One of the most predictable habits of today’s Republicans is that when they get caught doing something disreputable, they try very hard to deflect attention by claiming some Democrat has done the same thing.This seems to be what’s underway in Virginia, where there’s a lot of buzz about Ryan Lizza’s recent revelations in The New Republic concerning the boyhood Confeder-o-mania of Sen. George Allen, and its distinct echoes in his record as Governor of the Commonwealth during the 1990s.Before you could say “So’s your old man,” the conservative Richmond Times-Dispatch published a breathless article noting that one of Allen’s Democratic opponents this fall, former Navy Secretary James Webb, spoke at a Confederate Memorial event in Virginia in 1990.I don’t know if Allen’s backers had anything to do with this article, but it hardly required deep oppo research, since the speech in question is displayed on Webb’s own web page.And once you read the speech and think about it for a moment, the differences between Webb’s and Allen’s attachment to the Lost Cause couldn’t be clearer.First and most importantly, Webb is a southerner with actual Confederate Army ancestors. Not so Allen, whose attachment to the Confederacy developed when he was a Golden Boy rich kid with no southern background. (This point about Allen is one I emphasized in a TPMCafe post, as did Jason Zengerle in the New Republic blog).Second of all, there’s the timing of these events. Sure, Allen’s folks will argue that his Confederate infatuation burgeoned into true love back in high school, while Webb’s speech was a mere fifteen-years-and-change ago, when he was a former Cabinet member. But I think that gets it backwards. Webb did his speech long after the civil rights movement had triumphed over Jim Crow and the Confederacy had been consigned its place in the stormy history of the Republic; that, indeed, is a lot of what he talked about. When Allen was speeding around Southern California in his sporty Mustang with the Confederate flag plates, and wearing a Confederate flag pin in his high school yearbook, that symbol, especially outside the South, was synonymous with Jim Crow’s defiant death throes. (And, as a later TNR piece explains, Allen kept this romance up well after he moved to Virginia and entered politics).And finally, there’s the context of Webb’s speech: at a Confederate Memorial event. I personally think this is the most crucial distinction of all. The main southern argument for getting the Battle Flag off state flags and public buildings is not that Confederate symbols should be abolished, but that they should be consigned to history instead of adopted as current ideological totems. This was, indeed, the main argument in the once-progressive Zell Miller’s impassioned if unsuccessful 1993 Georgia State of the State address (disclosure: I was involved pretty heavily in drafting that speech): don’t forget the Confederacy, or the terrible sacrifices of its soldiers and their families, but don’t make the Lost Cause synonymous with the South as a whole, or allow it to be used for invidious racial or ideological purposes. As a Georgian who has long argued with my fellow crackers about the uses and abuses of Confederate symbols, I have read Webb’s speech and personally found it irreproachable.I sort of doubt George Allen was just exhibiting an exotic historical interest in the Confederacy, interchangeable with, say, an enthusiasm for the War of the Roses. No, there’s not much doubt what it meant to be a Yankee Confedero-phile in the late 1960s. The southerner in me always reacts to such phenomena by saying: “You’re touching my stuff, and breaking it.”So I hope nobody really buys the “everybody did it” idea about George Allen’s strange past.

There’s an interesting op-ed in the Washington Post today: none other than Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos invades the MSM to fire a shot across the bow of the Good Ship Hillary, suggesting that her (a) apparent disdain for the netroots, and (b) her identification with the D.C. Democratic Establishment, could imperil her presumed presidential candidacy in 2008.Now I don’t presume to know a lot about the interactions, positive, negative or neutral, between Team Hillary and netroots worthies; I’ll take Markos’ word for it that Clinton’s advisors haven’t been giving bloggers and other cyber-activists a lot of love. I’ll also play into the thought experiment that Clinton is definitely running for president; I’m not so sure, but obviously it could happen.But I do think Markos misses something important in drawing a direct parallel between Hillary Clinton and those “D.C. Establishment” candidates who got thrown off-balance by Howard Dean in 2004. Best I can tell from staring at polls for quite some time, Hillary Clinton has broad and deep support and approbation among actual, grassroots, rank-and-file Democrats around the country, based on many years in the brightest spotlight. Going into the 2004 race, there was no candidate with this kind of catholic appeal or folk-legend visibility, and that’s one reason why Dean’s incandescent campaign broke through so quickly (and perhaps one reason it collapsed when the contest got into the serious, vote-getting phase). I’m perfectly willing to agree that netroots support specifically, and activist support generally, is important, but in the end, it’s all about votes.Maybe I’m wrong and Markos is right on that score, but the part of his op-ed I have to take greatest issue with is the familiar argument that Hillary is handicapped by her husband’s role in the decline of the Democratic Party and the election of George Bush. We’ve all heard this litany before: Clinton never got more than 50% of the popular vote (nor did the previous three Democratic nominees, or for that matter, two of the three prior to that); Democrats lost Congress during Clinton’s presidency (a process any political scientist will tell you had been building for decades, and that began slowly reversing during the last three cycles of the Clinton years); and of course, the usual stuff about Clinton’s “third way” policies alienating the all-important activist base (which is probably why he was wildly popular with most activists when he left office, and why so many of them still pine for someone like him). And even Markos concedes that Clinton produced “eight years of peace and prosperity,” which ought to make the Clinton name a bit less poisonous than this column suggests.In any event, Markos’ op-ed is a pretty faithful reflection of the attitudes toward HRC you see steadily circulating around the blogosphere like a breeze through a wind farm. So it’s probably very useful for those who read WaPo but don’t know blogs from hogs to catch a whiff of it today.

Via Chris Bowers, I’m happy to report that the latest Gallup Poll shows George W. Bush reaching new lows in popularity, registering a 34/63 approval/disapproval rating, getting him seriously into the bad company of presidents in trouble, from (second-term) Harry Truman, to Richard Nixon, to Jimmy Carter and to his own old man. I’m not so old that I can remember Truman, though I am aware that his deep unpopularity after his upset 1948 election win fed a Republican congressional landslide in 1950, and then the Eisenhower landslide of 1952. But I do remember Nixon’s fall from grace very graphically (feeding the 1974 Democratic landslide and then the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976), and of course the free-fall Bush I went into thanks to his overt confusion and indifference over every aspect of domestic policy. Most of all I remember my fellow Georgian Carter (I was actually a Carter volunteer the first time he ran for governor, in 1966), whose well-earned post-presidential rehabilitation has obscured his own W.-like reputation in the late 1970s for total fecklessness. I will certainly never forget the day after the revelation of the Desert One disaster–the Iranian hostage effort that expired when U.S. helicopters collided en route to an aborted rescue. As it happens, I spoke that morning to my political mentor, a man who had worked for Carter in Atlanta, and who observed: “Well, Jimmy’s just established himself as the first president to screw up a one-car funeral.” George W. Bush has established an equal reputation for incompetence, and unlike Carter, has also richly earned a reputation for lying to the American people on a vast number of issues. He seems to be on a trajectory to combine the worst perceptions of Carter and Nixon: a president over his head, who can’t tell the truth to save his own political life.

The incoherence and attempted demagoguery of the beseiged Republican Party are becoming impossible to overstate. Witness the latest Big Idea on dealing with gas prices, unveiled last week by Senate GOP Leader Bill Frist: mailing $100 checks to 100 million Americans to help them fill up at the pump this summer. Check in with your favorite economist and ask him or her about the genius of this “plan.” It basically involves borrowing 10 billion smackers–yes, 10 billion–and tossing it into the marketplace to subsidize higher gas prices. The Frist “plan,” of course, isn’t intended to do anything serious about rising gas prices. Its rationale is purely political: buying votes just before the midterm elections. There are plenty of bad ideas bouncing around Washington right now about gas prices. As the Progressive Policy Institute’s Jan Mazurek explained last week, all the frantic casting-about for a short term response to higher gas prices ignores, and in some cases cuts directly against, the long-term solutions that the Bush administration and Congress have been rejecting over the last five-and-a-half years, especially a serious effort to build fuel-efficient and cleaner cars. The world’s insatiable lust for oil isn’t going to go away any time soon, and the only sure way to keep petroleum prices from wrecking our economy and wrecking family budgets is to reduce our dependence on this perilous energy source. Throwing money at every gas pump in America is a worse than unserious proposal.

Yesterday’s rally on the National Mall organized by the Coalition for Darfur didn’t break any attendance records, but the remarkable diversity of the crowd did turn a lot of heads. As the Post’s front-page headline put it: “Divisions Cast Aside in Cry for Darfur:”

[The rally] brought together people from dozens of backgrounds and affiliations, many of whom strongly disagree politically and ideologically on many issues….Among the speakers were Rabbi David Saperstein; Al Sharpton; Joe Madison, a black liberal radio talk show hose who has been pushing the issue; Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention; rap and fashion mogul Russell Simmons; a former basketball star Manute Bol, who is himself Sudanese.

Perhaps most striking of all were two speakers: Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, the great living reminder of the Holocaust; and Paul Rusesabagina, the hero who inspired the movie Hotel Rwanda. Said Wiesel: “As I Jew, I’m here because when we needed people to helpu us, nobody came. Therefore, we’re here.” Added Rusesabagina: “As Rwanda has been abandoned, Darfur is also abandoned.”Let’s hope those holding national power within earshot of the Mall were listening.

I don’t have a lot to add to news reporting of the rapidly burgeoning “Hookergate” scandal involving resigned and soon-to-be-hoosegowed Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham, a couple of defense contractors, other as-yet-unnamed solons and perhaps major CIA spooks, and some Ladies of the Night. But how rich is it that the alleged scene of the sexual, as opposed to the financial, prostitution scandals involved in this story was the Watergate Hotel? D’you suppose this was some sort of deliberate staging to make it clear that GOPers can break laws exactly wherever they want to? Is this the functional equivalent of George Allen responding to allegations of Confedero-mania by doing an environmental photo op at the Nathan Bedford Forrest State Park in Tennessee? The gross nature of the Hookergate violations, if they are true, is pretty astonishing, involving as they do not only bribery and prostitution, but insider manipulations on behalf of a Limousine/”Escort” service run by a guy with a very long rap sheet who somehow landed a giant, $21-million-dollar no-bid contract with those highly competent anti-terrorists over at the Department of Homeland Defense. Every single day, the contemporary GOP makes the Nixon crowd look like pikers at the power-corrupts game.

We’ve probably all had the experience of reading or watching something broadcast to the world, and wondering: “How big an audience could that have?” I remember having this sensation distinctly when I saw the movie “The Rapture” back in the early nineties. This flick, featuring Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny, is roughly one-half very graphic sex and one-half Book of Revelation. I mean, how many sex-addicted premillenial fundamentalists could there be out there?I had a similar reaction today to a TPMCafe post by Max Sawicky. Ostensibly (and eventually) a negative reaction to Mike Tomasky’s “common good” cover essay in the American Prospect, Max seemed mainly agitated by a brief reference to the famous 1960s New Left group Students for a Democratic Society, which, as “an SDS alumnus,” he considered very off-base. But the fun thing is that Sawicky in passing took shots at several SDS factions.I immediately buzzed my colleague The Moose, who shares my hobby of Marxist esoterica, and got him to read the post. Then, like the Hardy Boys on a mystery adventure, we spent twenty minutes trying to figure out from Max’s angry words which SDS faction he might have belonged to. We decided it had to be either (a) RYM II (for Revolutionary Youth Movement), created when RYM I morphed into the Weathermen, or (b) the Draperites, a Trotskyist offshoot of the better-known Schactmanites (the Moose’s own college fraternity).As we stood in the hallway feeling smug about our sleuthing work, I finally said to the Moose: “You realize what a couple of dorks we are?” He agreed. But thanks to Max Sawicky for an inadvertant bit of Friday afternoon entertainment.

Ramesh Ponnuru and Cass Sunstein have conducted an interesting colloquoy over at The New Republic site about the political implications of a hypothetical overturning of Roe v. Wade in the near future. National Review‘s Ponnuru took on the increasingly popular view that returning abortion policy to the legislative branches of the federal and state governments will be a boon to pro-choice progressives and a blow to the GOP. His main argument was that in a post-Roe world, pro-lifers may well be smart enough (and, if Roe is only partially overturned, may be forced) to focus on popular abortion restrictions rather than the kind of frontal assault on abortion rights that could produce a pro-choice backlash. Sunstein responded that losing Roe would give the pro-choice movement the kind of energy and determination that Roe itself has supplied for abortion opponents over the last thirty-three years.Both arguments have merit, but the debate itself makes an important point that should give pause to those progressives who sunnily forecast happy days in a post-Roe America: nobody knows exactly what would happen, but the one thing we do know is that a reversal of Roe would not create some sort of one-time national referendum on basic abortion rights. As Ponnuru suggests (and as I argued last fall in a public discussion with two leading pro-choice-but-anti-Roe experts, Stuart Taylor and Jeffrey Rosen), barring some highly unlikely preemptive action by Congress, the issue would play out in fifty state legislatures over an extended period of time, on a messy and complex landscape. Abortion would become a perennial, 24-7 issue in many states, dominating political discourse in ways that are easy to envision but hard to exactly predict. Perhaps elevating abortion policy to an overrriding national obsession will ultimately create the kind of decisive pro-choice consensus that Sunstein and others so confidently expect. But I wouldn’t bet the farm (or, if I were a woman, my rights) on it, or look with equanimity at the very real possibility that a lame-duck Republican president will soon give the Supreme Court a fifth vote to overturn Roe.

It’s one of those things you are aware of generally, but it’s amazing to consider, via Sam Rosenfeld at TAPPED, the sheer number of major issues on which the Republicans who control the legislative and executive branches of the federal government are gridlocked: immigration reform, lobbying reform, the budget, and the supplemental appropriations bill funding the Iraq and Afghanistan engagements plus Katrina recovery. Beyond Sam’s list, Republicans are battling over how to deal with gas prices and oil company profits, with most opposed to any measures to claw back past subsidies to the energy industry, much less take more aggressive steps.For ol’ folks like me, “gridlock in Washington” is a theme that goes back a very long time. Lest we forget, the two parties shared control of the federal government for 27 out of the 34 years between 1968 and 2002. But the current disarrray within the all-powerful Republican Party in Washington–a party that took power with an extraordinary degree of partisan discipline and ideological unity–is really remarkable.

Y’know, one of the reasons I treasure my friend Josh Marshall is that he’s willing to trade a bit of his popularity now and then for the opportunity to indulge in a bit of pointy-headed esoterica. Sure, he spends most of his time down in the trenches raking the muck and correcting the record and agitpropping with the best of them. But today, in a post on James Baker’s selection by George W. Bush to lead a “fact-finding” tour of Iraq, Josh manages to work in references to both Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of “eternal recurrence.”Kinda reminds me of the scene from Fearing and Loathing on the Campaign Trail when a McGovern staffer in Nebraska quoted Virgil to Hunter Thompson, leading Thompson to wonder for a moment if Virgil was the advance man for Scotts Bluff.Best I can muster in tribute to Josh’s virtuosity is a reference in the title of this post to a relatively obscure Jefferson Airplane album.