Category Archives: conservatism

Effing Sam Alito

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Righties have a remarkable capacity for bullshitting themselves, which is why some of them may actually believe Sam Alito doesn’t have an “agenda.” After all, returning women to the same legal status as dependent children is only doing what nature and the Founding Fathers intended, isn’t it?

Last night on cable TV various spokespersons for the Right — such as former Solicitor General Ted Olson on Hardball — mustered their best authoritative tones to declare that ol’ Sam could be counted on to rule on the law, not on his personal opinions.

And what is the law? Whatever the Bush Administration says it is, of course. Perry Bacon and Mike Allen wrote for CNN.com:

[Alito] was part of the Litigation Strategy Working Group, a team of about a dozen officials that Attorney General Edwin Meese appointed to help embed Reagan’s philosophy more deeply into the legal system. In a 1986 memo to the group, Alito proposed to have Reagan issue “signing statements,” defining exactly how the President understood a law’s meaning, when he approved a bill that Congress had passed. Reagan issued such statements occasionally, but the Bush Administration has dramatically expanded their use. In one issued two weeks ago, which infuriated both Democrats and Republicans, Bush suggested he would reconsider a recently passed torture ban if he felt there was an imminent national-security threat.

We’ve also been reassured that Alito is a man who respects precedent. As an appellate judge he even ruled against abortion restrictions because of precedent. And that’s true. In Planned Parenthood of Central New Jersey v. Farmer, where he sided with Planned Parenthood: “Our responsibility as a lower court is to follow and apply controlling Supreme Court precedent.” But that doesn’t tell us what he’ll do when he’s not on a “lower court,” does it?

So let’s just say I’m not reassured.

Dahlia Lithwick provides yesterday’s game highlights at Slate:

There aren’t a lot of other surprises today: Republicans go on and on about how easy it is for judges to know what “the law” is and what “the Constitution” requires, while Democrats rave about the centrist pragmatism of Sandra Day O’Connor. Not one Democrat on the committee, by my count, misses a chance to quote her “blank check” line from the Hamdi opinion. Senators Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., stage a little abortion-off, in which each fights to become the Most Pro-Life Man in the World (for anyone scoring at home, Coburn does not actually cry this time, but he does sniffle audibly). Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., agrees to introduce Alito, which he does graciously, but then stops short of endorsing him. Democrats fret about executive power in wartime, while Republicans are seemingly too worried about the threat of the Imperial Court to be bothered by the reality of an Imperial Presidency.

For liberals, there is no question that Alito should not be confirmed. But we are faced with two other questions: Can we stop the nomination, and if so, how far should we go to stop it?

Jane Hamsher answers question one with a big yes.

Strip Search Sammy is an altogether different beast than John Roberts, and his hearing comes at quite a different time. The public is starting to get their first tastes of the corruption scandal growing like a cancer on the Republican party who are vulnerable just at the time they are the most visible. Despite his bluster, John Cornyn is rightly terrified that the free pass given him by the press in the Abramoff matter will end any day now. He’s not the only one. There is considerable cover for an attack that didn’t exist only months ago.

And Alito himself is personally unappealing. Stiff, humorless, and comes off as a bit of a weirdo. People like Ron Wyden were afraid to go after Roberts because he was likeable, and Joe Biden learned to his peril that shredding the “nice guy” is the wrong place to try and make your bones. There is an opening for Democrats to capitalize on this as they try to tie unpopular Bush measures like the illegal NSA wiretaps to Alito’s tail like a tin can.

And the RNC knows it. Ken Mehlman himself is meeting today with Malkin, Hugh Hewitt, Cap’n Ed, Red State, Political Teen and others to try and control the quite critical message in the blogosphere, and seeding the notion of inevitable failure into the opposition narrative is one of the tricks that plays well for the GOP.

Is the DNC meeting with leftie bloggers? If so, I’m not on the invitation list. But let’s go on … Eleanor Clift argued in November that Democrats should not go to the mattresses over Alito:

Democrats should mount a tough fight and expose Alito and his conservative cheerleaders so the voters know what they’re getting. Highlight the ruling where Alito said Congress has no power to regulate machine guns under the commerce clause of the Constitution. Play the abortion card–but stop short of a filibuster. With President George W. Bush’s approval rating at 35 percent in the latest CBS poll, Democrats have finally sprung to life. That’s a good thing, but a bruising battle over cultural issues is better for Bush than for the Democrats. Rather than risk the filibuster in an unwinnable fight over Alito, Democrats should save it for when and if that awful day arrives when the most liberal member of the court, John Paul Stevens, 85, steps down while Bush is still president.

In other words, Clift calls for a strategic redeployment. One does wonder how bad a nominee has to be before we take a stand, though. We’re gonna redeploy our butts off a cliff one of these days. And what about the F word — filibuster? Via Scott at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Matt Yglesias has switched sides and is arguing against a filibuster. Sam Rosenfeld at TAPPED sounds discouraged:

[I]t’s hard to shake a sense of fatalism here. To state the obvious, the political scene in the last few months has been unusually packed with other issues that have prevented any kind of serious anti-Alito momentum from gathering real head-steam. Democrats clearly feel that they are enjoying quite a bit of momentum at the moment on a number of other fronts and are reluctant to risk losing it in an uphill nomination fight that could merely polarize partisans along familiar and not-particularly-beneficial lines. This isn’t the bravest kind of tactical logic — and of course pointing to the “lack of momentum” in one fight or the other is always a circular way of rationalizing not working to build that momentum — but I still find it pretty compelling. That’s because the Supreme Court “fights” we’ve seen so far in the last half year have already revealed the basic mistake of the longstanding conventional wisdom that post-Breyer nomination fights would inevitably be gonzo partisan battle royals. In fact, we’ve relearned that the presidency enjoys an immense degree of built-in advantage and deference on nominations that makes effective opposition prohibitively difficult, except under very rare circumstances. (This is all particularly true when the opposition party is the minority in the Senate.)

Moreover, the constant refrain that “it all comes down to the hearings” and that the whole dynamic of the fight might change this week seems delusional. The Roberts hearings should have made it abundantly clear that the most disgraceful amount of obfuscation and unjustifiable dodging in no way endangers a nominee’s prospects for confirmation. Roberts’ performance sparked unanimous Democratic grumbling about his giving short shrift to the Senate’s role in the process — and then a bunch of Democrats voted for him. Just because the logic compelling Alito to be forthcoming is even more air-tight and unanswerable doesn’t mean he will, in fact, be forthcoming. Democrats are unlikely to find it a politically compelling proposition to mount a filibuster mainly on procedural grounds, but without that threat there’s no leverage to get Alito to actually say anything.

I’ve heard suggestions that the Bushies want a tough fight against Alito, because it would take attention away from Jack Abramoff and the NSA scandal. On the other hand, the NSA scandal is very much part of why Alito is a frighteningly bad candidate for the SCOTUS. Alito should be compelled to express an opinion on Bush’s “war powers” and whether the 4th Amendment still applies. And I say the Dems should filibuster his ass until he does.

Finally, if the Dems need some new talking points, they should consult the Blogosphere. Via Kos, Michael at AMERICAblog has come up with a dandy:

He is apparently ashamed of everything he’s ever done. Alito boasted on an application for promotion in the Reagan administration about belonging to the racist, Neanderthal-ish Concerned Alumni For Princeton. Now he pretends he can’t remember ever belonging to them at all.

Alito said he wanted to become a lawyer because he was so distraught about Supreme Court rulings that led to “one person, one vote,” a cornerstone of our modern democracy. Now, he says we should ignore his consistent, persistent attacks on affirmative action.

Alito also cannily helped to devise the incremental approach to dismantling Roe v Wade that has been the very tactic the far right has used. Now Alito says to ignore all that.

Alito has repeatedly proven he believes the president is more like an emperor — someone who deserves almost unlimited deference from the Supreme Court, especially during a time of war.

Finally, Alito pledged to the Senate that he would recuse himself under certain situations as a federal judge. He repeatedly broke that pledge. His excuses vary: he forgot, the computers shouldn’t have assigned him those cases in the first place, he never HAD to recuse himself, and finally he never promised he would recuse himself forever. The reasons change, but the fact remains: Alito gave his word and then he broke it. He can’t be trusted.

Since Alito is so clearly ashamed of himself, shouldn’t we be ashamed of him and keep him off the Supreme Court?

Last night on Hardball, the guest-hosting Norah O’Donnell kept trying to get a rightie guest to admit that Alito would turn the court to the Right; I don’t believe she got a straight answer from any of them. What are righties ashamed of (like we don’t know)?

Update: Glenn Greenwald says Dems must filibuster!

Update update: Don’t miss “Bush Wired for Alito Remarks” at Democrats.com!!!

Because Jonah Goldberg Won’t Go

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A rightie at NRO supports the troops — from a distance — but only the male ones. NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez clucks with disapproval at this Washington Post piece by Anne Hull, “When Mom Is Over There.”

“[Y]ou really need to get yourself Women Who Make the World Worse to see how we got to the point where we’re deploying moms to Iraq,” sniffs Lopez, referring to a new book by celebrated right-wing airhead Kate O’Beirne. Lopez links to an interview with O’Beirne, who calls women serving in war zones “a disgrace.”

The Mom at War is Master Sgt. Angela Hull, Anne Hull’s sister-in-law. Anne Hull writes,

Angela is chief controller of the air-traffic control tower at Kirkuk Regional Air Base in northern Iraq. She did not graduate from the Air Force Academy or come from a long line of military heroes. Angela was 22 and working at the Stouffer’s frozen-food factory in her home town of Gaffney, S.C., in 1987 when she rebelled against the smallness of her life and joined the Air Force. She advanced the slow, hard way, from refueling aircraft at 30,000 feet to learning air-traffic control to commanding towers. In Kirkuk, she supervises 10 controllers in the base tower while serving as first sergeant to a squadron of 48.

But “women can’t and don’t meet the male physical standards,” says Kate O’Beirne.

I’d like to see O’Beirne explain physical standards to Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester of the 617th Military Police Company, who was awarded a Silver Star last June. According to the American Forces Press Service:

Hester’s squad was shadowing a supply convoy March 20 when anti-Iraqi fighters ambushed the convoy. The squad moved to the side of the road, flanking the insurgents and cutting off their escape route. Hester led her team through the “kill zone” and into a flanking position, where she assaulted a trench line with grenades and M203 grenade-launcher rounds. She and Nein, her squad leader, then cleared two trenches, at which time she killed three insurgents with her rifle.

When the fight was over, 27 insurgents were dead, six were wounded, and one was captured.

Kate O’Beirne finds Sgt. Hester disgraceful, even though her physical standards seemed perfectly adequate.

I realize we ladies are smaller and have a reduced capacity for upper body strength compared to men, and I have no doubt there are many war situations in which women generally would be at a disadvantage. I also realize that it’s hard on a family for Mom to be away. But isn’t it hard on a family for Dad to be away? Do O’Beirne and Lopez believe that husbands and fathers play a less critical role in family life than wives and mothers? I thought conservatives were into fatherhood these days.

I believe we should leave it to the military, not Kate O’Beirne or Kathryn Jean Lopez, to decide who is qualified to be a soldier and who isn’t. I’m told that our military activities in Iraq require smarts as much as brawn, if not more so. And in the past year the military often fell short of recruitment goals, causing the Army to lower its standards on aptitude tests. Are we supposed to replace smart, well-trained women for (possibly) less smart and less-well-trained men in order to satisfy Kate O’Beirne’s sense of propriety?

And if Ms. Lopez wants women serving in Iraq to be replaced by men, she could start by kicking her colleague Jonah Goldberg in his lazy butt and telling him to enlist.

Further — if we don’t want moms and dads going to war, maybe we should be a little more circumspect about starting wars, hm?

Law, Democracy, and Liberalism

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Sometimes one finds two essays written by two different people on two different subjects that illuminate each other. I believe I found such a pair today.

The first is at Unclaimed Territory (and cross-posted to Hullabaloo) by Glenn Greenwald. He writes,

What we have in our Federal Government are not individual acts of law-breaking or isolated scandals of illegality, but instead, a culture and an ideology of lawlessness. It cannot be emphasized enough that since September 11, the Bush Administration has claimed the power to act without any constraints of law or checks from the Congress or the courts. Its view of its own power and governing philosophy is based upon, and perfectly encapsulated by, this single paragraph from the incomparably pernicious September 25, 2001 Memorandum, written by then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo:

    1. In both the War Powers Resolution and the Joint Resolution, Congress has recognized the President’s authority to use force in circumstances such as those created by the September 11 incidents. Neither statute, however,

can place any limits on the President’s determinations

    1. as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response. These decisions, under our Constitution,

are for the President alone to make

    .

Awhile back Mr. Greenwald challenged righties to explain “how there can be any limits at all on his power under the theories of Executive Power which they are advocating to argue that Bush had the right to violate Congressional law.” The answers he received can be boiled down to: There aren’t. It is entirely within the President’s discretion which laws he will or will not follow; therefore, there are no limits to his power.

As disturbing as Bush’s power-grab has become, the knee-jerk defense of unlimited executive power coming out of the Right — often from self-styled “libertarians” — is beyond creepy. In Rightieworld, the White House is the sole arbiter of right and wrong. What Bush wants trumps not just Congress, but also the courts.

Glenn Greenwald continues:

The NSA law-breaking scandal cannot be seen as some isolated act. It is merely the most flagrant symptom (thus far) of the fact that we have a President — with three full years left in office — who has claimed for himself the right to ignore Congressional law and who believes that virtually all decisions of any real significance in our country are his “alone to make.” FISA. The National Security Act of 1947. The McCain Amendment. These are all federal laws — laws — which the Administration is openly claiming it has the right to violate.

How could this possibly be defensible in the United States? Do “conservatives” have no principles at all?

Here we come to the second essay, written last June by Michael Bérubé. [Update: Michael Bérubé has corrected me; the post I am quoting was written by John McGowan.]

Republicans have launched a full-scale assault upon democracy at home. Setting aside (for the moment) the simple fact that this assault is about grabbing and using power, it also reflects an impoverished view of democracy, basically one that limits democracy to free elections. In this view, the people ratify a set of leaders–a government–in an election, and, in so doing, gives those leaders a blank check. …

… This understanding of democracy tends toward the plebiscite–and toward the establishment of a strong leader, usually one who promises to sweep aside the complexities, compromises, frustrations, and inefficiencies introduced by parliamentary janglings and an independent judiciary. From Napoleon III and Bismarck in the 19th century to the Governator in the late 20th century, the plebiscite has almost always favored right wing leaders impatient with legal and institutional impediments to forceful action.

There was an interview on tonight’s “Hardball” that illustrated this perfectly; I’ll try to remember to post the transcript tomorrow. Essentially, an apologist for the Bush Regime said that if the people don’t like warrantless searches, in 2008 they can vote for a candidate who promises to get warrants. Until then … tough.

Bérubé McGowan explains that “A free society is one in which there are various centers of power, various positions from which people have the ability to influence decisions.” I might add that the separation of powers written into the Constitution can not lawfully be suspended just because one political party controls all branches of government and finds the separation cumbersome. The Constitution gives powers and authorities to legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government, not to whatever party wins the most elections.

Bérubé McGowan continues:

There is nothing that underwrites the rule of law except the continued practice of upholding it. The law must be reaffirmed anew each and every time it is enunciated and enforced. And the temptation to circumvent the law, to rewrite it to accommodate one’s current beliefs and practices, is also ever present. To pay the law heed is to accept that one’s own virtue is doubtful–or that one’s own beliefs are, in every sense of that word, “partial.” It is their assurance in their own virtue that renders the Republicans most dangerous, most prone to set the law aside when it gets in the way of doing when they know in their hearts is right. Impatience with the law is endemic–and it is the harbinger of extreme politics of either the right or the left. (It is here, of course, that the leftist will leap. But why should we think leftist self-righteousness any more attractive or less dangerous than the rightist variety?)

I think this answers the question of why righties are so blind to their own radicalism, and why they can so casually toss the “rule of law” out the window when it gets in the way of their agenda.

My point is that liberalism, first and foremost, is a set of expedients (mostly institutional and legal) for minimizing tyranny by setting limits to government power. It also tries to prevent the consolidation of power by fostering the multiplication of power. Democracy, in my view, is not worth a damn if it is not partnered with liberalism. Democracy and liberalism are a squabbling pair; they each locate power in a different place–democracy in the people, liberalism in the law–and they aim for different goods: democracy (in its most ideal form) for something like the “general will,” liberalism for a modus vivendi in a world characterized by intractable conflicts among people with different beliefs, goals, ambitions, and values. Neither one trumps the other; both, in my view, are essential ingredients of a legitimate polity.

Liberalism can seem “unnatural,” Bérubé McGowan says, because “It involves self-abnegation, accepting the frustration of my will.” Because liberalism values compromise, liberals can appear to have no strong convictions at all. But, IMO, one of the significant differences between Left and Right in America today is that liberals value the processes and procedures of democracy above any particular agenda, but conservatives place their agenda above the processes. For the sake of fleeting policy victories and an advantage in the next elections, “conservatives” (and I use the word loosely) are undermining the institutional structures of government that have sustained this country for more than two centuries. If those structures aren’t around to sustain future generations — who cares? We’ll all be dead.

What do we make of conservatives who don’t “conserve”? What we make of them is that the American Right has moved off the scale; it has become thoroughly radicalized. In truth, our present Right vs. Left conflict is really a conflict between radicals and moderates. I suspect a lot of Americans are beginning to sense this.

Update: See Lichtblau and Shant, New York Times: “Basis for Spying in U.S. Is Doubted.”

Somewhere There’s an Idiot

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My modus operandi for blogging is to cruise around the web until I find something that pisses me off, and then I blog about it. Maybe I’m just tired, but this morning I was struggling to find something obnoxious enough to be worthy of a post. Then I found this.

Rightie bloggers just love to demonstrate how well they’ve been brainwashed by regurgitating the propaganda and misinformation about liberalism they’ve been fed all their lives. Correct exposition of groupthink is then rewarded with rightie group approval. And I know it’s futile to try to educate them, but just maybe if we speak up a few innocents might be saved from being assimilated by the rightie hive mind. So here goes …

First off, by now you probably know that whenever anyone says “I used to be a liberal, but now I’m a conservative,” that person is either lying or never actually understood what a “liberal” is. I’ll be charitable and assume this Fausta person falls into the second category.

Fausta begins by defining liberalism, thus:

Liberalism used to mean, as Friedrich Hayek put it, “the fundamental principle that in the ordering of our affairs we should make as much use as possible of the spontaneous forces of society, and resort as little as possible to coercion”. Sixty years ago Hayek was saying, “That socialism has replaced liberalism as the doctrine held by a great majority of progressives does not simply mean that people have forgotten the consequences of collectivism. It has happened because they were persuaded of the very opposite of what these men had predicted”, and that’s even more true nowadays.

Now, I know Friedrich Hayek was a famous guy and a big bleeping authority, but this definition sucks. It’s true that liberalism is about liberty. But Fausta’s citation of Hayek reflects the Libertarian Fallacy — that all authoritarianism and coercion come from government, and if we could get government off our backs we’d all be free as birds.

The real world, people, does not work that way. In the real world, oppression comes out of the private sector just as readily as the public. In fact, if government doesn’t step in and put a check on private sector oppression, ordinary people can become as powerless and persecuted in a “free” country as they would be in a totalitarian state. The most blatant examples of this in American history involve racial minorities, but there also has been economic oppression where the wealthy were able to mercilessly exploit the laborers of all races who created their wealth. But liberalism assumes that We, the People, are rational beings who can recognize problems and use representative government as a means for solving those problems, thus achieving systemic improvement in the human condition. Thus, in the 20th century We, the People authorized government to ensure fair labor practices, for example.

But in the conservative mind, all checks on the power of the wealthy to get wealthier amounts to “collectivism,” which is the same thing as Communism. Where ordinary citizens are able to use government as a tool to protect themselves from oppression, that (to a rightie) is coercion and just a step away from Stalinism. In a free society, government should step aside so that big corporations can shortchange their workers and rob them of their lives and dignity without interference. To a rightie, “freedom” means limiting the power of government, which sounds grand. But if government truly is of, by, and for the people, what righties really want to do is limit the power of the people.

But enough of my liberalism lecture; let’s crash ahead to Fausta’s next paragraph.

You find liberals defending Mao, and splitting hairs over whether it’s fair for a book to claim that Mao was responsible for the deaths of 70 million people, when in fact it was “only” 20 million. The same people who claim to be against homophobia and injustice in this country choose to ignore the persecution of gays in Castro’s Cuba (where men have been sent to concentration camps for being gay, and AIDS patients are compulsorily interned) and in Muslim countries, where it gets you a death penalty.

You will not find liberals defending Mao. Maoism is not liberalism. Righties think everything identified as “the Left” is the same thing. It is not. One might find self-identified lefties defending Mao, but those people are not liberals. Period; end of argument.

As far as liberals “splitting hairs over whether it’s fair for a book to claim that Mao was responsible for the deaths of 70 million people, when in fact it was ‘only’ 20 million” goes, an example would have been nice. But one suspects this is a snip of historic scholarly argument taken out of context and has nothing to do with “liberalism.”

Regarding “ignoring” injustice in Cuba and elsewhere, in fact through “liberal” organizations like Amnesty International liberals have tried to make a difference for many years. Fausta is clearly not aware of these efforts, but he should educate him- or herself before he/she spouts off again.

Fausta continues,

Liberals rant about the glass ceiling in our country while not speaking a word against women being killed for having been raped in Iran – at times by being buried in the ground up to their necks and having small stones thrown at them until they die. That countries like Iran stand against the modern world poses no contradiction to liberals, even when liberalism used to be synonymous with modern ideals back when the very definition of modern stood for liberal.

In fact, the Feminist Majority Foundation and other feminist organizations were speaking out in opposition to the oppression of women in Afghanistan long before righties noticed that the Taliban was our enemy. And it is interesting that the rightie mentions Iran, a “bad” country, and not rape in Iraq (which I blogged about recently), or our “ally,” Pakistan.

Liberals rant about 2000 soldiers dying in Iraq while dismissing 2,996 murdered on the morning of September 11 by saying it was just “sand thrown in America’s eyes”.

As an eyewitness to the collapse of the WTC towers, I’d like Fausta to say that one to my face. Even better, Fausta should come to Manhattan and spout off about liberals “dismissing” the dead of 9/11 to an audience of liberal New Yorkers, most of whom knew at least one of those 2,996. The audience reaction should be, um, interesting.

In the rightie mind, whenever one self-identified “leftie” expresses an opinion, he speaks for all “liberals.” So because (I assume) somewhere in America a half-dozen crackpots might have “dismissed” the deaths of 9/11, ergo, all liberals think this way. In fact, if anything, “liberals” may be more genuinely concerned about the deaths than conservatives. Most of us believe we should have used all of our resources to destroy al Qaeda instead of being sidetracked into deposing Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with 9/11.

Liberals fuss about one CIA agent’s cover being blown, which in their eyes warrants an investigation, while leaks on confidential information on the war against Islamic fascism are applauded and any investigation should be called off.


Translation: Liberals object when administration officials conspire to manipulate the press by spreading rumors (which, incidentally, included revealing classified information). And liberals object when information is leaked that genuinely injures national security. However, leaks that reveal corruption, despotism, and illegal activity being perpetrated by our government are gratefully appreciated.

Liberals believe that the USA has no enemies, that there is not much in the way of danger, and that we’d all live in peace if only we’d turn our swords into plowshares, no matter how much evidence there might exist to the contrary.

The above needs to be filed under “outrageous hyperbole.” It’s too irrational to actually address. In fact, that pretty much encompasses the remainder of this little essay. Liberals, we are told, encourage ten-year-olds to have sex, hate the work ethic, and live to oppress Christians. The usual garbage that has no basis in reality.

Part of me feels sorry for Kool-Aiders like Fausta, but such brainless little robots are ever the soldiers of despotism. Pathetic as they are, they must be corrected, and opposed.

IOKIYAR

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I overlooked this column, “Slurs Fly from the Left,” by Jeff Jacoby in Wednesday’s Boston Globe and only noticed it today through some links. See if you notice what’s missing:

NOTHING BRINGS OUT RACIST slurs like an ambitious black man who doesn’t know his ”place.” So when Maryland’s lieutenant governor, Michael Steele, announced his candidacy for the US Senate recently, the bigots reared up. On one popular website, The News Blog, Steele’s picture was grotesquely doctored, making him look like a minstrel-show caricature. ”I’s Simple Sambo and I’s Running for the Big House,” read the insulting headline accompanying the picture.

This wasn’t some white supremacist slime from the right-wing fringe. The News Blog is a liberal site, and the reason for its racist attack on Steele, a former chairman of the Maryland Republican Party, is that he is a conservative. Specifically, a black conservative. As far as too many liberals are concerned, blacks who reject liberalism deserve to be smeared as Sambos and worse.

”Black Democratic leaders in Maryland say that racially tinged attacks against Lt. Gov. Michael Steele . . . are fair because he is a conservative Republican,” The Washington Times reported. ”Such attacks . . . include pelting him with Oreo cookies during a campaign appearance, calling him an ‘Uncle Tom,’ and depicting him as a blackfaced minstrel.”

What’s missing, of couse, is the blogger of The News Blog, Steve Gilliard. Who is black. And the beef with Steele is not with his conservatism but with his aquiesence to racism. Steve defends himself quite well here; no need for me to do it for him. “What would you think about Jewish politicians who sought the favor of Islamic radicals,” Steve asks. “Would you want that person to represent you?”

Still, I wasn’t going to write about this until I ran into Ann Coulter’s latest, um, effort. No need turning over rocks or reading between lines to find racism; Coulter throws it in your face. Here’s Ann’s ode to Kwanzaa:

(Sing to “Jingle Bells”)

Kwanzaa bells, dashikis sell
Whitey has to pay;
Burning, shooting, oh what fun
On this made-up holiday!

Yeah, she actually wrote that. Here’s a bit more, if you can stand it:

Coincidentally, the seven principles of Kwanzaa are the very same seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army, another charming invention of the Least-Great Generation. In 1974, Patricia Hearst, kidnap victim-cum-SLA revolutionary, posed next to the banner of her alleged captors, a seven-headed cobra. Each snake head stood for one of the SLA’s revolutionary principles: Umoja, Kujichagulia, Ujima, Ujamaa, Nia, Kuumba and Imani — the same seven “principles” of Kwanzaa….

…Kwanzaa was the result of a ’60s psychosis grafted onto the black community. Liberals have become so mesmerized by multicultural nonsense that they have forgotten the real history of Kwanzaa and Karenga’s United Slaves — the violence, the Marxism, the insanity. Most absurdly, for leftists anyway, is that they have forgotten the FBI’s tacit encouragement of this murderous black nationalist cult founded by the father of Kwanzaa.

Now the “holiday” concocted by an FBI dupe is honored in a presidential proclamation and public schools across the nation. Bush called Kwanzaa a holiday that promotes “unity” and “faith.” Faith in what? Liberals’ unbounded capacity to respect any faith but Christianity?

She also notes President Bush’s recognition of Kwanzaa: “It’s as if David Duke invented a holiday called ‘Anglika.'”

Jeff Jacoby wrote in the Boston Globe that “Once upon a time, segregationists excoriated white liberals as ‘nigger lovers.’ Today, racist insults in the political arena are more likely to come from the left — and to target black conservatives.” And if he reads Coulter’s column, will he revise his opinion? Of course not — IOKIYAR.

Update: See RT at Just a Bump in the Beltway and John at AMERICAblog.

Us Versus Them

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David Neiwert seems to be taking some time off from blogging, so he hasn’t reacted to Cathy Young’s commentary on his Michelle Malkin series (first installment here) in yesterday’s Boston Globe.

After calling Michelle Malkin’s book Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild “accurate and disturbing,” Young acknowledges that righties can get a little unhinged sometimes, too. Then she mentions Dave:

Dave Neiwert, a Seattle-based author and award-winning freelance journalist, has posted a rebuttal to Malkin on his website at dneiwert.blogspot.com. Neiwert documents a lot of nastiness on the right, including physical as well as verbal assaults. For every left-wing ”Kill Bush” T-shirt, he notes, there’s a right-wing ”Liberal hunting permit” bumper sticker.

I’ve never seen a “Kill Bush” T-shirt. Per Dave, this claim comes from Malkin. I’ll take her word for it that somebody has such a T-shirt for sale, but we don’t know if anyone bought them. Impeach Bush, on the other hand …

But this anecdotes illustrates another point that Young misses: Righties demonize liberalism far more broadly, and generally, than lefties demonize conservatism; see this old post for discussion and this post for an illuminating comparison of rightie and leftie book titles. Briefly, I argue that righties define liberalism in more broad-brush, demonic terms than lefties define conservatism. Although there is copious and robust snarking going both ways, I find it’s easier to find condemnations for liberalism itself on the Right Blogosphere than it is to find condemnations for conservatism itself on the Left Blogosphere. As I wrote earlier, “when liberals attack conservatives, liberals tend to be person- or issue-specific, and give reasons — This guy is a jerk because he did thus-and-so. This policy stinks because it’s going to have such-and-such effect.”

Comparing “shoot liberals” to “shoot Bush” illustrates my point. But let’s go on …

Young continues,

Neiwert makes a lot of excellent points, but unfortunately he can’t resist the temptation of arguing that right-wing nastiness is worse than the left-wing kind.

For instance, Neiwert argues that a number of leading conservative figures have employed rhetoric about rounding up the opposition. (Here’s Limbaugh again: ”Wouldn’t it be great if anybody who speaks out against this country, to kick them out of the country? . . . We’d get rid of Michael Moore, we’d get rid of half the Democratic Party. . .”) Such talk, Neiwert claims, has no real counterpart on the left. But was it much better when Garrison Keillor, who has an audience of nearly 4 million on National Public Radio, suggested taking the vote away from born-again Christians shortly after the 2004 election? Yes, it’s all in jest, but this is joking of a very poisonous kind.

I got news for you, honey lamb; the righties ain’t jokin‘. And notice we’re comparing violence (“kick them out of the country”) to non-violence (“taking away the vote”). I mean, we’re comparing raving mad, foaming-at-the-mouth Limbaugh to the courtly and often soporific Keillor, for pity’s sake. Give me a break.

Now we have another example. The LGF’ers are calling for James Wolcott’s decapitation. Yeah, beheading jokes are always knee-slappers.

The catalyst for this impromptu rally was my clinical diagnosis of Daniel Pipes as “a patronizing little shit,” which seemed to displease the footballers, not that any of them bothered to acquaint themselves with the causus belli (Pipes’ pipsqueak character smear of Muhammed Ali). Then again, the poor dears don’t seem to know the difference between an ocelot and an ocicat, another indictment of the limitations of home schooling.

This one sentence amid all that writhing distemper leapt out at me:

“May he [i.e., me] be kidnapped by ‘insurgents’ in Iraq then appear on an ugly net broadcast. I wonder, if in the moment before the knife started sawing into his fleashy neck if he might rethink his opinions on the GWOT.”

He later corrected the spelling to “fleshy,” lest anyone think I possess a flashy neck.

Y’know, I have called a lot of people names on this blog. I call them weenies and idiots and whackjobs. I describe their mental and educational limitations in colorful terms. But I honestly do not believe I have ever wished physical harm on anyone. And this goes for the many other liberal bloggers whose work I follow.

Our James W. continues,

More and more the rightwing militant “anti-idiotarians” (as they deludedly think of themselves)have been relishing the prospect of antiwar figures undergoing the Daniel Pearl treatment. They keep bringing it up as the retribution that’ll deliver certain choice heads on a platter. In a sick irony, Daniel Pearl’s marytrdom has provided a negative inspiration to certain super patriots professing to fight for truth, justice, and the American way.

For example, Anna Benson, the bodacious wife of a Mets pitcher, recently burst her bodice giving full lusty cry to an aria painting the glorious prospect of Michael Moore’s neck being used as a log.

“You are a selfish, pathetic excuse for an American, and you can take your big fat ass over to Iraq and get your pig head cut off and stuck on a pig pole. Then, you can have your equally as fat wife make a documentary about how loudly you squealed while terrorists were cutting through all the blubber and chins to get that 40 pound head off of you.”

And just this morning, the day after Christmas and the second day of Hannukah, blogdom’s zestiest Zionist party girl elevated the discourse by dismissing the concerns of legal scholars perturbed about Bush’s domestic spying thusly:

“Someone ought to tlell those legal scholars not to worry…….it’s smooth sailing once those Radical Islmonazis saw through their jugulars.”

(Her excitable italics.)

I assume her excitable spelling, too. But, for the record, I don’t find jokes about sawing through jugulars all that amusing.

I am not going to claim that no leftie ever wished physical harm, or death, or beheading, on a rightie. But it is a whole lot less common. And Mr. Wolcott knows why:

When rightwing bloggers and posters conjure that under Islam, Democrats–which they’ve come to call dhimmicrats–will get what’s coming to them (i.e., the business end of a butcher’s blade), it’s as if it’s a horrible fate that couldn’t possibly happen to them*–because it’s a death wish directed outward. The Islamic terrorists serve as proxies and stand-ins in this imaginary theater of cruelty, enacting what they (the warbloggers) would like to mete out to us (their domestic adversaries). …

…(*as another LGF poster put it: “Funny thing, the liberal mindset: expend all energy on phantom ‘enemys’, meanwhile the real enemy pounds at the fucking gate, ready to chop off their heads.” Note: “their,” not “our.” LGF’ers have a touching faith in the undetachablility of their own heads under the grisly Islamofascism they spend so many hours daydreaming about.)[emphasis added]

I think it’s often the case that the things people say they are afraid of are actually what they wish for. Survivalists are a good example; they are often people who feel marginalized or intimidated by the society they live in, so they hope for a day when that society is wiped out. Today’s Right Wing might be defined as a selective survivalist cult. They don’t want the entire society to be wiped out, just the liberal parts. And they aren’t joking.

September 11 Cancelled the Bill of Rights

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The blogosphere is having a full-blown war over Bush’s unilateral deletion of the 4th Amendment from the Bill of Rights. (See New York Times story here; my comments here.)

Nearly to a blogger, righties are saying damn the Constitution.

One of the High Priestesses of Totalitarianism herself, Michelle Malkin, dismisses those of us who are concerned about a clear violation of the 4th Amendment as “civil liberties Chicken Littles.” “The real headline news is not that President Bush took extraordinary measures to protect Americans in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,” she wrote, “but that the blabbermouths at the Times chose to disclose classified information in a pathetically obvious bid to move the Iraqi elections off the front pages.”

And, of course, the other reason the Times pushed this non-story, according to Malkin, was to promote James Risen’s book about the CIA and the Bush Administration, to be published by The Free Press in January 2006.

One big flaw in this theory is that The Free Press is an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which is the publishing operation of Viacom Inc. It has no ties to the New York Times (although it does publish Wall Street Journal Books). So there’s nothin’ in it financially for the New York Times. Ergo, no compelling reason for the Times to push the book, which isn’t mentioned in the story, anyway.

And the same story appears in the Washington Post, by Dan Eggen. Does Eggen have a book coming out, too?

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns & Money has a good one-paragraph summation of the rightie position.

You’ll like this: Malkin writes,

Civil liberties extremists pretend there are no tradeoffs, no costs, to putting legal absolutism over national security.

Civil liberties extremists? Legal absolutism? What Bush signed off on was a bleeping violation of the 4th Amendment!

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Ain’t no exceptions provided for. The federal government does not have the authority to spy on citizens without a warrant. End of story.

Update: See also — a John Bolton connection? At Kos, Susan G writes, “This is about the very foundations of democracy: Is the government our servant or our master? And is the president, who is elected to execute our laws, allowed to suspend them?”

Acts of Cognition

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Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham writes in today’s Washington Post, “In my view, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were an act of war, not a mere crime.”

Senator Graham goes on to make a nice argument for why we shouldn’t torture detained terrorist suspects. I want to comment only on that first sentence, however.

I remember September 13, 2001, wandering about Manhattan. I walked from Grand Central to Times Square, then took the Seventh Avenue local train to 14th Street, then walked over to Union Square. The pain in the city was palpable. Pictures of the dead — we weren’t yet acknowledging they were dead, but we knew — were stapled or taped on every available surface.

I remember feeling a kind of numb emptiness, and not just from sorrow. I remembered thinking that it would have been easier to process what I felt if the perpetrators had been more well-defined, something solid that we could circle on a map and label “enemy,” instead of wraiths from a shadow world I barely knew. If we had been attacked by another country, we could redirect our pain into simple purpose –going to war, defeating an enemy. But on September 13 it was as if we’d been attacked by mist. What would we do? The lack of a clear, well-defined path of action made the present seem so much harder to bear.

Over the next several days we learned more, of course. We learned about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, and we learned that much of that organization was being sheltered by the Taliban in Afghanistan. That was something tangible, with geographic boundaries. Yet we were not going to war with Afghanistan, but with something that could cross national boundaries as easily as smoke.

However, things are what they are. We have a lazy tendency to “understand” phenomena by sorting it into a pre-arranged file structure in our heads. But putting a label on something, or assigning a place for it in an ideological taxonomy, is not the same thing as knowing it as-it-is.

This is one part of my Zen studies that seems to have stuck. Words are not reality. Concepts are not reality. Zennies go way beyond thinking outside the box. Zennies are all about destroying the box altogether and evaporating all reference points in order to realize enlightenment. I can’t say I quite got to that point. But I still try to appreciate things as-they-are instead of by some system of classification.

It seems meaningless to me to classify the 9/11 attacks as either a war or a crime. They were what they were. Both, and neither.

You might have heard the old Hindu story about the blind men and the elephant; the men, feeling different parts of the elephant, got into an argument about whether the elephant was like a tree trunk, a snake, a fan, a wall, a spear, or a rope. Seems to me that arguing about whether 9/11 was an act or war or a crime is just about as blind. To understand it, you need to wipe former points of reference out of your head and take it in as-it-is. And you need to take it all in, not just whatever part seems most graspable.

Most of the chest-thumping bravado one finds on the Right makes me realize the chest-thumpers are looking at Islamic terrorism and seeing something entirely different from what I see. They’re seeing something like a conventional war; I do not. So many citizens (erroneously) embraced the invasion of Iraq out of emotional need to find a solid, tangible enemy to fight in a glorious little war. As I said, it makes processing the pain of 9/11 so much easier. But that’s an emotional crutch, not reality. And, as I argued this morning, all our thrashing around in Iraq is leaving us weaker and more vulnerable to real threats.

Real leaders would have helped us face reality while we processed our pain. Real leaders would have helped us understand the complex nature of what we faced while finding rational and effective ways to deal with it. Instead, we had Bush and Cheney. Not so much Dumb and Dumber as Dumb and Bleeping Delusional. Too bad for us.

Think of the Iraq War as the Mother of All Security Blankets. It’s what the Right clings to because they lack the fortitude (or brainpower) to face reality. And that’s why no amount of reasoning will persuade them to let go of it.

Why We’re Stuck in Iraq

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The longer we stay, the bigger mess we create. Once we invaded, we set in motion a group of forces that inexplicably has taken us to this point. We can‘t change that by staying longer. We can make it worse.

We essentially invaded for other peoples‘ interests without understanding it. We made Iraq safe for al Qaeda, therefore, we really encouraged or pleased Osama bin Laden.

The Iranians detested Saddam‘s regime. He had invaded them and fought them for eight years. Therefore, seeing Saddam and his regime overthrown greatly pleased the Iranians.

It has also created a situation inside Iraq, fragmentation, that‘s leading to the creation of a regime that will almost inexplicably will be an Islamic republic much closer to Iran than to the U.S. or anyone in the Arab world. [Lt. Gen. William Odom (Ret.)]

Odom, who served as head of the National Security Agency during the Reagan administration, came out for “cutting and running” before Jack Murtha did. The U.S. invasion of Iraq, he said, serves only the interests of Osama bin Laden, Iran, and extremists in both Palestinian and Israeli political circles. It ain’t doin’ a dadblamed thing for the United States, even though we’re pouring something like $6 billion a month into the effort. Odom has called the Iraq invasion the “greatest strategic disaster in United States history.”

I only wonder why the Right hasn’t gotten around to sliming Odom. I can only assume they haven’t noticed him yet. Or else they did slime him and I missed it.

Our Iraq policies are stuck on stupid because our political leaders, with few exceptions, refuse to lead. Republicans have tied their political careers not only to the war but also to the talking points, e.g., speaking out against the war helps the enemy. I’m sure that right now some of them (especially those facing re-election next year) are struggling to come up with a way to speak out against the war without, you know, speaking out against the war. (Good luck with that.) Meanwhile, the Democrats are struggling to find a way to say they’re against the war now, even though many of ’em voted for the October 2002 war resolution, without looking like flip-floppers or weenies on national security.

We citizens are left to debate the war among ourselves. But this is impossible because the pro-war side dismisses anti-war arguments as nothing but character flaws. Liberals, the righties say, are against the war because they hate America, hate freedom, and want our soldiers to die (workplace note: mute the sound on your computer before you click on that last link). Thus they dismiss our objections, no matter how factually based. Your standard rightie can no more address, never mind discuss, actual issues honestly than spinach can tap dance.

This leaves the rank-and-file Left to discuss Iraq among ourselves. But we fail sometimes too. On one hand are the liberal Iraq War “hawks” who supported the invasion and only recently (if at all) have come around to seeing the essential folly of it. And on the other hand are those who refuse to consider any option but immediate and total withdrawal, never mind potential consequences to the stability of the Middle East. In the middle are those of us willing to consider just about any option but “stay the course” — or, heaven forbid, escalation — that will put us on the path to withdrawal.

Until Congressman John Murtha presented his plan for “over the horizon” redeployment, there wasn’t much in the way of options to discuss. Now we’re hearing from Gen. Wesley Clark, who writes in the New York Times,

While the Bush administration and its critics escalated the debate last week over how long our troops should stay in Iraq, I was able to see the issue through the eyes of America’s friends in the Persian Gulf region. The Arab states agree on one thing: Iran is emerging as the big winner of the American invasion, and both President Bush’s new strategy and the Democratic responses to it dangerously miss the point. It’s a devastating critique. And, unfortunately, it is correct.

While American troops have been fighting, and dying, against the Sunni rebels and foreign jihadists, the Shiite clerics in Iraq have achieved fundamental political goals: capturing oil revenues, strengthening the role of Islam in the state, and building up formidable militias that will defend their gains and advance their causes as the Americans draw down and leave. Iraq’s neighbors, then, see it evolving into a Shiite-dominated, Iranian buffer state that will strengthen Tehran’s power in the Persian Gulf just as it is seeks nuclear weapons and intensifies its rhetoric against Israel.

Clark argues that a rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops risks broader regional conflict. He calls for keeping troops in Iraq, but with a drastically modified strategy that focuses mainly on controlling the borders and training Iraqi security forces. This would be combined with political and diplomatic efforts –for example, outreach to insurgents, enforcing the ban on armed militias, reducing sectarian influence.

I personally prefer Murtha’s plan to Clark’s, but I just wish the Democrats and moderate Republicans could get behind something so we can begin to make it happen. If we leave matters up to the Bush administration, we’ll lurch from disaster to disaster until circumstances force us to withdraw. And circumstances tend to get messy. But most Democrats seem unwilling to get behnd anyone’s plan but their own, even if they don’t have one.

Lt. Gen. Odom presented another perspective on last night’s “Hardball”:

MATTHEWS: Where do we concentrate our forces if we had an allied strength? If we were put together now the way we were before the Gulf War under President Bush the first, how would you arrange our power over there? Where would you put it?

Jack Murtha is talking about getting our troops out of Iraq and putting them nearby where they can be projected in on notice.

ODOM: I would try to keep some forces in Kuwait. But I don‘t really care where they would be in the region initially.

The main thing is to get out, let it develop and see where it makes sense to come back in. There are a number of things I would want to do before I raced back in with additional forces. I think getting back into the fight in Iraq would be almost as stupid as having gotten in the first place.

So I don‘t want to be spring loaded, ready to jump back in. I want to let the Europeans say what they think we ought to be doing there, because they are going to have to carry some of this load. And until they have had some say, they are not going to sign up.

This makes sense to me, too. Unfortunately no American politician dare come out and say that we’re going to listen to Europeans. The VRWC and its media echo chamber would go on the warpath. Europeans are the most evil and untrustworthy people on the planet, after Muslims. And Asians. And Latinos. And of course nobody listens to Africans. And we don’t think much of Canada any more, either. Last I heard we still trust Australia, which ought to be a source of worry to the Aussies. But let’s go on …

Odom has argued that “I don’t believe anyone will be able to sustain a strong case in the short run without going back to the fundamental misjudgment of invading Iraq in the first place. Once the enormity of that error is grasped, the case for pulling out becomes easy to see.”

Well, good luck with that. In spite of the mountains of direct, smoking-gun evidence, most of the Right is still in denial about the, shall we say, misrepresentation of intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s WMDs. But I want to point to this bit from “Bush’s Lost Year” by James Fallows in the October 2004 Atlantic Monthly:

As a political matter, whether the United States is now safer or more vulnerable is of course ferociously controversial. That the war was necessary—and beneficial—is the Bush Administration’s central claim. That it was not is the central claim of its critics. But among national-security professionals there is surprisingly little controversy. Except for those in government and in the opinion industries whose job it is to defend the Administration’s record, they tend to see America’s response to 9/11 as a catastrophe. I have sat through arguments among soldiers and scholars about whether the invasion of Iraq should be considered the worst strategic error in American history—or only the worst since Vietnam. Some of these people argue that the United States had no choice but to fight, given a pre-war consensus among its intelligence agencies that Iraq actually had WMD supplies. Many say that things in Iraq will eventually look much better than they do now. But about the conduct and effect of the war in Iraq one view prevails: it has increased the threats America faces, and has reduced the military, financial, and diplomatic tools with which we can respond.

“Let me tell you my gut feeling,” a senior figure at one of America’s military-sponsored think tanks told me recently, after we had talked for twenty minutes about details of the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. “If I can be blunt, the Administration is full of shit. In my view we are much, much worse off now than when we went into Iraq. That is not a partisan position. I voted for these guys. But I think they are incompetent, and I have had a very close perspective on what is happening. Certainly in the long run we have harmed ourselves. We are playing to the enemy’s political advantage. Whatever tactical victories we may gain along the way, this will prove to be a strategic blunder.“

And here is the cost of our blundering:

Step by step through 2002 America’s war on terror became little more than its preparation for war in Iraq.

Because of that shift, the United States succeeded in removing Saddam Hussein, but at this cost: The first front in the war on terror, Afghanistan, was left to fester, as attention and money were drained toward Iraq. This in turn left more havens in Afghanistan in which terrorist groups could reconstitute themselves; a resurgent opium-poppy economy to finance them; and more of the disorder and brutality the United States had hoped to eliminate. Whether or not the strong international alliance that began the assault on the Taliban might have brought real order to Afghanistan is impossible to say. It never had the chance, because America’s premature withdrawal soon fractured the alliance and curtailed postwar reconstruction. Indeed, the campaign in Afghanistan was warped and limited from the start, by a pre-existing desire to save troops for Iraq.

A full inventory of the costs of war in Iraq goes on. President Bush began 2002 with a warning that North Korea and Iran, not just Iraq, threatened the world because of the nuclear weapons they were developing. With the United States preoccupied by Iraq, these other two countries surged ahead. They have been playing a game of chess, or nerves, against America—and if they have not exactly won, they have advanced by several moves. Because it lost time and squandered resources, the United States now has no good options for dealing with either country. It has fewer deployable soldiers and weapons; it has less international leverage through the “soft power” of its alliances and treaties; it even has worse intelligence, because so many resources are directed toward Iraq.

Read those paragraphs above to any rightie, and pay attention to the response: You lefties are against the war because you hate America. You might as well argue with a doormat, or any other insentient object. If you find a rightie who actually listens and then says, well, I disagree because (followed by reasonably lucid sentences that actually address the subject and do not devolve into character assassination), that would be progress. I don’t believe there are such people, though.

Yesterday we learned that no one is taking charge of disaster preparedness. Billions for Iraq; not one cent for communications systems for first responders. This is just one symptom of our national disease — that our nation is being guided by emotionally adolescent ideologues who prefer the easy gratification of shooting “ragheads” to the unglamorous, policy-wonk work of making our nation safer. And, frankly, until and unless we can wrest some power away from them there won’t be any changes of policy in Iraq.

Analyze This

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Hard on the heels of the great menacing “X” panic — now a large segment of the Right Blogosphere has persuaded itself that the United States Postal Service is dissing Christianity and will stop issuing Madonna and Child Christmas stamps. Never mind that the USPS features the Madonna and Child stamps on its web site. According to this blogger, who got it from her mom who got it from a clerk at the local post office, the USPS will no longer print Madonna and Child stamps, so there will be no more when the current stock runs out. Further, the clerks have been instructed not to wish customers Merry Christmas; it’s Happy Holidays only.

Roger Ailes is claiming victory. Of course, we’re dealing with people whose spokespersons are still claiming a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. It doesn’t take much …

So I’m trying to think of some utterly absurd rumor about dissing Christmas I can plant in some little corner of the blogosphere. Then we can hold a contest to guess how many seconds it takes for Michelle Malkin to report it. Suggestions?

Update: See World o’ Crap on the great post office stamp massacre.

Next atrocity: Liberals ban reruns of the “Peanuts Christmas Television Special.” (Yeah, that’s good. The righties would believe it. Then we’ll tell them we’re putting drugs in the eggnog.)