There’s been a lot of buzz around the blogosphere about a phony Abraham Lincoln quote that Bush Iraq War supporters keep throwing out there (most recently senior House GOPer Don Young of Alaska), suggesting that dissenters in Congress during wartime are “saboteurs” who might well be “arrested, exiled or hanged.”Lincoln never said that, but the more important issue is the underlying suggestion that there’s something unprecdented and un-American about dissent, in Congress and elsewhere, in wartime. Nothing could be further from the truth.Many southerners opposed the War of 1812 as a New England conspiracy to seize Canada and enhance its regional power. Most northern Whigs–including, most notably, a young Congressman named Abraham Lincoln–opposed the Mexican War as a southern conspiracy to seize Mexican lands and enhance its own regional power. During the Civil War, much of the Democratic Party in the North officially opposed the government’s war aims. There were open and large and vibrant antiwar movements as well prior to and during the Spanish-American War, World War I, and Vietnam. And there’s no question that most Republicans openly challenged the Truman administration’s policies during the Korean War, and the Clinton administration’s intervention in Kosovo.The only real exceptions to the normal pattern of dissent were World War II and Afghanistan. And it’s no accident that in both cases, war began through a direct attack on the United States.The other wars were, like Iraq, wars of choice, waged not as a matter of immediate national self-defense, but in response to debatable and rebuttable arguments of national interest.Nearly two years after the Mexican War commenced, a Member of Congress penned a letter challenging the war’s original justification, and commencing with a demand for its termination, with these words:”[It] is a singular omission in this message [by President James K. Polk], that it, no where intimates when the President expects the war to terminate. At it’s beginning, Genl. Scott was, by this same President, driven into disfavor, if not disgrace, for intimating that peace could not be conquered in less than three or four months. But now, at the end of about twenty months, during which time our arms have given us the most splendid successes–every department, and every part, land and water, officers and privates, regulars and volunteers, doing all that men could do, and hundreds of things which it had ever before been thought men could not do,–after all this, this same President gives us a long message, without showing us, that, as to the end, he himself, has, even an imaginary conception. As I have before said, he knows not where he is. He is a bewildered, confounded, and miserably perplexed man. God grant he may be able to show, there is not something about his conscious [sic], more painful than all his mental perplexity!”The author of this missive, which any Member of Congress could equally address to George W. Bush, was one Abraham Lincoln.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

In case you somehow missed it, the Edwards Blogger pseudo-story reached its denouement this last week, when Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen resigned their new campaign jobs, citing vast quantities of hate email, including death threats. Anyone who puts his or her name out there in the public square is going to get hateful and abusive communications; I certainly do from time to time. But nobody should have to put up with threats of bodily harm, much less murder. In most jurisdictions in this country, conveying such “terroristic threats,” regardless of the medium, is a crime punishable with fines or even imprisonment. I hope Marcotte and McEwan let some of their worst tormenters know their emails have been referred to the appropriate authorities for investigation and prosecution. Maybe a few of these creeps will get a sense of what it feels like to be hunted.

There’s a brief but interesting article up on the American Prospect site by music historian J. Lester Feder that plays off the Dixie Chicks “controversy” to remind people that country music’s famous political conservatism was yet another legacy of Richard M. Nixon’s Southern Strategy.Feder’s right that country music got politicized in the Nixon Years, and I can add a few examples to his account, from personal memory.He rightly tags Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muscogee” as the apotheosis of country conservatism, and reports ol’ Merle’s claim that the song was a parody. He doesn’t mention Merle’s follow-up superpatriot hit, “The Fightin’ Side of Me”, that was clearly beyond parody:I read about some squirrely guy who claims that he just don’t believe in fightingAnd I wonder just how long the rest of us can count on being freeThey love our milk and honey but they preach about some other way of livingBut when you’re running down my country, hossYou’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me.This tune anchored a live album, recorded in Philadelphia, that was a red-white-and-blue extravaganza. I remember it vividly. My parents, huge Haggard fans (they actually got to hang out with him a bit at an Atlanta country music venue called the Playroom, in those innocent, pre-arena days of the genre), naturally had a copy, and made sure I heard the cut that included his spot-on impressions of other country stars, most notably fellow Bakersfield legend and country-rock pioneer Buck Owens (whose ex-wife Bonnie was Merle’s then-wife and backup singer).Haggard did, a couple of years earlier, turn down a request from George Wallace to endorse his 1968 presidential candidacy. But other country stars–if I remember correctly, they included both Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn–did sing for George. And one of my favorite memories from the 1968 campaign was an ad featuring Grand Ol’ Opry fixture Roy Acuff, who did a soulful musical intro about the nation’s many problems, and then the camera pulled back to show Roy standing next to a gigantic, hideous photo of Richard Nixon (Acuff himself ran for Governor of Tennessee as a Republican back in 1948, and in 1970, campaigned for fellow country singer Tex Ritter in 1970, running for the same office with the same futile result).Perhaps the best example of the abrupt transition from populism to conservatism that Leder talks about was Whisperin’ Bill Anderson, a Georgia country crooner whose band, the Po’ Boys, was rooted in the Depression populist tradition. But in the early 70s, he did a song, “Where Have All Our Heroes Gone?” that arguably captured the rightward, nostalgic trend in country music more presicely than Haggard’s pugilistic odes (though Loretta Lynn’s “God Bless American Again,” co-written with Conway Twitty, which she typically delivered against a backdrop that featured a spotlighted Old Glory, did so as well in a less explicitly political vein).The omission in Leder’s piece that surprised me the most was the obvious antecedent to the Dixie Chicks’ liberal heresy: Earl Scruggs. An alumnus of Bill Monroe’s band, co-founder of the vastly popular Flatt and Scruggs duo, and basically, the inventor of bluegrass banjo pickin’, Scruggs scandalized much of his following by performing at the big 1969 anti-Vietnam War rally in Washington.And Earl’s still around, probably chuckling a bit at the Chicks’ successful notoriety and multiple Grammies. Scruggs picked up his first Grammy the same year as his anti-war appearance, for Foggy Mountain Breakdown, and won a second Grammy for a re-recording of the same piece, in 2002.

As the U.S. House moves inexorably towards a non-binding resolution rejecting the Bush escalation plan for Iraq, I hope the widespread progressive mockery of this step will subside. It’s the first step towards a strategic withdrawal from combat operations in Iraq, not the last.And speaking of next steps, some bloggers who are citing the latest Gallup numbers showing tepid 51% support for a non-binding resolution against the Bush “surge”‘ aren’t exactly playing up the same poll’s 58% opposition to cutting off funds for the escalation. The big anti-Bush majority (63%) is for setting a deadline for withdrawal of U.S. troops by the end of 2008, which, given the poll’s options, probably means “as soon as possible without disaster.”The simplest way to interpret this and other recent polls is to say that serious majorities of Americans want Congress rather than the Bush administration to take control of Iraq policy, but not, if possible, by cutting off funds. And that probably means that the Democratic Congressional leadership’s strategy of gradually marginalizing Bush on Iraq makes sense.On another but related front, Democrats are beginning to make serious noises about the administration’s saber-rattling towards Iran. Over at TPMCafe, I’ve responded and dissented from my good friend and fellow Clintonian Kenny Baer’s post suggesting that the netroots are putting too much pressure on Dems to go pacifist with respect to Iran. For those of you who think such issues are cut and dried and follow the predictable patterns of the usual intra-Democratic debate on Iraq: give it all a look.

Props to Ezra Klein at TAPPED for once again posting on the unsavory but important issue of prison rape, which doesn’t appear to have abated despite Congress’ unanimous 2003 legislation (signed by Bush) called the Prison Rape Elimination Act.As Robert Weisberg and David Mills pointed out in Slate shortly after the 2003 legislation was signed:

[D]espite its grand words and its sponsors’ passionate expressions of concern, the main thing the law aims to do is collect data, and that may be, paradoxically, both quixotic and redundant.It is quixotic because the obvious problems of unreliable observations and underreporting inherent in prison assault make highly refined objective data a fantasy. It is redundant because the relevant facts are already clear: A recent report by Human Rights Watch synthesized data and various perception surveys from around the United States and conservatively concluded that approximately 20 percent of all inmates are sexually assaulted in some way and at least 7 percent raped. A cautious inference is that nearly 200,000 current inmates have been raped and nearly 1 million have been sexually assaulted over the past 20 years.

A look at the web page of the primary product of the 2003 act, the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, does not indicate what anyone would call a blizzard of activity. It’s held some hearings, and offers links to studies of prison rape, some of which were conducted prior to 2003. There is a link to an interesting 2006 Urban Institute report on state implementation of the NPREA. Despite lots of examples of new state programs, the report poses several “questions” that still need to be answered through “research.” Here are three of them that tell you everything you need to know:

Do the programs described in this report matter? Are incidents of PSV [Prison Sexual Violence] being eliminated in DOCs [state Departments of Corrections] implementing prevention efforts?…. Are perpetrators of PSV, both staff and inmates, being held accountable, through DOC sanctions and administrative penalties as well as criminally?

So we are definitely not as a society racing towards what the 2003 federal legislation described as a “zero-tolerance” position on prison rape. And thus we continue to accept the cruel irony of making prisons one of the most common arenas for the commission of one of the most violent felony crimes.Simple indifference aside, there are two obvious barriers to eliminating prison rape. The first is that most of the remedies are controversial (incarcerating far fewer non-violent offenders) or very expensive (building less crowded prisons, providing much higher pay and better training and supervision of prison staff, or radically improving monitoring of inmates).And the second barrier to change is the really dirty little non-secret underlying tolerance of prison rape: the idea that it’s an effective deterrent to criminal behavior.This “walk the line or get raped” attitude has undeniably been prevalent on the political Right, where for years politicians have railed against so-called “country-club prisons” and suggested that inmates deserve the most barbarous conditions imaginable. (There has to be a special place in hell for conservatives who want to criminalize loving, consensual gay and lesbian relationships, while smiling upon prison rape.) But it’s also found implicit currency elsewhere, among virtually every advocacy group that wants to deter some anti-social behavior, from drunk driving to white collar crime, by raising the specter of getting sent off to Oz and maybe being raped. As Ezra noted uncomfortably in a post last year:

When we were hoping to put Ken Lay behind bars, Bill Lockyer explained his grand desire “to personally escort Lay to an 8-by-10 cell that he could share with a tattooed dude who says, Hi, my name is Spike, honey.”‘

One of the most pervasive indicators of the keep-prisons-barbarous temptation has been the widespread deployment of “scared straight” programs which shuttle school kids through prisons to give them a taste of the consequences of straying into criminal behavior. No one has quite, yet, suggested staging a prison gang-rape for the edification of touring students. But that would in fact represent an act of clarifying honesty for those who continue to tolerate, for whatever reason, sexual violence in prisons.

It appears that Australian Prime Minister John Howard has finally figured out he should distance himself somewhat from Washington, DC. There’s only one problem. He didn’t take a shot at his buddy George W. Bush, who is profoundly unpopular Down Under as well as Up Here. No, Howard went after that real American political hot commodity, Barack Obama, and the Democratic Party.In a press interview, Howard said of proposals from Obama and other Democrats to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq:

“I think that would just encourage those who wanted completely to destabilise and destroy Iraq, and create chaos and victory for the terrorists to hang on and hope for (an) Obama victory,” Mr Howard told the Nine Network.”If I was running al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats.”

Wow. This isn’t Bushism; it’s Cheneyism gone publicly rampant. And in a country whose people (a) like the Iraq War even less than Americans do, if that’s possible, and (b) have a strong interest in maintaining good relations with both political parties in the U.S.The Obama campaign’s quick response was rather direct:

“If Prime Minister Howard truly believes what he says, perhaps his country should find its way to contribute more than just 1,400 troops so some American troops can come home,” [Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs] said. “It’s easy to talk tough when it’s not your country or your troops making the sacrifices.”

Indeed. Gibbs might have gone on to point out that even the very limited Australian troop commitment is deeply controversial in that country. Howard’s naming of Obama was perhaps not as weird as it would first appear to Americans. During my own recent visit to Australia, I was inundated with questions about the junior senator from Illinois; Aussies are extraordinarily well informed about U.S. politics. Moreover, Howard has been trying to make immigration a big wedge issue in the upcoming Australian elections, with the terrorist threat supposedly represented by Muslim immigrants being the public theme, and all sorts of racial fears lying just under the surface. Maybe an African-American politician with an Islamic-sounding name was just too tempting a target. Or maybe Howard’s just watching too much Fox News.

Why is the Democratic presidential nominating contest heating up earlier than ever? There are plenty of explanations, including an impressive field and the sense that this could be an especially momentous election. But the overriding reason is simply that despite widely-held complaints about the “front-loading” of the selection process in 2004, it’s going to be much, much more front-loaded in 2008.Jerome Armstrong of MyDD has a good summary of what he calls “the biggest mess ever,” and focuses on the maneuvering of some states to break into the DNC-dictated four-state (IA, NV, NH, SC) early calendar. And to be sure, all hell could break loose if NH and IA get into a crazy move-things-up-perpetually competition with other states to maintain their traditional first-caucus, first-primary status.But the bigger problem is the number and size of states that have moved up to dates just after SC. As Armstrong points out:

In 2004, seven states held primaries within a couple of weeks of New Hampshire, and already for 2008, sixteen states are in that window. Unlike the 2004, in 2008 there are mega-states like California, New Jersey, Michigan and Florida in that mix.

Some Democrats rationalized front-loading in 2004 on grounds that taking on an incumbent Republican president required an early start for the challenger. That’s obviously not a factor in 2008; yet the front-loading proceeds apace, basically because we don’t really have a national presidential nominating system.There are various theories about how front-loading will affect the 2008 contest. One is that it will actually magnify the importance of Iowa, where all indications are that there will be a close four-way race among Clinton, Edwards, Obama and Vilsack. Another is that the candidates with the most money and national support will “go long” and husband resources for delegate-rich post-SC states like CA and FL. But one thing’s for certain: when a grind-it-out attrition campaign means waiting to throw your real weight into states voting on February 5, roughly nine months before the General Election, it’s a very different nominating process than we’ve ever seen. And that makes me nervous.

There’s a fascinating and important exchange underway on the New Republic site between Yossi Klein Halevi of the Shalem Center and Larry Derfner of the Jerusalem Post about Israel’s options towards a potentially nuclear Iran.This debate was spurred by a widely quoted TNR article last week by Halevi along with Michael Oren that suggested Israelis have largely concluded that they cannot live with a nuclear Iran, and will probably soon launch some sort of attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities even if that spurs retaliation or a large-scale Middle Eastern meltdown.You should read the entire exchange (Halevi’s second rejoinder will appear tomorrow), but the central points in the dispute have to do with Halevi’s belief that the Iran regime’s peculiar theological nature will make it intolerably tempted to attack Israel with nuclear weapons regardless of the disastrous consequences to its own people, giving Israel little choice but to preempt that possibility or risk extinction.Derfner’s latest post nails the central problem with Halevi’s argument: it rejects the entire and completely successful history of nuclear deterrence:

You say it’s “facile” of me to use Stalin and Mao to argue that even crazy, bloodthirsty leaders aren’t likely to use nukes, because I’m disregarding the new element of apocalyptic Iranian religion. But, when I’m trying to anticipate what somebody’s going to do in the future, I put a lot more store in his deeds than in his texts. I think Stalin’s and Mao’s purges of tens of millions of innocents augur much more for nuclear insanity than the Shia doctrine of the Hidden Imam. For all its violent repression at home and aid to Islamic terrorism abroad, post-revolutionary Iran has never started a war with another country. It has never used its WMD on anybody, either. It has never trafficked in genocide.The reason, I believe, is the power of deterrence. It has worked on Iran, too. It has worked on everybody–no exceptions. And, while there is, of course, a theoretical possibility that it won’t work on a nuclear Iran, I think Israelis have to weigh the results of nuclear-age deterrence against the predictable and unpredictable results of a war against Iran–and to choose hopeful moderation over its fear-induced opposite.

There are, of course, considerable grounds for Israelis to believe that its nuclear deterrent won’t stop conventional military attacks on their country; after all, during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Egypt and Syria concluded (inaccurately, according to most accounts) that Israel would not launch a nuclear attack to keep Arab armies out of Tel Aviv. But the conventional threat to Israel is only marginally increased by Tehran’s nuclear program, even if it’s far more advanced and successful than most observers think it is. So the question remains: what’s riskier for Israel? Relying on the 100% success rate of nuclear deterrence against nuclear attacks since Hiroshima? Or unleashing a regional war at a time when the furies that would unleash are undoubtedly horrifying, not least for Israel?

If you are a regular reader of political blogs, you are probably aware of the burgeoning kerfuffle over certain remarks about the Catholic Church expressed in the past by two bloggers recently hired by the John Edwards presidential campaign. The story has been percolating for a while, but blew up yesterday when National Review’s Kathyrn Jean Lopez served up some choice quotes from one of the staffers, Amanda Marcotte (formerly of the Pandagon blog), suggesting that women’s rights might be safer if the Virgin Mary had been able to get hold of Plan B contraceptives.As of this writing, it’s not clear whether reports that the Edwards campaign was about to fire the duo are accurate or not. It is clear the campaign is a bit between a rock and a hard place, the rock being fear of association with anti-Catholic opinions, and the hard place being the progressive blogosphere’s increasingly angry demands that Edwards stand up to right-wing intimidation or forfeit his previously strong Left Netroots support.Complicating the story is the fact that the notorious right-wing political operative Bill Donahue of the conservative factional Catholic League (best known for his demands that the Church excommunicate pro-choice politicians like John Kerry) has massively piled onto the dispute, running around the MSM today expressing outrage at the bloggers’ offensive opinions. Thus, any Edwards effort to discipline or dismiss the bloggers is inevitably being interpreted as a cave-in to the Right-Wing Noise Machine on the order of Kerry’s alleged refusal to counter the Swift Boat Veterans’ smear of 2004.The person being most obviously victimized in the furor is the second Edwards staffer in question, Melissa McEwan (a.k.a. Shakespeare’s Sister), who apparently did nothing more than use some profanity in rejecting anti-abortionist efforts to control women’s reproductive systems. Big deal; I feel the same way myself on occasion, and I’m so Anglo-Catholic that I tend to catch a cold when the Pope sneezes.The underlying question, nicely framed by Ezra Klein at TAPPED, is whether we are henceforth going to be treated to endless oppo-research examinations of the published utterances of campaign staffers on topics other than, well, campaign staffing. Ezra thinks this would set a terrible precedent, and I tend to agree, though it’s hardly a novelty; way back in 1972, George McGovern got flack for a pro-Palestinian manifesto that a campaign staffer, Rick Stearns, had signed years earlier as a college student (leading Hunter Thompson to facetiously refer to Stearns as “that devious Arab bastard” in his famous book on the campaign).Since Edwards’ bloggers were not exactly hired to be back-room operators, perhaps the press release on their hiring should have included a disclaimer that read: “All our previously expressed opinions have now been subsumed in the transcendent cause of electing John Edwards president, to which we henceforth slavishly submit.” That might have headed off a world of trouble.The deeper question, when it comes to Marcotte’s more provocative quotes, is whether Catholics specifically, or Christians generally, ought to take offense at this sort of blasphemous nonsense, and play the victim. The simple reality is that the central mystery of Christianity, the Incarnation, is inevitably, to unbelievers, a standing invitation to sophomoric jibes about the Virgin Birth and the whole idea of God Made Human. That’s hardly news, and hardly grounds for believers to get self-righteously huffy, particularly if some of their co-religionists insist on politicizing their faith as hacks like Donohue perpetually do.The whole dispute reminds me of the forgotten incident in 1971, when Patricia Buckley Bozell (yes, that Buckley’s sister, and that Bozell’s wife) assaulted feminist icon Ti-Grace Atkinson at a Catholic University podium after Atkinson made some smarmy remarks about the Virgin Mary “getting knocked up.”Soon after, this letter appeared in Time Magazine:

As a Roman Catholic, as a supporter of the free expression of ideas, and as a believer in the virginity of Mary, I offer Ti-Grace Atkinson my apologies for the outlandish behavior of Patricia Buckley Bozell [March 22]. Never before has the Virgin Mary required the use of arms—or hands—to defend her. Mrs. Bozell was rather presumptuous to think that Mary now needed her intercession.

That’s as true today as it was more than thirty-five years ago.

Even as Rudy Giuiliani continues to lead in many GOP presidential polls, there’s a raging debate as to whether he could actually be nominated.Just today, Glenn Greenwald did a long, adamant post arguing that social conservatives care more about waging religio-ideological wars than about Rudy’s deficiencies on abortion or gay rights. Meanwhile, TPMCafe’s Election Central reports that one of the Christian Right’s big poohbahs, Tony Perkins, went on Pat Robertson’s network and dismissed Giuliani as an acceptable presidential candidate because of his views on abortion and gay rights, which place him “far outside the mainstream of conservative thought.”Somebody’s obviously right and somebody’s obviously wrong here. I’ve been in the “Rudy Can Fail” camp all along, and though Greenwald’s a persuasive guy, I think he’s a bit too pre-persuaded that social conservatives don”t really believe what they say or say what they believe.