The purpose of this week’s gratuitious “debate” in the U.S. Senate on the so-called Defense of Marriage Amendment doesn’t even qualify as an open secret: it’s more like an open sore. A panicked GOP, under direct threats from self-appointed Christian Right leaders like James Dobson and unable to deal with any real issues, is trying to shore up its hard-line cultural conservative base by pretending to do something about the Awful Specter of Gay Marriage. You might even call it Rove’s Last Stand: with growing majorities of Americans rejecting Bush and GOP policies on almost every conceivable subject, the idea is to repolarize the electorate with cultural wedge issues and reenergize the theocratic element of the God ‘n’ Mammon coalition that’s been so noisily falling apart of late.Tired and transparent as this ploy is, it does fit neatly into GOP plans to make the November elections not a referendum on Republican misgovernment, but a lesser-of-two-evils choice between the incumbent party of power and those crazy Christian-hating, terrorist-appeasing, Bush-impeaching Democrats.Right on cue, the Right’s most promiscuous slanderer, Ann Coulter, is coming out with a new book under the fair-and-balanced title Godless, which “exposes” liberalism as a vast and all-powerful conspiracy to ban Christianity, introduce mandatory Paganism, and reduce the human race to the status of beasts.If you think I’m exaggerating, check out the excerpt from Godless posted at townhall.com, but you might want to keep some hand-sanitizer close by in case you accidentally touch your computer screen. Here’s a characteristic passage:

Liberalism is a comprehensive belief system denying the Christian belief in man’s immortal soul. Their religion holds that there is nothing sacred about human consciousness. It’s just an accident no more significant than our possession of opposable thumbs. They deny what we know about ourselves: that we are moral beings in God’s image. Without this fundamental understanding of man’s place in the world, we risk being lured into misguided pursuits, including bestiality, slavery, and PETA membership.

Those of you who have risked exposure to Coulter’s nasty oeuvre will recognize in this last sentence her signature move of tossing a leaden “jest” into a series of gross calumnies, thus enabling her conservative defenders to excuse her as a practitioner of good, clean, hate-filled fun.Normally I wouldn’t pay any attention to Coulter’s ravings; it’s depressing enough to realize that Godless, like her earlier screeds, will probably wind up on bestseller lists. But a particular passage in the excerpt caught my attention:

If Democrats ever dared speak coherently about what they believe, the American people would lynch them. So they claim to believe in God, much as Paul Begala claims to go “duck hunting” (liberal code for “antiquing”). At the beginning of the 2004 presidential campaign, the Democratic Leadership Council held briefings to teach Democratic candidates how to simulate a belief in God. To ease the Druids into it, the DLC recommended using phrases like “God’s green earth.” (The DLC also suggested avoiding the use of phrases such as “goddamned, motherf—ing Republicans!”)

The last paranthetical sentence, of course, is another Coulter bon mot. It does not seem to occur to this self-proclaimed Defensor Fidei that she should eschew violations of the Second Commandment (or, for that matter, that she is exceptionally ill-equipped to accuse Paul Begala of elitism). But the previous two sentences happen to refer to a quote from yours truly, delivered at a conference on cultural issues in Atlanta in the autumn of 2003. Since I was, you know, actually there, and know a lot more about what I was saying that Ann Coulter’s research staff, I can report that the audience was a group primarily composed of southern state legislators, roughly half of them African-Americans. I strongly suspect none of them were tree-worshipping Druids, and moreover, that most of them have forgotten more about the theory and practice of Christianity than Ann Coulter will ever know. And in my remarks to the group, far from teaching anyone to “simulate belief in God,” I was actually suggesting that people of faith who are Democrats shouldn’t hide the fact, and could take a lesson from George W. Bush in how to weave scriptural language into policy discussions, especially insofar as W. seems to ignore half the Law and most of the Gospels.This particular passage of Godless is just a wolf-cub in the snarling pack of Coulter’s lies, but it does give you a sense of her respect for facts. I’ve personally been accused on occasion of indulging in unfunny humor, but to use another “bestial” metaphor, anyone who finds the Clown Princess of right-wing invective hilarious probably likes dead-kitten jokes, especially in the company of those PETA-loving liberal Druids.

Over at MyDD, Chris Bowers reacts to the DLC’s recent argument against a nationally-driven purge of Joe Lieberman by shouting “hypocrites!” Where, he asks, are Lieberman’s defenders when it comes to other primary challenges like Ed Case’s against “the arguably more progressive” Sen. Daniel Akaka of Hawaii? Having firmly planted the axiom that the case for Lieberman is all about rejecting the very idea of primary challenges to incumbent Democrats, Chris fulminates for a while about “establishment” types trying to deny Democratic voters their legal right to choose their nominees for office.I respect Chris Bowers, but this time he’s missing a very basic point. The DLC is not arguing against the right to “primary” incumbents; if Connecticut Democrats want to replace Joe Lieberman with Ned Lamont or anybody else, that’s fine by me. It’s the national effort to dump Joe, evidenced by the heavy involvement of national organizations like MoveOn and Democracy for America, that’s objectionable. And as Chris knows, much of the progressive blogosphere is nearly as obsessed with the Lamont candidacy as it is with delivering a Democratic Congress this November, for reasons that have zippo to do with the vindication of the sovereign rights of Connecticut Democrats to choose whomever they want (has anyone other than Ned Lamont himself pledged to support Lieberman if he does win the primary? If so, they’re pretty quiet about it). The level of abuse being aimed at Lieberman is, quite frankly, a close second to the abuse being aimed at George W. Bush.Comparing the national effort to get rid of Lieberman to Ed Case’s primary challenge to Daniel Akaka is just weird. But Chris is determined to follow the line of argument. A few weeks ago, he said this:

If anyone has the gall to claim that progressives are wasting Democratic resources in 2006 by challenging incumbents like Lieberman, just point to Hawaii where conservatives are doing the same thing. How dare the DLC waste Democratic resources like this! Don’t they know the real target should be Republicans?

Upon reading this post at the time, my first thought was “Huh?” Aside from the fact that the DLC doesn’t raise money or endorse candidates or recruit volunteers, I’m quite sure nobody at the DLC was more than dimly aware of the Case challenge to Akaka, which is apparently more about Akaka’s age than anything to do with ideology. This is clearly not a “nationally-driven purge,” just as it’s equally clear the anti-Lieberman campaign is exactly that. And any “so’s your old man” argument to the contrary is a bit like saying that Super Target is identical to Super WallMart because they sell some of the same items.Primaries are fine. Purges are not, and I don’t think there’s much doubt which is which when it comes to the intraparty politics of 2006.

Yesterday the blogosphere was full of talk about Unity ’08, a nascent third-party effort with a twist: the idea is to build a party online, agree on an agenda, draft candidates to run for president and vice president in 2008, and then get them on the ballot across the country.I found the talk especially interesting because two ol’ pols from my home state of Georgia, Ham Jordan and Gerald Rafshoon (both veterans of the Carter presidential campaigns) are in the forefront of the effort, along with Hotline founder Doug Bailey and former independent governor of Maine, Angus King. My old boss Sam Nunn is being mentioned as a possible candidate (don’t hold your breath, folks; Nunn’s got bigger fish to fry, like saving us all from loose nukes).My colleague The Moose hailed the effort but warned it would have a hard time overcoming the various institutional barriers to a third party. Over at Daily Kos, diarist Redshift notes that Unity ’08’s “crucial issues” list looks a lot like that of Democrats.My reaction was a little different: third-party efforts that begin with the concept of an agenda and the idea of a candidate tend to take its promoters through the looking glass in pursuit of White Rabbits they can never quite catch. Some of you may remember a similar effort back in 1995-96, organized by a group of former elected officials dubbed “the secret seven” (Bill Bradley, Dick Lamm, Tim Penney, Lowell Weicker, Paul Tsongas, Gary Hart and the self-same Angus King). Their deal was to promote “intergenerational equity,” a bit of a code word for entitlement reform, and the press got all excited by the possibility that the group would run one of its number for president as a third-party candidate in 1996.By a pure coincidence, I was moderating a panel at the Minnesota conference where Lamm, Tsongas and Penney showed up with the promise to reveal the “secret seven’s” plans. After much hype, the three did a long presentation on the budget and entitlement spending, admitted they had no plans for a candidacy, and then basically disappeared from view as the horse-race-deprived political media lost interest. My advice to the Unity ’08 crew is that they better get some serious candidate possibilities out there to define their effort and make sure their interactive agenda-building initiative doesn’t become a freak magnet. Otherwise, they’ll be chasing White Rabbits until their potential constituency disappears through the looking glass.

It’s not a particularly penetrating analysis of the Tennessee Senate race, but Robin Toner’s piece today in the New York Times on Harold Ford’s campaign does supply one very interesting anectdote:

Mr. Ford, a five-term congressman from Memphis, rouses his audiences, white and black, with little parables of political possibility: How he was driving back to Memphis one day on the campaign trail, fired up after a meeting at a church, and decided to stop and shake hands at a bar and grill called the Little Rebel. How he looked with some trepidation at the Confederate flag outside and the parking lot filled with pickup trucks, covered with bumper stickers for President Bush and the National Rifle Association.And how he was greeted, when he walked through the door, by a woman at the bar who gave him a huge hug. “And she said, ‘Baby, we’ve been waiting to see you.’ “

That’s actually an accurate parable of U.S. politics in Tennessee, the South, and America at large: voters are ready to fire the GOP, and Democrats simply need to seal the deal. The door is open; we have to take down the “Do Not Disturb” sign that has signalled voters Democrats only care about their own, and reach out aggressively to people who cast ballots for W., and regret it.

Tom Edsall’s Monday Washington Post article about the latest controversy involving the Man Who Would Be Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, Ralph Reed, had the familiar sound of another predictable shoe dropping on the boon companion of Jack Abramoff and Grover Norquist. Seems that back in 1999, Ralph got paid by Abramoff to do a direct mail piece to conservative Christians in Alabama urging them to contact then-Congressman Bob Riley (now the Republican Governor of that state) to get him to oppose legislation imposing federal wage and worker safety laws on the U.S. territory in the Northern Mariana Islands. Ralph’s mailer focused especially on the concern that the legislation would restrict the recruitment of Chinese workers to NMI industries, denying these wards of the Godless Communist State access to the Word of God readily available in their new if temporary home.Anybody familiar with the arcana of the ongoing Abramoff scandal will laugh and laugh at the mention of the Northern Mariana Islands, a favorite cash cow for Abramoff and company, and a strange pet cause of the conservative movement for much of the 1990s. Here’s how Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift, quoting my colleague The Moose, put it a while back:

Marshall Wittmann, a conservative activist turned centrist, attended the first meeting in 1993 hosted by Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, to rally conservatives of different stripes around a common agenda. “There were about a dozen of us wanting to stop this or that Clinton plan,” says Wittmann. “When the Mariana Islands came up, I wondered how did this become a conservative issue?” The Northern Mariana Islands were the first big project that Norquist and Abramoff worked on together. An American protectorate in the Pacific Ocean, the government there wanted help to resist certain U.S. laws, like paying minimum wage. Norquist talked up the Marianas as a model of free enterprise, and Abramoff collected $9 million in lobbying fees, smoothing the way for members of Congress to take fact-finding trips to the islands and play golf.“It was the first time I scratched my head and thought there’s something amiss here,” Wittmann told NEWSWEEK. “The seeds that were planted then developed into the fauna and flora we have now.”

Flora and fauna indeed. And it gets worse for Reed. Not only did his flacking for NMI entangle him even further with the Abramoff-Norquist money machine, but it turns out that great capitalist paradise in the Pacific engaged in practices even worse than U.S.-favored wage exploitation. Here’s how Edsall explained it:

A year earlier [than Reed’s mailer], the Department of the Interior — which oversees federal policy toward the U.S. territory — presented a very different picture of life for Chinese workers on the islands. An Interior report found that Chinese women were subject to forced abortions and that women and children were subject to forced prostitution in the local sex-tourism industry.

So it looks like maybe those Chinese workers in NMI weren’t exactly exposed to the Gospel in action after all. But Ralph took Abramoff’s bucks and did the sales job anyway, which might be described in biblical terms as trading his birthright for a mess of pottage.It’s still not clear how much damage all this accumulating flora and fauna of corruption is doing to Ralph Reed’s campaign; he’s still cashing his national chits and harvesting endorsements from people like Rudy Guiliani.But all across my home state of Georgia, from the Rabun Gap to the Tybee Light, and from Waycross to Cartersville to Ralph’s adopted home town of Toccoa, the shoes continue to drop. My guess is that sooner or later, the voters of this red state will recognize Ralph Reed as a classic Washington jiveass whose native son pretensions are as insubstantial as instant grits.

I’m part of that mid-baby-boomer cohort of men who didn’t get drafted but also didn’t have the mental or moral freedom associated with the All-Volunteer Military. Fact of the matter is that I went through the Draft Lottery of the early 1970s and drew number 265, which placed me far out of harm’s way while exposing less fortunate peers to a tour of duty in Vietnam. I could have volunteered for military service, but didn’t, and didn’t really consider it (a later near brush with voluntary service in the Air Force JAG Corps, which would have exposed me to little risk other than a possible tongue-lashing from a military judge, in no way exculpates me on that score).So I truly do honor those men and women who served and suffered for me and thee, whether they answered a compulsory call from Uncle Sam or didn’t wait for the draft notice. And I remain convinced, despite my own luck and self-interested decisions, that this country should do every thing necessary short of compulsion to make some sort of national service, military or civilian, a way of life for each new generation of young people.If that happens, then on Memorial Day we can express thanks for the sacrifices of those before us not as a guilt-offering of the fortunate and the privileged, but as comrades who have shared their willingness to place America’s defense, and freedom’s cause, above their own safety and comfort. Moreover, God willing, we can live in a country whose leaders do not make tax cuts for the most comfortable Americans their top war-time priority, profaning the spirit of common sacrifice and patriotism in a way that should make us all uncomfortable each Memorial Day until Washington is finally set right.

By the time you read this, it’s entirely possible that Denny Hastert and Nancy Pelosi (in, ironically, their first act of robust bipartisanship) will have cut some Rube Goldberg deal with the Bush administration whereby the FBI will turn over documents seized from Rep. Bill Jefferson to the House Ethics Committee, thus somehow vindicating the Honor of the Institution without enabling the doomed Louisianan to feed the papers to the nearest shredder.I know there’s a (weak) constitutional argument here, though I have a hard time believing that Hastert and Pelosi really think that the doctrine of separation of powers prevents a court-ordered seizure of documents unrelated to any legislative activity after a subpoena has been ignored. If they do, they’re endorsing a degree of complete immunity from law enforcement rarely seen since Thomas a Becket claimed that Henry II had no jurisdiction over criminal clergy (or at least since the last Bush administration ukase about the president’s imperial powers over national security).Maybe the two Leaders think they’re taking a bullet for the Long View, but it’s hard to say which partisans are more beside themselves for this display of solicitude for a guy who’s trying to hide documents after getting caught on videotape taking 100 Large, which apparently wound up nestled amongst the popsicles in his freezer.Here’s the calm assessment made by conservative John Podheretz over at The Corner:

I don’t know how to put this any other way, and I’m sorry if it sounds insulting, but: Whether you consider him the leader of an institution whose standing among the public is at historically low levels and in need of drastic moral renovation or a leading partisan official whose team is in pretty bad shape and could use a bit of a boost, Denny Hastert is a blithering idiot.

Meanwhile, Pelosi’s getting pounded all over the lefty blogosphere for screwing up a year-long effort to make it clear Democrats will clean up the House if they win it back this November. And even more vitriol is being poured on the Congressional Black Caucus for blasting Pelosi for her one effort to discipline Jefferson, her request that he give up his seat on the Ways & Means Committee. For once, I’m pretty much in agreement with the Left and Right and don’t any use for the “bipartisanship” being exhibited by the Leaders. Indeed, I think they’ve together climbed onto the Crazy Train. But I do have a small bone to pick with Kos, who went out of his way today to take this little shot: “Jefferson, by the way, is a card-carrying member of the DLC. You know, the organization founded to take on the ‘entrenched interests’ in DC. ” Kos’ link was to an article in Human Events, of all things, that quoted Bruce Reed as favoring CAFTA, as did Jefferson. So what? As I’ve explained over and over, the DLC ain’t got no membership cards. And what the hell does supporting CAFTA (which if I recall correctly, Kos himself said was defensible on the merits) have to do with taking bribes to peddle influence in Nigeria? The DLC has repeatedly and redundantly supported ethics rules and legislation tougher than anything that either party in Congress has seriously considered, along with public financing of congressional elections and an assault on corporate subsidies. Dislike the DLC all you want; it’s a free country. But Bill Jefferson’s apparent kleptomania has nothng to do with us, anymore than it has anything to do with the Democratic Party as a whole.

I’m a bit exhausted this evening, after the culmination of many weeks of staring at electoral and demographic data prepared by the ultimate Democratic number-cruncher Mark Gersh, leading to the release today of a study on Democratic and Republican performance in fast-growing areas of the country. The links above adequately describe the study, but the bottom line is that Democrats cannot rely on demographic trends or conventional base-mobilization efforts to build a durable majority, even if, as we pray, we do exceptionally well this November. We’re going to have to expand the base, geographically and demographically, using persuasion as well as mobilization, and not by aping Republican positions but by dealing with persistent doubts about Democrats on key issues, and by tailoring our message and agenda to the concerns and life-experiences of people who have not voted Democratic in the recent past.Today’s release event featured Ken Salazar and Tim Kaine, and a blizzard of data, charts and graphs. But the bottom line was clear and bright: Democrats can and must expand the base and grow the vote, particularly heading towards what may be a truly watershed presidential election of 2008, when we have a holy obligation to effect regime change in Washington.

The “compromise” immigration reform bill is slogging its way through the swamp of the U.S. Senate this week, with Republican and Democratic amendments largely being rejected. Most of the troglodyte efforts to eliminate anything other than puntive, border control measures have gone down, as have Democratic amendments designed to keep the bill from creating a massive “guest worker” program of illegal immigrants who are allowed temporarily to toil in low-wage jobs so long as they are deportable at some fixed point in the future.While I personally favor most of those Democratic amendments that are being defeated, the compromise is worth supporting, if it could actually become law. But the end-game that will come into play if the Senate passes a bill obviously involves an additional compromise between the Senate and House approaches.By refusing to sign on to a smooth-groove path for the compromise absent some assurances about the end-game, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid ultimately secured an agreement to cut Democrats, and members of the responsible bipartisan majority of the Judiciary Committee, into the conference committee. That’s why there are enough Senate Democrats willing to keep the compromise alive. But in the end, it won’t really matter if George W. Bush isn’t willing to use a veto threat and every other formal power he possesses, to make the compromise law, against the will of House Republicans. And if he won’t take definitive sides on immigration reform, then the whole excercise will be nothing more than another graphic illustration of the powerlessness to do good of the all-powerful Repubublican ascendancy in Washington.

Thanks to Greg Sargent, in his new personal blog The Horse’s Mouth, for a heads-up on Rudy Guiliani’s appearance at a fundraiser for Ralph Reed down in Georgia yesterday. Yes, indeedy, “America’s Mayor” lent his name and mug to the doughty if dingy former Poster Boy of the Christian Right, who is struggling against the backwash from his complicity in the Jack Abramoff scandal and other past sins to get himself nominated for the mighty post of Lieutenant Governor of Georgia. Greg’s post led me to check in with the indispensable Political Insider blog maintained by Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporters Jim Galloway and Tom Baxter. Their take on the Guiliani appearance noted that ol’ Rudy followed up his appearance for Ralph by cheerfully telling reporters he was still in favor of civil domestic partnership rights for gays and lesbians. This is, ironically, a position that’s anathema to Ralph and his supporters, who are currently up in arms about a state court decision striking down Georgia’s constitutional ban on any kind of official acknowledgement of gay and lesbian relationships. Indeed, George W. Bush’s disinclination to talk much these days about a federal constitutional ban on gay marriage or anything like it is one of the major grievances of the Cultural Right, and one of the reasons, along with his opposition to Deporting All Mexicans, that the “conservative base” is threatening to take a dive in November. Naturally Greg’s analysis compares Rudy to John McCain as a former ideological heretic getting a long look from GOP establishment types worried about 2008. But there is a big difference between the two. As Michael Kinsley explains in today’s Washington Post, McCain’s a guy who’s problem is that people who largely agree with him ideologically don’t like him or trust him. Rudy’s a guy that conservatives like and trust, but don’t agree with. His attack-dog appearance at the 2004 Republican Convention showed he was willing to please the conservative base on the national security topics they agree on, and his agreement to eat rubber chicken with Ralph Reed shows he’s willing to overlook differences on domestic and cultural issues. But are his putative partners in the GOP really willing to accept his positions in favor of what they think of as Holocaust-level baby-killing and rampant, triumphal sodomy?Personally, I’ve never taken Rudy’s presidential prospects that seriously. And until he starts spending less time raking in cash on the motivational- speaker circuit, and more time hanging out at pot-luck dinners in Iowa, I won’t be convinced that events like his appearance for Reed represent anything other than fluffing pillows with the Right. But if I’m wrong, and Rudy commits himself to a presidential race, then this man who at some roast once jokingly (in drag, no less) called himself “a Republican pretending to be a Democrat pretending to be a Republican” is going to have to discard the disguises and tell us precisely why he clings to the party of Ralph Reed, and George W. Bush. And a Guiliani candidacy would definitely hurt McCain, and increase the likelihood that someone (Allen? Gingrich?) will emerge as the True Conservative alternative to front-runners who have dissed the almighty Base.