Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

The Fallacy Of The Disembodied Mind

by tristero

This is woo-woo hoo-hah. Take this little anecdote:

Now let’s say that a man loses his job, becomes depressed, and wants a prescription for Prozac. What made him depressed isn’t the imbalance of serotonin in his brain but the loss of his job. Yet science continues to offer this kind of wrong explanation all the time. It mistakes agency for cause. The brain is serving as the agent of the mind, it isn’t causing mind.

Where to start? Chopra confuses anger, sadness, and possibly guiilt with what is clearly a medical condition. Or he confuses the colloquial use of the word “depressed” with the medical term “depressed.” Either way, he fails to recognize that there is a difference between the state of serious depression – which requires clinical treatment and shouldn’t rule out medication – and the complex of emotions felt normally when one loses a job – which doesn’t rise to the level of clinical seriousness. Those of us who either know someone who has clinical depression or who have personally suffered depression – perhaps most of us fall into one or other, if not both, categories – know that the depth of major depression and its very real dangers goes far beyond a mere reaction to the vicissitudes of life. In regulating emotion during depression, clearly the brain is badly misfiring, and that misfiring is indeed the cause of the disorder, among other causes.

To repeat, essentially, depression – in the technical sense – is a medical condition caused along the biochemical axis by certain dysfunctions in the apparatus that regulates the release of neurotransmitters, and not just serotonin (it is a gross oversimplification to limit the cause of depression merely to serotonin levels, dopamine plays an important role, as do other neurotransmitters). Depression manifests itself in behavioral symptoms detailed in the DSM-IV and it can be exacerbated (or brought on) by the brain’s reaction to life problems. However, clinical depression in no way is caused exclusively, or even predominantly, by life situations (with exceptions duly noted for extreme suffering: eg, the onset of depression after being tortured at Abu Ghraib, after losing your home in New Orleans, being arrested and detained indefinitely in solitary confinement a la Padilla, and so on). It is a brain disorder.

And then Chopra falls into one the hoariest errors in dualism. If the brain does not cause mind, then what does? And if that “what” is some non-material cause, say God, how does the non-material interact/interface with the material?

Now, whether or not we assume that Chopra is invoking something like God here – for example, he might be saying that what “causes” mind is the individual embedded in a culture – we are left, to Chopra’s misfortune, with the inescapable fact that there is no reliable evidence that an individual mind persists after the destruction/death of the brain, which really puts kind of a dent in his notion that the brain doesn’t cause mind.

Now if Chopra argued that mind cannot exist either without both brain and human society, he would be saying something I could agree to, but also something trivial. No one disagrees. But he seems to be asserting some kind of notion of mind that exists over and beyond physically-instantiated causes. And that is absurd. All he ends up doing is illustrate the pointlessness of attempting to argue by logic for the existence of the supernatural.

Likewise, another of Chopra’s point – the assertion that the wrong level of analysis often is brought to bear on the issue of depression – is very well-known. Again, speaking in generalizations, it is naive to talk about the “cause” of something like depression. It has many causes (including possible genetic ones), as do many other diseases for which Chopra doesn’t and wouldn’t claim supernatural cause – eg, diabetes. I would immediately agree that any psychiatrist who treated merely the neurotransmitter imbalances of depression without asking about life situations is doing his/her patient a grave disservice. But an efficacious treatment for depression does not, in any way require some kind of vague invoking of a supernatural, extra-material cause. In fact a resort to supernatural explanations would be worthless, if not counterproductive.

It is people like Chopra, who can’t wait to call upon woo woo, who make it extremely difficult to articulate criticisms of present-day scientific paradigms of depression and other complex human conditions. It seems reasonable to claim that the combination of personal biological functions and predispositions in concert with certain kinds of life situations is a more plausible cause of depression than the once trendy focus on the isolated chemistry of one individual. But that is a far cry from Chopra’s vague, and to my mind (ahem) at least, vaguely unpleasant, new age thinking.

There are responsible people who can talk about these very same issues. Depression, for instance, is a very important topic. What Chopra has to contribute to the discussion, other than his celebrity, seems roughly equal to zero. I fail to understand why HuffPo is giving him a platform and not some qualified physician.

We The People – Part Two

The Money Divide

by poputonian

Several posts ago someone pointed out that the corporate media fell on the other side of the money divide, and thus could not be relied on to advocate the People’s cause. Samuel Adams, the man who almost single handedly triggered the American revolution with the Committees of Correspondence, faced a similar issue back in the early 1770s. John Galvin, in his superb book Three Men of Boston, detailed how Adams was losing his way with the monied interests, and thus shifted his focus away from Boston merchants, the most prominent being John Hancock, and toward the Boston mechanics and rural farmers.

When the Boston merchants hired Otis to represent them in 1761, they were aggressive in their desire to fight the imposition of new rules on trade. The decade that followed, however, brought many bitter lessons. Nonimportation, which at first seemed a good answer that would bring quick results, had stifled all trade. Many of the best businessmen were bankrupted by the stagnation of trade in 1765, caused by the tightening customs stranglehold on the port of Boston. The merchants showed their dissatisfaction in a steadfast avoidance of any further affiliation with the radicals of the town: no more nonimportation, they said, no more support for Boston violence, no more attacks in the provincial administration. Hancock, who had inherited the leadership of the Boston merchants, led the way. He broke off his close friendship with Samuel Adams and made his peace with Hutchinson.

As long as Otis had been the dominant figure in Boston opposition to contemporary Parliamentary policy, the merchants were willing to commit themselves to his leadership. He was a radical, yes, but a constructive politician, in background and in philosophy a fellow merchant who might edge near the brink of defiance but whose uppermost concern was the betterment of the empire and consequently Massachusetts. He was, for the merchants, a force for good — meaning a mutually profitable relationship with the mother country under a very liberal trade policy with increasing power for American colonies without repudiation of the old institutions. Aberrations in his thinking were forgiven him and charged to the pressures of the time. (Otis himself had recognized this toleration and used it to extricate himself when trapped by his own inconsistencies.)

Adams had no such inconsistencies, nor did he possess any constructive view of the British empire as the potential salvation of mankind. He did not seek stability above all — in fact, he was willing to sacrifice a prosperous American trade, at least temporarily, in order to gain other ends. In the eyes of the merchants, Adams was much less predictable than Otis; they saw that the end at which he aimed was increasing independence — and perhaps even total independence — of Great Britain. What this would mean no one knew. Additionally, Adams’ obstructionism in the House, forcing adherence to the refusal to do business until the governor moved the General Court back to Boston, was beginning to cost too much. Without taxes and legislation, the province could not function, and without good government, commerce suffered. Continued exasperation of the Crown was certain to bring added punishment to Boston. Even more liberal businessmen began to hope fervently for a return of a healthy Otis to the scene.

Recognizing the reluctance of the merchants to cast their lot with him, Adams had already begun to transfer the basis of political power of the Boston radicals away from the merchants and toward the people. The merchants, he said, had been too long the “unconcerned spectators” on the political scene, who could be depended on only when their close interests were seen by them to be threatened. It was “the body of the people” who must decide the acceptance or rejection of Parliamentary decisions. He would base the fight on them.

Adams thus lost the support of the powerful and influential Merchant’s Society, a fact discernible in his poor showings in the elections of 1772.
…
His refusal to compromise, however, did not cost him his influence over the Sons of Liberty. He had seen to it that the small group, the Loyal Nine of 1766, was expanded into the Sons of Liberty (with 355 members) by 1769. These were the mechanics and small tradesmen of Boston, who now began to dominate the town meeting while the merchants grew ever more fearful of them.

Samuel Adams would eventually flood the small rural Massachusetts towns with letters, successfully drawing them into the revolutionary movement. In a similar way, the impeachment movement today isn’t coming from the business class, the major media, or from New York, Chicago, LA, or Dallas. It’s coming from the states, and towns such as Brattleboro, VT, Boca Raton, FL, Portland, ME, Hanover, NH, Iowa City, IA, Minneapolis, MN, San Diego, CA, Parma, OH, Santa Fe, NM, Nashua, NH, St. Cloud, MN, Newark, NJ, Dunellen, NJ, Oakland, CA, Albany, OR, Lompoc, CA, Winchester, MA, Bowling Green, OH, and Galveston, TX.

Perhaps this is a case of don’t follow the money.

(Subscription link to The Remedy, an impeachment newsletter, is at the bottom of the afterdowningstreet link above.)
We The People – Part One

Options On The Table

by digby

There is a back and forth going on about whether the US should take the military option “off the table” when discussing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Here’s a nice rundown of various points of view from Ezra Klein at TAPPED.

In a vacuum, one can understand why people think that taking the military option “off the table” is a bad idea. You need leverage and the “big stick” is the ultimate leverage. But we are not in a vacuum, we are in a world in which a president of the United States has so damaged his nation’s credibility that the single most important foreign policy imperative is to revive the certainty that the USA is not a rogue nation with imperialist desires, if not plans for world domination. Until that happens, any “leverage” of military action we have is taken as an absolute threat.

Right now, the term “all options on the table” very specifically means The Bush Doctrine of preventive war and until very recently this illegal concept was not even whispered in sane circles. That doctrine makes us a nation that lives by no known rules or laws. Furthermore, our credibility is so damaged by the series of lies that were told in 2002 and 2003 (and which most people around the world saw through at the time) it can no longer be assumed that we even have good intentions, even if our intelligence could be trusted, which we’ve recently proved cannot.

I don’t understand why people fail to see how damaged we are by what has taken place these last few years. There may have been a time when America could say that we knew a nation was building nuclear weapons and that we would surgically “take them out” for the good of all the world. George W. Bush destroyed that “option” and the ramifications of blundering ahead anyway are unthinkable, as all the experts cited by Klein (who were right about Iraq, by the way) have argued.

But until we admit that the Bush Doctrine is an illegal and immoral doctrine and repudiate it, we are going to be stuck in this horrible situation where we are the biggest military power on the earth who are mistrusted, feared, hated and actively resisted. The Bush administration has been right about one thing — it is human nature to resist domination. The problem is that while they market freedom like a product to other nations, they believe that United States leadership is nothing more than a simplistic, schoolyard philosophy of “might makes right.” They’ve been successful in that regard. We are now a huge, powerful nation that is loathed and feared around the world. But unfortunately their leadership has also shown the world that we are profoundly inept. There cannot be a more dangerous combination. It’s a recipe for miscalculation, not just on our part but on others. Think about this: we are dealing with two of the dumbest world leaders on earth, Bush and Ahmadinejad. Is it a good idea for these two to be playing a complicated game of chicken?

Democratic politicians have an obligation to ratchet down the rhetoric and restore confidence that the US can operate with calm, deliberate, competence. They should eschew any slogans or diplomatic speak that validates Bush’s policies and they should make the argument over and over and over again that they are dedicated to following international law, working with allies and using our military as a very last resort and only as a matter of self defense and that of our allies. And they have to loudly and emphatically renounce the Bush Doctrine. Until that happens, we will continue to be seen as an unpredictable, threatening superpower and the nuclear proliferation we are so worried about will become inevitable.

Little Iranian pitchers have big ears. They hear what is being said and they are acting accordingly. And right now “leaving all options on the table” sounds like the US is hellbent on attacking them no matter what they do. They saw what happened with Saddam and this looks like an instant replay. Democrats need to clearly send a different message.

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And Above The Fold, No Less

by tristero

Congratulations to Jane Hamsher and her merry team of bloggers at firedoglake both for the stellar work they’ve done on the Libby trial and also for making the front page of the New York Times. And the headline describes perfectly what blogging is about:

For Liberal Bloggers, Libby Trial Is Fun and Fodder

That’s right. Except for the dangerous scourge of rightwing extremists, who are an onerous duty to confront, political and cultural blogging can be a lot of fun. And you can learn an enormous amount. Well, at least I have. And blogging something important like the Libby trial, where even the most competent press reportage will omit details that many of us would find very important, does indeed provide fodder for a more focused political agenda.

One final thing about that headline. Jane, and by extension, our larger patch of the blogosphere has been – will wonders never cease? – accurately described. We are liberal bloggers, and the Times knows this, resisting the use of a more prejudicial and inaccurate adjective with the same number of letters that would please the rightwingers (can u guess what it is?). While the Times, disgracefully, still permits its reporters to take dictation from Bush and print it as reporting, this is a refreshing, and hopeful sign. It wasn’t too long ago that the Times, under Raines, would provide creationists free advertising on their front page. It’s not much of a step forward to describe Jane as a liberal blogger and not, inaccurately, as a _____, but it is a step.

In any event, congrats to everyone at firedoglake. And also, thanks, Marcy, thanks Jane, and thanks to all the rest of you for your great, great work.

[Update: Inaccurate description of Jane in penultimate paragraph removed so you can have the fun of guessing what it is. it’s not too hard…]

Polarizer In Chief

by digby

ABC News’ Teddy Davis Reports: In the forthcoming issue of Texas Monthly, former Bush strategist Matthew Dowd writes that President Bush’s “gut-level bond” with the American people “may be lost” and that “wholesale change” is needed in Iraq.

“Sending in a small contingent of troops is likely going to be seen as not helpful,” Dowd writes. “He’d be much better off with the public if he said, ‘This is a mess, we made mistakes, and the only way to fix it is a wholesale change.’ And that could mean either a serious increase in troop strength or withdrawal.”

Dowd opines that Bush’s problems stem from his success in the 2002 midterm elections. “. . . when all the levers of power in Washington became Republican, creating consensus seemed to become unnecessary at the White House.”

Well now, that seems like quite a mistake doesn’t it? I’ll bet the president wishes he hadn’t done that.

Who do you suppose told him he didn’t need to gain consensus to govern effectively?

In late 2000, even as the result of the presidential election was still being contested in court, George W. Bush’s chief pollster Matt Dowd was writing a memo for Rove that would reach a surprising conclusion. Based on a detailed examination of poll data from the previous two decades, Dowd’s memo argued that the percentage of swing voters had shrunk to a tiny fraction of the electorate. Most self-described “independent” voters “are independent in name only,” Dowd told me in an interview describing his memo. “Seventy-five percent of independents vote straight ticket” for one party or the other. Once such independents are reclassified as Democrats or Republicans, a key trend emerges: Between 1980 and 2000, the percentage of true swing voters fell from a very substantial 24 percent of the electorate to just 6 percent. In other words, the center was literally disappearing. Which meant that, instead of having every incentive to govern as “a uniter, not a divider,” Bush now had every reason to govern via polarization.

Let the self-serving re-writing of history begin.

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Washington State Introduces Impeachment Resolution

by poputonian

WHEREAS, this is awesome, please click the link to get the latest details, including the pdf of the resolution, email contacts to show support, and other explanations.

Washington State is one of several states racing to see which will be first to send the U.S. House of Representatives a petition to impeach Bush and Cheney.

State Senator Eric Oemig, on February 14, 2007, introduced a resolution (PDF) calling on the Washington State Legislature to petition the U.S. House.

The following Senators have cosponsored: Harriet Spanel, Darlene Fairley, Jeanne Kohl-Welles, Margarita Prentice, Karen Fraser, Debbie Regala, Claudia Kauffman and Adam Kline.

If you live in Washington state, please contact your legislators right away and ask them to support the resolution, or thank them if they already are.

How a state legislature, along with one Congress Member, can compel the U.S. House to begin impeachment proceedings: Explanation.

If you’re from anywhere, you can sign up to stay informed, contact your U.S. representative and senators, and add your voice to a national call for impeachment by… signing this petition for impeachment

UPDATE: If you haven’t watched the youtube of Oemig please do so at the link. The guy’s delivery is extremely well done; not grating, not hysterical, not histrionic; just an extraordinary combination of words, body language, cadence, and emphasis. His heart and his mind are in the same place.

They Made A Funny

by digby

This is so exciting! The producer of that fab torture fest “24” has created a new comedy show and it’s hilarious. Just listen to the wildly enthusiastic “laughter” if you don’t believe me:

I think Joel Surnow has kind of missed the mark, though. While I, a cowardly, flip-flopping liberal loser might find this “fake news” concept amusing, surely the codpiece-grabbing, testosterone-overdosed REAL MEN of the right need something .. more.

How about some witty waterboarding of teenage Muslim boys or a hilarous look at a shark feeding frenzy? And they are really missing the boat if they don’t include some of these. Should it be difficult to find them, they could always commission some Minutemen to shoot some Mexicans or put some firecrackers inside frogs and light ’em up like George W. Bush used to do when he was a kid. A good lynching is always cause for a chuckle.

They think they will succeed by apeing the left but they are being very short sighted. The right has a “differnt kinda humor.” Just ask their president:

While driving back from the speech later that day, Bush mentions Karla Faye Tucker, a double murderer who was executed in Texas last year. In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, Bianca Jagger and a number of other protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Tucker. “Did you meet with any of them?” I ask.

Bush whips around and stares at me. “No, I didn’t meet with any of them,” he snaps, as though I’ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. “I didn’t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it. I watched his interview with [Tucker], though. He asked her real difficult questions, like, ‘What would you say to Governor Bush?'”

“What was her answer?” I wonder.

“Please,” Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, “don’t kill me.”

Now that’s funny..

So’s this:

That lameass schoolboy “BO” stuff won’t cut it with the manly men and women of the right. They need RED MEAT!

C’mon, Surnow, you can do better than this.

Update: It has been argued in the comments that Surnow’s little Obama fest is a racist grand slam, and that’s true. All that’s missing are some subliminal cuts of cannibals with bones in their noses to drive the point home. But I still maintain that it isn’t real rightwing humor. There has to be violence and/or humiliation to really call forth a wingnut belly laugh.

H/T to Attytood
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International Bush League

by digby

Quiddity catches a very interesting choice of words by both the Iranian Ambassador last night on Charlie Rose and President Bush in his press conference today.

First the Ambassador:

The evidence that has been produced, in fact fabricated, is preposterous. The dates. If you look at the evidence, the dates that are used in this mortars are written in American date format, putting month first and date second. Whereas nowhere in the world people use month first and date second. Everywhere in the world except for the U.S. And those who fabricated this evidence should listen and learn. Everybody else in the world uses date, month, year. That is the order.

CHARLIE ROSE: That says what to you?

That this evidence is fabricated, as was the evidence that was fabricated before the Iraq war in order to launch an aggression. This evidence is fabricated and it points to a very dangerous policy that is being pursued by this administration.

CHARLIE ROSE: What is that dangerous policy pursued by this administration?

That dangerous policy is to create a crisis, to escape forward. That is, to blame somebody else for the results of their adventurism, which everybody knew would lead to this disaster.

And then there was the following exchange in Bush’s press conference this morning: (emp add)

Q: What assurances can you give the American people that the intelligence this time will be accurate?

BUSH: Ed, we know they’re there, we know they’re provided by the Quds force. We know the Quds force is a part of the Iranian government. I don’t think we know who picked up the phone and said to the Quds force, go do this, but we know it’s a vital part of the Iranian government. What matters is, is that we’re responding. The idea that somehow we’re manufacturing the idea that Iranians are providing IEDs is preposterous.

Quiddity asks:

Interesting. When questioned about the accuracy of the intelligence, Bush did not reply by saying that the collection of evidence was by reliable parties, or that the analysis was thorough. Instead, he spoke about manufacturing evidence, denying that it took place.

I suspect that’s what came up at his morning briefing and he just blurted it out because he’s an idiot.

Still, it’s hard for me to believe that even these people can be this inept, but it appears they can. There can be no reasonable explanation for the “bad coordination” between Baghdad on Sunday and Pace and now Bush today. And the “proof” is so suspicious that you honestly cannot take it seriously.

When a great nation has proved to everyone in the world that its leaders are liars and bumblers and its intelligence services are, at best, toadies and at worst totally incompetent, you not only have to reach the normal threshold of proof, you have to be unassailable. This government has zero credibility.

It’s almost as if they are trying to make fools of themselves. Maybe they think if they behave like inept amateurs over and over again it will entice the Iranians to make a mistake. It’s the only thing that makes sense at this point. No adminstration can be this incapable.

Can it?

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Welcome To Our World

by digby

The other night TRex at FDL paid me a very nice compliment and I’d like to return the favor by pointing out that this very funny, but important, post of his should be read by one and all. The DC punditocrisy has not just been craven and opportunistic, although they have been that. And they haven’t just been servants of power, although they have been that too. Apparently, they have actually been frozen for the last two decades and the blogosphere has caused them to melt. Via TRex, here’s Joe Klein:

As a newcomer to this blogging business, I’ve been interested in the Edwards dust-up. As readers know, I’ve been critical of the tone of the left-wing blogosphere in the past. But I think that Yglesias raises an important point here and anyone reading the comments section of any Swampland post knows that troglyditic right-wing cavedwellers fester there, in a vomitously vile manner, too. And I’d add this: Radio. I was driving into Springfield, Ill last night for the Obama festivities and caught the ever-vile Sean Hannity “interviewing” the even-more-vile Dick Morris about Hillary. Just disgraceful…and they were mild compared to the crap I’ve heard from Rush and others over the years.

It’s obvious that the current level of vitriol on the left is a reaction to nearly twenty years of sewage emanating from Rush et al. …The intemperance on the left has three other sources (1) justifiable fury over the Bush adminstration (2) justifiable fury over the way the media treated Clinton and, to a certain extent, Bush and (3) ideologues of any sort tend to be obnoxious.

Now I recognize that Klein goes on to make a number of predictable lukewarm water points about playing nice-nice. But, nonetheless, this is a breakthrough. Indeed, it is a sign of an important sea change in the punditocrisy’s worldview. For years they have been living in a Republican establishment bubble headed by society mavens pretending to be journalists — people like Cokie Roberts and David Broder. These are people who spent the decade of the 90’s aiding and abetting a GOP character smear of epic proportions, either because they felt the need to pretend that they were living in Bedford Falls instead of the ruthless capitol of the most powerful nation on earth — or because they are foolish and shallow people who enjoyed the sophomoric tenor of the rightwing machine. Either way, they were (and are) a symptom of a very sick political culture.
For years the allegedly liberal pundits willfully ignored the horrific eliminationist rhetoric of the right and instead focused their attention on tabloid scandalmongering and outdated liberal stereotypes. They pretended that people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter were, at worst, rodeo clowns whose angry violent swill was some sort of a joke. They shrugged their shoulders when Coulter wrote a bestselling book called “Treason” that opened with this passage:

Liberals have a preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason. You could be talking about Scrabble and they would instantly leap to the anti-American position. Everyone says liberals love America, too. No they don’t. Whenever the nation is under attack, from within or without, liberals side with the enemy. This is their essence. The Left’s obsession with the crimes of the West and their Rousseauian respect for Third World savages all flow from this subversive goal. If anyone has the gaucherie to point out the left’s nearly unblemished record of rooting against America, liberals turn around and scream “McCarthyism!”

They looked away when Rush Limbaugh, feted by both the president and the vice president and everyone in between as a highly valuable member of the Republican coalition said things like this:

I mean, if there is a party that’s soulless, it’s the Democratic Party. If there are people by definition who are soulless, it is liberals — by definition. You know, souls come from God. You know? No. No. You can’t go there.

When Limbaugh made his famous inappropriate and bizarre sexual statements about Abu Ghraib, the flagship magazine of the American right came to his rescue with this essay by FDL fave Kate O’Beirne:

Rush’s angry, frustrated critics discount how hard it is to make an outrageous charge against him stick. But, we listeners have spent years with him, we know him, and trust him. Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the “facts.” We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her. For millions of us, David Brock is firing blanks against a bulletproof target.

The allegedly liberal press and the allegedly liberal pundits were silent. We could only assume they agreed. In fact, as time went on, they became angry with the newly minted liberal blogosphere because we were aghast, as we had been for years, that this was considered acceptable. From Limbaugh to the Gang of 500 to Drudge to Joe Klein to Richard Cohen, it seemed that everyone agreed that liberals and Democrats were fair game for the worst sort of fascistic language imaginable. Liberal bloggers who objected were served up as proof of the right wing’s smears that the left was “unhinged.” As far back as 2000, Bob Somerby and the late Mediawhores Online pioneered this media critique, which was admittedly often harder on the so-called liberals than on the others. It had to be — these people were allegedly speaking for us and they would go on television and parrot rightwing cant at every turn. They railed about the “angry left” and they cried to their friends in the rightwing media when we insulted them. We wrote and wrote and wrote about it, documenting the atrocities and making the case. But nothing changed until these liberal pundits and journalists started blogging. This piece by Rick Perlstein spells out what happened to Klein’s colleague Jay Carney when he thoughtlessly repeated rightwing spin disguised as history on the TIME blog:

Chalk up 7:22 a.m. EST on Tuesday, January 23, 2007, as the moment a milestone was passed. On Time’s new blog, Swampland, D.C. Bureau Chief Jay Carney posted a pre-assessment of the State of the Union address comparing President Bush’s political position to Bill Clinton’s in January of 1995. Like Bush, “President Clinton was in free fall. … His approval ratings were mired in the 30’s, and seemed unlikely to rise.” Moments later, a writer identifying himself as “TomT” pointed out an error in Carney’s “nut graf” that would have earned a failing grade for a first-year journalism major: “Clinton’s approval rating in January [of 1995] was 47 percent. It was not mired in the 30s.” At 9:12, the blogger Atrios, also known as Duncan Black, alerted his readers to the gaffe, and they descended on the Time blog like locusts–and, to mix the Biblical metaphor, served Jay Carney’s head up on a charger. […]

At which Carney snapped back so churlishly (“the left is as full of unthinking Ditto-heads as Limbaugh-land”) that, for a moment, it was hard even to remember–why was it, again, that we were supposed to defer to the authority of newsweeklies (and the mainstream press) in the first place? Carney was rude and wrong. The barbaric yawpers of the netroots were rude and right.

Joe Klein has suffered many such incidents since he started blogging, as have other journalists who entered the fray and subjected themselves to the wild and wooly world of the blog comment section. And he didn’t like it one bit. But as other journalists who are entering the online writing world are finding, the feedback from readers is a bracing splash of reality that makes them take a new look at the world they’ve been writing about for decades. Joe Klein is seeing the current state of politics through new eyes. And for the first time he’s understanding that we are angry for a reason. I don’t expect him to give up his vaunted “centrism” which is his very special view of himself as being above it all. But if blogging means they can see even a tiny little speck of light about the right’s decades long jihad against their fellow Americans, then I say let them all blog. (Hell, make them all blog.) I think I speak for all of us out there who’ve been mixing it up with readers and trolls and critics for years, that while it may be somewhat harsh and disconcerting at first, it keeps you honest. And that is something the political punditocrisy has needed for a very long time. Welcome to the blogosphere, Joe.

X-posted at FDL

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Dear Kevin

by tristero

Dear Kevin,

You are making the exact same mistake you made in 2002/2003. I would have thought that by now you knew better than to engage seriously the “ideas” of fascist thugs. I guess not.

You are treating the lunatic Glenn Reynolds and his cheap-tv-series-style fantasies to murder Iranian civilians as if he is important and as if they are a serious proposal that needs to be parsed and understood rather than deplored, utterly condemned, and mocked. No matter how inadvertent your actions and well-intentioned you may be, you are providing him – and worse, his sick, insane, idiotic proposals – with crediblity. And believe me, Reynolds knows it.

Back in 2002/03, this is precisely how Bush et al built up support for the utterly ridiculous idea of invading Iraq without reason. Incredibly, people who should have known better felt, well yes, it’s a “breathtaking” idea, even an “audacious” one, but let’s look at it and not, you know, just reject it out of hand. Riiiight. We all know how that’s turning out, and it’s going to get a lot worse.

But there you were, in the runup to Bush/Iraq, when it was patently obvious that it was to be the worst foreign policy decision in US history, still opining that if Bush could get it right – hah! – then maybe it’s worth the risk. It wasn’t. It was a crazy idea and no one as intelligent and savvy as you should ever have been bamboozled.

And here you go again, reasonably entertaining notions that are sheer madness. You write there there is some kind of heavy-duty ethical conundrum at stake. There isn’t, not to Reynolds and his ilk. You talk about “moral knots” and definitions of terrorism. But Kevin, don’t you see, these terms have no meaning outside of the social philosophy of liberalism, which Reynolds and his fellow brown-shirts emphatically reject.

Talking about implied moral knots in Reynolds’ ideas is not sober commentary on your part, even if it sounds like it. Given what you are trying to take seriously – running the world, the real world, as if it were a 1 dimensional cable-tv thriller – you are talking sheer nonsense. There is a failure on your part to recognize what is really going on. Reynolds gleefully interprets your willingness to take him seriously and talk about moral dilemmas as a victory. And he is right. It is his victory.

Sure, sure, sure, I know you’re appalled at what Reynolds said. I know you don’t agree with any of it. But that’s not the point. You think there’s a moral knot where there is nothing but Reynolds’ stupid, ignorant, and utterly naive totalitarianism. Remember, Kevin, you are not dealing with liberals. You are dealing with people who do not accept the proposition that if they do the same thing al Qaeda does, it is terrorism by definition. You are dealing with people who do not believe in concepts like equal justice, liberty, or fair debate.

Please Kevin, for heaven’s sake, think before you discuss the utterly deranged ideas of people like Reynolds in a sober fashion. The only thing to take seriously about Reynolds and the rest of Bushism is their will to power and you have failed once again to recognize one important way they do it. They fool people like you into permitting them a place at the table.

love,

tristero