Just one after Rush Limbaugh proclaimed, "I love the women's movement - especially when walking behind it," Fox News host Chris Wallace added his voice to the long list of Sarah Palin's willing objectifiers:

IMUS: When you interview her, will she be sitting on your lap? (LAUGHTER)

WALLACE: One can only hope. (LAUGHTER)

Sadly for Wallace, he'll have to get in line behind National Review editor Rich Lowry.

Last November, Lowry greeted the appearance of Palin's book by basking in her "roguish charm":

It's September 2008 all over again. All the same players are lining up to put a good hate on Sarah Palin. She's like an isotope designed to course throughout our politics and culture, lighting up press bias, self-congratulatory liberalism, Christianity-hating secularism, and intellectual condescension wherever they are found.

The contempt of her enemies only increases the ardor of her fans.

And none is more adoring, it turns out, than Rich Lowry.

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.

As Lowry suspected, he's not alone. At the Weekly Standard, right-wing worker-bee Matthew Continettti has dedicated himself to protecting his queen. In his new tome, The Persecution of Sarah Palin, Continetti defends the "young, attractive, and pro-life conservative mom who connected with ordinary Americans" from the left's campaign of "distortion, exaggeration, fabrication, vilification, ridicule, and abuse." Disgusted that Palin on the one hand is branded a "true Stepford candidate," Continetti argues on the other:

If you had gone into a chemical laboratory to concoct a politician whose background and manner would sound liberal alarms, you probably would have come up with someone like Sarah Palin.

To be sure, given that opportunity the usual suspects among Palin's bathwater drinkers would be sure to manufacture a right-wing American version of Princess Diana. Rush Limbaugh, who in 1993 famously called the young Chelsea Clinton a "dog," blasted the likes of NBC's Andrea Mitchell for simply observing Sarah Palin is "not deeply read. She hasn't thought through a lot of these policies, and you have to do that." As he groused in July:

Okay, and I hear this from a lot of people on our side, too. Primarily women, primarily women. And I think many of them have been in Washington too long. "Lord knows she's attractive." That's the rub. That's the rub. Well, it's not the whole rub, but it's part of what grates on 'em. Trust me, my friends. Trust me. When your poster chick is Barbara Mikulski, you get the drift. When your poster chick is Nancy Pelosi. I don't care, pick one.

(To illustrate his point, Limbaugh features side-by-side photos of Sarah Palin and Democratic Rep. Barbara Mikulski.)

Palin's apparent sex appeal isn't limited to the men of the right. Ann Coulter, too, made clear that if loving Palin is wrong, she doesn't want to be Right:

The peculiarly venomous hatred of Palin is driven by women of the left and their whipped consorts. All that needs to happen is for a feminist to overhear two Nation readers saying, "I hate to admit it, but Palin is kind of hot" and ...

WHAT??????????? YOU CALL THAT HOT? I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW WE'VE GOT A MEGA-SUPER HOTTIE IN DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ. AND NEED I REMIND YOU AGAIN OF THE RAW SEX APPEAL OF RACHEL MADDOW?

Democrats are a party of women, and nothing drives them off their gourds like a beautiful Christian conservative. (How much money has that other beautiful born-again, Carrie Prejean, been forced to spend on lawyers to respond to liberal hysteria?)

(Unsurprisingly, the public statements of Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean are virtually indistinguishable.)

No doubt, the Republican Party's leaders past and present share Limbaugh and Coulter's adolescent assessment of the beauty of the right and the beasts of the left. After all, in 1998, Palin's running mate John McCain followed in Limbaugh's footsteps, joking, "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno." (McCain later apologized to Hillary and Bill Clinton, though not to Janet Reno). For his part, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in May laughed off Time magazine's selection of Sarah Palin as one of America's most influential people:

"But was that the issue on the most beautiful people or the most influential people?"

Back in July, Politico asked leading figures from the left and right "Are women in politics still routinely demeaned in the news media, or is it all about Sarah Palin?" (Grover Norquist argued that "Sarah Palin is not being attacked by the establishment media because she is a woman," but because she's a "possible leader of Reagan Republicanism.") This week, former Bush press secretary and new Obama appointee Dana Perino left no doubt where she stood on the question:

"There is a special burden for women in politics. And we saw that even for Hillary Clinton. And especially if you're an attractive woman and a conservative woman, then that burden is even greater."

As for Palin herself, she made clear in March 2008 that she had no patience for the whining of women candidates - like Hillary Clinton:

"Fair or unfair, I think she does herself a disservice to even mention it...When I hear a statement like that coming from a woman candidate with any kind of perceived whine about that excess criticism or, you know, maybe a sharper microscope put on her, I think, man, that doesn't do us any good. Women in politics, women in general wanting to progress this country. I don't think it's, it bodes well for her -- a statement like that...It bothers me a little bit hearing her bring that attention to herself on that level."

But far from producing crippling cognitive dissonance among her supporters, Palin's transparent hypocrisy and stunning contradictions only deepen her hold over them. For the likes of Rich Lowry, no Palin transgression could wipe the starbursts from his eyes. No Palin failure could ever lead to a political divorce.

Instead, the louder the objective criticism of grows, the more the right-wing objectification of her becomes. Still, Palin's heavy-breathing fans have the chutzpah to decry Democrats' supposed misogyny.

For their nerve, if nothing else, you've got to hand it to them.

—Perrspective 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) |

During his State of the Union, President Obama issued a call to action, looking to the nation's past for lessons on facing the challenges of the future:

It's tempting to look back on these moments and assume that our progress was inevitable -- that America was always destined to succeed. But when the Union was turned back at Bull Run, and the Allies first landed at Omaha Beach, victory was very much in doubt. When the market crashed on Black Tuesday, and civil rights marchers were beaten on Bloody Sunday, the future was anything but certain. These were the times that tested the courage of our convictions, and the strength of our union. And despite all our divisions and disagreements, our hesitations and our fears, America prevailed because we chose to move forward as one nation, as one people...

The only reason we are here is because generations of Americans were unafraid to do what was hard; to do what was needed even when success was uncertain; to do what it took to keep the dream of this nation alive for their children and their grandchildren.

But while Obama called for decisive action and national unity, Sarah Palin instead looked to her hand - and the hand of God:

Responding to questions pre-screened by Tea Party Convention organizers, Palin Saturday told an audience already preached to by the likes of Pastor Rick Scarborough and Judge Roy Moore (starting around the 3:50 mark in the video above):

"And then I think kind of tougher to, kind of tougher to put our arms around but, allowing America's spirit to rise again by not being afraid, not being afraid to kind of go back to some of our roots as a god fearing nation where we're not afraid to say, especially in times of potential trouble in the future here, we're not afraid to say, you know, we don't have all the answers as fallible men and women so it would be wise of us to start seeking some divine intervention again in this country, so that we can be safe and secure and prosperous again."

Of course, in Sarah Palin's telling, the Lord is going rogue with her.

As the Washington Post summed it up in its review of book, Palin's worldview is "an Alaskan frontierswoman's trinity" of "God, Todd and dominion over animals." And to be sure, the Quitta from Wasilla sees the hand of God everywhere in her life:

Right away, Palin posits her faith as the pillar of her career, as if her successes have unfolded according to a grand divine plan. Her selection as McCain's running mate was a "natural progression," she writes in one section. "I don't believe in coincidences," she writes in another.

But as it turns out, Sarah Palin doesn't just have the Lord in her corner, she's also His spokesman.

The war in Iraq, as then Governor Palin told students at the School of Ministry at the Wasilla Assembly of God, is "a task that is from God." And when it came to the multibillion natural gas pipeline she hoped would span her state, Palin lectured, "I can do my job there in developing our natural resources...But really all of that stuff doesn't do any good if the people of Alaska's heart isn't right with God," adding:

"God's will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that."

A jaw-dropping expose in Vanity Fair revealed the shocking extent of Palin's divine narcissism:

When [her son] Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig's condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God's, and signed it "Trig's Creator, Your Heavenly Father."

Of course, Sarah Palin apparently has long believed she was touched by both the voice - and hand - of God. In May 2005 process complete with a laying on of hands, Kenyan pastor Thomas Muthee prayed over Palin, imploring Jesus to protect her from "the spirit of witchcraft." As Election Day approached last fall, the GOP vice presidential claimed to be unconcerned by her ticket's dismal poll numbers. Victory, she insisted, was in God's hands:

"To me, it motivates us, makes us work that much harder. And it also strengthens my faith, because I'm going to know, at the end of the day, putting this in God's hands, that the right thing for America will be done at the end of the day on Nov. 4. So I'm not discouraged at all."

God, it seems, wanted Barack Obama in the White House.

Nonetheless, when it comes to God's chosen Republicans, Sarah Palin is the merely the natural successor to George W. Bush. (So much for the admonition from the first Republican, Abrahan Lincoln, that ,"My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side.")

Bush's amen corner was quite clear in the belief that he had been tapped by the Almighty. The portrait of Bush as Savior was painted in books like Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy and Michael Lind's Made in Texas. Phillips concludes that George W. Bush is convinced that "God wanted him to be president", a view backed by Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, who reported, "Among the things he said to us was: I believe that God wants me to be president." As White House official Tim Goeglein once put it, "I think President Bush is God's man at this hour, and I say this with a great sense of humility."

But if anything, Palin's followers are even more convinced that He is on their team. Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher also has a direct line to the Almighty as well. Asked about running for office, the McCain-Palin campaign prop replied:

"You know, I talked to God about that and he was like, 'No.'"

Then there's Sarah Palin's mini-me, Carrie Prejean. As the beauty pageant contestant turned anti-gay crusader told the adoring crowd at last year's Values Voters Summit:

"God chose me for that moment. He knew I was strong enough to get through all the junk that I have been through."

Sadly for Carrie Prejean, all of America soon learned that she had been touched not by God's hand, but her own.

And so it goes. While President Obama told Americans on January 27, "we don't quit," Sarah Palin told her adoring Tea Baggers this weekend:

"You don't need an office or a title to make a difference, and you don't need a proclaimed leader, as if we are all a bunch of sheep and looking for a leader to progress this movement."

Of course, she didn't mean it. By advising Americans to passively grovel for "divine intervention" to bring them prosperity and peace, Sarah Palin is indeed calling them sheep. And doubtless she believes it is God's will that Shepherd Sarah be the leader of the flock.

—Perrspective 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) |

After refusing in the past to run "controversial" ads from groups such as the United Church of Christ, CBS is reversing course. During its extended Super Bowl coverage on Sunday, the network will air a not-so-subtle anti-abortion message sponsored by Focus on the Family featuring Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow. In it, the nation's most famous virgin (if less famed passer) will apparently lecture American women on reproductive rights while joining his mother in discussing his miraculous birth.

Now that the network of Cronkite and Murrow will broadcast what it deems "responsibly produced" ads, here are just some of the CBS Super Bowl ads we'd like to see.

Ad Title: "Rewrap the Gift"
Sponsor: The Candies Foundation
Starring: Sarah Palin, Bristol Palin
Text:

SARAH: Those East Coast elitists say the only second chance you get in life is the chance to make the same mistake twice. But not my daughter from Main Street, Wasilla.

BRISTOL: That's right mom. I'm not going to have sex until I'm married. I can guarantee it.

SARAH: So even if some Sourdough has already been in your Cheechako, you can still be as pure as the driven snow we're so blessed and privileged to have here in Alaska. It's never too late to rewrap the gift."

Ad Title: "So Touched"
Sponsor: National Organization for Marriage
Starring: Carrie Prejean
Text:

"I'm Carrie Prejean. As you and your family gather to watch the Super Bowl, remember that marriage is between a man and a woman. Not between a man and another man, or a dog, box-turtle, wildebeest, ocelot, duck-billed platypus, American eagle, harp seal or any other of God's creatures.

And to all those across America who've stood behind me, thank you. I've never been so touched."

Ad Title: "The Fetal Firearms Act"
Sponsors: Family Research Council and the National Rifle Association
Starring: Wayne LaPierre (CEO, NRA), Tony Perkins (President, FRC)
Text:

"Hi, I'm Wayne LaPierre."

"And I'm Tony Perkins. We can't always count on heroes like Eric Rudolph, James Kopp and Scott Roeder to protect the culture of life. That's why we need to let the unborn carry concealed weapons."

"So call your Congressman and tell him to support the Fetal Firearms Act. Because innocent life can't defend itself."

UPDATE: The first of the Tebow ads is out and does not mention abortion. But viewers are asked to go to the Focus on the Family web site. There, Tebow's father Bob essentially repeats the story he told Sports Illustrated last year:

"When I was out in the mountains in Mindanao, back in '86, I was showing a film and preaching that night. I was weeping over the millions of babies being [aborted] in America, and I prayed, 'God, if you give me a son, if you give me Timmy, I'll raise him to be a preacher."

—Perrspective 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) |

Consider, for example, the Washington Post's description today of the assembled Birthers, Birchers, Deathers and Deniers in Nashville. Rather than thanking President Obama for the tax cuts 95% of working households received, the Tea Party followers stand the history of "no taxation without representation" on its head:

The 600 delegates at the National Tea Party Convention feel taxed to death, ignored by their elected representatives and the media, and appalled at the federal government's spending -- and there are millions of Americans just like them. Their anger has helped claim some political scalps, and they vow to "take back America."

But as the Daily Show's Jon Stewart suggested during the first Tax Day Tea Party rallies in April, one thing had changed since Election Day 2008:

"I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing."

For proof, look no further than the Washington Post's October 9, 2008 article, "Anger Is Crowd's Overarching Emotion at McCain Rally":

There were shouts of "Nobama" and "Socialist" at the mention of the Democratic presidential nominee. There were boos, middle fingers turned up and thumbs turned down as a media caravan moved through the crowd Thursday for a midday town hall gathering featuring John McCain and Sarah Palin.

While Slate political analyst John Dickerson described "a Republican mob scene," a CNN headline that same day reported, "Rage rising on the McCain campaign trail." Compare campaign 2008 footage (above) from Alexandra Pelosi's documentary, "Right America: Feeling Wronged" or "The McCain-Palin Mob" to any Tea Party hate fest highlight reel. By and large, the only thing that's changed is the dates.

Well, that and two other things.

First, from almost the moment Barack Obama took the oath of office, the Republican propaganda infrastructure mobilized - massively - to Astroturf grassroots unrest. In April, Fox News stars fanned out to appear at the Tax Day Tea Party protests. In the fall, Glenn Beck's supposed 9/12 campaign amped up the volume further. And this week, Fox alone has dedicated live coverage to the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville.

And to be sure, the ersatz revolution wasn't just televised by the organs of the Republican Party, but funded by their donors as well. As ThinkProgress documented here, here, here and here, Dick Armey's FreedomWorks and other of the usual suspects among Republican moneymen showered cash and organizational expertise on the Tea Baggers.

But while necessary, the care and nurturing from the Republican's right-wing media and money network was not sufficient to catapult the Tea Party events into a perceived national movement. That required the second new ingredient: the American media which in its continuing transformation of politics into just another form of entertainment saw in the Tea Parties a boon to its ratings.

After FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe wrongly inflated the estimates of the 9/12 crowd in Washington DC at 2,000,000, ABC and others eventually corrected the fraud. But that didn't stop the conservative blogosphere from parroting the charade debunked by both DC police - and simple comparative photography.

As Nat Silver concluded in "Size Matters; So Do Lies."

The way this false estimate came into being is relatively simple: Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, lied, claiming that ABC News had reported numbers of between 1.0 and 1.5 million when they never did anything of the sort. A few tweets later, the numbers had been exaggerated still further to 2 million. Kibbe wasn't "in error", as Malkin gently puts it. He lied. He did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long.

Now, the circle is complete. A global press contingent descended on Nashville this week to interview Tea Party Convention attendees the media likely outnumbered. As CNN's Jack Cafferty described it Thursday:

"Hundreds of mostly conservative independent activists descending on Nashville, Tennessee, for the first-ever National Tea Party Convention.

The movement began in small towns and large cities across the country, with people protesting against President Obama's economic and health care policies. And it's grown from dozens to hundreds of loosely-linked grassroots groups. Tea partiers have varying political views, although they generally agree on fiscal conservatism and the idea that the federal government has become too powerful. Hard to argue with that."

Jack Cafferty will get no argument from the leading lights of the Republican Party. Sarah Palin, Rep. Michele Bachmann, Senator John Cornyn and RNC chairman Michael Steele among other GOP mouthpieces insisted the Republican and Tea Parties should merge. As Jim Demint (R-SC) put it:

"We need to stop looking at the tea parties as separate from the Republican party."

On Saturday night, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC will take the unprecedented step of offering live coverage of the keynote address by half-term Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to the Tea Party Convention. But while the stature granted a failed vice presidential candidate is new, the venom and fury of the Tea Baggers themselves is not. Their spectacle in Nashville didn't miraculously appear overnight, but was birthed by a right-wing Republican Party long ago.

—Perrspective 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) |

On that point, Pastor Scarborough is unapologetic. The Vision America founder and face of the "War on Christians" conference, Scarborough told MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell Friday that he considered the event his organization sponsored "a good investment."

And Michelle Goldberg wrote in the American Prospect, what Rick Scarborough is investing in is new adherents to his particularly draconian right-wing vision:

In 2002, he left his post as pastor of Pearland First Baptist Church to form Vision America, a group dedicated to organizing "patriot pastors" for political action. That year, Falwell identified him as one of the new leaders of the Christian right. The author of books like In Defense of ... Mixing Church and State and the pithier Liberalism Kills Kids, Scarborough spent the Bush years organizing conferences that brought together conservative Republicans with preachers and activists working for the imposition of biblical law.

Among Pastor Scarborough's closest allies has been the disgraced former House Majority Leader Tom Delay. At his 2006 War on Christians conference, Scarborough defended His Hammer:

"I believe the most damaging thing that Tom DeLay has done in his life is take his faith seriously into public office, which made him a target for all those who despise the cause of Christ."

As the indicted Delay left the stage, Scarborough urged him to "keep your eyes on Jesus" and informed the audience that "God always does his best work after a crucifixion."

Then there's Republican candidate for governor and former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore.

Former that is, because an Alabama ethics panel removed Moore from his position in November 2003 after he refused a mandate to remove a 10 Commandments display from his courthouse rotunda. In response, as the New York Times recalled, Moore was unrepentant:

Moreover, Judge Thompson said, ''the chief justice showed no signs of contrition for his actions.''

Indeed, just minutes later, Mr. Moore strode out of the courthouse into a crush of his supporters and announced, ''I have absolutely no regrets.''

''We fought a good fight,'' he said. ''We kept the faith. But the battle is not over. The battle to acknowledge God is about to rage across the country.''

And to be sure, Moore continues to wage that battle. In addition to his campaigns for office, Judge Moore is an outspoken supporter of Senator Richard Shelby's jaw-dropping "Constitution Restoration Act," which:

"...aims to reinforce states rights by clarifying that the Supreme Court and district courts do not have jurisdiction to hear cases brought against a federal, state or local government or officer for acknowledging God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government."

And so it goes. Echoing Republican talking points from the 2008 campaign, failed GOP White House hopeful Tom Tancredo told the Tea Party faithful gathered in Nashville that Barack Obama is a "socialist." Tancredo also fired up the crowd, "You have launched the counter-revolution." Of course, the extremist right-wing counter-revolution urged by reactionaries like Rick Scarborough and Roy Moore has been underway for years. The Lord's Tea Baggers may now have a bigger stage, but they are delighting the same eager faces.

UPDATE: While Rick Scarborough was scheduled to host a Friday session titled, "Why Christians Must Engage," at Thursday evening's Tea Party kick-off he conducted the "Organized Prayer Session for the convention & our nation." As Time described it:

By the end of the night, much of the room knelt in prayer - one of the pastors, Rick Scarborough, went after homosexuals several times to choruses of amens -- before watching a Tea Party video.

—Perrspective 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) |

Last year, 137 House Republicans voted to convert the Medicare program that provides 46 million Americans with health insurance into a system of vouchers. (In September, Sarah Palin penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed which similarly called for "providing Medicare recipients with vouchers that allow them to purchase their own coverage.") Now, as Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias and TPM all noted, the GOP's Paul Ryan is making the privatization of Medicare the centerpiece of a new Republican deficit reduction gambit.

Of course, because the value of Ryan's vouchers fails to keep up with the out-of-control rise in premiums in the private health insurance market, America's elderly would be forced to pay more out of pocket or accept less coverage. The Washington Post's Klein described the inexorable Republican rationing of Medicare which would then ensue:

The proposal would shift risk from the federal government to seniors themselves. The money seniors would get to buy their own policies would grow more slowly than their health-care costs, and more slowly than their expected Medicare benefits, which means that they'd need to either cut back on how comprehensive their insurance is or how much health-care they purchase. Exacerbating the situation -- and this is important -- Medicare currently pays providers less and works more efficiently than private insurers, so seniors trying to purchase a plan equivalent to Medicare would pay more for it on the private market.

On Tuesday, Ryan acknowledged as much. Sadly for the Republican brain trust, he failed to follow the script that only Democratic reforms lead to "health care denied, delayed and rationed."

"Rationing happens today! The question is who will do it? The government? Or you, your doctor and your family?"

Of course, Ryan left out the real culprit - the private insurance market. But with 50 million uninsured, another 25 million underinsured, one in five American postponing needed care and medical costs driving over 60% of personal bankruptcies, Congressman Ryan is surely right that "rationing happens today."

But the Republican plan to "slash and privatize" hardly ends there. Despite insistence by the Republican leadership that the party is not officially advocating it, the Ryan alternative budget follows Rep. Jeb Hensarling's announced desire to privatize Medicare. As TPM documented:

Rep. Paul Ryan, (R-WI) the ranking Republican on the budget committee, recently detailed the Republican plan for Social Security that preserves the existing program for those 55 or older. For younger people the plan "offers the option of investing over one-third of their current Social Security taxes into personal retirement accounts, similar to the Thrift Savings Plan available to federal employees."

If that sounds vaguely familiar, it should. After all, George W. Bush's disastrous drive to privatize Social Security helped undermine his presidency. Now, in the wake of a Wall Street meltdown that evaporated the retirement savings for countless thousands of Americans, the Republican wunderkind Ryan is calling for an encore.

In Paul Ryan's defense, his so-called "A Roadmap for America's Future" was scored by the Congressional Budget Office as erasing the long-term deficit entirely, and produce surpluses by 2080 (!). While the Post's Klein stated, "I wouldn't balance the budget in anything like the way Ryan proposes," he also admitted:

"The audacity is breathtaking. But it is also impressive."

Audacious, indeed. After months of scaring the American people into believing that President Obama and the Democrats would ration health care and gut Medicare, Paul Ryan's Republican Party now proposes to do both.

For a look back at the hilarious April Fool's Day unveiling of Ryan's 2009 budget "marketing document," visit here.

UPDATE: In the latest pathetic twist in the Republican budget saga, House Minority Leader John Boehner is now trying to distance himself from Paul Ryan's document. Claiming "it's his," Boehner nevertheless replied "Off the top of my head, I couldn't tell you" when asked what in it he disagrees with.

If this storyline sounds familiar, it should. Boehner did the same thing last year after presenting Ryan's "The Republican Road to Recovery" with great fanfare:

"Two nights ago, the president said we haven't seen a budget yet of the Republicans. Well, it's not true, because here it is Mr. President."

For more, visit the American Road Map web site at http://www.roadmap.republicans.budget.house.gov/

—Perrspective 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) |

Starting today in Nashville, a strange brew of Birthers and Birchers, Deathers and Deniers will gather for the National Tea Party Convention. They will be entertained by the likes of WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah, "War on Christians" Pastor Rick Scarborough, Andrew Breibart and disgraced Judge Roy Moore. Then on Saturday, the frothing at the mouth faithful will be fleeced by keynote speaker Sarah Palin to the tune of $115,000.

But what they won't hear in Nashville is much of anything related to the truth. Here, then, is an encore presentation of September's "10 Lessons for Tea Baggers."

—Perrspective 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) |

One day after Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael Mullen embarrassed John McCain and other fear mongering Republicans, the man who doomed the 1993 effort to end discrimination in the armed forces reversed course. Mullen's predecessor Powell announced:

"In the almost 17 years since the 'don't ask, don't tell' legislation was passed, attitudes and circumstances have changed. I fully support the new approach presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee this week by Secretary of Defense Gates and Admiral Mullen."

The significance of Colin Powell's belated change of heart can't be understated.

In 1966, Professor Charles Moskos, among the nation's foremost authorities on racial integration in the U.S. military, documented the rapid progress since Truman's order, progress which he suggested spoke well not just of the armed forces as an institution but for the future prospect of American society overall:

By the middle 1950's this policy was an accomplished fact...Within a remarkably short period the makeup of a major American institution underwent a far-reaching transformation.

Thirty one years later in 1997, Moskos told David Gergen that the military was at the forefront of racial progress in the United States, and not merely because Colin Powell had risen to the rank of Joint Chiefs Chairman:

"It's the only institution in American society where white people are routinely bossed around by blacks and where black leadership is very, very evident and well regarded. I mean, obviously, Colin Powell comes to mind, but I might add that 9 percent of all army generals today are black, as are approximately 1/3 of all first sergeants and sergeant majors. It's not utopia by any means. There are problems in the military. It's got racist in it, but in terms of any other institution one wants to compare it with, black leadership is far and away superior."

Sadly for both the nation and his own reputation, Charles Moskos could not overcome his own biases when it came to openly gay Americans serving in the U.S. military. Before his death in 2008, Moskos authored the DADT policy in 1993, arguing "To me, the issue comes down to privacy. Prudes have rights too."

Now, with President Obama, Secretary Gates and Chairman Mullen pushing for the repeal of the DADT policy which shames the United States even as it undermines its national security, many of the same specious arguments and none-too-subtle code words are once again being deployed.

John McCain, for example, declared himself "disappointed" in the testimony from Gates and Mullen, arguing "At this moment of immense hardship for our armed services, we should not be seeking to overturn the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy." His Republican colleague Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) fretted that "the presence in the armed forces of persons who demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts would very likely create an unacceptable risk to those high standards" of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion. And while Chambliss worried about an explosion of "alcohol use, adultery, fraternization, and body art" in the U.S. military, fellow Republican Duncan Hunter was concerned about something else: hermaphrodites:

"I think it's bad for the cohesiveness and the unity in the military especially those that are in close combat, close quarters in country right now, it's not the time to do it. I think the military is not civilian and I think the folks that have been in the military in very close situations with each other, there has to be a special bond there and I think that bond is broken, if you open up the military to transgenders, to hermaphrodites to gays and lesbians."

Of course, the United States has been here before. As the Center for American Progress documented last year, 62 years ago the target color of bigotry was black and not rainbow. And yet Harry Truman pressed ahead in a much less friendly political environment, despite the same hatemongering from both parties and even Army Chief of Staff General Omar Bradley:

Truman's effort to desegregate the armed forces also faced strong opposition from members of both parties in Congress. Sen. Richard Russell (D-GA), the then-ranking minority member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, claimed that desegregation would lead to a weaker force because it would be "sure to increase the number of men who [would] be disabled through communicable diseases and the crime rate among servicemen [would] soar." Senate Majority Leader Robert Taft (R-OH) called Truman's executive order a cheap political ploy. Some of Obama's opponents in Congress will likely employ similar arguments against DADT, and the president must be prepared to display the same strong leadership Truman exhibited.

President Truman also faced significant opposition from the country. Only 13 percent of Americans supported "having negro and white troops throughout the U.S. armed services live and work together" when he issued his executive order to end segregation in the armed forces. Obama's potential support is much greater. A 2009 Washington Post-ABC News poll from July 2008 showed that 75 percent of Americans now believe that gay people should be allowed to serve openly.

Mercifully, much has changed in the United States. In the 1960's, conservative southern Democrats bolted the party for the open arms of the GOP in order to perpetuate the final vestiges of the Jin Crow system. And since then, Colin Powell didn't just reach the pinnacle of American military leadership. Unlike his champion Charles Moskos, he saw the light.

UPDATE: As ThinkProgress and TPM among others have noted, John McCain now has some serious explaining to do. For years, he has cited Colin Powell to back his refusal to oppose DADT. This includes his June 2009 claim that "The reason why I supported the policy to start with is because General Colin Powell, who was then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is the one that strongly recommended we adopt this policy in the Clinton administration," adding, "I have not heard General Powell or any of the other military leaders reverse their position."

—Perrspective 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) |

As it turns out, Palin's crusade against political correctness was a bogus one. As her manufactured outrage over Rahm Emanuel's closed-door comments show, Sarah Palin's new mantra is "political correctness for me, not thee."

On Tuesday, Palin took to Facebook to call for Emanuel's resignation following a Wall Street Journal story that the White House chief of staff called liberal activists "f**king retarded" during a meeting last August. But while Emanuel already apologized last week to Special Olympics Chairman and CEO Tim Shriver, Palin demanded his head on behalf of her son and those like him:

"Just as we'd be appalled if any public figure of Rahm's stature ever used the "N-word" or other such inappropriate language, Rahm's slur on all God's children with cognitive and developmental disabilities - and the people who love them - is unacceptable, and it's heartbreaking."

Of course, in two days Sarah Palin will collect a $115,000 pay day speaking to those who traffic in the "N-word" at the National Tea Party Convention.

For Palin, who called for the merger of the Tea Party movement and the Republican Party, the audience will be quite familiar. During the 2008 campaign, attendees at McCain-Palin events displayed toy monkeys to represent her African-American opponent. Self-proclaimed Tea Party "founder" Dale Robertson carried a large sign bearing the N-word at one of the movement's events. Only last week, Robertson distributed a fundraising email which portrayed President Obama as a pimp. It's not hard to imagine that the assembled Tea Baggers would buy "Obama Waffles" and sing along to the words of the "Barack the Magic Negro" song so beloved by Rush Limbaugh and would-be Republican National Committee chairman Chip Saltsman. Still, as Palin wrote in her USA Today op-ed Tuesday:

"They have the courage to stand up and speak out.

Their vision is what drew me to the Tea Party movement. They believe in the same principles that guided my work in public service..."

No doubt, the conservative commentariat will join Sarah Palin's call for Rahm Emanuel's ouster. Sadly, that may be difficult to do. Daily Caller founder and Fox New contributor Tucker Carlson, for example, called Canada "a retarded cousin" of the United States. Ann Coulter deemed former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan "retarded." As for Nancy Pelosi, Coulter wrote last February:

"But as long as the nation is obsessed with historic milestones, is no one going to remark on what a great country it is where a mentally retarded woman can become speaker of the house?"

Her political allies, too, may be in an awkward position. Take Texas Senator John Cornyn. Today, the head of the National Republican Senate Committee agreed with Palin that the GOP must accommodate the Tea Baggers, arguing that it's "important that we try to channel these relative newcomers to the political process through our primaries so that they can have an impact on who's nominated." But back in 2005, Cornyn took to the floor of the Senate to condone threats against judges for, among otherwise, barring the death penalty in a case where "the defendant was mildly mentally retarded."

"And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence."

In most quarters, threatening judges is not politically correct. No doubt, the old Sarah Palin would have had no problem with it.

But the new Sarah Palin has a new mantra: "Politically correct away!"

UPDATE: Palin might also want to berate Rush Limbaugh, on whose radio show she has been a guest. " Our political correct society is acting like some giant insult's taken place by calling a bunch of people who are retards, retards," he said, adding "There's going to be a retard summit at the White House."

—Perrspective 3:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) |

Still smarting after his budgetary beat down at the hands of President Obama Friday, Texas Congressman Jeb Hensarling this weekend invited a second round of punishment. "I stand by what I said," Hensarling said Saturday, referring to his manifestly ridiculous claim the previous day that "the old annual deficits under Republicans have now become the monthly deficits under Democrats." As it turns out, he wasn't talking about the red ink Republican George W. Bush. What he meant, Hensarling instead made clear, is the House GOP is now taking credit for the budget surpluses of the Clinton years, surpluses fueled in part by the 1993 deficit reduction package every single Republican in Congress voted against.

As sentient Americans will recall, the U.S. national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan only to double again George W. Bush. In between, President Clinton erased the GOP budget deficits, producing a $236 billion surplus by his last year in office and leaving Bush a 10 year forecasted surplus of $5.6 trillion. As President Obama made clear in setting Hensarling straight on Friday, he inherited a $1.2 trillion annual deficit when he was sworn in January 2009:

"Now, look, let's talk about the budget once again, because I'll go through it with you line by line. The fact of the matter is, is that when we came into office, the deficit was $1.3 trillion. -- $1.3 [trillion.] So when you say that suddenly I've got a monthly budget that is higher than the -- a monthly deficit that's higher than the annual deficit left by the Republicans, that's factually just not true, and you know it's not true."

While Obama is certainly right, Hensarling now insists was referring to something else. That something is Democratic blame for the Bush deficits and Republican ownership of the Clinton surpluses. As The Hill reported:

In anticipation of Obama rolling out his budget proposal Monday, Hensarling's Saturday statement cited Congressional Budget Office statistics putting the average deficit during 12 years of GOP House control at $104 billion and the average deficit under three years of Democratic control at $1.1 trillion.

The Republicans, as you'll remember, captured the House in 1994, maintaining control of the chamber until they were ejected in 2006. During that span, Bill Clinton presided over the end of the Reagan-Bush I deficits, only see to George W. Bush blow the surplus on tax cuts for the rich, the funded Medicare prescription drug program and the war in Iraq.

While Americans can look back fondly at the surpluses of the Clinton years, Jeb Hensarling wants them to forget that the Republican Party had very little to with it.

In 1993, Congress passed and President Clinton signed a half-billion deficit reduction package, one that included a boost in upper income tax rates to 39.6%. When Clinton's 1993 economic program scraped by without capturing the support of even one GOP lawmaker, the New York Times remarked:

Historians believe that no other important legislation, at least since World War II, has been enacted without at least one vote in either house from each major party.

Inheriting massive budget deficits and unemployment topping 7% from Bush the Elder, Clinton's $496 billion program was nonetheless opposed by every single member of the GOP, as well as defectors from his own party. As the Times recounted, it took a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Al Gore to earn victory:

An identical version of the $496 billion deficit-cutting measure was approved Thursday night by the House, 218 to 216. The Senate was divided 50 to 50 before Mr. Gore voted. Since tie votes in the House mean defeat, the bill would have failed if even one representative or one senator who voted with the President had switched sides.

The rest, as they say, is history. Except that Jeb Hensarling and Congressional Republicans are trying to rewrite it. In their telling, the spiraling deficits of the final Bush years are entirely the Democrats' fault. And the halcyon days of the Clinton surpluses and the flush Treasury he produced, Jeb Hensarling now mythologizes, were brought to you courtesy of the Republican Party.

—Perrspective 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

During their unprecedented televised gathering Friday, 140 House Republicans were intellectually and politically outnumbered by President Obama. Perhaps on no subject was the rout more complete than on the federal budget. Led by Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, the Republicans touted their own alternative budget proposed by Wisconsin's Paul Ryan. But as Americans should recall, with its new windfalls for the wealthy, gutting of social programs and privatization of Medicare, that budget was laughed off the national stage - and not just because it was unveiled on April Fool's Day.

When the House Republican leadership with great fanfare initially released the GOP budget proposal in late March, it was greeted with guffaws. The 19 page outline was detail-free, failing even George W. Bush's test ("It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it."). And while Rep. Ryan boasted "while we criticize, we propose," Minority Leader John Boehner went much further:

"Two nights ago, the president said we haven't seen a budget yet of the Republicans," said House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio). "Well, it's not true, because here it is Mr. President." He waved a thin document called "The Republican Road to Recovery" that describes the GOP proposal.

The DNC's National Press Secretary Hari Sevugan summed up the consensus reaction in his response:

"After 27 days, the best House Republicans could come up with is a 19-page pamphlet that does not include a single real budget proposal or estimate. There are more numbers in my last sentence than there are in the entire House GOP 'budget.'"

So the next week on April Fool's Day - you can't make this stuff up - Ryan returned to pronounce that Boehner's was merely a "marketing document." Rep. Ryan clarified further, "The thing you saw last week was not the alternative budget, this is our alternative budget," adding, "'Somewhere along the line there was a misimpression given that that was our budget."

And what a budget it was. For a nation experiencing a catastrophic recession, as the Washington Post reported on April 2, 2009:

After getting blasted last week for presenting a budget plan light on details, House Republicans yesterday unveiled a more complete proposal that would cut taxes for businesses and the wealthy, freeze most government spending for five years, halt spending approved in the economic stimulus package and slash federal health programs for the poor and elderly.

In his successor to the "not a budget" proposal, Ryan offered the same snake oil his party has been selling since the days of Reagan and Bush. The cure for what ailed the U.S. economy, it turns out, is a massive tax windfall for the wealthiest Americans who need it least.

The alternative Republican budget doubled down on the wildly regressive Bush/McCain tax cutting binge American voters rejected at the polls in November. Making the budget-busting Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 permanent, the GOP also proposed an alternative "highly simplified system that fits on a post card, with few deductions and two rates." Taxpayers making over $100,000 would see their rate drop to 25% from its current high of 35%. (Below that level, the rate drops to 10%.) Corporate taxes would also drop to 25%. While the capital gains tax rate would be frozen at its post-2003 level of 15%, the estate tax would be eliminated altogether.

The predictable result is yet another massive redistribution of the tax burden away from the richest Americans even as it produced a torrent of red ink. While the Center for American Progress concluded the Boehner-Ryan giveaway would hand an annual tax bonanza of $1.5 million to the average CEO, a preliminary analysis from the Center for Tax Justice last week concluded that by 2011, the GOP scheme would drain the Treasury to the tune of $300 billion more than the Obama plan. And as is par for the course for the Republicans, the usual upper-income suspects benefit the most:

Over a fourth of taxpayers, mostly low-income families, would pay more in taxes under the House GOP plan than they would under the President's plan.

The richest one percent of taxpayers would pay $100,000 less, on average, under the House GOP plan than they would under the President's plan.

(It should be noted the CTJ model was preliminary and does not necessarily reflect the final details in today's GOP budget document. For example, CTJ assumed a capital gains tax rate of 10% and not 15%.)

But the ironies don't end there. While Republicans all year warned of mythical cuts to Medicare (which, of course, they have opposed from its inception), the Ryan budget proposed privatizing altogether the health insurance program that serves 46 million American seniors. As Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly noted:

In April, 137 Republicans voted in support of a GOP alternative budget. It didn't generate a lot of attention, but the plan, drafted by the House Budget Committee's Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) called for "replacing the traditional Medicare program with subsidies to help retirees enroll in private health care plans."

The AP noted at the time that Republican leaders were "clearly nervous that votes in favor of the GOP alternative have exposed their members to political danger."

(In July, New York Democrat Anthony Weiner called their bluff, introducing an amendment that would eliminate "government-run Medicare." No Republicans voted for it.)

Still, Jeb Hensarling on Friday insisted, "since that budget was ignored, what were the old annual deficits under Republicans have now become the monthly deficits under Democrats. The national debt has increased 30 percent." Before making clear to both Hensarling and Ryan that he was well acquainted with their budget proposal, President Obama offered a response that captured the magnitude of the House Republicans' public relations defeat yesterday:

"Now, look, let's talk about the budget once again, because I'll go through it with you line by line. The fact of the matter is, is that when we came into office, the deficit was $1.3 trillion. -- $1.3 [trillion.] So when you say that suddenly I've got a monthly budget that is higher than the -- a monthly deficit that's higher than the annual deficit left by the Republicans, that's factually just not true, and you know it's not true."

Just like April Fool's Day, the joke was on the Republican Party.

—Perrspective 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Shaking his head at the bad economics and worse politics of the White House's proposed spending freeze, Paul Krugman deemed President Obama not a deficit hawk, but a "deficit peacock." "You can identify deficit peacocks," he wrote, "by the way they pretend that our budget problems can be solved with gimmicks like a temporary freeze in nondefense discretionary spending." But while Krugman is right to take Obama to task, he omitted an even more cynical player in the fiscal discipline kabuki dance, the Deficit Virgin.

Or, more accurately, the Born Again Deficit Virgin.

Like the those other born again virgins, this large group of Republican deficit grandstanders is also among the conservative movement's most esteemed members. Having already violated the moral strictures they claim to hold dearest, each now asks the American people to join them in pretending their sin never happened. But unlike a generation of Republican leaders who built a mountain of national debt for the United States, the secondary virgins only screwed themselves.

The Republicans' shameless cynicism was perfectly captured by Vice President Dick Cheney, who in 2002 proclaimed, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

Not, that is, if a Republican is in the White House. But when Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office and the $1.2 trillion deficit George W. Bush left for him there, the GOP quickly changed its tune. While the national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan and doubled again under President Bush, House Minority Leader John Boehner in February decried the $787 billion emergency economic recovery spending as "one big down payment on a new American socialist experiment." By June, Boehner warned of the "crushing debt Washington Democrats are running up." And Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), Obama's aborted choice for Commerce Secretary, slapped the President last fall, "we're basically on the path to a banana-republic-type of financial situation in this country." And, Gregg added:

"You can't keep throwing debt on top of debt."

Of course, throwing debt on top of debt is precisely what Gregg and his GOP allies have done for over a generation.

The Republicans' fiscal rot didn't begin with George W. Bush, but with Ronald Reagan. It was the legendary Gipper whose financial recklessness and tax-cutting fetish came to define the modern GOP.

The numbers tell the story. As predicted, Reagan's massive $749 billion supply-side tax cuts in 1981 quickly produced even more massive annual budget deficits. Combined with his rapid increase in defense spending, Reagan delivered not the balanced budgets he promised, but record-settings deficits. Even his OMB alchemist David Stockman could not obscure the disaster with his famous "rosy scenarios."

Forced to raise taxes twice to avert financial catastrophe (a fact conveniently forgotten in the conservative hagiography of Reagan), the Gipper nonetheless presided over a tripling of the American national debt. The $998 billion debt he inherited in 1981 exploded to $2.9 trillion by the end of his second term. By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history.

For his part, George H.W. Bush hardly stemmed the flow of red ink. For starters, in 1989 he ignored the recommendations of his own deficit commission. And when Bush the Elder broke his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge to address the cascading budget shortfalls, his own Republican Party turned on him. While Bush's apostasy helped ensure his defeat by Bill Clinton, it was Clinton's 1993 deficit-cutting package (passed without a single GOP vote in either house of Congress) which helped usher in the surpluses of the late 1990's.

Alas, they were to be short-lived. Inheriting a federal budget in the black and CBO forecast for a $5.6 trillion surplus over 10 years, President George W. Bush quickly set about dismantling the progress made under Clinton. Bush's $1.4 trillion tax cut in 2001, followed by a second round in 2003, accounted for the bulk of the yawning budget deficits he produced.

Like Reagan and Stockman before him, Bush resorted to the rosy scenario to claim he would halve the budget deficit by 2009. Before the financial system meltdown last fall, Bush's deficit already reached $490 billion. (And even before the passage of the Wall Street bailout, Bush had presided over a $4 trillion increase in the national debt, a staggering 71% jump.) By January 2009, the mind-numbing deficit figure reached $1.2 trillion, forcing President Bush to raise the debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion.

But despite studies showing that the payday for the richest Americans accounted for half of the mushrooming budget deficits both of the Bush years and the decade to follow, Judd Gregg in an interview with Forrest Sawyer on PBS Frontline tried to maintain the tried and untrue GOP talking point that tax cuts produce revenue gains for the Treasury:

SAWYER: Way back in 2000, there were surpluses projected, and that had come after some good luck with the economy and some hard work. And then came along this massive tax cut. Was that in retrospect a mistake?

GREGG: No, absolutely not. The surpluses that were projected weren't lost because of the tax cut. They were lost because of...the fact that we went into a recession as a result of 9/11 and the Internet bubble bursting...much like the real estate bubble we are going through today...The surpluses which we were running, which we thought we were going to run for a long time, simply weren't realized as a result of those two events.

Sadly for Gregg, his revisionist history is both transparent and wrong.

As David Leonhardt documented in the New York Times in June, "President Obama's agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying."

(Click to see the full image.)

In that jaw-dropping chart illustrating how today's trillion-dollar deficits were created, the Times concluded that even before the Bush recession commenced in December 2007, Dubya's dangerously irresponsible tax cuts and unfunded spending produced an ocean of red ink that dwarfed the impact of President Obama's stimulus and other spending programs:

"The economic growth under George W. Bush did not generate nearly enough tax revenue to pay for his agenda, which included tax cuts, the Iraq war, and Medicare prescription drug coverage."

Looking at the fiscal year 2009 data, former Reagan Treasury official Bruce Bartlett last fall destroyed the mythology of the born again Republican deficit hawks:

Now let's fast forward to the end of fiscal year 2009, which ended on September 30. According to CBO, it ended with spending at $3,515 billion and revenues of $2,106 billion for a deficit of $1,409 billion.

To recap, the deficit came in $223 billion higher than projected [in January], but spending was $28 billion and revenues were $251 billion less than expected. Thus we can conclude that more than 100 percent of the increase in the deficit since January is accounted for by lower revenues. Not one penny is due to higher spending.

It should be further noted that revenues are lower to a large extent because of tax cuts included in the February stimulus. According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, these tax cuts reduced revenues in FY2009 by $98 billion over what would otherwise have been the case. This is important because the Republican position has consistently been that tax cuts and only tax cuts are an appropriate response to the economic crisis...

I think there are grounds on which to criticize the Obama administration's anti-recession actions. But spending too much is not one of them. Indeed, based on this analysis, it is pretty obvious that spending - real spending on things like public works - has been grossly inadequate. The idea that Reagan-style tax cuts would have done anything is just nuts.

And to be sure, making the Bush tax cuts permanent would make the federal government's fiscal picture worse - much worse. As the AP detailed in October, continuing President Bush's massive tax windfall for the wealthiest Americans who need it least constitutes a grave threat to the nation's fiscal stability:

Of course, that is exactly what the leading lights of the Republican Party, most of whom helped preside over a generation of red ink, are now proposing. Their formula is simply more of the same dogma that produced the deficit catastrophe in the first place.

Take, for example, John McCain.

A supply-side convert just in time for the 2008 Republican primaries, McCain advocated extending and expanding the Bush tax cuts. (According to ThinkProgress, that would have blown another $2 trillion hole in the budget while delivering 58% of its benefits to the wealthiest 1% of American taxpayers.) After echoing the right-wing myth that "tax cuts, starting with Kennedy, as we all know, increase revenues," McCain this week rejected the notion of a deficit commission for the same reason:

"I want a spending commission, and I worry that this commission could have gotten together and agreed to increase taxes. Spending cuts are what we need. We don't need to raise taxes."

Then there's former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Butchering history and the truth, Palin regurgitated the Republican recipe during a speech in Hong Kong and again (in almost identical language) in her book:

Ronald Reagan, he was faced with an even worse recession, and he showed us how to get out of here.

If you want real job growth, you cut taxes! And you reduce marginal tax rates on all Americans. Cut payroll taxes, eliminate capital gain taxes and slay the death tax, once and for all. Get federal spending under control, and then you step back and you watch the U.S. economy roar back to life. But it takes more courage for a politician to step back and let the free market correct itself than it does to push through panicky solutions or quick fixes.

Which brings us full circle to born again virgins whose chastity, whether physical or fiscal, has already been compromised. Palin's daughter and unwed mother Bristol has emerged as an ambassador of sorts for teen abstinence, recently announcing, "I'm not going to have sex until I'm married. I can guarantee it." In a testy response to MSNBC's Contessa Brewer about how he would slash the deficit he only now finds so objectionable, Bristol's budgetary equivalent Judd Gregg could have spoken for them both:

"How do you get off saying something like that?"

—Perrspective 11:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Bush's Supreme politicking during his State of the Union speeches was a regular fixture of his presidency. For three straight years (2004, 2005 and 2006), President Bush denounced "activist judges" and insisted "for the good of families, children and society, I support a constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage." On the very day Samuel Alito joined the Robert Court, Bush used his 2006 SOTU for a victory lap:

"The Supreme Court now has two superb new members -- new members on its bench: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sam Alito. I thank the Senate for confirming both of them. I will continue to nominate men and women who understand that judges must be servants of the law and not legislate from the bench."

Nevertheless, Republican leaders feigned outrage over President Obama's criticism Wednesday of the Court's Citizens United decision last week. Utah Senator Orrin Hatch called it "rude," adding "It's one thing to say that he differed with the court but another thing to demagogue the issue while the court is sitting there out of respect for his position." Texan John Cornyn took it a step further, calling Obama's strong disagreement with the Court "hysterical" and insisting:

"I don't think the president should have done what he did in trying to call out the Supreme Court for doing its job. They are the final word on the meaning of the United States Constitution, even when we don't like the outcome."

"I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country...And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence."

Facing criticism for his remarks seemingly endorsing right-wing retribution against judges, Cornyn held his ground. "I didn't make the link," he said on Fox News Sunday, adding with a note of sarcasm:

"It was taken out of context. I regret it was taken out of context and misinterpreted."

As it turns out, Cornyn was merely echoing the words of the soon-to-be indicted House Majority Leader Tom Delay. On March 31st, Delay issued a statement regarding the consistent rulings in favor of Michael Schiavo by all federal and state court judges involved:

"The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today."

As the New York Times reported:

Saying that the courts ''thumbed their nose at Congress and the president,'' Mr. DeLay, of Texas, suggested Congress was exploring responses and declined to rule out the possibility of Congressional impeachment of the judges involved.

The impact of tacit conservative endorsement of violence against judges cannot be dismissed. After all, it extends to members of the Supreme Court of the United States. In March 2006, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg revealed that she and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor were the targets of death threats. On February 28th, 2005, the marshal of the Court informed O'Connor and Ginsburg of an Internet posting citing their references to international law in Court decisions (a frequent whipping boy of the right) as requiring their assassination:

"This is a huge threat to our Republic and Constitutional freedom...If you are what you say you are, and NOT armchair patriots, then those two justices will not live another week."

Neither O'Connor nor Ginsburg were shy about making the connection between Republican rhetoric of judicial intimidation and the upswing in threats and actual violence against judges. While Ginsburg noted that they "fuel the irrational fringe," O'Connor blamed Cornyn and his fellow travelers for "creating a culture" in which violence towards judges is merely another political tactic:

"It gets worse. It doesn't help when a high-profile senator suggests a 'cause-and-effect connection' [between controversial rulings and subsequent acts of violence]."

Of course, O'Connor and Ginsburg weren't the only targets of right-wing retribution, serious or otherwise. After sentencing Scooter Libby to 30 months in prison in 2007, Judge Reggie Walton reported receiving death threats. That episode followed a January 2006 joke by best-selling conservative author and media personality Ann Coulter, who mused in January 2006, "We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens' creme brulee."

As reaction to the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC ruling showed, judicial activism like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But as John Cornyn, Tom Delay and their fellow travelers at right-wing "Justice Sunday" and "Values Voter" events reveal time and again, judicial intimidation is the province of Republicans alone.

—Perrspective 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) |

Barack Obama's first State of the Union address last night was a needed reminder that Americans elect presidents and not popes. Throughout a speech which was well received by viewers for both style and substance, Obama acknowledged his failures. But if his language about "so much disappointment" and "deserved" political "setbacks" seemed unusual coming from the President of the United States, that's because it is. After eight years of George W. Bush's pretense of infallibility, Americans simply aren't used to hearing from a president with the courage to own up to his mistakes.

Perhaps the purest expression of President Bush's "admit no mistakes" mantra came during a press conference in April 2004. A year after his invasion of Iraq produced a growing insurgency, mounting U.S. casualties, no weapons of mass destruction and a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," a stammering President Bush could not think of a single mistake he had made during his tenure in the White House:

"I'm sure something will pop into my head here...maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."

But by January 2007, just days after he announced the surge in Iraq, Bush admitted to Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes that he had made mistakes, if only semantic ones:

PELLEY: You mention mistakes having been made in your speech. What mistakes are you talking about?

BUSH: You know, we've been through this before. Abu Ghraib was a mistake. Using bad language like, you know, "bring them on" was a mistake. I think history is gonna look back and see a lot of ways we could have done things better. No question about it.

Amazingly, Bush's most profound statement of regret about his tough talk came (despite Dana Perino's claim to the contrary) in June 2008. In London as part of his final swing through Europe before leaving the White House, President Bush told The Times of London that his cowboy rhetoric was perhaps his greatest regret:

President Bush has admitted to The Times that his gun-slinging rhetoric made the world believe that he was a "guy really anxious for war" in Iraq.

[...] In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. "I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric."

Phrases such as "bring them on" or "dead or alive", he said, "indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace."

To be sure, George W. Bush had a lot to apologize for when it came to his use of phrases like "bring 'em on." As a grieving Mary Kewatt told Minnesota Public Radio in June 2003:

"We have some issues with the fact that President Bush declared combat over on May 1. Combat is not over. We don't even know who's firing at us right now, and all of our soldiers are at great risk of being picked off as Jim was. And that's a shame. And then President Bush made a comment a week ago, and he said, 'bring it on.' They brought it on and now my nephew is dead."

Throughout his tenure in the White House, Bush evaded accountability for errors large and small. On no issue was this more on display than on the war in Iraq. After, President Bush's response to collapse of his primary rational for the war against Saddam was to joke about the absence of weapons of mass destruction. David Corn recalled Bush's performance at the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents Association Dinner, in which the Comic-in-Chief regaled the audience with his White House hijinx:

Bush notes he spends "a lot of time on the phone listening to our European allies." Then we see a photo of him on the phone with a finger in his ear. But at one point, Bush showed a photo of himself looking for something out a window in the Oval Office, and he said, "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere." The audience laughed. I grimaced. But that wasn't the end of it. After a few more slides, there was a shot of Bush looking under furniture in the Oval Office. "Nope," he said. "No weapons over there." More laughter. Then another picture of Bush searching in his office: "Maybe under here." Laughter again.

And to the very end, President Bush (along with his Republican allies) continued to perpetuate the myth of Saddam's link to Al Qaeda and 9/11. During his jaw-dropping December 15, 2008 interview with ABC's Martha Raddatz. The President wasn't merely content to ignore the bipartisan 9/11 Commission's conclusion that Al Qaeda and Iraq had no "operational relationship." Boasting that "there have been no attacks since I have been president, since 9/11," the President simply dismissed any criticism that it was only his 2003 invasion which brought Al Qaeda forces to Iraq:

BUSH: One of the major theaters against al Qaeda turns out to have been Iraq. This is where al Qaeda said they were going to take their stand. This is where al Qaeda was hoping to take -

RADDATZ: But not until after the U.S. invaded.

BUSH: Yeah, that's right. So what? The point is that al Qaeda said they're going to take a stand. Well, first of all in the post-9/11 environment Saddam Hussein posed a threat. And then upon removal, al Qaeda decides to take a stand.

In sharp contrast, President Obama from the very beginning made clear he would uphold a much different - and higher - standard of accountability. In February 2009, Obama acknowledged the vetting problems that led to two of his high profile nominees (Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer) to withdraw over tax problems. As he told NBC's Brian Williams:

"I'm here on television saying I screwed up, and that's part of the era of responsibility. It's not never making mistakes; it's owning up to them and trying to make sure you never repeat them and that's what we intend to do." He also offered one more mea culpa: "[S]o, did I screw up in this situation? Absolutely and I'm willing to take my lumps, you know that's part of the job here."

In April, a "furious" President Obama reacted to the Air Force One photo-op fiasco in New York by proclaiming, "It was a mistake, as was stated, and it will not happen again." Days later, Louis Caldera, the official responsible for the episode, resigned. (He did not receive a presidential medal.)

And addressing Congress last night, President Obama recognized the "cynicism" and "disappointment" that the change he promised has not come fast enough:

"Our administration has had some political setbacks this year, and some of them were deserved. But I wake up every day knowing that they are nothing compared to the setbacks that families all across this country have faced this year. And what keeps me going -- what keeps me fighting -- is that despite all these setbacks, that spirit of determination and optimism, that fundamental decency that has always been at the core of the American people, that lives on."

That's a far cry from George W. Bush's near-papal doctrine of infallibility. As for the impact of his unacknowledged mistakes on the American people who elected him, it was his wife First Lady Laura Bush who in 2007 perhaps described it most succinctly:

"No one suffers more than their President and I do."

—Perrspective 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Which makes the biggest question for Wednesday's State of the Union address simply this: will Barack Obama free himself of the fantasy that is ruining his presidency?

The early indicators are mixed.

After testing the waters earlier this wee with Clinton-style "small ball" initiatives aimed at the middle class, President Obama reportedly with ask Congress for a badly needed second stimulus bill to jumpstart the sluggish recovery and catatonic job market. With the Democrats' already watered down health care effort imperiled by the Republican Senate victory in Massachusetts and unending GOP intransigence, Obama will call for Democratic unity in pursuit of a commitment to "comprehensive" reform. Rumor also has it that President Obama will finally push for the repeal of the disgraceful "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy towards gay Americans in the United States military.

But those hopeful signs are countered by Obama's ill-timed, ill-conceived and transparently cynical call for a spending freeze covering $477 billion in domestic spending. Combined with an executive order calling for the creation of a deficit commission, President Obama's premature paean to deficit reduction is bad politics and even worse policy, one that will be nevertheless be rejected by the very Republicans who tripled the national debt during Ronald Reagan's tenure and doubled it again under George W. Bush.

While the New York Times announced that the President will acknowledge "mistakes" in his first year, the Washington Post reported that Obama will "address GOP critics directly in State of the Union speech."

Obama will ask Republicans to "change course" and "work together to face the big challenges," the official said, adding that the president's tone will not be markedly different than it has been in the past.

Of course, it never had to be this way.

Beginning with the stimulus package, Barack Obama offered Republicans a hand up before they were on their knees. Last year, Obama bent over backwards to accommodate the GOP on the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), producing a package not only much smaller than the $1.2 trillion some of his own advisors insisted was required, but weighed down with tax cuts demanded by Republicans. For his near-compulsive bipartisanship, Barack Obama like Bill Clinton before him was rewarded with exactly zero GOP votes in the House. (As Paul Krugman warned a year ago, "Look, Republicans are not going to come on board. Make 40% of the package tax cuts, they'll demand 100%.") Worse still, polls reveal that Americans view a program as wasteful, even as the overwhelming consensus of economists agrees that ARRA added up to four percentage points to annual gross domestic product and saved up to two million jobs.

On health care, too, President Obama was his own worst enemy. Refusing to commit his prestige and political capital to a course of reform he demanded, Obama left his fate to Democrats in Congress and Republican mythmakers determined to vilify him. As with the stimulus, he lost control of both the policy and the message to the great detriment of his political fortunes and the American people alike.

But during tonight's State of the Union speech, Barack Obama may have a second - and surely last chance - to fight the scorched earth politics of Republican obstructionism which are strangling his presidency.

Will Barack Obama liberate himself tonight from the dangerous fetish for bipartisanship that is a Stockholm Syndrome of his own making? Or will he just use this second chance to make the same mistake twice?

—Perrspective 4:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Rather than gut school funding and other essential government services during a recession like most states, Oregonians voted to raise taxes on the wealthiest residents and boost the minimum corporate tax from its shocking level of $10 a year.

As the New York Times noted this morning, Tuesday's special election became necessary when anti-tax advocates turned to Measures 66 and 67 to undo three quarters of a billion in funding for education and other programs:

The Legislature, controlled by Democrats, has already put the $727 million into the current budget. So if the ballot items, known as Measures 66 and 67, had been rejected, lawmakers would have been forced to hold a special session to find other ways to reduce spending or raise revenue.

And in what is a recurring theme for the nation as a whole, the New York Times in its election preview Sunday suggested who would vote for - and who would benefit from - the passage of the ballot measures in a state which hadn't voted for an income tax increase since 1930:

Yet if the measures pass, it will probably not be because of support here in largely conservative southwest Oregon. Too many times the state has proposed too many taxes, many residents here say, and this is no exception, never mind the school troubles.

Instead, experts say, if the measures pass it will be because Oregon lawmakers found a way to narrowly focus a tax increase that more liberal parts of the state could tolerate, even at a time when a tax increase could not be harder to digest.

Which is exactly what unfolded last night. In an election with 59% turnout statewide, voters approved both Measure 66 (which raises taxes on households with taxable income above $250,000) and Measure 67 (which sets sets higher minimum taxes on corporations and increases the tax rate on upper-level profits) by a comfortable 6 point, 90,000 vote margin.

As the Oregonian's Jeff Mapes concluded, the ballot measures' passage vindicated Governor Kulongoski, the Democratic legislature and its union supporters, which helped the "Yes" campaign outspend by $6.8 million to $4.6 million the "No" forces led by Nike's Phil Knight and Columbia Sportswear's Tim Boyle:

The strong "Yes" vote is the vindication of a risky strategy by majority Democrats and their union allies. During the Legislature, Kevin Looper, who ran the union-backed Yes campaign, told Democratic lawmakers that polling showed that a tax measure focused on the well-to-do and on corporations would win favor with voters.

All of which is a message that President Obama and Democrats in Congress need to hear. Of course, whether the mainstream media was listening is another matter altogether.

For more background on Oregon managed to preserve its budget while raising its per capita burden from 36th to 34th and business taxes from 3rd lowest in the nation to 5th lowest, visit BlueOregon here and here.

(This piece also appears at Crooks and Liars.)

—Perrspective 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) |

To be sure, the latest manifestation of Obama's dangerous fetish for bipartisanship couldn't be worse for what the economy requires and his political survival demands. Still recovering too slowly from a deep recession which Obama's stimulus has helped reverse, American economy needs more - not less- government spending in the near-term. As Krugman lamented:

"It's bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment...

It's bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead."

Worse still, President Obama is sending Americans precisely the wrong message by suggesting he wants to begin slamming on the brakes when the economy and his agenda alike demand he keep the pedal to the metal. Nate Silver succinctly summarized the looming communications disaster for Obama and Democrats:

"What concerns me more is the politics. Specifically, the sort of cognitive dissonance that is going to be created in the mind of the average voter when the White House is promising to freeze spending on the one hand (or, more accurately, this will be the media caricature of their gambit), and on the other, trying to defend its stimulus and its health care reform package, trying to excuse the bailout package as a necessary evil, and perhaps trying to champion new programs."

Now is not the time to worry about the deficit. And when it is time - after the economy rebounds and job creation ramps up - gimmicks like deficit commissions and spending freezes (for which candidate Obama rightly mocked rival John McCain) shouldn't be part of the solution.

Many of the ingredients are already known, much as partisans of both parties refuse to acknowledge them. First and foremost (as the chart above shows), all or at least most of the Bush tax cuts must be reversed. Charitable tax deductions should be lowered while capital gains taxes are raised to at least their Clinton-era levels. Entitlement reform will almost surely require a delay of the retirement age to at least 67, while payroll taxes should be assessed on incomes above today's $100,000 plateau.

What is also certain is that Obama's Republican foes are not serious about cutting the deficit. (After all, Dick Cheney in 2002 proclaimed, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter.") The Gramm-Rudman Act's mandatory "sequestrations" in the 1980's, George H.W. Bush's offhand rejection of his own deficit commission in 1989 and the GOP's paeans to a budget balanced amendment in the 1990's all were designed to create the appearance of action on the debt while absolving the White House and Congress from responsibility for the pain it would entail. In 1993, every Republican in the House and Senate voted against the Clinton deficit reduction plan that washed away the red ink by 1999. After tripling the national debt under Ronald Reagan and doubling it again under George W. Bush, listening to Republicans lecture on the federal budget deficit is akin to "watching arsonists calling the fire department reckless."

And at the worst possible time, President Obama is playing directly into their hands. His posturing is economically counterproductive and politically cynical, and virtually everyone (or at least, among Democrats) knows it. For a generation, Republicans have been digging a deep hole on the deficit. This week, Obama grabbed the shovel from their hands - and hit himself in the head.

—Perrspective 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) |

To be sure, with unemployment at 10% and forecast to remain above 9% by the end of 2010, the continuing pain caused by the dismal job market is very real. But the dividends of the stimulus package to date, even with changing White House accounting rules for the 1.5 to 2 million jobs it claims to have saved, are clear and growing.

For the three month period which ended in June, the Economic Policy Institute announced the Obama stimulus measures overall added "up to 3 full percentage points of annualized growth in the quarter." For its part, the Wall Street Journal in September agreed with that assessment:

Many forecasters say stimulus spending is adding two to three percentage points to economic growth in the second and third quarters, when measured at an annual rate. The impact in the second quarter, calculated by analyzing how the extra funds flowing into the economy boost consumption, investment and spending, helped slow the rate of decline and will lay the groundwork for positive growth in the third quarter -- something that seemed almost implausible just a few months ago. Some economists say the 1% contraction in the second quarter would have been far worse, possibly as much as 3.2%, if not for the stimulus.

On Monday, the USA Today panel of economists concurred.

Further, they largely agreed stronger action is still needed:

Unemployment would have hit 10.8% -- higher than December's 10% rate -- without Obama's $787 billion stimulus program, according to the economists' median estimate. The difference would translate into another 1.2 million lost jobs.

But almost two-thirds of the economists said the government should do more to spur job growth. Suggestions included suspending payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, increasing spending on infrastructure, enacting a flat tax on income and extending jobless benefits.

Importantly, as ProPublica documented in its recovery tracking project, only a fraction of the stimulus pot has been spent to date. As of January 25, 2010, only $172 billion of the program budget had spent so far with another $157 billion in process, leaving $251 billion in remaining funding. Meanwhile, by ProPublica's accounting, $93 billion in ARRA tax cuts have been paid out, with another $119 billion still to come.

But judging from CNN's polling, the Obama administration's message regarding the impact of the stimulus isn't getting through to the American people. Bombarded for months by Republican propaganda declaring the recovery package "a failure," CNN's respondents have clearly taken it to heart as part of that network's "Stimulus Project."

Twenty-one percent of people questioned in the poll say nearly all the money in the stimulus has been wasted, with 24 percent feeling that most money has been wasted and an additional 29 percent saying that about half has been wasted. Twenty-one percent say only a little has been wasted and 4 percent think that no stimulus dollars have been wasted.

"One reason why the economic stimulus bill is no longer popular with the American public is the perception that a lot of the money has been wasted. Six in 10 believe that the projects in the stimulus bill were included for purely political reasons," said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

As a dumbfounded Joe Klein of Time concluded, "nearly three out of four Americans think the money has been wasted. On second thought, they may be right: it's been wasted on them":

Indeed, the largest single item in the package--$288 billion--is tax relief for 95% of the American public. This money is that magical $60 to $80 per month you've been finding in your paycheck since last spring. Not a life changing amount, but helpful in paying the bills.

The next highest amount was $275 billion in grants and loans to states. This is why your child's teacher wasn't laid off...and why the fire station has remained open, and why you're not paying even higher state and local taxes to close the local budget hole.

Americans' deep skepticism about the stimulus package reveals the extent of the Republicans' double victory - and President Obama's twin defeats - on the politics of the economy. Last year, Obama bent over backwards to accommodate the GOP on the ARRA, producing a package not only much smaller than the $1.2 trillion some of his own advisors insisted was required, but weighed down with tax cuts demanded by Republicans. For his near-compulsive bipartisanship, Barack Obama like Bill Clinton before him was rewarded with exactly zero GOP votes in the House. (As Paul Krugman warned a year ago, "Look, Republicans are not going to come on board. Make 40% of the package tax cuts, they'll demand 100%.")

And for his trouble, Americans blame Barack Obama and his Democratic Party for a recovery package that, slowly but surely, is working. As CNN, CBS, ABC and other networks parrot the talking points on stimulus from Republicans like Tom Coburn (R-OK), chances for additional - and badly need- federal funding for infrastructure, jobs programs and aid to states evaporate.

During his State of the Union, President Obama will announce more half-measures to help Americans still stuck in the grip of the recession. Sadly, three-quarters of them already believe the stimulus was half-wasted.

—Perrspective 9:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) |

While the Obama White House and Democrats in the House and Senate rushed to look for options to stem the coming torrent of corporate campaign cash unleashed by the Citizens United case, Senator McCain gave up the fight not with a bang, but a whimper. Asked by Face the Nation's Bob Schieffer (roughly half-way through the video) if his campaign finance reform was "dead," McCain calmly responded, "Oh, I think so."

Resigning himself to the Court's validation of the Republican Party's position, McCain concluded, "I don't think there's much that can be done." As CBS reported:

McCain said he was not surprised by Court's decision: "I went over to observe the oral arguments," he said. "It was clear that Justice Roberts, Alito and Scalia, by their very skeptical and even sarcastic comments, were very much opposed to it"...

The Republican senator noted that in prior Court hearing on the issue of campaign financing, Justices Rehnquist and O'Connor had taken a different position. "Both had significant political experience; Justices Roberts, Alito and Scalia have none," he said.

Ironically, during the 2008 campaign McCain frequently cited Roberts, Alito and Scalia as his ideal Supreme Court Justices. That January, the Catholic News Agency reported, "As models of who he would select, John McCain pointed to Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia." And in a major address on his vision for the Court in May 2008, McCain announced:

"I have my own standards of judicial ability, experience, philosophy, and temperament. And Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito meet those standards in every respect. They would serve as the model for my own nominees if that responsibility falls to me."

In any event, McCain on Sunday admitted defeated in the signature effort of his post-Keating political career:

"We are going to see now an inundation of special-interest money into political campaigns. I think that diminishes the influence of average citizens."

Of course, John McCain became an expert on the "inundation of special interest money into political campaigns" during the Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980's.

Two years ago, the Boston Globe summarized McCain's close relationship with Charles Keating and his decision to intervene with federal regulators on his behalf:

McCain met Keating in 1982, during McCain's successful run for Congress, and soon began accepting offers from Keating to fly McCain's family on a corporate plane to Keating's house in the Bahamas. McCain did not pay for most of the trips until years later, when the matter became public.

Keating, meanwhile, complained regularly to McCain that a proposed regulation would hurt his business. Known as the "direct investment" rule, it limited the amount that savings-and-loan institutions could invest from their assets. In 1985, after having "heard frequently from Charlie on the matter," McCain decided that Keating's complaints "were sound enough to warrant our assistance." He cosponsored a resolution sought by Keating, but it failed to postpone the regulation, McCain wrote in his autobiography.

By then, Keating was one of McCain's most important benefactors; McCain received $112,000 in campaign donations from Keating and his Lincoln associates, mostly between 1982 and 1986.

It was in April 1987 that McCain fatefully joined four other senators in meeting with Edwin Gray, chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board in Washington. After that meeting, Gray told his associate William K. Black that he was "very upset" that the senators were trying to pressure him.

Senate ethics panel agreed with that assessment. California Democrat Alan Cranston was censured for "an impermissible pattern of conduct," while Senators DeConcini (D-AZ) and Riegle (D-MI) were criticized for actions which "gave the appearance of being improper." As for McCain, he and John Glenn (D-OH) were admonished for exercising "poor judgment."

McCain, who had told the Ethics Committee that his role in support of Keating was "to help constituents in a proper fashion," reacted to the panel's findings in 1991, "I am, of course, relieved that I have been exonerated."

In reality, McCain's wasn't exonerated. And the blight of his Keating association tormented him, becoming a driving force behind his redemptive crusade for campaign finance reform. As the Hearst Newspapers reported on February 27, 2000:

McCain's zeal for campaign finance reform stems from his searing experience as one of the Keating Five when he was accused of trading influence for campaign dollars.

McCain still describes the Keating probe as "a nightmare." He says that period was one of the most painful of his life "because my integrity and honor were under attack." McCain also said, "The thing I learned was that it's not only the impropriety that counts. It's the appearance that's just as important."

[Charles] Lewis [of the Center for Public Integrity] said the Keating scandal "scalded" McCain.

"He had an epiphany and pledged from that day to start thinking about (campaign finance reform) and dealing with it," according to Lewis.

In February 2008, the New York Times detailed McCain's loss of honor and integrity in the Keating Five affair and his drive for a political rebirth through limiting corporate campaign cash.

"I would very much like to think that I have never been a man whose favor can be bought," Mr. McCain wrote about his Keating experience in his 2002 memoir, "Worth the Fighting For." "From my earliest youth, I would have considered such a reputation to be the most shameful ignominy imaginable. Yet that is exactly how millions of Americans viewed me for a time, a time that I will forever consider one of the worst experiences of my life."

A drive to expunge the stain on his reputation in time turned into a zeal to cleanse Washington as well.

As it turned out, McCain's Republican colleagues were having none of it, unwilling to be victims of his personal political cleansing. As the Times noted:

Mr. McCain earned the lasting animosity of many conservatives, who argue that his push for fund-raising restrictions trampled free speech, and of many of his Senate colleagues, who bristled that he was preaching to them so soon after his own repentance. In debates, his party's leaders challenged him to name a single senator he considered corrupt (he refused).

Ultimately, of course, they won and he lost. After the Roberts' Court FEC ruling, Mitch McConnell's proclaimed that "for too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process," while John Cornyn (R-TX) crowed that the Supremes had "open up resources that have not previously been available" to the GOP.

But if John McCain's legacy consists of his Keating and campaign finance failures, it does offer a third contribution to American politics. McCain is, after all, the man responsible for the invention of Sarah Palin. And while most Americans lament McCain's introduction of Palin onto the national stage, you don't have to ask whether it brought smiles to the faces of hard line conservatives.

You betcha.

—Perrspective 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) |