Category Archives: conservatism

Pelosi Wears Scarf; Righties Bark at Moon

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[Update: This post is being linked to in a forum in which some rightie claims it is only us lefties making a Big Bleeping Deal out of the scarf. The fact is, much of the rightie blogosphere went into hysterics about Nancy Pelosi’s scarf. Think Progress has a selection of links.]

Of all the dumb things to get worked up into a snit about, this one is almost as dumb as Ann Althouse’s boob post.

The jolly folks at Little Green Footballs have gone batshit bleeping crazy because Nancy Pelosi wore a headscarf to visit a mosque in Syria. “Pelosi in a hijab!” they shriek.

Hello? Some of us are old enough to remember when women were required to cover their hair in Catholic churches. Here’s the divine Jackie with that first guy she married outside a church sometime in the late 1950s.

Apparently scarves are still a requirement at the Vatican.

[Update] Speaking of Laura Bush, here’s a lovely photograph of her visiting the Muslim holy shrine the Dome of the Rock in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, May 22, 2005.

I’d also like to note that American women very commonly wore headscarves tied under their chins like that all through the 1950s and into the 1960s. I remember wearing them myself; one wrapped one’s head when going outside to protect one’s bouffant hairdo from wind and weather. Apparently the only woman on the planet who still does that is Queen Elizabeth II, as portrayed below by Helen Mirren in The Queen (which is a lovely little flm, btw).

Nowadays it looks frumpy as hell, but Audrey Hepburn could carry it off.

I can’t say that Muslim women never wear a tied-under-the-chin scarf, but from what I see in photographs an actual hijab is usually wrapped rather than tied.

I’m certain I’ve seen photographs of Karen Hughes and Condi Rice with scarves wrapped around their heads hijab-style while visiting the Middle East, but I couldn’t find one to post here. If anyone else can, please leave the URL in the comments.

Update: Check out the exclusive Pelosi in ’07 tee shirt!

Update2: Thank you and a big smooch to maha reader johnnyrocket, who found this photo of Condi Rice in “hijab.”

Update3: Now LGF is whining that we lefties are being mean to them. The point was not about the scarf, they say, but that Pelosi was in Syria.

First, read this post and tell me the point isn’t about the scarf.

Second, three Republican congressmen were in Damascus last week.

We’re Not Angry, Dammit

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One of the more maddening conceits of the Right is that righties are temperate and reasonable while lefties are a quivering mass of inchoate rage. George Will, master of smug obliviousness, today writes that “Americans” are “infatuated with anger,” but somehow in Will World that anger is mostly on the Left.

There are the tantrums — sometimes both theatrical and perfunctory — of talking heads on television or commentators writing in vitriol (Paul Krugman’s incessant contempt, Ann Coulter’s equally constant loathing). There is road rage (and parking lot rage when the Whole Foods Market parking lot is congested with expressive individualists driving Volvos and Priuses). The blogosphere often is, as one blogger joyfully says, “an electronic primal scream.” And everywhere there is the histrionic fury of ordinary people venting in everyday conversations.

Krugman the equivalent of Coulter? Please. And I like the touch about road rage among Volvo owners in the Whole Foods parking lot. I did a news google for “road rage”; one of the first incidents that came up involved two Arizona guys driving pickup trucks.

Will continues,

Perhaps this should not be surprising, now that Americans are inclined to elect presidents who advertise their emotions — “I feel your pain.” As the late Mary McGrory wrote, Bill Clinton “is a child of his age; he believes more in the thrust-out lower lip than the stiff upper one.”

It never occurred to me before that empathy is a form of anger.

In his column Will quotes an anthropologist named Peter Wood. Wood, who also writes for such bipartisan publications as National Review and FrontPage, is the author of the recently published A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now. Here’s a review by Glenn C. Altschuler in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Unfortunately, Wood’s partisan preoccupations mar his ability to understand the origins, nature, and significance of the New Anger. His right-wing prism imprisons. He does not follow the evidence wherever it takes him. And so, A Bee in the Mouth deserves to be derided as a cri de Coors that Scaife-goats the 1960s and Bush-whacks ideological adversaries.

Wood insists that the “New Anger tends more to the political left than the political right.” He believes that once-angry conservative white males have turned their attention “to Home Depot and bass fishing.” For Americans now, “the primary image of anger” is Howard Dean, Al Gore, or a millionaire rapper. And the “leftist anger group” MoveOn.org. But not Tom DeLay, Pat Robertson or the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Those who believe that anger is caused by secularists, proponents of identity politics, and taboos against the politically incorrect “offer genuine insights.” Wood seems rather unconcerned about angry racists, homophobes, violent opponents of abortion, and civil-liberties-suppressing “super-patriots.”

In popular culture, Wood deems Bob Dylan’s protest songs “a kind of memo” to angri-culture, dividing the world into “weak good guys and powerful creeps.” But country music’s anger at a cultural elite that “proclaims its open-mindedness while simultaneously expressing contempt for traditional values” is “warranted.” Wood acknowledges, grudgingly, that right-wing anger dominates talk radio. But he focuses on Howard Stern and Don Imus, who are not conservatives, proclaims Rush Limbaugh a master of “comic tone and timing” who is not himself angry, and says nothing at all about Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly and Neal Boortz.

I’d dismiss Wood as a partisan hack, but I fear that would make me sound angry.

Update: See also Gary Boyd of North Carolina Mountain Dreams. (The photo makes me homesick, btw.)

Update update: Speaking of righties being angry …

Five Stages

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You’ve no doubt heard of the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance). I’ve come to realize something like that goes on among righties whenever a new Republican scandal washes ashore. I propose that the five stages of reaction to a scandal are:

1. Ignoring
2. Belittling
3. Blaming the Media
4. Evoking Bill Clinton.
5. Boredom

That last stage allows the sufferer to return to stage 1 and ignore the issue. Also note that righties don’t necessarily go through these stages in order or even one stage at a time.

This is a working hypothesis; I might choose to revise the list in the future. Let me know what you think.

Anyway, I’ve been surfing about looking at reaction to the U.S. attorney scandal to find examples. Here we are:

Macsmind is at Stage 2, Belittling:

Business as usual folks, nothing to see here. Fact is that they weren’t doing their job (note this was suspected democrat voter fraud – like that never happens) – so (for those slow of mind) that means bye, bye.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News is even deeper into Stage 2, if that’s possible:

So basically, this whole non-scandal scandal is over one guy who was dragging in feet in investigating voter fraud. Yet, the White House is taking it on the chin.

In our current model, “belittling” is just a nudge away from “ignoring.” The bloggers are noting that something happened, but they mentally edit out parts of the story; such as, the lack of evidence of Republican allegations of voter fraud and the fact that some of the purged attorneys were pressured to bring indictments against Democrats before the midterm elections.

For example, see this March 7 story about former U.S. attorney John McKay of Washington State, who was pressured by a congressman about voter fraud allegations in the election of Governor Chris Gregoire, and also accused by the White House of “mishandling” an investigation into the alleged fraud.

Asked if his failure to convene a grand jury in the election probe was the reason he was denied a judgeship, McKay said he did not know.

But he said he was confident he and his staff had handled the case properly, adding that there was no evidence of voter fraud despite widespread complaints by Republicans in Washington state and the nation’s capital.

“Frankly, it didn’t matter to me what people thought,” McKay told a House Judiciary subcommittee. “There was no evidence of voter fraud.”

No evidence? A mere technicality. The Dems must be guilty because, well, they’re Dems.

Sister Toljah and the Flopping Ace seem to be at Stages 2 and 3 at the same time. This is the Ace:

They were not doing their job. Their appointments were stripped.

But the left and our MSM want to bombard us with the appearance of evil.

Now, one could argue that “blaming the media” and “belittling” are pretty close to the same thing, and maybe I should roll them into one stage. But sometimes “blaming the media” can be so much more. Remember Jamil Hussein?

Mascmind and Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom are at Stage 4, Evoking Bill Clinton, recalling the Great Purge of U.S. Attorneys by Janet Reno in 1993. I explained here why that isn’t relevant.

Mr. Hawkins also provides a fascinating twist on Stage 4:

What they should be doing is exactly what the Clinton Administration would be doing in a situation like this, relentlessly and savagely attacking the other side, calling it a political witch hunt, and telling the public that this is exactly why we can’t have bipartisanship in Washington, because these jerks keep pulling stunts like this.

This whole thing is a big joke, but because the Bush Administration is still, STILL, for the most sticking with this “new tone,” mush and letting the Democrats use them as punching bags, the joke is on the Bushies.

In some cases “evoking Bill Clinton” means just the basic “Clinton did it, too” excuse, which is the foundation of all conservative ethics. Righties seem to think that Bill Clinton is the measure of all morals, and that they can’t be accused of doing anything wrong if Clinton did the same thing. But Mr. Hawkins’s post is a lovely example of psychological projection, either conscious or unconscious. David Neiwert at Orcinus has written some great posts on this, such as here and here. So “evoking Bill Clinton” describes a wide and complex range of behaviors.

James Joyner skipped to Stage 5:

For whatever reason, I’ve had trouble mustering an interest in the brouhaha over Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez’ firing of some U.S. attorneys for “political reasons.” It’s been the topic of much discussion in the blogosphere and the halls of Congress but just hasn’t inspired me to write anything.

Front page stories in today’s NYT and WaPo, which have inspired another mini-surge in blog outrage, continue to leave me yawning.

I wrote in January 2006 that “When cornered, righties will either fall back on “Dems” (or “Clinton”) “did it too,” or else feign boredom. (Yawn. So Washington is corrupt. Who cares?).” It’s where they go when their only other option is admitting the truth.

It is worthy of note that the bulk of the Right Blogosphere only recently moved out of Stage 1. You know a Republican scandal is getting long legs when that happens.

Things Fall Apart

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For some reason I’m on a mailing list called “Conservative News.” I have requested a couple of times to be taken off the list, but somebody keeps signing me up again. Anyway, today, “Conservative News” is announcing “The Conservative Exodus Project.”

I am copying and pasting this from the Exodus web page. Make of it what you will.

The Pledge

We, the undersigned, petition the Republican Party to support real conservative candidates for the 2008 presidential nomination.

In the belief that the Republican Party has become too liberal, we pledge, unless a suitable candidate is selected for the GOP 2008 presidential nomination, to stay home or vote third party (e.g. Constitution Party).

Returning to its liberal roots, the GOP has recently become the party of big business, neoliberal globalism, and unwise interventionism – not the party of conservatism.

The following presidential candidates are UNACCEPTABLE: John McCain, Rudolph Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, Chuck Hagel, Condoleezza Rice, et al. They all support the third-world invasion of the United States.

Unless a candidate is chosen who is tough on immigration (e.g. Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo, Duncan Hunter, or another candidate yet to announce), we shall have no choice but to vote third party.

We would like to stress these five points.

(1) We oppose the third-world invasion of the United States, and reject amnesty and any path to citizenship for illegals. We support deportation, attrition, and massive reductions in legal immigration, especially from the third world.

(2) We oppose free trade, the support of which has become an ideological suicide pact. Free trade is both destroying our economy and undermining our sovereignty. Historically, conservatives have opposed free trade, and they should, but many in the GOP have been “neoconned” on this issue.

(3) We support a moral candidate, critical of secularism, who embodies the virtues of the Christian Western tradition.

(4) We oppose the illegal neocon war in Iraq. The transformation of the Middle East to liberal democracy is Jacobin, not conservative.

(5) We wish to see big government reduced in size – in all three branches – and for many offices and functions to be returned to the states, where they Constitutionally belong.

Unless the above criteria are met, we pledge to stay home or vote third-party in 2008.

Point #4 is especially fascinating — “The transformation of the Middle East to liberal democracy is Jacobin, not conservative.” “Conservative News” needn’t worry; the Middle East is more likely to be transformed into an Islamic theocracy than anything else.

Granted, “Conservative News” may be one old curmudgeon and not a mighty hoard. But this isn’t too far away from the stuff Richard Viguerie has been cranking out lately.

BTW, the elephant art is from a 1911 Puck cover. The fellow in the top hat in the background is President Taft. In 1912 Republicans renominated Taft, after which Theodore Roosevelt cut his ties to the GOP and became the Progressive Party nominee for President. This split Republican votes and enabled the election of the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson.

Stout-Hearted Men?

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Glenn Greenwald has a post up on the right-wing cult of contrived masculinity. He writes that at the heart of movement conservatism

… is a cult of contrived masculinity whereby people dress up as male archetypes like cowboys, ranchers, and tough guys even though they are nothing of the kind — or prance around as Churchillian warriors because they write from a safe and protected distance about how great war is — and in the process become triumphant heroes and masculine powerful icons and strong leaders. They and their followers triumph over the weak, effete, humiliated Enemy, and thereby become powerful and exceptional and safe.

I’d say that at the heart of the cult of masculinity is something even more primordial, which is fear. As I wrote here, the pseudo-conservative movement that is the foundation of “movement conservatism” —

… started out as an intellectually incoherent reaction to the New Deal and the ideals and values that were mainstream 50 and more years ago. It was based on a complex of fears — fear of foreigners, fear of Communists, fear of the powerful forces in the world that they didn’t understand. Most of all, they were besieged by doubts that they fit into a world that was rapidly changing but which they didn’t understand. They feared they were being pushed out of what they saw as their rightful place in American life. Exactly what that place was, and who was pushing them, cannot be clearly defined. Often they lashed out not at real enemies but at the very institutions that protected them and enabled social and economic stability. Theirs was an irrational attempt to erase the previous several years of world history and go back to an earlier time — before the Depression, before World War II — when they had felt more secure. It didn’t sink in that that old feeling of security had been delusional.

I go on at more length in the old post. The point is that inside every wingnut lives a frightened little child looking for a daddy.

The Right’s masculinity problem is something I’ve written about before also, such as here, from 2003:

The faux masculinity celebrated by our culture equates violence with strength and power with potency. It is a rogue thing that does not honor the principles of civilization or the processes of governance. Like most John Wayne characters, or Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, following the rules is for girls and sissies. Why bother with a justice system when you’ve got a gun? …

… George W. Bush is an adolescent’s fantasy of what a president should be, just as John Wayne was an adolescent’s fantasy cowboy/lawman, and Dirty Harry an adolescent’s fantasy detective — easily bored with rules and talk, but quick on the trigger. Who needs diplomacy when you’ve got the biggest, baddest military in the world?

If you understand that this is where their heads are, one begins to understand why righties are not bothered by Abu Ghraib or that some of the people detained at Bagram, Kandahar, and Gitmo without due process of law turn out to be innocent. They think as children think. Children generally are unable to think rationally about what frightens them; if they are afraid there’s a monster in the closet, no amount of explaining there isn’t a monster in the closet will settle them. All they want is someone strong to protect them.

Thus, rghties want to smash everyone that frightens them without sorting out whether the thing they fear is a real danger or not, or whether the smashing is smart policy or not. And in Rightie World, applying rational judgments to fearful things is a sign of weakness. For example: The Iraq War is growing the threat of terrorism in the world. Yet you cannot explain to a rightie that a smart war on terror would require disengagement from Iraq. All they know is that there are Islamic extremists over there, and we must kill them. And (they think) if you don’t want to kill them, you are weak. Smash first; think later. If ever.

Of course, a Faux Man rarely volunteers to do the dirty work himself. As Glenn points out, righties on the whole think highly of military glory but are not so keen on gettng shot at themselves.

Another common trait of faux masculinity is misogyny; deep down inside faux men hate and resent women. As Robert Bly artfully explained awhile back in Iron John (I failed to find a good link explaining this point, sorry), faux men have unresolved issues about their mothers, and that lack of resolution leaves them in a state of perpetual adolescence — resentful, confused, fearful, simultaneously seeking yet rebelling against authority. They want a daddy who protects them from the monster in the closet; not a mommy who tells them to eat their vegetables, pay their taxes, and reduce their carbon emissions.

Glenn’s post is about Ann Coulter and why the Right won’t let go of her. He writes,

Coulter insisted last night that she did not intend the remark as an anti-gay slur — that she did not intend to suggest that John Edwards, husband and father, was gay — but instead only used the word as a “schoolyard taunt,” to call him a sissy. And that is true. Her aim was not to suggest that Edwards is actually gay, but simply to feminize him like they do with all male Democratic or liberal political leaders.

This is from Stephen J. Ducat’s book, The Wimp Factor:

I saw the Republican National Convention as essentially a hyper-masculine strut-fest. The real point of the convention was to make John Kerry their woman…. They had already done that with John Edwards by dubbing him the “Breck girl.” And Arnold Schwarzenegger went on to proclaim that any men who were anxious about the loss of jobs under the reign of George W. Bush were, as he put it, “economic girlie-men.” The inference was that Democratic candidates who were always whining about pink slips may as well be wearing pink slips.

Two years ago in a Buzzflash interview, Stephen Ducat said,

In a culture based on male domination and in which most things feminine tend to be devalued, even if they are secretly envied, the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman. This powerful adult male imperative to be unlike females and to repudiate anything that smacks of maternal caretaking is played out just as powerfully in politics as it is in personal life. In fact, political contests among men are in many ways the ultimate battles for masculine supremacy. This makes disavowing the feminine in oneself and projecting it onto one’s opponent especially important. This femiphobia–this male fear of being feminine–operates unconsciously in many men as a very powerful determinant of their political behavior. It also constitutes a very significant motive for fundamentalist terrorism. …

… In fact, the kind of hyper-masculine strutting that we see on display by right wing males is a defense. It’s a defense against this anxious masculinity, against their fear of the feminine. In a culture in which it’s so important to deny the feminine in men, masculinity becomes a really brittle achievement. It’s quite Sisyphean–you know, you can never quite get there. You’re always having to prove it.

Part of the reason is that this type of masculinity is defined largely in terms of domination. The problem is that domination–either in a personal or a global context–can never be a permanent condition. It’s a relational state. It’s dependent on having somebody in a subordinate position. That means you could be manly today, but you’re not going to be manly tomorrow unless you’ve got somebody to push around and control, whether that is an abused wife or another country. So this kind of masculinity is really brittle.

Faux men have to keep proving they are not tied to Ma’s apron strings; and subconsciously, to faux men any woman is All Women is Mother. The compulsion to denigrate women or anything understood to be “feminine” is, always, the mark of a faux man. Ann Coulter is “safe” because she is relentlessly unfeminine; a guy in a girl’s body. She uses the word female as an insult; she is alleged to have said in a 2003 interview, “It would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact.” (If anyone can find a link to the original source, please let me know.) Righties can count of Coulter not to get all womanly and maternal on them. She is the ideal woman for men who hate women. She does not remind them of their mothers.

Glenn continues,

The Coulter/Hannity/Limabugh-led right wing is basically the Abu Grahib rituals finding full expression in an authoritarian political movement. The reason people like Rush Limbaugh not only were unbothered, but actually delighted and even tickled by, Abu Grahib is because that is the full-blooded manifestation of the impulses underlying this movement — feelings of power and strength from the most depraved spectacles of force. The only real complaint from Bush followers about the Commander-in-Chief is that he has not given them enough Guantanamos and wars and aggression and barbaric slaughter and liberty infringement. Their hunger for those things is literally insatiable because they need fresh pretexts for feeling strong.

And that is where Ann Coulter comes in and plays such a vital — really indispensible — role. As a woman who purposely exudes the most exaggerated American feminine stereotypes (the long blond hair, the make-up, the emaciated body), her obsession with emasculating Democratic males — which, at bottom, is really what she does more than anything else — energizes and stimulates the right-wing “base” like nothing else can. Just witness the fervor with which they greet her, buy her books, mob her on college campuses. Can anyone deny that she is unleashing what lurks at the very depths of the right-wing psyche? What else explains not just her popularity, but the intense embrace of her by the “base”?

Yep.

While looking for other things I came across a nice specimen for the Faux Male exhibit. Awhile back rightie writer Harvey C. Mansfield wrote a book called Manliness that I have not read but have read much about. This review of Manliness on the site Intellectual Conservative is worth a comment. It begins:

In the twenty-first century workplace, the neutered male, all-too-often, is the employee most successful at climbing organizational hierarchies. Being a good listener, empowering others, and providing solicitous attention — as opposed to speaking the truth, taking a stand, and defending the meek — are the traits most likely to result in becoming a CEO or CFO. To get ahead, one must avoid confrontation rather than precipitate it. Characteristics like stoicism, independence, and reticence are now construed as signs of not being a team player despite their once being prevalent in the manliest of men. Perhaps a desire to commemorate what once was is what motivated Harvey Mansfield to write his book, Manliness, as the term itself has become a pejorative.

The premise is nonsense. Although there are exceptions to everything, in my experience corporate CEOs are not touchy-feely types. More often they exhibit absolute self-confidence and ruthless, take-no-prisoners aggression. A touch of sociopathy doesn’t hurt. Mansfield is an academic who needs to get out more. The reviewer, Bernard Chapin, possibly has another excuse. Or not. This comes later in Chapin’s review:

Levity aside, the strongest message of Manliness is delivered in these lines:

    As opposed to being manly, a defense of manliness requires that a man look a woman in the eye and tell her that she is inferior in certain important respects. Men cannot do that today.

He could not be any more right. The very reason that men are vilified and maligned is due to their refusal to defend themselves.

Obviously, Chapin and Mansfield are sniveling little weenies. Real men don’t have to put down women to “defend themselves.”

Having exposed Mr. Chapin for the unmanly lump of protoplasm that he is, you will not be surprised to find out that Mr. Chapin is an Ann Coulter admirer. Of course. Defending her use of the word faggot — which, inexplicably, he doesn’t spell —

F*ggot is not a term of hate. It’s a word sometimes used to describe gays as well as a bundle of sticks or branches, a type of meatball, and, way back when, it even represented a unit of measurement.

Chapin writes,

Consider Coulter’s statement for a moment. Does she really think that Edwards is gay? I seriously doubt it. She was using her enemies’ PC sensitivity as a means to provoke and incite — which is exactly what happened. The quip was an incendiary joke. Coulter is not publicity shy, and, given her background, must have known that furor would follow her heretical observation. Ironically, Howard Dean’s response — “this kind of vile rhetoric is out of bounds” — plays like made-to-order dogma. Like Dean, many leftists would like to send Coulter to places far fouler than rehab. Why is saying a word like f*ggot out of bounds? If a homosexual called Coulter a breeder or a black person called her a cracker, would we judge them “hate-filled and bigoted?” Of course not.

Well, um, I would, if the name-calling were intended to be hateful. (Coulter is neither a breeder nor a cracker as I understand the terms, however.) But the point is that if we measure Mr. Chapin by his own masculinity measure — “speaking the truth, taking a stand, and defending the meek” — you can see that he falls a tad short. What Coulter said was nothing but a juvenile slur. Pretending otherwise is not “speaking the truth.” It’s “pathological denial.”

Conservative Political Action Conference

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Step right up, boys and girls, and see the clown show Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which is going on right now in Washington, DC.

And what a show it is! For example, yesterday Richard Viguerie called on conservatives to stop giving money to GOP fundraising committees. Why? “because they spend our money in primaries to defeat conservatives.” He also wants conservatives to withhold support from “all of the top tier 2008 Presidential wannabees” and stop supporting Republican elected officials, except for the rare few who are real conservatives.

The objective is to return America to real conservative governance. “It may take 6-10 years for conservatives to be able to govern America,” he said. “We have to build a whole new conservative movement, independent of the two major parties.”

But, of course, conservatives have to win over others if their dream is to be fulfilled.

And all the Americans in the “sensible center” who know deep-down that conservatives really are “right:” We’re right on illegal immigration, right on taxes, right on health care, right on the economy, right on terrorism – and right for America.

Are we having fun yet?

See, the problem is that the Far Right is feeling left out. Julie Mason reports for the Houston Chronicle:

Leading American conservatives are fed up with President Bush and the Republican establishment, and they don’t give a toss for the party’s 2008 presidential front-runners, either.

At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual, three-day gathering of the far right and its leaders, the mood is feisty and disgusted — but not just at Hillary Clinton, this time.ight is feeling left out. …

… For a party that grew and achieved in large part by force of its unity, this rift between conservatives and the Republican power structure is profound. It could be either the ruin of the GOP or the re-making of it.

“We don’t want to be the Republican Party, we want to be the conservative movement,” said Phyllis Schlafly, legendary doyenne of the right. “We cannot afford to be ‘Bush Republicans.’ ”

With her trademark shiny gold eagle pin perched on her shoulder, Schlafly criticized Bush over the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination — the right questioned her conservative qualifications — and his handling of immigration issues.

“We cannot afford to let Mexico turn us into a two-language nation,” she said, as her audience roared approval and banged on tables in support.

Apparently John McCain wrote the CPAC crowd off as well; he chose not to attend.

Rosa Brooks of the Los Angeles Times checks out the sideshow:

Remember Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the right-wing goon squad whose defamatory insinuations helped sink John Kerry’s presidential campaign? They’re back! This afternoon, key Swift boaters George “Bud” Day, Mary Jane McManus and Carlton Sherwood are holding a little reunion, in the guise of a panel discussion at the American Conservative Union’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference. The panel topic? “The Left’s Repeated Campaign Against the American Soldier.”

Wait; it gets better.

Of course, the Swifties’ presence on the agenda is hardly the only evidence that the lunatics have taken over the asylum at CPAC. Other giveaways include some unintentionally humorous agenda items: Oliver North — he of the Iran-Contra scandal — will be presenting the “Defender of the Constitution Award,” for instance, while right-wing attack blogger Michelle Malkin, whose work has been repeatedly criticized for its cavalier attitude toward facts, gets the “Accuracy in Media Award.”

You can’t make this shit up.

Update: The circus continues — Bill Scher of Liberal Oasis is blogging CPAC and brings us this little gem:

At an afternoon panel on taxes, Scott Hodge of the Tax Foundation, lamented that despite six years of tax cuts mainly for the wealthiest, we haven’t completely destroyed our progressive tax system.

After a slide presentation described how the wealthy contribute more in taxes and the poor receive more in benefits, Hodge declared, “the rich are getting screwed.”

Now there’s the message that will bring back conservatism.

It’s Personal

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Katharine Hayhoe and Andrew Dessler, professors of geoscience and atomospheric science respectively, write that science has spoken.

On Feb. 2, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its fourth assessment report on the science of global warming. The report was written by hundreds of climate scientists from 130 countries. It has been reviewed by thousands of other climate scientists and hundreds of government agencies, and it has been opened for public review as well.

This IPCC report is perhaps the most thoroughly vetted document in the history of science. For this reason, its assessments are widely regarded as the most authoritative summaries of what we know about global warming.

So what does this new report tell us?

In short, after many tons of study and evaluation, science has reached consensus, and that consensus is “The Earth is warming, and most of that warming is very likely due to human activities.”

But the American political Right says that science can take its consensus and shove it.

Last week it was widely reported that the American Enterprise Institute, a rightie “think” tank (more of an anti-think tank, actually), offered $10,000 to scientists who would refute the report. Now, Steven F. Hayward and Kenneth P. Green of AEI write in the Weekly Standard that these stories are inaccurate. Sorta. If you read their rebuttal carefully, you see that they take umbrage at the AEI being called a “lobbying group” in some stories. And yes, AEI has received more than $1.6 million from Exxon Mobil, but that was over a seven-year period.

But what about the $10,000?

The AEI just wanted to help, say Hayward and Green. IPCC had identified some “uncertainties,” and the AEI is looking for “scientists, economists, and public policy experts” who would write essays “analyzing” the IPCC’s work. “We couched our query in the context of wanting to make sure the next IPCC report received serious scrutiny and criticism,” they said, clearly implying previous reports had received insufficient scrutiny and criticism. People writing these essays would receive a $10,000 honorarium.

Our offer of an honorarium of up to $10,000 to busy scientists to review several thousand pages of material and write an original analysis in the range of 7,500 to 10,000 words is entirely in line with honoraria AEI and similar organizations pay to distinguished economists and legal scholars for commissioned work.

Andrew Dressler, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M, wrote on his blog,

Also note: they’re willing to pay $10,000 to the authors. That’s A LOT of money for this type of activity. It was enough that it made me think, “maybe I should get involved with this.” Then I snapped back to reality.

[note added 7/31: My wife read this blog, saw the figure of $10,000, and asked me sweetly, “Are you SURE that climate change is real? We could really use the money.”]

To anyone in academia, $10,000 to write a 7,500- to 10,000-word essay is huge. Most academics are not going to make $10,000 on all of their papers, books, and essays combined in their lives. It’s like offering the ten-year-old next door $1,000 to wash your car. Jackpot, dude.

But Dressler points out that AEI was asking scientists to render a subjective opinion, not a scientific analysis. He quotes the letter AEI sent to scientists and boils the inquiry down to the question What’s the policy value of climate models? And that’s a subjective judgment. It’s fairly obvious that AEI was fishing for someone who would say that there was too much uncertainty about climate change to know precisely which remedies should be applied, which could then be spun into “it’s too soon to change policy.” But of course the AEI was careful not to say that explicitly.

The game the anti-science Right is playing is simply to exploit any cracks in the consensus. Since never in the history of science have all the scientists in the world been in 100 percent agreement on any theory or model of anything, that’s not hard to do. And this lack of 100 percent certainty equals doubt, and doubt soon becomes a reason not to bother about policy change. Until there is 100 percent agreement (which will never happen), then we can’t even think about policy.

We can only wish the Weekly Standard had applied the same principle to the story that Mohamed Atta met with Saddam Hussein’s agents in Prague.

What really struck me, however, is the paranoid tone of the Weekly Standard piece. It is titled “Scenes from the Climate Inquisition: The chilling effect of the global warming consensus.”

The “climate inquisition”? Yes, Hayward and Green allege they are the victims of a campaign to stifle dissent on the part of Climate Nazis.

Desperation is the chief cause for this campaign of intimidation. … The relentless demonization of anyone who does not fall in behind the Gore version of the issue–manmade climate catastrophe necessitating draconian cuts in emissions–has been effective

According to Hayward and Green, the “media frenzy” that surrounded the $10,000 honorarium story, plus the fact that the IPCC announced its findings a full three months before their complete 1,400-page report will be published suggests that something’s not kosher in Science Land. “There appear to be some significant retreats from the 2001 IPCC report,” they sniff. In the Weekly Standard‘s alternative universe, principled scientists are brewing a backlash against the inquisition. They conclude:

The climate inquisition is eliminating any space for sensible criticism of the climate science process or moderate deliberation about policy. Greenpeace and its friends may be celebrating their ability to gin up a phony scandal story and feed it to the left-wing press, but if people who are serious about climate change hunker down in their fortifications and stay silent, that bodes ill for the future of climate policy and science generally.

The hundreds of climate scientists from 130 countries who participated in the IPCC are, of course, not serious about climate change. They are stooges of the left-wing press, and the left-wing press is out to destroy the AEI and all it stands for, just because. That a huge majority of the earth’s scientists believe we have only a limited time to save the planet is not, to Hayward and Green, the reason the IPCC and the left-wing press are out to get them.

As reality closes in on the Right, righties are retreating into deeper and more pathological levels of denial. This week a report by the Pentagon inspector general concluded that Douglas Feith and his team at the Pentagon “cooked” intelligence to support invading Iraq (the New York Times calls this the “build a war workshop“)

And how does the Right respond? Yesterday, Hot Air latched on to a retraction in the Washington Post. It appears a Post story attributed quotes to the inspector general report that had actually been said by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.). Therefore, Hot Air concludes, all of the allegations against Feith were fabricated by Levin and were not the conclusions of an independent report.

Except there was an independent report by the Pentagon inspector general, and it did conclude that Doug Feith fed false information to the White House. The inspector general, Thomas A. Gimble, testified about this to the Senate last week. And Gimble said,

We found that the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on Iraq and Al Qaida relations which included conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community and these were presented to senior decision-makers.

But in Rightie World, the allegations against Feith have been retracted. And you know they will believe Feith is the innocent victim of a leftie inquisition as long as they live.

To righties, the concerns of the Left are all about them. It is beyond belief that some people might be legitimately concerned about the conduct of the nation, or the survival of the planet. No; it’s personal. Those loony lefties want to destroy the Right because, you know, they are haters who want to destroy everything that’s good and pure and decent that comes with big profit margins.

Meanwhile, Republicans are dredging the nation’s asylums scientific community looking for anything that will cast doubt on the IPCC report. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week “For twelve years, the leadership in the House of Representatives stifled all discussion and debate of global warming. That long rejection of reality is over.” I believe the Speaker is wrong.

Update: Bill Kristol says Obama would have been pro-slavery. These people are a bleeping freak show.

Update update: The freak show continues — Mark Steyn, “don’t ruin economy because of tiny temp rise.”

More updates: Andrew Sullivan Nigel Calder explains that scientists don’t understand how science works (and he does). Angry Bear, whom I hope is not a polar bear, rips up Mark Steyn (ouch). Ron Chusid tells us how conservatives determine the truth.

Who’s Left?

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Sometimes I think lobotomies must be a prerequisite for becoming a “pundit.” So many of them exhibit a profound inability to, actually, think.

Take David Brooks. Please. In his column today (which you can’t read if you don’t have a subscription, but you ain’t missin’ anything), Brooks declares that today’s young people are the “children of polarization.”

Today’s college students, remember, were born around 1987. They were 2 or 3 when the Berlin Wall fell. They have come into political consciousness amid impeachment, jihad, polarization and Iraq. Many of them seem to have reacted to these hothouse clashes not by becoming embroiled in the zealotry but by quietly drifting away from that whole political mode.

In general, their writing is calm, optimistic and ironical. Most students in my class showed an aversion to broad philosophical arguments and valued the readings that were concrete and even wonky. Many wrote that they had moved lately toward the center.

I would love to have a talk with these young people to find out what they think “center” means, since the term has been rather ill-defined lately, but let’s go on for now … Brooks describes one young man he met while teaching a political theory course at Duke University — I feel faint at the thought — who

… grew up on a struggling ranch in Idaho. His father died when he was young and his family was poor enough at times to qualify for welfare, though his mother refused it. Duke, with its affluence and its liberal attitudes, was a different universe.

Kendall arrived deeply conservative and remains offended by people who won’t work hard to support themselves. But he now finds himself, as he says, cursed by centrism — trapped between the Pat Robertsons on the right and the Democratic elites on the left, many of whom he finds personally distasteful.

By “Democratic elites” I assume Brooks is referring to the inside-the-beltway hothouse flowers we’ve all come to know and despair about. However, why Democratic Washington insiders are “elite” and Republican Washington insiders are not rather escapes me.

He has come to admire the prairie pragmatists, like Montana’s Jon Tester and Brian Schweitzer. In a long conversation with his brother Sage, who works on the ranch, Kendall decided that what the country needs is a party led by “entrepreneurial cowboy politicians” with a global perspective.

But here’s the truth that Brooks lacks the courage to acknowledge: Tester and Schweitzer, Democratic Senator and Democratic Governor respectively, are progressives. Liberal, even. Much more so than the Washington Democratic insider “elites,” who for years have tripped all over themselves running to the “center.” As candidates, Tester and Schweitzer both were cheered enthusiastically by us loony lefty bloggers, which ought to be a Clue. Both of these fellas are strong economic populists, championing the needs of the ordinary workin’ person against those of the wealthy and well-connected. And they’re both (I think) anti Iraq War (Tester for sure) and on the liberal side of most social issues you can think of.

(BTW, while researching this post I found a diary post by Cogitator at MyDD from last May titled “Why the DC elite will shun Brian Schweitzer.” )

Yet in the World o’ Pundits, insider elites like Joe Biden are “liberal” and Tester and Schweitzer are “centrist.” Why? First, because most pundits are idiots. Second, because Tester and Schweitzer are outdoor-type guys who like to hunt and fish and drive pickup trucks. In other words, they don’t conform to a stereotype “lefty” that lives in David Brooks’s head.

You have to read between the lines a bit, but I infer from Brooks’s column that he defines “centrist” or “moderate” as “someone who doesn’t think government can work.” He speaks of another of his Duke students:

He came to Duke with many conventional liberal attitudes, but he’d seen the failures of the schools in his neighborhood, where many of his smartest friends never made it to college. He’s a big fan of school vouchers and now considers himself a moderate Democrat: “I’m a Democrat because I think the Democratic Party is a better vehicle for the issues I care about: balancing the budget, checking President Bush’s foreign policy and curtailing global warming. However, I’ll switch to the Republicans in a heartbeat if I believe my ideas are better received in the G.O.P.”

Brooks doesn’t define what a “conventional liberal attitude” is, or why balanced budgets, checking Bush’s foreign policy and fighting global warming do not qualify as “liberal.”

I liked this paragraph:

For many students, the main axis of their politics is not between left and right but between idealism and realism. They have developed a suspicion of sweepingly idealistic political ventures, and are now a fascinating mixture of youthful hopefulness and antiutopian modesty.

Ah, but realism has a well-known liberal bias.

They’ve been affected by the failures in Iraq (though interestingly, not a single one of them wrote about Iraq explicitly, or even wanted to grapple with the Middle East or Islamic extremism). But they’ve also seen government fail to deliver at home. A number wrote about the mediocrity of their local public schools. Several gave the back of their hand to the politics of multicultural grievance.

One wants to kick Brooks out of the way and talk to these young people directly, because one suspects that Brooks may be injecting some of his own biases into his narrative. These young people are also likely reflecting the conventional wisdom among their peers at Duke. I don’t know where the Duke student body falls on the political leanings scale, but I suspect it isn’t exactly Oberlin. And if Brooks is the one teaching them political theory, then you can bet those kids understand the real difference between Left and Right about as well as Brooks can tell shit from shinola.

Be sure you are sitting down before you read this:

If my Duke students are representative, then the U.S. is about to see a generation that is practical, anti-ideological, modest and centrist (maybe to a fault).

That’s probably good news for presidential candidates like Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton, whose main selling point is their nuts-and-bolts ability to get things done.

‘Scuse me while I go bang my head against a wall and shriek for a while.

First, if there is one thing I would like America to know about Rudy Giuliani, it’s that 90 percent of what he did for New York after 9/11 was be on television. He actually had little direct hands-on interaction with the recovery efforts at Ground Zero, although he gets credit for the fact that the wealthy and resourceful city of New York did not completely fall to pieces because a relatively small part of it was destroyed that day. Pundits just love to tweak the hapless mayor of New Orleans for failing to clean up the Katrina mess, not noting that (1) Katrina impacted the entire city, as well as much of the region; and (2) New Orleans is a poor city in a poor state. Certainly there are things Ray Nagin could have done better, but had Giuliani been mayor of New Orleans when Katrina hit I doubt he would have come out of that catastrophe looking all that competent, either. In fact, the deaths of many New York firefighters can be blamed on Giuliani’s management incompetence.

And then there’s Senator Clinton, of whom I am hugely ambivalent. Exactly what has she “got done” so far? Anything major? And is she not one of Brooks’s “Democratic elites”? For that matter, isn’t Brooks a member in good standing of the nation’s political elite? If not, who the hell is?

The problem with national politics for the past several years is not a polarization between “Left” and “Right.” It’s that a cabal of extremist right-wing ideological whackjobs took charge of government, while the opposing party, which had long slipped its tether to any recognizable set of political values whatsoever, timidly chirped “me, too.” And the young folks recognize this, I suspect, better than Brooks does.