Harold Ford: The Constitution Is Not Worth A Good Bed-Wetting

Here's Harold Ford, the keynote speaker at the 2000 Democratic National Convention, saying that if terrorists scare us enough, we can throw out the Constitution and the rule of law and do whatever the hell we please, and nobody can object.

MATTHEWS: How well does this affect, or does it affect, (Pelosi's) status, in this big debate with the Republicans over torture? The party base of the Democratic Party, and you know, the people who go to the whip meetings, the rah-rah guys and women, they don't like this torture thing. Do they feel that she's been touched by it, do you think?

FORD: Two things. One, she's often been picked on as Speaker. She's been accustomed throughout her political career of having to overcome odds. This is another challenge she will face. Two, it's no surprise, Nancy Pelosi opposed the Iraq War, from the outset. I happen to have disagreed with the Speaker in that vote. She has been outspoken in her concern and outcry about the techniques used by the previous Administration to quell Al Qaeda's growth. These questions here are as much semantics as anything. I think the larger question from our party, however, is, is this really a debate we want to have? I think if you ask the majority of Americans if they were opposed to the waterboarding of some of these high-level terrorists, or those who orchestrated terrorist attacks, I think you'd be hard pressed to find many Americans, many Democrats even, who would be that outraged by it. So I hope we are able to move on from the conversation, and get on to the business that Leon Panetta's on, which is trying to fix our intelligence system to ensure that we're getting the best data, and that we don't get into the problem that we ran into in Iraq from the outset, which was going into Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, when they had no weapons of mass destruction.

CILLIZZA: There was a poll a week or two ago, an independent poll, a media poll that asked people whether what has gone on at Gitmo was torture and by a large majority people said yes. The next question was did they think that those techniques would be necessary in certain circumstances and a slimmer, but still more people said yes than no, so you have this weird disconnect. People do think it is torture, but they feel like if it yields results that it's the right thing to do, so this is tough especially as it relates to the Democratic Party base, which clearly believes this is something that is wrong, wrong, wrong.

MATTHEWS: You know it's interesting, Congressman, it seems like Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats are caught trying to do two things at the same time. You see her standing there in front of a million flags, she's clearly trying to look as nationalistic as the Republicans. I mean patriotic, we're all patriotic. Nationalistic, in other words, tough, anything that goes to defend the country, we're going to be as tough as nails, opposing any enemy of any kind, we are as tough as the Republicans are. At the same time, she's seeming to express sympathy for prisoners, bad guys. Is that a problem? You seem to be suggesting it is. You can't be both tough as nails, and at the same time look like you worry about human rights violations. Is that a problem or not?

FORD: No. I think that Eric Holder said this best when referring to the Ted Stevens case, and the aftermath, when he stepped foward and said the Justice Department of the United States would not move forward. He said the most important thing at the Justice Department is not winning, it's justice. So in this sense I think having the conversation about what happened and about whether or not, at Guantanamo Bay, and I'm not as outraged as some are about it, because as much as I think some of those techniques were enhanced and might have risen to a level of torture, you have to remember when this was occurring. This was 2002, 2003. The country was in a different place and a different space. And if you were to say to me as an American, put aside my partisanship, that we have an opportunity to gain information that would prevent the destruction of an American city, to prevent killings in American cities, and we have to use certain techniques, I'm one of those Americans who would have voted a certain way, Chris, in that poll, and said it might have been torture, but I'm not as outraged.

MATTHEWS: Wait a minute. You are veering into Cheney country.

FORD: No, Chris, no no no-

MATTHEWS: The destruction of an American city? What evidence did you ever have, that the enemy had a nuclear weapon that could blow up an American city? Where'd that, that's Cheney talk. That's what he uses to justify torture. We've no evidence that any enemy of ours had a nuclear weapon!

FORD: No, no, I said, if thousands of people in America- don't get me wrong, we can play the names associating me with one person or another. I'm just saying in 2002-

MATTHEWS: No, but you're saying, blow up an American city. What are you talking about?

FORD: In 2002, 2003, remember where America was. You remember our mindset. If the American people were told that there were those held at Guantanamo Bay that might have had information, after our country was attacked on 9/11, I'm certain people would have wanted those to take certain steps. I'm not arguing at all that there was evidence that that would have happened. Yet, Cheney has said that he hopes all the data is released and maybe at some point we'll have an opportunity to see that. The larger issue here I think is, where do we go from here. Ang the new director, Mr. Panetta has made it clear that finding, seeking out and finding the best intelligence has to be the goal of the CIA, and when we make a make a mistake, to admit we made a mistake. George Bush and Dick Cheney never could admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and as a result we pursued a path in Iraq that has weakened us in many ways in the Middle East and made it harder for this new President.

MATTHEWS: OK. Those guys used a nuclear threat. They said they had a weapon, they had a vehicle to deliver it here to America, to get us to go to war with Iraq, they used that again this weekend, the Vice President, to say it was an excuse, a reason for torture. I don't like references made to a strategic threat to the United States, a nuclear threat. We know what happened on 9/11, everybody knows. But the way they sold that war, the way they're still selling that war, the way they're selling torture, is that to say we faced a Holocaust in America, a city blown up. That's why I don't like any reference to Cheney talk, because that's what it is.

A new IG report is going to show that no, torture was not effective, not safe, and not advisable. But that doesn't matter now. Here we have a Democratic representative on national television telling the world that, if it might save lives, go with it. The law be damned.

That's how a country dies, or at least any pretensions that country has to being civilized. I've said consistently that the moment we started having a debate about torture, the side opposed to it lost that debate. Bringing torture into polite conversation, outside the taboo form it previously took, offering a "he said/she said" take on it, with the likes of admitted war criminal Dick Cheney allowed to air his side of the story, decimated any firewall between our ideals and our actions. It made excuses for lawbreaking - if America gets sufficiently nervous, international conventions and federal statutes lose meaning. That corrodes our system of justice and debilitates our moral authority.

And Harold Ford, a "Democrat," just said it out LOUD. Using the exact same tactics to justify torture as his right-wing friends. Keep in mind that when you justify torture, you also justify homicide.

If I thought this was just about Harold Ford, who was always suspect, I would organize a massive campaign around getting him to disassociate with the Democratic Party or apologize for his remarks. But it's sadly not. I think Ford happened to say out loud what the rest of the party thinks about this. They've shown no leadership on the issue because in their hearts, they project these beliefs that "the people" would want to torture citizens to protect the country. It's the same defensive posture on national security we've seen for decades. And until weasels like this are run out of the party, it's never going to stop. But worse than that, we have officially put torture on the table, so to speak, as a viable option. And we will rue the day we did that.

UPDATE: Video:

TN-09: Even Ford Has To Disassociate

Results from the Steve Cohen-Nikki Tinker matchup in TN-09 can be found here. The polls close pretty much right now.

Harold Ford, whose wife has maxed out to Tinker, had to acknowledge the ugliness of her campaign ads (with their anti-Semitic talk of Cohen entering "our churches") earlier today.

"Whenever race, religion or gender is invoked in a political contest, it generally means the candidate has run out of legitimate arguments for why he/she should be elected. Communities and nations are always made weaker when political figures try to divide us for political advantage. It is my strong hope that lessons will be learned."

The Memphis Commercial-Appeal has more. I'll be out, but feel free to update the race here.

UPDATE: Wow, Cohen just crushed Tinker tonight. What an embarrassment. Cohen only got 30% of the primary vote in 2006, and tonight he took 79%. Tinker's career in national politics is over. She disgraced herself and got nothing for it. And I hope EMILY's List learned their lesson.

Miscegenation Dogwhistle Watch

Wow, this is just transparent.



There's no reason to include Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in this ad. None. It hangs on the word "celebrity" being included, which means it could have just as well been Brad Pitt and George Clooney. Anyway, all the footage is from Obama's Berlin speech, not the red carpet. This is absolutely meant to juxtapose images of white women with images of a black man. They even dissolve into one another!

Josh Marshall notes:

I note with interest today, John McCain's new tactic of associating Barack Obama with oversexed and/or promiscuous young white women. (See today's new ad and this from yesterday.) Presumably, a la Harold Ford 2006, this will be one of those strategies that will be a matter of deep dispute during the campaign and later treated as transparent and obvious once the campaign is concluded.

...here we have a candidate, John McCain, who is running on a record of straight talk and honorable campaigning running a campaign made up mainly of charges reporters are now more or less acknowledging are lies. But there's precious little drawing together of the contradiction. What's more, as everyone will acknowledge after the campaign, the McCain campaign is now pushing the caricature of Obama as a uppity young black man whose presumptuousness is displayed not only in taking on airs above his station but also in a taste for young white women.

As he mentions, McCain actually hired the guy who created the "Harold, call me" ad in 2006.

This is very, very obvious. McCain's ads have overall been more negative and the press occasionally does push back on their falsehoods on a case-by-case basis. Let's see how they handle this one. Because right now we have a press narrative entirely focused on Obama, whether or not he's "ready," whether or not he's "presumptuous," whether or not he's "equipped to lead." It's high time there was a bit of focus on McCain, and the truly nasty, racially coded campaign he is now running.

Netroots Nation Notes

I think I have a particularly bad memory for events with huge groups of people where I meet hundreds of people at one time. So I'm going to rack my brain and put down everything here I can remember that I don't want to explore in a longer post.

• One of my favorite panels was the Iraq panel, which featured some of my favorite bloggers. Matt Yglesias gets the prize for the funniest insight when he talked about the White House's surprise at Hamas winning the Palestinian elections and said "You'd think Republicans would figure out that nationalism combined with excessive religiosity would be a powerful electoral strategy." Also that was the panel when I looked over and saw someone accessing my site in the middle of it. First time that's happened. I talked to him later at some bar, but didn't mention that.

• You've probably heard around the blogosphere about the final two keynotes, from Donna Edwards and Van Jones, but let me reiterate that they were quite amazing. This year the best keynotes were surely at the end. Here were two African-Americans stressing the need to stay true to principles, to work outside the system and take it on, to criticize our nominee when necessary and to work from the bottom up for change. Edwards is inside Washington as the newest US Representative, and despite being an early supporter of Sen. Obama she would not be silent in the face of his decisions that she didn't agree with.

And that's an important lesson. And it's a lesson that I learned, actually, when Bill Clinton became president. Because when Bill Clinton became president, many of us on the left, liberals and progressives, became very silent. And that was a mistake, because that mistake brought us some policies that were really not so great. And so we really can't make that same mistake with President Barack Obama.

But we need to be on the job today to make sure that he, and not John McCain, is elected as president of the United States. And don't be fooled about that.

... Finally, I want to share with you that not on any day, by any stretch of the imagination, do I believe that the United States Government should be listening to my phone calls. And if they do, and if they decide they want to listen to my phone calls, then they need to go to a real court and get a warrant.

And I want to tell you that just temporarily we lost that fight. But it's only temporary. Because it's going to come back. Because there is no way -- it's about the American public being smarter than the politicians in Washington.

• As for Van Jones, and I really knew little about him before this weekend, but his speech was stirring. He's an environmental justice activist who has keyed in on green jobs as a way to unite progressives and the poor ("when oil demand goes up, the price goes up; when solar demand goes up, the price goes down."), create a new post-carbon economy and save the planet for the next generation. Fresh off an 8-day trip to the Arctic with Jimmy Carter and other luminaries, he's seen the consequences of climate change and knows the need for action. But there's a danger, as Isaiah Poole notes:

But Jones also reminded the audience that Carter tried to rally the nation around a clean energy and conservation agenda in the late 1970s, only to see his popularity collapse in a lethal combination of inflation and stagnant economic growth—“stagflation.”

Jones said the same toxic economic brew—sharply rising inflation and sluggish economic growth—could quickly undo Sen. Barack Obama just as it did Carter if he wins the White House. Only this time, the consequences could be much more dire.

“If we are not careful, if we are not smart, this could be the precursor to a right-wing backlash that would make us miss John McCain, Make us miss George W. Bush,” Jones said.

The right is MUCH better at backlash than governing, and they'll certainly try to divide the disenfranchised and use Barack Obama "as a pinata," like Jones said. I don't think there's a lot of thought yet about how to deal with this because it's premature. I'm glad Jones brought it up, as it made me think.

• The "Larry Craig caucus" sign in front of the men's bathroom was priceless.

• Other notable panelists and speakers - Wes Clark (there's a TPM interview here), Florida Congressional candidate Annette Taddeo (a non-Cuban Hispanic Jew from South Florida), the always great Charlie Brown (CA-04), Hilda Sarkysian (the health care activist whose daughter died while waiting for a liver transplant), and of course Paul Krugman and Rick Perlstein. I'll have more on the health care panel and Don Siegelman at another point.

• The Rude Pundit went out to the conservative "competitor" to NN and had some fun with Mike Stark. They apparently accosted John Fund and Grover Norquist and accused both of having sex with each other. Classic. After Norquist told him to fuck off they apparently went over to TGIFridays. Hilarious. By the way, I'm publicly apologizing to the Rude One for getting in the way of his game on Friday night.

• It was awesome to personally meet Texas' greatest populist Jim Hightower, my new (or old) favorite blogger Jesse Taylor of Pandagon, and so many others. The Editors and the Sadlynauts have to show up at some point and then life will be complete. I'm sorry to have missed Jeremy Scahill and Mark Danner.

• Don't really know what to say about that Markos/Harold Ford discussion, but it was such a cavalcade of discredited conventional wisdom that I don't know how to put it. As I said, Ford essentially said that we should have ignored FISA because the Constitution doesn't poll well, which really assumes that we should be led around by the whims of the electorate instead of leading, an odd pose from the head of the Democratic Leadership Council. That said I think Markos did the right thing staying above the fray, as Ford was hanging himself with his own rope.

• We came in second in the pub quiz - basically one question away from beating the Daily Kos front-pagers. I missed the "Who Shot J.R." question, which in a way angered me the most.

• News coverage was generally good, although the Austin American-Statesmen came up with a terrible Page One story on Sunday that called Nancy Pelosi (D-Beijing) and injected all kinds of opinion into a straight news story. I didn't link it because the Statesman took it down and apologized today.

• I have to say this was the best conference yet. It was extremely well-managed, and better integrated with the city to allow for tourism as well as interaction with everyone in a social setting. I like the diversity of the panels that allowed you to customize your experience, and become exposed to all sorts of different viewpoints. It's a little overwhelming, and I think people ran out of gas by the end, so some midday break sessions might have been useful. Overall, I'm sure the organizers will continue to tweak it and improve it even more. And of course, just putting a couple thousand irreverent bloggers in the same space is bound to be a blast.

How Very Centrist Of You

I just participated in a discussion with thereisnospoon and hekebolos from Daily Kos about the terms "moderate" and "centrist" and how they played out in yesterday's debate on Meet the Press between Markos Moulitsas and Harold Ford (there's a good writeup of that here). You can listen to the discussion via podcast over at Political Nexus.

I thought Markos did a great job against a fairly stacked deck. David Gregory (sitting in for Tim Russert) framed the debate as an ideological battle between liberals as represented by the blogosphere and centrists as represented by Ford. It was an imprecise way of describing it. Markos himself is pretty moderate, and the opinion on the blogosphere ranges over a whole series of policy stances. There are plenty of "moderate" Democrats, as defined by an ideological stance on policy positions that is in the middle of the extremes on the left and the right, that have earned the support of the blogosphere. "Centrist" is actually a code word that means the type of person determined to preserve the status quo and suck up to the Beltway establishment elites, the Broders and Ignatiuses and Slaughters and Quinns of the world. This "centrism" is more about blurring the lines between the parties completely and arguing for "bipartisan solutions," which really means "shut up all dissent and do what we, your sensible elite overlords, tell you to do." Adversarial democracy demands vigorous debate in public so that a well-informed citizenry can make choices between a range of alternatives. "Centrists" do not want the people to have those choices, and would rather make the choices for them. The debate between the DLC and the blogosphere for the soul of the Democratic Party is not one about liberal versus moderate; it's about inside versus outside, about a few oligarchs versus a panoply of voices.

I also think that this insistence by the elites who rule our discourse for "sensible bipartisan solutions" ends up narrowing the bands of opinion, at least on the left. The belief from these elites is that we live in a fundamentally conservative country where "real Americans" can only be found in the center of the nation, literally and figuratively, and that voices on the far left represent some sort of fringe element instead of the mainstream of America on many issues (health care, getting out of Iraq, etc.). The nutjobs on the right can literally advocate anything and it isn't met with as much fervor, because they are typically arguing for an entrenchment of the status quo. Where anyone argues for REAL change, the elites see them as unserious and silly and unfit for public discourse (see Kucinich, Dennis).

It was a pretty good discussion, go have a listen at Political Nexus.

UPDATE: Thereisnospoon has further thoughts on this here. And yes, Harold Ford did make a real cheap shot calling Daily Kos an anti-Semitic site, then turned around and said he would appear at the NextGen Yearly Kos Convention. Harold Ford: pro anti-Semitic sites! (and to be clear, Daily Kos is most certainly NOT that.)

Things You Should Read

I'm a little caught up with things today. So get a load of these:

• Susan Gardner and Markos' op-ed about the blogosphere, and how it rejected DLC-style cautiousness and insiderism to win the country in 2006. Markos' appearance on Meet the Press is worth a look too, as he handed it to the slippery DLC Chair Harold Ford.

• Chris Matthews' completely weird longing for "big, beefy" Democrats, with its overall assumption that somehow what the country needs now more than anything is not intelligence but mass.

• Booman's story about the political press acting
like sports reporters and cheering for the guy who gives the good soundbite (Mike Huckabee, in this case) instead of revealing any kind of substantive truth about him.