Huckabee: Against counting votes before he was for it

On Nov. 17, 2000, Mike Huckabee and other Republican governors said Al Gore was causing grave risk to democracy by requesting a complete vote count in Florida. They said Gore needed to "cease and desist" his legal efforts to get the votes counted. They called the Gore campaign's criticism of Katherine Harris "an outrage."

Now the Huckabee campaign calls it "an outrage" that the Washington state Republican Party isn't counting all the votes from Saturday's caucus.

Back in 2000, Huckabee and his fellow GOP governors said there was no evidence that Harris, Florida's top elections official and co-chair of the state Bush-Cheney campaign, was unbiased and fair-minded, and that any criticism of her could weaken the foundations of American democracy. Harris had halted vote recounts after she concluded that Bush had won Florida.

The New York Times' B. Drummond Ayres Jr. wrote:
The governors, convened here at a golf resort near Tampa for their annual association meeting, argued that while the race was undeniably close, there was no credible evidence of any wrongdoing by Republican election officials, particularly in Florida. In a news conference, they demanded that Vice President Al Gore concede that Gov. George W. Bush had won fair-and-square and retreat from the field.

Yesterday, Ed Rollins, chairman of Huckabee's presidential campaign, said: "It would be a disservice to every voter in Washington state to not pursue a full accounting of all votes cast." He added, "we are prepared to go to court."

Eight years ago, after the Bush campaign filed a lawsuit to prevent a Florida recount, Republicans said it was a sign of Gore's lack of character that he filed a countersuit.

Shuster is the bullet, not the target

With her conflict against MSNBC, Hillary Clinton has revealed one of her central campaign strategies against John McCain, should she get the Democratic nomination. She is attacking McCain's biggest strength, which is his reputation as a truth-tellin' straight-shootin' honest politician.

She's not yet going after McCain's reputation for honesty directly. That will come later. She is starting out by weakening McCain's protective flank: She is undermining the credibility of the media that are forever swooning about McCain's supposedly unimpeachable honesty and forthrightness.

Assailing McCain's honesty is vital strategy. Doing it indirectly, by further weakening voters' trust in the media, is a clever tactic.

The Clinton campaign is deploying David Shuster as a long-range weapon, not as a target. Many in the media fail to understand this, as in this obtuse analysis by ABC's Jake Tapper, who guesses that Clinton "is capitalizing on an ugly moment to galvanize female voters." Sure, there might be an element of trying to stoke the ire of female voters (if you assume, as Tapper does, that only women, and not men, object when accomplished young women are smeared as whores), but the Clinton campaign is hunting for bigger game. They want to persuade voters to distrust the media that instruct them to trust John McCain.

Here's a comment accompanying the Tapper analysis, from a reader who says the media have writing about Clinton with "black colored goggles":

While not many, if any, of the Media's narrative "'points" resemble factual reality, the novelization of the political landscape continues apace. This novelization has burgeoned into an unsupportable, unreadable, and unviewable fictionalization of campaign and the candidates.

It is and has been for months outright well-poisoning. The media's fictionalizing is not just a disservice to the country but an outright betrayal of the public trust.

When I turn on the news I want the NEWS, the FACTS. I don't want a narrative, I don't want to hear what you think would be fun or interesting IF it were what was happening. I want narrative, I'll read a book or watch a movie.

This is conclusion that the Clinton campaign wants voters to make. This isn't about David Shuster or the locker-room atmosphere on MSNBC. This is about convincing voters, especially non-conservatives, that they can't trust the media. Expect the Clinton campaign to push further. They will get us to ask: When will Rush Limbaugh call 16-year-old Bridget McCain a dog? When will someone on MSNBC call Bridget McCain a whore who is being pimped by her parents? Because the media obviously have a double standard, can you trust reporters when they portray McCain as being unfailingly honest and forever frank?

MSNBC's (and Chris Matthews's) crotch and Mountie fixation

Over at Hullabaloo, Digby makes the important observation that the Donner Party over at MSNBC is circling the wagons. They think the, uh, hullabaloo about David Shuster's "pimped out" comment is politically motivated -- just a way for the Clinton campaign to get positive, feel-good, noncontroversial mileage out of a stupid comment, I guess.

The towel-snapping boys in the MSNBC locker room, so eager to deny and deflect attention from their homoeroticism, have convinced themselves that they are the victims of That Harridan Hillary. How do we change their behavior? Simple. The Clinton campaign can throw the MSNBC crew's words right back at them.

The obvious place to start is to ask Chris Matthews why he was staring at the president's crotch as Bush minced across the deck of an aircraft carrier. But I'd like the Clinton campaign to ask Matthews, and press him repeatedly with follow-up questions, about this quote from Matthews: "He has the perfect chin, the perfect hair, he looks right. He looks like a Mountie. He looks like from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. ... Can that guy capture the hearts of the American people?"

What's with Matthews's fixation on men's crotches and perfect chins and guys dressed like Mounties?

Do tell, Chris.

There's this comment in the comments section: "I think the inference is why is she making those calls? It does seem perverse when you consider she is not a politician or a political operative. There seems to me to be a feeling that if they put her up to the calls, the superdelegates will be put on the spot in a way that they wouldn't when speaking to a political operative."

I don't recall the press making an issue out of another instance of a presidential offspring delving deeply into the political process. During the presidential term of the first George Bush, his son George W. took up an office in the White House and became, in essence, his father's enforcer. I never knew about this little bit of history until 2000. What W. was doing in his father's White House was more substantial than anything Chelsea Clinton has done. But he got a pass from the press and she isn't getting one. Why the double standard?

Many voters believe Obama is a Muslim

Barack Obama has a problem. There are people out there who still think he is a Muslim, and they will refuse to vote for him because of it.

How many? I don't know of any polling data. But I know at least two people who insist that Obama is a Muslim -- and they'll never vote for a Muslim for president. They would vote for Obama if they believed he was a Christian, but they are positive that he is a Muslim.

Like you, I thought this Obama-is-a-Muslim story had been debunked more or less thoroughly. It hasn't. My first inkling of this came last week, when my conservative father-in-law mentioned Obama's prodigious fund-raising ability. Most of that $32 million raised in January, he said, "came from the Middle East."

Why did he think that? "Because he's a Muslim!" my father-in-law declared emphatically, in the same condescending tone that George Bush uses when he talks to his audience like they're all kindergartners.

"No, he's not," I said. "Obama belongs to the Church of Christ. He's a Christian."

"What are you talking about?" my father-in-law replied. "When he took office, he swore on the Koran, not the Bible. He's a Muslim, and if he's elected, he's going to let people in the Middle East call all the shots."

In the stunned silence that followed, my wife interjected. "My boss says he would vote for Clinton over McCain, but he would never vote for Obama because he's a Muslim."

Do you think these are the only two voters who have this mistaken belief? Me either.

The news about Obama's faith is not getting through to the Fox News audience -- even those Fox watchers who would be willing to vote for a Democrat instead of McCain. It's going to be difficult to push the truth past the gatekeepers of the right-wing media. The difficulty is compounded by the subtlety of the message: Obama isn't a Muslim -- not that there's anything wrong with that.

Fucking a Popsicle, you just shrivel up

Some buddies and I have been arguing about Franklin Foer's 2005 article in TNR, Swimming With the Sharks, about how Republicans develop their ratfucking and election-stealing tricks when running for national office for the College Republicans. It's a fascinating story, and frightening, if you believe that democracy and the rule of law are the ways to run a nation. The College Republicans don't have much use for democracy and rule of law.

We've had quite a debate about this article via email, with one Republican virtually covering his ears and saying, "Shutupshutupshutup!" to our superior liberal firepower. I hope he strives to understand what's so dangerous about the Republican ruling junta. Here's what I would tell him if he would remove his hands from his eyes and ears and listen for a few minutes:

There's a difference between taking bribes and subverting democracy.

Most college students spend their spring breaks getting laid (Democrats), trying to get laid (Republicans) or working full-time instead of the usual part-time (working-class kids like me). The point of Foer's article is that members of the College Republican National Committee fashion their spring breaks as laboratories to develop their skills for ratfucking, dirty tricks, slander and vote-stealing. Later, in elections out in the real world, you end up with Republican candidates who benefit from ratfucking, dirty tricks, slander and vote-stealing. The corruption of the College Republicans' electoral process is a feature, not a bug. It's practice for local, state and national elections.

The College Democrats just don't operate that way. That's why there hasn't been a Democratic counterpart to the likes of Donald Segretti, Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.

Atwater died (thank god) of a painful brain cancer, but not before he repented for the evil he had done. Karl Rove is destined to expire of a coronary while having his rectum reamed by a pre-op tranny with a Marine flat-top, so any last confession will be mumbled into a saliva-drenched pillow and lost to posterity.

The national convention of the College Republican National Committee is a virtually all-male affair where the big prize goes to the guy who does the best job of dreaming up creative ways to fuck the other guys. Politically, I mean. Just as with the 9/11 hijackers who spent their last night in one another's cozy company in a hotel room with a cloth draped over a painting of a scantily clad woman, the Republicans' guiding motivation stems from repressed homoeroticism and general sexual frustration. Hence the marriages to Popsicles such as Pat, Nancy and Laura, or to hormonally imbalanced, bug-eyed bitches like Barbara. Dick, Ronnie, George and George should have got out more when they were younger, married someone who moves her hips a little when she fucks.

If there's good and bad in both parties, why have Democrats been the targets of more than 80 percent of the federal prosecutions for political corruption under the Bush administration, when under previous administrations, it was about 50 percent? Why was Carol Lam dusted the week after she targeted Dusty Foggo? Why was David Iglesias pushed out when he declined to indict Democrats before the 2006 election because he lacked evidence? Why was Rove acolyte Bud Cummins appointed in Little Rock? Why was there so much foot-dragging in the New Hampshire phone-jamming case, and was the prosecution's bungling an accident?

If you don't know what I'm talking about, find another channel besides Fox News.

Look, there's nothing wrong with being conservative, just as there's nothing wrong with having any other mental handicap. But if you're a conservative and you're truly a patriot, you'll do something to take your party back from scoundrels such as Rove. At the next election, knock on doors. Hand out flyers. Make phone calls. Hold signs at rallies. And demand that your fellow volunteers -- and everyone in the candidate's organization, all the way to the top political advisers -- conduct themselves in exemplary fashion, as benefits a democracy.

Time line of the U.S. attorneys firing scandal

The Bush administration's firing of eight U.S. attorneys isn't easy to understand. The elevator-pitch version goes like this: Using the Global War on Terror™ as an excuse, the administration pushed through a change in the law that allows the president to appoint U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation. The White House recited an endless litany of baseless complaints of Democratic vote fraud during the 2004 and 2006 election cycles. Under cover of these complaints, Bush's closest lieutenants pushed out eight U.S. attorneys -- most of them for not indicting Democrats on trumped-up vote fraud charges, or for at least not leaking information about investigations of Democrats in time to tamper with elections. One of Bush's lieutenants was Harriet Miers, who he briefly nominated to be a justice on the Supreme Court.

Shorter elevator pitch: George Bush politicized the Justice Department to persecute Democrats.

This time line will be a continuing project. It is incomplete and needs items such as the date of Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

February 2005: Harriet Miers, the White House counsel, suggests to D. Kyle Sampson, Alberto Gonzales's chief of staff, that all 93 U.S. attorneys be dismissed and replaced.

February 2005: Alberto Gonzales approves the idea of firing "a smaller group of U.S. attorneys."

March 2005: D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff for Alberto Gonzales, emails Harriet Miers, the White House chief counsel, that ranks all 93 U.S. attorneys. According to the Washington Post: "Strong performers 'exhibited loyalty' to the administration; low performers were 'weak U.S. attorneys who have been ineffectual managers and prosecutors, chafed against Administration initiatives, etc.' A third group merited no opinion. At least a dozen prosecutors were on a 'target list' to be fired at one time or another, the e-mails show."

Oct. 3, 2005: Bush nominates Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court vacated by Sandra Day O'Connor.

Oct. 27, 2005: Bush withdraws the Miers nomination, based mostly on opposition from conservatives and Senate requests for documents relating to Miers's work for the White House. Bush later nominates Samuel Alito to replace O'Connor.

January 2006: D. Kyle Sampson writes to Harriet Miers: "I recommend that the Department of Justice and the Office of the Counsel to the President work together to seek the replacement of a limited number of U.S. Attorneys. … [a] limited number of U.S. attorneys could be targeted for removal and replacement, mitigating the shock to the system that would result from an across the board firing."

January 2006: D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff for Alberto Gonzales, sends the White House a list of seven candidates for dismissal. Four of them are gone by year's end: Margaret Chiara of Grand Rapids, Mich.; Bud Cummins of Little Rock; Carol Lam of San Diego, and Kevin Ryan in San Francisco.

March 2006: The USA Patriot Act is renewed. It allows the attorney general to name interim replacements for U.S. attorneys, without Senate confirmation.

Sept. 17, 2006: D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Alberto Gonzales, sends the White House a list of nine U.S. attorneys to be fired. He says one, Bud Cummins in Little Rock, is "in the process of being pushed out." Cummins and four others on the list are fired by year's end. He adds that the administration should eschew Senate confirmation of the replacements because "we can give far less deference to home state senators and thereby get 1.) our preferred person appointed and 2.) do it far faster and more efficiently at less political costs to the White House."

October 2006: D. Kyle Sampson, chief of staff to Alberto Gonzales, adds David Iglesias, the U.S. attorney in Albuquerque, to the list of U.S. attorneys to be fired, based on complaints from Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) that Iglesias wasn't prosecuting enough vote fraud cases.

October 2006: In a conversation with Alberto Gonzales, Bush mentions complaints about vote fraud investigations.

Dec. 7, 2006: Seven U.S. attorneys are fired. William Kelley, deputy to White House counsel Harriet Miers, writes that Domenici's chief of staff "is happy as a clam" about the firing of Iglesias.

Dec. 14, 2006: Sampson writes in an email that "Domenici is going to send over names tomorrow (not even waiting for Iglesias's body to cool)."

January 2007: Harriet Miers resigns as White House counsel.

March 12, 2007: Alberto Gonzales's chief of staff, D. Kyle Sampson, resigns "after acknowledging that he did not tell key Justice officials about the extent of his communications with the White House, leading them to provide incomplete information to Congress."

Broken gaydar

Ann Coulter needs to go into rehab.

She says so herself. Friday, in a speech at the right wing's big annual bash, the conference for the American Conservative Union's PAC, she called John Edwards a faggot.

"I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, " Coulter said, "but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so …" she paused as the audience's collective gasp turned into laughter and applause, then she continued: "so I'm kind of at an impasse."

Ann has anger issues as well as sexual identity issues.

I won't psychoanalyze her weird fixation on sexuality. Her fellow conservatives, many of whom are obsessed with the sexuality of others, might be a better choice for explaining Coulter's homophobia and her malfunctioning gaydar. (John Edwards? I mean, I can see someone calling out Lindsey Graham. But Edwards?)

As far as Ann's anger, we liberal bloggers bear some responsibility for it. Who among us has not called her Mann Coulter? Which of us has not noted that she has a horse face? Raise your hand if you have not commented, online or in person, upon Coulter's own dubious sexuality? Called her Coultergeist? Remarked upon her prominent Adam's apple?

We've been mean to her, folks, and so she struck at the best-looking presidential candidate she could find. Maybe she has a man-crush on Edwards. Hard to tell what's going on in Ann's mind. She makes her patented outrageous statements with so little conviction that it makes you wonder who the joke is on -- her supposed targets, or her conservative audience.

By the way, she endorsed Mitt Romney.

I find it odd that this hasn't gotten much coverage by the mainstream press. Atrios notes that "there's nothing a conservative can say which would cause the 'liberal media' to decide that she wasn't an appropriate person to promote." Over at Tapped, Ben Adler notes: "Charming. When the right lets out its hate-mongering id, it's a really pretty sight."

I met Ann Coulter last summer in a greenroom, when I was waiting to do a brief interview on Fox News out of a dingy studio in West Palm Beach. She walked in, doffed her chiffon cape and threw it on a couch, and made a beeline for the makeup chair. She told the makeup artist, Christine, that she had awakened with a red eye. Christine had Visine. I was relieved that Ann apparently didn't notice me, because I felt like the manly, Queequegish thing to do would be to say something nasty to her. But since I didn't exist in her world, I didn't have to discharge my responsibility.

I thought, what the heck, I'm not going to be an asshole unless she's an asshole to me.

After my interview, I walked out of the studio and into the greenroom. Ann was sitting on the couch, waiting for her time before the camera. She was wearing blue jeans (it was 90 degrees outside and humid) with a big hole ripped in the right knee. I smiled wimpily and mumbled hello as I lifted her chiffon cape to see if I had left anything on the couch.

Her car was parked next to mine. Empty. Engine running, air conditioning turned on full blast.

I asked myself if I had done the moral thing by not saying something belittling to her. My friends, I admit that I was afraid of confrontation. I sense that she's muy smart and she could have eviscerated me with a nasty comeback.

But perhaps the best she could have done would have been to call me a faggot.

Ratfucking in the 21st century

I got an email from the John Edwards campaign. Join One Corps (an organization that, as of yet, is not well-defined; I'm not sure what relationship it has to the campaign) and do something to push for universal health care. I typed in my ZIP code and got a list of five One Corps chapters in my area.

Good enough so far. I click on the chapter closest to me: One Corps for Palm Beach County Students. In the description of the chapter, it begins: "My name is Jeff and I'm a sophomore at a local high school."

And there's one more member listed besides the founder, Jeff. The other one is a guy who calls himself tedfun21. There's a photo of him, grinning, standing in a room, his arms crossed. Big arms. The guy works out. He's proud of those big ol' guns.

Let's look at the next-closest chapter, presumably a chapter started by a voting-age person in Palm Beach County. Thirteen members. And the second member listed is tedfun21. The next-closest chapter, just north of here. Two members, one of them tedfun21. The nine-member chapter in West Palm Beach includes tedfun21. And the seven-member chapter 22 miles south ranks tedfun21 as a member.

Let's check tedfun21 out by looking at his One Corps profile. Turns out he lives on South Beach, more than 100 miles south of the kid who started One Corps for Palm Beach County Students. He belongs to One Corps chapters from Florida's Panhandle to Miami Beach. Presumably, as part-owner of PR business, he's not going to have time to drive to all the meetings.

I mention the case of tedfun21 because he illustrates a hazard of online organizing. There's a real risk of getting ratfucked. (To put it another way, if a Republican candidate starts up something like One Corps, there's an opportunity to ratfuck his campaign.)

My first objection is the choice of the peurile handle "tedfun21." That sounds like the handle of someone who's cruising for anonymous sex partners, not like someone who is a serious, dependable political volunteer. Tedfun21's profile says he was Edwards's state volunteer coordinator in 2004. Well, OK. It still looks kind of weird when a grown man calling himself "tedfun21" gloms onto a high school sophomore online.

My second objection is the apparently unfettered ability for anyone to sign up for any One Corps chapter.

Neither one of these objections sounds like a big deal unless you consider the ratfucking possibilities. For the sake of argument, let's assume that John McCain starts something like One Corps, a vaguely defined online organizing thingie. Call it MegaCorpses, for his support for more killing in Iraq. Someone could adopt the handle GookKillr and join every chapter in the nation.

Someone calling herself Pu55yLiquor could join every chapter of Mitt Romney's online organization. If the object were to tweak the Mormon, the name Pu55yLiquor would provide a two-fer: lesbianism and alcohol.

Giuliani's online organization could be plagued by a guy calling himself Diallosnitestik.

Or maybe a guy calling himself Tedfun22 could join all the Republican online campaign organizations, post a nude picture of himself in his profile, and troll constantly for sex partners. That would take valuable time away from the people running the sites.

Naturally, we shouldn't expect the Republicans to come up with the same idea.

Update: Kos knows a potential ratfucking when he sees one.