I have never been one to criticize Laura Bush. I actually feel a little bit sorry for the woman, considering to whom she’s married. I always feel a little bit sorry for Republican wives (except Lynn Cheney…)
But now she’s pissed me off. Via Vegacura and Olberman I see she said of Michael J. Fox that “it’s always easy to manipulate people’s feelings with these awful diseases.”
No, Mrs. Moron it is not manipulation for someone who has a disease to speak out as for treatment or cure of that disease. It’s called advocacy and everytime one of your military widows or one of your preachers do it, it’s the same thing. I’m sorry it’s uncomfortable for your blastocyst worshipping political party to be faced with the real human result of their religious beliefs, but you’re just going to have to face people and explain why a clump of cells that are going to be thrown away are worth more than living, breathing people.
There are a lot of heroes in this election, but my personal vote goes to Michael J. Fox. It takes guts to go up against the GOP character assassination machine and that guy did it with humor and nobility. I hope for their sakes that all those heartless losers who went after him, including the first lady, who didn’t have the class to stay out of the mud, never have to face what he is facing. They don’t have the character to deal with it and they don’t care about curing it. It was one of the lowest things I’ve ever seen.
Wow. I’m posting because it is one of the starkest, most chilling examples I know of how close to the mainstream violent, racist extremism has once again come in America. And it is entirely due to the active courtship and encouragement of bottom feeders from the extreme right by some of the Republican Party’s most visible supporters – people the media treat as moderate, thoughtful people. This example features only two of the many who have been tickling the fascist dragon and hoping he doesn’t entirely wake up:
Ward Connerly, the California man leading a ballot measure to end most affirmative action in Michigan, accepts Ku Klux Klan support for his position in a video clip posted this week on the Internet…
“If the Ku Klux Klan thinks that equality is right, God bless them. Thank them for finally reaching the point where logic and reason are being applied instead of hate.”
Who, besides the Klan, also supports Ward Connerly in his efforts to end affirmative action in Michigan?
Ward Connerly is a California businessman and former member of the University of California Board of Regents. He propelled to victory the measures mandating colorblind government [translation into consensual English: anti-affirmative action measures] in California and Washington state.
With Gratz as its executive director, and Connerly lending hard-earned expertise, MCRI collected 508,000 signatures, more than ever gathered for a Michigan initiative.
… a white woman rejected by the University of Michigan, Jennifer Gratz, teamed up with anti-preferences [translation into consensual English: anti-affirmative action] crusader Ward Connerly to take the question to the voters.
The Klan supports Connerly’s effort to eliminate affirmative action in Michigan. George Will supports Connerly’s effort to eliminate affirmative action in Michigan. Rich Lowry supports Connerly’s effort to eliminate affiirmative action in Michigan.
Does this mean that Will and Lowry are Klansmen in Republican drag?
It most certainly does not and I am very serious. Just as ACLU is not pro-pederast, Will and Lowry are not pro Klan. Nevertheless, Will and Lowry have – almost surely unwittingly – openly aligned themselves with a man who, for whatever twisted reason, actively courted and is now openly praising and working with one of the most sickeningly racist organizations this country has ever produced. It’s time for both of them to back off fast, and let Connerly court the Klan alone.
Thanks, Dave Neiwert, for collecting the information and links that I’ve posted. For those over here at Hullabaloo, if you’re not reading Orcinus, Dave’s blog, I really suggest you do. When Dave talks about the American extreme right, he does so from personal encounters and rock-solid research. He’s one of the Real Guys, as Zappa says, who knows exactly what he’s talking about.
One of our regular commenters here, Sara Robinson, is also posting at Orcinus now, and she’s done some terrific stuff. Even when what she says is something I disagree with, it’s cogent, passionate, and well-argued.
[Updated to correct the tone of one sentence which implied too close a relationship between the Klan and Will.]
‘Twas the night before mid-terms And all through the House Speaker Hastert was ranting The filthy old louse
“Tomorrow they choose, and the future is clear. We’ll be handed our asses by the voters this year” “Coach” Hastert was rattled, his confidence lost For Nancy Pelosi would soon be his boss!
And Bill Frist with his scalpel, and a VERY scared cat Wondered why all the public thought him such an asshat. An irate America arose with such clatter That even Chris Matthews gave up his weak blather!
Away to the polls we all flew like a flash, And showed Dub the meaning of a voter backlash The results were disputed by spinmeister Snow But America just said “the bastards must go!”
When who should to my wondering eyes should appear But a feisty Jack Murtha with a case of cold beer. Wes Clark on his left flank, Charlie Rangle his right, I knew in a moment, it would be a long night!
Their losses now certain, our future so bright… It’s time to pay up KKKKarl, starting next Tuesday night
Gone Chafee, Santorum, Jim Talent and Burns… Plus Kyle and Dewine, ’cause America learns Gone Hayworth and Northrup and Christopher Shays. they’ll all lose their house seats in a matter of days!
And Nancy and Harry, they’ll go straight to their work Of fighting George Dubya, the pustular jerk! Bush, laying a finger upside of his nose Took a huge snort of……..well, you know how it goes…
Bush sprang to Dick Cheney, when “Darth” gave Dub a whistle As the Democrats swamped them both like a “nucular” missile!
And I heard Cheney growl as Bush cringed at his side “Be prepared you dumb asshole for a real nasty ride…..”
Merry Midterms, my friends.
Here’s Charlie Cook’s final prediction, here’s Stuart Rothenberg’s.
The legendarily confident Karl Rove is sounding a little bit frayed this morning. Charlie Christ (R- Closet), running to succeed Jebbie in Florida decided that he’d be better off campaigning with St. John McCain today instead of the Bush Brothers. It looks like the only one who will be seen with them on stage is the kooky Katherine Harris.
CNN caught the Boy Genius on the tarmac as AF1 was heading down to Florida.
Was this a snub?
Call him. All I know is yesterday morning they made a decision that rather than meet with the governor and president and 10,000 people in Pensacola they’d rather go to Palm Beach.
Does this say anything about the president’s popularity?
Let’s look at the comparison. Let’s see how many people show up in Palm Beach on 24 hours notice vs eight or nine thousand people in Pensacola.
One can only imagine what kind of tongue lashing he just took from the spoiled brat in chief over this bungle. The pictures of this trainwreck of a rally with the all-star team of George and Jeb up there alone with nutty election fixer Katherine Harris are going to be precious.
The fall of Rove is one of the big stories of the election. And he knows it. Of course, we’ve known what he was at least since January 2003, when Ron Suskind wrote this article for Esquire right after the last mid-term election.
The calls from members of the White House staff were solemn, serious. Their concern was not only about politics, they said, not simply about Karl pulling the president further to the right. It went deeper; it was about this administration’s ability to focus on the substance of governing—issues like the economy and social security and education and health care—as opposed to its clear political acumen, its ability to win and enhance power. And so it seemed that each time I made an inquiry about Karl Rove, I received in return a top-to-bottom critique of the White House’s basic functions, so profound is Rove’s influence.
I made these inquiries in part because last spring, when I spoke to White House chief of staff Andrew Card, he sounded an alarm about the unfettered rise of Rove in the wake of senior adviser Karen Hughes’s resignation: “I’ll need designees, people trusted by the president that I can elevate for various needs to balance against Karl. . . . They are going to have to really step up, but it won’t be easy. Karl is a formidable adversary.”
One senior White House official told me that he’d be summarily fired if it were known we were talking. “But many of us feel it’s our duty—our obligation as Americans—to get the word out that, certainly in domestic policy, there has been almost no meaningful consideration of any real issues. It’s just kids on Big Wheels who talk politics and know nothing. It’s depressing. Domestic Policy Council meetings are a farce. This leaves shoot-from-the-hip political calculations—mostly from Karl’s shop—to triumph by default. No one balances Karl. Forget it. That was Andy’s cry for help.”
But now the stunning midterm ascendancy of the Republicans boosts Rove into a new category; a major political realignment may hereby be ascribed to his mastery, his grand plan.
At the moment when one-party rule returns to Washington—a state that existed, in fact, in the first five months of the Bush presidency, before Senator Jeffords switched parties—we are offered a rare view of the way this White House works. The issue of how the administration decides what to do with its mandate—and where political calculation figures in that mix—has never been so important to consider. This White House will now be able to do precisely what it wants. To understand the implications of this, you must understand Karl Rove.
“It’s an amazing moment,” said one senior White House official early on the morning after. “Karl just went from prime minister to king. Amazing . . . and a little scary. Now no one will speak candidly about him or take him on or contradict him. Pure power, no real accountability. It’s just ‘listen to Karl and everything will work out.’. . . That may go for the president, too.”
Never forget that the dysfunction of this White House is not only the fault of Bush and Cheney. Karl Rove turned policy itself into politics in this administration. It’s one of the main reasons why nobody should have ever allowed such a white house to have extra-judicial power — there is no line between politics and national security or anything else. This is why nuclear secrets written in arabic wind up on the internet.
Tomorrow could be the day the country finally repudiates Karl Rove’s style of hyper-partisan political governance. It’s been a total disaster from the very beginning right up until this very minute. Here’s the latest from Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, on the illegal voter suppression techniques they’ve been using all over the country this cycle. Report your own experiences here at Protect Our Votes.
ALREADY A STORY: Republicans are blanketing key Congressional districts with annoying robo calls. Listen to one here. These calls may result in post-election fines because they do not properly identify themselves early in the script and may also be violating caller id requirements.
NOT YET A STORY: These calls may be a coordinated effort to suppress the vote. What’s the difference between annoying robo calls and voter suppression? Many voters are reporting that the robo callers are calling back immediately when they hang up. The first words of the robo calls are “Hi, I’m calling with information about [Democratic Candidate’s Name]…” followed by a short pause. Therefore, voters receiving these calls could think they are being called repeatedly by the Democratic campaign or a group supporting the campaign.
MISSING PIECE: For this to break through, there needs to be visual evidence that voters are being called back immediately. Bloggers: please tell your readers to get video cameras ready and start rolling when the phone rings. Use the speaker phone so that the call can be heard. We need just one example of that up on YouTube and VideoTheVote.com.
Even better would be emails leaked from the robo call house responsible (or any robo call house for that matter) that offer the service or mention the strategy in question.
This election is Rove’s last gasp* and we are seeing a new round of dirty politics that’s perhaps unprecedented. He isn’t going to go down easily.
* Newt, Delay, Reed(and Rove, god willing) have fallen. The king of the talkshow pigs, Rush Limbaugh, is the last remaining head on their generation’s GOP hydra. We’re getting there.
There are many more like them, trained and waiting in the wings, so it isn’t the dawning of a new day for the Republicans. The new generation is dumber, but even more vicious. We just have to deal with them one at a time.
To all of my fellow countrymen out here in the land of fruits and nuts, here’s a handy voting guide brought to you by eRiposte of The Left Coaster, replete with links to further information and good suggestions for all those propositions.
The Dems have run a sadly lackluster race against a newly liberal re-programmed cyborg so we look to be stuck with it for another four years. But there are many important races on the ballot, perhaps the most important being the Secretary of State.
For the rest of you living in places where it isn’t 76 degrees right now, here is a very useful site called the ballot.org with progressive voter guides from all over the country. (They may have the churches, but we’ve got the intertubes.)
If you can do more than vote, go to … Do More Than Vote. You can still make calls and tomorrow you can help getting people to the polls.
Oh, and vote Democratic.
Update: Here’s another post with helpful links. There’s even one where you can send videos of irregularities with your cellphone. Are these internets cool, or what?
One of the most tedious aspects of the rightwing assault on liberal, and therefore American, values is that they are using arguments that have been refuted long ago, sometimes, as in the case of the ontological existence of God, centuries ago. Here we are in the 21st century, a time when we should be literally agog at the astonishing wonders we now know the process of evolution has generated, and equally amazed that so much of that history has been comprehensible over the space of ionly around 147 years of concentrated human effort. Instead, brilliant women and men like Eugenie Scott, Pz Myers, Ken Miller, Richard Dawkins, and Barbara Forrest have to expend a great deal of effort explaining to the American public that idiotic notions like the Blind Watchmaker or the downright blasphemous God of the Gaps – two of the primary “philosophical” assumptions behind “intelligent design” creationism – are utterly fallacious. Meanwhile, are you aware that scientists have learned that whales once had legs? That they evolved from land animals that returned to the sea? And they have extraordinarily fascinating paleontologic evidence to show how this happened?
And so we return, as Digby notes below, to the defense of hypocrisy. With all due respect to Roy, especially for recalling the Diaghilev anecdote in this context, the only thing that would have astonished Diaghilev is that the right is trying again to defend hypocrisy.
In the 19th century, numerous American evangelicals published defenses of hypocrisy, of the importance of preaching and expounding things you knew weren’t true or that you didn’t follow yourself.* Here is an excerpt from a 1995 interview with Gertrude Himmelfarb, author and mother of William Kristol who spells out Victorian values, and argues for them:
R&L: The Victorians, especially with their strong emphasis on morality, virtue, and the like, are often criticized for hypocrisy – their high rate of prostitution, for example. How do you interpret this?
Himmelfarb: First of all, many of the charges of hypocrisy are grossly exaggerated. The rate of prostitution, for example, was probably no higher in the early Victorian period than it had been before, and it was almost certainly lower later in the century. In any case, I believe firmly in the old adage, “hypocrisy is the homage that virtue pays to vice.” Violations of the moral code were regarded as such; they were cause for shame and guilt. The Victorians did not do what we do today –- that is, “define deviancy down”– normalize immorality so that it no longer seems immoral. Immorality was seen as such, as immoral and wrong, and was condemned as such. Men might be weak – they might have recourse to prostitutes, for example–- but the moral principle remained the same. (And the same, incidentally, for men and women. Men violated the principle more often than women, but the principle applied to both. In this respect, there was no “double standard”.
Recently, in 2003, Jonah Goldberg made much the same argument in excusing Betting Bill Bennett’s hypocrisy when his spectacular addiction to gambling was exposed. In a typical rightwing rhetorical blitzkrieg**, Goldberg employs a “fire on all fronts” approach, advancing numerous contradictory arguments in the hopes that something will hit the enemy – that’s you and I, dear reader – and we will be overwhelmed and surrender . And so, earlier in his article, Goldberg asserts that Bennett really isn’t a hypocrite, but those who reported on his gambling are. While you’re trying to wrap your brain around that one, Goldberg shoots from the exact opposite angle: if Bennett was a hypocrite, what’s wrong with that?
Bennett is a big, sloppy Irish Catholic guy from Brooklyn who believes in old-fashioned morality and decency. He’s not perfect, but he’s been focusing our attention on the right things. When charged with hypocrisy, Max Scheler — the moral philosopher who dallied with the ladies — responded that the sign pointing to Boston doesn’t have to go there. America is a better place because Bennett pointed in the right direction.
There is also much amusing discussion of Madonna by Jonah, which I’m sure she found very touching. Who knew anyone still cared?
And then, published earlier this year is In Defense of Hypocrisy: Picking Sides in the War on Virtue by Jeremy Lott which I suspect is where Frum may have cribbed his argument (although I’ll grant that Frum is morally perverse enough mahybe to have thought it up ex nihilio). Lott, too, defends Betting Bill Bennett and raises the ante, invoking the name of the Savior of Mankind to his cause.
No, not George Bush. The other one, the Jew. Jesus, says Lott, would “not find common cause with our many modern anti-hypocrites.” And dig the sneaky use of the phrase “common cause” here, as in Common Cause, as in liberals, which enables Lott to say Jesus is no liberal but a righwinger without actually saying exactly that.
Having a book to fill with defenses of hypocrisy, Jeremy doesn’t limit himself to the odd couple of Betting Bill and the Holy Anticipation of George Bush. No, Lott slams both left feet into those evil scoundrels who would denounce poor Britney Spears as a foul hypocrite. Well, I have to admit I don’t follow pop culture very closely so it comes as quite a surprise to learn that the purpose of watching Britney Spears is to listen to her ideas. Thanks for the heads up, Jeremy. I’m sure your book is full of all sorts of useful goodies like that.
And here is a blogger who last August summarized much of the modern rightwing take on hypocrisy. And slide over, Rick Santorum and poodle – talk about strange bedfellows! Here, Paris Hilton joins NAMBLA to sock it to the liberals:***
Given a choice between the real thing and a faker, I’ll take the real thing anyday. But more and more that’s not the choice I’m given. When I have to pick between the slimy pretenders and the people proudly trumpeting their vice to the world, I’ll take the slimeballs.
The hypocrites are at least acknowledging that what they are covering up is wrong, or at the very least, socially unacceptable. As François de la Rochefoucauld famously said, “Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue.” There is still an operative sense of shame and a tacit acknowledgement that what they are keeping under wraps is wrong.
Contrast that, for instance, with NAMBLA and its avowed aim to “leave” children “free to determine the content of their own sexual experiences.” Or with Paris Hilton and her open quest for the venal, the superficial and the narcissistic.
Somehow, they evoke in me a much deeper sense of horror. And quite apart from my own personal feelings, which really don’t much matter to anyone who isn’t me, there is the fact that these people serve as magnets for the like-minded and together, they enable and embolden each other. It’s like removing a quarantine; the sickness spreads more easily.
Hypocrisy is indeed a vice, but in the long run it’s preferable to shamelessness.
To which, incidentally a commenter with the nom de net “Jeremy Lott,” he of the book defending hypocrisy asked, ” Is hypocrisy always a vice?”
Now, I have as much interest in “engaging” rightwing arguments on the subject of hypocrisy as I do in engaging Heaven’s Gate followers as to whether there really was a spaceship behind Hale Bopp. They are intellectually at the same level, and I don’t find it interesting that you can’t logically prove there wasn’t a spaceship behind the comet nor that there may be times when lying is defensible. Oh, and by the way, “live” backwards spells “waste of my fucking time.” But I will say this:
Hypocrisy on the level of influence Ted Haggard had directly harms millions of lives, both gay (Haggard’s enthusiastic support for a constitutional amendment declaring certain Americans ineligible for marriage) and to a much lesser extent, straight (by feeding one of the ugliest, stupidest, and most manipulated prejudice in modern American culture, with all the anguish and even violence that flows from stoking such hatred). Such hypocrisy is grossly immoral.
To defend hyypocrisy of the sort that Ted Haggard practiced, where he went out of his way to preach that perfectly normal behavior is a deep sin while repeatedly, and in secret, enjoying the behavior himself, is to advocate precisely the kind of moral relativism the right accuses liberals of practicing (but we don’t). There is nothing shameful about same-sex attraction and there is nothing morally wrong with two consenting adults doing whatever intimate acts they both enjoy. Haggard’s hypocrisy was not that he hid an immoral act. It is that he enjoyed his perfectly normal desires while enthusiastically preaching the lie that they are abnormal.****
What is morally wrong is to deny any couple that is prepared to celebrate that love in the public ceremony of marriage all civil rights a culture bestows on married couples. [Update: Including the right to marry itself.]
As I said earlier, if I were an evangelical, I would conclude that Haggard’s fall was Christ’s message to us. And the message is to stop the persecution of gays, stop trying to write bigotry back (again) into the US Constitution, let couples who love each other marry, and accept – love – them as your neighbors, friends, and family. Because that is, as with straight couples, what gay couples simply are.
*I haven’t yet re-located the reference in which I learned this. I believe it was in a book by Gary Noll. Any help from people who have this info on the tip of their brains would be deeply appreciated. The rest of you, if you don’t believe me without a reference, well, I don’t blame you. You shouldn’t. I hope to have a reference soon. FWIW, the 19th cent. arguments I recall seeing were, to some extent, similar to what Himmelfarb says.
**Ooops, by using blitzkrieg did I just make a sneaky association between Goldberg’s tactics and Nazi propaganda? Of course not. I meant no such reference. Honestly, the things people read into what I write!
***To those not up either on pervertspeak or rightwing propaganda….ahem…well anyway, NAMBLA stands for North American Man/Boy Love Association. And, if you ask anyone you care to on the right, since I’m a card-carrying member of ACLU, I therefore fully support the homosexual rape of minors. I also heart Oliver North. Don’t ask me why this doesn’t make any sense. I already know that.
****Haggard also betrayed his marriage vows. But that is between him and his wife. What concerns us is the hypocrisy that affected us, his lying words, his characterization of normal sexuality as immoral, while at the same time practicing his sexuality.
[UPDATE: One sentence immediately removed after posting which called Victorian hypocrisy the Victorian double standard. Not quite.]
I have long written that the right has retired the concept of hypocrisy. But until I read this piece by David Frum over at alicublog I didn’t realize that they had actually formulated a moral philosophy to justify it. It is truly astonishing:
Frum’s opening made me think he was just going to show sympathy for a fallen sinner; later, I thought he would be content to tag on some contempt for a liberal media pile-on; but eventually I realized to my horror this man, a professional writer who had once been employed by the President of the United States, was rejecting a taboo as old as human society:
Consider the hypothetical case of two men. Both are inclined toward homosexuality. Both from time to time hire the services of male prostitutes. Both have occasionally succumbed to drug abuse.
One of them marries, raises a family, preaches Christian principles, and tries generally to encourage people to lead stable lives.
The other publicly reveals his homosexuality, vilifies traditional moral principles, and urges the legalization of drugs and prostitution…
…the first man may well see his family and church life as his “real” life; and regard his other life as an occasional uncontrollable deviation, sin, and error, which he condemns in his judgment and for which he sincerely seeks to atone by his prayer, preaching, and Christian works.
Yet it is the first man who will if exposed be held up to the execration of the media, while the second can become a noted public character – and can even hope to get away with presenting himself as an exemplar of ethics and morality.
How does this make moral sense?
Because, you hoser, human society depends upon at least a rudimentary concept of justice. We can forgive inconsistencies, and even admire trying and failing, but when someone amasses power from us based on his personal superiority, and is proved a fraud, he has broken the basic bargain of leadership. We mock him not out of meanness, but out of a communal survival instinct.
It is innate common sense to hold those who fail to practice what they preach to their own standards — otherwise there are no such thing as standards in the first place and there is no moral value in honesty. Dear God, is he 12?
I had heard Kate O’Beirne make Frum’s argument on Friday on Chris Matthews’ show and just thought she was blubbering incoherently because she didn’t know how to spin it. Apparently Frum’s piece had just been injected into the Borg and hadn’t been fully assimilated.
But this isn’t really all that unusual. For instance, it also fits with their earlier admonition that parents should lie to their teen-agers about having taken drugs when they were younger. The right wingers say it’s better to lie than admit that you have regrets (or don’t.) They are enshrining dishonesty and hypocrisy as a moral imperative.
Frum and his fellow neo-cons and faith-based robots have spent the last few years mangling the discourse with so much hypocrisy, so many outright lies and twisted moral reasoning that they may have permanently built an alternate universe that they can turn to whenever the need arises. Witness two events that happened just last week.
First you had the John Kerry flap. After the first news cycle everyone knew he’d blown a punchline. There were even plenty of conservatives who admitted it. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was forcing him to apologize for something he never said. It was a pure act of force, as if they put their foot on his neck and demanded that he agree that “up is down and black is white” — a modern show trial in which Kerry agreed to confess in order to spare his party’s chances in the upcoming election. He instinctively resisted, as sane people always do when forced to deny reality. But the sheer power of the coordinated Republican outcry (with the willing help of cynical Dems and the media) finally made it imperative for him to issue an apology for something he never said.
And the Republicans laughed and laughed because once again they had forced a leading Democrat to bow to their will as surely as if they’d physically held him down and made him agree that black was white and up was down. It was all the more delicious because every party to it, the Republicans, the Democrats, the public, the media and John Kerry himself all knew the real truth. Now that’s power.
They pulled off a different, but related, gambit with something that was far more important. The administration tried to spin the irresponsible dumping of nuclear secrets on the internet as proof that the Iraq war was justified despite the fact that the documents were from before the first Gulf war. Even the secretary of state went on conservative talk radio and pretty much said “you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes.” Since it happened so late in the election cycle, it got lost in all the gay, meth snorting, joke blowing Republican effluvia of the campaign, but it is still one of the most audacious attempts at reality denial we’ve yet seen.
GIBSON: Catherine, wait a minute. It sounds to me like the lead is buried. Has the U.S. government confirmed that Saddam Hussein had nukes? And The New York Times, of all — of all organizations, is now confirming that Saddam Hussein was pursuing or had or was close to having nukes?
HERRIDGE: Right. I — I don’t want to think that I buried the lead, but that’s always possible. I think what’s happened here is that [Rep. Peter] Hoekstra (R-MI) and others are saying — and Secretary [of State Condoleezza] Rice said also today, look, these documents show that Saddam Hussein may have been further along in the nuclear weapons process than we had believed. It was alleged in the Times that the documents included information on firing plugs. This is a very specific type of technology, which is not freely available on the Internet. So, that’s — that’s one aspect of the story.
“Herridge” is Catherine Herridge, allegedly a news reporter, not a pundit. I suppose it would be too much to ask that she anger Roger Ailes and challenge Gibson on his blatant misrepresentation. But her approach wouldn’t have been all that different from the mainstream media had they seen it as something more than an “oops,” as CNN called it. It would have played out differently than the Kerry gaffe, but with the same underlying dynamic. The Republicans would have looked the media in the eye and dared them to say outright that the Republicans were lying. The media knows what it’s supposed to do so it would have reported it like this:
Republicans claim that the New York Times has verified that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear program and was much closer to building one that we’ve previously thought. Democrats counter by saying that the plans that were released on the internet date from before the first gulf war. Coming up, Representative GOP Liar and Senator Democrat Noodle debate the issue.
The pressure in the media is slightly different, but the result is the same. The real point of this total disregard for reality is to force others to be complicit in their falsehoods.
They succeeded in getting everyone to agree that John Kerry should have immediately apologized for something he never said and they managed to at least partially spin what should have been a public relations disaster — Bush personally ordering a project that resulted in arabic language nuclear plans winding up on the internet at the behest of their political fringe — into a positive story that proved the Bush administration case for war.
These are bold, in-your-face challenges to what we all commonly perceive as reality. Frum’s perverse moral view of Haggard’s hypocrisy and dishonesty is the same thing. It’s where the faith-based, the Limbaugh nation and the neocons come together in a Straussian orgy of lies and myths and pure brute force.
Winning this election will not change this. The political establishment has been trained in this method for almost two decades now and the Republicans are actually better at wielding this power as the opposition. I have no answers about how to deal with it. It’s one of the most difficult challenges we face.
I’d like to draw attention to some remarks of Perle’s that have gotten less attention from bloggers than the more outrageous things he and the others said. Except for phrases in brackets, the following are all quotes from Perle:
The levels of brutality that we’ve seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity…”
[An anarchic, failed state is becoming more likely], and then you’ll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating.”
I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, ‘Should we go into Iraq?,’ I think now I probably would have said, ‘No, let’s consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists…’Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have.”
Perle’s evasion of responsibility and propensity to blame others has been noted by others.
But Perle is also saying that he has learned a bitter lesson from the catastrophe of the Bush/Iraq War. Knowing what he knows now, he wouldn’t be so rash to recommend invasion, conquest, and occupation.
I’m going to try to say this as clearly and as forcefully as possible.
War should never be fought to provide anyone with an opportunity to grow in wisdom. Yet that is, as far as anyone can tell, the only thing other than sheer horror and outrageous exploitation that has come from this war. Richard Perle and friends have learned something.
And they all learned…what?
They learned that war is “horrifying.” They learned that war is unpredictable and chaotic, and its outcome impossible to discern. They learned that the men who start wars, no matter how brilliant they appear to be before the war, are incompetent. They learned that men who prosecute wars, no matter how stong-willed they might appear to be, cannot control them.
Yes, that is what Perle and his friends learned. That is all.
Question: After a war, how much wisdom do you need to gain to recognize the carnage? Answer After a war it takes only as much wisdom to see it was horrible as it takes intelligence to blame others – Rumsfeld, the beauracracy – for the failure of your crackpot plans. And that is exactly how much wisdom Perle has gained.
Why did Perle underestimate “the depravity” the world would see from a Bush/Iraq war, and spectacularly underestimate it at that? I have no idea, but it was not because he’s never seen a war up close. I haven’t either and I never underestimated the depravity to come from this war. Why did Perle fail to weigh carefully the very real probability that the Bush/Iraq war might result in a failed state where you’d get “all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating?” Again, I don’t know, but once again, I didn’t.
And I was far from alone.
Most of the world knew what was going to happen if Bush invaded Iraq. And to make absolutely sure Perle knew that we knew, and to bring the possibility that the Bush/Iraq war would end in chaos to his attention, just in case it happened to have escaped his brilliant mind, tens of millions around the world marched, not once, but twice, in protest. Millions of us wrote our governments begging them to do something, anything, to avert the inevitable disaster. Helen Caldicott even urged that the ailing John Paul II travel to Baghdad to become a human shield. And the Pope himself, face to face with George W. Bush, counseled a peaceful solution.
And then the war came. And the casualties began to mount. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands dead or horribly mutilated. Tortures and beheadings. Atrocities even worse, too horrible to describe. And no end in sight no matter whether the US stays or goes – and the US isn’t going anytime soon.
And it took all this to provide Perle with his learning experience. To finally have Perle say, maybe we could have looked at other means than war in dealing with the very containable threat of Saddam Hussein.
But you’d have to have been “delphic” to know that, Perle says. Yes, delphic… As if Richard Perle was a half-crazed woman ranting oracles in the mists. And Perle, he tells us this straight out, that’s the last thing he wants anyone to think Richard Perle could possibly be.
But this post really isn’t about Richard Perle.
When I first saw that article, like many of you, I was entertained by the spectacle of these scoundrels having to eat crow. But then I remembered that poor kid whose parents were killed and whose legs and an arm were severed by a bomb I paid for.
And I remembered that a television anchor asked the reporter on the scene whether the shocked, traumatized beyond all belief, child really understood that all of this happened to him for a good cause, the liberation of his country.
And after I remembered that I felt ashamed of my schadenfreude towards Perle. For he is among those directly responsible for the murder of that child’s parents, and for that kid’s own permanent mutilation. And he implicated me, and you, in that murder and gore as well, despite the fact that we protested loud and long. And he helped create the ghastly environment of immoral self-righteousness reflected in that anchor’s remarks. And he urged it happen. He wanted it to happen. He rejoiced when it happened. He wants it to happen again in Iran, in Syria, and elsewhere.
And I felt ashamed that this country’s public discourse is even now still so unspeakably corrupt that people as morally sick as Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, and Ken Adelman still have access to a wide public. And I felt furious that while Vanity Fair fusses to find the most elegant way to fling Perle’s shit at America, the rest of us can only wait anxiously for the inevitable catastrophes, the direct result of the advice and avid support of these people, to unfold, with little opportunity to guide the discourse back to anything close to sanity.
A longtime ago, the summer of ’03, I think it was, I wrote a private letter to Josh Marshall. I had just seen a video of him and Perle on a panel at, I think, American Enterprise Institute, discuss the Iraq War. Perle was unbearably coarse, surly, and contemptuous, even personally nasty towards Josh. And of course, everything Perle asserted was dead wrong.
In the letter, I told Josh that he shouldn’t raise Perle’s status in the world by deigning to appear with him.
I never heard back from Josh, but I’m pretty sure that one of the things he thought was that I was completely uninformed and had it entirely backwards. Probably he thought I didn’t know that Perle, a highly-placed adviser to a president and his war cabinet, was deigning to appear with him.
No, Josh, I knew exactly what I was saying.
It is high time that Perle, Ledeen, Adelman and the whole sick crew stop getting their phone calls returned from the media. And for the media to stop calling them. For truly, Perle is not Joshua Marshall’s peer. Perle is Joe McCarthy’s. He is Curtis Lemay’s. Perle is a nutcase, a madman. He makes Ward Churchill appear a paragon of insight and integrity. As for not being delphic, he makes Anne Heche seem normal.
Let this Vanity Fair article be the last time any mainstream publication would think enough of someone as utterly worthless as Richard Perle to publish his comments surrounded by the trappings of seriousness. And if it’s not the last time, then by God, let’s work to make sure its the second to last. Or the third to last.
[Updated to correct the name of the Pope. Thank you, commenters!]
Via Talking Points Memo, I see that we are able to see some results of the Corker “call me” ad in tennessee and it’s not pretty:
The poll suggests that a Republican ad mentioning that Ford attended a Super Bowl party attended by Playboy playmates and featuring a white woman telling Ford to “call me,” hurt Ford. A whopping 81 percent of likely voters saw the ad.
While 67 percent said it would have no effect on their vote, 23 percent said it made them more likely to vote for Corker and 10 percent said it made them more likely to vote for Ford.
Of those who said the ad affected their vote, by two to one they decided to vote for Corker. TPM also has a copy (pdf) of a slick mailer put out by this new national character assasination squad called Common Sense Ohio which says “Bob Corker and Harold Ford are separated by more than their school colors…”
There can be no question why this stuff still works. The good news is that far fewer people think that way than used to. The bad news is that quite a few still do. In a close election in the south it can make the difference.
Bob Herbert reported in the October 6, 2005 edition of the New York Times of a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater in which he explains the GOP’s Southern Strategy:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ni**er, ni**er, ni**er.” By 1968 you can’t say “ni**er” – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ni**er, ni**er.”
“Different school colors” and “call me, Harold” are abstract, but you don’t have to be a genius to get the message.
Ford opted to pretend that it was not happening and instead criticized the ad for being placed in the family hour. (The layers of hypocrisy surrounding that ad are a mile high.)He ran as far right as you can possibly run without breaking into Deutchland Uber Alles. Maybe that was a good idea, but it didn’t seem to work. I’m not sure what would work once the racist genie is out of the bottle.
Update: Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews just agreed that the problem for Ford wasn’t the ad. It was when he confronted Corker at that press conference. Scarborough explained that 200 years of history show that this is something that would offend a lot of southern voters.
Scarborogh and Matthews agreed that a black man has to be very careful how he behaves if he wants to win. Matthews pointed out that he needs to be a General or a 4.0 Harvard grad. Scarborough sadly intoned, “and it’s important not to appear to be intimidating.”
So, Ford’s loss has nothing to do with that racist ad after all. It was soemthing else entirely.
