ELITES WANT "STABILITY" TO PREVAIL -- WITH AT LEAST ONE RECENT EXCEPTION

I think Rick Perlstein has a point when he argues that Gerald Ford's decision to pardon Richard Nixon set a standard for the coddling of elite wrongdoers:

... political elites took away a dangerous lesson from the Ford pardon -- our true shame: All it takes is the incantation of magic words like "stability" and "confidence" and "consensus" in order to inure yourself from accountability for just about any malfeasance.

Perlstein writes about the investigation of U.S. intelligence agencies that began in 1975:

At the height of the intelligence investigations Washington Post's publisher Katharine Graham complained of the media's tendency to "see a conspiracy and cover-up in everything." Sen. J. William Fulbright said "these are not the kind of truths we need most right now," that the nation demanded "restored stability and confidence" instead. The CIA had no trouble promptly drumming up a disingenuous propaganda campaign that all but neutered reform. And, 39 years later, these institutions are still largely broken, and still almost entirely unaccountable.

That sort of thinking prevailed with regard to Iran-contra in the Reagan years and also the various abuses of the George W. Bush administration -- don't punish the principals severely and, heaven knows, don't impeach the president, much less hold the executive branch accountable in any other way.

But this isn't exactly an ironclad rule, because there's been at least one post-Nixon exception: Bill Clinton.

The elites didn't express horror at the thought of Clinton being forced from office because of the Lewinsky scandal. Approximately 125 newspapers called for Clinton's resignation. The media tut-tutters stood by as Clinton was actually impeached. The Washington Post, where in the mid-1970s there was disdain for those who allegedly "see a conspiracy and cover-up in everything," was home in the 1990s to those who believed that the president "came in here" (i.e., Washington) "and trashed the place, and it's not his place."

If President Obama's poll numbers remain low, and if a Republican Senate takeover inspires serious efforts to impeach the president, I wonder whether the insiders are going to argue in favor of "stability" or just join the pile-on. Given what happened to the last Democratic president, my money's on the latter.

IF EMMETT TILL WERE KILLED NOW, WOULD LOOKING AT HIS CORPSE BE CONSIDERED EXPLOITATION?

At The Guardian, Hannah Giordis tells us that we shouldn't watch the video of Ray Rice knocking his then-fiancee unconscious:

That we feel entitled (and excited) to access gut-wrenching images of a woman being abused -- to be entranced by the looks of domestic violence -- speaks volumes not only about the man who battered her, but also about we who gaze in parasitic rapture. We click and consume, comment and carry on. What are we saying about ourselves when we place (black) women’s pain under a microscope only to better consume the full kaleidoscope of their suffering?

This broadcasting of victims’ most vulnerable moments as sites for public commentary is not new. Indeed, victims of abuse have always been forced to recount their traumas to audiences more intent on policing their victimhood than finding justice. With YouTube and TMZ and all the rest, victim blaming extends far past simply being shunned by your immediate community -- it means having your most horrific memories go viral without your consent. It means having millions of people virtually dissect your wounds, not to heal them but to decide if your injuries were bad enough for everyone to feel bad for you.

So is it simply not possible to find a way to watch this brutality without exploiting the victim? Obviously there are people who don't grasp the seriousness of this act of abuse, or of abuse in general, but it seems to me that most people who've seen the video have come away horrified. Is there just no amount of disgust at what Ray Rice did that justifies the exposure of this incident, because some people aren't disgusted?

It makes me wonder about victims of violence from the past -- Emmett Till, for instance, whose mother, after he was beaten to death for whistling at a white woman, had him buried in an open casket, thus revealing to the world the extent of his disfigurement as a result of that beating, or Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the young girl burned by American napalm who's seen running down a road in Vietnam in a famous 1972 photograph. Is it impossible to look at the victimization of these two without exploiting them? It didn't seem that way at the time that we first saw their suffering, but now we're told any glance at suffering is voyeurism. Is that all our response to images of Emmett Till and Phan Thi Kim Phuc ever amounted to? And therefore is it impossible to watch the Rice video -- or videos of those beheaded by ISIS or Al Qaeda -- without giving power to the assailants? If we once could look at such images non-exploitively but can't anymore, when did that change? Why wasn't our gaze toxic decades ago? Why is it inevitably toxic now?

BACK TO THE WINGNUT ANTICHRIST FUTURE

Please kill me:



Below is a clip previewing the interview. In addition to Megyn Kelly in classic form -- she looks like the pretty nun of Old Hollywood cliche but talks like the mean Mother Superior, and seems as if she'd like to whack Churchill's knuckles with a steel ruler -- the clip features McCarthyite nerd Dinesh D'Souza, who pathetically seems to be trying to rebrand himself as just "D'Souza" while promoting his "documentary" America (coming to DVD in November!). Fox generously allows him to tag-team with Kelly on this interview (promoting D'Souza's projects seems to be a joint wingnut labor of love, like an Amish barn-raising). Churchill, still ponytailed and snarly, gives the punters just what they came for, like a pro-wrestling villain.



It's no coincidence that Fox would go searching for Antichrists outside politics at precisely this moment: President Obama is attacking ISIS, and it seems clear that D.C. Democrats are generally going to line up in favor of military action, just as they did in the early Bush years. Under those circumstances, someone has to be the war-skeptical object of Fox's Two-Minutes' Hates, just as someone had to fill that role between the vote authorizing force in Iraq and the mainstreaming of the get-out-of-Iraq movement within the Democratic Party. If we're entering a similar period, why not Churchill? I assume Roseanne Barr and Cindy Sheehan will follow in short order.

MARK LEIBOVICH'S MISDIRECTED PSEUDO-CYNICISM

Thanks, Yastreblyansky and Libby -- I really appreciate your posts this weekend, and I hope I won't be bugging you again for a while.

This morning I just want to respond to Mark Leibovich's harrumphing take on media coverage of Ferguson, which appeared in The New York Times Magazine yesterday:

In a less media-saturated time, we might have gone on to consider this serious news event on its own terms, with journalists providing facts and insights, and politicians pondering a course of action. But in the mixed-up scrum of politics and media that our so-called national conversation has become, a serious news event is only the start of the news. Soon after the shooting, the suburb of Ferguson became a roiling caldron of outside observers, all bent on "bearing witness" to the situation....

In their sometimes lofty self-assessments, journalists have long described their jobs as "bearing witness" just as politicians vowed to "bear witness" to whatever it was they were advocating for, or against.... In today’s social media- driven news cycle, however, "bearing witness" has largely become an easy rhetorical snack food — a mass-market trope available to anyone who wants to weigh in, or show up....

Leibovich wants us to believe that that the journalistic response to Ferguson was nothing but preening narcissism:

As politicians arrived, journalists who sometimes outnumbered the protesters often became the story themselves. They went, ostensibly, "to bear witness of this moment for our readers," as Akilah Johnson of The Boston Globe told Poynter....

Within a few days, unsurprisingly, the rampant talk of "bearing witness" became central to the "national conversation" that the shooting in Ferguson had sparked. Bearing witness and national conversations are in fact close twins in today's insipid talking-point wasteland.

Posturing as a Mencken or Orwell, he writes:

What does "bearing witness" or "starting a conversation" even mean? It is not really clear, except that they have become catchall proxies for kind of being there, kind of taking note and -- in many cases -- not really being able to do much of anything.

And "not really being able to do much of anything" means, specifically, that journalists are not "providing facts and insights" and politicians are not "pondering a course of action."

Except that the coverage of Ferguson was actually some of the most news-filled reporting we've seen in a while, and politicians actually have pondered courses of action as a result of it. Leibovich seems to be selling us cynicism because cynicism is in fashion, but he's selling us cynicism about participants in a news event who actually did some good work.

Look at what America learned from journalists covering Ferguson (and from journalists whose preexisting work on issues related to Ferguson became freshly relevant): We learned about the shocking militarization of our police, particularly in small towns where there can't possibly be a need for anti-terror weaponry. We learned that police forces started to become dumping grounds for post-Cold War military surplus a generation ago, a process that accelerated after 9/11. We learned that the small-town armies receiving these goods often don't even know how to use it properly.

We learned that demographic changes can leave a small majority-non-white town with an overwhelmingly white government that's utterly indifferent to the community. We learned that cash-strapped small towns balance their books with fines levied as a result of frequent and gratuitous traffic stops, which in Ferguson are clearly done in a racially biased way. We also learned about an incident in which Ferguson cops beat an innocent black man and then charged him with property damage for bleeding on a police uniform.

We saw authorities in nearby St. Louis releasing a citizen video of another police shooting, in which the cops seemed to show no interest in resolving the situation in any way apart from gunfire. The cops felt compelled to go public with this because of media attention on Ferguson. It was easy to imagine that the Mike Brown incident happened because there was just as little effort made to resolve it non-fatally.

We also saw journalists debunking disinformation, and thus exposing it as disinformation -- about the shooter's alleged injuries, and about the victim's supposed criminal past.

And the political response? Many politicians called for reductions in police militarization, including a top-tier Republican presidential candidate, who thus positioned himself to the left of his party (and who also, secondarily, denounced racially unequal justice in America, which leaves him greatly at odds with his party-mates). Ferguson seems to be accelerating moves to equip police in various locales with body cameras. And the Justice Department announced an investigation of the Ferguson police department's civil rights record. Meanwhile, the public response to events in Ferguson have included voter registration drives (although a Republican Party official in Missouri described this development as "disgusting").

People who are genuinely skeptical of politics and journalism feel that way because much of the time we don't get the information we need from journalists and we don't get the actions the public needs from politicians. But that wasn't really true about Ferguson. Journalists provided us with a lot of useful information. Some political actors did good things, or at least said some of the right things. If you want to be cynical, be cynical about the fact that none of this may amount to much, justice may never be served, the system may forget everything we talked about in August, and we may go back to business as usual. But don't be cynical about people who did at least some of what we needed them to do.

I didn't read Leibovich's book This Town, but the excerpt I read left me somewhat baffled: the book was supposed to be a takedown of the Beltway elite, but the storytelling seemed to glorify the supposed targets. It had a fake veneer of cynicism, but it didn't seem cynical about the inside players at all. It seemed to regard their career trajectories as very, very meaningful.

Leibovich's essay on Ferguson seems similar -- he seems to care primarily about being admired for being cynical. He's working his niche -- professional critic of the players in politics and the media -- but he doesn't really seem to be targeting his outrage at actual betrayals of the public. In this case, it's the authorities who've turned Ferguson into an occupied territory. It's not the targets of Leibovich's sneer.

Rejoinders

Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Skull, Leeks, and Pitcher. Via The Guardian.

Don't want to say goodbye this weekend without responding to commenter dgchicago, who very properly called me out on a post last weekend where I may have let my "Obama is a liberal" fantasy get away with me a little bit on the subjects of Lawrence Summers, Grand Bargains, and Syria.

What is your evidence that Obama never wanted to bomb Syria? Just as with the Grand Bargain and with Summers as Fed Chair, the timeline suggests to me that he was heading in the wrong direction until outside forces prevented it (Republican intransigence in the case of the Bargain, public opinion in the cases of Syria and Summers). You didn't provide any solid evidence to support your claims, not even in the links to past posts. You seem to start from the conclusion that what Obama did is Right and Good, then work backward from there.

Part of it was unclear writing; I didn't mean to suggest that Obama "didn't want" to nominate Summers to the Federal Reserve chair (as should have been clear from my original post)—I just didn't buy the narrative that he cared so much about it that nominating Janet Yellen instead would have been a personal defeat for him.

I certainly didn't mean to deny either that he spent a lot of time talking up the "Grand Bargain" proposals for matching a progressive tax reform for liberals with a regressive entitlement rephorm for conservatives. I can't give any evidence why he would have wanted to do it, but I think he might have hoped to replicate the triumph of the April 2011 budget, where the apparent Democratic concessions (which had made us all scream treason) turned out to be illusory, and Republicans really felt Boehner had been rolled. If that was chess, it was the two-dimensional kind practiced by Teddy Kennedy, and an elementary example of the Fool's Mate.

The problem with the Grand Bargain was that Boehner was determined not to get rolled again (and the Democratic concession of chained CPI was not illusory enough, though it was a lot less than the kind of cut-Social-Security horror we feared). But again there's no reason to accept the narrative that Obama was some kind of corporatist plant determined to break the New Deal; the purpose was always the bargain by which he would trade something for a fairer tax code.  (I would not have said it was a good deal, either, unless persuaded by a higher authority like Krugman, who did not approve.) And in any event, whatever his motivation may have been, he's finally dropped it, seeing he's not going to be able to swing it, in favor of talking like a Democrat:

We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. For we remember the lessons of our past.... The commitments we make to each other – through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security – these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us. They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great. (Inaugural Address, January 21 2012).

On Syria, though, I think TG is remembering the timeline wrong. It didn't look at the time as if Obama was "heading" in one direction or another, but two or three directions at the same time, as Elizabeth Drew tells it in her new New York Review article (my bold):

The president more than once moved toward greater involvement in Syria while at the same time seeking to make sure that it wouldn’t happen. In 2012 he drew a “red line” on the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons against its own citizens and then was much criticized when he didn’t follow through after Assad used them.

Unfortunately for the president, such criticism is based on a partial recollection of what happened. After Assad defied him and used chemical weapons, Obama felt pressed to respond. But rather than go ahead with bombing in Syria, with all the risks of getting further drawn into a civil war he was trying to avoid, he took the famous long walk on the White House grounds with his chief of staff, Denis McDonough, to whom he’s said to feel closer than anyone else he works with—other than, of course, the ever-present Valerie Jarrett—and decided to put the issue to Congress by asking its permission to bomb in Syria.

There’s little reason to doubt that he did this in the knowledge that the permission was unlikely to be forthcoming. But the outcome was more felicitous than that. Obama accepted an offer by the Russians to negotiate the removal of the chemical weapons from Syrian hands. Since the Russians are allied with the Syrian government, Obama’s threat seems to have been more credible to Assad than to his American critics.

Why was he contradicting himself this way?

Deep tweets

Me too.

#FixThePolice! pic.twitter.com/P5ys6RYS4X
— Reg Saddler (@zaibatsu) September 8, 2014

Cross-posted at the The Impolitic.

Worth nothing

Chris Cillizza literally phoning it in:

You can tell by the extraneous h in the parenthesis in line 4, which must have been produced by an Autocorrect gremlin making fun of Chris's portentous style.

I'm wondering how much President Obama has really thought at all about the political consequences of delaying his immigration action until after the election—beyond simply believing whatever Mark Pryor tells him.

It's not only the demoralizing effect on the Latino community, which the Democrats have decided isn't worth worrying about in 2014, since only one of the key Senate races, Colorado's, is in a state with a crucial Hispanic population (they've apparently given up on the House of Representatives, even though Steve Israel and his friends are sending me ten emails a day insisting that they haven't and all they need to win is $3 from me).

It's the way it encourages the worst rightwing fantasies of what Obama might actually have in mind: "I'm definitely going to do it, but I'll wait until after the election." Really? He's afraid to do it until we vote? It must be as bad as Steve King says it is! Plot to implement sharia!

It's like the implementation of the Affordable Care Act being stretched out over four years (now five with the delay on the employer mandate), creating a huge space for people to pollute with lies about what it contained, which they continue to believe today. It's no coincidence Cillizza calls that "the big example of federal overreach", because that's what the Village thinks, being uninterested in its success in reducing the uninsured rate or cutting medical costs because that's just so wonky.

The plan as far as we know, to give temporary residence and work permission to as many as 5 million adults already living in the US who are parents of US citizens and Dreamers (while at the same time hastening the deportations of all those refugee children back to the gang-terrorized streets of Tegucigalpa to show how "tough" we are), is far more modest than the Senate bill the Chamber of Commerce and Evangelical community were supporting last spring, which would give a chance to all 11 million undocumented aliens.

If Obama had signed the order back in June, giving the press and the population a few months to deal with the reality of the plan instead of paranoid fantasies about it, including lots of video of sweet and overjoyed families, how much effect would that have had on Mark Pryor's campaign? How much effect did the original Dreamer order in June 2012 have on that year's elections? Other than to make Marco Rubio very uncomfortable and thirsty?

2012 Senate elections, via Wikipedia, dull colors retentions and bright colors gains. How many seats did Democrats lose because of Obama's tyrannical amnesty order? Really, Nebraska? (I don't mean to belittle the difficulties for Democrats of this year's Senate election; I just don't see how this move makes them any better.)

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.

Annals of derp: Kissinger arithmetic

The old vampire Professor Kissinger was on the NPR this morning sharing his fascinating views. He seems to be a little challenged with respect to the arithmetic thing:

I think we would find, if you study the conduct of [the military], that the Obama administration has hit more targets on a broader scale than the Nixon administration ever did. And, of course, B-52s have a different bombing pattern.

On the other hand, drones are far more deadly because they are much more accurate. And I think the principle is essentially the same. You attack locations where you believe people operate who are killing you. You do it in the most limited way possible. And I bet if one did an honest account, there were fewer civilian casualties in Cambodia than there have been from American drone attacks.

I'm not aware of any statistics about number of targets or clear why anybody would be interested in making a comparison since, as Dr. Kissinger acknowledges, what constitutes a target for a B-52 is different from what constitutes a target for a Predator drone. The numbers of deaths, on the other hand, have been studied, if not very completely.

Wikipedia:

Although information is sparse, American bombing in Cambodia is estimated to have killed between 40,000 and 150,000 civilians and combatants.^[19][20][21]

Huffington Post, January 2014:

The U.S. drone program under President Barack Obama reached its fifth anniversary on Thursday having tallied up an estimated death toll of at least 2,400 people.

We don't have respectable numbers distinguishing civilian from combatant fatalities, or for that matter an agreed way of distinguishing civilians from combatants in these types of conflict, but if Dr. Kissinger is correct in claiming that drone operations are more accurate than carpet bombing, which seems likely on the face of it, then the percentage of civilians among the minimum 40,000 deaths in Cambodia is probably considerably higher than the percentage of civilians among the minimum 2,400 killed in the Overseas Contigency Operations of 2009 to 2014.

Thus, since the Cambodian bombing killed at least six times as many people total (in one small country outside the official theater of operations) as the OsCOps (that's my own acronym, by the way) in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and wherever else, the number of civilians it killed must have been more than six times as many, and probably a great deal more.

A hint on this is given in the numbers provided by the New America Foundation for Pakistan bombing, which yield a proportion of civilian to total deaths in Pakistan ranging from 25 to 30% under Bush 2004-2008, and  5 to 8% under the greatly expanded but much more professionally conducted drone operations of Obama 2009–August 2014. That would suggest that the number of all the civilians killed in the Obama-era OsCOps could be no more than 8% of 2,400, or 192, or even as little as 5%, or 120; while the number of civilians killed in the Cambodian bombings is clearly 50 to 100 or many more times as many, at the very least more than 10,000 (25% of 40,000).

Dr. Kissinger is lying so hard I'm surprised his tongue doesn't fall out.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names. My take on drone warfare in general, from February 2013, is here.

And now I'm out of here until Monday -- houseguests, Round II. But there'll be guest bloggers, so stop by.

YES, THERE'S WINGNUT SPECULATION THAT JOAN RIVERS WAS THE VICTIM OF A PRO-OBAMA MURDER

Joan Rivers has passed away -- and of course there's talk on the right thinks she was killed by Obama, because she recently joked that the president is gay and Michelle is transgender.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Mad Jewess, who floated this theory even shortly after Rivers fell ill:

It is quite possible that Joan Rivers could have been poisoned. After all, she works with Communists. Communist are murderers and terrorists. They are also thin-skinned and can’t take when you talk about their leader, Stalin-Obama, as we all have witnessed in our lives, on Twitter, Facebook and our blogs.

So, here are some questions…

Where was Joan Rivers in the last 2 weeks or so? I know there is a certain drug that works in your system, eventually snuffing the life out of you.. People slip it into drinks. Could that have happened to Joan Rivers? Is it also a probability that someone did not like Rivers' view on Palestine and slipped her a drug to kill her? That is also possible....

The Jewess directs our attention to Steve Bridges:

He was a comedienne [sic] who made fun of Obama. He is dead, now.

Oh, please. Based on this toothless material? This stuff makes Jay Leno sound like Lenny Bruce:



Plus, Bridges's family says on his own website that his untimely death at age 48 was due to natural causes. Which doesn't prevent the compiler of the Obama 'Dead Pool'" from assuming A Conspiracy So Vast:

Steve Bridges Dies At 48 - Impersonator Who Offended 0bama ...Steve Bridges as President Obama - August 2011 ....It appeared that he died of natural causes...: On the Steve Bridges website, they are now calling his death 'an accident"...that the probable cause of death was due to "upper airway anaphylaxis", caused by a severe allergic reaction.. --- CSI Show: Murder by anaphalaxis?... A real life example of possible murder by anaphalaxis

And now Joan Rivers. Who's next? Victoria Jackson, watch your back....

SO WHAT DOES IT SAY WHEN A DEMOCRAT CAN'T BEAT A REPUBLICAN WITH A 27% APPROVAL RATING?

As a Democrat, I'm supposed to be happy that my party's Senate nominee in Kansas, Chad Taylor, dropped out of the race -- as Princeton election wonk Sam Wong recently explained, this clears the field for someone who seems capable of beating Republican incumbent Pat Roberts -- Greg Orman, an independent candidate. Wang cites a Public Policy Polling survey showing that Orman would beat Roberts by 10 points in a two-man race, while Taylor would lose to Roberts by 4 in a two-man race. This despite the fact that Roberts has a job approval rating, according to the PPP survey, of 27%.

So whoopee -- the Republican might not win now, and the Senate might not tip to the GOP. But my question is: How toxic is the Democratic Party in Heartland America if a Democrat (and not a particularly lefty Democrat, as far as I know) can't beat a guy with a 27% approval rating? For that matter, why is Mitch McConnell, with a 37% job approval rating in the latest PPP survey of his state, beating Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes by 4 points?

Is it a ripple effect from Obama's job performance? Or from Obama's race? Or is it something more fundamental?

I keep hearing that there's an "emerging Democratic majority" out there -- women plus non-whites plus young people equals the death knell for the GOP. But it seems to me that outside the Northeast, the West Coast, certain portions of the Rust Belt and northern Midwest, and New Mexico and Hawaii, you've got more than half the country where white people just despise the Democratic Party, even if they don't love the Republicans.

I think it's the result of relentless right-wing propaganda (which alienates women/non-whites/young people but seems to be catnip to older white males) plus the way we fund our campaigns: the need for rich donors compels Democrats who want to win elections (up to and including the president) to curb any impulse that would genuinely help the middle class and poor. Ultimately I don't blame voters who wonder what the Democratic Party has done for them lately. (I'd say the answer is to limit the transfer of wealth from the non-rich to the rich, which Republicans openly cheer for and want to happen at a much faster pace.)

Some people think the GOP, as a party of old white men, may not survive much longer. I'm not one of those people. I suspect that today's younger white males will fill its ranks as they progress toward middle age, in response to the tribal pull of Republicanl propaganda. I just don't see the Democratic Party adding whites to its coalition, which might happen if it chose to sacrifice a few big-ticket donations and stressed a little more genuine kitchen-table economic progressivism. I can imagine a future in which there's nothing but a teabaggy Republican Party and a "Third Way" party that starts to the right even of the today's Democratic Party and then works rightward. Progressivism will be a boutique taste, maybe seen in Montpelier or Seattle, but not very many other places. If Democrats can never deliver on what they promise, why wouldn't this happen?

HOUSE REPUBLICANS: WE'LL DEFEAT ISIS USING DISHONEST ANTI-OBAMA GOTCHAS!

I see that the rise of ISIS has finally persuaded House Republicans to put country over party. I'm kidding, of course:

House Republicans are laying groundwork to capitalize on widespread discontent with President Obama's handling of ISIS, scheduling a series of hearings and meetings aimed at drafting a plan to defeat the jihadist group....

Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy criticized Obama's response to ISIS' rapid gains, saying it revealed misplaced priorities of the government bureaucracy. As an example, he seized on an article on a U.S. Forest Service blog providing safety tips for making s'mores....

Right -- it's terrible that that blog post appeared, because all functions of the federal government unrelated to national defense are supposed to cease immediately whenever there's been a terrorist attack, on personal orders of the president.

Yes, that post does discuss ways campers can make s'mores safely in the woods. If it's unseemly for the Forest Service to do public outreach on fire safety, then I suppose it's been a mistake all these years to talk about Smokey the Bear, who's been talking about fire prevention for the Forest Service since 1944. (Somehow we beat Hitler and won the Cold War despite all that wasteful government spending on Smokey.)

And yes, the post talks about s'mores in the context of nutrition. The USDA (of which the Forest Service is a part) has been publishing nutrition guides since 1894, and published its first Recommended Daily Allowances for nutrients in 1941 -- yup, the year Pearl Harbor was bombed, though somehow the publication of those guidelines didn't cause us to lose the war.

I see that on September 14, 2001 -- yes, the very day President George W. Bush spoke through that bullhorn about the 9/11 attacks -- the USDA website was publishing a news release describing a potentially nutritious mutant legume similar to alfalfa ("Udderly Fantastic: Mutant Plants a High Source of Calcium"). The USDA site noted that a few days later President Bush issued a proclamation for National Farm and Ranch Safety and Health Week -- the date of the proclamation was September 17, 2001. And here's the seemingly self-evident title of another USDA press release from that period: "Low-Fat Foods Can Help Lower Fat Intake." That one was dated October 1, 2001. Ground Zero was still smoldering! The U.S. attack on Afghanistan hadn't even been launched yet! What was President Bush doing?

Of course, no one attacked Bush this way in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. No one suggested that the federal government should cease functioning if terrorist groups that had killed Americans were still at large, nor did anyone suggest that the president is personally responsible for every small thing the federal government does.

But these are Republicans we're talking about. Cheap shots are all they know.

WHY DOES JONAH GOLDBERG HATE GOD?

I'm sure you've encountered Joe Biden's words on ISIS:

Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday delivered a fiery response to the killing of American journalist Steven Sotloff, telling Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant militants that the U.S. will "follow them to the gates of hell."

"[W]hen people harm Americans, we don't retreat. We don't forget," Biden said during a speech in New Hampshire. "We take care of those who are grieving, and when that's finished, they should know, we will follow them to the gates of hell until they are brought to justice. Because hell is where they will reside. Hell is where they will reside."

Pretty straightforward, no? Well, apparently not to Jonah Goldberg:

I realize that taking Biden's language too literally is a shortcut to madness, but I always thought "bring to justice" meant "bring to trial." The Internet seems to agree with me. So which is it? When he says they will reside in Hell, he makes it sound like we will be sending them there. But he also says we'll be bringing them to justice, which suggests that we will retrieve them. If he had said “we will follow them to the ends of the Earth” that would have made more sense. I mean do we have an extradition treaty with Hell?

Goldberg claims to be "taking Biden's language ... literally," but Biden didn't literally say we'll be bringing ISIS to justice -- he said "we will follow them to the gates of hell until they are brought to justice." By whom? By God, I assume -- Biden's a cradle Catholic, so I assume he expects his God to do the justice-bringing.

Which is the kind of talk I thought was supposed to be second nature to right-wingers and anathema to Godless-commie Democrats. But there it is from Biden -- and it went completely over Goldberg's head. Hey, Jonah, don't all you righties think America is a Judeo-Christian nation? Aren't you always telling us that Democrats want to banish religion from the public square? Well, here's the religion you love so much. Funny you didn't recognize it.

MORE EVIDENCE THAT ISIS ISN'T RECRUITING AMERICANS FOR STATESIDE ATTACKS

There's a freakout under way regarding this:

EXCLUSIVE: ISIS fighter worked at Minneapolis airport

He was the second known American killed while fighting for ISIS in Syria, and the second from Minnesota -- and a Fox 9 exclusive uncovering his employment history is raising a few eyebrows.

An airport is probably the last place anyone would want a suspected terrorist to work, but before he died overseas, that's exactly what Abdirahmaan Muhumed did in the Twin Cities. In fact, he may have cleaned your plane at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

... Multiple sources tell Fox 9 News that, for a time, he worked at a job that gave him security clearance at the airport, access to the tarmac and unfettered access to planes.

Two former employees confirmed working with Muhumed at Delta Global Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Delta Airlines. Earlier this year, the cleaning contract was taken over by another company, Airserv....

Yes, and?

Think about it for one second: You're the leadership of ISIS. You make a big effort to recruit foreign fighters, and one of those fighters turns out to have access to secure areas at a major U.S. airport. What do you do?

Well, if you're serious about conducting terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, you don't put this guy on the front lines as cannon fodder. You send him to a training camp far away from the field of battle. Then you send him back to Minnesota in one piece. You don't squander an asset like this by getting him killed like any random soldier -- unless you don't give a crap about launching attacks in America.

Will these guys ever try to expand the battlefield to the U.S.? I don't know. But that's not what they're interested in now. The story of Abdirahmaan Muhumed shouldn't scare us -- it should reassure us.


(For my earlier post on this subject, go here.)

DEXTER FILKINS IS ALMOST RIGHT

In The New Yorker, Dexter Filkins reacts to the video of Steven Sotloff's beheading:

In the final moments before an ISIS executioner beheaded the American journalist Steven Sotloff, the masked man offered up, in an English accent, a message to his viewers: "We take this opportunity to warn those governments that enter this evil alliance of America against the Islamic State to back off and leave our people alone."

Beheading an American hostage -- and a bound, kneeling one at that -- hardly seems likely to keep the United States out of the Middle East. Indeed, ISIS leaders couldn't have made the prospect of American airstrikes more likely if they had sent a video to President Obama begging him to drop more bombs.

Which raises a larger question: What could these people possibly hope to gain from such an act?

Filkins goes on to discuss bombing videos made (before the rise of ISIS) by Al Qaeda, which were collected and released under titles such as Greatest Hits II and Greatest Hits III. He quotes Abu Musab al-Zarqawi of Al Qaeda in Iraq: "If the enemy wins, we will burn everything." Filkins concludes that none of this is traditional warfare, with a political end in mind -- it's killing for the sake of killing:

It's hard to watch the video of Steven Sotloff's last moments and not conclude [that] the ostensible objective of securing an Islamic state is nowhere near as important as killing people. For the guys who signed up for ISIS -- including, especially, the masked man with the English accent who wielded the knife -- killing is the real point of being there.

I don't think the real point of being there is killing precisely -- it's living in a world of total violence, one in which everyone is in a gang (or in fear of gangs) and they're in the most fearsome gang in town. It's not just killing, it's having an enemy who's trying to kill you (but never quite does). It's being in a video game with real blood, and winning. It's exciting. It inspires admirers, and recruits as well (recruits make the gang even more fearsome).

Of course ISIS wants us to attack. ISIS rules its own turf, but everyone says the U.S. is the toughest gang anywhere -- so how badass are the guys in ISIS if they draw us into a fight and hold us off for a while? And sure, we might kill them, but, like teenagers who get killed by the police after shooting up a school, they want to go out like that. It's suicide by global cop.

So, no, it's not a desire just to kill. It's a desire for total violence. Plenty of sociopaths who desire to kill just ... kill. These guys are looking for a fight.

WHEN BARACK OBAMA SAID PRETTY MUCH WHAT RAND PAUL SAYS NOW, RIGHT-WINGERS THOUGHT HE WAS HITLER

You may have read that Rand Paul is a hawk with regard to ISIS:

Kentucky senator Rand Paul tells the AP that he would seek to "destroy ISIS militarily" if he were president -- or at least he seems to be based on statements he made last week at the annual meeting of Americans for Prosperity:

Speaking to a ballroom later, some of the loudest applause for Paul came when he quipped: "If the president has no strategy, maybe it's time for a new president."

In an emailed comment, however, Paul elaborated by saying: "If I were President, I would call a joint session of Congress. I would lay out the reasoning of why ISIS is a threat to our national security and seek congressional authorization to destroy ISIS militarily."

However, Jacob Sullum at Reason notes that Paul tried to finesse the question in a Q&A session held elsewhere in Dallas the same day:

I think the strategy has to be that you have an open debate in the country over whether or not ISIS is a threat to our national security. And it's not enough just to say they are. That's usually what you hear—you hear a conclusion. People say, "Well, it's a threat to our national security." That's a conclusion. The debate has to be: Are they a threat to our national security?

Our national security doesn't have to be just stopping at our borders. It can include our embassy personnel. It can include our soldiers. It can include citizens, and people involved in business, and journalists -- things like that. So I think it is a real debate.

What I would do, if you want a strategy, you have to go to the American people. You have to go to Congress. I would convene a joint session of Congress, and I would ask for permission from Congress and say, "These are the reasons why I think ISIS is a threat to us. This is why we should be involved." If [President Obama] doesn't do that, then I think he doesn't galvanize support, we look weak to the world, and in the end we don't really have a strategy.

Conclusion: Rand Paul wants war-skeptic kids' love and Sheldon Adelson's money, so he's talking out of both sides of his face. But we knew that, right? What I find more interesting is the middle paragraph from that Q&A quote. Let me run it by you again:

Our national security doesn't have to be just stopping at our borders. It can include our embassy personnel. It can include our soldiers. It can include citizens, and people involved in business, and journalists -- things like that. So I think it is a real debate.

You know what that reminds me of? This 2008 speech by presidential candidate Barack Obama:

... we’re going to grow our Foreign Service, open consulates that have been shuttered and double the size of the Peace Corps by 2011 to renew our diplomacy. We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set.

We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.

That's a small portion of a speech about creating national service opportunities, most of them domestic, some of them focused overseas. Remember what happened when Obama said this? Right-wingers freaked out. They took the bit about "a civilian national security force" and reacted this way:

A Republican congressman from Georgia said Monday he fears that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist dictatorship.

"It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he's the one who proposed this national security force," Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. "I'm just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may -- may not, I hope not -- but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism." ...

"That's exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it's exactly what the Soviet Union did," Broun said. "When he's proposing to have a national security force that's answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he's showing me signs of being Marxist."

They never stopped reacting that way. They're still reacting that way.

Did right-wingers really believe that Obama meant to turn the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps and the like into a national Gestapo? Did they really think he meant to fund them dollar for dollar at the same level as the military (rather than using "just as well-funded" to mean "as fully funded for their missions as the military is for its mission")? I guess a lot did, though others obviously just pounced cynically on the ambiguous language.

But can you imagine what the reaction would have been if Obama had talked instead about a national security policy that isn't "stopping at our borders" and "can include citizens, and people involved in business, and journalists"? Wouldn't the freakout have been largely the same? Obama wants a domestic army! Obama wants journalists to be part of the national security apparatus! Obama wants business subsumed to his national security ends!

Don't worry, Rand -- no one's going to react that way to what you said, not even if you're the 2016 GOP nominee. The same alarmists aren't going to describe you as a potential Hitler. You're a Republican. It's all good.

WHY DOES THE GOP NEED POLICIES WHEN POINTLESS TEMPER TANTRUMS ARE FAR MORE EFFECTIVE?

Remember when The Most Important Thing In The Universe was the border crisis? Remember when Republicans were running around with their hair on fire telling us that President Obama had to deal with this imminent threat to the stability of the Republic now now now? Remember when the Very Smart People told us that, for once, Republicans and Democrats would put aside their differences and agree on legislation to deal with the crisis, because doing nothing was simply not an option?

Well, guess what?

Congress might punt again on a border funding bill when it returns in September.

The House and Senate scrambled to move bills to give federal agencies extra money to handle the surge in unaccompanied child migrants crossing the southern border before their five-week recess.

But lawmakers ultimately left town in August without sending a measure to President Obama's desk or with concrete plans for how they will handle the issue when they return.

The two chambers found themselves far apart, with House Republicans approving a $694 million bill and the Senate failing to move their $2.7 billion measure.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson earlier this month said he was "left with no choice" and shifted $405 million away from other homeland security programs to provide sufficient resources at the border.

Johnson urged lawmakers to approve the Obama administration's $3.7 billion request when it reconvenes....

But now the House might not even take up border funding when it comes back to Washington. Some House Republicans question whether extra money is really needed, noting that DHS has the ability to reallocate funds.

"Currently, it is not clear that additional funding would be necessary," said an aide on the House Appropriations Committee....

During the summer, Greg Sargent of The Washington Post assured us that there might be a struggle, but we could pretty much count on gridlock being broken in this instance:

Despite Boehner's public rhetoric, there are signs he wants to get to Yes on funding the response to the crisis, probably because saying No is terrible politics for the GOP. Politico reports that Boehner privately told Republicans they should approve it before August recess. Meanwhile, some Republican officials and strategists are warning that failing to come through with funding is not a political option.

Gee, I guess failing to come through with funding was a political option after all -- not just before the August recess, but after it as well.

Forget about politics, though. What about policy? Don't Republicans care deeply about this issue?

No. They care about demagoguing the president. Once the opportunities to do that were pretty much exhausted (largely because Obama took steps to discourage the influx of child migrants, steps that in some cases led to the children's deaths), Republicans realized they'd accomplished everything they set out to accomplish and moved on to new damagoguing opportunities. (As I type this, I'm seeing reports that ISIS has beheaded a second American reporter, Steven Sotloff. ISIS had been the be the prime topic of GOP demagoguery in recent weeks, and this murder will extend that streak.)

Republicans don't care about issues. Republicans care only about opportunities to denigrate Democrats. Here's Republican policy on every issue: Obama sucks. And that's clearly all the policy they need, because they're going to win the midterms with nothing else to offer.

IT ISN'T A GAFFE IF ROGER AILES THINKS IT'S TRUE

In a New York Times article about attempts by Chris Christie and other Republican presidential aspirants to get up to speed on foreign policy, there's a passing reference to a recent statement by Rick Perry:

The job training has produced some stumbles. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas invited eye rolls from Pentagon officials when he declared it a "very real possibility" that fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria had come across the Mexican border and into the United States.

I read that in the Times a couple of hours ago -- at a moment when this was on the Fox Nation front page:

Fmr Border Patrol Official Warns of 'High Risk Marriage' Between Cartels, Terror Cells

Ronald Colburn, the former national deputy chief of the US Border Patrol spoke to FOX News' Jesse Watters on Fox & Friends about the ongoing crisis at the US/Mexico border.

Colburn warned of a 'high risk marriage' between Mexican drug cartels and terrorist groups intent on entering the United States.

He noted 'significant evidence' within the US intelligence community that groups such as ISIS are reaching out to the cartels for such assistance....

In the Fox and Friends clip, Watters asks if there is "actual intelligence that you're seeing that shows that ISIS is reaching out to Mexican drug cartels and potentially crossing the southern border into Texas." Colburn says there's "significant evidence and chatter, to call it that, being discussed amongst the intelligence community here in the United States that organizations such as ISIS are in fact reaching out to the very unscrupulous cartels and cartel leadership in Mexico. They are a marriage, one might call, that is quite a high risk to the United States of America." Colburn goes on to say that "we need to be watching this coming 9-1-1," over the usual Fox visual alarmism:



Of course, the long-standing, frequently debunked rumor is that Al Qaeda, not ISIS, is in cahoots with the cartels. (Note that Colburn says that some groups are working with the cartels, though he won't say specifically that ISIS is one of them. Watters, being a good Fox propagandist, is only too happy to make that final connection for Colburn.) This scaremongering goes back at least as far as 2005, when Al Qaeda was said to be working with MS-13 on what was meant to be an "American Hiroshima." (There was, of course, no such attack.)

Now, you'd think the dismal track record of the wolf-criers would dissuade others from joining their ranks, but that's not how the GOP operates. Back then it was crazy Louie Gohmert warning about the terrorist border menace; more recently, it's been National Review, which (inexplicably) still has a reputation for being resistant to crazy conspiratorialism. And as Roy Edroso notes, NR is not alone:

The venerable right-wing shit stirrers at Judicial Watch claimed that "high-level federal law enforcement, intelligence and other sources have confirmed" that "Islamic terrorist groups are operating in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez and planning to attack the United States with car bombs or other vehicle born improvised explosive devices." This was disseminated via friendly outfits like the Washington Times, National Review, and Newsmax, ratcheting up the panic among the brethren. "Fox News analyst Monica Crowley was one of the few journalists to draw attention" to the Judicial Watch report, breathlessly reported Twitchy, which also replicated tweets from conservatives such as "but still NO SECURED BORDER" and "Does the MSM even have a clue about this?!"

The New York Times says that Rick Perry decision to float this crazy theory was a "stumble." Was it? Not if the right-wing media thinks it wasn't. I expect this belief to become like climate change denialism and evolution skepticism -- every Republican candidate in 2016 will at least have to pay lip service to it.

HE'S DEFENDING HER HUMAN DIGNITY, WHICH IS MORE THAN JOAN RIVERS HAS EVER DONE

The New York Daily News reported today that Joan Rivers is being brought out of a medically induced coma:

"The waking-up process has begun and will take until Tuesday," a source close to the family told the Daily News. "There is real concern that the part of the brain that controls motor skills may have been compromised, leaving her as either a vegetable or in a wheelchair."

This offers Wesley J. Smith, National Review's "Human Exceptionalism" columnist, the opportunity to harrumph on behalf of Rivers:

Whatever the future holds for Joan Rivers, who may have experienced brain damage during surgery, she will always be an exceptional human being deserving of equal rights and perceived moral value.

To put it another way, contrary to some stories describing her potential health outcome, she will never be a carrot. Carrots are vegetables, human beings never are.

Um, here's Joan Rivers herself, in the memoir she published in July, Diary of a Mad Diva:



Whoops! Guess Rivers herself doesn't share Smith's outrage at the use of this word.

Smith's sense of the dignity of all human life makes him, needless to say, an unswerving opponent of abortion; here's Rivers on that subject:

When TMZ asked about Lindsay Lohan's miscarriage, Rivers said, "I hope she kept it." And when her daughter, Melissa, showed disgust, she continued, "I was born with a coat hanger in my ear."

Smith, in his post on Rivers, writes:

We need to stop using the V-word to describe our brothers and sisters with profound cognitive disabilities. That word is just as bigoted as the N-word for people of sub Saharan African descent, the K word for Jews, or the C-word for women.

The C-word? Here's another Rivers joke:

"Although in fairness, the autocorrect isn't always wrong. Everytime you type the name 'Joan Rivers,' autocorrect changes it to 'Insufferable Cunt.'"

Smith is defending the wrong person. He's defending the dignity of someone who's made a career of mocking dignity, including her own. So he should probably let it go.

ISIS AND THE GOP: COMPARE AND CONTRAST

Hi, I'm back. Thank you, Yastreblyansky and Crank -- excellent posts while I was away.

Today I'm reading about the imminent return of Benghazi-mania, and it's reminding me of something I read yesterday.

After several mercifully Benghazi-free months, the 2012 attack on the diplomatic compound in Libya is about to be thrust back into the spotlight around its September 11 anniversary.

The special House committee investigating Benghazi is finally expected to begin its work, in earnest, with its first hearing the week Congress returns from August recess. Meanwhile, two books promising explosive new allegations about the terror attack will hit shelves in September, and Fox News plans to air a new, one-hour documentary on the attack this week, featuring exclusive interviews with Americans who fought in the onslaught.

Add that to the usual fare that accompanies the anniversary of any major news event and you get a headache for the teams surrounding Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. For both, it's a stubborn political problem that will likely never go away, no matter how many investigations clear the senior players of the worst allegations of wrongdoing....

Republicans want us to believe that they're going to keep hammering away at Benghazi until they find something truly damaging to the president and/or Hillary Clinton -- just as ISIS wants us to believe that it represents an imminent threat to the U.S. and other Western countries. But as Scott Shane and Ben Hubbard noted in The New York Times yesterday, ISIS really doesn't seem focused on attacking the West:

A review of its prodigious output in print and online reveals a number of surprises. ISIS propaganda, for instance, has strikingly few calls for attacks on the West, even though its most notorious video, among Americans, released 12 days ago, showed the beheading of the American journalist James Foley, threatened another American hostage, and said that American attacks on ISIS "would result in the bloodshed" of Americans. This diverged from nearly all of ISIS's varied output, which promotes its paramount goal: to secure and expand the Islamic state....

Fawaz A. Gerges, a professor at the London School of Economics and the author of "The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global," said ISIS had so far consistently focused on what militants call "the near enemy" -- leaders of Muslim countries like Bashar al-Assad of Syria -- and not "the far enemy" of the United States and Europe.

"The struggle against the Americans and the Israelis is distant, not a priority," he said. "It has to await liberation at home."

... a common public rite of passage for new recruits to ISIS is tearing up or burning their passports, signifying a no-going-back commitment to the Islamic state.

This story reinforces what I said last week: that the point of ISIS propaganda is not to recruit potential terrorists who can go back and do harm in America and Europe -- it's to recruit soldiers for the fight ISIS is currently fighting.

That's also the point of the next round of Benghazi-mania (as it's the point of all previous rounds of Benghazi-mania): recruitment for the current fight.

ISIS wants to recruit fighters. The GOP wants to recruit voters. ISIS occasionally wants to send the message that joining ISIS is a way of getting back at the Western countries potential recruits live in -- but the real point is to fight to secure and expand the caliphate in Iraq and Syria. The real point of the GOP's media campaign isn't to bring down Hillary or the president, but to recruit voters for this year's midterms.

ISIS promises a global upheaval to stir the blood of potential recruits for a regional conflict. The GOP promises the downfall of two political giants to stir the blood of potential voters in congressional and state elections.

So don't be fooled: ISIS probably isn't building sleeper cells, and the GOP isn't doing ore than rehashing its Benghazi greatest hits. But if it all excites the recruits, it's working.