Month: August 2010

Sensitivity

by digby

Just some nice folks standing up for American values:

As a hot, humid wind blew off New York Harbor, Mitzner joined some 500 others to stir up a rhetorical whirlwind of protest against a proposal to build a mosque and Islamic cultural center near the site of America’s bloodiest terror attack…”It’s the epitome of an insult,” said Mitzner, 66, a retired New York City teacher, who stood on the edge of Sunday’s protesters and held aloft a handmade sign that proclaimed him to be “A Proud American Infidel.”[…]
“It’s not a question of building a mosque. It’s where they’re building it,” said Glenn Corbett, a former Waldwick deputy fire chief. “It’s insensitive to the 9/11 families because Islam’s faith was so central to the actions of 9/11,” said Corbett, who also drove to the protest rally, held on a plaza across from Ground Zero where families have gathered in recent years on the anniversary of the attacks to mourn loved ones.[…]
Sunday’s crowd included representatives of the conservative Tea Party movement, some of them wearing anti-tax T-shirts that had nothing to do with Ground Zero, Islam or terrorism. “We must take a stand and we must say no,” shouted rally organizer Pamela Geller as the crowd roared approval. Moments later, another keynote speaker, Robert Spencer, sparked more cheers when he asked, “Are you tired of being lied to?” Spencer, however, did not explain precisely what lies he was referring to. Many protesters held American flags. Many carried signs. “A Mosque at Ground Zero Spits on the Graves of 9/11,” one placard proclaimed. Another sign depicted a toilet, with this message: “This is a Mosque. Do You Want it Built at Ground Zero?” At one point, a portion of the crowd menacingly surrounded two Egyptian men who were speaking Arabic and were thought to be Muslims. “Go home,” several shouted from the crowd. “Get out,” others shouted. In fact, the two men – Joseph Nassralla and Karam El Masry — were not Muslims at all. They turned out to be Egyptian Coptic Christians who work for a California-based Christian satellite TV station called “The Way.” Both said they had come to protest the mosque. “I’m a Christian,” Nassralla shouted to the crowd, his eyes bulging and beads of sweat rolling down his face. But it was no use. The protesters had become so angry at what they thought were Muslims that New York City police officers had to rush in and pull Nassralla and El Masry to safety. “I flew nine hours in an airplane to come here,” a frustrated Nassralla said afterward.

That was time and money well spent.

I think that story makes it perfectly clear that this has nothing to do with bigotry or religious intolerance. It’s about about Muslims and liberals being insensitive.

Here’s a fairly typical comment:

Its clear to anyone that takes the time to sit and think about what happened, what is happening and what history and learning about Islam and the players involoved that the new mosque is meant to be a statement against the West. This is not about a peaceful gesture at all. Pure and simple don’t lecture me or the public about religious tolerance. They can build whatever they want but to state that we should shut up and sit down and not state our feelings about the prank is not about being tolerant. The truth hurts and needs to be stated. I for one see what is happening in North Jersey with the Islamic presence and it is not designed to be an intergrated part of our culture.

You’ll notice that the concern about “being integrated into our culture” is nearly exactly the same thing you hear said about Mexican immigrants.

h/t to mb

Why We Can’t Wait

by digby

Perlstein has a great idea:

White House announces frustration at gays for demanding full marriage equality. My idea: send the White House thousands of copies–tens of thousands of copies?–of “Why We Can’t Wait” by Martin Luther King. I’ve just gone to Amazon and done so. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C., 20500. I just went to Alibris.com and sent a $.99 copy. You should, too, and spread the word.

I just did it too. It’s an inexpensive way to make an important point.

It’s a fight on all fronts these days, isn’t it?

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Right Wing Identity Politics

by digby

Adam Serwer has written a good post today about Obama and political identity. It hits many of the same points Will Bunch hit in his post from last night about white privilege and the threat of “the other.” I think this discussion is vitally necessary for liberals and progressives to have in order to understand what’s happening in our culture right now.

Serwer flags this post from John Hinderacker at Powerline who take umbrage at the AP for noting that large numbers of Americans incorrectly identify Obama as a Muslim:

I love that “incorrectly.” The AP has evolved into an opinion machine, so it’s rare and a little startling to see it stand up so boldly for a “fact.” He’s not a Muslim, dammit!

I guess that would freak me out a bit more if there wasn’t precedent for right wingers cheering the ignorance of their followers. I can’t help but be reminded of this gem from 2003:

AMERICANS GET THE WAR ON TERROR [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
even if the Washington Post thinks they’re just MidEast-phobic: 70 percent believe Saddam Hussein was tied to 9/11.
Posted at 07:45 PM

That whole “reality based community” thing didn’t come out of nowhere. But Hinderacker has an explanation for why it’s ok to believe that Obama is something that he isn’t:

The second factor, I think, is Obama’s effort to project a post-American, above-America persona. Obama postures as a citizen of the world who has graced America by condescending to be our President and to instruct us. Some liberals accept this posturing gratefully, but most Americans don’t. Obama has defined himself as literally exotic. Small wonder that some Americans attribute exotic qualities to him. We’re not sure who he is, exactly, but he certainly isn’t one of us. Given the currents that swirl through world events these days, being a Muslim is one interpretation of Obama’s exoticism. Those who construe Obama in this way may well be wrong, but it is not hard to understand why they interpret his aloof non-Americanism in this way.

Hinderacker is a clever fellow, but this alleged anti-American exoticism is more of a convenient (if thoroughly neanderthal) excuse for traditional right wing tribalism, which is largely based on the notion that they are under seige by “lesser” people, who are simultaneously tremendously powerful. It’s also called know-nothingism and along with the repression of women and worship of the wealthy, it’s their raison d’etre.

Right now that tribe is obviously feeling threatened by any number of things, although I would guess that it’s not only the loss of their white privilege but a sense of tribal failure in general. At some point you have to look around and realize that the culture is radically changed and is likely to stay that way. And, like many people who feel displaced and betrayed, they blame “the other” rather than question their own assumptions and identity.

This reaction is human, but then humans are often stupid and immoral, so that doesn’t excuse it. And when it comes to scapegoating innocent people and making ethical errors of this magnitude, it can’t be sanctioned. Even if you can understand that people don’t want to blame their own tribe for their problems and that their feelings are very raw, America in 2010 simply cannot properly function if these impulses are socially tolerated.

Simply put, it is not an accident or a coincidence that the right is attacking African American institutions, Hispanic immigrants and American Muslims in the wake of the election of the first black president. As Serwer wryly points observes about the growing willingness to call Obama Muslim as if it were an epithet:

“In a less politically correct time they probably would have used a different word.”

Indeed. When you rub off the veneer of this very recently formed religious bigotry, you find the same old All American impulses. And catering to those impulses never, ever did anyone any good. There is no compromise possible. As Lincoln said at Cooper Union on the eve of an earlier tribal battle:

What will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

Think about what it is they really want us to do today. And then recognize that they will settle for nothing less than our complete and total capitulation. We must cease to call racial, ethnic and religious bigotry wrong and join them in calling it right and it must be thoroughly done in acts as well as words. We must place ourselves avowedly with them.

Or we fight it. This time we can assume that it probably won’t turn violent, at least on any massive scale. But these dark impulses cannot be finessed and they can’t be compromised with. It’s the story of our country. It just takes on new disguises to fit the times.

Update: Exhibit 78,439

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Martian Logic

by digby

And now a word from the woman who would have been a 76 year old’s heartbeat away from the presidency if the Republicans had won:

Can someone translate that for me? Klaatu barada nicto is about all the Martian I know.

I gather that she may be saying that Dr Laura’s first amendment right were abridged when activists criticized her? Man that’s downright anti-American. The next thing you know they’ll be telling her that she shouldn’t build an unpopular religious center on her own property.

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Played

by digby

Just a short note to reporters who are constantly reassuring us that Republicans really don’t want to exploit this anti-Muslim fever for electoral gain: I think they may be pulling your leg:

Last night, the Roy Blunt campaign posted a gross web video with an image of 9/11 rubble and a Robin Carnahan statement about the proposed Park51 project. As Randy Turner writes, “Blunt apparently wants us to be deeply offended because Robin Carnahan said she wasn’t going to tell the people of New York what to do about the construction of a mosque in the Ground Zero area and she didn’t want New Yorkers to tell us what to do in Missouri.”

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Mission Accomplished

by digby

It was very moving watching the US troop exodus TV show yesterday. Except for all the troops and contractors left inside the country you would have thought that the whole expensive mess was over.

The good news is that what we set out to do is finally done:

Halliburton Co. said on Wednesday that it has gotten a letter of intent from Shell Iraq Petroleum Development BV that would make Halliburton the project manager for developing the Majnoon field in southern Iraq. Halliburton said it wold be working with Nabors Drilling and the Iraq Drilling Company. The contract needs final approval by Iraqi authorities, Halliburton said. Iraq reached a deal with Shell in January to develop the mammoth oil field, along with partner Petronas, Malaysia’s state-run oil company. Shell and Petronas plan to raise production in the field from the current 45,900 barrels per day to 1.8 million barrels per day over 10 years.

Halliburton shares rose 9 cents to close at $28.79 on Wednesday.

Makes you want to run into the street and kiss a random sailor doesn’t it?

*Also to those who are kvetching that we aren’t having homecoming parades and patting Obama on the back for ending the war, Miss Manners says it’s unseemly for a country to celebrate the end of its illegal invasion of another country. It’s best to keep such things understated.

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Phony Bigots Posing As Patriots

by digby

I missed this NY Times article from last June, but I think it’s hugely important in terms of exposing the utter bullshit on the right about the alleged mosque being near Ground Zero — and should instruct the timorous Dems that even if they cave on this, they are going to be faced with the “question” of what to do about the next mosque. Are they all going to say it’s a local matter and none of their business?

In the last few months, Muslim groups have encountered unexpectedly intense opposition to their plans for opening mosques in Lower Manhattan, in Brooklyn and most recently in an empty convent on Staten Island. Some opponents have cited traffic and parking concerns. But the objections have focused overwhelmingly on more intangible and volatile issues: fear of terrorism, distrust of Islam and a linkage of the two in opponents’ minds. “Wouldn’t you agree that every terrorist, past and present, has come out of a mosque?” asked one woman who stood up Wednesday night during a civic association meeting on Staten Island to address representatives of a group that wants to convert a Roman Catholic convent into a mosque in the Midland Beach neighborhood. […]

“I was on the phone this morning with the F.B.I., and all I want to know from you is why MAS is on the terrorist watch list,” said Joan Moriello, using the acronym for the Muslim American Society. Her question produced a loud, angry noise from the audience. Mr. Hammous, a physical therapist who lives on Staten Island, exchanged a puzzled look with two other Muslim men who had joined him on the podium, both officers of the society’s Brooklyn branch, which operates a mosque in Bensonhurst and faces opposition to opening another in Sheepshead Bay. “Your information is incorrect, madam,” he replied. “We are not on any watch list.” The other men, Mohamed Sadeia and Abdel Hafid Djamil, shook their heads in agreement. The State Department maintains a terrorist watch list for foreign organizations, and the Justice Department has identified domestic groups it considers unindicted co-conspirators in various terror-related prosecutions. The Muslim American Society is on neither of those lists. But more than a dozen speakers, including Robert Spencer, a writer whose blog, Jihad Watch, is widely read in conservative foreign policy circles, said that the society and its national director, Mr. Bray, had ties to Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. The first two are on the State Department’s list. “Will you denounce Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations?” Mr. Spencer demanded. “Yes or no?” […]

Wednesday night’s meeting indicated that the questions of neighborhood residents may take some time to answer. Among them: “Is Sharia law better than democracy in your view?” “How do you feel about the role of women in society?” “What are your views on Israel?” “Can you point to any single statement in the Koran that you would consider to be incorrect?” The tenor of the inquiry became so fraught that the meeting eventually collapsed in shouting around 11 p.m., prompting the police and security guards to ask everyone to leave. But just 20 minutes earlier, as Bill Finnegan stood at the microphone, came the meeting’s single moment of hushed silence. Mr. Finnegan said he was a Marine lance corporal, home from Afghanistan, where he had worked as a mediator with warring tribes. After the sustained standing ovation that followed his introduction, he turned to the Muslims on the panel: “My question to you is, will you work to form a cohesive bond with the people of this community?” The men said yes. Then he turned to the crowd. “And will you work to form a cohesive bond with these people — your new neighbors?” The crowd erupted in boos. “No!” someone shouted.

Does anyone still want to pretend that this is about anything but ignorance, fear and hate stoked by the cynical opportunists of the right wing noise machine?

Update: Will Bunch has written an excellent post on this, which ends with a call for vigilance:

[T]he bottom line was that for many, reports that whites will be a minority of Americans by the year 2050 carried the shill ring of an alarm bell. But this concern about the submersion of a dominant white culture in America spiked prematurely in 2008 with the political rise of Obama. In researching the book, I spoke with many conservative voters who talked of their “discomfort” the first time they watched Obama speak on television, who said that in particular they were alarmed at the future president’s use of the specific word “transformation.” These voters were egged on by political “leaders” like vice presidential candidate Palin, who didn’t just voice traditional policies differences with the Democrat but accused him of “palling around with terrorists.” It is no surprise that by mid-2009 I was hearing from the leader of the anti-Obama group the Delaware 9-12 Patriots that the 44th president of the United States “is absolutely not American” while his neighbors were screaming at town hall meetings: “I don’t want this flag to change. I want my country back!” These rank-and-file citizens were often echoing what they heard in a 24/7 right-wing media bubble of ratings-driven irresponsibility — outlandish neo-McCarthyite allegations that Obama had Commies and Maoists working in the West Wing, Glenn Beck’s notorious claim that the president has “a deep-seated hatred of white people” and, perhaps more tellingly, of “white culture,” and most recently radio’s Rush Limbaugh’s bizarre charge that Obama is probably the “best anti-American president the country’s ever had.” […]

Let’s face it: This country has long had its Know-Nothings and its Birchers and its McCarthyites, but it never had gizmos like Fox News or Sarah Palin’s Twitter feed to fuel toxic ideas so far so fast. It’s time we admit these seemingly disconnected battles over “anchor babies, mosques, and a black man in the Oval Office are all part of the same war against “the Other,” and that we are in the fight of a lifetime.

Yes we are. The Washington Post is reporting tonight that that the number of people who don’t know that President Obama is Christian has grown 11 percent since he took office.

More than a third of conservative Republicans now say Obama is a Muslim, nearly double the percentage saying so early last year. Independents, too, are now more apt to see the president as a Muslim: Among independents, 18 percent say he is a Muslim, up eight percentage points.

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Page Two

by digby

The other night Mark Ambinder referred obliquely to the Cordoba Project Imam being considered “fashionable,” yet somehow sympathetic to terrorists, which I took it to be a some kind of reference to NY “radical chic.” He also indicated there were questionable real estate complexities surrounding the project and that knowledge of all this was the reason the White House was reluctant to fully endorse the project. (Most readers seemed to think I was being too suspicious when I suggested that they may have planted that idea with Ambinder, however.)

Anyway, Politico has the real estate story and I think it could very well result in a shift in the story line from moderate Imam wanting to build a community center to fashionable but shady provocateur trying to gin up controversy for his own purposes. And hey, maybe that’s even true. But if that happens it will result in a muddying of the principle issues at stake and further the notion that the project should be moved or perhaps scrapped, thus giving the psychotic Pamela Atlas serious credibility.

One of the hallmarks of a hissy fit is rapidly changing focus from one irrelevant detail to the other, in hopes of creating a false narrative from a set of true facts. This is how it unfolds. The good news is that it doesn’t always work. Then again, sometimes it does.

I’m exhausted already and the month is barely half over.

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Having It Both Ways

by digby

All afternoon I’ve been listening to reporter after reporter reassure the audience that Republican strategists are very upset about all this Muslim trash talk and that they really just wish everyone could get back to an elevated discussion of the economy.

That’s very convenient, don’t you think? Their lunatics are out there fanning the flames of racism and xenophobia for the neanderthal base, while they tut-tut on TV about civility. I think they are quite happy to have it both ways. Right now they are dominating the news cycle with this ugly nonsense, which is all they care about.

August hissy fits usually fade once they’ve done their job, which is gin up the GOP base with red meat politics (swiftboats, death panels, Ground Zero Mosque) and turn the Democrats into pretzels, making them look like they don’t know their assess from their elbows. Once that’s done, they’ll go back to demonizing the Democrats for their socialist/fascist ways having made sure their weakness and ineffectuality were fully displayed to normal people who can’t figure out how these lunatics came to be running the asylum. Again.

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The Generational Warfare Fantasy

by digby

Here’s another in a long line of articles by conservatives filled with many lies and distortions one of which is the assertion that generational warfare is going to be the death of social security because young people are convinced that there will be no benefits for them so they’ll vote to kill it. The problem is that young people always say this. I said it. It is also enormously difficult to persuade young people to save money in their 401ks, but I don’t see anyone proposing that this is because they have no faith in the stock market. It’s because they can’t picture being old and they have other, more pressing, things to spend their money on. Aside from a few college Republican hitmen, most young people simple aren’t engaged in the issue.

It is true that recently the polls have shown that general pessimism about the solvency of social security is at an all time high. But I would attribute it to pessimism about everything being at an all time high. (And needless to say the dishonest campaign being run by Pete Peterson aristocratic overlords is helping to create hysteria over it.) But keep in mind that traditionally, the people who vote on this issue are retirees and those for whom retirement is a looming concern — usually those over 50. (This latest poll breaks it down as 35-55 and 55+, so I don’t know how that plays out specifically, but my anecdotal experience with people my age is that retirement becomes a serious concern in the late 40s.)

And here’s the demographic reality. The large number of people who are both focused on social security and who will vote on social security is a very, very large number of people:

I am sorry about this. But we have, since the 1980s been paying extra to cover the extra expense of our large demographic by buying US Treasury bonds like good responsible adults. The idea that we are now being told those treasury bonds are worthless strikes me as a tad disingenuous unless Pete Peterson thinks the billions he has invested in the same treasuries are worthless too.

And one other little observation, which I’ve made before: if young people don’t want to pay into social security they probably need to start saving for a very big house with a couple of extra bedrooms for mom and dad and possibly grandma and grandpa too. That’s how everyone used to live before social security was enacted — with most of those that didn’t have kids able to take care of them living in grinding, horrible poverty. Perhaps the prospect of that will make people realize that social security is a very good deal.

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