Here’s an interesting critique of the prevailing hurrahs over Wal_mart’s entry into the organic foods business.

Hey, remember when I said that Joe Lieberman was a Republican a few days ago? Apparently, Jack Kemp agrees and will be campaigning for his fellow conservative.

There’s an interesting piece in The Monitor that asks whether or not the Bush Doctrine has failed. A variety of viewpoints are presented, but I do think it’s fair to say that the answer to that question is “yes”. The article then goes on to present the case made by some analysts that this conflict may present the end of western military dominance in the region. The basis for this is the notion that there’s a new “islamist” way of waging military resistance that cannot be defeated by conventional military tactics.

Hogwash.

I almost hate to say it, because it would be nice if it were true, but the “problem” here isn’t an end to western military dominance. The problem is the utopian neo-con abandonment of realpolitik for their special brand of faith based foreign policy. Some future U.S. president, wtih our intelligence and foreign policy establishments behind him will find a local proxy. That local proxy and his ethnic, religious, or ideological compatriots will have no difficulty doing the kind of horrifying brutality that sickens us when we can fool ourselves into believing that it’s “isolated incidents” of bad behavior by our troops. It’s what we’ve done so masterfully for a good 120 years or so now.

The American people don’t think of themselves as brutal oppressors and don’t want to think of themselves that way. We can maintain our self-image by letting others do the dirty work. The shift that came with the Bush Doctrine wasn’t preemption. Our whole empire is based on preemption. We just normally do it by proxy.

The Republican primary for governor is definitely the first one to start going ugly. Tom Gallagher has a commercial wherein he accuses Charlie Crist of being pro-choice, supporting civil unions for gays, supporting amnesty for illegal immigrants,  and being in favor of some billion dollar spending plan that JEB! opposes. For republican primary voters in Florida, this is about the same as accusing Crist of being in NAMBLA.
Crist has fired back with an ad that talks about Gallagher’s distorting attacks on JEB! eight years ago in his previous run for governor. Crist has been serving as Attorney General under JEB!. Prior to the JEB! era, Crist had made a couple of failed attempts at running for statewide office as the darling of the religious right. He has tried to position himself in this race as a mainstream, pragmatic problem solver, focusing on his work as Attorney General. Crist hasn’t really done much in the way of attack ads on Gallagher, at least not on TV. He may be doing them by mail or some other venue where only Republicans can see them. The aforementioned ad simply has Crist talking into the camera about Gallagher’s history of attack politics.

Early in this race, Crist was the clear favorite. That was kind of surprise to me. Gallagher is a well known figure in the state who has run several statewide campaigns over the last 15 years. The race has pulled much tighter in recent weeks, proof that Gallagher’s attack ads are working. I imagine that Crist is going to have to respond in kind if he wants to stay in this thing. Crist’s TV advertising has mostly been aimed at the general election audience until this most recent ad. I’m sure he was hoping to avoid a bruising primary, but that’s not looking too likely now.

Good.

Be all that you can be in the Army of one

A favorite disparaging remark about Joe Lieberman in recent years was to refer to him as the Republican senator from Connecticut. That’s become closer and closer to the factual truth in the last couple of weeks. It was shameful that Lieberman abandoned the Democratic party by thwarting the will of its voters in the 2006 primary. According to an article in the NY Times, the GOP has all but officially endorsed Lieberman in the race. The GOP’s own candidate is a complete joke, registering the lowest polling numbers of any major party candidate ever in some polls.

Lieberman is the choice for Weekly Standard editor and neoconservative leader William Kristol. In the Times article, Kristol states “Foreign policy hawks and Bush doctrine believers and prowar types, we want Lieberman to win.”

There’s the choice for Connecticut voters. Do you want the pro-Bush, pro-war candidate of the neoconservatives, publicly endorsed by the likes of Kristol and Newt Gingrich? Do you want a mainstream democrat with well developed positions on a wide array of issues? If it’s the former, you vote for Lieberman. If it’s the latter, you vote for Lamont.

A while ago, former U.S. Senator Bob Graham announced his support of Jim Davis in the Democratic primary for the shot to replace outgoing two term governor Jeb Bush. That alone was pretty big. Graham is probably the most popular politician in the state. He’s easily the most popular Democrat of the last 30 years and probably the second best retail politician we’ve produced in the last 50 years. This morning I saw a commercial that Graham has cut for Davis. Graham narrates the first half, is featured prominently with Davis while narrating and then talks directly into the camera. This is a really powerful ad and may just be what Davis needs to shore up the nomination.

Davis was once considered a shoe-in for the nomination. He was a strong enough candidate, on paper, that some other Democrats chose not to enter the race. State Senator Rod Smith quickly emerged as the not-Davis candidate and looked suprisingly strong. Polls showed the two of them in a neck and neck race with neither one beating Republican front runner Charlie Crist. Davis has started to pull away from Smith recently. He’s also pulling better against Crist. If Bob Graham is looking at Davis as the heir to his political machine and if he campaigns like that, Davis will end up winning this thing.

Sadly, I won’t live here to enjoy that. If Phil Angelides doesn’t get his act together, I may be leaving Florida just as the two term JEB! years are replaced by a Democrat in the governorship and moving to California just as Ahnold goes from being a political fluke to a two term governor of the largest state in the union.

More on the Republican race to succeed JEB! later.

E.J. Dionne has a pretty sensible op-ed in today’s Post. He talks about the state of the party as an organization and looks at contrasting views on how to go forward with it. He compares the Democratic Party with the Republican. I don’t think he’s saying anything revolutionary, but it’s good to see this viewpoint in print at such a high visibility publication. I particularly liked this bit:

The odd result is that Republicans, who defend individualism in theory, act like communitarians where their party is concerned. Democrats claim to be more community-minded but act like radical individualists in their penchant for candidate-centered, one-cause-at-a-time politics.

I think he’s definitely onto something there. It seems to me that there are a lot more single issue voters in the Democratic Party. I think it’s fair to say that it’s also widely understood that the interest groups that make up the Democratic Party are a less cohesive group than those inside the party. Some of that, I believe, is the legacy of the Democrats’ former status as a true majority party in this country. As the GOP cleaved a group here and a group there off of the Democratic Party, it was natural that those splinters would have a strong similarity with the existing GOP interest groups. But I also think that a major part of it comes from the Democrats’ inability to craft a coherent system of rhetoric that speaks to the various interests and unites them into an easily recognizable framework. Other than a few things that are so generic as to be almost just plain American rather than the province of the party, there are few themes that you’d see repeated by non-candidate speakers at various interest group sponsored Democratic events. The message that you’ll see at an event sponsored by the Teachers or the Teamsters is going to be very specific. It’s not uncommon for that message to even conflict with what speakers might say when at some other interest group’s meeting/rally/etc. To ever really gain true majority status again, the Democratic Party needs to craft a message that speaks to most Americans in clear and compelling terms. But once it’s done that, it also needs to have invested in the grass roots and state level infrastructure that develops compelling messengers for that message. I applaud Howard Dean’s effort to do the latter.

Stirling Newbury has an interesting op-ed up at TruthOut on “the new politics”. It’s a little too much of a love letter to Ned Lamont for my tastes. It also kind of reminds me a bit of some of the more naive versions of “information wants to be free, the internet will create freedom and grass roots democracy for all” that we were seeing a in the late 90s during the dotcom boom. In spite of that, it’s worth a read.

I have stayed quiet on the goings on in Cuba over the last few days. I’ve done so because the news coverage I’ve seen has been so far afield from reality that I didn’t quite know how to respond. It’s as if the whole media world had started drinking the same kool aid that keeps the Miami Cubans in their oddly excited and delusional state. Finally, I’ve seen an article that addresses things from a more realistic perspective. Given the sometimes delusionally neo-liberal tint of the Monitor, I’m almost surprised that it came from them, but their hard news is usually good. It’s more often the editorial pieces that are crazy from that rag.