The Dish

by David Weigel

The Republican candidate for governor of Wisconsin, Mark "not that one" Green, has been ordered to give back half a million dollars in donations he had reeled in while running for Congress. State law allows Green to use the money, but the partisan Wisconsin election board passed a rule… well, just read it.

Wednesday’s actions were in response to a complaint brought by the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which alleged Green should be subject to an "emergency rule" the board passed prohibiting candidates for state office from converting funds from prior federal campaigns if the donors are not registered in Wisconsin or the gifts exceed state limits.

The Elections Board, which is dominated by Democrats, first adopted the rule in 2005, one day after Green transferred his federal money to his state account.

The rule was quickly suspended by a committee of the Republican-controlled Legislature. But the full Legislature never adopted the required follow-up legislation to permanently kill the rule before lawmakers went home July 12.

Anyone care to explain why the election board’s Libertarian member voted to screw Green?

by David Weigel

This column in the American Spectator by Jeffrey Lord is pretty interesting, revisiting a race that no one much discusses anymore – the 1942 midterm elections. Lord is right that the GOP flourished – as it had stayed afloat in FDR’s third win of 1940 – by sticking with FDR on the war and differentiating itself on domestic policy. And then Lord banks left and takes the Rumsfeld Expressway into False Equivalence City.

So in circumstances like this, how does a political opposition approach the upcoming election? Savage FDR? Run on a campaign of "Roosevelt lied and people died"? Should they go out and tell the American people just how dangerously incompetent the man was, that the best thing to do was make peace with Hitler and Japan’s Hirohito, then elect Republicans who would simply force FDR to bring home the boys and let the rest of the world cope with chaos? After all, a few years earlier FDR himself had turned back an ocean liner filled with 937 Jews escaping the looming Holocaust. The idea of not making Hitler, Hirohito or Mussolini any angrier than they were was certainly one approach.

This is cute, and it would be relevent if the 2006 Democratic Party was running on a platform of making peace with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, appeasing Iran, and ending the U.S. military presence in the Middle East. It’s not, obviously. They don’t really have plans for dealing with al Qaeda and Iran, which is part of their problem, but the general Democratic stance on those issues is expressed here by Ohio U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod Brown:

Despite the sacrifice and bravery of our troops, the foreign policy of Republicans in Congress and the White House has failed to secure our interests at home and abroad:
– Osama bin Laden is still on the loose and Afghanistan has reemerged as a haven for terrorists and opium producers.
– While we have been distracted by the insurgency in Iraq, Iran and North Korea have gained ground in their effort to posses weapons of mass destruction.

Will voters appreciate that Democrats have decoupled the war in Iraq and the war on terror – that they want to pull out of the former and more aggressively (they say) pursue victory in the latter? I think so. And so do some Republicans.

by David Weigel

I’m pretty tolerant of the racial gaffes that bubble up into the political news cycle every month or so. I was proud to defend Joe Biden for saying, basically, that Indian Americans in Delaware are successful franchise entrepreneurs. But this comment by Sen. Conrad Burns (R-Mont.) was beyond the pale.

At the campaign event with [First Lady Laura] Bush, Burns talked about the war on terrorism, saying a "faceless enemy" of terrorists "drive taxi cabs in the daytime and kill at night."

The campaign said Thursday that the senator was simply pointing out terrorists can be anywhere.

Sorry, no, he wasn’t pointing that out. You don’t pluck "drive taxi cabs" out of the air when you’re thinking of a generic job that terrorists might do. That’s a job that Arabs and South Asians disproportinately do. They don’t do it in Montana, though, because Montana only has 5,508 Asians. They do it in DC and in New York City, and Burns is scared of brown people in places like that: He told a reporter in 1994 that living amongst swarthy African-Americans in DC was "a hell of a challenge."

by David Weigel

Over at Stats.org, Rebecca Goldin takes a scalpel to the Washington Monthly’s new-ish (this is the feature’s second year) College List, ranked by what the schools "are doing for the country."

“Each year,” says the Monthly, “Princeton receives millions of dollars in federal research grants. Does it deserve them? What has Princeton done for us lately? This is the only guide that tries to tell you.” The absurdity of this statement, from an academic point of view, is astounding. Research dollars are not given to Princeton for their commitment to social mobility and to community service. Research dollars are given to forward knowledge, whether through grants for the arts or grants for scientific discovery.

Read the whole thing.

by David Weigel

OK, does no one else see the irony in this?

Ex-U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Wednesday that the thought of California Rep. Nancy Pelosi becoming the next leader of the House and being third in line to the presidency is frightening."

The prospect of her bringing San Francisco values and a whole attitude on foreign policy that is, I think, an attitude of weakness and appeasement and surrender, I think, would be a disaster for the country," the outspoken Republican said.

Really, if anyone should understand how little the specter of a new House Speaker figures into a voter’s decision, it should be Newt Gingrich. The electorate of 1994 knew perfectly well that Newt Gingrich would be speaker if they elected a GOP congress. Democrats campaigned on that theme, knowing that the pugnancious minority leader was even less popular than Bill Clinton. The media gave them an assist by demonizing Gingrich, as seen here in some magazine called "Time."

It’s fair, obviously, for Republicans to point out how left-wing a Democratic Congress will be. But they’re simply not going to turn Nancy Pelosi into a swing voter-repelling cartoon character in 69 days.

An amazing Chinese mass-vogue.

by David Weigel

When even Paul Kiel admitted it was "sad to watch," I thought the punditry door had swung shut on Katherine Harris’s exciting-turned-Quixotic-turned-Jake La Motta-esque Senate race. But Jonathan Chait has the definitive take – maybe the last long piece ever – on Harris’s career. She was always crazy, says Chait, but Republicans chose to overlook that as long as she was of use to them.

After Harris floated unsubstantiated rumors that Joe Scarborough (a former GOP member of Congress whom Harris viewed as a potential primary rival) may have killed one of his interns, Scarborough noted, "That was the first clue that something wasn’t right with Katherine Harris."

In fact, there were plenty of clues to that effect from the very beginning. One such clue was Harris’s oft-stated belief that she was the modern-day incarnation of the biblical heroine Queen Esther. ("If I perish, I perish," she would proclaim dramatically, perhaps confusing Esther with Jesus.) During the recount, Harris made this analogy to her staff so frequently that, as the Post reported, her underlings finally begged, "No more Esther stories!"

by David Weigel

I assume Kathryn Jean Lopez posted a snippet of Jack Reed and Chuck Schumer’s conference call on "Islamofascism" to poke the Democrats in their eyes, to point out how silly they are. That’s funny; this is the most perceptive thing I’ve ever heard Jack Reed say.

You know, I think if one carefully has looked at the history of fascism, which was a political movement in western Europe that actually, in the two principal cases, came to power through democratic elections ‚Äî at least in Germany it did ‚Äî I think the analogy is very, very weak. And what they’re looking for is a kind of a connection, a symbolic connection, between the struggle against Nazism and fascism in Italy. And I think, again, it misperceives the nature of the threats we face today.

This is not a nationalistic organization that is trying to seize control of a particular government. It is a religious movement. It is motivated by apocalyptic visions. It is something that is distributed. Most of these terrorist cells seem to be evolving through imitation, rather than being organized. And again, I think it goes to the point of that their first response is, you know, come up with a catchy slogan, and then they forget to do the hard work of digging into the facts and coming up with a strategy and resources that will counter the actual threats we face.

Of course, the very fact that Democrats are discussing a ridiculous buzzword popularized by the great political philosopher Michael Savage is, in itself, a victory for the pro-war right. I’ll be curious to see polling done on the "Islamofascist" and "Islamic fascist" buzzwords. People in the beltway are split 50/50 on whether it’s a ridiculous term; are people in the rest of the country, utterly fed up with the slog in Iraq, eating up this talk of an endless crusade against an international gaggle of Hitlers?

UPDATE: Michael Ledeen comments:

Dingy Harry Reid doesn’t know the first thing about fascism, since he says that Hitler came to power by winning an election.  Wrong.  The NSDAP did well in an election, but the Conservatives formed the government.  Hitler became Chancellor via parliamentary action.  His electoral success came later.  Ditto for Mussolini. 

It’s nice to know that Very Serious Iran Scholar Michael Ledeen throws around Rush Limbaugh nicknames when he discusses American politics. It’s also nice to know that he has to misstate his opponents’ points to make even a half-baked argument. (I would make a comment about him conflating Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed with Sen. Harry Reid, but I did the same thing earlier.)

Reed says that fascism was a "political movement" that "came to power through democratic elections," which it was. Fascists didn’t take over by bombing planes or holding Bundestag members hostage. They were just another political fringe group until, starting in 1930, they polled incredibly well in Bundestag and presidential elections. The Nazis came to power by winning votes, building coalitions, and gaming the Weimar constitution until they had sufficient power to supplant it. That comports with Reed’s claims, as he never said "Hitler came to power by winning an election." Ledeen, unserious as ever, made that claim.

by David Weigel

Yes, it"s hilarious that Joe Lieberman’s high-powered campaign team meant to portray "a rising sun" in their new TV ad and instead used footage of a sun setting in California. But I’m amazed no one has spotted the Bob Roberts connection. If you recall, in his 1992 film about a hollow, venal right-wing Senate candidate, Tim Robbins, there’s a scene where the candidate’s aides are screening a new TV ad. It’s a mishmash of pretty images – flowers unfolding, the sun shining, grass blowing gently in the wind. After 30 seconds of this the message comes onscreen: "For a new day, vote Bob." It runs like a slightly less maudlin version of the film Edward G. Robinson watches in the suicide room in Soylent Green. The ad’s a failure, and Bob doesn’t start moving in the polls until he runs brutal attack ads against the incumbent Democrat, played by Gore Vidal.

Yes, Lieberman’s team is cribbing plays from a fictional U.S. Senate campaign. I wonder, why do liberals have such low opinions of Democratic consultants?

Berkeley, California, 9.30 pm.