Josiah Mitchell Morse

Josiah Mitchell Morse was blessed, by birth, with a beautiful American name, but such luck hasn’t been enough to ensure him and his work a place in the cultural memory. As of this morning, for example, a Wikipedia search assures us of Morse’s insignificance, offering only a grim ‘there is no page titled…’ alert. Using an earlier measure of a culture’s indifference to the strenuous exertions of its members, we might gauge Morse’s irrelevance, thus: none of his serious, funny, learned, angry, angering books has remained in print.[MORE . . .]

Sidney Blumenthal has written for The New Republic, the Washington Post, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and most recently served as Washington editor to Salon.com and as a contributor to The Guardian. He is one of America’s foremost political commentators, and also has a noteworthy trackrecord of political engagement. He served as an assistant and senior advisor to President Bill Clinton and is currently a senior advisor to Hillary Clinton. He was also executive producer for the Oscar Award-winning documentary “Taxi to the Dark Side.” Blumenthal has just published a collection of essays entitled The Strange Death of Republican America. I put six questions to him on the subject of his current book.

1. You have modeled your book, at least to a degree, on George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England, _the 1935 classic of modern political historiography that linked the demise of the Liberal Party to dramatic external changes–the political ascendancy of trade unionism, the civil war in Ireland and so forth. But there’s a difference, isn’t there? When Dangerfield wrote, the Liberal Party really was on the verge of extinction. But today, you’re effectively forecasting doom for the Republicans. Not only do the Republicans cling to power in the Executive Branch, they have arguably succeeded in a sweeping reallocation of power from the other branches to the Executive. And they have greatly consolidated their control of the Judicial branch. Only in the legislature have the Democrats staged a comeback, and even there the margins are narrow and they rest on a single election–2006. Admittedly George W. Bush has emerged as the most unpopular president of modern times, but American has developed a very stable two-party system, and part of that stability comes from a party’s rejection of its failed leaders. In the 2008 presidential race, the Republicans rejected the two candidates who positioned themselves as Bush’s heirs (Romney and Giuliani) in favor of John McCain, the man who was Bush’s nemesis in 2000. Don’t the signs point to an internal realignment within the G.O.P. that positions the party to hold on to the only part of the government that seems to matter, the Executive? Doesn’t that make your prognosis premature?[MORE . . .]

Barack Obama recently severed all links with Robert Malley, an informal Middle East policy adviser, after the latter “confessed” that he had met with the Palestinian group Hamas. And in a recent interview, Obama said, “We don’t do nuance well in politics and especially don’t do it well on Middle East policy…It’s conceivable that there are those in the Arab world who say to themselves, ‘This is a guy who spent some time in the Muslim world, has a middle name of Hussein, and appears more worldly and has called for talks with people, and so he’s not going to be engaging in the same sort of cowboy diplomacy as George Bush,’ and that’s something they’re hopeful about. I think that’s a perfectly legitimate perception as long as they’re not confused about my unyielding support for Israel’s security.”

This prompted Luca Menato, my favorite correspondent from overseas, to write:[MORE . . .]

Caught in the Web, 1860.

U.S. military reports on the interrogation of four captured Shia militia members concluded that Hezbollah was training small groups of Iraqi insurgents in Iran. John Bolton, ex-ambassador to the United Nations, said that attacking Iran was “really the most prudent thing to do”; the Iraqi government said that it would conduct its own inquiry. “We do not want to start a conflict with Iran,” said Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh. “We need our own government documentation of this interference, not from the Americans, not from the media.” The U.S.-backed government of Lebanon tried to dismantle Hezbollah's extensive telecommunications network there, and Hezbollah temporarily seized half of Beirut. “The hand that touches the weapons of the resistance,” said Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, “will be cut off.” One Wing, a bald eagle that lost its other wing in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, died of a heart tumor, shortly after the death of its mate, The Old Witch; three northern elephant seals were found shot in the head, lying in pools of blood, in San Simeon, California, near the Hearst castle. Oil exceeded $125 a barrel. Refined french-fry grease was 32 cents per pound, up 20 cents from 2006. [MORE . . .]

Well, I may be soft on Hillary, but this is very funny.

Doug Goodyear, who had been picked by John McCain’s campaign to run the GOP convention this summer, resigned over the weekend after Newsweek reported that a lobbying firm he heads once represented Burma. The DCI Group—Goodyear is its CEO—“was paid $348,000 in 2002 to represent Burma’s military junta, which had been strongly condemned by the State Department for its human-rights record and remains in power today,” Newsweek said.

Some of McCain’s allies, the magazine added, worried that Goodyear’s selection to run the convention “could fuel perceptions that McCain—who has portrayed himself as a crusader against special interests—is surrounded by lobbyists.” (Since McCain is, in fact, surrounded by lobbyists, it’s easy to see where that “perception” comes from.)[MORE . . .]

Saturday May 10th 2:30PM: You are invited to a free screening of the 2008 Academy Award winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side at Princeton University, 100 Robertson Hall, Princeton, New Jersey. The screening will be followed by a discussion with:

Roger Clark–Professor of Law, Rutgers University-Camden[MORE . . .]

A number of readers emailed about yesterday’s post on why, for reasons I myself find baffling, I’ve started feeling sympathetic toward Hillary Clinton. None of the emails were friendly, but they raised a lot of good points. (I would note here that I said I sympathized with Hillary for certain reasons—mostly because the media, in general, hate her. I didn’t say I preferred her to Obama. Even though I’m not sold on Obama, his politics are far more interesting than Hillary’s, and the latter’s 2002 vote on Iraq was unforgivable, as I’ve written before. Beyond that, the idea of Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton is too much to bear.) Below, I include a particularly interesting note, from a reader who wished to remain anonymous, that makes a strong case against Clinton and for Obama.

I think, as is often the case with political leaders, people are using Hillary Clinton as a random “projection field” for their own read on how the system should work. That is to say—as I think I’ve mentioned to you before—the strongest segment of Clinton’s base seems to me to be the people who want to re-fight the battles of the 90s: to punish the Republicans at the polls, to strong-arm them in Congress, to dilate on all the noble liberal motives that were thwarted by Gingrich and company. While I sympathize with and in some ways share these impulses, I also think they’re spectacularly ill-suited to this political moment, when even stout conservative partisans concede that they’re likely to lose ground in both the House and Senate, and the Democrats have the wind at their backs.

Put in simplest terms, I think Obama understands this moment in a way that Hillary doesn’t (and cannot afford to) understand. Hillary’s skill set, like that of her husband, works only when she can present herself as beleaguered, hemmed in by irrational opponents who deride her personally. It’s true that I find such politics distasteful—both the dumb-ass pursuit of centrist Democrats pushing a Republican agenda in power as though they were some kind of violent cohort of secular socialist revolutionaries, and the no-less-oafish effort to depict conservative political power as a dark mystical force that can be defeated only by an authentic battle-tested victim of the right’s predations (or a bloodthirsty monster, if you will).

What’s frustrating in all this is that it seems almost beside the point to object to Hillary’s candidacy—which I most emphatically do—on grounds of her policy positions. There’s her purist posturing on the health-care mandate she all but single-handedly destroyed in 1993; her pandering on the “gas tax holiday”; and—worst of all in my book—her hollow symbolic pose as a fire-breathing populist when she actively backed all sorts of worker-damaging policies in the White House, from the ratification of NAFTA to the repeal of Glass–Steagall.

A lesser but still baleful strain of her ideology is what a friend of mine calls “pedo-centric liberalism”: the effort to define liberal governance as an extended exercise in kiddie protection. Hence, her epically time-wasting hearings in the Senate (abetted by that equally self-regarding thug Lieberman) on the graphic content of videogames; hence, her long tutelage at the child-fetishizing feet of Marion Wright Edelman. I’ve got nothing against kids per se, mind you—it’s just that their recruitment as “poster children” in the effort to resuscitate liberal politics diminishes both them and whatever remains of liberal thinking and legislating in these dark times. It’s also empirically untrue that this generation of children is in some grave moral peril thanks to the digital gadgets they covet. There’s no shortage of real problems—like trade, energy policy, the real costs of environmental upgrades, a national industrial policy—that the Dems haven’t even started to address in any elementary fashion. As Roger Waters said, leave those kids alone.

At the end of the day, I don’t give a shit whether candidate A or candidate B has a self-image as a fighter, a reformer, a hope-pusher, or what have you. I just care about their ability to deliver some semblance of economic equity while forthrightly acknowledging that imperialism in the service of daft efforts to re-engineer parts of the world and systems of belief we know nothing about is a really, really bad idea. (Don’t get me started on Hillary’s mind-bending efforts to reel back her 2002 vote on the Iraq use of force resolution without conceding it was a mistake.) Obama, while no angel himself, stands a far better chance of delivering on some of these basic agenda items, by virtue of record, temperament and—most of all, I think—his salutary impatience with the dorm-room tenor of Boomer politics. Also—no small thing, this—he’s shown a striking ability to bring more people into the party. Hillary at best mobilizes a pre-existing Dem base that is, in all sorts of demographic measures, shrinking. If you cleave to the sentimental notion that the Dems should be the party of the ordinary people’s interests, counterposed to the G.O.P.’s standing as the party of money and business, then you want candidates at the top of the ticket who can use a broader voting base to fight the influence of today’s robber-baron class.

Anyway, this is all pretty much academic, since Obama’s going to be the nominee, barring a Michigan-Florida floor fight that would basically destroy the party. I have no doubt that Clinton, bloodthirsty monster that she may be, is contemplating such a measure—just as I have no doubt that, should she go through with it, John McCain would have the presidency locked down by the time the Democrats leave Denver.

I’ve received quite a few complaints in recent months from readers who think I’m pro–Hillary Clinton and anti–Barack Obama. In fact, I believe Obama has better politics than Clinton, is personally more honorable, and that his victory would represent an important generational shift in American politics.

That said, there are a few things that make me like Hillary. First, she’s a bloodthirsty monster who’ll stop at nothing in her quest for power. That is refreshing, given that the Democrats’ default presidential-campaign strategy is to whine about how rough the Republicans play and to get trounced. Another thing that warms me to Clinton is that the media (in general) hates her and loves Obama, which makes me sympathetic toward her and suspicious toward him.[MORE . . .]

The most honest and insightful piece yet on the media’s love affair with Obama:

But of course, I don’t know many of those fierce Clinton supporters, because most of my friends and acquaintances are writers and editors and cultural impresarios of one kind or another—members of “the media”—and there are precious few Clintonites among them. Because almost as much as geography is dispositive in spectator sports—if you live in New England, you’re bound to love the Red Sox and hate the Yankees—demography is dispositive in this year’s Democratic race. And the great majority of media people are members of the same (white) demographic cohort that has rejected Hillary and voted for Barack—educated, more-affluent-than-average residents of cities and suburbs. [T]he media and their fellow upscale Americans are now disposed to like Obama precisely because he resembles them in so many ways. The difference is he’s relatively unsullied, an exquisite, idealized version of themselves: educated, thoughtful, twigged to nuance, a lovely writer, well-traveled, witty, cool, dignified, candid, a little quixotic, a clued-in grown-up but not yet ruined by the ugly facts of Washington life.

[MORE . . .]

The situation in Zimbabwe is an outrage and I can understand why the Bush Administration, and the entire Western world, is appalled by President Robert Mugabe’s anti-democratic depredations. As has been widely reported by the American media, opposition parties won control of the national assembly in a March balloting, and Mugabe finished second behind an opposition leader in presidential voting, triggering a run-off as neither candidate won an absolute majority. The opposition is threatening to boycott the run-off, since it says that its candidate won the first-round election outright and “has ended Mugabe’s 28-year rule over the once prosperous country whose economy is in ruins.”

Does the world really think that President Bush will stand for this assault on democracy? Even now, Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl is surely recruiting a pundits’ brigade to bombard the nation’s op-ed pages with stirring denunciations of Mugabe’s assault on the administration’s “freedom agenda.”[MORE . . .]

A Japanese government employee was found to have viewed online pornography at work more than 780,000 times in nine months, and an Ecuadorian politician proposed that a woman's right to sexual pleasure be made part of the country's new constitution. Western Australia's Liberal Party leader, Troy Buswell, admitted to having sniffed the chair of a female staffer in 2005. At a town-hall meeting in Iowa, Baptist minister Marty Parrish asked Republican presidential nominee John McCain whether it was true that he had called his wife, Cindy, a “cunt” in 1992. “You know,” McCain replied, “that's the great thing about town-hall meetings, sir, but we really don't, there's people here who don't respect that kind of language. So I'll move on.” Parrish was then escorted from the meeting by the Secret Service and local police. In western Indiana, the president of the Sheet Metal Workers' Union attributed his support for Hillary Clinton to her “testicular fortitude” in facing problems like NAFTA. After Hillary Clinton proposed that she and Barack Obama compete in a Lincoln-Douglas-style debate, Fox News broadcast an image of Abraham Lincoln facing off against ex-slave Frederick Douglass instead of 1860 Democratic presidential nominee Stephen A. Douglas. A filly named Eight Belles, Hillary Clinton's pick, came in second in the Kentucky Derby, while victory went to the agile colt Big Brown; after losing, Eight Belles broke both front ankles and was promptly euthanized. Speaking to North Carolina Democrats, Clinton promised, “If Senator Obama is the nominee, you better believe I'll work my heart out for him.” [MORE . . .]

Can a lawyer be indicted for issuing a bad legal opinion? This evening, Philippe Sands and I will be discussing this issue at NYU Law School, in Lipton Hall, from 6—8 p.m. However, Alice Fisher, the head of the Bush Justice Department’s Criminal Division—whose resignation was just announced—apparently believes the answer is “yes,” because she signed the charges against Miami lawyer Ben Kuehne. Among other things, Kuehne had previously advised Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 Florida recount litigation. Read my analysis of the case in the current issue of the American Lawyer, just out.

You are cordially invited to a presentation

First Tuesdays Series: Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008. Tuesday, May 6th—7:00 PM. With Editor Mark Crispin Miller and contributors Jonathan Simon and Larisa Alexandrovna. Introduction by Scott Horton.[MORE . . .]

From Raw Story:

Any job applicant knows that background checks are routine—especially for jobs involving authority or oversight of money. So why didn’t the San Diego Republican Party do a simple Google search before naming Tony Krvaric as its chairman? Online research reveals that Krvaric is the co-founder of Fairlight, a band of software crackers which later evolved into an international video and software piracy group that law enforcement authorities say is among the world’s largest such crime rings.

From Politico:

Sen. Hillary Clinton’s mailing attacking Sen. Barack Obama’s record on guns appears to include a striking visual gaffe: The image of the gun pictured on the face of the mailing is reversed, making it a nonexistent left-handed model of the Mauser 66 rifle…“The gun in the photo does not exist,” said Val Forgett III, president of Navy Arms. “I find it laughable on its face. It’s like a picture of Babe Ruth hitting right-handed.”

It’s always a mistake to read the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl during breakfast (or at all for that matter), but his column today was particularly gag-inducing:

Last Tuesday, Israel faced the fallout from a Palestinian family of five perishing in the Gaza Strip during an Israeli strike against militants firing rockets at an Israeli town…For months now, Israel has been mired in an unwinnable war against Hamas and allied militias in Gaza, who fire missiles at civilians in Israel and then hide among their own women and children, ensuring that retaliatory fire will produce innocent victims for the Middle East’s innumerable satellite television networks.

[MORE . . .]

Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values

A Discussion Featuring Philippe Sands, author and professor of Law at University College, London, and Scott Horton, legal affairs writer, Harper’s Magazine Event Details[MORE . . .]

So, the trial of Deborah Palfrey ends with her apparent suicide, the public outing and humiliation of a number of the women who worked for her, and her company’s list of (male) clients almost entirely suppressed. If you missed it at the time, go back and read Dana Milbanks’s article on the trial from last month, entitled, appropriately, “The D.C. Madam Case, All Sordid Out.”