The Filibuster Revisited, part 1

Early last year, I went a few rounds with Nice Guy Eddie from "In My Humble Opinion" on the subject of the Senate filibuster, him fer it and me agin' it. It started here, then continued here and here, with remarks from both of us spread through the "comments" section of both blogs in the great, totally disorganized manner that would come to mark all of my more involved exchanges with Eddie.

Eddie thought on the subject for a long time. Nearly two years! Yesterday, a ridiculous item on Fox News, reported via Media Matters, inspired him to return to the subject. I've decided to post my reply here, as well as in his comments section. I fear it's rather cursory but I don't think for a moment it will be the last word in the discussion, so I've dubbed it "The Filibuster Revisited, part 1":

(A note: In order to have any idea what's going on, I recommend reading our entire exchange.)

In my second piece on this subject from last year, I ran the same numbers you did but my results were that, "at present population dispersal, just over 5.6% of the U.S. population, residing in the smallest states (which contain 11% of the total U.S. population), can theoretically elect a sufficient number of Senators (41) to filibuster anything everyone else wants to do." You came up with 2.3%. It's been so long I don't remember exactly how I did my own calculation but it doesn't really matter--either result supports my larger point.

I also ran the then-current numbers about actual Senate representation:

"...at present, Democratic Senators represent 74.9% of the population, while Republican Senators represent 48.7% of the population (there being overlap between states that have mixed Senate delegations). The minority is still running everything."

I pretty much addressed everything you wrote here back then. The notion that we will get bad results without a filibuster is a) absolutely true, and b) of absolutely no relevance. One either believes in liberal democracy or one doesn't. If you do, you have to take the good with the bad.

Defending the filibuster necessarily entails defending the abuse of it we've seen since Republicans lost control of congress in 2006 and particularly since 2008. That abuse has literally changed the constitutional order and is arguably unconstitutional. More to the point though, it completely nullifies our elections, rendering them meaningless exercises. This, too, is something one must defend in order to defend the filibuster. In evaluating its potential merits, one has to weigh this--a complete frustration of the democratic process, every day of every week of every year, forever--against the benefit of keeping it around, and in my view (and I think history clearly supports me in this), any alleged benefit is mostly illusory. No counter at all.

I don't see any argument in its favor.

--classicliberal2

The Tragedy of the Obama: Debt-Ceiling Edition

Niceguy Eddie, over at "In My Humble Opinion," has offered up some thoughts on the unpopularity of the current Republican position with regard to raising the debt ceiling. I thought I'd throw in a few of my own.

Popular sentiment does, indeed, cut strongly against Republicans on this issue. It cuts against them in this same really big way on pretty much every major issue, and Eddie is right about there being absolutely no reason for Democrats to compromise with them about anything when it comes to this. Republicans are a minority party with a minority in government and no real public support behind what they're trying to do, here. The Democrats could put their collective foot down, offer nothing at all, and dare the Republicans to do anything except either fold like an accordion in the face of this, or stand firm and reap the disastrous consequences. There really is only one choice. Demos would be literally insane to allow Repubs to hold the U.S. hostage over a debt-ceiling increase.

The reason offering nothing would work is the dirty little secret behind the entire debt-ceiling fight: Republicans, in the end, will vote to raise it. The, broadly speaking, Big Money community understands the ruinous effects of a potential default, and won't allow their puppets, in either party, to bring one about. Voting against a debt ceiling increase is political theater, staged by members of both parties from time to time, but the ceiling is always raised, and, at the end of the current made-up "crisis," it will be, as well, and Republicans--a sufficient number of them--will be on board when the votes are counted. That will happen, regardless of what else may. Democrats don't have to offer any deal at all, much less make one. Anything they "negotiate" away is by choice, not anything dictated by necessity.

Unfortunately, the Obama--as usual--is choosing to try to negotiate away anything and everything. From practically the moment he left the gate, he offered Republicans massive cuts to "entitlements" in exchange for their going along with some relatively minor revenue increases. That offer is still on the table. It shouldn't be. Republicans will probably hold out for more until nearly the last minute, but if there's even a chance enough Democrats will be willing to charge over the same cliff as Obama (and, as, practically speaking, it takes so few votes, there's a good chance of this), Republicans will eventually take Obama's deal.

If this happens, Obama will go down in history as having accomplished what no Republican has ever managed--to begin the dismantling of Social Security and Medicare. Defending these things has traditionally been a signature issue with Democrats. Indeed, Republicans, politically speaking, committed mass suicide via their votes, last year and this, on the Ryan plan. Democrats could have used that to absolutely eviscerate the Republican congressional caucus from coast to coast. Unless, that is, Democrats can be made to agree to the same sort of ruinous cuts that makes that plan so unpopular. That would rather spectacularly neutralize it as an issue, but, more to the point, it would remove one of the major reasons the public supports Democrats. Obama is working at chucking an easy win-win for his party and, much more importantly, undermining critically important programs, and isn't just pursuing a course that would begin their destruction; he's also working toward helping elect those who would finish the task.

--classicliberal2

Walker's War on Wisconsin (UPDATES below)

What can one say about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker? He's shown himself to be a preening, self-important peddler of poppycock, a wannabe Mussolini of the Midwest whose efforts to centralize an extraordinary amount of government power in his own hands have made him a rock star on the Republican right. That last only sounds paradoxical to those who don't pay attention.

Walker came to power alongside a rubber-stamp Republican majority in the state legislature, and he opened his administration in January by pressing through the body a series of fiscally ruinous policies, including huge tax cuts for the wealthy and for big business. Having added hundreds of millions of dollars worth of red ink to the state's finances, he then asserted that looming red ink meant the state faced a financial "crisis," and insisted it called for drastic and immediate measures to combat.

As it turned out, of course, the major aspects of his "Budget Repair Bill" didn't have much to do with the state's finances. It was mostly just about centralizing a great deal of power in Walker's hands. Among other things, it would have empowered him to sell off state-owned energy facilities to his Big Money cronies at will, without even any competitive bidding, and would have exempted such decisions from laws regarding public interest considerations. It would have removed from the legislature control over Medicaid, granting Walker's administration the dictatorial authority to raise premiums, limit program eligibility, and change reimbursement rates at will (Dennis Smith, Walker's appointee to head the agency charged with administering Medicaid, is an advocate for states leaving the program entirely). Most notoriously, it would break the state's contracts with public employee unions, cut their benefits, and strip from most of them their collective bargaining rights.

This last item caused quite a furor. Walker badly underestimated how unpopular it would prove to be, but he definitely knew he had a stinker on his hands, and he and the Republicans initially tried to jam it through with minimal debate before anyone noticed. He unveiled the bill, there was a single public hearing regarding it, a single committee meeting, and the Republican majority would have passed the bill the next day in a matter of minutes, except 14 Democratic legislators literally left the state in order to prevent them from having the Senate quorum necessary to do so.

The result was a stand-off that went on for weeks.

Walker was unyielding. Every time the absent senators would try to negotiate any sort of deal with him, his response was to call a press conference and insult them, while launching petty vindictive attacks on them through the legislature--trying to take away their parking, their pay, and their office expenses. More seriously, he and the Repubs tried to have them arrested for "contempt," in direct violation of the state constitution.

Walker insisted that the anti-union elements of his bill were absolutely necessary to deal with the state's fiscal "crisis." It became a mantra. It was a matter of public record that Wisconsin's future projected budget shortfalls--the portions not attributable to Walker's own policies--had nothing to do with the unions' benefits. They were a consequence of several items, primarily projected Medicaid expenses. Still, Walker repeated his mantra, and apparently hoped people would pay little attention to details. The unions had immediately agreed to the actual fiscal elements of Walker's proposal--the cuts in their benefits. Still, Walker repeated his mantra. Those concessions were always on the table, and at any point in this protracted drama, Walker could have simply taken them and declared victory. He refused to take "yes" for an answer because his purpose, contrary to his mantra, was to bust the unions, and he had no intention of accepting a negotiated settlement that left them their rights. Republicans in over a dozen states, in fact, suddenly simultaneously decided they also needed to go after their state's unions in the same way. Still, Walker repeated his mantra, apparently expecting us to accept this as merely an incredible coincidence.

The public didn't bite.

Instead, waves of protesters filled the state capitol. The demonstrations were scrupulously peaceful, but Walker ordered the capitol locked down anyway. A court ordered his administration to reopen it; Walker simply ignored the order, and circulated false stories in the press about the protesters causing millions of dollars in damage (in reality, there had been no real damage).

In order to finally pass the portion of the bill stripping the unions of their collective bargaining rights, the Repubs--after all that mantra repetition--finally had to admit it wasn't a fiscal measure at all, which had the benefit of removing the need for a senate quorum. They held a brief meeting with only two hours notice--an apparent violation of Wisconsin law--and passed the measure a few minutes later, inadvertently offering up the perfect footnote to the whole sordid affair by immediately arranging to attend a high-dollar fundraising dinner being thrown in their honor by lobbyists in Washington D.C..

To bask in the presence of their purchased puppets, these corrupt lobbyists will offer up a minimum $1,000 donation just to get in the door; lots of love, with lots of zeroes attached. The reaction of the larger public, however, has been quite different. After only two months in office, Walker's approval rating is in free-fall--down around 40%. Big majorities are now telling pollsters that, if the 2010 election was held again today, they'd vote against him, and by this time next year, he will--courtesy of Wisconsin's recall laws--most likely be reduced to a very-highly-paid Fox News special commentator, touring the brain-dead hemisphere of the talking-head circuit as a right-wing martyr to mean ol' labor unions, while a lot of the Repubs who backed him in the legislature will be unemployed. That may be the happiest ending Wisconsin can manage.

Meanwhile, the national Republican party has embraced the Mussolini of the Midwest as a hero, and seem to have decided they want what he's done to Wisconsin to be both their model and the public face of their party. Repubs, in legislatures across the country, continue their efforts to centralize power and destroy democratic--and Democratic--institutions.

Stay tuned.

--classicliberal2

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UPDATE (12 March, 2011) -- I've always found, in the various theories of liberal democracy, much merit in the notion that, when a government is elected, it earns the right to enact its program. In spite of what the Scott Walkers of the world believe, we don't elect dictatorships in the U.S., and the minority should get some concessions along the way, roughly equivalent to its size, but democracy has no meaning if a majority is prevented from governing at all. We've seen this at the federal level. Democrats won the White House and huge majorities in congress in 2008, but were effectively prevented from governing by a Republican minority that systematically abused the process and, in essence, completely nullified that entire election.

The Wisconsin situation isn't even close to being analogous to this, because Democrats, there, were objecting to items in a single bill, rather than to everything the Republicans had proposed, and Walker was refusing a reasonable compromise that fully addressed the concerns he feigned in public regarding state finances while pushing for a measure to which the public was overwhelmingly opposed

Still, the Democratic legislators' exit from the state in order to prevent that bill from going forward is a use of process to foil an elected majority, and merits some scrutiny.

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UPDATE (8 April, 2011) -- The potential violation of Wisconsin's Open Meetings Law in passing the union-busting bill resulted in a court injunction against publishing or enforcing the law. Wisconsin law requires that the Secretary of State publish any law in the official newspaper before it can be enforced. Walker and Republican Senate leader Scott Fitzgerald decided they could just ignore this law and the injunction, as well; they had the law published by the Legislative Reference Bureau, then publicly declared it had been legally published, was in effect, and that it would now be enforced. Rather than simply holding these clowns in contempt, the judge in the case issued a second order tersely reemphasizing that publication and enforcement of the law has been enjoined. Walker finally backed down, but the entire incident is emblematic of his behavior throughout this ordeal.

Setting the Record Straight on "Jack-Booted Thugs"

I'm still not really up to writing much, or well, but an item over at Media Matters caught my eye tonight, and I felt compelled to offer some thoughts on it.

Adam Shah of Media Matters For America offers this as his set-up:

National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre is the last person a responsible media outlet should have on its airwaves to comment on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). That's because LaPierre once referred to ATF agents as "jack-booted government thugs" and reportedly called for "lifting the assault weapons ban to even the odds in the struggle between ordinary citizens and 'jack-booted government thugs.'"

Shah's framing can be read in such a way as to suggest that anyone who would call government agents "jack-booted government thugs" is inherently nuts. The gripe I have with this is that government agents frequently are jack-booted thugs. That LaPierre said so isn't why his comments were problematic.

LaPierre is a reactionary who deals in the nuttiest sort of black-helicopter conspiracism. His rhetoric, offered in the 1990s, is indistinguishable from that of the militia movement that grew like a cancer in that same period, and it's this context that elevated his "jack-booted government thugs" comment from a truism to an eye-raiser.

But it takes some space to explain why.

The right is not, in fact, "anti-government." As much as the press and some liberal commentators love to use that phrase as shorthand, it's difficult to imagine a characterization that could more grossly misrepresent the politics of contemporary conservatism. There are many "schools" of conservatism in the U.S., of course, but the core of the conservative base, at present, is made up of what may fairly be described as self-obsessed authoritarians. They're very opposed to government that taxes them. They're very opposed to the small "d" democratic elements of government, those responsive to the public. When it comes to pursuing their own cherished goals, though--which usually involve maintaining the aristocratic prerogatives of The Powers That Be, aggressive militarism, and enforcing social homogeneity--no amount of government ever proves to be enough.

This conservative core isn't opposed to jack-booted thuggery on the part of government. Those on the right have, in fact, always supported such thuggery, nurtured it, enabled it, even demanded it, for the simple reason that government thuggery has, historically, almost always been aimed at the left or at other groups despised by the right (immigrants, racial minorities, etc.), and the conservatives have been (and are) its enthusiastic advocates as long as that's the case.

When LaPierre made his comments, on the other hand, the right was out of power, and the narrative had shifted. Suddenly, the story peddled to the nuts was that a democratic--and, more importantly, Democratic--government was out to get white, right-wing rednecks. This was a handy way of inflaming the bumpkins against the other party, but reflected no genuine concern about government abuses.[*] During the just-concluded Bush administration, when a real thug was running the government and asserting the power to ignore the law and the constitution at will, kidnap, torture, and even murder American citizens with no pretense of due process, and so on, the conservatives virtually worshiped government power and their Maximal Leader, and the militia culture and movement, which had made such a pretense of being centrally concerned about government abuses in the '90s (when abuses were relatively minor), all but disappeared. When Democrats rolled over Republicans in the 2008 elections, though, the right went back to criticizing government again, and the militia culture was suddenly back again with a vengeance.

Back in the 1990s, the federal action against the Koresh cult in Texas became the central organizing cause for militant reactionaries. The broad narrative of the event that evolved on the nut right was that the cult was merely an unthreatening church that was attacked and besieged by the government for no real reason, then, at the end, was maliciously burned alive for refusing to submit. None of this had much of a relationship to the truth, but it made for a nifty organizing tool for years.

LaPierre was opportunistically playing to this sentiment when he made his "jack-booted government thugs" comment. In the same letter in which he wrote those words, he even made explicit reference to the action against the Koresh cult, and, further, added

"Not too long ago, it was unthinkable for federal agents wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms to attack law-abiding citizens. Not today."

Of course, such a thing hadn't been "unthinkable" to left-wing political parties, the civil rights movement, radical groups, labor unions, anti-war groups, and more other non-conservative and anti-conservative groups than can be named--they'd been on the receiving end of government violence for over a century, by that point. It was only "unthinkable" to white Christian conservative good ol' boys who had never been subjected to it. LaPierre was part of a cadre of reactionaries who, for purposes of political expediency, was trying to make it thinkable to them. The world learned how thinkable some of them found it when a fertilizer bomb went off in front of a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing hundreds.

I realize that's more of a mouthful, as explanations go, but the implication that condemning government thuggery is what makes LaPierre's comments reprehensible shouldn't be allowed to stand. They're reprehensible for entirely different reasons. Real government thuggery should always be condemned by every American worthy of the name.

--classicliberal2

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[*] Back in the 1990s when LaPierre made his comment, the NRA was, in fact, trying to reinvent itself as a crime-fighting organization, circulating false "statistics" about how "soft on crime" America was, and advocating a "get tough" approach. In a word, thuggery.

Re-Thoughts on "Civil Discourse" (UPDATE BELOW)

I'm currently in the midst of a devastating personal crisis, and I'm probably crazy to even attempt to comment on any serious subject. It's a diversion from what's really on my mind, and, while that can be welcomed when thoughts are as bleak as mine, it's never a good state of mind for creating thoughtful discourse. I'm going to give it a try, anyway. If it doesn't turn out to be one of my best, it's something of a little miracle if I finish it at all.

The attack, by a deranged gunman, on a crowd at a public political gathering in Arizona has led, in the last few days, to some criticism of the political climate created by the right, which, in turn, led to a massive pushback by the right (far larger than the almost-non-existent original criticism). The cretinous Sarah Palin emerged from her Alaskan bunker to climb up onto her cross and deny rhetoric can play any role in such violent atrocities, while simultaneously asserting that the rhetoric suggesting that it may cause it can inspire violent atrocities, pretty much mirroring the tone of the entire conservative reaction. Writing over at "In My Humble Opinion," the overworked Niceguy Eddie has offered up some thoughts on the matter of civil discourse, but I take issue with what he says, to a degree, and decided I'd try to write about it.

First, Eddie:

"I’m not saying that we SHOULDN’T be more civil in our discourse, but using tragedy to highlight even THAT (which to some people STILL constitutes an “agenda”) is still politicizing it."

I think you miss a much more important point. One of the most serious problems we face in the U.S. flows, at base, from the efforts of those on the right to intentionally demonize, delegitimize, and dehumanize their enemies. What passes for public discourse from the American conservative elite (and is accepted without any significant skepticism by a lot of their followers) is little more than a string of personal attacks with that kind of total destruction as a goal. The right shows absolutely no regard for the truth when they're about this. They don't try to personally destroy someone based on the actual views and actions of that someone; they just, to put it bluntly, make shit up. Obama isn't opposed because of anything he actually does or is; he's opposed because he's a Kenyan Bolshevik who wants to set up government death panels to kill the elderly and infirm, manage a government takeover of industry, and destroy capitalism. The narrative, offered by the American conservative elite, of what happens in the U.S. rarely even touches reality. By it, there isn't even any room for honest disagreement. Those who disagree are enemies, and those enemies are the enemies of mankind itself.

The elite of the right has a gargantuan, omnipresent, multi-media machine to spread this narrative. It's like nothing that has ever existed in human history, and for a huge portion of the population (a distinct minority, but still huge), that narrative is holy writ.

This isn't just a problem in the ridiculous political food-fights we have every day, most of which don't amount to a hill of beans. It has, among other things, the potential to cause incredible amounts of violence. If you spend 24-hours/day, every day, telling your credulous followers that their enemies--those with whom they politically disagree--are out to destroy them, it's only a matter of time before a lot of them are going to get it in their heads that they'd better pick up a gun or a bomb and "save" the country. But violence isn't even the biggest problem we face as a consequence of this narrative. It's much bigger. It is, in fact, a literally existentialist matter. Forget about "civil discourse." Public discourse itself has been all but destroyed in the U.S. by this, and that's the death of a democratic society. Increasingly, people can't talk to one another in any meaningful way, they certainly can't disagree with one another, and for those who have seriously bought into the narrative as it is seriously offered, allowing any influence at all over public affairs by someone who disagrees--an enemy--begins to seem absolutely intolerable. Maybe even just living next to them will starts to seem intolerable.

Political rhetoric appears to have played no role in what happened in Arizona, but if the incident draws some attention to this wretched state of affairs, that's something positive that can come from the horror. I understand your concern for the feelings of the victims, Eddie, but I don't think dealing with this is any offense to them (though the ranting and bumper-sticker fix-alls offered by some of those clowns you mentioned are certainly thoughtless and inappropriate). The dead are gone. The rest of us still have to live, and part of that is addressing this problem.

It isn't addressed by noxious censorship, or anything like that. It can only be addressed by something we've fallen out of the habit of doing: having a real national conversation.

That said, I really don't think it will be addressed. Not as a result of what happened in Arizona, in any event. What little critical commentary that has emerged in recent days has focused, almost entirely, on things like Sarah Palin's use of phrases like "don't retreat; reload," and on defeated senatorial candidate Sharron Angle's suggestion that "Second Amendment remedies" could be a response if the right person--read: her--didn't win an election, and on Republicans' use of a map that put crosshairs on the districts of congressmen they're "targeting." This is totally misguided criticism. The problem isn't with things like this (most of which are of little consequence, and are relatively innocuous). It's with the context in which things like this are offered. It isn't with scattered comments involving allusions to violence. It's with the right's overall narrative. Focusing on the scattered comments will prevent it from being addressed.

It should also be most forcefully noted that this is a problem with the right, not with the rest of us. If, in the phony games of "balance" traditionally played by the press and in conservative efforts to deflect the issue by presenting a few scattered examples of inappropriate rhetoric by liberals, this is lost, then so will be any effort to address the problem.

The biggest reason it won't be addressed, though, is because of its sheer size. It isn't about those stray remarks. It's about what a huge portion of the population has been told to believe, and has accepted as reality. That's not something that can be turned on a dime. It may not be something that can be turned at all. A turn, in this case, requires people to begin questioning nonsense they've accepted as gospel for years. More importantly, it would require those who peddle it to them to stop peddling it, and that would entail that big right-wing machine going entirely out of business, because that's all it has to offer. Fat chance. And how do you have a conversation with people who, as a matter of fundamental ideology, regard you as an enemy whose every word is a lie, and refuse to indulge in any real conversation?

We have to try, though.

What else is there?

--classicliberal2

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UPDATE (20 Jan., 2011) -- NiceGuy Eddie replies in comments, and my response ran a little long, so I'll put it here. Eddie:

"...you can't simultaneously accept the truth that having 'civil discourse' will affect the Right's behavior 90% and the Left's just 10% and NOT call that 'an agenda.' That I happen to SHARE that agenda with you doesn't change the fact that it's AN AGENDA. And while you and I will rightly call it an AMERICAN agenda or a MORAL agenda or a PRINCIPLED agenda, given the affect it will have, and on who, the Right can reasonably call it a LEFTIST Agenda. That's bullshit of course, and it's their fault for moving to the Right of SANITY, but from their POV, it's still TRUE."

That's a symptom of the very malady I outlined in what I wrote before, though, and you can't cater to that. If you try, you lose before you even begin, because that's the outcome their narrative is designed to produce, the only one. If, as a precondition to having that conversation, you have to wait until the right doesn't act that way, that conversation will never happen.

As for angry ranting, it is often not only appropriate; the lack of it would be inappropriate. There's a big difference between angry ranting based on something that should provoke angry ranting and the sort of manufactured outrage that flows from (and sustains) the right on a daily basis. That's why the narrow focus on mere "civil discourse" is so misguided. There's no reason at all to be civil about things that legitimately provoke incivility. The reason the right's incivility is a problem is because it's based on nonsense. One lie on top of another on top of another.

When those on the right were fighting the health-care bill because it set up death panels to kill old people, they weren't disagreeing with the health-care bill; they're just making up shit to try to dehumanize their enemies. The same is true when they opposed it because it provided government health-care to illegal immigrants. No permutation of it ever did, and this was thrown out merely to fan the flames of racism and rip at the fabric of society (that clown Wilson, who, at Obama's address to congress, shouted "YOU LIE!" became a hero on the right for doing that). The same is true when they oppose it because they're against "socialized medicine." The bill that was passed doesn't "socialize" any aspect of health care. (and, further, the idea behind that--that any government involvement in business is properly characterized as "socialism"--is also a part of what I'm talking about, as is the fact that, in the right's usage, "socialism" is both a synonym for "liberalism" and an invocation of Bolshevism).

Now, the health care bill was, it's true, a monstrous piece of legislation. There were more painfully real reasons to genuinely oppose it than could be easily listed. I wrote article after article denouncing it at the time. The right wasn't opposed to it because of any of those real reasons. As I pointed out repeatedly, it was, in fact, a Republican bill that was passed. It was modeled on Romneycare in Massachusetts, and almost exactly the same legislation had been proposed, in recent years, by Republican Sen. Judd Gregg, and by former Republican Sen. Bob Dole. The first iteration on it was created by congressional Republicans back in the '90s when Clinton was working on health care--it was their proposed alternative (that's where Romney apparently got it). When Obama adopted it as his own, Republicans dropped it like a hot rock, and attacked it with the sort of rhetoric I just outlined.

There's a huge difference between outrage based on something actually outrage-worthy and this kind of bullshit. If I offer up an angry rant on an angry-rant-worthy subject and I'm tagged, by the right, as a hypocrite for doing it because I denounce their angry ranting (which is based on bullshit), that's symptomatic of their own problem, not an indication that I'm "rightly" branded a hypocrite.

As much as I've gone on, I don't think I've even started to do this subject justice. I'm just having an incredibly hard time right now. As bad as everything else is, a "friend" chose this, of all times, to manufacture an absolutely absurd drama and use it to drop another atom-bomb on me a few days ago (a few of them, actually). I try not to hold it against her, and I know I'm not even in any shape to judge what happened or anything else. I thought I'd already hit rock-bottom these last two months; she made a great stride in proving me wrong. A lot of what I've "written" here, was cut-and-pasted, with modifications, from some earlier things I'd written, because I'm just not up to writing right now.

The Obama Backs Bush Murder Policy

In one of the best-kept secrets of the U.S. corporate media, the Obama administration yesterday went before a federal court and threw its full support behind yet another of the Bush administration's assertions of fascist powers. This time, the issue revolves around the question of whether the executive branch of the U.S. government has the unlimited, unchecked, unreviewed power to unilaterally designate, as a danger to the U.S., a U.S. citizen--a civilian in a non-combat situation--then murder him. This administration, like the last, says "yes," and also asserted, in a manner all too familiar to those of us who had followed Bush's efforts to drag the U.S. down the long, ugly road to fascism, that it was an executive matter the judiciary hadn't even the authority to review.

All of this was in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, who are looking to limit the government's power to carry out these sorts of Mafia-style extrajudicial murders to cases of imminent danger to life and safety and have requested that the court force the executive branch to publicly disclose the secret process that results in a U.S. citizen being placed on a government hit-list.

The ACLU and CCR are acting at the request of Nasser Al-Aulaqi, the father of Anwar Al-Aulaqi. Anwar is a reactionary Muslim cleric reportedly placed on a government hit-list. Because he has been so targeted, the Treasury Department asserted that the ACLU and CCR, before they could even bring the suit, had to request a special license to allow them to do so. They requested the license, the government failed to provide it, and they proceeded to file a separate suit against the licensing scheme. Seems like a no-brainer. It's bad enough the government would assert the unrestrained power to kill U.S. citizens, but we're well into Kafka territory when someone so targeted has to obtain a license from that same government to allow him to challenge its decision to destroy him.

Linked to terrorists and, in his own right, reportedly an anti-Western Islamist reactionary of the worst sort, Aulaqi is hardly the poster-boy for an ideal plaintiff, but he is an American citizen, and his inflammatory views are of no real consequence to the issue at hand. Aulaqi has never been convicted or even charged with any crime by the U.S.. Jameel Jaffer, who presented arguments for the ACLU yesterday, put the matter succinctly:

"If the Constitution means anything, it surely means that the president does not have unreviewable authority to summarily execute any American whom he concludes is an enemy of the state."

The "liberal" Obama administration disagrees. Hopefully, the matter can be decided before it gets to the current Supreme Court.

--classicliberal2

Sound Election Analysis, or A Big Bunch of B.S From Bayh?

In these tough economic times, Evan Bayh certainly doesn't have to worry about ever being out of work. The cretinous right-wing slug who, until his retirement in January, is Indiana's excuse for a junior Senator, decided, yesterday, to give us a preview of his likely post-Senate job as a political analyst. Unsurprisingly, it looks a lot like what he's been doing as a "Democratic" Senator; namely, trashing liberal Democrats. The American conservative elite like "Democrats" who trash Democrats. They pay them well for it.

For some reason, the New York Times saw fit to waste the paper and ink necessary to mass-publish Bayh's application for this dismal work in the form of an op-ed offering the Senator's take on Tuesday's congressional election. Bayh concludes Democrats lost because they're too liberal.

What a surprise, right?

"To a degree," he says, "we [Democrats] are authors of our own misfortune." How so?

"It is clear that Democrats over-interpreted our mandate. Talk of a 'political realignment' and a 'new progressive era' proved wishful thinking. Exit polls in 2008 showed that 22 percent of voters identified themselves as liberals, 32 percent as conservatives and 44 percent as moderates. An electorate that is 76 percent moderate to conservative was not crying out for a move to the left."

But then, again, the American public isn't "76 percent moderate to conservative"; that polling reflects how people--most of whom are not political junkies and don't put a great deal of thought into what simple label they apply to their politics--view themselves and is profoundly impacted by the decades-long demonization of the "liberal" label. Ask them specific questions about their views and Americans are, just as they have been for ages, liberal and, on most issues, overwhelmingly so.

Bayh is phoning it in from another dimension when he says "we," by which he means Democrats, "were too deferential to our most zealous supporters." In this one, the Obama, who has largely set the Democratic agenda, has remained well to the right of the general public, continuing the war in Iraq while expanding the war in Afghanistan, refusing to even consider single-payer health care then dropping the public option from the Republican health care bill he adopted as his own, watering down regulatory reform, moving the already-reactionary Supreme Court further to the right, refusing to throw any kind of weight behind Democratic congressional efforts to both prevent companies from exporting jobs and to encourage companies to import them (at a time when jobs are THE major issue), then, as a final indignity, publicly trashing his own base while whining about how he doesn't get any credit for his "accomplishments." This behavior helped turn off his base and feed the "enthusiasm gap" between Democratic and Republican voters, which Gallup reported, just before the election, was 19%--greater than they'd ever measured in the nearly-two-decades they'd tracked it.

Bayh's fanciful account of the election season:

"During election season, Congress sought to placate those on the extreme left and motivate the base--but that meant that our final efforts before the election focused on trying to allow gays in the military, change our immigration system and repeal the George W. Bush-era tax cuts. These are legitimate issues but unlikely to resonate with moderate swing voters in a season of economic discontent."

Hard to know where to start.

In the real world, the public overwhelmingly supports allowing homosexuals to serve in the military. A typical poll (this one from CBS News) found, only a few weeks ago, 69% support for the proposition, 51% saying they supported it "strongly" (only 21% opposed it). Trying to make this possible wouldn't have been an effort "to placate those on the extreme left"--it would have been an effort to enact a policy overwhelmingly supported by the American public. Unfortunately, the Democrats weren't trying to allow gays in the military during the campaign--they were, instead, engaged in delaying tactics designed to prevent the matter from becoming an issue in the campaign. Only weeks ago, a federal court voided the current policy and if the Obama had wanted, he could have just been done with it at that point. Instead, he chose to appeal the ruling, which didn't endear him to anyone on the left.

There was no serious movement on immigration reform at any point during the campaign--Bayh's assertion to the contrary is fantasy.

It's a misrepresentation--or, just to call it straight, a lie--to say Democrats were trying "to repeal the George W. Bush-era tax cuts." The tax cuts aren't going to be repealed--they're going to expire. That's the law. If nothing happens, they all go away. The debate is whether or not they should be continued. Democrats have argued for renewing the tax cuts that go to most people while allowing to expire the big chunk of them that go to those of higher income. Polling shows that this is also the position of a majority or plurality of the public, depending on the question's wording, so, again, this isn't aimed at trying "to placate those on the extreme left"--the Democratic view has broad support.

Some numbers being well-circulated on the left blogosphere today further cripple Bayh's narrative that Democrats cut their own throats by being Democrats. While the liberal Congressional Progressive caucus lost only three of its more-than-80 members on Tuesday, the Blue Dog caucus, made up of right-wing Democrats like Bayh who shun "their" party and side with Republicans time and time again, was decimated, losing nearly 30 of their 54 members.

Even after voters sent most of the "Democrats" packing, Bayh's big solution to Democratic woes is that Democrats should become even more conservative and that the already-conservative Obama should move even further to the right--"seize the center," as Bayh euphemistically puts it. It's the sort of conclusion the American conservative elite pays well to spread around, particularly when it's being offered by a faux Democrat, so while Bayh has proven himself utterly worthless as a Senator, he can leave his overpaid post in these bad economic times without a worry about future employment. He'll have work. His family will never go hungry. His future is bright. He should probably wear shades.

--classicliberal2

"Far to the left in American politics"? A Test Case

I sometimes poke around over at "The Next Right," a theoretically "reformist" conservative site (albeit one that, in practice, mostly ends up being SOS), and, this being election day, I thought I'd step over there and see if there was anything interesting.

I found a blog, there, from poster Ironman, about Rep. Chris Murphy, the Democratic congressman from Connecticut's 5th district. Posted yesterday, it advises people to "be pragmatic tomorrow--remove a radical from CT 5." Campaigns produce a lot of hyperbolic rhetoric, of course, and maybe it's best to chalk IM's words up to the feverish emotions of the moment and leave it at that, but something made me want to offer a few comments on it. Probably the fact that it's so perfectly emblematic of the very wrongheaded "thinking" of a lot of the contemporary American right.

IM's premise is that Murphy is some sort of wild-eyed lefty radical who is misrepresenting himself in his reelection bid:

"Chris Murphy's closing argument in his flagging bid for re-election is that he represents the 'pragmatic center' of American politics.

"I call B.S. on this. Let's count the ways Murphy is far to the Left in American politics--even beyond the usual Nancy Pelosi foot soldier."

His first example:

"Murphy is one of the most vocal opponents of the use of warrantless wiretaps to obtain information to thwart terrorist threats... [D]o we want to hamstring the people who keep us safe? Murphy evidently does."

Is this evidence of Murphy's radicalism?

Well, it should be said, right up front, that Bush's NSA wiretapping program was completely illegal--a blatantly criminal enterprise that was explicitly forbidden by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had been on the books for decades, so IM's premise, that standing against government surveillance conducted with blatant criminality makes one some sort of radical, is, to put it as kindly as possible, shaky (another depressing sign of creeping fascism on the right).

What did the public think about Bush's criminal enterprise? In the immediate aftermath of the story breaking, the U.S. was almost equally divided. Polling showed that slim majorities either supported or opposed it based on the wording of the poll question, the more accurate wording producing stronger opposition than support. Murphy's "radical" opposition to it was in line with that of half the public.

That was just after the story broke.

As time went by, public opinion shifted strongly against the Bush administration on this matter. By Oct. 2007, a Mehlman Group poll found that 61% said the government should have to get a warrant before conducting this sort of surveillance; only 35% supported the Bush position. By Jan. 2008, another Mehlman Group poll asked the same question; 63% said the government should have to get a warrant (55% said they believed this "strongly"), with only 33% supporting the Bush position (24% "strongly"). By Feb. 2009, just after the beginning of Murphy's current term in office, 63% of respondents were telling Gallup they favored an investigation into the matter, including 77% of Democrats, 64% of independents, and even 41% of Republicans. Murphy's "radical" view, which IM says puts him "far to the Left in American politics," is, in fact, that of an overwhelming majority of the public--of Democrats, of independents, and of nearly half of the Republicans.

IM continues:

"Worse still, he favored letting the telecom firms that assisted the War on Terror face ruinous lawsuits from lefty lawyers "

The telecom firms in question "assisted the War on Terror" by illegally turning over private information on their clients to the Bush administration. They weren't ordered by a court to do so--Bush wanted it, and they just handed it over. Bush sought a bill granting these companies a blanket immunity from any legal action their enraged clients may bring against them. Murphy opposed this immunity.

Evidence of Murphy radicalism? Hardly. In that same Mehlman Group poll referenced above, 57% opposed granting immunity; 45% "strongly" opposed it. Only 33% supported it (22% "strongly"). The opposition to immunity cut across all political lines--liberals opposed it by 64%, moderates by 58%, and even 50% of conservatives opposed it.

So, again, IM is describing Murphy as a "radical" and "far to the Left in American politics" based on his holding the same views that are also broadly and overwhelmingly held by the public.

It's also worth, again, noting IM's premise in using this example; that Murphy is some sort of extreme lefty based on Murphy's opposition to blatant lawbreaking by the telecoms, turning over private information on the public to the government.

IM continues:

"Murphy is also one of the firmest opponents of keeping the detention facility at Gitmo open."

The public has been strongly divided on this question. In Jan. 2009, 53% told the ABC News/Washington Post poll they thought the U.S. should close the facility, with 42% supporting keeping it open. A CBS News/New York Times poll three months later showed an almost-even split--47% should continue to operate, while 44% said to close the prison. An AP/Roper poll two months later showed the public evenly split on the question--47% approved of Obama's then-goal to close the facility within a year, while 47% opposed it. Again, Murphy's view seems in line with about half of the public.

Unfortunately, this matter has been subject to a great deal of right-wing fear-mongering. The far right expended a great deal of effort telling the public that closing the facility would mean al Qaida prisoners would be dropped in their back yards, and when poll questions include nods toward this, NIMBYist sentiment kicks in. A USA Today/Gallup poll from May 2009, for example, asked, "Suppose the prison at Guantanamo Bay is closed. Would you favor or oppose moving some of those prisoners to a prison in your state?" 74% were opposed, with only 23% in favor. The results are usually less dramatic (around a 60/40 split), but large majorities do oppose closing the facility if the prisoners end up in their back yards, so on this matter, Murphy can be said to be out of sync with most people, if one doesn't control for NIMBYism.

IM continues:

"Chris Murphy has a problem with the health care bill. He doesn't think it went far enough. He is a strong supporter of the public option."

As was most of the public throughout the health-care debate. In a Time magazine poll from July, 2009, 56% supported the public option, 36% opposed. In a CNN/Opinion Research poll from Aug., 2009, 55% favored the public option, 41% opposed. In a Kaiser Family Foundation poll from Sept. 2009, 57% supported a public option, only 37% opposed. In a Quinnipiac poll from Oct. 2009, 61% supported the public option, only 34% opposed. In a CBS News/New York Times poll from Dec., 2009, 59% supported the public option, with only 29% opposed. This poll broke down the results by party, and found that support included 80% of Democrats, 59% of independents, and even 33% of Republicans.

So, again, Murphy is tagged as a lefty radical for being in line with most of the public.

And that's the whole of IM's substantive case against Murphy. He whines about Murphy attended a gathering of internet liberals, misrepresents a comment Murphy made to MSNBC [*], and concludes that "there are none [Democrats] more deserving of defeat than Connecticut's Chris Murphy."

It's clear IM doesn't like Murphy's politics, and, for whatever reason, he seems to personally despise the man, but he utterly fails to prove his premise that Murphy is some sort of "radical" who "is far to the Left in American politics." From IM's description, in fact, Murphy appears to be exactly what IM quotes him as calling himself, a representative of "the 'pragmatic center' of American politics." That IM sees this as "radical" says everything about himself, and nothing about Chris Murphy.

--classicliberal2

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[*] IM's version:

"He [Murphy] told MSMBC that after he and his colleagues got past the voters in November they would return with 'steel in their spine' ready to cast more tough votes against the wishes of their constituents."

The actual comment, in context:

"Giving an upbeat scenario for Election Day, Murphy said, 'When we retain the House, some members are going to come back with some extra steel in their spines, having cast some tough votes and having survived what’s likely the toughest election of their career.'"

[NOTE: The polls I cited but to which I don't link come from Pollingreport.com]

Monsters, Noses, & What Comes Next: Thoughts on the 2010 Congressional Elections

Some liberal commentators have displayed something akin to a panic at the prospect of a big Republican win in Tuesday's congressional elections. Keith Olbermann, Paul Krugman, and others have expressed their despair that fickle voters would return to power the advocates of the failed policies that, among other things, decimated the U.S. economy, sending it plunging into the deep pit in which it now remains stubbornly trapped. They've correctly outlined the extreme reactionary nature of the current Republican party, a party that has adopted its lunatic fringe as its mainstream.

In my view, most of these liberals presently sounding the alarm see this last as too recent a development. It's actually something that's been going on for quite some time, and their failure to recognize it doesn't speak well of them. They're right about one thing, though--it really is worse than ever. The hard core of the American right has, for decades, been an ever-rightening gaggle of overly reactionary reactionaries, but, while the broader, less insane Republican party with which they largely associated has always been a relatively narrow coalition, there had always been some little room for more reasonable--or, more precisely, less unreasonable--voices. In recent decades, though, that hard core has dragged out the long knives and ran them through just about anyone who wasn't as brutish, stupid, insane, and ass-backwards as it is. This was greatly accelerated by the 2008 campaign and its immediate aftermath, which saw the Democrats absorbing larger portions of the moderate and run-of-the-mill conservative demographics, leaving the hard core right to rebuild the Republican party. They've made it into a monster more monstrous than it has been in the lifetime of most people reading these words.

Now, that monster stands poised to take over, and progressive commentators are beside themselves at the prospect.

Their "solution," however, is not terribly helpful. They just tell us we should hold our noses and vote for Democrats.

The "hold our noses" part is necessary because the Democrats, in the last two years, have been abysmal failures. The Obama not only failed to roll back the horror that was the above-the-law, dictatorial chief executive built by the Bush administration, it refused to prosecute those responsible for it, and has actually defended most of its elements from every substantive challenge, allowing it to pass into precedent. The Obama and his party entirely squandered the historical opportunity handed them by the public in 2008, a chance to really get some things done; instead of anything that could be mistake for progressive change, all we've gotten from them are warmed-over conservative Republican policies. Even if the Democrats pulled off some incredible upset win on Tuesday, there's absolutely no reason to believe they'd behave any differently for the next two years than they have for the last. The nose must be held if voting for most Democrats because they don't deserve our vote. Most people, I suspect, aren't going to give it to them, either.

It's clear that the far right is just as much a horror show today as its fiercest critics insist, and there's no doubt it could do a great deal of damage if allowed unfettered power. It's just as clear, though, that, in spite of the alarmist sentiment coming from the liberals, it isn't going to get that sort of unfettered power. The reactionaries aren't winning hearts and minds. There's been no sudden upsurge in public enthusiasm for far-right policies or attitudes. Indeed, most people totally--even viscerally--reject both. The only reason the reactionaries are even being allowed anywhere near power now is because, at a time when the economy is in the toilet and the Democrats who hold the majority suck, they control the Republican party, which, in a theoretically two-party state, is considered the only viable alternative for expressing discontent. If they were to win both houses of congress on Tuesday and were to begin implementing their nuttier policies, the public would turn on them instantly. The right has managed to, broadly, rule the U.S. for decades, regardless of which party had a majority, but the far right is inherently self-destructive.

That shouldn't be read as underplaying the damage it could more realistically do. Even without an overwhelming win, they could block any effort at reform. But then, again, practically no one, among the elected, is offering any real reform anyway. Would it really be such a loss if the Obama was prevented from implementing the same kind of Republican policies, in the second half of his term, as he did in the first half?

This election is historically significant for a few reasons. It's the first election after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the "Citizens United" case, which guaranteed a significant degree of conservative success at the polls. In the wake of that ruling, corporate America has flexed its muscles in the ongoing congressional campaigns, with Big Money frequently outspending the parties and candidates in an effort to purchase an even more compliant congress. As long as this ruling remains uncorrected, this trend will only get worse as time goes by. This is also a census year, and to the extent that Republicans win at the state level, they'll be the ones directing redistricting efforts in the states based on that census, using the process to gerrymander as many safe Republican districts as they can manage.

The energy of progressives, though, shouldn't be so heavily directed toward playing electoral politics and trying to maintain a temporary majority in government for those who are (or at least seem) less reactionary. That energy should, instead, have been directed toward pushing for progressive reforms from the Obama and the Democratic congressional majority for the past two years. Only days after Obama's election, Tom Englehardt wrote a prescient piece I approvingly quoted (with some caveats)[*] at the time:

"Leave Obama to them [political Washington] and he'll break your heart. If you do, then blame yourself, not him; but better than blaming anyone, pitch your own tent on the public commons and make some noise. Let him know that Washington's isn't the only consensus around, that Americans really do want our troops to come home, that we actually are looking for 'change we can believe in,' which would include a less weaponized, less imperial American world, based on a reinvigorated idea of defense, not aggression, and on the Constitution, not leftover Rumsfeld rules or a bogus Global War on Terror."

Progressive reformers didn't bother, and now, it's too late. Regardless of what happens with this election, liberals need to finally get off their asses, roll up their sleeves, and do what Englehardt suggested years ago: raise some hell, and keep raising it.

--classicliberal2

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[*] The biggest one being that Englehardt gave Obama a pass on taking the blame. I thought--and think--he can take lots and lots of it.

"The Republicans are Nazis"?

Drawing parallels between contemporary politics and Nazism is a dubious enterprise. It's usually a good idea to maintain a taboo against it because, as "Nazi" and "fascist" became multi-purpose curses in political discourse, such parallels were both ubiquitously drawn and in almost every case entirely inappropriate. We have to be able to learn from the past and when we cheapen the world's experience with fascism by hanging the label on everything we don't like, we're cheating ourselves of the ability to do so.

That's the same reason such parallels shouldn't, as some argue, automatically be taboo. The taboo was created to combat inappropriate use of such comparisons. From that, the best of intentions, one could argue we've often erred in the opposite direction, coming to regard any comparison at all as inherently out-of-line. If overuse of the labels makes it difficult to learn anything from our past, being overly zealous in rejecting any comparison to fascism makes learning anything nearly impossible. The yardstick by which we should measure any such comparison should always be its appropriateness.

With that as preface, "Down With Tyranny" is rather alarmed today:

"Michael Godwin can [shove it]. The Republicans are Nazis... Or do you not see the relation between Sharron Angle's 'Second Amendment remedies,' Joe Miller's private thugs roughing up journalists, Daniel Webster's religious cult calling for the stoning of disobedient women and gays (stoning to death, I might add), Republicans' incessant demands that the Constitution be altered in ways they prefer, Boehner's 'Hell, No' obstructionism to economic salvation for the country, Rich Iott's glorification and emulation of SS death squads, physically violence towards women from top tier GOP candidates like David Rivera and Tom Ganley, and Monday evening's ugly 'altercation,' as Rand Paul put it in defending his fascist supporters, 'between supporters of both sides?' If America votes in the Republicans next week, it's one giant step--perhaps an irreversible one--towards what the German's allowed to happen to them in 1933."

As fascist parallels go, this skirts right along the boundary of appropriate and inappropriate. DWT is obviously mixing up a lot of elements on the right here and overly generalizing. My initial impulse was simply to write it off as over-the-top but there are certain on-the-ground facts (beyond those outlined by DWT) that hinder such an easy dismissal. Not so much related to this election in particular but about various trends in what, today, passes for American conservatism, reactionary trends feeding into if not fascism proper, a strong protofascism. This has been trending for some time now.

Consider what happened during the Bush administration. In George Bush Jr., the U.S. was confronted with a "president" who asserted the power to ignore U.S. law and the constitution at will; to unilaterally suspend fundamental constitutional rights like the free press; to kidnap anyone anywhere in the world, including U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, and to throw them in a deep, dark hole, with no access to courts, lawyers, any semblance of due process. From there, the victims of this government kidnapping could, the administration asserted, be tortured, shipped off to foreign soil to be tortured, tried in secret kangaroo courts with secret evidence and predetermined outcomes and even murdered in secret. Or, they could just be left down in that deep, dark hole to rot. Forever. Behind closed doors, the administration claimed the "authority" to read our emails, listen in on our phone conversations, dig through our financial records. They openly used "signing statements" to assert that they were immune from literally hundreds of laws passed by the legitimately elected government. Obsessed with secrecy, they made getting any significant information from the government almost impossible while carrying out a program of "cleansing" the key agencies of that same government of elements considered insufficiently "loyal" to Bush. They lied the U.S. into undertaking an imperial project in Iraq that has cost thousands of lives, billions in treasure and resulted in a quagmire from which the U.S. hasn't yet managed to extricate itself and had every intention of doing the same thing in Iran. And that's just for starters.

Bush was certainly no fascist but it's very difficult to look at everything he did and justify too vigorously wagging one's finger at someone who says he detected in that the whif of fascism. Certainly, the historical precedents for what Bush did are to be found primarily in squalid dictatorships.

And what about the larger American right? While Bush was building an embryonic tyranny of monstrous proportions, the conservatives practically worshiped him. Among conservative Republicans, he was probably both the most popular president and the most consistently popular one in the history of polling. As Bush was leaving office in Jan. 2009, his poll numbers among the general public in ruins, the ABC/Washington Post poll asked respondents to offer an overall rating of his administration: A whopping 82% of conservative Republicans rated him a success; 53% "strongly."

There is a strong protofascist current among what passes for conservatives today. The extreme anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-"different" sentiment is a part of it. A recurring example that never ceases to dismay is how even mainstream conservative figures now makes it a matter of furious controversy every time the Obama administration arrests someone as a suspect in a terrorism-related crime rather than simply kidnapping and torturing the fellow without regard for U.S. law or the Constitution. This represents an even closer step toward fascism than Bush encouraged, as his administration boasted of trying hundreds of terror suspects in legitimate courts, without any objection from the larger right. The Republican leader in the Senate describes his parties' primary goal as gaining power. They have the seemingly bottomless support of the money elite. A lot of what "Down With Tyranny" cites today could, indeed, be used to fill out this train of thought.

These are trends that are profoundly disturbing, particularly given the fact that the Obama administration chose to give the Bush gang a pass--no prosecutions or even investigations and, worse, much of what Bush did has either been allowed, by the Obama, to pass into precedent or has been actively defended by the current administration. This leaves in place the lawless governing monster Bush built, still there to be used by whomever may come along, while, at the same time, the Republicans, whatever they are or may become, are, in this theoretical two-party state, always the default beneficiaries of frustration with the majority party.

It may be that DWT's comments today skirt the boundary of appropriate with regard to the use of Nazi parallels. Such parallels are, practically speaking, generally quite unhelpful. He clearly thinks the barbarians are at the gates. It may be that his major error in this is in failing to realize how much progress they've already made.

--classicliberal2