Blogs of War

Of course, she sings a different tune when the “disrupters” aren’t on her side:

However, it is now evident that an ugly campaign is underway not merely to misrepresent the health insurance reform legislation, but to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting a civil dialogue. These tactics have included hanging in effigy one Democratic member of Congress in Maryland and protesters holding a sign displaying a tombstone with the name of another congressman in Texas, where protesters also shouted “Just say no!” drowning out those who wanted to hold a substantive discussion.

These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views — but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American. Drowning out the facts is how we failed at this task for decades.

Hypocrisy in Washington hardly seems noteworthy but Pelosi is pretty adept at distinguishing herself. In a city full of liars, hypocrites, and power-obsessed thieves she still manages to set the bar higher and higher.

The title of the piece is “Obama’s healthcare horror” but the real issue lies deeper:

What does either party stand for these days? Republican politicians, with their endless scandals, are hardly exemplars of traditional moral values. Nor have they generated new ideas for healthcare, except for medical savings accounts, which would be pathetically inadequate in a major crisis for anyone earning at or below a median income.

And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame concerned citizens as the “mob” — a word betraying a Marie Antoinette delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.

But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration’s outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable “casual conversations” to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.

Meanwhile, anger grows:

The announcement:

American Forces Press Service has launched a military blog called “Family Matters” dedicated to helping military families deal with the challenges and situations unique to a military lifestyle. The blog features tips from experts, useful resources and timely responses to comments and questions. Upcoming topics include back-to-school tips, education benefits, dealing with deployments, childcare and more. Read “Family Matters” at http://afps.dodlive.mil/.

Not much there at the moment but it might evolve into a useful resource.

Georgia Democratic Congressman David Scott was obviously fired up and ready to tee off on someone for astroturfing (He’s been drinking his party’s own Kool-Aid) that he forgot that real people are showing up with real concerns. The rest of his rant gives rare insight into just how consumed these guys are with their own positions and power.

Additional video of the event can be found at 11Alive.com.

Twitter
Monitor the discussion

Frank Rich on the growing discontent:

But this mood isn’t just about the banks, Public Enemy No. 1. What the Great Recession has crystallized is a larger syndrome that Obama tapped into during the campaign. It’s the sinking sensation that the American game is rigged — that, as the president typically put it a month after his inauguration, the system is in hock to “the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few” who have “run Washington far too long.” He promised to smite them.

No president can do that alone, let alone in six months. To make Obama’s goal more quixotic, the ailment that he diagnosed is far bigger than Washington and often beyond politics’ domain. What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand, from commercial transactions as trivial as the sales of prime concert tickets to cultural forces as pervasive as the news media.

It’s a cynicism confirmed almost daily by events. Last week Brian Stelter of The Times reported that the corporate bosses of MSNBC and Fox News, Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric and Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation, had sanctioned their lieutenants to broker what a G.E. spokesman called a new “level of civility” between their brawling cable stars, Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly. A Fox spokesman later confirmed to Howard Kurtz of The Post that “there was an agreement” at least at the corporate level. Olbermann said he was a “party to no deal,” and in any event what looked like a temporary truce ended after The Times article was published. But the whole scrape only fed legitimate suspicions on the right and left alike that even their loudest public voices can be silenced if the business interests of the real American elite decree it.

Rich, not surprisingly, finds Republican strategists missing a real opportunity to capitalize on this anger:

The best political news for the president remains the Republicans. It’s a measure of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have it backward. The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy. If anything, the most unexpected — and challenging — event that could rock the White House this August would be if the opposition actually woke up.

I think he’s right. Screaming “Socialist!” isn’t far off the mark and it’s an easy way to fire up the base but Republicans are missing an opportunity to craft a message that would have wide appeal across party lines. Frankly, I don’t expect them to do this because the resulting platform would require meaningful political reform. Reform? Yeah – not interested. That leaves the average American pretty much stranded since the Libertarian party will continue it’s tradition of failing to take itself, and the political system, seriously enough to offer us a meaningful alternative.

Get ready for a month’s long media event:

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder appears poised to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate CIA interrogation abuses, a step that would bring unprecedented scrutiny to cases that ended in the alleged torture and death of detainees, current and former U.S. government officials said.

But a probe of even the most egregious abuses is unlikely to lead to criminal convictions because of an array of evidentiary and legal obstacles, according to current and former CIA and Justice Department officials who have firsthand knowledge of the details of the interrogation files.

Criminal convictions aren’t really the goal here. This is political warfare and a Carter-esque attempt to damage the CIA’s mission.

Today’s event marks a major milestone in the reorganization of our nuclear forces:

The Secretary of the Air Force, the honorable Michael B. Donley, and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Norton A. Schwartz, have officially announced the Air Force Global Strike Command Activation Ceremony will take place August 7, 2009, at Barksdale Air Force Base, La.

The ceremony will begin at 10:30 a.m. in Barksdale’s Hoban Hall, and General Schwartz will preside over the ceremony. All official invites have been distributed; additional access to the ceremony will be limited to Department of Defense identification cardholders with access to Barksdale AFB. Seating will be on a first come first serve basis.

Lieutenant General Frank G. Klotz will assume command of the Air Force’s newest major command, taking responsibility for organizing, training and equipping Airmen for nuclear deterrence and global strike operations. The command’s mission will stretch across five Air Force bases and will include three major operational weapon systems.

DefenseNews has more.

It’s getting ugly out there:

Kenneth Gladney, a 38-year-old conservative activist from St. Louis, said he was attacked by some of those arrested as he handed out yellow flags with “Don’t tread on me” printed on them. He spoke to the Post-Dispatch from the emergency room of the St. John’s Mercy Medical Center, where he said he was waiting to be treated for injuries to his knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face that he suffered in the attack. Gladney, who is black, said one of his attackers, also a black man, used a racial slur against him before the attack started.

“It just seems there’s no freedom of speech without being attacked,” he said.

The St. Louis examiner has more:

I was at the event. My name is David Brown. I am an atty in St. Louis. My friend, Kenneth Gladney, who is black, was passing out Don’t Tread on Me Flags and Tea Party buttons at the end of the event to Tea Party supporters and conservatives. He was then called a racial slur by two SEIU members. He was then attacked by two black males (SEIU reps) and white male, another SEIU rep., and a white woman. The punched him in the face and he fell to the ground. He was then kicked and punched by all four. One fled on foot, and three were arrested. Kenneth was taken to St. John’s Mercy Hospital to the emergency room. He has suffered numerous injuries. For more information, please contact me at PHONE NUMBER EDITED OUT. Thank you.

This is likely to get worse. The AFL-CIO just declared these town halls to be their principal battleground.

Peggy Noonan looks at the increasingly disturbing tone of the national debate and finds fear and abuse of power:

The passions of the protesters, on the other hand, are not a surprise. They hired a man to represent them in Washington. They give him a big office, a huge staff and the power to tell people what to do. They give him a car and a driver, sometimes a security detail, and a special pin showing he’s a congressman. And all they ask in return is that he see to their interests and not terrify them too much. Really, that’s all people ask. Expectations are very low. What the protesters are saying is, “You are terrifying us.”

What has been most unsettling is not the congressmen’s surprise but a hard new tone that emerged this week. The leftosphere and the liberal commentariat charged that the town hall meetings weren’t authentic, the crowds were ginned up by insurance companies, lobbyists and the Republican National Committee. But you can’t get people to leave their homes and go to a meeting with a congressman (of all people) unless they are engaged to the point of passion. And what tends to agitate people most is the idea of loss—loss of money hard earned, loss of autonomy, loss of the few things that work in a great sweeping away of those that don’t.

…every day the meetings seem just a little angrier, and people who are afraid—who have been made afraid, and left to be afraid—can get swept up. As this column is written, there comes word that John Sweeney of the AFL-CIO has announced he’ll be sending in union members to the meetings to counter health care’s critics.

Somehow that doesn’t sound like a peace initiative.

It’s going to be a long August, isn’t it? Let’s hope the uncharted territory we’re in doesn’t turn dark.

Recent statements from the White House seem to indicate a certain easiness with darkness:

And White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina said Democratic senators who are attacked for supporting the health-care bill can count on the White House to help organize local doctors, nurses, religious leaders and others to come to their defense.

“If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard,” Mr. Messina told senators, according to two people in the room.

Republicans say the health bills working their way through Congress cost too much, won’t help most Americans and will lead to excess government control over the health system. They say momentum for the bills is likely to slow after the August break, once lawmakers hear from their constituents.

I’m actually somewhat surprised that Macon Phillips’s request, which was posted on the White House blog, is actually still there:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

It’s not hard to imagine a couple of junior political strategists and new media consultants running with this idea but you’d expect someone in charge to veto it on the first pass. Still, mistakes happen and things are released that shouldn’t have been so you’d expect a quick retraction. That retraction hasn’t happened and that can only mean that Obama’s team is incapable of understanding why this request is misguided and dangerous. Of course, it could also mean that heavy-handed attacks on free speech are exactly what they’re after. It’s scary any way you look at it.

Sen. John Cornyn is asking Obama to end this program immediately:

Dear President Obama,

I write to express my concern about a new White House program to monitor American citizens’ speech opposing your health care policies, and to seek your assurances that this program is being carried out in a manner consistent with the First Amendment and America’s tradition of free speech and public discourse.

Yesterday, in an official White House release entitled “Facts are Stubborn Things,” the White House Director of New Media, Macon Phillips, asserted that there was “a lot of disinformation out there,” and encouraged citizens to report “fishy” speech opposing your health care policies to the White House. Phillips specifically targeted private, unpublished, even casual speech, writing that “rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation.” Phillips wrote “If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.”

I am not aware of any precedent for a President asking American citizens to report their fellow citizens to the White House for pure political speech that is deemed “fishy” or otherwise inimical to the White House’s political interests.

By requesting that citizens send “fishy” emails to the White House, it is inevitable that the names, email addresses, IP addresses, and private speech of U.S. citizens will be reported to the White House. You should not be surprised that these actions taken by your White House staff raise the specter of a data collection program. As Congress debates health care reform and other critical policy matters, citizen engagement must not be chilled by fear of government monitoring the exercise of free speech rights.

I can only imagine the level of justifiable outrage had your predecessor asked Americans to forward emails critical of his policies to the White House. I suspect that you would have been leading the charge in condemning such a program-and I would have been at your side denouncing such heavy-handed government action.

So I urge you to cease this program immediately. At the very least, I request that you detail to Congress and the public the protocols that your White House is following to purge the names, email addresses, IP addresses, and identities of citizens who are reported to have engaged in “fishy” speech. And I respectfully request an answer to the following:

* How do you intend to use the names, email addresses, IP addresses, and identities of citizens who are reported to have engaged in “fishy” speech?
* How do you intend to notify citizens who have been reported for “fishy” speech?
* What action do you intend to take against citizens who have been reported for engaging in “fishy” speech?
* Do your own past statements qualify as “disinformation”? For example, is it “disinformation” to note that in 2003 you said:”I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health care plan”?

I look forward to your prompt response.

Sincerely,

JOHN CORNYN

United States Senator

I’ve thrown together a page that automatically pulls the latest discussion on this topic from Twitter. Check it out. (The page may not work at times due to the attack on Twitter.)