In a presumably tongue-in-cheek comment on a Baptist church that cited the First Epistle to Timothy as grounds for dismissing a woman from a Sunday School teaching post she’d had for 54 years, Charles P. Pierce of TAPPED proposed a little radical surgery on the New Testament:

Life would be so much better for a lot of us folks of faith if we could just run St. Paul’s sorry ass out of the New Testament the way they snuffed the Gospel of Thomas. Granted, the Book of Revelation has caused an awful lot of trouble, but it has the saving grace of being gorgeously written. Not so with the Bill O’Reilly of Tarsus.

Now there’s plenty of precedent for proposals to expurgate troublesome bits of scripture. The great heresiarch Marcion wanted to get rid of the Old Testament along with three of the four Gospels. Luther expressed a desire to expel the Book of Revelation as “fundamentally un-Christian.” And more recently, Thomas Jefferson published a “Bible” that junked all the “dogma” interspersed amongst the sound ethical teachings.But before Mr. Pierce gets too far with his anti-Pauline crusade, he should be aware that there’s a lot of doubt about the authorship of I Timothy. In fact, the late Fr. Raymond Brown, perhaps the preeminent New Testament scholar of recent years, suggested that about 90% of biblical experts thought that Paul did not write this epistle.This scholarly consensus does not, of course, cut much ice with biblical “inerrancy” fans, including the offending Baptist church in question, since the (probable) anonymous author of I Timothy identified himself as Paul. As my own grandmother back home in Georgia used to say when I ventured my own youthful sandbox theories of religion: “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.”But given Paul’s knack for allegorizing and reinterpreting the Law and the Prophets in the epistles, like Romans, that are indisputably his, I have a sneaking suspicion that despite his reputation as the favorite source for conservative abuse of scripture, Paul himself was no fundamentalist. And given his true legacy as the great and revolutionary advocate of Christian liberty, it makes little sense to consider him a conservative, either.

Yesterday’s New York Times included a brief but useful summary by John Broder about Sen. John McCain’s progress in reinventing himself from the brave maverick of GOP politics into the Chosen One of Republican elites, including many key veterans of George W. Bush’s two campaigns.I’ve long been a skeptic about McCain’s ability to propitiate the conservative ideologues that still own the Republican Party without losing the reputation that would make him a formidable nominee in 2008. But he’s off to a pretty good start, given his consistent front-running status in early GOP ’08 polls; his love-fest with prominent Bushies; and the high esteem he still enjoys from many mainstream media types. And lest we forget, the combination of very high and relatively positive name ID and insider backing is what lifted McCain’s former nemesis, George W. Bush, to the nomination in 2000.Broder’s summary of McCain’s pivot does not mention one factoid that the photo accompanying it illustrates: McCain yukking it up with attendees of the Iowa State Fair. He famously skipped the Iowa Caucuses in 2000, after conspicuously disrespecting the Ethanol Subsidy that ranks just behind the State Fair’s Butter Cow sculpture as Iowa’s Most Sacred Cow. McCain has now flip-flopped on ethanol, and is spending a lot of time in Iowa.McCain’s pivot, of course, most depends on the panic of Republicans who see the White House slipping away in 2008, and figure only a “maverick” like the Arizonan can save their bacon. The same underlying dynamic may doom a McCain general election candidacy, and thus his “electability” appeal, particularly if he continues to flip-flop on domestic issues, while championing the Bush administration’s disastrous course of action in Iraq.And even if McCain goes into the presidential cycle as the clear GOP front-runner, there’s no question many conservative movement types will continue to cast about for an alternative. At one point, Sen. George Allen of VA looked like a strong possibility for the Anybody-But-McCain (ABM) effort, but his sparse positive qualifications are clearly being overwhelmed by his current troubles. Right now the big debate about Allen is whether he’s a racist obnoxious jerk, or an equal-opportunity obnoxious jerk. No less an authority than Charlie Cook is already saying Allen’s presidential star has fatally fallen, and for that matter, Georgie is now in danger of losing his Senate seat.At present, the insider buzz about GOP alternatives to McCain revolves around Mitt Romney of Massachussets. Aside from the improbability of the Right readily embracing a guy once thought of as a northeastern moderate, whose most notable recent accomplishment was signing a quasi-universal health insurance bill, there’s the Mormon Issue. Last year Amy Sullivan wrote an important article examining probable conservative evangelical concerns about a Mormon candidate, but the problem could go deeper, since the unusual nature of LDS doctrines could discomfit some Catholics, mainstream Protestants and secular conservatives as well as evangelicals.The real darkhorse for the ABM mantle remains Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. Expect a boomlet to form around him at some point in the near future.

Not that long ago, one of the prime White House/GOP talking points was that Americans just didn’t appreciate how well they had it in terms of the national economy. With polls showing persistent unhappiness with Bush’s economic stewardship, W. and his minions fanned out across America touting growth, productivity, inflation and unemployment stats, and discounting concerns about job and pension insecurity; energy, health care and college costs; the federal borrowing binge; and general pessimism about the future of the U.S. economy.Well, Reuters reported today that Bush was “huddling” with his economic advisers to consider “options” for dealing with higher interest rates, a cooling housing market, higher unemployment, and fresh inflation fears, aside from all those continuing problems the GOP keeps telling Americans they shouldn’t worry about.I’m guessing one option won’t be to suggest to voters they should suck it up and accept some sacrifices because there’s a war on in Iraq.

Next week will mark the tenth anniversary of the landmark 1996 welfare reform legislation. And as a host of former opponents of this legislation now attest, it largely worked.No, it did not drastically reduce income inequality in the United States. Yes, its initial success depended in no small part on a red-hot late 1990s economy that in particular supplied an enormous number of entry-level jobs. Certainly, there should be a continuing debate over how best to help the dispossessed in our society get into the economic and social mainstream. And moreover, given the currently sluggish and insecure national economy, and the decision of congressional Republicans to reauthorize the 1996 act with no debate and in the dark of the night, with toughened work requirements for single mothers and little or no resources for child care–current law deserves some new scrutiny.But what’s annoying to me, having been heavily involved in the welfare reform debate of the mid-1990s, is the revisionist history being peddled by Republicans, who continue to claim the 1996 legislation as their own, when it’s just not true.Check out this line from a National Review editorial commemorating the anniversary of the 1996 act:

President Clinton vetoed conservative welfare reform twice before Republican resolve finally secured his signature on legislation that held cash welfare to a five-year limit and imposed work requirements on its recipients.

This has long been the view from the Right–and some precincts of the Left–about what happened in 1996: Republicans sent their bill up three times, and the third time Clinton signed it on the advice of the triangulating Dick Morris, in order to guarantee his re-election.Didn’t happen that way.The first congressional welfare reform bill sent to Clinton was a House-based package that disqualified unmarried mothers–obviously a large segment of the welfare population–from any public benefits. He vetoed it. The second bill was Senate-based, and essentially turned the entire public assistance system into a block grant, with no real incentives for finding jobs for welfare recipients, and every incentive for states to just slash eligibility and call it a day. Clinton, calling the bill “tough on kids, weak on work,” vetoed that one as well.The final bill was indeed a compromise. It eliminated the personal entitlement to public assistance, but did not disqualify big categorties of Americans (other than legal immigrants, a provision which Clinton vowed to change, and did in no small part before he left office), and created significant incentives for states to help welfare recipients find jobs immediately. Clinton famously agonized over signing this bill, but the idea that he simply caved in to Republicans is not at all accurate. Ten years later, the revisionist history of welfare reform is, like the bizarre belief of conservatives that Ronald Reagan created the 90s boom, just another bit of delusion in the service of propaganda.

There’s been an odd blogospheric interchange over the last 24 hours about why Democrats are particularly offended by Ann Coulter. It began with a piece by Elspeth Reeve on the New Republic site suggesting, if I’m not mistaken, that male liberals demonize Coulter because of some inverted desire to sleep with her. Over at TAPPED site, Ezra Klein and Charles Pierce joust about Reeves’ hypothesis (follow the links from Ezra’s last post to read the exchange), with all sorts of side discussions of TNR generally.As a Coulter-disparager who doesn’t watch much TV and is only dimly aware of her “leggy blonde” persona, I have to interplead that you don’t have to watch or listen to Ann Coulter to intensely dislike her. My own major attack on her was based on her written words. In reacting to her poorly researched arguments and her contemptible efforts to claim the entire Judeo-Christian tradition for her particular ideology, I did not really care if she was a “leggy blonde,” a squatty four-foot-ten brunette, or for that matter, a Man named Ann. I haven’t spent much if any time looking at her on the tube, and given her vicious and casual slurs on the truth and on people like me, I would not find her lovely if she were a certified Super-Model.Then again, I was a fan of Dolly Partin’s music before I had any idea what she looked like.Now that I’ve been informed of her exceptional sexiness, I won’t hold Ann Coulter’s looks against her, but I’ll be damned if I have to cut her slack because of an attraction to her that I do not have. There’s nothing sexy about hate and lies.

Like many of you, no doubt, I’ve been following the wide-ranging debate about the domestic political implications of the British terrorist bust of last week. It has come as no surprise, of course, that Republicans and their conservative allies have seized on the foiled plot to claim, for the thousandth time, that it shows how important it is to have a party focused on national security in charge in Washington, even if the consequences of its Iraq policies are looking more disastrous every single day. (The GOP’s comcomitant campaign on the theme that Joe Lieberman’s loss in Connecticut proves there’s only one party committed to fighting terrorism, absurd as it is, is Part B of its longstanding implicit argument that however much Bush is screwing up, he’s screwing up with the right intentions). But I do wonder if the revelation of an advanced plot to replicate 9/11 on a large scale isn’t going to unravel the whole line of “reasoning” that has reinforced the persistant gap between public feelings about Bush’s performance in Iraq, and the GOP’s general reliability on national security. We’re all familiar with the “flypaper” theory, so often articulated by Bush himself, that whatever else is going on in Iraq, the insurgency there is drawing jihadist attention and resources away from attacks on the U.S. (“We can fight them here or we can fight them there,” as Bush routinely says). And I personally think this factually crazy contention has been far more important to Bush and the GOP than most of us would like to accept. Back during the last presidential campaign, I became convinced, mainly through conversations with undecided voters back home in Georgia who would up voting for Bush’s re-election, that the most powerful thing the incumbent had going for him was a rough and unsophisticated argument that went like this: Some Arabs came here and killed a bunch of Americans. George Bush went over to Iraq and killed even more Arabs. Since then there have been no attacks. He must be doing something right.Anything and everything that reminds Americans that the Iraq War has not done a thing to reduce the terrorist threat against the United States will erode that argument, and with it, the GOP’s belief that any and all concerns about national security will benefit it at the ballot box. To the extent that clearly focusing on what they would do to deal with the actual terrorist threat undermines both parts of the Republican argument, while connecting public unhappiness with Iraq with residual concerns about terrorism, Democrats should hammer away on this subject every day. This administration has been a national security disaster. The “flypaper” has worn out, leaving us with a horrific mess in Iraq, an energized and growing jihadist threat, and a country more exposed than ever to terrorism. It’s time for a dramatically new direction.

Some days you open up your email and a message just jumps off the screen and flies up your–well, your sensibilities. That happened to me today when I read a toxic little note from self-styled populist avatar David Sirota ripping me apart for a post I did about Russ Feingold’s recent indictment of the DLC for doing things it did not do (e.g., creating the Clinton Health Plan). My post, written in a tone of bored sarcasm, was described by Sirota as a “temper tantrum,” a “meltdown,” and an “attack” on his very self, reflecting my “rage” and moreover, my “fear” at the rising tide of people-powered politics, etc., etc. This is all standard Sirota rhetoric aimed at anyone who disagrees with him, but he also called me a liar, which where I come from is pretty damn serious, and way over the line.I have a strange history with David, who is as reasonable and conciliatory offline as he is frantically abusive online. I first became aware of Sirota back in 1997, when I interviewed him (then just barely out of college) for a writer-researcher job with the DLC. He got sent up for a final interview with Al From, along with two other people, and didn’t get the gig. That was obviously the right decision for all concerned.Next time I noticed David was when he blazed into political journalism with not one, but two, nasty, slur-ridden attacks on the DLC and party “centrists” generally, towards the end of 2004. The American Prospect invited me to rebut one of them, and then Matt Yglesias–no big DLC fan–did a definitive smackdown of the factual inaccuracies of the other.But in no small part because of his willingness to pick up the phone or the keyboard and say abusive things about anyone, particularly Democrats, who dared to differ with his exact views, Sirota has become a major blogger and mainstream media quote-meister. He has also, to credit his considerable energy, written a book, Hostile Takeover, that is earning him serious attention with the same sort of indictment of both Republicans and Clintonian Democrats as part of a vast corporate conspiracy to enslave the nation.In a TPMCafe discussion of Hostile Takeover, I said nice things about Sirota’s analysis of D.C. Republicans, and actually agreed with most of his suggested policy agenda, but then had to say something else about his habit of demonizing people who don’t agree with him:

David’s approach creates a political as well as a moral hazard. The attribution of corrupt motives and systematic mendacity to anyone questioning his brand of “populism” and everything that goes with is what leads him to think of Bill Clinton as a “sell-out,” or to describe Rahm Emanuel as a politician obsessed strictly with his status within the “corrupt establishment,” and to confidently assume that anyone working in Washington, DC, spends his or her spare time toadying up to “elites” at “Georgetown cocktail parties”….. It’s how you wind up believing that all the vast differences that separate Ds from Rs are completely meaningless… [a]nd it’s ultimately how you forget the real-life consequences–which Hostile Takeover examines so thoroughly–of Republican rule as compared to that of “corrupt” centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton.

All these qualities are illustrated for the umpteenth time by David’s latest post, supposedly motivated by my “attack” on him for praising Feingold’s remarks. As consumers of Sirota’s rhetoric know, anyone who disagrees with him, however mildly or briefly, is invariably “attacking” him and “lying” about him. He can sure dish it out, but for a blogospheric street-fighter, he has a hard time taking it. What’s hilarious is that the “lie” David accuses me of comes from my suggestion that maybe the DLC isn’t the political behemoth its more paranoid critics always assume it to be. Why is that so offensive to Sirota? Maybe because if the DLC is not the ultimate Giant, then David Sirota ain’t no giant-killer, either. The Sirota style is perhaps best illustrated by his choice of words to describe yours truly: “formerly a Zell Miller staffer,” underlined with a link to a news report about Miller’s despicable 2004 Republican National Convention speech. The reader is presumably to understand that my secret fidelity to the GOP cause–which of course, I am lying about–is exposed by this association. Here’s the thing: I worked for Zell from the fall of 1992 until the end of 1994, in a period when absolutely no one thought of him as anything other than a very loyal and partisan Democrat–indeed, as a bit of a “populist.” And I have written far more sad and angry words (here, here, here, and here) about Miller’s slide into apostasy and his eagerness to serve his old enemies in the GOP than anybody else you will meet. So my work for Zell Miller in the early 90s is clearly no more relevant today than David Sirota’s interest in working for me and Al From in 1997. If I did a post casually referring to Sirota as a “disappointed job-seeker at the DLC,” he’d be rightly offended. But he shouldn’t be able to have it both ways.Lots of bloggers I talk with have the same private opinion of David Sirota’s tactics as I do, but think he’s useful to The Cause, precisely because he matches the single-minded energy and “take no prisoners” style of bloggers and pundits on the Right. Indeed, that’s what Matt Yglesias concluded in his American Prospect review of Hostile Takeover–a review, BTW, that sparked a long Sirota post repeatedly accusing Matt of various forms of dishonesty, including “dishonest regurgitation of Big Business’s talking points.”If that’s so; if Sirota’s type of fulmination actually contributes to the goal of expelling the venal GOP gang that’s running our country right now, then I suppose the offense caused by his chronic character attacks on fellow Democrats is just acceptable collateral damage. But I really don’t see that calling people like me or Matt liars serves any purpose other than to start stupid fights that aggrandize Sirota’s self-image as a brave truth-teller fighting the godless and omnipotent Washington Establishment. I wish some of his friends who find his talent for invective so useful would have a private word to him now and then and suggest there are a few lines in intra-party debate that should not be crossed.

You’d think from what we’re hearing this week from Republicans all over the country that Joseph Lieberman is indeed the Bush Lite politician that his Democratic detractors insist he is. Virtually every major national Republican pol has weighed in with crocodile tears for Lieberman’s narrow primary loss. And in a really odd development, Senate Republican candidates have begun endorsing Lieberman’s indie run in Connecticut. I can’t imagine that these hugs and kisses are any more welcome in Liebermanland than was Bush’s famous “kiss” at State of the Union Address. It’s not like Joe needs Republican help in Connecticut; in the absence of a viable GOP candidate in the race, there’s not a whole lot of doubt that Nutmeg State Republicans would overwhelmingly prefer Lieberman over Lamont in November without any encouragement from on high. And all the love directed at the incumbent from national Republicans could seriously erode his support among Democrats and independents. But here’s what I really want to know: are all these national Republicans embracing Joe Lieberman willing to support anything he stands for other than his position on Iraq, which they claim crazy lefties have illegitimately targeted him for? Will they suddenly develop an interest in dealing with global climate change? Will they agree that labor laws need to be revised to make it easier for workers to organize unions? Are they on board with Lieberman’s ambitious proposal for a federally funded National Center for Cures to speed new medical treatments? Will they take a serious look at Joe’s 2004 tax proposal, that would have made income tax rates actually more progressive than they were before the Bush tax cuts? Will they push for a systematic attack on corporate subsidies in the federal budget and tax code? Not hardly. But don’t expect any honest disclosures that their professed Joemania is about as genuine as Meat Loaf’s vow of eternal love in the classic rock song Paradise by the Dashboard Lights. The GOP’s love for Lieberman is just for one night. And he should inform them to go home and grow up.

My colleague The Moose is off grazing somewhere in the North Woods, and is not blogging at present. But he seems to have gotten into the head of David Brooks, whose New York Times column today channels the Wittmann-esque fantasy of a third-party movement headed by John McCain and Joe Lieberman.I understand the basic idea: the significant share of the electorate that’s palpably sick of partisan wrangling and polarization, and of politics-as-usual in Washington, might gravitate to a new coalition led by two notable heretics from each party.And I also get the premise that third parties tend to emerge based on a radically different set of priorities than those advanced by the two major parties (e.g., the rapid emergence of the Republican Party in the 1850s when Democrats and Whigs were national coalitions determined to ignore the issue of slavery). Thus, theoretically, the vast differences between John McCain and Joe Lieberman on a host of domestic issues might not matter if they represented a consensus on something more important to voters.But that’s where the Brooksian hypothesis breaks down, because he proposes this as the “slavery issue” of our era:

The McCain-Lieberman Party is emerging because the war with Islamic extremism, which opened new fissures and exacerbated old ones, will dominate the next five years as much as it has dominated the last five.

Fine, but as Matt Yglesias notes, it’s not like John McCain or Joe Lieberman exemplifies some sort of unrepresented and massive point of view on how to deal with the war with Islamic extremism. A sizeable majority of the American electorate simultaneously believes we must fight and win a war with Jihadism, and that the Iraq engagement is at best a distraction from and at worst a real handicap in said war. Lieberman and McCain notably believe the two issues are completely inseparable, a position that most Democrats and a growing number of Republicans have already abandoned, based not on ideology but on the terrible facts on the ground in Iraq and elsewhere. So if national security is the fulcrum of the political revolution that could create a McCain-Lieberman third party, it’s not clear either man is particularly well-equipped to lead the charge. Maybe some sort of odd coalition involving Wes Clark and Chuck Hagel could do that, but not John and Joe. And indeed, Joe Lieberman’s struggle to hang on to his Senate seat will heavily involve efforts to remind voters, just as he did during his near-miss primary fight, of his positions on all those issues that separate him from John McCain. Brooks, of course, hedges his bets and suggests that maybe elements of the alleged party of McCain and Lieberman could conquer one of the two major parties. And guess who might have a chance to do that? John McCain, of course, who is not going to join Lieberman in a third party effort, and who is in fact the early front-runner for the GOP nomination in 2008.Here Brooks follows his predictable pattern: distance yourself from both parties, gliding far above the messy partisan fray, but somehow wind up in a position of endorsing the GOP approach, whatever it is. The blunt reality is that we aren’t going to see a successful third-party movement in 2008 and if there is a third-party effort, it won’t be led by McCain or Lieberman. If, as Brooks professes to believe, the overriding imperative in American politics is to rid the system of polarization and the paralyzing influence of interest groups, the best and simplest way to make that happen is to get the current managers of Washington, who very deliberately created this polarized climate and have given interest groups far more privileged access than we’ve seen in Washington in a century, out of power. Then us Democrats can have our debates and our fights, and sort out those few issues on which our agendas for the country truly diverge.

David Sirota said he “boldly did what so few Democratic politicians are willing to do: he told the truth about the corporate-funded Democratic Leadership Council” Charles P. Pierce at TAPPED called it “the best argument yet made against the DLC by someone not named David Sirota.”I was naturally curious to read what motivated all this gushing, and discovered a rather peculiar rant by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) to a group of Wisconsin reporters that blamed the DLC for all the sins of the Democratic Party in the last decade or so.I was particularly interested to learn from Feingold that the DLC “came up with the health care plan with the Clintons that was so complicated nobody could understand it.” Gee, I seem to remember that the DLC actually opposed the Clinton Health Plan. “They are the ones that coalesced with the big corporations to pass unfair trade agreements that hurt America.” Funny: I thought maybe this guy named Bill Clinton–following the tradition of every Democratic president going back to Martin Van Buren–had a bit more to do with, say, NAFTA than anybody at the DLC. And here’s my favorite “bold” attack: “Feingold said DLC consultants ‘instill fear in Democrats’ by saying opposition to the war would be taken as not supporting the troops…. “It’s the DLC that has cut off our ability to say things like, ‘Let’s get out of Iraq because it’s a bad idea.”Until now, I had no idea what vast powers we exercise around here. Al From or Bruce Reed or somebody gets quoted in the papers, and Democrats fall silent in terror. And the stuff about “DLC consultants” is beautifully vague. Unless I’m forgetting something, the chief political consultant for the last two Democratic presidential candidates was named Bob Shrum, whose relationship with the DLC is about as warm as Ned Lamont’s with Joe Lieberman.Look, folks, what the DLC does is to write policy papers, hold conferences, publish a magazine, and network among state and local elected officials. Three of us do blogs. Our staff is small by Washington think tank standards; our budget is a fraction of CAP’s. Democrats are free to take the DLC’s advice or leave it. It’s hilarious to be told that attacking us represents some sort of profile in courage; it seems to have done wonders for the career of David Sirota, whose willingness to spit venom at the DLC has helped make him a quote machine in both the blogosphere and the mainstream media.So why the gratuitous outburst from Russ Feingold? It’s not like many actual voters have ever heard of the DLC; hell, it took my own family about five years to internalize the fact that I worked for the DLC rather than the DNC. You have to figure Feingold was sending a signal to the segment of Democratic activists, old and new, for whom those three letters “DLC” have come to represent a sort of Unified Field Theory of recent Democratic electoral losses.You probably know the rap: soulless, poll-driven centrists in Washington sold out their principles for corporate cash, blah blah blah, lost Congress and the states, blah blah blah, spend all their time on Fox News defending Bush and attacking Democrats, blah blah blah, denied Gore his victory and “took down” Howard Dean, bark bark woof woof. It takes a lot of words, and maybe a few actual facts, to say all that, so just intoning “DLC” and hearing the instant cheers is a nice shorthand, and less politically risky than, say, frontally attacking Bill Clinton. The fact that this sort of code and the lurid narrative it signals makes the messenger sound a bit like a Larouchie off his meds is, I suppose, a small price to pay for the message it sends to listeners eager to hear it.The odd thing is that Russ Feingold is actually pretty popular here at Centrist Conspiracy HQ. He’s usually refreshingly direct, and willing to be unorthodox in all sorts of different directions. But there’s nothing in Democratic politics today more tediously orthodox than DLC-bashing. I do offer one suggestion to other bold, brave politicians out there: if you’re going to do this, try and get the basic facts straight.