Donle’s Daily Dispatches

Volume 1 Issue 146             Today’s News and Views         Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Donle's Daily Dispatches RSS News Feeds

Latest news and opinion headlines from NPR, BBC, NY Times, etc.

See the cost in your community

Update of US Casualties in Iraq: 2455

Update of US Casualties in Afghanistan: 296

Figures provided by

the Iraq Coalition Causality website

VETERANS FOR PEACE, Inc.

Indiana Chapter 49

Veterans For Peace, Inc.

World Community Center

438 North Skinker Blvd.

St. Louis, MO 63130

Phone (314) 725-6005

Fax (314) 725-7103

vfp@igc.org

www.veteransforpeace.org 

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Michael McPhearson

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

David Cline, President

Sharon Kufeldt, Vice President

Elliot Adams, Secretary

Ken Mayers, Treasurer

Frank Ackles

Ellen Barfield

Dana Briggs

William Collins

Al Dale

Frank Houde

John Kim
Barry Riesch

Wayne Wittman

NATIONAL SERVICE ACTIONS:

School Of The Americas Watch

Chiapas, Mexico Delegation

Colombia Support Network

El Salvador Disabled Veterans

Veterans Peace Convoy and  

Nicaragua Election Monitors

Cuba Friendship Trips

Iraq Water Project

Friendship Village Vietnam

Vietnam Veterans Restoration Project

Gulf War Resources Center

Korea Truth Commission

Afghan Relief

Veterans Support Vieques

Campaign to Ban Landmines

Stonewalk USA

My Lai Peace Clinic, Vietnam

National Coalition for Peace & Justice

9-11 Emergency National Network

World Veterans Federation

United Nations NGO status

INDIANA CHAPTER OFFICE

Veterans For Peace

Indiana Chapter #49

Phone (317) 698-2450

e-mail:  vfp49indy@veteransforpeaceindiana.org

CHAPTER  PRESIDENT:

Charlie Wiles

For Immediate Release                                             May 18, 2006

2500 American Deaths in Iraq are Near:

We say, “Not one more.” Call for Peace Now.

Press Contacts:

Harold P. Donle, Veterans for Peace, Inc. #49, hdonle@insightbb.com 317/698-2450.

Heather Allen-Garde, Hoosiers for Peace, heather@hoosiersforpeace.org, 317/202-9302.

Jim Wolfe, Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center, jwolfe@butler.edu, 317/255-3857.

Members of Veterans for Peace, Chapter 49, Hoosiers for Peace and the Indianapolis Peace and Justice Center are asking Indiana citizens to assemble on Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis on the day that the 2500^th American is reported killed to mark this tragic occurrence.

This action is to honor the soldiers who have lost their lives in Iraq and their families, and to give our fellow Indiana citizens a visual representation of what 2500 looks like. We are against war because it kills our family members, wreaks havoc on our national treasury, makes the world a more dangerous place, and psychically damages our humanity.

Hundreds of Hoosiers have been invited to participate in this event that will combine an installation of 2500 flags to honor the dead and a memorial ceremony to call for an end to war. If the number is reached on a weekday (Mon.- Fri.) the group will gather at 6 P.M and if the number is reached on a weekend the group will gather at 4 P.M. at Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis. At that time, the assembled will move north along Meridian Street, planting a flag every two to four feet until they reach Veterans Memorial Plaza. They will continue to North St., turning east and continuing to plant flags, they will turn south on Pennsylvania St. and continue with the planting of the flags until they reach Michigan St., then they will turn west planting flags until they reach Meridian St. again, thereby encircling the entire Plaza.  Then the group will gather at the center of the Plaza and plant 64 flags around the base of the obelisk in memory of the 64 Hoosiers who have lost their lives in Iraq. There will be a period of brief remarks and a memorial ceremony in closing.

For more information contact Harold Donle at (317)698-2450.

Listen to Air America Radio while reading today's news and views

Today's News and Views

Bush could be a major GOP asset in a year when polls show the party at risk of losing its congressional majorities. She goes where the White House thinks she can do the most good.

She has focused on Republican-unfriendly areas such as New England, where voters are more moderate and less likely to embrace the positions on Iraq and conservative social issues held by President Bush and the Republican leadership.

"Mrs. Bush is welcome everywhere," says Susan Whitson, the first lady's spokesman.

President Bush's job approval in the eastern USA was 23% in a May 5-7 USA TODAY/Gallup Poll, compared with 31% nationwide, the lowest rating of his presidency.

By contrast, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll taken Jan. 20-22 — polls on the first lady are less frequent than those on the president — put Laura Bush's approval at 82%.

Political analysts have noticed a pattern about Laura Bush's travel. "She's the designated fundraiser for Republicans in the Northeast and upper Midwest, where she is much less of a target than the president is," says Stuart Rothenberg, publisher of The Rothenberg Political Report, a non-partisan newsletter.

She has raised money for three Connecticut Republicans: Reps. Christopher Shays, Nancy Johnson and Rob Simmons. She has also done so for Reps. Deborah Pryce, R-Ohio; Robin Hayes, R-N.C.; and Heather Wilson, R-N.M., and Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo., all in tough races.

On Friday, she made stops for moderate Rhode Island Sen. Lincoln Chafee and Vermont House candidate Martha Rainville, running in a state that leans left. "I see the first lady, and I think many other people do, as somebody who transcends partisan politics," Rainville told the Burlington Free Press on Thursday.

Rothenberg says President Bush could go into those areas where his wife is going and raise as much money or more, but his presence might hurt by giving opponents the chance to tie a candidate to the president, especially in TV spots.

"Laura is the softer side of Bush," Rothenberg says, "It's hard for people in suburban Columbus, Philadelphia or Connecticut who don't like George W. Bush to express a great deal of anger toward her."

"She brings the assets and appeal of the White House to a district without hauling in all the political baggage of her husband," says Amy Walter of the non-partisan Cook Political Report.

Laura Bush doesn't deliver attacks on Democrats. She emphasizes the positive. She praises the Republican candidate, talks about the importance of issues such as education or the war on terrorism, and solicits votes.

"During these crucial times in our nation's history, we need people who see the immense promise that's everywhere in our country and who look forward to the task at hand, no matter how difficult it may be," she said at a fundraiser in Greenwich, Conn., on April 24 that took in $300,000 for Johnson, Simmons and Shays.

Shays, a moderate Republican who has often broken with his party on issues such as campaign-finance changes and gun control, won re-election in 2004 with 52% of the vote. Twenty-eight percent of registered voters in his district are Republican, so he has to appeal to independents and Democrats. That same year, Bush lost the district to John Kerry, 52%-46%.

Shays is a target for Democrats this year and welcomes the first lady's help. "Most of my constituents respect her and admire her, regardless of party," he says.

Shays is not avoiding the president. When Bush visited Bridgeport last month, the congressman flew up with him on Air Force One.

Maurice Carroll, polling director at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., says Shays knows the difference between appearing with the president and having Bush do a fundraiser for him.

"Mrs. Bush is not going to get picketed and give him negative press," Carroll says. "At the same time, Shays is a savvy politician, and he's not going to pretend he's not a Republican."

In Rhode Island and Vermont last Friday, the first lady did draw pickets — some protesting the Iraq war and other critical of her husband's stand against gay marriage — a sign that anger against the president might be starting to rub off on his wife.

Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Bush's Base Betrayal

By Richard A. Viguerie
Sunday, May 21, 2006; B01

As a candidate in 2000, George W. Bush was a Rorschach test. Country Club Republicans saw him as another George H.W. Bush; some conservatives, thinking wishfully, saw him as another Ronald Reagan. He called himself a "compassionate conservative," which meant whatever one wanted it to mean. Experts from across the party's spectrum were flown to Austin to brief Bush and reported back: "He's one of us."

Republicans were desperate to retake the White House, conservatives were desperate to get the Clinton liberals out and there was no direct heir to Reagan running for president. So most conservatives supported Bush as the strongest candidate -- some enthusiastically and some, like me, reluctantly. After the disastrous presidency of his father, our support for the son was a triumph of hope over experience.

Once he took office, conservatives were willing to grant this Bush a honeymoon. We were happy when he proposed tax cuts (small, but tax cuts nonetheless) and when he pushed for a missile defense system. Then came the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and conservatives came to see support for the president as an act of patriotism.

Conservatives tolerated the No Child Left Behind Act, an extensive intrusion into state and local education, and the budget-busting Medicare prescription drug benefit. They tolerated the greatest increase in spending since Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. They tolerated Bush's failure to veto a single bill, and his refusal to enforce immigration laws. They even tolerated his signing of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance overhaul, even though Bush's opposition to that measure was a key reason they backed him over Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) in the 2000 primaries.

In 2004, Republican leaders pleaded with conservatives -- particularly religious conservatives -- to register people to vote and help them turn out on Election Day. Those efforts strengthened Republicans in Congress and probably saved the Bush presidency. We were told: Just wait till the second term. Then, the president, freed of concern over reelection and backed by a Republican Congress, would take off the gloves and fight for the conservative agenda. Just wait.

We're still waiting.

Sixty-five months into Bush's presidency, conservatives feel betrayed. After the "Bridge to Nowhere" transportation bill, the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination and the Dubai Ports World deal, the immigration crisis was the tipping point for us. Indeed, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found last week that Republican disapproval of Bush's presidency had increased from 16 percent to 30 percent in one month. It is largely the defection of conservatives that is driving the president's poll numbers to new lows.

Emboldened and interconnected as never before by alternative media, such as talk radio and Internet blogs, many conservatives have concluded that the benefits of unwavering support for the GOP simply do not, and will not, outweigh the costs.

The main cause of conservatives' anger with Bush is this: He talked like a conservative to win our votes but never governed like a conservative.

For all of conservatives' patience, we've been rewarded with the botched Hurricane Katrina response, headed by an unqualified director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which proved that the government isn't ready for the next disaster. We've been rewarded with an amnesty plan for illegal immigrants. We've been rewarded with a war in Iraq that drags on because of the failure to provide adequate resources at the beginning, and with exactly the sort of "nation-building" that Candidate Bush said he opposed.

Republicans in Congress and at the White House seem oblivious to the rising threat of communist China and of Vladimir Putin's Russia. Despite the temporary appointment of conservative John R. Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the current GOP leadership keeps shoveling money to the world body despite its refusal to change.

As for the Supreme Court, Bush's failed nomination of Miers, his personal lawyer, represented the breaking of what we took as an explicit promise to appoint more Antonin Scalias and Clarence Thomases, and it was an inexcusable act of cronyism.

Conservatives hope that John G. Roberts and Samuel A. Alito will turn out to be conservatives, as we were promised, but we are aware that six of nine previous Republican appointees to the Supreme Court turned out to be liberals or swing voters. And none of Bush's Supreme Court nominees had a significant paper trail as a conservative legal scholar. That sends a message to conservative lawyers and judges: If you want to be on the Supreme Court someday, hide your conservatism.

But conservatives don't blame the current mess just on Bush. They recognize the problem today is also at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

For years, congressional Republicans have sold themselves to conservatives as the continuation of the Reagan revolution. We were told that they would take on the Washington special interests -- that they would, in essence, tear down K Street and sow the earth with salt to make sure nothing ever grew there again.

But over time, most of them turned into the sort of unprincipled power brokers they had ousted in 1994. They lost interest in furthering conservative ideas, and they turned their attention to getting their share of the pork. Conservatives did not spend decades going door to door, staffing phone banks and compiling lists of like-minded voters so Republican congressmen could have highways named after them and so there could be an affirmative-action program for Republican lobbyists.

White House and congressional Republicans seem to have adopted a one-word strategy: bribery. Buy off seniors with a prescription drug benefit. Buy off the steel industry with tariffs. Buy off agribusiness with subsidies. The cost of illegal bribery (see the case of former congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham) pales next to that of legal bribery such as congressional earmarks.

In today's Washington, where are the serious efforts by Republicans to protect unborn children from abortion? Where is the campaign for a constitutional amendment to prevent liberal judges from allowing same-sex marriage?

Instead of conservative action on social issues, the Republican-controlled House has approved more taxpayers' money for an embryo-killing type of stem cell research. And it passed a "hate crimes" measure that could lead to the classification as "hate" of criticism of homosexual activity. And in the Senate, Republicans have let key judicial nominees languish, even when Bush has nominated conservatives for lower courts. Would a strong Senate leader such as LBJ have let his party's nominees fail for lack of a floor vote?

As long as Democrats controlled Congress or the White House, Republicans could tell conservatives they deserved support because of what they would do, someday. Now we know what they do when they have control. Their agenda comes from Big Business, not from grass-roots conservatives.

But unhappy conservatives should be taken seriously. When conservatives are unhappy, bad things happen to the Republican Party.

In 1948, conservatives were unhappy with Thomas E. Dewey's liberal Republican "me too" campaign, and enough of them stayed home to give the election to Harry S. Truman. In 1960, conservatives were unhappy with Richard M. Nixon's negotiations with Nelson A. Rockefeller to divide the spoils of victory before victory was even achieved, and John F. Kennedy won.

In 1974, conservatives were unhappy with the corruption and Big Government policies of Nixon's White House and with President Gerald R. Ford's selection of Rockefeller as his vice president, and this led to major Republican losses in the congressional races that year. By 1976, conservatives were fed up with Ford's adoption of Rockefeller's agenda, and Jimmy Carter was elected with the backing of Christian conservatives.

In 1992, conservatives were so unhappy with President George H.W. Bush's open disdain for them that they staged an open rebellion, first with the candidacy of Patrick J. Buchanan and then with Ross Perot. The result was an incumbent president receiving a paltry 37 percent of the vote. In 1998, conservatives were demoralized by congressional Republicans' wild spending and their backing away from conservative ideas. The result was an unexpected loss of seats in the House and the resignation of Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.).

The current record of Washington Republicans is so bad that, without a drastic change in direction, millions of conservatives will again stay home this November.

And maybe they should. Conservatives are beginning to realize that nothing will change until there's a change in the GOP leadership. If congressional Republicans win this fall, they will see themselves as vindicated, and nothing will get better.

If conservatives accept the idea that we must support Republicans no matter what they do, we give up our bargaining position and any chance at getting things done. We're like a union that agrees never to strike, no matter how badly its members are treated. Sometimes it is better to stand on principle and suffer a temporary defeat. If Ford had won in 1976, it's unlikely Reagan ever would have been president. If the elder Bush had won in 1992, it's unlikely the Republicans would have taken control of Congress in 1994.

At the very least, conservatives must stop funding the Republican National Committee and other party groups. (Let Big Business take care of that!) Instead, conservatives should dedicate their money and volunteer efforts toward conservative groups and conservative candidates. They should redirect their anger into building a third force -- not a third party, but a movement independent of any party. They should lay the groundwork for a rebirth of the conservative movement and for the 2008 campaign, when, perhaps, a new generation of conservative leaders will step forward.

I've never seen conservatives so downright fed up as they are today. The current relationship between Washington Republicans and the nation's conservatives makes me think of a cheating husband whose wife catches him, and forgives him, time and time again. Then one day he comes home to discover that she has packed her bags and called a cab -- and a divorce lawyer.

As the philanderer learns: Hell hath no fury. . . .

rav@conservativesbetrayed.com

Richard A. Viguerie, chairman of a Manassas marketing firm, is the author of "Conservatives Betrayed: How Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause" (Bonus Books), out this summer.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

There were, in fact, many people in this country who were energized and radicalized by Barry Goldwater’s quixotic campaign, and more importantly his message, and what happened in that year set the table for the conservative revolution and the Republican political dominance of the next 40 years. His followers loved him and his message formed the heart of modern conservatism — at least until its devil’s pact with the rightwing Christianists took over. (And, of course, Goldwater conservatism was almost totally full of shit too, in its own way.) It’s important for progressives to understand how and why they did it — and even more importantly, to understand the way they were perceived at the time by the powers that be and how they coped with that perception.

Perlstein’s book about that campaign and the forces that created it reads like a dream, bringing you into that period as if it were yesterday. The corniness of the 60’s isn’t something people remember so much now that the era has turned into a haze of nostalgic pot smoke. But there was always this other side — an earnest, peppy atmosphere in the midst of cold war paranoia that Goldwater and his followers inhabited. Perlstein has a genuine insight into this time and these people, and an affectionate respect too, which you cannot help but feel as well when you see the kewl kidz and the big money boyz and the movers and shakers of their day treat them like fools and children.

In the book, Goldwater himself is revealed to be what Joe Klein and David Broder today would like to call "authentic" and that "authenticity" (some would call it bullheadedness) led to one of the most wildly mismanaged and often hilarious campaigns in history. He did it his way and lost in a historic landslide. But in the beginning, before that awful day in November 1963, as Goldwater was showing himself to be the up and comer against establishment candidates Rockefeller or Scranton, the political establishment struggled to figure out how to deal with phenomenon of wildly cheering young crowds who were following Goldwater everywhere he went:

Perlstein explains:

As early as his 1922 book, Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann had come to believe that the world was so complex that political decisions would best be left to a specialized class of experts. Three years later the Scopes "monkey trial" confirmed his conviction that a public uninstructed to expert opinion would succumb to the tyranny of the majority — the very worst tyranny of all. Ideologically, the columnist vacillated from decade to decade, sometimes coming out liberal in foreign affairs and conservative in domestic, sometimes vice versa. But always, always, his thinking betrayed a constant: that he and his fellow pundits —- Hindi for "wise men," a title first given to him by an admiring Henry Luce —- were the nation’s best defense against the terror of the mob.

[….]

That was the subject of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All The Kings Men (1946): the story of a rootless man (named Burden) who heals his alienation by filing himself with devotion for a charismatic strongman modeled after Louisiana governor Huey Long, then frees himself over the course of the story from what he increasingly realizes in an existential horror. Warren had Burden exclaim, "There is nothing like the roar of the crowd when it swells up, all of a sudden at the same time, out of the thing which is in every man in the crowd but is not himself."

[…]

The American two-party system, it was thought, was a sublime bulwark against just such dangers. "each party is like some huge bazaar," wrote the sociologist Daniel Bell, "with hundreds of hucksters clamoring for attention." To win party leadership, the successful huckster must be bargainer, splitting most issues down the middle — and as long as that was the case, extremists like Huey Long could never be more than a single yelping voice among the teeming throng. So it was that Walter Lippmann wrote in August that Goldwater’s candidacy "strikes at the heart of the American party system." So it was that faced with the spectacle of a stadium of youth chanting Barry Goldwater’s name, Lippman had but two choices: predict Goldwater’s imminent movement to the ideological center, or brand him a fascist in the making.

…he chose to retreat into the cocoon of theory rather than record the evidence of his own senses: Goldwater, he reported, was becoming a moderate. "It is interesting to watch him, and comforting to think that the system is working so well." Lemminglike, others rushed to confirm the master. Pay attention to a "fascinating political biological process," The New Republic’s columnist TRB instructed readers, "like watching a polliwog turn into a frog."

The journalists didn’t consider Goldwater’s test-ban vote, or his correction in the congressional record to revise a passage giving the mistaken impression that he had denounced tjhe radical right, or, indeed, the day after Lippman’s pronunciamiento, a major speech Goldwater made on the Senate floor reaffirming his conviction that "profits are the surest sign of responsible behavior" — or that he was only becoming more popular in the event… Like Lippman, many liberals simply denied facts that seemed too unlikely to countenance. At a party celebrating the opening of a press liaison office in D.C., the AP’s top political analyst, James Marley, sniffed disdainfully over his cocktail that he polls showing Goldwater’s overwhelming popularity over Rockefeller simply couldn’t be true. (p 233, 234)

Plus ca change, eh? The Adam Nagourneys and Joe Kleins and David Broders of their day just refused to believe what they saw with their own eyes — a grassroots movement made up of real, live ordinary citizens throwing all their energies into politics and following a man who by all accounts stood against what the mandarins called the political mainstream. The establishment refused to acknowledge the rise of the right. Indeed, many people still fail to see that the energy of the 60’s was not a one sided "make love not war" anti-establishment movement. This was happening too — and I would submit that its influence has been no less earth shaking than the New Left scaring the hell out of the straights in 1968. It’s all part of the same political sweep that began with this odd duck of a candidate who refused to play by the rules and ended up making political history.

BTW: Is everyone aware that James Carville has just produced a remake of "All The King’s Men?"

This is right, but it’s only part of Perlstein’s story. Before the Storm does have a lot to say about movement politics. It’s not Goldwater who’s the main protagonist in Perlstein’s account; it’s the conservative activists who used his candidacy to rebuild American politics from the grassroots. But Perlstein also is interested in ideas – as the subtitle says, the book is about the “Unmaking of the American Consensus.” Perlstein wants to know how the smug liberal consensus underlying the Affluent Society of 1960s America was shattered, and replaced by a new, conservative-friendly, set of received wisdoms. “Before the Storm” only begins to describe how this happened, but suggests that it surely had its origins with Goldwater’s supporters. In short, Perlstein tells us that you have to understand both movement politics and ideas if you want to understand why the conservatives won.

Ideas are at the fore of Perlstein’s pamphlet The Stock Market and the Super Jumbo, where he draws out the lessons of the conservative movement for today’s Democrats. Perlstein argues that the Democratic party’s key problem is that it isn’t prepared to commit to a long-term political vision. Goldwater’s conservatives “made sure everyone knew what it meant to be a Republican” by committing to a set of ideas which were pretty unpopular at the outset. They pushed these ideas again and again until they gained legitimacy, and finally became received wisdom among the political classes. They spent sixteen years in the wilderness before they won; but when they won, they took the prize. They were able to reshape the political consensus in their image.

This is the reason why ‘centrist’ and ‘bipartisan’ pundits like David Broder are so damaging to the Democratic party. They’ve internalized Republican talking points about where the political center of gravity is, and how to enforce the boundaries of ‘acceptable’ debate. Progressives are at a perpetual disadvantage, because the terms of political argument are rigged against them. Perlstein’s solution is for the Democratic party to reconnect with the core interests of its voters by “making commitments that do not waver from election to election.” Specifically, they need to commit irreversibly to economic liberalism, and “stick with it even if they lose, in order to win big.”

So Perlstein’s argument isn’t about movement politics alone. There’s a second battlefield that’s nearly as important – the battlefield of ideas. This is one of the main points of David Frum’s recent essay on the fate of the conservative movement. Frum acknowledges that conservatives are in trouble, but claims that they have succeeded, at least in part, in permanently reshaping American politics. They stopped 1960s liberalism in its tracks, and may continue to have influence through their ideas, even if they disappear as a movement altogether. Frum may be right – even if the Democrats win overwhelmingly, they’re going to have problems in implementing a genuinely progressive agenda, (assuming they want to) unless they reshape the underlying political consensus at the same time. Look at what happened to health care reform in Clinton’s first term.

Even so, ideas aren’t anything without political movements. As Mark Schmitt says in this perceptive review of Before the Storm, the typical mistake of pundits and academics like myself is to concentrate on the battle of ideas and ignore or denigrate movement politics. The lesson of the Goldwater campaign is that “it is persistent and aggressive citizen-organizing that makes the difference between ideas that have consequences and those that are just ideas.” Even more than that: the ideas that won out often weren’t the ideas batted back and forth by academics and policy wonks. They were the ideas of the people who started out on the fringes of debate.

In short, I reckon that an important part of Perlstein’s book is about the relationship between movement politics and ideas. People interested in ideas tend not to understand the importance of movement politics; people interested in movement politics tend to underestimate the power of ideas. This suggests some questions for further argument – I’m sure that more will come up as the discussion gets going.

(1) Winning the battle of ideas vs. winning elections. Perlstein wants to get the Democrats to win the battle of ideas and hence become a dominant party. As he says in Stock Ticker and Super Jumbo, this is a very risky strategy, which could lead to losses over the short and medium term, and has no guarantees for working out, even in the long term. But if it wins, it wins big. The netroots, if I understand Jerome and Kos’s book right, are more interested in winning elections and letting battles over ideas sort themselves out afterwards. Are these strategies incompatible? If not, how to reconcile them (or at least to minimize the clash)?

(2) Core ideas. If the Democratic party is to commit irreversibly to a set of core ideas, what should those ideas be? Perlstein suggests vigorous economic liberalism (I heartily agree). Are there other core ideas that Democrats should be committing to? Should people who don’t agree with those ideas (i.e. certain DLCers etc) be shoved out, or brought into the coalition?

(3) Talking to the other side It isn’t only lefties like Todd Gitlin and Mark Greif who liked Before the Storm; so did conservatives like Kristol and Buckley. This is because Perlstein treats conservatives with respect, no matter how much he detests their ideas – indeed he calls them “political role models.” This allows him to really bring home how much they’ve betrayed their own principles. Perlstein argues elsewhere that journalist Paul Cowan’s “ability to probe where those he disagreed with were coming from while still understanding why he disagreed with them” was a sign of moral seriousness. But Cowan also understood the risks of doing this when he said “I would like to think there is room for fundamentalists in my America. But I’m not sure there is room for me in theirs.” How to deal with this – take conservatives seriously, calling them on their hypocrisy when appropriate, or recognize (if it’s true) that there isn’t any possible way for conservatives and progressives to live together?

(4) Taking the movement to the Democratic party. Today’s Democratic party is probably less open to takeover by activists than the Republican party of the 1960s was. Even so, we’re beginning to see netroots people actively running for office within the party – and winning. What kinds of strategies are needed to reshape the Democratic party organization and really get rid of the hacks? What specific lessons, if any, do the conservative activists of the 1960s offer on how to do this?

(5) Winning the battle of ideas. Chris Bowers had a post a while back suggesting that consensus among netroots bloggers was creating an alternative conventional wisdom to that of the Washington political elite, and that this could be a valuable political weapon. He also suggested that there was a tradeoff between “changing progressive infrastructure [and] changing progressive policy.” More policy-oriented types (i.e. myself) would argue back that there aren’t necessarily tradeoffs between progressive infrastructure and progressive policies. I’d further suggest that creating an alternative needs to go together with (a) a shared vision of what policies the left has to offer and why they’re better than those of our opponents, and (b) a reshaping of underlying understandings of politics along the lines of what the conservatives did between Goldwater and Reagan. Is consensus among the netroots enough, or do we need something more?

(Many thanks to Henry, Rick and everyone joining us here today.  There may be up to 30 second delays between the time people comment and the time it registers on the screen due to some server issues we’re trying to work out today and we appreciate your patience.  Please join us at the same time next week for Pt. 1 of Glenn Greenwald’s How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok. — JH)

The Emergence of a New Progressive Conventional Wisdom

by Chris Bowers, Mon Mar 20, 2006 at 06:12:48 PM EST

The production of conventional wisdom is undoubtedly one of the most important factors in the ebb and flow of the American political scene. While it is certainly not the only factor that determines political outcomes, investing in the political infrastructure that has the ability to shape and alter conventional wisdom within the DC political industrial complex in a manner favorable to your cause can result in an almost immeasurable return on your investment. When the vast majority of talking heads on television and radio, along with the vast majority of elected officials and high level consultants seem to repeat your talking points and voice your desired appraisal of the political environment at any point in time, in many ways you have won any political battle before it began.

For example, we all saw this last week when almost everyone in DC, Republicans and Democrats, elected officials and political commentators, staff members and political consultants all agreed, long before any polling data came out, and even before there has been any substantive public debate on the topic, that Feingold's censure move was both motivated by his desire to run for President and highly unpopular nationwide. It was astonishing to witness how almost every single establishment voice in DC immediately agreed with these two basic ideas. The conventional wisdom almost immediately closed around Feingold in a strongly negative fashion, and polls on the subject demonstrate the impact this had. In particular, look at the Newsweek poll on censure that came out this weekend:

Newsweek Poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. March 16-17, 2006. N=1,020 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3 (for all adults).

"As you may know, Senator Russ Feingold has called for Congress to censure, or formally reprimand, President Bush over the issue of his warrantless wiretapping program. Censure is a way for Congress to express strong disapproval of a President's actions without going so far as impeachment. Would you support the censure of President Bush by Congress, or not?"
(Support / Wouldn't Support)
All: 42 / 50
Dems: 60 / 30
Inds: 42 / 51
Reps: 20 / 75

"Do you think Feingold and other Democrats who support censuring Bush are doing it more for partisan political advantage, or more because they believe it is the right thing to do?"
(Partisan / Right Thing to Do)
All: 53 / 33
Dems: 33 / 51
Inds: 55 / 31
Reps: 79 / 14

This is one of the most illuminating polls I have seen in a while. First, it shows that Feingold's censure resolution wasn't nearly as unpopular as the pundrity implied. While the country was slightly more against it than for it, in the same poll Bysh's job approval rating was 36% approve, 58% disapprove. In other words, Feingold's move was more popular than Bush

Second, and more importantly, the poll shows just how effective DC conventional wisdom on a breaking news story is at shaping public opinion. While those opposing censure held only an eight point edge on those favoring censure, those believing that Feingold acted to bolster his standing with in the Democratic Party have a twenty-point edge on those who believe he acted out of conscience. Because those who buy into the DC conventional wisdom have tremendous control over the communication apparatus that helps to create the national conventional wisdom, their cliquish beliefs that Feingold was acting to bolster his 2008 prospects quickly became the national CW. In fact, this message was so powerful that over 20% of the people in the poll who support the censure of Bush also believe that Feingold was acting primarily to bolster his 2008 prospects. With both Democrats and Republicans, consultants and staffers, elected officials and pundits all simultaneously voicing the same opinion on Feingold's motives, the narrative triangle was closed around Feingold, and DC conventional wisdom became national conventional wisdom. Suddenly, perhaps the most principled man in DC became yet another merely calculating politician, all because that is what a small clique of people in DC thought of what he did..

However, at almost exactly the same time, I noticed something else of great interest. In my frequent talks with other bloggers, and in the immense amount of time I spend reading other blogs, it finally dawned on me last week that the netroots has developed its own, entirely separate conventional wisdom. Almost universally, people were in favor of Feingold's action. Almost universally, we discerned that the Democratic strategy in DC was simply to step aside and let the Republicans implode. Almost universally, we agreed that was a really poor strategy. It surprised me how quickly we were all on the same page on virtually every facet of the censure issue. We have developed out own ability to manufacture and alter conventional wisdom, and to transmit that conventional wisdom within our own little confined world: the netroots and the blogosphere.

Much more on this in the extended entry.

In many ways, it reminded me of my first reaction on reading Crashing the Gate. At several different points when going through the book, I thought to myself "this is like 100 seminal blog posts combined. It is the collective wisdom of the progressive political blogosphere that has developed over the past three years, and it has been distilled into a single 177-page book." I stand by that assessment, and if anyone ever asked me for a ten second review of the book, I would simply say that if you want to understand the main line of thought on the contemporary political situation within the progressive blogosphere, read this book. Crashing the Gate will tell you what the progressive political blogosphere thinks.

I don't know how this happened, or when it happened, but it has happened. Somehow, through all of the blog posts we have written, all of the conversations we have joined in the comments of those posts, all of the email list-serves we have joined, all of the conference calls we have organized, of the link exchanges we have maintained, all of the informal meetings and Meetups we have attended, all of the campaigns where we have worked together, and all that we have done in this four year conversation that just started with just a few of us banging out our own, disparate thoughts on lonely keyboards has somehow developed into a fully-blown counter-conventional wisdom on the direction the progressive movement needs to take. In my assessment, the leaders of the progressive blogosphere now all appear to be on more or less the same page on what direction we need to move as a party and as a movement of progressives. Generally speaking, that conventional wisdom is detailed, based on significant research and experience, and stands in contrast to the conventional wisdom of Democrats in DC.

As just one example of this, from about 11:30 am until 1:50 pm today, I wrote an article entitled Are Democrats Doing Better in 2006 Than 2004?. Apparently, when I was almost exactly halfway through writing that post, kos posted an article entitled The GOP advantages in 2006. Even though kos and I haven't talked about this subject well, ever, either over email, phone or in person, and even though neither of us was aware of what the other person was writing before we posted, somehow the pieces ended being remarkable mirrors of one another. I started my piece with an indictment of the Democratic "step aside and let Republicans implode" strategy, just as he did. He emphasized that Democrats are doing a lot better in objective measures of election status, which was the focus of my piece. We both emphasized how we still believed that we could blow this huge advantage. The only difference was in content emphasis, as I emphasized how much better our opportunity was, and he emphasized the many ways we could still blow it. It was as though we were sharing the same mind. And it was a lot like other pieces that a lot of other high profile bloggers have been writing lately.

These two sets of conventional wisdom are in active conflict with one another, both in DC on in the netroots. There are a minority of progressives in DC who subscribe to a reformist vision for the progressive movement very similar to the one espoused online, as there remains a minority online who ascribe to what I have termed the DC establishment view. Neither "camp" is monolithic, there are of course a large number of variations within each line of thought, there are no officials "centers" of either school of thought, and there are also several other schools of thought both online and in DC with a smaller number of adherents. Even so, any regular viewer of the political scene can see a number of major disagreements between these two schools of thought being played out on a regular basis:

• Long term fifty state strategy versus short term selective targeting;
• Being a partisan Democrat versus an ideological Democrat of some sort;
• Directly challenging Republicans versus letting Republicans self-destruct;
• Changing progressive infrastructure versus changing progressive policy;
• Altering the conventional wisdom versus accepting the conventional wisdom.

These are the main conflicts now taking place in the battle between the established progressive conventional wisdom and the emerging progressive conventional wisdom. Almost every time when the netroots has encountered interference with the progressive establishment (and the media establishment) has fallen into one of the five conflicts I listed above. I am actually rather stunned at how quickly we have made progress among many influential progressives in these five conflicts, which might indicate that the netroots is a lot more influential than we sometimes believe. However, the struggle over Feingold's censure resolution made it painfully clear last week just how many influential progressives we have utterly failed to sway. As we move forward into 2006 and beyond, it is important to remember that no matter what election results take place, the struggle for the direction of the party will continue, and that it will center around those five ideas. Whether or not we are in power, we are only going to build a lasting, natural governing majority unless we win the battle over those five ideas. I wouldn't characterize this as a struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party or the progressive movement, but I would characterize it as a struggle over the strategy of the Democratic Party and the progressive movement. No matter what happens in elections, in order for us to once again become a natural governing majority, this is a battle we will have to continue to fight until we have achieved near-total victory.

NATIONAL SECURITY DEPT.

LISTENING IN

by Seymour M. Hersh

Issue of 2006-05-29
Posted 2006-05-22

A few days before the start of the confirmation hearings for General Michael Hayden, who has been nominated by President Bush to be the head of the C.I.A., I spoke to an official of the National Security Agency who recently retired. The official joined the N.S.A. in the mid-nineteen-seventies, soon after contentious congressional hearings that redefined the relationship between national security and the public’s right to privacy. The hearings, which revealed that, among other abuses, the N.S.A. had illegally intercepted telegrams to and from the United States, led to the passage of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to protect citizens from unlawful surveillance. “When I first came in, I heard from all my elders that ‘we’ll never be able to collect intelligence again,’” the former official said. “They’d whine, ‘Why do we have to report to oversight committees?’ ” But, over the next few years, he told me, the agency did find a way to operate within the law. “We built a system that protected national security and left people able to go home at night without worrying whether what they did that day was appropriate or legal.”

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was clear that the intelligence community needed to get more aggressive and improve its performance. The Administration, deciding on a quick fix, returned to the tactic that got intelligence agencies in trouble thirty years ago: intercepting large numbers of electronic communications made by Americans. The N.S.A.’s carefully constructed rules were set aside.

Last December, the Times reported that the N.S.A. was listening in on calls between people in the United States and people in other countries, and a few weeks ago USA Today reported that the agency was collecting information on millions of private domestic calls. A security consultant working with a major telecommunications carrier told me that his client set up a top-secret high-speed circuit between its main computer complex and Quantico, Virginia, the site of a government-intelligence computer center. This link provided direct access to the carrier’s network core—the critical area of its system, where all its data are stored. “What the companies are doing is worse than turning over records,” the consultant said. “They’re providing total access to all the data.”

“This is not about getting a cardboard box of monthly phone bills in alphabetical order,” a former senior intelligence official said. The Administration’s goal after September 11th was to find suspected terrorists and target them for capture or, in some cases, air strikes. “The N.S.A. is getting real-time actionable intelligence,” the former official said.

The N.S.A. also programmed computers to map the connections between telephone numbers in the United States and suspect numbers abroad, sometimes focussing on a geographic area, rather than on a specific person—for example, a region of Pakistan. Such calls often triggered a process, known as “chaining,” in which subsequent calls to and from the American number were monitored and linked. The way it worked, one high-level Bush Administration intelligence official told me, was for the agency “to take the first number out to two, three, or more levels of separation, and see if one of them comes back”—if, say, someone down the chain was also calling the original, suspect number. As the chain grew longer, more and more Americans inevitably were drawn in.

FISA requires the government to get a warrant from a special court if it wants to eavesdrop on calls made or received by Americans. (It is generally legal for the government to wiretap a call if it is purely foreign.) The legal implications of chaining are less clear. Two people who worked on the N.S.A. call-tracking program told me they believed that, in its early stages, it did not violate the law. “We were not listening to an individual’s conversation,” a defense contractor said. “We were gathering data on the incidence of calls made to and from his phone by people associated with him and others.” Similarly, the Administration intelligence official said that no warrant was needed, because “there’s no personal identifier involved, other than the metadata from a call being placed.”

But the point, obviously, was to identify terrorists. “After you hit something, you have to figure out what to do with it,” the Administration intelligence official told me. The next step, theoretically, could have been to get a suspect’s name and go to the fisa court for a warrant to listen in. One problem, however, was the volume and the ambiguity of the data that had already been generated. (“There’s too many calls and not enough judges in the world,” the former senior intelligence official said.) The agency would also have had to reveal how far it had gone, and how many Americans were involved. And there was a risk that the court could shut down the program.

Instead, the N.S.A. began, in some cases, to eavesdrop on callers (often using computers to listen for key words) or to investigate them using traditional police methods. A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or the other. “In the old days, you needed probable cause to listen in,” the consultant explained. “But you could not listen in to generate probable cause. What they’re doing is a violation of the spirit of the law.” One C.I.A. officer told me that the Administration, by not approaching the FISA court early on, had made it much harder to go to the court later.

The Administration intelligence official acknowledged that the implications of the program had not been fully thought out. “There’s a lot that needs to be looked at,” he said. “We are in a technology age. We need to tweak fisa, and we need to reconsider how we handle privacy issues.”

Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, believes that if the White House had gone to Congress after September 11th and asked for the necessary changes in FISA “it would have got them.” He told me, “The N.S.A. had a lot of latitude under FISA to get the data it needed. I think the White House purposefully ignored the law, because the President did not want to do the monitoring under FISA. There is a strong commitment inside the intelligence community to obey the law, and the community is getting dragged into the mud on this.”

General Hayden, who as the head of the N.S.A. supervised the intercept program, is seen by many as a competent professional who was too quick to follow orders without asking enough questions. As one senior congressional staff aide said, “The concern is that the Administration says, ‘We’re going to do this,’ and he does it—even if he knows better.” Former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, who was a member of the 9/11 Commission, had a harsher assessment. Kerrey criticized Hayden for his suggestion, after the Times exposé, that the N.S.A.’s wiretap program could have prevented the attacks of 9/11. “That’s patently false and an indication that he’s willing to politicize intelligence and use false information to help the President,” Kerrey said.

Hayden’s public confirmation hearing last week before the Senate Intelligence Committee was unlike the tough-minded House and Senate investigations of three decades ago, and added little to what is known about the wiretap program. One unexamined issue was the effectiveness of the N.S.A. program. “The vast majority of what we did with the intelligence was ill-focussed and not productive,” a Pentagon consultant told me. “It’s intelligence in real time, but you have to know where you’re looking and what you’re after.”

On May 11th, President Bush, responding to the USA Today story, said, “If Al Qaeda or their associates are making calls into the United States, or out of the United States, we want to know what they are saying.” That is valid, and a well-conceived, properly supervised intercept program would be an important asset. “Nobody disputes the value of the tool,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “It’s the unresolved tension between the operators saying, ‘Here’s what we can build,’ and the legal people saying, ‘Just because you can build it doesn’t mean you can use it.’ ” It’s a tension that the President and his advisers have not even begun to come to terms with.

Copyright © CondéNet 2006.

This little piece of clumsy marketing died off quickly, but it gave away what many already suspected: the War on Terror will never end, nor is it meant to end. It is designed to be perpetual. As with the War on Drugs, it outlines a goal that can never be fully attained—as long as there are pissed off people and explosives. The Long War will eternally justify what are ostensibly temporary measures: suspension of civil liberties, military expansion, domestic spying, massive deficit spending and the like. This short-lived moniker told us all, “get used to it. Things aren’t going to change any time soon.”

The USA PATRIOT Act

Did anyone really think this was going to be temporary? Yes, this disgusting power grab gives the government the right to sneak into your house, look through all your stuff and not tell you about it for weeks on a rubber stamp warrant. Yes, they can look at your medical records and library selections. Yes, they can pass along any information they find without probable cause for purposes of prosecution. No, they’re not going to take it back, ever.

Prison camps

This last January the Army Corps of Engineers gave Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root nearly $400 million to build detention centers in the United States, for the purpose of unspecified “new programs.” Of course, the obvious first guess would be that these new programs might involve rounding up Muslims or political dissenters—I mean, obviously detention facilities are there to hold somebody. I wish I had more to tell you about this, but it’s, you know…secret.

Touchscreen Voting Machines

Despite clear, copious evidence that these nefarious contraptions are built to be tampered with, they continue to spread and dominate the voting landscape, thanks to Bush’s “Help America Vote Act,” the exploitation of corrupt elections officials, and the general public’s enduring cluelessness.

In Utah, Emery County Elections Director Bruce Funk witnessed security testing by an outside firm on Diebold voting machines which showed them to be a security risk. But his warnings fell on deaf ears. Instead Diebold attorneys were flown to Emery County on the governor's airplane to squelch the story. Funk was fired. In Florida, Leon County Supervisor of Elections Ion Sancho discovered an alarming security flaw in their Diebold system at the end of last year. Rather than fix the flaw, Diebold refused to fulfill its contract. Both of the other two touchscreen voting machine vendors, Sequoia and ES&S, now refuse to do business with Sancho, who is required by HAVA to implement a touchscreen system and will be sued by his own state if he doesn’t. Diebold is said to be pressuring for Sancho’s ouster before it will resume servicing the county.

Stories like these and much worse abound, and yet TV news outlets have done less coverage of the new era of elections fraud than even 9/11 conspiracy theories. This is possibly the most important story of this century, but nobody seems to give a damn. As long as this issue is ignored, real American democracy will remain an illusion. The midterm elections will be an interesting test of the public’s continuing gullibility about voting integrity, especially if the Democrats don’t win substantial gains, as they almost surely will if everything is kosher.

Bush just suggested that his brother Jeb would make a good president. We really need to fix this problem soon.

Signing Statements

Bush has famously never vetoed a bill. This is because he prefers to simply nullify laws he doesn’t like with “signing statements.” Bush has issued over 700 such statements, twice as many as all previous presidents combined. A few examples of recently passed laws and their corresponding dismissals, courtesy of the Boston Globe:

Dec. 30, 2005: US interrogators cannot torture prisoners or otherwise subject them to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

Bush's signing statement: The president, as commander in chief, can waive the torture ban if he decides that harsh interrogation techniques will assist in preventing terrorist attacks.

Dec. 30: When requested, scientific information ''prepared by government researchers and scientists shall be transmitted [to Congress] uncensored and without delay."

Bush's signing statement: The president can tell researchers to withhold any information from Congress if he decides its disclosure could impair foreign relations, national security, or the workings of the executive branch.

Dec. 23, 2004: Forbids US troops in Colombia from participating in any combat against rebels, except in cases of self-defense. Caps the number of US troops allowed in Colombia at 800.

Bush's signing statement: Only the president, as commander in chief, can place restrictions on the use of US armed forces, so the executive branch will construe the law ''as advisory in nature."

Essentially, this administration is bypassing the judiciary and deciding for itself whether laws are constitutional or not. Somehow, I don’t see the new Supreme Court lineup having much of a problem with that, though. So no matter what laws congress passes, Bush will simply choose to ignore the ones he doesn’t care for. It’s much quieter than a veto, and can’t be overridden by a two-thirds majority. It’s also totally absurd.

Warrantless Wiretapping:

Amazingly, the GOP sees this issue as a plus for them. How can this be? What are you, stupid? You find out the government is listening to the phone calls of US citizens, without even the weakest of judicial oversight and you think that’s okay? Come on—if you know anything about history, you know that no government can be trusted to handle something like this responsibly. One day they’re listening for Osama, and the next they’re listening in on Howard Dean.

Think about it: this administration hates unauthorized leaks. With no judicial oversight, why on earth wouldn’t they eavesdrop on, say, Seymour Hersh, to figure out who’s spilling the beans? It’s a no-brainer. Speaking of which, it bears repeating: terrorists already knew we would try to spy on them. They don’t care if we have a warrant or not. But you should.

“Free Speech Zones”

I know it’s old news, but…come on, are they fucking serious?

High-ranking Whistleblowers:

Army Generals. Top-level CIA officials. NSA operatives. White House cabinet members. These are the kind of people that Republicans fantasize about being, and whose judgment they usually respect. But for some reason, when these people resign in protest and criticize the Bush administration en masse, they are cast as traitorous, anti-American publicity hounds. Ridiculous. The fact is, when people who kill, spy and deceive for a living tell you that the White House has gone too far, you had damn well better pay attention. We all know most of these people are staunch Republicans. If the entire military except for the two guys the Pentagon put in front of the press wants Rumsfeld out, why on earth wouldn’t you listen?

The CIA Shakeup

Was Porter Goss fired because he was resisting the efforts of Rumsfeld or Negroponte? No. These appointments all come from the same guys, and they wouldn’t be nominated if they weren’t on board all the way. Goss was probably canned so abruptly due to a scandal involving a crooked defense contractor, his hand-picked third-in-command, the Watergate hotel and some (no doubt spectacular) hookers.

If Bush’s nominee for CIA chief, Air Force General Michael Hayden, is confirmed, that will put every spy program in Washington under military control. Hayden, who oversaw the NSA warrantless wiretapping program and is clearly down with the program. That program? To weaken and dismantle or at least neuter the CIA. Despite its best efforts to blame the CIA for “intelligence errors” leading to the Iraq war, the picture has clearly emerged—through extensive CIA leaks—that the White House’s analysis of Saddam’s destructive capacity was not shared by the Agency. This has proved to be a real pain in the ass for Bush and the gang.

Who’d have thought that career spooks would have moral qualms about deceiving the American people? And what is a president to do about it? Simple: make the critical agents leave, and fill their slots with Bush/Cheney loyalists. Then again, why not simply replace the entire organization? That is essentially what both Rumsfeld at the DoD and newly minted Director of National Intelligence John are doing—they want to move intelligence