GEE, I CAN'T IMAGINE WHY OBAMA IS SO WORKED UP ABOUT ELECTIONS
From U.S. News:
Some Republicans are working to delay votes on President Obama's healthcare reform until after November's off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey, but not just because they want time to amend the plan. GOP strategists are hopeful that Republicans will upset Democrats in the gubernatorial races there, scaring moderate Democrats away from the Obama plan as they worry about their own re-election in 2010....
To state the obvious, this is the real reason the Obama White House cares about who's running in the New York governor's race. It's not just because of the possible impact on down-ticket races that could change the head count in Congress. (And it's not because, in Richard Cohen's idiotic formulation, Obama is a Chicago thug and "When you become a problem for Obama, don't get too close to a window.") It's because the conventional-wisdom-molders of the political world will read way too much into any relatively high-profile election result that tips against the Democrats, even if it doesn't directly involve the House or Senate, and even if the loss had nothing to do with Obama. Any Republican victor in any race will be hailed as an Obama-killer.
Corzine is in trouble in New Jersey because of economic woes (which predate Obama) and because of state Democratic Party corruption; New Jersey is also a state with a recent history of electing Republican governors (Tom Kean, Christie Whitman). Virginia, though it elects some Democrats, was right-wing for decades and has begun to inch left only recently. And yet losses for the Democratic candidates in those states (which are likely) are already being spun as "upsets" -- and, will be spun as referenda on the entire Obama agenda (and nothing else).
Obama worries that thestaggeringly unpopular David Paterson will stay in the race for good reasons. Paterson's unwillingness to step aside might persuade the very popular Andrew Cuomo to stay out of the race -- or might lead to a bruising party primary, quite possibly with racial overtones. And either of those outcomes might lead to Rudy Giuliani in the governor's mansion -- and yet such an election result would be deemed a referendum on Obama. At that point, the guardians of conventional wisdom would declare Rudy Giuliani to be Barack Obama's debating partner (a role he'd only too happily accept). That's the risk: not that Giuliani could use a gubernatorial victory as a launching pad for a presidential campaign (sorry, Karl Rove, that ain't gonna happen unless Rudy does a Romneyesque flipflop on abortion and homosexuality), but that he'd become the press's idea of a shadow president. (The New York media, part of which is the national media, still harbors a hell of a lot of goodwill for Rudy, whom it regards as a sort of Sinatra of politics.)
And if we're going to talk about Rove and interventions in elections, we should talk not only about the AG scandal but also about stories like this one, from 2004, which describes the heavy-handed way the Bush/Rove White House intervened -- arm-twisted -- to get Mel Martinez on the ballot as a Senate candidate in Florida and apparently pressured the once-moderate Martinex to run a wingnutty and McCarthyite campaign. Let me know when we see evidence of anything like that on the current White House's part.
****
ON THE OTHER HAND: aimai's point in comments about the way Paterson was handled is absolutely correct.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
YOUR LIBERAL MEDIA
An event you probably missed over the weekend:
The Independent Women's Forum reports that its "About Our Children" event was a success.
The About Our Children town hall event was a collaboration of the Independent Women's Forum and MSNBC. The event aired Sunday night and featured entertainer Dr. Bill Cosby....
Yup -- the allegedly lefty/liberal/commie propaganda outfit MSNBC collaborated on this forum with the IWF.
You remember the Independent Women's Forum -- a group that produced an anti-health reform ad about breast cancer that FactCheck.org called "a false appeal to women's fears" fgor its outdated statistics, bad math, and willful misrepresentation of health-reform proposals. Joe Klein called an IWF fund-raising letter -- "More American women are going to die of breast cancer if you and I surrender to President Obama's nationalized healthcare onslaught. It's as simple as that." -- "despicable" and "lower than dirt."
Founded in the early 1990s, IWF was an outgrowth of the ad hoc organization Women for Judge Thomas. It once shared a president with Americans for Prosperity, one of the main organizations behind the tea party movement. It has fought legislation that seeks to protect women from violence.
Wake me when a forum organized by a lefty or genuinely feminist organization is cosponsored and broadcast by Fox News.
(Via Right Wing Watch.)
An event you probably missed over the weekend:
The Independent Women's Forum reports that its "About Our Children" event was a success.
The About Our Children town hall event was a collaboration of the Independent Women's Forum and MSNBC. The event aired Sunday night and featured entertainer Dr. Bill Cosby....
Yup -- the allegedly lefty/liberal/commie propaganda outfit MSNBC collaborated on this forum with the IWF.
You remember the Independent Women's Forum -- a group that produced an anti-health reform ad about breast cancer that FactCheck.org called "a false appeal to women's fears" fgor its outdated statistics, bad math, and willful misrepresentation of health-reform proposals. Joe Klein called an IWF fund-raising letter -- "More American women are going to die of breast cancer if you and I surrender to President Obama's nationalized healthcare onslaught. It's as simple as that." -- "despicable" and "lower than dirt."
Founded in the early 1990s, IWF was an outgrowth of the ad hoc organization Women for Judge Thomas. It once shared a president with Americans for Prosperity, one of the main organizations behind the tea party movement. It has fought legislation that seeks to protect women from violence.
Wake me when a forum organized by a lefty or genuinely feminist organization is cosponsored and broadcast by Fox News.
(Via Right Wing Watch.)
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
W for Weird
The DNC just called to fundraise from me. I would rather talk politics than clean the kitchen so I started sparring right away with the most mellifluous sounding man I've ever heard who was not a TV recording. Come to find out that he is on the phone for the DNC trying to raise money to start really pushing back on the Republican hate speech, they claim to be going in a totally new direction, they hear us, we're sick and tired of being attacked....blah blah blah. But the interesting thing is that after I started arguing with him about the DNC's abysmal track record since Dean left, and the lack of leadership from the Obama Administration, and the phony bipartisan shtick, we got really, really, chummy. He claims to have been in international conflict resolution before he gave it up for telemarketing, but his first love was the study of con men, con games, and carney and he found all that training in the con really useful in dispute resolution and mediation. He recomends the movie "Marjoe" and "F for Fake" and the Dime Museum in Baltimore (alas, now defunct) plus some bar he likes with a life size statue of Merrick, the Elephant Man. And he claims to have "done" Carney tricks on the bank of the Mekong with some Khmer carnies since although he doesn't speak Khmer and they don't speak English the language of three card monte and "I can drive a spike through my head" is universal. I recommended Bob Altemeyer's "The Authoritarians" and the blog Quatloos. A good time was had by all. But I told him flat out I wouldn't give money except for targeted ad campaigns against blue dogs, and ad campaigns run by third party groups like Move On.
The DNC just called to fundraise from me. I would rather talk politics than clean the kitchen so I started sparring right away with the most mellifluous sounding man I've ever heard who was not a TV recording. Come to find out that he is on the phone for the DNC trying to raise money to start really pushing back on the Republican hate speech, they claim to be going in a totally new direction, they hear us, we're sick and tired of being attacked....blah blah blah. But the interesting thing is that after I started arguing with him about the DNC's abysmal track record since Dean left, and the lack of leadership from the Obama Administration, and the phony bipartisan shtick, we got really, really, chummy. He claims to have been in international conflict resolution before he gave it up for telemarketing, but his first love was the study of con men, con games, and carney and he found all that training in the con really useful in dispute resolution and mediation. He recomends the movie "Marjoe" and "F for Fake" and the Dime Museum in Baltimore (alas, now defunct) plus some bar he likes with a life size statue of Merrick, the Elephant Man. And he claims to have "done" Carney tricks on the bank of the Mekong with some Khmer carnies since although he doesn't speak Khmer and they don't speak English the language of three card monte and "I can drive a spike through my head" is universal. I recommended Bob Altemeyer's "The Authoritarians" and the blog Quatloos. A good time was had by all. But I told him flat out I wouldn't give money except for targeted ad campaigns against blue dogs, and ad campaigns run by third party groups like Move On.
THE COMFORT OF HATING AN OLD FAMILIAR ANTICHRIST
Glenn Greenwald makes a couple of good points in this post about the Beckistas and 9/12ers, but this is really, really naive:
...[the] anti-Obama sentiment [of the protesters] is being exploited by run-of-the-mill GOP operatives who have no objective other than to undermine Democrats and return the Republicans to power -- manifestly not the goal of many of the protesters.... In many ways, [the movement's] leadership (both organizationally and in the media) is fundamentally at odds with the participants. How can people who cheered on the Bush/Cheney administration and who want to re-install GOP leaders in power (i.e., Fox News, Limbaugh, the right-wing blogosphere, GOP House members) possibly make common cause in any coherent way with those who are in favor of limited federal government power, reduced debt, privacy, and Constitutional protections -- all the things on which the GOP relentlessly waged war for years?
Oh, please, Glenn.
Look: out in the heartland, "limited federal government power" means limited social programs; the heartland doesn't consider wiretapping and, say S-CHIP to be in the same universe, much less in the same narrow category of "interventionist government." (Hell, in the heartland, Social Security and Medicare are exempted from curses aimed at "big government," even though it makes no sense.)
Angry people in the heartland like what they like: Medicare, Social Security, God, apple pie, and a star-spangled foreign policy. They don't like anyone they think is a "Kumbaya"-singing hippie, domestic programs that are less than forty years old, or people with funny names who seem to fall into the former category or advocate anything in the latter category.
So, yeah, it's true, Glenn G., that the tea-partiers are
the by-product of a completely different dichotomy...: between system insiders and their admirers (those who believe our national political establishment and its elites are basically sound and good) and system outsiders (those whose anger is confined not to one of the two political parties but who instead believe that the political culture itself is fundamentally corrupted and destructive).
But the tea partiers are not (as Greenwald wrote in a phrase I edited out above) "the by-product of a completely different dichotomy that is growing in importance" -- because the dichotomy isn't growing in importance. Greenwald goes on to say:
There are people typically identified as members of either the conventional Right or Left who are, in fact, more accurately described as eing in this latter group: those disenchanted with the political culture itself. Anger over the Wall Street bailout and corporate excesses was one example where that trans-partisan disenchantment was evident.... that trans-partisan rage is clearly playing an important role in driving these protest movements.
But lefties who hate Wall Street enough to actually punish Wall Streeters -- regulate them, limit their ability to prey on ordinary citizens, limit their ability to make more and more while repeatedly putting the rest of us at risk -- aren't ever going to be welcome in Beck's movement. Beck's movement resents Wall Street up to the point where we might consider taking action, and then it's time for the Antichrist that's as comfortable as an old shoe for these people: big government run by liberal Democrats.
Sure, some of these people could conceivably be tipped leftward -- but Democratic politicians aren't trying to build a genuine movement based around them, lefty groups aren't trying to recruit them, and most of them are happy just where they are, railing against the usual enemy. And I don't really care how much they (or Beck himself) claim to hate both parties -- they'll vote Republican a year and three years from now because Republicans will know enough to say, "I hate the people you hate," and Democratic pols won't run against the powerful in any compelling way.
Glenn Greenwald makes a couple of good points in this post about the Beckistas and 9/12ers, but this is really, really naive:
...[the] anti-Obama sentiment [of the protesters] is being exploited by run-of-the-mill GOP operatives who have no objective other than to undermine Democrats and return the Republicans to power -- manifestly not the goal of many of the protesters.... In many ways, [the movement's] leadership (both organizationally and in the media) is fundamentally at odds with the participants. How can people who cheered on the Bush/Cheney administration and who want to re-install GOP leaders in power (i.e., Fox News, Limbaugh, the right-wing blogosphere, GOP House members) possibly make common cause in any coherent way with those who are in favor of limited federal government power, reduced debt, privacy, and Constitutional protections -- all the things on which the GOP relentlessly waged war for years?
Oh, please, Glenn.
Look: out in the heartland, "limited federal government power" means limited social programs; the heartland doesn't consider wiretapping and, say S-CHIP to be in the same universe, much less in the same narrow category of "interventionist government." (Hell, in the heartland, Social Security and Medicare are exempted from curses aimed at "big government," even though it makes no sense.)
Angry people in the heartland like what they like: Medicare, Social Security, God, apple pie, and a star-spangled foreign policy. They don't like anyone they think is a "Kumbaya"-singing hippie, domestic programs that are less than forty years old, or people with funny names who seem to fall into the former category or advocate anything in the latter category.
So, yeah, it's true, Glenn G., that the tea-partiers are
the by-product of a completely different dichotomy...: between system insiders and their admirers (those who believe our national political establishment and its elites are basically sound and good) and system outsiders (those whose anger is confined not to one of the two political parties but who instead believe that the political culture itself is fundamentally corrupted and destructive).
But the tea partiers are not (as Greenwald wrote in a phrase I edited out above) "the by-product of a completely different dichotomy that is growing in importance" -- because the dichotomy isn't growing in importance. Greenwald goes on to say:
There are people typically identified as members of either the conventional Right or Left who are, in fact, more accurately described as eing in this latter group: those disenchanted with the political culture itself. Anger over the Wall Street bailout and corporate excesses was one example where that trans-partisan disenchantment was evident.... that trans-partisan rage is clearly playing an important role in driving these protest movements.
But lefties who hate Wall Street enough to actually punish Wall Streeters -- regulate them, limit their ability to prey on ordinary citizens, limit their ability to make more and more while repeatedly putting the rest of us at risk -- aren't ever going to be welcome in Beck's movement. Beck's movement resents Wall Street up to the point where we might consider taking action, and then it's time for the Antichrist that's as comfortable as an old shoe for these people: big government run by liberal Democrats.
Sure, some of these people could conceivably be tipped leftward -- but Democratic politicians aren't trying to build a genuine movement based around them, lefty groups aren't trying to recruit them, and most of them are happy just where they are, railing against the usual enemy. And I don't really care how much they (or Beck himself) claim to hate both parties -- they'll vote Republican a year and three years from now because Republicans will know enough to say, "I hate the people you hate," and Democratic pols won't run against the powerful in any compelling way.
To Whom? Where? When?
I've been meaning to write a blog post for a long time called "Does Public Opinion Matter?" But I think we really need to go back a few steps and ask ourselves whether there is anything like a "Public" at all, at this point--if by that we mean a listening, thinking, observing, aggregate--people who are actually aware enough of political events, statements, and sayings that they can be said to think anything at all. This seems to be something that is utterly lost on even our brightest commentariat. Look at this discussion over at Washington Monthly--Steve Benen and Greg Sargent (brought together by the miracle of blog commentary.) Sargent catches Grassley in a patent lie.
Uh? Really? Dems can "point to this...in order to argue...?" Baby, we are long past needing to argue to the voters. The voters aren't even in this debate at this point. Its all up to the legislators and they don't care what the voters know, or think they know. They only care about what they've been paid to do or what they believe in doing for its own sake. The voters and their votes are only the tools that get people into office to do stuff, and later a second order rationalization whose "real" interests or "real" beliefs can be used, rhetorically, to legitimize political acts taken in their names. There's no there there.
Let me explain something very slowly here: when politicians say things in public they are saying it for effect. They don't believe it, they don't stand behind it, and even their auditors and their audience knows better than to believe that they will either hew to their public line, or reject it, for reasons as picayune as logic, fairness, or honesty.
In this case Steve and Greg are thrilled they've caught the Republicans out in a blatant contradiction: --On the one hand Grassley and the Republicans have strongly opposed Democratic Health Care Reform Initiatives because, as we know, they don't want the Democrats to pass anything good. For purposes of propaganda sometimes Grassley et al pretend that the reason they oppose Democratic Initiatives is that these initiatives are not bipartisan, they are ideological, they are destructive. Sometimes, of course, Grassley et al pretend that the Republicans are active partners in drafting and proposing legislation. This leads Republican leaders to sometimes say things like there is "80 percent agreement" on this or that aspect of the bills in question. Sometimes they say *both* that the bills are hyperpartisan and worthless and should be scrapped and started again, sometimes they say that they have eighty percent agreement and the bills are hyperpartisan, should be scrapped, and started over again.
Both Benen and Sargent appear bemused by this...incoherence. This is not message discipline! This will make it harder for the Republicans to argue---what? It only makes it "harder" if you imagine that they are making any kind of logical argument to a consistent set of listeners who are amenable to logical argument. But they aren't. Look at the context in which these claims are made--Grassley's and Cantor's I mean. Claims are not made in the absence of context. Sometimes Grassley and Cantor shave their statements--they trim their coat to suit their cloth and they offer their listeners what they want to hear. They don't worry about that audience--nice ladies on a lunch break, angry tea party'ers on a tear, Glen Beck's audience, C-Span's audience--getting together to compare notes about what they've heard. Why should they? There's no singular public sphere in which these competing claims are held up for comparison and derision.
The location of that public sphere, the "coffee house" of our romanticized imagining, doesn't exist anymore. We have a fragmented public sphere of separate water coolers, and their "water cooler vengeance" style politics. The politics of rage, spite, and information incoherence. Beck's audience, Rush's audience, get their information from Fox. Other people get their information from similarly compromised major media sources which have shown no desire to fact check or back stop Republican statements as patently false as "Death Panels for Granny" or even its most recent avatar "Welfare Quota Queens Use Obamacare to Steal Granny's Winning Lottery Ticket"
Needless to say this approach to informed public policy and an informed public has to be right up there with the all time greatest hits of fear sublimation and rage projection. It could hardly be bettered, combining as it does deep seated and atavistic white fears of a crawling, clinging, rage filled underclass of undeserving poor non whites with discreet pleas for fundraising as though mere dollars and words are going to combat the horror. I don't think its going at all too far to point out that this is essentially to refight Reconstruction, with "health care for fat people, poor people, and black people" being translated through the Republican decoder ring into a modern version of "where de white wimmen at?"
There isn't going to be any come to Papa moment here. The Republicans aren't worried that their voters are going to wake up and realize that their leaders are lying to them. That's utterly besides the point. The voters care as little about bipartisanship as they do about reality itself. If they were paying attention to their own lives they'd be burning down the insurance companies doors instead of protesting the idea of government action while demanding government investigations of public transit authority business or holy walking to the podium to beg government to keep its hands off medicare. The last thing the Republicans have to worry about is equivalent of the White House pointing out that its "shocked! shocked! that there is gambling going on..." in the casino. No one who matters is paying attention.
aimai
I've been meaning to write a blog post for a long time called "Does Public Opinion Matter?" But I think we really need to go back a few steps and ask ourselves whether there is anything like a "Public" at all, at this point--if by that we mean a listening, thinking, observing, aggregate--people who are actually aware enough of political events, statements, and sayings that they can be said to think anything at all. This seems to be something that is utterly lost on even our brightest commentariat. Look at this discussion over at Washington Monthly--Steve Benen and Greg Sargent (brought together by the miracle of blog commentary.) Sargent catches Grassley in a patent lie.
As Greg Sargent, who called Grassley's comments "very significant," explained, this is an admission that "will make it tougher for Republicans to claim Dems didn't opt for a bipartisan approach on health care."
Grassley is, Greg added, "openly acknowledging that the GOP has had 'input' into the bill, which Dems can point to in order to argue that they pursued bipartisanship in good faith, even if they were unable to reach bipartisan agreement."
Uh? Really? Dems can "point to this...in order to argue...?" Baby, we are long past needing to argue to the voters. The voters aren't even in this debate at this point. Its all up to the legislators and they don't care what the voters know, or think they know. They only care about what they've been paid to do or what they believe in doing for its own sake. The voters and their votes are only the tools that get people into office to do stuff, and later a second order rationalization whose "real" interests or "real" beliefs can be used, rhetorically, to legitimize political acts taken in their names. There's no there there.
Let me explain something very slowly here: when politicians say things in public they are saying it for effect. They don't believe it, they don't stand behind it, and even their auditors and their audience knows better than to believe that they will either hew to their public line, or reject it, for reasons as picayune as logic, fairness, or honesty.
In this case Steve and Greg are thrilled they've caught the Republicans out in a blatant contradiction: --On the one hand Grassley and the Republicans have strongly opposed Democratic Health Care Reform Initiatives because, as we know, they don't want the Democrats to pass anything good. For purposes of propaganda sometimes Grassley et al pretend that the reason they oppose Democratic Initiatives is that these initiatives are not bipartisan, they are ideological, they are destructive. Sometimes, of course, Grassley et al pretend that the Republicans are active partners in drafting and proposing legislation. This leads Republican leaders to sometimes say things like there is "80 percent agreement" on this or that aspect of the bills in question. Sometimes they say *both* that the bills are hyperpartisan and worthless and should be scrapped and started again, sometimes they say that they have eighty percent agreement and the bills are hyperpartisan, should be scrapped, and started over again.
Both Benen and Sargent appear bemused by this...incoherence. This is not message discipline! This will make it harder for the Republicans to argue---what? It only makes it "harder" if you imagine that they are making any kind of logical argument to a consistent set of listeners who are amenable to logical argument. But they aren't. Look at the context in which these claims are made--Grassley's and Cantor's I mean. Claims are not made in the absence of context. Sometimes Grassley and Cantor shave their statements--they trim their coat to suit their cloth and they offer their listeners what they want to hear. They don't worry about that audience--nice ladies on a lunch break, angry tea party'ers on a tear, Glen Beck's audience, C-Span's audience--getting together to compare notes about what they've heard. Why should they? There's no singular public sphere in which these competing claims are held up for comparison and derision.
The location of that public sphere, the "coffee house" of our romanticized imagining, doesn't exist anymore. We have a fragmented public sphere of separate water coolers, and their "water cooler vengeance" style politics. The politics of rage, spite, and information incoherence. Beck's audience, Rush's audience, get their information from Fox. Other people get their information from similarly compromised major media sources which have shown no desire to fact check or back stop Republican statements as patently false as "Death Panels for Granny" or even its most recent avatar "Welfare Quota Queens Use Obamacare to Steal Granny's Winning Lottery Ticket"
Needless to say this approach to informed public policy and an informed public has to be right up there with the all time greatest hits of fear sublimation and rage projection. It could hardly be bettered, combining as it does deep seated and atavistic white fears of a crawling, clinging, rage filled underclass of undeserving poor non whites with discreet pleas for fundraising as though mere dollars and words are going to combat the horror. I don't think its going at all too far to point out that this is essentially to refight Reconstruction, with "health care for fat people, poor people, and black people" being translated through the Republican decoder ring into a modern version of "where de white wimmen at?"
There isn't going to be any come to Papa moment here. The Republicans aren't worried that their voters are going to wake up and realize that their leaders are lying to them. That's utterly besides the point. The voters care as little about bipartisanship as they do about reality itself. If they were paying attention to their own lives they'd be burning down the insurance companies doors instead of protesting the idea of government action while demanding government investigations of public transit authority business or holy walking to the podium to beg government to keep its hands off medicare. The last thing the Republicans have to worry about is equivalent of the White House pointing out that its "shocked! shocked! that there is gambling going on..." in the casino. No one who matters is paying attention.
aimai
THE RIGHT'S RICH FANTASY LIFE
At Lucianne.com right now:
I don't think you'd post this even half-seriously if you didn't genuinely believe that Everyone In America Is Talking about the damn ACORN videos. Seriously, kids? We're not. It was a one- or two-day story for most of America, of no more moment than Susan Boyle or some anesthesia'd-out kid on YouTube. There may be a bit more political fallout, but here in Non-Wingnuttia nobody can see how this story affects our lives or why we should give it a second thought. (And we're utterly indifferent to this NEA thing.)
Why the hell we've allowed delusional, self-regarding, circle-jerking wingnuts who think like this to hijack the vast majority of our political discourse for several decades, I can't explain.
At Lucianne.com right now:
I don't think you'd post this even half-seriously if you didn't genuinely believe that Everyone In America Is Talking about the damn ACORN videos. Seriously, kids? We're not. It was a one- or two-day story for most of America, of no more moment than Susan Boyle or some anesthesia'd-out kid on YouTube. There may be a bit more political fallout, but here in Non-Wingnuttia nobody can see how this story affects our lives or why we should give it a second thought. (And we're utterly indifferent to this NEA thing.)
Why the hell we've allowed delusional, self-regarding, circle-jerking wingnuts who think like this to hijack the vast majority of our political discourse for several decades, I can't explain.
DANCING FOR ACQUITTAL
By way of introduction, Mance tells one of the classic legends of Texas singers, that of the man who sings his way out of prison. It is well known that Huddie Ledbetter sand his way out of Texas's Central (nee Imperial) Prison Farm and that Lightnin Hopkins sang his way out of an East Texas road gang. They say that Texas Alexander did the same and, in fact, the story is told about most singers with any reputation at all.
--liner notes to Mance Lipscomb: Texas Sharecropper and Songster (Arhoolie Records, recorded 1960)
****
That was the first thing that came to mind when I heard that Tom DeLay was going to appear on Dancing with the Stars -- that he was planning to use the appearance as a way to create a positive public image of himself, in anticipation of any future trial on felony money-laundering charges, in the hope that the folks in the jury pool would think of him as that nice man they saw cutting a rug on TV. (It's the secular flipside to what Richard Scrushy, the sleazebag HealthSouth CEO, did a few years ago: he started a TV ministry, and his very public show of Godliness apparently helped motivate a jury to acquit him on money-laundering and fraud charges in 2005, although he subsequently lost a civil and was ordered to pay $2.8 billion earlier this year.)
Yeah, that's what I thought when I heard DeLay was doing this. When I actually saw him do it last night, I thought: Oh. My. God.
(Full -- and even more horrifying -- video here.)
Yeah, but who would fall for this kind of charm offensive? Only some dumb ol' rubes -- right? Um, well, check out the reactions from various Politico writers:
Staff Writer Lisa Lerer: ... The instructions were a "sexy and sassy" salsa. And while no one could really call DeLay's hip shakes, air guitar, or UPS man-gone-Las Vegas brown costume all that seductive, his performance was -- I'm shocked to admit -- almost graceful....
Gossip Columnist Anne Schroeder Mullins: When it comes to personality and charm, Tom DeLay hit it out of the park. After all, he loves to shake his tush. (A little too much perhaps.) And who needs dance moves? The Hammer stormed the dance floor and won over an unsuspecting crowd while he enthusiastically air-guitared and lip-synced "Wild Thing." Even Cheryl Burke said her partner is "charming." Tom DeLay gets an A.
Senior Political Writer Jonathan Martin: That was no politician going through the motions or merely being a good sport. The Tom DeLay cha-cha'ing, lip-synching, booty-shaking and air-guitaring his way through his "Dancing with the Stars" debut was a man on a mission.... He wanted it -- bad....
Features Editor Pia Catton: ... All in all, he was charming, playful, and seemed like he was having a good time. I laughed, I cringed, I sort of enjoyed it.
Senior Editor David Mark: "Hot Tub Tom" is back! On "Dancing" DeLay showed flashes of the fun-loving party animal from the 1970s he describes in his autobiography, "No Retreat, No Surrender." ... While partner Cheryl Burke had the better technical moves, the conservative Republican was in command....
I'd say, to use the old Molly Ivins standard, that DeLay had some Elvis in him -- but it was Elvis filtered through mid-'80s Twisted Sister videos and drunk karaoke.
Will it work? Oh, sure -- like a charm. I think of an old Phil Nugent post in which he described hearing a woman say (during Rod Blagojevich's extensive media tour earlier this year) that Blago was really guilty of nothing more than "acting like a jerk." Phil said of the media tour:
... what if it sort of worked? What did Blagojevich really hope to get out of it? Maybe he'd given up hopes of keeping his job but still hoped to stay out of jail and maintain his celebrity as a lovable doofus, because he's studied the careers of George Wallace and Oliver North and knows that a man who maintains his celebrity has managed to hold onto his long-term political viability. The Feds turned Blagojevich into one kind of cartoon character, the foul-mouthed cynical pol who's openly crooked as shit. Rather than waste his time trying to wipe away that image, Blagojevich countered by plastering the airwaves with images of himself as a different kind of cartoon: the endearingly shameless jackass, too amusing to be venal. Has it worked? It worked with that woman behind me.
And Blago seems like an amateur at this compared with DeLay. This dancing stuff worked with the Politico folks. It'll work with Grandma when she's in the jury pool.
By way of introduction, Mance tells one of the classic legends of Texas singers, that of the man who sings his way out of prison. It is well known that Huddie Ledbetter sand his way out of Texas's Central (nee Imperial) Prison Farm and that Lightnin Hopkins sang his way out of an East Texas road gang. They say that Texas Alexander did the same and, in fact, the story is told about most singers with any reputation at all.
--liner notes to Mance Lipscomb: Texas Sharecropper and Songster (Arhoolie Records, recorded 1960)
****
That was the first thing that came to mind when I heard that Tom DeLay was going to appear on Dancing with the Stars -- that he was planning to use the appearance as a way to create a positive public image of himself, in anticipation of any future trial on felony money-laundering charges, in the hope that the folks in the jury pool would think of him as that nice man they saw cutting a rug on TV. (It's the secular flipside to what Richard Scrushy, the sleazebag HealthSouth CEO, did a few years ago: he started a TV ministry, and his very public show of Godliness apparently helped motivate a jury to acquit him on money-laundering and fraud charges in 2005, although he subsequently lost a civil and was ordered to pay $2.8 billion earlier this year.)
Yeah, that's what I thought when I heard DeLay was doing this. When I actually saw him do it last night, I thought: Oh. My. God.
(Full -- and even more horrifying -- video here.)
Yeah, but who would fall for this kind of charm offensive? Only some dumb ol' rubes -- right? Um, well, check out the reactions from various Politico writers:
Staff Writer Lisa Lerer: ... The instructions were a "sexy and sassy" salsa. And while no one could really call DeLay's hip shakes, air guitar, or UPS man-gone-Las Vegas brown costume all that seductive, his performance was -- I'm shocked to admit -- almost graceful....
Gossip Columnist Anne Schroeder Mullins: When it comes to personality and charm, Tom DeLay hit it out of the park. After all, he loves to shake his tush. (A little too much perhaps.) And who needs dance moves? The Hammer stormed the dance floor and won over an unsuspecting crowd while he enthusiastically air-guitared and lip-synced "Wild Thing." Even Cheryl Burke said her partner is "charming." Tom DeLay gets an A.
Senior Political Writer Jonathan Martin: That was no politician going through the motions or merely being a good sport. The Tom DeLay cha-cha'ing, lip-synching, booty-shaking and air-guitaring his way through his "Dancing with the Stars" debut was a man on a mission.... He wanted it -- bad....
Features Editor Pia Catton: ... All in all, he was charming, playful, and seemed like he was having a good time. I laughed, I cringed, I sort of enjoyed it.
Senior Editor David Mark: "Hot Tub Tom" is back! On "Dancing" DeLay showed flashes of the fun-loving party animal from the 1970s he describes in his autobiography, "No Retreat, No Surrender." ... While partner Cheryl Burke had the better technical moves, the conservative Republican was in command....
I'd say, to use the old Molly Ivins standard, that DeLay had some Elvis in him -- but it was Elvis filtered through mid-'80s Twisted Sister videos and drunk karaoke.
Will it work? Oh, sure -- like a charm. I think of an old Phil Nugent post in which he described hearing a woman say (during Rod Blagojevich's extensive media tour earlier this year) that Blago was really guilty of nothing more than "acting like a jerk." Phil said of the media tour:
... what if it sort of worked? What did Blagojevich really hope to get out of it? Maybe he'd given up hopes of keeping his job but still hoped to stay out of jail and maintain his celebrity as a lovable doofus, because he's studied the careers of George Wallace and Oliver North and knows that a man who maintains his celebrity has managed to hold onto his long-term political viability. The Feds turned Blagojevich into one kind of cartoon character, the foul-mouthed cynical pol who's openly crooked as shit. Rather than waste his time trying to wipe away that image, Blagojevich countered by plastering the airwaves with images of himself as a different kind of cartoon: the endearingly shameless jackass, too amusing to be venal. Has it worked? It worked with that woman behind me.
And Blago seems like an amateur at this compared with DeLay. This dancing stuff worked with the Politico folks. It'll work with Grandma when she's in the jury pool.
Monday, September 21, 2009
DON'T JUST MAKE MORE DEMOCRATIC VOTERS. MAKE MORE LIBERALS.
A lot of people are fretting over this new Gallup poll:
Americans are more likely today than in the recent past to believe that government is taking on too much responsibility for solving the nation's problems and is over-regulating business. New Gallup data show that 57% of Americans say the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to businesses and individuals, and 45% say there is too much government regulation of business. Both reflect the highest such readings in more than a decade.
Is this a reaction to the Obama presidency? Well, in part I'd say it's a reaction to right-wing rhetoric about the Obama presidency, to judge from the last time numbers on a similar question were this high:
...the 45% "too much" reading is the highest of the decade and is higher than the one Gallup reading prior to this decade, in March 1993. However, a March 1981 Los Angeles Times poll using this question wording recorded a 54% "too much" level. This was just after Ronald Reagan took office, and may have reflected Reagan's emphasis during the 1980 presidential campaign on the need to reduce government involvement in American society.
"May have"? May have"?
Republican rhetoric has framed our view of this question, in Republican periods and (apparent) Democratic periods, for decades. Hell, to judge from Gallup's own numbers, the too-much-regulation number, now at 45%, was in the high 30s or low 40s throughout the George W. Bush presidency -- yes, people thought George W. Bush was a heavy-handed regulator, too:
Same for government doing too much that should be left to business:
The number is 57% -- but it was 55% just around the time of the 2004 election, after four years of Bush. It was 53% just around the time of the 2008 election, after eight years of Bush. And it was around 50% for nearly all of Bush's term -- half of America thought we had an overly interventionist government that got in business's way under Bush.
Steve Benen says,
After the excruciating failures of the Bush era, it was tempting to think the electorate might finally be prepared for an activist government , addressing crises that conservative policymakers preferred to ignore and neglect. That, alas, is not the case.
Well, no -- and of course it isn't. People didn't vote for Barack Obama because they had come to believe more firmly in government intervention and government programs. They voted for Barack Obama because things were bad and they thought he'd do ... something. They didn't know what exactly.
Every few years, our side gets the message out and persuades more people to vote Democratic. We don't get a message out that persuades more people to think in a genuinely progressive way. We never do that, and we desperately need to. We need to make more liberals, not just more Democrats.
Otherwise, this is the result: shock and horror when Democrats do (or even seem to do) Democratic things.
A lot of people are fretting over this new Gallup poll:
Americans are more likely today than in the recent past to believe that government is taking on too much responsibility for solving the nation's problems and is over-regulating business. New Gallup data show that 57% of Americans say the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to businesses and individuals, and 45% say there is too much government regulation of business. Both reflect the highest such readings in more than a decade.
Is this a reaction to the Obama presidency? Well, in part I'd say it's a reaction to right-wing rhetoric about the Obama presidency, to judge from the last time numbers on a similar question were this high:
...the 45% "too much" reading is the highest of the decade and is higher than the one Gallup reading prior to this decade, in March 1993. However, a March 1981 Los Angeles Times poll using this question wording recorded a 54% "too much" level. This was just after Ronald Reagan took office, and may have reflected Reagan's emphasis during the 1980 presidential campaign on the need to reduce government involvement in American society.
"May have"? May have"?
Republican rhetoric has framed our view of this question, in Republican periods and (apparent) Democratic periods, for decades. Hell, to judge from Gallup's own numbers, the too-much-regulation number, now at 45%, was in the high 30s or low 40s throughout the George W. Bush presidency -- yes, people thought George W. Bush was a heavy-handed regulator, too:
Same for government doing too much that should be left to business:
The number is 57% -- but it was 55% just around the time of the 2004 election, after four years of Bush. It was 53% just around the time of the 2008 election, after eight years of Bush. And it was around 50% for nearly all of Bush's term -- half of America thought we had an overly interventionist government that got in business's way under Bush.
Steve Benen says,
After the excruciating failures of the Bush era, it was tempting to think the electorate might finally be prepared for an activist government , addressing crises that conservative policymakers preferred to ignore and neglect. That, alas, is not the case.
Well, no -- and of course it isn't. People didn't vote for Barack Obama because they had come to believe more firmly in government intervention and government programs. They voted for Barack Obama because things were bad and they thought he'd do ... something. They didn't know what exactly.
Every few years, our side gets the message out and persuades more people to vote Democratic. We don't get a message out that persuades more people to think in a genuinely progressive way. We never do that, and we desperately need to. We need to make more liberals, not just more Democrats.
Otherwise, this is the result: shock and horror when Democrats do (or even seem to do) Democratic things.
HOW CONVENIENT: NOW THE WINGNUTS MAY HAVE NO NEED TO ATTACK OBAMA FROM THE LEFT ON AFGHANISTAN
A number of you didn't agree with me when I said a while back that Republicans wouldn't attack Obama from the left on Afghanistan, even though piling on in conjunction with liberal critics would help them achieve their goal of Obama's destruction. I said -- and I still believe -- that they're too locked into a narrative in which Democrats can only be "Kumbaya"-singing hippies in foreign-policy matters; cynical as they may be, they just can't pivvot that much. (I'm not sure they really are all that cynical about their belief system -- I think they really do believe Democrats and liberals are pure evil, for the reasons they've memorized from Rand and Rush and Reagan.)
Well, now it's clear that the righties may not have to attack Obama from the left on Afghanistan. Now there's a line of attack from their own side. Spencer Ackerman on today's big Washington Post story:
The Washington Post's headline -- "McChrystal: More Forces Or 'Mission Failure'" -- does what the persons who leaked Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Afghanistan strategy review evidently wanted to do: box President Obama in to a static request for more U.S. troops and dare him to refuse his chosen commander’s recommendations.... There's going to be pressure on Obama to simply accede to any request for more troops, and the media will frame the request, and Obama's decision, through that prism....
Basically, that's the message we're getting from the shadow Republican government: that the choice is escalation or appeasement. Here's ex-McCain blogger Michael Goldfarb for The Weekly Standard:
...It's probably not a coincidence that the McChrystal report leaked just as Obama looked like he was going wobbly on his commitment to the war effort.
(Editor's note: Hunh?)
Democrats on the Hill are already threatening to obstruct funding for additional U.S. forces -- Pelosi, Levin, and Murtha among them -- and Obama was skeptical of the need for more U.S. forces on the Sunday shows yesterday....
Obama may be trying to appease the left wing of his own party with a very public show of reluctance to add additional forces to the fight, but the administration has already deployed at least 22,000 additional U.S. troops since his inauguration. The previous commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan had requested 20,000 to 30,000 additional forces before Obama was even sworn-in. Obama sent 17,000 more troops in the spring, keeping a campaign promise but setting himself up for what Senator McCain said at the time would be "a Lyndon Johnson style of incrementalism." Indeed, Obama sent 4,000 more troops in June. Now McChrystal is set to request yet more forces in order to fulfill a need that was long ago identified by General McKiernan.
...Obama is slow-walking the troop increase for political reasons, even as it seems likely that he will, in the end, do the right thing and send the necessary reinforcements.
Translation: We think he's going to do the right thing ... but if he doesn't, if he doesn't click his heels and say "Yessir" to his own general, he's an appeaser even with all the troops he's sent. It's not escalation, it's "a Lyndon Johnson style of incrementalism." More war = less war (or at least inadequate war).
It would be so much easier, in some ways, for the Republicans to rediscover their party's past skepticism about foreign adventures; then they could join the left in tossing Obama an anvil if the Afghanistan waters rise around him. But they just can't do it. They believe the sandal-wearing-hippie cliche too much. That rehetoric isn't just for effect.
A number of you didn't agree with me when I said a while back that Republicans wouldn't attack Obama from the left on Afghanistan, even though piling on in conjunction with liberal critics would help them achieve their goal of Obama's destruction. I said -- and I still believe -- that they're too locked into a narrative in which Democrats can only be "Kumbaya"-singing hippies in foreign-policy matters; cynical as they may be, they just can't pivvot that much. (I'm not sure they really are all that cynical about their belief system -- I think they really do believe Democrats and liberals are pure evil, for the reasons they've memorized from Rand and Rush and Reagan.)
Well, now it's clear that the righties may not have to attack Obama from the left on Afghanistan. Now there's a line of attack from their own side. Spencer Ackerman on today's big Washington Post story:
The Washington Post's headline -- "McChrystal: More Forces Or 'Mission Failure'" -- does what the persons who leaked Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s Afghanistan strategy review evidently wanted to do: box President Obama in to a static request for more U.S. troops and dare him to refuse his chosen commander’s recommendations.... There's going to be pressure on Obama to simply accede to any request for more troops, and the media will frame the request, and Obama's decision, through that prism....
Basically, that's the message we're getting from the shadow Republican government: that the choice is escalation or appeasement. Here's ex-McCain blogger Michael Goldfarb for The Weekly Standard:
...It's probably not a coincidence that the McChrystal report leaked just as Obama looked like he was going wobbly on his commitment to the war effort.
(Editor's note: Hunh?)
Democrats on the Hill are already threatening to obstruct funding for additional U.S. forces -- Pelosi, Levin, and Murtha among them -- and Obama was skeptical of the need for more U.S. forces on the Sunday shows yesterday....
Obama may be trying to appease the left wing of his own party with a very public show of reluctance to add additional forces to the fight, but the administration has already deployed at least 22,000 additional U.S. troops since his inauguration. The previous commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan had requested 20,000 to 30,000 additional forces before Obama was even sworn-in. Obama sent 17,000 more troops in the spring, keeping a campaign promise but setting himself up for what Senator McCain said at the time would be "a Lyndon Johnson style of incrementalism." Indeed, Obama sent 4,000 more troops in June. Now McChrystal is set to request yet more forces in order to fulfill a need that was long ago identified by General McKiernan.
...Obama is slow-walking the troop increase for political reasons, even as it seems likely that he will, in the end, do the right thing and send the necessary reinforcements.
Translation: We think he's going to do the right thing ... but if he doesn't, if he doesn't click his heels and say "Yessir" to his own general, he's an appeaser even with all the troops he's sent. It's not escalation, it's "a Lyndon Johnson style of incrementalism." More war = less war (or at least inadequate war).
It would be so much easier, in some ways, for the Republicans to rediscover their party's past skepticism about foreign adventures; then they could join the left in tossing Obama an anvil if the Afghanistan waters rise around him. But they just can't do it. They believe the sandal-wearing-hippie cliche too much. That rehetoric isn't just for effect.
ANDREW BREITBART DESPERATELY TRIES TO SUSTAIN THE HIGH
If you do powdered drugs, at a certain point you get a tad antsy -- you get worried that you won't be able to sustain your high. Andrew Breitbart has recently had the profoundly enjoyable experience of unleashing the ACORN videos on the nation and watching them become a moderate-sized scandal (and no, I wouldn't go further than "moderate") -- and now Andy wants more.
So he's saying LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME -- which I strongly suspect he wouldn't be doing (he wouldn't have to) if what he had next were going to have anything resembling the impact of his ACORN stories.
Mike Flynn and John Nolte, writers for Breitbart, wrote yesterday, in a post titled "Pregame Report: The NEA Conference Call,"
Tomorrow at noon ET, explosive new information....
No, really -- LOOK! LOOK! I desperately need the attention!
Is he going to have something? Oh, sure. The huge hint being dropped is that this will be in connection with an earlier story Breitbart broke, about a National Endowment for the Arts conference call in which it seemed that artists were being encouraged to work on the Obama agenda.
The NEA's communication director, Yosi Sergant, was reassigned after that story broke. (And Glenn Beck, not Breitbart, got the credit.)
But for most Americans it was a big yawn. Why? Well, the ACORN story had hot buttons for heartland America: Money! Hookers! Negroes!
But if there's an NEA story ... um, where's the sex? Where are the nude women smeared with root vegetables and naked guys with bullwhips up their butts?
Instead, what we're apparently going to get later today is something connected to this:
But, there is even a larger issue that hasn't yet received much attention in the press. Among the Obama Administration officials on the call were Buffy Wicks, Office of Public Engagement and the lead White House official on the President's Serve.Gov initiative to promote national service. Also on the call was Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for Serve.Gov.
Omigod! Not Buffy Wicks! If Buffy Wicks and Nell Abernathy go down, the Obama presidency can be measured in days!
Er, who the hell are these people? I'm part of the vast left-wing conspiracy, and I've never even heard of them. You?
Look, it's wrong if Serve.gov got politicized. But it's a venial sin. America doesn't give a crap about Serve.gov. Discipline or fire a couple of people and move on.
Ah, but no: Breitbart & Co. are going to tell us that this is all part of THE OCTOPUS!!!!1!!!!:
As Dana Loesch recently reported at Big Government, the Serve.Gov portal funnels citizens to volunteer or service projects connected with ACORN and other leftist groups. The taxpayer-funded website is evolving into a cyber-recruitment tool for the progressive movement.
It's the Obama Civilian Army! This is how Hitler started!!!! Glenn! Draw a really insane-looking chart!
Oh, good Lord. If Obama really were building a "civilian army," is that where he'd be starting? With artists? In America? Artists are the kids who got beaten up in high school in Iowa before they decamped to some big city or college town. No one in America gives a rat's ass about artists.
****
Then again, the focus on artists might be Breitbart's obsession. After all, the ACORN story broke on his new site, BigGovernment.com, but for a few years he's been running BigHollywood.com, a site devoted to the alleged suffering of right-wing artistes, and the site has been much mocked and little quoted. (The current teaser is at BH, not BG.) And in today's Washington Times, Breitbart has an op-ed in which he tediously boasts about his brilliant technique for breaking the ACORN story ("Thus was born a multimedia, multiplatform strategy designed to force the reluctant hands of ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post. Videos of five different ACORN offices in five separate cities would be released on five consecutive weekdays..."), and what does he call the piece?
The politicized art behind the ACORN plan
Damn you people! I am Michael Moore! I am Karen Finley! I am making great political art!!!
****
UPDATE: The big honking story is up now, and a glance at the "EXPLOSIVE" quotes from audio of the NEA conference reveals just about what I expected -- people you've never heard of not quite grasping where there has to be a wall between government and partisan advocacy ... and doing it in the dullest, least titillating way imaginable. This is what Breitbart thinks is going to make pulses race?
* "I just first of all want to thank everyone for being on the call and just a deep deep appreciation for all the work you all put into the campaign for the 2+ years we all worked together."
* "We won."
* "I'm actually in the White House and working towards furthering this agenda, this very aggressive agenda."
* "We"re going to come at you with some specific asks here."
* "I hope you guys are ready."
This is not smart at all, to be sure ... but as far as a real NEA scandal goes, where's the damn naked flesh smeared with yams?!
This is page A18 stuff -- at best. Beck's neck veins will pop. No sane person's will.
If you do powdered drugs, at a certain point you get a tad antsy -- you get worried that you won't be able to sustain your high. Andrew Breitbart has recently had the profoundly enjoyable experience of unleashing the ACORN videos on the nation and watching them become a moderate-sized scandal (and no, I wouldn't go further than "moderate") -- and now Andy wants more.
So he's saying LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME -- which I strongly suspect he wouldn't be doing (he wouldn't have to) if what he had next were going to have anything resembling the impact of his ACORN stories.
Mike Flynn and John Nolte, writers for Breitbart, wrote yesterday, in a post titled "Pregame Report: The NEA Conference Call,"
Tomorrow at noon ET, explosive new information....
No, really -- LOOK! LOOK! I desperately need the attention!
Is he going to have something? Oh, sure. The huge hint being dropped is that this will be in connection with an earlier story Breitbart broke, about a National Endowment for the Arts conference call in which it seemed that artists were being encouraged to work on the Obama agenda.
The NEA's communication director, Yosi Sergant, was reassigned after that story broke. (And Glenn Beck, not Breitbart, got the credit.)
But for most Americans it was a big yawn. Why? Well, the ACORN story had hot buttons for heartland America: Money! Hookers! Negroes!
But if there's an NEA story ... um, where's the sex? Where are the nude women smeared with root vegetables and naked guys with bullwhips up their butts?
Instead, what we're apparently going to get later today is something connected to this:
But, there is even a larger issue that hasn't yet received much attention in the press. Among the Obama Administration officials on the call were Buffy Wicks, Office of Public Engagement and the lead White House official on the President's Serve.Gov initiative to promote national service. Also on the call was Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for Serve.Gov.
Omigod! Not Buffy Wicks! If Buffy Wicks and Nell Abernathy go down, the Obama presidency can be measured in days!
Er, who the hell are these people? I'm part of the vast left-wing conspiracy, and I've never even heard of them. You?
Look, it's wrong if Serve.gov got politicized. But it's a venial sin. America doesn't give a crap about Serve.gov. Discipline or fire a couple of people and move on.
Ah, but no: Breitbart & Co. are going to tell us that this is all part of THE OCTOPUS!!!!1!!!!:
As Dana Loesch recently reported at Big Government, the Serve.Gov portal funnels citizens to volunteer or service projects connected with ACORN and other leftist groups. The taxpayer-funded website is evolving into a cyber-recruitment tool for the progressive movement.
It's the Obama Civilian Army! This is how Hitler started!!!! Glenn! Draw a really insane-looking chart!
Oh, good Lord. If Obama really were building a "civilian army," is that where he'd be starting? With artists? In America? Artists are the kids who got beaten up in high school in Iowa before they decamped to some big city or college town. No one in America gives a rat's ass about artists.
****
Then again, the focus on artists might be Breitbart's obsession. After all, the ACORN story broke on his new site, BigGovernment.com, but for a few years he's been running BigHollywood.com, a site devoted to the alleged suffering of right-wing artistes, and the site has been much mocked and little quoted. (The current teaser is at BH, not BG.) And in today's Washington Times, Breitbart has an op-ed in which he tediously boasts about his brilliant technique for breaking the ACORN story ("Thus was born a multimedia, multiplatform strategy designed to force the reluctant hands of ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post. Videos of five different ACORN offices in five separate cities would be released on five consecutive weekdays..."), and what does he call the piece?
The politicized art behind the ACORN plan
Damn you people! I am Michael Moore! I am Karen Finley! I am making great political art!!!
****
UPDATE: The big honking story is up now, and a glance at the "EXPLOSIVE" quotes from audio of the NEA conference reveals just about what I expected -- people you've never heard of not quite grasping where there has to be a wall between government and partisan advocacy ... and doing it in the dullest, least titillating way imaginable. This is what Breitbart thinks is going to make pulses race?
* "I just first of all want to thank everyone for being on the call and just a deep deep appreciation for all the work you all put into the campaign for the 2+ years we all worked together."
* "We won."
* "I'm actually in the White House and working towards furthering this agenda, this very aggressive agenda."
* "We"re going to come at you with some specific asks here."
* "I hope you guys are ready."
This is not smart at all, to be sure ... but as far as a real NEA scandal goes, where's the damn naked flesh smeared with yams?!
This is page A18 stuff -- at best. Beck's neck veins will pop. No sane person's will.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
GLENN BECK AND WHAT (PROGRESSIVE) ARMY?
Oh, Frank Rich, are you joking?
Over the short term, the real economic grievances lurking beneath the extremism of the Beck brigades can do damage to both parties. A stopped clock is right twice a day. The recession-spawned anger that Beck has tapped into on the right could yet find a more mainstream outlet in a populist revolt from the left and center.
A Beck-generated left-wing (or centrist) revolt? Er, no. Not gonna happen.
Yes, this is true:
"Wall Street owns our government," Beck declared in one rant this July. "Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged." He drew a chart to dramatize the revolving door between Washington and Goldman Sachs in both the Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner Treasury departments. A couple of weeks later, Beck mockingly replaced the stars on the American flag with the logos of corporate giants like G.E., General Motors, Wal-Mart and Citigroup (as well as the right's usual nemesis, the Service Employees International Union). Little of it would be out of place in a Matt Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Or, we can assume, in Michael Moore's coming film, "Capitalism: A Love Story" ...
But come on, Frank -- this is (as I say over and over again) a classic strain of bigoted conspiratorialism, the demonization of rootless cosmopolitans who are at once hypercapitalists and evil communists bent on manipulation of hard-working simple folk (and on forced race-mixing). Salon's Alexander Zaitchik made that clear a few days ago, Frank, when he explained that Beck's favorite writer, W. Cleon Skousen, believed that (in Zaitchik's words) "the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of" pro-communist activity "going back to the Bolshevik Revolution" (Zaitchik, as I noted a couple of days ago, ultimately traces this argument to "Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian emigre who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'")
Yes, this line of thinking mixes ideas we think of as both left-wing and right-wing -- but this particular mix always leads its believers to march unceasingly to the right. Beck wishes all kinds of harm, up to and including death, on his real enemies, but when has he ever been pleased that Wall Street might suffer a bit of pain? When there was a congressional effort to recoup huge bonuses given to bigwigs at bailed-out companies, Beck was appalled.
Hey, I'd love to believe that there'll be a law of unintended consequences here, that Beck's crackpot worldview will get the populace riled up at the fat cats, at which time a left-leaning leader will rise up, but hell, our side couldn't even do effective pushback on the town-hall agitation. And really, what match are we for the other side? They have huge corporate lobbying organizations disguised as the grassroots, they have the only media mogul in America who doesn't fear imminent bankruptcy, and we have ... what? A bunch of kids who still have that will.i.am video dowloaded to their iPhones?
(No disrespect for will.i.am intended, but, really, the vaunted Obama army is no match for Dick Armey and Rupert Murdoch. Those guys have the money and the numbers.)
*****
I'm not buying this, either, from the Frank Rich column:
Now, as then, a Dixie-oriented movement like this won't remotely capture the White House. Now, unlike then, it is a catastrophe for the Republicans.... The more the party is identified with nasty name-calling, freak-show protestors, immigrant-bashing (the proximate cause of Wilson's outburst at Obama) and, yes, racism, the faster it will commit demographic suicide as America becomes ever younger and more diverse.
Rich says this three paragraphs after he says this:
Though Beck's daily Fox News show is in the sleepy slot of 5 p.m., his ratings are increasingly neck and neck with the prime-time tag team of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, and he has beaten them in the prized 25-to-54 demographic.
So a Beckite GOP is doomed to die off when its elderly backers die ... and yet Beck is drawing a young viewership. Which is it? Both of these things can't be true.
Besides, even though everyone outside the South allegedly hates the GOP, the GOP has a serious chance over the next fourteen months to win gubernatorial or senatorial elections in such deep-blue states as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Harry Reid, according to polls, is at serious risk of losing his seat. I'd hate to see what the polls would be looking like right now if everyone outside the South didn't hate the Republicans.
The problem is, hatred of the GOP isn't like hatred of the Democrats. Southern whites simply will not vote for a Democrat -- if Jesus Christ came back to Earth and ran as a Democrat, Southern whites wouldn't vote for him. But Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents will happily vote for Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and Jodi Rell and (in the recent past) Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney and William Weld and Tom Kean and Christie Whitman. You put a few of these in Congress and they enable the party's dominant wingnuts. I can think of one -- one --recent election in which Democratic-leaning voters turned out a Republican simply because he was a Republican and they knew he was helping make Republicanism possible: the defeat of Lincoln Chaffee in Rhode Island a few years ago. It never happens anywhere else. (Hello, Maine. Are you listening?)
So reports of the GOP's death are greatly exaggerated. And signs of an imminent progressive grassroots revolt enabled by Glenn Beck? Well, sure, that'd be nice. And I'd like a pony, too.
Oh, Frank Rich, are you joking?
Over the short term, the real economic grievances lurking beneath the extremism of the Beck brigades can do damage to both parties. A stopped clock is right twice a day. The recession-spawned anger that Beck has tapped into on the right could yet find a more mainstream outlet in a populist revolt from the left and center.
A Beck-generated left-wing (or centrist) revolt? Er, no. Not gonna happen.
Yes, this is true:
"Wall Street owns our government," Beck declared in one rant this July. "Our government and these gigantic corporations have merged." He drew a chart to dramatize the revolving door between Washington and Goldman Sachs in both the Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner Treasury departments. A couple of weeks later, Beck mockingly replaced the stars on the American flag with the logos of corporate giants like G.E., General Motors, Wal-Mart and Citigroup (as well as the right's usual nemesis, the Service Employees International Union). Little of it would be out of place in a Matt Taibbi article in Rolling Stone. Or, we can assume, in Michael Moore's coming film, "Capitalism: A Love Story" ...
But come on, Frank -- this is (as I say over and over again) a classic strain of bigoted conspiratorialism, the demonization of rootless cosmopolitans who are at once hypercapitalists and evil communists bent on manipulation of hard-working simple folk (and on forced race-mixing). Salon's Alexander Zaitchik made that clear a few days ago, Frank, when he explained that Beck's favorite writer, W. Cleon Skousen, believed that (in Zaitchik's words) "the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of" pro-communist activity "going back to the Bolshevik Revolution" (Zaitchik, as I noted a couple of days ago, ultimately traces this argument to "Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian emigre who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'")
Yes, this line of thinking mixes ideas we think of as both left-wing and right-wing -- but this particular mix always leads its believers to march unceasingly to the right. Beck wishes all kinds of harm, up to and including death, on his real enemies, but when has he ever been pleased that Wall Street might suffer a bit of pain? When there was a congressional effort to recoup huge bonuses given to bigwigs at bailed-out companies, Beck was appalled.
Hey, I'd love to believe that there'll be a law of unintended consequences here, that Beck's crackpot worldview will get the populace riled up at the fat cats, at which time a left-leaning leader will rise up, but hell, our side couldn't even do effective pushback on the town-hall agitation. And really, what match are we for the other side? They have huge corporate lobbying organizations disguised as the grassroots, they have the only media mogul in America who doesn't fear imminent bankruptcy, and we have ... what? A bunch of kids who still have that will.i.am video dowloaded to their iPhones?
(No disrespect for will.i.am intended, but, really, the vaunted Obama army is no match for Dick Armey and Rupert Murdoch. Those guys have the money and the numbers.)
*****
I'm not buying this, either, from the Frank Rich column:
Now, as then, a Dixie-oriented movement like this won't remotely capture the White House. Now, unlike then, it is a catastrophe for the Republicans.... The more the party is identified with nasty name-calling, freak-show protestors, immigrant-bashing (the proximate cause of Wilson's outburst at Obama) and, yes, racism, the faster it will commit demographic suicide as America becomes ever younger and more diverse.
Rich says this three paragraphs after he says this:
Though Beck's daily Fox News show is in the sleepy slot of 5 p.m., his ratings are increasingly neck and neck with the prime-time tag team of Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity, and he has beaten them in the prized 25-to-54 demographic.
So a Beckite GOP is doomed to die off when its elderly backers die ... and yet Beck is drawing a young viewership. Which is it? Both of these things can't be true.
Besides, even though everyone outside the South allegedly hates the GOP, the GOP has a serious chance over the next fourteen months to win gubernatorial or senatorial elections in such deep-blue states as New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Harry Reid, according to polls, is at serious risk of losing his seat. I'd hate to see what the polls would be looking like right now if everyone outside the South didn't hate the Republicans.
The problem is, hatred of the GOP isn't like hatred of the Democrats. Southern whites simply will not vote for a Democrat -- if Jesus Christ came back to Earth and ran as a Democrat, Southern whites wouldn't vote for him. But Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents will happily vote for Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins and Jodi Rell and (in the recent past) Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney and William Weld and Tom Kean and Christie Whitman. You put a few of these in Congress and they enable the party's dominant wingnuts. I can think of one -- one --recent election in which Democratic-leaning voters turned out a Republican simply because he was a Republican and they knew he was helping make Republicanism possible: the defeat of Lincoln Chaffee in Rhode Island a few years ago. It never happens anywhere else. (Hello, Maine. Are you listening?)
So reports of the GOP's death are greatly exaggerated. And signs of an imminent progressive grassroots revolt enabled by Glenn Beck? Well, sure, that'd be nice. And I'd like a pony, too.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
NAGOURNEY, STILL NOT GETTING IT
In today's New York Times, Adam Nagourney gives us another Republicans-are-back article. Given the existence of the filibuster, Fox News, a lily-livered Democratic congressional delegation, and a populace still so mesmerized by Reaganism thirty years after the fact that we weep at the thought of disturbing a hair on the head of every slimy fat cat who's ever denied us cancer coverage, I'd say Republicans were never away. But Nagourney is using conventional measurements. Yeah, the GOP is an aging regional party. But if half our elected Democrats still think Republicans are ten feet tall, what difference does it make?
How old-school is Nagourney's analysis? Well, he's still saying things like
They are still searching for new leaders and new ideas.
and
Finally, even though many Republicans have argued that the party needs new ideas to counter Mr. Obama, the overwhelming sentiment at the summit was that the conservative message of the past 30 years was as effective as ever.
Adam? This is ADHD America -- what do Republicans need new ideas for? The old core idea still works perefectly well: Democrats are going to kill you in your beds! And the most vicious ones will be hippies and Hispanics and Negroes!
It's going to be a low-turnout midterm election cycle, folks, and they have the motivated base. And I don't care if polls show that the GOP is still poorly regarded -- declare Democrats evil and who else but a Republican is going to be on most ballots opposing the Democrat?
The presidential election after that is a tough one for the GOP, but I believe more and more that Mitt Romney might just replicate Nixon's '68 strategy of persuading the knuckle-draggers that he's as big a hater as they are while also persuading the traditional-media mandarins that he's a seasoned and sensible centrist. We know he can talk out of both sides of his mouth -- now all he has to do is learn how to do it simultaneously and not just sequentially.
And Values Voter Summit superstar Carrie Prejean will probably place his nomination ... unless she's so miffed that he beat Sarah Palin in the primaries. (Assuming that's possible -- and let's hope it isn't possible, because Palin '12 is, needless to say, our best hope, and raises the possibility that Obama will be Nixon, i.e., the Nixon of the '72 election results.)
In today's New York Times, Adam Nagourney gives us another Republicans-are-back article. Given the existence of the filibuster, Fox News, a lily-livered Democratic congressional delegation, and a populace still so mesmerized by Reaganism thirty years after the fact that we weep at the thought of disturbing a hair on the head of every slimy fat cat who's ever denied us cancer coverage, I'd say Republicans were never away. But Nagourney is using conventional measurements. Yeah, the GOP is an aging regional party. But if half our elected Democrats still think Republicans are ten feet tall, what difference does it make?
How old-school is Nagourney's analysis? Well, he's still saying things like
They are still searching for new leaders and new ideas.
and
Finally, even though many Republicans have argued that the party needs new ideas to counter Mr. Obama, the overwhelming sentiment at the summit was that the conservative message of the past 30 years was as effective as ever.
Adam? This is ADHD America -- what do Republicans need new ideas for? The old core idea still works perefectly well: Democrats are going to kill you in your beds! And the most vicious ones will be hippies and Hispanics and Negroes!
It's going to be a low-turnout midterm election cycle, folks, and they have the motivated base. And I don't care if polls show that the GOP is still poorly regarded -- declare Democrats evil and who else but a Republican is going to be on most ballots opposing the Democrat?
The presidential election after that is a tough one for the GOP, but I believe more and more that Mitt Romney might just replicate Nixon's '68 strategy of persuading the knuckle-draggers that he's as big a hater as they are while also persuading the traditional-media mandarins that he's a seasoned and sensible centrist. We know he can talk out of both sides of his mouth -- now all he has to do is learn how to do it simultaneously and not just sequentially.
And Values Voter Summit superstar Carrie Prejean will probably place his nomination ... unless she's so miffed that he beat Sarah Palin in the primaries. (Assuming that's possible -- and let's hope it isn't possible, because Palin '12 is, needless to say, our best hope, and raises the possibility that Obama will be Nixon, i.e., the Nixon of the '72 election results.)
Friday, September 18, 2009
THE RACE-PROBLEM PROBLEM
The latest David Brooks column is titled "No, It's Not About Race." This is in reference to the Obama wars, obviously. He's probably not responsible for the headline, and his dismissal of racism as a motive for the anti-Obama crazies is less categorical -- but barely:
Well, I don't have a machine for peering into the souls of Obama's critics, so I can't measure how much racism is in there. But my impression is that race is largely beside the point.
He happened to see friendly interactions on September 12 between the teabaggers and participants in the Black Family Reunion Celebration, which was taking place at the same time, and, assuming that one anecdote is adequate data, concluded that race is essentially irrelevant. (This post from an African-American blogger who was at the Reunion suggests that Brooks may be right about the lack of tension, although a Wonkette commentator named biznesssavvychic saw some teabag disrupters.)
Two assertions I absolutely don't accept (though they don't annoy me equally):
1. It's not about race.
2. It's all about race.
Brooks is right when he says the current tension is about Huey Long/Father Coughlin populism vs. people perceived as evil urbanites -- but why on earth does that mean it can't be about race as well? It's not either/or. Don't tell me the Confederate flags and witch doctor images would be showing up in precisely the same numbers if the protests were being directed at President Hillary Clinton. (You'd get far more witches than witch doctors.)
Not everything is anti-Obama racism -- Joe Wilson's history of defending Strom Thurmond's alleged honor and the alleged good name of the Confederacy doesn't necessarily mean that he wouldn't have yelled "You lie!" at President Hillary Clinton, or President Bill Clinton, or President Kerry or Gore in a fevered environment like today's. He's angry about immigration, and that's about race, but I don't think it's about Obama's race. And no, I don't think it's racist to depict Obama as a whiteface Joker when the character being parodied is a white guy in whiteface.
Racism isn't the only factor ... and racism is a factor. That seems obvious. Brooks is right to stress populist rage -- just not to the near-exclusion of all else.
What's scary about the Joker poster is that it (and so much else in the right's hyperbole) suggests that Obama is an immediate lethal threat that must be eliminated as quickly as possible. Encouraging that belief could be a formula for anarchy and violence.
If I'd been Nancy Pelosi this week, that's what I'd have said to GOP pols and pundits: You know damn well what a totalitarian is. You know what a fascist is, and a Nazi. You know what Hitler and Stalin were really like. And you know damn well that nothing that's taking place right now bears even a glancing resemblance to the historical nightmares represented by those words. And you have a responsibility not to encourage the people you serve to misunderstand the historical truth because their misunderstanding can be used by you for cheap political gain.
*****
A couple more points about Brooks's column. He writes:
Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector.
Given all of this, it was guaranteed that he would spark a populist backlash....
Yeah, right -- unlike the administrations of Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Bush, which were dominated by high-school-dropout blue-collar workers who never met a millionaire and drank domestic beer out of the can.
We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.
Yeah, we really exaggerated the opposition to the Obama schools speech, didn't we? We said opponents were calling it socialist indoctrination! We said they were describing it as an attempt to recruit a pro-Obama civilian army! We said school districts were refusing to broadcast the speech! Where on earth did we get all that hyperbolic nonsense?
The latest David Brooks column is titled "No, It's Not About Race." This is in reference to the Obama wars, obviously. He's probably not responsible for the headline, and his dismissal of racism as a motive for the anti-Obama crazies is less categorical -- but barely:
Well, I don't have a machine for peering into the souls of Obama's critics, so I can't measure how much racism is in there. But my impression is that race is largely beside the point.
He happened to see friendly interactions on September 12 between the teabaggers and participants in the Black Family Reunion Celebration, which was taking place at the same time, and, assuming that one anecdote is adequate data, concluded that race is essentially irrelevant. (This post from an African-American blogger who was at the Reunion suggests that Brooks may be right about the lack of tension, although a Wonkette commentator named biznesssavvychic saw some teabag disrupters.)
Two assertions I absolutely don't accept (though they don't annoy me equally):
1. It's not about race.
2. It's all about race.
Brooks is right when he says the current tension is about Huey Long/Father Coughlin populism vs. people perceived as evil urbanites -- but why on earth does that mean it can't be about race as well? It's not either/or. Don't tell me the Confederate flags and witch doctor images would be showing up in precisely the same numbers if the protests were being directed at President Hillary Clinton. (You'd get far more witches than witch doctors.)
Not everything is anti-Obama racism -- Joe Wilson's history of defending Strom Thurmond's alleged honor and the alleged good name of the Confederacy doesn't necessarily mean that he wouldn't have yelled "You lie!" at President Hillary Clinton, or President Bill Clinton, or President Kerry or Gore in a fevered environment like today's. He's angry about immigration, and that's about race, but I don't think it's about Obama's race. And no, I don't think it's racist to depict Obama as a whiteface Joker when the character being parodied is a white guy in whiteface.
Racism isn't the only factor ... and racism is a factor. That seems obvious. Brooks is right to stress populist rage -- just not to the near-exclusion of all else.
What's scary about the Joker poster is that it (and so much else in the right's hyperbole) suggests that Obama is an immediate lethal threat that must be eliminated as quickly as possible. Encouraging that belief could be a formula for anarchy and violence.
If I'd been Nancy Pelosi this week, that's what I'd have said to GOP pols and pundits: You know damn well what a totalitarian is. You know what a fascist is, and a Nazi. You know what Hitler and Stalin were really like. And you know damn well that nothing that's taking place right now bears even a glancing resemblance to the historical nightmares represented by those words. And you have a responsibility not to encourage the people you serve to misunderstand the historical truth because their misunderstanding can be used by you for cheap political gain.
*****
A couple more points about Brooks's column. He writes:
Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector.
Given all of this, it was guaranteed that he would spark a populist backlash....
Yeah, right -- unlike the administrations of Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Bush, which were dominated by high-school-dropout blue-collar workers who never met a millionaire and drank domestic beer out of the can.
We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.
Yeah, we really exaggerated the opposition to the Obama schools speech, didn't we? We said opponents were calling it socialist indoctrination! We said they were describing it as an attempt to recruit a pro-Obama civilian army! We said school districts were refusing to broadcast the speech! Where on earth did we get all that hyperbolic nonsense?
THE WANNABE-ISM ISN'T A BUG, IT'S A FEATURE
I've been saying for a while that the neo-crazies on the right have a bad case of '60s envy. I knew they'd been making this obvious in sometimes absurd ways -- see, e.g., Michelle Malkin's declaration that "fiscal responsibility is the new counterculture." (Oooh, smell the patchouli.) I knew that a lot of righties have been name-checking Saul Alinsky lately -- for instance, ACORN antagonist filmmaker James O'Keefe But, um, the Dick Armey crowd, too? Those guys, according to Politico, are reading Alinsky?
The logo for the Sept. 12 protest in Washington, which organizers called the "March on Washington," featured an image that looked so much like those associated with the labor, communist and black power movements that some participants objected to it -- until they found out that's what the designers were shooting for.
"As an organization, we have been very closely studying what the left has been doing," explains FreedomWorks press secretary Adam Brandon, who says he was given a copy of "Rules for Radicals" when he took his current job....
And while they're handing out Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" at FreedomWorks, Armey himself told the Financial Times last month: "What I think of Alinsky is that he was very good at what he did but what he did was not good."
I don't want to talk about this as if it's a hopeless strategy -- obviously, putting Alinsky's strategies into the hands of people like Armey who are already powerful could continue to be effective, and could be very dangerous. But the naked envy does amuse me.
And I don't think these people can necessarily control what they've set in motion. I'm not one of those people who fear violence from the right because of a belief that right-wingers have a violence potential that's categorically impossible on the left -- I fear violence from the right, in part, precisely because right-wingers are imitating left-wingers who in a number of cases eventually abandoned King-like nonviolent strategies and resorted to violence. Do Armey and his underlings think everyone in their movement is sitting around reading a book? Do they not imagine that, if they dangle tantalizing images of peaceful sixties protest before their followers' eyes, the less peaceful protests might start seeming like an even more appealing model to imitate? Especially given the fact that there's already a bellicosity on the right, a fascination with guns and war (especially civil war, with and without capital letters)?
*****
Speaking of the Civil War, this, from Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks, is just delusional:
And as for the phrase "March on Washington," Brandon says, "This is something people said in the office. If we had been alive back in the 1960s, we would have been on the freedom bus rides. It was an issue of individual liberty. We're trying to borrow some from the Civil Rights movement."
Er, no:
Armey did not, in fact, participate in the freedom rides of the 1960s.
Gee, who'da thunk?
****
UPDATE: As Kevin notes in comments, David Weigel wrote essentially the same article for the Washington Independent in August. Sorry I missed it.
I've been saying for a while that the neo-crazies on the right have a bad case of '60s envy. I knew they'd been making this obvious in sometimes absurd ways -- see, e.g., Michelle Malkin's declaration that "fiscal responsibility is the new counterculture." (Oooh, smell the patchouli.) I knew that a lot of righties have been name-checking Saul Alinsky lately -- for instance, ACORN antagonist filmmaker James O'Keefe But, um, the Dick Armey crowd, too? Those guys, according to Politico, are reading Alinsky?
The logo for the Sept. 12 protest in Washington, which organizers called the "March on Washington," featured an image that looked so much like those associated with the labor, communist and black power movements that some participants objected to it -- until they found out that's what the designers were shooting for.
"As an organization, we have been very closely studying what the left has been doing," explains FreedomWorks press secretary Adam Brandon, who says he was given a copy of "Rules for Radicals" when he took his current job....
And while they're handing out Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" at FreedomWorks, Armey himself told the Financial Times last month: "What I think of Alinsky is that he was very good at what he did but what he did was not good."
I don't want to talk about this as if it's a hopeless strategy -- obviously, putting Alinsky's strategies into the hands of people like Armey who are already powerful could continue to be effective, and could be very dangerous. But the naked envy does amuse me.
And I don't think these people can necessarily control what they've set in motion. I'm not one of those people who fear violence from the right because of a belief that right-wingers have a violence potential that's categorically impossible on the left -- I fear violence from the right, in part, precisely because right-wingers are imitating left-wingers who in a number of cases eventually abandoned King-like nonviolent strategies and resorted to violence. Do Armey and his underlings think everyone in their movement is sitting around reading a book? Do they not imagine that, if they dangle tantalizing images of peaceful sixties protest before their followers' eyes, the less peaceful protests might start seeming like an even more appealing model to imitate? Especially given the fact that there's already a bellicosity on the right, a fascination with guns and war (especially civil war, with and without capital letters)?
*****
Speaking of the Civil War, this, from Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks, is just delusional:
And as for the phrase "March on Washington," Brandon says, "This is something people said in the office. If we had been alive back in the 1960s, we would have been on the freedom bus rides. It was an issue of individual liberty. We're trying to borrow some from the Civil Rights movement."
Er, no:
Armey did not, in fact, participate in the freedom rides of the 1960s.
Gee, who'da thunk?
****
UPDATE: As Kevin notes in comments, David Weigel wrote essentially the same article for the Washington Independent in August. Sorry I missed it.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
TIME COVER STORIES ON BECK AND COULTER: SEPARATED AT BIRTH?
There really is a formula to these Time cover stories on right-wing demagogues, isn't there? Let's compare David Von Drehle's "Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?" from the current issue of Time (hereafter Von Drehle on Beck) and John Cloud's Coulter story, "Ms. Right," from Time's April 17, 2005, issue (hereafter Cloud on Coulter).
* Worshipped by fans!
Von Drehle on Beck:
One person listens, Frankowski believes, and that's why back home in Alabama she arranged to have 10 large signs made on white foam board, nine of them marked with a big letter and the tenth with we and a heart. Raised aloft, the signs spelled out "We ♥ G-l-e-n-n B-e-c-k."
Cloud on Coulter:
Wearing an ankle-length fur and a wide-eyed expression, Coulter had to be pushed through the crowd by a team of handlers. When she swept past the spot I was wedged into, the young men near me went aflutter. "Ann Coulter should be staying on our floor!" one said lasciviously. During a Q&A at a private reception later, another guy raised his hand and asked her out.
* Primarily an entertainer, not a demagogue!
Von Drehle on Beck:
Beck describes his performances as "the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment" -- and the entertainment comes first. "Like Limbaugh, Glenn Beck is a former Top 40 DJ," radio historian Marc Fisher explains, "first and foremost an entertainer, who happens to have stumbled into a position of political prominence."
Cloud on Coulter:
People say that Jon Stewart has blurred the line between news and humor, but his Daily Show airs on a comedy channel. Coulter goes on actual news programs and deploys so much sarcasm and hyperbole that she sounds more like Dennis Miller than Limbaugh....
"What p_____ me off," Coulter says, "is when they don't get the punch line."
* A multi-platform media success in a way that leaves us breathless!
Von Drehle on Beck:
There are bigger one-voice enterprises in the world: Oprah, Rush, Dr. Phil. But few are more widely diversified. In June, estimators at Forbes magazine pegged Beck's earnings over the previous 12 months at $23 million, a ballpark figure confirmed by knowledgeable sources, and this year's revenues are on track to be higher. The largest share comes from his radio show, which is heard by more than 8 million listeners on nearly 400 stations -- one of the five biggest radio audiences in the country. Beck is one of only a handful of blockbuster authors who have reached No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller lists with both nonfiction and fiction.... His latest book, Arguing with Idiots, will be published this month, and if things go as expected, it will be the third No. 1 with his name on the front published in the past 12 months.
Cloud on Coulter:
Coulter's ubiquity on political talk shows is exceeded only by her inability to write a book that doesn't become a best seller. Her current effort ... recently ended a 16-week run on the New York Times best-seller list even though it's mostly a collection of previously published columns. Despite Coulter's indifference to the online world--she doesn't blog, and until recently she had little direct role in anncoulter.com--she has a staggering presence in cyberspace, where pro- and anti-Coulter forces wage unending battle. Her "official chat" site, which Coulter never visits, draws 1,000 posts a day. A recent documentary, Is It True What They Say About Ann?--co-directed by a friend of Coulter's, journalist Elinor Burkett--has played at film festivals and won some favorable notices.
* It's not any individual's fault that we live in such depraved times!
Von Drehle on Beck:
The creamy notions of postpartisan cooperation -- poured abundantly over Obama's presidential campaign a year ago -- have curdled into suspicion and feelings of helplessness. Trust is a toxic asset, sitting valueless on the national books. Good faith is trading at pennies on the dollar. The old American mind-set that Richard Hofstadter famously called "the paranoid style" -- the sense that Masons or the railroads or the Pope or the guys in black helicopters are in league to destroy the country -- is aflame again, fanned from both right and left. Between the liberal fantasies about Brownshirts at town halls and the conservative concoctions of brainwashed children goose-stepping to school, you'd think the Palm in Washington had been replaced with a Munich beer hall.
No one has a better feeling for this mood, and no one exploits it as well, as Beck.
Cloud on Coulter:
But no one on the right is so iconic, such a totem of this particular moment. Coulter epitomizes the way politics is now discussed on the airwaves, where opinions must come violently fast and cause as much friction as possible.
The articles aren't identical. Actually, the Coulter piece is harsher, even though, in retrospect, Coulter seems to have been far less dangerous than Beck is now. I guess all that phony gooeyness and tearing up is paying off for Beck.
There really is a formula to these Time cover stories on right-wing demagogues, isn't there? Let's compare David Von Drehle's "Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America?" from the current issue of Time (hereafter Von Drehle on Beck) and John Cloud's Coulter story, "Ms. Right," from Time's April 17, 2005, issue (hereafter Cloud on Coulter).
* Worshipped by fans!
Von Drehle on Beck:
One person listens, Frankowski believes, and that's why back home in Alabama she arranged to have 10 large signs made on white foam board, nine of them marked with a big letter and the tenth with we and a heart. Raised aloft, the signs spelled out "We ♥ G-l-e-n-n B-e-c-k."
Cloud on Coulter:
Wearing an ankle-length fur and a wide-eyed expression, Coulter had to be pushed through the crowd by a team of handlers. When she swept past the spot I was wedged into, the young men near me went aflutter. "Ann Coulter should be staying on our floor!" one said lasciviously. During a Q&A at a private reception later, another guy raised his hand and asked her out.
* Primarily an entertainer, not a demagogue!
Von Drehle on Beck:
Beck describes his performances as "the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment" -- and the entertainment comes first. "Like Limbaugh, Glenn Beck is a former Top 40 DJ," radio historian Marc Fisher explains, "first and foremost an entertainer, who happens to have stumbled into a position of political prominence."
Cloud on Coulter:
People say that Jon Stewart has blurred the line between news and humor, but his Daily Show airs on a comedy channel. Coulter goes on actual news programs and deploys so much sarcasm and hyperbole that she sounds more like Dennis Miller than Limbaugh....
"What p_____ me off," Coulter says, "is when they don't get the punch line."
* A multi-platform media success in a way that leaves us breathless!
Von Drehle on Beck:
There are bigger one-voice enterprises in the world: Oprah, Rush, Dr. Phil. But few are more widely diversified. In June, estimators at Forbes magazine pegged Beck's earnings over the previous 12 months at $23 million, a ballpark figure confirmed by knowledgeable sources, and this year's revenues are on track to be higher. The largest share comes from his radio show, which is heard by more than 8 million listeners on nearly 400 stations -- one of the five biggest radio audiences in the country. Beck is one of only a handful of blockbuster authors who have reached No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller lists with both nonfiction and fiction.... His latest book, Arguing with Idiots, will be published this month, and if things go as expected, it will be the third No. 1 with his name on the front published in the past 12 months.
Cloud on Coulter:
Coulter's ubiquity on political talk shows is exceeded only by her inability to write a book that doesn't become a best seller. Her current effort ... recently ended a 16-week run on the New York Times best-seller list even though it's mostly a collection of previously published columns. Despite Coulter's indifference to the online world--she doesn't blog, and until recently she had little direct role in anncoulter.com--she has a staggering presence in cyberspace, where pro- and anti-Coulter forces wage unending battle. Her "official chat" site, which Coulter never visits, draws 1,000 posts a day. A recent documentary, Is It True What They Say About Ann?--co-directed by a friend of Coulter's, journalist Elinor Burkett--has played at film festivals and won some favorable notices.
* It's not any individual's fault that we live in such depraved times!
Von Drehle on Beck:
The creamy notions of postpartisan cooperation -- poured abundantly over Obama's presidential campaign a year ago -- have curdled into suspicion and feelings of helplessness. Trust is a toxic asset, sitting valueless on the national books. Good faith is trading at pennies on the dollar. The old American mind-set that Richard Hofstadter famously called "the paranoid style" -- the sense that Masons or the railroads or the Pope or the guys in black helicopters are in league to destroy the country -- is aflame again, fanned from both right and left. Between the liberal fantasies about Brownshirts at town halls and the conservative concoctions of brainwashed children goose-stepping to school, you'd think the Palm in Washington had been replaced with a Munich beer hall.
No one has a better feeling for this mood, and no one exploits it as well, as Beck.
Cloud on Coulter:
But no one on the right is so iconic, such a totem of this particular moment. Coulter epitomizes the way politics is now discussed on the airwaves, where opinions must come violently fast and cause as much friction as possible.
The articles aren't identical. Actually, the Coulter piece is harsher, even though, in retrospect, Coulter seems to have been far less dangerous than Beck is now. I guess all that phony gooeyness and tearing up is paying off for Beck.
R. S. McCAIN: WE HAVE MORE TEEN PREGNANCY ... THEREFORE TEEN PREGNANCY IS GOOD!
I'm sure he'll say I'm misrepresenting his argument (and he does respond, even to Z-list blogs like this one), but I don't know how else to interpret Robert Stacy McCain's response to this news story:
U.S. states whose residents have more conservative religious beliefs on average tend to have higher rates of teenagers giving birth, a new study suggests....
The relationship could be due to the fact that communities with such religious beliefs (a literal interpretation of the Bible, for instance) may frown upon contraception, researchers say. If that same culture isn't successfully discouraging teen sex, the pregnancy and birth rates rise....
RSM writes:
The objective of this study? To convince college-educated middle-class people that religious faith is the No. 1 force for evil in the modern world....
Consdier this tragic example: Margaret started having sex when she was 12 and got pregnant when she was 13, in a community so violent that the 26-year-old baby-daddy got into a fight and died shortly thereafter, leaving the teenage girl, seven months pregnant, in the care of her mother, who was a devout Catholic and didn't believe in abortion.
Another teenage motherhood tragedy, and you know the statistics about the children of teenage mothers. So you can predict what happened to that fatherless baby.
Margaret named him Henry and on Aug. 22, 1485 -- yes, I said 1485 -- Henry's army defeated the forces led by the usurper Richard III in a place called Bosworth Field, ending the War of the Roses.
Henry Tudor's mother Margaret Beaufort was only 12 when she married the nobleman Edmund Tudor, who died after fighting rebels in his Welsh homeland. Margaret's orphaned son became King Henry VII of England. And Margaret? Well, some have called her the most brilliant woman of the 15th century....
So liberals and secularists and Yankees are evil and immoral -- but when it turns out that Christian Southerners are engaging in immoral behavior according their own criteria, well, it must be the criteria that are wrong. Pubescent pregnancy isn't bad, it's good! Outrage at pubescent pregnancy is just liberal propaganda! A goalpost-mover? Who, me?
I'm sure he'll say I'm misrepresenting his argument (and he does respond, even to Z-list blogs like this one), but I don't know how else to interpret Robert Stacy McCain's response to this news story:
U.S. states whose residents have more conservative religious beliefs on average tend to have higher rates of teenagers giving birth, a new study suggests....
The relationship could be due to the fact that communities with such religious beliefs (a literal interpretation of the Bible, for instance) may frown upon contraception, researchers say. If that same culture isn't successfully discouraging teen sex, the pregnancy and birth rates rise....
RSM writes:
The objective of this study? To convince college-educated middle-class people that religious faith is the No. 1 force for evil in the modern world....
Consdier this tragic example: Margaret started having sex when she was 12 and got pregnant when she was 13, in a community so violent that the 26-year-old baby-daddy got into a fight and died shortly thereafter, leaving the teenage girl, seven months pregnant, in the care of her mother, who was a devout Catholic and didn't believe in abortion.
Another teenage motherhood tragedy, and you know the statistics about the children of teenage mothers. So you can predict what happened to that fatherless baby.
Margaret named him Henry and on Aug. 22, 1485 -- yes, I said 1485 -- Henry's army defeated the forces led by the usurper Richard III in a place called Bosworth Field, ending the War of the Roses.
Henry Tudor's mother Margaret Beaufort was only 12 when she married the nobleman Edmund Tudor, who died after fighting rebels in his Welsh homeland. Margaret's orphaned son became King Henry VII of England. And Margaret? Well, some have called her the most brilliant woman of the 15th century....
So liberals and secularists and Yankees are evil and immoral -- but when it turns out that Christian Southerners are engaging in immoral behavior according their own criteria, well, it must be the criteria that are wrong. Pubescent pregnancy isn't bad, it's good! Outrage at pubescent pregnancy is just liberal propaganda! A goalpost-mover? Who, me?
What I'm Reading Today
The Power of Maps, by Denis Wood.
Influenza 1918, by Lynette Iezzoni
The Great Derangement, by Matt Taibbi
and
Unholy Business: a True Tale of Faith, Greed, and Forgery in the Holy Land, by Nina Burleigh.
The last one, Unholy Business, is really very dull. It is far less interesting than its subject matter which is the massive fraud that is Biblical Archaeology and the Antiquities Trade in significant Biblical "goodies" sold to both the Israeli Government and American Evangelicals. But there was one nugget in the book that is worth excerpting, on the even of Rosh Hashona, just because when you come across a great poem, you should share it. It is a poem by a, to me, unknown poet:
The Power of Maps, by Denis Wood.
Influenza 1918, by Lynette Iezzoni
The Great Derangement, by Matt Taibbi
and
Unholy Business: a True Tale of Faith, Greed, and Forgery in the Holy Land, by Nina Burleigh.
The last one, Unholy Business, is really very dull. It is far less interesting than its subject matter which is the massive fraud that is Biblical Archaeology and the Antiquities Trade in significant Biblical "goodies" sold to both the Israeli Government and American Evangelicals. But there was one nugget in the book that is worth excerpting, on the even of Rosh Hashona, just because when you come across a great poem, you should share it. It is a poem by a, to me, unknown poet:
"...the late Israeli poet Dan Pagis, a Polish-born internationally known linguist who survived a notorious Nazi death camp at the River Bug in Romania where forty thousand Jews are believed to have been killed in just four days. One of Dan Pagis's best known poems is a spare piece that manages to encompass the catastrophe endured by twentieth century European Jewry in just six lines, called "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car" ("Katuv b'iparon bakaron hehatum"):
here in this carload
i am eve
with abel my son
if you see my other son
cain son of man
tell him that i
A REQUEST
A reader has e-mailed me to say that he's planning to attend a bipartisan health-care town meeting in Virginia featuring the GOP's Eric Cantor and Democrat Robert Scott. He says:
I need to have a question pass screening. It needs to be provocative or interesting or sneaky enough that it will get fielded. I need my fellow liberal brains on this one, and they are in short supply here, and in my circle of friends.
Any response you might offer would be greatly appreciated. A discussion of some sort would be even more fantastic.
Any thoughts?
A reader has e-mailed me to say that he's planning to attend a bipartisan health-care town meeting in Virginia featuring the GOP's Eric Cantor and Democrat Robert Scott. He says:
I need to have a question pass screening. It needs to be provocative or interesting or sneaky enough that it will get fielded. I need my fellow liberal brains on this one, and they are in short supply here, and in my circle of friends.
Any response you might offer would be greatly appreciated. A discussion of some sort would be even more fantastic.
Any thoughts?
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
BECK'S IDOL AND THE MYTHICAL ULTRACAPITALIST COMMIES
I've been telling you for some time that Beckites have a bizarre worldview in which elitists and fat cats are barely distinguishable from communists -- and now there's further evidence of that. Alexander Zaitchik of Salon has published an extremely valuable article about the late W. Cleon Skousen, a conspiratorialist crackpot whose booksGlenn Beck obsessively touts (Beck has written a new foreword to Skousen's book The 5,000 Year Leap, which he helped made a #1 Amazon bestseller this summer). Skousen wrote about "the New World Order," the glories of slavery, and the ever-threatening Red Menace -- and his take on the latter is just what I've been telling you about:
Skousen ... reemerged at the end of the [1960s] peddling a new and improved conspiracy that merged left with right: the global capitalist mega-plot of the "dynastic rich." Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, Skousen now believed, used left forces -- from Ho Chi Minh to the American civil rights movement -- to serve their own power....
In "The Naked Communist," Skousen had argued that the communists wanted power for their own reasons. In "The Naked Capitalist," Skousen argued that those reasons were really the reasons of the dynastic rich, who used front groups to do their dirty work and hide their tracks. The purpose of liberal internationalist groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, argued Skousen, was to push "U.S. foreign policy toward the establishment of a world-wide collectivist society." Skousen claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch's own sources is Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian emigre who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
Yikes.
Think it's just Beck who falls for this crap? Note that Mark Williams, the tea party leader who appeared on Anderson Cooper's CNN show Monday night to defend the movement, said this:
... this is nothing at all to do with health care, other than health care has become the metaphor for all the different socialist policies that are being rammed down our throats by this president, or that he's trying to ram down our throats.
It's about TARP. It's about taking money from the working stiffs and giving it to the big corporations. It's about the corporate takeover of Washington, D.C.
If Williams believes that the menace of Obamaism involves "socialist policies" and "the corporate takeover of Washington, D.C." simultaneously, then, somewhere in hell, Skousen is smiling.
I've been telling you for some time that Beckites have a bizarre worldview in which elitists and fat cats are barely distinguishable from communists -- and now there's further evidence of that. Alexander Zaitchik of Salon has published an extremely valuable article about the late W. Cleon Skousen, a conspiratorialist crackpot whose booksGlenn Beck obsessively touts (Beck has written a new foreword to Skousen's book The 5,000 Year Leap, which he helped made a #1 Amazon bestseller this summer). Skousen wrote about "the New World Order," the glories of slavery, and the ever-threatening Red Menace -- and his take on the latter is just what I've been telling you about:
Skousen ... reemerged at the end of the [1960s] peddling a new and improved conspiracy that merged left with right: the global capitalist mega-plot of the "dynastic rich." Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, Skousen now believed, used left forces -- from Ho Chi Minh to the American civil rights movement -- to serve their own power....
In "The Naked Communist," Skousen had argued that the communists wanted power for their own reasons. In "The Naked Capitalist," Skousen argued that those reasons were really the reasons of the dynastic rich, who used front groups to do their dirty work and hide their tracks. The purpose of liberal internationalist groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations, argued Skousen, was to push "U.S. foreign policy toward the establishment of a world-wide collectivist society." Skousen claimed the Anglo-American banking establishment had a long history of such activity going back to the Bolshevik Revolution. He substantiated this claim by citing the work of a former Czarist army officer named Arsene de Goulevitch. Among Goulevitch's own sources is Boris Brasol, a pro-Nazi Russian emigre who provided Henry Ford with the first English translation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion."
Yikes.
Think it's just Beck who falls for this crap? Note that Mark Williams, the tea party leader who appeared on Anderson Cooper's CNN show Monday night to defend the movement, said this:
... this is nothing at all to do with health care, other than health care has become the metaphor for all the different socialist policies that are being rammed down our throats by this president, or that he's trying to ram down our throats.
It's about TARP. It's about taking money from the working stiffs and giving it to the big corporations. It's about the corporate takeover of Washington, D.C.
If Williams believes that the menace of Obamaism involves "socialist policies" and "the corporate takeover of Washington, D.C." simultaneously, then, somewhere in hell, Skousen is smiling.
A SPLENDID LITTLE RACE WAR
In response to Rush Limbaugh's take on the school-bus incident in Belleville, Illinois ("It's Obama's America, is it not? Obama's America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now"), Rod Dreher, writing from the right, says:
...if the Limbaughs of the world are going to be doing this kind of thing, and trying to blame, with no logical grounds whatsoever, a black president for black-on-white violence, and if they're going to do this in an increasingly hysterical atmosphere of protest against that black president, I don't want to talk about these things at all. Now is not the time. With this kind of inflammatory rhetoric, they are quite simply tearing the country apart.
Where do they think this is going to go?
Where? Well, it certainly isn't going to go anyplace bad, is it, in Limbaugh's eyes? It could become a war -- so what? It's just like a foreign war -- what could go wrong?
I think Limbaugh's racism is deep-rooted, yet I also think this new racial rabble-rousing -- on Limbaugh's part and on the part of Beck and the rest of the Murdoch media and all the others -- is deeply cynical. Its primary near-term goal is winning back the House for the GOP by increasing the anti-Obama turnout among racist and racially suspicious members of the white population.
If starting a race war seems to Limbaugh et al. to be the most effective means to that end, well, they're going to have the same reaction that they had to the Bush administration's saber-rattling: War is like Hollywood war! In a Hollywood war, once the people deemed the good guys start fighting, only bad guys get hurt, until ass is kicked and glorious victory is achieved!
Among Limbaugh and his allies, I don't know which ones would take simple racist satisfaction from a brutal pogrom or even ethnic cleansing of America's non-whites and which ones hope only that the "bad" non-whites, the Van Joneses and the Barack Obamas, are brought low, violently or nonviolently. But hardly any of them ever saw war or even stateside violence firsthand; they can't even imagine that a race war would do harm in any way even to people they'd deem innocent.
Dreher writes:
On his deathbed not too many years ago, a relative of mine confessed to having been part of a white lynch mob in the 1930s, which strung up a black man after he was caught having sex with a white woman. She accused him of rape. The sheriff led the lynch mob. There was no need for a trial; what a black man did to a white woman was considered so horrifying that nobody could wait for a trial and a verdict. After the black man was murdered, the guilt-stricken white woman confessed that the man had been her lover, and she called him a rapist to protect her honor.
None of us ever knew this about my kinsman, until in his dying days, he admitted it because it tortured him. It had been on his heart all his life. I pray that his repentance in the face of eternity helped him find mercy. It unnerved me, though, to think that that kindly old man had once fallen under the sway of race hatred to that degree, a race hatred that was part of the society into which he was born and raised. It still does, because that world seems like a thousand years ago. But it only seems so far away because many people worked too hard -- and some even gave their lives -- to drive those demons out. And now here is Limbaugh, of Palm Beach, and his ilk, calling them back insouciantly, for political advantage. This is evil.
But Limbaugh and his ilk can't imagine that, because they were never on either side of a real race war, and they're constitutionally lacking in the empathy that would allow them to imagine what one would be like.
In this as in foreign adventurism, they're chickenhawks.
****
Sorry -- I should have held this post for a while to give aimai's latest post a bit of breathing room.
In response to Rush Limbaugh's take on the school-bus incident in Belleville, Illinois ("It's Obama's America, is it not? Obama's America, white kids getting beat up on school buses now"), Rod Dreher, writing from the right, says:
...if the Limbaughs of the world are going to be doing this kind of thing, and trying to blame, with no logical grounds whatsoever, a black president for black-on-white violence, and if they're going to do this in an increasingly hysterical atmosphere of protest against that black president, I don't want to talk about these things at all. Now is not the time. With this kind of inflammatory rhetoric, they are quite simply tearing the country apart.
Where do they think this is going to go?
Where? Well, it certainly isn't going to go anyplace bad, is it, in Limbaugh's eyes? It could become a war -- so what? It's just like a foreign war -- what could go wrong?
I think Limbaugh's racism is deep-rooted, yet I also think this new racial rabble-rousing -- on Limbaugh's part and on the part of Beck and the rest of the Murdoch media and all the others -- is deeply cynical. Its primary near-term goal is winning back the House for the GOP by increasing the anti-Obama turnout among racist and racially suspicious members of the white population.
If starting a race war seems to Limbaugh et al. to be the most effective means to that end, well, they're going to have the same reaction that they had to the Bush administration's saber-rattling: War is like Hollywood war! In a Hollywood war, once the people deemed the good guys start fighting, only bad guys get hurt, until ass is kicked and glorious victory is achieved!
Among Limbaugh and his allies, I don't know which ones would take simple racist satisfaction from a brutal pogrom or even ethnic cleansing of America's non-whites and which ones hope only that the "bad" non-whites, the Van Joneses and the Barack Obamas, are brought low, violently or nonviolently. But hardly any of them ever saw war or even stateside violence firsthand; they can't even imagine that a race war would do harm in any way even to people they'd deem innocent.
Dreher writes:
On his deathbed not too many years ago, a relative of mine confessed to having been part of a white lynch mob in the 1930s, which strung up a black man after he was caught having sex with a white woman. She accused him of rape. The sheriff led the lynch mob. There was no need for a trial; what a black man did to a white woman was considered so horrifying that nobody could wait for a trial and a verdict. After the black man was murdered, the guilt-stricken white woman confessed that the man had been her lover, and she called him a rapist to protect her honor.
None of us ever knew this about my kinsman, until in his dying days, he admitted it because it tortured him. It had been on his heart all his life. I pray that his repentance in the face of eternity helped him find mercy. It unnerved me, though, to think that that kindly old man had once fallen under the sway of race hatred to that degree, a race hatred that was part of the society into which he was born and raised. It still does, because that world seems like a thousand years ago. But it only seems so far away because many people worked too hard -- and some even gave their lives -- to drive those demons out. And now here is Limbaugh, of Palm Beach, and his ilk, calling them back insouciantly, for political advantage. This is evil.
But Limbaugh and his ilk can't imagine that, because they were never on either side of a real race war, and they're constitutionally lacking in the empathy that would allow them to imagine what one would be like.
In this as in foreign adventurism, they're chickenhawks.
****
Sorry -- I should have held this post for a while to give aimai's latest post a bit of breathing room.
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