"Summer's here and the time is right/for dancin' in the streets!"

The radical Islamists, the al-Qaida … would be dancing in the streets in greater numbers than they did on Sept. 11 because they would declare victory in this war on terror.

This was what Steve King (R-IA) had to say about what would happen if Barack Obama were elected president. One funny thing about this little quip of Steve's is that he wasn't even basing it primarily on Barack's stance on the war in Iraq; rather, King's special brand of reasoning led him to this conclusion:

his middle name (Hussein) does matter. It matters because they read a meaning into that in the rest of the world. That has a special meaning to them. They will be dancing in the streets because of his middle name. They will be dancing in the streets because of who his father was.

Beg pardon? "The al-Qaida" will be dancing in the streets because Barack's father was Kenyan? Huh?

But really, the most absurd thing about Steve King is that the doomsday scenario he identifies is really not all that bad. In fact, it says something about the neo-con mindset that making sure Islamists are never happy is their primary goal. Never mind the human cost in American and Iraqi lives: it's more important to make Islamists angry. Let's think about this "dancing in the streets" concept for a second. Islamists are happy, and it didn't (unlike Sept. 11) cost us anything, especially not any lives, to get them that way. Happy Islamists are less likely* to go blow themselves and/or their neighbors and/or American troops up. So really, Steve King thinks that his own pride in not having other people think they've won is worth the continued deaths of American troops. (Once again, the right demonstrates that it hates the shit out of our troops). In reality, Bush's war on terror is a lose-lose situation. We can never win, because we're trying to stamp out the people who hate us, and the more we do that, the more people hate us. They can never win, because they want us to stop being douchebags in our foreign and economic policy, and the entire premise of the war on terror is foreign and economic douchebaggery. The world King proposes actually transforms this lose-lose situation into a win-win. We win because we are no longer hated, and therefore no longer attacked—and let's be clear, this is a war to defend our way of life, according to Dear Leader. The moment we are no longer attacked, we win by the Bush administration's definition. They win because...well...according to King, they think they've won. They're dancing in the streets declaring victory. I don't really care why they think they've won as long as they stop attacking us and their countrymen and -women.

King cares though, because at the end of the day, the lives of Americans, Afghanis, and Iraqis just don't matter very much to him.


*This is one situation where the "embolden the terrorists" scenario is even less credible than usual. Let's think about why Islamists would dance in the streets. Well, it would be because they perceive the U.S. as having installed a president who was Islam-friendly. Is there any mindset in which it would make sense to then turn around and attack the entity that you just celebrated?

Strange Bedfellows

The other day, in a class on Ethics in Public Policy, I found myself saying something that felt extremely strange coming out of my mouth. I said "I agree with the Bush Administration." I know, right? Those aren't words I'm used to saying. Before I get calls to turn in my pinko leftist card, let me specify that I wasn't agreeing with their entire policy stance on the issue at hand (Affirmative Action) but I thought aspects of their approach—considering socioeconomic background as a factor in equalizing admissions instead of race—were unusually thoughtful and made sense. So let's do a thought experiment. Let's assume affirmative action is really important to me. It's important to me like abortion, LGBT rights, or taxes are important to some voters—a make-or-break issue. Do I support Bush in the 2004 election? Since affirmative action isn't that important to me as a voter, it's not a dilemma I have to confront. I oppose Bush on so many more significant grounds that the off-chance that my thinking aligned with his on one is pretty irrelevant.

But for some people, this becomes an extremely relevant dilemma. They are forced to make political friends out of political enemies, enemies out of friends, and to sort out the mess that that can create practically. One of the best historical examples of this kind of behavior is the women's suffrage movement pandering to racists by excluding black women from marches and protests. These awkward little collisions of interest are fascinating to watch play out in contemporary politics. Here are some examples.

#1—Wisconsin is a stew of interests, what with hippie haven Madison and union refuge Milwaukee butting heads with rural-family-values everywhere else. Typically, it's the state that gave the nation both Bob LaFollette and Joe McCarthy. We are currently represented by one of the most progressive senators out there, Russ Feingold, but he's got an almost-perfect record in opposing gun control. It's along the "guns" line that a pretty absurd political hot button came up a few years ago. The DNR introduced introduced a bill in the state legislature that would make it legal to hunt cats. Yes, that means exactly what you think it means. If Mittens doesn't have a collar on, she's fair game (literally).

Now this little bill's strange bedfellows stemmed mostly from the fact that the environmental lobby was behind the bill. Feral cats killed off local birds, making them a nuisance for conservation efforts. The gun lobby was way behind it, because it meant they got to shoot stuff more often, and farmers were fans, because they considered feral cats a pest. That meant that the environmental lobby was against the animal rights fans. (As it worked out, legislators didn't want to go on the record as being pro-kitten-hunting, so the bill didn't pass.)

#2—Then there's this story. The upshot is that assholes want first amendment protection for their assholery, and the ACLU is helping them out. Now the ACLU tends to be pretty anti-homophobia, but they also like to protect your right, in certain circumstances to be an asshole. They're also big fans of second-amendment rights ("you mean I can have a gun, but I can't use it to shoot the queers?"). In any event, they're defending a church's right to picket military funerals—the church thinks deaths in Iraq are due to our tolerance of gays. So apparently you get to carry a sign at someone's funeral that says "thank God for dead soldiers." (But seriously, the left hates the troops).

So what are the implications of that kind of odd behavior? Well, an upside is that it makes people cross partisan boundaries and cooperate on issues that matter to them, and may create some kind of horse trading and compromise that is probably good for politics. People stop disagreeing with each other as a knee-jerk reaction and start actually considering their positions carefully. In theory, at least.

The downside is that it makes life awfully confusing for those of us who like to dedicate our time, money, or other resources to organizations that usually do really nice things, but don't want that money to go to protect, say, homophobic speech (I reluctantly think you can be a homophobic asshole whenever you want, but probably not at someone's funeral, and I'm certainly not going to give money to perpetuate it).

What about y'all? Have you encountered any interesting cases of strange bedfellows in your political life? How did you traverse that political space?

Mukasey appointed as attorney general.

Read about it here.

This just in

They're dropping like flies. Madison's own Russ Feingold says it best: the next attorney general must have his foremost loyalty be "to the law, not the president." Wouldn't that be something new.

Padilla Convicted

Jose Padilla, the terror suspect who was arrested in May 2002 amid cries from John Ashcroft that the government had foiled a dirty nuke attack in the works, was convicted on all charges in federal court yesterday. There's good news and bad news here. The good news is that this conviction makes it harder for the Bush administration to claim that terror suspects need an extra-constitutional process for trying and sentencing. The bad news...well...

Y'know the charges he was arrested on, the ones that John Ashcroft was so excited about? Those weren't mentioned at all in his federal trial, since for some silly reason federal courts don't like to use evidence that was gathered by rendering suspects outside the U.S. justice system. Instead, Padilla was prosecuted as part of an existing case against two other terror suspects, Adham Hassan and Kifah Jayyousi. The evidence? He met them at a mosque at one point, he talked with them on the phone during seven out of thousands of wiretapped calls, saying nothing of significance (the other phone calls, the ones with just Hassan and Jayyousi, had what prosecutors claimed was code), and his fingerprints were all over an Al Qaeda recruitment document that he could easily have handled while confined in military prison. The end result, though, was that the more persuasive evidence against Hassan and Jayyousi stuck to Padilla as well. Padilla might appeal.

But at least now everyone knows that the Bush administration doesn't need a special process to unjustly convict terror suspects--they can do that just as easily with federal courts. And maybe—just maybe—this will put pressure on the Bush administration to give terror suspects federal trials. That would be great, because then they'd have to stop getting evidence through extraordinary rendition and start getting it through better methods: y'know, the kind that don't involve getting other countries to torture individuals who haven't been accused of a crime. The end result would be more reliable intelligence, since the information gathered from torture is hideously unreliable.

A caveat: Padilla might be guilty. I certainly don't know. But the verdict he received seemed to rest more on his having the wrong friends than on any actual proof of terrorist activities.

UPDATE: The NYT agrees—Padilla was basically sentenced to life in prison for a thought crime.

Oh my.

As of about a half hour ago: Karl Rove resigned.
He says he needs to spend more time with his family. (What a sweet guy!) Of course, he is one of what is becoming a lengthy string of Bush administration officials to suddenly need some heart to heart time with the spouse and kids. He chose to break the big news to Rupert Murdoch's new pet project, the WSJ. The big question, of course, will be why he actually resigned. Infighting? Had Bush become a lost cause? Was Rove more controversy than he was worth with a year and a half left to go in a lame-duck presidency? Is it to skirt the soon-to-be-breaking news about his and Dick Cheney's torrid affair? (I wish.) Is he working for a 2008 presidential campaign??

Updates to come when the news is a bit more detailed.

UPDATE: Lauren asks, will he be indicted?