The Dish

A reader writes:

Lifelong Massachusetts voter here. I've enjoyed your thoughtful coverage of the senate race over the past few days, but now that I've gotten a gander at our local polling place this morning, I think we may have all over-thought this.

I was curious to see who in our small, fairly wealthy town was fired up enough to actually get out there and hold signs for Brown — turns out, a hockey dad and the assistant Pop Warner football coach, both white guys in their 40s, both small business owners. These guys may possibly have voted for Obama, but that's about as far over on the macho scale as they'd ever be willing to go. Guaranteed they voted for Celtics owner Steve Pagliuca in the primary, or possibly brawlin' Mike Capuano, but when Coakley won, they were out of there.

She's a lawyer and a female DA, so doubly emasculating in their eyes. She didn't help herself after the primary by only relying on the old Hillary base, which is other ball-buster female lawyers. That's a strong enough group to win a four-way primary but no way big enough for the general election.

In that context, all Scott Brown had to do was show up and 1) be white 2) be male and 3) come off as anything other than an elite. Hence the truck and hunting shirts, a brilliant touch on his campaign's part, and one that will probably win him the election.

This race is all about the suburbs — neither candidate has anything to offer the working poor — and, very sad to say, even in educated, liberal Massachusetts, many suburban wives still vote as their husbands vote, or, if they don't like his candidate, they just don't vote at all. It'll be interesting to see how the vote breaks down in terms of gender and suburban-urban, but given all this, I think Coakley is toast. Angry white guys for the win.

Since the debate about the meaning of this election will be intense, one has to lament the absence of any data that can help us understand what was going through people's minds as they voted. Is this a vote against Obama in a state that still gives him high approval ratings? Is it a protest vote against the continuing recession? Is it about the health reform bill? Or about the bank bailouts? Is it about Coakley's awful campaign and Brown's clever one? We will debate all of this and more – but without exit polls, we will do so with little but subjective judgment.

Not that that has ever stopped me.

Since so much of the energy behind the Brown candidacy seems to be driven by anti-government sentiment, why is someone like me – who actually criticized Bush for being big government long before these late-comers – so dismayed?

Here's why. The rage is adolescent. It did not exist when the Republicans were in power and exploded government during years of economic growth. Fox News backed Bush to the hilt through it all, as he added mounds of unfunded entitlements to the next generation's debt, and then brought Beck in as soon as Obama inherited the mess. Scott Brown, moreover, has no plans to cut the debt or control government: none. He is running in defense of every cent in Medicare. He wants to increase the deficit by more tax cuts. He favors an all-powerful executive branch that can suspend habeas corpus and torture people. He has no intention of cutting defense. His position on the uninsured is: get your own states to help. His position on soaring healthcare costs is: stop the first attempt to control them.

We hear Karl Rove lamenting big government! We hear Dick Cheney worrying about deficits! The cynicism here is gob-smacking. And the libertarian right is just happy to go along.

There is, moreover, the incredible lie that somehow all the debt that lies ahead was created by Obama in twelve months, in a recession, when austerity would be fatal. This was a lie propagated mercilessly by the FNC/RNC and by partisan bloggers like Glenn Reynolds. And it has stuck, as Obama has pressed for centrist reform between the screamers on the left and the haters on the right.

I'm sorry but this is not an anti-government vote. It's a hissy fit because reality has finally hit and the conservative bromides of the 1980s work as poorly as the liberal bromides of the 1970s. If Brown were urging big, structural cuts in entitlements, if he were proposing junking health insurance reform because he has a plan to balance the budget in five years, if he were pledging to vote against the wars for the deficit's sake, if he were proposing ways to restrain private healthcare costs and Medicare's GOP-passed Medicare D – whose fiscal impact makes the current reform look like a tightwad's – it would be one thing. But he isn't and they aren't.

They merely want to kill a reform presidency. They have no alternative. They have no policy that could restrain health insurance costs and the desperate plight of the uninsured. They have no plans for tackling climate change, when they can bring themselves to admit it exists. They have no plans to win or end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that Obama himself isn't trying. They have no idea how to balance the budget – except more tax cuts!

In Iran, when prisoners are turned into corpses after interrogation, even the Khamenei junta feels it necessary to respond. In America, not so much. But we do have one response from Colonel Bumgarner, the official who allegedly concocted the self-hanging, self-throat-stuffing suicide narrative that is now in question:

I don’t know who Sgt. Hickman is …

As Scott Horton notes,

As we confirmed with Defense Department records, Bumgarner recommended Hickman for a medal (shown below) based on his cool-headed approach to defusing a prison riot on May 18, 2006. Moreover, Hickman was selected as NCO of the Quarter at Guantánamo, a fact the camp commander would certainly have known at the time.

Bumgarner also claims that Hickman

knows nothing about what transpired in Camp 1, or our medical facility. I do, I was there.

Really? That was not Bumgarner's sworn testimony to the NCIS:

“On the night of 09JUN06, I was not in the camp. I had spent the evening at Admiral Harris’s house.” (This can be found on pp. 1059-60 of the NCIS evidence file, and can be examined here [PDF, 1.1M] on page 6 of the original document.) This account matches the recollection of other witnesses cited in Admiral Harris’s AR 15-6 statement, especially the statements beginning at p. 118. In all these accounts, Colonel Bumgarner does not arrive at the camp until 12:48 a.m. on the morning of June 10. The operative events of the narrative furnished by the guards occurred between 7:00 p.m. and midnight—long before Bumgarner’s arrival on the scene.

The Obama Justice Department refuses to answer these credible claims of cover-up of murder. The Justice Department:

"The Department took this matter very seriously. A number of Department attorneys and agents extensively and thoroughly reviewed the allegations and found no evidence of wrongdoing."

Still no mention of Scott Horton's Gitmo scoop on any right-leaning blog. But Marc Thiessen, and others on the right, are crowing about the above video on Gitmo recidivism:

Show this to anyone you know who is not convinced that the detainees at Guantanamo are terrorists — or that closing Guantanamo and bringing them to America is a mistake.

The only way to tell if all the suspects at Gitmo were terrorists is to examine the evidence of their alleged Jihadism before they were seized. This has been done. A huge majority were not captured by US forces, were handed over by bounty hunters and were innocent. That's why these Jihadists were released by the Bush administration. But, of course, if you weren't a Jihadist before you arrived in Gitmo, you sure as hell would be by the time they let you out. I would be. Listening to the screams of the tortured is a pretty good motivator to hate the US. And again, there is a non-sequitur here. There is nothing in this video that suggests or proves that a federal super-max jail would be less secure than Gitmo. Nothing.

But Thiessen does help explain how a man like Steven Hadley could find a way to rationalize torturing so many to death:

In an interview for my book, former national-security adviser Steve Hadley explained to me, “The interrogation techniques were not to elicit information. So the whole argument that people tell you lies under torture misses the point.” Hadley said the purpose of the techniques was to “bring them to the point where they are willing to cooperate, and once they are willing to cooperate, then the techniques stop and you do all the things the FBI agents say you ought to do to build trust and all the rest.”

From later in the article:

They took great care to stay within the confines of the law and to ensure the safety of those in their custody. For their efforts, they have been vilified as torturers by critics who know next to nothing about what went on at the “black sites” where they worked.

This is a double-lie. The law was twisted by mediocre hacks to enable Cheney to do anything he wanted to prisoners, which is why so many died under the ordeal. There was no attempt to obey the law; there was a very elaborate attempt to bypass it entirely and to stretch the meaning of plain English in ways reminiscent of totalitarian states. 

This is why I believe the current American right is proto-fascist. Because they can do this outside the law and then brag about it.

Michael Moynihan is buoyed by the rage:

Everywhere I turn there are r-dropping Bostonians complaining about government, insisting that Americans need to “take their country back.” One woman, who seemed overly familiar with all of my childhood neighbors—the Flynns, the McBreens—compares herself to a passenger on Flight 93 who wants to yell “let’s roll” and regain control of our hijacked country. Or perhaps she was suggesting that President Obama is a Muslim. It was, like many of the arguments I heard, not completely clear.

This the voice of the FNC/RNC. It is screaming that taxes are too high, that we need to torture more prisoners, and retain every single item of entitlement spending, especially Medicare, and defense. They are anti-war but pro-war. They want lower taxes and more entitlement spending and higher wages and cheaper healthcare. And FNC/RNC will keep feeding them this diet of hollow outrage until any chance of actual reform is dead. 

Cheerful, aren't I?

Douthat ponders the return of Northeastern Republicans:

What turns off Northeasterners, as Caldwell suggested a decade ago, is less a specific issue like abortion than “the broader cultural claims of those who put it forward” — the sense, that is, that a vote for the G.O.P. is a vote for the habits and mores of Alabama or Mississippi (or a caricature thereof), complete with guns in the cupboard and creationism in the schools.

The G.O.P.’s Dixie problem, in other words, is similar to the Democratic Party’s New England problem. Americans voted against Michael Dukakis and John Kerry because they were liberals, yes, but more importantly because they were Massachusetts liberals, which made them seem like cultural as well as political outliers to much of the national electorate. Likewise, the political history of the Bush administration would have been different, and probably less divisive, if Bush had been a conservative Catholic from Wisconsin rather than a conservative evangelical from Texas.

The campaign is already blaming national Democrats for the worst performance of a candidate in living memory. Ambers has the leaked memo. The campaign does seem very Emily's List: smug, elitist, arrogant and in the end, stupid and gutless.

Karen Tumulty is live-reporting from Massachusetts:

[Coakley's] election-eve rally at a gym in a Framingham middle school was three-quarters empty; someone on the campaign had pulled a curtain across the midpoint of the gym, so that it wouldn't look even worse. (This "packed house" photo of the event by the campaign nothwithstanding.) The candidate came onstage to the "Rocky" theme–an extraordinary choice, given that she at one point had been sitting on a 30-point lead in some polls.

What worries long-time Democrats in the state even more, they tell me, are the other omens they are seeing–not just an accelerating deterioration in the polls, but also yard signs for her opponent, state Senator Scott Brown, in neighborhoods where they had never seen even a stirring of life for the GOP.

There's a certain amount of complacency among many with respect to the looming British general election. No one doubts that Labour is deeply unpopular. But the electoral system makes it close to impossible for the Tories to win a clear majority. They are so far behind in seats it will take the biggest swing in decades to get them even a one-seat majority. Renard Sexton has a helpful round-up here.

The Tories have the following nightmare. Unlike the GOP, they have actually come out and declared how they would cut spending – drastically – to help return to fiscal balance. Unlike Republicans, the Tories do not believe, as Karl Rove and Dick Cheney do, that "deficits don't matter." But what if they get a tiny majority, enact austerity and then have to face the voters in another election a few months after that? That's what's worrying them. And with good reason.