GREAT QUOTES IN POLITICAL HISTORY: Fake Edition

A woman once went up to Calvin Coolidge at a dinner party and said, "Mr. Coolidge, I've made a bet against a fellow who said it was impossible to get more than two words out of you."

His famous reply: "Fuck You."

(Source: America: The Book)

GREAT QUOTES IN POLITICAL HISTORY: Appropriate Venue Edition

I've looked on many women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. God knows I will do this and forgives me.

— Jimmy Carter, 1976, in an interview with Playboy magazine.

Majority of the Majority

The FISA vote makes me think we need a "Majority of the Majority" rule in the House — never bring a bill to the floor unless it has the support of a majority of the majority party. The Republicans used to run the House this way and it worked pretty well for them.

Of course, the whole fucking leadership voted for the bill, so whatever. I can't understand it. Oh, wait.

FISA Vote

Final Vote Results for Roll Call 437

Costello, Carnahan, and Clay were all good guys.

In Selected Theatres, July 4th

The Tivoli gets it on the 11th.

Obama and FISA

I can't think of many Democrats who really want George W. Bush to have all that Civil Liberties Destroying Power in the FISA capitulation. But can you think of any reason why Barack Obama might want The President of the United States to be granted a whole lot more power just in time for 2009?

The Republicans voting for this bill are very very stupid men.

Renegade v. Phoenix

McCain's Secret Service Code Name is, according to a source who knows, 'Phoenix.'

It was McCain's choice. Associations: rising from the ashes. Arizona. Etc.

Cindy McCain has also picked a code name. It probably also begins with a 'P'.

As has been previously and extensively reported, Barack Obama is 'Renegade.' His wife Michelle is 'Renaissance.'

No comment from the McCain campaign.

It took McCain a while to take Secret Service protection — unlike Obama, who took it earlier than any previous candidate, McCain waited until after he had the nomination sewn up. Crazy macho bastard.

In case you're curious, the Clintons were Eagle and Evergreen.

Update: Bill is Eagle, Hillary is Evergreen.

GREAT QUOTES IN POLITICAL HISTORY: Bob Dole Says Bob Dole Edition

"There they are, see no evil, hear no evil and ... evil."

— Bob Dole in 1993, commenting on the ex-president line-up of Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon.

Europe is waiting

We will live to see these motherfuckers rot in jail.

Travel Advisory: "Viewed in this light, the Bush Administration figures involved in the formation of torture policy face no immediate threat of prosecution for war crimes. But Colin Powell's chief of staff, Colonel Larry Wilkerson, nails it: 'Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzales and--at the apex--Addington, should never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In the future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court.' Augusto Pinochet made a trip to London, and his life was never the same afterwards.

The Bush administration officials who pushed torture will need to be careful about their travel plans."

Call it the "Kissinger Klub".

Obama would have voted for the war?

Also yesterday, my slightly less crazy right wing uncle advanced the notion that had Barack Obama been in the Senate at the time of the war vote, he would have voted for it. This, despite his speech of the same time:

I don't oppose all wars. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

That is, to say the least, not giving the President the benefit of the doubt. But Obama's critique goes beyond the notion of Iraq being stupid — by calling out the neoconservative cabal behind the pre-war propaganda effort, Obama's critique of the rush to war is actually to the left of Paul Wellstone. Obama's opposition to the war was derided by Clinton during the primary as "just a speech", but it was a hell of an insightful speech, and about the best he could do given where he was at the time. He also ran on opposition to the war in the 2004 Senate race, and has generally voted with the half of the Democratic caucus that opposed the war in 2002. So by any honest measure, it's insane to suppose that Obama would have voted for the war if he'd been in the Senate at the time.

My father, during the primaries, was able to come up with one similarity Obama has with war-supporting Senators. Since the 2002 vote, every Senator that has run for President voted for the war. Therefore, the logic goes, if Obama had been in the Senate, he would have voted for the war. Blarg!

The actual arrow of causation points in the other direction. Every overly ambitious asshole who wanted to be President voted for the war, some from actual love of war (Clinton, Lieberman), some from misguided belief that it was politically necessary (Kerry, Edwards). Only fringe characters voted against the war, which is why the Democratic party has elevated a backbencher to the nomination this year. The Democratic Party is anti-war, and wanted to nominate an anti-war candidate, so aside from crazies like Kucinich, we had to pick someone inexperienced on the national level. Every asshole that just wanted to be President voted for the war. But Obama was opposed to the war, which marks him as a non-asshole, which is why he gets to be President.

In addition, I think the willful blindness to plain truth represents a deeper psychological urge. Both my father and my uncle were supporters of the war in the beginning, and now regret that support. I put to you three different beliefs about the war:

1. Every right-thinking person supported the war.
2. I supported the war.
3. Barack Obama opposed the war.

If all three of these are true, then a crazy person is about to become President. I didn't support the war, of course, so I don't agree with the first two. But since Barack Obama is obviously not a crazy person, these three beliefs create problems for people who share 1 & 2. I suspect that most Americans who don't follow politics closely, will simply cease to believe 2 — while majorities of Americans said they favored the war, that support was always soft and has evaporated rather quickly over the past few years. People are surprisingly revisionist in recollecting their own mental histories. Honest people can cease to believe 1, and just admit they were wrong, and the anti-war side was right. This, too, will be relatively easy for most people.

But for people who consider themselves to be smart and well-informed, 1 and 2 are incredibly difficult to give up. So in order to make sense of the current situation, it is necessary to disbelieve 3.

Having the next President of the United States on the right side of the Iraq issue is a terrible psychological blow for formerly pro-war people who think they generally have good opinions, as it highlights just how wrong they were. It's much easier to have been on the wrong side of Iraq if we were all fooled. Barack Obama's public awareness of America's folly calls into question the entire elite consensus. So it must not be true. Otherwise, they might have to listen to the dirty fucking hippies in the future.

Iraq War Revisionism

I went to a family gathering yesterday, and had a couple of chats with my Republican relatives. My hardcore right-wing uncle kept insisting that the major reason we went to war with Iraq was to create a stable and democratic Iraq. He, of course, insists that it's working out fine and victory is right around the corner, but that's just garden variety crazy.

How far down the memory hole have Weapons of Mass Destruction (or WMDs, as we called 'em back in the day) gone? Does anybody else remember this?

We did go to war with Iraq because they had super scary weapons and wouldn't disarm, right?

I mean, I remember the plan was to let 'em vote and stuff after we blew the place up, but the main goal was weapons, right? Democracy was a post hoc justification after we couldn't find any of the weapons.

What's that, Bushie?

THE PRESIDENT: My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.

Ok, so the crazy right-wingers that were wrong about everything are still wrong about everything. Good to know.

GREAT QUOTES IN POLITICAL HISTORY: Civil War Edition

Well, I wish some of you would tell me the brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.

— Abraham Lincoln, responding to criticism of General Grant's drinking habits.

Queer as a three dollar bill

Quinnipiac: Obama Leads in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania...

Obama could afford to lose Florida. McCain can't. And now Obama is sporting a four point lead. Maybe McCain should pick Crist as his running mate and just park him down in Florida for the duration of the election.

Accomplishing the Impossible

Marvel made twitter interesting.

Read Matt Taibbi

Go on now, go!

Full Metal McCain : Rolling Stone: "But the idea that John McCain is kicking off his trek to the White House by fleeing at top-end speed from the faltering Republican brand is the kind of absurdly facile misperception that only the American campaign press could swallow whole. The reality is that the once independent-thinking McCain has by now completely remade himself into a prototypical, dumbed-down Republican Party stooge — one who plans to rely on the same GOP strategy that has been winning elections ever since Pat Buchanan and Dick Nixon cooked up a plan for cleaving the South back in 1968. Rather than serving up the 'straight talk' he promises, McCain is enthusiastically jumping aboard with every low-rent, fearmongering, cock-sucking presidential aspirant who's ever traveled the Lee Atwater/William Safire highway."

Deep Thoughts on Quotes

I've noticed that I have an affinity for concession speeches. There are several more quotes from concession speeches coming up in the queue.

In his NYT Postmortem, Bob Kerrey told Hillary Clinton to write her concession speech early, as it would be her best speech of the campaign. Concession speeches allow a candidate to fully explain the meaning of their campaign, freed from the constraints of having to address the events in the campaign, or to worry too much about offending some group of voters. That makes a lot of sense.

But my quotes aren't like that — I just enjoy the bitterness of the ordeal.

GREAT QUOTES IN POLITICAL HISTORY: Nixon Edition

I leave you gentleman now and you will write it. You will interpret it. That's your right. But as I leave you I want you to know — just think how much you're going to be missing. You won't have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference and it will be one in which I have welcomed the opportunity to test wits with you.

— Richard M. Nixon, 1962, after losing the California Governorship; if only.

Fucking (literally) Boomers

Dear Fellow Millennials,

I regret to inform you that we are not nearly as slutty as the previous generation.

Rising Partisan ID

Here's a big fancy-pants academic paper explaining what I was talking about yesterday with the rise of two distinct national parties. He's got statistics and charts and graphs and everything!

Better News

Apparently a portal has opened up so that we can see into an alternate universe, far better than the one we live in...

More Ezra Charts

Inequality edition: Obama v. McCain tax plans

GREAT QUOTES IN POLITICAL HISTORY: Adlai Edition

That's not enough, madam, we need a majority!

— Adlai Stevenson, running for President in 1956; in response to the statement, "Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!"

Citizenship Tests

The Germans have a new one, and so do we. I passed the German sample test with 5 out of 7 (c'mon, who doesn't know the capital of the Rhineland?), and the American one 10 out of 10.

I say unto you: Booyah!

I am a citizen of the world.

— Diogenes of Sinope

Black Lincoln

One would certainly expect any Senator from Illinois running for President to be a fan of Abraham Lincoln, but Barack Obama seems to be particularly fond of him. At first I thought this was strategic — Obama's way of embracing his blackness and black history while rejecting black nationalism. But Obama's affection for Lincoln appears to be completely genuine, and of an intensity usually reserved for nerd Presidents obsessing over Jefferson (JFK, WJC).

To wit: He launched his campaign in Springfield, Lincoln's city, rather than Chicago, his own. He's often cited Lincoln's relative level of experience in comparison with his own. He mentioned he had read the book "Team of Rivals", which describes Lincoln's cabinet. And then, through the googles, I find out that he was in the habit of writing essays like this before he ran for President. Obama has compared himself to the biblical Joshua on more than one occasion, and I always thought he meant for MLK to be Moses in the analogy. Now I'm not so sure. But whatever the case, it's clear that Obama is a major Lincoln groupie.

Now, this has probably occured to Obama before me, but Lincoln's greatest avoidable error was in 1864, when he chose Andrew Johnson (the only Southern Democratic Senator who remained loyal to the union) to be his second term Vice President. After Lincoln was killed, Johnson completely screwed up Reconstruction for three years (and was impeached for his troubles). How much better off would we as a country have been after the Civil War if Lincoln had chosen a better successor?

I'll bet this question, more than any electoral calculations, is weighing heavily on Barack Obama's mind these days.

Gore!

Gore Endorses Obama

Meanwhile, Barack Obama texted me to tell me to watch them hang out at 8:30 EST. It'll be live on the intarwebs or something.

Father's Day

So yesterday was Father's day, and I went over to my Dad's house for beer and cards and dinner and cake. We of course spent some time talking about the primary, my father being an enthusiastic Hillary supporter, and myself being an anybody-but-Hillary supporter. The topic of Michigan and Florida came up, and my father suggested that Edwards and Obama had conspired to remove their names from the Michigan ballot because they knew Hillary would win there. I argued, once again, that Obama would have won Michigan narrowly against Hillary, or by a pretty big margin with Edwards in the race playing "white man" spoiler. My father argued that since Michigan went early, Obama wouldn't have had time to compete there and Hillary would have won, since she was leading in the polls. I pointed out that Obama crushed Clinton in South Carolina. He replied "Oh, that was a Jesse Jackson state." Because, as we all know, states that Jesse Jackson won don't count this year. I replied:

"Ummm, Jesse Jackson won Michigan."

Hah! Nailed! That shut him up for a bit. Now I'm afraid that he'll do a little research today, find out that Michigan had a caucus in 1988, and e-mail me with that information — since, as we learned from the Clintons during the campaign — caucuses, along with African-Americans, don't count.

The Nationalization of American Political Parties

America is a big diverse country. Big diverse democracies usually have lots of parties, but American winner-take-all elections provide a natural political gravity towards a two party system. But this natural gravity doesn't necessarily result in the same two political parties everywhere in a nation.

Early American political contests were divided between two political ideologies, Federalism and Democracy, with the Federalists winning the fight over the Constitution, and then the Democrats winning the government in 1800. America was functionally a one-party (with many internal factions) nation for the next thirty years, until the contested election/Jacksonian reformation of 1824-32 resulted in the first nomination convention for the Democratic party. After this period a national two-party system arose (with first the Whigs and then the Republicans being the other party). But these two parties only existed within the context of Presidential races. Different regions, states, and even municipalities had a variety of parties.

By the twentieth century, most of these parties called themselves either "Democratic" or "Republican" parties (the last holdout is Minnesota, whose Democratic party still refers to itself as the Farmer-Democratic-Labor Party), but they weren't the same parties. Conservative Democrats in the south partnered with northern liberals to enact the New Deal, but balked when it came to universal health care because that would have meant integrated hospitals.

The coalitions that made up the Democratic began to fray under the strain of mass media, and the Civil Rights Act fractured the party. Beginning with Goldwater in 1964, Southern Democrats began to vote Republican in Presidential races, while voting for their conservative (and still Democratic) congressional representatives. During the age of Nixon and Reagan/Bush, this trend continued — the great era of bipartisanship, brought to you by Republican Presidents and Southern Democrats who agreed to put party aside in order to pursue shared racist goals.

After Clinton was elected in 1992, however, the GOP recognized that they needed congressional power to thwart Clinton's progressivism. Gingrich targeted conservative districts and states, mainly in the south, that had voted for Bush but re-elected a Democrat to congress in 1992. Ignore any other hogwash about that election — it was this re-alignment that gave the Republicans the Congress in 1994. Similarly, in 2006, anti-Bush backlash returned the Democrats to power — but not the old Democratic majority of the twentieth century, but rather through the old Republican stronghold in the North.

We have had, over the past two years, a new situation in American politics. The leftmost member of the party of the right (the Republicans) is more to the right than the rightmost member of the party of the left (the Democrats). Or to put it another way: every Democrat in congress is now more liberal than every Republican. The parties are now ideologically coherent national parties.

This means, among other things, that not very many people are going to "ticket-split" (vote for one party for President and another for Congress) this year. It also means that those numbers showing a huge advantage for Democrats in Partisan ID actually mean a huge advantage for all Democrats at the ballot box.

Pundits gazed in wonder at the 1994 election, marvelling that Gingrich had managed to "nationalize" the election in an off-year. In 1998, pundits were shocked that Clinton had managed to "nationalize" the impeachment backlash, to punish the Republican congress in an off-year. In 2002, the Republicans vanquished conventional wisdom by being able to "nationalize" the aftermath of 9/11 into a mid-term victory. And in 2006 Democrats surprised everyone by running against Bush and therefore being able to "nationalize" the election and take over congress.

In 2008, everyone will be taken aback that all of those people who said they were going to vote for the Democrats vote for both Obama and Democratic congresscritters. And in 2010 we'll have more surprises!

Hillary's Racist Supporters

McCain's got 'em now.

Shocking, I know.

RE: GQIPH: Red Scare Edition

Weston asks in comments:

Do you suppose that there's a difference in American politics today where that speech had the effects it had then vs. what it'd do in our current climate under similar circumstances, then?

I think the environments are completely different, and the partisan situation in D.C. is different. One of the reasons the Republicans were able to run the government for six years with such slim majorities was an unprecedented sense of partisan unity — a unity that has only been surpassed by the cohesion Grandma Nancy has forced on the House Dems over the past 3 years.

Joe McCarthy didn't represent even the majority of Republicans, let alone people in the country, but he was able to appear as he did, as long as people were afraid of him. Welch represented the Army, one of the most popular institutions in America, and by extension, the Republican President (Eisenhower). Now, if the excesses of the past few years were the work of out of control congressional Republicans, and the Republican executive sent a surrogate to the Hill to shame them into knocking it off, it would have a similar effect.

Obviously, such a situation is laughable, as the moral rot and corruption of the modern Republican party runs right through its core.

GREAT QUOTES IN POLITICAL HISTORY: Red Scare Edition

Mr. Welch: Senator, you won't need anything in the record when I finish telling you this. Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us. When I decided to work for this Committee, I asked Jim St. Clair, who sits on my right, to be my first assistant. I said to Jim, "Pick somebody in the firm to work under you that you would like." He chose Fred Fisher, and they came down on an afternoon plane. That night, when we had taken a little stab at trying to see what the case is about, Fred Fisher and Jim St. Clair and I went to dinner together. I then said to these two young men, "Boys, I don't know anything about you, except I've always liked you, but if there's anything funny in the life of either one of you that would hurt anybody in this case, you speak up quick."

And Fred Fisher said, "Mr. Welch, when I was in the law school, and for a period of months after, I belonged to the Lawyers' Guild," as you have suggested, Senator. He went on to say, "I am Secretary of the Young Republican's League in Newton with the son of [the] Massachusetts governor, and I have the respect and admiration of my community, and I'm sure I have the respect and admiration of the twenty-five lawyers or so in Hale & Dorr." And I said, "Fred, I just don't think I'm going to ask you to work on the case. If I do, one of these days that will come out, and go over national television, and it will just hurt like the dickens." And so, Senator, I asked him to go back to Boston. Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty, I would do so. I like to think I'm a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.

Senator McCarthy: Mr. Chairman, may I say that Mr. Welch talks about this being cruel and reckless. He was just baiting. He has been baiting Mr. Cohn here for hours, requesting that Mr. Cohn before sundown get out of any department of the government anyone who is serving the Communist cause. Now, I just give this man's record and I want to say, Mr. Welch, that it had been labeled long before he became a member, as early as 1944 --

Mr. Welch: Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers' Guild.

Senator McCarthy: Let me finish....

Mr. Welch: And Mr. Cohn nods his head at me. I did you, I think, no personal injury, Mr. Cohn?

Mr. Cohn: No, sir.

Mr. Welch: I meant to do you no personal injury.

Mr. Cohn: No, sir.

Mr. Welch: And if I did, I beg your pardon. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.

Senator McCarthy: Let's, let's --

Mr. Welch: You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

— Senator Joe McCarthy and the army's chief legal representative, Joe Welch, in a public display that is often credited with ending Joe McCarthy's career.

Waterstone's story competition

Potter fans might find something interesting here.