9/11 Belongs to All of Us

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Chris Bowers has had a beef with the marketers/distributors of “Flight 93.”

I am the manager of the Liberal Blog Advertising Network, which has 86 member blogs that combine for 17.78 million page views per week. It is the second largest advertising network at Blogads. From what I can tell, not a single blog in that network features the Untied 93 advertisement that apparently was purchased on all 103 members of the Conservative Blog Advertising Network. That network was 4.37 million page views per week, just under 25% of our traffic.

Why did the marketers of United Flight 93 decide to only advertise on conservative political blogs? The Liberal Blog Advertising Network is four times as large, and is even a 20-30% better deal per page view (or CPM, to use the relevant industry term). Do they think that attack is only relevant to red America? Do they think that only Republicans were attacked on 9/11? Do they think that only conservatives remember that day? Do they think that the only people who took action on United Flight 93 had voted for George Bush one year earlier?

Chris updates and says the ads will now run on liberal blogs, too.

Congressmen Arrested

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This just happened today … Jim Doyle of the San Francisco Chronicle reports,

Five members of Congress, including Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo) were arrested today when they blocked the front entrance at the Embassy of Sudan in Washington, D.C. Their protest and civil disobedience was designed to embarrass the military dictatorship’s ongoing genocide of its non-Arab citizens.

All told, 11 people were arrested outside the Sudanese embassy on Massachusetts Avenue, including six activists as well as representatives Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Houston), Jim McGovern (D-Worcester, Mass.), Jim Moran (D-Virginia) and John Olver (D-Massachusetts). They were held in a jail cell for about 45 minutes and then released.

Good for them! I boldfaced the names in case you want to email and thank them.

Lantos, 78, was first elected to Congress in 1981. Two years later, he founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. As the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in Congress, he has pressed the Bush administration to take steps to deter the state-sanctioned murder and rape of hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan’s Darfur region.

FEMA Follies; or, Adventures with the Crony Fairy

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President Bush was back in New Orleans yesterday, getting his picture taken with disadvantaged black people. It was his eleventh photo-op trip to the Gulf Coast since Katrina.

Bush stopped at a modest bungalow restored by volunteers, situated on a Ninth Ward street still littered with debris and overgrown with weeds. White government trailers that are the main housing for the displaced sat in many front yards. …

… From Williams’ home, Bush’s motorcade took him to a nearby large vacant lot where Habitat for Humanity is building 81 new homes for New Orleans musicians.

Bush, clad in casual blue pants and checked shirt, donned work gloves and a tool pouch as he wandered around the construction site chatting with workers. The president, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco and New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin helped raise roof frames onto one house.

Let me get this straight — the politicians want people to know that they’re working hard to restore New Orleans, so they get themselves photographed alongside volunteers? Is that ’cause the government ain’t doin’ shit? So what do we need the politicians for, exactly?

Meanwhile, the Senate spent seven months investigating FEMA’s response to Hurricane Katrina and came to the brilliant conclusion that the agency should be scrapped. Sort of. Johanna Neuman writes for the Los Angeles Times,

Just weeks before the 2006 hurricane season officially begins June 1, a Senate committee on Thursday called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to be dismantled and reconstituted as a new, stronger agency within Homeland Security.

Many House members, meanwhile, are pushing to restore FEMA to its pre-2003 status as an independent agency, this time with Cabinet rank and additional funding muscle.

So the Senate and the House disagree, and naturally the White House is resisting any big changes at all.

And as President Bush made his 11th visit to the Gulf Coast since the storm hit Aug. 29, the White House urged a strengthening — but no reshuffling — of current operations.

“Now is not the time to really look at moving organizational boxes,” said Frances F. Townsend, the president’s domestic security advisor, who traveled with Bush to Louisiana and Mississippi on Thursday.

I can’t find an exact quote, but yesterday the MSNBC news team shoved a microphone at Bush’s face and asked for his reaction to the Senate’s FEMA suggestion. He said something to the effect that the White House was conducting its own FEMA investigation, and he thought the answer to the problem was making FEMA work better.

Translation: The Bush Administration hasn’t done a dadblamed thing to see to it federal agencies are better prepared for hurricane season than they were last year.

I wish someone would have pressed him to explain what he has done, personally, to improve the problems in our disaster preparedness response. Has he considered any options for reorganizing FEMA and Homeland Security? Did he demand progress reports from FEMA managers showing what measures they are taking to straighten up their act? Has he rattled any cages? Kicked any butts, other than Michael Brown’s? In fact, other than replacing Brown, has any tangible action been taken by the White House at all lo these many months?

Expect the White House to stonewall whatever reform the House and Senate eventually agree on. Any major overhaul of FEMA would be an admission that the original White House organization chart for FEMA was flawed, a mistake. And you know how it is … Bushies don’t make mistakes.

Joe Lieberman was one of the senators behind the proposal to overhaul FEMA but keep it within Homeland Security (he had a lot to do with the original Homeland Security Department proposal, so I guess Holy Joe can’t admit mistakes, either). Bill Walsh of the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that Lieberman complained of White House stonewalling of the investigation —

Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., accused the White House on Thursday of not only failing to cooperate with the Senate’s Hurricane Katrina investigation, but of telling key federal agencies not to turn over documents that he said could have shed light on the botched federal response to the nation’s worst natural disaster. …

… in a 43-page addendum to the committee’s report, Lieberman described a cat-and-mouse game between committee members and White House lawyers over setting up interviews and getting critical documents.

“In too many instances, we faced agencies and departments that saw our efforts as a nuisance — and their response as up to their discretion,” Lieberman wrote. “And the worst offender was the entity that should have stood above the fray and worked hardest with the committee to uncover the government’s failings in Katrina: the White House.”

The White House responded, in effect, that they cooperated a whole bunch and Joe Lieberman is a poopyhead.

Back to the Senate — what the newspapers are calling the Lieberman-Collins proposal calls for FEMA to be dismantled and replaced by a new agency, to be called the National Preparedness and Response Authority. NPRA would communicate directly with the President during a crisis — it’s implied that Michael Brown couldn’t do that because he had to go through NHS director Chertoff — and any big cuts to the budget or staff would have to be approved by Congress. The NPRA would remain under the Department of National Security umbrella, however.

Back to Johanna Neuman —

Many in the House, including Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Katrina that issued its report in February, favor making FEMA a separate agency, with Cabinet rank. …

… In the Senate, many Democrats — including Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey and Daniel K. Akaka of Hawaii, who were on the panel that issued the report Thursday — also want FEMA to stand alone, disagreeing with the Collins-Lieberman approach of taking it apart and putting it back together within Homeland Security.

“Unless FEMA has a direct line to the president, the people of Hawaii and the nation are at risk,” Akaka said in a statement. “FEMA must be restored as an independent agency.”

Just to make it all more fun, some Republican congressional leaders, such as Frist in the Senate and Hastert in the House, are making noises that they plan to stick with what the White House wants, whatever that is.

Conclusion: Nothing’s going to happen with FEMA this year, unless a major hurricane hits Virginia and wipes out the DHS headquarters.

Paul Krugman is not hopeful, either. He writes that the Lieberman-Collins proposal would change the agency’s name but not get to the root of what’s wrong with it.

The U.S. government is being stalked by an invisible bandit, the Crony Fairy, who visits key agencies by dead of night, snatches away qualified people and replaces them with unqualified political appointees. There’s no way to catch or stop the Crony Fairy, so our only hope is to change the agencies’ names. That way she might get confused, and leave our government able to function. …

… The [Senate] report points out that the Federal Emergency Management Agency “had been operating at a more than 15 percent staff-vacancy rate for over a year before Katrina struck” — that means many of the people who knew what they were doing had left. And it adds that “FEMA’s senior political appointees … had little or no prior relevant emergency-management experience.”

But the report says nothing about what caused the qualified people to leave and who appointed unqualified people to take their place. There’s no hint that, say, President Bush might have had any role. So those political appointees must have been installed by the Crony Fairy.

Heh.

The Senate proposal calls for the new agency to be staffed by professionals with experience in crisis management. “I guess it’s impossible to select qualified people to run FEMA,” writes Krugman. “If you try, the Crony Fairy will spirit them away and replace them with Michael Brown. But she might not know her way to N.P.R.A.”

Krugman gives us a history of FEMA —

In the early 1990’s, FEMA’s reputation was as bad as it is today. It was a dumping ground for political cronies, headed by a man whose only apparent qualification for the job was that he was a close friend of the first President Bush’s chief of staff. FEMA’s response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 perfectly foreshadowed Katrina: the agency took three days to arrive on the scene, and when it did, it proved utterly incompetent.

Many people thought that FEMA was a lost cause. But Bill Clinton proved them wrong. He appointed qualified people to lead the agency and gave them leeway to hire other qualified people, and within a year FEMA’s morale and performance had soared. For the rest of the Clinton years, FEMA was among the most highly regarded agencies in the federal government.

What happened to that reputation? The answer, of course, is that the second President Bush returned to his father’s practices. Once again, FEMA became a dumping ground for cronies, and many of the good people who had come in during the Clinton years left. It took only a few years to transform one of the best agencies in the U.S. government into what Senator Susan Collins calls “a shambles and beyond repair.”

In other words, the Crony Fairy is named George W. Bush.

“Playing President”

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Some good quotes in this interview of Robert Scheer at Alternet on why we can’t elect acquire better presidents:

RS: The process itself is so debilitating, so controlling, that it really doesn’t matter who these guys are or what they start out with.

Even with the best of intentions, even when they’re very smart and knowledgeable — as opposed to George W., who is neither — it doesn’t seem to matter. All they are proving is their ability to manipulate, to think superficially, and to exploit national security issues rather than deal with them. …

… The media, because it’s been driven much more by market competition and competition with electronic media. They’re doing this “gotcha” journalism. What passes for investigative journalism is finding somebody with their pants down — literally or otherwise. …

…OR: Do you think American voters care enough about the substance of policy?

RS: At the end of the day they do. When their taxes are wasted and their sons and daughters are killed in a meaningless war, when fanaticism is unleashed around the world because we follow stupid policies, and when we can’t save a city like New Orleans, yeah, I think they care. And when gas prices go up even though they were supposed to have gone down with the conquest of Iraq, I think they care. But the media fails them in not making a connection between the things they care about and the positions that these politicians take. …

…OR: You say in your book that George W. Bush is the first electronically projected president. Can you explain that?

RS: This administration doesn’t feel they need a mindful audience. They don’t care about facts, logic or consequences. They are the most cynical people that I’ve ever encountered in politics. This is the most cynical bunch — just think about that “reality-based community” quote. They create their own reality. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that kind of cynicism before, and I’m the guy who interviewed Richard Nixon.

These guys are, as John Dean keeps pointing out, far worse than the Nixon crowd because they think they can get away with it. Nixon, at the end of the day thought it mattered what the New York Times said. He felt that if there was a big contradiction, a big error, they would catch him and there would be all hell to pay.

There’s no longer that feeling. Over the years, I’m not getting cynical — they’re cynical. If I were truly cynical I wouldn’t be talking to you, and I wouldn’t be writing and teaching. Mark Twain said a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth puts its pants on. Well, the fact is the truth does get its pants on, it does catch up, and right now 65 percent of Americans think Bush lied to them.

OR: Between that kind of arrogance seen in your interview with George H.W. Bush, the showsmanship we see with Reagan, who is a better comparison to George W.?

RS: As we say in the subtitle of the book, none of them prepared me for Bush. Reagan had been on the election circuit on issues. I didn’t have to agree with him, but when he was a salesman for G.E. and head of the Actor’s Guild, he was talking about issues of foreign policy and domestic policy. He cared about these things and collected anecdotes and information that supported his views. When he was running, he was aware of the issues and what was at stake.

That was true of all of them. They were adults, and this guy, George W., as far as I can figure, is just a spoiled preppy, as he’s been described. What he’s done is rely on his tutors and he picked, unfortunately for us voters, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

OR: Are Americans capable of recognizing a good president?

RS: I do. I think the problem here was the failure of the democrats. When Kerry was asked by Bush, “Knowing what you know now, would you have gone into Iraq?” he should have said, “No.” He should have said, “You lied to Congress, you lied to the American people, it’s unconscionable.” He would have won the election, but Kerry was not comfortable in his own skin. Here’s the boy-scout war hero who seemed to be faking it, and yet in real life, this guy performed every time. And there’s George W., who has been faking it his whole life and somehow came across as more genuine.

I agree that Kerry screwed up, but I’m not persuaded that Americans are capable of recognizing a real leader from a faux one who just plays the role on TV. What do you think? What if media did a better job making the “connection between the things they care about and the positions that these politicians take”? Would enough Americans get the message? Or would too many of ’em still listen to Limbaugh and O’Reilly? And if we survive the next thousand days with Bush in the White House, will America have learned a lesson?

Update, sorta related: What might have been. And speaking of (maybe) finding somebody with their pants down … See also Billmon.

Stone Cold Crazy Bitch

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Sorry about the language, but Debbie Schlussel is at it again —

When previews for “United 93” were shown in New York City movie houses, the crowd whined, “Too soon!”

But “United 93” is not arriving in theaters too soon. If anything, it is arriving too late.

Whined?

Debbie the Demented may have forgotten exactly what happened on 9/11, but much of the damage was done to New York. If you lived in New York City then, there’s a large possibility you were at least acquainted with someone who died in the towers. Or, like me, you were close enough to witness the whole thing.

This may be difficult for D the D to grasp, as she’s clearly a stone cold crazy bitch, but this was an incredibly intense experience. Even after all these years emotions about 9/11 are still raw in New York. More raw, I suspect, than for people who were sitting comfortably in Detroit, or wherever D the D was, watching something happen on television to a bunch of strangers.

Just last year I walked through a museum display that included a twisted piece of one of the towers, and — much to my surprise — I started to hyperventilate. I wasn’t even aware myself how raw it still was.

I used to walk through the lower levels of one of the towers as part of my daily commute. I can still close my eyes and see it as it was, every detail. All the shops, all the people.

I heard the Flight 93 film is good, and I’m fine with the fact that there’s a film, but I don’t believe I will see it in theaters. I’m afraid I won’t be able to sit through it. I’ll wait until it’s on TV — I can change the channel if I need to.

I understand the film premier was in Tribeca, which is adjacent to Wall Street. And Wall Street is … well, you know. That’s where it happened. I’d love for D the D to stand outside the movie theater in Tribeca and tell New Yorkers they’re a bunch of whiners because some weren’t ready to watch a film about 9/11. Go ahead, Debbie. I’m sure they’ll care what you think.

The rest of her post might cause you to hyperventilate. Here’s the joke —

It has been almost five years since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and most Americans have fallen back to sleep. They’ve forgotten who our enemy is: extremist Islam. They’ve forgotten why the Patriot Act was enacted. They’ve forgotten why it was necessary for the NSA to listen in on phone calls of Muslims in America to their friends overseas. They’ve forgotten why it is necessary that many Islamic charities allegedly funding hospitals and orphanages must be shut down (because as on 9/11, they fund acts and groups that continue to put people in hospitals and orphanages).

Now, here’s the punch line:

That’s why “United 93” should be required movie viewing for all Americans who love freedom. …

Stone cold crazy STUPID bitch.

Update: See Attywood.

Never Mind

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Last week, even as the revelation of Mary McCarthy’s firing was leaked to the press, another story hit the news — a European Union investigator named Gijs de Vries reported he had “not turned up any proof of secret renditions of terror suspects on EU territory.”

Guess again. From today’s Guardian by Richard Norton-Taylor:

The CIA has operated more than 1,000 secret flights over EU territory in the past five years, some to transfer terror suspects in a practice known as “extraordinary rendition”, an investigation by the European parliament said yesterday.
The figure is significantly higher than previously thought. EU parliamentarians who conducted the investigation concluded that incidents when terror suspects were handed over to US agents did not appear to be isolated. They said the suspects were often transported around Europe on the same planes by agents whose names repeatedly came up in their investigation.

They accused the CIA of kidnapping terror suspects and said those responsible for monitoring air safety regulations revealed unusual flight paths to and from European airports. The report’s author, Italian MEP Claudio Fava, suggested some EU governments knew about the flights. …

… His report, the first interim report by EU parliamentarians on rendition, obtained data from Eurocontrol, the European air safety agency, and gathered information during three months of hearings and more than 50 hours of testimony by individuals who said they were kidnapped and tortured by American agents, as well as EU officials and human rights groups.

Righties will dismiss this because Fava is a member of the EU Parliament’s socialist group. However, data is data.

Data showed that CIA planes made numerous secret stopovers on European territory, violating an international air treaty that requires airlines to declare the route and stopovers for planes with a police mission, he said. “The routes for some of these flights seem to be quite suspect. … They are rather strange routes for flights to take. It is hard to imagine … those stopovers were simply for providing fuel.”…

… The Bush administration has admitted to secret rendition flights but says it does not condone torture.

The EU Parliament is still investigating the secret prisons.

Fitz v. Karl

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As a sure-enough leftie blogger I feel obligated to blog something about Karl Rove’s grand jury appearance yesterday, even though I don’t have any insights that somebody else didn’t blog first.

(Frankly, I am tired of being teased; I’m too old to stay on the edge of the seat of suspense this long. I long for a comfy and unambiguous seat with lots of pillows. I’ll let the young folks maintain the knife’s-edge anticipation until something substantive happens.)

Taylor Marsh says that when she wants to understand what’s going on with the Fitz & Karl show she reads Lawrence O’Donnell. OK, sounds good. And here’s the insight from O’Donnell:

Karl Rove’s return to the grand jury today could mean the end of the Rove investigation or the beginning of the Rove prosecution. It depends on who asked Rove to return. If Fitzgerald asked Rove to return to the grand jury, that means Fitzgerald thinks he doesn’t have enough for an indictment.

If Rove asked to return to the grand jury, that means Rove’s lawyer, Bob Luskin, believes an indictment is imminent and is sending his client back to make a final desperate attempt to avoid indictment.

Rove’s lawyer released a statement saying that Rove appeared “voluntarily and unconditionally at the request of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald.” Hmm.

For a recap of past episodes of the Fitz & Karl show, see Jane Hamsher.

Obstinance

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Thomas DeFrank writes in today’s New York Daily News:

Like his predecessors at moments of political urgency, President Bush can turn on a dime without losing any sleep. Even so, yesterday’s flip-flop was especially breathtaking for a son of the Oil Patch.

Time and again, Bush has spurned demands from critics he do precisely what he did yesterday.

Sometime in the 1980s, I believe, I decided the big difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Dems can identify a problem-in-the-making and maybe come up with a half-assed solution, whereas Republicans refuse to acknowledge a problem until it bites their butts.

Health care is a good example; Michael Dukakis made health care reform a big part of his 1988 platform when he ran against George H.W. Bush. As a state governor he saw the crisis we are enjoying now while it was still a couple of miles away. But when asked about health care Poppy would just look mildly befuddled and say We have the best health care system in the world; there’s no problem.

I’ve been predicting since then that some day, when enough middle-class people were really hurting, the Republicans would suddenly “discover” a health care problem and complain that Democrats let it happen. We’re just about there, finally.

I don’t believe this obstinant refusal to change course before we hit the iceberg was always true of Republicans. This article from 2004 reminds us that the first President to suggest we need to wean ourselves from dependence on foreign oil was Richard Nixon. I well remember at the time there was widespread and bipartisan realization that someday we’d have to find a way to generate power that didn’t involve fossil fuel. It’s a shame more wasn’t done then, but Vietnam and Watergate sucked the air out of just about every other issue at the time.

I also remember the Jimmy Carter energy crisis, which IMO was more annoying than today’s because there was a shortage of supply and finding an open gas station was a crapshoot. It got so that people would stop at any open gas station to “top off” their tank even when it was nearly full, because you never knew how long it would be before you could buy gas again. “This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our nation,” Carter said. One of the causes of that crisis was instability in the Middle East, notably the Iranian revolution. It’s almost 30 years later, and here we are again.

Ronald Reagan was critical of Carter’s emphasis on conservation and developing alternative fuel sources. Reagan said in his 1980 presidential nomination acceptance speech:

Large amounts of oil and natural gas lay beneath our land and off our shores, untouched because the present administration seems to believe the American people would rather see more regulation, taxes and controls than more energy.

This became the standard excuse for not preparing for an oil-scarce future — We have plenty of oil and gas already. We just have to dig it up. The problem was that those “large amounts” were already dug up, or were in places prohibitively difficult to reach, and once pumped the oil would need to be transported through environmentally sensitive regions like Prudhoe Bay or Prince Williams Sound. Or, like ANWR, the oil in them amounts to less than what the U.S. burns in a couple of years.

And the earth ain’t makin’ more oil. So even if every little scrap of oil and gas in the United States and its territories, including offshore, were tapped and shipped to the refineries, the Day of Oil Reckoning will still come, eventually.

So why didn’t President Clinton fix the problem? you ask. As I wrote in this post, Gov. Bush made Clinton’s “failed” energy policy a campaign issue in 2000. Could Clinton have done more? Could he have worked at it harder? Yeah, probably. But the Clinton-Gore Administration wanted to pursue sissy tree-hugger policies like development of renewable energy resources and building more energy-efficient cars and appliances. Republicans in Congress wanted to drill.

In this document from 2000 the Clinton Administration claimed Congress had approved only 12 percent of the funding requested for Clinton energy programs. At the same time, Congress cut funding for existing programs the Clintonistas considered vital to meeting future energy requirements. Republicans in Congress had become fixated on drilling in ANWR as The Only Energy Crisis Solution We’ll Ever Need.

And then came the Oil Guys.

This Greg Palast BBC story from 2001 reminds us of what changed after the Bushies assumed power.

The state of California has accused the El Paso Corporation and Dynegy of deliberately restricting the flow of natural gas through the pipeline from Texas creating an artificial shortage which caused prices to go up ten-fold.

President Clinton ordered an end to speculation in energy prices in California, which bit into the profits of El Paso, Reliant, Enron and Dynegy.

Between them the four companies gave $3.5m to Mr Bush and the Republicans. Three days after his inauguration Mr Bush swept away Mr Clinton’s anti-speculation orders.

Profits for these four power traders are now up $220m in the first quarter.

And protection against pollution is set to weaken further, the BBC’s Newsnight programme has discovered that deep in Mr Bush’s new budget, the million-dollar fund for civil enforcement to deter pollution will be axed.

In the future law enforcement will be left to locals.

The operative word for oil companies was bonanza. It was the lawless Wild West all over again. And I’m not so sure they’re ready to settle down and behave even now.

Today Frank O’Donnell wrote for TomPaine.com —

You know President George W. Bush’s ratings are in the toilet when he starts bashing oil companies in the name of protecting what he repeatedly called “our consumers,” as he did yesterday.

And you know the Party in Power—just back from getting an earful from angry constituents about rising gasoline prices—is shaking in its shoes at the prospect of tomorrow’s (April 27) profit announcement by ExxonMobil.

So the president did what a floundering politician does: he tried to change the subject.

O’Donnell goes on to document that the energy industry helped create the fix we’re in now. For example,

In declaring that part of the problem is that we haven’t built new refineries in the U.S. in decades, the president is being simply disingenuous. As he well knows from his days in the business, the big oil companies decided for economic reasons that it was more cost-effective to expand existing refineries than build new ones. In fact, they have managed those expansions to avoid a gasoline glut that could lead to lower prices.

Can’t have lower prices, can we? My gracious.

And then there’s the problem of Mr. Bush’s “do” deficit. From an editorial in today’s New York Times:

During his State of the Union speech last January, President Bush correctly diagnosed America’s oil consumption as an addiction. Unfortunately, Mr. Bush is balking at taking the steps to cure the abuse. …

…The alternative energy technologies Mr. Bush emphasized — biofuels, hybrids, hydrogen power — are important and promising. What’s missing is a plan to get us from here to there. That means oil and gas prices will continue to rise, as America leads the world in draining the planet’s petroleum resources.

If Bush remains true to form, he’ll trot around for a while making speeches about an energy policy that will, somehow, never come to pass. If he can get prices down in the short term (and surely his oil industry buddies can arrange that) the “crisis” will be over and he can continue to do nothing.

Of course, linked to the energy crisis is the global warming crisis that conservatives refuse to acknowledge even as the polar ice caps are melting. At least this time there won’t be an iceberg to hit. Although it might be understandable to provide a short-term relaxing of environmental law to meet a short-term crisis — might, I say — paying the greenhouse gas piper must be part of whatever long-term policies we eventually adopt. Righties are still at the “you loony liberals are so loony” stage on that issue, however, so I’m not expecting bipartisan consensus anytime soon.

Oh, and since the great Northeast Power Blackout of 2003, has anyone heard that the Bushies have come up with a plan for maintaining the aging electricity grid? I haven’t, but maybe it got by me.

One other thing — remember the “know thy enemy” T-shirt discussed in the previous post? One of the bullet points is “If you see a fuel-efficient car, it’s probably being driven by a liberal. Run it off the road with your SUV.” Make of that what you will.

Giggles

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Digby provides some shining examples of rightie “humor.” One is a T-shirt bearing the slogan “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required.”

The other is a list called “Know Thy Enemy: Fun Facts About Liberals.” This is followed by a list of suggestions, such as “Liberals will try to entice you with their twisted logic. Counter with a bitch slap,” and “Liberals are always whining about tolerance, but when I punch them for that, they get moody. Hey, be tolerant!”

Righties will say that if we don’t laugh at the joke we have no sense of humor. Of course, these little jokes aren’t really about being funny, are they?

There are all manner of soc-psych studies on “humor” as a form of hostility and aggression. A quickie google search turned up this one. The authors find that men who enjoy sexist humor are more likely than other men to be aggressive toward women and have, um, an accepting attitude toward violence against women, including rape.

Most women recognize when “humor” is being used to insult them and keep them in their place, and they don’t laugh. This may be the foundation of the stereotype that women don’t have a sense of humor. If you are old enough to remember the 1950s and early 1960s you might remember when a comedian only had to say “women drivers” and roll his eyes up, and the audience would howl. Ugly wives and shrewish mothers-in-law were also standard stand-up material. Women drivers, wives, and mothers-in-law were expected to laugh.

Many years ago, ca. 1978, I edited a book by a man who made a living as an after-dinner speaker. In fact, I dimly remember it was a joke book. I deleted a spectacularly ugly “joke” about wife beating, and he complained to the senior editor that I had no sense of humor. But the senior editor was a woman, too. The joke stayed out. All the ugly wife jokes stayed in, though; if we’d deleted those, there wouldn’t have been enough material left for a book.

In earlier times most white Americans just loved hideous caricatures of African Americans and other minorities. The Library of Congress prints & photographs archive is full of the stuff. This Harper’s Weekly cover from 1876 was intended to be funny, I suspect (if you haven’t been much exposed to this genre before — the guy on the right is Irish). This cartoon from 1893 is a “humorous” depiction of “darkies” at the Chicago World’s Fair. And this specimen was considered a real knee-slapper back in 1916. These illustrations were not aberrations; they’re very typical of cartoons commonly published in major general-circulation newspapers and magazines in their day.

If they don’t make you laugh, you must not have a sense of humor, huh?

Although it’s true humor sometimes can diffuse hostility, it seems obvious that laughing at a person or group is a way for the laughers to reaffirm their shared hatreds and make their bigotry socially acceptable. It is no coincidence, IMO, that the ugliest of the racial cartoons in the LoC archives come from the same time period as Jim Crow and mass lynchings. It’s also no coincidence that Jews were caricatured in Nazi cartoons. (The LoC has a collection of Nazi cartoons that are not online.)

You might remember a few days ago when a rightie wrote in the comments to this post “heh, well if its one thing you ‘lefties’ lack, its a sense of humor.” I had been dismayed at the guy’s attitude toward foreign tourism displayed in this blog post. Yes, obviously, he meant it to be humorous. But the loud-and-clear subtext of the piece is derision and condescension toward non-Americans, which only another American nativist would find funny. The authors’ defensiveness and discomfort with foreigners is palpable. It’s a very ugly piece that, apparently, got picked up by Pajamas Media and linked (no surprise) by Little Green Footballs, a not-jolly crew if there ever was one.

Liberals laugh at righties, but as a rule, liberals don’t make jokes about righties being lynched or slapped or punched. Yet these acts of aggression are staples of rightie humor. That says something, IMO.

Of course, righties don’t think Al Franken is funny, which proves they don’t have a sense of humor. You may have heard this one, but I’m gonna tell it again, anyway … here Al explains humor to Ann Coulter —

Ann recently told an audience:

“We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’ creme brulee,” Coulter said. “That’s just a joke, for you in the media.”

Here’s my question. What’s the joke? Maybe it’s a prejudice from my days as a comedy writer, but I always thought the joke had to have an operative funny idea. I’ll give you an example of a joke.

    1. Like they do every Saturday night, two elderly Jewish couples are going out to dinner. The guys are in front, the girls riding in back. Irv says to Sid, “Where should we go tonight?”

Sid says, “How about that place we went about a month ago. The Italian place with the great lasagna.”

Irv says, “I don’t remember it.”

Sid says, “The place with the great lasagna.”

Irv says, “I don’t remember. What’s the name of the place?”

Sid thinks. But can’t remember. “A flower. Gimme a flower.”

“Tulip?” Irv says.

“No, no. A different flower.”

“Magnolia?”

“No, no. A basic flower.”

“Orchid?”

“No! Basic.”

“Rose?”

That’s it! Sid turns to the back seat. “Rose. What was the name of that restaurant?”

That’s a joke.

And it still makes me giggle.

Update: Outside the Beltway tries to argue that leftie T-shirts are just as nasty as rightie ones. However, his T-shirt examples are all aimed at Bush and only Bush, not all conservatives — nothing comparative to the “liberals are the enemy” message described above — and the closest any of them come to advocating violence is the one that says “Give Bush another pretzel.” (The OtB blogger explains “there’s not a specific Democrat for Republicans to focus on.” Nah — the “liberals are the enemy” meme has been kicking around since the 1960s, at least.)

There’s a “European travel T-shirt” that says “Sorry my president is an idiot” in French, German, Dutch, Italian & Spanish. I actually kind of like that one.

He did find some bumper stickers that express hostility for all conservatives and Republicans. I say honestly that I don’t find these a bit clever or funny, just juvenile. It’s possible they weren’t meant to be funny. There’s a link to a “less family-friendly” site selling the kind of raunchy junk that I complained about in this post. They’re not funny and I’d be very happy if nobody ever wears them.

Thanks to services like Cafe Press anybody with half a brain can create nasty T-shirts and stickers and try to sell them on the web. The “Know the Enemy” shirt, however, comes from IMAO, a long-established rightie “humor” site and member of Pajamas Media. I’d be very surprised to find a leftie blog with a comparable blogosphere ranking pushing “all conservatives are the enemy so let’s smack them” merchandise.

Update update: Steve M. finds more examples of rightie “humor.”

Update update update: See David Neiwert, who points out in this post that the IMAO blogger has a history of hostile “humor.”

Update update update update: As I predicted in the post above, rightie commenters on the IMAO blog have decided we liberals don’t have a sense of humor. The blogger says he just wants to make people laugh, and I suspect he believes that’s true. But the “humor” displayed is, IMO, a form of passive aggression, not real humor.