Torture Nation
Sometimes it seems that every day brings new proof that America is no longer a nation of ideals, no longer deserving of the historically heroic stature we've always awarded ourselves. It's always easy simply to blame the Bush administration, and liberals (and not just liberals) have availed themselves of that expedient. But really, it's not them; it's us. It's Democratic officials who have allowed the administration to run roughshod over our laws and traditions, and Democratic voters who have enabled them to do so.

We are about to have a second consecutive Attorney General, in theory the nation's foremost upholder and enforcer of the rule of law, who condones torture. Once is an accident--in the case of Alberto Gonzalez a historical abortion, in fact--but twice is a trend. Michael Mukasey's nomination will be successful because two prominent Democratic Senators from the two most influential liberal states, Chuck Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California, will vote to confirm him. Feinstein has long been a sort of pre-2006 Joe Lieberman with pearls, a pro-corporate, pro-war pseudo-Democrat at the front of the line when there's a principle to be tossed aside. Schumer's decision wounds me more, in part because he's my Senator (the one I've voted for, in fact), in part because he's a political genius, and in part because on other issues--includes ones I've worked on personally--he's terrific. But on this one, he rolled. He put his own credibility--it was Schumer who supported Mukasey in the first place--ahead of a foundational moral principle. If that doesn't indicate a lack of integrity, I can't imagine what does.

It is all but official that torture is now the legally sanctioned policy of the United States. I quote Andrew Sullivan (whose blog I've added to the links on this page):

Even though waterboarding has always been regarded as torture and is illegal under any meaningful understanding of English; even though the United States prosecuted Nazis as war criminals for performing exactly the same torture techniques now authorized by the United States under the rubric of "enhanced interrogation"; even though the United States has court-martialed soldiers for doing what the president has authorized; unless the specific techniques are entered explicitly into the law, according to Lowry, the Geneva Conventions and settled law don't apply. And so any vote for Mukasey will now be interpreted by torture advocates like Lowry and Bush administration officials as legal support for torture. Here's [National Review editor Rich] Lowry's proof:

If waterboarding is torture, whoever has authorized and conducted this training should -- as a strict matter of the law -- be vulnerable to war-crimes prosecutions... If the Senate disagrees [with allowing the president to waterboard prisoners], it should put itself clearly on record forbidding waterboarding. Otherwise, it should confirm Mukasey as the careful legal mind he has shown himself to be throughout his career and during this controversy.

See? This is how they keep pumping the poison of torture into the American constitution. And so a new precedent will be set; and the torture program, already well-established, will further entrench itself into US law and practices. The current law is not in any way mysterious. Schumer's promise that the Congress will now pass a law specifically banning verschaerfte Vernehmung, to use the Gestapo's name for the Bush-Cheney techniques, is insufficient. It presupposes that the torture techniques described are not already illegal, thus retroactively exonerating all those who authorized them.
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Many seem to think that because these techniques are only used on terrorists, they are no threat to American liberty. What this complacent view doesn't grapple with is that these torture techniques can be used against any terror suspect; that such suspects are not subject to due process under president Bush's understanding of his powers; that such suspects can be captured within the United States; that they can be citizens; and that the war that justifies this extraordinary power is defined as permanent. That is why combining the power to detain without charge with the power to torture is an effective suspension of the rule of law and the Constitution. And such a suspension is astonishingly broad and open-ended.

That is why this has become a fight for the West's values against the moral relativists, legalistic parsers, and advocates of total executive power. The point is not a subjective judgment about the intentions of the torturers. It is not about whether Cheney and Bush can be trusted. It is about whether any individual can be trusted with such power. In a republic based on the rule of law, the intentions of the torturers - whether good or bad - are utterly irrelevant. In the West, we assume that the intentions of our rulers are likely to be evil. That's what distinguishes the Anglo-American tradition from those who trust individuals to govern them, rather than those who trust the law to allow us to govern ourselves. The point is that no person in the United States should ever have the power to detain and torture another person without due process. Once you make an exception for one man, the rule of law is over. The Decider may decide out of his own benevolence not to torture again. But he can still torture. And the knowledge that he can, and the knowledge that he was never stopped, and the knowledge that he was able to distort the plain meaning of the law to mean whatever he wants it to mean is a precedent that is staggeringly dangerous.

Emphases mine. With these standards in place, the entire frame of our politics changes. We are no longer a nation of laws; we are no longer a people of principle. Our political structure is teetering between a devalued but still somewhat functional democracy, still ruled in part by the legacy of the rule of law, and what I would call laissez-faire or just-in-time authoritarianism: it's all but certain that I (or Sullivan, or Markos Moulitsas, or Greg, or anyone) won't be detained and tortured for writing this post or anything else on my absolutely insignificant little blog, but I could be, and if the cost/benefit calculus were sufficiently different, I probably would be. All we're fighting for now is the preservation of the remaining Constitutional tools and governance traditions, and the chance to one day reassert them as the legal and moral basis of our society.

Hating When I'm Right
When Hillary Clinton entered the presidential race last January, I wrote the following:

[T]he advantages of money and organization are probably largest in the first stretch of the nomination race. With seven or eight candidates in the field, she can win pluralities in the high 20s and low 30s; as the field thins, those dropping out will be under pressure to endorse the likely winner, and eventually it could and probably will come down to Hillary versus Not-HIllary. At that point, a ton of institutional weight falls upon Not-Hillary: stop resisting the inevitable, stop doing the Republicans' oppo work for them, stop squandering resources we'll need for November. Unless she's been bloodied by then, Not-Hillary won't win that duel.

In the last couple months, Sen. Clinton has taken the lead in all the early primary states and increasingly projected the aura of "inevitability" that had been speculated about since she entered the race. Last night's Democratic debate, in Philadelphia, was more interesting than most of them have been, and exposed a number of her weaknesses as a candidate--but almost certainly did nothing to change the basic dynamic of the race. The storyline--and in these things, considering they're always more read about than watched, the storyline is always crucial--was that Sen. Clinton's opponents were approaching now-or-never time to cut into her lead and would come out swinging. They did, and scored some points on her Iran war-enabling, penchant for secrecy, and general proclivity to triangulate. But nothing ultimately happen to make me doubt that she'll be the nominee, or that the general election will proceed as I thought it would nine months ago--as close, and bitterly fought, as it will be free of substance, ultimately doing little either to roll back the damage of the Bush years or to address the major crises we will soon face.

It's too bad, because if everyone who will vote this winter had watched the debate, they would have seen Sen. Clinton revealed as the moderate Republican she essentially is.

• Has a foreign policy bias in favor of confrontation and war? Check.



• Ardently courts special interests? Check.



• Pulls the Thomas Frank Two-Step of rhetorical bait (attacking Bush in every statement) and switch (closely resembling Bush on war, executive power, secrecy and fuzzy answers)? Check.

Barack Obama remarked that the Republican contenders talk about Sen. Clinton because “it’s a fight they’re comfortable with.” While this is accurate, it leaves out two points. One (and Sen. Dodd obliquely got at this) is that the Republicans talk her up because to their primary voters doing so is like waving the red cape before the bull; they hate her, and hate--for her, and for us, and on some abstract level for Muslims/terrorists/foreigners/gays/whatever--is what motivates the modern Right. Two is that not only are the Republicans supremely comfortable running against her, the press is as or more comfortable pushing her forward. This is true both at the newsroom and boardroom level: the first group knows how to cover her, and the second know she won’t screw with them.

I’ve heard it said that Hillary Clinton appeals to the low-information voter. While there’s probably a touch of snobbishness in this sentiment, there’s also definitely more than a little truth. Those who see no need to go beyond the generalities and platitudes she spouts, who find it thrilling to see another Clinton (hard to imagine) or the first woman (a lot easier to picture, though I still have trouble understanding how the wife of a former president becoming president represents a true advance for feminism), are satisfied. Those of us less willing to go on faith and less trusting in the good judgment of people who've made catastrophically bad calls again and again, not so much.

It’s not a coincidence that her spokeszombies intone “strength and experience” in every prepared statement, or that she used the phrase last night, or that she twice gave a canned line about "not balancing Social Security on the backs of the elderly." The Clintonistas think the public only absorbs sound bites and simple arguments. They might well be correct, but this strikes me as a case of pandering to the lowest common denominator and then hoping the rest of us on the left side of the spectrum “fall in line” against the Republican adversary–-rather than trying to raise the level of our national conversation, which strikes me as a key element in leadership.

Fan Democracy?
As my hopes dim for public life in America, at least for the 2008 election cycle, I'm starting to think about power in other avenues. Maybe it's inspired by The Power Broker, the classic critical biography of Robert Moses, which I'm about 430 pages into; Moses began his long public career as an idealist, a man admirable in every way, but soon embraced dark means to achieve worthy ends, and later the means justified themselves as he became a sort of J. Edgar Hoover of public works. The author, Robert Caro, condemns Moses' sins and transgressions, but the point to me is how this man in the second stage of his career--when he'd abandoned procedural idealism but was still acting for goals any person of good faith would support--educated himself as to the tools of power and their uses.

I'm not really thinking about parks and bridges and roadways, though; I'm thinking about baseball, as usual.

The emergence of the internet hasn't revolutionalized baseball, but it's certainly revolutionized fandom. I remember in April 1993, as a sophomore in college, receiving an e-mail about a new listserv (I didn't know what that word meant) devoted to the Philadelphia Phillies, inviting me to join. For the next eight years or so, this was the primary vehicle of my fandom; with no internet at that point, I had the listserv and the AP wire, which featured game stories and was accessible through the university network, to keep me informed. (It's amazing to me now that I used to routinely go to sleep not knowing whether the Phils had won or lost; this happened, I think, exactly once in the 2007 season, the September game at St. Louis when Rod Barajas came off the bench to get the game-winning hit in the 13th inning. I'd pooped out around the 10th, after driving all day from a conference in upstate NY and maybe four hours' sleep the night before.) Over that period, the listserv evolved from fanboy basics to a fairly sophisticated news relay service, publishing (probably illegally) the game stories and other pieces from the Philly papers, trade rumors, and for awhile the contributions of Phils ace Curt Schilling. (Sideline: there's a terrific piece about Schilling, who's always been both huckster and hero, on the NYT site today.)

As the internet emerged and grew and added functionality, the listserv started to feel needlessly constraining, and when I became aware of Philliesphans in late 2002 I switched my time and mindshare there. During the next four years I made over 10,000 posts there--I'm not particularly proud of this, especially considering that a good chunk of that was squandered on idiotic political fights, with idiots--and a bit more than halfway through that time, I started The Good Phight with a few friends from that community. In December of '06 BackSheGoes emerged from a schism within Philliesphans, and I joined that community as a moderator. (The host/founder was one of the right-wingers I'd argued with on the former site, and reactionary politics notwithstanding he turned out to be a pretty good guy, so that at least represented some value from my time.) It's been a great not-quite year over there, and we've integrated it with TGP to the extent practically feasible.

The point of all this isn't to recap how much time I've wasted on online fandom, but that these evolving forums (fora?) represent a formalizing of community that was well-nigh impossible twenty years ago, and difficult ten years ago. Through the early '90s, the fans you knew were family and friends, and those you were aware of were the other 20-40,000 people in the park, people who called into the sports radio shows, and so on. You couldn't really coordinate anything with them, and you couldn't plausibly claim to have a particularly informed opinion because the data--the statistics, the game records, video, et cetera--weren't readily available to anyone but the insiders. None of this is true anymore. One of the primary functions of The Good Phight is to debunk the moronic "conventional wisdom" frequently espoused by the Phillies and and their guild of stenographers in the Philly media. And on both that site and BackSheGoes, we argue every day about possible courses of action for the team as well as what they actually do.

This is all a lot of fun, of course, but it hasn't meant anything--at least not yet. There are no real-world consequences to our theoretical power gain by virtue of having the data to form independent conclusions and coordinate with potentially many thousands of other fans. At times over the last two years (most prominently right after the Abreu trade/heist of 2006), a few of us have raised the quixotic notion of trying to force the sale of the team. But a few hundred signatures on an internet petition is unlikely even to register public notice, and to my knowledge the next canceled season ticket plan from this mini-movement will be the first.

The specific issue on which I'd like to test this nascent fan power is the possible elevation of assistant general manager Ruben Amaro Jr. to the GM chair, probably after the 2008 season. Amaro is universally considered the heir apparent, and many of us believe the only reason he didn't get the job after Ed Wade's firing at the end of the 2005 season is that the PR-conscious Phillies knew there would be outraged reaction. With the division title this year, they have some credibility to make an in-house replacement when current GM Pat Gillick retires... but Amaro seems no more qualified for the job now than he was then.

Amaro is a second-generation Phillie, a former bat boy for the 1980 world champs and a (lousy) bench player for the club during the '90s. He has a degree from Stanford University, and he would in some sense fulfill the mandate for greater diversity in front offices announced (but rarely followed up upon) by the Commissioner's office. But unlike Gillick, fellow AGM Mike Arbuckle, or even newly hired top scout Chuck Lamar, Amaro has no tangible organizational accomplishments he can tout. HIs current responsibilities include "negotiating contracts and handling medical issues"; I would characterize the team's work in those two areas as, respectively, a mild plus and a big minus. The Brett Myers deal last off-season was okay, the Chase Utley deal looks pretty good. On the other hand, it doesn't feel like the Ryan Howard situation was handled well, though that tale will be told in earnest this winter with Howard eligible for arbitration. The "medical issues," though, is tough to see as anything but a complete meltdown: in short, the Phillies traded for Freddy Garcia and his shredded arm without getting assurances, and they didn't sign Joe Borowski who went on to save 40 games for Cleveland (albeit with a high ERA and mediocre secondary numbers--but he still would have been no worse than the second-best full-year reliever on the roster).

More worrisome is that I've heard, second-hand but from multiple sources, that Amaro's both an asshole and a fool. He's reputed to be entirely dismissive of performance analysis; even Gillick, the epitome of old school, has expressed an appreciation for statistical metrics. The potential for a GM who's invincible in his arrogance to get fleeced in trade is almost incalculable. It's always worth repeating that "Moneyball," the best written account of the performance analysis revolution, isn't about "stats" per se but rather finding and exploiting irrational valuations in the market of baseball talent. If this characterization is correct, Amaro is a walking irrationality--and thus ripe for exploitation.

I don't know what's to be done here, but at least a little more scrutiny as to the succession for Phils GM, and laying the groundwork for fan reaction if our worst fears are realized, seem like possibly attainable outcomes.

As If I Wasn't Bummed Enough Already
By way of Andrew Sullivan's blog, which I'm coming to like more and more, here's an article from the libertarian Reason Foundation--a group that tends to lean right, but has had no love for the Bushes and neocons--that makes all the points I've been trying to articulate about Hillary Clinton's yen to perpetuate the Imperial Presidency:

[W]hen you strip away the partisan coating, Mrs. Clinton's grandiose, big-government vision is really no different than that envisioned by the neoconservatives so loathed by the left. Clinton, remember, not only voted for the Iraq war, she still hasn't conceded she was wrong to do so, and has made no promise to end it any time soon.
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Hillary Clinton voted for both the Patriot Act and its reauthorization. She voted for building a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. She voted to loosen restrictions limiting the federal government's ability to wiretap cell phones. In the past, she has supported a robust role for the federal government in enforcing "decency" standards in television and music. She teamed up with former Sen. Rick Santorum on a bill calling for the federal government to restrict the sale of violent video games.
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What about secrecy and executive power? It's difficult to see Hillary Clinton voluntarily handing back all of those extra-constitutional executive powers claimed by President Bush. Her husband's administration, for example, copiously invoked dubious "executive privilege" claims to keep from complying with congressional subpoenas and open records requests—claims the left now (correctly, in my view) regularly criticizes the Bush administration for invoking.

Hillary Clinton herself went to court to keep meetings of her Health Care Task Force secret from the public, something conservatives were quick to point out when leftists criticize Vice President Cheney's similar efforts to keep meetings of his Energy Task Force secret.
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That jibes with a February 2007 New York Times article on Clinton explaining her refusal to back down from her vote for the Iraq war: "Mrs. Clinton's belief in executive power and authority is another factor weighing against an apology, advisers said... she believes that a president usually deserves the benefit of the doubt from Congress on matters of executive authority."
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[A]n increasingly imperial presidency isn't good for our republic.

Neither is our overly interventionist foreign policy, or the continuing erosion of our civil liberties, be it in the name of "family values," government paternalism, the war on drugs, or the war on terror.

Activists on the left... should also realize that even if they succeed in electing Hillary Clinton to the White House, it's likely that the only real resulting change in Washington will be that come 2009, we'll merely have a Democrat pursuing the same misguided policies.

Much like the point I made earlier about how "spite voting" on the left could propel the Democrat uninformed Republicans hate the most into the White House, the author cites "the temptation on the left to want to stick it to their political opponents by putting their worst nightmare in the White House." But this won't mean a whole lot two years from now, when Madame President Clinton screws over the unions with another awful trade bill, orders air strikes against whoever the dark-skinned villain of that moment might be, and further seals the archives of all previous Bush and Clinton administrations. At that point, millions of Democrats are going to smack their foreheads, ask themselves what the fuck they were thinking, and find themselves forced to choose between defending a president they deplore and disagree with, and letting the same people they'd tried to spite by putting her into power run rampant in national politics.

We're Done with Democracy
The big political news of the weekend is coming out of the Values Voters Summit, a gathering of far-right Christianist groups to which all the Republican candidates have made pilgrimmage to pander. The utterly shameless Mitt Romney and Rabid Rudy Giuliani have taken shots at each other, and TV's Fred Thompson evidently seemed even less interested than usual; remember, TV's Fred's only in the race because his hot harpy right-wing wife really wants to be First Lady. I think it's probably about 50-50 that the marriage ends within a year of his campaign ending, and that's absolutely no more than four months off. Oddly, I sort of admire Thompson's refusal, whether from sloth or principle, to deliver the Hate in a cause he's not really feeling. Gail Collins nicely captures the rage-addled essence of these "Christians" in her op-ed column today.

This is a miserably depressing time for American politics. The large minority of the electorate represented, to a greater or lesser extent, by the people at the "Summit" live in a self-defined world where any resemblence to objective reality is purely coincidental--a world in which Iraq was a heroic (and successful!) undertaking, all taxes are confiscatory gambits of a malevolent polity determined to enrich non-white welfare recipients and leftist libertines at the expense of God-fearing families, and the only thing to fault George W. Bush for is not pushing hard enough to amend the Constitution to discriminate against homosexuals. Meanwhile, a plurality of the majority that rejects this insane worldview seems set to empower a woman who seems to have no guiding principle except power and shares most or all of the core assumptions that have informed the Bush administration these last seven disastrous years. Her election will do nothing but ensure that the awful politics of the last sixteen years--characterized by zero-sum partisan fights over generally small matters, viciously personal and blind to the larger issues--continues for at least another four.

Actually, I suspect Hillary Clinton will unite the country much as Bush has--in rejection of her governance--but to an even greater extent: while the 30 percent or so who still support the Deciderer have proven themselves far more loyal to ideology than empirical input, categorical Clinton supporters will prove to be far fewer in number. It's almost impossible to be ideologically bound to someone who has no ideology. She similarly won't be able to count on a cult of personality following, because she also has, or at least shows, no personality. The liberals who find her tolerable or even likable now will have defected inside two years; they'll cheer Russ Feingold in his noble and doomed attempt to primary her in 2012, and a lot of them will sit at home or vote third-party when Jeb Bush wrests away the Crown and Scepter that November.

I've spent a lot of the last two months or so reading books by a novelist named Steve Erickson. He's probably best characterized as a post-modernist in the style of Don Delillo, though he adds obsessions with sex and pop culture to Delillo's mix of time, historical pivot points and official and personal violence. Erickson also shares Delillo's ongoing fascination with the meaning of America, and for about fifteen years from the early '90s to 2004 he popped up from time to time as a commentator on the intersection of politics and culture. One piece he wrote that strikes me as especially resonant appeared in early 1995, shortly after the Gingrich takeover of Congress. It's evidently gone from the interwebs now, but here's the key bit:

History is clear that democracy cannot long navigate a sea of national rage. Untempered by rationale and open-mindedness, fury eventually consumes democracy rather than nourishes it, because it overwhelms our tolerance, our willingness to be reasonably informed, our determination to hold ourselves accountable for what we decide. Most important, it overwhelms our basic faith in democracy itself and our belief in the individual freedoms that are inviolate to the power of the majority, identified by the Declaration of Independence as endowed by God and codified in the first 10 amendments to the Constitution. We display less and less patience with what we previously held to be inalienable, less and less patience with democracy’s inherent messiness and inefficiency and the morass of conflicting interests that are read in democracy’s results. We display less patience, in other words, with other Americans.

A deep freeze has settled in the American soul. The nation gets meaner and more petty until rage is the only national passion left -- and then it is anger not at those on top, which is the anger America was born of, but at those on the bottom. ... This myth, that the process has grown helplessly out of touch with what we really want and feel and need, is the opposite of the truth. The truth is that we are the problem with America. The process and politicians, the lobbyists and “special” interests -- by which we mean any interest that doesn’t penterain to us -- have reflected us all too perfectly; and we hate them for it.

From dismal campaign to dismal campaign, we demand “change” and then give every indication of wanting nothing of the sort and of not having the slightest idea what we ever meant by it in the first place. Confronted with change that is truly profound or revolutionary, which is to say unavoidably painful and disorienting, we scurry back to the status quo that so infuriated us to begin with, and that not so long ago we claimed was unacceptable.

I've maintained for years that rage is the biggest, arguably the only, motivator for those on the right. The unhinged hatred of "liberals" on display every time a Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter or Dick Cheney or Clarence Thomas gets in front of a camera isn't extraordinary; it's reflected in the filler speech some right-wing functionary is probably giving right now at the "Values Voter Summit." One major difference I perceive between the left--at least, this particular left-leaning guy--and the right is that I wish they'd just go away, while they seem to wish me dead and burning forever in a Hell I don't believe exists.

"Spite voting" is the reason why so many millions of people who didn't particularly like George W. Bush in 2004, and certainly didn't think he was doing a very good job, voted for him anyway: to stick it to John Kerry, and to stick it to you and me.

This is America, not Denmark. In this country, tens of millions of people choose to watch FoxNews not simply because Americans are credulous idiots or at the behest of some right-wing corporate cabal, but because average Americans respect viciousness. They are attracted to viciousness for a lot of reasons. In part, it reminds them of their bosses, whom they secretly adore. Americans hate themselves for the way they behave in public, always smiling and nodding their heads with accompanying really?s and uh-huhs to show that they're listening to the other person, never having the guts to say what they really feel. So they vicariously scream and bully others into submission through right-wing surrogate-brutes. Spending time watching Sean Hannity is enough for your average American white male to feel less cowardly than he really is.

The left won't accept this awful truth about the American soul, a beast that they believe they can fix "if only the people knew the Truth."

But what if the Truth is that Americans don't want to know the Truth? What if Americans consciously choose lies over truth when given the chance—and not even very interesting lies, but rather the blandest, dumbest and meanest lies? What if Americans are not a likeable people? The left's wires short-circuit when confronted with this terrible possibility; the right, on the other hand, warmly embraces Middle America's rank soul and exploits it to their full advantage. The Republicans know Americans better than the left. They know that it's not so much Goering's famous "bigger lie" that works here, but the dumber the lie, the more they want to hear it repeated.
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The reason is simple. The underlying major premise of humanist-leftist ideology states that people are intrinsically sympathetic. If people are defiantly mean and craven, the humanist-left structure falters. "Why the fuck should I bother fighting for Middle Americans," they ask, "if they're just as loathsome, in their own petty way, as their exploiters, with whom they actively collaborate?"

But we on the left are, increasingly, guilty of the same thing. For one thing, it hurts to be told, by the President and his Men (and women), that we aren't really Americans. Erickson shrewdly observes that this was probably the biggest reason why so many people became enthusiastic about Howard Dean in 2003-2004; he was the one Democrat of that time to stand up and scream (literally, alas) that, yes, we are Americans and we're damn well entitled to be treated as such. I admit that the only reason I could even consider voting for Hillary Clinton--hell, the only reason I voted for her in her first Senate campaign, the same year Bush stole the presidency--is to stick it right back to them. The mania of spite voting is real, and increasingly it's bipartisan.

There's probably a cultural/societal component to this as well. I also believe this is the Age of Selfish Pleasures, and that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The rise of mass media in the 20th century created a somewhat unified culture for the first time: suddenly, people in Iowa and New York and Alaska and Louisiana were listening to, then watching, the same things, and the differences between those places and the people who lived in them began to diminish. Then, as mass media diversified--a thousand cable channels, then uncountable millions of websites--the newly coherent whole fractured to a greater extent than ever before. We could make our own amusement, and those personalized entertainments are so engrossing that now many of us, certainly myself, couldn't tell you what the highest-rated TV shows even are. Suddenly people in New York, or Iowa, or Alaska, or Georgia, had as little or less in common with those a hundred yards away as with those a thousand miles away. If you don't feel community with those even within shouting distance, it's unlikely that you'll feel a national sense.

In the long run, it's not hard to see how this could be a good thing. It's probably not that hard to chart a path from self-entertainment to self-fulfillment, and anything that helps break down hierarchies of control--the sort of hierarchy in its full glory at the "Summit"--is ultimately good for democracy. But for now, we're far from that, and there seems little to be done except to surf the web, play some video games and hope something good is on TV or at the movies. The public sphere is a no-man's land.

Rockholm Syndrome
I'll admit it: I'm rooting for the Rockies now. And I've even been watching the NLCS, earlier comparisons to televised Boggle notwithstanding.

This doesn't really make sense on my part. First of all, they did beat the Phillies and there's some atavistic craving for sweet, sweet vengeance; if the Indians knock off Boston and win the AL pennant, I'm sure I'll be pulling for the Tribe in the World Series, because I generally root for them. (And, damn, Cleveland needs a little joy. That town is like Philadelphia, only without the history or cuisine, and with maybe a third of the culture.)

Second, the Rockies are God Squadders, starting with their top management, and there's nothing I deplore more in sports, other than maybe Terrell Owens, than the sanctimonious assertion that God Almighty has taken a rooting interest. GM Dan O'Dowd, who brought in Mike Hampton and Denny Neagle--failures on the field and, at least in Neagle's case, conspicuous sinners off it--might be doing nothing more than kissing up to his boss, a Tom DeLay/George W. Bush-type reformed party animal who's now evidently into judging others. Or he might be sincere. Either way, it's grating. (Considering that Colorado is also home to some of the most obnoxious would-be theocrats in the country, it's doubly annoying that they're presumably weighing down the Rockie bandwagon these days.)

To be fair, I haven't heard any Rockies players rubbing this in anyone's face during the last few weeks--and with wins in 20 of their last 21 games, standing a victory away from the World Series after coming within one strike of not even making the playoffs, it's sort of understandable to entertain the notion that God might be on your side.

All that aside, though, what this team has accomplished is staggering. Winning 20 of 21 games against any schedule is impressive enough; the Rockies, though, have notched the last 19 of those victories against teams with winning records. In no more than one or two of those games (I'd need to go back and figure out exactly when the Dodgers were eliminated--they might have been done before the end of their final series against Colorado) were they playing against teams out of the race: the last seven were either play-in or playoff games, of course. And most of them have been close: the streak-starting 13-0 win over Florida wasn't, and two of the Rockies' seven wins against LA were by five runs or more; they beat Arizona 11-1 on Sept. 29, and I guess you could argue that the 10-5 win over the Phillies in Game Two of the NLDS wasn't close (though Manny Corpas earned a save, so the tying run was on deck late). Otherwise, they've all been relatively tight games.

Like the Phillies, the Rockies won in the regular season mostly on the strength of an overpowering offense. In the playoffs, though, they've done it with arms. Other than the five runs the Phils scored in Game Two, Colorado hasn't allowed more than two runs in any of their six playoff wins. The Rockies bullpen has allowed two runs in 23 innings; that's almost unimaginable.

When the Phillies lost, I was a little embarrassed that they got swept, particularly that they dropped the first two games at home. Now I'm almost feeling good about their role--and the fact that they battled in all three games--in what could prove to be the greatest run in baseball history.

(Archival note: if Arizona wins 10-0 tonight, I reserve the right to delete this post.)

Taking Kansas National
I watched the first hour or so of the Republican presidential debate in Michigan the other day. It was fascinating, just as a window into how willfully and completely these guys have disconnected themselves from American life as people experience it on a day-to-day basis. Asked about the economy, and the evident disconnect between statistics that show prosperity (stock market gains, low inflation and unemployment rates) and the widespread perception that we're in or approaching a recession, the candidates mostly responded that the strong economy is, in Fred Thompson's words, "the greatest story never told."

The truth, as anyone paying attention can tell you, is that the current economy closely resembles the hypothetical of Bill Gates in a room with a hundred retail clerks: on average, that's a roomful of millionaires. As The Wall Street Journal reports, the gains of those at the top more than offset the declines for those in the middle and bottom--so we have both statistical prosperty and widespread stagnation or deterioration:

The richest Americans' share of national income has hit a postwar record, surpassing the highs reached in the 1990s bull market, and underlining the divergence of economic fortunes blamed for fueling anxiety among American workers.

The wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all income in 2005, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. That is up sharply from 19% in 2004, and surpasses the previous high of 20.8% set in 2000, at the peak of the previous bull market in stocks.

The bottom 50% earned 12.8% of all income, down from 13.4% in 2004 and a bit less than their 13% share in 2000.
...
The IRS data go back only to 1986, but academic research suggests the rich last had this high a share of total income in the 1920s.

Even without their other disadvantages--the Iraq War, the incompetence and dishonesty of the Bush administration, and the widespread perception of corruption--I honestly wonder how the Republicans expect to win next year when the party refuses even to acknowledge that most Americans are struggling to hold their ground, let alone get ahead. I suppose it has something to do with the core contention of modern conservatism that government can't do any good in matters other than war--so policy actions that might help improve families' circumstances but require some additional spending, like broadening college access or health coverage, are prima facie unacceptable.

Indeed, at the Michigan debate, which focused on economic issues, the presidential contenders talked not about addressing the problems of working families but the need to hold the line or force deeper cuts on "discretionary" spending (other than the military, of course) and "reform" non-discretionary programs like Social Security and Medicare so as to get the budget under control. That these programs are so popular that even Bush after his re-election and with Republican congressional majorities couldn't come close to "reforming" (read: undermining) them evidently didn't register.

I'm not the only person to note how weird this all is. The conservative David Brooks in today's New York Times warns his co-partisans that they're on the brink of losing this argument before it's even truly begun:

You’d think that [the Republicans would] start every election by putting themselves at the kitchen tables of middle-class families with ambitious kids. Their first questions would be: What are the barriers to their mobility? What concrete help do these people need to realize their dreams?

Yet at the Republican economic debate in Michigan this week, there was no talk of that. The candidates declared their fealty to general principles: free trade, lower taxes and reduced spending. They talked a lot about the line-item veto and the Chinese currency. But there was almost nothing that touched concretely on the lives of the ambitious working-class parents who are the backbone of the G.O.P.

Sometimes the candidates seemed more concerned with massaging the pleasure buttons of the Club for Growth than addressing the real concerns of the middle class. They talked far more about cutting corporate taxes, for example, than about a child tax credit for struggling families.
...
Instead this ground is being seized by a Democrat. Over the past few months, Hillary Clinton has issued a string of specific policy programs aimed directly at members of the aspiring middle class.

Yesterday, it was a tax credit for college. Earlier in the week, Clinton offered a plan to give families down the income scale access to 401(k)-style plans. Right now, 75 million workers have no employee-sponsored pension accounts. The way our tax code is structured, people up the income ladder get big tax incentives to save, while working people, who have the most trouble saving, get the smallest incentives.

Under the Clinton plan, if a family making up to $60,000 a year put $1,000 into a new 401(k) account, they would get a $1,000 matching tax credit. The plan would create millions of new investors. Struggling families could choose mutual fund options and participate in the capital markets. They’d be encouraged to move away from a month-to-month mentality to a saving-for-the-future mentality.

Clinton’s plan poaches on economic values that used to be associated with the Republican Party. Moreover, it undermines the populist worldview that is building on the left of her party. Instead of railing against globalization and the economic royalists, Clinton gives working people access to Wall Street and a way to profit from the global economy.

Brooks's column reminds me of the smartest policy piece I've ever read in a right-wing publication: "the Party of Sam's Club." Written about two years ago as the Bush administration was really starting to unravel, the authors shrewdly observed that the Republicans were losing touch with their own base: white middle-class and working-class families who were with them on social issues but starting to feel that the Republicans weren't addressing their domestic concerns. They urged the party leaders to flesh out and develop the Bush/Rove "big-government conservatism" that had been implied, if not promised, in 2000. Specific proposals included a child investment credit that's strikingly similar to what Hillary Clinton recently proposed (a very good idea, by the way); a variant on the universal individual mandate to purchase health care that Mitt Romney signed into law in Massachusetts (and has mostly disavowed on the campaign trail); and, most shockingly to me as I re-read it today, subsidizing low-wage work as part of a second phase of welfare reform.

If you've heard any of these ideas advanced by any Republican presidential candidate in this cycle, you've been paying much closer attention than I have. More likely, the problem is that the dominant interests in the Republican coalition couldn't give a rat's ass about any of this stuff: Brooks's jab at "the pleasure buttons of the Club for Growth" could have been written by most any Daily Kos poster. Maybe it's inevitable that when any group has unfettered access to power for as long as the Republican business interests have, they lose track of what it takes to retain that power in even a flawed and provisional democracy like ours.

In the absence of a viable domestic platform, maybe the Republicans plan to run another campaign on xenophobia, fear, and "social conservatism." Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas?" sets out how this has been their model for a couple decades now. But it will be tough in 2008, for a few reasons: first, because the domestic issues are increasingly insistent, second, because their leading candidate is anathema to the social conservatives, and third, while support remains high for fighting "terrorism," there seems to be a broad consensus that the Republicans haven't done this in a smart way, either.

Other than demonizing Hillary Clinton or whatever Democrat becomes the face of the party, I find it almost impossible to see how they plan to win next year.

The Madness of Boss George
The first round of the baseball playoffs is complete, with dismal results in all local precincts. The 2007 Phillies are no more, as are my wife's cherished Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. (Okay, she could generally care less about the Halos, but adores Mike Scioscia more than anyone really should.) The Cubs went down even more meekly than the Phils, setting up a National League Championship Series between Colorado and Arizona that promises to be about as compelling as televised Boggle. And, as of an hour or so ago, the New York Yankees were eliminated by the Cleveland Indians.

Short playoff series are the definition of "crapshoot," and the Tribe knocking off the Bombers was the only one I predicted correctly. (I really would have enjoyed that Cubs-Phillies NLCS... ) Cleveland's pitching was too good, and the Yankees' too suspect, for me to pick the local guys. But that the Yankees made it at all is fairly incredible. They mirrored the Phillies in many respects, coming back from a slow start--which lasted a full 50 games in their case--to reach the playoffs on the strength of a relentless and powerful offense. New York's pitching took as bad or worse a beating from injuries as the Phils'. And through it all, legendary manager Joe Torre kept his cool, never complained, supported his young GM Brian Cashman in not trading homegrown talent for veteran fixes... and led his club to a 73-39 record over their last 112 games, for a .651 winning percentage that's almost unfathomable in a baseball season of (I think) unprecedented parity. As his veteran arms faded, Torre and pitching coach Ron Guidry integrated a new cohort of Yankee pitchers that, always provided they stay healthy, seem all but certain to lead the team back to the title within a few years.

But if they do, it won't be Joe Torre who gets another championship ring. In a dick move reminiscent of what he did in the '70s and '80s to become arguably the most reviled sports owner since the O'Malleys took the Dodgers west, Big Stein recently stated, "I don't think we'd take him back if we don't win this series."

At the time he said this, the Yankees trailed two games to none. They'd gotten blown out in the opener when starter Chien-Ming Wang couldn't handle the Cleveland bats, but very nearly seized homefield advantage before squandering a 1-0 lead late in Game Two and ultimately losing 2-1 in 11 innings. Though I didn't see most of that game, I haven't heard anyone suggesting that Torre's decisions were to blame. (Joba Chamberlain, perhaps the most talented of the Yankees' kid pitchers, lost the lead with a wild pitch in the 8th inning, Mariano Rivera threw two scoreless, and Luis Vizcaino--clearly the third-best arm in the New York bullpen, after the two guys who already had pitched, took the loss in the 11th.) But even if Torre had done the managerial equivalent of pooping on the lineup card, without him you're almost certainly not in the playoffs to start with--and he's as beloved in the city as Steinbrenner is detested. A similar state of affairs seems to hold in the clubhouse; if Torre is fired, it's probably less likely that Rivera, star catcher Jorge Posada and the certain MVP, Alex Rodriguez, choose to come back for 2008.

As self-defeating as it seems--and as unseemly as it is for a 77 year-old billionaire to act with a four year-old's petulant need for instant gratification--this is in keeping with Steinbrenner's nature, and the public response from Torre and his players acknowledges as much. But Nate Silver at Baseball Prospectus thinks the old guy might just be off his nut.

What it suggests to me, though, is that most of us are lucky not to have our professional fates controlled by possibly unhinged nut jobs like Steinbrenner. Six hundred years ago, that guy probably could have had you put to death; now he mostly just hurts himself unless Brian Cashman, Stick Michael or whoever else is in the Yankee brain trust these days can talk him down.

I don't hate the Yankees as so many of my friends and family do. Baseball is more fun when they're good, and when they're good for the right reasons--as is the case now with Cashman's emphasis on building from within and being opportunistic in trades--the whole game improves because other organizations look to the replicable aspects of Yankee success. But Steinbrenner's such a miserable, tyrannical prick--and always has been--that I do derive a certain pleasure from knowing that he's unhappy. When one expects the near-impossible--in Big Stein's case, championships every single year--it's inevitable that the disappointment of defeat dwarfs the joy of victory.

Though it also might have to do with this curse-as if New Yorkers weren't likely to support the Dem anyway--I'll go out on a limb and predict that the first year after Steinbrenner dies, the Yankees will win their 27th championship.

Huckabee: What'm I, Chopped Liver?
My favorite unhinged right-win would-be theocrat, James Dobson, has an op-ed in the New York Times today threatening to take his flock--I use the sheep metaphor advisedly--out of the Republican Party if they don't nominate someone he deems acceptably opposed to abortion, The Gays, and whatever else freaks these people out. Referring to a meeting last weekend of "pro-family" leaders in Utah, the man I like to call the Christatollah writes:

After two hours of deliberation, we voted on a resolution that can be summarized as follows: If neither of the two major political parties nominates an individual who pledges himself or herself to the sanctity of human life, we will join others in voting for a minor-party candidate. Those agreeing with the proposition were invited to stand. The result was almost unanimous.

The other issue discussed at length concerned the advisability of creating a third party if Democrats and Republicans do indeed abandon the sanctity of human life and other traditional family values. Though there was some support for the proposal, no consensus emerged.

Speaking personally, and not for the organization I represent or the other leaders gathered in Salt Lake City, I firmly believe that the selection of a president should begin with a recommitment to traditional moral values and beliefs. Those include the sanctity of human life, the institution of marriage, and other inviolable pro-family principles. Only after that determination is made can the acceptability of a nominee be assessed.

The other approach, which I find problematic, is to choose a candidate according to the likelihood of electoral success or failure. Polls don’t measure right and wrong; voting according to the possibility of winning or losing can lead directly to the compromise of one’s principles. In the present political climate, it could result in the abandonment of cherished beliefs that conservative Christians have promoted and defended for decades. Winning the presidential election is vitally important, but not at the expense of what we hold most dear.

This has been interpreted, probably correctly, as a shot across the bow of Rudy Giuliani, the Republican hopeful who has argued that conservatives should support him because, first, he's the only one who can beat Hillary Clinton, and second, whatever vitriol he lacks toward gays and women who shtup outside of marriage (which is what this is really about), he more than makes up for regarding Muslim Evildoers.

As there's no candidate I personally deplore more than Giuliani (though Senator Clinton herself isn't too far behind him), his misfortune is my pleasure. Without both sides of the Republican coalition--the rich elites who enjoy Golden Ages of Profitability whenever a Bush sits in the Oval Office, and the angry religious voters who evidently get gratification from hearing coded hymns or Bible verses in State of the Union addresses--they can't win nationally. Indeed, a new Rasmussen poll shows that in a three-way race between Clinton, Giuliani and a far-right third party candidate, Sen. Clinton wins easily with 46 percent of the vote; Rudy gets 30 percent, and "Gary Bauer" (hey, let's have some fun with this) gets 14.

What I wonder, though, is why the Dobsonites wouldn't just get behind former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. I've thought for awhile that Huckabee is the strongest general-election candidate the Republicans can muster anyway: he is, to paraphrase his own words, "conservative but not angry about it," an ordained minister, a public official of clearly superior competence than the Bush crowd (faint praise, but still), and solidly in line with the rightists on substance, and somewhat on style. He's a much better "retail" politician than Giuliani, and probably better than Mitt Romney or John McCain, and he's got enough economic populist credentials to run against a corporate pseudo-Dem like Clinton from the left on some issues.

I suppose the reason why the Dobsonites haven't gotten behind Huckabee is that doing so could risk a deeper schism with the Norquist wing of the Republican Party than merely sitting out next year's race, which many think the Democrats are certain to win anyway. Huckabee has taken fire from the small-government/anti-tax extremists for such sins as increasing state spending during his tenure and supporting levies such as a three-cent gas tax increase, four cents for diesel, so the state could make infrastructure improvements. The horror! Though he did eventually sign Norquist's no-new-taxes pledge, in March of this year, and he claims to support the thoroughly idiotic "Fair Tax" proposal,they likely still don't trust him. Remember that these guys both want low or no taxes and bad government--because every time FEMA bungles a Hurricane Katrina, it reinforces their core argument that the public sector is useless--and Huckabee was, as far as I can tell, a reasonably effective governor.

But in a Republican field where nobody has caught fire and a big chunk of the voting power is threatening to walk away, it seems strange to me that the rightists wouldn't get behind the candidate who both comes closest to their views and is generating the most buzz on the stump. Maybe it's not enough to be a conservative; maybe you really do have to be angry about it. In that case, there's always Alan Keyes...

A Protest Song for Our Time
I've become somewhat omnivorous in terms of music consumption: when someone says, "listen to this," and even better if he or she is willing to put it on a disc for ripping and later iPod uploading, I'm game. So it was a couple weeks back when a guy in my office burned a few hundred song files to a CD and I put them through the formats and added them to the 5,000-odd other tunes on the iPod.

Yesterday I'm walking to the subway and suddenly had my ears blown out, with my mind quickly following, by one of those songs, from the last Ted Leo & the Pharmacists album.

Here's the video, though I recommend turning the volume way up, closing your eyes and just listening, at least for the first time.

Below are the lyrics. Suffice it to say, though, that the song is so kinetic and heavy that I could see a tank commander getting as into it as the kid protesting his war...

Like a gray bird in a blue sky over a blue ocean civilized men fly,
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
Through puffy clouds and beautiful rainbows with the power and the speed
And the will to succeed, moneyed men fly high.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb
No need to clomp around through the ash,the rubble, and the mud.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
No need for face-to-face, or even worse to put a perfectly spit-shined brand new pair of leather boots on the dirty, busty ground.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
Oh sure, you could mobilize a million troops
(but a thousand could probably get the job done)
But then people start to ask questions,
So when you drop in and out of the white clouds in a blue sky,
Don't worry about them having to see the whites of your eyes.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
Just let the payload fly and wing on home, my son - it's not your day to die.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
And when the crying starts, you won't have to see their bloodshot eyes turn red,
And when the dying starts, you won't have to know a thing about who's dead.
This is your mission: pretend it's television, where the good guys always win,
And they're gonna win again, because you're gonna bomb.
Oh, they can keep talking - let 'em keep talking - they can talk while the bombs fall around them, for all I care.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
But when you've had enough of this diplomatic bullshit and your patience is up well alright!
It's on, and they asked for it.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
Ah, but you'll want to give yourself a minute, to take in the beauty of the sight.
As you come in over the mountains between the green earth and the sky and bomb yes.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
In and out, no mess, no fuss.
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.
And when the crying starts, you won't have to see their bloodshot eyes turn red.
And when the dying starts, you won't have to know a thing about who's dead.
This is your mission -- like television - where the good guys always win.
And we're gonna win again because you're gonna,
Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.Repeat.Bomb.

SWEETNESS!!!
Phillies 6, Nationals 1
Marlins 8, Mets 1

Phillies win the NL East.

All the agita, all the hours spent looking at this monitor or writing on TGP or BSG, all the aggravation my wife has had to suffer... right now, it's every bit worth it.

WE WIN!!!

I've been waiting a long time for this. Just wish more of our friends--mvpsoft/Dave Snyder of philliesphans.com, Jeff Lamana of phila[hans.com, Tacony Lou of the I Love Misery Phillies blog--were with us to see it, and hoping that wherever they are, they're celebrating too.

Newt, Newt, Newt...

UPDATE: That was quick-Gingrich bows out before he even officially steps in.

About thirteen years ago, when I was early in my senior year of college and it started to become clear that the Democrats risked losing their congressional majority, Newt Gingrich seemed like just about the scariest guy in the country. He had little positive to say about policy, but waged the sort of strident rhetorical war against the Democrats that has become commonplace in the years since but was pretty shocking at the time. He blamed Democrats and "liberalism" more broadly for everything from the seemingly stagnant economy to a woman, Susan Smith, drowning her small children. The media adored him, but to me his brand of unhinged demagoguery was reminiscent of Greg Stillson, the unhinged politician from Stephen King's novel "The Dead Zone," creepily brought to life in the movie by Martin Sheen, whose presidential ambitions, if fulfilled, would lead to nuclear apocalypse.

Though Gingrich won that November and became Speaker of the House of Representatives, within a couple years it was clear that I'd overestimated Newt and underestimated Bill Clinton, his great political rival. Clinton won re-election in 1996 and his Democrats cut into Gingrich's House majority. Two years after that, Gingrich had led the push for Clinton's impeachment but lost again in the mid-terms, and he resigned. For most of the next five years or so, he was perhaps best known for writing a shitload of amazon.com reviews, and of course for the revelation that at the same time he was leading the charge to impeach Clinton, he was also cheating on his wife with a much younger woman.

But like Clinton, Gingrich is both shameless and inexhaustible, and he set out to rehabilitate himself as a man of ideas and principle. As the collapse of George W. Bush Republicanism accelerated, Gingrich saw an opening: in the last two years, he's called for the Republicans to make a clean break with their president and look to the future. And if none of the Republicans who've announced for the 2008 presidential race would do that, then the man who once declared that his goal was "to save western civilization" would make himself available for the job.

In recent weeks, Newt has made it clearer and clearer that he's going to run for president. He's trying to raise $30 million to do it; he's cultivated James Dobson, the Christatollah of modern Republicanism, who's evidently more interested in a candidate who will hate on the gays and the slutty women than one who isn't a serial adulterer and hypocrite. Never short on ambition or ego, Gingrich still sees himself as a savior.

What's interesting to me, though, is that the man who rose to power on a wave of vicious attack politics and did so much to pave the way for political monsters like Karl Rove, now wants to run what sounds like the highest-minded campaign of modern times:

During a recent breakfast with a Politico reporter and other journalists, Gingrich made it clear he has given a great deal of thought to how he would run, starting with a national television ad that would be heavy on his policy ideas.

That might be followed with DVDs of his agenda to households in early-voting states.

Gingrich vowed that he would not participate in group debates like those that now sprinkle the campaign calendar.

“I’m not a penguin,” he said, referring to the field of candidates at the debates as “a row of penguins.” Instead, he said, he wants to hold one-on-one, 90-minute “dialogues” on such topics as fixing specific inner cities.

“If I did run, I wouldn’t do any dog and pony shows,” he said. “I’d debate anybody who wanted to for 90 minutes — one-on-one, for 90 minutes, in either party.”

Sounds good, no?

But here's the punch line: Gingrich's own legacy pretty much ensures that he's not going to get traction through this content-heavy approach. Consider you’re a TV network news division or a print/new media editor: given the choice between a detailed examination of Gingrich’s views on realigning tax policy to support inner-city entrepreneurship, or talking about how he was getting blowjobs from a woman a quarter-century his junior while trying to impeach Clinton for doing the exact same thing, which way are you likely to go?

Add in that he’s going to get shivved sotto voce by the many vicious scumbag Republicans who loathe him–like Tom DeLay, who led an unsuccessful coup against Gingrich in the mid-'90s-–and it couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.

I’ve long considered the withdrawal announcements of Republican presidential contenders the way that other men think about pornography; when Newt hangs ‘em up, I might be incapacitated for days.

The Republicans' Questionable Bet
Josh Marshall today points out just how remarkable it is that 151 Republicans in the House of Representatives--enough to sustain a presidential veto--voted against expansation of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP), and prophesies both a legislative defeat and the wrath of a vengeful electorate:

[T]his is one reason there is an as-yet-unrevealed though in many ways profound antipathy for President Bush among many congressional Republicans. He's not running again. And he couldn't care less how much he damages his party over the next 18 months. Often political leaders face a choice -- stand for principle and possibly have a strong political issue at the next election or achieve some substantive accomplishment. Here the Dems appear to have every likelihood of achieving both. They'll probably get SCHIP and while also having the president inflict what may turn out to be a fatal political wound on a number of House Republicans. He'll bring them down in the noble cause of keeping lower and middle income kids from getting health care.

I think this is true as far as it goes, though there are a couple premises that might throw his analysis into question: of those 151, how many of them are truly in competitive seats? Are they really putting their heads in the lion's mouth by Supporting Our President in redder-than-dried-blood districts? While I've heard for years that a lot of congressional Republicans detest Bush and view him as a political anvil, I suspect this sentiment is a lot stronger among the 50 or so Republicans who didn't vote with the president than the 151 who did.

It's possible, maybe even likely, that most of those 151 Republicans view this as a vote on principle--that government shouldn't subsidize health care for (those they regard as) the non-poor. I happen to think this is a blinkered and idiotic viewpoint, profoundly ignorant, in the way that only those for whom health costs are simply not a day-to-day consideration, of just how much of a financial whammy this can put on families. But their mileage, obviously, differs.

The real issue here, I think, is the Republicans' calculation that not only would "defeating" expansion of S-CHIP not hurt the prospects of individual Republicans next year, but that it won't hurt the overall party brand either. They're gambling that the Democrats have neither the political killer instinct to run on this issue in the 2008 campaign (Voiceover: "Republican Congressman X voted for 12 tax cuts that gave the richest 0.1 percent of Americans an extra million dollars a year, but when it came time to support health care for poor children, he decided the cookie jar was empty," as the camera slowly pans across black-and-white pictures of kids in desolate settings), nor the power and savvy to frame the debate, which they think might again revolve around fear and terrorism. Whether or not they're proven right could tell us a good deal about the state of our public discourse.

Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton... ClintonBush?
The beat goes on for Hillary Clinton, solidifying her frontrunner status in her race for Kinder, Gentler Empress. Two items from Political Wire today remind us that for all her posturing as a "change" candidate, she's easily the Democrat closest in both worldview and style to the members of that Other Great Family now holding the White House in our pathetic little War of the Roses knockoff.

The first is that Bush is communicating with the Clinton campaign, as well as other Democratic campaigns, to urge them to keep their options open regarding his Kickin' Ass War in Iraq. The second is that the campaign got a story that GQ had ready to run on infighting in Hillaryland spiked by threatening to block the magazine's access to Bill Clinton, who was the subject of a cover story. That's the sort of bullying of the media that we're used to seeing from the bunch in office now.

I don't think any of this is very surprising. From fundraising tactics to flag-burning, Hillary Clinton is by far far far the Democratic candidate most ideologically and temperamentally compatible with the sociopaths and idiots on the right who have gotten us into this mess. She’s perfectly comfortable with the Executive Branch SuperDuperPowers that Bush and His Loyal Bushies have amassed; hence her support of the atrocious Patriot Act and non-opposition, or at least sotto voce opposition, to the Military Commissions Act and the effective repeal of the Fourth Amendment.

Similarly, she’s fine with the premises that underscored our Iraq Adventure–that we can do what we want in the world by virtue of overwhelming force, and that there’s no moral qualm about waging wars to secure resources.

I wish the press would ask her a bit more directly about her views on all these things. But I won’t hold my breath, so long as there are stories to be told about cleavage and such.

My Support: the Kiss of Death
I realized something on my way home from the gym tonight: for as long as I've been entitled to vote, my presidential candidates of choice have never even won the nomination, much less taken office.

In 1992, I defended Bob Kerrey through innumerable late-night freshman year dorm hall arguments (in truth, I had little better to do). Four years later I didn't really have an opinion; I wasn't going to vote for the Republican, and Clinton was going to get remoninated. In 2000 I was a big Bill Bradley fan; last time around, at different points I was for Dean, Clark and Edwards. It was almost like I was consciously avoiding anyone even sort of viable.

I mention this because the Hillary Clinton train continues to chug along. Wes Clark, probably the 2004-cycle candidate I was most into, endorsed Lady Triangula this weekend. She's evidently suffering no damage from Norman Hsu's troubles (and presumably her scores of advisors are offering up prayers of thanks that O.J. is back in the news--it really is the '90s again!). And the Obama and Edwards campaigns can't get any traction.

All this despite the fact that Sen. Clinton still doesn't seem to have any answer for why she's running for president, beyond the zombie mantra of her flacks: "strength and experience, strength and experience, strength and experience..."

But history suggests that if I don't get a candidate's appeal, that candidate probably has a good thing going.

Loose Ends
A few semi-random links and musings on current events:

• Ed Kilgore ponders the "interesting times" of the last ten years in American politics--impeachment, a contested election, a major attack on American soil, a disastrous war of choice, and the partial destruction of a great city, all for the first time since the 19th century or ever--and provides an important reminder that the Republican Party, based on its current crop of presidential candidates, seems fairly proud of what they've wrought. It's astonishing, and endlessly depressing, that we share a country with millions of these people; it's almost enough to lead me to the conclusion that maybe the country just isn't so hot, after all. The fact that the Imbecile-in-Chief continues to play transparent political games with the tragic Iraq war is bad enough; that he's more or less allowed to get away with this by a still-supine press corps and a perpetually timid Democratic opposition is perhaps worse.


• Speaking of the Party of Lesser Evils, Philadelphia Inquirer political columnist and blogger Dick Polman sets out the story of Hillary Clinton and Democratic fundraiser/criminal fugitive Norman Hsu. I remember being very turned off, in the waning days of the 1996 campaign, by some of Bill Clinton's scummier fundraising activities that were then coming to light; it doesn't seem like they've learned much, or repented at all.
  
  

  The FBI is conducting preliminary inquiries into Hsu's bundling activities and business dealings; the Manhattan DA is investigating whether Hsu bilked a private equity firm in a Ponzi scheme. But what interests me is how the Clinton campaign has reacted to all this:
  
  With all the speed of a turtle trundling through molasses.
  
  Its first response, last June, was total denial. When a California businessman reportedly emailed the campaign to warn that "there is a significant probability that a man using the name of Norman Hsu is running a Ponzi scheme," a campaign official emailed back to say, "I can tell you with 100 certainty that Norman Hsu is NOT involved in a ponzi scheme. He is COMPLETELY legit."
  
  Its second response, also last June, was to search public records for information about Hsu, but aides turned up nothing. Apparently they didn't look very hard, because The Washington Post pointed out yesterday that "a commonly used public record search shows that Hsu had multiple business lawsuits filed against him dating back to 1985, filed for bankruptcy in 1990, and was a defendant in two Californis court matters listed as possible criminal cases."
  
  The campaign's third response, when suspicions about Hsu surfaced in the press in late August, was to praise their bundler. A Clinton flak said: "Norman Hsu is a longtime and generous supporter of the Democratic party and its candidates, including Senator Clinton. During Mr. Hsu’s many years of active participation in the political process, there has been no question about his integrity or his commitment to playing by the rules, and we have absolutely no reason to call his contributions into question." The campaign also said that it would not return any of the Hsu-related campaign contributions.
  
  The campaign's fourth response was to grudgingly give ground. After it became clear that Hsu was a fugitive from justice, and after other Democratic candidates made it clear that they intended to purge themselves of Hsu money, Clinton did the same, by donating to charity $23,000 that Hsu had personally donated. But the campaign made this announcement in the early evening, after most East Coast news deadlines...and made it clear that Clinton was refusing to give back the donations that Hsu had bundled from others.
  
  The campaign's fifth response came this past Monday evening. After learning that the FBI was on Hsu's trail, and after learning that The Los Angeles Times had obtained those aforementioned emails (the heads-up from the California businessman, and the 100 percent denial from the campaign), Clinton decided to give back the donations that Hsu had bundled from others. That's the $850,000. But the campaign, to soften the blow, made this announcement in the early evening (sound familiar?), after most East Coast news deadlines, and after the network news shows had gone on the air in the East, mostly with the dominant coverage of the Petraus hearings on Iraq. And now the campaign is refusing to disclose the names of the 260 bundlees who are poised to get their money back.

  
  I hope that any of her rivals who choose to attack The Empress on this--I doubt Obama will, for both style and substance reasons, but Edwards certainly might--will note that Sen. Clinton, like Bill, always has had a high comfort level with pay-to-play politics and disdain, if not disgust, for attempts to regulate the system. She was the leading opponent within the Democratic Senate caucus to the McCain-Feingold reform, mocking Russ Feingold for his naivete and complaining that the reform would destroy Democrats' political competitiveness.
  
  As quarterly reporting numbers for the congressional campaign committees and the presidential candidates themselves have shown again and again, this hasn't exactly been the case--and while I'm not saying that Feingold foresaw the political and technological changes that would make the Democrats more than competitive in fund-raising, I think the point is that he put principle first whatever the outcome. Has Hillary Clinton ever done as much?


• Related to all this, the recent news about next year's Senate races--most notably the retirements of John Warner (VA) and Chuck Hagel (NE) and the possible/likely candidacies of Mark Warner and Bob Kerrey to replace them--combined with the likelihood that the Democrats will nominate Senator Clinton, could contribute to an outcome that I believe is unprecedented: the Democrats lose their House majority while making big gains in the Senate. I've written before about my belief that Sen. Clinton will endanger, probably doom, many of the Democratic Representatives who won last year in districts where Bush defeated John Kerry in 2004. And I'm still waiting for some smart national political reporter to contact the offices of, say, Reps. Ellsworth in Indiana, Shuler of North Carolina, or Boyda of Kansas to ask them how they feel about running "with" someone perceived as a veritable devil by many of their constituents. But I think her impact in the Senate races will be much more limited. Mark Warner has his own base in Virginia, as does Kerrey in Nebraska. Democratic takeover efforts in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Oregon, all Kerry-supporting states, probably won't be hurt by Sen. Clinton. She may or may not lower the odds for a takeover in Colorado, and she probably removes whatever slim chance the Democrats had for upsets in North Carolina, Kentucky and New Mexico. But they should still anticipate a good year in 2008, with a larger Senate majority--enough to kick Joe Lieberman out of the caucus. The question will be whether Harry Reid has a Democratic Speaker and President to work with.

Re-tethering War to the Public
Watching some of the testimony of Ambassador Ryan Crocker and General David Petraeus to the Senate this morning--and trying to swallow my disgust at this show having been scheduled for September 10-11--I was reminded again of how far most of us are from the real effects of this war. We're saddened by its toll and outraged by how it's been mismanaged, but it's still a theoretical exercise for the overwhelming majority of Americans.

As I've written here before, one reason this is so that it's just way too easy for this country to go to war. Presidents can commit forces with very little short-term political risk, and while the bill comes due eventually--as it did for the Republicans last November--by then it's difficult to disengage, even if you don't have an ill-informed narcissistic sociopath at the controls. From this premise, I've reluctantly come to the opinion, in the last two years, that we need to reimpose some kind of political check on decisionmakers' tendencies to start wars and commit forces.

This could take the form a draft, of course; Charlie Rangel among others has advanced this argument. And it's fairly compelling; no question that the prospect of sending everyday people to fight and die would seriously raise the bar for military intervention. But the objections of the professional military to reinstituting a draft--mostly that it would dilute the quality--are legitimate too.

So maybe there should be another mechanism--some kind of tax that goes into effect whenever a military commitment lasts longer than six months. At the least, this would require the public to pay for its wars rather than put them on the credit card, as we've done in this instance. And it would speed the day of political reckoning.

I don't think this would mean that the country could never act; the Afghanistan War enjoyed overwhelming support at the time, and probably still has majority support. I have little doubt that majorities would have sustained that support despite a tax surcharge. At least initially, the same might have held true for Iraq.

The larger point is that some structural change that would involve the whole country in any war effort would be very good for our democracy. It is proper that the Republicans paid a heavy political price for the war last year, and might do so again next year. But with a draft, or a war tax, or something that required fuller public engagement, the president would have had to do what McCain and others always wanted him to do: talk to the public honestly about the war, and make a persuasive case that our involvement is justified.

This notion of selling the public on a set of policies has disappeared under Bush. There's a great piece in this past Sunday's New York Times magazine about Jack Goldsmith, a conservative who resigned from the Bush Justice Department in 2004 over administration policy regarding torture, wiretapping, and related measures. He agreed with Bush, Cheney and the rest about the threat of terrorism and the need for "strong measures"; his issue mostly was that they attempted to get what they want through unilateral decisionmaking.

The story includes a line I found resonant: "the power of the presidency is the power to persuade." This was the key to the successful presidencies of, among others, Lincoln, FDR, Reagan, and Clinton: they could bring the country around to their views, and their policies enjoyed popular legitimacy.

This war in Iraq hasn't enjoyed popular legitimacy at least since 2004, and that lack arguably has been as damaging as the debt we've incurred and the human losses we've suffered.

The Technology's Great; the Content Stinks
What a time to be alive. It's Sunday afternoon, I'm sitting in Brooklyn, New York, I've got two computers on the desk in front of me. One is showing the Eagles game, one is showing the Phillies game. The picture is pretty good on the Eagles, perfect on the Phils.

Problem is that the Eagles look like a bad high school team, losing 10-0 after fumbling a punt recovered in the end zone and with three sad excuses for drives, and the Phillies... well, it's hard to have faith in a team that lost two games where they led by five runs or more within the last week.

Still, I'm here, and work isn't getting done. So it's clear who the real sucker is.

Why Petraeus is Not to be Trusted
At least not by Philadelphia baseball fans. Here's the General:



And here's former Phillies General Manager Ed Wade:



Wade ran the Phillies for eight years, with no playoff berths to show for it. Eventually he spent more and more money, at grievous opportunity cost, yet the team never got closer to its objective. Sound familiar?

But for those who don't have an irrational detestation of Ed Wade, there are other reasons not to trust the general either. Paul Krugman sums them up:

Gen. Petraeus has a history of making wildly overoptimistic assessments of progress in Iraq that happen to be convenient for his political masters.

I’ve written before about the op-ed article Gen. Petraeus published six weeks before the 2004 election, claiming “tangible progress” in Iraq. Specifically, he declared that “Iraqi security elements are being rebuilt,” that “Iraqi leaders are stepping forward” and that “there has been progress in the effort to enable Iraqis to shoulder more of the load for their own security.” A year later, he declared that “there has been enormous progress with the Iraqi security forces.”

But now two more years have passed, and the independent commission of retired military officers appointed by Congress to assess Iraqi security forces has recommended that the national police force, which is riddled with corruption and sectarian influence, be disbanded, while Iraqi military forces “will be unable to fulfill their essential security responsibilities independently over the next 12-18 months.”

Krugman also cites this powerful piece of reporting from the Washington Post on Thursday, by Karen DeYoung. She found that the statistical gains championed by defenders of "the surge" are very, very dubious. The statistics "selectively ignor[e]" certain trends (such as escalating violence between different Shi'ite militias) in making assessments, and generally stacking the deck in favor of the wished-for conclusions. (Again, sound familiar?) One number the defenders don't cite is the civilian death count for August: 1,809, the highest monthly total this year.

Like Krugman, however, I fear that Congress will make a political decision to sustain "the surge" and generally defer to the White House. In part, this is because the sight of an Army uniform clouds their judgment; in part, I think, it's because somehow in our society, when we have a choice between "more war" and "less war," the structural factors pointing toward "more war" are almost irresistible. But that might be another discussion for another time.

For now, just don't trust the guy who looks lilke Wade.

Bill Clinton's Empathy Has No Bounds
Maybe this is to be expected given Bubba's own scandal history. But I still thought this was kind of cool:

Bill Clinton will appear on Larry King Live tonight to peddle his latest book and his wife's presidential bid. However, his comment on the sex scandal surrounding Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) will likely grab more headlines.

From an advance transcript:

"Well, first of all, I think we ought to recognize that this is a very traumatic time for him and his family. And whatever happens or doesn't, most of his political career was behind him. So whatever your party, we should be hoping that he and his family can work through this in a way that leaves them as whole as possible.

"I think that that is more important than the politics of this. The politics of this will have to be resolved by him and the Republicans in the Senate.

It's a particularly nice grace note considering Craig's reaction at the time of BlowGate.

All that said, I suspect Clinton, that great political mind, knows that the longer the Craig fooferall lingers, the worse this month will be for the Republicans--particularly considering the intent of the Republicans to focus on other subjects.