Learned Helplessness

In his column today, Bob Herbert writes,

When exactly was it that the U.S. became a can’t-do society? It wasn’t at the very beginning when 13 ragamuffin colonies went to war against the world’s mightiest empire. It wasn’t during World War II when Japan and Nazi Germany had to be fought simultaneously. It wasn’t in the postwar period that gave us the Marshall Plan and a robust G.I. Bill and the interstate highway system and the space program and the civil rights movement and the women’s movement and the greatest society the world had ever known.

When was it?

Now we can’t even lift New Orleans off its knees.

Welcome to the 28th year since the Reagan Revolution.

I don’t blame Reagan entirely for our state of learned helplessness, mind you. And Bob Herbert wasn’t writing exclusively about government. But by persuading people that “government is the problem” I think the Reaganites caused a shift in how Americans understood government. And this put the nation on the road to learned helplessness.

Even as late as the 1960s, most working- and middle-class white Americans (I realize African Americans had a different experience of things) felt that the government was theirs. Certainly people complained that Washington did plenty of boneheaded things, but still there was a belief that We, the People could accomplish great things by means of government. This may in part have been a legacy of FDR, who had a gift for evoking a “we’re all in this together” sentiment among America’s ordinary citizens.

But today, people treat and speak of “the government” as if Washington DC were occupied by space aliens taking orders from Mars, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Government can’t, or won’t, respond to the needs and concerns of ordinary Americans, and ordinary Americans no longer expect anything from government.

Thanks loads, Ronnie.

I’ve given this speech before, but I still think it’s critical that ordinary citizens be reconnected to the idea that government is “of the people, by the people, for the people.” It’s ours. It’s us. There’s nothing wrong with using government to solve problems that are not being solved by other means.

There’s a lot government cannot do. But, dammit, there’s a lot it can do, if people have the will and the leadership to see it done.

On a sorta kinda related note … yesterday David Brooks wrote one of his most bone-headed columns ever. I wanted to respond to it yesterday but was busy fighting off Shugden culties.

In “The Coming Activist Age,” Brooks said “periods of great governmental change have often been periods of conservative rule.” Really? Change? Conservative rule? Um, Coolidge? Hoover? Nope, can’t be. But lo, Brooks’s main example was Theodore Roosevelt.

You might disagree with TR’s ideas about foreign policy, but in the context of his times TR’s domestic policies made him one of the purest progressives who ever sat in the Oval Office. And after he left the White House he went further Left. His “New Nationalism” speech is the foundation of modern American liberalism.

Apparently John McCain is going around saying he wants to be the new Theodore Roosevelt. A Times letter writer responded,

Is John McCain aware that Theodore Roosevelt was not a conservative? On virtually every domestic issue — race relations, the environment, the role of government in the economy — T.R. was what today would be labeled a robust liberal, and the leading conservatives of his day, like Mark Hanna, hated and feared him.

There’s nothing of TR in McCain, I say.

One more interesting read — Sasha Abramsky, “Putting ignorance on a pedestal.

Elitism for Dummies

President Bush’s unintentionally hilarious/embarrassing/revealing/pathetic remark to Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo about the White House chef once again stirred up the “elitism” issue for me.

Were it not for the affected Texas accent, ol’ George would seem a character right out of some dry satire about a clueless and inbred European nobility. In some ways he’s the spoiled, undisciplined boy in school blazer and knickers who disrupts his mother’s crystal-and-china garden parties. Yet in other ways I sense his whole life is driven by brooding resentments and an urge to settle scores.

I’ve also long been curious about the Texas accent, since he appears to be the only member of his family who has one. One wonders if the accent and the rest of the folksy persona developed before or after Little Georgie was shipped back East to the Phillips Academy.

One definition of “elitism” is “The belief that certain persons or members of certain classes or groups deserve favored treatment by virtue of their perceived superiority, as in intellect, social status, or financial resources.” By that definition, Little Georgie is elitist to the core. He’s so entitled he can’t see his own limitations, and so thoroughly elitist he may not see his elitism as elitism, as he’s been protected from other ways to view the world.

You probably know that one of the Right’s favorite Fantasy Narratives is of the mysterious “liberal elite” that secretly runs everything and which countless right-wing politicians have won elections running against, even though it doesn’t exist. Oh, there are certainly groups of elitist liberals, but they haven’t had enough influence to impact a bag of marshmallows for years.

Anyway, awhile back I was reading some op ed by some blue-blooded, Ivy League-educated right-wing pundit in the Wall Street Journal, and out of the blue this guy slams somebody else for being an elitist. Too rich; I’m sorry I didn’t bookmark it. But this is what I mean by unconscious elitism.

Right-wing elitists in particular just love to think of themselves as Men (or Women, as it were) of the People, particularly the People of the Homeland, because these People share their Values and are easily snookered can be flattered into voting for Republican candidates who present themselves as People Just Like Them, and who in turn can be counted on to protect the privileges and prerogatives of the right-wing elitists who don’t see themselves as elitists.

John McCain’s recent mangling of Barack Obama’s famous “bitter” remark is also illustrative:

“We’re going to go to the small towns in Pennsylvania and I’m gonna to tell them I don’t agree with Senator Obama that they cling to their religion and the Constitution because they’re bitter,” said McCain, who might have been referring to the Second Amendment right to bear arms. “I’m gonna tell them they have faith and they have trust and support the Constitution of the United States because they have optimism and hope… That’s what America’s all about.”

A lot of people jumped on the malapropism about the Constitution, but I say look at the next part also — he’s going to small towns in Pennsylvania and (emphasis added) “I am going to tell them that they have faith and they have trust and support the Constitution of the United States because they have optimism and hope and that is the strength of America.” These are people he’s never in his life lived among, but he’s going to tell them what they think? Does anyone beside me think that’s weird?

Shortly after Obama was slammed for the bitter remark I wrote a post called “Elitism for Elites” that most of the people in media screeching about “elitism” were, in fact, elites who had never in their lives enjoyed the true small-town white experience. Yet they stepped all over themselves rushing to a microphone to speak for small-town white folks everywhere.

And then Bill Kristol said,

He’s [Obama] disdainful of small-town America — one might say, of bourgeois America.

Either Kristol doesn’t know what bourgeois means, or else someone ought to take Kristol on a cultural tour of small-town white America.

Karl Rove’s recent attempt to paint Barack Obama as some kind of country club snot was just lame, IMO. But after years of being Mr. Insider does Karl not notice that he’s, um, an elite?

Right wingers assume they have a copyright on religion, whether they personally are religious or not, and on all matters military, whether they personally have served or not. They also assume they cannot be elites, no matter how powerful and privileged they are. Sort of out of touch with themselves, I would say.

Memory Lapse

William Kristol complains that MoveOn.org’s “Alex” ad is a slap in the face to soldiers.

The MoveOn ad is unapologetic in its selfishness, and barely disguised in its disdain for those who have chosen to serve — and its contempt for those parents who might be proud of sons and daughters who are serving. The ad boldly embraces a vision of a selfish and infantilized America, suggesting that military service and sacrifice are unnecessary and deplorable relics of the past.

And the sole responsibility of others.

Can someone remind me when Kristol served in the military? I’m drawing a blank (she said, snarkily).

Just a few days ago, Kristol explained to Faux Nooz audiences that if Barack Obama becomes a clear favorite in the presidential race, President Bush would be forced to go ahead and bomb Iran. Otherwise, the job could wait for President McBush.

I think that if Kristol is so fired-up eager to attack Iran, we should give him a helmet and rifle and a plane ticket to Tehran. Go for it, dude. Let us know how it turns out.

Kristol conflates a reluctance to fight in Iraq with a reluctance to defend America. This is the same claim righties made during the Vietnam years — that those opposed to the war were opposed to defending America. But of course, “fighting in Vietnam” and “defending America” were two entirely different things.

As I’ve said before, we Boomers were raised to be idealistic and naive. The first wave of Boomers were children during the hyper-patriotic post World War II era, remember. We were taught to revere the flag and John Wayne. Boys in particular spent their childhood re-fighting Iwo Jima in surburban back yards. Had there been a genuine threat to America, and a genuine need to go to war, I believe my brother Boomers would have responded at least as well as our fathers did.

Instead, for many muddied and ignoble reasons, our idealism was betrayed with Vietnam, a war I’m sure Kristol supported enthusiastically as an undergraduate at Harvard even as he managed to avoid fighting in it.

So who’s being selfish and infantile, Bill?

Young people today seem a lot more grounded than we were back then. They are much less naive, at least. I can’t speak to the idealism issue; that’s hard to measure. But this may be the first generation since those of 1776 and 1860 that will be called on to re-evaluate the entire issue of nation, and why we have one. Good luck with that.

Update: See Mustang Bobby.

Who Needs Satire When You’ve Got Wingnuts?

You may have seen this elsewhere, but it’s too rich — I want to pile on, too. Yes, below is the famous Faux Nooz clip in which Little Lulu discusses “substantive” charges against Michelle Obama while the scroll calls her “Obama’s Baby Mama.”

Of course, today Malkin defends the use of the phrase “Obama’s Baby Mama,” showing us once again she’s got all the integrity of the post-iceberg Titanic.

See also Oliver Willis and Kyle Moore.

Update:
Be sure to read Liza.

Update 2: See also The Poor Man.

Return of the Killer Doughnuts

Little Lulu’s latest cause — the Obama-Che iconcography connection. Here’s how it goes —

  • Che Guevara was a radical Marxist guerrilla leader.
  • Alberto Korda’s iconic photograph of Guevara may be the most reproduced image in the world.
  • L.A. artist Shepard Fairey used the Korda photograph as a model for a poster of Barack Obama.
  • Therefore, Barack Obama must be a radical Marxist guerrilla leader.
  • I would add,

  • Michelle Malkin is nuttier than a peanut farm.
  • Correction: I see that Malkin didn’t write this post; it was her alter ego, See-Dubya.

    Blinking Over Burma

    As posted on the other blog, there are numerous reports today saying the military dictator of Burma has agreed to allow foreign aid workers into cyclone-devastated areas. Don’t believe it until it happens, however.

    The Wall Street Journal has an article today on the underground network of relief in Burma run mostly by monks. It’s a subscriber-only article, but if you can find the article through Google News you can read the whole thing. Some Buddhist organizations and private individuals have been able to get money and supplies directly to monks, bypassing the junta. Meanwhile, food and other supplies from the big aid organizations are showing up for sale in Yangon markets. Apparently soldiers are confiscating the supplies and selling them.

    There’s a news story circulating on right-wing blogs about the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) supplying condoms to Burma in response to the cyclone. At least, it looks like a news story. It seems to have originated on an anti-abortion site called LifeSiteNews. However, this same anti-abortion site claims

    UNFPA’s response to the deadly earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, that affected some 5.7 million people, was to “provide reproductive health supplies” as well as to ensure that pregnant women “receive proper emergency obstetric services (that is, abortion) when necessary,” according to the UNFPA website (http://www.unfpa.org/news/news.cfm?ID=1132)

    If you actually go to the URL provided, you find —

    Accepting the Fund’s offer of assistance, the Chinese Government has asked UNFPA to provide reproductive health supplies, including clean delivery kits for primary health centres and hospital equipment needed for Caesarean deliveries and blood transfusions. UNFPA assistance also includes hygiene kits for displaced individuals and funding to address immediate shelter needs.

    Chinese authorities estimate that the earthquake has affected some 5.7 million people, and that many may stay in temporary camps for up to one year. In such situations, the risks normally associated with childbirth are often heightened for displaced women.

    Can we say that the folks who run LifeSiteNews are a pack of sick, twisted, lying bastards? I believe so.

    I searched the UNFPA web site and did not find anything about sending condoms to Burma in response to the cyclone, which of course is not absolute proof they aren’t sending condoms in response to the cyclone. UNFPA does have an ongoing program of supplying condoms to Burma, however, mostly for the purpose of slowing the spread of HIV infection. This has been going on for a few years and has nothing to do with the cyclone.

    At Lulu’s place, SeeDubya writes,

    If any one story sums up what the U.N. has become, this is it. It’s at once so clueless and out-of-touch to be darkly comical (Hey, you know these people rebuilding their lives amid the bloated corpses and amoebic dysentery and famine really need? Some condoms!) while at the same time being sinister and malevolent, and redolent of Margaret Sanger’s eugenics movement. Somewhere poor brown people are multiplying, UNFPA notes with alarm, and primly resolve to help them stop.

    They’re a very C.S. Lewis sort of villain, thoroughly dangerous and yet still laughable, especially because of the deadly seriousness with which they take themselves. If you’ve read The Screwtape Letters or especially That Hideous Strength, you’ll know what I mean. What is the United Nations but the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments writ large?

    SeeDubya may not be lying, as I suspect he believes the condom story is true. But “sick” and “twisted” still apply.

    The Racist Vote

    There’s much chattering among the blogs today about Kevin Merida’s Washington Post story about racism and the Obama campaign. In particular, young volunteers working “on the ground” are encountering unvarnished, full-frontal racism for the first time. For example,

    Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: “It wasn’t pretty.” She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn’t possibly vote for Obama and concluded: “Hang that darky from a tree!” …

    … On Election Day in Kokomo, a group of black high school students were holding up Obama signs along U.S. 31, a major thoroughfare. As drivers cruised by, a number of them rolled down their windows and yelled out a common racial slur for African Americans, according to Obama campaign staffers.

    Of course, the rightie bloggers deny that reactions such as this to the Obama campaign have anything to do with racism. Nor does a T-shirt portraying Obama as a monkey with a banana have anything to do with racism, according to this guy.

    When a story hits this many outlets simultaneously it’s pretty clear that there is a coordinated effort to establish a new “meme.” This meme: if you’re white and vote against Obama, you’re an ignorant racist.

    This will be a common theme right through the election in November: racism may cost Barack, the post-racial candidate, the election (white racism that is, blacks voting over 90% for Obama isn’t “racism.” It’s payback, just like the verdicts in the Reginald Denny case were payback).

    This is what decades of affirmative action and racial victimhood politics have done to American society.

    Perhaps the above is what decades of brain-cell-destroying chemicals in drinking water have done to American society.

    Most of the anecdotes in the story take place in Indiana and Pennsylvania, where the famous white working-class voters gave their votes to Hillary Clinton. Publius writes,

    … let’s face it — race is playing a big role not just there, but throughout the Midwestern white working classes.

    That’s not saying all white working-class Americans feel this way, or even that most do. But a lot do — and everyone knows it. And that’s a big reason why Clinton is up by such obscene margins in West Virginia and Kentucky. We should stop pretending otherwise.

    There are legitimate reasons one might prefer Clinton to Obama as a presidential candidate. However, when we see consistently that white, older, less-educated voters tend to prefer Clinton, it’s, um, naive to assume that all those folks made their decisions based on those legitimate reasons.

    Coming from a white, small-town, working-class background myself, I suspect many of those Clinton voters are profoundly ignorant people with limited experience of the world outside their (often racially homogeneous) communities. And if you’ve spent much time with die-hard white racists, you might notice they are not so much sinister as they are profoundly unremarkable. Without race, they’d have little self-identity at all.

    And although racism trumps sexism with this group, better-educated Clinton supporters shouldn’t kid themselves that those older, white, working-class Clinton voters won’t prefer McCain in November. Time and time again, these are the same voters easily manipulated into voting for whatever knuckle-dragging troglodyte the GOP is selling. Of course, it’s not “CC” (conservatively correct) to say this out loud.

    Kyle Moore writes,

    I’ve bitten my tongue. I’ve tried not to essentially point out what I have personally viewed as the “racist vote.” I’ve refrained from looking at the split in West Virginia, and while I’ve whispered it here and there, I’ve held back at saying, “OF COURSE HE’S GOING TO LOSE THERE! THOSE PEOPLE ARE RACIST AS FUCK!”

    And why? Because the campaign hasn’t done that, and because I’m afraid of, what? Pissing off white people? Making them feel guilty? Stirring up racial tensions that I know to exist?

    Because I still want them to vote the Democratic ticket in the fall?

    Don’t cause too much of a ruckus. Folks are going to be racist, but it’s not the American thing to do to call them out on it. The folks who wave the Nazi flag, they’re okay to call out, but heaven forbid you should discuss the racial tensions the Bars and Stars evoke.

    And all of a sudden it seemed silly. We’re looking at how Obama can’t win the white vote in the Appalachians and the Rust Belt and the SOUTH of all places, and we’re pretending it has something to do with him being elitist because we’re all too afraid to insult white folks by claiming maybe some of them, maybe just an eensy teensy bit of them might be just a little itty bitty bit racist.

    On the positive side, I understand younger votes in these same areas are more likely than not to support Obama. But if Obama wins the nomination and then the election, it might signal to politicians going forward that you don’t have to pander, wink and nod at the racist vote to win elections. And wouldn’t that be grand?

    On the other hand, Gary Kamiya writes,

    McCain isn’t running against just any Democrat but against a black liberal named Barack Hussein Obama. Obama’s name may be the most potent weapon in the GOP’s armory. If you want to believe that America is a governable country of informed citizens and not a nation of ignorant, Fox News-watching sheep, the single most depressing fact to come out of the Bush years is that vast numbers of Americans continue to believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. According to a 2003 Washington Post poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans believed that. And in a poll taken last September, 33 percent of Americans still believed it — presumably the same 30-odd percent of Americans who will vote for a Republican even if he is running on a platform of sacrificing all the nation’s firstborn children to Beelzebub.

    Call it the Dumbshit Factor, the Nobody Home Problem, the Absentee Ballots from Mars Issue. Whatever you call it, it’s the Republicans’ built-in advantage this fall. If you’re not in the “reality-based community” infamously derided by a senior Bush official, then you won’t care if Iraq is a quagmire and the Middle East is a powder keg and the country is falling apart and the economy is on the verge of a depression and gas is $4.30 a gallon. You won’t care because you won’t know, or if you know you’ll blame it all on liberals, feminazis, evil bureaucrats and gays. As you watch Fox News from your Barcalounger orbiting somewhere beyond the confines of space, time and logic, you will vote for the old white guy with the Anglo-Saxon name, not a Muslim terrorist sympathizer who helped his cousin attack America.

    Kamiya also says,

    The issue is whether America is still the scared, reactionary, sclerotic, profoundly creaky nation that it has been for the last eight years, or whether it’s ready to shrug off the Bush era and begin anew.

    That is the question, isn’t it? Are we going to continue to be led by the lowest-common-denominator candidates? Will ignorance and bigotry continue to be treated as virtues? Can we shake off the demagoguery of the dumb and apply something resembling intelligence to our national policy decisions?

    Regulation and the Right

    We all know righties are against government regulation. Well, except when they aren’t.

    Background: Brody Mullins and Kris Maher of the Wall Street Journal today claim that Barack Obama won the support of the Teamster’s Union by privately pledging to end government oversight of the Union. Both the Teamsters and the Obama campaign deny there was a quid pro quo. The Obama campaign says Obama was on record in favor of ending the government oversight of the Teamsters back in 2004.

    The Teamsters point out that Senator Clinton also had told them she was opposed to the oversight:

    The union also noted that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, suggested that she might also support ending the union’s consent decree with the federal government when she spoke to the Teamsters’ general executive board last year.

    “You can’t go around dragging the ball and the chain of the past,” Mrs. Clinton said on that occasion — the March 27, 2007, meeting of the board — according to an audio tape that the union made available. “And I think that’s true for anybody, any organization, any individual,” she continued. “And so I would be very open to looking at that, and to saying, ‘What are we trying to accomplish here?’ and see what the answers were. At some point, you turn the page and go on.”

    Of course, the Clinton campaign now says Senator Clinton didn’t mean she was actually going to do anything about government oversight, and the Clintonistas have taken up right-wing talking points about the alleged Teamster quid pro quo to slam Obama.

    BTW, I believe the oversight under discussion is a consent decree made between the Justice Department and the Teamsters back in 1989 that allows the feds to supervise the Union and Union elections. The Teamsters signed the decree to settle a civil racketeering lawsuit that federal prosecutors had brought against the Union, charging it with being controlled by mobsters.

    We’re getting to the punch line — rightie blogger response to the Wall Street Journal story goes along the line of how dare anyone even think about not regulating unions! Here’s an example, from Townhall:

    Today’s Wall Street Journal implies that Barack Obama may have offered the Teamsters a quid pro quo in order to win the endorsement. Making matters worse, his “deal” involves looking the other way on the issue of corruption. … Making back-room deals with the Teamsters — now that’s a “new brand of politics”!

    In other words, reducing government supervision of the Teamsters is tantamount to “looking the other way on the issue of corruption.” The Teamsters were corrupt in the past; therefore, they will always be corrupt. They are corrupt by definition.

    Funny Big Corporations and financial institutions are not held to the same standard, huh? Even as the nation’s economy is reeling from the mortgage crisis, the Right is hollering about unfair regulation of financial markets. Paul Krugman writes,

    But while our out-of-control financial system has been bad for the country, it has been very good for wheeler-dealers, who collect huge fees when things seem to be going well, then get to walk away unscathed — indeed, often with large severance packages — when things go wrong. They don’t want regulations that would stabilize the economy but cramp their style.

    And now that the financial clouds have lifted a bit, the pushback against sensible regulation is in full swing. Even the Fed’s very modest proposal to curb abusive mortgage lending with new standards is under fire, and there are worrying signs that the Fed may back down.

    Here’s another little anomaly. Everybody knows righties are in favor of liberty and personal freedom, right? Well, except when they aren’t.

    Art Brodsky writes in Huffington Post that the Right is fighting net neutrality:

    Just in time for the House Telecommunications Subcommittee’s hearing tomorrow (May 6) on Net Neutrality legislation, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) and the American Spectator are out with new attacks on the simple idea that people should not have their Internet experiences subject to the whims of telephone and cable companies. …

    … The April 28 [American Spectator] blog post, cleverly headlined, “Public Know Nothings,” — a play on Public Knowledge — read like a basic corporate hit job on Net Neutrality of the kind one might read at any number of blogs or by any columnists in the thrall of the corporate world. But the story, combined with Armey’s April 22 Washington Times headlined “Spare The Net,” raise the inevitable question — what is it about individual freedom that “conservatives” like the Spectator and Armey don’t like?

    To be fair, the debate is larger than the Spectator and Armey. Most congressional Republicans oppose the idea of giving consumers freedom on the Internet. They take shelter in their anti-government, anti-regulation rhetoric, preferring to allow Internet freedom to apply to the corporations which own the networks connecting the Internet to consumers, rather than to consumers themselves.

    Brodsky goes on to explain how the Right’s point of view is burdened by a “tragic misunderstanding of how telecommunications policy, markets and technology worked in the past and how they work today.” Know nothings, indeed. (For the record, I believe you probably can find some right-wing bloggers who do have a clue that if Net Neutrality goes, their blogging privileges might go with it.)

    Elitism for Elites

    It always amuses me when upper-class people with power and privilege start screeching about “elitism.” Today all manner of political, media and blogging elites — people with advanced degrees who’ve never been to a tractor pull in their lives — are snorting about elitism because Barack Obama said something that anyone with a real redneck background knows to be true — working-class, small-town whites feel left behind, bitter and frustrated.

    This remark allegedly is an insult to working-class, small-town whites in Pennsylvania. I have a different perspective. Granted, my background is southern Missouri small-town working-class white, rather than Pennsylvania small-town working-class white, and there are subtle cultural distinctions between the two. While I may have kinfolk in half the trailer parks in the Ozarks, I admit that doesn’t qualify me to speak for Pennsylvanians. But over the past forty or so years small-town, working-class white America has been living through the shared experience of diminishing opportunity combined with increasing financial instability.

    In community after community, the old factory or mining jobs that sustained the local economy are gone. Forty years ago, young folks left high school, signed on to jobs that paid Union-obtained wages and benefits, and looked forward to all the trappings of American middle-class affluence — homes, new cars, trips to Disney World. Now the bright young people move away to cities, and those who remain in the small towns sustain themselves — barely — by flipping hamburgers or cashiering at Wal-Mart.

    The only ones who aren’t bitter and frustrated are those too young or too dim to realize life was much better a couple of generations ago.

    I concur with many of Obama’s critics that the place of guns and religion in American culture is older, deeper, and much more complex than Obama’s remarks reflected. But don’t tell me small-town, working-class white folks in America aren’t xenophobic. They are, deeply, and they have been going back generations. That’s just a plain fact. Believe me, you don’t know the half of it until you’ve lived among them.

    What’s rich about the current flap is that the biggest reason small-town, working-class whites have tended to vote “conservative” in recent decades is that the Right has stoked that bitterness, frustration and xenophobia, election after election, and turned it on the Left. As Joe Bageant pointed out in his pretty-brilliant book Deer Hunting With Jesus, small-town, working-class whites learn everything they know about the outside world from highly paid media elites like the perpetually angry and xenophobic Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. Fear and anger are the bread and butter of right-wing politics; it keeps the rubes compliant.

    Limbaugh, btw, may be from southeast Missouri, but his family had tons of money. True Redneckland would have been a place Limbaugh visited growing up, but he never had to live there.

    And today you’ve got people like John “Power Tool” Hinderaker (highly paid lawyer; graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Law) discussing Obama’s “bigoted opinion, common among urban liberals, of people who live in ‘small towns.” I don’t know why Hinderaker put quotes about “small towns”; maybe he thinks there are no such things.

    Quoting Oliver Willis:

    Apparently Fox, Drudge, and Politico are just tired of a slow news week and are looking for something – anything – to whip up a frenzy over, and of course the go-to people for quotes on this are the elite of elite cons like Grover Norquist and Karl Rove. I mean, when is the last time those guys had a conversation with someone making less than six figures– besides the help?

    I’ve long believed you aren’t a real American until you find yourself in some rural Kentucky roadhouse at 1 a.m. singing “Rocky Top” with the rest of the drunks. I dare say this is an experience not many of Obama’s critics have had. I admit that I’m far enough removed from my own roots that I no longer remember the words to “Rocky Top” beyond most of the first verse and the refrain, but I used to could sing it all the way through. I suspect, however, that the small-town, working-class world I grew up in would be utterly alien to the likes of Hinderaker.

    From a working-class perspective, the three presidential candidates represent different slices of the elitist pie. You’ve got Senator Hillary Clinton, who grew up in an affluent suburb of Chicago and graduated from Yale law school; Senator John McCain, son of a four-star admiral and U.S. Naval Academy graduate; and Barack Obama, the biracial graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law.

    American politicians going back to Andrew Jackson have emphasized the more common aspects of their biographies to appeal to voters. Failing that, one might get away with affecting folksiness as George W. Bush does. But politicians need to be careful when they presume to speak for the folks.

    “It’s being reported that my opponent said that the people of Pennsylvania who faced hard times are bitter; well, that’s not my experience,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience at Drexel University.

    Does anyone besides me find that hysterically funny? Of course it’s not been her experience. The only time she speaks to small-town, working-class commoners is when they’re lined up to shake her hand at a photo cop. She’s never been one of them. Obama has never been one of them, either, but he’s not pretending to be. Senator Clinton may think she’s found a talking point that will help her keep the lead in Pennsylvania, but she might want to be careful about portraying those small-town, working-class folks as being happy and optimistic.

    Oliver Willis makes another good point:

    It’s intriguing that Dems are never supposed to voice any criticism of rural America (which isn’t what Sen. Obama did) but Republicans are allowed to insult San Francisco, Massachusetts, the coasts, etc. It’s like there’s a double standard or something.

    It’s all part of the Right’s elitist program of selling snake-oil to the rubes.

    Update: See also Ezra Klein and Marc Ambinder.

    Update 2: See also Steve Benen, John Aravosis and John Cole.

    Why Wingnuts Are Idiots, II

    Because, you know, whenever one “lib” says Khalid Sheikh Mohammed should be set free, then (wingnuts figure) all “libs” must want Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to be set free.

    Idiots.

    Hawkins has a couple more brain cells than many of the rest of his tribe, which is frightening. One wonders how they manage to dress themselves.

    The real issue in the years to come is not what’s to be done with KSM. At this point he’s probably not capable of doing much but huddle in corners, hugging his knees and talking to his imaginary friends.

    No, the real issue is going to be separating fact from fiction. After four years of detention and torture, KSM confessed to personally decapitating Daniel Pearl. I understand he confessed also to masterminding the September 11th attacks, the Richard Reid shoe bombing attempt, the Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and various other foiled attacks.

    And maybe he did those things, or maybe he just said he did to stop the torture. We’ll probably never know, because cases grow colder as time marches on. And we’ll probably never be able to put KSM on trial.

    Speaking as an eyewitness to the destruction of the World Trade Center, I would like to say that it is more important to me to find out who really was responsible than it was to pick a scapegoat that fits the Bush Administration’s propaganda du jour and torture him into confessing. KSM was a dangerous guy and (note this, Hawkins) I don’t advocate releasing him, but neither do I accept on faith anything the Bush Administration says.

    ABC News reported yesterday that “enhanced” interrogation techniques were not just approved in the White House; they were choreographed in the White House.

    Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

    The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

    The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

    At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

    And anyone who doesn’t think Condi was keeping the President fully briefed on these meetings gets to sit in the corner wearing the dunce cap.

    Rightie genius macsmind writes,

    There is nothing inherently wrong with the President of the United States and his key advisors having such discussions on what to do with the tiny little fact the article misses that these were TERRORISTS that wanted to kill AMERICANS.

    And we know that because the Bushies said so! Brilliant!

    The phrase “war crimes” is being tossed about. I am skeptical the Gang of Six Plus One will ever be indicted in this country. However, their foreign travel opportunities may be severely limited in future.

    Well, I’m sure the government of China can show them a good time. They have so much in common.