Rich/Rudy

Yeah, yeah, it doesn't stop....

Frank Rich:

That this same Rudy Giuliani would emerge as the front-runner in the Republican pack six years later is the great surprise of the 2008 presidential campaign to date, especially to the political press. Since the dawn of the new century, it has been the rarely questioned conventional wisdom, handed down by Karl Rove, that no Republican can rise to the top of the party or win the presidency without pandering as slavishly as George W. Bush has to the most bullying and gay-baiting power brokers of the religious right.

When Rudy’s candidacy started to show legs, pundits and family values activists alike assumed that ignorant voters knew only his 9/11 video reel and not his personal history or his stands on issues. “Americans do not yet realize how far outside of the mainstream of conservative thought that Mayor Giuliani’s social views really are,” declared Tony Perkins, the Family Research Council leader, in February. But despite Rudy’s fleeting stabs at fudging his views, they are well known now, and still he leads in national polls of Republican voters and is neck and neck with Fred Thompson in the Bible Belt sanctuary of South Carolina.

There are various explanations for this. One is that 9/11 and terrorism fears trump everything. Another is that the rest of the field is weak. But the most obvious explanation is the one that Washington resists because it contradicts the city’s long-running story line. Namely, that the political clout ritualistically ascribed to Mr. Perkins, James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Gary Bauer of American Values and their ilk is a sham.

These self-promoting values hacks don’t speak for the American mainstream. They don’t speak for the Republican Party. They no longer speak for many evangelical ministers and their flocks. The emperors of morality have in fact had no clothes for some time. Should Rudy Giuliani end up doing a victory dance at the Republican convention, it will be on their graves.

Part of their demise, of course, can be attributed to the pileup of personal hypocrisies that have always undone Elmer Gantrys in America, from Jimmy Swaggart to Jim Bakker. The Ted Haggard revelations were in that tawdry tradition, and so was the news that the Christian Coalition’s front man, Ralph Reed, looked forward, as he put it, to “humping in corporate accounts” in collaboration with the now-jailed K Street lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Their fall from grace was synergistically augmented by their scandal-prone family-values allies on Capitol Hill. Even now, the virulent marriage defender David Vitter retains his Senate seat despite having confessed to unspecified sins after his name surfaced in bordello scandals in both Washington and New Orleans.

Also staying put in the Senate is Larry Craig, who, consciously or not, is calling the whole moral brigade’s bluff. After he was busted in the Minneapolis airport, Republicans insisted he undergo an ethics committee investigation on the assumption that he’d disappear before they could conduct it. Now they will have to make good on their word.

Mr. Craig is not just refusing to leave, but, as he demonstrated to Matt Lauer, he is ready, willing and able to re-enact his toilet pas de deux on national television. The Larry Craig show could be C-Span’s hit of the election season. It will culminate with its star’s return to the scene of the crime during the Republican National Convention, which, as perverse poetic justice would have it, is taking place in Minneapolis.

But the most significant — and happiest — explanation for the values czars’ demise as a political force is that white evangelical Christians and a new generation of evangelical leaders have themselves steadily tacked a different course from the Dobson crowd. A CBS News poll this month parallels what the Times reporter David D. Kirkpatrick found in his examination of evangelicals for today’s Times Magazine. Like most other Americans, they are more interested in hearing from presidential candidates about the war in Iraq and health care than about any other issues.

Abortion and same-sex marriage landed at the bottom of that list; fighting poverty outpolled abortion as a personal priority by a 3-to-2 margin. To see just how large a gap separates that evangelical electorate from the values organizations that purport to speak in its name, just look at the Values Voter Summit that the Family Research Council convened to much press attention in Washington last weekend. In a survey of participants to determine which issue would be “most important” in choosing a presidential candidate, the summit’s organizers didn’t even think to list the war, health care or fighting poverty among the 12 hot-button options.

The Values Voter Summit’s survey of the attendees’ presidential preferences showed just as large a disconnect. Rudy Giuliani came in next to last (behind Tom Tancredo, ahead of John McCain) in the field of nine candidates, earning only 1.85 percent of the vote. By contrast, among white evangelicals nationwide in the CBS News poll, he was in a statistical dead heat for first place with Fred Thompson; indeed, Mr. Giuliani’s 26 percent among evangelicals nearly matches his showing among all Republican voters. The discrepancy between the CBS poll and the summit survey leaves you wondering who exactly follows Dr. Dobson and Mr. Perkins beyond the ticket buyers who showed up for their media circus last weekend at the Washington Hilton.

Of late Dr. Dobson has been throwing a hissy fit about Rudy’s rise, reminiscent of his 2005 condemnation of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants for appearing in what he labeled a “pro-homosexual video.” Apparently suffering from the delusion that he has the pull on the right that Ralph Nader once did on the left, he has threatened to bolt to a third party. But for all this huffing and puffing, Dr. Dobson and his stop-Rudy brigade are as politically hypocritical as the Reverend Haggard was sexually hypocritical.

If they really believed uncompromisingly in their issues and principles, they would have long since endorsed either Sam Brownback, the zealous Kansas senator fond of using fetus photos as political props, or Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who spent 15 years as a Baptist preacher, calls abortion a “holocaust” and believes in intelligent design rather than evolution.

But they gave Senator Brownback so little moral and financial support that he folded his candidacy a week ago. And they continue to stop well short of embracing Mr. Huckabee, no matter how many rave reviews his affable personality receives on the campaign trail. They shun him because they know he’ll lose, and they would rather compromise principle than back a loser.

Backing a loser, they know, would even further diminish their waning Washington status in a post-Rove, post-Bush G.O.P. The more they shed their illusion of power, the more they imperil their ability to rake in big bucks from their apocalyptic direct-mail campaigns. They must choose mammon over God if they are to maintain the many values rackets that make up their various business empires.

Hilariously enough, some other big names on the right, typified by Sean Hannity of Fox News, are capitulating to the Giuliani candidacy by pretending that he, like the incessantly flip-flopping Mitt Romney, is reversing his previously liberal record on social issues. The straw they cling to is Rudy’s promise to appoint “strict constructionist” judges to the Supreme Court.

Even leaving aside the Giuliani record in New York (where his judicial appointees were mostly Democrats), the more Democratic Senate likely to emerge after 2008 is a poor bet to confirm a Scalia or Alito even should a Republican president nominate one. No matter how you slice it, the Giuliani positions on abortion, gay rights and gun control remain indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton’s.

“You have absolutely nothing to fear from me,” Rudy disingenuously told the assembled at the Values Voter Summit last weekend. Actually, there’s plenty for everyone to fear from a Giuliani presidency, starting with the mad neocon bombers shaping his apocalyptic policy toward Iran. But that’s another story. Whichever candidate or party lands in the White House, this much is certain: Inauguration Day 2009 is at the very least Armageddon for the reigning ayatollahs of the American right.

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Annals of American Justice; Southern Sex and Justice Edition

From the Oops! Dept.:

As Wayne DuMond listened last week to billionaire fugitive Marc Rich's explanation that Bill Clinton pardoned him for "humanitarian" reasons, he couldn't help but darkly snicker.
DuMond had been accused of raping a Clinton cousin in 1984 and was hog-tied and castrated before he even went to trial.

He used to be enraged about it, especially when the cracker sheriff, who was a pal of the rape victim's father, scooped up DuMond's balls, put them in a jar, and showed them off.

"They were mine. Those were my testicles," DuMond told a sickened courtroom in 1988. "He didn't have no right to take them and he didn't have no right to show them around and he didn't have no right to flush them down the toilet."

This is yet another Clinton saga of genitalia that fell into the wrong hands.

The rape victim's daddy, mortician Walter E. "Stevie" Stevens, was part of a Democratic machine that ruled the Arkansas Delta and nurtured Clinton's career.

Wayne DuMond, guilty or innocent, didn't have a chance at justice.

As Clinton was abandoning Arkansas for national politics, he stymied DuMond's release from prison, ignoring the judgment of his own parole board in June 1990 that DuMond's continued incarceration was a "miscarriage of justice."

It's the word humanitarian that makes Wayne DuMond, now in his early fifties, chuckle a little. He knows it's all politics.

"In the eleventh hour—the eleventh hour and 59th minute," DuMond told the Voice in an interview last week, "Clinton capitalized by gaining monetarily from exercising the duties of his office in a perverted kind of way."

Clinton argues that years ago prosecutor Rudy Giuliani unfairly hounded Marc Rich. Has Clinton forgotten about the torment that his old Arkansas ally, Sheriff Coolidge Conlee, perpetrated on Wayne DuMond?

Or, for that matter, what Clinton himself did?

As Clinton was vying for the presidency, he sat on the parole board's DuMond clemency recommendation. Insisting that he wanted to wait until the appeals process was complete (the opposite tack he took in the Rich case), Clinton met with Stevie Stevens and powerful state representative Pat Flanagin (whose sister used to shoot craps with Conlee in the sheriff's office) and convinced the board to reconsider its recommendation.

In late 1991, on the campaign trail, Clinton began to be pestered about the DuMond case. Recusing himself, in April Clinton turned over the matter to his lieutenant governor, Jim Guy Tucker. Unlike Clinton, Tucker read every word of DuMond's voluminous file, a DuMond lawyer told the Voice. Tucker promptly reduced DuMond's sentence, making him eligible for parole. Seven years later Republican governor Mike Huckabee signed DuMond's release papers.

Releasing Wayne DuMond earlier would have been a tough call, but many people were willing to show the decorated Vietnam veteran mercy, despite his admitted bad past—booze, drugs, mayhem. DuMond has told the tale of how he helped slaughter a village of Cambodians. Later, stationed in Oklahoma, he was charged with participating in the claw-hammer murder of a fellow soldier. Turning state's evidence, he insisted that he merely stood by and watched. In Tacoma, Washington, he accosted a teenage girl, an incident that led to five years of probation.

"Yeah," DuMond conceded in his Voice interview, "but what's that got to do with anything? That had nothing to do with the alleged case against me in Forrest City."

Wayne DuMond was sitting at home, drunk, when two men broke in, hog-tied him, and made him give one of them a blowjob. Then they castrated him with a knife.

Governor Clinton ignored pleas on behalf of DuMond at the same time that he was ignoring pleas on behalf of Rickey Ray Rector.

In early 1992, when the Gennifer Flowers story broke, Clinton interrupted his presidential campaign to stoke his stance as the one Democrat who would lock up and kill criminals. He flew back to Arkansas from New Hampshire so he could be standing on state soil while the convict was put down. It didn't matter to him that Rector had shot himself in the head immediately after the murder, in effect giving himself a lobotomy that left him without the power of reason.

Clinton recently noted the persuasive power of his former counsel Jack Quinn's last-minute phone call on behalf of Marc Rich. But in early 1992, Clinton dismissed a similar last-minute phone appeal from Rector's attorney, Jeff Rosenzweig, a Clinton friend since boyhood. Strapped down, the brain-damaged Rector screamed for 50 minutes while the executioners dug into his arm before finding a vein in which to shoot the poison.

DuMond thinks Clinton's rejection of his own bid for humanitarian handling was just as cynical, although it did have the personal element. "It would have been politically incorrect on both fronts," said DuMond, "the stand he had already taken about crime and being, maybe not a player in my case, but certainly in the background as a relative."

Many of the details of DuMond's life, and how it intersected with Clinton's reign as Arkansas governor, are laid out in the 1993 book Unequal Justice by Guy Reel, a mainstream reporter for The Memphis Commercial Appeal.

Given his past in the army, Reel writes, DuMond was hardly the most sympathetic character when he crossed paths with Clinton's relatives in late 1984 in Forrest City (named after Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest). He was an anonymous handyman, married with kids. One day, the daughter of prominent mortician Stevie Stevens saw DuMond driving down the road in his pickup. She identified him as the man who had raped her 45 days earlier.

That introduced DuMond to Sheriff Coolidge Conlee, a notorious gambler, bootlegger, dope dealer, and racketeer. He was so corrupt that, as it was later revealed in court, he even used crooked dice to shoot craps against his own deputies. Even as he threw dice in the sheriff's office, Reel writes, he was busting black-run gambling houses, except the ones that paid off his chief deputy, Sambo Hughes.

In early March 1985, with Wayne awaiting trial, his wife, Dusty, wrote a letter to a local newspaper defending her husband and blasting Sheriff Conlee.

Only days later, Wayne DuMond was sitting at home, drunk, when two men broke in, hog-tied him, and made him give one of them a blowjob—"just like you made her do," the perp snarled. Then they castrated him with a knife.

One of them, DuMond later said, chortled, "Mr. C would be proud." They left him to be discovered by his children.

Sheriff Conlee strolled into the DuMond home a few hours later. By his own court testimony, related in Reel's book, Conlee scooped up DuMond's testicles from the evidence scene and put them in a matchbox. He drove home, dumped the balls into a fruit jar, and then sped over to Stevens's funeral home. There, Stevens and funeral home employee Regan Hill were waiting. Hill poured formaldehyde over DuMond's balls. Clinton's cousin Stevens recounted later in a deposition that the sheriff said to him, "Here are DuMond's testicles. Do you want to see them?" Stevens, continuing his testimony, recalled, "Of course, they are looking at me, so that was it."

Over the next few days, Sheriff Conlee proudly showed the jar of DuMond's balls to several people. Eventually, he flushed them down a toilet.

"When we found out the sheriff had his testicles in a jar, we felt that maybe the sheriff would put my breast in a jar. We didn't know what he would plan next."

No one was arrested for castrating Wayne DuMond. But after he was convicted of the rape, DuMond sued Conlee and St. Francis County in federal court for humiliating the DuMond clan by displaying the balls. He won a judgment of $110,000.

It was during that trial that DuMond angrily talked about "my testicles." Dusty DuMond, who stood strongly behind her husband, told the court, "When we found out the sheriff had his testicles in a jar, we felt that maybe the sheriff would put my breast in a jar. We didn't know what he would plan next, so that was one of the things that made us decide to go into hiding."

While waiting for Wayne's rape trial, they fled Forrest City. After they left, somebody burned down their house, another crime for which no one was charged.

DuMond's chances at his trial were hopeless. There would be no change of venue. The prosecutors were Clinton ally Gene Raff and his top local aide, Fletcher Long, who was also Sheriff Conlee's personal attorney. Raff and Long were old college frat brothers of Stevie Stevens. The sheriff himself was the courtroom bailiff.

No evidence linked DuMond to the teenager's abduction, forced submission to oral sex, and brief penetration. In the primitive blood-semen testing that had been done (DuMond's lawyer said a more expensive DNA test wasn't needed), DuMond's semen, as a match to a spot on the teen's jeans, couldn't be ruled out. (A DNA expert later testified in one of DuMond's numerous appeals that the spot did not match.) The judge wouldn't delay the trial for a single day so the defense could bring in its own witness. The teen had said her attacker had blue eyes; DuMond's are hazel. But she insisted (and still insists) that DuMond did it. It was her word against his. DuMond's trial lawyer never brought up her previous identification of someone else as her attacker.

DuMond was convicted and sent to prison. He got out on parole in October 1999. Now he lives in a small Missouri town outside of Kansas City. Dusty didn't live to see it; she died from injuries in a Christmas Eve 1998 car crash on her way to visit relatives in Ohio.

The pain of all those events seems to have left Wayne DuMond. He sees his torment as a political act.

"As to the reasons," he told the Voice, "there's never been but one: money. My wife and I were actively campaigning against the sheriff. We were being mouthy toward him in the wrong direction, you might say."

In 1986, Sheriff Conlee lost a bid for reelection. A couple of years later, he was put on trial for racketeering and other felonies. Several pals turned against him, including deputy Sambo Hughes, who tearfully testified about the routine extortion of black-owned nightclubs. Conlee was convicted and died in prison.

"Bill Clinton is the only person in Arkansas without any balls. He would fence-straddle to the extreme, and that created false expectations in some people."

As the sheriff faded into a bad memory, Wayne DuMond was still in prison. The DuMonds organized a campaign to get Governor Clinton to free him. They weren't exactly Marc Rich, but Dusty rounded up friends and family.

"Most of the people I know are blue-collar workers, trying to eke out the best living they can," said DuMond. "How do you take the savings of lower- and middle-class people and persuade some high-powered politician to do something of this nature? When he was running for president, there were people jabbing at him. They were jabbing at him in Ohio, in Florida, in Texas—'What are you going to do about Wayne DuMond?' "

Dusty struck pay dirt in Houston, where she was seeking work and living with relatives.

"She interviewed for a job with my husband," Debbie Riddle recalled. "And he asked her her primary goal, and her primary goal was to get her husband out of prison. It was a real shock to us."

Dusty DuMond was hired as a secretary in Mike Riddle's law firm. On October 12, 1991, Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton came to Houston. The big crowds flocked to Jackson. An active Republican, Debbie Riddle sought out the lesser-known Clinton at a health clinic where he was working a small gathering.

"I went up to him," she recalled, "and said, 'There is a man in your home state, incarcerated, and you put together a pardon committee to look and said you would respond according to their findings. And you didn't. And the young woman allegedly assaulted is related to you.'

"He got very angry. He said, 'He was convicted by a jury of his peers.' I said, 'Yes, without the DNA evidence.' He said, 'That was his defense attorney's fault.' "

Press reports at the time noted that the national reporters on the candidate's campaign trail were befuddled by the encounter, and Clinton's handlers steered him away from Riddle.

And he steered clear of a decision on DuMond.

"Bill Clinton is the only person in Arkansas without any balls," recalled John Wesley Hall, DuMond's attorney during their futile appeals and no enemy of Clinton. "He would fence-straddle to the extreme, and that created false expectations in some people."

Even after the details of Coolidge Conlee's ghoulish behavior surfaced, Clinton didn't abandon his Arkansas cronies. In December 1991, two months after Riddle confronted him, Clinton appointed Regan Hill, the Stevens Funeral Home employee, to the governing body of St. Francis County.

The way DuMond sees it, when Clinton had nothing to lose, why not help his buddies and why not pardon rich and powerful friends? Especially now that he's not only left Arkansas but left D.C.

"What does he care about that?" said DuMond. "He's gone as far as he can go."

[Emphasis added.]

But while what Slick Willy did was vile, to say the least, DuMond only got released not because he was innocent but because it was in the wingnuts interests to release him to embarrass Clinton. Because, you know, they're people of great principle (this is in fact an unsupported allegation).

On the other hand, DuMond got his ass released and went out to make up for his railroading by killing a woman.

Meanwhile, my mother-in-law found this guy's arrest for having sex while black a "travesty of justice". No, no, no; it's just S.O.P. for the South, no travesty at all. It's normal.

After more than two years in prison for having consensual oral sex with a fellow teenager, Genarlow Wilson shook the hand of a warden Friday at the Al Burruss Correctional Training Center in Forsyth, Ga., and smiled shyly as he walked into the arms of his waiting mother and young sister.

Rudy For Idiots; Today's Edition

You wouldn't know it from reading the papers, but the favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination is a confirmed right-winger. On issues such as free speech and religion, secrecy and due process, civil rights and civil liberties, pornography and democracy, this moralist and self-styled lawman has exhibited all the key hallmarks of Bush-era conservatism.

That candidate is Rudolph W. Giuliani.

As any New Yorker can tell you, the last word anyone in the 1990s would have attached to the brash, furniture- breaking mayor was "liberal" -- and the second-to-last was "moderate." With his take-many-prisoners approach to crime and his unerring pro-police instincts, the prosecutor-turned-proconsul made his mark on the city not by embracing its social liberalism but by trying to crush it.

Somehow, though, Giuliani is being introduced to the rest of America as a liberal. And the people pinning the L-word on him aren't just far-right spokesmen such as James Dobson or Richard Viguerie, to whom even the Bush administration looks squishily centrist. No, it's supposedly objective journalists who've been using the label. ABC News reporter Jake Tapper recently spoke offhandedly about the mayor's "liberal views on social issues." Echoed NPR's Mara Liasson: "Giuliani has liberal views on a number of social issues, including abortion." On washingtonpost.com, political blogger Chris Cillizza referred to the mayor's "liberal positions on social issues," even though Giuliani supports only limited abortion rights and gay rights.

To a New Yorker, the idea of Rudy as a liberal or even a moderate is unreal, topsy-turvy -- like describing George McGovern as a hawk or Pat Buchanan as a Zionist. The case for Giuliani's moderation rests mainly on three overblown issues -- guns, gay rights and abortion -- and even in those cases, his deviation from conservative orthodoxy is far milder than is usually suggested.

The "social" and "cultural" issues that divide Americans encompass much more than guns, gay rights and abortion. They include state support of religion; the legitimacy of dissenting speech; the president's right to keep information secret; the place of fair procedures in dispensing justice. The Bush administration's hard-line stands on these matters have polarized the nation as much as the Iraq war has. And on these issues, Giuliani is just as hard-line as the man he'd like to succeed.

If you've managed to keep liking President Bush, you'd have no trouble loving President Giuliani.

Consider the first of our freedoms: free speech. One emblematic act of Giuliani's mayorship was his 1999 attempt to censor an art exhibit because it featured a painting of the Virgin Mary that used an unusual form of mixed media -- clumps of elephant dung, to be precise. (Others were also upset by the cutouts of female genitalia.) Giuliani, a Catholic who attended parochial schools and once aspired to the priesthood, understandably took offense. But he then converted his religious sensibilities into policy, unilaterally withholding a $7 million city subsidy to the Brooklyn Museum of Art. When that failed to get the painting removed, he tried to evict the museum from its century-old home. Ultimately, after losing in court, he was forbidden to retaliate against the museum. So much for moderation.

Those who deem Rudy a liberal might also recall his plan to fund parochial schools with city money. His goal went far beyond letting Bible groups meet after hours in public classrooms: The mayor personally phoned Cardinal John O'Connor to hatch a plan that would have placed public school students in church-run schools with overtly Christian curricula -- including catechism and excluding sex education. It was the real liberals on the school board who stopped the plan.

Beyond religious issues, a second conservative trait defined Giuliani's tenure: his Cheney-esque appetite for executive power. In 1999, for example, he directed (without the City Council's permission) the police to permanently confiscate the cars of people charged with drunken driving -- even if the suspects were later acquitted.

Giuliani's record on government secrecy, too, is hardly moderate. Liberals today routinely attack President Bush's refusal to divulge information about his domestic wiretapping program and his 2001 executive order claiming the power to close presidential papers. But they rarely discuss an equally autocratic move that Giuliani made: cutting a deal with the city as he was leaving office to assign control of his mayoral records to his own private company so that he could decide who could see them.

The fanciful notion of Giuliani's liberalism also omits the pi¿ce de r¿sistance of his mayorship: his flagrantly undemocratic bid to stay in office for an extra three months after Sept. 11, 2001. During earlier crises, even World War II, U.S. elections had always managed to proceed normally. But Giuliani maneuvered for weeks to remain mayor after his term-limited exit date. Only as normalcy returned to New York did his power grab fail.

Finally, don't forget foreign policy, which has become a social issue in these parlous times. In pledging to carry on the Bush legacy abroad -- seeking to assuage Americans' feelings of vulnerability through brazen nationalism and the ready use of force -- Giuliani taps the same emotions he did with his crusades against crime and vice: a sense that a frustrated people want a no-nonsense leader who will buck the weak-kneed worrywarts, be they urban school officials or Democrats who flinch at warrantless wiretapping.

What's left of the case for Rudy's liberalism relies on three prongs: guns, gay rights and abortion. But even those positions, seen in context, don't render Giuliani a liberal or a moderate so much as an occasional and tepid dissenter from the GOP line -- which, over the past quarter-century, has become increasingly right-wing.

Take gun control first. Some people demand that their candidate endorse the right to plunk down a wad of cash anywhere, anytime, for a submachine gun. But for most conservative voters, what matters is a "tough on crime" stance, and if any issue has defined Giuliani's career -- from his years as a prosecutor frog-marching corrupt bankers down Wall Street to his staunch support as mayor for trigger-happy cops -- it's his conservative posture on criminal justice. While liberals such as Michael S. Dukakis were thought to embrace gun control to conceal their distaste for tougher measures, Giuliani has always been known as an avenger.

His stands on gay rights also don't quite merit the liberal label. Pundits often note that he lived with a gay couple after splitting with his second wife. But policy stands, not private behavior, define a politician's ideology. (Just ask Sen. Larry Craig.) Yes, Giuliani supports more gay rights than do other Republicans, but he still opposes same-sex marriage and has even denounced New Hampshire's law blessing civil unions.

On abortion, Giuliani, while technically pro-choice, is far from liberal: He favors outlawing what opponents call "partial birth" abortion, backs parental-notification laws and supports the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for most abortions under Medicaid.

Ultimately, the use of the labels "liberal" and "moderate" matters less than the reason why they're used: to suggest that core Republican voters won't support Giuliani's candidacy. But the numbers say otherwise. Although some right-wing religious leaders are talking about backing a third-party candidate if Rudy is nominated, few primary voters are likely to follow. Not only has Giuliani consistently led the GOP field, but pluralities of survey respondents tend to agree that he "shares the same values as most Republicans" and that on social issues he's neither too conservative nor too liberal but "about right."

Pundits are flummoxed. When George Stephanopoulos told an ABC News gabfest that a Gallup poll showed that 69 percent of "religious Republican evangelicals" deemed the mayor an "acceptable nominee," George F. Will protested: "I just can't believe that those voters are going to go for Rudy Giuliani." Cokie Roberts chimed in, "I just find it very hard to believe that Rudy Giuliani is going to come out of Iowa and South Carolina as the Republican front-runner." But testimony from rank-and-file voters suggests that they will indeed tolerate his mild heterodoxies on abortion because they like his overall ideology, especially on Iraq and terrorism. (A Pew poll found that only 7 percent of Republican voters consider abortion their chief concern, compared with the 31 percent who named Iraq.)

When Bush ran for president, his slippery slogan of "compassionate conservatism" convinced many Washington journalists that he was a moderate. When he then pushed a right-wing agenda, they were stunned. They hadn't looked hard enough at his record. Likewise, if Giuliani becomes president, he will probably emerge as an unabashed social conservative -- as seen in his judicial appointments, his efforts to aid religious schools, the free hand he gives the government in fighting crime and terrorism, and an all-around authoritarian style. Let's not get fooled again.

Link.

See How Wingnuts Grow; The Future Of America

Michigan State University Young Americans for Freedom have established their Anti-Muslim and Anti-Hindu ideology, and believe in a narrow form of fundamental Christianity, to the exclusion of other Christians.

However, now YAF seems to be taking on an Anti-Semitic Agenda.

YAF announced they are bringing Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party, to campus. The British National Party (BNP) is political party that supports white supremacy and anti-immigrant stances.

Griffin himself is also a well known Anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. The BBC did a special report on the BNP and Nick Griffin.

On Nick Griffin they reported his beliefs on several Jewish issues.

"On anti-Semitism
In 1997, Nick Griffin published a booklet entitled "Who are the Mind Benders?". It claimed to prove that Jewish people controlled the British media and thereby were able to brainwash white British people into accepting multiculturalism.

On the Holocaust
Between 1995 and 1997, Nick Griffin edited 'The Rune'. Griffin referred to the Holocaust as a "Holohoax".

In 1998 Nick Griffin said, "I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that 6 million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also also once held that the Earth was flat... I have reached the conclusion that the "extermination" tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter witch-hysteria."
Beyond inviting a well known Holocaust Denier to campus, and adding his blog to their blogroll, YAF has had other ties with anti-Semites.

It was reported on Michigan Messenger that MSU-YAF Chair Kyle Bristow was administrator to two Facebook groups run by Preston Wiginton, an anti-Semite who posts often on Stormfront, a white nationalist site frequented by Skinheads, Neo-Nazis, and Klu Klux Klan members.

YAF-Watch did a follow up article on how Wiginton had made posts in a Facebook group called Just Say NO to YAF, on which Kyle Bristow and MSU-YAF Legal Adviser Jason Van Dyke were participants.

Preston Wiginton has ties with the British National Party. The Guardian reported that Preston Wiginton ran a BNP Facebook group.

Earlier YAF-Watch reported about a December 22nd, 2005 post by YAF Chairman-at-Large Craig Burgers that seemed to support Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's statement defending Mussolini and World War II era anti-Jewish laws.

Also of interest is a recent addition to YAF's blogroll. They have, in addition to adding Nick Griffin's blog, the blog of the Saint Benedict Center.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reported in their Summer 2007 Intelligence Report that Saint Benedict Center is run by a group of anti-Semitic radical traditionalist Catholics.

Yet the Slaves hotly defend Feeney and his beliefs from any criticism, echoing the anti-Semitism of their founder as they do.

In 2004, SBC prior Louis Villarrubia, who goes by the name of Brother Andre Marie, put it like this: "If anti-Semitism means opposing the Jews on religious matters, opposing the Zionist state in Palestine (as St. Pius X did), or opposing the Jewish tendency to undermine public morals (widely acknowledged by Catholic writers before the present age of PC [political correctness]), then we could rightly be considered such."

That same year, The Boston Globe quoted Brother Anthony Mary, whose real name is Douglas Bersaw, blaming the Jews for the murder of Christ and denying the World War II Holocaust: "There's a lot of controversy among people who study the so-called Holocaust. There's a misperception that Hitler had a position to kill all the Jews. It's all a fraud. Six million people… it didn't occur."

In 2005, at a radical conference hosted by a group called St. Joseph's Forum, Bersaw added that "the perpetual enemy of Christ is the Jewish nation" and said Jews should be dealt with using "blood and terror if it's required."

Link. And the event itself is written up here.

And here are photos of what never happened... just fantasy illos.... (Sources: here and here.)

Rightwing Dementia For Children

Feel the hate here.

Rudy's Brains

Late in March, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was not at the time known as a zealous supply-sider, held a news conference in Midtown Manhattan to announce that the conservative activist and former presidential candidate Steve Forbes would become his campaign co-chairman.

In the happy bluster of the event (Forbes declared that a Giuliani administration would launch "an assault" on the federal tax code), the former New York mayor was asked whether he would endorse Forbes's signature policy, the flat tax. A decade earlier, when Forbes made the flat tax part of the policy discussion, Giuliani dismissed it out of hand. Now, Giuliani was amenable. "The flat tax," he said, "would make a lot of sense."

It seemed a surprisingly ideological declaration for a candidate who had been billed as the pragmatist and the moderate in the 2008 Republican presidential field. For conservatives who believe in the policy, it split the difference between a thrilling moment and a puzzling one. "I've got to tell you, I don't think he understands what the Steve Forbes flat tax proposal is," said Alan Viard, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

That Forbes and the Giuliani campaign had ever gotten together was largely the work of one man -- a longtime conservative insider and friend of Giuliani's who was once a Republican candidate for governor of California -- Bill Simon. Simon, the Giuliani campaign's policy director, had arranged a lunch at which Giuliani made the case to Forbes that he was the right kind of Republican. "What came through with both Bill and the mayor was that they really got it on the economy and on taxes," Forbes said.

Starting last fall, when Giuliani first called Simon and said he was running for president, Simon, 56, has been more responsible than anyone for Giuliani's policy education, and he has been the agent charged with managing the sometimes eager, sometimes awkward relationship between the former mayor of a liberal city and the conservative establishment.

Well before Giuliani said publicly that he would be a candidate, Simon put him through a rolling seminar that those in the campaign called Simon University, bringing in thinkers to brief Giuliani on key issues. The result is that though many of Giuliani's campaign operatives worked with him when he was mayor, his policy staffers, who have largely been assembled by Simon, come mostly from the think-tank world.

The roster of the seminars was a who's who of conservative intellectuals, and their ideas a menu of conservative thought. There were neoconservatives Norman Podhoretz, John R. Bolton and R. James Woolsey Jr. on foreign policy, as well as less ideological thinkers such as Gen. Anthony C. Zinni and Yale professor Charles Hill; the Hoover Institution's Michael Boskin on taxes and economic policy; Hoover's race scholars Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell; and retired Gen. Jack Keane and the military scholar Frederick W. Kagan, the authors of the Iraq "surge."

"Simon is an incredible asset for the Giuliani campaign," said Grover Norquist, a conservative anti-tax activist. "He has the added advantage for Giuliani of being a serious social conservative and a pro-lifer, which gives people some assurance that social conservatives and judges will not be ignored."

Though Giuliani's natural inclination has been to talk primarily about national security and his experiences managing the city government in New York, Simon has helped coach him to express himself more prominently on positions that might resonate with the Republican Right: his conservative-leaning disposition on tax and economic policy, and his strict-constructionist views on judges.

Giuliani's senior policy advisers tend to favor some of the least popular elements of Bush administration policy. His most visible foreign policy adviser, Podhoretz, supports an armed intervention in Iran and a lengthy stay in Iraq. Giuliani's lead economic adviser, Boskin, was a prominent proponent of privatizing Social Security and remains convinced of the long-term necessity of private accounts. And Forbes, his campaign co-chairman, believes the Bush tax cuts did not go far enough in cutting marginal tax rates for the wealthy.

This has left Simon managing two ambitious, politically essential projects at once: helping to demonstrate that Giuliani is a conservative, and trying, through Giuliani, to ensure that his corner of the conservative movement is still powerful enough to pick the Republican nominee.

Deep Roots in Conservatism
It is a tradition that Simon has a stake in defending. His father, William E. Simon Sr., was a wealthy Wall Street bond trader who became secretary of the Treasury under President Richard M. Nixon and, later, a legendary architect of the modern conservative movement. But he was also legendarily mean, "a mean, nasty, tough bond trader who took no BS from anyone," in the words of his old friend Ed Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation. Simon would awaken his children on weekend mornings by dousing their heads with buckets of cold water.

The elder Simon came away from the experience of Watergate with a disgust for the partisan character of the affair, and the capital. The experience of impeachment convinced him, like members of the liberal "Net roots" 30 years later, not that partisanship was necessarily poisonous, but that his opponents were far better at partisanship than his side was.

The experience "had a very combative influence on Bill Simon the father," said James Piereson, president of the William E. Simon Foundation. Simon would spend the remainder of his life helping to redress the balance -- spending years on the boards of the Heritage and Olin foundations and the Hoover Institution -- in his person melding the old Republican establishment with the antsy, rising conservative one.

For all the aggression of his father's parenting style, Bill Simon Jr. followed him in his politics ("basically a chip off the old block in terms of his perspective," Feulner says); his deeply felt, conservative Catholicism (a Knight of Malta, Simon makes a pilgrimage to the cathedral in Lourdes, France, every year); and ultimately, his career.

After Williams College and law school at Boston College, Simon went to work for Giuliani, then the U.S. attorney in New York. Simon said he saw an innovative public policy sensibility in his old boss: "Rudy pioneered investigations in the forfeiture area, the use of criminal RICO [racketeering law], areas of law that hadn't previously been explored."

By the late 1990s, Simon had moved to Los Angeles and was running his family's investment firm with his brother and father and serving on the boards of conservative groups: Heritage, Hoover and his father's foundation. He struck associates as less of an ideologue than his father, a quick study but not a committed policy man.

In 2000, three months after his father died, Simon decided to run for governor after being approached by some members of the California Republican organization. Simon ran as the conservative in the Republican primary in 2002, attacking Democratic Gov. Gray Davis over the looming budget deficit, and used his experience at Hoover and Heritage to frame himself as the candidate of ideas needed to fix a failing state.

Simon cast himself as an insurgent conservative candidate, and he upset the favorite in the primary, former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, a moderate. Later, as it became clear that a Davis victory in the general election was likely, Simon's media consultant, Ed Rollins, developed a very aggressive, last-ditch, anti-immigration television ad that he wanted the campaign to run. Opinion in the campaign was divided; many thought it simply nasty, politics at its worst, while others considered it Simon's last, best chance.

Simon decided not to run the ad, and he lost by five percentage points.

'Proud to Be His Friend'
During presidential campaigns, relationships can come encased in legend. For Simon, the source of his legend is that he happened to be in New York on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and happened to be eating breakfast with the mayor when the World Trade Center was struck.

They were discussing Simon's gubernatorial bid and preparing to leave when Giuliani got the call and rushed downtown. Simon watched the next days unfold and saw Giuliani acquire the aura that has been a sustaining basis of his presidential candidacy. "When I watched Rudy on TV, I wouldn't say I was surprised about how he reacted," Simon recalls, "but I will say I was proud to be his friend."

Over the summer of 2006, as Giuliani began to seriously contemplate a presidential run, Simon began hosting occasional roundtables with scholars at Stanford University's Hoover Institution during the former mayor's California trips. He eventually signed on as the policy director for his friend's presidential campaign.

For Simon, Giuliani's record as mayor described a pragmatist who didn't enjoy just a casual affinity with grass-roots conservatives because they both hated liberals -- he was also a thinker for whom pragmatism and an instinctual conservatism were intertwined. "It's kind of a chicken-and-egg thing," Simon said when asked whether he believes Giuliani is a conservative by ideological conviction or came to his politics through the process of governing. "But both of those two lines are there."

The Simon University seminars that the policy mavens helped put together to refine Giuliani's conservative sensibilities were designed to mirror sessions Giuliani had sat through 15 years earlier, between his first, failed run for mayor of New York and his second, successful one.

Those sessions helped turn Giuliani into an innovative pragmatist as mayor, an empiricist who leaned on new technologies to help dramatically reduce crime and presided over a new urban prosperity.

But with Giuliani unlikely now to attract many conservative voters through his positions on social issues, Simon and the Giuliani campaign have tried, with some success, to suggest that his record in New York reveals a conservative's instincts.

On the stump, a few quiet accomplishments from Giuliani's eight years as mayor have been widely aired: The campaign has emphasized the decline in the number of abortions in New York while he was mayor. And the candidate has spoken frequently, and with a supply-side feeling, about the results of his cut in the hotel occupancy tax -- a move, he says, that helped fill hotels and thus drove up the city's revenue from the tax.

The hotel occupancy tax is a good sale for conservatives because it was a "miniature supply-side experiment," Norquist said. "I like people who can explain to you why they did it and why it worked, and Giuliani can." This presentation of Giuliani's record has also won him accolades from the conservative Club for Growth.

But if this presentation of Giuliani, a fiscal conservative with some socially conservative leanings, has worked in some circles in Washington, it has struck many New York insiders as something between a moderately misleading recasting of his record and naked spin.

Fran Reiter, a New York operative who managed Giuliani's mayoral reelection campaign, broke with him last month, signing on with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). "He took a political turn to the right -- clearly," Reiter said at the time.

Others say Giuliani's current positioning is out of touch with the reality of his governance. The nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission -- a business-backed watchdog group in New York -- recently put out a report highly critical of Giuliani's performance. It found that though his term as mayor coincided with a tremendous economic boom in the city, he left a larger budget deficit in his last year than his predecessor, Democrat David N. Dinkins, had left him. The group says he cut too-generous deals with municipal unions and failed most fiscal conservative tests.

"This idea that he was squeezing blood out of a stone is completely ridiculous," said John Mollenkopf, a professor of political science and sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Other observers say a close examination of Giuliani's record in New York reveals a man whose economic policy, in the words of Jonathan Bowles, "almost exclusively focused on providing discretionary tax breaks to a small number of the largest corporations," rather than the broad tax simplification and supply-side sensibility he now endorses.

Bowles, the director of the Center for an Urban Future, found that Giuliani gave more than 70 tax breaks to individual companies in order to keep them in New York, "even though some said openly they would not have left if they had not gotten the tax breaks."

Steering the Campaign
These days, Simon divides his time between California -- where his investment firm is, and where he is chair of the state's Giuliani campaign -- and New York, at campaign headquarters. Every Monday, he hosts a call during which a few senior members of the campaign staff -- Stephen Goldsmith, a former mayor of Indianapolis; John Avlon, Simon's deputy; and Piereson -- go over policies and speeches in development.

It is clear, during these calls, that the group is proud of Giuliani's foreign policy stance and sees something historic in it. The candidate's essay in Foreign Affairs remains a touchstone and is discussed as the basis for upcoming speeches and articles.

Giuliani framed the piece around the "long war" with Muslim fundamentalists and said the United States should not now be working toward the establishment of a Palestinian state. He advocated building a missile defense system and increasing the number of combat brigades, and he suggested that U.S. policy toward Iran, "should all else fail," might focus on destroying that nation's nuclear arsenal.

One of Simon's self-appointed roles during these calls is to urge the group toward even minor policy points that can distinguish Giuliani from the other candidates. Another role is to operate as a political compass, helping to ensure that the campaign's conservative message is preserved.

One recent Monday, the group was discussing a speech that Giuliani was scheduled to give before the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group. "We have an embarrassment of riches with respect to federalism," Goldsmith said. "We have I bet the top 10 federalism scholars."

Simon jumped in. "Did you guys see the op-ed in today's [Wall Street] Journal by Stephen Calabresi?" he asked. Calabresi, an adviser to the campaign, is the founder of the Federalist Society and a proponent of originalism, a theory of law favored by many conservatives that stresses that constitutional questions should be informed by asking how the document was perceived in the framers' own time. "Maybe there's a way to weave some of the originalism into the speech in November." The group agreed to try.

In its composition and its intended audience, the Giuliani policy team can sometimes seem self-contained, a subsidiary of the conservative think-tank world. A lingering danger for the campaign is that with this association it may be linking itself too closely to unpopular policies of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress, and to an elite form of conservatism.

Some of Giuliani's foreign policy advisers in particular -- Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes and Michael Rubin -- seem similar in outlook and approach to the neoconservatives whom some blame for pushing the nation into the Iraq war.

Simon, who talks frequently of making sure that the policy team encompasses the whole sprawl of conservative ideas, is sensitive on this point. "The head of our foreign policy unit, Charles Hill, is not a neocon; Robert Conquest, Ruth Wedgewood, these people are not neocons," he said. "If you look to the people who came in to brief the mayor -- Tony Zinni is not a neocon. In fairness, I think it's an eclectic mix."

In some of the early primary states, the campaign's embrace of the conservative establishment and resulting distance from the Republican Party's grass roots -- such as evangelical Christians, who have reacted with suspicion if not hostility to Giuliani -- has looked like a political risk. The campaign in Iowa, said David Redlawsk, a political scientist at the University of Iowa and the director of the Hawkeye Poll, has been harmed by a perception that it is out of touch, a view that "is partly a consequence of having a campaign that operates from a top-down, East Coast perspective."

Simon and Giuliani's policy team spent much of the spring working to outline what the campaign has called its Twelve Commitments, promises Giuliani is making to the American voter. Some of these promises seem standard Republican fare: restoring fiscal discipline, cutting taxes and simplifying the tax code. In others, there are flickers of Giuliani's experience in New York (instituting school choice) and pugnaciousness (he promises "to keep America on offense in the terrorists' war on us").

And then there are policies that might please the conservative base: a declared preference for the strict-constructionist judges the base prefers, and a pledge to "increase adoptions, decrease abortions, and protect the quality of life for our children."

On the big questions, Simon seems content to let Giuliani stand for an extension of the Bush administration, with all the political promise and risk that contains.

When asked to detail the ways in which a Giuliani administration would be different from the Bush administration, he is reticent.

"I think I would shy away," Simon said, "from pointing out differences."

Link.

And then there's this genius:

Norman Podhoretz believes that America needs to go to war soon with Iran. As far as he knows, Rudy Giuliani thinks the same thing.

“I was asked to come in and give him a briefing on the war, World War IV,” said Mr. Podhoretz, a founding father of neoconservatism and leading foreign policy adviser to Mr. Giuliani. “As far as I can tell there is very little difference in how he sees the war and how I see it.”

During a long interview this week in his bookcase-lined East 81st Street home, Mr. Podhoretz, 77, explained the very straightforward proposition he has been proposing to Mr. Giuliani from the start of the campaign: “The choice before us is either bomb those nuclear facilities or let them get the bomb.”

In the apartment, a Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by President Bush was displayed next to records of Bach and Beethoven, tin African sculptures and Japanese furniture. A picture of his son, John Podhoretz, the new editor of Commentary, which he himself edited for decades, was stuck to the refrigerator. Two of his grown Israeli grandchildren, one in a tank top, the other in an Atari T-shirt, watched television in John’s old room.

In July, Mr. Giuliani named Mr. Podhoretz a senior adviser on a foreign policy team subsequently stockpiled with more neoconservatives, including Middle East historian Daniel Pipes and Paul Wolfowitz acolyte Michael Rubin.

To Mr. Podhoretz’s obvious admiration, the Giuliani campaign seems to have become something of a lifeboat for neoconservatives shipwrecked after the Bush administration’s failures in Iraq.

“Well, I’m not finished,” said Mr. Podhoretz, who has just come out with a new book titled World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism.

“I think it is interesting that he doesn’t think that this is a liability,” he continued. “He is certainly aware of the fact that some people see it as a liability or use it against him.”

Not, Mr. Podhoretz believes, that all voters will see things that way.

“It’s certainly not hurt him in the South,” he said. “It may be that he thinks having a preponderance of hawks among his advisers, forget about neoconservatives, is good for his campaign. And from what I can gather, this has proved to be the case in South Carolina—you have a lot of military families.”

In addition, while his foreign policy ideas may be in bad odor with voters, they most certainly seem to remain the prevailing sentiment in the White House, with President Bush talking about “WWIII” in relation to Iran and Vice President Dick Cheney this week promising “serious consequences” if Tehran does not abandon its nuclear program.

And just as he has helped encourage Mr. Giuliani’s muscular international posture, Mr. Podhoretz can take some credit for the Bush administration’s articulated worldview.

In late spring, he met with President Bush at the Waldorf Astoria to share his views about what to do with Iran. As Karl Rove took notes, Mr. Podhoretz stressed that anything short of military action to prevent Iran from getting nuclear capabilities would fail, and that America needs to strike to prevent another Holocaust. Mr. Bush and Mr. Rove, Mr. Podhoretz recalled, laughed when he indirectly referred to the futility of the current American policy of pressuring Iran with sanctions and diplomatic isolation.

“I thought if they had believed in what they were doing there, they would get their backs up and say, ‘No, it’s not futile,’” Mr. Podhoretz said.

Other than that, the president didn’t tip his hand. But, turning the conversation back to the former mayor, Mr. Podhoretz said, “Rudy is another matter.”

MR. PODHORETZ SAID he has seen ample evidence that Mr. Giuliani supports the idea of military strikes. He referred to a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition earlier this month in which Mr. Giuliani said, “If I’m president of the United States, I guarantee you we will never find out what they will do if they get nuclear weapons, because they’re not going to get nuclear weapons.”

Although Mr. Giuliani’s closest competitors, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson, have also tried to project a tough line, Mr. Podhoretz said he doubted their nerve.

“Do I think that Giuliani would take that action? I personally think he would,” said Mr. Podhoretz. “I don’t know who Romney is. I have no sense of him. I don’t know who Fred Thompson is. He talks the talk. My guess has been all along is that he has been so popular, even if he is less popular now, because people think they are voting for Arthur Branch of Law and Order.”

Not surprisingly, Mr. Podhoretz was even more scathing in his assessment of the position of leading Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, who advocates vigorous diplomacy and has rejected the “false choice” between imminent war and a nuclear Iran. He was particularly derisive about Mrs. Clinton for voting to label Iran’s Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization and then proposing legislation to block Mr. Bush from attacking Iran without Congressional approval.

“It’s the Kerry—she voted for it before she voted against it,” he said. “It’s a tactic, and it didn’t work for him and it isn’t going to work for her. If Rudy does get the nomination, I think that will be one of the vulnerabilities he will be able to hit her on.”

Nor is Mr. Podhoretz’s opprobrium reserved for blowhard politicians. While Mr. Giuliani has been reluctant to criticize military officials openly, Mr. Podhoretz plainly disdains those of them who have been skeptical about launching a war with Iran.

He thinks John Abizaid, the retired Army general who headed Central Command for nearly four years and who recently said, “There are ways to live with a nuclear Iran,” reflects a growing sense of defeatism in the foreign policy firmament as diplomacy fails. As for Admiral William Fallon, the U.S. commander in the Middle East, who recently said the “constant drumbeat of war is not helpful,” Mr. Podhoretz prefers to cite his analysis that the United States has the military capability necessary to attack Iran. “He says we have the capability,” Mr. Podhoretz said. “That is all he is required to say.”

Asked to comment for this story, Giuliani campaign spokesperson Maria Comella said, “Mayor Giuliani has a range of advisors to provide him information on foreign policy issues and at the end of the day Mayor Giuliani’s viewpoints regarding foreign policy are his own.”

ONE CRITICISM OF Mr. Podhoretz’s latest book is that it is more preoccupied with his enemies in America than the Islamofascists he says we are at war with. In it, Mr. Podhoretz takes aim at the realists, the liberal internationalists and the isolationists.

He explained in the interview that he has felt victimized by antiwar bloggers who call him “pathological scum” or demand that he return to Israel. (“Where I’m from is Brownsville in Brooklyn,” he said.) The protesters who recently forced him and his wife to get a police escort after a reading of his book at Barnes and Noble were proof of what he says are uniquely venomous times.

To Mr. Podhoretz, his critics are myopic to the point of blindness.

“My view has been, and I very much doubt that Giuliani would disagree with what I am about to say, what we are doing is to try and clear the ground that has been covered over at least since WWI,” he said. “Draining the swamps is the beginning of the process of clearing the ground, and planting the seeds from which institutions can grow the foundations of a free society.”

In the context of a broader, longer war that he expects will take at least three decades to win, the casualties that the United States has so far endured are “miniscule.” He says that fretting about whether to attack Iran sends only a message of weakness to the combined Shiite and Sunni enemies in the Middle East. And, like Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Podhoretz thinks that the creation of an independent Palestinian state would now only create another terrorist state.

Instead, America should be working to overthrow governments in Saudi Arabia, Syria and Egypt and “every one of the despotic regimes in that region, by force if necessary and by nonmilitary means if possible,” he said. “They are fronts of the war. You can’t do everything at once. And to have toppled two of those regimes in five years or six years is I think a major achievement. And maybe George Bush won’t be able to carry it further, but I think he will. It may have just been given to him to start act one of the five-act play.”

Presidential Portrait

Link. Photo montage of Beloved Leader -- made up of photos of our forces killed in Iraq, not a one he cares about.

See It Now! Our Primary Leader In Inaction, Showing His Concern For His Fellow Americans

Link.

Of course, Ronnie Raygun did this all the time too. And of course it's not like he needs to hear what he Knows Beloved Leader is saying since he or his people told B.L. what to say... (maybe nneded to hear him, though, to make sure he didn't screw up...).

A Jewess Wants To Be Perfected By Ann Coulter

Second Jew finally comes out in support for Ann. (First one is Andrew "Slimy" Stein, who maybe is not be being perfected by Ann but is having something else done by her. Look, look, look!)



Really, though, this is all overblown. Christianity is amazingly shallow yet broad in its mutability. Some believes that despite his position on the wealthy, Jesus nonetheless is happy to make people wealthy anyway. Then there are those for whom converting non-Christians is an imperative.

Our Leaders In Action

Andrew Belonsky: So, you’ve compiled these sixty scandals - everyone from Jack Ryan to John Paulk - do you have a favorite of those sixty?

Joseph Minton Amann: I have some favorite excuses. It’s hard to approach some these sex scandals in a humor book. Someone like Ted Haggard is pretty easy. When a pastor is doing crystal meth with a male hooker, that’s ideal. You couldn’t hope for better. But, you get into some of these child molestation things and it’s really hard to find a humorous approach. You’ll often find humors in those excuses: “That girl said I attacked her, but I actually tripped and fell on her”. My whole mentality is if you’re going to trip and fall on a young girl, you should probably pull your pants and underwear up first. Just as a general rule of thumb.

AB: Did you hear about the Reverend Gary Aldridge?

JMA: Yep.

AB: That’s crazy. I’m sorry it didn’t make the book.

JMA: We’re launching a website: conservativesexscandals.com. It will be up next week. It’ll promote the book, but it will also be a way for us to deal with the scandals that we weren’t able to get in.. When we were doing this, we were looking for someone to write the forward and the first person who came to mind was Larry Flynt, because he has really taken a “let’s weed these people out” approach before they take office. When we asked him to write the forward, he said “Yes” right away. One of the notes he made when he was talking to us about it was “This isn’t a finite subject”. It’s not going to be over when we stop writing and it’s not going to be over when it publishes, so we decided to have a website to continually have updates.

AB: We have seen a surprising amount of political outings or sex scandals. Do you think it’s people like Larry Flynt and Mike Rogers who are asking for tips or do you think these people want to get caught? They’re just getting sloppy.

JMA: I think there is a little bit of that finger in dyke - which is a really horrible sounding metaphor. The concept that when repression builds - any kind of repression - when you really repress that, it comes out in a really unhealthy way. I think these people - what’s sad is that this is what they’re teaching their kids: “Don’t want that, don’t do that and everything will be okay”. Well, it’s not okay and it ends up coming out either people get hurt in the process or your family, your constituency… There are certain ones where it’s kind of fun to see the mighty fall. Ted Haggard was so pompous and talking about his “healthy” sexuality. When you have that pomposity about it and you look down on other people, I think a lot of people want to see you fall. I also think a lot of these people are - I don’t know if it’s that they want to get caught, but I think that they’re obviously getting caught up in self-destructive behavior, which catches up with them.

AB: In addition to taking these people’s careers and costing the Republicans elections, these scandals also perpetuate pretty gross myths about gay people.

JMA: Oh, like “That that’s what it means to be gay: to smoke crystal meth with hookers.” I think that helps gay people, because - I used to work for a furniture manufacturing company in Wisconsin and a lot of the people that I worked with, this was their first introduction to a gay person. What they start to see - I think that Ted Haggard-types help, because people who see healthy gay people around them, they start to realize that “Wow, when you don’t lead a healthy life style, you do act out in unhealthy ways”.

AB: But then you have people - like everyone who was in Washington this weekend for the Values Voter summit and people in Ted Haggard’s church - who think “Oh, well, this is exactly why homosexuality’s so wrong! It tempts you to do terrible things!”

JMA: Those people are kind of unsalvageable - really. If you’re going to see it that way. Chances are their kids are salvageable, but there are always going to be certain people that - it’s that way with racism, sexism, homophobia - there are always going to be people who are too far gone. You are not going to be able to show them that not all black people are trying to mug you and all women are trying to control their husbands. They’re always going to have those prejudices. Living in middle America, moving from Chicago back up into Wisconsin, it’s been very interesting to me to live in a town of 60,000 or something people and see that homosexuality is pretty accepted. It really is. You see little pockets of people who feel it’s immoral, but if you allow yourself to spend time with them, it kinds of dissipates when they see that you’re like everyone else.

AB: Do you think gay aspects of scandals matter? For example, nobody cares about Vitter anymore and his hookers, but everyone still cares about Larry Craig. Obviously they’re different cases, but it seems to me that there’s a gay tone to it makes it even more sensational. In the introduction to the book, you talk about what makes a really good sex scandal. Does homosexuality make it more sensational?

JMA: Yeah, it makes it more salacious. Had Larry Craig been a very liberal Republican who said, “Republicans need to lay off the gay issues” and then got caught in a homosexual affair, it wouldn’t be as big of a story as it is. I think the hypocrisy of it makes it big. That’s why I think that’s why Jim McGreevey and Larry Craig are so different. McGreevey got go on Oprah and say “I’m a gay American”. If you’re liberal, people will say, “Oh, he tried to apologize to his wife and -” People got over it. If you’re out campaigning against gays and against gay rights… Obviously guys doing it are more salacious than a man or a woman.

AB: How do you feel about the way the Republicans are treating Larry Craig?

JMA: It’s interesting. One of the key ones is how Romney’s been treating him. He had really done a lot for Romney and for Romney, the first thing to do was assume Craig was guilty and denounce him, because people will forgive that more than if he had supported Craig and then had egg on his face later. He took the safer approach, although it may have been the more callous and mean-spirited approach. I think the majority of Republicans were politically smart to instantly distance themselves and not do what they did with Foley. You know, I don’t know what I would do in their position. It’s hard when someone confesses and support them in changing their story.

AB: Do you think the Republicans have a chance?

JMA: I think everyone has a chance. I think their best chance is Giuliani and they don’t like it. They don’t like they would have to run a socially liberal guy who had done drag a lot and doesn’t want to get involved in gay issues. On paper, he’s probably a true conservative - have a federal government be small and let states deal with all the sex stuff - I don’t think they want that. They’re used to having the federal government push their social agenda. You know, I would like to Hillary to win, but I wouldn’t feel like the Republican winning would be the end of the world, either. I would love to have an election where I got there and say, “This is the guy that I’d like to win, but if the other guy wins I’m not going to puke”. That, to me, would be a victory.

AB: What do you want to accomplish with this book?

JMA: The main thing that I would like to see happen is that when people start - to move away from this party of family values. It’s such a load of bullshit. If projects like this can make it so that when people say that, people laugh at them, “You can say you’re the party of lower taxes, God love ya. You can say you’re the party of fast military action. Great. But don’t come back and say you’re the party of family values, ’cause you’re not.” That’s the best thing that could happen.

Link.

And you can find the book here.

GOP Candidate Lie Of The Moment

Christian nation, my ass. Just a lie spread by Christofascists pandering to the religious "right" -- in this case, by a dope who really might not know better -- not that anything fact-based would stoip him.

PolitiFact:

1 out of 56 equals 'most'? No, it doesn't

During the Republican debate, Mike Huckabee said he believes one of the defining issues facing the country is the sanctity of human life. Arguing that the issue is of historical importance, he invoked the Declaration of Independence's rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and said that most of the signers of the declaration were clergymen.

Not even close.

Only one of the 56 was an active clergyman, and that was John Witherspoon. Witherspoon was a Presbyterian minister and president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).

A few more of the signers were former clergymen, though it's a little unclear just how many. The conservative Heritage Foundation said two other signers were former clergymen. The religion web site Adherents.com said four signers of the declaration were current or former full-time preachers. But everyone agrees only Witherspoon was an active minister when he signed the Declaration of Independence.

One issue that may contribute to the confusion about which signers had a history in the clergy is that during the time the Declaration was written, people who studied at universities often received doctorates of divinity, a common degree designation, even if they were not working clergy, said Mary Jenkins of the Independence National Historical Park. As for religious affiliations, all of the signers were Protestant Christians with one exception, Charles Carroll of Maryland, who was Roman Catholic.

We'd like to give Huckabee every benefit of the doubt, but even if you consider former clergymen among the signers the best you could come up with is four. Out of 56. That's not "most," that's Pants-on-Fire wrong.

Prospering Through The Sub-Prime Crisis

Why should the lenders of disaster worry? They're the "victims" getting protection and a pass from Our Leaders, not the true victims, the borrowers.

Fox Bidness Journal:

Countrywide Financial Corp.'s stock price rebounded sharply from its recent lows as the mortgage lender said it will eke out a modest profit in the current quarter after recording a $1.2 billion loss for the third period.

***

Foreclosed real estate held by Countrywide totaled $676.1 million at the end of the quarter, up from $251.2 million at the end of 2006.

The damage has spread well beyond subprime loans, those made to people with weak credit records. One area of concern is the $26.8 billion of option adjustable-rate mortgages, or option ARMs, held as investments by Countrywide's savings bank. These loans, though classified as prime, are risky because they allow minimal payments in the early years but leave borrowers exposed to much higher ones later. Excluding loans made this year, payments were at least 90 days late on 3.3% of these loans as of Sept. 30, up from 0.3% a year earlier.

Like other lenders, Countrywide has had to become far more conservative after years of lax lending. It is demanding bigger down payments and adding restrictions to loans for investors and people who don't fully document their incomes or assets. Under the new guidelines, Countrywide said, 89% of the option ARMs granted in 2006 wouldn't be made.

***

Fresh foreclosure figures for California, Countrywide's biggest market, illustrate the challenge ahead. DataQuick Information Systems, a La Jolla, Calif., real-estate research firm, said the number of notices of default -- which can be filed when mortgage payments are 90 days late -- totaled 72,571, more than double the year-earlier level and topping the previous record of 61,541 in the first three months of 1996. About half of the defaults were concentrated in the region called the Inland Empire, which consists of two counties east of Los Angeles, and in the Central Valley, the heart of California's farm belt.

Fewer than half of the homeowners in default emerged from the foreclosure process by bringing their payments current, refinancing or selling their homes, compared with 81% a year ago, DataQuick said. Many homes had multiple loans, complicating negotiations with lenders. The number of California homes lost to lenders in foreclosure totaled 24,209 in the quarter, seven times as high as a year earlier and the highest level in DataQuick's statistics, which go back to 1988.

And see how the lenders whine here.

Our Leaders: Idiocy In Leadership

Two fresh examples from the War Room.

This can only be construed as an insult to the lap-dog press and, more importantly, the citizens:

Dana Perino said many words at today's White House press briefing. Here are some of them:

"OK. Happy Friday. I do not have anything to start with ...

"Well, I'm not going to comment on market conditions or market movements. There's a lot of different factors that go into that ...

"Look, the problem here isn't the United States. It's not the international community. The problem is Iran ...

"You're going to have to ask FEMA ...

"Again, this is not -- the United States is not at fault. The international community is not at fault. Iran is at fault for not stopping its activities ...

"I'm not going to comment on it ...

"Iran has a choice to make. The problem is not with us; it is with Iran ...

"Well, I think it's a little bit more complicated than that, how sanctions work. And I'll have to refer you over to Stuart Levey at the Treasury Department for how all that works ...

"Well, I'm not an economist. And we could try to get you together with Eddie Lazear ...

"I'm not going to comment on the market movements ...

"Can I look into it?

"We'll get back to you on it ...

"Every time I come in here, you ask me about President Putin's comments and it's like you want me to say something derogatory or negative about another world leader on behalf of the president. And I'm not going to do it ...

"I am not saying that ...

"I didn't get a chance to sit down on that, but I'll check ...

"I can't remember exactly what our position is ...

"It's the first I've heard of it. And I don't know what the president's position is on it ...

"I'm not well-versed in all of the details ...

"But I'll ask Tony Fratto to get back to you on that ...

"I think it's too early to say ...

"I'm not going to comment on those press reports ...

"I'm sorry. I'm not well-versed in it, but we'll try to get you an answer ..."

A new low in the art, as it were, of lying:

Given what sometimes passes for journalism in Washington, it may have been just as well ... but did the folks at the Federal Emergency Management Agency really think it would be a good idea to have FEMA employees pose as reporters and ask softball questions during a FEMA press briefing on the California fires this week?

Well, yes, it appears that they did. And now that they've been caught, they still do.

As the Washington Post's Al Kamen reports, at least three and maybe four FEMA public relations staffers asked questions of FEMA deputy administrator Harvey Johnson during what was billed as a news briefing Tuesday. Fox and MSNBC both carried parts of the briefing live, apparently with no mention -- probably because they didn't know -- that the reporters asking questions weren't actually reporters at all.

Mike Widomski, FEMA's deputy director of public affairs, was one of the phony reporters and seems to be entirely untroubled by the episode. He tells Kamen: "If the worst thing that happens to me in this disaster is that we had staff in the chairs to ask questions that reporters had been asking all day -- trust me, I'll be happy."

Update: FEMA issued a statement this afternoon saying that it is "reviewing" its "press procedures" to ensure that its future communications are "straightforward and transparent." "The real story -- how well the response and recovery elements are working in this disaster -- should not be lost because of how we tried to meet the needs of the media in distributing facts," the agency says. "We can and must do better, and apologize for this error in judgment."

At the White House, press secretary Dana Perino said that the White House didn't know about the phony briefing before it happened and does not approve of the concept. "FEMA has issued an apology, saying that they had an error judgment when they were attempting to get out a lot of information to reporters, who were asking for answers to a variety of questions in regard to the wildfires in California," Perino said. "It's not something I would have condoned."

Homeland Insecurity

Soon, we will all be terrorist suspects....

The government's terrorist watch list has swelled to more than 755,000 names, according to a new government report that has raised worries about the list's effectiveness.

The size of the list, typically used to check people entering the country through land border crossings, airports and sea ports, has been growing by 200,000 names a year since 2004. Some lawmakers, security experts and civil rights advocates warn that it will become useless if it includes too many people.

"It undermines the authority of the list," says Lisa Graves of the Center for National Security Studies. "There's just no rational, reasonable estimate that there's anywhere close to that many suspected terrorists."

The exact number of people on the list, compiled after 9/11 to help government agents keep terrorists out of the country, is unclear, according to the report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Some people may be on the list more than once because they are listed under multiple spellings.

Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who plans a hearing on the report today, says "serious hurdles remain if (the list) is to be as effective as we need it to be. Some of the concerns stem from its rapid growth, which could call into question the quality of the list itself."

Link.

Terrorist Victory: Al-Qaida Victory

The Raw Story:

MSNBC host Keith Olbermann says the realistic threat of terrorism is being so overstated by the Bush administration -- and in turn, by Fox News -- that it's downright funny.

"What happens when the culture of fear begins to inspire not terror or outrage, but laughter?" asked Olbermann. "Am I being too optimistic, or has giggling now passed paranoia in response to the president and these macabre parrots working at Fox?"

Olbermann cited a report yesterday carried by Fox News which suggested that Al Qaeda may be the true culprit behind the rash of recent California wildfires. Basing their coverage on an article it said ran "five days ago" in the Arizona Republic, the Fox and Friends morning program discussed an FBI memo stating that an Al Qaeda detainee had brought up the possibility of such a plan.

Calling the the report "almost all wrong," the host took the network to task for grossly misreporting the age of the memo:

"The memo was reported not...five days ago, but six days ago -- plus 1,560 more days ago," said Olbermann. "The memo is from July 11, 2003. The Arizona Republic is a newspaper. Congratulations, Fox. But it has not been carrying the story...the guy who reported it doesn't even work there anymore."

Later in the program, Olbermann made up his own terror rumor about Al Qaeda's far-reaching powers:

"I heard Al Qaeda causes night to fall," he warned.

Today's Micro$oft Bashing

From my beloved, The Register:

Something seems to have gone horribly wrong in an untold number of IT departments on Wednesday after Microsoft installed a resource-hogging search application on machines company-wide, even though administrators had configured systems not to use the program.

"The admins at my place were in a flap this morning because Windows Desktop Search 3.01 had suddenly started installing itself on desktops throughout the company," a Reg reader by the name of Rob informs us. "The trouble is that once installed, the indexer kicks in and slows the machines down."

The blogosphere is buzzing with similar reports, as evidenced by postings here (http://sadjadbp.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!21F12BB61B822DFA!263.entry), here (http://dblume.livejournal.com/78836.html) and here (http://www.davidarno.org/2007/10/24/microsoft-update-strikes-again/).

"I'm slighly pissed of [sic] at M$ right now," an admin in charge of 3,000 PCs wrote in a comment to the first aforementioned link. "All the clients have slowed to a crawl, and the file servers are having problems with the load."

According to Reg tipster Rob, Windows Server Update Services (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/wsus/default.aspx) (WSUS) forced Windows Desktop Services (WDS) 3.01 on the fleet of machines even though admins had configured their system to install updates only for existing programs and the search program wasn't installed on any machines (well, until then, anyway).

***

It's been a rough several weeks for managers running Microsoft's auto update services. Last month, bloggers disclosed the existence of a Windows patch that silently and automatically installed itself (http://www.theregister.com/2007/09/14/microsoft_dispels_stealth_update_rumors/) even on Machines configured not to install updates. Critics cried foul on the principle that users should have absolute control over their machines. They also argued that the stealth update could hamper compliance requirements.

***

The revelation that Microsoft is pushing yet more installations not explicitly agreed to by administrators is not likely to sit well with this same vocal contingent. Redmond may want to don the asbestos suits now.

Meanwhile, the Fox Bidness Journal readers speak:

THIS Is A Man Of Genuine Principal

In January 1955, Homer Jacobson, a chemistry professor at Brooklyn College, published a paper called “Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life” in American Scientist, the journal of Sigma Xi, the scientific honor society.

In it, Dr. Jacobson speculated on the chemical qualities of earth in Hadean time, billions of years ago when the planet was beginning to cool down to the point where, as Dr. Jacobson put it, “one could imagine a few hardy compounds could survive.”

Nobody paid much attention to the paper at the time, he said in a telephone interview from his home in Tarrytown, N.Y. But today it is winning Dr. Jacobson acclaim that he does not want — from creationists who cite it as proof that life could not have emerged on earth without divine intervention.

So after 52 years, he has retracted it.

The retraction came about when, on a whim, Dr. Jacobson ran a search for his name on Google. At age 84 and after 20 years of retirement, “I wanted to see, what have I done in all these many years?” he said. “It was vanity. What can I tell you?”

He found many entries relating to his work on compounds called polymers; on information theory, a branch of mathematics involving statistics and probability; and other subjects. But others were for creationist sites that have taken up his 1955 paper as scientific support for their views.

Darwinismrefuted.com, for example, says Dr. Jacobson’s paper “undermines the scenario that life could have come about by accident.” Another creationist site, Evolution-facts.org, says his findings mean that “within a few minutes, all the various parts of the living organism had to make themselves out of sloshing water,” an impossible feat without a supernatural hand.

“Ouch,” Dr. Jacobson said. “It was hideous.”

That is not because he objects to religion, he said. Though he was raised in a secular household, he said, “Religion is O.K. as long as you don’t fly in the face of facts.” After all, he said, no one can disprove the existence of God. But Dr. Jacobson said he was dismayed to think that people might use his work in what he called “malignant” denunciations of Darwin.

Things grew worse when he reread his paper, he said, because he discovered errors. One related to what he called a “conjecture” about whether amino acids, the basic building blocks of protein and a crucial component of living things, could form naturally.

“Under the circumstances I mention, just a bunch of chemicals sitting together, no,” he said. “Because it takes energy to go from the things that make glycine to glycine, glycine being the simplest amino acid.”

There were potential sources of energy, he said. So to say that nothing much would happen in its absence “is totally beside the point.” “And that is a point I did not make,” he added.

Another assertion in the paper, about what would have had to occur simultaneously for living matter to arise, is just plain wrong, he said, adding, “It was a dumb mistake, but nobody ever caught me on it.”

Vance Ferrell, who said he put together the material posted on Evolution-facts.org, said if the paper had been retracted he would remove the reference to it. Mr. Ferrell said he had no way of knowing what motivated Dr. Jacobson, but said that if scientists “look like they are pro-creationist they can get into trouble.”

“There is an embarrassment,” Mr. Ferrell said.

Dr. Jacobson conceded that was the case. He wrote in his retraction letter, “I am deeply embarrassed to have been the originator of such misstatements.”

It is not unusual for scientists to publish papers and, if they discover evidence that challenges them, to announce they were wrong. The idea that all scientific knowledge is provisional, able to be challenged and overturned, is one thing that separates matters of science from matters of faith.

So Dr. Jacobson’s retraction is in “the noblest tradition of science,” Rosalind Reid, editor of American Scientist, wrote in its November-December issue, which has Dr. Jacobson’s letter.

His letter shows, Ms. Reid wrote, “the distinction between a scientist who cannot let error stand, no matter the embarrassment of public correction,” and people who “cling to dogma.”

Link.