Barbarians at the Gate

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This bleak but brilliant post by Billmon exemplifies why we bloggers are either the last, best hope of civilization, or the last, best chroniclers of the end of civilization. The post is so rich it’s hard to find any one part to quote. I guess I’ll start here:

There’s something deeper at work here than just conventional media bias or capitalist economics, although they’re certainly part of it. There’s always been a powerful current of anti-intellectualism in American politics, just as there is in American life. It’s the dark side of democracy: The pressure to accept what the majority, or the most vocal minority, thinks is true as truth – even when the evidence is entirely on the other side. When Henry Ford said history was bunk, he wasn’t taking about the past but about the present, and his ire wasn’t directed at historians per se but at the revisionist historians of the Progressive Era, who were telling him and his fellow know nothings inconvenient facts they didn’t want to hear. Pump Henry full of Hillbilly Heroin and put him on the radio, and you’ve got Rush Limbaugh, still making the same point.

The difference between Ford’s time and Limbaugh’s is that the political presumption against rationality is now shared, or at least pandered to, even at the top of the political and cultural pyramid. It’s curious that people who are paid to think and write for a living, and who, like Gore, attended the “best” schools, are now nearly as susceptible to the politics of ignorance as your average conservative talk show host, but then the elite media ain’t what it used to be. Like academia, it’s fighting a losing rear-guard action against the spirit of the times and the angry, irrational prejudices that go with it.

But even more than academia, the old journalistic bastions of enlightenment liberalism – the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek – are vulnerable to the growing institutional and commercial pressures to tell the customers what they want to hear. And since conservatives are by far the larger and more economically attractive audience, the gravitational pull is perpetually to the right, which these days means the authoritarian right and the artificial reality it prefers to live in.

In other words, even “serious” journalism – and by extension “serious” politics – is no longer a conversation between educated, largely secular elites, with the unwashed masses free to listen in as long as they don’t challenge the wisdom of their socio-economic superiors. The masses are now educated too, not to mention economically empowered. And while this hasn’t made much of a dent in the American tendency towards anti-intellectualism, it means the opinions and prejudices of the populist right can no longer be ignored or segregated in the fringe world of talk radio.

Sometimes we’ve talked about how to get people to understand the dangers we’re facing, assuming that’s possible. I don’t think people necessarily have to be re-programmed in order to “get it.” A glance at Bush’s approval ratings suggests that people are catching on. And “the top of the political and cultural pyramid” certainly has never been free of prejudices and biases. On the other hand, when culture — which includes mass media — explains the world in a certain way or expresses only a limited range of ideas and points of view, it’s a challenge for most people to imagine the world in another way, or to think outside that limited range. Even if their guts are telling them something is wrong with this picture, they are likely to stay stuck in the same ol’ cognitive ruts as long as culture doesn’t show them other options. And they will continue to respond to the same old spin and talking points they’ve been conditioned to accept as truth.

I think Billmon is right about “a conversation between educated, largely secular elites, with the unwashed masses free to listen in as long as they don’t challenge the wisdom of their socio-economic superiors” being the way things used to be, especially before mass media. When you consider that, once upon a time, U.S. senators were chosen by state legislatures instead of by popular vote, and presidential candidacies were brokered in the old smoke-filled rooms, you’d think we are more democratic today than ever. But it doesn’t do much good to put decisions in the hands of the people when the people are being demagogued and lied to at every turn.

Happy News Roundup

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Congratulations to Italy on winning the World Cup! “A joy so big I have never felt,” said coach Marcello Lippi.

The photograph of the sun beaming down on an Italian flag is one I took early this year in Tuckaho, New York, from outside the Generoso Pope Foundation building. I had planned to send it to Michelle Malkin to get her worked up over il riconquistare — the nefarious plot to claim America as Italian territory in the name of Amerigo Vespucci, Giovanni da Verrazzano and Cristoforo de Colombo — but I never got around to it.

If I’d only realized this was an omen of a World Cup victory and placed bets then … oh, well.

Getting all the happy news out of the way early so I can go back to snarking — Paul Krugman writes that the economy of the world’s greatest city — New York, New York — is thriving.

Update: Via Avedon — some great editorial cartoons.

Frisch Follow Up

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Please note the following chart:

This chart shows traffic patterns on Debbie Frisch’s blog over the past 30 days. Here it is for the past week.

Now, what do these charts tell us? They tell us that Debbie Frisch got next to no traffic before the recent little dust-up with Jeff Goldstein. As of right now her sitemeter says she gets 5,781 average daily visits. Before this weekend she was getting, um, way less. Possibly fewer than 100 visits a day. I took a look at her site meter yesterday afternoon after the controversy was already spreading around the blogs, and her average at the time was under 500.

Skippy figured out that Frisch has been blogging less than a year, and in that time she had been honored with a total of 12 links to her site before the Goldstein flap.

I bring this up because this fellow wrote,

Well checking her site meter it looks like Ms. Frisch is averaging 5,700 hits a day with today well over 10k hits already. I am sure her average has spiked due to this controversy. Still looking at Maha’s meter her blog is averaging only 1,800 hits per day. Maha has been around a lot longer but Ms. Frisch’s blog is definitely not some unknown lil voice out in the internet wilderness.

Yes, it is.

Update: Preemptive Karma offers an apology. But not for Frisch.

Update: I see from Memeorandum that the righties are still nipping at Frisch, who is warped enough to still be responding to them. Look, I don’t know what Frisch’s problem is. I don’t know if she’s just immature or if she’s bipolar or is being deliberately provocative to drive up her traffic — which is working brilliantly — but it’s way past time to leave it alone. I learned a long time ago on the Internets that when it becomes clear the person you are “debating” is a few clowns short of a circus, it’s time to walk away. Let ’em have the last word, and just walk away, and ignore or twit filter the loon in the future.

Comments Improvements in Progress

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I’ve spent a big chunk of this afternoon trying to install preview and quicktag functions for comments. As of now the quicktags work but the preview doesn’t. It “previews” a blank post by “anonymous,” but then if you go ahead and post the comment you wrote does post.

I’ll leave the plug-in activated for now, so you can at least use the quicktags. If I can’t find out what I did wrong, maybe I can find another plug-in that does work.

House of Lords

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When did being a U.S. Senator become an entitlement? I thought senators served at the pleasure of voters. But somebody must’ve changed the rules while I was napping.

Today the Cabbage writes (behind the firewall; see also Raw Story) about Ned Lamont’s challenge of Joe Lieberman’s Senate seat:

This isn’t a fight between left and right. It’s a fight about how politics should be conducted. On the one hand are the true believers — the fundamentalists of both parties who believe that politics should be about party discipline, passion, purity, orthodoxy and clear choices. On the other side are the quasi-independents — the heterodox politicians who distrust ideological purity, who rebel against movement groupthink, who believe in bipartisanship both as a matter of principle and as a practical necessity. …

… What’s happening to Lieberman can only be described as a liberal inquisition. Whether you agree with him or not, he is transparently the most kind-hearted and well-intentioned of men. But over the past few years he has been subjected to a vituperation campaign that only experts in moral manias and mob psychology are really fit to explain. I can’t reproduce the typical assaults that have been directed at him over the Internet, because they are so laced with profanity and ugliness, but they are ginned up by ideological masseurs who salve their followers’ psychic wounds by arousing their rage at objects of mutual hate.

Those last couple of sentences could describe what’s written on the Internets about anybody in American politics. But I skipped over the part of Brooks’s rant that compares netroots activists to fascists —

In the 1930’s, the Spanish Civil War served as a precursor to the global conflict that was World War II. And in a smaller fashion, the primary battle playing out on the smiling lawns of upscale Connecticut serves as a preview for the national conflict that will dominate American politics for the next two years.

Seems to me that there’s plenty of mob psychology on Lieberman’s side. For all the hysteria you’d think this was the first time an incumbent Senator faced a primary challenge.

Jonathan Chait is on a similar tear:

… if Lieberman’s allies are irritating and often wrongheaded, alas, his enemies are worse. Lieberman recently declared, “I have loyalties that are greater than those to my party.” Markos Moulitsas, the lefty blogger from Daily Kos who has appeared in a Lamont commercial and has made Lieberman’s defeat a personal crusade, posted this quote on his website in the obvious belief that it’s self-evidently absurd. But shouldn’t we all have greater loyalties than the one to our party — say, to our country? Partisanship isn’t nothing, but must it be everything?

Is he saying that opposition to Lieberman is unpatriotic? Weird.

Their technique of victory-via-purge is on display in Connecticut. Although Lamont decided on his own to run, the left bloggers made his campaign their central cause. One result is that Lieberman has announced his intention to run an independent candidacy should he lose the primary. Moulitsas and other Lamont supporters are filled with outrage that Lieberman has opened up the possibility of splitting the liberal vote and letting a Republican win.

Well, OK, some anger is appropriate here. But doesn’t this suggest that the whole Lamont crusade has sort of backfired?

If Lieberman loses the primary and runs as an independent, then splitting the vote to let a Republican win — a likely outcome — is not the fault of Ned Lamont and his supporters unless you assume Lieberman is entitled to his Senate seat, and that there’s something wrong with another Democrat challenging him for it. Why isn’t it the case that if a challenger wins a primary against an incumbent, that must’ve meant the voters wanted a change? For whatever reason?

And surely Lieberman realizes that if he runs as an independent he will likely be handing the seat to a Republican. What does it say about him that he’d rather the seat goes to a Republican than to a rival from his own party? And doesn’t this prove that Lieberman is a liability to the party?

The whole anti-Lieberman blog campaign has a self-fulfilling quality: They charge that Lieberman isn’t a Democrat, they drive him from the party, and they declare themselves to be correct. The more ex-Democrats they create, the more sure of their own virtue they become.

First Chait says that Kos et al. are too partisan; next they’re not partisan enough. Weird.

I keep hearing is that activists are applying an Iraq War “litmus test” to Lieberman. Or that Lieberman should be admired and supported for taking a “principled stand” on Iraq. In reverse order:

Lieberman’s stand on Iraq may indeed be “principled,” in that he sincerely thinks the invasion was the right thing to do. But if the voters disagree with that position, why should Lieberman be rewarded for holding on to it? Politicians can hold all kinds of positions for principled reasons, but if those positions are way different from my equally principled positions, I’m not going to vote for those politicians, am I?

And anyway, it’s not about the war.

Let’s go to Cenk Uygur for a reality check:

I am constantly amazed by how uninformed people are when their job is to inform others. Every press article or editorialI have been a centrist all my life and I was a Republican until five years ago. Lieberman doesn’t offend my non-existent leftist ideology. So why would a centrist be so angry with a senator who claims to be a centrist and tries to find common ground between the two parties? Because the Republicans today are so far to the right that going over to their side is abandoning centrists in favor of siding with right wing zealots.

He knows. Lieberman knows that these are the same guys who have been unabashedly using 9/11 as a political tool. He knows these are the same guys who linked Iraq and 9/11 when there was absolutely no connection. He knows they campaign against gays, immigrants and anyone else they can focus people’s hatred on. He knows they have devolved into a party of misinformation, propaganda, ill-conceived wars and religious zealotry — and he still loves them.

He doesn’t just vote with Republicans, he relishes it. He talks like them, he walks like them, he is them. It’s not the Iraq War vote people care about nearly as much as when he said, “It is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be commander-in-chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war we undermine Presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.”

That’s going out of your way to support not just their ideology and their war, but to support their demagoguery. It’s ugly and it reeks. We get plenty enough of that from Republicans, we don’t need any of that from so-called Democrats.

I’ve seen on the Lieberman issue completely misses the point. We are not against Joe Lieberman because we are leftists who require ideological purity. We are against him because he aids and abets an out of control Republican Party.

What’s sad about Jonathan Chait’s op ed is that Chait almost gets it. He writes:

A good window into the competing mentalities can be found in two arguments, one by prominent Lieberman supporters, the other by a prominent critic. First, the supporters. Writing in the Hartford Courant, Marshall Wittmann and Steven J. Nider of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council complain that “far too many Democrats view George W. Bush as a greater threat to the nation than Osama bin Laden.”

Those loony Democrats! But wait, is this really such a crazy view? Even though all but the loopiest Democrat would concede that Bin Laden is more evil than Bush, that doesn’t mean he’s a greater threat. Bin Laden is hiding somewhere in the mountains, has no weapons of mass destruction and apparently very limited numbers of followers capable of striking at the U.S.

Bush, on the other hand, has wreaked enormous damage on the political and social fabric of the country. He has massively mismanaged a major war, with catastrophic consequences; he has strained the fabric of American democracy with his claims of nearly unchecked power and morally corrupt Gilded Age policies. It’s quite reasonable to conclude that Bush will harm the nation more — if not more than Bin Laden would like to, than more than he actually can.

This is what Lieberman and his backers don’t understand. They piously insist that “partisanship stops at the water’s edge” and that they won’t take political potshots at a Republican president when he’s waging a war in America’s name — as if Bush were obeying this principle, and as if Bush were just another Republican president rather than a threat of historic magnitude. Lieberman seems to view the alarm with which liberals regard Bush as a tawdry, illegitimate emotion.

Yes, exactly. But then Chait turns around and says the netroots activists who support Lamont are worse. So we agree that there’s a case to be made against Lieberman, yet somehow it’s wrong to challenge Lieberman’s Senate seat.

I ask again — when did being a U.S. Senator become an entitlement?

Update: See Greg Sargent.

Hypocrisies

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This blogger had the bad judgment to get nasty with Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom, and apparently she drew upon herself the wrath of the Right Blogosphere, and now she’s sorry. See Kathy Kattenburg at Liberty Street for more background.

Maybe the first rule of blogging should be, Don’t dish out what you aren’t ready to get back tenfold.

Anyway, the blogger in question, Deb Frisch, has been identified by the Right as a “liberal,” and Confederate Yankee asks,

When a liberal blogger threaten child sex abuse and murder, what response do we get from prominent liberal blogs?

*crickets*

Not one post.

Nothing from Kos, or Atrios, silence from Raw Story, AMERICAblog, and MyDD.

Nothing from me, either, as I never heard of Deb Frisch. If she said what is claimed she said, then she’s really awful and should be ashamed of herself. But I refuse to be collectively lumped together with or held accountable for people I’ve never heard of.

Perhaps the Yankee expects liberal bloggers to apologize for the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.

I’d like to establish a “blogroll” rule. If someone on my blogroll writes something inexcusably nasty, then you can lump me together with or expect me to apologize for what that blogger wrote. Otherwise — go to hell. [Update: Please pass this on to Right Wing Nut House, OK?]

See also Jeralyn at TalkLeft and Retardo at Sadly, No.

Update: Tbogg.

Update update: Although we lefties are being slammed for not apologizing for remarks made by someone we never heard of on a blog few of us ever read, Michelle Malkin refuses to express even a flicker of regret for Denice Denton’s suicide. Of course, as she says, Malkin didn’t kill Denice Denton. We don’t know how much of a factor, if any, Malkin’s targeting of Denton was in Denton’s decision to kill herself. However, we don’t know is not the same as no responsibility whatsoever. It’s we don’t know. Meaning, it may have been a factor.

Even if Malkin sincerely believes she had no part in the suicide, a decent person would have written something along the lines of “This individual I blogged about a couple of months ago has killed herself, and even though I disagreed with what this woman was doing I extend my condolences to her friends and family.” That’s, like, the minimum amout of regret a civilized and mature person would express under the circumstances. It’s the least Malkin ought to have done. And, of course, she doesn’t do that. She just flies into a big snit because people are mean to her.

Identity Crises

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I spent part of a day in London last summer, about six weeks after the 7/7 subway bombings. I was fresh back from an adventure safari into deepest Wales and was too tired to do much more in London than ride around in one of those double-decker tourist buses. But at least I looked at London, which provided an interesting contrast to New York City six weeks after the 9/11 attacks.

By late October 2001 New York City had begun to dismantle the thousands of shrines that sprang up after 9/11 and spread like kudzu over the sidewalks, lampposts, and scaffolding. Six weeks on, some shrines were entirely gone; others merely trimmed back. But in October 2001 the city was blooming with American flags. Rockefeller Center was an ocean of flags, and if you looked up and down Fifth Avenue you could see more flags than you could count, flapping away into infinite distance. It was quite a spectacle.

In London, the only visible remembrance of 7/7 that I saw was the lonely little sign in the photo at the top of this post. The only other clue that London had recently endured anything out of the ordinary was the tour guide’s cheerful announcement that the bus would not be stopping at Buckingham Palace for security reasons. I didn’t go to the subway stations associated with the 7/7 bombings (I considered it, but thinking of how tourists gawking at Ground Zero made me feel queasy, I decided — out of respect to London — to stay away). I assume there were flowers and signs and visible expressions of grief around those stations. But if so the shrines were confined to those stations and not drizzled liberally all over the bleeping city, as they were in New York.

Neither had London turned into a flag festival. In fact, I barely saw a Union Jack the entire time I was in Britain. Of course, the English flag is not the Union Jack, because that is the British flag. The English flag is the Cross of St George, which I understand is waved enthusiastically by soccer fans wherever an English team is playing. Perhaps the English are less given to flying national flags because they’re ambivalent about which national flag to fly.

By contrast, the Welsh fly their dragon flag from anything that will hold still for it. When you enter Wales by car you are greeted by a big, proud, dragon-festooned sign that says Croeso i Gymru — Welcome to Wales. They want you to know you ain’t in England any more, boyo. But when you drive into England from Wales you get no clue at all that you’ve crossed a border, except that suddenly all the road signs are entirely in English.

The English also seem a bit ambivalent about national anthems. “God Save the Queen” is the anthem of the entire United Kingdom, and since other parts of the UK have their own anthems, there is some controversy about whether “GStQ” is the proper anthem for English soccer matches. And if it isn’t, what is? I understand some English rugby teams have adopted “Land of Hope and Glory” as the English anthem, while others prefer “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” for some unfathomable reason. But soccer teams haven’t made up their minds. There is no official Scottish anthem, but the Scots unofficially have adopted “Flower of Scotland,” or sometimes “Scotland the Brave.” On the island of Britain only the Welsh are not at all confused about anthems; theirs is “Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau,” diolch yn fawr iawn (thank you very much).

The difference in reaction to terrorist attack, New York v. London, might be explained by the larger magnitude of the New York attacks. Further, attacks on London from foreign enemies have not passed from living memory. I suspect Londoners born since the Blitz have absorbed the bombing of London into their national identity, and they are guided by that brave example. We Americans have no such collective memory to guide us. Even those of us who have heard of the War of 1812 may not be aware that the British captured and burned Washington, DC, in 1814. For us, that was too long ago to count. For most Americans, our invincibility from foreign attack is part of our national identity. The 9/11 attacks were not just atrocities committed by foreigners against our fellow citizens; they were a violation of our collective ego.

The London subway bombers, however, were British citizens. There’s another difference. But they were British citizens who did not define themselves as British, apparently.

English national identity may be going through a different kind of identity crisis. I suspect the English may be going through a deep, if subtle, re-evaluation of what it is to be English, especially as something distinct from being British. Or maybe not. It’s subtle, as I said.

Americans tend to use England and Britain as synonyms, as Shakespeare himself did in Richard II —

    This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
    This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
    This other Eden, demi-paradise,
    This fortress built by Nature for herself
    Against infection and the hand of war,
    This happy breed of men, this little world,
    This precious stone set in the silver sea,
    Which serves it in the office of a wall
    Or as a moat defensive to a house,
    Against the envy of less happier lands,—
    This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

But the Celts, dug into Britain’s edges and highlands since the time of Roman and Saxon invaders, stubbornly refused to surrender their own unique identities. In recent years Wales and Scotland have won some degree of home rule, and the English gave up their centuries-long effort to eradicate the Welsh language, allowing Wales to be officially bilingual. In effect, Scotland and Wales have demanded recognition as British, but not English, and England has agreed.

Now there is an English Question. The devolution of Britain’s old centralized government now allows the Scots and Welsh some say-so over matters specific to Scotland and Wales. But what about England? As Tony Wright observed, matters now decided by the Welsh Assembly for Wales and the Scottish Parliament for Scotland are decided by the British Parliament for England.

Those who warned that devolution to Scotland and Wales would trigger the break-up of Britain have turned out to be emphatically wrong. Those who argued for devolution as a means of keeping the British project up and running have been no less emphatically vindicated. Yet it has, ineluctably, also created the English Question, and it is to this that attention now has to turn. The future of Britain, and of Britishness, may well depend on whether we can find a convincing answer to it.

It is reported that Scottish Labour MPs decided not to sign up to the parliamentary rebellion against the Government’s education white paper because it would draw attention to the anomaly of Scottish MPs deciding on education in England when English MPs have no say on education in Scotland. In fact of course it did precisely the opposite, especially as abstention of view was not intended to be translated into abstention of vote. Similarly, the smoking ban in England was voted on by Scottish and Welsh MPs despite the fact that in Scotland and Wales the issue is a matter for devolved decision.

I’m not aware that the English are pushing for home rule for themselves. The oddness of this may be apparent to everyone but the English. Maybe centuries of seeing themselves as the lords and rulers of all of Britain have left them thinking of Scotland and Wales as relics of history, or vestigial organs — sort of the way non-native Americans think of Indian reservations. As exemplified by the signs (or lack thereof) along the English-Welsh border, the Welsh are far more interested in the integrity of national boundaries than the English.

But now the English are asking, “Hey — where’s our national anthem?” Did they not notice this void before? Is noticing the void now a signal that the English are re-defining themselves vis-à-vis the Welsh and Scots? And if so, will “Welcome to England” signs someday be posted along the roads leaving Wales?

The matter of racial minorities in Britain complicates the identity thing even further. I haven’t spent nearly enough time in Britain to fully understand where the Brits are with this. My impression is that, while most Brits are determined to put on a tolerant face, there’s some racism bubbling under the surface. For example, during the Welsh safari I was told that some English people are buying homes in Wales because Wales is still mostly white.

Yes, but it’s still mostly white for the same reason the Ozarks are still mostly white — a shortage of good jobs and other economic opportunities. Centuries of low status have left Wales still beautiful, but poor. Like the Ozarks, it’s not a place large numbers of people move to; if you live there, chances are you were born there. If racial identity could so override national identity and cause an English person to move in with the poor cousins, among whom “you’re acting English” is an insult — how ironic is that? And isn’t it interesting how we seem to have layers of identities, and that we push one forward and pull back another, depending on circumstances?

And yes, I realize I’m leaving Northern Ireland out of this discussion. That’s a whole ‘nother level of complication that could add several feet to the length of this post.

I started musing about the English because of this post by Michelle Malkin, who in her artless way managed to turn a remembrance of 7/7 into a smear of the British. Brits are not nearly hateful or intolerant enough to suit Malkin. The Unhinged One links to this op ed in the Washington Times by Diana West, who is disturbed because an entire 13 percent of Britain’s Muslim population believe the 7/7 suicide bombers should be considered martyrs.

And, apparently, some among this 13 percent are not shy about expressing their opinions. West quotes one of these, Anjem Choudary:

“Who says you own Britain, anyway?” Mr. Choudary replied. “Britain belongs to Allah. The whole world belongs to Allah … If I go to the jungle, I’m not going to live like the animals, I’m going to propagate a superior way of life. Islam is a superior way of life.”

Offensive, yes, but I don’t see a big distinction between Mr. Chaoudary’s attitude and that of many of the Christian Right who live among us here in America. They all disgust me, yet if I make faces at the Christian Whackjobs I’m a Bad Person, according to the righties.

Malkin and West are angry that Brits permitted Chaoudary and others to demonstrate outside the Danish Embassy during the recent cartoon war, and that British police protected the demonstrators from violent reprisal. The demonstrators had to be protected because they carried signs praising both the 7/7 and 9/11 terrorists. West writes,

Hundreds of demonstrators marched through London, praising the 7/7 killers or calling for the murder of journalists who publish Mohammed cartoons. And the police stood by.

More accurately, they made sure the protest went off smoothly, as the Times Online reported. “People who tried to snatch away [the placards] were held back by police,” the newspaper reported. “Several members of the public tackled senior police officers guarding the protesters, demanding to know why they allowed banners that praised the ‘Magnificent 19’ — the terrorists who hijacked the aircrafts used on September 11, 2001 — and others threatening further attacks on London.” …

… The “Newsnight” show on which Mr. Choudary subsequently appeared included news footage of an English bobby vigorously silencing such a citizen, described as a van driver, who, according to the televised report, had angrily criticized the Muslim protesters. It is tragically enlightening.

“Listen to me, listen to me,” said the policeman, shaking his finger at the van driver. “They have a right to protest. You let them do it. You say things like that you’ll get them riled and I end up in [trouble]. You say one more thing like that, mate, and you’ll get yourself nicked [arrested] and I am not kidding you, d’you understand me?”

Van driver: “They can do whatever they want and I can’t?”

Policeman: “They’ve got their way of doing it. The way you did it was wrong. You’ve got one second to get back in your van and get out of here.”

Van driver: [bitter] “Freedom of speech.”

This vignette wasn’t law and order in action. It was desperate, craven appeasement. As the bobby put it, “You say things like that, you’ll get them riled.” And we mustn’t get them riled. Let Anjem Choudary and his band of thugs praise mass killings, threaten more attacks and advocate murder by beheading on London streets in broad daylight, but don’t get them riled.

Unfortunately, neither Malkin nor West spell out what they would have done in this situation. Would they have refused to allow the Muslims to demonstrate? That sets off all kinds of questions about when the government can stop demonstrations and when it can’t, and Malkin and West do not address those questions. Would they have had the police step aside and let the demonstration turn violent? What if the police stepped aside and people — Muslim and non-Mulsim — were killed? Would Malkin and West have been happy then? They don’t say. They don’t grapple with the hard issues. They just know that Muslims should not be permitted to do things that anger Malkin and West.

Muslims in America seem a lot more docile than Muslims in Europe. Is this because they are less angry than British Muslims? Or is it that they are more afraid of what might happen to them if they speak their minds? If the latter is true, what does that say about Americans? Does it say we are not “appeasers,” or does it say we have less respect than the Brits for freedom of speech? Does suppressing speech make the problem of Islamic extremism go away, or does it sweep Islamic extremism under a rug? What might happen if Muslim extremists demonstrated in New York City with signs that praised the 9/11 terrorists? Would the NYPD be able to keep the peace? Would the NYPD try to keep the peace?

And what are the 13 percent angry about, by the way?

According to this article in the June 22 Economist, Muslims in Europe are angrier than Muslims in America. The article poses various possible reasons for this. But this one was most intriguing to me (emphasis added):

Amid all the confusion, there is one clear trend among European Muslims. Islam is increasingly important as a symbol of identity. About a third of French schoolchildren of Muslim origin see their faith rather than a passport or skin colour as the main thing that defines them. Young British Muslims are inclined to see Islam (rather than the United Kingdom, or the city where they live) as their true home.

It does not help that all Europeans, whatever their origin, nowadays find themselves “identity-shopping” as the European Union competes with the older nation-states for their loyalty. No wonder many young European Muslims find that the umma—worldwide Islam—tugs hardest at their heart-strings.

Hmm, there’s that identity thing again.

The Bush Doctrine Is Dead

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According to Bob Schrum on tonight’s Hardball, today President Bush “announced the end of Dick Cheney’s dominance in foreign policy.”

Wow.

The announcement was made in a presidential press conference in Chicago. After President Bush went on — and on — at some length about stuff nobody cares about or believes any more — like No Child Left Behind works real good and what the economy needs is more tax cuts — he took some questions from Chicago reporters. And the first question was about North Korea.

Q Mr. President, Japan has dropped the threat of sanctions from its proposed Security Council resolution about North Korea. Why was that necessary? And how do you punish or penalize a country that’s already among the poorest and most isolated in the world?

THE PRESIDENT: I think that the purpose of the U.N. Security Council resolution is to send a clear message to the leader of North Korea that the world condemns that which he did. Part of our strategy, as you know, has been to have others at the table; is to say as clearly as possible to the North Korean, get rid of your weapons and there’s a better way forward. In other words, there’s a choice for him to make. He can verifiably get rid of his weapons programs and stop testing rockets, and there’s a way forward for him to help his people.

I believe it’s best to make that choice clear to him with more than one voice, and that’s why we have the six-party talks. And now that he has defied China and Japan and South Korea and Russia and the United States — all of us said don’t fire that rocket. He not only fired one, he fired seven. Now that he made that defiance, it’s best for all of us to go to the U.N. Security Council and say loud and clear, here are some red lines. And that’s what we’re in the process of doing.

The problem with diplomacy, it takes a while to get something done. If you’re acting alone, you can move quickly. When you’re rallying world opinion and trying to come up with the right language at the United Nations to send a clear signal, it takes a while.

And so, yesterday, I was on the phone with — I think I mentioned this to the press conference yesterday — to Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin; the day before to President Roh and Prime Minister Koizumi. And Condi, by the way, was making the same calls out there to her counterparts, all aiming at saying, it’s your choice, Kim Jong-il, you’ve got the choice to make.

So we’ll see what happens at the U.N. Security Council. I talked to Condi this morning first thing, in anticipation of this question, and she feels good about the progress that can be made there.

No more Lone Ranger foreign policy. No more unilateral action. No more charging around the globe doing whatever we want. Now we’ve got to get the world to speak with one voice; we’ve got to rely on diplomacy, because we have no other bleeping options.

Back on Hardball, Schrum and Norah O’Donnell said that we don’t have a credible threat of force, and sanctions are not supported by the UN security council, so all we’ve got left is diplomacy. But as Schrum also said, “It was time for diplomacy six years ago.”

Somebody — I think it was O’Donnell — said that she’d never heard Bush use the word diplomacy as often as he used it today.

But Bob Schrum also said, “He can’t talk his way out of the problems he has right now.”

The problem isn’t just that Bush should have started diplomacy six years ago. It was that shortly after he became President in 2001 he trashed years of diplomacy that had gone on before. And he did this because he is an asshole.

Go here for some background on how badly Dubya bleeped up North Korea:

So here’s where we stood when Bush II became President: Kim Jong Il was (and remains) a genuinely horrible leader whose people were starving, and western intelligence agencies at least suspected he was processing uranium. But relations with South Korea were improving, the IAEA was still inspecting, and the plutonium processors were still sealed.

But then there was Bush.

Kim Dae Jung came to Washington in March 2001 to pay respects to the new U.S. President Bush and ask for his support for the Sunshine Policy. And what happened?

Bush dissed him, that’s what. The arrogant little twerp snubbed a Nobel Prize winner and friend to America. And when word of the snub reached North Korea, the “Sunshine Policy” died.

The late, great Mary McGrory wrote:

    We should perhaps remember that President Bush has never liked talking to Koreans. His first overseas visitor was the estimable Kim Dae Jung, whom Bush snubbed.

    Bush, as he was eager to demonstrate, was not a fan. Kim’s sin? He was instituting a sunshine policy with the North, ending a half-century of estrangement. Bush, who looked upon North Korea as the most potent argument for his obsession to build a national missile defense, saw Kim, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, as nothing but trouble. He sent him home humiliated and empty-handed. [McGrory, “Bush’s Moonshine Policy,” The Washington Post, December 29, 2002; emphasis added].

As a reaction to Bush’s unexpected hard-line stance, North Korea cancelled scheduled reconciliation talks with South Korea.

And it was Bush (and Condi) screwups that got Kim Jong Il back into the plutonium processing business, as explained here. Note that the Republican Noise Machine persuaded much of the press and public that Kim Jong Il had broken the 1994 agreement made with the Clinton Administration to stop processing plutonium. But in fact Kim Jong Il had stopped processing plutonium. The Bushies raised a stink about North Korea processing uranium, which was a whole ‘nother matter and not nearly as much of a concern as processing plutonium, as explained here. And as I explained here, in 2002 Condi explained that North Korea is just so much more manageable than Iraq, and if we just stand up to them they’ll mind us like housebroken puppies. Two years later, North Korea announced it had nuclear weapons. Brilliant.

Click here for the entire “Blame Bush for North Korea’s Nukes” archive.

Righties Being Wrong

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I don’t know why this popped into my head this morning — possibly because it’s turning out to be a lovely summer day — but as I sipped coffee and admired the aforementioned day through the window I remembered something. Last April a rightie blogger predicted “this is going to be a vindicating summer for supporters of the Bush Administration.”

The MSM is predictably trying to throw cold water on this new story as AJ Strata comments on the NY Times take. But the pure and simple fact is as I told you this is going to be a vindicating summer for supporters of the Bush Administration.

Well, it’s July 7. “Vindication summer” has been a bust so far.

The cause of last April’s optimism on the Right was the firing of Mary McCarthy from the CIA on allegations that she leaked classified information to reporter Dana Priest. Naturally the Right Blogosphere immediately declared McCarthy to be a traitor. But they were also very certain McCarthy’s would be just the first head to roll. They were supremely confident that the noggins of Larry Johnson, Ray McGovern, and the like would soon follow.

I guess they were wrong.

What Really Happened is that two weeks after CIA Director Porter Goss fired McCarthy, Goss himself was fired. McCarthy, who maintains her innocence, dropped out of the news. Conventional wisdom says that Goss was fired because he unwisely butted heads with John Negroponte, or else because of his association with one “Dusty” Foggo, who had fallen into bad company. Since then, there have been no new developments on the McCarthy story that I’m aware of, although she’s mentioned in this WaPo Op Ed from June.

One suspects the White House wants the firing of Mary McCarthy to drop into a very deep memory hole.

Much more recently righties celebrated the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as a major turning ponit in the war in Iraq. I wrote at the time, “since it’s unlikely this will make any bleeping difference to the insurgency or the activities of the Iranian-sponsored Shiite militias — whoop-dee-doo.” This rightie blogger found my attitude shocking.

Well, guess what? The pace of killings in Iraq has increased since Zarqawi’s death, and even the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, admits that killing Zarqawi has not made Iraq safer.

The non-effect of Zarqawi’s death wasn’t a hard prediction to make if you have even a rudimentary idea of who’s doing what to whom in Iraq. The reality is that diverse factions are killing each other for diverse reasons. Al Qaeda is only one of the factions, and a small one at that. But since the righties persist in maintaining their simplified cognitive model (bad guy terrorists v. good guy coalition), they don’t get it.

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin, who has made a career of stirring up hatred of ethnic (and other) minorities, is bashing “Democrats” because of a bigoted remark made by Sen. Joe Biden. Naturally, if one Democrat makes a bigoted comment, all Democrats must be bigots. That’s logical, right? Oh, wait …

One wonders why a bigoted remark would bother Malkin, since bigotry is her stock-in-trade. (See David Neiwert for the connections between Malkin and white supremacists.) Jill at Feministe expresses my views on the matter. See also Jill’s Crazy Conservative Round-up.

Be sure to add your own favorite examples of righties being wrong to the comments.

Update: Speaking of Malkin — David Weigel of Hit and Run has a follow up to the story about UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Denice Denton, the target of a Malkin hate campaign who recently committed suicide. True to form, Malkin expresses no contrition for her possible contribution to Denton’s state of mind. Instead, she complained that Weigel’s asking for a comment is some kind of harrassment.

“Making Malkin angry is like shooting orca in a barrel,” says Weigel. Heh.