Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Blown Circuits: An Autopsy Of The PPs

by poputonian

Jose Chung helpfully keeps the story moving along for us, the evil Left, with his dry and deadpan opposition to every point made. So once again he should be thanked for leaving this inquiry about the liberal world’s fascination with literary GIANTS:

How much longer is the Left going to sit at rapt attention at the knees of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, two octogenarians …

Oh those eighty-year-olds. What are they good for?

I twice commented in that thread that one other octogenarian, Kurt Vonnegut, should not be forgotten. Last year, Vonnegut published another best-seller, this one called A Man Without A Country. Vonnegut’s humor will make you laugh, but his fatalism will make you cry. In typical Vonnegut fashion, the points he makes throughout the book are woven together with the flair of a creative writer. The two main complaints he emphasizes are unmistakable: the senseless killing being perpetrated by America, and America’s addiction to fossil fuel. America is destroying the planet, which leads Vonnegut to reject the country he once fought for.

Overall the book is about politics, government, and philosophy, but on its sweeter side it is about people and family, about community. It might well be his best work ever. At one point in the book, Vonnegut describes how children learn to be creative, or how they came to use their brains to think and imagine; no sounds, no pictures, just thinking and imagining:

We are not born with imagination. It has to be developed by teachers, by parents. There was a time when imagination was very important because it was the major source of entertainment. In 1892, if you were a seven-year-old, you’d read a story–just a very simple one–about a girl whose dog had died. Doesn’t that make you want to cry? Don’t you know how the little girl feels? And you’d read another story about a rich man slipping on a banana peel. Doesn’t that make you want to laugh? And this imagination circuit is being built in your head. If you go to an art gallery, here’s just a square with daubs of paint on it that haven’t moved in hundreds of years. No sound comes out of it.

The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. But it’s no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. Now there’s the information highway. We don’t need circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses.

Let’s see how this circuit business works. Read carefully, Jose, and try to feel something as Vonnegut describes an experience he had during WWII. Have you ever served in a war? Have you ever been held captive? Vonnegut was an American prisoner of war, held in captivity in Dresden, Germany on February 13, 1945. That was the night the British intentionally massacred 135,000 people. Killed them all dead, in one night.

It was pure nonsense, pointless destruction. The whole city was burned down, and it was a British atrocity, not ours. They sent in night bombers, and they came in and set the whole town on fire with a new kind of incendiary bomb. And so everything organic, except my little POW group, was consumed by fire. It was a military experiment to find out if you could burn down a whole city by scattering incendiaries over it.

Of course, as prisoners of war, we dealt hands-on with dead Germans, digging them out of basements because they had suffocated there, and taking them to a huge funeral pyre. And I heard — I didn’t see it done — that they gave up this procedure because it was too slow and, of course, the city was starting to smell pretty bad. And they sent in guys with flamethrowers.

Why my fellow prisoners of war and I weren’t killed, I don’t know.

I was a writer in 1968. I was a hack. I’d write anything to make money, you know. And what the hell, I’d seen this thing, I’d been through it, and so I was going to write a hack book about Dresden. You know, the kind that would be made into a movie where Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and others would play us. I tried to write, but I couldn’t get it right. I kept writing crap.

So I went to a friend’s house — Bernie O’Hare, who’d been my pal. And we were trying to remember funny stuff about our time as prisoners of war in Dresden, tough talk and all that, stuff that would make a nifty war movie. And his wife, Mary O’Hare, blew her stack. She said, “You were nothing but babies then.”

And that is true of soldiers. They are in fact babies. They are not movies stars. They are not Duke Wayne. And realizing that was key, I was finally free to tell the truth. We were children and the subtitle of Slaughterhouse Five became The Children’s Crusade.

Why had it taken me twenty-three years to write about what I had experienced in Dresden? We all came home with stories, and we all wanted to cash in, one way or another. And what Mary O’Hare was saying, in effect, was, “Why don’t you tell the truth for a change?”

Ernest Hemingway wrote a story after the First World War called “A Soldier’s Home” about how it was very rude to ask a soldier what he’d seen when he got back home. I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

But I think the Vietnam War freed me and other writers, because it made our leadership and our motives seem so scruffy and essentially stupid. We could finally talk about something bad that we did to the worst people imaginable, the Nazis. And what I saw, what I had to report, made war look so ugly. You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff. You’re not expecting it.

Of course, another reason to talk about war is that it’s unspeakable.

I can sense the brain circuits of the right-wingers, or the flag conservatives, or the authoritarian followers, as they try to process Vonnegut’s words: Just how courageous was he in battle? Prove it. Did he have any serious injuries, or just superficial ones? Did he have the right attitude, that of a soldier dedicated to his country? Does Vonnegut think any war is worth fighting; is the Constitution worth fighting for?

It so happens that idealism enough for anyone is not made of perfumed pink clouds. It is the law! It is the U.S. Constitution.

But I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable.

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: “C-Students from Yale.”

George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.

To say somebody is a PP is to make perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!

Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.

PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he’s against gay marriage.

So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.

They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with any doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In these Times, and kiss my ass!

By now the brain circuits of the authoritarians and their followers are breaking down. Ken Lay’s did, and he killed himself. Rush Phlegmball’s did, so he turned to painkillers. George Bush never had any circuits. The man used to blow up frogs with firecrackers. Now he blows up children with bombs. He can’t feel a thing. Who will do the post-mortem on the brains of these psychopaths? Whoever it is, surely they will find broken circuits.

And please, Jose, respect your elders. Literary giants have something to offer that you won’t get from Republican politicians or the right-wing echo chamber; something you’ll never get out of the President-who-can’t-feel-a-thing: Experience, wisdom, and the truth.

Think about it. Imagine.

A Man Without A Country. It’s worth the investment. Vonnegut even explains precisely why Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a masterpiece. It might well be the best lesson you can get from the wise old man.

Ethical Realism

by digby

Your Sunday night reading assignment, should you decide to accept it, is this article in The American prospect by Flynt Leverett, former member of the Bush administration, who quit in 2004.

His assessment is one of the most clear eyed views I’ve seen of the ramifications of the Bush Doctrine as it’s been applied in the middle east. He calls for a return to “realism” which not so long ago was considered a dirty word by people like me. But I’ve learned a few things in the past few years — there is something far worse than foreign policy realism and it’s called neoconservatism in full effect, a lethally stupid combination of puerile Trotskyite idealism with a belief that brute force is the only path to democratic utopia. Combine that with epic ineptitude and you have the chaos that the Bush administration will bequeath to the next administration. And if a Republican succeeds him, the roots of neoconservatism are now deep enough in the party establishment that it will probably carry on for some time.

After five years of that Frankenstein experiment I’m more than happy to try some old fashioned stability, if only to catch a breather and survey the damage that’s been wrought. I suspect many ordinary people in the mid-east would appreciate it as well.

Leverett points something out that we Democrats are going to have to think about. As I noted in my post yesterday about the “bipartisan” neocon think tanks, we have some issues to deal with on our side:

This focuses attention on the role of Democrats as the nation’s “loyal opposition” and whether the party can articulate a “return to realism” in U.S. foreign policy. The party has little to be proud of in the way it has discharged its role on foreign-policy issues. It has endorsed (or acquiesced to) all of the fundamental tenets of Bush’s revisionist approach to the Middle East. Broad support for the Iraq War among congressional Democrats was intellectually legitimated by “experts” like Kenneth Pollack, who wrote a best-selling book using an analytically flawed assessment of the Iraqi WMD threat to argue that going to war against Saddam was the “conservative” option. Similarly, Democrats have not posed a significant challenge to the administration’s emphasis on democratization in its strategy for the war on terrorism or its non-historical approach to the Palestinian issue.

Democrats have fallen into a “soft neconservatism” that has dulled the party’s voice on foreign policy. Henry Kissinger once observed that the United States is the only country in which the term “realist” is used as a pejorative. The more progressive elements of the Democratic coalition have been especially strident in voicing their antipathy to Kissingerian realism. But it was the 20th century’s greatest Democratic secretary of state, Dean Acheson, who defined a fundamentally realist paradigm for U.S. foreign policy in Europe during the Truman administration that laid the foundations for eventual peaceful victory in the Cold War. America needs that kind of wisdom about the Middle East today. It is time for Democrats to understand that, when it comes to curbing the threats posed by problematic states like Iran, encouraging reform in strategically important states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, or ensuring Israel’s long-term future, realism has become the truly progressive position on foreign policy.

It’s popular to invoke the Truman, Acheson period these days and i’m a little bit skeptical about this somewhat romantic characterization of a policy that was driven as much by simple pragmatism (a good part of the world was in rubble) as overarching philosophy. But I suppose there is an argument to be made that by connecting with some heroic ancestors we might be able to reclaim the mantle of patriosim from the nutball neocons. But regardless, the critique of the Democrats is correct. Many of them have adopted a soft neoconservatism, which until recently, I assumed to be a purely political decision due to Bush’s massive early popularity and the trauma of 9/11. I’m not so sure now. Seeing the reactions to the recent Israel-Lebanon war, I can only assume that some sincere kool-aid drinking has gone on and that is very worrisome.

I am not entirely sure how I feel about this notion of “Ethical Realism” but I’m completely confident that neoconservatism in any permutation is dangerous and doomed to fail.

I will repeat my favorite little story to illustrate:

I remember as a child a strange little neighbor girl who was found in her backyard swinging her cat by the tail against the sidewalk screaming “you’re gonna love me!”

That’s neoconservatism. It’s so insane, I believe almost anything is an improvement.

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Rich Sunday

by digby

Frank Rich does a bang-up job this week comparing the Duelling Pageants. He sees the empty Codpiece coming up short on both counts. (Here’s a free link to the column.)

The best part, I think, is this:

What’s amazing on Katrina’s first anniversary is how little Mr. Bush seems aware of this change in the political weather. He’s still in a bubble. At last week’s White House press conference, he sounded as petulant as Tom Cruise on the “Today” show when Matt Lauer challenged him about his boorish criticism of Brooke Shields. Asked what Iraq had to do with the attack on the World Trade Center, Mr. Bush testily responded, “Nothing,” adding that “nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attacks.” Like the emasculated movie star, the president is still so infatuated with his own myth that he believes the public will buy such nonsense.

I hadn’t thought about the similarities between Bush’s plight and that of Tom Cruise before and I should have. After all, Bush consciously adopted the Cruise Top Gun persona for the most audaciously over-the-top performance of his presidency. And here they both are today: absurd, clownish versions of their former selves, rejected by the masses who once worshipped them. The only difference is that Cruise was massively successful at everything he did until he fired his amazing publicist Pat Kingsley and turned into a freak a couple of years ago. Bush’s Pat Kingsley, Karl Rove, hasn’t been nearly as successful over the long haul.

Rich also provides a quote by Douglas Brinkley, the historian, about the real Katrina agenda and I really think there is no doubt that he’s correct:

Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian who wrote the best-selling account of Katrina, “The Great Deluge,” is worried that even now the White House is escaping questioning about what it is up to (and not) in the Gulf. “I don’t think anybody’s getting the Bush strategy,” he said when we talked last week. “The crucial point is that the inaction is deliberate — the inaction is the action.” As he sees it, the administration, tacitly abetted by New Orleans’s opportunistic mayor, Ray Nagin, is encouraging selective inertia, whether in the rebuilding of the levees (“Only Band-Aids have been put on them”), the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward or the restoration of the wetlands. The destination: a smaller city, with a large portion of its former black population permanently dispersed. “Out of the Katrina debacle, Bush is making political gains,” Mr. Brinkley says incredulously. “The last blue state in the Old South is turning into a red state.”

We all talked about the Aftrican American NOLA diaspora sort of abstractly last year but it really has come to pass. A large part of the city and environs aren’t coming back and as long as the rebuilding is so “slow” they won’t. Eventually they will put down roots elsewhere. The result is that the Democratic base of Louisiana has been disappeared. I have no doubt that is no accident.

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“I’m Nothing Like Her, Nothing!”

by digby

I was perusing the Limbaugh web site (subs. only) for some specific Lieberman info and I was quite surprised at the defensiveness we netkooks seem to engender in the old gasbag. He haaates being being compared to us more than anything:

LIMBAUGH: Isn’t it interesting, by the way, these people are just flat out loonies; they are insane kooks, these left wing blog types, yet they are treated with great reverence and great respect and fear in the Drive-By Media and Democratic Party circles — and yet let Pat Buchanan run for president; let his supporters, you know, do their number, and the whole focus is on how insane Buchanan supporters were, how wacko, how dangerous and so forth they are. These people are being pumped up as though they are actual factors. They can’t sell books; they don’t generate much of anything other than a bunch of hot air amongst themselves. Because they’re liberals and because they hate Bush, the Drive-By Media loves them. So her question again to John Harwood. “Well, we know Lamont’s campaign in many ways has been driven by the netroots, many bloggers very supportive of him. What about that?”

HARWOOD: What the netroots Democrats are trying to do in some ways, they’ve got their own way of emulating Republicans because in the Republican Party today, conservatives drive the train, they get nominated, and they win elections. Can these netroots Democrats win nomination contests and then win general elections? Conventional wisdom has been that their Democratic liberal base is not large enough to do that.

RUSH: Well, let me clue you in, John. To compare the liberal netroots, these literally insane kooks to the conservative base is where you’re off base, is where you’re missing the point. It is not a bunch of kooks, it is not a bunch of extremist wackos and it’s not a bunch of fringe minority members who drive the conservative train or who drive the Republican Party train. So to compare the netroots to the mainstream conservatives that dominant the Republican Party is the first mistake that is made, but again, it’s a Drive-By Media guy and they’ve got their template and of course there’s no such thing as a fringe liberal, but fringe Republicans are all over the place. The only problem is there just aren’t enough of these liberals. Can you believe that? There aren’t enough liberals. Life is so unfair, folks. There just aren’t enough liberals to compete with the conservatives in their base operations.

Keep telling yourself that Oxy-boy.

He can’t quite make up his mind whether the Democratic party loves us or hates us, but no matter what, Rush starts snivelling like a spoiled little schoolboy whenever anyone suggests that he is equivalent to lefty bloggers. It’s hilarious.

RUSH: This is from the Beltway Boys on the Fox News Channel on Saturday.

KONDRACKE: Ned Lamont represents — if he wins — represents a triumph in the Democratic Party for the MoveOn.org, Howard Dean, Daily Kos, Michael Moore, left wing of the Democratic Party, which is not only, you know, bad on foreign policy, but on globalization, but is also just as nasty and mean on the left as Rush Limbaugh and those other hot dogs on the right.

RUSH: What has gotten into this guy? He knows better than this. There has to be some reason for this. He knows that this program is not on the same page as those guys. But let’s talk about this Lieberman thing because the latest announcement is that Der Schlick Meister is going in there to campaign for him. I’ll tell you the reason why, folks. It’s really not complicated. The Democrats, more and more of them, are really getting afraid of the MoveOn.orgs and the Daily Koses and these wackos at the Democrat Underground. They’re trying to deflect as much of the influence of these people as possible.

Limbaugh, you see, thinks of himself as a serious player, invited into all the finest homes in DC, married by a supreme court justice, the chosen voice of the most powerful people in the world. He’s very important. It totally unfair to lump him in with all us nobodies!

Poor Rush. When you get right down to it, after all the money and all the fame, he’s just another mean and nasty kook. That’s certainly not news to us — but it seems to be news to him.

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Wingnut Welfare Queens Take On The First Amendment

by digby

For several years, Javed Iqbal has operated a small company from a Brooklyn storefront and out of the garage at his Staten Island home that provides satellite programming for households, including sermons from Christian evangelists seeking worldwide exposure.

Mr. Iqbal’s home, a modest two-story stone and brick house on Van Name Avenue in Mariners Harbor, stands out because among the children’s toys in the backyard were eight satellite dishes.

But this week, the budding entrepreneur’s house and storefront were raided by federal agents, and Mr. Iqbal was charged with providing customers services that included satellite broadcasts of a television station controlled by Hezbollah — a violation of federal law.

Yesterday, Mr. Iqbal was arraigned in Federal District Court in Manhattan and was ordered held in $250,000 bail. The Hezbollah station, Al Manar — or “the beacon” in Arabic — was designated a global terrorist entity by the United States Treasury Department in March of this year.

Hezbollah was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department in 1997.

“The charge lurking in the background is material support for terrorism,” Stephen A. Miller, an assistant United States attorney, told United States Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein. He said Mr. Iqbal, 42, was a flight risk because he has family in England and Pakistan. “We think there is a strong incentive for him to run,” Mr. Miller said.

[…]

Court papers filed by the government to obtain a warrant to search Mr. Iqbal’s business and home suggested that the authorities learned that certain high-definition global transmission systems were providing access to Al Manar broadcasts in the United States. They got their information from Mark Dubowitz, who heads a Washington-based policy group that has monitored Al Manar — through a project called the Coalition Against Terrorist Media — and campaigned for its removal from worldwide broadcasting.

[…]

According to the government documents, agents flew a helicopter over Mr. Iqbal’s home, then sent a confidential informant to the shop to buy a satellite package from Mr. Iqbal. The informant said that Mr. Iqbal had told him that the station was legal. Mr. Iqbal, according to the government, pressed the informant to buy a package with Al Manar instead of another service.

Mr. Iqbal’s family members declined comment yesterday. Neighbors said that the family had lived there for about five years. A sign attached to a chain-link fence along the driveway announces the business, “HDTV-LTD,” and advertises “TX/RX Earthstation and video, audio data, IP security.”

This is a big win for the “Coalition Against Terrorist Media” which I had never heard of until I read this story. A quick visit to Mr Google tells me that it is affiliated with The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies:

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, founded two days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, describes itself as the “only nonpartisan policy institute dedicated exclusively to promoting pluralism, defending democratic values, and fighting the ideologies that drive terrorism.”

Who can argue with that? And it’s bipartisan too! Well, sort of:

Republican Party insiders dominate FDD’s board, and its president, Clifford May, is the former director of communications for the Republican National Committee (1997-2001) and was the editor of Rising Tide, the party’s official magazine. FDD’s three board members are Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp, and Jeane Kirkpatrick. As a way to achieve widespread acceptance of its positions on counterterrorism and on Middle East affairs, FDD has two bipartisan advisory groups.

Its four “Distinguished Advisers” are Newt Gingrich, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Louis J. Freeh (former FBI director), and James Woolsey. FDD also has a Board of Advisers, whose members are: Gary Bauer, Donna Brazile, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY), Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), Frank Gaffney, Amb. Marc Ginsberg, Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ), Charles Jacobs, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Hon. Richard D. Lamm, Richard Perle, Rep. Jim Marshall (D-GA), Sen. Zell Miller (D-GA), and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY).

Through frequent media interviews and news analysis, Clifford May is the prominent public face of FDD in the media. In addition to his former work with the Republican National Committee, May’s other institutional affiliations include being vice chair of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He is also chairman of the policy committee of the Committee on the Present Danger, which is described by FDD as a “venerable Cold War group” that was recreated by FDD in 2004.

I really have to wonder what posseses certain Democrats to join groups that consist of the most virulent wingnut freaks in the country. Well, maybe not: it is an extremely well funded “think tank” that has more money floating around than just about anyone else.

According to their web site, the Coalition Against Terrorist Media has had quite a bit of success in persuading satellite companies around the world not to carry the station, which seems legitimate to me. But once again, we find the rightwing being unable to resist using the government to criminalize things which are not normally criminal in the name of terrorism. In fact, the government made a point of even saying that selling this channel could be considered “giving material support to the terrorists,” which is a very chilling concept to say the least.

In response to this arrest the ACLU wrote:

“It appears that the statute under which Mr. Iqbal is being prosecuted includes a First Amendment exemption that prevents the government from punishing people for importing news communications,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “Such an exemption is constitutionally necessary, and the fact that the government is proceeding with the prosecution in spite of it raises serious questions about how free our marketplace of idea is.”

Very serious questions indeed.

And then we have the usual rightwing intellectual incoherence. Cliff May, the welfare queen who sits at the head of this wingnut pyramid wrote recently:

Where are all the Muslim moderates?…They are out there, I suspect; in larger numbers than we might be led to believe. But if most are silent and fearful of speaking out, can you blame them? The vast majority of Arabs and Muslims live in countries ruled by illiberal and oppressive regimes. And in the few relatively free countries – Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia – there is no protection from the long arm of Militant Islamism. Indeed, even in Europe it can be dangerous to challenge religious fascism. And last year, Shaker Elsayed, leader of Dar al-Hijrah, one of the largest mosques in the U.S., told American Muslims: “The call to reform Islam is an alien call.”

Muslims who dissent from this orthodoxy have received precious little support from anyone. As far back as 1989, Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini called for the murder of British author Salman Rushdie. Such a frontal attack on freedom of speech should have prompted Western governments to send Iranian diplomats packing. Instead, Rushdie went into hiding while most Western intellectuals persuaded themselves this quarrel was none of their business.

Since that time, and perhaps partly as a consequence, Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered for making a movie some Muslims found insulting. Danish journalists who dared publish cartoons satirizing the radicalization of Islam have been threatened. Such formerly-courageous publications as The New York Times declined to publish the cartoons, claiming – unconvincingly — that they had not been intimidated; they were merely demonstrating sensitivity.

That’s another stirring rightwing defense of free speech and a rousing condemnation of repressive governments for stifling dissent. What’s more, the media itself is complicit for not publishing the offending material as a matter of principle regardless of its offensiveness or potential to incite terrorism.

How odd then that this same man runs a lavishly funded a program devoted to eliminating speech they consider to be offensive and which has the potential to incite terrorism. Moreover, his organization has gone even further by informing to the government and demanding that it arrest those who are accused of selling such material. And I think we can be quite sure that he would heartily condemn any news organization that insisted on broadcasting it as a matter of principle. It makes your head ache.

I have no idea how bad Al-MANAR (Hezbollah TV) really is. But I’m willing to assume that it’s pretty bad and I can’t see why I would want to add it to my cable package. (If I want extremist political propaganda I’ll watch FOX, which is of far more immediate relevance to my life.) But I’m damned if can agree with Cliff May and Joe Lieberman that speech should ever be considered giving material support to terrorists or that selling such speech is a criminal offense. That kind of thing is Stalinist claptrap of the worst kind.

As Noam Chomsky said, “Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.”

Ok, I know. Chomsky is a leftist terrorist lover so he’s full of it. How about this guy, who used to be considered quite a hero to many on the right:

John Stuart Mill: “If any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.”

Of course, assuming their own infallibility is a feature of the rightwing, so this argument probably isn’t persuasive.

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Heroes

by digby

If they can appropriate JFK, FDR and Truman, we can damn well take Barry Goldwater. Eventually, we’ll take Reagan too — remember, he got all touchy feely with Gorby toward the end and he signed the biggest tax increase in history to save social security. (Haha. Did you just hear that collective gasp?)

They can keep Nixon and the Bush family. They are the true leaders of the modern GOP, anyway — crooked and psychologically unfit for office.

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Stupid Explained – The Flag Conservatives

by poputonian

Norman Mailer differentiates between two types of conservatives, and articulates about pseudo-Christians. In doing so, he labels the inferior of this class as the Flag Conservatives, who, unfortunately, also happen to be running America:

There is just this kind of mad-eyed mystique in Americans: the idea that we Americans can do anything. So, say flag conservatives, we will be able to handle what comes. Our know-how, our can-do, will dominate all obstacles. They truly believe America is not only fit to run the world but that it must run the world. Otherwise, we will lose ourselves. If there is not a new seriousness in American affairs, the country is going to go down the drain.
…
On the other hand, conservatism has its own deep ditches, its unclimbable walls, its immutable old ideas sealed in concrete. But lately, there are two profoundly different kinds of conservatives emerging, as different in their way as the communists and the socialists were before and after 1917, yes, two types of conservatives in America now. What I call “value conservatives” because they believe in what most people think of as the standard conservative values—family, home, faith, hard work, duty, allegiance—dependable human virtues. And then there are what I call “flag conservatives,” of whom obviously the present administration would be the perfect example.

I don’t think flag conservatives give a real damn about conservative values. They use the words. They certainly use the flag. They love words like “evil.” One of Bush’s worst faults in rhetoric (to dip into that cornucopia) is to use the word “evil” as if it were a button he can touch to increase his power. When people are sick and have an IV tube put in them to feed a narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush uses evil as his hot button for the American public. Any man who can employ that word 15 times in five minutes is not a conservative. Not a value conservative. A flag conservative is another matter. They rely on manipulation. What they want is power. They believe in America. That they do. They believe this country is the only hope of the world and they feel that this country is becoming more and more powerful on the one hand, but on the other, is rapidly growing more dissolute. And so the only solution for it is empire, World Empire. Behind the whole thing in Iraq is the desire to have a huge military presence in the near-East as a stepping stone for eventually taking over the world. Once we become a twenty-first century version of the old Roman Empire, then moral reform will come into the picture. The military is obviously more puritanical than the entertainment media. Soldiers can, of course, be wilder than anyone, but the overhead command is a major pressure on soldiers, and it is not permissive.
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You see, behind flag conservatism is not madness but logic. I’m not in accord with the logic. But it is powerful. From their point of view, America is getting rotten. The entertainment media are loose. They are licentious. The kids are getting to the point where they can’t read, but they sure can screw. Morals are vanishing. The real subtext may be that if America becomes again a military machine that is huge in order to oversee all its new commitments, then American sexual freedom, willy-nilly, will have to go on the back burner. Commitment and dedication will become necessary national values (with all the hypocrisy attendant on that.) Flag conservatives may see all this as absolutely necessary. In the last decade, there have been many blows to the psychic integument of conservatism. And the last half-year has been horrific. We have all had to recognize the outsize chicanery and economic pollution of the corporations, we have had to deal with the great blow the Catholic Church took, not to mention 9/11, which was a shock, if not an outright chasm at our feet. I think Americans took a hit that is not wholly out of proportion to what happened to the Germans after World War I when inflation came and wiped out the fundamental German notion of self, which was that if you worked hard and saved your money, you ended up having a decent old age. It is my belief Hitler could never have come to power ten years later without that runaway inflation. By the same measure, I think 9/11 did something comparable to the American sense of security.
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The point I want to make is that—let me do it in two parts: First, there was a fierce point of view back when the Soviet Union fell. Flag conservatives felt that was their opportunity to take over the world because we were the only people who knew how to run the world. And they were furious when Clinton got in. One of the reasons he was so hated was because he was frustrating what they wanted. That world takeover, so open, so possible from their point of view in 1992, was missed. How that contributed to intense hatred of Clinton! This attitude, I think, grew and deepened and festered through the eight years of the Clinton administration. I don’t know if White House principals talk to one another in private about this, but the key element in their present thought, I suspect, is that if America becomes an empire, then of necessity, everything here that needs to be strengthened will be affected positively. By their lights! If America grows into the modern equivalent of the Roman Empire, then it will be necessary to rear whole generations who can serve in the military in all parts of the world. It will put a new emphasis again upon education. Americans, who are famous for their inability to speak foreign languages, will suddenly be encouraged and over-encouraged to become linguists in order to handle the overseas tasks of empire. The seriousness of purpose will be back in American life. These are, I suspect, their arguments. They are not mine. I am not for World Empire. I can foresee endless disasters coming out of that.
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One of the messages that the flag conservatives are trying to send to China is, I expect: Hear this! You Chinese guys are obviously very bright. We can tell. We know! Because your Asian students in our universities get better marks than our people do. They are more serious. They were born for technology. People who have led submerged lives love technology. They don’t get any pleasure anyway, so they do like the notion of personal, right-at-your-desk power. Technology is ideal for them. All right, goes the unspoken message of the flag conservatives, you guys can have your technology, but you had better understand, China, that you will be the Greek slaves to us Romans. We will treat you well because you will be most important to us, eminently important. But don’t try to rise above your future station in life. The best you can ever hope to be is Greeks.
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Flag conservatives are not Christians. They are, at best, militant Christians, which is, of course, a fatal contradiction in terms. They are a very special piece of work, but they are not Christians. The fundament of Christianity is compassion, and it is usually observed by the silence attendant on its absence. Well, the same anomaly is true of the Muslims. Islam, in theory, is an immensely egalitarian religion. It believes everyone is absolutely equal before God. But the reality, no surprise, is something else. A host of Arab leaders, who do not look upon their poor people in any way as equals, make up a perfect counterpart to the way we live with Christianity. We violate Christianity with every breath we take. So do the Muslims violate Islam. Your question, is it a war to the end? I expect it is. We are speaking of war between two essentially unbalanced inauthentic theologies. So, it may prove to be an immense war. A vast conflict of powers is at the core and the motives of both sides are inauthentic which, I expect, makes it worse. The large and unanchored uneasiness I feel about it is that we may not get through this century. We could come apart—piece by piece, disaster after disaster, small and large.

It’s frightening to think how many followers of the Bush/Cheney flag conservative administration have no idea they are being deceived, that what they are following is exactly as Mailer describes. All those flags and all the yellow ribbons. If people only knew. They bought the simple logic: we’re for Good and they’re for Evil.
Here is another clip from Mailer, this one again is from his book, Why Are We At War?, which was published in 2003, several months after the interview above. This anectdote seems a good summation of the present state of affairs with regard to the flag and to the future of America:

We had a parade in Provincetown on the Fourth of July, 2002. A rather nice looking, pleasant fellow — he looked to me like a young liberal lawyer — came up to me and handed me a small American flag. And I looked at him and just shook my head. And he walked on. It wasn’t an episode in any way. He came over with a half-smile and walked away with a half-smile. But I was furious for not saying, “You don’t have to wave a flag to be a patriot.” By July of 2002, it bothered me a good deal. Free-floating patriotism seemed like a direct measure of our free-floating anxiety.

Take the British for contrast. The British have a love of country that is profound. They can revile it, tell dirty stories about it, give you dish on all the imperfects who are leading the country. But their patriotism is deep. In America it’s as if we’re playing musical chairs, and you shouldn’t get caught without a flag or you’re out of the game. Why do we need all this reaffirmation? It’s as if we’re a three-hundred-pound man who’s seven feet tall, superbly shaped, absolutely powerful, and yet every three minutes he’s got to reaffirm the fact that his armpits have a wonderful odor. We don’t need compulsive, self-serving patriotism. It’s odious. When you have a great country, it’s your duty to be critical of it so it can become even greater. But culturally, emotionally, we are growing more arrogant, more vain. We’re losing a sense of the beauty not only of democracy but also of its peril.

Democracy is built upon a notion that is exquisite and dangerous. It virtually states that if the will of the populace is freely expressed, more good than bad will result. When America began, it was the first time in the history of civilization that a nation dared to make an enormous bet founded on this daring notion–that there is more good than bad in people. Until then, the prevailing assumption had been that the powers at the top knew best; people were no good and had to be controlled. Now we have to keep reminding ourselves that just because we’ve been a great democracy, it doesn’t guarantee we’re going to continue to be one. Democracy is existential. It changes. It changes all the time. That’s one reason why I detest promiscuous patriotism. You don’t take democracy for granted. It is always in peril. We all know that any man or woman can go from being a relatively good person to a bad one. We can all become corrupted, or embittered. We can be swallowed by our miseries in life, become weary, give up. The fact that we’ve been a great democracy doesn’t mean we will automatically keep being one if we keep waving the flag. It’s ugly. You take monarchy for granted, or a fascist state. But democracy changes all the time.

The Stupids: Episode 4,577

by digby

A geography teacher put on paid leave for refusing to remove Mexican, Chinese and United Nations flags from his classroom will be allowed to return to school today after district officials backed down.

But Eric Hamlin, who teaches seventh-graders in Jefferson County, hopes his experience will inspire a backlash against a Colorado law that restricts display of other nations’ flags.

“This hasn’t been a teacher-versus-school- district issue,” Hamlin said. “This has been a teacher taking on the state statute, with the school district stuck in the middle as the enforcer.”

Carmody Middle School principal John Schalk put Hamlin on paid leave Wednesday after the teacher refused three orders to take the flags out of his classroom.

The school district cited a state law prohibiting the display of any flag but the American, Colorado or local flags on public buildings, including schools. Temporary displays for instructional or historical purposes are exempt, but the school principal did not consider Hamlin’s display temporary enough.

District officials agreed Thursday that Hamlin could keep the flags up for six weeks, then exchange them with other flags from his collection of more than 50. The district said he could keep his next set of flags, 25 of them from Middle Eastern nations, up for 12 weeks.

Former state Rep. Carl Miller, who sponsored legislation in 2002 strengthening a 1971 law restricting foreign flag displays, said the school was right to put Hamlin on leave and should not have let him return so soon.

Miller, a Democrat from Leadville, disagreed with Jefferson County Superintendent Cindy Stevenson, who said the outcome was a “win-win situation.”

“The only win-win I see is that Mr. Hamlin wins, China wins, Mexico wins and the United Nations wins,” he said.

The Stupids: Episode 4,578

Littleton schools take down foreign flags

A Littleton middle school removed 30 flags from the gym today, fearing they violate a Colorado law against displaying foreign flags in state buildings.

Goddard Middle School Principal Amy Oaks said students will express the same message of diversity by creating banners that symbolize the foreign nations.

“Perhaps I have a much more cautious interpretation of the law than other people,” Oaks said. “I have no idea. I just know that we certainly wouldn’t want to be in violation of the state law…

“We don’t want it to be anything that anybody would say, ‘Do you realize you’re violating the law on the wall of your gym? We don’t want that.”

State law allows flags as part of a temporary display for educational purposes, provided the flags are not permanently affixed to the building. The Goddard flags have been up since the 2003-04 school year.

“It kind of feels permanent to me,” Oaks said.

Oaks pulled down the flags after a teacher in Jefferson County was placed on administrative leave over a flag controversy in his classroom.

The 30 flags at Goddard, including a U.S. flag, represented the nationalities of Goddard students, including some from as far away as Mongolia and Eritrea.

Oaks said she and an art teacher will oversee creation of the banners, using paint on artists canvas.

These are the educated people.

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Re-Runs

by digby

I am getting so tired of this nonsense. I read today from Avedon Carol that the wingnuts are attacking feminists again for not being sufficiently exercized by the plight of women under Islamic theocratic regimes:

Another re-run being linked by right-wingers is this crap about how western feminists are uninterested in condemning Islamic extremism. Of course, we do – all the time – but no one listens. We condemned Bush for leaving Afghan women high and dry after bombing Kabul, where the Taliban is now having a resurgence. We condemned the neocon plan to invade Iraq, thus unleashing extremist Islam in what had been a secular country. And we don’t like the way Bush’s policies have interrupted what had been a gradual weakening of extremism in Iran. Not one thing Bush-Cheney has done in the Middle-East has improved the lot of women, and in Iraq they have made things dramatically worse. The last thing the Islamic world’s women need is more of this kind of help.

And by the way, where were the wingnuts before 9/11 on this subject? I don’t remember them saying anything at all. But I do remember the Feminist Majority’s Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan:

October 21, 1998

Lenos Announce $100,000 Contribution to Raise Awareness of Gender Apartheid in Afganistan

Mavis and Jay Leno today presented a gift of $100,000 to the Feminist Majority Foundation to expand its Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan and to restore women’s rights to work, education, healthcare and freedom of movement. Mavis Leno will chair the national effort.

“Our contribution kicks-off an expanded organizing drive to mobilize public support and increase visibility for our Campaign to Stop Gender Apartheid,” said Mavis Leno. “We are determined that every American know about what is happening to women and girls in Afghanistan. We must not remain silent. Jay and I are challenging others to lend their help and support.”

“Two years ago women in Afghanistan could work, be educated, and move about freely,” explained Leno. “Then the Taliban seized power. Today women are prohibited from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a close male relative and are forced to wear the burqa – a head-to-toe shroud. Girls and women are banned from schooling. . .even home schooling. Male doctors are forbidden to examine women. Women doctors are no longer allowed to practice. No healthcare. . .no education. . .no freedom of movement. This nightmare is reality for 11.5 million women and girls in Afghanistan.”

[…]

Smeal and Leno were joined at today’s the press conference by Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) who has been leading efforts in Congress to stop gender apartheid, Zohra Rasekh, MPH of Physicians for Human Rights which has just completed an important study of the condition of women living under the Taliban, Jan Goodwin who has traveled extensively in Afghanistan and written on gender apartheid, and Sima Wali, an Afghan woman working in the U.S. to end gender apartheid.

Every couple of years some idiot rolls out this dipshit canard and everyone has to spend hours rebutting it. It’s ridiculous on its face, the same way it’s ridiculous that the rightwing claims that liberals, gays, women whomever are in league with the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. If there are any Americans who have a basic sympatico with these most conservative of social conservatives it’s the … American social conservatives.

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Blind Cruelty

by digby

Glenn Beck is “driven out of his mind” by little signs in braille outside offices that tell blind people which office they’re entering. Apparently, this “political correctness” interferes with wingnut freedom to not have to look at little plaques they dislike … or something:

MILANO: Well, “Dare to Ask,” Glenn, like my book, I Can’t Believe You Asked That!, is — it’s a chance for people to ask those kinds of taboo cultural questions that we all wish we could ask but we’re so afraid of offending in this P.C. world that, you know, we — we dance around it, as you were saying earlier.

BECK: OK. I have one. I have one. I’m going to get to some of the questions that have already been asked, but I’ve got one that drives me out of my mind. I work at Radio City in midtown Manhattan, and up by the doors, you know, like where the — you know — the office kitchen is, in Braille, on the wall, it says “kitchen.” You’d have to — a blind person would have to be feeling all of the walls to find “kitchen.” Just to piss them off, I’m going to put in Braille on the coffee pot — I’m going to put, “Pot is hot.” Ow!

It’s downright cruel that society is so “politically correct” that they restrict the freedom of good and decent poeple like Beck from exercizing his god-given right to commit acts of physical violence against people with physical handicaps, too. Where will all this political correctness end, I ask you?

The good news is that CNN is making sure that men like Beck have a national forum from which to educate and entertain the people with commentary such as this.

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