Month: February 2008

E. Coli Conservatism

by dday

By now you’ve heard about the 134 million pound recall of beef, after a Humane Society video showed employees at a slaughterhouse abusing downer cows and forcing them into the food supply.

The recall applies to beef slaughtered at the Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. since Feb. 1, 2006. The company has produced no meat since Feb. 4 of this year, when operations were suspended.

The action came nearly three weeks after the Humane Society of the United States released a video showing workers at the plant using forklifts and water hoses, among other methods, to rouse cattle too weak to walk. In addition to issues of animal cruelty, the video raised questions about whether so-called downer cattle were entering the food chain in violation of federal regulations.

Although the Humane Society said at least four non-ambulatory cattle had been slaughtered for food, the USDA had repeatedly said it had no such evidence. On Sunday, federal officials said for the first time that they had evidence such cattle from Hallmark had been processed for food.

There have been enough of these videos made by PETA, the Humane Society, and other groups, that you have to figure that this kind of animal cruelty is the norm. Businesses want to maximize their profit and that means using every animal as meat, regardless of their physical health or disease. And the reason is very simple: there aren’t enough resources for the USDA to inspect all of the plants. They have too few inspectors and not enough funding. With little oversight comes many opportunities for abuse, because there won’t be any consequences. Democrats can investigate the process all they want; like the pet food recall, like the toy recall, they’ll discover that nobody’s doing any overwatch.

This is how the “drown government in the bathtub” ideology of conservatism ends up impacting everyone’s real life. Their goal is to strip as much regulation as possible for business, and you can only infer that they don’t care about the results. Just another thing at stake in this election.

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The Passion Of St. John

by tristero

What turns John McCain on? Judges so reality-challenged they think the New Deal was Leninism:

[Janice Rogers Brown’s] speeches given to the Federalist Society and the Institute for Justice, Brown railed against judicial opinions in the 1930’s upholding the New Deal as “the triumph of our own socialist revolution.” Brown, almost alone among lawyers, openly yearned for a return of the so-called “Lochner-era” in which a conservative court routinely struck down labor, health and safety laws in the early 20th century. In the words of Robert Bork (no liberal he), Lochner is an “abomination” that “lives in the law as the symbol, indeed the quintessence of judicial usurpation of power.” No one in the Senate is more responsible for Brown’s confirmation to a lifetime seat on the all-important DC Circuit Court of Appeals than John McCain, a fact he touts on the campaign trail.

And why does he tout his support of Judge Brown? Well, there could be many reasons, but I think the real reason begins with the fact that placing judges as delusional as Brown in the Supreme Court is a high priority, if not the highest priority, of christianists:

As for us, we will continue to fight for judges who interpret the Constitution based upon its original meaning, and who recognize that there are distinct limits on their powers and responsibilities. As our founding fathers knew, a restrained and limited judiciary is essential to the continued freedoms of a nation. They knew from personal experience the despotism that occurs under all-powerful judges, and they put in place protections to ensure this would never happen again. Unfortunately, not many of our elected officials have read the Constitution and too many judges are on record as saying the Constitution is outdated and irrelevant.

Judges—a key issue, especially when you remember that limited, constitutional judges would not have “found” a right to privacy in the Constitution that gave us Roe v. Wade, or the separation of church and state that ripped Ten Commandment’s out of schools and court houses.

Anyway, it turns out that Janice Rogers Brown is just the kind of judge “Dr.” Scarborough hearts:

Judge Janice Rogers Brown, of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, recently gave a speech at Harding University that deserves an enthusiastic amen from every Christian in the land.

…An African-American from California, who came from an impoverished background, Janice Rogers Brown has thrown down the gauntlet to the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the rest of their ilk.

…God willing, someday I’ll write about Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown. Whether or not that day ever comes will depend on what Christians do between now and Election Day 2008. If Hillary Clinton takes the oath of office in 2009, if the Senate remains in liberal hands, the next nominee for the high court will be another Ruth Bader Ginsburg or David Souter, rather than a true judge of Brown’s caliber.

And that’s why McCain’s so proud he voted for that crackpot. Because people like Scarborough just don’t trust McCain. Here, Scarborough quotes with agreement from the “email based” edition of the Wall Street Journal’s Poliical Diary

[from the Political Diary:]Senator John McCain’s biggest challenge remains proving himself to conservatives on core issues like judges. That’s why at last week’s CPAC speech, he was at pains to differentiate himself from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, whom he said would appoint federal judges ‘intent on achieving political changes that the American people cannot be convinced to accept through the election of their representatives.’

He echoed those sentiments in a recent manifesto for a Federalist Society symposium — and none too soon. Conservative critics, led by Rush Limbaugh, have turned their attention on former New Hampshire Senator Warren Rudman, who endorsed Mr. McCain and served as co-chair of his 2000 campaign. Senator Rudman was a chief sponsor in 1990 of David Souter, now part of the Supreme Court’s reliable left flank and a “disaster” for conservatives, according to Mr. Limbaugh. “Rudman… the guy who misled us all on David Souter happens to be a top honcho on McCain’s campaign,” the radio host told listeners last Tuesday.

As it happens, Mr. Rudman is not a “top honcho” in the campaign this year, but as recently as the Florida debate, Mr. McCain did name him as an important adviser in the “the circle that I have developed over many years.” Not helping matters is a remark Mr. McCain reportedly made questioning Bush Justice Sam Alito because he “wore his conservatism on his sleeve.” Mr. McCain now says he doesn’t recall making the statement.

Voters like to know what they are voting for, and Mr. McCain has gradually come around to making clear, specific promises to appoint “proven” conservative judges. His biggest credibility challenge, however, may be his authorship of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. Whatever Candidate McCain says now, the only way a President McCain would likely be able to preserve his handwork is by appointing more liberal Justices to the Supreme Court.

[“Dr.” Scarborough:] An interesting perspective–and one worth dwelling on. Senator Rudman, along with Senator Sununu, convinced President George H. W. Bush to nominate Souter to the bench–who consistently votes antithetical to our conservative values. [italics and bold in the original]

By the way, notice how Scarborough boldifies the accusation of Souter support (horrors!) but ignores the refutation. In any event, Scarborough needn’t worry about McCain. As Doug Kendall wrote in the first link above:

…one looks in vain for a judge who is too ideologically conservative for McCain: he voted to confirm Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas and, unless I’ve missed something, every other Republican judicial nominee voted on in his 22 years in the Senate.

Let’s be clear. McCain didn’t vote that way to pander to anyone. He really, really likes far-right judges. He’s acting on his bedrock principles as a movement conservative.

Y’know what galls me, tho? Nick Kristof knows McCain’s record on judicial appointments is militantly extremist. And yet he persists in perpetuating utterly irrelevant myths about McCain’s straight talk. Who cares whether McCain lies or not when his record of fanatical support for some of the worst ideas in modern American politics is so stark?

Again, my friends, the issue is McCain’s judgment, including his demonstrated blindness to reality (that Bagdhad market again) and his support of the same in others (Bush, Rogers Brown). Adhering to far right principles doesn’t demonstrate a depth of character. Rather, it shows how incredibly obtuse and narrow-minded a person is.

It is high-time for pundits like Kristof, who pretend to be above the deplorable partisanship of partisan politics, to stop clowning around and tell the simple truth about the current crop of GOP candidates. They run the full gamut from deplorable to worse-than-deplorable. It is ridiculous to pretend that ’08 is a contest between two opposing but valid world views, Democratic or Republican.. Rather it is a contest between a reality-based politics and one based entirely upon myths and chimera like “straight-shooting,” “compassionate conservatism,” and “winning wars on terror.” It is high time Kristof, and other, more influential media figures, recognized this.

Run For Your Lives

by digby

Is everyone shivering with fear today waiting for airplanes to fly into their beds? Yes, it’s true. You are all as unprotected as little babes, now that the Protect America Act has expired. Run for your lives! You are no safer today than you were last August when the Protect America act was rammed through the congress on a whisper campaign that the terrorists were planning an attack on Washington DC.

Remember that?

On August 2, Roll Call issued a breaking news report, warning of a suspected terror threat against the U.S. Capitol:

Capitol Police officials have stepped up the department’s security presence on Capitol Hill in response to intelligence indicating the increased possibility of an al-Qaida terrorist attack on Congress sometime between now and Sept. 11.

Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) ratcheted up the rhetoric, “ominously” advising that “Congress needed to pass changes to terrorist surveillance laws before leaving for the August recess and warned that otherwise ‘the disaster could be on our doorstep.’” Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), speaking at a FISA event yesterday organized by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, stated that the terror claims were “part of a well-orchestrated campaign” by the administration to politicize the FISA debate. She referred to the efforts as part of the “Rovian strategy of using terrorism as a wedge political issue.” Harman asserted that the intelligence agencies “knew” the terror claims propagated by conservative lawmakers were false:

That specific intelligence claim, it turned out, was bogus; the intelligence agencies knew that –apparently had communicated to Congress or to relevant people that it was bogus, the source was unreliable. But that communication wasn’t in any published form until the day that the Senate passed the amendments to FISA.

On August 5th, 2007 they passed that bill. The same bill they insist is absolutely necessary to keep the country from suffering another terrorist attack. The same bill which was not in place until six months ago and which Democrats were willing to extend as is except for the granting of immunity for lawbreaking corporations.

The Republicans are wise and understand that this isn’t an easy issue to explain to the American people. They know they can just say that the Democrats are refusing to give the President the tools he needs to keep terrorists from killing you in your beds. And it might work again. But the administration has been crying wolf for nearly six years, over and over again, whenever they want something, and it’s human nature to discount these threats after a while. The Republicans will run on beating back the twin boogeymen of terror and taxes, and there are a fair number of people who will throw in their lot with the fear mongers. But it seems pretty clear that most of the country is not as responsive to this stuff as they used to be.

9/11 was a terrible day and the price the world has paid for it has been huge. Iraqis and Americans and Afghans continue to pay the price every day. But this mindless fearmongering has turned 9/11 into a cheap Republican advertising campaign. I’m sure they’d love to switch gears and try another tack, but really, what do they have? They’ve got their “reformer with results” St John McCain out there snarling out the words “my friends” like a rabid pit bull with Tourette’s Syndrome and talking about staying in Iraq for a thousand years while claiming that he’s going to radically cut non-defense government spending during a recession. He’s like a Salvadore Dali version of Bush.

They are going to plop this big mess (including, by the way, our impending “victory” in Iraq which the Democrats will be accused of squandering starting January 21st 2009) in the lap of the next president to give themselves some daylight between Mr 28% and the conservative movement.

It would be very helpful if a new Democratic president and the Democratic congress would make it their business not to let this happen. Unless they want to be blamed for all the fallout, and lose big in 2010, they’ll make sure the country knows, without doubt, who is responsible for this mess. (Of course, we all hoped for that in 2006, but maybe a new president will make the difference.)

Update: Greenwald captures the Heritage Doomsday clock:

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Dumb As Posts

by digby

All of ’em.

Can someone explain to me why Republican presidential candidates are always saying completely brain dead things like this?

SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN, (R) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I do not believe in mandates. I believe that every American should have affordable and available health care and I’d like to talk just an additional minute about that. But I’m not going to mandate that they do. I want every American to have affordable and available education. But I’m not going to mandate that they do.

Is he planning to dismantle the public school system?

It looks like we’re going to have an instant replay of the memorable 2000 campaign where Junior kept saying things like “Down in Washington they’re playing with social security like it’s some kind of government program.”

I think it’s pretty clear that a majority of the American people have had enough of that.

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Just Another Post-Partisan Monarch

by dday

Or perhaps, just another spoiled little rich man who is disinterested in complying with the rule of law:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg invoked a rarely used power today not to enforce a law he deems illegal, saying he would ignore an electronic recycling bill passed by the City Council this week if his planned veto is overridden.

The mayor, on his weekly radio program on WABC-AM (770), said the bill as currently written is “totally illegal.”

“We will not enforce it,” he said. “And we don’t have to enforce it because it violates a whole bunch of federal laws on interstate commerce.”

The threat evokes the much-debated use of so-called “signing statements” by the Bush administration. In a 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning series, Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe showed how the president has used hundreds of these statements to disobey laws passed by Congress on issues ranging from military rules and regulations to affirmative action.

In 2006, the Bloomberg administration won a battle in the state’s highest court saying the mayor does not have to enforce a law he deems to be unconstitutional. That legal fight was waged over a 2004 law passed by the City Council, after overriding the mayor’s veto, that would have required private companies that contract with the city to provide the same health care and other benefits they extend to married couples to domestic partners.

Isn’t the whole Bloomberg appeal supposed to be that whole “liberal on social issues and the environment” thing?

Sounds to me like Bloomberg’s idea of “getting along and working together to solve problems” is identical to the current resident of the White House.

(and actually, the real problem here is the NY State Supreme Court agreeing that the mayor can ignore any law he decides is unconstitutional. That passed a legal test? Are you kidding me?)

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The World’s Best Panderer

by tristero

Originally, the title to this post was an obscene play on words, the topic being how much Nick Kristof enjoys ingesting the products of John McCain’s totally bent straight shooter. I thought better of it – and so should you, because you’ve got better things to do. Like documenting all of Nick’s serious misunderstandings of St, John McCain’s positions and actions. They are legion.

Me, I’d like to focus on this very silly, but none the less dangerous (because it is so often believed), ad hominem fallacy, a persistent one that Digby has also discussed:

In short, Mr. McCain truly has principles that he bends or breaks out of desperation and with distaste. That’s preferable to politicians who are congenital invertebrates.

No, it’s not.

How anyone after George W. Bush could conceivably defend something so idiotic is truly beyond me. Let’s grant – just for a moment, I promise – that Kristof’s dichotomy is true, namely that the world divides neatly between politicians with nothing but principles and politicians with none. Then it’s quite clear that principles don’t matter in the slightest. What really matters is judgment. Clarence Thomas has principles, fer crissakes. That doesn’t mean I want him anywhere near a position of influence in my government. In most instances (we all know the exceptions) I would far, far prefer an agonized Hamlet on the Supreme Court who decides the cases on their merit, not by recourse to a pre-existing ideology stuffed to the gizzard with principles on what the law “should” be or “is.”

But the world doesn’t divide as neatly as Kristof says it does. No one, even Tom Delay, is bereft of principles (death to insects! was the last thing many a Texan termite heard). And anyone, even our greatest leaders can be portrayed as spineless. Try parsing Lincoln’s positions on slavery and race sometime. Chase was (one of) the genuinely principled abolitionists in the cabinet, not Honest Abe. He even said that if he could preserve the union by keeping slavery, he would keep slavery (yes, I know, Lincoln’s a wily one and what he said has many interpretations, but I can’t imagine Chase saying anything remotely like that: his principles wouldn’t allow Lincoln’s nuanced, or if you prefer, unprincipled attitude towards individual freedom versus restoring a potentially fragile political union).

Anyway, Nick types on:

[McCain] is a rare politician with the courage not just to follow the crowd but also to lead it. It is refreshing to see that courage rewarded by voters.

I honestly can’t believe I read that in the column of a New York Times op-ed writer. Has Kristof not read his Brothers Grimm, or Andrew Lang’s fairy tale books? How many stories do you think there are in Western cultures warning against the Pied Piper, or being a lemming? Hundreds, perhaps? Thousands? And how about American history? Remember George Armstrong Custer? Or even Lyndie England’s creepy boyfriend? Or, duh! How about one George W. Bush, Crawford’s own Churchill and nemesis to Evil Ones – or at least all the bass in his cement pond?

The truth is that despite the salaries corporate CE0’s make, leaders are, in fact, rather common in the cultural milieu that produces politicians and other American elites. Political leaders with judgment – now, that’s a different story.

America doesn’t need merely anyone who can lead. They need someone who can make rational decisions about how to clean up the massive, stinking problems the Bush administration has deposited all over this country and the world. Based upon his record, his character, and his statements, in no way is John McCain that person – I can’t forget that nutty stroll in Baghdad, for example. Oh, I”ll concede that John McCain is a more rational and sensible person than Michael Huckabee. That qualifies McCain to run for the post of county dogcatcher (but not necessarily to win). That certainly does not make John McCain presidential material.

Face it, Nick. In 2008, the Republicans have to to choose from a truly awful slate while the Democrats are top heavy with potentially great presidents – and Obama, Clinton and Edwards are hardly the only truly great leaders in the party.

By the way, I won’t touch, even with an eleven foot pole, this genuinely embarassing Friedmanism:

It’s a pleasure to see candidates who don’t just throw red meat to the crowds but try to offer vegetarian options.

Consider torture.

Y’know, there oughta be a law against an innocent blogger coming across something like that on a perfectly fine Sunday morning. That really hurts.

Saturday Night At The Movies

Blues for Ceausescu

By Dennis Hartley

There was a great film that came out four years ago called Maria Full of GraceThe story was a simple, straightforward narrative about a young, pregnant Columbian woman who hires herself out as a U.S.-bound drug mule in a desperate bid to escape her bleak, poverty-ridden existence. It wasn’t a horror film. It didn’t scream “tension and suspense just ahead!” with ominous musical cues. It was quietly observant and presented with an almost detached, “life-as-it-happens” nonchalance. Yet it was one of the most harrowing and suspenseful nail-biters I have ever squirmed my way through in a movie theater. However, when I finally let out my breath at the end of Cristian Mungiu’s new film, 4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days, I realized that Maria had just met her match.

Mungiu wrote and directed this stark, gritty drama, set toward the end of Ceausescu’s oppressive regime (the late 80s). Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) and Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) are friends who share a Bucharest university dorm. From the get-go, we can see that these two aren’t exactly a pair of your typically care-free, happy-go-lucky coeds. In fact, none of the students wandering the hallways seem very quick to smile; they vibe a palpable sense of lowered expectations for their future and an innate mistrust of others that tends to fester in a totalitarian police state (you know-that nagging sense of dread that most thinking Americans have experienced since Junior deep-sixed habeas corpus).

Gabita has a problem. She’s pregnant, and wishes to have an abortion. Even though this story is set a scant 20 years ago, Gabita might just as well have wished for world peace and a million dollars in a Swiss bank account. In 1966, Ceauescu ostensibly decreed abortion to be a crime against the state in Romania, making exceptions only for women over the age of 42, and only if they had already mothered a requisite number of children; he also imposed a steep tax penalty, garnished on the income of any childless woman or man over the age of 25, single or married (he was a real piece of work). Otilia agrees to help. She secures a hotel room, and makes arrangements with a shady abortionist, Bebe (Vlad Ivanov). Once Gabita, Otilia and Bebe converge, an increasingly nightmarish and heart-pounding scenario proceeds to unfold for the remaining three-quarters of the film.

Most of the more dramatically gripping moments take place in the hotel room, particularly in a hard-to-watch scene where the creepy Bebe forces an utterly reprehensible act of extortion on the two young women prior to performing the abortion. If you are squeamish, you may not make it all the way through this portion of the film. The unblinking realism of Mungiu’s vision demands full commitment on part of the viewer, and those more sensitive souls may want to avoid the film altogether. I think it is important to point out that when I apply the term “unblinking”, I don’t want you to interpret it to mean “exploitative”; there is nothing exploitative or “sexy” going on here.

This is one of those films that you find yourself thinking about long after the credits roll; the significance of certain scenes doesn’t sink in completely until you have had some time to digest. One such scene for me is when Otilia has to abandon Gabita in the hotel room during a crucial post-procedure monitoring period because she has promised her boyfriend Adi (Alex Potocean) that she would join him for dinner at his parent’s house (her boyfriend is already asking too many questions about her mysterious errand). There is a static shot of the dinner table that must last for a good 7-8 minutes, where Otilia sits in center frame, not able to explain the real reason she is not eating (at that point, we in the audience have lost our appetite, after viewing what happened in that hotel room). She says very little, other than a few perfunctory pleasantries, while the other dinner guests laugh and prattle on about mundane matters, proposing endless toasts and heaping second portions onto their plates (a few stuffy guests dismiss Otilia’s behavior at the table with some passive-aggressive inferences that it must have something to do with her lower-class upbringing). With nary a word of dialogue to utter for several pages of script, actress Anamaria Marinca nonetheless holds your rapt attention for the duration; her facial expressions flagging her inner turmoil and the concern for Gabita back at the hotel. It’s an amazing piece of acting and an inspired gamble by Mungiu that pays off in spades.

I like the fact that Mungiu doesn’t prosthelytize one way or the other about the issue of abortion in his film; it is merely presented as an incidental element of the bigger story here, which is how it feels to live in mortal fear of one’s own government. It’s all the little brush strokes that end up producing an incisive portrait of an oppressed society. For instance, the relatively simple act of booking a hotel room essentially becomes a white-knuckled interrogation scene; the officiously bureaucratic hotel clerk eyes Otilia suspiciously and demands to know why she and her roommate would need a room when they already live in a dorm. Everyone seems infused with a chronic, low-grade paranoia.

I have to single out Vlad Ivanov’s performance as Bebe. He’s so effectively convincing as a quietly menacing, repugnant but thoroughly believable heavy that it is easy to overlook the fact that it is a quite a turn on the actor’s part and must be commended.

4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days may not be a walk in the park, but it is a worthwhile 1 hour, 53 minutes for the discerning viewer-and depending on your degree of cynicism about our own state of affairs these past 7 years-can also be viewed as a cautionary tale.

And one more thing…

R.I.P. Roy Scheider

I was saddened to hear of the death of one of my favorite actors, Roy Scheider last Sunday. He was solid and dependable; I don’t think I ever saw him give a bad performance. Scheider was one of the last of the Lee Marvin school; while he did not have matinee idol looks, he still projected an un-self conscious aura of incredible “cool” onscreen; a “cool” borne not of cockiness, but confidence. Also, like Marvin, he made it look effortless; you could not detect his “method”, but you could always feel his character. He will likely be forever emblazoned in the minds of most movie fans as Chief Brody in Jaws , Gene Hackman’s partner in The French Connection and Bob Fosse’s avatar in All That Jazz, but his catalogue went much deeper. Even in relatively smaller supporting roles (Marathon Man, Romeo is Bleeding and Naked Lunch, to name a few) he always made quite an impression. Here are a couple additional recommendations:

52 Pickup – This tough, mean neo-noir from John Frankenheimer ties with Tarantino’s Jackie Brown as my favorite Elmore Leonard novel-to-screen adaptation. Scheider is perfect as a rich, self-made industrialist who is victimized by of a trio of murderous, imaginatively evil blackmailers. Scheider’s ingenious revenge is a dish served up very cold, indeed! Luscious Ann Margret (as his wife) is a force to be reckoned with as well.

2010: The Year We Make Contact – Although it’s not quite in the same league as its predecessor 2001 – A Space Odyssey (very few films are, IMHO) this is still an intelligent and exciting sci-fi adventure in its own right. It features a fine performance from Scheider as a scientist who travels to Jupiter as part of a joint U.S./Russian space mission to investigate what happened in the wake of the HAL computer’s meltdown (depicted in the first film). The fantastic cast includes Helen Mirren, John Lithgow and Bob Balaban.

Sorcerer – I think it’s time for a re-appraisal of William Friedkin’s unfairly trounced 1977 remake of the 1953 nail-biter The Wages of Fear. Scheider plays a desperate American on the lam in South America, who signs up for a suicidal job transporting a truckload of nitroglycerine via a treacherous jungle road. There’s also a great soundtrack by Tangerine Dream. I’m hoping for a proper DVD release (the current edition is dismal).

Still of the Night – Writer-director Robert Benton goes for a Hitchcock vibe, and Scheider and Meryl Streep have great chemistry in this thriller about a psychiatrist who falls hard for a woman whom he begins to suspect as the murderer of a former patient. It was a bit of a bomb when first released, but it I think it has held up quite well. It’s easy to get this one confused with Jonathan Demme’s 1979 film Last Embrace, which was also a Hitchcockian thriller starring Scheider (although not quite as involving as Benton’s film).

-D.H.

The Great Rationalizer

by dday

This BBC interview with George W. Bush is truly amazing. He should put it on display at his future Presidential library (where it can stand in for all the missing books). The logical contortions that this guy has to make just to go on living are truly remarkable. It’s like watching a yoga master twist himself into a knot. Here’s Bushie on Darfur:

Frei: You were very tough in your speech about Darfur. And, yet again, you called what’s happening there genocide?

Mr Bush: Yeah.

Frei: Is enough being done by your administration to stop that?

Mr Bush: I think we are. Yeah. You know, I had to make a seminal decision. And that is whether or not I would commit US troops into Darfur. And I was pretty well backed off of it by – you know, a lot of folks – here in America that care deeply about the issue. And so, once you make that decision, then you have to rely upon an international organisation like the United Nations to provide the oomph – necessary manpower…

Frei: Yesterday, Steven Spielberg – the Hollywood director – pulled out of the Beijing Olympics over Darfur. He said the Chinese aren’t doing enough to stop the killing in Darfur. Do you applaud his move?

Mr Bush: That’s up to him. I’m going to the Olympics. I view the Olympics as a sporting event. On the other hand, I have a little different platform than Steven Spielberg so, I get to talk to President Hu Jintao. And I do remind him that he can do more to relieve the suffering in Darfur. There’s a lot of issues that I suspect people are gonna, you know, opine, about during the Olympics. I mean, you got the Dali Lama crowd. You’ve got global warming folks. You’ve got, you know, Darfur and… I am not gonna you know, go and use the Olympics as an opportunity to express my opinions to the Chinese people in a public way ’cause I do it all the time with the president. I mean. So, people are gonna be able to choose – pick and choose how they view the Olympics.

On sleeping well:

Frei: I mention the genocide thing also because your predecessor, President Clinton, says that the one thing – one of the key things that keeps him up at night is that he didn’t do enough over at Rwanda to stop the killing there. Is it possible that Darfur might become your Rwanda?

Mr Bush: I don’t think so. I certainly hope not. I mean, Rwanda was, you know, I think 900,000 people in a very quick period of time of just wholesale slaughter. And I, you know, I appreciate President Clinton’s compassion and concern. And, you know, I’m comfortable with making’ a decision that I think is the best decision. And comfortable with the notion that once that decision is made we’re keeping the world’s focus as best as we can on that amongst other issues.

On Iraq:

Frei: But, do you regret, rather, I should say that you didn’t listen to your – some of your commanders earlier, to send more troops to Iraq to achieve the kind of results that we’re seeing now?

Mr Bush: You know, my commanders didn’t tell me that early. My commanders said, “We got the right level of troops.”

On torture:

Frei: But, given Guantanamo Bay, given also Abu Ghraib, given renditions, does this not send the wrong signal to the world?

Mr Bush: It should send a signal that America is going to respect law. But, it’s gonna take actions necessary to protect ourselves and find information that may protect others. Unless, of course, people say, “Well, there’s no threat. They’re just making up the threat. These people aren’t problematic.” But, I don’t see how you can say that in Great Britain after people came and, you know, blew up bombs in subways. I suspect the families of those victims are – understand the nature of killers. And, so, what people gotta understand is that we’ll make decisions based upon law. We’re a nation of law […]

Frei: Can you honestly say, Mr President, that today America still occupies the moral high ground?

Mr Bush: Absolutely – absolutely. We believe in human rights and human dignity. We believe in the human condition. We believe in freedom. And we’re willing to take the lead.

I mean, those are some world-class justifications there. Olympic level, actually. There oughta be an event.

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The Craftiness Of The Right

by tristero

In early 2005 BuzzFlash posted an article by Drs. Neil Wollman and Abigail A. Fuller entitled “How Does Right-Wing Media Craft Its Message?” I wrote to them and, based on my own observations, suggested a few additions. Wollman and Fuller have decided to re-distribute their original article and are doing me the honor of appending my letter. With Dr. Wollman’s permission, here is both the original article and my response. Something tells me it may come in handy in the months to come…

How Does Right-Wing Media Craft Its Message?

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Drs. Neil Wollman and Abigail A. Fuller

The following presentation styles were gleaned from an observation of right-wing broadcast media over the months leading up to the 2004 election. (The principle sources were right-wing radio, the Drudge Report and Fox News web sites, and Fox News Channel.)

We use the term “presentation styles” here, but one could also call these “techniques,” “strategies,” or “propaganda,” depending on your take on the intention of the media outlet. No attempt was made to differentiate between the media outlets in the type or amount of usage of these styles–nor was an analysis made of left-wing broadcast media for comparison purposes. It is difficult to judge the effectiveness of such styles in swaying public opinion, but certainly some of what was presented in right-wing media was picked up by mainstream media and so exposed more widely to the public.

1. Highlight a quote from the opponent out of context from a speech or interview. Comments made by Ted Kennedy opposing Bush’s policy in Iraq, for example, were used this way. These and similar quotes were then used to paint the liberal establishment as strident Bush haters. Although Teresa Heinz Kerry is not shy about voicing strong opinions, specific quotes that cast her in a negative light were often repeated. This is a way to hurt her credibility and, indirectly, that of her husband.

2. Use loaded terminology to describe a disliked program. For example, use “death tax” instead of inheritance tax or “class warfare” to describe Democratic support of a more progressive tax to benefit lower-income Americans. (George Lakoff has discussed this in his work on political rhetoric.) An accompanying tactic is to make repeated negative associations with key concepts or constituencies so that they conjure up negative feelings (as with “Liberal” or “trial lawyer”).

3. While attacking liberals, promote the idea that it is conservatives who are under attack or marginalized, whether you actually are or not. (Thom Frank notes this in his bestselling book What’s the Matter with Kansas?) For example, conservatives push the idea of a liberal bias in media, academia, and Hollywood. This keeps the focus on areas of real or apparent liberal strength, without acknowledging conservative or pro-corporate influence in major social institutions.

4. Give coverage–and thus credibility—to right-wing groups and individuals with an overtly biased perspective, while granting some limited coverage to the liberal opposition. Conservative media outlets used this style in covering the Swift Boat Veterans’ slam of John Kerry. It can set the agenda of what issues get covered (even in mainstream media), while maintaining one’s claim of objectivity.

5. Attack people and their credibility, making them rather than the issue the focal point of discussion. Right-wing media focused more on Kerry’s character and personality rather than on his political record.

6. Find some vulnerability in the opponent and make that the focus for evaluating him or her. Pound away on that topic until the opponent is judged only in those terms. For example, right-wing media succeeded in painting John Kerry as a flip-flopper (even when the flip-flopping was exaggerated and numerous instances of Bush flip-flops were uncovered).

7. To divert attention away from a liberal opponent’s attack on a conservative position or individual, discredit widely one piece of their argument as a way of discrediting their entire argument. Thus, conservative media (who were followed by mainstream media) gave extensive coverage to the Dan Rather/CBS plagiarism story. This quickly deflected attention from the larger issue of President Bush’s questionable National Guard record. (It also made journalists fearful of covering related stories in the future.)

8. Accuse the opposition of doing the same underhanded things to you that you yourself refuse to acknowledge doing to them. For example, although conservatives launched numerous personal attacks on Kerry, they loudly complained about attacks on the president by “Bush haters” (see the first point above). This also tends to make the attacks by conservatives more acceptable given that it is “really” the other side that is the problem.

By the way, a quick perusal of the rhetorical literature revealed that many of the presentation styles presented here were discussed in the section on “Propaganda Techniques” in J. A. C. Brown’s 1964 book Techniques of Persuasion, Propaganda, and Communication!

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Dr. Neil Wollman is a Senior Fellow at the Peace Studies Institute and Professor of Psychology at Manchester College, North Manchester, IN. (now Senior Fellow, Bentley Alliance for Ethics and Social Responsibility; Bentley College; Waltham, MA)
Dr. Abigail Fuller is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Manchester College, North Manchester, IN.

In response, we received this message with further tactics employed according to this researcher.

Dear Professors Wollman and Fuller,

I very much appreciated your recent Buzzflash Guest Contribution. I’ve been studying the right’s rhetorical style for quite some time now (as a layman). I’d like to suggest that in addition to the styles you discussed, I’ve noticed a few others that may be of interest to track. If you would like I can easily provide you with specific examples from right wing articles and blogs.

1. Be the first. The tactic is to be the first to escalate the emotional tenor of the argument and by the use of “hot button” code words and phrases, such as “infringement of my rights,” “you are a bigot,” and so on. This immediately puts their opponent on the defensive. I’ve noticed that most of these charges are projective. That is, a white supremacist will try early on in an argument to call his/her opponent a racist for refusing to respect the rights of whites.

2. Expropriate liberal symbols and culture. No one seems to have noticed this, including Thomas Frank, and yet it appears to be a conscious tactic. For a very long time, the right has, whenever possible, attempted to expropriate people, songs, and texts associated with liberals and the left. A photo of Franklin Roosevelt signing Social Security legislation appeared in a commercial advocating privatization. Daniel Drezner, a conservative commentator and blogger, claims that Reisman’s famous article, “The Paranoid Style” describes those who oppose George Bush. Incredibly, even a Bob Dylan protest song was invoked to scold Democrats for opposing Alberto Gonzales See here.. There are many other examples. Among the effects this tactic has is that it dramatically narrows the intellectual/cultural space for opponents to draw upon. Rhetorically, it blurs the meaning of these icons and symbols and marginalizes liberals by stripping them of any unambiguously positive references.

3. Conflation Often, a conservative will write as if the words “liberal” and “socialist” describe the same politics. In the same article, or similar ones, they will claim that communism is identical with socialism. They will then use “liberal” as an adjective: “the liberal Democrat [sic] Party” which rhetorically brands all Democrats as communists, i.e., discredited enemies of America.

4. Nit-picking (combined with changing the subject.) A perfect example was the right-wing attack on the Killian memos. The subject was changed from Bush’s dereliction of duty to a detailed discussion of typewriter fonts. All sense of truth was buried under the technical minutiae of the subject. Needless to say, the conservatives who began this were by no means expert on typography. When genuine experts examined the memos, nearly all the details pointed to as “clear evidence of forgery” were debunked. But by that time, it was too late. The entire Bush National Guard story was radioactive in the mainstream media.

5. Flood the rhetorical space. Pack a sentence with numerous falsehoods, misconceptions and biases so that it is difficult, if not impossible, to rebut them all within a reasonable time. For example (a hypothetical one, exaggerated to illustrate the technique): “Stem cell research, concocted and shamelessly promoted by the same Godless biologists that want to ban the Bible everywhere, has one and only one purpose, which is to kill innocent human babies.” By the time anyone has corrected all the errors of fact, any conceivable audience open to persuasion has fallen asleep.

In any event, good luck with your research.

Yours,

[tristero]

Partisan Chin Music

by digby

I don’t know how many people watched those dreadful steroids hearings this week, but Waxman himself says now that he thinks they were a mistake. (He claims that he was given little choice by Clemens’ attorneys, but whatever.)

But I was struck by something very odd in the hearings that made no sense on the merits, which Christine Daniels of the LA Times wrote about today:

Usually in this country, baseball partisans are paying customers who shell out for peanuts and hot dogs, move the turnstile, crack open the Cracker Jack and root, root, root for the home team.

They are not, traditionally speaking, members of Congress batting around the issue of Roger Clemens and steroids as if their party affiliation was a logo emblazoned across a cap and jersey.

Wednesday’s congressional hearing on the Mitchell Report introduced us to two new influential political action groups:

Republicans for Roger Clemens.

Democrats for Brian McNamee.

You could hear in their voices and see it in their demeanor as representatives from both sides of the aisle took turns at firing/lobbing questions at Clemens, embattled baseball legend, and McNamee, former personal trainer for the legend and the man who claims he injected Clemens with steroids.

Rep. Dan Burton, Republican from Indiana, called Clemens “a titan in baseball. All these lies, if they’re not true, destroy his reputation.”

Rep. Elijah Cummings, Democrat from Maryland, told Clemens, “You’re one of my heroes, but it’s hard to believe you.”

Burton told McNamee, “This is really disgusting. You are here, under oath, yet you have told lie after lie.”

Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Democrat from California, said, “I think McNamee has a lot of credibility.”

Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican from North Carolina, looked at photos of Clemens taken at various stages in his career and told the pitcher, “You appear to me to be about the same size. It doesn’t appear to me that your size has changed.”

On and on it went. Now batting for McNamee, a Democrat. Coming in to pitch for Clemens, a Republican.

The battle lines were so obviously and outrageously drawn according to party affiliation, Rep. Tom Davis, Republican from Virginia, revealed some true colors as he posed a question for McNamee while alluding to the grilling Clemens was taking: “Since the other side seems to be focusing on Mr. Clemens, I will direct my questions to you.”

Bush, you’ll recall, defended Rafael Palmiero when this whole thing was first revealed. Even the question of drug use is a partisan issue.

I confess that when I saw Dan Burton out there railing like his old self, like he was getting ready to go shoot a watermelon with a picture McNemee’s head on it, I was a little confused. Since when are Republicans the big softies toward people accused of drug use?

And then I realized that it’s because steroids aren’t a drug used for pleasure, which we know is a big no-no. They are drugs used solely to give users an edge that others don’t have. Of course they are protective of a big, white Texas boy using steroids to win by any means necessary. It’s a fundamental conservative value!

Update: I missed this earlier. According to FDL, sports radio tuned into these silly hearings and are up in arms at some of the Republicans who made asses of themselves. Don’t mess with sports fans. Big mistake.

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