(Crossposted at Veritosity.com)

From the Politico: Jewish leaders fight back on Obama smears

To be clear, those are smears against Obama, not smears from Obama.

While it's nice of them to let us know that some upright Jewish citizens are taking a stand against this "OMFG Obama's an anti-Semite" nonsense, the lovely people at the Politico might want to word their headlines more carefully.

(Crossposted at my own blog.)

Since Jonah Goldberg seems so eager to jump into that discussion. As one blogger points out (via Andrew Sullivan) a guy who works at the National Review really has no right to be throwing charges of fascism around willy-nilly. After all, it wasn't the Nation that was publishing love letters to Adolf Eichmann and Francisco Franco in the 60's and 70's.

But since we're on the topic of the history of fascism in the United States, let's talk about the Business Plot - an incident that is curiously absent from the current dialogue about the history of American fascism.

Here's the Cliff Notes version: in the early to mid-30's, a group of corporate leaders who weren't big fans of the Roosevelt administration but thought that the Nazi Party was just swell tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a coup to overthrow the president of the United States and install a fascist dictatorship in his place. Unfortunately for them, they forgot rule #1 of fascist coups: never trust a man named Smedley to carry out your sinister conspiracy for you. It turns out that not only was Butler a patriot, but he had openly supported FDR in the 1932 election. Suffice to say, whoever's bright idea it was to recruit him to lead the coup did not end up winning the 1934 Golden Cassius award for malevolent plotting. Butler ended up testifying to a congressional committee about the whole thing.

So who was involved in the whole thing? Turns out it was a bunch of hippie vegetarian liberals who didn't think FDR was liberal enough. Gotcha! Actually, the chief backers, according to Butler, were the Du Pont family, funding it through a bipartisan but overwhelmingly pro-corporate organization called the American Liberty League. Butler also fingered Chase Bank, GM and Goodyear as having a part in the plot. Decades later, a documentary called The White House Coup alleged that Senator Prescott Bush was also part of the plot.

The Senate committee that Smedley Butler testified to acknowledged the existence of the conspiracy, but no convictions were handed down.

Just for kicks, here's some campaign contributions made during this election cycle by individual members of the Du Pont family. And here's some info about the Du Pont company's PAC, which even with a Democratic majority in both houses and a more pickups in both the House and Senate forecasted this year (not to mention that presidential election we keep hearing everyone talk about), is still donating 64% of its contributions to Republican candidates.

Now look, I'm not an idiot. I'm not going to go running around screaming that Duncan Hunter's a fascist just because a member of a wealthy family that was financially backing a US fascist coup donated money to Hunter's campaign. Nor am I suggesting that George W. Bush is a neo-Nazi just because his grandfather may not only have had a hand in the coup but also had financial interests in Nazi Germany. All I'm saying is that Goldberg's been throwing around similarly ridiculous accusations about the modern progressive movement based on evidence that basically amounts to: Liberals are unpleasant : fascism is also unpleasant : liberals are therefore fascist. Apply his rigorous and highly serious standards of historical research to the National Review's history and the history of the Business Plot and you'll find that the Hitler mustache is on the wrong face.

(Crossposted from my own blog.)

A lot of people have been pointing out the stupidity of the New York Times' recent decision to pick up the tab for Bill Kristol's career life support. But it's a decision too patently ridiculous for me to not throw in my two cents.

On the one hand, I can sort of understand the rationale behind such a hire. The Times op-ed page is frequently derided as too liberal - or even socialist - by the conservative media (using a strange sort of math that makes Tom Friedman a foreign policy liberal and assumes Maureen Dowd has any kind of political convictions besides a love of Beltway high school gossip). What the Times needs, then, is another David Brooks - a self-styled conservative "intellectual." Kristol's cultivated an image as such an intellectual. And there's got to be somebody in the Times headquarters reading all of the negative reactions to their recent hiring and smugly deciding that if the paper is now pissing off both the left and the right, they must be doing something right.

I wouldn't really call Brooks an intellectual, but at least he has some ability to form opinions independent of the Republican Party. A good op-ed columnist should be able to do that - after all, Times official policy is supposed to bar columnists from outright endorsements. As my favorite NYT columnist, Paul Krugman, said in a recent interview: "In principle, you don't even know which party I favor."

There's no question which party Bill Kristol favors. The guy is a pure GOP talking point machine, through and through. He's spent the last seven years as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration and when the GOP picks a nominee he'll be that nominee's unofficial press secretary throughout the rest of the election.

Despite the image of himself that Kristol has tried to cultivate, he's no intellectual. I'm still waiting for evidence that he's even sentient.

(Crossposted from my own blog.)

You've really got to feel sorry for Mitt Romney right now. This is the guy who is [probably] going to be the Republican nominee and yet he is beset on all sides by indignities within his own party.

Romney's main pitch is that he's a good synthesis of the three legs of the Republican stool, as he'd call it - the corporate lobby (that one's not hard to explain and is perhaps the only thing he's been consistent on throughout his entire career), the theocons (due to his willingness to ditch his previously moderate positions on social issues and wage an all-out pander assault on Christian fundamentalists), and the foreign policy neocons (due to his constant attempts to out-Giuliani Giuliani with mindless blather about radical Jihadists and doubling the size of Guantanamo).

The latest slew of attack ads from the Romney campaign show how little large voting blocs of the Republican Party are buying this pitch. Why settle for a Mormon faux-fundamentalist who used to actually tolerate gay people when you can have Mike Huckabee? Why have John McCain's foreign policy-lite when you can have the actual John McCain? Romney may have been able to take out a piece of Giuliani's advantage by feigning the über-hawk, but McCain's been pretty consistent about that all along.

So now Romney is in a weird position - beset by Huckabee in Iowa and McCain in New Hampshire. And things are getting even more awkward now that McCain is aggressively campaigning in Iowa this week too. The thing is, even this could be part of the cutting-down-Romney-in-NH strategy; Josh thinks that McCain is hoping a third-place finish in Iowa would give him momentum into the granite state. We'll see how doable this is - I'm skeptical that either Huckabee or McCain can unseat Romney in the end since they've got little appeal outside of their own legs of the stool - but what's remarkable here is that Romey is being forced to run attack ads in Iowa and New Hampshire.

In particular, I can't help but feel a little sorry for Romney now that he's been forced to actually acknowledge McCain in New Hampshire. The schandenfreude kind of overwhelms the sympathy, but it's still there. Massachusetts governors aren't supposed to have to fight for New Hampshire and the fact that up until a few weeks ago all McCain was doing at the debates was taking up valuable podium space compounds the embarrassment.

As I've said before, I still expect Romney to be the nominee. But what's happening right now is that two other insurgent candidates are draining all of the GOP enthusiasm out of a Romney candidacy, which is going to make mobilizing the base really hard for him in a general election. And we get to see him sweat a little bit - I'd be lying if I said that wasn't entertaining.

(Crossposted at my own blog.)

(And Andrew Sullivan in particular)

In the spirit of the season, everyone needs to chill the hell out. As Matthew Yglesias points out, people have a tendency to overstate their case when it comes to supporting or knocking down candidates during the primary season. Everyone's guilty of it, including me. But for whatever reason, that seems to be particularly true of the Obama supporters of the Internet. So here are some things to keep in mind:

1. I don't like Hillary Clinton either. That doesn't mean that every single criticism of her, no matter how off-the-wall, illogical, or just plain silly (like the assertion that another Clinton presidency would be the continuation of a Bush-Clinton monarchical dynasty) has merit.

2. Regardless of the merit of Paul Krugman's attacks on Obama's rhetoric, Krugman is not Karl Rove. He does not have some kind of wild-eyed personal vendetta against Obama. He is not camped in the bushes outside of Obama's campaign headquarters with a screwdriver and a sock full of quarters. He has serious concerns about Obama's policy and rhetoric which should be treated as such, not as personal attacks on the level of salacious rumors about Obama's mother.

3. And while we're on the subject of his critics, not everyone who criticizes Obama is a secret enemy of the campaign or whatever. Re: Ezra Klein.

4. Barack Obama has screwed up. He has hedged, and he has pandered. Candidates do that from time to time, even the best ones. His campaign isn't a small part of some huge movement or a political realignment - it's a relatively conventional campaign being run by a guy with an unconventional personal biography. It's not "people-powered politics," like the Dean campaign. It's a campaign all about electing Obama. That's what most campaigns are.

5. Lastly: Take a deep breath. Seriously.

Happy holidays, everyone. It's weird to think that Huckabee and I share a Christmas tradition, but I guess that's some kind of metaphor for something. Or something.

(Crossposted at my own blog.)

That are rumors swirling that McCain and Edwards might be doing stronger in their primaries than current polling indicates. On the GOP side, Greg reports that McCain is trending upwards and could possibly get a strong second-place finish in New Hampshire. That would be potentially embarrassing for Romney, considering, as one McCain staffer points out: "no Massachusetts candidate has ever won in New Hampshire by less than eight points."

My initial reaction to all of this was to write off the McCain surge (extra points for irony in the name) as wishful thinking on the part of a lot of beltway Republicans who clung to the old image of McCain as some sort of maverick freedom fighter. But with Giuliani slipping fast in the early states and no plausible alternatives, I could see McCain becoming the candidate of choice for the GOP hawks. Sure McCain doesn't seem to share Giuliani's distaste for checks and balances and civil liberties, but if video evidence is correct he's still got the "national security candidate's" full-on war-boner for Iran.

The fact that the media loves McCain would give him a huge boost too, particularly since right-wing punditry is flailing for somebody who can be the anti-Huckabee. Right now they've more or less settled on Romney, but I'm willing to bet that if McCain started to look like a viable choice again they would dump him.

Edwards looks like a little bit less of a long shot, considering how tight polling is in Iowa right now. Obviously the race doesn't begin and end in Iowa, but if Edwards finished first there and Obama second, we're looking at a three-way race. If Edwards finishes first and Clinton second, then it's a two-way race. I predicted a first-place finish for Obama in Iowa, but Chris Bowers seems to think that Edwards has a couple percentage points in his pocket that aren't represented in polling. We'll see about that.

It might not be relevant, though. Bowers is still reporting that Edwards will finish in second to Obama, which I think would be more of a reflection of Clinton's current weakness than Edwards' strength. If this is what the lineup looks like after Iowa, I don't see a two-way race or a three-way race - I see a month or so of Obama playing touch football in front of a phalanx of cameras and pausing every once in a while to flash a youthful and vigorous grin and tell the American people about the importance of hope and optimism.

So as of right now? Both of these secret-surge theories have merit, but I don't think they're going to change the ultimate outcome. My prediction is still for a Romney v. Obama general election.

(Crossposted at my own blog.)

Mike Huckabee on torture, late November:

For the most part, Huckabee told reporters after speaking in Cedar Rapids on Thursday morning, U.S. policy ought to be to "never support anything done to others that we would not want done to our own soldiers."

...

Huckabee would leave decisions about the appropriateness of the technique "because of a unique situation" to commanders in the field.

Mike Huckabee on torture and Guantanamo, early December:

After the meeting, Huckabee joined Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in declaring his opposition to the interrogation procedure known as "waterboarding," and said he would support closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a contrast with the other leading Republicans.

Mike Huckabee on torture and Guantanamo, late December:

Asked about Guantanamo, Mike Huckabee said he had visited the facility and said it was “disappointing” that military personnel were eating meals that averaged $1.60 while the detainees were eating Halal meals that cost over $4 each.

“The inmates there were getting a whole lot better treatment than my prisoners in Arkansas. In fact, we left saying, ‘I hope our guys don’t see this. They’ll all want to be transferred to Guantanamo. If anything, it’s too nice.”

It looks like Huckabee decided that his earlier idea of picking a single issue to not be completely insane on was a bad move. No, he has to be crazy across the board.

(Crossposted at my own blog.)

Yesterday's TPMtv electoral roundup was definitely a keeper. Take a look.

I think Josh's assessment of the Republican race right now is spot on. You're already seeing the conservative punditry consolidate around Romney - a little over a week ago Joe Scarborough had a gushing interview with him on MSNBC, there's the National Review endorsement and just a general sense that things have reversed between Huckabee and Romney - Huckabee was largely perceived when he first started taking off as the anti-Romney, the guy who could win over the evangelicals because he was actually one of them rather than being a patrician panderer like Romney. Now Romney is largely seen among the GOP elite as the anti-Huckabee. Huckabee, for reasons I still don't fully understand, scares the crap out of them, and so they're rallying around the guy who can beat him - Giuliani's pro-choice, tarred as soft on immigration, scandal-ridden and too weak among evangelicals and the early-staters to rescue them from the genial fundamentalist menace.

So that makes Romney the eventual nominee, I suspect, since the conservative media's going to keep piling on Huckabee until he really starts to feel the pressure. Expectations for Huckabee are high right now, so Romney might not even have to get first in Iowa anymore - but if does, then he's going to be called the resurgent candidate and that boost is going to carry him through New Hampshire and the later states.

The other possibility is that Huckabee actually wins the nomination, and I think that's a possibility that's often too easily discounted. So far the anti-Huckabee sentiments among GOP pundits hasn't hurt his momentum so much, and while I suspect it will eventually, it might not be enough to stop the Huckabee steam engine. He could win, and in fact right now I think he has a better chance of winning the nomination than Giuliani. But I'm still going to have to hand it to Romney, with Huckabee as a close second.

On the Democratic side, I think Josh is underestimating the power of the anti-Clinton media firestorm. Sure her "inevitability" was always largely a media creation, as is her current campaign doldrums, but that doesn't mean that they're not real. Right now Iowa's anyone's game - hell, even Edwards could take it - but I think ultimately both Iowa and New Hampshire are going to go to Obama. What's going to happen then? I don't think we're going to see a line of TV personalities waiting to get on the air and, in perfectly even tones, say, "Well, in all fairness, Clinton's inevitability was always overrated and she's still looking pretty strong, so we could have a real fight on our hands still." No, the reaction's going to be more along the lines of, "HOLY CRAP, THE ONCE INEVITABLE CANDIDATE IS TAKING A BEATING COULD THIS BE THE BEGINNING OF THE END?!!"

Cue hours and hours of news footage about the Clinton campaign's total implosion and the inescapable tide of Obamalocity or whatever stupid word they're going to come up with for it.

Clinton might bounce back from it, and if Edwards takes Iowa we might see a whole different game. But right now my prediction for the general election battle is Obama versus Romney. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how that would turn out.

(Crossposted at my own blog.)

Nobody's ever really properly demonstrated to me the importance of Jonah Goldberg's opinion to the wider electorate, so I guess unless you're either a politics nerd like me and most of the people on my blogroll or a pretentious conservative self-styled pseudo-intellectual (which is really just one of the more detestable subgroups of your run-of-the-mill politics nerd), there's really no reason for you to care who this guy is. And that's why I haven't made much mention of him here.

Except that his forthcoming book, the unironically titled Liberal Fascism, is worth mention just for sheer entertainment value alone. If what we've seen from quotes and scans of advance copies floating around the blogosphere (look at the example in the title) are any indication, then writing this book and then allowing it to be published is somewhere on the spectrum of humiliation in between pissing your pants while receiving your high school diploma and being featured in an episode of To Catch a Predator.

There's an important lesson to be learned from all of this: the modern conservative movement is so impoverished of genuine intellect that one of their most prominent intellectual heavyweights is the guy who accused liberals of using fascism like a cudgel without even understanding what it means and then went on to write an entire book about how liberals are fascists because Hitler was a vegetarian who liked exercise too.

Ezra Klein likes to poke fun at Goldberg's oblivious insistence that his book is "a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care," but to be fair, Goldberg has a point. His book probably does represent the definitive laying out of that argument, but considering how obviously ridiculous and stupid said argument is, that's an extremely low bar to clear.