Month: August 2007

A new, interesting blog — Wonkosphere — monitors how much ‘buzz’ is flying around the blogosphere on the various presidential candidates. Interestingly, Ron Paul places second at the moment behind front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton.  Obama is third.

Chris Dodd runs in seventh place but beats Giuliani, Huckabee, McCain, Brownback, and Kucinich.  Gravel is not on the list — and oddly, neither is Joe Biden.

But one must guess that Chris Dodd’s "Wonkosphere Ranking" will probably surge given the just announced endorsement of him by the International Associaton of Firefighters.

The most recent analysis of the Dodd endorsement came to me from an observer of unions and politics who has given me permission to quote his comments from a private listserv:

My theory [on the Dodd endorsement]?  It’s a case of the Althusserian "absent center" with Dodd as the donut hole. 

The Firefighters don’t want to make the "wrong" choice between the three candidate that can win — Clinton, Obama, and Edwards.

They like Edwards like the rest of the movement but don’t think he’s going to win, and don’t want to piss off the Hillary machine. But they also don’t want to seem paralyzed and ineffectual.  They want to be players.  So they pseudo-aggressively endorse someone, but don’t piss off any of the big three by picking one of them against the other two. 

After Dodd drops out following Iowa or New Hampshire, they see the lay of the land and jump to the likely winner.

Sounds very plausible to me. 

I agree with much of Hilzoy’s eloquent essay from 2005, but I don’t think the points she raises are mutually exclusive from the ones in the email I posted. In other words, one can oppose the incompetent managing of the Iraq War and still believe that the West lacks "grit" in terms of the greater war against Islamic extremism. I think that’s the point my correspondent was trying to raise. I still don’t understand why the email I posted generated such vitriol (judging from the inbox). I imagine it’s because people think my correspondent is making an oblique case for remaining in Iraq for an indefinite period of time. But my correspondent makes the explicit point that his message is not about "stay[ing] in Iraq forever," but rather the consequences of a strained, U.S.-U.K. partnership. He too agrees with Hilzoy’s critique of Bush. He’s concerned about America’s image in the world, because he considers it to be an "indispensable nation." It was Madeleine Albright who came up with that appellation. How many Democrats believe this today?

Also, keep in mind that Hilzoy wrote her essay two years ago, before a leading Democratic presidential candidate declared that the War on Terror is just a "bumper sticker" slogan, a line he repeats to rapturous applause at rallies. I fear that this sort of sentiment–that the war against Islamic militancy is not really a war at all, and not nearly as potentially lethal as we’ve been made to believe–is gaining currency in America and certainly already has in Britain. Downplaying the threat that the enemy poses is, yes, a loss of grit. Thankfully, Hillary (the presidential candidate, with two "l’s"), who has taken on something of a motherly role in her frequent repudiations of the more naive pronouncements of her opponents, refuted Edwards for his attempts to win over the Kossack wing of the Democratic Party. She’ll likely win the nomination, and this ought to reassure both my worried correspondent as well as Chris Orr, who says that his email was a "fairly transparent critique of liberals." Yes, it is a  critique of some liberals, but certainly not all of them (and it’s a critique of some conservatives, too, for instance, those partial to the world-view espoused by Andrew’s beloved Ron Paul).

Anyways, I agree with the following reader (and I imagine my original correspondent does as well), in saying that "The defense of anti-Iraq grit is a straw man."

I think the discussion about grit misses the point of the original author’s essay, at least as I read it.  I didn’t take away that the lack of grit in current society is a reason for IRAQ, or even having much to do with the war over there.  I took it as a lament for and indictment of the soft, flabby, intellectually and physically lazy society we are all a part of.

Perhaps it is a generational thing (I am 39) but I see a big difference between "the grit"  of my parent’s generation and my own, let alone some of the 20-somethings that are coming into the workforce today. Perhaps it is a matter of the increase in general prosperity and advent of technological improvements, but I think it’s pretty clear that people in the past could tap an inner reserve of fortitude that most Americans (myself included and excluding the brave people of New Orleans) would find it almost impossible to locate.

My mother grew up during WWII in occupied France.  She saw friends hauled off to concentration camps, neighbors shot, her brother-in-law hauled off to jail for aiding the resistance.  She survived many many years on short wartime rations, had a toe amputated because she couldn’t get shoes that fit and her toe was permanently deformed,  and rode her single-speed bike 5 miles to school through the mountainous terrain of eastern France (though not, famously, uphill both ways).  She volunteered for the Peace Corps after she retired and turned 70 while in-country in Cameroon  My father was a Minnesota farm boy who rode his bike to Missouri to go to college because that was the only way he could get there.  He volunteered for the armed services at a time (Korean War) when the draft would likely have gotten him anyway. He walked 2 miles to and from school every day, often through the worst that a Minnesota winter had to offer (his teacher would put snow on his cheeks to prevent frostbite).

My parents understood the concept of "paying your dues."  They knew that you had to earn your opportunities and make the best of them once they came along, because many people never got those opportunities.  The never expected to be handed anything, and they rarely were.

This is not to laud my own parents for being particularly "gritty" people. They were and are not, at least not for their generation.  I’m sure that most people with parents of a certain age could tell similar stories to illustrate what their parents had and we seem to have lost.  It is not the ability to blindly support a policy or president, it is the ability to not only survive, but to grow and dream of larger and better things while the world throws hard curves at you each and every day.  Not just to persevere, but to prosper during difficult times.

I find it sad to admit that we are becoming a spoiled and lazy people.  People complain that Bush didn’t ask Americans to sacrifice anything for Iraq and thus we never felt connected to the mission and (especially) the soldiers on it.  What this missed is that we likely would not have been willing to make such a sacrifice, and even minor inconvenience would have led to widespread bitching and moaning. (not that the fiasco in Iraq was or is a good reason to sacrifice anything other that Bush’s fat head) Every American of my generation (and most of the Baby Boomers) has had so many luxuries handed to them that we cannot fathom true need or want.  Or sacrifice. What are you going to do, ask me to give up my Playstation?  Go a week without cable?  Eat only ethically-produced earth-friendly organic leafy greens that cost 3 times as much as the head of Foxy lettuce? Refuse to fill the gas tank of my Humvee on a particular day to "send a message" to the oil companies, forgetting that we’ll all be at the same pump again tomorrow?  Please…

My point in all this (and yes there is one) is that you all should stop trying to defend the "grit" of people who want out of Iraq as I don’t think that question was ever the point.  I want us out of Iraq, and I freely admit that my parent’s willingly suffered far more privation than I’m ever likely to see (Gods willing).  There is no connection, unless some fool like Bush tries to fabricate one (Bush, BTW, is a great example of just how much grit we have lost – just compare his wartime experiences to his father’s).  The defense of anti-Iraq grit is a straw man. 

What really saddens me is that if we had a legitimate "freedom" war, a "good war" like WWII, I still don’t think most of us would be willing to make even 50% of the sacrifices our parents (or grandparents) did.  We want easy answers, fast food and no one to tell us that we can’t have everything that we want whenever we want it.  We deserved to get Bush for a president because we let people ask (and happily answered then discussed what it meant) who we’d rather have a beer with instead of smacking those pollsters upside the head and telling them we DON’T CARE what a candidate is like having a beer and would rather discuss what they might actually do or not do to us, the country and the world.

But that would require some sort of intestinal fortitude, some inner strength and, dare I say, some grit.

Call me if you find any (try looking in NOLA).  I’ll be out back eating sand and waiting for the next election.

I will avoid today discussion of the reasons why so many men chose to look for sex partners in public bathrooms, gyms, and the like over the last few decades.  Most engaged in this kind of sex would probably have preferred socially supported venues for relationship and sexual development — in the clubs, restaurants, public places galore that the heterosexual world has to walk together, to talk, to hug, to kiss, and to ‘do it.’

Andrew Sullivan has much better dexterity with this subject than I do — but it is disgusting that while so many are now cringing at the thought of gay man having tearoom sex that they are at the same time so obsessive about trying to stop same sex marriage between committed individuals.

Tucker Carlson brought this home in an interview he did yesterday in which he got "bothered" in a public restroom when he was a high school student and then got a buddy and went back to beat up the guy before he was arrested.  To be fair to Carlson, we haven’t yet heard whether the "botherer" grabbed Tucker’s crotch or just tapped his foot under the stall. 

But Carlson’s comment that he chose to beat up the trespasser "after the fact" in a vigilante action says much.

This from Media Matters:

On the August 28 edition of MSBNC Live, hosted by MSNBC general manager Dan Abrams, Tucker Carlson, host of MSNBC’s Tucker, asserted, "Having sex in a public men’s room is outrageous.

It’s also really common. I’ve been bothered in men’s rooms." Carlson continued, "I’ve been bothered in Georgetown Park," in Washington, D.C., "when I was in high school."

When Abrams asked how Carlson responded to being "bothered," Carlson asserted, "I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the — you know, and grabbed him, and … hit him against the stall with his head, actually."

Read the full transcript (or watch the video clip) which is pretty disgusting, not just because Tucker Carlson, self-described as "the least anti-gay right-winger you’ll ever meet", admits to beating up someone trolling for sex in a public bathroom — but because Dan Abrams and Joe Scarborough just laugh.

Someone should go look for evidence of the arrest that Tucker Carlson mentions.

— Steve Clemons

Update:

Tucker Carlson responds:

Let me be clear about an incident I referred to on MSNBC last night: In the mid-1980s, while I was a high school student, a man physically grabbed me in a men’s room in Washington, DC. I yelled, pulled away from him and ran out of the room. Twenty-five minutes later, a friend of mine and I returned to the men’s room. The man was still there, presumably waiting to do to someone else what he had done to me. My friend and I seized the man and held him until a security guard arrived.

Several bloggers have characterized this is a sort of gay bashing. That’s absurd, and an insult to anybody who has fought back against an unsolicited sexual attack. I wasn’t angry with the man because he was gay. I was angry because he assaulted me.

Sorry Tucker — guess I misunderstood the banter and your comments here:

ABRAMS: Tucker, what did you do, by the way? What did you do when he did that? We got to know.

CARLSON: I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the — you know, and grabbed him, and — and —

ABRAMS: And did what?

CARLSON: Hit him against the stall with his head, actually!

[laughter]

CARLSON: And then the cops came and arrested him. But let me say that I’m the least anti-gay right-winger you’ll ever meet —

Tucker — use your fame and opportunity for influence more wisely.  You conflate your views toward gays with a bad bathroom experience with someone who came on to you.  What lessons do you think you convey in your banter with Scarborough and Abrams?  Vigilanteism is cool. Gays lurk in bathrooms — watch out! It’s OK to assault someone after they have done something inappropriate.

I’m sure you were shocked — but you turned your opportunity to educate Americans as the "least anti-gay right winger" into frat boy banter.  But thanks for the clarification.

— Steve Clemons

In President Bush’s recent speech to the American Legion he continues to ratchet up the war of words with Iran, notably speaking of the region potentially being under "the shadow of a nuclear holocaust" because of Iran’s nuclear program. I find this rhetoric very incendiary, very uneven, very dangerous. Of course, we expect this from the disgraced ideologues surrounding Vice-President Cheney. But I hope people like Bob Gates and Steve Hadley and Josh Bolten have the courage to speak truth to power so that the United States government pursues a policy short of war vis-a-vis Iran. After all, their reputations are on the line if they let this President blunder into a catastrophic conflict with Iran. These are dangerous times, and there are very few individuals tasked with protecting the national interest at the highest levels of government. Here’s hoping historical perspective and tempered reason will ultimately prevail among them. The stakes are very high, and we have rarely in our history had an Administration as reckless as this one charged with the public trust. It is time for some of our most senior public servants to finally summon the courage to face down the seeming propulsion to messianism passing as policy-making that has infected this Administration.

(Cross-posted at Belgravia Dispatch)

The United States and its ally, the EU, has supposedly been trying to pressure Iran to halt its nuclear development via economic sanctions. So what’s this all about?

…by blocking facebook. But seriously, while American college kids use it to post drunken party photos and find out who’s-hooking-up-with-whom, Iranian students were using it to bring about a democratic revolution. Iran, apparently, fears "that virtual  organizing could help opposition movements."

In the fall of 1955, 12 men were arrested in Boise, Idaho for "infamous crimes against nature." Over a decade, it had been alleged, some of the city’s most prominent men operated an underworld gay prostitution ring with hundreds of teenage boys. A story in Time, published after the scandal emerged, characterized the feelings of the day : "Boise, Idaho (pop. 50,000), the state capital, is usually thought of as a boisterous, rollicking he-man’s town, and home of the rugged Westerner." How shocking, then, that there could be gay people living there. One of the more humane participants in this episode was the chief of the state’s Department of Mental Health, who, rather than advocate that the men face jail time, offered that, "One alternative might be to let them form their own society and be left alone."

There’s a documentary film about this episode called "The Fall of ’55."

Initial claims that over a hundred boys were abused were exaggerated; only four or five boys were involved. But lives were ruined, gay men fled the city, and the sexual witch-hunt left a stamp on the state. Larry Craig is just one of the more public victims of the cultural atmosphere in this country that portrays homosexuality as disgusting and something of which to be ashamed. There are many, silent sufferers like him. You could see his shame in yesterday’s press conference, and that the specter of Boise, 1955 has hung over Larry Craig all his life.

I hadn’t planned on posting the below YouTube of Bill Kristol being passionately challenged by a caller during a C-Span show as I think it’s several months old (I had only put it over on my site, along with brief commentary). But given Jamie and Hilzoy’s discussion about "grit", I found it more relevant, somehow. I guess I’d ask Jamie, and I don’t mean this snarkily, is the woman caller in the YouTube not manifesting enough "grit"? Is it wrong of her to plaintively cry: "(p)lease bring my husband home"? Is it wrong of her to emotively complain "we’re tired"? Is it wrong of her to challenge Kristol by pointing out that her husband relays supposedly friendly troops we are training and equipping in Iraq then turn around and plant IEDs meant to harm our men behind their backs? Finally, is it wrong of her to say: "(w)e can’t want it for them more then they want it for themselves", not least given the ongoing fiasco that is national reconcilation in Iraq, let alone minimal accommodation even, which is a critical prerequisite for any serious progress in Iraq?

I know for a certain middle-aged set stricken by nostalgie for the guts and fortitude and sweat of the bygone days of classical Athens and such (think the ever more amusing VDH, say) not enough "grit" will be shown until we are fire-bombing Isfahan a la Dresden, but I thought Jamie might have a more ‘contemporary’ outlook, shall we say. Let’s show a little more humility around here, no? There are some real sacrifices going on in this country, day in, day out. And I’m afraid very few of us in these cyber-echo chambers are really exemplars of leading the charge in terms of convicingly showcasing "grit", all told.

Americans want a good impeachment, but the will is just not there yet to seriously go after the President or Vice President — and I think these would be losing propositions in any case.  But what about Haley Barbour? Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour — former Chairman of the Republican National Committee — would be a great exercise in impeachment for the numerous Katrina-related ethics violations and beyond that he has been party to.   Here is the impeachment clause from the Constitution of the State of Mississippi.

Bloomberg’s Timothy Burger deserves a Pulitzer for all that he is digging up in the muck of the Haley Barbour administration’s contracting decisions in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  Burger writes on August 15th:

Many Mississippians have benefited from Governor Haley Barbour’s efforts to rebuild the state’s devastated Gulf Coast in the two years since Hurricane Katrina.

The $15 billion or more in federal aid the former Republican national chairman attracted has reopened casinos and helped residents move to new or repaired homes. Among the beneficiaries are Barbour’s own family and friends, who have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from hurricane-related business. A nephew, one of two who are lobbyists, saw his fees more than double in the year after his uncle appointed him to a special reconstruction panel.

Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in June raided a company owned by the wife of a third nephew, which maintained federal emergency-management trailers.

Meanwhile, the governor’s own former lobbying firm, which he says is still making payments to him, has represented at least four clients with business linked to the recovery.

To take Barbour’s ethics blurriness a few notches further, it appears that Barbour has had a Bill Frist like problem of not being blind about what was inside his blind trust. 

According to Burger in an article just out today:

When Haley Barbour was sworn in as governor of Mississippi in 2004, he set up a blind trust to avoid conflicts of interest and said he had severed ties with the Washington lobbying firm he co-founded.

The blind trust document he signed about six weeks later says that on Jan. 13, 2004, the day he took office, Barbour still had a stake worth $786,666 in the publicly traded parent company of Barbour Griffith & Rogers Inc., as well as pension and profit-sharing plan benefits from the lobby firm.

A copy of the notarized trust agreement, obtained from an individual who requested anonymity, says Barbour receives $25,000 per month, or $300,000 a year, from it. He lists the trust in his annual Mississippi ethics filing as his only source of income outside his $122,160 salary as governor.

Barbour, 59, a former Republican National Committee chairman, has refused to discuss his personal finances. His attorney, Ed Brunini Jr., said in a statement yesterday that "the provisions of his blind trust are fully appropriate and legal under Mississippi law." Brunini alleged that the disclosure of the information was unlawful. Barbour spokesman Pete Smith said Brunini’s statement would have the governor’s approval.

It couldn’t be learned what, if any, interest Barbour had in Barbour Griffith when the members of the firm lobbied the state last year in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina two years ago. The minimal disclosure required by Mississippi law contrasts with federal executive-branch rules that individuals who set up blind trusts report publicly their initial holdings and what they are worth, within ranges.

What we have here is that some times Barbour has made statements that he did hold an equity position in the parent company of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers — now very much in the news for its representation of the Iraq political ambitions of former Iraq Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi — and at other times he said he had severed all ties to the firm but was getting a "retirement payment."

As former head of the firm, he must have known that there was no retirement from BGR, but that he was receiving a kick-out, or dividend, of $25,000/month from his so-called blind trust that was coming out of the growth, gains and principal of whatever equity positions his trust held.

This is important because there is already enough in the public domain to show that Governor Barbour knew that he had an ongoing stake in the work of his former lobbying firm — which "cleaned up" along with many of his family members in the Washington-provided recovery funds after Katrina.

Haley Barbour has flown over the public ethics line in the past as well. 

The case I am most familiar with and which was investigated by Congressman Henry Waxman’s Government Oversight committee involved Barbour setting up in 1993 a non-profit 501(c)3 organization called the National Policy Forum (NPF). 

Barbour allegedly used NPF as a vehicle for funnelling $800,000 in foreign money into the 1996 election cycle after having used NPF as the same kind of vehicle in 1994 congressional races. 

The Internal Revenue Service eventually ruled that the NPF was a subsidiary of the Republican National Committee and not entitled ot tax-exempt status. 

Barbour’s partner in this enterprise when Barbour was serving as Chairman was John Bolton who became president of NPF in 1995.

Barbour, whether as Chairman of the Republican National Committee; Chairman of the National Policy Forum; Chairman and Proprietor of the lobbying firm Barbour Griffith & Rogers; or now Governor of Mississippi, has demonstrated obsessive disregard for the line between public ethics and private gain.

Mississippians should impeach him because he’s undermined the interests of their state — and many around the country should help.   

Iraq is an ongoing tragedy — but so is Katrina.  Impeaching Haley Barbour could start a healthy trend.

A reader compares Larry Craig to former Spokane Mayor Jim West, whose support for anti-gay policies came to haunt him when revelations over his own sexuality hit the papers. PBS’s Frontline did a documentary about him, which you can watch here. Our reader writes that rather than feel schadenfreude over Craig’s (and West’s) downfall, gays–and liberals, more generally–should welcome them into the fold.

I breath the air of freedom because of gays who struggled for rights, and we gays nearly breath the air of equality thanks to our continued persistence. Craig and West were stuck in a place from which they saw no escape and are mortal beings who made mistakes.

I wish the gay community would shelter them from these storms; would extend welcoming arms as I believe our community has always welcomed people; and say to the Christianists: if you will cast him out, then we will take him in (not that Senator Craig will come running to the next Pride event, but it is the gesture and tone that is most important I believe).

It seems to me the Christianists calling for Craig to be tossed overboard are far from their Christian teachings of love, truth, tolerance and acceptance. I had a flash of anger today listening to Mitt Romney say, "He’s no longer associated with my campaign, as you can imagine. He resigned just today. And you know, he was one of those who was helping my effort, and I’m sorry to see that he has fallen short."

For political points Mr. Romney is going to dump his friend flat and then thrash him on national television. When Larry needs someone to stand by him the most, Mitt is getting as far away from him as he can.

It was the D.C. thing to do, not the Christian thing to do.

I too feel a strange bit of sympathy for Craig–as I feel sad for any man of his age who has had to live a lie for so long. Like most gay men, I think I can understand what he’s going through, but I was an adolescent at the time–not 62. But Craig has only compounded his own misfortune by hurting others. He has a perfectly anti-gay voting record. If he was closeted but didn’t use his powers to harm gay people, then there would be cause to sympathize. But Craig now claims that there is a "cloud over Idaho" because of his own alleged attempts to solicit sex in a restroom. How myopic. Craig’s own, individual actions do not suddenly cast a pall over his entire state and, more ominously, Craig seems to be implying that to be considered homosexual is to have a "cloud over" one’s dignity. It’s no surprise that he feels this way.

Craig could have done what Jim McGreevey did and just come out of the closet (but not simultaneously claim that homosexuality was the cause of his ethical wrongdoing). And, of course, Mitt Romney’s kicking Craig while he’s down is everything we’ve come to expect from the former Governor with the movie-star good looks who will do and say anything to get elected.

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, my friend Dale Carpenter has more on why, if you don’t necessarily feel sympathy for Craig, you ought at least question the police powers used to arrest him.