Month: April 2007

Sleeper Cells

by digby

I know this is currently tristero’s beat, but way back when this blog was just a little blogbaby, I discussed Jeff Sharlet’s fascinating expose in Harper’s called “Jesus Plus Nothing: Undercover among America’s secret theocrats.” It remains to this day one of the more chilling articles I’ve ever read about the intersection of politics and religion in this country. The facts in the article are true but they are so bizarre that I think people discounted it because it’s almost impossible to believe.

Or was. Now that we know about the little theocratic “sleeper cells” that have been implanted throughout the government during Bush’s reign, it doesn’t seem all that bizarre at all.

Just a quick recap:

Ivanwald, which sits at the end of Twenty-fourth Street North in Arlington, Virginia, is known only to its residents and to the members and friends of the organization that sponsors it, a group of believers who refer to themselves as “the Family.” The Family is, in its own words, an “invisible” association, though its membership has always consisted mostly of public men. Senators Don Nickles (R., Okla.), Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), Pete Domenici (R., N.Mex.), John Ensign (R., Nev.), James Inhofe (R., Okla.), Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), and Conrad Burns (R., Mont.) are referred to as “members,” as are Representatives Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), Frank Wolf (R., Va.), Joseph Pitts (R., Pa.), Zach Wamp (R., Tenn.), and Bart Stupak (D., Mich.). Regular prayer groups have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries. The Family maintains a closely guarded database of its associates, but it issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities.

The organization has operated under many guises, some active, some defunct: National Committee for Christian Leadership, International Christian Leadership, the National Leadership Council, Fellowship House, the Fellowship Foundation, the National Fellowship Council, the International Foundation. These groups are intended to draw attention away from the Family, and to prevent it from becoming, in the words of one of the Family’s leaders, “a target for misunderstanding.” [1] The Family’s only publicized gathering is the National Prayer Breakfast, which it established in 1953 and which, with congressional sponsorship, it continues to organize every February in Washington, D.C. Each year 3,000 dignitaries, representing scores of nations, pay $425 each to attend. Steadfastly ecumenical, too bland most years to merit much press, the breakfast is regarded by the Family as merely a tool in a larger purpose: to recruit the powerful attendees into smaller, more frequent prayer meetings, where they can “meet Jesus man to man.”

“We work with power where we can,” the Family’s leader, Doug Coe, says, “build new power where we can’t.”

At the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast, George H.W. Bush praised Doug Coe for what he described as “quiet diplomacy, I wouldn’t say secret diplomacy,” as an “ambassador of faith.” Coe has visited nearly every world capital, often with congressmen at his side, “making friends” and inviting them back to the Family’s unofficial headquarters, a mansion (just down the road from Ivanwald) that the Family bought in 1978 with $1.5 million donated by, among others, Tom Phillips, then the C.E.O. of arms manufacturer Raytheon, and Ken Olsen, the founder and president of Digital Equipment Corporation. A waterfall has been carved into the mansion’s broad lawn, from which a bronze bald eagle watches over the Potomac River. The mansion is white and pillared and surrounded by magnolias, and by red trees that do not so much tower above it as whisper. The mansion is named for these trees; it is called The Cedars, and Family members speak of it as a person. “The Cedars has a heart for the poor,” they like to say. By “poor” they mean not the thousands of literal poor living barely a mile away but rather the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom: the senators, generals, and prime ministers who coast to the end of Twenty-fourth Street in Arlington in black limousines and town cars and hulking S.U.V.’s to meet one another, to meet Jesus, to pay homage to the god of The Cedars.

[…]

There they forge “relationships” beyond the din of vox populi (the Family’s leaders consider democracy a manifestation of ungodly pride) and “throw away religion” in favor of the truths of the Family. Declaring God’s covenant with the Jews broken, the group’s core members call themselves “the new chosen.”

I urge you to read it all if you haven’t and to read it again if you have.

Sharlet has a new article in Rolling Stone, which he disusses at Talk To Action. And as you would expect, he has some intriguing insights into some of the “Good Bushies” that have been salted throughout the government:

There’s much concern that the Bush administration has been allowing the infiltration of federal government by Christian fundamentalist “sleeper cells,” political appointees whose first loyalty is not to the Constitution, but a reductionist understanding of the Bible. It’s true, of course, and here’s another one…

In my latest Rolling Stone story, “Teenage Holy War” (only the first quarter of it’s online, here; the rest is in the issue on the stands now) I wrote of one such character, Rebecca Contreras, whom I saw “lecture” at the east Texas Honor Academy of Ron Luce, a fundamentalist youth leader:

The week I’m at the Academy, the guest speaker is Rebecca Contreras, a pretty 35-year-old professional evangelist in blue jeans who was a former Special Assistant to the President in Bush II’s first term, responsible for 1,200 presidential appointments. She tells us about one of her first days in Washington. “The vice president is sitting there, and the president is sitting in his chair,” she said. “There I was, little Latina Rebecca from the inner city.” Contreras had not gone to college. She felt overwhelmed by all the advanced degrees in the room — Cheney, with his almost-Ph.D (he’s a drop-out), Bush, with his Harvard MBA. “The Devil began to say, `Look at you, you don’t belong here. You’re not credentialed.’ Then I heard the voice of the Lord say, `Put you’re eyes on me!'” Contreras raises her finger in imitation of God. ” `I CREDENTIALED YOU! I HAVE PLACED YOU HERE!’ ” The moral of the story, she says, is that obedience to God matters more than education. Contreras speaks of “generational curses” for those who do not obey — the idea that one must pay for the sins of one’s fathers, after all, a notion rejected even by most fundamentalists — and then she closes her eyes and begins swaying as she prays in a strong alto sing-song for the Battlecry interns, many of whom will go no further in their education than this hall, many of whom have risen to their feet during her story and some who have fallen to their knees. “I pray Father-God that these young people, that they would impact. That–Father-God–some would even–Father-God–become missionaries and pastors, some of them would become, oh Father-God, senators! And congressmen! I thank You, Father-God!” The boy next to me, a towering slab of earnestness with sheepdog bangs, shakes with tears as the class comes to a close.

[…]

There are many, many great evangelicals working in government, almost all of them clear about the constitution and every bit as dedicated to their jobs as their counterparts of other faiths and no faith. And, for the record, there’s nothing illegal about getting yourself a government job because you believe government should be led by God, so long as you perform your job competently. But from a democratic perspective — small d democratic, that is — there’s a real problem with men and women dedicated not to democracy but to a sort of voluntary theocracy, especially when they work toward that end without regard for competence or rule of law (Goodling, Contreras above). And those of us opposed to the fundamentalist attempt to pack the bureaucracy have to recognize that this problem has been with us for decades.

I’m sure there are many wonderful evangelical believers in government too. But I don’t consider people like Rebecca Contraras amongst them. Regardless of how you feel about religion in politics, when you get right down to it, she is just a facilitator of a corrupt and incompetent patronage machine. Whether Goodling or Brownie, the conservative “movement” is filled with the worst and the dumbest and this country will fail with people of this caliber running it. There are just too many hungry competitors out there in the global economy who don’t put their trust in prayer to make things happen. They study, work hard and try to do it better. As Benjamin Franklin said, “the Lord helps those who help themselves.” (And he didn’t mean help themsleves to the treasury, either.)

“The Family” may have once been the toppermost of the poppermost for the religious politico set, but they left the everyday scut work to the Good Bushies. The results were entirely predictable.

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Last Gasp Strategery

by digby

I’ve been hearing on television for a while now that the Democrats are on the run. Joe Scarborough said a bit back that Bush was “a phoenix rising.” I assumed it was wishful thinking to buck up the base, considering that everything the administration does turns to compost, but apparently, this is an actual strategy.

BC from Cliff Schecter’s blog reports:

Three weeks ago, Republican pollster David Winston wrote in his weekly column in Roll Call (subscription required)

“The honeymoon is officially over. Like a pair of newlyweds back from a week on a warm Caribbean beach, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) suddenly have run head-on into the cold, harsh reality of wartime politics. They may have a majority, but the party’s marriage of anti-war liberals and centrists seems shaky and sorely lacking in cohesion as Congressional Democrats struggle to find an Iraq War policy on which
they can agree.Shrewdly, the Democrats kicked off their newly won control with their “100 Hours” agenda, kind of a “Contract with America”-lite, designed to score some quick public relations points with voters without the heavy lifting. Now, the first phase of their takeover is all but over, and the new majority’s track record clearly has failed to impress the public.In two media polls taken in early March by CBS News/New York Times and NBC/Wall Street Journal, Congressional job approval remained at a low ebb with a 31 percent approval rating and 53 percent disapproval. It’s worth noting that the Democrats’ low marks don’t differ from Republicans’ job approval of only a year ago when voters in these same polls gave Congress approval/disapproval ratings of 32 percent/54 percent and 33 percent/53 percent, respectively, just eight months before sending the GOP majority packing.

When I first read that passage, I thought Winston was an incredible idiot for making that statement. The Democrats had barely been running the House and Senate for two months, and he was already suggesting the American people had judged them. Of course, he was wrong.

A new AP Poll shows that Congressional approval is on the rise, and much better than the Republicans from last year.

Read the whole thing.

I think perhaps the biggest problem for Republicans right now is that they have forgotten how to live in reality. Years of pretense and believing their own BS has left them very weak and disoriented. That is not to say they won’t regroup. They just need a rest after all the pillaging and warmongering. They’ll get a grip before too long. But it’s an interesting case study in what happens to a movement that is almost exclusively reliant on hype and marketing when its “product” has been thoroughly discredited and rejected. It’s not pretty.

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Blog Against Theocracy Part VII: Culture Is Religion

by tristero

This is the final set of excerpts from With Liberty & Justice for All: Christian Politics Made Simple by Joe Morecraft. Here Morecraft discusses the relationship between religion and culture. He asserts that all culture is, by definition, religious, but not necessarily “theistic,” i.e. based in God. Since religious neutrality is a “myth,” any attempts by a “secular” state to assert a tolerant attitude towards a diversity of religions are utterly misbegotten. In fact, such a “secularist” state privileges a “pragmatic” and “technalist” philosophy, all in the service of a dangerous non-theistic state religion: “humanism.”

**
[MORECRAFT, IN A DISCUSSION OF THE DANGERS OF RELIGIOUS NEUTRALITY QUOTES “CHALLENGE AND RESPONSE” BY BERNARD ZYLSTRA]

Neutralism is the view that man can live wholly or partly without taking God’s Word into account. Those who pay homage to the fiction of neutrality maintain that many segments of modern culture are merely technical. It is then thought that a corporation, a union, a school, a government can be run by making exclusively factual, technical decisions which have no relation to one’s ultimate perspective on the basic issue… [NOTE: THIS ATTITUDE IS ECHOED SOMEWHAT IN THE MISSION STATEMENT OF “INTELLIGEN DESIGN” CREATIONIST WILLIAM DEMBSKI’S BLOG, Uncommon Descent IN ITS CRITIQUE OF “MATERIALISM.”] This “technalism” is the result of a pragmatic philosophy. The defenders of “technalism” are among the most dangerous guides to a wholly secular world. (pp 110-111.)

What do we mean by the word, religion? It is “the binding tendency in every man to dedicate himself with his whole heart to the true God or an idol,” according to F. Nigel Lee [IN HIS BOOK, “THE CENTRAL SIGNIFICANCE OF CULTURE”]. In this sense, all men are religious because no man can escape being a man in the image of God created to worship and serve God, rebellious and unregenerate though he may be…Man is inescapably religious.

What do we mean by the word, culture? It is religion externalized. Culture “is the unavoidable result of man’s necessary efforts to use and to develop the world in which he lives either under the guidance of the Lord or under the influence of sin…in short, the cultural products of the whole of man’s life stand either in the service of God or in the service of an idol,” writes Lee (pp. 113-114) [IN THE SAME BOOK AS ABOVE.]

All cultures, then, are thoroughly religious and never can be a-religious. (That is not to say that they are all theistic. For instance, humanism, as recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court [Torcaso vs. Watkins [NOTE: THIS IS MOREHEAD’S BRACKETING] ] is a non-theistic religion believing only in man. [NOTE: THIS IS A WILLFUL DISTORTION OF A SLOPPILY WRITTEN FOOTNOTE BY ONE SUPREME COURT JUDGE. IN NO WAY WAS HUMANISM SO DEFINED BY THE SUPREME COURT, LET ALONE “RECOGNIZED” AS A RELIGION. SEE COMPLETE DECISION HERE.]

Every aspect of a nation’s life will reflect, and cannot help but reflect the religion of the citizenry, whatever that religion may be. Religious neutrality in politics, and in every other facet of a nation’s culture and life, is a myth…There are no neutral cultural activities, as there are no neutral “works;” they are either “good works” or “evil deeds,” done either to the glory of the God of the Bible or to the glory of an idol (non-god). (p.115)

[MORECRAFT QUOTES “THE CALVINISTIC CONCEPT OF CULTURE” BY H. VAN TIL]

…the position of the cultural anthropologist is tha religion is simply a projection of the human spirit, an attempt to manipulate the unseen by magic, or, in any case, that man creates the gods of his own image, thus making it a cultural achievement. This is also the general attitude of the religious liberal, who uses religion for achieving man’s ideal goals such as world peace… The reason religion cannot be subsumed under culture is the fact that whereas man as a religious being transcends all his activities under the sun, culture is but one aspect of the sum total…To divide life into areas of sacred and secular…is to fail to understand the true end of man. (p. 116)

**
Morecraft’s book then has a chapter extolling the virtues of far right Georgia Congressman Larry McDonald, who was killed in the crash of Korean Airlines flight 007. Morecraft speculates that in fact the crash may have been deliberately caused by the Soviet Union in order to eliminate an uncompromising and effective opponent of Communism.

The final chapter is an extended screed against abortion, consisting of standard far right arguments in favor of banning the practice which, if ever enacted, would have the effect of increasing the number of deaths of poor women seeking coathanger abortions.

I draw the following conclusions from reading Morecraft’s book:

1. Christianism is a poltical movement. It is a serious mistake to consider it religious expression. It must be confronted in the arena of politics. This political movement is an imminent threat that has already seriously eroded Church/State separation.

2. It is important to understand that while christianists share a particular worldview, there are major differences between them that must be understood in order to fight them effectively. To assume that all christianists are the same, and therefore their views needn’t be understood in any real detail, is a foolish mistake. It will make it that much easier for a theocrat like Tim LaHaye to deflect opposition to his activism by highlighting unsuspected differences between his views and, say, Morecraft’s.

3. Most followers of the christianists surely have little idea of the movement’s real goals. There are few genuine theocrats, but they have created many bamboozled followers. It is hard to imagine that many Americans truly desire, as Morecraft does, a U.S. government without the consent of the governed. But like a frog that boils to death in a slowly heating pot, many followers – especially in the more “moderate” christianist groups – are gradually inured to a totalitarian mindset via bald-faced lies and distortions, that America was founded as a Christian nation, for example.

4. If one’s goal is simply to beat back the theocratic assault by the American far right, then the immediate fight is best characterized not as a culture war but as a political struggle against a dangerous, well-funded, anti-democratic foe. Such a characterization isolates the theocrats and enables broad coalition-building that can include both the non-religious and formerly mainstream religious groups who historically have been opposed to theocracy.

This final point is somewhat controversial. Some infer that advocating a large coalition of religious and non-religious people against the theocrats is tantamount to demanding that atheists and other “secular humanists” compromise their message. Not necessarily. Or rather, I, at least, do not advocate such a sellout. I believe that a broad coalition opposed to theocracy requires no compromise from any of the myriad groups opposed to their will to power.

As I see it, opposition to theocracy and advocacy of a non-theistic worldview are two separate goals. When theocrats succeed in advancing their agenda, all moderate religious denominations are as endangered as the non-religious. There are good reasons for Catholic-Americans to work with Jewish Americans to oppose efforts to erode Church/State separation despite profound theological and philosophical differences. Furthermore, both groups are equally as endangered as the non-religious and the religiously non-observant. We have seen theocrats assault the religious practice of anyone who fails to adhere to their idiosyncratic pseudo-theology. The Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter is not really a Christian, ditto the Catholic Kerry, the Protestant Dean, and the Mormon Romney.

In fashioning an effective coalition to defeat christianism, there is no reason for Catholics to stop praying the Rosary, and there is no reason for Jews to start! Likewise, there is no reason for atheists to pretend they really believe in God. All have a common goal: to push back to the margins of political discourse the anti-American, totalitarian thugs who are, right now, tearing down the wall of separation of Chruch and State.

In short, the here and now danger is James Dobson and Howard Ahmanson, not an Episcopal minister soliciting donations for a homeless shelter from her congregation. It is sheer foolishness to lump them together. When we fail to recognize the difference, we inadvertently provide theocrats cover to pursue their voracious will to power. In addition, it permits christianists the opportunity to falsely claim solidarity with all religious people – ie, the vast majority – in opposition to “atheistic secularists” when, in fact hardly anyone in the US agrees with the christianist political agenda once it is accurately described.

In conclusion, I’d like to stress how poor our understanding is of the relationship between American religious belief and its interaction with attitudes towards science and society. We read that some 49% of all Americans believe Genesis over evolution when it comes to the origins of human beings. While I have no doubt that that is an accurate, and deeply troubling, statistic, it should only serve as the beginning, not the end, of an investigation of how religious belief intersects with science. Where were those questions asked? Does the proportion change if the population surveyed has recently attended church? Or gone to a natural history museum? How do the proportions skew for age? Precisely how were the questions framed? I strongly suspect that American religion/science attitudes are far more complex than have been reported. Understanding that complexity won’t make the 49% statistic any less disturbing. But it will make it possible to create genuinely effective strategies to lower that figure.

To paraphrase Gary Larson, we know the theocrats are nuts. But to fight them, we need to know exactly how they’re nuts. At present we don’t know very much. Hopefully, by discussing one theocrat in depth, Joe Morecraft, I’ve helped provide some insight into the precise nuttiness that many christianists share. It’s by no means a complete picture, and christianists differ, but maybe, for those Americans who’ve never thought too much about what these people actually believe, it’s a start.

Dispatches From The Freashow Circuit

by digby

Back in the day I wrote:

This article in The Times seems to validate my theory that Bush saw Kerik as some sort of alter ego. It doesn’t elaborate on his insistence on relying on his gut and therefore overruling the necessary vetting, but I’ll bet you he did. These guys aren’t usually sloppy about these things and this was outrageously sloppy. It has the mark of Codpiece all over it.

digby 12/19/2004

Waddaya know:

Bush met Kerik in the debris of the World Trade Center and was so impressed that he later sent him to Iraq to train police. The bald, mustachioed street cop appealed to Bush, who admired his can-do persona. By 2004, Kerik was sent to the Democratic National Convention as part of an opposition war room, given a prime speaking slot at the Republican National Convention and tapped to appear with the president on the campaign trail.

[…]

So when Giuliani telephoned Bush to recommend that he make Kerik his second-term homeland security secretary, the president jumped at the idea. The sheen of a 9/11 hero seemed to be just what was needed to take on a troubled new department struggling to integrate 22 agencies and 180,000 employees to protect the nation’s ports, borders and airports; enforce immigration and customs laws; and respond to major disasters. Only a few aides, including then-Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and senior adviser Karl Rove, were clued in to the president’s decision.

[..]

…White House officials knew that Kerik had been head of the nation’s largest police department and had a security clearance for his work in Iraq. He was a hero of Sept. 11. He was well liked by the president. No one checked with key officials at the Homeland Security, Defense or State departments or elsewhere in the government. Even within the White House, the choice was kept secret so Bush could make a splash.

“The loop on it was extremely small,” said a former official. “That’s a president-of-the-United-States, ‘I don’t want anyone to know, I want to announce it on Friday’ [deal]. It drives people to not follow all the normal procedures.”

Yeah.

Of course, it’s never really their fault. Nothing is:

In the White House, there is still resentment toward Giuliani for foisting the problem on the president. “There are two people who are to blame for what happened — Rudy Giuliani and Bernie Kerik,” said one former White House official. Still, a senior administration official acknowledged some responsibility as well. Bush wanted “a hard-charging personality” to get the department in line, he said. “Instead, we ended up shooting ourselves in the foot.”

It had the mark of the Codpiece, allright. As does everything else this misbegotten empty suit has done to this country over the past six years.

Update: Oh, and in case anyone’s wondering about last week’s featured Republican weirdo, Dr Oxytocin, check this out:

The daughter, whose name was withheld, also said Keroack gave her parents money and presents, and allegedly issued a fraudulent prescription for the anti depressant Zoloft to her sister — who had insurance — when their uninsured mother became unable to pay for the prescription herself.

In his response to the board, Keroack acknowledged that he had switched the prescription, saying that he had recently given the complainant’s sister several free samples of Zoloft. With the prescription in hand, he said, the sister would then be able to pass the samples on to his patient. He said it was like “killing two birds with stone.”

He also acknowledged giving the patient money and presents, but denied overstepping the patient-doctor boundary, as alleged in the complaint.

“I am guilty of being generous to a fault in the care of this couple and their family,” said Keroack, who has a degree from the Tufts University School of Medicine.

“It seems that being aware of the dynamics in a family that I have taken care of for over 12 years has somehow been interpreted to be atypical, abnormal, and a violation of boundaries,” he wrote the board. “This is a sad reflection on the state of what is considered normal within today’s medical care system. In my opinion, it does not serve a patient’s best interest to whisk them in and out of an office visit in 15-20 minutes, learning nothing about their actual every day life.”

[…]

In the 2005 complaint, the patient’s daughter, who had once been Keroack’s patient, alleged that the doctor gave her mother money for groceries, evenings out with her husband, and a Cape Cod getaway for the couple. “What MD does this???” the daughter wrote the board of medicine in writing.

But she seemed most upset by a letter he had recently sent urging her to make peace with her parents, who had both been diagnosed with cancer.

Using exclamation points, all-capitalized sentences, and quotes from country singer Randy Travis, Keroack urged his patient’s daughter to make up with her mother “before it’s too late to fix it.” “If either of your parents were to die tomorrow . . . . YOU and ONLY you will be responsible for the losses that will surely follow.”

The man is a gynecologist. And obviously a total nutcase, not that we didn’t already know that. He’s just another in a long line of Bush appointees from the bowels of the far right freakshow who have been given important jobs in the federal government.

I can only imagine what we are going to find in the civil service after seven years of career workers being forced out for Pat Robertson U grads. Aye yay yay.

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It’s Hard Out Here Fo A Pimp

by digby

I’ve been listening to alleged journalists falling all over themselves on television to assure all of us that Don Imus is a really great guy underneath all the ugliness and that he’s really, really, really sorry. Even David Gregory is vouching for him like a brother while that paragon of integrity Armstrong Williams is begging that he be given another chance.

I can’t help but be reminded of the Imus profile of a year ago in Vanity Fair (not online, unfortunately) in which his psychotic freakshow was fully revealed. I’m sure all these disgusting sycophants read it. After all, it featured them in starring roles — being insulted by Don Imus:

“They don’t make good decisions,” he says of MSNBC and its programming. “You can’t make idiotic decisions like (hiring hosts) Tucker Carlson and Ron Reagan.” Of conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, he says: “He’s a twit. He’s a pussy.” This is in the same spirit as an earlier comment on Senate majority leader Bill Frist (“a fucking criminal”). Similarly, when he looks up from his circular desk at a television monitor during a commercial break and sees Chris Matthews, the host of Hardball, silently nattering away, he says, “There’s that idiot,” to no one in particular.

It makes you wonder why they continue to appear on his show and are making complete fools of themselves today assuring everyone that Imus is a “good man.”

This might explain it:

I can feel the high of becoming part of his incestuous circle of regulars-the media elite who have entree with the I-Man and have never seemed troubled, at least publicly troubled as far as I can tell, by the show’s forays over the years into homophobia and crudeness and sexism. I like this idea of being right in there with columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich of The New York Times and NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and David Gregory and Tim Russert (husband of Vanity Fair special correspondent Maureen Orth), all Imus regulars. I wonder if there’s some secret media-elite handshake I need to learn, just so I can hear the jubilant sound of the cash register ringing when it comes time to sell my next book, because nobody (with the clear exception of Oprah) sells a book better than Imus.

He likes that power, enjoys going on Amazon to see just how much he can boost a book. During the week I’m there, he has Larry the Cable Guy on as a guest-Larry has just written a book called Git-r-Done. Before the show, according to Imus, the book was about 1,800 on the Amazon list. But when he checks on the Internet just after the show, it’s No. 122.

I wonder if the media elite’s failure to seriously take Imus to task for anything is due to a fear that their book-promotion pipeline will be cut off if they rub him the wrong way. In a 1998 New Yorker piece, Ken Auletta drew up a list, confirmed by Imus, of more than a dozen high-profile journalists who made contributions to the Imus Ranch. It’s hard to quibble with donations to a worthy cause. As George Stephanopoulos said on the air to Imus in 1998, with his book on the White House still in the works, “I’m not too proud to suck up for a good cause. So count me in for $5,000 on the ranch!”

I wonder what I would have done, had I been an Imus regular with a book to sell, when the previous sports announcer for the show, Sid Rosenberg, said on the air last May of a female entertainer who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, “Ain’t gonna be so beautiful when the bitch got a bald head and one titty.” I wonder how I would have reacted to the cackling of various members of Imus’s ensemble over the next minute or so to Rosenberg’s remarks, as well as Imus’s own hardly outraged response: “There’s a reason I fire you about every six weeks.” He did get fired from the show, and Imus distanced himself from what Rosenberg had said. He says the remarks were “horrible,” but there seemed to be something disingenuous about Imus’s repudiation-complete bullshit, as he might put it-given that Rosenberg had already distinguished himself on the show in 2001 by calling tennis player Venus Williams an “animal” and noting that she and her sister, Serena, had a better chance of posing nude for National Geographic than Playboy. I wonder what I would have done had I been in the audience the night Imus made his crude and unfunny remarks about President Clinton and his wife. Would I have said, That’s it, never again. Or would I have been like Cokie Roberts of ABC television, who called Imus’s remarks “profoundly rude,” vowed never to go back on the show, and then did several years later when the opportunity arose to push her new book, We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters.

It’s as if they believe we can’t read or are too stupid to figure out what they are doing. I read Vanity Fair. I hear his disgusting show and hear them on it, kissing up to him like he’s some sort of oracle instead of a spoiled, petulant bully with an incoherent worldview. And I also listen to their complaints about the vituperation on the internet, how the bloggers — especially the “angry left” — are horrible people who treat them disrespectfully. And I have to laugh because I know that Don Imus can call them and their colleagues twits and pussies in Vanity Fair and they come back licking his boots, begging for more. And we know why.

They have earned their reputation — even some of the good ones, the ones who write things I like. When you sell your personal integrity for money to a racist scumbag like Don Imus, you have to expect that people are not going to treat you with a lot of respect.

Don Imus has been behaving badly and apologizing for it for many, many years. I expect he will continue to do so once he’s finished with his two week vacation. And all of these writers will once again make pilgrimages to his show and pledge fealty to him in order to sell books. Because, unlike those great basketball players he maligned so casually — they really are whores.

Update: Democratic politicians like Joe Lieberman who have the utter gall to lecture people about civility while they patronize this swill are whores too, by the way:

McGUIRK: You know, before you get paroled, you have to admit that you did something wrong and you’re — you’re sorry for it.

IMUS: I never admitted it when I went down there and got in all that big jam, insulting Bill Clinton and his fat ugly wife, Satan. Did I? Did I ever say I was sorry for that?

No he didn’t. But even if he had, he’d just be saying the same stuff the next week and all the sycophants would be crawling up his robes eager to demean themselves again.

Update: I just watched an MSNBC panel unable to come up with an instance of Rush Limbaugh racism except for his comment that Obama is a halfrican. I guess they forgot that he was fired from ESPN for his bigoted remarks about Donovan McNab:

“the sports media, being liberals just like liberal media is elsewhere, have a desire that black quarterbacks excel and do very well so that their claims that blacks are being denied opportunity can be validated.”

For some reason, the mainstream media just refuse to believe that Rush is a wingnut jerk of the highest order. When he is publicly exposed as a racist to the extent that he is fired from a broadcast network, they forget all about it. Why is that?

(And, of course, there are myriad other example as well. But you’d think that would at least have stuck in their memories.)

Oh, and at the time it happened, Rush had to decline to accept the Claremont Institute’s “Statesmanship Award” that year because he was under such a cloud for his drug addiction and racist remarks and had to go to rehab. Not to worry. They gave it to him the next year. Here is a little piece of the speech the racist creep gave at the “Churchill Dinner” where he accepted a bust of old Winnie himself:

How many of you yesterday happened to see any pictures at all of the opening ceremonies of the Bill Clinton Library and Massage Parlor? (Laughter) How many hands do I see? Okay. I don’t see too many hands and I’m not surprised. Let me tell you, I watched it. Not because I wanted to. I watched it for you. I watched it, my friends, because it’s my business to do this. The Clinton library opening ceremonies epitomized, if you will, exactly where the left in this country is today. First, where was it? It was in a red state. They hate red states. In fact, the media in this country, the — what I call them, the liberal spin machine — I don’t like to use the word “mainstream press” anymore. The liberal spin machine was there. They were all excited. But they’re thinking about sending foreign correspondents to the red states to find out what people — and to the red counties of California — to find out what Americans are really like.

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Hey, Must Be The Money

by digby

So I make myself some coffee and open my dead tree version of the NY Times this morning only to see a call for blogger ethics on the front page. How interesting. Another call for “managed civil speech” (which is claimed to be “freer” than unfettered free speech.) There was no word on who would be the managers of such speech, but I think we can count on those who call for it to be the ones who feel they are most qualified to define and enforce it. (Apparently, this will all be done “voluntarily” and will be dealt with through purges and link boycotts and the novel concept of moderated comment sections. Or something.)

Meanwhile, on the media page is a story about the execrable Don Imus and the fact that he routinely makes racist, misogynistic and eliminationist jokes on his show while half the Washington press corps spends time there kissing his ring. For some reason that kind of “incivility” doesn’t upset the journalistic prima donnas half as much as the uncivil blogosphere does.

So what’s up with this? The blogosphere is admittedly an uncivil place. Nobody disputes that. But it is comprised of a bunch of disparate individuals who are arguing amongst themselves with varying degress of seriousness and talent as part of the national (and international) dialog. There is a corner of it that is despicable and revolting, as the misogyny that set off this latest debate clearly demonstrates. But for inexplicable reasons it’s the liberal blogosphere that is being particularly attacked for our alleged incivility by the mainstream media. (I suspect it’s the fact that we drop the “F” bomb too much, which is simply shocking in American life)

However, for almost two decades now, talk radio has been spewing vile racist, misogynistic and eliminationst spew — and their stars have been feted and petted for it among the highest levels of the capital cognoscenti. I don’t know for sure why that would be, but I have my suspicions.

First of all, I suppose it’s possible that the media insiders all share the politics and beliefs of Rush and Imus and O’Reilly and Hannity and Savage. They could be crude racists and misogynists and haters of all forms of liberalism who love to make vulgar jokes at others’ expense. I have no way of knowing except for the company they keep. So that’s one theory.

The other is that they are, like a lot of people in this culture, drawn to anyone who makes a lot of money, and lord knows, these spewers of rightwing filth have made billions from selling their hate over the years. Many of the media insiders are extremely wealthy themselves, so perhaps they see Rush and Imus as being part of their social class and therefore are willing to give them a pass. That’s another theory.

Or maybe it’s because they all work for big media companies and there’s a certain synergistic pressure on all of them to kiss each others asses.

Or maybe it’s a combination of all these things and more.

Whatever the reason, it’s quite clear that mainstream media have either ignored, pandered to or actively embraced hate radio for almost two decades now. Nary a peep has been said about the relentless, daily drumbeat of demogoguery and loathing of their fellow citizens that these talk show hosts vomit onto the public airwaves for anyone with a radio to hear.

Imus seems to have garnered some tepid attention with his “nappy headed hoes” comment, although it’s not substantially different from the kind of racist, misogynist offal he’s featured on his show for years. So, in addition to having to apologize, he got a gentle little lecture from one of his “gang” today, mainstream journalist Howard Fineman of Newsweek magazine.

FINEMAN: Just before I came on the show, I was coming upstairs and my cell phone rang, and it was some listener who called me out of the blue. I’d never heard of the guy before. I’d never heard his name. He called me and he said, “Are you going to go on the show and finally confront this Imus guy? Are you going to quit enabling him?” And, you know, I thought about that, and I said to the guy, “You know, I’ll puzzle that through on the radio.” And I would like to continue to enable you to do a lot of the good things you do. Including, you know, talking about stuff happening in the world, which you do a very good job of on this show.

You know, the form of humor that you do here is risky, and sometimes it runs off the rails. Most of the people who listen to this show get the joke most of the time, and sometimes, you know, as David Carr said in The New York Times this morning, sometimes you go over the line so far you can’t even see the line. And that’s what happened in this case. And I think of all the stuff you’ve done and do do, and, you know, you make your mistakes — we all make our mistakes. We all make mistakes. This was a big one. And I thought that the way you handled it just now — and I’m not blowing smoke here — I believe it, you know, was very heartfelt. And I know you well enough to know that that’s the case and you’re going to do everything you can to set it right.

You know, I don’t know what’ll happen. I think — you know, it’s a different time, Imus. You know, it’s different than it was even a few years ago, politically. I mean, we may, you know — and the environment, politically, has changed. And some of the stuff that you used to do, you probably can’t do anymore.

IMUS: No, you can’t. I mean —

FINEMAN: You just can’t. Because the times have changed. I mean, just looking specifically at the African-American situation. I mean, hello, Barack Obama’s got twice the number of contributors as anybody else in the race.

IMUS: Amen.

FINEMAN: I mean, you know, things have changed. And the kind of — some of the kind of humor that you used to do you can’t do anymore. And that’s just the way it is.

IMUS: But I would say, in the spirit of charity, that the same black journalists who are calling for me to be fired had the option — and the same black leaders — they had the option to call me when I was asking for weeks about help in trying to get more information about sickle-cell anemia, about what the government was doing, about what could be done about research. And nobody — nobody — called me.

I’m not looking to get patted on the back for that, but those are the facts. So we — people can write and say whatever they want to say about me, but they have an obligation to respect the facts of my life and what I do. And I’m not trying to excuse or weasel out of anything. But a context and a proportionality to who I am and what I do and what my wife does is crucial. So, anyway, thanks.

FINEMAN: Well, I hope the women from Rutgers will meet with you, and — although I can understand if they won’t, but I hope that they do. This is what they call a teaching moment, you know, in child-rearing, they call a teaching moment. This is a teaching moment for us all. For everybody. You know, all of us who do your show, you know, we’re part of the gang. And we rely on you the way you rely on us. So, you know, you’re taking all of us with you when you go out there to meet with them, you know.

IMUS: Well, these people at CBS Radio, Les Moonves on down, have known me for years. I wouldn’t be on the radio this morning if they thought that I meant this or if they thought that I was a bad person. They know what the deal is with the show — everybody understands that. Same with — I’ve been on MSNBC for 10 years. I know everybody over there. From [NBC Universal president Jeffrey] Zucker on down. So —

FINEMAN: Well, we’ll see how it goes.

IMUS: They’re not fools, you know.

FINEMAN: We’ll see how it goes. Good luck with it.

You have to hand it to Imus. He knows very well what he brings to the table. And so does his “gang.”

I’m almost speechless at Fineman’s comments, though. A rich white man derisively calling black women “nappy headed hoes” has never been acceptable among decent people — never. Howard Fineman just lowered himself to the level of the most rank, putrid racist by implying that Imus is just a little bit behind the times with his bigoted remarks. I’m surprised he didn’t come right out and say that Imus should have used “less inflammatory” language to describe his racist revulsion for the Rutgers University women’s basketball team. You just can’t say those things, you see. (Maybe he could have given him some pointers on proper racist code like: “those are some rough looking, affirmative action queens.”)

Meanwhile, the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz publicly derides liberal bloggers as racists for being rude to poor little Michelle Malkin, author of “Invasion: How America Still Welcomes Terrorists, Criminals, and Other Foreign Menaces to Our Shores” and “In Defense Of Internment.” And the NY Times uses its front page to issue a call for blogger ethics. From where I sit as one of those loathesome pseudonymous bloggers, this looks a bit odd. In fact it looks as if the mainstream press is living in an insular little universe populated by rich rightwingers who either lead them around like pied pipers — or have welcomed them into their ranks. Either way, they continue to fail their readers with this increasingly difficult to sustain disconnect from the world in which the rest of us are living.

The discourse that everyone is so shocked to see is now uncivil and “nasty” was polluted decades ago by a bunch of rich, white businessmen who saw that they could make a very nice profit at exploiting the lizard brain of the American rightwing and help their political cause at the same time. The media thought it was all in good fun (and good for their bosses) just as they do today.

We bloggers didn’t make this toxic, fetid environment, we just live in it. And toxic and fetid it is. At some point the prim and proper MSM are going to have to put down the smelling salts over the uncivil blogosphere and deal with the fact that the world they enabled with their convivial chuckling and snorting at Rush and Imus over the years has brought us to this place. The rest of us are little busy fighting off the neanderthal thugs they helped create.

Update: Et tu, Oliphant?

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Playing Real Good For Free

by tristero

One quick break from theocracy to comment quickly on Gene Weingarten’s boneheaded article about Joshua Bell playing for free in the DC Metro. The article is everything others have said it is, condescending, elitist and obnoxious. But let’s not stop there. The idea that a world-class musician would forgo the proscenium stage and the snoots is a great one.

Accordingly, I propose divorcing the idea from Weingarten’s pomposities. Let’s get other great musicians play in public spaces anonymously and unannounced. It’s what the Beatles did in Liverpool. It’s what Bach did every Sunday, and at the coffee-house Collegium in Leipzig. Branford Marsalis, Zakir Husain, Rory Block, Leila Josefowicz, my God, there are so many great ones! Let’s get this music-making in front of people, so it becomes part of their lives. The problem isn’t with people’s ability to understand anything but the most insipid music around. The problem is that great music is too hard to find, too hard to learn about, too hard to hear live.

Great musicians performing in such a place as to be literally integral to a community’s daily life – man, now that’s a great idea.

Blog Against Theocracy Part VI: The Continuing Influence Of Pat Robertson

by tristero

Another bonus post (and there will be one more post of excerpts from Morecraft following this one even though the blogswarm is officially over). In the comments to Part V, Enlightened Liberal wondered whether there was any real chance of a Christian Republic, ie a theocracy, ever happening in the U.S. I referred him back to Part IV of this series. But the takeover of the Texas GOP by christianists is old news. Here’s an example “ripped from today’s headlines:”:

When Monica Goodling’s name erupted into the news last week, the mainstream press discovered suddenly that Pat Robertson’s Regent University exists. Not only that, the press learned that it has made a deep footprint in George W. Bush’s Washington…

The right has exploited the mainstream press’s ignorance about Robertson to avoid weathering the blowback from his most embarassing gaffes. Case in point: Two years ago, after Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, Fox News’ Brit Hume introduced what would become a central talking point for spinning the controversy. On the August 23, 2005 episode of Fox News’ Special Report, Hume declared, “The televangelist Pat Robertson’s political influence may have been declining since he came in second in the Iowa Republican caucuses 17 years ago. And he may have no clout with the Bush administration.”

Morton Kondracke echoed Hume, exclaiming that “Pat Robertson’s day has long since passed…”

But in the wake of Goodling’s hotly publicized resignation, the mainstream press suddenly — and correctly — decided to judge Robertson by the fruits he has borne…

The Christian right is far more than a pantheon of charismatic backlashers with automatonic followers of “old men and women.” It is also a sophicated political operation with a coherent long-term strategy. Goodling may be out of a job, but thousands of capable Christian right cadres remain, waging the culture war from inside the White House, federal agencies and Republican congressional offices. Together they will continue to inflame conflicts that were previously unimaginable.

Anyone insisting in spite of continuously mounting evidence that the Christian right is going to simply shrink into oblivion because the Democrats control Congress, or because evangelical leaders are prone to scandal, should learn from Goodling’s example and take the fifth.

For details to back up these assertions, please visit the link.

Two points:

I am not claiming that Robertson is a follower of Rushdoony. He is not and there are important differences between the two men. I am saying that Robertson, Rushdoony, and Morecraft are all theocrats who share a common worldview and the common objective to transform the United States into a “Christian Republic” or a theocracy.

I am also not claiming that a full blown theocratic dystopia a la The Handmaid’s Tale is likely in America’s future. However, the theocrats have managed to undermine the separation of church and state in numerous different ways. Many of the goals of the theocrats, which were considered utterly crackpot, are now considered fit for mainstream discussion. Some examples include the establishment of an office of “faith-based initiatives,” the utterly substance-less “intelligent design” creationism, the advocacy of a minimalist federal government, the opposition to the U.N. and multi-lateralism, the establishment of a false dichotomy between a dominant “secularism” and a persecuted Christianity, the attempt to undermine and eliminate Social Security, and the placement within the American government, at all levels, of political operatives fully committed to destroying American liberalism.

By “American liberalism” I am not referring specifically to those of us who call ourselves “liberals” but something far broader. The goal of the theocrats is to replace the Englightenment liberal idea of a nation of laws and the consensus of the governed with a government of self-described superior beings who claim they derive their power directly from God.

Such claims immunize rulers from criticism or accountability from the people. Such claims are made, in many different ways, by the Bush administration. Only Bush, of all presidents, at least in recent history, has explicitly claimed that the reason he took the country to war was because God told him to. Furthermore, Bush has never discouraged his far right base from claiming he is God’s avatar on earth. (If anyone doubts this, I’ll gladly provide links.) But sometimes the claim that “God commands it” is minimized or simply assumed, in the theocrats’ support of such far-right goals as the elimination of Social Security, income tax, or participation in the UN.

These are extremely dangerous trends. Due to a highly sophisticated public relations campaign, the extent of christianist undermining both of American civic values AND the very infrastructure of American government (as with Goodling) has been grossly underestimated by the mainstream.

Why should we worry? Well, when you have an American president who follows God’s will rather than the will of the people, you end up quagmired in insane, immoral wars as in Iraq. You end with an erosion of scientific expertise. And you end up with a federal government which holds itself accountable to no earthly law or lawmaker.In short, you end up with precisely the situation we face today with the Bush administration and, at the local level, with christianist incursions into state, county, and city government.

That’s for starters. As bad as Bush is, if the theocrats aren’t beaten back to the fringes of American politics, it will get a lot worse.

Morecraft’s “Christian Republic” is merely a sick fantasy. But an America where a woman can’t get accurate information and medical attention regarding reproductive health issues from her government because doing so conflicts with some crackpot’s idea of what the Bible says is already a reality.

And that’s why those of us who’ve read in detail what the theocrats say, and examined what they claim as their goals in light of what the Bush administration is doing are deeply worried. Too many of their worst people are already ensconced in government. And too many of their worst ideas are becoming law, or already are law.

Long May He Write

by digby

Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution says “Happy Birthday, Weirdo.” And he means it in the nicest possible way. It’s Seymour Hersh’s 70th birthday.

When asked what the secret is to being an investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh said, “I don’t make deals, I don’t party and drink with sources, and I don’t play a game of leaks. I read, I listen, I squirrel information. It’s fun.”

He never struck me as a cocktail party kind of guy. Here’s to more weirdos like him.

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New Life

by digby

I was explaining to a friend the other day that despite the fact that I’m not a religious believer, I like the spring festivals like easter and passover for all the reasons that I suspect humans have been celebrating at this time of year (in the northern hemisphere anyway) since cave days. Spring signals rebirth, new life, the world seems fresh again and alive with possibilities. It’s a beautiful time to appreciate both the spiritual and the natural world.

So, with that in mind, I thought some of you might enjoy this much viewed YouTube video in celebration of spring:

Happy Easter everyone.

Update: And for those who are just too hardboiled and cynical to appreciate the above adorableness, here’s Tom DeLay comparing himself to Jesus. Yep.

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