I was pretty taken with the protests/objections raised
by the members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)
on January 6th during the formal counting of the
Electoral College vote. And also chagrined that no
senator would agree to sign on with one of their
objections, and thus force a brief debate on the
merits of the Florida electors. But I was talking to
some folks in the Senate today. And maybe there’s a
little more to say about this. I talked to a source
close to one of the senators you’d really expect would
have been high on the list of senators to go to. And
apparently no member of House spoke to this senator
and asked him to join the objection. None. Not one.
Now there were apparently some contacts between
staffers, informal discussions, and so forth. But not
the sort of request directly from a member of House
that would signal that they’re serious. Is this source
trying to cover for the senator in question? Yeah,
sure, there’s some of that. But you’d think one of the
CBC members would have tried to up the ante by making
a direct request. (In fairness, I didn’t get the sense
this senator would have agreed anyway. But the point
is they say he wasn’t really asked.) Frankly, I am not
sure quite what to make of this. I’ve no doubt the
members of the CBC were angry. And I think they had a
right to be angry. But maybe their lobbying wasn’t
quite as intense as they implied.
I guess it’d be too much to ask to find out that
Interior Secretary nominee Gale Norton also made
warm-n-fuzzy remarks
about the Confederacy, right? Well, hey, it’s your
lucky day! Turns out in a 1996 speech
Norton said, “We lost too much” when the South lost
the Civil War. Now, in fairness, Norton did explicitly
say she was not referring to slavery but rather
states’ rights — something that didn’t occur to John
Ashcroft to say. Norton referred to that whole slavery
thing as “bad facts” that clouded the merits of
states’ rights. Give her credit for at least making
this clear. Sure, it’s a clumsy and foolish way to
make the point. But it’s different from what Ashcroft
said. (Can’t Bush find cabinet secretaries who aren’t
clumsy and foolish? Come on! How’s Bush gonna apply a
standard like that!?)
But let’s make some other points clear as well.
Slavery was the chief evil of the Confederacy, not the
only one. It’s one thing to march around in
Confederate uniforms before heading back to the barn
for a couple dozen bottles of Michelob. But to praise
the Confederacy’s ideology is deeply suspect. The
doctrines of nullification, interposition, states’
rights, and secession were fundamentally
anti-Democratic and they were heretical perversions of
the nation’s constitutional order. And in case you’re
really into this stuff, no, they can’t be justified
with reference to the Virginia
and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-99! (What is he
talking about? Fugghedaboutit! More history grad
school stuff.)
The leaders of the Confederacy were, of course, also
traitors. The point here isn’t history, though. The
fact that Norton has an antediluvian and perverted
states’ rights understanding of the constitutional
order isn’t offensive, or obscene. But it’s extremely
significant in judging whether she’s fit to serve as
the custodian of the national domain.
P.S. The ironically named Independent Institute
was the venue where Norton gave her speech. And they
got in a bit of trouble back in Fall of 1999. In the
summer of ’99, the Institute purchased full page ads
in the New York Times and the Washington
Post signed by 240 academics arguing in support of
Microsoft against the government anti-trust suit.
Well, turned out Microsoft had used the Independence
Institute as a front and Microsoft had purchased the
ads. Ouch! Not clever. Not clever at all.
Just when I think I’m out, they PULL ME BACK IN! Will
my work exposing the multiple villainies of John
Ashcroft and his imbecile minions never be done?
Apparently not. I thought I liked Ashleigh Banfield,
the Starbucksian-looking reporter on MSNBC. But does
she have to repeat the Ashcroftians’ . . . well,
talking points word for word? Banfield led this
evening with a stunning new controversy embroiling
freshman Senator Jean Carnahan. During her late
husband’s campaign against then-Senator Ashcroft, the
Carnahan campaign did opposition research on Ashcroft.
And now Carnahan’s campaign consultant Marc Farinella
has made that opposition research available to those
preparing the opposition to Ashcroft. (Actually, he
said he’d make it available to whomever wanted it.)
This is shocking! Except it’s not shocking. So what?
Every campaign does “oppo” research. In fact it was
well-known that Ashcroft and Carnahan both did a lot
of it. Banfield also noted that Carnahan’s decision
was particularly unexpected after the gentlemanly way
Ashcroft chose not to contest her election. Do we
really need to rehash this canard one more time? (Need
a refresher? See Tim Noah’s concise dispatching of this moronic argument.)
Ashcroft lost the race by 2 percentage points. He
lost. He had no case with a recount or a court case,
period. He made the best of the situation and made a
gracious concession. (Of course, saying how gracious
it was and using it as a cudgel sort of makes it a
little less gracious, right?) Handing over the
opposition materials was “troubling, given the class
and dignity that was shown by Sen. Ashcroft in
conceding the election,” said David Israelite,
political director of the RNC. And because of this,
Carnahan needs to carry water for him? Please. This
non-story story is a good example of a common
reportorial phenomena. Press flaks dress up an utterly
known set of facts as a discovery, and lazy or foolish
reporters report it as though it were news. Even when
it’s clearly not news. Did you hear the one about how
Rick Lazio ran television ads designed to suppress
turnout among Hillary Clinton supporters? Or how
George W. Bush assisted pro-Bush voters to the polls
and systematically avoided providing the same service
to Gore supporters? You get the idea. As nearly as I
can tell, if one is not a complete moron this is a
pretty obvious effort to shift the focus onto
Carnahan’s widow. In fact, according to the AP,
“GOP operatives asserted late Tuesday the loan
reflects poorly on the governor’s widow, Sen. Jean
Carnahan, who was appointed to replace her dead
husband.” Ohhhhhhhhhhhh . . . That’s class and dignity
for you.
Now Republicans are organizing “grassroots” groups to
support the Bush cabinet nominees. And, hey, they’re
coming to me for support! Well kinda. About a year
ago, I and the guy who worked with me in my office at
the time dropped by the annual Conservative Political
Action Conference. He loved it. Missile defense
and cocktails. Grover
Norquist talking about his plan to cut the size of
government by two thirds in 25 years, or something
like that. And a lot of T-shirts with Clinton with
Pinnochio noses. Great stuff. Anyway, on the way out,
he stopped by the Citizens for a
Sound Economy table and in exchange for giving his
name and e-mail address got a Trial Lawyers are Sharks
T-shirt and a small plastic Citizens for Sound Economy
football (he goes in for this sort of stuff) that he
threw at people in the office for several months.
Well, now they’re getting into the nomination game.
They sent along this e-mail:
President-Elect Bush has finished
selecting his cabinet. As part of our democratic
process, all cabinet level officials have to be
confirmed by a simple majority in the U.S. Senate.
Several left wing groups have targeted some of
President-elect Bush’s selections for defeat. We must
show members in the Senate that there is grassroots
support for the nominees that will help us in our
fight for less government and lower taxes. The link
below will provide you with the information and tools
you need to accomplish this goal. Please forward this
message to friends and family. If you have additional
questions please call our toll free hotline at
888-564-6273. Remember government goes to those who
show up!!! **You may be wondering how we came to
receive your e-mail address? The way in which we
receive e-mail addresses is only if a person gives
this information to us. Perhaps we met you at a fair,
convention, conference, or you visited our home page
at www.cse.org. If you would like your name removed
from our list please respond and write “unsubscribe.”
** Citizens for a Sound Economy recruits, educates,
trains, and mobilizes hundreds of thousands of
volunteer activists to fight for less government,
lower taxes, and more freedom.
And who is Citizens for a
Sound Economy? Standard wacked-out Washington
pressure group pushing for no taxes and no regulation.
They’re run by C.
Boyden Grey, longtime Bush associate, Bush Sr.’s
White House Counsel, and also heir to some sort of
tobacco fortune.
Is there really any reason not to cut Linda Chavez
some slack after she’s had such a tough time of it?
Yes. I’m still a bit unclear on exactly what Marta Mercado was doing for Linda Chavez. And as noted
before, she’s not crazy about how this all turned out.
But did you notice how many digs
Chavez got in at people she doesn’t like? Let’s see .
. . Congressman David Bonior and Senator Carl Levin,
who were supposedly indifferent to the fate of some
woman Chavez helped back in the 1980s. And then there
was Zoe Baird. First, Chavez said she thought Baird
was treated unfairly and then proceeded to dump on
her. “I don’t know what Zoe Baird’s circumstances
were,” she said, “but I can tell you that my
relationship with Marta was quite different.” Huhhh???
Then she mentioned Baird’s limo driver for no other
reason than to drive home the limosine liberal image.
Then she proceeded to say how her case was different
from Baird’s because there had been a talk radio-based
public groundswell against Baird and there had been a
groundswell of sympathy for her. The American people,
largely because of talk on talk radio, began
complaining about Ms. Baird and her chauffeur and her
live-in maid . . . I have not, by the way, seen that
kind of reaction in terms of the stories that have
been out there about me. I have not seen a, kind of,
grassroots furor. Quite the contrary, I think there
has been a, kind of, grassroots support. Is this the
definition of self-serving crap? Or just an excellent
example of it?
Of course Chavez never mentioned the fact that she had
been particularly outspoken against Baird at the time.
Which brings us to our point. This sort of ritualized
immolation is ugly. Even if Chavez’s mistakes make her
unfit for the job, it’s still ugly. And Chavez herself
complained about this ugliness in her denunciations of
the “politics of personal destruction” (PPD). One
thing that I have learned during the last eight years
is that people make mistakes. Everybody makes
mistakes. Mistakes that look foolish or venal or
bizarre years later or when peered at by harsh eyes or
ripped from their context. And people deserve to be
judged by their better half and not their worst. But
Linda Chavez is a practitioner of the politics of
personal destruction. Her Republican associates are
practitioners of the politics of personal destruction.
Does that mean she deserves what she gets? No, it
doesn’t. But if she wants sympathy for being treated
to the nastiness of this city doesn’t there have to be
some recognition of “wow, that was really bad when we
crucified this or that Clinton appointee”? Isn’t
something like this necessary? Instead, Chavez’s line
seemed to be: Those Clinton folks like Zoe Baird
really were bad but how could you do this to me . . .
If Chavez were willing to show some recognition of the
wrong done to Clinton nominees and various Clinton
officials over recent years, then she would be very
entitled not just to sympathy but perhaps also the
ability to go on with her confirmation hearings (of
course I think she should be rejected on the merits).
But she’s not; so no sympathy.
This Washington Memo adapted from Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points
