Get A Clue
by digby
Oh for gawd’s sake. I’m about to shoot myself in the face if I have to hear another wingnut say that Al Sharpton needs to go after rap lyrics or he’s a hypocrite.
Do rightwingers have google? No More Mister Nice Blog does.
h/t to Julia.
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Nobody Stood Up For Him
by digby
Tucker just said that nobody among Imus’s lifelong friends in the media came forward and vouched for his character, saying he was a good man and not a racist.
Tucker doesn’t watch his own network:
DAVID GREGORY: And Mike, I think I speak for both of us, we are both, as the audience may know, frequent guests on the Imus program. You have known him and been on the program even longer than I have. And this is a difficult time, not just because of the hurt that he has inflicted and what he said, as he tries to deal with it, but for all of us who are on the program and certainly don’t want to be associated with this kind of thing that he’s done, as all of this plays out.
So, first, your reaction to this as we go forward.
BARNICLE: David, you’re right, it is a difficult thing to endure, it’s a difficult thing to hear for any of us, no matter whether you’re on the program or not. I’ve known Don a long time. I can tell you, as he has indicated several times today and last week, he is a good man, he is not a racist. I mean, it sounds pitiful to have to say something like that, but he’s a good man.
[…]
BARNICLE: Oh, David, he absolutely gets it. He, more than any of us, more than you, more than Gene, more than myself, more than a lot of people realizes that word are weapons, that the hurt that these words inflicted are deep, lasting, historical in some sense. The historical pain is resurrected here. He certainly understands that. He also knows that something the two of you just alluded to, this is not over, that we live in a nation, given the power of the Internet and bloggers, that we are a nation of 300 million newspaper columnists today and everyone will weigh in on this, from coast to coast. And at some point, some blogger in Pocatello, Idaho, carries somewhat equal weight to, like, George Will.
That’s the country and the culture we’re a part of. He gets all of that.
[…]
FINEMAN: To answer your earlier question about whether Imus gets it, I think he does get it. But he said what he said, and there will be consequences for what he said. And NBC made it clear tonight what those consequences are. And I think NBC is hoping, as I do, when I spoke with Imus this morning on the radio, that he uses this as what I call the teachable moment, that he learn from this. And as I think he said at one point this morning when I was talking to him, he said, I need to grow up, at least a little. And that’s a humorous way of saying the obvious truth here, that he does. He’s 66 years old. People learn.
I think the form of humor that he was using is not only risky but has probably outlived its usefulness.[! — ed] I think times have changed, things have changed.
But in any era, at any time, to say what he said about those women was, as I think Steve Capus of NBC News said tonight, just reprehensible and outrageous and completely unacceptable in any framework. [nice save…ed]
[…]
GREGORY: Craig Crawford, is it time for Imus to go?
CRAIG CRAWFORD, “CONGRESSIONAL QUARTERLY,” MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Not at all. I don‘t see how that helps anything. I would say this man—you know, in my experience on the show—I‘ve done it nearly 70 times in the last three years—this—his heart is as big as his mouth, and the mouth gets him in trouble, as it has now.
[…]
GREGORY: But Craig, you feel a little bit differently here. You think that people are overblowing this, that he‘s apologized, that we should move on.
CRAWFORD: I think in the context of this show—I know, as you know say, that much of it is serious commentary. And when they do the sports, as they were doing here, that‘s where you see more to the comedy elements, some of the skits they do. It‘s not just racial. We see jokes about Catholics, about Jewish people, gays, I mean, and my argument would be that when you stifle that kind of speech, when you stifle it, you‘re not dealing with the sentiment behind it. And to actually say someone should be fired for making jokes about this kind of stuff doesn‘t really get us down the road toward discussing what‘s behind it and how—how…
That’s just from Hardball alone.
Tucker got the idea that nobody vouched for Imus’s character from this rather shocking interview with someone I normally quite admire, Jonathan Alter:
ALTER: I do go on the show. I will continue to go on the show. I think what he said was racist, not to mention being unfunny and stupid, but if you don‘t believe he should be fired, then you can‘t call for a boycott, because a boycott would amount to the same thing as his being fired. If all of his guests, all of those senators in both parties, all the journalists all stopped going on, that would be the end of Imus. It would be.
CARLSON: I don‘t know. He could do a sports show.
ALTER: Come on, that‘s his show. So if you favor boycotting him, you favor the end of “Imus in the Morning.”
CARLSON: How about a middle ground?
(CROSS TALK)
CARLSON: — your our own personal conscience doesn‘t allow you to participate in a racist enterprise.
ALTER: That is a boycott. That‘s saying—also, it buys into the idea that I am responsible for every stupid thing that you have said.
CARLSON: So what does going on say?
ALTER: You‘ve said some pretty stupid things. You haven‘t said any racist things that I know of. But you‘ve said some pretty appalling things.
CARLSON: On today‘s show.
ALTER: I don‘t want to have the responsibility to endorse or not endorse things that you said.
CARLSON: I understand. So, what is the message of—you say the message of not going on would be to boycott the show, and that‘s some how wrong. What‘s the message of going on the show?
ALTER: I think the message of going on the show, and if the subject comes up, what I will say the next time I go on the show, is that he does have to be called to account for this. And he has work to do. And he started that today, and he needs to continue it. I think it would—
CARLSON: What kind of work?
ALTER: Well, He needs to go and apologize to those young women directly.
CARLSON: That‘s enough?
ALTER: I don‘t know what‘s enough. I would we could argue about the work that he has to do. But what he said to them was just wrong and racist, and he needs to be called to account for that. The question is whether he deserves the professional death penalty for it and I don‘t believe he does.
CARLSON: Well, he is an older man who is extremely rich, so nobody‘s dying here.
ALTER: Again, the question is, is it the end of his career. Other people, they have seen—
CARLSON: It was the end of George Allen‘s career and nobody cared.
You know what I mean? Nobody cared.
(CROSS TALK)
ALTER: The George Allen comparison is facetious.
(CROSS TALK)
ALTER: I just said what Imus said is racist. You said that there was a double standard.
(CROSS TALK)
ALTER: Voting for them is not the same thing. That‘s a complicated judgment. The question is, should people have had to have boycott appearing with George Allen if they were politicians. I didn‘t call for that. I didn‘t say any Republican should be ashamed of going down and campaigning for George Allen. You didn‘t hear me say that or anybody else.
CARLSON: I did hear people say that, but OK—Richard, do you want to jump in here.
[…]
ALTER: I will go on the show, because I do not believe that even though I think what he said was disgusting and racist that I am responsible for everything that comes out of his mouth. And I don‘t think it‘s a moral issue, as it applies to me.
Well that explains it. Imus makes zillions of dollars for decades with his revolting, stomach churning swill because the establishment media have never felt they have any moral or civic stake in the consequences of such talk. The man is a bullying jerk of the highest order — his ongoing schtick is crude, mean and nasty, almost always something puerile about somene’s looks and physical characteristics, like “nappy headed”, regardless who he and his little band of “comedians” are deriding. And his show adds nothing positive to the discourse even if he does have various insiders on to talk to each other and pimp their books — and give him a veneer of respectability. Sure, you can pretend that just being on his show doesn’t mean anything — but it does to the people who are the object of his cruelty. Nobody’s saying that you can’t go on shows with people with whom you disagree. But when the media and political elite constantly appear with someone who makes a living demeaning others in the coarsest and most inflammatory ways and then laugh and yuk it up on the same show, they are, at the very least, endorsing the kind of show he does if not the specific statements.
If you ever wanted to see how the establishment media bubble is floating around way outside the everyday world in which the rest of us live, this is it.
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Illiberal Insiderism
by digby
Atrios says that this Imus flap isn’t about rappers, despite Howard Kurtz going on TV and spouting MSM talking points to that effect. That is correct — there is a conversation to be had about misogynist rap lyrics, but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
I just had a conversation with a wingnut in which I was held responsible for Imus because the so-called liberal media were his strongest defenders so therefore, they are racists, which makes me a racist also. Did you get that logic? That’s where they’re going with this, folks.
I have written before about my pet peeve that people believe the mainstream media represent liberalism, particularly the alleged liberals of the punditocrisy. (Think Richard Cohen.) And because of this, they also don’t have a clue what “liberals” really believe in since politicians babble in politico speak and these sanctioned pundits and talking heads are so incoherent that they rarely make any sense.
Regardless of their designated perch on the media political spectrum, the fact is that these people are part of a decadent political establishment, which has almost nothing to do with liberalism anymore (if it ever did.) But the successful conflation of “liberal” and “media” has brought all the disgust at the pompous clubbiness of the media gasbags down on our heads and I resent the hell out of it.
This is why I’m so repulsed with this Imus mess. Yes, he’s a racist, misogynist jerk — he has smugly made millions shedding crocodile tears each time he “goes off the rails” and everybody knew it. The SCLM eagerly pimped their books on his little public cocktail party and gave us a very valuable window into the way these people relate to one another. It is how we knew exactly what they were doing. We write about it every day, (and are loathed by the elite media for having the temerity to call them on it.) This is the very essence of the leftwing critique of the political press.
So I’m damned if I’m going to be held responsible for these people. They do not represent me or my thinking and haven’t for decades. If they want to sell their books on racist radio shows, they can have at it. But I’d really appreciate it if their magazines and newspapers would designate them as what they are instead of saying that they are representative of liberalism or progressivism — or anything other than insiderism.
Media Matters has helpfully compiled a list of those who have made the pilgrimage to Imus in 2007. I guess none of these pundits, writers and journalists noticed that Clarence Page, Eugene Robinson, Gwen Ifill, Cynthia Tucker or any other black colleagues from major publications or broadcast networks were conspicuously absent from Imus’s show. (Perhaps in their mind, Harold Ford speaks for all African Americans, including journalists.)
It’s not that there should be a quota. But when someone has repeatedly been taken to task for his racist “jokes” and there seem to be almost no minorities on the show, you’d think that some of these people might have asked themselves whether they might be tacitly endorsing something wrong by palling around with him so blatantly.
We know this happens on the rightwing hate radio all the time. The president himself appears on Rush even though Rush says repeatedly that half the country aren’t even real Americans and are routinely committing treason. That seems a little bit beneath the leader of the free world, but that’s just me. However, the Democrats and the media elite who patronize the Imus on-air frat party aren’t much better. Talk radio in general has been a sewer for many, many years now and nobody in the media ever seemed to give a damn, constantly making excuses and calling it good fun. They still are.
This scandal finally puts to rest that old liberal media trope. There is no liberal political media of any consequence in our culture. There is establishment media, which is actively hostile to liberalism and there is conservative media which is part of the wingnut welfare system. So they can call the Imus regulars whatever they want, but don’t call them liberal.
It’s like when Ann Coulter said they should string up John Walker Lind so liberals would know what could happen to them (as if we dirty hippies on the left are supportive of conservative religious extremists!)so too my wingnut friend’s idea that “liberal” racists are defending Don Imus. It just doesn’t make sense when you stop and think about it. These pals of his may or may not be racists but it’s pretty clear that by hanging around so comfortably with one who makes such a huge profit selling racism that they certainly aren’t liberals.
Update: MSNBC is dropping Imus. I ‘ll look forward to hearing what all his defenders say now.
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Here They Go Again
by digby
I don’t know if they’re joking or what, but I can hardly believe they are going to try to pull this now:
President Bush’s spy chief is pushing to expand the government’s surveillance authority at the same time the administration is under attack for stretching its domestic eavesdropping powers.
National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has circulated a draft bill that would expand the government’s powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, liberalizing how that law can be used.
Known as “FISA,” the 1978 law was passed to allow surveillance in espionage and other foreign intelligence investigations, but still allow federal judges on a secretive panel to ensure protections for U.S. citizens — at home or abroad — and other permanent U.S. residents.
The changes McConnell is seeking mostly affect a cloak-and-dagger category of warrants used to investigate suspected spies, terrorists and other national security threats. The court-approved surveillance could include planting listening devices and hidden cameras, searching luggage and breaking into homes to make copies of computer hard drives.
McConnell, who took over the 16 U.S. spy agencies and their 100,000 employees less than three months ago, is signaling a more aggressive posture for his office and will lay out his broad priorities on Wednesday as part of a 100-day plan.
The retired Navy vice admiral recently met with leaders at the National Security Agency, Justice Department and other agencies to learn more about the rules they operate under and what ties their hands, according to officials familiar with the discussions and McConnell’s proposals. The officials described them on condition that they not be identified because the plans are still being developed.
Ties their hands? Well, the entire constitution “ties their hands” if you want to look at it that way. Wouldn’t they be able to “protect us” better if they could just lock up anybody they find suspicious without any of these messy legal requirements? Wouldn’t their jobs be easier if they could just shoot people they think might be breaking the law? Why are we tying their hands this way? Clearly, all these laws are keeping them from protecting the nation.
According to officials familiar with the draft changes to FISA, McConnell wants to:
_Give the NSA the power to monitor foreigners without seeking FISA court approval, even if the surveillance is conducted by tapping phones and e-mail accounts in the United States.
“Determinations about whether a court order is required should be based on considerations about the target of the surveillance, rather than the particular means of communication or the location from which the surveillance is being conducted,” NSA Director Keith Alexander told the Senate last year.
_Clarify the standards the
FBI and NSA must use to get court orders for basic information about calls and e-mails — such as the number dialed, e-mail address, or time and date of the communications. Civil liberties advocates contend the change will make it too easy for the government to access this information._Triple the life span of a FISA warrant for a non-U.S. citizen from 120 days to one year, allowing the government to monitor much longer without checking back in with a judge.
_Give telecommunications companies immunity from civil liability for their cooperation with Bush’s terrorist surveillance program. Pending lawsuits against companies including Verizon and AT&T allege they violated privacy laws by giving phone records to the NSA for the program.
_Extend from 72 hours to one week the amount of time the government can conduct surveillance without a court order in emergencies.
Uhm. No. An administration that has politicized the Department of Justice to the point where even the uber-hawkish, pro Bush Washington Post editorial page is concerned (see Greenwald here) cannot be trusted with more unfettered power to spy on its own citizens. Sorry. Fool me once, won’t get fooled again.
I can hardly believe they are going to try to do this directly on the heels of the US Attorney scandal and worst of all this:
The FBI’s Secret Scrutiny
In Hunt for Terrorists, Bureau Examines Records of Ordinary AmericansThe FBI came calling in Windsor, Conn., this summer with a document marked for delivery by hand. On Matianuk Avenue, across from the tennis courts, two special agents found their man. They gave George Christian the letter, which warned him to tell no one, ever, what it said.
Under the shield and stars of the FBI crest, the letter directed Christian to surrender “all subscriber information, billing information and access logs of any person” who used a specific computer at a library branch some distance away. Christian, who manages digital records for three dozen Connecticut libraries, said in an affidavit that he configures his system for privacy. But the vendors of the software he operates said their databases can reveal the Web sites that visitors browse, the e-mail accounts they open and the books they borrow.
Christian refused to hand over those records, and his employer, Library Connection Inc., filed suit for the right to protest the FBI demand in public. The Washington Post established their identities — still under seal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit — by comparing unsealed portions of the file with public records and information gleaned from people who had no knowledge of the FBI demand.
The Connecticut case affords a rare glimpse of an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act, which marked its fourth anniversary on Oct. 26. “National security letters,” created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.
That was from 2005. Just last month we were told about this:
The Justice Department’s inspector general told a committee of angry House members yesterday that the FBI may have violated the law or government policies as many as 3,000 times since 2003 as agents secretly collected the telephone, bank and credit card records of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals residing here.
Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said that according to the FBI’s own estimate, as many as 600 of these violations could be “cases of serious misconduct” involving the improper use of “national security letters” to compel telephone companies, banks and credit institutions to produce records.
National security letters are comparable to subpoenas but are issued directly by the bureau without court review. They largely target records of transactions rather than personal documents or conversations. An FBI tally showed that the bureau made an average of 916 such requests each week from 2003 to 2005, but Fine told the House Judiciary Committee that FBI recordkeeping has been chaotic and “significantly understates” the actual use of that tool.
There is a reason that the constitution was written the way it was — to protect free people from the corrupt likes of Karl Rove and his henchment in the powerful office of the presidency. Having been under the thumb of monarchy, the original Americans knew the evil that could be done in the name of the crown and they put in place safeguards.
No executive branch can be trusted in these matters. Not the Democrats and certainly not the Republicans who, in their modern incarnation, have shown themselves for the last forty years to be hungry for as much authority as possible and who seem to have a propensity to use the power of the presidency to spy on their domestic political enemies.
Check this out:
McConnell hinted at his discomfort with current laws last week during a speech before an audience of government executives, saying he worries that current laws and regulations prevent intelligence agencies from using all of their capabilities to protect the nation.
“That’s the big challenge going forward,” he said…
I love these small government conservatives, don’t you? They hate everything about it except use its massive and ever growing police powers. That they truly love.
Here’s why that comment sends chills down my spine and why it should send chills down yours. Intelligence agencies using “all their capabilities” against their own citizens in the name of protecting them is something only a Stalinist could love. There is no end to it. And when you hear the president of the United States and his entire political apparatus repeatedly saying that anti-war sentiment or domestic political opposition is “helping the terrorists” you don’t have to be a genius to figure out what Mr. McConnell’s “protecting the nation” might mean, do you?
This is very dangerous stuff and I hope the Democrats are not listening to the strategists this time who say that this is dangerous ground for them politically. Even if it is, they have an obligation to try to put a stop to this right now.
There is no reason that the government needs anything more than the already existing secret court to issue secret warrants that are good for 120 days. If they can’t “protect us” with that kind of power then they are either incompetent or they are doing something so wrong that even a kangaroo court won’t sign off on it. Loosening those rules is absurd on its face.
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Blog Against Theocracy: Links Parts I – VII
by tristero
Here, for your convenience, are links to the entire series of posts I did for Blog Against Theocracy:
Part I: Meet The Theocrats
Part II: A Taste Of Rushdoony
Part III: God’s Law, Never Man’s
Part IV: Takeover Of The Texas GOP
Part V: How A Christian Republic Punishes And Taxes
Part VI: The Continuing Influence Of Pat Robertson
Part VII: Culture Is Religion
Also, here is a link to Digby’s post about sleeper cells of christianists throughout the Bush administration.
Sleeper Cells
by digby
I know this is currently tristero’s beat, but way back when this blog was just a little blogbaby, I discussed Jeff Sharlet’s fascinating expose in Harper’s called “Jesus Plus Nothing: Undercover among America’s secret theocrats.” It remains to this day one of the more chilling articles I’ve ever read about the intersection of politics and religion in this country. The facts in the article are true but they are so bizarre that I think people discounted it because it’s almost impossible to believe.
Or was. Now that we know about the little theocratic “sleeper cells” that have been implanted throughout the government during Bush’s reign, it doesn’t seem all that bizarre at all.
Just a quick recap:
Ivanwald, which sits at the end of Twenty-fourth Street North in Arlington, Virginia, is known only to its residents and to the members and friends of the organization that sponsors it, a group of believers who refer to themselves as “the Family.” The Family is, in its own words, an “invisible” association, though its membership has always consisted mostly of public men. Senators Don Nickles (R., Okla.), Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), Pete Domenici (R., N.Mex.), John Ensign (R., Nev.), James Inhofe (R., Okla.), Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), and Conrad Burns (R., Mont.) are referred to as “members,” as are Representatives Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), Frank Wolf (R., Va.), Joseph Pitts (R., Pa.), Zach Wamp (R., Tenn.), and Bart Stupak (D., Mich.). Regular prayer groups have met in the Pentagon and at the Department of Defense, and the Family has traditionally fostered strong ties with businessmen in the oil and aerospace industries. The Family maintains a closely guarded database of its associates, but it issues no cards, collects no official dues. Members are asked not to speak about the group or its activities.
The organization has operated under many guises, some active, some defunct: National Committee for Christian Leadership, International Christian Leadership, the National Leadership Council, Fellowship House, the Fellowship Foundation, the National Fellowship Council, the International Foundation. These groups are intended to draw attention away from the Family, and to prevent it from becoming, in the words of one of the Family’s leaders, “a target for misunderstanding.” [1] The Family’s only publicized gathering is the National Prayer Breakfast, which it established in 1953 and which, with congressional sponsorship, it continues to organize every February in Washington, D.C. Each year 3,000 dignitaries, representing scores of nations, pay $425 each to attend. Steadfastly ecumenical, too bland most years to merit much press, the breakfast is regarded by the Family as merely a tool in a larger purpose: to recruit the powerful attendees into smaller, more frequent prayer meetings, where they can “meet Jesus man to man.”
“We work with power where we can,” the Family’s leader, Doug Coe, says, “build new power where we can’t.”
At the 1990 National Prayer Breakfast, George H.W. Bush praised Doug Coe for what he described as “quiet diplomacy, I wouldn’t say secret diplomacy,” as an “ambassador of faith.” Coe has visited nearly every world capital, often with congressmen at his side, “making friends” and inviting them back to the Family’s unofficial headquarters, a mansion (just down the road from Ivanwald) that the Family bought in 1978 with $1.5 million donated by, among others, Tom Phillips, then the C.E.O. of arms manufacturer Raytheon, and Ken Olsen, the founder and president of Digital Equipment Corporation. A waterfall has been carved into the mansion’s broad lawn, from which a bronze bald eagle watches over the Potomac River. The mansion is white and pillared and surrounded by magnolias, and by red trees that do not so much tower above it as whisper. The mansion is named for these trees; it is called The Cedars, and Family members speak of it as a person. “The Cedars has a heart for the poor,” they like to say. By “poor” they mean not the thousands of literal poor living barely a mile away but rather the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom: the senators, generals, and prime ministers who coast to the end of Twenty-fourth Street in Arlington in black limousines and town cars and hulking S.U.V.’s to meet one another, to meet Jesus, to pay homage to the god of The Cedars.
[…]
There they forge “relationships” beyond the din of vox populi (the Family’s leaders consider democracy a manifestation of ungodly pride) and “throw away religion” in favor of the truths of the Family. Declaring God’s covenant with the Jews broken, the group’s core members call themselves “the new chosen.”
I urge you to read it all if you haven’t and to read it again if you have.
Sharlet has a new article in Rolling Stone, which he disusses at Talk To Action. And as you would expect, he has some intriguing insights into some of the “Good Bushies” that have been salted throughout the government:
There’s much concern that the Bush administration has been allowing the infiltration of federal government by Christian fundamentalist “sleeper cells,” political appointees whose first loyalty is not to the Constitution, but a reductionist understanding of the Bible. It’s true, of course, and here’s another one…
In my latest Rolling Stone story, “Teenage Holy War” (only the first quarter of it’s online, here; the rest is in the issue on the stands now) I wrote of one such character, Rebecca Contreras, whom I saw “lecture” at the east Texas Honor Academy of Ron Luce, a fundamentalist youth leader:
The week I’m at the Academy, the guest speaker is Rebecca Contreras, a pretty 35-year-old professional evangelist in blue jeans who was a former Special Assistant to the President in Bush II’s first term, responsible for 1,200 presidential appointments. She tells us about one of her first days in Washington. “The vice president is sitting there, and the president is sitting in his chair,” she said. “There I was, little Latina Rebecca from the inner city.” Contreras had not gone to college. She felt overwhelmed by all the advanced degrees in the room — Cheney, with his almost-Ph.D (he’s a drop-out), Bush, with his Harvard MBA. “The Devil began to say, `Look at you, you don’t belong here. You’re not credentialed.’ Then I heard the voice of the Lord say, `Put you’re eyes on me!'” Contreras raises her finger in imitation of God. ” `I CREDENTIALED YOU! I HAVE PLACED YOU HERE!’ ” The moral of the story, she says, is that obedience to God matters more than education. Contreras speaks of “generational curses” for those who do not obey — the idea that one must pay for the sins of one’s fathers, after all, a notion rejected even by most fundamentalists — and then she closes her eyes and begins swaying as she prays in a strong alto sing-song for the Battlecry interns, many of whom will go no further in their education than this hall, many of whom have risen to their feet during her story and some who have fallen to their knees. “I pray Father-God that these young people, that they would impact. That–Father-God–some would even–Father-God–become missionaries and pastors, some of them would become, oh Father-God, senators! And congressmen! I thank You, Father-God!” The boy next to me, a towering slab of earnestness with sheepdog bangs, shakes with tears as the class comes to a close.
[…]
There are many, many great evangelicals working in government, almost all of them clear about the constitution and every bit as dedicated to their jobs as their counterparts of other faiths and no faith. And, for the record, there’s nothing illegal about getting yourself a government job because you believe government should be led by God, so long as you perform your job competently. But from a democratic perspective — small d democratic, that is — there’s a real problem with men and women dedicated not to democracy but to a sort of voluntary theocracy, especially when they work toward that end without regard for competence or rule of law (Goodling, Contreras above). And those of us opposed to the fundamentalist attempt to pack the bureaucracy have to recognize that this problem has been with us for decades.
I’m sure there are many wonderful evangelical believers in government too. But I don’t consider people like Rebecca Contraras amongst them. Regardless of how you feel about religion in politics, when you get right down to it, she is just a facilitator of a corrupt and incompetent patronage machine. Whether Goodling or Brownie, the conservative “movement” is filled with the worst and the dumbest and this country will fail with people of this caliber running it. There are just too many hungry competitors out there in the global economy who don’t put their trust in prayer to make things happen. They study, work hard and try to do it better. As Benjamin Franklin said, “the Lord helps those who help themselves.” (And he didn’t mean help themsleves to the treasury, either.)
“The Family” may have once been the toppermost of the poppermost for the religious politico set, but they left the everyday scut work to the Good Bushies. The results were entirely predictable.
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Last Gasp Strategery
by digby
I’ve been hearing on television for a while now that the Democrats are on the run. Joe Scarborough said a bit back that Bush was “a phoenix rising.” I assumed it was wishful thinking to buck up the base, considering that everything the administration does turns to compost, but apparently, this is an actual strategy.
BC from Cliff Schecter’s blog reports:
Three weeks ago, Republican pollster David Winston wrote in his weekly column in Roll Call (subscription required)
“The honeymoon is officially over. Like a pair of newlyweds back from a week on a warm Caribbean beach, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) suddenly have run head-on into the cold, harsh reality of wartime politics. They may have a majority, but the party’s marriage of anti-war liberals and centrists seems shaky and sorely lacking in cohesion as Congressional Democrats struggle to find an Iraq War policy on which
they can agree.Shrewdly, the Democrats kicked off their newly won control with their “100 Hours” agenda, kind of a “Contract with America”-lite, designed to score some quick public relations points with voters without the heavy lifting. Now, the first phase of their takeover is all but over, and the new majority’s track record clearly has failed to impress the public.In two media polls taken in early March by CBS News/New York Times and NBC/Wall Street Journal, Congressional job approval remained at a low ebb with a 31 percent approval rating and 53 percent disapproval. It’s worth noting that the Democrats’ low marks don’t differ from Republicans’ job approval of only a year ago when voters in these same polls gave Congress approval/disapproval ratings of 32 percent/54 percent and 33 percent/53 percent, respectively, just eight months before sending the GOP majority packing.When I first read that passage, I thought Winston was an incredible idiot for making that statement. The Democrats had barely been running the House and Senate for two months, and he was already suggesting the American people had judged them. Of course, he was wrong.
A new AP Poll shows that Congressional approval is on the rise, and much better than the Republicans from last year.
Read the whole thing.
I think perhaps the biggest problem for Republicans right now is that they have forgotten how to live in reality. Years of pretense and believing their own BS has left them very weak and disoriented. That is not to say they won’t regroup. They just need a rest after all the pillaging and warmongering. They’ll get a grip before too long. But it’s an interesting case study in what happens to a movement that is almost exclusively reliant on hype and marketing when its “product” has been thoroughly discredited and rejected. It’s not pretty.
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Blog Against Theocracy Part VII: Culture Is Religion
by tristero
This is the final set of excerpts from With Liberty & Justice for All: Christian Politics Made Simple by Joe Morecraft. Here Morecraft discusses the relationship between religion and culture. He asserts that all culture is, by definition, religious, but not necessarily “theistic,” i.e. based in God. Since religious neutrality is a “myth,” any attempts by a “secular” state to assert a tolerant attitude towards a diversity of religions are utterly misbegotten. In fact, such a “secularist” state privileges a “pragmatic” and “technalist” philosophy, all in the service of a dangerous non-theistic state religion: “humanism.”
**
[MORECRAFT, IN A DISCUSSION OF THE DANGERS OF RELIGIOUS NEUTRALITY QUOTES “CHALLENGE AND RESPONSE” BY BERNARD ZYLSTRA]
Neutralism is the view that man can live wholly or partly without taking God’s Word into account. Those who pay homage to the fiction of neutrality maintain that many segments of modern culture are merely technical. It is then thought that a corporation, a union, a school, a government can be run by making exclusively factual, technical decisions which have no relation to one’s ultimate perspective on the basic issue… [NOTE: THIS ATTITUDE IS ECHOED SOMEWHAT IN THE MISSION STATEMENT OF “INTELLIGEN DESIGN” CREATIONIST WILLIAM DEMBSKI’S BLOG, Uncommon Descent IN ITS CRITIQUE OF “MATERIALISM.”] This “technalism” is the result of a pragmatic philosophy. The defenders of “technalism” are among the most dangerous guides to a wholly secular world. (pp 110-111.)
What do we mean by the word, religion? It is “the binding tendency in every man to dedicate himself with his whole heart to the true God or an idol,” according to F. Nigel Lee [IN HIS BOOK, “THE CENTRAL SIGNIFICANCE OF CULTURE”]. In this sense, all men are religious because no man can escape being a man in the image of God created to worship and serve God, rebellious and unregenerate though he may be…Man is inescapably religious.
What do we mean by the word, culture? It is religion externalized. Culture “is the unavoidable result of man’s necessary efforts to use and to develop the world in which he lives either under the guidance of the Lord or under the influence of sin…in short, the cultural products of the whole of man’s life stand either in the service of God or in the service of an idol,” writes Lee (pp. 113-114) [IN THE SAME BOOK AS ABOVE.]
All cultures, then, are thoroughly religious and never can be a-religious. (That is not to say that they are all theistic. For instance, humanism, as recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court [Torcaso vs. Watkins [NOTE: THIS IS MOREHEAD’S BRACKETING] ] is a non-theistic religion believing only in man. [NOTE: THIS IS A WILLFUL DISTORTION OF A SLOPPILY WRITTEN FOOTNOTE BY ONE SUPREME COURT JUDGE. IN NO WAY WAS HUMANISM SO DEFINED BY THE SUPREME COURT, LET ALONE “RECOGNIZED” AS A RELIGION. SEE COMPLETE DECISION HERE.]
Every aspect of a nation’s life will reflect, and cannot help but reflect the religion of the citizenry, whatever that religion may be. Religious neutrality in politics, and in every other facet of a nation’s culture and life, is a myth…There are no neutral cultural activities, as there are no neutral “works;” they are either “good works” or “evil deeds,” done either to the glory of the God of the Bible or to the glory of an idol (non-god). (p.115)
[MORECRAFT QUOTES “THE CALVINISTIC CONCEPT OF CULTURE” BY H. VAN TIL]
…the position of the cultural anthropologist is tha religion is simply a projection of the human spirit, an attempt to manipulate the unseen by magic, or, in any case, that man creates the gods of his own image, thus making it a cultural achievement. This is also the general attitude of the religious liberal, who uses religion for achieving man’s ideal goals such as world peace… The reason religion cannot be subsumed under culture is the fact that whereas man as a religious being transcends all his activities under the sun, culture is but one aspect of the sum total…To divide life into areas of sacred and secular…is to fail to understand the true end of man. (p. 116)**
The final chapter is an extended screed against abortion, consisting of standard far right arguments in favor of banning the practice which, if ever enacted, would have the effect of increasing the number of deaths of poor women seeking coathanger abortions.
I draw the following conclusions from reading Morecraft’s book:
1. Christianism is a poltical movement. It is a serious mistake to consider it religious expression. It must be confronted in the arena of politics. This political movement is an imminent threat that has already seriously eroded Church/State separation.
2. It is important to understand that while christianists share a particular worldview, there are major differences between them that must be understood in order to fight them effectively. To assume that all christianists are the same, and therefore their views needn’t be understood in any real detail, is a foolish mistake. It will make it that much easier for a theocrat like Tim LaHaye to deflect opposition to his activism by highlighting unsuspected differences between his views and, say, Morecraft’s.
3. Most followers of the christianists surely have little idea of the movement’s real goals. There are few genuine theocrats, but they have created many bamboozled followers. It is hard to imagine that many Americans truly desire, as Morecraft does, a U.S. government without the consent of the governed. But like a frog that boils to death in a slowly heating pot, many followers – especially in the more “moderate” christianist groups – are gradually inured to a totalitarian mindset via bald-faced lies and distortions, that America was founded as a Christian nation, for example.
4. If one’s goal is simply to beat back the theocratic assault by the American far right, then the immediate fight is best characterized not as a culture war but as a political struggle against a dangerous, well-funded, anti-democratic foe. Such a characterization isolates the theocrats and enables broad coalition-building that can include both the non-religious and formerly mainstream religious groups who historically have been opposed to theocracy.
This final point is somewhat controversial. Some infer that advocating a large coalition of religious and non-religious people against the theocrats is tantamount to demanding that atheists and other “secular humanists” compromise their message. Not necessarily. Or rather, I, at least, do not advocate such a sellout. I believe that a broad coalition opposed to theocracy requires no compromise from any of the myriad groups opposed to their will to power.
As I see it, opposition to theocracy and advocacy of a non-theistic worldview are two separate goals. When theocrats succeed in advancing their agenda, all moderate religious denominations are as endangered as the non-religious. There are good reasons for Catholic-Americans to work with Jewish Americans to oppose efforts to erode Church/State separation despite profound theological and philosophical differences. Furthermore, both groups are equally as endangered as the non-religious and the religiously non-observant. We have seen theocrats assault the religious practice of anyone who fails to adhere to their idiosyncratic pseudo-theology. The Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter is not really a Christian, ditto the Catholic Kerry, the Protestant Dean, and the Mormon Romney.
In fashioning an effective coalition to defeat christianism, there is no reason for Catholics to stop praying the Rosary, and there is no reason for Jews to start! Likewise, there is no reason for atheists to pretend they really believe in God. All have a common goal: to push back to the margins of political discourse the anti-American, totalitarian thugs who are, right now, tearing down the wall of separation of Chruch and State.
In short, the here and now danger is James Dobson and Howard Ahmanson, not an Episcopal minister soliciting donations for a homeless shelter from her congregation. It is sheer foolishness to lump them together. When we fail to recognize the difference, we inadvertently provide theocrats cover to pursue their voracious will to power. In addition, it permits christianists the opportunity to falsely claim solidarity with all religious people – ie, the vast majority – in opposition to “atheistic secularists” when, in fact hardly anyone in the US agrees with the christianist political agenda once it is accurately described.
In conclusion, I’d like to stress how poor our understanding is of the relationship between American religious belief and its interaction with attitudes towards science and society. We read that some 49% of all Americans believe Genesis over evolution when it comes to the origins of human beings. While I have no doubt that that is an accurate, and deeply troubling, statistic, it should only serve as the beginning, not the end, of an investigation of how religious belief intersects with science. Where were those questions asked? Does the proportion change if the population surveyed has recently attended church? Or gone to a natural history museum? How do the proportions skew for age? Precisely how were the questions framed? I strongly suspect that American religion/science attitudes are far more complex than have been reported. Understanding that complexity won’t make the 49% statistic any less disturbing. But it will make it possible to create genuinely effective strategies to lower that figure.
To paraphrase Gary Larson, we know the theocrats are nuts. But to fight them, we need to know exactly how they’re nuts. At present we don’t know very much. Hopefully, by discussing one theocrat in depth, Joe Morecraft, I’ve helped provide some insight into the precise nuttiness that many christianists share. It’s by no means a complete picture, and christianists differ, but maybe, for those Americans who’ve never thought too much about what these people actually believe, it’s a start.
Dispatches From The Freashow Circuit
by digby
Back in the day I wrote:
This article in The Times seems to validate my theory that Bush saw Kerik as some sort of alter ego. It doesn’t elaborate on his insistence on relying on his gut and therefore overruling the necessary vetting, but I’ll bet you he did. These guys aren’t usually sloppy about these things and this was outrageously sloppy. It has the mark of Codpiece all over it.
digby 12/19/2004
Bush met Kerik in the debris of the World Trade Center and was so impressed that he later sent him to Iraq to train police. The bald, mustachioed street cop appealed to Bush, who admired his can-do persona. By 2004, Kerik was sent to the Democratic National Convention as part of an opposition war room, given a prime speaking slot at the Republican National Convention and tapped to appear with the president on the campaign trail.
[…]
So when Giuliani telephoned Bush to recommend that he make Kerik his second-term homeland security secretary, the president jumped at the idea. The sheen of a 9/11 hero seemed to be just what was needed to take on a troubled new department struggling to integrate 22 agencies and 180,000 employees to protect the nation’s ports, borders and airports; enforce immigration and customs laws; and respond to major disasters. Only a few aides, including then-Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and senior adviser Karl Rove, were clued in to the president’s decision.
[..]
…White House officials knew that Kerik had been head of the nation’s largest police department and had a security clearance for his work in Iraq. He was a hero of Sept. 11. He was well liked by the president. No one checked with key officials at the Homeland Security, Defense or State departments or elsewhere in the government. Even within the White House, the choice was kept secret so Bush could make a splash.
“The loop on it was extremely small,” said a former official. “That’s a president-of-the-United-States, ‘I don’t want anyone to know, I want to announce it on Friday’ [deal]. It drives people to not follow all the normal procedures.”
Yeah.
Of course, it’s never really their fault. Nothing is:
In the White House, there is still resentment toward Giuliani for foisting the problem on the president. “There are two people who are to blame for what happened — Rudy Giuliani and Bernie Kerik,” said one former White House official. Still, a senior administration official acknowledged some responsibility as well. Bush wanted “a hard-charging personality” to get the department in line, he said. “Instead, we ended up shooting ourselves in the foot.”
It had the mark of the Codpiece, allright. As does everything else this misbegotten empty suit has done to this country over the past six years.
Update: Oh, and in case anyone’s wondering about last week’s featured Republican weirdo, Dr Oxytocin, check this out:
The daughter, whose name was withheld, also said Keroack gave her parents money and presents, and allegedly issued a fraudulent prescription for the anti depressant Zoloft to her sister — who had insurance — when their uninsured mother became unable to pay for the prescription herself.
In his response to the board, Keroack acknowledged that he had switched the prescription, saying that he had recently given the complainant’s sister several free samples of Zoloft. With the prescription in hand, he said, the sister would then be able to pass the samples on to his patient. He said it was like “killing two birds with stone.”
He also acknowledged giving the patient money and presents, but denied overstepping the patient-doctor boundary, as alleged in the complaint.
“I am guilty of being generous to a fault in the care of this couple and their family,” said Keroack, who has a degree from the Tufts University School of Medicine.
“It seems that being aware of the dynamics in a family that I have taken care of for over 12 years has somehow been interpreted to be atypical, abnormal, and a violation of boundaries,” he wrote the board. “This is a sad reflection on the state of what is considered normal within today’s medical care system. In my opinion, it does not serve a patient’s best interest to whisk them in and out of an office visit in 15-20 minutes, learning nothing about their actual every day life.”
[…]
In the 2005 complaint, the patient’s daughter, who had once been Keroack’s patient, alleged that the doctor gave her mother money for groceries, evenings out with her husband, and a Cape Cod getaway for the couple. “What MD does this???” the daughter wrote the board of medicine in writing.
But she seemed most upset by a letter he had recently sent urging her to make peace with her parents, who had both been diagnosed with cancer.
Using exclamation points, all-capitalized sentences, and quotes from country singer Randy Travis, Keroack urged his patient’s daughter to make up with her mother “before it’s too late to fix it.” “If either of your parents were to die tomorrow . . . . YOU and ONLY you will be responsible for the losses that will surely follow.”
The man is a gynecologist. And obviously a total nutcase, not that we didn’t already know that. He’s just another in a long line of Bush appointees from the bowels of the far right freakshow who have been given important jobs in the federal government.
I can only imagine what we are going to find in the civil service after seven years of career workers being forced out for Pat Robertson U grads. Aye yay yay.
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It’s Hard Out Here Fo A Pimp
by digby
I’ve been listening to alleged journalists falling all over themselves on television to assure all of us that Don Imus is a really great guy underneath all the ugliness and that he’s really, really, really sorry. Even David Gregory is vouching for him like a brother while that paragon of integrity Armstrong Williams is begging that he be given another chance.
I can’t help but be reminded of the Imus profile of a year ago in Vanity Fair (not online, unfortunately) in which his psychotic freakshow was fully revealed. I’m sure all these disgusting sycophants read it. After all, it featured them in starring roles — being insulted by Don Imus:
“They don’t make good decisions,” he says of MSNBC and its programming. “You can’t make idiotic decisions like (hiring hosts) Tucker Carlson and Ron Reagan.” Of conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, he says: “He’s a twit. He’s a pussy.” This is in the same spirit as an earlier comment on Senate majority leader Bill Frist (“a fucking criminal”). Similarly, when he looks up from his circular desk at a television monitor during a commercial break and sees Chris Matthews, the host of Hardball, silently nattering away, he says, “There’s that idiot,” to no one in particular.
It makes you wonder why they continue to appear on his show and are making complete fools of themselves today assuring everyone that Imus is a “good man.”
This might explain it:
I can feel the high of becoming part of his incestuous circle of regulars-the media elite who have entree with the I-Man and have never seemed troubled, at least publicly troubled as far as I can tell, by the show’s forays over the years into homophobia and crudeness and sexism. I like this idea of being right in there with columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich of The New York Times and NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and David Gregory and Tim Russert (husband of Vanity Fair special correspondent Maureen Orth), all Imus regulars. I wonder if there’s some secret media-elite handshake I need to learn, just so I can hear the jubilant sound of the cash register ringing when it comes time to sell my next book, because nobody (with the clear exception of Oprah) sells a book better than Imus.
He likes that power, enjoys going on Amazon to see just how much he can boost a book. During the week I’m there, he has Larry the Cable Guy on as a guest-Larry has just written a book called Git-r-Done. Before the show, according to Imus, the book was about 1,800 on the Amazon list. But when he checks on the Internet just after the show, it’s No. 122.
I wonder if the media elite’s failure to seriously take Imus to task for anything is due to a fear that their book-promotion pipeline will be cut off if they rub him the wrong way. In a 1998 New Yorker piece, Ken Auletta drew up a list, confirmed by Imus, of more than a dozen high-profile journalists who made contributions to the Imus Ranch. It’s hard to quibble with donations to a worthy cause. As George Stephanopoulos said on the air to Imus in 1998, with his book on the White House still in the works, “I’m not too proud to suck up for a good cause. So count me in for $5,000 on the ranch!”
I wonder what I would have done, had I been an Imus regular with a book to sell, when the previous sports announcer for the show, Sid Rosenberg, said on the air last May of a female entertainer who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, “Ain’t gonna be so beautiful when the bitch got a bald head and one titty.” I wonder how I would have reacted to the cackling of various members of Imus’s ensemble over the next minute or so to Rosenberg’s remarks, as well as Imus’s own hardly outraged response: “There’s a reason I fire you about every six weeks.” He did get fired from the show, and Imus distanced himself from what Rosenberg had said. He says the remarks were “horrible,” but there seemed to be something disingenuous about Imus’s repudiation-complete bullshit, as he might put it-given that Rosenberg had already distinguished himself on the show in 2001 by calling tennis player Venus Williams an “animal” and noting that she and her sister, Serena, had a better chance of posing nude for National Geographic than Playboy. I wonder what I would have done had I been in the audience the night Imus made his crude and unfunny remarks about President Clinton and his wife. Would I have said, That’s it, never again. Or would I have been like Cokie Roberts of ABC television, who called Imus’s remarks “profoundly rude,” vowed never to go back on the show, and then did several years later when the opportunity arose to push her new book, We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters.
It’s as if they believe we can’t read or are too stupid to figure out what they are doing. I read Vanity Fair. I hear his disgusting show and hear them on it, kissing up to him like he’s some sort of oracle instead of a spoiled, petulant bully with an incoherent worldview. And I also listen to their complaints about the vituperation on the internet, how the bloggers — especially the “angry left” — are horrible people who treat them disrespectfully. And I have to laugh because I know that Don Imus can call them and their colleagues twits and pussies in Vanity Fair and they come back licking his boots, begging for more. And we know why.
They have earned their reputation — even some of the good ones, the ones who write things I like. When you sell your personal integrity for money to a racist scumbag like Don Imus, you have to expect that people are not going to treat you with a lot of respect.
Don Imus has been behaving badly and apologizing for it for many, many years. I expect he will continue to do so once he’s finished with his two week vacation. And all of these writers will once again make pilgrimages to his show and pledge fealty to him in order to sell books. Because, unlike those great basketball players he maligned so casually — they really are whores.
Update: Democratic politicians like Joe Lieberman who have the utter gall to lecture people about civility while they patronize this swill are whores too, by the way:
McGUIRK: You know, before you get paroled, you have to admit that you did something wrong and you’re — you’re sorry for it.
IMUS: I never admitted it when I went down there and got in all that big jam, insulting Bill Clinton and his fat ugly wife, Satan. Did I? Did I ever say I was sorry for that?
No he didn’t. But even if he had, he’d just be saying the same stuff the next week and all the sycophants would be crawling up his robes eager to demean themselves again.
Update: I just watched an MSNBC panel unable to come up with an instance of Rush Limbaugh racism except for his comment that Obama is a halfrican. I guess they forgot that he was fired from ESPN for his bigoted remarks about Donovan McNab:
“the sports media, being liberals just like liberal media is elsewhere, have a desire that black quarterbacks excel and do very well so that their claims that blacks are being denied opportunity can be validated.”
For some reason, the mainstream media just refuse to believe that Rush is a wingnut jerk of the highest order. When he is publicly exposed as a racist to the extent that he is fired from a broadcast network, they forget all about it. Why is that?
(And, of course, there are myriad other example as well. But you’d think that would at least have stuck in their memories.)
Oh, and at the time it happened, Rush had to decline to accept the Claremont Institute’s “Statesmanship Award” that year because he was under such a cloud for his drug addiction and racist remarks and had to go to rehab. Not to worry. They gave it to him the next year. Here is a little piece of the speech the racist creep gave at the “Churchill Dinner” where he accepted a bust of old Winnie himself:
How many of you yesterday happened to see any pictures at all of the opening ceremonies of the Bill Clinton Library and Massage Parlor? (Laughter) How many hands do I see? Okay. I don’t see too many hands and I’m not surprised. Let me tell you, I watched it. Not because I wanted to. I watched it for you. I watched it, my friends, because it’s my business to do this. The Clinton library opening ceremonies epitomized, if you will, exactly where the left in this country is today. First, where was it? It was in a red state. They hate red states. In fact, the media in this country, the — what I call them, the liberal spin machine — I don’t like to use the word “mainstream press” anymore. The liberal spin machine was there. They were all excited. But they’re thinking about sending foreign correspondents to the red states to find out what people — and to the red counties of California — to find out what Americans are really like.
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