The Right did its best to whip up fake outrage over the way Democrats conducted themselves at Senator Edward Kennedy’s funeral. Allahpundit attempted a creative conflation of the Graeme Frost fake outrage campaign with the Paul Wellstone fake outrage campaign and came up with a post bristling with fake outrage that one of the senator’s grandsons said a prayer at the funeral that mentioned health care.

I didn’t watch the funeral and can’t find a transcript of the prayer, so I don’t personally know what the grandson said. However, I find myself unable to work up much outrage that we, the living, would be asked to carry on the Senator’s life’s work.

Since the etiquette of expressing “win one for the Gipper”-type sentiments (ah-HEM) at funerals seems to be in question, let me go on record as saying that I want my funeral to be a rally for whatever cause I’m caught up in when I’m done. Not that I expect a big turnout, but anyone who does show up should be wearing the proper message T-shirt and be prepared to donate money to the Cause. Instead of a eulogy, I want people to discuss an action plan. Then just dump my ashes in a nice flower bed somewhere and go out to fight the good fight. You could do me no greater honor.

And if we want to talk about child exploitation, look no further than this kid.

My sense of the thing is that most of the country is ignoring the fake outrage this time. Most folks are either noting the end of an era, or not, but the fact that speakers at the Senator’s funeral urged people to carry on his work doesn’t seem to be bothering anyone but the wingnuts.

Allahpundit also asked, “I’m unfamiliar with the sermon where Jesus called for Caesar to create a public fund to heal the sick. Can any Bible aficionados help?” I’d rather know where Jesus taught us to shut our eyes to suffering if there’s no way private industry can make a profit from it.

According to Reason magazine’s Ronald Bailey, If people are denied needed resources by government, it’s rationing. If people are denied needed resources by private companies, it’s their own fault.

See, all that stuff about people being priced out of the insurance market, being sold junk insurance policies, being denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, or being dropped by their insurers because, well, because? It’s their own fault. Markets are perfect.

Bailey concludes,

But through the usual lack leftwing lack of imagination and a truly touching and naive faith in the efficacy of top/down government “solutions,” Klein ends up advocating for government rationing and for imposing a government monopoly on health care, instead of for more competition and choice.

Let us reflect on Bailey’s truly touching and naive faith in private markets. It’s one thing to have faith in a theory or proposition that hasn’t been tried before. But when the thing you have placed your faith in is sinking like the Titanic right in front of your eyes, that’s not faith. That’s delusion.

See also: Ezra Klein

Sorta like really ripe road kill.

OLIGARHY? Not a word, but maybe it ought to be.

Sorry I’ve been away — my back is not letting me sit in a chair for very long, which makes keyboarding a bit tricky. Ice packs are helping, though.

Anyway — Attaturk has a video of a man at a Senator Charles Grassley townhall meeting who is saying,

The president of the United States, that’s who you should be concerned about. Because he’s acting like a little Hitler, I’d take a gun to Washington if enough of you would go with me.

Grassley is silent. Attaturk links to similar incidents with other Republican politicians. He also documents some Republicans who not-too-implicitly encouraged constituents to use violence to enforce their political will.

Last night, Rachel Maddow showed us that extremist anti-reproductive rights groups are encouraging people to assassinate more abortion doctors.

American popular culture long has promoted an almost romantic ideal of the little guy picking up a gun and taking on some evil that is either being protected by the establishment or is the establishment itself. Think of Charles Bronson’s ” Death Wish” films, for example, or most westerns, or “Dirty Harry” and its many clones. Indeed, American gun culture has invested guns and gun ownership with powerful symbolic meaning. Add to that decades of demagoguery and manipulation of public opinon by right-wing forces that respect democracy only as long as they control it. And what you’ve got is a significant number of people who are primed to become domestic terrorists.

Grassley is silent, and I say he is silent because he is intimidated. The anger is out of his control. If he were to tell people to put their guns away and rely on the democratic process, they’d turn on him. It’s not lost on Republicans, I suspect, that when John McCain attempted to calm down his audiences during last year’s presidential campaign, the audience tuned him out. It was Sarah Palin who fed them all the red meat they wanted, so she became their champion.

At the Washington Monthly, Steve Benen asks (reasonably),

But reading over these specific lies, and thinking about them in relation to the other insane attacks we’ve seen as part of the health care reform “debate,” it occurs to me to ask right-wing opponents of reform a simple question: “Why would Dems want that?”

And by “that,” I mean any of the various nightmares that insurance companies and GOP hacks have come up with. Why would Democrats want “death panels”? Why would they support widespread “rationing”? Why would they try to force bureaucrats between patients and their doctors? What possible incentive could they have?

They’re politicians. They want to do well, but they also want to keep their jobs (i.e., win re-election). It’s in their interests to pass legislation that would benefit the country, and which voters will like. Does it make any sense to think Democrats would take this rare opportunity to approve legislation that would kill off seniors, while making things drastically worse for tens of millions of people? Why would Dems want that?

But this is a line of reasoning that was lost a long time ago. To many, liberals by definition are people with an insane plan to raise taxes for the sake of raising taxes, who encourage people to go on welfare, who get off on throwing money out the window in buckets, who burn Bibles, and of course want to take their guns away. And it’s thought liberals/Democrats want to do these things because they “believe in” doing them. One picks one’s tribe by faith, not reason.

So here we are. The politicians and pundits who feed the beast don’t control it. Or, to use another metaphor, they’ve played with fire, and now the fire is out of control. We’re going to be very, very fortunate if there aren’t more assassinations and mass shootings.

This morning, bloggers across the liberal blogosphere thought of memorializing Senator Kennedy by naming the health care bill after him. This is fitting and natural, since health care reform was the Senator’s premier issue. Moreover, he continued to work toward its passage this year, as he was dying, as long as his body allowed him to work.

Ezra Klein wrote,

There is an impulse to honor the dead by erasing the sharp edges of their life. To ensure they belong to all of us, and in doing, deprive them of the dignity conferred by their actual choices, their lonely stands, and their long work. But Ted Kennedy didn’t belong to all of us. He didn’t even belong to all Democrats. He was not of the party that voted for more than a trillion in unfunded tax cuts but cannot bring itself to pay for health-care reform. He was not of the party that fears the next election more than the next failure to help America;s needy. Rather, he belonged to the party of Medicare and Medicaid, the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Civil Rights Act and immigration reform. He belonged to the party that sought to advance the conditions and opportunities of the least among us. He was, as Harold Meyerson says, “the senior senator from Massachusetts and for all the excluded in American life.”

And he still is.

Be sure to read all of Ezra’s post, and also this one, which includes links and videos.

A few hours ago the Right began a pre-emptive strike to prevent the passing of Senator Edward Kennedy from impacting the health care debate. The meme going around is that we liberals are shamelessly using Edward Kennedy’s death to push our agenda. There was a trackback, now deleted, to a prominent rightie site attached to my last post. I’m being slammed for writing,

I had hoped Senator Kennedy would live to see a health care reform bill signed. If Congress does pass a decent bill, I hope they name it after the Senator.

… as if wishing to memorialize the senator is somehow out of bounds, just a cheap ploy to score a legislative win.

I’m not going to link to any of the hate posts out today. Just know that few of them are holding back or making any pretense of respecting the dead. Then ignore them.

A National “March for Healthcare” is being organized for September 13. I’d like to see a big turnout. See also Steven Pearlstein’s column today.

Republicans seem determined to preserve the uniquely American system under which health care is rationed today — on the basis of employment status and ability to pay. According to the respected Institute of Medicine, this market-based approach to rationing has held the number of untimely deaths each year to a mere 18,000 uninsured souls. Thanks to Medicare, all of those victims are younger than 65, but apparently that is the kind of age-based rationing that real Republicans can embrace.

The struggle continues.

Thank you, Senator Kennedy.

I hope the young folks will forgive us geezers for thinking of all the Kennedy boys today. They were a huge part of our lives.

I had hoped Senator Kennedy would live to see a health care reform bill signed. If Congress does pass a decent bill, I hope they name it after the Senator.

Requiem eternam dona eis, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.

So a Big New Thing comes out, this time the Inspector General Torture Report, and immediately the Right and Left blogosphere read it entirely differently. You’d think there were two IG Torture Reports.

According to the righties, the documents prove that Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs) “work.” The problem with this theory is that the documents, in particular the ones that former Veep Dick “the Dick” Cheney said would vindicate him, don’t exactly say that. I read them last night — or what you could see that wasn’t blacked out — and they didn’t specifically say what techniques were used to obtain what particular information that might have thwarted an actual terrorist plot, as opposed to taking apart the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch. The righties are just seeing in it what they want to see, not what the document actually reveals.

And, anyway, I think my version is better.

Spencer Ackerman has read the documents more closely than I did. And Ackerman argues that the documents reveal that what usable information that was obtained from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed came from traditional interrogation and intelligence work, not “EITs.”

And if you haven’t seen it already, be sure to read Glenn Greenwald’s “What every American should be made to learn about the IG Torture Report.”

I have these little moments of clarity in which I think I understand everything. I’m having one now, so I have to keyboard fast before it fades.

In an essay at The Guardian, Madeleine Bunting writes,

This humbling evidence of our hopeless decision-making exposes consumer capitalism as not being about millions of independent decisions of individuals expressing unique identities, but about how social norms can be manipulated to create eager shoppers.

In a nutshell, why “libertarianism” doesn’t work.

I’ve long had a kind of anthropological interest in Reason magazine. Reason is a libertarian publication that has as its motto “Free Minds and Free Markets.” I had a free subscription for a while, and reading it always gave me an urge to put the lot of the staff on a couch, à la Freud, and ask them how they felt about their mothers.

The issue with the Reasonites is not intelligence. Some righties are just bag-of-hammers stupid, yes, but the writers of Reason are articulate and capable of showing insight as long as they aren’t writing about, you know, politics. Or economies. In those contexts, “free market” ideology has so shackled their brains that they can’t critically think their way out of a wet paper bag.

Take this article by Damon W. Root, which is one of the most stunningly wrong-headed things I’ve read on the Web in quite some time:

Chip Berlet, a senior researcher at the liberal think tank Political Research Associates, went even further than that, telling New America Media: “For over 100 years—more like 150, you’ve had these movements, and they came out of the Civil War. It is a backlash against social liberalism and it’s rooted in libertarian support for unregulated capitalism and white people holding onto power, and, if they see themselves losing it, trying to get it back.” …

… Perhaps Berlet should consider the career of South Carolina’s Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman (1847-1914), a leading progressive who railed against the sins of “unregulated capitalism” while preaching the salvation of white supremacy. An ally of the agrarian populist William Jennings Bryan, Tillman supported antitrust laws, railroad regulations, the free coinage of silver, and a host of other progressive panaceas. He first entered politics as a member of the Red Shirts, a Klan-like terror group that “came out of the Civil War” to menace African Americans during the early years of Reconstruction. When President Theodore Roosevelt entertained the black leader Booker T. Washington at the White House in 1901, Tillman served as a de facto spokesman for the Southern opposition, declaring: “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.” It’s hard to imagine a nastier threat of political violence than that—and Tillman is obviously nobody’s idea of a libertarian.

Jeez, where do I start — I’m not even going to address the crass intellectual dishonesty of defining “progressivism” purely in terms of regulation of capitalism, except that it’s a standard lie righties tell themselves to make the world a simpler place to understand. Sorting everything in into simple binary piles of good-bad, us-them, capitalists-everybody else, is a grand way to conserve cognitive resources, although it doesn’t tell you much about the real world.

Second, if you know anything at all about the antebellum South and the passions and ideas that inflamed into the American Civil War, you should know that 19th century southern whites were anti-capitalists. Indeed, you could define the secession movement of 1860 and 1861 as a libertarian revolt against capitalism. It would be a stretch, but not nearly as big a stretch as defining Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman as a “progressive.

By 1860, the northern states were well into the industrial revolution, while the South remained stuck in pre-industrial agrarian mode. More and more damnyankees were leaving the farms and making a living either by getting jobs in industry or starting a business. But the slave economy of the South did not allow capitalism to gain a foothold, because goods and services were either imported or performed by slaves.

The enormous majority of southern whites were illiterate dirt farmers (or “yeoman” farmers, in the vernacular of social historians), not plantation owners or slave owners. But these fellows largely bought into the southern ideal of being one’s own man (women not being full citizens yet) on one’s own property. The northern proclivity for getting jobs and working for someone else was sneered at as “wage slavery.”

So, 19th century Southern culture was thoroughly anti-capitalist. However, you could argue that it was very “libertarian” in that it also was anti-Big Government. The Confederate Constitution is one of the most libertarian political documents America every produced. The Confederate ideal was all about weakening the federal government in favor of states’ rights and neutering the power of government generally to interfere with what a man did on, and with, his own property. The election of Abraham Lincoln represented, to them, the ascendancy of big-government tyranny that would interfere with their freedom to live as they wished.

The hot issue of the 1860 wasn’t just slavery; it was slavery in the territories. The popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin notwithstanding, most white northerners really didn’t care if the southerners kept slaves, so long as slavery was kept out of their neighborhoods (which was an issue in the Dred Scott decision, which determined that a slave remained a slave even if he was taken into free territory). But northerners were passionate about keeping slavery out of the territories, which at that point was most of the country west of the Mississippi, because if slavery moved in, the possibilities of entrepreneurship would be canceled out.

Plantation owners, on the other hand, came to believe that if slavery couldn’t be spread into the territories it eventually would die out. So every time a new state was admitted into the Union, the whole nation would get into an uproar over whether the state would be “slave” or “free.” A very bloody mini-Civil War was fought over the admission of Kansas as a free state (finalized in January 1861), for example. There had been several compromises over the years that postponed civil war, but by 1860 the population of the U.S. was poised to spill over into the vast western plains and mountains in a big way, and a decision had to be made. Clearly, the country could not survive divided against itself, half slave and half free.

So the Civil War was fought, and two of the reasons the South lost was (1) lack of industrial resources, and (2) states’ rights. Jefferson Davis couldn’t get the state governments to work together to maximize federal resources as well as Lincoln could.

The bottom line is that for an old Confederate — and, later, a leading proponent of Jim Crow — like Tillman to be defined as a “progressive” because he didn’t mind some regulation of capitalism is beyond bag-of-hammers stupid. It reveals a deep delusion brought on by seeing everything through a thick fog of ideology. There are no “free minds” at Reason magazine.

The very fact that Tillman opposed Theodore Roosevelt should have been a clue, because in his domestic policy ideas TR was one of the most progressive presidents we ever had. Indeed, some of us see TR’s New Nationalism speech, delivered after he left the White House, as the foundation of American liberalism.

OK, so I got into the Civil War and almost forgot where I started. Going back to Madeleine Bunting, who is one of my favorite writers at Comment Is Free — she writes about new trends in psychological and sociological scholarship, which argue that we are not the free thinkers we think we are. We are all, in fact, programed by our culture and upbringing and easily manipulated by many forces within our societies. Intellectual autonomy is a delusion.

(In short, what the Buddha taught 25 centuries ago. Nice to see the West catching up.)

The libertarian/Randian argument that free people making independent and rational decisions about their own economic self-interest will naturally create self-sustaining, healthy market and community systems that need a minimal amount of government regulation. The empirical fact that such an ideal doesn’t work in the real world never sinks in. The fact is that few of us make genuinely independent and rational decisions, but rather stumble through life in a semi-awake state, being jerked around like puppets by many forces within and without. And it takes enormous effort to break through the fog and see that.

It’s so much more comfortable to cocoon yourself in a place where you are always right, because your ideological interface allows you to manipulate reality any way you like. But some of us don’t call that “freedom.”

Some links I want to share —

Los Angeles Times: “Doing nothing is not an option.” What the critics of reform fail to mention is that the system will collapse without crucial changes.

Malcolm Potts, “The war for Afghanistan’s women.” It’s not worth risking U.S. lives unless we raise the status of Afghan women.

Paul Krugman, “All the President’s Zombies.” It’s Krugman. Read it.