2000 Elections

Wednesday, Jan 30, 2002 4:45 PM UTC

Vote of no confidence

A self-described "election junkie" surveys dozens of books about the 2000 presidential contest and arrives at some troubling conclusions.

By John W. Dean

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By my count, the 36 days following the Nov. 7, 2000, presidential election generated not less than 36 books and one Ph.D. dissertation, plus countless articles and essays. To examine and understand the historic Florida vote count, however, no reasonable person is going to read all this material, excepting perhaps another Ph.D. dissertator. Nonetheless, being an election junkie, I was sufficiently interested to read almost half of them.

Many observers believe that the 2000 presidential election story is over and dead. I don’t. Rather, I think these events are going to return to haunt future elections, not to mention the Senate confirmation hearing of the next nominee to fill any vacancy on the United States Supreme Court. For example, after reading these books, I would not be surprised to discover that Enron’s political largess was somehow involved in the Florida vote-counting debacle.

Most of the book-length efforts at recounting, explaining, criticizing and justifying the 36-day imbroglio have been ignored. Clearly, some books have been victims of the tragedy of Sept. 11, which rendered Election 2000 irrelevant, passi.

Yet even before that, only two Election 2000 books had attracted any real attention; former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s “The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President” spent six weeks on the New York Times paperback bestseller list, and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz’s “Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000″ enjoyed seven weeks of New York Times bestsellerdom.

Both books (which were reviewed by Salon), however, had fallen off the New York Times list a month before the terrorist attacks. I read Dershowitz’s broadside on the Supreme Court’s majority ruling in Bush vs. Gore for the same reason that people stop to watch a wrecking ball knock down a building. The professor does not disappoint. He does a smashing job … so to speak.

Similarly, I couldn’t resist mince-no-words Vincent Bugliosi, who makes Dershowitz appear shy as he asserts that the five justices who “literally stole a presidential election” did so because “they had, incubating inside them, the most squalid of characters, a lowness that may never have manifested itself if they had never been presented with this situation.”

More specifically, “these five justices are criminals in every true sense of the word, and in a fair and just world belong behind prison bars as much as any American white-collar criminal who ever lived.”

A seasoned senior editor at a New York publishing house told me shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack that all the Election 2000 books still in the publishing pipeline — and there were many — would be DOA; even those by previously bestselling authors like Jeffrey Toobin would tank. He was correct. No other Election 2000 book would become a bestseller.

Certainly, after Sept. 11, my own thoughts and reading turned from the election debacle to understanding terrorism. But as that clear and present danger has seemingly diminished, my interest in all those Election 2000 books was revived.

I decided to take a serious look. Leaving aside institutional books (those prepared by Lexis-Nexis, Congressional Quarterly, the New York Times, the National Commission on Election Standards and Reform, and the like), as well as those I had already read (Dershowitz, Bugliosi, Jake Tapper and Bruce Ackerman, to name a few), I selected nine more authors I thought might be worth adding to my library. There were a few surprises, both good and bad.

Because most of these books are highly critical of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bush vs. Gore, I was particularly interested in any that defended the high court’s action. They are few, with the most prominent being “Breaking the Deadlock: The 2000 Election, the Constitution, and the Courts” by Federal Court of Appeals Judge Richard A. Posner. While a partisan, Judge Posner is always judicious.

Having read many of the prolific judge’s writings — indeed I’m reading his latest on “Public Intellectuals” as I write this — I found that his Election 2000 apologia may be the worst book he has ever written. It is poorly organized and so thinly argued that it is difficult to find justification for his conclusion “that the Florida Supreme Court acted unreasonably and that the U.S. Supreme Court did not — which is not the same thing as saying that the Court’s decision was correct. That is a close question, perhaps unanswerable.”

Posner’s less than ringing defense of Bush vs. Gore is typified by his claim that the “decision is not lawless merely because the majority opinion is weak, especially when pressure of time made it impossible for merely human judges to do a good job.” But this rushed-ruling argument ignores the fact that each of the four dissenting justices managed to assemble well-reasoned, articulate arguments that eviscerated their conservative colleagues’ thoughtless work. Judge Posner’s public intellectualism on Election 2000 will disappoint even his most ardent fans. It did me, anyway.

A book that I consider a great “little” find is Fordham law professor Abner Greene’s “Understanding the 2000 Election: A Guide to the Legal Battles That Decided the Presidency.” This concise volume does exactly what it promises. Greene explains what happened during the various legal proceedings and why.

He offers commentary rather than criticism. This book can serve as a terrific summary reference work for students, journalists and others interested in getting a quick handle on the many legal actions involved during the Florida vote count.

However, for a fuller account of the legal machinations — and a similarly dispassionate, scholarly and accessible analysis — there is the work of University of Southern California political science professor Howard Gillman, “The Votes That Counted: How the Court Decided the 2000 Presidential Election.” Gillman’s analysis is often striking, not by reason of his rhetoric, but rather because of his cold logic and lucid arguments.

Particularly powerful (as well as carefully and tightly reasoned) is Gillman’s analysis and conclusion — which is the exact opposite of Posner’s — that the Florida Supreme Court acted in a nonpartisan manner while the U.S. Supreme Court acted in a partisan fashion.

He states: “The five justices in the Bush v. Gore majority are … the only judges involved in this election dispute who fall uniquely within the category that is most indicative of partisan justice: they made a decision that was consistent with their political preferences but inconsistent with precedent and inconsistent with what would have been predicted given their views in other cases.”

Not all the authors discussed here focus on the monthlong festival of bickering lawyers as they carried briefs for either Bush or Gore in and out of Florida and federal courtrooms. The legal activity that culminated in the controversial landmark Bush vs. Gore ruling was not the sum total of the story. Actually, for most authors examining the 36-day Florida vote contest, Bush vs. Gore was merely the story’s finale.

Larry J. Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist, succinctly covers the full spectrum. Professor Sabato (with UVA colleague Joshua Scott) introduces an anthology of thoughts and commentary from both participants and observers in “Overtime! The Election 2000 Thriller.”

For me, the most interesting essays were those by Gore’s legal advisors Ron Klain and Jeremy Bash (explaining what they tried to do) and by Bush’s legal advisor George Terwilliger III (explaining his team’s efforts), and Jake Tapper’s revealing essay, “Down and Dirty, Revisited: A Postscript on Florida and the News Media.”

As Salon readers know, Tapper covered the election, including the Florida vote-counting phase. He writes for Sabato about researching his book, “Down and Dirty: The Plot to Steal the Presidency,” and reports that when he returned to Florida after it was all over he discovered he “was learning tons. Waaaaaay too much. It was unnerving how much I did not know.”

Even more striking, Tapper writes, he was virtually alone as a journalist digging out the details of what had actually happened. Tapper found that once Bush had been elected, his colleagues in the news media turned away from the story. And this was long before Sept. 11.

The failure of the mainstream news media, particularly television news, during Election 2000 is a central theme of University of California philosophy professor Douglas Kellner’s book, “Grand Theft 2000: Media Spectacle and a Stolen Election.”

Kellner asserts that the mainstream news media “failed in their task of providing probing investigative journalism, intelligent analysis and critique of partisan positions, and independent analysis of the stakes of the combat in the events such as the struggle for the presidency that followed Election 2000.” Employing the tools of critical social and media theory analysis (but explaining his findings in lay terms), he persuasively documents the basis of his conclusions, not only regarding the media’s failure, but also supporting his contention that the Republicans stole the presidency.

Before joining the UCLA faculty in 1997, Douglas Kellner was at the University of Texas in Austin. As an experienced Bush watcher, he offers this heads up: “The coming Bushgate will be the inexorable and possibly cascading torrent of revelations that will uncover the slimy political and economic history of the Bush dynasty, the particular scandals that George W. Bush has been involved in, the correlation between the contributors to the Bush campaign and his actual policies, and the hopeful uncovering and dissemination of the manipulations, machinations, and possible criminality involved in his theft of Election 2000.”

Given the current headlines about Enron’s colossal failure and its close ties to the Bush administration, it is not easy to dismiss Kellner’s charge as mere Bush bashing by a left-leaning scholar. To the contrary, I found myself carefully rereading parts of Kellner’s book where he addresses the media’s failure “to pursue George W. Bush’s family history, scandalous business career, dubious record as governor, lack of qualifications for the presidency, and serious character flaws.”

If Kellner is correct, Enron may prove a calamity for George Bush. Still, if Enron is covered by the mainstream media as poorly as Kellner asserts they covered the 2000 election, Bush will survive it.

Without doubt, the best title of the bunch belongs to John Nichols, Washington correspondent of the Nation magazine and author of “Jews for Buchanan.” While his subtitle slightly distracts, it lets you know where he’s headed: “Did You Hear the One About the Theft of the American Presidency?”

This diminutive paperback, about six inches by six inches, could be mistaken for a novelty book on Election 2000. And indeed, it is fun and funny, but its humor is deadly — for the Bush folks.

“Jews for Buchanan” is filled with amusing quips, cartoons and more than incongruous — but apparently authentic — e-mail from a recused Florida governor, John Ellis “Jeb” Bush. No presidential election is complete without the observations of gonzo journalist Dr. Hunter Thompson, which can be found in this small volume: “Bush didn’t actually steal the White House from Al Gore, he just brutally wrestled it away from him in the darkness of one swampy Florida night. Gore got mugged, and the local cops don’t give a damn.”

Also, Nichols has included an exclusive interview with Pat Buchanan: “Look, I am not unaware of what 20 years of accusations in the media can do to your reputation. Remember, I worked for Richard Nixon. I heard one old fellow in Palm Beach County say he would sooner vote for Farrakhan than Pat Buchanan.”

The delight of Nichols’ effort is its brevity, his light-handed but relentless deconstruction of the vital events leading to Bush’s Florida victory. This is wit worth taking seriously.

While reading all these accounts, I expected the experience to be like watching Akira Kurosawa’s “Rashomon,” the Japanese film masterpiece showing the varying perceptions that people can have of the same event. Remarkably, this did not happen. The underlying story, told from varying viewpoints and focuses, is consistently reported.

This is not to say that all the books rehash the same account. To the contrary. Take the analysis by two working journalists, both of whom are trained as lawyers: David Kaplan, who is a senior writer for Newsweek magazine, and Jeffrey Toobin, who writes for the New Yorker.

Kaplan’s “The Accidental President: How 413 Lawyers, 9 Supreme Court Justices, and 5,963,110 Floridians (Give or Take a Few) Landed George W. Bush In the White House” reports the same events as Toobin’s “Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election,” but relies on different details, with only a few exceptions. When they happen to deal with the same facts, they rarely disagree, although there are a few irrelevant discrepancies.

For example, both report on an interesting tidbit previously known to no one outside the Gore camp. Al Gore wanted to get Erin Brockovich, who had organized victims of corporate pollution, involved with the recount. Apparently, the vice president had seen Julia Roberts’ portrayal of Brockovich, which was on screens everywhere at the time. So Al called Erin.

Kaplan writes that Ron Klain had no problem with bringing Brockovich into the recount undertaking, but deferred to Michael Whouley, the aide who was out collecting affidavits from voters; Whouley, Kaplan reports, thought it would be a disaster. Toobin writes that it was Ron Klain who turned Gore off the idea. The difference is irrelevant, however, because obviously Gore listened to someone, and as a result avoided being savaged by late-night comics who could have found endless material in his hiring of Brockovich.

Both Kaplan and Toobin report on the inner workings of the Gore and Bush camps. Both found Gore far more restrained than Bush, for Bush’s operatives had only one goal in Florida — winning.

While Gore wanted to win, he did not want to offend anyone in the process. The Bush team could not have cared less about who they offended. Maybe Gore should have hired Brockovich, for she doesn’t work on a leash. And her arrival in Florida might have given a freer rein to the entire Gore team.

David Kaplan concludes that George W. Bush became president because of a fluke, a series of aberrant events, and because he got lucky. Jeffrey Toobin thinks that Gore lost Florida because he was overly concerned about elite opinion makers, men and women who write the editorials for the New York Times and the Washington Post, rather than with doing what was necessary to win. Kaplan’s writing is highly entertaining; Toobin’s eloquence flows beautifully. Either or both might have been bestsellers had Osama bin Laden not let loose his twisted wrath on America.

Of all the books reviewed here, however, I found none more enjoyable and informative, from a very different perspective, than CNN senior political analyst Jeff Greenfield’s “Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow! Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish In American History.” This is a look inside CNN’s Election 2000 coverage.

Greenfield tells how CNN and the other news organizations mistakenly called the winner of the presidential race not once, but twice. He provides a feel for the off-camera drama of covering this historic election, showing both the show business side of television news, as well as the backstage nitty-gritty of anchors and analysts cramming their heads, or notecards, full of interesting facts and figures to fill the airtime. Greenfield makes no effort to justify the goofs, rather he reveals how they so easily happened.

Greenfield explains how exit polls work — or sometimes don’t work — how TV news organizations (CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News and AP) underwrite, at a total cost of $33 million, the gathering of exit poll information by Voter News Service. Each news organization has its own analyst who evaluates the VNS data, along with a small percentage of actual voting returns, to make the call on the winners and losers, usually within minutes of the polls’ closing.

While exit polls have strengths (they are directed at actual voters with fresh memories), they also have weaknesses (they do not always include sufficient absentee ballots, which must be accounted for based on samplings that can be flawed). Florida, it became clear after the fact, was statistically too close to call.

Jeff Greenfield, who went to Yale Law School with Sen. Joe Lieberman, addresses both legal and political matters. His writing percolates, particularly when he reconstructs what he was thinking during various crises and events. Unfortunately, this terrific book is flawed by the failure to include an index.

I could easily fill another book with what I gleaned from the Election 2000 books that now fill my shelf. But you should know a few bottom-line facts I learned from my reading. For these, the evidence is overwhelming, and the conclusions are inescapable, if not irrefutable:

Al Gore, to win in Florida, should not have restrained his Florida team, worrying unnecessarily that the establishment elite would be unhappy with him, for if he had taken the attitude of his opponent — Bush was prepared to tie up the election indefinitely, if necessary — he could have prevailed in the Florida recount. He had more actual votes than Bush, not to mention more voters who were disenfranchised by Florida election errors. In truth, he won the Florida vote, but lost the recount.
Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s behind-the-scenes efforts and influence are still not fully known, but his presence was felt everywhere during the recount, assuring his brother’s team a win. Jeb Bush’s influence helped open doors for George W. Bush, and closed doors for Gore. This part of the story still remains to be told.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s intervention into the Florida recount was pure partisan politics, driven by the court’s conservative majority, and their actions resulted in one of the high court’s most shameful decisions ever.
Finally, until we modernize our presidential election processes and procedures with new laws (and, if necessary, a constitutional amendment to abolish the outmoded electoral college), another presidential election debacle could easily, and very likely will, occur again.

John W. Dean served as counsel to President Nixon from 1970 to 1973. He now writes a column for Findlaw and is the author of several books, with the next to be published in January 2004, a biography of Warren G. Harding. . More John W. Dean.

Saturday, Sep 3, 2011 10:03 PM UTC

The “Saturday Night Live” of the West Bank

A hit satire show on the West Bank wrings laughs from the Occupation -- and gets canceled for humor that hits home

By Joel Warner

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(Credit: Joel)

The hit Palestinian TV satire show “Watan ala Watar” began its Aug. 14 episode with a sketch featuring Palestinian Attorney General Ahmad Mughani getting besieged by Palestinians filing lawsuits over “Watan ala Watar” making fun of them. One woman says in Arabic that the TV show hadn’t parodied her yet, but she’s sure it’s going to, so she wants to file suit preemptively. In the middle of the commotion, the frazzled Mughani, played by “Watan ala Watar” co-creator Imad Farajin, gets a phone call: “Watan ala Watar,” it turns out, just made fun of him, too.

The sketch ends by showing Farajin and his “Watan ala Watar” colleagues one year later, silently clowning around, suggesting that even if Mughani and his government cohorts muzzle them, that won’t stop the comedy crew’s high jinks.

Those high jinks have been a runaway success since “Watan ala Watar,” aka “Homeland on a String,” hit the airwaves in 2009, the first political satire show ever broadcast on Palestinian TV. The weekly 15-minute show’s three creators became local celebrities in the West Bank capitol of Ramallah, where they live and work, and episodes became a must-watch phenomenon, especially during Ramadan, when the show ratchets up to a nightly schedule. The holy month is akin to a U.S. “sweeps” period, with everybody at home by the TV. Last year, a local polling organization found that 60 percent of those in the West Bank and Gaza who’d seen “Watan ala Watar” actively approved of it — far higher approval ratings than those of either Fatah or Hamas, the two major political parties.

From the start, the show enjoyed a surprising amount of editorial freedom, considering that it aired on state-run television in the Middle East. “We told officials there would be one condition: no censorship,” says the show’s 30-something co-creator Manal Awad, who dresses in stylish, modern clothes and speaks English with a heavy British accent, courtesy of her time in London where she got a master’s degree in theater directing.

Palestinian officialdom agreed, allowing the show to air a sketch in which progress on an Israeli peace deal is announced by Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas — that is, Mahmoud Abbas the 13th, at a time 500 years in the future. Hamas, the Islamist party governing the Gaza Strip, received its share of knocks, too. One skit featured an Islamist judge making eyes at a male courtroom reporter. While Hamas’ Ministry of Information has called “Watan ala Watar” “an example of black propaganda,” the show has long enjoyed the blessing of the Palestinian Authority. Yasser Abed Rabbo, one of President Abbas’ closest advisors and head of Palestine TV, even played himself on the show.

Most promising of all, during this year’s Ramadan, “Watan ala Watar” had competition: “EscotChat,” a new sketch comedy show that aired 20 minutes later. “Five years from now, you will find comedy clubs and comedy series here, and not just ‘EscotChat’ and ‘Watan ala Watar,’”says Ihab Al-Jarere, “EscotChat’s” creator.

“Watan ala Watar,” it seemed, was helping Palestinians ascend the Middle Eastern comedy ladder, the unofficial scale in which Egyptians are considered to be the funniest of the funny and the Jordanians the exact opposite. (As one Palestinian joke goes, “Have you heard the one about the Jordanian businessman? Every morning before work he puts on his shirt, tie and angry face.”)

But then, two days after “Watan ala Watar’s” skit about the attorney general sketch aired, Palestine dropped a few comedy rungs closer to Jordan. Mughani, in a move reminiscent of the skit itself, pulled the show off the air.

It had told one controversial joke too many — and Mughani and his cronies weren’t the only ones not laughing. Recently, the show had diversified its subject matter, turning its satirical gaze upon Palestinian society itself. “We criticize all the governments, Hamas and Fatah, but they haven’t changed since we started,”says Awad. “We needed new figures to criticize.”

That’s why in one recent sketch, the show took on the local medical industry’s outdated practice of settling malpractice issues outside of court with informal payoffs, depicting a doctor and a grieving mother bargaining over a dead baby as if haggling over prices at the market. Another episode satirized the shabbiness of Palestinian Authority police. In the skit, officers on the lookout for drunk drivers couldn’t afford breathalyzers, so they’re forced to smell the scofflaws’ breath — and get drunk themselves off the fumes.

Those jokes didn’t go over so well. While local politicians had been fair game (maybe because in territories still controlled by Israel, the Palestinian Authority doesn’t have much authority at all), the Palestinian elite apparently was not. The local police and the physicians’ union filed grievances, and “Watan ala Watar’s” creators say that for the first time ever, officials censored them. Meanwhile, newspaper opinion pieces called the show a disgrace, and somebody hacked the TV show’s Facebook page, causing it to lose 40,000-plus fans.

Then, on Aug. 16, the attorney general, noting the complaints, pulled the plug. “Watan ala Watar” hasn’t been on since, with “EscotChat” moving into its time slot. “I thought this season was going to be a really, really huge success,” sighs Awad between puffs of an ever-present cigarette. “I didn’t expect this really aggressive reaction against us.”

This wasn’t the only recent aggressive reaction to artistic rabble rousing in Palestine. In April, a masked gunman shot and killed Juliano Mer-Khamis, founder of the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank, a murder that’s still unsolved. While Palestinians mourned his death as a national tragedy, some weren’t surprised: Mer-Khamis was a half-Jewish artist and activist who was always pushing the cultural envelope, staging versions of Animal Farm that featured boys and girls onstage together, wearing pig masks and criticizing the revolution. As Awad says of Mer-Khamis’ murder, “You can’t force new thoughts on people. Bit by bit, you have to work with them.” Maybe Awad and her colleagues had been guilty of the same mistake.

Do such developments suggest the people here aren’t yet ready to laugh at themselves? Is comedy in Palestine as stagnant as the peace process?

Far from it, in fact. There has always been humor in Palestine,” says Sharif Kanaana, a Palestinian folklore professor who’s been collecting local jokes since 1989, from the jubilant highs of the two intifadas (where many zingers involved street kids getting the better of Israeli soldiers) to the disillusioned lows in between. (A typical post-intifada joke goes, “Several heads of state meet with God and make requests for their people. To each, God says, “Not in your lifetime.” Then Yasser Arafat asks for his people’s freedom and God says, “Not in my lifetime.”) “It’s not just fun and entertainment,”says Kanaana. “It is a pan-human way of people expressing themselves.”

And in a place defined by absurdity — where the beach is a few miles away but people in the West Bank have to hopscotch though Jordan and Cyprus to get there — if Palestinians aren’t allowed to express themselves through laughter, what else do they have left?

That’s why the people haven’t taken “Watan ala Watar’s” shutdown lightly. Hundreds have signed on to Facebook campaigns such as “People against the decision to stop broadcasting Watan ala Watar,”and “People want Watan ala Watar,” and in Bethlehem, protesters marched against the decision.

Many officials agree with them. “This decision of the attorney general is bad news and, in my opinion, is wrong,” says Palestinian Authority spokesman Ghassan Khatib. “I think I speak for Prime Minister Salam Fayyad as well.” Politicians such as Fayyad are savvy enough to know that in a period where Middle Eastern dictators are falling left and right, now is not the time to crack down on free speech.

While “Watan ala Watar’s” shutdown could be bad news for the Palestinian Authority, it could end up being good news for the comedians behind the show. Headline-grabbing controversies, after all, are a comedian’s bread and butter. Awad hints that Watan ala Watar is already fielding offers from other media outlets, and the hubbub may even score the show attention in Israel. “I haven’t heard of them, but it’s a shame that they were shut down,” says David Kilimnick, an Israeli comic who owns the Off the Wall Comedy Basement club in Jerusalem. “I wouldn’t be against giving them a stage here.”

In the meantime, Palestinians can catch a glimpse of “Watan ala Watar” at the three comedians’ weekly live show at an upscale open-air restaurant in Ramallah. Two days after being pulled off the air, the trio took the stage there armed with timely material. As television news cameras rolled, the three apologized for being late. They said they had been detained at Attorney General Mughani’s house. “Watan ala Watar” may be muzzled by the authorities, but that’s not going to stop them from clowning around.

Joel Warner, who blogs for Wired.com and Psychology Today, is co-authoring a book about traveling around the world with a humor professor in search of what makes things funny. Find out more at Humorcode.com and on Twitter @HumorCode.

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Thursday, Dec 16, 2010 6:17 PM UTC

It’s still OK to hate Joe Lieberman

Sure, he's fighting to repeal "don't ask, don't tell." He's also still a sanctimonious troll

By Alex Pareene

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Joe Lieberman

It looks very much like “don’t ask, don’t tell” will finally be repealed, 17 years after the discriminatory policy was enacted. And it’s thanks, in very large part, to the tireless work of independent/”Connecticut for Lieberman” Sen. Joe Lieberman. Yep, Joe Lieberman, the single most annoying man in the United States Senate — the august home, since the days of our founders, of America’s most annoying citizens — was instrumental in righting a fundamental injustice. Andrew Sullivan has anointed him a “civil rights hero,” and barring some last-minute betrayal or successful Republican attempt to delay the vote until the New Year, he may actually earn the title.

But it’s still totally OK to hate the guy.

Seriously.

Seven months ago the guy introduced a bill that would automatically strip Americans of their citizenship if they were charged with “a terrorist act.” He named it “the TEA Act.” Why did he do that? Because he’s a political troll. Not in the “living under a bridge eating goats” sense, but in the old Usenet sense of someone who purposefully enrages and frustrates members of a community, while pretending to have no idea what he’s doing.

Joe Lieberman gets his kicks trolling the left — how else to explain why he nearly torpedoed the fragile healthcare reform process by blatantly reversing himself on the Medicare buy-in?

Liberals used to be told that while Lieberman was a hawk, he was a reliable liberal Democrat on domestic issues. That reliable liberal Democrat recently promised to fight to his last breath to protect the rights of our richest citizens to have smaller tax bills.

Even before Iraq, this was the guy who took to the Senate floor to ponder “the moral consequences for our country” of Bill Clinton’s misbehavior. He regularly flirted with banning “indecent” music and video games. Before Al Gore picked him as his running mate — whereupon Lieberman did all he could to sink the campaign from within, by throwing his debate with Cheney and repeating GOP talking points during the recount — Lieberman even voiced support for Social Security privatization.

That whole miserable history of sanctimonious opportunism aside, it’s true that Joe Lieberman has always proudly fought for the rights of gay and lesbians to serve openly in our armed forces.

While his opposition to “don’t ask, don’t tell” is one of the handful of positions Joe Lieberman hasn’t reversed himself on, his support for gays in the military is pretty much directly tied to his blood lust. Of course he wants gay people in the military — he wants everyone in the military, and he wants the military everywhere. He supports the right of every American to serve his or her country regardless of race, creed, color or sexual orientation, and he also supports making those brave young heroes invade and occupy the entire Middle East, forever.

So you’re still OK hating the guy.

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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Wednesday, Sep 1, 2010 4:01 PM UTC

Maureen Dowd phones in world’s worst Obama speech reaction column

The New York Times columnist talks about the new Oval Office carpet, and makes ancient Al Gore jokes

By Alex Pareene

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Maureen Dowd

Award-winning New York Times Op-Ed columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a political column about Barack Obama’s speech last night! Of course the column had to be finished in time for this morning’s paper, so it was obviously written in 10 minutes or so yesterday afternoon, before the speech was actually delivered. There is a joke about Al Gore and “earth tones” in the very first sentence of this column on Barack Obama’s speech about the Iraq war.

An earth tones joke. In the year 2010.

The “earth tones” thing was a completely fictional story invented, almost simultaneously, by the entire 2000 campaign press corps, because the narrative everyone had decided on was that Al Gore was a phony and a wacko weakling liberal loser. MoDo led the charge, and has clung to that caricature, despite its basis almost entirely on complete fabrications, ever since.

As far as I know Maureen Dowd has never acknowledged — let alone apologized for — her relentless, inaccurate smearing of Al Gore. (In 2007 she pretended to apologize, in the voice of Clarence Thomas, but I’m not sure she’s actually self-aware enough to get the real joke she ended up making.) And her blithe willingness to go back to the “earth tone” well illustrates both her lazy hackishness (it’s been a decade, Maureen) and her complete disregard for any truth beyond the idiotic fantasies she constructs about public figures.

That, as I said, is only the very first sentence.

The “earth tones” crack is because there was some utterly inane pseudo-news over the weekend about the Oval Office getting redone. Which, obviously, is a subject of much more interest to political opinion columnist Maureen Dowd than a “war,” because it is utterly inane pseudo-news.

So! She refers to the Oval Office as President Obama’s “redecorated man cave,” because “man caves” are a trend thing she read about, in the year 2005. She then throws in a gratuitous reference to the terrible, trashy taste of those awful Clintons, another Dowd pet topic.

And then the column ends with a dreadful series of Dowd’s trademark stupidly obvious, terribly out-of-date pop culture references. (“Cool Hand Luke.” “Jaws.” “Scarface.” “Body Heat.” Yes, “Body Heat.”)

Maureen Dowd is a Pulitzer-winning columnist.

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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Thursday, Oct 1, 2009 10:31 AM UTC

Reading “The Clinton Tapes,” thinking about Obama

The president and the historian provide a candid, intimate look at how the GOP became a nasty party of obstruction

By Joan Walsh

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I need a break from the rhetorical outrage beat. I was going to write about the Newsmax columnist who all but advocated a military coup to bring down Obama, then I was pondering a post about Rep. Alan Grayson’s claim that the GOP health reform plan amounts to if you get sick, “die quickly.” But I’m tired of overheated rhetoric right now, (plus the indefatiguable Alex Koppelman got to both stories first!) so I took refuge in Taylor Branch’s new book, “The Clinton Tapes.” I had planned to review it, but it’s almost 700 pages, and I have a day job. If I took the time to read it and then write about the whole thing, it would be weeks before I’d get it done — and I think the book has insights that are supremely relevant to today.

So I thought I’d try to blog my review, over several days, and ask for your help, if you’re reading the book. Every few days I’ll write about what I am learning, and anyone who’s reading, or curious, can participate in comments. (We could do the same thing with “Going Rogue” next month, but it would probably take us about an hour.)

I have to start by saying Taylor Branch’s trilogy, “America in the King Years,” is my favorite work of history. He brought the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. alive for me. And to see my favorite civil rights historian — so far, there are some up-and-comers that deserve a look, too! — grappling with the president who, until Obama, thought and did more about civil rights than any president before him, well, it’s a thrilling combination. The book opens with the pair believing they are fulfilling the movement they’d worked for as young men, convinced Clinton can do so much to advance King’s goals, though we know that eventually politics got in the way. Still, it’s important to remember that civil rights was the mission that animated Clinton’s, and Branch’s, passion for politics.

One hundred pages in, here’s what’s fascinating. First: Serendipitously, Branch started his private, taped talks with Clinton nine months into the Clinton presidency, in October, roughly where Obama is now, the better to focus you on the parallels and differences in their first year. I am not privy to the secrets of the Obama White House, but Branch brings the reader directly into the rooms where a red-eyed, exhausted Clinton sits talking late into the night about the challenges he faced in Mogadishu, Bosnia, Haiti and Iraq (remember how he bombed a weapons facility to retaliate for an attempt on President Bush’s life, so W. wouldn’t have to start a war!); the disappointment of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and the thrill of the short-lived Israeli-Palestinian peace accords, signed just eight months into his presidency; his failure to get a stimulus bill passed (thanks to Democratic turncoats and Republican opponents); the early work on healthcare reform (and that 1,342 page bill) and the controversial NAFTA.

Reading it all, your head and heart hurt for Obama. We know our presidents have to juggle multiple crises, that’s the job, but the way Branch depicts the pace of it, and the toll it took on Clinton (who still found time to help Chelsea with her math homework), well, it made it real. I got tired just thinking about it. I am probably going to be a little easier on Obama in the weeks to come.

There are some wonderful windows on policy triumph and disappointment: He depicts a stormy but funny meeting of Democratic senators to tell Clinton why they’ll block any liberalization of policy on gays in the military. Robert Byrd leads off fulminating about the immorality of homosexuality, and Clinton tries to head him off by noting that adultery is immoral (ahem) but we don’t dismiss military folks for cheating on their spouses. Sam Nunn raised the unit cohesion argument (there was a lot of discussion of those close quarters, especially on Navy ships!). Clinton observes Sen. Ted Kennedy on the sidelines: “I couldn’t tell if Teddy was going to start giggling or jump out the window” as the talk turned to the bawdy, omnisexual practices of ancient Greek and Roman warriors.

But at the end of the day, Clinton said, he was surprised by the fact that he couldn’t tell which of the opponents truly believed it was bad to have gays in the military (or anywhere else); all they discussed was the politics of the proposal. That theme would recur. Clinton was the consummate horse-trader, no steely ideologue, but even he was surprised at the extent to which politics trumped policy, or even the silly idea of what’s right or what’s best for the country, in every single debate.

There are also eerie parallels with some of Obama’s battles this year. Clinton lost the stimulus battle that Obama (after compromising) won, doomed by zero Republican support and duplicitous Dems like Oklahoma’s Chuck Boren, who kept insisting he needed the bill to be bipartisan. (Hello, Max Baucus!) The utter hypocrisy of the GOP is well traced back to 1993, when they fought an anti-deficit bill that would have cut spending and raised some taxes. They’ve been the party of no for 16 years, even switching sides to say no, cynically, to completely opposite ideas: They were against shrinking the deficit when the Dems were for it; now they’re suddenly worried about deficit spending (after eight years of Bush budget-busting) when Dems are trying to spend money on the economy and healthcare, and not merely war and bailing out Wall Street and banks.

Branch is mystified by Clinton’s strange passivity with the press — he just accepted that they’re against him, and he put none of his considerable charm and charisma behind the task of courting them, unlike the young president he so admired, John Kennedy. The funniest scene in the first four chapters comes during an interview with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and political correspondent William Greider. Greider comes in with a photo of a destitute American (who’d apparenty been in Clinton’s “Faces of Hope” campaign materials), and began guilt-tripping Clinton. Branch paraphrases:

Here is one of the countless poor people who looked to you for leadership; you were their last hope! Now they feel utterly disillusioned and abandoned. Can you look into this face and name one thing that you have done to help? Or one principle you won’t compromise? One cause you will uphold? One belief you would die for ? [In fact, the R.S. interview transcript shows that Greider said the man told him: "Ask him what he’s willing to stand up for and die on."]

Clinton “kind of went off on him,” he told Greider.

He told Greider he had done things already that no other president would do. He had raised taxes on the rich and lowered them for the working poor. He introduced the AmeriCorps service program, which Rolling Stone campaigned for … He was taking on the gun lobby and the tobacco industry. He had proposed fair treatment for gay soldiers. He was fighting for national health care coverage, and more, but liberals paid very little attention to any of these things because they were bitchy and cynical about politics. They resented Clinton for respecting the votes of conservatives and opinions of moderates. They wanted him to behave like a dictator because they didn’t really care about results in the world … He said he had pointed at Greider to tell him the problem is you, Bill Greider. You are a faulty citizen. You don’t mobilize or persuade, because you only worry about being doctrinaire and proud. You are betraying your own principles with self-righteousness.”

Clinton took a breath. “I did everything but take a fart in his face.”

In fact, the president was much more eloquent on tape than in his memory (although he might have misremembered what he said directly to Greider, or else Greider cut it). You can read, and listen to, the actual exchange on the Rolling Stone site. It’s fun.

Here’s Clinton’s retort, verbatim, with some narration from R.S.:

The president, standing a foot away from Greider, turned and glared at him. Clinton’s face reddened, and his voice rose to a furious pitch as he delivered a scalding rebuke — an angry, emotional presidential encounter, the kind of which few have ever witnessed.

“But that is the press’s fault, too, damn it. I have fought more damn battles here for more things than any president has in 20 years, with the possible exception of Reagan’s first budget, and not gotten one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press, and I am sick and tired of it, and you can put that in the damn article.

“I have fought and fought and fought and fought. I get up here every day, and I work till late at night on everything from national service to family leave to the budget to the crime bill and all this stuff, and you guys take it and you say, ‘Fine, go on to something else, what else can I hit him about?’ So if you convince them I don’t have any conviction, that’s fine, but it’s a damn lie. It’s a lie.

“Look what I did. I said that the wealthy would have to pay their fair share, and look what we did to the tax system. I said that I’d give working families a break, and I did. People with modest incomes, look what’s going to happen. Did I get any credit for it, from you or anybody else? Do I care if I get credit? No.

“But I do care that that man has a false impression of me because of the way this administration has been covered. It is wrong. That’s my answer. It is wrong. I have fought my guts out for that guy, and if he doesn’t know it, it’s not all my fault. And you get no credit around here for fighting and bleeding. And that’s why the know-nothings and the do-nothings and the negative people and the right-wingers always win. Because of the way people like you put questions to people like me. Now, that’s the truth, Bill.”

[At this point the president started to walk away but changed his mind and came back, still mad as hell.]

“That’s why they always win. And they’re going to keep winning until somebody tells them the truth, that this administration is killing itself every day to help people like them and making some progress. And if you hold me to an impossible standard and never give us any credit when we’re moving forward, then that’s exactly what will happen, guys like that will think that. But it ain’t all my fault, because we have fought our guts out for ‘em. And the bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. They shift the blame, they never take responsibility. And they play on the cynicism of the media.

“That’s not what I do. I come to work here every day, and I try to help that guy. And I’m sorry if I’m not very good at communicating, but I haven’t gotten a hell of a lot of help since I’ve been here.”

Let me make you read one part of that quote again, because you could be talking about the Obama administration’s dilemma in 2009:

“That’s why they always win. And they’re going to keep winning until somebody tells them the truth, that this administration is killing itself every day to help people like them and making some progress. And if you hold me to an impossible standard and never give us any credit when we’re moving forward, then that’s exactly what will happen, guys like that will think that. But it ain’t all my fault, because we have fought our guts out for ‘em. And the bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. They shift the blame, they never take responsibility. And they play on the cynicism of the media.”

The bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. Sixteen years later, it’s just as true. After opposing efforts to censure Rep. Joe “You lie!” Wilson, Republicans are trying to censure Rep. Adam Grayson (whose rant maybe went over the top,) even though Rachel Maddow assembled a string of video clips showing at least a half-dozen Republicans depicting Democratic healthcare plans as an effort to get Americans to die, drop dead, be killed, you name it, by any means necessary. A lot of my liberal Twitter friends were over the moon about Grayson’s string of bold remarks, and while part of me enjoyed turning the tables on the lying ideologues, part of me thinks Democrats win when they stick to facts and focus. And part of me is laughing at that naive part of me right now.

Wait, I said I was going AWOL on the rhetoric war. I tried. It’s going to be a fun book. Stay tuned. Tell me what you think.

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Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh.

Monday, Aug 11, 2008 9:38 AM UTC

I’m so angry, it’s time to change

Ever since the 2000 elections I've been angry -- not just at the government but at all of us Americans.

By Cary Tennis

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Dear Cary,

The past few years my personal life has taken a nosedive. I think the biggest factor is this anger I’ve got inside, which frequently prevents me from socializing and meeting new people (or just having a good time with people). Basically I’ve become a very grumpy middle-aged man.

This all basically started after the 2000 election. By now, I feel justifiably disgusted by the Bush administration and his supporters of course, but it’s bigger than this. I also feel my fellow Americans the past two decades or so have been awash in gleefully/mindlessly practicing the seven deadly sins, of which I believe ignorance should be added as the eighth.

Anyway, I know some people go to anger management therapy but I’m not sure that is for me. You associate that type of therapy with people who have snapped, people who have abused people physically as well as verbally. My anger is merely my own; I don’t lash out; I just despair, because I know lashing out would cost me (my job, family, friends).

BTW, I have been on Prozac for about 15 years for mild chronic depression. Normally I feel like Prozac has been good for me, keeping away the blue days and making my skin thicker. I also exercise a lot, running three times a week and playing soccer, but lately I’m pissed off even after a good workout! I eat pretty well and drink moderately. But lately I’m thinking my chemistry is not right (though dropping the antidepressant sounds very risky).

Can you or Salon readers offer any advice? I fear I am on a path to becoming an urban hermit, joylessly working toward retirement, and maybe not giving a toss when I get there.

Anger Issues

Dear Anger Issues,

Some of us who think of ourselves as liberal, rational, freethinking, freedom-loving patriots have a special problem with anger. We are deeply affected by what we see going on in our country. We see a symphony of outrage heaped upon outrage; we see the brazenness of it, its roots in years of secret plotting; we perceive intricate patterns in its serpentine, many-tentacled, conspiratorial vastness; we see our sacred precepts violated, sacred vows trashed; we jeer the garishly painted faces of evil as they trot onstage, and our jeers do not seem to be heard and this compounds our outrage; we join our compatriots in outrage, and our righteous anger grows.

We think our anger is justified. The abuses are so obvious, the perpetrators so shameless, the crimes so awful and historic. Who would not be angry? How could anger be our problem?

But our anger is our problem. At historic moments like this, we are called to come up with something better than anger.

If you are not sure whether anger management classes are for you, then the intelligent thing to do is to go to a few sessions and see what methods are being used. Fearlessly investigate and make an honest assessment. If it appears that others have benefited from these methods, consider how you might adapt those methods to your own situation. Your situation may not be as dire as theirs. Use what is useful. Leave the rest. Participants in the workshop are likely to be at different stages in their anger. Some may have lashed out physically. Some may have suffered legal and financial consequences. Others may just be curious, or feel that they are not skillful enough in their management of anger. You may learn from all of them. And you may have things to teach them as well.

By beginning in this individual way, we have a chance to demonstrate the collective superiority of another approach. The country’s response to 9/11 was a response of anger, as if anger would suffice. The country responded to a cunning, devastating blow with brute anger and was led into a trap. We responded as the enemy expected, with blind, misguided, disproportionate violence, like the one-eyed Cyclops stumbling with rage, outwitted in the cave by a nimble Ulysses. If Enlightenment ideals are to prevail over religious tyranny once again, anger will not suffice. We must be more cunning, more devastating, wiser, more full of resolve, better controlled, more far-thinking, more strategic. We must be better statesmen, better orators, better historians.

When angry we cling to what we feel will shield us and we drop what we sense is a burden or an encumbrance. Collectively, as a nation, in response to the 9/11 attacks, it could be said that we clung to our pride, our feelings of masculine superiority and our addiction to ease and consumption; we held on to our simplicity of feeling, our belief in our goodness, our woundedness. And we dropped our love of ideas, our belief in ideas, our faith in a future of law and reason, our reliance on intelligent pragmatism, our unshakable reliance on constitutional principle.

We dropped what we needed and clung to what was useless. Now we are in a pickle.

Those of us who saw this happen feel a sputtering rage. But we must not fall into the trap again. We must work as individuals to let go of our anger so that collectively we can think more clearly and see what is before us.

Letting go of anger is hard. It’s like letting go of money. We give up, we pay, we sacrifice what we have held dear, but we bring home peace of mind in a big shiny box with a bow on it. What could be more American than that?

But seriously, in seeking peace of mind, it can be most difficult to let go of the anger we think is justified.

So I do hope you will look into these anger management sessions. But you can go far beyond that. You have much to gain by working with your anger. It may be the doorway to a new way of thinking and living.

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Cary Tennis writes Salon's advice column, leads writing workshops and creative getaways, publishes books, writes an occasional newsletter and tweets as @carytennis.

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