Saturday, November 09, 2002
THE STORY NO ONE�S TELLING:
Conservatives and Republicans may have reasons to keep this one quiet. But liberals and Democrats shouldn�t.
So, read here about how Democrat Dave Freudenthal upset the favored Republican, Eli Bebout, in the race for governor of Wyoming.
Yes. Wyoming. Rootin�-tootin� rowdy ranchin' Republican Wyoming. The state where Matthew Sheppard died a horrible death. Dick Cheney�s home state.
Excuse us, but we think this is very bad news for the Republicans, worse than they realize (Sure, it doesn't deliver much in the way of electoral votes, but there are two senators who suddenly have to worry about being replaced by Democrats if they kick off or quit in the next two years). It was Hesiod who called this one the sleeper of the election, so we're amazed, just amazed, that he hasn�t gotten around to reporting on it yet.
What, specifically, may have tipped the issue was something called coalbed-methane extraction, a keystone of Cheney's energy plan, in which the federal government leases mineral rights (which, in Wyoming, it owns quite a bit of) to make short-term money while extracting enough of this stuff to keep our natural-gas needs met for ... about one year at best; meanwhile, the privately-owned ranchland above is desecrated with little recompense to the owners, who in many cases have no choice about allowing this to happen, whether the drillers find CM or not. Many Republican ranchers, particularly in the Powder River basin (and guess where the toxic runoff from this process goes?) in the northern central region of the state were so outraged by this that they voted Democratic for the first time in their lives.
But what Sullivan and other GOP triumphalists should take time off from slapping backs to read is things like this:
In a state where Republicans outnumber the Democrats two-to-one, the result was by no means assured.
Betty Wood helped shift the balance. A lifelong Republican, she changed party affiliation for the August primary and voted Democrat.
In part, she changed to support Freudenthal, whom she knows through church.
�I think most highly of him,� she said.
But Wood, 73, said she changed parties because she doesn�t like the direction the GOP is taking, on both the state and national levels.
�It�s swung too far to the right,� she said midway through the evening.
She had come to the Hitching Post with a number of friends, but they had left long before the final numbers were announced.
�They (Republicans) don�t seem to be concerned with what�s best for the country, just what�s best for themselves,� she said.
Uh, wait a minute Sully, isn�t that what, according to your script, she�s supposed to be saying about the Democrats?
And, out in that same region of the country, he might also look at The American Prospect�s analysis of just what the deciding factor in Tim Johnson�s narrow re-election victory (you know, the one he conveniently forgot when writing �53-47 America� in neighboring South Dakota (you know, again, the state where he swallowed those phony voter-fraud allegations like so much freshly-ejaculated semen) turned out to be (yes, the piece was written before the election):
When President Bush appeared at Mount Rushmore, near the epicenter of the drought, he failed to deliver the disaster relief that many ranchers had hoped for. �We�re one of the states that helped [Bush] get elected,� says Fox. �I do support him on most things but I'm surprised and disappointed on this.� And though South Dakota supported Bush as enthusiastically as Texas in 2000, many diehard Republicans who have never pulled the lever for a Democrat are considering voting for Johnson due to his position on drought relief, his stand against big meatpacking companies, and his votes on fast track and other trade issues affecting the agricultural sector. The support of this unlikely constituency just might tip the balance for Johnson on Nov. 5.
[...]
According to veteran political reporter Dave Kranz of the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, �This state is not all that Republican when you cut through it. It�s more of a populist state.�
[...]
For several years, Johnson has led the charge to ban meatpacker ownership of livestock and to require country-of-origin labeling of meat, fruits and vegetables, which would protect local producers from being priced out of markets by what [a rancher] calls �free-trade dumping.� These issues, and his vote against granting President Bush fast-track trade-promotion authority, have made Johnson somewhat of a hero to ranchers who have historically voted Republican.
In February the meatpacking company Smithfield Foods took out full-page ads attacking Johnson and threatened to close the John Morell plant, one of Sioux Falls� largest employers. The local newspaper denounced the threat as �absolutely despicable,� farmers called it �blackmail� and ranchers flocked to Johnson�s defense. In the House, meanwhile, Thune remained opposed to the so-called packer ban. It was not until several weeks later that Thune reversed course; the significance was not lost on ranchers. �If you�re a Republican and you can't admire that kind of courage in a senator from the other party, then you�re a dud Republican,� [the rancher] says. In addition, Thune�s vote for fast track in December was critical in giving Bush a 215-to-214 victory. �John Thune cast the deciding vote for fast track after cattle groups met with him repeatedly and begged him not to do that,� says Trask. �He was clearly working for Bush and not for South Dakota�s people. I believe it will cost him the Senate race.�
[...]
Others complain about recent reports of voter fraud on American-Indian reservations, which would likely help Democrats in a state with a troubled history of white-Indian relations. But Lower Brule tribal Chairman Michael Jandreau insists that only a few dozen fake registrations have turned up so far and that �the auditors should reject them.� And, Jandreau wonders, �How many non-Indians could go in without them even bothering to check?�
[...]
For undecided voter Fox, �Personally, I feel that Tim Johnson is more in tune with what�s going on with rural people and our livelihood.� In a state where agriculture is the biggest industry and livestock production is the biggest sector of agriculture, Johnson�s stand against meatpackers and unfettered free trade could be just enough to send him back to Washington.
And, as TAPped (from whence came this link) points out, that�s exactly what ultimately happened out on the prairies last Tuesday.
In hardcore-Republican Harding County, where Bush beat Gore by an 89-9 margin, Johnson managed to garner 21 percent of the vote on Tuesday; in Butte County Bush beat Gore 75-22 in 2000, but Thune only beat Johnson by a 65-33 margin. In populous (by South Dakota standards) Pennington County, Bush beat Gore 68-30 in 2000, but Thune only carried it 61-38 this year.
The Republicans, savoring their party�s increasing dominance in, and by, the Southeast, aren�t taking notice. But you can bet Nancy Pelosi is.
posted by Sully 11/09/2002 03:05:00 AM
WILL HE NOTICE?:
Slate�s William Saletan, who was at the Wellstone memorial, wrote this shocking piece yesterday saying that stories about partisanship there were, while not without some truth, greatly exaggerated. We�ve decided to reprint it in full here not only because Sully talked about it but because we're genuinely shocked that none of our fellow liberal bloggers picked up on it.
Two years ago, I saw Al Gore debate George W. Bush in their first clash of the 2000 presidential election. The first impression of most reporters was that Gore had won on points. I agreed but thought Bush had made a more favorable impression as a human being. Neither of those opinions became the consensus, though. The consensus formed around a theory partly validated by Gore and fully promoted by conservative activists: that Gore had shown he was a compulsive liar. He never recovered from that consensus.
Two years ago, I saw Al Gore debate George W. Bush in their first clash of the 2000 presidential election. The first impression of most reporters was that Gore had won on points. I agreed but thought Bush had made a more favorable impression as a human being. Neither of those opinions became the consensus, though. The consensus formed around a theory partly validated by Gore and fully promoted by conservative activists: that Gore had shown he was a compulsive liar. He never recovered from that consensus.
Last week, I saw it happen again. I was at Paul Wellstone�s memorial service. I saw Rick Kahn, the speaker chosen by Wellstone's family, deliver an election rallying cry instead of a eulogy. I thought it was inappropriate, and I said so. But the consensus that formed around that service�that the whole thing was a crass political rally � was a gross exaggeration. The possibility that that consensus changed the outcome of the election gives me great remorse.
Wellstone's service was about three and a half hours long. Most of it, as I reported, consisted of poignant tributes to the friends, aides, and family members who died along with Wellstone. Kahn's speech was way out of line, as was the crowd's enthusiastic reaction. Wellstone's sons also crossed the line, but less so. When the time came to review my notes and choose a theme for my story, it was a tough call. I wrote about Kahn and the politicization of the service � I said the event had gradually turned into" a rally�because it was the aspect that stood out most. The eulogies were dog-bites-man. The electioneering was man-bites-dog. I'm sure other reporters followed the same reasoning.
What I saw on Minneapolis TV and on the Internet the next day was a distillation of that spin. Gone were the accounts of the touching eulogies delivered the night before. All anybody talked about was the electioneering. Dittoheads showed up in Slate�s �Fray� and every other political chat room to spread the new message. People in the street who hadn't been to the service began to describe it as an all-out rally. Minnesota Democrats spent the rest of the week apologizing. Their replacement candidate, Walter Mondale, sank in the polls and lost the election.
Kahn's speech was inappropriate and inconsiderate to the many Republican senators who had come to pay their respects to Wellstone. And there were plenty of legitimate reasons, depending on your political views, to vote against Mondale. I suspect that the Republican who won, Norm Coleman, will be a better senator. But I hope he didn�t win because voters thought Wellstone's memorial service was just a political rally. That wasn�t a fact. It was a spin job.
Has Saletan been reading Media Whores Online all of a sudden? This is a rare moment indeed when a reporter for a publication like Slate gets such a graphic epiphany of how the conservative media machine, the Mighty Wurlitzer, works so effectively to spin and distort the truth. We hope he�ll take this lesson for the future.
Of course, we know Sullivan also read it. But don�t count on him retracting anything he said.
posted by Sully 11/09/2002 02:11:00 AM
Friday, November 08, 2002
THE GIRLS, THEY LOVE TO SEE YOU SHOOT ... I LOVE A MAN IN UNIFORM!! I LOVE A MAN IN UNIFORM!! ...:
Apparently it didn�t take too long after the elections for Sully to recall that, hey, these people still hate queers (whereas before, it seemed, al-Qaeda must have been using Max Baucus�s campaign to send coded messages to its operatives in Big Sky country).
While he is right about this (and we do have to admit we were skeptical about this since it resembled an urban legend going around those EEEEEeeeevillll left-wing college campuses a decade ago: that during the Gulf War the Army found out it had fired all its Arabic translators because they were gay. But for now we'll take the Servicemembers� Legal Defense Network at its word (and isn�t it interesting that Sully cites the GFN story that is pretty much a rehash of the original press release ... the sort of practice he decries on other issues as an example of intolerable media bias)), it stil nevertheless rankles one that Sullivan gets so passionate about this cause given his now-public record of patronizing attitudes to the military and those who serve in it, especially when he never showed any inclination to put in time in uniform himself in British forces that lack an explicit ban on gays serving.
OH, REALLY NOW ...:
Gee, compared to the sort of anti-war rhetoric one finds elsewhere on the web, Hirsh�s statement is positively tame. Yet Sullivan considers that an example of intractable bias.
posted by Sully 11/08/2002 12:19:00 PM
Thursday, November 07, 2002
THE NEW YORK TIMES, SULLY, AND MAPS:
You know, as we showed last July with the Alaskan climate graph (which, regrettably, we can�t get to at the moment due to Blogger�s ongoing archive problems), Sullivan has a hell of a lot of nerve taking the Grey Lady to task for sloppiness.
IF YOU�RE GOING TO QUOTE SOMETHING OUT OF CONTEXT, AT LEAST DON�T INCLUDE THE CONTEXT SO YOU DON�T EMBARRASS YOURSELF:
Anybody but Sully, it seems, would read those sentences referring to Yemen�s sovereignty and then the line about �where no war has been declared� and understand that �where� has its standard referent of space, not time. Unless they had an axe to grind with the fact that The Guardian exists in the first place.
(In any event, we also seem to recall that Yemeni authorities had at least tacitly consented to the action. But we could be wrong).
And here�s another bit from that same editorial, making a common point of the left today that Sully prefers to pretend doesn�t exist rather than try to deal with:
Stateless, gangster terrorism is a fearsome scourge. But state-sponsored terrorism is a greater evil, for it is waged by those who should know better, who are duty-bound to address causes not mere symptoms, who may claim to act in the people�s name. As Alexander Herzen said in another age of struggle: "We are not the doctors. We are the disease."
BUSH v. GORE, APPEAL STILL PENDING:
If, without judicial intervention, Bush can get legitimately elected in two years, then we�ll believe you, Blog Queen.
(Actually, we like this insight, from a commentator on Eschaton, best).
posted by Sully 11/07/2002 12:00:00 PM
MORE SNEAKING AROUND:
We distinctly remember that as of midnight last night, the little update Smalltown Boy made on how his election picks went wasn�t there.
Yet, this morning, there it was, as if it had been poted yesterday evening.
And this guy still wants us to believe he never does any unindicated alterations to his posts more than a few minutes after they go up?
posted by Sully 11/07/2002 11:42:00 AM
OLD STORIES NEVER DIE; THEY JUST KEEP COMING BACK TO HAUNT YOU:
Earlier this week, Atrios reminded us that the story of Scott Leopold has not gone away despite the New York Times's successful effort to smear him and make Paul Krugman back off a Bush Administration official.
You remember Leopold, right? The freelance writer who had loads of sources among former Enron employees, many of whom passed along insider documents showing that the Fallen Energy Trading Giant��� had booked contracts from Eli Lilly and Quaker Oats at values far higher than they really could justify, and lied to investors about it.
Nothing special, that was Enron�s (ahem) stock in trade, after all. But the head of the Enron division in question was Thomas White, a retired general who has returned to the Pentagon as Secretary of the Army.
Leopold received a smoking-gun email from one source in which White told the recipient to hide a loss by inflating the price of the deal even further. In other words, White was fully aware of what was going on.
He wrote a story for (yeccch!) Salon, which checked out all his sources and put it up in late August. Nothing happened in response.
But a few weeks later, Paul Krugman chatted with Leopold and devoted a column to the story. Suddenly everyone got nervous. That a
key Bush appointee in such an important position be pretty much all-over-but-the-shouting guilty of securities fraud, on a single piece of evidence far more inculpatory than anything investigators ever discovered in the Clinton Cabinet, flummoxed the media machine to no end. Salon was easily buffaloed into withdrawing the story on a possibly dubious plagiarism allegation; the Times helped out with an article that, while ostensibly about the controversy, unjustly smeared Leopold and blew the cover of one of his sources, going very far to make sure Leopold can never work in journalism again. Krugman took responsibility for the latter but still had to publish a correction.
Well, we hope Krugman will write about this (probably not, unfortunately, but if you're reading this at princeton.edu, Krugster, there's no time like now) but Leopold just put his sources online so you can judge them yourself.
This, and Pitt�s resignation, could perhaps be the beginnings of a slow discordant crescendo in the current Republican fanfare. They may one day look back and say, if only we'd known at the time ...
posted by Sully 11/07/2002 01:50:00 AM
Wednesday, November 06, 2002
THE MORNING AFTER:
As you can imagine, we here at SullyWatch were none too thrilled with the election results, hence no posting yesterday (and we were also kept busy doing other things not related to the elections). And at least Sully must have posted this morning before his Androgel application ... his analysis is actually fairly sober, in accord with what liberal commentators have themselves been saying, and thus free of the adolescent triumphalism we�d been fearing.
Memo to Dems: We somehow survived 1994, which was worse than this, believe us (We would do well to take this lesson).
Memo to Bushies: Enjoy it while it lasts. We somehow think that, come fall 2004, you may be wishing it could have been Ramadan 2002 forever (We would see something ominous, were we you, in the quiet resignation of Harvey Pitt. A previously-unbreached wall has been cracked). You should also be fretting about losing governorships not only in the Midwest but in places like Oklahoma as well. Nothing gold can stay.
CHUTZPAH:
So he gives his Von Hoffman Award nomination to ... Dick Morris!! Not that it isn�t richly deserved, but ... ahem ... didn�t we strongly suggest the award should be named for Morris rather than the much more respectable and likable von Hoffman like, a couple of weeks ago?
SO NOW HE THINKS HE CAN TELL US:
Forrester was a lousy candidate, we learn (gee, a month ago it was all about punishing Torricelli). And that Chambliss�s defeat of Cleland was �dispiriting.� (again, why, exactly?). Would�ve been brave of him to say that before the votes had been cast (but, bravery is certainly not something we expect from him when there is any power within sucking-up reach).
KRISSED-OFF:
Someone needs to point out to Nick (and Sully) that the paranoid right that blamed Clinton for Foster�s death (like, say, Richard Mellon �Toe the Party Line Or I Cut Off Your Funding, Without Which You Will Fail� Scaife) has never quite grown up (as any reader of NewsMax or WorldNet Daily can attest), contrary to what his column suggests, even though its partisans have now assumed power. So why are us left-wing paranoid nutcases to be quiescient, especially in the face of a president from a family that�s been at Ground Zero of so many of this country�s disreputable dealings since even before World War II? A president who, it is looking more and more certain, committed insider trading as a director of an oil company that may have been a CIA front?
The last time we looked, by the way, Republicans still controlled the House of Representatives.
Vanguard. Remember that word. Vanguard.
posted by Sully 11/06/2002 02:22:00 PM
Monday, November 04, 2002
IT GETS EVEN FUNNIER:
Little did we know something so trivial as a missing link could really tie Sullivan up in knots.
Not only is he forced to admit, possibly two hours after we noted it, that he forgot to include a link in the homophobic-uncle item, he manages to botch the correction, too (Go to his site and click on the link. We really like the internal andrewsullivan.com error page that pops up).
Let�s add web designer to the list of professions Sully should not even pretend to be.
posted by Sully 11/04/2002 02:10:00 PM
THE GREAT SOUTH DAKOTA NON-ISSUE:
You will, of course, note that in his Times piece Sully refers blithely to �allegations of massive voter fraud in South Dakota,� apparently hoping you haven�t read Josh Marshall�s excellent reportage on how they have largely been ginned up from something into nothing by the Mighty Wurlitzer spin machine.
posted by Sully 11/04/2002 02:02:00 PM
THE SOUND OF THE CLOCK BEING PUNCHED ... AGAIN:
Skip his latest Sunday Times column and just read what he ripped it off from.
Gosh, doesn�t Kaus ever get tired of Smalltown Boy taking a free ride on his tail?
posted by Sully 11/04/2002 01:48:00 PM
... THE LESS WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU ABOUT IT:
And at some point in the very near future we�ll have the scientific data to know that this was a pretty stupid idea, too.
Seriously, what the hell prompted this post? Is he still trying to justify the Bell Curve cover story? Is he admitting that the facts behind his arguments on a variety of things just aren�t there and that Science will come along like his big brother and win it for him?
posted by Sully 11/04/2002 11:11:00 AM
WELL, THANKS FOR TELLING US:
I�ve long believed that some kind of U.N. mandate would be very helpful in waging what will be a difficult and unpredictable war and occupation. I even think that inspectors aren�t completely useless, as long as they are genuinely allowed to operate without conditions and we can interrogate Iraqi scientists outside the country and give their families amnesty to protect them ...
How perfectly Bushy of him to flip-flop like this. Go review his summertime archives ... he sure wasn�t so sweet on the U.N. back then.
posted by Sully 11/04/2002 11:07:00 AM
THE INTERNS DO IT AGAIN:
What, exactly, is a perfect Christmas gift for the homophobic uncle? We get this feeling we're supposed to know, that one of the words in that sentence will be bright and underlined and takes us way to another place when we click on it.
posted by Sully 11/04/2002 11:04:00 AM
Sunday, November 03, 2002
AMNESIA WATCH:
Sullivan, May 21, 2001.
COGNITIVE DISSONANCE WATCH: Browsing through the Washington Times over my Number 3 Supersized tonight, I came across a Bill O�Reilly column arguing that the pedophile group NAMBLA should be made illegal even for disseminating its views that under-age boys are old enough to have consensual sex. The First Amendment be damned � these people are evil!
Good God, he actually sounds like Neal Pollack here.
posted by Sully 11/03/2002 12:59:00 PM
YET MORE REPUBLICAN GAY-BAITING SULLIVAN WON�T TALK ABOUT:
In Illinois this time.
Link via ArchPundit.
OUT TO LUNCH:
Atrios, to whom we are so indebted, posts this link to Go To Lunch, who delivers a fairly lengthy critique of Sully�s Salon bigotry piece.
Some morsels:
There was nothing �fringe� about speculation that President Clinton and his wife might be murderers. It was indulged in, with more than just a wink and a nod, by well-known public office holders like Representative Dan Burton, and influential media owners and political advocates like Reverend Falwell; people possessing, or routinely welcomed into, the nation�s most powerful and public forums.
Given that reality, Mr. Sullivan may want to revise his assessment of "American reasonableness." As well as re-examine any assumptions he may be harboring about the current state of American faith in our political leaders, or, for that matter, in each other.
[...]
Now, with the political shoe on the other foot, Mr. Sullivan wants us, with no more than a few partisan assurances and the issuance of a high court�s judgement, to get our faith in democracy back.
But, for reasons far more serious than Bill Clinton�s philandering, or the Impeachment Manager�s partisan excess, distrust infects the air we breathe. And, because it�s useful, paranoia is still the coin of the realm.
In fact, paranoia and routine hints of conspiracy have infected Mr. Sullivan�s writing just as much as they have infected the broader body politic.
For example, in the very first paragraph of his commentary, Sullivan robs the two writers he has chosen to critique, Michael Nimans, an obscure college professor, and Ted Rall, a cartoonist, of their individuality, and assigns them to some �morally debased� and shadowy �movement.�
In size and power, this is not quite the same conspiracy that relentlessly stalks the forces of goodness and reason in books like �Bias� and �Slander,� yet, for his purpose, it will do.
Sullivan then selectively edits Mr. Rall's essay to, more dramatically, make his point and defeat the writer�s own. Giving us his assurance, with no provided link, that those quoted are �the money lines.�
But, as a discussion of responsibility for Senator Wellstone�s death, the actual money line, it seems to me, in Mr. Rall's essay is this: �Odds are overwhelmingly in favor of a natural or mechanical explanation for the crash of Paul Wellstone's plane.�
Whatever the writers� criticisms of the Bush administration may be, Mr. Sullivan doesn�t answer them. Nor does it occur to him, any more than it would any other partisan, to try to address and allay the distrust that is these writers� real subject. His argument, at heart, is one that, without reflection, is trotted out to cover any circumstance -- not that the opposition is wrong or mistaken in the particular, but that, in its general nature, it is morally wanting, false, and �other.�
That is paranoia at work.
And, despite Mr. Sullivan�s sophistication, it is the same kind of paranoia that makes our political conversation routinely absurd, and reflexively dismissive. For instance, by labeling the 52% of voters, overwhelmingly middle and working class, who did not vote for Mr. Bush in the last election as a shadowy �elite,� that does not share �our� values. Or, at best, implying that large numbers, even a majority, of citizens are profoundly foolish dupes of that elite -- that has overtaken our schools, emptied our churches, weakened our resolve, ruined our marriages, and contributed to the delinquency of our children.
It is also the kind of paranoia that can whip normally decorous partisans, many on the public payroll, into a frenzied mob determined to stop the legal counting of votes and discount the democratic voice of other citizens. That can loudly condemn, on no evidence other than self-interest, the judgement of one court as corruptly partisan, and, at the same time, lead another court to abandon its established principles in order to preemptively save us from the potentially messy consequences of democracy itself.
[...]
But what, when fact is missing, or in dispute, does �reasonableness� rely on?
The answer to that is �trust.� Something that, in terms of this administration, despite the unwillingness of Mr. Sullivan and others to acknowledge it, many Americans lost in the wreck of the last election -- and that no amount of sifting through the evidence, or partisan arguments and rationales, can ever recover.
The plain fact is this: Bush partisans aggressively used all the levers of powers at their disposal to stop the vote count in Florida and gain the presidency. And, no matter what those partisans may wish to tell themselves, the people they used those powers against weren�t some conspiratorial elite or degraded minority trying to grab illegitimate power � they were millions of ordinary Americans like me, exercising, proudly, the legitimate, important, and only, political power we possess.
In positing politics as war, Mr. Bush�s party made America the enemy.
And if that isn�t both paranoia and a cause for it, what is?
posted by Sully 11/03/2002 12:17:00 PM
