The Weekly Sift

Two Eventful Weeks. Since my last Sift, the primaries ended and Barack Obama became the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. Where the race is now, the best links for keeping track of it, and best guesses about what the Clinton supporters will do.

They Lied. Not so long ago, saying “Bush lied” marked you as a resident of the Far Left. Now the Senate Intelligence Committee has come very close to saying it, with the support of two of its Republican members.

The Media Helped Them Lie. Scott McClellan says the media was “too deferential to the White House” when the Iraq War was being sold. ABC’s Charles Gibson protests, but the facts don’t back him up.

Political Summer Reading. A few books that aren’t exactly beach reading, but are worth a look if you have some time this summer.

I’m running over my voluntary 3,000-word limit this week, so I’ll do without a Short Notes section. In the meantime, check out the most recent “Unearthed News” feature by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Brendan DeMelle on Huffington Post. Short Notes will be back next week.

More people have changed their minds about George W. Bush than about any president in American history. Over the last seven years, his approval rating has done a falcon-dive from its historic high in the 90s after 9-11 to a Nixon-like 25% today. In the course of that long re-assessment, two events stand out: his administration’s bumbling response to Hurricane Katrina, and its failure to find WMDs in Iraq. We didn’t save New Orleans, and we didn’t save the hypothetical cities that Bin Laden was going to destroy with Saddam’s weapons.

No matter how messy, bloody, and expensive the Iraq War turned out to be, Americans would still support it if we thought it had prevented al Qaida from blowing up Atlanta or unleashing an anthrax plague on Chicago. That was the war President Bush sold us. If it had just turned out to cost more than he led us to believe, we’d have forgiven him.

But there were no WMDs. American cities faced no danger from Saddam. And if Bin Laden still has plans to destroy them, our troops in Iraq do not stand in his way.

Katrina was just incompetence, but Iraq has long carried an odor of deception. Did Bush and his people just get it wrong? Were they themselves fooled by incompetent intelligence services? Or did they lie to us?

The new report of the Senate Intelligence Committee adds weight to the case that they lied. The Senate report examines the public statements of Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Powell during the lead-up to the war, and compares them to the intelligence reports the administration was receiving. Conclusion: In regard to WMDs, evidence supporting their position existed, but they ignored contrary evidence and dissenting interpretations in the intelligence community. In regard to the relationship between Saddam and Bin Laden, they just made stuff up. The intelligence community had debunked the Saddam/Osama relationship, but the administration pushed it anyway. All of the committee’s Democrats and two Republicans — Chuck Hagel and Olympia Snowe — approved the report.

Almost simultaneously, Scott McCellan’s new book What Happened was describing the Iraq deception from the inside, using the word propaganda to describe what the administration did.

In addition to the obvious conflict with the administration, McClellan’s book touched off a discussion about the role of the press. A lot of the mainstream journalists — NBC’s David Gregory, for example — took offense at McClellan’s charge that the press was “too deferential to the White House.”

NBC’s Today morning show coincidentally had the three major network anchors on — Katie Couric, Brian Williams, and Charles Gibson — and asked them about it. Couric described the pressure the networks were under — how the administration threatened to freeze CBS out of war coverage if they didn’t change their tone. But Gibson claimed the right questions were asked and “there was a lot of skepticism” about Colin Powell’s speech.

Unfortunately for Gibson, we have Google and YouTube now and can check his memory. Glenn Greenwald did the research, and discovered that in fact Gibson displayed precious little skepticism after Powell’s speech.

“It is not our job to debate [the administration],” Gibson told the Today audience, “It is our job to ask the questions.” Glenn goes on to nail this as the Stenographic Model of Journalism:

Real reporting is about uncovering facts that the political elite try to conceal, not ones they willingly broadcast. It’s about investigating and exposing — not mindlessly amplifying — the falsehoods and deceit of government claims. But our modern “journalists” (with some noble exceptions) don’t do that not only because they can’t do it, but also because they don’t think it’s their job.

His post contains many links worth following, to discussions of how Phil Donahue’s show got canceled despite its ratings, the firing of Ashleigh Banfield, and CNN correspondent Jessica Yellin’s assertion that “the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings.”

Imagine that you’re a what-the-hell kind of guy who loves foreign languages and cultures. You’ve been bopping through life with no discernible plan when in June, 2001 you get this amazingly brilliant idea: If you join the Army, they’ll pay you to learn Arabic. Fast forward a couple of years, and life is not turning out exactly the way you planned. You’re an interrogator at Abu Ghraib.

That’s what happened to Tony Lagouranis. He begins his memoir Fear Up Harsh with one of the great opening lines: “I should never be mistaken for a hero.” And then he goes on to tell a fascinating story of corruption and slippery slopes. It has a moral:

Once introduced into war, torture will inevitably spread, because ticking bombs are everywhere. Each and every prisoner, without exception, has the potential to be the one that provides the information that will save American lives. So if you accept the logic that we have to perform torture to prevent deaths, each and every prisoner is deserving of torture. … We should be very concerned about this steady progression and where it will lead, because the essence of torture — tyrannical control over the will of another — is everything that a free and democratic society is supposed to stand against. We should be very skeptical of the idea that our use of torture overseas will never come home.

Martha Nussbaum is a philosopher whose new book Liberty of Conscience explores the boundary between philosophy, American history, and constitutional law with regard to the issue of religious freedom and the relationship between church and state. If that description sounds dense, academic, and unreadable, I’ve done her an injustice. Her book has a very simple point: Defenders of religious liberty screw up when they present separation-of-church-and-state as an end in itself. Separation is better understood as a means to this end: Every American should come to the public square as an equal, without hierarchies created by ranking one religion over another. Mixing church with state inevitably implies that some beliefs make you more (or less) American, and therefore they entitle you to a higher (or lower) level of respect from your government.

Nussbaum retells the history of religious freedom and oppression in America — including the shameful parts — from Roger Williams leaving the Massachusetts Bay Colony to present controversies about displaying the Ten Commandments, reciting “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, and same-sex marriage. Her ultimate conclusions resemble down-the-line ACLUism. But her arguments are founded on values that really are common to the vast majority of Americans, rather than values that we merely wish were common.

Have you ever noticed how the war party is full of people who dodged military service? The anti-gay party has an inordinate number of closeted gays? The family values party has a hard time finding candidates who can hold their first marriage together long enough to raise a child? (And do any of them have a daughter as pride-worthy as Chelsea Clinton?)

Glenn Greenwald thinks that’s not just a series of unfortunate coincidences. In Great American Hypocrites, he makes the case that the true core value of the conservative movement is hypocrisy. And in a brilliant move, he takes his history-of-conservative-hypocrisy all the way back to the icon: John Wayne. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard somebody say that the Republicans are the John Wayne party. Well, Glenn agrees: Wayne ducked military service during World War II, when other actors of his era (Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable — even Jane Fonda’s dad Henry, for God’s sake) enlisted. He philandered. He was married three times. He got hooked on prescription drugs. And all the while he strutted around like the epitome of male virtue. Yep, he’s the model for the Republican party.

Like most of Glenn’s stuff, this book repeats itself and could have been a lot shorter. But it’s a fun rant, and will provide plenty of ammunition for arguments with conservative friends and relatives.

Every few months the blogosphere lights up with reports of some inspirational talk given by Bill Moyers. Well, now you can read them all in a book, Moyers on Democracy. Except for the talk he gave at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis Saturday. That one you’ll just have to watch on YouTube. You can also watch the hilarious way Moyers turns the tables on an ambush interviewer sent by Bill O’Reilly. It takes nine minutes to play out, but it’s worth it.

I haven’t finished Drew Westen’s The Political Brain yet, but I’ve seen enough to recommend it. His main point is that Democrats approach a campaign like a high school debate, while Republicans approach it like marketing. That’s why Republicans win even when the Democrats’ positions are more popular. He discusses how emotions and imagery influence political decision-making, and dissects political advertisements to explain why they do or don’t work.

The Clintons, Season 17. Why is so much political coverage focused on a candidate who no longer has a chance to win?

The Scariest Thing I Read This Week. Radar’s article about a program called Main Core is all based on anonymous sources. But it’s a pretty frightening story all the same.

McCain Watch. Nobody is paying attention, but the media actually is starting to scrutinize John McCain.

Short Notes. Playing fetch in Iraq, Joe vs. Joe, Sistani’s new fatwa, and a bold way to handle the border patrol.

Politics and government are actually not very popular in America, so it’s not unusual for our political coverage to be taken over by some other art form. That happened this week, as the media focused its attention not on the future governance of the United States, but on the ongoing soap opera of The Clintons. Will the sexist media force Hillary out of the race? Will she destroy the Democratic Party? Will we finally discover that Barack is the secret love child of Bill Clinton and Tina Turner? Stay tuned.

Let’s get political reality out of the way as fast as possible: Obama now has the majority of the elected delegates. The superdelegates continue to trend towards him. In spite of the claims of the Clinton campaign, the polls show no statistically significant difference between how Obama and Clinton compete against McCain. There is no credible scenario where Clinton gets the nomination, or credible argument that she should get it, and even the incredible scenarios leave the Democratic Party so shattered that McCain wins.

Enough of that. It’s boring. On to the juicy stuff.

Did She Really Say That? No, not really. She did bring up Bobby Kennedy’s assassination while answering a question about why she was staying in the race, but the people who think she was hinting that someone might shoot Obama are being unfair. (Keith Olbermann, who I ordinarily admire a lot, kind of wigged out on this one.) The first time I saw the video, I interpreted it the same way she eventually explained it: the RFK assassination is something lots of people remember from a primary campaign that stretched into June. Bringing it up was misguided for a bunch of other reasons — 1968 is not a campaign today’s Democrats should be imitating — but I didn’t hear any invitation to violence. (An invitation to violence looks like this.) The most complete telling of the story is here.

As past readers of this blog should know, I’m down on this whole somebody-said-a-bad-thing style of politics. I didn’t like it when the media was going crazy about Obama’s “bitter” comment, and I don’t like it now. Obama is being gracious and writing the whole thing off to the stress of a long campaign causing words to come out wrong. Let’s leave it at that.

What’s She Doing? I wish I could figure it out. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a candidate continuing to run long after any real chance at the nomination is gone. Mike Huckabee did it, and nobody holds it against him.

But Clinton is doing something Huckabee didn’t: working hard to raise resentment against her party’s near-certain nominee. Her Florida-and-Michigan rhetoric tries to make Obama’s victory seem illegitimate. The why-are-they-trying-to-force-me-out stuff is salting the wounds of her supporters. Just before making the RFK comparison she complained “People have been trying to push me out of this ever since Iowa.” Why? “I don’t know. I don’t know. I find it curious. Because it’s unprecedented in history.” In reality, Obama’s been handling her with kid gloves, but she’s doing her best to sound like a victim.

Hillary Clinton is on a very destructive path. I can’t figure out where it’s going or what she hopes to gain from it.

Mulitiple frames. From the beginning of Hillary’s campaign, many older women — who experienced overt discrimination that younger women have trouble imagining — have framed this campaign as The Only Chance In Our Lifetime To Elect a Woman President. Some of them seem to have a hard time imagining that other people frame the campaign differently, so they can only attribute Clinton’s loss to sexism. Any other explanation is just an excuse.

By contrast, thirty-somethings, male and female alike, find the Clinton-is-all-women notion puzzling. To them, Clinton’s gender is an important part of her biography, but not the all-encompassing theme of 2008.

A lot of Democrats of all ages have framed this campaign around the war: Clinton voted to authorize it and has never really admitted that vote was a mistake, or explained how she will avoid similar mistakes in the future. When the war was popular, she positioned herself so that its possible success wouldn’t ruin her candidacy. Now that it’s unpopular, she talks forcefully about ending it. In 2006 the late Molly Ivins wrote: “Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her.” Is that an excuse for sexism?

For liberal activists, 2008 is the culmination of the Dean revolution of 2004. The Clinton-era move-to-the-right tactics that killed us in 2002 and 2004 are finally being rejected. Hillary made the mistake of picking the wrong side: She’s the establishment candidate in a revolutionary year. Should we ignore that because she’s a woman?

Is She the Last Hope? Marie Cocco writes: “The record suggests that if Clinton is not the nominee, no woman will seriously contend for the White House for another generation.” Of course, after Colin Powell ruined his future by being the mouthpiece for the Bush administration’s lies to the UN, the prospects for a black president looked pretty dim too. Who saw Obama coming in 2003?

Let’s back up and take a wider view of how sexism works at this level. Lots of people, male and female, are talented enough to make a serious run for president. What most of them lack are a jumping-off point and a story. Sexism has made it harder for women to get either one.

Credible presidential candidates are almost always either governors or senators or vice presidents. You need that jumping-off point. (Congressmen like Dennis Kucinich or Tom Tancredo just prove the rule. How far did they get?) So as long as there weren’t many female governors or senators, the chances for a female president were slim. But that’s changing. The Center for American Women and Politics lists eight current female governors, including two — Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas — who are widely mentioned as Obama VP possibilities. There are 16 female senators. Not half, but not zero either. Then there’s Nancy Pelosi. The more women who stand at jumping-off points, the more likely that one will be in the right place when opportunity beckons.

But that’s not the complete accounting of sexism in presidential politics. A candidate also needs to be the protagonist of a story of leadership, and men have a bunch of such stories to choose from. John McCain can run as a war hero, because war-hero-becomes-political-leader is a story as old as Caesar. When Obama runs as a charismatic young Turk, people say, “Oh, yeah — JFK. I know this story.”

Right now neither of those stories works for women. (I think that’s a big piece of the feminist resentment of Obama.) Only two leadership stories do: The Deserving Ladder-Climber, who pays all her dues, fulfills all the prerequisites, does all the homework, and is ready. And the Heir, who carries on the political legacy of her father or husband. (Think Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Evita Peron.) Hillary Clinton’s story is a combination of the two: She paid her dues in her husband’s administration.

Both stories have disadvantages. By the time a Deserving Ladder-Climber makes it to a jumping-off point, she might be too old to go further, like Diane Feinstein (but not Sebelius or Napolitano) today. And since legacy-producing leaders are rare, plausible Heirs are always going to be rare too.

The main reason I think we’ll see a female president much sooner than a generation is because more leadership stories are going to open up for women. The manufactured Jessica Lynch story took off because the country is ready to see a woman as a war hero. A genuine female war hero may yet come out of Iraq or Afghanistan and start moving up. I’d love to see a 40-something woman try the Charismatic Young Turk story — that might be ready to start working too. As we see more female CEOs, the Non-Political Business Wizard story — Ross Perot, Lee Iaccoca — might open up as well.

We’ll really know that women have made it in American politics when we see a uniquely female leadership story, one that builds on traditionally feminine archetypes. That might take a generation. But some other story will work first.

Like digby and emptywheel, I don’t know what to do with articles like this one from Radar magazine. It’s frightening. It sounds plausible. But it’s totally based on anonymous sources, so maybe it’s just one reporter’s paranoid fantasy. Should we be scared or not? Beats me.

Here’s the main idea: Deep inside some part of the Homeland Security Department, probably FEMA, is a plan to deal with the ultimate emergency — something that unleashes chaos on the land and threatens the continuity of government. The plan descends from those Cold War plans to keep the country going after nuclear attack, and it contains the option of martial law.

Scary, but not too scary yet. Just about everybody who’s thought much about the possibility of apocalyptic disaster assumes there’s a plan like that somewhere. But it gets scarier if this plan is not just a wad of paper in a filing cabinet in some underground bunker, but is instead an active program interconnected with all the Bush administration’s illegal spying programs. That’s the thesis of this article: All the illegal wiretapping and data mining is feeding a database called Main Core, which has records on eight million suspicious Americans, and which will be used to figure out who the government needs to round up and detain at the outset of the national emergency.

It is, of course, appropriate for any government to plan for the worst. But when COG [continuity of government] plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated by Congress or the courts, and married to an overreaching surveillance state—as seems to be the case with Main Core—even sober observers must weigh whether the protections put in place by the federal government are becoming more dangerous to America than any outside threat.

Like any good conspiracy theories, this one pulls a lot of threads together. No one has ever explained the real issues behind the dramatic Ashcroft hospital-room scene. Why has the Department of Homeland Security expanded its capacity for large-scale temporary detention? Administration testimony about warrantless wiretapping has always carefully bracketed “this program” without commenting on what other secret programs might be doing. DHS is a likely home for such a program, because it lacks the Congressional oversight and legal restrictions of the CIA, FBI, NSA, or other intelligence agencies. FEMA’s feeble performance against natural disasters might be the result of its re-orientation towards political emergencies. And why did the Military Commissions Act of 2006 expand the domestic role of the military?

The right answer to these questions is not to jump to conclusions, but for Congress to soberly investigate. Of course, that would mean avoiding the executive privilege roadblock that has allowed the administration to prevent any serious oversight so far. That’s not going to happen until Congress either threatens impeachment or starts putting people in jail under its power of inherent contempt. And so far it isn’t ready to go there.

Fasincating piece in the NYT a week ago Sunday: The McCain Doctrines by Matt Bai. Bai compares the military-policy views of four Vietnam-veteran senators — McCain, Kerry, Hagel, and Webb — and makes an insightful point: By spending 1967-1973 as a POW, McCain missed the common experience of the war that the others were having.

During those years, McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle; he never underwent the conversion that caused Kerry, for one, to toss away some of his war decorations during a protest at the Capitol. Whatever anger McCain felt remained focused on his captors, not on his own superiors back in Washington.

McCain compensated for this hole in his experience by studying the Vietnam War after-the-fact at the National War College. There he was taught that we arrived at the right anti-insurgent strategy in Vietnam too late, and that Congress pulled the plug on an effort that was starting to work. That’s the lesson he’s applying to Iraq.

It briefly looked as if McCain had taken an in-between position on Telecom Amnesty: Give the telecom companies retroactive immunity only after Congress had held rigorous hearings to figure out what they did. Alas, it was an illusion. The McCain campaign has issued a correction: McCain completely supports the Bush administration policy of no-strings amnesty for the telecoms who helped the government illegally spy on their customers.

Slate’s Robert Gordon explains why McCain is wrong on health care. When the federal government started allowing interstate banking, all the card companies moved their credit card operations to South Dakota, which gives consumers the fewest rights. McCain’s proposal for interstate health insurance would have the same result.

The Washington Post determines that the saving McCain expects to make by limiting earmarks just doesn’t add up.

In Iraq, Ayatollah Sistani is turning against us. That’s pretty important.

Public Eye magazine discusses the emerging links between the religious right and anti-immigrant groups. The article traces the fault lines in a political coalition that wants to include both working-class whites (who feel threatened by the growth of the American Latino population) and the Catholic Church (which represents most of that population and depends on it for future growth).

Phillip Carter’s Intel Dump blog pointed me in the direction of one of his favorite soldier blogs: Kaboom: A Soldier’s War Journal and this story about an American platoon in Iraq adopting a stray dog. Small things can be very touching sometimes, like a game of fetch just before dawn in a place that seems abnormal in every other way.

RFK Jr. and Brandon Demelle remind us of all the important stuff that happened this week that the major media never got around to covering. Think of it as a Short Notes inside Short Notes.

A pair of Joes — Lieberman and Biden — went back and forth on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal this week.

Lieberman charges that the Democratic Party has abandoned the strong foreign policy that it stood for under Truman and Kennedy, that after Vietnam it slid into believing “the Cold War was mostly America’s fault” — a position that was reversed under Clinton and now has been reversed back. After 9/11 “I felt strongly that Democrats should embrace the basic framework the president had advanced for the war on terror as our own, because it was our own. But that was not the choice most Democratic leaders made.”

Biden points out that there is not a single part of the world where the Lieberman-Bush-McCain foreign policy is working. “On George Bush’s watch, Iran, not freedom, has been on the march.” He describes 9/11 as a historic opportunity “to unite Americans and the world in common cause” — an opportunity that the administration blew through policies that “divided Americans from each other and from the world.” He concludes: “The Bush-McCain saber rattling is the most self-defeating policy imaginable. It achieves nothing. But it forces Iranians who despise the regime to rally behind their leaders.”

I’m sure you’re in suspense about which case I find more convincing. Do I favor torture, the surrender of our civil liberties, and pre-emptive war based on false intelligence? Or should we try to represent the democratic values of the world and deserve the good-guy mantle that Bush wants to claim through rhetoric alone? Hmmm. Let me think.

Glenn Greenwald follows the money as the telecoms try to get Congress to let them off the hook for breaking the law. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the groups whose lawsuits will be dropped if telecom immunity passes, reports: “AT&T’s spending for three months on lobbying alone is significantly more than the entire EFF budget for a whole year.”

Now even the Pentagon is admitting that contractors in Iraq were mismanaged.

In case you missed any part of it, SlateV has a seven-minute summary of everything that’s happened in the race for the Democratic nomination.

I don’t think I’d have the guts to handle a border-patrol checkpoint like this.

The Horse Race. Can we finally stop talking about Obama-Clinton and focus on Obama-McCain? The trick for Obama is to make the campaign focus on issues. The trick for McCain is to focus on Obama.

Judging McCain’s Judges. John McCain outlined his judicial philosophy last Tuesday. Any Clinton supporter who’s thinking about sitting out the fall election should pay attention.

Short Notes. Life in Baghdad. McCain and the environment. Stamping out wizardry in Florida’s schools. And what IOKIYAR really means.

After the Indiana and North Carolina primaries, the major media proclaimed the Democratic presidential race over. During the coverage of those primaries Tuesday night, official media spokesman Tim Russert said: “We now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be.” And suddenly, it was now OK to point out that Hillary Clinton had no chance to win the nomination.

Wednesday morning the Obama-supporting blogs were too exasperated by the media group-think to be grateful that the major pundits were finally agreeing with them. OpenLeft’s Chris Bowers was typical:

I spent a good amount of time last night ranting about how the national media called the nomination campaign for Obama after the North Carolina and Indiana results, even though their logic for doing so could have been applied at any point in the campaign since the Wisconsin and Hawaii nomination contests on February 19th. … Essentially, since February 19th analysis of the campaign revealed that Clinton had virtually no chance of closing the delegate gap, and pretending otherwise was just an exercise in kabuki-theater where Obama was ritually gutted by the national media for the amusement of a reality-ignoring pundit elite.

Anyway, the media still mostly refuses to move on and consider the McCain-Obama race, because it’s much more interesting to speculate on whether Hillary will exit gracefully or pull the whole Democratic Party down on top of herself, a la Samson. Clintonites seem to think that calls for her to withdraw are sexist, a charge that I’m sure puzzles supporters of male ex-candidates like Dodd, Biden, Edwards, and Richardson. You lose, you leave — what’s strange about that? The bizarre thing in this story isn’t that she’s being urged to stand down, but that her candidacy continued to be taken seriously after she lost ten straight primaries and caucuses in February.

Moving on to McCain/Obama: It’s really clear how this race is going to go. If it’s decided on issues, Obama wins. McCain can’t defend his position on the war. Nobody other than McCain and a few neocons wants a new war with Iran. His economic policy, like Bush’s, boils down to don’t-tax-the-rich — and that’s been working so well for the rest of us. He promises to nominate more judges like Alito and Roberts, and Justice Stevens will be 92 by the end of the next president’s term, so Roe v. Wade is pretty much history if McCain gets in. His health care plan (which I described last week) amounts to the claim that the insurance companies would work miracles for us if government only got out of their way.

Play campaign consultant for a moment: Do you see anything here he can run on? Each of his positions has a small-but-dedicated constituency that could put him over the top if the rest of the electorate divided. But none is close to being a majority view. And they’re all virtually identical to positions identified with George W. Bush, who has the highest disapproval rating ever recorded.

McCain isn’t suicidal, so we can conclude that he won’t run on issues. Like every conservative candidate since Reagan, he’ll run on image. He’s the maverick and Obama is the out-of-touch liberal. He’s a war hero and Obama is a wimp. He’s a patriot and Obama hates America. Obama is the candidate of homosexuals, of angry black radicals like Jeremiah Wright, of bomb-throwing hippies like William Ayers, and of Osama bin Laden. (Did you know he’s a Muslim? I read it on the internet.) Again and again, we’ll hear from “ordinary” Americans saying things like: “I don’t know what it is about Obama, but there’s something just not right about him. He’s not like everyday folks.” (Hint: He’s black. Maybe that’s the problem.)

That strategy is the subtext of Time’s advice in McCain’s 7 Steps to Beating Obama. The steps revolve around destroying Obama’s image, and say not a word about issues. The question is whether McCain can throw this mud without dirtying his own image. And that largely depends on whether he continues to enjoy the complete adulation of the media. If he can still be portrayed as the upright, straight-shooting candidate while saying things like “It’s clear who Hamas wants to be the next president,” then he might pull it off.

If anything will bring Clinton-supporting women to Obama in the fall, it’s going to be their fear of John McCain’s judicial appointments. Obligingly, McCain outlined his judicial philosophy in a speech at Wake Forest on the same day as the North Carolina and Indiana primaries. The headline-making quote from this speech was:

I have my own standards of judicial ability, experience, philosophy, and temperament. And Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito meet those standards in every respect. They would serve as the model for my own nominees if that responsibility falls to me.

McCain’s people deny the characterization of his prospective presidency as George Bush’s third term. But when it comes to judges, he proudly says that he will model his choices on Bush’s choices.

And that’s not all he says. If you have the time, read or watch the whole speech on the McCain web site. Far from being “maverick” or “moderate” in any way, the speech is a classic conservative rant against liberal “judicial activism”. An excellent critique of the speech — making a number of the same points I’m making but in more detail — was posted by OpenLeft contributor Lang. The Balkinization blog has a number of comments: notably by Jack Balkin and Andrew Koppelman. My own opinions about so-called judicial activism haven’t changed since my Wide Liberty essay of 2005.

Somehow, no matter how many Republican presidents we have or how many judges they appoint, Republicans can still run against the judiciary. (Eli on FireDogLake claims the root cause here is that Republicans hate the law. Judges and lawyers are just symbols of that underlying curse of legality.) Of the current Supreme Court, for example, only two justices were appointed by Democrats (Ginsberg and Breyer, both by Clinton). Ford appointed Stevens. Reagan named Scalia and Kennedy. Thomas and Souter are the responsibility of Bush the First, and Roberts and Alito can be charged to the account of Bush the Second. Given that Republicans have held the White House for 5 of the 7 terms since 1980, that’s probably typical of the federal judiciary as a whole. If there’s a problem with our judges, it’s a problem that Republicans have caused.

The most disturbing part of McCain’s speech comes early. After praising the Founders and the checks and balances they established to keep government in line, McCain notes that “There is one great exception in our day” to the success of the check-and-balance system. Is it the Bush administration’s overwhelming abuse of executive power? Its defiance of Congressional subpoenas? Signing statements that “interpret” laws to say whatever the president wants them to say? Specious legal opinions that the Justice Department writes to circumvent our treaty obligations not to torture? Creating a law-free zone in Guantanamo ? Holding an American citizen in solitary confinement for three and a half years and driving him virtually insane before charging him with any crime?

What could this “one great exception” be? None of the above. It’s “the common and systematic abuse of our federal courts by the people we entrust with judicial power.” Other than that, McCain thinks checks and balances are working fine.

McCain gives several examples of this “abuse of our federal courts” — one of which is incoherent. He cites the Kelo case in which a woman’s home was taken by eminent domain so that a private developer could build on the site. By a 5-4 majority, the Supreme Court refused to intervene and the seizure went forward. Now, McCain may not like the way this case turned out — I’m not sure I do either — but it’s an example of judicial restraint, not judicial activism. “Real activism,” McCain says, is democratic and tries to change the hearts and minds of the electorate.

By contrast, activist lawyers and activist judges follow a different method. They want to be spared the inconvenience of campaigns, elections, legislative votes, and all of that. They don’t seek to win debates on the merits of their argument; they seek to shut down debates by order of the court.

Well, Kelo was an example of elected officials exercising their judgment. But rather than undoing that decision via the ballot box, McCain wanted the courts to undo it. Somehow, failing to undo a local government’s action is “judicial activism”.

This up-is-down reasoning is typical of such rants. Lang cites a Yale study of the 64 cases from 1994-2005 where the Court struck down federal laws. The researchers totaled up how often each justice voted in favor of the “activist” position to strike down a law. By that measure of activism, the conservative judges were far more activist than the liberals. Conservative Clarence Thomas voted with the law-overturning majority 66% of the time and liberal Stephen Breyer 28%, with judges lining up in between in almost exactly conservative-to-liberal order.

McCain’s speech also denounced “airy constructs the Court has employed” in contrast to “the clear meanings of the Constitution.” He obviously intended to imply that the right to privacy (which protects a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion) is such a construct. But conservatives always fail to note other legal constructs. The words “executive privilege” appear nowhere in the Constitution. And the notion that corporations have the same legal status as persons and so can claim the full Bill of Rights — that’s a construction of the Supreme Court as well. And no one can find a quote from the Founders that remotely resembles the Bush administration’s theory of the unitary executive.

A true constitutional minimalist (somebody who denounces every constitutional interpretation not specifically envisioned by the Founders) could start an interesting discussion and raise the general level of debate in this country. But that’s not at all what McCain is doing. He, like President Bush before him, wants the courts to be a weapon for conservatism. He’s in favor of aggressively conservative judges, and only applies the negative frame of “judicial activism” to decisions that he disagrees with.

Linking to myself: Thursday I wrote an essay slightly too long for the Sift — Pirate Treasure: Why oil and democracy don’t mix. It explains why Iraq’s oil wealth is a hindrance to its becoming a democracy, not an asset — and why that should have been obvious from the beginning. It’s on my Open Source Journalism site, and I posted it as Pericles on DailyKos. I also recently preached a sermon at my Unitarian church in Bedford, Mass. It’s called Some Assembly Required, and you can find it on my religious blog Free and Responsible Search.

Sunday’s Washington Post described the everyday life of an Iraqi businessman who the reporter has known since before the invasion. His family lives in exile in Jordan; he won’t live in the house he owns in an upscale neighborhood. The dangers of the Saddam era are past,

But in this post-Saddam time, other threats impose themselves. Material ostentation draws kidnappers, political engagement invites assassination, and time spent outside the seeming safety of four walls carries the risk of being caught in the middle of horrific violence. In 2006, Yousif’s cousin, an engineer, “was driving in the street, and they shot him,” Yousif recalled when I met with him in Baghdad in March. The family has no idea who killed the man, or why, or even if there was a reason.

Monday’s Washington Post describes McCain’s environmental record as a “balancing act”. Someone with less media admiration than McCain might be described as inconsistent or flip-flopping. In the 12th paragraph they do get around to noting that the League of Conservation Voters gives his environmental voting record a 24 rating, as opposed to Obama’s 86.

The Onion quantifies a trend many others have wondered about: There are now only four acceptable things a candidate can say without offending someone. The Onion News Network has a video report on John McCain’s plans to save the government money by disbanding the Secret Service and defending himself.

A substitute teacher in Land o’ Lakes, Florida claims to have lost his job after being accused of “wizardry”. He did a magic trick for his students, making a toothpick vanish and reappear. If they don’t crack down now, I guess, somebody will saw a student in half.

Cristina Page on Huffington Post combined state-by-state data from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy with NARAL’s state-by-state ratings on how pro-choice or pro-life a state is. Conclusion: In pro-life states teens are more sexually active, more likely to have had sex before age 13, and more likely to have four or more sexual partners. This pattern has been noted by a number of observers and comes up in a variety of statistics, but somehow never becomes common knowledge: States where abstract “family values” are politically popular are usually states where actual family values are in bad shape. As of 2005 (the most recent stats I could find) Massachusetts and Connecticut still had the lowest divorce rate in the nation, with Arkansas and Oklahoma the highest (not counting Nevada, which does a lot of divorces for out-of-staters).

The latest anti-evolution tactic recently failed in the Florida legislature. The creationist Discovery Institute is pushing an “academic freedom” bill to protect public-school teachers who argue against evolution in their classrooms. Their online petition warns against “self-appointed defenders of the theory of evolution who are waging a malicious campaign to demonize and blacklist anyone who disagrees with them.” But the St. Petersburg Times doubts the bill’s premise: “most of the evolution-related pressure being put on science teachers is aimed at those who want to teach the scientific consensus about evolution, not those who want to teach the ‘full range of scientific views’ — which would presumably include the fringe notion that evolution is not backed by strong evidence.”

Internet acronyms can be frustratingly obtuse, but one I recommend learning is IOKIYAR: “It’s OK if you’re a Republican.” Senator Vitter frequents a house of prostitution? So what? IOKIYAR. Larry Craig makes a gay pass at a policeman, but he can stay in office because IOKIYAR. McCain breaks campaign finance laws he helped write? Never mind, IOKIYAR. Jerry Falwell blamed America for 9/11 every bit as much as Jeremiah Wright did, but IOKIYAR. Rush Limbaugh’s drug problem? IOKIYAR. The latest example is Cindy McCain’s tax returns, which she recently pledged that she will never release. Of course, the “liberal” Washington Post complained in 2004 when Theresa Kerry tried the exact same maneuver. (“There may well be nothing of great note in Ms. Heinz Kerry’s tax returns other than the scope of her wealth. But with her husband seeking the presidency, her financial dealings, as well as his, ought to be as open as possible. Keeping her returns private would set a bad precedent.”) And what do you think the reaction would have been if Hillary hadn’t included Bill’s income in her disclosures? But never mind, Cindy. IOKIYAR.

TV’s Military Analysts: Who Do They Work For? Eight days ago the New York Times made a stunning attack on the integrity of the major media’s military analysts and the networks that employ them. The networks responded by … well actually they haven’t responded. And maybe they can’t.

Pretty Laws, Ugly Practices, and the Demonization of Lawyers. Why bother to take away people’s rights when you can accomplish the same thing by taking away their ability to claim their rights? How John McCain, Senate Republicans, and conservatives on the Supreme Court have eviscerated a woman’s right to equal pay.

Religious Issues. This week I gave the religious short notes their own section. Moyers interviews Wright. An atheist sues the Army. And Ben Stein stands up for innocent religious extremists who are being oppressed by nasty scientists.

Short Notes. How to make John Ashcroft lose his temper. Being poor can kill you. What’s underneath the Obama-Clinton battle. And a high school prank I wish I’d thought of.

It’s hard to claim that a story that made the front page of the Sunday New York Times is flying under the radar, but this one is: On April 20 the NYT had a major article called “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand“. The article describes the incestuous relationship between the Pentagon, the “independent” military analysts you see on TV, and the military contractors these analysts often work for.

Short version of how the system works: Ex-generals can make much more money after their military retirement by working for government contractors. To certain extent they’re selling their expertise, but mainly what they sell is their access to decision-makers in the Pentagon and to inside information about the military’s needs. A number of these retired officers also work as military analysts for the major TV networks. They purport to be independent, but the Pentagon thinks of them as its spokesmen in the media. The Pentagon “pays” them by arranging special events that enhance their access — and give them more to sell to contractors.

The article describes specific moments when meetings were held and talking points were distributed — which the analysts then repeated on their networks as if they had come to these conclusions independently.

At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

“You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. Krueger said. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some days, he added, “We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

The article is impressive by itself, but this video compiled by FreePress.net brings it home by collecting the TV excerpts. It’s one thing to read about talking points, but another to see them come to life.

It’s debatable whether this program broke any of the laws against institutionalized propaganda, but the Times’ article strikes at the heart of the integrity of networks like CNN. (It also strikes at Fox News, but integrity has never been an issue there.) So you would think that they would respond swiftly either by defending themselves or taking action to right their ship. But no. There’s been an almost complete silence about the story from the major media.

Glenn Greenwald has kept after the story in his characteristically relentless way. (Note to self: Never get on Glenn’s wrong side.) Already on Sunday he was observing the media non-reaction: “Having just watched more Sunday news shows than a human being should ever have to endure, it is striking — though unsurprising — that not a single one saw fit to mention this NYT story demonstrating that these news programs all fed government propaganda to their viewers.” On Tuesday he found documentation that CNN had presented its list of military analysts to the Pentagon for approval prior to the Iraq invasion. On Wednesday he was interviewing ex-CNN-anchor Aaron Brown, and destroying the claim “that [the military analysts] were there only to instruct viewers on tactical and military questions, not to engage in political advocacy.”

To me, this story looks like the tip of an iceberg that the networks don’t dare examine. In the old model of journalism, from the Walter Cronkite era of my youth, journalists were supposed to be working for you, the reader or viewer. Being human, they had points of view that sometimes would distort their coverage, but that was a failing. When exposed, it was deplorable.

Today, though, most of the talking heads you see are not working for you, not even in theory. They’re working on you. In political coverage, for example, it has become very hard to tell the difference between the hired campaign operatives being interviewed and the pundits who interview them. This week CNN hired Tony Snow to be a political commentator. Is he working for you now, or is he still working for President Bush and the conservative movement? Is he going to help you understand the political scene, or try to manipulate you into thinking what the conservative movement wants you to think?

In theory, it would be possible to assemble to team of pundits of a variety of political philosophies, but still have them work for you. Their statements would be colored by their philosophies (the same way mine are), but they would say only what they truly thought, and not what their side’s strategy wanted you to believe.

In practice, I don’t see this happening anywhere.

So many of this week’s short notes concerned religious issues that they’re worth a section of their own.

This week’s Bill Moyers’ Journal demonstrates why Bill has become such a hero in the liberal blogosphere: He sits down with Jeremiah Wright and has a real conversation with him about religion and the black experience of Christianity. You can watch the whole thing online. (Or you can go to Salon and let Joan Walsh give you the view from Planet Clinton.) Wright’s discussion of how black Christians have been taught to be ashamed of Africa and African culture gave me some new understanding of the black church: “A lotta the missionaries were going to other countries assuming that our culture is superior, that you have no culture. And to be a Christian, you must be like us. Right now, you can go to Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and see Christians in 140-degree weather. They have to have on a tie. Because that’s what it means to be a Christian.” A lot of whites have been reading the “unashamedly black” part of Trinity Church’s self-description as some kind of militant separatism. But Wright comes out of a context where the shame of being black is very real and has to be addressed.

Jeremy Hall, a soldier who happens to be an atheist, is suing the Army for religious discrimination. Now he’s an atheist with a lawsuit, which gives the Army two reasons to treat him unfairly.

Ben Stein’s new anti-evolution movie Expelled is out now, and crystallizes the challenge that the scientific community faces in bringing its message to the public. One of the most important plot-types in our culture is: “A privileged elite is using its institutional power to suppress the evidence against the story that justifies that power. But a brave few are trying to bring out the truth.” If you can fill in the blanks in that plot so that you are the brave few and your enemies are the privileged elite, you’ve got a powerful propaganda weapon. That’s what Stein has set out to do. He presents intelligent design as the oppressed scientific rival of evolution, and tars the scientific community as the oppressors. This kind of narrative is hard to fight with facts and reason alone, as Chris Mooney observes.

Basically, you have to fight stories with stories. A humorous parody of the Expelled trailer is here, advertising a non-existent movie about the Stork Theory of where babies come from. And this video from the National Center for Science Education makes heroes out of the people who protect students from creationist disinformation.

John Ashcroft made a speech Wednesday at Knox College in Galesburg, Illnois. Elsinora from DailyKos was there, and gives a good example of how to confront an unrepentant torture advocate. My favorite part: In response to someone else’s question about the UN Convention Against Torture, Ashcroft says, “Now, I don’t have a copy of the convention in front of me …” and Elsinora jumps up and says: “I do! Would you like to borrow it?”

I’ve talked about this before, but the evidence just gets more and more disturbing: Being poor means that you die sooner, and the number of lost years is growing. Sunday the New York Times called attention to recent reports that life expectancy has flattened out for poorer women, and is actually going down in many parts of the country. This graphic is, well, graphic. If you want to chase down the details, the two reports the article is based on are from the Public Library of Science’s medical journal and the Congressional Budget Office.

Another NYT article: The story of one principal’s attempt to start an Arabic-language-based public school in Brooklyn, and the smear campaign that brought her down. The article ends with the now-former principal, Debbie Almontaser, touring a Spanish-language school and thinking about what might have been.

Last week I wondered whether the 2001 quote (“we didn’t do enough“) that is being used to paint Bill Ayers as an unrepentant terrorist might have been out of context. Well, this week I ran across the letter Ayers wrote to Times right after the quote appeared. In it he embraced the interpretation I speculated: that he didn’t do enough to end the Vietnam War, not that he didn’t set off enough bombs.

David Sirota raises an interesting point: As we talk about the importance of white working class voters, at some point the discussion starts to shade over into a less savory notion — that Democratic superdelegates shouldn’t take black primary voters as seriously as white primary voters.

In the course of a speculative post about who would make a good VP for Obama, BooMan brings up something that it seems like everybody in the liberal blogosphere knows, but never gets discussed in front of the general public: Underneath the Clinton-Obama battle are the same forces that lined up in the Terry McAuliffe vs. Howard Dean battle over the direction of the Democratic Party. The Dean position has been: Evangelize for liberalism. Try to compete in all 50 states, and tell people everywhere why Democratic principles and programs would work for them. The McAuliffe position is: Focus all your energies on the battleground states and the swing voters, and move to the right to make yourself more appealing to them. Deaniacs see the 2006 sweep as a vindication of their approach, with victories in places that McAuliffe would never have put resources. As current head of the DNC, Dean is officially neutral in the Obama-Clinton race, but the Deaniac activists are almost unanimously for Obama, while McAuliffe is working for Clinton. One reason there’s so much hostility between the campaigns is that the activists on each side have been battling much, much longer than Obama and Clinton.

EmptyWheel is one of the best investigative bloggers — she covered the Scooter Libby trial better than any mainstream journalist — and doesn’t usually get into the horserace side of politics. But she’s also a Michigan Democrat who resents the way her state has been turned into a political football. So she presents her own plan for handling the Michigan delegation.

SlateV lets us in on White House Life’s plan for President Bush’s retirement.

Am I the only one who wishes I had pulled off a prank like this when I was in high school?

In this week’s Sift:

Leave Iraq? No Time Soon: General Petraeus came back to Washington, but his troops will stay in Iraq for a long time.

Time to Assess the Bush Boom: If we’re going into a recession, we can make fair comparisons to the start of previous recessions. The results don’t look good.

Chaff and Bitterness: Chaff issues sparkle, but have no content. They work because voters are cynical, and voters get more cynical when chaff issues dominate the debate.

Short Notes: Bush confessed to war crimes and no one cared. Railroading Don Siegelman. And the Daily Show’s history of Fox News.

That minor skirmish in Iraq came briefly back into the spotlight this week. General Petraeus spent two days testifying in front of Congress, and it all led up to a speech in which President Bush “accepted” Petraeus’ advice to stop withdrawing troops when the Surge brigades leave — as if he ever considered doing anything else. In a conversation with Bill Kristol, Bush admitted the deception: “My answer is no. [But] I’m not going to say that. I’m going to say that I agree with David, that we ought to take a look.”

You can watch Bush’s 17-minute speech for yourself. It closes with this heartfelt message to our worn-down troops:

The day will come when pigs sprout wings, and you will fly home on their backs.

Wait, I must have nodded off and dreamed that part. According to the transcript he actually said this:

The day will come when Iraq is a capable partner of the United States. The day will come when Iraq is a stable democracy that helps fight our common enemies and promote our common interests in the Middle East. And when that day arrives, you’ll come home with pride in your success, and the gratitude of your whole nation.

No time soon, in other words.

So what did we learn this week? The gist of General Petraeus’ testimony was predictable: We’re making progress in Iraq, but that progress can’t be quantified in any way that would allow us to make predictions (at least not in a time frame shorter than “the day will come”). The failure of the recent Basra offensive was spun like cotton candy into a sign of this unmeasurable progress. Petraeus kept using mathematical metaphors like “battlefield geometry” and “political-military calculus,” but appealing to the intimidation factor of mathematics rather than the objective, calculable aspect. “Political-military calculus” seems to be something that experts like General Petraeus can understand, but can’t explain to doofuses like the American people or their elected representatives (like that well-known blond airhead, Senator Clinton).

The hearings were also a chance for the presidential candidates to audition their Iraq policies. (See TPM’s selected highlights of the hearings, including Ohio Republican Senator George Voinovich saying: “The American people have had it up to here” at about the 5:40 mark.) Their performances are good examples of how each one thinks.

Senator McCain gave an opening statement that sounded a lot like President Bush: He framed the situation in simplistic terms that appeal more to American emotions than to the complicated reality of Iraq — success, failure, victory, dying in vain, and so forth. He also read his statement as badly as Bush usually does. (Check out Clinton’s bored expression at the 2:20 mark.) His conclusion: “With the untold costs of failure and the benefits offered by success, the Congress must not choose to lose in Iraq. We should choose instead to succeed.”

Senator Clinton tried to turn the administration spin around. She responded to “suggestions that have been made leading up to this hearing and even during it that it is irresponsible or demonstrates a lack of leadership to advocate withdrawing troops from Iraq. … I fundamentally disagree. Rather, I think it could be fair to say that it might well be irresponsible to continue the policy that has not produced the results that have been promised time and time again.”

Senator Obama treated the hearing as if it were a genuine discussion rather than a set-piece for everyone to play predictable roles. (The first time I watched, I had no idea where he was going.) He stated his personal opinion — “I continue to believe that the original decision to go into Iraq was a massive strategic blunder” — and then tried to craft a bipartisan narrative for the committee as a whole: “Our resources are finite. This is a point that has just been made by Senator Voinovich. It’s been made by Senator Biden, Senator Lugar, Senator Hegel. … When you have finite resources, you’ve got to define your goals tightly and modestly. … I’m trying to get to an end point. That’s what all of us have been trying to get to.” And then he plunged into the details to see if he could drive the definition of “success” downward to something that is achievable. His ultimate question was: If “a messy, sloppy status quo” in Iraq — modest Al Qaida involvement, some violence, some corruption, some Iranian influence, but no threat to Iraq’s neighbors and no secure base from which Al Qaida could launch external attacks — could be maintained by the Iraqi government without American troops, would that count as success? Crocker and Petraeus did not seem to know what to do with this kind of questioning. Crocker first tried to interpret it as a proposal for “precipitous drawdown”. Then he got condescending: “This is hard. This is complicated.” And then he seemed to me to more-or-less agree, while closing on the caveat: “That’s not where we are now.”

One way people get tricky with statistics is to pick their dates carefully. Unless you’re at the worst moment in all of human history, you can always say: “Stuff has improved this much since that time when stuff was worse.” If you go back to the Great Depression or the Black Death, you can always show phenomenal improvement.

That’s how on January 4 the White House was able to announce: “Since August 2003, more than 8.3 million jobs have been created.” Why August, 2003? Because that’s when the job market bottomed out. Stuff has improved by 8.3 million since that time when stuff was worse. Should we be impressed or not?

In economics, the only meaningful comparison is across a complete business cycle. If you’re, say, 40% of the way through a cycle, the meaningful comparison is to a time 40% of the way through the last cycle. Unfortunately, you usually don’t know where you are — the term business cycle is sort of a euphemism — so you aren’t sure what to compare to. The economy goes up and down, but it doesn’t roll along smoothly like a wheel. It’s more like a wheel on an icy, bumpy road.

Right now, though, it’s pretty clear where we are: We’re going into a recession. So that makes this a good time to total up. How do things look compared to the start of the last recession in 2000? And how does that complete cycle compare to previous cycles?

For years, cheerleaders like CNBC’s Larry Kudlow have been telling us about “the Bush Boom” and how media bias has kept Americans from appreciating just how wonderful things are. In December Kudlow wrote:

fiscal and monetary coordination will continue the Bush boom for years to come. Though mainstream media outlets will never admit it, President Bush has kept America safe and prosperous. But history will eventually judge him in a more kindly light.

Now that this business cycle is over, history can start judging. And you know what? This cycle, to use the technical economic term, sucked. The suckiness shows up in jobs, GDP, length of expansion, and all the other statistics. But in Wednesday’s New York Times David Leonhardt put his finger on the key number: median annual family income.

In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500. This has never happened before, at least not for as long as the government has been keeping records.

This graph of median annual family income makes the point even clearer. No recent cycle comes close to the Kennedy-Johnson record of a 37% increase, but the subsequent cycles have shown increases of 7%, 6%, 6%, and the Clinton cycle’s 11%. And now it goes down. Heck of a job, Georgie.

“We have had expansions before where the bottom end didn’t do well,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who studies the job market. “But we’ve never had an expansion in which the middle of income distribution had no wage growth.”

So what happened? Briefly, the expansionary part of this cycle was pretty anemic to begin with, and all the money that it did generate went to the rich. That trend towards increased inequality goes back to Reagan, as Paul Krugman argued last September using this graph of the percent of total income going to the top 10%.

For a more detailed analysis, see this post by Hale Stewart (a.k.a. “bonddad” on Daily Kos). He argues that increased debt makes the median family even worse off than the income statistics suggest: Total household debt was 92% of GDP in 2005 compared to 70% in 2000. Stewart sums up:

1.) Job growth was the weakest of any post WWII recovery.

2.) Real median income actually dropped for the duration of this expansion.

3.) To sustain consumption, consumers went on a mammoth debt acquisition binge, so that now

4.) Debt payments are as high as they have ever been on a percentage of disposable income basis.

So after 7 years of economic expansion we have lower incomes and more debt.

Lower income, more debt — sounds great, doesn’t it?

I’m tempted to end on a Bush-is-the-worst-president-ever note, but that’s too easy. The Bush administration is not some bizarre anomaly; it is the culmination of a conservative movement that started with Goldwater and took control with Reagan. The Bush policies — cut rich people’s taxes, spend a lot on defense, squeeze the welfare state, and deregulate business — are core Goldwater-Reagan policies that will continue if conservatives keep power by electing McCain.

We’ve tried those policies. They don’t work.

The only difference between Bush the Second and other recent conservative presidents was that W had a freer hand. He had Republican majorities in Congress for most of his term, and the Democratic opposition was unusually timid in the wake of 9/11. So this administration is the fairest test yet of conservative economics.

Those ideas don’t work. It’s that simple. The facts are in, and among rational people the debate should be over: We don’t just need a new face in the White House, we need a fundamentally new approach to the economy.

I wasn’t going to comment on this week’s campaign controversy: Obama’s “they get bitter” comment about small towns that have been exporting jobs overseas for 25 years. It seemed like a non-issue that had already gotten too much attention elsewhere. But then I realized that, precisely because it is so vacuous, this story provides a good opportunity to discuss what I have started calling “chaff issues”.

Chaff, as all Cold War buffs know, is the aluminum foil that B-52s release in strips as they approach a target. It looks all sparkly on radar, so it confuses air defense systems. A chaff issue works the same way: It sparkles like a major issue, but has no content. If a campaign releases enough chaff, the real issues facing the country might never be detected at all. The classic chaff issue was the pledge of allegiance, which Bush the First used against Dukakis in 1988.

Daily Kos has a good review of the “bitterness” issue: text of what Obama said, responses from McCain and Clinton, and a video of Obama’s comeback. Obama’s point, in essence, explains chaff issues: The reason they work, he claims, is because people have lost faith in the government’s ability to change their lives in a meaningful way. (Bill Clinton made more-or-less the same point in 1991.)

Let’s flesh that idea out. If people had believed that they’d get better jobs under a Gore administration than under Bush, would they have cared whether or not Gore claimed to have invented the Internet? Of course not. But if government is so useless or corrupt that it makes no difference in your life, then why not treat the presidential race like an episode of American Idol? Elections become dramas about characters, not attempts to change the country. “That John Kerry is rich and he windsurfs and his wife has a funny accent. Screw him.”

The McCain/Clinton attempt to flog Obama’s comment into some issue about “elitism” or being “out of touch” with regular people — really that just illustrates Obama’s point. Suppose you genuinely believed that Obama would end the Iraq War but McCain wouldn’t. Would you care whether Obama was “elitist”? Picture it: “Sure, my nephew in the Marines might have to die if McCain gets in, but I can’t vote for Obama because he’s just not a regular guy.”

No. Chaff issues work because people are cynical about government. They don’t believe that their votes can end the Iraq War, get them health care, or change their lives in any meaningful way at all. And it’s a self-reinforcing cycle: The more campaigns revolve around chaff issues — issues that by definition lead to no change in everyday life — the more cynical people get.

Here’s a key point that is often missed: Republicans do well with chaff issues because they want people to be cynical about government. But Democrats play with fire when they stir up chaf. A cynical electorate is never going to support a new New Deal. Instead, it’s going to use government as a club to beat down people it doesn’t like — gays, immigrants, Muslims, foreigners — because that’s all government seems to be good for.

So in the long term Democrats can’t win by developing new and better chaff. Democrats need to overcome voters’ cynicism rather than pander to it. They need to run on issues that mean something — Iraq, health care, the environment, energy — and then deliver clear progress after they get elected. And they need to encourage the opposite of cynicism, to (in the words of Rabbi Michael Lerner) “overcome the alienation from each other that this way of being has created so that we might once again recognize each other as embodiments of God.”

Last week I linked to Phillippe Sands’ article alleging that “enhanced interrogation” came to Guantanamo from top-level administration lawyers. Well, this week ABC News went further and placed the blame right at the top: First came a report (based on anonymous sources) that the National Security Council principals group — Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Tenet, and Ashcroft — approved specific tortures for specific detainees. Friday, this claim was confirmed by the highest possible source. President Bush told ABC News’ Martha Raddatz: “Yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.” For some reason a lot of us are having a hard time fathoming, the president’s confession of war crimes has not become a major story. (See Digby, Emptywheel.) I remember the media outcry for Obama to denounce Rev. Wright — where’s the outcry for McCain to denounce Bush?

If you wonder why anyone should care about the U.S. attorneys’ scandal and the politicization of the Justice Department, watch this 60 Minutes piece on former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, who has spent most of the last year in prison. CBS presents Siegelman’s conviction as the result of a long-term attack plan masterminded by Karl Rove. I was struck by this quote from Siegleman’s lawyer: “You still have to investigate crimes, not people. It undermines the entire system of justice, because at that point anybody can be a target. Any prosecutor can look across the table and say, ‘You know what? I just don’t like you.’ ” Last Monday, MSNBC’s Dan Abrams’ interviewed Siegelman (part 1, part 2), who just got sprung from prison (pending his appeal) by an appellate judge.

Blue Texan on FireDogLake gives us a great example of how to respond quickly and efficiently to pro-war propaganda. In Friday morning’s Wall Street Journal, Michael Yon wrote a glowing account of the achievements of the Surge and its new counterinsurgency strategy: Now young Iraqi boys want to grow up to be American soldiers; Abu Ghraib has been forgotten; our hired Sunni tribesmen are like the soldiers at Valley Forge; Iraq is making political progress, because military progress IS political progress. These “facts” lead to a conclusion about the “outdated” discussion going on in Congress: “Precisely because we have made so much political progress in the past year, rather than talking about force reduction, Congress should be figuring ways and means to increase troop levels.” (In other words: Congress should reach into its top hat and pull fresh brigades out like rabbits.) By 10:30 that morning, Blue Texan had googled Yon’s previous articles and pointed out that the Surge and counterinsurgency have nothing to do with Yon’s rosy outlook: Two and even three years ago Yon was waxing eloquent about how we were “winning” the war, despite how the media was “deluding” us.

Your weekly minimum humor requirement: The Daily Show’s John Oliver does a hilarious and biting history of Fox News. And 23/6 cuts an episode of Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room down to one minute — losing surprisingly little.