Matt Ortega

Awesome post by Glenn Greenwald on what conservatives believe is “conservative” and “liberal” nowadays. He touches upon a theme that many progressive bloggers have picked up on, myself included.

The rhetoric of Bush followers is routinely comprised of these sorts of sentiments dressed up in political language – accusations that domestic political opponents are subversives and traitors, that they ought to be imprisoned and hung, that we ought to drop nuclear bombs on countries which have committed the crime of housing large Muslim populations. These are not political sentiments, and they’re certainly not conservatives sentiments, but instead, are psychological desires finding a venting ground in a political movement.It’s not an accident that Ann Coulter and her ongoing calls for violence against “liberals” (meaning anyone not in line behind George Bush) are so wildly popular among conservatives. It’s not some weird coincidence that the 5,000 people in attendance at the CPAC this last week erupted in “boisterous ovation” when she urged violence against “ragheads,” nor is it an accident that her hateful, violence-inciting screeds — accusing “liberals” of being not wrong, but “treasonous” — become best-sellers. Ann Coulter has been advocating violence against liberals and other domestic political opponents for years, and she is a featured speaker at the most prestigious conservative events. Why would that be? It’s because she is tapping into the primal, rather deranged rage which lies in the heart of many Bush followers. If that weren’t driving the movement, she wouldn’t provoke the reactions and support that she does.

Glenn is dead on in his analysis. In the last five years, the Bush administration has single-handedly shifted some of the most basic principles of the conservative movement.

That “conservatism” has come to mean “loyalty to George Bush” is particularly ironic given how truly un-conservative the Administration is. It is not only the obvious (though significant) explosion of deficit spending under this Administration – and that explosion has occurred far beyond military or 9/11-related spending and extends into almost all arenas of domestic programs as well. Far beyond that is the fact that the core, defining attributes of political conservatism could not be any more foreign to the world view of the Bush follower.As much as any policy prescriptions, conservatism has always been based, more than anything else, on a fundamental distrust of the power of the federal government and a corresponding belief that that power ought to be as restrained as possible, particularly when it comes to its application by the Government to American citizens. It was that deeply rooted distrust that led to conservatives’ vigorous advocacy of states’ rights over centralized power in the federal government, accompanied by demands that the intrusion of the Federal Government in the lives of American citizens be minimized.

Is there anything more antithetical to that ethos than the rabid, power-hungry appetites of Bush followers? There is not an iota of distrust of the Federal Government among them. Quite the contrary. Whereas distrust of the government was quite recently a hallmark of conservatism, expressing distrust of George Bush and the expansive governmental powers he is pursuing subjects one to accusations of being a leftist, subversive loon.

The whirlwind of discussion on the left after Vice President Dick Cheney’s hunting mishap is interesting to read. Jane Hamsher reminds us of Cheney’s election-year rhetoric.

That just takes the whole fun out of it. I am reminded of a hilarious Chuck Norris fact: “Chuck Norris does not hunt. Hunting infers failure. Chuck Norris goes killing.” The same is true of Bush/Cheney, apparently, and not because the two are tremendous hunters/fishermen, but because the odds are stacked so much in their favor, failure is virtually an impossibility. Sounds like GOP politics to me.

Updated on 02/12/06 at 12:20am: Apparently Cheney’s office nor the White House wanted anybody to know about the shooting.

The more than 18-hour delay in news emerging that the Vice President of the United States had shot a man, sending him to an intensive care unit with his wounds, grew even more curious late Sunday. E&P has learned that the official confirmation of the shooting came about only after a local reporter in Corpus Christi, Texas, received a tip from the owner of the property where the shooting occurred and called Vice President Cheney’s office for confirmation.The confirmation was made but there was no indication whether the Vice President’s office, the White House, or anyone else intended to announce the shooting if the reporter, Jaime Powell of the Corpus Christ Caller-Times, had not received word from the ranch owner.

I kid you not:

Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and injured a man during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, his spokeswoman said Sunday.

Harry Whittington, 78, was “alert and doing fine” after Cheney sprayed him with shotgun pellets on Saturday while the two were hunting at the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas, said property owner Katharine Armstrong. [...]

Whittington was in stable condition Sunday, said Yvonne Wheeler, spokeswoman for the Christus Spohn Health System. [...]

“The vice president didn’t see him,” she continued. “The covey flushed and the vice president picked out a bird and was following it and shot. And by god, Harry was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty good.” [...]

She said emergency personnel traveling with Cheney tended to Whittington, holding his face and cleaning up the blood.

“Fortunately, the vice president has got a lot of medical people around him and so they were right there and probably more cautious than we would have been,” she said. “The vice president has got an ambulance on call, so the ambulance came.”

Updated 02/13/08 at 4:34pm: Ed Helms and Rob Corddry in two of the most hilarious clips from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart:

Michael Brown, the former FEMA head sweetheart that swept Americans off their feet following Hurricane Katrina, testified under oath to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

He agreed with some senators who characterized him as a scapegoat for government failures.”I feel somewhat abandoned,” said Brown.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has said he did not know that New Orleans’ levees were breached until Aug. 30. Bush at the time said, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.”

At an occasionally contentious White House briefing Friday, Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said there were conflicting reports about the levees in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

“We knew of the flooding that was going on,” McClellan said. “That’s why our top priority was focused on saving lives. … The cause of the flooding was secondary to that top priority and that’s the way it should be.”

After three hours of testimony, Brown was handed a subpoena ordering him to reappear in front of a House panel investigating the storm response. Brown is expected to be questioned by House investigators this weekend — days before the panel is expected to release its findings on the storm.

Recounting conference calls that described initial damage reports the day Katrina hit, Brown scoffed at claims that Homeland Security didn’t know about the devastation’s scope until the next day. He called those claims “just baloney.”

Republican Senator Norm Coleman from Minnesota had harsh words for Brown, saying “You’re not prepared to put a mirror in front of your face and recognize your own inadequacies,” said Norm Coleman, R-Minn. “Perhaps you may get a more sympathetic hearing if you had a willingness to confess your own sins in this.” To which Brown responded, “That’s very easy for you to say sitting behind that dais and not being there in the middle of that disaster watching that human suffering and watching those people dying and trying to deal with those structural dysfunctionalities, even within the federal government” (video).

Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall had this analysis on the exchange between Brown and Coleman:

If you aren’t watching the Michael Brown senate hearings, you just missed a real treat. Sen. Norm Coleman (R), doofus senator from Minnesota, just managed to get his butt kicked by disgraced former FEMA Director Michael Brown.That’s a singular accomplishment.

Coleman tried the standard hearings grandstanding against a disgraced or weakened witness — a tactic pretty much written into the DNA of every senator and rep. But Brown managed to get in Coleman’s face and turn the tables on him.

At the end, Coleman actually used the fact that he had run out of time to run away from the encounter with Brown. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that happen before.

Earlier this year, this nation was dealt a huge blow with the passing of Coretta Scott King, widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Even after Dr. King’s death in April 1968, Mrs. King continued her late husband’s efforts to advance the nonviolent movement for justice, equality and peace with The King Center. Mrs. King advocated women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights (including same-sex marriages), was anti-war and opposed the death penalty.

The memorial for Mrs. King was held in Lithonia, Georgia and several prominent dignitaries showed, including former Presidents Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. President Bush and the First Lady, Laura Bush, also attended, along with “three governors, three plane loads of Congress members, celebrities, gospel starts and leading figures in the civil rights movement.”

During the memorial, several speakers made headlines with comments about the war in Iraq, the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina and the National Security Agency’s surveillance program.

Dr. Joseph Lowery, co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. King:

“We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there [standing ovation]… but Coretta knew and we know that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war billions more but no more for the poor.”

Former President Jimmy Carter, signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978:

“It was difficult for [Dr. King and Mrs. King] personally — with the civil liberties of both husband and wife violated as they became the target of secret government wiretapping, other surveillance and as you know, harassment from the FBI.” [...]

“We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi — those who were most devastated by Katrina — to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans.

The media went crazy with charges such as “Democratic pep rally” and “Democratic convention” - familiar charges surrounding late Senator Paul Wellstone’s funeral several years ago.

However, as Media Matters notes, such claims were absent during the 2004 funeral of former President Ronald Reagan:

But many of those same media figures accusing speakers of politicizing the King funeral did not show the same aversion to the politicization of the 2004 death of a figure of a different political stripe: former President Ronald Reagan. Nor did they apparently think it worth noting that the Reagan funeral included no Democratic speakers, but a long roster of Republicans, including President Bush, who was running for re-election and was reportedly trying to attach himself to the Reagan legacy. [...]

While the media have devoted substantial coverage to Carter and Lowery’s purported politicization of the King funeral, the June 11, 2004, funeral for Reagan did not provoke similar scrutiny, despite clear political overtones. For example, the media largely ignored the fact that no Democrats were invited to speak at either the funeral at the National Cathedral or at a ceremony held on Capitol Hill two days earlier. (President Clinton had even delivered a eulogy at former President Richard Nixon’s funeral a decade earlier). [...]The King funeral, by contrast, included speeches by two Republican presidents and two Democratic presidents, as noted above.