Ethics indeed

I've been reading about the Kos/myDD dustup with some interest, even though it only affects me peripherally (I only take money for the publication of my work, and decline all ads). I do think the ethics of blogging is an evolving thing, but it might not be bad to establish.

More troubling is that the whole brouhaha reflects yet again the breakdown in ethical standards for the mainstream media -- in this case, the Wall Street Journal, which ran the piece that set off the controversy. It included this paragraph:

A spokeswoman for Mr. Dean said the two bloggers hired by the campaign did nothing unethical because both disclosed their connection to the Dean operation.

Now it turns out that, according to the "spokeswoman" cited here, she said no such thing. According to today's post by Kos that quotes her comments at Dean For America:

Jeanne's colleagues committed a journalistic no-no: they took her background conversation with me and made up a quote from "a Dean spokeswoman". Their fake quote had this spokeswoman apparently admitting that the bloggers were paid for promoting the campaign. They completely mischaracterized our conversation -- and Jeanne was rightly upset about it. I was, and am, too.

Since a distorted version of the conversation has been put in print, I'll tell you what was told to Jeanne when she asked what the story was with the campaign and these bloggers.

I said that, as many media outlets noted at the time and a giant disclaimer on their blog said, these guys were hired as technical consultants. Specifically, they helped the Web team pick a technology platform for the blog (Movable Type) and helped manage Internet advertising (banner ads, Google ads, etc.). They weren't paid to write content -- either for the campaign or on their own blogs. And just in case there was any ambiguity, the campaign made sure they had a notice saying "I am a paid consultant for Howard Dean" right smack on the front of their personal blogs.

The only people the campaign paid to write blog posts were full-time staff at headquarters who wrote the content here on Blog for America. They and the rest of the staff at headquarters were people who quit their jobs and upended their lives to work 100 hours a week for a campaign they believed in -- and frankly, compared to "normal" jobs, the campaign barely even paid them. Had the campaign been throwing around cash to people just to write nice things on blogs, there would have been a mutiny in Burlington.

Ahem. I think the Wall Street Journal needs to convene an independent panel to investigate how this clearly fraudulent quote appeared in print in their newspaper. Any former attorneys general handy?

Betraying the truth

The most striking aspect of the dustup over the CBS News 60 Minutes report on George W. Bush's National Guard service record is what it reveals about the standards of modern journalism -- not just at CBS, but throughout the national media.

Indeed, the reaction so far has been more instructive than any flaws CBS may have uncovered regarding its own practices.

When the Independent Review Panel that was assembled to examine the matter released its report earlier this week, it was clear that CBS' internal standards for reporting had been violated, and dismissing the four executives involved was appropriate. Most astonishing, certainly, was the CBS reporting team's failure to adequately establish the provenance of the so-called Killian memos. As I mentioned previously, this kind of failure is just emblematic of the shoddy standards that have come to prevail throughout the national media.

The same degraded journalism, in fact, has pervaded much of the ensuing discussion of the CBS matter, both before and after the report. As Corey Pein explored at Columbia Journalism Review, the rest of the media's handling of the story, particularly the carefully orchestrated firestorm that erupted on the right side of the blogosphere, was every bit as riddled with shoddy documentation and analysis, groundless conjecture, and politically motivated bias as anything CBS might have contemplated.

Moreover, once CBS broadcast its report and the right-wing-spin-driven brouhaha erupted over the memos, the Beltway press treated the matter of Bush's military records as a tainted story. Any pursuit of the many remaining unanswered questions about Bush's records and the White House's mendacious explanations for them summarily disappeared from the media's radar.

However, the evidence, as I've explained at length, is overwhelming that Bush skipped out on his commitment by failing to take his flight physical and disappearing from duty for the ensuing year or more; the Killian memos, if they had been legitimate, only would have supplemented and shed some fresh light on what was already a mountain of established and confirmed data. As Kos puts it, the bottom line is this: Bush was AWOL, and every independent examination of his record confirms it.

Not only have the national media failed to pursue this, or even acknowledge it, they are now characterizing the CBS panel's report as actually vindicating Bush -- even though it specifically does not. For that matter, it doesn't even make a definitive finding on whether the "Killian memos" were authentic or not.

Media Matters reported on this the other day:

On January 10, CNN host and nationally syndicated columnist Robert Novak and author and WorldNetDaily.com columnist Bob Kohn both falsely suggested that questions about Bush's service rested solely on the flawed 60 Minutes report. January 11 reports in The Washington Post and The Boston Globe relayed erroneous claims by Bush administration officials and other Republicans that the panel report vindicates Bush's assertion that he fulfilled his service and received no preferential treatment, without detailing the vast body of evidence that is completely unrelated to the memos and has not been contradicted or substantively disputed.

Appearing on the January 10 edition of MSNBC's The Abrams Report, Kohn reacted to CBS anchor Dan Rather's September 15 remark that nobody has questioned the "major thrust of our report" by asserting that "There's no story without the documents. ... it's just conjecture without the documents." Earlier that day on CNN's Crossfire, Novak asked why CBS has failed to issue a "formal retraction of George W. Bush ducking National Guard service."

In a January 11 article, The Washington Post reported that conservatives asserted that the panel's findings "would convince Americans that Bush had served honorably during the Vietnam War and received no special treatment," but failed to mention that the panelists explicitly stated (as noted below) that they were not addressing the issue of Bush's service -- not the strength of the evidence against him, nor the credibility of his response. Instead, the Post quoted a remark that made no reference to the panel's findings -- Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie's claim that "[t]he public has made their judgment: They know the president served and was honorably discharged."

Perhaps the rest of the press is eager to sweep the whole affair under CBS' carpet because the entire sorry episode stands as a condemnation of the degraded standards that have come to hold sway throughout the media for the past decade and more.

Atrios commented on this the other day:

[T]he worst Rather has been accused of by sensible people is letting partisanship cloud his judgment. Accepting that as true just for sake of argument, it's still a far less egregious sin than most of the Whitewater-era horseshit which has never been acknowledged as horseshit by the liberal media, even though unlike the Rather incident, much of that horseshit was clearly deliberately manufactured by the producers and reporters. These events were recycled and echoed throuhgout the entire liberal media, with no one calling foul and no one calling for their heads. Without making any statement about what the appropriate consequences for "Rathergate" should be, it's clear that the media attention by that liberal media and the actual consequences have been much greater than dozens of worse incidents involving clear deliberate deception by people in the media.

In his weekly column, Gene Lyons elaborated on this point in more detail:

Amazingly, the CBS team reporting on the president's lost year in the National Guard -- and do let's recall that the suspect memos made a neat fit with other signs that Bush took a powder -- never talked to the purported source of the documents even after Burkett changed his story about who it was.

That's incredible.

Or would be, that is, had Conason and I not documented even worse transgressions in our book, "The Hunting of the President."

During the infamous Whitewater scandals, reporters pursuing Clinton credited the "revelations" of paid sources; edited audio tapes and video clips to make innocent remarks appear suspect; routinely hid exculpatory evidence (my favorite was a Washington Postarticle neglecting to mention that Clinton never endorsed a supposedly suspicious check); intervened with the Justice Department on behalf of an embezzler under indictment; actively assisted prosecutors trying to flip witnesses against the president; hyped stories about nonexistent FBI testimony alleging that the Clintons got $50,000 from a crooked loan; and even gathered information from sources and turned it over to Starr's prosecutors.

Those should have been firing offenses, too. But that was then; this is now. That was Clinton; this is Bush Last week, columnist and TV pundit Armstrong Williams got caught violating the most basic rule of all: He took $240,000 from the White House for touting its education reforms. There was a signed contract; he fulfilled it. Even Pravda did things more subtly.

This failure betrays any ethos of journalism that aspires to be about determining the truth. The vacuum created by the decline of traditional journalistic standards of fact-checking and substantiation is always, in short order, replaced by propaganda.

That in turn means the direction of public discourse will be determined by whoever has the most aggressive spin machine. Over the past decade, that has been the Republicans.

The result has been an unending litany of reportage in which Republican propaganda has been treated as established fact, daily news budget have become a virtual replica of daily GOP talking points, and editorial news judgment has been driven by the conservative agenda. Atrios and Lyons describe, I think, the ways this has driven political coverage in America.

But it goes beyond politics as well. Most egregiously, it has affected the work of the press corps in covering our government, largely by altering the relationships of journalists to the government. With conservatives in control of every branch, the press has become increasingly a propaganda organ for the government, and in particular the executive branch; simultaneously, its historic watchdog function as a check on abuse of government power has seriously eroded.

As Matt Yglesias says, this could not be more clear than in the instance of the decision to invade Iraq, as well as the continuing occupation of that country. The press was eager to embed itself and remain in the graces of an extraordinarily controlling and punitive administration that had little regard for the truth, and in the process failed to ask the hard questions that might have prevented the nation from entering into an ill-starred conflict whose chief accomplishment appears mostly to have been to kill over a thousand American soldiers, kill thousands more Iraqi civilians, and create conditions certain to only create even more terrorists bent on destroying us.

And now that the weapons of mass destruction which gave the administration its only serious pretext for the invasion have been officially established as not having existed, it can't be any more clear that America was led to war under false pretenses.

But on the day it was announced, that news received far less attention than the relatively meaningless CBS panel report.

Many liberals believe the answer is to create their own aggressive spin machine and think-tank infrastructure. No doubt that would help reverse the swing of public discourse to the right. But it won't solve the problem.

At some point, journalists are going to have rediscover their commitment to the standards of the craft, particularly the old adage: "Get it first, but get it right." At some point, we're going to have to recognize that getting it first without getting it right leads to disaster.

Certainly, the producers at CBS have learned that. Unfortunately, no one else in the media seem to. Indeed, the lesson everyone seems to have gleaned from the whole episode is: "Don't get right-wing bloggers pissed off at you." If that's what everyone comes away with, it'll mean we're only worse off now.

UPDATE: I meant to include a link to Mark Gisleson's excellent analysis of the panel's report over at Norwegianity.

Journalism or disinformation?

Reading Robert Jamieson's admiring column this morning, it's easy to come away with the impression of Stefan Sharkansky of Sound Politics as a kind of crusading truth-finder seeking out anomalies in the just-finished recount of the governor's race in Washington state.

I like Stefan. But I'm not so sure about whether truth is what he and the folks at Sound Politics are after. I think what they're after is for the candidate they rooted for to win -- any way, anyhow.

One of Stefan's more incendiary charges mirrors one made by the loser-out Republican in the race, Dino Rossi, in his lawsuit contesting the election, to wit, military voters were cheated out of a chance to vote by King County elections officials. Sharkansky argues, based on shakily obtained evidence, that these officials obscured the date on which they sent out military ballots and thereby engaged in a "cover-up" (a follow-up post by Brian Crouch charges fraud even more clearly).

However, Carla at Preemptive Karma went a-fact checkin', and found that the claims were not what they seem:

I then contacted Bobbie Egan, the media relations person for the King County Elections Office. Ms Egan knew of the soundpolitics allegations.

Egan informed me that the King County Elections Office doesn't handle the mailing for most of the military ballots directly. They do send emailed and faxed ballots out to those military people who request them. However, King County uses a hired vendor (contractor) to send out military ballots to most APO and US military addresses. King County puts the ballots in the envelopes and addresses them, then hands them off to the vendor who prepares them for the bulk mailings through the US Postal Service. King County's bulk mailing permit isn't used for these ballots. There is a federal permit used for mailing military ballots. Ms. Egan further informed me that they have a paper trail to verify that the mailings were properly sent. I'm hopeful that she will be faxing me copies of this paperwork later today.

I did get a call back from the USPS, but not the supervisor of the Business Mail Entry office in Seattle. I spoke with the media relations person for the region, who is following up on my questions and is set to get back to me later today.

Carla also makes some astute observations about the nature of this kind of "journalism":

If the braintrust at soundpolitics had just made a few phone calls, they could have checked their information. Instead, they published what appears to be dubiously and sloppily sourced material, misleading their readership. This misinformation is being used to prop up some very serious allegations.

Bloggers aren't usually held to the same standard as journalists. It's clear that the kind of sourcing and fact checking usually done by journalists isn't part of the blogosphere, in general. However soundpolitics is making some very serious charges (and working hard to self promote in the wake of these charges). Their readership is whipped up into a frenzy without all of the facts.

This tossing about of serious wrongdoing coupled with dubious sourcing and fact checking is irresponsible.

For what it's worth, the behavior at Sound Politics only mirrors the behavior of the Republican right throughout the recount fight: throw shit on the wall and see what sticks. This is especially true of top Republican officials (notably Rossi and GOP Chairman Chris Vance) as well as right-wing radio, where the word "fraud" rings throughout the airwaves -- a charge that simply has not come even close to being proven.

Indeed, one has to ask: Who's perpetrating the fraud here?

The tsunami T-shirt scam

One of the ways that smears work is that they prey on people's gullibility -- on their willingness, or even desire (depending on your Oxycontin intake), to believe the worst about other people. Especially if it excuses your own lack of human feeling and basic decency.

See, for instance, the far-flung right-wing discussion of the tsunami victims seen wearing Osama bin Laden T-shirts. As Digby noted the other day, a caller to Rush Limbaugh used the photo of a person wearing such a shirt as part of her excuse for not feeling any sympathy for the tsunami victims:

CALLER: (Giggle) Well, I was pretty upset and even getting madder the more coverage I watched, and I was thinking, 'Why am I not feeling so charitable, and I'm seeing all these bodies,' and then I see this picture on the Internet that was sent to me, and it was them carrying a body along in Sri Lanka, it said Galle, G-a-l-l-e, Sri Lanka and they had a crowd of people watching and this guy in the middle is standing there looking at the body wearing an Osama bin Laden T-shirt.

RUSH: I saw that picture.

CALLER: And I thought, it just validated the way I felt and I thought these are the same people that were the cheerleaders on 9/11, and we're going to go rebuild their world for them.

RUSH: Yeah.

This is all part of the right-wing meme blaming the tsunami victims' faiths for the disaster.

However, in at least some instances, something else is at work here as well.

The other day Amy Goodman interviewed the fearless Allan Nairn, who described how, in Indonesia, the bin Laden T-shirts are being used by right-wing miltarists as a propaganda ploy designed to anger Americans:

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, Colin Powell announced that the U.S. would be supplying spare parts for C-130 transport planes ostensibly to help with the relief effort, the Indonesian military transport planes. Within days of Powell making this announcement, it came out that the Indonesian military, which had previously used these planes to transport the goods looted from East Timor, as they were destroying East Timor in 1999 to take thousands of Timorese civilian prisoners out after the 1999 campaign of slaughter in Timor, which previously have been used to drop paratroops over Aceh, were now used just in the past week to bring members of two Bin Laden affiliated Indonesian groups, the FPI and the MMI, the Islamic Defenders Front and the Islamic Mujahadin Council, they flew them up to Aceh, ostensibly to help in the relief effort. These groups were created or – well the FPI was in part created by the Indonesian armed forces, and the MMI has received backing from Indonesian military intelligence at various points. The MMI includes Laskar Jihad a group the went into Malukus and helped spark sectarian fighting between Muslim and Christian peasants, Muslim and Christian militias, in which thousands were killed. This was done to create chaos, which the Indonesian military could then take advantage of. And these groups are openly connected to Bin Laden and espouse that ideology.

AMY GOODMAN: You're saying that the Indonesian military has brought them into Aceh now, actually flown them in?

ALLAN NAIRN: Yes, they brought them into Aceh. Some of them are walking around with Bin Laden T-shirts. They go up to foreign reporters and present themselves as Acehnese even though they are not, and James Kelly of the U.S. State Department just said, there's worry that such militants might attack U.S. troops. Well simultaneously Powell was announcing the U.S. is going to aid the Indonesian military, one of the rationales being the Indonesian military is needed to fight such Bin Laden-style military.

AMY GOODMAN: The Indonesian military brought them as in as a way to galvanize support for the Indonesian military?

ALLAN NAIRN: Apparently so. They have used similar tactics before. It's also seems to be a way of terrorizing the Acehnese population.

Be sure to check out Nairn's blog. I was working MSNBC's international desk during the 1999 East Timor crisis, and came to admire Nairn for his bravery and awesome reporting. Here's a Salon piece looking back on that episode.

[Hat tip to Erin in comments.]

A little talk about hate

I'm scheduled to make a speaking appearance today at Seattle University. I'll be discussing hate crimes and my book, Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America.

The program is located in the Schafer Auditorium which is in the foyer of the Lemieux Library. I'm scheduled to begin speaking at around noon; I'll talk for about half an hour, then take questions, and then sign books. The program is supposed to last until 1:30 p.m.

This appearance is sponsored by the school's Office of Multicultural Student Affairs. (A PDF of the flyer for the talk is here.)

The public is welcome, so be sure to come down if you have the time.

Montana madness

I mentioned the other day that my recent reconnaissance in Montana and elsewhere had produced some disturbing data, particularly regarding the way right-wing rhetoric is trending.

What I neglected to mention is that Montana in particular is, at the same time, showing signs of hope for rural progressives. This is a winnable fight, if we can ever convince our urban-centric political colleagues to listen up.

Right after the election, I laid out the need for developing a rural strategy if progressives really want to turn the current electoral trend around. Democrats need to become a national party again.

The key, as I said then, is not to surrender on core issues, but to begin fighting back and countering the pervasive right-wing propaganda in rural districts, both by words and by actions. The latter is particularly key, since Republicans have been harming rural dwellers in ways that can be easily demonstrated, particularly by counter-action.

David Sirota recently had a piece in Washington Monthly profiling Brian Schweitzer, the new governor of Montana. He's a Democrat. And he won by adopting precisely that strategy.

The issue that Schweitzer used to drive a wedge between Republicans and their rural base was a simple one: land and stream access for hunters and fishermen. As Sirota explains:

To understand why hunting and fishing is such a big deal in Montana, consider this: The state has a population of 971,000; in 2001, 723,000 of them fished, hunted, or watched wildlife, according to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service survey. Though the state has plenty of land for hunting and fishing, the residents don't take kindly to any effort to restrict their sporting pursuits. Yet throughout the Mountain West, Republicans, working with conservative think tanks, have pushed privatization and property-rights regulations that have the effect of doing just that. In the late '90s, for example, the Montana Republican Party platform, along with Brown's running-mate, Rep. Dave Lewis, tried to restrict the state's treasured Stream Access Law, which demands private landowners allow non-commercial anglers to fish on streams crossing through their property. The legislature also attempted to sell off large chunks of state land, much of it prime hunting territory. Some outdoorsmen became worried that the state's deficit woes would be used as a Republican rationale to reduce spending on public land management programs and sell off even more valuable hunting real estate.

Working with a local outdoorsmen group in Gallatin County, which includes Bozeman, Schweitzer drafted a 9-point plan to protect cherished hunting and fishing access rights on public and private lands. Among other things, Schweitzer called for keeping public lands in the state's hands, for spending more money to maintain them for hunters and anglers, and for using fees from hunting licenses to buy easements from private property owners to give sportsmen easier access to fields and streams. He unveiled this plan at a town hall meeting of conservative hunters and fishermen in Bozeman, to happy applause. Randy Newburg, a Republican who heads the Headwaters Fish and Game Association in Bozeman, effectively endorsed Schweitzer, calling access a "special" issue, and accusing Republicans in Helena of trying to "sell it off to the highest bidder."

The beauty of the access issue was three-fold. First, it helped Schweitzer make inroads with the constituency of outdoorsmen that is normally Democrat-averse.

Second, it let us speak to both left-leaning environmentalists, who wanted public lands and wildlife herds maintained, and right-leaning outdoorsmen, who wanted a place to recreate and a steady population of game to hunt. This was especially important because we did not want to alienate the enviros who would be out in force on election day to vote against an initiative to permit cyanide leach mining. Stern, who had a deft sense of strategy, once pointed out, "Hunters can be some of the biggest environmentalists around, even though they don't think of themselves that way and would never in a million years label themselves that."

Third, it was an issue that would ultimately help us tie Brown in Republican-leaning Gallatin County, one of the fastest growing counties in America. Like other Rocky Mountain exurbs, Gallatin had seen an influx of new residents looking to live in an area with outdoor recreation. Targeting these new residents and making them Democratic voters early were key not only to the election at hand, but also for building a majority for the long haul.

There are similar issues that can be used to dispel the conservative stranglehold on rural political life: the demise of the family farm; corporate timber giants' job-reducing measures and resource mismanagement; the gutting of the rural infrastructure; destruction of hunting and fishing habitat. And that's just for starters. For nearly every rural locale, there is a menu of opportunities.

It is important to remember that this has to be done by candidates who who can demonstrate they share rural dwellers' real values: hard work, honesty, decency, forthrightness, integrity. They also have to be genuine; a few years ago, Idaho Democrats ran as their candidate for the U.S. Senate a man from the East Coast who claimed residence in Sun Valley. Nice fellow, and an avid fly fisherman, but he wasn't from Idaho and gave little sign he had any more than a peripheral connection to the people who live there. He got creamed, of course; but even worse, he underscored the perception in the state of Democrats as the party of urban elites.

Even though Schweitzer is making great strides in Montana, he faces a continuing uphill battle, in no small part because the Republican Party in Montana is so entrenched and remains so powerful. More to the point, the GOP in Montana is becoming increasingly extremist in its orientation.

This has not exactly been a secret in Montana. There have been Republican legislators with militia/Patriot associations, from nearly every part of the state. This strand of GOP politics remains alive and well; take, for instance, the Bozeman legislator who is proposing to require a death certificate be issued for all abortions.

One of the most interesting of these figures is a fellow named Rick Jore, who hails from Ronan, the Mission Mountain/Flathead Valley reservation town where I spent the better part of one summer (in 1988) editing the local weekly paper. Jore's constituency is the extreme right wing whites who tend to form a substantial bloc in western Montana, including the Flathead. (See my previous report on extremist activity in the valley.)

Jore held his seat in the Legislature from 1994 to 2000, always as a Republican. But he maintained associations with Howard Phillips' Constitution Party for several years, and in 2000 announced he was leaving the GOP and running as a Constitution candidate. He promptly lost his seat and hit Phillips' CP speaking circuit.

Jore decided to try running again in 2004. He wound up splitting the right-wing vote, and ended up in a numerical tie with Democrat Jeanne Windham after the final recounts were held: Jore and Windham each had 1,559 votes, while Republican Jack Cross garnered 1,107 votes.

That meant the governor was allowed to make a choice between the two candidates. One big problem with that: the current governor is a Republican, who would be making a choice that would affect the incoming Democratic governor (Schweitzer). Indeed, if Windham were chosen, Democrats would control the state House for the first time in over a decade (in addition to the governorship, they also took the Senate). If Jore, the GOP would maintain its tenuous grip.

Now, outgoing Republican Gov. Judith Martz is perhaps the most unpopular governor in Montana history. (You used to be able to buy a bumper sticker in Montana that proclaimed, "My governor is dumber than your governor.") So unpopular that she decided not to seek re-election after one term. Her ineptitude was a big boost for Schweitzer as well.

Unsurprisingly, Martz picked Jore:

At a press conference, Martz said she studied the election results and found that 63 percent of the House District 12 voters favored the conservative candidates -- either Jore or Cross -- in the three-person race.

"It is my opinion that the people in that community really were looking for a conservative to serve them," she said. "I believe that was the choice of the people and that's why I chose Rick Jore."

In response, Jore said, "I was pleased and privileged that she would express the confidence in me." He said he agrees with Martz that the district ought to have a conservative representative, given how the vote totals came out.

Windham could not be reached for comment but in the past has rejected the notion that more Lake County voters cast their ballots for conservative candidates, a conservative should be appointed.

What's noteworthy about Martz's action was that it explicitly acknowledged an ideological connection between Republicans and the extremists of the Constitution Party. Usually, they are more circumspect.

A voter's lawsuit contested the outcome, though, on the basis of seven ballots that were marked for both Jore and Cross, which according to Montana law rendered their vote invalid for that race, but which were counted for Jore. Eventually, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and Windham won the seat, which in turn gave the House to Democrats.

Now, you may recall that the Constitution Party sponsored a couple of Montana appearances by Judge Roy Moore, the fellow who raised the ruckus over the Ten Commandments in Alabama. Those appearances were also bolstered by a turnout drive from the Militia of Montana.

Travis McAdam (of the Montana Human Rights Network) explained in detail in a recent op-ed for the Helena Independent Record what the Constitution Party is: among other things, the only party that openly supported the "militia" movement:

Howard Phillips founded the national Constitution Party in 1992, combining Christian Reconstruction with themes of the militia movement. Reconstructionists believe that civil law should mirror Old Testament biblical law, meaning capital punishment should be extended to gays, lesbians, blasphemers, and adulterers. People who are not "Christian enough" could be denied citizenship, or worse, be executed. The party also promotes "New World Order" conspiracy theories similar to those of the militia movement.

(A minor corrective worth noting, incidentally: they originally called themselves the "U.S. Taxpayers Party" and changed the name to "Constitution Party" in 1999 for the 2000 election.)

Even more profound is the significance of Martz's move:

Her decision reverberates with partisan political sentiment. Wanting to keep Republicans in control of the House, Martz provided legitimacy to the Constitution Party, something the party had been unable to do on its own. For short-term political gain, Martz has allowed Montana conservatism to take another gigantic step to the right.

Brian Schweitzer, to his credit, appears poised to take advantage of this creeping extremism by making hay with it. His national peers might be wise to follow his example.

Blogiversary

I really am bad at this sort of thing, but I suppose I should have noted that yesterday was my second anniversary operating Orcinus. (Here's my first post.)

The only reason it's worth noting is that every now and then I like to stop and say thank you to the people who keep reading and linking to this little corner of the blogging world. I consider myself incredibly fortunate in this regard. It's every writer's dream to have a kind of ongoing conversation with so many thoughtful people. I've tried to keep the blog a real writer's journal where I work out writing ideas, so attracting this kind of readership is extremely gratifying (not to mention edifying).

Here's to many more years.

Brain dead indeed

The ever-on-the-spot John Ray at Dissecting Liberalism posted this today:

There is a pompous Leftist ass (as in donkey) called Steve Kangas who claims to have all the answers to why Leftists are right and others are wrong. I guess he has convinced himself but convincing others will be harder. I have shown here how far-Left and quite stupid is his treatment of one topic at least. He starts out by defining socialism in such a way that only Communists can be socialists and then defines socialism in a way that would exclude Stalin from being one! So is ANYBODY a socialist according to Kangas? Only Mr Brain-dead Kangas himself, I guess.

Obviously John Ray is as well informed as he is a deep thinker. Because on the left side of the Web, it's very well known that Steve Kangas has been dead since Feb. 8, 1999, the day he was found in the men's restrooms of Richard Mellon Scaife's offices.

The circumstances were mysterious at best, and though Kangas' death was officially ruled a suicide, it has formed the basis of several theories that he was murdered for his outspoken views, and especially his ongoing criticism of Scaife (see here, here, and here). I have no idea whether these theories hold any water, not having examined any of them thoroughly. But there is little doubt that Kangas has been, uh, brain dead for five years now, a fact that takes only a little googling to ascertain.

I think John Ray wonders why none of the people he "dissects" (including yours truly) take his work seriously. Really, now.

[Via The Daou Report.]

White like me

Here's a disturbing piece out of Portland, from Willamette Week:

Dreaming of a White New Year: "Ghost skins" plan to descend on Southwest Portland in the next month.
Portland supremacists

White supremacists have been seeking to mainstream themselves for years, particularly as the younger generation of former skinheads has aged and melted into larger society. The militia movement of the 1990s was a form of this mainstreaming, but it entailed stripping out the overtly racist and anti-Semitic content of the belief system, leaving it to revolve around conspiracy and monetary theories as the chief drivers of its political agenda.

If this story is accurate, then they're trying out a new strategy that keeps intact these more noxious elements and presents them in a guise of seeming social normalcy:

Ramm, a Tualatin resident, is the national director of the Tualatin Valley Skins and, in some ways, the new face of intolerance. He and his fellow supremacists are self-described "ghost skins." They don't shave their heads, commit crimes or duck-step around town in boots and braces. While their identities remain murky, their goals are crystal-clear.

"We seek to enlighten the public on racial truths the media, schools and government are afraid to promote," says Ramm.

To perform this duty, he and an unknown number of like-minded Aryans are staging a "flyer outreach contest" Jan. 8 in Gabriel Park. Sometime after 1 pm, they will disperse through the surrounding Hayhurst, Maplewood and Multnomah neighborhoods armed with hate-promoting handbills. These are rubber-banded around rocks, stuffed into plastic baggies and lobbed onto the lawns and driveways of pre-assigned targets.

Ramm says judges will be manning a police scanner and the team who generates the most complaints wins 1,000 white-power songs, two racist DVDs and a 17-inch swastika.

According to the TVS website, the contest is a perfectly legal opportunity to "just say NO to the Oregon cesspool of Niggers, Spics, Kikes, Faggots, Ragheads, Chinks, Gooks, Roaches & leftist communist swine."

One of the aspects of right-wing extremism that is most frequently overlooked is its ability to blend into the landscape and present itself as normal. My encounters with various members and camp followers of the Aryan Nations, and my personal encounters with avowed neo-Nazis as well as Freemen and militiamen, made me realize that the stereotype was wrong: For the most part, many of these people passed as least nominally normal. They held jobs, paid taxes, took part in the PTA and local clubs, went to barbecues with their neighbors and went fishing with their coworkers.

James Aho discussed this in depth in his landmark 1992 study The Politics of Righteousness: Idaho Christian Patriotism. Aho compiled an extensive dataset on a large number of members of far-right "Patriot" groups and found that, by and large, they were better educated and better employed than the average American, contrary to the stereotype. (He did observe a particular trend in their education patterns; they hardly ever came from fields involving the humanities, and had an emphasis on technical, engineering and business fields.) For the most part, their lifestyles were indistinguishable from that of their neighbors.

It was this realization, concurrent with the recognition that what I was dealing with was genuine fascism, that sparked my long interest in fascism studies. It's one of the reasons I continue to insist that fascism is not such a distant phenomenon for we Americans.

If the "ghost skins" of Portland enjoy any success, it will signal a more deeply disturbing trend: a receptivity to this tactic, the object of which is "normalizing" white supremacist beliefs. Given the current political environment and latent intolerance, it seems likely they'll at least pick up some numbers on the margins; the bigger picture rests on their ability to actually mainstream themselves and gain acceptance.

Here's hoping the people in Portland who are standing up to them -- including the nonprofit Southwest Neighborhoods -- have some success as well.

Beyond the pale

The hatemongers of the right-wing pundit class are always pushing the envelope, trying to top each other with fresh outrages that continually redefine the boundaries of acceptable public discourse, grossly distorting that discourse along the way.

Every now and then, one of them will tread well over that line. Think of Ann Coulter's remark about wishing Tim McVeigh had blown up the New York Times building. Not only the remark, but people's reactions to it, become telling. They tell us a lot about the real characters of the people who would condone such filth, let alone utter it.

Michael Savage, who has had many such moments, has finally topped himself. Media Matters reports that he said the following on his Dec. 31 radio show:

SAVAGE: It is the Savage Nation out here on the West Coast. We've had rain for five days. We have another five days of it. I need some aid right now. International aid. Because I may be suffering from seasonal affective disorder if this keeps up. Maybe I should go to the U.N. [United Nations] and see if I can get some special psychotherapy and sun lamps.

[...]

We shouldn't be sending as much as we're sending. Bush has a lot of gall writing a check for 135 million dollars. This is more a UNICEF deal, it's a U.N. deal, it's a Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, George Soros, Bill Clinton bleeding-heart-liberal deal. I don't want to send them any money. You know, a few airplanes with some medical supplies and a little lip service would have been fine for me.

[...]

You could take the argument that it's God's will, it's too bad and let's move on. And then let others help them. They're not in our sphere of interest. Primarily, they hate our guts in plain English. All right, well, the argument is, well, if you send them money, they're gonna like us, show 'em we're not anti-Muslim. That is such rubbish. That is such rubbish. They're gonna hate you anyhow, no matter what we ever do.

[...]

It's not a tragedy. I wouldn't call it a tragedy. It's a human disaster. It's not a tragedy in that sense. But, the issue is, theological questions suddenly arise. ... Now, for you atheists, you have no questions about this. It's a pure accident of nature. You don't ask yourself, "Was it God's hand?"

Apparently, Savage has now joined the Fred Phelps school of compassionate conservatism.

But as unconscionably inhuman as these remarks were, he was only getting started. In fact, what followed was genuinely dangerous:

If you are a God-believing, God-fearing person, I am sure at some point you ask yourself, wait a minute. The epicenter of this earthquake and the resulting tidal wave was adjacent to the sex trade island of Phuket, Thailand ... and then it knocked out many, many regions of Indonesia, some of which are the most vicious recruiting grounds for Islamic terrorists. That's a fact of reality. Then going the other way, it hit Sri Lanka, ex-Ceylon. And as you well know, Sri Lanka is a viciously anti-Western nation, the home of the Tamil Tigers, who are not only separatists but anti-Westerners, anti-Christians, etc. You could argue, maybe this is God's hand, because some of their brethren struck Christian America. Maybe God speaks the truth but waits. Seeks the truth and waits. I don't know. You could argue: God struck them. Now, I don't argue that because I'm not a theologian. Nor do I believe that God is omnipotent. I believe God is omnipresent. But I don't think God has control over every act because there would be no free will and I don't believe in that. ... But then again, who knows? I'm one man amongst billions of people, with one man's opinion.

[...]

Many of the countries and the areas in these countries that were hit by these tidal waves were hotbeds of radical Islam. Why should we be helping them destroy us? ... I think what we're doing is feeding our own demise. ... I truthfully don't believe in foreign aid.

[...]

We shouldn't be spending a nickel on this, as far as I'm concerned. ... I don't want one nickel of my money going over there. ... I am sick of being bled to death by every damn incident on the earth.

If Michael Savage ever were perceived as the voice of America, we'd all be in big trouble. The rest of the world would see us as monsters, and they'd be right.

Digby the other day caught Rush Limbaugh playing footsie with the same kind of sentiments:

CALLER: (Giggle) Well, I was pretty upset and even getting madder the more coverage I watched, and I was thinking, 'Why am I not feeling so charitable, and I'm seeing all these bodies,' and then I see this picture on the Internet that was sent to me, and it was them carrying a body along in Sri Lanka, it said Galle, G-a-l-l-e, Sri Lanka and they had a crowd of people watching and this guy in the middle is standing there looking at the body wearing an Osama bin Laden T-shirt.

RUSH: I saw that picture.

CALLER: And I thought, it just validated the way I felt and I thought these are the same people that were the cheerleaders on 9/11, and we're going to go rebuild their world for them.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Now, I love President Bush. I respect him. I voted for him, but when I saw him come out and I realized they were asking for more money --

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: -- I got even madder, and I thought, 'I don't think we should be asked to give any more.'

Later in the show, a Sri Lankan man called in to correct the woman's misimpressions:

CALLER: Yeah, Rush, hi. I wanted to answer the lady called earlier regarding to the guy is wearing a T-shirt. I don't know he was a dead guy or not. I'm from Sri Lanka. I've been listening to you for a long time. Sri Lanka is not a Muslim nation. Sri Lanka is 68% Singhalese people, that influence all the Catholics and the majority is Buddhist.

RUSH: Yes, yes.

CALLER: There are Muslims around that, you know, probably hate America, but we don't hate United States of America. The Singhalese people do not hate America. I just want to tell you that because we have our own problem for years with Tamil, and Muslim people. I just wanted to tell you that.

RUSH: That woman was calling from Pennsylvania, and there's picture going around the Internet, and I've seen it. Some aid is arriving while a body is being carted away, and there's a kid, a young man watching it all with a bin Laden t-shirt. She said the picture is from Sri Lanka. I don't know that it is. I don't know the picture is from Sri Lanka, but you have to understand the power of pictures. You know, there are going to be some Americans who are just going to recoil at the thought that we are bailing out and helping people who swear an oath of loyalty to Osama bin Laden, whether it's in Sri Lanka or not. I don't think her comment was actually aimed at Sri Lanka per se, specifically. It was just in reaction to that picture she saw. What are the Muslim nations that were affected by this tsunami, if not Sri Lanka?

The ignorance that abounds here really is astonishing in both the Limbaugh and Savage transcripts. The epicenter of the quake was near Sumatra, one of the islands of Indonesia, a largely Muslim nation. (In case anyone has forgotten, it was also a noteworthy victim of an Al Qaeda attack, namely, the bombing in Bali.) Most of the rest of the victim nations are Hindu or Buddhist.

What's dangerous about these remarks is the way they play right into the hands of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. As I long ago remarked, people who make all of Islam out to be our Enemy are furthering bin Laden's hopes, which is to draw us into an all-out global religious conflict pitting Islam against the West.

Savage has been playing this theme for a long time, but rarely has he stooped to such vicious and monstrous depths. These remarks, if repeated in the Muslim world as representative of American beliefs, have the potential to cause serious long-term damage.

Fortunately, no one really takes Savage that seriously. He remains firmly embedded in the public mind as a representative of far-right conservatism.

The flip side of this caveat is the fact that he's the third-most popular talk-show host on right-wing radio. If he's on the fringe, it's become a mighty big damned fringe.

Worst of all, you'll find all kinds of supposedly "mainstream" conservatives defending him, a la Limbaugh, as just an "entertainer."

Actually, Savage is a right-wing propagandist. He belongs to, and is a major spokesman for, the conservative movement.

And these remarks, it should be clear, place him well beyond the pale of what should be acceptable public discourse. He is a hate-monger and an unreconstructed bigot who deserves not even a scintilla of credibility. Any right-winger who refuses to renounce him -- let alone who condones him or supports him -- is making clear that they stand shoulder to shoulder with Savage in his bottomless moral abyss.

Savage's remarks should be a benchmark: Either repudiate them, and the man who spoke them, or stand confirmed as a moral wretch. It's a simple test. Let's see who passes.

America Haters

This cartoon is titled "America Haters." Talk about your classic case of projection. You've gotta love how the liberal antiwar type is waving from atop a heap of corpses. Doesn't get much more inflammatory than that, does it? (It can be found in the Jewish World Review.)

Of course, I just mentioned the increasing inclination by people on the rank-and-file right to talk loosely about rounding up and executing liberals. A lot of this is fueled, I think, by the pervasive identification of liberals (and the "liberal media") with the Enemy, that is, with terrorists. This cartoon fits precisely into this trend.

Another interesting recent example of this is the (I think) current edition of the NRA magazine America's 1st Freedom (though strangely, it isn't available online). The cover story, titled "Media Terror," is all about how the "liberal media elite" undermines our "freedom" and the "war on terror." The cover illustration features a terrorist-looking dark-clad figure (who just might be a journalist) strangling an eagle in his hand. Nothing like subtlety, huh?

[I saw this magazine during my trip to Idaho, and it belonged to someone else. If anyone knows how to obtain a copy for my files, I'd appreciate a note in my e-mail.]

Well, I think we're getting the message. The rabid right wingers don't hate America. They just hate their fellow Americans.

Brave new media, my ass

Remember how everyone was certain the blogosphere had blown Dan Rather out of the water by "proving" that the so-called "Killian memos" it displayed in its story on George W. Bush's military career were "fraudulent"? Wasn't that the basis for Time naming PowerLine "blog of the year"?

Not so fast, please. As Corey Pein explains in the latest Columbia Journalism Review, what those self-anointed "new journalists" of the blogosphere achieved was something well below even the crudest of journalistic standards in terms of getting to the truth of the matter. Mainly because their work was so bereft of factual basis:

But CBS's critics are guilty of many of the very same sins. First, much of the bloggers' vaunted fact-checking was seriously warped. Their driving assumptions were often drawn from flawed information or based on faulty logic. Personal attacks passed for analysis. Second, and worse, the reviled MSM often followed the bloggers' lead. As mainstream media critics of CBS piled on, rumors shaped the news and conventions of sourcing and skepticism fell by the wayside. Dan Rather is not alone on this one; respected journalists made mistakes all around.

Of special note is the way the memos were "debunked":

Haste explains the rapid spread of thinly supported theories and flawed critiques, which moved from partisan blogs to the nation’s television sets. For example, the morning after CBS's September 8 report, the conservative blog Little Green Footballs posted a do-it-yourself experiment that supposedly proved that the documents were produced on a computer. On September 11, a self-proclaimed typography expert, Joseph Newcomer, copied the experiment, and posted the results on his personal Web site. Little Green Footballs delighted in the "authoritative and definitive" validation, and posted a link to Newcomer's report on September 12. Two days later, Newcomer -- who was "100 percent" certain that the memos were forged -- figured high in a Washington Post report. The Post's mention of Newcomer came up that night on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN, and on September 15, he was a guest on Fox News's Hannity & Colmes.

Newcomer gave the press what it wanted: a definite answer. The problem is, his proof turns out to be far less than that. Newcomer's résumé -- boasting a Ph.D. in computer science and a role in creating electronic typesetting -- seemed impressive. His conclusions came out quickly, and were bold bordering on hyperbolic. The accompanying analysis was long and technical, discouraging close examination. Still, his method was simple to replicate, and the results were easy to understand:

Based on the fact that I was able, in less than five minutes . . . to type in the text of the 01-August-1972 memo into Microsoft Word and get a document so close that you can hold my document in front of the 'authentic' document and see virtually no errors, I can assert without any doubt (as have many others) that this document is a modern forgery. Any other position is indefensible.

Red flags wave here, or should have. Newcomer begins with the presumption that the documents are forgeries, and as evidence submits that he can create a very similar document on his computer. This proves nothing -- you could make a replica of almost any document using Word. Yet Newcomer's aggressive conclusion is based on this logical error.

Many of the typographic critiques were similarly flawed. Would-be gumshoes typed up documents on their computers and fooled around with the images in Photoshop until their creation matched the originals. Someone remembered something his ex-military uncle told him, others recalled the quirks of an IBM typewriter not seen for twenty years. There was little new evidence and lots of pure speculation. But the speculation framed the story for the working press.

Pein goes on to mention the case of Utah State professor David Hailey, who was sucked into the blog controversy because of journalistically irresponsible behavior on the part the right-wing blog WizBang (described in detail here and here). Hailey himself has now published a response to the controversy.

Of course, I've been saying all along that these self-proclaimed "new journalists" had better learn that they're going to have face the same reality that was part and parcel of the world of "old journalism": Credibility is the coin of the realm, and you won't have it very long if you don't engage in fact-checking and testing your pet theses. If PowerLine, Little Green Footballs, and WizBang represent the future of blogging, we might as well give up now.

In any event, the blue-ribbon panel investigating the CBS memos is supposed to release its report soon. Popcorn, anyone?

Headin' for the big roundup

Having made two post-election jaunts to the red state hinterlands of Idaho and Montana, I'm back to report that, well, things are getting ugly out there. In some cases, really ugly.

I've been talking for some time about the course that eliminationist rhetoric on the right would eventually take by the force of its own nature: pretty soon we'd go from talking about liberals as traitors to overtly wishing for violence to be visited upon them and discussing locking them up, followed in due course by such violence and incarceration becoming a reality.

Well, it is now becoming a commonly spoken sentiment on the right to wish for violence against liberals and to simultaneously suggest they and all "traitors" (including Muslim Americans) should be locked away. We're firmly into Phase II now.

Now, you won't hear this talk on the upper levels of the conservative movement. People like William Bennett will call for a "national renewal" aimed at enforcing a new moral code, while Ann Coulter will explain to her readership, a la the title of her most recent "bestseller", that the "preferable" way to address a liberal is with "a baseball bat." [Ha ha. Whatsa matter, you don't think that's funny? Someone should beat you up.]

And if you talk to supposedly "reasonable" conservatives, who will claim that talk like this remains relegated to the fringes and is just so much "hot talk." I've been hearing this for a long time, but I keep hearing more and more of the eliminationist talk.

You hear it when conservatives -- especially those red-state cultural conservatives from the working class who are most likely to vote against their own self-interest, and then blame liberals for how lousy their lives are -- get together among themselves for their communal liberal-bashing hatefests. They'll say it when they think no one else is listening. You can hear it from "fringe" radio figures like Michael Savage. Or you can read it in the unpublished letters to the editor that most publications choose not to run.

It's the natural outgrowth of the kind of rhetoric we've gotten from the national conservative punditry, manifesting itself on a less sophisticated but more direct and plain-spoken mode.

My very clear impression of the rank-and-file American right is that many if not most of them, at the behest of their leaders, now believe that opposing George W. Bush and the Iraq War, as well as his handling of the War on Terror, is an act of genuine treason worthy of the ultimate social condemnation, including incarceration and execution. They feel not only vindicated but profoundly empowered by the election result, empowered to silence their opposition, by force if need be.

These aren't just my impressions from hanging out in Deep Red Country. The evidence is abundant elsewhere as well. Consider, for instance, some of the letters to the editor received by Editor and Publisher after it published a piece by former USA Today publisher Al Neuharth (who is not exactly a liberal) questioning the administration's handling of Iraq.

One correspondent wished we had formed an alliance with Hitler (so we could have eliminated Commies and leftists from the planet first), while the rest called the offending authors "cowards and traitors", "unAmerican," "jackals," and the like. Then the threatening notes enter:

Their dissent equals treason. The terrorists got him just like all the other rich liberals who side against our victory. They forget that wars end, and then the country takes stock of who was where.

More along those lines:

Neuharth should be tried for treason along with a lot of other blowhards who should be spending their energies condemning the barbarism of our enemies, the same people who destroyed the Twin Towers.

... In the end William Joyce was executed for giving aid and comfort to the enemy during war time. Would that the same fate befall Al Neuharth!

The consummate expression of these attitudes was this:

The Patriot Act will put both of you (Neuharth and Mitchell) on trial for treason and convict and execute both of you as traitors for running these stories in a time of war and it should be done on TV for other communist traitors like you two to know we mean business. This is war and you should be put in prison NOW for talking like this. Who the hell do you people think you are? You give aid and comfort to our enemies and aid them in murdering our proud soldiers. You people are a disgrace to America. Your families should be put in prison with you, then be made to leave and move to the Middle East ...This is a great Christian nation and god wants us to lead the world out of darkness with great leaders like President George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Communists like Al and Greg will soon be in prison and on death row for your ugly papers. We won the election and now you are mad. We own America and all the rights, you people are trash, go back to Russia and Africa and take your friends with before we put you on death row after a fair trial.

E&P had earlier been the recipient of a similar e-mail from a fellow named Joe M. Richardson voicing similar sentiments, while holding forth on the subject of the soldiers who dared to question Donald Rumsfeld (cited by Atrios):

The duped soldier should be put at the very front of the action, no armor. The cooperating sergeant's career should be over and maybe become MIA. Pitts and all his cronies should be executed as traitors. We are fighting a war, the debate is over, you’re either for us or against us, there is no middle ground. I say start executing the leftists in our country, soon.

Bow-tied Beltway Republicans (and liberals, too) like to disregard talk like this as unrepresentative. But I don't think that's the case any longer. I think they're not just blowing smoke, they're deluding themselves. It's out there, and it's just about everywhere.

As Better Angels put it:

As for ol' Joe: nothing that you say to someone like him will change his mind. What I'm afraid of is that there are many, many more like him, that they're the ones driving the debate, and that we won't be able to unhorse them until this noble, great, beloved country of mine lies in ruins--and even then, they'll be so congenitally unable to accept responsibility that they'll be looking for blame everywhere except where it lies--in themselves.

A lot of my regular readers wondered why I jumped all over Michelle Malkin for her noxious defense of the Japanese American internment. Aside from my extensive background in dealing with the subject -- enough to know that Malkin was perpetrating an outrage against memory and history -- the more pertinent concern was that I could see where this argument was heading.

Malkin's disingenuous disclaimers notwithstanding, it was clear she was creating a rationale for repeating one of American history's real atrocities by rounding up and incarcerating the nation's Arab and/or Muslim populace and placing them in concentration camps (given an appropriate GOP-style euphemism like, say, "homeland security centers"). Earlier this week, Bush appointee Daniel Pipes published an op-ed piece clearly advocating the view that such internment should be considered a viable option. (Eric Muller has the consummate commentary on Pipes' piece.)

As Juan Cole observed, in light of Pipes' piece:

If the American yahoos ever start putting people in concentration camps, I think we may be assured that they won't stop with the Muslims or the Asians, and Mr. Pipes will come to have reason to regret his imprudence and, frankly, his demonic implication.

So will, I suspect, a whole class of willfully self-deluded conservatives and "moderate" liberals. As for the rest of us, well, who knows whether we'll even still be around when they finally reach their epiphany?

Replaying Florida in Washington

I don't know how many of you have been following the mini-drama regarding the governor's race up here in Washington state, but it's worth noting if only because of certain national implications contained therein. I have been tracking it while busily not posting here the past few weeks.

Christine Gregoire was not my first choice for the governorship, but then, Democrats failed to nominate anyone who was. Gregoire emerged as the winner in a mediocre field, and so it didn't surprise me when she ran a tepid, uninspiring campaign. In fact, it was awful. As it also happened, a good friend of mine worked for Gregoire's office for several years, and over the years he had provided me with a less than flattering view of her judgment and competence.

The only problem was that her opposition, Dino Rossi, was a real potential nightmare. A wholly owned subsidiary of the Building Industry Association of Washington, Rossi was big battering ram aimed right at the state's environmental protection laws. He also was something of a stealth candidate for the religious right, which he masked with an affable public image. There are also some latent issues regarding Rossi's personal ethics.

So I held my nose and voted for Gregoire. (My friend did not; he simply left the governor's race blank.) But I wasn't surprised when the initial returns showed Gregoire losing by 261 votes -- in a year when Patty Murray and John Kerry won handily at the polls statewide. In other words, a lot of people voted for Kerry, Murray ... and Rossi.

Since there were some 2.9 million votes cast, the narrow margin triggered an automatic machine recount, which further trimmed Rossi's margin to a mere 42 votes. At that point, Gregoire's last chance lay in filing for a manual recount, requiring a $730,000 up-front deposit on the part of Democrats. For awhile, no one was sure whether Democrats were even going to come up with the money for it.

At this point, Republicans went into their classic bullying mode, a la Florida 2000: Rossi won the first two counts. Why take it to court? Radio talk-show host John Carlson, the GOP's 2000 gubernatorial nominee, advised Gregoire to "concede already," based on his experience. There was, however, ahem, a minor difference of several hundred thousand votes in Carlson's case.

Indeed, with a difference of 42, it would have been be foolish not to file for a manual recount. It was, after all, the third and final step allowed by Washington law when it came to counting votes in this state's election. But the GOP went all-out to make it seem Gregoire was being outrageously partisan if she did file.

Predictably, when Gregoire finally decided to seek a manual recount, the Republicans were all aflutter, largely because Democrats simultaneously sued to have some disallowed ballots reconsidered:

"I have faith in you, the voters of Washington," Rossi said. "Unfortunately, Christine Gregoire has faith in lawyers."

Other Republican leaders were furious.

"It's outrageous," said state Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance. "The Democrats are flat out trying to steal this election by changing the rules."

Let's be clear: At every step of the process, the Democrats followed the letter of Washington law. The state's election statutes are very clear that there are three potential counts of the vote: If, after the general-election tally, a race remains within 1 percent of the total vote, a machine recount occurs automatically. If, after that count, one of the candidates requests it, a manual recount of all ballots occurs. The candidate, however, has to put up a deposit for the costs of the recount, which is reimbursed if the challenge is successful.

Those are the rules. And the most important one is this: Whoever comes out ahead in the final, manual tally is the winner. Period.

And, indeed, Gregoire promised to accept the outcome of the manual recount, even if Rossi won by only a single vote. Rossi, however, refused to match her pledge. That, of course, was the giveaway to what followed.

The GOP's outrageous tactics -- essentially trying to game the system by short-circuiting the legitimate outcome of the established process through a public-relations campaign waged largely over the right-wing talk airwaves -- made it absolutely essential to get behind Gregoire's recount. The principles at stake, particularly regarding respect for the process and the final count, as well as of the right of citizens to have their legally cast votes be counted, were the same ones that had been disregarded so easily four years before in Florida.

Had the legal process in Florida been allowed to proceed without interference from the federal courts, it's clear it would have produced the only equitable solution: a manual statewide recount of all legal votes. And as we now know, that in turn would have produced a different outcome than what the nation got -- namely, an illegitimate president appointed to his seat by a partisan judiciary, a violation of the vote-counting foundations of democracy itself, as well as of the separation-of-powers doctrine that makes the Constitution function.

The GOP prevailed in Florida by short-circuiting the legal vote-counting process through a combination of mendacity and bullying, all of it designed to stop legally cast ballots from being counted. The tendency to obtain and maintain power by undermining the tenets of democracy itself, as we've noted previously, have only continued unabated since.

Washington Republicans pretty early on resurrected the phony memes of the Florida debacle, particularly those that favored maintaining the original vote outcome giving Rossi the slender victory. This included the outrageous claim that machine recounts are "more accurate" than hand recounts, which turns all established precedents regarding vote counts on its head.

The anti-democratic nature of the party, though, really came to the surface when election officials in King County -- home to more than a third of the state's entire votes -- announced the discovery of several hundred ballots that had been improperly disallowed in the first count.

Now, this is the kind of clear mistake that manual recounts are intended to correct, and ordinarily it would be considered uncontroversial for them to be included in the recounts. Indeed, similar mistakes were uncovered in other counties and the votes, logically, counted.

But King County was one of the few places where the votes trended Gregoire's way, so Republicans -- playing the same kind of cherry-picking tactics they had earlier accused Democrats of using -- decided to contest the counting of those ballots in that county only, by filing a suit to prevent it. So much for having faith in the voters, not lawyers.

What was especially noteworthy was that all of the discoveries of mistakes in King County were mistakes that heavily favored Rossi. That is, what they actually signalled was the possibility that Republican operatives within the elections office had made "mistakes" that gave Rossi an illegitimate win and let him claim an initial victory. But using the reverse offense tactics that became famous in Florida, Republicans took to the airwaves charging that the discovery of these mistakes could only be explained by fraud or incompetence on the part of Democrats.

Chairman Vance (our state's own Karl Rove in miniature) inveighed at length against counting the King Coiunty votes (which eventually tallied some 735 ballots) by impugning the integrity of the elections office: "At this point it is impossible for us to determine whether they are colossally incompetent or completely corrupt," he said.

Eventually, the state Supreme Court ruled in Gregoire's favor, saying unanimously that the votes should be counted. A reading of the ruling itself makes clear that it is based on well established precedent in Washington law, dating back to a key 1926 ruling.

Nonetheless, Chairman Vance declared: "Throughout this process we've objected whenever someone tried to change the rules. The Supreme Court just changed the rules. Now we will aggressively fight by those new rules."

Sure enough, it was only a brief matter of time before the Rossi camp -- you know, the folks who previously attacked their opponents for trying to change the rules after the fact -- announced that they wanted another election -- at taxpayer expense, of course. Best of all was their rationale:

"I would not want to enter my governorship with so many people viewing my governorship as illegitimate," Rossi said, reading from a letter sent to Gregoire last night.

Gosh, we certainly can't have people taking higher office in America when some portion of the populacec believes the election to be illegitimate. Heavens no.

Nevermind, of course, that both on the week of his inauguration and a poll taken just before his election, over 40 percent of Americans believed that George W. Bush had not been legitimately elected.

Washington can do better -- right, Dino? We just need to tap another $4 million out of the state budget so the voters can send you packing by another 120 votes. Indeed, all Gregoire needed to win, according to the rules, was the 10-vote margin the hand recount, independent of the additional King County votes, gave her.

Now it's Rossi who wants to change the rules.

As political-science professor Erik Olsen told the Seattle P-I:

Asked what advantages or pitfalls might await Rossi should he refuse to concede, Olsen said, "There is something to be said in a democratic political culture for being gracious when you lose -- but I would not second-guess him if he has some legitimate legal challenges."

However, Olsen said there is a danger that Rossi could be seen as a sore loser.

"There is a real risk for Dino Rossi if he contests this election too much -- that he's excessively partisan, excessively ambitious and that he doesn't respect the process," Olsen said.

Er, too late.

We'd already been exposed to Rossi's, shall we say, less-than-circumspect style. As the Seattle Times reported, "Rossi had been using the title 'governor-elect,' and his family even toured the Governor's Mansion."

The demand for a new election only cemented the impression. Rossi, like the rest of the Republican Party, is a power-grabber.

The party's Stalinist side has been coming out since then. Anyone who fails to toe the party line on the election outcome -- which is, that Gregoire is an "illegitimate" governor and that there exists "massive" evidence of fraud -- is nastily and vociferously attacked. This includes even Sam Reed, the Republican Secretary of State, who chose to follow his legal and constitutional duty and certify Gregoire as the governor-elect:

Now Reed believes the anger toward him is driven by a feeling he hasn't been Republican enough. For example, some think he should have backed the party's call for county auditors to reopen their tallies in hopes of getting more Rossi votes counted.

"There are people who think I should be using the position of secretary of state simply to weigh the scales on the side of my own party. I just don't accept that, and it would not be proper," he said.

"There are some people who have been dismayed that I wasn't a Katherine Harris who took the position, 'I'm a Republican, and by God that comes first.' "

It's clear that the difference between Florida and Washington is that we had the good fortune of having elected a secretary of state with genuine integrity, instead of someone willing to game the system for partisan gain.

Now the GOP is moving toward contesting the election, which can only take place on such grounds as "misconduct on the part of election workers; the ineligibility of a candidate to hold office; or the casting of illegal votes."

So far, there has emerged no credible evidence of any actual misconduct by any specific election workers, nor of a substantively organized effort to cast illegal votes. Stefan Sharkansky -- who seems to have worked himself into believing that Gregoire's imminent ascension to the governorship is actually the "tipping point" that will bring about her downfall (... er, okaaay ...) -- has been busily compiling evidence of "phantom votes" and the like, most of which involve mathematical anomalies not very dissimilar to those raised by Kerry supporters in Ohio, and none of which rise to the level of holding up in court as a challenge to the election.

The chief piece of evidence raised so far is a discrepancy of 3,500 votes in the final King County tabulations; tallies showed that many more votes than people who had actually signed in to vote. But, as always, the GOP was jumping the gun, comparing preliminary tabulations to the finished tallies, which will not be complete for another week and a half.

The GOP went hunting for more of these discrepancies, and today announced it had found more of them in counties that went for Gregoire. In all, it found some 8,500 "phantom votes." But as the story points out, these kinds of discrepancies are extremely common in all elections -- in fact, they're endemic, and will increase the greater the volumes of voters. The 2004 election tallied more votes than any in the history of the state.

Moreover, what the story doesn't point out is that the GOP did not seem to look for "phantom votes" in Rossi counties -- even though there is a statistical certainty that they will appear there as well.

If the reconciled numbers still reveal a substantial number of "phantom" votes -- greater than, say 1/10 of 1 percent of the final vote -- then there might be cause for concern about the presence of systematic fraud in the election. However, at best this anomaly would be cause for investigation only; it would not of itself serve as evidence of actual fraud on the part of election workers or voters. So far, the GOP has only been able to serve up speculation and not evidence.

In an op-ed in the P-I today by Republican mouthpiece David E. Johnson, we get a classic demonstration of conservative projection: It's Democrats who are taking the election to the courts and trying to litigate the outcome, not Republicans. That legally permitted step that Gregoire took in filing for the manual recount was, you see, a kind of litigation, not the normative political step that Rossi would gladly have taken as well were their roles reversed.

Besides accusing Democrats of employing the very tactic they themselves apparently intend to deploy -- that is, of contesting the election through the courts -- Johnson's piece also contains the obligatory egregious distortions, notably:

The third, a manual recount with dubious ballots suddenly discovered in heavily Democratic King County that were not counted previously gave her the election.

There was nothing "dubious" about the King County ballots; they were legally cast, and improperly discarded the first time around. If anything needs investigating on that count, it is the circumstances under which they were originally disallowed. More to the point: They proved to be moot, since the manual recount gave Gregoire the victory even without those ballots; they only increased her victory margin.

Johnson also asks:

Does anyone believe if Rossi had won the manual recount, the Democrats would be willing to concede the election?

Er, well, yes. Gregoire repeatedly said she would accept the outcome of the manual recount. There is no reason to believe she would go back on that word, unless Johnson can prove otherwise. And it was Rossi who refused to join her in that promise. Just who has respect for the voters' will here?

It's important to remember that, as George Howland in the Seattle Weekly points out, Republicans lost because they put all their efforts into playing a PR game in which they hoped to bully the Democrats into submission as they did in Florida. That was, of course, the larger purpose of Rossi's premature assumption of the governor-elect's title and the calls for Gregoire to concede. Meanwhile, Democrats went out and used the legal process, as it's designed to be used, to their advantage to scare up additional votes.

The Republicans failed because of incompetence, pure and simple, and now they're counting on clubbing Gregoire with the "illegitimate" label for the next four years. The irony is delicious. The hypocrisy, though, is what we've come to expect.

That revisionist touch

We learn via Brian Leiter that Antonin Scalia has been engaging in a kind of Holocaust revisionism:

Scalia, 68, addressed the topic of government and its relationship to religion.

In the synagogue that is home to America's oldest Jewish congregation, he noted that in Europe, religion-neutral leaders almost never publicly use the word "God."

But, the justice asked, "Did it turn out that, by reason of the separation of church and state, the Jews were safer in Europe than they were in the United States of America? I don't think so."

As Thom Hartmann points out, fascism was closely associated with religious institutions, which it cynically manipulated for its own purposes. "Separation of church and state" was not what occurred under Nazism.

As a matter of fact, Jews proved to have been much safer in America, where they had, you know, separation of church and state. Somewhat compromised, perhaps, but certainly more pronounced than what was occurring in Germany.

Indeed, you'd think Antonin Scalia would know this full well. After all, as Alan Dershowitz pointed out in Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000, Scalia's father was a member of the American Italian fascist party in the 1930s. Atrios posted a quotes from Dershowitz regarding this subject a few months ago:

He's an interesting guy. His father was a teacher at Brooklyn college when I was there. His father was a proud member of the American-Italian fascist party and got his doctorate at Casa Italiano at Columbia at a time when in order to get your doctorate you had to swear an oath to Mussolini. So he comes from an interesting background and he went to a kind of military school in New York which was a place where many children of fascists were educated.

You'd think a fellow like Scalia, in fact, would be well aware of the integration of the Italian fascist state and the Church, embodied by the Lateran Treaties:

Through the concordat, the Pope agreed to submit candidates for bishop and archbishop to the Italian government, to require bishops to swear allegiance to the Italian state before taking offices, and to forbid the clergy from taking part in politics. Italy agreed to submit its rules on marriage and divorce to make them conformable to the rules of the Roman Catholic Church, and to exempt clergy from military conscription. The treaties granted the Roman Catholic Church the status of the established church in Italy. They also gave the Roman Catholic Church substantial control over the Italian educational system.

Then again, it's very likely Scalia knows full well these facts.

After all, as another Italian observer of fascism put it: "Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak."

The same essay reminds us of an all-too-relevant reminder from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, spoken in 1938:

If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.

It's starting to sound like prophecy.

Just don't kill God

I was pleased to hear that someone was making Phillip Pullman's remarkable trilogy, His Dark Materials, into a film.

Now comes the word (via Pandagon) that the film version is going to omit all references to God -- which would be like doing The Lord of the Rings without any reference to Sauron.

The reason? They don't want to offend AmeriBush's delicate religious sensibilities:

Chris Weitz, director of About a Boy, said the changes were being made after film studio New Line expressed concern.

The books tell of a battle against the church and a fight to overthrow God.

"They have expressed worry about the possibility of perceived anti-religiosity," Weitz told a His Dark Materials fans' website.

The story goes on to explain that New Line feared that staying true to the text would render the film "unviable financially." Right. Just like the books, which have sold several million copies.

Pullman, it seems, is working around this:

Weitz said he had visited Pullman, who had told him that the Authority could "represent any arbitrary establishment that curtails the freedom of the individual, whether it be religious, political, totalitarian, fundamentalist, communist, what have you".

He added: "I have no desire to change the nature or intentions of the villains of the piece, but they may appear in more subtle guises."

There are a number of Christian websites which attack the trilogy for their depiction of the church and of God, but Pullman has denied his books are anti-religious.

His agent told the Times newspaper that Pullman was happy with the adaptation so far.

"Of course New Line want to make money, but Mr Weitz is a wonderful director and Philip is very supportive.

"You have to recognise that it is a challenge in the climate of Bush's America."

Now, humanities have never been the strong suit of these alleged "Christians" who despise Pullman's books, so it's very likely that none of these people have ever heard of Milton and Blake. But they are the literary lions on whom Pullman bases much of his work. His cosmology in particular, and his depiction of God, is drawn directly from theirs.

But then, it doesn't take much reflection to see that, in the view of fundamentalists, such Christian mysticism is indeed a kind of blasphemy.

So how long will it be before the folks with pitchforks and torches start demanding that school libraries remove Paradise Lost and Songs of Innocence and Experience?

I suppose it helps that no one is making a movie out of them ...

Back

Sorry about dropping out for the past week. I've been in the middle of a deadline-intensive edit of Strawberry Days, a process that requires a kind of writing mindset that admits and emits no light.

I have, however, been squirreling away little tidbits that caught my attention and which I just didn't have time to write about. So I'll be popping them out over the next few days.

I should warn you all, though, that I will be able to post only lightly during the week before Christmas, since I'm traveling to Idaho and my Web access will be limited.

Eliminationist watch

I have heard a lot of people say that, after the 2004 election, "gays are the new Jews." That struck me as a bit of hyperbole at first.

But maybe not:

...A pro-family activist from Virginia says voters who put Republicans in office should demand that politicians not employ key personnel who don't hold the conservative views that the party promotes. That activist says the Capitol Hill office of Virginia Senator George Allen is a good example. Senator Allen is head of the Republican Senatorial Committee and was a key figure in the GOP's big victories in November. But Joe Glover, president of the Virginia-based Family Policy Network, says something is very wrong. Glover says homosexual publications have outed at least six members of the senator's office as homosexuals. He says one homosexual activist even went so far as to say Allen had the "gayest office on Capitol Hill." Pro-family conservatives, he says, need to make sure Senator Allen hears their voices. "If someone is going to run the day-to-day operations for the Republican apparatus to elect U.S. senators across the country, then dog-gone-it, it better not be somebody who practices a lifestyle that is diametrically opposed to the evangelical Christian base that delivered George W. Bush and the Republicans in the Senate the victory they saw in November," he says. Glover says Allen's executive director recently resigned because he was outed as a homosexual.

Soon enough, it will be illegal for anyone to employ homosexuals. The people have spoken, after all. And definitely, no more man dates.

[Via Salon's Right Hook.]

A liberal war on terror

Peter Beinart's recent piece in The New Republic raises a reasonable problem: Why haven't liberals gotten behind the war on terror, given that most terrorists' political and religious beliefs are diametrically opposed to progressive values?

Good question. And the answer is contained within it, to wit: Liberals have not supported the current war on terror precisely because it does not confront the real nature of the terrorist threat.

Liberals, I believe, would enthusiastically support a "war on terror" that recognized its broad nature, its root sources in radical fundamentalism, and its asymmetrical shape, and responded appropriately. Unfortunately, the DLC-style leadership we've been getting from atop the Democratic party, cheered on by folks like Beinart, has been too timid to articulate that kind of vision.

In the meantime, it should not surprise anyone that liberals are unenthusiastic about the Bush administration's substitute: warmed-over Cold War strategies combined with a megalomaniacal vision of American global hegemony. Moreover, its "war on terror," as I've argued frequently, is manifestly a political public-relations campaign that does not take any serious steps at actually confronting terrorism. We know this isn't a real war on terror because we still haven't caught either Osama bin Laden or the anthrax killer -- and don't show any signs of doing so soon. We know this administration isn't serious about terrorism precisely because we are now spending the bulk of our national energy fighting a war in Iraq that made the likelihood of future terrorist attacks exponentially greater.

Beinart starts out reasonably enough:

On health care, gay rights, and the environment, there is a positive vision, articulated with passion. But there is little liberal passion to win the struggle against Al Qaeda--even though totalitarian Islam has killed thousands of Americans and aims to kill millions; and even though, if it gained power, its efforts to force every aspect of life into conformity with a barbaric interpretation of Islam would reign terror upon women, religious minorities, and anyone in the Muslim world with a thirst for modernity or freedom.

Note, however, the way that Beinart describes the "war on terror" -- that is, as "the struggle against Al Qaeda" and "totalitarian Islam". Nowhere is there a mention, in his discussion of terrorism, of the anthrax killer or Oklahoma City. Nowhere does he evince any awareness that right-wing domestic extremists pose a similarly potent threat to American lives and the national well-being, having committed the second-most lethal terrorist attack on American soil and by far the largest number of terrorist acts within our borders. This blind spot pervades Beinart's essay, but it is only part of what is wrong with it.

Indeed, Beinart veers off into the ditch in short order by getting to the heart of his essay: identifying liberals' antiwar faction as the source of their problem, and urging the marginalization of this bloc.

The challenge for Democrats today is not to find a different kind of presidential candidate. It is to transform the party at its grassroots so that a different kind of presidential candidate can emerge. That means abandoning the unity-at-all-costs ethos that governed American liberalism in 2004. And it requires a sustained battle to wrest the Democratic Party from the heirs of Henry Wallace. In the party today, two such heirs loom largest: Michael Moore and MoveOn.

This is a peculiar formula. Of course, if the Democrats have any grassroots strength now, it is associated with the MoveOn and Howard Dean factions (and mentioning Michael Moore is just silly, since he is a nonentity organizationally speaking). How exactly does he intend to transform the party at its grassroots by excising the people who are its grassroots? If we jettison these folks, as he's suggesting, who do we replace them with? This sounds like a classic formula for self-evisceration.

More to the point, why exactly should we drive out the faction that proved, in fact, to be right about the Iraq war? Perhaps so people like Beinart won't have to be constantly reminded reminded just how wrong they were?

MoveOn.org has never indicated anything but support for combating terrorism, and particularly for hunting down bin Laden. What the grassroots antiwar factions objected to was a willy-nilly invasion of another country without adequate assessment in the case of Afghanistan, and in the case of Iraq, the unwarranted invasion of another country, one only marginally associated with terrorism and unconnected to 9/11, under false pretenses and without a well-planned exit strategy. And you know what? They were right in most cases.

Very few mainstream progressives opposed the Afghanistan invasion on principle; many questioned its necessity and its planning and execution, questions that remain legitimate in light of the outcome there, with bin Laden and Al Qaeda still at large and the Taliban still a political force. But generally speaking, liberal opposition was very muted and generally limited to the factions that oppose war in any form.

Iraq, however, was a wholly different matter. Many mainstream liberals immediately questioned the rationale for invading Iraq (as well as some mainstream conservatives conservatives who made similar cases) -- and were pooh-poohed by the New Republic crew as a bunch of peaceniks. Then as now, the essence of their attacks on the antiwar factions boiled down to image over substance.

I had some specific experience in this area. I was one of the first journalists to ask whether Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks, and based much of my early reportage on interviews with people like James Woolsey and Laurie Mylroie, who it turned out were also the people directly influencing the White House as well. But the more time I spent on the matter, the more clear it became that the case connecting Saddam to 9/11 was utterly ephemeral, as I explained in one of my first posts at this blog. Even later, it was proven beyond a doubt that Mylroie had been selling everyone a bill of goods.

As the Bush administration had made it clear it intended to invade Iraq, it seemed simultaneously clear that it simply had failed to make any kind of valid case for doing so. And many of us said so.

There were five major substantive objections to the invasion of Iraq:

-- Its rationale was predicated on questionable assertions about the presence of weapons of mass destruction.

-- It seemed similarly predicated on an assumption that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks.

-- There seemed to be little or no planning for the post-invasion environment, particularly an extended occupation.

-- It would destabilize Iraq, creating an environment ripe for inviting fresh terrorist activity.

-- And most of all, as I pointed out at the time, it would seriously dilute our ability to actually fight the war on terror.

Looking back, all five of these objections were not only well grounded, they proved prophetic. All five are now the essence of what has gone wrong with the invasion.

But those of us looking for liberals to lead the charge in giving voice to these objections found no one -- particularly not the TNR and DLC crowds -- to provide that leadership. So they allied themselves, naturally, with the antiwar progressives who were already geared up in opposition.

As Atrios suggests, the blame lies not with grassroots organizers like MoveOn and Howard Dean, but the Democratic Party leadership. At a time when thoughtful liberals needed someone from the top to step up and oppose the war, they were ignored instead by the John Kerrys and Hillary Clintons who opted to give Bush the green light.

Things haven't gotten any better since. None of the Democratic candidates were able to articulate a cogent approach to the war on terror, particularly not John Kerry. Part of the problem is that the mainstream, pro-defense Democrats have proven to be as hidebound in their thinking as the antiwar folks like Moore and MoveOn, only on opposite sides of the aisle. Neither side seems ready to step outside the box.

The key to winning any war, whether amorphous, cold, or real, is contingent on one's ability to objectively assess the facts on the ground. When your assessments are constantly twisted by politics, ideology, and public relations, you lose that ability. The Bush "war on terror" is doomed to fail because it has made itself ideologically incapable of recognizing the real nature of terrorism itself.

The result has been a "war on terror" that is recognizably a sham. Kevin Drum has noticed some of this as well:

-- The Republican party has made it as clear as it possibly can that the war on terror is not vital enough to require either bipartisan support or the support of the rest of the world. They've treated it more like a garden variety electoral wedge issue than a world historical struggle.

-- Things like Tom Ridge's sales pitch for duct tape, along with the transparently political color coded terror levels, have made the war on terror fodder for late night TV. It's entirely predictable that anyone who was even a bit skeptical in 2002 now views the war as trivial at best, and comical or Machiavellian at worst.

It's arguable that liberals are foolish to let all this prevent them from seeing the totalitarian danger for what it is. But it's hardly surprising. The fact is that compared to fascism and communism, Islamic totalitarianism seems like pretty thin beer to many. It's not fundamentally expansionist, and its power to kill people isn't even remotely in the same league.

Bottom line: I think the majority of liberals could probably be persuaded to take a harder line on the war on terror -- although it's worth emphasizing that the liberal response is always going to be different from the conservative one, just as containment was a different response to the Cold War than outright war. But first someone has to make a compelling case that the danger is truly overwhelming. So far, no one on the left has really done that.

I don't think, though, that the threat needs to be overwhelming for it to be compelling. There are many reasons liberals should be in the front lines fighting the war on terrorism, a few of which Beinart points out, and some of which he misses. The problem is that the war we're currently fighting has little or nothing to do with terrorism, other than making it more likely.

The liberal response can't just be different: It has to be effective. It has be based on a rational consideration of the facts on the ground and must jettison ideological blinkers of all kinds. Most of all, it has to take a realistic measure of the actual nature of terrorism.

The first recognition has to be that terrorism is an asymmetrical threat: that is, unlike conflicts between nations, it involves an attack by a small entity (perhaps only a handful of people) against a large nation. Likewise, the danger terrorist acts represent are outsized compared to the scale of the organization undertaking them.

The essence of terrorism is undermining citizens' sense of security, their belief that their government is capable of protecting them adequately. As P. Terrence Hopmann explains:

Asymmetrical conflict succeeds by playing on such fears. Terrorism strikes at innocent civilians going about their daily lives. It also flourishes on flexibility and uncertainty. The terrorist has the advantage of choosing the time, place, and means of attack. The targets are mostly symbolic, chosen for maximum psychological impact. The goal is to disrupt the lives of all. In fact, the capacity to instill in ordinary people the fear that they can be attacked anytime and anywhere, while doing just about anything, is the most important weapon terrorists have.

It's important to remember that such threats cannot be dealt with by ordinary military means. Of course, those who commit such horrendous acts of terrorism as those carried out on September 11 must be found and brought to justice, one way or another. But the classic riposte of retaliation against the homeland of the aggressor may not only be meaningless, it may be dangerous, creating additional terrorists who are even more dedicated and self-sacrificing than those who went before. And as long as the terrorists continue to find fertile soil on which to operate anywhere in the world, they will be able to survive, to react flexibly to circumvent whatever security measures the United States and other countries put in place, and to find new means to deliver terror at times and places of their own choosing.

The Bush administration has dealt with terrorism in a classic symmetrical response, sending the military out into action against other nations. But terrorism is not state-based; it floats about the fringes of whatever places it finds a foothold under the various circumstances that inspire it. This is pretty much everywhere, including the United States.

Any serious war on terrorism will take domestic terrorists just as seriously as it does those from abroad. One need search no further than the anthrax attacks for an example of how terrorist attacks, both internation and domestic in origin, can piggyback off each other in attaining their goals. Differentiating them in terms of threat assessment only leaves us vulnerable to attack from the faction that is deemed the lesser.

This in turn entails a serious assessment of domestic-terror threats. The Bush administration has deemed eco-terrorism the most significant source of domestic terror -- a clear skewing of priorities, considering that eco-terrorists have to date only committed property crimes, while fundamentalist right-wing terrorists have a long and bloody history of killing people, and have shown little inclination to stop this. (At the same time, mainstream liberals need to take eco-terrorists seriously, which they often do not; the fact remains that not only are these people committing acts of violence, their attacks on scientific research are every bit as regressive as any Bible-thumper's attempts to impose creationism on local schools).

Short of simply trying to rub out anyone who might be deemed a terrorist -- the Bush Doctrine approach -- it's clear that any effective war on terrorism has to be predicated around enhancing our intelligence-gathering capacities. The central component of this has entail our capacity to infiltrate radical groups with the potential to commit terrorist acts. As we saw in the 1995-2000 period, this approach was phenomenally successful in short-circuiting a large number of domestic terrorist attacks.

Some preventative measures are also fairly obvious from the asymmetrical nature of the threat. One of these is a real tightening of our borders and particularly our ports, which remain vulnerable to a scenario under which terrorists place bombs in an uninspected container.

Next, there has to be an understanding of what is fueling terrorism. The Center for Proliferation Studies describes the identifying features of modern terrorists, particularly when it comes to wielding chemical and biological weapons:

The six characteristics we identified are: charismatic leadership, no external constituency, apocalyptic ideology, loner or splinter group, a sense of paranoia and grandiosity, and defense aggression. Of these six characteristics, the two that were present in all of the cases of actual CBW use warrant thorough examination: no outside constituency and a sense of paranoia and grandiosity.

Over the past 15 years and more, the great generator of terrorist acts around the world has been the phenomenon that embodies the commingling of all these traits: radical religious fundamentalism. The forms this takes range from the right-wing domestic terrorists of the Patriot movement to the Al Qaeda fanatics who struck on 9/11. (A variant on this is Tim McVeigh, who was closer to a neo-Nazi than a fundamentalist; but he clearly shared their apocalyptic worldview and urge to defend "traditional" values.) All of them have one key trait in common: an abiding hatred of modernity and progressive values.

So progressives indeed have a clear and compelling interest in opposing terrorism. Central to their support, indeed, is confronting the core of what is driving the phenomenon. The left naturally will readily confront radical fundamentalism, as long as it's made clear that's what we're dealing with.

What's been missing, however, is either a recognition or at least acknowledgement of this aspect of the problem from the right and its toadies on the left. Since American fundamentalism is primarily associated with the mainstream right, it probably shouldn't surprise anyone that the Bush administration has assiduously refused to frame the modern terrorist threat (including, notably, Al Qaeda) as primarily a right-wing phenomenon -- even though that is clearly what it is. And the ever-timid "moderate" leadership of the Democratic Party has been too polite to point it out.

Beinart, indeed, attacks the antiwar left as "the softs" who, like their counterparts of the early 1950s, tended to see the only potential threat to America as emanating from the right, blinding itself to communism. What he ignores, though, is the fact that Al Qaeda-style terrorism is in fact a radical right-wing movement. This is part of the reason why the "Islamofascism" label, while not entirely accurate in terms of what constitutes fascism, is nonetheless substantially close to the truth.

Beinart and Drum are right in pointing out that progressives have done a poor job of articulating a vision for a progressive war on terrorism. But blaming antiwar liberals is a convenient way of scapegoating the bloc that so far has been right in this whole debacle. The problem has been an utter lack of vision from the current Democratic leadership, and progressive leadership generally, including folks like Beinart, Drum, and the TNR. They have bought too readily into the right-wing paradigm of what a war on terror should be about.

They've also bought into the right-wing paradigm of what's wrong with liberalism: namely, the antiwar left. This is self-serving not just for those on the right but for the liberal hawks who now seem too chagrined to acknowledge that they were wrong and -- gulp -- Michael Moore was right.

Kevin Drum put the hypocrisy inherent in this position on display the other day responding to Atrios:

And evading the issue by constantly implying that no one who supported the Iraq war is morally qualified to criticize those who opposed it doesn't really help matters.

This has it exactly backwards. No one is saying the Beinarts and Drums of the world don't have anything to contribute. What Beinart is explicitly saying is the reverse: That the Michael Moores and MoveOn folks have no value to the party.

So really, what doesn't help matters is evading the issue by implying the people who opposed the Iraq war -- that is, the people who were right -- not only are unqualified to contribute, but must be evicted from the ranks of liberalism. That, in fact, is the opposite of an honest conversation.