Category Archives: conservatism

Our Cold Civil War

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In our country, the lie has become not just a moral category, but a pillar of the State.

– Alexander Solzehnitsyn

Earlier this month, when General Betray-Us was among us, Larisa Alexandrovna posted Our Cold Civil War at the Huffington Post. It caught my eye, and I filed it away for a better time to write about it. Lucky you, that time is now. Her thesis is two-fold:

  1. There are two wars going on, the one overseas, and the one domestically. The domestic war is between the oligarchs of this country versus We, The People. In her view, the domestic war far overshadows the overseas war in importance.
  2. Move-On’s General Betray-Us ad represents a major pushback in this domestic war – not because the ad was so great, but because roughly 3 million MoveOn members were able to pool their resources and have an effect – of getting Bush, the Senate, and others to rebuke it.

I don’t agree with everything she says – she doesn’t get why we’re still in Iraq (here’s a clue), but she expresses ideas both new to me and also ones I’ve long held but don’t often see in print. Examples:

…The attacks of September 11, 2001 were not the singular, all-transforming event that changed everything. Rather, it was the Supreme Court decision of 2000 that changed everything, a consequence of that single monumental failure to protect the Constitution…

The robber barons needed their figurehead, and so their allied fourth estate bosses fixed the propaganda around the myth, creating substance where there was none. The propaganda worked to create an image of a war veteran candidate Bush with a stellar educational background, an experienced and successful businessman, and an honest Texan raised on a farm. Those lies led to more lies and since then, we have essentially been held hostage by an ever expanding parade of liars.

—

The corporate interests of America are now almost entirely at one with the political interests of America. The people are either relegated to the outskirts as unimportant bystanders or are caught in the cross-fire as casualties of a hostile corporate takeover by American and even foreign corporations. We "the people" do not matter in a country where corporate profits are tied to state policy, which then uses those same corporations to tell us what is real and what is fabricated, what is true and what is false.

—

If a voice of dissent should manage to slip through the heavily corporatized and politicized public censors, as we saw happen in the case of Ambassador Joseph Wilson, a cadre of purchased truth tellers, reporters, and grassroots groups are ready in the wings to react swiftly, to silence and discredit back into the shadows not only the lone whistle-blower, but any other person considering coming forward.

This is not something that happens in a democracy. This type of political character assassination in which the assassins are so much of the mainstream does not happen in a democracy. It only happens in countries under the control of something other than the people, but not in a democracy.

In a nation where corporations control the government, the military, and every possible freedom that can be afforded to a people (voting rights, access to basic life sustaining resources, etc.), a thing such as "democracy" is merely another marketing strategy or product brand, worn like one might wear a tiny American flag on the lapel of a dinner jacket.

Such corporate control and merger with the government and military has been in modern times called fascism. In America, we call it "privatization," so that the jagged edges and unpleasant concepts of a nation where no choice is our own to make can be much more easily digested.

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In America we now have designated areas where people may protest, conveniently far away from news cameras and the people they are protesting – so out of sight…they have been rendered largely invisible. The right to congregate, as with other constitutionally protected rights, would have been almost entirely dismantled by this administration if not for the Internet. So armed with a new printing press, a global printing press at that, it would not be long before the public awoke from the lies that led to the Iraq war.

And even when those lies were finally exposed, and we – the public knew that we were all being lied to, we watched is stunned horror as the corporate owned/state sponsored "news" outlets attempted to convince us that we simply did not understand the reasons given for the war in the first place. It was WMD; no, it was the spreading of Democracy; no, it was something or other; but whatever it was, it was always "we the people" who were at fault. We simply did not get it, is what we were told. The entire administration set off on a tour of the US hoping to convince us that we simply did not get it. What they did not realize, however, is that we simply no longer bought it.

—

It has slowly become more and more obvious that we are fighting a domestic war, as yet unnamed, but is palpable to any of us who pay attention. Although it is important today as ever that we hold the Bush administration accountable for cooking intelligence that led us into a war of choice against a nation posing no threat to us, the most immediately important questions surround the reasons for why we continue to be held hostage to that war.

Understanding the nature of the domestic battle can only lead to a single conclusion. Whatever the myriad of lies that have led us into Iraq in the first place, we now only continue to remain in Iraq as a distraction from the real war at home and likely for the worst kind of political abuses.

Divide and Conquer:

Yet those villains [the oligarchy] would have us believe we are fighting each other, a nation divided by its own political and social views. The same corporate interests who are robbing us blind would have us believe that we are a deeply divided nation: pro-choice vs. anti-abortion, taxes vs. no taxes, God vs. godlessness, gays vs. heterosexuals, and on and on it goes, pitting us against one another on the basis of every conceivable human attribute, position, and whatever differentiates any one person from another.

Does it not seem odd that differences that have for so long existed and co-existed, even with some tension, would suddenly now be strong enough to split this nation apart over the policies of George W. Bush? I have yet to meet a sane and rational person, regardless of political affiliation, who believes anything positive about Bush, Cheney, and the rest of their administration. When I talk to everyday people in everyday context, they don’t bring up pro-choice vs. anti-abortion, nor do they bring up the mantra of gays taking over the country. No, everyday people I talk to are appalled, embarrassed, and frightened of this cabal.

Indeed, on the most important issues of our time and despite our many individual differences, the majority of us agree on the basics of what is currently wrong with this country and its leadership.

So why are we being constantly bombarded with the idea that we are a nation divided? And just who spending billions on propaganda to make us believe it?

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In our cold civil war, the enemy is not a part of the country called the "red states," as conveniently manufactured. Nor is the enemy a phantom right wing "wing-nut" or left wing "liberal loony," although there are some people who fall very much under those definitions. On the whole, however, there are simply not enough delusional and/or corrupt Americans to fill the manufactured stereotypes of the typical this or a typical that, even if the label is color-coded for political fear tactics.

The image of a divided nation at war with itself is a false one, as false as the reasons for this war and the general war on terror, which is more of a reign of terror than anything else. But who is it trying so hard to divide this nation and for what reason?

Perhaps the most obvious answer lies in that same question reworded thusly: Who benefits? Consider this question in yet another way: So long as we are standing face to face and not standing shoulder to shoulder, who is benefiting? The answer of course is the same corporations and their lackeys masquerading in the garb of government. They need to distract us, divide us, spend billions of dollars trying to convince us what we need, what we hate, what we love, who is evil, who is good and everything in between.

She eventually talks about how the MoveOn ad demonstrated 1) strength in numbers, and 2) who in the power structure is for us and who is against us, by their reaction to the ad. Read the whole piece.

I first became radicalized to her point of view, during the 2000 election cycle, back when I was a Green, marching in the streets of Los Angeles during the Democratic National Convention. I was reading Jack London’s The Iron Heel – which, combined with these events, connected the dots for me, and changed my view of American politics forever.

Naomi Wolf on “The End of America”

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Naomi Wolf presents the ideas in her book, The End of America, at the University of Washington. Video is a bit long, but the illuminating introduction explains what drove her to write it, and promises some hope by the end of her talk.

Wolf argues that the language, images, and manipulations that despots used in the past to break down democracies have a consistent pattern, and are being employed here and now. From Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 1930s, and to the present, she finds that all modern despots do the same things. Mussolini created the formula, Hitler followed it, and Stalin studied Hitler – this pattern gets passed down. Wolf summarized this blueprint in ten points:

  1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
  2. Create a gulag
  3. Develop a thug caste
  4. Set up an internal surveillance system
  5. Harass citizens’ groups
  6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
  7. Target key individuals
  8. Control the press
  9. Dissent equals treason
  10. Suspend the rule of law

In the video, Wolf argues that all of these factors are now underway in the USA. It’s a different take on the popular 14 points of fascism – without invoking the "f" word. Her phrase "shutting down a democracy", gets past the objections associated with "fascism". However, Wolf goes beyond a simple list of features and demonstrates both the predictive nature of her model, and the non-linear nature of change as a democracy weakens. She closes with:

…History shows it’s not enough to impeach criminals and murderers. You have to put them behind bars.

The Founders did not intend for us to delegate the defense of liberty to a professional class of pundits or politicians or constitutional scholars. The Founders intended for us to do it.

What the Founders intended was for ordinary Americans, ordinary people to assume the patriot’s task and lead the fight to restore democracy, and to see themselves as leaders.

Wild Things

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I didn’t watch the GOP debate last night, choosing instead to flip between CSI reruns and an Animal Planet show about a charmingly nutty couple and their pet hippopotamus. (Pet owners tip: Feeding your hippo too many sweet potatoes can give her diarrhea.) But judging by the Reason Magazine live blog, the GOP debate made damn fine comedy. A sample:

7:55: Sean Hannity bashes Hillary Clinton (“she’ll promise all of them a new car!”) and then asserts that Republicans “want a positive agenda.” His irony-fu is strong.

8:04: Rudy Giuliani: The real conservative, because George Will said so. As he did at the FRC conference, he mentions his war on porn in his list of conservative achievements. (An auspicious start: My server timed out and gobbled my first two debate comments.)

8:05: I suppose some people will care that Mitt Romney’s cowlick underwent structural damage right before the debate began. He’s conservative because he can bring the Republican *gutteral noise* HILLARY CLINTON HILLARY CLINTON grhgh.

8:07: Fred Thompson: Real leadership means making Ted Kennedy fat jokes. coughing and “I only got a minute here.”

Egalia of Tennessee Guerilla Women:

Wow. I’ve never seen anything like it. Eight raging hormonal white men savaging one Democratic woman.

Some Republicans might want to call this a presidential debate, I call it the eruption of a whole lot of anxious white male fear and loathing of a woman in line to take charge.

This was one rabidly he-man affair. And the seething Republican crowd was right there with them. …

… Fox News moderator Chris Wallace gave the cue for the men to beat their hairy he-man chests when he asked:

“Is she fit to be Commander-in-Chief?”

The Republican audience yelled “NO!”

The post by Paul Mirengoff of Power Tools is unintentionally hilarious; a work of brilliant if unconscious self-parody.

Thompson’s ability to slug it out with Giuliani, coupled with overall improvement in the quality of his answers, makes him one of tonight’s winners. The other major winner was John McCain. McCain brought the house down when he criticized Hillary Clinton for supporting the Woodstock memorial museum. McCain acknowledged that Woodstock must have been “a cultural and pharmaceutical event,” but noted that he couldn’t make it because he “was tied up at the time.” McCain got off another great line when asked if President Bush had been naive when it came to Vladimir Putin. McCain said he didn’t know about that, but when he (McCain) looked into Putin’s eyes (he probably meant to say soul) he saw three letters, K-G-B. In addition to the one-liners, McCain gave sensible and concise answers on a range of issues.

“Sensible and concise answers” in Rightie World means talking in complete sentences for a minute and a half while looking somber. The actual content of the talk is irrelevant. Righties only care about the red meat. More one liners! More Hillary bashing!

Despite failing to shoot down Thompson, Giuliani had another good night. Several times, he successfully tied his answers to quotes from or references to Ronald Reagan. When he’s doing that (instead of rehearsing his New York city crime fighting record), it’s a sure sign that he’s successfully defending himself on the merits as a conservative.

If you can speak reverently of Saint Ronald, you must be a real conservative.

Romney was solid, as he generally is, but didn’t say anything memorable. In response to a softball question about whether Hillary Clinton would make a good commander-in-chief, Romney talked about how he’s better than she is at running things. He thus fluffed an opportunity to attack Hillary on matters of substance.

Matters of substance, like the Woodstock memorial museum. “Better than she is at running things” sounds boring.

Near the end of the debate, he finally launched into an attack on the Clinton administration’s “vacation from history” foreign policy (“we got the dividend but not the peace”). Attacks like that are guaranteed winners in these kinds of debates, and Romney needs to make them at every opportunity.

Less boring policy wonk talk! More jokes! More chest thumping!

When they weren’t bashing Hillary Clinton to show how manly they are, the candidates squabbled over which of them was most conservative. And that takes me to a fascinating opinion piece by Michael Tomasky on the Guardian web site.

Let me offer what I think is the most important undercurrent question of next year’s election: have Americans tired of conservatism, or have they merely tired of corrupt and incompetent conservatism?

Tomasky points out that “movement conservatism” has been around since the 1950s, but not until the Bush Administration did movement conservatives have complete control of the federal government. Reagan had a Democratic Congress, and when the Republicans took over the Congress in the 1990s they had to deal with a Democratic president. Divided government moderated what the Right could achieve and provided righties with someone to blame for whatever went wrong.

Then came Bush. At first things were motoring along nicely, and Bush guru Karl Rove’s prediction that a permanent conservative majority was coalescing seemed probable. Now it has all crashed and burned for the reasons we know about. But we still don’t know what exactly is that “it”.

That is, Americans have now experienced a conservative government failing them. But what lesson will they take? That conservatism itself is exhausted and without answers to the problems that confront American and the world today? Or will they conclude that the problem hasn’t been conservatism per se, just Bush, and that a conservatism that is competent and comparatively honest will suit them just fine?

Conservatives and the Republican presidential candidates hope and argue that it’s the latter. They largely endorse and in some cases vow to expand on the Bush administration’s policies – Mitt Romney’s infamous promise to “double” the size of the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, notably. Like Bush, they vow that tax cuts, deregulation and smaller government will solve every domestic problem. Where they try to distinguish themselves from Bush is on competence. Romney talks up his corporate success, Rudy Giuliani his prowess as mayor of New York.

“Movement” conservatives have been talking up the magic powers of tax cuts and smaller government since the 1950s (before that, conservatives weren’t a “movement”). I think by now most Americans have noticed that there is no magic. There’s just talk. Bill Clinton may have been a womanizing, big-spending liberal (not really all that big spending or that liberal, of course), but by damn, the man could run a government. And Tomasky points to a fact righties want to forget: “Reagan left office with a lower approval rating than Bill Clinton did.” The “golden age” wasn’t all that golden.

In some ways liberalism/progressivism is in the same place today that conservatism was in the 1950s and 1960s. IMO the last Democratic president who pushed an unabashedly progressive domestic policy was Lyndon Johnson. Although LBJ was hugely unpopular and became the post-FDR template for big-government, tax-and-spend liberalism, I contend that much of the backlash to Johnson’s programs was less about political and economic ideology than it was about racism. In any event, a growing number of adult Americans are too young to remember what even a mildly progressive federal government was like, which makes progressivism the new new thing.

I don’t think Americans are really that averse to government programs if they can see they are getting some value from them. What they don’t like, is waste. Which brings us back to our current rule by movement conservatives — those people waste money like there’s no tomorrow. How can these whackjobs seriously think they can scare voters with the charge that Democrats will spend their tax dollars? Republicans have been burning tax dollars by the truckload on pork and an unpopular war, and there’s none left over for anything Americans want their tax dollars going to. Waste, waste, waste. I get a sense that voters are damn sick of it, especially after Katrina.

The other point of contention is taxes. A generation of Americans have been born and grown into adulthood listening to rightie propaganda that taxes must always go down. “Starve the beast,” you know. The problem is that “the beast” conservatives are starving is our country. Do read this editorial in today’s New York Times:

This country’s meager tax take puts its economic prospects at risk and leaves the government ill equipped to face the challenges from globalization.

According to a report from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, a think tank run by the industrialized countries, the taxes collected last year by federal, state and local governments in the United States amounted to 28.2 percent of gross domestic product. That rate was one of the lowest among wealthy countries — about five percentage points of G.D.P. lower than Canada’s, and more than eight points lower than New Zealand’s. And Danes, Germans and Slovaks paid more in taxes, as a share of their economies.

Politicians on the right have continuously paraded the specter of statism to rally voters’ support for tax cuts, mainly for the rich. But the meager tax take leaves the United States ill prepared to compete. From universal health insurance to decent unemployment insurance, other rich nations provide their citizens benefits that the United States government simply cannot afford.

The consequences include some 47 million Americans without health insurance and companies like General Motors being dragged to the brink by the cost of providing workers and pensioners with medical care.

President Bush and his tax-averse friends extol the fact that the tax haul has risen over the past two years as evidence of the wisdom of his tax cuts. But if anything, the numbers underscore the economy’s weaknesses — mainly its growing inequality.

Indeed, the growth in tax revenue since 2004 is due mostly to the spectacular increase in corporate profits, which have grown at the expense of workers’ wages. Moreover, it’s proving ephemeral. As economic growth has decelerated, corporate profits are losing steam and the growth of tax revenue has begun to slow. This pretty much guarantees that the revenue will prove too low to face the challenges ahead.

I think a majority of the American people are ready to listen to an argument for progressivism. The only question I have is whether Democrats have the guts to make that argument, and if elected, will deliver a genuinely progressive government instead of a grab bag of Clintonian mini-ideas. And because of Republican mismangement we’re likely to be heading into some lean years, no matter how competent the government, and you know the rightie noise machine will blame Democrats for the mess movement conservatism made. They won’t go away anytime soon.

Meanwhile, I look forward to the next GOP debate. I hear the candidates will wear gorilla suits and burn Hillary in effigy. Could be better than Animal Planet.

Update: Hillary bites the heads off puppies?

Update 2: See also Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger.

Faux Outrage

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Regarding all the weeping and wailing from the Right over recent comments by Rep. Pete Stark, I agree with Digby that their outrage seems a tad calculated.

Are these macho tough guys really offended that some congressman made these comments in a debate? Are their feelings hurt on behalf of the president? Does CNN really believe that’s what’s going on? Does anyone think that what Pete Stark said on the floor yesterday truly upset the Republicans? Of course not. These are the same people who spent month after month calling president Clinton a rapist and worse, for crying out loud. They are not shrinking violets who believe that there are limits to acceptable rhetoric about the president. They don’t believe there are limits to any rhetoric.

Everyone knows exactly why the Republicans sent out “statement after statement” about this obscure congressman’s words yesterday — distraction. Does anyone point that out? No. In fact, the damned Democrats go right along with this nonsense and “hold meetings” and leak to the press about how they agree with the Republicans agreeing that Stark caused the distraction, and basically showing themselves to be a bunch of pathetic fumblers falling for this nonsense over and over again.

For the record, here’s what Congressman Stark said:

“I’m just amazed that the Republicans are worried that we can’t pay for insuring an additional 10 million children. They sure don’t care about finding $200 billion to fight the illegal War in Iraq.

“Where are you going to get that money? You’re going to tell us lies like you’re telling us today? Is that how you’re going to fund the war? You don’t have money to fund the war or children.

“But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement.

“This bill would provide health care for 10 million children and unlike the President’s own kids, these children can’t see a doctor or receive necessary care.

“Six million are insured through the Children’s Health Insurance Program and they’ll do better in school and in life.

“In California, the President’s veto will cause the legislature to draw up emergency regulations to cut some 800,000 children off the rolls in California and create a waiting list. I hope my California Republican colleagues will understand that if they don’t vote to override this veto, they are destroying health care for many of our children in California.

“In his previous job as an actor, our Governor used to play make believe and blow things up. Well, the President and Republicans in Congress are playing make believe today with children’s lives.

“They claim we can’t afford health care and say the bill will socialize Medicine. Tell that to Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley, and Ted Stevens, those socialists on the other side of this Capitol! The truth is that the Children’s Health Insurance Program enables states to cover children primarily through private health care plans.

“President Bush’s statements about children’s health shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than his lies about the War in Iraq. The truth is that that Bush just likes to blow things up – in Iraq, in the United States, and in Congress.

“I urge my colleagues to vote to override his veto. America’s children need and deserve health care despite the President’s desire to deny it to them.”

Here’s the video:

[Update: From the “lies and the lying liars who tell them” department — rightie blog Gateway Pundit accuses Crooks and Liars of misquoting Stark. But Gateway Pundit lies. C&L quoted Stark accurately. What Gateway Pundit quotes as the “accurate” statement is a different part of the same statement. Gateway Pundit also called Stark’s statement “anti-military,” and I believe that is a lie; I don’t see anything anti-military about it.]

Is that really so outrageous? Maybe the line about “kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement” was hyperbole, if only because Bush might have noticed that soldiers are getting tougher to replace. But the rest of it seems fairly mild. I know I could have come up with something a lot harsher.

The double standard about what one can say about a President has been going on for a long time. I was a teenager during the LBJ years, and I doubt any president ever got slammed harder than Johnson did. And that was by the press, the public, and other politicians across the board. I can’t say he didn’t deserve it. Maybe I missed it, but I don’t remember that anyone complained much that a president ought to be treated with more decorum, if only out of respect for the office.

But that changed during the Nixon years. Television reports of criticism of Nixon frequently were “balanced” by expressions of outrage that anyone would say such things about a President of the United States. No end of sweet-faced matrons, tears in their eyes and quivers on their lips, expressed shock that anyone would talk about a President so. Burly men with VFW caps pounded tables and thundered, they’re saying these things about the President, as if public criticism of a President were somehow beyond the pale of civilized conduct. Never mind that most of “these things” turned out to be true, and never mind that Johnson was treated, IMO, much worse than Nixon was, at least by the standards of Nixon’s first term. The Watergate scandal did let the dogs loose, so to speak.

President Ford was ridiculed frequently, and my impression is that the Right didn’t exactly have his back. True righties didn’t care for Ford, possibly because they truly despised his Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller. President Carter also was ridiculed mercilessly through his presidency.

But after Saint Ronald was elected, suddenly conservatives became very protective of the dignity of the office. And the White House press corps of the Reagan Administration was a muzzled and castrated thing compared to that of the Johnson years. Something had changed.

And as soon as Bill Clinton was elected, it was open season on Presidents again.

There’s no doubt in my mind that this shifting of of standards is being orchestrated from the top of the rightie power pyramid. But I don’t think rank-and-file righties are capable of seeing the double standard as a double standard. In their minds, the only legitimate presidents are the conservative ones, and the rest are interlopers, never mind that they were elected.

But that takes us to another question, and let’s keep it hypothetical. Let’s say frank, harsh criticism of a head of state is unacceptable and cause for public censure, unless the head of state is a tyrant. We tend to think that people who stand up to a tyrant are being courageous and heroic. Where is the line drawn? A remark that seems unfair to the head of state’s supporters might seem perfectly fair to lots of other people. At what point does the needle flip from “not OK” to “OK”?

I say it’s not always clear, particularly in the case of an up-and-coming tyrant who hasn’t yet gained full dictatorial powers. Early in their political careers even the great tyrants of history — Mao, Hitler, Stalin — didn’t seem that bad to everyone.

My questions:

Are people supposed to keep their mouths shut until after freedom of speech has been lost?

If people are intimidated by societal pressure from speaking frankly about a moderate, democratic leader, how will they find the courage to speak out when the real tyrant shows up?

Every president is slammed by some part of the public, including members of Congress who are, after all, representing the people. I don’t agree that Congress critters have to hold their tongues out of some sense of beltway propriety. They’re supposed to be speaking for us. If our representatives can’t speak frankly, who will?

If the criticism is genuinely off the wall, it’s fair to criticize it back. If someone makes false accusations about a President, by all means speak up loudly and set the record straight. Let the court of public opinion judge the matter. But let’s stop playing games about what commentary is appropriate or disrespectful of the office. I say that if a citizen, politician or otherwise, is thinking something, he shouldn’t be afraid to say it.

Gore Derangement Syndrome

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I think you’ll enjoy Paul Krugman’s column today — “Gore Derangement Syndrome.” I don’t entirely agree with this part of it, however.

What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.

Maybe sorta kinda. The true believers never saw a stain of illegitimacy, of course. Righties don’t think much of elections, except as a kind of ritual; a motion that has to be gone through (one way or another) so that a government can call itself “democratic.” Righties never believed Bill Clinton was the “legitimate” president, even though he won two elections decisively. They spent eight years trying to take him down and nullify those elections, any way they could. And when the American people continued to support Clinton, William Bennett was all over media pushing his book The Death of Outrage and complaining the American people had lost their sense of morality.

In other words, to a rightie “legitimacy” is not something conferred by the expressed will of We, the People. It is conferred by decisions made behind closed doors in right-wing think tanks and disseminated to the true believers through right-wing media. And they’d been smearing and vilifying Gore for years before the 2000 elections.

And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening.

They won’t admit he’s right, of course. Their lips would fall off first. But yes, they are threatened. They want to look at the world and see their vision perfectly reflected back at them, as in a mirror. When the world reflects back something else, they can’t stand it. They’re like the evil stepmother in Snow White when the Magic Mirror told her someone else was more beautiful than she was.

This is why the Right wants to destroy Al Gore — they are jealous. All admiration and adulation belongs to them.

Today, being a good Republican means believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised. It also means believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with them.

So if science says that we have a big problem that can’t be solved with tax cuts or bombs — well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor’s Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of — who else? — George Soros.

Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He’s taken everything they could throw at him, and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them crazy.

Krugman himself has been the target of rightie search-and-destroy missions. Andrew Leonard writes at Salon, in a review of Krugman’s new book The Consciences of a Liberal:

For those who go the extra step of publicly making their living inveighing against conservative triumphalism, the reward has been ridicule and scorn. In “The Conscience of a Liberal,” Krugman recounts how after the 2004 election, some colleagues told him that it was time to ease up on his constant hectoring of George W. Bush. “The election settled some things.” …

…If they can bring themselves to skim through its pages, conservatives, naturally, will not find much to like in “The Conscience of a Liberal.” Perhaps one of the best things you can say about it is that Krugman will drive them mad with rage (kind of like Al Gore winning a Nobel Peace Prize).

See also Kevin Drum, Robert Parry, Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast, Skippy, the Carpetbagger, and Matt at Think Progress.

Malkingate

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The latest news from La Lulu is that she has refused to debate Ezra Klein. Ezra was mean to her, see. Her “refusal” amounts to one long self-pitying temper tantrum.

M’love, the first rule of blogging is, if you can’t take it, don’t dish it out.

I second Mustang Bobby:

Not a big surprise, and I don’t think Ezra is surprised that not only did she turn him down, she used the opportunity to launch another full-scale attack on him and anyone he’s met, talked to, or sat next to in an airport departure lounge. And frankly, I think that while Ezra may have made the debate offer in good faith, he knew what the response would be. But it was nice of him to at least make the offer and to prove once again that the right wing is not interested in discussion or discourse; they just want to make a lot of noise and obscure the fact that they can’t make their case.

Tbogg provides an ode:

Brave Ms. Malkin ran away.
Bravely ran away, away!
When debate reared its ugly head,
She bravely turned her tail and fled.
Yes, brave Ms. Malkin turned about
And gallantly she chickened out.
Bravely taking to her feet
She beat a very brave retreat,
Bravest of the brave, Ms. Malkin!

Lots of people are linking to an old Malkin post in which she complains how hard it was for her and her husband to find an affordable private health insurance policy. They settled for a high-deductible plan. Today she says,

Grown-ups, on the other hand, will be able to grasp effortlessly that if I had decided not to buy private insurance and then demanded that the government cover my medical expenses and insure me after a catastrophic accident, then, yes, why, yes, you could flap two HYPOCRISY! cards up and down in each hand until your feet lifted off the ground.

What they haven’t yet realized is that if they face a medical disaster similar to what the Frost family went through, their insurer will drop them like a hot calabasa unless state regulations say otherwise.

See this discussion on health care that was on CNN last June. The young lady representing the Right kept going on about how she didn’t have health insurance because she was self-employed and wanted some kind of tax credit so she could afford it. She already can deduct every penny she spends on health insurance from her taxes, but that’s not good enough. Further, since she’s young and healthy she thinks it doesn’t make sense for her to purchase health insurance when she sees a doctor maybe once or twice a year.

See also “We Are All Uninsured Now.” The fact is that the increasing numbers of Americans without health insurance is creating big honking social problems that affect all of us, directly or indirectly. It can’t just be dismissed as somebody else’s “bad choice” that’s “not my problem.”

A perspective from the grown ups (you have to be 50 years old to join) at the AARP:

Digby:

Mark Steyn patiently explained once again today that parents of four children earning 45,000 dollars a year should just work harder and sell their house to pay for health insurance:

    Mr Frost works “intermittently”. The unemployment rate in the Baltimore metropolitan area is four-percent. Perhaps he chooses to work “intermittently,” just as he chooses to send his children to private school, and chooses to live in a 3,000-square-foot home. That’s what free-born citizens in democratic societies do: choose. Sometimes those choices work out, and sometimes they don’t. And, when they don’t and catastrophe ensues, it’s appropriate that the state should provide a safety net. But it should be a safety net of last resort, and it’s far from clear that it is in this case.

Setting aside the total dishonesty of that — surely Steyn has been informed by now that the Frost kids go to private school on scholarship and the house was bought for 55,000 in 1990 — what has become crystal clear in this debate is one that I think needs to be discussed. The Republicans believe that people should be completely destitute, living in a one room shack and working two jobs before they “deserve” subsidized health insurance. The middle class who are one car accident or one cancer diagnosis away from losing their jobs, being unable to afford either the cadillac COBRA plans from their employers (my last one here in California was $1700.00 a month and I’m healthy) must not be allowed to keep ANY assets.They must be, as Steyn’s pal wrote, “dying on the streets with sores on their bodies” before they qualify for aid.

But, of course, neither will they necessarily even be able to buy private health insurance at any price even if they do live in a one room apartment with their four kids and work two jobs. (I was turned down recently because I had had gum surgery in 1996.)

See also Sadly, No, TRex, and Morte.

Update: See also Time magazine, “The Swift-Boating of Graeme Frost.” The only problem with this article is that it attributes the reprehensible behavior to “bloggers,” not “right-wing whackjob bloggers.”

Update2: Hale “Bonddad” Stewart:

Under the Malkin theory, either poor people shouldn’t have children because insurance is too expensive, or the poor should go into debt to pay for insurance which under the new bankruptcy laws is tantamount to indentured servitude.

Read the rest of Hale’s post for a grand argument for single-payer health care.

Update 3: John Roberts on CNN this morning repeated the rightie claim that the Democrats are to blame for the assault on the Frosts.

John Cole (emphasis added):

I can understand why people would get frustrated if the Democrats put up a little boy who stated “Please don’t kill this bill or I will suffer.” It would be demagoguery and shameless and it would be hiding behind a kid.

But that isn’t what happened here. What happened here is that the Democrats chose someone who had been helped by the program, and they stood up and told people that it had helped them and an expansion might help others. …

… It wasn’t hiding behind a kid, it was the picture of advocacy by citizens who had been helped by a government program (Given the governance of the past few years, I will admit that it is entirely conceivable that a certain subset of those screeching are unaware that government programs are allowed to help people. Not all of them are designed to whisk people away to secret CIA facilities or read your email and listen to your phonecalls.).

It is, also, not the first time something like this has been done. By now you have heard of Noah McCullough, the nine year old who traveled with Bush to advocate on behalf of social security. Or the snowflake babies, on stage with Bush when he vetoed the stem-cell bill. My memory is not perfect, but I do not remember similar campaigns to viciously attack these kids and their families.

Aside from the disgusting nature of the attacks on the Frost family, this is one of the things that has many of us aghast. To what end are these Freepers and Malkinites and Corner readers attacking these people, as even if the Bush veto of the expansion holds, they are going to still qualify for the program? The inability to recognize this, and the instinctive need to just attack, attack, attack and smear, smear, smear is what has surprised me the most. This is not a policy dispute to these folks- this is tribalism, and something deeper and darker and more sinister. It was a mob whipped into a frenzy, a blind rage, and there was no point to it other than the rage itself.

Scum on Toast

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The right-wing hate campaign against Graeme Frost has finally seeped into mainstream media. Here’s Richard Wolf in USA Today:

Bloggers showed a photo of the couple’s glass-front cabinets and 1992 wedding announcement in The New York Times. Democrats “filled this kid’s head with lies,” Rush Limbaugh said on his radio show.

The blogs were “pretty insulting stuff, and really just low,” Halsey Frost, Graeme’s father, said Tuesday.

Bloggers said the house was worth more than $400,000. It turns out it was bought for $55,000 in 1991 in a Baltimore neighborhood where “there were drug dealers and prostitutes on our street,” Bonnie Frost said. Halsey Frost, a woodworker, did most of the renovations, which are “still not done,” Bonnie said.

Bloggers said Graeme and Gemma go to private Park School, where tuition costs about $20,000. Graeme gets a scholarship, while Gemma’s brain injuries were so severe that the city pays to educate her at a school for children with disabilities, the couple say.

The commercial property, which bloggers noted was bought for $160,000 in 1999, was intended to house Frostworks, Halsey’s business. It folded soon after, he said — partly because of the cost of health insurance.

He has worked for small companies and is trying to restart his own business. She works part time for a consulting firm. The couple — who have four children in all —earned about $45,000 last year, well below the $55,220 limit for a family of six set under the original SCHIP program. Maryland’s program goes higher, to nearly $83,000 for a family of six. “We are struggling,” Bonnie Frost said. “We live paycheck to paycheck. “

Yesterday I was struck by the number of rightie bloggers who demanded that the Frosts abandon their notions of independent business ownership — scuttled in part by the costs of health insurance — and report for work at the nearest big corporation, assuming there are any hiring at the moment. So much for the American pioneer spirit. We’re all supposed to be wage slaves to Big Corporate Massa now, and “market based” health “insurance” is the chain binding us to our servitude.

Even right-wing blogger A.J. Strata, no S-CHIP supporter, understands that his brother and sister righties have fallen off the sanity wagon.

[The Frosts] are self sufficient entrepreneurs who try to give their kids the best. They supposedly paid their taxes, which in my mind gave them the right to access those government programs. They have 6 wonderful children and they have stayed together as a family. As one leftwing site noted yesterday they are really a poster family for the GOP. And that is what should have been leveraged instead of the low-brow attack mode some have lazily come to rely on for political discourse. …

… The Frosts had an emergency and we, their neighbors, were going to subsidize them one way or the other. Either through taxes or premiums we were going to help out. So to say they are free-loading on the rest of us through their decisions in mindless bunk.

The Baltimore Sun has a photo of Mr. and Mrs. Frost sitting on the stoop of their lavish “$400,000” home — an estimate quoted by one rightie blogger after another as gospel — and which the New York Times says is actually worth $260,000. In some parts of the country $260,000 can still buy a pretty nice place, of course. In Manhattan it might get you a new, generously sized corrugated cardboard box in a prime location under an overpass.

Anyway, the Baltimore Sun article, by Matthew Hay Brown, talks about the accident that injured the children.

Bonnie Frost was driving children Zeke, Graeme and Gemma in Baltimore County in December 2004 when the family SUV hit a patch of black ice and slammed into a tree. Graeme sustained a brain stem injury; Gemma suffered a cranial fracture.

The family relied on SCHIP during the more than five months that the children were hospitalized. Graeme had to learn again to walk and talk, his parents say; he remains weak on his left side and speaks with a lisp. Gemma is blind in her left eye; she has difficulty with memory, learning and speech, and sees a behavioral psychologist to help her deal with her frustration.

“Her personality has changed,” Bonnie Frost said yesterday. “She’s not the same girl.”

Then Graeme recorded the Dems’ radio address —

It was the news coverage of that broadcast that set off the blogo- sphere. A pseudonymous contributor to Free Republic cataloged the $20,000 cost of tuition at the Park School, the $160,000 Halsey Frost paid for his warehouse in 1999 and the $485,000 for which a neighbor sold his home in March. Links were provided to photos of the Park School’s 44,000-square- foot Wyman Arts Center and the Frosts’ 1992 wedding announcement in The New York Times.

Soon strangers were posting accusatory messages describing Halsey Frost as a business owner who lived on a street of half-million-dollar homes, worked out of his own commercial property and paid to send his children to private school, yet still took advantage of government-funded health care.

“Bad things happen to good people, and they cause financial problems and tough choices,” Mark Steyn wrote on the National Review Online. “But, if this is the face of the ‘needy’ in America, then no-one is not needy.”

The Redstate contributor was less civil.

“Hang ’em. Publically,” the contributor wrote. “Let ’em twist in the wind and be eaten by ravens. Then maybe the bunch of socialist patsies will think twice.”

David Herszenhorn writes for the New York Times:

The critics accused Graeme’s father, Halsey, a self-employed woodworker, of choosing not to provide insurance for his family of six, even though he owned his own business. They pointed out that Graeme attends an expensive private school. And they asserted that the family’s home had undergone extensive remodeling, and that its market value could exceed $400,000.

One critic, in an e-mail message to Graeme’s mother, Bonnie, warned: “Lie down with dogs, and expect to get fleas.” As it turns out, the Frosts say, Graeme attends the private school on scholarship. The business that the critics said Mr. Frost owned was dissolved in 1999. The family’s home, in the modest Butchers Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, was bought for $55,000 in 1990 and is now worth about $260,000, according to public records. And, for the record, the Frosts say, their kitchen counters are concrete.

Certainly the Frosts are not destitute. They also own a commercial property, valued at about $160,000, that provides rental income. Mr. Frost works intermittently in woodworking and as a welder, while Mrs. Frost has a part-time job at a firm that provides services to publishers of medical journals. Her job does not provide health coverage.

Under the Maryland child health program, a family of six must earn less than $55,220 a year for children to qualify. The program does not require applicants to list their assets, which do not affect eligibility.

In a telephone interview, the Frosts said they had recently been rejected by three private insurance companies because of pre-existing medical conditions. “We stood up in the first place because S-chip really helped our family and we wanted to help other families,” Mrs. Frost said.

“We work hard, we’re honest, we pay our taxes,” Mr. Frost said, adding, “There are hard-working families that really need affordable health insurance.”

Michelle Malkin has taken a lead role in the attacks on the Frost family, and she’s not backing down. Today she’s blogging about “Democrat poster-child abuse, the nutroots’ pushback, and the continued campaign to silence the Right.”

Silence the Right — ooo, that’s rich. Here’s a woman with several national megaphones, including frequent gigs on Fox News, who has been leading a high tech lynch mob against some ordinary citizens who had the guts to speak up, and she’s screaming because she thinks someone is trying to silence her.

Actually, I don’t want to silence her. I want everyone in the nation to know about this little episode so they will realize what Michelle Malkin really is — scum. A hateful, bigoted, foaming-at-the-mouth neo-fascist.

People used to say, “pick on somebody your own size.” Malkin can hurl insults at politicians or other prominent media personalities all she likes, but when she tries to destroy an ordinary family just because they had the nerve to say something she doesn’t like, that’s something else entirely.

If you can stand it, take a look at Malkin’s post and note that throughout she has “corrected” means-tested to asset-tested. Apparently Malkin had said the Maryland S-CHIP program does not have means-tested eligibility requirements, when in fact it does. So now she’s howling about asset testing, which I assume means that because the Frost’s have some home equity they shouldn’t be eligible for S-CHIP.

I don’t know what mortgage load the Frost’s are carrying, but we can guess they have about $200,000 in equity in their home. So, in order to qualify for aid, Michelle wants them to sell their home and everything else they can liquify, move into a cardboard box, and then apply for aid once the $200,000 is gone, which these days would take about six months. We’ll destroy any chance they had of clinging to middle-class status, make sure they are permanently destitute, and then help them. OK.

Does anyone on the Right ever, you know, think?

The idea behind “safety-net” type programs is supposed to be to help people enough so that they don’t slide into destitution, but get back on their own feet. But in Rightie America, people who have had a run of misfortune must be utterly crushed.

Shamanic writes for Newshoggers:

Basically, she doesn’t approve of the choices that this family has made. Doesn’t approve of their jobs. Doesn’t approve of their home. Doesn’t approve of what the schools where they send their children. So she strongly, vehemently believes that the state of Maryland should have forced them to sell their home, burn through the profits and any savings they may have on medical bills, and then, once they were really poor, I guess we could talk about whether, as Michelle repeatedly states, “Taxpayers of lesser means should…be forced to subsidize them.” (Sorry, her statement is a more of a commandment, that taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize them.)

Voters also have choices. We can let people like Michelle Malkin run interference for a party that wants to punish us and take away everything we’ve worked for if, God forbid, something terrible happens, or we can vote for a different kind of society, where a safety net exists to ensure that a family in need doesn’t lose its home when a car accident lands two children in the hospital. Go and read her piece. Ponder the philosophy behind her words, one where everyone is truly on your own regardless of circumstances, and ask yourself if that’s the country that you want.

I know I’ve been going on about Malkin and the Frosts quite a lot lately, but IMO this episode gets right to the heart of what kind of nation we want to be, and what kind of nation we are becoming.

Do we want to live in a nation in which ordinary citizens must live in fear of saying the “wrong” thing? Of drawing the attention of powerful people who will publicly crucify them?

Do we want to live in a nation in which most of us are one accident or illness away from losing our homes and everything we’ve ever worked for?

(Canadians, are you paying attention to this? You’d better get started building your border fence now.)

Update: Ezra challenges Malkin to a debate.

The Loony Brigade

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There are some more good posts on the mob hysteria over Graeme Frost. Kevin Drum writes,

As near as I can tell, the right-wing blogosphere has spent the past three years fantasizing obsessively about uncovering a new Rathergate. It was their great triumph (Blog of the Year from Time magazine!), and now it seems like hardly a month goes by without the hysterical discovery of yet another faked photo, planted note, or lying liberal. Almost without fail, though, they turn out to be…..wrong. Embarrassingly, completely, unquestionably, flat-on-their-faces wrong.

But they don’t give up. The latest example is 12-year-old Graeme Frost, whose great sin was to tape a radio address supporting expansion of the SCHIP children’s health program. Unsurprisingly, the latest crackpot loony brigade is headed up by the chief crackpot, Michelle Malkin, who has distinguished herself by staking out Graeme’s house and grilling his father’s friends. Other members of the brigade have dug up property records, scoured wedding announcements, checked out school websites, and when trash day comes will probably be rooting through their garbage barrels.

And the point of all this? To “prove” that the Frosts are secret zillionaires who don’t deserve government help with their medical bills. In this, the loon brigade is, as usual, embarrassingly, completely, unquestionably, flat-on-their-faces wrong. I’ll give you one guess about whether that’s going to stop them.

Bill Scher:

These are the same conservatives that insist that they love tax cuts, not because they are cold and selfish, but because it will unleash the entrepreneurial spirit that makes us Americans.

Well, Mr. Frost is an entrepreneur and small business owner.

And the tax cuts for the wealthy did not provide him with the financial security to afford health insurance for himself and his family. Nor did it do anything to reduce the cost of health insurance.

But the family has been able to get by, despite suffering unexpected medical expenses, in part because we have collectively pooled our resources to provide health insurance for millions of kids.

Without SCHIP, the Frosts’ entrepreneurial spirit may well have been crushed, literally and figuratively.

This does not concern conservatives.

All of a sudden, their patriotic love of entrepreneurship in pursuit of the American Dream has vanished.

Instead, conservatives are fine with making it a choice between being an entrepreneur and having health insurance for one’s family.

And John Cole writes,

I simply can not believe this is what the Republican party has become. I just can’t. It just makes me sick to think all those years of supporting this party, and this is what it has become. Even if you don’t like the S-Chip expansion, it is hard to deny what Republicans are- a bunch of bitter, nasty, petty, snarling, sneering, vicious thugs, peering through people’s windows so they can make fun of their misfortune.

I’m registering Independent tomorrow.

See also Dave Neiwert.