Stout-Hearted Men?

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Glenn Greenwald has a post up on the right-wing cult of contrived masculinity. He writes that at the heart of movement conservatism

… is a cult of contrived masculinity whereby people dress up as male archetypes like cowboys, ranchers, and tough guys even though they are nothing of the kind — or prance around as Churchillian warriors because they write from a safe and protected distance about how great war is — and in the process become triumphant heroes and masculine powerful icons and strong leaders. They and their followers triumph over the weak, effete, humiliated Enemy, and thereby become powerful and exceptional and safe.

I’d say that at the heart of the cult of masculinity is something even more primordial, which is fear. As I wrote here, the pseudo-conservative movement that is the foundation of “movement conservatism” —

… started out as an intellectually incoherent reaction to the New Deal and the ideals and values that were mainstream 50 and more years ago. It was based on a complex of fears — fear of foreigners, fear of Communists, fear of the powerful forces in the world that they didn’t understand. Most of all, they were besieged by doubts that they fit into a world that was rapidly changing but which they didn’t understand. They feared they were being pushed out of what they saw as their rightful place in American life. Exactly what that place was, and who was pushing them, cannot be clearly defined. Often they lashed out not at real enemies but at the very institutions that protected them and enabled social and economic stability. Theirs was an irrational attempt to erase the previous several years of world history and go back to an earlier time — before the Depression, before World War II — when they had felt more secure. It didn’t sink in that that old feeling of security had been delusional.

I go on at more length in the old post. The point is that inside every wingnut lives a frightened little child looking for a daddy.

The Right’s masculinity problem is something I’ve written about before also, such as here, from 2003:

The faux masculinity celebrated by our culture equates violence with strength and power with potency. It is a rogue thing that does not honor the principles of civilization or the processes of governance. Like most John Wayne characters, or Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, following the rules is for girls and sissies. Why bother with a justice system when you’ve got a gun? …

… George W. Bush is an adolescent’s fantasy of what a president should be, just as John Wayne was an adolescent’s fantasy cowboy/lawman, and Dirty Harry an adolescent’s fantasy detective — easily bored with rules and talk, but quick on the trigger. Who needs diplomacy when you’ve got the biggest, baddest military in the world?

If you understand that this is where their heads are, one begins to understand why righties are not bothered by Abu Ghraib or that some of the people detained at Bagram, Kandahar, and Gitmo without due process of law turn out to be innocent. They think as children think. Children generally are unable to think rationally about what frightens them; if they are afraid there’s a monster in the closet, no amount of explaining there isn’t a monster in the closet will settle them. All they want is someone strong to protect them.

Thus, rghties want to smash everyone that frightens them without sorting out whether the thing they fear is a real danger or not, or whether the smashing is smart policy or not. And in Rightie World, applying rational judgments to fearful things is a sign of weakness. For example: The Iraq War is growing the threat of terrorism in the world. Yet you cannot explain to a rightie that a smart war on terror would require disengagement from Iraq. All they know is that there are Islamic extremists over there, and we must kill them. And (they think) if you don’t want to kill them, you are weak. Smash first; think later. If ever.

Of course, a Faux Man rarely volunteers to do the dirty work himself. As Glenn points out, righties on the whole think highly of military glory but are not so keen on gettng shot at themselves.

Another common trait of faux masculinity is misogyny; deep down inside faux men hate and resent women. As Robert Bly artfully explained awhile back in Iron John (I failed to find a good link explaining this point, sorry), faux men have unresolved issues about their mothers, and that lack of resolution leaves them in a state of perpetual adolescence — resentful, confused, fearful, simultaneously seeking yet rebelling against authority. They want a daddy who protects them from the monster in the closet; not a mommy who tells them to eat their vegetables, pay their taxes, and reduce their carbon emissions.

Glenn’s post is about Ann Coulter and why the Right won’t let go of her. He writes,

Coulter insisted last night that she did not intend the remark as an anti-gay slur — that she did not intend to suggest that John Edwards, husband and father, was gay — but instead only used the word as a “schoolyard taunt,” to call him a sissy. And that is true. Her aim was not to suggest that Edwards is actually gay, but simply to feminize him like they do with all male Democratic or liberal political leaders.

This is from Stephen J. Ducat’s book, The Wimp Factor:

I saw the Republican National Convention as essentially a hyper-masculine strut-fest. The real point of the convention was to make John Kerry their woman…. They had already done that with John Edwards by dubbing him the “Breck girl.” And Arnold Schwarzenegger went on to proclaim that any men who were anxious about the loss of jobs under the reign of George W. Bush were, as he put it, “economic girlie-men.” The inference was that Democratic candidates who were always whining about pink slips may as well be wearing pink slips.

Two years ago in a Buzzflash interview, Stephen Ducat said,

In a culture based on male domination and in which most things feminine tend to be devalued, even if they are secretly envied, the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman. This powerful adult male imperative to be unlike females and to repudiate anything that smacks of maternal caretaking is played out just as powerfully in politics as it is in personal life. In fact, political contests among men are in many ways the ultimate battles for masculine supremacy. This makes disavowing the feminine in oneself and projecting it onto one’s opponent especially important. This femiphobia–this male fear of being feminine–operates unconsciously in many men as a very powerful determinant of their political behavior. It also constitutes a very significant motive for fundamentalist terrorism. …

… In fact, the kind of hyper-masculine strutting that we see on display by right wing males is a defense. It’s a defense against this anxious masculinity, against their fear of the feminine. In a culture in which it’s so important to deny the feminine in men, masculinity becomes a really brittle achievement. It’s quite Sisyphean–you know, you can never quite get there. You’re always having to prove it.

Part of the reason is that this type of masculinity is defined largely in terms of domination. The problem is that domination–either in a personal or a global context–can never be a permanent condition. It’s a relational state. It’s dependent on having somebody in a subordinate position. That means you could be manly today, but you’re not going to be manly tomorrow unless you’ve got somebody to push around and control, whether that is an abused wife or another country. So this kind of masculinity is really brittle.

Faux men have to keep proving they are not tied to Ma’s apron strings; and subconsciously, to faux men any woman is All Women is Mother. The compulsion to denigrate women or anything understood to be “feminine” is, always, the mark of a faux man. Ann Coulter is “safe” because she is relentlessly unfeminine; a guy in a girl’s body. She uses the word female as an insult; she is alleged to have said in a 2003 interview, “It would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact.” (If anyone can find a link to the original source, please let me know.) Righties can count of Coulter not to get all womanly and maternal on them. She is the ideal woman for men who hate women. She does not remind them of their mothers.

Glenn continues,

The Coulter/Hannity/Limabugh-led right wing is basically the Abu Grahib rituals finding full expression in an authoritarian political movement. The reason people like Rush Limbaugh not only were unbothered, but actually delighted and even tickled by, Abu Grahib is because that is the full-blooded manifestation of the impulses underlying this movement — feelings of power and strength from the most depraved spectacles of force. The only real complaint from Bush followers about the Commander-in-Chief is that he has not given them enough Guantanamos and wars and aggression and barbaric slaughter and liberty infringement. Their hunger for those things is literally insatiable because they need fresh pretexts for feeling strong.

And that is where Ann Coulter comes in and plays such a vital — really indispensible — role. As a woman who purposely exudes the most exaggerated American feminine stereotypes (the long blond hair, the make-up, the emaciated body), her obsession with emasculating Democratic males — which, at bottom, is really what she does more than anything else — energizes and stimulates the right-wing “base” like nothing else can. Just witness the fervor with which they greet her, buy her books, mob her on college campuses. Can anyone deny that she is unleashing what lurks at the very depths of the right-wing psyche? What else explains not just her popularity, but the intense embrace of her by the “base”?

Yep.

While looking for other things I came across a nice specimen for the Faux Male exhibit. Awhile back rightie writer Harvey C. Mansfield wrote a book called Manliness that I have not read but have read much about. This review of Manliness on the site Intellectual Conservative is worth a comment. It begins:

In the twenty-first century workplace, the neutered male, all-too-often, is the employee most successful at climbing organizational hierarchies. Being a good listener, empowering others, and providing solicitous attention — as opposed to speaking the truth, taking a stand, and defending the meek — are the traits most likely to result in becoming a CEO or CFO. To get ahead, one must avoid confrontation rather than precipitate it. Characteristics like stoicism, independence, and reticence are now construed as signs of not being a team player despite their once being prevalent in the manliest of men. Perhaps a desire to commemorate what once was is what motivated Harvey Mansfield to write his book, Manliness, as the term itself has become a pejorative.

The premise is nonsense. Although there are exceptions to everything, in my experience corporate CEOs are not touchy-feely types. More often they exhibit absolute self-confidence and ruthless, take-no-prisoners aggression. A touch of sociopathy doesn’t hurt. Mansfield is an academic who needs to get out more. The reviewer, Bernard Chapin, possibly has another excuse. Or not. This comes later in Chapin’s review:

Levity aside, the strongest message of Manliness is delivered in these lines:

    As opposed to being manly, a defense of manliness requires that a man look a woman in the eye and tell her that she is inferior in certain important respects. Men cannot do that today.

He could not be any more right. The very reason that men are vilified and maligned is due to their refusal to defend themselves.

Obviously, Chapin and Mansfield are sniveling little weenies. Real men don’t have to put down women to “defend themselves.”

Having exposed Mr. Chapin for the unmanly lump of protoplasm that he is, you will not be surprised to find out that Mr. Chapin is an Ann Coulter admirer. Of course. Defending her use of the word faggot — which, inexplicably, he doesn’t spell —

F*ggot is not a term of hate. It’s a word sometimes used to describe gays as well as a bundle of sticks or branches, a type of meatball, and, way back when, it even represented a unit of measurement.

Chapin writes,

Consider Coulter’s statement for a moment. Does she really think that Edwards is gay? I seriously doubt it. She was using her enemies’ PC sensitivity as a means to provoke and incite — which is exactly what happened. The quip was an incendiary joke. Coulter is not publicity shy, and, given her background, must have known that furor would follow her heretical observation. Ironically, Howard Dean’s response — “this kind of vile rhetoric is out of bounds” — plays like made-to-order dogma. Like Dean, many leftists would like to send Coulter to places far fouler than rehab. Why is saying a word like f*ggot out of bounds? If a homosexual called Coulter a breeder or a black person called her a cracker, would we judge them “hate-filled and bigoted?” Of course not.

Well, um, I would, if the name-calling were intended to be hateful. (Coulter is neither a breeder nor a cracker as I understand the terms, however.) But the point is that if we measure Mr. Chapin by his own masculinity measure — “speaking the truth, taking a stand, and defending the meek” — you can see that he falls a tad short. What Coulter said was nothing but a juvenile slur. Pretending otherwise is not “speaking the truth.” It’s “pathological denial.”

Twist and Shout

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Ann Coulter must’ve wondered what hit her. She trotted out her usual shtick at CPAC, and the Right when ballistic over it. Sample:

Ann Coulter used to serve the movement well. She was telegenic, intelligent, and witty. She was also fearless: saying provocative things to inspire deeper thought and cutting through the haze of competing information has its uses. But Coulter’s fearlessness has become an addiction to shock value. She draws attention to herself, rather than placing the spotlight on conservative ideas.

In fact, Coulter’s been spewing the same spew for years. What she said at CPAC was actually rather mild by Coulter standards. But as I wrote here, her problem is not that she has changed, but that the movement that supported her has changed. They are having to work harder at persuading themselves that they are morally superior to the Left, and lately this effort has taken the form of pretending they are more genteel of speech than we are.

Thus, the Coulter we have all known all these years is off-message.

Y’all will love this — defending the Right against this Glenn Greenwald column, rightie blogger Patterico posts an unintentionally hilarious screed “proving” that lefties do too engage in hate speech.

There are two major problems with Patterico’s “proof.” The first is that many of the people he lists as “lefties,” um, aren’t. Nina Totenberg? Chris Rock? Craig Kilborne? I’d never heard of Julianne Malveaux, although I take it she writes a column somewhere.

But the other little flaw in Patterico’s post is that none of his links go to original sources, but to posts and articles by right-wing bloggers and columnists. So there is no way to check the context that the righties lifted the quote out of, or even if the quote is accurate.

This is unethical and dishonest, I say. Essentially Patterico is blowin’ smoke. And Glenn Greenwald wins again.

In Rightie World, “Support” = “Abandonment”

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The House Oversight Committee and the Appropriations Committee are both holding hearings today on the conditions at Walter Reed. Michael Roston reports for Raw Story:

With a US Army veteran declaring “I want to leave this place,” a House committee began a hearing this morning at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center on the difficulties that casualties from the Iraq war have experienced in receiving medical care.

In the special hearing’s first panel, two veterans and the wife of a third alleged that senior Army officials failed to heed the warnings that they had heard for years about the state of care at the Army’s Walter Reed Medical Center, and the committee’s chair, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), suggested that the problems at the Army Medical Center might be “the tip of the iceberg.” …

… US Army Staff Sgt. John Daniel Shannon suffered injuries from an explosion in Iraq. He testified before the committee that he had experienced difficulties for two years in receiving certification that would enable plastic surgery he needs to be fitted for a prosthetic eye.

He told the committee that he’s had enough of the complications of receiving medical care at the Army hospital.

“I want to leave this place,” Shannon said.

He then explained that the patients’ advocates at Walter Reed don’t put the care of veterans up front in the help they provide.

“We have no advocacy that is not working for the government,” he explained. “They have its interests, not mine, in mind.”

And Paul Krugman has a must-read column on Walter Reed in the New York Times today ( you can read the column at Welcome to Pottersville). It begins:

When Salon, the online magazine, reported on mistreatment of veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center two years ago, officials simply denied that there were any problems. And they initially tried to brush off last month’s exposé in The Washington Post.

But this time, with President Bush’s approval at 29 percent, Democrats in control of Congress, and Donald Rumsfeld no longer defense secretary — Robert Gates, his successor, appears genuinely distressed at the situation — the whitewash didn’t stick.

Yet even now it’s not clear whether the public will be told the full story, which is that the horrors of Walter Reed’s outpatient unit are no aberration. For all its cries of “support the troops,” the Bush administration has treated veterans’ medical care the same way it treats everything else: nickel-and-diming the needy, protecting the incompetent and privatizing everything it can.

I hadn’t been aware of the privatization at Walter Reed, but apparently there’s quite a tale to tell about it. This September 2006 release from Senator Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) provides some highlights; see also Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. Very basically, a company called IAP Worldwide Services got the contract to provide services at Walter Reed and replaced 300 federal employees with 50 private employees. IAP is led by Al Neffgen, a former senior Halliburton official.

Krugman continues,

What makes this a particular shame is that in the Clinton years, veterans’ health care — like the Federal Emergency Management Agency — became a shining example of how good leadership can revitalize a troubled government program. By the early years of this decade the Veterans Health Administration was, by many measures, providing the highest-quality health care in America. (It probably still is: Walter Reed is a military facility, not run by the V.H.A.)

But as with FEMA, the Bush administration has done all it can to undermine that achievement. And the Walter Reed scandal is another Hurricane Katrina: the moment when the administration’s misgovernment became obvious to everyone.

IAP has had a lot of FEMA contracts, too.

The problem starts with money. The administration uses carefully cooked numbers to pretend that it has been generous to veterans, but the historical data contained in its own budget for fiscal 2008 tell the true story. The quagmire in Iraq has vastly increased the demands on the Veterans Administration, yet since 2001 federal outlays for veterans’ medical care have actually lagged behind overall national health spending.

To save money, the administration has been charging veterans for many formerly free services. For example, in 2005 Salon reported that some Walter Reed patients were forced to pay hundreds of dollars each month for their meals.

More important, the administration has broken longstanding promises of lifetime health care to those who defend our nation. Two months before the invasion of Iraq the V.H.A., which previously offered care to all veterans, introduced severe new restrictions on who is entitled to enroll in its health care system. As the agency’s Web site helpfully explains, veterans whose income exceeds as little as $27,790 a year, and who lack “special eligibilities such as a compensable service connected condition or recent combat service,” will be turned away.

Yep, this is how the Bush Administration supports the troops.

We know from Hurricane Katrina postmortems that one of the factors degrading FEMA’s effectiveness was the Bush administration’s relentless push to outsource and privatize disaster management, which demoralized government employees and drove away many of the agency’s most experienced professionals. It appears that the same thing has been happening to veterans’ care.

The redoubtable Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, points out that IAP Worldwide Services, a company run by two former Halliburton executives, received a large contract to run Walter Reed under suspicious circumstances: the Army reversed the results of an audit concluding that government employees could do the job more cheaply.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the whole narrative, but it seems that, sometime in the past (possibly pre-Bush) some jobs were opened to competition from private contractors. This means (I think) that a private contractor might get a contract to provide a service if it could underbid the federal agency providing that service; this is called an “A-76 privatization review.” This was supposed to be a cost-saving measure, although I gather from my research this morning that the review process costs a boatful of money also. Anyway, the federal employees had “won” the Walter Reed job competition until someone changed the rules to favor the private contractor.

Note that IAP has had the contract only since January 2006, so it’s hard to tell from here how much of Walter Reed’s problems stem from the contractor.

Rightie blogs on the whole have studiously attempted to ignore the Walter Reed controversy. Desperate to prove that liberals don’t really care about the troops more than he does, the blogger of Riehl World View spins objections to Joe Liberman giving the Dem radio address Saturday as liberal disses of the troops. I kid you not. This goes way beyond stupid. But since Fox News provided 12 times more coverage to Anna Nicole Smith than Walter Reed, maybe the righties don’t know about Walter Reed yet.

What Righties Mean by “Support”

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Along with “the troops,” another entity righties claim to “support” is “the family.” As in “marriage” with “children.” So one assumes righties will be disturbed by this story by Blaine Harden in today’s Washington Post:

Punctuating a fundamental change in American family life, married couples with children now occupy fewer than one in every four households — a share that has been slashed in half since 1960 and is the lowest ever recorded by the census.

As marriage with children becomes an exception rather than the norm, social scientists say it is also becoming the self-selected province of the college-educated and the affluent. The working class and the poor, meanwhile, increasingly steer away from marriage, while living together and bearing children out of wedlock.

Does this mean President Bush’s Healthy Marriage Initiative isn’t working? The HMI, you might remember, was George Bush’s cure-all for welfare. Bush budgets carved money out of Medicaid and other “entitlements,” but in 2006 HMI was allocated $750 million ($150 million per year for five years). The goal of HMI is to increase the number of children raised by married couples. (Here is a good analysis of HMI by Emily Amick of Wellesley College.)

The point of the marriage initiative isn’t just to provide children with stable homes, but also to raise families out of poverty. For quite a while righties have noticed that, statistically, poor families are likely to be single-parent families. Therefore, deep thinkers like these geniuses at the Heritage Foundation concluded that if only poor women could be persuaded to get married (like it never occurred to them before) they’d automatically be on the road to the Middle Class. Robert Kuttner explained in 2002:

When the welfare reform program of 1996 comes up for renewal later this year, it will have a new emphasis — wedding bells. The Bush administration wants to spend $300 million of scarce welfare funds to encourage marriage and another $135 million promoting premarital chastity.

Several governors have already jumped the (shot)gun with state programs to promote marriage, not just for welfare recipients but for everyone. Some conservatives, like Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, would go further and provide $4,000 bounties for poor people who marry.

But the Blaine Harden article suggests righties were putting the cart before the horse. It wasn’t the erosion of marriage causing poverty, but increasing financial instability causing an erosion in marriage.

Marriage has declined across all income groups, but it has declined far less among couples who make the most money and have the best education. These couples are also less likely to divorce. Many demographers peg the rise of a class-based marriage gap to the erosion since 1970 of the broad-based economic prosperity that followed World War II.

“We seem to be reverting to a much older pattern, when elites marry and a great many others live together and have kids,” said Peter Francese, demographic trends analyst for Ogilvy & Mather, an advertising firm.

Another grim trend for the “family values” crowd — Sharon Lerner writes in today’s New York Times that women in industrialized nations are having fewer children.

To the dismay of pundits and politicians alike, women in industrialized countries and elsewhere have been bearing fewer and fewer children. More than 90 states have fertility rates below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman, and the trend, which began in the early 1960s, is already leading to fewer workers, graying populations and dire predictions about vanishing peoples.

The Right will tell you this is the doing of those liberal anti-family, pro-Hollywood types. But wait …

Curiously, Europe’s lowest birthrates are seen in countries, mostly Catholic, where the old idea that the man is the breadwinner and the woman is the child-raiser holds strong. Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece have among the lowest fertility rates in Western Europe. Meanwhile, countries that support high numbers of working women, like Finland, Norway and Denmark, have among the highest birthrates.

And how did this happen?

One explanation is that the more traditional countries face particular challenges when their women do start to work. In these countries, the welfare of the family is still typically seen as the responsibility of individuals rather than of the government, according to Peter McDonald and Francis Castles, who are demographic theorists. And with little public support for working mothers forthcoming, women are likely to think they must choose work or motherhood. At least for now, it seems, many are choosing neither. Statistics show that women in these countries are both less likely to work and less likely to bear children than their counterparts in, say, Scandinavia.

Scandinavia?

In Scandinavia, extensive public child-care systems offer a slot to virtually every child under 5 whose parents work. Do such programs have an effect? Some experts have linked changes in Sweden’s birthrate to paid-maternity-leave policies. And according to Ronald Rindfuss, a sociologist, Norwegian women who live in towns with more day-care slots available have more children and become mothers earlier. The timing of births is important, because lower fertility rates may owe something to the fact that many women inadvertently delay becoming pregnant until it’s no longer biologically possible.

So what about the United States? Immigrants to the rescue —

Looking at America’s fertility rate, which now hovers around replacement level, you could assume that the U.S. has escaped such problems. But in fact, it’s the relatively large families of new immigrants that are staving off a population crisis — and masking the difficulties women face when they try to “have it all.” With a largely hands-off approach to family policy, the U.S. spends far less than other wealthy countries on child care while guaranteeing no paid parental leave. As a result, being an employed parent may be more difficult here than in countries now experiencing even the most severe baby droughts.

In his 2002 TAP article linked above, Robert Kuttner remarked that, on the American Right, having “family values” means being opposed to having government do anything that might actually help families.

With no sense of contradiction, the welfare reformers demand that single mothers work or lose all benefits — so much for Mom staying home. But missing from the equation is high quality childcare, so necessary to reconcile working motherhood, sane family life, and healthy children, whether for single moms or working couples.

Why is the childcare link missing? Because of conservative ideology: socially provided childcare violates ”traditional values” and costs public money.

Scholarly assessments of the welfare reform experiment reveal a bitter paradox: The more that single mothers ”succeed” by getting off welfare and staying in low-wage employment, the more their unsupervised teenage children are placed at risk.

Kuttner brings up the Scandanavian factor:

So if the administration were serious about promoting healthy marriages and flourishing children (and not just throwing a steak to the religious right), it would be pushing several other policies — jobs that paid living wages, high quality child care, paid parental leaves, sex education that includes birth control as well as early teen abstinence, and generous treatment of children who happen to be born to single parents.

Won’t this just reward single parenthood? In Norway, public policy provides all of these supports, yet a higher percentage of kids grow up with both their parents, more mothers are in paid work, and far fewer families and children are poor.

But policies such as these accept the realities of modern family life and they challenge archaic notions of sex roles and traditional values beloved by the religious right. They also cost tax dollars that were just given away to multimillionaires.

So when righties say they support “family values,” this doesn’t mean supporting families and children. It means supporting an idea of “families” and “children.” Real families and children must fend for themselves. Likewise, when righties say they support “the troops,” this does not, in fact, mean supporting the troops. It means supporting an idea of “troops” as part of their idea of glorious victory in the magnificent war in Iraq (meaning a fantasy of Iraq, not the actual place).

And, of course, “support” means a conceptualization of support. It doesn’t extend to concrete support, such as raising tax dollars to pay for body armor, or hospital care, or covering one’s own precious skin with a uniform and going off to fight in Iraq (the actual place).

I hope that’s clear.

Coulter: Off Message?

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A couple of days ago the righties were congratulating themselves for how mild of speech they are compared to us foul-mouthed lefties, after this fella determined that lefties use dirty words a whole lot more than righties. And then Ann Coulter jumped in with an over-the-top comment about John Edwards being a “faggot” (huh?), and now they are torn between denouncing and defending her.

The funny thing is, a whole lot of them are denouncing her. I do believe some (probably not all) of those denouncing her today are the same people who winked and grinned in the past when Coulter wished death and violence on just about everyone on the planet.

This may mean the Right has had a little bit of a consciousness shift lately. A few short years ago, I clearly remember, many rightie bloggers flung profanity-laced ad hominems with reckless abandon in all directions and didn’t give a thought to the consequences. I’d argue that rightie bloggers used to be at least as randy with the naughty words as lefties are. When I was researching Blogging America (late 2003-early 2004) it struck me that language on most of the rightie blogs I stumbled on was, on the whole, more foul than that of my brothers and sisters of the Left. This was an impression, not a scientific survey, and taken from a random sample of both high- and low-traffic blogs. But I saw what I saw. These days you have to know where to look to find a foul-mouthed rightie blogger. At some point, I postulate, rightie bloggers began to police themselves pretty stringently. So while they still spread hate and ignorance, they do it with cleaner language. (I have more to say about this, but will have to do so at another time.)

Back to Coulter — Editor & Publisher notes that a whole lot of “MSM” reporters who covered Coulter’s CPAC speech didn’t bother to mention the “faggot” remark in their news stories. It became an issue because the Edwards campaign and DNC chairman Howard Dean made a big deal about it. Looks like Our Side is learning. (See also John at AMERICAblog.)

And just to show how sensitive Their Side is getting — Lydia Cornell reports that one of her conservative Christian friends was tossed out of CPAC by one of Ann Coulter’s bodyguards.

Today, the argument is over how loudly Coulter was applauded. Michelle Malkin claims the “faggot” remark was greeted by only “a smattering of laughter.” Glenn Greenwald says there was “enthusiastic” applause. There’s a video floating around somewhere. In any event, Andrew Sullivan writes of the CPAC experience,

That’s the base. It’s a party that wants nothing to do with someone like me. All I heard and saw was loathing: loathing of Muslims, of “illegals,” of gays, of liberals, of McCain. The most painful thing for me was the sight of so many young people growing up believing that this is conservatism. I feel like an old-style Democrat in 1968.

Announcement

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I’m pleased to announce that Bart Acocella, a regular contributor of The Gadflyer, has agreed to come on board The Mahablog as a contributing blogger, starting sometime next week. Bart is a freelance writer, specializing in speeches and op-eds for political candidates, officeholders and progressive organizations. You can read more about him here.

Conservative Political Action Conference

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Step right up, boys and girls, and see the clown show Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which is going on right now in Washington, DC.

And what a show it is! For example, yesterday Richard Viguerie called on conservatives to stop giving money to GOP fundraising committees. Why? “because they spend our money in primaries to defeat conservatives.” He also wants conservatives to withhold support from “all of the top tier 2008 Presidential wannabees” and stop supporting Republican elected officials, except for the rare few who are real conservatives.

The objective is to return America to real conservative governance. “It may take 6-10 years for conservatives to be able to govern America,” he said. “We have to build a whole new conservative movement, independent of the two major parties.”

But, of course, conservatives have to win over others if their dream is to be fulfilled.

And all the Americans in the “sensible center” who know deep-down that conservatives really are “right:” We’re right on illegal immigration, right on taxes, right on health care, right on the economy, right on terrorism – and right for America.

Are we having fun yet?

See, the problem is that the Far Right is feeling left out. Julie Mason reports for the Houston Chronicle:

Leading American conservatives are fed up with President Bush and the Republican establishment, and they don’t give a toss for the party’s 2008 presidential front-runners, either.

At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual, three-day gathering of the far right and its leaders, the mood is feisty and disgusted — but not just at Hillary Clinton, this time.ight is feeling left out. …

… For a party that grew and achieved in large part by force of its unity, this rift between conservatives and the Republican power structure is profound. It could be either the ruin of the GOP or the re-making of it.

“We don’t want to be the Republican Party, we want to be the conservative movement,” said Phyllis Schlafly, legendary doyenne of the right. “We cannot afford to be ‘Bush Republicans.’ ”

With her trademark shiny gold eagle pin perched on her shoulder, Schlafly criticized Bush over the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination — the right questioned her conservative qualifications — and his handling of immigration issues.

“We cannot afford to let Mexico turn us into a two-language nation,” she said, as her audience roared approval and banged on tables in support.

Apparently John McCain wrote the CPAC crowd off as well; he chose not to attend.

Rosa Brooks of the Los Angeles Times checks out the sideshow:

Remember Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the right-wing goon squad whose defamatory insinuations helped sink John Kerry’s presidential campaign? They’re back! This afternoon, key Swift boaters George “Bud” Day, Mary Jane McManus and Carlton Sherwood are holding a little reunion, in the guise of a panel discussion at the American Conservative Union’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference. The panel topic? “The Left’s Repeated Campaign Against the American Soldier.”

Wait; it gets better.

Of course, the Swifties’ presence on the agenda is hardly the only evidence that the lunatics have taken over the asylum at CPAC. Other giveaways include some unintentionally humorous agenda items: Oliver North — he of the Iran-Contra scandal — will be presenting the “Defender of the Constitution Award,” for instance, while right-wing attack blogger Michelle Malkin, whose work has been repeatedly criticized for its cavalier attitude toward facts, gets the “Accuracy in Media Award.”

You can’t make this shit up.

Update: The circus continues — Bill Scher of Liberal Oasis is blogging CPAC and brings us this little gem:

At an afternoon panel on taxes, Scott Hodge of the Tax Foundation, lamented that despite six years of tax cuts mainly for the wealthiest, we haven’t completely destroyed our progressive tax system.

After a slide presentation described how the wealthy contribute more in taxes and the poor receive more in benefits, Hodge declared, “the rich are getting screwed.”

Now there’s the message that will bring back conservatism.

North Korean Uranium: Never Mind

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Do you remember back in October 2002, when the Bush Administration threw a major hissy fit over the “discovery” that North Korea was processing uranium? And do you remember how this “discovery” touched off a spasm of hysteria on the Right, along with a collective denunciation of Bill Clinton’s handling of North Korea, most especially a 1994 agreement negotiated by Jimmy Carter that stopped North Korea from processing plutonium? I rant about this from time to time.

In today’s New York Times, David Sanger and William Broad write that the U.S. might have been, um, wrong about the uranium.

For nearly five years, though, the Bush administration, based on intelligence estimates, has accused North Korea of also pursuing a secret, parallel path to a bomb, using enriched uranium. That accusation, first leveled in the fall of 2002, resulted in the rupture of an already tense relationship: The United States cut off oil supplies, and the North Koreans responded by throwing out international inspectors, building up their plutonium arsenal and, ultimately, producing that first plutonium bomb.

But now, American intelligence officials are publicly softening their position, admitting to doubts about how much progress the uranium enrichment program has actually made. The result has been new questions about the Bush administration’s decision to confront North Korea in 2002.

The 2002 hissy fit, and President Bush’s decision of November 2002 to stop oil shipments to North Korea (per the 1994 agreement), destroyed years of careful diplomatic efforts by many nations to minimize the threat posed by North Korea and its military capabilities. In December 2002, North Korea notified the International Atomic Energy Agency that it was re-starting its plutonium reactors, which had been idle since 1994. And last October, North Korea tested a plutonium bomb. This timeline from the Arms Control Association can walk you through some of the background. See also “Rolling Blunder” by Fred Kaplan (Washington Monthly, May 2004) and my own
“Blame Bush for North Korea’s Nukes” archive.

So now the administration is acknowledging that the “intelligence” about uranium in 2002 was questionable and probably wrong. The Sanger & Broad article linked above suggests that this admission might “be linked to North Korea’s recent agreement to reopen its doors to international arms inspectors.” Was the concession part of the deal? Did Kim Jong Il stipulate that the Bushies admit their mistake about the uranium before he allowed weapons inspectors back in to North Korea? (Not everyone in the Bush Administration is conceding the mistake, so maybe I’m reading too much into this.)

In 2002, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly claimed that a North Korean official, Kang Sok Ju, had admitted there was an ongoing uranium weapons program. But Kang Sok Ju has denied this all along. The recent disclosure suggests that Kelly was fibbing.

And all this nonsense is tied in to Iraq. The hysteria ginned up by the Bushies in 2002 was part of their “regime change” saber rattling. The Bushies held up North Korea as an example of how Bill Clinton’s and Jimmy Carter’s wussy diplomacy had failed. A confident Condi Rice made the rounds on cable TV politics talk shows and declared that the Bush Administration knew just how to handle North Korea. Eventually, of course, the Bushies would depend on China to take the lead in negotiations and clean up the mess they had made.

In December 2002 the Bushies tried to tie North Korea to Iraq. At the request of the U.S., Spanish warships stopped the North Korean freighter So San. Its cargo of Scud missiles and unidentified chemicals were bound for Iraq, the Bushies claimed. This claim quickly fizzled, and the U.S. turned the cargo over to its rightful owner, Yemen.

Sanger and Broad continue,

The disclosure underscores broader questions about the ability of intelligence agencies to discern the precise status of foreign weapons programs. The original assessment about North Korea came during the same period that the administration was building its case about Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs, which turned out to be based on flawed intelligence. And the new North Korea assessment comes amid debate over intelligence about Iran’s weapons.

The public revelation of the intelligence agencies’ doubts, which have been brewing for some time, came almost by happenstance. In a little-noticed exchange on Tuesday at a hearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee, Joseph DeTrani, a longtime intelligence official, told Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island that “we still have confidence that the program is in existence — at the mid-confidence level.” Under the intelligence agencies’ own definitions, that level “means the information is interpreted in various ways, we have alternative views” or it is not fully corroborated.

“The administration appears to have made a very costly decision that has resulted in a fourfold increase in the nuclear weapons of North Korea,” Senator Reed said in an interview on Wednesday. “If that was based in part on mixing up North Korea’s ambitions with their accomplishments, it’s important.”

Get this — part of the 2002 claim was based on aluminum tubes!

Outside experts, including David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks nuclear arms, have suggested in recent days that something similar happened in North Korea’s case. “The evidence doesn’t support the extrapolation” to the judgment that North Korea was making crucial strides in its uranium program, Mr. Albright said in an interview. “The extrapolation went too far.”

He said administration analysts were right in thinking that Dr. Khan had sold North Korea about 20 centrifuges. Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, confirmed that in a memoir published last year. But, Mr. Albright said, intelligence agencies overstated whether North Korea had used those few machines as models to construct row upon row of carbon copies.

His report zeroed in on thousands of aluminum tubes that the North Koreans bought and tried to buy in the early 2000s. The C.I.A. and the Bush administration, the report said, pointed to these tubes as the “smoking gun” for construction of a large-scale North Korean plant for the enriching of uranium. It was assessments about the purpose of aluminum tubes that were at the center of the flawed Iraq intelligence.

In the North Korea case, intelligence analysts saw the tubes as ideal for centrifuges. But Mr. Albright said the relatively weak aluminum tubes were suitable only for stationary outer casings — not central rotors, which have to be very strong to keep from flying apart while spinning at tremendous speeds.

Moreover, he added, the aluminum tubes were “very easy to get and not controlled” by global export authorities because of their potentially harmless nature. So that purchase, by itself, Mr. Albright added, was “not an indicator” of clandestine use for nuclear arms.

In the January/February 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs, Selig Harrison questioned the Bush Administration’s claims and wrote that it was doubtful North Korea had the capacity to produce weapons-grade uranium. And about the aluminum tubes —

The limited evidence that has, in fact, been provided to South Korea and Japan does confirm that North Korea has made efforts to buy equipment that could be used to make and operate centrifuges. This equipment includes electrical-frequency converters, high-purity cobalt powder for magnetic-top bearing assemblies, and high-strength aluminum tubes.

In most of these cases, however, it is not clear whether the purchases were ever made and, if so, how much North Korea bought. For example, in April 2003, French, German, and Egyptian authorities blocked a 22-ton shipment of high-strength aluminum tubes to North Korea, the first installment of an order for 200 tons. But no evidence has been presented to establish that any of the order was delivered. Similarly, a U.S. Department of Energy intelligence study reported a North Korean “attempt” to buy two electrical-frequency converters from a Japanese firm in 1999. But the report concluded that “with only two converters, [North Korea] was probably only establishing a pilot-scale uranium enrichment capability.”

Again in 2003, Japan blocked a renewed North Korean effort to buy frequency converters, this time three. But as a careful study by the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) observed, “hundreds” of such converters would be required for a production-scale enrichment facility equipped with enough centrifuges to make weapons-grade enriched uranium. The IISS study concluded that such “failures in Pyongyang’s procurement efforts suggest that North Korea may still lack key components,” especially a special grade of steel for rotors and caps and rotor bearings.

The Sanger & Brooks article says,

The strongest evidence for the original assessment was Pakistan’s sale to North Korea of upwards of 20 centrifuges, machines that spin fast to convert uranium gas into highly enriched uranium, a main fuel for atom bombs. Officials feared that the North Koreans would use those centrifuges as models to build a vast enrichment complex. But in interviews this week, experts inside and outside the government said that since then, little or no evidence of Korean procurements had emerged to back up those fears.

Not everyone in the Bush Administration is admitting the mistake.

The continuing doubts prompted the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Wednesday to declassify a portion of the most recent, one-page update circulated to top national security officials about the status of North Korea’s uranium program. The assessment, read by two senior intelligence officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity in a joint interview, said the intelligence community still had “high confidence that North Korea has pursued a uranium enrichment capability, which we assess is for a weapon.”

It added, they said, that all the government’s intelligence agencies “judge — most with moderate confidence — that this effort continues. The degree of progress towards producing enriched uranium remains unknown, however.”

In other words, while the agencies were certain of the initial purchases, confidence in the program’s overall existence appears to have dropped over the years — apparently from high to moderate.

Unfortunately, thanks to the Bushies, North Korea’s plutonium weapons capabilities went from low to high. Very high.

Also: See Josh Marshall, Hilzoy, Kevin Drum.

Update: Captain Ed still refuses to acknowledge that the 1994 Agreed Framework was aimed at stopping plutonium production. The distinction between uranium and plutonium is significant, but the Right still brushes it aside.

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The North Korea link archive:

Selig Harrison, “Did North Korea Cheat?” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2005

Eric Alterman, “Blaming Success, Upholding Failure”

Rachel Weise, “North Korea Nuclear Timeline”

Hilzoy, “Do You Feel Safer Now?”

Joe Conason, “Wagging the Big Dog”

Fred Kaplan, “The Slime Talk Express”

Rosa Brooks, “A Good Week for the Axis of Evil”

Fred Kaplan, “Rolling Blunder”

The Mahablog North Korea posts (most recent first):

“Bush Hides Behind China’s Skirts”

“Blame Everybody (But Bush)”

“More Bombs”

“Bombing”

“Happy Talk”

“Bolton Lies; Righties Confused”

And finally,

“Blame Bush for North Korea’s Nukes”