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Haley Barbour's Ridiculous Story
Sep 6, 2010
By Eugene Robinson (Truthdig)
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, who may seek the Republican nomination for
president, is trying to sell the biggest load of revisionist nonsense about
race, politics and the South that I've ever heard. Ever.
He has the gall to try to portray Southern Republicans as having been
enlightened supporters of the civil rights movement all along. I can't
decide whether this exercise in rewriting history should be described as
cynical or sinister. Whichever it is, the record has to be set straight.
In a recent interview with Human Events, a conservative magazine and
website, Barbour gave his version of how the South, once a Democratic
stronghold, became a Republican bastion. The 62-year-old Barbour claimed
that it was "my generation" that led the switch: "my generation,
who went to
integrated schools. I went to integrated college-never thought twice about
it."
The "old Democrats" fought integration tooth and nail, Barbour
said, but "by
my time, people realized that was the past, it was indefensible, it wasn't
gonna be that way anymore. And so the people who really changed the South
from Democrat to Republican was a different generation from those who fought
integration."
Not a word of this is true.
Barbour did not attend "integrated schools," if he's referring to
his
primary and secondary education. Mississippi
ignored the 1954 Brown v. Board
of Education decision that was meant to end separate-but-unequal school
systems. Eventually, officials implemented a "freedom of choice"
desegregation plan-but black parents who tried to send their children to
white schools were threatened and intimidated, including by cross-burnings.
Finally, in 1969, the Supreme Court ordered Mississippi
to integrate its
schools immediately. The long-stalled change took place in 1970.
That was long after Barbour had graduated from high school in Yazoo City and
gone on to attend the University of Mississippi-the "integrated
college" he
mentioned in the interview. The federal government had forced Ole Miss to
admit its first black student, James Meredith, in 1962; he had to be
escorted onto the campus by U.S.
marshals as white students rioted in
protest.
The following year, a second black student was admitted. In the mid-1960s,
when Barbour was attending Ole Miss, it's no wonder that he "never
thought
twice" about integration. There were only a handful of black students,
and
by all accounts-except Barbour's-they were isolated and ostracized by their
white peers.
The governor's assertion that segregation was a relic of the past "by my
time" is ludicrous. He was 16, certainly old enough to pay attention,
during
the Freedom Summer of 1964, when civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew
Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan near
Philadelphia, Miss. He was a young
adult, on his way to becoming a lawyer,
when the public schools were forced to integrate. I'll bet Barbour could
remember those days if he tried a little harder.
Equally wrong-and perhaps deliberately disingenuous-is his made-up narrative
of how the South turned Republican. Let me correct the record.
As he signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, Lyndon Johnson is supposed
to have said that the Democratic Party had "lost the South for a
generation." Among those who voted against the landmark
legislation was
Sen. Barry Goldwater, who became Johnson's opponent in the presidential race
that fall.
Johnson scored a landslide victory. Goldwater took his home state of Arizona
and just five others: Louisiana,
Mississippi, Alabama,
Georgia and South
Carolina. It was the first time those Deep
South states had voted for a
Republican presidential candidate since Reconstruction-and marked the moment
when, for many Southern voters, the GOP became the party of white racial
grievance. It wasn't "a different generation from those who fought
integration" that made the switch. Integration was the whole reason for
the
switch.
Now, Haley Barbour is not stupid. Why is he telling this ridiculous story?
Maybe this is the way he wishes things had been. You'll recall that earlier
this year, when asked about a Confederate history month proclamation in
Virginia that didn't mention the
detail known as slavery, Barbour said the
whole thing "doesn't amount to diddly." Most charitably, all this
might be
called denial.
It's much more likely, however, that Barbour has a political purpose. The
Republican Party is trying to shake its image as hostile to
African-Americans and other minorities. It would be consistent with this
attempted makeover to pretend that the party never sought, and won, the
votes of die-hard segregationists.
One problem, though: It did
September 4, 2010
The Poodle Speaks
By MAUREEN DOWD (NY Times)
WASHINGTON
Even in the thick of a historical tragedy, Tony Blair never seemed like a
Shakespearean character.
He's too rabbity brisk, too doggedly modern. The most proficient spinner
since Rumpelstiltskin lacks introspection. The self-described
"manipulator"
is still in denial about being manipulated.
The Economist's review of "A Journey," the new autobiography of the
former
British prime minister, says it sounds less like Disraeli and Churchill and
more like "the memoirs of a transatlantic business tycoon."
Yet in the section on Iraq,
Blair loses his C.E.O. fluency and engages in
tortured arguments, including one on how many people really died in the war,
and does a Shylock lament.
He says he does not regret serving as the voice for W.'s gut when the
inexperienced American princeling galloped into war with Iraq.
As for "the
nightmare that unfolded" - giving the lie to all their faux rationales
and
glib promises - Tony wants everyone to know he has feelings.
"Do they really suppose I don't care, don't feel, don't regret with
every
fibre of my being the loss of those who died?" he asks of his critics.
In Iraq,
marking the transition to the "post-combat mission" for American
troops, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was eloquent with an economy of
words.
Asked by a reporter if Iraq
would have to be a democratic state for the war
to benefit U.S.
national security, Gates cut to core: "The problem with this
war for, I think, many Americans is that the premise on which we justified
going to war proved not to be valid - that is, Saddam having weapons of mass
destruction." He added, candidly: "It will always be clouded by how
it
began."
Iraq will be
"a work in progress for a long time," Gates said, and, "how it
all weighs in the balance over time, I think remains to be seen."
Blair writes that he thought he was right and that he and W. rid the world
of a tyrant. But he winds up with a bitter anecdote: "I still keep in my
desk a letter from an Iraqi woman who came to see me before the war began.
She told me of the appalling torture and death her family had experienced
having fallen foul of Saddam's son. She begged me to act. After the fall of
Saddam she returned to Iraq.
She was murdered by sectarians a few months
later. What would she say to me now?"
There is no apology, but Blair sounds like a man with a guilty conscience.
He concedes that the invasion of Iraq
was more about symbols than immediate
security, about sending "a message of total clarity to the world,"
after
9/11, that defying the will of the international community would no longer
be tolerated.
In other words, Osama bin Laden had emasculated America,
and America
had to
hit back, and did so against a country that had nothing to do with him or
9/11.
Blair did not want to be W.'s peripheral poodle. He wanted to "stand
tall
internationally" with Britain's
main ally and not "wet our knickers," to use
a Blair phrase, when the going got tough (or delusional).
Blair fantasized that Saddam might someday give W.M.D. to terrorists. This,
even though the dictator didn't like terrorists because they were impossible
to control, and even though, as Blair admits, (the secular) Saddam and (the
fundamentalist) Osama were on opposite sides. (When Saudi
Arabia felt
threatened by Saddam's invasion of Kuwait,
Osama offered to fight the Iraqi
dictator.)
It is criminally naïve, given the billions spent on intelligence, that Blair
and W. muffed the postwar planning because they never perceived what Blair
now acknowledges as "the true threat": outside interference by Al
Qaeda and
Iran. So the
reasoning of the man known in England
as Phony Tony or Bliar
amounts to this: They had to invade Iraq
because Saddam could hypothetically
hook up with Al Qaeda. But they didn't properly prepare for the insurgency
because they knew that Saddam had no link to Al Qaeda.
He knew Dick Cheney had a grandiose plan to remake the world and no patience
for "namby-pamby peacenikery."
"He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq,
Syria, Iran,"
as well as
"Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.," Blair writes of Cheney, adding: "He
was for hard,
hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes. We're coming after you, so change or
be changed."
The religious Blair fancied himself a conviction politician who had
intervened for good in Kosovo and Sierra Leone
and would do so again in
Iraq. So he did
not, as he said others did, "reach for the garlic and
crucifixes" when Dick hatched his sulfurous schemes.
If he had challenged W. and Cheney instead of enabling them, Blair might
have stopped the farcical rush to war. Instead, he became the midwife for a
weaker Iraq
that is no longer a counterweight to Iran
- which actually is a
nuclear threat - and that seems doomed to be run one day by another brutal
strongman.
Maybe Blair should have realized the destructive Oedipal path W. was on. At
their first meeting at Camp David, W. screened
"Meet the Parents."
September 4, 2010
Freedom's Just Another Word
By FRANK RICH (NY Times)
AMONG the few scraps of news to emerge from Barack Obama's vacation was the
anecdote of a Martha's Vineyard bookseller handing him
an advance copy of
Jonathan Franzen's new novel, "Freedom." The book has since
rocketed up the
Amazon best-seller list, powered by reviews even more ecstatic than those
for Franzen's last novel, "The Corrections." But I doubt that the
president,
a fine writer who draws sustenance from great American writers, has read
"Freedom" yet. If he had, he never would have delivered that
bloodless
speech on Tuesday night.
What was so grievously missing from Obama's address was any feeling for what
has happened to our country during the seven-and-a-half-year war whose
"end"
he was marking. That legacy of anger and grief is what "Freedom"
mainlines
to its readers. In chronicling one Midwestern family as it migrates from St.
Paul to Washington
during the 9/11 decade, Franzen does for our traumatic
time what Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities" did for the
cartoonish
go-go 1980s. Or perhaps, more pertinently, what "The Great Gatsby"
did for
the ominous boom of the 1920s. The heady intoxication of freedom is
everywhere in "Freedom," from extramarital sexual couplings to the
consumer
nirvana of the iPod to Operation Iraqi Freedom itself. Yet most everyone,
regardless of age or calling or politics, is at war - not with terrorists,
but with depression, with their consciences and with one another.
This mood has not lifted and may be thickening as we trudge toward Year 10
in Afghanistan.
But Obama only paid it lip service. It's a mystery why a
candidate so attuned to the nation's pulse, most especially on the matter of
war, has grown tone deaf in office. On Tuesday, Obama asked the country to
turn the page on Iraq
as if that were as easy as, say, voting for him in
2008. His brief rhetorical pivot from the war to the economy only raised the
question of why the crisis of joblessness has not merited a prime-time Oval
Office speech of its own.
That Obama did consider Iraq
worthy of that distinction - one heretofore
shared only by the BP oil spill - was hardly justified by his tepid
pronouncements of progress ("credible elections that drew a strong
turnout")
or his tidy homilies about the war's impact. "Our unity at home was
tested,"
he said, as if all those bygones were now bygones and all the toxins
unleashed by this fiasco had miraculously evaporated once we drew down to
50,000 theoretically non-combat troops.
Americans are less forgiving. In recent polls, 60 percent of those surveyed
thought the war in Iraq
was a mistake, 70 percent thought it wasn't worth
American lives, and only a quarter believed it made us safer from terrorism.
This sour judgment is entirely reality-based. The war failed in all its
stated missions except the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
While we were distracted searching for Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass
destruction, Iran began revving up its actual nuclear program and Osama bin
Laden and his fanatics ran free to regroup in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We
handed Al Qaeda a propaganda coup by sacrificing America's
signature values
on the waterboard. We disseminated untold billions of taxpayers' dollars
from Baghdad's Green Zone, much
of it cycled corruptly through
well-connected American companies on no-bid contracts, yet Iraq
still doesn't
have reliable electricity or trustworthy security. Iraq's
"example of
freedom," as President Bush referred to his project in nation building
and
democracy promotion, did not inspire other states in the Middle
East to
emulate it. It only perpetuated the Israeli-Palestinian logjam it was
supposed to help relieve.
For this sad record, more than 4,400 Americans and some 100,000 Iraqis (a
conservative estimate) paid with their lives. Some 32,000 Americans were
wounded, and at least two million Iraqis, representing much of the nation's
most valuable human capital, went into exile. The war's official cost to
U.S. taxpayers
is now at $750 billion.
Of all the commentators on the debacle, few speak with more eloquence or
credibility than Andrew Bacevich, a professor of history and international
relations at Boston University
who as a West Point-trained officer served in
Vietnam and the
first gulf war and whose son, also an Army officer, was
killed in Iraq
in 2007. Writing in The New Republic after Obama's speech, he
decimated many of the war's lingering myths, starting with the fallacy,
reignited by the hawks taking a preposterous victory lap last week, that
"the surge" did anything other than stanch the bleeding from the
catastrophic American blundering that preceded it. As Bacevich concluded:
"The surge, now remembered as an epic feat of arms, functions chiefly as
a
smokescreen, obscuring a vast panorama of recklessness, miscalculation and
waste that politicians, generals, and sundry warmongers are keen to
forget."
Bacevich also wrote that "common decency demands that we reflect on all
that
has occurred in bringing us to this moment." Americans' common future
demands it too. The war's corrosive effect on the home front is no less
egregious than its undermining of our image and national security interests
abroad. As the Pentagon rebrands Operation Iraqi Freedom as Operation New
Dawn - a "name suggesting a skin cream or dishwashing liquid,"
Bacevich
aptly writes - the whitewashing of our recent history is well under way. The
price will be to keep repeating it.
We can't afford to forget now that the single biggest legacy of the Iraq
war
at home was to codify the illusion that Americans can have it all at no
cost. We willed ourselves to believe Paul Wolfowitz when he made the absurd
prediction that Iraq's
oil wealth would foot America's
post-invasion bills.
We were delighted to accept tax cuts, borrow other countries' money, and run
up the federal deficit long after the lure of a self-financing war was
unmasked as a hoax. The cultural synergy between the heedless
irresponsibility we practiced in Iraq
and our economic collapse at home
could not be more naked. The housing bubble, inflated by no-money-down
mortgage holders on Main Street
and high-risk gamblers on Wall Street, was
fueled by the same greedy disregard for the laws of fiscal gravity that
governed the fight-now-pay-later war.
Our attitude toward the war's human cost was no less cavalier. We were all
too content to let a volunteer army fight our battles out of sight and out
of mind, on a fictional pretext yoked to a military strategy premised on a
cakewalk. For too long we looked the other way as the coffins arrived in
Dover off camera in the shroud of
night, as the maimed endured inhumane
treatment in military hospitals at home, and as the Iraqi refugees who aided
Operation Iraqi Freedom at their own peril were denied the freedom to seek a
safe haven in our country.
Both President Obama and Glenn Beck, in his "Restoring Honor" rally
in
Washington last weekend, were
fulsome in their praise of the troops, as well
they should have been. But the disconnect between the civilian public,
including the war's die-hard advocates on the right, and those doing the
fighting remains as large today as ever. As one Iraq
war vet e-mailed to me
after hearing Beck's patriotic sermons: "What does gathering in D.C. do
for
the troops?" He was appalled at the self-regard of those who thought
their
jingoistic rally would help returning troops abandoned by the military's
"criminally poor mental health care" or save any soldier who was
"two
seconds away from getting his leg blown off by an I.E.D."
The other American casualties of Iraq
include the credibility of both
political parties, neither of which strenuously questioned the rush to war
and both of which are still haunted by that failure, and of the news media,
which barely challenged the White House's propaganda about Saddam's imminent
mushroom clouds. Many pundits, quite a few of them liberals, stoked the war
fever as well. Some eventually acknowledged getting it wrong, though in most
cases they stopped short of apologizing for their failures of judgment and
their abdication of journalistic skepticism about the government's case for
war.
Even now those think-tank types who kept seeing light at the end of the
Iraqi tunnel are ubiquitous on television and op-ed pages making similar
stay-the-course prognostications about Afghanistan.
Their embarrassing track
records may have temporarily vanished into the great American memory hole,
but actions do have consequences, and there must be an accounting. America
does have a soul, and, as Franzen so powerfully dramatizes in
"Freedom,"
when that soul is violated, we are paralyzed until we set it right.
And yet here we are, slouching toward yet another 9/11 anniversary, still
waiting for a correction, with even our president, an eloquent Iraq
war
opponent, slipping into denial. Of all the pro forma passages in Obama's
speech, perhaps the most jarring was his entreaty that Iraq's
leaders "move
forward with a sense of urgency to form an inclusive government that is
just, representative and accountable." He might as well have been
talking
about the poisonous political deadlock in Washington.
At that moment, there
was no escaping the tragic fact that instead of bringing American-style
democracy and freedom to Iraq,
the costly war we fought there has, if
anything, brought the bitter taste of Iraq's
dysfunction to America
September 3, 2010
The Ungreat Debate
By GAIL COLLINS (NY Times)
We do not generally look to gubernatorial debates for excitement. But this
week there was a fascinating one in Arizona,
where Gov. Jan Brewer gave a
bad performance of epic proportions. Really, Richard Nixon in 1960 was
Demosthenes in Athens compared
with this one.
Brewer began by blanking out during her introductory statement - there was
this horrible 16-second interval where she went silent, stared down at her
notes and giggled. The evening ended when she stomped away from reporters
who were yelling: "Governor, please answer the question about the
headless
bodies."
Everyone knows you never want to finish a big campaign night on a
headless-body note.
Brewer is an unelected governor, a Republican who moved into the job when
Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, was named secretary of homeland security.
(Someday, when things are calmer, we may want to discuss whether it was
really a good idea for President Obama to fill his administration with
senators and governors from swing states.) She is trying to win a term in
her own right by running almost exclusively on her support for that new
Arizona law aimed at cracking
down on undocumented immigrants.
The governor has been on national programs on Fox 20 times since April to
talk about illegal immigration, but she has been generally unavailable to
the Arizona reporters. I
learned this from the postdebate newscast on the
local Fox outlet in Phoenix,
where the reporter Steve Krafft complained
about her propensity to stonewall the state's news media in favor of the
national shows. During the postdebate confrontation, "I locked eyes with
her," said Krafft. "She was looking right at me as if perhaps,
maybe, I
might ask some question and bail her out. ... but all of us wanted an
answer."
The headless body debate goes back to Brewer's longstanding contention that
Arizona is plagued by "drugs
and the kidnappings and the extortion and the
beheadings" related to illegal immigration.
Naturally, inquiring minds wanted to know about the beheading part. "Oh,
our
law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert - either buried or
just lying out there that have been beheaded," she said in an interview.
This was both memorable and untrue. At the debate, her Democratic opponent,
Terry Goddard, claimed that Arizona
was losing business because people
around the country now believe it's a hellhole of immigration-fueled
violence. "Jan, I call upon you today to say there are no
beheadings," he
demanded.
We will pause here briefly to express regret that questions like this don't
come up more frequently in gubernatorial debates. Really, it's usually all
about bonded indebtedness and pensions.
"Terry, I will call you out. I think that you ought to renounce your
support
and endorsement of the unions that are boycotting our state," Brewer
responded, not precisely to the point.
The most interesting issue in this campaign, and the most critical one for
the rest of the nation, is whether crime by undocumented immigrants created
public fear, which then led to the Arizona
law and Brewer's current
popularity. Or whether politicians, in search of a winning issue, created
the fear all by themselves. During John McCain's sterling performance in his
primary campaign this summer, he contended that cars full of illegal
immigrants "are intentionally causing accidents on the freeway."
The nonexistent beheadings and alleged drive-by assaults are being brought
up at a time when, as Goddard points out, "violent crime is at the
lowest
level it's been since 1983 and crime along the border is at least at a
10-year-low."
But there's an undeniable surge in drug-related violence in Mexico.
The
question is whether, for Arizona,
the problem lies in the general population
of illegal immigrants or the well-financed and technologically sophisticated
crime lords who smuggle drugs and human beings over the border.
Goddard, who is the state attorney general, is absolutely passionate on this
subject. He can go on for hours about the Treasury Department's failure to
follow the dirty money. He worked with Western Union
to stop the smugglers'
ability to receive payments by wire for their human cargo. He's outraged
about the way our laws limiting the amount of cash people can carry across
the border haven't kept up with the modern methods of transferring money.
None of these issues, alas, are nearly as exciting as headless bodies or
demonic drivers.
In her postdebate repair effort, Brewer told a radio interviewer that
"the
bottom line is that there have been beheadings in the border region in
Mexico."
She also said that the difference between her and her opponent was
that "I've done something. Terry hasn't did anything." We are going
to
forgive her the sentence construction because, really, it had been a bad
week.
She also announced that there will be no more debates
The spoiled-brat American electorate
By Eugene Robinson (Washington Post)
Friday, September 3, 2010
According to polls, Americans are in a mood to hold their breath until they
turn blue. Voters appear to be so fed up with the Democrats that they're
ready to toss them out in favor of the Republicans -- for whom, according to
those same polls, the nation has even greater contempt. This isn't an
"electoral wave," it's a temper tantrum.
It's bad enough that the Democratic Party's "favorable" rating has
fallen to
an abysmal 33 percent, according to a recent NBC-Wall Street Journal poll.
It's worse that the Republican Party's favorability has plunged to just 24
percent. But incredibly, according to Gallup,
registered voters say they
intend to vote for Republicans over Democrats by an astounding 10-point
margin. Respected analysts reckon that the GOP has a chance of gaining 45 to
60 seats in the House, which would bring Minority Leader John Boehner into
the speaker's office.
My guess is that with a decided advantage in campaign funds, along with the
other advantages of incumbency, Democrats will be able to mitigate these
prospective losses -- perhaps even relieving Nancy Pelosi of the hassles of
moving. But there's no mistaking the public mood, and the truth is that it
makes no sense.
In the punditry business, it's considered bad form to question the essential
wisdom of the American people. But at this point, it's impossible to ignore
the obvious: The American people are acting like a bunch of spoiled brats.
This is not, I repeat not, a partisan argument. My own political leanings
are well-known, but the refusal of Americans to look seriously at the
nation's situation -- and its prospects -- is an equal-opportunity scourge.
Republicans got the back of the electorate's hand in 2006 and 2008;
Democrats will feel the sting this November. By 2012, it will probably be
the GOP's turn to get slapped around again.
The nation demands the impossible: quick, painless solutions to long-term,
structural problems. While they're running for office, politicians of both
parties encourage this kind of magical thinking. When they get into office,
they're forced to try to explain that things aren't quite so simple -- that
restructuring our economy, renewing the nation's increasingly rickety
infrastructure, reforming an unsustainable system of entitlements,
redefining America's
position in the world and all the other massive
challenges that face the country are going to require years of effort. But
the American people don't want to hear any of this. They want somebody to
make it all better. Now.
President Obama can point to any number of occasions on which he has told
Americans that getting our nation back on track is a long-range project. But
his campaign stump speech ended with the exhortation, "Let's go change
the
world" -- not, "Let's go change the world slowly and incrementally,
waiting
years before we see the fruits of our labor."
And one thing he really hasn't done is frame the hard work that lies ahead
as a national crusade that will require a degree of sacrifice from every one
of us. It's obvious, for example, that the solution to our economic woes is
not just to reinflate the housing bubble. New foundations have to be laid
for a 21st-century economy, starting with weaning the nation off of its
dependence on fossil fuels, which means there will have to be an increase in
the price of oil. I don't want to pay more to fill my gas tank, but I know
that it would be good for the nation if I did.
The richest Americans need to pay higher taxes -- not because they're bad
people who deserve to be punished but because they earn a much bigger share
of the nation's income and hold a bigger share of its overall wealth. If
they don't pay more, there won't be enough revenue to maintain, much less
improve, the kind of infrastructure that fosters economic growth. Think of
what the interstate highway system has meant to this country. Now imagine
trying to build it today.
Fixing Social Security for future generations, working steadily to improve
the schools, charting a reasonable path on immigration -- none of this is
what the American people want to hear. They're in the market for quick and
easy solutions that won't hurt a bit. It's easy to blame politicians for
selling a bunch of snake oil. But the truth is that all they're doing is
offering what the public wants to buy.
September 1, 2010
Sarah's Amazing Race
By GAIL COLLINS (NY Times)
Sarah Palin is going to Iowa to
be the headliner at a Republican
fund-raiser. In the state that will be the first to hold a contest in the
2012 presidential campaign, even if it has to do it in 2011.
Her staff says this means nothing whatsoever, but let us acknowledge that
Palin is on a roll. She's got her own TV show, not counting Fox News. And
she twitters! Or somebody does it for her. Hard to tell which. Her twit on
the president's Iraq
speech was: "may make u want to dig out ur
old Orwell
books so rewritten history can be deciphered."
On the one hand, the sentence construction does have that Sarah ring to it.
On the other, how many of you think that Palin has old Orwell books hanging
around the house? May I see a show of hands?
And she endorses candidates. In the Republican primary for the United States
Senate race in Alaska, her
pick, a hitherto unknown person named Joe Miller,
beat the incumbent, Lisa Murkowski. Whether Palin's backing made any
difference to the 28 percent of eligible voters who flocked to the polls is
unknowable. But Palin's endorsement did inspire the Tea Party Express to
give Miller nearly $600,000 for TV commercials, which he used to brand
Murkowski as a liberal insider who changes her positions "more often
than a
moose sheds its antlers" and as a member of a family that regards itself
as
entitled royalty.
"We stayed on the high road," Murkowski said when she finally
conceded on
Tuesday. She originally got her Senate seat from her father, Frank, who held
it before her and then decided to appoint Lisa as his successor when he
moved on to the state's governorship. So the royalty ad may have had a
point, although I'm sure the bit about the antlers was over the top.
Almost no one expected her to lose - certainly not the Alaska Democratic
Party, which had dumped its nomination on Scott McAdams, the affable mayor
of Sitka, a town with 9,000 people
and no road access.
He seems to be an intelligent and well-spoken guy. But the choice was
apparently based on the fact that the party's state convention was held in
Sitka and McAdams was, if not well
known, at least extremely handy.
Anyhow, Miller's victory was another big win for Palin in this year's
primaries, and it was followed by the news that she was going to appear at a
fall fund-raiser in Iowa - the
Iowa of Iowa presidential caucus fame. "Iowa
Republicans are going to look favorably on anybody that has come to this
state this year to help us win in 2010," the state party chairman told
The
Des Moines Register.
So very hard to imagine Palin as a presidential candidate. So very easy to
imagine her on a reality TV show. "Sarah Palin's Alaska,"
is set to premiere
in November on TLC, the cable network that was known in happier days as The
Learning Channel. One of the episodes will reportedly involve an educational
visit to Alaska by Kate Gosselin and her twins and sextuplets, who also have
a reality show on TLC that used to be known as "Jon & Kate Plus
Eight" until
her husband ran off with a large number of different women.
Kate Gosselin appeared last year on "Dancing With the Stars," and
Bristol
Palin will be competing on it this fall, holding what is apparently the
Recent Break-Up slot in the competition. While Levi Johnston, the father of
her baby, runs for mayor of Wasilla, Alaska,
on his own reality show. The
Palins are now reality TV royalty, like the Blagojeviches and the Ozzy
Osbournes.
In her spare time, the former governor of Alaska
is making speeches at
$75,000 a pop. To which she must be flown first class, as per her standard
contract, or in a private plane that "MUST BE a Lear 60 or larger."
This is
a new, emerging "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" version of
Palin. In her
public comments, Sarah is still just a down-home gal, making moose chili for
the kids and assuring an N.R.A. convention that she and Todd prefer sleeping
in the back of their truck to paying for a motel room.
A new Vanity Fair profile by Michael Joseph Gross suggests that Palin does
still cut costs by being an extremely bad tipper. The piece also resurrects
the charge that she does not actually hunt, and claims that Todd had to
scour the neighborhood to find some moose to put in that chili when a TV
crew came to call.
This is not the first time Palin's hunting creds have been questioned. I
think it is time for her to take a pool of reporters out into the woods,
bring down a moose and dress it on the spot. Maybe she could compete with
other allegedly outdoorsy politicians, like Joe Miller. Maybe they could
call it "Shooting With the Stars.
August 31, 2010
Not-So-Magic Carpet Ride
By MAUREEN DOWD (NY Times)
WASHINGTON
If we had wanted earth tones in the Oval Office, we would have elected Al
Gore.
(Oh, yeah, we did.)
On the night we were reminded that George W. Bush ended up in the White
House and heedlessly, needlessly started the war with Iraq,
President Obama
did his Mission Relinquished address from his redecorated man cave.
The Oval Office was done over by the chichi decorator Michael Smith, who was
previously paid $800,000 for his part in refurnishing the lair of the former
Merrill Lynch C.E.O. John Thain (a $1.2 million project featuring the
notorious $35,000 antique cabinet, or commode).
The Oval Office, the classiest, most powerful place on earth, is now
suffused with browns and beiges and leather and resembles an upscale hotel
conference room or a '70s conversation pit with a boxy coffee table that
even some Obama aides find ugly.
It almost made me long for the Technicolor Belle Watling swagging and
swathing style of the Clintons' Little
Rock decorator, Kaki Hockersmith.
The recession redo, paid for by the nonprofit White House Historical
Association, was the latest tone-deaf move by a White House that was
supposed to excel at connection and communication. Message: I care, but not
enough to stop the fancy vacations and posh renovations.
As Obama himself said in February 2009 when he released his first budget:
"There are times where you can afford to redecorate your house, and
there
are times where you need to focus on rebuilding the foundation."
It might have been wise, given America's
slough of despond, to hark back to
a time when presidents just went to work and took their office pretty much
as they found it, without the need to make a personal statement. As the
former White House curator Rex Scouten once told me, in the era from Taft to
Truman, the green rug in the president's office was changed only once, when
it wore out, to a new green rug.
The new cream-of-wheat-colored rug is made of 25 percent recycled wool and
features 100 percent recycled quotes around the border that have
significance for President Obama. (Which means, of course, that the next
chief executive will want to carpet copy-edit and put his or her own special
quotes on the Oval rug. If the Tea Party triumphs, it might be "Don't
Tread
on Me." If Sarah Palin ascends, it will no doubt be a mama grizzly bear
rug,
personally bagged by her.)
The quotations chosen by Obama include F.D.R.'s "The only thing we have
to
fear is fear itself"; Martin Luther King Jr.'s "The arc of the
moral
universe is long, but it bends towards justice"; Lincoln's
"Government of
the people, by the people, for the people"; J.F.K.'s "No problem of
human
destiny is beyond human beings"; and Teddy Roosevelt's "The welfare
of each
of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us."
Given the cunning tableau created on the Mall over the weekend by Glenn Beck
and Palin, in their artful and frightening mix of theology and Tea Party
ideology, the president might be better served by a carpet that prompts him
to get his groove back.
The first thing the once inspirational orator should embroider around the
rug, the maxim that sums up so much of what's wrong with the administration
now, is the immortal line from "Cool Hand Luke": "What we've
got here is
failure to communicate."
Sidetracked by the mosque fight and now admirably plunging into brokering a
Middle East peace, Obama clearly needs a reminder about
what really counts
as the Democrats prepare to get their clocks cleaned. The rug should quote
James Carville's famous admonition: "It's the economy, stupid!"
There should be a special message for John Boehner, the Republican leader
who has been strutting around as the Speaker-in-Waiting and who led the
Republicans on Tuesday in their inane effort to deny Obama credit for
anything by spending the day reminding people that it was W.'s war. The
president should emblazon Kathleen Turner's line from "Body Heat":
"You're
not too smart, are you? I like that in a man."
Obama needs his rug to remind him to toughen up. When the self-styled
Republican "Young Guns" - Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy
- pull
their wacky ideas out of their policy holsters, they should have to look
down and read the warning from Al "Scarface" Pacino about his
machine gun:
"Say hello to my little friend."
While he's at it, the president who naïvely yearned for unanimity when he
had a majority might put this legend around the border of his carpet:
"Post-partisanship doesn't work with Mitch McConnell."
And for all of us who have that sinking feeling that the economic rug is
being pulled out from under us, the president might stitch in the famous
warning from "Jaws": "We're going to need a bigger boat."
They Go or Obama Goes
Aug. 25 2010
By Robert Scheer
Barack Obama and the Democrats he led to a stunning victory two years ago
are going down hard in the face of an economic crisis that he did nothing to
create but which he has failed to solve. That is somewhat unfair because the
basic blame belongs to his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush,
who let the bulls of Wall Street run wild in the streets where ordinary
folks lived. And there was universal Republican support in Congress for the
radical deregulation of the financial industry that produced this debacle.
The core issue for the economy is the continued cost of a housing bubble
made possible only after what Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers
back then trumpeted as necessary "legal certainty" was provided to
derivative packages made up of suspect Alt-A and subprime mortgages. It was
the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which Senate Republican Phil Gramm
drafted and which Clinton signed
into law, that made legal the trafficking
in packages of dubious home mortgages. In any decent society the creation of
such untenable mortgages and the securitization of risk irrationally
associated with it would have been judged a criminal scam. But no such
judgment was possible because thanks to Wall Street's sway under Clinton and
Bush the bankers got to rewrite the laws to sanction their treachery.
It is Obama's continued deference to the sensibilities of the financiers and
his relative indifference to the suffering of ordinary people that threaten
his legacy, not to mention the nation's economic well-being. There have been
more than 300,000 foreclosure filings every single month that Obama has been
president, and as The New York Times editorialized, "Unfortunately,
there is
no evidence that the Obama administration's efforts to address the
foreclosure problem will make an appreciable dent." The Times noted that
the
administration's main program has been a bust, with only $321 million of the
$30 billion allocated to the program having been spent to help folks stay in
their homes.
The ugly reality that only 398,198 mortgages have been modified to make the
payments more reasonable can be traced to the program being based on the
hope that the banks would do the right thing. While Obama continued the Bush
practice of showering the banks with bailout money, he did not demand a
moratorium on foreclosures or call for increasing the power of bankruptcy
courts to force the banks, which created the problem, to now help distressed
homeowners.
The subject of housing foreclosures is inherently boring unless you happen
to own a home being foreclosed, in which case your family's life has just
been turned disastrously upside down. But few of the well-paid pundits on
television are in such a position, and as a result the tragedy that has hit
4 million families in the past two years has received scant notice.
But even that highly privileged group of commentators must now be aware that
those foreclosures are behind Tuesday's news that U.S. home sales reached
their lowest point in 15 years and that there is unlikely to be an economic
recovery without a dramatic turnabout in the housing market. The stock
market tanked Tuesday on reports that U.S.
home sales had dropped 25.5
percent below the year-ago level.
When homes are foreclosed in a neighborhood the equity of those in the area
who have faithfully paid their mortgages is slashed. And when the banks dump
those foreclosed properties back on the market, prices drop even lower. Yet
the administration has offered the most tepid of responses to stanch the
fierce bleeding of home equity worth. A paltry $4.1 billion has been
committed to efforts by the states to help the unemployed and other
distressed borrowers stay in their homes. Compare that with the trillions
spent on making the financial industry super-profitable once again.
There is no way that Obama can begin to seriously reverse this course
without shedding the economic team led by the Clinton-era "experts"
like
Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner who got us into this mess in
the first place. They are spooked by one overwhelmingly crippling idea-don't
rattle the financial titans whom we must rely on for investment. But when it
comes to keeping people in their homes, it is precisely the big banks that
must be rattled into doing the right thing.
Obama gained credibility through sacking Gen. Stanley McChrystal for making
untoward remarks. Why not sack Summers and Geithner for untoward policies
that have inflicted such misery on the general public?
August 29, 2010
It's Witch-Hunt Season
By PAUL KRUGMAN (NY Times)
The last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop witch
hunt by his political opponents. Prominent figures on the right accused Bill
and Hillary Clinton of everything from drug smuggling to murder. And once
Republicans took control of Congress, they subjected the Clinton
administration to unrelenting harassment - at one point taking 140 hours of
sworn testimony over accusations that the White House had misused its
Christmas card list.
Now it's happening again - except that this time it's even worse. Let's turn
the floor over to Rush Limbaugh: "Imam Hussein Obama," he recently
declared,
is "probably the best anti-American president we've ever had."
To get a sense of how much it matters when people like Mr. Limbaugh talk
like this, bear in mind that he's an utterly mainstream figure within the
Republican Party; bear in mind, too, that unless something changes the
political dynamics, Republicans will soon control at least one house of
Congress. This is going to be very, very ugly.
So where is this rage coming from? Why is it flourishing? What will it do to
America?
Anyone who remembered the 1990s could have predicted something like the
current political craziness. What we learned from the Clinton
years is that
a significant number of Americans just don't consider government by
liberals - even very moderate liberals - legitimate. Mr. Obama's election
would have enraged those people even if he were white. Of course, the fact
that he isn't, and has an alien-sounding name, adds to the rage.
By the way, I'm not talking about the rage of the excluded and the
dispossessed: Tea Partiers are relatively affluent, and nobody is angrier
these days than the very, very rich. Wall Street has turned on Mr. Obama
with a vengeance: last month Steve Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman of
the Blackstone Group, the private equity giant, compared proposals to end
tax loopholes for hedge fund managers with the Nazi invasion of Poland.
And powerful forces are promoting and exploiting this rage. Jane Mayer's new
article in The New Yorker about the superrich Koch brothers and their war
against Mr. Obama has generated much-justified attention, but as Ms. Mayer
herself points out, only the scale of their effort is new: billionaires like
Richard Mellon Scaife waged a similar war against Bill Clinton.
Meanwhile, the right-wing media are replaying their greatest hits. In the
1990s, Mr. Limbaugh used innuendo to feed anti-Clinton mythology, notably
the insinuation that Hillary Clinton was complicit in the death of Vince
Foster. Now, as we've just seen, he's doing his best to insinuate that Mr.
Obama is a Muslim. Again, though, there's an extra level of craziness this
time around: Mr. Limbaugh is the same as he always was, but now seems tame
compared with Glenn Beck.
And where, in all of this, are the responsible Republicans, leaders who will
stand up and say that some partisans are going too far? Nowhere to be found.
To take a prime example: the hysteria over the proposed Islamic center in
lower Manhattan almost makes one long for the days when former President
George W. Bush tried to soothe religious hatred, declaring Islam a religion
of peace. There were good reasons for his position: there are a billion
Muslims in the world, and America can't afford to make all of them its
enemies.
But here's the thing: Mr. Bush is still around, as are many of his former
officials. Where are the statements, from the former president or those in
his inner circle, preaching tolerance and denouncing anti-Islam hysteria? On
this issue, as on many others, the G.O.P. establishment is offering a nearly
uniform profile in cowardice.
So what will happen if, as expected, Republicans win control of the House?
We already know part of the answer: Politico reports that they're gearing up
for a repeat performance of the 1990s, with a "wave of committee
investigations" - several of them over supposed scandals that we already
know are completely phony. We can expect the G.O.P. to play chicken over the
federal budget, too; I'd put even odds on a 1995-type government shutdown
sometime over the next couple of years.
It will be an ugly scene, and it will be dangerous, too. The 1990s were a
time of peace and prosperity; this is a time of neither. In particular, we're
still suffering the after-effects of the worst economic crisis since the
1930s, and we can't afford to have a federal government paralyzed by an
opposition with no interest in helping the president govern. But that's what
we're likely to get.
If I were President Obama, I'd be doing all I could to head off this
prospect, offering some major new initiatives on the economic front in
particular, if only to shake up the political dynamic. But my guess is that
the president will continue to play it safe, all the way into catastrophe
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