By now you may have heard that Amanda Marcotte resigned from the Edwards campaign. I’m very sad. Other than that, I have nothing to add to what Taylor Marsh wrote.
Plan of Attack
The White House is pushing its new product — war with Iran — as hard as it can. Dan Froomkin describes the sales pitch:
For a long time now, Bush administration officials have been promising reporters proof that the Iranian government is supplying deadly weaponry to Iraqi militants.
The administration finally unveiled its case this weekend, first in coordinated and anonymous leaks to a trusting New York Times reporter, then in an extraordinarily secretive military briefing at which no one would speak on the record, journalists weren’t allowed to photograph the so-called evidence, and nothing even remotely like proof of direct Iranian government involvement was presented.
Joshua Partlow of the Washington Post describes the briefing:
Senior U.S. military officials in Iraq sought Sunday to link Iran to deadly armor-piercing explosives and other weapons that they said are being used to kill U.S. and Iraqi troops with increasing regularity.
During a long-awaited presentation, held in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, the officials displayed mortar shells, rocket-propelled grenades and a powerful cylindrical bomb, capable of blasting through an armored Humvee, that they said were manufactured in Iran and supplied to Shiite militias in Iraq for attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops.
Today the Telegraph (UK) published a photograph of the cylindrical bomb claimed to have been made in Iran. “America today blamed Iran for the deaths of 170 US troops inside Iraq, accusing Teheran of supplying insurgents with increasingly sophisticated bombs,” David Blair of the Telegraph wrote.
Sean-Paul Kelley of The Agonist questioned the, um, provenance of the bombs. Kurt Nimmo of Global Research made the same call.
For some reason the geniuses at the Pentagon have failed to explain why the Iranians used a date from the Christian Gregorian calendar and not one from the Islamic Persian calendar. According to the Muslim calendar, the date stenciled on this mortar shell should read 1427, not 2006. And why did Iran, a country speaking and writing in Persian, a language written in a version of the Arabic script, decide to label their shells in English? Maybe they thought it would fool the infidels?
I’m not taking the bait. As usual, this attempt to frame Muslims stinks of neocon sloppiness. Once again, the neocons blow it. Not that it particularly matters, as most Americans are oblivious and, besides, millions of them still think Osama and Saddam are twin brothers.
The Voice of America reports that General Peter Pace “declined to endorse” the claims of the anonymous Baghdad Briefers (hat tip News Hog).
At Raw Story, David Edwards reports that a former Bush Administration official is accusing the White House of trying to provoke a conflict with Iran.
A former top Bush administration official for Persian Gulf affairs has said in an interview this morning on CNN that the US may be trying to spark a conflict with Iran.
Hillary Mann is the former National Security Council Director for Iranian and Persian Gulf Affairs. She warned in the interview that the recent flare up between Iran and the US over the former’s alleged assistance to Shi’a militias results from a US desire to provoke conflict with the Iranians.
“They’re trying to push a provocative, accidental conflict,” Mann said.
She added that the administration hopes to goad Iran into an overreaction so that it can have justification to carry out “limited strikes” against nuclear infrastructure and Revolutionary Guards headquarters buildings in Iran.
Meanwhile, Nico at Think Progress points to a quote from a Cheney aide — the Bushies are calling 2007 “the year of Iran.”
So, yeah, the Bushies plan to attack Iran. Paul Krugman writes,
Now, let’s do an O. J. Simpson: if you were determined to start a war with Iran, how would you do it?
First, you’d set up a special intelligence unit to cook up rationales for war. A good model would be the Pentagon’s now-infamous Office of Special Plans, led by Abram Shulsky, that helped sell the Iraq war with false claims about links to Al Qaeda.
Sure enough, last year Donald Rumsfeld set up a new “Iranian directorate†inside the Pentagon’s policy shop. And last September Warren Strobel and John Walcott of McClatchy Newspapers — who were among the few journalists to warn that the administration was hyping evidence on Iraqi W.M.D. — reported that “current and former officials said the Pentagon’s Iranian directorate has been headed by Abram Shulsky.â€
Next, you’d go for a repeat of the highly successful strategy by which scare stories about the Iraqi threat were disseminated to the public.
This time, however, the assertions wouldn’t be about W.M.D.; they’d be that Iranian actions are endangering U.S. forces in Iraq. Why? Because there’s no way Congress will approve another war resolution. But if you can claim that Iran is doing evil in Iraq, you can assert that you don’t need authorization to attack — that Congress has already empowered the administration to do whatever is necessary to stabilize Iraq. And by the time the lawyers are finished arguing — well, the war would be in full swing.
Finally, you’d build up forces in the area, both to prepare for the strike and, if necessary, to provoke a casus belli. There’s precedent for the idea of provocation: in a January 2003 meeting with Prime Minster Tony Blair, The New York Times reported last year, President Bush “talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire.â€
In the end, Mr. Bush decided that he didn’t need a confrontation to start that particular war. But war with Iran is a harder sell, so sending several aircraft carrier groups into the narrow waters of the Persian Gulf, where a Gulf of Tonkin-type incident could all too easily happen, might be just the thing.
Watch for it.
Yesterday’s Man
Rudy Giuliani praised George W. Bush for his “leadership” and “foresight” and compared him to Abraham Lincoln. I’m not kidding.
Michael Finnegan reports fot the Los Angeles Times:
Republican presidential hopeful Rudolph W. Giuliani praised President Bush’s war leadership on Saturday and mocked supporters of a nonbinding congressional resolution condemning the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq.
The former New York City mayor came to Bush’s defense as he promoted his White House candidacy at a California Republican convention. Drawing parallels between Iraq and America’s Civil War, Giuliani compared Bush’s political troubles to Abraham Lincoln’s. When the Civil War was unpopular, Giuliani said, Lincoln “kept his eye ahead.”
“He was able to say, ‘I know my people are frustrated, and I know my people are angry at me.’ ” But after weighing public opinion, Lincoln had “that ability that a leader has — a leader like George Bush, a leader like Ronald Reagan — to look into the future,” Giuliani said.
Giuliani’s defense of the currently unpopular president comes as he is portraying himself as a decisive leader unafraid to buck public opinion. …
… America, he added, is “very fortunate to have President Bush.”
That’s his campaign speech?
Giuliani made the rounds of Republican constituency groups at the convention, attending small meetings of women, Jews, Asian Americans and lawyers.
But not African Americans? Maybe he’s afraid they know how he behaved after the Diallo shooting.
But he canceled a plan to take questions from members of the conservative California Republican Assembly. The group’s president, Mike Spence, called it “your basic snub.”
The question is, can Giuliani be a bigger whore than he already is? Or has he hit the limits? There even have been reports that Giuliani has shifted his former pro-choice position further right.
Seems to me Giuliani is taking entirely the wrong direction if he expects to be a viable candidate. The one and only attribute he’s got going for him is a perception — a questionable perception — that he’s a take-charge guy who would be tough on terrorism. But if he can’t stand apart from the Miserable Failure-in-Chief and sell himself as someone who would take a new direction, what’s the point?
It’s Personal
Katharine Hayhoe and Andrew Dessler, professors of geoscience and atomospheric science respectively, write that science has spoken.
On Feb. 2, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its fourth assessment report on the science of global warming. The report was written by hundreds of climate scientists from 130 countries. It has been reviewed by thousands of other climate scientists and hundreds of government agencies, and it has been opened for public review as well.
This IPCC report is perhaps the most thoroughly vetted document in the history of science. For this reason, its assessments are widely regarded as the most authoritative summaries of what we know about global warming.
So what does this new report tell us?
In short, after many tons of study and evaluation, science has reached consensus, and that consensus is “The Earth is warming, and most of that warming is very likely due to human activities.”
But the American political Right says that science can take its consensus and shove it.
Last week it was widely reported that the American Enterprise Institute, a rightie “think” tank (more of an anti-think tank, actually), offered $10,000 to scientists who would refute the report. Now, Steven F. Hayward and Kenneth P. Green of AEI write in the Weekly Standard that these stories are inaccurate. Sorta. If you read their rebuttal carefully, you see that they take umbrage at the AEI being called a “lobbying group” in some stories. And yes, AEI has received more than $1.6 million from Exxon Mobil, but that was over a seven-year period.
But what about the $10,000?
The AEI just wanted to help, say Hayward and Green. IPCC had identified some “uncertainties,” and the AEI is looking for “scientists, economists, and public policy experts” who would write essays “analyzing” the IPCC’s work. “We couched our query in the context of wanting to make sure the next IPCC report received serious scrutiny and criticism,” they said, clearly implying previous reports had received insufficient scrutiny and criticism. People writing these essays would receive a $10,000 honorarium.
Our offer of an honorarium of up to $10,000 to busy scientists to review several thousand pages of material and write an original analysis in the range of 7,500 to 10,000 words is entirely in line with honoraria AEI and similar organizations pay to distinguished economists and legal scholars for commissioned work.
Andrew Dressler, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M, wrote on his blog,
Also note: they’re willing to pay $10,000 to the authors. That’s A LOT of money for this type of activity. It was enough that it made me think, “maybe I should get involved with this.” Then I snapped back to reality.
[note added 7/31: My wife read this blog, saw the figure of $10,000, and asked me sweetly, “Are you SURE that climate change is real? We could really use the money.”]
To anyone in academia, $10,000 to write a 7,500- to 10,000-word essay is huge. Most academics are not going to make $10,000 on all of their papers, books, and essays combined in their lives. It’s like offering the ten-year-old next door $1,000 to wash your car. Jackpot, dude.
But Dressler points out that AEI was asking scientists to render a subjective opinion, not a scientific analysis. He quotes the letter AEI sent to scientists and boils the inquiry down to the question What’s the policy value of climate models? And that’s a subjective judgment. It’s fairly obvious that AEI was fishing for someone who would say that there was too much uncertainty about climate change to know precisely which remedies should be applied, which could then be spun into “it’s too soon to change policy.” But of course the AEI was careful not to say that explicitly.
The game the anti-science Right is playing is simply to exploit any cracks in the consensus. Since never in the history of science have all the scientists in the world been in 100 percent agreement on any theory or model of anything, that’s not hard to do. And this lack of 100 percent certainty equals doubt, and doubt soon becomes a reason not to bother about policy change. Until there is 100 percent agreement (which will never happen), then we can’t even think about policy.
We can only wish the Weekly Standard had applied the same principle to the story that Mohamed Atta met with Saddam Hussein’s agents in Prague.
What really struck me, however, is the paranoid tone of the Weekly Standard piece. It is titled “Scenes from the Climate Inquisition: The chilling effect of the global warming consensus.”
The “climate inquisition”? Yes, Hayward and Green allege they are the victims of a campaign to stifle dissent on the part of Climate Nazis.
Desperation is the chief cause for this campaign of intimidation. … The relentless demonization of anyone who does not fall in behind the Gore version of the issue–manmade climate catastrophe necessitating draconian cuts in emissions–has been effective
According to Hayward and Green, the “media frenzy” that surrounded the $10,000 honorarium story, plus the fact that the IPCC announced its findings a full three months before their complete 1,400-page report will be published suggests that something’s not kosher in Science Land. “There appear to be some significant retreats from the 2001 IPCC report,” they sniff. In the Weekly Standard‘s alternative universe, principled scientists are brewing a backlash against the inquisition. They conclude:
The climate inquisition is eliminating any space for sensible criticism of the climate science process or moderate deliberation about policy. Greenpeace and its friends may be celebrating their ability to gin up a phony scandal story and feed it to the left-wing press, but if people who are serious about climate change hunker down in their fortifications and stay silent, that bodes ill for the future of climate policy and science generally.
The hundreds of climate scientists from 130 countries who participated in the IPCC are, of course, not serious about climate change. They are stooges of the left-wing press, and the left-wing press is out to destroy the AEI and all it stands for, just because. That a huge majority of the earth’s scientists believe we have only a limited time to save the planet is not, to Hayward and Green, the reason the IPCC and the left-wing press are out to get them.
As reality closes in on the Right, righties are retreating into deeper and more pathological levels of denial. This week a report by the Pentagon inspector general concluded that Douglas Feith and his team at the Pentagon “cooked” intelligence to support invading Iraq (the New York Times calls this the “build a war workshop“)
And how does the Right respond? Yesterday, Hot Air latched on to a retraction in the Washington Post. It appears a Post story attributed quotes to the inspector general report that had actually been said by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.). Therefore, Hot Air concludes, all of the allegations against Feith were fabricated by Levin and were not the conclusions of an independent report.
Except there was an independent report by the Pentagon inspector general, and it did conclude that Doug Feith fed false information to the White House. The inspector general, Thomas A. Gimble, testified about this to the Senate last week. And Gimble said,
We found that the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy developed, produced and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on Iraq and Al Qaida relations which included conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the intelligence community and these were presented to senior decision-makers.
But in Rightie World, the allegations against Feith have been retracted. And you know they will believe Feith is the innocent victim of a leftie inquisition as long as they live.
To righties, the concerns of the Left are all about them. It is beyond belief that some people might be legitimately concerned about the conduct of the nation, or the survival of the planet. No; it’s personal. Those loony lefties want to destroy the Right because, you know, they are haters who want to destroy everything that’s good and pure and decent that comes with big profit margins.
Meanwhile, Republicans are dredging the nation’s asylums scientific community looking for anything that will cast doubt on the IPCC report. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week “For twelve years, the leadership in the House of Representatives stifled all discussion and debate of global warming. That long rejection of reality is over.” I believe the Speaker is wrong.
Update: Bill Kristol says Obama would have been pro-slavery. These people are a bleeping freak show.
Update update: The freak show continues — Mark Steyn, “don’t ruin economy because of tiny temp rise.”
More updates: Andrew Sullivan Nigel Calder explains that scientists don’t understand how science works (and he does). Angry Bear, whom I hope is not a polar bear, rips up Mark Steyn (ouch). Ron Chusid tells us how conservatives determine the truth.
Feet to Fire
Margaret Talev, Renee Schoof and Steven Thomma write for McClatchy Newspapers:
In Washington, Democrats are blaming Republicans for the Senate’s failure so far to vote on a resolution opposing a troop increase in Iraq.
But in the heartland, some voters say such excuses no longer are good enough.
Having banked on the promise that Democrats would force a change of course in Iraq if they won control of Congress, some of the people who helped the Democrats get there are growing impatient.
They’re frustrated that Democrats sank so much energy into a nonbinding resolution then dropped the bipartisan plan of Sens. John Warner, R-Va., and Carl Levin, D-Mich., like a hot potato when Republican leaders who support President Bush maneuvered them into a corner.
All the finagling has gotten in the way of a formal debate or vote in the Senate on Bush’s plans for Iraq.
Sometime last week Senator John Tester was on Hardball last week saying that if the Dems couldn’t get a majority for a nonbinding resolution, something more forceful would be even more unlikely. And that makes sense, but …
National polling shows that a majority of Americans support a resolution opposing the troop increase. National independent polling organizations haven’t assessed reaction to the stalled Senate debate.
It’s only about a month into the 110th Congress, and the appropriations bills – where Democrats have the real power to attach strings to military spending if they can muster the will and support – are weeks away from consideration. Still, there’s mounting pressure on Democrats from their base across the country.
At least 22 state legislatures are considering resolutions urging Congress to stop the deployment of more U.S. troops to Iraq, said David Sirota, the Montana-based co-chairman of the Progressive States Network.
Harr Reid says the Senate Dems will “redouble their efforts” when the Senate reconvenes after a recess at the end of this month. Sometime in March, in other words.
The House Dems are vowing to fight harder.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the House couldn’t let members go home Feb. 17 for a weeklong recess empty-handed. So the House plans to begin a three-day debate Tuesday and vote on its own resolution opposing the troop buildup.
The Senate Dems seem to think they were outmanevered by the Republicans.
Many Republicans say the Warner-Levin resolution is pointless and that without the force of law it could demoralize the troops. They say the president’s troop increase in Iraq should be given a chance.
So they said they’d block consideration of the resolution unless Democrats also debated a resolution by Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., that would support the troops and take no position on a troop increase.
Democrats saw a trap: If they backed Gregg’s resolution, then didn’t get 60 votes on Warner-Levin, the only formal statement out of the Senate would voice no opposition to the troop increase. If they rejected Gregg’s, opponents would run ads accusing them of hurting the troops.
Their decision: Hold off on a formal debate.
But ya know what, folks? With the war as unpopular as it is, and Bush as unpopular as he is, what the hell are the Dems afraid of? This just plain makes no sense.
I think they should make an announcement that they tried to compromise with the Republicans, but the Republicans are ducking the issue of Iraq, so they should go back to Senator Feingold’s resolution and vote on that, and let the GOP be damned if they don’t allow it to pass.
It’s time to hold Dem feet to fire. Call, write, fax, email every Dem on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (remember to be nice to Russ Feingold). Call, write, fax, email Harry Reid and your own senators, whoever they are, if they’re Dems. Tell ’em to crank it up and fight.
Edwards on Health Care
Marie Cocco and Paul Krugman have columns out today panning and praising, respectively, John Edwards’s national health care proposal. As much as I respect Professor Krugman, at first glance I have to side with Cocco on this one. The Edwards plan is a lot better than what we’ve got now, but I don’t think it’s where we want to go.
As explained on Edwards’s campaign web site, the proposal would achieve universal coverage by:
Requiring businesses and other employers to either cover their employees or help finance their health insurance. Making insurance affordable by creating new tax credits, expanding Medicaid and SCHIP, reforming insurance laws, and taking innovative steps to contain health care costs. Creating regional “Health Markets” to let every American share the bargaining power to purchase an affordable, high-quality health plan, increase choices among insurance plans, and cut costs for businesses offering insurance. Once these steps have been taken, requiring all American residents to get insurance.
You can read a PDF document explaining the plan in more detail here.
This sounds a whole lot like a plan being floated by Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, as Krugman acknowledges. I wrote about the California plan here, and quoted Krugman about why the Schwarzenegger plan was bad. So why is the Edwards plan good? Krugman explains,
People who don’t get insurance from their employers wouldn’t have to deal individually with insurance companies: they’d purchase insurance through “Health Marketsâ€: government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public’s behalf. People would, in effect, be buying insurance from the government, with only the business of paying medical bills — not the function of granting insurance in the first place — outsourced to private insurers.
Why is this such a good idea? As the Edwards press release points out, marketing and underwriting — the process of screening out high-risk clients — are responsible for two-thirds of insurance companies’ overhead. With insurers selling to government-run Health Markets, not directly to individuals, most of these expenses should go away, making insurance considerably cheaper.
Better still, “Health Markets,†the press release says, “will offer a choice between private insurers and a public insurance plan modeled after Medicare.†This would offer a crucial degree of competition. The public insurance plan would almost certainly be cheaper than anything the private sector offers right now — after all, Medicare has very low overhead. Private insurers would either have to match the public plan’s low premiums, or lose the competition.
Again, this is way better than what we’ve got now. But Marie Cocco says,
John Edwards is trying to get ahead of the political curve, but he would send us back to the future. To 1993, to be exact.
Edwards would repeat the mistake that was at the heart of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s misadventure in trying to fix a health insurance system that was then, and is now, so out of whack that it manages to cover fewer and fewer Americans at higher and higher cost.
Like Clinton did, Edwards seems to believe that you can get the private insurance industry to do something it refuses to do because, in essence, doing what Edwards wants would put the industry out of business.
He wants insurers to cover everyone, no matter how sick and expensive they are. He wants employers to continue to carry on their ledgers a cost that is ever more burdensome to them and to their workers, onto whose shoulders more of the health-insurance tab is being shifted.
The 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee and 2008 presidential hopeful knows that no matter how many times our health insurance crazy quilt is ripped up and stitched back together, it still will fail to cover millions of Americans.
So Edwards wants them to be able to buy a new public insurance plan that would be like Medicare, but not exactly. And he wants affluent people to pay more taxes to support coverage of the less fortunate, but not directly.
I think that we need to get private insurers out of the picture except, maybe, for people who want to purchase supplemental policies like many folks on Medicare do. In practice, pure single-payer systems don’t seem to deliver as well as a system that covers everyone publicly but permits private insurance and providers to stay in business also.
Since Edwards’s big draw is that he’s strong on domestic policy, to be a candidate I would support he’s going to have to be amazing on domestic policy. I think the health care proposal falls short of amazing.
The Spitters Are Back
Righties can’t let go of the stories about antiwar protesters spitting on soldiers during the Vietnam era. There’s a new round of blog posts about it, mostly linking back to this one. Although it would be foolish to claim it never happened, I do have a few clarifications to make.
First, regarding Jerry Lembcke — the sociologist did not, I believe, claim that no antiwar protester ever spit on a soldier. His research focused on a particular spitting narrative, that of antiwar protesters lining up at airports to spit on veterans who had just returned from Vietnam. He explained this is a Boston Globe op ed in 2005.
One can, of course, chop parts of Lembcke’s many articles and his book out of context to make it seem he was claiming there was no spitting whatsoever, and I’m sure righties do that all the time, but everything of his I’ve ever read was specifically focused on the spitting-at-the-airport stories. This was an issue because, for some reason, in the 1980s and 1990s such stories were so common you’d think every soldier walking out of an airport must’ve been wringing wet with spittle, yet Lembcke was unable to find contemporary news stories about this phenomenon. He concluded that the airport spitting stories amounted to an urban legend.
On the Right, however, Lembcke’s claims were contorted into a claim that no soldier was ever spit on by anybody during the Vietnam era, and I see they’re still arguing with Lembcke based on this assumption.
The examples of soldier-spitting dug out of old newspapers by the rightie bloggers do not take place in airports. (I see one airport story, but it’s not clear that it was taken from a newspaper.) Hence, they do not disprove Lembcke’s contention that the airport stories in particular are apocryphal.
Such claims made many years after the fact are suspect for many reasons. For one, urban legends have a way of planting themselves into peoples’ heads as false memories. Two, although it’s impossible to prove it never happened — can’t prove a negative, you know — if it had happened half as much as it was claimed to have happened, you’d think somebody would have noticed it at the time. But the airport-spitting stories didn’t take off until several years after the war.
Another point the righties love to drag up and argue about is that, somewhere, Lembcke wrote that soldiers didn’t land at the San Francisco airport, at which much of the alleged spitting took place. And, of course, soldiers did land at San Francisco sometimes, so that is not true. Without seeing exactly what Lembcke wrote I can’t defend it properly, but his point may have been that soldiers didn’t typically return from Vietnam to the U.S. together in a troop ship. They flew back to the states as individuals on commercial flights, to whatever airport was closest to home. Thus, it made no sense for protesters to hang around in airports just waiting to find soldiers to spit on, since on many days they would have waited around all day and never seen one, or maybe just one or two, and then there was no way to know whether they had just returned from ‘Nam or not.
And, indeed, I never saw any protesters at airports, even the San Francisco airport, in those years. On the other hand the Hare Krishna devotees were thick as fleas at San Francisco and other airports back then. They were generally benign as long as you bought their flowers. But maybe some folks mistook them for antiwar protesters.
The next point I’d like to make regards the Right’s false dichotomy that in those days the Left was antiwar and anti-military and hated the troops, and the Right was prowar and pro-military and supported the troops. It wasn’t that simple. For one thing, as the war turned sour many hawks blamed the soldiers for being slackers and drug addicts. It was not at all difficult to find people who were pro-war and who badmouthed the troops for losing it. For all we know some of the people who spat at soldiers were pro-war.
Further, as the war continued the enlistees were increasingly against the war themselves. This page (hat tip to Steve Gilliard) lists various protests and riots by soldiers on military bases during the Vietnam War era. It so happens I spent the summer of 1971 living on post at Fort Ord, California, with my brother and his wife, and those enlistees I met had, um, attitude problems. They hated the war, and the military, and didn’t want to be there. I remember a couple of fellows claiming they took part in antiwar protests — in civilian clothes — on their days off, but they may have been bragging to impress me.
In any event, by 1970-71 or so it was the returning veterans themselves keeping the antiwar movement alive, and not just as part of the Winter Soldier campaign. By then the Pentagon had switched to a lottery system to call up enlistees, and fewer and fewer young men were being called, and after 1971 or so (as I remember) there was less antiwar activism on most college campuses than there had been earlier. As soon as the guys figured out they weren’t going to be drafted, they tuned out the war and went back to planning keggers. It was mostly the returning veterans who cared passionately that the war end asap. I rather doubt they spit on other veterans.
And that’s all I have to say about that.
Well, OK, here’s an update — Here’s a photo (source) of a Vietnam protester not spitting at a soldier.
As the article linked to says, sometimes encounters between demonstrators and protesters got hostile. And sometimes the protesters gave the soldiers flowers.
Amanda and Melissa
John Edwards has released a statement saying that, although Amanda and Melissa have written things on their blogs that offend him, he is not going to fire them from his campaign.
Links when available.
Update: Here’s a link.
Conservative Correctness
Bill Scher discusses rightie aversion to political correctness..
…Michelle has become a “hate crime howler.”
Michelle is by no means alone in promoting a “Conservative Correctness” (see the War on Christmas, the Dixie Chicks, Dick Durbin’s torture speech) where if you say something impolitic about the president, the war, interpretation of scripture, etc. an attempt is made to shame the speaker, pressure associates and stifle debate.
The kind of thing conservatives used to complain about. (Actually, still complain about.)
I understand why most conservatives play this game. Because to them it is a game.
Because they’re hypocrites and bullies. Their interest in conjuring up a phony narrative of the nature of liberals, and the joy they derive in getting under the skin of liberals, supersedes any interest in intellectual consistency. …
… “Conservative Correctness” should be called out for what it is. Mischief making.
For whatever excesses have occurred under the umbrella of “P.C.,” at least the intentions were generally honorable — mainly, trying to rid society of debilitating bigotry.
“Conservative Correctness” is not well intentioned. It’s simply just about intimidating people who disagree with you. …
… C.C. is not guided by principle. It does not wait for an actual transgression. It is happy to selectively quote, distort and manufacture outrage.
Therefore, it is C.C. that needs to be dismissed and ignored, so our campaigns can be real debates over issues, and not a string of ridiculous distractions.
It’s important to understand that bigots don’t believe nonbigotry is guided by principle, either. Wingnuts practicing “C.C.” generally think they’re only doing to lefties what they believe lefties do to them.
White racists, for example, nearly always believe deep down inside that all other whites believe as they do, and whites who say otherwise are either kidding themselves or lying. I know this is true because I grew up among white supremacists in a segregated community, and I’ve seen social-psychological studies that confirm my observations.
The more overheated whackjobs sincerely believe that the only reason white liberals cozy up to minorities is to serve some larger and nefarious goal, such as (back in the day) instigating a communist takeover. I guess these days they think we’re trying to instigate an islamofascist takeover; I haven’t been keeping up.
Bigots generally are not the most nuanced thinkers on the planet. They’re more the “you’re either fer me or agin’ me” types. Anyone who doesn’t want to wipe out Muslims and spread Judeo-Christian hegemony throughout the planet hates America.
Social psychologists will tell you that bigotry is a strategy for “conserving cognitive resources” (I love that phrase). People do tend to be uncomfortable with others who are “different.” This may be something of a vestigial instinct, a holdover from those long-ago days when human civilization was all about fighting off other tribes who wanted to kill your tribe and take all your stone tools. From here, we liberals might define ourselves as people who have gotten over our instinctual fears of the “other” and instead find diversity stimulating and enjoyable.
Political conservatives are not necessarily bigots, but I think much of today’s right-wing extremism is fueled by irrational fears of the “other” and modernity generally. And because righties conserve cognitive resources by thinking in simplistic stereotypes, they aren’t capable of thinking through their fears and perceiving how irrational most of them are. They also find it inexplicable that there are other people living among them — us — who aren’t afraid of the things they are afraid of. To them, we’re the irrational ones, because we don’t understand that all those islamofacists are lurking just outside the cave and want to break in and murder us and steal our stone tools. Or else, we do understand it, and we’re working for the enemy tribe. They think we must be fixin’ to stab them in the back and invite the enemy into the cave for a mastodon barbecue.
When the phrase “political correctness” was first coined, as I recall, it was something of a joke, ribbing academics for going overboard creating “inclusive” language, like “physically challenged” for “disabled.” Wingnuts seized the phrase and turned it into an all-purpose explanation for why liberals say crazy things like “racial discrimination is wrong” — the standard response is “Oh, you’re just being P.C.” Meaning, “you don’t really mean what you say.”
But we really do mean what we say, and when righties conjure up some phony outrage in order to bash liberals, we get all caught up in answering charges, explaining logical fallacies, and pointing out hypocrisies. We do this because we assume they mean what they say. And, frankly, the more cognitively challenged among them probably do mean what they say, because they can’t critically think their way out of a wet paper bag.
But Bill’s hypothesis is that many of the opinion leaders among them — he discusses Michelle Malkin because he knows her personally — don’t mean what they say. They know good and well that many of the outrages they gin up to bash us with are contrived. They’re just trying to bully us, often because (deep down inside) they think we’re trying to bully them. So while we’re exhausting ourselves in a mighty intellectual struggle, they’re just playing tit for tat and barely working up a sweat.
And if this is the case, we’ve got to stop letting them jerk our chains. We should just dismiss their lunacy with “Oh, you’re just being C.C.”
Libby, Libby, Libby
I take it some significant stuff happened at the Scooter Libby trial today. I’m still trying to take it in, as I was focused elsewhere most of the day. But it appears Scooter is toast. Lots of updates at firedoglake.
Chris Matthews has finally figured out that the story about Joe Wilson being sent to Niger by his wife was a red herring tossed by Cheney’s office to discredit Joe Wilson. He should have gotten that straight three and a half years ago, but better late than never.
The trial so far has pictured Dick the Dick as the instigator of the plot against the Wilsons. Dan Froomkin writes that the testimony
…gives credence to the widespread view that Vice President Cheney oversees his own intensely secretive, highly defensive and sometimes ruthless operation within the White House — and that he does so with President Bush’s approval, but often outside the view of Bush’s top aides.