So, we're all disgusted at the Dems caving once again. The diaries and comments on this site will be red hot on the topic for days. But what real action can we take? Preferably something immediate, rather than two or four in the future. One thing I did was unsubscribe from Harry's Reid's "Give 'Em Hell, Harry" list. You can do so here. If enough of us do it today and tomorrow, he might sense some unhappiness in the ranks. Another project I heard about was Laugh at Lieberman. I don't know if I understand the efficacy of this tactic, but it's out there. I report, you decide. What other ideas have you come up with or heard about? I've collected some after the fold. Post yours in comments. (more...)

In the Senate, the Escalation of Rhetoric

In the Senate, the Escalation of Rhetoric

By Mark Leibovich
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 17, 2005; C01

As a general rule, the catastrophic fallout from an atomic detonation is not something you want to be associated with. That’s why Senate Republicans are trying to avoid the term “nuclear option.”

The procedure — which the GOP is threatening to exercise to thwart Democratic filibusters of President Bush’s judicial nominees — could be implemented as early as this week. But it won’t be called the “nuclear option,” at least not in the official GOP lexicon. It’s akin to McDonald’s touting the Quarter Pounder With Cheese as “the heart attack option.” Bad marketing, in other words.

Republicans have tried to rechristen “nuclear option” as the “constitutional option,” a less radioactive alternative. “Nuclear option” gives Democrats too many opportunities to portray the Republican position as bellicose, doomsday-bringing and generally unpleasant. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) would soon “pull the trigger” on the nuclear option, while other Democrats have predicted that Frist would “go nuclear,” “start a nuclear war” or “detonate a bomb” on the Senate floor. “We will not negotiate under a nuclear cloud,” Reid declared last month. He said nothing about a “constitutional” cloud.

In the face of Republican complaints, media outlets now qualify references to the nuclear option with caveats such as “so-called” or “what Democrats refer to as . . .” “Constitutional option,” meanwhile, has become a staple in GOP talking points, chat show appearances and news releases. This was not so a few months ago, when Republicans were using “nuclear option” freely. Or, for that matter, two years ago, when the term was coined by Republican Sen. Trent Lott.

“Nuclear option” remains the most commonly used term, and it is not completely anathema to anti-filibuster Republicans. Some revel in its scorched-earth connotations. On “Crossfire,” filibuster opponent the Rev. Jerry Falwell told Ralph Neas of the liberal group People for the American Way that Frist would indeed use “the nuclear option . . . and when that happens you guys are dead in the water, and you ought to be.”

Manuel Miranda, a former aide to Frist who is now chairman of the National Coalition to End Judicial Filibusters, says that “the draconian implications” of “nuclear option” expressed the urgency that filibuster opponents felt. “If these weren’t such ominous and terrible terms, I don’t think it would have exploded in the press,” says Miranda.

Few Americans understand how filibusters work, let alone how Republicans are threatening to circumvent them, or what Democrats might do in response. A filibuster is, essentially, a stalling tactic by which a minority of senators can engage in endless debate until 60 senators vote to end discussion. If GOP leaders move to end filibusters for judicial nominees, Democrats have vowed to effectively halt Senate business.

“The filibuster is a Senate rule that’s been changed many times over the years,” says Bob Stevenson, Frist’s communications director. It wouldn’t be a “nuclear option,” he says, except for the threatened retaliation of Senate Democrats. GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch has said it’s the Democrats who will “blow up the Senate” if Republicans exercise their constitutional right to simply “debate and vote.”

Nuclear vs. Constitutional is just the latest in a series of rhetorical wrestling matches pitting Republicans (purveyors of “personal accounts” for Social Security, foes of “the death tax” and “pro-life” opponents of abortion) against Democrats (foes of Social Security “privatization,” purveyors of the “inheritance tax” and champions of “a woman’s right to choose”).

“In general, Republicans have perfected the art of associative naming,” says Deborah Tannen, a Georgetown University linguistics professor who has studied word choices in public discourse. Associative naming refers to linking products or ideas to pleasant or virtuous-sounding words, or unpleasant ones if you are against them. The term “partial-birth abortion,” for example, constitutes a masterstroke in this regard, she says. As soon as opponents of this late-term abortion procedure injected the word “birth” into the debate, they won, Tannen says.

But the nuclear option has proven trickier for Republicans, almost from the time Lott first uttered the phrase during the successful Democratic filibuster against Miguel Estrada, whom Bush had nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. “Nuclear option” instantly became the de facto term of art. Miranda, who resigned as a Frist aide last year amid allegations that he accessed Democratic e-mail memos on judicial nominees, says, “Until the last few weeks, the Democrats owned the field in terms of language.” The media only had “the Democratic language” to use, he says.

“The implication of ‘nuclear option’ is way too hot and extreme,” says GOP pollster Frank Luntz, an expert on political phraseology. Words define the debate in politics, he says. “Someone comes up with a cute phrase, like ‘nuclear option,’ and all of a sudden the debate is named.

“This is an example of how cute phrases can kill.” He means this figuratively.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

LiberalOasis makes the progressive case against the Nuclear Option deal made yesterday by a coalition of Senators.

As I write this, the Senate is confirming Owens. So, I imagine that after a good night’s sleep, the as-good-as co-opted liberals are facing the new reality: FINO (filibuster in name only). Like free speech in this country, we can fight wars for it, but don’t you dare actually try to practice it.)

There were myriad unwise words said today in the Senate. These undoubtedly were the unwisest:

On the same day that a federal judge whose family was assassinated testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about courthouse safety, Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) described Democratic efforts opposing some of President Bush’s judicial nominees as “leadership-led use of Cloture vote to kill, to defeat, to assassinate these nominees.”

Unbelievable! I just wrote Sen. Frist via his web form. I doubt anyone will ever read it, but I feel somewhat better for having raged at him.

You spoke the following words in the Senate today:

THE ISSUE IS NOT CLOTURE VOTES PER SE. IT’S THE PARTISAN LEADERSHIP-LED USE OF CLOTURE VOTE TO KILL, TO DEFEAT, TO ASSASSINATE THESE NOMINEES. AND THAT’S THE DIFFERENCE.

Senator Durbin seemed willing to give you the benefit of the doubt about your words; I’m not. An apology to all judges, regardless of political persuasion, and to all Americans, regardless of political persuasion, is in order, and sooner rather than later.

You need to take a deep breath, sir, and collect yourself, because you have surely lost your grounding in rationality and perspective. Based on what I heard today,

I should have added:
“Have you no shame, sir?” echoing the words that finally ended the McCarthy madness in the 50s. But of course, they are long past shamelessness.

Meanwhile, Judge Urges End to Verbal Attacks. Judge Lefkow asked lawmakers to “publicly and persistently repudiate gratuitous attacks on the judiciary.”

To their credit, the AP story includes this:

In recent months, several Republican members of Congress have lashed out at judges involved in the Terri Schiavo case and others. Schiavo, a brain-damaged Florida woman, died after her feeding tube was removed, her parents’ legal challenges unsuccessful.

Sen. Rick Santorum (news, bio, voting record) of Pennsylvania said, “The actions on the part of the Florida court and the U.S. Supreme Court are unconscionable.”

“This loss happened because our legal system did not protect the people who need protection most, and that will change,” House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said. “The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.”

Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition and head of the Christian Broadcasting Network, appeared on ABC’s “This Week” this month and criticized the federal courts. Robertson said, “The gradual erosion of the consensus that’s held our country together is probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings.”

Lefkow said that kind of “harsh rhetoric is truly dangerous.”

Thankfully, many Democratic senators, such as Durbin, are speaking up. But power-hungry cretins like Frist are not about to. Wouldn’t want to upset those who will be bringing all those “religious” voters to the polls. That word needs about a million quote marks around it when referring to anyone who would give the time of day to Robertson, Dobson, et. al.

Daily Kos :: Galloway’s Testimony Before Senate: MUST READ!

Only Senators Coleman and Levin were in attendance for the hearing of testimony by George Galloway, MP, on what part he may have played in the Iraq oil for food debacle. But Galloway knew he had a much larger audience and he used the opportunity well.

“Senator, this is the mother of all smoke screens,” he said and, by golly, Coleman, representing the entire administration, had to sit there and listen to it. The only downside is that none of the video I saw included an angle that caught his face. He got smacked down and he bloody well knew it. Levin was an ass too, but Coleman was the top stooge.

Brilliant stuff. Don’t know whether Galloway is guilty or not of the charges, though I suspect not, but he did a great thing today. You know he hit a nerve because all the officials in DC and all the big mouths on TV were attacking his personal life, charges by an ex-wife, et. al. Again, don’t know if true, but definitely more smoke. Anything, after all, rather than talk about the $300+billion dollar elephant in our communal living room.

Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.

If the world had listened to Kofi Annan, whose dismissal you demanded, if the world had listened to President Chirac who you want to paint as some kind of corrupt traitor, if the world had listened to me and the anti-war movement in Britain, we would not be in the disaster that we are in today. Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported, from the theft of billions of dollars of Iraq’s wealth.

“Have a look at the real Oil-for-Food scandal. Have a look at the 14 months you were in charge of Baghdad, the first 14 months when $8.8 billion of Iraq’s wealth went missing on your watch. Have a look at Halliburton and other American corporations that stole not only Iraq’s money, but the money of the American taxpayer.

“Have a look at the oil that you didn’t even meter, that you were shipping out of the country and selling, the proceeds of which went who knows where? Have a look at the $800 million you gave to American military commanders to hand out around the country without even counting it or weighing it.

“Have a look at the real scandal breaking in the newspapers today, revealed in the earlier testimony in this committee. That the biggest sanctions busters were not me or Russian politicians or French politicians. The real sanctions busters were your own companies with the connivance of your own Government.”

Blunt but eloquent and intelligent language (and no notes he was reading from as far as I could tell ) — no wonder it shook up Washington so!

The AP story is dry and boring as usual, but the Guardian piece is snarky and fun, and yet also much more accurate of the dynamic that occured.

I especially like this:

The culture clash between Mr Galloway’s bruising style and the soporific gentility of senate proceedings could hardly have been more pronounced, and drew audible gasps and laughs of disbelief from the audience. “I met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him,” Mr Galloway went on. “The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns, and to give him maps the better to target those guns.”

American reporters seemed as fascinated as the British media: at one point yesterday, before it was his turn to speak, Mr Galloway strode from the room, sending journalists of all nationalities rushing after him - only to discover that he was going to the lavatory.

By condemning him in their report without interviewing him, the senators had already given Mr Galloway the upper hand. But not everything was in his favour. For a start, only two senators were present, sabotaging Mr Galloway’s efforts to attack the whole lickspittle lot of them - and one of the two, the Democrat Carl Levin, had spent much of his opening statement attacking the hypocrisy of the US government in allegedly allowing American firms to benefit from Iraqi oil corruption.

Even so, Mr Galloway was in his element, playing the role he relishes the most: the little guy squaring up for a fight with the establishment.

For these purposes, Senator Coleman served symbolically to represent all the evil in the world - the entire Republican party, the conscience of George Bush, the US government and the British government, too: no wonder his weak smile looked so nauseous.

So out of this, watch for a slew of new words to enter the American lexicon:

• lickspittle
• schoolboy howler

and last but by no means least:

• cock-a-hoop

I think I will be using that last one to describe my feelings about George Galloway, Respect Party MP, at least as concerns his visit to the U.S. Senate today. Bravo!

“Filibuster Frist” @ Princeton University

Update: wayback machine link (script causes page to refresh, which loads the dead link).

Contemporary coverage by Daily Princetonian.