(Don't) Buy American

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stayed the Fiat-Chrysler deal pending a forthcoming order, perhaps because she simply wanted more time to make and informed judgment, or because she wanted to bring her associates into the decision. At issue are the protestations of three Indiana pension funds, controlled by a Republican state Treasurer, who simply want a better deal on their unsecured Chrysler debt they purchased about a year ago. Apparently the phrase "caveat emptor" doesn't enter into the equation.

Meanwhile, another genius collection of wingnuts have decided that the best way to restore American capitalism is to boycott American car companies.

"In the effort to reverse this lurch beyond the farthest left fringe of previous Democratic statist urges, individual Americans have a role to play. They have to say no to GM products and services until such time as the denationalization occurs," says Hugh Hewitt. He acknowledges that this is a serious step that could hurt people currently working for GM: "But there isn't any alternative, every dollar spent with GM is a dollar spent against free enterprise. Every car or truck purchased from Government Motors is one not purchased from a private car company that competes fairly against all other car companies."

Where Hewitt makes his point as a seemingly reluctant and composed agitator, Rush Limbaugh makes no bones about what he wants in his own praise of the idea. The most amazing thing here is that Limbaugh appears to be openly admitting that the purpose of this is economic and political sabotage -- to prevent President Obama from succeeding at something.

Limbaugh reassures any GM workers who might be listening that the boycotters aren't angry at them. "They don't want to patronize Obama. They don't want to do anything to make Obama's policies work!" he explains.

Quite a needle to thread - boycotting a US company while claiming to have nothing but love for that company's workers. Wow, I don't think Democrats will lose MIchigan for the next 200 years now.

As John Cole notes, just a week or two ago these same people were whining and crying about all the dealers being pushed out of business by Overlord Obama, and not they are conspiring to actively put whatever dealers are left out of business, if successful, by refusing to buy their products. Not to mention the fact that, at this point, the fastest way to return GM to the private sector would be to, well, buy a bunch of their cars, so the government can divest.

But none of this is supposed to make economic sense. It simply reflect the kind of lashing out at whatever perceived enemy that has become the sum total of Republican output these days. They are the wounded animal in the corner, thrashing about incoherently in the hopes that all of America beyond the myopic, paranoid corner that they inhabit will come to love them again.

Pop Quiz Time

So Mitt Romney, who was embarrassed in California, a beaten third all over the Southwest and really only strong in states he had a house in, has decided to spend Tagg's future kids' college funds and stay in a futile quest for the GOP nomination. And the bureau chief at Pravda Online Hugh Hewitt decided to make an analogy to commemorate this bold (some would say ignorant) decision. Now what public figure from the recent past do you suppose Hewitt would use in said analogy to describe Romney's choice?

I'll give you ten seconds. Hum the "Match Game PM" theme to keep time.

....

Give up?

Like Reagan In '76, Romney Is Staying In

Congratulations! Hugh Hewitt, you're the proud recipient of the Reagan Library's "One Billion References to Reagan" Award! We'll fly you and a guest first-class from Reagan National Airport to Simi Valley for a tour of the Reagan Library! That's right, you'll drive down the Ronald Reagan Freeway and onto Ronald Reagan Drive, where you'll take in the Reagan Oval Office, the Reagan legacy, and the Reagan Reagan, a special of this prize package!! And we'll give you a stack of Reagan dimes and a DVD copy of the CBS miniseries "The Reagans" for you to burn!! Reagan Reagan Reagan 9/11 Reagan!!!

Sheesh, if they could re-animate St. Ronnie's corpse... he'd do better than Mitt Romney. And actually that'd make at least 3 corpses running on the GOP side this year.

Welcome Clownhall Readers!

And thanks for putting me in such good company with Steve Benen and Matthew Yglesias and Big Tent Democrat and John Cole and Glenn Greenwald!

It is, of course, deeply shocking to me that the author of "Painting the Map Red" and "If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat" can't understand that a deliberate US military strategy of outreach to ideologues such as himself saps confidence that they will administer reports with independent assessments.

Oh wait, no it doesn't.

UPDATE: Another example of the politicization of the Pentagon. Kind of sickening if you think about it.

You're Either With Us Or Against Us

Anyone who thinks General Petraeus, a.k.a. Deity Who Bestrides The Earth Like A Colossus, is going to offer an unbiased assessment of the situation in Iraq come September can end that fantasy right now:

If I were eager to maintain a semblance of military independence from the agenda of extremist, Republican partisans, I wouldn't go on the Hugh Hewitt show, would you? And yet Petraeus has done just that. I think such a decision to cater to one party's propaganda outlet renders Petraeus' military independence moot. I'll wait for the transcript. But Petraeus is either willing to be used by the Republican propaganda machine or he is part of the Republican propaganda machine. I'm beginning to suspect the latter.

I have little need to wait for a transcript. This has become a Defense Department strategy, intentionally reaching out to conservative bloggers and media types in order to get their "unfiltered message" out. They even have a name for it; the "Surrogates Option". Of course, those partisan ideologues that continue to defend the President are all too happy to scrupulously type up military propaganda. Because that's what it is.

This is nothing new in wartime, but it ought to be known that the General leading forces in Iraq is only speaking to partisan ideologues instead of any reporter that would ask a tough question. And Congress should use that as a guide when they take a look at his report in a couple months.

UPDATE: Yglesias sez the transcript is a mixed bag. But he makes the mistake of comparing it to his own experience on the show. David Petraeus didn't book himself on the Hugh Hewitt show. The Pentagon did. This is part of their propaganda operation.

Immigration Day

Sorry for the delay, adjusting to a new schedule.

So the battered and bruised immigration bill has another day in the Senate, and they'll try to move debate forward and then work through a pile of amendments before a final vote. Chances of passage are slim, if you ask me. But it's nice to know that the Republicans are bringing in the most genteel of supporters to help craft this legislation:

Conservative talk radio's impact on the immigration debate reached new heights last week, with one host effectively writing an amendment for when the Senate returns to the imperiled bill this week [...]

Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., the key conservative negotiator behind the compromise bill, told reporters Friday that California-based radio host Hugh Hewitt "had several ideas" that "we are trying to include" in amendments to be offered in an upcoming series of crucial votes.

Hewitt, a conservative who has criticized many aspects of the bill, had Kyl as a guest on Thursday and asked: "Does the bill provide for any separate treatment of aliens, illegal aliens from countries of special concern?"

Kyl replied: "It's going to, as a result of your lobbying efforts to me."

Hugh Hewitt, a guy with about as much logic as Baghdad Bob when it comes to denying the realities of America, is writing immigration legislation in this country. We'll see if it finds a positive hearing on the Hill.

This bill is going to result in such draconian measures for immigrants that even the AFL-CIO has turned against it. And the temporary worker program should be completely eliminated. Trent Lott has said that, if we dont pass anything now, we'd have to wait until 2009, and "who knows who'll be President then." It's a gamble I may be willing to take.

UPDATE: They just voted to proceed on the bill, but there will be plenty of poison pills along the way.

Blaming The Victim

The President has become ever more incoherent when talking about Iraq, today going back on everything he's been saying since 2004 and suggesting that there's such a thing as an acceptable level of violence in that country.

Either we'll succeed, or we won't succeed. And the definition of success as I described is sectarian violence down. Success is not, no violence. There are parts of our own country that have got a certain level of violence to it. But success is a level of violence where the people feel comfortable about living their daily lives. And that's what we're trying to achieve.

Shorter Bush: If Iraq is, say, the Gaza Strip, then we've done our job and we've won.

So now, if you want to line everything up, it looks like this to the Bush spinners. If there's less violence, that means we're winning. If there's "an acceptable level of violence," we're winning. If there's more violence, we're winning because that means the insurgents are desperate. Under literally any security situation in Iraq, there's some spin that this means the United States is winning the war. And that's what has Americans so frustrated, because they cannot hope to expect that they are being told the truth when confronted with this twisted logic.

Furthermore, any attempt to pole vault reality over the castle walls of conservatism that they built for themselves is an exercise in futility.

Hugh Hewitt: [Lawrence Wright] said absolutely, it is not the case it’s a strategic disaster. While there may be more jihadis in Iraq than there were before, it’s not like our intervention in Iraq created them, and he went on to characterize their camps in Mali, their camps in Gaza…

Michael Isikoff: Right.

HH: Their Waziristan…that they are manufacturing…they were manufactured for a decade in Afghanistan.

MI: Right.

HH: And now, they’re coming to al Anbar Province, because that’s where they can kill the great Satan. And so we’re not manufacturing them, we’re gathering them in one place…

MI: Right.

HH: And they’re surging against us. That’s a different spin. I’m not saying it’s the facts on the ground, either.
[...]

MI: We have to guess. We have to guess. I mean, we know that a lot of bad guesses were made by this administration in the invasion.

HH: Again, that’s spin.

MI: No, no, no, no, no, no. We know that.

HH: Give me a specific.

MI: They did not…a specific?

HH: Of a bad guess.

MI: Did they anticipate the sectarian warfare that was going to take place?

HH: No. Okay…

MI: Did they tell the country that there’s a high risk that we’re going to be enmeshed in a civil war in Iraq, in which thousands of Americans…

HH: Civil war is itself a spin, though.

MI: Well, what do you call it?

HH: That is a characterization…I call it an insurrection, I call it an al Qaeda surge, I call it bad militias in Baghdad.

MI: Well…

HH: But a civil war, where you’ve got Sunni and Shia…actually, the one thing Petraeus has also said…

MI: Fighting each other. Fighting each other. That’s…

HH: There are lots of definitions. It’s spin.

Reality has no meaning to committed Bush-defending conservatives. They can shrug it off and call it spin while at the same time employing the argument "If there's more violence, that means we're winning" without considering that spin at all. The American people are sick to death of these bullshit justifications for an unnecessary disaster of a war.

And that is the point at which they pull out the biggest spin of all; that the people who are tired of the lies about Iraq are the ones to blame for the loss.

TROUBLING THOUGHTS ON IRAQ, from Rick Moran. Sadly, I agree that our domestic political situation will make constructive action difficult. As I've said before, it was obvious in the 1990s that we had a dysfunctional political class, but it's become much more obvious in the current decade. (Via TMV). And yes, time's the enemy now. Pentagon planners talk about the "three year rule" for domestic support in a war, and it's been four -- five if you count Afghanistan.

This "blame the American people" idea has been building for some time - Jonah Goldberg did a typical column for this genre a little while back saying that you can't use public opinion polls as a judge because people are stupid. And in fact, Vietnam was only lost because America lost their will to win. This Tinkerbell strategy ("clap louder!"), this exceptionalist myht that America can never lose at anything, this is all the most dangerous attitude in the world. It pre-empts rational thought, and ensures that if a mistake is ever made, it will be compounded over and over because only glorious victory is acceptable. This isn't 300 and this isn't the turning point of Act II. This is real war, where real lives (not chickenhawk conservatives, but somebody else's) are at stake, and you cannot put aside facts as inconvenient and blame only those who pay attention to them. It's like someone trying to cook an egg, and burning the food and the skillet and the stove and nearly the entire kitchen, the whole time saying "just a sec, have some patience, I'm almost done," and then when they're finally taken out of the house, yelling at the fire crews because "you ruined my perfectly good breakfast!"

I will not let this smear merchants who want no responsibility for the death march across Iraq try to pin this tragedy on people who are simply pleading for this to stop. It is the opposite of reason to claim that America can only be stopped by itself. I've had it.

Republicans Driving Blissfully Into Oblivion

Kevin Drum wonders about something:

Earlier this week Wayne Gilchrist (R-Md) predicted that 30 to 60 Republicans would vote for the nonbinding House resolution opposing the surge. The final vote was held today and the resolution passed 246-182. Only 17 Republicans voted in favor.

So what happened? Is Gilchrist just a lousy vote counter? Did a bunch of Republicans chicken out? Did the GOP leadership apply some unusually effective arm twisting?

Actually I'm not wondering about this at all. Of course they chickened out. They're tied to George Bush and he's a magic anchor headed straight for the earth's mantle.

They have idiots like Frank Gaffney on their side who'll call for their hanging if they vote the way in which their constituents want them. Gaffney would accuse these Republicans of treason as easily as he accuses Glenn Greenwald of it in the above-linked interview (it's a beaut, go listen). The nuts in the insaneosphere all signed a pledge that they wouldn't give one dime to any candidate who didn't further their mission of perpetual war, and threatened to cut off the Republican campaign committees in the House and Senate if they helped any of those treasonous members.

This mindset didn't come out of the ether. It's an internalized neocon concept that the Republicans have swallowed, whether in government or out, and they can't very well turn away now. Their crazy base is completely in thrall to empire and in fear of the other, and the representative apples don't fall far from the tree. Even in the world's most deliberative body, Sen. Reid is acknowledging that his copycat measure has no chance getting the few votes it needs from Republicans to get to the floor. But he's doing the absolute right thing by bringing it up for vote:

Of course, Dem leaders may be calculating that there's an upside in losing tomorrow -- because it gives them more ammo to paint Republicans as too fearful to debate escalation in the Senate.

As one source close to Reid puts it, "After these guys cast the vote, they're gonna have to go back to their home states and justify their votes. It's a politically perilous place for them to be. They're saying the Senate shouldn't even have this debate. I think that's an untenable position."

The fact is that the Republicans are trapped. After years of hyping up an existential threat, after lying the country into Iraq and now trying to do the same with Iran, they simply can't reverse course. So with every vote they throw their big arms in a bear hug around a historically unpopular President, and in so doing destroy the Republican brand for decades:

According to the latest Gallup survey, Republican self-identification has declined nationally and in almost every American state. Why? The short answer is that President Bush's war of choice in Iraq has destroyed the partisan brand Republicans spent the past four decades building.

That brand was based upon four pillars: that Republicans are more trustworthy on defense and military issues; that they know when and where markets can replace or improve government; that they are more competent administrators of those functions government can't privatize; and, finally, that their public philosophy is imbued with moral authority. The war demolished all four claims.

Schaller's article is great on the specifics. Clearly Iraq has proven the Republicans to be insane on foreign policy, dead-set to privatize everything for the gain of a few greedy oligarchs, incompetent at every level of governance, and immoral beyond compare. When you finally pin down one of these extremists on these issues, they reveal themselves to know that they've lost the country:

On several occasions, he lost control of himself, even using profanities. Aside from the entertainment value that provides, it illustrates an important point. Gaffney is a professional right-wing extremist. He has been in the Reagan administration, on every television and radio show for years, and is very well-funded by numerous neoconservative funding sources. The fact that he became so shrill and defensive and even frightened reveals that neocons know that America is turning against them and beginning to realize the destruction they have wrought and the culpability they possess for what they have done to our country.

That is why they are so eager to equate criticism of them with treason and to stifle debate. They have not only lost the debate over Iraq and general Middle East militarism, but their continuous extremism and deceit is being exposed, and they fear being held accountable. It is only natural that they want to render criticism of their war and their conduct impermissible.

The elected leaders of the GOP either: 1) are either stupid enough (or scared enough) to agree that endless militarism and privatization and the crushing of dissent is an effective way to run a nation, or 2) know that nobody agrees with this, but can't shake the monster of a base they've created which demands that they remain avowedly with them. Therefore, they will remain attached at the hip to a hated President and a failed ideology for the near future. They have absolutely no choice.

Vote your conscience in the 2008 primary, cats and kitties, vote your conscience. Because the Republican brand is crashing on the rocks.