A Revolution of One

This Doesn't Sound Promising, Part II

Again , not good:

Within the past month, four former deputy directors of operations have tried to offer CIA Director Porter J. Goss advice about changing the clandestine service without setting off a rebellion, but Goss has declined to speak to any of them, said former CIA officials aware of the communications.

The four senior officials represent nearly two decades of experience leading the Directorate of Operations under both Republican and Democratic presidents. The officials were dismayed by the reaction and were concerned that Goss has isolated himself from the agency's senior staff, said former clandestine service officers aware of the offers.

Good thing the grown ups are back in charge.

This Doesn't Sound Promising

So says the now former head of the CIA's Osama Bin Laden unit:

Michael Scheuer, the author and former chief of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit, announced yesterday that he had resigned from the agency so he could speak openly about terrorism and what he sees as the government's failure to understand the threat from al Qaeda.  "I have concluded that there has not been adequate national debate over the nature of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and the force he leads and inspires, and the nature of the intelligence reform needed to address that threat."

Cue Operation Slime and Defend, Part VII.  Let's see, we have Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson, John Diullio, Paul O'Neill, etc.  How many former Bush Administration insiders do we need to come out and say that this administration has no serious policy operation and that the war in Iraq was a distraction from the real war on terror before the "security moms" realize that voting for Republicans doesn't make you safe.  I'll bet it's about the same time the media stops telling the public the Osama bin Laden was wearing a Kerry/Edwards pin in his rock video.  This isn't a mystery, terrorism is a good issue for Bush because the media says its a good issue for him.  There has been no serious debate in the media about this administration's approach to terrorism other than to wonder "Would it be just awesome if we bombed Saddam Hussein, or would it be fuckin' awesome."  In the good old days, like the Clinton Administration, this type of revelation from the former head of what might be the most crucial unit in the CIA might trigger a scandal.  Now, it's just par for the course.

And why I do keep forgetting the election is over?  Can denial really last this long?

A Rose by Any Other Name

Atrios is right in "Values."  Much has been made about how this election was lost on issues of moral values and the election post mortem seems to be focused how the Democrats can better connect with the "moral values" voters.  The answer, is quite simply, they can't.  Nor should they try.  That's because the Democrats didn't lose this election on moral values.  They didn't even lose it on the tiny subset of tenets held by the Religious Right (also known as the Republican Party) that Karl & Co., with the aide of the liberal media, ginned up in order to get the crazies to the polls.

Back in the real world, we all know that wanting to help those less fortunate is a moral value.  We know that wanting to provide all Americans with a basic standard of health care is a moral value.  We know that being straight with the public before starting a war is a moral value.  But that's not what the values voters were voting on.  They were voting on gays and abortion.  The question is why is this an issue.

This becomes more intriguing when you read what Josh Marshall  has to say.  The red states aren't any more "moral" than the blue states.  Not when you're talking about abstract, "liberal" notions of morality like those mentioned above nor when you're talking about more specific Christian notions of morality, such as divorce or out of wed-lock births.  The rate of divorce in particular is low in many blue states, such as say, well, I don't know, Massachusetts.  But as has been pointed out, nobody was making an issue of reducing the divorce rate or rate of single parenthood in this election.  In the whole "a marriage is between a man and a woman" portion of presidential programming we didn't hear Georgie Boy once talk about how this related to divorce or out of wedlock births.  That's because, quite simply, red America has nothing to get uppitty about on these issues - they're all single and pregnant or divorced.  The moral values crowd wasn't really about moral values, and it wasn't even about Christian values.  It was about getting on one's high horse and feeling superior.

We've read lots and lots of articles and listen to lots and lots of conservative pundits talk about how the coastal liberal elites condescend to real Americans with real values.  Notwithstanding that it's pretty fucking condescending when somebody tells me, I'm not a real American because I live in New York, this is clearly bullshit.  The red states that aren't in the process of becoming blue states are pissed because the world has passed them by.  They are less educated than the blue states, they are less wealthy than the blue states and they just generally get less attention than the blue states.  They're jealous.  They're not even any more "moral" in the conventional sense or in the Christian sense.  But god damn it, they're not as gay as we are and when their teenage daughters get knocked up, she's gonna have the kid.  The Republicans recognized this deeply felt resentment in red American.  They tapped into it by telling them they have "values" because they're not gay and they don't have abortions.  That's why they're better than us.  Lots of red America is looking for an excuse to lash out against blue America, and these "values" give them an excuse.  The Democrats can't woo their votes, because they're not available to be wooed.  The Democrats can start talking about values for the next four years, and then sometime in March 2008, somebody in RNC headquarters will come up with another reason why we're heathens and the people of South Carolina aren't.

There is a division in America, and the blue states are on one side and the red states, specifially the south and the plains are on another side.  Their half is bigger right now, so to speak.  This is obviously a generalization, and there is tremendous variety amongst voters in the blue and red states, but I think these issues are pervasive in quite a bit of  red America.  The Democrats aren't going to get anywhere trying to win their votes because their votes are not available to us.  Better to try to win the votes of the people that  aren't looking for a reason to hate us.  I guaranty the voters in the red states that are open to voting Democrat weren't the ones that voted on "values" this time.  We didn't lose the election because we couldn't attract the "values" crowd.  We lost because we didn't present a compelling enough message to attract enough of the others.

One of These Things is Not Like The Other

I am disheartened.  This is the part where I talk about baseball.  The great thing about the merry go-round of general managers the Mets have going is that the fans get to experience different breeds of idiocy.  First there was the Steve Phillips win now-now-now, damn the future and by the way, I'll pay $10 million for a reliever, any old one will do, as long as he is really, really old.  Then there was Jim Duquette, who gets called ineffectual by the people who are trying to DEFEND him.  Now there is Omar Minaya, who frankly, just can't tell a good baseball player from an aardvark.

I have no gripe if Omar wants to trade Piazza or Floyd.  They are old, and won't be part of the next great Mets team.  But Reyes?  For Soriano?  Isn't it enough that the Mets pissed away one great young talent for a pile of magic beans?  Were they so unmoved by the reaction to the Kazmir trade that they want to do the same thing again?

Objectively, I can see an argument for trading Reyes.  He's injury prone, he has holes in his game, most notably substandard plate discipline.  His performance last year when he was healthy wasn't exactly inspiring.  His value is at his highest right now.  But he is young and cheap, immensely talented and the Mets control his rights for the next five years.  So if you're going to deal him, better get something tasty back.

This is where Omar has a problem.  He apparently has interest in Alphonso Soriano.  Soriano just isn't a very good baseball player.  He has been declining for the past two seasons.  He has worse plate discipline than Reyes.  He is a defensive liability.  He is expensive and the Mets would only control him for this year and next before he becomes a free agent.  His park-adjusted OPS was actually below the league average last season.  But damn it, he runs fast and he has all those nice, yet meaningless counting stats like home runs and RBIs, so lots of folks like Omar think he's just dandy.

Now admittedly, after the Kazmir deal, Mets fans are gun shy about this sort of thing.  They hear a crazy rumour that would be a colossally stupid deal for the Mets and automatically assume the Mets are going to do it.  There could be nothing to it.  I hope there is nothing to it.  But if it happens, I can't say I will abandon the Mets - if I didn't leave after the Kazmir debacle, nothing is going to do it - but I will root for them to lose and continue to do so until they prove they aren't run by a bunch of morons with no ability to see past the upcoming season.  But what I'm saying is nothing new.  Just go here .

Hillary

I hope she runs for the Democratic nomination in 2008.  Maybe then, when she gets her ass handed to her in the primaries, the Fox news crowd will stop treating her as if she were a Democratic rock goddess and frightening the common folk with the prospect of her as some sort of Presidential boogeywoman.  Okay, so that's a bit naive.

Anyways, I like Hillary, but she can't win.  Both because far too many people, including many Democrats, just don't like her for reasons deeply rooted in sexism and archiaic notions of gender roles and because she is not nearly as politically talented as her husband.  Every Democrat knows this and none of us have any need to get killed in another election solely for the purpose of doing the bidding of the great and wise Hillary Clinton. 

Honest Republicans know Hillary has no shot at either the Presidency or the Democratic nomination.  The Media knows this as well.  But just the mention of her name and the Presidency in the same sentence gets the freepers and the people who like to discriminate in the name of god all riled up.  So Rush and Sean keep talking about and the media does their bidding and takes it seriously, even though everybody knows it's a ruse.  But if the Democrats repudiate her in the primaries before the Republicans get the chance they have been dreaming about, perhaps the spectre of Hillary can be vanquished.

Here We Go Again

So James Carville thinks "The purpose of a political party is to win elections."  It's all becoming so clear now.  The purpose of a political party isn't to win elections, it's to govern.  That's not Carville's problem - he's the salesman.  But there he is telling Democrats what it is he can sell.  And there the Democrats go listening to him because they put winning at a higher priority than getting the governing part right.  Winning elections may be a damn near pre-requisite in allowing a political party to govern, but you have to go about winning elections within the ideological framwork of how you want to govern - not go about governing within the political framework of how you think you can win elections.  If you don't people will recognize the fraud.  Winning the popular vote in 2000 and losing by a couple percentage points in 2004 doesn't indicate the democratic arty has been exposed as a fraud, but clearly we need to do better.  Making up who we think we should be isn't going to help.

What Would Brian Boitano Do?

For the past week, Slate has been asking Why Americans Hate Democrats .  My answers to this question are alternatively, depending on my mood:

1) Because they're idiots
2) Who cares?  Fuck 'em, and
3) I don't know

Not surprisingly, the writers at Slate, most of whom get paid to do this sort of thing for a living have come up a with a different set of answers.  Generally speaking, among the suggestion are  move to the right , move to the left , do nothing and do the hokey-pokey and shake it all about.  I think the answer is none of these, though the hokey-pokey thing shouldn't be dismissed without due consideration.  The real problem (which in fairness, Tom Tomorrow does touch upon) is that the Democrats are prone to engage in these sorts of recriminations.  We have become the first entirely post-modern political party in American politics.  This is a three step process.  First, there are Things Democrats Believe.  Then, they look to the good people of Alabama for guidance, use them as a proxy for the American people as a whole, and decide The American People Will Not Tolerate the Things Democrats Believe.  Finally, there is the Things Democrats Say They Believe, which they generally don't truly believe, but are close enough that they don't quibble.  We try to see ourselves as others see us, adjust accordingly, and the face we present to the world isn't actually who we are anymore.  See also "How John Kerry Became the 2004 Democrat Nominee for President."

We have thus become a nationwide political party whose stated positions are not firmly entrenched in a set of commonly held beliefs but are massaged from a set of shared principles to form some sort of watered down notion of liberalism packaged for public consumption.  It creates this odd dichotomy where Democrats articulate their support for a candidate not based on any of his or her stated positons but based on what we believe the candidate believes notwithstanding what he or she really said.  So nobody really believes John Kerry's position on gay marriage is the right one, but we know that if he could, he would come out against it.  Nobody really believes John Kerry's position on the Iraq war is the right one, but we know if he was president in 2002, he wouldn't have started it.  Nobody really believe the Democrats wanted to jack up the fines for broadcast indecency - strike that - they totally and completely spit the bit on that one. Nevertheless, true blue Democrats can decipher the code, and maybe some ineffectual moderates think "Well, that seems reasonable," but everybody else is sitting around thinking "What the hell?"  And they would be right, but we don't realize their they're right because we don't read the words on the page, we just see the code between the lines.

In a sense, it's similar to the way bigots knew that everytime a Republican politician was talking about states rights, what they were really saying was "Damn them negroes."  Now, if you're going to advocate racism, maybe it makes sense to speak in code, because you're only talking to the true believers and you don't actually want everybody else to understand what you are talking about.  But support for gay marriage, abortion rights and the Democratic position on the Iraq War are not the moral equivalent of racism, and the Democrats have to stop acting like it is.  No matter how watered down the positon they take, Democrats are always going to be the position of gays and abortion.  We're not going to get credit for being only sort of pro-gay marriage or sort of pro-abortion (and this isn't the type of credit we should want anyway), so embrace it.  We are never going to convince anybody that what we believe is right if we don't actually sat what it is that we truly believe.  It's just not productive to sit around navel gazing wondering how we can mute ourselves enough that we become palatable to 600 more people in Florida or 150,000 more people in Ohio. 

So get John Kerry, John Edwards, Russ Feingold and as many of the Clintons as you can round up, put them in a room, have them figure out some good stuff and then give that stuff to the marketers and tell them to sell it.  But for the love of god (see, we Democrats can talk about god comfortably), don't let the marketers in the room.   So my advice to the Democrats (other than stop listening to advice) is the same advice a parent would give to their child on the first day of school - just be yourself and people will like you.  Now maybe your kid is an asshole, and they should try not to be themselves.  That's the Republican approach and it works for them.  But I think the Democrats are actually pretty decent.  They should stop being ashamed of it.