Saturday, March 25, 2006

Freedom From

In Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale Offred, a woman in the Taliban-like Republic of Gilead, muses on her past, much like our present, and on her present, a fundamentalist era with veiled women going out only in pairs:

Women were not protected then.

I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out but that every woman knew: Don't open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police. Make him slide his ID under the door. Don't stop on the road to help a motorist pretending to be in trouble. Keep the locks on and keep going. If anyone whistles, don't turn to look. Don't go into a laundromat, by yourself, at night.

I think about laundromats. What I wore to them: shorts, jeans, jogging pants. What I put into them: my own clothes, my own soap, my own money, money I had earned myself. I think about having such control.



Freedom to and freedom from. Which type is the freedom espoused in this Red State blog post addressed to us, the liberals?


What is the freedom the conservatives desire? It is not freedom from family, clearly, or certainly not freedom for all the members of that family. It is not freedom from want, given the emphasis on the markets being free to exploit whomever they wish. Is it the freedom-from that Atwood discusses? Or is it that kind of "freedom" for some of us, perhaps the women, the poor the disadvantaged, and another kind of freedom, freedom-to, for others, perhaps the wealthy, the white, the patriarchs?

What is freedom for the conservatives? Is it the absence of government? But that would be anarchy. Is it freedom in the markets and none at home? And where does one person's freedom end and another one's start? If you have the freedom to preach, do I have the freedom to cover my ears and not hear, not listen?

Freedom, free markets and family. The three Fs. Who wouldn't like the idea of freedom, in a totally abstract sense at least? Who wouldn't like the idea of family, especially if it is not defined they way the patriarchs do? Even the concept of free markets sounds jolly and light-hearted, something to explore on a Saturday morning while shopping for fresh vegetables.

But all these are emotional signals, terms, which mean nothing and everything, terms which are not explained because explaining them would leave nothing but empty air. Freedom from.

Friday, March 24, 2006

The Problem with Freedom's March

Is excellently laid out in this blog post. Democracy alone is not adequate. Without the laws and institutions it needs democracy is nothing more but majority power, and if the majority decides that a member of the society should die then that is what happens if majority rule is all we go by.

And that is why democracy can't be exported and handed out wrapped in a pretty bow. That's why Russia has trouble with democracy, right now, too. Learning to run a democracy takes years of practice and nothing much will come out of it until the necessary laws and institutions are not only in place but acknowledged to be in place by most of the citizens. Even then democracy means nothing unless the citizens are willing it to work.

Read the histories of democracies. They almost all had a bloody beginning and then a long stage when democracy meant that only some people could vote. Slowly, very slowly, the concept of democracy has been stretched and reworked to cover previously disfranchised groups such as women and racial minorities, and this stretching has coincided with reworkings of the laws and institutions that are necessary for democracy. We can't just take a cookie cutter and punch out democracies in the Middle East. It doesn't work.

Irony Is Dead, Again

I posted about the idea of a good old-fashioned liberal war against Easter a few posts down, but the wingnuts have alredy started a real one. Must not scream in frustration.

And here is some real irony for you: My human incarnation has decided to start writing on her own! How dare she! This is goddess bidness. (My Friday dump...)
Thanks to Phila in the comments for the World Net Daily link.

What Now?

So Ben Domenech has resigned and Jim Brady doesn't have to fire him, after all. Move on, ladies and gentlemen, nothing to see here now. We will return to our regularly scheduled programming at the Washington Post, which means finding another wingnut but one who doesn't plagiarize, to match routine (nonliberal) reporting. This is balance.

And what is the story the media and the blogosphere are following now? To me it looks like a war story. Just check out these quotes:

And just as this was about to be posted, word comes that Domenech has indeed resigned from The The liberal blogosphere will now have its scalp and the MSM has yet one more black eye that it didn't need.

"The liberal blogosphere will now have its scalp". Ok. The Red State blog which Domenech part-founded agrees with the idea that this is a war:

Redstate is not deterred. We are emboldened. We stand together, bound by ideology and a desire to advance the conservative movement. The movement is bigger than me, you, or Redstate.

And Atrios appears to agree, too:

The Redstaters have to be pissed, as they don't just see themselves as a blog, but as the nexus of the conservative political movement online.

Then there are the opinions of Jeff Goldstein:

What is most distateful about this episode from the perspective of the blogosphere, on the other hand, is the palpable glee with which many on the left set out after Ben and are now luxuriating in his resignation. And, of course, they have taught the WaPo the lesson they wished to teach it: that rightwing commentary will be scrutinized in direct inverse to the acceptance they give to the obvious biases of leftwing media figures.

And of Michelle Malkin:

Michelle Malkin, a prominent conservative blogger, wrote before the resignation that Domenech had edited one of her books and she had been cheering for him. "But now the determined moonbat hordes have exposed multiple instances of what clearly appear to me to be blatant lifting of entire, unique passages by Ben from other writers." That, Malkin said, is "unacceptable . . . And, painfully, Domenech's detractors, are right. He should own up to it and step down. Then, the Left should cease its sick gloating and leave him and his family alone."

"Sick gloating", "palpable glee", and elsewhere "Schadenfreude". Stuff we shrieking denizens of the extreme left are engaging in right now. All bad, though perhaps not as bad as lying and stealing.

The new story is about a war. A war between the two blogospheres and also a war between the traditional media and the lefty blogs. Surprisingly enough, there seems to be no war between the wingnut blogs and the media, surprisingly, because that is the old myth we have all absorbed for years. Perhaps the media has already been taken over by the wingnuts and all that remains is to wipe the cybernet clean of those shrieking hordes of the left. Who in the rest of this world might be called moderates or even independents, by the way. And yes, I was insulted by Domenech's virgin blog using the term "shrieking denizens" about people like me.

The war storyline is an unfortunate one. It allows the reframing of serious questions about the roles of the media to remain unanswered. It lets everything be twisted into "us-against-them" anecdotes, and it is a real hindrance to substantive political discussions. All you need to do now is to label someone as a moonbat or a wingnut and then there will be no discussion. And yes, I know I've done that myself all the time.

It may be impossible for humans to frame the situation in any other ways. The war storyline releases all sorts of primitive emotions: the evil ones, the good ones, the righteous message, the stinking lies, the good community, the satanic community, and so on. A couple of decades of right-wing hammering on the nails that are our reputations and our human worth on the liberal side of this society have also had their impact. Yes, we are gleeful right now, and yes, we have raised our uncouth voices to scream and ridicule the conservatives. But this response didn't come out of nowhere. Ask our good avuncular friend, Rush Limbaugh. Or our dear auntie, Ann Coulter.

No, we have been well trained by the very people who now decry our hostility and our horde-like tendencies of going for the lowest common denomination. They should be proud of the impact they have had on political debate in this country.

I started this post with a vague idea of handing out an olive leaf or a pigeon or some such thing. Seems I'm still too angry to do that.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Stealing And Lying





A War Against Easter

How about it, moonbats*? Fox News has nothing to talk about, because we have been lax on our recent culture war efforts. I propose a strong offensive against Easter, especially the little yellow chickens. They should not be displayed prominently in the public sphere, not even if it is established that the Founding Fathers loved them. We are adamantly and defiantly opposed to little yellow chickens, and we are ready to spend money and time to fight them. Or anyone who likes them.

I'm trying to help Bill O'Reilly. The War Against Christmas is a seasonal thing, after all. I'm also trying to turn the public attention away from the question whether the Washington Post has hired a plagiarist as its newest wingnut blogger or not. And I'm having fun.
*being the shrieking denizens of the extreme far left

The Abstinence Scam?

How much money can you spend telling students: "Don't Do It!"? A lot, it seems:






One way of looking at this giveaway is as political payback. You give money to those who gave you votes, and if the Democrats got the money in the past now it is time for the social conservatives to milk the taxpayers. But another and a more ethical way would be to ask what is actually being done with all this money. What effect does abstinence education have? What are all these other faith-based programs achieving? Anything at all? Remember that this bonanza for the wingnuts is taking place at the same time as the administration is cutting funding for such proven programs as screening for cervical cancer among poor women.

And Even More on Ben Domenech

The newest hotshot wingnut penning a blog for the august Washington Post while equally religious and also homeschooled (sort of) goddesses get no offers from them has now been accused of plagiarism.

May I give a gentle hint to the people who do the hiring at the Post? Google is your friend.
Also check this one out. Via Eschaton.

Greetings from Karl Rove

This is good to know:


Relentlessly optimistic, our Mr. Rove, but he does have an interesting definition of "external events". The Iraq war just "happened", I guess, and the failures after Katrina were all caused by some outside force.

What on earth is he plotting now, hmm.

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Mom, Don't Read This One

Because the post will be on the topic of sex. Ann at has listed ten reasons why liberal men are better in bed. It's a funny list, but I don't actually believe that sexual prowess goes with ones political views with one exception: I have a hard time seeing how a fundamentalist misogynist could be of any enjoyment in bed.

Though I must admit that my liberal trophy husbands are much nicer than the few conservatives someone gave me as Christmas presents. It's something to do with the meaning of the word "liberal".

Cecilia Fire Thunder

She is the president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe at Pine Ridge, SD, and she doesn't like the South Dakota ban on all abortions except to save the life of the mother:

According to an Native American Times article by Tim Giago, Ms. Fire Thunder was "incensed...that a body made up of mostly white males would make such a stupid law against women."

"To me, it is now a question of sovereignty," she said to [Tim] last week. "I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction."

A Public Service Announcement

This time in statistics. Some days ago Atrios posted a link to Rush Limbaugh's website where this picture was prominently displayed (it isn't there now).

The point of the picture is to make the Iraq fatality numbers look tiny. The error in the picture? That the risk of death is not related to the population at risk. There are far fewer Americans in Iraq than in this country, yet Limbaugh ignores the difference in these base numbers. To make the terms comparable, we'd need to make the bases comparable. If the American military dies in Iraq at the rate of 2,300 out of the, let's say, 130,000 currently there, then this rate applied to the general American population would give us about 5.3 million war dead.

Limbaugh lies with statistics, a common hobby for some writers on the Iraq war.

If you still doubt me, consider this: That the number of people who have died trying to climb Mt. Everest is not in the thousands must mean that mountain climbing is every bit as safe as just staying in bed all day long.

A similar attempt at using absolute numbers to make arguments about rates of war deaths is taking place today in the right blogosphere. It's not too hard to see what is wrong with it if you remember to check what the base is.

Conservatives Don't Believe In Social Engineering?

Never thought that this one would resurface after years of the administration giving money to abstinence-only education and the patriarchal traditional marriage movement. I thought that soundbite was one for the history books, given that the current wingnuts are firmly trying to do social engineering, including trying to influence what science reports. But Derbyshire argues the old chestnut:


How can he be so clear-eyed about it in Iraq but not at home? And not only is he clear-eyed, he is also cold-hearted, chillingly rational and horrifyingly honest:


Does Derbyshire calmly contemplate the death of little Muslim children in this slaughter?

It's interesting to learn what makes wingnuts tick.

More on Domenech

Sorry if you don't want to hear more about him. I want to write more about him, because we have been finally told what you need to do to get one of the plum jobs in political writing. All that is necessary is to be home-schooled, twenty-four years old and a blogger. And a wingnut, of course. People with this combination of credentials know what the majority of Americans think. They provide a substantial contribution to the national debate. They are also probably appointed to stick one in the eyes of the rabid lefty blogosphere. You know, the people who are uncouth and rude and call others names. Not like Domenech ( who called us shrieking denizens).

Atrios has a Domenech day if you want to learn more about this newest sage.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Welcoming Ben Domenech

He is Washington Post's newest blogger, a very conservative political writer. He is supposed to balance the neutral journalists in their stable. When the Post was questioned about this odd choice they answered like this:


Now's Opinions editor, Hal Straus, has sent some answers to our questions via a spokesman, Eric Easter. For your edification and enjoyment, here are the questions, followed by Straus's answers:

Question 1: Was the hiring of Ben Domenech motivated by a desire to placate right-wing critics upset with Dan Froomkin's frequent criticism of George Bush or upset with the recent Dana Milbank appearance poking fun at the shooting episode involving the vice president?

Straus: "When launched Opinions we said we wanted this new area to be about a variety of voices across a broad spectrum of political and cultural thought. Ben Domenech's Red America is simply another reflection of that effort.


"He's an Internet pioneer, an accomplished writer and someone who is willing to challenge sloppy thinking even if, occasionally, he finds it on the GOP side of the aisle."

Question 2: Does have any liberal bloggers who can act as a counterpart to Mr. Domenech?


Neat, isn't it? What a liberal blogger might add is not substantive enough?

Let's see what Domenech contributes to the national conversation:

This is a blog for the majority of Americans.


Democrats who have won major elections since 1992 have, with very few exceptions, been the ones who distanced themselves from the shrieking denizens of their increasingly extreme base, soft-pedaled their positions on divisive issues and adopted the rhetoric and positions of the right -- pro-free market, pro-business, pro-faith, tough on crime and strongly in favor of family values.


While the mainstream media has been slow to recognize the growth in conservative America, smart Democrats have not. Former Virginia Governor Mark Warner and Hillary Clinton are not alone in recognizing that the unhinged elements of their base, motivated by partisan rage, Michael Moore conspiracies and a pronounced feeling of victimhood have dragged down the Democratic Party for far too long. It's a political anchor apotheosized by the founders of leftist websites Daily Kos and MyDD, whose recently published book on political strategy and the Internet (an odd publication when one considers that DKos endorsed candidates are 0-19 in elections) opens with the sentence "Five years ago, the Republicans took over the government through nondemocratic means." Smart Democrats read this kind of rhetoric and recognize that if they continue to be the party of Howard Dean, the floor may be nonexistent.

I love this balance shit.

Added later: Check out what Domenech used to write a little earlier. Via Eschaton. This is getting very hilarious. Substantive addition, indeed. How does a twenty-four year old without any real experience get a plum appointment like that, hmmm?

War is a Job for Men

So says Kate O'Beirne, the wingnuts' answer to feminism:


Interesting how she assumes that the women in the military should be viewed in their patriarchal family roles. But more importantly, it doesn't seem that O'Beirne's people are succeeding very well in keeping the war a male business:

Also among the dead were son Walid's wife, Asma, 32, who was shot in the head, and their son Abdullah, 4, who was shot in the chest, Rsayef and Hamza said.

Walid's 8-year-old daughter, Iman, and his 6-year-old son, Abdul-Rahman, were wounded and U.S. troops took them to Baghdad for treatment. The only person who escaped unharmed was Walid's 5-month-old daughter, Asia. The three children now live with their maternal grandparents, Rsayef and Hamza said.

Rsayef said those killed in the second house were his brother Younis, 43, who was shot in the stomach and chest, the brother's wife Aida, 40, who was shot in the neck and chest while still in bed where she was recuperating from bladder surgery. Their 8-year-old son Mohammed bled to death after being shot in the right arm, Rsayef said.

Also killed were Younis's daughters, Nour, 14, who was shot in the head; Seba, 10, who was hit in the chest; Zeinab, 5, shot in the chest and stomach; and Aisha, 3, who was shot in the chest. Hoda Yassin, a visiting relative, was also killed, Rsayef and Hamza said.

The only survivor from Younis's family was his 15-year-old daughter Safa, who pretended she was dead. She is living with her grandparents, Rsayef said.

Deserves More Recognition

This blog does. If you agree, you can vote for it in the Koufax awards. We have made the finalist round.

Talking to Fundamentalists

When the Taliban took over Afghanistan I realized how impossible it would be to debate a Taliban cleric. It just can't be done. There is nothing that we could say to a person who believes that he knows the exact word of god, who believes that carrying out the meaning of that word will result in an eternal happy life. Now this is a real difficulty for those of us who believe in debate and democracy.

So how do you talk to fundamentalists? Take the old example of the Taliban banning women's shoes that make a noise. Why would they do something like that? The reason can be found in the writings about Mohammed's era. It seems that prostitutes wore bells around their ankles in those days, and there is most likely something in the writings that says good women don't make a noise when they walk. Hence the need for soft shoes centuries later. Did someone try to explain this to the Taliban clerics? I'm sure that they would have appreciated such a clarification of the religion they study all the time...

Everything is absolute to literalist fundamentalists, and it is the very absoluteness that they value. Consider the recent court case in Afghanistan:



If you have found the true god it is a grievous sin to then leave him, and there is only one correct avenue to faith.

Our own fundamentalists have exactly the same attitude. Here is an example of it:


I don't believe that we can talk to the fundamentalists, and I am very worried about this, not only because the fundamentalists always believe in the inferiority of women (as their truths are based on writings from an era when women were universally acknowledged to be inferior), but more generally, too. We have fundamentalists wielding power right now, and they have their own agendas about how to wield it, agendas that have to do with the end of the world and the Rapture. All this is worrying and makes communicating even more urgent. But how to do it? I really can't see a way.

Monday, March 20, 2006

Microeconomics 101 by John Snow

Billmon quotes a gem from John Snow:






The Manly New York Times

It's an odd thing for the Gray Lady to do, this catering to the wingnut men. They must have carried out a marketing study which proves that they make more money by pissing off every single thinking woman if only they can get a few wingnut guys to subscribe. Who am I to argue that this might not be the best strategy to follow? I don't have thymos.

According to David Brooks, thymos is the secret ingredient in men, the thing that makes them tick. Not the puppydogs' tails, after all. Had there ever been a female Freud she might have had her question about what men want answered easily: men want to be recognized:





Brooks is trying to hedge his bets about whether women might want similar things, too. On the one hand, he has just read a really fun and supportive book about Manliness. On the other hand, he wants recognition from women as the kind of guy who might not bash them on the head and drag them back to the cave for some... recognition.

I smell patriarchy in the air at the New York Times. So does Garance Franke-Ruta. Her long piece on the number of women writing on abortion in the Times is depressing reading:


Probably because these men want recognition and women don't.

Wingnut Disarray

According to Washington Post:




Every effort so far to produce such a platform has stumbled.




License Plates and Free Speech

A federal appeals court has allowed the state of Tennessee to offer pro-life license plates while at the same time refusing to offer pro-choice license plates:

Federal appeals courts have been divided over whether such license plate programs are constitutional. Last year the U.S. Supreme Court let stand a lower-court ruling that said similar South Carolina license plates violated the First Amendment.

Drivers will be able to pay an extra fee in Tennessee for the "Choose Life" plate, and some of the proceeds will go to New Life Resources, an anti-abortion group.

But drivers in Tennessee are not able to pay an extra fee for a pro-choice plate.

Blogging Feminism

One reason the top of this blog says "opinions of" is to let me escape writing only about feminism. Escape, because it's a tough life to be a warrior for a cause which is among the most ridiculed, belittled and misunderstood. Or so it seems, on certain days, particularly after I've surfed in some really vile places.

Today was one of those days, mostly because of my dog Hank's illness, but also because I innocently skipped over to a website which should have health warnings for women. Why do I never learn how to prepare myself for misogyny? Why do I still feel that women should be accepted into the human race by even those men who have some serious psychological problems with sexuality or the female sex? Maybe Freud could tell me.

A whiny soldier I am. Which explains why I don't write on every single nasty article I come across, or even the majority of them. There are other feminist bloggers who take on topics that need to be addressed, others who know more than I do and who wield the keyboard better than I do. But ultimately I can only take so much of the shit without losing my ability to sleep or my appetite.

All this is a long way of unnecessarily explaining why this blog is neither one thing nor another, although I also believe that feminism is more than just addressing topics of sexual or gender equality. It's a part of a larger outlook on the world, a way of seeing it and the creatures in it from an angle of equality or respect or even humility, of believing that each creature matters in some sense, and not just as a tool for some other creature. And this is an approach which makes life interesting and rich and meaningful, the listening and the learning and the odd connections it allows us to make, the sharing of the universe and its wonders and then finding this same universe inside ourselves, connecting the selves to yet another selves and back again.

If that makes any sense. I'm tired today and grumpy.

Avoiding Cognitive Dissonance

Wingnut style. Krugman talks about how this is done now that George Bush no longer looks like the second coming of Christ, even to the wingnut base. That everything about the combined neoconservative-fundamentalist administration is a mess is the truth. To reconcile this with the neoconservative-fundamentalist ideology still being the correct one requires some clever work, and Krugman points out that this work consists of painting Bush as a big domestic spender. Which he isn't, according to Krugman:

So what's left? Well, it's safe for conservatives to criticize Mr. Bush for presiding over runaway growth in domestic spending, because that implies that he betrayed his conservative supporters. There's only one problem with this criticism: it's not true.


Conservatives aren't criticizing Mr. Bush for his defense spending. Since the Medicare drug program didn't start until 2006, the Bush administration can't be blamed for the rise in health care costs before then. Whatever other fiscal excesses took place weren't large enough to play more than a marginal role in spending growth.


But the reason conservatives fall for the Heritage spin is that it suits their purposes. They need to repudiate George W. Bush, but they can't admit that when Mr. Bush made his key mistakes — starting an unnecessary war, and using dishonest numbers to justify tax cuts — they were cheering him on.

This isn't an uncommon thing. When something happens that clashes with a person's worldview it's usually the evidence that will be reinterpreted so that the worldview can stay. Fixing worldviews is a major psychological undertaking, and few of us want to do it. Ultimately, though, a false worldview bumps against conflicting evidence so often that the alternatives are either to accept the need to rethink the whole ideology or to start drinking heavily. I wonder which will be more popular among the wingnuts.

Nah, I don't wonder. The wingnuts will find their way back into the lap of wingnuttery. They will regroup and come back with another hairbrained scheme, but probably only after someone else fixes the country so that it's worth wrecking again.

Sunday, March 19, 2006

The American Theocracy


From this review:





Clift Notes

I often like what Eleanor Clift writes, but her recent piece on Russ Feingold and the censure strategy is really off the cliff (you knew I couldn't resist that). She begins by explaining why Feingold has just single-handedly destroyed the Democrats' chances of getting the House back in 2006:

Republicans finally had something to celebrate this week when Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold called for censuring George W. Bush. Democrats must have a death wish. Just when the momentum was going against the president, Feingold pops up to toss the GOP a life raft.
It's brilliant strategy for him, a dark horse presidential candidate carving out a niche to the left of Hillary Clinton. The junior senator from New York is under attack for being too soft on Bush and the war, and most of the non-Hillarys are to her right. There is a vacuum in the heart of the party's base that Feingold fills, but at what cost? His censure proposal looks like a stunt, "the equivalent of calling for a filibuster from Davos," says Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. To win in '06, he says, "Democrats need to take the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm."

Just as John Kerry's belated effort to stop Judge Samuel Alito's confirmation to the Supreme Court failed to rally his fellow Democrats, Feingold's move toward censure has been received like a foul odor, sending Democrats scurrying for the exits. Only two of his colleagues, Iowa's Tom Harkin and California's Barbara Boxer, signed on as cosponsors. And for good reason. The broader public sees it as political extremism. Just when the Republicans looked like they were coming unhinged, the Democrats serve up a refresher course on why they can't be trusted with the keys to the country. Nor could it have come at a better time for a Republican Party still battered by bad news in the polls. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC survey, released earlier this week, shows that Bush's job approval rating at its lowest ever—37 percent—as a majority of Americans lose confidence that the Iraq war will end successfully. The same poll shows a significant uptick in the country's willingness to accept a Democratic Congress, with 50 percent of those questioned saying they would prefer the party to control Congress. Thirty-seven percent say they want it controlled by Republicans.

I like the image of "Democrats scurrying for the exits". They might as well, for the amount of good they are doing right now.

I also like the idea of the Hippocratic Oath in this context: first, do no harm. Or in slightly different terms: softly, softly, catchee monkey. Except that this is neither medicine nor catching wild animals but politics, and the Democrats were voted in by people who, you know, expected them to do stuff. Not to wait very quietly in a corner to see if they will then look like a better option than the foaming-at-the-mouth wingnuts. How do you like them choices: either Attila the Hun or someone cowering in the corner, waiting, waiting.

Clift's argument is that Feingold has energized the Republican base by this stunt, and that the Republican base will, once again, somehow turn up to vote in numbers much greater than their actual numbers are, and then the Republicans win again. And all because of one Russ Feingold.

Well, not just because of him. We (the Democratic base of rabid latte sipping limousine-riding welfare-sucking feminazi types) are also to blame here:

The Democrats' dilemma is how to satisfy a restive and angry base without losing the rest of the country. "If someone proposed stringing up Bush like they did Mussolini, that would have a lot of support in the base of the party, too," says a Democratic strategist. "But it's not smart." Democrats want the November election to be a plebiscite on Bush's job performance, not a personal vendetta. "Republicans will rally round him if they think it's a personal attack just like we did with Clinton," warns the strategist.

Do you notice something very interesting here? The Republican base is dangerous and must be treated hush-hush carefully, but the Democratic base is a nuisance, something that is a hindrance to the Democratic party. It is always dangerous to placate us, always. We are good for one thing only, and that is to provide money for the party.

What is odd about this asymmetry of the bases is that what worked for the wingnuts could work for the Democratic party, too. If Bush gets votes because he manages to energize his base, why isn't Feingold's move a good way to energize the liberal base and to get these voters to vote?

And note the whole positioning of the middle so that people who think Bush's illegal wiretapping is illegal are now rabid extremists. Never mind that most opinion polls suggest that the rabid extremists who dislike Bush a lot are now the majority.

It's an interesting form of political debate, the Democrat bashing. Either they don't have any clear alternative proposal to Attila the Hun and friends (so they cower in the corner) or if they act they benefit Attila the Hun and friends (Feingold's censure proposal). You can't win if you're a Democrat.