It’s generally accepted that conservative activists were a lot more upset about the judicial nomination “compromise” in the Senate than were their Democratic counterparts. But if current developments in Ohio are any indication, the Right isn’t going to get over it without extracting some revenge. According to a (subscription only) article by Lauren Whittington in today’s Roll Call, conservative fury about Sen. Mike DeWine’s involvement in the compromise is endangering the campaign of his son, Pat DeWine, in a special election to fill the seat of new U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman. Until the Senate went non-nuclear, the younger DeWine had been the front-runner for the GOP nomination in this heavily Republican district, mainly thanks to a big fundraising edge. But now, according to a poll conducted for his leading rival, former Rep. Bob McEwen, the two are neck and neck, with DeWine’s favorable/unfavorable ratio at a queasy 40/36 as opposed to McEwen’s 51/5. According to Whittington, the most important reason for DeWine’s high negatives is his father’s role in the Senate compromise. Indeed, he’s even suffering from conservative anger at his father’s Ohio colleague, George Voinovich, for his opposition to the Bolton nomination. “The actions of the two Ohio Senators,” reports Whittington, “considered blasphemous by much of the GOP base, have dominated conservative radio outlets in recent weeks.” What’s most interesting about this story is that anger over the judicial compromise and the Bolton “betrayal” is apparently not limited to full-time activists; it’s extending deep into the conservative rank-and-file. And that shows the Right-Wing Noise Machine, so effective as an instrument on behalf of the GOP, can turn lethally self-destructive if the Republican coalition begins to fall apart.

It’s no big secret that the Bush/Rove polarization approach to politics and policy is predicated on the belief that since self-identified conservatives handily outnumber liberals, destroying any middle ground will force moderates to choose sides in a competition where Democrats have to win a huge, disproportionate number of them to stay even. But as a new Washington Post survey shows, Democrats may soon be well-positioned to do just that. According to the survey, while four of five Democrats think Bush is focusing on the wrong priorities, and nearly as many Republicans disagree, an astonishing 68 percent of self-identified political independents agree with Democrats on this question. And let’s be clear: it’s not that they worry about Bush’s particular approach to this or that issue, or don’t know enough about it–they think he’s focusing on the wrong issues entirely. Since the dominant conservative wing of the GOP is now deeply, and probably irreversibly, invested in Bush’s current agenda, it will be very difficult for him to change gears dramatically, even if he did have something relevant to offer on the economy, health care, or Iraq, which he doesn’t. Thus, it may well be that the powerful logic of polarization–a strategy that simultaneously allows you to rev up your base, reward constituencies, and force the opposition to counter-polarize–is turning perverse, as Bush struggles with a restive base, clamoring constituencies, alienated swing voters, and a united Democratic opposition that, for all its problems, seems more in touch with what Americans care about.

Ah yes, I’ve been waiting for this all year. Finally, as the Abramoff-Scanlon-Norquist-Reed Casino Shakedown Scandal gains momentum, some are beginning to wonder if a close acquaintence of all these gents named Karl Rove might have had some idea what was going on. Last week my colleague The Moose cited a Texas Observer article by Rove-watcher Lou Dubose reminding readers of lots of little favors the Bush White House performed for Abramoff and Norquist and their clients (both men, of course, especially Norquist, were early and avid backers of W. for president in 2000). And everybody knows Ralph Reed has been a big-time Bush-Rove favorite who helped create the Christian-K Street coalition which saved W.’s bacon against John McCain in 2000, and who was allowed to test-drive the GOP’s state-of-the-art Get Out the Vote strategy as Republican Party chairman in Georgia in 2002.But I come at this issue from a slightly different perspective. When it first became apparent that the Texas scam of Reed taking Abramoff-generated Indian Casino money to run anti-gambling initiatives had been replicated in Alabama, I thought: Hmmmm. Texas and Alabama. Alabama and Texas. Don’t we know somebody famous who made these two states his personal political stomping grounds in the 1990s? Some guy named Rove?Rove’s dominance of Texas politics in the 1990s is a well-known story. But as Josh Green explained in his Atlantic profile of Rove last year, Alabama was nearly as large a preoccupation for the Boy Genius. As part of his patented effort to bond the business community and cultural conservatives (and their money) to the GOP through abrasive judicial campaigns, Rove was deeply involved in an effort to take over the Alabama Supreme Court from 1994 to 1998 (indeed, his one loss was to a judicial candidate named Roy Moore, a defeat which, according to Green, deepened Rove’s respect for the political power of the Christian Right).Now, none of this proves in the least that Rove had any involvement in the Casino Shakedown, even though it sure seems Rovian in its three-cushion-shot dynamics of raising special-interest money to succor conservative constituency groups and damage Democrats. But the idea that anything as big as this scam, involving several Rove/Bush intimates and three very visible statewide public campaigns, went down in those two particular states without ol’ Karl having a clue about it is as incredible as the idea that Ralph Reed got millions of casino dollars without suspecting the source of the money. Somewhere, the bloodhounds are gathering and getting the scent of dirty dollars. It will be interesting to follow their trail.

In today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jim Galloway gives us a much clearer picture of the 1999-2000 Alabama gambling/anti-gambling scandal in which Ralph Reed, candidate for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, played a central role.Turns out the 1.1 million that flowed from the Choctaws of Mississippi to Grover Norquist to anti-gambling forces in Alabama to Reed’s consulting firm occurred during two different campaigns. The first, involving a $300,000 payment, went to the successful effort to defeat a state lottery initiative backed by then-Gov. Don Siegelman. The rest of the money, $800,000, passed through the Alabama Christian Coalition the following year, and was aimed (successfully) at stirring up public opposition to a bill that would have authorized video poker at four ailing dog racing tracks.More importantly, Galloway clearly explains the motives of the Choctaws in shelling out this much dough to influence gaming laws in Alabama. They weren’t so much worried about a lottery or video poker in Alabama. Their real concern is that legalized public gaming in Alabama would open the way for a ‘Bama tribe, the Creeks, to upgrade an existing facility with bingo-based games into a full-scale casino, in direct competition with the Choctaws across the border.Today’s piece also reveals that Reed has a new story about the source of the money: it came from a special account set up by the Choctaws from their non-gambling revenues. This will apparently become his fallback defense if nobody believes his highly dubious argument that he had no idea his ol’ buddy Jack Abramoff was involving with Indian gaming.I doubt this defense will cut much more ice than the original Reed profession of innocence. The issue is not exactly which Choctaw bank account financed the anti-gambling effort in Alabama; it’s the motive that matters. And there’s not much doubt one tribe, on the advice of Abramoff and utlilizing his close friends Norquist and Reed, was spending freely to avoid competition from another.So far Reed seems to have controlled the immediate political damage to his campaign of his ever-more-intimate implication in the Abramoff scandal. But within the next week or two, the Alabama Christian Coalition is expected to release the results of an internal investigation of the mess. And at a time when Alabama Democrats are pushing a proposal to demand that groups like the Christian Coalition who are involved directly in campaigns disclose their funding sources, the organization might just decide to drop a heavy dime on Reed. Stay tuned.

There’s an interesting Babington piece in today’s Washington Post that says things are looking up for the two most vulnerable Democratic Senators going into the 2006 elections: the Nelson boys, Ben of Nebraska and Bill of Florida. In Ben’s case, there are signs the compromise on judicial nominations, whatever it means to the federal bench or the future of the filibuster, has been very popular in Nebraska. And in Bill’s case, Florida Republicans continue to struggle to recruit a strong candidate to challenge him, with Rep. Katherine Harris, a cult figure among GOP activists but a probable loser in a general election, looking more and more like the front-runner for the Republican nomination. Holding the Nebraska and Florida seats is absolutely critical to the prospect of serious Democratic Senate gains in 2006. That’s why the growing signs of a full Nelson sweep are sweet for Democrats who would prefer to focus on knocking off vulnerable Republicans like Santorum, Burns and Chafee.

Whether or not you think al Qaeda is still capable of launching another major terrorist strike on the United States, it’s clear the loose network inspired by Osama bin Laden has significantly morphed since 9/11. Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as al Qaeda’s primary training ground and deployment center, and increasingly, its leading figure is Abu Mus’ab al Zarquawi rather than Osama himself. In a fascinating new article in The New Republic, Joseph Braude suggests al Qaeda is beginning to undergo a second transformation based on its emergence in an urban rather than rural setting. He focuses on a little-known but increasingly savage al Qaeda-based Islamist resistence to Quaddafi’s regime in Libya. And he goes on to suggest that the same conditions–a weakening militarist regime with a poor grip on tribal and religious loyalities, and a growing urban lumpenproletariat fed by military downsizing–exist in abundance in Syria.My first reaction to this hypothesis was to think: “Al Qaeda’s new targets are Quaddafi and Assad? Excellent!” But as Braude points out, an urban-based Islamist resistance linked to global terrorism could easily spread to less unsavory Muslim regimes in the greater Middle East. Moreover, al Qaeda’s modus operandi in both Afghanistan and Iraq–importing, training, using and then re-exporting “foreign fighters” to wreak havoc elsewhere–seems to be happening in Libya right now. At any rate, check out Braude’s piece, and see if it makes you more or less concerned about the future shape of the terrorist network that the Bush administration is beginning to think of as a spent force.

The intellectual and moral incoherence of George W. Bush’s position opposing federally funded embryonic stem cell research is a topic that many have written about, including Matt Yglesias, the DLC, and myself. But in a new posting on the New Republic site, Michelle Cottle adds another count to the indictment: the insight that the in vitro fertilization process that Bush and his fellow stem cell research demonizers stubbornly refuse to address is an element of the downside of the “culture of life” they claim to be defending. People who desparately want to be parents are the ones generating all those excess embryos without which we wouldn’t be having this debate. Check it out.

I have often written about the twisted religious roots, and the disturbing political implications, of the belief of many leaders of the Cultural Right that the United States of America is a fundamentally evil society thanks to the nefarious (and increasingly imaginary) power of godless, baby-killing, marriage-hating, Christian-persecuting liberals.Well, it looks like these folks may have themselves a candidate for president: Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, said to be eying a 2008 run.I knew Brownback was a pretty strange dude, and popular on the Cultural Right, and did notice his comments during the stem cell research debate about the “killing of young human beings.” But not until I stumbled on George Will’s puff piece on the Kansan in a recent Newsweek did I know how fully he has internalized the America-as-Nazi-Germany logic of the most serious and extreme anti-abortion advocates.According to Will, Brownback believes the effort to extinguish abortion rights will succeed because:

[T]he youngest voters, ages 18 to 25, are the most pro-life cohort. They were born, he says, when abortion rates were highest, so “many of them feel they’re the survivors of a holocaust: one in four of their compatriots are not here.”

I don’t know where Brownback is getting his polling data on young voters. But aside from that, this little quote indicates exactly what the man thinks of the rest of us who have somehow managed to get through the years since Roe v. Wade without acknowledging we are NARAL’s Willing Executioners.(A footnote to Brownback’s use of Holocaust imagery is that his 1996 Senate campaign was accused, though never with any concrete evidence, of complicity in a whispering campaign about the Judaism of his Democratic opponent Jill Docking).The other thing I quickly learned about Brownback is that he’s a recent convert from Methodism (albeit the George W. Bush-style conservative wing of that denomination) to Catholicism–and not just any old Catholicism, but Opus Dei Catholicism. Yes, like columnist Robert Novak, he entered the Church via the hyper-conservative ministry of D.C.-based Opus Dei priest John McCloskey, a man who believes “liberals” have no place in Christianity, much less Catholicism.So it looks like Brownback is the perfect vehicle for those who believe Christians have a religious obligation to be politically conservative and activist Republicans.One thing is for certain sure: if Brownback emerges as the powerful candidate of the Cultural Right in 2008, two men in particular are going to become even bigger celebrities than they are now: Dan Brown, author of the Opus-Dei-centered novel The Da Vinci Code, and Thomas Frank, the preeminent analyst of the peculiarly virulent strain of Kansas Cultural Conservatism that lifted Brownback to the U.S. Senate.

There’s something sad and quaint about the massive coverage the Washington Post is giving to the revelation that an FBI official named Mark Felt was the legendary Deep Throat: the primary source for the Post’s own Woodward-Bernstein revelations about the Watergate scandal. It’s kind of sad because WaPo is having to acknowledge being scooped on this story by Vanity Fair, which must really hurt. The Post’s coverage of Watergate, after all, is what basically established it as a national Newspaper of Record right up there with the New York Times.The coverage is quaint because it serves as a reminder of a very different era of political journalism, and of journalism generally. Unless you are old enough to really remember Watergate, you might have trouble understanding the extent to which this one story dominated newspapers and network news for months and months on end. Nowdays the only story that can approach this kind of media obsession is a celebrity trial (or, following the American Idol template, a trial of “ordinary” people who play culturally stereotypical roles). The only political story out there now with the potential to morph into something vaguely approaching Watergate is the Casino Shakedown Scandal, which for sheer drama, irony, and symbolic resonance is actually a lot more interesting than Watergate itself. And again, it’s the Post (with recent assists from the Boston Globe and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) that’s putting the story together, apparently without any assistance from a Deep Throat. Maybe lightning will strike twice for the Post, but more likely, the Deep Throat revelation is the last news from the last truly dominant political story of our times.

This is in many respects the most ironic of American holidays (with the possible exception of the orgy of consumption commemorating the birth of that preeminent anti-consumer, Jesus Christ). Established to honor those fallen in war, Memorial Day has become a signpost to the advent of the langorous season of summer, marked by such un-martial and non-sacrificial past-times as beachcombing and barbecuing. Certainly some have argued that these activities are among the blessings of liberty and prosperity for which American soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines have sacrificed. But that’s too easy a rationalization, much like George W. Bush’s injunction after 9/11 that Americans could best fight terrorism by shopping and traveling.Many of us have reason on Memorial Day to remember family members of the distant or recent past who have died in combat. And all of us should spend at least a few moments thinking about the countless, often nameless young men (and increasingly, young women) who were sent into the shadow of the Valley of Death on our behalf, and never came back.But we should also think about the responsibility we have as citizens to make such journeys uneccesary: to create a world where young people don’t have to go into strange lands and enter the ultimate lottery of random injury and death, usually at the hands of enemies they hardly see.Those of us who are indifferent to politics and civic life should reflect on the simple fact that virtually every war reflects the failure of politics and civic life; the breakdown of peaceful arrangements painfully developed over time; and the incompetence or ideological excesses of politicians on one or both sides of most wars.I won’t go into a long history of modern wars, but think about this:The deadliest war in American history was the Civil War, which was touched off not by impersonal forces or irrepressible socio-cultural conflicts, but by the self-absorbed idiocy of a few hotheads in South Carolina, drunk on the prose of Sir Walter Scott, who dragged their region and ultimately their country into a battle over the doomed and evil institution of slavery.And the deadliest World War (at least for combatants), World War I, was a maddeningly pointless war caused by the incompetence of politicians and diplomats who developed a pattern of alliances that gave a handful of Serbian nationalists and Austrian militarists the ability to pull five continents into the trenches.The great military strategist Clausewitz once memorably defined war as “politics continued by other means.” A better definition would be that war is the failure of politics continued by other means.So as we honor those who have died for America in good and ambiguous wars, for clear and hazy purposes, let’s remember this: we owe each and every one of our fallen heroes, and those we place in harm’s way today, a politics aimed at making these sacrifices less numerous, and at reducing the sway of homicidal folly in the politics of every country on earth. That may well mean a more active and even militant U.S. foreign policy. But it definitely means we must, in honor of our heroes past, present and future, remain vigilant against the folly that great superpowers so often embrace.