Attaturk says Andrew Sullivan is taking criticism for saying:
Instapundit’s coverage suggests that he believes that the erroneously-sourced Newsweek story is actually more offensive and important than what happened at Abu Ghraib.
I don’t know about Instapundit; I’ve been awfully busy watching dust motes above my monitor and haven’t had a minute to spare reading his world renowned blog. However,as I note below, The Blog Of The Year has expressed this exact view quite explicitly:
I really think that calling Newsweek’s blunder “the press’s Abu Ghraib” is unfair to the low-lifes who carried out the Abu Ghraib abuses. After all, they didn’t even hurt anyone, let alone kill them. And the people they abused were almost certainly terrorists. One can’t say the same for the people who were murdered in the riots that foreseeably followed Newsweek’s story.
So everybody is rightly quoting the liar Myers (he must be since his version of events is completely at odds with the new “Newsweak Lied” meme), based upon Kit Seelye’s article in the NY Times. And there is some discussion of Lawrence DiRita’s intemperate remark as quoted in Evan Thomas’ article:
Told of what the NEWSWEEK source said, DiRita exploded, “People are dead because of what this son of a bitch said. How could he be credible now?”
But, what I haven’t seen (and, granted, I may have missed it) is the acknowledgement of what DiRita himself was quoted as saying in this AP report on Saturday:
“The nature of where these things occurred, how quickly they occurred, the nature of individuals who were involved in it, suggest that they may be organized events that are using this alleged allegation as a pretext for activity that was already planned,” said DiRita.
It wasn’t only Myers who gave this explanation, it was the now conveniently irate Pentagon spokesman as well. Maybe a reporter needs to ask him about this.
In Ohio, the Rev. Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church said at a gathering of 1,000 Patriot Pastors last week that the issues underscoring the filibuster fight transcend partisan politics.
“We’re not Democrats. We’re not Republicans. We’re Christocrats,” he declared.
Christocrats tend to vote exclusively Republican, however, because Jesus was very much against the capital gains tax.
Talking about inequality and social mobility, Ezra says:
I’ve little hope that we’ll address this, though. The overarching evils of vast inequality and the transcendent good of do-it-yourself mobility are such foundational philosophical tenets of America’s two parties that I can’t see either coming to recognize that the fix, such as one exists, might be the same for both. Indeed, while the Democratic party may be convincible simply because the solutions line up with our proposed programs, Republicans will, for good reason, never relinquish the strict dichotomy they’ve created between individual mobility and general equality. The belief that large social programs must be avoided because they tamp down on individual virtues stretches back to Hoover and Associationalism, it’s not going to be given up now.
As I have argued before,at some tedious length, it goes back further than that. It goes all the way back to the beginning of the Republic and relates very closely to our little “problem” with slavery. It might even be said that the whole concept of American individualism rests on the back of racism.
It was long held that government guarantees of equality meant that the wrong people would get things they did not deserve or could not handle. There have been many of “those people” over the years, but the concept originated with slaves and free African Americans. And the reason is that they, unlike virtually every other poor sub-group, had no economic support systems like churches and ethnic organizations and instead had to depend upon government programs. The face of government largesse was, for many people, black. The “welfare queen” was only the most modern description of a phenomenon that riled up certain citizens for a long, long time.
Individualism became part of the American ethos as much as an expression of racial superiority as personal virtue.
I really think that calling Newsweek’s blunder “the press’s Abu Ghraib” is unfair to the low-lifes who carried out the Abu Ghraib abuses. After all, they didn’t even hurt anyone, let alone kill them. And the people they abused were almost certainly terrorists. One can’t say the same for the people who were murdered in the riots that foreseeably followed Newsweek’s story.
Hindquarter, Powerline
Except, except…. Highpockets, here’s what your pal Lawrence DeRita had to say:
“The nature of where these things occurred, how quickly they occurred, the nature of individuals who were involved in it, suggest that they may be organized events that are using this alleged allegation as a pretext for activity that was already planned,” said DiRita.
No kidding.
(I’m not even going to address the ridiculous assertion that the Abu Ghraib prisoners were terrorists. He needs to do some homework on that subject. Suffice to say that repeating anything that the addlepated James Inhofe says is always a mistake.)
To any of us who were closely following the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo story last summer, this Koran in the toilet thing is old news. Really old news. I wrote a lot about General Geoffrey Ripper and the interrogation techniques down there, and in the course of reading all the informatin that was coming out about Gitmo at the time, it was glaringly obvious that religious desecration was on the menu. (Juan Cole points out in his post this morning that this may actually be a standard US military training technique.)
When the first four British detainees were released, they made some claims that sounded ridiculous. The stuff about desecration of the Koran hardly raised an eyebrow by comparison to the wildly improbable assertion that American women were rubbing menstrual blood all over detainees to get them to talk. How could you believe anything they said when they made up crazy shit like that, right? Right.
What’s so phony about the right wing explosion on this issue is that as Arthur Silber points out in this indispensible post, is that it’s not as if the Muslim world wasn’t already well aware of this practice. Detainees have been released and they have talked. As far back as December 2003, when Vanity Fair published David Rose’s expose of Guantanamo (sorry, not online), it was known that throughout the Muslim world, Gitmo was seen as an abomination. And it was known that practices in Guanmtanamo were creating more terrorism and more violence than they stopped:
One senior defense intelligence source gives a grim assessment of the camp’s backlash potential: “It’s an international public-relations disaster. Maybe the guy who goes into Gitmo does so as a farmer who got swept along and did very little. He’s going to come out a full-fledged jihadist. And for every detainee, I’d guess you create another 10 terrorists or supporters of terrorism.”
The miracle is that the riots didn’t come much sooner. Guantanamo is the greatest recruiting tool in the jihadist arsenal and our absurd insistence on keeping it going (even though it has long since been shown to be nothing more than a puerile expression of national rage) turns us from simple over-reactors into stubborn fascists and self-defeating idiots.
David Rose, in his recent book based upon the Vanity Fair reporting, called “Guantanamo: The War On Human Rights” says:
Across the middle east, those pictures of the newly-arrived detainees kneeling in the dirt in their shackles have become a trope for cartoonists and pamphleteers, a graphic rendition of oppression which speaks to millions of Muslims. The unjust suffering of families and individuals engendered by this aspect of “Operation Enduring Freedom” is sowing dragons’ teeth, turning moderates into fanatics determined to smite the west.
On Islamist websites and in the Arab press, Guantánamo is cited time and again as a rallying point for jihad, as a justification for creating more suicide “martyrs”.
This little item in Newsweak is a pretext for action against interrogation techniques that are already well known. Which is why the quasi retraction over the week-end is such a chickenshit display of cowardice on the part of Newsweak. This is old news to anybody who’s been paying attention. The jihadists know it, those of us following the story know it and the government certainly knows it. The riots last week in Afghanistan and now around the world are orchestrated to gin up support and their followers are already pissed off enough about this stuff to get with the program quite easily.
Of course, as Silber says, this is probably going to end up being just another scalping party. And until the mainstream media cares about being played and used, the shrill shrieking harpies of the right wing noise machine will continue to treat them like the lackeys they are … and make examples of some of them every once in a while to keep everybody in line.
This will teach the media to report any more stories about fun loving hijinks and calling them torture. The Blog of the Year is on to you, MSM killers.
This is the only source I find with this information, so maybe it’s not true; if it is, it’s amazing:
The Syrian government signed an agreement with New Bridge Strategies to improve its image in the American society, convince President Bush that it seeks good relations with his administration and is willing to be extremely flexible in its cooperation with the White House.
The company was selected specifically because its CEO (Joe Allbaugh) had close ties with Bush. Allbaugh was Bush’s Chief of Staff and Campaign Manager when Bush was the Governor of Texas. He managed his 2000 campaign and later became Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in charge of coordinating the public services and provide assistance to the victims of natural disasters.
I’m sure the fighting 101st keyboarders will will ensure that Allbaugh keeps his eyes open for all the WMD’s Saddam spirited into Syria before the war.
Allbaugh is extremely close to Junior. He was the third in the “Iron Triangle” with Rove and Hughes. Josh Marshall has reported how unseemly it is that he’s out there raking in huge bucks so soon after being in the administration anyway, particularly from the Iraq debacle which was never part of his portfolio. (He’s never been anything but a political hack.) But for him to be making big money lobbying for one of the officially proclaimed terrorist states while his good buddy is the president goes beyond the appearance of impropriety. For all the shrill caterwauling about liberals committing treason every other minute, this little deal really looks like it could be.
But IOKIYAR. It’s not like the guy went to a buddhist temple or had a haircut or anything.
Via Daniel Munz, who’s pinch hitting over at Ezra’s place, I see that my old pal “Mudcat” Saunders is offering some more good advice to Democrats:
“Bubba doesn’t call them illegal immigrants. He calls them illegal aliens. If the Democrats put illegal aliens in their bait can, we’re going to come home with a bunch of white males in the boat.”
The thing is, he’s absolutely right. To put together this great new populist revival everybody’s talking about, where we get the boys in the pick-up trucks to start voting their “self-interest,” we’re probably going to need to get up a new nativist movement to go along with it. That’s pretty much how populism has always been played in the past, particularly in the south. Certainly, you can rail against the moneyed elites, but there is little evidence that it will work unless you provide somebody on the bottom that the good ole boys can really stomp. As Jack Balkin wrote in this fascinating piece on populism and progressivism:
History teaches us that populism has recurring pathologies; it is especially important to recognize and counteract them. These dangers are particularly obvious to academics and other intellectual elites: They include fascism, nativism, anti-intellectualism, persecution of unpopular minorities, exaltation of the mediocre, and romantic exaggeration of the wisdom and virtue of the masses.
Is it any wonder that the right has been more successful in recently in inflaming the populist impulse in America? They are not squeamish about using just those pathologies — and only those pathologies — to gain populist credibility in spite of a blatant lack of populist policy.
Populism can have a very close relationship to fascism and totalitarianism. Indeed, it may be essential. Despite Dennis Prager’s confused blather, it wasn’t the intellectual elites who fueled the Nazi movement; the intellectuals were purged, just as they were purged by Stalin, by Pol Pot and by Mao during the “cultural revolution” in China. These are the extreme results of a certain populist strain — or at least the misuse of populist thinking among the people. That Mao and Stalin were commies has nothing to do with it. Populism, in its extreme form, is inherently hostile to intellectualism.
That is not to say that populism is evil. It is just another political philosophy that has its bad side, as every philosophy does. Balkin describes it in great depth, but here’s a capsulized version:
The dual nature of populism means that political participation is not something to be forced on the citizenry, nor are popular attitudes some sort of impure ore that must be carefully filtered, purified, and managed by a wise and knowing state. From a populist standpoint, such attempts at managerial purification are paternalistic. They typify elite disparagement and disrespect for popular attitudes and popular culture. Government should provide opportunities for popular participation when people seek it, and when they seek it, government should not attempt to divert or debilitate popular will. An energized populace, aroused by injustice and pressing for change, is not something to be feared and constrained; it is the very lifeblood of democracy. Without avenues for popular participation and without means for popular control, governments become the enemy of the people; public and private power become entrenched, self-satisfied, and smug.
Progressivism, or modern liberalism, takes a distinctly different view:
Central to progressivism is a faith that educated and civilized individuals can, through the use of reason, determine what is best for society as a whole. Persuasion, discussion, and rational dialogue can lead individuals of different views to see what is in the public interest. Government and public participation must therefore be structured so as to produce rational deliberation and consensus about important public policy issues. Popular culture and popular will have a role to play in this process, but only after sufficient education and only after their more passionate elements have been diverted and diffused. Popular anger and uneducated public sentiments are more likely to lead to hasty and irrational judgments.
Like populists, progressives believe that governments must be freed of corrupting influences. But these corrupting influences are described quite differently: They include narrowness of vision, ignorance, and parochial self-interest. Government must be freed of corruption so that it can wisely debate what is truly in the public interest. Progressivism is less concerned than populism about centralization and concentration of power. It recognizes that some problems require centralized authority and that some enterprises benefit from economies of scale. Progressivism also has a significantly different attitude towards expertise: Far from being something to be distrusted, it is something to be particularly prized.
That sounds right to me. What a fine tribe it is, too. Balkin goes on, however:
What is more difficult for many academics to recognize is that progressivism has its own distinctive dangers and defects. Unfortunately, these tend to be less visible from within a progressivist sensibility. They include elitism, paternalism, authoritarianism, naivete, excessive and misplaced respect for the “best and brightest,” isolation from the concerns of ordinary people, an inflated sense of superiority over ordinary people, disdain for popular values, fear of popular rule, confusion of factual and moral expertise, and meritocratic hubris.
And there you see the basis for right wing populist hatred of liberals. And it’s not altogether untrue, is it? Certainly, those of us who argue from that perspective should be able to recognise and deal with the fact that this is how we are perceived by many people and try to find ways to allay those concerns. The problem is that it’s quite difficult to do.
In the past, the way that’s been dealt with has been very simple. Get on the bigotry bandwagon. In some ways, everybody wants to be an elitist, I suppose, so all you have to do is join with your brothers in a little “wrong” religion, immigrant or negro bashing. Everybody gets to feel superior that way.
There was a time when the Democratic party was populist/progressive — William Jennings Bryan was our guy. (He was also, if you recall, the one who argued against evolution in the Scopes trial.) He ran his campaigns against the “money changers” in New York City; the conventional wisdom remains that his Cross of Gold speech with it’s economic populist message was the key to his enormous popularity in the rural areas of the west, midwest and south. I would argue that it had as much to do with cultural populism and Lost Cause mythology.
Richard Hofstadter famously wrote that both populism and early progressivism were heavily fueled by nativism and there is a lot of merit in what he says. Take, for instance, prohibition (one of Bryan’s major campaign issues.)Most people assume that when it was enacted in 1920, it was the result of do-gooderism, stemming from the tireless work by progressives who saw drink as a scourge for the family, and women in particular. But the truth is that Prohibition was mostly supported by rural southerners and midwesterners who were persuaded that alcohol was the province of immigrants in the big cities who were polluting the culture with their foreign ways. And progressives did nothing to dispell that myth — indeed they perpetuated it. (The only people left to fight it were the “liberal elites,” civil libertarians and the poor urban dwellers who were medicating themselves the only way they knew how.) This was an issue, in its day, that was as important as gay marriage is today. The country divided itself into “wets” and “drys” and many a political alliance was made or broken by taking one side of the issue or another. Bryan, the populist Democrat, deftly exploited this issue to gain his rural coalition — and later became the poster boy for creationism, as well. (Not that he wasn’t a true believer, he was; but his views on evolution were influenced by his horror at the eugenics movement. He was a complicated guy.) And prohibition turned out to be one of the most costly and silly diversions in American history.
It is not a surprise that prohibition was finally enacted in 1920, which is also the time that the Ku Klux Klan reasserted itself and became more than just a southern phenomenon. The Klan’s reemergence was the result of the post war clamor against commies and immigrants. The rural areas, feeling beseiged by economic pressure (which manifested themselves much earlier there than the rest of the country)and rapid social change could not blame their own beloved America for its problems so they blamed the usual suspects, including their favorite whipping boy, uppity African Americans.
They weren’t only nativist, though. In the southwest, and Texas in particular, they were upset by non-Protestant immorality. According to historian Charles C. Alexander:
“There was also in the Klan a definite strain of moral bigotry. Especially in the Southwest this zeal found expression in direct, often violent, attempts to force conformity. Hence the southwestern Klansman’s conception of reform encompassed efforts to preserve premarital chastity, marital fidelity, and respect for parental authority; to compel obedience to state and national prohibition laws; to fight the postwar crime wave; and to rid state and local governments of dishonest politicians.” Individuals in Texas thus were threatened, beaten, or tarred-and-feathered for practicing the “new morality,” cheating on their spouses, beating their spouses or children, looking at women in a lewd manner, imbibing alcohol, etc.
Yeah, I know. The more things change, yadda, yadda, yadda. The interesting thing about all this is that throughout the 20’s the south was Democratic as it had always been — and populist, as it had long been. But when the Dems nominated Al Smith in 1928, many Democrats deserted the party and voted for Hoover. Why? Because Smith was an urban machine politican, a catholic and anti-prohibition. Texas went for Hoover — he was from rural Iowa, favored prohibition and was a Protestant. Preachers combed the south decrying the catholic nominee — saying the Pope would be running the country. Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia went Republican, too. Now, one can’t deny that the boom of the 20’s was instrumental in Hoover’s victory, but rural America had been undergoing an economic crisis for some time. However, then, like now, rural American populists preferred to blame their problems on racial and ethnic influences than the moneyed elites who actually cause them. It’s a psychological thing, I think.
(By 1932, of course, all hell had broken loose. Nobody cared anymore about booze or catholics or rich New Yorkers in the White House. They were desperate for somebody to do something. And Roosevelt promised to do something. Extreme crisis has a way of clarifying what’s important.)
So, getting back to Mudcat, what he is suggesting is a tried and true method to get rural white males to sign on to a political party. Bashing immigrants and elites at the same time has a long pedigree and it is the most efficient way to bag some of those pick-up truck guys who are voting against their economic self-interest. There seems to be little evidence that bashing elites alone actually works. And that’s because what you are really doing is playing to their prejudices and validating their tribal instinct that the reason for their economic problems is really the same reason for the cultural problems they already believe they have — Aliens taking over Real America — whether liberals, immigrants, blacks, commies, whoever. And it seems that rural folk have been feeling this way forever.
It’s a surefire way to attract those guys with the confederate flags that Mudcat is advising us is required if we are ever to win again. On the other hand, short of another Great Depression, how we keep together a coalition of urbanites, liberals, ethnic minoritites and nativist rural white men, I don’t quite get. Nobody’s done it yet.
*I should be clear here and note that Jack Balkin does not necessarily endorse my views on nativism and populism in his paper. He notes that there has been some revision of Hofstadter’s analysis and that some scholars have found substantial regional differences among rural populists. I agree to the extent that I think this is a much more salient aspect of populism in the south. But history leads me to agree with Hofstadter that nativism and racism are powerful populist impulses pretty much everywhere. It may change colors and creeds, but it’s always there.
Balkin does point out some of the difficulties in creating a coalition of progressives and populists and suggests that academics in particular have a hard time because they really are, well, intellectual elites. It’s interesting. One of the more intriguing things his thesis alludes to is that the crusade against popular culture may be the least populist thing we could undertake. The rural populists really don’t like the liberal elites telling them what’s good for them.
Back in the day, before talk radio became a stroke inducing wingnut nightmare (and before Air America) I used to listen to KABC in Los Angeles, which has always been an all talk station. In the mornings it had Michael Jackson (not that one) a very erudite, well informed personality who had the world’s most impressive rolodex. He could get Nelson Mandela or Margaret Thatcher on the phone and callers, before everybody became a right wing asshole, were invariably polite and well informed. It was the kind of talk radio that people like me — the snoozers who watch the History Channel and Lehrer — love. No yelling, no controversy, just a bunch of smart people palavering endlessly. Needless to say, this is so far out of fashion it might as well be a Nehru jacket.
Jackson was on from 9 to 1 and then that sanctimonious prick, Dennis Prager, would come on and blow the whole mood. Guys like him are a dime a dozen today, but he was my first modern wingnut gasbag, so he holds a special place in my … digestive system.
Today, on the Huffington Post, he says that the guy who heckled Ann Coulter is a Hitler youth. But the universities are also like Weimar Germany and Phd’s led the way to the death camps and the gulags.
None of that is factual or makes any sense. Weimar “decadence” was the target of Nazism, not the cause — unless you want to adopt the abuser excuse “she made me do it because she was bad.” And Nazism may have ostensibly been “secular, but it sure as hell used Christian nationalism when it suited them:
In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, “The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.”
But whatever. That’s just typical Dennis Prager dribbling confusedly about barbarians and brown shirts because somebody was rude to Ann Coulter. Rude to Ann Coulter — something one would think he’d be embarrassed to bring up considering what a nasty piece of work she is.
Does everyone remember what the student’s outrageous question in that Q&A was?
“You say that you believe in the sanctity of marriage,” said Ajai Raj, an English sophomore. “How do you feel about marriages where the man does nothing but fuck his wife up the ass?”
Think about that for a minute. When I first heard about it I thought he was saying something for the pure purpose of being (as he admits) a jackass and trying to put Coulter off balance. But considering the revelations of this week, in which it was revealed that a prominent religious leader enjoyed forcing sodomy on his wife against her will, it’s actually a serious question.
I agree with Prager that there are barbarians in our midst, but I think he needs to look a little bit closer to his own social circle.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m not being too harsh, and sometimes maybe I am, but I can safely say that I will never regret saying that Michelle Malkin is utterly delusional
Word.
Although I agree that these are fine words to live by, and I do, in this case he is specifically referring to her latest illustration of right wing paranoid victimology:
When was the last time you thanked a cop? And wouldn’t it be nice if, for just a brief moment, the mainstream media would hold a ceasefire in its incessant cop-bashing crusades?
There are good cops, and there are bad cops. But national press outlets, predisposed to harp on law enforcement as an inherently racist and reckless institution, hype the hellions at the expense of the heroes.
Yes, and the MSM hates puppies and kitties and baby rhesus monkeys too. Goddamn evil bastards.
Roy swats down her absurdities like the pesky little nits they are and goes on to discuss the veritable deification of cops in our popular culture noting the somewhat disturbing CSI trend in which:
…cops are not only immaculate honest and zealous in pursuit of the truth, they are also scientifically predestined to find it. (Someday Minority Report will be done as a cop series, and young people will be shocked to learn that it was originally a dystopian vision.)
This may be working against the police, actually, since now prosecutors such as those in the Robert Blake case find their TV addled juries unimpressed with any evidence that isn’t scientifically incontrovertible. They even call it the CSI effect. (I would imagine that the new series CSI:Wichita will solve that little problem by having the crime scene investigators simply pray for the suspects to confess. Looking very hot, of course.)
Meanwhile, here in California, cops and firefighters are on TV every five minutes taking issue with the powdered and pampered Republican Governor saying of them, “These are the special interests. Special interests don’t like me in Sacramento because I kick their butt.” Seems these unionized public employees didn’t care too much for that. Go figure.
As Roy says and I concur:
I don’t begrudge the police this heroic treatment — though I would prefer, as I suspect they would, that they got the love in their pay-envelopes rather than from mass media. But to say that the MSM is out to make cops look bad is just nuts.
And that is why I join Roy in saying I will never regret saying that Michelle Malkin is delusional. And nuts.
By giving us your cell phone number, we will text message you as soon as Senate Republicans trigger the “nuclear option.” Embedded in that text message will be a link to the Senate switchboard. With the push of a couple buttons, your call – along with thousands of others – goes right through to the corridors of power demanding preservation of the filibuster.
This the first time flash mob technology’s been used for political purposes. Which means it’s just cute enough to get some press.