One Less For The Baby Party

This may be the ultimate Baby Party move:

Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) will resign his seat by the end of the year, he announced in his home town of Pascagoula on Monday.

The announcement took Capitol Hill by surprise because Lott, the former majority leader, seemed to be relishing his job as minority whip, the second-ranking GOP leadership job [...]

A Lott friend said part of the reason, and a factor in the timing, is a new lobbying regulation, signed by President Bush in September, extending the existing lobbying ban for former members of Congress from one to two years. The lobbying ban takes effect at the end of this year.

Lott was just elected in 2006. He waited to see if Republican Governor Haley Barbour, who will select a replacement to serve until November 2008, was re-elected at the beginning of the month. Then, seeing that his cash cow would slip away and he'd have to wait a whole TWO YEARS to make a bazillion dollars on K Street, he decided to put his wallet first and resign. Plus the Senate wasn't any more fun anyway, what with all this "minority" stuff.

You'd think a guy like Lott, with his history, would be relishing the Minority Whip position, but it didn't have the allure of making millions for the pharmaceutical industry or something.

Thing is, there's a good Democratic candidate named Mike Moore, a former Attorney General in the state, waiting in the wings. And Mississippi apparently has a funny thing called the law that won't let Lott resign without automatically triggering a Senate election within 100 days:

Gov. Haley Barbour (R) said in a statement Monday that he would schedule the special election for the same day as the November 2008 general election. State law, however, appears to require an earlier date if Lott retires this year, as he said he would.

While Lott sneaks in under the wire for the extended ban on lobbying Congress by retiring this year, the secretary of state’s office said Monday that state law appears to require a special election within 90 days if he does so.

Conversely, if Lott were to wait and retire in 2008, the law allows for the special election to be held the same day as the general. Of course, he would then be subject to the new two-year ban on lobbying his former colleagues, instead of the current one-year ban.

Whoopsie!

Not only is this the ultimate selfish act, it actually harms Republican chances in the Senate. Lott will have to choose between waiting a year for his payday or allowing a rushed general election in the middle of April. Three guesses what he'll pick.

Waa Waa Waa

I guess I didn't notice this yesterday, or it wasn't fully reported, but apparently Bush said that if Michael Mukasey isn't confirmed by the Senate, there won't be an Attorney General for the last 15 months of his term. Which is fitting, because the law means pretty much nothing to these guys.

"If the Senate Judiciary Committee were to block Judge Mukasey on these grounds, they would set a new standard for confirmation that could not be met by any responsible nominee for attorney general," Bush said in a speech at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

"That would guarantee that America would have no attorney general during this time of war," the president said.

This is a familiar tactic, where Bush does things and then blames it on the Democrats. His veto of Iraq funding with a timeline meant that Democrats were blocking the funding. His stopping the SCHIP bill meant that Democrats were playing politics with children's health. And now, his refusal to bring up a new nominee means that Democrats are "allowing" the position of Attorney General to go unfilled.

That's crazy. But it absolutely show you where his priorities lay. Bush cannot allow anyone who specifically cites waterboarding as torture to be the nation's top law enforcement official. To me, that means he personally authorized the technique, and he would be subject to future prosecution in that case. I agree with emptywheel that I'm OK with this issue being framed as one about torture:

You see, events thus far have made it very important for Bush to get Mukasey approved. While David Addington may have thought it in Bush's best interest to push Mukasey to adopt the party line, they're now at the place where, if Mukasey is rejected, it will be because of Bush's torture policy. (Frankly, this is unfortunate from a principled perspective, since it means that the Senators don't care about the unitary executive more generally, but it works to our advantage politically.) The press has spun the rising tension to be entirely about the issue of torture, which makes it inconceivable that, if Mukasey is rejected, the narrative will be anything but torture. Which will shine a bright light on the torture policy itself, and some Soccer Moms who might otherwise be ignorant that men are being tortured in their names may just discover that their government is doing reprehensible things.

Mukasey's other answers on executive power are actually worse, and grounds for dismissal, but it's on torture where Bush could get frogmarched. That's why he's pushing so hard. And there are a few Senators - Feinstein and Schumer seem the most likely on the Judiciary Committee - who make succumb to the pressure. We'll see on Tuesday.

Meanies Trying To Help Kids

The Senate just passed a revised SCHIP bill and has enough votes to override Bush's veto - and there are rumors of a compromise in the works:

In a situation of bewildering political complexity, Republicans dictated the decision to pass the legislation speedily. It appeared their goal was to short-circuit attempts by supporters of the bill to reach a compromise that could attract enough votes in the House to override Bush's veto.

Attempts by Reid to delay final passage of the bill until next week or longer drew objections from the GOP.

"I believe a deal is within reach," said Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, a participant in meetings with two senior Senate Republicans, Sens. Charles Grassley of Iowa and Orrin Hatch of Utah, and several members of the House GOP.

Rep. Judy Biggert, R-Ill., who supported Bush's first veto and is involved in the discussions, said "we are pretty close" to an agreement but that several issues remain. For example, she said, the two sides had narrowed their differences on the issue of insuring maximum coverage of poor children before those in slightly higher-income families can be brought into the program.

Of course, now Bush is objecting to the financing mechanism, though I'm sure he won't be coming up with one on his own that he can live with. So the President has responded to public outcry and damagin his party for a generation by retreating FURTHER away from the program. You can only conclude that he doesn't want it to go forward. But these negotiations may leave him no choice.

Of course, this could all have been resolved earlier if the Democrats weren't such mean meanie meanheads.

The latest rationale: They voted against it because Democratic leaders were nasty to them. That's what angry House GOPers have now told Dem leaders in a private meeting on the Hill:

In a closed-door meeting before the last vote on the children’s health care bill, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer appealed for the support of about 30 wavering Republican lawmakers. What he got instead was a tongue-lashing, participants said.

The GOP lawmakers, all of whom had expressed interest in a bipartisan deal on the SCHIP legislation, were furious that the Democratic leader from Maryland had not reached out to them in a more serious way early on. They also criticized him and Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel of Illinois for failing to stop his allies outside Congress from running attack ads in their districts, while they were discussing a bipartisan deal.

They really are the Baby Party. Can you imagine Tom DeLay wasting one moment of his time on the FEELINGS of Democrats before ramming through one of his middle-of-the-night corporate giveaways? And these same House Republicans decrying the partisanship over the bill were the ones... being partisan about it, during the debate:

If GOPers were really interested in reaching an understanding with Dems, they had a funny way of showing it. Over a month ago, for instance, Keller accused Speaker Nancy Pelosi of "playing politics" while risking the health of "6 million children." He blasted the Dems' SCHIP plan as "socialized medicine" funded by a "gigantic tax increase."

Another Republican who claimed to want to compromise with Dems on SCHIP, Rep. Tom Price, was similarly caustic in his hits on Dems early on, blasting the Dems' SCHIP plan a month ago as having "nothing to do with our nation’s neediest children and everything to do with political posturing."

And these gentle souls are now complaining that they didn't support SCHIP because Dems were mean to them?

It's a tremendus bit of projection, isn't it? The Republicans are out of ideas other than blocking things like children's health, so they'll fall back on that "sure winner," whining about partisanship. They are DEFINED by partisanship. And so their criticism falls on deaf ears.

Leader Of The Baby Party

On top of the petulance, he's factually wrong.

When it comes to funding our troops, some in Washington should spend more time responding to the warnings of terrorists like Osama bin Laden and the requests of our commanders on the ground, and less time responding to the demands of MoveOn.org bloggers and Code Pink protesters.

MoveOn.org doesn't have any bloggers. They don't have a blog, you cultural illiterate.

The President of the United States has been reduced to whining. Stomping his little feet like a kid with her parents who wants to go home from the mall. The comments from earlier in the day were even worse, whining that the Senate needs to confirm Waterboard Mukasey and that they're being all mean and stuff asking him questions:

I then remind the audience that a key member of the national security team -- a key member of the team that works to protect the American people is the Attorney General. I've submitted a highly competent, smart, independent nominee in Judge Mukasey to the Senate. I am disappointed that the process is taking so long to get his name to the floor.

I believe that the questions he's been asked are unfair; he's not been read into a program -- he has been asked to give opinions of a program or techniques of a program on which he has not been briefed. I will make the case -- and I strongly believe this is true -- that Judge Mukasey is not being treated fairly. He's made the rounds on Capitol Hill, he's answered questions, he's been to hearings. I do thank the Senate for setting up what I hope will be a opportunity to move him out of Judiciary Committee to the floor on Tuesday. It is time to get his nomination to the floor so the Senate can vote him up or down [...]

Q Judge Mukasey is experienced in terrorism trials, he's been around. Why is it wrong for him -- or why will you not let him say whether he thinks that waterboarding is illegal torture?

THE PRESIDENT: He has not been read in -- first of all, let me put this in perspective. The Congress did pass a law, the Detainee Detention Act [sic]*, that I signed into law. The techniques we use informed that law and members of the Senate and House -- select members of the Senate and House, both parties, have been briefed on the law.

Secondly, he doesn't know whether we use that technique or not. And thirdly, it doesn't make any sense to tell an enemy what we're doing. One of the fundamental questions that the American people have got to know is that in order to protect America, if we capture somebody who may have data about whether or not he's going to -- he is ordering an attack or there's an impending attack or there's a threat, we need to know that.
And the techniques we use by highly trained professionals are within the law. That's what's important for America to know.

If he doesn't know what you use, tell him. Furthermore, you can give him a bunch of articles which clearly show that waterboarding has been practiced by the US government. But it's irrelevant to why Mukasey can't answer the question; waterboarding is a centuries-old method, used in the Spanish Inquisition, and its illegality doesn't depend upon whether or not the US does it. Except, of course, it does, because this is all about keeping Bush's ass out of jail.

In adamantly refusing to declare waterboarding illegal, Michael B. Mukasey, the nominee for attorney general, is steering clear of a potential legal quagmire for the Bush administration: criminal prosecution or lawsuits against Central Intelligence Agency officers who used the harsh interrogation practice and those who authorized it, legal experts said Wednesday.

The biggest problem for Mr. Mukasey remains his refusal to take a clear legal position on the interrogation technique. Fear of opening the door to criminal or civil liability for torture or abuse, whether in an American court or in courts overseas, appeared to loom large in Mr. Mukasey’s calculations as he parried questions from the committee this week. Some legal experts suggested that liability could go all the way to President Bush if he explicitly authorized waterboarding [...]

Jack L. Goldsmith, who served in the Justice Department in 2003 and 2004, wrote in his recent memoir, “The Terror Presidency,” that the possibility of future prosecution for aggressive actions against terrorism was a constant worry inside the Bush administration.

“I witnessed top officials and bureaucrats in the White House and throughout the administration openly worrying that investigators, acting with the benefit of hindsight in a different political environment, would impose criminal penalties on heat-of-battle judgment calls,” Mr. Goldsmith wrote.

President Pissypants needs an Attorney General who will look the other way on his lawbreaking. That's the end of the story.

These guys can't prosecute a terror case to save their lives, are reconstructing other terror cases because all the evidence is inadmissable, and is only prosecuting them to begin with to try and save their party's fortunes in 2008. How dare Bush claim that the DEMOCRATS are the ones politicizing terror. They're both politicizing it, and using it.

UPDATE: In a typically thorough post, emptywheel notes that what's more troubling is Mukasey's answers on contempt of Congress, also designed to protect Bush Administration officials from prosecution, but for the US Attorney purge.

Baby Party Blues - And Their Enablers

It's a familiar pattern: the Republicans are on the absolute wrong side of an issue, wildly out of step with the American people. So to distract from that reality, they whine about someone saying something mean to them. I wonder if this does nothing but end up reinforcing in the public mind that Republicans are a bunch of babies who can't take words of any kind without heading for the fainting couch. Here's the problem, though: Democrats actually help along this crap.

His words will live on as part of the congressional record, but Rep. Pete Stark's comments about President Bush gaining "amusement" over deaths in Iraq have been condemned by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

In a statement released Friday evening, Pelosi called the comments of her fellow California Democrat "inappropriate."

"While members of Congress are passionate about their views, what Congressman Stark said during the debate was inappropriate and distracted from the seriousness of the subject at hand -- providing health care for American children," Pelosi said.

What's inappropriate is you having so much as a word to say about it. Rush Limbaugh makes a comment about "phony soldiers" and the entire Republican Party rallies around him, and he auctions off a letter signed by 41 Democrats for $2 million dollars. Pete Stark makes a bold statement in the midst of a heated debate, and Democrats have to denounce and distance. It's just horrendously bad politics. How about discussing how Republicans can't stop whining and crying and fainting about talk instead of action?

Babies As Far As The Eye Can See

We really have become a nation of children, so worried about the harming power of words - WORDS - that we'll put together a Senate resolution condemning them when they are used in a pun. The latest mau-mauing from the right concerns Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to the UN and Columbia University. We are for some reason given the impression that "President" must mean some sort of ruler/despot, which shows both how strong the Imperial Presidency has grown in this country, and how globally illiterate Americans, and particularly the media that seeks to inform them, are (and the media deserves practically all the blame here). Ahmadinejad is like the Speaker of the House of Iran. He actually wields a little less power than that. He doesn't control foreign policy, he doesn't control the military, he doesn't control Iran's weapons arsenal. What's more, he's very unpopular in his own country, and is unlikely to win re-election. The only thing an outcry like this does is increase the power of someone who is essentially powerless. The mullahs are using him as a lightning rod so they can curtail civil liberties and dissent at home. While we focus on one guy, ordinary Iranians see the man attracting all this criticism and rally around him.

In demonizing Mr. Ahmadinejad, the West has served him well, elevating his status at home and in the region at a time when he is increasingly isolated politically because of his go-it-alone style and ineffective economic policies, according to Iranian politicians, officials and political experts.

Ahmadinejad would just wither on the vine if we'd only stop screaming about him. But the neocons won't, because they have a very specific plan that Matt Stoller outlines well.

1) Empowering Ahmadinejad: He's not particularly important within Iran, but this kind of mindless attention helps him domestically.

2) Leading Us into a New War: Wars require villains. Ahmadinejad, as an ineffective buffoon with a weak domestic power center, wasn't enough of a villain. He must be built up into an all-powerful character that can only be removed by American force. The divestment from Iran campaign, currently swirling around the states, is accomplishing this, and will almost certainly continue, at least PR-wise, into the next Democratic administration. This will make negotiations much harder and the path to a military strike much more likely.

3) Attacking Free Speech at Columbia: Dismantling or weakening institutions that stand up against the right or could conceivably do so is one of the long-term conservative movement strategic interests. The Freedom Watch ad calling Columbia University 'appeasers' is meant to intimate, and it often works in subtle ways.

Are we so fearful of losing our own democracy that we think one lone nut's words can take it down? That's ridiculous. We've weathered the storm of dissent before and we will again. Neoconservatives want to mirror the mullah-led state of Iran here in America because it would make it easier to take the country to war that way. And a pliant media, mindful that black-and-white worldviews and good-versus-evil constructions are easier to market, willingly goes along, setting up Ahmadinejad like he's Sinestro or something. Meanwhile this isn't mentioned.

While all eyes are on Manhattan, precious few are watching what's happening in Washington. On Thursday, Senators Jon Kyl and Joseph Lieberman filed an amendment to the 2008 Defense Authorization Bill that would make it official U.S. policy to "combat, contain and roll back" Iran and its surrogates in Iraq. Section 5 calls for the United States to formally designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization. If passed, this amendment would open the door even wider for military action against Iran.

Why hasn't this bit of news sparked similar debate?

Because our traditional media are a pack of babies whose buttons are easily pushed by the babies on the right. Who are afraid of somebody saying something. Please.

Don't You Know How We Do Things Here?

Charles Grassley is one of those fossils who appears to have been grown in the Senate chamber and will likely return to the primordial soup there as well. He has this sense of entitlement that is endemic to a class of Senators that are probably still pissed off that they have to be elected directly. Grassley's all pissed off at Barack Obama for asking constituents of his to participate in their democracy. Such practices should be verboten.

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama stepped up his pressure on Republican Sen. Charles Grassley on Thursday, arguing voters should urge the Iowa lawmaker to help override President Bush's veto of a bill that would set a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq [...]

"It isn't personal," Obama told about 300 people at a town hall meeting at Simpson College. "I respect him greatly. But I said then and I say now that he needs to hear from you and people across Iowa who understand that it's time to change course." [...]

Grassley has rejected the suggestion that he can be pressured on the issue, saying Obama, an Illinois senator, is violating traditions of the institution by traveling to another state and publicly applying pressure to a colleague. He has labeled that step "not senatorial" and said he had no intention of voting to override the veto.

Obama said he has not overstepped his grounds, saying those senatorial traditions pale before the magnitude of the war.

"This isn't about Washington etiquette, it's about bringing our troops home," said Obama. "This is how real change happens in America. This isn't symbolic, this is real."

Grassley exemplifies exactly the kind of clubby insiderism that has brought us such maladies as the Washington Consensus and the military-industrial complex. Senators of Grassley's era, pompous as all get out, truly believe they own their seats and that they should never be questioned by anyone, friend or foe.

You can say what you will about Obama (and I have), but he doesn't believe in that DC circle jerk. In fact, everywhere he's gone, he's asked citizens who believe in ending the occupation of Iraq to petition their Senators for redress of grievances (you know, like it says in the First Amendment). This isn't even about Grassley. Obama's done this in Louisiana and Virginia and Iowa and elsewhere.

If you want to relieve the pressure, stop continuing to be a rubber stamp for the failed policies of George W. Bush. But don't give me this crap about "senatorial tradition" when all Obama's asking is for citizens to make a phone call. This comes from the same GOP that saw Bill Frist go to the Minority Leader's state in 2004 and campaign on behalf of John Thune against Tom Daschle. I guess it's only un-senatorial if a Democrat does it. They really are the Baby Party.

The Baby Party

I touched on the Sheryl Crow-Karl Rove incident at the painfully unfunny White House Correspondents Association dinner, where Crow and Laurie David tried to engage Rove on the subject of global warming and Rove snapped "Don't touch me." Rove's take on the matter was that “She came over to insult me and she succeeded.”

Top Democrats will never do this, but it seems to me that this would be the perfect opportunity to give the Republicans a taste of their own medicine. Republicans live to feminize Democrats; see the fake Edwards haircut controversy for an example. Now we have the GOP's top strategist running away from two women, shrieking "Don't touch me!" like Margaret Dumont in an old Marx Brothers movie, and snootily harrumphing that he was o-ffended by the whole thing.

What a little baby!

And the GOP's culture of babyhood is certainly well-documented; we have a President who makes a living out of throwing temper tantrums, we have a Congress that whines and cries at every opportunity.

If the Republicans are always trying to frame the Democrats as the Mommy Party, why aren't we similarly always framing them as the Baby Party?

The recent filibusters in the Congress should be construed "baby-like obstructionism." The entire conservative worldview can be boiled down to the behavior of a 4 year-old at the mall stamping her feet and yelling "I don't WANT to help people! I don't WANT to pay taxes! I wanna go home!" They always whine and cry about "personal attacks" from the other side of the aisle and the "politics of personal destruction." And the issue that occasioned the Rove-Crow controversy is global warming, which the Republicans have used the logic of two year-olds to deny, looking outside their window and seeing snow and thinking "See, there's no global warming," which is no different than infants who think that toys disappear when they're out of their sight.

These are the characteristics of children, and I don't think the American people want a Party full of mewling little babies running the most powerful nation on Earth. After all, they've seen the effects of that for six years.

This goes along with the need for Democrats to fight back, and that's not always simply with a litany of facts. Kevin Drum found a great example of this, some advice on how Edwards could defuse the haircut non-controversy and attack Republicans in the same breath.

Imagine if Edwards said something on these lines:

Yeah, I'm rich; I get $400 haircuts. I started out poor, and today I own a big fancy house; I drive my favorite car, and I don't have to look in the price column of the menu when I eat out. You media elitists and right wingers can't keep all the good things in life just for yourselves. I don't intend to give any of it up; I just want everybody to have the same chance at getting rich I did. And I want anybody who works hard to have some of the good things in life whether they get rich or not. That's the American way; everybody gets to dance, and there are lots of prizes besides first.

Now that is not exactly what I believe, but from his public statements, I'd say that it is exactly what Edwards believes. It is a pretty mainstream take.

It demolishes the "Democrats are sissies" trope that is the main point of all this, by fighting back with tough fighting words. It even includes an appropriate country music reference for that dog whistle politics.

Furthermore, Edwards could go on to say "Why do Republicans hate it so much when poor people rise up and do well? They seem to do everything they can to keep the poor entrenched in their own station while their rich fatcat friends continue to benefit enormously from the policies of inequality. If anyone beats the odds and actually rises their station in life, Republicans attack them for being too rich like them. Why can't they stand it when the poor get rich?"

That's a class warfare attack I could really get behind. It portrays the GOP as hiding behind castle walls and shooting crossbow darts at anyone who tries to make their way inside. Time after time, the Baby Party tries to pull up the drawbridge on every American but themselves and their rich friends. When Edwards accomplishes the amazing feat of actually scaling those castle walls, they whine and cry and bluster about it like the babies that they are.

I really think this can fly. Mockery is a dynamic element in American politics, and so is slotting stories into a familiar narrative. The GOP is The Baby Party. Learn it. Live it. Know it.

UPDATE: Well, that was handled about the opposite of how I suggested:

"It’s a ridiculous amount of money for a haircut. I’m actually embarrassed by it. This guy had to come to where I was to get a haircut. I knew it’d be expensive. I didn’t know it would be that expensive. Hopefully, I’ll have enough sense not to do that again."

I really don't know what to say about that. He had NOTHING to apologize about. That's either some bad advice by consultants or a knee-jerk defensive posture. I'm very disappointed.