains thinking about and discussing options for Iran just now. We need reasoned debate on a topic which poses a serious risk to world peace. An oil-rich country with no current need for nuclear energy appears determined to develop a nuclear capability, after having declared their desire to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth.

No reasonable nation has gone on record as suggesting stopping them is a bad thing, most find it necessary. Planning for that is the prudent step. Characterizing it as demon, warmongering Bush taking up nuclear arms to confront Iran is not only silly, it’s harmful and misleading for the necessary discussion at hand.

Actually, Think Progress has a good round-up of a series of leaks in the past couple of weeks all designed to make the Iranian leadership very, very uncomfortable. Despite their bluster about nothing being able to stop their efforts to develop their “peaceful” use of nuclear energy, the fact is they are scared witless about an American strike. They realize that the military would insist on not only taking out their nuclear infrastructure but also their air defense system and probably their naval capabilities as well. Saddam never did fully rebuild his air defense system following the punishment it took during the Gulf War in 1991. And the Iranians need their navy in order to project the kind of regional hegemony to which they aspire.

One thing for sure; these leaks are putting enormous pressure on the domestic political situation in Iran which now pits the radicals who have pretty much taken over all top government positions against the not-so-radicals who used to run things and are mightily upset that Ahamdinejad has blown their nuclear cover and bollixed things up on the international stage so that Iran is once again a pariah nation:

Many Iranians are critical of Ahmadinejad’s forays into international affairs and his diplomatic blundering. The most intense and meaningful criticism has come from relatively centrist figures who represent an older generation of politicians - former Presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, for example. They have spoken out against the undoing of their work, particularly the painstaking restoration of Iran’s relations with the international community.

[...]

The international isolation Iran is facing due to its intransigence has contributed to the growth of fissures within Iran’s body politic. In an effort to end public debate on this subject and criticism of the executive, Rafsanjani announced at a March 8 meeting of the Assembly of Experts - a popularly elected body of 86 clerics tasked with supervising the supreme leader - that it was time for national unity in the face of “enemy” plots. Divisive comments, he said, undermined national unity.

The next day, Ahmadinejad accused unnamed Iranians of being agents of an enemy trying to divide the country. These efforts, he continued, were connected with the desire to undermine Iran’s nuclear pursuits. And on March 10, Friday prayer leader Hojatoleslam Ahmad Khatami’s sermon in Tehran, which was broadcast across the country by state radio, shed light on the political coloring of the call for unity. Khatami (no relation to the former president) noted that the current nuclear policy was not Ahmadinejad’s alone and had been shaped years earlier. “The decision was first taken during the previous government’s term of office. The current government is implementing the same decision now.” As for domestic critics, he said, “When the time comes, the great Iranian nation will give a harsh response to the insiders who move in the same direction as the enemies, just as it has given decisive responses to foreigners.”

And into this charged up atmosphere comes the anti-Bush forces screaming, in effect, that it is unfair not to tell Iran that we have no intention of using nuclear weapons or initiate a military strike of any sort. The left calls this “confidence building” - which is a pretty good descriptive except the only people’s confidence such a tactic builds is our own domestic moonbats whose opinion and confidence in their own superior moral certitude is affirmed. Meanwhile, our enemies snicker behind their hands and keep building their nuclear capability.

This past week has seen the Jack-in-the-Box left in all of it’s glorious moonbattery jumping up and down over a story that not only has been reported before but which promises to actually vindicate Bush in his denial that he ever told anyone to leak Valerie Plame’s name.

Given what’s at stake in Iran, I would hope that whatever the Administration decides to do about it, most of us from both the right and left would be supportive. I honestly don’t think the military option is in play in any serious way. Only if we discovered that Iran was closer to building a bomb than we thought or if they gave reliable indications that they were planning on using such a weapon against Israel or the United States would we go with a military option.

And there is absolutely zero chance - zero, zip, nada - of the US using nuclear weapons on Iran. Even with nukes that will detonate below the surface, there is going to be massive radioactive fallout drifting toward Russia - something I’m sure would cause President Putin to cancel his membership in the Official US Fan Club.

But for the loony left, it’s just one more way to bash Bush. So let them have their fun. It’s actually playing into the Administration’s strategy to give the Iranians pause and make them realize we can cause serious damage to both their military infrastructure and political unity.

From our friends at the Times of London, a possible answer to a mystery and the total destruction of some pretty loony conspiracy theories; the riddle of who forged the so-called Niger Uranium Documents may have been solved:

TWO employees of the Niger embassy in Rome were responsible for the forgery of a notorious set of documents used to help justify the Iraq war, an official investigation has allegedly found.

According to Nato sources, the investigation has evidence that Niger’s consul and its ambassador’s personal assistant faked a contract to show Saddam Hussein had bought uranium ore from the impoverished west African country.

The documents, which emerged in 2002, were used in a US State Department fact sheet on Iraq’s weapons programme to build the case for war. They were denounced as forgeries by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) shortly before the 2003 invasion.

Is that the end of the story? Hardly. Because what this investigation also confirmed - and buttressed by the the British Butler Commission as well as our own Senate Select Committee Investigation - was that another document that was not a forgery was used as a basis for the claim that Saddam was trying to purchase uranium from Niger:

Some time in 2002, however, they obtained another apparently incriminating document, the source said. This was a letter purporting to be from al-Zahawie relating to a visit to Niger in 1999 to discuss the possible supply of uranium. This did not constitute evidence that Niger had agreed to supply yellowcake but it did indicate Saddam was trying to obtain it.

The letter, deemed “credible” by the Butler inquiry into Iraq intelligence, appears to be the evidence that led to Bush’s claim in January 2003 that the British had “learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”.

(emphasis mine)

It turns out that the French had a paid agent who was trying to bilk French intelligence into buying a forged document about an actual uranium sale to Saddam from Niger. This was after the agent had established his bona fides by handing over an authentic document about a visit to Niger by the Iraqi Ambassador to the Vatican (a man obviously with a lot of time on his hands).

The French, smelling a rat, spotted the forgery immediately and refused to pay. It was later in 2002 that the French obtained another authentic document this time detailing the meeting in 1999 between the same Iraqi Ambassador and a former Niger Prime Minster where unspecified trade topics were discussed. Since Niger’s exports are extremely limited - cowpeas, livestock, and onions as well as uranium - it doesn’t take an expert to guess what commodity was under discussion.

Just for fun, let’s look at those dreaded 16 words one more time from the SOTU in 2003:

“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

For the mentally challenged among you, let me sum up: 1) a document is passed to the British government from the French authenticating claims that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from Niger, 2) This is exactly what Bush said. 3) Joe Wilson is a scurvy liar.

Does this really matter?

Of course not - not in any way that counts. I suppose for the record, historians will have a good laugh at the lefties who twisted their panties into knots screaming that Bush lied about Saddam and Niger uranium. But in the current political climate where the impeachment drums are starting to beat louder and louder the closer we get to November, this will be lost in the shuffle and the lie will continue to be told. Or, as is the case when one of their strawmen is knocked down, the left will pretend they never mentioned it and move on to the next meme.

In trying to decide how to respond to this thoughtful, yet seriously flawed article by David Neiwert, I had my pick of several different threads where the author, in an effort to ferret out what he considers to be “racism” and “hate” on right wing blogs, actually reveals some profound truths about the left and their total cluelessness regarding what constitutes legitimate debate in a free society about race and public policy.

Neiwert’s thesis - that right wing “movement” bloggers are “transmitting” the very same themes and ideas that fascists and racists espouse only dressed up in mainstream intellectual couture - is an old one, as ancient as similar lines of attack followed by the left against William Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and the bête noire of liberals Ronald Reagan. The assault is based on false assumptions, setting up straw men, towering intellectual conceits, and a moral absolutism with respect to one’s own privileged frame of reference regarding issues of race, class, and politics.

It should be noted that Mr. Neiwert has done more than most to expose the dark underbelly of the extreme right, writing extensively on the Neo-Nazi and White Supremacist movements in the Northwest. His book, Death on the Fourth of July was well received and praised for its penetrating look at hate groups and hate crimes.

That said, Mr. Neiwert should be ashamed of himself. By trying to connect right wing bloggers and the positions they advocate on the issues, however tangentially, to the haters, the Hitler lovers, the cross burners, and the racial purists, he demonstrates an arrogance commonplace on the left where it has become de rigueur to simply mouth the words “racist” and “fascist” in order to cut off debate on the issues and destroy any moral authority to which their opponents might aspire.

Mr. Neiwert sets up his hit piece by recalling his visits to a Neo-Nazi compound before it was shut down by Southern Poverty Law Center, a truly unsung organization, having done more to eliminate race and ethnic hate groups through the creative use of lawsuits than even the government. After this promising beginning, Neiwert descends rapidly into madness:

The compound represented an era when white supremacists were relegated to the fringes of American society. And while their tireless efforts to promote racial hatred were now muted, their simultaneous efforts to gain mainstream acceptance — particularly by disguising themselves and muting their core beliefs — had obviously begun to take root.

What was most disturbing was, even in 2000, the way the mainstream conservative agenda was beginning to resemble the politics of longtime racists like David Duke and Richard Butler, the Aryan Nations leader: bashing welfare recipients, attacking affirmative action, complaining about “reverse discrimination,” calling for the elimination of immigrants. Since then, this trend has only accelerated, to the point that old-fashioned haters like Duke and the National Alliance are finding their ranks thinned by followers who just become Republicans.

How many straw men can one writer set up in a paragraph or two?

First of all, it might be helpful to give Mr. Neiwert a little history lesson. “Bashing welfare recipients” (welfare reform) “attacking” affirmative action and complaining about (quotes please) “reverse discrimination” - as if such a thing didn’t exist - calling for the “elimination” (?) of immigrants (immigration reform) are in fact, conservative issues. The only problem with Mr. Neiwert’s notions of insidious issue creep by racists and fascists into the mainstream of conservatism is that he is blaming the responsible right for the fact that the racists adopted these issues, mixed them into an unrecognizable porridge of nauseating half truths and bowdlerized slogans, and spewed the result onto the internet and elsewhere trying to appear reasonable.

In short, while trying to connect Neo-Nazis to conservatives, Mr. Neiwert makes a classic, some would say stupid mistake; he puts the cart before the horse. It was not conservatives who adopted these issues from the extremists; it was the other way around.

I would suggest to Mr. Neiwert that his next article deal with the adoption by the Communist Party USA of many liberal issues such as racial justice, anti-war agitation, universal health care, and reigning in corporate power. Or better yet, he might want to take on Osama Bin Laden and that worthy’s peculiar habit of regurgitating liberal talking points about America, the war, and western civilization every time he makes a videotape.

It should make for some interesting reading. Especially the part where I’m sure Mr. Neiwert will point out that communists don’t “hate” anyone nor, for that matter, does Osama desire anything more than America leave his poor, benighted beheading jihadis alone. Yet Communists have proved themselves over the years to be inveterate haters of everything that we Americans - even patriotic liberals like Mr. Neiwert - love about this country; freedom and liberty for the individual. Any bets on what would happen if the CPUSA actually managed to seize power here? There hasn’t been a communist revolution yet that didn’t prominently feature gulags and “re-education camps” in their takeover brochures. Osama, of course, has his own axes to grind - literally.

Not content with straining every effort to connect conservative bloggers to hate groups, Neiwert then sets up the most extraordinary canard I’ve ever seen on a lefty website: that, in fact, this “transmission” of hate issues into the conservative mainstream has already happened and that righty bloggers have in fact become closet racists only awaiting the right moment for their bigotry to show itself in all its glory:

The main mechanism for converting mainstream conservatives into right-wing extremists and white nationalists is a process I call transmission: extremist ideas and principles are repackaged for mainstream consumption, stripped of overt racism and hatefulness and presented as ordinary politics. As these ideas advance, they create an open environment for the gradual adoption of the core of bigotry that animates them.

This strategy was first enunciated by Patrick Buchanan back in 1989, in a nationally syndicated column that expressed a level of kinship with David Duke, who at that point was building momentum in a bid to win the Louisiana governorship. Buchanan thought the GOP overreacted to Duke and his Nazi “costume” by denouncing him; he urged:

Take a hard look at Duke’s portfolio of winning issues and expropriate those not in conflict with GOP principles, [such as] reverse discrimination against white folks.

It was a simple formula: Look at the issues that attract white supremacist votes, strip out the racism (or anything inimical to good public relations for the GOP) and present them to the public as fresh, “cutting edge” ideas. In the process, you’ll attract a lot of middle-class white voters who harbor unspoken racial resentments.

Put aside the personal affront to the integrity and intent of conservatives. This is just plain ignorance. Conservatives didn’t need David Duke or any other extremist to come out against reverse discrimination. The Bakhe case was decided in 1979 - 10 years before Pat Buchanan wrote his political analysis regarding the efficacy of Duke’s “issues.” Again Mr. Neiwert is ascribing views held by extremists as being adopted by conservatives instead of the other way around. By trying to make conservatives responsible for how extremists attach themselves to their issues while at the same time smearing the entire conservative movement, Neiwert reveals himself to be little more than a petty partisan hack, an ideologue who can’t tell the difference (or deliberately obfuscates it) between legitimate arguments about public policy and the coarse, bastardization of conservative issues by the haters.

It is monstrous calumny to accuse conservatives thusly. Especially dressing his screed up, as Mr. Neiwert does in this piece, as some kind of psychological analysis of the motivations and deeply held beliefs of conservative bloggers. At bottom, the way conservatives are attacked in this piece says more about the arrogant, smug, self-righteous, self congratulatory left than it does about the people it seeks to deliberately defame.

What are we really discussing here? Nothing less than the ability to debate public policy issues without one side having recourse to use blood libel terms like “racist” in order to delegitimatize the thoughts, words, and deeds of one’s opponent. This is the reason “race” as a matter of public policy cannot be discussed rationally. The left starts with the premise that any deviation from its base assumptions on race is non-negotiable - an advantage they see as set in stone as the Ten Commandments. Hence, one cannot discuss reforming affirmative action because to do so is, by definition, racist.

Neither is it possible to discuss immigration reform as evidenced by Mr. Neiwert’s loony contention that conservatives have adopted the extremists viewpoint of “eliminating immigrants” - one would assume both legal and illegal - which is a laughable corruption of the conservative’s belief that the laws of the land currently on the books should be enforced and that in a just society, one group should not be treated differently by the law than another. Ergo, what should be a necessary and vital debate on the nature of law and society not to mention the very real and vital issues of securing our borders, allowing for orderly immigration to the United States, and dealing with the problem of illegal immigrants already here, instead degenerates into more name calling and a ghastly oversimplification and distortion of the conservative position - par for the course when the left feels it is losing an argument with the American people.

Neiwert then takes on conservative bloggers in a specific and, from my point of view, dubious way by positing that 1) Glenn Reynolds is a “right wing blogger”, 2) that commenters at right wing websites don’t speak for the proprietor of that blog (unless they really do), and 3) that David Neiwert is a mind reader of such stupendous gifts that he should be classified as a secret weapon by the Pentagon, so incisive and penetrating his analysis of people’s thoughts and motivations.

After taking blogger Michelle Malkin and Reynolds to the woodshed for their ideas on Mexican irredentism - a notion currently being mainstreamed itself by leaders of the current round of immigration protests - Neiwert reveals that attacking the reconquista issue is in and of itself, racist:

Malkin, in truth, was simply following in the footsteps of the most prominent right-wing blogger, Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, who for several months in 2004 was likewise promoting the “reconquista” notion while arguing, groundlessly, that the student organization MEChA was a pack of “fascist hatemongers” comparable to the Klan.

But in Malkin’s case, the thread from far-right extremism to mainstream consumption is especially pronounced, since she herself has a considerable history of dalliances and associations with extremists and far-right organizations, most notably VDare, the SPLC-designated hate group that publishes not just Malkin’s work but that of Steve Sailer and Jared Taylor.

Malkin, of course, has never explained her association with VDare, just as Reynolds never recanted his groundless smearing of MEChA. Similarly, they never confront the effects of their reliance on old appeals from the far right, because that would undermine the whole enterprise.

Malkin is perfectly capable of defending herself although I will point out that her articles in VDare appear courtesy of Creative Syndicate which gives her about as much “connection” to VDare as any writer would have to a site that publishes their articles through an agreement with a third party. I suppose Mr. Neiwert could have missed that very salient point in his haste to smear Mrs. Malkin. As an aside, it might be interesting to see what websites some of Mr. Neiwert’s articles have turned up on. He may not like the results of such a search.

But calling Reynolds a “right wing blogger” is a surprise - especially, I’m sure, to Glenn who has made it clear on almost a daily basis that he is not a conservative by any stretch of the imagination. His dissatisfaction with conservatism is well known by most of us on the right which means either Niewert can’t read or he simply chooses to ignore the facts.

That said, calling MEChA “fascist hatemongers” may be a touch hyperbolic but I’ll let the reader decide. Neiwert links to an article that points out MEChA’s founding document never mentions “reconquista” which is true. But the “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlan” mentioned in the linked article does contain some interesting ideas regarding “reclaiming the land” of their forefathers and a despicably racist statement for its motto:

The Plan Espiritual appears to translate the foregoing principles into a militant plan of action. The Plan offers an ahistorical counterrevolutionary version of Manifest Destiny for Chicanos:

In the spirit of a new people that is conscious not only of its proud historical heritage but also of the brutal “gringo” invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano, Mexican, Latino, Indigenous inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlan from whence came our forefathers reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our sangre [blood] is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny.

It explicitly states that Aztlan does not belong “to the foreign Europeans” and declares MEChA’s refusal to “recognize capricious frontiers on the Bronze continent.” And then, following these remarks, the Plan goes further still, uttering those infamous words:

. . . . [W]e declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlan. Por La Raza todo. Fuera de La Raza nada.

The translation of that last little ditty is “On behalf of the Race, everything. Outside the Race, nothing.”

But hey! Don’t call them hatemongers!

Here’s where Neiwert employs his mind reading powers to their fullest extent:

Rather, they trot them out for consumption and play coy about any of the deeper implications of what they’re saying. Then, they leave it up to their readers to complete the connection.

Thus, the editors at sites like Little Green Footballs, Free Republic, or RedState provide few substantive instances of outright racism — but plenty of examples of repackaged extremism. Their commenters, however, are another story altogether; as we’ve seen, their audiences are all too glad to revel in the underlying bigotry.

The end result is a poisonous environment in which not merely the ideas, but the endemic attitudes and worldview, of the racist right receive not just fresh clothes but a whole new generation of adherents. This is why, for instance, so much naked eliminationism aimed not just at illegal immigrants and Muslims but, generically, “treasonous” American liberals has become inextricably interwoven with right-wing rhetoric in recent years.

First of all, may I propose a truce? We on the right will stop holding liberals responsible for what unhinged lefty commenters say on their sites if liberals stop the same practice regarding idiots who comment on right wing blogs. The notion that our commenters (I’m stifling a laugh here) “complete the connection” to our racist views is absurd. I had to reread that part to make sure that a grown up had actually written something so dramatically out of kilter with reality. For once again, Mr. Neiwert takes the legitimate policy positions taken by responsible conservatives and tries to destroy them by linking the ideas behind them with the mindless gibberings of the haters. Doesn’t he get tired of pulling both the horse and the cart?

When political writers like Neiwert try to play amateur psychologist by pretending to examine the innermost feelings of people for which they feel nothing but contempt and hate, the result is predictable; a slanderous, disjointed, and in the end, disquieting example of what passes for rational thought on the left. Neiwert’s piece is symptomatic of the level that civil discourse in this country has descended. And it speaks volumes to why this sad state of affairs will not be turned around anytime soon.

UPDATE

I experienced a full blown mandible gravity event when I read this bit of idiocy from David Anderson of ISOU:

The Firedoglake post makes some great points about racism in the conservative blogsphere. I find it interesting that one of the most vile racist [sic] is Michelle Malkin, who in a White Supremist [sic] Society would be at best a concubine for some Brownshirt. Perhaps Michelle has not payed [sic] much attention to her own image in the mirror lately, but HELLO, Michelle… You are a BROWN PERSON. If your Utopia ever came to pass, you might… as a reward for being a collaborator, get to work as a maid in Anne Coulter’s house, but having kissed Anne’s rear end so much, LaShawn barber [sic] would probably beat you to that job.

Thus speaketh the mainstream left.

A reoccurring theme that I’ve written about on this site has been the war by national security apparatchiks in the CIA, the State Department, and even in the Department of Defense against the Bush Administration’s foreign policy. Powerline, among others, has covered this subject in great detail - a subject largely ignored by the mainstream press. This is unfortunate because most of the Administration’s actions in the Plame Affair need to be understood in this context if one is interested in getting to the heart of the motivations behind what was going on.

This is not to say that the “outing” of Valerie Plame was in any way a justifiable act. Even if, as some claim, it was common knowledge that Joe Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA, naming CIA employees in print is unconscionable. This has been a favorite gambit of the left for more than 30 years, done to undermine the agency’s effectiveness and can simply never be countenanced.

But the question unanswered by the President’s critics is how do you pushback against unelected bureaucrats who are not only undermining policy, but also attacking the credibility of the Chief Executive of the United States of America? Do you sit in the Oval Office and simply take it? Do you allow these partisans who used selective leaking of classified information in order to deliberately try and defeat a political rival at the polls, to operate with impunity while American men and women are fighting and dying overseas?

The arrogance and hubris exhibited by the leaking clique in the CIA and State Department - unelected, unaccountable, unhinged - demonstrates the dysfunctionality of those vital departments. This incompetence and bureaucratic game playing led directly to the tragedy of 9/11 and will, if not stopped, be the death of many more of us.

Scooter Libby evidently felt he had permission to leak parts of the classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq that showed the consensus of the government - not the selected, cherry-picked leaks of opposing viewpoints that came out later during the Presidential campaign - was that:

* Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.

* We are not detecting portions of these weapons programs.

* Iraq possesses proscribed chemical and biological weapons and missiles.

* Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons grade fissile material.

This was not “twisted” intelligence. It was not invented out of whole cloth. This was the best guess of our intelligence professionals gleaned from hundreds of discussions, thousands of pages of documents, and discussion and debate at the highest levels of our intelligence apparatus. It was then presented to the President and it was up to him - the elected leader of the government - to act on it or not.

The President chose to act. And when some of that NIE turned out to be wrong or overblown, the leakers, the bureaucratic ass coverers, the partisans, and the ideologues crawled from underneath the rock they were hiding and unleashed a blizzard involving the most brazenly criminal and incontrovertibly illegal dissemination of classified material in memory. Not since Nixon had to deal with our SALT fallback negotiating position showing up on the front page of the New York Times has a President had to scramble to stem the flow of damaging leaks.

This is the context in which Joe Wilson wrote his little editorial heard ’round the world - a screed that his since been shot so full of holes that swiss cheese is whole by comparison. Wilson was lying. The Vice President did not send him to Niger. His junket was not an exercise in fact finding. If it was, one must ask why Wilson’s “report” was never disseminated to the White House. And of course, Wilson mis-characterized his own findings when he said that there was no evidence that Saddam was seeking uranium in Africa. Two separate inquiries - one in the Senate and one British - concluded that in fact Saddam was seeking to buy yellowcake uranium to augment the 500 tons he already possessed and had in storage at the Al-Tuwaitha nuclear facility.

We know all of this. The fact that it has to be repeated time and time again says more about how the media and the left continue to flog the dead horse of pre-war intelligence than it does about the White House pushback against the leakers. By dressing the same pig up in different couture, the President’s critics seek to raise long dead charges under different auspices in order to damage his credibility further and undermine support for the Iraq War with the American people.

Even the New York Times recognizes there’s nothing new to the Scooter Libby “revelations” except to grouse that their own publishing of classified information is not getting a pass:

The testimony by the former official, I. Lewis Libby Jr., cited in a court filing by the government made late Wednesday, provides an indication that Mr. Bush, who has long criticized leaks of secret information as a threat to national security, may have played a direct role in authorizing disclosure of the intelligence report on Iraq.

The disclosure occurred at a moment when the White House was trying to defend itself against accusations that it had inflated the case against Saddam Hussein.

The president has the authority to declassify information, and Mr. Libby indicated in his testimony that he believed Mr. Bush’s instructions — which prosecutors said Mr. Libby regarded as “unique in his recollection” — gave him legal cover to talk with a reporter about the intelligence.

The fact that the President “has the authority to declassify information” seems to have escaped the notice of people like Andrew Sullivan, David Corn,, and Christy Hardin Smith among others. The Washington Post is even more definitive in its judgement on the legality of the issue:

Legal experts say that President Bush had the unquestionable authority to approve the disclosure of secret CIA information to reporters, but they add that the leak was highly unusual and amounted to using sensitive intelligence data for political gain.

“It is a question of whether the classified National Intelligence Estimate was used for domestic political purposes,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a Washington lawyer who formerly served as general counsel for the CIA.

Indeed, a tough case to make either way regarding “domestic political purposes.” Was there an element of politics involved in the leak? I don’t doubt it. But - and this is something the President’s critics never, ever give him credit for - was there also an effort to pushback against those who sought to undermine Bush’s credibility?

The answer to that question is clearly yes. And I think the overwhelming evidence points to this being the major reason for the Plame Affair, this particular NIE leak, and other actions taken by the Administration to defend their good name. To not acknowledge these facts - as the left and media never do - is to beggar belief. Bush’s critics would have him sitting in the oval office emasculated, his credibility in tatters, while his enemies flitted from reporter to reporter leaking a steady stream of classified information with the President’s men constrained from responding because in order to do so, they must leak back. Meanwhile, our men and women are fighting in Iraq and watching as their Commander in Chief twists slowly in the wind, hung by a cabal of shameless, partisan, witchhunters who worked against the interests of the United States as determined by her elected leaders.

A totally unsatisfactory state of affairs but one not of the President’s making. I’ve had major differences with the President on Iraq. But this partisan effort to alter the historical record on pre-war intelligence time and time again for political purposes sticks in my craw. This is one issue on which I will continue to defend the President’s actions until the record is set straight.

UPDATE

With all my growling about motivations for the leaks, I never addressed the fact that this story has absolutely nothing to do with the Plame Affair except in a tangential way. Tom McGuire quoting from the Times article I linked above:

More air is let out of the balloon in paragraph six:

That is not just Libby asserting that the President was uninvolved in Libby’s leaks of the Plame info; it is Fitzgerald saying so too.

This hasn’t stopped some of the most amatuer, one dimensional, analysis I’ve ever seen on the web taking place at some of the top lefty websites:

Firedoglake: CONSPIRACY!! CONSPIRACY!!

Huffpo: NEENER! NEENER! NEENER!

War and Piece: HYPOCRITE! HYPOCRITE!

Austin Bay is a little more nuanced in his analysis. But then, a three toed sloth would be more nuanced in their analysis of this issue than anyone I’ve seen so far on the left:

Presidents and vice-presidents can declassify information based on their own good (or bad) judgment. That is a privilege and responsibility of the office. Their authority is near-absolute.Disseminating unclassified information isn’t a crime — no matter the technique used. The information can be disseminated at a press conference, in a press release, in a speech, or — yes– via leak. (UPDATE: Background links I should have included in the original post– though the president’s power in the sphere is common knowledge. The president is at the top of the Classification Authority hierarchy– he holds the ultimate clasification/declassification power. The vice-president is granted authority from the president. See this link to the relevant executive order regarding the vie-president. And I just found this article by Byron York which details the estension of presidential powers to the vice-president. York’s article emphasizes the formal codification of the vice-president’s classification powers, which is a change from past administrations.)

Reporters thrive on “leaks” because a leak usually means “scoop.” A leak can also mean “spin” but that’s an understood aspect of Washington’s political carnival. However, leaking properly declassified material isn’t a crime. Leaking classified material is illegal– and so is publishing classified material in a press release.

The revelations involving NBC’s attempt to “out” NASCAR fans as anti-Muslim bigots by having men who “look Muslim” wander around during a race in order to raise the ire of of race fans toward representatives of the Religion of Peace says something profound about the red state/blue state divide in America and the conundrum facing liberals as they seek to claw their way back into power in Washington.

The utter contempt toward ordinary Americans exhibited by NBC in this case would be shocking except that it is representative of a mindset that permeates the journalistic elite in New York and Washington as well as the political and cultural elites along the Potomac and the ivory towers of academia. The fact is, these groups have about as much interest in the lives of ordinary Americans as they do in the study of some primitive New Guinean tribal culture. We are anthropological curiosities to them, best suited to keeping our mouths shut and voting “correctly.” Beyond that, our strange beliefs as Christians, our focus on families (”dysfunctional,” of course), our dangerous flag-waving patriotism, and our silly, sappy, sentimentality when it comes to our feelings about this country are mercilessly derided as simple-minded, unsophisticated, and just plain stupid.

Herein lies the dilemma for Democrats and liberals in general: How do you cover up the fact that you feel such haughty disdain for the very people you absolutely must convince to vote for you so that you can regain power in Washington?

We got a dose of this scornful contempt in the immediate aftermath of the election in 2004. The caustic remarks dripping with sarcasm about “Jesusland” voters being too stupid to know where their own interests lay and the long, thumb-sucking magazine pieces accusing Bush supporters of being afraid of gays, of blacks, of Muslims, of any and all things “different” which dovetailed nicely with their pre-conceived notions that the NASCAR culture is, at bottom, in favor of re-establishing Jim Crow and throwing the sodomites in jail while making sex illegal and chaining women to the kitchen.

There are even efforts in blue states to stop “trading” with people and companies who live in ordinary America, as if people who live, work, play, go to church on Sunday, take off their hat when the flag goes by, and get choked up when they hear the national anthem live in a different country than the urban sophisticates who dominate the culture and to a large extent, the national conversation. We are told what is proper to believe, what we should watch on television, what cartoons are blasphemous, and which European countries are better than we are. We are instructed in what is “good” and even what is funny and what is not.

And when red state America rebels against this cultural tyranny by voting the way they think rather than the way they are told to, they are belittled as morons, mouth breathers, hicks, hillbillies, and dolts.

And liberals wonder why they can’t win an election for dog catcher in most areas of the country?

In truth, as we head into the silly season in politics, Democrats are going to have to find a way to put a lid on this attitude of loathing toward ordinary voters lest they be discovered for the insufferable elitist louts they truly are. This will prove to be more difficult than they think given that their base makes their feelings known toward ordinary voters every single day on the web. With cries of “American Taliban” echoing in their ears, somehow I don’t think evangelical Christians are going to feel too kindly toward a party that thinks them capable of the kinds of crimes against women and gays that these webnuts assure us hovers just below the surface of the “theocrats” beliefs. In their conspiratorial fantasies, the Republicans are conspiring with Christians to throw progressives to the proverbial lions while waiting for the rapture with a brew in one hand and a bible in the other.

In another context, it would be amusing. But since the KosKooks are dead serious about this, it poses an enormous problem for the Democratic party who, thanks to the stupidity and arrogance of the Republican Congress, have a shot at taking back both the House and Senate in November. How does one go about rhetorically satisfying a base that sees apostasy in saying anything nice about their cultural enemies in red states while sounding a soothing note to those very same voters in order to get them to swallow the blue pill on election day?

The Democrats are going to need help. In this, they can count on their allies in the media who view red state voters in exactly the same way as the netnuts; culturally backward ape-like creatures whose worldview must be shaped correctly by carefully managing what news is fit to be disseminated and what news should be finessed. This dance with the truth will be vital if the true feelings of the left toward their fellow citizens is going to be subsumed by the mainstream Democratic message of “change.”

What that change represents will also be finessed. It just wouldn’t do to inform the public that the first order of business for a newly seated Democratic House will be to start impeachment proceedings against the President of the United States. Beyond that, changing Iraq by cutting and running and altering the war on terror to one similar to pursuing bank robbers will also be in the cards. Along with their complete contempt for the nature of red state voters, Democrats show a disdain for their intelligence by hiding their web-driven agenda behind platitudes and sophistry.

“Exposing” red state America may be satisfying to the elites in a cultural context. But I don’t think the NASCAR dads, security moms, or evangelicals who voted for Bush 62 million strong in 2004 will appreciate the spitefulness their cultural “betters” direct their way when they once again fail to do as they’re told and vote for a radical liberal agenda.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin has a round-up of reaction to the Dateline story, including an interesting email from Ramsey Poston of NASCAR to NBC:

“This is outrageous for a news organization with the reputation of NBC to stoop to the level of attempting to create news instead of reporting it. Any legitimate journalist should be ashamed.”

This is directed to a “news show” that has been exposed time and again in the past of trying to manipulate images in order to make a story more “dramatic.” I hardly think they can feel any shame since any pretensions to being legitimate journalists went out the window years ago.

UPDATE II

Do my liberal friends think I’m exaggerating?

Check out this column in today’s WaPo from Harold Myerson about the DeLay story:

Let us not think that Tom DeLay’s decision not to seek reelection was prompted by merely temporal concerns. The Rev. Rick Scarborough, DeLay’s sometime pastor, told the New York Times that The Hammer confided in him last Saturday that “God wanted him to get out of that race.”

The broader question is whether such a deity still rules in Washington. As gods go, He was surely more ethically flexible than most. Lesser gods might frown upon bribery, fraud, greed and the abrogation of the democratic process, but this one was willing to overlook such trifles if they strengthened the Republicans’ hold on the House and were performed in a spirit of piety.

Yes DeLay is a very bad man who was mean to Democrats, kicked dogs, beat little children, and probably ate human flesh. But please note Mr. Myerson’s dripping sarcasm when talking about DeLay’s prayers and the snide comments about religion in general. I’m sure Myerson is giving a good chuckle to his elitist, snobby friends. But if one were to ask a person of faith what they thought of Myerson’s humor, somehow, I don’t think they would find it quite as amusing - even if they were a Democrat.