Unhinged

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I’m going to run these YouTube videos without much comment, as I believe they speak for themselves. You are, of course, free to comment on them all you like.

In the first video, which relates to the last post, Michelle Malkin gives a powerful dramatic interpretation of the word “asshole.”

Vent Hot Air Theater presents…Amanda Marcotte

This second video is one of the most awesome things I ever found on YouTube. In it, Bill O’Reilly and Michelle Malkin complain about how other people are mean. It’s absolutely priceless.

Labeling People Bigots and Racists / Michelle Malkin

I particularly like the part in which Michelle plugs her book Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, a nasty and dishonest smear of the Left. Awhile back Dave Neiwert did a series on Michelle and her book that you must read. Here’s Part One.

Intimidation

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A few days ago the John Edwards campaign announced the hiring of two of my favorite sister bloggers, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare’s Sister. And of course I was insanely jealous, because I want to be a campaign blogger, too. (Wes Clark? Are you reading this?)

Of course, as soon as anyone on the leftie blogosphere gets a little mainstream media attention, the hate squads of the right form a line and start shooting. This is to be expected. They’re pretty well conditioned to shoot anything on our side that moves. Here is a typically thoughtful criticism of Amanda from the Right.

So far, blogging as usual. But today I see the mainstream media is picking up the “controversy.” The Washington Post is running a Nedra Pickler/AP story headlined “Catholics Slam Bloggers Hired by Edwards.” Wow, that sounds bad. But as the article progressed, “Catholics” was quickly downgraded to “a Catholic group,” which turned out to be Bill Donohue.

How is this news? Donohue hates everybody who isn’t the Pope.

Nedra Pickler writes,

Donohue cited posts that the women made on blogs in the past several months in which they criticized the pope and the church for its opposition to homosexuality, abortion and contraception, sometimes using profanity.

Re the profanity: Apparently rightie bloggers are quivering with outrage because the two ladies occasionally use the “F” word, which rightie bloggers never do.

“The Catholic church is not about to let something like compassion for girls get in the way of using the state as an instrument to force women to bear more tithing Catholics,” Marcotte wrote on the blog Pandagon on Dec. 26, in an excerpt cited by Donohue.

I agree that Amanda is not being fair to single out the Catholic Church for its policy on reproduction rights. It’s not just the Catholic Church, but the entire Christian Right, that considers women to be brood animals.

Among the McEwan posts that Donohue listed was one she posted on Feb. 21, 2006, on her site, Shakespeare’s Sister. She questioned what religious conservatives don’t understand about “keeping your noses out of our britches, our beds and our families?”

Hey, Bill, if the truth hurts …

Amanda is also getting slammed for allegedly deleting some posts about last year’s Duke University rape allegations. Via email, Amanda says the “deletions” occurred accidentally last year when Pandagon archives were imported to WordPress from Moveable Type. Lots of posts about other issues were “deleted” as well.

James Joyner points out that campaigns on both sides are hiring bloggers —

As more campaigns (and corporations and PR firms) get aboard the “blogger relations” bandwagon, the natural impulse is to hire established bloggers. Hillary Clinton has hired Peter Daou, John McCain has Patrick Hynes, Rudy Giuliani has Patrick Ruffini, and the Senate Republicans have hired Jon Henke, who was also brought on too late to do George Allen much good.

[Update: Glenn Greenwald takes a stroll through the Patrick Hynes archives.]

I figured out yesterday that Ruffini was working for Giuliani, because the two Giuliani posts I wrote yesterday were getting hits from Ruffini’s news aggregate site. Apparently the site had picked up the posts without paying much attention to what I actually wrote. Sharp lad, that Patrick Ruffini.

But this made me stop and think. It’s clear that as soon as the Edwards campaign announced the hiring of Amanda and Melissa, elements of the Right began combing through their old posts for anything they could turn into a scandal. Nobody on the Left appears to have done the same to Hynes, Ruffini, or Henke. Anyone who has been blogging very long at all is bound to have written a few things that come across badly or turned out to be wrong. Yet we don’t bother to do to them what they do to us. Why is that?

(Note to Wes Clark campaign: I assure you that I don’t ever use the “F” word on Mahablog. I rarely use any profanity stronger than “whackjob” or “Michelle Malkin.”)

Speaking of Michelle — I’m trying to import a couple of YouTube classics of Michelle for your enjoyment to include in this post, but they are slow to come up. They’ll probably pop up on the blog later today when I’m not looking. Well, fudge. Until then, you can see one of them here.

Anyway, I called this post “Intimidation” because I see in the New York Times that the Edwards campaign is “weighing the fate” of the two bloggers. Which, of course, is the point of the rightie slime campaign — to intimidate lefties into backing down. I urge the Edwards campaign not to back down.

Giuliani Time, Part II

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Bob Herbert should be persuaded to publish a collection of his many New York Times columns about Rudy Giuliani. There’s a wealth of juicy bits in them that people really ought to know before they consider making him President.

For example, if you want to know what America would look like under President Giuliani, this Bob Herbert column from March 2000 provides a clue:

The police intercepted the two teenaged boys who were running up Broadway, near 138th Street, and opened fire. This was on the night of Feb. 13, 1997. Robert Reynoso, 18, collapsed to the ground with a bullet in his chest. Juval Green, 17, fell with a leg wound.

The police would later say they thought the boys had a gun. There was no gun. And the boys, who survived the shooting, had not been involved in a crime. Nevertheless, the police arrested them. The charge — incredibly — was criminal possession of a firearm.

This is not a joke.

The Police Department tried to keep the shooting under wraps but I got a tip and wrote about it. When I visited Mr. Reynoso at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, he was handcuffed to his bed. Breathing and swallowing were so difficult for him, and he was in so much pain, that he would at times whisper to relatives, ”I just want to die.”

This shooting typified the over-the-top, overly aggressive behavior that has become the hallmark of policing under Rudolph Giuliani. The cops were responding to a report of shots fired at Broadway and 135th Street, three blocks away. Not only were Mr. Reynoso and Mr. Green shot, but four other innocent people were arrested.

The police were shooting and rounding up people without the slightest clue as to what was happening. Afterward, the department tried to conceal the extent of the madness. Top officials would not even confirm the four additional arrests until I let them know I had obtained a copy of a confidential memo from a police captain, Robert T. Varieur, to the chief of the department, Louis Anemone.

The memo said: ”During the confrontation in front of 3395 Broadway, four (4) individuals who were initially thought to be involved in the incident at West 135th Street were taken into custody. Upon investigation it was determined that there was no evidence to link them to that incident and these arrests were subsequently voided. All four (4) individuals were visiting from Baltimore, Maryland.”

Rudy’s just the guy you want at the head of the nation’s law enforcement, intelligence and security agencies, huh? Just wait; it gets better. Here’s another Bob Herbert column, from February 25, 1999:

It may be that Rudolph Giuliani never has a reflective moment. He just likes to push people around. He’s pretty indiscriminate about it. One day it’s an indisputably worthy target, like violent criminals, the next day it’s jaywalkers. One moment it’s the organized thugs at the Fulton Fish Market, the next it’s cab drivers and food vendors.

Mark Green, Carl McCall, New York magazine — they’ve all been targets. Mr. Giuliani shut down an entire neighborhood in Harlem and buzzed its residents with police helicopters because he didn’t like Khallid Muhammad. Solid citizens trying to exercise their right to protest peacefully have been fought at every conceivable turn. Many gave up, their protests succumbing to fear or exhaustion.

Civil rights? Civil liberties? Forget about it. When the Mayor gets it in his head to give somebody a hard time — frequently through his enforcers in the Police Department — the niceties of the First Amendment and other constitutional protections get very short shrift.

The latest targets are people suspected of driving drunk. The cops have been given the power to seize their vehicles on the spot. Why not? Why wait for a more sober mind — say, a judge — to assess the merits of the case? Why even bother with an annoyance like due process? Hizzoner — who would like to be known as His Majesty — makes the rules. And he says even if the drivers are acquitted they may not get their cars back.

Listen to him: ”Let’s say somebody is acquitted, and it’s one of those acquittals in which the person was guilty but there is just not quite enough evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. That might be a situation in which the car would still be forfeited.”

Bring on the royal robes and the crown. And get rid of those pesky legislators and judges.

Rudy Giuliani is a man with many facades. The Rudy who spoke to TV cameras after 9/11 wasn’t a complete stranger, but over the years New Yorkers had seen a whole lot less of that Rudy than of the Rudy who usually hosted his weekly call-in radio show, “Live from City Hall.” Amy Goodnough described the mayor’s on-air persona for the New York Times (August 1, 1999):

When Tony from the Bronx called to question the Mayor’s handling of the Amadou Diallo shooting, Mr. Giuliani told him, ”Either you don’t read the newspapers carefully enough or you’re so prejudiced and biased that you block out the truth.” When Bill in Manhattan asked why it was illegal to hang a flag from city property, Mr. Giuliani shot back, ”Isn’t there something more important that you want to ask me?”

And when David in Oceanside called last month to complain about the ban on pet ferrets, the Mayor of New York City leaned into the microphone on his desk and intoned, ”There is something deranged about you.”

A three-minute diatribe against the ferret advocate ensued, with Mr. Giuliani saying things like, ”You should go consult a psychologist or a psychiatrist with this excessive concern — how you are devoting your life to weasels.”

Not exactly the transcendent figure the nation thought it saw after 9/11.

Two of his most startling tirades recently came in response to calls from David Guthartz, the ferret advocate — whom Mr. Giuliani said has made repeated phone calls to his aides — and Margarita Rosario, whose son Anthony, an 18-year-old robbery suspect, was shot dead by two police detectives in 1995. Mrs. Rosario called last month, identifying herself only as Margarita from the Bronx, and said that she wanted to discuss Con Edison. But instead she started protesting the shooting, and Mr. Giuliani barely let her speak.

”Maybe you should ask yourself some questions about the way he was brought up and the things that happened to him,” the Mayor told Mrs. Rosario, whose nephew, also a suspect, died in the shooting. ”Trying to displace the responsibility for the criminal acts of your son onto these police officers is really unfair.”

Yep, that’s our Rudy.

If you want a a textbook case of how a public official should not handle a crisis, study Giuliani after the Amidou Diallo shooting. Diallo, a black immigrant from Guinea, was cornered in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building by four New York City plain clothes cops. The cops fired 41 shots at Diallo, killing him. Diallo was unarmed and not the suspect in any crime; he was just trying to go home.

After the shooting, America’s Mayor failed to soothe the city’s frayed nerves. In fact, his every public utterance made public anger grow. At first he asked the public not to jump to conclusions about what happened, which was reasonable, but over the next several days the man who sounded just the right notes after 9/11 was out of tune with the city. The Mayor seemed more defensive than conciliatory. He recited statistics comparing fatal police shootings in New York with those in other cities, as if to claim the NYPD didn’t shoot as many people as other cops do, so what’s the problem?

Most inexcusable after such a racially charged incident, for weeks Giuliani failed to reach out to the city’s African Americans. Dan Barry wrote for the New York Times (February 11, 1999):

That was the clear message at a news conference convened yesterday by C. Virginia Fields, the Manhattan Borough President, and attended by, among others, former Mayor Edward I. Koch, who had troubles of his own with many black political and civic leaders. But rather than score the Mayor, most of the speakers pleaded with him to open the lines of communication.

Being Mayor ”requires a willingness to hear,” Mr. Koch said.

”So we’re saying to the Mayor: ‘Listen.’ ”

Ms. Fields agreed. ”I certainly am not blaming Mayor Giuliani or Commissioner Safir for the tragedy that took place,” she said, referring to Police Commissioner Howard Safir. Nevertheless, she said that the city ”must change the tone and move in a different direction.”

Mr. Giuliani responded last night by impeaching the event’s credibility, noting that Mr. Koch is a persistent critic and saying that Ms. Fields failed to acknowledge the Police Department’s accomplishments, including reduced crime in black neighborhoods.

Six weeks later, the Mayor finally made a gesture toward his critics. Dan Barry wrote March 28, 1999:

Time and again, the Giuliani administration has demonstrated the ability to make the routine seem unusual and the bizarre seem mundane. How else could a meeting between the Mayor and the city’s highest-elected black official take on the significance of a Botha-Mandela sitdown? How else could a mayor have refused to meet that leader for more than a year?

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s session last week with C. Virginia Fields, the Manhattan Borough President, was viewed as so extraordinary that the City Council Speaker, Peter F. Vallone, who arranged the meeting, somehow emerged as the great healer of City Hall. Then came word that the Mayor had agreed to meet with State Comptroller H. Carl McCall, another black leader he had rebuffed for years, and would soon be inviting other people of color to Gracie Mansion for face-to-face chats.

Nearly seven weeks after the Amadou Diallo shooting began roiling race relations in the city, the administration decided that the time had come to, as one aide put it, ”build bridges” and let the ”healing process” continue. And so Mr. Giuliani was poised to be congratulated for meeting elected city and state officials — activities that used to be normal conduct for any mayor, an expected duty of the office.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions from these examples, but I assure you that they are not atypical examples.

Here’s another example, provided by Jimmy Breslin in New York Newsday:

As the mayor, he had a detective driving one of his girl friends out of the Gracie Mansion driveway while another detective was arriving with another girl friend and was waved off to prevent a domestic riot.

All the while upstairs there were his wife. and children.

Giuliani then showed appropriate behavior by walking in a parade on Fifth Avenue with his girl friend and all the while his children could sit and watch him on television.

If Giuliani is the nominee, I swear to you I will hunt down every rightie who wanted Bill Clinton impeached because of Monica and shove this column in his/her/its face.

I can’t diagnose Rudy Giuliani, but there’s no question he is seriously miswired. He is autocratic, intolerant of criticism, and as mayor used the NYPD as his private praetorian guard. In fact, he combines many of the worst qualities of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. And he’s a lot smarter than Bush, which makes him more dangerous.

Just thought you ought to know.

Giuliani Time, Part I

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Word is that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is now the front runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

This far out from the actual nomination the polls don’t mean much, and I am reasonably certain that Rudy’s candidacy will self-destruct long before the Republican National Convention. There are reasons the people who know him best — New Yorkers — prefer their polarizing Senator, Hillary Clinton, over Rudy Giuliani. There are also reasons why the thought of a President Giuliani scares the daylights out of me.

Here are a few things America really needs to know about Rudy Giuliani:

Had Rudy Giuliani been mayor of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit, no one would be talking about what a great leader Giuliani is today.

I was in lower Manhattan on 9/11, and as I was working in Manhattan I spent most of my time there in the days and weeks after. So you can take my word on this: Rudy’s post-9/11 “leadership” amounted almost entirely of the mayor appearing on television. He did a fine job of appearing on television, and he managed to set the right tone and say the right things — abilities Hizzoner did not always draw upon in the past. I give him credit for his performance. But that performance did not constitute “leadership.” It was all public relations. It was all about Rudy.

Jimmy Breslin wrote,

He was a nobody as a mayor and in one day he became a hero. This sudden career, this door opening to a room of gold, all started for Rudolph Giuliani when his indestructible bunker in World Trade Center building blew up. He had personally selected it, high in the sky, and with tons of diesel fuel to give emergency power.

And Giuliani walks on. He walks from his bunker, up Barclay Street and went on television. Went on and announced his heroism and then came back every hour or so until he became a star, a great figure, a national hero, the mayor who saved New York.

Most of this comes from these dazed Pekingese of the Press. … Giuliani was a hero with these news people. He did not pick up a piece of steel or help carry one of the injured off. [Jimmy Breslin, “He Molests the Dead,” New York Newsday, March 7, 2004]

The fact is that Giuliani did little to “lead” rescue or recovery efforts. While Rudy was prancing around on television, a hodge-podge of city agencies loosely — very loosely — coordinated by the Office of Emergency Management went to work deconstructing the remains of the World Trade Center with little input or direction from the Mayor.

Consider also that the World Trade Center was yards away from Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange. Unlike Mayor Nagin of New Orleans, Mayor Giuliani did not have to beg for help getting the debris cleared and electricity hooked up so that the financial district was up and running again as quickly as possible. New York’s business leadership saw to that.

This pro-Giuliani TCS article comparing New York and New Orleans is nothing short of absurd. Conditions in New York after 9/11 and New Orleans after Katrina cannot be compared, because these are entirely different cities and entirely different disasters. There were not, alas, thousands of New Yorkers waiting to be rescued after 9/11, for example. As terrible as it was, the tragedy of 9/11 did not exhaust New York’s resources to deal with it. New York is a rich city, and most of it was untouched.

On that day the survivors of the tragedy simply walked away from it; I remember seeing them, covered in white dust and walking silently as ghosts up 8th Avenue. They had only a few blocks to walk before the air was clear and the infrastructure (and civilization) was intact, and all the food and medical assistance and other help they could possibly want was theirs for the asking.

For those who couldn’t walk, New York’s several state-of-the-art hospitals took it upon themselves to besiege lower Manhattan with ambulances and paramedics and world-class triage units to care for the injured. These medical professionals lingered most of the day with little to do. Those survivors who did need first aid got it very promptly.

In New York, residents who were unable to return to their apartments for the most part had the means to find other shelter on their own without waiting for FEMA to assign them a trailer. They did not have to resort to looting abandoned grocery stores for food or wait for days in unsanitary shelters for buses to take them elsewhere.

To be fair, the mayor did threaten to arrest anyone caught south of 14th Street without permission. That threat, and the solid wall of armed law enforcement officers and New York National Guard who populated 14th Street intersections for several days, no doubt discouraged looting. Manhattan’s geography — the damage was on the tip of an island — made securing the area easier. More important, large numbers of increasingly desperate people were not trapped inside the secured area with no help and no way out.

So exactly what did Mayor Giuliani do to exhibit “leadership”? The fact is that post-Katrina New Orleans was a much bigger mess than post-9/11 New York, and Rudy Giuliani did nothing after 9/11 that would indicate his “leadership” would have made much difference in New Orleans. As Michael Atkinson wrote in the Village Voice last year, “After 9-11, a sick, scandalized lame-duck mayor became a national hero for simply keeping his composure on TV.”

Which takes us to the next item:

Rudy Giuliani’s shoddy “leadership” made the 9/11 tragedy worse.

You might recall that several New York firefighters died when the towers collapsed. Giuliani testified to the 9/11 Commission that firefighters had been given an evacuation order, but they chose to stay because they were rescuing civilians. This testimony was not exactly, um, true.

For all the power of his voice and stature, however, Mr. Giuliani’s account must compete with a substantial and diverse body of evidence that flatly contradicts much of what he and his aides say happened that day, particularly on matters that could be seen as reflecting on the performance of his administration.

On perhaps the most painful of these, the loss of at least 121 firefighters in the north tower, Mr. Giuliani suggested that they stayed inside the trade center because they were busy rescuing civilians — never mentioning that they could not hear warnings from police helicopters, that many of them never learned the south tower had collapsed or that they were having serious problems staying in touch with their own commanders.

Witnesses who escaped from the tower tell a vastly different story than Mr. Giuliani. They say that in the north tower’s final 15 minutes, only a handful of civilian office workers were still in the bottom 44 floors of the building, perhaps no more than two or three dozen. Many of the firefighters who remained in the towers were between the 19th and 37th floors, having made slow progress up the stairs in their heavy gear.

It is clear, witnesses said, that even after the south tower collapsed, many, if not most, of the firefighters had no idea that they were in dire peril, or that it was time for them to leave. In contrast, police officers received strong guidance from their commanders to get out of the building, the commission reported, thanks in large part to the information sent to the ground by police helicopters.

The police could not talk to the firefighters, however, because the two NY departments used different types of radios set on different frequencies. Giuliani offered the 9/11 commission a lame excuse about the limits of technology, which is absurd on its face. In fact, there had been many complaints about the radios before 9/11, and the Mayor had done nothing.

Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins wrote in The Village Voice (“Rudy’s Grand Illusion,” August 29, 1006):

Everyone agrees that a critical problem that day was that the police and fire departments could not communicate; that’s one of the reasons the lack of inter- operable radios became such a focus of fury. If the top brass of the two departments were at each other’s sides, they could have told each other whatever they learned from their separate radio systems. Many of the command and control issues that might have saved lives could clearly have been better dealt with had Giuliani stopped, taken a deep breath, and pushed Kerik and Ganci to fully and effectively join forces. Insisting that Kerik, McCarthy, Esposito, or Dunne stay at the incident post would have established a joint operation.

Wayne Barrett (author of Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 and Kevin Keating (director of the documentary “Giuliani Time” were interviewed by Amy Goodman recently; see the transcript here. Wayne Barrett said,

The firefighters were using the same radios that they used at the ’93 bombing, even though we found a report that was written in 1990 that said that they were already obsolete and that they were a danger to the life of firefighters. And the firefighters are still carrying those same radios eight years after the 1993 bombing.

Kevin Keating made another point:

Here, our own local channel in New York, New York 1, had the head of the police union, the head of the firefighters union. Both of them were condemning Giuliani. They don’t have to negotiate any more contracts with him. This is not union leaders blustering about a contract. They had to be embodying and representing the vast majority of their membership. They pointed to our book and said our book told the truth about how Giuliani responded. And they denounced him, not just for the lead-up to 9/11, but for what you raise, which is, we have two chapters in the book that point out Giuliani’s terrible responsibility for — look, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 you can understand the chaos. You can understand why firefighters and police officers are out there without respirators. They’re still trying to do rescues. But once it was clear that nobody could be rescued, why there were thousands of construction workers, as well as these first responders, working there without respirators and with no plan to get them respirators, and why they were exposed to these toxins and why we now have thousands of them who have respiratory and even cancer signs right now, severe respiratory difficulties, why that was allowed —

You know, Giuliani, we quote the head of — his own commissioner from the Department of Design and Construction, who ran the ground zero cleanup. He said he dealt with Giuliani every day, that Giuliani only asked him one question: how much debris did you remove yesterday? Are we on schedule? Are we ahead of schedule? All he cared about, even though the fires were still burning and spewing toxins in the air, all he cared about was the public relations. I mean, obviously, it’s five years later. Nothing’s been built there. What was the rush? The public relations question of making it look like they were efficiently cleaning up the site. And the consequences have been dire.

In fact, many of the 9/11 families were so outraged at the gentle treatment Giuliani received at the hands of the 9/11 Commission that hundreds of them refused to go to the final hearings as scheduled. Today, some are threatening to campaign hard against Giuliani’s presidential bid.

Coming soon in Part II: Learn why Rudy’s your guy if you want America to be a police state. No question. If he were to run America the way he ran New York, he’d make the Bush Administration look benevolent.

Who’s Right?

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I started to tack this on to yesterday’s morning post, then decided to enlarge on it a little more in a new post. So here goes. Paul Silver writes at The Moderate Voice,

Political sands are always shifting. Labels become obsolete. Paradigms evolve. People with little interest in politics can find themselves bewildered to figure out who stands for what. Political parties are challenged to be in a constant state of reinvention.

I have been a Democrat and a Republican and an Independent. I changed when the parties changed. Now I find myself sliding back towards appreciating the Democrats because they are remaking themselves into a party of pragmatism and inclusion. The GOP has lost the benefit of the doubt that they are the party of fiscal restraint, organizational competence, the masters of foreign affairs. So what do they want to be? It is a new game.

I contend that the Republicans haven’t changed so much as have their bluff called. As I wrote here, the GOP modus operandi going back as far as I remember has been to bash Democrats and claim that if only the Dems would get out of the way the GOP would do so much better. But when they finally got complete control of both Congress and the White House they proved they have no clue how to actually govern. Bash Democrats is all they can do.

It is good to remember that, over time, the parties have reinvented themselves considerably. A century ago Republicans were (more or less) the progressives, and Democrats were, um, not. But if you look back over time at what American liberalism and conservatism have stood for, then for the past century or so liberalism (I’m talking real liberalism, not the made-for-TV version) has been about economic and social justice, whereas conservatism had been about protecting property, wealth, and privilege from the unwashed populist mob. And as much as my sympathies lie with the liberal side of the equation, I would argue that in a healthy political climate these two sets of values should balance and moderate each other.

Paul Silver continues,

We each have own way of organizing our worlds. I tend to embrace the progressive aims to move the world towards more fairness, health and opportunity. I tend to embrace the conservative method of optimizing free markets to most efficiently utilize resources. The most viable political movement that best combines these gets my money and vote. Apparently the next generation of leaders are sorting through the same choice.

Ah, yes. Free markets. In the 19th century (and today, in many parts of the world) the term “free market” was associated with liberalism. Once upon a time the opposite of “free market” was “controlled market,” in which government regulates prices and supply. A free market economy was liberal when most citizens were either farmers or self-employed artisans — shoemakers, silversmiths, whatever — as was the case in the early days of the Republic.

Back then “free markets,” along with “limited government,” were thought to be supportive of democracy, independence, equal opportunity, and civil liberty. Hence, free markets and limited government were “liberal.” “Strong” government, on the other hand, was thought to protect the aristocracy and special privilege, and was considered conservative. And in many parts of the world “conservatives” and “liberals” still sort themselves out that way. But not in the U.S.

A funny thing happened on the way to laissez-faire paradise — the Industrial Revolution. Industrialization and the rise of capitalism brought with it widespread exploitation of “free” labor by employers. In fact, in the early 19th century, as the economy in the northern states became dependent on manufacturing and many citizens dependent on jobs, white southerners hooted at capitalism and called it “wage slavery.” The “independence” of white plantation owners and farmers was, of course, purchased by, um, traditional slavery. One of the reasons so many poor, non-slave-owning southern whites supported slavery was that they’d rather be poor but independent subsistence farmers than factory laborers.

In the capitalist North it didn’t take long for a new kind of aristocracy to arise, and they were called “robber barons” and “tycoons.” And this new aristocracy found that limited government and “free” markets worked to their advantage. By the late19th century — during the so-called Gilded Age — America had devolved into a Hobbesian free-for-all in which the powerful few prospered to the detriment of many others. Those unfortunates forced to survive as being factory or farm laborers — “quitting” meant starvation — were not much better off than slaves. The fact that it was not government exploiting workers but capitalists operating outside government was a meaningless distinction.

Over in Europe, Karl Marx was writing about class struggle and predicting that capitalism was not sustainable and must be replaced by socialism. Socialism was harder to sell in America, however, because most white people still were either independent farmers or small business owners for whom a free market economy still worked pretty well, and socialism had no appeal for them. Those who sharecropped in the South or toiled in tenement sweatshops in the North were pretty much out of sight and out of mind for the majority until “muckrakers” like Upton Sinclair and Jacob Riis shoved the ugliness in their faces. Some people, at least, perceived that “free markets” were creating a new class of workers who were, in effect, slaves in all but name. Further, as the robber barons became more powerful they began to undermine democracy itself, and government was less “of the people, by the people, for the people” than it was “of big money, by big money, for big money.”

About a century ago, as the struggle between (anti-capitalist) socialists and (pro-corporatist) fascists was getting under way in Europe, American progressives considered less extreme alternatives. As explained by Theodore Roosevelt in his New Nationalism speech of 1910, through government the people could seek protection from exploitation and provide for equal opportunity within a capitalist economy. TR didn’t call his ideas “liberal,” but I think the New Nationalism speech laid the foundation of modern American liberalism. The ideas and values TR championed got little opportunity to be put into effect before the Progressive Era ended, however. Then a series of non-progressive Republican administrations in the 1920s supported laissez-faire policies that crashed and burned on Wall Street in October, 1929. (See “A (Pretty) Short History of Wingnutism.”)

When Great Depression began in 1929, conservatives blamed trade unions, saying they upset the glorious natural balance of capitalism and free markets. They argued that the government had to restrict democracy and restore profit margins to put the economy back on track. Socialists, on the other hand, called for a “command” or centrally planned economy that restricted civil liberty. Franklin Roosevelt said no to both “solutions.” He enlarged upon his distant cousin Teddy’s New Nationalism ideas, and he called the result liberal — a word previously associated with limited government, laissez-faire policies, remember. But it was liberal because it was based on the values of fairness, equal opportunity, civil liberty, and economic and social justice.

FDR was determined to protect neither the privilege of aristocracy nor “free-market” plutocracy. He built upon Cousin Teddy’s New Nationalism idea and promoted policies that protected ordinary folks from both the malefactors of great wealth and the boom-and-bust caprices characteristic of unregulated economies. As I explained in “Wingnutism” the New Deal had only a limited impact on the economy itself. But New Deal programs had a longer-term success in fostering economic stability. Federal deposit insurance, unemployment insurance, Social Security, increased government oversight of securities, and other New Deal innovations made Americans’ economic lives more secure and created a buffer against many of the factors that cause economic depressions.

Leapfrogging to the post-World War II era — in Harry Truman’s day liberalism had become populist and looked pretty good to many working-class whites who were benefiting from the New Deal, the GI Bill, and mortgage subsidies. In those days the Democratic Party and the unions had partnered up to reinforce the principle that Democrats were for the little guy, giving them pretty solid support among white working folks.

The achilles’ heel of liberal domestic policy was that FDR had made a deal with the devil (am I mixing mythical metaphors?) to get the New Deal enacted back in the 1930s. He caved in to the demands of southern Democrats to allow for racial discrimination. White workers enjoyed protections and benefits that black workers did not. So the economic gap between whites and blacks grew even wider. In the 1960s Lyndon Johnson launched some New Deal-type programs intended to reduce the gap; in effect, he finally broke down the racial barriers built in to FDR’s New Deal. And working class whites, who had once supported the New Deal, suddenly got conservative and began to spout off about the virtues of self-reliance and the evils of “dependency” on “government hand-outs.” I go into more detail here.

And the Right saw an opportunity, and before you can say “voodoo economics” white workers had bought into a big lie that busting unions and stripping away worker protections would make everybody free and prosperous. And, by the way, don’t expect government to do anything for you, unless you’re a big corporation.

So now it’s 2007, and a whole generation of people too young to remember much before the Carter Administration has been conditioned to accept, unquestioningly, the propaganda of the Right. “Free markets” are intrinsicallygood. “Deregulation” is always right. Any sort of government regulation is bad. “Big government” is bad. “Limited government” is good. And they mindlessly regurgitate these ideas without understanding their historical context or even thinking them through.

I say that none of these things is intrinsically bad or good. Sometimes the same economic policy will benefit one part of the population but devastate another. Sometimes taxes need to be lowered, and sometimes they need to be raised. Sometimes government regulations are stupid, and sometimes they are necessary. A nation needs to look at the situation in which it finds itself, and think many things through, before understanding which is the correct course.

Yes, knee-jerk ideology will sometimes provide an acceptable solution, but so will a Ouija board.

On the other hand, when something is tried over and over again and always turns out badly, one might think doing it a few more times expecting a better result is, um, nuts.

Paul Silver — who seems to be a perfectly nice fella, so I don’t want to be harsh here — actually says “I tend to embrace the progressive aims to move the world towards more fairness, health and opportunity. I tend to embrace the conservative method of optimizing free markets to most efficiently utilize resources,” without realizing that you can either have “fairness, health and opportunity,” or you can have “conservative method of optimizing free markets,” but you can’t have them both. Because the second thing will, inevitably, destroy the first. And I say that because it always has.

I defy anyone to show me a nation that has actually enacted pure “free market” policies that did not devolve into corruption, plutocracy, and worker exploitation eventually.

This is not to say that government regulators always make the right choices, but when you allow “the market” (e.g., the interests of wealth) to make decisions with no government oversight, you can count on enough of those unregulated capitalists to make enough bad choices to do considerable damage, like cheating people out of their life savings, or starving the Irish. It is inevitable, I say.

Ideologies are, essentially, strategies for making the world easier to understand by limiting one’s cognitive choices. They allow people to “get” complex issues by simplifying them. Ideologies often are based on how issues unfold most of the time, or something that has been successful in the past. But human civilization, and its political and economic components, are perpetually changing and evolving, means that an approach that might have worked in one century is a disaster in another. And if nobody ever sits down and thinks the issues out, all the way through, ideologies turn into something like superstition. It never rains when I wear my pink socks. Or, free markets always optimize the use of resources.

History tells us that complete deregulation more often results in the exploitation of resources and nasty boom-and-bust cycles, but telling that to some people is like telling a four-year-old there is no Santa Claus.

But let’s swoop back up to the beginning of this post, where Paul Silver says

The GOP has lost the benefit of the doubt that they are the party of fiscal restraint, organizational competence, the masters of foreign affairs. So what do they want to be? It is a new game.

Hard to say. American conservatism (which was not always married to the Republican Party) has been riding the hobby horse of free markets since the post-Civil War era, and I don’t expect them to stop in my lifetime. The Democrats are only just beginning to pick up the mantle of economic populism that they dropped many years ago, and the Washington establishment Dems remain mostly clueless. So we could see only incremental tweaks in both parties over the next few years, or we could see big changes and a major political re-alignment similar to the one the New Deal brought about. I think it could go either way.

But if the latter is the case, I see where the Dems could go with that, but the Republicans? I have no idea.

Who’s Left?

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Sometimes I think lobotomies must be a prerequisite for becoming a “pundit.” So many of them exhibit a profound inability to, actually, think.

Take David Brooks. Please. In his column today (which you can’t read if you don’t have a subscription, but you ain’t missin’ anything), Brooks declares that today’s young people are the “children of polarization.”

Today’s college students, remember, were born around 1987. They were 2 or 3 when the Berlin Wall fell. They have come into political consciousness amid impeachment, jihad, polarization and Iraq. Many of them seem to have reacted to these hothouse clashes not by becoming embroiled in the zealotry but by quietly drifting away from that whole political mode.

In general, their writing is calm, optimistic and ironical. Most students in my class showed an aversion to broad philosophical arguments and valued the readings that were concrete and even wonky. Many wrote that they had moved lately toward the center.

I would love to have a talk with these young people to find out what they think “center” means, since the term has been rather ill-defined lately, but let’s go on for now … Brooks describes one young man he met while teaching a political theory course at Duke University — I feel faint at the thought — who

… grew up on a struggling ranch in Idaho. His father died when he was young and his family was poor enough at times to qualify for welfare, though his mother refused it. Duke, with its affluence and its liberal attitudes, was a different universe.

Kendall arrived deeply conservative and remains offended by people who won’t work hard to support themselves. But he now finds himself, as he says, cursed by centrism — trapped between the Pat Robertsons on the right and the Democratic elites on the left, many of whom he finds personally distasteful.

By “Democratic elites” I assume Brooks is referring to the inside-the-beltway hothouse flowers we’ve all come to know and despair about. However, why Democratic Washington insiders are “elite” and Republican Washington insiders are not rather escapes me.

He has come to admire the prairie pragmatists, like Montana’s Jon Tester and Brian Schweitzer. In a long conversation with his brother Sage, who works on the ranch, Kendall decided that what the country needs is a party led by “entrepreneurial cowboy politicians” with a global perspective.

But here’s the truth that Brooks lacks the courage to acknowledge: Tester and Schweitzer, Democratic Senator and Democratic Governor respectively, are progressives. Liberal, even. Much more so than the Washington Democratic insider “elites,” who for years have tripped all over themselves running to the “center.” As candidates, Tester and Schweitzer both were cheered enthusiastically by us loony lefty bloggers, which ought to be a Clue. Both of these fellas are strong economic populists, championing the needs of the ordinary workin’ person against those of the wealthy and well-connected. And they’re both (I think) anti Iraq War (Tester for sure) and on the liberal side of most social issues you can think of.

(BTW, while researching this post I found a diary post by Cogitator at MyDD from last May titled “Why the DC elite will shun Brian Schweitzer.” )

Yet in the World o’ Pundits, insider elites like Joe Biden are “liberal” and Tester and Schweitzer are “centrist.” Why? First, because most pundits are idiots. Second, because Tester and Schweitzer are outdoor-type guys who like to hunt and fish and drive pickup trucks. In other words, they don’t conform to a stereotype “lefty” that lives in David Brooks’s head.

You have to read between the lines a bit, but I infer from Brooks’s column that he defines “centrist” or “moderate” as “someone who doesn’t think government can work.” He speaks of another of his Duke students:

He came to Duke with many conventional liberal attitudes, but he’d seen the failures of the schools in his neighborhood, where many of his smartest friends never made it to college. He’s a big fan of school vouchers and now considers himself a moderate Democrat: “I’m a Democrat because I think the Democratic Party is a better vehicle for the issues I care about: balancing the budget, checking President Bush’s foreign policy and curtailing global warming. However, I’ll switch to the Republicans in a heartbeat if I believe my ideas are better received in the G.O.P.”

Brooks doesn’t define what a “conventional liberal attitude” is, or why balanced budgets, checking Bush’s foreign policy and fighting global warming do not qualify as “liberal.”

I liked this paragraph:

For many students, the main axis of their politics is not between left and right but between idealism and realism. They have developed a suspicion of sweepingly idealistic political ventures, and are now a fascinating mixture of youthful hopefulness and antiutopian modesty.

Ah, but realism has a well-known liberal bias.

They’ve been affected by the failures in Iraq (though interestingly, not a single one of them wrote about Iraq explicitly, or even wanted to grapple with the Middle East or Islamic extremism). But they’ve also seen government fail to deliver at home. A number wrote about the mediocrity of their local public schools. Several gave the back of their hand to the politics of multicultural grievance.

One wants to kick Brooks out of the way and talk to these young people directly, because one suspects that Brooks may be injecting some of his own biases into his narrative. These young people are also likely reflecting the conventional wisdom among their peers at Duke. I don’t know where the Duke student body falls on the political leanings scale, but I suspect it isn’t exactly Oberlin. And if Brooks is the one teaching them political theory, then you can bet those kids understand the real difference between Left and Right about as well as Brooks can tell shit from shinola.

Be sure you are sitting down before you read this:

If my Duke students are representative, then the U.S. is about to see a generation that is practical, anti-ideological, modest and centrist (maybe to a fault).

That’s probably good news for presidential candidates like Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton, whose main selling point is their nuts-and-bolts ability to get things done.

‘Scuse me while I go bang my head against a wall and shriek for a while.

First, if there is one thing I would like America to know about Rudy Giuliani, it’s that 90 percent of what he did for New York after 9/11 was be on television. He actually had little direct hands-on interaction with the recovery efforts at Ground Zero, although he gets credit for the fact that the wealthy and resourceful city of New York did not completely fall to pieces because a relatively small part of it was destroyed that day. Pundits just love to tweak the hapless mayor of New Orleans for failing to clean up the Katrina mess, not noting that (1) Katrina impacted the entire city, as well as much of the region; and (2) New Orleans is a poor city in a poor state. Certainly there are things Ray Nagin could have done better, but had Giuliani been mayor of New Orleans when Katrina hit I doubt he would have come out of that catastrophe looking all that competent, either. In fact, the deaths of many New York firefighters can be blamed on Giuliani’s management incompetence.

And then there’s Senator Clinton, of whom I am hugely ambivalent. Exactly what has she “got done” so far? Anything major? And is she not one of Brooks’s “Democratic elites”? For that matter, isn’t Brooks a member in good standing of the nation’s political elite? If not, who the hell is?

The problem with national politics for the past several years is not a polarization between “Left” and “Right.” It’s that a cabal of extremist right-wing ideological whackjobs took charge of government, while the opposing party, which had long slipped its tether to any recognizable set of political values whatsoever, timidly chirped “me, too.” And the young folks recognize this, I suspect, better than Brooks does.

Skeptical

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I was just visiting the McClatchy Newspapers Washington Bureau site and was struck by their headlnes —

Justifications for attacking Iran on shaky ground

Experts skeptical about plans for balanced federal budget

Report questions Bush’s Iraq strategy

The substance of all of these stories is that the White House is lying its ass off about something, and somebody is calling them on it. And of course they’ve also (finally) been called out on their lies about global warming.

Regarding that first story, Kevin G. Hall writes,

On Monday, President Bush will propose a fiscal 2008 federal budget that he says will get the nation out of the red by 2012, but budget experts warn that it’s likely to be based on unrealistic assumptions that won’t yield a balanced budget.

Watch for trap doors in his numbers on tax cuts, war costs and spending reductions. Experience suggests that all three are likely to be unrealistic. Moreover, even if Bush managed to steer the budget toward balance in 2012, the long-term challenge of financing the baby-boomers’ retirement costs threatens to plunge the budget back into deficits that grow worse exponentially each year.

Reporters have gone from explaining what the President is expected to say to explaining how the President is expected to lie.

Many historians will tell you that all presidents have told fibs here and there during their administrations, usually for political reasons, but I think Bush is the first president for whom lies are his standard form of communication.

On Monday Bush will announce that he’ll seek $100 billion more to pay for the both wars through Sept. 30, the end of fiscal 2007. He’s also expected to seek another $145 billion for war spending in fiscal 2008 and $50 billion more for fiscal 2009. Total cost: $772 billion.

And don’t forget — most of the time when Bush asks for money for his war he ask for off-budget supplemental appropriations. It makes balancing the budget so much easier if you don’t figure your real expenditures into it, see.

The president also is expected to propose sharp cuts in virtually all spending that isn’t defense-related or automatic, such as Social Security. Championing fiscal discipline is new for Bush; he and the Republican-led Congress increased government spending by 45 percent from fiscal year 2001 to 2006.

I seem to remember Bush talks about “fiscal discipline” a lot; he just doesn’t do it.

Nevertheless, the president’s spending-cut proposals this year could put Democrats on the defensive to protect their favored programs from reductions without being framed as big spenders.

“Framed as big spenders” by Republicans and rightie media, of course. When Bush pours money into the Iraqi desert he’s being “fiscally prudent; when Democrats act to save Grandma’s Medicare they’re “big spenders. I think most of the American people are starting to see through this charade.