So I've been following recently the debate that's been going on between Digby and Jamelle Bouie over whether it's really wise to use hyperbole and over-the-top mockery to thrash your political opponents. As you can imagine, I largely side with Digby on this matter and find constructions like this from Bouie to be particularly annoying:

Unlike myself, Moulitsas isn't a journalist, and his job isn't to be an honest broker for ideas; no, it's to rally progressives and score points against conservatives.

Bouie seems to me like the sort of person, to use the phrase of an old acquaintance, who would have been extremely upset that the wicked John Swift would suggest eating all those Irish babies.

Using hyperbole and outlandish mockery to skewer one's political opponents is a wonderful human tradition that extends back centuries. Not only is it a terrific way to blow off steam, but if done smartly it also garners attention by making your opponents convulse into fits of rage. Newt Gingrich understands this better than any other political figure -- he'll say stuff that he knows is outrageous and untrue simply to capture media attention and to push the conversation further to the right. Instead of coming out and saying, "I disapprove of Obama's plan to open up exchanges where people can get government-subsidized health insurance," he says something along the lines of "Barack Hussein Obama's secular socialist machine and its government takeover of health care post a greater threat to the United States than Hitler ever did." While liberals will all shriek and hem and haw about Gingrich's ridiculous rhetoric, the media will report it as, "Liberals deny that Obamacare is worse than the Nazis."

The idea is that you should always be whacking your opponent in the face with something that will force them to respond in a defensive manner. Markos understands this very well which is why his blog has been such a huge success in mobilizing people and money to elect progressive candidates over the past decade. The liberal establishment, best exemplified by Bouie's quote above, thinks that we only need to be "honest brokers for ideas" in order to win over the American public. Sorry but that ain't so.

That said!

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Enough Already Blogenlust

Avedon and Digby are involved in an interesting discussion about the "freakish confidence" recently exhibited by Republicans. The question, first raised by Avedon, is why are they so confident about something that could very easily bite them in the ass at the voting booth? As Digby wrote, "It really does make you have to at least consider the possibility that they know they will not lose elections."

I recently had a conversation with Far East about this very same topic. What crossed my mind in that conversation was how much the Left's relationship with the Right mirrors an abusive relationship. The posturing, policies, and false bravado, in conjunction with the electoral success of this Administration and its political Party is having an adverse effect on the emotional mindset of the Left. Like the abused in an abusive relationship, the Left's first reaction is to buy into the false power and intelligence of the Right, which causes us to cower and freak out about what might come next. The best example of this is the talk about past rigged elections, and the prospects of future rigged elections.

My own opinion is that the Right loves our worries and conspiracies about vote rigging because it reinforces our perception of their dominance and our self-awareness of our feebleness.  Whether we know it or not, talking about rigged elections or wondering whether the Republicans are too confident because they know they're going to win only reinforces our problems and does nothing to rectify the lack of our Party's political power. 

Conservatives have been waging a political psy-op war against us for a generation, and until we realize that our reactions are reinforcing their strategy, nothing will change.  Now I don't have a lot of answers for how to break this cycle, but a good start would be to cease all discussion about how the Republicans control our destiny, and start talking and thinking about how we can establish a political identity that is not a reaction to the Republican Party.

                   Lawyers, Guns and Money

I'm not the sort that reads Powerline with any regularity, but this caught my attention:

It's great to see someone standing up for colonialism, especially British colonialism. I agree wholeheartedly with this observation, for example:

Had Britain had the courage to face down Gandhi and his rabble a few years longer, the tragedy that was the partititon of India might have been avoided.

My own opinion is that the Right loves our worries and conspiracies about vote rigging because it reinforces our perception of their dominance and our self-awareness of our feebleness. Whether we know it or not, talking about rigged elections or wondering whether the Republicans are too confident because they know they're going to win only reinforces our problems and does nothing to rectify the lack of our Party's political power.

Conservatives have been waging a political psy-op war against us for a generation, and until we realize that our reactions are reinforcing their strategy, nothing will change. Now I don't have a lot of answers for how to break this cycle, but a good start would be to cease all discussion about how the Republicans control our destiny, and start talking and thinking about how we can establish a political identity that is not a reaction to the Republican Party.

Our Libyan Success No Capital

This is amazing. Libya is the "victory" that Bush has touted so often, asserting that that nation dismantled its nuclear programs in accordance with US demands.

Well, maybe not so much:

Authorities hunting traffickers in nuclear weapons technology recently uncovered an audacious plan to deliver a complete uranium enrichment plant to Libya.

The discovery provides fresh evidence of the reach and sophistication of the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan's global black market in nuclear know-how and equipment. It also exposes a previously undetected South African branch of the Khan network.

Details of the plot began to emerge in September, when police found the elements of a two-storey steel processing system for the enrichment plant in a factory outside Johannesburg. They were packed in 11 freight containers for shipment to Libya.

South African officials will say only that they discovered nuclear components. It appears, however, that the massive system was designed to operate 1000 centrifuges for enriching uranium.

Once assembled in Libya, the plant could have produced enough weapons-grade uranium to manufacture several nuclear bombs a year. Delivery of the plant would have greatly accelerated Libya's efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

Blessed are the sneaky bastards TBogg

Sometime back we referred to Mel Gibson's theological snuff film as Crouching Jesus, Hidden Agenda. Now reader Ed (no, not that Ed, the other one) provides us with a link where handy tips are provided for slipping Jesus through the eye of a needle cracks:

If you are worried that your local schools are teaching children that religion has no place in the study of biology, please consider donating biology-related books, posters, CDs, and DVDs with religious content to your school. These materials can be given to public libraries, too, and even directly to science teachers who can keep them in the classroom as convenient reference sources. Students benefit greatly from being exposed to alternatives to the theory of evolution, which is the bias of most textbooks used these days.

These donations are completely legal, and provide a very good way to provide balance in the school without formally challenging the agenda of the mainstream curriculum.

[...]

"These donations can also be tax deductible, but are best made anonymously so that a connection is not easily made to the religious affiliations of the donor. Purchases made at Amazon.com can be sent directly to the school's librarian." (my emphasis)

Oh. And if you want to have some fun, there's a contest to rename Intelligent Design. Why? Here's why:

As you know, lately we have enjoyed increasing success in getting religious explanations of life reintroduced into public school curricula, and we believe our strategy of "repackaging" every 10 years has been a critical contributor to this success. In particular, it has allowed our members to appear more "fair and balanced" at school board meetings.

Because appearing to be "fair and balanced" is much more important than actually being "fair and balanced".

The Surge in Iraq essentially became a plan to bribe militants with guns and barrowloads of cash to not attack US troops and that left the core corruption, graft and incompetencies of the Iraqi government untouched and thus left the seeds of future conflict while temporarily tamping down violence to a level which would still horrify anyone West of Beirut. The planned surge in Afghanistan is likely to do the same there.

Want to be a provincial police chief? It will cost you $100,000.

Want to drive a convoy of trucks loaded with fuel across the country? Be prepared to pay $6,000 per truck, so the police will not tip off the Taliban.

Need to settle a lawsuit over the ownership of your house? About $25,000, depending on the judge.

“It is very shameful, but probably I will pay the bribe,” Mohammed Naim, a young English teacher, said as he stood in front of the Secondary Courthouse in Kabul. His brother had been arrested a week before, and the police were demanding $4,000 for his release. “Everything is possible in this country now. Everything.”

Kept afloat by billions of dollars in American and other foreign aid, the government of Afghanistan is shot through with corruption and graft. From the lowliest traffic policeman to the family of President Hamid Karzai himself, the state built on the ruins of the Taliban government seven years ago now often seems to exist for little more than the enrichment of those who run it.

It's utterly unclear how 30,000 extra American soldiers in the South are intended to remedy this situation - and if corruption remains untouched then allied forces will have to remain there in perpetuity to ensure any level of cohesive governance at all. Thus the two greatest drivers of the Taliban's resurgent insurgency will remain intact and anything done in Helmland takes on the character of an extended game of whack-a-mole.

However, extending cycles of violence until the point where they dropped off the medias radar worked in Iraq and gave the US an excuse to head (mostly) for the exits. The same might be true in Afghanistan. Matt Yglesias writes:

What I do think it’s worth reflecting on is what a big deal it really turns out to have been that the Bush administration screwed up back in the winter of 2001-2002 and failed to capute Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, and the rest of the top al-Qaeda / Taliban leadership. Had we done that, I think we still would have been under a general moral and prudential obligation to try to assist the people of Afghanistan. But transforming Afghanistan into a prosperous, stable government with an effective central authority has always been a tall order. And if we’d achieved our core security objectives back six and a half years ago, then the stakes would be much lower if down the road foreign troops started to wear out their welcome for whatever reason. We could just leave.

Foreign troops have already worn out their welcome - even Karzai is looking for a timetable nowadays. But we're no closer to "a prosperous, stable government with an effective central authority" than we've ever been in Iraq - just as the Kurds or the federalist/seperatists of Basra - yet we're still leaving. It occurs to me that an Obama administration might look to re-engineer the exit from Iraq for Afghanistan. Paper over the cracks for long enough if they can, declare victory and visibly leave, while repurposing a large part of any occupation forces as "trainers". Then, of course, any later collapse isn't officially our fault for invading in the first place...

Crossposted from Newshoggers

If only MSNBC would have listened to us months ago, but at least she's there now. Move over Larry King, there's a new girl in town....Her ratings even beat Countdown a few times.

It's nice to see and we hope you will continue to tune in. O'Reilly has stepped up his attacks on NBC in response to her success and that will only help them in the long run.

John McCain attacked Barack Obama recently saying Obama would "slow" FCS, the future combat system which has been a procurement nightmare with corruption and overruns all around. McCain had previously spoken out about how bad that nightmare has been.

Indeed, it's been so bad that, back in July, the McCain's campaign's senior economic adviser submitted a "plan to balance the federal budget by 2013 to The Washington Post editorial board" that specifically set out what McCain would do about it as president.

Noah Shachtman at Danger Room found the relevant passage:

Balance the budget requires slowing outlay growth to 2.4 percent. The roughly $470 billion dollars (by 2013) in slower spending growth come from reduced deployments abroad ($150 billion; consistent with success in Iraq/Afghanistan that permits deployments to be cut by half -- hopefully more), slower discretionary spending in non-defense and Pentagon procurements ($160 billion; there are lots of procurements -- airborne laser, Globemaster, Future Combat System -- that should be ended and the entire Pentagon budget should be scrubbed).

Oops.

Noah continues:

McCain aides are privately furious about the contradiction, I'm hearing. But there's been no official comment, so far, about the mix-up.

I bet McCain's infamous anger is showing right now - and his campaign staff are on the receiving end.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Rep. Eric Schneiderman on Transforming the Liberal Checklist. A good primer for all of us who are interested in furthering a movement, however, I think it also provides some insight as to why Barack Obama's campaign has swept up so many new voters and independent voters and surprised so many election prognosticators:

I respectfully suggest that if we want to move beyond short- term efforts to slow down the bone-crushing machinery of the contemporary conservative movement and begin to build a meaningful movement of our own, we need to expand the job descriptions of our elected officials. To do this, we must consider the two distinct aspects of our work: transactional politics and transformational politics.

Transactional politics is pretty straightforward. What's the best deal I can get on a gun-control or immigration-reform bill during this year's legislative session? What do I have to do to elect a good progressive ally in November? Transactional politics requires us to be pragmatic about current realities and the state of public opinion. It's all about getting the best result possible given the circumstances here and now.

Transformational politics is the work we do today to ensure that the deal we can get on gun control or immigration reform in a year--or five years, or twenty years--will be better than the deal we can get today. Transformational politics requires us to challenge the way people think about issues, opening their minds to better possibilities. It requires us to root out the assumptions about politics or economics or human nature that prevent us from embracing policies that will make our lives better. Transformational politics has been a critical element of American political life since Lincoln was advocating his "oft expressed belief that a leader should endeavor to transform, yet heed, public opinion."

The need for a renewed focus on transformational politics is obvious when we compare the success of the conservative movement over the past thirty years with the collapse of the American progressive coalition. The important thing about contemporary conservatives is not just that they won elections--it's how they won. They didn't win by changing their positions or rhetoric to move toward the voters--or where polls told them the voters were. They won by moving the voters closer to them, paving the way for the last decade of conservative hegemony.

It’s been more than seven years, but I still laugh when I look back at this classic satirical item from The Onion, in which George W. Bush assured the nation that “our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.”

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

Of course, this piece, written four days before Bush’s first inaugural, proved to be rather prophetic. But in the meantime, whenever I see or hear references to “peace and prosperity,” I think of The Onion, and the strength and success Bush squandered.

I was reminded of it again this morning, listening to Bush’s speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

“Listen, the stakes in November are high. This is an important election. Prosperity and peace are in the balance.”

Really? Where is this elusive “prosperity and peace”?

Last December, Republicans in Congress introduced a resolution noting the significance of Christmas and the Christian faith, which eventually passed, blurring the lines between church and state -- and they're at it again, attempting to rewrite American history and further the lie that America is a Christian nation.

Via Secular Coalition for America:

Jan. 11 - Flush with last year's success in passing H.Res. 847, "Recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian Faith," Christian nationalists -- those who would have the United States be governed as a Christian theocracy -- are pushing H.Res. 888, another resolution which promotes a false and distorted Christian nation reinterpretation of our history. Generally, we do not take action regarding resolutions because they are ceremonial in nature and express the non-binding opinion of one chamber. They do not have the force of law. Read on...

The resolution, which is supported by the likes of Reps Patrick McHenry, John Doolittle and Mean Jean Schmidt, calls for an "American Religious History Week" and rejects any attempt to remove religious messages or teachings from our public buildings and educational resources. There can be no doubt that during an election year, Reps voting against the resolution will be labeled anti-religion, but we can't let them be bullied into signing this flawed resolution that goes against the very principles our country was founded on. Contact your Representatives and tell them to say no to H. Res. 888, (corrected) which further blurs the separation between church and state.