"Something ghostlike about a wall standing in the moonlight"

(Note: p3 originally ran this post on Veterans Day, 2006.)

I've done many drawings of wrecked buildings. Shattered towns and bomb-blasted houses are constant reminders of the war, long after the dead are buried.

There's something very ghostlike about a wall standing in the moonlight in the midst of a pile of broken rubble and staring at you with its single unblinking eye, where a window used to be. There's an awful lot of that in Italy, and it is going to haunt those people for years.

You can usually tell what kind of fighting went on in a town, and how much was necessary to take it, by the wreckage that remains. If the buildings are fairly intact, with only broken windows, doors, and pocked walls, it was a quick, hand-to-hand street fight with small arms and grenades and perhaps a mortar or two.

If most of the walls are still standing, but the roofs have gaping holes, and many rooms are shattered, then the entry was preceded by an artillery barrage. If some of the holes are in the slopes of the roofs facing the retreating enemy, then he gave the town a plastering after he left.

But if there isn't much town left at all, then planes have been around. Bombs sort of lift things up in the air and drop them in a heap. Even the enormous sheet-metal doors with which shop-owners shutter their establishments buckle and balloon out into grotesque swollen shapes.

Bill Mauldin, Up Front (1945)

For several cartoonists' tribute to Mauldin (who died in 2003, after a difficult and often lonely bout with Alzheimer's), go here.

Red sky at morning, Lieberman take warning

I've been following the Lieberman/Lamont contest because the anti-incumbency angle, among other features of the business, resonates beyond the Connecticut borders.

But I have to say, this is just silly:

Does the new Joe Lieberman ad depict a sunrise or a sunset? On Tuesday Lieberman launched an ad depicting the sun low in the sky over an orange-tinted ocean as a female narrator says softly: "Joe Lieberman thought you might enjoy a break from Ned Lamont's negative attacks." Yesterday the Lamont campaign asked: "Is the sunset in Joe's new ad a fitting metaphor for the end of his Senate career?" But Lieberman aide Dan Gerstein fired back that the ad depicted a "sunrise." So which is it?

The fact that Lamont supporters (or Lieberman detractors--there's not a 100% overlap in the two groups) spent time actually tracking that image down suggests that the collaborative fact-checking capacity of the blogworld, however healthy overall, nevertheless has its practical upper limits. Clearly, there's at least something to the rumors that there are bloggers out there with way too much unstructured free time.

But the fact that Team Lieberman is now in the position of having to insist that they really do so know in which direction the sun rises is a very bad sign. In fact, that's the differential (as they'd say on House, MD) for a campaign that has seriously lost its focus on the big picture.

Is a picture of the sun near the horizon a sunrise or a sunset? (If you really feel the need to judge this for yourself, you can see the ad here.) The story reminds me of the incident of the stolen box of raisins on "Seinfeld:" Even if the Lieberman camp did pass a Santa Barbara sunset off as a Connecticut sunrise--does it really matter enough to lie about it?

It also brings to mind a track from David Frye's classic "I Am the President" album (although the joke itself probably goes back at least to vaudeville):

["Toastmaster General" George Jessel has been brought to the White House to prep President Nixon before he meets Prime Minister Golda Meir:]

JESSEL: Mr. President, the Hebrew word for "hello" is "shalom."

NIXON: And the word for "goodbye"?

JESSEL: The Hebrew word for goodbye is "shalom."

NIXON: Well, how do you know if you said "hello" or "goodbye"?

JESSEL: If she leaves after you say it, you said "goodbye."

In Lieberman's case, the smart move would simply have been to laugh it off (as the Adorable One does in this recent example). How hard would it have been to say: "Guys, guys, let's all get a grip here--it's just stock footage we used to make a point in an ad. It's not the freakin' Zapruder film. You guys do know that George Washington didn't actually chop down a cherry tree, don't you?"

But for whatever reason, the Lieberman campaign hasn't been the poster child for smart moves this electoral season. Opening "Sunrise, Sunset" out of town is just the latest example. Let's move on.

CT Dem primary: The morning after

The NYTimes got it right (and Portland's newspaper of record didn't) about what the Lieberman loss means: Democrats in Connecticut know that accommodating the Bush administration is not--cannot be--moderation:

The rebellion against Mr. Lieberman was actually an uprising by that rare phenomenon, irate moderates. They are the voters who have been unnerved over the last few years as the country has seemed to be galloping in a deeply unmoderate direction. A war that began at the president’s choosing has degenerated into a desperate, bloody mess that has turned much of the world against the United States. The administration’s contempt for international agreements, Congressional prerogatives and the authority of the courts has undermined the rule of law abroad and at home.

Yet while all this has been happening, the political discussion in Washington has become a captive of the Bush agenda. Traditional beliefs like every person’s right to a day in court, or the conviction that America should not start wars it does not know how to win, wind up being portrayed as extreme. The middle becomes a place where senators struggle to get the president to volunteer to obey the law when the mood strikes him. Attempting to regain the real center becomes a radical alternative.

When Mr. Lieberman told The Washington Post, “I haven’t changed. Events around me have changed,” he actually put his finger on his political problem.

And this is why the outcome of yesterday's CT primary is important in Portland, Oregon, as it is in Portland, Connecticut--and in Poughkeepsie, Peoria, and Petaluma.

Courtesy of Arivosis, here's the shorter Lieberman campaign message from now until the general election:

The Democratic party has been taken over by extremists who don't remember September 11 and who are soft on national security.

Don't expect to hear much else from Joe during his campaign as a soi-disant "independent;" Take this away from him and he's shooting blanks. But do expect to hear it a lot; expect to hear it on Imus, the 700 Club, and Hannity & Colmes, and expect it to be repeated endlessly by such true defenders of Democratic Party purity as Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and Coulter.

There is, of course, a word for Senate candidates who base their campaign on nothing more than attacking the Democratic party: The word is "Republican."

Which brings up this odd rumor reported by George Stephanopoulos:

According to a close Lieberman adviser, the President's political guru, Karl Rove, has reached out to the Lieberman camp with a message straight from the Oval Office: "The boss wants to help. Whatever we can do, we will do."

What I find puzzling about this story is that, from the sound of it, it was leaked from the Lieberman camp.

I can easily imagine Rove's office making the offer, and leaking it, simply to create mischief; and I can imagine a politically and ideologically rudderless Lieberman campaign accepting the offer but learning just enough from last night's thumping to keep the arrangement a secret as long as possible. I mean, when the Pennsylvania GOP rents out the Green Party like a Grange Hall to help get Santorum elected, anything's possible.

But for Joe's own people, less than 24 hours after losing a primary election because he was seen to be far too accommodating to the right-wing extremists running the government, to themselves publicly announce that they're fielding an invitation from Karl "Heart of Darkness" Rove himself to help their campaign . . . why would any Democrat touch Lieberman again without a level 3 hazmat suit?

Not to be forgotten as the Connecticut Primary votes are counted

(Written after the polls closed in CT, but before the votes were counted.)

Tomorrow morning's Conventional Wisdom--no matter whether Leiberman or Lamont wins the CT Democratic primary--will be about bloggers, Iraq, the 1968 and 1972 elections, and other usual suspects. (TJ righteously excoriates The Big O for echoing the kind of analysis that Beltway Insiders are perpetuating simply--as Gov. William J. LePetomaine would say--to protect their phony-baloney jobs.)

But, First Amendment kind of guy that I am, I am compelled to point out an important theme in the Connecticut Democratic primary, one that's getting far too little play. A Lamont victory over Lieberman--hell, simply the fact that Lamont has already clearly scared the bejeezus out of a 3-term Senator and former VP candidate--represents a backlash against the pernicious power of incumbency in national-level politics. And a good thing, too.

Part of the reason Lieberman is looking at the very real possibility of a primary loss tonight (as well as the reason he's claiming he'll run as an Independent in November--in a party named after himself--if he does lose) is because members of Congress, as well as their Beltway cocktail party confreres, assume that once they've been elected to office the position is theirs until death takes them.

Quoth Glenn Greenwald in yesterday's Salon.com:

There are few positions that offer greater job security than being an incumbent member of the U.S. Congress. The reelection rate for incumbents in the House is now 98 percent, a figure that would create envy even among 1970s Politburo members. It is extremely rare for a three-term senator to lose an election, let alone lose to a primary challenger from his or her own party.

For some time now, this has been one of the greatest and most frustrating contradictions in our political system. Americans are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with, even contemptuous of, Congress, yet they continue to reelect the same representatives over and over, making reelection effectively automatic.

It is not hyperbole to describe a Lieberman defeat as an earthquake for the political establishment -- which is why virtually all members of that establishment, from both political parties and from its pundit class, have been enthusiastically supporting Lieberman. More than any other factor, what enables elected officials to be so unresponsive to the views of those whom they ostensibly represent is that their incumbency advantage effectively eliminates the fear of being removed from office.

The supremacy of incumbency has given birth to a more or less permanent Beltway class that views its power as an entitlement, something that its members have the divine right to possess until they choose to relinquish it. It is that aristocratic mindset that explains the bizarre sense of anger and offense triggered among the political and pundit classes -- and within Lieberman himself -- by Ned Lamont's aggressive primary challenge. The effort to defeat Joe Lieberman was considered to be improper, uncouth, even somehow undemocratic by those most entrenched in our stagnant, plodding, virtually immovable political structures.

Beyond striking a blow against the Iraq war and the neoconservatives who are responsible for it, a Lamont victory would deal a hard blow to the power of incumbency and the entitlement mindset it has spawned. It would be seen, rightfully so, as a repudiation of the Beltway pundit and political classes that, from the start and with virtual unanimity, viewed the Lamont challenge with scorn, as a distasteful rebellion by the crazed, dirty, unenlightened masses. The most important impact of a Lamont win is that it would shake the foundations of a self-contained Beltway political structure that is as unresponsive as it is corrupt at its core.

I support measures to limit the incredibly lopsided advantage of incumbency, starting with publicly financed elections. And, truth be told, I support giving free air-time to qualified candidates, to the horror of radio and TV stations who make a fortune selling publicly-owned airwaves back to us in the form of campaign ads every 2 years. (It is, I grant you, a comfortable position to support since it will never, ever, ever come anywhere close to enactment.)

I don't support term limits, even though they're generally enacted in the name of equalizing the playing field, because in fact they throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you're tired of seeing the same people elected over and over, lower the barriers to entry for viable challengers, rather than forcing out office-holders without regard to whether they still have their constituents' support.

And that also means--as shocking as this evidently is to Cokie Roberts, Joe Lieberman, and the editors of The Oregonian--allowing Democrats to challenge other Democrats in Democratic primaries.

Shocking thought.

Especially since polling results indicate that incumbency may not be the great deal-breaker it's been for sometime now:

Especially worrisome for members of Congress is that the proportion of Americans who approve of their own representative's performance has fallen sharply. Traditionally, voters may express disapproval of Congress as a whole but still vote for their own member, even from the majority party. But 55 percent now approve of their lawmaker, a seven-percentage-point drop over three months and the lowest such finding since 1994, the last time control of the House switched parties.

Members of Congress actually having to defend their phony-baloney jobs. What a concept.

Reading: Dolchstosslegende

"Although American political life has rarely been touched by the most acute varieties of class conflict," wrote Richard Hoftstadter in the opening pages of The Paranoid Style, "it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds."

It is a truth universally acknowledged among right wing pundits that the American left--Democrats, liberals, progressives, and (oh this above all) left-of-center bloggers--are "angry." It's a standard talking point of the right, trotted out most recently, as my DD notes, by the dwindling cadre of Lieberman supporters to explain why he's fighting for his political life in a primary--a primary! Connecticut hasn't had a Democratic primary in 36 years, for pity's sake!

But forget about the left; it's the American right that's been the home of the uber-myth of political anger, resentment, and paranoia: dolchstosslegende--more literally, "dagger-thrust legend," but more familiar to Americans as "stab-in-the-back theory." The stab-in-the-back theory posits that "we" could not possibly have failed because "our" enemies were more powerful, or because "our" leaders were incompetent, or "our" cause not just, but only because of betrayal from within.

Dolchstosslegende was born in German nationalists' need to explain their loss in World War I, but its adopted home since the end of World War II has been American conservatism.

Harper's has done us a valuable, if grisly, service by reprinting Kevin Baker's history of the stab-in-the-back theory in post-WWII American conservatism:

Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to increase the number of internal enemies.

Beginning as they meant to proceed, conservative Republicans looked to backstabbing as the explanation for their own political irrelevance at the end of America's greatest success to that point, the second World War.

The dolchstosslegende first came to the United States following not a war that had been lost but our own greatest triumph. Here, the motivating defeat was suffered not by the nation but by a faction. In the years immediately following World War II, the American right was facing oblivion. Domestically, the reforms of the New Deal had been largely embraced by the American people. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations—supported by many liberal Republicans—had led the nation successfully through the worst war in human history, and we had emerged as the most powerful nation on earth.

Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow liberal internationalists had sounded the first alarms about Hitler, but conservatives had stubbornly—even suicidally—maintained their isolationism right into the postwar era. Senator Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican,” and the right’s enduring presidential hope, had not only been a prominent member of the leading isolationist organization, America First, and opposed the nation’s first peacetime draft in 1940, but also appeared to be as naive about the Soviet Union as he had been about the Axis powers. Like many on the right, he was much more concerned about Chiang Kai-shek’s worm-eaten Nationalist regime in China than U.S. allies in Europe. “The whole Atlantic Pact, certainly the arming of Germany, is an incentive for Russia to enter the war before the army is built up,” Taft warned. He was against any U.S. military presence in Europe even in 1951.

This sort of determined naiveté had Taft and his movement teetering on the brink of political irrelevance. They saved themselves by grabbing at an unlikely rope—America’s very own dolchstosslegende, the myth of Yalta. No reasonable observer would have predicted in the immediate wake of the Yalta conference that it would become an enduring symbol of Democratic perfidy.

And so on, to the present day--actually, Baker's accounting stops just short of the most recent example, the claim by the most rabid factions of the right that the New York Times, by reporting that the US government was monitoring international financial transactions as part of its "War on Terror," had given aid and comfort to our enemies--even though the Bush administration itself had revealed the basic information some time ago.

Some of that "treason" talk, of course, is simply working the refs. And yet, of all the ways to cow the opposition and the soi-disant independent media, how quickly, how effortlessly--how naturally--they reach for the "betrayal from within" cudgel.

"Stab in the Back!" is going on the Reading list.

Q: When is a "Democrat" not a Democrat?

A: When he's a "petitioning Democrat."

From the Hartford [CT] Courant's web site, although you can read steady updates at AmericaBlog, FireDogLake, Eschaton, and DailyKOS, among many many other places:

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman announced today he will petition for a place on the November ballot as an "independent Democrat," giving him a chance to stay alive politically should he lose an Aug. 8 primary for the Democratic nomination.

Lieberman, 64, a three-term senator whose outspoken support of the war in Iraq has brought months of grief and inspired a strong primary challenge from Greenwich businessman Ned Lamont, announced his decision this afternoon at a brief press conference at the State Capitol.

I'll admit it; I was pissed at Al Gore for a long time after the 2000 election. I thought he ran a wavering campaign, I thought he should have exploited Bill Clinton's popularity and fund-raising prowess for everthing it was worth, and I thought his recount endgame seemed to indicate he didn't want the Presidency all that badly.

I've mellowed since then. It's hard to remember it now, but Nader's Green Party candidacy brought some value to the campaign--although his "no difference between Republicans and Democrats" finish was deplorably foolish, and bought him the obscurity he now so richly deserves. Also, after 6 years of having my head held underwater by Bob Somerby, I get it that I greatly underappreciated how much of Gore's problem was a hostile and dismissive media.

And Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" penance has also gone a long way toward clearing his slate.

But there's still one thing Al has yet to atone for: He elevated Joe Lieberman to national notice, largely because--oh, how he began as he planned to continue--Joe was the first Democrat to publicly attack Clinton during Monicagate. If not for Gore, Lieberman would have no national cred that he could barter with the Bush Administration to play his self-flattering role as "moderate" "deal maker."

Sorry, Al--but you still have to answer for Joe.

A good start might be a heart-to-heart with your erstwhile running mate on the virtues of party loyalty and the dignity of accepting the will of one's constituents.