I know I posted about the Ralph Reed primary in Georgia just last Friday, but with the election just eight days ahead, I will continue to blog about it as events warrant. And the latest news is that Ralph’s primary opponent for the Lite Governor gig, state senator Casey Cagle, has launched a TV ad that gets pretty down ‘n’ dirty, using phrases like “lying about his record,” and “selling out our conservative values,” and “lying about Casey Cagle.” The ad also gets heavily into the forced abortion and forced prostitution allegations about that libertarian paradise, the Northern Mariana Islands, which Reed promoted at the behest of his buddies Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist.The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway and Tom Baxter understated the situaton by saying: “In the Republican race for lieutenant governor, Casey Cagle has crossed into Point of No Return Land. There’s no shaking hands and wishing best of luck after a TV ad like this.”The same Galloway/Baxter column provides a link to a robo-call for Ralph Reed by none other than Zell Miller, who talks about how long he’s known Ralph, five or six Miller political personalities ago.

Somebody in my office forwarded a piece from Hotline today citing a Chris Bowers MyDD post in which Chris, sort of stamping his foot, once again decries the hypocrisy of those who criticize netroots types for going after Joe Lieberman while “conservative Democrats” and “the DLC” are trying to purge Sen. Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, via a primary challenge by Rep. Ed Case. This is the third time Chris has made this argument, and after the second one, I did a response making it clear that the DLC has nothing at all to do with Case’s challenge to Akaka, which is, best I can tell, mainly about Akaka’s advanced age (81) and the possibility that he could be replaced at some point during the next six years by a Republican apointee. The rationale for Case’s candidacy is not one for the squeamish, to be sure, but it certainly does not reflect some sort of national centrist “purge” of Akaka, whom I barely knew anything about until I started reading that I was apparently involved in a plot to drive him from office.Now I don’t expect Chris Bowers to read this blog regularly, but he’s pretty influential in some circles, and insofar as he seems to have lurid ideas about the DLC’s trans-Pacific reach, he might want to actually find out if this DLC- goes-after-Akaka story line has any basis in reality. It doesn’t.

Boy, the calendar really snuck up on me like a crafty pick-pocket: the Georgia primary that will, among other things, determine Ralph Reed’s political fate is just eleven days away.The Man Who Would Be Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, as part of a Master Plan to stroll into the White House in 2016 or so, is fighting for his life against primary challenger state senator Casey Cagle. A poll taken by the Georgia-based firm Insider Advantage on June 26-27 has Reed ahead of Cagle 32-27, with a gigantic 41 percent still undecided. According to a report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway and Tom Baxter, here’s what Insider Advantage’s savvy Matt Towery had to say about the poll:

Those who are shocked at the large undecided percentage in this survey should understand that these two candidates have only been up on broadcast television for under a week. As we’ve noted in the past, Reed may be well known in political circles, but the average voter has little if just a hazy idea of who he is and what office he is seeking. And Sen. Cagle suffers from the same anemic name identification.

Towery thinks the dynamics help Reed. I dunno. The release of the final Senate Indian Affairs Committee report on the Abramoff scandal, which toted up Reed’s take from casino tribes to campaign against competitors at more than 5 million smackers, did not come at a good time for Ralph. And Cagle’s final TV blitz is all about Reed and Abramoff (Reed is retaliating with ads claming Cagle got fat and happy from his own state legislative service).As a Democrat, I hope Reed wins the primary; his nomination will not only give likely Democratic nominee Jim Martin a good shot in November, but could wreak holy havoc on the whole GOP ticket, headed by Governor Sonny Perdue, whose private opinion of Ralph is unprintable in a family-friendly blog.But as an expatriate Georgian, who bleeds Bulldog red-and-black, yearns for the sight of landmarks like the Big Chicken, and goes home pretty regularly to get re-crackerized and eat some decent grits–I don’t want my home state to do much of anything to facilitate Ralph Reed’s visions of grandeur. His exposure as part of the Abramoff scam, along with long-time buddy Grover Norquist, is a perfect reflection of his role in the mutual corruption of social and economic conservatives in the latter-day GOP. Whether he loses on July 18 or in November, he needs to lose, and it will be a fine day in Georgia when the chickens all come home to roost, and Ralph Reed’s political ambitions finally expire.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

I know us progressive bloggers are supposed to be boycotting The New Republic these days, but hell’s bells, I’ve always been a bit contrary by nature, and the magazine is, well, actually very good on a regular basis.Today’s TNR posts offer two very interesting takes on the way that the misuses of language can make politicians here and everywhere literally crazy.The estimable John Judis, after a whirlwind tour of modern epistemology (no kidding), suggests that the Bush administration is pursuing an insane foreign policy based on the assumption that America’s enemies are insane. It’s a fine piece, though I do think he should have acknowledged the odd psychopath in power (see Hitler, Adolph, and Stalin, Josef) who provides the exception to the rule of semi-rational statecraft.Meanwhile, the equally estimable Leon Wieseltier offers an assessment of Hamas’ bizarre denial of Israel’s formal existence, suggesting an unusually Orwellian use of language by some Palestinians about words like “exist.” At the height of Leon’s diatribe, he describes Hamas’ position towards Israel this way: “Israel is to be accepted as just another nasty fact of life, like toxic waste or Tom Cruise.”Selah.

I waited for some of the dust to settle before commenting on Barack Obama’s remarkable speech to Jim Wallis’ Christian Left assemblage last week, but here’s a simple summary of the reaction:1) Some folks praised Obama for calling on Democrats to reach out to people of faith, and for denying Republicans had any natural monopoly on their support.2) Some folks attacked Obama for either (a) reinforcing “Republican talking points” by suggesting Democrats had a problem with people of faith, or (b) suggesting that Democrats reach out to people who are part of the conservative base, which can’t be done without compromising progressive principles.Among the critics, Chris Bowers of MyDD managed to tie himself in knots by making both negative arguments simultaneously.Lots of the critics and even some of the fans don’t seem to have paid sufficient attention to what Obama actually said. Over at TPMCafe, Nathan Newman, quoting liberally from Obama’s remarks, pretty decisively refutes the claim that the Illinois senator was piling onto Republican attacks on Democrats, or calling for any sort of “tilt to the right” on policy issues (beyond the single issue of church-state-separation absolutism).But uniquely, and not suprisingly, Amy Sullivan, in an article at Slate, noted a very different aspect of Obama’s speech that in the long run may make it more significant: an intra-Christian argument about the connection between faith and political commitment that suggests any simple claim that God wants the faithful to vote this way or that is spiritually dangerous. Here’s how Sullivan puts it:

This humbler version of faith has been in the shadows for the past few years, derided as moral relativism or even a lack of true belief. Obama stepped up not to defend this approach to religion, but to insist on the rightness of it. That should be comforting to anyone who has been deeply discomfited by Bush’s version of Christianity. A questioning faith is a much better fit for a society like ours than one that allows for no challenge or reflection. It also acts as a check against liberals who would appropriate God for their own purposes, declaring Jesus to be the original Democrat and trotting out New Testament verses to justify their own policy programs. Liberals don’t have the answer key to divining God’s will any more than conservatives do.

In other words, Obama was fighting something of a three-front battle in this speech:(1) against conservative claims that God’s Will is easy to understand, dictates culturally conservative positions, and requires nothing more than obedience;(2) against Christian Left claims that progressives of faith should simply counter their Law with our Gospel; their sexual moralism with our social-justice moralism; their scriptural authorities with our scriptural authorities;(3) against secularists of the Left or the Right (encompassing, BTW, most of the political chattering classes) who reduce religious faith to entirely secular political and cultural positions, without having any clue of the ambiguities involved in believing in a transcendent God who reveals Himself in history and human action as well as in scripture. The political import of Obama’s speech is that he is engaging in an intra-Christian debate that is already undermining the Christian Right every day. In essence, the James Dobsons of the religious world have sought to lead their flocks into a prophetic stance that stakes their spiritual lives to a series of specific and highly questionable political commitments. More and more, even the most conservative evangelical Christians are chafing against this bondage, while the less conservative faithful, including the largely apolitical attendees of rapidly growing non-denominational megachurches, never bought into it much to begin with. This is an enormous potential political constituency that is waiting to hear from Our Side, not with Conservative Lite policy prescriptions; not with Christian Left counter-prophetic-absolutism; but with credible and authentic appeals to the holy fear that the faithful should respect when confronting those who make exclusive claims to represent God’s Will on Earth.This is precisely the appeal Barack Obama made last week, and as a Christian, and as a Democrat, I am grateful for it.

This headline from today’s Washington Post says it all: “GOP Seeks Advantage In Ruling On Trials.” In other words, now that the Supreme Court has denied that George W. Bush has virtually monarchical powers to deal with terrorist suspects as he sees fit, Republicans want to suggest that any Democrats who recommends legislation complying with the decision is a terrorist-lover. Here’s a sample of what we’re going to hear real soon:

House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) criticized House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi‘s comment Thursday that the court decision “affirms the American ideal that all are entitled to the basic guarantees of our justice system.” That statement, Boehner said, amounted to Pelosi’s advocating “special privileges for terrorists.”

You know what this line of “reasoning” reminds me of? Many years ago I happened to be in one of those states with no limitations on campaigning for judicial positions, and to my horror, I watched a TV ad where some craggy old buzzard cast a steely eye at the camera and said: “Elect me to the bench, and I’ll always rule against the criminals. I’ll be the hangin’ judge.”Now you don’t need a law degree to understand that the reason we have safeguards and procedures for criminal proceedings is that you don’t know who the criminal is until after the trial. Same goes for terrorist suspects. If some sort of evidence-based system for figuring out who terrorists actually are before you punish them is a “special privilege,” then I’m all for it, and you should be, too.

The long-awaited U.S. Supreme Court review of the Tom Delay-orchestrated re-redistricting of Texas congressional districts finally came down today, and a splintered Court continued its recent habit of disarray on redistricting principles. It’s clear a sizeable majority of the Court has decided that mid-decade reversals of redistricting plans are not barred by the federal constitutution, and a less-sizeable majority refuses to consider re-redistricting as grounds for strong suspicion that illicit political gerrymandering has occurred. But the Court appears to be all over the place, as it has been for more than a decade, in determining when if ever political gerrymandering can violate the Constitution. Meanwhile, a 5-4 majority of the Court ruled than one of the districts in the DeLay Map violates the Voting Right Act as a straightforward dilution of Hispanic voting strength. But the decision about how to deal with it was dumped back to a District Court in Texas, which must now decide whether there is anything they can do about it between now and November. Obviously, fixing one district could affect many others. You have to try, as I did, to slog through the whole 132 pages of concurring and dissenting opinions to see how divided and tentative the Court is on this whole subject. I’m no fancified constitutional or elections lawyer, and praise the Lord I left behind this sort of preoccupation when I decided to go into politics, but still, you don’t have to put “Esquire” after your signature to figure out when the Supremes are a herd of kitty-cats. More troubling is the fact that the ruling on re-redistricting may not get the attention it deserves in political circles because it’s becoming moot for this particular decade.Looking back, Republicans got away with re-redistrictings in Texas and Georgia. Democrats tried to retaliate in Ohio and Florida, but the former effort failed dismally last year at the ballot box, while the latter foundered in the Florida courts (it could possibly be revived and placed on the ballot in 2008, but that’s awfully close to the next regularly scheduled redistricting anyway). A Republican-backed California re-redistricting measure also failed last year, but that was a bit of a special case, since it was poorly designed, and in any event was backed by a lot of non-Republicans. But no one should forget that the one place in which a DeLay-style GOP partisan re-redistricting foundered was Colorado, for the simple reason that the state’s own constitution banned mid-decade redistricting. Looking ahead to the next decade, states should strongly consider emulating Colorado’s ban on the practice of overturning congressional and state legislative maps every time partisan control of state government solidifies or flips. No one can any longer foster the illusion that the U.S. Supreme Court will do anything to stop the madness.

As you may have seen or read, the Washington, DC area is under what looks to be a semi-perpetual flash flood watch, with roads all over the place becoming impassable and basements flooding on everything other than high ground. Rain will more or less continue for the next few days, and there’s a potential tropical storm brewing up off the Carolina coast that could really make things biblical in these parts. I don’t know this for sure, but as The Nation’s Capitol continues to get battered, those on both ends of the political spectrum who think of this city as the source of all iniquity may become quietly pleased that Big Beltway Types may be knee-deep in muddy water just like disaster victims elsewhere. For us small fry in the Emerald City, it will be a good time to hunker down, read and sleep, turn on some bad TV, get right with God, get together with dear friends, or just watch the rain pelt the windows and hope that mudslides are primarily a west-coast phenomenon. And let’s hope that the Good Lord is not deep down a neo-populist of the Left or Right, and is visiting upon us a modern Plague of Frogs.

Last week the editor of Blueprint Magazine and I had a casual conversation about a New York Times article about a mammoth new publication entitled American Conservatism: An Encylopedia. I just as casually agreed to review the book, not realizing the deadline was, well, now, and that the tome would land heavily on my desk the next morning. Thus, I spent a good part of the weekend slogging through the book and trying to get a handle on it.I won’t scoop my own review, but suffice it to say that this encyclopedia is, among other things, a solid repudiation of much of the political and theoretical success of the very movement which inspired it. In the introduction, the editors flatly say they “do not see in the history of conservatism the inevitable development of an increasingly powerful and coherent ideology of any kind.” And the book expresses a very lukewarm attitude towards virtually every conservative politician other than Taft, Goldwater and Reagan. The entry about W. says: “The presidency of George W. Bush has proved problematic for conservatives and the conservative movement,” and concludes: “Bush’s presidency revealed starkly the philosophical cleavages in the conservative movement as much as it also helped redefine political conservatism in the public mind.” I acknowledge and agree with those who view the current disenchantment of conservative journalists and activists with Bush and the GOP in general as in no small part an exercise in denial based on the failure of their policies and the unpopularity of their agenda. But American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia illustrates a more systematic disillusionment among conservative intellectuals with politics generally, and with the unity and integrity of their own tradition. For those on the Left who still believe in the elan of the Right Wing Machine, and want to emulate it, this book is a good reminder that the Machine’s design is flawed, and the engine is sputtering.

When I wrote on Friday that the Bush administration was probably planning troop withdrawals to begin shortly before the fall elections, I didn’t know this is precisely what the U.S. Commander in Iraq, General George Casey, was discussing with his superiors in a classified Pentagon briefing written up today in the New York Times. It appears the Pentagon is planning troop withdrawals later this year, and substantial troop withdrawals next year, even as the White House and congressional Republicans blast Democrats for thinking along the same lines. Michael Gordon of the Times connects the dots:

[A]fter criticizing Democratic lawmakers for trying to legislate a timeline for withdrawing troops, skeptics say, the Bush administration seems to have its own private schedule, albeit one that can be adjusted as events unfold.If executed, the plan could have considerable political significance. The first reductions would take place before this falls Congressional elections, while even bigger cuts might come before the 2008 presidential election.

So there you have it: the administration’s secret plan for Iraq, all ready for a fall rollout. Amazing.