U.S. Politics

Ok readers, I am not going to be silly this time. Austria is not taking over the U.S.A.

Ms Maha has a reason why she linked to R. Hofstadter's article "The Paranoid Style in American Politics". She's angry with an editorial in the Washington Post about the late Mr. Hofstadter.

For one thing, according to Maha the editorial is pointless and stupid
Oh Really....a pointless and stupid op-ed...

One bad sentence caught my eye:

---

It was a mistake to tear liberalism from its populist roots and to emphasize the irrational element of popular movements almost to the exclusion of their own self-understanding.

---

As if one person (Hofstadter) could do that.
(Who never had a T.V show!)

The populists groups of liberalism were farmers and union members which happen to be as scarce as wired phones that you dial.

This group wasn't repudiated by elites.....assassinated by the modern world is more like it.

Whether that's right or wrong...or good or bad...maybe I'll leave that to another post.

But back to the op-ed. Read the darn thing but be forewarned.
It's just another boring "why does everyone hate the liberals" piece ...

Except this time, to be more classy the theme is let's blame it on a dead intellectual instead of Bill Clinton or Michael Moore.

Are you tired of hearing about 9-11, Iraq, Iran, and terrorists? Are you envious of your ancestors or even dear old Grandma and Grandpa because they never had to listen to this anxiety producing crapola on Fox-CNN?

Well first unplug the television set and then read this link to Richard Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics".  The essay was written in 1963 during the cold war and applies to the new war on terror as well.

Yes, political paranoia about the "other" is as old as America. It started with the Catholics....I think the Gunpowder Plot had something to do with starting that particular brand of paranoia which imported nicely to the colonies. Religious paranoia went out of fashion at the beginning of 20th century and was replaced with Bolshevik and Communist paranoid fantasies. 

I find it interesting that the Nazis or fascists are never mentioned. Nazis seem to be the modern default symbol for evil, yet did any political group have tin foil theories about them during the thirties?

I do have to point out this particular part of the essay....

---

Two books which appeared in 1835 described the new danger to the ?American way of life and may be taken as expressions of the anti-Catholic mentality. One, Foreign Conspiracies against the Liberties of the United States, was from the hand of the celebrated painter and inventor of the telegraph, S.F.B. Morse. “A conspiracy exists,” Morse proclaimed , and “its plans are already in operation…we are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our ships, our forts, or our armies.” The main source of the conspiracy Morse found in Metternich’s government:

“Austria is now acting in this country. She has devised a grand scheme. She has organized a great plan for doing something here.…

She has her Jesuit missionaries traveling through the land; she has supplied them with money, and has furnished a fountain for a regular supply.” Were the plot successful, Morse said, some scion of the House of Hapsburg would soon be installed as Emperor of the United States.

---

Well see, maybe those tin foil hat guys were right after all. Look who is Governor of California...(the most populous and one of the richest states in  America). Maybe that law about the president needing to be born in America will be changed and he can become president. Do you suppose he is a scion of the house of Hapsburg?

Thanks to Mahablog for the link to the essay!

I see the New York Times has finally gotten around to commenting on the YouTube effect on politics. (See my July 19th post.) The effect being the embarrassment of your every stupid utterance being viewed over and over again by people from all over the world. Not to mention the potential for an election day disaster.

The newspaper story was typical NY Times...the broadband revolution changes everything in politics and at the same time it changes nothing in politics. Will someone at the editorial board of the Times please make up their mind?

Ok enough beating up on the Times....on to the latest YouTube fiasco.

At an outdoor campaign rally, the incumbent Republican candidate for Senator of Virginia George Allen was caught on tape pointing out S. R. Sidarth in the audience and calling him a "macaca". The "macaca" is an Indian-American aide to the Democratic opponent and happened to be filming the Senator's speech when he was so rudely insulted. Also Allen said to Sidarth "Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia". Ironically Allen is a native Californian and Sidarth is a native Virginian.

On the editorial page of that other paper I read on Sunday, the San Francisco Chronicle, I think the columnist Kathleen Parker had a
good reply to the Senator's bad behavior.

---

Here's what we may fairly conclude from Allen's macaca meltdown: he was a rude cad. And, despite his Confederate accoutrements, his cowboy boots, his chaw, his good ol' boy persona, Allen is missing the key ingredient in his Southern shtick: you gotta be a gentleman.

---

I modestly predict that there will be more political storms due to the YouTube effect before the November elections. I suggest America's politicians get used to it. It is not going away. Unlike the NY Times, I don't think that politicians campaigning for elections will need stop road-testing their stump speeches because of YouTube fear. The average YouTube user won't be tempted to view videos of boring speeches on domestic and foreign policy. They are looking for the gotcha's.
..........................................................................................
And somewhere on a golf course far away, former Vice President Dan Quayle is saying a prayer before he tees off "Thank you merciful Lord for giving me my political career before YouTube"

So Sen. Joe Lieberman loses his primary and the radical blogging left has surrounded Washington D.C. with rocket propelled grenade launchers.

What???

When you read the op-eds in the MSM for the next few days, you'd think that was happening. But it's not...however an incumbent for US Senate was ousted in a primary so that's close enough.

Read the Midterm Roundup post from TPMCafe. It has links to stories about Lieberman's historic loss from the left, right, center, international web sources, and the dreaded MSM.

I suppose I have to comment on the New York Times situation. I mean I get mad at the Times...but the gas chamber thing is going a bit too far. Does somebody miss the "Commies"? I must say I am amazed and impressed at the monumental hypocrisy of the Wall Street Journal. And I am not easily impressed. The Bush administration is behaving as it always does. Looking for that red meat to throw to the base.
Ho Hum. But the Journal....it must be nice to have an independent editorial staff that can criticize another paper for publishing a story that the Journal publishes on the same day...with the same information.

Billmon at Whiskey Bar has a conspiracy theory take on this media storm.

---

This is by far the most sustained political attack on an American news organization since Nixon took on the Washington Post over its early Watergate coverage, and we all know what he was afraid Woodstein would find.

---

Billmon is not happy with the NY Times story either....or the Times...and according to Billmon they should have saved their ammo for the really big story. That they probably wouldn't print.

BTW if Tony Snow takes away some press passes, can I have them?

After reading the Sunday New York Times this morning, I went to the laptop in the office and went to The Mahablog. I expected a cabbage...I got my cabbage. The cabbage is Maha's endearing symbol of New York times columnists David Brooks. David's latest piece is on Kos (Markos Moulitsas)...the Mafia Don of political blogs that lean to the left. Of course Brooks is just a late-comer to stories about the supposed power of Kos to turn disaffected Democrats and Progressive Independent bloggers into the equivalent of Hitler's Brown Shirts.

The ten-second elevator version of the story goes like this.  Kos raises money for liberal candidates who hire him as a consultant and bashes the ones who don't in his blog. Kos writes a memo to his fellow bloggers demanding they not discuss this accusation from the Times and the New Republic in their blogs. They obey...the rapid lambs.

Instead of adding to the discussion of this story, Mr. Brooks trys to be sarcastic "cutesy" like his colleague Maureen Dowd. David...it only works for Maureen.

What really seems to aggravate Mr. Brooks about Markos M. is that Brooks took years and years of sucking up to politicians before he got invited to their soirees for cocktails and chit-chat about the secret back-room deals in Washington. And this pretender takes only four years. The nerve of the little twerp.

---

I am getting out my lucky tea cup and saying it is really all about Connecticut. A safe Senate seat is suddenly not so safe. Senator Joe Lieberman will actually have to campaign to win his party primary in 2006. If doesn't matter if he wins or loses, the republican candidate Alan Schlesinger now has a much better change of winning.

So if a bunch of geeks, nerds, and losers can take down a Senator..the world must be coming to an end.

It seems anarchists aren't the only political group that has a problem being part of an existing power structure. So do today's conservative D. C. ers.

This article in Washington Monthly "Why Conservatives Can't Govern" by Alan Wolfe details the tortuous thinking of  our elected officials who "hate government" but keep making it bigger. And conflict between values and action make for some very bad results....Iraq, Katrina, Senior Drug Program.

---

If government is necessary, bad government, at least for conservatives, is inevitable, and conservatives have been exceptionally good at showing just how bad it can be. Hence the truth revealed by the Bush years: Bad government--indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and unfair government--is the only kind of conservative government there is. Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.

---

Washington Dems should be reading this article with a yellow Hi-Liter. A magazine subscription is a lot cheaper than a consultant and this story lays out some good talking points.

Wow! In the land of Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris, a young activist, Cara Jennings wins a seat on the Lakeland Florida city commission. And the A stands for Anarchist. Not Democrat, not Green, not Independent but Anarchist.

How did she win?

---

I’ve been active here in Lake Worth on a local level for six years, working on issues of affordable housing, helping to start some of the local community gardens, doing youth programs and attending a sick number of city meetings. So I’ve made myself visible as a young person who’s knowledgeable about things happening in the city. I looked at the other people who were running and I decided that I could do a better job. So I began door knocking and pounding the pavement, attending debates, and ended up winning an election.

---

So Cara did it the old-fashioned way...lots of community work and pavement pounding. This is an interesting story... when compared to all the blog discussions of the networking and brainstorming sessions that took place last week at Yearly Kos and Take Back America on how to wrest power back from the Neo-ConArtists.

A cheerleader just showed you how.

However being an anarchist in an existing power structure does have its existential problems...

---

So it’s been difficult running for office and acknowledging that I’m putting myself in a perceived and sometimes real position of power over other people. The reason that people are excited to see me out there, like at an immigration rally, is because they know, whether I like it or not, that I have additional power that they don’t have. I don’t want to claim the assumed power that comes with winning an elected office, but at the same time, I’m in this position to leverage that power, and be outspoken about things that are wrong and receive attention for that. I don’t know really how you do that without falling into that trap of getting credit for a position of power that shouldn’t exist in the fist place. It’s challenging.

---

Good luck Cara! And don't get discouraged when things don't go your way. Trailblazers don't have it easy.

Story Tip: Hit and Run and In these Times

Okay...this post is for those of us who are "fifty..ish" and cranky.

Now in the little g government publication "National Review" an article stating "what's the fuss that the UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT has years of data on your calls to Grandma and those phone sex lines.....

And from the lib-er-al America hating online rag "Salon" an article lamenting the END of the CIA.

Conservatives liking expansion of the federal government power?
Liberals lamenting the end of the power of the CIA?

Let's all sing...

If buttercups buzz'd after the bee,
If boats were on land, churches on sea,
If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows,
And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse,
If the mamas sold their babies
To the gypsies for half a crown;
If summer were spring and the other way round,
Then all the world would be upside down.
 

Hi faithful readers of isntitobvious.com  I'm BAACK!

I took a short vacation to visit the family and bring rain from soggy California to drought stricken Oklahoma.

I took my trusty laptop with me, however access to free wireless that doesn't crash the laptop was... shall we say spotty. If anything was going on outside of Oklahoma...the local paper and the local t.v. news were not going to tell me. Hey....the rain was everything. I mean floods in a drought... you can't beat that.

Well I get back and find out the number 1 and number 3 guys at the CIA have resigned. And Hookers, Bribes, Poker and (Watergate) seem to have a connection to this. Whoa!

The MSM seems to be holding its collective breath...no related stories in Google News today. However Josh Marshall's crew at TPM won't let this one slip away. More later!

Between the rain and the lousy stock market....I have neglected my blog

From The Chronicle of Higher Education

---

It is beyond my powers to know whether America's next president will be a Republican or a Democrat. But I do know that some future president will be faced with undoing the damage of a man sufficiently lacking in intellectual curiosity to question the bad ideas upon which he built his administration.

---

Yes be optimistic all ye eggheads out there...ideas and intellectual curiosity will make a comeback in Washington D.C. It can't get any worse!

Link from Arts and Letters Daily

Senator Russ Feingold does his best Gary Cooper impression and introduces a resolution to censure President Bush for breaking the law on domestic surveillance. And just as in the movie, he finds himself alone.

---

Sen Feingold:  I’m amazed at Democrats, cowering with this president’s numbers so low. The administration just has to raise the specter of the war and the Democrats run and hide. … Too many Democrats are going to do the same thing they did in 2000 and 2004. In the face of this, they’ll say we’d better just focus on domestic issues. … [Democrats shouldn’t] cower to the argument, that whatever you do, if you question the administration, you’re helping the terrorists.

---

For some recent history and background on domestic surveillance in wartime..the Vietnam war, please read this post from Digby's Hullabaloo. We are reminded that during the time of the invasion of Cambodia, Senator Sam Ervin from North Carolina was beginning his investigation into Army surveillance of American civilians and anti-war political groups.

---

From the story: SENATOR SAM ERVIN AND THE ARMY SPY SCANDAL OF 1970-1971:
To some Washington observers it seemed strange to see one of the South's most conservative senators leading the attack against the Army's domestic surveillance program.  Ervin's consistent opposition to civil rights, his support of the Vietnam War, and his reputation as a defender of the free enterprise system hardly seemed to square with what in the 1960s seemed to be a "liberal" stand against the Army.  As one newspaper stated, "Senator Sam Ervin is, to us, a strange man.  He is ultra‑conservative . . . until it comes to interpreting the U.S. Constitution and especially the First Amendment; then he is a howling liberal.

---

Then came Watergate.

The Dubai Ports World deal is no more. Rather than sit through congressional hearings, the management of Port World has said they
will sell the ports division to an American company.

Halliburton ....Your country needs you again.

The NewsHour Friday discussion with Shields, Brooks and Mr. Lehrer covered the Ports Deal controversy. And Mr. Brooks seems to think the demise of the deal was due to poor marketing...like New Coke. If I had been invited to this little gabfest I would have said something more then Right...Right...Right.

So here is part of the discussion transcript from the PBS website

with my comments in blue....

From Talking Points Memo Coffee House

Gee, Gettysburg Wasn't a Civil War  by Larry Johnson

A brief update to my earlier piece about the denial that a civil war is underway in Iraq.  I almost drove off the road when I heard our National Director of Intelligence, John Negroponte, offer his definition in testimony before Congress on Tuesday.  According to Mr. Negroponte a civil war is, "a complete loss of central government security control, the disintegration or deterioration of the security forces of the country."

Did he fall asleep during high school history?  Apparently he never studied our own civil war. Based on his definition we never had a civil war and Abraham Lincoln and his generals were deluded.  We even had two Presidential elections during that so-called war in the 1860s and Congress met regularly.  Call me crazy, but John Negroponte needs to do better than this.

Added comment from high school history teacher:

The November 1860 election was held a month before South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union. This was while Buchanan was still President.

The actual combat did not begin until the action at Fort Sumter in spring 1861, in which only a horse died. The 1864 election, Lincoln defeating McClellan, was the only Presidential election held during the Civil War.

As far as the Iraq disaster, Larry has it 100% correct.

ANNA JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer...TIP from Dispatches from the Culture War  (one of the Science Blogs)

Americans apparently know more about "The Simpsons" than they do about the First Amendment.

Only one in four Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances.) But more than half can name at least two members of the cartoon family, according to a survey.

The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just one in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms.

Joe Madeira, director of exhibitions at the museum, said he was surprised by the results.