In what an Alaska television station describes as a “stunning development”, Sarah Palin announced today that she will step down as governor in a few weeks, resigning her office with about a year and a half left in her term.  Palin didn’t exactly give a clear explanation as to why she is stepping down–she said she had decided not to run for re-election, but it’s not clear why that led her to resign now, with a year and a half left in her term.  Republican consultant Mike Murphy described her actions as setting new standards in erratic behavior.  MSNBC is reporting that other Republicans are describing the announcement she made today as “bewildering”.

We’ll have to see if there is more to come in terms of an explanation as to why Palin is stepping down.  It strikes me that this is further evidence that John McCain took an enormous gamble on behalf of the American people when he selected Palin as a running mate.  During the campaign, she demonstrated she was woefully unprepared to be first in line to succeed the president, should that be required.  Her decision today, described by Murphy as incredibly erratic, provides another reason to be thankful she and McCain were defeated last November.

Politico is reporting that the Washington Post circulated a flier offering lobbyists off the record access to elected officials as well as the paper’s own reporters and editors–at a price ranging from $25,000 to $250,000.  The first access-for-sale event the Post had in mind was aimed at the topic of health care reform.  One lobbyist who received the offer apparently passed it along to a reporter  with Politico, providing the understated observation that it would be a conflict for the paper to charge for access to its health care reporting and editorial staff.  It’s not clear whether any elected officials, or administration officials, had agreed to be there, but that would certainly be disturbing, to say the least, if it’s the case.

In a post yesterday, I noted that, while there is overwhelming support for health care reform, including the public option, the fight for reform has been a difficult one, in part, because of the traditional media’s failure to accurately and fairly report on the issue.  I wrote about one Post reporter, Ceci Connolly, who has falled short of that standard.  Connolly says she was told she would be invited to the event the Politico reported on.  That’s disturbing.

The Post’s crass offer should remind us of larger problems: (1) that political access seems to be for sale to those who can afford it (and unavailable to those who cannot) and (2) traditional media types seem to have a pretty cozy relationship with the elected officials they cover, as has been noted in other contexts.

The term “follow the money” is associated with Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke the Nixon administration’s malfeasance at the Watergate and beyond wide open (though it’s not clear the reporters themselves came up with this term).  Woodward and Bernstein stand for the ideal that media ought to hold elected officials accountable.  The Politico story about today’s Post suggests the paper would rather connect elected officials with lobbyists, in exchange for a fee.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a conference Pat Buchanan’s group, the American Cause, recently held.  The conference featured a panelist who describes himself as a “white nationalist” and has argued that the Republican party should focus on its base: “white Americans.”  Reading about the conference and Buchanan’s organization got me curious: what else is Buchanan up to?  I went to the American Cause’s website, and started reading through Buchanan’s columns.

Turns out he is using his organization’s website to make wildly extreme, ultra-reactionary arguments against evolution and in defense of a man the Simon Wiesenthal Center says committed “unspeakable crimes” as a Nazi death camp guard.  That man is John Demjanjuk.  In 2002, a U.S. federal court found that reliable evidence supports the conclusion that Demjanjuk was an armed guard at Sobibor, a death camp where 250,000 people were murdered.   German prosecutors say they have hundreds of documents and a number of witnesses that prove Demjanjuk’s involvement in the murder of 29,000 Jews in 1943.  The head of the special German office investigating Nazi crimes says there is “no doubt” Demjanjuk is responsible for these murders.  Demjanjuk was recently deported from the U.S. and is in a German prison awaiting trial on charges that he was an accessory to these 29,000 murders.

Now, it’s important to note that, in 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court threw out Demjanjuk’s conviction for war crimes committed by the notorious Ivan the Terrible at Treblinka, a different death camp.  The Israeli court found that new evidence suggested Ivan the Terrible was another man–however, according to BBC News, the court was careful not to declare Demjanjuk innocent, pointing to “ample evidence that he had served as a guard in concentration camps other than Treblinka.”

I fully believe that Demjanjuk has a right to a fair trial, and he will receive one.  However, these are very serious charges, and they hardly sound frivolous.  It’s hard to say Demjanjuk is being railroaded or persecuted–unless you’re Pat Buchanan, that is.  Buchanan wrote a column in April, entitled “The True Haters”, that implicitly compares Demjanjuk to Jesus Christ.  Buchanan paints Demjanjuk as a victim of relentless persecution, focusing on the fact that Demjanjuk’s conviction in 1993 was thrown out.  Buchanan leaves out crucial points: (1) the Israeli court that threw out Demjanjuk’s conviction did not say he was “innocent” and noted there was evidence he was guilty of other crimes (2) German prosecutors say there is “no doubt” that Demjanjuk is criminally responsible for 29,000 murders, pointing to hundreds of documents and a number of witnesses backing up their case and (3) the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which has been involved in the Demjanjuk case for many years, has concluded he committed unspeakable crimes during the Holocaust.

Why does Buchanan completely ignore the evidence against Demjanjuk?  Why does he paint Demjanjuk as a victim, grotesquely and bizarrely calling him “the American Dreyfus”?  (Dreyfus was a French Jewish military officer who was convicted of espionage charges against a backdrop of anti-Semitism: Dreyfus’s name stands for injustice based on prejudice against Jews).  Why did he go so far as to compare Demjanjuk to Christ, saying that Demjanjuk was the victim of “the same satanic brew of hate and revenge that drove another innocent Man up Calvary that first Good Friday 2,000 years ago“?  (This is a particularly explosive comparison, given the centuries-old slander that the Jews killed Christ: is Buchanan suggesting that the Jews are similarly trying to kill Demjanjuk?)

I can’t say what motivates Buchanan, but his tendentious defense of an accused Nazi war criminal makes me ill.  As I asked before, how is it that Buchanan is able to market himself as a mainstream commentator?

Update: hat tip to Philip Klein, who eloqently exposed Buchanan’s “vile defense” of Demjanjuk back in April.

When it comes to important change that requires political action, success never seems to be easy.  Consider womens’ suffrage, Social Security, the abolition of slavery, federal anti-discrimination laws (we’re not all the way there on these yet).  Reactionaries opposed each of these measures, and made it incredibly difficult for liberals to achieve these basic norms we now take for granted.

I guess that achieving a modern, rational health care shouldn’t be any different–and it hasn’t been.  It’s clear that there’s nothing easy about health care reform, despite the fact that Americans overwhelmingly support substantial change to the health care system, including the so-called “public option”–the idea that a government insurance plan ought to compete with private insurers.

Why is it so hard to achieve something that most Americans support?  Opponents of change are skillful marketers.  While they may not have much to offer when it comes to substance, but they have proven skillful at crafting slogans that dominate debate–scary sounding terms like “socialized medicine” are trotted out at every turn.

Another thing opponents of what is essentially popular reform have going for them is the traditional media.  Media Matters is shining a much-needed light on how this is playing out.  As Media Matters points out, it’s not too much for us to ask that the media report accurately and fairly on health care reform.  Unfortunately, things aren’t working out that way at the Washington Post.  The Post’s Ceci Connolly recently wrote that Change Congress interim chief executive Adam Green was, in an interview, “hard pressed to articulate a substantive argument for the public plan...”  Green counters that Connolly didn’t ask him about the substance of the health care reform, she asked him about the politics, and when he gave her an answer on the political front, she wrote that he had failed to answer on the substance.  (Media Matters also points out that it’s pretty easy to find an eloquent substantive argument for the public option, if that’s what Connolly was looking for–by leaving this out, she made it seem that there simply is no substantive argument for the public option).

I don’t think Connolly has any sinister motive–as Green put it, she simply doesn’t understand the debate over health care, and she falls back on comfortable, but inaccurate shibboleths: for example, she wondered why Green was “attacking [his] friends” by holding Senate Democrats accountable for taking money from insurance companies.

It may not fit Connolly’s script to acknowledge that not all Democrats are on the progressive side of the health care debate, but it happens to be reality.  As she continues to cover this critical debate, I hope that she, and the Post, will give careful consideration to the serious questions Media Matters has raised about her reporting.

The NY Times has a piece in today’s paper entitled “Journalism Rules Are Bent in News Coverage from Iran.”  The piece questions the accuracy of news reporting on recent events in Iran that is based on “anonymous Twitter messages”, blogging and “unverified videos.”  The Times piece calls this type of reporting evidence of a “publish first, ask questions later” approach to journalism.

I think it’s absolutely fair for the Times to ask questions about the sources for news coming out of Iran, but I also think they’re incorrectly suggesting that the axiom “check the source” especially applies to reports associated with new media.  Let’s not forget the Times’ failure to consider the source when it uncritically published reports by Judith Miller and others that accepted at face value the Bush administration’s misinformation about WMD in Iraq The Times ultimately conceded that its coverage of the buildup to the war in Iraq was “not as rigorous as it should have been.”  It admitted that reporting had often depended on “Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on regime change in Iraq” whose credibility “c[a]me under increasing public debate.”  That’s putting it mildly.

I think it’s a great idea for the Times and others across the media spectrum to be skeptical, to ask questions, to consider and check the source when it comes to recent events in Iran.  I just hope that this scrutiny is not limited only to reporting that involves new media and is not limited to recent events in Iran .

As Gov. Sanford confessed his affair during a press conference yesterday, he made a comment I found very revealing.  He said that “God’s law is indeed there to protect you from yourself.”

I have a friend (who I’ll refer to as Pat) who was raised in a traditional Christian household.  Pat was taught that pre-marital sex was wrong–so wrong, in fact, that those who engage in pre-marital sex will go to hell.  Pat told me that Sunday school teachers would drive this point home in detail, explaining what it would be like to burn in hell.

Not surprisingly, Pat was terrified of pre-marital sex.  Also not surprisingly, Pat ended up having pre-marital sex.  Pat now has some pretty confused ideas about sex and about self.  Pat has also had trouble forming relationships.

I think this is the mode of faith Gov. Sanford was referring to when he spoke of religion as something that is there to “protect you from yourself”.  Some people, certainly not all people of faith, are afraid of themselves, of their human passions and feelings, of sex themselves.  They learn that sex is bad, and they believe, like Gov. Sanford, that religious laws are intended to repress human passions and feelings–because, the implication is, human beings cannot do this on their own.  They believe that fear can help them to be good.

This approach–the idea that faith can be based on fear, that religion means repression of self–obviously doesn’t always work.  It didn’t work for Gov. Sanford.  It didn’t work for my friend.  It didn’t work for Sen. Ensign.

Joe Lieberman once said that morality is impossible without religion.  I disagree–I think human beings, with or without religion, are capable of understanding that extramarital affairs are wrong, hurting and embarrassing your loved ones is wrong.  But one thing is clear: religious faith does not guarantee morality.  Another thing is clear from Gov. Sanford’s remark about God’s law.  We ought to be asking questions about a fear-based view of faith that has affected every aspect of politics from stem cell research to marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples to policy in the Middle East.  What does it mean to teach people that fear ought to make them good?  What about abstinence-only education, a policy choice flowing from a fear-based view of faith?  It teaches people to fear themselves, fear their bodies, fear contraception, but, of course, does not actually stop people from having pre-marital sex.

Perhaps something positive can come from Gov. Sanford’s statement about faith and fear.  It’s time to make policy choices based on reason and common sense, not on a fear-based view of faith that, especially when it comes to sexual matters, leads to bad policy choices.  It’s ok to be human–people make mistakes, as Gov. Sanford did, as we all do.  It’s time for people like Gov. Sanford to stop insisting that Americans live by a religious code that aims to make sexuality taboo.

Last month, the crew on Morning Joe “had a field day”, in Free Republic’s view, over the NY Times’ decision not to put a story about Nancy Pelosi accusing the CIA of lying on the front page.  Joe, Mika, and the rest were slavering over the Pelosi story, and couldn’t get enough of what they saw as the Times’ bias in burying the story on page A 20.

The Morning Joe crew are pulling a NY Times themselves when it comes to the Gov. Sanford story.  The explosive account of the Governor’s affair is all over the media, receiving prominent coverage–but not on Morning Joe.  It didn’t even make the headlines that Mika read at the top of the hour, and it took 20 minutes before anyone mentioned the story (it’s 8:20, and Mika just said they’d talk about this “after the break”).

The Morning Joe crew did the equivalent of placing the Sanford story on p. A 20–they put it on at 8:22.  Not exactly a coincidence–the Joe crew has had Sanford on a number of times, and Scarborogh has told the governor that he ought to run for president.

People who turn Adolph Hitler into a political punchline are doing a disservice to political debate and diminishing the monstrous reality of what Hitler and the Nazis carried out: world war, murder of civillians, torture, and genocide, for starters.  Comparing anyone’s fiscal policies to the Nazi reign of terror is truly foolish, but that hasn’t stopped the Republican Women of Anne Arundel County (Maryland).  They solemnly insist that “Obama and Hitler have a great deal in common…”  Their “proof”?  Obama’s policies are “destroying…America”–just like Hitler’s blitzkrieg destroyed European cities.  (thanks to Think Progress for reporting on this).

“Blitzkreig” is German for “lightning war”.  When you use this term in connection with Adolph Hitler, you’re talking about a tactic that was used to conquer countries and slaughter civillians–a sort of “trial run” was used to destroy the Spanish town of Guernica.  Hundreds of civilians were killed.  One military expert has described what happened in Guernica this way: “For the German air force, Guernica was a trial run on how one can spread horror and distress through attacks on cities and towns…Of course the bombing of Guernica was a blatant violation of human rights and had a terrorist character.  It was accepted that civillians would be harmed.”

With Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, the concept of “blitzkreig” was cemented as a method of warfare that included indiscriminate bombing of civillian targets. The tactic was also used in the Netherlands, and in the Battle of Britain.  Thousands of civillians were killed.

There are times when comparisons work and there are times when they don’t.  Comparing Obama’s economic and health care policies to a method of warfare that killed thousands of civillians is a good example of a comparison that doesn’t work, to put it mildly and politely.

One of the oddest things about the comparison made by the Republican group in Maryland was the conclusion they reached: they urged supporters to “fight back” by “Start[ing] a blitzkreig of our own!” Huh?  Their message makes no sense–are they saying “blitzkreig” is an acceptable tactic, just not when Obama does it?  Why would someone who thinks Obama is using the same despicable blitzkreig tactic Hitler himself employed think the correct response is to start their own “blitzkreig”?  The group did make clear that the “blitzkreig” they envision involves contacting members of Congress, but this is not a term one uses lightly, especially after you’ve just gotten through arguing that Obama is like Hitler because he uses the blitzkreig method to overwhelm his “enemies” (Another very poor word choice by the Republican group, by the way.  Supporters of Obama and critics of Obama are not “enemies”, and they’re certainly not “enemies” in the sense that Hitler had enemies).

Five years ago,  then RNC chair Ed Gillespie said it was “despicable” to compare Bush with Hitler.  He’s right–and I hope he, as well as Sean Hannity and John Gibson of Fox News (who also fumed about comparisons between Bush and Hitler) will call out Republicans and rightwingers (the Maryland group is far from the only example) who mindlessly compare Obama with Hitler.

As I’ve noted, the Republican party has some work to do if it wants to erase the stain that racism has left on the party, including, but not limited to the series of racist comments Republican elected officials, staffers, and activists have directed at President Obama and his wife over the past year.  I’m still waiting to see if Republican leaders will take this on, but some people would like to see the party embrace the politics of division.

Pat Buchanan’s group, The American Cause, held a conference last weekend that provided guidance for conservatives and Republicans looking to build “a new majority.”  (Thanks to Think Progress for reporting on this).  During a panel discussion, some panelists suggested backing English-only initiatives as a way to build support among working-class Democrats (who, according to the panelists, must care more about linguistic primacy than they do about paying their mortgages).   The proposal did include some unintended comic relief–a banner hanging over the panelists misspelled the English word “conference”.

Scapegoating minority groups during a time of economic crisis is an old, tired tactic that should be relegated to the dustbin of history.  This is an appeal that depends on ugly racial divisiveness.  One of Buchanan’s panelists, Peter Brimelow, describes himself as a “white nationalist” and has suggested the Republican party “must appeal to its base: “white Americans.”

One question I have is: why is Pat Buchanan able to market himself as a mainstream commentator, appearing regularly on cable TV shows like Hardball and Morning Joe?  He has immersed himself in the ugly politics of scapegoating minority groups.  It might be nice if, at the least, Chris Matthews or Joe Scarborough asked him about this some time.

On the plus side, I don’t think these scare tactics (panelists suggested that Obama could force Americans to speak Spanish) will actually build the new majority Buchanan promises.  That doesn’t mean scapegoating can be ignored.  For one thing, the politics of scapegoating minority groups can be dangerous.

The Republican party is faced with a choice.  Is it a party that believes scapegoating minority groups is the way to political re-birth, or is it a party that will denounce the ugly message on display at The American Cause’s conference?  Speakers at the conference included two former Republican congressmen (Tom Tancredo and John Hostettler), former Republican secretary of state from Ohio (Ken Blackwell), Newt Gingrich’s former press secretary Tony Blankley, and Buchanan himself, a former Republican presidential candidate.  Will anyone in the party make clear that they denounce the politics of scapegoating spread by these prominent Republicans?

As Cosanostradamus pointed out in a comment, politicians and pundits have, so far, generally been silent when it comes to responding to the pattern of Republican elected officials, staffers, and activists making racist comments about President Obama and his wife.  I was glad to see Kathleen Parker break some of the silence in today’s Washington Post.  Parker lives in South Carolina and her piece mainly focused on the question of whether that state can put an end to “race-based politics”–  her piece is entitled “A Stain to Erase in South Carolina.”

The focus ought to be on the Republican party itself, not just one state.  At the end of her piece, Parker finally notes that “If Republicans ever want to see the Oval Office again, they’ll have to purge their tent of this foul air.”  That’s the real point–not that there’s a stain to erase in South Carolina, but that there’s a stain to erase in the Republican party–a stain we’re reminded of by the racist comments about Obama, but also a racial stain that goes back to Richard Nixon’s southern strategy, Ronald Reagan’s Philadelphia, MS speech about state’s rights, the 1988 Willie Horton ad, and decades of racial code words used for political gain.    It’s past time for Republican leaders to respond to the string of racist comments spewing forth from their party, and it’s past time for them to address the stain that decades of racial politics has left on their party.