The Rebranding Of The Republican Party As A Force For Willfully Destructive Anarchy

This morning the Senate voted to keep the government up and running through December 11 with a huge bipartisan vote, 78-20. All 20 extremists who voted for a shut down were sociopaths determined to prosecute the Republican Party's War On Women. Rubio, a coward who can't decide what he is, was afraid to commit himself and ducked the vote entirely. Of the 20 Republicans voting to shut down the government, the 5 most likely to be significantly hurt in next year's elections are Pat Toomey (R-PA), Dean Heller (R-NV), Richard Burr (R-NC), John Boozman (R-AR), Roy Blunt (R-MO). Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, who are running for the GOP presidential nomination, have to work this vote into their electoral calculus, easy for Cruz, more nuanced for Paul. Vitter's vote to shut down the government could also impact his struggling gubernatorial campaign back in Louisiana. The full list of the shut down senators:

• Roy Blunt (R-MO)
• John Boozman (R-AR)
• Richard Burr (R-MC)
• Dan Coats (R-IN)
• Tom Cotton (R-AR)
• Mike Crapo (R-ID)
• Ted Cruz (R-TX)
• Dean Heller (R-NV)
• James Inhofe (R-OK)
• James Lankford (R-OK)
• Mike Lee (R-UT)
• Jerry Moran (R-KS)
• Rand Paul (R-KY)
• James Risch (R-ID)
• Ben Sasse (R-NE)
• Tim Scott (R-SC)
• Jefferson Beauregard Sessions (KKK-AL)
• Richard Shelby (R-AL)
• Pat Toomey (R-PA)
• David Vitter (R-LA)

Boehner plans to ram the same CR (continuing resolution) through the House today with lots of Democratic support and not so much support from his own crackpot conference. The CR, of course, did not include Cruz's poison pill to defund Planned Parenthood, something his allies are expected to try-- and fail, just as Cruz did in the Senate-- to add in the House.

Geoffrey Kabaservice is a good writer and, for a Republican, a smart guy, and I don't mean to disparage him or his work, especially not his book Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party. This week, though, in his op-ed for the NY Times, "Anarchy in the House," he mistakenly categorizes the two sides of the Republican civil war that is currently raging in Congress as a fight between "comparatively moderate and conservative factions." 

There are no moderates in this fight. It is, in reality, a battle between conservatives-- albeit some who could be called "mainstream conservatives"-- and reactionaries and radical extremists. Boehner is a hard-core conservative by every reasonable definition, as are his congressional allies. The enemies within the GOP who brought him down are not conservatives. A conservative and a reactionary are two different species. A conservative, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is someone "believing in the value of established and traditional practices in politics and society." A reactionary, on the other hand, is "someone who favors reaction," as in "a reverse movement or tendency; an action in a reverse direction or manner." 

In short, a conservative wants to keep things the way they are. A reactionary wants to take things backwards to the way they used to be.

Kabaservice points out that in the early 1960s realism was kicked out of the Republican ideology. "The radicals who coalesced around Senator Barry Goldwater’s insurgent presidential campaign were zealots," he wrote.

They had no interest in developing a governing agenda. Their program consisted mainly of getting rid of the New Deal and every other government effort to promote the general welfare. As Goldwater famously wrote: "My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones."

That strain of reactionary thought-- along with the bigotry and hatred that usually accompany it-- is what is running rampant in today's GOP. That's what Ted Cruz is all about... to a T.

Goldwater’s followers viewed any Republicans who wanted to govern as traitors to be stamped out. They accused their own leadership of conspiring with Democrats to thwart conservatives; the theme of betrayal from within had been the essence of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s populist appeal. They had no strategy other than taking over the party and nominating Goldwater. He would win the 1964 election, they believed, because a hidden majority would flock to the polls when presented with a candidate who wasn’t what we would now call “politically correct.”

Years ago, I wrote a history of the Republican civil war between the moderates and radicals of the Goldwater era. I’m sufficiently alarmed, watching history repeat itself, that I now work as a research consultant for the Main Street Partnership, an organization of over 70 members of Congress who represent the moderate-conservative wing of the Republican Party. Their rivals are members of the Freedom Caucus, who would rather close the government than compromise.

Once again, the battle is between Republicans who want to govern and those who don’t. The radicals have no realistic alternative solutions of their own. Even to contemplate the negotiations and compromises such policies entail would sully their ideological purity.

Senator Goldwater, despite his brave talk of repeal, was an isolated, powerless legislator. The extremists who opposed John A. Boehner as speaker are likewise a small faction without the ability to accomplish any positive program. InsideGov, a government watchdog site, recently came up with a list of the least effective members of Congress, as determined by the percentage of bills they sponsored that went on to pass committee. Ideological extremism correlates closely with legislative impotence.

That’s unsurprising, since many members of the Freedom Caucus put a higher priority on scoring purity points than on carrying out the nation’s business. Its chairman, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, is, by this accounting, the second-least effective member of Congress. The only one who’s even less effective is another longtime critic of Mr. Boehner, Representative Steve King of Iowa, not one of whose 94 sponsored bills has passed the committee stage. Most of Mr. Boehner’s harshest critics lurk at the bottom of the Lugar Center’s Bipartisanship Index. Representative Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, who triumphantly tweeted “Today the establishment lost” after Mr. Boehner’s resignation, is ranked last.

The Republican Party’s unhappy ideological adventure in the early ’60s ended in disaster. Goldwater not only lost the election in a landslide, but he dragged down the entire Republican ticket. The main result of conservative overreach was to hand President Lyndon B. Johnson the liberal supermajority he needed to pass Medicare and Medicaid.

The present resurgence of anti-governing conservatism is also likely to end badly for Republicans. The extremists have the ability to disrupt the Congress, but not to lead it. Their belief that shutdowns will secure real concessions is magical thinking, not legislative realism. And the more power they gain, the less likely it becomes that a Republican-controlled Congress can pass conservative legislation, or indeed any legislation at all.

It’s true that sometimes no legislation is better than bad legislation. But the United States faces real problems, including stagnant wages, family instability, infrastructure collapse and long-term indebtedness. If Republicans can’t advance their own solutions, they’ll have to deal with what Democrats-- or harsh realities-- impose on them. Paralysis is not a plan.

The rebranding of Republicanism as a force for anarchy has spilled into the presidential contest and threatens the general election chances of the eventual nominee. The Republican establishment, and the party’s governing majority, have the power to quell this insurgency, whether by abandoning the so-called Hastert rule, which requires a majority of the majority to approve of legislation before it can come up for a vote, or by mounting primary challenges of their own. It’s too late for Mr. Boehner to face down the radicals, but his successor will have to if the Republican Party is to have a meaningful future.

As if this weren't painful enough for Republicans, it's being played out in the context of a superfluous battle royale between self-servers with little to no interest in the Republican Party running for the party's presidential nomination: multimillionaire failed business executive Carly Fiorina, former pediatric surgeon and Fox News contributor Ben Carson, and of course Trumpy the Clown.

This week, in a NY Times Magazine profile, Mark Leibovich took the deep dive into the fetid waters of Trumpism and Trump. His first sentence is from Trump himself: "I don't worry about anything." Now Trump is worth $4.5 billion (less than half of what he spuriously claims, according to Forbes), so he probably doesn't worry about the same things normal people worry about. But he worries, all right. Bank on it. For one thing, he seems obsessed with the idea that people will see him as a loser. (We'll come back to that in a moment.)

The Trump campaign may be a win-win for Trump, but it is a monstrous dilemma for a lot of other people. It is a dilemma for the Republican Party and a dilemma for the people Trump is running against. They would love to dismiss him as a sideshow and declare his shark jumped, except he keeps dominating the campaign and the conversation, and they have no clue whether to engage, attack, ignore or suck up in response. It is a dilemma for the elected leaders, campaign strategists, credentialed pundits and assorted parasites of the "establishment." They have a certain set of expectations, unwritten rules and ways of doing things that Trump keeps flouting in the most indelicate of ways. And, of course, it is a dilemma for the media, who fear abetting a circus.

... Getting close to Trump is nothing like the teeth-­pulling exercise that it can be to get any meaningful exposure to a candidate like, say, Hillary Clinton. This is a seductive departure in general for political reporters accustomed to being ignored, patronized and offered sound bites to a point of lobotomy by typical politicians and the human straitjackets that surround them. In general, Trump understands and appreciates that reporters like to be given the time of day. It’s symbiotic in his case because he does in fact pay obsessive attention to what is said and written and tweeted about him. Trump is always saying that so-and-so TV pundit "spoke very nicely" about him on some morning show and that some other writer "who used to kill me" has now come around to "loving me." There is a Truman Show aspect to this, except Trump is the director-- continually selling, narrating and spinning his story while he lives it.

... I asked whether he had ever experienced self-doubt. The question seemed to catch Trump off guard, and he flashed a split second of, if not vulnerability, maybe non­swagger. "Yes, I think more than people would think," he told me. When? "I don’t want to talk about it." He shrug-­smirked. "Because, you know-- probably more than people would think. I understand how life can go. Things can happen." This was a rare moment when Trump’s voice trailed off, even slightly. He then handed me a sheet of new polling data that someone had put on his desk. "Beautiful numbers," he said, inviting me to take them with me.

... Trump makes no attempt to cloak his love of fame and, admirably, will not traffic in that tiresome politicians’ notion that his campaign is "not about me, it’s about you." The ease with which Trump exhibits, and inhabits, his self-­regard is not only central to his "brand" but also highlights a kind of honesty about him. He can even seem hostile to any notion of himself as humble servant-- that example of mod­esty that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln strove for.

The idea of a president as Everyman stands at odds with his glamorized vision for the nation. The president should be a man apart, exceptional and resplendent in every way. "Jimmy Carter used to get off Air Force One carrying his luggage," Trump said. "I used to say, 'I don’t want a president carrying his luggage.'" Carter was a nice man, Trump allowed. "But we want someone who is going to go out and kick ass and win." Which apparently cannot be done by someone "who’s gonna come off carrying a large bag of underwear."

... Resentment of this class has built over several years. It has been expressed on both sides, by the rise of insurgent movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street (Trump’s railing against fund-­raiser "blood money," "bloodsucker" lobbyists and Wall Street "paper pushers" would play well across the board). As a reporter in Washington, I, too, have grown exceedingly weary of this world-- the familiar faces, recycled tropes and politics as usual-- and here was none other than Donald J. Trump, the billionaire blowhard whom I had resisted as a cartoonish demagogue, defiling it with resonance. He tacked not to the left or to the right, but against the "losers" and "scumbags" in the various chapters of the club: the pundits who "wear heavy glasses" and "sit around the table," the "political hacks" selling out American interests overseas. Karl Rove "is a totally incompetent jerk," Trump told the crowd in Dallas, referring to the Fox News commentator and chief Republican strategist of the George W. Bush years. The crowd went nuts at the Rove put-down, which in itself is remarkable-- the "architect" of Bush’s political ride being abused by a right-­leaning crowd in Bush’s home state.

Vincent Harding (1931-2014)

"For those who seek a gentle, nonabrasive hero whose recorded speeches can be used as inspirational resources for rocking our memories to sleep, Martin Luther King Jr. is surely the wrong man."

-- Vincent Harding, who wrote MLK's 1967 anti-Vietnam
War speech, to the National Catholic Reporter in 1997

"Sen. Barry Goldwater (Ariz.), who was the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, said the speech 'could border a bit on treason.' "

-- from Matt Schudel's WaPo obituary of Dr. Harding

by Ken

No, the name of Dr. Harding, who died from an aneurysm on Tuesday at 83, wasn't familiar to me. It's a shame that an obituary has to be the way we learn about people we should have know about, but better late than never.

In his Washington Post obit, Matt Schudel describes Dr. Harding as "a historian who was an influential behind-the-scenes figure during the civil rights movement and who wrote a controversial speech for Martin Luther King Jr. that condemned the war in Vietnam." That speech, Matt says later, "was seen as bringing together the two major tides of protest in the 1960s: civil rights and the antiwar movement."

Here's how Matt chronicles the speech that, nearly 50 years later, still provided the hook for its author's obit:

Dr. Harding, who said his service in the Army made him a dedicated pacifist, was a lay minister in Chicago when he began working for the civil rights movement in the late 1950s. He moved to Atlanta in 1961, settling around the corner from King’s family.

Soon afterward, Dr. Harding and his wife founded the Mennonite House, one of the South’s first interracial gathering places for proponents of civil rights.

While teaching at Atlanta’s Spelman College in the mid-1960s, Dr. Harding began to explore the moral implications of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He wrote a letter to King and other civil rights leaders outlining a critical stance toward the war, then composed a speech for King that addressed Vietnam in the context of civil rights.

King delivered the speech at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 — one year to the day before he was assassinated in Memphis. The speech, often called “A Time to Break Silence,” was little changed from Dr. Harding’s original draft.

“A time comes when silence is betrayal,” King said. “And that time has come for us in Vietnam.”

He called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and said it was morally indefensible to send African American troops to “guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

King concluded that “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

An overflow crowd of 3,000 gave King a standing ovation, but his message was not well received in other circles. A New York Times editorial criticized King’s views, and the NAACP called the speech a “serious tactical error.”

Sen. Barry Goldwater (Ariz.), who was the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, said the speech “could border a bit on treason.”

It's easy to make fun of Barry Goldwater's "could border a bit on treason" imbecility. But just think how his modern-day ideological heirs would react -- when, for example, it already qualifies as out-and-out treason to show insufficient respect toward an obviously thieving, gun-violence-promoting pile of puke like Cliven Bundy.

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," Dr. Johnson said. And the dominant strain of American fake-patriotism, so long so intimately entwined with the scourge of racism, has reached such depths that it has become the worship and practice of scoundreltry.

As for Dr. Harding's life after (and before) the MLK speech:

In his later academic work as a historian, Dr. Harding wrote several books describing the development of radical ideals among African Americans and said King belonged squarely in that tradition.

The 1967 speech condemning the Vietnam War, Dr. Harding said, was not an anomaly but was a pure reflection of King’s evolving views of the role of civil rights on the world stage.

“For those who seek a gentle, nonabrasive hero whose recorded speeches can be used as inspirational resources for rocking our memories to sleep,” Dr. Harding told the National Catholic Reporter in 1997, “Martin Luther King Jr. is surely the wrong man.”

Vincent Gordon Harding was born July 25, 1931, in New York City and was raised by a single mother who worked as a cleaning woman.

He graduated from City College of New York in 1952 and received a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1953 before serving in the Army for two years. He received a master’s degree in 1956 and a doctorate in 1965, both in history from the University of Chicago.

A Seventh-day Adventist early in life, Dr. Harding later adopted the Mennonite faith, known for its pacifist beliefs.

After King’s death, Dr. Harding became the first director of what was then the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center and then led the Institute of the Black World, both in Atlanta. In 1974, Dr. Harding moved to Philadelphia to teach at Temple University and later the University of Pennsylvania. He joined the faculty of Denver’s Iliff School of Theology in 1981.

He wrote or edited more than 20 books, including “The Other American Revolution” (1980), “There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America” (1981) and “Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero” (1996).

In the 1970s and 1980s, Dr. Harding was a prominent voice in an often-heated debate over the purpose and direction of black studies courses. Although he had been educated at mixed-race or predominantly white institutions from high school through graduate school, Dr. Harding advocated a form of racial separatism in education, at least for a while.

“Those who have colonized us for 300 years are essentially unqualified to educate our children,” he wrote in the Times in 1970.

Dr. Harding believed African American communities should develop “alternatives to white public and private education” and “the means to keep these black experiments in educational creativity under the control of the black community.”

Other scholars, both black and white, criticized his views as polarizing and academically unsound.

It would be “a very serious error,” Michael R. Winston, director of Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, told The Washington Post in 1982, to believe “there’s no room for conventional scholarship in black studies.”

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Garry Wills on Willard: "What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it?"

Willard's way, per GW: "Ask not what you can do for your
country, but what your country can do for your family."

"What vestige of a backbone is Romney left with? Things he was once proud of -- health-care guarantees, opposition to noxious emissions, support of gay rights and women’s rights, he had the shamelessness to treat as matters of shame all through his years-long crawl to the Republican nomination."

-- Garry Wills, in a NYRB blogpost, "What Romney Lost"

by Ken

Maybe I was so convinced -- or maybe just so afraid (after surviving eight years of the "Chimpy the Prez" Bush regime -- that Willard Inc. was going to be elected president that I gave very little thought to a post-candidature Willard. And certainly didn't think to make the connection when circumstances had me writing about George McGovern just a few weeks ago.

Luckily, we have Garry Wills for such things. "What happens to those who lose a presidential campaign?" he asks setting off on a new NYRB blogpost, "What Romney Lost." "Some can do it with heads rightly held high," he writes, "and go on to give valuable service to the nation."

We were reminded of this just two weeks before the recent election, when George McGovern died. Though he underwent a humiliating defeat by Richard Nixon forty years before, he was a man of integrity, some of whose ideas were continued by people who worked in his 1972 campaign, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, veterans of his Texas office that year. McGovern was re-elected to the Senate after his presidential loss, where he performed important services, like defying the cattle, egg, and sugar lobbies to set up national dietary standards. This was a long-time commitment of his. Even before he went into the Senate, he had served as President Kennedy’s point man in the Food for Peace Program. In 1998, President Clinton appointed him his ambassador to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, where he worked effectively to curb world hunger. Above all, though he was a heroic flyer in World War II, he was a principled opponent of useless militarism.

The obvious question then is: "What public service do we expect from Mitt Romney?" Already you're snickering, right? Garry's thought: "He will no doubt return to augmenting his vast and hidden wealth, with no more pesky questions about where around the world it is stashed, or what taxes (if any) he paid, carefully sheltered from the rules his fellow citizens follow."

The roster of modern defeated presidential candidates isn't kind to Willard. Going back to --

BARRY GOLDWATER -- who,

after his massive defeat, stayed true enough to his principled conservatism that the modern Republican Party was a beneficiary of his legacy -- a beneficiary but not the determiner of that legacy. It was Goldwater himself who told the heir to his influence, Richard Nixon, that it was time to cleanse the White House by leaving it. Though Goldwater was a factor in the Southern strategy of Nixon, he was no racist, and no fanatic of any stripe. He was an acidulous critic of the religious right and a strong advocate for women’s rights (like abortion). He had backbone.

Which prompts the thought I quoted atop this post, about Willard's vestigial backbone.

CARTER? GORE? DUKAKIS? DOLE?

Other defeated candidates compiled stellar records after they lost. Two of them later won the Nobel Prize -- Jimmy Carter for international diplomacy, Al Gore for his environmental advocacy. John Kerry is still an important voice for the principles he has always believed in as a Democrat. Michael Dukakis carries on as the college professor he always was, with no need to reject or rediscover any of the policies he championed. Robert Dole joined with McGovern in international nutritional projects.

[Notably missing here, I note, is any mention of a certain Young Johnny McCranky. -- Ed.]

"None of these men," says Garry, "engineered a wholesale repudiation of their former principles." Willard, by contrast, underwent the transformation from a Senate candidate running to the left of Ted Kennedy on gay rights and abortion to a presidential candidate "to the right of Strom Thurmond." ("He decided to hire more expensive lawn care only on the principle of 'I'm running for office, for Pete's sake, I can't have illegals.' ")

Garry contrasts the war heroes McGovern and Dole ("They asked what they could do for their country") with Willard, "who avoided military service as a missionary, said none of his sons of military age could serve because they were serving the nation by helping him, year after year, run for president. 'Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for your family.'" [Emphasis added.]

Many losing candidates became elder statesmen of their parties. What lessons will Romney have to teach his party? The art of crawling uselessly? How to contemn 47 percent of Americans less privileged and beautiful than his family? How to repudiate the past while damaging the future? It is said that he will write a book. Really? Does he want to relive a five-year-long experience of degradation? What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it? His friends can only hope he is too morally obtuse to realize that crushing truth. Losing elections is one thing. But the greater loss, the real loss, is the loss of honor.

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Rick Perlstein wants us to remember that Martin Luther King Jr., so casually lionized today, was far from lionized while he was alive

Dr. King led this protest outside City Hall in Chicago in 1966.

by Ken

Every Martin Luther King Day, our friend Rick Perlstein bristles at the sanctimonious pro forma tributes to Dr. King, like this from President Obama: "Half a century ago, America was moved by a young preacher who called a generation to action..."

"No, Mr. President," Rick writes, "the preponderance of white Americans, and much of the black establishment, despised him half a century ago." And Rick recalls a pair of posts he wrote in June 2008 -- and even then, he explained at the start of the first post, "The Meaning of Box 722," that "for at least six months now" he had been "planning, and putting off, this post." His hand was finally forced, he wrote, by "the imminent occasion of the first African American major-party nominee."

The post consisted of selected annotated selections from the mass of material he found in "Box 722," a tiny bit of the vast hoard of papers of the late Sen. Paul Douglas housed in what was then known as the Chicago Historical Society, which he perused when he was researching the senator's unsuccessful reelection campaign of 1966 while he was working on Nixonland, his landmark history of the conservative ascendancy that took began taking shape surprisingly quickly after Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964 -- so "gigantic" that "it appeared to pundits the Republican Party would be forever consigned to the outer darkness if it ever entertained a Goldwater-style conservative law-and-order platform again."

But a startling turnaround was already evident in the '66 midterm elections, when --

most of the new liberal congressmen swept in on LBJ's coattails -- the congressional class that gave us Medicare and Medicaid, the first serious environmental legislation, National Endowments for the Humanities and Arts, Head Start, the Voting Rights Act, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the end of racist immigration quotas, Legal Aid, and more -- was swept out on a tide of popular reaction.

And an important part of that turnaround, Rick felt, was attributable to white backlash against the civil-rights uprising, most emphatically including the part of it under the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr. "In the summer of 1966," Rick reminded us, "as debate over open housing raged in Congress -- which, if Chicago did, would be a first. It was the most segregated city in the north." What had brought him to Chicago? "[A] teenager answering a job ad walked over the border from Chicago into the all-white city of Cicero, and for that sin and no other was beaten to death."

Box 722 of the Douglas papers contains mail the Senator received that year on the subject of open housing and the King visit to Chicago. Those letters, Rick wrote, "comprise an unmatched emotional history on how the white middle class built by the New Deal learned to vote Republican."

Here's one, written in March 1965, while the Voting Rights Act was being debated:

I am white and am praying that you vote against open housing in the consideration of Equal Rights.

Just because the negro refuses to live among his own race -- that alone should give you the answer.

I was forced to sell my home in Chicago ('Lawndale') at a big loss because of the negroes taking over Lawndale -- their morals are the lowest (and supported financially by Mayor Daley as you well know) -- and the White Race by law.

Please don't take away our bit of peace and freedom to choose our neighbors.

What did Luther King mean when he faced the nation on TV New Year's day -- announcing he will not be satisfied until the wealth of America is more evenly divided?

Sounds like Communism to Americans. 'Freedom for all' -- including the white race, Please!

As he read the letters in Box 722, Rick wrote , "I felt like I was peering into the dark soul of America to a depth I'd never thought possible." Here's another:

Recently we members of the Marquette Park area of Chicago witnessed violence over the so called subject of civil rights. Since the Civil Rights Act Act was passed all we have seen is violence, riots, and general defiance of the laws of our land by the Negro population under the guise of this nebulous term, civil rights. When is the Congress going to wake up to the fact that it cannot legislate morals or love?

"We white people have taken a lot from the Negro. We have been patient, and now find ourselves pushed up against a wall by groups that feel it is their God given right to have our property. We have worked hard and saved to get what we now own. Because we do work hard and wish to maintain our property are we to be denied the right to dispose of our property as we see fit? Is the ultimate aim the same as the Soviet Union when all property was collectivized. . . .

The Civil Rights legislation amendment that which deals with the so-called open occupancy law is disgusting and makes me almost ashamed to admit that it has been proposed in America. All this civil rights legislation is un-American.

There's much more, in this and a follow-up post from 2008. I'm leaving out most of the guts of Rick's argument.

Nevertheless, let me jump to this summation:

Here is the fundamental tragedy of the backlash: Voters like this empowered a party that decided they didn't need protection against predatory subprime mortgage fraud. Didn't need affordable, universal health insurance; made it easier for companies to rape their pensions; kept on going back to the well to destroy their Social Security; worked avidly to shred their union protections. Fought, in fact, every decent and wise social provision that made it possible in the first place for mere factory workers to live in glorious Chicago bungalows, or suburban homes, in the first place.

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Libel And Celebrity Outing From Liberace To Barry Goldwater

Which one didn't seek redress from the courts to save his manly honor?

Last year, one of the most notorious white shoe law firms on K Street, Sidley Austin-- also the sixth largest law firm in the U.S.-- spent a few weeks harassing me over a post I did about one of their shadier clients, right-wing extremist John Shadegg (R-AZ). Shadegg is on constant alert over publicity concerning his illicit affair with the wife of a congressional colleague, Jon Christensen (R-NE), an affair that resulted in either one or two fist fights between the two right-wing imbeciles. Shadegg's lawyers claim everyone involved-- except the former Mrs. Christensen, who refuses to comment on the record-- denies it ever happened. They threatened to sue me if I didn't take down the post. After several months of discussing it with them-- as well as free speech attorneys who said I could be sued-- I took it (basically an excerpt from a book that exposed Shadegg) down. Of course a 3 month old post isn't that big a loss, especially since it had been widely propagated. I then proceeded to get an insurance policy that covers libel.

I wasn't even aware that public figures could successfully sue for libel and slander-- but I was so wrong. This month's Out has a column talking about famous people who have successfully sued to remove the "stain" from their reputation after being outed. Tom Cruise's suit against French porn star Chad Slater is probably the most famous, but Liberace's successful 1959 suit against the Daily Mirror is certainly the most telling of the absurdity of these suits. Liberace "reconstructed his actual emotions with difficulty afterward, he said, but 'plain, simple, ordinary fear is what I think I felt,' he related. 'I had a secret feeling I was about to get clobbered.' As he described it, 'I find it difficult to put into words how I felt that Monday, June 8, 1959, as I sat in an English courtroom, Queen's Bench Number Four, surrounded by black-robed, white-wigged gentlemen, and prepared to hear myself vilified, as well as defended, and waited to find out whether I'd done the right thing or the wrong one in following the insistence of my conscience and the confirmation of my attorney.'"

The way Liberace's attorney defended him against the attacks of U.K. gossip monger William Conner (aka- Cassandra) brings to mind Glenn Beck on Fox News: "a literary assassin who dips his pen in vitriol, hired by this sensational newspaper to murder reputations and hand out sensational articles on which its circulation is built."

While the trial took many ducks and turns, one phrase in the article dominated the proceedings from both sides. This was Conner's identification of the pianist as "the summit of sex-- Masculine, Feminine and Neuter. Everything that He, She and It can ever want."... If Conner could smirk about his language, it horrified the pianist. It named the nightmares from his childhood. "I prayed I'd never seen that, never heard it and that I'd never hear it again. That was the passage that decided me to sue. That was the one I was afraid would haunt me all my life."

The trial did rotate on the phrase. The defendants argued that Conner had intended it as a statement of the pianist's sex appeal in general. They calculated all their evidence and witnesses to this end, to prove the "sexiness" of Liberace's act. The plaintiffs countered this strategy by affirming the basis of Liberace's appeal to family and traditional values. They also leapt onto the phrase's challenge to Liberace's masculinity or maleness... "I had put myself on the block of public opinion in defense of one of the three most important things in a man's life ...," he testified, "perhaps all of them. They are Life itself. Manhood. And Freedom." He elaborated: "Naturally my life, as such, was not at stake. But the attack on me had threatened my mother's health and so, her life. And, perhaps the quality of my life had been put in jeopardy. Certainly my manhood had been seriously attacked and with it my freedom... freedom from harassment, freedom from embarrassment and most importantly, freedom to work at my profession."... The idea, of course, was that Liberace was homosexual and that homosexuals were not men-- not real men, not natural men-- not Men. That was the issue for Liberace... Denying one's homosexuality, then, equaled defending one's manly prerogatives of earning a living. Liberace managed it like George Cukor, Anthony Perkins, and Rock Hudson. In denying his homosexuality, he confirmed his career.

During the trial Liberace claimed he was not a homosexual, had never had sex with a male and that he opposed "the practice because it offends convention and it offends society." He was lying his gay ass off but he won the case as well as $22,000, "the largest settlement of any libel case in British history."

All but one of the other gays who sued to clear their good names were entertainers: Jason Donovan and Robbie Williams. The remaining plaintiff was a conservative American politician, who was also a gay rights advocate, Barry Goldwater. Lately news of gay Republican politicians being accused of raping young boys or trying to fellate undercover police in public restrooms is so common as to be nearly passe. But in 1964, claiming a Republican politician was gay was still shocking. Doing his part to bury the Goldwater campaign in 1964, Fact publisher Ralph Ginzburg tarted up a special issue entitled "The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater." The goal wasn't so much to prove that Goldwater was homosexual as to prove he was mentally unfit to be president. The Fact articles ran some kind of a poll of the 2,417 psychiatrists (out of 12,356 they had contacted) of which 1,189 said Goldwater was unfit to be president. after his historic defeat, Goldwater sued for libel, winning one dollar from the jury, which also awarded him $75,000 in punitive damages because of the magazine's "recklessness." Although the kooks and fascists on the far right who make up the Republican Party today pay homage to Goldwater as one of their movement's founding fathers, he would clearly be repulsed by what the GOP has degenerated into. Goldwater had a distinctly libertarian bent to his brand of conservatism and certainly defended abortion rights and gay rights and had nothing but contempt for the Elmer Gantry religionists that control so much of the GOP these days.

Now that the history lesson is done, see if you can guess which one is either Jason Donovan or Barry Goldwater, Be sure to stay 'til the end when all is revealed:

By November Will There Be Any Non-Mormons Left Voting For McCain?

It's well known in Arizona political circles that Barry Goldwater always hated McCain and avoided him whenever he could. McCain's crooked approach to politics and sleazy relationships with bribe wielding big money men, coupled with his nasty personality and suck-up attitude always made Goldwater's skin crawl. If the book Barry Goldwater, Jr. (penned with John Dean) about his dad, Pure Goldwater, wasn't enough to convince you that Barry, Sr. had passed his antipathy towards McCain on to his whole clan, be sure to read his granddaughter's post at HuffPo. She and her siblings joined other members of the Goldwater family in endorsing Barack Obama.

We believe strongly in what our grandfather stood for: honesty, integrity, and personal freedom, free from political maneuvering and fear tactics. I learned a lot about my grandfather while producing the documentary, Mr. Conservative Goldwater on Goldwater. Our generation of Goldwaters expects government to provide for constitutional protections. We reject the constant intrusion into our personal lives, along with other crucial policy issues of the McCain/Palin ticket.

My grandfather (Paka) would never suggest denying a woman's right to choose. My grandmother co-founded Planned Parenthood in Arizona in the 1930's, a cause my grandfather supported. I'm not sure about how he would feel about marriage rights based on same-sex orientation. I think he would feel that love and respect for ones privacy is what matters most and not the intolerance and poor judgment displayed by McCain over the years. Paka respected our civil liberties and passed on the message that that we should conduct our lives standing up for the basic freedoms we hold so dear.

Long before the current Goldwaters were born, their antecedents changed their name from Goldwasser and changed their religion to something that was more upwardly mobile at the time. Today it's ok to be Jewish and there are even some Jewish Republicans-- just like their were a few self-loathing or just really stupid Jews in the early 1930s who supported the Nazis in Germany. But the vast majority of Jews do not support right-wing parties and the GOP never fares very well with Jews. Every election cycle Republicans say this year we will get the Jews They never do-- and 2008 will not be the exception. A new Gallup poll shows that since the summer, more and more Jews have embraced the idea of a President Obama. He now leads McCain 74-22%. That's around the same number of Jews who voted for Bush in 2004. As you can see from the graph, Jewish support for Democrats has been pretty steady for three decades.



But this morning's big news isn't that Scotty McClellan endorsed Obama or that much of the Bush electoral coalition is swinging in Obama's direction or that most Jews are doing exactly what most Jews always do-- vote for the better candidate. No, it's the quality of the exhaustive 3 page NY Times Obama endorsement. The warm-up:

The United States is battered and drifting after eight years of President Bush’s failed leadership. He is saddling his successor with two wars, a scarred global image and a government systematically stripped of its ability to protect and help its citizens — whether they are fleeing a hurricane’s floodwaters, searching for affordable health care or struggling to hold on to their homes, jobs, savings and pensions in the midst of a financial crisis that was foretold and preventable.

As tough as the times are, the selection of a new president is easy. After nearly two years of a grueling and ugly campaign, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has proved that he is the right choice to be the 44th president of the United States.

And for a newspaper that actually endorsed McCain just a few months ago and has been part of the media cabal that has helped him create a false myth that he was a straight talking and honest maverick, they have certainly soured on him under long overdue scrutiny.

Senator John McCain of Arizona has retreated farther and farther to the fringe of American politics, running a campaign on partisan division, class warfare and even hints of racism. His policies and worldview are mired in the past. His choice of a running mate so evidently unfit for the office was a final act of opportunism and bad judgment that eclipsed the accomplishments of 26 years in Congress.

Given the particularly ugly nature of Mr. McCain’s campaign, the urge to choose on the basis of raw emotion is strong. But there is a greater value in looking closely at the facts of life in America today and at the prescriptions the candidates offer. The differences are profound.

Mr. McCain offers more of the Republican every-man-for-himself ideology, now lying in shards on Wall Street and in Americans’ bank accounts. Mr. Obama has another vision of government’s role and responsibilities.

...The American financial system is the victim of decades of Republican deregulatory and anti-tax policies. Those ideas have been proved wrong at an unfathomable price, but Mr. McCain-- a self-proclaimed “foot soldier in the Reagan revolution”-- is still a believer.

Mr. Obama sees that far-reaching reforms will be needed to protect Americans and American business.

Mr. McCain talks about reform a lot, but his vision is pinched. His answer to any economic question is to eliminate pork-barrel spending-- about $18 billion in a $3 trillion budget-- cut taxes and wait for unfettered markets to solve the problem.

It will should come as no surprise to anyone-- though it will-- that McCain-Palin is dragging the entire Republican Party down the toilet with it. Last night the Politico reported on GOP warnings of a rout.

An internal document circulating among House Republicans warns of an impending congressional bloodbath, listing 58 Republican-held House seats being at risk, and 11 already considered as good as gone. As many as 34 GOP-held seats are in serious jeopardy of swinging to Democrats, the assessment shows.

The seats that they know they're losing are many of the ones we've been talking about all year here at DWT and pushing at Blue America. According to the memo they've written off the seats currently held by Randy Kuhl (NY-29), Don Young (AK), Tim Walberg (MI-07), Joe Knollenberg (MI-09), Tom Feeney (FL-24), Ric Keller (FL-08) as well as almost all the open seats from which Republicans-- some facing prison, some just sick of politics-- are retiring.

Ironically, the only blue to red switch, will be in FL-16, where the Republicans are going to beat a corrupt Republican who switched his voter registration to Democratic a few months before the 2006 election. Rahm Emanuel explained to him that Foley had a problem about to break and that if Mahoney became a Democrat he could promise him the seat. Mahoney did win (as a "Democrat") but has voted with the GOP more than almost any other Democrats in the House. Evan a lowlife like Emanuel is afraid to defend him now. Let the GOP take the district back. It will mean a net pick up of 36 instead of 37 seats-- or maybe 40 instead of 41.

To be honest with you, I would rather the Democrats win far fewer seats as long as they are real Democrats, not these phony nominal ones from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party who are just as bad as actual Republicans. How do you know who the real ones are? We did the work for you. If you can help... even $5 or $10 helps.


UPDATE: ANOTHER MAINSTREAM REPUBLICAN DUMPS McCAIN

Former Massachusetts Bill Weld (R), just endorsed Obama. "Senator Obama is a once-in-a-lifetime candidate who will transform our politics and restore America's standing in the world," Weld said in a statement. "We need a president who will lead based on our common values and Senator Obama demonstrates an ability to unite and inspire. Throughout this campaign I've watched his steady leadership through trying times and I'm confident he is the best candidate to move our country forward."

DOES McCAIN EVEN HAVE A CHANCE IN NOVEMBER?

Paul Krugman hasn't been an advocate for Obama this year. In fact, he's tilted so far towards Hillary that I thought he might tumble off his rock-steady Rocinante. But this morning he's back being  an analyst and back being the brilliant and relevant Paul Krugman whose columns have become such a key part of the liberal conversation. And he's got a warning for Obama: don't squander a sure thing. A sure thing? The polls show a tight race between Obama and a third term for Bush, not a landslide.

Political scientists, by and large, believe that what happens on the campaign trail, while it gives talking heads something to talk about, is more or less irrelevant to what happens on Election Day. Instead, they place their faith in statistical analyses that identify three main determinants of presidential voting.

First, votes are affected by the state of the economy-- mainly economic performance in the year or so preceding the election.

Second, the approval rating of the current president strongly affects his party’s ability to hold power.
Third, the electorate seems to suffer from an eight-year itch: parties rarely manage to hold the White House for more than two terms in a row.

This year, all of these factors strongly favor the Democrats. Indeed, the Democratic Party hasn’t enjoyed this favorable a political environment since 1964. Robert Erikson, a political scientist at Columbia, tells me: “It would be difficult to find any serious indicator that does not point to a Democratic victory in 2008.”

What about polls that still seem to give John McCain a good chance of winning? Pay no attention, say the experts: general election polls this early tell you almost nothing about what will happen in November. Remember 1992: as late as June, Gallup put Ross Perot in first place, Bill Clinton in third.

Of course, no one expects McCain or his desperate corporate allies-- and that, obviously, includes the media-- to just raise the white flag. If you think Hillary fought like a mad dog for the nomination, just wait 'til you see what McCain will do to give himself the opportunity to make up for those lost years in the Hanoi Hilton. Today's Wall Street Journal reports he's been working hard, almost Madonna-like, in re-defining the latest incarnation of John McCain as "a reliable conservative but not a George W. Bush clone" and will soon start the process of smearing Barack Obama with a series of campaign ads (and the kind of Rovian innuendo once-upon-a-time used against McCain himself).

And yet, the national media still shies away from a serious analysis of McCain's actual voting record in the Senate-- not his rhetoric or how he nods and winks on the Daily Show but how he actually voted. True, he's been prone to not showing up for tough votes-- or for even scurrying out of his seat and hanging out where one would normally expect to see Larry Craig during contentious times but he still has a voting record and even if the corporate media refuses to look at it seriously, Keith Poole, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego just did. He concludes that although McCain has been slightly less right-wing than the average Republican senator for much of his career, once he decided to run for president, he tossed the "moderate" and "maverick" guises off as fast as he could and re-invented himself as an extremist nut-job. He votes the Bush-Cheney line-- both domestically and internationally-- 95% of the time. The only Republicans who have more extreme voting records are an assortment of far from the mainstream neo-Confederates like James Inhofe (OK), John Cornyn (TX), David Diapers Vitter (LA), Jeff Sessions (AL), Saxby Chambliss (GA), Jim DeMint (SC), Miss McConnell (KY), Tom Coburn (OK)... the real bottom of the barrel. For this current session of Congress, McCain consistently ranks among the 20 most far right extremists in the Senate-- across the board policy-wise. Anyone who wants another 4 years of what we've just gone through need only examine John McCain's voting record to know who their candidate must be. And one thing anyone who pays any attention will soon find-- McCain is a radical right rubber stamp, but he sure isn't the principled Goldwater conservative he fancies himself-- or once fancied himself.

John Dean, whose latest book, Pure Goldwater was co-authored by Barry Goldwater, Jr. has this to say about the comparisons McCain is always trying to drum up between Goldwater and himself: "By calling himself a Goldwater Republican or Goldwater conservative, John McCain invites the comparison, but that is an error on McCain's part, for closer examination shows that he is not in the mold of Goldwater, notwithstanding his claims (or wishes) to the contrary."

In reading [Matt] Welch's work, McCain: The Myth of A Maverick, I was impressed by the striking differences between these two men, as was Welch. In the following discussion, I have combined my personal knowledge regarding Goldwater with what I have learned from Welch's books to offer an overall assessment.

To begin, Welch reports that McCain seeks to use the federal government to generate greater patriotism and expand the nation's greatness, while Goldwater – knowing the folly of empire and excessively large government – sought to maximize individual liberty and local autonomy.

Welch notes, too, that McCain has no problem whatsoever being a nasty if not a devious s.o.b. when he sees doing so as necessary to serve or accomplish a greater cause. Goldwater, on the other hand, rejected all incivility and dishonesty in public service, and refused to take the low road; for him, the ends never justified any means. McCain, we learn from Welch's book, has wanted to be president since returning from Vietnam, while Goldwater was drafted to be the GOP standard-bearer. Stated a bit differently, McCain's oversized ego provides him strength, while Goldwater curtained his natural strengths by always acting with great humility.

No wonder, then, that when McCain sought to suck up to Goldwater, Goldwater declined to embrace this very different politician. Welch points out that "McCain has spent much ... time puzzling over Goldwater's lack of embrace." Indeed, McCain stated in his memoir Worth the Fighting For when discussing Goldwater, "I admired him to the point of reverence, and I wanted him to like me.... He was usually cordial, just never as affectionate as I would have liked."

This is no surprise to anyone who knew Goldwater. Welch sums it up accurately: "[T]he biggest differences between McCain and Goldwater were so obvious, [and] so destined to keep the two men out of each other's arms, that McCain's inability to identify them borders on self-denial and political tone-deafness." The gulf is wide, and the difference fundamental: Goldwater loved America and its people; McCain loves power, and what it can do for McCain.

Although Goldwater initially supported McCain's run for the Senate, Goldwater knew an opportunist when he saw one, and did not like any of them. We chose not to dwell on the McCain/Goldwater relationship in Pure Goldwater, but we did report how, after assisting McCain win his Senate seat, Goldwater was forced to pull McCain up short for using his good name for fundraising, when McCain had tarnished his own name because of his involvement with the Keating Five. We also included correspondence to shows that McCain is not very good at keeping his word.

To know Goldwater-- as we believe those who read his unpublished private journal will-- is to understand how different these men are, and to see that McCain is cut from very different cloth than Goldwater. Goldwater considered public service a high calling, not an ego trip or power play. McCain was fortunate that Goldwater never publicly exposed him, but Goldwater was too good a Republican to do that and he thought too highly of McCain's father to sink his successor in the Senate.

Had Goldwater publicized what I believe to be his true feelings about John McCain, I doubt McCain would be the presumptive nominee of the GOP in 2008. Goldwater's political perceptions of others have proven extraordinarily prescient, so his reaction toward McCain is telling.