A man without honor

"He's a graduate student at one of America's most prestigeous business schools.

He is the leader of his class basketball team.

Without provocation, he hits the leader of the opposing team in the jaw to stop him from making a shot. A few minutes later, he blocks another shot by the same man by smashing his legs on a jump shot.

Years later after both had become successful businessmen, the fellow who'd been struck twice was still wondering what the hell all that had been about. One day he happened to run into the man's brother, now the governor of a state. Could he explain it?

Well, yes. You see, in Texas there are people who get satisfaction from being hard. This was an example of Texas hardness.

This explains a lot, I think."

Source: Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine.

John Dean: Triumph of the Authoritarians

truthout.org

"Contemporary conservatism and its influence on the Republican Party was, until recently, a mystery to me. The practitioners' bludgeoning style of politics, their self-serving manipulation of the political processes, and their policies that focus narrowly on perceived self-interest - none of this struck me as based on anything related to traditional conservatism. Rather, truth be told, today's so-called conservatives are quite radical.

For more than 40 years I have considered myself a "Goldwater conservative," and am thoroughly familiar with the movement's canon. But I can find nothing conservative about the Bush/Cheney White House, which has created a Nixon "imperial presidency" on steroids, while acting as if being tutored by the best and brightest of the Cosa Nostra.

What true conservative calls for packing the courts to politicize the federal judiciary to the degree that it is now possible to determine the outcome of cases by looking at the prior politics of judges? Where is the conservative precedent for the monocratic leadership style that conservative Republicans imposed on the US House when they took control in 1994, a style that seeks primarily to perfect fund-raising skills while outsourcing the writing of legislation to special interests and freezing Democrats out of the legislative process?

How can those who claim themselves conservatives seek to destroy the deliberative nature of the US Senate by eliminating its extended-debate tradition, which has been the institution's distinctive contribution to our democracy? Yet that is precisely what Republican Senate leaders want to do by eliminating the filibuster when dealing with executive business (namely judicial appointments).

Today's Republican policies are antithetical to bedrock conservative fundamentals. There is nothing conservative about preemptive wars or disregarding international law by condoning torture. Abandoning fiscal responsibility is now standard operating procedure. Bible-thumping, finger-pointing, tongue-lashing attacks on homosexuals are not found in Russell Krik's classic conservative canons, nor in James Burham's guides to conservative governing. Conservatives in the tradition of former senator Barry Goldwater and President Ronald Reagan believed in "conserving" this planet, not relaxing environmental laws to make life easier for big business. And neither man would have considered employing Christian evangelical criteria in federal programs, ranging from restricting stem cell research to fighting AIDs through abstinence.

Candid and knowledgeable Republicans on the far right concede - usually only when not speaking for attribution - that they are not truly conservative. They do not like to talk about why they behave as they do, or even to reflect on it. Nonetheless, their leaders admit they like being in charge, and their followers grant they find comfort in strong leaders who make them feel safe. This is what I gleaned from discussions with countless conservative leaders and followers, over a decade of questioning.

I started my inquiry in the mid-1990s, after a series of conversations with Goldwater, whom I had known for more than 40 years. Goldwater was also mystified (when not miffed) by the direction of today's professed conservatives - their growing incivility, pugnacious attitudes, and arrogant and antagonistic style, along with a narrow outlook intolerant of those who challenge their thinking. He worried that the Republican Party had sold its soul to Christian fundamentalists, whose divisive social values would polarize the nation. From those conversations, Goldwater and I planned to study why these people behave as they do, and to author a book laying out what we found. Sadly, the senator's declining health soon precluded his continuing on the project, so I put it on the shelf. But I kept digging until I found some answers, and here are my thoughts.

For almost half a century, social scientists have been exploring authoritarianism. We do not typically associate authoritarianism with our democracy, but as I discovered while examining decades of empirical research, we ignore some findings at our risk. Unfortunately, the social scientists who have studied these issues report their findings in monographs and professional journals written for their peers, not for general readers. With the help of a leading researcher and others, I waded into this massive body of work.

What I found provided a personal epiphany. Authoritarian conservatives are, as a researcher told me, "enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, antiequality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian and amoral." And that's not just his view. To the contrary, this is how these people have consistently described themselves when being anonymously tested, by the tens of thousands over the past several decades.

Authoritarianism's impact on contemporary conservatism is beyond question. Because this impact is still growing and has troubling (if not actually evil) implications, I hope that social scientists will begin to write about this issue for general readers. It is long past time to bring the telling results of their empirical work into the public square and to the attention of American voters. No less than the health of our democracy may depend on this being done. We need to stop thinking we are dealing with traditional conservatives on the modern stage, and instead recognize that they've often been supplanted by authoritarians."

Gone native

The DNC (Democratic National Committee) developed a bad name with the progressive community over the last couple of decades. Instead of being the representative of the Democratic electorate as a whole, it became a single issue lobby group dedicated to one issue and one issue only: getting Democratic DC-insiders re-elected in spite of the will of the Democratic voters in the reps respective states. We're seeing this played out with the DSCC in Connecticut.

I saw a little of the politiking that went on here in Maryland to keep Howard Dean from being elected chairman of the DNC. You see it now when the heads of the DSCC and the DCCC snipe at him for not pouring cash into their efforts to re-elect the insiders.

The DNC under Dean's leadership is funding a broad-based policy that is Populist by it's very nature and antithetical to the interests of the entrenched Democratic powers who have gone native and who just can't bring themselves to needs and desires of the Great Unwashed Masses.

Steve Gilliard makes a good point in his post The Single Issue Trap...

"In this world, the NAACP is just one more interest group, along with the rest. Real issues of social justice become second place to consumerism and political game playing. Which is why the Green Party went from weak to irrelevant. Instead of developing as an adjunct to the Democratic Party, it wound up riven with factional disputes. Why? Because every idea is valid. Everyone has a voice and leadership is a debate. Which is fine in ordering pizza, but politcs is supposed to create leaders, not serve as a personal temper tantrum.

So I am constantly amazed that people expect NARAL and Planned Parenthood to see a bigger picture. Why should they? They have been trained to be single issue advocates. And those kinds of organizations are dedicated to schmoozing in DC and hiring Hill Rats. It is rarely about what the local members want or a larger picture..."

We need to throw these single issue organizations off the island and start supporting a broad-based organization that is better prepared to do the work needed to, say, protect reproductive rights, environment, etc. One that won't sell out by supporting Republicans (and Corporate Dems) who pay lip-service to these ideals while making sure bills that undermine these causes slip through Congress like greased pigs.

The next time NARAL calls and asks for a donation (and I have donated to them before), I'm telling them I'm giving my money to an organization that has a better chance of protecting woman's reproductive rights.

The DNC.

Alan Wolfe: Why Conservatives Can't Govern

Alternet

"Contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding. The end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government.

"Ideas," a distinguished conservative named Richard Weaver once wrote, "have consequences." Americans have learned something about the consequences of conservative ideas during the Bush years that they never had to confront in the more amiable Reagan period. As a way of governing, conservatism is another name for disaster. And the disasters will continue, year after year, as long as conservatives, whose political tactics are frequently as brilliant as their policy-making is inept, find ways to perpetuate their power...

If government is necessary, bad government, at least for conservatives, is inevitable, and conservatives have been exceptionally good at showing just how bad it can be. Hence the truth revealed by the Bush years: Bad government -- indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and unfair government -- is the only kind of conservative government there is. Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.

Three examples -- FEMA, Medicare, and Iraq -- should be sufficient to make this point. Because liberals have historically welcomed government while conservatives have resisted it, it should come as no surprise that the Federal Emergency Management Agency worked so well under Bill Clinton and so poorly under Bush I and II. True to a long tradition of disinterested public management, Clinton, in the wake of Hurricane Andrew, appointed James Lee Witt to head FEMA. Witt refocused FEMA away from civil-defense efforts to increasingly predictable national disasters, fought for greater federal funding, achieved cabinet status for his agency, and worked closely with state and local officials. For all the efforts by Republicans to attack their enemies, no one has ever put a dent in Witt's reputation. Government under him was as good as government gets.

Upon assuming office, George W. Bush turned to former Texas campaign aide Joe Allbaugh to run FEMA and then shifted it into the new Department of Homeland Security (whose creation he had opposed). Allbaugh, and his hand-picked successor Michael Brown, like so many Bush appointees, were afflicted with what we might call "learned incompetence." They did not fail merely out of ignorance and inexperience. Their ineptness, rather, was active rather than passive, the end result of a deliberate determination to prove that the federal government simply should not be in the business of disaster management..."

Why all the Joe-nertia bashing?

Why pick on Joe, who's "voting record" isn't "all that bad"? Well, for one thing, the percentages of voting with the Democratic caucus mask and important point: just because he may vote with the caucus more than 70% of the time doesn't negate the considerable damage he does when he votes with the Republicans. The vast majority of those "Democratic" votes may be for inconsequential items.

The most important point, I think, is that NO DEMOCRAT SHOULD BE IMMUNE FROM PROVING HIM/HERSELF IN A PRIMARY. It sucks the life out of our momentum as a Party when the Washington insiders pre-select a candidate whom THEY want filling a House or Senate seat. Their ability to achieve this is probably at an end but they're going to go down kicking and screaming before they realize it.

Joe Lieberman, by planning to go independent if he doesn't win the primary is, in effect, putting a gun to the Party leaders saying in effect, "make sure I get the seat (against the wishes of Connecticut Dems) or I will disrupt the campaign in CT and keep Dems from the House."

Stand-up guy, that Joe. Time to get rid of him.

A Party of One

Update below

Well the first shoe has dropped. Joe-nertia held a press conference at 1 p.m. today essentially announcing that those nasty, mean Connecticut Democratic voters aren't showing the proper obeisance and fealty to his candidacy and person.

Boston Globe

U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman, facing a stronger-than-expected Democratic primary challenge and sagging poll numbers because of his support of the Iraq war, said Monday he'll collect signatures to run as an unaffiliated candidate if he loses next month's primary.

Joe likes to pass himself off as a man of integrity and honor, but when it all really comes down to the wire, the only allegiances Joe has is to himself. He has had the support of the Democratic party in every election since first winning office 18 years ago. One of the hallmarks of running for office is LOYALTY. You are loyal to the people who supported your candidacy, you're loyal to the voters who put a checkmark next to your name on the ballot, and you are loyal to the Party apparatus that pounds the streets getting out the vote for you every election.

But in every primary election you have to face the voters of your own party and justify their support in your re-election. And this year, Joe's finding it extremely difficult overcoming his unwavering support for the man and party who stole the election from him, his Party's leader, Al Gore, and the Democratic Party. Time after time, when called upon to stand by the Democrats he stabbed them in the back. He's the darling of the radical right, the darling of the right-wing media (the go-to guy when Fox needs a Democrat to criticize his own party) and George Bush's FAVORITE DEMOCRAT.

So, as it becomes clear that Joe just might lose the primary and his seat in the Senate, he makes it clear where his loyalties lie. Lieberman will run as an independent if he loses the primary as is likely. At that point, the national party and the Connecticut state party should put the hammer down and do whatever it takes to put Ned Lamont in office and throw Joe off of the island.

Joe's about to declare war on the Democratic Party and it's time we make him pay for that judgement.

Update: Lieberman - "I have loyalties that are greater than those to my party."