On the Rachel Maddow Show this morning, Rachel highlighted a new Republican slogan that I’d missed…
Ken Mehlman, appearing on Meet the Press this Sunday, had this to say to David Gregory.
MR. MEHLMAN: Look, the fact is that our mission in the war in Iraq is critical. We agree on that; we agree it’s wrong to cut and run. But look, we’re not coming in and saying “Stay the course.” The choice in this election is not between “Stay the course” and “Cut and run,” it’s between “Win by adapting” and “Cut and run.”
Let me tell you what we’re doing. The fact is, before the successful Iraqi elections, the number of troops went up from 137,000 to 167,000. That’s adapting to win. Recently, the increased troops in Baghdad, adapting to win. We changed how the training of Iraqi forces occurred to involve more Iraqis.
That’s adapting to win.
Is it possible to be more of a Stepford Spokesman than Ken Mehlman? I sincerely doubt it.
But from the Google search I did this morning, it seems most everybody else has missed this choice bit of shell game theatrics, too.
As of the time of this writing, there are only 14 references to the phrase “win by adapting.” The Angry Bear gets top blog billing for mentioning it on Sunday.
But, the other few references to "win by adapting" were interesting, I thought…
And this reference from the U.S. Army War College’s journal, Parameters, from 2000, was revealing, too. Especially since the Bush administration doesn’t seem to listen to military leaders who’ve spent their whole lives studying these issues.
But, while wisely saying "The only thing the GOP adapts is their spin. Democrats you have been warned, " State of the Day was able to find a little bit more conversation that Google has yet to pick up…
I’m sure Mark Halperin and the noble gang at the Note would argue that they were just poking fun at themselves and the elite they hang out with…
Or, more likely, trying to bait people like me - which they seem to enjoy doing quite often - who detest the “you peasants don’t get it” tone that they project.
But could they possibly be more obnoxiously elitist than this from their list of things readers can do while the Note is on vacation?
6. Tell anyone at a Hampton’s cocktail party who wants you to speculate about what happens if Senator McCain or Senator Clinton doesn’t run for president, “Why don’t we just wait and see?”
I mean, do they realize how completely vomit-inducing that is?
And do they ever actually have conversations with normal Americans, who don’t go to the Hamptons, and probably have never even heard of the place?
At Editor & Publisher, I read tonight about a new Gallup poll concerning Americans’ attitudes toward their fellow Americans, who happen to be Muslim.
Here are the sad numbers…
22% say they would not like to have a Muslim as a neighbor. [Well, I guarantee I wouldn’t want to live next to youeither, Mr.& Mrs. 22%.]
34% believe that U.S. Muslims back al-Qaeda. [Isn’t it a bit scary to think that there may in fact be 12% of the population that wouldn’t have a problem chatting with their al-Qaeda supporter neighbors in their driveway while getting their morning paper?]
Only 49% believe U.S. Muslims are loyal to the United States. [Let’s hazard a guess at which political party most of these 49% feel a closer affinity with, shall we?]
39% admit that they hold some “prejudice” against Muslims. [Ya think? You mean being bombarded with right-wing talk radio hate-mongers and listening to Bush pledge to defeat those “muslim fascists” leads to a little homespun bigotry?]
44% percent say Muslim’s religious views are too “extreme.” [Why does it seem likely that a big chunk of this number might actually have fairly fundamentalist religious views that many U.S. Muslims would consider “extreme”?]
And now, perhaps the most disturbing…
39% believe that U.S. Muslims here should carry special I.D. [Holy Christ.]
But… Americans who actually know a Muslim person are more sympathetic. [Wow, you mean turning off Neal Boortz or Rush Limbaugh for once and actually living in the real world can make you a bit more reasonable and open-minded? Who knew?]
What with all the disgusting political machinations by the GOP, trying to subvert the Lamont victory by tying it to the absurd argument that “some” (read: a majority of Americans) don’t get that America is under threat of terrorism, while senior Bush administration officials were fully aware of the pending public disclosure of the British terror plot.
And the “kill them all” rhetoric is really getting to me, too.
I’ve been meaning to write about the neo-con “Clean Break” strategy, but hadn’t gotten riled up enough to do so. But, with all this shameless bluster, and Randi Rhodes pointing out yesterday that Sidney Blumenthal is making some noise about it now, I want to help in my small way to at least get the term “clean break” listed a bit more in the news aggregators.
Maybe many of you are already familiar with it, but if not, you should be…
Cuz, well, it’s essentially the official roadmap of the “kill them all” strategy…
In order to try to understand the neoconservative road map, senior national security professionals have begun circulating among themselves a 1996 neocon manifesto against the Middle East peace process. Titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” its half-dozen authors included neoconservatives highly influential with the Bush administration — Richard Perle, first-term chairman of the Defense Policy Board; Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of defense; and David Wurmser, Cheney’s chief Middle East aide.
“A Clean Break” was written at the request of incoming Likud Party Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and intended to provide “a new set of ideas” for jettisoning the policies of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Instead of trading “land for peace,” the neocons advocated tossing aside the Oslo agreements that established negotiations and demanding unconditional Palestinian acceptance of Likud’s terms, “peace for peace.” Rather than negotiations with Syria, they proposed “weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.” They also advanced a wild scenario to “redefine Iraq.” Then King Hussein of Jordan would somehow become its ruler; and somehow this Sunni monarch would gain “control” of the Iraqi Shiites, and through them “wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria.”
Netanyahu, at first, attempted to follow the “clean break” strategy, but under persistent pressure from the Clinton administration he felt compelled to enter into U.S.-led negotiations with the Palestinians. In the 1998 Wye River accords, concluded through the personal involvement of President Clinton and a dying King Hussein, the Palestinians agreed to acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel and Netanyahu agreed to withdraw from a portion of the occupied West Bank. Further negotiations, conducted by his successor Ehud Barak, that nearly settled the conflict ended in dramatic failure, but potentially set the stage for new ones.
At his first National Security Council meeting, President George W. Bush stunned his first secretary of state, Colin Powell, by rejecting any effort to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. When Powell warned that “the consequences of that could be dire, especially for the Palestinians,” Bush snapped, “Sometimes a show for force by one side can really clarify things.” He was making a “clean break” not only with his immediate predecessor but also with the policies of his father…
…Having failed in the Middle East, the administration is attempting to salvage its credibility by equating Israel’s predicament with the U.S. quagmire in Iraq. Neoconservatives, for their part, see the latest risk to Israel’s national security as a chance to scuttle U.S. negotiations with Iran, perhaps the last opportunity to realize the fantasies of “A Clean Break.”
By using NSA intelligence to set an invisible tripwire, the Bush administration is laying the condition for regional conflagration with untold consequences — from Pakistan to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Israel. Secretly devising a scheme that might thrust Israel into a ring of fire cannot be construed as a blunder. It is a deliberate, calculated and methodical plot.
Randi Rhodes has been great in the last hour, recounting her appearance opposite Neal Boortz on Larry King.
Apparently she sent the paleosphere into fits by stating simply that the best way to fight terrorism is to prevent it using law enforcement agencies.
You know, as opposed to the Rush Limbaugh/Boortz policy of “kill them all.”
Oh yes, Rush Limbaugh, echoing Osama bin Laden, said that the ~civilians in Lebanon must pay the price for supporting Hezzbolah~ and further suggested that pretty much all Arab men are terrorists.
But, Randi Rhodes certainly felt vindicated when today it was announced that (gasp!) it was British law enforcement who foiled the airline terrorist plot.
Um… Killing of civilians was not what worked here, folks.
Get it, you proud members of the American Taliban wing of the Republican Party?
The Lamont race has been a proxy war between both the old media and the new, and the old-school Democratic consultants and the net-roots theorists who are actively seeking to displace them.
Look at the election day coverage yesterday. It was dominated, during the fat part of the voting period, by wall-to-wall coverage of a very shaky claim by the Lieberman camp — that Lamont’s internet crazies had crashed his rather feeble web pages.
Clearly, that coverage had the capacity to sway last-minute voters. Yet almost all media outlets, but particularly those on the Right, worked it throughout the afternoon, not even publishing Lamont denials until evening.
Why? Because the netroots are an upsetting phenomenon. They effectively re-apportion power, bypassing a series of credentialing systems that have been in place since time out of mind.
The Traditional Media initially tried to pass off the Dean phenom as a fluke - a bunch of crazies temporarily riled up. A simple glitch in their collective narrative of American politics. After Dean did not bolt the Party as many predicted, and his supporters dutifully fell in line behind John Kerry’s miserable run, some pundits even started referring to the Dean movement in a positive light, given that it was now safely consigned (as they thought) into history and therefore rendered harmless and irrelevant to their own, beltway-tethered world.
But fast forward to 2006. Howard Dean is the DNC Chair and - to the chagrin of many - is pushing his 50-state strategy forward relentlessly. And it’s Joe Lieberman who has been rejected by a record turnout of his own state Party and is bolting from the Democratic Party altogether. The right-wing Talking Heads are apoplectic, and the centrist types who pass as the “liberal media” (such as Cokie Roberts) are in a complete tailspin, mired in predictions of Democratic apocalypse, all because their own party has rejected the notion that insiders like them have a special right to dictate to the rank-and-file how they should vote and what’s in their best interests.
At day’s end, the traditional Media’s attempts to marginalize the Lamont phenomenon worked decidedly against them. The relentless narrative was that the Lamont campaign was simply fueled by crazy bloggers - which was obviously untrue (try to imagine, for a moment, rank and file Dems sitting around a Connecticut bar talking about DailyKos). As others have observed, focusing on the blogosphere at all shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the new media. Sure, the lefty political blogs are abig part of it, but there is also Burlington’s Democracy for America and True Majority, the mighty MoveOn.org, the media watchdog groups such as Crooks and Liars and Media Matters, journalism sites such as Raw Story - all leaderless, decentralized, and finally, after a couple years - truly grassroots (and I do not use that term lightly).
In keeping with this idea of true people-powered politics and information - and the integration of both netroots and grassroots…
The idea is to foster increased involvement by regular citizens to encourage the kind of “leaderless, decentralized… truly grassroots” concept that Odum describes above.
Writing today on her blog on the Sunlight Foundation’s site, Ellen Miller discusses her conversation with Vermont’s own netroots guru, Zephyr Teachout (currently listed as the National Director of the Sunlight Foundation) about the meaning of the Lamont win yesterday and the Washington Post article today about the net/grass relationship…
We agree that the breakthrough for Lamont wasn’t necessarily the use of the Internet but how he used it. Since 2004 candidates have increasingly “used” the internet, but mostly used it as an alien force, not as an aspect of every part of the campaign itself. For a campaign not to use the Internet to amplify everything you do would be like not using the telephone.
The Lamont campaign had a different — and obviously much better — approach. It used the Internet to enable people’s creativity and passions, instead of simply to direct doorknockers and mobilize (though they did that too). They brought to the campaign people with enormous creativity and passion, rather than shunning them. They used techniques like video blogging with people who were really passionate about their candidate. They repeatedly proved that openness in the process of campaigning actually works. This kind of attitude and approach — serve the people who want to work with you, enable them, ala Craig Newmark – is essential for meaningful political participation. And it results in robust involvement of real people in the campaign.
We also can’t overlook the role that political bloggers played in this race, not directly in reaching voters (Zephyr’s hunch is that number of primary voters actually reading blogs would be less than 10 percent) but in how they shaped the race for the national press, which in turn affected local voters as they got a sense of its importance.
So, what do we learn from the experiment of allowing creative, passionate, dedicated people direct access to the many aspects of political activity - from the creation of branding, the dissemination of information, and the framing of the public conversation, all the way to creative, novel approaches for get out the vote efforts?
If you listen to the professional pundit/consulting class, it can only mean one thing…
The death of democracy.
But, to me, and to all of the millions of net and grassroots activists out there, inspired by Lamont’s win, it just might mean the very healthy rise of increased transparency, openness, and participation in the political process.
And perhaps maybe, just maybe, we crazy, unhinged lovers of true democracy, have begun to shape the public discourse a bit.
And maybe, just maybe, the wisdom of Justice Brandies’ famous aphorism (and the inspiration for the Sunlight Foundation name), “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” might have a chance of becoming conventional wisdom…
I’m pleased to report that, according to John Odum, it’s official…
On Monday, August 28th at 12:00 noon, Green Mountain Daily will host Vermont’s first online political candidate debate between the Democratic primary candidates for Lieutenant Governor, Representative John Patrick Tracy of Burlington and Senator Matt Dunne of Hartland. The debate will be held in a live chat room linked from the GMD front page, with comments from viewers in a parallel live-blogging thread.
Yours truly will be moderating, and GMD front pagers Jack McCullough and Vermonter will be on site with the candidates for the duration of the debate.
Details on the format and updates will be forthcoming between now and the 28th. As you can imagine, we’re pretty excited. Mark your calendars and bring a bag lunch to work!
The real question is whether I’ll be able to detect Dunne or Tracy secretly employing government technology in order to magically insert campaign-approved talking points into the open-source chat software.
