It's more than they deserve, of course, but here's one way that we can all help Chimpy and his family get the hell out of our White House

MITT'S NOT THE ONLY REPUBLICAN FLIP FLOPPIN' FOOL-- COLEMAN, SUNUNU & VOINOVICH TURN AROUND ON TREATY

I think when I first heard about opposition to a treaty regulating access to the world's seas there wasn't anyone credible against it at all. When Reagan was preisdent he had endorsed it-- and vowed to live by it's regulations until it had officially passed. The U.S. military wants it. Even Bush is for it. The only opposition is from the "black helicopter crowd," nuts and loons like Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and John Bolten. And they don't like it primarily because they just hate the UN and the concept of the UN. But these are the kinds of folks who just DO NOT BELIEVE in organized society-- the kinds of people who refuse to fund fire departments but who are rich enough to have their own for themselves.

Steve Clemons at The Washington Note has the whole story today about how kooks like Bolton and Frank Gaffney have gotten to rubber stamp wingnuts John Sununu (R-NH), Norm Coleman (R-MN) and George Voinovich (R-OH) to start making noises about changing their votes to oppose the bill. Right wingers are suspicious because if environmentalists and the UN want it, there must be something they can find to hate in it-- even if two Bushes and a Reagan thought it was in the country's interests to ratify the treaty.

Environmental groups endorse the treaty's protection of global fish stocks, the US navy endorses its assurance of free movement and the oil industry's trade group endorses its promise of a level playing field for companies staking claim to drill in the Arctic.

But Republican antagonists in the Senate, several of whom have derailed the treaty twice in the past, discount even the Bush administration's backing. They yesterday blocked a preliminary ratification vote, and in doing so declared it an auspicious date for foes of international institutions.

"There is no better time to celebrate the 62nd birthday of the United Nations than to say we don't want it," said Jim Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican senator who leads an annual effort to withhold US funds from the UN.

Inhofe... the craziest and most backward member of the U.S. Senate; figures. I called Andrew Rice, the exceptionally bright Oklahoma state senator who is running against him next year. I could see him rolling his eyes over the phone, embarrassed that of all the states in the country it had to be the one he's so proud of to be stuck with a nutcase like Inhofe.

"As a U.S. Senator who constantly portrays himself as a pro-national security public servant, Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe is now choosing to ignore the pleas of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of the Navy, among other military leaders, when they ask for Senate approval of UNCLOS.  American military leaders have made it clear that participation in UNCLOS will enhance our national security and that changes have been made in UNCLOS provisions to explicitly protect American interests.  And yet Jim Inhofe and a very small minority are working against our nation's best interests, simply because it might hurt the special interests he puts before the needs of Oklahomans again and again. Inhofe is clearly out of step with our national security needs."

The two most backward of the pathetic pygmies™ running for their party's useless presidential nomination, Huckabee and Thompson, have also weighed in against the treaty-- even if neither has much of a clue what it's about. "Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, and former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson have pointedly broken with Mr Bush on the treaty. 'At a time when customary international law in this area has proven sufficient, I believe the efforts of treaty proponents would be better spent reforming the United Nations,' Mr Thompson said yesterday," attempting to curry favor with that same old Black Helicopter crowd.

Taylor Marsh and Matt Stoller, neither of whom spend smuch times riding black helicopters, have both written eloquently on this today. If, like me, you feel it's time to celebrate the impending end of the Bush Years but getting rid of detrius like James Inhofe, Andrew Rice's Blue America page is open... 24/7.

The very reason we're forced to talk about the immigration issue is also why it's impossible to lift the level of discussion above wacko blithering

Or, poor Chimpy learns that if you live by Rove-ism,
you can also get it shoved way up your BE-hind


Last night I tried to suggest, in my characteristically subtle, breezy way, that the people who are driving the immigration issue are dangerous lunatics who should be hooked up to millions of volts of electrical current with a view to improving the clarity of their thinking.

Perhaps I should attempt a more detailed, reasoned statement of my position on immigration. The only thing is, I don't really have a detailed, reasoned position on immigration. The subject is way too complex for my poor brain.

I understand enough, however, to recognize when scum-sucking demagogues have gone into heavy-artillery attack mode on a position that is based on unmitigated ignorance and evil. And I understand that, the way our political system is set up, there is almost no hope of shutting those shitheads up and ever having a sensible discussion of the issue.

And I still don't see that it's even a particularly pressing issue. I certainly see that the arguments hurled by the anti-immigration demagogues are imbecilic fabrications. That doesn't add up to a crisis, though. In fact, the solution is embarrassingly simple, at least conceptutally: Just have the know-nothing wackos shut their friggin' pieholes. (No, I don't know how we do that, but as best I could tell, neither did the Senate immigration "reformers.")

Am I surprised, then, that immigration has become such a raging issue? No, not really, because it's an issue made to order for the political system bequeathed to us by Karl Rove.

Let me back up. Awhile back I made fleeting reference here to charisma, and to candidates past, present, or hypothetical who may or may not have it.

Now, there's no question in my mind that there really is such a thing as charisma: something that gives certain people a hold over a sizable number of other people out of all proportion to any identifiable qualities that might justify such appeal. If anyone really doubts this, we could certainly talk about it, but for now I'm going to assume that everyone here has been to high school.

The Karl Rove school of governing leans heavily on charisma. We've all heard some version of the story that must originate with Rove himself (who else could have told it?), the story of the first time he laid eyes on young George W. Bush, when Karl as a not especially valued aide in the White House of Chimpy's Poppy, George H.W.B., was sent to fetch the prodigal son when he arrived in Washington from, as I recall, his grad-school graduation. The minor details don't matter; it's the gut punch that counts here, and the punch line is that Karl seems to have taken one look at the chump off the old clunk and creamed in his pants.

Rigorously filtering out the more distasteful suggestions that are suggested, we may take from this, er, uplifting anecdote the information that Karl Rove, budding genius that he was, knew from a single glance that you could get large numbers of people to vote for this person, for just about any office he might run for. And that's without knowing anything else about his qualities as a candidate, except perhaps his family name.

I wonder how many of us would have recognized this. I can't help thinking that my reaction after getting one glimpse of our Chimpy would have been: "This bozo went to Yale and Harvard, and got degrees and everything?" So I don't discount this blazing insight of Master Karl's.

But of course that isn't the core of his political genius. He clearly understood from way back that the nature of our political system is such that it invites electioneering, not by reasoned discussion of issues, but by the pushing of hot buttons. The trick, and our Karl has spent his career doing it, is to identify issues--real, fake, or somewhere in between--that push enough people's buttons and drive their votes.

Put the two together--the candidate with charisma and the campaign strategy that zeroes in on voters' primal impulses--and field-test to the point where you prove to yourself that the combination works better than any other political strategy anyone's come up with, and you've just about permanently eliminated, not just the need for, but the possibility of, rational and informed debate on real issues.

Indeed, except in the case of issues that literally force themselves to the forefront (as, say, 9/11 was clearly bound to for at least one election cycle), there is no reason for any candidate ever to raise an issue unless his/her handlers believe it's (a) a hot- (or at least warm-) button one that (b) can be made to work in the candidate's favor.

I'll bet any of us could easily draw up a list of all sorts of pressing issues that not only are never discussed by political candidates but never will be, unless they happen one day to sprout one of those "buttonable" handles. For the most part, these will be the very issues that ought to be on the table.

I certainly grant Iraq as an exception, but with an asterisk. Obviously the mess there is inescapably on the table. But look at how it got there: as the result of a set of policy initiatives concocted by a bunch of wackos so bent ideologically, not to mention so out of touch with reality, that they succeeded in producing a cataclysm out of something that should barely even have been an issue for us, and to the extent that it was an issue for the U.S. should never have been handled remotely the way the wackos imagined.

That said, now that the issue of Iraq has been forced to the forefront of our attention, that doesn't mean, the Rove system would argue, that it has to be discussed reasonably. Why can't we still look for those special buttons to push? (Hey, dem goddamn Dems doesn't support duh troops!)

I would like to think most of know intuitively that immigration is an incredibly complex subject, which is one good reason most of us don't want to think about it. To use an Imus-ism, it would make our hair hurt.

Plus, as far as I can tell, there still is no evidence of any actual immigration crisis, the sort of thing that would make it necessary for us to think about it.

Why has it become not just an issue, but to an extent the issue? This part is easy. Because certain political shot-callers recognize that it's the ultimate "buttonable" issue.

Button no. 1: More and more Americans have already lost their jobs, and more still are afraid of losing theirs. This is a nightmare even for people who have no illusion about what crappy jobs they've lost or may be about to lose. There's no evidence that this has anything to do with immigration, but it doesn't matter. The link is way easier to fantasize than the equally phony one between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and look how well the Bush regime sold that one. When you can press a button that taps straight into people's panic concerning simple economic survival, you don't have to worry about nuance.

Button no. 2: There's always been a core of Americans who hate those goddamn furriners. To date no one has established what limit, if any, there might be to how powerfully native xenophobia can be inflamed by a campaign built on confusion, resentment, hostility, shame, and fear exploding from our fun times in Eye-rack. Sure, the arguments are sub-moronic and could be answered by an average 11-year-old, starting with the grotesquely obvious fact that we Americans are all by definition immigrants.

However, don't forget my note above about nuance. (In case you've forgotten, the note is: Forget about it!) And don't forget that a hefty chunk of the American electorate is seriously dumber, less curious, and harder to reason with than your average 11-year-old. (Plus, on the question of us all being immigrants, there's a kind of person who takes great satisfaction in having the gate slammed shut just after the goniff himself has slipped through.)

The word we're groping for here is scapegoat. The wonderful thing about scapegoats is that they make for just fabulously buttonable issues. Tie some poor schlub to a powerful enough fear, or to a powerful enough hatred, and you've got him by the nuts.

I should add that, unlike Karl Rove, I haven't spent a lifetime studying the theory and practice of political button-pushing, so I'm just working off the top of my head here. But I have a hunch that I'm not far off in suspecting that fear and hatred are going to be the top finishers in the button-sensitivity sweepstakes. I don't even know what might place third. Religion is probably in there, but I can't help thinking that religion works mostly as a conduit and energizer for the fear and hatred.

Back in the good old days of the Cold War, of course, we had the good old godless Commies. I'm not so nostalgic that I minimize the insanity and tragedy caused by the torture done to American values by all sorts of miscreants covering themselves in the mantle of anti-Communism. And having the Commies as scapegoats didn't mean that we couldn't also have other scapegoats. It was always possible to whip up selective anti-immigrant sentiment, for example.

The difference is that without the Commies, we have to find other scapegoats.

And you can tell the degree of desperation involved when you recall that the first target the right-wing scapegoaters came up with was the goddamn gays. Of course, for the religious wackos it was a Button Bonanza. For reasons only they could attempt to explain, not many things energize their fear and hatred more passionately than (shudder) the goddamn gays.

Oh, they got plenty of mileage out of it. But you didn't have to think very deeply to realize that, while you can have heaps of fun and vent lots of bad stuff by stickin' it to the goddamn gays, over the long haul the idea of selling them as the root of all our misfortune is simply preposterous. Especially as more and more Americans have contact with, or more likely realize that they've had longtime contact with, actual people--friends, neighbors, and especially relatives--who happen to be gay, and turn out not to resemble "the goddamn gays" in any important way. They turn out to be just folks, some of 'em nice and some of 'em not so nice, like all other sorts of people, but mostly minding their own beeswax.

True, the noise level of the frothing anti-gay demagogues grew louder and shriller, but that was kind of a giveaway. Not to suggest that the issue has gone away, but it seemed clear that what we were hearing was panic, as the looniest of the loonies discovered that they just couldn't get the same rise out of their flocks when they brandished the Homosexual Menace.

You might have thunk that terrorists could be the new Commies. And there's no doubt that terror-ism has been a splendid button issue, the best the demagogues have had in ages. But terror-ists seem to be somehow too abstract for prime scapegoat. When our terrorism-fighting regime lost interest in finding Osama bin Laden, you had to figure, how dangerous could the terrorists be? It probably didn't help that all the newly captured terrorist menaces who were paraded in front of us whenever the Bush regime needed a bounce in the polls, or just needed desperately to change the subject, turned out to be utterly pathetic, hapless losers pursuing "plots" so ridiculous as to be scarcely worthy of the name.

But what if you had those faceless murdering terrorists on the Outside, and on the Inside, those ever-growing hordes of marauding, America-raping Immygrants.

Yes, that's it! Goddamn Immygrants. Book 'em, Alberto!


UPDATE FROM HOWIE (BECAUSE THIS PIECE ISN'T LONG ENOUGH): WRITERS LESS THOUGHTFUL THAN KEN JUST BLAME THE WHOLE MESS ON BUSH

Michael Abramowitz and Dan Balz in tomorrow's Washington Post say the immigration bill lost because of Bush's inability to hold up his end of the bargain. "He failed to exert the leadership needed to save what is likely to be the last major domestic agenda item of his presidency." The defeat "was a reflection of the weakened state of his presidency."

"This is sort of what his life is going to be like for the rest of his term," veteran GOP strategist Ed Rollins said. "There are Republicans defecting from him now. He's not going to have any great success on anything that's controversial."

...Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg said until the president leaves office, the prospects for bipartisan cooperation will remain slim. "The reason we have this [polarized] politics is George Bush," he said. "Not the Democratic Party or even the Republicans in Congress. The climate of this era has been set by Bush."

Quote of the day: Paul Krugman ponders the sadly Broder-esque deafness of Democratic leaders to the urgings of the base--and the country as a whole

"The [Democratic] party's base seems to be more in touch with the mood of the country than many of the party's leaders. And the result is peculiar: on key issues, reluctant Democratic politicians are being dragged by their base into taking highly popular positions."
--Paul Krugman, in his NYT column today, "Way Off Base"

April 16, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist

Way Off Base
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Normally, politicians face a difficult tradeoff between taking positions that satisfy their party's base and appealing to the broader public. You can see that happening right now to the Republicans: to have a chance of winning the party's nomination, Republican presidential hopefuls have to take far-right positions on Iraq and social issues that will cost them a lot of votes in the general election.

But a funny thing has happened on the Democratic side: the party's base seems to be more in touch with the mood of the country than many of the party's leaders. And the result is peculiar: on key issues, reluctant Democratic politicians are being dragged by their base into taking highly popular positions.

Iraq is the most dramatic example. Strange as it may seem, Democratic strategists were initially reluctant to make Iraq a central issue in the midterm election. Even after their stunning victory, which demonstrated that the G.O.P.'s smear-and-fear tactics have stopped working, they were afraid that any attempt to rein in the Bush administration's expansion of the war would be successfully portrayed as a betrayal of the troops and/or a treasonous undermining of the commander in chief.

Beltway insiders, who still don't seem to realize how overwhelmingly the public has turned against President Bush, fed that fear. For example, as Democrats began, nervously, to confront the administration over Iraq war funding, David Broder declared that Mr. Bush was "poised for a political comeback."

It took an angry base to push the Democrats into taking a tough line in the midterm election. And it took further prodding from that base--which was infuriated when Barack Obama seemed to say that he would support a funding bill without a timeline--to push them into confronting Mr. Bush over war funding. (Mr. Obama says that he didn't mean to suggest that the president be given "carte blanche.")

But the public hates this war, no longer has any trust in Mr. Bush's leadership and doesn't believe anything the administration says. Iraq was a big factor in the Democrats' midterm victory. And far from being a risky political move, the confrontation over funding has overwhelming popular support: according to a new CBS News poll, only 29 percent of voters believe Congress should allow war funding without a time limit, while 67 percent either want to cut off funding or impose a time limit.

Health care is another example of the base being more in touch with what the country wants than the politicians. Except for John Edwards, who has explicitly called for a universal health insurance system financed with a rollback of high-income tax cuts, most leading Democratic politicians, still intimidated by the failure of the Clinton health care plan, have been cautious and cagey about presenting plans to cover the uninsured.

But the Democratic presidential candidates--Mr. Obama in particular--have been facing a lot of pressure from the base to get specific about what they're proposing. And the base is doing them a favor.

The fact is that a long time has passed since the defeat of the Clinton plan, and the public is now demanding that something be done. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed overwhelming support for a government guarantee of health insurance for all, even if that guarantee required higher taxes. Even self-identified Republicans were almost evenly split on the question!

If all this sounds like a setting in which Democrats could win big victories in the years ahead, that's because it is.

Republicans will, for a while at least, be trapped in unpopular positions by a base that's living in the past. Rudy Giuliani's surge into front-runner status for the Republican nomination says more about the party than about the candidate. As The Onion put it with deadly accuracy, Mr. Giuliani is running for "President of 9/11."

Democrats don't have the same problem. There's no conflict between catering to the Democratic base and staking out positions that can win in the 2008 election, because the things the base wants--an end to the Iraq war, a guarantee of health insurance for all--are also things that the country as a whole supports. The only risk the party now faces is excessive caution on the part of its politicians. Or, to coin a phrase, the only thing Democrats have to fear is fear itself.