the real reason Clinton pardoned Rich

I don't often recommend Joe Conason articles, though he is generally thorough and honest with the facts. While we're on the subject of Washington blasphemies, however, I have to recommend this one.

new website showing 50 years of campaign commercials

Fascinating. www.livingroomcandidate.org allows you to view presidential campaign commercials going all the way back to Eisenhower.

I looked at some of the 1992 Clinton/Gore commercials, and one thing has become abundantly clear: we are a more liberal country than we were back then. Bill Clinton '92 would have been the most conservative candidate in the entire Democratic primary this year, and probably the most of any of the '04 crowd as well. Most of his commercials are geared toward cutting taxes, punishing criminals (prominently noting that he supports the death penalty), and "ending welfare as we know it."

16 years later, Barack Obama can openly attack his Republican opponent for not supporting "a woman's right to choose," and both candidates are trying to out-green each other, with frakin' T. Boone Pickens trying to outdo both of them!

Then again...

What is Maureen Dowd's problem?

This may be the most hateful, sneering column I've ever read. Edwards' confession was "creepy?" Really? And what's with the odd, irrelevant side-swipe "Bill Clinton's alleged soul?"

Also, this is a trap:

The creepiest part of his creepy confession was when he stressed to Woodruff that he cheated on Elizabeth in 2006 when her cancer was in remission. His infidelity was oncologically correct.

Edwards would not have stressed that fact if he didn't think (almost certainly correctly) that Dowd et al. would have been all too happy to "elide" the timeline to sensationalize his infidelity, in some cases just letting people assume he was cheating during his wife's hour of need, and in other cases outright lying about it, unless he made it inescapably clear that such was not the case. It's a disingenuous and unfair attack.

For that matter, she claims:

John Edwards’s confession was a little bit breathtaking.

Not the sex stuff. That happens here all the time.

And certainly not covering up the sex stuff. That happens here all the time, too...

The stunning admission Edwards made to ABC’s Bob Woodruff, and in a written statement from Chapel Hill on Friday afternoon, was that he’s a narcissist.

Really? She's gotten so worked up that she would write such a bile-filled column, complete with puerile name-calling ("Breck Girl?" You're really still tossing that one around, Maureen?), because she's so upset that John Edwards is a narcissist? Isn't she a little long in the tooth for a "politicians are narcissistic" epiphany? It's not exactly cutting-edge political insight.

So why has Edwards' and Clinton's particular infidelities evoked such rage from Maureen Dowd? After all, it's not like they were out there waving their fundamentalist fingers and trying to prevent gays from marrying while they sullied their own marriages or anything, yet so far as I can tell, neither Larry Craig nor even the execrable Mark Foley got anything approaching the Edwards treatment. Maureen Dowd appears not to have even written about David Vitter when his scandal broke. Do dirty sins of the flesh "narcissism" and having a "need to sell what is secretly weakest about themselves, as if they yearn for unmasking" only merit heaps of scorn when the guilty party fits the Democrats-as-sexually-depraved narrative? What gives?

the morning after bitter pill

I mentioned last night that, out of nowhere, the media has turned violently against Clinton, with Tim Russert and Chris Matthews, the two biggest pundits on the biggest news staff, declaring the contest over and Barack Obama the nominee.

It continues this morning. Bob Shrum, as interviewed in The New York Times:

“The people who have her best interests at heart, they would now say to her, ‘You ought to really think about not protracting this, because you will only look selfish in the weeks to come,’ ” Mr. Shrum said. “Her Pennsylvania win bought her permission to go on. But then her narrow victory in Indiana and this smashing defeat in North Carolina — there is no rationale for her to continue.”

Say what you will about his record as a strategist (and I often do), his opinion is hot s**t in Washington and, to my knowledge, he has no horse in this race.

Meanwhile, Paul Begala, former strategist for Bill and current Hillary supporter, goes on national TV and calls Obama supporters "eggheads and African Americans." Here we see the sentiment behind Clintonian triangulation, specifically that the party can and should shit on liberals, seculars and blacks with impunity because, let's face it, they have nowhere else to go. Liberals, seculars, and feminists, in fact, are the only demographics that you can explicitly slander on national TV without ever having to worry that someone will come to their defense. No one ever does.

So screw 'em, right? The party's got them over a barrel so, if beating on them in public makes the bubbas like you, do it! After all, it's not as if such behavior has ever had electoral consequences.

elections have consequences

So you know all that work Clinton put into lowering not just the deficit, but the ratio of national debt to GDP? The work that consumed nearly his entire second term and that required him to concede significant cuts to the social safety net? The work that exhibited one of the rare true compromises between Republicans and Democrats to achieve something useful in this era of Rush Limbaugh and casual comparisons to Nazis? The work that had us on track to pay off the national debt entirely by 2012?

It's now all gone. Thanks, Mr. MBA President.

Revelation of the Day

When Chelsea Clinton was young, she got called a "dog" for being in an awkward puberty stage. When she finally blossomed and became too beautiful to be called a dog, she must've felt pretty happy about beating that rap. That is, until they started calling her a whore instead.

But David Shuster and Don Imus are important media figures who provide "incisive" political commentary.

Reuters misses the significance of Wayne Dumond

From the guilty party:

Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas who leads the Republican field in Iowa and is rising in national polls, has his own potential Willie Horton, in the name of Wayne Dumond.

Dumond was serving a life prison term for raping a 17-year-old cheerleader in Arkansas in 1984. In 1996 his appeals for clemency attracted the attention of Huckabee, a Baptist preacher, after the inmate was said to have found religion.

Dumond gained freedom when paroled by the state's parole board -- with Huckabee's endorsement -- and moved to the Kansas City area in 1999.

Less than a year later, Carol Sue Shields died of suffocation, and Dumond was convicted in her murder. He died in prison of natural causes in 2005.

The case roiled Arkansas politics at the time and now that Huckabee's presidential campaign is rising, it is getting national attention.

Of course, it wasn't the fact that Dumond supposedly "found religion" that attracted Governor Huckabee's attention; it was the governor's need to please the rumormongering anti-Clintonites of the right wing. Wayne Dumond had become something of a cause celebre on the Right, and they had constructed an entire alternate narrative of his circumstances that they could gather in their seedy little corners of the internet and froth over. You see, it all hangs on one little detail about this case that this piece never bothered to mention: that first victim of Dumond's was a distant cousin of then-governor William Jefferson Clinton.

Now do you see where this is going?

According to the reality-challenged version concocted by conservative ideologues, Clinton then put Dumond, a father and Vietnam veteran, on trial for rape just because he wanted revenge and to advance his career. And Dumond was probably totally innocent anyway. Even worse, while he was awaiting trial, Clinton even sent some of his goons to go castrate Dumond for his alleged crimes! That sick, sick troop-hating pinko!

Well, these wankers eventually caught the ear of Clinton's successor, who was looking for some opportunity to step out from under the shadow of the Big Dawg, and he went to the mat for these guys. He pulled strings, bent the rules, and lobbied the parole board hard for his release. Huckabee was so far in the tank for these guys that he assumed they were right about Dumond without really investigating the matter for himself; people who spoke with him about it noted his ignorance of the details of the case, and at times he would even cite exculpatory evidence that only existed in conservative mythology, to the bafflement of the other actors in this play. From a fantastic Arkansas Times story:

“He [Huckabee] kept insisting that there was DNA evidence that has since exonerated Dumond, when that very much wasn’t the case,” recalled Long. “No matter that that wasn’t true … we couldn’t seem to say or do anything to disabuse him of that notion.”

In fact, there had never been any DNA testing in the Ashley Stevens case.

Had he not been blinded by desire to appease the darker elements of the Right, maybe he wouldn't have so easily dismissed evidence everyone else, included the jury that convicted him, found to be pretty compelling: Wayne Dumond had a string of crimes of this sort on his rap sheet, was suspected in a couple of other sexual assault cases that were not yet adjudicated and was positively IDed by the victim of the crime for which he was serving time. Sometimes men with these demons abuse their own bodies out of guilt or self-hatred or whatever; it's not exactly unheard-of for sex offenders to castrate themselves.

Of course, the jury, the victim, and the parole board's instincts (they originally wanted to deny parole) were proven right, and Huckabee and the ultraconservative ideologues wrong, when Dumond got out of prison, moved to Missouri, and raped and murdered a young woman there. He was also suspected in a second rape and murder in Missouri, but died in prison before the case could go to court.

Huckabee is now denying that he had a hand in Dumond's release, pinning it instead on the parole board. Tristero dispenses with that argument easily enough. It appears, however, that Huckabee doesn't really have to deny it or parse or dissemble on his role of l'Affair Dumond because our media will never get the story right.

Why is that, you may be asking? Because the underlying narrative of the story is one that the national press has considered verboten for the last 30 years: it's about the incredible disconnect from reality under which the far right labors, and the individual conservative ideologue's inability to see facts that don't support his worldview. The story is significant and noteworthy in a presidential race because it shows just how far in the tank Mike Huckabee is for far-right conspiratorialists. He doesn't just listen to them, he trusts them and believes whatever they tell him so implicitly that he'll make major governmental decisions based solely on their advice and without ever looking into the matter for himself. It's about a presidential candidate who's a terrible judge of character, who has trouble discerning truth from myth (especially when said truths seem to contradict his movement conservative, Christian fundamentalist worldview), and is easily manipulated into making poor decisions even by people with little or no credibility.

Sound at all familiar?

Yet in order to highlight this main point of the Dumond episode, you have to be willing to point out that right wing crazies seized upon Dumond's story, metamorphosed it into a sob story about the evil, conniving Bill Clinton and his heroic victim, and sold it back to a pitifully uninformed and gullible Huckabee. And you will never see a major news channel, newspaper, or magazine portray the far right in such a way. After all, we already know that the media is so scared of right wing retaliation that they'd rather let an egregiously unqualified man win the presidency than disclose his numerous flaws and risk their ire.

This is the same reason why Huckabee's evolution gaffe in the first GOP debate is so important. If you'll remember, Brian Williams (I believe) asked the entire field to raise their hand if they do NOT believe in evolution, and Huckabee raised his hand. He knew he'd screwed up afterwards and tried to dissemble on his answer, focusing instead on human evolution and abiogenesis, but the damage had been done.

Evolution, as a biological principle, is indisputably true: not only can you watch bacteria evolve in a petri dish in an afternoon, but there's a mountain of scientific evidence that evolution happens. For instance, scientists recently found that people of Germanic/northern European descent are more resistant to bubonic plague than others (and, interestingly, HIV, because it attacks cells in a similar way) because of their higher exposure to the Black Death in the Middle Ages. We have to develop new flu vaccines every year because influenza evolves, becoming more resistant to old vaccines. Conagra and Monsanto forcibly evolve corn and soybean plants, annually releasing new seeds that grow stronger, hardier, more productive crops. To deny evolution as a principle, even in the case of humans, requires a particularly acute fear of reality, a willingness to ignore an overwhelming array of evidence in order to hold onto a position that won't force you to ask uncomfortable questions.

Do we really want another president who so flagrantly denies reality when it's uncomfortable for him?

back to Chris Matthews

It appears that Matthews' new hobbyhorse is the apparent hypocrisy of liberals who do not support Libby's commutation and yet also decried the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Matthews' logic here, however, is flawed for the reason that usually gets him into trouble: his knowledge of politics is a lot wider than it is deep. Interestingly, unlike David Broder, who glosses over the details, Matthews frequently loses sight of the forest through the trees. Perhaps he just has to spend so much time listening to spin that it's hard to keep him perspective properly oriented.

Libby's commutation=Clinton's impeachment is wrong for 2 reasons:

1. Bill Clinton was never convicted. Chris Matthews has on multiple occasions brought up this canard about how 50 Republicans voted to impeach him, but it's irrelevant because 50 other senators, plus the VP, voted to acquit (and as we've seen, getting 50 Republican senators to vote for something unjust is not exactly the hardest thing in the world to pull off, especially when they think it will benefit them politically). Civil charges, meanwhile, were not pursued (h/t Media Matters, .pdf).

2. There was no underlying crime. Clinton supporters have been on the rampage about this for years, and they're completely consistent on this point: Clinton lied about cheating on his wife, and adultery is not illegal. Outing an undercover CIA agent is a felony. That Fitzgerald chose not to prosecute Karl Rove and/or Dick Armitage for the leak itself is irrelevant, as prosecutors do sometimes choose not to litigate crimes for a variety of reasons. The act of outing a CIA agent is a felony, and it has been attested again and again, by Fitzgerald himself and by various of Plame's former superiors, that she was undercover and working on Iranian WMD at the time of her outing. Ergo, Scooter Libby lied to cover up a crime, whereas Clinton lied to cover up an embarrassment.

It really takes deliberate obtuseness (or way too much time spent listening to other people's bullshit) not to understand this very simple point.

the vindication of William Jefferson Clinton

10 years later, every single Republican presidential contender, save John McCain, says he should've gotten off without punishment. From ThinkProgress, here's what the leading candidate and former US Attorney said:

Giuliani said the case ... was “incomprehensible” because “ultimately, there was no underlying crime involved.”

Oops, they're actually talking about Scooter Libby, who lied about outing a covert CIA agent working on Iranian WMD to exact political revenge on her husband (and, of course, silence any other potential naysayers among the spooks). That would be the same Iran that's now closer to acquiring a nuclear weapon. Bill Clinton lied about cheating on his wife, which last time I checked, was not, in fact, illegal.

the Onion: January 2001

Amazing. The Onion:

WASHINGTON, DC–Mere days from assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the nation in a televised address Tuesday that "our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over."

President-elect Bush vows that "together, we can put the triumphs of the recent past behind us."

"My fellow Americans," Bush said, "at long last, we have reached the end of the dark period in American history that will come to be known as the Clinton Era, eight long years characterized by unprecedented economic expansion, a sharp decrease in crime, and sustained peace overseas. The time has come to put all of that behind us."

Bush swore to do "everything in [his] power" to undo the damage wrought by Clinton's two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.

2 points: For one, this was written on January 17, 2001, before Bush had even taken office. What do you think are the chances David Broder or Tim Russert could have predicted the future with this degree of accuracy? Is it really any surprise that so many people have turned to comedians to do the job of pundits, and even Washington reporters?

Two, remember this article next time someone argues that Americans, or conservatives, or Republicans, or whoever had no way of knowing that Bush would be so disastrous of a president (an argument I admit I have myself used). The evidence was all there for anyone who took the time to look. Much of this he'd pretty much said himself on the campaign trail or in the debates, and the rest of it was easily inferred from his statements as governor, from newspaper and magazine articles and bios of him, and the agendas of his ideological brothers and sisters. We knew he was intellectually incurious and deeply ignorant of foreign affairs, he was callous and petty, he was an ideologue (remember, McCain was the moderate candidate at that time), and he was a terrible administrator. How reporters who knew about his history in the private sector were able to report on him advertising himself as "the CEO president" without laughing hysterically, I'll never know.

when all you've got is a Hammer...

I just listened to the first part of the Diane Rehm show, where I had the pleasure of hearing Newt f*^king Gingrich lecture today's politicians on, yes, being too partisan. Then, in his answer to the very first caller's question, he claimed that the only answer liberals have to global warming was "to raise taxes and give more power to trial lawyers."

That was right after he totally evaded the first emailed question about his own dubious role in the country's polarization with the Clinton impeachment.

But damn those politicians and their partisan soundbytes!

UPDATE 12:06PM: My landlady tells me that Gingrich eventually skipped out on Diane only 40 minutes into the show, which royally pissed her off, as he had promised her the whole hour, so she had no guest for the last 20 minutes (apparently, she spent it ranting about Gingrich's performance).

Gingrich is perhaps the worst of these hyperpartisan politicians (Tom Delay being second) when it comes to practicing oppositional politics. He doesn't care about actually fixing anything. Rather, his entire being is geared toward soundbytes and framing and political maneuvering. Everything, and I mean everything, that comes out of Gingrich's mouth has one purpose: to disparage and discredit his opponents. There are no moments of candor with him; he's always got one hand on his dagger and one eye on the backs of Democrats, liberals, and intellectuals.

This is what, to me at least, is emblematic of current Republicanism: defeating Democrats and marginalizing liberals is the point of every word and every action. You don't see this with liberals, or even most major Democrats (with perhaps the exception of Rahm Emmanuel). When Al Gore is talking about climate change or John Edwards about poverty, you don't get the sense that they've got Republicans or conservatives in the back of their mind, and they hardly ever come up.

Republicans, however, just won't STFU about Democrats and liberals and how stupid and evil and weak and traitorous and fascist they are, and Gingrich is one of the main reasons for this. He showed them a way of winning that was no holds barred, that had no vision, no answers, no end other than winning, and he molded the GOP to work like him. It's all they know, and that probably goes a long way to describing just why they've been so singularly ineffectual administrators and lawmakers. They can cut taxes, they can start wars, they can stage PR stunts, and they can denigrate liberals, but that's all they've got. That's the entire GOP playbook: 4 moves designed and poll-tested to win elections. They're not so great at maintaining healthy economies or keeping government running smoothly or answering societal problems or stopping impending environmental catastrophies, but for a decade and a half the GOP has been winning by pretending everything is a nail and they put all their other tools in hock when Gingrich proved to them that responsibility and openness are unnecessary in government. Now, of course, they're reaping what Gingrich and Armey and Delay sowed, as these tried-and-true techniques are diminishing in their returns. Authoritarian cultism, propaganda, and corruption can only hide one's incompetence for so long.

the dictionary definition of hypocrisy

From TPM:

In the wake of the Libby verdict, Fox News has wheeled out a brigade of legal analysts and their usual TV hosts, all of whom are reaching oddly similar conclusions: The verdict is flawed, and there was no underlying crime.

So the conservative gasbags on FOX News were complaining about the verdict because there was no underlying crime. That is, though Libby lied, he lied about something that is not, in fact, a criminal act. In a perjury and obstruction of justice trial. Of someone in the White House.

Of course, I'm just being facetious. After all, there is a major difference between the two cases: unlike adultery, leaking the identity of a clandestine CIA operative is, in fact, a federal crime. It could even constitute an act of domestic terrorism according to the Patriot Act.

a screw-up that boggles the mind

This is pretty amazing. From The New York Times (c/o Josh Marshall):

WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 — Last October, the North Koreans tested their first nuclear device, the fruition of decades of work to make a weapon out of plutonium.

For nearly five years, though, the Bush administration, based on intelligence estimates, has accused North Korea of also pursuing a secret, parallel path to a bomb, using enriched uranium. That accusation, first leveled in the fall of 2002, resulted in the rupture of an already tense relationship: The United States cut off oil supplies, and the North Koreans responded by throwing out international inspectors, building up their plutonium arsenal and, ultimately, producing that first plutonium bomb.

Okay, now this nuclear program stuff is a little confusing, so Josh explains:

Speaking very broadly, there are two big ways to make nuclear weapons -- with uranium and plutonium. Each involves different technical challenges and processes. And each has a different bang you get versus the complexity of the task of putting the thing together.

The big issue with North Korea has always been their plutonium production. Back in 1994, they were on the brink of being able to produce bombs with the plutonium they were making. The US came close to war with the North Koreans over it. But the two countries settled on something called the 'Agreed Framework' in which the North Koreans' plutonium production operation was shuttered and placed under international inspection in exchange for fuel oil shipments and assistance building 'light water' nuclear reactors.

We don't need to get into the details of the agreement at the moment. The relevant point is that from 1994 to 2002 the North Korean nuclear weapons program was frozen in place. The strong consensus judgment was that they had not yet made any nuclear weapons. And during that period they could not access the plutonium they had already produced.

It was on the basis of this alleged uranium enrichment program -- which may well not even have existed -- that the US pulled out of that agreement. This allowed the North Koreans to get back into the plutonium business with a gusto. And they have since produced -- by most estimates -- at least a hand full of nuclear weapons, one of which, albeit a rather feeble one, they detonated last October.

As he rightly notes, this is a pretty serious fuck-up even if the uranium program was real. But it's entirely possible that the Bush Administration undermined the one and only working deterrent to a North Korean nuclear arsenal and then did NOTHING while Kim Jong Il developed just such a thing over a figment of the CIA's imagination.

It's difficult even to articulate how big of a botch this was, what supreme incompetence at the highest levels this required. Like the Iraq War and the Bush Administration itself, this is a fuckup that has transformed world politics. Of all the nations that could've gone nuclear, North Korea was the worst case scenario (the second worst, incidentally, is Iran). Bill Clinton achieved a diplomatic solution that at worst slowed North Korean nuclear development to a crawl, and at best halted it entirely, yet after only a single year in office, George W. Bush demolished it and replaced it with... nothing.

And here we are, with a world that is significantly more perilous than it was only a decade ago, due perhaps single-handedly to George W. Bush.