Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

There has been a lot of discussion within progressive circles recently about whether Barack Obama’s candidacy poses a real threat to the political establishment. Of course, he has won the hearts and minds of the grass roots liberal and progressive communities, but can a person who has advisers like former national security advisors Zbigniew Brzezinski and Anthony Lake, former assistant secretary of state Susan Rice, and former navy secretary Richard Danzig really be that much of a revolutionary? I use this excerpt from Wolves, to remind us that the threat isn’t necessarily the candidate, but the flow of political reformist insurgents they bring into the party apparatus.

“The two-party system was never anything, just two political factions fighting over jobs, money, influence and power. We have only one political party, the Party of Property, which has two right wings: Republican and Democrat, and that’s it. There are no great differences.”

Many of you will be familiar with this verbiage, long has it been the mantra of the great American novelist and political commentator, Gore Vidal. This is the way he put it to me during our interview just a year after George Bush began his second term in the White House.

Vidal’s indictment of the American political system does not exist in a vacuum of conspiratorial anti-establishmentarianism. In fact, it is exactly because of the way that Democrats and Republicans have ganged up on third party candidates that “bipartidism,” the academic term used to describe a two-party system, has evolved into a pejorative.

The bipartidism critique focuses on the control of the two-party system by a myth in which Democrats are supposedly the party of the people, while Republicans are the agents of establishment power. The parties, critics assert, use hot button or wedge issues like abortion or health care reform to compartmentalize the political discourse, while ultimately supporting economic policies that favor their true constituents, the wealthy and corporate elites in the country. Writing in his book Contours of Descent, economist Robert Pollin noted dryly, “the general requirement of product differentiation in an electoral market entails that, at the margin, any Democratic president will offer more social concessions than a Republican of the same cohort. But we should be careful not to make too much of such differences in the public stance of these two figures, as against the outcomes that prevail during their terms of office.” Pollin’s book targets the supposed ’90s “boom” under Bill Clinton, explaining that, even while Clinton was seen as a friend of the poor, his policies actually did more to harm average workers whose wages stagnated as they faced more job insecurity than under his Republican predecessor, Bush Sr. So, the theory goes, while modern day political leaders trade off their party’s conservative or liberal legacy to keep voters entranced, in reality, as country music legend Waylon Jennings once said, “There ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between them.”

That wouldn’t have surprised American historian and political economist Walter Karp, who analyzed a century of collusive political scheming in his hard-to-find volume Indispensable Enemies. Karp’s book exposes a political system run at both state and federal levels by “party bosses” whose sole mission is to maintain control of their party organization. With their power and wealth dependent on the measure of influence these bosses exert on their parties, Karp explains “every elected official is a potential menace.” Thus, American political history can be viewed through a radically different lens, especially in those instances when, as Karp alleges, bosses have purposely lost elections in order to protect themselves from internal threats in the form of “insurgent” candidates. Citing examples that span from the late 1800s right through to the early 1970s, Karp argues that once reformist candidates win office, they often turn their attention to the corrupt party machine itself.

With the support of the electorate, there is nothing to stop them from “attempting to oust local party leaders, from bringing new men into the party ranks, from passing reforms that weaken the party organization, from winning public support so strong that the organization cannot deny him renomination… There are times, therefore, when losing an election becomes an absolute necessity.”

Extrapolating these Machiavellian tactics to the broader state and national political scenes, where Republicans and Democrats portray themselves as ideological enemies, Karp is no less thorough in his deconstruction. Looking back over seventy years of political action, he points to the fact that in most states the relative power — ie. minority or majority status — of each party had remained virtually unchanged. How can this be, he asks, if the sole purpose of each party organization is presumably to do all they can to win elections? Can the party organizations in their respective districts simply fail that consistently to field winning candidates without a major overhaul? According to Karp, it’s common sense. For party bosses whose real concern is not winning, but maintaining power, it is far more important to strike alliances with their supposed opposition so that they can collaborate in maintaining and protecting each other’s base of power.

Karp uses the failed insurgency of Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy to illustrate this dynamic. After the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the Democratic Party bosses had a problem. McCarthy stepped into the campaign and channeled the energy of the Kennedy delegates into his own reformist campaign. Young students and hippies traveled across the country, cutting their hair and going door-to-door for their candidate under the slogan “Get clean for Gene.” Worried about the destabilizing influx of new party activists, Karp contends, the bosses decided to push “party hack” Senator George McGovern, who would put forward his own reformist agenda to splinter McCarthy’s rank and file. Then, using their power at the party convention to engineer the Democratic presidential nomination for Hubert Humphrey, despite the fact he had not won a single primary, the bosses threw the election to stem the tide of reformist idealism that was sweeping through the party. As Karp explains, a victory “could only make genuine insurgency more promising to many and encourage yet more newcomers to enter active politics. On the other hand, a defeat… would strengthen the party oligarchy considerably. Newcomers to active politics would be crushed with disappointment, branded as losers and quickly returned to private life.”

Beyond their mutual need to protect each other’s control of the party organization, the party bosses must ensure that the economic support base—namely, their wealthy and corporate donors, many of whom spread their charity to both parties—is not harmed by a reformist candidate. Karp even goes as far as saying that since the authority for policing elections and operating election machinery is left to the state parties—who are assumed to be rivals—the opportunity for colluding in vote fraud, in the case of an upstart victory, is very real.

Of course, many of America’s best-loved presidents have campaigned and won on a tide of populist hope. But Karp spills a good flow of ink to show how programs like FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society were powerful rhetorical vehicles that, upon reaching Congress, were subjected to a scheme of self-sabotage in which one wing of the victorious party — the obstructionists — would play the role of bad cop to the reformist wing’s good cop, thus shutting down much of the original value of the platform.

While much of Karp’s analysis involves specific examples of skullduggery and planned outcomes of various state and federal campaigns, he also posits a larger, more far-reaching assertion about the intent of these collusive political tactics. Karp was an anthropologist and, in applying a macro lens to the phenomenon he was exposing, discovered that, in order to protect its power, the fundamental mission of the party machine was “to eliminate the political condition that breeds independent ambition.” In other words, to engineer in the electorate a sense of apathy or, as he puts it, a “gratitude for small favors and a deep general sense of the futility of politics.” While this claim is the most difficult to prove, it is interesting to note that around the same time that Karp was writing Indispensable Enemies, Harvard intellectual and foreign policy analyst Samuel Huntington generated a report for the Trilateral Commission which warned that the rise in radical consciousness and civil unrest during the 1960s would have long- term effects on the governability of American society. More, he warned, it had endangered the establishment authority, which was “based on hierarchy, expertise and wealth.” Aptly titled The Crisis of Democracy, Huntington’s report reminded its readers that “the effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the part of some individuals and groups.”

We don’t need to look much farther than the statistics on American voter turnout to see that, whether inculcated by elites or from a widespread sense of boredom, political apathy has always been a fact of nature in U.S. politics. Addressing the media one week before the 2004 presidential election, Curtis Gans, the director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, told reporters that Americans are “now 139th out of 172 democracies in the world in our level of voter turnout…” In fact, the highly contentious 2000 election inspired a turnout of approximately 106 million people, representing 54 percent of the eligible voters. Comparing the turnout of voters to that of the sixties era, he cited a long list of factors including “a lower level of trust in our leadership than perhaps at any time” in American history. Yet, while professing a general sense of pessimism about the future of voting patterns, he did predict that the 2004 election would yield a marked surge in people 30 and under. As it turned out, he was right.

[According to the Census Bureau, nearly half of all eligible voters 18-24 came out in 2004; up from 36 percent in 2000. With an increase of over five percentage points, the youth were the biggest gainers of all age groups. It’s no surprise, considering the heavy pressure on the rap fans to “Vote or Die,” as a high profile national billboard campaign featuring Hip Hop gangsters and divas warned. At election time, it was the Democrats who ruled Generation Y with Kerry taking 56 percent of votes cast by people aged 18-24, while Bush earned 43 percent.]

My response to Terror remembrances of bombs past, an article written by The Globe and Mail’s London correspondent, Doug Saunders. In it, Saunders draws parallels between those Che-loving, bomb-making  70’s era urban guerrillas and today’s Islamic jihadists. As Saunders writes, “violent leftist revolution was a Seventies fashion… violent Islamism may be the same.” He couldn’t be more wrong.

Doug,

As someone who has spent the past two years filming in countries like Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia, Lebanon, and Israel/Palestine, with a specific focus on infiltrating jihadist groups, I found your Islamism article to be shockingly off the mark. There is simply no basis for comparing today’s Muslim terrorists/insurgents to the 70’s era urban guerrillas. And to do so isn’t only historically inaccurate but also extremely dangerous as it seriously deludes the public about the very real threat posed by these groups.

Let’s be clear. The Weathermen, SLA, and Red Army Faction drew their inspiration from Marxist/Maoist revolutionaries who were operating in fascist or colonial societies. Vastly different than the democratic political systems - namely Germany and the US - these “bomb-making university grads” were attempting to disrupt. To illustrate, let’s take just two of their major inspirations: Cuba’s Che Guevara and Brazil’s Jose Marighella. Each of which achieved very different results, which should have been instructive for the would-be revolutionaries.

Guevara (and Castro) ultimately won critical public support for their Cuban revolution, which was supported through a network of rural peasant communities who had had enough of their Spanish masters. And even after the revolution, Cubans generally backed the murderous tactics deployed by Guevara in the name of halting counter-revolutionaries. But the case of Marighella, who’s Manual for the Urban Guerrilla became the playbook for the First World upstarts, is more instructive. He was fighting against a vicious US-backed military dictatorship in Brazil and his blueprint for revolution was based on “the propaganda of the deed.” Unlike the Cubans, insurgents in Sao Paolo - with its population of 8 million - could not zip out to the countryside for rest and supplies after a big fight against the fascists. So Marighella wrote his Manual with precise instructions on assassinations, bank robberies and bombings - all of which, he hoped, would serve to inspire and energize the citizenry, galvanizing them into a mass revolt against the dictatorship. Of course, he was wrong. The people were too terrorized to do anything of the sort and Marighella was killed after two priests were tortured into giving up his whereabouts.

It’s one thing to hatch these ideas while living under intolerable conditions. It’s quite another to cut-and-paste them into a liberal democratic paradigm. The reason the Weathermen and their ilk faded out so fast was because they had zero public sympathy, were (for the most part) buffoons, and were essentially operating in a vacuum.

Not so with the jihadists. It would be nice to think that the “mood will dissolve.” But the reality is that it won’t. Unlike the SLA and Weathermen, who were using violence to sway a population living in a functionally democratic society, jihadists are fighting against (real or perceived) US-backed military dictatorships (Pakistan), sanctioned torture that breaches the Geneva Conventions (Guantanamo), terrorizing of indigenous Muslim populations by US-backed allies (Israel), genocide (Clinton’s sustained bombing and sanctions of Iraq which allegedly killed over 500,000), occupation of Muslim land and looting of resources (Iraq), and even the overthrow of democratically elected governments (Algeria). Now I don’t know how much traveling you’ve done outside London, but you don’t need to go much further than the East end to find large groups of extremely angry Muslim men and women who will cite any of the above as justifications for the jihad. And it’s getting worse.

I spent time with members of the now-disbanded radical group al-muhajiroun, many of whom have since been arrested under Britain’s tough new anti-terror laws for non-violent crimes. One man, Abdul Muhid, got 4 years for holding up a (violently worded) banner at the London cartoon rally. While I can’t argue with the public’s clamor for action against the agitantes, the British are actually radicalizing their own Muslims with these kinds of clampdowns faster than the occupations of Iraq and (the unholy mess that is) Afghanistan. Remember, the 7/7 bombers weren’t the crazy-eyed protesters like Mahid and his group. No, they were quiet, middle class kids. And the 07 Glasgow attack? Mild-mannered doctors.

Are you and I getting the same newspapers?

Now go a little farther out of your bubble… try Jenin in the occupied territories where I spent some time with Zakaria Zubeidi, leader of the al Aqsa brigades, who has to turn away widows and young men who want to be martyrs. Or maybe to Jakarta where I rolled with Ustadz Farign, who hosted al-Zawahiri when he came to plot 9/11 and whose entire family has dedicated itself to overthrowing the vastly corrupt, ultraviolent secular government of Indonesia. I filmed a training camp with over 20 young boys, all highly intelligent, rational students, who want to turn Indonesia’s archipelago into a base for al Qaeda to destroy American imperialism.

Or, finally, Pakistan, where I was shooting up until 2 days before Bhutto’s assassination. I had traveled there with Khalid Kelly, another member of Britain’s banned al-Muhajiroun. Kelly cannot return home for fear of arrest and has not seen his sons Osama (yes, named after his hero) and the newborn Muhammed (now the second most popular boys name in Britain) for months. We crossed into the NWFP and were in a nearby village when Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao, the Interior Minister and confidante of General Musharaf, was targeted by a suicide attack in his mosque on the Muslim celebration of Eid. Suicide attacks, once unheard of in Pakistan, have now become standard in the guerrilla war against the military. With the (impossible) dream of controlling a nuclear Pakistan, many jihadists see Pakistan as the most important battleground in the new century. Imagine how it is for ordinary Pakistanis, who just want to live their lives in peace and prosperity, when America’s new MLK, Barack Obama, declares his intent to unilaterally deal with Pakistan if they do not get their house in order. When it is precisely the lie of “American democracy” that has enabled a dictatorship in their land and emboldened the jihadists liberals like Obama want to stop!

Now, as a Canadian living in the United States, I am wary of the neo-conservative propaganda that seeks to amplify, and indeed, exaggerate the jihadi threat. But I am equally concerned about those who underplay it either out of reactionaryism or sheer ignorance. All it does is serve to disarm the public in the face a frighteningly real danger, one which we desperately need to address as a global community if we are going to avoid successive (and more devastating than 9/11) terrorist attacks. More, it proves the point that people in the West, in who’s name soldiers are fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, have no grasp on what this fight is truly about.

Stephen Marshall

Could it get any weirder? Ann Coulter is now making the case for us…. Or just trying to scare liberals away from Clinton.  You decide.

Well, it’s official. With the long-expected Clinton endorsement from “liberal” media bastion The New York Times, we can finally begin an earnest discussion about what “mainstream liberalism” actually means in this country. What it doesn’t mean is the revitalization of the social safety net, authentic socialized medicare, or a concerted revolution in inner city education. Neither does it mean a rapprochement in terms of foreign policy with the increasingly alienated Islamic world.

As far as the economic/political elite in America is concerned, this needs to be a century of emboldened militarism as they race across the RISK board/map of the world to secure resources for the next two generations. For realists, there just isn’t any other choice. And as “incandescent” as Barack Obama may be, the Times knows that Hillary will be able to make the kind of hard choices and bold moves that, frankly, George W. Bush couldn’t have made on his own. Call her neo-con lite… but that’s the reality. As the Times wrote in their January 25 editorial, Hillary has “used her years in the Senate well to immerse herself in national security issues, and has won the respect of world leaders and many in the American military. She would be a strong commander in chief.”

I agree with the appraisal, but for very different reasons than the Times has outlined.

What the Times, and no other mainstream publication, has had the inclination to say is that Hillary has been in the Pentagon’s good books for a lot longer than her time in the Senate. Is it such ancient history now, that these journalists can’t remember Iran-Contra? Or maybe we’ve all forgotten. Just ask yourself this simple question.

Q: Where was it that the infamous drug planes, carrying cocaine from Colombia and returning with weapons for the right-wing Nicaraguan Contras, were landing?

A: Mena Air Force. In Arkansas.

Forget the fact that Bill Clinton’s Little Rock (aka Crack Rock) became coke central once all the bags started being off-loaded from narco-courier Barry Seals‘ plane. Or the cover-ups of witness murders that became routine under Bubba’s tenure (GNN interviewed award winning Arkansas journalist Mara Leveritt about these charges and the facts are chilling). All you really need to know is that one of the closed-door witnesses to the Iran-Contra hearings was Hillary Clinton, then-partner in the Rose Law Firm which allegedly negotiated contracts for “tenants” at Mena Airport, including disgraced Clinton associate, and Rose partner, Webb Hubbell. And it doesn’t take a highly logical leap to understand that she wasn’t a closed-door witness because of some old airplane parts being stored at the airport. [And the fact that both Hillary and death-by-suicide White House counsel Vince Foster were both Rose partners doesn’t do much to quell the conspiracy fervor. Suffice it to say, these people were highly sophisticated actors in the realms of intelligence and national politics.]

Because Big Media never went that far in-depth into the story, little is publicly know about the Rose Law Firm’s role in Iran-Contra. But it’s become the stuff of conspiracy legend. I mean, you only need to goto Political Friendster’s page on the scandal to find this summary:

“Hillary was on the witness list for the closed door session of the investigations. Senior partner in Rose law firm which negotiated many secret CIA contracts at the Mena airport for various tenants…”

But that’s not really the point. The point is that the Clintons have been involved with US intelligence for a long time. And though much was made of the Clinton-Bush feud in the run-up to the ‘92 election as Americans were drawn into a so-called “culture war” between the left and right, the Clinton administration merely sustained the economic and military policies favored by the elite. As I wrote in Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing:

Writing in his book Contours of Descent, economist Robert Pollin noted dryly, “the general requirement of product differentiation in an electoral market entails that, at the margin, any Democratic president will offer more social concessions than a Republican of the same cohort. But we should be careful not to make too much of such differences in the public stance of these two figures, as against the outcomes that prevail during their terms of office.” Pollin’s book targets the supposed ’90s “boom” under Bill Clinton, explaining that, even while Clinton was seen as a friend of the poor, his policies actually did more to harm average workers whose wages stagnated as they faced more job insecurity than under his Republican predecessor, Bush Sr. So, the theory goes, while modern day political leaders trade off their party’s conservative or liberal legacy to keep voters entranced, in reality, as country music legend Waylon Jennings once said, “There ain’t a dime’s worth of difference between them.”

Clinton pushed through the disastrous NAFTA, bombed Serbia (and effectively established the Bondsteel military base, which as Chalmers Johnson writes, is “the largest and most expensive base constructed since the Vietnam War”), and bombed and sanctioned Iraq for the entirety of his presidency, creating the “soft target” that became the legacy of George W. Bush.

Hardly the stuff of a bleeding heart…

The liberal establishment knows that whichever party is able to associate the other party with extremists, tends to win, as John Avlon, one of the strategists for the Giuliani campaign, told me. The reason Bill Clinton was the first Dem president to be re-elected since FDR was because he chose the middle way. As much as the fundamentalists in the red states hated him, the financial/political elite knew he was batting for them.

And so will Hillary.

And this endorsement from the Times just before the crucial - but not decisive - South Carolina primary, shows that the liberal establishment is putting their cards on the table. According to the Times, Hillary Clinton is “more qualified, right now, to be president.” But if there is one thing we have learned from the last 8 years, it is that the President is merely a figurehead. I mean, this isn’t frontpage news. But it’s never been so plain to see that someone could be elected President and still proceed with policy initiatives and military objectives without the intellectual capital required to make those decisions alone.

In that sense, Obama - who would clearly pull all the same advisers that Hillary would, should he gain the nomination - is just as capable a leader. The only difference is that he is not the choice of the Pentagon who see the next 8 years as critical to re-asserting American dominance in the world. Hillary has shown that she can keep secrets. And that she will do the bidding of the US military. Obama just hasn’t earned that trust. Whether we believe it or not, for these people America is at war. And I sincerely fear for Obama if he comes out strong in Super Tuesday. He has no idea who he is up against.

And clearly, neither does The New York Times.

Please Digg this story!

Is where I’ll be for the next two weeks. As I pack my bags, the net is abuzz with the Code Pink/Washington Times sit-down during which the group’s founder, Medea Benjamin, finally admitted she “felt betrayed by the very people we helped to put into office. We have a particular break with the leadership of the Democratic Party.”

Of course, this was the warning of Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing. Give the book to your friends and family this Christmas. It will be a great primer for the 08 electoral season. Check out more info about the book, here.

One of the biggest stories in the Democrat sweep of 2006 was the rise of the Blue Dog Coalition, which is even more conservative than the DLC. There are now 37 Blue Dogs in Congress and, as Joshua Frank reported on CounterPunch, “not one had opposed the invasion of Iraq. All supported the Bush tax cuts as well as the wall along the border of Mexico. None support impeachment. All support Israel unequivocally, and if Bush moves ahead with a military intervention in Iran, they’ll all be on board.” Speaking to the LA Times before the elections, Blue Dog Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.) put it all in perspective: “The Democrats are going to retake the House of Representatives by electing conservative and moderate Democrats. We’re going to move our party back to the middle.”

At this point, the middle would look like hallowed ground. As Ralph E. Shaffer and R. William Robinson of the Baltimore Sun report, California Blue Dog Rep. Jane Harman’s Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act passed the House 404-6 late last month and “swift Senate passage appears certain.” This is the advent of a new McCarthyist era in the US and the fact that it is being driven to law by a Democrat should give everyone a little pause before they buy into the Democrat/Republican dualism that gives so many Americans a sense of security that the political system will balance out extremism.

One of the findings of the bill is that, “the Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens.”

The language couldn’t be any plainer. Ms. Harman is talking about ideological warfare and historically, that has meant an imminent attack on Constitutional freedoms that Americans hold most dear. It’s almost cliché to cite the House Un-American Activities Committee Hearings that ultimately led to the black listing of Hollywood leftists, not to mention the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. But this is an aspect of American civil culture that goes back to the 1886 execution of anarchists cited with organizing and fomenting the Chicago Haymarket Riot.

Giving it a modern spin, Harman’s bill would empower roving 10-member national commission to hold its own hearings in a quest to define and locate “violent radicalization” and “homegrown terrorism” in our midst. But it gets worse. As Lindsay Beyerstein reports in In These Times.

The bill also directs the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to designate a “center of excellence,” a university-based research center where academics, policy-makers, members of the private sector and other stakeholders can collaborate to better understand and prevent radicalization and homegrown terrorism.

Can you imagine the Center, being run by none other than David Horowitz? Joking aside, it’s one thing for Republicans to waffle on the definition of torture and waterboarding. But for Dems to be blindsiding the nation with this kind of “oversight” legislation is truly disturbing. This is the first time I have actually felt that kind of fear tingle my spine… the rare kind that one gets in those dreams when they have been chased into a dark corner with no way out.

Democrats swept the 2006 elections on a promise to end the war and pull the United States back from a precipitous decline in world opinion. And while one cannot fault House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the handful of liberal progressives who have consistently fought to realign the nation’s political character, the hardcore liberal base in California is losing patience. According to a Field Poll released Friday, the approval rating for Congress among California voters has “fallen below 30 percent for only the seventh time in the past 15 years.” As John Hill of the Sacramento Bee reports,

Both Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat who became speaker this year, and Congress as a whole have fallen short of voter expectations since taking over both houses, poll director Mark DiCamillo said.

“I think the reason for her decline and the low ratings Congress is getting is that voters here are not seeing any change,” DiCamillo said.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s approval rating of 51 percent is down 10 percentage points since March, but consistent with her average over the years. Sen. Barbara Boxer’s rating also has slumped, from 54 percent in March to 44 percent. Both Boxer and Feinstein, however, still enjoy the approval of more voters than disapproval of them.

For Pelosi, it was the first time the poll showed more people disapproving than approving of her performance – 40 percent to 35 percent, with 25 percent having no opinion.

What Californians are waking up to is the reality that while Pelosi may be the standard bearer of liberal values in the Democratic Party, the nation’s political pendulum has shifted so far to the right that she is merely a symbol. The economic elite of this country know the value of having Pelosi as a figure head. It gives the impression of an authentic political spectrum. But all we have to do is look at the Dem Presidential contenders - based on fundraising - to get a real bell weather on where liberals like her, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer figure into the national scene.

Forget Hillary for a moment, though I am more than confident at this point that the power base in the DNC is going to give her the nomination. And it’s looking increasingly like the Obama camp feels the same way. After a terrible week - in which he outraged true blue liberals by failing to remove the anti-gay evangelizer Donnie McClurkin from his tour (homosexuality is a “curse”) - Obama pledged a revitalized mission to take Clinton on more forcefully. But what does this mean? Well, it means adopting more right-wing rhetoric to woo the attention of the real money. But this is only further upsetting the people over at DailyKos and other liberal blogging sites. As one blogger summed it up:

There are a lot of Democrats who worry that Clinton is too mainstream, too… Republican. They want someone to challenge her forcefully from the left, and they want Obama to be that person. They want Obama to be a proxy for them, for their frustration at how wildly far to the right they think the country has pulled in the last eight years.

Naturally, a lot of these people are gay or gay-friendly liberals. Naturally, these people have bad memories of the last presidential campaign and all its gay-baiting and homophobe embracing. Obama needs these people, and a lot of them are naturally drawn to him (or to an idealized vision of him), but here’s what he’s done lately to win them over:

First, he ran a campaign that failed to mount a forceful challenge to Clinton’s candidacy. Then he promised he would get tougher against Clinton and point out where his positions are actually more in line with liberal values than hers. And then, within the span of a day, he proved not even tough enough to yank an anti-gay voice from one of his campaign’s own events, infuriating liberals all over the country.

If Obama’s not tough enough to defend the interests and beliefs of left-leaning Democratic voters at his own events, why should these people now believe that he’s tough enough to successfully take on Clinton? More importantly: Why should they believe he’s any different than Clinton?

More sophisticated Dems are looking past this little tussle over McClurkin and hoping that Obama will make stands where it does count. As Josh Marshall wrote:

If Obama is looking for an issue where the politics and the substance both point in the same direction it’s sitting right in front of him: Iran.

In front of everyone’s eyes we are creeping toward a catastrophic replay of the mistakes the country made half a decade ago in Iraq. You hear the same arguments — ‘time is not on our side,’ etc. All nonsense. Even among the ’sensible’ people on this issue the common assumption is that yes, eventually we may need to go to war. But we need to give more time to diplomacy, etc. This is all nonsense and it’s a set of shared assumptions that now appears to unite Hillary with all the Republican candidates. At least that’s one way to interpret her recent remarks. This is an issue that goes to the heart of America’s future role in the world. And it’s an issue that could work for him. Or someone, if they’d pick it up and start talking sense.

Anyone asking Nancy Pelosi?

Proving that people who aren’t “pretending” to be politicians have less political validity than actors… Stephen Colbert’s Presidential campaign group on FaceBook, 1,000,000 Strong For Stephen T Colbert has, in less than 10 days, outdone Obama’s (1,000,000 Strong) group, which took more than 9 months to get 381,000 members.

Furthermore, the site adds, “it has taken the “Stop Hillary Clinton: (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary)” more than 8 months to get over 488,000 members. We beat this within 6 days!”

Colbert will easily have 1 million before the 10th day and if that is any indication of his poll power, he’s a shoe-in for the GOP nomination. But it’s not in the can yet… as Politico reports, his campaign could cause his network a pile of legal trouble.

If he continues moving toward a presidential campaign, particularly if he, or Comedy Central, keeps spending money exploring and promoting by hyping it on his nightly half-hour news parody show, he could get himself and his network in trouble for violating election laws, including those barring corporate campaign contributions.

“You don’t get a different set of rules because you’re running as a joke,” said Marc Elias, a leading Washington election lawyer who represents Democratic candidates.

“You may get a different set of rules because it’s a joke and you’re not really running,” said Elias, who stressed he was not speaking for any client. “But if it isn’t a joke, then there may be any number of issues.”

Amazing to read this in the Times editorial this weekend:

Every now and then, we are tempted to double-check that the Democrats actually won control of Congress last year. It was particularly hard to tell this week. Democratic leaders were cowed, once again, by propaganda from the White House and failed, once again, to modernize the law on electronic spying in a way that permits robust intelligence gathering on terrorists without undermining the Constitution.

The task before Congress was to review and improve an update to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, that was pushed through the Capitol just before the summer break. That bill endorsed warrantless wiretapping and gutted other aspects of the 1978 law.

House Democrats drafted a measure that, while imperfect, was an improvement to the one passed this summer. But before the House could vote, Republicans tied up the measure in bureaucratic knots and Democratic leaders pulled it. Senate Democrats did even worse, accepting a Potemkin compromise that endorsed far too much of the bad summer law.

We were left wondering who is really in charge, when in a bipartisan press release announcing the agreement, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Kit Bond, described the bill as “a delicate arrangement of compromises” that could not be changed in any way. The committee’s chairman, Jay Rockefeller, didn’t object.

[…]

Otherwise, it was a very frustrating week in Washington. It was bad enough having a one-party government when Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. But the Democrats took over, and still the one-party system continues.

There was an excellent piece in the October 7 Times Magazine about Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi exile who was one of the more influential forces driving the liberal ethos behind the invasion. In, “What’s Left?,” his scathing attack on anti-war progressives, leftist British writer Nick Cohen used Makiya as his muppet to make the case for a liberal intervention and, Hitchens-like, was still defending his position earlier this summer when I debated him at the Hay festival. I wonder if Cohen got a chance to read the Magazine this weekend. Especially this passage in which Dexter Filkins describes an exchange which took place between Makiya and some of his fellow Iraqi exiles.

[Makiya] leaned forward to pose a question.

“How many Iraqis have died since 2003?” Makiya asked his friends.

There was silence at the table. Makiya was asking the others, but he also seemed to be asking himself.

“Five hundred thousand?” Makiya mused. “Two hundred thousand? What are the estimates?”

Someone said something about a study.

“It’s getting closer to Saddam,” Makiya said. Then he sat back in his chair, and the conversation continued on its way.

And then there is this appraisal by Ali Allawi, another exiled Iraqi who opposed the invasion but who then served as minister of defense and of trade before quitting the nightmare that had become of his homeland, when the Times writer:

asked Allawi if Makiya, and the others who made the human rights case for war, were not responsible for the disaster that Iraq has turned out to be. “I think they are relieved of responsibility only because I think their influence was far less than they thought it was,” Allawi said. “Ahmad Chalabi, Kanan Makiya, all of these people became media stars, but their influence on decision making was next to nothing. I can’t believe that a person like Wolfowitz or Cheney or whoever it was in the neocon cabal would allow themselves to be manipulated in this way. They are far too cynical. They have their own agendas. And these agendas were boosted by Iraqis who seemed to be singing from the same song sheet. The Iraqis gave them credibility, gave them substance. But I don’t think they were influenced by them.”

Now substitute the word “liberal” for “Iraqis”… namely those liberals like Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman who urged the neocons to war for humanitarian reasons. While Berman ranted about the need to counter a Nazi-like death cult, Hitchens channeled the rage of the Shia and Kurdish populations, who had been most victimized by the Hussein regime. I wonder what they would say of Allawi’s appraisal. Most likely that the intentions of the mission were noble, but the execution was its downfall. And yet now we are seeing even more popular support gather behind the attack on Iran by all major Democrat candidates without much of a whimper from the mainstream outlets who were so easily goaded into acquiescence last time.

If you remember, that began with the Iraq Liberation Act of 2002. Now we have the Kyl-Lieberman amendment which makes terrorists of the Iranian military. Soon we’ll be talking about liberal interventionism again… and out will come the Iranian exiles.

Oh, shit, they’re already in.