One of the oddest and most interesting recent aspects of politics in Australia and New Zeland I learned about in my trip Down Under was an incident in the last New Zealand election of 2005, wherein a small and secretive religious sect called the Exclusive Brethren was implicated in push-polling, negative leafletting and phone calls, and other controversial activities on behalf of the conservative National Party.The Exclusive Brethren are not connected with the better-known German pietist family of denominations using the name “Brethren;” their antecedents were the British Plymouth Brethren, who left the Church of England in the early nineteenth century in reaction to the Anglican abandonment of scriptural literalism. There are about 40,000 of them world-wide, but they are especially active in Australia (where their current leader resides) and New Zealand. And in the latter country, where it doesn’t take much money or manpower to have a big political impact, they got caught in an implicit, and allegedly even explicit, arrangement with National Party Leader Don Brash to go crazy negative on the governing Labour Party along with the Greens. The political motivations of the EBs are much like those of American Christian Right movements, with opposition to gay marriage being an especially big issue. But whereas the sect spent about as much money here trying to help George W. Bush in 2004 as it spent in New Zealand, it was pretty much a drop in the bucket in the U.S. (They have also been exposed as playing a hand in support of John Howard’s conservative coalition in Australia as well). Conversely, their exposure in New Zealand created a sensation, contributing heavily to a narrow Labour win, and to the subsequent disgrace and resignation of National Leader Brash, whereas Christian Right negative campaigning here has been going on for eons. You don’t have to spend much time Down Under to recognize a general fear that divisive conservative cultural tactics are gradually migrating from the U.S. southward and westward. Thus, one of the main tokens of cheer I was able to offer my hosts during this trip was the growing evidence that the Christian Right in my own country seems to be going through a general crisis of confidence and faith.

Sorry for the lack of posts this week, but it turned out to be a bit more difficult to blog from Australia than I anticipated, mainly because the international power adapter I brought didn’t work. I was also pretty busy getting a crash course on center-left politics in Australia and New Zealand. Australia’s heading for a general election this year (probably in the mid-fall), and the opposition Labor Party is cautiously optimistic about its chances (particularly under new leader Kevin Rudd) to finally end Prime Minister John Howard’s winning streak.The Aussies were quite interested in hearing more about the U.S. midterms (along with such related political topics as Obama-o-mania), and I was able to encourage them with one direct parallel: Bush and the GOP tried to make good macroeconomic statistics a campaign issue (and that’s been Howard’s most potent issue all along), and failed, with U.S. voters not only considering Iraq and corruption bigger concerns, but also expressing unhappiness with economic conditions. Like Americans, Australians are beginning to worry quite a bit about economic insecurity and inequality, and like Bush and the GOP, Howard and his conservative coalition are widely perceived as indifferent to both.I’ll have a lot more to say about my trip Down Under this weekend.

I’m posting this from Sydney, Australia, where I’m speaking and moderating a panel at an Australian Labor Party International Progressive Summit. I’m too jet-lagged at the moment to say much of anything intelligent, other than to note the little-known but continuing dialogue among center-left political parties around the world. This particular conference is focused on learning both positive and negative lessons from recent elections, in the run-up to the next Australian national contest. It occurs in the wake of the election of a very new ALP leadership, led by Kevin Rudd, who has very good ties to a variety of U.S. Democrats. In my own remarks, I’ll try to be very honest and inclusive about the varying interpretations of what happened in the U.S. on November 7. I do think we are mostly united in thinking Democrats did as well as they did by becoming the “change” party, and that’s what they are looking for in Australia.

In case you missed it, the ever-so-lame-duck session of the Republican-controlled Congress is about to ride out of town after dumping roughly a half-trillion dollars in appropriations decisions on their Democratic successors. To put it another way, having once again failed to pass appropriations bills during the regular session (often because of internal GOP wrangling), they got another bite at the apple and decided to make these decisions a toxic little Christmas present for Democratic legislators. And as Kevin Drum at Political Animal notes, it’s clear this is a deliberate tear-up-the-tracks gesture for Republican solons still petulantly angry about their loss of power.After suggesting, accurately, that this ultimate abandonment of responsbility isn’t getting much attention, Kevin also reminds us of the big media furor that surrounded alleged (and ultimately unsubstantiated and/or small potatoes) “sabotage” by outgoing Clinton White House staff back in 2001. Yeah, I’d say deliberately leaving the federal government in fiscal limbo, and in a continuing budget crisis, is a bit more egregious than removing the “W” key from a couple of White House computers. But this stroll down memory lane did get some old synapses firing, and I suddenly remembered an example of real intraoffice sabotage.Many years ago, I met a guy who had been the first landing craft to hit the State Capitol on Inaugural Day in a southern state where one party was supplanting another in the governorship, after an especially bitter campaign. First off, he discovered the locks had been changed in the Governor’s Office. So he had to track down a building supervisor to let him in. Then he found that the light bulbs had all been removed from the overhead lights and lamps. So he had to deal with that. The phones were totally screwed up; he couldn’t get a dial tone. And when he tried to boot up a computer, it became apparent the operating systems had been deleted.Now that’s sabotage, friends. But it was nothing more than a minor nuisance compared to the current batch of bitter congressional Republicans, who want to make sure the fruits of their long reign of fiscal irresponsibility create a ripe, rotting smell around the Capitol when Democrats take over in January.It would have been far, far better if the GOPers had screwed up the phones and computers after doing their jobs and deciding how to fund the federal government.

Today’s most ha-larious political news (in the Washington Post, via Ezra Klein at TAPPED) involves the Republican reaction to incoming House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s announcement that the House would eschew the previous late-Tuesday to mid-Thursday work week, and actually require Members to show up five days a week, much like the rest of the American work force.A Republican House Member from my home state of Georgia supplied the Post with the richest comment: “‘Keeping us up here eats away at families,’ said Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), who typically flies home on Thursdays and returns to Washington on Tuesdays. ‘Marriages suffer. The Democrats could care less about families — that’s what this says.'”At the risk of taking this fatuous comment too seriously, I would note that the abbreviated work week might have worked fine for a Republican Congress that did very little, and where Members who weren’t committee chairs or in the leadership had no particular role. But if Democrats truly want to ramp up the productivity of Congress, asking Members to spend at least half their time on the job doesn’t seem terribly unreasonable.More broadly, this idea that making Congress spend a fair amount of its time in the Capitol is “anti-marriage” or “anti-family,” is, well, a bit counter-historical. Before the era of easy commercial air travel, most Members went to Washington for each session and stayed there, typically without their families, often living in boarding houses that served as extraordinarily important unofficial venues for bipartisan comity, legislative deal-cutting, and (at the frequent drink-fests) legendary debates and oratory. We are often told by conservatives that marriage and family were safe and supreme in those long-gone days; wonder how they survived those months of nuclear family meltdown?As a lot of the Republican carping about Steny’s announcement indicates, I suspect the real beef here isn’t about denying Members family time, but denying them officially-paid campaign time. Here’s a revolutionary thought: how’s about making your and your party’s actual accomplishments in Congress your key campaign talking points, instead of demanding that you get to go home for four days each week to Bigfoot it around your district?Just wondering.

It got blown off the front pages by the entirely predictable John Bolton resignation, and seems to have been largely ignored in the blogosphere. But today’s White House meeting between George Bush and scary SCIRI honcho Abdul Aziz Hakim cleared up a few things about the motivation for this meeting.Hakim obviously got the imprimator of respectability from Bush, despite his pro-Iranian background and his probable responsibility for death squad killings of Iraqi Sunnis during the recent escalation of violence.But what did Bush get? A real, live, authentic looking Iraqi who said (a) he violently opposes any international intervention to settle the Iraqi civil war, and (b) wanted the U.S. military to hang around for the foreseeable future.Maybe there’s some Grand Strategy involved with the Bush administration’s sudden enthusiasm for SCIRI. But given its snails-eye view of Iraq since, well, the beginning, you’d have to guess the White House just wanted that photo op and those Hakim quotes, and will postpone thinking through the implications of embracing Hakim until somewhere down the road.

One of the oddest and most interesting post-election kerfuffles has been the well-reported encounter between George W. Bush and Senator-elect from Virginia Jim Webb last week. In case you missed it, Bush asked Webb how his son, currently serving in Iraq, was doing, and Webb promptly responded, echoing a major theme of his campaign, that he’d like to get him and his comrades home soon. Bush bristled and said, “That’s not what I asked you,” and apparently Webb bristeled in response.According to the New York Times column linked to above, presidential scholar Stephen Hess thought Webb had violated protocol by answering Bush’s question honestly. A phalanx of lefty bloggers not only defended Webb, but suggested anything other than plenary disrespect for Bush would have violated their own sense of protocol.For what it’s worth, here’s where I come down on the general subject of civility towards political enemies. I do think us political compatants tend to forget that Americans generally agree on a whole lot of things that are violently controversial in many parts of the world: democratic elections, a regulated capitalist economy, a system of protections of basic liberties, and an international regime that aims at liberal democracy, just to name a few. You can argue, as I have myself, that Republicans don’t fully respect these communal values, but that’s not the same as suggesting they aren’t communal values to begin with.That’s why, despite my own deep antipathy for Bush and his party, I don’t like attacks on them that rely on analogies to the Nazis, the fascists, or other enemies of the American system, or suggest that every single administration policy, and everyone who agrees with it, are inherently corrupt or evil.But in the case of the Webb encounter, Bush raised a particular subject, and Webb responded appropriately. Residual respect for the underlying American Consensus does not require specific respect for particular policies of the Ruling Party. When those policies enganger your own son, no father can be faulted for telling the simple truth, even, or perhaps especially, in the presence of the Commander in Chief.

The events of the last few days have cast a much-needed spotlight on what may really be going on within the administration on Iraq, aside from the usual “victory” talk from the president.As many people have noted, the long-awaited Baker-Hamilton commission report took a cautious position, but one that in many respects reflected the Democratic consensus of the last year or so that some sort of phased withdrawal needs to begin right away.But a more interesting revelation came from the leaked NSC Hadley memo. And over at The American Prospect Online, Laura Rozen has a fascinating and somewhat alarming report about the actual intra-administration debate that memo reflected.Two of the options under consideration, according to Rozen, are familiar: the “status quo plus” approach of redeploying troops from within Iraq to Baghdad to stabilize that area; and the “hunker down” approach of confining U.S. troops to bases, intensifying training operations, and gradually reducing our presence.But the third option, which some commentators are calling “the 80% solution” (reflecting the percentage of the Iraqi population that is either Shi’a or Kurdish), is to “tilt to the Shi’a” and essentially abandon the Sunni minority to a bloody fate.Here’s how Rozen describes that option:

The “unleash the Shia” option would have the United States back a Shiite coalition that would include SCIRI leader Hakim and his Badr Brigades as the core of an Iraqi Army under the direct control of Prime Minister Maliki. Even as the United States sided with the Shia, Hadley’s memo makes clear that the United States would at the same time press Maliki to distance himself from Sadr and his Mahdi army.

The idea, apparently, is to make U.S. support for letting the Shi’a settle scores with the Sunnis contingent on marginalizing Moqtada al-Sadr, presumably because he is so violently anti-American.Maybe tilting to the “winning side” makes sense, if stabilization of Iraq, at any cost, is the best we can hope for. And Lord knows removing Sadr’s paws from the levers of power would be a good thing, assuming he could truly be marginalized.But let’s not have any illusions about the alternative military-power base suggested by this option: the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and its Badr Corps militia. For one thing, the Badr Corps appears to have deployed its own “death squads” separate from Sadr’s in the indiscriminate reprisals against Sunnis sparked by insurgent atrocities against Shi’a. But more importantly, SCIRI (which was actually created in Iran as an anti-Saddam exile group) is widely assumed to be honeycombed with Iranian intelligence operatives, and has done little or nothing to reduce the perception that it is Tehran’s closest ally in Iraq.Maybe this is the best we can do to create the impression that we are reaching out to “responsible” Shi’a Islamists. Still, deliberately empowering a pro-Iranian armed faction in the context of “unleashing” the Shi’a against the Sunnis would represent a remarkable devolution from all the talk of peace and national unity–much less making Iraq a role model for the Middle East–that the administration has repeated so very many times.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

My response to Tom Schaller at Salon about Democrats and the South got a decent buzz; I especially appreciate the shout-outs from the impeccably fair Chris Bowers at MyDD, and my ol’ buddy Armando at TalkLeft.Their takes and some of those in their comment threads illustrate an interesting anomaly about this debate on writing off, or even demonizing, the South. You’ve got a small contingent that thinks Democrats should significantly modify their platform to win in the South. And you’ve got a somewhat larger contingent that would just love it if Democrats not only wrote off the region, but shared their strong antipathy towards all sorts of aspects of southern culture, from fried foods to militarism to SUV-mania.But Bowers, Armando, plenty of their commentors, and yours truly, present a cross-ideological United Front in favor of the basics of Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy. We think the progressive message, presented with sensitivity to regional variations, can create a long-term Democratic majority, and that anything less will likely squander that opportunity. As Chris Bowers in particular notes, positioning Democrats as the anti-southern party won’t work any better than the Republican positioning as the anti-northeastern party ultimately did, as exhibited by the 2006 election results.The estimable Rick Perlstein posted an article on the New Republic site yesterday that escalated the Schaller hypothesis into an attack on the white South as hopelessly racist, and on anyone who doubts that argument as hopelessly myopic, if not dishonest.I’ll have more to say about the Perlstein article here or there.

The news that Moqtada al-Sadr’s politicians–including five Cabinet members and 30 members of parliament–have “suspended” involvement in Iraq’s government was a very timely if unwelcome reminder that the man once derided by U.S. officials as a “pipsqueak cleric” is a big dog indeed these days.The “suspension”–falling short of an actual withdrawal from the government, which would cause it to fall–was transparently a reminder to Iraqi prime minister Maliki that he’s on a very short leash in Amman, where he’s to meet with George Bush tomorrow.In case you’ve missed it, Sadr’s virulently anti-American Shi’a militia, the Mahdi Army, is generally held responsible for the vast wave of indiscriminate killings of Sunnis that has helped mobilize Sunni support for the insurgency while plunging Iraq into civil war. Used to be the experts thought Sadr was a paper tiger who was being quietly restrained by moderate Shi’a cleric Ayotollah Sistani. Not any more.Here’s a chilling summary of Sadr’s current status in Iraq posted today by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius:

Sadr has been the biggest winner in the power vacuum of Iraq. A senior U.S. intelligence analyst told me this week that Sadr’s forces are eight times larger than they were in August, 2004. If provincial elections were held today, the intelligence official said, Sadr’s party would win in every Shiite province of Iraq but one. And Sadr for sure has been the most powerful political muscle behind Maliki’s fragile coalition.

So that’s what, and whom, we are dealing with in any effort to somehow create a viable government of national unity in Iraq.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey