(updated below – updated again)
To follow-up on the issues relating to Ann Coulter’s speech at the CPAC on Friday, the following exchange occurred today during the live chat hosted by The Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz:
Oxford, Miss.: Are the comments from Ann Coulter, a featured speaker at the most influential conservative convention, comparable to anonymous blog comments made at the Huffington Post? Do the anonymous comments at HuffPo tell more about liberals than comments from featured speakers at conservative events tell about conservatives? (And Ann Coulter’s views and style were known before she was chosen to speak.)
Howard Kurtz: Coulter’s comments are more telling because a major conservative conference of the Republican Party invited her to speak. . . .
I’d say that is a rather substantial understatement, but it is still productive to compel Kurtz to acknowledge it. And though he goes on to insist that he “never said that the nutjobs posting Cheney death wishes on the HuffPost were representative of anything other than the fringe,” the fact remains that he devoted an entire column to the Cheney comments promoted on the front page of the Post‘s website, (and a separate column to the Edwards bloggers comments), but never mentioned a word in his column about the Coulter speech, despite the fact that it is “more telling because a major conservative conference of the Republican Party invited her to speak.”
On a less encouraging note, Kurtz actually said: “I was certainly surprised that she got more than a smattering of applause when she dropped the F-bomb.” As Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog said in response:
Oh, yeah — that was a huge surprise, wasn’t it? Based on all of our experience with movement conservatives, you’d have expected the crowd to walk out en masse and begin burning her books instantly — right?
Several right-wing bloggers have created and signed onto a commendable petition which, among other things, calls for the CPAC to cease inviting Coulter to speak. Several of the more decent pro-Bush bloggers have signed on, though, at least as of now, most have not (and Sean Hannity expressly refused to condemn Coulter when asked about the remark).
This was the point all along. Merely denouncing specific comments of Coulter’s — as plenty of right-wing political figures have done routinely in the past — is plainly disingenuous if the conservative movement continues to venerate her as a featured speaker at its key events and the people who claim to find her comments so offensive never object to her inclusion and even attend those events. As the Petition itself states: “Denouncing Coulter is not enough. After her ‘raghead’ remark in 2006 she took some heat. Yet she did not grow and learn. We should have been more forceful.”
Of course, Coulter has a history that is many years long of making statements of this sort, which is why the right-wing movement’s elevation of her to superstardom and its clear approval of her message made it not just fair to claim, but inescapably clear, that it was enamored of her and her sentiments (and Blue Texan offers the less generous and likely more accurate explanation for many, if not most, of the denunciations). As the aforementioned Steve M. said this weekend, in a post that seems to have spawned the creation of the right-wing petition:
Reality: She is your biggest star. The people you claim to speak for feel she speaks for them much, much more than you do — and they’re right.
She is modern conservatism’s id — she’s the one who says what the rest of you would say if you didn’t feel it would cost you your standing as reasonable, responsible people.
Want to prove me wrong? You cut her off. You boycott the sponsors of TV shows that still invite her on as a guest. You show up at her book signings and campus appearances and hand out flyers quoting her nastiest bon mots. You boycott CPAC next year if she’s invited, and demand that others do the same. Or if you have a problem with boycotts as a matter of principle, at the very least urge your fellow conservatives, on college campuses and elsewhere, to stop extending invitations to her, given the profound harm you say she does to your movement.
But you won’t do that, will you? In that case, shut the hell up, hypocrites, and acknowledge that while Coulter may be the bad apple in the family, your door is always open to her.
Precisely. And along those lines, several right-wing bloggers who did not sign the petition are running around today giddy because they think they found equivalent statements made by “prominent leftist figures” — including such towering political leaders on the left as Conan O’Brien, Chris Rock, Alec Baldwin, Alexander Cockburn, Dan Savage, and Louis Farrakhan — many of which are from 20 or 10 years ago, with the average being 8 years old.
The fact that they found such examples proves, they all claim in unison, that I “lied” in this post — because my argument, of course, was that no liberal of any kind has ever said anything offensive or wrong in the entire history of the world, so finding examples where that happened — no matter how isolated, stray, inconsequential, unrepresentative, or old — proves that I’m a “liar.” The reason I ignore most attacks from right-wing bloggers is not because I don’t believe in the virtues of responding — I do — but because most of the attacks are at this level and it is honestly difficult to generate the motivation to reply (as but one helpful hint, if you want to accuse someone of “hypocrisy,” you must (a) excerpt a standard the person has advocated and then (b) show how they have violated that standard; failure to follow steps (a) or (b) means that you have not made out a case for what is called “hypocrisy”).
Ron Chusid and Lean Left provide more than ample analysis and responses to those posts. As they both note, the fact that someone has to go digging into ten-year-old comments from low-level celebrities (or, again, anonymous blog comments) in order to establish an equivalency, when the right-wing’s most popular pundits with literally millions of fans — Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity and the rest — spew out hate-mongering bile on virtually a daily basis, tells you all you need to know about the validity of the purported equivalency.
UPDATE: In Comments, Mona points out the real issue here, the glaring question that most right-wing pundits and their media allies are simply unwilling to examine:
I’d love to hear [the "petitioners"] explain why it is that (a) they need to ask a “respectable” organization like CPAC to keep a hate-spewing bigot off its stage, and (b) whether they think a petition will do anything to diminish the popularity of Coulter’s views, as manifest in cheers, heavy booking on college campuses, as well as astronomical book sales?
What does all this mean about their conservative movement? The idea that they could get around that issue with some cheap and easy “repudiation” on their blog or something is absurd. I’m not saying they don’t deserve a bit of credit for the petition effort, but there are bigger questions about their brand that ought to be occurring to them.
Denounce away, but the undeniable fact is that there are millions of hard-core Republican “base” (in every sense of the word) voters who admire or even revere Coulter, buy her books the minute they are available, and generally cheer her on as enthusiastically as can be.
Aren’t there any political journalists out there who are interested in examining why that is, what that demonstrates about the political movement that has been dominating our country for a full decade or so? I tried asking some of those questions, here, at one right-wing blog and did not really get any answers. But that is the issue that makes these Coulter-related issues so important. It is not Ann Coulter or anything she says that matters, but rather the reasons why she is — and for years now has been — so incomparably popular in this movement.
UPDATE II: Few people have documented the deeply dysfunctional and outright pureile national press we have as well as Bob Somerby has, and his post today on the lowly and vapid insults which fill Maureen Dowd’s column (h/t Cindy Ross) is just superb. Somerby makes a convincing case that Dowd’s endless attempts to feminize Democratic male politicians (and masculinize Hillary) is merely a slightly more polished version of the tactics which make Coulter so wildly popular on the right (Coulter’s use of the word “faggot” with regard to Edwards was not, of course, an actual attempt to suggest he was gay, but designed only to impugn his masculinity).
(updated below)
As noted earlier today, new Bush appointee at the State Department, Eliot Cohen, expressly views the U.S. not as a republic, but as “a global empire,” and his entire foreign policy world view is centered around the need to maintain and expand that empire through an “imperial strategy.” Cohen believes, in essence, that the U.S. should rule the world through superior military force. And in particular, he has long urged the U.S. to change the government of Iran using any means, and has repeatedly argued against even negotiating with the Iranians as a method for resolving our conflicts.
Cohen has written multiple times over the year for Commentary Magazine — ground zero for neoconservatism. One of the essays (.pdf), from 1982, was entitled Why we Need a Draft. In it, Cohen argues that a draft must be reinstated because that is the only way to preserve military readiness, and because an all-volunteer force produces troops who are too stupid to fight and, worse, forces the U.S. to allow females into the military, which destroys the macho fighting spirit needed for an effective force.
Cohen specifically emphasized the unfairness of having the U.S. dramatically expand its military commitments while having only the poorest and dumbest in the society serve in the military, which — Cohen says — is what happens with an all-volunteer force. This is the title:
Cohen begins by reciting the arguments against a draft, but then notes how pervasively stupid American troops have become under an all-volunteer force:
Cohen next documents just how dumb he thinks the troops are:
The big problem for Cohen in having such stupid troops as a result of an all-volunteer force is that the U.S. was being forced to use women as soldiers, and nothing would destroy the manly fighting spirit as much as that would:
. . . . 
Cohen specifically cited the grave unfairness of having wars where only our poorest young people risk their lives:
And Cohen ended his call for a draft by emphasizing that it is necessary to enable the U.S. to meet its ever-expanding military obligations — obligations which Cohen, today, wants to expand beyond anything anyone dreamt of back then:
It’s true that this essay was from 1982, but I have read a lot of Eliot Cohen today and saw nothing in which he repudiated any of this (which doesn’t mean he still embraces it, but it seems like he should at least be asked). Recall that Republicans accused Jim Webb of sexism for arguing back then that women should be excluded from combat — a position less extreme than Cohen’s argument against women in the military. And John Kerry was mauled continuously, of course, for suggesting inadvertently that there is a correlation between volunteer service and intellectual limitations — a point which Cohen made expressly and continuously. And the idea of re-instating the draft in order to fulfill grand military conquest — conquest which Cohen, to this day, champions as much as ever — is as radical an idea as it gets.
To be fair, essays that are written two decades ago have limited value, though not none — especially where the arguments have not been convincingly repudiated. The relevant point here is that Cohen has spent his entire career working on the fringe, always with more militarism and love of war than virtually the entire mainstream population. Given that he is about to assume to a very influential position in the State Department — at exactly the time when our interactions are most critical with regard to countries on whom Cohen clearly wants to wage war — some sort of meaningful examination of his views, or at least questioning of the State Department about these views, seems warranted.
UPDATE: One of the principal reasons I think this Cohen appointment is so notable, and disturbing, is because the Counselor he is replacing — Philip Zelikow — was one of the few remaining influential, old-style realists in the administration who favored negotiations with the Iranians as a means of avoiding war. Reader AB emailed me this September, 2006 Zelikow speech, which he heard Zelkiow deliver, as but one example, in which Zelikow argued:
One of the concerns I have about my friends, some of them on the conservative side, who argue that we don’t have the resolve to face up now to the binary, uncomfortable choice we should face between war and peace is that they’ve already shoved the diplomacy aside. They’re anxious to get to the real issue, the interesting issue, the glamorous issue. Then it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy; we assume the diplomacy won’t work. Let’s talk now about the war and peace problem. How about we try to make the diplomacy; work because Iranian leaders do need to face that choice. That’s the message the president was conveying. Why, at this critical time in our relations with Iran (not to mention the larger Middle East), has one of the few pro-negotiations officials been replaced by one of our country’s most extremist warmongers, who has expressly argued in favor of overthrowing the Iranian government and against negotiating with them? Isn’t that shift at least worth some discussion and examination, particularly in light of what appears to be a fairly rich record of fringe pro-militarism statements by Cohen? At the very least, it’s as good of an opportunity to compel a debate over these critical issues as any that has been presented in awhile.
(updated below – updated again)
On Friday, Condoleezza Rice announced that Eliot Cohen has been chosen to be the new Counselor of the State Department. It is not hyperbole to say that Cohen is as extremist a neoconservative and warmonger as it gets. Even The New York Sun‘s Eli Lake — in an article claiming that Cohen’s replacement of Philip Zelikow signals a more militaristic approach for the administration — points out that Cohen “ intellectually is neoconservative” and that “he was an early supporter of the military intervention in Iraq and came out against recommendations from the Iraq Study Group in December to launch negotiations with Iraq’s neighbors,” i.e., Iran and Syria — especially Iran.
But Cohen’s record is far more extremist than just that. In a November, 2001 Wall St. Journal Op-Ed, Cohen criticized the attempts up to that point to name “The new War” — all the names chosen were far too limiting and unglorious. Rejecting all the possibilities, Cohen insisted that “a less palatable but more accurate name is World War IV.” Even back then, look at what was on Cohen’s mind:
Afghanistan constitutes just one front in World War IV, and the battles there just one campaign. . . . First, if one front in this war is the contest for free and moderate governance in the Muslim world, the U.S. should throw its weight behind pro-Western and anticlerical forces there. The immediate choice lies before the U.S. government in regard to Iran. . . . The overthrow of the first theocratic revolutionary Muslim state and its replacement by a moderate or secular government, however, would be no less important a victory in this war than the annihilation of bin Laden. Cohen’s second priority — after Iran — was changing the government of Iraq, and he showcased what would be the false war-justifying propaganda before Don Rumsfeld, Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz began the process of feeding it to the President:
The U.S. should continue to target regimes that sponsor terrorism. Iraq is the obvious candidate, having not only helped al Qaeda, but attacked Americans directly (including an assassination attempt against the first President Bush) and developed weapons of mass destruction. Cohen was most worried that Afghanistan would be the only real Churchillian war we would fight, rather than getting on with World War IV in all its glory: “if after the Afghan campaign ends, the government lapses into a covert war of intelligence-gathering, arrests, and the odd explosion in a terrorist training camp, it will be a sign that it would rather avoid calling things by their true name.”
Over the next several years, Cohen became one of the most militant advocates of expanded regional war in the Middle East. A 2003 Asia Times article by Ahmad Faruqui called him “the most influential neoconservative in academe”:
Cohen refers to the war against terrorism by a chilling name: World War IV (citing the Cold War as the third world war). . . . Cohen claims that America is on the good side in this war, just like it has been in all prior world wars, and the enemy is militant Islam, not some abstract concept of “terrorism”. Cohen argues that the US should throw its weight behind pro-Western and anticlerical forces in the Muslim world, beginning with the overthrow of the theocratic state in Iran and its replacement by a “moderate or secular” government. After September 11 he was one of the first neoconservatives to call for an attack on Iraq, even though there was no credible evidence linking Iraq with the attacks on the US or al-Qaeda.
It likely goes without saying by now that the reason Iraq was so quickly at the forefront of Cohen’s mind in the aftermath of 9/11 was because invading Iraq and changing its government was long one of Cohen’s dreams, and the 9/11 attacks became the pretext dressed up as the “justification” for Cohen’s dream to come true.
This continues to be the most astounding, significant, and alarming trend — as the recognition grows even in Beltway elite media circles that the people who designed and sold the Iraq war to the American public are completely untrustworthy and discredited figures, they are exactly the ones who continue to exert the most influence, by far, on the President, and their influence seems only to be growing. Here is a question which Tim Russert asked Lindsay Graham this weekend — a question that is three years overdue but nonetheless welcome — after Graham kept insisting that Americans give the Great Surge Plan ” a chance” to succeed:
MR. RUSSERT: But many Americans will say that those who supported the war are saying, “Trust us, see this through,” the same people who said, “There are weapons of mass destruction. General Shinseki’s wrong, we don’t need hundreds of thousands of troops. We will be greeted as liberators.” SEN. GRAHAM: Mm-hmm.
MR. RUSSERT: “The cost of the war,” according to Lawrence Lindsey, “won’t be more than $200 billion.”
SEN. GRAHAM: Yeah.
MR. RUSSERT: “There won’t be any sectarian violence.” All those judgments were wrong. Why should the American people continue to believe in those same people who had so many misjudgments leading up [to] and executing the war?
The premise of Russert’s question is exactly right, and it is one of the most crucial propositions to emphasize — “Why should the American people continue to believe in those same people who had so many misjudgments leading up to and executing the war?” They should not, of course. And we know exactly who “those same people” are. Eliot Cohen is not just one of them, but he is one of their leaders. He has been wrong about everything. If he had his way, we would have far more wars than we have already.
The Cohen appointment is clearly another instance where neoconservatives place a watchdog in potential trouble spots in the government to ensure that diplomats do not stray by trying to facilitate rapproachments between the U.S. and the countries on the neoconservative War hit list. In that regard, behold the head-patting reaction to the Cohen appointment from one of the country’s most radical Iran obsessives:
Michael Ledeen, a former government official and conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said Cohen’s appointment was good news. “You want your leaders to hear disagreements,” he said. “You don’t want monotonous conformity.”
Unlike the more political neoconservatives, who are very careful about what they say and go to great lengths to conceal their ultimate goals, Cohen has been an academic and thus more explicit about the theoretical underpinnings of his worldview. In a 1998 essay in (fittingly enough) The New Republic, Cohen called for the U.S. to build up and modernize its military capabilities faster and more aggressively, and to “justify” that plan, he laid out his neoconservative vision of the role of the United States in the world:
Another way to put it is that the United States needs an imperial strategy. Defense planners could never admit it openly, of course, and most would feel uncomfortable with the idea, but that is, in fact, what the United States at the end of the twentieth century is–a global empire. Talk of “cooperative security” masks the reality that in any serious military confrontation, the central question is whom the United States asks to cooperate. . . . One cannot separate the so-called “soft power” of the United States–the global dominance of its culture, beginning with its language–from its military strength.
Rock fans around the world listen in English; so do fighter pilots. The same information technologies that make the Internet a decidedly American phenomenon provide the nervous systems of American military power. Free trade rests on common consent, to be sure, but would it exist absent America’s military dominance?
Even Cohen recognized what a profound departure from America’s founding principles it is to call for America to dominate the world as The Great Imperial Power:
The United States is today by far the most powerful state on the planet. If it chooses to remain so, citizen and soldier alike must brace themselves for the occasional imperial fiasco. More important, they will have to accept the uncomfortable notion that they are wielding military power in a way that is historically unusual for a country that has long viewed empires with proper republican suspicion. America’s strategic vision will thus have to peer inward, as well as out, if we are to play our new role in the world successfully. These are the radical principles laid out unabashedly by the Bush State Department’s new Counselor, which are the same principles still driving the administration. We are in the middle of World War IV. We have numerous countries against whom we must wage war. The highest strategic priority is to change the government of Iran, with whom we can never negotiate. And the ultimate goal is to rule the world with our military force as the Supreme Imperial Power.
That is the neoconservative vision at its core. And the untold damage it has wreaked on our country has not diminished their influence in any way in this administration. They are still in control, particularly in the area they care about most — the Middle East. And they have dealt with their greatest fear — war-avoidance with Iran prior to regime change — by installing one of their very own extremists to scrutinize and check the State Department.
This is really the debate America needs most, but is also the one we are furthest away from being able to conduct — is the goal of the U.S. really to maintain and expand imperial world domination? The dangers to our country from that pursuit are grave and obvious. They are precisely the ones about which, among others, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Dwight Eisenhower most urgently warned, and Jefferson similarly emphasized continuously that the most important obligation a country has is to avoid war except when the nation’s security is directly attacked.
But that, more than anything, accounts for the current predicament of America. We have ceased adhering in these matters to the principles of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Dwight Eisenhower, and have instead become a nation of Dick Cheneys, Victor Davis Hansons, Richard Perles, and Eliot Cohens.
These are — to use Russert’s phrase — “those same people” who caused the Iraq disaster and have their sights set on further damage still. They do not want to avoid war at all, but instead believe that it’s glorious and elegant and empowering. They want to ensure a state of Permenant War, complete with all of the internal constrictions of liberty which wars inevitably entail, because they view the United States not as a republic, but as an empire which — in order to fulfill all sorts of agendas — can, should and must rule the world with superior military force. There is a temptation to dismiss “those same people” as irrelevant extremists, but as Cohen’s Friday-announced appointment reflects, they are anything but irrelevant.
UPDATE: Over at This Modern World, Jonathan Schwarz cites an anecdote from Gen. Wesley Clark which reflects both the radicalism and (one must never forget) the sheer ineptitude that has driven this administration’s Cohenesque War project from the start.
UPDATE II: Unrelated (mostly, not completely) to the topic of this post, The Washington Post‘s media critic, Howard Kurtz, will be hosting his weekly chat today at 12:00 noon EST, where readers can pose questions to him regarding his column.
To their real credit, The New York Times Editorial Page (though definitely not the Times itself) was one of the earliest national media venues to recognize our country’s true constitutional crisis brought about by the Bush administration’s radical theories of presidential omnipotence. And they have, as relentlessly as any other media outlet, condemned those abuses and repeatedly called for actions to limit, if not altogether end, the sheer lawlessness of the Bush presidency.
Today the Times has an Editorial — entitled “The Must-Do List” — which identifies numerous pending Bush scandals regarding lawbreaking and abuses of presidential power, and for each one, the Editorial provides a proposed Congressional solution in the form of legislation. It is worth emphasizing, as always, that this list entails only the abuses that we have learned about (not from Congressional oversight, but from the disclosures of whistleblowers to journalists). It is beyond doubt — as Ron Suskind recently pointed out in an interview with Spiegel– that there are a whole array of similar, if not worse, abuses which the unprecedentedly secretive Bush administration has still managed to conceal:
SPIEGEL ONLINE: You quote former CIA director George Tenet in your book as saying after Sept. 11: “There is nothing we won’t do, nothing we won’t try.” Are there any other dirty stories? Suskind: Logically, I would have to say yes. You’re dealing with an oddity here, a secret war. Wars tend to be very public things, they are visible. There are correspondents traveling with the troops and you get daily dispatches. This is a new conflict, fought largely in secret. The public is only informed a kind of “need to know basis.” Based on that, I would assume that there remains something of an undiscovered country of activity in terms of what we have done over the past five years.
The NYT Editorial is well-intentioned and possibly helpful in re-focusing attention on these issues, but the Editorial’s suggested solutions are ultimately misguided. None of the proposed measures — from restoring Habeas Corpus to enacting new FISA legislation to closing secret CIA prisons to repealing the interrogation provisions of the Military Commissions Act — is realistic, because it is just not possible to marshall the filibuster-proof number of votes in the Senate right now to accomplish any of that. That’s just reality.
And that, in turn, is true because Senators, including large numbers of Democratic Senators, remain petrified of challenging the President in any meaningful way on national security issues generally, and are particularly wracked with fear when it comes to trying to limit those powers which are “justified” in the name of Fighting the Terrorists. Before any of these measures can be pursued meaningfully, media perspective and public opinon on these matters need to change.
Congressional Democrats, for instance, have become somewhat more emboldened in their opposition to the War in Iraq not because they suddenly decided on principle that resolute opposition was necessary, but because American public opinion was way ahead of them and all but demanded action on the war. Americans turned against the war, and thus, Congressional Democrats feel compelled to find a way to follow. Nothing moves Beltway politicians except pressure from their donors and/or demands from the voters who have the power to turn them out of office.
Beyond the obvious fact that the Republican-led Congress completely abdicated their legislative and oversight responsibilities for five years, there have been two principal reasons the Bush administration has been able to break the law with impunity and to continue to govern with no accountability — (1) a listless and compliant press which has done very little to reveal and make Americans aware of the true nature and extent of these abuses, and (2) the administration’s obsessive maintenance of a wall of secrecy which has concealed its behavior from the public and thus prevented the public (and the media) from really understanding what their Government has been doing. While little is going to change with the former, the Democrat-controlled Congress does have the ability to tear down that wall of secrecy and truly shed light on how radical and lawless this administration has been.
Far more than legislative solutions right now (which have no chance of succeeding), what we urgently need are compelled, subpoena-driven, aggressive hearings designed for maximum revelation and drama. Hearings are able, in a dramatic and television-news-friendly environment, to shed light on how extreme and radical this administration really has been in all of these areas. More than trying to repeal the worst legislative abuses of the last Congress, hearings – real and dramatic and probing — were the real promise of electing Democrats to take over the Congress. It is time — and it is beginning to be past the time — for that to start in earnest.
You can’t convince Americans of the need to stop abuses until you demonstrate to them in a dramatic and undeniable way that those absues are being perpetrated and that they are harmful and dangerous. Just as one example, FISA itself was enacted only after the Church Committee conducted a probing and aggressive investigation and exposed the decades of eavesdropping abuses on the part of the Executive branch, whereby all the heinous transgressions from J. Edgar Hoover’s blackmail-motivated eavesdropping on Martin Luther King to the array of Nixonian surveillance excesses came to light in all of their unvarnished and ugly reality. Americans were not moved by abstract notions of privacy or checks and balances but by the real life anecdotes of abuses and the evidence demonstrating how widespread they were.
That is what we need now. But we do not have it because the administration even in the wake of its defeat in the November elections — one could even say especially after the election — continues to aggressively exploit and manipulate the terrorism threat as a tool to conceal their own conduct and protect themselves from accountability and consequences. Until that ends, no progress on any of these issues is possible.
Just look at some of the developments in the last few weeks alone. The administration successfully convinced an appeals court last week to uphold dismissal of the lawsuit brought by Khaled el-Masri — the German citizen who was abducted by the CIA, shipped around to various countries for interrogation, and then dumped on the side of the road in Albania once it was determined he was innocent. The administration claimed that allowing the lawsuit to proceed would risk disclosure of “state secrets” — a doctrine previously confined to a very narrow scope of cases but which the administration has expanded beyond recognition in order to all but entirely shield its conduct from judicial review and to shield itself from accountability under the law.
And then there is the ongoing travesty of the Jose Padilla criminal case, where the judge has ordered the Government to turn over all tapes of Padilla’s interrogation in order to determine whether, as Padilla alleges, he was tortured while being held incommunicado and with no charges for three-and-a-half years. But as Newsweek just reported, the administration is claiming that it is “no longer able to locate” the “crucial video” of Padilla’s last interrogation in the military brig. After years of resisting any efforts to allow Padilla any process of any kind, and finally being ordered by a federal court to disclose this information, the administration now simply claims that it lost the critical evidence which would shed definitive light on Padilla’s treatment and therefore cannot produce it.
Incidents of this kind — whereby the administration will engage in any efforts without limits to prevent an examination of its actual conduct — are too numerous to chronicle, literally. Sen. Jim Webb has spent the last two months — unsuccessfully — merely attempting to obtain an answer from the administration as to whether they believe they have the authority to attack Iran without Congressional approval. The administration has repeatedly breached all of its commitments to provide to Congress any real information about how it used its illegal eavesdropping powers on Americans when it exercised those powers for five years with no oversight (on whom did they eavesdrop in secret?). And just last week, Attorney General Gonzales expressed the same contempt for Congressional oversight as he has been exhibiting for years, albeit more explicitly this time, when he told Bob Novak that, in essence, he has more important things to do than respond to Congressional inquries.
Democrats in Congress need to realize right now that the administration will not produce or disclose any meaningful evidence unless and until they are truly forced to do so, and forcing them to disclose meaningful information is going to require a willingness to fight hard. Vague little threats of future action or pseudo-tough allusions to subpoenas are pointless. Far more than legislative solutions that will go nowhere and have no chance of passing (absent real changes in the focus of public and media attention), what must be the first priority are efforts to shine a bright light on what this President has been doing in the dark for years.
There has been talk recently from the President’s supporters of the possible “constitutional crisis” that may be triggered by a confrontation between the President and the Congress over war powers in Iraq and/or Iran. Such talk is absurd. We have had a constitutional crisis in this country since September, 2001, when the Bush Justice Department promulgated theories of limitless presidential power that could not be any more repugnant to our constitutional order. And since then, this President has exercised those powers continuously and aggressively, to the point where he has literally existed outside of and above all forms of law, and has been all but immune from true judicial scrutiny and/or Congressional oversight or limitation.
The choice is not whether to provoke a constitutional crisis. The real choice is whether to recognize that we have one and to act to end it, or continue to pretend that it does not exist by acquiescing to the President’s ongoing abuses and fundamental encroachments into every area. If — as has happened — Congress sits by and allows the President to seize limitless power and to ignore Congressional authority, then the subversion of our constitutional system becomes as much the fault of the Congress as the President.
Thus far — and, granted, it has only been two months since Democrats took over — the efforts to force these issues to the fore have been rather lame and anemic. Having said that, one should acknowledge that approaching these matters incrementally is necessary. For instance, demanding information that you know is not forthcoming might be strategically smart before issuing subpoenas, so that one can depict the subpoenas as necessary. But we don’t really have the luxury of having months go by while we indulge all of that incremental strategizing.
Democrats have to internalize that this administration does not operate like previous ones. No rational person can doubt that they are limitless in their contempt for legal restrictions or notions of checks and balances. The last election, by itself, has not changed their approach and will do not so. They are not going to voluntarily comply with anything or disclose anything. They are going to have to be forced to do so.
And televised, highly publicized confrontations over the administration’s hubris and arrogance and utter contempt for our legal institutions and political traditions is not something to be avoided. It is something we desperately need as a country. Issue subpoenas for all of this information, make them defy the subpoenas, and then demand that courts compel compliance. Create media dramas in which the administration fights to maintain full-scale secrecy around all of its legally dubious and extreme behavior. Americans hate hubris of that sort and do not trust this administration. Those are fights they cannot win.
Confrontations of this type are absolute pre-requisites if one wants to do anything about any of the truly urgent issues raised by the Times Editorial this morning. These issues cannot be amicably resolved or legislated away. The real power of the Congress is to compel a public airing of what this Government has been doing for the last six years. Everything else will follow from that. But it still remains to be seen — it is highly questionable — whether the Democrats who have been given control of the Congress by the American people have the stomach for that fight.
(updated below – updated again)
So Ann Coulter appeared as a featured speaker today at the Conservative Political Action Conference — the preeminent conservative event of the year — and called John Edwards a “faggot.” Her speech was followed by an enthusiastic round of applause from the upstanding attendees.
Last year at the same event, she warned Arab “ragheads” about violence that would be done to them and called for Supreme Court justices to be murdered — and received standing ovations. Everyone knows what a rancid hate-monger she is, yet (or rather: “therefore”) she continues to be invited to the highest-level “conservative” events, be drooled on with admiration by presidential candidates like Mitt Romney, and have little right-wing warriors wait in line around the corner to get her signature on their copies of the books she wrote.
But that’s all fine. There are much more important topics to discuss — like the anonymous commenters at Huffington Post and the bad words said by the bloggers hired for low-level positions by the Edwards campaign. Those are matters of the gravest importance meriting the most solemn condemnation and righteous outrage from all decent people. Those HuffPost commenters have uttered terrible thoughts, and that shows the anger, venom and hatred on the left, among liberals. It is cause for great alarm — and for headlines.
But the single most prestigious political event for conservatives of the year is a place where conservatives go to hear Democrats called faggots, Arabs called ragheads, and Supreme Court justices labeled as deserving of murder — not by anonymous, unidentifiable blog commenters, but by one of their most popular featured speakers.
And after she does that, she is cheered wildly by an adoring conservative movement that has made her bigoted and hate-mongering screeds best-sellers, all while they and their deceitful little allies in the media, such as Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post, write idiot tracts about how terribly upset they are by the affront to decency from HuffPost commenters [in between writing obsequious, tongue-wagging profiles of Coulter's most radical ideological allies, such as Michelle Malkin, who penned a lovely defense of the internment of Japanese-Americans, for which even Ronald Reagan apologized (but, I believe, she never cursed while doing so, which is what matters most)].
This is why I wrote so extensively about the Edwards blogger “scandal” and the Cheney comments “scandal.” The people feigning upset over those matters are either active participants in, or passive aiders and abetters of, a political movement that, at its very core – not at its fringes — knowingly and continuously embraces the most wretched and obvious bigotry and bloodthirsty authoritarianism. They love Ann Coulter — and therefore continue to make her a venerated part of their political events — because she provides an outlet, a venting ground, for the twisted psychological impulses and truly hateful face that drives the entire pro-Bush, right-wing spectacle.
The more delicate ones will claim to repudiate her comments in the most limited terms, but their actions speak far louder than their cursory and reluctant words. Anyone who went to this event — and that includes Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Dick Cheney — knew exactly what they would be getting. Coulter’s face was prominently plastered on the promotional material. The right-wing political candidates who accepted the invitations to speak there knew exactly the type of people would be there – namely, the type who continously cheer on Ann Coulter’s bigoted and nakedly hateful screeds. Anyone who makes themselves a part of that event is purposely associating themselves with those sentiments. That is what this Conference is for.
None of this is news, particularly. This is a movement propelled by an insatiable hunger for more slaughter and more wars. It is centrally dependent upon hatred of an Enemy, foreign or domestic — the Terrorist, the Immigrant, the Faggot, the Raghead, and most of all, the Liberal. As John Dean brilliantly documented, that is the only real feature that binds the “conservative” movement at this point, the only attribute that gives it identity and purpose. It does not have any affirmative ideas, only a sense of that which it hates and wants to destroy. So to watch as the crowd wildly cheers an unapologetic hatemonger is perfectly natural and not at all surprising.
But we should, at the very least, be able to have a moratorium on all of the scandals driven by their claims to be so offended and upset when anonymous commenters on a blog say mean things, or when bloggers use curse words, or when Senators transparently botch a joke. The ugliest and most obscene sentiments are openly expressed not by their blog commenters or even bloggers — though that is true — but by their most admired and successful political leaders, the ones whom their presidential candidates desperately seek to embrace and for whom their most committed throngs cheer wildly.
That is why it is difficult to refrain from commenting, with increasing disgust, on all of their Decency and “anti-Anger” scandals, abetted by the Howard Kurtzs and Terry Morans of the world who are every bit as much one of them as they are anything else. This is a movement driven by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity — who, along with Bill O’Reilly, are by far the most popular and successful right-wing pundits. Shouldn’t every rational and decent person convulse with anger or at least scornful laughter whenever this movement claims to find offensive or upsetting indecent remarks coming from others or when they accuse others of being angry and hateful?
UPDATE: The Conference attendees who will say that they do not approve of Coulter’s “joke” will act as though they found her behavior unexpected or surprising — just as they did last year and every other time she has made similar comments. But three weeks ago, Coulter was on Fox and made virtually identical remarks — not about Edwards specifically, just the hilarious complaint that people who say the word “faggot” have to enter rehab.
No right-wing supporter (that I know of) complained when they learned that Coulter would be a featured speaker at this event. No prominent “conservative” (that I know of) refused to be a part of the event because Coulter was a featured speaker. Thus, any claims to find what she said so deeply offensive should be weighed against their much more meaningful actions in attending.
UPDATE II: Andrew Sullivan was (I believe) present at this event, and said this about Coulter’s speech:
When you see her in such a context, you realize that she truly represents the heart and soul of contemporary conservative activism, especially among the young. The standing ovation for Romney was nothing like the eruption of enthusiasm that greeted her. . . . Her endorsement of Romney today – “probably the best candidate” – is a big deal, it seems to me. McCain is a non-starter. He is as loathed as Clinton in these parts. Giuliani is, in her words, “very, very liberal.” One of his sins? He opposed the impeachment of Bill Clinton. That’s the new standard. She is the new Republicanism. The sooner people recognize this, the better.
She is the face of what the hard-core Republican Party has become, particularly during the Bush presidency. That is why she holds the position she holds in that movement. That’s why Mitt Romney was giddy with glee when her name passed his lips. He knows that her endorsement is valuable precisely because she holds great sway within the party, and she holds great sway because the hard-core party faithful consider her a hero for expressing the thoughts which they themselves believe but which other, less courageous Republican figures are afraid to express.
This is not about a single comment or isolated remark. The more Ann Coulter says these things, the more popular she becomes in this movement. What this is about is that she reflects exactly what sort of political movement this is. She reflects its true impulses and core beliefs. If that were not the case, why would she continue to receive top billing at their most prestigious events, and why would she continue to be lavished with rock star-adoration by the party faithful?
