Month: January 2015

Palin and the Nuge

by digby

What a lovely guy:

National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent shared an open letter “to all the braindead hippie logic-challenged dipshits in the media” that mocked individuals with mental disabilities with the line, “Not every retard can read, but look at you go, little buddy.”

In two weeks, Nugent will appear on Sarah Palin’s Sportsman Channel show. Palin, who has a child with Down syndrome, has compared the use of the word “retard” to using racial slurs.

She didn’t just compare it to making racial slurs. She went ballistic and a lot of her followers issues very strong condemnations of the practice. I’m not the word police but I discovered long ago that this sort of language was uselessly destructive and hurtful to people who don’t deserve it — even if it’s aimed at people who do. Life is too short to be such an ass.

And Palin had a right to be upset — her son is disabled. Wouldn’t any mother be upset by this?

On the other hand, she is just a teensy bit inconsistent:

On Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel, she said his comments calling liberal groups “f-ing retards” was “indecent and insensitive” and cause for his dismissal.

But the former governor went to great and sometimes awkward lengths to insist that when conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh used the same exact term to describe the same exact group, it was simply in the role of political humorist.

“They are kooks, so I agree with Rush Limbaugh,” she said, when read a quote of Limbaugh calling liberal groups “retards.” “Rush Limbaugh was using satire … . I didn’t hear Rush Limbaugh calling a group of people whom he did not agree with ‘f-ing retards,’ and we did know that Rahm Emanuel, as has been reported, did say that. There is a big difference there.”

Logic, Palin style. Still, it’s an interesting side-note to our discussion of free speech and political correctness this past week. Let’s just say that while everyone’s a little bit conflicted and confused by all this, nobody can even come close to Sarah Palin’s muddled thinking. There’s something comforting about that.

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Opportunity knocks for the authoritarians

by digby

My piece for salon this morning is about the national security opportunists who use fear to advance their agenda. You know who they are:

It’s also not unusual that intelligence and national security officials immediately seize the opportunity to advance their agenda whether or not their agenda would have prevented the attacks. The most famous example of this phenomenon, of course, is the war in Iraq, which had been pushed hard by neoconservative hawks for over a decade prior to 9/11 but which was put on the table in the earliest days after the attacks on the World Trade Center under the understanding that this was their chance to do what they wanted to do anyway. True, it actually exacerbated the terrorist threat but the architects of the policy considered that a small price to pay for the ability to finally “take out” the hated tyrant Saddam Hussein.

That was a dramatic example and one that really stands alone in the annals of national security opportunism. More relevant to today is the quick and easy passage of the Patriot Act, which had been offered in earlier Congresses and rejected due to its authoritarian components and constitutional vagueness. Once 9/11 happened, there was no stopping it despite the fact that nobody knew in those early days if it would have been helpful in preventing the attacks. (We later learned that there was plenty of information available prior to the attacks that wasn’t properly followed up. There was even a presidential memo titled “Bin Laden determined to strike in US.”) But in their need to “do something” after the fact, the political leadership pretty much agreed to anything the national security establishment had on its wish list.

It was a lesson they learned well. One must never let a terrorist attack go to waste. These past few years have revealed that our intelligence services not only took advantage of the moment to legalize much of what they’d always wanted to do, they went further still. The legacy of post 9/11 overreach includes torture and indiscriminate spying on Americans, both of which have, as a result, moved from being strictly illegal and taboo to being matters of partisan and ideological debate. And while the idea of Americans fighting terrorism with ground troops in the middle of sectarian quagmires and civil wars is not popular with the American public, it remains a point of disagreement among many in the national security realm.

So it should come as no surprise that the immediate response to the terrorist attack in Paris was for all the usual suspects to immediately push their agenda. And nobody does it better than former NSA chief Michael Hayden, the face of American spying. Like a cat who just slurped an entire bucket full of cream he smugly announced:

I was talking to you guys about 12 months ago about these massive amounts of metadata that NSA held in storage. That metadata doesn’t look all that scary this morning…

Whether collecting metadata would have stopped those attacks is left unexplored. But he also claimed that these are a new “sophisticated” kind of terrorism, “the high end of the new genre of attacks.” One wonders if he’s ever heard of workplace violence in America where armed people burst into an office and shoot down multiple people. It’s quite common. We even have a name for it: “going postal.” (But we probably shouldn’t tell him about that. Hayden would be happy to use all that data to closely monitor every American for possible thought crimes.)

Hayden’s not the only one.

Click over to see the inane stuff Lindsay Graham said on Hugh Hewitt’s show. Basically president Obama killed the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists.

The free speech consensus challenge

by digby

This complicates matters:

Anti-semitic French comedian Dieudonné was arrested after he seemingly compared himself to the terrorist who murdered four people at a kosher supermarket in Paris last week.

Dieudonné M’Bala M’bala, 48, who was being held for questioning at a Paris police station, could face possible charges of “apology for terrorism”.

Paris state prosecutors opened a formal investigation on Monday night into remarks made by the comedian on his Facebook page after the vast “Republican march” in Paris on Sunday.

After mocking the media superlatives about the march, the comedian declared: “As for me, I feel I am Charlie Coulibaly”.

Amedy Coulibaly was the man who took hostages and killed four people at the Jewish supermarket in eastern Paris last Friday before being killed by police.

Dieudonné’s comments generated a wave of fury on the internet – including many angry reactions from his own fans on his Facebook page. His statement was withdrawn after less than an hour.

The French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, called the comment “abject” and asked his officials to investigate whether the comedian should be prosecuted for breaching a French law which forbids “apology for” or encouragement of terrorism.

In fact, over 50 people have been arrested in France on this charge since the killings.

Dieudonné is a disgusting piece of anti-Semitic work, whose work has been banned before. It’s explained this way:

Jewish leaders say Dieudonné is a symptom of a larger problem. Here and across the region, they are talking of the rise of a “new anti-Semitism” based on the convergence of four main factors. They cite classic scapegoating amid hard economic times, the growing strength of far-right nationalists, a deteriorating relationship between black Europeans and Jews, and, importantly, increasing tensions with Europe’s surging Muslim population.

This is how his attorney defended his work:

Dieudonné was unavailable for comment, but his attorney, Sanjay Mirabeau, said the comedian was simply speaking truth to power.

“If the Portuguese were protected in France and had big influence, then he would protest the Portuguese,” Mirabeau said. “But as it is, there are others” who fit that description.

I’m going to guess that many of the people who have been so defiant in the case the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, saying that despite their profane nature one must righteously defend the “practice” rather than simply affirm the magazine’s right to publish, are not going to be wearing “Je Suis Dieudonné” t-shirts any time soon. Certainly, from what I’m seeing on twitter this morning, there are many people making the point that “this is completely different”.

But from the young Muslim perspective, Jews are the powerful ones, both in France and in the Middle East. I think most of us in the West understand the horrifying historical resonance of all that, but that’s probably not something marginalized young people are going to find very compelling. To them, that’s ancient history and all they see is what’s in front of them.

The horror of the killings transcends this academic debate and takes it into a different realm. Violence isn’t speech. But in the end, I come back to where I was in the beginning, which is that free speech must be inviolate and that state censorship must be banned in all cases. However, social sanction and vigorous debate on all sides must also be defended. I think Robert Wright was on to something:

[W]hy not take the model that has worked in America and apply it globally? Namely: Yes, you are legally free to publish just about anything, but if you publish things that gratuitously offend ethnic or religious groups, you will earn the scorn of enlightened people everywhere. With freedom comes responsibility.

Of course, it’s a two-way street. As Westerners try to attune themselves to the sensitivities of Muslims, Muslims need to respect the sensitivities of, for example, Jews. But it’s going to be hard for Westerners to sell Muslims on this symmetrical principle while flagrantly violating it themselves. That Danish newspaper editor, along with his American defenders, is complicating the fight against anti-Semitism.

Some Westerners say there’s no symmetry here — that cartoons about the Holocaust are more offensive than cartoons about Muhammad. And, indeed, to us secularists it may seem clear that joking about the murder of millions of people is worse than mocking a God whose existence is disputed.

BUT one key to the American formula for peaceful coexistence is to avoid such arguments — to let each group decide what it finds most offensive, so long as the implied taboo isn’t too onerous. We ask only that the offended group in turn respect the verdicts of other groups about what they find most offensive. Obviously, anti-Semitic and other hateful cartoons won’t be eliminated overnight. (In the age of the Internet, no form of hate speech will be eliminated, period; the argument is about what appears in mainstream outlets that are granted legitimacy by nations and peoples.)
[…] 

Most Americans tread lightly in discussing ethnicity and religion, and we do it so habitually that it’s nearly unconscious. Some might call this dishonest, and maybe it is, but it also holds moral truth: until you’ve walked in the shoes of other people, you can’t really grasp their frustrations and resentments, and you can’t really know what would and wouldn’t offend you if you were part of their crowd.

The Danish editor’s confusion was to conflate censorship and self-censorship. Not only are they not the same thing — the latter is what allows us to live in a spectacularly diverse society without the former; to keep censorship out of the legal realm, we practice it in the moral realm. Sometimes it feels uncomfortable, but worse things are imaginable.

And it’s not as if Americans have perfectly cracked this one, is it? Each day we learn about ways that we are consciously and unconsciously expressing intolerant, insulting viewpoints. And sometimes those insulting viewpoints are important. This is an ever-evolving conversation. But there’s no doubt that we’ve progressed. In the course of my lifetime, the way we speak to each each other and about each other, our consciousness of the differences between ignorant bigotry and legitimate debate, has improved dramatically. And that happened without the state stepping in. We don’t do everything right here by any means, but I’d suggest that the founders had the right idea about this one.

None of this says that defiant, irreverent, profane, obscene speech on all sides will, or should, disappear. In fact, one hopes that it doesn’t because it can represent the cutting edge of change. Taking the starch out of ossified institutions, including religion, is a necessary part of progress. But everyone has a role to play in how progress unfolds and Wright’s point is that social consensus for self-restraint against gratuitous insults is what makes us all able to rub along together in a pluralistic society. For the most part we all agree to do this every day in real life. Very few of us just blurt out every thought that comes into our heads at work. We don’t do it with strangers. We observe a very obvious norm that insulting people to their faces because of their race or their religion is a needlessly provocative act. In fact, it’s only on the internet where we tend to let our freak flags fly. So this really isn’t all that hard to fathom.

There’s a simple philosophy underlying all this that we can all adopt. It crosses all social traditions, religions and beliefs. It’s called the Golden Rule: treat others as you would have them treat you. If everyone would sign on to that one, the world would be a much better place.

Update: This is a very interesting philosophical take on the matter: Rival Sanctities.

Update II: On twitter @jlassen makes the important point that the US is hardly innocent in the criminalizing of speech issue and he’s right. For instance:

Over the past several years, the Justice Department has increasingly attempted to criminalize what is clearly protected political speech by prosecuting numerous individuals (Muslims, needless to say) for disseminating political views the government dislikes or considers threatening. The latest episode emerged on Friday, when the FBI announced the arrest and indictment of Jubair Ahmad, a 24-year-old Pakistani legal resident living in Virginia, charged with “providing material support” to a designated Terrorist organization (Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT)).

What is the “material support” he allegedly gave? He produced and uploaded a 5-minute video to YouTube featuring photographs of U.S. abuses in Abu Ghraib, video of armored trucks exploding after being hit by IEDs, prayer messages about “jihad” from LeT’s leader, and — according to the FBI’s Affidavit — “a number of terrorist logos.” That, in turn, led the FBI agent who signed the affidavit to assert that ”based on [his] training and experience, it is evident that the video . . . is designed as propaganda to develop support for LeT and to recruit jihadists to LeT.” The FBI also claims Ahmad spoke with the son of an LeT leader about the contents of the video and had attended an LeT camp when he was a teenager in Pakistan. For the act of uploading that single YouTube video (and for denying that he did so when asked by the FBI agents who came to his home to interrogate him), he faces 23 years in prison.

I forgot to never get too self-righteous about the American superiority in anything. Our actions rarely match up to our ideals.

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Teach your cronies well
by Tom Sullivan

The U.S. press dutifully spent the last two days focused on why the White House did not send any high-level officials to join other world leaders at this weekend’s Charlie Hebdo photo-op in Paris. Meanwhile, few registered that 2,000 people died in Nigeria over the weekend at the hands of Boko Haram. Twenty died and many more were injured when a maybe ten year-old suicide bomber attacked a Nigerian market. Matt Schiavenza of the Atlantic notes that the story appeared on page A8 of Saturday’s New York Times. The massacre of civilians made page A6. Schiavenza explains why:

The main difference between France and Nigeria isn’t that the public and the media care about one and not the other. It is, rather, that one country has an effective government and the other does not. The French may not be too fond of President Francois Hollande—his approval ratings last November had plunged to 12 percent—but he responded to his country’s twin terror attacks with decisiveness. Not so Nigeria’s Goodluck Jonathan. Since assuming the presidency in 2010, Jonathan has done little to contain Boko Haram. The group emerged in 2002 and has consolidated control over an area larger than West Virginia. And it’s gaining ground. Perversely, the seemingly routine nature of Nigeria’s violence may have diminished the perception of its newsworthiness.

Jonathan’s failure to confront Boko Haram, of course, is nothing new. Nigeria has long been cursed with a corrupt, ineffective government, one perennially unable to translate the country’s vast oil wealth into broad-based prosperity. During his campaign for re-election—Nigerians go to the polls on February 14—Jonathan has vowed to tackle his country’s problem with graft. …

You know, one way to read that is, Goodluck Jonathan means to tackle his country’s lack of broad-based prosperity with more graft—just as the corrupt, ineffective government the U.S. is cursed with has taught him by example. With the Republican congress and GOP-controlled state legislatures misleading the way, we’ll all be saying “Je suis Nigeria” in no time.

The upside? Maybe the world press will start ignoring our mass killings.

(h/t Josh Holland)

Smell the freedom

by digby

Propublica

One Sunday afternoon in 2012, Sharon Kay Harris, a diminutive 54-year-old grandmother, was still in her church clothes getting a soda out of the fridge when police officers threw a flashbang into her kitchen. “It was very scary,” Harris said. “It’s real loud, it sounds like a gun going off.” Other officers broke down her front door with a battering ram and threw a flashbang into the living room, igniting a pile of clothing. A few weeks earlier, Harris had sold a plate of food and six cans of beer without a license, a misdemeanor in Arkansas, to an undercover officer. The officer returned on a second occasion to catch Harris in another offense: selling liquor on a Sunday. During their raid on Harris’ house, the police confiscated several cases of beer, which she freely admitted to selling along with hot dogs, nachos and fajitas.

IT WAS JUST BEFORE DAWN when 18 police officers poured out of an armored truck and an unmarked white van at the Laurel Park apartment complex on the outskirts of Atlanta. A few days earlier, a confidential informant reported seeing “a brown skinned black male” with “a small quantity of a green leafy substance.” The 22-year-old suspect, paroled for forging a check, lived in a small ground floor apartment with easy access. But the police didn’t plan on taking any chances.

Treneshia Dukes suffered second-degree burns from a flashbang grenade. Her sister took these cellphone photos shortly after she got out of the hospital.

Jason Ward and his high-school sweetheart Treneshia Dukes were asleep, naked, in the apartment when an explosion went off and their bedroom window shattered. Ward leapt up toward the broken glass. Dukes started running. In the dark, she crashed into a closet door before stumbling into the bathroom and balling up in the tub. “I just started crying and I’m praying like, ‘I’m not going to die like this, this is not how I want to die,’” she later testified. Seconds later, a man wearing a mask stormed the bathroom and held a gun to her face, instructing her to lie on the floor. “If you move I’m going to blow your fucking brains out,’” Dukes recalled him saying. It was then she noticed skin hanging off her arm and blistering patches of pink flesh on her brown legs.

The masked man noticed her skin, too. He told Dukes to sit up and signaled to a man in plainclothes to inspect her. “The guy came in there,” recalled Dukes, just starting to realize she was dealing with the police, not armed assailants, “and he looked at me and he looked back at the other guy and was like, ‘Y’all done fucked up.’”
[…]
The military-style assault on the Laurel Park apartment the morning of July 21, 2010, did not uncover a violent criminal’s drug lair. Although Dukes’ boyfriend grabbed a handgun when the window shattered, he tossed it aside as soon as he realized that the intruders were police. He threw himself down on the ground and surrendered immediately. In the end, after storming the apartment and throwing three flashbangs, the police found about a tenth of an ounce of marijuana.

Such aggressive use of flashbangs has become common among today’s militarized police forces. The Clayton County police, who burned Dukes, deployed flashbangs on about 80 percent of their raids in the year prior to her injury, according to police records.

These bombs were invented to help special forces in hostage situations. Which makes sense. If civilian lives are in danger then it’s reasonable to take risks. When it’s over a baggie full of pot, not so much.

I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that they tend to only throw them into the homes of African Americans:

Read the whole thing. As you know by now, the attitude of the police is that we are at war in the streets of America and their primary duty is to keep each other safe. All they want is to kill the “enemy” and get through their tour in one piece. But selling beer on Sunday is not jihad, African Americans are not the Taliban and protesters are not ISIS. Just because they wear the costumes and carry all the gear it doesn’t make them soldiers.

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He’s got the choo-choo train

by digby

Thank goodness Mike Huckabee is looking out for the Obama girls’ morals:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has accused President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle of parenting by double-standard, in an interview published Tuesday, saying they shelter their daughters from some things but allow them to listen to the music of Beyoncé.

While promoting his new book, Huckabee told People magazine, “I don’t understand how on one hand they can be such doting parents and so careful about the intake of everything — how much broccoli they eat and where they go to school … and yet they don’t see anything that might not be suitable” in the lyrics and a Beyoncé choreography “best left for the privacy of her bedroom.”

That’s right.  And this is best left in the privacy of his fetid imagination:

Just in case you don’t know the words…

“Cat Scratch Fever”

Well, I don’t know where they come from but they sure do come
I hope they comin’ for me
And I don’t know how they do it but they sure do it good
I hope they’re doin’ it for free

They give me cat scratch fever
Cat scratch fever

Well, the first time that I got it I was just ten years old
I got it from some kitty next door
An’ I went to see the doctor and he gave me the cure
I think I got it some more

They give me cat scratch fever
Cat scratch fever
I got a bad scratch fever
The cat scratch fever

It’s nothin’ dangerous
I feel no pain
I’ve got the choo-choo train
You know you got it when you, you’re going insane
It makes a grown man cry, cry, oh won’t you make my bed

Well, I make the pussy purr with the stroke of my hand
They know they gettin’ it from me
They know just where to go when they need their lovin’ man
They know I’m doin’ it for free

I give them cat scratch fever
Cat scratch fever
They got a bad scratch fever
The cat scratch fever

Cat scratch fever
Cat scratch fever
Cat scratch fever
Cat scratch fever

Cat scratch fever
Cat scratch fever

Now it must be pointed out that it’s unlikely that teen-age girls are watching Huckabee! on Fox. But all those old white guys on Medicare should probably avoid listening to anything that might get them too excited. Taxpayers are paying a lot of money for their heart medications and Viagra prescriptions.

Still, you have to give old Huckabee credit. Nobody does this smug, nasty, left handed Mean Girls act better than he does. Not even Rush.

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Race has absolutely nothing to do with it

by digby

It’s such fun watching the right wingers defend freedom of speech. For instance, there’s going to be a rally in Texas this week that has them all confused:

Muslim leaders from across America will gather in Texas this weekend to hold the annual Stand With the Prophet in Honor and Respect conference, a weekend forum that is being billed as a “movement to defend Prophet Muhammad, his person, and his message,” according to event information.

The Saturday event, which seeks to combat “Islamophobes in America” who have turned the Islamic Prophet Muhammad “into an object of hate,” according to organizers, comes just a week after radicalized Islamists in France killed 17 people.

Oh my. I don’t suppose I have to explain why they are a little bit dizzy:

Islam is a political ideology disguised as a religion—so the excuse that it falls into protection under religious freedoms is also a false narrative.

No mention anywhere of whether it falls under the protection of free speech. And the whole right to blaspheme thing would be a bit beside the point if it’s not an actual religion.

The article doesn’t call for the rally to be shut down, so give a big high five for the survival on the First Amendment. But the commenters have a lot to say about it and it isn’t long before there’s a call for them to be rounded up and deported. And lots of stuff like this:

Besides, what muslims object to Westerners saying about islam is when westerners tell what muslims do, so what muslims do about that, is to go do exactly what westerners already reported accurately, from the time before, the muslims do it all over again – to “VINDICATE” their religion from the TRUTH.

Makes them mad when we say they cut people’s heads off, so they go cut some more people’s heads off, to prove they don’t cut people’s heads off, and tell us if we don’t quit saying they are always cutting people’s heads off, they are going to get even with us by cutting some more people’s heads off – so you better stop telling everyone they cut people’s heads off! OR ELSE!!!

Like they did to this eleven yr old boy’s head, because he said he didn’t want to be a muslim because islam is too violent.

And then this person posted a lurid picture of a decapitation with no link to anything.

But within a couple of minutes they all got bored with the whole thing and went back to standard All American racism showing pictures of Sheila Jackson Lee and writing junk like this:

Curly Bill Rose • 18 hours ago
Without re districting, shed be on welfare. Like her constituents.

It always circles back to the same thing…

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Queasy

by digby

One hopes this worry is misplaced:

When House Republicans signaled last week that they would provoke a fight over Social Security in the next two years, progressive stalwarts like Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren decried the action, with Brown alleging the GOP wanted to “set the stage to cut benefits for seniors and disabled Americans.”

But notably silent on the Republican stance, which prevents what has been a routine transfer of revenue between the retirement and disability funds, upping the chances of a crisis for the latter in late 2016, was the Democratic official who might actually be at the table if conservatives succeed in forcing negotiations in the next Congress: President Barack Obama.

TPM asked multiple times last week for the White House’s position on the House action, but never received a formal response, a stark contrast to the loud public pronouncements of Brown, Warren, and others. It also invokes the uneasy relationship between the White House and Social Security advocates, who were dismayed by Obama’s willingness to accept cuts to the program during the 2011 grand bargain talks with House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

“Advocates do not trust the president on Social Security,” Monique Morrissey, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, told TPM last week. “If he blinks and they message this right, it could be something.”

Yes it could.

I have been encouraged by the administration’s YOLO (you’re only lameduck once) attitude since November. But with all the talk about “tax reform” and “entitlement reform” coming from the Republican majority in both houses you can’t help but recall that those two items were the 2nd and 3rd stools of the Grand Bargain (the 1st being Health Care, of course.) I would hope that idea has been successfully deep-sixed for all time, simply because the underlying conceit — Big Bipartisan Deals — has been shown to be a fool’s errand.

I am not personally wringing my hands over this. I suspect the White House understands that its legacy will not be it’s success at bringing the two sides together to do Big Things. These are different times and the legacy will depend upon a different analysis of the administration’s achievements. But you never know. Social Security represents the most successful anti-poverty program in America’s history and it’s a simple, Big Government solution. The right sees it as a repudiation of all their hold dear. It also represents a whole lot of money, a piece of which certain capitalist sharks would love to bite off. It’s always going to be a target. Vigilance is required.

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Terrorism rivals and allies

by digby

If you are a bit confused about the supposed nexus between Al Queda in Yemen and ISIS and Anwar Awlaki in the Paris attacks, this article from Jeremy Scahill sorts it out for you. I had been under the impression that the two groups were rivals and thus unlikely to have coordinated but it’s a lot more complicated than that. A whole lot more complicated than that. Scahill writes:

AQAP and ISIS have been engaged in a very public and bitter feud on social media and through official communications for the past year. While not impossible, it is unlikely that AQAP and ISIS at a high level agreed to cooperate on such a mission. An AQAP source told me that the group supports what Coulibaly did and that it does not matter what group — if any — assisted him, just that he was a Muslim who took the action. ISIS, clearly seeking to capitalize on the events in Paris, has now reportedly issued a call for its supporters to attack police forces. Of course, it is also plausible that all three of the men received some degree of outside help, but created their own cells to plot the Paris attacks. Whether Coulibaly was actually working with the Kouachi brothers or was inspired by their attack is also unknown.

For now, we have little more than verified statements from an AQAP source, a claim of responsibility from an ISIS figure and words of praise from both ISIS and some key AQAP figures. Taking responsibility for the attacks, whether true or not, could aid either group in fundraising and in elevating its prominence in the broader jihadist movement globally.

One thing to keep in mind: at least 90% of what you might be hearing on cable news is probably bullshit. But you knew that.

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Hippies, fries and free speech

by digby

Dday made an astute observation about our newly militant First Amendment warriors on the right today in Salon:

But there’s a giant gap in this newfound war on censorship. It neglects the most prominent recent example of this country shutting down free speech. I’m talking about the repression of public protest movements, most notably the violent dismantling of Occupy Wall Street encampments, a censorship directed by the state.

The right to peaceable assembly is as much a part of the First Amendment as the right to free speech, and in fact they intersect. In 2011 the tens of thousands of Occupiers across the country had no access to a printing press or real estate in a newsweekly. So they used their collective voice, basically all they had to use, to call attention to an economic system that doesn’t work for the 99 percent. In their view, the best way to maximize the reach of that opinion was through an ongoing protest, using public spaces to register dissent.

This was not welcomed as a new addition to the public debate, or an example of boldly exercising the sacred, inalienable right to speak out. In fact it was immediately seen as a problem to be solved. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security gathered intelligence on Occupy protests from even before it began, coordinating this surveillance with local police nationwide and even the New York Stock Exchange and private businesses. City councils subsequently passed a host of new laws, presented as protections for health and safety, to criminalize assemblies and justify evictions from encampments.

A 2012 report into law enforcement responses to Occupy Wall Street documented violent late-night evictions, illegal arrests and arbitrary detentions. Police across the country used pepper spray to disperse peaceful protesters and beat them with clubs and barricades. The report also cited 85 arrests of journalists in 12 cities reporting on the protests, among other obstructions of the press, another one of those First Amendment clauses. New York City just settled lawsuits with three protesters for $142,500 over police misconduct.

At no time did the army of free speech warriors on the right speak up against this state-sponsored repression of peaceful assembly and protest. They did suggest that the protesters should leave the country if they opposed the economic system, and they did whip up fear by equating outlier criminal conduct with the entire movement. Traditional media and government, particularly on the right, worked hand-in-hand to discredit the protests and ensure no backlash when they were inevitably and brutally repressed.

You would think that conservatives, theoretically wary of state power and allegedly steadfast in their readings of the Constitution, would have something to say about police crackdowns of First Amendment guarantees. But some opinions should be shoved in the face of detractors like an upright middle finger, and others should be subject to a paramilitary-style assault and removal from the public square.

I’m sure conservatives found the Occupy message uncomfortable, and they had every right to oppose it and offer rebuttals. But they’ve spent the last week arguing that it’s wrong to extinguish that uncomfortable speech, to narrow the zones where that expression can take place. In fact they’ve called anyone who tries to shut down speech the moral equivalent of a terrorist. Does that also count for the nation’s law enforcement apparatus knocking out those who question the effectiveness of unregulated crony capitalism and soaring inequality?

What an excellent question. And I think we know the answer, don’t we?

I suppose we are all guilty of situational ethics in these cases. It’s very hard to maintain an absolute consistency in these matters. That’s what the ACLU is for. But the breast beating and sanctimony on the right of the past week does stand out for its sheer hypocrisy. Indeed, we don’t even have to go all the way back to the Occupy protests to see this contrast illustrated. These comments came just a couple of weeks ago:

There’s blood on many hands tonight,” Patrolman’s Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch said late Saturday. “Those that incited violence on this street under the guise of protest, that tried to tear down what New York City police officers did everyday.

“We tried to warn it must not go on, it cannot be tolerated,” Lynch continued. “That blood on the hands starts on the steps of city hall in the office of the mayor.”

That’s right. When he said “it cannot be tolerated” he was talking about peaceful protests, which he claimed “incited violence.” Nobody on the right was saying “Je Suis deBlasio” in response to that.

The only time these conservatives oppose a police agency is when it’s the federal government trying to collect taxes or enforce gun laws. Other than that they are always with the boys in blue.

Let’s just say that I tend to doubt the sincerity of authoritarian right wingers when they start shouting “Je Suis Charlie” and lugubriously defending free speech. These were the same guys who changed the menu in the House cafeteria to “freedom fries” when the French refused to go along with the daft Iraq invasion. I wouldn’t count on them to be there at the barricades defending your right to say things they don’t like.

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