When Republicans play the race card, they lose

Steve Benen, writing at Political Animal, discusses how in 2006 "the National Black Republican Association ran radio spots in Baltimore insisting that African-American voters should back the GOP, because Democrats were responsible for Jim Crow laws, the KKK, and releasing vicious dogs and fire hoses on civil-rights activists."

GOP pundit Bruce Bartlett joined in the ridiculous argument to remind us of the way-back history of racist Democrats. Is his offense a sin of omission in failing to address how the Democratic Party paid for its stand on civil rights as bigoted defectors stampeded toward the Republican Party, which welcomed the racists into its ranks? Are Bartlett's efforts a propaganda extension of the rightwing Project 21 initiative to bamboozle the public with the dubious slogan, a new leadership for Black America?

Following up, Steve wrote:

Bartlett insists that the Democratic Party's history must not be "swept under the rug as old news," adding that if Dems believe Reagan's racist appeals in 1980 still matter today, Democrats' history has to matter, too.

Matt Yglesias nailed Bartlett's argument to the wall with a single stroke and Steve Benen concluded, "I'm far more concerned with the Republicans' transparent present that the Dems' not-so-buried past." To which I commented:

Yeah, me, too.

I met Harold at the Playboy party....

...

The Republican National Committee is responsible for the content of this advertising.

Harold, call me!

E.J. Dionne wrote at the time of the ad runnning, "And there is what will, sadly, become the most famous advertisement of this [2006] election cycle, the "Harold, call me'' ad run by the Republican National Committee against Rep. Harold Ford Jr., the Democratic candidate for the Senate from Tennessee. To claim that an ad depicting a pretty blonde woman coming on to an African-American politician does not play on the fears of miscegenation on the part of some whites is to ignore history."

How convenient for Bartlett to ignore this recent GOP history.

If Bruce Bartlett, who's hawking his attack on Democrats through his new book release, "Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past," I wonder how much he writes about Democratic presidents Harry S. Truman and LBJ? I haven't read his book so I don't know. So let's examine the racist past of Democrats during the Truman era and what thereafter happened.

[Keep reading... more history after the jump.]

Almost sixty years ago on July 26, 1948, a Democratic president defied his own party's extremists to end discrimination in the military by issuing Executive Order 9981. With a stroke of his pen, President Truman signed the document that declared racial equality for soldiers of color:

WHEREAS it is essential that there be maintained in the armed services of the United States the highest standards of democracy, with equality of treatment and opportunity for all those who serve in our country's defense.

[...]

1. It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale.

Note these words: the highest standards of democracy, with equality of treatment and opportunity for all those who serve in our country's defense. Funny how today, those same words should apply to gays in the military, but in opposition to their Democratic rivals, the 2008 GOP presidential candidates support the ban on equality. Truman's bold leadership lifted the segregation of soldiers of color in the military and helped precipitate the burgeoning issue of desegregation throughout the land.

Fast forward to today and examine two Democratic WH contenders: Obama is African-American and Big Bill Richardson is Hispanic. Where's the diversity in today's GOP compared to today's Democrats? According to the Catholic News Service:

In its analysis of the ethnic makeup of the 109th Congress, Congressional Quarterly said the number of African-Americans in Congress had increased by four with one in the Senate and 42 in the House. All are Democrats.

The number of Hispanics in Congress was up two in the Senate -- one Democrat and one Republican -- and increased by one in the House to 24 -- 19 Democrats and five Republicans.

I haven't had time to research the ethnicity of the current 110th Congress but I daresay you will find more diversity among Democrats than Republicans. Who's walking the talk?

Are we also to ignore former GOP senator George Allen's macaca moment during 2006? Or the racial overtones of the 2006 ad aimed at Democrat Harold Ford in Tennessee? Which matters? History today or the distant past that no longer affects Democratic politics but still impacts the GOP?

Back in 1948 when Truman issued his executive order to denounce racism in the military, a New York Times article, "Presses For Rights: President Acts Despite Split in His Party Over the Chief Issue," reminded me that history repeats itself. See if you can grasp the twirling boomerang and the parallels to the politics du jour within the GOP and its media surrogates. If not, I'll help you out in a minute:

On the eve of his appearance before Congress, the President issued two executive orders to carry out his sweeping aims. He said that men in uniform should have "equality of treatment and opportunity" without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.

Similarly, he decreed that "merit and fitness" should be the only application for a Government job, and that the head of each department "shall be personally responsible for an effective program to insure that fair employment policies are fully observed in all personnel actions within his department."

The two orders were expected to have a thunderbolt effect on the already highly charged political situation in the Deep South, a situation which is expected to be aggravated further tomorrow when Mr. Truman makes his omnibus call on Congress for action. The message, in one of its eleven major elements, is expected to go down the line for his ten-point civil rights program, which last February started the deep fissures in the Democratic party.

[...]

In recent months, Mr. Truman has been caught between two fires on the civil rights issue. The more extreme Southern Democrats, arguing that the program infringed on states rights, have named their own Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates. Their feelings, it was predicted, would become even more exacerbated by the executive orders.

[...]

A federal official interested in promoting the rights of Negroes said tonight that while the orders were a step in the right direction, they called for the end of "discrimination," but made no mention of ending "segregation." Proponents of the Negro cause declare that segregation is prima facie evidence of discrimination.

This official recalled that integration of Negroes in the Army went down to companies who served alongside of companies of white troops. He believed that the President's order on the armed forces, which was not specific on the degree of integration or mixing to be attained, might push the line down to platoon.

He did not believe that it would go down to the squad, the smallest unit, or twelve men, as that would involve white men and Negroes eating and sleeping in the same quarters.
[Italics added. The PDF file of the article appears to have moved, so I've used the text from my archive of the 1948 article.]

Truman's presidency coincided during the days of the Dixiecrats, Southern Democrats who opposed civil rights and desegregation under the banner of states rights. Disgruntled Dixiecrats -- Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott types -- would later join the Republican Party to faithfully turn the racially-divided South into its current red-state haven in defiance of the Democratic Party that had the audacity of justice, the integrity and grit, to push civil rights. Forget about doing the right thing: The Right wants the might of its own prejudice.

As the illustrious Digby recently wrote at FDL, "Notice how polite the racism has become? No 'nigger, nigger, nigger' anywhere." Yet we all know the heart of racism still beats, just covertly in the Republican pesharim of "Afro-American" and "states rights." Sadly, rightwing racsim doesn't end with one ethnic minority.

Remember the hissy fit over the first Muslim elected to Congress, Keith Ellison (D-MN), his use of the Quran instead of the Bible during his swearing-in ceremony? The Right questioned his loyalties and values:

Does he believe in Sharia law or freedom? Does he respect the authority of nation states or only that of the Nation of Islam? Does he believe in tolerance and equality between Muslims and non-Muslims? Does he believe in freedom of speech even when it slanders Islam? Can he, in good conscience, uphold our man-made constitution even when it conflicts with the Koran?

The following smear really drives the GOP prejudice home: "...it is alarming that citizens of the U.S. have elected someone who appears to be in bed with our enemy." Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) called Ellison's decision a threat to American values. I wonder what The Greatest, Mohammad Ali, thinks of such slanderous rhetoric and the GOP's assault on religious freedom? Good job, Rethugs!

Turning to immigration, Hispanics have left the GOP for the friendlier big tent in the Democratic Party:

It also would imperil Republican prospects for years with Hispanics, the fastest-growing slice of the American electorate. In 2006, surveys suggest Republicans got less than 30 percent of the Hispanic vote, a drop of about 10 points that cost them a half-dozen House seats and several in the Senate.

This reflects disillusionment with the anti-immigrant posture of prominent Republicans. The party chairman, Mel Martinez, a Florida senator and an immigrant from Cuba, warns it could be ominous for next year: "If we get the same type of Hispanic support in the next election cycle that we did in the last, there is no way we can elect a Republican president."

Ask Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) what reward he received in backing immigration reform that eventually stalled in the Senate. As with the civil rights movement, the stumbling block for Graham emanated from his southern constituency in addition to like-minded wingnuts in the "bigotsphere." Oh, the pain of reaching for a just solution in a party filled with racists.

The dog won't hunt Bruce Bartlett's latest contention that somehow the racist past of Democrats matters today when in truth, the party made a U-turn post-Truman, through the civil rights movement under LBJ, and up until today. What matters, what Bartlett hasn't honestly confronted, is how prejudiced the current GOP and its mouthpieces in Big Media remain 27 years after Reagan's Philadelphia, Mississippi speech in 1980.

I'm still waiting for GOP candidate Ron Paul to publicly denounce his white supremacist friends.

Crickets chirp.

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Our rotting press corpse stinks again

They just can't help themselves (with emphasis):

On the December 6 edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe, during a discussion of former Arkansas Gov. and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's role in the 1999 release of convicted rapist Wayne DuMond, who was convicted of raping and murdering another woman after being released and was suspected in another rape and murder, host Joe Scarborough asked MSNBC correspondent David Shuster, "Do you think this is going to be a big issue?" Shuster responded: "No, I don't, because the reason -- the reason I think it was a big issue for [1988 Democratic presidential candidate] Mike Dukakis was because it played into the idea of a Massachusetts liberal soft on crime. Mike Huckabee has sentenced more people to death and carried out the death penalty more than anybody else, so it doesn't really fit that narrative."

Oh, I get it. We've come to expect a conservative to exemplify little compassion, to contradict a pro-life position by executing the death penalty more than anybody else, to accept that Republicans are a hard-hearted, blood-thirsty clan. And fallacious, too.

Later in the discussion, Shuster stated, "[T]here are a lot of ways that I think that Mike Huckabee can get out of this, and again, because he's a conservative guy from a conservative state, I just don't think it carries the same weight as Mike Dukakis in '88."

Follow Shuster's reasoning with me. Maybe I'm missing somethin' redemptive. Maybe not.

[Keep reading...]

A liberal pegged as soft on crime in liberal Massachusetts, who supported a weekend furlough system in which a felon raped, committed physical violence and armed robbery was a big story.

But, a conservative who went soft on crime in a conservative state, who -- against the objections of sexual assault victims -- made a bad and politically questionable decision that led to rape and murder is no big deal. Uh huh. IOKIYARIARS? The families of murder victims Sara Andrasek and Carol Shields probably wouldn't agree.

Reading my friend Blue Girl added a different and relevant perspective to Shuster's specious gaffe. Read her whole post. For now, a few snips:

If not for the family connection between the victim and Bill Clinton, Dumond would have rotted in an Arkansas prison and died, unknown and unmourned. That would have been justice.

Instead, the Arkansas GOP went into full-froth mode...Dumond was innocent! He was railroaded by that bastard Clinton! He must be freed!

Bullshit. He was a predator and a rapist and a murderer. That mattered not a whit...

...The Huckster pressured the parole board behind closed doors, and they granted the murdering monster parole - without Huck having to affix his signature to the release. When the victim pleaded with Huckabee to keep the man in prison, he dismissed her, telling her that he believed that the man was reformed and repentant, and would pose no future threat. (Haven't we heard that "looked into his soul" line of crap before?)

I do not believe for one second that anyone in Arkansas thought the bastard was reformed.

If they truly believed he was reformed, why was one of the conditions of his parole that he had to leave Arkansas???

Steve Benen also provided an excellent overview on Huckabee's involvement in the DuMond parole.

And what's this in today's Sunday NYTimes? Sho 'nuff, they finally caught up to the liberal bloggers.

Despite the Huckster's denials, "Two former parole board members in Arkansas said yesterday that as governor, Mr. Huckabee met with the board in 1996 to lobby them to release the convicted rapist, Wayne DuMond, whose case was championed by evangelical Christians." And... "The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that three of the seven members of the parole board said Mr. Huckabee had pressured them, echoing earlier reporting by The Arkansas Times and other local news media."

Yet, according to MSNBC's David Shuster, the DuMond case ain't nuthin' for Huck to sweat. If a complicit media covers Huckabee's behind, maybe he's got a point.

When Shuster defended his argument with the excuse that Huckabee is a conservative guy from a conservative state, I thought that dog won't hunt, bubba. That's plain conservatard punditry. Without thinking (our mainstream press unwittingly and sometimes willfully sneaks in rightwing talking points, they're so insidiously ingrained like shoe polish on their wingtips), Shuster revisited the myth, a Serious Idea, that liberals are soft on crime and conservatives aren't -- a favorite narrative of the GOP. Bless his pea-picking heart, his mouth ran away from his brain.

So few Molly Ivins and Lars Erik Nelsons remain alive to demonstrate to the pups how to think independent of an approved script. Tragic but true especially on tee-vee.

The next day on the Dec. 7 Morning Joe, Shuster almost -- almost! -- acted like a journalist asking pertinent questions before fumbling as he pressed the waterboarding debate with Joe Scarborough. (Crooks and Liars). When he suggested that the CIA torture tapes may have been disposed to "cover up war crimes, and that torture doesn’t work and is barbaric and wrong," Joe launched his best "Sean Hannity impersonation" and issued a forceful "torture apologia" that vented his wingnut spleen.

"Because...we live in a dangerous world!" Joe vehemently defended, all bowed up and thunderin' like Moses in a Cecil B. DeMille production.

Now if Shuster -- "naive" is what Joe called him -- could realize how a "conservative guy in a conservative state" contributed to a dangerous world, maybe he'd understand why northwest Missouri thinks Huck's "guilty of felony murder."

But, for the life of me, I can't figure out how soy lattés on the upper West Side of New York City factor in a clash over the depravity of torture.

Oh, the mysteries of our rotting press corpse.

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Pushback against the NIE on Iran

UPDATED AFTER THE BREAK

Over the past five days, the pushback against the NIE findings would amuse of it weren't such an indictment of our rotting press corpse compounded by the tragic consequences of a rogue presidency, Bushie's neocon sweeties, and the Repub intel committees that let the preznut run amok.

The usual wingnuts -- certifiable Bushwackos who ultimately make million$ reaching millions with erroneous infotainment news and opinion -- have lined up to discredit the NIE, the most unpoliticized and authoritative intelligence assessment on Iran in years. The mission: Protect their precious ideology and the worst president in U.S. history who continues to hype the Iranian threat. Ergo, trash the NIE, Democrats, the IAEA, ElBaradei, Europeans, and Bill Clinton to persuade people their Dear Leader's foreign policy isn't a national security train wreck.

A sampling of this week's propaganda about the NIE:

[Keep reading...]

* Steve Benen's Fox News roundup, a thorough report on Tuesday's contentious talking points from the Bushwacko Right.

* Crooks and Liars alerts us to the alleged CIA plot to subvert the Bush Doctrine authored by the head psychotic of the neocon ward, Norman Podhoretz, also foreign policy advisor to Rudy Giuliani. More in-depth details here.

* ThinkProgess dares to go where I prefer not to tread without galoshes for my keyboard ...further deconstruction of Podhoretz' reaction to the NIE. "He insisted the Iranians were very close to developing a nuclear weapon" and likens negotiating with Iran to the same effect that "Munich had with Hitler." See the TP Update for a creative conspiracy theory: It's a plot to affect the elections! Ooga booga!

* Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson leads us through the twisted minds of neocons gone ballistic.

* Emptywheel reveals John Bolton's warped history, one caveat of which was featured in a Dec. 6 Washington Post editorial, The Flaws In the Iran Report. More pushback on the IC's new sourcing rules used for the NIE. Plus, a nifty NIE timeline so you can keep track of who boosted what and lied when.

* Katrina vanden Heuvel at The Nation takes The Post's Al Kamen to the woodshed for his "snarky" hit job on the IAEA's Director General Mohamed ElBaradei and his remarks about the NIE. The quote with ouch from Katrina: "Maybe Kamen and his paper should set aside some time to reflect on how dead wrong they were in blasting ElBaradei on his Iraq assessment." Self-awareness dips low at the WaPo's editorial page so mendacity abounds.

* Bolton on CNN without a disclaimer... shameless. How can CNN advertise itself as "the most trusted name in news" and grant air time to an untrustworthy neocon kook? Dec. 4:

BOLTON: Well, I think it's potentially wrong. But I would also say many of the people who wrote this are former State Department employees who, during their career at the State Department, never gave much attention to the threat of the Iranian program. Now they are writing as members of the intelligence community, the same opinions that they have had four and five years ago.

BLITZER: President Bush says he has confidence in this new NIE, and he says they revamped the intelligence community after the blunders involving weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He says there's a whole new community out there and he has total confidence in what the national intelligence director is doing.

BOLTON: Well, I have to say I don't. I think there's a very real risk here that the intelligence community is like generals fighting the last war. They got Iraq wrong and they're overcompensating by understating the potential threat from Iran.

* More Bolton lunacy on Iran. See and hear him live raving at YouTube -- Dec. 4 on O'Reilly's spinathon in defense of Bush's Iranian warmongering despite the NIE -- Dec. 4 on CNN when Bolton slammed the NIE (excerpts above) -- his desire in August to attack Iran within six months -- earlier in June more warmongering against Iran for arming the Taliban (whom Shiite Iran hates) in Afghanistan -- and earlier in May, Bolton "hoped" that Iran would withdraw from the NPT or to expel IAEA inspectors. Bolton either requires medication for his delusions or he's a stone-cold sociopath. Take your pick.

* Tom Friedman's brain gasping like a hooked brook trout flopped from its cranium to lunge at parody -- an Iranian NIE on America -- that implicitly trivialized the American NIE on Iran:

As you’ll recall, in the wake of 9/11, we were extremely concerned that the U.S. would develop a covert program to end its addiction to oil, which would be the greatest threat to Iranian national security. In fact, after Bush’s 2006 State of the Union, in which he decried America’s oil addiction, we had “high confidence” that a comprehensive U.S. clean energy policy would emerge. We were wrong.

Stephen Colbert has absolutely nothing to fear.

* Michael Ledeen of the spin tank, the American Enterprise Institute, christens the NIE, The Great Intelligence Scam, at Pajamas Media. I decline to link to his scurrilous dreck so click here for excerpt and the link.

* Where's the ooey-gooey fudge factor with a wingnut center? NRO always delivers the goodies:

[1] If Iran was working on a nuclear weapons program until 2003, what does this say about U.S. policy in the late Clinton period and European engagement?

[2] Are [Democrats] now to suggest that Republicans have been warmongering over a nonexistent threat for partisan purposes? But to advance that belief is also to concede that Iran, like Libya, likely came to a conjecture (around say early spring 2003?) that it was not wise for regimes to conceal WMD programs, given the unpredictable, but lethal American military reaction.

[3] Two years ago, the [Intelligence Community] — the same IC that claimed to have detailed information about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, that famously missed the boat on al-Qaeda, and that has had at least two spy networks inside Iran rolled up in the past couple of decades — told us it was all but certain that Iran was “determined to develop nuclear weapons.” [Ed. translation: They were wrong then so they're wrong now.]

[4] What the NIE does not explain — what no one has explained — is why the world’s third-largest exporter of oil and gas needs nuclear power.... ...It’s no secret that careerists at the CIA and State have been less interested in implementing the president’s policies on Iran, Iraq, and North Korea than in sabotaging them at every opportunity. Sources close to the intelligence community question the objectivity of the NIE’s Iran conclusions, and tell us that three principal authors of the report are longtime critics of the administration’s policy who have axes to grind.

[5] The attitude among many people — like say, John Edwards — is that we dodged a bullet with this NIE. But that's only true if this NIE is right. Indeed, as a matter of national security, it seems to me one could make the case that it would be better for the NIE to be wrong the other way. That is to say, if the NIE is wrong, better it be wrong on the side of caution. Which would you rather: An NIE that says Iran isn't pursuing nuclear weapons when it really is? Or, an NIE that says Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons when it really isn't? How you answer that question probably says a lot about how you view foreign policy generally.

The last chewy nugget from Jonah Goldberg seems to justify dishonesty, the kind that led to Operation FUBAR in Iraq. Yes, such distorted morality shrieks loudly about one's foreign policy view.

I'm certain plenty more pushback against the NIE on Iran skips merrily along to a polka beat but I've got to stop delving at this point. My head hurts from propaganda overload.

Can't wait for what Lil' Tim (who's hosting Rudy!) and the roundtables of the Sunday funnies have to say. Serious talk about the success of the Bush Doctrine could upstage the key findings in the NIE. Wanna bet?

Know of other NIE wingnuttery? Leave your picks in Comments. I'll post an update.

UPDATE: Digby (with a h/t to Josh Marshall) noted "the administration was changing its focus from WMD to Iranian influence in Iraq as a justification for the war they insisted must be waged." Summing up, Digby writes (with emphasis):

It seemed obvious to me that the Iran obsessives were working hard to build a case that even if Iran didn't have the bomb, it had declared war on the US by killing our soldiers in Iraq and we had to start bombing them post-haste anyway. Kyl-Lieberman was clearly designed to further that goal, no matter what Clinton and others say about it now.

Their problem seems to be that The Man Called Petraeus's surge has resulted in a decline in violence and urgency about Iraq --- and they couldn't hold back the NIE any longer. (It would have leaked before long with all this warmongering going on.) They finally had to admit that they couldn't get this defective casus bellis off the assembly line.

They knew. A whole bunch of them knew, even that nutcase Ledeen.

Which makes the pushback the empty rhetoric of gnashing teeth.

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Unity08: Your Grandmother's Manners and a Pony

I'm probably going to liberal hell for linking to The New Republic (motto: Finding New Ways Every Week to Betray Our Progessive Founders), but this inside look at Unity08 is too good to ignore.

As Steven Benen points out at Talking Points Memo, Unity08 is "a solution in search of a problem."

Third parties, if they hope to compete, have to offer voters some kind of policy positions. Unity08, on the other hand, is a policy-free gimmick. It's a "party" that will "nominate" a bipartisan ticket in '08, simply for the sake of bipartisanship. What does the party think about the war? It doesn't have a position. Culture war issues? Nada. Trade? Domestic security? The environment? Nothing but a blank page.

The party, apparently, believes that politicians should be more "civil." Leaders should be more open to "compromise." There should be less negative campaigning and more solution-oriented discussions.

It all sounds perfectly pleasant, just so long as you over look how vacuous and incoherent the whole undertaking is.
(SNIP)
But running a presidential campaign that intentionally prefers process and politeness over substance and policy isn't going to do anyone any favors.

I can't decide whether Unity08 is an amazingly naive fantasy or an incredibly cynical scam, but either way, it's got the situation completely backwards.

Far from wanting less partisanship, American politics is in dire need of more partisanship.

American Government isn't failing because politicians are putting party over principles; it's failing because politicians are putting blind loyalty to an individual, obligations to lobbyists and fear of what the cool kids at the media table will say about them above party principles.

If Congressional Republicans were truly partisan in the sense of upholding republican principles and protecting republican interests, they would have spent the last eight months demanding Cheney resign so Bush could appoint an heir apparent with a chance in hell of winning the '08 election.

If Congressional Democrats were truly partisan in the sense of upholding democratic principles and protecting Democratic interests, they would have spent the last eight months in the House bringing impeachment charges against Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Rove, Justice Roberts, Justice Alito and everyone else they can think of, and the last eight months in the Senate forcing the Republicans to actually filibuster - on their feet, non-stop, no food, no water, no toilet breaks, no passing - every single bill, until all 49 Republicans had to be hauled away in ambulances.

As they say, politics ain't beanbag. And Unity08 ain't even a bean.

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