Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe used to boast that within one year of his coming out and entering the heavy leather gay scene, he had seen every kind of deviance, fetish, and perversion there was to see. Nothing could shock him.
Got it now? That’s right, the Bush administration, in cahoots with the gas and oil industries, has systematically defrauded the US government. To the tune of $700 million for gas royalties alone.
Can’t get your head around the leaders of a US administration conspiring to bilk the US government of more than 2/3 of a billion bucks? Neither can I. But that’s exactly what’s going on.
What Bush’s henchmen are doing makes jamming a finger inside another man’s penis look like a gentle caress.
(Revised shortly after posting to correct a bad typo on the amount defrauded ($700 million not billion), which required editing out some inappropriate examples. An apology: I read the article in the print edition of the Times and misread the amount. An inexcusable error of fact which I will make every effort not to repeat. During my career as a blogger, I haven’t made too many of these careless mistakes -literally around a handful, but if someone has kept track, and I’ve made more, I’ll issue another correction. Nevertheless each one I’ve learned about has been quickly corrected and a straightforward apology has been offered. Thanks much to the readers who found this one.)
There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times.
What kind of courage does it take, for mercy’s sake? The majority of the American people think the war in Iraq is a mistake and we should get out. The majority (65 percent) of the American people want single-payer health care and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The majority (86 percent) favor raising the minimum wage. The majority (60 percent) favor repealing Bush’s tax cuts, or at least those that go only to the rich. The majority (66 percent) want to reduce the deficit not by cutting domestic spending, but by reducing Pentagon spending or raising taxes.
The majority (77 percent) think we should do “whatever it takes” to protect the environment. The majority (87 percent) think big oil companies are gouging consumers and would support a windfall profits tax. That is the center, you fools. Whom are you afraid of?
I listen to people like Rahm Emanuel superciliously explaining elementary politics to us clueless naifs outside the Beltway (“First, you have to win elections”). Can’t you even read the damn polls?
Here’s a prize example by someone named Barry Casselman, who writes, “There is an invisible civil war in the Democratic Party, and it is between those who are attempting to satisfy the defeatist and pacifist left base of the party and those who are attempting to prepare the party for successful elections in 2006 and 2008.”
Oh come on, people — get a grip on the concept of leadership. Look at this war — from the lies that led us into it, to the lies they continue to dump on us daily…
Bush, Cheney and Co. will continue to play the patriotic bully card just as long as you let them. War brings out the patriotic bullies. In World War I, they went around kicking dachshunds because they were “German dogs.” They did not, however, go around kicking German shepherds. The minute someone impugns your patriotism for opposing this war, turn on them like a snarling dog and explain what loving your country really means. Or eviscerate them with wit (look up Mark Twain on the war in the Philippines). Or point out the latest in the endless “string of bad news.”
Do not sit there cowering and pretending the only way to win is as Republican-lite. If the Washington-based party can’t get up and fight, we’ll find someone who can.
“Karl Rove only has a White House job and a security clearance because President Bush has refused to keep his promise to fire anyone involved in revealing the identity of an undercover CIA operative,” said Dean. “Rove’s political standing gets him an invitation to address Republicans in Washington, DC today, but it doesn’t give him the credibility to question Democrats’ commitment to national security. The truth is, Karl Rove breached our national security for partisan gain and that is both unpatriotic and wrong.”
When Will The Times Stop Kowtowing To Creationists?
by tristero
Judith Shulevitz in tomorrow’s Times Book Review continues the utterly disgraceful NY Times coverage of evolution and “intelligent design” creationism. Shulevitz lets some creationist from Discovery rail against Judge Jones’ brilliant decision in Kitzmiller v. Dover for somehow imposing his religious opinions on others. You’d never guess that during the trial, this very same judge listened patiently for hours while creationist “experts” demonstrated from their own words that “intelligent design” was just a new phrase for the same old creationism and that in fact these same “experts” had repeatedly stated that “intelligent design” was invented to bring religious ideas back into public schools. She neglected to mention that one of these brilliant “scholars” was so ignorant of what science is, he asserted that by his definition, astrology would be considered a science. And you’d never guess that some of the instigators of the “intelligent design” creationism initiative in Dover were so deceitful in their answers and behavior that the judge made a point of declaring calling them out and out liars.
And then there are Shulevitz’s mistakes. She writes:
Darwin…realized that if he were to turn his theories into a credible science, he’d have to avoid ascribing a higher merit to those who won out in the battle for life.
But earlier Shulevitz (mis-)described Darwin’s theory of natural selection as “the continual culling of less fit forms of life that drives evolution forward,” ie, precisely the kind of oversimplified, easily mistaken, Spencerian formulation of evolution Darwin was trying to avoid.
Shulevitz then discusses Michael Ruse’s contention that there’s a quasi-religious movement among scientists called “evolutionism,” which apparently is a “partly secularized postmillennialist” movement. The problem with this is that as far as I know of no scientist when discussing either evolution or their thoughts about how evolution might – repeat might – impact ethics, politics, and culture has ever tried to bring discussions of when the Son of God will return (and what we need to do to hasten that happy day) into the discussion. It doesn’t work, even as metaphor, as Shulevitz suggests.
No matter. Shulevitz nevertheless accepts the existence of an evolutionism religious cult:
[T]he notion that evolution equals progress still runs through many evolutionary theorists’ works and public statements, giving them, at times, a curiously spiritual feel.
But she fails to provide a single example. I’ve read Ruse’s The Evolution-Creation Struggle, the book she discusses, and I can’t remember detecting a “spiritual feel” behind any of the remarks Ruse describes as “evolutionistic.” And I recall being quite unimpressed with the notion that there was any coherent religious or philosophical system in the extra-scientific musings he quoted, even from such known firebrands as Dawkins. It all seemed more ad hoc than “spriitual.”
Finally, Shulevitz winds up saying, sure, teach science in science class – good for her! But were it not for the IDiots and their tomfoolery, that would go without saying. And then:
Teach evolution in biology class and evolutionism in religion class, along with creationism, deism and all the other cosmologies that float unexamined through our lives.
But Judith, how can you teach “evolutionism” as a religion if there is no such thing, outside of Ruse’s dubious ruminations?!?
In short, Shulevitz, and the Times in general, continue to mis-cast the battle over teaching “intelligent design” creationism as one between two sides, religion or science. This mischaracterization persists despite considerable evidence that it is simply not the case that this is a religion/science clash of civilizations. Rather, it really is a fight between a handful of well-funded lunatics clamoring to make their particular religion – and no one else’s – a State religion and the rest of us, who know that that is one of the stupidest fucking ideas ever.
(I’ll leave the interesting subject of whether creationism is a fit subject even for a religion class to another post. For now, I’ll just say that in some overlooked testimony during Kitzmiller, a Christian theologian and scholar cast considerable doubt on creationism’s viability as an intelligible theology. In short, creationism is to theology as astrology is to astronomy: not worth the time and effort to study. )
So Tweety introduced a new feature today called the “Hardball Hotshots” with Joe Scarborough, Tucker Carlson and Rita Cosby — two wingnuts and a babbling tabloid airhead. They all agreed that bin Laden was parroting Michael Moore, John Kerry and Ted Kennedy in his tape yesterday.
No apologies. In fact, quite the opposite. Chris did say that he’d been misunderstood, but he didn’t elaborate. They all agreed that it was going to help the president.
(Remind me. Whose side is bin Laden supposed to be on again?)
They also agreed that Hillary was incredibly offensive with her plantation statement. Rita was particularly shocked because she’s from the south. No comment yet from anyone in the media about all the prominent Republican references to the “Democratic Plantation.” Perhaps those comments aren’t offensive because it only refers to African Americans who are supposed to be too stupid to know which party better serves their interests. Hillary was beyond the pale. She accused white southern males of running a plantation. In Limbaugh Nation, that’s racist you see.
A commenter alerted me to this article in The American Prospect that explains why the Democrats picked Tim Kaine to give the Democratic response at the State of the Union: he speaks in religious moral terms. Good to know.
But the article is interesting because it profiles a new and influential polling and analysis group that is trying to change the way the Democrats look at the electorate. And as far as I can tell, the Democrats (or maybe just the author) are taking the wrong lessons from them.
Here’s the story:
In April 2005, Nordhaus left his job at the opinion research firm Evans/McDonough Company to start, along with Shellenberger, an American branch of the Canadian market research behemoth Environics, which specializes in the study of consumer behavior, right down to the level of “neighborhood lifestyle segmentation.” Though such data are not collected on behalf of political figures, it’s the kind of information political operatives often use to slice and dice the electorate into ever thinner pieces. Similar data allowed Republicans in 2004 to make sure they targeted last-minute calls and fliers to domestic SUV-drivers, subscribers to hunting magazines, and women who watch Will and Grace. American Environics intended to use the detailed data its parent company had collected since 1992 for a different purpose, however: to challenge progressive interest-group orthodoxies and the progressive movement itself.
In the great debate about how Democrats can stage a comeback (beyond simply waiting for the coming Republican implosion that never seems to arrive), American Environics rejected some of the more popular recommendations out there. Rather than focusing on reframing the Democratic message, as Berkeley linguistics and cognitive science professor George Lakoff has recommended, or on redoubling Democratic efforts to persuade Americans to become economic populists, as another school of thought suggests, the American Environics team argued that the way to move voters on progressive issues is to sometimes set aside policies in favor of values. By focusing on “bridge values,” they say, progressives can reach out to constituents of opportunity who share certain fundamental beliefs, even if the targeted parties don’t necessarily share progressives’ every last goal. In that assessment, Shellenberger and Nordhaus are representative of an increasingly influential school of thought within the Democratic Party.
Nothing too revolutionary there, you say? Well, no, when described in that predictable way. We all love values. Values are, in fact, the basis of all poltiics. What a good idea. Let’s talk values. The article also (for inexplicable reasons) spends a great deal of time discussing the data produced by Stanley Greenberg who, like clockwork, interviews a bunch of rural voters in Arkansas and finds out that they care more about gay marriage than putting food on the table. Which means we will lose because of values and we need to get some. (Those of us who disagree with the rural Arkansans are assumed to have no values, apparently.)
But the article skews that way for reasons that have little to do with the study. Here’s what Environics actually found out and it’s quite interesting:
Looking at the data from 1992 to 2004, Shellenberger and Nordhaus found a country whose citizens are increasingly authoritarian while at the same time feeling evermore adrift, isolated, and nihilistic. They found a society at once more libertine and more puritanical than in the past, a society where solidarity among citizens was deteriorating, and, most worrisomely to them, a progressive clock that seemed to be unwinding backward on broad questions of social equity. Between 1992 and 2004, for example, the percentage of people who said they agree that “the father of the family must be the master in his own house” increased ten points, from 42 to 52 percent, in the 2,500-person Environics survey. The percentage agreeing that “men are naturally superior to women” increased from 30 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile, the fraction that said they discussed local problems with people they knew plummeted from 66 percent to 39 percent. Survey respondents were also increasingly accepting of the value that “violence is a normal part of life” — and that figure had doubled even before the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks.
Lumping specific survey statements like these together into related groups, Nordhaus and Shellenberger arrived at what they call “social values trends,” such as “sexism,” “patriotism,” or “acceptance of flexible families.” But the real meaning of those trends was revealed only by plugging them into the “values matrix” — a four-quadrant plot with plenty of curving arrows to show direction, which is then overlaid onto voting data. The quadrants represent different worldviews. On the top lies authority, an orientation that values traditional family, religiosity, emotional control, and obedience. On the bottom, the individuality orientation encompasses risk-taking, “anomie-aimlessness,” and the acceptance of flexible families and personal choice. On the right side of the scale are values that celebrate fulfillment, such as civic engagement, ecological concern, and empathy. On the left, there’s a cluster of values representing the sense that life is a struggle for survival: acceptance of violence, a conviction that people get what they deserve in life, and civic apathy. These quadrants are not random: Shellenberger and Nordaus developed them based on an assessment of how likely it was that holders of certain values also held other values, or “self-clustered.”
Over the past dozen years, the arrows have started to point away from the fulfillment side of the scale, home to such values as gender parity and personal expression, to the survival quadrant, home to illiberal values such as sexism, fatalism, and a focus on “every man for himself.” Despite the increasing political power of the religious right, Environics found social values moving away from the authority end of the scale, with its emphasis on responsibility, duty, and tradition, to a more atomized, rage-filled outlook that values consumption, sexual permissiveness, and xenophobia. The trend was toward values in the individuality quadrant.
No kidding. Is the culture growing more coarse? Check. Cruel? check. Nihilisitic? check. Xenophobic? check. Consumption worshipping? check. Sexist? check. Rage filled? check. Hmmmm.
Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the skull and bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?”
This is a very revealing portrait of what’s happening in America and it explains some things about why the right is so successful. And it’s the opposite of what everybody says it is. It isn’t because they’ve become more moral and religious. It’s because they’ve fostered and exploited extremism, nihilism and cruelty. After all, if it was the libertine culture of “Brokeback Mountain” or “unwed motherhood” or (gasp) abortion that was creating this shift, you’d think we would have benefitted, not them. For all their crowing about traditional values, it’s the right that has embraced decadence, sadism, vice and corruption.
Yes, it’s a trend. It started years ago when the feminist movement decided that their best friends were going to be German shepherds. You know. So that’s — well, it’s true. You go to the right airports and you can see it.
I have little doubt that most of the people who listen to Rush also believe that they are good practicing Christian conservatives. And many Christian conservatives probably don’t listen to him. But they listen to this:
You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it. It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war.
How about group marriage? Or marriage between daddies and little girls? Or marriage between a man and his donkey? Anything allegedly linked to civil rights will be doable, and the legal underpinnings for marriage will have been destroyed.” Now, that’s more or less a prophecy. Not a divine prophecy, but a prediction.
Notice how Limbaugh and the preachers pander to the depraved imagination? It’s not religious values these people are selling. They are selling a brutal, domineering, degenerate culture, making their listeners and viewers wallow in it, plumbing the depths of the subconscious, drawing forth Goyaesque images of bestiality and violence and death. That’s a feature of some religions, to be sure, but it’s not the nice upright Christian morality everybody’s pretending it is.
If the culture is careening into a crude, dog-eat-dog corrupt “Pottersville” it’s because the greedheads and the juvenile authoritarian thugs, whether in street gangs or talk radio or K Street, have taken it over. And it is hard for liberals to counter this because our bedrock values include tolerance, free expression and personal autonomy and that enables this decadent turn in many ways. But let’s make no mistake, it is only on the right that purveyors of brutal, sadistic, depraved political discourse are welcomed into the houses, offices and beds of the nation’s political leadership.
I’m not sure what the answer to this is, but I know that this is where the real political problem for Democrats lies. So, perhaps we can stop bullshitting ourselves that we can solve this problem by speaking in rightwing approved religious language and pulling our punches on abortion. That is not the real reason the right is winning and we won’t win that way either. Religion is cover for these people. Rush Limbaugh is the guiding spirit of the Republican Party.
LIMBAUGH: And these American prisoners of war — have you people noticed who the torturers are? Women! The babes! The babes are meting out the torture…You know, if you look at — if you, really, if you look at these pictures, I mean, I don’t know if it’s just me, but it looks just like anything you’d see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage. Maybe I’m — yeah. And get an NEA grant for something like this. I mean, this is something that you can see on stage at Lincoln Center from an NEA grant, maybe on Sex in the City — the movie. I mean, I don’t — it’s just me.
When Limbaugh came under fire for those vulgar comments, the leading lights of the Republican party quickly came to his defense.
Rush’s angry, frustrated critics discount how hard it is to make an outrageous charge against him stick. But, we listeners have spent years with him, we know him, and trust him. Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the “facts.” We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her. For millions of us, David Brock is firing blanks against a bulletproof target.
— Kate O’Beirne is Washington Editor for National Review.
Figure out how to deal with that and we might be able to make some headway.
It’s a contradiction in terms. Comparing liberals like Michael Moore to Islamic fundamentalist terrorists is calumny in every possible way. Islamic fundamentalism is the antithesis of liberalism. It’s not funny and it’s not cute when influential pundits try to make points by comparing the two. I’m sick of it.
Tell Chris Matthews you want an apology, by dropping by this board and leaving your remarks. He’ll read it. MSNBC has been getting an earful.
Kevin asks liberal bloggers to respond to a hypothetical and I will cheerfully do so, although my argument won’t please Kevin, I think:
For the sake of argument, let’s assume that we had pretty good intelligence telling us that a bunch of al-Qaeda leaders were in the house we bombed. And let’s also assume that we did indeed kill al-Masri and several other major al-Qaeda leaders. Finally, let’s assume that the 18 civilians killed in the attack were genuinely innocent bystanders with no connection to terrorists.
Question: Under those assumptions, was the attack justified? I think the answer is pretty plainly yes, but I’d sure like to see the liberal blogosphere discuss it. And for those who answer no, I’m curious: under what circumstances would such an attack be justified?
My answer, which will surprise no one who knows my writing, is that what Kevin has written is so loaded that it is utterly incoherent as a spur to an honest discussion of terrorism and what to do about it. The only appropriate way to answer is ask the questions that should be asked in the first place, the ones that are being sidestepped. To explain:
Although it seems there are two questions here, there are exactly no real questions being asked. In fact, Kevin simply has crafted a blunt accusatory phrased as a question which can only elicit one possible answer: his. He’s really saying, roughly, “You’d be out of your mind not to bomb them, even if 18 innocents died. Thousands, if not millions, of lives, will be spared.”
The question, “Was the attack justified?” is not meant to be seriously disputed and a little bit of thought will show that it never can be. Let’s just say you answer no and with tremendous eloquence you discuss the morality of it, invoking not only the Bible, but the Bhagavad Gita and a few scientific studies of moral dilemmas. It’s all meaningless, for all Kevin needs to do is follow up with, “Okay, let’s say the people in that building were putting the finishing touches on a plan to nuke Boston. Would you now say it’s justified?” And if that doesn’t change your mind, Kevin can simply continue to up the ante – in the house, say, was enough Chemical W to obliterate the Midwest for generations. Eventually, even you will be forced to abandon your objections.
But what happens if you agree with Kevin that the attack was justified? Well, an opponent can easily play this game, too. Simply respond with the opposite extension of the hypothetical. “Okay, let’s say those 18 killed included your Mom, your Dad, your brother, two sisters, and your favorite cousins. Was it still justified to attack that house?” And sooner or later you will end up saying, no it wasn’t justified.
And around and around you’ll go, fine tuning the hypothetical to provide you with exactly the answer you want. It only looks like a moral dilemma but really, it isn’t. A moral dilemma happens in the real world, not in hypothetical situations. Kevin’s hypothetical is a setup. In fact, and this really should be patently obvious, it isn’t even Kevin’s hypothetical, but the Bush administration’s, a hypothetical they are asserting actually occurred. And while they’re marketing it as likely fact, this situation doesn’t resemble genuine moral dilemmas I know, which are far more complex than a carefully constructed hypothetical which this clearly is. In other words, the story of the attack and its justification is a lie.
The question Kevin asked is precisely the one Bush wants us to ask. They have composed this “justification” for the attack which they expect will meet the minimum standards necessary for some dispassionate observers to conclude that yes, it just might be worth it to have unfortunately killed all those innocent civilians. But the closer you look at the story, how it developed, how it’s being described, the more bogus it seems. For example:
Mysteriously, the bodies of the targeted terrorists were removed before they could be identified. The US government, quite skillfully, has refused to confirm or deny the latest Pakistani story which originally contended it was al Zawahiri but now it’s a mad bomber genius, al Qaeda’s own Unabomber, who was – ever so ironically – blown to bits. Surely, that’s worth 18 innocent lives, yes?
And that, plus other peculiarities, is why I don’t believe a word of it. It’s too pat, too perfect a concretization of a carefully crafted arm chair accusatory skewed towards only one right answer – Bush’s – and as details emerge it can be easily adjusted to make that answer even more inevitable. And tellingly, the structure of the Pakistan assertion combined with a US refusal to confirm easily enables the story to be disowned a few months from now, when no one’s paying much attention.
Am I saying that there is no way in hell the story put out by the Pakistanis and the Bushies could be true? What I’m saying is this: the story of 18 innocents sacrificed to eliminate an Evil Bombing Genius is so perfectly tailored to fit the moral theorizing of amateur philosophers rather than any possibly real conflict with al Qaeda that it resembles more the fake Jessica Lynch heroism stories than the real Lynch story.
This is merely Bush propaganda at its most cynical and crude. Frankly, I’m amazed that Kevin asked precisely the question Bush wanted us to ask, a question posed only so that outrage over American bombing of civilians – a war crime if deliberate – would dissipate. I’m also amazed, in fact saddened, that PZ Myers didn’t realize this was was a con and chose to respond as if it were a serious question designed to “engage” a debate about national security and its tradeoffs. PZ didn’t realize the fundamental bogosity of the question.
But while Kevin may be naive when it comes to accepting the terms of the Bush administration for debate – and he is, as his pre-invasion support for the war shows – he is no Bushite. In fact he is probably after a deeper question here: How should al Qaeda be confronted? What techniques and strategies will not only neutralize al Qaeda’s ability to strike but eliminate al Qaeda-ism as a serious danger? That’s a question I’d like not only liberal bloggers to discuss; I’d like the government of the United States to address it directly instead of spewing an endless stream of third rate propaganda intended only to make it impossible for their domestic political opponents to object to their cockmamie plans.
Perhaps Kevin is also posing a meta-question here: How can liberals construct narratives that are rhetorically as slippery as the rightwing, like this one about the botched bombing? That is another very good question. Personally, I lean towards crisply telling the truth no matter where the chips land. I’m not sure much more is required to bring down Bush and Bushism for good. It would be nice if a political party did that in a consistent fashion, just as an experiment some time.
(updated immediately after posting to fix grammar and clarify some subsidiary points.)
When you’re asked to donate to the Democratic party, just remember that your dollars are paying the salaries of the idiots who decided that this man was the appropriate person to deliver the response to Bush’s 2006 State of the Union address.
Don’t get me wrong. There are some great Americans in the Democratic party – Dean, Kerry, Pelosi, Obama – make your own list. But something is seriously – major seriously – askew with the plumbing behind the scenes. And Dean, even as head of the party, won’t be able to fix it. In short, Daou’s an optimist.
What to do? I suggest donating to another organization that recognizes exactly how serious a danger Bushism represents an organization that’s shown they will fight tooth and nail against it. I’m suggesting that such an organization could then use its financial and electoral clout to demand the Democrats fire every last strategist, consultant, and adviser who was involved in the inexcusable losses of the 2002 and 2004 elections and hire new people who are prepared to implement a winning strategy.
What NOT to do? Don’t forgo political donations – give them to groups that you think matter. Don’t drop out and refuse to vote – every vote counts. Most importantly, don’t, for a moment, hold on to the delusion that the Democrats, as presently run, are a viable national second party. They’re not, and we’re going to have to work like hell to create a national party that can confront the Republicans and marginalize the extreme right.
One personal note. I truly hate having to blog about this issue. I’m no purist, I’m not a Naderite, a radical. I’m a moderate liberal. I recognize that a national strategy opposed to Bush can’t possibly address many of the issues I care about. I understand that I will inevitably disagree with positions taken to attract a more conservative voter than myself.
But what the Democratic advisers are doing isn’t wise strategy designed to appeal to the center. It’s sheer stupidity and incoherence. And if bloggers don’t speak out – loudly – then no one will. Although our influence is genuinely trivial, it is not zero. And so we must protest in the hopes that someone, somewhere, will read what we say and perhaps try in some small way to turn the Democrats around so that the US can once again become a two party democracy.
