Month: January 2011

The Other Woman

by digby

Watch out Sarah … I think you could be replaced by a much younger model:

A 17-year-old from Nebraska became the youngest winner of the Miss America crown in 90 years on Saturday after beating 52 other young women from across the United States…

[Teresa] Scanlan, a recent high school graduate from the western Nebraska town of Gering, planned to study American politics at Patrick Henry College in Virginia after her reign as Miss America.

She also hoped to attend law school, become a judge and eventually a politician, according to her pageant biography.

Scanlan won after strutting in a black bikini and a white evening gown, playing “White Water Chopped Sticks” on piano and telling the audience that when it comes to the website Wikileaks, security should come before public access to government information.

“You know when it came to that situation, it was actually based on espionage, and when it comes to the security of our nation, we have to focus on security first and then people’s right to know, because it’s so important that everybody who’s in our borders is safe and so we can’t let things like that happen, and they must be handled properly,” she said.

She’s only 17 and she sounds at least as articulate than your average pundit on this subject — she didn’t even call for them to hunted down like dogs.

Palin had better watch out. This young woman could be the Tea Party’s trophy wife.

BTW: Patrick Henry College:

Patrick Henry College (PHC) is the first college in the United States founded specifically for Christian home-schooled students. Patrick Henry is known for its conservative evangelical Christian focus.

h/t ms

.

Re-writes for the really big show

by digby

Yesterday I discussed what I see as the likely outcomes of the upcoming political fights over the budget and noted that Eric Cantor had said quite openly that they would have to raise the debt limit, but could use the situation to “leverage” Republican spending cuts. I pointed out that this means the Democrats will only be capitulating voluntarily if they do so, since the Republicans have already shown their hands. The debt ceiling is not a hostage. They do not want a re-run of 1995 and they will blink.

But that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to put on quite show. Here’s one scenario from Tim Pawlenty, via ThinkProgress:

WALLACE: Back in 2005, you allowed the government of Minnesota to shutdown for nine days because of a disagreement with a Democratic legislature about taxes and spending. Should congressional Republicans take the same tough stance when it comes to raising the debt limit and federal spending?

PAWLENTY: …I’m glad we had that showdown in Minnesota. As to the federal government, they should not raise the debt ceiling. I believe we should pass legislation, allow them to seek spending, as the revenue comes in to make sure they don’t default and have a debate about what other spending could be reduced.

WALLACE: You would say to Republicans up in the building behind me do not raise the debt limit?

PAWLENTY: That’s right. To avoid the default, I would take it one step further. Send the president a piece of legislation that authorizes the federal government to sequence the pain of the bill so we don’t default on the debt obligation and then have debate about how we reduce the other spending.

I don’t know what that means, exactly, but it doesn’t matter. I’m sure there are going to be all sorts of silly things like this thrown out there to gain “leverage.” And the Democrats don’t have to listen to any of them. Cantor already said that they must raise the debt ceiling. If the Dems go along with any of this nonsense, it’s because they like the “compromise.”

h/t to bb

Zeitgeist

by digby

Michelle Goldberg tells us in this must-read article, about Jared Loughner’s obsession with a conspiracy theory “documentary” which includes many of the oddball concepts in Loughner’s videos.

We now know a little bit more about the matrix of ideas that helped inspire Jared Loughner’s murderous rampage on Saturday. According to a friend of his interviewed on Good Morning America on Wednesday, the conspiracy documentary Zeitgeist “poured gasoline on his fire” and had “a profound impact on Jared Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives in.” He was also, according to his friend’s father, influenced by the documentary Loose Change, a classic of the 9/11 Truth movement. This does not mean that either of these movies is responsible for making Loughner do what he did, but it does show how his madness was shaped by a broader climate of paranoia, and offers a clue as to why he targeted Gabrielle Giffords.

According to his friend, Zach Osler, Loughner “didn’t listen to political radio, he didn’t take sides, he wasn’t on the left, he wasn’t on the right.” Naturally, conservatives have seized upon this to exonerate themselves of charges of incitement. But it’s not that simple. It’s hard to place Zeitgeist and Loose Change on the conventional partisan spectrum—both come from a shadowy conspiracy-mad subculture where the far right and the far left meet. Yet it’s the contemporary right, the right of Glenn Beck and the Tea Party, that has mainstreamed ideas from this demimonde in an unprecedented way.

She goes on to explain radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ role in promoting these two films and it reminded me of an email I got from someone last week-end after the shooting in which a reader said that somebody ought to take a look at Jones. Apparently, a lot of the weird incoherence of Loughner’s vids is familiar to people who are aware of the Jones ouvre.

Goldberg writes of Jones:

His political hero is Ron Paul—he runs RonPaulWarRoom.com, and Paul is a frequent guest on his radio show. But until recently, most conservatives disdained him. In 2007, Michelle Malkin argued that Paul’s association with Jones was enough to disqualify the congressman from participating in GOP primary debates.

Since then, though, Republican politics have become a lot more paranoid. Tea Party groups and Fox News started echoing Jones’ warnings that the swine flu virus was really a pretext to establish martial law. Lou Dobbs went on Jones’ show in 2008 to discuss the coming North American Union.[Senator Rand Paul is on board with that one — ed.]…

People who study the right have worried for months about the consequences of paranoid beliefs about treasonous government plots. In 2009, Berlet authored a report titled, “Toxic to Democracy: Conspiracy Theories, Demonization and Scapegoating.” It traced the history and dissemination of the kind of conspiracy theories floating around the right, and said, “People who believe conspiracist allegations sometimes act on those irrational beliefs, and this has concrete consequences in the real world.

Conspiracy theories have always been around. The difference, as Dave Neiwert explained in his book The Eliminationsts is the mainstreaming of it in the greater society, particularly under the auspices of “news” networks and politicians. Beck is clearly the king of this nonsense, with his blackboard of allegedly interconnecting relationships and credulous reporting of “Fema camps” and Soros conspiracies. As Goldberg points out in her piece, Beck’s book The Overton Window, is nothing more than a novelized Alex Jones conspiracy theory.

One might have thought an incident like this would ring enough bells to make the mainstream right feel the do a little soul searching, but it’s clear that’s not going to happen. Indeed, they are very busy scapegoating the left, and as usual, the public as a consequence ends up believing that each side is equally to blame and putting a pox on both their houses. They are not going to back off.

The Overton Window is for sale at my corner drugstore right alongside the diet books and the Romance novels. You can’t get any more mainstream than that. Of course, Glenn Beck would never be able to publish that drivel if it weren’t for the fact that he’s a huge television celebrity with a rabid following, many of whom believe that he’s a very smart person.

Glenn Beck is the most highly regarded individual among Tea Party supporters of the people we tested. He scores an extraordinarily high 75 percent warm rating, 57 percent very warm.

This affinity for Beck came through very clearly in the focus groups. The only news source that participants said they could trust was Fox. Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity were cited as people who “are not afraid to tell it like it is” and support their arguments with solid facts. Beck was undoubtedly the hero in these groups. Participants consider him an “educator” (in contrast to the popular Rush Limbaugh who is an “entertainer”) who teaches people history and puts himself at risk because he exposes the truth. In the words of a woman in Ft. Lauderdale, “I would trust my life in his hands.”

Other comments are just as laudatory:

“I like the way he’s trying to get back to the basics of the Constitution of the United States because I think that’s where our government is losing focus. They’re trying to change the Constitution or somehow twist it…”

“He brings out facts… And he actually shows the people saying the things. It’s not like just sound bites. It’s not chopped and really edited. And he is scary because every time I watch the show, which is pretty much every day, my heart feels…and I feel like I want to do something.”

“I’m frightened for him… Because of the things that he says. I think that he is stepping on some big toes.”

“He really does his research and he really lays it out to you well; a good professor.”

Among his fans are members of congress:

Monday on Fox News, Beck claimed that President Obama gave $2 billion to the Brazilian state-run oil company PetroBras “just days” after conservative boogeyman George Soros strengthened his investment in the company.

The very next evening, the two Republican congressmen repeated Beck’s baseless charge on the House floor. While criticizing the moratorium on offshore drilling brought on by the Gulf oil spill, Rep. Burton said that “we just sent $2 billion to Brazil so they can do offshore drilling.” Moments later, Burton parroted Beck’s fantasy version of events: “We don’t need to be sending Mr. Soros money in Brazil so he can make more money by doing offshore drilling with our taxpayers’ money.”

Here’s Beck:

This whole thing was conspiratorial lunacy, by the way, completely untrue. As were the Beck conspiracy rants that explicitly inspired these acts of violence.

It’s not there aren’t paranoid, violent left wing conspiracy nuts out there. Of course there are. But their ideas are not being mainstreamed into the general population the same way the right’s are and that’s because the paranoid left doesn’t have their own media. Also the politicians on the left don’t listen to them and believe what they say. They don’t even listen to the mainstream left.

You can’t legislate this, of course. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to spout off ludicrous bullshit. But it’s probably a good idea to at least try to draw attention to the loonier stuff, even though you will be descended upon by a bunch of shrieking harpies the minute you bring it up. Certainly the mainstream media could do a better job of filtering this nonsense out.

Oh, and Fox should be shunned by all right thinking people simply for the fact that they feature a bunch of conspiracy theorists on their air every day filling up millions of people’s heads with this crazy stuff. Loughner may have gotten his ideas from the Alex Jones fringe, but a bunch of these other loons and militants got it from the next level of right wing paranoia — Fox.

.

Get Off My Lawn

by digby

We all know that any discussion of violent political rhetoric or gun control is off the table so attention is turning to mental illness. This is not sitting well with Fox News, which has to find a way to blame “the left” for the Tucson tragedy or they just aren’t earning their money.

Professional curmudgeon Liz Trotta (famous for her hilarious joking about assassinating the president) found a way to do it in her media commentary this morning: the left wing media are all on drugs and are engaged in a cover-up:

Trotta: The whole drugs story, illegal drug use, was abandoned by the media oh some 20 or 25 years ago. The 60’s really did, the 70s drug use has become accepted. So many states, including Arizona, are ratifying the legal use of marijuana. It’s one more thing that the media, particularly the media have decided to accept it as part of American life.

Take a look at this quote for a second if you will:

“As a teen Loughner turned to heavy drinking and drugs, such the legal hallucinogen Salvia,” Osler [Zach] said. “He would say he was using and he would talk about it say {it” would do to him and I was like “Dude, that’s screwed up.”

Now that was reported by ABC radio and we have heard some reports about Salvia, in the Daily Beast, which is a hallucinogen.Most of the testimony we’ve heard coming from his friends is that there was very big drug use and they still won’t write the story. Like Katie Couric over at CBS would rather do a story on mental health a series, which by the way sounded as though it was written by an 8 year old. And talk about mental health, but not drugs because the left accepts illegal drug use. And many of users are in the media.

Eric Shawn: The salvia issues is interesting, we had Mylie Cyrus smoking some herb in a bong. Newsweek wrote about it, Michael Savage has been talking about every day every week, he’s been saying salvia, salvia, salvia. Why do you think that this has largely been ignored?

Trotta: Because we’ve now come to the view that marijuana doesn’t do anything to you. And of course it does. We’ve got generations of people out on the street who were the hip people of the 60s and the 70s and they’re homeless and we either ignore because they’re another class and that’s the left, or we think that’s just an exercise of freedom.

And then you’ve got people like Joe Klein over at Time Magazine citing studies and many British studies which are solid saying that the use of marijuana only exacerbates schizophrenia. And so he says this,he quotes this and then he’s quick to run and let you know that he is for the legalization of marijuana because nobody really quote knows why he’s done this. Why doesn’t this country, particularly the media in this country grow up and realize that the schools and the young population as well as the adult population is being ravaged by the use of hallucinogens and other illegal drugs.

I mean this is a man who thought grass was blue for heavens sakes!

Eric Shawn: They may say that it wasn’t drug use that it was mental illness. The they’ll say this is like Reefer Madness, remember that documentary?

Trotta: You cannot separate the two! You cannot separate the two! And they want to! That why is they’re going “mental illness, mental illness” Juuust slowly but surely, now we’re getting to drugs. But they want marijuana to be legalized even though it’s creating havoc.

I have to tell you. I went through the 60s and 70s covering lots of drugs use, witnessing lots of drug use. And I never met a druggie who hadn’t started on marijuana.

Eric Shawn: Alright, that’s an argument that’s been around for a long time. Salvia, though, may be one of the big stories, if that’s available although it’s illegal some places..

Trotta: Go to the web site and listen to the description of users of Salvia by the way, it’s hilarious.

It’s fairly clear that Trotta doesn’t know that salvia and marijuana aren’t the same thing. Either that or she is being purposefully dishonest. (And you had to see the look on Eric Shawn’s face to truly appreciate the sheer mean old lady nastiness of Trotta’s commentary.) I particularly liked the part where she said that Katie Couric sounded like an 8 year old and accused the “liberal media” of all being users. It’s kind of nostalgic to hear this kind of talk these days. Reminds me of my youth.

There is one thing people should keep in mind about this story. It’s true that drugs, particularly pot, are thought to exacerbate schizophrenia in young people. But the schizophrenic population is vanishingly small, somewhere about one percent. And reports from Loughner’s friends indicate that he was clean:

In October 2008, Tierney was living in Phoenix, and Loughner came to visit. They went to see a Mars Volta concert with friends, and Tierney was surprised when Loughner said he had quit partying “completely.” Loughner, according to Tierney, said, “I’m going to lead a more healthy lifestyle, not smoke cigarettes or pot anymore, and I’m going to start working out.” Tierney was happy for his friend: “I said, ‘Dude, that’s awesome.’ And the next time I saw him he was 10 pounds lighter.” Tierney never saw Loughner smoke marijuana again, and he was surprised at media reports that Loughner had been rejected from the military in 2009 for failing a drug test: “He was clean, clean. I saw him after that continuously. He would not do it.”

After Loughner apparently gave up drugs and booze, “his theories got worse,” Tierney says. “After he quit, he was just off the wall.” And Loughner started to drift away from his group of friends about a year ago.

The military rejected him because he admitted smoking pot many times on his application, not because he failed a drug test.

I haven’t seen too much discussion of this on TV, although I honestly don’t think it’s because all the reporters are high. I think it’s just that it’s completely absurd to talk about marijuana being the cause of this shooting when this mentally ill fellow with all these problems was able to easily buy an automatic weapon and walk into Walmart and buy clips with 31 bullet magazines. I don’t doubt that Fox is trying,and may well succeed, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Meanwhile, keep your eye out for Trotta. She’s going to be talking about incivility next week. Should be a corker.

.

Huck’s Causing Trouble Again

by tristero

This is ridiculous Puritanism:

No parent who is raising a black teenager and trying to get him to read serious fiction for his high school English class would ever argue that “Huckleberry Finn” is not a greatly problematic work. But the remedy is not to replace “ni**er” with alternative terms like “slave” (the latter word is already in the novel and has a different meaning from “ni**er,” so that substitution just mucks up the prose — its meaning, its voice, its verisimilitude). The remedy is to refuse to teach this novel in high school and to wait until college — or even graduate school — where it can be put in proper context.

The only way that banning Huck Finn from high school could be helpful is if by doing so, the book is made more appealing to the kinds of teenagers who get off on doing something that’s forbidden by the We-Know-We-Know-What’s-Good-For-You crowd. But let’s face it: that probably won’t work, any more than banning, say, The Magic Flute, would get more kids to listen to it.

Then she drives the point home, literally:

“Huckleberry Finn” is not an appropriate introduction to serious literature, and anyone who cannot see that has never tried putting an audio version of it on during a long car trip while an African-American teenager sits beside her and slowly, slowly slips on his noise-canceling earphones in order to listen to hip-hop.

As if the only reason said teen might have for slipping on those “noise-canceling” earphones is to escape the uncomfortable nature of Twain’s novel. More likely that kid was bored out of his mind listening to a stupid book and would have done the same even if it were this book instead. Don’t get me wrong: it could be that Huckleberry Finn is not an appropriate introduction to serious literature, in which case it most certainly shouldn’t be taught. But that would be because it is, in fact, a crummy novel. However, very few people knowledgeable about American and English literature, even Lorrie Moore, would argue that – they might not like it, they might believe that there are better American novels (certainly I think so, for example, this one), but few people think it is not an important literary work.

Then, Moore inadvertently gets to the heart of the problem, and gets it entirely backwards:

No novel with the word “kike” or “bitch” spelled out 200 times could or should be separated — for purposes of irony or pedagogy — from the attitudes that produced those words. It’s also impossible that such a novel would be taught in a high school classroom.

That, as Ms. Moore should realize, is a serious problem. If they’re great books, novels that use the word “kike” or “bitch” spelled out 200 times should be taught in high school! I can’t think of a single reason not to and a lot of reasons to do so.

A great book is a pain in the ass more often than not. It’s not impossible, of course, but it is extremely hard to find a truly great book that doesn’t offend an awful lot of people, either because the subject matter is creepy = say, a botched bombing by a secret agent and purveyor of cheap pornography – or the book is hard to read or it contains certain passages that even presumed sophisticates like the judges for the Pulitzer Prize deem “obscene.”

To the extent that learning how to read great books has an ulterior moral purpose – and “moral purpose” is the worst of all reasons to read great books – it surely is to learn how to grapple with ideas, situations, characters, forms, and language which challenge you to think for yourself and form your own conclusions. It is to confront the disturbing, the unknown, the confounding, and the unpleasant and by doing so, recognize these are as much a part of living as the things that comfort us. The list of great books that are not, in some way, quite disturbing, is very, very short. To make the absence of language that is racist, bigoted or sexist an important criterion for “teen-appropriate” great literature is the height of silliness. The essential criterion for great literature is very simple: the novel must be astounding.

Huckleberry Finn certainly is astounding. But look, I don’t think it’s terribly important whether that particular book gets taught to high school kids. So this part of Moore’s op-ed is spot-on. Unfortunately, it is the only part that is:

One reader’s sensitivity always sets off someone else’s defensiveness. But what would be helpful are school administrators who will break with tradition and bring more flexibility, imagination and social purpose to our high school curriculums.

Indeed. Kids should read more. But substituting crummy books that don’t offend for those awesome books that do solves very little, including that obsession of all right-thinking American parents: the building of a kid’s self-esteem. And watered-down, inoffensive books hardly attracts passionate readers. They simply can’t deliver the goods the way the truly nifty stuff can.

If not Twain, why not Nabokov? Or, even though it’s in translation, Kafka? Or Woolf?And so on – you folks, I’m sure, can easily supply a bunch of wonderful examples, including living novelists…

The point is this: kids should be reading more, and also reading more great literature. Let’s not obsess about language and offensiveness. But yes, let’s redouble our efforts, and use our imaginations and our passionate interests to vastly expand the number of truly great books we teach our kids. We need more disturbing, challenging books like “Huckleberry Finn” to introduce high school kids to, not less.

Saturday Night At the Movies

Hollywood in the crosshairs: The American assassin on film

By Dennis Hartley

I shouted out, “Who killed the Kennedys?”
When after all…it was you and me.

-from “Sympathy for the Devil” by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

Although the senseless massacre in Tucson last Saturday that snuffed out six lives and left a congresswoman gravely wounded is still too recent to fully process, I think that it is safe to say that a Pandora’s Box full of peculiarly “American” issues have tumbled out in its wake: the politics of hate, the worship of guns, and the susceptibility of mentally unstable and/or socially isolated individuals to become even more so as the culture steers more toward being “plugged-in”, rather than cultivating meaningful, face-to-face human contact. And the irony of this situation, of course, is that by all accounts, Representative Giffords is a dedicated public servant who thrives on cultivating meaningful, face-to-face human contact with constituents; her would-be assassin, on the other hand, is a person who had become withdrawn from friends and family, living in an increasingly myopic universe of odd obsessions and posting incoherent ramblings on his personal web pages. While many of us in the blogosphere (including this writer) admittedly could easily be accused of living in a myopic universe of odd obsessions and authoring incoherent posts-I think there is an infinitesimally microscopic possibility that I would ever go on a shooting rampage (I don’t own any weapons, nor have I ever felt the urge to pick one up).

This begs the question-what is it, exactly that possesses a person to commit such an act-specifically upon a politician or similarly high-profile public figure? Political extremism? Narcissism? Insanity? One from column “a” and one from column “b”? And even more specifically, why have a disproportionate number of these acts over the last 150 years or so appear to have taken place right here in the good old United States of America, home of the free, land of the brave? Digby blogged earlier this week about Anderson Cooper’s interview with Bill Maher on his AC360 newsmagazine. Maher made this observation:

“This is the only country in the world that shoots its leaders at the rate that we do. The last time I think a leader was shot in Britain was 1812. Canada has had 15 or 16 prime ministers. How many have been shot? Zero. (America is) a very well-armed country…with a lot of nutty people. And that’s a very bad combination.”

An astute observation, I might add. But Maher’s statement can also be read as an oversimplification, which still leaves a fair amount of unanswered questions hanging in the air. Now, I don’t pretend to be an expert on such issues-that’s why I’m just the movie guy around here, and not one of the highly respected political pundits who 99.999% of the visitors to this site are here to read and engage in intelligent discourse with. That being said, I will level with you now and tell you that it’s been very difficult for me to take my “job” as the resident movie critic very seriously since last weekend. I have found this event to be profoundly disturbing, and it gives me a very bad feeling about where this country is headed. I really think that future historians will either refer to this incident as the beginning of the end of the American political system as we know it, or, if we are smart enough to use this as a teachable moment, it could instead be the catalyst for a new age of enlightenment. It’s up to us. And if that particular concern trumps me pretending to care about how faithful the new Green Hornet film is to the original TV series, so be it.

There’s an old adage says, “Write about what you know.” So I’ll climb off the soapbox now and go to my “safe place”, which is where I am most comfortable. Since I truly am struggling to make sense of this whole thing, or to at least come to an understanding of how “we” have reached this point, I thought I would use a touchstone I can easily relate to-movies. That is because when you focus on films within a specific genre, released over your lifetime (in my case, fifty-odd years) hopefully you can get a picture of where we used to be, in relation to where we are now, and maybe even figure out how we got there.

I am hard pressed to recall any films that offer significant character studies of the assassins responsible for the deaths of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield or McKinley (Robert Redford’s upcoming historical drama about John Wilkes Booth cohort Mary Surratt, aside). So for the purpose of this study, I will start with a relatively obscure low-budget noir from 1954, called Suddenly, directed by Lewis Allen. Frank Sinatra is surprisingly effective as the cold-blooded leader of a three-man professional hit team who are hired to assassinate the president during a scheduled whistle-stop at a sleepy little California town. They commandeer a family residence that affords them a clear shot. The film is ultimately played as a hostage drama; here, the shooter’s motives are financial, not political (“Don’t hand me that politics jazz-that’s not my bag!” Sinatra snarls after he’s accused of being “an enemy agent” by one of his hostages). Some aspects of the story are eerily prescient of President Kennedy’s assassination 9 years later; Sinatra’s character is an ex-military sharpshooter, zeroes down on his target from a high window, and utilizes a rifle of European-make (there have been a few unsubstantiated claims over the years in various JFKconspiracy books that Lee Harvey Oswald had watched this film with a keen interest). Richard Sale’s script also drops in a perfunctory nod or two to the then-contemporaneous McCarthy era (one hostage speculates that the hit men are “commies”).

There’s certainly more than just a perfunctory nod to Red hysteria in John Frankenheimer’s 1962 cold war paranoia fest, The Manchurian Candidate, which was the very last assassination thriller of note to be released prior to the zeitgeist-shattering horror of President Kennedy’s public murder. Oddly enough, Frank Sinatra was involved in this project as well. Sinatra plays a Korean War veteran who reaches out to help an old Army buddy he served with (Laurence Harvey) who appears to be on the verge of a meltdown, triggered by recurring nightmares about his war experiences. Sinatra’s character has also been experiencing some of these same disturbances (which today we would readily identify as PTSD), although not quite as intensely (both men had been captured and held as POWs by the North Koreans). Once it begins to dawn on Sinatra that they may have been brainwashed during their captivity (for sinister purposes), all hell breaks loose. In this narrative (based on novelist Richard Condon’s political thriller) the assassin is posited as an unwitting dupe of a decidedly “un-American” political ideology; a robotic, programmed domestic terrorist manipulated by his Communist puppet masters.

After the events of November 22, 1963, Hollywood took a decade-long hiatus from the genre; it seemed nobody wanted to “go there”. But after Americans had mulled a few years in the socio-political turbulence of the mid-to-late 1960s (including the double whammy of losing Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King to bullets in 1968), a new cycle of more cynical and byzantine conspiracy thrillers began to crop up (surely exacerbated even further by Watergate). The most significant shift in the meme was to move away from the concept of the assassin as a dupe or an operative of a “foreign” (i.e., “anti-American”) ideology; some films postulated that shadowy cabals of businessmen and/or members of the government were capable of such machinations. The rise of the JFK conspiracy cult (and the cottage industry it created) was probably a factor as well.

One of the earliest examples of this new sub-genre was the 1973 film, Executive Action, directed by David Miller, and starring Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan. Dalton Trumbo (famously blacklisted back in the 50s) adapted the screenplay from a story by Donald Freed and Mark Lane. The narrative behind this speculative thriller about the JFK assassination, which offers a possible scenario that a consortium comprised of hard right pols, powerful businessmen and disgruntled members of the clandestine community were responsible, is more intriguing than the film itself (which is flat and very talky), but the filmmakers at least deserve credit for being the first ones to “go there”. The film was a flop at the time, but has become a cult item; as such, it is more of a curio than a classic.

1974 was the banner year, with two outstanding offerings from two significant directors-The Conversation, written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and The Parallax View, which was directed by Alan J. Pakula and adapted by David Giler, Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and Robert Towne from Loren Singer’s novel. Coppola’s film does not involve a “political” assassination, but does share crucial themes with other films here (it was also an obvious influence on Brian De Palma’s 1981 thriller, Blow Out, in which a movie sound man inadvertently captures a recording of a car “accident” that may have actually been a political assassination). Gene Hackman leads a fine cast as a free-lance surveillance expert who begins to obsess that a conversation he captured between a man and a woman in San Francisco’s Union Square for one of his “clients” is going to directly lead to the untimely deaths of his subjects. Although the story is essentially an intimate character study, set against a backdrop of corporate intrigue, the dark atmosphere of paranoia, mistrust and betrayal that permeates it mirrors the political climate of the era (particularly in regards to the film getting released in timely proximity to the breaking of the Watergate scandal). Pakula’s film, on the other hand, takes the concept of the dark corporate cabal one step further, positing political assassination as a viable and sustainable capitalist venture, provided that you can perfect a discreet and reliable methodology for screening and recruiting the right “employees” (and what could be more “American” than that?). Warren Beatty stars as a maverick print journalist who is investigating an ongoing series of untimely deaths for a number of people who witnessed a U.S. senator’s assassination in a restaurant atop Seattle’s Space Needle. The trail leads him to a shadowy organization called the Parallax Corporation. There are allusions to the JFK assassination; it uses the “assassin as patsy” scenario, and the film closes with a slow, ominous zoom out on a panel of men who bear a striking resemblance to the Warren Commission, sitting in a dark chamber and solemnly reciting their “conclusive” findings on what has transpired (although we know better-which still does not assuage our despair). It’s claustrophobic and unnerving, but remains a masterpiece of the genre.

There are two more significant films in this cycle worth a mention-Sydney Pollack’s 3 Days of the Condor (1975) and William Richert’s Winter Kills (1979). Pollack’s film, which was adapted by Lorenzo Semple, Jr. and David Rayfiel from James Grady’s novel “Six Days of the Condor”, puts a unique twist on the idea of a government-sanctioned assassination; here, you have members of the U.S. clandestine community burning up your tax dollars to scheme against other members of the U.S. clandestine community (there’s no honor among conspirators, apparently). Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, Cliff Robertson and Max von Sydow head an excellent cast. The film conveys the same atmosphere of dread and mistrust that infuses The Conversation and The Parallax View. Richert’s film is arguably the most oddball entry in the cycle; the director adapted his screenplay from Richard Condon’s book (note that Condon also wrote the source novel for The Manchurian Candidate). Jeff Bridges stars as the half-brother of an assassinated president who, after bearing witness to the deathbed confession of a man claiming to be a heretofore unknown “second gunman” reluctantly becomes involved in reopening the investigation years after the matter was supposedly put to rest. The film is an uneven affair (it can’t seem to decide whether it is a genuine conspiracy thriller, or a self-conscious parody of conspiracy thrillers) but is imminently watchable, mostly thanks to an “interesting” cast. John Huston chews up major scenery as Bridges’ father (a Joseph Kennedy Sr. type). Also on hand are Anthony Perkins, Eli Wallach, Sterling Hayden, Ralph Meeker, Toshiro Mifune (!), Richard Boone, and Elizabeth Taylor (in a cameo).

The obvious bookend to this particular cycle is Oliver Stone’s controversial 1991 thriller, JFK , in which Gary Oldman gives a suitably twitchy performance as Lee Harvey Oswald. However, within the context of Stone’s film, to say that we have a definitive portrait of JFK’s assassin is difficult, because, not unlike Agatha Christie’s fictional detective Hercule Poirot, Stone suspects no one…and everyone. The most misunderstood aspect of the film, I think, is that Stone is not favoring any particular prevalent narrative. Those who have criticized the approach seem to have missed the fact that Stone himself stated from the get-go that his goal was to provide a “counter myth” to the “official” conclusion of the Warren Commission, which has become known as the “lone gunman” theory. It is a testament to Stone’s skills as a consummate filmmaker that the narrative he presents appears so seamless and dynamic, when in fact he is simultaneously mashing up at least a dozen possible scenarios. The message is right there in the script, when Donald Sutherland’s “Mr. X” advises Kevin Costner (as New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison) “Oh, don’t take my word for it. Don’t believe me. Do your own work…your own thinking.”

Even though it doesn’t fit quite so neatly into the “political assassination” category, no examination of the genre would be complete without a nod to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). In my review of the 2008 film, The Killing of John Lennon, I wrote:

There is a particularly creepy and chilling moment of “art-imitating-life-imitating-art-imitating life” in writer-director Andrew Piddington’s film, The Killing of John Lennon, where the actor portraying the ex-Beatles’ stalker-murderer deadpans in the voiceover:

“I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention, I believe that one should become a person like other people.”

Anyone who has seen Scorsese and Shrader’s Taxi Driver will instantly attribute that line to the fictional Travis Bickle, an alienated, psychotic loner and would be assassin who stalks a political candidate around New York City. Bickle’s ramblings in that film were based on the diary of Arthur Bremer, the real-life nutball who grievously wounded presidential candidate George Wallace in a 1972 assassination attempt. Although Mark David Chapman’s fellow loon-in-arms John Hinckley would extrapolate even further on the Taxi Driver obsession in his attempt on President Reagan’s life in 1981, it’s still an unnerving epiphany in Piddington’s film, an eerie and compelling portrait of Chapman’s descent into alienation, madness and the inexplicable murder of a beloved music icon.

So what is it that (the fictional) Travis Bickle, and real-life stalkers Arthur Bremer, Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley (and possibly, the Tucson shooter) all have in common? They represent a “new” breed of American assassin. They aren’t rogue members of the government’s clandestine community, “patsies” for some deeper conspiracy, or operatives acting at the behest of dark corporate cabals. And although their targets are in most cases political figures, their motives don’t necessarily appear to be 100% political in nature. More often than not, they are disenfranchised “loners”, either by choice or precipitated by some kind of mental disturbance. Many of them fit the quintessential “angry white male” profile; impotent with rage at some perceived persecution (or betrayal) by specific people, or society in general. One thing we do know for sure, and the one thing they all share as citizens of this country, is that they had no problem getting their hands on a firearm. Yes, I know-“Guns don’t kill people. People do.” So what about that other issue that has come up-the possibility that inflammatory vitriol from politicians or media figures can trigger murderous behavior from someone who is already disturbed?

There are at least two films that have breached this scenario, if perhaps only tangentially-Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976) and Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio(1988). *SPOILER ALERT* In Lumet’s film, written by the late great Paddy Chayefsky, respected news anchor Howard Beale (whose visage graces the banner of this very blog site) has a complete mental meltdown on air, announcing his plan to commit public suicide, on camera, in an upcoming newscast. When the following evening’s newscast attracts an unprecedented number of viewers, some of the more unscrupulous programmers and marketers at the network smell a potential cash cow, and decide to let Beale rant away in front of the cameras to his heart’s content, reinventing him as a “mad prophet of the airwaves” and giving him a nightly primetime slot. Eventually, some of the “truthiness” in his nightly “news sermons” hits a little too close to home regarding some secret business dealings that the network has with some Arab investors, and it is decided that his program needs to be cancelled (with extreme prejudice). And besides, his ratings are slipping, anyway. So the network hires a team of hit men to assassinate him on air. Obviously, this film is purely satirical in nature, through and through, but the idea of a media demagogue precipitating his own demise by hammering away with inflammatory on-air rants night after night is, in a fashion, oddly prescient of our current political climate. Stone’s film, on the other hand, does have some grounding in reality, because its screenplay (by Stone and Eric Bogosian) is based on a play (co-written by Bogosian and Tad Savinar), which itself was based on a non-fiction book (by Stephan Singular) about Denver talk show host Alan Berg, who was ambushed and shot to death in his driveway by members of a white nationalist fringe group in 1984. Berg was an outspoken liberal, who frequently targeted neo-Nazis and white supremists in his on-air rants. Bogosian reprises his stage role as “shock jock” Barry Champlain, who meets with the same fate. Finally, there is one more film that sort of squeaks into this category-Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991). Jeff Bridges plays a successful late night radio talk show host whose career literally crashes overnight after a disturbed fan goes on a murderous shooting spree at an upscale restaurant after he hears the DJ exclaim, “They must be stopped before it’s too late…it’s us or them!” as part of a (tongue-in-cheek) anti-yuppie diatribe on his show. One can’t help but be reminded of the Limbaugh apologists who always attempt to douse any criticism of his vile hate rhetoric with the tired old “He’s just an entertainer!” meme.

So what can we learn about last Saturday’s shooting by analyzing these particular films, if anything? Frankly, I don’t feel any more enlightened about the “whys” behind this senseless violence than I did when I started this exercise. Perhaps Bill Maher was not “oversimplifying”, after all, as I postulated earlier. Maybe the equation really is as simple as “A well armed country + A lot of nutty people = A bad combination”. Is change even possible? Maybe we’re already on the right path by continuing to engage in the dialogue we’re engaged in and asking the questions we’re asking. Then again…like the man said: “Don’t take my word for it. Don’t believe me. Do your own work…your own thinking.”

Previous posts with related themes:

Death of a President
Milk

.

The New Normal

by digby

From Esquire magazine comes a sad, but true analysis of the events of the past week — and the past decade and a half:

[T]he most remarkable thing about what happened in Oklahoma City is how little it matters today. The president of the United States gave a fine speech Wednesday night in Tucson at the memorial for the people Jared Loughner shot. The only mention of Oklahoma City in connection with the president’s speech was to compare it with the speech that another Democratic president had given in the aftermath of the memorial service for the 168 people that Timothy McVeigh murdered in 1995.

People mostly remembered that Bill Clinton once had made a passing mention of what he called “the purveyors of hatred and division… the promoters of paranoia” on the airwaves. (At the actual memorial service, Clinton quoted Scripture and talked about healing.) This time, many people struck pre-emptively; Rush Limbaugh may be self-medicating his wounded ego for the rest of his life over what he imagines Clinton said about him. There was a lot of what was called “defensiveness” on the activist Right, but it was nothing of the sort. They were on offense, just the way they have been since they took that heat in 1995. They abide by the order Stalin gave to the Red Army when the Germans invaded in 1942: Ni shagu nazad.

Not a step back.

The activist Right wants this rhetoric for 2012. It wants the same dark energies that helped it win the House last fall. It wants to be able to say the same things with impunity that it’s been saying since 2009, as though Tucson never happened. Oklahoma City might as well have happened to the Hittites.

Which is how nothing ever changed. Which is why Oklahoma City wasn’t enough.
[…]

The political culture is not what it was in 1996. It’s worse. The wild-assed, Clinton-centric conspiracies — death lists! Vince Foster! Mena airport! — look positively quaint compared to the grand paranoid delusions spouted on television and on radio these days. And the casual mainstreaming of vicious mendacity isn’t the property talk radio alone; we have just seen installed a Congress full of thunderous loons. Against all odds — and, arguably, against all decency — what Bill Clinton so carefully criticized has degenerated into a time in which the governors of major states talk glibly about secession, and automatic weapons are casual accessories at political rallies….

(Perhaps the crowning irony is the fact that, of all the repercussions from the Oklahoma City bombing, the most lasting is probably those provisions of Clinton’s own 1996 antiterrorism act that were strengthened and codified five years later into what became the constitutional nightmare that is the USA PATRIOT Act.)

I’ve been following this story of the radical right very closely since Oklahoma City. But as I mentioned the other day, I didn’t realize what a huge role it has come to play in their popular imagination. They believe they were wronged, and it’s fed their militant paranoia ever since then.

It is worse. But perversely, because it is worse, people are less alarmed by it. It’s fairly obvious to me that this has been normalized. And it’s been normalized to the point where what people now find alarming is someone pointing it out.

American voters say 52 – 41 percent that “heated political rhetoric drives unstable people to commit violence,” the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University poll finds. Liberals rather than conservatives are more responsible for such rhetoric, voters say 36 – 32 percent.

No, that’s not a joke. But I’m not surprised. I often get accused of being divisive when I write about right wing lunacy. It makes people feel uncomfortable.

But then, they haven’t usually seen this.

h/t to balloon juice

.

Involuntary Manslaughter

by digby

Can you make sense out of this, because I can’t:

Story one:

Maria Kelly Whitt, a former nurse at Lexington’s Veterans Affairs Medical Center, pleaded guilty Monday in federal court to involuntary manslaughter in the morphine overdose death of a 90-year-old World War II veteran.

Whitt, 33, of Mount Sterling, had been charged with murder in the Sept. 3, 2006, death of Jesse Lee Chain, whose hometown was Maysville.

Whitt admitted to administering 10 milligrams of morphine to Chain without a doctor’s written orders, her attorney, Patrick Nash, said. Whitt administered the morphine to ease Chain’s breathing, not to kill him, he said.

The U.S. district attorney’s office will recommend that Whitt serve 16 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, according to a plea agreement filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Lexington.

“We will be asking the judge for a more lenient sentence,” Nash said.

The maximum federal penalty for involuntary manslaughter is eight years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Whitt is scheduled to be sentenced April 1.

Story two:

A former western Massachusetts police chief who organized a gun fair was found not guilty of all charges in the 2008 death of an 8-year-old boy who accidentally shot himself in the head with an Uzi submachine gun.

Edward Fleury cried and hugged his attorney and family Friday after he was acquitted of involuntary manslaughter and three counts of furnishing machine guns to minors in the death of Christopher Bizilj on Oct. 26, 2008. Several of Christopher’s relatives quickly left the courtroom without commenting.

[…]

Fleury’s firearms training company co-sponsored the annual Machine Gun Shoot and Firearms Expo at the Westfield Sportsman’s Club, about 10 miles west of Springfield. Christopher, of Ashford, Conn., was shooting a 9 mm micro Uzi at pumpkins when the gun kicked back and shot him in the head.

The jury was shown a graphic video of the shooting, taken by Christopher’s father, that led to a collective gasp in the courtroom.

Prosecutor William Bennett said he wouldn’t have done anything differently. He said he believed the organizers of the event were the people responsible for the boy’s death.

[…]

The machine gun shoot drew hundreds of people from as far away as Maine and Virginia to the Sportsman’s Club’s 375-acre compound. An ad said it would include machine gun demonstrations and rentals and free handgun lessons.

“It’s all legal & fun — No permits or licenses required!!!!” read an ad on the club’s website.

“You will be accompanied to the firing line with a Certified Instructor to guide you. But You Are In Control — “FULL AUTO ROCK & ROLL,” the ad said.

Bennett said the ads falsely said no permits or licenses were required. He said state law bars children from shooting machine guns.

Scapicchio said there’s an exemption in state law that allows minors to shoot certain automatic weapons if they’re supervised by someone with a firearms license, but Bennett said the exemption doesn’t apply to machine guns.

I just don’t see how you can call this justice. A nurse gives too much morphine to a 90 year old patient to ease his breathing and he dies and she gets 16 months in prison for involuntary manslaughter, while a man who put an Uzi in an 8 year old’s hands was acquitted of the same charge. I realize that the circumstances, laws in various states etc differ, but simple logic says that this is unjust.

Moreover, there should be laws against children ever handling automatic weapons. Oh wait. There were. And apparently it didn’t matter.

.

Setting The Stage For The Big Kabuki

by digby

It looks like the Third Way folks and the Republicans are working in tandem to position the Democrats on the wrong side of the people again. (It’s always interesting how much their agendas intersect.) Here’s a rather astonishing report on the politics of deficit reduction from yesterday’s Washington Post:

President Obama’s refusal to raise taxes for the vast majority of Americans will prevent him from pursuing a broad overhaul of the tax code and is making it difficult for him to achieve his goals for reducing the budget deficit, according to administration and congressional sources.

Barely a month after Obama’s fiscal commission laid out a road map for reining in the soaring national debt, the president’s resistance to tax increases for families making less than $250,000 a year has ruled out a key prescription: a plan to reduce cherished but expensive tax breaks for individuals.

Obama is planning to propose deeper cuts in agency spending in the budget request he will submit to Congress next month, including a sharp reduction at the Pentagon. But the president is unlikely to trim nearly as much from future spending as the commission has proposed and nowhere near as much as House Republicans are demanding, the sources said.

Without deeper cuts or fresh revenue, White House budget officials will have a tough time meeting the president’s own targets for short-term deficit reduction, including a promise to narrow the budget gap from nearly 9 percent of the gross domestic product last year to 3 percent of GDP by 2015.

The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because the budget is still being drafted.

Administration officials said no one should be surprised to learn that Obama is unwilling to backtrack on one of the central tenets of his administration – protecting middle-class Americans from higher taxes – particularly after last month’s tax battle with Congress.

“The president remains committed to returning to a path of long-term fiscal discipline without imposing additional burdens on middle-class families,” White House spokesman Amy Brundage said. “His budget will reflect these values.”

This is such a neat trick I have to give credit where credit is due. The Republicans and their Third Way allies are winning because they’re just a whole lot better at politics than liberals are. See what’s happened here? The Democratic President of the United States is now pushing the GOP agenda — there will be no tax hikes, no matter what. This is his promise to the American people — they will not have their taxes raised, none of them, not even the rich. In fact, we can’t raise them because it will harm the economy. This isn’t your father’s Democratic Party anymore. It’s your rich Uncle’s.

As a result of this, the only answer to what they also agree is a looming debt crisis is to cut spending, long term. The president’s opening gambit will be to cut it a little. The Republicans will demand that we dismantle everything but the military and Homeland Security. And they will have another kabuki battle in which it’s pre-ordained that despite the fact that we are still reeling from a monumental recession and hovering around 10% unemployment, the only “serious” solution will be some Pentagon cuts to outmoded systems and cuts to so-called entitlements that will not directly affect people for some years in the future.

And needless to say, the Democrats will not be given any credit by the very Serious People for their fiscal rectitude and willingness to whittle away at the crown jewel of the New Deal and break their 60 year bond with the American people:

“It’s a tremendous letdown,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “The purpose of the fiscal commission is to give politicians cover to do hard things, to pull back from the promises they can’t stick to and to be a game-changer that promotes the real policies we need to fix the situation. If the White House returns to the stale debate over untenable promises about what they won’t do, then they’re not even letting the fiscal commission help them.”

The fiscal commission, you’ll recall, didn’t actually meet its mandate for a super-majority vote and didn’t publish a final report. It’s completely illegitimate to use that cheap shot Simpson-Bowles monstrosity as a baseline for “common ground” but then we knew that it was a set-up from the beginning, didn’t we?

So, where do we stand? There’s one bit of good news, which the Democrats, if they actually wanted to stop this austerity trainwreck, could use to great advantage in the upcoming “negotiations”:

At the House GOP retreat in Baltimore, “Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) delivered a stern message that the debt ceiling will eventually have to be raised to keep the government from defaulting. But he also promised that Republicans will ‘use the leverage’ they have to enact at least some of their spending-reduction goals. ‘It’s a leverage moment for Republicans,’ Cantor said in an interview Friday. ‘The president needs us. There are things we were elected to do. Let’s accomplish those if the president needs us to clean up the old mess.'”

I wonder what “old mess” he’s talking about — the mess the Republicans made in their eight years of useless wars and tax cuts or the old mess of “entitlement spending”? But that’s beside the point: Cantor just said that they will have to raise the debt ceiling. He said it out loud and on the record. Therefore, we now know that any capitulation made by the President and the Democrats in the negotiations will be made because they wanted to make them. There can be no doubt about that.

In any case, with tax-cuts-forever being the new Obama agenda, the only thing he has left is unpopular spending cuts — for which the Republicans want him to take credit. And after the beltway love and poll jump he got for extending the Bush tax cuts I’m guessing he thinks this is a winning strategy. And maybe it is. But he shouldn’t think that enacting vastly unpopular spending cuts is going to be applauded by the Republicans in 2012. They’re going to hang them around his neck and unless you think negative ads don’t ever work, and the economy is going to be growing so robustly that people will not care, they will be successful. And lucky for them, in the era of Citizens’ United, they don’t even have to take responsibility for doing it.

Social security is in danger right now. Very serious danger. There are people in the White House who believe that “fixing” social security by cutting benefits through raising the retirement age or means testing is a legacy item that will be seen as a great progressive victory. I don’t know what they’ve been smoking, but they really think that ordinary people will thank them for this. There are others who believe that it must be done in order to soothe markets and still others who simply think that the social safety net is outmoded and that they should be able to experiment with people’s lives by creating some new system with “market incentives.” (Think health care reform.) These people are the proverbial “best and the brightest” many of them veterans of the deregulation schemes of the 90s. They do not have a good track record. It’s impossible to know where the president is going to come down on this at the moment because he’s said conflicting things about it for the past four years. But let’s just say it’s not particularly comforting to know that he’s even considering doing this. Certainly the fact that he’s just recently hired people who are known to be sympathetic to all these ideas isn’t a good sign.

The Social Security Works coalition is trying hard to get its voice in these deliberations and has launched a full blown campaign to persuade the president not to talk about Social Security in his State of the Union address. It’s only step one, of course, because there are Democrats in the Senate who are determined to cut social security and see this as their golden opportunity to get it done. But it won’t be as easy for them if the president publicly takes it off the table or at the very least, doesn’t put it on the table.

You can read more about this at Campaign for Americas Future. If you feel like calling your Senator and telling him or her that you really want the president to remove Social Security from this debate, it’s possible that they might convey this information to the White House. It certainly can’t hurt to let the Democrats know that there’s rumbling about this. Harry Reid said last week on Meet the press “stop picking on Social Security” because he survived a very close election in part because he was a hard core champion of the program. The White House needs that kind of reminder from many members.

President Obama could get a tremendous amount of good will from the base if he would make a ringing endorsement of the safety net and declare with the same resolve he shows with the tax cuts that he will not touch social security. I, for one, would be much more confident that he is going into 2012 as a fighter for average Americans if he did that. From what the polls indicate, most Americans would too.

.

Claiming The Founders

by digby

Bill Maher had a fun riff last night on the Tea partiers and the Founding Fathers:

That’s pretty funny. But the reactions from the right wingers is even funnier. This one’s from Hot Air:

I hate to break it to you, Bill, but the majority of the Founding Fathers were religious. And those who weren’t orthodox in their beliefs, at least had a healthy respect and appreciation for religion. They didn’t want to force others to believe as they did – certainly – but they respected religion, and the Bible, nonetheless. Even those more critical, such as Thomas Jefferson, believed the Bible contained important lessons – lessons wise men should take to heart. There may have been a few, like Thomas Paine, who held religion in less high esteem, but they were the minority, not the majority.

Furthermore, unlike what Maher seems to believe, the Founding Fathers weren’t big fans of a welfare state. At all. In fact, they considered the government the greatest potential threat to freedom. They understood that an intrusive, activist state always limits a people’s freedom. That’s why they wrote the Constitution in the first place: they wanted to guarantee Americans specific rights, the government could not take away.

The Tea Party continues this tradition. They too stand for individual liberty, over collectivism and social engineering. They want the government to get out of the people’s business – out of their health care and out of their pockets. If there’s one thing they demand, it’s to be left alone to live their lives as they please. Not as it pleases Maher and other cocky liberals who mess up their own lives in virtually every respect, but who nonetheless believe it’s up to them to tell others how to live.

Perhaps that Maher can do what he seems to value so much – get a good education – before spouting his mouth off again about things he has little to no knowledge of. If not, he’d do us all a favor if he’d just keep his deliberately humiliating mouth shut.

No, Maher is right and they are wrong. but there’s no telling them that — this is a foundational myth of the Tea party.

It’s true the founders didn’t want to force everyone to believe as they did. How refreshing it would be if the Tea Partiers would follow their lead. They refuse to even recognize the legitimacy of any political opposition much less other religions — or lack of religion. I posted this the other day, but it’s worth doing again in this context:

“It’s a movement about the Founding Fathers and what their faith was to this country, and how they brought faith over to this country,” she says.

Smith is describing a “civil religion” that seems to appeal to many Tea Partiers: the idea that America was a divine experiment, that the Founding Fathers were Christian men who created a nation on biblical principles. She says America in 2010 has lost that.

“That’s what started this whole downfall of America — taking God out of everything, and political correctness,” Smith says. “We were founded on Judeo-Christian principles, and its like ‘What’s happened? Why aren’t we fighting to save that?’ They fought hard for that so why aren’t we? So we’re out here trying to fight for those principles.”

And then there’s Michael Giere, a mortgage banker and evangelical Christian. “We are a Judeo-Christian country, and I don’t care who says we’re not, we obviously are,” he says.

Giere says religious conservatives are the sleeping giant in the Tea Party.

“The discussion of the day is on economics, but when you start peeling back that onion, there is devout faith spread throughout the Tea Party and spread throughout the Tea Party leadership,” he says.

Polls show that Tea Party members are far more likely to be weekly churchgoers and conservative Christians than the population as a whole.

That is what Wendy Wright, president of the evangelical Concerned Women for America, has found. And she says she believes the Tea Party is prompting Americans to look closely at their religious heritage — in particular, at the faith and early writings of the Founding Fathers.

An August poll of nearly 800 Tea Party supporters revealed that a larger percentage than the general U.S. either “agreed” or “strongly agreed” that they were white evangelical Christians.

These people believe that the Constitution is a “Judeo-Christian” document. They are simply wrong. It is as secular as secular can be, designed explicitly to keep the government out of religion and vice versa. The Founders, religious and atheist alike, were very familiar with the 500 years of bloody religious wars in Europe and understood this mix of religion and politics was lethal.

And I don’t think the founders were too worried about social engineering and collectivism in their time. They were worried about tyrannical monarchy, which I suspect the Tea Partiers would have no problem with as long as the King promised to lock up all the people they hate too. (They never seem to be too worried about the authoritarian state when it comes having a couple million people in jail, illegal warrants, a corrupt justice system or any of the other things the Founders actually were worried about.)

Let’s face it, they would have been Tories. You know they would have. That’s what Republicans are.

.