The clearest sign we’ve seen yet that the wingnuts are really on the run is that they are now pathetically trying to imitate liberal-ish media and they have no earthly idea what they are imitating or what it means:
Great Moments In Fox News Dept. Forget Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person In The World” contest — it’s now been completely upstaged by a new Sunday contest on Fox: Sean Hannity’s “Enemy of the State” award.
This is their idea of irony, no doubt, but it’s not funny because … oh why bother:
An enemy of the state is a person accused of certain crimes against the state, such as treason. Falsely describing individuals in this way is often a manifestation of political repression. For example, an authoritarian regime may purport to maintain national security by describing social or political dissidents as “enemies of the state”.
They are becoming parodies of themselves.
And I have a sneaking suspicion that Dennis Miller has something to do with this — poor, sad, Dennis “bad timing” Miller who thought he was making a good career move and ended up in the wingnut ghetto.
There is an interesting back and forth going on between Jonathan Chait and Peter Wood who has written a book about “The New Anger” which is apparently a manifestation of a leftwing unhinged by Jimi Hendrix.
I wrote about Staney Kurtz’s review of Wood’s book last week in some detail, tracing the actual genesis of the “New Anger” — and let’s just say that it wasn’t the Democrats who invented it. In fact, it was once celebrated on the cover of national magazines as a righteous Republican emotion:
After writing that post I got some very interesting correspondence from two different people who had been working in the congress during the 80’s when Newtie and the boyz were starting their jihad and they both said that I didn’t know the half of it.
This rightwing anthropologist’s thesis about leftwing “anger” is part of the resurgence of the rightwing victimization theme which as been around, but somewhat ridiculous, during the years in which they held power in all three branches of government. In this case they are saying that the left is irrational — much as certain cloddish men are prone to tellling women to “calm down” when they get righteously pissed at their poor behavior, the right is trying to marginalize liberal anger.
In a different line of attack, as with this new book “Applebee’s America”, they are pushing the idea that there is no such thing as partisanship in the first place. The whole red-blue divide is now deemed ridiculous as we are all members of discrete tribes, most of which are composed of swing voters.
“Applebee’s America” is perfectly designed to appeal to the lukewarm punditocrisy who are desperate to believe that the needs and desires of average Americans are exactly like their own and to that end a book written by a Republican strategist, a Democratic strategist and a reporter is their idea of analytical nirvana. (It’s juuuuust right.)
This is awfully convenient for the Republicans who must shift gears and say “why, oh why, can’t we all get along?” now that they no longer hold the institutional levers of power. That whole “elections have consequences” thing is so 2004. And it’s extremely convenient that one of the authors of “Applebee’s America”, Bush’s former pollster Matthew Dowd, has changed course and finds that the country is one vast land of swing voters who want nothing more than for the parties to all get along. He’s the guy who famously gathered the data that proved to Rove after the Republicans controlled all branches of government that there was no longer any such thing as a swing voter. But let’s not let that get in the way of a soothing new meme for the DC courtiers to embrace.
(Go on over to the book’s site and take the fun test “what’s your tribe?” I’m apparently in the “tipping tribe” which makes me a swing voter. Seriously.)
I don’t know if there’s going to be any stopping this. But I think it would be best for the Democrats to keep a smile on their faces and just do what needs to be done. It is a very serious moral hazard to allow the Republicans to continute to get away with this stuff:
In insurance theory, moral hazard is the name given to the increased risk of problematic (immoral) behavior, and thus a negative outcome (“hazard”), because the person who caused the problem doesn’t suffer the full (or any) consequences, or may actually benefit.
That practically defines the Republican party since 1974.
This has been going on almost as long as I can remember, from Nixon’s crimes to Reagan/Bush and the Savings and Loan scandals and Iran Contra and now Bush Jr and well… everything. Every time they did it, the establishment watched these people rape the nation and then got all misty eyed for civility and healing and forced the Democrats to not only clean up the mess, but take unbelievable abuse while they did it. This has got to stop.
Update: Jesus H. Christ. You just can’t win with these people. John Boehner asks the Democrats to let him go to the Ohio State game today along with a bunch of other politicians and in the spirit of comity, the Democrats said yes. Now they are being slammed for being hypocrites because they have gone back on their pledge to work five days a week. Had they said no to Boehner, they would have been slammed for not allowing him to cheer on his team in the big game.
Meanwhile we had 12 years of the nastiest, unethical behavior in modern American history and the press treated it as if it was simply good old fashioned harball politics.
Moral hazards everywhere, my friends.
Update II: I should also point out that as Atrios and Yglesias mention, Jonathan Chait sometimes exhibits the exact same tendency as the Republicans to say that the liberal blogosphere is shockingly and inappropriately angry. The truth is that he’s righteously angry, we’re righteously angry and the only difference is that we work in a medium that is much more conversational and informal than he does. Whatever. Believe me, the right sees no difference between us and it probably behooves the liberal punditocrisy to stop worrying about our profane vitriol and start loooking at the bigger picture. We’re all in this together whether they like it or not.
I’m getting a little bit depressed about the bloggers who are quitting these days. First, it appears Billmon has checked out for good. Jeanne D’Arc said so-long some time ago as did my pal Kevin K. Yesterday I read that Kevin Hayden at American Street just can’t afford to do it anymore. He’s been one of the longest running and hardest working bloggers around and I don’t think the blogosphere will be the same without him.
And today, I see that one of my very favorite bloggers, Michael Bérubé, is hanging it up too. I will really miss him.
It’s a strange and almost compulsive thing we do and I don’t blame anyone for finally getting burned out or disillusioned or just plain bored with the conversation. I think all of us feel that way at least from time to time. When I first started, I used to take time off, but that’s not really possible anymore. So, you just keep keeping on or you stop, I guess.
Anyway, I will miss all of them and would hope they would leave the door open to returning if they get the urge. Any of these fine writers are more than welcome to contribute here, any time they have something to say. It would be an honor to host them.
Meanwhile, on a lighter bloggy note, Street Prophets has found a new way to raise a little “dough” by creating a cookbook and selling it. As a cookbook collector myself, I’ll be buying one and any of you out there who are similarly into either cooking or eating might want to do the same. (They say that cooking is good for the soul, but I never took it literally…) Pastordan and his folks are some of the good guys on the religious left and I think they should be supported by all of us godless liberals out here or the faux religious left will turn the Democratic party into a mild version of Focus on the Family.
As regular readers know, I’ve been pondering this infuriating fixation on bipartisanship and moderation for the last couple of weeks and watching aghast as the press does the wingnuts’ bidding, setting up the Dems as failing to fulfill their promise to the American people that they would be moderate and bipartisan if they won the election. This was simply not on the agenda during the election, other than that the House Democrats would restore some sort of fairness to the rules and pass anti-corruption legislation. In fact, the entire election was about the Democrats taking power to provide some needed checks and balance on the Republicans.
Oddly, however, in the last couple of weeks, the media has been obsessing that the election reflected a desire among the American people for the congress to stop fighting and work together, which makes no sense. The Republican congress didn’t fight — the Democrats just caterwauled ineffectually from the sidelines, while the Republicans did what they wanted. There was no gridlock, they passed virtually every piece of legislation they wanted and the congress was perfectly in sync with the president. If comity was what people were concerned about they obviously would have kept undivided government.
The American people voted for the Democrats because they wanted them to stop the Republican juggernaut. Look at the poll numbers. Look at the election results.
So, where is this coming from? First, it’s obviously coming from the Republicans who have much to gain by whining incessantly about being trod upon by the horrible Democrats who are betraying the citizens who voted for them by being big old meanies. No surprise there. They make their money and derive their power among their mouthbreathing base by portraying themselves as being victimized — whether in power or out, the liberals are always keeping them down.
It’s also long been obvious that the political and media establishment are perfectly comfortable with noxious rightwing nutballs like Tom Delay running things, but panic at the idea of a Democrat with a pulse. Their worship of “moderation and bipartisanship” a la Jerry Ford is largely based on their irrational fear of hippies. Still, it all seemed a bit bizarre, even for them.
One of the sillier theories I’d been bouncing around was that the punditocrisy and the reporters had spent so much time riffing and boozing during that interminable period of mourning for Ford that they somehow conflated their tributes to his moderation and bipartisanship with some sort of mandate from the American people in this last election.
Up to that point, the media had seen the Democrats’ post-election promises to “work with the other side” — as a rhetorical rebuke to the way the Republicans had governed. They were right. While I’m sure the Democrats had no intentions of running the congress like a plantation as the Republicans had, nobody thought it meant that they would follow the president’s agenda or compromise on issues on which they had run, like the war or preserving social security. The election, after all, was a referendum on a party that had had six years of total power and who’s approval ratings were hovering in the low teens. The press had had to extract assurances that the Democrats wouldn’t impeach the president, for crying out loud. Bipartisan kumbaaya was clearly not on the agenda.
Suddenly, Jerry Ford died and it seemed to me that days and days of eulogizing Ford’s legacy just prior to the new congress taking over (and during the holiday drinking season) had caused the media to literally confuse the Ford ascension in 1974 with the election last November. It wasn’t until I saw Fox News this week-end that my theory was confirmed:
Fox News Watch:
Eric Burns: Grandma Pelosi goes to Washington. Don’t you think the handlers have to back off just a little bit?
Neal Gabler: yeah, perhaps. I mean the themes of this week were really moderation and bipartisanship, not being grandma. We saw that in Ford’s funeral and we saw that with the celebration.
Burns: Celebration meaning?
Neal Gabler: Moderation meaning, we’ve had … and this is a slap clearly at the Bush administration — “we’ve had six years of hyperpartisanship” …. and what we’re looking at in Gerald Ford is a model of bipartisanship and moderation and what we’re looking for in terms of the new congress is the hopefulness of bipartisanship and moderation.
That pretty much covers it all in one muddled, hangover stew. Evidently, the brainless punditocrisy does now believe that people voted for the Democrats last November because they were yearning for 1974 and wanted the Democrats to act like Jerry Ford. These people have decided that the Democrats are supposed to “pardon” President Bush in order to heal the nation.
I don’t think so.
60 Minutes last night reminded us of what it was really like back in the good old days when Betty Ford was in the White House being excoriated for her courageous decision to act like a normal human being instead of a robot:
Betty wouldn’t step back. In fact, her outspokenness was such a trademark that there are several exhibits about her candor at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Michigan.
For one, the Fords abandoned the notion of separate bedrooms. At the time, people were shocked by this.
“We had always shared a bedroom, and I thought there was no reason we had to change our lifestyle if I wasn’t gonna give him up entirely,” Mrs. Ford told Stahl.
But if that shocked the country, it was nothing compared to Betty’s interview with Morley Safer in 1975. All hell broke loose. She said that if she were a teenager, she probably would try marijuana, that she’d seen a psychiatrist, and that she was pro-choice. And then there was the question about her 18-year-old daughter.
“Well, what if Susan Ford came to you and said, ‘Mother… I’m having an affair’?” Safer asked.
“Well, I wouldn’t be surprised. I would think she’s a perfectly normal human being, like all young girls,” the first lady replied.
Historians consider the interview so important, it runs perpetually at the Ford Museum. At first, two-thirds of the mail and phone calls were negative. Editorials criticized her for being too candid and too liberal, potentially an enormous problem for Jerry Ford.
Asked if her husband was upset with her, Ford told Stahl, “When he saw it, he said, ‘Well, honey, there goes about 20 million votes, but we’ll make it.'”
But other people were outraged. “There were people who actually demonstrated in front of the White House and said I was a embarrassment as a first lady,” she remembered.
She went on to become extremely popular because, shocking as it was, she was actually like the vast majority of the country. Her views were not out of the mainstream — she was just one of the few people in public life who had the courage to not be a hypocrite.
If everyone wants the Democrats to emulate the Ford era, being independent, outspoken and broadminded like Betty would be the right way to go about it. People were sick and tired of mushmouthed platitudes and insulting deception after all the years of lies. After Bush, I have a feeling people might just be looking for a little of that same Betty Ford straightforward honesty and clarity.
… It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that [the voters] message was intended for only one party or politician. The votes hadn’t even been counted in November before we heard reports that corporations were already recruiting lobbyists with Democratic connections to carry their water in the next Congress.
That’s why it’s not enough to just change the players. We have to change the game. Americans put their faith in Democrats because they want us to restore their faith in government — and that means more than window dressing when it comes to ethics reform. … We must stop any and all practices that would lead a reasonable person to believe that a public servant has become indebted to a lobbyist. That means a full ban on gifts and meals. It means no free travel or subsidized travel on private jets. And it means closing the revolving door to ensure that Capitol Hill service — whether as a member of Congress or as a staffer — isn’t all about lining up a high-paying lobbying job. We should no longer tolerate a House committee chairman shepherding the Medicare prescription drug bill through Congress at the same time he’s negotiating for a job as the pharmaceutical industry’s top lobbyist.
But real reform also means real enforcement. We need to finally take the politics and the partisanship out of ethics investigations. Whether or not the House ethics committee has been covering for its colleagues, the secrecy with which its members have operated has led people to question why legislators who are serving jail time were not caught and stopped by the committee in the first place. It’s led people to wonder why Congress cannot seem to police itself.
I have long proposed a nonpartisan, independent ethics commission that would act as the American people’s public watchdog over Congress. The commission would be staffed with former judges and former members of Congress from both parties, and it would allow any citizen to report possible ethics violations by lawmakers, staff members or lobbyists. Once a potential violation is reported, the commission would have the authority to conduct investigations, issue subpoenas, gather records, call witnesses, and provide a report to the Justice Department or the House and Senate ethics committees that — unlike current ethics committee reports — is available for all citizens to read.
This would improve the current process in two ways. First, it would take politics out of the fact-finding phase of ethics investigations. Second, it would exert greater public pressure on Congress to punish wrongdoing quickly and severely. Others have proposed similar good ideas on enforcement, and I am open to all options. We must restore the American people’s confidence in the ethics process by ensuring that political self-interest can no longer prevent politicians from enforcing ethics rules.
The truth is, we cannot change the way Washington works unless we first change the way Congress works. On Nov. 7, voters gave Democrats the chance to do this. But if we miss this opportunity to clean up our act and restore this country’s faith in government, the American people might not give us another one.
The pending invasion of Iran and the recent “seismic event” in North Korea are a wake-up call that the Cold War never completely thawed out; it just went a little tepid. It also made me all misty-eyed for the last golden era of anti-nuke films, circa 1980-1984 (a veritable flurry of cautionary tales, spurred on, no doubt, by the dreaded thought of Evil Empire hatin’ Ronnie R’s itchy trigger finger wagging ever more perilously close to The Button).
One of the best of the bunch (and as timely as ever) is 1983’s Testament(Paramount DVD). Originally an “American Playhouse” presentation on PBS, the film was released to theatres and garnered a well-deserved Best Actress nomination for Jane Alexander (she lost to Shirley MacLaine). Director Lynne Littman takes a low key, deliberately paced approach, but pulls no punches. Alexander, her husband (William DeVane) and three children (Roxana Zal, Ross Harris and Lukas Haas) live in sleepy Hamlin, California, an idyllic, Speilbergian suburbia, where it’s just another day of getting the kids off to school, Dad off to work, and the garbage cans out to the curb. Alexander is directing the local elementary school production of “The Pied Piper Of Hamlin” (which becomes a significant, if somewhat obvious, allegory for what is about to happen to the citizenry of the “real” Hamlin).The children’s afternoon cartoons are interrupted by a news flash that a number of nuclear explosions have occurred in New York. Then there is a flash of a whole different kind when nearby San Francisco (where DeVane has gone on a business trip) receives a direct strike. There is no exposition on the political climate that precipitates the attacks, but I think this is a wise decision by the filmmakers because it helps us zero in on the essential humanistic message of the film. All of the post-nuke horrors ensue, but they are presented sans the histrionics and melodrama that plagued the more widely-seen (and in my opinion, inferior) “The Day After”. The fact that the nightmarish scenario unfolds amidst such everyday banality is what makes it so believably horrifying. As the children (and adults) of Hamlin succumb to the inevitable scourge of radiation sickness and (just like the children of the imaginary Hamlin) steadily “disappear”, one by one, we are left haunted by the final line of the school production-“Your children are not dead. They will return when the world deserves them.” Amen.
Update: Digby here. There have been a few comments/questions as to why we link to Amazon since they are a soulless, hegemonic fascist corporation and all. First, let me be clear that I am the one doing the linking, not Dennis, and I do it because if one of you fine folks decided to purchase one of these films, Amazon kicks back a couple of sheckles and it helps support the site. I know that nobody who reads this blog believes that I have any magical power to compel people to buy things against their will so I feel quite confident that everyone can make their own decisions in these matters. There are, needless to say, many fine places to buy DVD’s or rent them. The public library even lets you check them out for free! (The good news is that all the money we’ve made from this scam project makes us almost as well paid as 9 year old rug makers in Bangladesh, so we’re very grateful.)
The idea of this feature was simply to spark some interesting conversation about the intersection of movies and politics on the week-ends when everyone gets a little bit worn out from the news cycle. Popular culture is some powerful mojo on our society and I don’t think we talk about it enough or use it enough. Plus it’s fun.
Atlas Shrugged tries to be a comedian. As with most shrieking wingnut attempts at humor the only people who find her amusing are those who get turned on watching those disgusting animal snuff films.
Manygreatbloggers have already written definitive posts about the rightosphere’s Jamail Hussein witch hunt so I won’t go into the particulars. It’s an ugly story all around and I’m hoping that it shows, once and for all, the difference between the “angry left” who boisterously criticize the media and the truly pernicious lynch mob mentality of the right. They go for journalistic scalps, and in this case, they may have literally gotten one.
One of the more sickening aspects of this awful little story is the Eason Jordan sideshow in which the former president of CNN, who was scalped earlier by a rightwing mob for saying that the military may have been targeting journalists, has been using this story to gain credit and linkage from the same wingnuts who took him down. I had wondered in the beginnning if perhaps he wasn’t playing some sort of advanced jiujitsu to get revenge, but that’s obviously not the case. He’s clearly trying to curry favor with the wingnuts. Even today, he continues his pathetic quest to become Michele Malkin’s man in Bagdad. (“The controversy likely will linger in this area, with third party reporting being done to determine the accuracy of Captain Hussein’s statements to the AP.”) The man has become a living example of the battered media wife.
Most people looked at Iran’s Holocaust Denial conference and thought: wow, that place is really screwed up. And rightfully so. How crazy does a country have to be to host that kind of poisonous nonsense?
But…here in America we don’t have much grounds to criticize. Because we take lots of people with the exact same moral and intellectual standards as Holocaust deniers, and then—rather than consigning them to complete obscurity, as sane cultures do—WE PUT THEM ON NATIONAL TELEVISION.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Michelle Malkin and the Saga of Jamil Hussein.
Click over to find out how closely Malkin and her crew hew to the same methods and logic as the holocaust deniers. It’s amazing to see it in real time, though. With modern technology and instant communication, one would think people would be especially cautious of such things and terribly vulnerable to exposure and embarrassment. But as we’ve seen so frequently these past few years, the right has developed a capability of creating an alternate reality as it happens which means that today, the first draft of history is being written in two dimensions. They don’t have to airbrush history, they are editing in the camera.
Sadly, the mainstream media seems mostly incapable of battling this back properly — if they even want to. (I suspect that where there isn’t social or political bias, in a busy world it’s cheaper and simpler to regurgitate the pre-digested rightwing narrative.) The AP fought back hard and prevailed, but it remains to be seen if the lesson they take is to be overly cautious with its war reporting or beat the hell out of the wingnutosphere when they come after them.
This particular incident is just one of many and it’s what allowed so much of what’s happened over the last few years to happen. The right’s professional noise machine is creating a disorienting inability on the part of many journalists and citizens to be able to distinguish reality from fantasy — and it’s making it possible for someone like the president to be completely unresponsive to the people.
We keep expecting that reality is going to change things. For instance, we logically thought that the president would have to begin to withdraw in Iraq once his popularity tanked to unprecedented lows and his party lost the election. Instead, he just carries on, no matter what happens out here in the real world, because in the world the right wing has created, this last election shows that he has a mandate to escalate the war.
Likewise, I would have thought that Michele Malkin would be compelled to issue a mea culpa for her jihad against the AP once it was proved that they didn’t make up their source. Nothing. In fact, Eason Jordan chastizesthe AP for its attitude rather than the relentless “critics” many of whom commonly accuse them of being in league with terrorists.
The AP erred in part by responding in a hot-headed, antagonistic way to questions about the existence of Jamil Hussein and the credibility of AP reports featuring comments from Captain Hussein. The AP’s harsh statements fueled the suspicions of critics and those who otherwise would give the AP the benefit of the doubt.
The AP is a professional news organization which is subject to criticism like every other news organization, but there are very few people who think that the violence in Iraq is being fabricated for political reasons and they are the only “critics” who fail to give the AP the benefit of the doubt in its war reporting. These “civil war deniers” are centered in the most feverish quarters of the right wing blogosphere and talk radio.
This incident is just one of many (as Greenwald lays out here) in which the rightwing blogosphere has been caught making these kinds of errors. But if Eason Jordan is any example, they have not only failed to lose credibility, the more obvious the error, the more credibility they actually gain. This is new and I don’t think we fully understand the ramifications of it yet.
The only thing you can compare it to would be if holocaust denial were to be considered perfectly acceptable. Just as the right continues to emulate its great enemy the Soviet Commies, it’s morphing before our eyes into its own version of its new enemy, Iran. The irony is that the violence they are so intent upon denying is violence perpetrated by the Mahdi Army — Iran’s kissin’ cousins. What a tangled web we weave when we try to operate in complicated situations with nothing but a lizard brain.
(Paramount DVD). Originally an “American Playhouse” presentation on PBS, the film was released to theatres and garnered a well-deserved Best Actress nomination for Jane Alexander (she lost to Shirley MacLaine). Director Lynne Littman takes a low key, deliberately paced approach, but pulls no punches. Alexander, her husband (William DeVane) and three children (Roxana Zal, Ross Harris and Lukas Haas) live in sleepy Hamlin, California, an idyllic, Speilbergian suburbia, where it’s just another day of getting the kids off to school, Dad off to work, and the garbage cans out to the curb. Alexander is directing the local elementary school production of “The Pied Piper Of Hamlin” (which becomes a significant, if somewhat obvious, allegory for what is about to happen to the citizenry of the “real” Hamlin).The children’s afternoon cartoons are interrupted by a news flash that a number of nuclear explosions have occurred in New York. Then there is a flash of a whole different kind when nearby San Francisco (where DeVane has gone on a business trip) receives a direct strike. There is no exposition on the political climate that precipitates the attacks, but I think this is a wise decision by the filmmakers because it helps us zero in on the essential humanistic message of the film. All of the post-nuke horrors ensue, but they are presented sans the histrionics and melodrama that plagued the more widely-seen (and in my opinion, inferior) “The Day After”. The fact that the nightmarish scenario unfolds amidst such everyday banality is what makes it so believably horrifying. As the children (and adults) of Hamlin succumb to the inevitable scourge of radiation sickness and (just like the children of the imaginary Hamlin) steadily “disappear”, one by one, we are left haunted by the final line of the school production-“Your children are not dead. They will return when the world deserves them.” Amen. 
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