Mirrors are magical

New Capitalist Pyramid

From Signs of the Times

via The Mahatma X Files

Old Capitalist Pyramid here.

Plus ça change...

The part of Super Tuesday I like best.

The most entertaining part of the Super Tuesday bonanza is watching the aftermath, particularly where the Reagan Republicans are concerned.

To wit, Mark R. Levin looks at the trap and decides to chew his own arm off before the jaws snap shut.

The problem is that McCain has a number of factors working against him, including his own long career of hostility toward the people he needs to win the general election. If you can't consolidate and motivate your base, you will not win the presidency. It has been his strategy to distance himself in numerous and provocative ways from his own party.

That would be because they are wingnuts and freaks. Even McCain can't stand them.

He has used the tactic of alienation to pander to constituencies outside the party.

Interesting. To Levin, ignoring the wingnut faction and actually talking to, you know, average Americans is "pandering". If he sucked up to the goofball faction, it would just be good politics. Good Republican politics.

To say, from one's computer keyboard, that the Reagan coalition should unify behind McCain to prevent the specter of a Clinton or Obama presidency is, I believe, wishful thinking.

Get that? This is how the Bushies went to war in Iraq, how the economy tanked and how they managed the US into a state the rest of the world despises. If they can't have it their way, and that means exactly their way with no deviations from their plan, they would rather sit on the curb and wish for ponies.

And we'll just keep watching as the Reagan Republicans turn the guns on themselves.

When the billionaires start getting noisy you know they're worried.

So, the billionaires have decided to take on MoveOn.org with a group of their own.

Freedom’s Watch, a deep-pocketed conservative group led by two former senior White House officials, made an audacious debut in late August when it began a $15 million advertising campaign designed to maintain Congressional support for President Bush’s troop increase in Iraq.

It debuted with a $15 million campaign.

Founded this summer by a dozen wealthy conservatives, the nonprofit group is set apart from most advocacy groups by the immense wealth of its core group of benefactors, its intention to far outspend its rivals and its ambition to pursue a wide-ranging agenda. Its next target: Iran policy.

How is this different from FOX News or the Washington Times? And they're into policy. Sounds like another organ of the American Enterprise Institute.

With a forceful message and a roster of wealthy benefactors, Freedom’s Watch has quickly emerged from the crowded field of nonprofit advocacy groups as a conservative answer to the nine-year-old liberal MoveOn.org, which vehemently opposes the Iraq war.

And who are these cats?

One benefactor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the group was hoping to raise as much as $200 million by November 2008. Raising big money “will be easy,” the benefactor said, adding that several of the founders each wrote a check for $1 million. Mr. Blakeman would not confirm or deny whether any donor gave $1 million, or more, to the organization.

Since the group is organized as a tax-exempt organization, it does not have to reveal its donors and it can not engage in certain types of partisan activities that directly support political candidates. It denies coordinating its activities with the White House, although many of its donors and organizers are well connected to the administration, including Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary.

The "Fat Cats".

For years, the group’s founders lamented MoveOn’s growing influence, derived in large part from its grass-roots efforts, especially on the debate about the Iraq war. “A bunch of us activists kept watching MoveOn and its attacks on the war, and it just got to be obnoxious,” said Mr. Sembler, a friend of Vice President Dick Cheney. “We decided we needed to do something about this, because the conservative side was not responding.”

These guys have yet to figure out that the "conservative side" has been wrong about absolutely everything for the past seven years. Notwithstanding, the members of Freedom's Watch are probably the greatest benefactors of the continuous string of Bush administration screw ups.

Mr. Blakeman and Mr. Fleischer said they intended to turn Freedom’s Watch into a permanent fixture among Washington advocacy groups, waging a “never-ending campaign” on an array of foreign policy and domestic issues. They also hope to build an active, grass-roots support network.

Grass-roots.... billionaires. Yeah right! And there are enough right-wing mouth-breathers who are dumb enough to buy into the idea.

Mr. Pariser, of MoveOn, said his group’s grass-roots membership — it claims 3.3 million members — was the envy of Freedom’s Watch. “I think people see that Freedom’s Watch is a few billionaires, and not a large, mainstream constituency,” he said.

Mr. Blakeman denied the accusation that Freedom’s Watch is a White House front group. “I don’t need their help,” he said of his former colleagues at the White House. “I don’t seek their help. And they don’t offer it.” Mr. Blakeman is a long-time friend of Ed Gillespie, the new counselor to Mr. Bush who succeeded Dan Bartlett. Mr. Blakeman said that he speaks with Mr. Gillespie, but that they are careful not to discuss the activities of Freedom’s Watch.

That's a conversation I'd really like to hear.

Mr. Fleischer said Freedom’s Watch was not coordinating with the White House and had an agenda beyond the Bush administration. “On Jan. 21, 2009, what will these critics say when we are still here, doing the same thing?” he said. “We will still be here after George Bush is gone.”

That could be wishful thinking at its finest. But more importantly, someone should remind Ari Fleischer that he isn't working for the Bush/Cheney administration anymore - he can stop lying anytime now.

I love it when the neocons try to figure out grass-roots. The concept seems to be lost on them. Grass, to take root, needs fertile ground.

Grass won't grow on a toxic waste dump.

Cry PARDON! And wear your cowardice well

Via Carson's Post, we get a Moyer's-eye-view of the Washington neo-con elite circling the GMC Yukons to keep Scooter Libby out of jail.

We have yet another remarkable revelation of the mindset of Washington's ruling clique of neoconservative elites -- the people who took us to war from the safety of their Beltway bunkers. Even as Iraq grows bloodier by the day, their passion of the week is to keep one of their own from going to jail.
[...]
One Beltway insider reports that the entire community is grieving -- "weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness" of Libby's sentence.
[...]

None seem the least weighted down by the sheer, glaring unfairness of sentencing soldiers to repeated and longer tours of duty in a war induced by deception. It was left to the hawkish academic Fouad Ajami to state the matter baldly. In a piece published on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, Ajami pleaded with Bush to pardon Libby. For believing "in the nobility of this war," wrote Ajami, Scooter Libby had himself become a "casualty" -- a fallen soldier the President dare not leave behind on the Beltway battlefield.

Not a word in the entire article about the real fallen soldiers. The honest-to-God dead, and dying, and wounded. Not a word about the chaos or the cost. Even as the calamity they created worsens, all they can muster is a cry for leniency for one of their own who lied to cover their tracks.

A graphic depiction of the neo-con elitist mind at work. The actual carnage is meaningless; the loss of one of their own, who lied to protect other liars, has them running for the cover of the very constitution they conveniently ignored for six years. Incredibly, the same neo-cons who called international treaties quaint but outdated, who defiled the rule of law and who oversaw the destruction of a society thousands of miles away are suddenly waving around legal precedences, howling that the sentence handed to a criminal is too tough.

Too tough. Would that they showed even an ounce of the same compassion for anyone outside their elitist circle. This is the "get tough on crime" crowd suddenly using words which have not appeared in their lexicon for almost a decade: clemency, leniency and pardon.

It goes beyond Libby however. As they lay secure in their beds fretting over the demise of I. Lewis Libby, aircraft fly over head and make their final approach to Dover and Andrews Air Force Bases delivering a cargo of corpses and shattered bodies, hidden from public view in an attempt to conceal the product of neo-con lies. They worry about Libby because they worry about their own exposure.

Libby is a neo-con caricature. But his conviction and sentence are the realities his supporters truly fear. If they can get him; they can get them. Libby's lies were not manufactured to protect himself; they were produced to protect others. He was a water-carrier.

Added to the injury the neo-cons feel is the process by which Libby arrived in his situation. He was pursued by a conservative prosecutor, found guilty by a jury of citizens and then sentenced by a Bush administration appointed judge. And they were not to be swayed by appeals outside the law. They have a passion for the law and the neo-cons can't stand it. The idea of getting tough on crime was meant for everyone but them.

The demands for a pardon for Libby further demonstrate the exclusionist beliefs of the neo-con elitists. They don't fight the wars they start, they don't obey the laws they write and they don't accept punishment for proven felonies. They all seem to ignore that Libby's post put him in a position of great power. He was entrusted to pursue his role within the boundaries of the law. When questioned he was expected to be truthful. His obstruction of justice is not just the felony alone; it is also a breach of the public's trust.

Bush is now caught between the real rock and a hard place. If he doesn't pardon Libby, he violates the exclusionist establishment of the neo-cons by exposing their vulnerability. If he does pardon Libby he illuminates that exclusionist establishment and everything it stands for: an elitist body, completely out of touch with life outside the precincts of the beltway.

Libby's sentence is anything but harsh. Reggie Walton went easy. He should have tossed Libby a kevlar helmet, the same sub-standard body armour US troops are expected to wear in combat and an M4 carbine. Then he should have ordered Libby to perform 3 months of community service in Kirkuk. And if he survived that, he still gets 2 1/2 years in jail, 2 years probation and a fine.

So, let the neo-cons howl for a pardon. It serves to demonstrate that their macho rhetoric was always bluster. Far from the tough-guys they hold themselves out to be, they whine and snivel and throw tantrums like an out of control two-year old. Their weakness is their cowardice and they are wearing it for all to see.

The neo-con swing and the price that goes with it

I don't know whether this is good or bad.

DISILLUSIONED supporters of President George W Bush are defecting to Barack Obama, the Democratic senator for Illinois, as the White House candidate with the best chance of uniting a divided nation.

Tom Bernstein went to Yale University with Bush and co-owned the Texas Rangers baseball team with him. In 2004 he donated the maximum $2,000 to the president’s reelection campaign and gave $50,000 to the Republican National Committee. This year he is switching his support to Obama. He is one of many former Bush admirers who find the Democrat newcomer appealing.

Matthew Dowd, Bush’s chief campaign strategist in 2004, announced last month that he was disillusioned with the war in Iraq and the president’s “my way or the highway” style of leadership – the first member of Bush’s inner circle to denounce the leader’s performance in office.

Although Dowd has yet to endorse a candidate, he said the only one he liked was Obama. “I think we should design campaigns that appeal, not to 51% of the people, but bring the country together as a whole,” Dowd said.

As curious as all this may sound, some of them have personal reasons.

Bernstein is a champion of human rights, who admires Obama’s call for action on Darfur, while Dowd’s opposition to the war has been sharpened by the expected deployment to Iraq of his son, an Arabic-speaking Army intelligence specialist.

OK. So I'm being cynical. There's more.

But last week a surprising new name joined the chorus of praise for the antiwar Obama – that of Robert Kagan, a leading neoconservative and co-founder of the Project for the New American Century in the late 1990s, which called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Kagan is an informal foreign policy adviser to the Republican senator John McCain, who remains the favoured neoconservative choice for the White House because of his backing for the troops in Iraq.

But in an article in the Washington Post, Kagan wrote approvingly that a keynote speech by
Obama at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs was “pure John Kennedy”, a neocon hero of the cold war.

In his speech, Obama called for an increase in defence spending and an extra 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 marines to “stay on the offense” against terrorism and ensure America had “the strongest, best-equipped military in the world”. He talked about building democracies, stopping weapons of mass destruction and the right to take unilateral action to protect US “vital interests” if necessary, as well as the importance of building alliances.

“Personally, I liked it,” Kagan wrote.

Disagreements on the war have not stopped John Martin, a Navy reservist and founder of the website Republicans for Obama, from supporting the antiwar senator. He joined the military after the Iraq war and is about to be deployed to Afghanistan.

“I disagree with Obama on the war but I don’t think it is a test of his patriotism,” Martin says. “Obama has a message of hope for the country.”

The swing of the neo-cons, many of whom were Democrats in a former life, is a bit surprizing, but anyone with that kind of appeal has also attracted the wrong kind of attention.

US presidential hopeful Barack Obama has been given secret service protection far earlier in the campaign than any previous candidate following worries about racist threats, officials said.

Mr Obama, who regularly draws large crowds as he campaigns to become America's first black president, requested the protection himself, the department of homeland security said last night.

The Homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, authorised this and the secret Service "is now implementing that protection", said Eric Zahren, a secret service spokesman.

[...]

Several concerns had been raised, including some racist discussions on white supremacist websites, the official told the Associated Press newswire.

Dick Durbin, a Democrat senator, told reporters last night that he had received information several weeks ago, some of it connected to Mr Obama's race, that made him worried for the Democratic candidate's safety.

Mr Durbin said he approached Senate leaders from both parties several weeks ago and that they took the issue to the secret service.

"I expressed concern because of my affection for Barack and his family. I've travelled with Obama. I've witnessed enormous crowds," Mr Durbin said. "This is a relief."

Federal law allows candidates to seek protection if they meet a series of standards, including public prominence as measured by polls and fundraising. However, Mr Obama has been given a secret service detail far earlier than previous candidates, nine months before the first primary votes are cast.

What a hell of a way to apply for a job.