Category Archives: conservatism

Cracked

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I’ve been predicting the crackup of “movement” conservatism for, well, awhile. Today it’s obvious even to some pundits that The Great Disintegration has finally arrived. (Never fear; Cokie Roberts remains clueless; via Avedon.)

This is not to say that the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy will go away soon, or that David Horowitz will ooze back under his rock-of-origin. The wingnuts still have a lot of power and can still do a lot of damage. Yet their days of near-absolute dominance of national politics are behind them. For good, I say.

Floyd McKay writes for the Seattle Times,

The Achilles’ heel of the Republican “base” constructed by Karl Rove for the 2000 election and continued through 2006 was always that the strategy relied on a rock-hard minority propelled into majority status by organization and cash. …

… The best that can be done with a base of this size is to find ways to pump it up to 51 percent, which was Rove’s strategy — get one vote above 50 percent, call it a mandate, give your financiers tax breaks and tell the evangelical base how important it is.

The danger in this system is that even if you hold 70-plus percent of this base, you are still short of a majority, and if you emphasize too much your dedication to the values of the base, you will alienate moderates.

That happened on Nov. 7, and all the polls show moderates fled the GOP in droves and left the white evangelical base — loyal to the end — short of friends outside the South.

Bottom line, the righties finally swung way too far right.

By pursuing rhetoric and policies that targeted the religious right, Bush and Rove turned off many others, certainly including the well-educated, who reacted to their anti-science opposition to stem-cell research and global warming.

One of the significant developments of the midterms was the “swing” of suburban, middle-class voters to the Dems. At New York Newsday, Lawrence Levy argues:

Suburbanites are not anti-change, just anti-extremism of any stripe – whether Democrats in the ’70s or Republicans in the ’90s. They’re not anti-government. Many people move here for more and better government services. And they’re not anti-tax. They’re willing to pay high taxes, to a point, if they feel they’re getting good value.

On Tuesday, the finicky, often ticket-splitting suburbs said that President George W. Bush and his party weren’t giving them their money’s worth – not in Iraq, not on ethics, not on the economy. These voters did so because, overall, the GOP again had become too stubbornly extreme and unaccountable.

Neither party owns the suburbs, Levy says. But Republican support had been sliding in the suburbs until 9/11, after which Republican exploitation of fear and “patriotism” caused suburbanites to swing right. But that’s so over.

McKay at the Seattle Times continues,

Some traditional Republican financiers found the current Republican White House and Congress shy on traditional values of low spending and small government, and withheld checks. New-style millionaires have appeared in the high-tech industries in particular, and many see Democrats as more friendly to science and higher education, vital for American competitiveness. Voters earning more than $100,000 still voted Republican by a 52-48 margin, but that is the smallest margin since at least 1988.

Republicans have also lost their edge among better-educated Americans; college grads were split 50-50 and those with advanced degrees voted 59-41 for the Democrats. The latter is the highest since at least 1986. There are plenty of advanced degrees teaching literature and sociology, of course, but more work for law firms, big business and high-tech employers. These folks vote and they also decide where business places its campaign funds. Forty-five percent of 2006 voters have a college degree or more.

If the GOP loses its traditional strength among high-income voters and among college graduates, it is in serious trouble, more trouble than a 100-percent vote from white evangelicals could reverse.

McKay thinks the turning point for many voters was Terri Schiavo. He (and I) think that most Americans watched the “pro-life” carnival outside Schiavo’s hospital with revulsion. As Levy says, middle-class suburbanites are, above all else, anti-extremism.

In today’s Boston Globe, Derrick Jackson writes about the influence of Hurricane Katrina on the midterms. Jackson looks at the impact of the storm on urban voters —

Ron Dellums rattled off why he thought America gave control of the House and the Senate to the Democrats. He said the reason most underplayed by the media was Hurricane Katrina.

“This election was about scandal, it was about checks and balances, about Iraq,” Dellums said. “Also about Katrina. Because at a time that this country was saying that we’re in a foreign country for the purposes of security and safety, when it hit home, our response was inept, inadequate, insincere and lacking in compassion. Here’s the wealthiest nation in the world — gave a Third World response to a major catastrophe. In my opinion, Katrina was a metaphor for everything wrong in urban America. What Katrina did was expose the stark reality of the vulnerability of urban life . . . the winds of Katrina blew through the television all of the pain of urban life.”

Speaking Sunday before the Trotter Group of African-American newspaper columnists at its annual conference at Stanford University, Dellums, 71, the former longtime congressman and mayor-elect of Oakland, said every city is a potential Katrina. Beyond the much-examined issues of preparedness and infrastructure, Dellums said Katrina gave Americans a chance to see how poverty has so many dimensions: in healthcare, education, justice, and the environment. “Katrina opens the door on the domestic front so that we have to address these issues.”

Suburbanites watched also, and even those unconcerned about poverty were disturbed by what they saw. Government spending out of control, yet corpses are left to rot on the streets of a major city? Remember what Levy wrote — “They’re willing to pay high taxes, to a point, if they feel they’re getting good value.” Pretty obvious we’re not getting good value.

Unlike libertarians, who seem not to want government to do anything, I think moderates are less concerned about “big” government than they are about “wasteful, incompetent, out-of-control” government. I suspect moderates are OK with government that is “big” enough to do what they want it to do; that is responsive to civil problems and gives good value for tax dollars spent. As I argued here, we shouldn’t be talking about “big” or “small” government, but about “stupid” or “smart” government.

If you want to know why Republicans were thumped in the midterms, read this interview of right-wing strategist Richard Viguerie by Mary Jacobs, posted on Salon two years ago. Fresh from the 2004 general election, Viguerie assured Jacobs that the right-wing revolution was about to start.

The time is now to take a very different approach to governing that this town hasn’t seen since the 1930s, when Democrats took control of the White House in the 1932 election [with FDR]. Since then, the big-government establishment has driven the political agenda. They started driving it in the early 1930s, and they pretty much drove the agenda through 1994 [when Republicans seized control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years].

Then things kind of came to a halt. It was difficult for the conservatives to implement a lot of their agenda. [With Bill Clinton’s election in 1992] they didn’t have the White House. The president could veto our legislation, as he did. And then, we had slim [conservative] majorities to none in the Senate. Now we have a comfortable margin. And George Bush has a mandate. It’s humorous and amusing to hear people in the media and liberals in the country — and even some Republicans, though not many, just one as a matter of fact — who are saying we’re not going to move on [our conservative agenda].

FYI, the “one” was Arlen Specter. Specter had just warned Bush not to nominate anti-abortion Supreme Court justices.

And you’ll notice that his staff has been backtracking all day on it. You can’t turn on the television right now without hearing someone talking about the Republicans, saying Bush has an obligation to unify the country. That’s code for “abandon your conservative allies and move to the left.” That’s what they mean by unity: Stop trying to promote a conservative agenda. That’s just what the country needs, one more politician to break his promise hours after he was reelected.

Satisfied that Specter (whom Viguerie wanted to block from the Senate Judiciary Committee chairmanship) was being whipped into line, Specter addressed the question, “Is there any future at all for moderate Republicans in the GOP?”

Absolutely. It’s just that the election was fought not on moderate Republican issues but on conservative issues. It was conservatives who made the phone calls and pounded the pavement and turned out the big vote for Bush and the Republicans in Congress. But yeah, sure, unlike [with] the Democrats, there’s a place for moderates in the Republican Party. The Democrats do not tolerate dissent in their party. You have zero chance of having a successful career in national Democratic politics if you’re not pro-abortion and [don’t] pass the homosexual litmus test. Not so in the Republican Party. Not only are you welcome, but we put you on TV. We give you platforms to speak out on.

Except that if, like Specter, you say the wrong thing, expect punishment.

If they believe in a pro-abortion position, well, we’re not going to accommodate it. Absolutely not. But we do welcome them in the party, and they have made some welcome contributions. To the extent they support lower taxes, a fiscally sound government and a strong national defense — absolutely we welcome them.

In other words, moderates are welcome into the party, as long as they agree with the extremists. OK. But there aren’t enough extremists in America to win elections. To win elections, you have to persuade (or fool) a substantial number of moderates to vote for you.

Two years ago, victorious radicals in the GOP ignored calls to “unify” the country and pushed ahead with their extremist agenda. Today some of those same righties are warning Democrats that they’d better be careful to cater to conservatives. One of the clued pundits, Harold Meyerson, says the Right is in denial.

Republicans may have lost, conservatives argue, but only because they misplaced their ideology. “[T]hey were punished not for pursuing but for forgetting conservatism,” George F. Will, conservatism’s most trenchant champion, wrote on this page last week. …

… Holding conservatism blameless for last week’s Republican debacle may stiffen conservative spines, but the very idea is the product of mushy conservative brains unwilling to acknowledge the obvious: that conservatism has never been more ascendant than during George Bush’s presidency; that the Republican Party over the past six years moved well to the right of the American people on social, economic and foreign policy; and that on Nov. 7 the American people chose a more pragmatic course. …

… [W]hat has defined conservatism in the popular mind over the past couple of years has been its willingness to enlist government to block stem cell research, stop the teaching of evolution and supersede the duties of Terri Schiavo’s husband.

This may be a conservatism that makes libertarians cringe, but it is the conservatism that dominates the Republican Party we have. Republicans generally and conservatives particularly have profited mightily from the rise and politicization of fundamentalism over the past few decades. The decimation of Republican moderates from the Northeast and Midwest in last week’s elections came at the hands of centrist and independent voters who’d had it with the Southernized religious conservatism of the Republicans’ base — and with its moderate Republican enablers.

Finally, conservatives argue that the newly elected Democrats are really conservatives, too — proof that the ideology is in no need of a tuneup. It’s true that some of the Democrats take conservative positions on guns and abortion. But it’s also true that virtually all the new Democrats look askance at free trade, want to raise the minimum wage and back a bigger role for government in making health care more affordable.

At a time when corporations abandon their employee benefits, globalization depresses wages, and individuals are compelled to shoulder more and more risk, the last thing Americans need is a government that tells them — as it told their countrymen in New Orleans last year — they’re on their own.

Righties have been spouting anti-government, drown-it-in-the-bathtub rhetoric for decades. Now they’ve had nearly six years to show Americans what they can do when they get complete control. And America just said no.

America Says No to Wedgies

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I’m still trying to wrap my head around the results of the midterm elections. But one result I hope I’m seeing is the beginning of the end of “wedge issue” campaigns that get right-wing extremists elected.

Consider same-sex marriage. It’s true that seven of eight states passed same-sex marriage bans on Tuesday. However, these ballot initiatives — which in the past brought enough hard-Right voters out of the woodwork to swing elections — seem not to have impacted House or Senate races at all. Andrew Romano, Lee Hudson Teslik and Steve Tuttle write for Newsweek.com:

Three of those states—South Carolina, Idaho and South Dakota, all of which voted for bans—were reliably Red, and no Republican candidates needed the boost. In Wisconsin (which voted 59 percent to 41 percent in favor), gay marriage had no bearing on the outcome: incumbents won across the board, with a Democrat, Steven Kagen, taking the only contested House race. A similar story played out in Colorado, which voted 56 percent to 44 percent for the ban: the lone Republican to win a key race was an incumbent. In Tennessee (80 percent to 20 percent in favor), the measure wasn’t much of a wedge, despite a crucial Senate win for Republican Bob Corker. Both he and his Democratic opponent, Harold Ford, opposed gay marriage.

Another ban passed in Virginia, but it appears Virginians elected Jim Webb anyway. In the House, Virginia incumbents, mostly Republican, all won; no seats changed parties. Perhaps the ban impacted some close House races and kept the Webb-Allen contest closer than it might have been, and had a more liberal Democrat been running against Allen the wedge tactic might have worked. But you know what they say — woulda, shoulda, coulda.

And Arizona narrowly rejected a same-sex marriage ban. If “gay marriage” has lost its usefulness as a wedge issue, I predict the national Republican Party is going to be far less interested in it in the future.

Arizona also rejected a slate of immigration hard-liners in favor of candidates with more moderate positions on immigration. This is from an editorial in today’s Los Angeles Times:

… voters in the state demanded a more nuanced and pragmatic solution than that being offered by the most virulently anti-illegal immigration candidates. The best illustrations came in the races for two House seats, one representing the sparsely populated border counties in southeastern Arizona and the other representing some upscale suburbs east of Phoenix. A six-term Republican incumbent, J.D. Hayworth, and a former Republican state representative, Randy Graf — both known for their firebrand stances on border security — lost to Democrats Harry Mitchell and Gabrielle Giffords, who had aligned themselves on immigration with McCain.

Make no mistake; Arizonans have not gone “soft” on immigration. The editorial says Arizona voters —

… overwhelming support Tuesday for ballot initiatives to deny bail, curtail subsidies for education and childcare, limit civil damage awards for illegal immigrants and make English the state’s official language. Voters backed all these proposals, reflecting a widespread belief that illegal immigrants impose a variety of burdens on taxpayers.

But the voters might have had enough of the bullying extremists. Via David Neiwert, Kynn Bartlett reports,

In the morning on voting day, two men — anti-immigrant crusader Russ Dove and his cameraman — showed up at precinct 49 in Tucson, at the Iglesia Bautista church, 4502 S. 12th St. Their plan: To harass and intimidate Spanish-speaking voters by using an “English-only” petition to screen for “illegal immigrants” trying to vote, videotape them, and post their likenesses on the Internet. Roy Warden also came, armed with a gun — as he usually does — and the trio started approaching a small number of people. MALDEF monitors were there, to observe the effect of Arizona’s new requirement for ID to vote, and observed the attempted intimidation tactics.

The trio left around noon to head to other polling places, then gave up after talking to only a few people. MALDEF reported this to the authorities, who are investigating; MALDEF has photographs of the men from when they were there.

MALDEF (the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund) reports other intimidation tactics at the polls. Be sure to read all of David’s and Kynn Bartlett’s posts to get the full picture. (And may I say the thought of some extremist thug showing up at a polling place with a gun gives me the willies.)

In Missouri, the embryonic stem cell initiative worked as a wedge issue in Claire McCaskill’s favor. As the Newsweek.com article linked above says, “The issue divided Talent’s Republican supporters, many of whom favor stem-cell research for its potential to boost a local economy increasingly reliant on biotechnology firms.” Since a big majority of Americans nationwide support federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, I believe the national Republican party will be very cautious with this issue going forward. (They should have known better than to cross Nancy Reagan.)

South Dakota voters handily defeated SD’s draconian abortion law, which banned all abortions with no exceptions for rape and incest and only the flimsiest thread of an exception for a woman’s health. In spite of this, SD’s whackjob Republican governor, who was behind the ban, was re-elected by a wide margin. Still-red SD also voted to ban same-sex marriage and rejected a medicinal marijuana initiative. The Fetus People vow to continue the fight in SD and re-introduce the abortion ban in the future. But the several other state legislatures considering similar bans may be having second thoughts. Meanwhile, Oregon and California voted no on proposed laws that would have required parental notification when minors seek abortions.

In California, voters dumped an anti-environment extremist incumbent. Michael Doyle reports for McClatchy newspapers:

The “Western rebellion” that propelled California Republican Rep. Richard Pombo to power now has receded, leaving many of its most important goals unmet and possibly beyond reach. …

… The Western rebellion, also known as the Sagebrush rebellion, involves people in the West who think that the federal government oversteps itself on property rights issues, especially regarding enforcement of the Endangered Species Act. They also chafe over the fact that half the West is owned by the federal government instead of privately.

Pombo’s surprisingly resounding loss to wind energy consultant Jerry McNerney, 53 percent to 47 percent, made the onetime rancher the only one of 19 Republican committee chairmen in the House of Representatives to go down in defeat Tuesday.

Nationwide —

Of 13 lawmakers identified by the League of Conservation Voters’ “Dirty Dozen” campaign, nine lost Tuesday. They included Rep. Charles Taylor of North Carolina, whose Democratic opponent, Heath Shuler, likewise benefited from the organization’s ads. Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Rick Santorum, another ad target, also lost.

Why electing a Democratic majority matters:

The probable new chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. She’s one of the Senate’s most liberal members; the current chair, Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe, is among the most conservative.

The changing cast of characters will play out in many ways:

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil-and-gas drilling perennially championed by House Republicans won’t go anywhere in the next Congress. Drilling off the coast of Florida or other states becomes a real long shot.

Other controversial ideas that Pombo once toyed with – such as selling 15 little-visited National Park Service sites, including playwright Eugene O’Neill’s home in the California city of Danville – are down for the count.

The Endangered Species Act, which Pombo built his career on combating, has a new lease on life. The Democrat who’s poised to become House Resources Committee chairman, Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia, voted against Pombo’s Endangered Species Act legislation. The League of Conservation Voters gave Rahall a vote ranking of 92, compared with Pombo’s score of 17.

Take that, Naderites!

Minimum wage increases passed in all six states it appeared on the ballots. However, Tuesday was not a sweep for liberalism. Per the Newsweek.com story linked above, Michigan banned affirmative action. Initiatives in Colorado and Nevada that would have decriminalized private possession of small amounts of marijuana were defeated. But on the whole, Tuesday’s elections did more than turn the House and Senate over to the Dems. It also took the wind out of the extreme Right’s sails.

See also: The “Top Five Winners and Losers.” The article actually lists the top six winners and losers, but there’s plenty of winning and losing to go around this week.

Busted

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The Associated Press reports —

The Rev. Ted Haggard was dismissed Saturday as leader of the megachurch he founded after a board determined the influential evangelist had committed “sexually immoral conduct,” the church said Saturday.

Haggard had resigned two days earlier as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, where he held sway in Washington and condemned homosexuality, after a Denver man named Mike Jones claimed to have had drug-fueled trysts with him. He also had placed himself on administrative leave from the New Life Church, but its Overseer Board took the stronger action Saturday.

“Our investigation and Pastor Haggard’s public statements have proven without a doubt that he has committed sexually immoral conduct,” the independent board said in a statement.

    “Those who have great realization of delusion are buddhas; those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings.”

    — Dogen, Genjokoan

    “When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.”

    — Jesus, Gospel of Thomas

Update: Blaming Mrs. Haggard.

Update update: You want to read James Wolcott.

Government: Smart or Stupid?

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Bruce Reed writes in Slate:

More Is Less: In 1994, Republicans took over the Congress with one goal foremost in mind—to turn Americans against government. Twelve years later, they’ve succeeded, although not the way they intended. A new CNN poll finds that 54 percent of Americans think government tries to do too much, while only 37 percent think government should do more. And to put government in its place, they’re going to vote … Democrat.

The poll linked doesn’t provide insight into what people think the government is doing too much of. Jeff Greenfield provides a clue:

The discontent includes the sharp growth in government spending — including the kind of domestic spending conservatives have long deplored — to the growth of “pork-barrel” projects once seen as an emblem of how big government politicians hold power.

“They have increased the amount of government spending by a degree that no Democrat would ever dream of getting away with,” said columnist Andrew Sullivan.

True enough. But then I read this story by Adam Nossiter in today’s New York Times about a high school in New Orleans:

In the last six weeks, students at McDonogh, the largest functioning high school here, have assaulted guards, a teacher and a police officer. A guard and a teacher were beaten so badly that they were hospitalized.

The surge hints at a far-reaching phenomenon after Hurricane Katrina, educators here say. Teenagers in the city are living alone or with older siblings or relatives, separated by hundreds of miles from their displaced parents. Dozens of McDonogh students fend largely for themselves, school officials say.

“They are here on their own,” Wanda Daliet, a science teacher, said. “They are raising themselves. And they are angry.”

The principal, Donald Jackson, estimated that up to a fifth of the 775 students live without parents.

“Basically, they are raising themselves, because there is no authority figure in the home,” Mr. Jackson said. “If I call for a parent because I’m having an issue, I may be getting an aunt, who may be at the oldest 20, 21. What type of governance, what type of structure is in the home, if this is the living conditions?”

After Hurricane Katrina the loss of homes and jobs caused many already fragile families to break apart. And the failure of every level of government to re-establish New Orleans as a viable city turned what might have been a temporary disruption into long-range social disintegration.

Of the 128 schools in the city, fewer half have reopened. The state took over many of them after the storm. That change, hailed at first as a bright beginning, has proven to be partly stillborn, as teachers, textbooks and supplies came up drastically short in the state-run schools.

The McDonogh library has no books. State officials, fearing mold, threw out all of them.

Rundown before the storm, the school buildings are now even more battered. The stalls in a girls’ restroom have no doors.

We could, if we wanted to be anal, argue about how much of the fault and responsibility lies with local and state government, and how much lies with federal government. The fact is that Louisiana is a poor state that lacks the resources to recover from a disaster on the scale of Katrina. And the failure of a major city like New Orleans affects all of us, directly or indirectly. The nation, not just New Orleans, needed local, state, and federal government to work together to help New Orleans recover as quickly as possible.

Instead, we got grandstanding.

For all of Bush’s talk about how he wants “local folks” to be in charge of hurricane recovery, the federal government has kept most of the project under its own inept control. As water still stood in the streets of New Orleans, the feds began to cut sweetheart deals with its pet contractors/contributors. Perfectly capable local companies were overlooked in favor of companies from as far away as Alaska that (ah-HEM) just happened to have close relationships to the Washington Republican Party establishment. And these contractors answer to their buddies in Washington, not to officials in New Orleans or Louisiana. And as a result, billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted by fraud and abuse. (See, “His Majesty to Visit One of the Lesser Colonies“; “Life Lessons“; and “The Quintessential Bush.”)

And the lives of the young people of New Orleans are getting thoroughly bleeped up.

Government did too much, all right. It did too much of the wrong thing. But it didn’t do enough of the right thing.

Here’s a story by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Jonathan Weisman in today’s Washington Post that provides another example of misplaced priorities:

As part of their midterm election push, House Democrats are promoting a wide-ranging legislative agenda that would add tens of billions of dollars a year to the federal budget for the military, homeland security and education yet still impose a new budget restraint that would make it harder to widen the annual deficit. …

… “”It’s schizophrenia in ’06 is what it is,” said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), a member of the Budget Committee. “You cannot balance the budget by vastly increasing spending.”

Congressman McHenry, btw, was identified by Ari Berman as one of the five Congress critters most likely to keep alive the corrupt legacy of Tom DeLay:

Patrick McHenry (age 30). The youngest member of the 109th Congress, McHenry is the “it” boy of the GOP establishment. DeLay recently named McHenry one of his potential successors, an endorsement the freshman accepted enthusiastically. “I’m blown away,” McHenry told the Washington Times. “I’m so excited that Tom DeLay would say that about me”–a fitting compliment to a pupil who’s earned a reputation as the party’s “attack-dog-in-training.” DeLay was the first Washington pol to contact McHenry after he won the Republican primary in North Carolina’s rural 10th Congressional district, promptly sending his campaign $10,000. Upon election, DeLay shepherded McHenry through Washington, with cushy seats on the Budget and Financial Services committees, a communications position within the GOP’s fundraising arm and a role in Blunt’s whip operation. McHenry returned the favors by attacking House minority leader Nancy Pelosi for alleged travel violations and by voting, along with just nineteen other Republicans, to rewrite House ethics rules permanently to insulate DeLay. McHenry’s clearly a quick learner: He’s hired Grover Norquist’s press secretary and dated a former assistant of Karl Rove.

Let’s be sure we all understand one thing clearly: The single biggest cause of our current budget deficit is Bush’s tax cuts. The budget deficit didn’t come about because the United States, still the richest nation in the world, squandered money on education. It came about because of the bleeping tax cuts, and after that because of corruption and pork.

As you can see from this pie chart, the second biggest drain on national spending is “Defense, Homeland Security and International.” (International what isn’t clear.) But don’t forget that we’re dumping $2 billion a week into the bleeping war in Iraq, not to mention spending money to protect petting zoos in Indiana, while cutting spending for security in the major cities most likely to be struck by terrorism. And might I add, missile defense? It might be that we are spending enough money on “defense, homeland security and international” already; we’re just spending it in stupid ways.

And if the Republican “defense, homeland security and international” budget isn’t generously larded with kickbacks and quid pro quos, I will eat my sneakers.

The Dems want to institute a pay-as-you-go system, in which any new spending must be offset by budget cuts or tax increases. Apparently Republicans disagree with this idea. Why? Given that they’ve hardly been examples of fiscal restraint, they should be grilled mercilessly on this point. Too bad we don’t have an independent, professional news media any more. Reporters used to be good at that sort of thing.

Anyway, as Birnbaum and Weisman at WaPo explain,

Democratic leaders dispute the accusation and have been talking up Six for ’06. The plan would allocate billions of dollars to build up the military, subsidize student loans and bolster port security. It would raise the minimum wage, make college tuition payments tax-deductible, repeal oil-company tax breaks and expand incentives for personal savings accounts, among many other provisions.

The program would prohibit the House from approving new spending or tax measures that widen the budget deficit. It would do that by restoring budget rules requiring that all future spending increases and tax cuts be offset by equivalent tax hikes or spending cuts.

“It’s a road map to how Democrats would govern” if they win a majority in the House, said Jennifer Crider, spokeswoman for Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.).

Sooner or later President Bush’s tax cuts are going to have to be rolled back. In spite of the fact that President Clinton proved tax increases don’t kill the economy, Republicans will wail and shriek that the economy is dooooooooned if the wealthy are forced to pay their fair share of the tax burden. We can’t afford to pay for education because, you know, Lord and Lady Lah-Dee-Dah wouldn’t be able to buy a second yacht. And that takes jobs away from yacht builders.

But experience shows us that investing in education brings substantial returns.

Purdue University President Martin C. Jischke:

The enormous economic growth and social advancements that fueled the 20th century took place predominantly after World War II. That is when the G.I. Bill educated people in the emerging technologies of the day.

Who were these people?

They were people like Kenneth Johnson, who grew up on remote farms in Arkansas and Missouri and went to a one-room schoolhouse surrounded by mud. He came to Purdue on the G.I. Bill, graduated with a degree in engineering, and went on to help revolutionize airplane engine technology working for General Electric.

They were people like Billy Christensen, who finished his studies at Purdue in 1950 on the G.I. Bill and took a job with a punch card company. He went on to become vice president and general manager of the international arm of that company — IBM.

They were people like Bill Rose, who barely survived the Depression before he went to war and then came to Purdue on the G.I. Bill fresh out of the Navy. He graduated and took a job in the Joint Long-Range Proving Ground at the Banana River Naval Station. We know it today as the Kennedy Space Center.

The G.I. Bill was an investment in people and education that has paid for itself many times over.

It’s obvious that development of new technologies is critical to economic growth these days. While I don’t begrudge anyone a good job in the yacht-building industry, it makes no sense to place the discretionary spending of the super-rich (who, after all, could buy that second yacht in France) ahead of invention, technological development, and entrepreneurship here in the U.S. Yet that’s what Republican tax policies do. And as more and more of the nation’s wealth gets tied up in paying interest on the money we owe China, less and less money will be available for things like education and business loans. This is no way to run an economy.

Much of rightie hysteria over “big government” and the myth of the tax-and-spend liberals can be traced to a backlash against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, as I explained here. Although American conservatives have always been allergic to entitlement spending, during the New Deal and post World War II era — when most of the beneficiaries were white — a majority of Americans took a more progressive view. But in the 1960s, conservative politicians successfully planted the idea that “welfare” was just a transfer of white tax dollars into black pockets, and suddenly white America decided that government programs (like the ones that had paid for their educations and subsidized their low-cost mortgages) were bad. Ronald Reagan, with his “welfare queen” stories, milked that notion for all it was worth. But I think we may finally have reached a point at which race-baiting just doesn’t work the way it used to, and white middle-class Americans are uncomfortable and insecure enough that they may be ready to listen to some facts. And the facts are that, in the long run, investing in ourselves is good for the economy. Conversely, cutting any Americans off from education and opportunity is bad for the economy, and will keep all of us poorer in the years to come.

Back to Bruce Reed at Slate:

Call it the Wal-Mart Effect. Independents and Perotistas pointed toward the kind of government Americans would get under Clinton: more for less.

Bush’s approach has been just the opposite—less for more. The federal government has gotten visibly bigger, with deficits that squandered the surplus and have added more than a trillion dollars to the national debt. A study by Paul Light of the Brookings Institution shows that the number of federal contractors has ballooned by 2.5 million over the past four years, a 50 percent increase. After shrinking by 400,000 under Clinton, the federal work force is growing again as well.

Bush would dearly love to blame the return of big government on Congress, Democrats, and the terrorists. But a big government that costs more and succeeds less is at the core of Bushism. Bush ran a campaign that promised not to cut government and runs a government that doesn’t try to solve problems. Where the president has expanded government’s reach—from Medicare to the Department of Homeland Security—it hasn’t gone well. Where we needed government to succeed—from managing Iraq to responding to Katrina—the Bush administration did a Hack of a job.

Seems to me we shouldn’t be talking about “big” or “little” government; we should be talking about “smart” or “stupid” government.

Facts and Fictions, Part II

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Following up the last post — what got me started on righties and reality was this TAP article by Brad Reed.

As the midterm elections approach, many conservatives are feeling betrayed by one of their most important allies in the war on terror: Battlestar Galactica.

To which I thought, WTF?

I just recently got into Galactica. I’ve been following season 3 while catching up with seasons 1 and 2 through Netflix. It’s entertaining. However, it has never occurred to me to incorporate Galactica into some inner political fantasy life. I keep real current events and television fiction in separate boxes, thanks.

I guess I just don’t think like a rightie.

In the series, a fleet of space ships carrying about 50,000 humans is fleeing evil killer robots, called Cylons, after the Cylons massacred most of the human species. Apparently righties came to identify with the fleeing humans and to associate Cylons with the dreaded Islamofascists.

National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, who writes regularly about Galactica’s politics on NRO’s group blog, The Corner, also picked up on parallels between the show and the war on terror. Goldberg took particular glee in attacking Galactica’s anti-war movement, which he said consisted of “radical peaceniks” and “peace-terrorists” who “are clearly a collection of whack jobs, fifth columnists and idiots.” Goldberg also praised several characters for trying to rig a presidential election. “I liked that the good guys wanted to steal the election and, it turns out, they were right to want to,” wrote Goldberg. Stolen elections, evil robots, crazed hippies … what more could a socially inept right-winger want from a show?

I must not have gotten to the part about the anti-war movement. Season 2 did have a storyline about a couple of Cylon prisoners who were subjected to Abu Ghraib-type abuse, but otherwise in the first two seasons I didn’t see much resemblance to the Global War on Terror. At the very beginning of the series the Cylons, with huge technological and military advantages over the humans, won a total war over humans. The few humans who escaped are trying to haul their butts out of harm’s way, but the Cylons keep catching up to them. An intriguing twist is that the humans lived in a distant star system, and they are trying to get back to Earth, which they know about only from religion and myths. And that’s the series. That doesn’t seem to me much like our current asymmetrical war against Muslim extremists, particularly if you assume humans = Americans and Cylons = terrorists. (But what does it tell us that righties associated America with characters who are already defeated and helpless to do much but flee their more powerful enemies? Hmmmm?)

Brad Reed continues,

But alas, this love affair between Galactica and the right was not to last: in its third season, the show has morphed into a stinging allegorical critique of America’s three-year occupation of Iraq. The trouble started at the end of the second season, when humanity briefly escaped the Cylons and settled down on the tiny planet of New Caprica. The Cylons soon returned and quickly conquered the defenseless humans. But instead of slaughtering everyone, the Cylons decided to take a more enlightened path by “benevolently occupying” the planet and imposing their preferred way of life by gunpoint. The humans were predictably not enthused about their allegedly altruistic rulers, and they immediately launched an insurgency against them using improvised explosive devices and suicide bombers.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think the screenwriters set out to make Galactica an allegory of the war on terror, one way or another. I think they set out to tell a good story. (Of course, I’m also one of those purists who insists The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory of World War II.) It is worth noting that the series is based on an earlier (and dreadfully boring, as I remember) series produced in 1978. Certainly the screenwriters have added elements from current events — torture of prisoners, suicide bombings — and some storylines do seem allegorical. But interpreting the overall series as pure allegory just doesn’t work, whether you are rooting for the humans or the Cylons.

Anyway, “Galacticons” like Goldberg and John Podheretz are mourning the program’s betrayal of their fantasies. And a rightie fan named Michael who has dedicated a blog to Galactica wrote:

Has this show jumped the shark? The writers are using current events in the Middle East as the source for their material, but putting the humans in the position of being the terrorists. The humans even resort to suicide bombings.

Terrorist tactics only work against the United States and Israel because we’re too good to wipe all of them out. The Cylons, on the other hand, had no problems with destroying twenty billion humans, why wouldn’t they destroy the remaining fifty thousand?

Terrorism also requires that the side being terrorized cares about dying. But the Cylons don’t care if they die. They just get reincarnated into a new body.

Why are people so pissed if the Cylons “massacre” two hundred humans? Hello McFly! The Cylons already massacred twenty billion.

I don’t think this storyline works at all.

I think somebody needs a more active social life. I also think the season 3 storyline works fine, if you aren’t married to the idea that the program is an allegory of the war on terror and can just enjoy it as science fiction. But that’s me. (BTW, if you’re familiar with the series, this post will amaze you. Not in a good way, however.)

Brad Reed documents a number of other recent connections between rightie politics and popular fiction, and concludes,

The most notable thing about the Galacticons is that even when they aren’t directly referencing science fiction, they still sound like total space cadets when discussing American military power. As they understand it, America is an omnipotent level-20 Warmage with 19 Strength and 20 Charisma who can wipe out entire armies of mariliths, gold dragons, and goblinoids with the flick of a wrist.

During a recent debate on Meet the Press, Tim Russert asked former GOP House Majority Leader Newt Gingrich if having 130,000 of our troops stuck in Iraq had reduced our ability to deal effectively with Iran and North Korea. “Only in our minds,” Gingrich replied. Glenn Reynolds, the prominent transhumanist conservative blogger, once wrote that the problem with Bush’s approach to the war on terror wasn’t that he got our military stuck in an Iraqi civil war, but rather that he “hasn’t been vigorous enough in toppling governments and invading countries in that region.” And William Kristol, one of America’s preeminent sci-fi foreign policy thinkers, said in the aftermath of Israel’s failed bombing campaign against Hezbollah that American should take the opportunity to launch a preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “Why wait?” asked the dweeby Galacticon sage. Such fantasies of military conquest are particularly galling since the Galacticons really don’t seem to think that waging multiple preemptive wars would have any adverse consequences. The world, it seems, is their Risk board.

Of course, it’s easy to talk tough about invading multiple nations if you’re not the one doing any of the work. The thrill the Galacticons get from watching the Iraq war on their TVs is the same thrill the typical Mountain Dew-swilling reject feels watching Battlestar Galactica; it’s only fun for them because they’re not going through it themselves. But this is sadly what characterizes much of Bush’s approach to the war on terror, which has been less about real sacrifice than cheap voyeuristic thrills and empty feel-good platitudes — combined with foolhardy notions of American omnipotence in the world. While the outright buffoonery of the Galacticon jingonauts is certainly amusing, the overall Galacticazation of American war policy is anything but.

Many have remarked on the rich fantasy lives of chickenhawks. See, for example, this Think Progress post and my comments on a Mark Steyn column. Digby wrote awhile back that many righties seem to be living a vicarious fantasy life of war-movie glory through the troops:

We are dealing with a group of right wing glory seekers who chose long ago to eschew putting themselves on the line in favor of tough talk and empty posturing — the Vietnam chickenhawks and their recently hatched offspring of the new Global War On Terrorism. These are men (mostly) driven by the desire to prove their manhood but who refuse to actually test their physical courage. Neither are they able to prove their virility as they are held hostage by prudish theocrats and their own shortcomings. So they adopt the pose of warrior but never actually place themselves under fire. This is a psychologically difficult position to uphold. Bullshitting yourself is never without a cost. …

… Playing laptop Pattons at full volume, supporting the president and the entire power structure of the government is their only way of proving to themselves that they are warriors. They are damaged by their own contradictory past and as a result they cannot see their way through the haze of emotional turmoil to seek out and find real solutions to the problem of terrorism. They lash out with trash talk and threats and constant references to their own resolve because they are afraid. They’ve always been afraid.

I’ve read that children like to pretend they are superheroes because it calms their fears. They can pretend they are not small and helpless. Some psychologists say that a retreat into superhero fantasies feels good to adults, too:

Legendary sociologist Norbert Elias suggested that in an increasingly structured society, fantasy books, games and movies create arenas for the “controlled decontrolling” of emotions. It’s not socially acceptable to duel that surly human resources director with a stapler gun at 20 paces, and destroying a castle with a trebuchet isn’t an option for the average white-collar worker. Instead, against a backdrop of magic and myth, heroic fantasy allows us to prove our mettle by saving some parallel world from easily identifiable bad guys.

But which bad guys? Let’s go back to Brad Reed for a moment:

Last year, a Star Trek rerun inspired Minnesota Star-Tribune columnist and warblogger James Lileks to concoct a plan that would eliminate any liberals who opposed abusing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. “It’s time to institute Disintegration Chambers in our major American cities,” wrote Lileks, referring to a Star Trek episode that featured two tribes who preferred to fight wars by disintegrating their own people rather than sending them into live combat. Even though the episode was actually an allegory about the perverse methods governments use to shield their people from the brutal costs of war, Lileks took quite a fancy to the idea of forced disintegration, especially for his ideological foes.

“Here’s the deal,” he wrote. “We decide what constitutes torture, and identify it as the following: insufficient air conditioning, excess air conditioning, sleep deprivation, being chained to the floor, and other forms of psychological stress … Those who disagree with these techniques must sign a record that registers their complaints. When a terrorist finally spills the details on a forthcoming attack on, say, Chicago, the people who signed the register and live in Chicago are required to report to the disintegration chamber.”

Lileks probably believes this column was humorous. But it isn’t. As David Neiwert has documented in this and many other posts, eliminationism has become “a dominating feature of right-wing rhetoric.” I infer righties spend a lot of time fantasizing about suppressing, ejecting, or terminating us. In truth, righties have little faith in the processes of democracy; they want control.

And why do they want control? Is it because, deep down, they are fearful little weenies who feel helpless and weak, and who want a superhero to save them from the scary Cylons and Muslims and liberals?

* * *

Sorta kinda related: At Slate, William Saletan (who, truth be told, has had his own problems separating fact from fiction) discusses the fantasy world of Rush Limbaugh.

I once had a friend who listened to Rush Limbaugh three hours a day. He was a Republican operative. He sat in my apartment, wearing headphones, while I worked. He swore that if I put on the headphones for 10 minutes, I’d be hooked. So I put them on.

Inside the headphones was another world. Everyone in this world thought the same way, except liberals, and they were only cartoon characters, to be defeated as though in a video game. In the real world, my friend was unemployed and had been staying with me, rent-free, for two months. But inside the headphones, he could laugh about welfare bums instead of pounding the pavement.

Somebody said recently that the whole point of Rush Limbaugh is to help righties avoid reality. You can say that about the entire VRWC echo chamber, of course. But Saletan documents that Limbaugh has a hard time separating real life from stuff he’s seen on TV. Seems to be a common affliction.

Facts and Fictions, Part I

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About a month ago I wrote a post that started with this quote:

Win or lose, the GOP talks about three core principles: less government, lower taxes, and a strong military. It doesn’t matter that, when in charge, Republican politicians have been known to grow government, raise taxes, and stretch the military too thin. Party leaders have decided that less government, lower taxes, and a strong military is what they stand for and what they run on. That’s their story and they’re sticking with it for good reason — because more often that not, it has helped them win. [Bill Scher, Wait! Don’t Move to Canada! (Rodale, 2006), p. 13.]

I asked if we might come up with our own short list of “ideas” to run on. I see that LeonJohn Podesta asked a similar question:

“The question I’m asked most often is, When are we getting our eight words?” Podesta said. Conservatives, he went on, “have their eight words in a bumper sticker: Less government. Lower taxes. Less welfare. And so on. Where’s our eight-word bumper sticker?”

My post generated some rich discussion, but no “eight words in a bumper sticker.” I’ve been thinking about this since, and realized that everything I come up with is much less specific than what the Right runs on. For example, where the Right always runs on cutting taxes, I would run on responsible taxes. Whether taxes should be raised or lowered, IMO, depends on a whole lot of factors that are always changing. Factors to consider include what people need from their government and what’s good for the economic health of the nation, both short and long term. There is a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. And there’s a time to lower taxes, and a time to raise them. But the phrase “responsible taxes” doesn’t mean anything unless I explain what I mean, so we’re already over the eight words.

Of course, I always want to pin conservatives down on what they mean by “less” government, since many of them seem OK with big, strong, intrusive government in matters of sex and death. If you think about it, they seem to want government to go away only where money is involved. And I’m all for a “strong” military, but by that I don’t mean keeping the military-industrial complex gorged on no-bid contracts and sweetheart deals. I mean a military strong enough to defend the nation.

Leon Podesta said that coming up with eight words in a bumper sticker is harder for liberals, “because we believe in a lot more things.” I don’t think that’s true; righties certainly seem to have beliefs up the wazoo. Liberals get slammed because we don’t have beliefs. For example, check out what what Sebastian Mallaby wrote in the Washington Post awhile back:

After years of single-party government, the prospect of a Democratic majority in the House ought to feel refreshing. But even with Republicans collapsing in a pile of sexual sleaze, I just can’t get excited. Most Democrats in Congress seem bereft of ideas or the courage to stand up for them. They clearly want power, but they have no principles to guide their use of it.

In fact, Dems are brimming over with ideas; just check out Podesta’s think tank if you want some examples. Do the Dems as a party have clearly articulated principles to guide their use of power? That’s a harder question to answer. But do Republicans? Not that I’ve seen. Republicans have rhetoric; they have talking points; they have campaign slogans. Principles, not so much. But Republicans get a pass on the principle thing. In the same way, the Democratic Party is perpetually being challenged to come up with a plan for Iraq; individual Dems have come up with a number of plans, but since the party hasn’t rallied around any one plan, this doesn’t count. But Republicans as a party have no discernible “plan,” either, other than “stay the course.” And now some of them are disowning even that.

But as I’ve been combing through commentary this morning I’m struck by the fact that many commenters (like Mallaby) use words like idea, principle, and belief loosely and interchangeably as if they were synonyms, and of course they are not. Fuzzy use of language usually connotes fuzzy thinking. Why is it that Republicans get credit for having ideas even though they haven’t had a genuinely new idea since the McKinley Administration? Why is it Republicans get credit for having principles even though their words and deeds rarely meet up in the same ball park?

Many liberals argue that righties have us beat in the language and framing departments, and I think that’s part of it, but I say there’s a more fundamental reason: righties have a strong ideology, and lefties don’t.

I just stumbled upon this very lovely quote —

    “The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.” -Bertrand Russell

Contrast this to our current crop of American conservatives, who remain steadfastly loyal to their ideas even after trial and empirical evidence reveal they don’t work. Supply side economics comes to mind.

I’m not saying ideologies are better than no-ideology; just the opposite. I am leery of ideology. The dictionary defines ideology thus —

1. The body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual, group, class, or culture. 2. A set of doctrines or beliefs that form the basis of a political, economic, or other system.

— But I think ideology is better understood as an interface to reality. An ideology makes interacting with reality easier, because it eliminates much of the detail and limits one’s choices.

For example, if a non-ideological person wants to understand why there is so much poverty in New Orleans, he has to piece together myriad historical, cultural, political, and economic factors, some of which may be unique to New Orleans. But an ideologue can click on the drop-down menu for social problems, then choose poverty, and get a simple answer. Easy as pie.

Simple answers have the advantage of being easier to explain and to understand than complicated answers. This gives politicians with simple answers a strong advantage over those whose answers require some explaining. A person with simple answers also can seem more certain about what he says than someone who understands all the ambiguities and complications and mitigating factors.

And, my dears, there are always ambiguities and complications and mitigating factors. Pretending they aren’t there doesn’t make them go away.

Put another way, instead of learning more about a issue to understand it, ideologues eliminate factors until the issue becomes easily understandable. The fact that the “understanding” may have little to do with reality is of no consequence. You see this phenomenon in righties’ quest for “moral clarity.” The way one achieves “moral clarity” is not through deep thinking or thorough study; it is through reducing complex issues to a simple “good versus evil” equation. And this equation is created by eliminating any factors that don’t return the desired answer.

For example, “moral clarity” on the abortion issue usually means designating the embryo as “good” and the woman who wants to abort as “bad.” In order to be “clear” the ideologue sees the embryo as innocent and blameless, but the “bad” woman is narcissistic and immoral. Crushing personal circumstances or genetic anomalies are dismissed as “inconveniences” that virtuous women would accept without complaint. Factors that don’t fit into the equation are dismissed as unimportant, in other words.

To be fair, there are lefties who dismiss the embryo as a “growth” or a “parasite,” which is another easy way to achieve “clarity” on the issue. To my mind, these people are playing the same mental games righties are playing. It’s not an honest way to look at the issue.

Ideologies can be found all along the political spectrum. But neither conservatism nor liberalism are in themselves ideologies. In some people, conservatism or liberalism are no more than inclinations or attitudes that cause them to sympathize with one set of values more than another. If you look at political conservatism around the globe and over time, you find all manner of competing and contradictory ideas attached to it. And many Americans have called themselves conservative without having to believe that taxes must always be cut or that abortions must be stopped at all cost.

But right now, in the U.S., most of the Right is strongly ideological, but most of the Left isn’t. Most of us who call ourselves “liberals” or “progressives” or “Democrats” these days do not have simple doctrines and beliefs and dogmas that tell us whether taxes should go up or down, for example. Instead, we’ve got policy wonks studying trends and crunching numbers. Most of us in favor of reproduction rights are concerned about the impact of abortion and birth control bans on the lives and health of women, and our concerns are based on real-world experience. We think government ought to be responsive to the needs and desires of citizens, but we don’t assume what those needs and desires are always going to be.

Thus, we have “nuances.” We lack “clarity.” We aren’t always sure we are right. We can’t reduce our ideas into simple slogans and equations. The Right can do these things, however. While the Left consults maps and debates diverse routes, the Right knows exactly which way to march.

But then, so do lemmings.

See also: The Anonymous Liberal, “Straw Man Politics and The Great Rhetorical Divide“; Robert Parry, “Whose Moral Clarity?“

Righties Can’t Read

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I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again; righties have the reading comprehension skills of a turnip. Today’s example:

There’s a profile of Jim Webb in today’s Washington Post that plays up Webb’s southwest Virginia roots. It begins this way:

About a year ago, before he was running for the Senate, James Webb took a colleague to the mountains of southwest Virginia to do some research for a movie they were working on.

Rob Reiner , meet my cousin Jewel and her husband, Buck. Jewel made a home-cooked meal for Webb and his producer-director friend. She pointed across the way to a nearby hollow and said:

“Ah wuz bawn rat ovah theyah.” That’s Reiner on the phone from Los Angeles, doing a mountain accent.

At night, Webb took Reiner to a rustic auditorium. There was bluegrass and flatfoot dancing.

“Incredible experience,” Reiner says.

Nostalgia kicked in as soon as I read this. I had a Great-Aunt Jewel who lived with Great-Uncle Carl on a little farm in the mountains, and I recall a dance — I’m not sure of the venue, but it might have been a church basement — where there was old-time fiddlin’ and clog dancing. It was explained to me once that the “clog” style common to the Ozarks is more Celtic — think Irish dancing — and the “flatfoot” style of the eastern mountains comes from English country dancing. I’m not going to swear that’s the truth, but it could be.

There may be few places in the country more foreign to Hollywood than Gate City, Va., and much of Webb’s livelihood has been to translate one culture for another. His dad’s family came out of these hollows, though Webb grew up on military bases all over the country. Over the course of his career, in books and more recently in screenplays, Webb, 60, has been writing about the dignity of his people — the gun-loving, country-music-singing, working-class whites of Scotch-Irish descent who fight in wars, staff the nation’s factories and shop its Wal-Marts.

“This people gave our country great things, including its most definitive culture,” Webb writes in his most recent book.

He knows that some folks might call his people rednecks. We pity those folks if Jim Webb is around when they say that.

The profile, by Libby Copeland, continues to describe Webb’s career in the Marines and in the Reagan Administration, where he was Secretary of the Navy. He is also a prolific writer; among other works he has published six novels and a book of nonfiction about Scotch-Irish culture. He has done some screenwriting as well, which the Allen campaign has tried to exploit by tying Webb to the “culture of Hollywood.” (And Ronald Reagan wasn’t tied to the “culture of Hollywood”?)

The funny thing is, Webb — a Democrat who became a Republican in the ’70s and a Democrat again in recent years — has been a largely conservative force both in movies and on the printed page. At various times he has eviscerated liberals, feminists, elites, academics and those who protested the Vietnam War. He has criticized Hollywood for its treatment of his people.

“His people” being the small-town and rural folk of southwest Virginia, note.

The project that took Webb and Reiner to the hills of southwestern Virginia is a script they’d been working on for a movie about this very subject. “Whiskey River” centers on an Iraq war soldier who hails from a world much like Gate City, Va., and what Reiner calls the “culture of service” this soldier comes from. It is also, Reiner says, about the fundamental unfairness of a war in which “only certain people have to sacrifice.”

The notion of his people’s sacrifice in wartime is a theme Webb has returned to again and again in his writing. In his 2004 book, “Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America,” Webb writes that the Scotch-Irish “have fed dedicated soldiers to this nation far beyond their numbers in every war.” In interviews, he recalls starting law school in 1972 and discovering that others were in “ethnocentric retreat.” Everyone else knew who they were and where they came from, everyone else had ethnic pride, but the identity of Webb’s own culture had been lost. He says his peers labeled him a white man of privilege, a WASP.

This is something I relate to, big-time. First, hillbilly culture — I should say “cultures,” because as the dancing styles illustrate there are distinctions — has never been properly recognized as a culture. And now the distinctions are mostly gone, and mountain cultures have dissipated to become nearly indistinguishable from small-town and rural cultures throughout most of America. That didn’t used to be so.

And I hate being mistaken for a WASP, even though I pass for one most of the time. I function in WASP culture (I think) because over the years, by trial and error, I learned to do so. (I had the advantage of being able to speak standard English. Nothing more clearly separates hard-core hillbillies from middle-class white folks than noun-verb agreement.)

In the decades since, Webb has studied the migrations of his people, exulting in their fighting history and puzzling over their entrenched poverty.

Entrenched white poverty is mostly rural and hidden away where most folks don’t see it. There are parts of the Ozarks in which families have been on welfare since they invented welfare, and whose residents can no more function in standard middle-class white culture than they can fly.

Then the profile describes Webb’s novels. I haven’t read his work, but I take it from the description that Webb uses fiction to explore the moral ambiguities and brutality of war. Naturally the Allen campaign is combing through his work, looking for anything he’s written they can twist around to use against him.

We’re getting to the punch line.

In a recent interview in the back of his campaign RV, Webb talks about how Hollywood has lampooned the Scotch-Irish. He says he is sick of this story line. For too long, he says, poor Southern whites have been one of the few groups it’s still safe to make fun of.

We are now more than 30 paragraphs into a story whose theme, restated over and over, is Jim Webb’s quest to bring respect to the lives and culture of “his people,” a group often disparaged as “rednecks.”

“Towel-heads and rednecks — of which I am one. If you write that word, please say that. I mean, I don’t use that pejoratively, I use it defensively. Towel-heads and rednecks became the easy villains in so many movies out there.“

Obviously — obvious if you have standard reading comprehension skills and take in the context of the entire profile — he’s saying that he hates the way filmmakers sterotype Middle Easterners and the subset of white Americans identified as “rednecks,” whatever that is these days. And naturally some rightie bloggers twisted this quote into meaning something else. Here we have Idiot #1:

“Towel-heads?” It’s on Page 3 of this Post story. I think that’s what they call a buried lede. I’m eagerly waiting the 188 Post stories on this slur. You know, the one that doesn’t require knowing a foreign language or finding three anonymous witnesses from 1972 to corroborate it. Yeah, I won’t hold my breath, either. Yeesh, if you’re gonna get your ire up about these things, I demand even-handed ire.

Idiot #2:

In August, Democrats and even some Republicans called upon Senator Allen to apologize for using the term “macaca”, a word with no meaning to the majority of Virginians but one that some took offense to. Senator Allen personally took it upon himself to quickly publicly apologize for the comment and even call the gentleman he directed it towards.

James Webb has now used a well known term that derides an entire ethnic group not just in Virginia or America but the world. I am willing to grant that he mis-spoke. That deserves not excuses but an apology.

Idiot #3:

I’m the last person who wants to be the PC language police around here, but can anyone imagine the media’s reaction if George Allen said something like this? As Tim Graham points out, the number of Post articles, news stories and editorial features with the word “Macaca” in them is up to 92!

Can we take up a collection and send these people somewhere for remedial reading classes?

Cowards

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The fundamental question is this: Why would any American citizen support the “2006 Military Commission Act” that President Bush signed into law today?

Let’s review:

The Act empowers President Bush to declare not just aliens, but also U.S. citizens, “unlawful enemy combatants.” An American citizen who speaks out against Bush’s policies could be designated an “unlawful enemy combatant” by Bush. The Act empowers the President to round up and incarcerate anyone, citizen or non-citizen, who he determines has given “material support” to terrorists. The Act strips habeas corpus rights from detained aliens who have been declared enemy combatants. The U.S. will continue to round up innocent and guilty alike and hold them indefinitely without giving them a way to prove their innocence. For more on how the Act strips American citizens and others of basic rights, see Marjorie Cohn, “American Prison Camps Are on the Way.”

Regarding torture: Reasonable people might disagree over the distinction between “cruelty” and “torture.” For example, Stephen Rickard argues in today’s WaPo that the Act authorizes cruelty but not torture. I assume he refers to definitions of torture and cruelty in international law; personally, I don’t see a difference. But he also says,

[The CIA] reportedly was using waterboarding (a terrifying mock execution in which a prisoner is strapped to a board and convinced he is being drowned), dousing naked prisoners with water in 50-degree cold and forcing shackled prisoners to stand for 40 straight hours. …

…The United States has prosecuted every one of these techniques as a war crime. So when Congress passed the McCain amendment last fall banning cruel treatment, CIA interrogators reportedly stopped working. Vice President Cheney had sought an exemption for the CIA — but didn’t get one. The administration apparently pushed the interrogators hard to resume their tactics, saying these techniques were still legal, but the CIA refused.

It seems the agency had learned an important lesson from the infamous Justice Department “torture memo,” which claimed that to be deemed “torture” a procedure had to be capable of causing major organ failure or death. The administration repudiated the memo when it became public. The lesson? Secret, contorted legal opinions don’t provide any real protection to CIA officers.

So the CIA demanded “clarity” — from Congress. No wonder President Bush practically sprinted to the cameras to begin spinning his “compromise” with Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on the Military Commissions Act. He needs to convince CIA interrogators that they now have congressional carte blanche.

So did the Act signed today do the trick? Rickard says it doesn’t, and that if the interrogators give in to White House pressure and resume brutal interrogations, they’ll be at greater legal risk than before.

The administration is trying to convince CIA officers that they won’t be indicted — or at least convicted. But the CIA demanded clarity, not more ambiguity and “plausible deniability.”

At the end of the day all the president can honestly tell CIA interrogators is this: “The law has some loose language. We’ll give you another memo. Don’t worry.”

Sure.

And torture doesn’t work, anyway. Bush wants us to believe that the “tough” techniques that may or may not be torture has yielded vital information that has saved American lives, but there is plenty of indication that’s not so.

Dan Froonkin writes,

The new law vaguely bans torture — but makes the administration the arbiter of what is torture and what isn’t. It allows the president to imprison indefinitely anyone he decides falls under a wide-ranging new definition of unlawful combatant. It suspends the Great Writ of habeas corpus for detainees. It allows coerced testimony at trial. It immunizes retroactively interrogators who may have engaged in torture.

Here’s what Bush had to say at his signing ceremony in the East Room: “The bill I sign today helps secure this country, and it sends a clear message: This nation is patient and decent and fair, and we will never back down from the threats to our freedom.”

But that may not be the “clear message” the new law sends most people.

Here’s the clear message the law sends to the world: America makes its own rules. The law would apparently subject terror suspects to some of the same sorts of brutal interrogation tactics that have historically been prosecuted as war crimes when committed against Americans.

Here’s the clear message to the voters: This Congress is willing to rubberstamp pretty much any White House initiative it sees as being in its short-term political interests. (And I don’t just mean the Republicans; 12 Senate Democrats and 32 House Democrats voted for the bill as well.)

Here’s the clear message to the Supreme Court: Review me.

I ask again: why would anyone support Bush’s position? Today righties are snarling and snapping like cornered animals at anyone who criticizes the torture bill. We nay-sayers are “whiny hippies” throwing a “moonbat hissy fit.”

A more temperate rightie declared “This is undeniably a victory for those of us that believe we need to aggressively wage the war against jihadism.” This and other rightie commenters continue to follow the White House in blind faith that the Bush Administration knows what it is doing and will use the unprecedented power it has gained wisely. Given the Bush Administration’s record — that’s insane.

Righties like to talk tough, but peel enough layers off ’em and you’ll find a sniveling little coward crouching and whimpering at their core. Deep down, they want Dear Leader to have dictatorial power so that he can protect them. Like any mob in the grip of hysteria, they have lost reason and inhibition, and they attack anyone who gets in their way.

They’re cowards, they’re out of control, and they must be stopped.

Fill in the Punch Line

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How many Neocons does it take to screw in a light bulb? One to hold the bulb and nine to rotate the ladder, plus 300,000 ground troops to invade Iran.

If you can think of other answers, add ’em.

How about these:

You may have heard Neocons are complete idiots, but that’s not true. Some parts are missing.

You can tell which kids will grow up to be Neocons. They’re the ones outsmarted by Silly Putty.

I started to create a Photoshop pic of Kristol and Hume wearing “I’m with stupid” T-shirts, but decided that would be redundant.