>Funny–they keep saying…

And there it is. This demonstrates how the national political conversation has been reduced to a one-sided circle-jerk, where the only viewpoint worth discussing is the one put forth by the right wing. The Post, the Times, and seemingly all the other major media treat the news similarly–the argument always starts at the right.

Thank God for the blogs. We’d be nowhere without them.

You know, at this point I’d rather err on the side of caution. If you really meant for the first sentence of your post to be a disclaimer, why did you give your post the title you did?

We have not won. Not by a long shot. And, as my environmentalist friends in D.C. say, even if we do win, â€don’t put away those suitsâ€.

Complacence and grandiose thinking are absolutely deadly at this point in the game. We can’t afford either of them.

Having written for television for the past twenty years, I have a feeling Disney/ABC was completely blindsided by this scandal. I doubt that, on a corporate level, they knew they were making such a conservative movie. What’s amazing in television is that, with the mind-numbing level of oversight and scrutiny, there are still huge things that slip through the cracks. I wrote the first couple years for a show on Fox called Arrested Development, and we were able to slip in tons of political material–from Iraq to â€free speech zonesâ€â€“that I’m sure Rupert Murdoch was never aware of.

I agree. What’s insane is how Disney has reacted once it realized what it has on its hands, including all the dissembling about copies being sent to right-wing bloggers.

I should catch up on the Bolton nomination situation. Because I really want to say that these guys rarely let anything die. The Harriet Miers nomination is the only thing I can think of that actually went away when it looked dead. Even Social Security privatization was slated for a comeback, even if they ended up doing nothing about it.

From everything I have read, it does look like a rather amateurish right-wing group was invited to make the film, and then more right wingers, including David Horowitz, got involved in the marketing.

But remember that while this was going on, Disney had just gone through a high-profile fight to get rid of Michael Eisner as CEO. Eisner was evidently still around in mid-June, 2005, but was due to leave in the fall. So the show was a sort of â€transitional†project. One wonders just who green-lighted the project, how much supervision was exercised, and who really knew what they had on their hands when the right-wingers began their marketing campaign. Here’s one clue about the show’s â€balanceâ€: the August PDB isn’t in the show, neither is Bush reading â€The Pet Goat.â€

But dealing with the fall-out could hardly have been more amateurish, and at least one review I read said the program isn’t really very good.

I think the Lieberman campaign’s loss in the primary was an important effort on the part of liberals and centrists nationally, and many of us were involved in undermining his continuity then; DemFCT’s probing evaluations helped prepare for that important shift. Rhode Island is a close knit place. While Lieberman was disconnected in policies which affect the social fabric, he had cobbled influences together to keep from losing before when he might have; but the Republicans were really out of touch to overlook the tenuousness of his overall political ’position’. I worry very much exGov MWarner’s candidacy shares some of those defects, but MW’s organization is only beginning to develop strategy. Lieberman’s decline accentuates the misperceptiiveness among Republicans who thought RI could be an easy win for the rightwing contingent in the Republican party. I think what is developing now is a reassertion of more centrism in the Republican Party among forward thinkers who want to do beter in the next presidential election than Bush’s current third of the voters. Still, these two states Are New England, notoriously difficult territory for Republicans, at least urban Republicans. The Bolton news is welcome, and was a given, but Bush still is the neoCon darling and Bolton’s successor is likely to be another person who will preserve the agenda of that part of the Republican Party. The movie bit, I see as a mediocre result of a new centrist leadership in that corporation which has a long history of mildly regressive politics. I wonder what the filmmakers there thought of Uncomfortable Truth. One potentially interesting feature of the middle road Republicans, unlike the rightwing Disney Repubilicans, is the centrists are light on social issues. There is a strong moralist streak in our national identity and history, but I doubt there is much strength remaining in that counterpoint to what has become fairly mainstream American lifestyle. Attacking with the Independent Counsel on social values was a final bankrupt ploy, a last resort when Gingrich had failed and the mundane civil corruption charges the Republicans first sought to investigate as a way to discredit the president petered out, as it were, and the only remaining charges were about private matters unrelated to governance. It has gotten a bit bizarre now that some of those ’moralists’ are in office trying to rewrite the laws on privacy, habeas, coercion of statements of guilt. I am surprised, but only slightly, that Graham is one of the people recruited to launch the coercion initiative. I worry, though, about Frist’s plans for the retirement party: whether he still wants to leave a heritage of being the one to end cloture and remake the senate into a libertarian chamber which bickers but moves toward becoming a replica of the lower chamber.

There is a lot of work to do, as the title suggests.

Nice to see Page sometimes.

I disagree with the analysis here that the Club for Growth and the far right of the Republican party have given up on the 2006 by putting the Republican Senate seat in Rhode Island at risk. That blue state seat was always going to be at high risk in an election cycle that would sweep out of office five other Republican senators.

However, here’s what important. The Club for Growth would rather have a smaller Republican majority lock-stepping in the Senate than a larger Republican majority party there with some senators exercising their independence from time to time.

Liberals are forever seeing madness where there is, in fact, successful and ruthless far right-wing strategic method at work.

Thinking some more about ABC, I still don’t believe it’s a conscious strategy, but they have been targeting a few of their shows to a conservative base for a while. It’s all just been under the radar. No one really cared, partly because progressives don’t tend to watch these shows. For instance, Extreme Home Makeover has crazily sentimental, patriotic moments all the time. There was an episode a couple years ago featuring Jessica Lynch helping someone get a house that was pure madness.

Wheel, is there a link here where I can send you an email? It’s about the Plame book. If not, I don’t mind posting my email here so you can contact me. Just let me know, thanks.

Regarding Bolton, I wouldn’t put a lot of stock in the issue. If Frist doesn’t believe that he has the votes to confirm, he probably won’t even bring it to the floor for a vote. After that, if Bush still wants Bolton at the UN, he’ll just make another recess appointment sending him back to the UN. There doesn’t seem to be anything in the Constitution to prevent successive recess appointments.

Regarding Lincoln Chafee, I’m amazed that he’s polling that far behind Laffey. I know that Chafee probably won re-election in 2000 because of his incumbancy and his name. (He was appointed to the US senate in 1999 after the death of his father John Chafee to fill out the term, and I suspect–but cannot prove–that more than a few voters believed that they were re-electing John in 2000), but I’m really surprised that he is doing so poorly in the Republican primary polling. Apparently, some odd things are going on in the state Republican parties in New England. Maybe they are becoming more radical conservatives, as the voters in the region are not, and the voters are reacting against that. That certainly seems to be the case in my home state of Massachusetts.

raj

Bush can recess Bolton again, but Bolton couldn’t be paid. So he’d be serving with even less credibility than he has now … but that never seemed to bother him.