The only thing scarier than wingnuts who think "moral clarity" is "just words"? Wingnuts who think they know what those words mean

On Friday's Countdown, Jonathan Turley insists that we don't have any choice about prosecuting the Bush regimistas responsible for torture -- it's not only morally but legally required, or "the Bush crimes become our crimes."

"Now, it's true that a serious investigation of Bush-era abuses would make Washington an uncomfortable place, both for those who abused power and those who acted as their enablers or apologists. And these people have a lot of friends. But the price of protecting their comfort would be high: If we whitewash the abuses of the past eight years, we'll guarantee that they will happen again."

-- Paul Krugman, in his Friday NYT column, "Forgive and Forget?"

"People with 'moral clarity' recognized the ultimate existential evil of Communism, and were constantly on guard against its unceasing efforts to bring down the capitalist world by any means necessary. To these early movement conservatives, having 'moral clarity' meant that you weren't the kind of weakling who would be deceived into negotiation with the Commies, or consent to arms control, or be duped into merely containing their relentless march across the globe. It meant that you had the intestinal fortitude (or pure enough vital bodily fluids, as you wish) to do whatever had to be done to permanently exterminate America's implacable enemies -- whether it was to send in the Marines or drop the bomb."

-- Sara Robinson, in a Campaign for America's Future post,
"Redefining 'Moral Clarity'"

by Ken

I've been trying to write a post that should be ridiculously simple, because it really consists of nothing more than distilling the wisdom of three incredibly wise people. It shouldn't require anything more than this simple 1-2-3:

(1) Read Paul Krugman's Friday NYT column, in which he argues that we have to prosecute the crimes of the Bush regime, because otherwise they're not only likely but certain to be repeated. This is Krugman in top form, which means it doesn't get any better.

(2) Watch the above clip from Friday's Countdown, in which Jonathan Turley (after Keith O actually quotes from Krugman) takes the argument a step further. Confronted with demonstrable war crimes, he says, we don't even have a choice. It doesn't matter that prosecuting the torturers might be inconvenient, as AG-designate Eric Holder seemed to be saying to the Senate Judiciary Committee in his confirmation hearings. We are not only morally but legally required to prosecute. Otherwise the Bush crimes become our crimes. This is Turley in top form, which again means it doesn't get any better.

As a bonus, Keith plays the clip of Texas Sen. John Cornyn, apparently campaigning for the title of World's Dumbest Human, haranguing AG-designate Holder with his insistence that he accept Dumb John's 24-style "hypothetical" -- that we have a terrorist in possession of information that can only be extracted via torture, a "hypothetical" that flouts reality in ways that are clearly beyond the understanding of a brain-dead blitherer like the senator.

Really, I think the Senate needs to adopt a rule whereby people like Senator Cornyn be required to wear a dunce cap -- with minimum cone diameter and height specified -- anytime they appear in the Senate or on Senate-related business, like campaigning.

We should talk about the 24 phenomenon someday. I suppose the show, ghastly as it is (being concocted out of the worst writing and acting in, well, the history of writing and acting), is forgivable as mindless escapist entertainment, on the order of the really, really bad James Bond movies. But people like "Dumb John" Cornyn and Bill O'Reilly, not to mention the Fox Noise viewership, think they're watching something of documentary-like accuracy and insight. In reality it's not only bullshit, but bullshit so appallingly stupid that you would have to be truly brain-deficient to accord it the slightest seriousness. Which, as it happens, brings us to --

(3) Read the above-noted Campaign for America's Future post by Sara Robinson, making an important connection regarding the phrase "moral clarity." As Chimpy the Prez demonstrated the other night in his pathetic "farewell address," it falls really clunkily out of the mouth of a bozo like our Chimpy. (Clearly the Senate Dunce Cap Rule, and its presumed corresponding House version, needs to be adopted by the executive branch as well. And for that matter by the judicial branch too, for the use, not only of Supreme Court Justices Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito, but also of all those lower-echelon judges stuffed into the court system on Chimpy's watch.)

In the clip intro, Keith O in fact makes specific reference to Chimpy's use of the phrase "moral clarity." I think we can see him wince involuntarily at the association of the phrase with a person so utterly devoid of any kind of purposeful morality. And I think most of us hear the phrase the way Keith did, as just some words that wingnuts as just part of their clueless delusion. It sounds like "just words" to them -- and as with so many other words, they have no clue what they mean. They just like the sound of them.

But here comes Sara, picking up on something very different, and very important. She notes that conservatives use the phrase "moral clarity" a lot.

And it always sounds absurd to progressive ears, coming as it does from members of an administration that shredded the Constitution, deprived people of due process, committed horrific acts of torture, and lied the country into the worst military debacle in its history. It's always bewildering to listen to such people lecture the rest of us on "moral clarity." What in the hell are they talking about?

They keep using those words. It turns out that they don't mean what we think they mean.

Over the holidays, Sara reports, she "devoured" U.S. Vs. Them, in which J. Peter Scoblic
"looks at the way the conservative penchant for 'othering' (a word I coined to describe their perpetual need for someone to project their own demons onto, and then hate on) has shaped US foreign policy from the beginning of the Cold War through the current administration."
From this she has gleaned the definition I've quoted above.

This definition of "moral clarity" has been a major factor in U.S. foreign policy ever since. From that day unto this, the conservative movement has never been without a demonized Other to focus its vaunted "moral clarity' on. "Moral clarity" is why conservatives hate summit meetings; why they've scuttled every attempt at arms control and non-proliferation; why every problem in the world can only yield to a military solution; and why defense is the only valid government expense. To people with "moral clarity," these choices are obvious. Those who disagree (like those progressive pantywaists who refuse to acknowledge the threat, or are willing and eager to coddle Pure Evil by parleying with it) are, perforce, inherently weaker and less morally serious. If you've ever marveled at the depths of conservative moral self-righteousness, now you know the deep well from which it springs.

It is, in a word, Cheneyism. I've written before, a number of times, about the "higher truth" Big Dick clearly thinks he's in possession of, which justifies the campaign of atrocities to which he has devoted the portion of his life that isn't devoted to enriching beyond measuring his pals the greedy Repulicronies.

Of course the collapse of the global Communist menace was an existential nightmare for these people, whose thinking (for want of a better word) was based so overwhelmingly on death-sworn opposition to that "other." Of course they tried other "others," like the homos and liberals (same thing, no?), but even they realized that, fun as we are to demonize, we really aren't up to the job of being the required Other. And make no mistake, it's a big job. It remains to be seen whether the Islamofascists are up to it.

Whenever you hear a conservative go on about "moral clarity" . . . there is always an enemy. They are always out to get us. They will stop at nothing. You cannot coddle them or negotiate with them; you can only survive by annihilating them. And people who see the moral world clearly will not waste time or breath questioning these essential truths.

It's pretty stunning stuff when you read it that way. It really makes you realize that conservatives live in a world of paranoia, xenophobia, and seething aggression that most progressives can't even fathom. And their entire moral universe has been twisted to serve their externalized fears; to take that will to project their own demons onto someone else and then destroy them, and elevate it as the highest possible moral good. It's a definition of "morality" that renders the rule of law meaningless, but readily justifies genocide and torture as moral acts of self-preservation.

Is it any wonder that the Bush regime has done everything in its power to prop Osama up? It's as if the regimistas' entire foreign policy -- and most of its authoritarian domestic policy too, come to think of it -- came straight from Al Qaeda HQ.

"Once we understand what they're really saying," Sara writes, "it becomes pretty obvious that one of the first things we're going to need to do in this new era is challenge this horrific definition of 'moral clarity' and overwrite it with one of our own."

We believe moral clarity is defined by the Constitution, embodied in the rule of law, and on display wherever the dignity of other people -- including those whose interests oppose ours -- is upheld. And, in case there's any question about where the real moral clarity lies here: Ours is the morality America was founded on. Theirs is one that almost put that light out forever.

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Quote of the day: Robert Klein, as a fellow "geezer," thinks Young Johnny McCranky is too old -- among other things -- to run for president

Funnyman Klein is troubled by the dependence of Senator McCranky (left) on his friend Senator Lieberman (right). Oops, that's celebrated ventriloquist's dummy Charlie McCarthy with his friend Edgar Bergen.

"[Holding up one finger.] One house! [Pause.] And the mortgage is a little behind. But Trump is taking over."

-- funnyman Robert Klein's opening comment to Keith Olbermann on last night's Countdown, which had featured extensive discussion of Senator McCranky's too-numerous-to-remember homes

by Ken

Klein, evidently not a great McCranky enthusiast, is bothered less by the abundant wealth on display in the "how many homes" gaffe than by the evidence of geezerdom. As a certified geezer himself at 66, he said, he thinks McCranky is too old to be running for president. "I don't like the idea of Lieberman whispering in his ear, like Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy."

He doesn't seem much impressed with the McCarthy resume either. "I don't know where all this experience was supposed to have been gained, from all those years of supporting the status quo," he said. "There was a sanctity about him because of his suffering, like Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel -- a prisoner subject to torture. Okay, I know, but we have a world to run."

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How would you expect the lying liars of the Bush regime to respond to the charge that they (gasp) LIED? Why, naturally, with a new fusillade of lies!

C'mon, Scotty, smile! Rod Serling rarely managed a Twilight Zone scene as creepy as this sendoff Chimpy the Prez gave his longtime loyal lapdog. (Poor Scotty looks like he's praying to a different sci-fi icon -- to his Star Trek namesake, to be beamed up, or anywhere away from here.)

"McClellan's explosive new book, which alleges that the Bush administration waged a 'political propaganda campaign' in favor of the Iraq war and bungled the response to the storm that devastated the Gulf Coast, prompted a counterattack yesterday from some of his oldest political colleagues, who accused him of disloyalty and questioned his credibility."

--from Dan Eggen's front-page report in today's Washington Post

Howie has already noted the furious response by Bush regimists to news of former White House Press Secretary Scotty McClellan's new book. I'm more struck by the comic element of the fracas. As news of the book's innards tumbled out last night, I really didn't think all that much about it. I figured, well, this should cause the regime gang some temporary embarrassment -- you know, having such stuff said by such a deep-inside-the-regime insider.

But the revelations themselves? I mean, really now! Ooh, the bad regime boys (and girl, with Madame Condi's ritual denial duly noted) propaganda-blitzed the country into a war in Iraq. Blah blah blah. Shocking!

Yawn. Come on now! In May 2008, can there possibly be anyone to whom this is news? And so on with all the "revelations" in the book. Of course I haven't read the thing, but could there be anything in it that would surprise anyone who's been paying even the tiniest attention to the unfolding horror of the Bush regime?

Least of all the gang of conspirators within the regime, rising now in unison in such self-righteous dudgeon. And they all profess to be shocked, really shocked. The deck on Dan Eggen's Washington Post story captures (I suppose unwittingly) the hilarity of it:

"Former Bush Aide Stuns Many With Critical New Book"

Why, they're beyond shocked, they're stunned! All the way to the, er, top. We have it on the authority of no less than poor Scotty's most recent successor as White House manure-shoveler, Dana Perino, that the president "is puzzled, and he doesn't recognize this as the Scott McClellan that he hired and confided in and worked with for so many years." (Doesn't it seem possible, even likely, that if you put a pair of Groucho glasses on Mrs. Chimpy, Chimpy the Prez wouldn't recognize her either?)

Now we all know the brand of comedy that's being played out here, don't we? One hates to invoke yet again the utter shock of the corrupt police Captain Renault in Casablanca, as voiced so memorably by Claude Rains, at the discovery of gambling in Rick's Cafe Americain. But this wonderful moment has become a cliche precisely because in it the hypocrisy is so perfectly distilled.

Except to the brain-locked class of Beltway insiders, there's no imaginable mystery about "what happened" to poor Scotty. During his long lapdog-like service to George W. Bush, it obviously escaped everyone's attention that while he might have been every bit the schlub he appeared, he may not have been the doofus and moral cypher normally pressed into service for the moral sinkhole that would be the Bush regime.

Clearly there were glimmerings during his service as press secretary that the regime power brokers were lying to him, and sending him out to the briefing room to spread those lies to the press, and by extension to the American people. Clearly there were instances when he discovered he was being lied to bare-facedly, as with the manure that Karl Rove among others shoveled at him over Plamegate.

Maybe the book spells out the process by which poor Scotty came to understand how badly he had been used by a pack of liars he had foolishly trusted -- and, worse, came to understand that he had been made a cog in their machine for systematically lying to the American people. My guess is that the loyal sad sack started with an alarmingly high doubt threshhold, but that once it was breached, the real story came together increasingly easily.

By the time poor Scotty couldn't take any more and abandoned his liar's podium, it was clear to anyone who was paying attention that something terrible had happened to him. My gosh, who could forget that creepy scene where Chimpy the Prez bade farewell to his loyal retainer, who looked like he was about to walk off into an alien spaceship? It was like a scene out of The Twililght Zone.

But of course the Bush regimists weren't paying attention. Poor Scotty was just another lowly functionary who'd been used and now, when his time came, discarded. (Write if you get work!)

However far along poor Scotty was in his path to illumination at the time he left the White House, I'm guessing that the view from outside the Beltway did wonders to clarify and sharpen his vision. Why exactly he went public, especially knowing the kind of humiliation and character assassination that inevitably awaited him, only he himself could explain. If I had to guess, I'd say that there was a spark of decency in him that escaped the notice of the regimists who had been pulling his strings. (We'll speculate a bit more below.)

It's that same spark of decency that turned out to lodge somewhere inside some of the Nixon faithful as the Watergate scandal unfolded. John Dean, for one, who after all had tried to warn the president that there was a cancer on the presidency, at a time when he was still too naive to realize that the president he had served so loyally was the cancer on the presidency. Talk about a fish rotting from the head: All the filth and corruption of the Nixon regime traced back ultimately to the mind of the master.

So where, I keep asking, is the mystery in all of this?

Supposedly serious media types tell us, in all supposed seriousness, how mystified all of poor Scotty's former colleagues are by this shocking book. Where could poor Scotty have gotten those crazy ideas?

Now, it could be that some of the Bush loyalists, both within the regime and in the media, are genuinely stumped. Because Bush loyalists (again, both in the media and within the regime) come in two basic flavors: the people who drank the Kool-Aid and the people who served it.*

And it's entirely possible that the Kool-Aid drinkers are puzzled. For example, all those Bush regime law diplomates who got their "legal training" at Pat Robertson's Regent U. I can believe that many (most?) of them believe that shredding the damned document and lining bird cages with the resulting confetti really is how a president can best "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."

But as for the others, the people who have made the Bush regime function, my gosh, if it weren't so pathetic, and also so semi-serious, it would be hilarious.

Here we have the bloated carcass of Karl Rove, a man who has never in his benighted life told the truth about anything unless he was playing some other-dimensionally devious angle, blithering bemusedly (on Fox Noise, where else?) about the perfidy and ignorance of poor Scotty. Okay, in fairness to our Karl, it's not as if treating poor Scotty like a schmuck and a patsy is something new, or something that he does only behind his back -- look how long he did it right to the dumb schmuck's face.

Thank goodness for Countdown, where we at least had Keith Olbermann pointing out that the regime's hastily assembled Get Scotty Posse was merely spewing -- what else? -- talking points! "Why, that doesn't even sound like our Scotty!"

Well, this may actually be true, because it's doubtful that their Scotty ever talked to them this way when he was shoveling their manure to the ever-eager-for-more White House press corps. Where they apparently went wrong was in assuming that he was just another member of the loyal Kool-Aid Brigade.

On Countdown last night there was much speculation as to what poor Scotty could hope to gain by writing a book that incriminates himself as much as anybody. Let me throw out a theory. Might this be the necessary first step toward redeeming his soul?

It can happen. The young John Dean paid a heavy price for his involvement in the swamp of Nixonian corruption. The older-and-wiser John Dean has emerged from his crucible as one of our more valuable public figures.

It's a start, Scotty.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -
*Although it doesn't really concern us here, there is in fact a third category of Bush loyalist, especially prevalent among the crony capitalists who have been so well served by the regime -- like the war profiteers and other sleazy opportunists for whom each successive regime disaster, regime-made or otherwise, represented another potential bonanza. The cronies didn't need to drink the Kool-Aid because they didn't need to believe any of the regime's pathetic mock-patriotic cover stories. They understood how the game is played: You make the payoffs so you can cash in on the paydays.

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Quote of the day: Not-really-quite-fired Mark Penn must be wondering why the Clinton supreme command didn't fire those damned voters instead

"In some sense, the Penn battle plan worked perfectly until the first contact with the voters."
--commentator Richard Wolffe, on last night's Countdown, replying to Keith Olbermann's question regarding the seemingly infallibile strategizing of now-semi-deposed Clinton campaign strategist Mark Penn (right) through the early phases of the 2008 presidential season



HONORABLE MENTION: JON STEWART HAS TROUBLE BELIEVING HILLARY

"Somehow, I'd believe her more if she was trying to convince me less."
--Jon Stewart, on last night's Daily Show, after watching video of Sen. Hillary Clinton emoting her recollection of how she heard that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot

So you've come to DWT expecting another round of childish, tasteless Larry Craig-being-gay jokes? Yeah, okay, can do

Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho)
Celebrating a Quarter-Century
of People Gossiping About Me Being Gay
(1982-2007)

In his younger years, our Larry plays dress-up with
"one of the nation's most requested cowboy entertainers" (by
his own description), Cowboy Rudy. (cowboyrudy.com)

Attention, people, this is serious. It's our Larry's silver anniversary. Which naturally raises the question:

What do you get for the man who's had folks officially gossiping about his homosexuality for a full quarter of a century?

Is he listed anywhere?

Oh, you don't think it's a problem? Okay, let's say you think long and hard and come up with something really thoughtful and appropriate. A solid-silver cock ring, say.

It may be a tad familiar for someone you've never so much as personally shared an adjacent men's-room stall with, but what the heck, you decide to run with it. You're going for "the personal touch." (If there's a pun in there, it's mostly intentional.) And then it turns out he's already got one! If not an entire collection. Or else he's a tad shy about keeping it with the rest of his jewelry, where his wife might see it and get that same wrong idea people have been gossiping openly about for a full quarter-century now.

So now he has to go try to exchange it for something he needs, like maybe a set of butt plugs. (I'm just making it up as we go here.) But he doesn't have the receipt! Have you ever tried to do that? Have you?

But seriously, what are you planning to give our boy? Isn't it tacky just to send a card, presumably from the "Congratulations on Not Being Gay (Wink-Wink)" section. Say, did the Singing Senators make any records? (I can't find any on Amazon.com.)

My own inclination would be a copy of Michelangelo Signorile's Outing Yourself: How to Come Out as Lesbian or Gay to Your Family, Friends, and Coworkers. Amazon's got the paperback edition for $11.05 plus shipping, with used copies from $1.37. Our Larry might also appreciate Signorile's still-stirring Queer in America: Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power, for its consideration of the "closet of power" dearest to the senator's heart, the one in Washington, D.C.


COUNTDOWN POSTSCRIPT

By the way, did you catch the Countdown Players' Dragnet-style dramatic reenactment last night--straight from the official officer's police report--of the great men's-room encounter? Favorite moment here: when "the senator" hands the officer a business card, and says, "What do you think of that?"--and we see a business-size card that has nothing on it except the hand-scribbled word:

SENATOR

UPDATE: HOWIE WEIGHS IN

Just when I had finally decided that I had had it with Larry Craig stories, Ken ambushed me with the one above. How could I resist jumping back in? (Were I a Republican I'd say, "He started it!") I've thought a lot about this since it first came out that Senator Craig was arrested for soliciting sex in a public restroom, something he has been prone to do-- and deny-- over the years. I went from mean-spirited schadenfreude on Monday afternoon to pity on Tuesday and anger towards his Republican homophobic tormentors on Wednesday.

Today I called Senator Craig's office to offer a redemptive strategy that will help him capture his dignity and his soul. I don't think he'll bite. But I very much agree with Barney Frank, who kind of outed him back in October of '06 on the Bill Maher show. He didn't actually out him. He just left the question hanging and said something about hypocrisy: "The right to privacy should not be a right to hypocrisy and people who want to demonize other people shouldn't then be able to go home and close the door and do it themselves."

This morning Barney took issue with Craig's homophobic colleagues, playing to the GOP's Know Nothing base, like John McCain and Norm Coleman, who have called for Senator Craig to resign at once. Barney's message to Craig: resist!

The GOP is after Craig's scalp so they can go to their base and say, "See, we'll not all toe-tappin' homos and when we find one, we root him out." They actually applauded David Diapers Vitter (R-LA) when he admitted he had broken the law by hiring hookers. No one asked him to resign from his committees. And no one asked Ted Stevens (R-AK) to step down from his committees, let alone from the Senate, after the FBI announced an investigation into a massive and systematic bribery operation Stevens has been running, an operation based on abusing his committee assignments. But Stevens and Vitter are straight, so Republicans don't even care what laws they break. "What he did, it’s hypocritical," said Barney of Craig this morning, "but it’s not an abuse of his office in the sense that he was taking money for corrupt votes," a subtle slap at Stevens and Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, a closet queen himself, who is leading the charge to purge Craig.

Barney went on: "It’s one thing to say that someone can’t be trusted to vote without being corrupt, it’s another to say that he can’t be trusted to go to the bathroom by himself."

And as far as resigning, Jeff Merkley the ballsy Democrat looking to replace Oregon's rubber stamp Republican Gordon Smith, has a far better target than the pathetic Larry Craig. Merkley sent the pathetic George W. Bush an evite suggesting he resign.