Month: June 2005

Expanding the Cult

Kevin at Catch catches Ben Stein deep throating Richard Nixon’s corpse again. Aside from peddling the latest Peggy Nooner dolphin fantasy — that Mark Felt is responsible for genocide because the Mahatma Nixon died for our sins, or something — he comes up with some especially colorful rhetoric to describe him:

Have you noticed how Mark Felt looks like one of those old Nazi war criminals they find in Bolivia or Paraguay? That same, haunted, hunted look combined with a glee at what he has managed to get away with so far?

He goes on to say how odd it is that Felt would betray the savior of the his people.

If he even knows what shame is, I wonder if he felt a moment’s shame as he tortured the man who brought security and salvation to the land of so many of his and my fellow Jews. Somehow, as I look at his demented face, I doubt it.

Click the link at Catch to read some of Isaac Bashevis Nixon’s inspiring words about the Jews.

I have once again misunderestimated Republicans. I had thought they had cast all their considerable historical revisionist desires totally into Saint Ronald. As the obsessive object of their fear and love had done with Lenin, I had assumed the Reagan cult would serve as the Republican historical example of perfect leadership and humanity. I was wrong. Being the great winners of ideological struggle apparently entitles them to raise all Republican leaders to the status of gods. In fact, there is no Republican leader on earth, from Joe McCarthy to Richard Nixon, who has not been entirely misunderstood until now. They have all not only been great warriors and leaders of men, they are also, each in their way, Jesus-like in their transcendent love for their fellow man and devotion to peace. All of them. Even the paranoid drunks and crooks.

Perhaps this is something necessarily present in the totalitarian mindset. The movement is infallible and all leaders of the cause must, therefore, be perfect. We’ve seen this before, of course. Caligula made his horse into a senator (and you know, Bill Frist does have a rather equine visage…) Still, it never fails to amaze me that somewhere along the line the right wing in America came to identify so closely with their left wing nemeses. Perhaps obsessing about communism all those years created a kind of mass Stockholm Syndrome. Whatever the explanation, they become more and more like them every day.

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Shoes Tumbling To The Ground

If any Democratic Senators are looking for a way to shine light on the Downing St Memo(and I’m not holding my breath) this may be the way to do it. And the beauty of it is that they can use that loudmouthed cretin John Bolton to do it:

John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal has since judged unlawful, according to officials involved.

A former Bolton deputy says the U.S. undersecretary of state felt Jose Bustani “had to go,” particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war.

[…]

The Iraq connection to the OPCW affair comes as fresh evidence surfaces that the Bush administration was intent from early on to pursue military and not diplomatic action against Saddam Hussein’s regime.

An official British document, disclosed last month, said Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed in April 2002 to join in an eventual U.S. attack on Iraq. Two weeks later, Bustani was ousted, with British help.

[…]

After U.N. arms inspectors had withdrawn from Iraq in 1998 in a dispute with the Baghdad government, Bustani stepped up his initiative, seeking to bring Iraq – and other Arab states – into the chemical weapons treaty.

Bustani’s inspectors would have found nothing, because Iraq’s chemical weapons were destroyed in the early 1990s. That would have undercut the U.S. rationale for war because the Bush administration by early 2002 was claiming, without hard evidence, that Baghdad still had such an arms program.

In a March 2002 “white paper,” Bolton’s office said Bustani was seeking an “inappropriate role” in Iraq, and the matter should be left to the U.N. Security Council – where Washington has a veto.

Bolton said in a 2003 AP interview that Iraq was “completely irrelevant” to Bustani’s responsibilities. Earle and Bohlen disagree. Enlisting new treaty members was part of the OPCW chief’s job, they said, although they thought he should have consulted with Washington.

Former Bustani aide Bob Rigg, a New Zealander, sees a clear U.S. motivation: “Why did they not want OPCW involved in Iraq? They felt they couldn’t rely on OPCW to come up with the findings the U.S. wanted.”

Bustani and his aides believe friction with Washington over OPCW inspections of U.S. chemical-industry sites also contributed to the showdown, which went on for months.

The article discusses at some length what an asshole Bolton was, menacing and inapprorpiate, but then what else is new. What is interesting is that the article connects the dots between Downing St and this explicitly.

This is an AP article. Unfortunately, it is also on the wires on Saturday where it is most likely to be overlooked. Unless we refuse to let it.

The media needs a hook to start talking about Downing St. I think Bolton’s toast, but if the nomination goes forward I would certainly hope that the Democrats would use this as an opening to start talking about it. If Bolton ends up withdrawing because of this (and he might) then the media also has an excuse to talk about it.

I wonder if Monsignor Russert will see fit to discuss this between Hail Mary’s on Press the Meat tomorrow morning?

Hat tip to samela

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What’s Good For The Goose Is Only Good For The Goose

It is interesting that the ACLU got a ruling requiring that all the Abu Ghraib pictures be released to the public. What is really interesting is that the government argued that releasing them would be contrary to the Geneva Conventions. (Via Talk Left)

“It is indeed ironic that the government invoked the Geneva Conventions as a basis for withholding these photographs,” said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney at the ACLU. “Had the government genuinely adhered to its obligations under these Conventions, it could have prevented the widespread abuse of detainees held in its custody in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.”

It’s nearly impossible to be as obtuse as is the Bush administration without having either some sort of cognitive problem or psychological impairment. I suspect it’s the latter.

This recent phony outrage about Amnesty International is another example of this pathology. They had no problem using Amnesty to buttress their case against Saddam, but balk at being called to task for our own very obvious and well known human rights abuses in Guantanamo. Of course, there is little mention of this (except by Jon Stewart) so it doesn’t matter. Patriotic correctness requires that any criticism of the United States be immediately struck down as treasonous, if not blasphemous.

If anybody still wants to know why they hate us, this would be a good place to start.

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Who Cares What We Think?

Matt Yglesias, blogging from his fancy new digs at the TPM Cafe, says today:

At today’s Take Back America conference I saw some interesting polling data from Diane Feldman on a subject I’d pondered now and again. Unfortunately, the written summary of the presentation doesn’t contain the exact numbers and I didn’t write them down because I assumed this question would be included in the summary. The point, however, was that when you ask if America is “the greatest country in the world” most voters say that it is. When you ask if Democrats believe that America is the greatest country, most voters say that they do not.

I think it’s clear that this perception creates some electoral problems. Indeed, it’s a particularly serious kind of electoral problem because my guess is that the perception is probably correct.

It seems to me that if you are a member of the “reality based” community, as so many of us liberals claim to be, that you can’t answer such a question without qualifiers. This means that we are unable to respond in appropriate knee jerk fashion and are therefore assumed to be unpatriotic. The question is simple minded and it demands a simple minded answer and that’s a problem for us. Perhaps we should just lie, like everyone already does about going to church or whether they are faithful or all the other things Americans are forced to lie about in our right wing PC times.

Patriotism is defined in the dictionary quite simply as “love of one’s country and a willingness to sacrifice for it.” That is not the same thing as believing that your country is the greatest country in the world. I love many things in life that aren’t “the greatest” and I don’t see the conflict. One doesn’t have to abandon all intellectual integrity to love something, imperfect and not-so-great as it may be. America is certainly the most powerful country in the world. One would think that people could be satisfied enough with that, but apparently not.

What does it mean to be the “greatest country in the world, or as I’ve heard it put, “the greatest country the world has ever known” anyway? Is it measured by how fair and just our system of government is or standard of living or military prowess, or what? Is it, as George W. Bush pushes incessantly, because its people are “good?” Or is it that by all measures of all things it is simply the best?

I raise this because I suspect that what people really want from liberals is not patriotism, but chauvinism, one important facet of which is characterized in this context by the belief that your national culture and interests are superior to any other. (Our vaunted “exceptionalism” is not made up of a whole lot more than that simple definition.) And, yes, some liberals do not sign on to that, for good reason. Because it’s bullshit. And America, the home of mutts from all over the world, the give-me-your-tired-your-poor immigrant nation, should be more aware of the shallowness and idiocy of this than any other country in the world. It’s not as if we are Germans trying to preserve the fairy tale of a thousand year Reich. It’s one of the good things about not being European, with all that baggage — or would be if we thought about it for half a minute.

Simple observation of the world shows that all nations are made up of human beings, which automatically taints the project. America and Iraq and China and everywhere else are comprised of this very flawed species. If you live long enough you see that, as much as our fearless leader likes to claim otherwise, Americans are not “better” and therefore our country is not “better.” Only individual people can be judged better or worse and it is without regard to nationality, culture or religious belief.

Our democratic experiment has been a worldwide inspiration and our Bill of Rights is one of the most important contributions any nation has made to mankind. This country has welcomed immigrants (in fits and starts) from all over the world and created a wealthy, successful nation because of it. I would easily sacrifice for the country, it’s my home. I love it the way anyone loves their home, with a deep and emotional connection that transcends intellectual thought. But I don’t need to suspend my judgement or my faculties and further say that this country is the greatest country on earth. There is no such thing as the greatest country on earth.

Matt feels that this presents an electoral problem. I would agree if people like me were expressing these views in a political campaign. (Just call me Ward Churchill, I guess.) However, the perception that Matt talks about isn’t fueled by some quasi intellectual argument about chauvinism. It’s fueled by Rush Limbaugh and his band of flaming gasbags who have spent the last fifteen years saying that liberals hate America day after day.

John Kerry volunteered for Vietnam, fought bravely, and came home and devoted himself to ending what he saw as an unjust war. Meanwhile his rival George Bush spent the war drinking beer and fucking off. Yet Kerry was made out to be a coward and Bush a hero. I suspect that my candidate, Wes Clark, would have been similarly reduced to sissy status despite the fact he was a four star general. Proof of love and devotion to country is not particularly relevant — just as what liberals really think about America is not particularly relevant.

Our political problems stem from some very deep and ongoing cultural anxieties that we need to think about and confront. What we can’t do anything about is the idea that liberals tend to be more — dare I say it — nuanced than conservatives. It is a characteristic not a policy. We’re stuck with that and we’re just going to have to find a way to make it work for us.

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Common Sense

Dear FEC,

I write to you today to request your kind advisory as to whether this pamphlet defines me as an ACTIVIST or a JOURNALIST. Whilst I am loathe to corrupt our pristine electoral system with my calls to political action, neither would I wish to cause our sanctioned press any undue hardship due to its perceived affiliation with rabble like myself. I do understand that “citizen journalists” not being PROPERLY CREDENTIALED creates terrible confusion amongst the leaders of government and society. I humbly request, therefore, that you peruse my pamphlet with an eye toward giving me the designation I shall need going forward if I wish to publish and disseminate my words without government interference. I anxiously await your verdict.

Sincerely,

Thomas Paine

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For The Record

Yesterday I mentioned the fact that that FoxNews had the incredible chutzpah to discuss openly why nobody is reporting the Downing Street Memo — without actually reporting on the Downing St memo. It turns out that there is a movement afoot to gain some attention for this thing and I think it’s worth doing, if only for history’s sake if nothing else. There should be a record of some Americans’ interest in such a damning document that proves the president of the United States knowingly took the country to war on false pretenses. It may come in handy someday.

Shakespeare’s Sister informs me that theBig Brass Alliance is a collection of bloggers who are supporting a group called After Downing Street that is dedicated to gaining exposure for this issue. One positive thing that anyone can do is sign (along with 88 members of congress) this letter that John Conyers has written to the president requesting some answers to the obvious questions this document raises.

This isn’t some pie-in-the-sky lefty kumbaya petition (not that there’s anything wrong with that.) This memo is smoking gun proof that Bush lied us into war. Many of us knew this from the get. But, I think it’s probably true that most others already know this on some level as well — a fair number are glad he did, a few more don’t care, and the rest just don’t want to confront their own bloodlust or willfull blindness. It’s hard to admit you were wrong about something so deadly.

The rest of us need to keep a clear head and insist that this not be swept under the rug to the extent that we can. We have to keep the idea that there will be some sort of rational accountability for such acts alive in this culture or we are goners.

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Losing Their Religion

Regarding right wing Christians putting their embryos up for adoption and insisting they not be adopted by gays or non-Christians (preferably not a working woman either) AMERICAblog wonders how this Bush promoted religious discrimination can get past the editors of the NY Times unaddressed.

I’ll tell you how:

Though we have our lapses, (pdf) individual news stories on emotional topics like abortion, gun control, the death penalty and gay marriage are reported and edited with great care, to avoid any impression of bias. Nonetheless, when numerous articles use the same assumption as a point of departure, that monotone can leave the false impression that the paper has chosen sides. This is especially so when we add in our feature sections, whose mission it is to write about novelty in life. As a result, despite the strict divide between editorial pages and news pages, The Times can come across as an advocate.

The public editor found that the overall tone of our coverage of gay marriage, as one example, “approaches cheerleading.” By consistently framing the issue as a civil rights matter — gays fighting for the right to be treated like everyone else — we failed to convey how disturbing the issue is in many corners of American social, cultural and religious life.

[…]

Too often we label whole groups from a perspective that uncritically accepts a stereotype or unfairly marginalizes them. As one reporter put it, words like moderate or centrist “inevitably incorporate a judgment about which views are sensible and which are extreme.” We often apply “religious fundamentalists,” another loaded term, to political activists who would describe themselves as Christian conservatives. …

The editors didn’t fail. They succeeded. They “re-framed” the issue of religious discrimination and gay rights. They are simply being “sensitive” and “conveying how disturbing the issue us in many corners of American social, cultural and religious life” when they uncritically report on a White House endorsed publicly funded group that enables Christian bigots to discriminate even though it’s clearly against the law.

I think it’s time we called out the PC police on the wingnuts. Nobody likes political correctness, not even liberals, really. And our day is long past. This is the new province of the right and they have finally hammered the press into thinking that discrimination and bigotry are really just normal expressions of religious belief and must be treated with kid gloves. I call bullshit every time one of these timorous cowards clutch their tiny lace hankies and blubber something about how they are being sensitive to the beliefs of bigoted assholes.

Just in case James Dobson and his new friends, the intellectuals at the NY Times, have forgotten their eighth grade American history class, Confederates used the Bible to justify slavery, too. Bin Laden uses the Koran to justify terrorism. Just because they wrap themselves in the Holy Books doesn’t mean these theo-fascists they aren’t breaking the laws of both God and Man.

For a more in depth analysis of the NY Times “credibility” report, see Reading A1
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Buy This Book

The Stock Ticker and the Superjumbo : How the Democrats Can Once Again Become America’s Dominant Political Party

I have ordered it and await it eagerly. Rick Perlstein is one of the clearest observers of American politics around and one of the very few historians who really understands how the right wing works.

It’s only 8 bucks and I guarantee that it will be worth reading even if you don’t agree with his conclusions:

A majority of Americans tell pollsters they want more government intervention to reduce the gap between high- and lower-income citizens, and less than one-third consider high taxes to be a problem. Yet conservative Republicanism currently controls the political discourse. Why?

Rick Perlstein probes this central paradox of today’s political scene in his penetrating pamphlet. Perlstein explains how the Democrats’ obsessive short-term focus on winning “swing voters,” instead of cultivating loyal party-liners, has relegated Democrats to political stagnation. Perlstein offers a vigorous critique and far-reaching vision that is a thirty-year plan for Democratic victory.

If you are very good, I may even be able to persuade the author to do a little blogospheric interview if he’s so inclined. It’s long past time that liberals supported their writers and thinkers the way the wingnuts support theirs.

Update:

Speaking of books, are any of you libertarians out there a little bit discomfited by the fact that “On Liberty” by JS Mill got an honorable mention in the 10 worst books list by HumanEvents magazine? I mean, “Mein Kampf” and “Das Kapital” aren’t big surprises. I’m not shocked by “The Feminine Mystique” or even the inclusion of John Maynard Keynes (although you have to love this commentary: “FDR adopted the idea as U.S. policy, and the U.S. government now has a $2.6-trillion annual budget and an $8-trillion dollar debt.” Haha.)

But “On Liberty”? What, he wasn’t sufficiently agitated about stem cell research? The capital gains tax?

Jesus, I now have not one single intellectual connection to the right. Not one. They are aliens from another planet.

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The Party Of Krugman

Somebody asked me what my favorite columnist was the other day and I said that I thought most liberal bloggers like Krugman because he writes the way we write — he doesn’t suffer fools and he writes with all the righteous indignation he feels at what he sees. And, I suspect that this is why establishment journos like Daniel Okrent don’t like him. He just refuses to play the game by establishment rules.

This post by Brad DeLong exposes the entire silly social aspect of this and gives us a window into why liberals are being marginalized in the mainstream media. We are supposed to be nice. The other side is expected to be tough and uncompromising. Krugman is a fighter and he never gives ground when he thinks he’s right. That’s unbecoming in a liberal because it means that you have to engage in the facts and have a real argument instead of just hurling insults or bumper stickers as you can when dealing with right wing critics.

Daniel Okrent finds his behavior unseemly and annoying:

For a man who makes his living offering strong opinions, Paul Krugman seems peculiarly reluctant to grant the same privilege to others. And for a man who leads with his chin twice a week, he acts awfully surprised when someone takes a pop at it

[…]

On Prof. Krugman’s defense of his unfamiliarity with it, he’s effectively saying, “If I didn’t know about it, it must not be important.” This is a polemicist’s dodge; no self-respecting journalist would ever make such an argument.

[…]

Believe me — I could go on, as could a number of readers more sophisticated about economic matters than I am. (Among these are several who, like me, generally align themselves politically with Prof. Krugman, but feel he does himself and his cause no good when he heeds the roaring approval of his acolytes and dismisses his critics as ideologically motivated.) But I don’t want to engage in an extended debate any more than Prof. Krugman says he does. If he replies to this statement, as I imagine he will, I’ll let him have what he always insists on keeping for himself: the last word.

I hate to do this to a decent man like my successor, Barney Calame, but I’m hereby turning the Krugman beat over to him.

Oh Boo hoo hoo. God forbid a liberal should accuse one’s critics of being ideologically motivated. You would think that the ombudsman of the NY Times would have a slightly bigger bone to pick with the right wing which has been calling them ideologically motivated for 40 fucking years. But then, that would require they acknowledge reality and that is what cannot happen.

Paul Krugman is an in-your-face, unapologetic member of the reality based community. He calls it as he sees it and he doesn’t mince words in doing so. As he amply demonstrated in his response to Okrent’s shallow criticisms (which, even if true, would hardly back-up his calumnous accusations in his last piece) Krugman does not particularly enjoy being told he is wrong on the facts when he isn’t. World class economists may be used to being called to task for their conclusions or their predictions, but saying that he is cooking the numbers for partisan reasons are fighting words. His reputation rests on his intellectual integrity. Of course he is going to fight when challenged by lame conventional wisdom and spoonfed propaganda. If only more liberal pundits had his guts we might not be where we are today.

Paul Krugman is tough and fearless and we need more like him — people who are not part of the cliquish Sally Quinn social scene (it about made me puke to read that unctuous little screed again) and who do not depend upon the approbation of aging social mavens for their self esteem.

Tell me that the party of Krugman is a bunch of soft cowards who can’t fight terrorism or run a disciplined economic agenda. Tell me the party of Krugman doesn’t know what it believes in. The party of Krugman believes in reality, that the emperor has no clothes, that up is up and down is down. And it isn’t afraid to tell snivelling little babies like Daniel Okrent to stick it where the sun don’t shine. The party of Krugman doesn’t lay down and take it. It fights.

Update! Somerby takes Okrent, skewers him quickly and then slowly roasts him over a very high flame. It is awesome. Okrent, the Manhattan fop.

No Mirrors Available

This is too much. Shakespeare’s Sister spots a FoxNews headline that says: Downing Street Memo Mostly Ignored in US.

Can you believe it? And then Fox goes on to wonder why that might be. They simply can’t figure it out. They interview people and ponder the question and go to great lengths to explain why it isn’t being reported. I don’t see that they interview Roger Ailes or John Moody, however. Perhaps they were too busy.

They even point out that the left has been trying in vain to get attention for the issue:

Several popular left-leaning blogs have taken up the cause to keep the story alive, encouraging readers to contact media outlets. A Web site, DowningStreetMemo.com, tells readers to contact the White House directly with complaints.

“This is a test of the left-wing blogosphere,” said Jim Pinkerton, syndicated columnist and regular contributor to FOX News Watch, who pointed out that The Sunday Times article came out just before the British election and apparently had little effect on voters’ decisions.

“In many ways that memo might prove all of the arguments the critics of the war have made,” he added. “But the bulk of Americans don’t agree, or don’t seem that alarmed, so it is a power test to see if they can drive it back on the agenda.”

I guess the fact that most people don’t know is irelevant. Certainly, it can’t be because FoxNews itself isn’t reporting it. Except, of course, to report that nobody cares.

Even though Pinkerton is trying to turn this into a test of the liberal blogosphere for gawd knows what reason, it is an important story that we should continue to press. Sometimes these things take time.

Check out DowningStreetMemo.com. They’ll tell you where to send your angry lefty e-mail.

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