Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 131

Is Terrorism being used to erode free speech rights?

Last week at NYU Law School, I was on a panel -- along with NYU Law Professor Burt Neuborne, Chicago Law Professor Geoffrey Stone, and FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force Supervsiory Agent Niall Brennan, moderated by Time's Barton Gellman -- which examined whether the threat of Terrorism was being exploited to erode core First Amendment/free speech rights, including the First Amendment right to advocate violence as recognized by the 1969 Supreme Court case Brandenburg v. Ohio.  The 1-hour event -- which contained discussion of Obama's assassination program and Anwar al-Awlaki -- is worth listening to.  The video is below.  My initial presentation was the last one of the four panelists and begins at 30:00, and a quick rebuttal from me of a few of the other panelists' points begins at 50:50. 

At roughly 53:00, the Q-and-A session with the audience began, and the first questioner was NPR's national security reporter Dina Temple-Raston, whose Awlaki reporting I had criticized just a couple days earlier for uncritically repeating claims told to her by anonymous Pentagon officials.  She directed her rather critical multi-part question to me, claiming, among other things, that she had seen evidence of Awlaki's guilt as a Terrorist (which she had not previously reported or described in any detail), and that led to a rather contentious -- and, in my view, quite revealing -- exchange about the role of journalists and how Awlaki can and should be punished if he is, in fact, guilty of any actual crime:

The perniciousness of Blue Dogs

Below is the video of the 12-minute segment I did last night on MSNBC with Lawrence O'Donnell, continuing the debate we began about Blue Dogs last Friday on Morning Joe.  This was a much more civil and therefore more constructive and substantive discussion, which is a good thing.  The topics we discussed are purely political in the narrowest sense of that word -- Why did Democrats lose?  What effect do Blue Dogs have?  What's the real Blue Dogs agenda?  Can Democrats win without them?, etc. -- and are therefore quite limited in scope.  Needless to say, it's my view that the Democratic Party has serious problems and deficiencies far beyond the faction calling itself "Blue Dogs."  When I was in Wisconsin last week, I did a 20-minute radio interview with Progressive Magazine Editor Matthew Rothschild that covered many more topics, and that can be heard here:

Government harassing and intimidating Bradley Manning supporters

(updated below)

In July of this year, U.S. citizen Jacob Appelbaum, a researcher and spokesman for WikiLeaks, was detained for several hours at the Newark airport after returning from a trip to Holland, and had his laptop, cellphones and other electronic products seized -- all without a search warrant, without being charged with a crime, and without even being under investigation, at least to his knowledge.  He was interrogated at length about WikiLekas, and was told by the detaining agents that he could expect to be subjected to the same treatment every time he left the country and attempted to return to the U.S.  Days later, two FBI agents approached him at a computer conference he was attending in New York and asked to speak with him again.  To date, he has never been charged with any crime or even told he's under investigation for anything; this was clearly a thuggish attempt by federal officials to intimidate any American citizen involved with or supporting WikiLeaks.

That campaign of intimidation is now clearly spreading to supporters of Bradley Manning.  Last Wednesday, November 3, David House, a 23-year-old researcher who works at MIT, was returning to the U.S. from a short vacation with his girlfriend in Mexico, and was subjected to similar and even worse treatment.  House's crime:  he did work in helping set up the Bradley Manning Support Network, an organization created to raise money for Manning's legal defense fund, and he has now visited Manning three times in Quantico, Virginia, where the accused WikiLeaks leaker is currently being detained (all those visits are fully monitored by government agents).  Like Appelbaum, House has never been accused of any crime, never been advised that he's under investigation, and was never told by any federal agents that he's suspected of any wrongdoing at all.

Last Wednesday, House arrived at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, and his flight was met in the concourse by customs agents, who examined the passports of all deplaning passengers until they saw House's, at which point they stopped.  He was then directed to Customs, where his and his girlfriend's bags were extensively searched.  After the search was complete, two men identifying themselves as Homeland Security officials told House and his girlfriend they were being detained for questioning and would miss their connecting flight.  House was told that he was required to relinquish all of his electronic products, and thus gave them his laptop, cellphone, digital camera and UBS flash drive.  The document he received itemizing his seized property is here.  He was also told to give the agents all of his passwords and encryption keys, which he refused to do.

House was then taken to a detention room by two armed agents and on his way there, he passed by a room in which several individuals were plugging various instruments into his laptop and cellphone.  The two agents, Marcial Santiago and Darin Louck, proceeded to question him for 90 minutes about why he was visiting Manning in prison, what work he did to support the Manning campaign, who else was involved in the Manning support group, and what his views were on WikiLeaks.  He was told that he would not receive his laptop or camera back, and the agents kept it.  To date, he has not received them back and very well may never.  When he told them that he had roughly 20 hours of source code work in his laptop and would like to save it or email it to a saved site, they told him he could not do that.  He subsequently learned from Agent Santiago that although Agent Louck identified himself as a Homeland Security agent, he is, in fact, with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.

What's going on is here obvious.  The Federal Government has the authority to conduct border searches of people entering the country that are far broader than for those inside the country, and such searches require no search warrant.  The Government has that power in order to prevent security threats from entering the country, but here, they are clearly exploiting and abusing it in order to conduct investigative searches which would ordinarily require a search warrant but for which they have no basis to obtain one (in his effort to justify what he did in turning in Manning, Adrian Lamo -- the least credible person on the planet -- has been attempting to convince federal authorities that WikiLeaks is not merely a publisher of classified information, but an "espionage" ring that affirmatively induces leaks, thus enabling its prosecution; to achieve that, he has repeatedly claimed, without a shred of evidence, that MIT students actively assisted Manning in obtaining and leaking the information; in any event, House is not and never was an MIT student).  American citizens who are charged with no crime and not under investigation should not have their laptops permanently seized and searched by law enforcement officials in the absence of reasonable suspicion that they did something wrong.

The real purpose of this conduct is to intimidate and deter anyone from being involved in any way with WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning.  And it works.  I had been invited to go and speak with Manning at Quantico, and still fully intend to do that -- I think Manning, if he did what he's accused of, is the most heroic political figure of the last decade at least -- but of course incidents like these, as intended, implant in your brain the fear that if you do go visit Manning -- or if you donate money to his legal defense fund, donate to WikiLeaks, or otherwise support them in any manner whatsoever -- then you, too, will be put on some list and have your property seized and searched with no search warrant when entering the country, and otherwise harassed and intimidated by the Executive Branch's police agencies.  It's bad enough that the Obama administration has escalated attacks on whistle-blowers through vastly increased prosecutions, but this level of intimidation is clearly targeting legitimate political activity.  It now goes far beyond prosecuting whistle-blowers and is intended to harass and deter those who are merely supportive of them.

 

UPDATE:  I just want to underscore how abusive this all is.  Totally independent of the intimidation aspects -- which are the worst part of this -- just consider what an absolute mockery this makes of the Constitution.  If House (or Appelbaum) had been inside the U.S., the Government would have never have been able to search or seize their laptops because the Fourth Amendment prohibits that behavior without a search warrant, which they obviously can't obtain.  So instead, the Government just waits for them to leave the country -- which many many people do these days -- and then seizes their belongings and searches all of their communications upon their return, without a shred of judicial review or any basis to establish wrongdoing.  What conceivable purpose is there in having a Fourth Amendment if it can be so easily circumvented this way through the blatant abuse of border searching powers?

Jim Webb on Democrats and Wall Street

In an interview with Real Clear Politics, Democratic Sen. Jim Webb provides just the latest whiff of what the Democratic Party has become:

Webb is a Reagan Democrat who returned home. He was Ronald Reagan's Navy secretary. Almost two decades later, he was the Democrat who scrapped out a win in Virginia.

Webb seems less at home today. He identifies himself as a Democrat. But he has few Democratic leaders to identify with. . . .

Webb's one of the last FDR Democrats. An economic populist. Liberals also admire the populist Webb. The same cannot be said for the Democratic establishment. Webb has pushed for a onetime windfall profits tax on Wall Street's record bonuses. He talks about the "unusual circumstances of the bailout," that the bonuses wouldn't be there without the bailout.

"I couldn't even get a vote," Webb says. "And it wasn't because of the Republicans. I mean they obviously weren't going to vote for it. But I got so much froth from Democrats saying that any vote like that was going to screw up fundraising.

"People look up say, what's the difference between these two parties? Neither of them is really going to take on Wall Street. If they don't have the guts to take them on, and they've got all these other programs that exclude me, well to hell with them. I'm going to vote for the other people who can at least satisfy me on other issues, like abortion. Screw you guys. I understand that mindset." 

Undoubtedly, some of the motivation for this complaint is political:  Webb barely won in 2006, and just watched as his state, which voted for Obama a mere two years ago, turned almost completely red in this last election.  He obviously knows that he has no chance of being re-elected unless he seriously separates himself from the Party and the White House.  Still, what caused Jim Webb to switch in the first place to the Democratic Party was (1) his vehement opposition to the Iraq War and (2) his perception that the GOP had become the party-servants of Wall Street and was ignoring (and trampling upon) the interests of working class Americans.  That he is now emphatically complaining that Democrats are just as guilty of (2) ought to be taken quite seriously.

One other point about this article:  the author (David Paul Kuhn), previously of Politico, included this exceedingly strange though revealing and typical passage:

Yet liberals often seem to view Webb's breed of Democrat more like frenemies. There was Glenn Greenwald, typical among many liberal writers the morning after the election, explaining why he viewed "last night's Blue Dog losses with happiness." This is par for partisan flanks. We saw it on the right this year, when tea party activists savored the defeat of Delaware moderate Republican Mike Castle, though it cost Republicans a critical Senate seat.

Leave to the side the fact that Webb is one of the politicians I've most lavishly praised (see here:  "There are few things rarer than a major politician doing something that is genuinely courageous and principled, but Jim Webb's impassioned commitment to fundamental prison reform is exactly that" and here:  "in a rational or honorable world, those who knowingly subjected themselves to an onslaught of vicious attacks from all corners for having been so right, such as Jim Webb  -- and Howard Dean -- would be heralded as the serious and wise leaders whose judgment can be trusted").  Also leave to the side the trite, anti-democratic Beltway contempt for supporting only those politicians who advocate views one likes, while opposing those with views one dislikes, regardless of party identity (ironically, the willingness to oppose such politicans from "one's own party" -- such as Blue Dogs -- is the exact opposite, by definition, of what those on the "partisan flanks" would do); that's more or less the topic I hope to discuss with Lawrence O'Donnell tonight if he can free himself from the type of substance-free, self-centered, personalized drama in which he seems to be wallowing.

What's most notable and bizarre about this passage is that Kuhn equates Webb's anti-Wall-Street economic populism with "Blue Dogs," and thus understands "Webb's breed of Democrat" to be Blue Dogs.  Blue Dogs are the very opposite of that.  They are not moderates or centrists or even conservatives; above all else, they are Wall Street and corporate servants, loyalists to the lobbyist class, which is why they've been so well-funded.  Jim Webb's anger with the Democratic Party for being so servile to Wall Street doesn't make him a Blue Dog; it makes him an anti-Blue-Dog.  Webb's grievances with the Party's economic policies are grounded in everything the Blue Dogs (though by no means only them) represent and do.  To equate Webb's anti-Democratic-Party critique with the "ideology" of Blue Dogs is to evince an extraordinary (though quite common) confusion about the debates and divisions within the Democratic Party.

* * * * *

Speaking of whiffs of the Democratic Party, U.S. District Court Judge John Bates yesterday held a three-hour hearing over the request by the ACLU and CCR for an injunction ordering President Obama not to assassinate Anwar Awlaki without due process.  The fact that the Bush-43-appointed Bates spent so much time on this hearing, demonstrates -- along with comments he made during the hearing -- how seriously he takes this case, as well he should.  He several times pointed out how extraordinary and unprecedented is the Obama administration's position that it not only has the power to assassinate Americans with no due process, but that courts have no role whatsoever to play in reviewing how those powers are exercised.  David Addington and Dick Cheneywould have been very proud.  My guess is that the court will refuse injunctive relief on some procedural ground -- such as ruling that Awlaki's father has no standing to bring this suit on behalf of his son -- but it is quite apparent that there are very serious legal and Constitutional issues raised by the Obama administration's attempted seizure of this power.

The self-absorption of America's ruling class

This morning we have a living, breathing embodiment of America's political culture and its ruling class:  a prototypical featured article in Politico by Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei which "reports" on the widespread anger at President Obama from -- as they put it -- "virtually every group that matters in American politics."  Who, to Politico, are the only groups that matter in American politics?  "Congressional Democrats. . .  Democratic state party leaders . . . . Democratic lobbyists . . . business leaders  . . . Republicans."  And of what does this "reporting" consist?  A bunch of petulant, cowardly royal court functionaries -- hiding as always behind "journalistic" anonymity -- whining in Politico about a series of petty ceremonial slights.  That's what makes this article such a perfect exhibit of our self-absorbed political culture, and this article will undoubtedly shape much cable news chatter for today at least.

With a massive unemployment crisis, millions of foreclosures, rampant elite lawlessness and plundering, and pervasive, severe anxiety over America's decline, this is what the "groups that matter in American politics" are anonymously complaining about:

- In July, Obama was visiting GM and Chrysler plans in the Detroit area and invited the local House member - but other Democratic lawmakers who stood to benefit from the exposure were left in the cold.

- When Obama was giving the commencement address in the University of Michigan's "Big House" stadium last May, he mingled in the home-team locker room with university deans and regents. Across the tunnel, in the visitor's locker room, several members of Michigan's Democratic congressional delegation -- including Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin and House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers Jr. -- waited patiently.

Some had brought grandchildren so they could get their picture taken with the president. But they never got to see him. Obama didn't cross the tunnel to see the lawmakers.

- In June, during an East Room reception for top supporters at Ford's Theatre, several of the attendees were disappointed that they didn't get to shake the president's hand and take a photo, as they had in the past. Instead, Obama greeted a few people down front, reaching over a rope line.

"People thought they were going to a reception with the president, not a campaign event," one attendee recalled.

- One veteran Democrat recalled a group of Obama donors who were chatting at last December's State Department holiday party, hosted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "Half of them were upset because they had not been invited to a White House party," this Democrat recalled. "The (other) half was upset because they had been invited to the White House, and were kept behind a rope line instead of getting to greet the president."

- The president invited Senate chairs and ranking members over for dinner in March 2009, but came in after they were seated and went back to the residence without shaking hands or visiting each table. . . .

Other executives complained that Obama did not do enough outreach, even after the friction became clear. And executives who did get an audience complain that he is too often behind a podium, not doing the off-the-record question-and-answer sessions that would make them feel more involved and maybe promote understanding between the two sides.

There, ladies and gentlemen, is the mentality of the "groups that matter in American politics."  That's what these people are worried about and focused on.  Some of the anti-Obama grievances cited by Politico are marginally less trivial though still on the level of political process complaints (rhetorical and communication failures on the part of the White House).  But almost all of them are voiced anonymously.  That Wall Street and other financial executives have spent the last year petulantly complaining about how unfairly they are treated -- as their wealth continues to boom while the rest of the population suffers -- was, in my view, one of the year's most vivid expressions of the degradation of America's political culture.  That "the groups that matter" are preoccupied with these sorts of prerogative-denying slights -- while Politico gives them front-page anonymity to whine about those grievances -- is definitely another.  We have the country we have because of the character of the people who run it.

* * * * * 

This is my absolute last week to finish my book and posting will therefore be light and erratic -- though not non-existent -- until next Monday.  

For now, one other event worth noting:  Lindsey Graham became the latest leading American official to prove that Iran is ruled by extremist, crazed and bellicose leaders who threaten other nations with aggression when he suggested that the U.S. would and should attack Iran "not to just neutralize their nuclear program, but to sink their navy, destroy their air force and deliver a decisive blow to the Revolutionary Guard, in other words neuter that regime."  Aren't those mullahs totally unstable and radical?  Interestingly, though, while Graham "predicted Republican support for more aggressive U.S. involvement in the world," he also "acknowledged that some new members of Congress, particularly those elected under the tea party banner, are likely to have different foreign policy views. . . . The Republican Party is going to have two wings . . . .The isolationist wing, and the wing led by [Sen. John] McCain [Ariz.], Graham and [Sen. Jeff] Sessions [Ala.] that says you'd better stay involved in the world because if you do disengage, you'll regret it." 

I'm not convinced at all that these Tea Party candidates will remotely impede American aggression:  not a single successful one of those candidates questioned, let alone opposed, the attack on Iraq, advocated for withdrawal from Afghanistan, or opposed any of the Bush/Obama executive power abuses, and more important, much of the Tea Party movement is driven by the type of crazed anti-Muslim bigotry which drives those policies.  But, interestingly, Senator-elect Rand Paul this weekend told ABC News that controlling the deficit requires real cuts to America's military spending -- a view which only a minority of Democrats are willing to express -- and also told Sam Husseini that we've been going to war too lightly and without the declarations of war and Congressional involvement which the Constitution requires.  With reports this weekend that the U.S. is operating drones in Yemen -- yet another country in which we're now waging war under the direction of the Nobel Peace laureate -- it is clear that neither the Republican nor Democratic leadership is even close to impeding American imperial adventurism.  If it is to be challenged, it will be from a combination of more severe economic distress and an ad hoc alliance from the more marginalized factions in both parties.

Lawrence O'Donnell vehemently denies his own words

On Friday morning, I had a somewhat contentious discussion on Morning Joe with MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell regarding the criticism I wrote of his election-night comments.  Salon posted the video last night -- it's here for those who haven't seen it -- and there has been extensive commentary about it in other places.  There were issues raised by this dispute that are actually substantive and important, and some of them received some worthwhile attention, but by and large, O'Donnell's refusal to cease speaking for any longer than a few seconds at a time -- the standard form of adolescent cable-TV behavior -- caused the segment to degenerate into one of those cable scream-fests which was ultimately more headache-inducing than enlightening.  I have a few comments to make about the substance of these issues -- and O'Donnell has invited me on his show on Monday night to discuss them, though it's unclear if the logistics will work out -- but first there is one point I particularly want to highlight and address.

O'Donnell repeatedly insisted that I had attributed to him views that he did not actually express, and several times repeated that he said none of what I criticized him for saying; after the segment, he continued spouting that same accusation.  As I told him both during the segment and after, only the transcript will resolve that question, and -- as I'll demonstrate in a moment -- it does.  First, here is the entirety of what I wrote about his remarks:

[A]lmost every time I had MNSBC on, there was Lawrence O'Donnell trying to blame "the Left" and "liberalism" for the Democrats' political woes. Alan Grayson's loss was proof that outspoken liberalism fails.  Blanche Lincoln's loss was the fault of the Left for mounting a serious primary challenge against her.  Russ Feingold's defeat proved that voters reject liberalism in favor of conservatism, etc. etc.

I wasn't sitting in front of the TV watching MSNBC until numerous people started emailing me and alerting me on Twitter to the fact that O'Donnell was repeatedly blaming liberalism and the Left for the Democrats' political problems.  That's how I became aware of what O'Donnell was saying.  Beyond that, here is what Salon's Editor-in-Chief Joan Walsh wrote on election night, long before I wrote a word about any of this (I hadn't read this until yesterday):

Strangely, I watched Democrats including MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell try to blame the blowout on whiny progressives.

If O'Donnell didn't actually do that, he might want to ask himself why so many people think he did.  Did huge numbers of people simultaneously suffer a mass hallucination, or did his comments -- spread out over the course of several hours that night -- create the impression that this was precisely the point he was making?

I've now been able to obtain the videotape and transcript of that evening, and here (with links to the video)  is what O'Donnell actually said regarding the three Democratic losses I referenced -- Grayson, Lincoln and Feingold:

Re: Grayson, after Olbermman announced his loss:

O'DONNELL: He was also considered a test case by many liberals making the argument that Democrats made the mistake of going too far to the middle.  Alan Grayson went very clearly to the left, and it didn't work in his district.

Re: Lincoln, after NBC projected her the loser:

O'DONNELL:  Ed, it's Lawrence O'Donnell. I want to ask you more about Blanche Lincoln.  In retrospect, does it look wise to have challenged Blanche Lincoln in a primary and weakened her, if that's what happened, given that she, in fact, did not fight health care all the way?  She was a member of the Senate Finance Committee. She voted for the Senate Finance Committee bill. She was one of the pro-choice votes in the Senate Finance Committee, where not all Democrats voted for the pro-choice components of that health care bill.

She, in fact, helped it get out on to the Senate floor. She, in fact, helped it pass on the Senate floor. She did all that. And it was judged not enough by liberals who wanted to take her out in the primary.

ED SCHULTZ: True.

O'DONNELL: They failed. They left a wounded nominee . . . . We may have elected in West Virginia a vote in favor of repealing the Obama health care bill, which Blanche Lincoln enabled to be legislated.

Re:  Feingold, after Matthews asked why he lost:

MADDOW:  The situation is that Russ Feingold never earned the loyalty of his party because he was so iconoclastic, he went his own way, he made principled votes on things like the Patriot Act   .  .  . he never earned any national favor from anyone but progressives  . . . . . he's against someone who has a ton of outside help and a ton of money.  He just didn't have anyone supporting him because the national party just never backed him up.

O'DONNELL:   What does this have to do with the argument that's going on inside the Democratic Party between progressives and others about how Democrats should run?  Did Russ Feingold lose because he wasn't liberal enough?  . . . . When we talk about money in races, we have to face the fact that it's not the full explainer that everyone thinks it is.  If money beat Russ Feingold in Wisconsin, why isn't it beating Jerry Brown in California?  . . . .. 

This is about real candidates, this is about real positions they've taken, especially if they're incumbents, like Russ Feingold, and to pretend that voting on Russ Feingold has nothing to do with his voting as an incumbent I think is to ignore the reality of life on the ballot as a Democrat in Wisconsin.. . . .

MADDOW:  If you really believe he could have campaigned his way out of this race, I'd love to hear how he could have campaigned differently in a more effective way, but I just don't see it.

O'DONNELL:  A liberal was defeated by a Republican -- by voters who had information about this one being a liberal, this one being a Republican.  We have to then assume the voters are completely irrational and don't know what they are doing, or we assume that they do know the difference between a liberal and a Republican and they made that choice, based on his being a liberal and him being a Republican, money being whatever it was in that situation.

At times, O'Donnell phrased these views in the form of rhetorical questions and, in the Wisconsin discussion specifically, disclaimed certainty about why Feingold lost, but the remarks that he made as quoted above leave no doubt as to his point.  I'm more than content to have anyone compare the summary which I wrote of his remarks to what he actually said.  What I wrote was completely accurate.  His meaning could not have been clearer, which is why so many people understood it exactly that way.

As for the substance of our discussion, O'Donnell -- in standard cable TV form -- basically had one simplistic point he repeated over and over:  exit polls show that only a small minority of voters (a) self-identify as "liberal" and (b) agree that government should do more.  There are so many obvious flaws in that "analysis."  To begin with, exit polls survey only those who vote; it excludes those who chose not to vote, including the massive number of Democrats and liberals who voted in 2006 and 2008 but stayed at home this time.  The failure to inspire those citizens to vote is, beyond doubt, a major cause of the Democrats' loss (see the first reason listed by CBS News for why the Democrats lost:  "The Democratic Base Stayed Home").  Alienating your own base by moving to the Right via Blue Dog dependency is obviously a bad electoral tactic for Democrats, and O'Donnell's little stat does nothing to negate that; to the contrary, it bolsters that point, since the Democratic base of 2006 and 2008 stayed at home this year.  O'Donnell's fixation on those who voted, while ignoring those who chose not to vote, necessarily excludes a major factor in the Democrats' loss.

But more important, voters don't think the way that cable TV personalities think.  Voters don't run around basing their vote on this type of vapid sloganeering:  who is a liberal?  who is a conservative?  who wants big government and who wants small government?  It's true that the word "liberal" has been poisoned and it's thus hardly surprising that few people embrace it as their political identity.  But, as I documented during the segment and O'Donnell steadfastly ignored, large majorities support positions routinely identified as "liberal," including the public option, greater restraints on Wall Street, preservation of Social Security and Medicare, etc.  They can say they are not "liberal" but their specific views on substance prove otherwise.

But far more important still, what voters care about are not cable-news labels, but results.  Democrats didn't lose because voters think they're too "liberal."  If that were true, how would one explain massive Democratic wins in 2006 and 2008, including by liberals in conservative districts (such as Alan Grayson); were American voters liberal in 2006 and 2008 only to manically switch to being conservative this year?  Was Wisconsin super-liberal for the last 18 years when it thrice elected Russ Feingold to the Senate, and then suddenly turned hostile to liberals this year?  Such an explanation is absurd.

The answer is that voters make choices based on their assessment of the outcomes from the political class.  They revolted against the Republican Party in the prior two elections because they hated the Iraq War and GOP corruption (not because they thought the GOP was "too conservative"), and they revolted against Democrats this year because they have no jobs, are having their homes foreclosed by the millions, are suffering severe economic anxiety, and see no plan or promise for that to change (not because they think Democrats are "too liberal").

People like Lawrence O'Donnell predictably don't understand this because none of that is happening to them.  In their world, what matters are facile, superficial political labels and trite, McGovern-era Beltway wisdom:  Dems have to Move To the Center.  But voters are rejecting Democrats because of their perceived policy failures, not because of cable news bumper stickers.  As this superb Mother Jones analysis demonstrates, the trite "wisdom" of people like O'Donnell could not be more empirically false:

The most widely accepted narrative to emerge from the 2010 midterm elections, in which Democrats took a "shellacking" and lost the most congressional seats since World War II, was this: Sick of liberal overreach, voters -- especially independents -- shifted their favor to the right, choosing Republican candidates in huge numbers.

Not so, according to a new exit poll by the firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner. The firm's findings, released Friday, show that voters weren't necessarily allying themselves with the GOP, but rather were voicing their disapproval with Washington as a whole, and especially with the federal government's inability to restart America's economic engine. To wit, voters polled gave equally poor favorability ratings to both parties as well as the tea party, the poll found.

What matters most to voters isn't political nit-picking or Washington drama but the economy, plain and simple. As pollster Stan Greenberg, a former Clinton White House staffer, put it, "While this clearly was a blow...to the president and Democrats for failing to fix the economy, there's very little indication it was an affirmation of conservative ideology and agenda. In fact, we were rather surprised in many ways at the fact that the voters, in large numbers, are still looking for larger answers to an economy that's not working for them in a situation that they find for the country very worrisome."

That jobs-centric conclusion probably isn't so revelatory for most Americans. After all, outside the Beltway, where such political narratives thrive, is where most unemployed people live. But it's a welcome corrective here in Washington, where the conventional wisdom suggests a GOP revival supposedly spurred by voters' newfound embrace of the Republican Party's ideas, however scarce they may be.

People aren't running around thinking:  who is a liberal and who is a conservative?  They're running around thinking:  we have no jobs and no economic security, and thus will punish those in power.  As I made explicitly clear in my original post about O'Donnell -- and people like this and this should learn to read a little bit better -- my objection to his comments was not that the massive loss of Blue Dogs proves that conservative Democrats can't win.  Democrats didn't lose because they're "too conservative" any more than because they are "too liberal."  My objection was that he was attempting to derive shallow meaning from the loss of specific liberal candidates -- see, voters don't like liberals! -- when that plainly was not what motivated voters; merely to negate his reasoning, I pointed out that if one did want to use O'Donnell's fundamentally flawed method (i.e., look at which candidates lost and that's how you know which ideology voters rejected), then one could far more easily make the case that they were rejecting conservative Democrats, since Blue Dogs are who bore the brunt of the bloodbath.

People are suffering economically and Democrats have done little about that.  Beyond that, they failed to inspire their own voters to go to the polls.  Therefore, they lost.  By basing their power in Congress on Blue Dog dependence -- rather than advocating for the views of their own supporters and implementing those policies -- they failed, and failed resoundingly.  Building their party around a large number of muddled, GOP-replicating corporatists not only creates a tepid and failed political image, but far worse, it prevents actual policies from being implemented that benefit large number of ordinary Americans.  Democrats repeatedly refrained from advocating for such policies in deference to their Blue Dogs, failed to do much to alleviate the economic suffering of ordinary Americans, and thus got crushed.   Anyone who thinks that Democrats lost because they were "too liberal" -- rather than because Americans are suffering so much economically -- is wildly out of touch, i.e., is a multi-millionaire cable TV personality who has spent decades wallowing in trite D.C. chatter.

The Republicans have long lived by what they call "The Buckley Rule":   always support the furthest Right candidate who can plausibly win.  This year, knowing that it would be a wave election, one that would sweep in huge numbers of Republicans in districts where they ordinarily couldn't get elected, they changed that to:  support the furthest Right candidate, period.  That's because they believe conservatism will work and want to advocate for it.  Democrats don't do that.  The DCCC constantly works to prop up the most "centrist" or conservative candidates -- i.e., corporatists -- on the ground that it's always better, more politically astute, to move to the Right.  Even in the pro-Democratic wave years of 2006 and 2008, the Democratic Party blocked actual progressives and ensured that Blue Dogs were nominated, even though the anti-GOP sentiment was so strong that any Democrat, including progressives, could have won even in red districts (as Alan Grayson proved).

With that strategy, the Democratic Party now reaps what it has sown.  Its message and identity are profoundly muddled, incoherent, unclear, uninspiring, and self-negating.  Worse, its policies are mishmashes of inept half-measures that, with a handful of exceptions, produce little good for anyone (other than Wall Street, the Pentagon and other corporate interests).  They are perceived as -- and are -- beholden to Wall Street, special interests, and the corporations they vowed to confront.  They are without any ability to confront the massive unemployment crisis and financial decline the country faces.  And as a result of all of that, they lay in shambles.  Anyone who can survey all of that and cheer for the strategy which Democrats have been pursuing -- let's build our majorities by relying on GOP-replicating corporatist Blue Dogs -- or who thinks that this election loss happened because "Democrats are too liberal," resides in a world that has very little to do with reality.  And that's true no matter how many times they repeat the simplistic snippets of exit polls to which they've obsessively attached themselves.

Greenwald vs. O'Donnell on MSNBC's "Morning Joe"

 

Progressives, Obama and the Democratic Party

Earlier today I posted video of a Civil Liberties and Terrorism speech I gave last night at the University of Wisconsin, along with some notices of events and media appearances tomorrow, but I wanted to separately post this 13-minute discussion I had on MSNBC this afternoon with Dylan Ratigan and Cenk Uygur about the Obama presidency, progressives and the Democratic Party, because I thought the discussion was quite good and touched on some important issues:

Terrorism and civil liberties speech

I'm traveling today and therefore likely unable to post, but last night I spoke at the University of Wisconsin on "Civil Liberties and Terrorism in the Age of Obama."  An article on the event from the Badger Herald is here.  The speech -- which focused on the meaning (or lack thereof) of the terms "civil liberties" and "terrorism" -- was roughly 50 minutes long and can be seen in the video below.  There was also an hour-long question-and-answer session that followed which was quite good, and although the video of the Q-and-A portion appears to be not yet available, it will be posted here once it is.  Note that I will also be on MSNBC with Dylan Ratigan at roughly 4:00 p.m. today, and on Morning Joe tomorrow morning:

Pundit sloth: Blaming the left

(updated below - Update II)

Ten minutes was the absolute maximum I could endure of any one television news outlet last night without having to switch channels in the futile search for something more bearable, but almost every time I had MNSBC on, there was Lawrence O'Donnell trying to blame "the Left" and "liberalism" for the Democrats' political woes.  Alan Grayson's loss was proof that outspoken liberalism fails.  Blanche Lincoln's loss was the fault of the Left for mounting a serious primary challenge against her. Russ Feingold's defeat proved that voters reject liberalism in favor of conservatism, etc. etc.  It sounded as though he was reading from some crusty script jointly prepared in 1995 by The New Republic, Lanny Davis and the DLC.

There are so many obvious reasons why this "analysis" is false: Grayson represents a highly conservative district that hadn't been Democratic for decades before he won in 2008 and he made serious mistakes during the campaign; Lincoln was behind the GOP challenger by more than 20 points back in January, before Bill Halter even announced his candidacy; Feingold was far from a conventional liberal, having repeatedly opposed his own party on multiple issues, and he ran in a state saddled with a Democratic governor who was unpopular in the extreme.  Beyond that, numerous liberals who were alleged to be in serious electoral trouble kept their seats: Barney Frank, John Dingell, Rush Holt, Raul Grijalva, and many others.  But there's one glaring, steadfastly ignored fact destroying O'Donnell's attempt -- which is merely the standard pundit storyline that has been baking for months and will now be served en masse -- to blame The Left and declare liberalism dead.  It's this little inconvenient fact:

Blue Dog Coalition Crushed By GOP Wave Election

Tuesday was a tough night for Democrats, as they watched Republicans win enough seats to take back the House in the next Congress and began to ponder life under a likely House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). But one group hit especially hard was the Blue Dog Coalition, with half of its members losing their seats.

According to an analysis by The Huffington Post, 23 of the 46 Blue Dogs up for re-election went down on Tuesday. Notable losses included Rep. Stephanie Herseth-Sandlin (D-S.D.), the coalition's co-chair for administration, and Rep. Baron Hill (D-Ind.), the co-chair for policy. Two members were running for higher office (both lost), three were retiring and three races were still too close to call.

The Blue Dogs, a coalition of moderate to conservative Democrats in the House, have consistently frustrated their more progressive colleagues and activists within the party . . . .

Half of the Blue Dog incumbents were defeated, and by themselves accounted for close to half of the Democratic losses. Some of us have been arguing for quite some time that the Rahm-engineered dependence on Blue Dog power is one of the many factors that has made the Democratic Party so weak, blurry, indistinguishable from the GOP, and therefore so politically inept, and would thus be stronger and better without them -- here's a 2008 Salon article I wrote making that case.  Despite viewing last night's Blue Dog losses with happiness, I wouldn't point to this outcome as vindication for my argument, as there are many complex factors that account for last night's crushing of Congressional Democrats: widespread economic suffering, anxiety over America's obvious decline, the perception that Obama has done little to undermine destructive status quo forces and much to bolster them, etc. etc.

But for slothful pundits who want to derive sweeping meaning from individual races in order to blame the Left and claim that last night was a repudiation of liberalism, the far more rational conclusion -- given the eradication of 50% of the Blue Dog caucus -- is that the worst possible choice Democrats can make is to run as GOP-replicating corporatists devoted above all else to serving corporate interests in order to perpetuate their own power: what Washington calls "centrists" and "conservative Democrats."  That is who bore the bulk of the brunt of last night's Democratic bloodbath -- not liberals.

* * * * *

One other point about the standard pundit line: for all the giddy talk about the power of the "Tea Party" -- which is, more than anything else, just a marketing tactic for re-branding the Republican Party -- the reality is that the Tea Party almost certainly cost the GOP control of the Senate. Had standard-issue GOP candidates rather than Tea Party fanatics been nominated in Delaware, Colorado, Alaska and Nevada, the Republicans would have almost certainly won those seats (in Alaska, rejecting the GOP incumbent in favor of a Tea Party candidates appears to have ensured that Lisa Murkowski will return to DC as a GOP-hating reject rather than a loyal Republican, the way Joe Lieberman returned after 2006). That's not a criticism of the Tea Party -- I think it's admirable to support candidates who represent one's views and be willing to take a few extra losses to do so -- but the Tea Party storyline from last night is one that is far from unadulterated success; in the case of Senate control, it's quite the opposite.

 

UPDATE:  On a related note, in The New York Times today, one finds the spectacle of Evan Bayh -- who gave up his Senate seat to a Republican while he frolicks around in the millions of dollars his wife receives from the health care industry -- demanding massive entitlement cuts for the poor and freezes on the pay for government workers, while also blaming the Democratic loss on the alleged fact that "we were too deferential to our most zealous supporters."  Is he referring there to the escalation in the war in Afghanistan, the massive increase in civilian-slaughtering drone attacks, the virtually wholesale embrace of the Bush/Cheney civil liberties architecture, the defense of Don't-Ask/Don't-Tell and DOMA, the multi-billion-dollar bailout of Wall Street, the failure to stem the tide of the foreclosure crisis, or the elimination of the public option?  Apparently, the lesson Evan Bayh -- and most pundits -- took from last night's results, and which they want the Party to learn, is that if only Democrats had suppressed the enthusiasm of their base just a little more, they would have won.

 

UPDATE II:  The number of Obama followers writing to me on Twitter and elsewhere telling me that left-wing critics of the President are the primary cause of last night's outcome -- rather than massive economic suffering and the actions of their Leader -- is even more than I expected.  Bizarrely, they actually seem to have convinced themselves of this; I suppose one who is desperate to cling to their leader-love will find any theory that shields him from responsibility.  Behold the supreme power of the Professional Left!!