Huckster Sunday is positively reeking with big huckster news. Raw Story has the results of the Gannon FOIA requests that show that he had some very unusual access to the White House. Why, he was there on days there weren’t even any press briefings. And he frequently appears to have spent the night. (Well, he didn’t sign out, anyway. One wonders if that’s normal protocol.)
But that’s not all the Gannon goodness we have today and it’s not even the best. Michael Dietz of Reading A1 has a great investigative piece on Alternet about how Jimmy became Jeff.
Reading this would almost make you think that somebody helped him form a new identity.
When JD pulled up stakes at the beginning of 2002, Bulldog went with him, at least for a time. His profiles, some of which were live on the web until recently, seem to have stopped being updated after May of that year. His last client review, though, posted Nov. 12, comes weirdly late in the game. Perhaps significantly, that review describes Bulldog as “a very well-rounded man who is interested in talking about everything from the Orioles to politics.” It seems almost like a coded message, a kind of sly wink. Because politics, now, was on the agenda: and Jeff Gannon, the D.C. insider of Bulldog’s dreams, had that very day published his first editorial.
The Birthing of Jeff Gannon
Jan. 18, 2003, a day of nationwide Iraq war protests, was clear and cold in Washington hovering just above the freezing point. The tens, even hundreds of thousands who rallied on the Mall and marched to the Capitol needed whatever warmth they could husband. So did the relative handful of counter-protesters organized by an apparently one-off group called MOVE-OUT (Marines and OtherOther Veterans Engaging Outrageous Un-American Traitors) and by the D.C. chapter of the national Free Republic organization. For those 50 or so pro-war right-wingers, who managed to attract almost as many attending press, warmth was conveniently available in the form of a sympathizer’s apartment located close to their rally point at 8th and I Streets. Joel Kernodle of MOVE-OUT made sure to mention it in his after-event thank-yous:
I would like to thank the Marines who went there with me, the folks at FreeRepublic and especially Kristinn Taylor and Raoul [Deming], U.S. Navy Capt. Frank Davis who gave us a place to call home while we were there, [and] Jeff Gannon “The Conservative Guy” who has a web site and writes and speaks to conservative issues, who let us use his place just off the march route for an on-site headquarters.
JD Guckert had left his two-bedroom duplex in Wilmington just a year earlier, and he had left “his guys,” the TKEs, under a small cloud of mystery. It was a deliberate effect. “The only time [JD] had ever actually mentioned working for a living,” the Mu Alpha brother who spoke to us said, “was when he moved to D.C., and even then all that he mentioned was that he needed security clearance and that he would be working as a ‘contract negotiator’ for a DoD subcontractor.” Though likely no more real than JD’s Marine play-acting, in one respect the hush-hush fantasy rings true: having arrived in D.C., James Guckert vanished. His appearance in the background of the Free Republic rally (along with his attendance at another D.C. Freeper event, a Sean Hannity book-signing) marks one of the only times in an entire year when the man who had been JD is visible in any location outside of cyberspace.
Everything solid in JD’s life — his residence, his place of work, his circle of friends — melts into air. We can surmise the actual date of his move only from its probable trace in the internet records: on Jan. 25, 2002, the domain “theconservativeguy.com” was created. (The registration, to a “J. Daniels” of Bedrock Corp., referenced a Delaware address, a mail drop just down the road from JD’s old duplex.) It would be at least another four months of silence before a web site appeared at the new domain, and the Conservative Guy announced his existence.
What was happening in those blank, incubatory months? (An almost identical period of latency, oddly, separates the registration of “jeffgannon.com” in mid-June from the first appearance of Jeff Gannon’s byline on the web in November.) With its crude layout, minimal graphic design and limited, untimely content, the Conservative Guy web site itself hardly demanded so much lead time. Perhaps the work had gone into crafting the identity.
And how, exactly, did he make a living during this period? Did someone “meet” him and think that a man who not one person remembers ever making a political remark in this life could be a perfect blank slate? Did this man whose entire life has been spent as an office worker in dull and colorless businesses in rural Pennsylvania just suddenly have a Walter Mitty fantasy that happened to come true?
James Dobson is quoting Thomas Jefferson right now, a man who would never stop PUKING if he knew what these religions extremists were trying to do.
The delusion is so extreme that he just said that the ultra conservative Rehnquist Court is out of control — because they aren’t conservative enough.
And the Supreme Court caused the civil war.
Bill Frist said some Republicans are opposed to ending thefilibusters, because they may someday want to use the same tactics against the Democrats. He said, “that may be true. But if what Democrats are doing is wrong today, it won’t be right for Republicans to do the same thing tomorrow.” He could have added, “besides, right or wrong for Republicans is irrelevant because we did it yesterday and got away with it and we can get away with it tomorrow; nothing we say or do is based upon any principle whatsoever.”
It is important for people to understand how the Republican Party sold its soul to these radicals and blame those who made it happen. An article from some years back in TNR called “The Right’s Robespierre” which predicted a conservative crack-up back in 1997, laid it all out. The crack-up didn’t happen then and it may not happen now. But if it does, there are some very particular individuals to blame — Paul Weyrich and Morton Blackwell notably at the top of the list:
Finally, on the verge of realizing his right-wing utopia, Weyrich harvested what his friend Morton Blackwell termed “the greatest track of virgin timber on the political landscape”: evangelicals. “Out there is what one might call a moral majority,” he told Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Pennsylvania [sic], in 1979. “That’s it,” Falwell exclaimed. “That’s the name of the organization.” Weyrich, who had converted from Roman Catholicism to the Eastern Orthodox church after Vatican II, did more than coin the name; with a handful of activists, he engineered the alliance between the Republican Party and the growing number of evangelicals angry over abortion rights and federal intrusion in parochial schools. Less than a year later, Ronald Reagan walked into the White House.
It seems that people like me have been predicting that the Republican party would splinter because of these extremists in their midst for a long time now. The coalition has never made much sense. Weyrich and Blackwell and their proteges like Grover Norquist don’t give a damn about religion, of course — or at least any religion other than “conservatism.” Evangelicals are just a special interest voting block to these people. And I suspect that being the hucksters they are, most of the preachers who are agitating for political power today don’t really give a damn either. Most of them are simple hypocrites at best and violent immoral power mongers at worst.
Regardless, I think it’s clear that they believe their time has come. They are flexing their muscles. Maybe Weyrich and Blackwell think it’s just fine and maybe they will win in the end. But, when they invited religious zealots to sit at the table with them and run their movement they gambled that a majority of the American people would go along if it came down to it. It looks like we’re about to see if it paid off.
And it’s interesting to note that on Tim Russert’s Sunday Mass, it wasn’t even mentioned.
Update: Here’s a sincere and righteous liberal vow on Justice Sunday from Shakespeare’s Sister. .
An audio recording obtained by the Los Angeles Times features two of the nation’s most influential evangelical leaders, at a private conference with supporters, laying out strategies to rein in judges, such as stripping funding from their courts in an effort to hinder their work.
[…]
“There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and there’s more than one way to take a black robe off the bench,” said Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, according to an audiotape of a March 17 session. The tape was provided to The Times by the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
DeLay has spoken generally about one of the ideas the leaders discussed in greater detail: using legislative tactics to withhold money from courts.
“We set up the courts. We can unset the courts. We have the power of the purse,” DeLay said at an April 13 question-and-answer session with reporters.
[…]
The March conference featuring Dobson and Perkins showed that the evangelical leaders, in addition to working to place conservative nominees on the bench, have been trying to find ways to remove certain judges.
Perkins said that he had attended a meeting with congressional leaders a week earlier where the strategy of stripping funding from certain courts was “prominently” discussed. “What they’re thinking of is not only the fact of just making these courts go away and re-creating them the next day but also defunding them,” Perkins said.
He said that instead of undertaking the long process of trying to impeach judges, Congress could use its appropriations authority to “just take away the bench, all of his staff, and he’s just sitting out there with nothing to do.”
These curbs on courts are “on the radar screen, especially of conservatives here in Congress,” he said.
Dobson, who emerged last year as one of the evangelical movement’s most important political leaders, named one potential target: the California-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Very few people know this, that the Congress can simply disenfranchise a court,” Dobson said. “They don’t have to fire anybody or impeach them or go through that battle. All they have to do is say the 9th Circuit doesn’t exist anymore, and it’s gone.”
[…]
“Folks, I am telling you all that it is going to be the mother of all battles,” Dobson predicted at the March 17 meeting. “And it’s right around the corner. I mean, Justice Rehnquist could resign at any time, and the other side is mobilized to the teeth.”
The remarks by Perkins and Dobson reflect the passion felt by Christians who helped fuel Bush’s reelection last year with massive turnout in battleground states, and who also spurred Republican gains in the Senate and House.
Claiming a role by the movement in the GOP gains, Dobson concluded: “We’ve got a right to hold them accountable for what happens here.”
Both leaders chastised what Perkins termed “squishy” and “weak” Republican senators who have not wholeheartedly endorsed ending Democrats’ power to filibuster judicial nominees. They said these included moderates such as Sens. Olympia J. Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. They also grumbled that Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and George Allen of Virginia needed prodding.
“We need to shake these guys up,” Perkins said.
Said Dobson: “Sometimes it’s just amazing to me that they seem to forget how they got here.”
Every day that Dobson and Perkins are on television is a good day for Democrats. Keep them in the spotlight.
Via Crooks and Liars. (Go there for the latest Jeff Gannon media appearance.)
Terrence Samuel writes a very interesting article on legislative strategy in The American Prospect that I hope gets wide readership. He discusses the fact that the Democrats have found “their inner no” and are realizing that as the opposition party their primary job must be to stop the other side from doing their worst. Tom DeLay and his minions are going to continue to screech that democrats have no ideas and no beliefs and that is why they are opposing the GOP agenda. Aside from being an asinine statement, it is also overlooking one important thing and it’s something that Samuel mentions in his final paragraph:
Chafee, who had once been the Dems’ best hope for stopping Bolton, seemed to be back on the fence. “The dynamic has changed,” Chafee said. “A lot of reservations surfaced today. It’s a new day.”
And maybe for the Democrats as well. “The passion on the other side on this — I don’t think it’s political,” Voinovich said. So the Democrats may be becoming not just the opposition but the principled opposition. A new day, indeed.
This is what happens when Democrats fight for something that hasn’t been poll tested and focus grouped to death. They actually persuade some people by the virtue of their passion and their argument. Voinovich apparently was simply struck by the fact that his Democratic colleagues really seemed sincere about this which made him stop and think about it.
Of course Democrats have to put forth a vision and they do and they will do more of it. The lesson is that, in the immortal words of Al Gore, sometimes you have to “let it rip,” even if you are going to lose. It’s how people come to see what you care about — and even if they disagree they respect the fact that you give a damn.
Which brings me to this Salon interview with the new Governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer, which I’ve been mulling over for a couple of days now. As all of my 4 readers know, I’m a proponent of an electoral strategy to capture back the mountain west. I don’t say that the south is lost forever, but short of an economic disaster (which may very well happen) I just don’t see Democrats winning it back for a while. So, I’m extremely interested in Democrats who win in the mountain red states and how they believe that they did it.
I’ve read a lot about Schweitzer and am predisposed to like him. Contrary to myth, latte swilling liberals like me don’t actually look down on everybody but coastal elitists. I happen to like fiesty political personalities with regional color whether they are flinty Vermonters or silky Mississipians. I find the TV anchor style of politics boring. And I agree that part of the way to gaining ground in the heartland is to embrace a cultural style with which people who aren’t like me feel at home. Fine.
Schweitzer says some very smart things:
“You know who the most successful Democrats have been through history?” he asks. “Democrats who’ve led with their hearts, not their heads. Harry Truman, he led with his heart. Jack Kennedy led with his heart. Bill Clinton, well, he led with his heart, but it dropped about 2 feet lower in his anatomy later on.
“We are the folks who represent the families. Talk like you care. Act like you care. When you’re talking about issues that touch families, it’s OK to make it look like you care. It’s OK to have policies that demonstrate that you’ll make their lives better — and talk about it in a way that they understand. Too many Democrats — the policy’s just fine, but they can’t talk about it in a way that anybody else understands.”
I’m with him on the message being straight and true and talking in language that people can understand. But there are times he’s so over the top “aw shucks” that I’ve got to tell you that I find it hard to believe that he’s being straight himself. His “authenticity” sometimes sounds contrived — this is a guy who spent many years all over the world as an expert on irrigation techniques. He’s a trained scientist. But there are times in this interview that he seems quite shallow. I know he’s a real rancher and down home guy, but c’mon, the whole point of the interview is to find out what Democrats should do to win in the heartland, and he dispenses advice about it quite freely. But then he says stuff like this:
Q: Do you have to show the voters that you’re a regular guy — the “who would you most want to have a beer with?” test — or is it a matter of building some kind of link with voters on political or social issues?
You’re asking me? Hell, I’m out here in Montana. I don’t have any idea what the big shots in Washington, D.C., are doing. I don’t think I’ve got any great solutions for the rest of the world, but I think I understand Montanans.
[…] Q:Does that kind of personal authenticity trump everything else in the minds of voters?
There’s more that the big shots from big cities will never understand. I probably shook hands with at least half of the people who voted for me, maybe two-thirds. You can do that in a place where there’s only 920,000 people.
Q:But you can’t do that when you’re running for president. How would you translate that sort of personal appeal into a national campaign?
You’re asking me about a national campaign? What the heck would I know about a national campaign?
Look, I started this out by saying that Democrats can win if they lead with their hearts. Let people feel you! Don’t try to verbalize. Let them feel you first. If you’re not a passionate person — I happen to be. If I’m for something, you’re gonna know it pretty quick. And if I’m agin it, you’re gonna know it too. I’m straight about those things. Some people can’t do that. Maybe they’ve had a lot of time in politics, or they’re lawyers, or it’s just their makeup. And they have all these highfalutin pollsters and media people, and they say, “Well, there’s this demographic that kind of bleeds into this demographic, and you don’t want to lose these over here because you were on this.” I don’t believe any of it. I think most people will support you if they know that you’ll stand your ground.
I get the straight shooter business and I agree with the essence of what he’s saying. I think that people will be particularly receptive to some straight talk after the Bush administration is done. But I’ve got to tell you, after George W. Bush I have a feeling that people aren’t going to be too impressed with leadership that goes overboard to pretend that they don’t understand the way the world works. I don’t think that will work again.
And frankly, I just don’t underestand what the hell he’s saying here, other than that the voting public is stupid:
Q: Howard Dean, who earned an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association as governor, has said almost exactly what you’ve just said about guns. But people in Montana probably don’t think of him as a friend to rural gun owners.
Most people that matter in Montana have never heard of Howard Dean or anybody else we’ve talked about today. People who are into politics — they’ve already decided how they’re going to vote not only in 2008 but in 2012. They’re not persuadable. The more people follow this, the less persuadable they are. Anybody that knows the names I just talked about is either a hard “R” or a hard “D.” They already know how they’re going to vote for the rest of their lives.
So Joe and Mary Six-Pack, they don’t have time to watch “Hardball With Chris Matthews.” They haven’t any idea who Pat Buchanan is, or Robert Novak. They don’t watch that stuff. They don’t read about it. They open the newspaper; they read a couple of headlines on the front page to see if they know anybody that got in a pickle, and then they go right to the sports page or the comics. And if they see something about politics in there — hoo, they’re not reading that.
Q:Don’t you think any of it seeps through? The Republicans’ involvement in the Terri Schiavo case, for example?
Sure it does. Maybe a little [on] Terri Schiavo because it was blasted on the national news. But I don’t think anybody figured out what was going on there, except that it looked to them like it was a big political move by some rascals in Washington.
Do they make any distinction about which “rascals” those were?
You know, Joe and Mary Six-Pack, they don’t disassociate. They’re pretty much all in the same box.
Q: They may not differentiate among Democrats, either. Again, Howard Dean has a record that’s not at all unlike what you’re trying to pull off in Montana, but it’s hard to imagine Dean as the kind of national candidate who would do well here.
The first time people heard of Howard Dean, they heard of him as some guy from Vermont — and people vaguely know where that is, but it sounds like it’s where lots of hippies live — and that he was against the war. So even before they saw him on TV, they figured he had a ponytail and a nose ring. Turns out, if they had gone three or four pages deep, they would have found out that the guy was a well-respected, moderate Democrat. But in the course of national politics, you’ve got about a blink or two to make up your mind whether you like somebody.
I just don’t get that. You couldn’t possibly have formed an opinon of Howard Dean if you didn’t follow the news at least somewhat. And what’s the point of being a straight shootin’ sonofagun if nobody listens to what you’re saying? If Joe and Mary Six Pack know nothing about politics and haven’t formed any opinion, then they are not likely to vote. Besides, there definitely are swing voters and ticket splitters in Montana, which is proven by the fact that he won the governorship while Bush won the presidency there.
I spent many years in Alaska, a quintessential western red state, where guns are worshipped and individualism is a religion. I thought that the ethos was fierce independence, not unwillingness to understand the details. And I certainly thought they didn’t like anybody telling them what they think.
But, this guy knows more about it than I do, so perhaps he’s right and we should rely almost entirely on style and not sweat the details.
I like him and I understand his basic message. I’m grateful that he’s out there as an example. But he seems a little bit shallow in this interview so I’m not sold on the idea that he’s the guy to lead us out of the wilderness.
Update: After reading the comments and having an e-mail exchange with a very smart friend, I think the problem is that guys like Schweitzer should not give interviews about strategy. His mystique is all about not caring about strategy, just telling it like it is. There’s a little cognitive dissonence in someone like him trying to finesse that. He’s better off talking about what he believes, not talking about how other people should talk about what he believes.
This was one of my biggest gripes about Dean. He talked about process constantly — “I want guys in pick-up trucks to vote for us” — when a candidate ought to just make his pitch to the guy in the truck. (Now as the Democratic chairman it’s his job to talk about process, so it’s perfectly approcpriate.)
Straight talking guys should never talk about politics in purely political terms. It takes away their mystery and makes ’em look like politicians. Which they are — but it’s exactly the image we are trying to dispel.
Miguel Estrada says that Ann Coulter is “lively and funny.” John Cloud wonders if she is really a “hard right ironist.” She herself thinks that she’s wickedly hilarious.
And the really, really cool thing is that this is a talking doll. Here’s an example of the hilarious one-liners she gets off: (click here to hear her do a perfect impression of Amber Waves in “Boogie Nights.”)
“Liberals can’t just come out and say they want to take our money, kill babies and discriminate on the basis of race.”
Irony has never been so subtle. Here’s another of her screamingly funny bon mots (again, click the link to hear it delivered as if she’s just swallowed a fistfull of Rush’s Oxy)
“Liberals hate America, they hate flagwavers, they hate abortion opponents. They hate all religions except Islam post 9/11. Even Islamic terrorists don’t hate America like liberals do; they don’t have the energy; if they had that much energy they’d have indoor plumbing by now.”
Cloud says, “the officialdom of punditry, so full of phonies and dullards, would suffer without her humor and fire.” I suppose if you are the kind of person who thinks that tying cats tails together and throwing them over a clothesline is funny, you might think this is too. There’s always a market for that kind of “humor” among racists, bullies and their sycophants.
One thing I notice in all this back and forth is that Cloud and other Coulter defenders don’t seem to grasp the fundamental difference between what Coulter says and what other, allegedly equally vicious, liberals like Eric Alterman say. Cloud is offended by Eric Alterman’s use of the phrase “journalistic venereal disease” to describe the current state of Time magazine. (Apparently, he cannot appreciate the literary imagery of the phrase.) What he fails to understand is that Alterman is condemning a specific article, magazine, person etc, while Coulter is dehumanizing an entire group of people.
To be fair, it isn’t just her, although she’s probably the most egregious offender. Rush has been making this same argument for years. They are fomenting a form of tribal hatred which is not something that Eric Alterman or others are doing when they caustically criticize Time magazine.
There is an overt advocation of group hatred evolving here that should be offensive to everyone. Politics is a rough game and nobody says that we all have to speak as if we are at a tea party for Queen Elizabeth. But you have to look at the substance of what people like Coulter and Limbaugh are saying. They are making millions of dollars selling the message that liberals are enemies of America. Not just wrong. Not just stupid. Not just ugly. Dangerous traitors in a time of enormous challenge and global military action. People are reading and listening to this stuff and if they don’t know better they might just think she isn’t joking. Which I would argue, she isn’t.
I don’t suggest that she shouldn’t be allowed to say what she wants (although Red State quotes her at the CPAC conference saying “this whole free speech thing is a canard.”) But it isn’t too much to ask that one of the mainstream national magazines of record not enable her overt hate mongering with a puff piece.
Cloud ends his letter to Alterman with the convenient chestnut that since both sides are screaming at him he must be fair. Coulter’s defenders are mad at him because the cover doesn’t flatter their gal enough. Liberals, on the other hand, are angry that Time magazine has seen fit to give mainstream credibility to someone who wants to annihilate them. That means he’s fair and balanced.
Check out Sommerby on this subject if you’ve forgotten to. His series is a keeper.
Oh and just for a laugh here’s a classic comment to the Red State post that expresses qualms about Coulter:
I don’t know what you guys are whining about. Ann Coulter doesn’t go on television ranting and raving like the liberals do. Remember Lawrence O’Donnell? Paul Begala? James Carville? Try Maureen Dowd. Ann is nothing like these losers but she does have a sharp wit and biting tongue and knows how to dish it out. These conspiracy theory wingnuts deserve nothing less.
That is the problem with Republicans. They don’t know how to go for the throat while the Democrats are pros at aiming for the head.
I hope Ann keeps it up and never gives an inch. She is a strength for us conservatives, not something to be ashamed of.
That reminds me: Is anyone else thinking Bush term two looks a lot like Clinton term one? Tough fights on nominations, unpopular cultural battles (gays in the military then, Schiavo now), collapse of primary domestic initiatives (Health Care reform then, privatization now), ethical investigations weakening friendly congressional leaders, and so on. The resemblance is quite close.
As a matter of fact, I’ve been noticing the same thing. Except Bush actually is a lame duck and that means his agenda is toast.
I was struck the other day as he and his cadre of ugly Republican sycophants gathered for the signing of the MBNA Usury Bill that I didn’t see much of him anymore. This after four long years of hearing his fake Texas twang day in and day out like an ear worm. Suddenly, he’s not there all the time.
It’s true that it is reminiscent of Clinton’s first term, but Clinton was always the focus of what was going on, even when they claimed he was shrinking. The press couldn’t get enough of him. Bush, on the other hand, looks lamer and lamer by the day. Now we are headed toward a new version of the government shutdown and Bush isn’t even a player. The action is in the congress and it’s a lot more interesting than listening to him repeat his sub-literate mantras day in and day out. The media isn’t that interested in him any longer.
Clearly, we are going to have to start a new front in the GWOT. It’s the only thing that will save Karl Rove’s legacy.
1,347: Number of days from the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to VJ Day (Victory in Japan) on August 15, 1945.
1,317: Number of days from the airplane-bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, to today.
If Osama makes it to May 21, he will have survived the self-declared world’s only superpower in a presidentially-declared war longer than Tojo, Hitler, and Mussolini combined.
The 101st fighting keyboarders will soon be able to proudly say that their epic war has gone on longer than the biggest conflagration in human history. And with similar results. Except for the winning part.
But damn, we typed and shopped bravely, didn’t we?
Arnold Schwarzenegger could well be a one-term governor. Unbelievable as that seemed at the beginning of the year, which the action superstar entered as arguably the most popular governor in California history, it may end up that way.
[…]
A telling scene came last week at a strange little event at the Capitol. Billed as a “Thank You, Arnold” rally, heavily promoted with blast e-mails, robocalls and talk radio, it was a complete bust. A mere 100 supporters turned up to see the strange duo of Hollywood libertine Tom Arnold (the comedian who was Schwarzenegger’s sidekick in True Lies) and abstemious conservative 2003 gubernatorial candidate Tom McClintock.
Read the whole article for the litany of problems the Governator is facing as his “reform” agenda is resisted by pretty much everybody.
Unsurprisingly, I think that Warren Beatty understands the problem:
“This is an Arnold picture,” says Oscar-winner Beatty. “Superman walks in the room, and shit happens. That can be pretty spectacular. As long as all the characters follow the script. But this isn’t a movie.”
This is another example of the folly of voting for superficial politics. Schwarzenneger is alleged to be a pretty smart guy. I think it was Hollywood hype. He’s a hard worker who parlayed his body into a successful Hollywood career. (Many women have done the same before him, and none of them have been called geniuses for doing it.) If he really believed that he could do something like destroy California’s public employee pension plan purely by dint of his celebrity — a little fallacy that seems to common among big shot Republicans these days — then he’s stupid.
Hollywood is full of delusional people who think that they are geniuses. The worst offenders aren’t even stars like Arnold who can, at least, prove that they can make a movie profitable merely by their presence in it more often than not. The movie executives, who are the only organizational role models Arnold has ever had, are the real offenders.
Nikki Finke has this fascinating little window into the Hollywood boardroom:
Hypocrisy, thy name is EW’s parent company, Time Warner. Chairman and CEO Dick Parsons gave himself a perk that’s a monument to ego: a 5,000-square-foot, 21st-floor, marble-and-rare-wood dream suite (a supposed $25 mil to build out) inside the swankiest and priciest NYC office space, the new Time Warner Center. Parsons and the other heads of the Mammoth Media conglomerates feeding America its infotainment — Disney, Sony, Viacom, General Electric and News Corp. — may gag on celebrity greed, but they never stop indulging their own corporate gluttony.
Wanna hurl? Look at the latest shareholders-be-damned headlines this week about Viacom — owner of Paramount, CBS, MTV, VH1, and Infinity radio — disclosing that it gave its top three moguls a 58 percent pay increase even though the company’s stock price fell 18 percent in 2004. A Viacom spokesman noted that the bonuses for all executives were tied to operating income, not share price.
It’s not just the arrogance of rich, old Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone claiming he cuts costs at every corner while at the same time lining his own pockets at the expense of investors that’s so nauseating. It’s also the profligacy of a public company shameless enough to reimburse Les Moonves, who lives in Los Angeles but also has a New York apartment, $105,000 for the period he stayed in New York at his apartment instead of at a hotel, or Tom Freston, who is based in New York but also has a residence in Los Angeles, $43,100 for the time he spent staying at his L.A. home instead of a hotel.
Years ago, in another life, I used to receive Christmas baskets from Sumner Redstone. Instead of muffins or popcorn, however, he sent Omaha steaks. He was a cheapskate in every other way, but he did know his perks.
Mississippi is among the first states in the nation to make it lawful to allow religious documents to be posted on public property.
By signing the law today, Gov. Haley Barbour “thrills” the Christian conservative base of the Republican Party, which he’ll need if he plans to seek re-election or launch a presidential campaign, said Larry J. Sabato, director of the director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Virginia.
The law gives permission to those in authority of public buildings to post The Ten Commandments, excerpts of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and the motto, “In God We Trust.”
“Fundamentalist Christians can be a majority of those who turn up in caucus primaries. This would be very useful in seeking the Republican nomination for president,” Sabato said.
There is only one way to deal with this. Scientologists, fully recognized as a religion by the US government, should insist on displaying their sacred documents as well. If the government of Mississippi isn’t establishing Christianity as the state religion with this act, then it will be open to displays of all religions that Americans practice, right?
I honestly think this may be a better tack to take than constantly fighting purely on the principle that no religious displays should be allowed. People evidently need to have someone draw them a picture of the problems that ensue when the government starts taking sides in religious issues. (They could read European history, but that would take time away from “Desperate Housewives”.) The hard core fundamentalists would not care because they actively seek to wipe out any religious expression but their own. However, there are many people who don’t see the harm in displaying The Ten Commandments in a courthouse. It is those people who need to be shown what happens when the government allows one religion to have official standing over another. Things get ugly. Apparently we need a demonstration of that before people will understand it.
We have been very fortunate in this country to have religions of all kinds flourishing without interference. The establishment clause, it should be remembered, was supported by evangelicals at the time because they were the most likely to be oppressed if freedom of religion was not made explicit in the new constitution. Without the establishment clause, and American government’s overall hands-off attitude, the Mormon and Pentacostal churches would never have become world religions.
I don’t know if the following is true (got it on these here internets) but I think it’s a fair illustration of the lesson:
THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD GO I –
“On seeing several criminals being led to the scaffold in the 16th century, English Protestant martyr John Bradford remarked, ‘There but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford.’ His words, without his name, are still very common ones today for expressing one’s blessings compared to the fate of another. Bradford was later burned at the stake as a heretic.” From the “Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins” by Robert Hendrickson, Facts on File, New York, 1997.
Update: Matt Yglesias has more on the difficulties awaiting the new Republican “religious” party/ .
David Brooks says that if it weren’t for Roe vs Wade we wouldn’t be having all this nastiness in our political discourse. And the fight over the judiciary — my gawd — nobody would even think of it:
Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe vs. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter -viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it.
Religious conservatives became alienated from their own government, feeling that their democratic rights had been usurped by robed elitists. Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views. The parties polarized as they each became dominated by absolutist activists.
I think he’s right. In fact, all those right wingers who agitated for the impeachment (and worse) of Earl Warren in the 1960’s were not actually upset about Brown vs board of education or Griswald vs Connecticut or any of the other decisions that we thought had set the wingnuts aflame during the era. It was because they were anticipating that the Supreme Court was going to find a right to abortion in 1973.
The Warren Court (1953-1969) fueled the Culture War into an inferno and then placed the federal judiciary squarely in the white-hot center of the conflagration. “Impeach Earl Warren” signs exploded like rockets across the nation as Americans began to realize what was happening. But the courts and the Constitution have remained at the center of our culture conflict, and much of the Warren Court’s legacy remains in tact.
Clearly, they refuse to admit that until Roe vs Wade in 1973 the right had no issues with the courts. Indeed, everyone got along just great. They bore no ill will for the court that found “separate but equal” to be unconstitutional. Oh no, it wasn’t until poor Harry Blackmun found that a woman had a right to the privacy of her own body that the right decided that the “robed elitists” had usurped their democratic rights. All that impeachment talk before then was just good clean fun.
Thus, the culture war is all about abortion and not, as some have erroneously assumed, a half century of struggle over fundamental issues of social justice, tolerance, individual rights and modernity in general. This whole thing is a simple disagreement between upstanding conservatives saving cute little babies from black robed elitists and lazy liberals refusing to admit that equal rights under the law is a matter for legislative negotiation with Rick Santorum.
That Brooks, he’s a keen social observer and historical analyst. He figured this out, I’m sure, over a Bud light and a plate of popcorn shrimp down at Coco’s.
