Bush Appointments Extremist of the Extreme

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MinutemanMedia

by Donald Kaul

Last week the U.S. Senate confirmed the appointment of Janice Rogers Brown to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, perhaps the most influential appellate court after the Supreme. She is, by all accounts, a remarkable woman. 

She is African-American and as her supporters never tire of pointing out, a sharecropper’s daughter who overcame early widowhood and single motherhood to work her way through college and UCLA law school. She maneuvered her way through the political thickets of California to become, eventually, an associate justice on the California Supreme Court. 

She is said to write poetry, read widely and her speeches are peppered with quotations by such as Cicero, Ayn Rand, Samuel Beckett and Chris Rock - that crowd. She is, in short, a practically perfect candidate for an important judicial appointment. She has but a single flaw; hardly worth mentioning, but I’ll mention it anyway. 

She’s nuts.

She is a raving conservative lunatic who not only grasps the most extreme right-wing views available to her, she dips them in blood and waves them around like flags. She has said in speeches, for example, that the New Deal, with its emphasis on regulation of business and help for the disadvantaged, has brought upon us a new slavery. 

“In the heyday of liberal democracy all roads lead to slavery,” she has said. “We no longer find slavery abhorrent. We embrace it. If we can invoke no ultimate limits on the power of government, a democracy is inevitably transformed into a kleptocracy - a license to steal, a warrant for oppression.”

She found a 1937 Supreme Court ruling allowing federal regulation of the workplace particularly egregious, calling it a “triumph of our own socialist revolution.”

 “Where government moves in, community retreats and civil society disintegrates. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible.” She apparently wants a return to the pre-New Deal era - bread lines, child labor, unfettered stock market manipulation. Those were the days.

Still, that wasn’t what bothered me most about Judge Brown. People say extreme things in speeches all of the time; I’ve done it myself. Nor was it the fact that in cases involving discrimination against minorities or women that have come before her, she seems most often to favor the discriminators rather than their victims. There are two sides to every issue; she’s entitled to her opinion.

No, it’s statements like this:

“These are perilous times for people of faith, not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud.”

Or this:

“Atheistic humanism handed human destiny over to the great god autonomy and this is quite a different idea of freedom. Freedom then becomes willfulness.”

As a matter of fact, these are the least perilous times for people of faith - particularly the evangelical Protestant faith to which Judge Brown belongs - in my lifetime. Name the last “atheistic humanist” hired by the Bush administration to do anything. “People of faith” are in the saddle and riding the rest of us hard. And I - an agnostic humanist, if you have to know - have not handed over destiny, human and otherwise, to any god, let alone the great god autonomy. As a group we secularists are at least as moral and ethical as our religious brethren and are more fun at parties.

Believing in the progressive income tax and Social Security is not a mortal sin. Someone should tell Judge Brown that.

The scary thing about Judge Brown’s appointment was that she wasn’t even the worst nominee to be confirmed to the bench that week. There’s Judge William Pryor, Jr., who thinks Roe v. Wade (the abortion decision) “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history” and compares homosexual relations to bestiality and necrophilia.

God, if any, help us all.

Donald Kaul recently retired as Washington columnist for the “Des Moines Register.” He has covered the foolishness in our nation’s capital for 29 years, winning a number of modestly coveted awards along the way. Email: donald.kaul2@verizon.net.  You can read Donald Kaul weekly at MinutemanMedia

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We Love Howard Dean

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By John Cory,  t r u t h o u t | Perspective

[BFIA Editor's Note: Did you hear that big Dick cheney said THIS about the much beloved Howard Dean: "Maybe his mother loved him, but I've never met anybody who does."  Yeah, I think that's because little bully cheney closes his eyes and pretends we don't exist.  He's got a pretty active fantasy life, I'd say.  To those of us who realize the country is drowning in a sea of incomprehensible fascism, Howard and his tough talk are a breath of fresh air.  Now, from last week, before little cheney opened his big mouth on national TV, an article from Truthout.org on WHY we love Howard Dean.]

The Bush GOP is a Wal-Mart of five-and-dime ethics, self-enriching corporate sponsored war, imitation morality made in China, and a fresh baker's dozen of half-truths for every occasion. America on sale: to the right folks in the right place at the right time for the right price. Going once, going twice ...

Bible-thumping-bunko artists shove the hand of God into your pants pocket for thirty pieces of silver to buy membership lists from the likes of David Dukes and the KKK, because we all know, Heaven is white with just a touch of beige. And if you question that, James Dobson will take his Bible belt and show you the lashing love of Jesus.

...The Downing Street Memo is all the talk to avoid. There are some people who want the American media to cover the contents of the memo that show Bush and Blair conspired to wage war despite their promises otherwise. But the media won't cover the memo any more than they covered Bush's words in the second presidential debate of 2000 when he said: ".... The coalition against Saddam has fallen apart or it's unraveling, let's put it that way. The sanctions are being violated. We don't know whether he's developing weapons of mass destruction. He better not be or there's going to be a consequence should I be the pResident."

So what is the topic that grabs the news and the Democratic leadership's attention?

Howard Dean said something mean. Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

Bush lied and people died. Nope - not news. Ohio Republicans involved in financial and voting scandal. Nope - not news. Republicans jam Democratic phone lines during 2004 election to stop the vote. Republicans hack into Democratic computers. No news there. Tom Delay has repeated ethical lapses and takes money from lobbyists like Jack Abramoff. Nope - not news. The White House edits critical environmental reports to refute scientific fact. Nope - no news there. Wait a minute - this just in:

Howard Dean said something mean.

Oh my God! Stop the presses! Did you hear? Dean has gone mean, pass it on. Get Candy Crowley at CNN and Chris Matthews at MSNBC. Don't forget Scarborough. This is a week's worth of programming! Get Holy Joe Lieberman to speak for the good Democrats. Get Jive-Joe Biden, he'll be good for a sensible quote to contrast with the madness of Howard "Beal" Dean.

...If you Democratic leaders want to get upset about something, here's part of my list:

   1. Lack of health care in this country.
   2. Trampling of civil rights and privacy in the name of phony patriotism.
   3. Religious hate discrimination against gays sanctioned as legislation.
   4. Corporations ruining the environment and defiling worker's rights.
   5. In a culture of life - why does more money go to improving bombs than improving schools?
   6. How can a [pseudo-]president lie to Congress about war and get away with it?
   7. Church and State do not belong together. Ever.
   8. Why do I need to remind you of any of this?

...The list is long and ignored. I understand you are much too busy trying to teach Howard Dean how polite society functions.

...I want someone who will stand up not stand down. I want someone outspoken and outrageous and out there, for me. I want someone on my side, not on my back for more money. I want someone who fights, not folds at the first sign of fake indignation.

To paraphrase my good friend Titus: You whiny Democratic Leadership wussies - get down off the cross and use the wood to build a bridge to get over it! We love Howard Dean!

(Click here to read the complete article.)

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John Cory is a Vietnam veteran. He received the Purple Heart and Bronze Star with V device, 1969 - 1970.

Hey, Howard!  Keep Talking!

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T r u t h o u t | Perspective

In honor of Governor Dean's Iowa appearance tonight at the Iowa Democrats Hall of Fame Dinner, we bring you the always eloquent William Rivers Pitt on Howard Dean and the Democratic Party.

Democrats need to follow Dean's lead

Dean Was Right

   ~ By William Rivers Pitt

If the leadership qualities of those in charge of the national Democratic Party could be squeezed into a shampoo bottle, the directions on the back of the bottle might read something like this: “Make tentative statement. Offer equivocation to avoid appearing adamant. Scramble for cover when colleague offers stinging critique of opposition. Stab colleague in back in public. Palpitate and fret, hem and haw. Lather, rinse, repeat.”

Quite a recipe for success, yes? Not lately.

For the last several years, the Democratic Party has been, for the most part, leaving skid marks on the street as they have retreated from confrontation after confrontation with the radicals who now control the Republican party. This retreat has gone from the ridiculous to the sublime to the utterly outrageous.

Here and there resistance has been put forth - on the Social Security issue, on the stem cell legislation, on the nomination of Bolton as UN ambassador - but all too often the most effective resistance to these and other disastrous policy initiatives has come from other Republicans, and not from the Democrats. It was the eloquence of Republican Senator Voinovich that threw sand in the gears of the Bolton nomination, and it was Republican Senator Specter’s promised override of any Bush veto of the stem cell legislation that has made that issue a problem for the White House.

And then along comes Howard Dean, chairman of the DNC, outspoken and uncompromising, swinging Willie Stark’s meat ax with a will and a purpose. He dared to say that he hates Republicans, that the leadership of that party hasn’t worked a day in their lives, that the GOP has become a radical hothouse of right-wing Christians, almost all of whom are white, and that House majority leader Tom DeLay should go back to Texas and get his looming prison sentence over with. Insert palpitations.   Suddenly, Democrats like Joe Biden and Bill Richardson start knocking over furniture and old ladies in their rush to get to a microphone so they can distance themselves from the wild man.

Yes, yes, lather and rinse and repeat. The problem with all the equivocation is that it obscures a simple fact that requires exposure and discussion in this country: Dean was right. Ninety-nine percent of Republicans in the state legislatures in all 50 states, and in Congress in Washington DC, are white. Even in states and districts with large minority populations, the Republican representatives for those places are almost uniformly white Christians.

Of 3,643 Republicans serving in state legislatures across the country, only 44 of them are minorities, amounting to 1.2%. Texas, with a minority population of 47%, has 106 Republicans in the state legislature. There are exactly zero African Americans and exactly zero Hispanics serving in that body as Republicans. In Washington, 274 of the 535 elected Senators and Representatives are Republican. Exactly five are minorities.

Of course, there are ethnic and religious minorities within the rank and file of the GOP, but every demographic analysis of the party’s makeup clearly shows the vast majority of Republicans fit exactly into the description offered by Mr. Dean. His point, by the way, was not that white Christians are bad people. His point was that, in this pluralist society made up of so much diversity, the Republican Party does not represent the true face of this country. He was also pointing out that the GOP has been taken over by that small, radical minority of white Christians who believe separation of church and state is evil, and who believe Biblical law is a better tool of governance than that pesky Constitution.

As for hating Republicans, the employment record of the GOP leadership, and DeLay’s date with a Houston cellblock, there is method to the supposed madness here. Those who question the wisdom of Dean firing broadsides like this look to the old lawyer’s maxim: When you have the law on your side, pound on the law, and when you have the facts on your side, pound on the facts, and when you have neither the law nor the facts on your side, pound on the table. On so many issues facing us today, Dean and the Democrats have both the facts and the law on their side. The question becomes, then, about why Dean is pounding on the table.

The answer is straightforward, and appropriately bold after several years of ineffective limp-noodle Democratic leadership. Every time Dean fires off one of his salvos, reporters flip open their notebooks. Headlines get made, discussion begins, and a whole lot of people start debating the facts and merits of his statements. Is the Republican leadership run by right-wing yahoos? Is DeLay going to jail? Controversy begets press. Dean can see, as well as anyone else, how effective the moderate, soft-touch, treading-lightly approach has been working lately for the Democrats.

But how are we going to win those white Christian middle-America voters to our side by having Dean basically call them out? asks the ruffled Democratic leadership. The answer to this lies at the heart of what the Democratic party has been failing at for a while now. The voters who are supposedly going to be alienated by this kind of talk are the very same voters who look for guts, strength and straight talk from the leadership of this country. All too often, Democratic leaders come off sounding like they are saying seven things at once, leaving the impression that their spines are somewhat slippery. Boldness, on the other hand, begets confidence, even in disagreement.

These Dean statements also, coincidentally, whip the Democratic base into a roaring frenzy as they hear an actual Democratic leader speak their beliefs out loud and in public. One of the things Dean is working on every day is to redirect DNC fundraising away from the big-dollar donors who give equally to both parties in order to hedge their bets. Dependence on this breed of donor causes the party to crab towards the middle and avoid anything resembling true opposition.

Dean wants DNC fundraising efforts to be focused on the common citizen, the Democratic activist who has been screaming at the party to say what must be said, and Dean’s inflammatory statements spark the kind of donation avalanche that turned his Presidential campaign into a financial juggernaut. He may have lost in the end, but the manner in which he raised campaign money changed the face of electoral politics. He is porting those lessons into national DNC fundraising efforts, and statements like these go a long way towards making those efforts wildly successful.

Memo to Dean: Keep doing what you are doing. Lather, rinse, repeat.

(Source)

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William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.  You can also find him at Truthout.

The Democrats' Woman Problem

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by Martha Burk, TomPaine.com

Martha Burk is a political psychologist and author of Cult of Power: Sex Discrimination in Corporate America and What Can Be Done About It , released last month from Scribner.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told Tim Russert on "Meet The Press" last week that if he could strike the words "choice" and "abortion" out of the lexicon of the Democratic party, he would.  Echoing George Lakoff’s influential book — Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate — Dean said  “when you talk about framing this debate the way it ought to be framed... this is an issue about who gets to make up their minds.” Lakoff, the current darling of party strategists agonizing over what went wrong in the last election, says the Dems didn’t get their ideas out in a way that fit the emotional “frames” already in people’s minds about the role of government in their lives.

...[The] erosion of women’s support for Democrats was also a result of the Kerry campaign strategy. The Kerry campaign shied away from talking to women at all, choosing instead to go for the white male warrior vote. Women’s advocates were alarmed about this from the beginning, when the Democrats refused to fund a strategy to get women to the polls, while the Bush team had a person in every precinct who was responsible for turning out the female “W” vote.
 
...According to the Votes for Women 2004 project, Republican women’s events were about how much the campaign valued women, while Democratic women’s events were about extracting money from female donors to use on general campaign themes.

...Leaving women out of the debate was not new for the Democrats. They have shown us in the last two elections that they don’t want to be too vocal about women. Every time George Bush said to Al Gore, “I don’t trust the government, I trust the people,” Gore had the perfect opportunity to counter with “except for women in making their own decisions about their own bodies.”  He never once took that opportunity. In 2004, the Dems avoided “women’s issues” at every turn, even taking the Equal Rights Amendment out of the platform for the first time in 40 years.  When their own internal polling showed the pay gap as one of the top concerns for women, the candidate didn’t want to talk about it publicly.  As for the abortion issue, only those far inside the Beltway could decode Kerry’s rambling answer in the final debate to conclude he was — sorry, Howard — pro-choice.  Even so, the DNC is now blaming the loss on “being forced into the idea of defending the idea of abortion,” according to Dean.

(Click here to read the complete article.)