The Dish

by David Weigel

A report from Alabama:

I’m a resident of Birmingham, Alabama; an acquaintance of Patricia Todd’s; and a longtime foot soldier for various Democratic Party causes down here (I worked my tail off for the Kerry campaign two years ago and am helping out one of our Democratic candidates for a statewide judicial race). I know quite a few people at various levels  of the state party organization, and your post on Patricia, particularly the implication that the state Democratic Party was involved in a comprehensive attempt to get her purged from the House seat she’d won fair and square, is inaccurate.

Not that the truth is much more flattering, but this categorically is not an anti-gay crusade on the part of Todd’s opponents. Rather, this has to do with the fact that the 54th House District had long been held by African-American representatives but was won by a white woman, and one man, Joe Reed, decided he didn’t like it.

Dr. Reed is, as the New York Times article states, highly influential in the state Democratic Party, but by no means do his various opinions reflect the official stance of the  party as a whole. In fact, one of the top three state Party officials testified at the Democratic subcommittee hearing that the obscure finance-report-filing rule hadn’t been complied with by ANY candidate in years, so there was no point in arbitrarily invoking it now. But Joe Reed’s going to do what Joe Reed’s going to do, and so now we’re stuck in the current situation.

None of this is to say that Dr. Reed and Gaynelle Hendricks’s supporters haven’t behaved abominably, because they have. And again, Reed’s influence in the state party apparatus is considerable. But your post gives the heavy implication that the entire state party is somehow anti-gay and that the effort to deny Patricia her seat is official policy, and that simply isn’t the case.

I hope you’ll post a correction or a clarification of this either on Hit & Run or on Sullivan’s blog, because we here in Alabama have to take enough crap as it is from Democrats and Republicans alike in the rest of the country about being backward and hate-filled; we don’t need inaccurate reports from "outsiders" making matters worse. Again, the truth of this matter is not something I’m the least bit proud of either, but it is not completely as you have described it.

I’ve corrected the post to make it clear the official Democratic party isn’t in charge. This stuff gets lost in translation.

by David Weigel

Alabama was set to elect its first openly gay state representative this fall, after  Patricia Todd won the primary for a safe Birmingham seat the GOP wasn’t even contesting. But Todd is being knocked out of the race by… quick, guess. An injunction by Roy Moore? Pat Robertson’s glutamine-powered mindwaves? No, by an enemy in her own Democratic party.

On Thursday, a Democratic Party subcommittee heard a challenge to Ms. Todd’s candidacy on the ground that she had violated a rule that, by party officials’ own admission, has not been enforced in nearly 20 years. The subcommittee voted to disqualify both Ms. Todd and her runoff opponent, a black businesswoman named Gaynell Hendricks, because neither had complied with the rule.
…
When Ms. Todd and Ms. Hendricks wound up in a runoff, things got nasty, by both sides’ reckoning. Anonymous fliers circulated calling Ms. Todd a “confessed lesbian” and applying racial slurs to Ms. Hendricks. The two primary opponents who threw their support to Ms. Todd woke to find signs in their yards accusing them of being “Uncle Toms,” said one of them, Charlie L. Williams.

The district’s voters stood athwart this wave of bigotry and shouted "stop!" One of their fellow Democrats was shouting something else entirely.

(Cross-posted at Hit and Run.)

by David Weigel

North Carolina perma-candidate Vernon Robinson – who prefers to be known as "the black Jesse Helms" – is ramping up his attacks on Rep. Brad Miller (D) by writing eliminationist parodies of 1960s TV show themes. I’m really quite serious. Robinson earned a little fame this year with an ad portraying modern America, with its Mes’kins and homosexers, as the Twilight Zone. Andrew blogged that the ad seemed to shoot straight out of "Michelle Malkin’s id."

Well, whose id wants to take responsibility for this?

Come and here me tell about a politician named Brad
He gave illegal aliens everything we had
Gave ’em Social Security and drivers’ licenses too
Free, health care, free lawyers, free lunches at the school
Well the next thing you know old Brad’s a congressman
With all the sneaky aliens eating from his hand
Sugar Daddy Miller’s what they call him in DC
Givin’ them the taxes he stole from you and me

All this in a Democratic seat so safe it’s not ranked in the top 50 most competitive races by National Journal. Pity.

by Ana Marie Cox

You probably haven’t heard the words "Kitty Kelly" and "The New Republic" in the same sentence since the last time you told someone "I was going to read The New Republic, but that Kitty Kelly story in Vanity Fair was more fun." Yet last week, The New Republic ran a story BY Kitty Kelly. As its cover. It’s the first published interview with Mrs. Duke Cunningham, who, while distancing herself from Dukestir, is amusingly delusional about her 15 mintues in the public spotlight:

"I identify with women like Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Diana," Nancy said. "They, too, had husbands like that."

There’s nothing spectacularly new in the piece, but there’s plenty that’s spectacularly laughable.

by Ana Marie Cox

Liberal bloggers have been having a lot of fun with John Hinderacker’s elegaic post on his visit to the Oval Office (gee, how’d he score that invite?), which , in part, describes Bush’s as "persona is very much that of the big brother." Only he means it as a compliment. He means the whole post as a compliment, which it is and couldn’t be more so unless it involved a tongue bath:

He clearly derives real joy from the opportunity to serve as President and to participate in the great pageant of American history. And he sees himself as anything but a lame duck, which is why he is stumping for Republican candidates around the country. It was, in short, the most inspiring forty minutes I’ve experienced in politics.

But the post only seems overthetop if you don’t take into account that John is not ever going to have aother Oval Office confab, since, clearly, his pissed himself at some point during this one.

 

by Michael J. Totten

TEL AVIV — Lots of people get kidnapped in Gaza. It‚Äôs common knowledge in Israel that most hostages are released within two to four hours, and that kidnappings are just a part of Gaza‚Äôs fun-filled internal politics. So when two Fox News journalists vanished into Gaza for days, it didn‚Äôt look good. They‚Äôre alive, as it turns out, but it still doesn‚Äôt look good.

A PREVIOUSLY unheard of group, the Holy Jihad Brigades, yesterday claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of two Fox News journalists in Gaza ten days ago and demanded that the United States free "Muslim prisoners" within 72 hours to gain their release.

In a video released later, the two journalists, correspondent Steve Centanni, a 60-year old American and New Zealand cameraman Olaf Wiig, 36, said they were in "fairly good health" and appealed for help to secure their release. It was the first time the two had been seen since they were abducted in front of a security forces headquarters while on a story.

New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark says her government will not pay a ransom to free Olaf Wiig or his American colleague. It almost goes without saying that the U.S. also won’t free any prisoners to secure the release of the hostages.

Rusty Shackleford thinks Al Qaeda 3.0 is behind these kidnappings, and he’s probably right.

by Ana Marie Cox

If Katherine Harris is refusing to drop out of the Senate race because she’s worried that she won’t find other work, we hear there’s a new product debuting in the U.S. that needs an American spokesmodel. Can you think of a better job for La Harris than hawking this?

YOU MUST "launch the interactive demo," IF YOU DARE. Not as interactive as some might like, but feel free to play along at home. Also: The somehow even more hilarious Chinese version. (So that’s how they maintain the one-child policy…)

And, finally: IT’S CALLED IGALLOP. You can go now.

No, wait, one more thing: "Best of all, iGallop‚Ñ¢ is fun to ride!"

by Ana Marie Cox

When George Allen loses his Senate race, will bloggers have the graciousness to let Allen take credit for it? While much has been made of the role that the web and YouTube have played in publicizing the "macaca" incident, one cannot discount the role played by the sheer stupidity of Allen and his campaign. This is not a victory for the net roots, it’s a loss for idiocy.

Someday political scientists will study the Allen campaign as an example of how not to do damage control. First, do NOT "dismiss…the issue with an expletive and insist…the senator has ‘nothing to apologize for.’" Second, do NOT try to "explain" the offensive remark (He said the word sounds similar to "mohawk," a term that his campaign staff had nicknamed Sidarth because of his haircut.). Third, do NOT offer a SECOND, possibly more offensive, explanation after the first one proves inadequate. Fourth do NOT leak a campaign memo that blames the media for the offensive remark. Lastly, do NOT wait a week to actually apologize. Oh, and do NOT be an idiot.

Allen has been apologizing to "those who were offended" ever since he realized they were offended, of course, though apparently he had to watch the media coverage in order to realize that the person he called "macaca" was offended:

“He took the blame for saying them, and he said he didn’t realize how offended I was until he heard my comments from the media.”

All of which makes one wonder about this "attempt" at apologizing:

"I just want to say, from the deepest part of my heart, I am sorry and I will do better."

If it’s coming form his "heart" now, maybe those other apologies were coming from the other end. Macaca, indeed.

Appleton, Wisconsin, 3 pm.

by David Weigel

On that weak Iranian military:

I think Sailer is being a little flip about the Iranian airforce.

First, the F4 was and is a very credible fighter.  It may have first entered service in the late ’50s, but you know what?  The fighters that make up the front line of the US line-up all entered service in the 1970s, 30 years ago (that’s right: the F-14, F-16, and F-18 all debuted in the ’70s).   Age of first introduction is not a very interesting metric.

Second, people trying to turn Iran into the new Nazi Germany are doing it based on one thing and one thing alone:  its alleged possession of an atomic bomb.  Now anyone who pays attention to the facts and the evidence knows that they do not have one, and cannot have one for many years.  But that is the real issue among the fear-mongerers, and trying to dispel the fear by talking about their fighter-fleet is neither here nor there.

We are being subjected to another giant con-job about Iran; the same losers in the White House who rushed us into Iraq are now trying to rush us into Iran.  It is really important that we resist their stupid, wicked, and unbelievably cynical con-job this time.

So–by all means help in the deflation.  But try to answer the arguments that are being made, not arguments that are not being made.