The “Pillars” of Conservatism

Over at the HuffingtonPost Bob Burnett identifies what he calls “ten pillars of conservative political wisdom,” and he advises that Liberals should attack each one of them. Mr. Burnett provides a lot to chew on, I think. Here are the “pillars” of conservatism that we should go after:

1. Government is bad: Conservatives believe the Federal government is unnecessary, except for the military. They maintain that entitlements for the disadvantaged–the poor, elderly, and disabled–are counter-productive, as they foster dependency. Most Americans believe in the necessity for the Federal government and these entitlements. It’s the role of liberals to provide a new justification for government, in general.

2. Competence is overrated: Because conservatives don’t believe in government, they feel the only salient qualification for political office–such as President and Vice President–is ideological purity. As a result, the Bush White House has proved to be the most conservative and least competent Administration in modern political history. Liberals must insist that elected officials have a record of accomplishment; they should believe in working for the common good and know what they are doing.

3. Cutting taxes fixes everything: Beginning in 2001, the conservative Bush Administration reduced taxes, claiming this would reduce the size of the Federal government and a "rising tide would lift all boats." Instead, this ill-considered "panacea" created a record Federal debt and lifted only the yachts of the rich. Liberals need to roll back these tax cuts and take a stand for fiscal sanity.

4. The market will provide: Conservatives believe that, in the absence of Federal programs, the market will solve national problems. America’s healthcare crisis demonstrates that this is naïve: the market doesn’t care about problems that affect the average American. And, the market doesn’t respond to disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina. Liberals should argue that only government can solve certain national problems and resurrect the notion that government provides a "the safety net."

5. Our best foreign policy is a strong military: Even though the US has by far the largest Defense budget in the world, conservatives continue to lobby for billions of dollars for wasteful Pentagon projects. They argue that big is better, that America’s best defense is a strong military. They ignore the fact that our armed forces didn’t protect us on 9/11 and haven’t won the war in either Afghanistan or Iraq. Conservatives also argue that the military is our best instrument of foreign policy. It’s time for liberals to demand a complete review of our defense strategy and foreign policy.

6. The U.S. is at war: Since 9/11, conservatives have argued we’re engaged in a "war on terror." But we’re not. Terrorism isn’t a military campaign waged by countries that don’t like us; it’s a social disease that requires America to use a variety of means to combat extremists. Liberals need to stop calling this a war and begin lobbying for a balanced campaign that includes diplomacy and use of police and intelligence resources.

7. Don’t ask questions: President Bush has consistently argued that it’s not necessary to understand why terrorists want to attack us, all that’s required is knowing they "hate our freedom." However, most experts on terrorism argue that terrorists have readily understandable motives, and we can head off future attacks by understanding what these motives are: for example, they want us to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord.

8. Trust the Commander-in-chief: Since 9/11, Bush and his conservative supporters have argued that the President, as commander-in-chief, has special responsibilities that obviate the necessity for the balance-of-powers logic in the Constitution: because the US is at "war" the President is above the law. Liberals need to attack this notion and roll back legislation that restricts our civil-rights.

9. America can go it alone: A cornerstone of conservative foreign policy is the belief that our allies are stupid and, therefore, don’t care if we act like bullies most of the time. The Bush Administration philosophy assumes that since the US has a bloated military, it doesn’t matter whether or not we use diplomacy or participate in international organizations. Conservatives believe that because America is big and powerful we can do whatever we want in the world: go it alone. Liberals need to point out that the strategy hasn’t proven successful, that it hasn’t built the alliances required to solve problems such as terrorism, AIDS, and global warming.

10. Winning is everything: Finally, the operating philosophy of conservatives has been that it doesn’t matter how you accomplish your objectives, just that you win: the ends justify the means. This has been the modus operandi of a conservative Bush Administration that lied to the American people. Liberals need to stand up for telling the truth, argue that Americans are governed by a morality that that values the common good, and places the public interest above personal ambition.

The Bolton UN Resignation

Steve Clemons has been following the Bolton UN nomination, confirmation and, now, resignation very closely. Accordingly to Clemons here’s what the Bolton resignation means:

1. John Bolton’s resignation reflects a loss of ground by Jesse Helms’ inspired ‘pugnacious nationalists’. It is also a clear loss for Vice President Cheney and his loyal followers. Jim Lobe captures this quite well in a piece he has written tonight on Bolton.

2. Bolton’s resignation also hurts Condoleezza Rice in the short term because while she had to "manage" him more frequently than she liked — often sending Undersecretary for Political Affairs R. Nicholas Burns to manage the most fragile diplomatic agendas — Rice now has NO Deputy Secretary of State, and will soon face in January NO Counselor and NO Ambassador to the United Nations.

Losing Robert Zoellick, Philip Zelikow and John Bolton is an awful lot to lose without having clear successsors in place and ready to go. The already stretched thin Secretary of State will be stretched even thinner with Bolton’s departure.

3. On the good side, if the White House and State Department get their mutual acts together, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is ‘likely’ to expedite at lightning speed reasonable, even partly controversial, nominees to both Bolton’s UN position and to the Deputy Secretary position. This Bolton Battle won’t be replayed soon. I think the incoming Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden will bend over backwards to help Rice get a full team back in place at State as fast as possible.

4. This has not been picked up by the press, but I believe that the theatrical dimensions of the Bolton resignation were designed to make it look like the President was giving up something he really, really wanted in order to encourage Dems to ‘de-complexify’ the confirmation process of Defense Secretary nominee Robert Gates. Watch for Dems who previously opposed Gates or had serious concerns about his Iran Contra involvement to ratchet down their concerns.

The President’s dropping of Bolton may very well be designed to facilitate a fast confirmation process for Gates.

5. Who will succeed Bolton is unclear. I have written about Jim Leach in the past — as well as many others including Paula Dobriansky and Zalmay Khalilzad.

I think Dobriansky has a strong chance of getting the job as she is respected around DC, is acceptable to both Rice and Cheney, and is not a complete rejection of John Bolton’s views. She is neocon-friendly if not a true neoconservative, and she manages diplomacy and achieving America’s diplomatic objectives well.

Jim Leach could also be extraordinary — and Khalilzad could be an important asset there too as a Muslim envoy from America to an institution representing the nations of the world. He is also a well-experienced strategist and diplomat.

There are other choices I won’t list here tonight as I think that these three are all qualified and realistic choices given the fact that George W. Bush is going to make the appointment.

6. Finally, it is important to remember that the Bolton Battle was not a true partisan struggle. It was one in which many Republicans covertly supported leading Democrats in the process — and on the other side, some Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Ben Nelson openly advocated Bolton’s confirmation.

Bolton did not get confirmed because of the failure of the White House to either unite the Republican caucus behind Bolton or to select a candidate that was easier for the whole Republican caucus in the Senate to accept. Republicans with a conscience stopped Bolton’s confirmation process, with support from the Democrats who were in the minority.

Liberal Media on the Attack

Our so-called liberal media can never tear itself away from conventional wisdom, nor from sucking conservative-talking-points ass. This so-called liberal-main-stream-media is all too content with simply parroting the conservative attack lines against Democrats. Here’s one example from Newsweek’s CW feature:

Old CW: First woman Speaker will be Rayburn redux.
New CW: Botox bumbler blows first play.

Digby has more on the "Botox" attack line being directed against Democratic women representatives:

This particular Mean Girlz theme didn’t spring from nowhere. It’s coming directly from Frank Luntz:

LUNTZ: I always use the line for Nancy Pelosi, "You get one shot at a facelift. If it doesn’t work the first time, let it go."

This must have focused grouped well among their target wingnut pigs because, as I previously noted, Queenbee Dowd generously shared this one with the whole world today (before she went off on a sexist rant of her own):

Ted Olson, the former solicitor general and eloquent Republican lawyer who argued the Bush v. Gore case before the Supreme Court, was warming up the rabidly conservative Federalist Society crowd for John McCain with a few sexist cracks about Botox.

The new Congress could amuse itself, he said, by “searching for any sign of movement in Speaker Pelosi’s forehead.” The Senate, he added, would be entertained by “the expressionless, Pelosi-like forehead of Senator Clinton.”

Thank god for commentators like Arinna Huffington, who chimes in on the sexist conservative attack lines being parroted by our so-called liberal media:

The only thing surprising about the current mainstream media narrative regarding Nancy Pelosi is its relentless predictability. Practically since the day the Iraq war started to go bad, Democrats have been derided in the press for not having a plan, and choosing pragmatism over principle.

Cut to ’06. Hot on the heels of an electoral triumph, Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi endorses as Majority Leader the member of the House most identified with speaking out against the war — the man whose courage in doing so fueled the nationalized campaign that gave Democrats the majority in the first place. I’m speaking, of course, about Jack Murtha.

Murtha then loses the Leadership race to Steny Hoyer. As Pelosi no doubt knew, it was an uphill battle from the beginning — Hoyer had been tirelessly campaigning for the job among Democratic caucus members for months. But Pelosi gave her support to Murtha because, as she put it in title of her blog this week on HuffPost: "Bringing the War to an End is my Highest Priority as Speaker."

It doesn’t get much clearer or more principled than that.

So what’s been the reaction in the media?

According to the Los Angeles Times, Pelosi is off to a "rocky start," while the New York Times says she’s "tempting disaster."

Disaster? If wanting to give a high-profile platform to the man most responsible for his party finally locating its spine regarding Iraq (and who, for his troubles, received the full brunt of the Bush/Rove/Mehlman slime machine) is a "disaster," what word do you use to describe the war itself? Disast-orrfic? Catastro-bacle-aster? Disaster-to-the-10th-power?

Maureen Dowd joined the bash-Pelosi-bash with a column entitled "Squeaker of the House," writing:

"Nancy Pelosi’s first move, after the Democratic triumph, was to throw like a girl. Women get criticized in the office for acting on relationships and past slights rather than strategy, so Madame Speaker wasted no time making her first move based on relationships and past slights rather than strategy… Ms. Pelosi offered an argument along the lines of: John Murtha’s my friend. He’s been nice to me. I don’t like Steny. He did something a long time ago that was really, really bad that I’m never, ever going to tell you. And I’m the boss of you. So vote for John."

Really? I don’t recall Pelosi ever saying — or even implying — anything of the kind. Again, how much clearer could Pelosi be than "Bringing the War to an End is my Highest Priority as Speaker"? If ending this disastrous war (and I’m using the term in its true sense and not its New-York-Times-editorial sense) doesn’t qualify as "strategy" then what does?

In their editorials this week, both the LA Times and the New York Times chided Pelosi for even considering not installing California Congresswoman Jane Harman as the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, a point also raised by Dowd:

"Everyone in Washington was perplexed at Ms. Pelosi’s ham-handed effort to sabotage not only Mr. Hoyer but her former friend and fellow Californian, Jane Harman."

Wait, so first Pelosi is criticized for "making her first move based on relationships," and then she’s criticized for not giving a chairmanship to a "former friend and fellow Californian?"

So damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

As for the wisdom of "everyone in Washington," well, a walk around Baghdad should suffice as rebuttal.

I’m surprised that seniority as the be-all qualification for leadership still has so many ardent backers in Washington. Pelosi has made it clear that the highest priorities of the new Congress will be changing course in Iraq and the restoration of oversight. It is by these two yardsticks that she needs to decide who the Chair of the Intelligence Committee should be. And by nothing else.

Wouldn’t it be refreshing to have a Democratic leader who would rather listen to the American people than to "everyone in Washington"?

“Frat Boy”-in-Chief

That’s Paul Rieckhoff when he was a young lieutenant in the army. He went on to serve in Iraq, and since his return to the States he’s been working to bring his brothers and sisters in arms in Iraq back to their families.

Rieckhoff makes a great point here about our "Frat Boy" commander-in-chief:

Last week’s White House press conference was notable for a number of reasons. First, any time President Bush answers questions from the press is a noteworthy event, given that he has deigned to do so fewer times than almost any other modern President. It was also notable because mere hours earlier, North Korea claimed to have tested a nuclear weapon underground.

The press conference was also noteworthy because of what happened after the President left the podium. Just after he wrapped things up in the Rose Garden, top Pentagon officials held a press conference of their own to announce a new plan to maintain US Army strength in Iraq at current levels, roughly 140,000 Soldiers, through 2010. This was startling news, if only because it stands in such stark contrast to the initial war plans (or lack thereof), which called for reducing troop strength in Iraq to 30,000 by the end of 2003.

[...]

But there’s one more reason yesterday’s White House press conference was notable. In between questions on such topics as nuclear proliferation, an alleged child predator in Congress, and the death of untold thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq, our President found time to make wisecracks about the wardrobe of the White House press corps. And the press corps, for their part, indulged him. It’s all right there, in the official press conference transcript.

[...]

The next day, I read about how many US troops were killed and wounded in Iraq. I wonder if any of them died, or lost a limb, or were blinded at the same time our President was cracking jokes on national television.

His attitude at the press conference reminded me of his little performance back in 2004 at the White House Correspondents Dinner, when he cracked jokes about not being able to find WMD in Iraq. Here is the video if you missed it. That wasn’t funny either. Remember that?

As a veteran of this war in Iraq, I am sickened by the consistently flip nature of the President in the face of deadly serious issues. His ridiculous banter reflects poorly upon all Americans.

[...]

[W]ith nukes in North Korea, perverts in Congress and 140,000 of my brothers and sisters in uniform bound to serve another four years in Iraq, I’d rather have a statesman than a frat boy.

I agree, it’s about time we get some adults in congress so that they can supervise our "Frat Boy"-in-chief.

If you haven’t done so already, why not help get some adults elected this November… every little bit helps.

Right Wingers and ABC

And still the right-wing sympathizers think that there’s such a monster as the so-called liberal media:

“Path to 9/11″ Maker Has Evangelical Ties
By Justin Rood – September 8, 2006, 2:39 PM

The director of ABC’s controversial “Path to 9/11″ docudrama has ties to an evangelical Christian group whose goals include “transform[ing] Hollywood from the inside out.”

Update: This story just gets murkier and murkier… just who is behind this fake "docudrama"? Max Blumenthal, over at HuffingtonPost.com, has some answers:

“The Path to 9/11″ is produced and promoted by a well-honed propaganda operation consisting of a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, he is working with a secretive evangelical religious right group founded by The Path to 9/11′s director David Cunningham that proclaims its goal to “transform Hollywood” in line with its messianic vision.

Before The Path to 9/11 entered the production stage, Disney/ABC contracted David Cunningham as the film’s director. Cunningham is no ordinary Hollywood journeyman. He is in fact the son of Loren Cunningham, founder of the right-wing evangelical group Youth With A Mission (YWAM). The young Cunningham helped found an auxiliary of his father’s group called The Film Institute (TFI), which, according to its mission statement, is “dedicated to a Godly transformation and revolution TO and THROUGH the Film and Televisionindustry.” As part of TFI’s long-term strategy, Cunningham helped place interns from Youth With A Mission’s in film industry jobs “so that they can begin to impact and transform Hollywood from the inside out,” according to a YWAM report.