CT Blue

The Progressive Caucus is about to let President Obama know that they won’t co-operate if his phony deficit commission tries to gut social security:

Democrats led by Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Raul Grijalva are drawing a line in the sand before the White House’s fiscal commission: If your report recommends cuts or other changes to Social Security, they will say, you’ll lose our support.

This time, unlike when they made similar threats regarding the public option, they may, in fact probably do, really mean it. There will be nothing else in the commission’s recommendations that will be especially enticing, so there will be no half loaf to tempt them.

The more signatures the letter gets, the less likely the Republicans will realize their fondest hope: the final destruction of the New Deal, with Medicare’s destruction as an added bonus. I know the next time I see Joe Courtney I’ll be either congratulating him for having added his name, or asking him why he didn’t. Every one of our representatives should be expected to sign on.

One of my right wing commenters (I always have one) posted a comment in response to my recommendation that we, one and all, sign Kos’s petition to end the filibuster.

The comment was to the effect that you need 67 votes to change the filibuster rule.

Kos isn’t stupid, and if he thought you needed that many votes to change the rule, he wouldn’t bother to press for it, since it’s pretty clear that you couldn’t get a single Republican vote to change it at this time. As is usual, our right wing friend is wrong.

But the fact is, you don’t need 67 votes to change the rule. You need 51 votes, provided you take the vote at the beginning of the session. We can thank Nelson Rockefeller for that. He was Vice-President in 1975. More importantly, he was president of the Senate at that time, and in that capacity he ruled that it took only a majority of votes to change the rules at the beginning of a session. The filibuster was in danger at that point, because it took 67 votes to break one, and his ruling could have spelled the end of the filibuster at that time. The Senate compromised, and passed a new rule requiring 60 votes to break a filibuster, but Rockefeller’s ruling stood, meaning that in January of 2011 the Senate could, be a mere majority of Senators, change its rules again.

I am beating this dead horse simply because it’s such an important issue, and everyone on our side should know the facts.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen are on the attack against Wikileaks, particularly its founder Julian Assange. While they are unable to point to any specific deleterious effect of the leaks (other than the exposure of the morass in which we find ourselves), they nonetheless are claiming that he has blood on his hands.

Just a couple of days ago, the Defense Department disagreed with its head guy:

The Pentagon is telling NBC’s Michael Isikoff that a special assessment team looking over the WikiLeaks Afghanistan war logs has found nothing that could damage national security.

What’s amazing is that these two can accuse someone else of having blood on their hands with respect to the war in Afghanistan, a war whose needless continuance they have overseen and defended, while many American soldiers, and of far less moment, but still worth pointing out, many Afghans have died needlessly. All the perfumes of Arabia can’t wash the blood from their hands, but without a hint of irony they accuse Assange. Perhaps they’ve taken a lesson from the bloody handed Lady MacBeth, with Assange playing the role of the hapless grooms:

I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal; For it must seem their guilt.

Atrios suggests, in this tweet, that the ultimate reaction to the documents released by Wikileaks, about which Der Spiegel, The Guardian and the New York Times reported today, may be primarily about the propriety of the leak rather than the contents of the papers and what they say about our involvement in Afghanistan.

That may, in fact, seem to be the case in the short term, but long term these documents can only have a corrosive effect on this already justifiably unpopular war. The Obama administration will make a mistake, win or lose, if it attempts to either stop publication of the papers or prosecute the leakers, if it can find them. That’s the tack that Nixon took with the Pentagon Papers, which might have worked during WW II, but didn’t during the unpopular Vietnam War. They certainly tried to make it a fight about the leak and the publication. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which back then was a court of substance. It’s quite possible that today’s court would back even an effort to quash publication, though the fact that it would be Obama that was asking them to do it might be enough to stay their hand. They would certainly have no problems with criminal sanctions against the leakers, but convictions would be a Pyrrhic victory. The war is asymmetric in the extreme. We are spending ourselves into bankruptcy in pursuit of a victory we can’t even define. The American people can sense that. Obama will find himself on the wrong side of history if he continues to pursue this war. Truly time to declare victory and get out.

I might add that the only thing that might diminish the inevitable repercussions against Obama, for what is now truly his war, is the fact that for many Americans the war is an afterthought, with an acceptable level of casualties, particularly considering that the dying are not the sons and daughters of the middle class, but increasingly the cast-offs of our society, who “volunteer” for service because they have no hope of finding work anywhere else. This is not universally so, but it is increasingly the case.

But even the fact that the war is no direct threat to the average American young person, like it so directly was during Vietnam, will be enough to save it and its defenders from its eventual fate. Besides costing those expendable lives it is costing a lot of money; it is dragging on and it is becoming increasingly clear that it will drag forever unless we manage to disengage ourselves. Americans are rightfully tired of being mired down in un-winnable wars. I am 60 years old, and this country has been bogged down in unwinnable wars for half my life and counting. Obama has promised to disengage, but he’s promised a lot of things. He’ll be doing himself a favor if he keeps this promise, but those are the type of promises he seems to have the hardest time fulfilling.

From Political Wire:

President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress “are setting the stage for a high-stakes battle over taxes in the final weeks before the November congressional elections, betting that their plan to eliminate tax breaks for the wealthy will resonate with voters who have lost houses and jobs to what many see as an era of Wall Street greed,” the Washington Post reports.

“Raising taxes is usually a perilous move. But Democrats, facing the potential loss of their majorities on Capitol Hill, believe that the strategy will both force Republicans to defend tax breaks for a tiny, wealthy minority and expose GOP hypocrisy on budget deficits.”

Here is what will happen. The Blue Dog Democrats, among whom are many recruited by Rahm Emanuel, will undermine the narrative in the House, and join a unanimous Republican caucus to extend the tax breaks, assuming Nancy Pelosi doesn’t pull an embarrassing about face and pull it from the floor. But she won’t do that, because the Republicans, without a hint of embarrassment, aided and abetted by the media that has never had a problem with Republican obstruction, will demand an up or down vote, because that’s the democratic way.

After the tax cut passes the House, it must pass the Senate, where, surely, one would think, even if it gets to the floor, there would at least be 41 Democrats with spine enough to filibuster it. But no, the Republicans, without a hint of embarrassment, aided and abetted by the media that has never had a problem with Republican obstruction, will demand an up or down vote, because that’s the democratic way.

The Democrats will cave, and the Republicans will get their tax break for the rich. Perhaps Obama will veto it, but don’t bet on it. Remember, this is the Bush tax cut for the rich, which will expire if Congress does nothing, which is precisely what Congress will not do. The Democrats will allow themselves to be manipulated into making this massive transfer from the middle class to the rich permanent.

All this, of course, will further dampen Democratic turnout (see, 2002, spineless Democrats voting to give Bush his war and consequent low Democratic turnout) turning the election into a blowout, and ushering in perhaps the most radical and irresponsible Congress in the history of the Republic.

The Democrats will learn the lesson that they are always learning: that they are not far enough to the right.

I hope and pray that I’m wrong. Only the Democratic Party could pull this off, but there’s no reason to think that they won’t.

Why do we on the left insist on being rational, and believing, despite all the evidence, that our fellow creatures are rational. Given that those fellow creatures appear poised to give huge gains to the Republicans as a reward for preventing the enactment of an effective recovery plan, the idea that we will fail if our arguments are not logically precise seems rather absurd.

The immediate cause for this rant is this observation by Steve Benen, at the Washington Monthly:

The notion that Democrats would gain traction this year by tying Republican candidates to George W. Bush’s failed presidency has always seemed implausible to me. The GOP’s lack of popularity still stems from the previous administration’s catastrophes, but it seems challenging, at best, to keep connecting the party to Bush two years later.

As I observed at a recent Blumenthal event (I think it was a Blumenthal event), the Democrats, who were not constantly on their heels back then, were still running against Herbert Hoover well into the 50s, for I can remember his name being invoked by Democratic politicians when I was back there in Catholic school. Republicans were running against Jimmy Carter well into the nineties and they are still, in places, running against George McGovern. And we are to believe that we can’t run against the worst president in history a mere two years after he departed the stage? If we can’t, it’s because our above the fray president threw the opportunity away, opting instead for the fantasy of “bi-partisanship”, something only a deeply deluded person could believe in. I read today that many people confuse the Obama stimulus package with the Tarp plan. Only Democrats could have let that happen, what with the handily alliterative “Bush Bailout” ready at hand, a term we should have heard daily since November of 2008. The only way to remind people that we were brought to this pass by George Bush is to constantly rub their noses in it. It appears to have escaped the attention of the present day Democrats that the average American has the attention span of a gnat, but if you keep saying something, as the Republicans constantly prove, it will eventually sink in.

So it’s not implausible that the Democrats could successfully use George Bush against the Republicans. What’s implausible, yet apparently true, is that it does not have occurred to them to do so.

Things not to do:

When you are campaigning as an anti-big government candidate, never, never actually get specific about what you intend to do. Certainly never let the victims beneficiaries of your anti-government zeal know how your policies are going to affect them.

Case in point, Minnesota Republican Gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, who recently proposed that big government should lighten up on small restauranteurs by reducing the minimum wage for tipped employees, many of whom, according to him, were pulling in a 100 grand or more a year while their employers were inches from bankruptcy.

Poor Emmer may never get to be governor now, because for reasons only he can’t figure out, those waiters and waitresses (hereafter, sporadically, “waiters”, sorry but there’s no good non-sexist term) aren’t willing to believe his protestations that he didn’t mean what he said, particularly because if you listen to the protestations, he still really means it.

If the man were a pro, he would have railed against big government, maybe even posed with one of those waiters, and promised, with the bemused or smiling (depending) waiter beside him, that he would free that person’s employer from the dead hand of big government that was preventing the business from thriving. Then, a good half, more or less, of those waiters and waitresses would have voted for him, along with half of those waiters and waitresses close friends and relatives. Once in office, he could have stuck it right to those folks and they would never know what hit them.

Now, poor guy, he may never get the chance.

I’ve always thought the flaw in Honest Abe’s formula is that, in a democracy, you only have to fool most of the people most of the time. But you have to put at least a little effort into fooling the people, even American people. Emmer has failed on that score, and, especially for a Republican, that is a mortal sin.

Poor Michael Steele.

Throughout his tenure as RNC Chair he has earned a reputation for saying things that are both untrue AND politically embarrassing for the Republicans. That combination has made his tenure uncertain, since while Republicans have no problem with spreading untruths, they prefer to make political capital from them.

How ironic then, that Steele may have self administered the coup de grace by delivering himself of a statement that was mostly true, yet even more politically embarrassing for that very reason.

Steele came here to our little section of Groton (I was not invited, for reasons I can’t fathom) and made two points. The first was that the Afghanistan conflict was a “war of Obama’s choosing” and the second was to the effect that the war was unwinnable, something, he said, any student of history should realize.

The members of his party are calling for his head, not so much for the first statement, which is arguably inaccurate, but for the second, which is absolutely true.

As a matter of historical fact Obama did not start the conflict in Afghanistan. But he did choose to prove his tough guy credentials during his presidential campaign by declaring that it was, in effect, the “good war” and that he would win it, whatever that means in context, if elected. It was one of the two or three promises he made that I devoutly hoped he would discard once elected, but along with his other sop to the ignorant, support for off shore drilling, he has kept that promise, or tried to do so, to his and our detriment.

That’s the assertion for which Steele is taking heat from the press, because as a matter of concrete fact, he is wrong. In a broader sense, he’s right.

But, as I said, it is his claim that the war cannot be won that most riles his fellow Republicans. The proper formulation, according to them, is that the war can be won, but not by Obama, thereby implying that we must remain in that god forsaken hell hole, pouring borrowed money into a losing effort (no problem with non-stimulative deficit spending for this worthy cause), until at least 2013, when they fantasize Obama will be replaced by a Republican, who will then proceed to “win”. For the sin of speaking truth on this point, Steele may well lose his job.

So, let us pause for a moment of silence for poor Michael Steele, a career of lying destroyed by a single moment of truth.

Steven Benen points out here that Obama took what is, for Obama, direct aim at the Republican strategy of obstruction during his weekly address to the nation. That would be the weekly address that none but hard core political junkies ever watch.

These types of “attacks” to the extent they can be dignified with the name, will never work, because Obama prefers to talk in abstractions, without assigning any blame or obloquy to any real life person.

Obama should take a page from FDR’s book. FDR went after his enemies by name, classically in his attacks on Martin, Barton and Fish. Obama has been a target since he was inaugurated, a target made all the more useful to Republicans because the (usually) unspoken subtext of race is involved. It’s time to turn the table. You have to put a face on the enemy.

Obama has to take aim at the Republicans for obstructing progress, and he has to name names. Make Mitch McConnell and a few of the other obstructionists prime targets. I’m sure his speechwriters can come up with an alliterative phrase or two. Of course they’ll scream that he’s not being nice, or bi-partisan, but if there was ever a time for either of those qualities, that time has long since passed. You can’t rail against the system; that doesn’t work. You have to blame somebody. It’s best, by the way, if you pick someone, like McConnell, who is used to working pretty much in the shadows and won’t be comfortable if you turn the light brightly on him. Nationwide it would be great if the Democrats would run spots exposing the people the Republicans will be putting in charge of Congressional committees, should they take control. Barton is exhibit one, but he’s by no means the only crazy waiting in the wings. Democrats have the advantage, if they would only use it, of being able to “attack” by merely quoting their opponents. Republicans will call even that negative politics, but who cares?