Funniest lede of the day? This one, from AP (via CNN):”House Majority Leader Tom DeLay strongly denied wrongdoing Tuesday in connection with two overseas trips financed by outside organizations, and said he is eager to discuss the facts with leaders of the House ethics committee.”I like that “strongly denied.” What’s he going to do? “Weakly” deny wrongdoing? It reminds me of a great Hunter Thompson fantasy (we miss you, man) from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, wherein a doomed candidate denies reports he’s withdrawing from the race and “predicts total victory in all states.” DeLay’s alleged “eagerness” to talk about his junkateering–especially the little casino-financed jaunt to the U.K.–is pretty funny, too. Yeah, I bet he just can’t wait to lay out all the details. The way this story’s going, it’ll probably turn out he made the trip on Hooters Air.But the best part is DeLay’s designated confessional box: the House Ethics Committee. Good thing he had the foresight to neuter the watchdog committee completely in a series of moves earlier this year. Making his case to those guys is the functional equivalent of sticking it in a bottle and dropping it in the ocean. But maybe he should wait a week or two before he gets chatty about his latest series of ethical lapses. At his current pace, there will be two or three more, er, ah, situations to explain by Friday. DeLay, of course, is blaming all his problems on a partisan Democratic witch-hunt. He’s giving us way, way too much credit for industry and imagination. Nobody could invent this level of ethics recidivism. And with more smoke in the air than a roadhouse on Saturday night, DeLay could burst into flames any day now, with or without Democrats helpfully offering some lighter fluid.

One of the inherent risks of blogging is that once you hit that “publish” buttom, it’s Out There and you can’t really take it back. My last post defending myself and the DLC from a tirade by Kos will likely earn me lots of emails and links deploring my involvement in this “fight” (vindicating the school-yard axiom that nobody really cares who hits first or hardest; the Assistant Principal will punish everybody). What I should have done is to link to the screed, and then quote Woody Allen’s words to the Christopher Walken character in Annie Hall:”Excuse me, Duane, I have an appointment back on Planet Earth.”

Well, it was just a matter of time, I guess. Perhaps upset at occasional bouts of Sympathy for the Devil being posted on his own page, Kos of DailyKos has more or less called for kicking the DLC out of the Democratic Party for being mean to other Democrats. Or at least I have no other way of understanding today’s characterization of myself and my colleagues as “the media’s handy tool for Democratic bashing. Enemies of unity of the left. Self-important fools who exist merely to advance the other side’s agenda.” Nothing much ambiguous about that, eh?The crowning “outrage,” apparently, is the recent suggestion by Al From and Marshall Wittman that maybe the leadership of MoveOn doesn’t speak for the Democratic Party as a whole, a suggestion Kos chooses to interpret as a call for the party to “purge millions of supporters from its ranks.” (Oh, yeah, Al also mocked bloggers; I somehow managed to get over it, down there in my basement).Man, talk about beams and motes. The vitriol that’s been poured on the DLC by Kos and several other netwarriors in the last couple of years is endless, personal, often obscene, and frankly, a little nuts. If we’re as irrelevant as he keeps insisting we are, why bother? Just ignore us, and we’ll go away, right? If our only value, as Kos suggests today, is to provide right-wing media with anti-Democratic quotes, then you have to wonder why so many elected officials bother to identify with us and come to our events (e.g., one today attended by Sen. Joe Biden)?Indeed, that question seems to bother Kos as well, since his very next post begins a process of “calling out” DLC-friendly Democratic pols and asking them to disassociate themselves from us. He even took the trouble to dig down in our web page–bypassing a few hundred thousand pages of policy work, which is what we do to pass the time while waiting for the next call from Fox News–and discover that Sen. Barack Obama is still listed in our data base! Scandal! (He’s in there because he recently joined the Senate New Democrat Coalition, all of whose members are in our database, which is about as controversial as a phone book). Hillary Clinton? Evan Bayh? Better get away from those people, or risk the consequences.This is more embarrassing than anything else, to tell you the truth. If Kos was screaming at us for alleged agreement with Bush or something, he’d at least have the beginnings of an argument. But being called “divisive” by a guy who’s way around the bend in hating this particular group of Democrats is just a bad joke.Well, I for one ain’t going anywhere. And having contested this particular guy’s right to show me the door, I will say no more about this or future Kos temper-tantrums. After all, I’ve got some of that deceptive Republican-bashing to do, and a few of those issues to work on that nobody cares to hear from me about. And despite this terrible anathema, I remain ready to break bread with anybody in the party who wants to talk, self-important fool that I am.UPCATEGORY: Ed Kilgore’s New Donkey

Thanks to the American Prospect’s apparent new policy of hiding content to sell actual magazines, I’ve been waiting, and waiting, and waiting to write about a fascinating new Matt Yglesias article on Democrats and national security. I read a bootleg copy, but didn’t want to discuss it until I could steer eager readers to a link.But fortunately, in a Tapped post today, Matt did a nice summary of his basic hypothesis:

On forward-looking issues there are, to be sure, disagreements among Democrats. But in my experience those disagreements don’t split the party into two camps, don’t map onto a hawk-dove divide, and don’t have a great deal to do with the Iraq War. The bigger divide is just between people of various persuasions who are determined to continue focusing on national security and find a way to make the Democrats competitive on the issue versus those who’d prefer to put their heads in the sand and hope for a revival of ’90s-style “it’s the economy, stupid” politics.

In the full article, Matt goes on to suggest that this politics of evasion on national security is partly attributable to the constituency-group mindset of so many Democrats. If there ain’t a Big Democratic Group that cares about a subject, why should the rest of us care, right?I’ll do a fuller treatment of Matt’s article when the fine folks at the Prospect put it online, but it does remind me of a satori moment I experienced back in the 90s when the constituency-group focus of my party became clear to me. Shortly after Roy Romer became general chairman of the DNC, a colleague ran into my office with a big fat book, crying “Look, Romer’s already making a difference over there; this is an actual issues book for Democratic candidates!” Together, we excitedly looked at the table of contents, only to find that the “issues” were all organized by constituency group (“Public Employees Issues,” “Asian-Pacific Islanders Issues,” etc., etc.). Made us want to howl at the moon.

Like many Americans, I have temporarily put aside poltical differences to focus on the NCAA basketball tournament.Unlike many Americans, I am searching for analysis of the women’s, not the men’s tournament.In part that’s because my preferred school, the University of Georgia, is not in the men’s tournament, while its women’s team, as always, is in the hunt, seeded sixth but considered dangerously capable of going higher.But in part it’s because the women’s college game is more fun to watch from a purist’s perspetive. They always block out. They rarely miss layups. They generally hit their free-throws. And their 3-point shooting is usually strategic, not egocentric.Aside from my attachment to the Lady Dogs, my interest in the women’s game goes back to early childhood, when I had several aunts who played small-town high school basketball down in Haralson County, Georgia. One year I attended a regional championship game with my Aunt Sylvia, who spent the entire 48 minutes screaming at the refs to call “3 seconds in the lane” and other technically accurate but rare penalties. I learned then that women in many respects took the game more seriously than men.So I’ll watch the men’s tournament, but will reserve my real passion for the women’s game, where all the old virtues of basketball, with few of the new moneyed vices, live on.

In a long-delayed response to the emergence of the Religious Right, there are stirrings of life on the Religious Left, reports the intrepid Amy Sullivan in (subscription-only) Salon. Her departure point is a press conference held last week by leaders of five mainline Protestant churches (the Protestant Episcopal Church, the United Methodists, the Presbyterian Church USA, the United Church of Christ, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) denouncing George W. Bush’s proposed budget as “immoral.”While greeting this development, Sullivan goes on to indict “liberal” Protestants (the primary components, outside the African-American churches, of the “Christian Left”) for a self-marginalizing, secularized approach to political engagement in the past, complemented by a hands-off attitude towards religion by these churches’ natural allies in the Democratic Party. She also notes that mainline churches have been frequently paralyzed by internal denominational fights in recent years, exemplified by the current travails of the Episcopalians over same-sex unions.If anything, I suspect Amy’s being too nice to her fellow (and my fellow) mainline Protestants. Look at that list of denominations represented in the anti-Bush press conference again. They were once the dominant religious, cultural and political forces in America. They have been shrinking in numbers, and in influence, for decades, even as fundamentalist and pentecostal denominations grow like topsy. There are certainly demographic and sociological reasons aplenty for their decline, but you don’t have to be a conservative to understand that religious liberals have largely lost their prophetic voices somewhere between weekly worship services and the host of civic and political organizations they support with great energy and commitment.The steady secularization of mainline Protestantism over the second half of the twentieth century is an old and familiar story. But its relationship to the counter-secularization now championed by the Christian Right is less well understood. It’s fairly safe to say much of the political and social teaching being hurled at congregations across the religious spectrum is dangerously disconnected from its scriptural and theological roots. This gives religio-political conservatives an advantage, given the natural tendency of religiously minded people to value what they understand as “traditional values.” And it gives fundamentalists a crucial advantage, because they can selectively find “inerrant” scriptural support for any number of right-wing cultural and political positions.That’s why the revival of mainline Protestantism as a religious force, and as a poltical and cultural force, point in exactly the same direction: a movement to rediscover and proclaim the profoundly un-conservative message of the Law, the Prophets, the Gospels, the Church Fathers, and Church History, with a minimum reliance on modern sociology or Identity Politics.Let the Christian Right be the faction of bad physical and social science, bad economics, and distorted, selective history. Let them be the ones who dress up secular agendas in “God Talk.”Sure, the Religious Left needs to adopt better organizational methods, better communications strategies, and better tactics. But above all, “liberal” Christians need to save themselves as religious communities before they can fulfill their calling to help redeem the world for truly Christian values.

Today’s latest Washington Post installment of the Jack Abramoff/Indian Casino/Ralph Reed story is especially surreal. James Dobson puts in a guest appearance in a supporting role to Reed in pledging to whip up evangelical Christian opposition to a rival to Ambramoff’s client. The senior leadership of the U.S. Department of the Interior drifts in an out of the story as they weigh various Indian casino bids and warily eye politically connected suitors. Huge amounts of money change hands. Golf junkets abound. If you didn’t know this was nonfiction, you’d almost swear the whole spectacle was a promo for some new HBO series called The Cross and the Croupier or Indian Givers or Triple Cross or something. If this doesn’t become the Watergate of this era, it’s not for lack of drama, intrigue, or tragi-comedy. Don’t wait for the DVD; pop some popcorn and read it now.

Garance Franke-Ruta’s recent American Prospect article on key differences between Left and Right bloggers has created an interesting and useful debate. But I suspect she may be spurring a different, but equally useful, debate in a new post on Tapped that challenges the idea that bloggers are mainly “citizen-journalists” who represent an entirely new phenomenon in political commentary.Franke-Ruta goes through a whole list of leading Left and Center-Left blogs, including this one, and notes the various credentials–in terms of background, experience, institutional ties, and even social connections–their authors bring to the keyboard. Her post will probably set off a backlash among bloggers who (a) fear the blogosphere is being taken over by Washington and/or Establishment Types, and (b) really freak out at the idea that Washington and/or Establishment Types are eating, boozing, and shmoozing together in order to promote each other at the expense of their less-connected peers.I did a long post last fall providing my own, tentative take on the relationship between blogs and other forms of political expression, and concluded that the whole phenomenon represents the confluence of a new technology with a classic market failure in political journalism and advocacy.Alternatives to market failures create all sorts of new outlets for creativity and expanded involvement, and that’s been the case with blogs. But alternatives to market failures also produce a market response, and that’s why so many Washington political institutions have started up or blessed blogs.So: does that mean the Establishment is neutering the blogosphere? No, for two major reasons.First, the Establishment response to the growing influence of online competition has loosened up the Establishment itself in significant ways. Kos is now a player in Democratic campaign planning. Nobody involved in Democratic strategy on the Social Security issue can ignore Josh Marshall. And institutional blogging is changing institutions. The stable of young bloggers at the Prospect is changing that staid journal’s image and emphasis significantly. I can tell you a lot of people seem to be taking a new look at the DLC thanks to this blog and The Moose. The Center for American Progress and the New America Foundation are now sponsoring blogs, along with most political magazines. Co-optation of market-share-threatening trends is generally a two-way street. So the invasion of the blogosphere by the Establishment is a tribute to the medium’s influence.But secondly, whatever advantages Establishment bloggers have, everybody else remains just a click or a google-search away, and the quality and value-added of non-Establishment blogs continue to bubble up. I’m forever discovering that some blog I read now and then is being written by somebody living in America rather than Washington–someone with a day job who is light years away from getting a hand on the greasy pole of print or electronic journalism, or from a gig with a major political outfit or think-tank. Like most low-mid-major bloggers, I get a constant stream of email from people wanting me to link to their blogs, and the backlog of requests is a constant source of anxious guilt.But they are there, in far greater numbers than the people lining up for interviews with Establishment outlets, and boasting qualifications–like the ability to write, and an actual knowledge of actual conditions around the country–that their Ivy-educated peers often don’t have.Yeah, many bloggers are people who’d be doing faily well in the punditocracy if the internet did not exist, and yeah, the internet has created opportunities for intelligent commentary and advocacy by a whole lot of folks who didn’t go to Harvard and thus can’t get in the door at The New Republic. Let’s hope the supply and demand curves ultimately begin to converge. In the mean time, there’s space for us all.

Since I just made a point of bragging about my good-ol’-boy populist credentials, I should hasten to explain this title, which alludes to one of the few concepts I remember from law school, means “The damn thing speaks for itself like a deacon caught in a ginmill.”And here’s the hook: according to the subscription-only Congress Daily, during a congressional hearing on child care funding in connection with the endless effort to reauthorize the 1996 welfare reform law, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) said this: “The issue of child care is a Washington-based issue. It is not an issue out in the states.” Methinks ol’ Rick will be explaining that one to the working parents of Pennsylvania for a good while as he barnstorms the state posing as the avatar of “compassionate conservatism” during his re-election effort next year. Kinda reminds me of the moment during the 2000 presidential debates when George W. Bush said: “Insurance…that’s a word they use in Washington, DC!” Sometimes the truth peeks through the demagoguery. And it speaks loudly.

We political bloggers sometimes fall prey to our own obsessions, and I’m sure some of us are gripped by the delusion that the whole hep world is breathlessly tuned into the Social Security debate, the bankruptcy bill, or the various machinations of Karl and Grover and HoHo, or the jesuitical DLC. But let’s get real: none of this stuff is more than a tinny little sound compared to America’s real preoccuption these days: the trial of You-Know-Who.Now I’m sure that traffic-savvy bloggers like Wonkette (or the Substitute Wonkette, or the Wonkette-Mini-Me, or whoever the hell is womanning that sex-and-booze-soaked Font of Hilarity these days) will constantly find ways to use interest in the West Coast Offense to draw readers to the latest batch of Washington Gossip. But I’m going to be a Real Democrat and stand up for my values here, and declare NewDonkey an official Jacko-Free site. I don’t care if political news gets so slow that I’m writing about GAO reports on traffic-light synchronization; I just won’t go to Santa Maria.Although it violates the religio-ethical principal of Avoiding the Near Occasion of Sin, I am not swearing off references to anyone named “Jackson.” Jesse, Scoop, Andy–these are all legitimate Jacksonian topics. But no Moonwalking, I swear.In taking this hard line against Jackocentrism, I expect at least a few emails accusing me of blogo-snobbery. That’s not fair. I’m one of the few political bloggers who regularly uses “ain’t” and “sho nuff” and other crackerisms. Unlike David Sirota, I learned my populism at my grand-daddy’s knee back in the day, not by working on some 2004 campaign. And with March Madness on the horizon, I’ll certainly be watching a lot of cheesy beer-and-junk-food commercials and heading for the kitchen with Pavlovian regularity.But you have to draw a line somewhere, and as Martin Luther famously said: “Here I stand; no other can I do.”