alternative hippopotamus

I didn’t realize that Jake Tapper, late of “The Note” is back at the blogging grind. It looks like ABC wanted to open an anti-Obama, anti-Clinton bureau, and found just the hack for the job.

An excerpt, so you don’t have to read it for yourself:

In the National Journal’s annual ratings of senators’ standings on the political prism you have to hang a Left before you find Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois.

Pass Barbara Boxer…Ted Kennedy…keep going.

Pass Sheldon Whitehouse….Robert Menendez…

Keep going….

Oh, look, here’s Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described socialist…

Keep going.

Ah, at the waaaaaaay end.

Senator Obama, good to see you sir.

Somehow I picture Tapper hanging out at a bar with Jeff Gannon and Michelle Malkin, lamenting how the Democrat Party has become the party of cut and run.

With no apologies to fascist fabulist Jonah G, I present the scribblings of radio host, and 1992 Pat Buchanan supporter Michael G:

It’s bizarre. Romney isn’t a contentious, pick-a-fight kind of guy. He was by every estimate a competent governor. Not a miracle worker, not a moron. The state was in demonstrably better shape when he left then when he was elected — and he gave the Left a mandatory health care policy. Why the animus?

I don’t have empirical data, but the anecdotal is overwhelming: Mitt Romney hurt Massachusetts’ feelings. He came, he won, he left to run for president. As juvenile as it may sound, quite a few Massachusetts folks act like a jilted bride when it comes to Romney.

It’s true that a poke-you-in-the-eye guy (Bush) is more obviously annoying than a shoot-you-in-the-back kind of guy (Mittens).

Willard M. Nero fiddled while the tech bubble burst in Boston. I watched as myself and people I was close to saw their jobs vacuumed out of Boston and moved to Mumbai and Calcutta. His greatest asset (pre-election) was his close work with VC’s, a relationship he promised to use to attract businesses to the area. After he was elected he announced his first priority was not the economy (I don’t recall him even discussing the economy again), but to enact a death penalty for Massachusetts.

Later, he fought tooth and nail against gay marriage, despite popular support, and support in the Massachusetts legislature.

I’ll give him the health care plan, although that was put together too late to help me when the dot com company I worked for went broke.

My home town.

It seems like just last week when I posted last. Actually, it was last week. It’s just that I’ll never get a superaction hero named after me if I don’t feed the blog on a regular basis. Secretly, my aim for this blog was to have someone - could be a cartoon, feature film, or episode of the Colbert Report- say “This is a job for… Alt Hippo.”

Basically, the last week has been a series of grass-roots DC kind of events, starting with Spencer Ackerman’s appearance at the local Liberal Fascism Beer Hall Putsch. Then a South Carolina Primary/Torchwood watch party at my place, and finally SOTU7: The End of an Error, with our good friends at The Seminal. The latter was accompanied by a bubbly Matt Stoller, popping up to applaud every Bush line. Matt’s funny that way.

So, Giulliani dropped out. That’s good. Now Edwards dropped out. That’s not good, but expected. Here’s what I think it all means. In my opinion, Ted Kennedy endorsed Obama expecting Edwards to drop out. Heck, he may have even had a hand in coordinating the move. People like my mother who’ve experienced the US before the Civil Rights Act, and even before Brown vs. the Board of Education, don’t think Obama can be elected. People like me don’t have the unpleasant experience of that particular historical context to inform my views. I think Obama can win against McCain, who were all pretty sure is going to edge out Mittens. So, Ted Kennedy’s endorsement is meant to reassure people like my mother in a post-Edwards campaign that Obama really can win.

This commenter at TPMmuckraker captures my frustration with the Dems over caving to Bush on FISA, contempt, etc:

I can’t stand the Democrat Party. I cannot stand a single one of these triangulating bullshit artists. I miss the Democratic Party: what ever happened to them? Did Clintonism really wipe ‘em all out?

When I get discouraged in times like this, I always try to find something to make me laugh. The pantload is usually good for that. This, for instance, was pretty funny: (my emphasis)

The Nazis and affiliated intellectuals firmly believed that the Jew was behind the scenes, pulling strings, manipulating events, rigging the system — even the language — in profound and pernicious ways. Carl Schmitt — quite popular on the left today — was tasked with the job of purging the Jewish spirit from the law.

Who? At first I thought maybe he was the guy who started Schmidt’s brewery, then I noticed his name was spelled wrong. The only blogospheric reference I could find to him was as a bad example:

But where exactly did Yoo come up with the analysis that led to the purported conclusions that the Executive was not restrained by the Geneva Conventions and similar international instruments in its conduct of the war in Iraq? Yoo’s public arguments and statements suggest the strong influence of one thinker: Carl Schmitt.

The Friend/Foe Paradigm
Perhaps the most significant German international law scholar of the era between the wars, Schmitt was obsessed with what he viewed as the inherent weakness of liberal democracy. He considered liberalism, particularly as manifested in the Weimar Constitution, to be inadequate to the task of protecting state and society menaced by the great evil of Communism.

Not that this should stop Goldberg from babbling incoherently, but it’s people like Yoo that convince the left that the right-wingers are a bunch of fascists.

I’m not sure if it’s possible for a “conservative” in the post-modern extremist sense of that word to be “over the top.” If it is, Jonah Golberg’s public reply to criticisms by David Niewert would fit that description. One would think that the public humiliation Goldberg experienced on the Daily Show would be a chastening experience. Instead, arms and legs lying uselessly on the floor, Goldberg continues to taunt Niewert. I guess he can always bite his head off.

An excerpt so you can get the flavor of Goldberg’s barbs:

He also revisits, like a dog returning to his vomit, this idiocy about Bush grandfather funding Hitler. It’s really a tiresome topic. But let’s assume for two seconds it’s true. The most common criticism I get from the left is that I’m playing guilt-by-association. The New Republic crowd liked Fascism and therefore I’m supposedly insinuating that today’s New Republic crowd does too. I take great pains not to make that argument in the book.

Since his argument is that the figurative DNA of the modern progressive movement has more fascist strands than the modern right, yes, I would say that bit of history about Bush’s literal DNA is relevant.

I know that Goldberg tries to sell himself as a more erudite, less caustic kind of right-wing propagandist. The reality is that Goldberg is turning into Ann Coulter without the deep masculine voice.

On the Daily Show, Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, just called Bill Clinton “King Lear with a Southern accent.” I don’t care who you support in the election, that’s a funny line.

And other maxims of the right.

( Originally posted at dcdl.)

After seeing There Will be Blood, a few of us huddled in Georgetown’s Alamo Grill for a meal of chips, and well… mostly chips. I’d really hate to see how slow the kitchen is on a busy night.

At any rate, in a typically wide-ranging conversation someone touched on the subject of presidential pardons. Would Bush issue pardons for political cronies? Given that’s one of those questions that answer themselves, more generally, would Bush issue a blanket pardon for the entire Executive branch?

Personally, I find the area of presidential pardons to be very interesting. This wikipedia article is a starting point. (Though, given the controversial nature of the subject matter, it really needs to be taken with a grain of salt.)

One thing that the article mentions, supported by Bob Woodward’s Shadow, is that accepting a pardon implies an admission of guilt. See also this NYT article on Ford’s defense of his pardoning of Nixon:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 28 — President Gerald R. Ford was never one for second-guessing, but for many years after leaving office in 1977, he carried in his wallet a scrap of a 1915 Supreme Court ruling. A pardon, the excerpt said, “carries an imputation of guilt,” and acceptance of a pardon is “a confession of it.”

Note that Bush didn’t pardon Scooter Libby. To do so would jeopardize Libby’s defense in Joe Wilson’s civil suit. Instead, he commuted Libby’s sentence.

Note also that Carter’s blanket amnesty for draft evaders was really a pardon (see here). Here, there was not a disagreement over whether draft evaders had broken the law- they clearly had. And, it could be that the argument would be similar for a potential blanket pardon of Bushies: it’s not really a crime to break an unjust law. That is, of course, a rhetorical defense and not a legal defense.

I’d say there’s an unexplored question over how blanket a blanket pardon can be. I think we can all agree that Bush couldn’t issue an executive pardon for all Republicans until the end of time. But, he may be able to issue a blanket pardon for his favorite 12,500 people in his administration. (See this 1974 Time Magazine article. 12,500 was the minimum number that Carter’s pardon applied to.)

Now, getting back to our conversation in the Alamo Grill we all agreed that a President Kucinich would challenge such a pardon. Would a President Obama or Clinton? It seems to me a worthwhile question to ask these candidates while we still have their attention.

While the national attention was focused on the Nevada caucus (for the record, I still have no idea what the correct pronunciation of Nevada is), and the SC primary for our Republican friends (supply of Republican friends may be limited. Void where prohibited) I spent the day at the DC pre-primary caucus.

Later today we’ll find out who the likely DC winner is. I’m guessing Obama, but was surprised to see the turn out for Clinton.

Despite all my whining about how bad the Red line was today, and it existed in a kind of badness that approached reverse-time, it was fun to see all the people. And, it was interesting to note that even though it was a Saturday morning/early afternoon, people were there in their Sunday finest.

I think the next time I hear someone talk about how the liberals “Blame America first,” I’ll take them to the DC pre-primary caucus. “Could you show me,” I ask my imaginary interlocutor, “which is the one who’s blaming America first? Point him out, and I’ll give him a good talking to. If not, maybe this is a good time to stop talking smack.”

I was poking around for a clip of last night’s Jonah Goldberg interview, and here I see eRobin already has it up.

I was surprised to see that he used the line about progressivism leading to Clintonism, which as we know is an official department in the Trilateral Service Commission (see New World Order conspiracy if this is confusing). It’s just a particularly stupid arrow in his singularly vapid quiver. It occurred to me as I was getting ready for bed that maybe the whole exercise is a dog whistle for the Birch Society types. Recalling that, as a rule of thumb, deconstructing tiny minds is a sure-fire path to insanity, I decided to knock it off for the evening.

I see David Neiwert has more up on the Pantload, including this howler:

…Moreover, if the Klan was less racist than we’ve been led to believe, academia was staggeringly more so. …

Michael Ledeen, who appears to be taking his meds, joins the party:

So much for the view—the fact—that Hitler was driven, from an early age, by an antisemitism so virulent that he would not rest until he had set in motion the Holocaust. Indeed, in one of “Liberal Fascism“‘s most unfortunate phrases, Jonah trivializes Nazi racism, equating it with some American political rhetoric:

“What distinguished Nazism from other brands of socialism and communism was not so much that it included more aspects from the political right (though there were some). What distinguished Nazism was that it forthrightly included a worldview we now associate almost completely with the political left: identity politics.” And in case you thought he was kidding, he repeats it a few pages later: “What mattered to (Hitler) was German identity politics.”

Except for the white washing of the Klan and Hitler, Mrs. Lincoln enjoyed the play.

Here’s the funny thing. Jonah could have received his right-wing bonafides not by writing a hack fest, which is what he ended up doing, but by following conventional lines. For instance, he could have started with The Road to Serfdom, updated its warnings for the 2008 election, and even have slung some mud at the Clintons- which undoubtedly is part of his purpose.

Alternatively, he could have started with Star Trek, as I understand one of his favorite shows, and shown what the Prime Directive would have implied for the US in the Middle East.

In either case I probably wouldn’t have read his “treatise”, but at least the book would have been kind of interesting, and not the kind of thing that would expose him to universal ridicule, which is the predictable outcome of his little endeavor.

Be careful what you ask for, I guess.

I thought it would be interesting to look at two definitions for the word progressivism.

First, wikipedia:

Progressivism historically advocates the advancement of workers’ rights and social justice. The progressives were early proponents of anti-trust laws and the regulation of large corporations and monopolies, as well as government-funded environmentalism and the creation of National Parks and Wildlife Refuges.

Second, Lord Pantload:

The early progressives saw the world as a contest between ethnocultural groups and Yglesias does too. But we don’t really have to prove any arcane point of ideological resemblance in order to rebut his charge of ahistorical reductionism. My book argues that national socialism in this country, which used to be called progressivism, changed its name to liberalism after World War II. Hillary Clinton herself – the virtual embodiment (according to her supporters) of modern liberalism — rejects the liberal label and proudly proclaims her spiritual kinship with the Progressives. Does she understand what it means to link herself to a nationalistic, socialistic, eugenicist project? Do any of today’s self-proclaimed progressives?

I think someone’s been hitting the Cheetos past their bed time.

More later. I’m off to the Drinking Eugenically happy hour.