Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Nanny’s Not A Wingnut

So I watched the show “Super-Nanny” last night to get a sense of this “Focus on the Family” shill job. The ad is perfect for the show, which featured a very dysfunctional family on the verge of chaos — the two kids (aged 3 and 7) were rude, undisciplined and out of control and the parents were in way over their heads. The FOF ads were very slick; they could have been a clever government sponsored spot, like those produced for Partnership For A Drug free America. They appeared to be connected to the show — and one would guess that the show endorsed the program by the way it was presented. The show featured a couple of very undisciplined brats which the ads, featuring little demon children saying they are going to wreak havoc on their parents’ lives, seemed to indicate the FOF program could cure. I bet they got some calls.

Having read Dobson’s torture manual “The Strong Willed Child” however, I can say that after watching the show, they bear no relationship to one another. Dobson’s book is extremely heavy on corporal punishment and strict authoritarian control. The nanny show consisted of common sense approaches like setting rules, scheduling activities and play time, communication and consistency. There was no hitting, although there was the expected sturm and drang over discipline, which had been a total disaster up to that point. The biggest problem in this family, it seemed to me, was that the mom didn’t seem to relate very well to small children, which is not unprecedented I would think. Why would every woman automatically be good at such a thing? (Not that the Dad was much better, but he seemed a little more natural around them, even if he was a putz and a control freak.)

It was obvious that she loved them, but she was frustrated by her inability to be herself, which appeared to me to be a somewhat reserved type of person who wasn’t very interested in kid stuff. She seemed quite depressed, or at least worn down, and she probably felt guilty for not liking the kid games she was being asked to do. The structure the nanny gave the mom appeared to give her something to hold on to, but I suspect she might be more comfortable as a mother when her children get a little bit older. I thought this was one family that could have benefitted from sending the kids to day care, where they could be around other little kids and grown-ups who are into playing with them.

Anyway, these kids were the children from hell, but anybody could see that it was because the parents were completely inept. They were the ones who needed guidance and I suspect that this is usually the case. There seemed to be a lot of improvement during the course of the show, but who knows how much these shows are edited for dramatic purposes. Still, these seemed like decent people who love their kids so they’ll probably be ok.

If they had taken Dobson’s advice, however, they would right now be indulging in child abuse instead of patience, discipline and understanding. His view is that children must be taught to obey because they must observe the hierarchy of the family which means that father, then mother are always to be obeyed without question. The point is not to raise happy, healthy people, but oppressed, subservient kids who turn into rigid authoritarian adults. He is in the business of creating Nazis, not normal human beings.

I pity the many poor little children who are going to be subjected to Dobson’s torture after their desperate parents saw that slick ad last night and called the FOF number. Those parents are going to learn that they are justified in being angry at their children and that violence is the proper way to express that anger, “for the good of their child.”

And I pity the country that takes another step back into the dark ages when torture was considered acceptable. We are now one of the torture cultures. That’s quite an achievement.

Update: For some very thoughtful commentary on this subject, read the comments to this Patrick Neilsen Hayden post on Electrolite.

.

Life Lessons

Kevin at Catch gets schooled by Joe Scarborough on what a South Park Conservative is:

JOE SCARBOROUGH: Why don’t we just show a clip of “South Park” to help define what “South Park” conservatives are.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, “SOUTH PARK”)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: Kids, this is the Costa Rican Capitol Building.

This is where all the leaders of the Costa Rican government make their…

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Oh, my God, it smells out here.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: All right, that does it. Eric Cartman, you respect other cultures this instant.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: I wasn’t saying anything about their culture.

I was just saying their city smells like ass.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: Wow. Staying in a place like this really makes you appreciate living in America, huh.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: You may think that making fun of Third World countries is funny, but let me…

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: I don’t think it’s funny. This place is overcrowded, smelly and poor. That’s not funny. That sucks.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Lord knows South Park Conservatives know what ass smells like — their heads being buried up there and all.

Seriously, my friends, this a deep and meaningful lesson, not just a puerile, unfunny swipe at poor people. You see, the SP conservatives are just pointing out that it sucks to be poor. And they do it in a lighthearted, funloving way that makes everyone understand that it is better to be an American because our cities smell like vanilla cookies and lemon Pledge. Because we’re better.

I feel sorry for this generation. We had MAD magazine (the greatest influence in my life.) They have this.

.

Greenlight This Baby!

Roy Edroso gives us shorter Jane Galt:

Not only are Hollywood actors liberal and wrong — they don’t even know how to act! Jane Galt must school them in empathy!

She says:

America enjoys Forrest Gump, but it’s not really that hard to learn to deal with someone who talks a little slow. Where are the movies covering the people who seriously discomfort us–the unverbal, or inappropriately verbal, or whose verbal skills just aren’t up to sermonettes on love

She’s right, you know. We certainly don’t see enough characters whose skills aren’t up to sermonettes on love. And I have the perfect project to correct that. Just imagine George Clooney playing that dreamy he-man John Galt with Nicole Kidman as the sensual yet plucky industrialist Dagny Taggert — in the big Hollywood remake of “Atlas Shrugged: The Rapture.”

Haven’t I? — he thought. Haven’t I thought of it since the first time I saw you? Haven’t I thought of nothing else for two years?. . . He sat motionless, looking at her. He heard the words he never allowed himself to form, the words he had felt, known, yet had not faced, had hoped to destroy by never letting them be within his own mind, Now it was as sudden and shocking as if he were saying it to her…Since the first time I saw you…. Nothing but your body, that mouth of yours, and the way your eyes would look at me, if…. Through every sentence I ever said to you, through every conference you thought were so safe, through the importance of all the issues we discussed…. You trusted me, didn’t you? To recognize greatness? To think of you as you deserved — as if you were a man?

Get me a cig and a coupla dexies, stat.

.

Mainstream Child Abuse

Via MAX BLUMENTHAL I see that ABC is going to allow that psychopath James Dobson to advertise his S&M child training techniques on their network, when they refused to allow the United Church of Christ to air its “controversial” ad. No no no — if you’re going to start making these kinds of judgements, you don’t get to allow sick fuck animal and child beating fundamentalists to advertise either.

Obviously, it’s time to let the good people of this country know who they are dealing with in Mr Dobson. His book, “The Strong Willed Child” — the precepts of which will be featured in the Focus on the Family “program” being advertised on ABC’s “Nanny” show, features the following little vignette, which many of you have already read here, but which deserves to be read by everyone, particularly those at ABC:

“Please don’t misunderstand me. Siggie is a member of our family and we love him dearly. And despite his anarchistic nature, I have finally taught him to obey a few simple commands. However, we had some classic battles before he reluctantly yielded to my authority.

“The greatest confrontation occurred a few years ago when I had been in Miami for a three-day conference. I returned to observe that Siggie had become boss of the house while I was gone. But I didn’t realize until later that evening just how strongly he felt about his new position as Captain.

“At eleven o’clock that night, I told Siggie to go get into his bed, which is a permanent enclosure in the family room. For six years I had given him that order at the end of each day, and for six years Siggie had obeyed.

“On this occasion, however, he refused to budge. You see, he was in the bathroom, seated comfortably on the furry lid of the toilet seat. That is his favorite spot in the house, because it allows him to bask in the warmth of a nearby electric heater…”

“When I told Sigmund to leave his warm seat and go to bed, he flattened his ears and slowly turned his head toward me. He deliberately braced himself by placing one paw on the edge of the furry lid, then hunched his shoulders, raised his lips to reveal the molars on both sides, and uttered his most threatening growl. That was Siggie’s way of saying. “Get lost!”

“I had seen this defiant mood before, and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me “reason” with Mr. Freud.”

What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!”

This is the basis of Dobson’s child rearing advice. He thinks of children as animals and he believes that animals and children should be beaten. He believes that nine month old babies should be switched on the bare legs. He believes they should be pinched hard, on the neck, so it will hurt. He believes in things that could get parents arrested in many states in the union.

Yet his program is considered to be more wholesome and less controversial than a church that allows gays to be a member.

Max Blumenthal has the addresses and phone numbers of the various ABC offices to which you can lodge your complaint. I think this one is worth fighting. Dobson is real menace and he should be marginalized as quickly as possible.

.

Ya Think?

Doubts About Mandate for Bush, GOP

The day after he won a second term in November, President Bush offered his view of the new political landscape.

“When you win there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view,” he said, “and that’s what I intend to tell the Congress, that I made it clear what I intend to do as president . . . and the people made it clear what they wanted, now let’s work together.”

Six months ago, this comment was widely viewed as more than just a postgame boast. Among campaign strategists and academics, there was ample speculation that Bush’s victory, combined with incremental gains in the Republican congressional majority, signaled something fundamental: a partisan and ideological “realignment” that would reshape politics over the long haul.

As the president passed the 100-day mark of his second term over the weekend, the main question facing Bush and his party is whether they misread the November elections. With the president’s poll numbers down, and the Republican majority ensnared in ethical controversy, things look much less like a once-a-generation realignment.

Where do they come up with this stuff? Of course he has a mandate. Of course it’s been a sweeping realignment. He won 51-49, a completely unambiguous indication of huge popular support, particularly for the centerpiece of his campaign, his social security plan. Why would anyone think otherwise? I thought we all understood that the vast majority of the country are social conservatives who support overturning Roe vs Wade, a constitutional amendment against gay marriage and remaking the courts in the image of Tom DeLay. Nothing could be clearer.

Now the press is wondering if that interpretation of the last election is wrong. In the article, of course, they claim that’s the administration’s interpretation, but we all know that administrations tend to exaggerate their mandates, so it’s up to the media to properly put these things into perspective. And, needless to say, they were convinced from the beginning that Bush could claim support for anything he chose to do, given his “impressive” victory in November (which was impressive only in comparison to his previous “impressive” showing.) And the Democrats, properly chastened by their embarrassing defeat would support it also, because they are losers and wouldn’t have the nerve to stand up to the codpiece collosus.

But it hasn’t worked out that way. And the press is scratching their little noggins and wondering if maybe Karl Rove’s talking points didn’t quite capture the limits of Bush’s victory. Certainly, one could have interpreted a 2% win in the presidential race as something less than a validation of the president’s most extreme positions, but why dwell on the negative?

Nobody in the mainstream press bothered to consider for even one moment that Bush might not be able to get support for the destruction of what was up to now known as the third rail in politics or that the public did not support the notion of fundamentalist preachers involved in the government. They just assumed it would be so.

Among the press it has been as if Bush has magical powers. He and Uncle Karl are thought to be so spectacularly gifted, in ways that they can’t even comprehend, that they can accomplish the impossible. Apparently, they think that cutting taxes and lashing out in inchoate anger after being attacked is some sort of difficult task — completely misunderstanding the true difficulty of governing which is to not run deficits and keep the people from lashing out in inchoate anger after being attacked. It was never going to be difficult to talk the country into taxcuts and killing after 9/11. That they gave Karl and George credit for something really courageous in that is a testament to their shallowness. President Britney Spears could have gotten that done.

After 9/11 (or maybe even before, when they anointed him in 2000 and told the rest of us to “get over it”) they never once gave up the idea that Bush was a popular, extraordinary leader who only a few hippies in Hollywood and a couple of stiffs in New York didn’t like because he talked funny. We had to fight that every step of the way in 2004 and still we came extremely close to winning.

There is no realignment. We are in a period of pure political combat in which the power could change dramatically in each election. There is no real middle, there are only two opposing forces. Nothing is predictable and anything could happen. The Republicans hold institutional power by only the most tenuous means, despite all their bluster about political dominance. And their biggest achilles heel — as it has been forever — is hubris. Clearly, that is the story that one would have thought the press would see from the beginning; an administration that overreached its non-existent mandate in an intensely polarized political climate.

Better late than never, I suppose. Still, it would be nice, if just once, the media could play this administration straight. They are always given the benefit of the doubt at the least, and portrayed as masterful political players most of the time — and then the ditzy media is surprised when Bush and Rove gamble and lose. It happens over and over again. For reasons I will never understand, the Washington press corpse invested itself in Junior’s success early on. It’s past time they woke up and realizes that the Republicans aren’t political wizards.

Without 9/11 Bush wouldn’t be president today. It’s all he has, and all he ever had. No mandate, no realignemnt. No nothing. Karl Rove is not a genius.

.

Geniuses

Kevin at Catch links to Little Green Footballs so I don’t have to. While gingerly tip-toeing through the dreck, I came across the dumbest, dumass rightwing post of the week (and you know how tough the competition is for that.)

Reacting to a quote from Al Gore’s speech last week (which was, btw, just great) one of the tiny chartreuse pee-wee players said:

“This aggressive new strain of right-wing religious zealotry is actually a throwback to the intolerance that led to the creation of America in the first place,” Gore said as many in the audience stood and applauded.

Another thing that gets me about this statement is the hypocracy of it. I get told by Leftists all the time that this nation was founded by enlightened folks who wanted to create a secular nation. Does anybody else see the logic error in stating that religious zealots wanted to create a secular nation?

Are these people allowed to drive?

.

Naughty, Naughty

I read these Wonkette excerpts of Laura Bush’s speech at the WH correspondence dinner last night and I thought it was satire. But I just saw the tape and it’s for real:

“I am married to the President of the United States and here is our typical evening. Nine o’clock, Mr. Excitement here is sound asleep, and I am watching Desperate Housewives. With Lynne Cheney. Ladies and gentleman, I am a desperate housewife. I mean if those women on that show think they’re desperate, they ought to be with George. One night after George went to bed, Lynne Cheney, Condi Rice, Karen Hughes and I went to Chippendales….I won’t tell you what happened, but Lynne’s Secret Service code name is now Dollar Bill.”

“George always says that he’s delighted to come to these press dinners. Baloney. He’s usually in bed by now. I’m not kidding. I said to him the other day, George, if you really want to end tyranny in the world, you’re going to have to stay up later.”

“The amazing thing is that George and I were just meant to be. I was a librarian who spent 12 hours a day in the library, yet somehow I met George.”

“I’m proud of George. He’s learned a lot about ranching since that first year when he tried to milk the horse. What’s worse, it was a male horse.”

Now that I see it again, it really does have the ring of truth.

Thank goodness she’s such a good Christian or someone might get the idea she’s alluding to equine hand jobs, thong stuffing and a very limp husband. I’m sure James Dobson would interpret these comments correctly as her desire for her husband to take his proper leadership role. And, of course, if she doesn’t respond to his leadership George can always take a belt to her as if she’s a dauchshund.

Did anyone happen to notice if FauxNews covered this little story?

.

Goldilocks Logic

By the logic of modern journalism, in which they are considered to be “getting it right” if both sides of an issue criticize them, we now know that James Dobson is a moderate on gay rights:

Gay rights supporters from around the country, angry at James Dobson’s stance against homosexuality, are expected to converge Sunday and Monday on his Focus on the Family headquarters.

A second demonstration is also set for Sunday by a handful of extreme anti-gay activists from the Rev. Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan.

Ironically, both groups will be protesting the stand taken by Dobson and his ministry on homosexuality. The gay rights advocacy group Soulforce accuses Dobson of “spreading lies about same-gender families.”

Phelps’ group says Focus officials are headed to hell because the ministry is soft on homosexuality.

One’s too hot, one’s too cold and this one’s juuust right.

.

“They’re talking about my burrito”

A call about a possible weapon at a middle school prompted police to put armed officers on rooftops, close nearby streets and lock down the school. All over a giant burrito.

[…]

The drama ended two hours later when the suspicious item was identified as a 30-inch burrito filled with steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa and jalapenos and wrapped inside tin foil and a white T-shirt.

[…]

Russell said the mystery was solved after she brought everyone in the school together in the auditorium to explain what was going on.

“The kid was sitting there as I’m describing this (report of a student with a suspicious package) and he’s thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh, they’re talking about my burrito.'”

Afterward, eighth-grader Michael Morrissey approached her.

“He said, ‘I think I’m the person they saw,'” Russell said.

The burrito was part of Morrissey’s extra-credit assignment to create commercial advertising for a product.

“We had to make up a product and it could have been anything. I made up a restaurant that specialized in oddly large burritos,” Morrissey said.

The terrorists have won.

Hat tip to senior blog research assistant, Gloria

Hello-oh? Pope Is Dead

I know that most of you probably read The Howler and don’t need any reminding, but this one is a particularly good observation and I haven’t heard anyone mentioning it. Tim Russert has turned his show into a religious seminar for the last month and a half. Last week really was the final straw. Here’s Sommerby:

THROUGH THE TUBE DARKLY: Refresh us—when exactly did Meet the Press become an openly Catholic program? Last Sunday, for the third time in the last five weeks, Tim Russert devoted his entire show to a religious discussion. Early on, Russert popped this question to Father Thomas Bohlin, U.S. vicar of the conservative Catholic group, Opus Dei:

RUSSERT (4/24/05): Father John McCloskey, who was also an Opus Dei with you, was on this program. He has a Web site where he predicted basically in 2030 that the number of Catholics would go from 60 million to 40 million; almost a smaller and purer church. Is that, do you think, the vision of our pope? [Russert’s emphasis]

No, Russert’s emphasis didn’t make sense, but it was quite pronounced. Moments later, we heard from Joseph Bottum, one of two other guests whose bull-dog conservatism made Bohlin seem like a poodle. Bottum responded to the claim that the Catholic hierarchy needs to consult with Joe Sixpack more often:

BOTTUM: I’m not sure that there’s any solution in all of that… I’m not sure it’s any solution to the problem the church faces addressing the concerns that arise in a democratic experiment like the United States. We have characteristic abuses, as I said, that are going to happen in these places. And the church needs to be to some degree countercultural, to stand against that and to speak out and say, “We can’t kill our babies.”

Did we say conservative? Yes, when Bottum discussed the “characteristic abuses” that occur “in these places,” he was referring to democracies—to “places” like the U.S.!

Question: Were we the only ones who gazed with surprise at Sunday’s Meet the Press discussion? Who wondered what this odd debate had to do with the American news agenda? Who wondered why we were hearing this on NBC’s one weekly news hour?

SISTER MARY AQUIN O’NEILL: I’m grateful for an opportunity to return to the question of truth. Truth is another name for God and so it cannot be something that we possess. It’s something that we hope to dwell within. The truth is always larger than we are, greater than we are. And it is not something that we can attain by ourselves.

Say what? O’Neill seemed like a very nice person, but were we the only ones wondering why this rumination was occurring on Meet the Press, which was once a well-known news show? In fact, we found ourselves puzzling again and again as the conversation veered into the weeds. For example, why was Father Joseph Fessio, siting in Rome, saying this on a one-time news program?

FESSIO: The point is if Jesus Christ is the bridegroom of the church, if God has sent his son to us as a man to unite himself in a marital act, a nuptial act to his whole people, to make us one flesh and one body with him, there’s something very deep and mysterious about that. It’s what the church has always taught is that, not that men are better than women, not that men should be given more honor than woman, but that men image forth the bridegroom because Christ is essentially someone who’s married to us, and therefore you can’t have a woman who gives that iconic image of Christ who’s the bridegroom of the church.

But why exactly is that “the point” on a weekly news program? And why exactly was this a topic for such a weekly show:

O’NEILL: Frederic Herzog wrote many years ago that the two things that distinguish Catholicism are the sacraments and the Blessed Mother, Mary. They are both under siege right now. And the sacraments are in trouble because we don’t have ministers. That’s the question for me. We must find a way to solve that. The people are hungry for the sacraments, and without the sacraments, we don’t have the church.

That’s a perfectly fine conversation—but what was NBC News presenting it? O’Neill continued, but what was the connection between her rumination and the traditional Meet the Press?

O’NEILL: I believe that one of the most important things for this church now is to really act on Christici Fidelis Laici, where we were told there’s a complementarity between the laity and the ordained. Complementarity means one cannot trump the other. And so, in all the questions that the church faces, the lay-people and their experience and their insights have to have an equal place at the table with those who are ordained.

Of course, you know how these news shows can be. Once one guest opines about Christici Fidelis Laici, everyone has to spout off:

BOHLIN: I think there’s another way of looking at this whole issue, which is the way that John Paul II has looked at it, coming out of Christici Fidelis Laici, the great document on the lay-people in the church, which is that, really, talking about priests, bishops, Catholic professionals, is talking about an infinitesimal portion of what the church is, and really, the forefront of the battle of the church is waged by every baptized person. And that’s what’s has to be—that’s the battle. That’s where the battle is, where those people are.

For ourselves, we don’t have a view on this great document. Meanwhile, why would the Meet the Press audience have a dog in the following hunt?

RUSSERT: But if you’re a sacramental church, you need priests to administer the sacraments. And if there’s a shortage of priests, what do you do?

Why can’t “our pope” just figure it out, then tell us what we should do in “these places?” In the meantime, why couldn’t Russert spend a few minutes on the actual news, which might affect the actual American people, the people who live in such lands?

But enough of the negative! In the good news department, the very ’umble Parson Meacham was there, preaching the gospel according to Newsweek:

MEACHAM: If you are a person of faith, particularly in the United States, you live in hope. You live in the hope that one day there will be a God who will wipe away all tears from your eyes and there’ll be no more pain, an image from Revelation that’s drawn from Isaiah. And if people of faith are to play a role in the public square, they must, I believe—a humble layman’s opinion—they must practice humility and be—understand that the peace of God does passeth all understanding and that no one has, I believe, a monopoly on truth.

Of course, this ’umble layman is always inspiring. Just consider this earlier bite, where he ’umbly impressed with his detailed knowledge of every known item of scripture:

MEACHAM: You know, in the words of the Elizabethan Prayer Book, we are all seeking the means of grace and the hope of glory, and the road by which we—the road we take to attempt to do that can be different and obviously have been throughout history. I would draw a distinction between the teachings of the church and ultimately the broader force of Christianity. There is a sense, I think, of—as God said to Job in the Old Testament in the longest sustained monologue from the Lord in the Bible, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the world?” So he should not be presuming to act as though we know everything and that we understand all truth.

In fact, St. Paul said, “For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face-to-face. Now, I am known in part, soon I will be known in full.” So we are all on a journey. St. Augustine defined this as the soul’s journey back to God. And my sense is, the more that Benedict XVI can speak in the spirit of the past week as opposed to the past generation, he will become a force for at least an ecumenical spirit if not reconciliation.

Let’s face it—Meacham really isn’t the man to be talking about “longest sustained monologues.” Or, as we normally paraphrase Meacham, Blah blah blah blah harrumph zzzzzzz.

Meachum is, of course, the dunce who wrote:

The uniqueness—one could say oddity, or implausibility—of the story of Jesus’ resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological.

Hookay.

I was rather stunned by Russert’s show this past week-end. It was, after all, Justice Sunday, a “religious” event that was actually newsworthy. Russert spent the hour talking Catholic theology instead. And it wasn’t as if we hadn’t just spent five long weeks with wall to wall religion on all the networks covering every possible issue that could be of interest to anyone who hadn’t actually taken vows — which I’m expecting to see Little Russ do any day now. That priest shortage is a big problem. His pope needs him.

.