I’d guess most of my regular readers also habitually visit Josh Marshall’s TalkingPointsMemo site. If so, you probably know Josh is about to launch a whole new site, TPMCafe.com, that will probably rival DailyKos as an all-purpose, multi-faceted portal for progressive discussion, with a different tone: less agitprop and abusive language, and more diversity of views. Both sites will have their loyalists, and many readers will regularly visit both, but the competition will be healthy.A centerpiece of Josh’s new site will be a group blog called The Coffee House, which will be frequented by yours truly, by my colleague The Moose, and by a truly distinguished company that ranges from polymath Michael Lind to deep blogger Mark Schmitt to policy entrepreneur Karen Kornbluh to bestseller socio-religious author Annie Lamott. The Coffee House goes live on Tuesday, May 31, and while I intend to be an active participant, NewDonkey will continue to offer its distinctive take without interruption or distraction. I hope you will visit the new site, but stick with me here as well.

Well, it’s Memorial Day weekend, and having already departed from political commentary by touting the stylistic excesses of one piece in the current online edition of The New Republic, I might as well mention another: a stunning review of Lucinda Williams’ musical development by David Jaffe. If you are interested in Williams’ music, the southern musical idiom, or simply the painful irrationality of human relationships, Jaffe’s piece is a must-read. His basic hypothesis is that Lucinda’s power as an artist has increased as she has aged and has begun to replace musical virtuosity with the savage intensity of her rage against the bad men she incorrigibly loves. And his writing is as raw and disturbing as Williams’ music has become during her powerfully libidinous mid-life crisis.

Most writers have a favorite stylistic vice, a practice that stubbornly violates the canons for reasons of emphasis, clarity, or just plain self-indulgence. Mine is the long and sometimes awkward clinching sentence that seals an argument with a strong and snarky punch. Having made it through college without once taking a composition or journalism course, I toss these off with the primitive innocence of the self-educated.I mention this to introduce an outstanding example of my favorite stylistic vice, penned by freelance writer Christopher Hayes, that appears in an unfriendly review of a right-wing book (Steven Malanga’s The New New Left) in The New Republic. After scathingly analyzing the author’s dismissal of latter-day organizers for the working poor as “special interests,” Hayes offers up this line, which is the verbal equivalent of a boxer delivering a long overhand hook for the knockout:

Malanga thinks that janitors who clean buildings for eight dollars an hour are a special interest, while I tend to think that middle-age white guys whose cushy sinecures at conservative think tanks nicely insulate them from the vicissitudes of the same free market they so fetishize are a special interest.

Elegant? No. Faithful to Strunk and White? Hell, no. Would the New York Times have published this sentence? Of course not. But I like its style.

This morning, when I was still trying to get the fog out of my brain, I started getting all these congratulatory emails, enclosing a crumb from today’s edition of the Washington Insider’s Daily Bread, ABC’s The Note:

RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman travels to Virginia to endorse Ed Kilgore’s gubernatorial bid. Mehlman then participates in an ed board meeting with African American reporters. DNC Chairman Howard Dean is in New York City.

Before asking the DLC press office to email Mark Halperin and demand a correction of “Ed” to “Jerry” (it was changed on the web, and tomorrow’s Note will include a formal correction), I did indulge in a brief fantasy. Wouldn’t a NewDonkey/Tim Kaine gubernatorial contest be a real breath of fresh air for the Ol’ Commonwealth of Virginia? We could have a vibrant debate over my proposal to put out an All Points Bulletin to the State Police to intercept Grover Norquist if he crosses the Potomac to engage in tax-cut demagogeury. Our platforms would also differ considerably, with Kaine laying out a detailed policy blueprint covering property taxes, education, and the budget, while I stuck to my simple message of “Mark Warner–What He Said.”But in the end, I did the responsible thing and issued a Sherman Statement, which native Georgians rarely do.Still, it’s got to trouble the Attorney General of Virginia that among the omniscient political junkies of The Note, he didn’t win a word association contest when the name “Kilgore” popped up.So I will repeat my earlier challenge to Jerry Kilgore: to avoid further confusion, one of us should change his name. Since I had it first, it’s only fair that you do the right thing and pick a new monniker.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

There, above the fold, in this morning’s Washington Post was a photo of George W. Bush performing that most hackneyed ritual of the politician: kissing a baby. The baby in question, it transpires, is what certain life-begins-at-conception advocates call a “Snowflake”–a child that develops from an embryo “rescued” through adoption from a fertility clinic.This photo-op was designed to dramatize Bush’s threat to veto a stem cell research bill passed yesterday by the U.S. House, and that is certain to pass the Senate as well. But what it really does is to graphically illustrate the intellectual incoherence, moral relativism, and political opportunism of his position.Matt Yglesias has a good summary of the manifold absurdities of Bush making this the first veto of his presidency. But the worst of these absurdities is at the very center of his allegedly “principled” stand against federal funding of research on new embryonic stem cells obtained from embyros scheduled for destruction at IV fertility clinics.He’s not for banning federal funds for research on existing stem cells, mind you–even though the “moral complicity” arguments applies as much to old as new stem cell lines. He’s not for banning research so long as it’s funded by somebody other than Uncle Sam. And most importantly, he’s not for banning the deliberate creation and destruction of embryos at fertility clinics, even though that is where all of the “destruction of human life” goes on.But those aren’t all the “anti-life” practices George W. Bush doesn’t seem to be against. The only possible rationale for his position on federal funding of stem cell research is that he shares the hard-line Right to Life movement belief that human beings deserving the full protection of the law exist from the moment of conception. So why isn’t he calling for ban on IUDs or “morning after” pills? (To be sure, his FDA is trying to make it harder for women to get morning-after pills, but if there’s been any talk of a ban, I haven’t heard it). All these practics, in addition to the creation of “excess” embryos at fertility clinics, and surgical abortion procedures, are part of what the moment-of-conception people regard as a vast slaughter of innocent human beings far worse than anything that has happened in recorded history.So George W. Bush’s “deeply principled” response to all this alleged homicide is to take it out on scientists who are at least trying to get some positive, pro-life healing from just one of these practices?That’s why this is perhaps the worst of many cynical panders that Bush continues to make to the Cultural Right. He’s with them, he says, so long as it does not discomfit the vast majority of Americans who may be troubled by the number and nature of some abortions, but who think, if they think about it at all, that the life-begins-at-conception positionis metaphysical mumbo-jumbo that defies common sense.So on the stem cell issue, Bush does not deserve praise for being courageous or principled. He’s just another baby-kissing pol who thinks he’s found a convenient way to appeal to one group without completely alienating others.

In the wake of the deal that (at least temporarily) derailed the Nuclear Option on judicial nominations, the most striking thing about the reaction has been the general satisfaction of Democrats and even much of the blogospheric Left, and the glumness of Republicans, along with angry hysterics among the leadership of the Cultural Right. Sure, there’s a heap o’ spinning going on all around, but the fury of guys like Dobson and Bauer appears genuine, and there is a general agreement across the ideological spectrum that the whole incident represents a big body blow to the presidential aspirations of Bill Frist, and perhaps to his future viability as Boss of the Senate.But in terms of unhappiness on the Right, the question remains: whose idea, exactly, was it to make this issue so central to the GOP/Religious Conservative alliance? My general assumption has been that the Nuclear Strategy was forced onto the White House and the Republican Party by a Cultural Right that’s finally demanding results from their partners on an agenda–overturning abortion rights, reversing gay rights advances, and stopping all this church-state separation crap–that depends on reshaping the Supreme Court. But in an interesting essay today, the estimable Mark Schmitt, citing an exceptionally articulate post on the conservative site redstate.org, suggests that maybe it’s the other way around: the Nuclear Option is just another cynical effort by the GOP to get the Cultural Right fully invested in their D.C. power games.So, with apologies to Aretha Franklin, the question is: Who’s zoomin’ who here?Not being privy to the internal councils of the Republican Party or the Cultural Right, I talked to a couple of smart conservatives of my acquaintance, and came away convinced that there is truth to both perspectives. The general strategy of focusing obsessively on judges was forced on the GOP by the Cultural Right. But the specific tactic of the Nuclear Option was developed by legal beagles on the Hill and in the cells of the Federalist Society as a way to placate the Cultural Right without entering into an immediate and explosive national debate on the shape of the Supreme Court, and issues like abortion, gay rights, and church-state separation.Here’s pretty much, I gather, how the thing was put together. Cultural Right leaders, growing angrier for years about the excuses being made by D.C. Republicans for failure to make progress on their agenda, finally started getting fed up after the 2004 elections created the great judicial opportunity of a second Bush term, and the largest GOP majority in the Senate since 1930. Tired of hearing that Republicans couldn’t do anything about the godless judges without 60 votes, they basically said, “Figure something out.” And that’s where the Nuclear Option came in.As fate would have it, the Schiavo fiasco occurred during the run-up to the judicial confrontation, vastly increasing the investment of the Cultural Right in this issue. And then Bill Frist decided this was his ticket to the 2008 Iowa Caucuses.So everybody rolled the dice and then crapped out. And the irony of the incident (unless, as is entirely possible, the Nuclear Option is revived and deployed later this year) is that while this may not have begun as a cynical beltway scam designed to frustrate the foot soldiers of the Right, that may be how it’s being interpreted by said foot soldiers at the moment.After all, some of them must be aware that the segment of Senate Republicans who are relieved about The Deal is not confined to the seven GOPers who formally signed it (dubbed “the Satanic Seven” by some angry talk show callers today, according to water-cooler intel from my semi-omniscient colleague The Moose). Arlen Specter and Trent Lott didn’t sign The Deal, and everybody thinks they were involved in cooking it up. How confident can the Cultural Right be that when push comes to shove in a future Supreme Court nomination fight, the White House can be trusted to send up a sure vote to overturn Roe. v. Wade, or that these slippery Senate Republicans will get that sure vote confirmed, through either conventional or nuclear weapons?In other words, this incident is going to vastly raise the stakes, and the penalty for failure, in future judicial fights, with the whole elaborately constructed, and politically and spiritually hazardous, relationship of the Cultural Right and the GOP hanging in the balance.

In my last post, a long meditation on the disturbing political implications of the religious right’s “prophetic stance” against American society, I quoted extensively from a brilliant review by Alan Wolfe in The New Republic, but in pursuing my own theories, didn’t completely do justice to Wolfe’s piece. But after reading the profile of Rick Santorum in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, one of Wolfe’s observations struck me as especially trenchant: “In these days of conservative ecumenicalism…all that matters on the right is whether your beliefs are conservative and not what your beliefs actually are.” That’s certainly true of Santorum. According to Michael Sokolove’s profile, Santorum in 2002, alluding to Toni Morrison’s famous description of Bill Clinton as “the first African-American president,” called George W. Bush “the first Catholic president.” Sokolove asked Santorum the obvious question: what about America’s actual Catholic president, John F. Kennedy? And Santorum basically said Kennedy wasn’t much of a Catholic at all, because, like many Catholic Democrats today, he “sort of adopted that same line, that they are going to hold that part of themselves off to the side, which has led to people who want to completely separate moral views from public life, which is a dangerous thing.”Bush, on the other hand, is a better Catholic than JFK, suggests Santorum, because his views are consistent with “Catholic social teaching.” So there you have it: two thousand years of scripture, Church Fathers, creeds, counsels, scholastic philosophy, monastic traditions, saints and martyrs, liturgy, and magisterium, are hardly worth mentioning in comparison with the Right’s contemporary obsession with abortion and gay rights. Despite the inelegance of his words, Santorum serves as an eloquent example of Wolfe’s point about the debasement of conservative Christianity by its essentially secular dedication to partisan politics.

Surely there is no subject on which more words are currently being said with less real meaning than that of the intersection of religion and politics in America. And that is why you ought to read a recent New Republic piece by the indispensable Alan Wolfe, who cuts through the fog like a search-light.In the format of a review of Jim Wallis’ much-discussed God’s Politics, along with a collection of case studies of religio-political cooperative ventures, Wolfe pens a long, eloquent and often angry essay about the growing willingness of evangelical Christian leaders to reject the liberal principles of tolerance, pluralism and church-state separation that made the growth of their own tradition possible in the first place.In other words, suggets Wolfe, they’ve traded their birthright for a mess of pottage:

They have rendered under Caesar what is Caesar’s: themselves, as it happens, and all the political power that comes with them. They dwell not in the house of the Lord, but in the House of Representatives. Their prayer breakfasts are strategy sessions, their churches are auxiliaries of political parties, their pastors are political bosses. Their God must be great: look at the clout of his constituency.

In plunging into illiberal politics, says Wolfe, conservative evangelicals have willfully forgotten that America’s liberal traditions, especially those expressed in the First Amendment towards which they so often express contempt, have been essential to their ability to grow and develop in the past, and may become so again in the future. To the extent their alliance with the Republican Party is successfully tempting the GOP to abandon its own vestiges of respect for the liberal tradition, both sides of the bargain are being corrupted. Or as Wolfe puts it, “The politicization of the religious right has done great damage to both religion and politics.”Not surprisingly, this approach leads Wolfe to take a rather dim view of Jim Wallis’ case for mobilizing an Evangelical Left. While acknowledging that Wallis has a vastly more biblically grounded case for his politics than James Dobson does for his, Wolfe worries that Wallis wants to play the same game with the same result.

In adopting much of the language of Christian evangelicalism, Wallis brings along its problems. Its participation in politics has led the religious right to a position in which its politics have driven out its faith. God’s Politics is proposing the same degradation for the left. For the left would certainly suffer a similar fate if it adopted the prophetic stance that Wallis urges.

I’m not sure that’s entirely fair to Wallis, but Wolfe uses a phrase here that I think is very important in understanding the psychology of the religious right: adopting a prophetic stance.As you may know, in the Judeo-Christian tradition one who takes a prophetic stance believes the moral and spiritual conditions of a society have become so depraved that the faithful are obliged to step outside the normal bounds of civility and respect for authority and call down the righteous wrath of God. Taking a prophetic stance is by definition exceptional; occasionally essential, but always spiritually as well as politically dangerous. And that is why true prophets are so greatly honored, and false prophets are so feared and despised.My guess is that the leaders of the religious right know how perilous their adoption of the prophetic stance truly is. And this knowledge explains, better than any other factor, the remarkable tone of paranoia, self-pity, and even hysteria that has come to characterize their political utterances.If, say, the existence of legalized abortion is attributable to legitimate and honorable differences of opinion about the intersection of law, ethics, and reproductive biology–and even of religious tradition–then legalized abortion could not of itself justify a radical decision to make political activity a religious obligation–indeed, the most important religious obligation. That is why religious right leaders have to say to themselves and their followers that pro-choice Americans are consciously promoting infanticide and euthanasia.If advocacy of equal rights for gays and lesbians is simply an expression of tolerance and inclusion, and of a sense that it is the logical next step in the long American drive towards fully equal citizenship for all people, then the efforts of a few jurisdictions to extend those rights into domestic arrangements, and the reluctance of “liberals” to stop them, are hardly grounds for creating a church-based national movement to write prohibitions of gay marriages or civil unions into the U.S. and state constitutions. (Indeed, if the prevailing scientific view that homosexuality is primarily a biological orientation is true, then it’s the opponents of gay rights who are defying both natural law and divine providence). That is why religious right leaders have to attribute to their opponents a quasi-totalitarian determination to destroy the institution of marriage itself, as part of a broader agenda of complete moral relativism.And if court decisions restricting the use of public places or funds for religious purposes are a plausible, if sometimes excessive, interpretation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, then they don’t justify a radical assault on the judiciary by either religious leaders or by the Republican Party. After all, are a few town hall creches, a few government grants, and a few watered-down public school prayers, really worth the kind of savage warfare over judicial nominations we are witnessing in Washington right now? No, and that is why religious right leaders keep making the claim that today’s judiciary is engaged in a systematic battle to destroy religious liberty, and to deny people of faith the opportunity to serve as judges.More generally–and this is the most important point I want to make–the prophetic stance is rapidly leading the religious right and its political allies into a contempt for their own country and their fellow citizens, because, after all, the prophetic stance is implictly reserved as an extraordinary response to fundamentally wicked societies. It’s no wonder James Dobson keeps comparing himself to the leaders of the German Confessing Church of the Nazi era, or that religious right politician Rick Santorum can’t stop himself from comparing his Democratic opponents on judicial nominations to Hitler.Religious right leaders, who love to proclaim their patriotism, cannot, of course, accept the logic that is inexorably driving them towards hatred of America. And that’s the source of their constant and increasingly absurd search for evidence that “liberals” are actually, covertly, and illegitimately in charge of the country despite Republican control of the federal government, the strong position of institutions like the business community and the military that conservatives love, and indeed, the robust growth of the conservative evangelical movement itself.If I’m right about all this, or even half-right, there’s not much surprising about the total-war rhetoric and tactics the religious right has embraced, infecting the conservative movement, the Republican Party, and, increasingly, American political discourse generally with a bitter and unforgiving tone. After all, these leaders have to believe that “liberals” and Democrats and anyone who stands in their way are not only trying to kill babies and old people, destroy marriage, abolish all moral codes, and persecute Christians, but are also bent on subverting democracy. Otherwise, those leaders who have gambled their faith on a prophetic stance would clearly stand exposed to the terrible accusation, made so powerfully by Alan Wolfe, that they have traded the Kingdom of God for political power, and are just as secular-minded as the most convinced atheist.

Need a break from the “nuclear option” debate? So do I, so please allow me talk about, and recommend, a truly remarkable book I just finished reading.When Steve Oney’s massive book, And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank, was published in the fall of 2003, I made a mental note to read it but didn’t get around to buying it until a couple of weeks ago, when I stumbled on a paperback copy in New Orleans.For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Phagan/Frank saga, these are the basic facts: in Atlanta in 1913, on Confederate Memorial Day, a 13-year-old pencil factory worker named Mary Phagan was gruesomely murdered at her place of work. Within days, the factory’s manager, an Ivy League-educated member of Atlanta’s hyper-respectable German Jewish community, Leo Frank, was arrested for the murder, and ultimately convicted and sentenced to death by hanging after a trial that revolved around the testimony of an alleged accomplice-after-the-fact, an African-American janitor at the factory named Jim Conley.During a long and unsuccessful series of legal appeals of the conviction, Frank’s case became a national and international sensation, and a source of bitter sectional and religious animosity. At the last possible moment, Frank’s execution was commuted to life imprisonment by an outgoing Governor with close links to the defense attorneys, sparking widespread public outrage in Georgia. And finally, in August of 1915, a group of men from the Phagan family’s ancestral home in Marietta, Georgia, kidnapped Frank from a state prison farm, drove him halfway across to state to a spot near Marietta, and lynched him–an event that was met with wild celebrations in many parts of Georgia and much anger up north, especially among New York’s rapidly growing Jewish immigrant population.This story is generally remembered as an American Dreyfus Case, with Frank being framed and then lynched primarily because he was Jewish. But as Oney explains, in his painstakingly detailed but lively account, there was a whole lot more going on than simple antisemitism. Among the many dimensions of the case he illuminates, there were these:(1) Journalistic competition. As it happens, the Phagan murder coincided with an intense newspaper circulation battle in Atlanta, sparked by the appearance of a Hearst paper called The Georgian, which initially viewed the case through the prism of Hearst’s nationwide battle against child labor abuses. With The Georgian and its Atlanta rivals, The Journal and The Constitution, all hyping the case with constant extras, the police and legal authorities were under enormous pressure to make a quick arrest even before the evidence had been sifted. Much later in the saga, journalism again became a big factor, with many northern papers, most especially The New York Times, leading a crusade for Frank’s release and/or commutation.(2) Primitive criminal investigation procedures. Oney’s account provides a shocking demonstration of the shortcomings of criminal investigations and forensic science in the early twentieth century. Most of the physical evidence in the Phagan case was ignored or mishandled. Some of Georgia’s best physicians could never conclusively determine whether the child was raped or violated in any way, though the prosecution’s case completely relied on a sexual motive for the murder. Frank’s (and for that matter, Conley’s) guilt or innocence basically came down to conflicting circumstantial evidence and the credibility of the two principals’ eyewitness testimony. Ultimately one piece of physical evidence–“murder notes” admittedly written by Conley in the guise of an accusation by the victim, but which Conley claimed were composed by Frank–became the centerpiece of the case for Frank’s commutation, and years later, for his posthumous vindication–but was not central in the trial or the appeals.(3) Race. Oney also untangles the racial aspects of Frank’s conviction and lynching. At the time, a big part of the sensation surrounding the Frank trial was that a respectable white man was being convicted primarily on the testimony of a disreputable black man–in Jim Crow Georgia. And there’s no question Frank’s attorneys, and some of his journalistic supporters, played the race card aggressively, describing the murder as a classic “Negro crime.” But racist assumptions about Jim Conley also hurt Frank, because jurors believed Conley incapable of conceiving, executing, and covering up the murder, or of composing the “murder notes.” The central figure in Oney’s account of the racial implications of the case, and the book’s only real hero (other than Governor Slaton) is Conley’s attorney, William Smith. Smith signed onto the prosecution team out of an unusual but lifelong concern for racial equality for African-Americans, and a fear that Conley would become a convenient scapegoat for the murder. But after brilliantly defending Conley by prosecuting Frank, Smith realized that his client was a very intelligent and relatively well-educated man who was entirely capable of hiding his crime and framing Frank. This soon led Smith to re-investigate the case on his own and passionately advocate Frank’s innocence.(4) Sex. Although the physical evidence of a sexual motive for Phagan’s murder was botched, Oney leaves no doubt that everyone involved assumed such a motive was central. And despite widespread stereotypes about the sexual interest of African-American men towards white women, Conley was able to deflect this suspicion elsewhere by explicitly suggesting that Frank’s sexual proclivities were “unnatural,”–i.e., not revolving around “normal” intercourse. That was a “vice” that was associated not with African-Americans but with “cosmopolitan” sybarites from alien places like France or New York, and thus, with men with backgrounds like Leo Frank’s. The belief that Frank was a sexual predator with outsized and perhaps perverse appetites was reinforced by questionable but not completely refuted testimony at his trial by a number of Phagan’s “factory girl” peers that he sometimes took occasion to enter their dressing room without notice or otherwise press his attentions on them. In a long and interesting interview with WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi during his book tour, Oney acknowleges that although he is fairly certain Frank was innocent of the murder, the factory manager may have been guilty of what we now think of as sexual harrassment.(5) Class. Long before race became a factor in the Phagan/Frank case, economic class loomed very large. Phagan was a living example of the extent to which Atlanta’s entry into the Industrial Age depended on cheap child labor; she began working full-time at the age of ten. And there’s little question that the big villain in inciting Frank’s lynching, the aging paragon of radical southern populism, Tom Watson, first treated the Frank trial as a parable of rich capitalists seeking to escape responsibility for the physical, as well as economic, exploitation of poor southerners forced off the land into factories. Eventually, Watson descended into blatant antisemitism, but his constant attacks on the rich northern Jews fighting for Frank’s freedom generally emphasized the adjectives rather than the noun. And Watson’s fury was really directed at Frank’s defenders in Georgia–men like Frank’s temporary savior, Governor Slaton–who in his view represented a long and dishonorable tradition of “scalawag” surrender to the Northern Capitalism that defeated the Confederacy and dominated Reconstruction.(6) The Conspiracy of Silence. The most original contribution of Oney’s book is his excavation of the plot to lynch Leo Frank, and his explanation of why, after all the furor, the case vanished from the public eye for many decades. As he makes plain, the lynching was the product of a well-coordinated plan involving many of the leadin
g citizens of Marietta, encompassing a takeover of the state administration of prisons, and utilizing a series of threats and bribes to secure the passive complicity of Frank’s custodians. And the plan included the subversion of the only forum in which the lynchers could have been brought to justice: a Marietta grand jury on which seven members of the lynch mob served, guided by a prosecutor who helped design the whole scheme.Oney documents the rich political rewards earned by many of those who worked to hang Leo Frank, from the chief prosecutor, Hugh Dorsey, who was soon elected governor, to Tom Watson, who ended his erratic career as a U.S. Senator, to suspected lynch mob participant John Wood, who survived into the 1950s to serve as chairman of the notorious U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities. But he also explains why Frank’s defenders fell silent. The New York Times stopped publishng articles and editorials on the case when publisher Adolph Ochs became convinced his earlier crusade had contributed to the climate that produced the lynching. And in Georgia, virtually everybody–the lynch mob’s supporters and abbetters, the chastened Atlanta newspapers, and a deeply traumatized Jewish community–agreed to put the case behind them.The Phagan/Frank case would probably have become a mere historical footnote, and an occasional source of grievance for Jewish Americans, except for the fact that in the early 1980s a previously unknown witness appeared: another African-American employee of the pencil factory named Alonzo Hall. In a near-deathbed disclosure, Hall confessed that on the day of the murder he had seen Jim Conley carrying Mary Phagan’s body towards the factory basement, where it was later found.The Hall confession led to a resurgence of interest in the case, and ultimately, to an unsuccessful 1983 effort to get the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to posthumously pardon Frank. While the Board ultimately decided that the Hall revelation was insufficient to clearly establish Frank’s innocence (in part because much of the original evidence had been lost or destroyed), it did later issue an official apology for the State’s failure to protect Frank from lynching. But Hall’s testimony had another effect: it convinced a Georgia-bred Southern California journalist named Steve Oney to get obsessively interested in the case.Now I admit my fascination with this book is partly parochial. I spent nearly four decades living near or in Atlanta, where most of “my people” still live. My mother recently told me my grandmother used to sing “The Ballad of Mary Phagan”–a protest song against the commutation of Leo Frank’s death sentence, and later, the anthem of pro-lynching advocates across Georgia. I graduated from high school in Cobb County, not far from the lynching site, at a time when the community was just beginning to abandon the rural pineywoods heritage Oney vividly describes. My in-laws hail from the mountain town of Dahlonega, where William Smith began and ended his quixotic lifelong search for justice, equality and honor. And I have long been very interested in the career of Tom Watson as a cautionary tale about the dangers of assuming that economic populism is inherently a progressive impulse.But even if this saga did not call up so many familiar ghosts, I’d be tempted to write about this book and the 17-year struggle of its author to research and write it. It’s the kind of tribute that we unreflective and impulsive bloggers ought to occasionally pay to those who say not a word until they’ve got the story right.

I can’t even imagine how dreadful it must be to work in the U.S. Senate right now. Just watching the runup to the “nuclear option” from a safe distance is dispiriting enough. I thought the Schiavo thing was the most bizarre, contrived and self-destructive congressional fiasco I’d ever seen, but this is worse, and Lord only knows how long it will last, since the maestro of this production, Bill Frist, dare not go for a vote until he’s sure he’s got 50. Frist does, of course, have to worry that every hour of fresh debate will tempt the Rick Santorums in his ranks to go over the brink into another offensive Nazi analogy.But the thing about Frist (and his buddies over at the White House) that I’ve been struggling to understand is this: if he gets his “nuclear option,” one bad thing will happen to the Republican coalition right away, because the business community (whose lobbyists, best I can tell, generally think the whole idea of making judicial confirmations an Armageddon issue is as dumb as a sack of hammers) is going to be really honked off at the goodies they’ll lose when Democrats shut down non-essential Senate business.But it’s unlikely that bad thing is going to be balanced by any good thing for the GOP. Sure, the Cultural Right will be grateful for the win after years of being played for suckers, but they’ll also actually increase their demands for right-wing judicial nominations. Without the excuse of needing 60 votes for a confirmation, how can Republicans possibly argue against, say, ensuring that any Supreme Court nominee is someone who’s got a garage full of fetus posters?I ran this line of questioning by a very shrewd friend of mine who knows the Senate and its Leader pretty well, and this was his response:

Look, if you’re Bill Frist, you know you’re out of here in eighteen months, and then you’re on the presidential campaign trail, having punched your ticket with the Right. He doesn’t give a damn about the long-term consequences for the Senate or the Party. If he thinks about them at all, he probably figures, “I’ll fix it once I’m in the White House.”

We all know strange things happen in the minds of people who start seeing the Next President of the United States in the bathroom mirror each morning, or humming “Hail to the Chief” over breakfast. Hunter Thompson once compared presidential wannabes to “bull elks in rut,” crashing through the woods blindly and self-destructively at the first sound of an cow elk call.But ol’ Bill must have a pretty advanced case of the presidential hots to willingly go down in history not only as the guy who made the Supreme Court safe for wingnuts, but as the Majority Leader who sought to turn the U.S. Senate into a less representative version of the U.S. House, while reducing the constitutional powers of the Congress as a whole with respect to the executive branch. That’s a real trifecta of irresponsibility.