Perlstein nails it

This is great, from the Nation. If only the Democrats were listening...

Will the Progressive Majority Emerge?

by RICK PERLSTEIN

[from the July 9, 2007 issue]

For as long as I can remember, there's been a generally accepted story about the recent history of Democratic Party fortunes, a neat little morality tale that goes something like this: The New Deal majority fell apart when the party was taken over by forces outside the mainstream of American life. Getting blindsided by Reaganism was the party's just deserts. And if Democrats wanted the country back, they would just have to learn to become mainstream again.

For as long as I can remember, liberals have been complaining about awkward, self-conscious attempts to recover this "mainstream" sensibility and how they have paradoxically weakened the party. They forced Democratic politicians to become obsessed with polls. That, in turn, boxed Democrats into an identity the public--the mainstream--found the most off-putting of all: Democrats became timid. They couldn't pursue a bold public agenda because they were too hemmed in by polls. Very recently, among progressives, a new dictum has emerged: Hug close to the polls, worship the polls, be the polls.

Trends in Political Values and Core Attitudes: 1987-2007, a massive twenty-year roundup of public opinion from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, tells the story. Is it the responsibility of government to care for those who can't take care of themselves? In 1994, the year conservative Republicans captured Congress, 57 percent of those polled thought so. Now, says Pew, it's 69 percent. (Even 58 percent of Republicans agree. Would that some of them were in Congress.) The proportion of Americans who believe government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep is 69 percent, too--the highest since 1991. Even 69 percent of self-identified Republicans--and 75 percent of small-business owners!--favor raising the minimum wage by more than $2.

The Pew study was not just asking about do-good, something-for-nothing abstractions. It asked about trade-offs. A majority, 54 percent, think "government should help the needy even if it means greater debt" (it was only 41 percent in 1994). Two-thirds want the government to guarantee health insurance for all citizens. Even among those who otherwise say they would prefer a smaller government, it's 57 percent--the same as the percentage of Americans making more than $75,000 a year who believe "labor unions are necessary to protect the working person."

It's not just Pew. In the authoritative National Election Studies (NES) survey, more than twice as many Americans want "government to provide many more services even if it means an increase in spending" as want fewer services "in order to reduce spending." According to Gallup, a majority say they generally side with labor in disputes and only 34 percent with companies; 53 percent think unions help the economy and only 36 percent think they hurt. A 2005 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 53 percent of Americans thought the Bush tax cuts were "not worth it because they have increased the deficit and caused cuts in government programs." CNN/Opinion Research Corp. found that only 25 percent want to see Roe v. Wade overturned; NPR/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard found the public rejecting government-funded abstinence-only sex education in favor of "more comprehensive sex education programs that include information on how to obtain and use condoms and other contraceptives" by 67 percent to 30 percent. Public Agenda/Foreign Affairs discovered that 67 percent of Americans favor "diplomatic and economic efforts over military efforts in fighting terrorism."

Want hot-button issues? The public is in love with rehabilitation over incarceration for youth offenders. Zogby/National council on Crime and Delinquency found that 89 percent think it reduces crime and 80 percent that it saves money over the long run. "Amnesty"? Sixty-two percent told CBS/New York Times surveyors that undocumented immigrants should be allowed to "keep their jobs and eventually apply for legal status." And the gap between the clichés about what Americans believe about gun control and what they actually believe is startling: NBC News/Wall Street Journal found 58 percent favoring "tougher gun control laws," and Annenberg found that only 10 percent want laws controlling firearms to be less strict, a finding reproduced by the NES survey in 2004 and Gallup in 2006.

You suspected it all along. Now it just might be true: Most Americans think like you. Nearly two-thirds think corporate profits are too high (30 percent, Pew notes, "completely agree with this statement...the highest percentage expressing complete agreement with this statement in 20 years"). Almost three-quarters think "it's really true that the rich just get richer while the poor get poorer," eight points more than thought so in 2002.

If only there was an American political party that unwaveringly reflected these views, as a matter of bone-deep identity. You might think it would do pretty well. Which leads to the aspect of the Pew study that got the most ink: "Political Landscape More Favorable to Democrats," as the subtitle put it. When you compare Americans who either identify themselves as Democrats or say they lean toward the Democrats with Republicans and Republican leaners, our side wins by fifteen points, 50 percent to 35, the most by far in twenty years. As recently as 2002 it was a tie, 43 to 43.

Plunge below the surface, however, and this stirring tale becomes disconcerting. Yes, again and again, the views of independents track the views of Democrats--more so, in fact, with every passing year. Pew says it's "striking" that 57 percent of independents think government should aid more needy people even at the price of higher debt. In 1994 it was only 39 percent. When asked their opinion of statements like "Business corporations make too much profit," independents answer the same way as Democrats: about 70 percent agree. On questions like "Are you satisfied with the way things are going for you financially?" the chart is amazing: Republicans, independents and Democrats clustered together at 65 and 64 percent in 1994. But Republicans have increasingly answered that question in the affirmative--81 percent in 2007. Meanwhile, the lines for independents and Democrats headed down, down, down, nearly in lockstep, to 54 percent today.

Pew says independents are thinking like Democrats, and that fewer and fewer want much to do with the Republican Party. In 1994 independents gave the GOP a 68 percent approval rating; now only 40 percent do. And the percentage of people who call themselves Republicans has dropped from 29 percent in 2005 to 25 percent today. But these people are not signing up as Democrats. The proportion of those who call themselves Democrats has held steady, in the lower 30s.

Here's a riddle: What's an "independent"? More and more, it's an American who holds positions we associate with Democrats but who refuses to call himself by the name. Why? Part of the reason is that people say to themselves, "If only there was a party that thought like me--that was for harnessing the power of government to help the needy and protect the middle class; for reining in business excess; for fighting overseas threats through soft power instead of reckless force." But they don't find today's Democrats answering to the description. A Washington Post/ABC News poll published in early June proved it on Iraq: It heralded the emergence of what might be called "antiwar independents," who'd like nothing more than to find a party determined to end the war but don't see enough difference between Congressional Republicans and Democrats for the latter to earn their loyalty. Fueled, the Post suspects, by the failure of Congress to change course in Iraq, independents gave Congressional Democrats a 49 percent approval rating in April but only 37 percent in June.

The pattern--Democrats losing because they don't look enough like Democrats--is nothing new: During the 2002 election Democrats did such a poor job of selling themselves as better protectors of middle-class interests that Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research found only 34 percent of voters saw a difference between Democrats and Republicans on prescription drug benefits to seniors. That year, when the party was handed a once-in-a-generation shot to prove itself as a protector against runaway greed (the corporate accounting scandals), DNC chair Terry McAuliffe called the swindling firm Global Crossing a "great company."

I suspect there's another reason, however, one much more easily fixed. There is a famous Washington story, perhaps apocryphal, about jovial, "all politics is local" Tip O'Neill. After his first run for local office, O'Neill was gabbing with a neighbor, perhaps someone he grew up with, with whose family his was entirely interlaced in that Boston, Irish Catholic way. He asked if she had voted for him. She answered, "No." Shocked, Tip demanded to know why. "Because you never asked," she replied.

Democrats make a similar mistake these days: They rarely ask the public to vote for them as Democrats. The trend was obvious by the 2006 season, for those who cared to see: The same Pew numbers that now show a 50-35 Democratic/Democratic-leaners advantage over Republicans had the advantage at 47-38 in 2006. Candidates would have earned a premium just slapping the label "Democrat" on their TV ads, but most didn't do it. That fall writers and readers of the website MyDD.com ran an ad watch. Some Democratic commercials failed to mention any of the issues. Bush's war was a disaster; Bush's government was a crony-infested sinkhole; under Bush, the middle class was having a hard time--these would have been immense burdens for GOP candidates. Other ads, though, were even more frustrating: They mentioned those issues--but never used the label "Democrat."

It could have been a virtuous circle, a matchless teachable moment: Voter identification with the positions articulated could have translated into a party identification that independents hadn't been inclined to feel before--a crucial party-building function. But that's just not how the Democratic consultancy class thinks. Their habits were set when they were blindsided by the Reagan presidency and the rise of popular conservatism ("It helped convince me that the national Democratic Party drag was such that good candidates were carrying an albatross around their necks with the words Democratic Party written on it when they went into elections," Will Marshall of the Democratic Leadership Council once said). Democratic leaders, scarred by the 1980s and frozen in the strategies of the 1990s, have repeatedly squandered the opportunities presented by the increasingly liberal sympathies of voters.

Of course, slapping a graphic reading "Democrat for Congress" on ads or reforming the vague shame some powerful Washington Dems feel toward their party--or even turning Democratic Congress members overnight into tough advocates for bringing the troops home from Iraq--may not be enough to bring election day tallies in line with the party's fifteen-point advantage in lean and identification. It's a problem with many moving parts. The stubborn oxen on TV and in the establishment media who tell the American people how to think are part of the problem too.

The commentariat tells itself a little fairy tale. As a new report from the Campaign for America's Future (my employer, though I'm solely responsible for the ideas in this essay) and Media Matters for America points out (The Progressive Majority: Why a Conservative America Is a Myth), when the GOP took over Congress in 1994, the New York Times front page claimed, "The country has unmistakably moved to the right." It hadn't; for an excellent study showing this wasn't so, see Ronald Rapoport and Walter Stone's Three's a Crowd, which shows how Newt Gingrich's Contract With America was tailored as an appeal to Perot voters, then retroactively spun as a mandate for conservatism. Ten years later, when Bush beat Kerry by three points, Katie Couric asked on Today, "Does this election indicate that this country has become much more socially conservative?" It was a rhetorical question, for the establishment had set the conclusion in stone long before. Three weeks before the 2006 election Candy Crowley of CNN said Democrats were "on the losing side of the values debate, the defense debate and, oh yes, the guns debate." After election day, Bob Schieffer of CBS said, "The Democrats' victory was built on the back of more centrist candidates seizing Republican-leaning districts." (Tell that to my favorite Democratic House pickup, Carol Shea-Porter, a former social worker who won a New Hampshire seat after getting kicked out of a 2005 presidential appearance for wearing a T-shirt reading Turn Your Back on Bush.) John Harris of the Washington Post, now of The Politico, said, "This is basically not a liberal country." Concludes the Media Matters/Campaign for America's Future report, "Democratic victories are understood as a product of the Democrats moving to the right, while Republican victories are the product of a conservative electorate."

The media have always been this stubborn, even when the conclusions they reached were 180 degrees reversed. In 1964, after Lyndon Johnson swamped Barry Goldwater, pundits said conservatism was dead as a force in American politics, and continued in that arrogant vein for years, ignoring plentiful evidence of the conservative upsurge. They were no less empirically impaired after they were shocked into making the pivot, and they won't turn again until they're forced, kicking and screaming, when the evidence finally becomes overwhelming and undeniable.

An important corollary of the media fairy tale is that the Democrats can't embody the will of the people. As an editorial in the Los Angeles Times explained in 2004, Kerry lost because of his party's "God gap." Once more, the data won't cooperate: A declining constituency--the devout--is treated as if it were booming. Pew shows that the number of people who "completely agree" that "prayer is an important part of my daily life" is down six points in the past four years. The number who "never doubt the existence of God" is down eight over the same period. The Barna Group likewise reports, "There has been a 92% increase in the number of unchurched Americans in the last thirteen years"--a population of 75 million, which is growing: According to the Pew report, "This change appears to be generational in nature, with each new generation displaying lower levels of religious commitment than the preceding one." America, of course, is a religious country--but 19 percent born after 1976 are either atheists, agnostics or claim no religion, compared with 5 percent born before 1946. Yes, social conservatives are a loud component of our body politic. But the numbers peaked long ago. Pew measures social attitudes via six questions, such as whether schools should have the right to fire gay teachers and whether AIDS is God's punishment for sexual immorality. In 1989 about half of respondents answered at least four of those six questions conservatively. Now, a mere 30 percent do.

Just who are these iniquitous citizens? People who identify themselves as secular or unidentified with a religious tradition represent about 5 percent of Republicans and 11 percent of Democrats. They are a downright heathenish 17 percent of independents. The Pew report has a chart of three descending trend lines of those who answer the social-values questions conservatively. The line for independents is less socially conservative than for Democrats. DLC types love to talk about "swing voters," a group often taken to largely overlap with "independents." Say party centrists, they just don't trust the Democrats--that "God gap." So Democratic candidates are supposed to wear their piety on their sleeve if they ever hope to creep over 51 percent in an election. The centrists are wrong. Independents are the most secular portion of the electorate.

Of course, the media business also has interests. Those interests happen to coincide with those in our party--the Democratic Leadership Council is the most notorious--who have been fighting since the 1980s to make the party more friendly to corporations. The two ostensibly nonconservative cable news channels look more and more like loss leaders for giant corporations eager to signal to other giant corporations that they won't do anything to harm them. There is little other rational explanation for why a network like CNN Headline News keeps on a spittle-flecked right-wing ranter like Glenn Beck (he got less than 60,000 viewers in the 25-54 demographic one recent Tuesday); or in a gentler, more culturally mediated way, why cable news gravitates toward ostensibly nonconservative commentary that posits an ineluctable social conservatism of the electorate as the reason the GOP is the country's natural governing party.

We may not be able to get the media to understand that this is the most favorable climate for liberalism in a generation. But I do know a class of people we might have a better chance of influencing: Democratic politicians--especially Democratic presidential candidates. But what I'd like to say is a paradox, given what I've been arguing above: Don't pay too much attention to polls, no matter how favorable they may be to the kind of politics you'd like to see. Not just because it keeps you from leading but because it can keep you from winning.

More and more I find myself telling a story I consider the key to understanding modern American political history: that of Ronald Reagan's 1966 California gubernatorial campaign. His expensive, top-drawer consultants had hired a company formed by psychology PhDs who promised that Reagan's would be the first campaign run "as a problem in human behavior." Many liberal interpreters of Reagan's career have pointed to this to suggest that he was plastic, or a pawn, or a manipulator of voters. Not so. In fact, he was the opposite. One of the first things he did was tell all these fancy pollsters to shut up. In his early, exploratory campaigning, he'd been attacking the insolence of insurgent Berkeley students--who "should have been taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown out of the university once and for all." His consultants told him to knock it off, pointing to their data: Berkeley didn't even show up as an issue. Reagan threw the polls back in their faces: "Look, I don't care if I'm in the mountains, the desert, the biggest cities of the state, the first question is: 'What are you going to do about Berkeley?' And each time the question itself would get applause."

Reagan followed his heart, of course, made Berkeley his signature issue and thumped Edmund Brown in one of the greatest upsets in modern political history (even though the establishment media hated his conservatism then more than they hate our liberalism now, and even though Republican elites were more unmistakably ashamed of the GOP "brand" than DLCers are of the Democratic one now). The technical lesson in this story is that longitudinal polls like Pew's are inherently incomplete. They derive their value from asking exactly the same questions over time, even though the banquet of issues people care about always changes. A politician who goes into battle believing polls can teach him "the issues" is fighting in a static world, which is not the world we live in.

But the more profound lesson is that the greatest politicians create their own issues, ones that no one knew existed. Was the mood in California favorable for Reagan's conservative message in 1966? Obviously, or else Reagan wouldn't have won; he wasn't a magician. But he was--yes--a great communicator, confident of his gifts. By listening and interacting with ordinary people, and sniffing out where his own sense of right and wrong dovetailed with what he heard, he divined a certain inchoate mood. It had to do both with a fear of breakdown of the social order and resentment of liberal elites. Finding those frequencies sounding via the trope of "Berkeley," he was able to turn that mood into a political appeal. In that regard, his pollsters could only hurt him. All they knew was that Berkeley wasn't an "issue."

That's the danger of even the best polling: its power to smother intuitive leaders in the cradle. The Pew poll and all the others can only point to the modern electorate's anxieties--anxieties that have something to do with a sense of breakdown in the economic order, and with resentment of conservative elites. But what story can Democratic politicians weave to repair them? None that they are telling yet. All I know is that to sound the right frequencies, we need candidates who know when to tell their pollsters to stuff it.

Superpower Corrupts

This should've gotten a star, but didn't...

Superpower corrupts absolutely

Great stuff, Mr. Greenwald; I heartily agree with everything you wrote, except for this key point...

A superpower -- especially the world's only superpower -- can be either respected and admired or despised and feared....America's strength has been grounded in the legitimacy and moral credibility of its power.

That's the trap that even liberals run into, with regard to American superpower.

I think a superpower can only truly be feared; only Americans have a vested interest in wanting to be respected and admired; the rest of the world finds the shadow of the colossus intimidating. Whether America is smiling or frowning diplomatically, it carries a civilization-busting nuclear arsenal, a monstrously large military, globally deployed, and a network of autocratic countries dependent on our aid. So long as we vastly outspend the world in such things, we'll always be feared and despised.

The way of earning respect and admiration as a society can't come through exporting our values, funding pro-US regimes, being the world's arms dealer, throwing foreign aid around to foster dependency on American hegemony and beneficence.

No, the strongest way of earning respect and admiration we want from the world is in the conduct of our domestic affairs as a country, how we treat our weak, our sick, our poor, our old, our young -- to build a just and generous society that inspires people in other countries to build just and generous societies of their own, to look at how we do things as a country and say "We want that in our country, too." That is the best demonstration of our values in practice.

From the late 20th century onward, the US has become increasingly mesmerized by the staggering growth of the wealth of the top 1%, and of the ever-advancing militarization of our society: the trappings of empire, while, at home, our society becomes ever less just, ever less generous, ever less worthy of respect and admiration, which erodes whatever legitimacy and moral credibility there is to our power.
-- Slackie Onassis

Holy Hitchens!

From SLATE; I usually don't like Hitchens' work, but I agree with his essay, here...

God Is Not Great
Was Muhammad epileptic?
By Christopher Hitchens
Updated Thursday, April 26, 2007, at 10:28 AM ET

---

From: Christopher Hitchens
Subject: Religion Poisons Everything
Posted Wednesday, April 25, 2007, at 1:31 PM ET
There are four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.

I do not think it is arrogant of me to claim that I had already discovered these four objections (as well as noticed the more vulgar and obvious fact that religion is used by those in temporal charge to invest themselves with authority) before my boyish voice had broken. I am morally certain that millions of other people came to very similar conclusions in very much the same way, and I have since met such people in hundreds of places, and in dozens of different countries. Many of them never believed, and many of them abandoned faith after a difficult struggle. Some of them had blinding moments of un-conviction that were every bit as instantaneous, though perhaps less epileptic and apocalyptic (and later more rationally and more morally justified) than Saul of Tarsus on the Damascene road. And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning "punctuated evolution" and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication. (My own annoyance at Professor Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, for their cringe-making proposal that atheists should conceitedly nominate themselves to be called "brights," is a part of a continuous argument.) We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—since there is no other metaphor—also the soul. We do not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that without these blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way.) We are reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and room. We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any machinery of reinforcement. We are those who Blaise Pascal took into account when he wrote to the one who says, "I am so made that I cannot believe."

There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be "holier" than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty. Some of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief and believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman. These mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them. We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.

While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way—one might cite Pascal—and some of it is dreary and absurd—here one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis—both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear. How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be concealed—not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one's own sin? How many needless assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to "fit" with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities? How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to be able to establish a dogma and then—after infinite pain and loss and absurdity and cruelty—to be forced to rescind one of those dogmas? God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.

The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the "meaning" of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them. And yet—the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what "he" demands of us—from our diet to our observances to our sexual morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction—itself composed of mutually warring factions—has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need. Such stupidity, combined with such pride, should be enough on its own to exclude "belief" from the debate. The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted.

The argument with faith is the foundation and origin of all arguments, because it is the beginning—but not the end—of all arguments about philosophy, science, history, and human nature. It is also the beginning—but by no means the end—of all disputes about the good life and the just city. Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other. For this reason, I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could. Very generous of me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference between me and my religious friends, and the real and serious friends are sufficiently honest to admit it. I would be quite content to go to their children's bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to "respect" their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations. And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition—which is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.

Neo-Fascist CNP Can't Find a Candidate for '08

Haha! The evil Council for National Policy can't find anybody to support! Bahahaahahahah! May the marginalization of the bogus "Christian Right" movement continue. Good riddance. Another 25 years and they'll be like the John Birch Society, a place for dead-end wannabe fascists to nurse their grievances over steaks and cigars. Once they're not able to deliver elections to the GOP, they're going to be ever more marginalized! Of course, they're well-heeled, so they'll be around for longer, still -- rich Christians? Yeah, they're for real. Hah. They're theocratic fascists.

NYT
February 25, 2007
Christian Right Labors to Find ’08 Candidate
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

WASHINGTON, Feb. 24 — A group of influential Christian conservatives and their allies emerged from a private meeting at a Florida resort this month dissatisfied with the Republican presidential field and uncertain where to turn.

The event was a meeting of the Council for National Policy, a secretive club whose few hundred members include Dr. James C. Dobson of Focus on the Family, the Rev. Jerry Falwell of Liberty University and Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. Although little known outside the conservative movement, the council has become a pivotal stop for Republican presidential primary hopefuls, including George W. Bush on the eve of his 1999 primary campaign.

But in a stark shift from the group’s influence under President Bush, the group risks relegation to the margins. Many of the conservatives who attended the event, held at the beginning of the month at the Ritz-Carlton on Amelia Island, Fla., said they were dismayed at the absence of a champion to carry their banner in the next election.

Many conservatives have already declared their hostility to Senator John McCain of Arizona, who once denounced Christian conservative leaders as “agents of intolerance,” and former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, a liberal on abortion and gay rights issues who has been married three times.

But many were also deeply suspicious of former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts; the council has been distributing to its members a dossier prepared by a Massachusetts conservative group about liberal elements of his record on abortion, stem cell research, gay rights and gun control. Mr. Romney says he has become more conservative.

And some members of the council have raised doubts about lesser known candidates — Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and Representative Duncan Hunter of California, who were invited to Amelia Island to address an elite audience of about 60 of its members, and Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, who spoke to the full council at its previous meeting, in October in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Although each of the three had supporters, many conservatives expressed concerns about whether any of the candidates could unify their movement or raise enough money to overtake the front-runners, several participants in the meetings said.

Finally, in a measure of their dissatisfaction, a delegation of prominent conservatives at Amelia Island attempted to enlist as a candidate Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, a guest speaker at the event. A charismatic politician with a clear conservative record, Mr. Sanford is almost unknown outside his home state and has done nothing to prepare for a presidential run. He firmly declined the group’s entreaties, people involved in the recruiting effort said. A spokesman for Mr. Sanford said he would not comment.

“There is great anxiety,” said Paul Weyrich, chairman of the Free Congress Foundation and an elder statesman of the conservative movement. “There is no outstanding conservative, and they are all looking for that.”

Mr. Weyrich, a longtime member of the council, declined to discuss the group or its meetings. The council’s bylaws forbid members from publicly disclosing its membership or activities, and participants agreed to discuss the Amelia Island meeting only on the condition of anonymity.

For eight years and four elections, President Bush forged a singular alliance with Christian conservatives — including dispatching administration officials and even cabinet members to address council meetings — that put them at the center of the Republican Party.

But in the aftermath of the stinging defeats in the 2006 midterm elections, and with discontent over the Iraq war weighing heavily on the public, some Christian conservatives worry that they may find themselves on the sidelines of the presidential race.

Both Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney have worked hard to pitch themselves to Christians conservatives — Mr. McCain by delivering a speeches at venues like Mr. Falwell’s Liberty University or a recent abstinence-promotion event, Mr. Romney by leading the charge for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. But neither has won over many of the movement’s leaders.

The conservative concern may also be an ominous sign for the Republican Party about the morale of a core element of its political base. Conservatives warn that the 2008 election could shape up like 1996, when conservatives faced a lesser-of-two evils choice between a Republican they distrusted, former Senator Bob Dole, and a Democrat they disdained, President Bill Clinton. Dr. Dobson of Focus on the Family later said in a speech to the council that he voted for a conservative third-party candidate that year rather than pull a lever for Mr. Dole.

The Council for National Policy was founded 25 years ago by the Rev. Tim LaHaye as a forum for conservative Christians to strategize about turning the country to the right. Its secrecy was intended to insulate the group from what its members considered the liberal bias of the news media. In recent years the group has brought together a cross-section of the right from Edwin J. Feulner to Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association.

In addition to doubts about their ability to generate enough money and momentum, each candidate who addressed the group also faces initial skepticism from one faction or another on issues like immigration, trade, taxes and foreign affairs.

“Right now there is still a vacuum among conservative Republicans,” said Gary Bauer, a Christian conservative who was a Republican primary candidate in 2000. Conservatives, he said, “want a more provable conservative who also is demonstrating that they can put together the resources necessary to prevail.” He declined to comment on the Amelia Island meeting.

A spokesman for Mr. Brownback said he would not comment on the senator’s presentation to the council, citing its rules about strict confidentiality. Several others who attended his speech said he received heavy applause for his emphasis on restricting abortion and amending the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. But foes of illegal immigration objected to his support for a temporary guest worker program, and some faulted him for touching only briefly on the threat of Islamic terrorists, an increasingly central focus of the council and many social conservative groups since the Sept. 11 attacks.

(People who attended the Amelia Island event said Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania, delivered a well-received address to the council about what he called the gathering threat of radical Islam.)

In an interview, Mr. Hunter, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee and a supporter of Mr. Bush’s plan to send more troops to Iraq, said the need for a strong national defense was the centerpiece of his speech. That defense, he argued, should include cracking down on illegal immigration, building a wall along the Mexican border and renegotiating foreign trade deals to protect American manufacturing. “We are losing the arsenal of the democracy,” he said.

But several people at the council meeting said his stance on trade alienated the business wing of the Republican Party, compounding his substantial fund-raising challenges.

Mr. Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister who was the head of the Arkansas Baptist convention before becoming governor, has the advantage of strong personal ties to many council members. Many prominent evangelical Christians consider him a friend, and he has appeared several times as a guest on Dr. Dobson’s popular Christian radio program.

In an interview, Mr. Huckabee said he believed his roots in the evangelical world helped set him apart from his rivals. “I am not going to them,” he said. “I am coming from them.” He said he did not remember speaking about his opposition to abortion or same-sex marriage, “although I am sure that I must have.” He said he emphasized education, among other issues, and talked about a continuing war “with a radical form of Islamic fascism,” which he called “a bastardization of religion.”

But many conservatives, including several participants in the Amelia Island meeting, said Mr. Huckabee faced resistance from the limited-government, antitax wing of their movement. Some antitax activists fault Mr. Huckabee for presiding over tax and spending increases. (He says the only tax increase resulted from a public referendum.)

In the interview, though, Mr. Huckabee said he was now leaning toward signing a pledge not to raise income taxes that is presented to all the candidates by Mr. Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform.

Mr. Norquist said he remained open to any of the three candidates who spoke to the council or to Mr. Romney. He argued that with the right promises, any of the four could redeem themselves in the eyes of the conservative movement despite their past records, just as some high school students take abstinence pledges even after having had sex.

“It’s called secondary virginity,” he said. “It is a big movement in high school and also available for politicians.”

Biden his time?

Joe Biden is out of his mind. There's no way he'll ever be nominated for President, let alone elected. He reminds me of a blowhard coach from high school, always with a handy football metaphor to throw out in the middle of a serious policy discussion. He should just understand that sometimes people just stay Senators. For that matter, Senators rarely get a chance to become President.

Say it ain't so, Joe.

Case in point

This is from the Washingpost. See what I mean? One greasy hand washing the other. Nixon really felt sorry for himself...

Ford, Nixon Sustained Friendship for Decades
By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 29, 2006; A01

Months before Richard M. Nixon set a relatively unknown Michigan congressman named Gerald R. Ford on the path to the White House, Nixon turned to Ford, who called himself the embattled president's "only real friend," to get him out of trouble.

During one of the darkest days of the Watergate scandal, Nixon secretly confided in Ford, at the time the House minority leader. He begged for help. He complained about fair-weather friends and swore at perceived rivals in his own party. "Tell the guys, goddamn it, to get off their ass and start fighting back," Nixon pleaded with Ford in one call recorded by the president's secret taping system.

And Ford did. "Anytime you want me to do anything, under any circumstances, you give me a call, Mr. President," he told Nixon during that May 1, 1973, conversation. "We'll stand by you morning, noon and night."

This and other previously unpublished transcripts of their calls, documents and personal letters provide a portrait of an intensely personal friendship dating to the late 1940s but so hidden that few others were even aware of it. Until now, the relationship between the two presidents has been portrayed largely as a matter of political necessity, with Nixon tapping Ford for the vice presidency in late 1973 because he was a confirmable choice on Capitol Hill.

But the tapes, documents and two lengthy recent interviews with Ford before his death this week, conducted for a future book and embargoed until after his death, show that the close political alliance between the two men seriously influenced Ford's eventual decision to pardon Nixon, the most momentous decision of his short presidency and almost certainly the one that cost him any chance of winning the White House in his own right two years later. Ford became president on Aug. 9, 1974; he pardoned Nixon just a month later. "I think that Nixon felt I was about the only person he could really trust on the Hill," Ford said during the 2005 interview.

Ford returned the feeling.

"I looked upon him as my personal friend. And I always treasured our relationship. And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon, because I felt that we had this relationship and that I didn't want to see my real friend have the stigma," Ford said in the interview.

That acknowledgment represents a significant shift from Ford's previous portrayals of the pardon that absolved Nixon of any Watergate-related crimes. In earlier statements, Ford had emphasized the decision as an effort to move the country beyond the partisan divisions of the Watergate era, playing down the personal dimension.

[Yeah. "A government of laws, and not men." J'accuse!!]

A key window into their close friendship and political alliance was that May 1973 call. It was the day after Nixon had gone on national television to announce the resignations of his two top aides, H.R. "Bob" Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, and the Watergate coverup was unraveling. The president knew it and was eager for Ford's reassurance that his political situation on Capitol Hill was not as grave as it seemed.

"You've got a hell of a lot of friends up here," Ford told him, "both Republican and Democrat, and don't worry about anybody being sunshine soldiers or summer patriots."

"Well, never Jerry Ford," Nixon replied. "But if you could get a few congressmen and senators to speak up and say a word, for Christ's sakes."

Ford was played a copy of that tape in 2005. Although the existence of Nixon's secret taping system had been publicly disclosed in 1973, no such tapes of Ford had come to public attention, and the former president seemed stunned. "I remember vividly that," he said, recalling how Nixon often turned to him to get things done on the Hill. He added that he considered himself to be Nixon's "only real friend."

At times, their friendship was the gossipy sort, as two longtime politicians sorted through the Washington rumor mill. They were so comfortable with each other that they openly traded nasty personal assessments of others.

On April 6, 1971, for example, Nixon called Ford to find out what was going on with House Majority Leader Hale Boggs (D-La.). Boggs had just taken to the House floor alleging that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was regularly wiretapping members of Congress, and Nixon wanted to know why Boggs was going public.

"He's nuts," Ford told Nixon in the call picked up by Nixon's secret taping.

"He's on the sauce," Nixon said, suggesting the majority leader was drinking. "Isn't that it?"

"Well, I'm afraid that's right, Mr. President."

"Or is he crazy?" Nixon asked.

"Well, he's either drinking too much or he's taking some pills that are upsetting him mentally," Ford replied.

In their personal correspondence, extending over decades, the two men conveyed a sense of personal bond that went beyond public niceties, demonstrated in dozens of letters in Ford's confidential files that he allowed a reporter to review and copy.

Two months before Nixon resigned, he sent Ford, by then his vice president, a personal thank-you. "Dear Jerry," he wrote on June 8, 1974, "this is just a note to tell you how much I appreciated your superb and courageous support over the past difficult months. How much easier it would be for you to pander to the press and others who desperately are trying to drive a wedge between the president and vice president. It's tough going now, but history will I am sure record you as one of the most capable, courageous and honorable vice presidents we have had."

[Nixon was right about that, judging from the media gushfest.]

Their friendly notes to each other continued until not long before Nixon's death in 1994. In 1978, for example, Nixon wrote to buck up Ford after Ford's former press secretary wrote a tell-all memoir, "It Sure Looks Different From the Inside," in which he gave details of Betty Ford's addiction to alcohol and various medications. "Dear Jerry, I thought Ron Nessen's comments on Betty were contemptible. Tell Betty her many friends won't believe him and for her few enemies -- The hell with them. Sincerely, Dick."

And in a handwritten letter on his personal stationery on June 1, 1990, Nixon wrote Ford urging him to attend the dedication of the Nixon library along with then-President George H.W. Bush and former president Ronald Reagan. Once Ford came, Nixon followed up with another note: "Our friendship goes back further than all the others and the event would not have been complete without you."

On June 28, 1993, Nixon wrote Ford again, this time thanking him for attending the funeral of Nixon's wife, Pat.

"As you undoubtedly noted, the emotion had caught up with me by the time we met after the services, and I did not adequately express my thanks to you then," Nixon wrote.

Then he turned back decades, to their own long friendship and a small gesture by Ford he had carried with him, not as momentous as the pardon that would come later but still vivid 31 years after it happened.

"One action of yours for which I will always be grateful was your going on a TV program when ABC had the bad manners to put Alger Hiss on to nail my coffin shut after my defeat for governor of California," Nixon wrote, remembering the sting of his 1962 loss.

"I have often said that when you win, you hear from everyone -- when you lose, you hear from your friends," he wrote. "You have always measured up in that respect, and I shall always be grateful."

There's more to a Ford

The media is making me want to puke with their elevating Gerald Ford to Master Statesman status -- not as bad as the big circle jerk they did with Reagan, but close. Ford did a terrible thing to the country when he pardoned Nixon. That pardon set the precedent for the President to, effectively, be above and beyond the law. That pardon made George II possible, pure and simple. And it pisses me off.

He may have been a nice guy, but the media is manufacturing this narrative about how he saved the country by pardoning Nixon. Bullshit. He saved the government -- the corrupt bunch of assholes in power. He didn't save the country.

Pisses. Me. Off.