Oh for Christ’s sake. Via Americablog I see the WaPo published this ridiculous nonsense from George Will:
By 1987, when President Ronald Reagan gave his first speech on the subject, 20,798 Americans had died, and his speech, not surprisingly, did not mention any connection to the gay community. No president considers it part of his job description to tell the country that the human rectum, with its delicate and absorptive lining, makes anal-receptive sexual intercourse dangerous when HIV is prevalent.
I don’t know why. The whole country discussed the president’s own personal rectum for weeks, in great detail, two years before. People couldn’t stop talking about it. I don’t know why he needed to be so polite about it when it came to AIDS.
In July 1985, Reagan underwent surgery to remove a suspicious polyp from his colon. Two feet of the intestine was removed, and tests days later revealed that the growth was cancerous but had not spread far. Doctors were confident that they had removed all the disease, and tests during the rest of Reagan’s presidency showed no sign of cancer.
Doctors quoted Reagan as saying after the surgery, “Well, I’m glad that that’s all out.”
This picture shows Reagan showing the whole country how the procedure was done:
Kennedy pulls a bait and switch close to the beginning on the 3 percent/2 percent who were “disenfranchised by the long lines in Ohio”:
Manjoo seizes on one line in the 204-page report and then attempts to play a clumsy game of gotcha. But if he had read more carefully he would have understood that the 129,543 votes he refers to were only a subset of those disenfranchised by the long lines. Had Manjoo read a mere paragraph further in the report, he would have seen that it identifies a second group, comprising roughly 48,000 citizens, or 0.83 percent of Ohio’s electorate, whose votes were also suppressed because of the lines and other factors [Emphasis added.].
I haven’t worked through the details of Kennedy’s argument to gauge the extent to which the “other factors” affect his point about the size of the group of voters disenfranchised by the long lines. At the least, it’s a bit – not a lot, but a bit – sloppy on Kennedy’s part.
Manjoo, however, seems on very shaky ground in his attempt to salvage his rebuttal of the “Connally Anomaly.” He found one ignoramus who didn’t know how “liberal” Connally was. No doubt he can find a second (that Ignoramus 1 has a rep as an Ohio voting expert would seem to say more about his qualifications than anything else; he’s certainly a rotten witness for Manjoo’s point in this context). Barring confounding factors (eg, party affiliation wasn’t printed on the voting ballots), it seems highly unlikely, however, that ignorance played a large role in the discrepancy between Connally’s tallies and Kerry’s, although like any other halfway reasonable factor, it had some.*
And Kennedy’s rebuttal of the Black and Resnick results from 2000 seem very plausible. Yes, Kucinich was wrong, twice before, down-ticket candidates outperformed presidential candidates. The relevant number is how often does that occur? Neither Kennedy nor Manjoo say here (nor do I recall their saying so in the original article). I suspect, however, it is quite rare. Otherwise, Manjoo would have cited more examples than just these two.
Bottom line: I’ll anger a lot of you, but based on the information in Kennedy’s first article, Manjoo’s response and this new article, I believe it is a seriously open question as to what actually happened in Ohio in 2004. Without further, extensive investigation honest people will disagree on whether it was stolen or whether Bush would have won anyway. If the latter, it seems it would have been a squeaker.
What is beyond dispute either by Kennedy or Manjoo are two points. First, what happened in Ohio (if not elsewhere) stinks to high heaven. Agreed. Second, if America is still a democracy, then election form is what the president of the United States should be using his bully pulpit to advocate, not ways to use the Constitution to empower gay bashing. Agreed.
*Dan Tokaji, the voting expert who didn’t know the politics of Connally, says, “So inferring election fraud in 12 counties based on Connally’s vote total is, in my view, quite a stretch.” Correct me if I”m wrong here, but the discrepancy between Connally’s and Kerry’s vote totals was one of several factors that led Kennedy to infer voting fraud in 12 counties. The convergence of highly smelly data, all trending clearly in one direction, is what leads to the inference, not one single piece of trash.
Here are some links to get you started with understanding exactly what Bill O’Reilly is playing around with.
A History of the Malmedy Massacre. You’ll get details on the SS slaughter of surrendered American troops. Further investigations confirmed this account. As an aside, note the fate of the last Nazi participant in the massacre:
In December of 1956, the last prisoner, Peiper, was released from Landsberg. He eventually settled in eastern France. On July 14, 1976, Bastille Day in France, Peiper was killed when a fire of mysterious origin destroyed his home. Firefighters responding to the blaze found their water hoses had been cut.
On December 22, 1956, SS Sturmbannführer Peiper was released. He settled in the small village of Traves in northern France in 1972 and four years later, on the eve of Bastille Day, he was murdered and his house burned down by a French communist group.
Ms. Coulter’s work includes an admiring if brief biography of McCarthy’s political career. One that for some reason excludes the senator’s remarkable efforts on behalf of the members of the SS battle group who executed 86 American POWs in the Ardennes campaign in December 1944; otherwise known as the Malmedy Massacre. In his impassioned efforts on behalf of the accused–one never to be repeated in his investigative career–the senator charged that the U.S. Army had cruelly mistreated the former SS men.
And here, from a site called “Original Dissent,” which bills itself as “Traditional, American Conservatism for and from the Common Man” and to which I will not link, are the racist lies about Malmedy. It is impossible to unpack the full extent of overlapping lies, distortions, etc without going into detailed investigations that the charges simply don’t deserve, but which they received due to the relentless pressure from the lunatic American right including McCarthy:
After the war, Germans who had taken part in the fighting at Malmedy were turned over to U.S. Army Colonel A.H. Rosenfeld and his Jewish underlings for “interrogation.” The prisoners were arbitrarily reduced to civilian status so that they would not be protected by the Geneva Convention, and brutal torture was used to extract confessions. When 18-year-old prisoner Arvid Freimuth hanged himself after repeated beatings rather than sign a “confession,” the prosecutors were permitted to use as “evidence” the unsigned statement which they themselves had contrived.
McCarthy dared to speak against this officially sanctioned lynching, when almost no one else had the courage to do so. By fearlessly championing the underdogs, the defeated and vilified Germans, and speaking out against the actual atrocities committed by self-righteous aliens in American uniform, the Senator demonstrated the rare moral courage that later propelled him into the forefront of the struggle against Communism.
The Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator Raymond Baldwin, Republican of Connecticut, was assigned to investigate the charges of torture, but whitewashed them instead. On July 26, 1949, Senator McCarthy withdrew in disgust from the hearings and announced in a speech on the Senate floor that two members of the Committee, Senator Baldwin and Senator Estes Kefauver, Democrat of Tennessee, had law partners among the Army interrogators they were supposedly investigating. This was in several ways a preview of things to come.
The Jews showed instant hostility toward anyone who interfered with their campaign of vengeance against the conquered Germans, and so they began turning their big guns in the media against McCarthy: a December 1949 poll of news correspondents covering the United States Senate already had reporters branding McCarthy “the worst Senator” — a high honor indeed.
[UPDATE: Incredibly, according to this synopsis of a book on Malmedy, the man who pushed for the vindication of the Nazis was an anti-semite who, as a Southerner, identified with and felt sympathy for the humiliation the defeated Nazis suffered.
Communists murdered the last Nazi implicated in the massacre. The “plight” of the Nazis, so similar to the “plight” of the white South in 1865. O’Reilly knew exactly what he was tapping into. Boy, did he ever.]
Bill O’Reilly’s outrageous attempt to paint the Nazis as victims of an American atrocity at Malmedy when in fact Nazis slaughtered American troops should have led to his immediate firing and ostracism from American airwaves. What did Fox do? They tried to scrub the transcript, but were caught and restored it.
But that’s not all. Watch and marvel at the sordid history of rightwing denial of the Malmedy atrocity, complete with genuinely ugly eruptions of American homegrown anti-semitism. And don’t miss a cameo appearance by Joe McCarthy, which should thoroughly discredit anyone malicious enough to try to whitewash that scoundrel’s reputation.
And you know what’s the worst part of this? No one really cares that much, no one that matters. “Oh, that’s just Fox News, that’s just O’Reilly, whaddya expect?” The level of bullshit, ignorance, bigotry, and malicious stupidity is so high we don’t even notice it anymore. Worse, the stench is so bad and is so far over our heads already, we don’t even notice when it’s reached a new height.
But we’re not done yet. If O’Reilly can keep his job – and he can and will – after smearing American WW II soldiers (as well as sending covert signals of support to all the David Irvings in America), then he will feel compelled to top that. Anyone care to predict the next O’Reilly outrage?
I don’t. If you had told me that Bill O’Reilly could get away with rewriting Malmedy, I would have said you were mad. But what we do know is that the goal posts have moved and rightwing extremism is just a little less extreme than it was.
Let’s call it the Neiwert Effect, in honor of the expert in how extreme rightwing memes get mainstreamed. Last week’s racist anti-immigrant remarks seem downright moderate compared to re-casting Nazis as innocents when they were cold-blooded murderers. And since there were no consequences for him doing so, O’Reilly now has permission to be as publicly bigoted against Mexicans and Hispanics as Stephen Douglas was against African Americans.
Taking a trip through neglected posts from last week when my blog imploded, I find (via Yglesias) that the Wall Street Journal has finally reviewed Ramesh Ponnuru’s pathetic flop “The Party Of Death” and surprisingly wrote this:
“It doesn’t matter to Mr. Ponnuru that this argument flies in the face of a complex intuition that seems to underlie the American ambivalence: Invisible to the naked eye, lacking body or brain, feeling neither pleasure nor pain, radically dependent for life support, the early embryo, though surely part of the human family, is distant and different enough from a flesh-and-blood newborn that when the early embryo’s life comes into conflict with other precious human goods or claims, the embryo’s life may need to give way.”
Whoa. That, like, makes sense and everything. Yglesias adds:
Ponnuru responds with what amounts to an effort at burden shifting, pointing out that this kind of vague appeal to intuition isn’t an argument per se. This is a point I’m sympathetic to as a general matter. But to the best of my knowledge, though abortion rules have varied widely no society has actually considered the deliberate destruction of an early-stage embryo as on a par with deliberate murder of a human being, nor the accidental death of such an embryo (which is very common) as on a par with the accidental death of a human being. Thus, it seems reasonable to me to say that the burden here lies with Ponnuru, and that Berkowitz is merely observing that Ponnuru’s argument seemed unpersuasive in light of its wildly counterintuitive consequences.
No kidding. Call me crazy, but it seems to me that one of the main reasons humans have this complex intuition about the beginning of life is because this “life” happens to exist INSIDE THE BODY OF A FULLY FORMED HUMAN BEING!!! It would seem fairly obvious to me this unique circumstance in human experience requires a little more sophisticated thinking than just “ugh life, good.” But that does necessitate that one admits that the fully formed “vessel” that houses that life has more rights than a blastocyst. That seems to be the real sticking point for some people.
Sebastian Mallaby and Paul Krugman both have columns today excoriating the Senate for what it’s about to do on behalf of useless parasites like Paris Hilton and Brandon Davis. It is infuriating that some Democrats are signing on to this bullshit.
For most of the past century, the case for the estate tax was regarded as self-evident. People understood that government has to be paid for, and that it makes sense to raise part of the money from a tax on “fortunes swollen beyond all healthy limits,” as Theodore Roosevelt put it. The United States is supposed to be a country that values individuals for their inherent worth, not for their inherited worth. The estate tax, like a cigarette tax or a carbon tax, is a tool for reducing a socially damaging phenomenon — the emergence of a hereditary upper class — as well as a way of raising money.
But now the House has voted to repeal the estate tax, and the Senate may do the same this week. Republicans are picking up support from renegade Democrats, such as Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Bill Nelson of Florida, Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Max Baucus of Montana. Several more may go over to the dark side if a “compromise” bill, which would achieve nearly everything that abolitionists dream of, is introduced in the Senate. President Bush, who has already muscled a temporary repeal of the estate tax into law, would be delighted to sign a bill making abolition permanent.
So much for the “populism” of these Red State hypocrites. There can be no reason for doing this other than to pay off contributors. If a Democrat from Nebraska can’t make the argument that he or she refuses to give tax breaks to movie stars then he or she needs to get into another line of business.
The campaign for estate tax repeal has largely been financed by just 18 powerful business dynasties, including the family that owns Wal-Mart.
You may have heard tales of family farms and small businesses broken up to pay taxes, but those stories are pure propaganda without any basis in fact. In particular, advocates of estate tax repeal have never been able to provide a single real example of a family farm sold to pay estate taxes.
Nonetheless, the estate tax is up for a vote this week. First, Republicans will try to repeal the estate tax altogether. If that fails, they’ll offer a compromise that isn’t really a compromise, like a plan suggested by Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, that would cost almost as much as full repeal, or a plan suggested by Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, that is only slightly cheaper.
In each case, the crucial vote will be procedural: if 60 senators vote to close off debate, estate tax repeal or something close to it will surely pass. Any senator who votes for cloture but against estate tax repeal — which I’m told is what John McCain may do — is simply a hypocrite, trying to have it both ways.
But will the Senate vote for cloture? The answer depends on two groups of senators: Democrats like Mr. Baucus who habitually stake out “centrist” positions that give Republicans almost everything they want, and moderate Republicans like Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island who consistently cave in to their party’s right wing. Will these senators show more spine than they have in the past?
In the interest of stiffening those spines, let me remind senators that this isn’t just a fiscal issue, it’s also a moral issue. Congress has already declared that the budget deficit is serious enough to warrant depriving children of health care; how can it now say that it’s worth enlarging the deficit to give Paris Hilton a tax break?
I also think it’s important to not that an active duty Army captain with two years experience makes $38,656 a year. A private first class makes $15,282. God forbid that Paris should be asked to kick in a piece of her inheritance to pay the bills this country owes — bills which include those salaries. What’s this country ever done for her? (And anyway, the price of a mojito at Club Butter is just ridiculous these days.)
And, by the way, if John “I’m Teddy Roosevelt reincarnated” McCain does do some shenanigans with this vote, I think we should hire a skinny blond in huge sunglasses to follow him around blowing kisses and thanking him profusely. (It sounds like a job for the Billionaires.)
Bayh calmly answered that “I wouldn’t cast the same vote today as I did then.” He noted that “the French believed that (there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq), the Germans believed that, the Russians believed that, everybody believed he [Saddam Hussein] had weapons of mass destruction.”
Yes, we’ve heard that. Apparently, it’s supposed to excuse the fact that the administration ignored its own government, but whatever. This trope about France, Russia and Germany is dragged out with such frequency it’s become a matter of faith. But is it true?
I honestly don’t know. There are reports on the internet that France did not believe it. The Guardian published a story in the fall of 2002 featuring Pootie-Poot saying this:
Specifically targeting the CIA report, Putin said, “Fears are one thing, hard facts are another.” He goes on to say, “Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we have not received any such information from our partners yet. This fact has also been supported by the information sent by the CIA to the US Congress.”
Putin, like everyone else, then endorsed sending the inspectors back in for obvious reasons — to prove the case one way or the other. But the only thing I’ve ever seen that indicated the French and the Germans had independent knowledge of what has turned out to be a non-existent arsenal, came from David Kay, who testified to that effect before congress. But I suspect that to the extent they might have said they believed it, it was because we told them we had evidence, not that they had independently verified it. I just have a sneaking suspicion that we would have heard what it was by now.
You’ll recall that the security council in the run up to the war was in a frenzy of activity trying to stop this stupid war. The resolution to allow inspectors back in was not based upon a set of facts that that everyone agreed to. It was based upon a desire to stop the US from plunging headlong into war. And the history of that rush to war shows this:
The United States told UN arms inspectors to pack their bags and leave Iraq, with last-ditch talks at the United Nations Security Council looking unlikely to break a diplomatic deadlock amid unswerving French and Russian opposition to war.
The Security Council was set to meet in what US President George Bush said would be “a moment of truth for the world”, while the United States and Britain told their nationals to leave Kuwait immediately, with London warning of the threat of chemical and biological attack from neighbouring Iraq.
With war looking increasingly imminent – British commentators have spoken of a 24-hour pause for weapons inspectors, diplomats and others to leave Iraq before war begins – Security Council members China, Russia, France and Germany all appealed for Bush to give diplomacy more time.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said the United States would be making a mistake with the most serious consequences if it went to war without UN backing, in his first direct comments on the Iraq crisis for weeks, Interfax news agency reported.
[…]
Yesterday, he said, “is the day that we will determine whether or not diplomacy can work”, adding that Saddam would have to disarm or would be disarmed by force.
Asked whether that meant the diplomatic window would now close for a vote on a draft UN resolution brought by the US, Britain and Spain that is widely seen as paving the way for war, he replied: “That’s what I’m saying.”
Baghdad responded that Washington and London had “drowned the world with lies”.
France, whose opposition to the resolution has led to a diplomatic deadlock at the UN, insisted it would veto the resolution, despite appeals from Mr Bush and Mr Blair for international unity.
“France cannot accept the resolution on the table that lays down an ultimatum,” Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin told Europe 1 radio, reiterating a pledge by President Jacques Chirac to torpedo the motion.
Moscow added its opposition, saying there was “no chance” of the Security Council approving the resolution, Interfax reported.
“We do not believe that any new resolutions are necessary,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Yury Fedotov.
In Beijing, Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing insisted the issue should be solved through dialogue within the United Nations, while German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder rejected the rush to war and said UN weapons inspections in Iraq were proving effective.
With Paris and Moscow lining up to veto the resolution, speculation rose that London and Washington would withdraw the text and launch strikes.
[…]
Mr Blair had given Paris until yesterday to change its mind, saying: “People have got to decide whether they are going to allow any second resolution (on Iraq) to have teeth, to make it clear that there is a real ultimatum in it.
“If their positions do not change … it is very difficult to see how you can move this diplomatic process forward,” he said. “This is the impasse.”
A government official said the ball was in France’s and Russia’s court: “It’s a decision for France and Russia whether they would sign up to an ultimatum.”
None of that proves that France, Germany and Russia believed that Iraq had WMD. But let’s not pretend that they had jumped on the bandwagon with our plans either. If they “knew” independently that Saddam had WMD, they certainly didn’t seem to think it required an invasion. You’d think that fact would have given Evan and his buds in the congress some pause at the time. You’d certainly think it would embarrass the shit out of them now.
The excellent Steve Benen, pinch hitting over at Washington Monthly, highlights this rather stunning story from the LA Times in which we learn that the Army is eliminating the prohibition against “humiliating and degrading” treatment from the new edition of the field manual:
The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans “humiliating and degrading treatment,” according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.
The decision could culminate a lengthy debate within the Defense Department but will not become final until the Pentagon makes new guidelines public, a step that has been delayed. However, the State Department fiercely opposes the military’s decision to exclude Geneva Convention protections and has been pushing for the Pentagon and White House to reconsider, the Defense Department officials acknowledged.
Benen says:
I can’t help but wonder if Bush administration officials know or care about how this undermines our standing and credibility in the world. It’s simply breathtaking. As Kevin put it a while back, “It’s simply impossible to persuade the rest of the world that we’re the good guys as long as we persist in plainly repugnant behavior.”
The problem is that they, and I assume many in the pentagon, believe the exact opposite. They think that “being tough” and “sending the right message” will make the enemy put its tail between its legs and run for the hills. That’s the simple truth of it. And that idea is what’s permeated into the military ranks in Iraq and elsewhere. When Cheney said “take the gloves off” he meant it. And people believed it. And that led us directly to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and now the horror of Haditha.
Newsweek’s story on the subject this week doesn’t really shed any new light on the story, but it ends with one hell of a speculation:
MacGregor also faulted U.S. generals for not accompanying platoon and squad leaders as they patrolled—to better understand their environment and what they needed to survive in it. Had the generals done so, writes MacGregor, they would have known what a sergeant on patrol in Ramadi meant when he told a journalist, “You can have my job. It’s easy. You just have to drive around all day and wait for someone to bomb you. Thing is, you have to hate Arabs.”
Left to their own devices, grunts sometimes improvise. It is possible that Kilo Company was determined to “leave a calling card,” which is to say, to warn Haditha that IEDs would be met with heavy retribution. It’s an old and primitive counter-insurgency tactic. Long ago, the Romans used it against barbarians.
Romans and conservatives are very big on “sending messages.” They like to make examples of people; it’s one of their favorite authoritarian tactics. And executing children sends a hell of a message, no doubt about it. No gloves anywhere to be seen in that operation. The “humiliating and degrading” treatment at Abu Ghraib, the torture at Bagram and Gitmo and god knows where else, the kidnapping and renditions, and yes, the massacre of civilians including children, is not a matter of incompetence or misunderstanding or the fog of war. It’s the plan.
In this famous essay called “World War IV,” neocon king Norman Podhoretz spells it all out. The US has been soft for more than thirty years. Even St Ronnie doesn’t get a pass (for “cutting and running” after the barracks bombing in Lebanon.) We have invited this malevolent threat to attack us because we have been weak. After recounting American failures to “get tough” over the course of the last thirty years, he concludes:
The sheer audacity of what bin Laden went on to do on September 11 was unquestionably a product of his contempt for American power. Our persistent refusal for so long to use that power against him and his terrorist brethren—or to do so effectively whenever we tried—reinforced his conviction that we were a nation on the way down, destined to be defeated by the resurgence of the same Islamic militancy that had once conquered and converted large parts of the world by the sword.
As bin Laden saw it, thousands or even millions of his followers and sympathizers all over the Muslim world were willing, and even eager, to die a martyr’s death in the jihad, the holy war, against the “Great Satan,” as the Ayatollah Khomeini had called us. But, in bin Laden’s view, we in the West, and especially in America, were all so afraid to die that we lacked the will even to stand up for ourselves and defend our degenerate way of life.
Bin Laden was never reticent or coy in laying out this assessment of the United States. In an interview on CNN in 1997, he declared that “the myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims” when the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan. That the Muslim fighters in Afghanistan would almost certainly have failed if not for the arms supplied to them by the United States did not seem to enter into the lesson he drew from the Soviet defeat. In fact, in an interview a year earlier he had belittled the United States as compared with the Soviet Union. “The Russian soldier is more courageous and patient than the U.S. soldier,” he said then. Hence, “Our battle with the United States is easy compared with the battles in which we engaged in Afghanistan.”
Becoming still more explicit, bin Laden wrote off the Americans as cowards. Had Reagan not taken to his heels in Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983? And had not Clinton done the same a decade later when only a few American Rangers were killed in Somalia, where they had been sent to participate in a “peacekeeping” mission? Bin Laden did not boast of this as one of his victories, but a State Department dossier charged that al Qaeda had trained the terrorists who ambushed the American servicemen. (The ugly story of what happened to us in Somalia was told in the film version of Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down, which reportedly became Saddam Hussein’s favorite movie.)
Bin Laden summed it all up in a third interview he gave in 1998:
After leaving Afghanistan the Muslim fighters headed for Somalia and prepared for a long battle thinking that the Americans were like the Russians. The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized, more than before, that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat.
Naturally, they believed him. He wouldn’t lie would he? So America simply had to respond to bin Laden’s trash talk by showing the world that we are one tough mofo of a superpower that would invade any country that looked at us sideways. Never mind that bin Laden was full of shit about everything and that 9/11 would only succeed if we did exactly what we ended up doing. Incensed by his taunts, the administration rose up like an angry giant and began to flail about incoherently. That’ll show him who’s boss.
And after everything that’s happened since, Bush still believes it. From March of 2006:
Ours is an enemy which has embraced an ideology — an ideology of hatred, an ideology that is totalitarian in nature: they decide if you can worship and how you worship; they decide whether or not your children can go to school; they decide this, they decide that. They stand exactly the opposite of the United States of America. They have expressed their tactics for the world to see. They believe that those of us living in democracies are weak, and flaccid. It’s just a matter of time, they believe, if they continue to exert pressure that we will retreat from the world. That’s what they want.
The vaunted neo-conservative intellectuals have a simplistic, shoolyard view of the world based on what appears to be a very simplistic, schoolyard psychology that very much appealed to the boy-man that had been installed in the white house when bin Laden struck on 9/11. What serendipity! It is this puerile psychological misfire that united them with the feverish one handed typists of the 101st keyboarders — all threats, no matter how small or insignificant at the time, must be met with crude brute force lest someone taunt you about your small cojones. The real threat is the appearance of weakness.
The interesting thing about this, of course, is that very few of these people have ever put any of that into practice in their own lives — this belief exists in an abstract realm of fantasy — a pageant to be performed by others. (When you read Podhoretz’s piece you can’t help but be struck by all the vainglorious pride he takes in the physical courage of others.) Yet they also need to maintain a sort of religious fiction about themselves as being purveyors of democracy and freedom — concepts that don’t ordinarily lend themselves to barbaric message sending.
And that is how we found ourselves invading and occupying (and killing and torturing) to prove we are good and they are evil. And it’s why with every failure, every misstep, every hypocrisy and war crime, this braindead macho policy makes America far more vulnerable today than we were on 9/11. This mistaken belief that bin Laden attacked us because he thought we were weak — has made us weak. Virtually the entire American political establishment got punked by Osama bin Laden’s trash talking and they still don’t get it. With every impotent “message” of toughness we send, the more we play into his hands.
I write a lot about tribal identity, specifically conservative tribal identity, and I think it’s an issue we need to think about in order to understand how our politics really work. Mostly, I have felt throughout my adult life, since Reagan anyway, that I didn’t have much of a tribe, certainly not a political tribe. The left has been defined for so many years by the exaggerated cartoon image created by the wingnuts that it’s often been difficult to even admit you are a liberal, much less publicly identify and congregate with others explicitly on that basis. You’d pick an issue or a candidate, maybe. You’d speak in a sort of code. But you rarely gathered in one place as liberals or revel joyously in calling yourself one.
That’s changing. Last night I saw Laughing Liberally here in LA and I now think that for the first time in a long time people are willing to assume the mantle and be proud liberals for its own sake. This virtual bloggy thing of ours is translating into actual human interaction. And that means we can change our politics.
Granted, LA is a liberal town so it’s not shocking that you could gather an auditorium full of people for political comedy. But there was more to it than that. There was a celebratory vibe in the air — and a very nice feeling of explicit liberal solidarity based on our shared worldview.
A couple of observations:
Lieberman is tremendously unpopular but Dem bashing in general is not as popular as it used to be among liberals. We’re starting to take ownership of the party, I think. Good for us.
People are far more aware of the details of current political intrigue than I realized. I’m assuming this is because of the blogosphere and Air America (the LA station that carries it heavily promoted this event.) Also good for us.
If I have one request of the comedians on this tour, all of whom were great, it would be that they start thinking right now about some John McCain jokes. It’s never to early to start the political ridicule. Indeed, we need to get going on all the potential GOP candidates. The Republicans are probably funding an entire think tank study on how to ritually humiliate ours.
Laughing Liberally is great fun. I hope they are able to expand this tour and take it to some places where it liberals really need the laughs. But I have to say that I’m grateful to them for bringing it here and offering all of us Hollywood Libs (who, along with Boston and San Francisco, all the red state conservatives blame for the destruction of civilization as we know it) a chance to congregate and laugh our asses off about politics. Everybody needs to get together with their tribe once in a while, see each other face to face and share the same space. It feels good. We should do it more often.
Laughing Liberally will be at Yearly Kos in Vegas and then in Boston. Go see it if you can.
NB: The following was transcribed verbatim from an actual videotape found in the tape library of Heather Donahue, the noted documentary filmmaker. Hullabaloo regrets the occasionally coarse language, but we’ve decided to retain it so that the full extent of the unfortunate condition into which one of our regular correspondents seems to have sunk will become clear.
All too clear, alas.
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
Tristero, s’up?
I’m feeling a little weird right now. I don’t feel so good.
What’s the matter? You drop that tab of Sunshine I know you’ve been bogartin’ since ’67? (laughs)
Yup. Looks like he’s actually gonna get on tv and propose a constitutional ban on marriages because he doesn’t like the biology of the people getting married.
Doesn’t that strike you as completely, like utterly, in-fucking-sane????
No, tristero, it doesn’t. Oh, it’s not like I don’t support gay marriage or something. “Course I do, ‘course I do. Everyone does. I mean everyone, except Bush and those idiots. It’s just that there are entirely rational reasons why Bush is doing this.
What??? Don’t you get it? The day after tomorrow, Fred Phelps will be officially no longer half the kook that any member of Lamda will suddenly be. Sure Phelps’s is clearly clinically manic, no one likes him (at least not publicly) but don’t you see, his delusions are closer to the unambiguously expressed direction the president of the United States wants for America than anyone interested in providing gays with civil rights.
And don’t you see what’s gonna happen?? After tomorrow, it’s duck season on gays, lesbians, and the transgendered. People will die, people are gonna die! Good people will die, smart people, people who are loved, and who are raising great familes, all because tomorrow the president of the United States is gonna endorse writing into the Constitution, the Constitution! for crissakes, that gays, lesbians, and transgenders can’t legally marry. That is absolutely insane! Do you realize what would happen if they passed that abomination?
Okay, tristero, hold on, calm down, okay, calm do…
I can’t calm down! Look, you know the right just as well as I do. They’re unbelievably sneaky bastards. They pretend they’re anti-abortion, but they’re really anti-contraception, and that’s not even it – they’re really anti-sex except with a government license. But that’s not all of it, either. Look at Santorum, he thinks he can tell even a married couple how to fuck in their own bedroom. These people are flat out crazy perverts.
So y’gotta wonder, what are they hiding? What aren’t they talking about when it comes to this amendment? You think this is just about gays? Well yes it is, my God, the violence. And think how’d they suffer if this thing passed!
Dude, shut up! I’m trying t’ tell you…
No, wait, these people, these rightwingers oh, they got lotsa “biological criteria,” and not just gender fetishes, over what makes a proper marriage. This don’t stop with homosexuality.
A while back, Atrios caught the Washington Times expressing “concern” or “distress” over blacks and whites having sex. And you know about Bob Jones’ University notorious policy to prohibit “interracial” dating, like they’ll ever permit it even it’s no longer an official ban. Oh yeah, there’s a lot of people on the right, the very same folks deeply worried about women having sex with each other, who are also deeply concerned about the numerous cultural problems flowing from the spreading practice of “miscegenation.” After all, until quite recently, black/white marriages weren’t recognized everywhere in the US. So, there will be no reason why the US can’t revisit the reasoning behind the ban and extend the purview of the anti-marriage amendment.
But tristero, will you just shut u…
But that isn’t all. Many people seriously worried about gay marriage are also majorly upset about the moral issues around abortion. The question of the woman’s culpability is a wrenching one for them, and most of them won’t talk about what they really think about it. But other groups will. The “christian” Reconstructionists – some of the friendly folks behind intelligent design Creationism- theyll talk about it. A woman who has had an abortion is a murderer.
Should murderers in a Christian society be permitted to marry? Why? Marriage is a holy sacrament, y’know, it’s not just a fucking piece of paper giving you and your spouse legal rights. You befoul the sanctity of marriage when you permit murderers to marry! The question for these people is not whether a murderer should marry but whether a woman who murders her own child should be permitted to live. The Bible says you don’t suffer a witch to live. Ditto baby killers.
Okay, this isn’t funny anymore, you’re starting to seriously scare me. Let me explain…
Not yet. America is, as Dobson and his ilk are always so eager to remind us, a Christian country from the beginning. And Christian it must stay. No more Jewish/Christian marriages. Just as important, it’s becoming time to address the serious problems that Christians have with so-called Catholics…
And what about sluts and whores? Seriously, should non-virgin women marry? Other cultures have problems with that, why should the US condone second-rate marriages? The anti-marriage amendment gives us a chance at keeping marriage only between virgins.
Oh, crissakes, that’s silly, it could never happen in the US.
You’re right, it can’t, because we don’t have an anti-marriage amendment yet. That’s why it can’t happen here – it’s not because we’re “more sensible” people than the Afghans under the Taliban and wouldn’t permit it – we’re the most religious First World country in the world, y’know. It’s simply because legally it is impossible and that’s the only reason why it can’t happen here. But if there is an anti-marriage amendment, it can happen here and, if history is any guide, it will.
Okay, tristero, you done for now? Good! It’s time to get back to Planet Reality, my friend. Look, I am as worried as you are, but let’s just think about what’s actually gonna happen, not what could maybe happen. Everyone, but everyone agrees on this, that the chances of Congress passing a constitutional amendment that bans marriages are exactly zero. You’re hallucinating if you think this will lead to wholesale, violent oppression of the Jews. Oh, sorry, I meant, gays, just ignore the slip.
Are you serious?? That’s supposed to make me feel better? Has 5 years of Bush so warped your sense of the truly bizarre that you don’t see this as flat out surreal, as in Dali Persistence of Memory surreal? The fact that the amendment has no chance of passing, THAT’S supposed to make me feel that what’s gonna happen is LESS psychotic? What’s he doin it for then? Huh? That just makes it even more insane, not less. What the hell is going on? Has everyone lost their mind?
Tristero, you know very well what’s going on. Bush is proposing the anti-marriage amendment, even though he knows it won’t pass, simply to help elect Republicans in the fall.
Ahhh! My God, my head, my head! Did I hear that right. Are you telling me, let me get this straight…
Are you telling me, and this is not a joke, man, tell the truth, I’m starting to lose it big time here… You’re saying the reason Bush is gonna do his best to act like the Man From Fucking La Mancha tomorrow is because he desperately needs to make sure every modern-day witchburner and every American Nazi comes out and votes Republican in the fall elections or the party falls from power? I don’t believe I heard you say that.
Is that really what GOP power depends on, the white supremacists and religious fanatics? That can’t be, that just can’t be…this can’t be happenin…
Wait a minute…y’know, come to think of it, that’s it. This really is all too crazy to be real, y’know, mebbe, I really did eat that Sunshine after all, haven’t seen it in a while…
Yup, that’s it! I’m tripping! This is just a bad trip! None of it’s real, none of it, the anti-marriage amendment, and your crazy reasoning, why you’re just a hallucination, a hologram of my imagination. You’re gone, I can’t see you anymore! Oh, thank God.
(laughs with relief) A bad trip, just a verrrrrrrrrry bad trip. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It’s just a bad trip. It’s not gonna happen.
