Crack Brain Zealot For Democracy

The Best Blogger On The InterTubes

Seriously, kids. No one - and I mean no one - can hold a candle to Ta-Nehisi Coats. Stop what you are doing are read this. I'm just... wow.

On The Ontology of Miranda Rights

Matt Yglesias on "The Ontology of Miranda Rights":

One tick I’ve noticed in conservative discourse on the Underpants Bomber case is the idea that Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and the FBI somehow decided to “give” the suspect his Miranda rights, as if they’d somehow created the right to remain silent out of whole cloth. The point of the standard lines about how “you have the right to remain silent, you have the right to an attorney, etc.” is that these are rights that criminal suspects inherently have in virtue of the American constitution. When a law enforcement officer tells someone he’s arresting that he has these rights, he’s not creating the rights, he’s informing the suspect what the situation is.

What’s more, it can’t be emphasized enough that government agencies need to follow some kind of rules or processes. The accused have rights for the sake of the integrity of the system as a whole—it’s not a courtesy we offer to criminals, it’s a procedure designed to produce reliable outcomes. It’s true that in the specific case of the Underpants Bomber the guy seems so obviously guilty that it’s not reasonable to worry about him being railroaded or framed-up. You really could just skip the whole trial part with no loss of reliability in this particular case. But, again, if you just let law enforcement unilaterally which suspects are “obviously” guilty that would cause all kinds of obvious problems. The United States is a big country with tons of different law enforcement agencies. They can’t run around making up the rules on a case-by-case basis. So you follow the rules in all cases, even when it really is obvious that your suspect is guilty.

The underlying issue here, as I’ve been saying, is that conservatives think that any constraint on the state security apparatus is too much. They believe, contrary to all of the evidence, that the rule-bound criminal justice system can’t or doesn’t function and that things would be better if we scrapped all the rules. And, indeed, in the civilian context they’ve worked steadily and systematically over a period of decades to weaken the constitutional protections as much as possible, and bring us as close as possible to their dream scenario of limitless state-sponsored violence. The desire to push certain categories of people (non-citizens) or certain categories of suspects (terrorists) out of the constitutionally protected realm is just part-and-parcel of that broad-based assault on the idea of a rule-bound justice system.

This is all good, but Matt doesn't go far enough here. What matters isn't just that the constitution guarantees these rights, but that it guarantees them precisely and only because they are necessary to protect "the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle" each of us as human beings.

Those natural rights Jefferson, Madison, and the rest wanted to protect? They belong to each and every human being on the planet. Even the ones you don't like. Even the ones trying to kill you. To suggest anything less is to suggest they are neither "natural" nor "God given." And that's not what conservatives mean to suggest, is it?

Stand Up!

Kottke provides the connect:

If you travelled back in time to 1963 and told everyone that in 2009 the President of the United States is a black man, perhaps only Martin Luther King Jr. would have believed you.

A Response To Beck and Palin

I've revised and updated my post from last night. Check it out.

All Of 'Em [Updated]

And while I'm on the topic of Sarah Palin, check this out:

Nice to see that she can repeat the whole "Washington didn't want to be king" myth. Even if it is a myth. Because the truth is there aren't many things he wanted more. He just didn't want to have to ask for it. Or fight for it. Or not get chosen by the people in an election for it. And if it meant he was going to be attacked every day by people like Thomas Jefferson, or worse, by some blockhead average citizen with a printing press, well... then his gentlemanly ass wanted none of it. And that, and not some noble desire to return power to the people, is why he retired to Mt. Vernon. The whole American Cincinnatus thing was just a story told by the Federalists after he retired to help their political cause. It was spin, nothing more, spun so well that its now believed as truth. Like that stupid cherry tree story.

But hey, I'll cut her some slack there, because my guess is that most of you have never heard the truth either. What I won't cut her slack on is the whole "they all came together in diversity to compromise" thing, because that's just nonsense.

The debate over the constitution? It was held in secret, because they knew that the people of the various states would freak out if they found what they were up to.

The debate over ratification that led Madison and Hamilton to publish the Federalist? That was necessary because many of the nation's Founders, as well as a sizable percentage of its citizens, had lined up on the anti-Federalist side of the aisle. Some wanted a stronger central government than the constitution provided for. Some wanted a weaker one. But whatever their motivation, they shared the belief that the proposed constitution would be a disaster.

And once the constitution had been ratified and Washington was elected our first President? His Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton and Secretary of State Jefferson hated each other's ideas so much that they started a newspaper war that, among other things, led Jefferson to resign his position and "retire" to C'ville and Washington to not run for a third term.

And Adams, our second president? He and his Federalist allies in Congress signed the Alien & Sedition Acts, legislation designed explicitly to criminalize the speech of citizens using their First Amendment rights to organize a new political party to elect Thomas Jefferson our President. Because god forbid that the rabble criticize their betters. (Remind me to tell you about Adams' plan to impose a monarchy by force some time. Its a ripping good story.)

And once TJ was President? His Vice President Burr fought a duel with TJ's former adversary, Alexander Hamilton. It was over some comments Burr had made about Hamitlon's Federalist policies, and it ended with Hamilton dead.

This whole idea that "The Founders" got along and agreed on everything? Its nonsense on stilts. They disagreed about things so vehemently that one of them actually shot and killed over the disagreement.

And don't even get me started about the efforts of New England Federalists in the early Nineteenth century to get their region to secede from the United States.

UPDATE: I can only bear watching this interview in small chunks, so I only just now got around to this segment:

I've written about this numerous time, so I won't rant here. I'll just quote.

First, Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence:

"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." - Letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814

"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."
- Letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT., Jan. 1, 1802

"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own."
- Letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814

"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
- Notes on Virginia, 1782

"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear."
- Letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787

"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors."
-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

And now some of his critics, on what his election would mean for the nation:

"What is a man who does not even make a profession of Christianity? What is he, what can he be, but a decided, hardened infidel?" - George Mason

"At the present solemn and momentous epoch, the only question to be asked by every Amercian, laying hand on his hear, is 'Shall I continue in allegiance to GOD - AND A RELIGIOUS PRESIDENT; or impiously declare for Jefferson - and no god!!!"
- Gazette of the United States (1800)

"Is it that we may see the Bible cast into a bonfire, the vessels of the sacramental supper borne by an ass in public procession, and our children, either wheedled or terrified, uniting in the mob, chanting mockeries against God, and hailing in the sounds of Ca ira the ruin of their religion, and the loss of their souls? Is it, that we may see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution; soberly dishonoured; speciously polluted; the outcasts of delicacy and virtue, and the lothing of God and man? Is it, that we may see, in our public papers, a solemn comparison drawn by an American Mother club between the Lord Jesus Christ and a new Marat; and the fiend of malice and fraud exalted above the glorious Redeemer? Shall we, my brethren, become partakers of these sins? Shall we introduce them into our government, our schools, our families? Shall our sons become the disciples of Voltaire, and the dragoons of Marat;* or our daughters the concubines of the Illuminati?"
- Timothy Dwight, President of Yale (July 4, 1798)

So, uh.... no. The Founders didn't agree on everything. They didn't even agree on God. In fact, they especially didn't agree on God.

Rhode Island? It was founded as a colony for dissidents fleeing Puritanical Massachusetts.

This isn't complicated stuff.

Glenn Beck vs. Thomas Paine: Part I

Over the past month or so, I've made several references - most notably here - to the fact that Glenn Beck's beliefs are the antithesis of those of his supposed hero, Thomas Paine. And every time, I get accused via email by some of my more conservative readers of not actually understanding Paine.

So... rather than conduct the debate in private - why would I want to do that? This is a blog after all - I've decided to take it public. Every few weeks, I'm going to post a direct quotes from both Paine and Beck for your consideration. No commentary. Just quotes. Like these:

"The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion." - Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Part II, Section 20

[W. Cleon Skousen] was years ahead of his time. And our founders were thousands of years ahead of their time. My hope is that all Americans young and old will spend the time with this book to understand why we are who we are. The words of our founding fathers have a way of reaching across any political divide. They are words of wisdom that I can only describe as divinely inspired. They are here for us to help solve the unsolvable -- and they are the reason why we have for so long been the greatest nation on earth. But most importantly, in these pages, you will find hope. -Glenn Beck, in the foreword to The 5,000 Year Leap, a book that "outlines 28 reasons why the U. S. Constitution created the miracle we call America."

Fun Thomas Paine fact #1: In 1776, Paine's Common Sense was the most widely read book in the American Colonies, selling more than 120,000 copies in a nation of roughly 2.5 million people. Paine donated all of the proceeds from the book to the Continental Army, thus becoming one of its primary sources of financial support.

Glenn Beck As A Performance Artist

First this: Glenn Beck’s Christmas Sweater: A Return To Redemption

And now this: The Plan

You cannot understand what this guy is doing if you start with the idea that he's first and foremost a political activist/journalist. He is not. He is a performance artist who uses politics as his medium to separate millions of people from their hard earned cash. If along the way that art also affects political change, so much the better, as it both broadens and lengthens his career. But that is secondary.

That said....

His performance art does have very clear political ramifications, particularly this latest 100 year plan thing (and he says Obama has a dangerous ego!).

For example:

The plan will require you to not only know history, read history, learn history but to teach history because the system is not teaching it. The system is not doing the job.

Beck considers Thomas Paine to be his personal hero. And yet more than any of the other Founding Fathers, Paine was a proto-socialist. You don't have to take my word for it. Just go read Paine's response to the founding father of conservatism, Edmund Burke, on the subject of the French Revolution in The Rights of Man. It's a pro-social welfare, pro-estate tax, anti-military spending, anti-concentration of wealth, anti-hereditary wisdom, anti-individual sovereignty, pro-French, anti-Federalist masterpiece. Or to put it another way, it's opposed to virtually everything Beck supposedly stands for.

But of course that's not the Paine that Beck and his followers will teach. Which is to say, the Paine they will teach will not actually be Paine. To make this movement work, inconvenient facts will be either ignored or eliminated. And that is a very dangerous thing.

The Art of the Possible

Via Steve Benen, here's something from Paul Begala written last August that should be kept in mind as the debate over the Stupak Amendment unfolds over the next few weeks:

No self-respecting liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt's original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers -- a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn't even cover the clergy. FDR's Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn't work, you got nothing from Social Security.

If that version of Social Security were introduced today, progressives like me would call it cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist. Perhaps it was all those things. But it was also a start. And for 74 years we have built on that start. We added more people to the winner's circle: farmworkers and domestic workers and government workers. We extended benefits to the children of working men and women who died. We granted benefits to the disabled. We mandated annual cost-of-living adjustments. And today Social Security is the bedrock of our progressive vision of the common good.

Politics is the art of the possible, not the perfect. I understand this specific issue is a very, very big deal to some people. But big enough to sink a once in a generation chance at meaningful heath care reform?

As with all legislation, these reforms can always be altered and improved later on, particularly because the major provisions don't take effect for as many as 3 or 4 years. If it cannot be corrected now, it can always be corrected later. But if this bill fails to pass, we lose everything in it. There is no a la carte option here.

Lieberman is willing to let the whole thing die because of the public option, exhibiting a level of self-interested short-sightedness that drives his opponents on the left nuts. But now, some of his fiercest critics want to draw a similar line over abortion funding. And so I have to ask: would the women that so many are fighting to defend be better off with a reformed system that doesn't provide insurance coverage for abortions, or with no reform at all? Because if this fight is pushed too far, those will be the choices.

I'm not saying that this isn't a fight worth having. If you believe it is, then fight! But as you do, keep the biggest possible picture in mind.

UPDATE: If you are going to fight, this line of attack from Markos (via Twitter) is a great one to take:

@markos: The thing the Stupak amendment is that I thought Republicans didn't want government between a doctor and patient.

[Updated to correct an absurd number of typos. Never blog before coffee!]

Playing Catch Up

I have so many posts saved that its almost overwhelming. While I watch baseball, time to play catch up....

+ Another in a series of "this is why we voted for Obama" moments. Kevin Drum:

It's a testament to the difficulty of healthcare reform and the power of the healthcare lobby that it's able to make reform of Pentagon procurement look almost easy by comparison. But that's how it's turned out: at the same time that President Obama's healthcare reform has been fighting through the congressional underbrush one painful subparagraph at a time, his defense cuts have practically sailed through. Remarkably enough, he's succeeded almost completely in cutting back the weapons platforms he targeted earlier this year, and he's succeeded so quietly that I'd pretty much forgotten it was even happening. But it did, and the defense appropriations bill Obama signed yesterday included nearly all the cuts he had asked for...

+ This, however, is not why we voted for him. To be honest, there still is not enough public pressure to make this happen. And without public pressure, it won't happen. Which would be sad, except: that's how our system is supposed to work!

+ I don't care who Obama plays basketball with. Wait no, I do... I want him to play basketball with whomever he wants to play basketball with. He's a guy, so like all guys, I suspect it he will play with other guys. Why anyone would see this as a problem is beyond me. Oh, wait... The only people who see it as a problem are people in the media who are looking for a good controversy that will "drive the conservation" for a day or two.

+ I might have mentioned this before, but I had absolutely no idea that Glenn Beck's last book is supposedly inspired by Thomas Paine. And I say "supposedly," because there is absolutely no way that Beck would say such a thing if he had actually ever read Thomas Paine. Take, for example, his pamphlet on Agrarian Justice, which is really just an extended riff on one of the many subjects he covered in Rights of Man. It's an argument for a redistribution of wealth from landowners to the rest of society for, in his words "for the loss of his or her natural inheritance." As in, its an argument that we would today describe as "socialist." So... either Glenn Beck is a socialist, or he hasn't read the works that he claims directly inspire his arguments beliefs.

+ Speaking of strange conservative arguments, check out this bit of analysis from the Democracy Corps study of the conservative movement:

A central part of the collective identity built by conservative Republicans in the current political environment is their belief that they possess knowledge and insight that the majority of Americans – whether too lazy or too misguided to find it for themselves – do not possess. A combination of conservative media outlets are the means by which they have gained this knowledge, led by FOX News (“the truth tellers“), and to a lesser degree conservative talk radio. Their antipathy and distrust toward the mainstream media could not be stronger, and they fiercely defend FOX as the only truly objective news outlet.

This is how many movements work late in life. They become so insulated, and so self-referential, that they become convinced that they and only they know the truth about the world around them. So long as the movement retains majority support, this isn't much of a problem. But once they fall back to minority status - as all movements inevitably do - this obviously becomes an enormous problem.

This time around, this particular movement faces a very unique problem. Fox News, their "truth tellers," have absolutely no interest in actually telling the truth. Their interest is in ratings, and in affecting the 24-hour, short term news cycle. Top-down broadcast media do not and cannot do long term party building. And that, I suspect, is creating a feedback loop that is driving both the network and its politically active viewers further and further from the center of American politics. The more extreme the view, the more attention it gets and the more polarized Fox viewers become. What breaks the cycle? Honestly, I have no idea. Yet. But give me some time. That's one of the things I'm working on.

+ Former Pres. Clinton was in VA recently on behalf of the Deeds campaign, and he offered up a great explanation of the meaning pre-election polls:

...polls are both accurate and they're not."

"So are the polls right?" he told the audience gathered in McLean. "The answer is yes, no and maybe."

"Yes, the polls are an accurate measurement of the voter groups that they talk to in proportion to each other," Clinton said. "The no answer is, that's not a profile of the people who voted in the primary...or in the general election in 2008."

"The maybe is you," he told the crowd. "The maybe is what you do in the next two weeks, and whether you're prepared to step into the breach."

+ Speaking of polls... if only 20% of Americans consider themselves Republicans, but nearly double that number self-identify as "conservative," what does this mean? Most likely, it means that some people are so conservative that they don't feel at home in the GOP, some are conservative Democrats, and some don't know what they are talking about. More importantly, it means that you should ignore these "liberal vs. conservative polls" and focus only on the ones measuring party ID. After all, its party ID that's important come Election Day. And ideology? That's only important in discussion section.

+ Andrew Sullivan's take on the blackness of America is a must read. As is TNC's short response.

+ You know how I'm always railing on about the natural irrationality of human behavior? Here's a great bit of evidence backing my view. It's not just humans. It's monkeys too. Which, assuming you aren't one of those people who wants to
"teach the controversy," shows that our behavioral biases might just predate out humanness. They are old. They are deep. And they are something we will never be able to overcome.

+ While I'm standing on my favorite soap boxes... Data show that the strength of the economy when you graduate from college has an impact on your wages more than 15 years later. The stronger the economy, the more money you can and will make a decade and a half later. You know what that means, kids... we aren't in this alone. We rise and fall together, no matter how fantastic our individual talents are. We are the community, and the community is us.

+ This might be my favorite quote from the entire debate over health insurance reform:

The political beauty of the public option opt-out, in a nutshell: the red states will throw a tantrum & hold their breath -- until they turn blue.

+ If this is true, its incredibly depressing. Short version from Kottke:

JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs made $6.8 billion in profit last quarter. Basically they borrowed money from the US Govt at 0% and then bought bonds from the US Govt that paid 2-3%.

+ If you haven't seen this, you need to stop and watch it. Its four minutes you'll never forget. Its also while I will always and forever believe in "we, the people" - and by we, I mean all of the people:

+ Last but not least. Its fucking fall, bitches:

I don't know about you, but I can't wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I'm about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it's gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There's a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.

Friday Night Bits + Bobs

No reason not a guy can't watch baseball and blog at the same time....

+ Jon Chait comes around to my "if you take the longview, Obama's doing just fine" point of view.

+ Moments like this are precisely why I have no - and by no I mean none, zero, zip, zilch, nada - worried about the 2010 or 2012 elections.

+ Peter Beinart, however, is still clueless. To suggest that liberals should "lay off Obama" is to completely misunderstand how progressive politics work. Our system was designed to make change very, very hard. Without constant pressure from the left, conservative forces will inevitably dominate. So as always, please ignore Beinart.

+ I've never paid much attention to Alex Castellanos, both because I very rarely watch CNN and because I think Castellanos' is a dick. Hunch confirmed.

+ Why don't I watch CNN? Yglesias nails reason #1. Ezra nails reason #2.

+ Why do polls say that Americans think crime is on the rise? If you ask me, its because polls no longer, and perhaps have never, accurately measured how the public feels about anything beyond how they plan to vote. I mean, what to make of this poll from FoxNews? Does anyone anywhere actually think this is measuring a pre-existing attitude? Of course not. And that's one of the big problems with polls - the evidence that they measure pre-existing attitudes is almost entirely nonexistent. And yet people spend millions on them.

+ Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.), meanwhile, is straight up insane. Expect much more of this as we move into a new, 1790's partisan political system.

+ Oh look! Here's more! But again, everyone should start getting used to this sort of thing. Because in our new world of hyper-partisan media (like this blog!), this is going to become the new normal. Which is what my dissertation is all about.

+ Also, this! The more hyper-partisan the media gets, the more we will see parties moving towards their respective bases. So this study should be seen as a sign of a beginning, not an end. The problem for the GOP, as Eric Kleefeld implies here, is that the positions of the great uninformed middle are much, much closer to those of the Democrats than of Republicans. To which I would add: the GOP needs to be very, very careful about where it heads the next few years. Should they take the Palin path, I suspect they may find themselves facing a similar future to the Federalists and the Whigs. When was the last time you had a chance to vote for one of them?

+ Last but not least, just because:

OK, back to the game.

As Old As the Republic Itself

So Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) calls Speaker Pelosi "a domestic enemy of the Constitution," and everyone freaks out. And they are right! Its an incredibly stupid thing to say, but look...

This sort of thing is as old as the republic itself. When Jefferson was running for President in the 1800 election, he was called far, far, far worse. And after he won, things only got worse. Despite that, the republic thrived.

Is it an outrageous thing to say? Absolutely. Should Democrats use it to their political advantage? Maybe, if they do something more than whine about it - something like this, perhaps. Does it mark the beginning of the end of the republic? Quite the opposite, actually. I think it actually marks is a return to our roots, one that's more than a century overdue.

Stick around, and I promise over the next few months I'll explain. Until then, a brief update on where I've been recently:

As I mentioned at the beginning of the Fall semester, I've moved into a pretty intense period of research and writing for my dissertation. For a variety of reasons not worth explaining here, I started my work by digging deeply into the historical record of the 1790s and early 1800s. What I've found, quite frankly, has shocked me, and is taking my work into a much more radical direction that I expected. When I started out, I thought I was chasing one pattern - the interaction of media and political system development - but I'm now starting to see a second equally important one - the development and defense of small-d democratic institutions in our small-r republican system of government.

As a result of all this, my attention has shifted away from short term political phenomenon towards much longer-term ones, and I expect you'll see that in my approach to this blog. Which is good, because to be honest I was getting burned out on blogging the minutia of day to day politics. Not only is it not much fun (outside of an election, of course!), but most of it just doesn't matter, and in the crush of events its often hard to see that.

Narratives, not news cycles, remember?

Also: Fuck the Federalists. But more on that later...

Going Rogue

Since Sarah Palin has apparently decided it is a word that defines the story of her life, I thought I might as well get everyone up to speed on where the word comers from. Wikipedia:

The word "rogue" was first recorded in print in John Awdeley’s Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561), and then in Thomas Harman’s Caveat for Common Cursitors (1566).

In England, the 1572 Vagabond Act defined a rogue as a healthy person who has no land, no master, and no legitimate trade or source of income; it included rogues in the class of idle vagrants or vagabonds. If a person was apprehended as a rogue, he would be stripped to the waist, whipped until bleeding, and a hole "about the compass [circumference] of an inch" would be burned through the cartilage of his right ear. A rogue who committed a second offense, unless taken in by someone who would give him work for one year, could face execution as a felon. A third-offense perpetrator would only escape death if someone hired him for two years.

The 1598 Vagabond Act banished and transplanted "incorrigible and dangerous rogues" overseas, and the 1604 Act commanded that rogues be branded with the letter "R" on their bodies.

Good luck getting that mental image out of your head.

History Doesn't Hurt My Brain

Stories like the one The Daily Show told last night are exactly, precisely why I love teaching politics:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Where the Riled Things Are
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

Over the course of the 20th century, our government did a series of things that transformed our society for the better. Having come to accept those transformations as nothing more than "the way things are," we as a society came to take them for granted, eventually forgetting the role that government played in creating them in the first place. 

A vast majority of the American Southwest was a desert before the Bureaus of Land Management and Reclamation transformed it into one of the most prosperous and fertile regions in the world. But once the transformation was complete, the role of government was almost totally forgotten or ignored. Within a decade or two, that same region gave rise to modern anti-government conservatism, eventually leading to the piece Stewart highlights above. Sean Hannity has no idea what he's talking about. The farmers in that region don't understand their own history. And a teacher's job is never done.

Weekend Update

I don't expect to have any time to blog this weekend, and since its been awhile.... some thoughts:

+ Video of the Week: In case you haven't already seen it:

Josh Marshall responds:

With Sen. Kyl pointing out that men have no interest in having insurance cover child birth, no doubt women will note that they have little interest in covering prostate and testicular cancer. And surely men will get back into the act and want to get out of under the cost of covering breast cancer, which very few men get. Indeed, you can see how everyone should probably insist on special customized insurance policies which cover the ailments they plan on getting and avoid paying for the ones they don't. As long as everyone plans well and makes good predictions everyone should be able to save a lot of money.

+ The Paranoid Style: Hendrik Hertzberg is dead on in his description of the GOP as a party led not by politicians but by talk radio personalities. But the rest of this post? Nonsense. Anyone who thought that Obama wouldn't face this kind of backlash has forgotten the 2008 campaign. And the idea that "lunatic paranoia" has always been confined to the fringe is equally ridiculous. It only appeared to be on the fringe because that was where our top-down, elite driven media placed it. But it was always at the heart of the Southern Strategy, and the Southern Strategy is at the heart of Republican success for more than three decades. So much so, in fact, that the South is all they've got left.

But Hertzberg's conclusion is dead on:

The boorish South Carolina Republican who shouted “You lie!” at the President after he said, truthfully, that reform “would not apply to those who are here illegally” did the public weal a favor by underlining bipartisanship’s futility. A bill that reflects a necessary compromise among Democrats is bound to be stronger than one that reflects an unnecessary compromise between Democrats and Republicans. And that’s no lie.

What I don't understand is why people don't see that this was always understood by Obama's team as one of the possible outcomes of bipartisan outreach. Calling your opponents obstructionist is nothing more than name-calling if you don't first give them a chance to obstruct!

And - shocking! - although this seems to be something that neither our talking heads nor most of our elite bloggers understand, the American people get it. Greg Sargent reports on the results of a new CBS/NYT poll:

The poll finds that an overwhelming majority of 64% think Republicans are opposing Obama’s health care plans mostly for political reasons. But it also finds that an equally large number, 65%, say Democrats shouldn’t pass a bill without Republicans — even if they think it’s right for the country — and should instead compromise to win over some GOPers.

This shows, I think, that Democrats have convinced the public that the GOP wants Obama and Dems to fail at all costs. But they’ve failed to make the case to the public that GOP obstructionism may leave them no choice but to go it alone in order to realize reform.

Senator Chuck Schumer has been privately telling Dem colleagues that much more needs to be done to lay the political groundwork for doing health care alone through the “reconciliation” process, should it come to that. The numbers above suggest he’s right.

Greg frames that as a problem, but I don't see why. The Democrats have won the argument on its merits. They've also convinced the public that the Republicans aren't serious partners in reform. Now, and only now, can they move on to the final stage of convincing citizens that the GOP has left them no choice but to go it alone.

We're almost there, people. Almost there.... Oh, and for the record: I was right about what all the teabagging would do for public opinion. Oh ye of little faith....

+ Speaking of Talk Radio: Ezra Klein:

“In the course of a few years," writes Michael Gerson, "a fringe party was able to define a national community by scapegoating internal enemies; elevate a single, messianic leader; and keep the public docile with hatred while the state committed unprecedented crimes. The adaptive use of new technology was central to this achievement."

That party? The Nazis. That technology? Talk radio. But Gerson's subject is not talk radio or the Nazis, but the vast expanses of the Internet. "User-driven content on the Internet often consists of bullying, conspiracy theories and racial prejudice," writes Gerson, which is interesting, as I thought it consisted of porn and teenagers holding party cups. "The absolute freedom of the medium paradoxically encourages authoritarian impulses to intimidate and silence others," he continues. "The least responsible contributors see their darkest tendencies legitimated and reinforced, while serious voices are driven away by the general ugliness."

That doesn't describe the Internet I know (unless, for some reason, you don't think Autotune the News is a serious voice), but the Internet is big, and Gerson might visit parts I miss. "The exploitation of technology by hatred will never be eliminated," he concludes. "But hatred must be confined to the fringes of our culture -- as the hatred of other times should have been."

What's striking is that this doesn't really describe the Internet. Hateful voices remain on the fringe. And they stay on the fringe. The beauty of the Internet is that it's pretty much all fringe. Controlling a Web site or a blogspot domain is not like controlling a radio station or a television network.

Gerson's examples, in fact, come from comment threads, which virtually disproves his thesis. But there is a major medium where the hateful voices sit firmly in control of the content, and it's the same medium that begins Gerson's remarks: talk radio. And, to a lesser extent, cable news. That's where society's most hateful conspiracy theories sit and fester, where its most explosive lies are recounted and amplified, where its least responsible elites have control of the means of production. I don't worry about jewhater429, the 97th entrant in a comment thread. I worry about Beck and Limbaugh and Savage.

Look, this is really simple: Authoritarian political systems need hierarchical, top down systems of media to propagate their ideologies. Bottom up, decentralized networks are a direct threat to everything they stand for. You cannot build a system of absolute control atop something that is fundamentally uncontrollable.

Was the Nazi system built atop talk radio? Absolutely. Because talk radio is both hierarchical and centralized. It doesn't actually allow citizens to communicate with one another, or with their leaders. It, like TV, only makes it appear to others as if there is a conversation going on. And that appearance is part of what makes their system so seductive. It convinces you that you and your hatred are part of a vast, previously silent majority. But its a trick. An illusion. Nothing more than a funhouse mirror reflecting back a single image as if it were from a million unique sources.

"The beauty of the Internet is that it's pretty much all fringe." Think on that. Deeply. If you want to understand how the world has changed, you must understand this. Stop thinking of the world in 20th century mass broadcast terms. The center of the media universe is gone, and it is not coming back. In its place we now have a million centers. Like the ever expanding universe, no matter where you stand you are at the center, looking out on an infinite horizon that is moving away from you at the speed of light.

Gerson doesn't get it. Limbaugh doesn't get it. Beck doesn't get it. The empire they have built is an illusion. They scream into the void. Sometimes the void screams back. But in the end, all they are doing is screaming at themselves. Our national conversation? The real one that's happening between average citizens day in and day out? It is moving further and further away from them. Here's why:

+ It's About TIme: I'm really late getting to this one, but TNC had the best of all possible responses to the "Limbaugh blames high school bullies on Obama" ridiculousness:

For black people, the clear benefit of Obama is that he is quietly exposing an ancient hatred that has simmered in this country for decades. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of us grew tired of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, mostly because they presented easy foils for Limbaugh-land. Moreover, again rightly or wrongly, they were used to define all of us.

It's intensely grating to live say, in Atlanta, and have some dude in Harlem crowned as your unelected leader. It's even more grating if said dude's agenda seems, in large measure, come down to standing in front of cameras and tweaking his opponents. It's no mistake that O'Reilly and Sharpton would break bread together at Sylvia's--they feed each other.

But Barack Obama, bourgeois in every way that bourgeois is right and just, will not dance.He tells kids to study--and they seethe. He accepts an apology for an immature act of rudeness--and they go hysterical. He takes his wife out for a date--and their veins bulge. His humanity, his ordinary blackness, is killing them. Dig the audio of his response to Kanye West--the way he says, "He's a jackass." He sounds like one of my brothers. And that's the point, because that's what he is. Barack Obama refuses to be their nigger. And it's driving them crazy.

It's about time.

If everything is now the fringe, then there are no longer shadows in which demagogues can hide. Once upon a time they could mask their hatred by wearing a mask whenever they spoke to the wider world, only revealing their true natures when appearing before "friendly" audiences. But you cannot control who hears and sees you anymore. There still may be many publics, but the lines separating them are now so porous as to be virtually nonexistent.

TNC is right. None of this is new. What's changed is that it is all now being exposed. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it isn't the decentralized nature of our newly reborn public sphere. But if not this, what? What else explains this change if not our new grassroots system of communication?

+ The Coalition Cracks: The birthers and turning on one another. The talk radio hosts are turning on one another. This is what happens as a multi-decade coalition collapses into itself. And yes, as TNC just said, it is intensely gratifying to watch. Stay focused on the very long view and you'll see what I mean.

+ Making the Trains Run On Time: Speaking of the birthers, Glen Beck called them and their fellow travellers to DC a few weeks back, and a whole bunch of them came. Not a million. Not even close. But still... When they got back home, guess what? They complained that Metro - you know, the DC area's "public option" for ground transportation - wasn't properly prepared for their arrival. Because nothing says "die hard anti-tax conservative" like demanding low cost, high quality public transportation in the congressionally controlled District of "taxation without representation" Columbia. Morons.

+ Just Say No To PROPAGANDA: My "favorite" lowlight from last week's Texas Board of Ed meetings on rewriting the US history curriculum.

Propaganda is a "negative" so we shouldn't use the word, she says. She even cites our nation's experience under President Wilson as the reason for her plea. Ummm... OK. For the record:

Pres. Wilson hired George Creel to head the United States Committee on Public Information during World War I. Here is how Creel defined his mission:

Not propaganda as the Germans defined it, but propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the "propagation of faith."

But since that word is too "negative" (you know, like on the SAT's!), students in Texas won't be allowed to hear it. Brilliant.

+ Somewhere Mr. Jefferson Is Smiling: If I had to describe my religious beliefs by fitting them into a single tradition, I'd almost certainly say I am a deist. I would have thought I was largely alone in this. But wow... as many as 1 in 5 of my students would be right there with me.

You want to know what the Founders really thought about God? Start here. If you understand what you find there - and much more importantly, what you do not find - you'll be a long way towards understanding the faith of our fathers.

+ Tipping Points: There are 9 climate change tipping points. All of them appear to be irreversible. For those who want to go deep into the weeds, Science has an in-depth set of articles on CO2 sequestration. Sadly, you either need a subscription or access to a university library. Here's the conclusion for those who cannot click thru:

On the 10-year time scale, it is not technology, but legal permission, business development, and public opinion that will determine whether CCS experiments and demonstration plants are built sufficiently rapidly for CCS to be deployed in 2020. On the 20-year time scale, these initial demonstrations must enable a new CCS industry to be born. Low-cost reliable capture at clusters of CCS power plants must emerge, and national pipe networks must be developed, delivering to aquifer storage capacity that must have been validated. CCS also needs to be built and operated in developing economies with high national but low per capita emissions. If CCS is difficult to afford now in Western economies, then it is even more so in India and China. Additional payments for CCS demonstrations will accelerate the above-mentioned actions.

Simply pricing carbon in a market is not enough to encourage CCS or to enforce decarbonization. During peak demand, venting of CO2 will be commercially beneficial. If the price of carbon is set very high to avoid such effects, that taxes the whole economy, not just dirty electricity. Additional policy levers will be needed to enforce CCS operation. Lessons from previous clean-up technologies applied to power plants—such as SOx and NOx removal from flue gases—show that voluntary codes do not work, but clearly signed and enforced rule changes do.

New power plants can now be built "capture ready," to be converted when CCS is established. This is the death-or-glory test of governments, as there is industry pressure to build new coal and gas plants now, increasing CO2 emissions, and perhaps convert to CCS later. Substantial difficulties can be anticipated in government-enforced plant-by-plant conversion. Another regulatory route is the introduction of emissions performance standards, expressed as amount of CO2 per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced. These standards are conceptually simple and directly address the issue. Care will be needed to avoid unintentionally incentivizing gas-fuelled plants, which are not fitted with CCS but lock-in CO2 emissions. A permitted emission amount decreases through time, enforcing innovation. A key difficulty is that firm rules and dates cannot be applied to technologies that do not yet exist.

Coal and gas combustion can become more sustainable. To change black fuel into green energy, the acceleration and scale-up of CCS is required, from tens of power plants within 5 years, to hundreds of large plants by 2025, and then to thousands of small power plants by 2035. This progression can defer climate change problems and buy time. To do this, bold policies of clear vision to include CCS emissions reductions must be explicit. CCS may be the single most effective and direct climate action available. It is not yet too late, but good words need to be matched by hard actions and good money; the present level of committed funds is too low and needs a 4- to 10-fold increase in order for this climate mitigation to be successful.

+ Julian Sanchez gets positively medieval on FireDogLake and other lefty blogs cheering on the DEms get tough approach to DOJ hearings:

So it looks as though Al Franken reading the Fourth Amendment to DOJ’s David Kris has blown up on lefty and/or privacy-friendly blogs. Look, I appreciate the sentiment, I really do.  I want to see Senators reciting the Fourth Amendment to representatives of the executive branch every time there’s a hearing.  I want them to tattoo it on their legislative aides’ foreheads and have it played as a background soundtrack in Dirksen like subliminal Brave New World programming. But for the serious? David Fucking Kris does not need to be schooled on the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirements by Stuart Smalley.  I spent Thursday afternoon reading the chapter David Kris wrote on how the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirement applies to FISA taps in his ginormous reference book on national security surveillance.  If  the name doesn’t ring a bell, Kris is the stone cold killer who put a bullet in the head of the legal sophistry invoked to justify Bush’s warrantless wiretap program without breaking a sweat. Alternatively, you may recall him as the guy responsible for exposing the bogus claim that investigators needed broad new powers in order to be able to eavesdrop on wholly foreign conversations. Or the guy who torpedoed the dishonest technological argument for expanding FISA wireline intercept powers.

His job is now to defend the renewal of roving wiretap authority in foreign intel investigations. But you know what? There should be roving wiretap authority in foreign intel investigations. No sane person says there shouldn’t.  No, really. Call the ACLU or CDT and ask. The surveillance hawks want the debate to be “should this power exist or not?” because—since it should—that means they win. The real question is whether there should be clearer limits on roving applications to ensure that if a warrant gets to “rove” across communications “facilities” (e.g. disposable cell phone numbers) you at least have to specify an individual target precisely and follow robust, enforceable minimization procedures to guarantee you’re only picking up your target’s communications. When I hear Kris saying we shouldn’t implement that reform, I’ll shed a single sad-clown tear for the smart man we’ve lost to the Sarlacc Pit of government work. What I’m actually hearing so far are offers to work with Congress to fix the insane legislation that—who now?—oh yes, Congress passed when a different bunch were running DOJ.

Memo to Democratic legislators: The people there now are relative friendlies.  They’re extending olive branches, which you should probably stop setting on fire. You’re just giving Bushie dead-enders an excuse to paint this as “civil liberties hippies vs. the Brave Americans Fighting Terror.” I watched John Conyers spend a good chunk of Tuesday’s hearing on the House side being a condescending dick to Todd Hinnen, one of the fiercest critics of Bush-era detention and interrogation policies. This just leaves smarmtastic bottom-feeders like Jim Sensenbrenner and Jeff Sessions to cast themselves as solicitous Grima Wormtongues by contrast. It makes for an awesome YouTube clip on Firedoglake, right up until the part where you fucking lose.

Let’s write a new script.  I call it “Civil libertarians and sober intel people trying to craft good policy together, thereby depriving psychotic executive branch maximalists of the cover they need for their fearmongering.”  Not, admittedly, a particularly pithy title.  It’ll never be a Regnery bestseller.  But we’re talking C-SPAN here; work with me people.

+ The Future Is Crowdsourced: People are often skeptical when I tell them that crowdsourcing is the future of commerce. Not e-commerce. Commerce. But check it out: CBS Radio agrees with me. They're getting set to launch a Last.FM powered radio station. No DJs. Just the wisdom of the crowd. If that doesn't kill off satellite radio, nothing will.

That Damn Flag Again

So it turns out Rep Joe "You Lie" Wilson is a huge fan of the Confederate Flag. Rep Steve King, a Republican from Iowa, tries to defend him:

Being a son of the South puts you in a different position when it comes to the Confederate flag. It means something entirely different to the people who have ancestors who fought in the Civil War on the south side of the Mason-Dixon line.

One more time here. The flag represents one thing, and one thing only: treason. It is a symbol of a movement that seceded from and declared war on the United States of America. Under that banner, the Army of the Confederacy killed more than 100,000 American soldiers. Not Union soldiers. That framing hides obscures more than it reveals. Soldiers in the U.S. Army.

Those ancestors Rep. King is talking about? They were traitors to our nation. As in, not just gave aid and comfort to enemies of the United States, but actually became enemies. They even fired the first shot.

So please, let's all just shut the fuck up with this "you just don't understand" nonsense, OK? I do understand. That's the problem.

UPDATE: To those of you who would say "but it doesn't mean what it used to. It's about culture now! And pride!" I would say the following:

Pride in what? Secession? White supremacy? Treason? War against the United States? What?

You can no more divorce the Battle Flag of the Confederacy from its history than you can separate the Reichskriegsflagge from its roots. They are both battle flags belonging to nations whose abhorrent ideologies led them into open, armed, prolonged, and extremely brutal conflicts with the United States of America. To pretend otherwise is to dishonor the men and women who died to defeat them.

Is that clear enough for you now?

Weekend Bits + Bobs

Some things that I didn't get around to commenting on this week....

+ Ron Brownstein parses the Census data on life during the Bush years:

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially.

The Census' final report card on Bush's record presents an intriguing backdrop to today's economic debate. Bush built his economic strategy around tax cuts, passing large reductions both in 2001 and 2003. Congressional Republicans are insisting that a similar agenda focused on tax cuts offers better prospects of reviving the economy than President Obama's combination of some tax cuts with heavy government spending. But the bleak economic results from Bush's two terms, tarnish, to put it mildly, the idea that tax cuts represent an economic silver bullet.

So for what should be the last time: trickle down economics is a pathetic excuse for a joke of an economic philosophy.

+ O'Reilly and Beck are clueless. We all know that, right? Doesn't matter. Watching them stumble their way into unintentional idiocy is still fun. Go check Attackerman and see what I mean. Brilliant.

+ Andrew Sullivan on the Tea Bag Brigades:

Here's a test: when you see as many posters lambasting Bush and Cheney and the GOP for getting us into this crisis in the first place, I will take these people seriously as genuine small government non-partisan conservatives and independents. In so far as they can pressure the Congress and president into taking the debt seriously in the future, good for them. In so far as they are proposing no practical solutions, and echo truly disturbing hatred of a president barely eight months in office, facing huge crises on all fronts, they are doing their own cause far more harm than good.

Steve Benen piles on:

As for what the overwhelmingly-white crowd had to say, I still think these protests could benefit from some focus. We learned today that right-wing activists don't like government spending (except when Bush and Republican lawmakers spent freely), don't like the size of government (except when Bush and Republican lawmakers increased the size of government), don't like deficits and debt (except when Bush and Republican lawmakers added trillions to the nation's tab), and don't like czars (except when Bush used dozens of them to implement his agenda).

They don't like health-care reform, though it's not clear why. They don't like gun control, though it's not clear why they think anyone's coming for their firearms. They also don't like taxes, immigration, abortion, Muslims, the U.N., and the idea of "socialism," though their understanding of the word is tenuous at best.

In other words, the point of today's rally was to let the country know there are a lot of right-wing activists with right-wing beliefs. We knew that before today, but I guess they wanted to remind us.

This is precisely why its been many decades since protests from the left were taken seriously. So yes, although it is a problem that the Washington Post considers these loons worthy of front page treatment, but over time that will fade. With all of this Nazi nonsense, they are delegitimizing themselves. As always, stay focused on the long view.

+ I wonder if the results of this study don't help to explain a good bit of the economic narcissism of the Baby Boom years:

[I]ndividuals growing up during recessions tend to believe that success in life depends more on luck than on effort, support more government redistribution, but are less confident in public institutions.

Boomers came of age during one of the greatest (both in terms of size and length - economic booms in all of human history. The post WWII boom was a direct result of government policy - think the Marshall Plan, the GI Bill, and even to some extent the policy of containment - but the Boomers, unlike their parents, never really understood that. To them, government wasn't what had created the boom; it was what had caused its end. Thus, the solution was to get government out of the business of regulation. And the result? Go back and reread that Brownstein piece.

I mean, even uber-conservative economist Friedrich Hayek understood things more clearly than the Boomer conservatives he supposedly inspired.

"Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance - where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks - the case for the state's helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong... Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make the provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken," - Friedrich Hayek, The Road To Serfdom (Chapter 9).

+ Here's another take on the Obama as Community Organizer theme:

President Obama started his career as a community organizer. Which means he is used to (and most excellently skilled at) running an organization by “working for consensus”, a set of skills quite different from the ones needed for running the more usual top-down business/military/GOP organizations. In an authoritarian organization, for better or worse, at the end of the day what the Big Kahuna says goes is what goes. Even if he’s the best, most open-minded Big Kahuna in the universe, heading up a team of uniquely gifted & prickly talents – he can ask for input, he can get input he hasn’t asked for, but when hammer meets nail it’s the Big Kahuna’s hammer that gets to choose the nail. And the other members of the team are always aware of this reality; barring things get so bad that grenades get rolled into the colonel’s tent, no private in the army forgets for long that the colonel is the one setting the agenda.

In a consensus-driven organization, on the other hand, everybody must have a chance to give an opinion… even when their opinion is stupid, crazy, laughable, and wrong. Being a successful community organizer means knowing that the local Mr. Tinfoil or Ms. Crystal-Bunny will show up at every godsdamned meeting and waste everybody else’s time ranting about black helicopters or the necessity for regular high colonics. A large part of the job of being a successful community organizer is ensuring that the resident nutball gets a respectful hearing without being permitted to permanently derail the meeting. Because, sad as it may seem, the rest of us skittish flaky primates want to know (even when we don’t articulate it) that “our guy” will take our ideas seriously, even when we’re not sure our ideas are worth taking seriously. When Obama stands up before Congress and explains that his health care reform proposals will involve neither death panels or government-paid abortions (unfortunately, IMO), he is reassuring the 80% of his audience who have no strong feelings about either topic that he will, at another time, be open to their opinions, however formless and/or gormless. This is important, even when it means that the meetings keep running into overtime and that us sane people have to listen to an awful lot of extremely random crap.

After eight years of the Cheney Regency’s “My way or the Gitmo highway” authoritarianism, anything less forceful than sloganeering and explicit threats seems like pretty weak sauce to those of us who’ve been paying attention. The question, of course, is whether President Obama’s target audience—the vast quivering voting-eligible majority that isn’t ideologically wed to either Invisible-Hand-of-the-Marketplace-Uber-Alles or Medicare-for-All-Americans-Immediately —considers his speech, and his administration’s work over the next few weeks and months, as sensible compromise or timid obfuscation. Perhaps we’d get better proposals and a more useful final bill if President Obama would channel his Inner Authoritarian a little more, but his gift for seeking consensus seems to be why Obama is President and certain other people are not. Maybe all the histronics are simply a necessary part of the process of committing democracy.

+ Yet more proof that Cheney's rules were a danger to national security. This one comes from our staunchest ally, the Brits.

+ Tom Schaller details the political history of South Carolina:

I, for one, am not much surprised that such bleating-heart conservatism came from South Carolina. I mean, c'mon: This is a state that, more than any other, has been resisting progress for the Union--and the Union itself--since, well, before there even was a United States.

This is a state whose slaveowners pressured Thomas Jefferson to remove condemnations of slavery from the Declaration of Independence. This is a state where loyalists rallied by the British as part of their "Southern Strategy"--the Brits' term, not mine--recaptured South Carolina from the patriots in 1780 as part of a plan to flip SC and Georgia and roll northward from there to smother the very revolution that birthers and tea partiers and Glenn Beck sychophants point to today as inspiration. This is the state that gave us senator and Vice President John C. Calhoun, who advocated state “nullification” of federal powers. This is also the state which became the first to secede from the Union to start the Confederacy—and even threatened to secede from the Confederacy when the other southern states refused to join its calls to re-open the slave trade. This is also the state that boasts of Congressman Preston Brooks, who in 1856 bloodied abolitionist senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a cane. (Top that, Rep. Wilson!)

All ancient history, you say? Not so fast.

Well into the 20th century, this was the state where black citizens observed the Fourth of July mostly alone. Why? Because--get this--the vast majority of whites preferred instead to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day, May 10, a practice that continued into the early 50s, which means there are some very senior South Carolina citizens who skipped a few Fourths back in their early years. (Why isn't Sean Hannity asking them to brandish their flag pins?) In 1920, this was the state whose legislature rejected the women’s suffrage amendment, only ratifying it for symbolic purposes a half century later, in 1969. In 1948, this was the state where the legislature declared President Harry Truman’s new civil rights commission “un-American,” and that offered segregationist favorite son Strom Thurmond as the so-called Dixiecrat party's presidential nominee. And it was this state's Clarendon County, not Topeka, that was the original case that later became--and only after political intervention by Gov. James Byrnes to replace SC with KS--the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling. Is anyone surprised that this was the state that brought the first court challenge to the 1965 Voting Rights Act?

Joe Wilson's outburst? Puh-lease. Merely a peep, folks. Merely a peep.

+ And then there's this - Michael Steele as the Humpty milk monitor:

+ Finally, I'm at a loss for words on this one. And no, it isn't meant as a joke.

His Greatest Political Failure

At this point in the news cycle, there's not much I can add about Kennedy that hasn't already been written. So rather than offer yet another take on this great man's life, I'll simply say this:

Kennedy considers his greatest political failure to have been not making a deal with Nixon in the early 1970s on national health care. What Nixon proposed wasn't perfect, but in retrospect, the decision to hold out for something closer to the liberal idea of perfect meant that this nation went more than a generation without any reform at all. A desire for perfection, he came to see, should never be allowed to become the enemy of the good. Take the best deal you can get, and then work like hell to make it better every day of the rest of your life. That's how change happens in this country. As you remember the man, keep that lesson in mind.

Today's Health Care Must Read

Michael Tomasky:

If Obama serves two terms, we are a mere 8% of the way into his tenure. That strikes me as a little early for people to be throwing in the towel. So the interesting question of the near future will be: can the Obama movement go from the euphoric phase, in which everything seemed possible, into a more realist phase in which people come to terms with the very difficult and far less exhilarating tasks associated with governing, and the often dissatisfying victories that result from the legislative process?

Liberals... tend to have a deeply romantic view of political movements. When we think of the civil rights movement, we think of the highlights, the stirring moments. Memory tricks us, and the media, which speak in such shorthand, help perpetuate the trick. So we tend to think that Rosa Parks sat on a bus, Martin Luther King gave some great speeches, decent Americans recoiled at racist violence on the nightly news, and boom, change happened. The reality was that nine long years passed from Parks's act of civil disobedience until Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights bill – nine years of often mundane and inglorious work. And even then, the civil rights bill didn't really fix the problem of African Americans being denied the vote, so Congress had to go back the next year and pass the voting rights act.

Ditto with Franklin Roosevelt, to whom Obama is often unflatteringly compared. FDR, the comparers say, fought the right tooth and nail, took no prisoners and was unapologetically liberal, even leftwing by today's standards. Many very important points are left out of this comparison. Roosevelt made lots of mistakes – the bill he'd intended as the landmark legislation of his first year, the national industrial recovery act, was an abysmal failure, eventually struck down as unconstitutional by the supreme court. Unlike Obama, he didn't have to worry about Senate filibusters, which weren't really invoked in those days but which are a constant threat today. And while the right wing he faced was real, it wasn't nearly as well-financed and orchestrated as today's version, which even has its own national disinformation "news" network.

It's been a rocky month or six weeks, no denying it. The White House has made its share of errors. At the same time, I don't think anyone could have anticipated the rightwing response to the healthcare proposals. Forceful opposition and lies here and there, sure. But death panels and armed citizens coming to presidential rallies and comparisons to Hitler and polls showing that more than half of Republicans aren't convinced Obama is even an American citizen? No one saw this coming.

So now, liberals have to fight hard for something they're not terribly excited about. A health bill will likely have a very weak public option or it won't have one at all. But liberals will have to battle for that bill as if it's life and death (which in fact it will be for thousands of Americans), because its defeat would constitute a historic victory for the birthers and the gun-toters and the Hitler analogists. In the coming weeks, building toward a possible congressional vote in November, progressives will have to get out in force to show middle America that there's support for reform as well as opposition, even though they may find the final bill disappointing.

This is what movements do – they do the hard, slow work of winning political battles and changing public opinion over time. It isn't fun. It isn't something Will.i.am is going to make a clever and moving video about, and it offers precious few moments for YouTube. It takes years, which is a bummer, in a political culture that measures success and failure by the hour. The end of euphoria should lead not to disillusionment, but to seriousness of purpose.

To which Ezra adds:

I'd go a step further than Tomasky: The upside of health-care reform is not that it's a defeat for the reactionaries. Rather, the upside of health-care reform is health-care reform. Four years ago, when the public option didn't exist as a popular policy concept, liberals would have been thrilled with the legislation we're seeing today. It's better than anything the major Democrats proposed in the primary, much less anything that passed four committees in Congress...

Obviously, there are a hundred ways that reform is going to fall short of not only perfection, but sufficiency. And the political compromises required to pass anything will dispiriting and inane. But it's worth keeping in mind that this bill is going to help a lot of people. Tens of millions. Hundreds of millions over the course of a few decades. It will mean that some of the very worst things that can happen to someone -- medical bankruptcy, or a cancer that strikes when someone is uninsured -- will, by and large, simply stop happening. That's worth being excited about.

This reform is a beginning, not an ending. Take what we can get, then keep fighting to make it better. That's how change happens. It's how the New Deal happened. It's how the Civil Rights movement happened. It's how women's suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and even the formation of this nation happened. It's how all movements happen.

The stories told on teevee are repacked versions of reality, and not reality itself. Don't ever confuse the two.

Bits + Bobs

Lots of things this past week that I could have posted on. Here are the short versions of a bunch of them:

+ On Bipartisanship: You can't prove that your opponents aren't negotiating in good faith if you don't negotiate with them first. Had Obama ignored the Republicans and tried to simply do thing "his way," he would undermined every narrative he built about himself during he 2008 election, thus playing right into his opponents hands. By calling their bluff, he can now run against them as obstructionists in 2010, 2012, and 2014.

+ On the Public Option: It doesn't matter if it is in the Senate Finance Bill. It doesn't even really matter if it is in the final version that comes out of the full Senate. All that matters is that it survives the conference committee process. And there's nothing that has been said by anyone in the administration that should make anyone think that Team Obama isn't going to do everything they can to make sure it comes out of conference.

+ On Sebelius' Sunday Misspeak: For nearly two weeks the media had been focused obsessively on the non-existent death panels. Then Sebelius goes on one of the Sunday talk shows and "accidentally" says that the public option isn't "essential." Then progressive bloggers and politicians go nuts, and the media shifts their focus on to them. Then, nearly two full days later, the White House clarifies that she made a mistake. To believe that this wasn't a planned event designed to refocus the debate, you would need to a) believe that no one on Rahm Emmanuel's staff or in the entire White House watched her appearance and understood how important her statement was until a full day later, and b) believe that Sebelius, one of the most stereotypically quiet and guarded politicians to come out of the Great Plains in a long time, misspoke and then refused to correct herself on the single most important political issue facing the country today. And before you answer, remember that these people are skilled enough political operatives to have made it all the way to the top of a very tough game. So yes, I'm with Noam Scheiber on this one: these guys aren't idiots, and they knew what they were doing.

+ Guns and Town Halls: I made this point once before, but I feel like I should make it again. If the Second Amendment stands for anything, it is the right of the people to take up arms against politicians they believe have become tyrannical. Thus, if there is anywhere people should have a right to openly carry guns, it is at town hall meetings. Don't like that? Think its crazy? Amend the constitution.

+ Don't Tread On Me: Every time I see a picture of some protestor holding a Gadsden Flag at a town hall meeting (you know, the flag with the don't tread on me snake?), I can't help but wonder if they have any idea what the flag actually means. It's origin? It came out of Franklin's "Join or Die" campaign during the French + Indian War, and thus was originally used as a call for political unity. A bit later, it was adopted by the US Navy during the Revolutionary War, serving as a standard flown during the fight to interdict British ships carrying war supplies. Once again, a call for national strength and unity. Eventually, however, some historically illiterate people picked it up and started waving it around as some sort of symbol of patriotism, and then.... then it turned into something American citizens use against one another? That's about as stupid as using the Stars and Bars as a sign of American patriotism. Oh, wait.....

+ On Thousand Page Bills: Many people, including some supposedly very smart ones, complain that the bills coming out of Congress are "too big." I do not understand this. We live in a nation of 300+ million people who produce more than $14 trillion in economic activity each year. The diversity and complexity of the problems and issues facing a nation of that size are almost unimaginably complex. Unless you either plan to adopt an "every man for himself" attitude towards society (i.e. reject the idea of a nation entirely) or intend to push for a dissolution of the union (i.e. reject the idea of this nation in favor of many smaller ones), you are going to have to get used to the idea of very large bills. In the meantime, can we please stop assuming that big round base 10 numbers have some sort of special meaning? 1000 only appears to be important because our system of counting is rooted in the fact that we have ten fingers, and last time I checked, the number of fingers on the human hand has no bearing whatsoever on what makes legislation "good."

+ On Super-Super Majorities: Sen Chuck Grassley, among other Republicans, has recently demanded that any health care reform must meet a new, 70-80 vote threshold before it can be considered either legitimate or bipartisan. Because yes, if there is one thing the patriots at Lexington and Concord were fighting for, it was the idea that nothing should ever happen unless and until a super-majority of well heeled elites achieve near-universal agreement on the most contentious issues facing their country. Or something. But seriously... this is what passes for serious argument among Republicans these days? That votes don't count unless some of their people get what they want? What are they all, 8 years old?

+ On Government Surveillance: This one was totally predictable. When Bush was president, conservatives thought that the domestic surveillance system couldn't be big or powerful enough. Now that a Democrat is in the White House, they are terrified that he might use the White House web site to collect email addresses of people engaged in dissent. So for the record: I was opposed to domestic surveillance then. I am opposed to it now. But collecting email anti-reform emails in an effort to rebut some of the nonsensical criticism that's out there? If the White House really wanted to round up dissenters, it wouldn't have to use such an inelegant model. It could just use the system Bush built. You know, the one that collects every email and phone call that travels across our nation's telecomm networks? The one that you guys said was both necessary and harmless? That's the system you should be afraid of. And its the one you conservatives built.

+ On Polling Data: There is a fairly extensive and well-establishd literature within political science that shows that policy-specific opinion poll data is likely to be, well... more than a bit unreliable on most issues. When asked, people will not only frequently contradict themselves and offer opinions on things they have no prior knowledge about, they will offer firm opinions about programs and proposals that don't even exist! Nevertheless, politicians, pundits, and all heads on my teevee treat tiny fluctuations in policy-related polls as if they actually tell us something. But... they don't. So please: stop reading them! They might work for gauging electoral support, but when it comes to policy, they are only slightly better than useless.

+ On LaRouchies: The point isn't whether they want to be Democrats or Republicans. The point is that they have always been deemed nutty, and yet their rhetoric on health care is literally indistinguishable from all of the leaders of the GOP. Generally speaking, if you find all of the crazy people lining up behind you because they firmly believe in your ideas, well...

+ On Color-Coded Terror Alerts: Former DHS Secretary Ridge is finally telling us what we in the Netroots already knew - that the Bush Administration manipulated the terrorism threat level system in an effort to scare the crap out of people in the months prior to the 2004 election. As many, many other bloggers have pointed out today, all of the Very Serious People in the Village that is DC saw the widespread acceptance of this idea among the Netroots as a sign of how "crazy" and "fringe" we all were. Only - gasp! - for the 5,427th time, we were right. And no, Mr. Ambinder, we weren't driven to say the things we said because we hated Bush. We hated Bush because of the things he did. Because among other things, as Atrios points out, "using the threat of terrorism to try to achieve political goals is, you know, what terrorists do

+ On Fiji Water: Please don't drink it. Please.

What Madison Would Say About Our Health Care Debate

Time to finally get around to my long-promised take on what Madison would have to have to say about our current health care debate.

I want to start by riffing off of something Peter Suderman recently wrote over at Sully's place:

But I wonder: How do you have political involvement without the sort of ruckus we're now seeing? As far as I can tell, the health-care protesters at town halls are "politically involved." Lobbyists soliciting favors from Congressmen is "political involvement." Politicians who know better (or should) cynically spreading rumors about "death panels" is political involvement too. It's not all pleasant, community-minded folks peacefully and sensibly arguing in policy-smart bullet points. I don't think it's possible to have a politically involved citizenry and avoid the sort of nuttiness we've seen. This -- the chaos and absurdity of competing interests fighting for what they want and believe -- is what politics looks like.

The very simple answer is: you don't. Not in this system of government, anyway. Because like it or not, this is precisely how Madison intended for things to work. Let's walk this one out.... Federalist 10.

AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a wellconstructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. He will not fail, therefore, to set a due value on any plan which, without violating the principles to which he is attached, provides a proper cure for it. The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished....

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.

There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.

It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man

If you've ever read Madison, my guess is that this piece is what you read. And you should have! These words are as close as we will ever get to a pure, undiluted take on the "original intent" of the man who quite rightly is remember as the "Father of the Bill of Rights."

Madison's basic argument is both simple and elegant. Human beings are imperfect, passionate, self-interested creatures. Because of this, we often join together to pursue projects that end up infringing the rights of others and harming the interests of the community in which we live. [For the record, yes: Madison did indeed believe that there was an identifiable public interest, and that it was not simply the sum of each citizen's individual interest. But more on that another time.] In theory, we might be able to prevent this by forcing everyone to conform to a single set of norms and behaviors, but to do so would require the creation of what we now call a totalitarian state. Thus, in a free society, faction - self-interested lobbying, partisan politics, and other potentially problematic behaviors - will always be a fact of life.

... we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.

Any of that sound familiar? Like anything you are seeing play out in our political system today? The world we live in today may be very different than the one Madison inhabited when he wrote those words, but human beings haven't changed all that much. It's only been 222 years - just 3 human lifetimes - since he sat down and put pen to paper, so yes, we still are who he thought we were.

But Madison had a solution for this. And the popular mythology of the Founders as elitists notwithstanding, it didn't rest on elites:

It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole.

The inference to which we are brought is, that the CAUSES of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS.

If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution. When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed. Let me add that it is the great desideratum by which this form of government can be rescued from the opprobrium under which it has so long labored, and be recommended to the esteem and adoption of mankind.

Minority factions weren't a concern for Madison. Although he recognized that they might make a lot of noise and slow down the political process, because they are by definition a minority, in a properly constructed majoritarian system they would never be able to actually pass legislation that furthers their crazy and/or selfish goals.

Majority factions, however, posed a much more serious threat. What do you do when a majority of the country decides they want to drive themselves off a cliff? Is there some way to protect the minority from their madness? And maybe even protect them from themselves?

And its here that many many people get tripped up. Isn't the point of a democracy that the majority gets to do what the majority wants? Yes. But - and this is the key move - we don't live in a democracy. We live in a republic. And in this republic, the one created by the man who wrote these words, our institutions are designed to make sure that the majority doesn't always get what it wants.

Madison explains:

The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.

The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose. On the other hand, the effect may be inverted. Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.

"But wait," I can hear you saying. "Doesn't this prove that Madison really was an elitist? What's all this nonsense about wise and discerning citizens representing the people?" No. It doesn't.

To understand why, you need to pay particular attention to the phrase "refine and enlarge the public views." Although it would require a book chapter, or perhaps even a dissertation, to fully unpack the meaning of those words - and trust me, I am already working on that! - the short version is more than enough for this post. In Madison's view, a political system acted like a massive information and passion processing machine. The bigger the system, the more competition each individual idea would face; the more competition, the greater the chance falsehoods would be exposed and mistakes would be uncovered. Moreover, because bigger systems were likely to move more slowly - it takes time for people and ideas to rise to the top - the passions that drove people to unreasonable ends were likely to burn themselves out before they could infect a majority.

So yes, Madison did believe that wise representatives might help prevent radicals from seizing control of the system and moving it towards their own ends, but he wasn't counting on them. In fact, he recognized that the representatives were as likely to be a problem as a solution, since the representatives will inevitably be afflicted with all of the very same flaws as everyone else.

And that takes us to one of Madison's other masterworks, Federalist 51, where he continues the debate. Rather than fight human nature, Madison instead built our system of government around it, structuring our institutions so that the selfish behavior of politicians became a blessing, rather than a curse:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.

Cheney's wet dreams notwithstanding, our system was explicitly designed to pit its various parts against one another. It is supposed to work slowly. It is supposed to be chaotic. It is supposed to be messy, and loud, and fractious, and rude. There is no other way, Madison argued, because a government can be no better than the people that populate it. Let the system work quickly, and eventually madmen will make madness the rule. Slow it down, however, and passions will burn themselves out, leaving only reasonable ideas and patient people around at the end of the debate and in control.

Madison then makes his final move:

There are, moreover, two considerations particularly applicable to the federal system of America, which place that system in a very interesting point of view. First. In a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people is submitted to the administration of a single government; and the usurpations are guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and separate departments. In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself. Second. It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.

There are but two methods of providing against this evil: the one by creating a will in the community independent of the majority that is, of the society itself; the other, by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable. The first method prevails in all governments possessing an hereditary or self-appointed authority. This, at best, is but a precarious security; because a power independent of the society may as well espouse the unjust views of the major, as the rightful interests of the minor party, and may possibly be turned against both parties. The second method will be exemplified in the federal republic of the United States. Whilst all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.

In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects; and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of country and number of people comprehended under the same government...

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger; and as, in the latter state, even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves; so, in the former state, will the more powerful factions or parties be gradnally induced, by a like motive, to wish for a government which will protect all parties, the weaker as well as the more powerful.

All of which brings me around to today. If Madison could see this system in action... if he could somehow rise from the grave and attend one of our ridiculous town halls, he would find things exactly as he intended and predicted. People are self-interested and passionate, and that passion often leads them to say, do, and believe things that make no sense. But rather than create a system of government that tried to control what people think, he and his fellow travelers instead opted to build one that required a structured competition of ideas. As children of the Enlightenment, they believed to their core that reason would always trump mindless passion, and so they built a set of institutions designed to slow things down enough that cooler heads would ultimately prevail.

They wanted us to have this debate for ourselves. They wanted us to talk, to yell, to scream, and yes, even to shoot if it became necessary. Our republic is supposed to be loud. It is supposed to be rude. It is supposed to be fractious. It is supposed to be just like this.

"In every country where man is free to think and to speak" Jefferson once wrote, "differences of opinion will arise from difference of perception, and the imperfection of reason; but these differences when permitted, as in this happy country, to purify themselves by free discussion, are but as passing clouds overspreading our land transiently and leaving our horizon more bright and serene."

So my advice? Stop complaining about how much nonsense is out there. Recognize that this is how our system is supposed to work. And then get out there and do your part to defend the truth. If not you, who? If not now, when?

Because as Teddy Roosevelt once said, "It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out where the strong man stumbled, or where a doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, and who comes up short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause. The man who at best knows the triumph of high achievement and who at worst, if he fails, fails while daring greatly, so that his place will never be with those cold timid souls who never knew victory or defeat."

And one last thing: If you don't like the way this system works, then you should fight to change that too. Madison knew his system wasn't perfect because he knew he wasn't perfect. They gave us an amendment process for a reason. So if you want to use it, then use it!

So That I Don't Get Lazy And Forget

UPDATE: I didn't forget. I'm just too tired to do this tonight. So.... tomorrow! ---

This post is a reminder to myself - and a notice to you, so that you can remind me in case I forget! - to spend an hour or two tonight writing about "death panels," the role of truth in a republican system of government, and our constitutional structures. The short version? Like it or not, this is actually how our political system was designed to work. In fact, with one crucial difference - the speed of modern communication networks - it is an almost perfect illustration of what Madison was going for in Federalist 10. Do your homework, and I'll be back to explain what I mean tonight.

Federalist 10 

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.

There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.

There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.

It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

The second expedient is as impracticable as the first would be unwise. As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results; and from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government.

No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time; yet what are many of the most important acts of legislation, but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens? And what are the different classes of legislators but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine? Is a law proposed concerning private debts? It is a question to which the creditors are parties on one side and the debtors on the other. Justice ought to hold the balance between them. Yet the parties are, and must be, themselves the judges; and the most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction must be expected to prevail. Shall domestic manufactures be encouraged, and in what degree, by restrictions on foreign manufactures? are questions which would be differently decided by the landed and the manufacturing classes, and probably by neither with a sole regard to justice and the public good. The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling with which they overburden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets.

It is in vain to say that enlightened statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests, and render them all subservient to the public good. Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole.

The inference to which we are brought is, that the CAUSES of faction cannot be removed, and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its EFFECTS.

If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution. When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed. Let me add that it is the great desideratum by which this form of government can be rescued from the opprobrium under which it has so long labored, and be recommended to the esteem and adoption of mankind.

By what means is this object attainable? Evidently by one of two only. Either the existence of the same passion or interest in a majority at the same time must be prevented, or the majority, having such coexistent passion or interest, must be rendered, by their number and local situation, unable to concert and carry into effect schemes of oppression. If the impulse and the opportunity be suffered to coincide, we well know that neither moral nor religious motives can be relied on as an adequate control. They are not found to be such on the injustice and violence of individuals, and lose their efficacy in proportion to the number combined together, that is, in proportion as their efficacy becomes needful.

From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. Let us examine the points in which it varies from pure democracy, and we shall comprehend both the nature of the cure and the efficacy which it must derive from the Union.

The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.

The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose. On the other hand, the effect may be inverted. Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people. The question resulting is, whether small or extensive republics are more favorable to the election of proper guardians of the public weal; and it is clearly decided in favor of the latter by two obvious considerations:

In the first place, it is to be remarked that, however small the republic may be, the representatives must be raised to a certain number, in order to guard against the cabals of a few; and that, however large it may be, they must be limited to a certain number, in order to guard against the confusion of a multitude. Hence, the number of representatives in the two cases not being in proportion to that of the two constituents, and being proportionally greater in the small republic, it follows that, if the proportion of fit characters be not less in the large than in the small republic, the former will present a greater option, and consequently a greater probability of a fit choice.

In the next place, as each representative will be chosen by a greater number of citizens in the large than in the small republic, it will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried; and the suffrages of the people being more free, will be more likely to centre in men who possess the most attractive merit and the most diffusive and established characters.

It must be confessed that in this, as in most other cases, there is a mean, on both sides of which inconveniences will be found to lie. By enlarging too much the number of electors, you render the representatives too little acquainted with all their local circumstances and lesser interests; as by reducing it too much, you render him unduly attached to these, and too little fit to comprehend and pursue great and national objects. The federal Constitution forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures.

The other point of difference is, the greater number of citizens and extent of territory which may be brought within the compass of republican than of democratic government; and it is this circumstance principally which renders factious combinations less to be dreaded in the former than in the latter. The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it; the fewer the distinct parties and interests, the more frequently will a majority be found of the same party; and the smaller the number of individuals composing a majority, and the smaller the compass within which they are placed, the more easily will they concert and execute their plans of oppression. Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. Besides other impediments, it may be remarked that, where there is a consciousness of unjust or dishonorable purposes, communication is always checked by distrust in proportion to the number whose concurrence is necessary.

Hence, it clearly appears, that the same advantage which a republic has over a democracy, in controlling the effects of faction, is enjoyed by a large over a small republic,--is enjoyed by the Union over the States composing it. Does the advantage consist in the substitution of representatives whose enlightened views and virtuous sentiments render them superior to local prejudices and schemes of injustice? It will not be denied that the representation of the Union will be most likely to possess these requisite endowments. Does it consist in the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties, against the event of any one party being able to outnumber and oppress the rest? In an equal degree does the increased variety of parties comprised within the Union, increase this security. Does it, in fine, consist in the greater obstacles opposed to the concert and accomplishment of the secret wishes of an unjust and interested majority? Here, again, the extent of the Union gives it the most palpable advantage.

The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.

In the extent and proper structure of the Union, therefore, we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government. And according to the degree of pleasure and pride we feel in being republicans, ought to be our zeal in cherishing the spirit and supporting the character of Federalists.

Ambition to Counteract Ambition

This (via Andrew Sullivan's spot) from Alex Massie...

Freed from any kind of electoral or political reality, Cheney was able to rampage through Washington, doing all kinds of damage to almost every institution or office or agency he touched. That's the price you pay for Cheney's lack of personal political ambition. We often think of political ambition as something to be wary of - and rightly so - but Cheney demonstrates that the quiet lack of personal ambition can have disastrous consequences too, for it frees a man from having to be accountable for his actions, permitting him to justify anything and everything if it moves him an inch closer to achieving goals that he, and he alone, has set.

...makes me think of this from Madison

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State.

The system of internal checks and balances written into our constitution are premised on the idea that ambitious politicians will jealously guard their power. Combine Cheney's lack of ambition for higher office, his disdain for the welfare of his political party, and the near total abdication of Congress' role in overseeing the executive, and you get the constitutional disaster that was the 2001 to 2008. Even if you like the policy outcomes - and god knows I don't - you must admit that the system did not work as it was designed. And to understand that, you need to think long and hard about the positive role ambition is supposed to play in our system of checks and balances.

About That Second Amendment & Jefferson's Tree Of Liberty

Over the past few days, there have been a number of different reports about citizens bringing guns to health care town hall meetings, include one held by President Obama himself. Along the way, nearly everyone - even some commentators on Fox News! - have commented on how such behavior is either inappropriate or dangerous. And it is! But here's the thing....

If the Second Amendment means anything at all, at least as far as original intent is concerned, it is that citizens have the right to bear and perhaps even use arms against tyrannical rulers. That, after all, is how the American Revolution happened, and it is why the Amendment exists. So if any sort of arms-realted behavior is protected, it would be this one. And yet there's near universal agreement that brining guns to town hall meetings with the President of the United States is a very bad idea.

If that doesn't prove how anachronistic the 2nd Amendment is, nothing will. Whatever else the Amendment means, it certainly does not mean that we have a right to bear arms, except when we are around politicians, in which case the right can be restricted. That's obviously not what the Founders meant, and yet....

And since we're on the subject, let's clear up another, potentially much more significant historical misunderstanding. Over the past few weeks, I noticed several different occasions where protesters relied on Jefferson's famous remark on how the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants." In every instance, its been used by some anti-reform zealot to warn ominously of a coming revolution. The problem for them is that this quote, when read in context, doesn't mean what they think it means. Not at all.

From Jefferson's letter to William Smith, written in Paris on November 13, 1787:

The people cannot be all, & always well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independent 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure.

What Jefferson is suggesting here is that from time to time, ignorance will run so rampant that it leads some people to take up arms against their government. Jefferson sees this as a good thing not because revolution is good, but because it gives people who understand the truth the opportunity to clear up all of the misconceptions. "The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?" Or in other words, if it takes the blood of a few misinformed citizens to rebalance the debate in favor of the truth and remind the leaders that the people are sovereign, so be it. Liberty, according to Jefferson, is worth the price. The revolution will have been successful not because it overthrew the government, but because it helped root out and eliminate ignorance.

So those protestors who are quoting Jefferson? They would have been the ones Jefferson would have sacrificed to protect liberty. They are, in essence, calling for their own deaths.

Jefferson didn't write in soundbites. If you don't read the quotes in context, you usually have no idea what he meant.

UPDATE: A fellow TJ scholar sends along her thoughts on this. Her take is slightly more nuanced than mine, but arrives at essentially the same conclusion. She writes:

I do read TJ just a teensy bit differently right at the end of this excerpt. Here's my alternate interpretation: it seems to me that he's saying, "Better to have enough freedom that even when ignoramuses misunderstand and get discontented, they cause a little mayhem and their rage alerts their leaders/fellow citizens to their misunderstanding/dissatisfaction--even if the ignoramuses kill a few people in the process--than to have things buttoned down so tight that (a) you squelch all the good parts of freedom along with the bad parts (such as weaponized ignorance) and (b) you never find out what the fraction of The People who are discontented are thinking (after all, they're The People, too, and democracy means at least getting their ignorance on the table and heard, even if they're a minority and need education/facts rather than implementation of their misinformed preferences)."

In other words, I think the people dying in Jefferson's scenario are maybe politicians (rather than ignorant, discontented, violent citizens getting a good beating before their re-education program). But like you argue, the people killing those politicians (both those who are tyrants and those who are patriots--mobs rarely discriminate) and putting blood on the roots of liberty's tree are not laudable geniuses of democracy but rather the idiots who don't have all the facts and have gotten their stupid up. And given Jefferson on books, education, and reason, he seems to be saying that pardoning these people and giving them the facts is better than hanging them for acting out. Always the idealist in some ways, Jefferson seems to believe to the last that if you just give people the facts, they'll settle down and work in the spirit of enlightenment. I love him for it, even if I'm not always sure that Reason can really make her case to some people loudly enough to pacify them, no matter how many facts they have.

...even stupid, misinformed rebels remind the state/politicians that they don't have a bunch of sweet peasants to kick around, but a mighty People with a wild, dangerous heart.

In short: Don't cross us, state. You're on notice.

Absolutely, Perfectly Backwards

Andrew Sullivan - channeling Justin Miller - couldn't be more wrong if he tried:

A useful reminder of a previous occasion on which the Republican base called the president a communist. The president was Eisenhower. Eventually, the Birchers were kicked out of the party; today, the Birthers are 70 percent of the party. It will take a helluva civil war to kick them out.

Miller relies on William Buckley Jr.'s version of the story of how the Birchers were "exiled" from the GOP, but of course Buckley isn't an unbiased source here. Because if you read the story you'll find that he's placed himself at the center of the story. Which is true, so far as this tiny bit of the history goes, but of course this tiny bit isn't enough. Not nearly enough.

Goldwater and Buckley might have liked to believe that they had "exiled" the Birchers, but all they really did was exile the organization known as The John Birch Society. The ideology lived on, as did the people who called themselves Birchers. And guess what? All of them became Goldwater Republicans.

That's just a basic historical fact, Buckley's self-serving narrative notwithstanding.

Breeding Backlash (A.K.A. Narrative, Not News Cycles)

Marc Ambinder has been arguing all day today - he's on my teevee! in my twitter! on the blogs! - that the astroturfed health care protests by crazy rightwing activists present a real problem for Obama and the left because they represent "real" anger. Here are just a few of his Tweets from earlier today:

H/c protesters are mix of artificial and real. Point is: they're THERE.

Protests and rallies can be organized and still reflect valid concerns. Liberals don't complain when their groups successfully organize.

I posit that there is no meaningful distinction b/w grassroots, organized and spontaneous gatherings in the modern world.

Liberals might not think the anger is legitimate, but that's the question to be argued, not to be assumed.

Basic point: liberals ignore the _reality_ of these protests (even when they're contrived) at their peril.

I responded with a series of Tweets myself, but since you can find them on Twitter, I'll summarize them by saying: Yes, they exist. No, there's no proof that the content of these protests are any more real (in the sense that they are generalizable to the wider population of voters) than the birthers (more on that later). And most importantly, never ever forget that not all protests are created equal. Tactics matter.

On that last point, Ben Smith is dead on

Yes, there is now much energy on the right.

But much like those angry crowds that populated McCain and Palin rallies last fall (recall "he's an Arab"), there is danger in such raw passion.

See, as one Dem points out, the much-watched Lloyd Doggett video today. Go to about a the 2:00 minute mark and you'll find a guy carrying a kid on his shoulders and hoisting a sign with the Nazi "SS" lettering.

Recall also the hanging in effigy of another Dem congressman last week at an anti-health care rally.

These are the sort of excessive displays that breed a backlash. 

I think its actually worse than that. So far, these protesters are almost universally acting in ways designed to disrupt town hall meetings. They show up and start shouting, with the hope of shutting the entire event down. Among other things, that's extremely rude. And Americans don't like rudeness. Throw in the Nazi imagery, the graphic anti-abortin literature, the birth certificates, and everything else, and you've got a mess almost perfectly designed to create a backlash.

Will the mess succeed in shutting down some town halls? Of course? Is there any way to prevent this? In a country that protects free speech, it is and should be extremely difficult. Will these tactics help the protestors and their backers accomplish their political goals? Its very difficult for me to image how that would happen.

The right is making the same mistake that the left made back in the 1970s and 1980s. As a rule, shouting down your opponents might work for a day or a week, but they are almost certain to be a miserable failure beyond that. When protests are carefully targeted, on message, and innovative, they work. When they are not, they fail. When they come across as disorganized, they hurt their own movement. And when they come across as needlessly obnoxious, they create a backlash.

Now, to be clear: I am not suggesting that the left simply sit back and wait for the right to make fools out of themselves. The backlash won't create itself. Get out there and start filming town hall meetings. Show the world just how insane these people really are. At the top, the leaders need to start proactively framing these protests in language that focuses on their tactics. Town Hall meetings are supposed to be a discussion about the issues. If they want to argue about health care, great! But by shouting, they are preventing themselves and their fellow citizens from having that discussion.And don't scold. Get angry on behalf of the people you represent. You know, the ones who are sitting their silently, watching the whole thing unfold around them.

Silent maj.... Silent major.... I swear that's a parallel for this in out recent past. If only I could think of what it was. Silent majori..... Hmm....

UPDATE: Steve Benen nails it:

This is not to say all opponents of reform are radical extremists. The point, though, is that conservatives run a risk of convincing the American mainstream that the only people worked up in opposition to health care reform are nutjobs.

That's as perfect a description of Nixon's Silent Majority strategy as you can get.

In our media saturated world, the crazies are always in danger of discrediting the movement. One or two nutters isn't a problem. But once you start seeing them all over the place, they very quickly become the face of the movement.

Think, for example, of the Weathermen. Or the Yuppies. In each case, they don't represent a majority of either the wider public or the movements of which they were a part. But because they were good at getting noticed, they are remembered as leaders. And not because historians have paid too much attention to them, but because people alive at the time considered them as such.

Bottom line: Crazy people can't help build a movement. They can't lead a movement. They can't strengthen a movement. They can do nothing but discredit a movement. Assuming, of course, that the world comes to understand them as crazy.

UPDATE II: More like this, please!

A key part of the developing strategy: ridicule the opposition -- and portray those who disrupt meetings with loud chants and signs as part of the same ilk of people who showed up at campaign rallies for John McCain and Sarah Palin right after the 2008 Republican National Convention. At those rallies, some supporters hurled racist remarks and displayed objectionable signs; McCain himself was forced to respond to a questioner who called Obama a "Muslim," to the applause of others in the crowd. To this day, McCain aides maintain that the media inflated the number of reactionairies reactionaries in the crowd, abetted by an Obama campaign that was all too happy to point them out.

A party strategist e-mailed around a clip from Rep. Lloyd Doggett's town hall meeting. At one point, a sign featuring Nazi lettering can be seen. Another strategist with ties to the White House made sure to point out that a popular sign at these rallies features Obama, in Shepherd Fairy-esque ink, as the Joker (although it's not clear how many signs have been seen at actual rallies.) . A White House official pointed to press secretary Robert Gibbs's comparison to the 2000 "protest" at Miami-Dade county election headquarters organized and peopled with young conservative lawyers.

Patronizing opponents is a tried and true tradition in Washington, and Democrats have used the tactic with success. They ridiculed the hundreds of thousands of conservatives who protested the stimulus package as "tea baggers."

But Republicans are just as responsible for the perception. The folks who tend to show up at protest events tend to be to the right of the mean in the party. And, as the spread of the birther movement demonstrates, not a small chunk of these Republicans are reactionaries. The challenge for the White House and Democrats is that they find a way to separate genuinely anxious conservatives who ask good questions -- even if those questions are provided by conservative groups -- and the crazies who tend to pack town hall meetings.

Except that last part makes no sense. These people aren't showing up to ask questions. They are showing up to scream and shout, and if necessary, shut the whole event down. Like this:

There is no need to separate the two, because as Ambinder points out, they are already separated. And the second group, the "crazies who tend to pack town hall meetings," will discredit the first. If we play this right, they will dominate the news cycle, become the narrative, and discredit the opposition.

Want more?

Jon Cohn: The Mob Is Not The Majority
Bill Scher: A Right-Wing Mob Is Not a Majority
Ruy Teixeira: Public Opinion Snapshot: Health Care Reform Still Popular
Glenn Thrush: Doggett calls protesters a 'mob'
Greg Sargent: Anti-Reform Group Takes Credit For Helping Gin Up Town Hall Rallies
Jon Cohn: Don't Whine. Organize.
Steve Benen: Gibbs Notices The Brooks Brothers Brigade At Work
Steve Benen: The Force Behind The Harassment Strategy

Just Words?

Do you love words? Do you love Jefferson? Then you will love this.

John Yoo: Worse That You Think

I'm a bit late getting to this, but it is important enough that I want to come back around anyway.

Late last week, John Yoo, the Bush Administration lawyer who wrote the legal memos clearing the way for the torture of prisoners in US custody, wrote an op ed for the Wall St. Journal in which he once again defended himself and the policies his memos helped create. And as is always the case with this guy, he deliberately and willfully distorted the truth as he did so.

Take, as your first example, paragraph four:

It is absurd to think that a law like FISA should restrict live military operations against potential attacks on the United States. Congress enacted FISA during the waning days of the Cold War. As the 9/11 Commission found, FISA's wall between domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence proved dysfunctional and contributed to our government's failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks.

Yoo's right: it is absurd to think that a law like FISA should restrict live military operations. Why? Because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) does no such thing! It governs the collection of intelligence, not the conduct of "live" military operations, which during the Cold War were potentially far more dangerous than anything we face today. And that "wall" that he makes reference to in the last section? FISA says nothing about that, as the 9/11 Commission report makes clear. The "wall" was a policy constructed within the DOJ in reaction to a number of different considerations, and after 9/11 it was eliminated without changing or violating FISA in any way.

But that's not the worst part. Check paragraph seven:

The power to protect the nation, said Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist, "ought to exist without limitation," because "it is impossible to foresee or define the extent and variety of national exigencies, or the correspondent extent & variety of the means which may be necessary to satisfy them." To limit the president's constitutional power to protect the nation from foreign threats is simply foolhardy. Hamilton observed that "decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch will generally characterize the proceedings of one man, in a much more eminent degree, than the proceedings of any greater number." "Energy in the executive," he reiterated, "is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks."

Long-time readers of this blog know that back during the man national security debates of the Bush Administration, I loved to quote the Federalist. Which is why as soon as I read this my head nearly exploded. 

Yes, Alexander Hamilton wanted the President to be as powerful as a king. But even he didn't believe the things Yoo is suggesting here. How do I know, because I can read! Here's the relevant quote, with the parts Yoo left out in italics, and the part he quoted in bold:

The authorities essential to the common defense are these: to raise armies; to build and equip fleets; to prescribe rules for the government of both; to direct their operations; to provide for their support. These powers ought to exist without limitation, because it is impossible to foresee or define the extent and variety of national exigencies, or the correspondent extent and variety of the means which may be necessary to satisfy them. The circumstances that endanger the safety of nations are infinite, and for this reason no constitutional shackles can wisely be imposed on the power to which the care of it is committed. This power ought to be coextensive with all the possible combinations of such circumstances; and ought to be under the direction of the same councils which are appointed to preside over the common defense.

Notice anything in the line just before the portion Yoo quoted? What "ought to exist without limitation" isn't, as Yoo suggests, "the power to protect the nation," but is instead a set of very specific powers that, in Hamilton's words, "ought to be under the direction of the same councils which are appointed to preside over the common defense." And as any student of American politics knows, under our Constitution the "councils" granted those specific powers are the Congress, not the Executive! Article II, Section 8:

The Congress shall have Power To...

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

And of course it isn't a coincidence that the language used by Hamilton almost perfectly mirrors the languages of the Constitution itself, because of course the Federalist was written as part of a campaign by Hamilton, Madison and Jay to argue on behalf of ratification!

Which bring me back around to Yoo. We know he can read, if for no other reason than that he left out the parts of Hamilton's quote most damaging to his argument. And by extension, we know he's not stupid. Which means we can safely conclude, I think, that he's a lying douchebag. For the record, of course...

Quotes of the Day

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I know white Southerners, and the GOP gets tired of being tarred with the racist tag. That said, it's worth considering that black people get tired of being the targets of people who are tired of being tarred with the racist tag.

More TNC:

I imagine for a kid coming up in these times, in certain sectors of the South, it's painful to face up to... the notion that the pomp and glamour, all the talk of honor and independence was, at the end of the day, dependent on slavery. The Lost Cause isn't just "lost," it's barely a cause. 

The temptation to continue to lie, to see yourself as the victim in a grand play is formidable--consider Lindsay Graham chafing at the constraints of whiteness, while Sonia Sotamayor evidently swims in a free world of color. But I suspect that some manner of change is coming, that we are reaching point when witlessly honoring the founder of the greatest perpetrator of domestic terrorism in American history, when flying that sorry order's battle flag, becomes embarrassing. Sooner or later, I think the South will understand that the ideology of "noble victimhood" is a luxury it too can ill-afford. Some will hold out, I am sure. But sooner or later, I think most of the South will be black like me. 

I have to say, TNC has more faith in the South than I do. Unless you put the stress on the word "later" in that last sentence, that is.

Quote of the Day

From Bill Clinton:

The point I'm making is, you wouldn't even think about that if you never read a book; if you had no sense of history; if you were under the illusion that because you were on the Internet everything about you was new and everything was special and all that mattered was what you blurted out in the moment that was on your mind

Context here.

Entirely Predictable, But Nevertheless Outrageous

The Obama Administration released a number of previously secret Dept. of Justice memos today. Keeping to the new "less posts, longer posts" format of this blog, I was planning on waiting until the weekend to discuss this. But then I read this, and I just can't wait:

The Justice Department secretly authorized President George Bush to use the military inside the United States to snoop on, raid and even kill citizens in order to fight terrorism without regard to the Fourth or Fifth Amendment, according to a Oct 23, 2001 memo released by the Obama Administration Monday.

"We do not think a military commander carrying out a raid on a terrorist cell would be required to demonstrate probable cause or to obtain a warrant," the Office of Legal Counsel memo (.pdf) said. "We think that the better view is that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to domestic military operations designed to deter and prevent future terrorist attacks."

...The memo found that the military could be deployed widely within the United States without being subject to the limits of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Those actions include using the National Security Agency to spy on communications inside the United States without getting court approval -- as the Bush Admnistration admitted it did for years.

"Military action might encompass making arrests, seizing documents or other property, searchring persons or places or keeping them under surveillance, intercepting electronic or wireless communications, setting up roadblocks, interviewing witnesses and searching for suspects," the duo wrote.

It was be news to the men who wrote and ratified the Fourth Amendment that it was not intended to cover military officials. Read the text:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized

Notice that this is a "right of the people," and that there is no mention whatsoever of who is being prevented from "violating" that right. More to the point, during the Colonial period, there was often little or no distinction between British military and civilian officials. Colonial Governors quite often used the British military to enforce their warrants, particularly when they involved shipping.

There is no textual basis for this interpretation. There is no historical basis for this interoperation. It is, so far as I can tell, entirely made up. So much for that whole "strict constructionist" thing, huh?

UPDATE: From last night's Maddow:

And while I'm updating, why not offer another great quote from John Yoo?

First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.

Not to belabor the point, but... the level of historical ignorance at work here is astonishing. The First Amendment was written and ratified in the aftermath of a war fought to defend political rights like, oh, I don't know... the ones enshrined in the First Amendment.