Framed

Zeitgeist, Y'all

The playlists on country music stations reveal a lot about the spirit of the times.  Lately, I've noted a definite change.

In 2002, Toby Keith was promising that some unidentified enemy would get "a boot in your ass, it's the American way."

In 2003, the country was not ready for the Dixie Chicks' "Travelin' Soldier," especially after Natalie Maines admitted to being ashamed that George Bush was a fellow Texan.  Country stations proved far more receptive to  Darryl Worley's "Have You Forgotten? "  which was probably responsible more than any other single factor for the popular belief that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11:

Have you forgotten
When those towers fell, we had neighbors still inside
Going through a living hell
And we vowed to get the ones behind bin Laden?
Have you forgotten?

Now Worley has a new single, "I Just Came Back," which last weekend was at #21 on the country charts, and it has a far less bellicose theme:

I said I just came back from a place where they hated me
And everything I stand for,
A land where our brothers are dying for others
Who don't even care anymore.
If I'm not exactly the same good old boy that you ran around with before,
I just came back from a war.

In three years, we've gone from vowing to get the ones supposedly behind bin Laden to dying needlessly for people who don't care.  I guess that's progress--and trouble for the pro-war minority.

Scared

I'm watching Bush's presser now.  His delivery is as halting and garbled as ever, but there is something new in his body language.  He looks up (toward heaven?) as if searching for words.  He hunches his shoulders, Nixonlike.  He chews his lip.  At times he looks utterly uncomprehending and scared.  He seems grayer, older.  His tie (blue with white polkadots?) looks askew, with a deep dimple on the left side.

Look: I have always disagreed with most of what this man says and does.  But as an American, I want our leaders to project strength, confidence, wisdom, and resilience.  Bush used to do that, even when he was flat-out wrong.  Now, though, I don't know how anyone could watch him and conclude that the country has a strong, confident hand on the tiller. 

In the national interest, this man should be kept off the air as much as possible.

Feed the Rush

With the double down metaphor for increasing U.S. troop levels in Iraq thoroughly discredited, the administration began casting about for some new euphemism to use for sending more U.S. troops to Iraq to quell the civil war there. 

What better metaphor than a defunct carbonated beverage that advertised "all the sugar and twice the caffine"?  For the new policy, will the tag line  read "all the sorrow and twice as obscene"?

As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch  puts it:

Increasing troop levels would cost billions more in U.S. treasure and perhaps hundreds more American lives. It would sap the final resources of U.S. combat brigades, weakening the ability to respond to other threats. It would postpone desperately needed rebuilding of U.S. forces.

Unless the United States is prepared to garrison 50,000 troops in Baghdad permanently, the lid can't be kept on indefinitely. Given the ferocity of sectarian hatreds and the reluctance of Iraqi politicians to confront them, a short-term surge of more U.S. troops will do nothing more than prolong the procrastination.

I would have said even if the U.S. garrisons 50,000 troops in Baghdad permanently, we will not be able to stop the civil war there. 

Ethics

Yesterday  I posted a quote from Pat Buchanan about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Not long after, I received a request to approve a trackback to a post on a site called Staunton News.  The post was called "Muslims Hate Americans," and was full of bigoted, crazy, paranoid and offensive stuff (not to mention bad grammar).  My first impulse was not to allow it, but then I decided to let it go through as an example of the kind of ignorant kookiness that our brethren on the right so often fall prey to.  I'll think twice before I say something nice about Pat Buchanan again.

Fairness

Senator Sam Brownback, a possible Christianist candidate for the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination, is threatening to place a hold on the nomination of Janet Neff, currently a Michigan state judge who has been nominated to the federal bench by President Bush.  Although her nomination has already been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Brownback now wants to call her back for another hearing.

And why?  What did Judge Neff do to call her credentials for the Federal District Court into question?  Did she cheat on her taxes?  Get caught with kiddy porn?  Knock over a 7-11?

No.  She attended a lesbian commitment ceremony at the invitation of one of the participants, a longtime neighbor of hers. 

In the alternative, Brownback has asked Judge Neff to recuse herself from all gay marriage cases.

Right.  In the interests of fairness and justice, though, it seems to me that we also ought to ask all judges who have ever been to a heterosexual marriage ceremony to similarly recuse themselves from such cases.  At the very least, we should grill judicial nominees who have been to traditional weddings about whether their attendance would affect their ability to act impartially as federal judges.   

Narratives

Over at Media Matters, Jamison Foser has been looking at how Republicans and their allies in the media have been framing progressives , and the effect this framing has:

• The narratives about progressives tend to be negative -- Al Gore was a liar and a wimp, Howard Dean was crazy, John Kerry was a flip-flopping wimp, etc.).

• The narratives about conservatives tend to be positive (John McCain is a straight-talking maverick, Rudy Giuliani is "America's Mayor," etc.)

• The narratives about progressives (our focus today) are often based in large part on the media's endless repetition of snarky comments, stories, and anecdotes about purported personal qualities.

• Progressives and journalists often blame the victims of these narratives, chalking them up to inept candidates and campaign staff. No matter how many different progressives get unfairly defined by the media as soft and dishonest and ineffectual, too many people refuse to hold journalists accountable.

What's heartening to me is that in last month's election, a lot of voters in some unlikely places (Missouri, Montana, Virginia) saw through that kind of framing.  They saw through it more clearly than many liberal commentators did.  Let's hope their vision remains 20/20 for the next two years.

Ahmadinejad

It just kills me to write this, but Pat Buchanan is right about one thing: Ahmadinejad would have been a much better choice for TIME Magazine's MoTY than aluminum foil guy.

But the refusal to select Ahmadinejad reveals an unwillingness to confront hard truths. For putting his face on Time's cover would have done a useful service, jolting America to a painful realization. Not only George Bush, but the United States, its Arab allies and Israel, had a dreadful year, as Iran emerged as first beneficiary of a war fought by this country at a cost of 25,000 dead and wounded.

What the choice of Ahmadinejad would have said is that Iran is in the ascendancy in the Middle East and it is not inconceivable that the United States is headed for defeat, not only in Iraq but Afghanistan.

The Taliban have come back. The Pakistanis have ceded them sanctuary. Some NATO nations are refusing to risk troops in combat. And it has been some time since guerrillas who enjoyed a privileged sanctuary in that part of the world failed to expel European soldiers perceived as imperial occupiers.

Islamists control Somalia. Anti-Americanism is rampant in Lebanon – after Condi Rice blocked a U.N. cease-fire resolution to stop Israel's bombing last summer in what was supposed to be a campaign to clear Hezbollah from her northern border. The Beirut government could fall at any moment or be forced into a coalition with Hezbollah.

Even Bush's defense secretary concedes we are not winning in Iraq. It may take a "surge" of 20,000 to 40,000 troops to stave off defeat before the end of Bush's term. On the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas and Fatah appear on the brink of civil war. The elections Bush demanded produced dramatic gains for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine and Moqtada al-Sadr in Iraq.

Eighteen months ago, Ahmadinejad was the unknown mayor of Tehran. Today, he is the visible face of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism, both a cause of and the personification of our failures. He has defied Bush's demand that he give up the enrichment of uranium, split the Security Council, mocked the Holocaust, called for the end of the Zionist state and the expulsion of America from the Mideast, terrified the Sunni monarchs, and united the Arab and Islamic masses behind his defiance.

*  *  *

He inspires all who hate Israel and Bush's America. And, according to the Zogby polling yesterday, that is a majority which, in some once-friendly nations, is approaching near unanimity.

Hard to argue with any of that.

Edging

Senator Hillary Clinton is edging away from her vote in favor of the Iraq war resolution. 

This morning on NBC's "Today" show, Sen. Clinton was asked about her 2002 vote and offered a slightly evolved answer.  "Obviously, if we knew then what we know now, there wouldn't have been a vote," she said in her usual refrain before adding, "and I certainly wouldn't have voted that way."

This is only a small step in the right direction, and doesn't do much to win me over to the Clinton camp.

23 U.S. Senators were not taken in by Bush's deceptions, were not swept up in the pro-war parade, and were not afraid to vote their consciences.  History has proved them right.  Here are the Senators who voted against the Iraq war; why was Hillary Clinton's judgment on this crucial issue so much worse than theirs?

Akaka (D-HI) Bingaman (D-NM) Boxer (D-CA) Byrd (D-WV) Chafee (R-RI) Conrad (D-ND) Corzine (D-NJ) Dayton (D-MN)

Durbin (D-IL) Feingold (D-WI) Graham (D-FL) Inouye (D-HI) Jeffords (I-VT) Kennedy (D-MA) Leahy (D-VT) Levin (D-MI)

Mikulski (D-MD) Murray (D-WA) Reed (D-RI) Sarbanes (D-MD) Stabenow (D-MI) Wellstone (D-MN) Wyden (D-OR)

Southbound

Tom Schaller has noted (via Digby, writing in Firedoglake) that the electoral map of the United States today looks very, very similar to the electoral map of 1860, only with the colors reversed.  The GOP is now the party of the solid south, while the northern east coast, much of the upper midwest and the west coast are in the Democrats' column.

Look at the country's electoral demographics.  The south is gaining population and potency in the electoral college. Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia,  Kentucky,  Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia held a total of 141 electoral votes, or more than half of the 270 needed to elect a President.  The GOP gets 46 reliably Republican votes from states such as Alaska, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota,  South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.   With that base of 187, the GOP needs to find only 83 more electoral votes to reach the magic number of 270.  Presumably, the Republicans would focus their efforts on states such as Arizona (10), Colorado (9), Florida (27), Iowa (7), Missouri (11), Nevada (5), New Mexico (5), Ohio (20) and West Virginia (5).

Digby thinks that the GOP's status as the party of the south is not necessarily a bad thing:

The fact is that it is the Republicans who have backed themselves into a corner. By allowing their southern wingnuts to dominate they have marginalized themselves and are losing their appeal to the country as a whole.

I wish I could be as sanguine about this situation, but I'm not.  I don't think the GOP will nominate a wingnut in 2008.  Look at the list of likely GOP candidates.  It is top-heavy with candidates who seem like reasonable gents: Romney, McCain, Giuliani, Thompson, Pataki, Huckabee, Gilmore.  These are not names to frighten the horses.

The other issue addressed by Digby is why the south votes the way it does.  The conclusion:

When all is said and done, the thing that separates [conservative white southerners] from the rest of the nation is racism. All the racial codes, the slick misdirection, even the appeals to homophobia and religion are in some sense directed at this one simple characteristic. And that characteristic is the thing that trumps all the other concerns about economic justice that Democrats persist in believing they can use to persuade white southern males to vote for them.

Sad to say, there are data that back up this claim.   Does this mean that Howard Dean's Fifty State Strategy is doomed?  During the 2004 campaign, Dean famously remarked

White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back ought to be voting with us and not them because their kids don't have health insurance either, and their kids need better schools too.

As I've noted before, Dean thinks long-range.  I'm enough of an optimist to believe that over the next two decades, issues of race and sexual orientation will lose some of their potency, even in the south.  Immigration (both by foreigners and by citizens from other parts of the U.S.) and the displacement of the Jim Crow generation by the Civil Rights generation should take the edge off racial issues.  At that point, the disparities between the south and other areas of the country in terms of the economy, health care and education will make the Democrats more competitive in Dixie.  It's not going to happen overnight; it almost certainly won't happen in 2008.  But so long as the Democrats continue to think strategically about the south, the long-range future is brighter for them there than it has been recently.

Announcement

John Edwards plans to announce his candidacy for the Presidency in New Orleans' Ninth Ward later this month.  He couldn't have done better in choosing a location that frames what the 2008 election is going to be about.  And it seems that the good people of  Iowa agree .