Election Day: A brief consideration of a before and after

Frank Rich, "The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York" (Oct. 31, 2009)

The New York fracas was ignited by the routine decision of 11 local Republican county chairmen to anoint an assemblywoman, Dede Scozzafava, as their party's nominee for the vacant seat. The 23rd is in safe Republican territory that hasn't sent a Democrat to Congress in decades. And Scozzafava is a mainstream conservative by New York standards; one statistical measure found her voting record slightly to the right of her fellow Republicans in the Assembly. But she has occasionally strayed from orthodoxy on social issues (abortion, same-sex marriage) and endorsed the Obama stimulus package. To the right's Jacobins, that's cause to send her to the guillotine.

Sure enough, bloggers trashed her as a radical leftist and ditched her for a third-party candidate they deem a "true" conservative, an accountant and businessman named Doug Hoffman. When Gingrich dared endorse Scozzafava anyway — as did other party potentates like John Boehner and Michael Steele — he too was slimed. Mocking Newt's presumed 2012 presidential ambitions, Michelle Malkin imagined him appointing Al Sharpton as secretary of education and Al Gore as "global warming czar." She's quite the wit.

The wrecking crew of Kristol, Fred Thompson, Dick Armey, Michele Bachmann, The Wall Street Journal editorial page and the government-bashing Club for Growth all joined the Hoffman putsch. Then came the big enchilada: a Hoffman endorsement from Palin on her Facebook page. Such is Palin's clout that Steve Forbes, Rick Santorum and Tim Pawlenty, the Minnesota governor (and presidential aspirant), promptly fell over one another in their Pavlovian rush to second her motion. They were joined by far-flung Republican congressmen from Kansas, Georgia, Oklahoma and California, not to mention a gaggle of state legislators from Colorado. On Fox News, Beck took up the charge, insinuating that Hoffman's Republican opponent might be a fan of Karl Marx. Some $3 million has now been dumped into this race by outside groups.

Who exactly is the third-party maverick arousing such ardor? Hoffman doesn't even live in the district. When he appeared before the editorial board of The Watertown Daily Times 10 days ago, he "showed no grasp" of local issues, as the subsequent editorial put it. Hoffman complained that he should have received the questions in advance — blissfully unaware that they had been asked by the paper in an editorial on the morning of his visit.

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Eugene Robinson, "Attack of the Palinites" (Nov. 6, 2009)

The "tea party" conservatives -- led by Palin, Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Armey and others fed up with the GOP "establishment" -- managed to get Democrat Bill Owens elected in a solidly Republican Upstate New York congressional district. They accomplished this feat by driving the Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, from the race because of her apostasy on abortion and gay rights.

The Palinites -- because of her star power, she's the de facto leader of the movement at this point, so it's fair to name it after her -- backed a third-party conservative named Doug Hoffman. Scozzafava pulled out and threw what support she had to Owens, who won by four points.

The net result is minus-one for the Republicans and plus-one for the Democrats in the House. That arithmetic seems to have escaped Erick Erickson, editor in chief of the Web site RedState.com, which is almost as influential in the tea party world as Palin's Facebook page. He wrote: "This is a huge win for conservatives. . . . We did exactly what we set out to do -- crush the establishment-backed GOP candidate."

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele crowed about winning the two governorships. "Assume the Heisman position. Yeah, baby. That's my moment," he said Wednesday on MSNBC. But even Steele couldn't find joy in the New York debacle. "I don't see a victory in losing seats," he said, quite logically.

The tea party people have made clear, however, that logic doesn't count -- and that this is just the beginning. The next target, now that they've made the world safe from Scozzafava, seems to be Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who is running for the Senate. Crist committed the unforgivable sin of supporting Obama's stimulus bill and must face a conservative former state legislator, Marco Rubio, in the primary.

Erickson wrote that "if Crist wants to own the mantle of 'GOP Establishment Candidate,' let's tie it around his waist and throw him in one of Florida's many lagoons."

I guess Florida lagoons are a substitute for Siberian tundra.

How Not to Torture

Peter Finn and Joby Warrick, "Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots"

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President George W. Bush had publicly described him as "al-Qaeda's chief of operations," and other top officials called him a "trusted associate" of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed.

Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a "fixer" for radical Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 -- and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.

(See also, Dan Froomkin, "Bush's Torture Rationale Debunked".)

It's Getting Harder Not To Notice

E.J. Dionne Jr., "Capitalism's Reality Check"

The biggest political story of 2008 is getting little coverage. It involves the collapse of assumptions that have dominated our economic debate for three decades.

Since the Reagan years, free-market cliches have passed for sophisticated economic analysis. But in the current crisis, these ideas are falling, one by one, as even conservatives recognize that capitalism is ailing.

You know the talking points: Regulation is the problem and deregulation is the solution. The distribution of income and wealth doesn't matter. Providing incentives for the investors of capital to "grow the pie" is the only policy that counts. Free trade produces well-distributed economic growth, and any dissent from this orthodoxy is "protectionism.

Irony: A Politician Asks a Paid Liar About a Suspected (Known) Liar

WashingtonPost.com, "McClellan Testifies Before Congress" (June 20, 2008)

REP. ARTUR DAVIS, D-ALA.: Mr. Chairman, thank you. And, Ms. Baldwin, thank you for letting me slip ahead, because I have a plane to catch. So I thank you for that. Mr. McClellan, let me circle around a person whose name has come up a great deal today, and that's Karl Rove. You state in your book and you've reiterated to the committee several times that Mr. Rove encouraged you, allowed you and encouraged you to repeat a lie.

You've said a number of things about Mr. Rove. And you've indicated that you've known him for some period of time. So I want you to kind of give the committee some advice on how to deal with the little situation that we have with Mr. Rove right now. The committee has extended an invitation to Mr. Rove to do what you've done to come and appear under oath to allow anyone who wants to ask you questions to do so. Mr. Rove has, not surprisingly to you, I suspect, declined the invitation.

Mr. Rove has come back and he's said to the committee, well, I'm willing to talk, but only if there is no oath, only if there are no cameras present, only if there are no notes made of what I have to say. And let me just ask you, based on what you know of Mr. Rove, Mr. McClellan, does it, first of all, surprise you that Mr. Rove is seeking limitations on the manner and the circumstances in which he would appear before this committee?

MCCLELLAN: No, it doesn't surprise me. And I think it's probably part of an effort to stonewall the whole process.

DAVIS: I'm going to ask you two pointed questions. Would you trust Mr. Rove, if he were not under oath, to tell the truth?

MCCLELLAN: Well, based on my own experience, I could not say that I would.

DAVIS: And, in fact, if Mr. Rove were under oath, would you have complete confidence that he would tell the truth?

MCCLELLAN: I would hope that he would be willing to do that. And as you point out, it doesn't seem that he is willing to do that. But based on my own experiences, I have some concerns about that.

DAVIS: Mr. Rove did testify under oath before the grand jury investigating the leak a number of times, did he not? You have to answer orally.

MCCLELLAN: Yes. I'm sorry. Yes.

DAVIS: You don't believe he told the complete truth to the grand jury under oath when he did testify?

MCCLELLAN: I don't know. Since I haven't seen his testimony, I do not know.

DAVIS: You state at one point -- there was a very pointed sentence -- you say that Karl was only concerned about protecting himself from possible legal action and preventing his many critics from bringing him down. Do you believe, based on what you know of Mr. Rove, that he is capable of lying to protect himself from legal jeopardy, sir?

MCCLELLAN: Well, he certainly passed on false information -- or he lied to me. That's the only conclusion I can draw. So based on my own experience, you can appreciate where I'm coming from.

DAVIS: Do believe, based on what you know of this gentleman, your experiences with him, that he is capable of lying to protect himself from political embarrassment?

MCCLELLAN: I would have to say that he did in my situation, so the answer is yes.

Rosie the Iraqi

Ernesto Londoño, "Iraqi Women Take On Roles Of Dead or Missing Husbands"

Nearly 1 million women in Iraq are widows or divorcees, or their husbands are missing, according to Samira al-Mosawi, a Shiite member of parliament who heads the women's affairs committee. She said the number, an estimate reached by several government agencies, includes women who became widows during Iraq's war with Iran in the 1980s.

Mosawi said approximately 86,000 widows are receiving about $40 a month from the government. Aid organizations and government agencies are unable to help more widows because of a lack of funds and the challenges of doing social work in volatile neighborhoods.

"Frankly speaking, there's not much attention paid to the social issues in the country," Mosawi said in an interview. "Attention goes to security and defense."

Before U.S. troops strode into Baghdad in the spring of 2003, Abadi worked as a seamstress to complement the earnings of her husband, who worked at a government factory.

She was optimistic during the days after the invasion. Her impressions of Americans, shaped largely by a news story she saw on television, gave her hope. The story was about an hours-long effort to rescue a cat stuck in a sewage pipe.

"If those people are so good to the animals," she said, "I was expecting good things."

But the invasion and its aftermath brought more troubles than blessings.

When the family's rent rose from about $20 a month to more than $80, Abadi moved into the building that had housed Saddam Hussein's Baath Party after the structure had been looted and set ablaze.

"During Saddam's time, no one had a right to raise rent on the people," she said. "After the invasion, the rules were gone."

The "Liberal" Media

Glenn Greenwald, "The U.S. establishment media in a nutshell"

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

"Yoo and torture" - 102

"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73

"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16

"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043

"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)

"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607

"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079

And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq -- that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight -- has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above. "The Clintons are Rich!!!!" will undoubtedly soon be at the top of this heap within a matter of a day or two.

"Media critic" Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post today devoted pages of his column to Obama's bowling and eating habits and how that shows he's not a regular guy but an Arrogant Elitist, compiling an endless string of similar chatter about this from Karl Rove, Maureen Dowd, Walter Shapiro and Ann Althouse. Bloomberg's Margaret Carlson devoted her whole column this week to arguing that, along with Wright, Obama's bowling was his biggest mistake, a "real doozy."

Obama's bowling has provided almost a full week of programming on MSNBC. Gail Collins, in The New York Times, today observed that Obama went bowling "with disastrous consequences." And, as always, they take their personality-based fixations from the Right, who have been promoting the Obama is an Arrogant, Exotic, Elitist Freak narrative for some time. In a typically cliched and slimy article, Time's Joe Klein this week explored what the headline called Obama's "Patriotism Problem," where we learn that "this is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what's wrong with America than what's right." He trotted it all out -- the bowling, the lapel pin, Obama's angry, America-hating wife, "his Islamic-sounding name."

The McCain Story Is, Thankfully, Not So Sexy

Michael D. Shear and Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, "The Anti-Lobbyist, Advised by Lobbyists"

For years, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has railed against lobbyists and the influence of "special interests" in Washington, touting on his campaign Web site his fight against "the 'revolving door' by which lawmakers and other influential officials leave their posts and become lobbyists for the special interests they have aided."


But when McCain huddled with his closest advisers at his rustic Arizona cabin last weekend to map out his presidential campaign, virtually every one was part of the Washington lobbying culture he has long decried. His campaign manager, Rick Davis, co-founded a lobbying firm whose clients have included Verizon and SBC Telecommunications. His chief political adviser, Charles R. Black Jr., is chairman of one of Washington's lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has represented AT&T, Alcoa, JPMorgan and U.S. Airways.

Senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Mark McKinnon work for firms that have lobbied for Land O' Lakes, UST Public Affairs, Dell and Fannie Mae.

McCain's relationship with lobbyists became an issue this week after it was reported that his aides asked Vicki Iseman, a telecom lobbyist, to distance herself from his 2000 presidential campaign because it would threaten McCain's reputation for independence. An angry and defiant McCain denounced the stories yesterday, declaring: "At no time have I ever done anything that would betray the public trust."