Category Archives: conservatism

Identifying Evil

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Sometimes the worst evil is done by good people who do not know that they are not good. — Reinhold Niebuhr

Via Avedon — David Gerrold has written a post reflecting on the nature of evil. One of his points is that the way evil is usually portrayed on television and in the movies is phony.

People like to pretend — they like to pretend to be vampires and monsters and princesses and Vulcans and whatnots.

And that’s what most Hollywood evocations of evil are — people pretending, because they have no sense of the reality. That’s what was wrong with this particular recreation of the Manson Family; they played it like a bunch of teenagers giddily enjoying their own awfulness. …

… in this show, evil wasn’t portrayed as evil, but as a bunch of Hollywood actors pretending to be evil, chewing the scenery, baring their teeth, flashing their eyes, and practicing their wicked laughs — bwahahahaha. It was pretense.

Real evil looks very different from Hollywood evil.

Hannah Arendt, in her book about the trial of Adolf Eichman, the architect of the Holocaust, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil writes of how she sat there day after day, trying to understand how a mild-looking human being could have authored such monstrousness. Ultimately, she coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe the essential thoughtlessness — ie. without thought, without feeling, without compassion — that results in evil deeds. The monsters of the Holocaust weren’t monsters, they were acting without regard, without conscious awareness, without empathy, without connection to the larger spiritual realm of humanity.

For a long time I’ve noticed that when racists are portrayed in films they are nearly always depicted as people who are scowling (or smirking) and disagreeable all the time; think Rod Steiger in The Heat of the Night. Yet in my experience — I grew up in an all-white redneck zone — racists can seem to be lovely people in any other context; they can be soft-spoken, considerate, and reasonableness itself except on the matter of race. It’s as if some part of their conscience were missing. It can be hard to grasp that nice Mr. Smith who voluntarily cuts the grass on the church lawn, or sweet Mrs. Johnson who bakes pies for the old folks’ home, would be capable of evil. Yet history tells us that a whole lot of “ordinary” people have taken part in evil acts in the past.

Gerrold writes, “I think evil occurs as a complex cocktail of forces.” I suspect most people are capable of evil if they get caught up in these forces. This is not an excuse for evil, but a warning to take care to recognize those forces and avoid them. People fall into evil because they don’t recognize evil as evil. They mistake it for justice, or righteousness, or even God’s Will.

“Evil does not see itself as evil,” writes Gerrold. “Those who commit evil acts do not see those acts as evil or even malicious. They see themselves as justified.” This is exactly right.

Osama bin Laden and his 9/11 flunkies believed their terrorist attack was righteous and justified, as did Tim McVeigh when he blew up the federal building. Even the all-time great evildoers like Hitler and Stalin and Mao no doubt rationalized their actions as serving a greater good.

A couple of years ago I argued that most of us think of evil as an intrinsic quality that some people have and others don’t, or at least have very little of. If you see evil that way, the next step is to assume that “evil” people are so dangerous and corrupted that “good” people are justified in whatever they do to get rid of them. Thus, “evil” and “good” people are different not because of what they do, but because of who they are. But when you start thinking that way, you’re opening the door to evil and inviting it in.

There’s no question that what took place in that prison was horrible, but the Arab world has to realize that the U.S. shouldn’t be judged on the actions of a…well, we shouldn’t be judged on our actions. It’s our principles that matter, our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember: just because torturing prisoners is something we did, doesn’t mean it’s something we would do. — Rob Corddry, The Daily Show

How many times have you heard a rightie say something like this —

The difference between you and me is that, deep down inside, you cannot accept the fact that there are truly evil people in the world. The difference between the liberal and conservative viewpoints boils down to this: you think that, deep down inside, the Islamic nutjobs really only want to have a nice house and a yard, and raise their children in a loving and safe environment, just like all the people you know. Whereas I think that they are truly evil people, like the Nazis, that want more than anything else to destroy all that we hold dear. And they are more than willing to sacrifice their lives, their families, everything in their hatred of all that is good and beautiful.

What most righties don’t understand about evil is how seductive it is. The seduction begins with the notion that “his hatred of me is evil, but my hatred of him is justified.” The fellow who wrote that paragraph may not yet be completely besotted with evil, but he is sure as hell flirting with it.

I say evil is as evil does. It’s not who you are; it’s what you do, that is evil. Or not.

Again, I’m not saying that evil acts should be forgiven, or that people shouldn’t defend themselves from evil or seek to apprehend or even destroy dangerous people before they can harm others. I’m just saying that as we do these things, we must take care not to be seduced by evil ourselves. And that’s hard. It takes a lot of self-honesty and self-discipline.

And it takes recognizing evil as evil. Evil doesn’t wear a big E on its T shirt. Evil can seem to be virtuous. It flatters your ego. And it can feel really good.

See also: Jill at Feministe, “God and Abortion Rights.“

Going Too Far

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Pity Debbie Schlussel. She thought she was leading a glorious charge, but she charged into a place so dank and unwholesome even the Nice Doggie wouldn’t follow. And when she looked she saw her rightie brethren not following her. Instead, they were staring. At her. With disgust.

Wow.

This means that somewhere in the confused and nebulous world righties seem to inhabit, there are edges. There are parameters and boundaries and signs that warn to stay on the path and be sure to wear clean, dry socks. This is good to know.

You might have seen this Schlussel post, which accused Jill Carroll of having “anti-American views” and implied that both Carroll “and those who are ‘elated’ about her release” are collaborating with terrorists. A newer post reveals that in Schlussel’s mind, “Islamist” (which is bad) and “Arabic” are synonyms. Schlussel found an article in a Jordanian newspaper (no link provided) that said (boldface is Schlussel’s)

From Arabic food to the Arabic language, Jill has always wanted to know and experience as much as possible about Arab identity, and she is keen on absorbing it, learning, understanding and respecting it.

She doesn’t just “like” Arab culture, she loves it. . . . It is simply unconscionable for any Arab to want to harm a person like her.

There is a direct connection between couscous and Osama bin Laden. Be warned.

But by Schlussel’s logic … the President is a terrorist.

Now Schlussel is snarling and snapping at her brother bloggers like a cornered wolverine, and some righties are wondering whether to back away or fetch a tranquilizer dart. Heh.

Last I checked neither Orrin Judd nor Alexandra the Dim had apologized for implying that Carroll was a terrorist collaborator (Judd) or a coward (the Dimwit), but now it seems they are in the minority even among righties. Jonah Goldberg finally issued a limp apology.

Now, I’m going to apologize to Captain Ed, because I took offense at the title of this post — it struck me as being patronizing — but on the whole the Captain has been fair and reasonable about the Carroll episode. So, Captain, I’m sorry I snapped at you.

Update: See Matt Stoller.

April Fools

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No matter how vile and mean and ignorant righties can seem to be, they can still surprise me and get even more vile and mean and ignorant.

Yesterday I mentioned in “Crabs in a Barrel” that “John Podhoretz of the National Review criticizes the just-released Jill Carroll for not being anti-Muslim enough.” Podhoretz was just the beginning, however.

Yesterday Liberal Oasis described the “insidious reaction among certain conservatives to the release of Jill Carroll.” As usual when someone becomes a rightie hate target, righties don’t stop at criticizing something she’s said or done that offended them. Instead they are dissecting her like a pickled frog looking for anything about her they can hate.

What set off the feeding frenzy was a video she made while still a hostage in which she criticized George Bush. Christian Science Monitor reporter Dan Murphy interviewed Ms. Carroll’s father, who said making the video had been the price of her release.

Ms. Carroll had been their captive for three months and even the smallest details of her life – what she ate and when, what she wore, when she could speak – were at her captors’ whim. They had murdered her friend and colleague Allan Enwiya, “she had been taught to fear them,” he says. And before making one last video the day before her release, she was told that they had already killed another American hostage.

That video appeared Thursday on a jihadist website that carries videos of beheadings and attacks on American forces. In it, Carroll told her father she felt compelled to make statements strongly critical of President Bush and his policy in Iraq.

Even worse, in the eyes of righties, she was quoted as saying after her release that her captors hadn’t hit her and that she was “kept in a safe place and treated very well.”

“May as well just come right out and say she was a willing participant,” says rightie Orrin Judd. Meanwhile, rightie hate hag Debbie Schlussel accused Carroll of having “anti-American views” and strongly implied that both Carroll “and those who are ‘elated’ about her release” are collaborating with terrorists. And the ever-brainless Alexandra of All Things Hateful seconds Schlussel — “when you listen to the video, you know that parts of what she is saying, she actually believes, either that or she deserves an honorary Oscar for her convincing performance.”

Somehow, I suspect if Alexandra ever had a gun pointed to her head and was told to be convincing or die, she’d put out an Oscar-worthy performance, too. Right after she wet her pants.

But the lowest low probably came from Bernard McGuirk, who is Don Imus’s Executive Producer. You won’t believe this.

Murphy of the CSM continues,

“You’ll pretty much say anything to stay alive because you expect people will understand these aren’t your words,” says Micah Garen, a journalist and author who was held captive by a Shiite militia in southern Iraq for 10 days in August 2004. “Words that are coerced are not worth dying over.”

Most people understand that; clearly righties are not most people.

Shortly before her release, her captors – who refer to themselves as the Revenge Brigade – also told her they had infiltrated the US diplomatic compound in Baghdad, and she would be killed if she went there or cooperated with the American authorities. It was a threat she took seriously in her first few hours of freedom.

Carroll worked at the Wall Street Journal’s Washington office in early 2002 when that paper’s reporter Daniel Pearl was abducted and beheaded in Pakistan. “Many of her colleagues knew him and it was very emotional in the office,” Jill told her father. “She had that memory in the back of her head while she was being threatened.”

In making their last video, Mr. Carroll says her captors “obviously wanted maximum propaganda value in the US. After listening to them for three months she already knew exactly what they wanted her to say, so she gave it to them with appropriate acting to make it look convincing.“

Just how stupid and hateful do you have to be not to be able to understand that?

Oliver Willis takes on Captain Ed, who decided that the explanation of Carroll’s behavior in Dan Murphy’s CSM story was “good enough” for him: “Can you believe the hubris of these chuckleheads?”

Digby takes on Jonah Goldberg and gets to the heart of the matter: “He reminds of one of those guys who says a rape victim didn’t act traumatized enough for him, so she’s probably lying.” See also Jane Hamsher.

Credit where credit is due — a few rightie bloggers criticize their rightie brethren for being hateful idiots.

Be sure to read all of the Liberal Oasis post.

Carroll is the kind of war correspondent the Right claims to want.

Laura Ingraham was cheered by her fellow right-wingers last week when she returned from being escorted around Iraq to scold NBC’s David Gregory:

    Bring the Today show to Iraq … and then when you talk to those soldiers on the ground, when you go out with the Iraqi military, when you talk to the villagers, when you see the children, then I want NBC to report on only the IEDs, only the killings, only, only the reprisals…

    … to do a show from Iraq means to talk to the Iraqi military to go out with the Iraqi military, to actually have a conversation with the people instead of reporting from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs going off.

Of course, that’s exactly what Jill Carroll did: got out of her room and had a conversation with the people.

Except that she didn’t have a military PR person leading her by the nose or hovering over her conversations.

There’s no pleasing some people.

One other thing — this reaction from the Right may be part of another pattern. My observations here are purely subjective; I do not spend time performing analyses of what news stories the Right is blogging about. But seems to me that in recent weeks they’ve gotten themselves worked up over smaller and smaller issues. Today, for example, they’re swarming over the news that Rep. Cynthia McKinney had an altercation with capitol police.

(Note to the congresswoman: Everybody must go through security. No exceptions. There are reasons for this.)

I gave some other examples in the “Crabs” post yesterday. It seems to me that more and more often the righties are running away from big issues and instead are focusing on peripheral news items about awful things non-righties are doing and, of course, they’re still posting the usual knee-jerk excuses for whatever Bush is up to. As I said, this is purely subjective and maybe I’m wrong, but keep watch for it.

Update: Does this even make sense? See also David Ignatius.

Crabs in a Barrel

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At the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson writes about “The Meltdown We Can’t Even Enjoy.”

It’s frustrating. The three overlapping forces that have sent this country in so many wrong directions — the conservative movement, the neoconservative movement and the Republican Party — are warring among themselves, doing their best impression of crabs in a barrel, and sensible people can’t even enjoy the spectacle. That’s because it’s hard to take pleasure in the havoc they’ve caused and the disarray they will someday leave behind.

“Crabs in a barrel” — what perfect imagery! Can’t you just imagine all the righties, all the Bush culties and fundies and neocons and Big Gubmint-hating quasi-libertarians confined together within their shared lies and resentments? And as the reality of their failed ideologies closes in, see how they pull in their eyestalks and scramble for whatever crumbs of self-validation they can find?

Today the Right Blogosphere is swarming over the critical news that Borders Books refuses to stock a magazine that published the Danish Mohammed cartoons. Other recent blogswarms involved displays of the Mexican flag. For the past couple of days righties have labored mightily to assure themselves that the opinions offered by some retired FISA judges was the opposite of what the judges actually said it was. They’re still picking through the intelligence garbage dumped by John Negroponte. John Podhoretz of the National Review criticizes the just-released Jill Carroll for not being anti-Muslim enough. And for the past several days a number of them, led by John Fund, have been obsessed over a former Taliban member enrolled at Harvard.

Crumbs, I say. The same people who spent the past several years congratulating each other for their grand “ideas” are running (sideways) from big issues as fast as their scaly little legs can scramble. Robinson continues,

It would all be entertaining if the stakes weren’t so high. Iraqis and Americans are dying; the treasury is bleeding; real people, not statistics, are at the center of the immigration debate. Iran is intent on joining the nuclear club. Hallowed American traditions of privacy, fairness and due process are being flouted, and thus diminished.

Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution takes a gloomier look at the Big Pcture —

It’s not merely that the Bush administration has run aground on its own illusions. The real problem runs deeper, much deeper, and at its core, I think, lies the fact that out of fear and laziness we insist on trying to address new problems with old ideologies, rhetoric and mind-sets.

To put it bluntly, we don’t know what to do, and so we do nothing.

Run through the list: We have no real idea how to address global warming, the draining of jobs overseas, the influx of illegal immigrants, our growing indebtedness to foreign lenders, our addiction to petroleum, the rise of Islamic terror . . .

Those are very big problems, and if you listen to the debate in Congress and on the airwaves, you can’t help but be struck by the smallness of the ideas proposed to address them. We have become timid and overly protective of a status quo that cannot be preserved and in fact must be altered significantly.

The Republicans, for example, continue to mouth a cure-all ideology of tax cuts, deregulation and a worship of all things corporate, an approach too archaic and romanticized to have any relevance in the modern world, as their five years in power have proved.

The GOP’s sole claim to bold action — the decision to invade Iraq in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001 — instead epitomizes the problem. The issue of Islamic terrorism is complex and difficult, and by reverting immediately to the brute force of another era, we made the problem worse.

Yet in recent years the Dems in Washington have offered little else but tweaks to the Republican agenda.

It’s not as if the big, bold ideas needed to address our real problems don’t exist. Sure, they exist — among people with no power to implement them. And thanks to the VRWC echo chamber, those people are painted as dangerous, radical, impractical loonies by just about everyone in both parties and in major news media. Eugene Robinson calls on the Dems to “put together an alternative program that will begin to undo some of the damage the conservative-neocon-GOP nexus has wrought.” But the party as it exists now hardly seems capable of such a challenge. It’s too compromised, too tired, too inbred.

What’s a progressive to do?

As a practical matter, the way Americans conduct elections makes third parties irrelevant. If we had run-off elections or a parliamentary system, I’d say abandon the Dems and form something new. But our system marginalizes third parties; there’s no way around that. Our only hope is to reform the Dems.

Meanwhile, conservatives are being challenged to choose between loyalty and principle. On the Blogosphere, loyalty seems to be winning out. And the righties scurry to hide inside fantasies that George W. Bush is a great leader, and the majority of the American people are still behind him. Snap snap snap.

Truth by Proclamation

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The story thus far: Yesterday the New York Times published a story by Eric Lichtblau titled “Judges on Secretive Panel Speak Out on Spy Program.” In this story, Lichtblau described the testimony of four former FISA judges to the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding Bush’s NSA spy program. A fifth judge who was not at the hearing sent a letter to the Committee expressing his opinion.

The main point of the story, per Lichtblau, is that the judges testified “in support of a proposal by Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, to give the court formal oversight of the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping program.”

In support of the proposal, mind you. Take note of that.

Lichtblau also wrote that the judges

voiced skepticism at a Senate hearing about the president’s constitutional authority to order wiretapping on Americans without a court order. They also suggested that the program could imperil criminal prosecutions that grew out of the wiretaps.

Judge Harold A. Baker, a sitting federal judge in Illinois who served on the intelligence court until last year, said the president was bound by the law “like everyone else.” If a law like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is duly enacted by Congress and considered constitutional, Judge Baker said, “the president ignores it at the president’s peril.”

However, Lichtblau writes, the judges avoided the question of whether the NSA program is illegal.

The judges at the committee hearing avoided that politically charged issue despite persistent questioning from Democrats, even as the judges raised concerns about how the program was put into effect.

Judge Baker said he felt most comfortable talking about possible changes to strengthen the foreign intelligence law. “Whether something’s legal or illegal goes beyond that,” he said, “and that’s why I’m shying away from answering that.”

Now the plot thickens. Also yesterday, the Washington Times published an article by Brian DeBose about the same testimony. And this article was headlined “FISA judges say Bush within law.” Here is the lede:

A panel of former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges yesterday told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that President Bush did not act illegally when he created by executive order a wiretapping program conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).

The five judges testifying before the committee said they could not speak specifically to the NSA listening program without being briefed on it, but that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not override the president’s constitutional authority to spy on suspected international agents under executive order.

Clearly, one of these stories is wrong. The question is, which one?

Yesterday John Hinderaker of Power Line accused Lichtblau of having “a huge personal investment in the idea (wrong, I think) that the NSA program is ‘illegal.'” To prove this charge, Hinderaker linked to another Power Line post in which Hinderaker hectored Lichtblau for writing a story Hinderaker didn’t like. Since the story is not linked I can only guess at what’s going on here, but I infer that Lichtblau interviewed people who said the NSA program is illegal as well as people who said it isn’t illegal. Hinderaker objected, thus:

Here’s my problem with your coverage: as a legal matter, there isn’t any debate. The authorities are all on one side; they agree that warrantless surveillance for national security purposes is legal. I think your articles misleadingly suggest that there is real uncertainty on this point, when there isn’t.

So we’re all agreed it’s legal. Except for these guys. Oh, and some of these guys. And just about every constitutional scholar on the planet who is not a Republican Party operative has at least some doubts about the legality of the program. But they don’t count. Clearly, the only reason Lichtblau would have interviewed and quoted such people is that he has a huge personal investment in the idea that the NSA spy program is illegal. Hinderaker, on the other hand, clearly and objectively reasons that doubts about the program’s legality simply do not exist.

Anyway, taking their cues from Hinderaker, the Right Blogosphere declared the DeBose/Moonie Times story to be the correct one. And they would know, as they have no personal investment in any of this.

Unfortunately, the Anonymous Liberal had to go make trouble and read the transcript.

I’ve now read through the transcript, and not surprisingly, it’s clear that Lichtblau was awake during the hearing and DeBose was, well, very confused. …

… Okay, let’s review the facts. The transcript of the hearing–which is very long–is only available via subscription, so you’re going to have to take my word for now. A total of five judges testified in person, and one submitted written testimony. All of the judges made it crystal clear that they had no intention of opining on the legality of the NSA program (“we will not be testifying today with regard to the present program implemented by President Bush”). The judges were there to testify about FISA and about the merits of Sen. Specter’s proposed legislation to amend FISA.

The bulk of the testimony by the judges was in praise of FISA and in praise of Specter’s proposed bill (which is clearly why Specter called them to testify in the first place). Although the judges were careful not to opine about the NSA program specifically, it was clear from their testimony that they believe further Congressional authorization is necessary and desirable and that the judiciary has an important and indispensable role to play in overseeing domestic surveillance.

Their agenda, to the extent they had one, was to lobby for the continued relevance of the FISA court. …

…I can assure you, though, that at no point did any of the judges come anywhere close to saying that the president “did not act illegally” or that he acted “within the law” when he authorized the NSA warrantless surveillance program. So the Washington Times story is complete rubbish. It could not possibly be more misleading.

This is all very bothersome. The Right had agreed to and proclaimed what the truth is, and here’s this loony liberal muddying the water. No wonder we liberals are so unpopular.

Update: See also Glenn Greenwald, “This Week in the NSA Scandal.”

Update update: Hinderaker is still defending his claim that the New York Times article, not the Moonie Times article, was the one that got the story wrong. And now another of the Power Tools, Scott Johnson, defends Hinderaker’s defense of his claim in a remarkable exercise in intellectual dishonesty. I say “remarkable” not because Johnsons is being dishonest — one expects such things from the Tools — but because he’s so bare-assed about it. He’s claiming that people didn’t say what he quotes them as saying.

Johnson quotes a passage from the testimony that he says belies “the tenor of Lichtblau’s description of the judges’ ‘skepticism.'” This is followed by a passage from the transcript in which two judges say, in effect, that since they don’t know details of what the NSA is up to they can’t offer an opinion of whether what they are doing is illegal or not.

Which is what Lichtblau and the Anonymous Liberal said they said. It was the other story, by DeBose, that claimed the judges had declared the NSA wiretapping program to be legal, and the judges clearly didn’t say that. Yet in Rightie World Lichtblau is “misleading” but DeBose is as honest and straightforward as sunshine itself.

Further, the judges clearly say that what worries them is that the NSA might be picking up domestic communications, which would require a warrant. Get this bit that Johnson quotes:

Judge Baker: Senator, did the statute limit the President? You created a balance between them [in the FISA statute], and I don’t think it took away the inherent authority that Judge Kornblum talked about. He didn’t call it “inherent,” he doesn’t like that. But the whole thing is that if in the course of collecting the foreign stuff, you are also picking up domestic stuff, which apparently is happening, I don’t know that that’s–it becomes a real question, you know, is he under his inherent power? Is he running around the statute?

From which Johnson concludes:

Judge Baker — who observes that he does not think FISA “took away” the president’s inherent constitutional authority to order warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance — is the one judge Lichtblau actually bothers to quote as allegedly expressing skepticism regarding this authority. Did Lichtblau leave the hearing early?

I do not believe that anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the issues in this case has ever claimed that the feds need a warrant to do foreign intelligence surveillance. What people — including the retired FISA judges — are skeptical about is whether the NSA is really limiting its activities to foreign intelligence. Judge Baker just said as much. By essentially changing the subject — by implying that the issue was foreign intelligence surveillance, which it clearly wasn’t — the Tools are trying to wriggle out of having to admit they were wrong.

Johnson concludes,

In short, I don’t think that the judges can fairly be described as having voiced skepticism regarding the president’s constitutional authority to order the NSA surveillance program. Having reviewed the transcript of their testimony, however, I am voicing skepticism that Eric Lichtlbau and the New York Times are reporting on matters related to the NSA program in good faith.

Having reviewed the Power Line web site, however, I am voicing skepticism that the Tools would recognize intellectual honesty if it bit their butts.

Mystery Solved

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Ever wonder how it is that conservatives can go to Iraq and not see any violence? Well, now we know — they’ve been in the wrong country.

Will Bunch posted a photograph that Republican congressional candidate Howard Kaloogian (running for Duke Cunningham’s seat) claimed he had taken in Baghdad.

Turns out this photo is actually of a suburb of Istanbul.

Does this explain how, for example, Ralph Peters could travel all over Baghdad without so much as seeing smudged shoes or a hair out of place? Have the Bushies set up a Potemkin Baghdad village somewhere in Turkey to show off to visitors? I mean, we’ve heard for years the moon landings were faked. If you can fake the moon, you can fake Baghdad.

Of course, this might be just an honest mistake. So I created this handy-dandy guide to Middle East geography for Republicans:

I’m just funnin’ with ya, righties. But those of you who think you’ve been to Iraq might want to check what’s stamped on your passport.

Update: Howard Kaloogian says he’s sorry about the photo. He’s sorry he didn’t “just” get back from Baghdad; he got back last year. And he didn’t “take” the “photo.” He doesn’t know who took it. He didn’t write the caption; some staffer wrote the caption. Maybe some staffer’s mother. Maybe elves. But he thinks people are being picky.

Karma’s a Bitch

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In his first public comments since resigning earlier today as a blogger for washingtonpost.com, Ben Domenech says his editors there were “fools” for not expecting an onslaught of attacks from the left.

“While I appreciated the opportunity to go and join the Washington Post,” Domenech said, “if they didn’t expect the leftists were going to come after me with their sharpened knives, then they were fools.” — Robert Bluey, Human Events

If you want to see a blog wallowing in Martyrdom, just head on over to RedState.org. For example, here, here, here, and here. Poor babies.

For a bit of info on RedState’s role in the Eason Jordan smackdown, click here. Nasty babies.

Domenech names Jayson Blair the 2003 Fraud of the Year.

JimmyJeff: “Ben Domenech, welcome to my world!” How sweet.

Affirmative Action for Bushies

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The Washington Post just announced that Ben Domenech has resigned from his WaPo blog. This is not a surprise.

Whether I agree with his opinions or not, I would expect someone who landed such a plum assignment at the tender age of 24 to show a spark of cleverness, some freshness, some, um, talent. But Mr. Domenech’s work at WaPo was drearily unexceptional and, to this middle-age lady, about as interesting as a sixth-grader’s Social Studies report on wheat farming in Saskatchewan.

His strongest post was this one, in which he takes offense because WaPo editors didn’t “get” current rightie film iconography. This is writing typical of a college newspaper, but I think WaPo could do better. Even choosing among rightie bloggers, WaPo could do better.

Speaking of college newspapers, I’ve looked at the examples (at Salon, Eschaton, and elsewhere) and the boy did plagiarize other peoples’ work for his college newspaper, The Flat Hat. To plagiarize is “To use and pass off (the ideas or writings of another) as one’s own,” according to the online American Heritage dictionary. And he did that; it is beyond question. There is a post up at RedState.com titled “We Must Defend” that defends Mr. Domenech, thus: “…permissions obtained and judgments made offline were not reflected online by an out dated and out of business campus newspaper.” But even if he had obtained permission to quote other peoples’ work, he still plagiarized that work by trying to pass it off as his own. And, strictly speaking, it would be a violation of any one-time serial rights agreement I’ve ever seen to republish the permissioned work without the proper permissions statements attached to it. And The Flat Hat (linked above) is not out of business. So the “defense” is absurd on its face.

(And what’s really outrageous for anyone who cares about film, he plagiarized bleeping Stephanie Zacharek of Salon. Zacharek’s “Batman Begins” review actually says the Joel Schumacher Batman films were better. There’s no excuse for that.)

I’m assuming Mr. Domenech got the Post position through connections, as it wasn’t through talent. DHinMI writes,

Ben Domenech did not get his position at the Washington Post based on merit. He got his position because of connections. He was home-schooled in part because his family–unlike most American families–could maintain a comfortable living with only one parent working outside the home. He got in to William and Mary, but he did not come close to graduating. (And given his penchant for plagiarism, one would have to wonder if intellectual thievery prompted a forced departure from William and Mary.) Nevertheless, despite no degree or significant life accomplishments, he got some patronage jobs in the Bush administration, no doubt because his father is an upper level GOP apparatchik. He has gotten bylines over at that bastion of heartless blue bloods, the National Review Online. He was a founder of Redstate.com. (And can you believe those clowns have shut down comments from new members, banned anyone who criticizes Domenech, and are actively defending this thief?) And he parlayed all those connections in to getting the Washington Post gig while still in his mid-20’s.

Would anyone recognize a similar career trajectory of some schmoe from a working class community outside the DC/NYC/Boston/LA/Bay Area metro areas, who went to a state university, got great grades, but whose blue collar parents didn’t have the connections of a Ben Domenech? Especially within the context of the current GOP, somebody with that background (and whose family wasn’t tightly connected with politically powerful religious leaders) might as well be a feral child.

This feral child has seen hacks promoted and talent held back all her life. It nearly always ends badly. Although I’m sure somebody in the VRWC establishment will come through with another cushy job for Mr. Domenech, he’ll be remembered in the news/publishing biz as the guy who bombed out at WaPo. And it’s a shame, because in another ten or twenty years Mr. Domenech might be capable of being interesting, even if he’s still a rightie.

See also: Glenn Greenwald, Digby, Booman Tribune.

Update: See Jay Rosen at PressThink:

I wasn’t—in principle—against the Post.com hiring a Republican activist as an opinion writer. It didn’t bother me that Domenech lacks mainstream newsroom credentials, and doesn’t call himself a journalist. I found it more interesting than scandalous that he was home schooled. And to me it was an inspired thought to give a 24 year-old a blog at washingtonpost.com.

Today I might be defending Jim Brady and company for their decision— if…. If Ben Domenech were a writer with some grace, a conservative original, a voice, something new on the scene, a different breed of young Republican, with perspective enough on the culture war to realize that while he can’t avoid being in it, he can avoid being of it. I might even be sympathizing with Ben if he had been that kind of hire.

He wasn’t. That he wasn’t was suggested by his first post, Pachyderms in the Mist: Red America and the MSM, a strange and backward-facing thing the apparent purpose of which was once more to ridicule what Peggy Noonan called “the famous MSM.” And it is famous, as a construct that allows anyone to say anything about the news media without fear of contradiction. This was Ben:

    Any red-blooded American conservative, even those who hold a dim view of Patrick Swayze’s acting “talent,” knows a Red Dawn reference. For all the talk of left wing cultural political correctness, the right has such things, too (DO shop at Wal-Mart, DON‘T buy gas from Citgo). But in the progressive halls of the mainstream media, such things prompt little or no recognition. For the MSM, Dan Rather is just another TV anchor, France is just another country and Red Dawn is just another cheesy throwaway Sunday afternoon movie.

I suppose this was supposed to mean that reporters, editors and producers in the nation’s newsrooms don’t know why Dan Rather is such a prized conservative scalp, or that the right hates the French. Besides being untrue, this was also an extremely ungracious statement, since the washingtonpost, was hiring Ben Domenech to bring the news about social conservatives to more Americans.

But in fact there is no MSM. No one answers for it. It has no address. And no real existence independent of the dreary statements (like Ben’s) in which it is bashed. Therefore it is not a term of accountability, which is one reason it’s so popular. No one’s accountable for what they say using it. If you’re a blogger, and you write things like, “The MSM swallowed it hook, line and sinker,” you should know that you have written gibberish. But you probably don’t, for to keep this knowledge from you is the leaden genius of MSM.

This Explains a Lot

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I’ve argued in the past that support for George W. Bush is rooted in fear. Now I’m coming around to the idea that fearfulness is the foundation of political conservatism.

For example, I’ve noticed that whether one enjoys or is frightened by foreign places and cultures is a nearly sure-fire predictor of whether one is a liberal or a conservative. Further, conservatives are clearly more frightened of terrorism than we liberals are (they think we’re naive; we think they’re weenies).

I wrote awhile back in “Patriotism v. Paranoia” (we’re the patriots; they’re the paranoids) that according to some guys at Berkeley, 50 years of research literature reveal these common psychological factors linked to political conservatism:

* Fear and aggression
* Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
* Uncertainty avoidance
* Need for cognitive closure
* Terror management

Now we’ve got a new study that says whiny, insecure children are more likely to grow up to be righties. According to Kurt Kleiner of the Toronto Star,

In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids’ personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There’s no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it’s unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings.

A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.

The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.

Block admits in his paper that liberal Berkeley is not representative of the whole country. But within his sample, he says, the results hold. He reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.

This explains a lot.

You can tie this back to Philip Agre’s great essay “What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong With It.” Agre defines conservatism as “the domination of society by an aristocracy.” (Note: Please read the essay before you argue with me that he’s wrong.) People willingly cling to authoritarianism out of fear. This is true of people who feel they might lose wealth, power and privilege if society gets too egalitarian. But this can also be true of people who have little wealth, power and privilege to lose. Unprivileged people can sometimes identify with the privileged group or think that the privileged group deserves to be privileged (a variation on Stockholm Syndrome?).

And there’s also a connection to Eric Fromm’s proposition in Escape from Freedom that people who feel alone and powerless try to “escape” by, for example, following a powerful and charismatic leader.

Rightie projection, denial, bullying, and never-ending resentments are all about defending themselves from whatever it is they fear. Instead of trying to reason with them, maybe it would be easier to just get them on some meds.

Update: Sorta kinda related — see today’s Dan Froomkin column on Bush’s Orwellian use of language.

Why They Fight

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Life must be bleak for Andrew Sullivan these days.

One thing has struck me these past few years about the right in America. As it has slowly abandoned its own principles – limited government, individual freedom, balanced budgets, federalism – it has been forced to resort to three fundamental issues to keep itself alive. The first was the war on terror, the second fundamentalist Christianity, and the third, hatred of the left. The first has waned somewhat, not because we aren’t still at war and in great peril, but because it is manifestly obvious that this administration is stunningly incompetent in its execution of the war. There’s only so much you can do to defend it at this point. The evangelical base whose support for Bush is entirely for religious rather than political reasons – the theocratic heart of the GOP – will never stop believing, as long as the Supreme Leader refuses to show any doubt and keeps preventing vaccines from being developed, puts pro-lifers on the Court, and keeps up the pressure on gays. But the rest – and they’re critical – are motivated entirely by being anti-left.

The most depressing aspect of this was the vile “Swift Boat” attack on John Kerry in the last election campaign. But you only have to watch O’Reilly or read Powerline or listen to Sean Hannity or David Horowitz to know that the only thing that really gets them fired up any more is loathing of liberals.

This has been obvious for a long time, at least to everyone but the Right. Righties like to think they’re the ones with the “ideas.” Can anyone remember what those “ideas” might be? Oh, yeah … cut taxes, shrink government, cut taxes, promote corporate welfare, cut taxes, cut social programs, cut taxes, praise Jesus. And cut taxes. The same zombie ideas they’ve been dragging around since Goldwater. Even neoconservative foreign policies are leftovers from the Cold War.

From yesterday’s Liberal Oasis:

Republicans Have No Ideas

Only Enemies

According to top Republicans, what agenda item will motivate their supporters to the polls this year?

More tax cuts for the rich? More drilling in environmentally sensitive areas? Less help for the poor?

Trick question.

Since Republicans in Washington aren’t really into passing legislation anymore (when was the last time they passed something?), there’s no issue for their supporters to get excited about.

So what do Republicans have left? From the NY Times:

    “Impeachment, coming your way if there are changes in who controls the House eight months from now,” Paul Weyrich, a veteran conservative organizer, declared last month in an e-mail newsletter.

    The threat of impeachment, Mr. Weyrich suggested, was one of the only factors that could inspire the Republican Party’s demoralized base to go to the polls.

    With “impeachment on the horizon,” he wrote, “maybe, just maybe, conservatives would not stay at home after all.”

Tim Grieve at Salon:

We’re hearing a lot about Democrats these days — from Republicans. Democrats are going to run Hillary Clinton as their presidential nominee in 2008. Democrats are going to try to impeach George W. Bush if they win control of Congress in 2006. It’s enough to send the Republican base into panic — which is, of course, exactly the point.

For the last four years, the Bush White House has kept the American public in line by warning that the terrorists are everywhere and fixing to “hit us” again at any minute. That argument isn’t working anymore, at least not to the president’s benefit. The public has begun to disapprove of the way that George W. Bush is handling national security; only 30 percent still think that Bush’s “central front” in the war on terror — the war of choice he launched in Iraq — is actually making Americans safer.

But when all you’ve got is fear, you’d better hope that everything looks like a monster: So if Osama bin Laden isn’t scaring Americans into the president’s camp these days, the Republicans have to hope that Russ Feingold will.

Got that? We’re the new Osama.