As I as read all the blaring headlines about Karl Rove’s involvement in the US Attorney cases, I can’t help but be reminded of Glenn Greenwald’s interview with Chuck Todd, political director for NBC News in which he brought it up as an example of how silly we little purists (those who view the system from 30,000 feet) are for insisting that the rule of law applies to politics just as it applies to the rest of us:
Chuck Todd: Look at the US attorney thing. What did we find out during this whole US attorney scandal? There was no doubt the White House, the previous White House was trying to play politics with US attorney selections. That has been proven. Except what did we also find out – it was perfectly legal. Now, this is a case of where you’re mixing the politics and, and look, President Obama now is nominating US attorneys, some of whom are political favors.
GG: Well, what was perfectly legal, to fire prosecutors who either prosecuted Republicans or refused to prosecute Democrats? It turned out it was legal?
CT: Unfortunately, it turned out it was perfectly legal.
GG: Who said that? Who said that?
CT: Because they serve at the pleasure of the president.
GG: There’s lawsuits–
CT: They serve at the pleasure of the president.
GG: Chuck. First of all, the question of whether or not crimes were committed in the US attorneys case is still a pending matter before several federal courts.
CT: And I believe it should be investigated–
GG: There are laws in place that say, it is a crime to obstruct prosecutions for political reasons. If Karl Rove is in the White House directing that prosecutors who prosecute Republicans, or who refuse to prosecute Democrats, be fired, that is a crime. That’s not–
CT: Wait, now you conflating what I said. What I’m saying is that the aspect that he could just, the White House could just fire US attorneys at will – that was perfectly legal.
GG: But the question is whether the–
CT: The question is whether they fired them at a time when it actually, that is what is being investigated and should be investigated.
GG: And if there are crimes that were committed, they should be prosecuted?
CT: And I think – and this is something see more from the legal community – this issue of US attorneys being political appointees, is probably something that needs to be taken up, because I think it’s fraught with peril, and fraught with the potential for abuse.
I think it’s pretty clear that he didn’t realize that the issue in the scandal wasn’t whether the president had the right to fire US Attorneys but whether the White House used the Department of Justice for political purposes. In fact, I think it’s clear he really didn’t know the difference. To Todd the whole controversy was about cronyism. How can someone in his position misunderstand something so fundamental?
He must be very confused by all the hoopla in the papers. After all, it was all perfectly legal. What’s the problem?
The questions we ask determine the answers we receive. The specific form of those questions, and the assumptions they hold, further shape our answers. Those are the key ideas in one of my favorite pieces on critical thinking, a short 1976 essay by Neil Postman called “Silent Questions.” Unfortunately, it can be hard to find a copy. Here’s a taste:
I cannot vouch for the story, but I have been told that once upon a time, in a village in what is now Lithuania, there arose a most unusual problem. A curious disease afflicted many of the townspeople. It was mostly fatal (although not always), and its onset was signaled by the victim’s lapsing into a deathlike coma. Medical science not being quite so advanced as it is now, there was no definite way of knowing if the victim was actually dead when it appeared seemly to bury him. As a result, the townspeople feared that several of their relatives had already been buried alive and that a similar fate might await them—a terrifying prospect, and not only in Lithuania. How to overcome this uncertainty was their dilemma.
One group of people suggested that the coffins be well stocked with water and food and that a small air vent be drilled into them just in case one of the “dead” happened to be alive. This was expensive to do, but seemed more than worth the trouble. A second group, however, came up with an inexpensive and more efficient idea. Each coffin would have a twelve-inch stake affixed to the inside of the coffin lid, exactly at the level of the heart. Then, when the coffin was closed, all uncertainty would cease.
This is no record as to which solution was chosen, but for my purposes, whichever it was is irrelevant. What is mostly important here is that the two different solutions were generated by two different questions. The first solution was an answer to the question, How can we make sure that we do not bury people who are still alive? The second was an answer to the question, How can we make sure that everyone we bury is dead?
The point is that all the answers we ever get are responses to questions. The questions may not be evident to us, especially in everyday affairs, but they are there nonetheless, doing their work. Their work, of course, is to design the form that our knowledge will take and therefore to determine the direction of our actions. A great deal of stupid and/or crazy talk is produced by bad, unacknowledged questions which inevitably produce bad and all-too-visible answers…
The first problem, then, in question-asking language may be stated this way: The type of words used in a question will determine the type of the words used in the answer. In particular, question-words that are vague, subjective and not rooted in any verifiable reality will produce their own kind in the answer.
A second problem arises from certain structural characteristics, or grammatical properties, of sentences. For example, many questions seem almost naturally to imply either-or alternatives. “Is that good?” (as against “bad”), “Is she smart?” (as against “dumb”), “Is he rich?” (as against “poor”), and so on. The English language is heavily biased toward “either-or-ness,” which is to say that it encourages us to talk about the world in polarities. We are inclined to think of things in terms of their singular opposites rather than as part of a continuum of multiple alternatives. Black makes us think of white, rich of poor, smart of dumb, fast of slow, and so one. Naturally, when questions are put in either-or terms, they will tend to call for an either-or answer. “This is bad,” “She’s dumb,” “He’s poor,” etc. There are many situations in which such an answer is all that is necessary, since the questioner is merely seeking some handy label, to get a “fix” on someone, so to speak. But, surprisingly and unfortunately, this form of question is also used in situations where one would expect a more serious and comprehensive approach to a subject…
A similar structural problem in our questions is that we are apt to use singular forms instead of plural ones. What is the cause of…? What is the reason for…? As with either-or questions, the form of these questions limits our search for answers and therefore impoverishes our perceptions. We are not looking for causes, reasons, or results, but for the cause, the reason, and the result. The idea of multiple causality is certainly not unfamiliar, and yet the form in which we habitually ask some of our most important questions tends to discourage our thinking about it. What is the cause of your overeating? What will be the effect of school integration? What is the problem that we face? I do not say that a question of this sort rules out the possibility of our widening our inquiries. But to the extent that we allow the form of such questions to get unchallenged, we are in danger of producing shallow and unnecessarily restricted answers.
This is equally true of the third source of problems in question-asking language, namely, the assumptions that underlie it. Unless we are paying very close attention, we can be led into accepting as fact the most precarious and even preposterous ideas…
A number of these observations may seem like common sense, but that doesn’t mean they’re commonly applied. Some of Postman’s references are dated, but his core ideas hold up very well, and go nicely with George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” These days, it’s more common to hear people speak of these dynamics as “framing.” The recent book The Death of Why? seems to center on similar issues. Postman looked at this from the teaching angle himself in several books, including Teaching as a Subversive Activity (the first chapter is called “Crap Detecting”). And all of this is completely in the spirit of what Socrates did in Plato’s dialogues and many a good teacher or thinker has done throughout the ages. One can speak of silent questions, framing, false premises, unchallenged assumptions, implicit false assertions, or something else. Whatever one calls it, the point is to reflect and use a critical eye, on the world and discussions around us, but also on our own thinking.
Most of the liberal blogosphere’s media critiques attempt to do just this – question the framing and the unspoken (and often false) assumptions driving coverage. Everyone has his or her blind spots, but the corporate media definitely has its patterns. And poor questions tend to lead to muddled conversations which contribute to poor public understanding and poor policy. Sadly, it’s not hard to find examples every day.
“Marquee” events can be even worse. Almost all the questions during the presidential/primary “debates” were absolutely atrocious, despite above-average prep time for the journalists (the NPR debate was probably the sole good one). James Fallows gave a useful overview of the debates, but for a partial recap, there’s: Wolf Blitzer asking misleading questions on taxes and Charlie Gibson believing $200,000 joint income is middle-class (no class issues in our media coverage, no sirree), Gibson making misleading claims about capital gains taxes, Fox News asking irresponsible questions on torture ripped from 24 for a Republican machismo contest, badgering by Brian Williams and Tim Russert, Russert asking misleading questions about Iraq, Russert haranguing Obama on Louis Farrakhan after he’d already answered repeatedly, a “debate on race” with superficial questions aimed to make candidates squabble (“Do you believe this is a deliberate attempt to marginalize you as the black candidate?” “Senator Edwards… what is a white male to do running against these historic candidacies?”) and the absolute nadir, the ABC primary debate between Obama and Clinton. That debate capped off a steady pile of loaded, shallow, gossipy questions with a few poor policy questions for a turd on top. Yet theoretically, given their importance, the debates should have represented the best of mainstream political journalism. It’s pretty easy to ask a candidate a question to make him or her uncomfortable due to its slanted nature or sheer idiocy, of course. But posing a tough but trenchant question on policy or governance that might actually inform the public requires that a journalist be thoughtful and interested. As Neil Postman writes later in the same essay, poor questions “insinuate that a position must be taken; they do not ask that thought be given.”
Some important questions rarely ever get asked. The media seldom seems to wonder “How do we hold Wall Street/Washington accountable?” or pose other questions about abuses of power. I’ve used this example before, but Dahlia Lithwick captures Senator Lindsey Graham’s contortions on torture beautifully:
All morning, Graham clings to the argument that he believes in the rule of law. And as he does so, he explains that the lawbreaking that happened with respect to torture: a) wasn’t lawbreaking, b) was justifiable lawbreaking, c) was lawbreaking done with the complicity of congressional Democrats, d) doesn’t matter because al-Qaida is terrible, or e) wouldn’t be lawbreaking if the Spanish police were doing it.
I’d say Graham is flailing because rather than using consistent principles, he’s arguing from a conclusion backwards – don’t investigate or prosecute these abuses. However, if we phrase that in the form of a question, Alex, it becomes something like, “How do I prevent my pals in the Bush administration from being prosecuted for war crimes?” You can see the same basic dynamics in some beginning acting exercises or everyday situations (such as teenagers trying to borrow the car keys from their parents) – the objective never changes, but the tactics and specific arguments shift constantly. Sometimes pundits and politicians will contradict themselves even within a single segment, because their goal is “to win the half-hour” (as Dan Froomkin puts it), not to build or maintain a system or principles.
Graham’s maneuvering is also designed to shut down questioning – he’s not inviting anyone to examine these matters more carefully, he’s trying to prevent it. Graham’s mostly a partisan hack, but in the case of torture it’s because he has some inkling of the stakes of accountability. In partial contrast, while many torture apologists in the punditocracy are biased toward protecting their luncheon buddies and oppose investigations and prosecutions too, it seems they’re genuinely unreflective and uninformed as well. Take a look at Glenn Greenwald’s conversation with Chuck Todd on torture investigations. Todd’s amiable enough, I suppose, but he’s painfully uninformed on the subject matter, including legal statutes mandating that credible allegations of torture be investigated, and the strong evidence that the OLC memos “authorizing” torture were neither issued in good faith nor legally sound. Like most of the Beltway crowd, apparently Todd has simply never asked, “What are the possible consequences of not investigating this?” As Greenwald points out, it’s one thing to argue against investigations, but never for a moment to consider why they might be desirable or even necessary is an appalling omission. But that’s the rule rather than the exception in the corporate media. Issues are decided largely by unreflective consensus, and there’s simply little social pressure among the chattering class to be informed about policy, the law, or facts, let alone care about them.
As bad as most of the mainstream media is, no one loads their questions up with crap quite like Fox News. One of my favorites comes from the 2005 edition of their annual “War on Christmas”:
Now there’s a fair and balanced question: Economic Disaster if Liberals Win the “War on Christmas”? This presupposes that a “war on Christmas” can exist, that one is being waged, that such a war can be “won” or “lost,” and that liberals are waging it – all before we even get to the question of whether “economic disaster” will occur. But that part of question, as breathlessly sensationalistic as it is, is largely superfluous. The main point of asking the question in the first place is to push its premises, that liberals hate Christmas, Christians, and prosperity, and are the enemy of all that is good and holy (apparently, Bill O’Reilly).
This example’s actually more innocuous than most of their blather, and Fox News’ routine, demonizing propaganda would be merely funny if it weren’t for two factors – Fox News pretends to be legitimate and is often treated as such, and together with the rest of the right-wing echo chamber, it does have an effect. While Bill O’Reilly and Fox News aren’t directly responsible for Dr. George Tiller’s murder, all that ridiculous anti-abortion “liberals hate babies” and “Tiller the Baby Killer” crap contributed to a dangerous climate and validated extremist views. Fox News certainly never portrayed Tiller as a compassionate person who helped women facing some very tough situations. The teabaggers, birthers, and angry, uniformed town hall mobs spring in part from the same fevered mindset. Liberals may view right-wingers as dangerous and mock and insult them, but it’s pretty rare for liberals to use eliminationist rhetoric, which is disturbingly common on the right-wing. (It’s not both sides bringing guns to town hall meetings and threatening violence there, either.)
Rachel Maddow and Steven Pearlstein have produced good pieces at major media outlets on how conservatives have distorted the health care debate. The “shrill one,” Paul Krugman, is also reliably incisive. But a great deal of mainstream coverage has been pretty bad on the issue, and it’s more common for journalists to make ridiculous contortions to present false equivalencies. It’s extremely rare for health care reform to be criticized from even slightly to the left, all the more so because those perspectives are crowded out by blather such as Sarah Palin’s idiotic and irresponsible statements about government death panels (Newt Gingrich doubled down on that). Such tactics push the discussion into paranoid fantasy land, and challenging that vile stupidity wastes time that could be spent debating possible solutions to very real problems. (In this case, pointing out how insurance companies effectively have their own death panels is rather pertinent.)
The media simply decides what’s important and what’s not, but often with little regard for public opinion or reality. As DDay and Ezra Klein note, single payer was deemed Not Serious, just as war protesters weren’t, but astroturf organizations have often been treated as legitimate. Meanwhile, as Thers quipped, “Imaginary Liberal “Disruption”: Fascism! Actual Conservative Disruption: Democracy!”
Some of the most glaring unchallenged assumptions are on budgetary matters. As Stephen Walt observes:
One of the great triumphs of Reagan-era conservatism was to convince Americans that paying taxes so that the government could spend the money at home was foolish and wrong, but paying taxes so that the government could spend the money defending other people around the world was patriotic.
This comes via Eric Martin, who has more on the inconsistency between Beltway attitudes on war and health care. Television journalists, most of them richer than the average American, have repeatedly pressed Obama about what the middle class must “sacrifice,” yet never acknowledge the massive wealth inequity in America, nor how it’s grown worse over the past 30-some years. Might the most prosperous and privileged have some duty, too? Again, everyone has his or her blind spots (this writer included), and while there’s far too much deliberate hack work out there, some of these unchallenged assumptions are probably unconscious. But they’re even more harmful and persistent because of that. As Paul Krugman points out, “the fundamental fact is that we can afford universal health insurance — even those high estimates were less than the $1.8 trillion cost of the Bush tax cuts,” which he notes most Blue Dog Democrats supported, and which disproportionately benefited the wealthy. Furthermore, “even as they complain about the [health care] plan’s cost, the Blue Dogs are making demands that would greatly increase that cost.” (Matthew Yglesias dissects these contradictions as well.) The issue has never been costs – it’s priorities. As Digby notes:
…You have to recall that there was no discussion, zero, when the last administration asserted without any debate that we were engaged in a war without end, for which costs could not be measured nor should they be. It was accepted by members of both parties as a simple imperative and no discussion of cost-benefit analyses were even on the table. But when it comes to directly benefiting Americans with a life and death threat of another sort, that’s all we talk about. This is not an accident.
It’s also no accident that Robert Samuelson, who’s expressed feudal attitudes on health care, has also made misleading attacks on Social Security and attacked decent wages and health care for auto workers as “welfare.” Nor is it an accident that many opponents of health care reform have health care themselves, and largely ignore that roughly one in six Americans is uninsured, and that many of those who are covered are underinsured. They’ve got theirs. Perhaps it’s hard for these pundits to imagine otherwise.
Occasionally health care opponents do voice their silent questions and unchallenged assumptions, such as the one that ‘people who don’t have the money to pay for good insurance deserve to die.’ My favorite recent example comes from the reliably disingenuous and callous Wall Street Journal editorial page, in a piece by a British physician titled, “Is There a ‘Right’ to Health Care?”:
When the supposed right to health care is widely recognized, as in the United Kingdom, it tends to reduce moral imagination. Whenever I deny the existence of a right to health care to a Briton who asserts it, he replies, “So you think it is all right for people to be left to die in the street?”
When I then ask my interlocutor whether he can think of any reason why people should not be left to die in the street, other than that they have a right to health care, he is generally reduced to silence. He cannot think of one.
I can think of a lot of things wrong with this argument. In the first place, perhaps Dalrymple (that’s the author’s name) ought to ask different people from the men on the Clapham omnibus. Secondly, it’s weird that the people he asks always give the same answer and are stumped by the same objection. Third, Dalrymple’s question is adequately answered by the person, who takes it as self-evident that no one should be left to die in the street when someone can do something about it.
Rights, for the average guy on the Clapham omnibus, are like that. Ask the average American on the 151 Sheridan whether she has the right to private property, and she will say “yes.” Ask her why it shouldn’t be the case that no one should take away her goods for no reason at all and she will stare at you and repeat that she has a right to private property.
The recognition of baseline inalienable rights (so we can say for the sake of argument) does not mean one lacks moral imagination…
Beyond any questionable claims about Britishhealth care, the Dalrymple op-ed is a dreadful piece, even as just a thought experiment (and if you’re familiar with the WSJ editorial page, or if you read the whole op-ed, you’ll know it’s not). It’s quite an amazing conceit that posing that it’s “all right for people to be left to die in the street” somehow represents bold, independent thought versus the usual selfishness married to unusual ghoulishness. It certainly doesn’t show “moral imagination” – just a privileged, feudal outlook and a contempt for one’s fellow human beings. Compassion basically requires imagination of a sort, but certain political ideologies don’t fare well with either compassion nor imagination, and are belligerently proud of that. I suppose it’s refreshing to hear someone from this group actually come out and explicitly state their actual positions. (I wonder, does this guy tell his patients, “Tell me why I shouldn’t let you die”…?)
To return to Postman’s essay, I’ve always gotten a strong nosferatu vibe from the buried alive story he tells at the start. The tale’s also strangely relevant to several of the political battles of today (as the WSJ piece shows). In the story, the first group (“How can we make sure that we do not bury people who are still alive?”) is concerned with people, and set on preventing or alleviating their suffering. The second group (“How can we make sure that everyone we bury is dead?”) is focused on money, perhaps on fear, and essentially ignores the concerns of the first group. Crucially, the second group doesn’t or can’t imagine itself in that horrible situation, and their “solution” is one which allows them to dismiss it. Looked at one way, liberal reformers are the first group and their opponents are the second. But stepping back, perhaps it’s the reformers who need to wield stakes (metaphorically only, of course) against a parasitic and predatory ruling class, to combat that boot stamping on a human face, the steady stream of zombie lies, and that great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.
Conservatives are “blowing their chance” to derail the Democrats’ health-care reform, said Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic. Repeating a mistake “the left patented during the Bush administration,” the “organized right” has “discredited” itself by coming on too strong and crazy. Americans “remain anxious and confused” about the health-care overhaul, but the irate GOP activists who show up at town halls to exploit those fears are too “easy to mock.”
I’m not going to take the bait and thoroughly rebut the claim that the “the left” “patented” anything during the Bush years like what we’re seeing these Townhalls. I will point out that two of the most famous examples of what the Village decided was “going too far” were Cindy Sheehan’s camp in Crawford and the General Betrayus ad, neither of which were astroturf, violent or mendacious. I know that people thought they were completely outrageous acts of treason and all, but they really were not anything like these red-faced hysterics screaming incoherent gibberish at the top of their lungs about “losing their country” just six months into the new presidency — because of health reform. Please.
However, let’s assume for the sake of argument that “the left” and “the right” are exactly the same. Why do they believe this stuff isn’t effective? After all the Democrats now control the government. And as tristero pointed out below, the teabaggers are making progress:
The raucous protests at congressional town hall meetings have succeeded in fueling opposition to proposed health care bills among some Americans, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds — particularly the independents who tend to be at the center of political debates.
In a survey of 1,000 adults taken Tuesday, 34% say the sometimes heated protests at sessions held by members of Congress have made them more sympathetic to the protesters’ views; 21% say they are less sympathetic.
Independents by 2-1, 35%-16%, say they are more sympathetic to the protesters now.
Some liberals have the unfortunate habit of thinking that if only the country gets a good look at the wingnut sideshow they will reject it. It’s part of an ongoing presumption that people really, really want rationality and good ten point plans, (which is what people say they want…just before they jump into a cauldron of CW and crazy.) I honestly don’t know where they get their optimism. Our culture is awash in violence and ritual humiliation. A hell of a lot of people must like this stuff.
It’s pretty to think that there’s a silent majority out there who will rise up and say “enough.” But if they exist, I’m pretty sure they thought they did that in the last election. And this is what they get.
The conservatives in this country have no compunction about paralyzing the normal operations of the government, particularly when it is in the hands of what they perceive to be an illegitimate president. (And no Democrat can be legitimate, by definition.) We’re watching them do it as we speak.
This is not to say that they are fomenting a real revolution. The most likely scenario is that they will just succeed in giving the timorous, compromised Democrats an excuse not to follow through, everyone will blame crazy liberals for being too ambitious and the villagers can sleep like babies knowing that they’ve saved their town once again.
Though I’m sure you haven’t noticed, I was away from the blog for about a week. See, I was off getting married, and I didn’t want the new wife finding me with the laptop furtively typing away while on the honeymoon, leading to me getting a quickie divorce. Now I’m back and on the ground here in Pittsburgh for Netroots Nation. Just a reminder that, if you’re at the conference, you can find Digby and myself on a few panels over the weekend.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 13TH 3:00 PM – 4:15 PM PANEL, 317 Some of the big economic policy fights that loom on the horizon—including domestic recovery, global trade, banking and health care—turn on issues that can be tough to blog about without narrowing interest to a small band of hardy policy wonks. How can we crystallize the debate and explain what’s at stake without getting hung up on paralyzing jargon? And how can we defuse the negative associations with words like “deficits,” “protectionism,” “nationalization” and “government-run health care” that currently help special interests and obstructionists misframe the debate? This panel also offers an opportunity for attendees to clear up confusion about complicated policy details, giving us all the ability to make strong policy arguments.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 15TH 3:00 PM – 4:15 PM PANEL, 318 This panel will discuss the opportunities and risks of the current economic and social environment. Will Obama seize the opportunity to restore elements of the New Deal, or will the oligarchs use shock to strengthen their position of control?
Sadly, my panel on California is at the same time as Digby’s on Saturday:
SATURDAY, AUGUST 15TH 3:00 PM – 4:15 PM PANEL, 317 California is the nation’s largest state, and is often seen as a bellweather for economic and social change. However, the peculiar dynamic of state government institutions has threatened that role, as the state has slipped into an almost perpetual crisis mode. Despite an overwhelming majority of progressive lawmakers in the state legislature, the two-thirds rule for passing a budget and tax increases, among other issues, handcuffs them and empowers a radical conservative minority. Thirty years of short-term fixes and failed leadership have only exacerbated the problem and put the state—and the nation—in real danger. As Paul Krugman recently said, “Years of neglect, followed by economic disaster—and with all reasonable responses blocked by a fanatical, irrational minority … This could be America next.” In this session, we will look at the reasons for California’s budget tangle, the larger implications for the progressive movement at large, and what some organizations are doing to change these outdated rules and take back state government for the people.
And both of us will be around throughout the weekend, so if you’re here, seek us out and say hi.
Commenters to my previous post objected that I ended without a prescription for how to counter the thuggery of the Republican party and its goon squads (some of you would say there is no real difference between, say, Senator Charles Grassley and an hysterical deather disrupting a town hall meeting; that is not an opinion I would care to contest).
Well, what needs to be done – and not done – is pretty obvious, I think. Still, Sara Robinson has an excellent how-to on the subject (and makes the point that we are fast approaching a turning point in the permanent establishment of an American fascist state).
The real problem right now is, paradoxicaly, not Republican thugs. They have always acted this way. It is that the Obama People and the rest of the Democrats were caught completely off guard, had no idea Limbaugh would call Obama a Nazi, were flabbergasted to find their meetings disrupted by organized thuggery, and are, rightly, terrified by the presence of rightwing lunatics packing guns at numerous meetings. This was a terrible blunder on Obama’s team’s part.
And it is being compounded. The other day, Howard Dean went on one of the Sunday gasbag fests with creepy Newt Gingrich. The problem was that Howard Dean apparently had absolutely no idea that Gingrich had made a complete turnabout on end of life care from his position just a few months ago. He had to be informed of that ex post facto by Matt Taibbi. Thanks, Matt, you’re great as always. But by the time he posted this, it was too late.
And that brings me to the one thing I would like to add to Sara’s list of how to counter fascist thuggery: we need professionals who have no illusions about what the modern Republican party is and what these town hell thugs represent. For Dean to have walked onto that show against Gingrich and not have realized he had an impressive opportunity to expose his hypocrisy and opportunism, is not only amateurish; it is extremely dangerous.
This is not Dean’s fault, of course. This is the fault of his staff, the Democrats’ staff. And Obama’s.
If I’m a thoughtful, informed conservative with legitimate concerns about President Obama’s healthcare proposal — and I’m sure there are millions of such people, many of whom are turning out for these town halls and behaving appropriately — I’d be infuriated right now because my measured voice and thoughtful objections are being lumped together with the fevered, incoherent complaints of a few.
“…a thoughtful, informed conservative with legitimate concerns about President Obama’s healthcare proposal — and I’m sure there are millions of such people…”
And I’m sure Saddam had millions of WMD and we just haven’t found ’em yet.
And y’know something else? Those oh so thoughtful conservatives, they’re not infuriated. Even Senators are encouraging the thugs.
In a survey of 1,000 adults taken Tuesday, 34% say the sometimes heated protests at sessions held by members of Congress have made them more sympathetic to the protesters’ views; 21% say they are less sympathetic.
Independents by 2-1, 35%-16%, say they are more sympathetic to the protesters now.
Now in a federal court in suburban Washington, a case is unfolding that gives us a practical sense of what an Obama-era rendition looks like. Raymond Azar, a 45-year-old Lebanese construction manager with a grade school education, is employed by Sima International, a Lebanon-based contractor that does work for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also has the unlikely distinction of being the first target of a rendition carried out on the Obama watch. According to court papers, on April 7, 2009, Azar and a Lebanese-American colleague, Dinorah Cobos, were seized by “at least eight” heavily armed FBI agents in Kabul, Afghanistan, where they had traveled for a meeting to discuss the status of one of his company’s U.S. government contracts. The trip ended with Azar alighting in manacles from a Gulfstream V executive jet in Manassas, Virginia, where he was formally arrested and charged in a federal antitrust probe. This rendition involved no black sites and was clearly driven by a desire to get the target quickly before a court. Also unlike renditions of the Bush-era, the target wasn’t even a terror suspect; rather, he was suspected of fraud. But in a troubling intimation of the last administration, accusations of torture hover menacingly over the case. According to papers filed by his lawyers, Azar was threatened, subjected to coercive interrogation techniques and induced to sign a confession. Azar claims he was hooded, stripped naked (while being photographed) and subjected to a “body cavity search.” On a ride to the infamous Bagram air base in Afghanistan — site of the torture-homicides involving U.S. interrogators exposed in the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side — Azar contends that a federal agent pulled a photograph of Azar’s wife and four children from his wallet. Confess that you were bribing the contract officer, the agent allegedly said, or you may “never see them again.” Azar told his lawyers he interpreted that as a threat to do physical harm to his family. Azar alleges that on arriving at Bagram he was shackled to a chair in an office for seven hours and not allowed to move. Then in the midst of a cold rainstorm he was taken to an unheated metal shipping container converted to use as a cell. The cell was brightly lit and although the outside temperature approached freezing, he was given only a thin blanket. He also claims that he was not permitted to sleep during his confinement at Bagram, which lasted over a day. Then he was told he was going to take a plane trip. His handlers would not tell him where he was going. He feared he was being dragged to Guantanamo, there to be “disappeared” and tortured. How else, he thought, could he explain the absence of Afghan authorities, the hooding and other techniques? Before boarding the Gulfstream, Azar was shackled, blindfolded and had earphones placed on his head. Occasionally, the earphones and blindfold were removed so that his interrogation by FBI agents could continue. The 16-hour flight was broken by a refueling stop in Tbilisi, Georgia — which has long served as a pit stop for rendition flights into and out of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. During the flight, according to papers filed by the Justice Department, Azar confessed to the charges against him–essentially that he was aware of corrupt payments made to a U.S. government contract agent to help Sima International secure or extend its contracts with U.S. government agencies.
If this is true, the world really has gone mad. people are hysterical and overwrought that the government is trying to give everyones health care and the same government is kidnapping and torturing confessions out of fraud suspects and nobody gives a damn. .
There’s a lot of new information in the newly released emails indicating that Karl Rove and Harriet Miers were both heavily involved in trying to influence the US Attorney’s to make unfounded prosecutions against political opponents and then firing them for refusing. None of the that is surprising, of course, but it certainly is good to see some additional proof even if it is coming at a glacial pace.
But also among the emails is this, from TPM, which is just precious:
In March 2007, about a month and a half after the firings became public knowledge, Solomon — then a reporter for the Washington Post, and now the editor of the Washington Times — emailed DOJ press aide Brian Roehrkasse, asking for information that would “bring some perspective to how the process occurred.
Solomon continued:
Of course, the White House counsel’s office had to sign off. Of course, an administration in its last two years looks for some fresh blood to inject into jobs. Of course, DOJ’s analysis of prosecutors goes beyond performance evaluations to achievements or failures on policy issues like immigration.
I think we can get this just right with your help.
Of course, Solomon was seeking information from a source, so a certain amount of sycophancy might have been a smart move. But he seems to be saying flat-out that he accepts just about every premise of the administration’s defense on the story.
A few days later, Roehrkasse and Dana Perino emailed each other about a New York Times story on the firings. Perino, referring to Solomon’s story for the Post, written with Dan Eggen, wrote: “the wp was much better than this.”
Roehrkasse replied:
I know….which is change consider (sic) the post coverage with eggen has been so bad. But the post brings in john solomon and becomes far more fair in their coverage and the times brings in eric lipton and becomes far worse.
Savage says “internment camps being planned.” From the August 10 edition of Talk Radio Network’s The Savage Nation:
SAVAGE: You see, there are internment camps being planned. You may not understand it because you didn’t see it on CBS News. But I direct you to an article that came out over the weekend that will scare you to death. It came out on WorldNetDaily. I put it up on MichaelSavage.com. Now, you say, “Well, they’re making it up. They’re just scaring you.” No. It’s an ad for National Guardsmen to run internment camps.
WOR’s Malzberg: “Internment camps. It ain’t going to be for Ara — for Muslim terrorists.” On the August 10 broadcast of his radio program on WOR in New York City, Steve Malzberg said of the internment/resettlement specialist ad:
MALZBERG: But what kind of administration is this? And I think lots of us fear we know the answer as to what kind of administration this is. Internment camps. Internment camps. It ain’t going to be for Ara — for Muslim terrorists, I can tell you that much. That we know. It’s not going to be Muslim terrorists in these internment camps. What options does that leave left? Who does that leave? Who does that leave?
After noting stories about swine flu “worst case scenarios” and two governors’ opposition to Defense Department emergency powers, Malzberg said:
MALZBERG: They’re working on various levels simultaneously, ladies of gentlemen. God forbid this bird — this swine flu gets out of hand. God forbid. Because they will separate families, they will intern, they will quarantine, they will — there’s all kinds of speculation as to what they might do.
But why is the Defense Department now intruding on states’ emergencies? What’s the deal with commercials for internment camp soldiers needed, police needed? What’s going on in this country? The website to turn in your neighbor.
This is Barack Hussein Obama. Ah, uniter. Open, transparent. Yeah, right — Marxist. Marxist. And does this not sound like a Marxist government ready to rock and roll? Ready to rock and roll.
WND’s Porter: “Internment/confinement/correction camps for American civilians?” In an August 11 WorldNetDaily.com column, Janet Porter noted the Defense Department listing and wrote:
Internment/confinement/correction camps for American civilians? Maybe there’s something to all those rumors of FEMA concentration camps. After all, those internment/resettlement specialists are going to have to report to work somewhere. If you’re going to round up American citizens, you’re going to need a place to put them.
Internment and confinement are for criminals … for terrorists. And terrorists, according to DHS, are … us.
[…]
We’ve gotten more than a glimpse of the agenda of the people to which we’ve handed the keys of power. It is unmistakably evil.
WND: Ad “generating concerns that there is some truth in those theories about domestic detention camps.” In an August 7 article, WND news editor Bob Unruh wrote:
An ad campaign featured on a U.S. Army website seeking those who would be interested in being an “Internment/Resettlement” specialist is raising alarms across the country, generating concerns that there is some truth in those theories about domestic detention camps, a roundup of dissidents and a crackdown on “threatening” conservatives.
[…]
Officials at the state and federal National Guard levels told WND they were unaware of the program, although one officer speculated it could be intended for soldiers trained in the U.S. and dispatched overseas to “detention facilities.” From the national level, WND was told, officials were unaware of any such “internment facilities” at which there could be jobs to be available.
Examiner.com’s Dolen-Proffit: “[O]nce those ‘Internment/Resettlement’ positions have been filled, you better be quiet.” In an August 10 post, Examiner.com’s Sacramento Conservative Examiner Karole Dolen-Proffit noted the job listing and wrote:
So if you oppose firearms restrictions, are a returning veteran, reject the idea of big federal government, oppose abortion or lax immigration policies, or are currently unemployed, then you are now a target. Consider yourself warned, and once those “Internment/Resettlement” positions have been filled, you better be quiet and fall in line, or prepare for whatever the consequences may be for your “right-wing extremist” activities.
You can find the actual job listing and explanation at the link. But, why bother?
What I can’t understand is why they haven’t consulted the country’s most respected expert on the subject:
