Tag Archives: Politics

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Game Change

Game Change, the Jay Roach film based on the much ballyhooed book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, is basically a love song for hacks.  The film, as one might surmise, is politics in its very soul – but politics in a very DC sort of sense.  This is after all, the Washington DC that saw Bill Clinton’s adultery as a far greater sin than Ronald Reagan funding the rape and murder of Catholic missionaries in El Salvador, that continued to pass of Hermain Cain as a conservative wunderkind not until he proved his lack of basic knowledge on Libya, but when it turned out he like to boink.  There is a claim that DC cares more about politics than other towns – which is partially true, but it is more knee deep in the tactics on the Hill than any sort of curiosity about what they are fighting for.  I know living here, I have seen motorcades passing by – but who knew the world the tinted windows covered was no more sophisticated than 8th grade?  Judging by the information contained in Game Change, a film which benefits greatly from competent direction and acting that is better than the material, Halperin and Heilemann had the best seat in the house for the 2008 campaign but could only deliver with spreading nasty rumors about the girls they saw.  This is not to say that the film is not well made.  It absolutely lives up to HBO’s standards for production and acting and whatnot – and this has to be vastly superior to the book considering how much Moore and Harrelson bring to their characters, and how little curiosity the writers seem to show for anything that would actually be interesting or insightful.

Woody Harrelson plays Steve Schmidt – who has remade himself as MSNBC’s Republican Primary version of Hubie Brown – a campaign strategist left over from the Bush days who gets called by John McCain (Ed Harris) to try to help the campaign.  In this moment, we hear Schmidt talk about how Obama lacked experience while McCain was an American hero and he wants to help the team and so-forth.  And that basically is the extent of the politics in the film – and things shift into the very interior world of running a campaign.  Apparently, McCain is struggling along with Obama getting the large convention bump and so on and so on – and so there has to be something to counterract it.  Steve Schmidt of course has the brilliant idea – bring in the governor of Alaska.  Here, the movie is skillful in displaying the calculation.  The team is looking at numbers and the news cycle, and trying to win the everyday campaign.  There is an absence of a larger context – perhaps since for these people there IS no larger context.  Indeed, the authors of the book bring no such insight to the table.  In some ways, the movie would have benefited from eliminating the McCain character entirely.  Ed Harris brings little to the role here, and the filmmakers and the book’s authors have no interest in portraying him as anything other than the heroic news clippings that make Chris Matthews drool.

Of course, with this choice comes the entrance into the arena of Ms. Palin (Julianne Moore) herself.  Palin I believe, is none too pleased about her portrayal here.  Actually I think Roach is far more sympathetic to Palin than Halperin and Heilemann are.  As a matter of fact, considering their gleeful disparaging of Elizabeth Edwards, one can surmise that there is a bit of a misogynistic streak in how they regard women working in the arena in general.  The Palin story of course needs no rehashing here, and Juliane Moore – seasoned pro that she is – does not attempt to strike a perfect impersonation.  Tina Fey has that covered.  Instead Moore suggests the Palin personality, and in the limited things the screenplay allows her to show, you get a sense of a woman who got the call from the big leagues, and slowly started to recognize and exploit what a big deal she was.  She did not ask for this, but the McCain campaign was trying to have it both ways – have her be the running mate for their base, PR flunky reasons, but limit her power to actually act like somebody important.  Needless to say, Palin – like anybody in that position – resisted.  Moore’s performance is heroic here, in fewer quiet moments, suggesting some depth and feeling without the screenplay offering her much help.  Halperin and Heilemann want us to think that she is the cartoon character depicted in the media – but Moore resists.

Indeed, Palin becomes more difficult to handle, and by the end, we are asked to sympathize with Schmidt’s regret for his decision.  However, I just got the sense he was upset that they lost – and for those who lived in that time, it’s not like Palin was causal – preventing a perfectly heroic angel from winning what was entitled to him.  That, like much of DC politics is also invented claptrap.  But of course, this is a Beltway insider book, so what did we expect?  I was glad I saw the movie, if nothing else to sate my curiosity.  However, the screenplay David Mamet wrote for the fictional Wag the Dog contains far more insight about politics, and the PR folks who shine their shoes and the court stenographers.  It is amazing yet totally unsurprising that the book Heilemann and Halperin wrote made such a splash – full of sound and fury and rumor signifying nothing.

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A Brief Moment of Advocacy

In the past, we have discussed the wonder of new diversity that food trucks have brought DC.  Title 24 is being debated by the City Council to make it easier for mobile dining vendors to keep operating in the city.  Of course, the lobby for the restaurant industry is fighting this – claiming that this is an unfair stealing of customers.  Obviously, this is stupid – and anti-small business and anti-consumer.  And, let’s face it, it’s not as if people will stop investing in DC because of a few trucks to help make lunch more bearable for office workers.  Anyway, today is the last day to voice support (or opposition if you do hate small businesses and consumers) for Title 24.  I don’t pimp political advocacy causes at all – and I have no horse in the race aside from a personal stake in tasty lunches – so I hope that if you clicked here, you’d click below as well and make your feelings known.

http://yesontitle24.com/

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Lawyers Aren’t Evil, Except When They Are

Well the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility concluded its audit on Jay Bybee and John Yoo.  On the surface, the finding that no disciplinary action will be taken SEEMS like a win for torture (well that and Barack Obama’s support of just letting go) – that the DoJ did not do their job.  To the contrary – actually Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis was right on the money.  This was a disciplinary hearing – not a trial, and lawyers write these rules.  Why would they write rules to make doing their job difficult?  So of course, to be found irresponsible, you’d have to be not just a total boob, but legitimately evil, as Jack Balkin, Yale law professor deftly explains (h/t Greenwald):

I know what you are probably saying: shouldn’t every government lawyer have to live up to this standard? Of course, they should, but the point is that this is a disciplinary proceeding. It’s not about what people should do, but about how badly they have to screw things up before they are subject to professional sanctions.

Instead, Margolis argues that, judging by (among other things) a review of D.C. bar rules, the standard for attorney misconduct is set pretty damn low, and is only violated by lawyers who (here I put it colloquially) are the scum of the earth. Lawyers barely above the scum of the earth are therefore excused.

Margolis concludes that Yoo and Bybee exercised poor judgment and made bad legal arguments. But lawyers often make arguments that are bad or even laughably bad, and this by itself does not violate the very low standard set by rules of professional responsibility. These rules are set up by jurisdictions to weed out the worst offenders, leaving the rest of the legal profession to make entirely stupid, disingenuous and asinine arguments that normal people with functioning moral consciences would not make. That is to say, rules of professional misconduct are aimed at weeding out sociopaths and people driven to theft and egregious incompetence by serious drug and alcohol abuse problems; they do not guarantee that lawyers will do right by their clients, or, in this case, by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America. In effect, by setting the standard of conduct so low, rules of professional conduct effectively work to protect all those lawyers out there whose moral standing is just a hair’s breadth above your average mass murderer. This is how the American legal profession simultaneously polices and takes care of its own.

So yeah, John Yoo might be a crazy evil man with weirdo beliefs about the presidency and torture.  But he did not violate his duty.  Read the entire Balkin piece, trust me.

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Wow! I Can Enslave My Cousin??

Really?  That’s what Maine Senator Susan Collins told me.  OK, maybe she didn’t but she did point out an issue with interrogating the underpants bomber:

This failure occurred when the Obama Justice Department unilaterally decided to treat this foreign terrorist as an ordinary criminal.

Abdulmutallab was questioned for less than one hour before the Justice Department advised him that he could remain silent and offered him an attorney at our expense.

Once afforded the protection our Constitution guarantees American citizens, this foreign terrorist ‘lawyered up’ and stopped talking.

So the Constitution only applies to citizens?  Really?  Wow this will surprise my friends who came here to go to school.  They should be especially worried that the slave amendments do not apply to them.  I guess this means they can sell themselves into slavery (maybe to a college chum) if they have trouble making rent – so might not be all bad.

Glenn Greenwald covers the case law so I won’t rehash this here, but how does an elected official not know that the Constitution, unless noted specifically, applies to non-citizens in the US?  Let’s put it this way – Gitmo was invented so there would be a non US location so the detainees lack of rights could be justified by Bush (and the current White House has not changed that mindset).  This sort of fear mongering and abject stupidity is – well it’s typical of discourse today – like freezing spending in a depressed economy or something.

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Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission

Well, predictably the political world is up in arms over the Supreme Court’s surprisingly wide ranging 5-4 vote saying that restricting corporate contributions to campaigns is a violation of the First Amendment.  Keith Olbermann on his show referred to it as the Dred Scott of our time.  Overall, this seems like a bit of a stretch.  First, some background.  Citizens United is a nonprofit dedicated to some sort of flimflam, and they produced some snuff propaganda film about Hillary Clinton.  The Federal Election Commission basically banned its airing on the basis of it being intended solely as an attack on a candidate – undue corporate influence of the political process.  And so up the chain of justice they went.  The 5-4 vote itself was not a surprise.  The usual Scalia-Roberts-Thomas-Alito block voted in favor of the Citizens United.  The usual Ginsburg-Breyer bloc voted in favor of the FEC.  Sotomayor, new but kind of all over the place in her past rulings, joined the Breyer factions, and that left Stevens and Kennedy as the main guys.  Kennedy has been against these sorts of restrictions for years, as Jonathan Turley points out:

The result is seismic for opening up elections to corporate spending. It is also a case of Justice Kennedy finally achieving a majority after voting against these limitations in 1990. While Justice Sandra Day O’Connor later changed her position to uphold campaign financing, Kennedy has remained firm that such limits run counter to the first amendment. He believes that public policy can be achieved through transparency provisions: “The government may regulate corporate political speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements, but it may not suppress that speech altogether.”

The opinions offer strikingly different views of the First Amendment with Stevens writing: “The basic premise underlying the court’s ruling is its iteration, and constant reiteration, of the proposition that the First Amendment bars regulatory distinctions based on a speaker’s identity, including its ‘identity’ as a corporation.” While that glittering generality has rhetorical appeal, it is not a correct statement of the law.”

What is interesting about the criticism of the ruling is that most of what I have seen comes from the CONSEQUENCES of the ruling.  It’s not that corporations have no more limits to flush elections with cash, it is that the Republicans have a better mechanism with it.  Nothing prevents FOX from flooding FOX News with more propaganda, but nothing stops George Soros either.  The ruling is very close – but not the partisan hackery that it seems.  This was legitimately difficult – and with the establishment of corporate personhood in 1886 (in the most weird of ways), I am not sure the Court’s ruling can be called immoral. (it can be challenged intellectually, but I am too dumb to participate in that debate)

Really the ruling is not the end of the world – as long as disclosure laws with teeth are in place.  Really this ruling would be quite benign if we had more than the 1.3 or so political parties we do have.  Let’s say we had 10 political parties.  You would think some of the ten would refuse KBR’s money.  That would be a differentiator!  But now with so little to differentiate the parties (despite the paradoxical mega partisanship), interests can flood both parties equally and corrupt them further.  There are concerns about foreign interests, but could Joe Lieberman really be any more in the bag for Iraq than he already is?  Ultimately this is a tough civil liberties ruling – and restraint with the First Amendment is always best.

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Eric Holder – When Political Expedience Still Gets You Hassled

I remember checking on Daily Kos as the 2008 election of Barack Obama neared.  And to be fair, it’s not just them.  Talking Points Memo, you name it – a progressive savior had come!  Of course, the euphoria of his personal story, his oratory, his passion and intelligence were the headline stories, as they should have been.  I remember having read his enlightening Dreams from my Father (compared to the other book, which is more of campaign oratory) and identified with his search for meaning and where he fit in socio-culturally and reconciling that with the man that he was.  However, on the campaign trail, what we saw was a very organized, pragmatic and close to the vest campaign.  There was the obvious kumbaya sort of sentiments that were the spiritual underpinning of his campaign – but if one looked harder in retrospect, there was a candidate who was thoughtful and considered, but also did not like to put himself on the button.

Since Obama’s ascension to the White House, his own moves have been a study in non-boldness.  Whether it be asking for too little money in the stimulus, or refusing to constructively suspend enforcement of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, or whether it has been cutting deals with pharma companies to make sure health care reform would not drive their prices down – there is an accomodationist streak that is refreshing on one level but maddening on another.  Most of this is done in the name of bi-partisanship – but the result has been things like a dangerously emasculated health care bill.    And does it make Obama more favored among the GOP, especially the boisterous?  Put simply, no.

In a way this is what makes the hearings today with Attorney General Eric Holder so darkly amusing.  Obviously the hearing is to cover the decision to put Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to trial – in a United States Courtroom – to an impartial jury.  But really, this is merely a subset of the Guantanamo Bay detainees.  As President Obama has outlined, it is not as if a large number of the detainees will get trials, or even the chance to really challenge their imprisonment even if not charged with anything.  Holder maintains that detainees accused of attacking overseas military targets will get military tribunals, which makes sense on the surface, but is really just an arbitrary distinction.  This administration is still codifying the notion of internment camps – just for Muslims and not the Japanese.  Put simply, aside from some slightly prettier language, this is not at all different from the Bush Jr. policies.  Yet Holder gets pilloried anyway by the likes of brain dead Chuck Grassley.

What is hard to understand is why our courts are not good enough to successfully try the accused.  Why are our federal prosecutors incapable of winning trials in court with normal standards of evidence?  Why the presumption of guilt for detainees when their record on habeas hearings is so good?  Must this country, the beacon of morality and democracy, resort to third world despot tactics to get allegedly rubber stamp guilty criminals convicted?  Just another case of the Democrats acting like pretend Republicans – and still getting called evil anyway.

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Racists Getting a Jolt of Joementum

OK. Chutzpah is a good word.  Chutzpah is actively campaigning against a majority party’s candidate while begging for a Senate chairmanship.  Chutzpah is threatening to filibuster against the party’s pet bill – a historic bill no less.  But chutzpah is one thing.  Racism is another.  Take it away, Israel’s United States Senator:

So the Fort Hood shooter is Muslim.  He is also a member of the military, which is no stranger to religious indoctrination.  And, perhaps, he was crazy, which trascends any other demographic slice that matters.  Sigh.

Update: Obama has an answer, though not optimistic it will help …