US election: let's hope the fucking GOP keep self-destructing (now it's revealed that Karl Rove's people called evangelical leaders "the nuts")

1. America is finally revolting against the Republicans
Sex, money and Iraq are a triple-whammy of reasons for voters to turn against President George Bush and his party
By Andrew Rawnsley (from the good old Guardian)

It is one of George Bush's favourite frat boy pranks to grab people in a neck lock. That is appropriate because he and his party have had a stranglehold on America. The Republicans have occupied the White House since 2001. They've controlled the House of Representatives and for most of the time, the Senate as well. Thanks to the appointments made by Bush, the Supreme Court belongs to the right too.

Karl Rove, the grand wizard of strategy known as 'Bush's brain', seemed close to realising his ambition to create a Republican hegemony that would last for a generation. He had a dream of turning America into a one-party state and it was a dream that looked like becoming all too real. A country founded on the idea of the separation of powers has rarely witnessed such a concentration of might in the hands of one party.

Such hubris is always the midwife to nemesis. Suddenly that Republican domination is beginning to crack. This autumn the tectonic plates of American politics are beginning to shift under the feet of President Bush and an increasingly desperate Republican party. When I spoke to Stan Greenberg, the hugely experienced political consultant for the Democrats, he predicted an 'earthquake' in the mid-term elections for a third of the Senate and all of the House of Representatives. Even more tellingly, the Republicans themselves sound very scared that angry voters are about to punish them with a thrashing. Thomas Davis, a Virginian Congressman who is one of his party's most senior strategists, talks about the Republicans losing as many as 30 seats in the House, which would put that half of Congress into the hands of the Democrats for the first time in 12 years.

Some say it is the war. Some say it is the money. Some say it is the sex. Actually, it's all three, a triple-whammy of reasons for Americans to express their disgust with how they are being governed.

Let's start with Iraq. Any American with a television set and an IQ above room temperature has known for a long time that Iraq is far from becoming the pacified, liberal democracy that was promised in the original prospectus for the war. Most Americans were nevertheless prepared to tolerate the mounting carnage so long as they could believe that the ultimate outcome would be positive. There has been a big turn in the mood about the war in the past fortnight. John Warner, the Republican who chairs the Senate's armed services committee, came back from a visit to American troops in Iraq to warn that there had to be 'a change of course'. A commission chaired by James Baker, Secretary of State when Dubya's father was in the White House, is about to publish a report calling for a major recasting of strategy.

These rock-ribbed Republicans cannot be dismissed with the usual White House line that anyone who asks awkward questions about Iraq is an unpatriotic appeaser and fellow traveller of Osama bin Laden. Soaring up the bestseller lists is Bob Woodward's account of a dysfunctional administration presided over by a wilfully uninquiring Commander-in-Chief who will never acknowledge the scale of the blunders committed in Iraq.

President Bush has again tried to use national security as his trump card in this election. The terror of terror worked for the Republicans in 2002 and again in 2004. It is not working this time. The opinion polls all agree: a majority of Americans now feel that Iraq is getting worse, and that the war was a mistake which has left them less secure.

They still see Bush as a 'War President'. The difference now is that they see him losing his wars. The United States has invaded Iraq and not found any weapons of mass destruction while North Korea is acquiring the nuclear bombs which George Bush once pledged he'd prevent them from having. At a news conference at the White House, the President talked big about Kim Jong-Il but carried a small stick. The world's soi-disant hyperpower is reduced to suggesting that China should do something about it.

The more helpless that America looks in relation to North Korea, the more emboldened the Iranians will feel about defiantly pursuing their ambitions to join the nuclear club. The Bush presidency has expended squillions of dollars on warfare and military hardware. So much treasure and so much blood and Americans are left with a growing dread that they have ended up weaker in the world.

Then there's the sex. While his party shamelessly fanned homophobia to ramp up its vote, a gay Republican congressman was making advances to teenage male interns. As is so often the case, the Nixon rule of scandal applies. It is not so much the crime as the cover-up that has done the most damage. There has been a corrosive drip of accusations that the party leadership in Congress ignored warnings about Foley's behaviour. The Republicans are reeling from the impression that the self-appointed moral daddies of America harboured a sexual predator.

When I spoke to Andy Card, who for five years was Chief of Staff to President Bush, he calculated that the election would ultimately come down to which side could mobilise more of its supporters in the last 72 hours. The Rove vote machine has been heavily reliant on evangelical Christians, precisely the group most repelled by what it sees as moral degeneracy on Capitol Hill.

And then there is the money. A rising stench of corruption surrounds the Republicans. The scale of the kickbacks made to politicians by Jack Abramoff, the convicted lobbyist, are awesome even by the standards of American bribery scandals. A defining theme of the Bush era has been Republicans who preach fiscal abstinence while practising recklessly unprotected spending. The surplus inherited from Bill Clinton has been blown and turned into a staggering deficit. The richest and most powerful country on the planet is now in the strange and dangerous place of being hugely indebted to the rest of the world. Put it all together - and I get the sense that Americans are finally putting it all together - and the Republicans look like a party that is jeopardising their nation's moral, strategic and financial future.

You have to say, it couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people. Lynn Westmoreland is running for re-election as a Republican congressman in Georgia. His sole legislative initiative has been to press a bill requiring that the Ten Commandments be displayed in the House and the Senate. He then had to confess on television: 'I can't name them all.' In fact, he could barely name three of the commandments that he was so keen on. Voters in Iowa have on offer the Republican Steve King. He wants to keep out illegal immigrants by constructing a 700-mile wall along the border with Mexico. Better still, he built his own model of this 'Tortilla Curtain' out of cardboard and wire which he demonstrated to Congress in Blue Peter fashion. That is outdone in the crazy stakes by the Texan Republican Sam Johnson who offered personally to fly an F-15 to nuke Syria. Afterwards, he said he was: 'Kinda joking.' Don't you love the 'kinda'.

Don Sherwood, a Pennsylvania Republican, is famous for paying an undisclosed sum to his former mistress, who had accused him of repeated assaults, to settle her lawsuit against him. He has been forced to broadcast campaign ads denying that he tried to choke her. Down in Florida, Katherine Harris, who achieved world notoriety over the hanging chads which gave Bush the White House in the first place, is running for the Senate. According to her: 'God is the one who chooses our rulers.' Mmm. If the Great Returning Officer really does bother himself with deciding elections, then God must be mighty pissed with America to have chosen rulers like these.

A slew of recent opinion polls shows support for the Republicans plummeting and the Democrats gaining what should be a decisive edge. Gallup gives the Democrats a lead of more than 20 per cent among likely voters. Given such a toxic blend of policy failure abroad, financial and sexual scandals at home, compounded by discontent about the economy, in most democracies the governing party would be expecting a total meltdown. The purgative mechanism of the ballot would do its necessary work to kick the scoundrels out.

And yet you have to be a little cautious about predicting that the Republicans will suffer the sort of wipe-out that natural justice says they deserve. America is in a febrile state. There are three weeks left before election day and the polls have yo-yoed depending on the sleaze or terror headline of the hour.

While America's mood is volatile, its democracy is becoming atrophied. And by design. The gerrymandering of seats to permanently fix their political complexion has made it extraordinarily difficult to dislodge incumbents.

The story of this election is one of Republican collapse rather than any great enthusiasm for the Democrats. They don't have a clear message delivered by a popular and plausible leader. One of the Democrat's best hopes for the presidency - Mark Warner of Virginia - has just backed out of the race for 2008. It is in the nature of the American system that the executive can speak with a single voice - that of the President - while the opposition talks in a cacophony of tongues.

A senior member of the Clinton cabinet put it to me like this: 'The Democrats don't have one spokesman. They have 10 spokesmen.' There is no such thing as the Shadow President. If ever there was a country in need of a leader of the opposition, it is the United States today.

Even in the absence of one, George Bush faces a bleak closing chapter of his presidency. The Democrats need only gain control of one house to start launching investigations into 9/11, the Iraq war and its searing aftermath, the financial scandals, the sexual scandals - you name it, they can subject the White House to torture-by-inquiry. A Democrat majority in the House will almost certainly give the chairmanship of the judiciary committee to John Conyers who has previously called for the impeachment of the President.

George Bush is set to spend his last two years in the White House besieged by searing probes into his presidency. That would be a fitting fate for a President famous for his unwillingness or inability to focus on detail and his lack of curiosity about the consequences of his own decisions. The neck lock will then be on George W Bush.


2. Book says Bush just using Christians
‘Tempting Faith’ author David Kuo worked for Bush from 2001 to 2003
By Jonathan Larsen ("Countdown" producer MSNBC)

More than five years after President Bush created the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, the former second-in-command of that office is going public with an insider’s tell-all account that portrays an office used almost exclusively to win political points with both evangelical Christians and traditionally Democratic minorities.

The office’s primary mission, providing financial support to charities that serve the poor, never got the presidential support it needed to succeed, according to the book.

Entitled “Tempting Faith,” the book is not scheduled for release until Oct. 16, but MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” has obtained a copy. Author David Kuo, who has complained publicly in the past about the funding shortfalls, goes several steps further in his new book.

He says some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as “the nuts.”

“National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy,’” Kuo writes.

More seriously, Kuo alleges that then-White House political affairs director Ken Mehlman knowingly participated in a scheme to use the office, and taxpayer funds, to mount ostensibly “nonpartisan” events that were, in reality, designed with the intent of mobilizing religious voters in 20 targeted races.

Nineteen out of the 20 targeted races were won by Republicans, Kuo reports. The outreach was so extensive and so powerful in motivating not just conservative evangelicals, but also traditionally Democratic minorities, that Kuo attributes Bush’s 2004 Ohio victory “at least partially … to the conferences we had launched two years before.”

With the exception of one reporter from the Washington Post, Kuo says the media were oblivious to the political nature and impact of his office’s events, in part because so much of the debate centered on issues of separation of church and state.

In fact, the Bush administration often promoted the faith-based agenda by claiming that existing government regulations were too restrictive on religious organizations seeking to serve the public.

Substantiating that claim proved difficult, Kuo says. “Finding these examples became a huge priority.… If President Bush was making the world a better place for faith-based groups, we had to show it was really a bad place to begin with. But, in fact, it wasn’t that bad at all.”

In fact, when Bush asks Kuo how much money was being spent on “compassion” social programs, Kuo claims he discovered the amount was $20 million a year less than during the Clinton Administration.

The money that was appropriated and disbursed, however, often served a political agenda, Kuo claims, with organizations friendly to the administration often winning grants. More pointedly, Kuo quotes an unnamed member of the review panel charged with rating grant applications as saying she stopped looking at applications from “those non-Christian groups,” as did many of her colleagues.

(Watch “Countdown” each weeknight at 8 p.m. ET)


3. The Gay Old Party Comes Out -- by Frank Rich

Paging Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council: Here’s a gay Republican story you probably did not hear last week. On Tuesday a card-carrying homosexual, Mark Dybul, was sworn into office at the State Department with his partner holding the Bible. Dr. Dybul, the administration’s new global AIDS coordinator, was flanked by Laura Bush and Condi Rice. In her official remarks, the secretary of state referred to the mother of Dr. Dybul’s partner as his “mother-in-law.”

Could wedding bells be far behind? It was all on display, photo included, on www.state.gov. And while you’re cruising the Internet, a little creative Googling will yield a long list of who else is gay, openly and not, in the highest ranks of both the Bush administration and the Republican hierarchy. The openly gay range from Steve Herbits, the prescient right-hand consultant to Donald Rumsfeld who foresees disaster in Iraq in Bob Woodward’s book “State of Denial,” to Israel Hernandez, the former Bush personal aide and current Commerce Department official whom the president nicknamed “Altoid boy.” (Let’s not go there.)

If anything good has come out of the Foley scandal, it is surely this: The revelation that the political party fond of demonizing homosexuals each election year is as well-stocked with trusted and accomplished gay leaders as virtually every other power center in America. “What you’re really seeing is the Republican Party on the Hill,” says Rich Tafel, the former leader of the gay Log Cabin Republicans whom George W. Bush refused to meet with during the 2000 campaign. “Across the board gay people are in leadership positions.” Yet it is this same party’s Congressional leadership that in 2006 did almost nothing about government spending, Iraq, immigration or ethics reform, but did drop everything to focus on a doomed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

The split between the Republicans’ outward homophobia and inner gayness isn’t just hypocrisy; it’s pathology. Take the bizarre case of Karl Rove. Every one of his Bush campaigns has been marked by a dirty dealing of the gay card, dating back to the lesbian whispers that pursued Ann Richards when Mr. Bush ousted her as Texas governor in 1994. Yet we now learn from “The Architect,” the recent book by the Texas journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater, that Mr. Rove’s own (and beloved) adoptive father, Louis Rove, was openly gay in the years before his death in 2004. This will be a future case study for psychiatric clinicians as well as historians.

So will Kirk Fordham, the former Congressional aide who worked not only for Mark Foley but also for such gay-baiters as Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma (who gratuitously bragged this year that no one in his family’s “recorded history” was gay) and Senator Mel Martinez of Florida (who vilified his 2004 Republican primary opponent, a fellow conservative, as a tool of the “radical homosexual agenda”). Then again, even Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania senator who brought up incest and “man-on-dog” sex while decrying same-sex marriage, has employed a gay director of communications. In the G.O.P. such switch-hitting is as second nature as cutting taxes.

As for Mr. Foley, he is no more representative of gay men, whatever their political orientation, than Joey Buttafuoco is of straight men. Yet he’s a useful creep at this historical juncture because his behavior has exposed and will continue to expose a larger dynamic on the right. The longer the aftermath of this scandal continues, with its maniacal finger-pointing and relentless spotlight on the Republican closet, the harder it will be for his party to return to the double-dealing that has made gay Americans election-year bogeymen (and women) for so long.

The moment Mr. Foley’s e-mails became known, we saw that brand of fearmongering and bigotry at full tilt: Bush administration allies exploited the former Congressman’s predatory history to spread the grotesque canard that homosexuality is a direct path to pedophilia. It’s the kind of blood libel that in another era was spread about Jews.

The Family Research Council’s Mr. Perkins, a frequent White House ally and visitor, led the way. “When we elevate tolerance and diversity to the guidepost of public life,” he said on Fox News Channel, “this is what we get — men chasing 16-year-old boys around the halls of Congress.” A related note was struck by The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, which asked, “Could a gay Congressman be quarantined?” The answer was no because “today’s politically correct culture” — tolerance of “private lifestyle choices” — gives predatory gay men a free pass. Newt Gingrich made the same point when he announced on TV that Mr. Foley had not been policed because Republicans “would have been accused of gay bashing.” Translation: Those in favor of gay civil rights would countenance and protect sex offenders.

This line of attack was soon followed by another classic from the annals of anti-Semitism: the shadowy conspiracy. “The secret Capitol Hill homosexual network must be exposed and dismantled,” said Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media, another right-wing outfit that serves as a grass-roots auxiliary to the Bush administration. This network, he claims, was allowed “to infiltrate and manipulate the party apparatus” and worked “behind the scenes to sabotage a conservative pro-family agenda in Congress.”

There are two problems with this theory. First, gay people did not “infiltrate” the party apparatus — they are the party apparatus. Rare is the conservative Republican Congressional leader who does not have a gay staffer wielding clout in a major position. Second, any inference that gay Republicans on the Hill conspired to cover up Mr. Foley’s behavior is preposterous. Mr. Fordham, the gay former Foley aide who spent Thursday testifying under oath about his warnings to Denny Hastert’s staff, is to date the closest this sordid mess has to a whistle-blower, however tardy. So far, the slackers in curbing Mr. Foley over the past three years seem more straight than gay, led by the Buffalo Congressman Tom Reynolds, who is now running a guilt-ridden campaign commercial desperately apologizing to voters.

A Washington Post poll last week found that two-thirds of Americans believe that Democrats would behave just as badly as the Hastert gang in covering up a scandal like this to protect their own power. They are no doubt right. But the reason why the Foley scandal has legs — and why it has upstaged most other news, from the Congressional bill countenancing torture to North Korea’s nuclear test — is not just that sex trumps everything else in a tabloid-besotted America. The Republicans, unlike most Democrats (Joe Lieberman always excepted), can’t stop advertising their “family values,” which is why their pitfalls are as irresistible as a Molière farce. It was entertaining enough to learn that the former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed wanted to go “humping in corporate accounts” with the corrupt gambling lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The only way that comic setup could be topped was by the news that Mr. Foley was chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus. It beggars the imagination that he wasn’t also entrusted with No Child Left Behind.

Cultural conservatives who fell for the G.O.P.’s pious propaganda now look like dupes. Tonight on “60 Minutes,” David Kuo, a former top official in the administration’s faith-based initiatives program, is scheduled to discuss his new book recounting how evangelical supporters were privately ridiculed as “nuts” in the White House. If they have any self-respect, they’ll exact their own revenge.

We must hope as well that this crisis will lead to a repudiation of the ritual targeting of gay people for sport at the top levels of the Republican leadership in and out of the White House. For all the president’s talk of tolerance and “compassionate conservatism,” he has repeatedly joined Congress in wielding same-sex marriage as a club for divisive political purposes. He sat idly by while his secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, attacked a PBS children’s show because an animated rabbit visited a lesbian couple and their children. Ms. Spellings was worried about children being exposed to that “lifestyle” — itself a code word for “deviance” — even as the daughter of the vice president was preparing to expose the country to that lifestyle in a highly promoted book.

“The hypocrisy, the winking and nodding is catching up with the party,” says Mr. Tafel, the former Log Cabin leader. “Republicans must welcome their diversity as the party of Lincoln or purge the party of all gays. The middle ground — we’re a diverse party but we can bash gays too — will no longer work.” He adds that “the ironic point is that the G.O.P. isn’t as homophobic as it pretends to be.” Indeed two likely leading presidential competitors in 2008, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, are consistent supporters of gay civil rights.

Another ironic point, of course, is that the effort to eradicate AIDS, led by a number of openly gay appointees like Dr. Dybul, may prove to be the single most beneficent achievement of this beleaguered White House. To paraphrase a show tune you’re unlikely to hear around the Family Research Council, isn’t that queer?