The Air, the Air Is Everywhere

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rightwingoverse I’m hoping Salon and Tom Tomorrow don’t mind my borrowing a panel of today’s strip, but I haven’t seen anything that better sums up the current state of the Right than the panel at left. What’s hysterical about it is that it’s not exaggerated.

The Right cannot merely disagree with Democrats and with the Obama Administration. No; every point of disagreement (which is everything the Obama Administration is doing, because it’s them doing it), no matter how minor, is framed not as a bad idea but as The End of the Universe as We Know It.

For example, at the Los Angeles Times Jonah Goldberg explains the role of the Environmental Protection Agency in the evil plot to bring America into the grip of dictatorship. Because the EPA (Goldberg says, ominously) has given itself the power to regulate everything, including the air you breathe.

Nominally, the Environmental Protection Agency’s announcement last Friday only applies to new-car emissions. But pretty much everyone agrees that the ruling opens the door to regulating, well, everything.

According to the EPA, greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide — the gas you exhale — as well as methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride. It is literally impossible to imagine a significant economic or human activity that does not involve the production of one of these gases.

Ah, how diabolical. The EPA can regulate everything that involves carbon dioxide, which is pretty much all air-breathing life forms on this planet.

For a little background, read the New York Times editorial on the EPA policy:

The formal “endangerment finding” names carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases as pollutants subject to regulation under the federal Clean Air Act. This in turn sets the stage — after a 60-day comment period — for broad new rules touching major sectors of the American economy and profoundly influencing how Americans use and generate energy.

The finding is also likely to accelerate the progress of climate legislation in Congress and will give the United States the credibility it lost in international climate negotiations during the Bush administration. The next round of talks is scheduled for Copenhagen in December.

The decision has been a long time coming. Two years ago, the United States Supreme Court ordered the agency to determine whether greenhouse gases harmed the environment and public health and, if so, to regulate them. Scientists at former President George W. Bush’s E.P.A. largely agreed that greenhouse gases are harmful and should be regulated. In December 2007, the agency forwarded an endangerment finding to the White House, where senior officials promptly suppressed it, refusing even to open the e-mail to which it was attached.

Talk about judicial activism! The Supreme Court was in on the plot two years before Obama became President! Of course, what you don’t see anywhere in Goldberg’s column is anything resembling a reasoned, documented argument why the EPA’s policy regarding greenhouse gasses is not the best approach for, you know, protecting the environment.

BTW, here’s the background on the Supreme Court decision, which passed by a 5-4 vote, the usual dissenters (Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas) dissenting. More here and here.

But, you know, there’s a list that goes on and on. The marginal tax rate for millionaires is bumped up by 3 percent, and the wingnuts start screaming about econo-fascism. (Because, you know, calling it socialism isn’t working.) What you don’t get is anything resembling a reasoned, factual discussion of Obama’s actual tax policies (as opposed to the fantasy Obama tax policies the Right complains about) and why they might not be a good idea.

For that matter, someone explain why wingnuts scream bloody murder when someone suggests paying taxes is patriotic. They say they love America, but they don’t want to pay to maintain it? Isn’t that a bit like saying you love your children, but not enough to be bothered to feed and clothe them?

A rightie might argue they are only opposed to taxes that are too high or unfair taxes — taxing some people at a higher rate than others. OK, fine. Then stop fomenting hysteria and attempt a reasoned, factual discussion. (Clue: A fact is generally defined as something that has objective, verifiable reality; it is not anything you want to believe because it fits your prejudices.)

In other news, the lying aggregate of fecal matter known as “Newt Gingrich” went ballistic because President Obama not only shook hands with Hugo Chavez; he smiled and shook hands at the same time. Satyam Khanna points out at Think Progress that lots of presidents have shaken hands with dictators and smiled while they were doing it.

Gingrich said on NBC,

How do you mend relationships with somebody who hates your country, who actively calls for the destruction of your country and who wants to undermine you?

Which brings me back to the cartoon at the top of the post. We turn once again to Richard Hofstadter, here quoting Theodore W. Adorno:

The pseudo-conservative, Adorno writes, shows “conventionality and authoritarian submissiveness” in his conscious thinking and “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness in the unconscious sphere … The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

How much more spot on can one get? They’ve somehow simultaneously staked claims on both “love it or leave it” super-nationalism and “hate the Gubmint” anarchism, which may be unprecedented.

Must-Reads at TPM

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I don’t have time to comment, but I want to be sure y’all see these — first, read about Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) who allegedly got caught by an NSA wiretap working out a quid pro quo with a “suspected Israeli agent.” As Josh Marshall says, the allegations against Rep. Harman are extremely serious. But one also must ask why member of Congress was being wiretapped by the NSA.

There are a number of follow-up stories at TPM, so just go there for the latest.

Second, remember Scott Beauchamp, the Army Private who wrote about soldiers behaving badly for the New Republic? And how the Right formed a firing line to call Beauchamp a liar? Well, one of the chief witnesses against Beauchamp, Master Sergeant John Hatley, was just convicted by a military jury in Germany of executing four handcuffed, blindfolded Iraqi men by shooting them in the backs of their heads.

Signs of the Times

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Paul Krugman writes in his column today that Ireland appears to be sinking into a genuine depression And he says the rest of the world could follow.

… to satisfy nervous lenders, Ireland is being forced to raise taxes and slash government spending in the face of an economic slump — policies that will further deepen the slump.

And it’s that closing off of policy options that I’m afraid might happen to the rest of us.

How did the Irish economy get into such a slump (emphasis added)?

By being just like us, only more so. Like its near-namesake Iceland, Ireland jumped with both feet into the brave new world of unsupervised global markets. Last year the Heritage Foundation declared Ireland the third freest economy in the world, behind only Hong Kong and Singapore.

BTW, if you want to see a study in psychotic denial, check out the Heritage Foundation issues page on the economy.

In other news, Ceci Connolly reports for the Washington Post that a downtown in manufacturing has caused a big bump in the number of North Carolinians without health insurance. One-fourth of the state’s residents have no health insurance, and another 9 percent are underinsured.

As a result, emergency rooms and nonprofit health services are being swamped by people needing basic medical care who cannot pay for it. Thanks to federal stimulus money, many nonprofit clinics are meeting the demands, but there are long waits.

On Request

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Patterico wants all bloggers to embed this video. So I watched it, and said yeah, sure.

You’ll recognize reporter Susan Roesgen of CNN from an earlier post. Roesgen’s work as shown on the earlier video was clumsy. She was over her head, I think, and obviously got rattled. I felt a lot more sympathy for her in the video above.

The thing is, righties are linking to this video as if it vindicates them somehow. I think it makes them look worse. Don’t stop the vid until you see the guy delivering the speech about how Hitler was a socialist. Classic.

Roesgen is getting the Dan Rather treatment now, btw. The righties are digging for everything they can find on her so they can smear her.

Update: Glenn Reynolds is bragging about how genteel, polite, and multi-racial the “tea parties” were. Yes, and I’m Prince Charles.

Update: See also No More Mr. Nice Blog.

Prove It

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We’ve learned that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month. This begs the question: If torture is so good at extracting information, why did it need to be applied 183 times in one month?

Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002. Of this, CIA officials have said,

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

Before he was waterboarded, Zubaida provided information that led to the capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other al Qaeda operatives. Moreover, before the 83 waterboardings the Bush Administration already knew that Zubaida was not an al Qaeda insider. He wasn’t a member of al Qaeda at all. He worked directly with al Qaeda only after 9/11.

What do you want to bet that the torture of Zubaida and KSM was more about Iraq than al Qaeda? Zubaida was waterboarded in August 2002. We know that the decision to invade Iraq had been made by then, and that Bushies were busily fixing intelligence and facts around policy. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded in March 2003, the same month the Iraq invasion began. The Bushies wanted more “intelligence” that gave them permission to invade Iraq. Whether the intelligence was true or not wasn’t that important.

You cannot get a wingnut or ex-Bush Administration official to admit that waterboarding doesn’t work. As Timothy Rutten writes in today’s Los Angeles Times, since leaving office many Bush officials (especially ex-Veep Dick Cheney) have publicly declared that their “enhanced” interrogation techniques “worked” to extract valuable information from terrorists that foiled real terrorist plots.

The argument that torture gets the job done was made yet again Thursday, when a person identified only as a former top official in the Bush administration told Politico that release of the memos was “damaging because these are techniques that work. … Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring they can never be used again — even in a ticking-time-bomb scenario where thousands or even millions of American lives are at stake.”

As John Cole says, “There better be a pretty damned long fuse on that ticking time bomb.”

The part about “not being able to use the techniques again” makes no sense whatsoever. What techniques were used that surprised anyone? Waterboarding goes back to the bleeping Inquisition.

There is copious testimony from people with experience in intelligence that torture is not an effective tool for extracting useful information. For example, Rear Admiral (ret.) John Hutson, former Judge Advocate General for the Navy, said,

“The United States has been a strong, unwavering advocate for human rights and the rule of law for as long as you and I have been alive. I’m not ready to throw in the towel on that just because we are in a battle with some terrible people. In fact, in a war like this, when we are tempted to respond in kind, we must hold ever more dearly to the values that make us Americans. Torture, or “cruel, inhuman or degrading” conduct, are not part of our national character. Another objection is that torture doesn’t work. All the literature and experts say that if we really want usable information, we should go exactly the opposite way and try to gain the trust and confidence of the prisoners. Torture will get you information, but it’s not reliable. Eventually, if you don’t accidentally kill them first, torture victims will tell you something just to make you stop. It may or may not be true. If you torture 100 people, you’ll get 100 different stories. If you gain the confidence of 100 people, you may get one valuable story.” (Legal Affairs “Debate Club” January 27, 2005)

However, what you get from Bushies and Bushie apologists are vague claims and ticking time bomb scenarios. Of course, the perps can always hide behind “national security,” but I would argue that allowing this chapter of our history slide by unexamined is the greater long-term threat to our national security. As Rutten says,

There will be another terrorist attack on American soil eventually. If it occurs in the absence of a clear historical record of what the Bush/Cheney torture policies did or did not accomplish, those who supported the former administration will come roaring out of the weeds to charge that Americans died because their soft-headed countrymen were preoccupied with civil liberties and human rights.

The next time the wingnuts claim torture works, ask them to prove it.

Catching More Flies With Honey

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Right now The Usual Wingnuts are having a fit because President Obama shook hands with Hugo Chavez at the Summit of the Americas meeting in Trinidad and Tobago. In other words, the President is behaving like a grownup, and we can’t have that!

What the wingnuts won’t tell you: “Obama drives Chavez out of limelight”

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez was greeted like a rock star by onlookers when he arrived at a 34-nation summit — but only because Barack Obama had slipped through a back door.

A short while later, a roomful of dignitaries from every nation in the Americas except Cuba met the U.S. president with thundering applause and a few whoops. Some stood up to clap.

No one else got as warm a reception, and Obama was repeatedly interrupted by applause as he promised an “equal partnership” with the region, including a bid to mend relations with Cuba.

Chavez didn’t speak at the opening ceremony and had to be content sitting quietly with the other leaders. It was a big change from the last Summit of the Americas in 2004, when he led the pack in defeating a hemispheric trade accord spearheaded by his nemesis, former U.S. President George W. Bush.

Though Chavez remains hugely popular among Latin American leftists, he has been considerably weakened by Bush’s departure and Obama’s arrival. He’s also less powerful because his oil-rich nation can’t simply buy as much good will now that oil prices have plunged.

“In the end, Chavez is a product of Bush,” said Marta Lagos, director of the Chile-based Latinobarometro polling firm. “Chavez would have never existed if Bush hadn’t opposed him the way he had.”

Can we just say that the wingnuts lack an appreciation of the power of good public relations, as opposed to throwing temper tantrums or behaving like your neighbor’s teenage brat who was never taught manners?

Along these same lines, I wanted to say one more thing about the tea parties — there is a debate on the Left about how seriously we should be taking the tea party “movement.” I do think it should be taken seriously as a potential cause of violence, but as a force that will turn the nation against President Obama — I don’t think so.

Awhile back, while we were debating the effectiveness or lack thereof of the antiwar protests, I took a look at mass demonstrations in history, noting which ones were effective and which ones weren’t, and formulated the “Bigger Asshole” rule: Effective demonstrations are those that make them look like bigger assholes than us.

It’s important to be clear how mass demonstrations “work.” Demonstrations should be viewed as a form of public relations. The point of them is to win public sympathy to your cause. They can also be tools for organizing, among other things. But demonstrations are a dangerous tool, because they can just as easily work against you as for you.

The really great mass protest movements — the prototypes are Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement — “worked” because the public at large sympathized with the protesters. The protesters behaved in a way that demonstrated they were worthy of respect, and the Powers Than Be they were protesting — whether redneck southern sheriffs or the British Empire — behaved like assholes.

On the other hand, a kid in a “Buck Fush” T-shirt screaming “No blood for oil!” over a megaphone for an hour and a half is just obnoxious. And don’t even get me started on the endless scatological references to “Dick” and “Bush,” the silly costumes, giant puppets, and often juvenile street theater that are standard features of leftie demonstrations and which broadcast the message “We are not serious; we are clowns in Clearasil.”

(Although I did like “Billionaires for Bush.” Humor is a good PR tool, when it’s really humorous.)

The true measure of “success” for the recent tea parties is not the number of people who turned up for them. (The final total may have been 300,000 nationwide, which does not impress me given the way Fox News pushed the parties. If there were a genuine groundswell of support for the “cause” I would have expected many more people than that.) The real measure is whether the tea parties gained public sympathy for the partiers. And from here I can’t see that they did.

If leftie demonstrators tend to come across as immature and unserious, I’d say the rightie demonstrators come across as frightening. They are dumb but sinister, like a beast defending its territory. I can’t imagine that someone who is not already inclined to think the way they think would have felt sympathy for them.

Update: See also Comments From Left Field.

Torture

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By now you’ve heard the Obama Administration released the memos used by the Bush Administration to justify torture. As Digby says,

This is the very definition of the banality of evil — a dry, legalistic series of justifications for acts of barbaric cruelty.

Many are angry that the President has promised not to prosecute CIA officials involved in torture. About the only justification for this I’ve seen is from the Anonymous Liberal, who writes,

I know many of you disagree with me on this, but I think Obama did the right thing by promising not to prosecute CIA officers who acted in accordance with the OLC’s prior advice. Given the kind of things these folks are asked to do and the important missions entrusted to them, they have to be able to rely on the legal advice they’re given by the government. If we start prosecuting people for conduct they were specifically advised was legal by the OLC, it will severely hamper our ability to conduct future intelligence work. No one will trust the advice they are given, they’ll worry that the rug will be pulled out from under them at some point down the road. That’s an untenable situation.

But also,

The people who should be punished are the people who gave the advice. The lawyers. The Jay Bybees, John Yoos, and David Addingtons of the world. Obama did the right thing by releasing these memos today. It is now up to us to make sure they generate the degree of outrage that they should.

I am uncomfortable with not prosecuting the CIA officials, since “just following orders” hasn’t been a defense since the Nuremberg Trials. However, releasing the memos themselves was the most important thing, and prosecuting the people who gave the advice is the next most important thing. However, I don’t think that what the White House says about the CIA officials necessarily ties Congress’s hands, does it?

Tea Leaves

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Nate Silver estimates that yesterday’s “tea parties” altogether drew about 250,000 participants. Chris Good puts the number of tea partiers a lot lower, at a mere 25,650, but Nate is the numbers guy so I’m going with his estimate.

As many have pointed out, there were more people than that in some anti-war protests in New York City alone. However, I’ve seen some hand-wringing on the Left from people who say that the tea parties show the wingnuts are catching on to online organizing. We should be afraid.

I don’t think so. I believe most of the people who showed up to tea party yesterday were not “organized” online but by Fox News and talk radio. They may have been told how to go to a website to find the closest tea party, yes. But considering all the hype the tea parties have received from electronic mass media, a turnout of 250,000 nationwide falls way short of impressive.

On February 15 2003, between 6 and 10 million people in about 60 countries around the world participated in a day of protest against the invasion of Iraq. At least 300,000 to 400,000 of us — and those are the lower estimates — were jammed together on First, Second and Third avenues that day. This organizing was done almost entirely online. And in the U.S. this achievement was largely ignored by news media, even in New York, both before and after the event.

For that matter, the immigration marches of a couple of years ago were considerably bigger and more impressive.

So the shills on Fox News were able to stir up 250,000 of the hard core, “low information” whackjob Right, a crew far more alarming than inspiring. There are plans for a bigger event on July 4, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the powers behind yesterday’s tea parties quietly drop plans for follow-up events.

Update: I think somebody needs to have a talk with this guy.