Only wimps are Republicans
Last week, while reflecting on Bob Dole throwing away his last shreds of credibility, several writers pointed out that this should not have come as a surprise to anyone. Bob Dole has always been a vicious, partisan attack dog. What’s surprising is that after each round of attacks, he pulls out his genial, self-effacing, good ol’ Bob persona and convinces us that this is the new Dole. Then the party calls on him to be a vicious, partisan attack dog and the old Dole is back.

In going over the history of this cycle (perhaps we should call it a flip-flop), I was reminded of an argument he brought up as Ford’s running mate in ’76. In his vice-presidential debate with Walter Mondale, Dole characterized all of the twentieth century American wars as the Democratic Wars. Democrats, he argued were the party of war because we entered WWI, WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam during Democratic administrations. He did not follow his argument through by pointing out that the only two of those we won were won by Democratic administrations.

Obviously, Republicans don’t know squat about winning serious wars. Sure they can see us through a couple week commitment in Grenada or Panama, but how do they do with a long-term commitment like Viet Nam or Lebanon? They cut and run. Just this week Bush showed the true defeatist nature of the Republican Party when he said we can’t win the war on terrorism. To steal the right wing punditry’s favorite adjective, serious people will be voting Democratic this year. Anything else is just letting the terrorists win.

Not classy
I have never subscribed to the philosophy that if you oppose a candidate you must hate their family, yea verily, even unto the seventh generation. A lot of people on the left believe this and it's practically an article of faith on the right (witness how Hilary hating has been transfered practically unchanged into Teresa hating). I don't make jokes about the Bush twins and I usually have had nice things to say about Laura. Until now.

"Do you think these swift boat ads are unfair to John Kerry?"

"Not really. There have been millions of terrible ads against my husband."

What kind of childish logic is that? "Someone, somewhere said some bad stuff about my husband, so it's okay to slime John Kerry." If she had argued that Kerry was responsible for the "terrible ads" there would be a sort of "he hit me first" logic (still childish, but logic of a sort). But she doesn't make that logic, just "George is hurting, so Kerry should hurt too." That's petty, mean-spirited, and should be beneath her.

I suppose my own reaction should be a sad shake of the head and a pious murmer about how politics brings out the worst in all of us. But I'm not in that mood. I'm going to bitch and carp.

Bad dog, Karl
On a side note, I wonder about Karl’s self image. Retainers like Rove usually flourish in anonymity. Their glory comes in the part they play in building the success of their master or cause. What happens when they become infamous in their own right? Karl is not becoming famous as a good servant, he is becoming famous (whether accurately or inaccurately) as the pioneer of a new level of political discourse. The good servant, the good retainer, does not draw attention to himself; he focuses attention on his master. In this, at the peak and end of his career, Rove is a failure. His name is becoming an adjective. Long after he retires from the political scene, people will characterize certain low actions as “Rovian” in their despicableness, as in “That was a Rovian dirty trick.” By becoming the issue himself, he is a failure as a tactician.

As long time readers know, I would be the last person to deliver a cheap shot (stop laughing, dammit). Is Rove's mom still alive? What does she think about his name becoming a byword for dirty fighting.

Beware the ire of the Rovian attack beast
Many of the analyses of the Swift Boat brou-ha-ha have pointed out how this is the archtypical Karl Rove offensive. The typical Rove smear uses deniable surrogates to deliver the message. The typical Rove smear attacks the subject’s strong points and converts them into vulnerabilities. These are both true, but we are leaving out one element of the classic Rove attack morphology.

In military terms, Rove does not commit all of his troops to a single battle. Rove fights the political equivalent of a guerrilla war. He wears his opponent down with pin-prick attacks from multiple directions. This is not surprising coming from someone who came of age at the peak of the cold war. A corollary of the MAD doctrine (“Mutual Assured Destruction” not “What, me worry?”) was that if the great powers could not confront each other directly, they would confront each other through surrogates. Both sides were guilty of this horrendous crime against the less powerful countries of the world. The current situations in the Middle East and Central Africa are, from one perspective, the last flickerings of the immoral policy of proxy war. Being immoral himself, it is no wonder Rove sees this as a model to be emulated.

The third element that Karl watchers are leaving out is the strategy of disequilibrium. Rove has many more tricks up his sleeve than just the Swifties. Having weathered their attack with minimum damage, we should not assume we are safe or even that we have time for a deep breath of relief. We beat back the first attacking Hun, there are a thousand more behind him.

The Rove method involves keeping the opposition off balance by delivering multiple unrelated attacks from different directions. Be assured that his next attack will have nothing to do with Viet Nam. As soon as we have our attention laser focused on the Mekong Delta in 1969, someone is going to bring up Kerry’s divorce, or an obscure Senate vote in 1993, or a favor he did a constituent in 1985. When we focus on that, he’ll change direction again. Rove does not care if we destroy the Swifties. They are completely disposable.

While we spend all of our energy responding to Rove’s proxy attacks, his candidate deals with the issues. This is brilliant. Americans have been primed by their media to believe that some vague thing called “character” is the most important issue in an election. Rove’s attacks usually question the opposition’s character. When his strategy works best, the opposition is constantly neglecting issues to defend character. On one hand, Rove determines the agenda that the other side must address. These are never issues that the opposition can win. Meanwhile, Rove’s candidate talks about things that do work well for him and do sound like real issues to the mainstream press and their audience.

The result of this pattern of proxy character attacks on the opposition while his boy addresses the issues is twofold. Most casual news consumers will only see the pattern of repeated claims that “something is wrong with that opposition guy.” Only partisan news junkies who dig into the issues will see the secondary pattern of “all these claims are bogus.” Complimenting this negative slant is the fact that the Opposition, being constantly on the defensive, never launch their own attacks and never calmly address the issues. The bottom line is a perception that Karl’s guy is the one who talks important stuff, however shallowly, while I heard that other guy is some kind of creep.

All this brings me around to my main point. We should not feel good about beating back the Swifties. Rove has a score of these attacks in the wings. Many writers have described the Rove method as “if you throw enough mud, some is bound to stick.” That is a naive oversimplification. The Rove method assumes that as a foundation and adds, “if mud doesn’t stick, try dung, then pudding, then paint, then gravy, then bile, then library glue, then baby poop, mud again, warm tar, herbed bread crumbs, cheese sauce, Silly Puddy ™, that stuff that collects in the trap of your kitchen sink, toe jam, more pudding…” You get the idea.

The attack has just begun. We need to brace ourselves for the next assault.

Questions that need to be asked
Most of us are aware of the hypocrisy of the speakers’ roster at the Republican convention. They plan fill our TV screens with a happy image of reasonable moderation and inclusiveness while passing a platform (and nominating a candidate) filled with hateful intolerance and cultural extremism that most people would find frankly repulsive. That’s offensive enough, but Amy Sullivan points out that the hypocrisy of some of their religious allies manages to be an order of magnitude worse.

Between Arnold Schwarzenegger and George Pataki, their states are responsible for 35 percent of the abortions performed in the U.S. And yet you'll hear nary a peep of protest about this from the conservative Catholic League, a supposedly "non-partisan" organization that has been frothing in continuous outrage over John Kerry's pro-choice leanings.

[...]

The silence coming out of the Catholic League regarding the prominence of a bunch of heretical babykillers at the GOP Convention is simply deafening...

It’s understandable that the GOP will make a tactical decision to soft pedal, or even misrepresent, some issues in the name of getting and keeping power. It is the nature of political parties that the health of the party is more important than the successful pursuit of any single issue. That’s what sets parties apart from other political organizations.

The Catholic League is supposed to be a non-partisan lobbying group working to support the doctrine and agenda of the Catholic Church. They have no business signing on to compromise their values for the good of the Republican Party. It’s one thing for a politician or voter to decide that political considerations are more important than religious doctrine. One of the rights of free thought is to decide how to rank our values. It is something else for a religious group to decide politics are more important than religion. That’s just corruption. Were these guys corrupt before hand or did the GOP corrupt them? Just wondering.

What gives me the willies
Genetic tinkering gives Nicholas Kristof the willies.

My concern is ... with the possibility that we will irreversibly change what it is to be human. Geneticists have tried to improve apples over the last 50 years, producing larger, prettier species that just aren't as tasty or as interesting as they used to be; it would be a tragedy if we did to humans what we've done to apples.

The fact Nick Kristof worries whether in some dystopic future people will be as tasty as they used to be is much, much too much information about how Nick's mind works. That gives me the willies.

Tangled Bank
Wolverine Tom has the latest Tangled Bank. Tangled Bank is the science geeks' "Carnival of the Vanities". For those of you who haven't run across the carnival phenomenon in blogging, a word of explanation is in order.

A carnival is a weekly showcase of good weblog writing, selected by the authors themselves (that's the vanity part). Each week, one of our crew will highlight a collection of interesting weblog articles in one convenient place, making it easy for everyone to find the good stuff.

I've been following the Tangled Bank since it started and have discovered some great science and politics of science bloggers through it.

I'm bringing up the Tangled Bank both because I think you should be reading it and because I have a self-serving interest in it. The next installment of Tangled Bank will be hosted by a non-scientist, a self-proclaimed grumpy liberal and under-employed history guy. I'll let you guess who that might be.

Trouble on the Res
When Bush appeared before the Unity: Journalists of Color convention two weeks ago and responded to a question about what tribal sovereignty meant in the 21st century with: "Tribal sovereignty means just that; it's sovereign. You're a -- you've been given sovereignty, and you're viewed as a sovereign entity" most of us snickered and filed it away as just another example of what an inarticulate boob he is. But some people bristled on a more fundamental level.

One word caused the most stir.

A five-letter word that George W. Bush uttered 3,000 miles away, one week ago today, at a gathering of minority journalists.

A word that has since raised eyebrows across Indian country, and one that, almost immediately after leaving the president's lips, had Democrats licking theirs:

Given.

[...]

To many Native Americans -- and Democrats, alike -- the president's answer spoke volumes about what they see as his ignorance of Indian issues. And to many, the operative word in Bush's response was the verb "given."

Native Americans feel that sovereignty is an innate state, an inalienable right; it is not a gift from the great white father. To suggest such a thing is to undermine the ultimate base from which their group identities and rights spring. Gifts can be taken back. It's not a slip of the tongue that can be easily overlooked or ignored.

Bush's verbal slip isn't the only problem Republicans are facing with Native Americans this year. In many ways their problems with Native Americans parallel their problems with other minorities. A certain portion of every minority is rich, culturally conservative, or owns businesses. These sub-groups should be a natural constituency for Republicans. But for over thirty years these voters have given the majority of their votes to Democrats for the simple reason that Republican pandering to racists, religious bigots, and immigrant haters drives them away. The same strategy that made the Republicans the dominant party in the South makes them repulsive to most minorities.

The conventional wisdom is that this will be a very close election. Though some have debated that interpretation, it’s wise for both campaigns to act as if it will be and to contest every vote. The idea that this will be a close vote lends special weight to small, cohesive constituencies. Any move that will grab a thousand votes at a time is better than converting one at a time, but any such move has the potential of alienating another constituency.

Though Native Americans are a cohesive group large enough to tip the balance in any one of a half dozen Western states, any Republican move toward courting their vote runs the risk of offending their core constituency, defensive, white males. Nowhere is this problem worse than in South Dakota.

South Dakota has about 16,000 Native American voters. In the last few elections, the precincts encompassing the Pine Ridge Reservation were among the last to report election results. These were very close elections. As more districts reported, the safer the Republican candidates looked. Then the overwhelmingly Democratic Pine Ridge Votes came in, reversing the results. Tim Johnson was elected to the Senate in 2002 by 524 votes. Stephanie Herseth, won the state's only House seat earlier this summer by less than 3,000 votes. A similar situation removed Slade Gorton from Washington’s delegation in 2000. These last minute reversals did not go over well with the angry white guy voters.

Of Johnson’s election Robert Novak said on Crossfire: "(Republican candidate John) Thune would have been elected to the state's other Senate seat, but the election was stolen by stuffing ballot boxes on Indian reservations.” Despite protests by the Governor of South Dakota and other state Republicans, Novak refused to apologize for his unfounded characterization and even repeated it. National Review repeated the accusation in a long article, making it a permanent part of the Conservative persecution mythos.

The Native Americans' struggle for voting rights in the West in many ways parallels the Black voters in the South. Among my books I have a 1902 geography text that includes a table of voting rights in the 44 states. Many Southern and Western states have poll taxes and literacy tests. Many states exclude felons, duelists, the insane, paupers, and the military from the vote. California excludes the Chinese. Most Western states exclude Indians. Though federal law guaranteed reservation Indians the vote in 1939, many Western states used a variety of tactics to make voting difficult right up to the present day.

When Edna Weddell, a Yankton Sioux tribal elder who gets around with a walker, tried to vote in South Dakota this month, a poll worker stopped her. She had to produce a photo ID first, she was told. Ms. Weddell's granddaughter pointed out that South Dakota law allows voters who do not have an ID with them to sign an affidavit instead, but the poll worker would not budge. Ms. Weddell was forced to retrieve her ID from home before she was allowed to vote.

Last year, after Indians had made the difference in Senator Johnson's election, the Republican-controlled State Legislature passed a new voter ID law that posed a particular hardship for Indians, who often do not have driver's licenses. They were assured that the new law would not present a problem, since it stated that any voter without ID "may complete an affidavit" instead. But many Indians were concerned that poll workers, who are often hostile to them, would ignore that provision.

That seems to be precisely what happened on June 1, and voting rights activists do not believe the mistakes in applying the law were accidental. As evidence, they have produced instructions used in Corson County on Election Day, apparently written by the Corson County auditor, saying: "Some voters are reporting that ID is not required. Please inform the voters that ID is in fact required." South Dakota Secretary of State Chris Nelson insists that county auditors were all properly trained on the new law. In Corson County, "the auditor chose to add some additional instructions," he says. "I don't know why."

That was this June. Other tricks include making registration difficult and inconvenient and gerrymandering districts (useful for limiting Native American influence in state politics, but less useful in national elections). Though in the past, both parties have been guilty of trying to keep Native Americans away from the polls, today it most often the Republicans who do so. Any outreach that they try to make to minority groups runs afoul of their largest constituency, rural White males.

If some of this sounds familiar, it should. For years it has been a standard talking point among Republicans and Conservative talking heads that Democrats can’t win an election based on white males alone. To most of us this sounds as if they are saying that only White males are “real” American voters and women, non-Whites, non-English speakers, non-Christians, recent immigrants, and city folk are “special interests.” When called on it, the talking heads protest that’s not what they meant, they were just sayin’, you know?

Sadly for them we do know. So too do the voters who are not native born, White, male, Christian, English speakers. And that’s the biggest problem the Republican Party faces in the West and elsewhere. Though they like to pull out the red and blue map and crow over how big their part is, the truth is the Republican Party has tied its fortunes to a shrinking constituency.

Great. Just bloody great
The Iranian government has announced that it might be willing to start Bush’s next war for him.

Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani warned that Iran might launch a preemptive strike against US forces in the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities.

"We will not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly," Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV when asked if Iran would respond to an American attack on its nuclear facilities.

[…]

Shamkhani, who was asked about the possibility of an American or Israeli strike against Iran's atomic power plant in Bushehr, added: "We will consider any strike against our nuclear installations as an attack on Iran as a whole, and we will retaliate with all our strength.

Very few of us on the left would be able to protest against a war in response to another country attacking our armed forces, even if was perfectly clear that they were manipulated into doing so. I’m sure Wolfowitz and the other planners at the Pentagon are grateful to Minister Shamkhani for laying out just what they need to do in order to have a war with Iran and make it Iran’s fault.

I’m back. Don’t pay the ransom
This couldn’t have come at a worse time. With so much happening in the news, my employers have actually demanded that I do some work for my paycheck (the bastards!). Though looking at from today’s perspective, I’m not sure I would have provided anything more than cheerleader noises.

It has been exciting, hasn’t it? Kerry hit back at the Swifties and hit back hard. The mainstream press is doing the job that we so often complain they’re unwilling to do. The fight is still going on and it will no doubt be a week or more before we can tell who got he worst from it. It might be November before we know.

I want to make two points here. First, we Blogistanis give the mainstream press a lot of grief for engaging in “he said/she said” reporting. That is, just reporting what the sides say, never digging any further, never pointing out inconsistencies or falsehoods, the latter in a misguided attempt at objectivity. We need to send some positive reinforcement to those outlets that have done their job. Top on the list are the Washington Post, the New York Times, Chris Matthews, Knight Ridder Press, and the Chicago Tribune.

My second point is, however fun this has been, it has no bearing at all on the problems we face now and will face over the next four years. Rather than tracking down every loose end on the Swiftie story, we need to turn our attention back to issues that matter a quickly as possible. Although this brou-ha-ha has been a genuine threat to the Kerry campaign, once it has been dealt with the longer term effects of it has been to force Kerry to spend money he would better have saved for October and to distract the rest of the country from the miserable job Bush is doing.

A little righteous indignation is good for the blood circulation from time to time, but now we need to get back to work driving Bush from office in shame.