Month: March 2010

The one thing you always knew about the Clintons and those who were close to them in the 1990s: they always, always reeked of fear. They suspected that white Americans could never vote for a black president; they believed you had to triangulate to the right of the GOP to survive; they believed that health insurance reform was political death; they held that standing up for civil rights for gay people was always stupid. And very few represent that kind of politics more than Jim Carville, Stan Greenberg and, yes, Rahm Emanuel, still traumatized after all these years.

Emanuel has a reputation for feistiness and God knows I'm not one to throw stones in my own glass House. But behind the thuggishness is a pathological fear of the right and a remarkably inept and crude set of human skills. He was hired to handle Congress; and yet his rank failure to pass a health insurance bill with a super-majority in the Senate and a big majority in the House for a full year – and the depth of the distrust between House and Senate that has emerged under his watch – reveals that his brand of cowardly principle and bullying practice is not what it is cracked up to be. Now his stupid posturing is also being used – naked in a shower no less – as a tool for Glenn Beck and the nihilist far right. 

But more disturbing is his classic Clintonian refusal to stand up against the Cheneyite right on critical matters such as national security and American values. No wonder he is so beloved of the Cheneyite rump now installed by Fred Hiatt at the Washington Post. All of which is to say: beware this poll from Greenberg on national security this morning.

The poll shows very strong credibility for the president in foreign policy and national security:

His handling of Afghanistan (58 percent), national security (57 percent), "leading America's military" (57 percent), "improving America's standing in the world" (55 percent), fighting terrorism (54 percent), and Iraq (54 percent), were all higher than his 47 percent overall approval rating.

But those numbers were down from levels in the 60s that were recorded by the same group last May. Fewer respondents now say they view Obama's handling of national-security issues as better than that of his predecessor George W. Bush — Obama's margin here has shrunk from 22 to just 5 percent.

Good Lord. Time to adopt torture and military commissions for all terror suspects; time to keep Gitmo; time to let Emanuel run rough-shod over Holder. Please. Of course these ratings are down from last May – what do you think happens to presidents over time? Of course his lead over his predecessor has declined. It's like gravity. The response is to reiterate just how successful Obama has been in prosecuting terror suspects, killing terrorist leaders abroad, restoring America's moral credibility. But, of course, the Carville-Greenberg-Emanuel trio think it's time to bring in Dick Morris. A reader writes:

Greenberg, now a kitchen advisor to Rahm, represents all his worst instincts–avoid conflict with the GOP at all costs, adopt their national security positions to avoid their being able to make headway on them.  He was an advisor to Gore in 2000, part of the clique urging him to wear earth colors and "be nice."  He was an advisor to Kerry in 2004, strongly advising against making an issue out of torture, lest the Dems be seen as "weak"–it was Greenberg who came up with the genius strategy of saying not a critical word about Bush at the 2004 Dem convention.  The subtext of this "poll" is the same that Greenberg had been peddling for years:  cede national security to the GOP, don't make an issue out of it.

Via Massie, Mark Benjamin describes how waterboarding worked in practice:

The CIA's waterboarding regimen was so excruciating, the memos show, that agency officials found themselves grappling with an unexpected development: detainees simply gave up and tried to let themselves drown. "In our limited experience, extensive sustained use of the waterboard can introduce new risks," the CIA's Office of Medical Services wrote in its 2003 memo. "Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue or psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excessive filling of the airways and loss of consciousness."

Remember when we were told that it lasted just a few seconds and provided miraculous, accurate intelligence? And are still told by propagandists like Marc Thiessen and Cliff May that the victims were actually grateful for this and treated it as a religious liberation?

Now imagine what we still don't know about what Cheney and his band of incompetent and weak war criminals got away with.

Barcelona, Spain, 5.01 pm

Just for the record, in November 2003, when Ramesh Ponnuru was defending a travesty of parliamentary procedure to pass a completely-unfunded multi-trillion-dollar, Rove-inspired pre-election bribe to seniors, this far leftist was writing:

We're beginning to realize that GOP has nothing to do with small government or fiscal sobriety. It's a vehicle for massive debt and catering to the worst forms of corporate welfare. Thank God for McCain. Bush should veto this [energy] bill, until it is de-porked. He won't, of course. He has yet to veto a single big-spending bill. He doesn't seem to give a damn about what is happening to the fiscal health of this country.

On the Medicare bill, the Dish was virulently opposed on fiscal grounds, and didn't let the Democrats off either:

Their paleo response to the Medicare bill is truly depressing. There are many reasons to oppose this bill – most importantly that it wll destroy the remaining threads of fiscal hope. But to oppose even experimentation with cost-cutting reforms reveals a party completely bankrupt of new ideas… The GOP has now no crediibility as a party of fiscal discipline or small government. It's just another tool of special interests – as beholden to them as the Dems are to theirs. Its pork barrel excesses may now be worse than the Dems, and the president seems completely unable or unwilling to restrain them. I know I'm a broken record on this but we truly need some kind of third force again in American politics – fiscally conservative, socially inclusive, and vigilant against terror. Last week has shown us why.

I guess I want to reiterate my consistent fiscal conservatism, against the smears of the bloggy right. And that's why I support this health insurance reform bill, because it promises to actually cut Medicare and to experiment with serious cost-controls. Obama is to the fiscal right of Kerry in 2003, and, of course, to the fiscal right of Sarah "Death Panels" Palin in 2010.

One other thing worth noting from that November. The partisan right have long tried to argue that my position on Iraq shifted because of the FMA on marriage equality. But you'll see from the archives that I'm up in arms about the amendment and still embarrassingly pro-Bush on the war.

Calculated Risk contrasts unemployment rates with levels of education. Ryan Avent has further unemployment thoughts.

"We have no time — time works against us. The conflict can be transferred from a national conflict to a religious one, which is unsolvable, and this is something that we cannot afford," – Tzipi Livni, Kadima leader and former Israeli prime minister, understanding why Netanyahu's intransigence is so dangerous for all of us.

Greenwald wants action:

There is a real opportunity here to cause that rarest of political events:  namely, having someone's credibility and standing be diminished by virtue of repugnant acts.  Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol and Andy McCarthy (with whom it originated) have so transparently crossed every line with this ugly smear campaign that they are being condemned across the political spectrum. 

Only the hardest-core ideological dead-enders are defending them. It would therefore not only be politically plausible, but valuable, for the Congress to officially condemn these McCarthyite attacks on Justice Department lawyers.  If the Democratic Congress was willing (indeed eager) to do so against the nation's leading progressive group, why wouldn't it do the same in response to a far more repugnant and potentially destructive campaign launched by a Far Right group?  In 1954, the U.S. Senate condemned the original Joe McCarthy, so why not his progeny?

Kristol, Cheney and McCarthy need to be named and shamed. I'm all for this, of course. And it would be a way for the Democrats to actually regain some balls and initiative on the vital question of the compatibility between American values and national defense against Jihadist terrorism.

Obama did yesterday what he will do this fall if the Democrats have the common sense to pass the health insurance reform bill. Start watching the video above at 9.30. I love his jab at Washington pundit bullshit. As I wrote in my column last Sunday,

The polling shows the bill isn’t as unpopular as the Republicans insist it is. In the latest poll of polls, about 48% oppose it and about 43% support it. That has been stable since November, as Nate Silver, the blogger, has noted. A Wall Street Journal poll found support at a mere 36%. But when the same sample was told what was in the bill — everyone gets insurance; it does not end when you lose your job; no one gets denied insurance because of a pre-existing condition — the support went up 20 points. Its component parts are far more popular than the total concept — and more easily explained to the public. Just because Obama hasn’t done this so far doesn’t mean he won’t.

And now he has. This is the kind of argument that, in a recovering economy, could shift the dynamic back to the president’s party. This is the Obama many of you voted for. Money quote (as inspiring as the campaign):

The insurance companies continue to ration health care based on who’s sick and who’s healthy; on who can pay and who can’t pay.  That’s the status quo in America, and it is a status quo that is unsustainable for this country.  We can’t have a system that works better for the insurance companies than it does for the American people.  (Applause.)  We need to give families and businesses more control over their own health insurance. And that’s why we need to pass health care reform — not next year, not five years from now, not 10 years from now, but now.

Now, since we took this issue on a year ago, there have been plenty of folks in Washington who’ve said that the politics is just too hard.  They’ve warned us we may not win.  They’ve argued now is not the time for reform.  It’s going to hurt your poll numbers.  How is it going to affect Democrats in November?  Don’t do it now.

My question to them is:  When is the right time?  If not now, when?  If not us, who?

So how much higher do premiums have to rise until we do something about it? How many more Americans have to lose their health insurance? How many more businesses have to drop coverage?

Think about it.  We’ve been talking about health care for nearly a century.  I’m reading a biography of Teddy Roosevelt right now.  He was talking about it.  Teddy Roosevelt.  We have failed to meet this challenge during periods of prosperity and also during periods of decline.  Some people say, well, don’t do it right now because the economy is weak.  When the economy was strong, we didn’t do it.  We’ve talked about it during Democratic administrations and Republican administrations.  I got all my Republican colleagues out there saying, well, no, no, no, we want to focus on things like cost.  You had 10 years.  What happened? What were you doing?  (Applause.)

Every year, the problem gets worse.  Every year, insurance companies deny more people coverage because they’ve got preexisting conditions.  Every year, they drop more people’s coverage when they get sick right when they need it most.  Every year, they raise premiums higher and higher and higher.

Just last month, Anthem Blue Cross in California tried to jack up rates by nearly 40 percent — 40 percent.  Anybody’s paycheck gone up 40 percent?

Attaboy. There is a very easy way to seize back the initiative: not Rahm-style surrenders to the Cheney right; not some kind of reframing. The same frame he won the election on: you want change or do you want nothing?

David Jarman criticizes National Journal's rankings of politicians:

[W]hen Kucinich votes against healthcare reform for not being single-payer, it’s notched as a conservative vote rather than a lefty one. And when Paul votes against military adventurism, it’s recorded as a liberal vote rather than modern-day isolationism. In other words, because they break with their party on principle, National Journal ends up classifying ideologues as centrists.