Sullivanus Laughibalis. I’d heard that Andrew Sullivan was preparing a “counterblast” to my recent writings on the ‘imminent threat’ ridiculousness. Well, now it’s up. And you can see it here: "Marshall Comes Up Empty".
Most revealing nugget: Sullivan found the direct quotations chosen by TPM readers so weak, skewerable, and unconvincing that he fails to quote, mention or even make reference to any of them.
Imagine that.
(Also note the funny-business with the Rumsfeld quote.)
--Josh Marshall
If I had to pick one book to get my footing in the history of the modern Middle East, its ironies and intractability, there's no question I'd pick David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.
It's a history of the birth of the modern Middle East in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the new Arab successor states by the European powers.
Just shy of a masterpiece.
--Josh Marshall
Do you reap what you sow?
From Dick Cheney on the hustings on Friday ...
In Iraq, a ruthless dictator cultivated weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. He gave support to terrorists, had an established relationship with al Qaeda -- and his regime is no more. (italics added)
One can only imagine where they're going with this one.
--Josh Marshall
The Republicans are puffing themselves up with a lot of mock outrage over this Democratic draft memo. And the White House is about to get into the act too.
I’ve got an idea, a proposal, shall we say, that I’m going to float on behalf of the Democrats to get us past all this acrimony and suspicion.
The Democrats will turn over all their memos and work product on everything to do with intelligence and investigations into intelligence. Everything back to September 1st, 2001.
And I mean everything --- every staff memo, every planning memo, minutes from brainstorming sessions, memos from each senator's staff, communications with the White House and the CIA, and planning and strategizing with regards to both. All the work product. Everything. They’ll package it all together and give one copy to the majority and one copy to the White House.
In exchange, the majority will hand over the same range of documents to the minority and the White House.
And the White House and the rest of the national security-related departments and agencies in the executive branch will hand over the same to the majority and the minority in the Senate.
Deal?
--Josh Marshall
"The U.S. military swept through Iraqi neighborhoods early Saturday, firing at houses suspected to be harboring hostile forces in the wake of an apparent attack on a Black Hawk helicopter that killed six U.S. soldiers."
That's the lede of a piece Fox News is running on the aftermath of today's helicopter downing.
--Josh Marshall
We all know how this works.
Two guys walk into a ring for a fight. One knows he’s about to get creamed. But he can’t bear the shame and humiliation of walking away from a fight. So at the very last moment he whips out some phony claim that the other guy’s cheating.
He puffs himself up with forced indignation. And huffily storms off.
Everybody knows it was bogus --- the accused, the accuser, everyone else. But it gives the coward just enough of an angle, just enough of a smokescreen to get out of the place without having a glove laid on him and with a bit of his dignity intact.
This is of course more or less exactly what the Republicans are doing with the hullabaloo over this unsent Democratic staff memo.
Precisely the same.
(The actual memo bears reading because, though Jay Rockefeller has said he never authorized it and it was never sent, it's much more tame than the hyper-ventilating coverage would suggest. The 'plot' is essentially a plot to have a real investigation.)
As I said in this earlier post, the Republicans are trying to use this memo ridiculousness to shut down any scrutiny of the intelligence related bad-acts in the lead-up to the war.
And they’re already starting. According to Newsmax, Newt Gingrich said yesterday that the president should refuse to cooperate with the committee altogether.
“I don't see how the White House can cooperate with an intelligence committee which has this level of partisanship,” he told Sean Hannity on Thursday.
See where they’re going with this?
--Josh Marshall
Throughout the day I've been collecting thoughts about the ridiculous charges Senate Republicans are making about this Democratic staff memo revealed by Sean Hannity. But I've been reporting out another story for most of the day. And, honestly, I'm just too worn out to write.
A quick thought, then more later.
The Republicans are trying to protect the administration from a host of disclosures about shenanigans in the lead up to the war. They've seized on this memo (which is a bit embarrassing for the Dems, certainly, but hardly more than that) and are trying to use it to secure even further partisan control over the intelligence oversight process -- or, in other words, to prevent any serious inquiry into what happened in the lead-up to the war.
The stakes are truly that serious.
Senator Santorum apparently wants to use the brouhaha as an excuse to stack the Senate Select Intelligence Committee with Republicans.
The whole thing will be a test of how much people in this town can be played for saps, and whether the Democrats can shake off these intimidation tactics and learn to fight back.
--Josh Marshall
They truly know no limits.
According to an email sent out Wednesday by director of the White House Office of Administration, Timothy A. Campen, the Bush administration will no longer respond to budgeting questions from congressional Democrats. And they imply they may apply this new principle, if you can call it that, to non-budgetary oversight.
(Given the questions that are being asked, I can certainly understand the motivation.)
They've dressed it up a bit. The wording actually says they'll no longer respond to queries not sent by the committee chairmen. But since Republicans are the chairmen that means the GOP chairman will have a veto over every Democratic request for info.
AEI's Norm Ornstein, not exactly a shill for the Dems, says "I have not heard of anything like that happening before. This is obviously an excuse to avoid providing information about some of the things the Democrats are asking for."
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And if you're already pretty corrupt when you get the power ... well, then things can really get bad pretty quick, as we're seeing.
--Josh Marshall
Okay, so the much-awaited results of our imminent threat contest.
In recent weeks a number of conservative commentators have tried mightily to make the case that because administration leaders seldom used the phrase ‘imminent threat’ that they didn’t argue that this was the situation we faced.
Yet, as I said in The Hill on Wednesday, their argument is really just a “crafty verbal dodge — sort of like ‘I didn’t accuse you of eating the cake. All I said was that you sliced it up and put it in your mouth.’”
Democrats aren't responsible for disentangling this mumbo-jumbo if they want to talk about the president's record and responsibility.
Part of the administration’s effort to float the imminent threat argument was based on redefining what such a threat would mean in the face of terrorism and inadequate intelligence information. Many of the president’s defenders refer to this statement in the president’s State of the Union address in his defense …
Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words and all recriminations would come too late.
But what the president is saying here is that in the context of rogue states in alliance with terrorists we’ll never have the sort of advance warning which used to count as the evidence of an imminent threat. And thus what we had in Iraq actually amounted to an imminent threat. In fact, the administration anticipated this line of reasoning in its National Security Strategy document when it said “We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries.”
Condi Rice made a similar point in September 2002 when she said on Nightline: “Well, the President talked about a direct threat. And a threat that might materialize at a certain time. And after the experience of September 11th, the question of what is imminent is a different question because, at any time a threat that has been brewing, a threat that has been developing, can suddenly strike you from the blue.”
But enough of this, because on numerous occasions administration leaders dispensed with this nuancing entirely and just said it was a plain old imminent threat -- and progressively more often as we moved toward war.
The key is the claim that it is a present threat that could come at any moment and which the country has to confront now or risk potential disaster. I made my argument about the bogusness of the “we never said it was an imminent threat” argument in my last column in The Hill. And if you’re interested you can read it there.
But now, let’s get down to who won the super-slick TPM T-shirt.
Some people sent in quotes like this one from Richard Perle:
And the only point I want to make is that as long as Saddam is there, with everything we know about Saddam, as long as he possesses the weapons that we know he possesses, there is a threat, and I believe it's imminent because he could choose at any time to take an action we all very much hope he won't take.
That’s pretty clear, ain’t it?
Throughout the build-up to the war, Perle was acting as a de facto spokesman for the war-hawks in the administration. And he had an office in the Pentagon. But at the end of the day he wasn’t a principal in the administration. So, although his statements typified the administration line, his can’t be the winning quote.
More in contention are the quotes from the president’s spokesmen at the time. Did they think the president was arguing there was an imminent threat? The evidence here is awfully clear. Three examples from my Hill column …
Last October, a reporter put this to Ari Fleischer: “Ari, the president has been saying that the threat from Iraq is imminent, that we have to act now to disarm the country of its weapons of mass destruction, and that it has to allow the U.N. inspectors in, unfettered, no conditions, so forth.”Fleischer’s answer? “Yes.”
In January, Wolf Blitzer asked Dan Bartlett: “Is [Saddam] an imminent threat to U.S. interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home.”
Bartlett’s answer? “Well, of course he is.”A month after the war, another reporter asked Fleischer, “Well, we went to war, didn’t we, to find these — because we said that these weapons were a direct and imminent threat to the United States? Isn’t that true?”
Fleischer’s answer? “Absolutely.”
Any of those could be winners in my book.
But others are still in contention.
What always struck me as the most egregious statement at the time was the president's claim on the very eve of the war that we "will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder." (italics added)
Administration leaders also called the threat “urgent” (Bush), “mortal” (Cheney), “immediate” (Rumsfeld) and a bunch of other similar lines.
But the most important enunciator of the president’s argument is the president himself.
So first prize in the TPM Imminent Threat T-Shirt Contest (TPMITTSC) goes for this quote from the president’s October 7th 2002 speech in Cincinnati Ohio ...
Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.
The first runner up goes to another line from a few moments later in the same speech ...
Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
And the second runner-up goes to this exchange from May 7th 2003 with then-presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer:
Question: Well, we went to war, didn't we, to find these -- because we said that these weapons were a direct and imminent threat to the United States? Isn't that true?Fleischer: Absolutely. One of the reasons that we went to war was because of their possession of weapons of mass destruction. And nothing has changed on that front at all.
Now, we had almost 500 entries. So many people sent in the same quotations. And the only fair way to sort them out was to go with the entrant who came up with the quote first.
(BTW, a special thanks to TPM editorial assistant and all-around helper Zander Barnes for processing, organizing and reviewing all the entries.)
So, with that in mind, the winners are …
1st Place … Jason Barnosky (Winner of a finely-crafted TPM T-Shirt)
2nd Place … Anita Krasno (Winner of a finely-crafted TPM Mug)
3rd Place … Jon Rey (Winner of a finely-crafted TPM Mug)
Now, in these trying times, it’s important for all of us to keep our morale up. So if you’re hit especially hard by not winning the contest, keep in mind that you can buy your own TPM apparel, mugs and carry-alls in the TPM Shop.
--Josh Marshall
If you wanted to write the script for next year's election to ensure the closest possible result, you'd write it pretty much exactly as it's shaping up. If the economy remained persistently sluggish, the fiscal situation remained so awash in red ink, and things remained so bleak in Iraq, I think President Bush would have great difficulty getting reelected.
But it now seems clear that there is new job growth in the economy --- as signaled by today's down-tick in the unemployment rate to 6%. Growth in itself is comparatively insignificant in political terms. The key political metric is jobs. And there are signs of improvement there too.
(See this article at CNN/Money to get a feel for how much job growth is necessary just to keep up with population growth and productivity gains. Says the CNN article: "Most economists believe payrolls need to grow by at least 150,000 jobs a month in order to keep up with the natural growth of the labor force and keep the unemployment rate down, and that is generally expected to happen only slowly in the next year.")
We've had a couple false-start recoveries in the last couple years. But it seems hard to figure that president Bush won't enter the home stretch of the campaign next year without at least an improving economy to point to. But how quickly will it come? Where will the pick-up be concentrated? And how will the economic news meld in voters' minds with what's happening abroad?
--Josh Marshall
Since I was going to appear on another show on CNN later that evening, I only heard parts of the Rock The Vote presidential debate that CNN broadcast Tuesday night. When I was listening from the other room, though, I heard parts of the lambasting Howard Dean got from the rest of the candidates about the confederate flag remarks.
On first blush, I thought that Dean was really getting unfairly pummeled and that the other candidates were just grandstanding. I think everyone knew the point Dean meant to convey. And that's a point that's hard to disagree with: namely, that Democrats need to seek the votes of working class Southern white voters who've been basically lost to the Democratic party for two generations.
As I listened to hullabaloo unfold, however, something else occurred to me. Dean's stubbornness and arrogance can be a big liability for him. When he got asked about the comment at the Rock The Vote debate there was a really straightforward way to answer ...
A) I stand by the point I was trying to make. B) If the way I phrased it offended you, I'm really sorry about that. C) You know, you speak a lot on the campaign trail. And sometimes you don't phrase something just the right way. But I'll try to be more careful about how I choose my words.
End of story. That would have been it, though his opponents would certainly have tried to milk it a bit longer. No big production of an apology would have been necessary.
But he couldn't bring himself to do it. And it was the headline out of the debate. And the headline yesterday with the semi-apology. And today when I brought up the CNN page the story about the full apology is practically breaking news.
One of Dean's selling points is the straight-talk thing, sorta like John McCain. So I don't think it would be a good idea for him to muzzle himself. But part of the straight-talk thing is being willing to quickly say "yeah, that was lame" when you put your foot in your mouth and then move on.
If he can't learn to do that, he'll have a lot of trouble ahead.
--Josh Marshall
Senator Pot in need of a kettle to call black ...
It is a disgusting possibility that members of the Senate would actually try to politicize intelligence, especially at a time of war, even apparently reaching conclusions before investigations have been performed ...
Senator John Kyl (R-AZ) Wednesday on the Senate floor.
--Josh Marshall
Newspaper stories see the light of day for all sorts of strange and inscrutable reasons. Often the nominal 'story' is like the calm or slightly rippled surface of a lake in which all sorts of hidden business is taking place beneath.
Why are you hearing about a given story now? Who dropped a dime on who? The surface story is often at least as important as the backstory. But the backstory is something you want to know too.
Here's one of those cases.
You've likely already seen or will soon see the story running in several major news outlets this evening about apparent last minute overtures that Iraq made to the US, looking for a deal just before the outbreak of the war.
The story centers on an apparent back channel (or attempted back channel) using a Lebanese-American businessman who had a relationship with an analyst in Doug Feith's shop at the Pentagon, Michael Maloof. (Richard Perle was part of the potential back channel too.)
In aftermath of 9/11, Maloof and David Wurmser were each part of a two-man team tasked by the Pentagon with finding links between Shi'a and Sunni extremist groups as well as between Islamist terrorists and secular Arab regimes. They reported finding lots of evidence. But the folks at the CIA never bought it.
Down deep in the New York Times article, there's this line contained in a parantheses: "In May, Mr. Maloof, who has lost his security clearances, was placed on paid administrative leave by the Pentagon."
There's your ripple.
And that's where I think you'll find a lot of the backstory for why we're hearing now about this business with the last-minute overture.
To start getting a feel for that backstory, see this piece from Knight Ridder's Warren Strobel from August 1st ("U.S. revokes security clearance for Pentagon employee.")
This issue of security clearances and the revocation of security clearances and investigations in the depths of the bureaucracy is an important story of which we're only getting the vaguest hints.
Late Update: Let me be a bit more clear about what I'm getting at here.
Let's say I'm a career defense bureaucrat struggling to get my security clearances restored because it's very hard for me to be a defense bureaucrat without them. And let's say one of the reasons I can't get them restored is because of some unauthorized contacts I had with a Lebanese-American businessman under investigation for running guns to Liberia. And let's further add to the mix that my whole mess with the security clearances is part of a larger struggle between different factions in the national intelligence bureaucracy. Oh, and one last thing: let's say I'm a protégé of Richard Perle.
Okay.
Now, if I'm on the line for these unauthorized contacts with the gun-running businessman, wouldn't it be a lot harder to punish me for it if it looked like that contact almost allowed me to secure a deal that would have averted the need for war?
And if that's the case, wouldn't it be cool if my buddies and mentors went to the press with the story of how I almost saved the day?
(And as long as we're on the subject, look at all the contradictions between the Times' piece and Strobel's piece.)
--Josh Marshall
Word was spread about today that the president would be giving a major speech tomorrow about democracy in the Middle East. It turns out that it'll be at a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy.
Everybody's for democracy in the Middle East these days, so far as it goes. But the question isn't what you're for so much as what and who you're against. And the word that was being bandied about was that the president would say that the longstanding US policy of supporting the region's autocracies had failed and would be ended.
That's the kernel of the neocon faith (or rather what we might call the Neocon Faith 3.0 or 3.2 or something like that) and there's more than a little to be said for it.
But who would the president call out? The Saudis? The Egyptians? We've always been against the anti-American autocracies. How about the pro-American ones? At the current moment, in a tough battle in Iraq, that would certainly be the all-or-nothing approach.
The AP has a run-down out now. And it seems it's going to be a rather more tepid affair.
Still, I think this speech will be worth reading, if only to get a glimpse into the factional in-fighting in the White House today.
--Josh Marshall
See this interesting post on Muqtada al-Sadr on Juan Cole's site. An example of some seemingly successful carrots and sticks applied by the CPA. Cole's site is one of the few places online -- in English at least -- where you can find good sustained reporting on these nitty-gritty details of what's going on over in Iraq. Invaluable.
--Josh Marshall
We've made our way through all the entries for the TPM 'imminent threat' contest. And we'll be announcing the winner on Friday. (So if you entered the contest a lustrous, new TPM T-shirt may be in your future!)
But to get things started, here's my new column in The Hill on the effort to convince us that all those administration leaders didn't say what everyone remembers them saying less than a year ago.
In other words, the 'imminent threat' mumbo-jumbo.
--Josh Marshall
TPM tonight on the Aaron Brown show on CNN at 10 PM -- talking about the Reagan miniseries ridiculousness.
--Josh Marshall
As promised in the previous post, here's a copy of the letter about possible voting irregularities in Mississippi today which Secretary of State Eric Clark sent today to Attorney General Mike Moore and the state's two US Attorneys.
The irregularities include reports that poll watchers are videotaping voters in predominantly black neighborhoods.
--Josh Marshall
The Kentucky governor's race is down to the wire, with Republican candidate Ernie Fletcher having a clear, though not insurmountable, advantage going into today's voting. Says uber-election-maven Charlie Cook ...
In Kentucky, Republican Rep. Ernie Fletcher appears to have a low single-digit lead over Democratic state Attorney General Ben Chandler. While a win for Chandler is still possible, the odds are higher that Fletcher, who has been the favorite, will win.
Meanwhile, in Mississippi, the other state holding a gubernatorial election today, there are reports of voting irregularities, including poll watchers videotaping voters in predominantly black neighborhoods, in direct violation of the law.
More on this in a moment.
--Josh Marshall
Let's file this one <$NoAd$>under 'saving private nethercutt' ...
A couple weeks ago Congressman George Nethercutt (now running for Senate) stuck his foot in his mouth about up to his ankle when he said that the good news in the reconstruction of Iraq was "a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day."
Here's how the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, reported it ...
Rep. George Nethercutt said yesterday that Iraq's reconstruction is going better than is portrayed by the news media, citing his recent four-day trip to the country."The story of what we've done in the postwar period is remarkable," Nethercutt, R-Wash., told an audience of 65 at a noon meeting at the University of Washington's Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs.
"It is a better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day."
He added that he did not want any more soldiers to be killed.
(TPM had this comment at the time.)
Now, rather than saying he'd mischosen his words, Nethercutt's campaign spinmeisters seem to have told him that the best approach was to go on the offensive. So Nethercutt first demanded an apology and then ran a bunch of ads accusing the paper of having "massacred" his words, engaging in "deliberate distortion" and "slander[ing]" him.
And what was the full quotation, according to Nethercutt?
So the story is better than we might be led to believe in the news. I’m just indicting the news people, but it’s, it’s a bigger and better and more important story than losing a couple of soldiers every day which, which heaven forbid is awful.
Slander?
Frankly, it sounds to me like the Post-Intelligencer is mainly guilty of not being Nethercutt's flack, of not bending over backwards to save Nethercutt from his own clumsy and over-zealous repetition of the White House party line (viz, that the press is hiding the good news.)
It's awfully hard to get around his statement that the Iraqi schools reopening and other similar stuff is a "bigger and better and more important story than losing a couple soldiers every day" even if he did tag on a throwaway line about American fatalities being a terrible thing.
Today, Andrew Sullivan uses the whole imbroglio to attack Paul Krugman. Go figure ...
--Josh Marshall
Okay, some follow-up on the ‘sees’ versus ‘seeks’ matter in the president’s speech before the Australian parliament last month, which is noted below.
I’ve done a little digging and here’s what I’ve found out --- some of it helpful to the White House, some not.
According to a trusted source, the prepared remarks the White House handed out at the time did indeed include the word ‘seek.’
But when the president delivered the speech he pretty clearly said ‘see’, thus changing the meaning of the statement and creating a small international hubbub. (Listen to the audio feed here.)
The White House released the transcript of the president’s speech saying ‘see.’ The official record of the Australian parliament records it as ‘see.’ Perhaps most revealing, when asked about it by members of the press, administration officials traveling with the president in Asia defended the ‘see’ statement and made no mention of the president’s having meant something different from what he said.
At some point people at the White House realized that the president had just committed a gaffe. He said ‘see’ but they had told him to say ‘seek’. And the folks at the White House seem to have reasoned, ‘hey, why are we defending this line when it’s not what he was supposed to have said in the first place?’ So they just changed the transcript to say what the president was supposed to have said rather than what he did say.
Now, is this a federal case or the end of the world? Of course not. But this White House does have a bit of a record of massaging transcripts. And at the end of the day there’s something to be said for the transcripts actually saying what the president said rather than what he was supposed to say.
Call me old-fashioned ...
--Josh Marshall
Fareed Zakaria has a dynamite column about 'Iraqification' in today's Post.
--Josh Marshall
Waiting for Godot, but getting Linda. The Pentagon has agreed to pay Linda Tripp $595,000 to settle her claims that the DOD violated her privacy rights.
--Josh Marshall
I just noticed this post from Andrew Sullivan's <$NoAd$> site taking a shot at the BBC ...
Yep, they went in and changed the text which had said that "peace" had been declared in Iraq last April. It's not my error. The Beeb is one of the few news organizations which simply rewrites posted copy without any indication that they have done so. Sometimes with simple typos etc. this makes sense. But in factual errors, it's a form of deception, a rewriting of the record, with no accountability. It's a sign, I think, of the general level of integrity at today's BBC - i.e. frayed.
That reminded me of something.
The week before last I wrote a post questioning the wisdom of something President Bush said when he addressed the Australian parliament.
"We," said the president, "see a China that is stable and prosperous, a nation that respects the peace of its neighbors and works to secure the freedom of its own people."
The statement and its rather odd implication were reported around the world. But then a few days later I got an email from a reader who had followed the link I'd provided to the White House's transcript of the speech and asked if maybe I'd gotten it wrong.
A few days ago (10/23), you quoted Bush as speaking to the Australian Parliament and saying that he "sees" a China that is free, etc. At the time, I didn't go back to the White House press release, but if you look at it now you will see that it says he "seeks" a free China. Did you misread it, or have they been massaging the record after the fact? I don't know how to go about looking for a cached version of the page, but maybe it's worth pursuing.
Well, I'm not sure I'd know how to go about getting the cached version either. But luckily that's not necessary, since I made a PDF version of the original White House transcript as it appeared on the day in question. (Call me suspicious.) You can see it right here. If you scroll down to the big, clumsily-drawn red circle you'll see that the word was 'see' not 'seek'. Then compare it to the current version now at the White House website.
At some later point, they (i.e., someone in the White House press operation) simply changed the word and thus utterly changed the meaning.
Now, I've heard some speculate that the president had meant to say 'seek' but somehow misspoke or perhaps was supposed to say 'seek'.
Maybe.
But I find that a touch dubious because I think that on such a delicate matter the White House would check the 'transcript' against the prepared speech that the president read from. But however that may be, I'd say this performance from the White House press office turned out to be, to paraphrase Andrew, frayed as well.
--Josh Marshall
According to Reuters, CBS is seriously considering canceling its miniseries on the Reagans. What an utter joke.
Since I haven't seen it, I have no idea if the thing is complete tripe, biased, maudlin, lame or whatever. From my experience with TV miniseries, it's probably all of those things.
(Of course, not having seen it doesn't seem to be much of a problem since, from what I can tell, none of the critics have actually seen it either.)
I mean, imagine the temerity of CBS in running a miniseries which departs from a hagiographic portrayal of the former president!
The only good I can see coming of this is that it puts the lie to all the conservative mumbo-jumbo about 'wingers being for free speech or their being an embattled group oppressed by the liberal media. A little mau-mauing and the plug is pulled.
A TV network produces a miniseries about a former president and the current national chairman of the president's party demands that it be reviewed for historical accuracy by a board of 'scholars.'
The fact that it's put together by people who aren't themselves conservatives (and/or party loyalists) is itself, it seems, another outrage.
Wake me up when we're back in America.
--Josh Marshall
When I want my numbers crunched, my <$NoAd$>Democratic party demographics explained, and my election dynamics analyzed, I know to go to Ruy Teixeira. Ruy’s with The Century Foundation, the Center for American Progress and probably a bunch of other places I can’t remember. Luckily, he now has his own blog, Donkey Rising. So I know right where to go.
We chatted briefly about the primary race last week at the foreign policy conference. And now he’s penned two posts (#1 & #2) on what he thinks a winning strategy for Wes Clark might look like.
--Josh Marshall
TPM traffic stats are in for October: total unique visitors 349,401; total visits 1,174,598; total page views 1,418,272. As always, thank you for making these numbers possible.
--Josh Marshall
The Washingtonpost.com has gotten each of the nine Democratic presidential candidates to sign up for online chats on the WaPo website this week. (Here's the page they've set aside for it on the site.)
Dick Gephardt is the lead-off this morning at 11:30 AM.
Now, I hear that Gephardt is still the only one of the nine candidates who hasn't committed to show up for the Rock The Vote forum/debate tomorrow night on CNN live from Boston.
What gives?
Sure, labor and seniors may be his target constituencies. But doesn't this put a bit too fine a point on it? Maybe a little face time for the kids?
--Josh Marshall
A new TPM Featured Book, Love Thy Neighbor by Peter Maass, one of the most riveting, humane and wise books I've ever read -- certainly the best book I've read about what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s.
Here's what I wrote about it in a short TPM review back in March 2002 ...
It's about the war in Bosnia. Not the whole of Yugoslavia. It's not a history, either. It's a war reporter's memoir. If you're looking for the big-picture about the Balkans in the 1990s or the what happened in Kosovo or Croatia or inside Serbia, this isn't the book -- though it contains important information on each of those topics.
This is an interior story, what Maass himself saw. And it is by far the best piece of writing I've read of any of the books written on the 1990s Balkans. By far the best.
Reading it you see how the war in Bosnia was tragic in the deepest, most regret-inspiring and folly-filled sense of the word. This book will make you feel moments of agony. It will also make you laugh. Perhaps most uncomfortably, it will sometimes join these two feelings and reactions quite closely in time. I would say it is the best piece of war reporting I've ever read. And I believe it is. Only covering the Bosnian war, as Maass describes it, wasn't exactly a war so much as a loosely-organized, long-running series of individual and group murders.
This book is humane, and comic, and horrifying in each of the right measures and moments. I cannot recommend it more strongly. If you read it I think it will change you. Perhaps forever.
--Josh Marshall
If you have a chance on Monday check out the Center for American Progress's (aka John Podesta's new liberal think tank) new daily run-down of all things political: The Progress Report.
Also, I mentioned a few days ago that Zbigniew Brzezinski's speech at the New American Strategies for Security and Peace conference was absolutely essential viewing and/or reading. Well, now you can do both. Here's the transcript. And here's a link to the archived video feed.
--Josh Marshall
We’re again seeing the importance of language in politics. Or, more specifically, the way that orotund, abstract language can obfuscate truth-telling, accountability, and just simple facing of reality.
We hear again and again how all the bombings and mayhem are obscuring all the good things that are happening in Iraq. But this is like how the thunderstorm ‘obscures’ the underlying sunny day.
Watching Paul Bremer today on CNN I was struck by his use of language like ‘enemies of freedom’ and terrorists to describe the people we’re fighting in the country (these are from my recollection, the precise phrases may be different.) People who kill soldiers are not, at least not by definition, ‘terrorists’. They’re guerillas or insurgents. This isn’t a matter of cutting them slack, but one of precision. And precision is required to know what we’re doing, what we’re trying to do, and how we can get from clarifying what our goals are to finding effective means to pursue their implementation.
This is part of what Orwell was getting at in “Politics and the English Language” when he lamented that “political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”
--Josh Marshall
A note on advertising.
As you’ve no doubt noticed, TPM is now accepting advertising. (We've already run three ads and have two more pending.) And quickly after we started doing so we got inquiries from presidential campaigns wanting to advertise.
This raises a number of issues. And I’ve given the matter some thought. So let me share with you what I’ve come up with.
First, all these advertisements are paid advertisements. Within certain subjective bounds of appropriateness and taste, the ad space on the site is open to whomever wants to purchase it. I don’t want to put too fine a point on it because I greatly appreciate those who choose to advertise and, as a general matter, I encourage readers to visit the sites to support that support. But ads appearing on this site come with no implied endorsement from TPM. I would happily run ads from a conservative candidate or a conservative organization. Please see these ads as no different from ones you might see on the websites of the Times or the Post.
Now, having said all this, political campaigns are a bit different. It’s no secret that I prefer Democratic candidates over Republican ones. And if you read the site over time you’ll see that I prefer some Democrats over others. Indeed, I do and will continue to write about the different presidential campaigns, telling you how I think they’re doing, which I think have better chances of getting the nomination and potentially winning the general election next November.
Will accepting campaign ads compromise my judgment or independence, or perceptions of either?
Needless to say, other media outlets accept all sorts of campaign advertising while they’re also covering those campaigns. And people think little of it. But let’s be frank: blogs are different. I’m the business side and the editorial side in one person. So it’s a little different from a TV station where one group of people runs the news and another group sells the ads.
So what to do? I asked two of the people who I respect most in this profession. And they told me that they didn’t think it was a problem. Both said the same thing: the only problem would be if all the advertising came from one campaign. Other than that, they thought it was a good idea and that I should do it.
I’ve mulled this a lot. And here’s what I’ve come up with. I’m going to accept the ads. (The first one is now running on the site now.) And here are the rules I’m following …
First, only one ad from a given campaign at a time (Some readers weren't clear on what this previous sentence meant. Let me clarify: three different campaigns can advertise at once, but a single campaign can't run three ads simultaneously, or two for that matter.) I don’t have any reason to think at the moment that any of the campaigns want to buy all the TPM ad space. But I just think it’s a good guideline to set up in advance. Second, a company called Blogads is handling the ads for TPM. And I’ve asked the person who handles selling the ads not to discuss with me whatever discussions he’s having with particular campaigns. I know he’s having discussions with several of the campaigns. But I don’t know any more than that. And I’ve asked him to keep it that way.
So that’s what I’ve decided. Blogs are a new medium. The answers to these questions aren’t always clear-cut. I invite your input.
--Josh Marshall
In a recent monograph Ornamentalism, the historian David Cannadine argued that class rather than race was at the heart of the British Empire at its apogee. The British used their empire to replicate an idealized vision of Britain’s hierarchical class system in the colonies.
Just as the home country was becoming increasingly democratic and dukes and earls were becoming anachronisms, Britons (or at least the ones who ran the empire) tried to recreate that vanishing hierarchical class- and status-based society in the colonies. Cannadine figures that that’s why you had all the campish pomp, ceremony and extravagant trappings of the empire. It was a grand act of compensation, remaking or preserving in the colonies what was being lost at home.
You can find other examples of this pattern. The early missionary enterprise in the Spanish empire, for example, had a similar dimension. The Franciscan and Dominican friars who evangelized the New World saw the discovery of America as an opportunity to put right all that had gone wrong during the first fifteen centuries of Christianity.
Christianity in the New World wouldn’t just be as good as that of the Old World, but better. At least as they imagined it, America provided a blank slate, where the edifice of Christianity could be built right from the ground up, free of all the accidents or history and the corruptions and complications of the Old World.
You might call it blank-slatism. Colonized or occupied countries become prey to the philosophical imaginings and unrealizable political wish-lists of the home countries. Privatizing everything is a pretty hard slog at home? Let’s do it in Iraq where we control the whole show. School choice? Hey, teachers unions are nowhere to be found in Iraq. Let’s try it there.
Down in the details of the reconstruction of Iraq there have already been plenty of examples of this. But now we see the most obvious and I’d say the most bizarre example of this in Iraq. As the Washington Post reports on Sunday, Paul Bremer has just announced the imposition of a 15% flat tax on Iraq.
The Post article is made up largely of conservative flat-taxers like Grover Norquist crowing about how good a thing this is. "It's extremely good news," Norquist told the Post. And though Bremer's pronunciamento leaves some ambiguity about whether Iraqis might face graduated levels of taxation under 15%, Norquist says "they told me it's a flat rate and it appears as though it's a flat rate ... It might be a hint to the rest of us."
Conservative economist Bruce Bartlett makes the blank slate argument pretty explicitly. With so little in place, he told the Post, there is no “need not worry about all the political and transition problems that have made adoption of fundamental tax reform here so difficult.”
Indeed.
--Josh Marshall
