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Month: May 2008

No Exit (polls)

by digby

I know I shouldn’t have to say this after the 2,398th primary of this campaign, but don’t believe the early exit polls. They are wrong because they are incomplete. Which also means, don’t allow the TV gasbags to fool you into thinking that things are going a certain way with their thinly veiled glee or dismay because they are also relying on the incomplete exit polls.

The only reliable poll is the one that’s made today by the voters. We just have to wait.

I know, I’m tired of it too. We have a little ritual in my house of eating take-out Chinese on election day. I’ve never eaten so many pot stickers in my life.

Update: Oh, and whenever you begin to think the whole thing’s just not worth it, think again.

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Perlstein Auction

by digby

Commenters in the post below about Perlstein’s Nixonland have wondered where they can get copies of his earlier book Before The Storm, which is out of print.

Ebay!

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Tragedy Befalls A Dictatorship

by dday

The destruction from the cyclone in Myanmar is so widespread that the country is asking for outside help. For context, Myanmar was battered during the tsunami and resisted outside help.

“YANGON (AFP) – Myanmar said Monday more than 10,000 people died in the cyclone that battered the impoverished nation, whose secretive military rulers made a rare appeal for international help to cope with the tragedy.

Reeling from the weekend disaster, which also left thousands missing, the Southeast Asian country once known as Burma — one of the world’s poorest — warned that the staggering death toll could still rise further.

‘There could be more casualties,’ said Nyan Win, foreign minister of the military junta which has ruled the country with an iron fist for decades, and normally puts tight restrictions on aid agencies from the outside world.

‘We will welcome help like this from other countries, because our people are in difficulty,’ he said.”

It should be noted that NPR is reporting that relief organizations haven’t yet been allowed inside the country, although World Vision already had a small group there and they have begun to operate emergency services.

This plays into the food crisis as well, because the area hit the hardest is full of rice paddies. Myanmar exports rice to Sri Lanka. Also, the World Food Program is coordinating relief efforts, which means a further strain to their resources.

The most recent number I heard was 22,000 dead. (I also don’t put it past this government to add those monks murdered in last year’s riots on to the top of the piles of bodies.)

I cannot say if relief money will actually get through, which is frustrating, but here’s a link.

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Sam Harris Redux

by tristero

I must admit to being a bit surprised at the amount of disagreement with my earlier post on Sam Harris. Several posters asserted that I had taken Harris’ rhetorical question out of context. I read the original article again and I do not believe I have. Here, for reference, is that question:

But, leaving aside the practical and political impossibility of doing so, could we even allow ourselves to contemplate liberating the women and children of traditional Islam?

Some main points of the article are obviously true: there surely are egregious abuses of universal human rights in many Islamic and islamist societies. I did not need to read Harris’ article to know that and indeed, found nothing I didn’t already know.

It is also obviously true that Islamists and very strict Islamic cultures are worse abusers of human rights than all but the most marginal of American christianists and fundamentalists. Again, Harris is saying nothing that anyone serious has ever disputed.

I believe, however, that Harris seriously underestimates how dangerous and powerful America’s theocrats are. That people like Robertson, Hagee, and Dobson feel, at present, restrained from calling for the killing of heretics, abortion providers, blasphemers and other “undesirables” is not due to their inherent tolerant impulses: they have none. If America’s Taliban is not advocating the execution of infidels or oppressing women at the same horrific level as the Taliban itself, it is due to the strenuous effort of those other Americans who have been fighting tooth and nail to maintain church/state separation and strenuously object to any erosion of it, no matter how seemingly trivial. Under Bush, the theocrats have become ominously more powerful and therefore more virulent. While Harris, a well-known atheist, surely deplores christianism and fundamentalist Christianity, he is all too quick – at least in the article under question – to dismiss the seriousness of their threat when comparing them to the islamists and strict followers of Islam.

But that is just a question of emphasis. Far worse is that Harris can’t help confusing two entirely separate issues. It is not enough for him to condemn specific abuses within Islamic communities. He feels compelled to condemn the religion itself:

The connection between the doctrine of Islam and Islamist violence is simply not open to dispute. It’s not that critics of religion like myself speculate that such a connection might exist: the point is that Islamists themselves acknowledge and demonstrate this connection at every opportunity and to deny it is to retreat within a fantasy world of political correctness and religious apology.

His argument is specious. No one denies a “connection between the doctrine of Islam and Islamist violence.” Of course, radical islamists will quote the Qu’ran and other texts as justification. What Harris fails to appreciate is that this is a highly specific exploitation of certain Islamic tropes and symbols to gain political power. However, while it is certainly possible to read the texts of Islam (at least, the translated texts) as supporting a political program and the use of violence to gain power, it is not a necessary reading any more than a reading of the Hebrew Bible necessarily supports the violent suppression of objections to Israeli settlements.

No doubt, islamism in many different forms is widespread, and violent versions of islamism are a major problem. But Harris’ failure here goes far beyond merely repeating what everyone knows. Convinced that what he calls “Islam” itself is the problem, he fails to acknowledge that a major factor feeding the growth of violent islamisms has nothing to do with the Qu’ran and everything to do with the catastrophe known as the Bush/Iraq war.

In other words, Harris’ mistake here, in the very definition of the problem, is all of a piece with the one he makes in the question I quoted in the earlier post. He oversimplifies and “leaves aside” pieces of a complicated problem that are crucial to understanding the problem. For indeed, there is no such thing as “Islam” but Islams – plural. To lump all Islams together and condemn the aggregate as inherently violent is not merely silly, but bizarre. It’s like saying because there has been a pedophilia scandal in the American Catholic church, we need to oppose all Christianities, even the most upright, and barely-observed Lutheranism in Iceland,*

If Harris’ purpose is to minimize human rights abuses in Islamic and islamist societies (it is crazy to assume they can be eliminated), then it is neither necessary, relevant, nor helpful to concoct a demon called “Islam” that is more inherently evil than others. But eliminating abuse within a religion is only part of Harris’ goal: he also seeks the elimination of Islam altogether, if not all religions. And, since in Harris view, all the Islams are corrupt, imaginary and dangerous, they can be grouped under the rubric of “Islam,” then conflated with islamism, and the aggregate loudly condemned.**

The refusal to address the practical conflict between the two goals leads to an irresolvable intellectual incoherence. Again, this is the problem inherent within the question I quoted. If your goal is to confront specific human rights abuses within a specific Islamic society, then it is counterproductive – to put it mildly – to condemn Muslim socieities in general. Even if the abuse is widespread? Of course! The abuse may be the same and utterly horrific, but the reasons very different.

You cannot speak about an aggregate “Islam” and create an effective confrontation with it. Why? Because it does not exist. You cannot leave aside the practical and political in discussing a problem as complex as abuse. Yet, by conflating Islams and then conflating them again with islamisms, Harris creates just such a meaningless abstraction which he urges us to see as obviously deplorable and therefore something we must condemn.

Not me.

But by refusing to accept Harris’ over-generalizations and join him in deploring an imaginary demon, I incurred the wrath of many commenters. Here’s a typical example In comments, I wrote a hasty precis of the above:

[Harris has two goals:] One is to eliminate evil acts by a religion he loathes. The other is to eliminate all religions. Both are crazy ideas.

Tensor commented:

It’s crazy to eliminate human sacrifice? We’ve already done that, and we all can see it was “evil acts” by a religion. As for eliminating all religions, the most prosperous areas of the world seem to have the least religious fervor. If that trend continues for long enough, it may indeed end religion. I never though a thinker as good as tristero would dismiss a far-thinking idea with such airy language.

For the record, I have no interest in far-thinking ideas when they refer to changing societies or cultures. In fact, far-thinking ideas, in the hands of the powerful, may very well lead to enormous human sacrifice. That is, they can lead to war. But let’s not be glib.

Somehow, by refusing to accept Harris specious’ premise that all Islams are essentially one evil Islam, and by my refusing to “engage” the issue of human rights abuses in Islamic societies within this nutty paradigm, many commenters truly felt I was “excusing” such practices as female genital mutilation and the like. And at least one imagined I think it is crazy to eliminate human sacrifice.

I can think of few attitudes more likely to perpetuate atrocities like female genital mutilation than Harris’. What he is proposing is that the West – whatever that is – treat Islamic cultures as one big inherently immoral black box, that we denounce the immorality of this non-existent entity. Furthermore, he wishes us to to entertain the thought, leaving aside all practical and political vicissitudes, of “liberating” – whatever the hell that means in such a generalized context as Harris’ – the women and children of ” traditional Islam.” The ignorance, moral laziness, and intellectual arrogance of such an attitude is simply breathtaking. And it’s simply asking for resistance and antagonism. Not to mention an utterly intractable attitude towards all traditional practices, and possibly the creation of more traditions for the sole purpose of defining a culture in opposition to :”the West.”

And then he has the gall to claim that multiculturalists – ie, those of us who don’t think of the world’s complex cultures as a big bad black box – can be “credibly accused of racism,” not he.

Folks, I stand by my earlier post. Harris’ argument differs in no significant way from the nonsense that was spoon-fed to the liberal hawks to get them to sign on to Bush/Iraq. The issues of illiberalism, oppression and abuse in Islamic cultures deserves a far more serious and articulate treatment than Harris’ “lump ’em all together and condemn ’em all” approach. It smells too much like Kurtz and it’s high time liberals learned to recognize that smell before it turns once again into the foul stench of rotting corpses courtesy of US tax dollars.

Harris is no idealist. He is just plain wrong. Intellectually wrong. And morally wrong.

{UPDATE: Ali Eteraz had a similar reaction to Harris’ article.}

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* If someone happens to turn up a pandemic of horrific scandals in Icelandic churches, simply substitute the mildest and most scandal-free congregation of reform Jews, or Episcopalians; the point is these are very different situations and it makes no sense to generalize in this fashion.

** I’d like to make it clear that many of the most outspoken atheists don’t think like this. But Harris does.

Nixonland

by digby

A few years back, I read a book about the Goldwater campaign that changed my view of conservatism. It was called Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and it chronicled the campaign of Barry Goldwater in 1964. It was written by a young whippersnapper historian named Rick Perlstein, who hadn’t even been born when Goldwater ran for office. The book was important because it supplied a fresh look at something Americans had come to see in a rather one-sided way: the 60s. I realized that the modern conservative movement wasn’t born of old fashioned, ossified ideas from the past reasserting themselves, but was actually another manifestation of the social upheaval and rapid change that characterized the post war era. I had never before thought of 60s radicalism as being a two way street.

After I read that book, Rick Perlstein and I became friends. He was working at the Village Voice when we first met and it was shortly thereafter that he began to work full time on his new book, a sequel of sorts to Before The Storm, called Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. At times over the past few years, as he was writing it, Rick would generously offer to publish pieces of the unfinished manuscript on my blog and others as a way of giving context to current issues. And there were many — about race and quagmires and vote suppression and many other topics. That’s why Nixonland is so important to all of us who follow politics closely today; you can’t begin to understand our current political time without understanding that one.

I know people don’t want to hear that. We want to leave all that hideous old 60s nonsense behind and move forward into a new day. But even if you believe that it’s possible to bury those old issues, you still need to fully grasp them in order to do it. What Perlstein explores in his sweeping, epic history of Nixon’s America are the events which laid bare the class resentments that fueled Richard Nixon’s own complicated psyche — and American culture. We have dull marketing terms for this phenomenon today: “beer track/wine track,” “blue collar/elite” but Perlstein uncovers a fascinating metaphor about Nixon’s high school years in which the young social outcast formed a club called the “Orthogonians” to compete with the kewl kids who called themselves the “Franklins.”

Nixon always had a gift for looking under social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight: that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the nonspectacular — silent — majority. The ones who labor quietly, sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback’s shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter. ..

Nixon beat a Franklin for student body president. Looking back years later, acquaintances marveled at the feat of this awkward, skinny kid the yearbook called “a rather quiet chap around Campus” … They hadn’t learned what Nixon was learning. Being hated by the right people was no impediment to political success. The unpolished, after all, were everywhere in the majority.

Perlstein writes toward the end of the book:

I have written of the rise of the two American identities, two groups of Americans, staring at each other from behind a common divide, each equally convinced of its own righteousness, each equally convinced the other group was defined by evil. I have written of the moments where, at the extreme, members of these groups killed one another or tried to kill one another, most often in cold blood. Klansmen killing civil rights marchers in Selma; and two pacifists shot through the back of the head in Richmond, Virginia, and left in a ditch; a hippie shot in the back of the head in New Mexico. A teenager shooting a rabbit dead during a service in Louisville, crying, in the New Left’s new language, about the congregation’s “phoniness and hypocrisy.” Weathermen preparing bombs for a massacre at a servicemen’s dance at Fort Dix. Vigilante Cubans setting fires and bombs at the offices of Soviet attaches and talent agents handling Soviet artists. State police carrying out extrajudicial killings, following the pacification of the riot in Newark; black nationalists ambushing cops in Cleveland. I have dedicated this book to the memory of these Americans killed by other Americans, for reasons of ideology.

I have written of the rise, between the years 1965 and 1972, of a nation that had believed itself to be at consensus instead becoming one of incommensurate visions of apocalypse: two loosely defined congeries of Americans, each convinced that should the other triumph, everything decent and true and worth preserving would end.

That was the 1960s.

We Americans are not killing or trying to kill one another anymore for reasons of ideology, or at least for now. Remember this: this war has ratcheted down considerably. But it still simmers on…

I would guess that most people would agree, particularly after the last few weeks, that these divisions have not yet healed. While we will undoubtedly continue to argue about whether it’s possible to heal them, and if so, how and who will accomplish such a thing, we cannot believe that the breach no longer exists. Indeed, in reading this book, I often had a strange feeling of deja vu — not at the events themselves, but the arguments that were made around them.

I lived through those times, and had the not uncommon experience of being a young person in a house divided. There were many families out there like mine, with privileged Franklin kids raised in the affluent post war world by World War II era Orthogonian parents. This low grade civil war was often very, very personal. But nonetheless, for many years I did what most people do when remembering their youth: I shaded the distinctions, romanticized my cohort. And I tended to see the period through the minds eye of one who believed that the majority must approve of all the changes even if they didn’t know it. In other words, I believed we had reached a new sort of cultural and political consensus: the culture was liberal even if our politics were conservative. It made me feel naively confident that the culture war was some sort of phony problem that would eventually right itself as soon as we could defeat these awful conservatives who were stoking these unnatural resentments.

I was wrong about that. The culture war is real, not some sort of mistaken division created out of whole cloth by wily conservative politicians to gain office. The Orthogonians are people like my father. He’s not a libertarian or a social conservative; he’s not motivated by any fancy philosophical construct of the modern conservative movement. He is just a regular American who doesn’t trust educated elites, who thinks that too much change is harmful and that we’d all be better off with a little more authority and a little less freedom (to cause trouble.) The country is full of people like my father — and they resent the hell out of people like me. For real. Not because they are racist and sexist (although plenty of them are, including him) and not because they can’t imagine a world unlike the 1950s (although plenty of them can’t.) They simply think that those of us who are out here grandly proclaiming that we know what’s good for everyone and that we have the all the answers strike them as well — full of shit. Full of ourselves. And, you know, we often are.

The big social and cultural changes of the Nixon era — many of them long overdue and unstoppable — were like a harsh and painful noise to people like this. And they rose up, right along with the draft resisters and the civil rights marchers and the “women’s libbers.” They were called the “silent majority” but they made their voices heard. It wasn’t just the kids and the college professors who were radicalized. That seething Orthogonian resentment came to the surface and they stared down the Franklins — for the next forty years.

In Nixonland, in an almost Rashoman fashion, we see the events with which we are familiar — and many with which we aren’t — unfolding from the perspectives of both the freaks and the straights (as we used to call this division.) It reveals a different picture than the one we thought we all know — a different country. Perlstein believes that Nixonland was a unique moment in American history and I agree, (although I tend to think it was an earthquake that dramatically opened up long standing fissures in American society rather than a unique event that will someday be over.) But either way, we agree that it isn’t over yet. When you think about it, the 40 year period of the 60s until now is a blink of an eye in the broad historical sense and yet fundamental changes have taken place in our society during that time. It’s not surprising that there would be turmoil and resistance. What has been surprising is how badly we grasp the way our American tribes work even though we’ve been circling around each other for a very long time.

Nixonland is a wonderful, entertaining history filled with fascinating characters evoked in loving and penetrating detail. Nixon himself features heavily, of course (and who is more fascinating than him?) He is probably the most important politician of the last half of the 20th century and his character, in many ways, encompasses all the contradictions of the America he represents. It’s a great story, written with the graceful flow of a novel and a sense of drama that often makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. As odd as it might be to say about a work of history that weighs several pounds, it’s hard to put down once you’ve started.

Buy the book. It’s a masterpiece. You are in for a great read and a most insightful look at the period from which we are still feeling cultural and political aftershocks every day. We are still living in Nixonland. Maybe we always have been. Maybe we always will.

Update: Bookforum offers a lengthy, juicy excerpt from the book about the 1972 convention. here’s a taste:

At McGovern headquarters at the famous Doral resort, the usual haunt of golfing Shriners, hordes of kids awaited their hero’s arrival, “wearing,” Norman Mailer wrote, “copper bangles and spaced-out heavy eyes.” He imagined the reaction of the Democratic regulars: “Where were the bourbon and broads of yesteryear?” Not at the Doral’s rooftop restaurant-bar; it was one of the few rooms left in town that still required a suit and tie. That meant this week it was empty. Prostitutes were lonely, too. The New Politics, this movement of acid and abortion for all, had a Calvinist work ethic. Many McGovern delegates had won their spots by outlasting the flabby old regulars in caucuses, just as they’d outlasted rival left factionistas at endless antiwar meetings. They were not in Miami to party. Germaine Greer, the women’s liberationist, complained she “couldn’t find anyone to ball.” Presidential candidates arrived at Miami International Airport, one by one: Wilbur Mills, still rumored to be fronting a Ted Kennedy draft; George Wallace, who touched down in a plane provided him by the White House and was honored by the DNC with a brass band; Hubert Humphrey, who responded when asked whether he thought he could win, “I didn’t come down for a vacation.” John Lindsay landed to rumors that he was so unpopular that the New York caucus would be avoiding him. The front-runner touched down one hour late due to a tropical storm, after an airport press conference from George Meany in which the labor boss intoned, “We’ve made it quite plain we don’t like McGovern.” But could he stop McGovern? That was the question. Any kind of chaos seemed possible. Meany called it “the craziest convention I’ve seen.” And he’d seen a few.

More here…

And for those who have read the book or are planning to, it would be helpful if you could do a review on the Amazon site. Evidently it is some sort of metric that publishers like.

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Sexual Politics

by digby

We are seeing the first of the inevitable navel gazing feature stories purporting to look at the subtext of the campaign from the perspective of the always perceptive political press. And just as inevitably, they say far more about the press than they do about anything else. (This one’s headline is so unintentionally funny, I couldn’t stop giggling for 15 minutes.)

But the one that is bound to be remembered as one of the most inane of an inane lot, is this one by Michael Wolff in the new Vanity Fair:

Politics is now about sex. Not just scandalous sex, not just who is having what kind of sex, but what we think about the sex each politician is having, or not having. Sex (sex, not gender) in politics is as significant a subtext as race.

That’s right. Politics is really all about an image we form in our minds of politicians having sex. According to Wolff, it’s all anyone ever talks about in private.

Now, I don’t know about you, but among my friends, this just doesn’t come up. Even among my female friends, where after a few margaritas we often become a little bit salty and indiscreet, it’s rarely brought up. We might mention a little recurring George Clooney fantasy we have or speculate about the waiter, but I don’t think it would have ever occurred to us to even think about the presidential candidates and their spouses in bed. We do know, however, that at least one major Village chatterer can speak of nothing else:

X. told me that, the whole night, all Maureen could talk about was which women Bill Clinton was sleeping with. Literally. “Do you think he’s having an affair with B.? I think he is. But maybe they did and it’s over now and he’s moved onto someone else. Ya think? Maybe he’s messing around with C. — she seems more his type. I’d bet he’d love to have an affair with D., but I’m not sure she’d fool around with a married man.” And on and on and on and on and ON in this vein. The whole night long. X tried to engage her on other topics. The world, after all, is full of a number of things: Books. Movies. Theater. Travel. Music. Food. And how about, not what Bill Clinton was doing with his penis, but what he was doing with his policies?

But alas, in spite of my friend’s ministrations, he could not get the lady off Topic A.

Wolff obviously sees the world the same way Dowd does — the way they all do. Even the Village elder of Village elders, David Broder, is obsessed with the sexual lives of politicians in a way that is more than a little bit odd. (But then, that’s the way provincial villages operate, isn’t it?)

But Wolff doesn’t stop with just speculating about the politicans’ sex lives. He makes the assumption that voters are as obsessed with politicians’ sex lives and speculates that their own sexual “deficiencies” are dictating their presidential preferences:

The Hillary story is—and how could it not be?—largely a sexual one. This is not so much a sexist view as a sexualist view: What’s up here? What’s the unsaid saying? What’s the vibe? Although it’s not discussed in reputable commentary, it’s discussed by everyone else: so what exactly is the thing with Hillary and sex, with the consensus being that she simply must not have it (at least not with her husband; there are, on the other hand, the various conspiracy scenarios of whom else she might have had it with). It’s partly around this consensus view of her not having sex that people support her or resist her. She’s the special-interest candidate of older women—the post-sexual set. She’s resisted by others (including older women who don’t see themselves as part of the post-sexual set) who see her as either frigid or sexually shunned—they turn from her inhibitions and her pain.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard this theory. In fact, several correspondents have shared with me the supposedly hilarious observation that Clinton is the “Joan of Arc of the dry pussy demographic” and her “neck looks like a badly folded quilt.” We are all familiar with Rush Limbaugh’s memorable statement that nobody wants to see a woman age before their eyes. (Those last weren’t explicitly sexual observations, but one can assume they refer in some way to the phenomenon that Wolf says he and his friends can’t stop talking about.)

Why Wolff thinks his immature, locker room talk represents anything meaningful is beyond me, but the fact that he writes it in a national magazine, apparently never realizing the multiple levels of insult at a large swathe of American voters is baffling. Perhaps an even greater mystery is why he didn’t realize that these allegedly “post sexual” and “older women who don’t see themselves as part of the post-sexual set” probably make up substantial number of Vanity Fair readers. (However you parse it, it’s a pretty mean way to categorize middle aged and older women.)

Lance Mannion does an excellent job of unpacking this kinky lunacy here, remarking:

We want our politicians to represent us but that’s far from saying we want them to stand in for us as surrogate selves. We hire them to do a job and our interest in them is in how well they do that job and that’s why, to the consternation of the professional scolding class in the Media, we often don’t care at all about their personal oddnesses. Wolff, though, believes otherwise. Stranger than this, however, is Wolff’s contention that while we’re all imagining our political leaders naked we’re creeped out by what we’re imagining and what creeps us out is the fact that all these naked politicians are middle-aged. Middle-agedness is in itself creepy. To be middle-aged is to be grotesque, repulsive, and ridiculous, and all of this creepiness, grotesquery, repulsiveness, and ridiculousness is, tautologically, both caused by middle-aged sexuality and makes sex in middle-age creepy, grotesque, repulsive, and ridiculous. Which, according to Wolff, is why folks like Barack Obama so much. He’s not middle-aged.

There is next to no speculation about Barack Obama’s sexual secrets. This is a seismic shift in racial subtext. The white men are the sexual reprobates and loose cannons (while Mitt and Hillary are just strange birds) and the black man the figure of robust middle-class family warmth. Against these middle-aged people, he’s the naturalist, the credible and hopeful figure of a man who actually might be having sex with his smiling, energetic, and oomphy wife. (During the Spitzer affair, a friend of mine, a middle-aged white doctor and an active Obama supporter, curiously dropped into something like street talk to say Obama would never have the sex problems of middle-aged politicians, “because Michelle would whip his skinny ass.” A good man, in other words, is a controlled man.) He’s the only one in the entire field who doesn’t suggest sexual desperation. He represents our ideal of what a good liberal’s sex life ought to be.

A couple more paragraphs for Wolff to talk over with a professional, but note that, besides the strange racial and marital hang-ups, Wolff is saying that we don’t have to worry about Obama making himself ridiculous or creepy in our dirty minds’ eyes because he and his wife are young and good looking, as if no one with an “oomphy” spouse would ever be tempted to anything besides healthy, uncreepy, monogamous and conjugal sex.

Mannion sees the implications in Wolff’s bizarre take on Obama’s marriage too:

Actually, look over his description of the Obama marriage and you’ll see that he doesn’t seem to think that even a young woman like Michelle Obama has a real interest in sex for the sake of pleasure or love—young women use sex to keep their men in line; older women, having lost all sexual desire, no longer have control over their men, and that’s why those men make fools of themselves in the beds of younger women or men, which would seem to imply that Mrs Senator Larry Craig could have kept her husband out of airport bathrooms if she’d still been willing to get nasty with him.

Actually Wolff isn’t alone in that particular view. Here’s a picture from last night’s Jefferson Jackson dinner:

It’s tiresome and, frankly, kind of jarring to have to deal with this. I yearn for the days (a few months ago) when I foolishly believed that even though I knew the culture was full of creepy sexual hypocrites, that we had gone beyond the point where this kind of thing was acceptable in the public discourse. I certainly didn’t think I’d read such things blithely bandied about in a mainstream magazine that, judging by the advertisements, is mainly aimed at women. I admit that I’m a little bit gobsmacked at the sheer casualness of the ageist misogyny that’s bubbled up in this campaign. My bad. I’m fairly sure I just wasn’t paying proper attention.

I don’t know how much this affects politics. I would imagine not much. I honestly don’t think most people really give a damn about the sex lives of these people and if they do it’s not for the reasons Wolff cites but more for the reason that lovely young man made that homemade sign — simple assholishness. But this stuff does seem to be something of an obsession among the Villagers, which then trickles into the media culture and into our lives whether we like it or not.

It’s a problem. In more ways than one.

* Do read Lance Mannion’s thoughtful meditation on this if you find the subject intriguing.

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The Thugs Are Out

by dday

Kudos to Raw Story for an incredible piece of journalism detailing the lengths to which the Administration’s goons are trying to shut down any investigations into the perversion of the Justice Department. Jeers to the traditional media for its near-total blackout on these incidents. We’re talking about serious business here.

These crimes raise serious questions about possible use of deliberate intimidation tactics not only because of who the victims are and the already wide criticism of the prosecutions to begin with, but also because of the suspicious nature of each incident individually as well as the pattern collectively. Typically burglars do not break-into an office or private residence only to rummage through documents, for example, as is the case with most of the burglaries in these two federal cases.

In Alabama, for instance, the home of former Democratic Governor Don Siegelman was burglarized twice during the period of his first indictment. Nothing of value was taken, however, and according to the Siegelman family, the only items of interest to the burglars were the files in Siegelman’s home office.

Siegelman’s attorney experienced the same type of break-in at her office.

In neighboring Mississippi, a case brought against a trial lawyer and three judges raises even more disturbing questions. Of the four individuals in the same case, three of the US Attorney’s targets were the victims of crimes during their indictment or trial. This case, like that of Governor Siegelman, has been widely criticized as a politically motivated prosecution by a Bush US Attorney.

It’s more than just a bunch of Watergate-style burglaries, too.

The incidents are not limited to burglaries. In Mississippi, former Judge John Whitfield was the victim of arson at his office. In Alabama, the whistleblower in the Don Siegelman case, Dana Jill Simpson, had her home burned down, and shortly thereafter her car was allegedly forced off the road.

While there is no direct evidence linking these crimes to the US Attorneys’ office targeting these individuals, or to the Bush administration, there is a distinct pattern that makes it highly unlikely that these incidents are isolated and unrelated.

All of these crimes remain unsolved.

Read the whole thing. You’d think there was some kind of Nixon’s plumbers’ reunion tour or something.

For a really good look into the Siegelman story in case you haven’t kept up, Thom Hartmann interviewed the former Alabama governor last week. Here’s the audio.

I wasn’t aware of this part:

[Thom Hartmann]: And, in fact, if I understand this correctly, you were being prosecuted by a woman whose husband was the campaign manager for the Republican who ran against you for governor and in the middle of the night in one county because of a voting machine malfunction after the election had apparently already been called in your favor, suddenly in the middle of the night when there were nobody expect Republicans standing around, they discovered a couple thousand more votes and said ‘Oh, yeah, no no, Don Siegelman actually lost’. Do I have that right?

[cross talk]

[Don Siegelman]: You have it right. They electronically shifted votes from my column to my Republican’s column.

[Thom Hartmann]: To Bob Riley’s column.

[Don Siegelman]: I believe, yes, to Bob Riley’s column. And oddly enough, it didn’t effect a single down-ballot race. They took five thousand or six thousand votes of mine and shifted it over to Bob Riley and when they counted everybody else’s votes, the shift at the top which logically would have made a difference at the bottom…

[Thom Hartmann]: Sure.

[Don Siegelman]: You know, had no impact whatsoever.

[Thom Hartmann]: So the people running for the lesser state offices, the folks who voted Democratic right down the ticket all of a sudden at the very top of the ticket were ‘Oh, I’m going to vote for every Democrat except Don Siegelman, I’ll put that over to Riley ‘ and only in this one area in this one county on this one set of machines that was discovered in the middle of the night. by the Republicans.

[Don Siegelman]: Yes, a couple of other interesting things, Thom, since you brought this up, but the two people who either were given credit or who gave themselves credit for stealing the election and swinging the election to my Republican opponent for catching this ‘electronic glitch’ as they called it, one was Karl Rove’s partner, business partner, her name was Kitty McCullough also known as Kelly, oh gosh, I can’t remember what her second name was but she had a different married name.

[Thom Hartmann]: But she’s the one who discovered the extra votes that caused you to lose and caused Bob Riley to won, OK.

[Don Siegelman]: And the other person was a guy named Dan Gans who right after that went to work for an Abramoff/Tom Delay related company, a group called the Alexander Strategies Group. And he claimed credit on his web site that he was responsible for this, because he had an expertese in electronic ballot security.

That 2002 election, in places like Alabama and Georgia, was as dirty as the day is long.

You’ve got election theft, destruction of evidence (5 million emails), violation of subpoenas, perversion of the instruments of justice, railroading Democratic officials into jail, and now intimidation of witnesses, arson and burglary. It’s all wrapped up with a nice little bow if any Woodwards and Bernsteins want to take a whack at it. Even, you know, Woodward, or Bernstein.

UPDATE: Just so you know, the EPA is experiencing a similar purge, just like the Justice Department has.

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Answering Sam Harris’ Question

by tristero

Sam Harris asks:

But, leaving aside the practical and political impossibility of doing so, could we even allow ourselves to contemplate liberating the women and children of traditional Islam?

Long version: Leaving aside “practical and political” issues makes this ipso facto an empty, meaningless question. Dangerously so, as it implies both a simplistic idea of what a moral absolute is, and it also seeks to replace reasoned discourse by recourse to emotions, especially guilt and shame (for failing to act). No moral action exists in a practical and political vacuum. Ever. And truly moral actions cannot be anchored merely on an emotional response.

Shorter version: this is the fallacy behind Kanan Makiya’s now infamous (and truly lunatic) call to topple Saddam by replacing experience with hope, a fallacy embraced with gusto by the liberal hawks

Even shorter version: This is rank imperialism dressed up as embarrassingly naive Cumbaya.

Shortest version: No.

And The Story Gets More Baroque

by tristero

Now Iran is supposed to be hiring Hezbollah to conduct classes in terrorism for Iraqis in Iran so they can go back to Iraq and create havoc. Got that?

Militants from the Lebanese group Hezbollah have been training Iraqi militia fighters at a camp near Tehran, according to American interrogation reports that the United States has supplied to the Iraqi government.

And how do they know this?

An American official said the account of Hezbollah’s role was provided by four Shiite militia members who were captured in Iraq late last year and questioned separately.

Probably tortured separately. Assuming, of course, that any part of this Michael Gordon-told story is true. Apparently, the Iraqi government has its own set of doubts:

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government announced Sunday that it would conduct its own inquiry into accusations of Iranian intervention in Iraq and document any interference.

By all means the Iraqi government should never trust Bush propaganda. Nor should the US public without convincing public proof. That is the problem with lying about something as monumental as Saddam’s wmd: these allegations may very well be true. But there is no reason to assume so – and every reason to conclude they are not – given the Bush administration’s long history of lies, and of the NY Times regurgitating those lies on their front page. In this case, the story Gordon weaves is just a mite too slick at filling in some holes in the earlier ones:

First, they say, the Iranians believe it is useful to have Arabs train fellow Arabs. Second, Hezbollah has considerable experience in planning operations and using weapons and explosives in Lebanon.

And the proof?

he official summed up the information from the interrogation reports but did not make them available. He declined to be identified because the information had not been released publicly.

Which brings up serious questions regarding why the NY Times prints this swill.

Again, maybe it’s true. Then again, if it was, there’d be little reason to withhold the documentation of the interrogation and certainly no reason to withhold the identity of Gordon’s source.

[UPDATE] Glenzilla stomps all over the same article.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

by digby

Here are who the Telegraph considers to be the 50 most influential political pundits in America. The following are the top choices starting with number 10, Mark Halperin, all the way down to number 1, Karl Rove:

The only good news here is that Maureen Dowd is not among them.

I have long held that the reason so many people hate liberals in this country is because the right convinced them that all of those pictured above who are not right wing icons — are liberal. No wonder they hate us. With the exception of Jon Stewart, they are all immense jackasses.

The list includes a few Democratic political operatives and a handful of intelligent liberals like Paul Krugman and Rachel Maddow who are listed at 48 and 50, but for the most part they are rich, mainstream gasbags and conservative dickheads.

I have no idea what criteria the Telegraph used to make these judgments (and they seem not to make any distinction between political operatives and pundits) but I don’t think they are far off in their assessments, even if they were made for the wrong reasons. They are the most influential — and that’s the problem. When three of the top liberal pundits in the country are actually comedians (no matter how funny), you know there’s a problem.

But hey, the fact that a sociopath like Michael Savage even makes the list should tell you just how screwed up our national discourse really is.

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