Category Archives: liberalism and progressivism

Patriotism v. Francis Fukuyama

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This is only tangential to the “patriotism v. nationalism” series I seem to have embarked on, but I’d like to toss it in to the mix now before it gets stale.

Some years ago I read the original “The End of History?” article that Francis Fukuyama wrote in 1989, and out of which grew a book by the same name. This essay persuaded me that, just as youth is wasted on the young, graduate school is wasted on the stupid. I expressed more dismay at Fukuyama and explained why I think he’s an idiot here.

Anyway, Fukuyama wrote a long essay for yesterday’s New York Times Sunday magazine called “After Neoconservatism.” I haven’t read it all the way through yet and will refrain from criticising it directly until I do. But links to the essay took me to this post by Andrew Seal of The Little Green Blog (“All things petty and profound at Dartmouth College – and beyond…”) that’s a gem. Note this paragraph in particular

I would add that neoconservatism is also a reaction to modernization, that the idea, pseudo-Nietzschean as it is, that we can shape history by our will to power (veiled as a will to democracy) is a reaction to a globalized world where awareness of things beyond our power has grown to frightening proportions. It is not that we have less power over our situation than ever before, but that we are more aware of how little power we have always had. I guess Nietzsche himself identified this phenomenon–or symptom, if you prefer–as ressentiment.

This nicely supports what I said of neoconism in the last post, “Patriotism v. Paranoia,” which was a follow up to “Patriotism v. Nationalism“: “I see neoconservatism as proactive isolationism. Foreigners scare us, so we’ll make them be more like us so they’re not so scary.”

Mr. Seal of Dartmouth says it a bit better, though.

Here Mr. Seal quotes Fukuyama and makes a comment —

    The [Iraq] war’s supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform.

In other words, we’ve all clearly been taking things like Locke’s “state of nature” and Rawls’s “original position” a little too literally. Democracy is not, in fact, at the heart of humanity.

This represents some progress on Fukuyama’s part, because in “The End of History?” he assumes that something called “liberal democracy” (which I infer from the essay is neither liberal nor democratic as most of us understand those words) is humanity’s natural state and the final destination of mankind’s political evolution. Once mankind has universally achieved this state, history (meaning wars and other political upheavals) will end, Fukuyama concluded.

I think righties generally have this same view of “democracy”; that whatever it is, it’s immutable, and once you have it you don’t have to be concerned about damaging it or losing it. Subvert it, break it, bend it out of shape, and it’ll just snap back, good as new. Further, once a people have elections, they have democracy, because people will always choose to freedom over totalitarianism. Numerous real-world examples to the contrary will not dissuade righties from this notion.

Also, Mr. Seals says,

Fukuyama is asserting the existence of what Richard Hofstadter called “the illusion of American omnipotence”—that anything seriously bad happening in the world had to be the result of American mismanagement of global affairs. He used the example of the Chinese fall to Communism—many believed that democratic China’s collapse was due to insufficient American involvement and support or even “betrayal.” However, the illusion of American omnipotence has another side as well—we tend to believe that anything good happening in the world is a fruit of beneficial American policies–the embrace of democracy by many of the former Warsaw Pact countries was “due” to our shining example, for instance. (City on the Hill, etc.) Neocons are simply the most ardent believers in the illusion of American omnipotence.

Exactly so. And now I want to treat you to my favorite rightie, Orrin Judd. He remains my favorite even over Michelle Malkin and Captain Ed (and even Confederate Yankee, who loves me but won’t admit it), because he’s such a pure example of the walking delusional state that is rightiness. Others may occasionally be contaminated by momentary bursts of clarity or reason, but not our Orrin. In reaction to Fukuyama’s essay, he writes,

The problem for Mr. Fukuyama and others counseling a return to Realism is that the neocons aren’t the driving force behind the policy of humanitarian interventionism. It is instead a function of the Judeo-Christian remoralization of Anglo-American foreign policy that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan began and that continued unabated under Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, reaching its current heights under our most openly evangelical president, George W, Bush. With Australia, India, Japan, and perhaps now Canada joining the Axis of Good, which requires that regimes be democratic in order to be considered legitimate, there’s not much chance danger of the kind of retreat he’s fretting about. And with John McCain the odds on favorite to be our next president we’re more likely to be increasingly interventionist rather than less.

What can one say to that, but … holy shit.

And be sure to read the comments. As Mary Matalin might say, they are delicious. I think my favorites are “We stepped in and imposed peace. It’s who we are”; and “It’s our fault we’ve let them all depend on us. Democratization is like global welfare reform–get on with your own lives.” The “illusion of American omnipotence” indeed.

Patriotism v. Paranoia

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This post is a followup to the last post on Patriotism v. Nationalism, in which I argue that the hard-core Right is not patriotic, but nationalistic.

Saturday at Huffington Post, EJ Eskow posted “Shot Through the Heart and You’re to Blame: Conservatism as Psychopathology.” Eskow disagrees with Glenn Greenwald that our current “conservatism” is a Bush personality cult.

I think the truth is simpler and sicker than that. People don’t slavishly obey and follow every whim of Messrs. Bush (and now Cheney) because they revere them. They do it for a more basic reason: They’ve got the candy.

Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld … they’re Mafia bosses doling out the largesse in return for unquestioned fealty. And today’s so-called “conservatives” respond in kind. Will Roger Ailes get more exclusive interviews if he peddles the daily GOP lies and spins? As you wish, Godfather. Will Arnold Schwarzenegger become Governor if he pumps for Bush at the convention? Thank you, Don Karl. Will “Straight Talkin'” John McCain be rewarded with a chance to run in 2008 if he forgets what they did to his wife and kid? It’ good to kiss the ring again, Mr. President. Let me hug you.

Everything conservatism used to stand for, from fiscal restraint to obeying the law to good manners, is being turned on its head by the Bush Regime. And the faithful love them for it. Eskow writes,

Wrecking the country’s finances. Trashing civil discourse. Law breaking. Ruining the earth itself for our grandchildren. That’s some sick s**t. Now, we have the sight of Mr. Whittington — by all accounts a good and decent man — being forced to crawl on broken glass to stay in the club. Hey, too bad about Harry — but business is business.

But now to the psychopathology — Eskow points out that the recent shooting incident (“Get loaded, shoot a guy in the face, tell the world it’s his fault, then make him crawl.”) is illustrative of antisocial personality disorder as defined by the DSM psychiatric manual. Well, yes; Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the top officials of the Bush Administration could fill the Personality Disorder Hall of Fame. But does “they’ve got the candy” really account for Bush’s following among the people of the U.S.? It might explain why other Republican politicians kowtow to the Bushies, but it doesn’t explain Bush devotion among the hoi polloi.

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

Fear, aggression, avoidance, terror. As Glenn Greenwald wrote,

When all else fails, what we end up hearing from Bush supporters, usually in quite strained and urgent tones, is that we have no real choice but to consent to the latest item of controversy on the Bush agenda (which now even includes allowing the President to break the law when he decides that our protection requires that), because if we do not, we will all die violent and horrible deaths at the hands of the powerful Islamic terrorists. Our very survival is at risk — the people who want to kill us all are coming — and given our dire state, anything and everything is justified to stop them.

I think righties are genuinely baffled when they find others who aren’t as afraid as they are and who aren’t being driven by fear. Like, for example, lefties. They assume we are innocents who don’t understand how dangerous the world is. And I think they’re unhinged. Yes, terrorism is frightening. Terrorists can knock down buildings and kill people. But terrorists can’t destroy America. There aren’t enough terrorists with enough weapons in the world to invade and occupy America. Terrorists can’t destroy the Constitution or cancel our civil liberties. Only we can do that. And fear is driving the more unhinged elements of the Right into doing exactly that.

In “Bush and the Cultivation of Fear” I argued that support for George W. Bush is built on fear. Even neocon-ism, which on the surface appears to be all about self-confidence and dominance and spreading American hegemony, is an ideology born of fear. I see neoconservatism as proactive isolationism. Foreigners scare us, so we’ll make them be more like us so they’re not so scary.

Relating this to the last post on nationalism — I see nationalism and fundamentalism and most other right-wing isms as essentially driven by fear. In the past century or so our species, worldwide, has undergone some seismic social shifts. People no longer remain neatly sorted by skin color, language, and cultural history. All over the globe people of diverse ethnic and social backgrounds are having to learn to live together. Once upon a time “foreign” places were far, far away. But air travel has brought them closer in terms of travel time; now every foreign place on the globe is just over the horizon. Soon foreigners will be sitting in our laps.

I think nationalism arose and became dominant in the 20th century largely because of these seismic social shifts. People who can’t handle the shifts retreat into nationalism as a defense.

This is from something I wrote in December 2003:

I’ve observed my whole life how Americans can be frightened into stampeding off cliffs. Fear of Communism gave birth to McCarthyism, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the War in Vietnam. Today the Republicans are using fears of terrorism, foreigners, ethnic minorities, and various aspects of sexuality to keep the serfs in line.

Consider also the Religious Right. In her magnificent book The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism, Karen Armstrong demonstrates that fundamentalism arose in response to modernity, especially to scientific rationalism. “Fear is at the heart of fundamentalism,” she writes. “The fear of losing yourself.” This is true of Islamic fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden as well as our homegrown types. Liberals cherish tolerance, democracy, pluralism, and civil liberties; fundamentalists fear these values as weapons of (their) annihilation.

    It is important to recognize that these theologies and ideologies are rooted in fear. The desire to define doctrines, erect barriers, establish borders, and segregate the faithful in a sacred enclave where the law is stringently observed springs from that terror of extinction which has made all fundamentalists, at once time or another, believe that the secularists were about to wipe them out. The modern world, which seems so exciting to a liberal, seems Godless, drained of meaning and even satanic to a fundamentalist. [Armstrong, The Battle for God (Ballantine, 2000), p. 368]

I postulate that existential fear is at the heart of most “isms.” And although there’s no objective measure of angst that I know of, the world may seem scarier to We, the People, than it used to, and not just because of terrorism. Collectively, our props are falling away. Compared to fifty years ago (as far back as I can remember), communities are fragmented, families are scattered, jobs are ephemeral. Across rural and small-town America, communities that were once homogeneous are becoming multiracial and multiethnic. “Givens” about God and Man and Sex and other big issues are being openly challenged.

Thus, fearful voters can be incited into voting against their own self-interests by the terrifying specter of gay people getting married.

If you understand the fear issue, then what I call Erin’s Paradox (named for my daughter because she noticed it, not because she has it) becomes more understandable. Erin’s Paradox says that the further away Americans live from any likely terrorist target, the more fearful they are of terrorism. “Likely terrorist targets” are urban, and city dwellers learn to be comfortable with multiculturalism. If you live in some homogeneous little town out on the prairie, however, it’s more likely you are not comfortable with multiculturalism at all. Thus, dusky Islamic terrorists from unfathomable foreign places scare the stuffing out of them, much more so than the potential Timothy McVeigh wannabee next door.

Bottom line: When you are looking at a rightie you are looking at a nationalist; and when you are looking at a nationalist you are looking at someone who has already surrendered to fear. The terrorists have got ’em right where they want ’em — terrorized.

Later I want to tie this in to hate speech from the Right, but I think I’ve gone on long enough for now.

Patriotism v. Nationalism

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Do you remember Sydney Harris? He was a syndicated columnist who died in 1986. I used to love his column.

Patriotism is proud of a country’s virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country’s virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, “the greatest,” but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is. — Sydney J. Harris

I’ve been struggling with ideas about patriotism v. nationalism. And then I looked in Bartlett’s Quotations and rediscovered Sydney Harris.

The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.

I miss Sydney Harris. But here’s another good quote on patriotism and nationalism, from some other guy:

Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill and calling for larger spurs and brighter beaks. I fear that nationalism is one of England’s many spurious gifts to the world. — Richard Aldington

“Responsibility” seems to be a common theme:

What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility … a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. — Adlai Stevenson

I’m sure by now you see where I’m going with this: Righties are not patriots, but nationalists. And I’m arguing that one of the basic differences between a patriot and a nationalist is that patriots value responsibility. This includes the citizen’s responsibility to his country, a country’s responsibility to its citizens, and the responsibility of a country and its citizens to the rest of the world.

Nationalists, on the other hand, do not value responsibility. They value loyalty, and their loyalty is a type of tribalism. The loyalty may not necessarily be to one’s fellow citizens, but only to members of their tribe. You know the righties feel absolutely no loyalty to us lefties, for example, even though we are fellow-citizens.

The right Americans are the right Americans because they’re not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans. — Eric J. Hobsbawm (b. 1917), British historian

Further, nationalists feel no sense of responsibility for the actions of their country. No matter what the country does, the nationalist will either justify it or deny it. Just speaking of the wrongdoing of one’s country is “disloyal” to a nationalist.

Cal Thomas is a nationalist, not a patriot. Recently he wrote,

Last Sunday, Gore spoke to the Jeddah Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia. … Gore told his audience, many of whom have been educated at American universities, that after 9/11 Arabs in the United States were “indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa or not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable.” … Gore also claimed there were “terrible abuses” of the detainees, but he failed to provide any examples, and media calls to his office produced none.

Thomas should have called the U.S. Department of Justice. In June 2003 the Justice Department’s inspector general issued a report of the results of an internal, but independent investigation. The report reveals that the FBI and immigration authorities seized hundreds of Arabs and South Asians after 9/11 and subjected them to severe prison conditions with barely a nod to due process. A summary of the report is here. The complete report, in PDF format, is here.

Amazing what three minutes of googling will turn up, isn’t it? You’d think a “journalist” like Cal Thomas would figure these things out. Anyway, Thomas continues,

For Gore to make his anti-American remarks in Saudi Arabia is at least as bad as what Nazi sympathizers said in this country and abroad leading up to and during World War II.

One definition of “treason” at dictionary.com is: Violation of allegiance toward one’s country or sovereign, especially the betrayal of one’s country by waging war against it or by consciously and purposely acting to aid its enemies. By any objective standard, Gore’s remarks in Saudi Arabia appear to fit the definition.

Does Thomas not realize an audience of U.S-educated Saudis must have known already about the rights violations detailed in the Justice Department report? Or does he think simple brown natives won’t find such things out unless we tell them? (Puh-leeze … )

What really ticked off Thomas was that, in his eyes, Gore’s admission to a pack of foreigners that America had done something wrong was an act of disloyalty. But acknowledging wrongdoing is an act of taking responsibility. Taking responsibility is what patriots do. Denying that one’s country is ever at fault is what nationalists do.

And if you really want to find an American aiding America’s enemies, Cal, take a look at the Oval Office.

Seems to me that the easiest way to tell a patriot from a nationalist is to apply the “responsibility” test. When the U.S. is at fault, a patriot considers it a duty to speak up and say so. But where a patriot sees responsibility, a nationalist just sees disloyalty. The nationalist will say something like “why are you tearing down your country? Why don’t you talk about this bad thing another country did?” I’m sure you’ve heard speeches like that, many times. And the answer is, because I’m not responsible for that other country. I’m responsible for my country. Nationalists don’t get that.

[Update: The Poor Man finds an example.]

This is from the late, great Erich Fromm:

Nationalism is our form of incest, is our idolatry, is our insanity. “Patriotism” is its cult. It should hardly be necessary to say, that by “patriotism” I mean that attitude which puts the own nation above humanity, above the principles of truth and justice; not the loving interest in one’s own nation, which is the concern with the nation’s spiritual as much as with its material welfare–never with its power over other nations. Just as love for one individual which excludes the love for others is not love, love for one’s country which is not part of one’s love for humanity is not love, but idolatrous worship.

Fromm puts patriotism in quotation marks; I assume he is using the word in an ironic sense. But speaking of idolatrous worship, last Thursday Dave Neiwert posted about “The Conservative faith” at Orcinus. Responding to Glenn Greenwald’s must-read post “Do Bush followers have a political ideology?” Dave argues that what passes for current “conservatism” is a kind of political religion, a critter defined this way by Wikipedia:

In the terminology of some scholars working in sociology, a political religion is a political ideology with cultural and political power equivalent to those of a religion, and often having many sociological and ideological similarities with religion. Quintessential examples are Marxism and Nazism, but totalitarianism is not a requirement (for example neo-liberalism can be analysed as a political religion).

… The term political religion is a sociological one, drawing on the sociological aspects of religion which can be often be found in certain secular ideologies. A political religion occupies much the same psychological and sociological space as a theistic religion, and as a result it often displaces or coopts existing religious organisations and beliefs; this is described as a “sacralisation” of politics. However, although a political religion may coopt existing religious structures or symbolism, it does not itself have any independent spiritual or theocratic elements – it is essentially secular, using religion only for political purposes, if it does not reject religious faith outright.

Dave Neiwert continues to present, IMO, a solid case that current contemporary “conservatism” is more a nascent political religion than a political philosophy. And this explains much about the righties’ attitude toward American non-righties. We are not just the political opposition; we are apostate. We are blasphemers. We are heretics.

One of the most maddening traits of righties is that they cannot wrap their heads around the simple truth that those of us who oppose the Bush Administration have lots of reasons for doing so. How many times has a critic of Bush policy been dismissed as “just a Bush hater”? It doesn’t matter what facts or documentation the critic presents. It’s all swept away with the simple explanation — Bush hater. Or liberal. Which takes us back to Glenn Greenwald’s observation that anyone who criticises the Bush Regime becomes a “liberal” in the minds of righties, no matter if that individual is as politically conservative as cheesy eagle art. Glenn writes,

People who self-identify as “conservatives” and have always been considered to be conservatives become liberal heathens the moment they dissent, even on the most non-ideological grounds, from a Bush decree. That’s because “conservatism” is now a term used to describe personal loyalty to the leader (just as “liberal” is used to describe disloyalty to that leader), and no longer refers to a set of beliefs about government.

If you understand Bush cultism as a religious faith, then the behavior of Bush supporters becomes, if not understandable, at least recognizable. In their minds, whatever we say is blasphemy; through us, Satan himself speaks. The righteous must plug their ears and refuse to listen.

Religion and nationalism do tend to get mixed up together into the same toxic, warmongering soup. This is precisely what is going on in the Muslim world; Islam as nationalism. You can find examples of enmity sorting itself into religious/ethnic camps in many parts of Africa, Asia, and around the globe. Perhaps as nation-states become more multiethnic and religiously pluralistic, the urge to form enemies and make war is being driven out of the hands of governments and into the hands of charismatic religious/ethnic leaders, like Osama bin Laden. We should note that even though encyclopedias still define the word nationalism as “loyalty to a nation-state,” which would certainly apply to most 20th-century nationalist movements, nationalists can defy existing political boundaries and organize themselves around an ideal of “nation” that excludes existing borders and governments. But that’s a topic a bit too ambitious for Sunday morning.

Let’s go back to Cal Thomas for a moment. Last week Citizen K of DKos wrote a post called “Cal Thomas: the republican call for Leninism and blasphemy” in which the Citizen argued that righties like Thomas “illustrates the takeover of American discourse by Leninist ideology.” Citizen K quotes Lenin saying that anyone who vacillates from the positions worked out by Soviet political leaders “objectively can have only one result … helping the imperialists to provoke the Russian Soviet Republic into a battle that will obviously be to its disadvantage ….” And Citizen K compares this to Thomas’s “By any objective standard, Al Gore’s remarks in Saudi Arabia appear to fit the definition [of treason].” Citizen K concludes,

Because Lenin (and Cal Thomas) are omniscient, anyone who disagrees with them is “objectively” treasonous. The use of this language by Thomas is no coincidence – the neo-cons are a movement of Leninists. The essence of Leninism is Power. Lenin was happy to switch back and forth from capitalism (NEP) to communism, from elections to bullets, from a strong war policy to surrender as long as he retained and built power. The US leninists have the same flexibility. For them, political positions are simply valuable propaganda or not. Balanced budget/unbalanced budgets, gun control/gun banning, anti-choice/”moderation”, gay marriage bans/hiring Cheney’s daughter for gay/lesbian outreach and so on. The suckers who kept trying to find high minded socialism in Lenin were no more or less gullible than the “conservatives” who look for some “conservatism” in Bush/Cheney’s policies. The only consistency is Power.

In the Soviet Union, loyalty to the Communist Party and its leaders largely replaced religion. We aren’t anywhere close to that point here, of course. I do think it can be argued that, in America, the conservative political religion has largely co-opted (and corrupted) Christianity for its own purposes. And I think it can be argued that much of what passes for “Christianity” in America is a political-religious mythos that is Christian on the surface but something else entirely in its heart. But that’s another topic a bit too ambitious for Sunday morning.

Later, today or tomorrow, I plan to post something about politics and psychopathology that ties into this post. But I’ve gone on long enough for now.

Let’s close with some more quotes:

Nationalism is militant hatred. It is not love of our countrymen: that, which denotes good citizenship,
philanthropy, practical religion, should go by the name of patriotism. Nationalism is passionate xenophobia. It is
fanatical, as all forms of idol-worship are bound to be. And fanaticism…obliterates or reverses the distinction
between good and evil. Patriotism, the desire to work for the common weal, can be, must be, reasonable: “My
country, may she be right!” Nationalism spurns reason: “Right or wrong, my country.” –Albert L. Guerard

Nationalism … is the worship of the collective power of a local human community. Unlike the faith in progress through science, nationalism is not a new religion; it is a revival of an old one. This was the religion of the city-states of the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world. It was resuscitated in the West at the Renaissance, and this resuscitation of the Greco-Roman political religion has been far more effective than the resuscitation of the Greco-Roman style of literature, visual art, and architecture. Modern Western nationalism, inspired by Greco-Roman political ideals and institutions, has inherited the dynamism and fanaticism of Christianity. Translated into practice in the American and French Revolutions, it proved to be highly infectious. Today, fanatical nationalism is perhaps 90 percent of the religion of perhaps 90 percent of mankind. — A.J. Toynbee

Finally,

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. — George Orwell

Update: See Digby, “Political Religion.“

That Liberal Media

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There are some must-read items on the web today — let’s start with Digby’s “Dispatches From The Fever Swamp.”

The president’s approval rating is stuck at around 40% and I think it’s pretty clear that it isn’t the reporting in the mainstream media or by the “reasonable” Democrats at the New Republican that brought that about. If left up to them the Republicans would be coasting to another easy re-election.

I don’t say this because I think that liberal blogs are taking over the world and have changed the face of politics as we know it. I say it because I know that without us there would have been virtually no critical voices during the long period between 2001 and the presidential primary campaign during 2003. We were it. The media were overt, enthusiastic Bush boosters for well over two years and created an environment in which Democratic dissent (never welcome) was non-existent to the average American viewer. In fact, it took Bush’s approval rating falling to below 40% before they would admit that he was in trouble.

I believe that if it had not been for the constant underground drumbeat from the fever swamps over the past five years, when the incompetence, malfeasance and corruption finally hit critical mass last summer with the bad news from Iraq, oil prices and Katrina, Bush would not have sunk as precipitously as he did and stayed there. It literally took two catastrophes of epic proportions to break the media from its narrative of Bush’s powerful leadership. And this after two extremely close elections —- and the lack of any WMD in Iraq.

It’s a beautiful thing to see reality crystallized into a few concise sentences. Makes me want to cry. But this is why I started blogging. What was being reported as “news” on television and in newspapers was such obvious propaganda, such nonsense, I had to speak up.

Among the few negative emails I got after the recent C-SPAN gig were from gentlemen (why always men?) who patiently lectured me that news media is overwhelmingly liberal and for me to say otherwise was a self-evident lie. And I think, who am I supposed to believe — the Republican Noise Machine or my own lying eyes? And there’s no use arguing with them, you know. They’ve been told all their lives that the media is “liberal.” If you go back to the early 1950s you find Joe McCarthy saying it. Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew declared all-out war on media in the early 1970s. Rightie talk radio, Faux News, and the rest of the echo chamber pour this lie into the ears of millions of non-thinking listeners, who accept “liberal media bias” as gospel.

That excellent resource Media Matters has a new study out called “If It’s Sunday, It’s Conservative: An analysis of the Sunday talk show guests on ABC, CBS, and NBC, 1997 – 2005.” The executive summary is here; the full report in PDF format is here. And the report tells us what any viewer with a usable brain surely has noticed — the guest lists of the Sunday television political programs are lopsidedly right-wing. “Panel discussions” also tilt right. In the crucial period leading up to the Iraq invasion, congressional opponents of the Iraq invasion were largely absent from the Sunday shows.

What’s particularly galling to me are the phony liberals — people who don’t speak for us liberals and progressives at all, yet they represent us on television. For example, take Christopher Hitchens and Joe Klein. Please.

Kevin Drum discusses the Media Matters report and also links to an article by Paul Waldman in the current Washington Monthly:

This ideological imbalance isn’t only evident in the “official” sources that are interviewed: the elected officials, candidates, and administration officials who make up most of the shows’ guests. It is even clearer in the roundtable discussions with featured journalists, [where] it has been a frequent practice for a roundtable to consist of a right-wing columnist or two supposedly “balanced” by journalists from major newspapers.

….The consequence of all this is that in every year since 1997, conservative journalists have dramatically outnumbered liberal journalists, in some years by two-to-one or more. Why would the producers of the shows believe that a William Safire (56 appearances since 1997) or Bob Novak (37 appearances) is somehow “balanced” by a Gwen Ifill (27) or Dan Balz (22)? It suggests that some may have internalized the conservative critique of the media, which assumes that daily journalists are “liberal” almost by definition, and thus can provide a counterpoint to highly partisan conservative pundits.

Kevin says,

The result is that genuinely liberal pundits get almost no exposure on these shows. You get conservative guests, super-conservative guests, moderate liberals, and journalists. And though it’s not part of this study, they’re almost all men. Only 10% of the guests on Sunday talk shows are women.

Some balance.

And this is particularly strange when you consider that the right-wingers are to the right of the majority of Americans on many issues. For example, 62 percent of adults recently polled by CBS News and the New York Times said that the “federal government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans.” If you listen to “mainstream” political talk shows, however, you’d think the only people supporting this view are the far-left Marxist fringe.

The right-wing agenda is presented incessantly on mainstream media; genuinely progressive policy ideas are rarely presented at all. Yet the media has a “liberal” bias. Uh-huh.

While you’re at Hullabaloo reading Digby, see also this post by Tristero. Excellent. For example:

The genuine major voices opposed to war weren’t permitted anywhere near an effective microphone, but they were known. When Jessica Mathews of Carnegie Endowment – as sober an American as one could ask for and certainly known within the media – started to make a convincing case on NPR that democracy by invasion was a crazy pipe dream, even that relatively unimportant network was too big. William Kristol personally called up and horned in on her time with ludicrous assertions designed to prevent the conversation from touching upon the substantive issues at stake.

We can’t return America to the people without straightening out the problems in media, IMO. Democracy can’t work unless the people are truthfully informed. And when they aren’t seeing their real concerns being addressed by the political psychobabblers on television, most people will just tune out politics as being kind of pointless. And the Wingnuts will continue to run our beautiful country into the ground, because people don’t even know they might have had another choice.

The Democratic Party seems largely unable to pull itself together and push back. There are individual Democrats who are terrific people. But any Democrat who sticks his neck out is instantly, and visciously, smeared throughout news media, and the Dem Party won’t provide cover.

So it’s left to the Blogosphere to push back. It’s not much, but it’s all we’ve got.

What We’re Up Against

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I found this paragraph in an Eleanor Clift column crushingly depressing:

A pro-choice Republican who spoke with NEWSWEEK but didn’t want her name used said she is more worried about Alito after hearing him testify, and wishes the Democrats would spend their time finding a candidate to beat Hillary Clinton in the primaries “or we’re going to get four more years of judges like this.” She thinks that to win the White House the Democrats need a more centrist candidate than Clinton. “The math is against her.” (That debate is raging within Democratic circles, but no candidate has yet surfaced who could plausibly overtake Clinton, given her rock-star hold on party activists and the esteem in which she and her husband are held by African-American voters, a core Democratic constituency.)

Go ahead and read the whole column — it’s interesting — but let’s look at these “party activists.” There are activists, and there are other activists.

Compare/contrast Clift’s paragraph with this MyDD post by Chris Bowers — “Why The Blogosphere and the Netroots Do Not Like Hillary Clinton.”

… Hillary Clinton is, um, not exactly the most popular Democrat within the blogosphere and the netroots. I can offer loads of anecdotal information to support this, but perhaps the most striking evidence is that despite her large lead in national telephone surveys, she polls around fifth or sixth in our presidential preference polls. The real question we face is to figure out why she is not very popular among this large segment of the progressive activist class.

People will offer lots of reasons for this. In the past, I have done so myself. However, when one understands who actually makes up the blogosphere, a rarely, if ever, discussed reason comes to the fore. Within the progressive activist class, there is also a very real class stratification. While the blogosphere and the netroots may not be “the people” within America or the Democratic party as a whole, within the world of progressive activists, they are definitely “the people,” “the masses,” “the rank and file,” and any other populist term you want to throw out there. I believe the main mark against Hillary Clinton within the blogs and the netroots is the degree to which she is perceived as the uber-representative of the upper, aristocratic classes of the progressive activist world.

I think that’s part of it. See also these December posts by Avedon and Leah at Corrente. It’s not just that she’s unelectable; it’s that we don’t trust her.

Stirling Newberry wrote last November,

Hillary Clinton as a disaster for progressives and ultimately for the Democratic Party.

You want hard reasons? Let me list why I will never, ever, ever, ever, ever support Hillary Clinton, because she cannot ever, ever, ever, ever be trusted not to stab progressives in the back on key issues. She isn’t with us, except long enough to get the checks.

Let me start by way of explanation, when Bill Clinton first ran in 1992, I liked Hillary more than Bill, and even joked that we might be voting for the wrong Clinton. I felt she was smarter and sharper than Bill. She is, but, tin plated candidate that she is, she has no heart.

And she doesn’t like liberals or progressives. That’s a statement reported from several sources. She looks at us the same way that DeLay’s team looks at religious right voters – as stupid cash cows.

Stirling goes on to list concrete reasons why Hillary Clinton is unacceptable to the netroots; the first is “Hillary still supports the war.” He concludes,

Hillary is not politically reliable: she is busy selling progressives out now for her presidential bid. Which means that when she doesn’t need us at all, say the moment she has taken the oath of office and need only get re-elected with no primaries the second time around, we will be worse off than against a Republican, because we will have to sit through at least one Republican president before getting a progressive in the White House. If you don’t want to see a progressive President in your life time, then, by all means, support pro-war, soft on choice, anti-progressive, old top down media politics Hillary Clinton.

I think both Stirling and Chris are right, in different ways. Bottom line, Hillary Clinton is not one of us. She doesn’t represent us. She doesn’t know what we think and has lost the capacity to learn. She’s worked so hard at marketing herself to a mythical “center” that whoever she used to be has been consumed by her packaging. She’s an empty pants suit. As an active netcitizen of the Left, I believe I speak for an enormous majority of us when I say we are just as enthusiastic about a Hillary candidacy as we are about turnips.

Yet here is Eleanor Clift, who’s not a bad sort, writing about Hillary’s “rock-star hold on party activists.” Maybe Clift needs to stop shrieking at Tony Blankley on the McLaughlin Group and get out more.

Chris Bowers continues,

Within the world of progressive activists, from the viewpoint of the working and middle class progressive activists, Hillary Clinton is seen as hopelessly aligned with the establishment activists, with the insider activists, with the wealthy activists, with the well-connected activists, and with every possible progressive activist “elite” you can possibly imagine. Is it thus in any way surprising that the activist base, which is largely on the outside looking in, generally does not harbor much positive feeling toward her? The progressive activist base considers the progressive activist elite to be the main culprit in progressives losing power around the country. We keep losing, and we blame them. Thus, why should it be a surprise to anyone that we dislike the person who is viewed as their primary representative? We literally hold her, and what she represents within the world of progressive activism, to be responsible for the massive progressive backslide that has taken place over the past twelve years.

My cruder evaluation is that the Clintons represent a strategy that won some elections in the 1980s and 1990s but which has exacted a terrible cost on the Democratic Party. Their strategy was to toss enough progressive policy overboard to stay afloat in the Republican-controlled media sea. Bill Clinton made it work for him partly through force of personality — the man can charm the scales off a snake — and partly through co-opting Brand Republican positions; for example, on welfare and the death penalty. In the wake of the Reagan Era, perhaps that was a smart strategy.

But the Clintons, and the Democrats through the 1980s and 1990s, mounted no serious challenge to the GOP’s control of the sea — the VRWC and the Republican Noise Machine. Today the top of the Democratic Party and their “expert” consultants stick to the Clinton strategy, but now the VRWC has learned how to nullify it. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has tossed away so much of itself it’s hard to know what it stands for any more. They don’t call ’em “Republican Lite” for nothing.

Yet time and time again we see that the Republicans have moved far to the right of the American public on many critical issues. The attempt to “reform” Social Security, the Terri Schiavo episode, and, increasingly, Iraq reveal the Republicans to be way out of touch with mainstream Americans (which makes the notion that the Dems need to find a “centrist” candidate rather amusing). I truly believe many not-politcally-active people are growing heartily sick of right-wing extremism. But when they turn on the television or the radio, they don’t see or hear much in the way of an alternative. And so the Republicans win elections, for reasons that have little to do with their accomplishments (which are … ?) or their policy positions.

Chris Bowers argues that the blogosphere is not “the people,” in the sense that bloggers and their readers tend to be more affluent and educated than the population as a whole. But we represent the heart and soul of progressive activism far more faithfully than does the Democratic Party. And I think we represent the Party’s only viable future. The path they are on now leads to irrelevancy — some will argue they’ve already arrived — and to dissolution.

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.

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.

Questions for Righties

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Dana Milbank writes in today’s Washington Post:

In his 37 years in the military, John Murtha won two Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star with a Combat “V,” and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. As a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania for the past 31 years, he has been a fierce hawk, championing conflicts in Central America and the Persian Gulf.

Yesterday, he was called a coward.

It was as sure as the sun comin’ up in the morning that the righties would smear Murtha for his speech calling for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Righties have utterly lost the ability to just disagree with someone. Opposition must be crushed.

After Murtha stunned the Capitol with a morning news conference calling for a pullout from Iraq because our “troops have done all they can,” the denunciations came quickly.

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) accused Murtha of delivering “the highest insult” to the troops. “We must not cower,” Hastert lectured the old soldier.

Majority Leader Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) informed Murtha that his views “only embolden our enemies” and lamented that “Democrats undermine our troops in Iraq from the security of their Washington, D.C., offices.”

At a rival news conference called four hours after Murtha’s appearance, Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.), who like Hastert and Blunt does not have military service on his resume, alerted the 73-year-old Murtha that “the American people are made of sterner stuff.” And Rep. John Carter (R-Tex.) said the likes of Murtha want to take “the cowardly way out and say, ‘We’re going to surrender.’ “

Murtha wasn’t surprised.

Murtha, whose brand of hawkishness has never been qualified by the word “chicken,” was expecting the attacks. “I like guys who’ve never been there to criticize us who’ve been there. I like that,” the burly old Marine said, hands in pocket. Referring to Vice President Cheney, he continued: “I like guys who got five deferments and never been there, and send people to war, and then don’t like to hear suggestions about what needs to be done.”

If you really want to read what’s being said about Murtha on the Right Blogosphere you can find plenty of links of Memeorandum today. But you know what they’re saying. They are calling Murtha every vile name they can think of. For example, in a post titled “Democrats Keep Shifting Towards Surrender,” Captain Ed writes,

Rep. John Murtha pushed the national argument on the Iraq War further towards the International ANSWER/MoveOn agenda this afternoon by demanding an immediate start of an American retreat from Iraq, declaring that American soldiers do not have the capability to defeat terrorists. He based his conclusion not on the facts on the ground, but apparently his experience in Viet Nam, which he tossed around like a West Point degree all afternoon long.

This is, of course, a deeply dishonest representation of what Congressman Murtha actually said. But instead of addressing the congressman’s points, such as —

I have been visiting our wounded troops at Bethesda and Walter Reed hospitals almost every week since the beginning of the War. And what demoralizes them is going to war with not enough troops and equipment to make the transition to peace; the devastation caused by IEDs; being deployed to Iraq when their homes have been ravaged by hurricanes; being on their second or third deployment and leaving their families behind without a network of support.

— which must be what Captain Ed mistranslated into “American soldiers do not have the capability to defeat terrorists,” the Right does what the Right always does and erupts into a festival of mud-throwing.

I’d like the righties to answer two questions honestly. Yeah, I know, when pigs fly. But this is the discussion we should be having if rightes were capable of rational discussion:

The first question is What is our political objective in Iraq? I want a concrete answer, not just “peace, prosperity, and freedom,” because those are a tad open ended. This nation was founded (if you count from the ratificaton of the Articles of Confederation) 224 years ago, and we’re still working on those objectives ourselves. We’ve done better than a lot of other nations with them, granted, but even we don’t have them perfected.

I know a lot of you want to say Screw the objectives; let’s just get out. Maybe so, but right now I’m not trying to determine what our Iraq policy should be. Rather, I’m looking at the national discussion we are not having to determine what the policy should be.

I believe the original Neocon vision was to establish a pro-American government in Iraq headed by their buddy Ahmed Chalabi or a reasonable facsimile thereof. The recent reception Chalabi got in Washington makes me think the Neocons are still holding out hope for this. Cards on the table, rightes–is that still the goal? And if so, we need to talk. We need to talk about why the Neocons are stll married to Chalabi. We need to talk about whether a stable, democratic, and pro-American government, with or without Chalabi, is still possible in Iraq. Or, will we settle for any government the majority of Iraqis consider legitimate, even if that government doesn’t like us much, for the sake of regional stability?

In other words, given our current status (assuming we can agree on that), what can we realistically expect to achieve that would serve the best interests of the United States and Iraq? We should consider both the stability of the Middle East and the discouragement of terrorism. We should also consider rationally how much of our military resources we can afford to commit before we weaken our ability to respond to other problems beside Iraq.

Once we’re settled on the objective, we can go on to the second question — Is our military activity supporting that objective? One of Congressman Murtha’s points is that it isn’t. Yesterday the congressman said,

It is evident that continued military action in Iraq is not in the best interest of the United States of America, the Iraqi people or the Persian Gulf Region.

General Casey said in a September 2005 Hearing, “the perception of occupation in Iraq is a major driving force behind the insurgency.” General Abizaid said on the same date, “Reducing the size and visibility of the coalition forces in Iraq is a part of our counterinsurgency strategy.” …

…I said over a year ago, and now the military and the Administration agrees, Iraq can not be won “militarily.” I said two years ago, the key to progress in Iraq is to Iraqitize, Internationalize and Energize. I believe the same today. But I have concluded that the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is impeding this progress.

Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, Saddamists and foreign jihadists. I believe with a U.S. troop redeployment, the Iraqi security forces will be incentivized to take control. A poll recently conducted shows that over 80% of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the presence of coalition troops, and about 45% of the Iraqi population believe attacks against American troops are justified. I believe we need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis.

The congressman is hardly the first person to warn that our presence in Iraq is fueling the insurgency. It is obvious to me we are simultaneously feeding and smothering the same fire. Righties lack the moral courage to address this issue; they just jerk their knees and deny it. But if civilians are being burned with white phosporous, even accidently, generations of Iraqis will remember. Assuming that establishing a pro-American government in Iraq is an objective, pissing off the populace seems counterproductive. At the very least we should be looking hard at our rules of engagment to minimize these little accidents. On the other hand, putting too many constraints on our soldiers puts them at greater risk.

The obvious solution is to expect the Iraqis to fight their own bleeping insurgency. But as Steve M. calculated, at our current rate “the Iraqi military will be able to replace the 160,000 U.S. troops currently in Iraq in the year 2592.” No, that’s not an exageration. Based on the Pentagon’s own reports, we’re averaging 22 fully training Iraqi soldiers a month. So unless we can find a way to crank out fully trained Iraqi soldiers a damn sight quicker than we’re doing it now, we’re going to have to make up our minds what “victory” we will settle for. Otherwise 20 years from now the children of today’s U.S. soldiers in Iraq will be fighting the children of today’s insurgents.

The terrible truth that the Right refuses to face is that we could win a military objective and lose the political objective. I’m sure we could, if we really tried, obliterate Iraq, but I think even righties — some of ’em, anyway — ought to be able to comprehend that obliteration would be counterproductive to Iraqi freedom and prosperity and all that. We need to make some firm decisions about how aggressively the U.S. can pursue a military objective without utterly screwing up the political objective.

Congressman Murtha’s contention, stated above, is that the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq is impeding our political goals. Are there any righties out there willing even to discuss this, beyond “You’re wrong” and “Murtha stinks”? Are our military actions furthering or impeding our political goals in Iraq? And if the answer is “impeding,” then what the hell are we fighting for?

If any righties wander by here and want to provide serious answers to these questions based on factual evidence, they are welcome to do so. Knee-jerk comments or gratuitious insults will, as usual, be deleted.

Grow Up With God

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Following up the last post — Jason Felch and Patricia Ward Biederman write in today’s Los Angeles Times that the conservative National Association of Evangelicals has reached across the doctrinal aisle to support All Saints Church of Pasedena. The church is being hassled by the IRS for preaching that Jesus didn’t like war.

The evangelicals’ act is a welcome contrast to the juvenile gloatings of a couple of trolls; see this, this, and this. I want to point this out because I don’t believe all conservative Christians are pubescent, literacy-challenged Kool Aiders. It just seems that way because pubescent, literacy-challenged Kool Aiders tend to run things in Rightie World. But in this case the evangelicals are behaving like adults:

When Ted Haggard, head of the 30-million-member National Assn. of Evangelicals, heard about the All Saints case Monday, he told his staff to contact the National Council of Churches, a more liberal group.

Haggard said he personally supports the war in Iraq and probably would not agree with much in the Rev. George Regas’ 2004 sermon at All Saints, which was cited by the IRS as the basis for its investigation. But Haggard said he wants to work with the council of churches “in doing whatever it takes to get the IRS to stop” such actions.

For the record, even the Southern Baptist Convention was mightily pissed off by the attempt to exploit churches on behalf of the Bush campaign, as described in the last post.

Haggard’s act was welcomed by the National Council of Churches.

Robert Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, cheered when he heard of Haggard’s offer, which Edgar said represented a rare reaching out by the evangelical group to the council.

Edgar, a United Methodist minister, former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania and ex-president of the Claremont School of Theology, said the IRS move against All Saints appeared to be “a political witch hunt on George Regas and progressive ideology. It’s got to stop.” He stressed that Regas did not endorse a candidate in the sermon.

The article goes on to explain the distinction between issue advocacy and candidate endorsement:

The tax code prohibits nonprofits from “participating or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office.” The ban includes endorsements, donations, fundraising or any other activity “that may be beneficial or detrimental to any particular candidate.”

Advocating for ballot initiatives, as many California churches have done in advance of today’s special election, is a separate issue, tax experts said. Churches and other tax-exempt organizations are allowed to engage in lobbying as long as “a substantial part of the organization’s activities is not intended to influence legislation.”

Savvy churches make sure they don’t draw unwanted attention from the IRS, church officials and others said.

When elections near, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles sometimes sends reminders to local parishes of its guidelines on political action. “We don’t endorse or oppose candidates, but we can endorse ballot propositions when there is a moral or ethical issue involved,” said archdiocese spokesman Tod Tamberg, who knew of no local Catholic churches under IRS scrutiny.

This weekend, during Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Archbishop Roger Mahony endorsed Proposition 73, the state ballot initiative requiring parental notification before an abortion can be performed on a minor.

Seems to me that advocating for or against a ballot initiative is intended to influence legislation, but let’s go on … throughout American history, religions have been engaged in the nation’s hot-button issues. There was preaching both for and against slavery and secession, for example. Church groups worked to prohibit the sale of liquor and to stop child labor laws (yeah, you read that right; conservative churches wanted six-year-olds to work in factories). More recently, conservative churches have pushed hard to stop legal abortion. African-American churches were at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement. This is a role American churches and other religious institutions have played from the beginning of our history, and I think it’s a legitimate role. And I have no problem with treating churches as tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, as long as they are genuinely nonprofit and not fronts for something that would otherwise be taxed.

However, I agree that tax-exempt organizations should be prohibited from actively campaigning or endorsing parties or candidates. Otherwise, you’d soon have “churches” that were nothing more than fronts for political campaigns. Political parties could take over established churches through generous “donations” in exchange for endorsements and a compliant ministry. Ministers could find themselves serving two masters–God and the Party. The wall of separation so many conservatives want to tear down protects religious independence of politics.

Update: Don’t miss flaming idiot Don Surber’s comment to this post (here and here) and my response. You will laugh your butt off, unless you are Don Surber. And what is it with righties that they can’t read the bleeping posts they comment on?