Born on third

The other day, after I posted at Hullabaloo, in the comments DB was called out for cheating. Well, for relying on quotes from Jonah Goldberg, which are so easily mocked it's almost unfair to use them. It's a good point.

The same could probably be said for Tucker Carlson quotes, but I just can't resist. Here's what he had to say right before the AFL-CIO sponsored Democratic debate Tuesday:

BILL PRESS: The rights that I enjoy as a union member...

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh God.

PRESS: ... Whatever rights I have in terms of pension, in terms of vacation time, in terms of health care comes from the union. I wouldn't have zip without the union and neither would any other union member in this country...

CARLSON: You know, that's a total crock. I have a union card in my wallet right now, and I will pull it out and show you, and it gives me zero rights. Zero rights. Any right I have, I negotiated because I paid my lawyer to do so, OK? This is a total joke and I'm forced to pay into this because of stupid laws surrounding it pushed by people like John Edwards.

PRESS: I want to see, Tucker, you get in a run in with MSNBC and see how fast they come to help you.

CARLSON: Yeah, right.

PRESS: The union will be there...

CARLSON: The union? Are you kidding?

PRESS: Absolutely, just like they get behind any working man or woman in the country.

CARLSON: Aaaaaaaagh.

PRESS: And where do you...

CARLSON: Alright.

PRESS: Where do you think you get your, the vacation that you get? Where do you think you get your health care?

CARLSON: Because I paid my lawyer to negotiate it.

It's hard enough to understand what keeps this guy on the air at all, but it's impossible to figure out why they'd air somebody with no sense of history or appreciation for his surroundings right before a debate where real Americans were discussing real problems with the candidates. It didn't sound to me like any of the people asking about health care, worker safety and job protection had personal lawyers to negotiate their vacation schedules.

I didn't go to Yearly Kos, but anybody criticizing the bloggers who went, claiming they sold out or something, need to remember what it looks like when somebody with zero connection to the real world is given a microphone day after day and paid handsomely to drool on it.

Is our Cheney learning?

In my quiet, but urban neighborhood, after the sun goes down, you don't hear a lot. Pretty much any sound you hear is the result of a human. The loudest noise invariably comes courtesy of the LA Times, who, I'm convinced, deliberately remove the mufflers from their delivery vehicles.

Unless the earth does something to remind you that you are on it, it's easy to forget that's the case. Despite the most obscenely expensive 3-D computer-animated weather reports on the local news, you could go months without hearing a forecast here and it would have absolutely no impact on your life. The only time I've seen more than 12 stars in the sky here was after the 1994 Northridge earthquake knocked out all the power.

Last night, I was lured outside by an eerie conversation. Under the light of a nearly-full moon, I discovered that the nonsensical blathering was actually a pair of insane cats. I had no idea they could make noises like that.

What a relief. For a moment, I was convinced that Tucker Carlson and Jonah Goldberg (another example of the LA Times amplifying a dull roar) were continuing their bromidic paean to Dick Cheney right outside my door.

Asked by host Tucker Carlson why some critics have such a strong distaste for Cheney, Goldberg offered this penetrating analysis:

I have no idea. I truly have no idea. I like Dick Cheney — love to have a beer with the guy. I think he is a smart, serious man in American life. I think one of the things that bothers them is he doesn’t care. … He looks like he should be eating a sandwich while he’s [giving a speech]. That’s just the sort of matter-of-fact, eating lunch over the sink, oh yeah and by the way, here’s my view of the world. I love that!

As it turns out, the cats might not have just been howling at the moon. They might have been inspired to join our lunar companion in the Carlson-Goldberg celebration:

It's hard to know what these events really are, but if they're the result of gas seeping from the interior, we might learn some interesting things about the Moon by studying them. Like most people, I normally think of the Moon as a dead, unchanging place, but if it's outgassing from time to time, that view may not be so accurate.

Glenn Greenwald, typically, wrote a brilliant post about the segment:

But I want to focus on one specific exchange between Tucker and Jonah as they explored the Greatness of Dick Cheney:

[...]

GOLDBERG: And you know, but I do think that what Cheney has learned after a lifetime in Washington as a power player, is that the person who holds the secrets has power. And he is using that for what I would say, or probably what he believes to be certainly good ends. A lot of people disagree on that, but he's trying to do best as he can and he sees holding onto power as a tool to do that.

That, of course, is the defining mentality of the Authoritarian Mind, captured in its purest essence by Jonah. Our Leaders are Good and want to protect us. Therefore, we must accept -- and even be grateful -- when they prevent us from knowing what they are doing. The less we know, the more powerful our Leaders are. And that is something we accept and celebrate, for our Leaders are Good and we trust that the more powerful they are, the better we all shall be.

The part that jumps out at me in that jewel of wisdom from Goldberg is the word "learned." I guess we're finally discovering what, exactly, Cheney "learned" at the "refresher courses on ethics and handling classified materials" everybody in the administration was ordered to attend back in 2005.

Cheney "learned" that adhering "to the spirit as well as the letter of all rules governing ethical conduct" is the same thing as accumulating even more power for himself.

As was the case with "[t]he British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," the Cheney administration has disabused me of the notion that something had to actually happen for you to "learn" that it did.

After all, I also "learned" that our government was created with three branches.

Dead to me

The choice between Lou Dobbs and Tucker Carlson is excruciating.

3:00 p.m. PT is now officially music hour in DB HQ.

Please feel free to offer some suggestions.

Lithwick

Dahlia Lithwick nails it again. DB has said it before... Lithwick and Fred Kaplan are the only reasons Slate is still bookmarked in my browser.

It's easy to be distracted, even slightly amused, by the banal office shenanigans that make up the day-to-day coverage of the scandal. Increasingly, the Justice Department is revealed in all its wacky Dunder Mifflin glory. Alberto Gonzales is unmasked as The Office's Michael Scott—in so far over his head that he has no idea what his youthful employees are up to. With our daily focus on who was e-mailing whom and who was spending what on their fancy investitures, it's tempting to dismiss senior Justice Department staff ranking U.S. attorneys for their "loyalty" to the president as sophomoric. The Duke case is a useful reminder that the little plastic game cards being shuffled around and swapped by Kyle Sampson and Monica Goodling were, in fact, loaded weapons.

Federal prosecutors, like state district attorneys, have tremendous power and almost limitless discretion to launch investigations, to subpoena, to file charges, to question witnesses, and to drop charges when the facts don't bear them out. And if the Duke case reminds us of anything, it's that the innocent targets of such investigations and indictments have only one power: to wait it all out and hope for the best.

While Tucker spent his time on the air today shouting "I was right!!!" about the Duke case like a five-year-old, Lithwick shows how a thoughtful person responds to a serious problem with our legal system.

SOTU memories

It's been four years, but this one is still a favorite on this blog:

Let me give you an example of why this president truly is underrated, I think, politically. Tonight he's going to talk about hydrogen fuel cells. You can laugh about it. But it's actually a very promising alternative energy source.

It's the kind of thing, actually, that a Democrat, you would think would be behind. But they're not. -- Tucker Carlson, Jan. 28, 2003

It's one of DB's favorites, not just because Bush hasn't done jack to solve our energy problems, but because Tucker got to hear this while sitting in the same chair on the same set, just nine months earlier:

TUCKER CARLSON: Senator Kerry?

SEN. JOHN KERRY: The bottom line is that unless the United States of America recognizes our use curve is going up and up and up and we have a very limited pot of oil.

We can't by drilling in ANWAR solve the long-term problem in the country. So why not get about the business now of solving the long- term business of the country by becoming truly independent of oil itself.

Then, you know, even if you did ANWAR, you're still going to be importing 58 percent of America's oil from the Middle East. I want America to be independent so no terrorist, no cartel can bully us around. We grow it here at home with ethanol, with hydrogen fuel cells, with the technology of the future. And that is the only way America will be secure and independent. -- April 16, 2002

The hype is that Bush will be making a big environmental splash in tomorrow's speech. Forgive me if I don't shift to the edge of my seat. After all, we heard that the "surge" speech was going to center around sacrifice. Instead it centered around threatening Iran and Syria.

Anyway, talk is cheap and this is the same administration that brought us "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests."

The wrong way to fight

Now that the news has been dominated by the plot to blow up all those airplanes, some of the talking heads have revived the idea of treating Muslims like criminals.

TUCKER CARLSON: This question we were talking about just a minute ago, it's obviously great news that 24 suspects were caught, but it seems to me bad news that 24 westernized Muslims would be willing to die in order to hurt Americans. Are we in the United States government thinking deeply about why these people are willing to kill themselves to hurt us? And what are we doing about that?

FRANCES TOWNSEND, HOMELAND SECURITY ADVISER: Absolutely. We have been reaching out, and we have allies around the Muslim world, around the world, but we work with our allies, like Saudi Arabia, like Pakistan, to understand how we can do a better job at denying them the pool of people they seem to be recruiting from.

I was listening to your earlier dialogue, and I'll say to you, I don't think that you can target a particular population. We know from what we've learned in intelligence channels that, as soon as we focus on a particular population of people that we believe are going to be used as suicide bombers, they'll shift. They may go from young Arab men to people of Southeast Asian descent. And so you have to—you can't—the minute you...

CARLSON: Well, wait a sec. I mean, with all due respect, Ms. Townsend, and I definitely have respect for you, we know that they're all observant Muslims. I mean, there is one population that remains constant. Sure, they may be different colors, different ethnicities, but they share a religion. And so once we know that, why not focus on people we know are observant Muslims?

TOWNSEND: But how do you know that, Tucker? I mean...

(CROSSTALK)

CARLSON: Well, you don't know, but once you know that, you know, observant Methodists, or Presbyterians, or orthodox Jews probably aren't going to be members of Al Qaeda, so, I mean, you can ignore them and save a lot of time.

TOWNSEND: Well, that's right, but, I mean, I guess my question to you is, how would people feel if, when people came up to screening, we were asking them, "What is your religious belief? Are you Catholic? Are you Jewish? Are you Muslim?" We find that offensive.

CARLSON: Oh, it is offensive. On the other hand, so is waiting in line for three hours or destroying the American economy. I mean, at some point, you know, there are tradeoffs. We keep talking about, "We're all going to be inconvenienced." Well, why exactly is that? Why aren't we smarter about it, since we know that only a very small percentage of the population is likely to do anything like this?

What a shock to learn that Tucker Carlson is willing to alienate an entire segment of the population as part of a "tradeoff" in a grand compromise in the generational struggle against long lines.

Let's just get started with the obvious. The 9/11 hijackers lied their way into America, lied their way into flight school, lied their way into normal lives here, and lied their way onto the airplanes. We're supposed to believe that these people would cave once they got to the airport? That they wouldn't say "I'm a Methodist" at the TSA checkpoint?

Ah, but Tucker asks "why not focus on people we know are observant Muslims?" And I suppose we know this because we're making lists with everybody's religion now? We're sending spies into places of worship? Is there a column to indicate just how observant we all are? Will we have agents at the entrance to all churches to know who's OK? Or to make sure that Muslims aren't trying to get into them on Sundays just to throw us off?

But aside from the practical reasons this idea is insane, there is a much larger picture which apparently eludes people like Tucker.

The foiled terrorists in Britain were home grown. Now, Tucker called them "24 westernized Muslims," but they were British. British. Again, this isn't a practical complication. It's part of the big picture.

There's a reason why there were riots in France's Muslim community. There's a reason why British-born citizens would be plotting against their own country, while America does not face the same threat.

It's because we don't treat the millions of Muslims in America the way they do in Europe. And if we start acting like Europeans, not only is that, by definition, un-American, it will tear millions of people out of our national fabric. We have a "with us or against us" position in the war on terror. Treating any Muslim like a potential terrorist tells them that we believe they are no longer with us. So where does that leave them?

And unless Tucker thinks someone like him is going to go Donnie Brascoe on al-Qaeda, then we need all the help we can get. Treating an entire religious segment of American like crap in order to get from the limo to the plane faster is the kind of small thinking that makes us more despised and less secure. It's exactly what the terrorists want.

UPDATE: Juliette Kayyem at TPM Cafe gets it.