Category Archives: Politics: US

All the bloggers I read are so busy finding deep meanings in the Gore endorsement of Dean that they don't give enough weight to the obvious aspects of the timing. The past 7-10 days of the Democratic contest have seen the candidates begin to go overtly negative about each other, even in TV ads. That helps Bush and hurts the eventual nominee whoever he is.

If you are Al Gore, the thing you want most out of this next election is for Bush to lose. Preferably to lose big. If Bush were to win, it could have some retrospective legitimating effect on the 2000 election. If Bush loses, and especially if he loses big, history will be brutal. If I were Gore that is what I would most want.

By endorsing now, Gore helps cement Dean's frontrunner status and cuts down on (nothing short of a Clinton endorsement can eliminate) the internecine sparring that is grist for the Republican mill in the general election. That's canny. It's also statesmanlike.

The only part of this I don't understand is the failure to make at least a courtesy call to Lieberman. One would think he was owed that, unless there is some hidden bad blood somewhere. Lieberman was not very helpful to Gore during the period after the election, while Florida was in doubt, and perhaps that has something to do with it?

Stuff like this from Escapable Logic illustrate what's best about the Dean campaign.

I could be a ferverent supporter but for the fear that grips me. Not of “McGovernite” tendencies for they are largely mythical. Not of the possiblity that this or something equally false and dumb will be seized on by the Republican smear machine, because that's inevitable whoever the candidate is, that's been the Bush family M.O. at least since I was campaigning against them in the Republican primaries in Connecticut in 1980.

No, what scares me is that while the candidate has a gift for being quite inspirational, he also has excellent aim for his own feet. The current records flap is a minor example, but a good one….although (on third try) his recovery is not bad….

(Oh yeah, the trade stuff bugs me too, but you can't have everything.)

Part of the mystery of current politics is why other than (1) rich people getting tax cuts, (2) people for whom even small shifts in anti-abortion policies are everything, (3) those for whom larger shifts in subsidies to mainstream religion are worthwhile, and (4) corporate welfare recipients, there's anyone left who supports Bush.

As Matthew Yglesias notes there's something real mysterious about the current apparent political stasis in the face of Bush's abandonment of most traditional Republican policies.

But I'm beginning to doubt the stasis thesis. Could it be that the national polls are wrong and there's a giant subterranean shift going on? Consider the latest Miami Herald poll — high headline numbers for Bush but low 'would vote for' numbers. Plus, when viewed up close, traditionally GOP groups now contain elements quite hostile to Bush. See for example this striking Letter from an Army vet posted at, of all places, Salon.com.

Note to self: do not become hopeful. This leads to pain.

David Neiwert (aka Orcinus), has some very interesting and disturbing things to say about the sad and vicious state of political discourse. Start with his The Political and the Personal, then read his summary of the many reactions. The purpose of this essay isn't to agree or disagree, so much as muse aloud in his wake.

I don't personally have a formed view as to the psychology of either the modern brownshirts or of their fellow travelers. As Sinclair Lewis brilliantly explored in his vastly under-appreciated novel It Can't Happen Here, many of the people who go along with brownshirts do so out of simple opportunism. Which is why the Republican party's actions that seek to entrench their political victories economically by taxing Democratic-voting districts and transferring money to Republican-voting ones is for me as least as worrying and cynical as anything they say. Similarly, the strategy of imposing today's costs on tomorrow's citizens (huge deficits that are not spent on investments likely to repay their costs) presents a serious problem; were there to be a serious economic repercussion — like OPEC going off the dollar, or world markets choosing to hold more Euros and sending back a chunk of the dollar overhang, then we'd see the true cost of this fecklessness.

I am not quite as persuaded as Orcinus that today's political rhetoric is that much worse than what I recall from the early 70s—or even that much more respectable than invective was then. Seems to me that I remember Nixon, Agnew, and a bunch of other politicians and commentators were fairly vicious towards Vietnam War protestors. And some people acted out then too. It was bad then, it's bad now, but what seems worse today isn't the rhetoric so much as what it covers up or distracts from.

Continue reading →

Atrios reports that they have caught the Republican hacker who'd been purlioning Democratic memos at the Senate Intel committee. Recall that according to no less an august figure than the Chair of the committee, the publication of one such purloined memo compromised the war on terror.

Last week it seems that Republicans managed to purloin a Democratic memo relating to the Senate Intelligence committee — either from a computer or a trash can. At the same time, someone was stealing Democratic memos relating to the Senate Judiciary committee: Apparent Theft Of Democratic Memos Probed (washingtonpost.com).

Republican hacker at large?