Month: March 2010

Missing The Real Story

by digby

This point by Jamison Foser can’t be stressed enough:

The hand-wringing at the Post and the Times about being insufficiently attuned to conservative arguments should ring false to any fair-minded person who remembers the role those papers played in the relentless hyping of Clinton-era non-scandals, their heavily slanted coverage of the 2000 presidential campaign, or their disastrously inadequate coverage of the Bush administration’s march to war. (Alexander and the Post editors have ducked requests that they reconcile the paper’s coverage of those events with their statements that the Post needs to be more responsive to conservatives.)

But even worse than the myopic view of their treatment of conservatives over the years was the misguided premise that the media should pay attention to certain people simply because they are ideologically conservative — as if a person’s ideology, rather than the accuracy and honesty and importance of his claims, determines whether he should be taken seriously.

That’s dangerously wrong. It’s the kind of thinking that leads the media to grant equal weight to scientists who say the Earth is warming and politicians who respond by pointing out the continued existence of snow.

And, indeed, the conservative media have spent the last several months proving again and again that they simply do not deserve to be taken seriously.

[…]

And yet The New York Times and The Washington Post think they should pay extra attention to claims that come from the right-wing media; that they should be quicker to repeat the nonsense churned out every day by this pack of professional liars, simply because they are conservatives. But the decades-long track record suggests the opposite: The fact that Fox News or The Weekly Standard is promoting some story is pretty good reason to assume it isn’t newsworthy.

Furthermore, this track record suggests that these stories are also a pretty good reason to assume it is propaganda and seek out the motivations and strategy behind them. There is a story in all this, it’s just not the one the right wing media are spinning.

Read Foser’s whole column for a thorough rundown of just the lies these conservative rags have been telling in the past few months. It’s astonishing to see it in one place.

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These conservatives the mainstream press feels so compelled to take seriously

Visions

by digby

His Holiness has backtracked on his earlier encyclical requiring that people leave the church which practices social justice. Now he says,

“Social justice in which ‘you empower yourself to go out and help the poor’ is permissible”

That’s a relief.

Oh, and this would be His Holiness Glenn Beck The First not the Pope. (Presumably, the Pope still believes in social justice at least in theory (as long as women and gays aren’t unduly privileged, anyway.)

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Huckleberry Sunday

by digby

President Huckleberry Graham threw down the gauntlet this morning on This Week

TAPPER: Now you have said that if the Democrats use reconciliation to pass the fixes to the Senate bill, it will be catastrophic to attempts to have any sort of bipartisan cooperation. But you have voted for reconciliation in the past when Republicans were in the majority, the 2003 Bush tax cuts, more than $300 billion worth in the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 which slowed the growth of Medicare. Those votes seemed to pass without catastrophe. So why has this changed? GRAHAM: Well, number one, they related to income and spending. And this is one-sixth of the economy about to be affected here.

Evidently “affecting one sixth of the economy” has nothing to do with income and spending. Interesting. He continued with a non-sequitor:

Under reconciliation, you can’t make any changes to Social Security because Senator Byrd understood it was never meant to be used for a purpose like this. Senator Byrd said you couldn’t pass Senator — President Clinton’s health care plan through reconciliation. It was never meant — and you can repeal the Bush tax cuts if you don’t like it. If they use this device called reconciliation to deal out Republicans, it will open up Pandora’s box.

The Republicans dealt themselves out — indeed, they declared health care Obama’s Waterloo and left the game completely. Yet the bill passed with 60 votes. The House bill passed with a majority. Reconciliation will pass with a majority. Only one Republican voted yes in the entire process. Evidently Huck believes that means none of those bills were legitimate. Which also means that Huck doesn’t believe in democracy.

And the interview I just heard is spin, campaigning. I thought the campaigning was over. Are you trying to tell me and the American people that Scott Brown got elected campaigning against a Washington bill that really is just like the Massachusetts bill? The American people are getting tired of this crap. No way in the world is what they did in Massachusetts like what we’re about to do in Washington. We didn’t cut Medicare — they didn’t cut Medicare when they passed the bill in Massachusetts. They didn’t raise $500 billion on the American people when they passed the bill in Massachusetts.

To suggest that Scott Brown is basically campaigning against the bill in Washington that is like the one in Massachusetts is complete spin. I’ve been in bipartisan deals, I was in the “gang of 14” to stop the Senate from blowing up when the Republicans wanted to change the rules and use the majority vote to get judges through.

If they do this, it’s going to poison the well for anything else they would like to achieve this year or thereafter.

Yeah, that’s a huge risk. What will they do it the Republicans decide to obstruct their agenda?
He went on to blame the Democrats for the failure of immigration reform under Bush. Seriously.

TAPPER: Well, the leader of the Republican charge, other than President Bush, for immigration reform last time was your dear friend Senator John McCain, who, as far as I can tell, is completely AWOL from the debate. I know he has a tough primary against a more conservative — arguably more conservative challenger there. But shouldn’t — I mean, where — what is his commitment? It certainly doesn’t look unwavering. GRAHAM: Well, to me, his commitment is what it has always been. He has done the heavy lifting on immigration. He has been fighting the health care bill that the country dislikes and Republicans can’t tolerate. He has fought the stimulus package. And he has worked with the president on (INAUDIBLE). Here is my advice to the administration, I will release a document with Senator Schumer about my views on how to fix immigration. The campaign is over, you told Senator McCain. President Obama, lead. You write a health care — immigration reform bill. You do the heavy lifting. You put together a comprehensive immigration reform package. You bring it to the Senate and House and see how many Democrat and Republican supporters you can get. All you have done is talk about what we should do, now is the time to lead. Tell the people at the rally next weekend that your administration will write a comprehensive immigration reform bill. I will be glad to look at it. If I like, I will sign on. If I oppose it, I’ll tell you where I disagree. And see how many votes you can get. TAPPER: To be fair, Senator Graham, the reason that immigration reform didn’t pass last time, even with you, Senator McCain and President Bush pushing for it, was because of the Republican Party. The Republican Party seems in no — GRAHAM: That’s not fair. TAPPER: Why is that not fair? GRAHAM: That’s not fair at all.
TAPPER: Even Republican members who are part of the coalition voted against it. GRAHAM: I can show you 10 Democrats in the Senate today who voted against immigration reform: Tester, Baucus, Bayh, Webb — TAPPER: And how many Republicans voted against it? GRAHAM: It was a bipartisan — (CROSSTALK) GRAHAM: A lot of us voted for it. We got over 60 votes at one time. It fell apart because the bill was attacked from the left and the right.

I hope everyone realizes that this is a set-up on immigration reform. Graham is a snake. He is trying to position the Republicans as friends of the Hispanic community, but he will torpedo anything meaningful and then blame it on the Democrats. The GOP has no intention of going up against their tea party bigots, but they’d sure like to demobilize the Hispanic community by undermining their loyalty to the Democrats.
I consider Graham to be one of the most dangerous Republicans in the government. He’s a very bad faith player whom the villagers love as a sort of cornpone Jimmy Stewart. I hope the Democrats don’t underestimate him.

Also: If you get a chance to see Amity Schlaes on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN today, don’t miss it. This mendacious twit has no business on respectable television show, and least of all Zakaria’s which hit a low point by having her on today. He validated her lies by presenting her as a serious person and somebody should make him answer for it.

Here’s just one example of her ludicrous drivel in an exchange with Jeffrey Sachs:

SACHS: Amity talks about tax cuts. We’re already by far lowest taxed country of all of these countries, and we busted so many of our public functions at this point, and we have a 10 percent of GNP budget deficit. You do the basic arithmetic. We come again and again to the same point that since we have the lowest tax take, that is as a share of our income and I’m not talking about the structure of the taxes, we can’t fund basic things to have a normal, civilized country right now. That’s what’s eating us alive. We can’t do anything right now. We’re just paralyzed because of this huge gap and the idea that no, we got to cut more, cut more taxes, cut more taxes, rather than take an honest piece of arithmetic and say, it’s going to have to be both. We’re going to have to have some spending cuts. We’re going to have to have some tax increases, but let’s take this seriously because otherwise, the rot that will come will be very, very serious.

ZAKARIA: Tax increases. Can you go along with the value-added tax?

SHLAES: No, I can’t. When you do an honest bit of math and say, supposing I want to get rid of the deficit this year, I want no deficit for the United States, well, the tax foundation did some math this week on that. They said we’ll do it through taxes and they found that the top rate would be 65 percent. We would need statically (ph) to get to zero deficit. Also, everyone else’s rate would go up, too. It would be needed across, what we call across the board increase. The future of the U.S. —

ZAKARIA: Nobody’s saying you have to go down to zero and nobody’s saying —

SHLAES: But the future of the U.S. lies in the reforming of the entitlements, not in adjusting the taxes or even necessarily adding that. I would argue that the VAT is part of Europe’s trouble. Europe lies about its financial data, its national economic data more than the U.S. does. I remember and Jeff remembers, the days when Italy said, you have to count our black market economy in our GDP —

What a piece of work.

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Beyond Helter Skelter

by tristero

About a week ago or so, in a small town somewhere in America, a horrible mass murder occurred. An entire family was brutally killed in what looked like an extremely bizarre satanic ritual. It was all the over the news. You missed it? I don’t know how. It was everywhere.

And did you also miss the interview about the murders with Charles Manson? You didn’t see it? Odd. His opinion was so completely unexpected it was repeated at least twice in primetime every day. He astonished the country by saying that he thought the murderers went much too far, that their bizarre deeds were, and I’m quoting Manson directly here, “out of bounds.”

“Out of bounds” even for Charles Manson! That must mean those sickos did some major-league perverted stuff.

I guess you also missed the op-eds about the tragedy that name-checked Charley. Today, for example, a well-known, well-respected columnist for the New York Times:

When even the relentless pursuer of Helter Skelter is moved to call a ritualistic mass slaying “out of bounds,” as Manson did in this case, that’s a fairly good indicator that it’s way off in crazyland.

Hold it right there, dear reader.

Doesn’t this strike you as all rather…odd???? Since when is Charles fucking Manson an arbiter of what passes for sensible or crazy behavior? Does that mean that if Charley approved of that mass murder, it might be a matter of debate as to whether those killings were a reasonable thing to do?

Of course not. Manson’s thinking is so warped and distorted, who knows why he thought those murders, but not the ones he perpetrated, were “out of bounds?” For all we know, it may be that what really disturbed Charley was that the killers smashed some mint-condition Beach Boys singles and sprinkled them over the bodies. What a terrible thing to happen… to those priceless recordings!

It’s silly to think that those deeds were too horrific “even for Charley Manson.” If the media were truly serious about providing news and information, they’d have understood that simply because Charles Manson is a warped human being does not make him an expert on the relative perversity of others. Rather than pretend a murderous lunatic’s opinion is the gold standard for what’s beyond crazy behavior, you talk to genuine, and genuinely reasonable, experts on homicide, mass murder, and so on who can offer some serious insight and perspective on how awful a given heinous crime was. Put simply: A mass murderer is hardly a trustworthy source of opinion on the propriety of other mass murderers. Duh.

Or so one might think…

I like a lot of what Frank Rich writes, and I like a lot of this column , but the following trope making the rounds – Rich is hardly the only one to employ it – is totally outrageous::

Among those who have called out Keep America Safe for its indecent impugning of honorable Americans’ patriotism are Kenneth Starr, Lindsey Graham and former Bush administration lawyers in the conservative Federalist Society. When even the relentless pursuer of Monicagate is moved to call a right-wing jihad “out of bounds,” as Starr did in this case, that’s a fairly good indicator that it’s way off in crazyland.

Amazing! Why, Kenneth Starr’s opinion of Liz Cheney’s character assassinations – “out of bounds” – is identical to Manson’s on those mass murderers…

Coincidence? No. I simply made up the murders and the Manson interview in order to make the point that Starr weighing in on Cheney/Kristol’s latest outrage matters as little as Manson’s would mean about a recent mass murder. It’s not that Keep America Safe is too much even for conservatives like Starr. It’s that Starr himself is so far out of bounds that his opinion on other extremists can’t be used as a gauge to judge anything. (Am I being unfair to poor Kenneth Starr, comparing him to a maniacal control freak obsessed with sex and power? I’m so totally sorry):

To repeat. Starr is an extremist. That doesn’t make him an expert on extremism who knows when others have gone “too far.” If he were, he’d never have behaved the way he did during Whitewater. His opinion of Cheney and Kristol’s latest stunt is no indication whatsoever that that they are somehow out there in crazyland “even for the right.”Starr, too is so out there in crazy land, his opinion can hardly be considered reliable.

This is important: Starr said something that appeared – I stress the “appeared” – sensible. What we must remember is that this is the man who tried to persuade the president’s ex-girlfriend to wear a wire into the Oval Office. By any rational standard, that was so beyond “out of bounds” as to make his objections to the extremism of others meaningless. Who knows why he really objects to the demonizing of the Gitmo lawyers? Maybe at least one of the lawyers was a close pal of his and he’s standing up for a friend; otherwise he simply would have kept his trap shut. Makes sense to me.

Or maybe he confused Liz Cheney with Mary Cheney and thought Keep America Safe was some radical lesbian cooperative mandating contraceptive use by everyone. He’s amply demonstrated his kinkiness when it comes to sex, after all.

Again, who knows? To say the least, Kenneth Starr’s statements are hardly a reliable source in order to get a sense for how extreme others on the right is. Even when he appears to be making sense? Especially so: Something else must be going on.

Let me put it another way: If you think the reason Kenneth Starr spoke out against Cheney/Kristol is because he shares your disgust of McCarthyite smears, you need to read Conason’s and Lyon’s book. Starr demonstrated again and again that he has neither the slightest respect for boundaries and nor the slightest problem with McCarthyism. None. In objecting to Keep America Safe, he’s just working the angles. Or he’s misinformed. Me, I’m betting on the angles and I’m betting Cheney and Co. smeared a friend or two.

So, assuming it would actually be useful know such a thing, whose opinion might actually demonstrate that Liz Cheney and William Kristol’s nasty little smear campaign “is a fairly good indicator that it’s way off in crazyland?” Well, rather than propagate Starr’s worthless brain-burps, they could have interviewed Susan Herman, president of ACLU and given her opinion as much airtime as they did Starrs . But they didn’t. In fact, they rarely quote someone sensible when the right goes “out of bounds.” Case in point: Rich’s column. We hear only from the crazies – Starr, Graham, Bush-admin lawyers – and they’re complaining that other equally crazy people are crazy . That’s not helpful.

It’s as if somehow an extremist’s condemnation proves that there’s some mythical further-out-there-beyond-the-pale extremism. It doesn’t. It means nothing besides this: liberal – ie. reasonable- voices are not taken seriously when objecting to the madness of the rightwing. In the mainstream media, only the rightwing are empowered to judge when they’ve gone too far.

This has got to stop. Kenneth Starr and his fellow creeps have nothing constructive to add to the national discourse on any subject whatsoever. As for the trope, “Well, even staunch movement conservatives like FILL IN THE BLANK think Cheney and Kristol have gone too far” that is a worthless construction. Reasonable people, not a roundup of exclusively movement conservatives, need to be heard from when movement conservatives go too far. They themselves are not intellectually or morally equipped to know when that has happened.

To recap:

Kenneth Starr calling Cheney/Kristols’s actions “out of bounds” is no different than Charles Manson saying the same thing about a ritual murder. These are not sensible actors and their opinions are worthless for gaining any genuine insight into the relative extremism of genuinely insane behavior and/or dangerously bad social movements. Rather than accept the construction, “even the right thinks that is too extreme,” we should strongly object to it. Why does their opinion matter at all? They’ve been wrong on everything.

The right has demonstrated time and again that they are neither honest nor coherent. Movement conservatives are in no position to judge the relative extremism of their allies and rivals within the movement and their motives for doing so are suspect. Kenneth Starr, of all people, is hardly capable, morally or intellectually, of defining a line beyond which McCarthyite tactics could be thought “out of bounds.”

Saturday Night At The Movies

Of butcher boys and green-eyed ladies

By Dennis Hartley

Child of nature, friend of man.

With Saint Patrick’s Day coming up in a few days, I thought I’d help you “get your Irish up” and drive the snakes out of your media room with my Top 10 recommendations…

The Butcher Boy-A real gem from director Neil Jordan, featuring one of the most extraordinary performances I have ever seen by a child actor (Eamonn Owens is like a midget Brando). Hard to describe, the film is sort of a distant cousin to An Angel at My Table or Heavenly Creatures. The difficult and dark subject matter is handled with judicious compassion. Both heartbreaking and savagely funny, this is worth seeking out.

The Commitments-“Say it leoud. I’m black and I’m prewd!” Pulling together a cast of talented yet unknown actor/musicians to “portray” a group of talented yet unknown musicians was a stroke of genius from director Alan Parker. This “life imitating art imitating life” trick works wonders. In some ways a thematic remake of the director’s own 1980 film Fame, Parker transplants the scenario from New York to Dublin (look fast for a sly reference when a band member sings a parody of the Fame theme). However, these working class Irish kids don’t have the luxury of attending a performing arts academy; there’s an undercurrent of economic downturn, with most band members “on the dole” . The acting chemistry is superb, but it’s the musical performances that really win you over, especially from (then) 16-year old Andrew Strong, who has the soulful pipes of someone who has been drinking a fifth and smoking 2 packs a day for decades. In 2007, cast member Glen Hansard popped up again as the co-star of the surprise low-budget hit, Once, a lovely (if a bit over-praised) character study that would make a good double bill.

The General-Brendan Gleeson explodes onscreen like an Irish Tony Soprano in his turn as real-life gangster Martin Cahill. According to the script, Cahill was a bit of a latter-day Robin Hood figure to some Dubliners (one suspects some degree of artistic romanticism on that count). Regardless, Gleeson makes quite an impression in his first major role. Jon Voight (!) is an unexpected delight as Cahill’s law enforcement nemesis. Written and directed by the eclectic John Boorman, who adapted from the novel by Paul Williams.

In Bruges-OK, full disclosure. In my original review, I gave this 2008 Sundance hit a somewhat lukewarm appraisal. But upon a second viewing, I realized that I had “missed something” the first time around, and have now decided that I actually like this film quite a lot (happens sometimes…nobody’s perfect!). A pair of Irish hit men (Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell) botch a job in London and are exiled to the Belgian city of Bruges, where they are ordered to lay low until their piqued Cockney employer (an over the top Ray Fiennes) dictates their next move. What ensues can be perhaps best described as a tragicomic Boschian nightmare (which will make more sense once you’ve seen it). Written and directed by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, who deftly demonstrates the versatility of the word “fook” (as a noun, an adverb, a super adverb and an adjective).

Into the West-Here’s another sleeper worth seeking out, from one of the more deft (and underappreciated, IMHO) “all-purpose” directors working today, Mike Newell (Dance With a Stranger, Enchanted April, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Donnie Brasco, Pushing Tin). At first glance, it falls into the “magical family film” category, but it carries a subtly dark undercurrent with it throughout, which keeps it interesting for the adults in the room. Lovely performances, a magic horse, and one purty pair o’humans (Ellen Barkin and Gabriel Byrne, real-life spouses at the time). What more do you want?

My Left Foot-This was the first (and best) of three rewarding collaborations between writer-director Jim Sheridan and actor Daniel Day-Lewis (1993’s In the Name of the Father and 1997’s The Boxer were to follow). This 1989 biopic about Christy Brown, a severely palsied man who became a renowned author, poet and painter despite daunting physical roadblocks makes for an incredibly moving film. What makes this film unique within its genre is that it avoids the audience-pandering trap of turning its protagonist into the cinematic equivalent of a lovable puppy (see Rainman, I Am Sam); Brown is fearlessly portrayed by Day-Lewis “warts and all” with all his peccadilloes laid bare. As a result, you quickly acclimate to Day-Lewis’ physical tics, and begin to see past them, allowing Brown to emerge as a complex human being, not merely an object of pity. That is a mark of a truly great actor, and Day-Lewis quite deservedly picked up an Oscar. Brenda Fricker also earned her supporting Oscar as Brown’s mother. It’s easy to overlook 13-year old Hugh O’Conor’s contribution as the young Christy, but it is an important one.

Odd Man Out-An absorbing film noir from the great director Carol Reed (The Third Man, The Fallen Idol). James Mason is excellent as a gravely wounded Irish rebel who is on the run from the authorities through the dark and shadowy backstreets of Belfast. Interestingly, the I.R.A. is never referred to directly, but the turmoil borne of Northern Ireland’s “troubles” is most definitely inferred by word and action throughout F.L. Green and R.C. Sherriff’s intelligent screenplay (adapted from Green’s original novel). Unique for its time, it still holds up remarkably well as a “heist gone wrong”/chase thriller with strong political undercurrents. The great cast includes Robert Newton and Cyril Cusack.

The Quiet Man-A John Ford classic. I was never a huge John Wayne fan, but he’s damn near perfect in this role as a down-on-his-luck boxer who leaves America to get in touch with his roots in his native Ireland. The most entertaining (and purloined) donnybrook of all time plus a fiery performance from the gorgeous Maureen O’Hara round things off nicely. Although quite tame by today’s standards, I’ve always thought the romantic scenes between Wayne and O’Hara to be surprisingly tactile and sensuous for the time. The pastoral valleys and rolling hills of the Irish countryside have never looked lovelier onscreen, thanks to Winton C. Hoch and Archie Stout’s Oscar-winning cinematography.

The Secret of Roan Inish-John Sayles delivers an engaging fairy tale, devoid of the usual genre clichés. Wistful, haunting and beautifully shot by the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who captures the misty desolation of County Donegal’s rugged coastline in a way that frequently recalls Michael Powell’s similarly effective utilization of Scotland’s Shetland Islands for his 1937 classic, The Edge of the World. The seals should have been nominated for a special Oscar for Best Performance by a Sea Mammal.

U2-Rattle and Hum-An outstanding, artfully produced rock doc from director Phil Joanau (State of Grace). They’re a band from Dublin, y’know. P.S.-Fook the Revolution!

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Peas In A Pod

by digby

This op-ed by Howell Raines, former editor of the NY Times, in which he wonders why the media refuse to confront their rivals FOX news as the propaganda arm it is has been getting a lot of circulation. Setting aside the sheer chutzpah of the man who refused to apologize for being Newtie’s little lapdog during the Whitewater scandal (they didn’t need FOX on those days because they had the paper of record doing their dirty work for them), the answer to his question seems fairly obvious to me. The rest of the press doesn’t want to come down too hard on FOX because in a shrinking journalistic universe there is a diminishing number of places to work these days.

And anyway, what makes Raines think that the NY Times has a problem with Fox in the first place? Judging from the ACORN scandal, they don’t see much of a problem even with a totally phony group of liars like Breitbart?

Building on the work done by Bradblog and Media Matters on this issue, FAIR came out with an advisory last week which should make the Times cringe with embarrassment. Here’s just the most recent evidence of their journalistic malpractice on this story:

–On March 2, 2010, under the headline, “ACORN’s Advice to Fake Pimp Was No Crime, Prosecutor Says, “the Times reported: “The ACORN employees in Brooklyn who were captured on a hidden camera seeming to offer conservative activists posing as a pimp and a prostitute creative advice on how to get a mortgage have been cleared of wrongdoing by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.”

But the story the Times continues to tell is wildly misleading, as a review of the publicly available transcripts of his visit (BigGovernment.com) makes clear. O’Keefe never dressed as a pimp during his visits to ACORN offices, seems to never actually represent himself as a “pimp,” and the advice he solicits is usually about how to file income taxes (which is not “tax evasion”). In at least one encounter (at a Baltimore ACORN office), the pair seemed to first insist that Giles was a dancer, not a prostitute.

In the case recounted in the March 2 Times story, the transcripts show that O’Keefe did not portray himself as a pimp to the ACORN workers in Brooklyn, but told them that he was trying to help his prostitute girlfriend. In part of the exchange, O’Keefe and his accomplice seem to be telling ACORN staffers that they are attempting to buy a house to protect child prostitutes from an abusive pimp.

Throughout the months the Times covered the story, it made a major mistake: believing that Internet videos produced by right-wing activists were to be trusted uncritically, rather than approached with the skepticism due to anything you’d come across on the Web. O’Keefe and the Web publisher Andrew Breitbart refused to make unedited copies of the videotape public, and with good reason: A more complete viewing, as the transcripts show, would produce a much different impression.

This isn’t just about O’Keefe and Giles misrepresenting how they looked when they went into those offices. They misrepresented what they said and what the ACORN workers were responding to. There’s no excuse for the Times refusing to acknowledge this and at this point, the Times’ refusal to acknowledge how badly they handled this story is a scandal in itself.

Perhaps we should begin to ask whether or not the press isn’t questioning the right wing noise machine’s propaganda simply because they agree with it?

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I have refrained from writing much about this because I’m so angry at the Catholic hierarchy at the moment that I’m afraid I might say something I’ll regret. But I can’t resist this, from Pam Spaulding:

At one time you might have thought what you’re about to read was an extreme looney-toon statement, but given the vortex of evil coming to light—the criminal pedophile priest protection enterprise sitting at Benedict’s door of responsibility, the pimping out of undocumented immigrants, members of the Vatican choir, Papal Gentlemen and seminarians…it’s like a bad novel come to life. Well, this story is like a novel, The Exorcist. The Vatican’s exorcist-in-chief, who was the basis for the priest in the film, thinks there’s evil inside those walls and he’s not shy about saying it.

Pam goes on to talk about the horrifying mess the Vatican is facing and writes:

I think the public relations staff have such a nightmare on their hands—who knows when a coerced rent boy’s going to emerge to tell tales of priests in all sorts of compromising positions, or more papers implicating Cardinal Ratzinger emerge that show he repeatedly allowed children to be raped and pedophile priests to remain free to victimize more?

Oh boy.

She mentions the fact that the Pope is considered infallible which means there’s not much anyone can do about this short of some very dicey Dan Brown novel kind of stuff. But that raises a question for me: if the Pope is infallible and it turns out that he was involved in the pedophile priest scandal, as now looks likely, does that mean that pedophilia would now be considered an act ordained by God?

*I suppose I should regret saying that too, but I don’t. The Church hierarchy has a lot to answer for these days . And nobody seems more unhappy with all this than observant Catholics themselves.

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Kabuki Play

by digby

Michael Isikoff and Michael Hirsh are on to something here, when they call Liz Cheney “Palin with a pedigree.” I hadn’t thought about it that way, but Cheney is also a somewhat youthful mother of five who sells herself as a living example of traditional family values from a position of powerful and famous political celebrity. It’s a trick only the right wing could possibly get away with, but their history is filled with such hypocritical women.

But this I find even more interesting:

It’s telling that no one at the Palazzo seemed very concerned that Liz, daughter of Dick, had just four days earlier appalled many in her own party’s establishment. Her conservative advocacy group, Keep America Safe, had launched a nasty assault on seven Justice Department lawyers who had defended Guantánamo detainees. The ad branded the Justice lawyers “the Al Qaeda Seven” and asked, in ominous tones, “Whose values do they share?” To many critics within and outside the GOP, the attack smacked of McCarthyism for seeming to impugn the loyalty of lawyers who—like all members of their profession—sometimes represent unpopular (and guilty) clients. Nineteen conservative lawyers later issued a statement denouncing the ad. Among them were Ken Starr and top officials who had served in the George W. Bush administration. “I was horrified,” says John Bellinger, Condoleezza Rice’s former chief counsel.

Like father, like daughter, it seems. Much as Dick Cheney staked out the far right wing of the Bush administration, winning the respect and gratitude of GOP hawks despite his low popularity nationwide, Liz seems eager to make her reputation by unnerving her party’s moderates. In another era—one less driven by ideological extremes—the vicious attack ad might have sunk her political career. But now it may have only turbocharged it. Cheney’s aides could barely contain their glee last week at the ruckus they had stirred up. “For $1,000, we’ve driven the debate for over a week,” said one political adviser, who asked not to be identified because the group, co-led by conservative commentator Bill Kristol, wanted to speak only through official statements. Or as one of Liz Cheney’s biggest fans, Rush Limbaugh, put it on his radio show: “It sure as hell got everybody’s attention, didn’t it?” (Cheney herself did not respond to a request for comment.)

It was not a mistake. They knew exactly what they were doing.

Bill Kristol was, you’ll recall, the man who wrote the memo back in 1994 urging total obstruction of Clinton’s health care bill. He is a master at moving the debate to the right. Similarly, the Cheneys have been on the attack since the day Obama was elected and have been extremely successful at forcing them off their position and re-normalizing the neocon position in the mainstream media.

Everyone on the left feels very smug about having all those right wing lawyers brush Cheney and Kristol back. But they shouldn’t. Cheney’s charge about the Obama Justice Department lawyers is “out there” and according to Cokie’s law that means it’s no longer beyond the pale. And from the sound of this article, the conservative establishment understands that very well.

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They Never, Ever Quit

by digby

Say what you will about the right, but you have to admit that they are tenacious and use every opportunity, win or lose, to organize and advance their agenda:

Several Religious Right activists and California state legislators have unveiled a new effort to take control of the court system “across San Diego County and eventually America” via elections through a new organization called “Better Courts Now”, arguing that Proposition 8 would not have even been necessary if the state had the proper judges: Assemblyman Joel Anderson, R-La Mesa, and one of his predecessors from the 77th Assembly District are among those appearing in videos for a new Chula Vista-based group that is urging conservatives to elect local judges who value “life and traditional family.” The website, BetterCourtsNow.com, also includes testimonials from at least one person affiliated with the National Organization for Marriage (NOM), a group that has been in the center of political battles over gay marriage in California and around the country. “It’s important that we unify our votes so we ensure that solid men and women of high morals, who will not legislate from the bench, are elected to office,” Anderson says in a 97-second video. Later he adds, “We are in full agreement that we need to get behind BetterCourtsNow.com.”

They understand something the left doesn’t —- this is a fight that never ends. It’s easier for them because they are temperamentally suited to permanent battle. But it doesn’t change the fact that there is never going to be a permanent armistice in the march for human progress. After all, we just went through the bloodiest century in history, fighting all this out on the world stage and yet the war, by other means, continues. It’s the nature of our species. Liberals had better recognize that it’s going to take vigilance, creativity and persistence just to protect the progress that’s been made, not to mention any further advances. The reactionaries, authoritarians and sadists never rest.

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Security Clowns

by digby

So, it looks like Michael Chertoff’s DHS relied on wingnut organizations to keep them apprised of allegedly leftwing threats to the nation. And not just any rightwing organizations: David Horowitz’s Frontpage Magazine’s paranoid “Discover The Network” project.

This does not surprise me in the least. Michael Chertoff proved long ago that he was a fool:

They held a seminar at the Heritage Foundation with the shows actors and producers featuring Chertoff and Limbaugh in which Chertoff said:

SECRETARY CHERTOFF: …In reflecting a little bit about the popularity of the show “24” — and it is popular, and there are a number of senior political and military officials around the country who are fans, and I won’t identify them, because they may not want me to do that (laughter) I was trying to analyze why it’s caught such public attention. Obviously, it’s a very well-made and very well-acted show, and very exciting. And the premise of a 24-hour period is a novel and, I think, very intriguing premise. But I thought that there was one element of the shows that at least I found very thought-provoking, and I suspect, from talking to people, others do as well.

Typically, in the course of the show, although in a very condensed time period, the actors and the characters are presented with very difficult choices — choices about whether to take drastic and even violent action against a threat, and weighing that against the consequence of not taking the action and the destruction that might otherwise ensue.

In simple terms, whether it’s the president in the show or Jack Bauer or the other characters, they’re always trying to make the best choice with a series of bad options, where there is no clear magic bullet to solve the problem, and you have to weigh the costs and benefits of a series of unpalatable alternatives. And I think people are attracted to that because, frankly, it reflects real life. That is what we do every day. That is what we do in the government, that’s what we do in private life when we evaluate risks. We recognize that there isn’t necessarily a magic bullet that’s going to solve the problem easily and without a cost, and that sometimes acting on very imperfect information and running the risk of making a serious mistake, we still have to make a decision because not to make a decision is the worst of all outcomes.

And so I think when people watch the show, it provokes a lot of thinking about what would you do if you were faced with this set of unpalatable alternatives, and what do you do when you make a choice and it turns out to be a mistake because there was something you didn’t know. I think that, the lesson there, I think is an important one we need to take to heart. It’s very easy in hindsight to go back after a decision and inspect it and examine why the decision should have been taken in the other direction. But when you are in the middle of the event, as the characters in “24” are, with very imperfect information and with very little time to make a decision, and with the consequences very high on a wrong decision, you have to be willing to make a decision recognizing that there is a risk of mistake.

Here’s Rush at the same seminar:

RUSH: I asked Mary Matalin, by the way, on this trip to Afghanistan, we were watching this, and I asked her — she worked for Vice President Cheney at the time — I said, “Do we have anything like this?”

SURNOW: (Laughter.)

RUSH: She said, “Not that I know of.” What about the possibility of government officials — back to the scholars — government officials watching this program (we know they do) can they get ideas, creative ideas on dealing with these problems from this show, or are they strictly fans, do you think?

[…]

Speaking just as an American citizen, you mentioned the operation in Canada. This is why the show has an impact on people. We have a political party trying to shut down the program that enabled that operation in Canada to be a success. It’s being called “domestic spying,” when it’s not. These guys put the same kind of conflict in the program. Jack Bauer, who never fails, always is the target of the government, somebody, being put in jail. It’s amazing how close it is.

Rush was actually asking the right question. I laughed at him at the time,thinking he was an embarrassing torture fanboy. But it turns out that the military really was getting ideas from the show:

According to British lawyer and writer Philippe Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early “brainstorming meetings” of military officials at Guantanamo in September of 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial new interrogation techniques including water-boarding, sexual humiliation, and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer “gave people lots of ideas.”

This probably worries me as much as anything I’ve heard about the antics of the Bush administration. These people are so fundamentally unserious that they found inspiration in a television show when the stakes were about as high as they could possibly be. It’s horrifying to think these powerful people were this daft. But they were.

And that’s the problem with using Horowitz’s silly lists as well. It was so fundamentally unserious that it’s scary. And it makes it pretty clear that we were either very, very lucky or that Al Qaeda was a spent force after 9/11. American security during those days was a clown show.

Update: Emptywheel has more

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