Category Archives: conservatism

Chickens and Straw Men and Hawks, Oh My

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Jeff Jacoby doesn’t want to be called a “chickenhawk.”

You hear a fair amount of that from the antiwar crowd if, like me, you support a war but have never seen combat yourself. That makes you a “chicken hawk” — one of those, as Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, defending John Kerry from his critics, put it during the 2004 presidential campaign, who “shriek like a hawk, but have the backbone of a chicken.” Kerry himself often played that card. “I’d like to know what it is Republicans who didn’t serve in Vietnam have against those of us who did,” he would sniff, casting himself as the victim of unmanly hypocrites who never wore the uniform, yet had the gall to criticize him, a decorated veteran, for his stance on the war.

“Chicken hawk” isn’t an argument. It is a slur — a dishonest and incoherent slur. It is dishonest because those who invoke it don’t really mean what they imply — that only those with combat experience have the moral authority or the necessary understanding to advocate military force.

Jacoby defends himself by scratching up a straw man argument. I, for one, would never argue that “only those with combat experience have the moral authority or the necessary understanding to advocate military force.” I don’t have combat experience, and I spout off about moral authority and military force all the time. Further, our two greatest war presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, had no combat experience. FDR was never in the military, and Old Abe claimed the most action he saw in the Illinois militia was swatting mosquitoes.

Yet Jacoby might still be a chickenhawk.

I like this definition of chickenhawk (emphasis added) —

Chickenhawk n. A person enthusiastic about war, provided someone else fights it; particularly when that enthusiasm is undimmed by personal experience with war; most emphatically when that lack of experience came in spite of ample opportunity in that person’s youth.

James Wolcott elaborates:

Those who wrestled with the decision to go to war I’m not inclined to call chickenhawks. A pro-war civilian does not automatically a chickenhawk make.

For me, the working definition of a chickenhawk is–a chickenhawk is a cheerleader. A cheerleader for war. And not necessarily just the war in Iraq, or regional war in the Mideast, but war in general. A chickenhawk glorifies war as an enterprise, enjoying the heroics inside his or her head, mocking those less enthusiastic military aggression as pacifists, appeasers (Michael Ledeen’s pet word), even traitors. Who patronize anyone with qualms, from the Quakers to the Chuck Hagel, with edgy impatience and disdain. Who treat the destruction of human life as a stupendous flourish as long as it’s the US doing the destroying–who, that is, propose “creative destruction” on a geopolitical scale as an instrument of transformation. Not to mention an opportunity to teach those desert folks in sandals a lesson upside the head.

The enthusiasm part is essential to the classification of the species pullus bellum diligo. Sometimes wars have to be fought. Sometimes people who recognize a war has to be fought have no combat experience and are not capable of combat — too old, too infirm, whatever. By themselves, these attributes do not make someone a “chickenhawk.”

As Jacoby’s argument is made of straw, just ignore it. Please also ignore Wikipedia on this matter, as the online encyclopedia gets neither the etymology or the definition of chickenhawk right. I assume a chickenhawk wrote it.

There is a big difference between acknowledging a war must be fought and being enthusiastic about it. There’s a difference between making a moral judgment for war and cheerleading. A person with no combat experience who makes a sober and reluctant decision to support war, and is unable to fight that war, is no chickenhawk. He or she may have made a wrong decision, but it wasn’t a chickenhawk’s decision.

But when you find an able-bodied enthusiastic cheerleader for war who has “other priorities” than to fight it — you’ve got yourself a chickenhawk. And I think the lowest form of chickenhawk is not only a war cheerleader who thinks himself too precious to fight; he also attacks and calls “cowardly” people who don’t support the war. Like it’s an act of courage to park one’s fat backside on the sofa and cheer the carnage on CNN.

Greg James writes in today’s San Francisco Chronicle,

You don’t have to be a psychologist to see a predictable pattern with this administration and its most vocal conservative supporters: They project one thing and do another. Or more to the point, they try to project a manly Teddy Roosevelt “rough rider” image; in reality they are a bunch of overweight middle-aged men who mostly avoid wars and real action in favor of sending others to do the dirty work.

In many ways, I suspect this is at the heart of why Iraq is going so wrong, and why our country is in such turmoil. Maybe the U.S. is finally waking up to the scare tactics, orange alerts and right-wing “talkers” and coming to terms with who they really are.

Recently, Rep. John Murtha took presidential adviser Karl Rove to task for his “cut and run” comments and called a spade a spade. He didn’t mince words as he described Rove as a fat Washington-based spin doctor who sits in an air-conditioned office and has no problem pushing a war in which he’d never die. Thank God someone finally found the guts to go after the cheerleaders and actually point out what they really are — sissies who talk tough but do little.

From President Bush all the way down, a quick look finds the “big talkers” in charge and promoting a kind of “do as I say, not as I do” agenda. As a veteran myself, it’s hard not to be outraged by this crowd. Bush, who has so vocally pushed the war in Iraq, was himself a cheerleader (yell king) in college and avoided Vietnam with a cushy job in the Air National Guard.

Vice President Dick Cheney took numerous deferments from the draft and, as the poster boy for the National Rifle Association and tough guy hunters, shot a friend in the face at close range while blasting pen-raised quail in Texas. Limbaugh, along with Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Mike Medved and the majority of right-wing radio’s most vocal “tough talkers” also fall squarely into the “did not serve” crowd.

The most offensive thing about this bunch is they have no problem attacking people such as Murtha, Sen. John Kerry, former Rep. Max Cleland and retired Gen. Eric Shinseki (the guys who actually did fight in Vietnam) while they sit around sipping lattes in their protected, mostly white, upper-class enclaves.

As with Limbaugh and his constant attacks on Clinton, you have to wonder if this isn’t actually some type of perverse psychology playing out on a national scale where the sissies actually tear into the tough guys because they’ve developed sharp tongues as a response to their own perceived shortcomings. (In this case, a lack of real courage.)

And the punch line:

I suspect the Iraq war would have had a whole lot more thought put into it if the “cheerleaders” actually had to fight rather than sitting on the sidelines talking and urging others on.

I suspect so, too.

See also: “Chickenhawk” flash video; “The new world immaturity.”

I Love New York

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Did anyone see the “Stand With Israel” rally in New York City yesterday? I did not, as I am just now hearing about it. The wondrously dim Pamela of Atlas Shrugs has photos up and gushes it was overwhelming. “Tens of thousands,” she says.

As Tbogg observes, “Next thing you know Boston will be overrun by the Irish next March 17th.”

Listen, folks, if you throw a pro-Israel rally in New York City and only tens of thousands show up, we’re not talking “overwhelming.” We’re talking “Where is everybody?” In New York City you can get tens of thousands by handing out free bagels. I’ve been to three anti-war and anti-Bush events in New York City that drew hundreds of thousands, easy.

What was overwhelming yesterday was the heat, however, which possibly discouraged many people from joining the rally. But I wasn’t there. Eyewitness accounts from lefties are welcome.

Most of the time, righties don’t like New York. They loved New York immediately after September 11, but that didn’t last long. You might remember when John McCain was dissed at the New School commencement this past May. The entire Right Blogosphere went on a “we hate New York” rampage.

Today, the righties love New York City again, because New York City rallied for Israel. But last week, Eric Alterman wrote,

I’d like to see some attention paid to the exploitation of right-wing American anti-Semitism that underlies the Bush campaign against The New York Times and the rest of what Republican Rep. Peter King called its “arrogant, elitist, left-wing agenda.” As Jon Carrol observed, “The New York Times contains the word ‘New York.’ Many members of the president’s base consider ‘New York’ to be a nifty code word for ‘Jewish.’” This anti-Times campaign reminds me of the conservative campaign to slander George Soros, which was also a sometimes explicit, usually implicit exploitation of traditional Jewish stereotypes. Remember Tony Blankley calling Soros a “robber baron” and “pirate capitalist,” and “a man who, when he was plundering the world’s currencies, in England in ’92, he caused the Southeast Asian financial crisis in ’97. He said that he has no moral responsibility for the consequences of his financial actions…. He is a self-admitted atheist; he was a Jew who figured out a way to survive the Holocaust.” (Blankley later wrote me that his comments were “both incomplete and pregnant with a malicious implication I did not intend.” It’s all here.) Anyway, there it is.

Jon Carrol’s full remarks are here:

Also, the name of the New York Times contains the word “New York.” Many members of the president’s base consider “New York” to be a nifty code word for “Jewish.” It is very nice for the president to be able to campaign against the Jews without (a) actually saying the word “Jew” and (b) without irritating the Israelis. A number of prominent Zionist groups think the New York Times is insufficiently anti-Palestinian, so they think the New York Times isn’t Jewish enough.

More on Tony Blankley’s infamous antisemitic smear of George Soros here. As Kevin Drum encapsulates,

Translation: he’s a Jew-hating Jew, he’s a greedy Jew, he’s a conniving and heartless Jew, he’s an atheistic Jew, and he’s a Jew who must have been (if you get my drift, wink wink) a Nazi collaborator. Anyone who’s not a child knows perfectly well what Blankley was saying here.

Of course, if you want to find examples of someone spewing antisemitism while accusing others of antisemitism, you can’t beat Ann Coulter.

In addition to having a number of family deaths among them, the Democrats’ other big idea – too nuanced for a bumper sticker – is that many of them have Jewish ancestry. There’s Joe Lieberman: Always Jewish. Wesley Clark: Found Out His Father Was Jewish in College. John Kerry: Jewish Since He Began Presidential Fund-Raising. Howard Dean: Married to a Jew. Al Sharpton: Circumcised. Even Hillary Clinton claimed to have unearthed some evidence that she was a Jew – along with the long lost evidence that she was a Yankees fan. And that, boys and girls, is how the Jews survived thousands of years of persecution: by being susceptible to pandering. …

… The Democrats’ urge to assert a Jewish heritage is designed to disguise the fact that the Democrats would allow the state of Israel to perish as Palestinian suicide bombers slaughter Jewish women and children. Their humble-origins claptrap is designed to disguise the fact that liberals think ordinary people are racist scum.

Dave Neiwert commented,

How exactly is Lieberman’s Jewishness a form of “pandering” anyway? Should he stop being Jewish just so Democrats can’t be accused of sucking up to the Jews? And should Howard Dean get a divorce so that no one will think he’s pandering?

But most noticeable is this undercurrent: Coulter seems to believe that the only reason Jews would vote for Democrats is that because they’re too stupid to recognize pandering for its own sake. Kind of the same reason blacks vote Democratic, right?

This is, throughout, a column reptilian in its nastiness. Its core thesis is that Democrats try to score political points by exhibiting compassion. What she clearly misses is that Republicans fail to do likewise not out of principle, but because, frankly, they rarely bother to exhibit much in the way of compassion themselves, unless it is for environmental polluters, Enronesque corporate outlaws and drug-addicted right-wing talk-show hosts.


Dave, a very wise man, also writes,

As I noted quite awhile back, projection from the right has become such a common phenomenon that it’s now a very useful gauge in guessing where the right is taking us next:

    Indeed, one of the lessons I’ve gleaned from carefully observing the behavior of the American right over the years is that the best indicator of its agenda can be found in the very things of which it accuses the left.

Whether it’s sexual improprieties, slander, treason, or unhinged behavior, it doesn’t matter: if the right is jumping up and down accusing the left of it, you can bet they’re busy engaging in it themselves by an exponential factor of a hundred.

Bigotry is a multi-faceted thing. Growing up in a small, all-white, all-Christian Bible Belt town taught me that. I have no doubt there are folks back home cheering for Israel who would be less, um, enthusiastic if a Hasidic family moved next door. This is not going to happen, since it’s probably an hour’s drive to the nearest synagogue, but I can well imagine the uproar. Bible Belt children are taught to admire Moses, David, Solomon, and Daniel in Sunday School, but in Sunday School literature Moses, David, Solomon, and Daniel aren’t portrayed wearing fedoras and sidelocks. There had been some Jewish residents in my little town early in the 20th century, but by the time I came along their descendants had either moved away or converted. I don’t know details. It’s only been in recent years that a few black families moved in, and I understand they’ve been given a very hard time.

On the other hand, I didn’t grow up hearing expressions of anti-semitism. This probably had a lot to do with the fact that the nearest synagogue was an hour’s drive away. The religious divisions I remember from childhood were not between Christians and Jews, but between “mainline” Protestant Christians and born-again Christians — or, put another way, between the sprinkled and the dunked. The few Catholics in the community learned to keep their heads down and their rosaries hidden. Jews seemed long ago and far away, so anti-semitism was a back-burner bigotry. I guess if you can’t be with the ones you hate, hate the ones you’re with.

Back to Tbogg:

Basically it is impossible in America to criticize Israel, or speak in defense of the Palestinian people, without being called an “anti-semite” which is why I believe that so many blogs on the left have been so quiet about the attack on Lebanon and what is benignly referred to as Israel’s “overreaction”. In fact, I hesitated to even write this post remembering how Juan Cole was smeared and denied an appointment at Yale. It is a very rare occurrence when I hesitate to write what is on my mind; but you know us liberals and how we hate to be called a “bigot” or to be accused of being “intolerant” by people who are bigots and are intolerant. Well, as my grandmother used to say: “fuck that noise”. Also, I’m not staying up late waiting for a call from Yale.

I know that many on the right (and this would include those on the right who have kind of forgiven the jews, if only for the moment, for killing their savior) are cheering on Israel as our proxy in the fight against Islamowhateverism, because the right loonisphere constantly demands that someone must fluff their hate hard-on, particularly at a time when the commies, homos, negroes, and Mexicans (temporarily at least) lie dormant.

Many righties dismiss criticism of Israeli actions and policies as anti-semitism. But the opposite of bigotry is not an equal and opposing bigotry. It’s objectivity. Bigots don’t comprehend objectivity. They assume that if you don’t share their prejudices you must have equal and opposing prejudices. Thus, if someone criticizes Israel for its indiscriminate punishment of the Lebanese, that person (a bigot assumes) must hate Israel. They can’t wrap their heads around the fact that non-bigoted people who criticize Israeli government policies can sincerely support Israel’s right to exist and want Israelis to live in safety and peace.

Last week the Vatican issued a statement condemning Israel’s attacks on Lebanon. The righties were appalled. And the only possible reason the Vatican does not solidly support Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, this rightie says, is that Israelis are Jews. But there is a substantial number of Lebanese Catholics, and their lives are endangered by the Israeli assault. Is the Vatican supposed to ignore that?

In the real world, my dears, people can’t always be sorted neatly into two opposing camps — good/bad, right/wrong, us/them — and if you do sort people that way you may have to do a lot of re-sorting. Last year the Lebanese were good because they rallied for democracy; now they’re bad because they couldn’t evict Hezbollah and Israel has to bomb them. Last year the Catholic Church was good because it is “pro-life”; now it is bad because it doesn’t want Lebanese Catholics to be killed by Israeli bombs. (See also James Wolcott.)

And the righties swing from jeering at New York City one day to praising it the next. Yet it’s the same place this week that it was last week. And the opposite of dispassion is zealotry.

Update: Glenn Greenwald notes:

During the protests several months ago against proposed anti-immigration legislation, there were all sorts of angry denunciations over the protestors’ waving of Mexican flags. As I noted at the time, there are numerous self-identified ethnic or nationalistic groups within the U.S. who routinely wave the flags of other countries at events, parades and protests — including Israel, Ireland, Italy — and yet that does not invoke the same objections. To the contrary, many of the same individuals who condemn the waving of Mexican flags praise and celebrate the waving of these other flags.

Yesterday, in the middle of New York City, protestors clogged the streets of Manhattan for a large rally called the “Stand with Israel” rally. As the photographs taken by one of the attendees reflect, there seem to have been many Israeli flags but, at least in these photographs, no American flags. Despite that, one of the most vocal commentators who lambasted the waving of Mexican flags on U.S. soil lauded the pro-Israeli protest.

With the immigration protests, some criticized the waving of Mexican flags on strategic grounds — isn’t it dumb of the protestors, they argued, to signal that their allegiance is to Mexico rather than to the U.S. Shouldn’t they therefore be waiving U.S. flags? As Mickey Kaus put it (emphasis in original): “flaunting allegiance to a neighboring country was not a good way to make most Americans want to let in more people who share your attachment!”

Shouldn’t the same thing be said about the pro-Israeli protestors yesterday? If Americans are going to be persuaded to join this war, it ought to be because doing so is in the interests of the United States, not of Israel. Wouldn’t it make more sense, then, to wave American flags in order to illustrate the point that intervention is in America’s interests, rather than waving the flag of another country in order to persuade Americans to enter a war on its behalf? And what, exactly, is the difference — moral or etiquette-based or otherwise — between the heinous act of waving Mexican flags and the inspiring act of waving Israelis flags, both on U.S. soil?

I agree with what Glenn says in the same post about Juan Cole, too. Righties think balance is a form of moral depravity, and righties hate him not because he’s too biased, but because he isn’t biased enough.

Barbarians Online

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Like sharks to chum, so righties to beheading videos. They’ve got a new one, and they’ve dropped poor Debbie Frisch in mid-flame because, you know, why waste time baiting the psychologically miswired when you’ve got severed heads?

I’m not going to link to the rightie sites “discussing” the video — they aren’t that hard to find, if you really want to go there — but here’s a New York Times story about it. The video shows the the mutilated bodies of Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, 23, of Houston, and Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker, 25, of Madras, Ore. Just the description of the video is sickening enough.

Of course I didn’t watch the video, but I inadvertently saw some “stills” posted on a rightie site, which is why I’m not linking to any of them. The last thing these sickos need is encouragement. However, I’m going to quote this from the Jawa Report anyway —

This video shows the true face of the enemies we fight. However you feel about the war in Iraq, this should enrage you. They are ruthless barbarians who boast about killing those they have taken hostage.

We show you these images so that you will understand what it is we are up against. The video and images should enrage you. If you do not have righteouss anger after seeing this, you are beyond hope. Update: Or, as reminded by Jason in the comments, they ought to at least give you clarity and resolve to defeat them.

Update: John at Powerline laments that POTUS has not followed Putin’s example, and ordered the killing of the AQ scum who did this. However, I have received several e-mails from officers serving in Iraq who wanted the video.

One Air Force officer told me he was about to do a brief and wanted to show it to his men. So, if POTUS hasn’t directly ordered revenge, I have a feeling the military is about to take it upon themselves to find and kill the AQ bastards who did this.

Vengeance may not always be swift, but it is always sweet.

I say vengeance is self-indulgent. To act out of vengeance is to abandon your own purposes. Instead, you’re letting your emotions jerk you around, like a puppet on strings, and the script for your theatrics is being written by your enemies. Disciplined people, wise people, don’t indulge in vengeance. They don’t take the bait.

Further, “resolve” born of rage rarely goes hand in hand with “clarity.” Enraged people are not thinking people. Enraged people aren’t weighing the consequences of their actions. They aren’t in control of themselves.

Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate about the U.S. Army’s new field manual on counterinsurgency (here in .pdf format). According to the field manual, getting vengeance for anything is about the last thing we need to be doing in Iraq now.

From first page to last, the authors stress that these kinds of wars are “protracted by nature.” They require “firm political will and extreme patience,” “considerable expenditure of time and resources,” and a very large deployment of troops ready to greet “hand shakes or hand grenades” without mistaking one for the other.

“Successful … operations require Soldiers and Marines at every echelon to possess the following,” the authors write. (Emphasis added.) They then list a daunting set of traits: “A clear, nuanced, and empathetic appreciation of the essential nature of the conflict. … An understanding of the motivation, strengths, and weaknesses of the insurgent,” as well as rudimentary knowledge of the local culture, behavioral norms, and leadership structures. In addition, there must be “adaptive, self-aware, and intelligent leaders.”

Meanwhile, a single high-profile infraction can undo 100 successes. “Lose moral legitimacy, lose the war,” the authors warn, pointedly noting that the French lost Algeria in part because their commanders condoned torture.

The authors note mistakes the U.S. has made already:

  • “The More Force Used, the Less Effective It Is.”
  • “An operation that kills five insurgents is counterproductive if the collateral damage or the creation of blood feuds leads to the recruitment of fifty more.”
  • “Only attack insurgents when they get in the way. Try not to be distracted or forced into a series of reactive moves by a desire to kill or capture them. Provoking combat usually plays into the enemy’s hands.”
  • “A defection is better than a surrender, a surrender better than a capture, and a capture better than a kill.”

    • Kaplan observes, “as a nation we may simply be ill-suited to fight these kinds of wars.” He’s probably right. But even if most of us could countenance such an effort, most of us are not in charge. The righties are. And righties are way ill-suited to fight these kinds of wars. You can see that today in the calls for vengeance on the rightie blogosphere. The hell with the mission; to hell with the consequences; they want blood.

    Back to the new video — according to Edward Wong of the New York Times, “A message with the video says the soldiers were killed out of revenge for the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl in March, a crime in which at least six American soldiers are suspects.”

    “We present this as revenge for our sister who was dishonored by a soldier of the same brigade,” says a message in Arabic on a title card at the start of the nearly five-minute video. Militants had learned of the crime early on and “decided to take revenge for their sister’s honor,” the message says, according to a translation by the SITE Institute, which tracks jihadist Internet postings.

    However, this explanation may be bogus:

    It is questionable whether the soldiers were actually killed out of revenge. Iraqis around Mahmudiya, where the rape and murders took place, believed at the time that the girl and the other three victims were killed by other Iraqis in sectarian violence, according to the mayor of Mahmudiya and American military officials. The mayor said the possible involvement of American soldiers only became apparent on June 30, when the American military announced it had opened an investigation into the crime.

    So, the “revenge” motive may have been post hoc. Still, we’ve had no end to revenge killings already. We’re already well into the “retaliations for retaliations” cycle, which I’m sure is a major cause of the escalation of violence.

    The 2004 attack of Fallujah was, by many accounts, ordered by the White House in retaliation for the murder and mutilation of four civilian contractors. This order was given against the counsel of the commanders on the ground. The results are not, um, encouraging.

    On a practical level it’s ill advised to be Sonny Corleone (“They hit us so — we hit ’em back.”) if you don’t have the muscle to settle all the family business at once. (Remember what happened to Sonny?) And we don’t have that kind of muscle in Iraq.

    Another rightie argues that “I strongly believe we must know and understand who we are fighting against.” OK, but we’d better understand ourselves as well. Whether you thought the invasion was a good idea or not, from the beginning the effort in Iraq has been pulled in at least two directions. War supporters talk about nation building, unified governments, democracy, and security, and that’s fine. But, time and time again, our actions — Abu Ghraib comes to mind — say that we want something else entirely.

    I’ve believed all along that, on a subconscious level, Iraq is a proxy war. It stands in for the war many of us, including me, desired after the 9/11 attacks. If only we’d been attacked by a nation-state instead of an international movement, we could have bombed the bleepers to hell and been done with it. But we couldn’t have that war, because we weren’t attacked by a nation-state. Most of us understood that, and we realized that counterterrorism and national security policies should be crafted to deal with the enemies we have instead of the enemy we wished we had.

    But then there are righties. They blame us lefties because Iraq is less than the resounding triumph they wished for, but the fact is they and their Dear Leader have been working at cross purposes all along; their desires get in the way of their goals; their ids override their superegos. They haven’t yet come to grips with the fact that the enemies we face are not the same ones John Wayne took on in Sands of Iwo Jima.

    (One of the rightie bloggers worked up over the new video has this blurb in his blog masthead: “Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” — H.L. Mencken. Observes Steve M., “I have to say I really enjoy being lectured on the savagery of people who slit throats by a blogger whose motto invokes the desirability of slitting throats.”)

    I’m sure the righties want me to look at the video so that I will be “understand” and feel as they feel. But like I tell the “controlled detonation” theorists who drop by here from time to time — I saw the WTC towers fall with my own eyes. I don’t need to look at the video, thanks.

    Righties Being Wrong

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    I don’t know why this popped into my head this morning — possibly because it’s turning out to be a lovely summer day — but as I sipped coffee and admired the aforementioned day through the window I remembered something. Last April a rightie blogger predicted “this is going to be a vindicating summer for supporters of the Bush Administration.”

    The MSM is predictably trying to throw cold water on this new story as AJ Strata comments on the NY Times take. But the pure and simple fact is as I told you this is going to be a vindicating summer for supporters of the Bush Administration.

    Well, it’s July 7. “Vindication summer” has been a bust so far.

    The cause of last April’s optimism on the Right was the firing of Mary McCarthy from the CIA on allegations that she leaked classified information to reporter Dana Priest. Naturally the Right Blogosphere immediately declared McCarthy to be a traitor. But they were also very certain McCarthy’s would be just the first head to roll. They were supremely confident that the noggins of Larry Johnson, Ray McGovern, and the like would soon follow.

    I guess they were wrong.

    What Really Happened is that two weeks after CIA Director Porter Goss fired McCarthy, Goss himself was fired. McCarthy, who maintains her innocence, dropped out of the news. Conventional wisdom says that Goss was fired because he unwisely butted heads with John Negroponte, or else because of his association with one “Dusty” Foggo, who had fallen into bad company. Since then, there have been no new developments on the McCarthy story that I’m aware of, although she’s mentioned in this WaPo Op Ed from June.

    One suspects the White House wants the firing of Mary McCarthy to drop into a very deep memory hole.

    Much more recently righties celebrated the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as a major turning ponit in the war in Iraq. I wrote at the time, “since it’s unlikely this will make any bleeping difference to the insurgency or the activities of the Iranian-sponsored Shiite militias — whoop-dee-doo.” This rightie blogger found my attitude shocking.

    Well, guess what? The pace of killings in Iraq has increased since Zarqawi’s death, and even the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, admits that killing Zarqawi has not made Iraq safer.

    The non-effect of Zarqawi’s death wasn’t a hard prediction to make if you have even a rudimentary idea of who’s doing what to whom in Iraq. The reality is that diverse factions are killing each other for diverse reasons. Al Qaeda is only one of the factions, and a small one at that. But since the righties persist in maintaining their simplified cognitive model (bad guy terrorists v. good guy coalition), they don’t get it.

    Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin, who has made a career of stirring up hatred of ethnic (and other) minorities, is bashing “Democrats” because of a bigoted remark made by Sen. Joe Biden. Naturally, if one Democrat makes a bigoted comment, all Democrats must be bigots. That’s logical, right? Oh, wait …

    One wonders why a bigoted remark would bother Malkin, since bigotry is her stock-in-trade. (See David Neiwert for the connections between Malkin and white supremacists.) Jill at Feministe expresses my views on the matter. See also Jill’s Crazy Conservative Round-up.

    Be sure to add your own favorite examples of righties being wrong to the comments.

    Update: Speaking of Malkin — David Weigel of Hit and Run has a follow up to the story about UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Denice Denton, the target of a Malkin hate campaign who recently committed suicide. True to form, Malkin expresses no contrition for her possible contribution to Denton’s state of mind. Instead, she complained that Weigel’s asking for a comment is some kind of harrassment.

    “Making Malkin angry is like shooting orca in a barrel,” says Weigel. Heh.

    Bankrupt

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    Kevin Drum sums it up:

    … the Bush administration literally seems to have no foreign policy at all anymore. They have no serious plan for Iraq, no plan for Iran, no plan for North Korea, no plan for democracy promotion, no plan for anything. With the neocons on the outs, Condoleezza Rice at the State Department, and Dick Cheney continuing to drift into an alternate universe at the OVP, the Bush administration seems completely at sea. There’s virtually no ideological coherency to their foreign policy that I can discern, and no credible followup on what little coherency is left.

    We keeping reading that the Democrats are in disarray, and that the Democrats can’t agree on a plan. But at least the Democrats have competing plans to disagree about.

    The Bushies got zip.

    And check out “Why Conservatives Can’t Govern” by Alan Wolfe:

    The collapse of the Bush presidency, in other words, is not just due to Bush’s incompetence (although his administration has been incompetent beyond belief). Nor is it a response to the president’s principled lack of intellectual curiosity and pitbull refusal to admit mistakes (although those character flaws are certainly real enough). And the orgy of bribery and special-interest dispensation in Congress is not the result of Tom DeLay’s ruthlessness, as impressive a bully as he was. This conservative presidency and Congress imploded, not despite their conservatism, but because of it.

    Contemporary conservatism is first and foremost about shrinking the size and reach of the federal government. This mission, let us be clear, is an ideological one. It does not emerge out of an attempt to solve real-world problems, such as managing increasing deficits or finding revenue to pay for entitlements built into the structure of federal legislation. It stems, rather, from the libertarian conviction, repeated endlessly by George W. Bush, that the money government collects in order to carry out its business properly belongs to the people themselves. One thought, and one thought only, guided Bush and his Republican allies since they assumed power in the wake of Bush vs. Gore: taxes must be cut, and the more they are cut — especially in ways benefiting the rich — the better.

    But like all politicians, conservatives, once in office, find themselves under constant pressure from constituents to use government to improve their lives. This puts conservatives in the awkward position of managing government agencies whose missions — indeed, whose very existence — they believe to be illegitimate.

    Contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding. The end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government.

    Brilliantly put.

    As a way of governing, conservatism is another name for disaster. And the disasters will continue, year after year, as long as conservatives, whose political tactics are frequently as brilliant as their policy-making is inept, find ways to perpetuate their power.

    Wolfe doesn’t distinguish between conservatives and, um, other conservatives, as I did here. But be sure to read the whole article.

    The Patients Are Running the Asylum

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    Awhile back I wrote a post called “Patriotism v. Nationalism,” which was followed up by “Patriotism v. Paranoia,” “Patriotism v. Francis Fukuyama,” “Patriotism v. Hate Speech,” and probably some other posts.

    I bring those old posts up because Christopher Dickey has a splendid article on the Newsweek web site that makes many of the same points. Dickey sites George Orwell’s 1945 essay, “Notes on Nationalism,” and argues that the American Right has become the embodiment of Orwellian nationalism. That is not good.

    American nationalism, unlike American patriotism, is different — and dangerous.

    The second part of Orwell’s definition tells you why. Nationalism is the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or an idea, “placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” Patriotism is essentially about ideas and pride. Nationalism is about emotion and blood. The nationalist’s thoughts “always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. … Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.”

    One inevitable result, wrote Orwell, is vast and dangerous miscalculation based on the assumption that nationalism makes not only right but might-and invincibility: “Political and military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.” When Orwell derides “a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war,” well, one wishes Fox News and Al Jazeera would take note.

    For Orwell, the evils of nationalism were not unique to nations, but shared by a panoply of “isms” common among the elites of his day: “Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, anti-Semitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism.” Today we could drop the communists and Trotskyites, perhaps, while adding Islamism and neo-conservatism. The same tendencies would apply, especially “indifference to reality.”

    Get this part:

    “All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts,” said Orwell. “Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage-torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians-which does not change its moral color when committed by ‘our’ side.… The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

    Hammer. Nail. Head.

    It’s this aspect of nationalism that peacemakers in the Middle East find so utterly confounding. The Israelis and the Palestinians, Iraq’s Sunnis and Kurds and Shiites, Iranians and Americans have developed nationalist narratives that have almost nothing in common except a general chronology. “In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown,” Orwell wrote, in a spooky foreshadowing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s nationalist musings. “A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one’s own mind.”

    I think this tells us a lot about why righties cannot be reasoned with, which is more or less the subject of the three previous posts on this blog. This post, for example, is about the way righties frame arguments to confound any attempt at rational response (quoting Tristero):

    Like, “So, would you rather Saddam stay in power?” this is a framing of the issue that provides for not even the hint of an intellectually coherent response, let alone a “dialogue.” It is designed to elicit the narrowest range of acceptable responses, responses that reduce disagreement with Bushism to a quibble.

    Or, the way they’re turning agreement for the Hamdan decision into support for terrorists, which is absurd, but righties will cut off their own lips before they’ll admit the point is absurd. A few righties, I believe, know good and well their arguments are absurd but make them anyway, probably because they’ve got a vested interest in righties running things. But the bulk of them really don’t know their arguments are absurd, because they’ve walled off large parts of their brains. As Orwell said, “A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one’s own mind.”

    Gene Lyons:

    For years, the idea’s been percolating through the right’s well-organized propaganda apparatus that Democrats aren’t loyal Americans.

    Regarding Ann Coulter’s ludicrous book, “Slander,” I once wrote that “the ‘liberal’ sins [she ] caricatures—atheism, cosmopolitanism, sexual license, moral relativism, communism, disloyalty and treason—are basically identical to the crimes of the Jews as Hitler saw them.” Michael Savage, Michael Reagan, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh and others peddle the same sterilized American update of an ancient slur. Limbaugh recently called 80 percent of Times subscribers “jihadists.” Now the Bush White House, desperate to prevail in 2006 congressional elections, has taken up the cry. Reasonable people never want to believe that extremists believe their own rhetoric. But quit kidding yourselves. This is mass psychosis. The next terrorist strike, should it happen, will be blamed on the enemy within: treasonous “liberals” who dissent from the glorious reign of George W. Bush. Unless confronted, it’s through such strategems that democracies fail and constitutional republics become dictatorships.

    Have a nice day!

    Dear Media, Part II: The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

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    Several commenters to Dear Media, Part I pointed to corporate ownership of media as the cause of media corruption. Corporate ownership certainly is an important factor, but the situation is more complex than that. And worse.

    Don Hazen provides a glimpse of the bigger problem we’re up against:

    Consider that the conservative political movement, which now has a hammerlock on every aspect of federal government, has a media message machine fed by more than 80 large non-profit organizations – let’s call them the Big 80 – funded by a gaggle of right-wing family foundations and wealthy individuals to the tune of $400 million a year.

    And the Big 80 groups are just the “non-partisan” 501(c)(3) groups. These do not include groups like the NRA, the anti-gay and anti-abortion groups, nor do they include the political action committees (PACs) or the “527” groups (so named for the section of the tax code they fall under), like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which so effectively slammed John Kerry’s campaign in 2004.

    To get their message out, the conservatives have a powerful media empire, which churns out and amplifies the message of the day – or the week – through a wide network of outlets and individuals, including Fox News, talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, Oliver North, Ann Coulter, as well as religious broadcasters like Pat Robertson and his 700 Club. On the web, it starts with TownHall.com

    Fueling the conservative message machine with a steady flow of cash is a large group of wealthy individuals, including many who serve on the boards of the Big 80.

    Needless to say, there’s not exactly a wall of separation between the right-wing media machine and corporate media managers, although it’s hard to say if media-VRWC relationships are primarily ideological or financial. In the case of the big publicly owned companies, sooner or later profits will trump all, I suspect. According to OpenSecrets.org reveals that many of the parent corporations, such as Time Warner (CNN, Time), General Electric (NBC, Newsweek), Disney (ABC), and CBS, donate more money overall to Democrats than to Republicans. On the other hand, and not surprisingly, News Corporation (Fox), the National Association of Broadcasters (an industry group representing commercial radio and television stations), and Clear Channel donate more to Republicans than to Democrats.

    But if ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN, and their various print affiliates aren’t altogether in bed with the Right, why does right-wing ideology permeate so much of the news they produce? As explained here,

    There is an important dynamic relationship between right-wing alternative media and the corporate media. Many of the conceptual frameworks and arguments used to marginalize left and liberal ideas in the media are first developed at think tanks funded by right-wing foundations and corporations. After these ideas are sharpened through feedback at conferences and other meetings, they are cooperatively field-tested within right-wing alternative media such as small-circulation newsletters and journals, and also by tracking responses to rhetoric in direct mail appeals. As popular themes that resonate with conservative audiences emerge, they are moved into more mainstream corporate media through columns by conservative luminaries, press releases picked up as articles in the print media, conversations on radio talk shows, and discussions on TV news roundtables.

    Once the talking points are developed, right-wing operatives make sure the talking points permeate mass media. This Media Matters report shows how right-wing spin dominates Iraq War news and debate throughout mass media, for example.

    And who are the operatives? A lot of them are grown in VRWC laboratories. In his book Lapdogs, Eric Boehlert describes the petrie dish Ann Coulter crawled out of:

    Coulter wasn’t merely a controversial pundit; she was a pure product of the Beltway’s right-wing culture and career track. Coulter put in time clerking for Pasco Bowman II of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, litigated for the Center For Individual Rights, a right-wing advocacy group, and worked as a flak for Michigan Republican Senator Spencer Abraham. She then went on to write High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton; Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right; and Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. [p. 113]

    Several of Coulter’s books were published by Regnery, which has been accused of “promoting” books by arranging bulk purchases to push up sales figures and place books on best-seller charts. The authors then make the rounds of talk shows, repeating the books’ propaganda points as they go. Whether anyone actually reads the books is not really the point. Recently, other major book publishers have begun to publish for the right-wing market. Coulter’s most recent book, which has come under accusations of plagiarism, was published by Random House.

    Thus Coulter, who had never exhibited so much as a spark of insight, wit, originality, or intelligence, is promoted to mass media prominence by the VRWC.

    And this is something the Right does very well. It finds “talent,” or whatever it is about Coulter they find valuable, and mentors, grooms, and promotes that talent and gets it in front of the public. The Left? Fuhgeddaboudit.

    The Right began to build its think tank-media infrastructure in the 1970s, This was, as I explained in the previous post, the same time that the Left was coming apart.

    The story of the conservative rise that Stein portrays begins back in the early 1970s, when there was panic among conservatives, especially in corporate boardrooms, that capitalism was under serious attack, and something drastic had to be done about it. …

    … The conservative right, starting with seed money from the Coors Brewing family and Richard Mellon Scaife’s publishing enterprise, moved forward … conservatives – in spite of political differences, ego, and competing priorities – were able to cooperate and develop a methodology that drives their issues and values relentlessly.

    Starting with just a handful or groups, including the Heritage Foundation, in the early ’70s, the conservatives built a new generation of organizations – think tanks, media monitors, legal groups, networking organizations, all driven by the same over-arching values of free enterprise, individual freedoms and limited government.

    Hazen goes on to explain that various right-wing organizations work together to provide each other with speakers, guest “pundits,” and other resources. They also, apparently, work closely with producers of mainstream mass media talk shows on radio and television to provide bodies to staff the “roundtables” and other guest spots the programs need to fill.

    And what are liberals and progressives doing to compete? As I explained here, not nearly enough.

    Rightie media infrastructure isn’t the only reason why media is screwed up, however. More will be discussed in Part III.