Kevin links to Volokh spotting a Slate “Bushism” error. Volokh appears to think that the president is often mischaracterized and that journalists should not take it on faith that he speaks opaquely at times.
As I’ve said before, part of the problem with the Bushisms column is that they often fault the President for things that aren’t much worth faulting. But the broader problem is that once a journalist gets into the mindset of “Let me catch Bush misspeaking,” it’s very easy to start seeing errors where no errors exist. Instead of the normal “Someone says Bush erred, so let’s investigate this skeptically” view that journalists should have, the author falls into the habit of assuming that all claimed Bush misstatements are in fact misstatements. And the consequence is screw-ups like this. Shouldn’t we expect better from the editor of a leading magazine?
Yes we should.
And we should also expect better than this from the president of the fucking United States of America:
Because the — all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There’s a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be — or closer delivered to what has been promised.
Does that make any sense to you? It’s kind of muddled. Look, there’s a series of things that cause the — like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate — the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those — if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.
Now I am entirely sympathetic to the notion that journalists are not skeptical enough of many things. The president’s social security plan. WMD in Iraq. That 2+2=5. But surely, after listening to four years of that kind of mentally challenged gobbledygook it’s a bit presumptuous to lecture journalists for not being entirely skeptical of accounts that have the president speaking mentally challenged gobbledygook.
Yesterday I had the questionable pleasure of listening to Lynn Cheney on Fresh Air very reasonably describing the United States as the best country in the world, a country whose history should be taught as living up to the highest ideals of human achievement. She sees this nation as being on an ever upward trajectory toward perfection and is mighty displeased that schoolchildren are not being taught this patriotic view.
This is especially interesting in light of the fact that she and her husband and the rest of the Bush administration have the dubious distinction of committing some of the first war crimes of the 21st Century.
I don’t know what happened to certain people in the United States after 9/11, but they seemed to have entered some sort of hallucinatory fugue state in which they lost all reason. We find out today that the tales of sexual depravity at Gitmo that everyone dismissed earlier are true.I wrote about this last summer when the Center For Constitutional Rights issued its (pdf) report. We have known for some time that General Geoffrey Miller, artillery officer, was the one who introduced this fatuous, Sipowitzian interrogation style to Guantanamo. From the report, issued last July:
“We had the impression that at the beginning things were not carefully planned but a point came at which you could notice things changing. That appeared to be after General Miller around the end of 2002. That is when short-shackling started, loud music playing in interrogation, shaving beards and hair, putting people in cells naked, taking away people’s “comfort” items, the introduction of levels, moving some people every two hours depriving them of sleep, the use of A/C air. Isolation was always there. “Intel” blocks came in with General Miller. Before when people were put into isolation they would seem to stay for not more than a month. After he came, people would be kept there for months and months and months. We didn’t hear anybody talking about being sexually humiliated or subjected to sexual provocation before General Miller came. After that we did. Although sexual provocation, molestation did not happen to us, we are sure that it happened to others. It did not come about at first that people came back and told about it. They didn’t. What happened was that one detainee came back from interrogation crying and confided in another what had happened. That detainee in turn thought that it was so shocking he told others and then other detainees revealed that it had happened to them but they had been too ashamed to admit to it. It therefore came to the knowledge of everyone in the camp that this was happening to some people. It was clear to us that this was happening to the people who’d been brought up most strictly as Muslims. It seemed to happen most to people in Camps 2 and 3, the “intel” people, ie the people of most interest to the interrogators. In addition, military police also told us about some of the things that were going on. They would tell us just rather like news or something to talk about. This was something that was happening in the camp. It seemed to us that a lot of the MPs couldn’t themselves believe it was happening.
And it was after Miller was sent to evaluate Abu Ghraib that the bad apples began their nocturnal hijinks. Coincidence, I’m sure. (It’s almost impossible to believe that they sent Miller to “clean up” Abu Ghraib after the pictures came out, but they did. Has there ever been a more arrogant bunch of assholes?)
One thing that has not yet been put together in all this is the fact that Gitmo became a training school for interrogations (which may explain why they got into all this thongs and menstrual blood smearing business.) They knew very early that the prisoners there were useless for intelligence purposes. Most of them, if they were Taliban or al Qaeda at all, were so low level that they simply had nothing to share. But why waste all those lawyerless losers. Use them as guinea pigs for a new generation of TV addled interrogators trained by those who know nothing about it. (Once again, keep in mind that the entire neocon faction is enamored of a comic book called “The Arab Mind.”)
As more and more is revealed every day it becomes clear that these incompetents who ignored the warning signs before 9/11, (more proof of which was also revealed today) are going to get a lot more of us killed. I guess that is the price we shall have to pay for allowing ourselves to wallow in political trivia and tabloid sensation during the Clinton years and creating a taste for showbiz politics that encouraged the puerile cartoon reaction to the attacks from our leaders. Our leaders, the people with whom we trusted our very lives, behaved as we wanted them to, as we would expect the man who we’d like to have a beer with to behave — with simple-minded bloodlust instead of reason.
I keep thinking I’m going to wake from this awful dream in which law professors (and former deputy attorneys general) of the highest reputation do not make arguments like this (from the important article by Jane Mayer in this week’s New Yorker called “Outsourcing Torture”):
In a recent phone interview, Yoo was soft-spoken and resolute. “Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system?”
What would that category of behavior be? Mass Murder? Torture? Genocide? Medical experimentation? Eviscerating babies with a bobby pin? No, those are all covered by criminal statutes and international law. So, it must be something worse than that, musn’t it? It must be worse than Hitler. It must be something so bad that Satan could only conceive of it. We call it “terrorism.”
I wonder when those in this country whose children were killed by a child molester like John Wayne Gacy or who were the victims of a brutal home invasion robbery or even a drunk driver might begin to wonder why the criminals who committed those crimes should should be allowed this “luxury” of due process when we can simply pluck terrorists off the street, inflict torture upon them and throw them in prison forever. That awful day on 9/11 was shocking, to be sure. But is it more shocking than Tim McVeigh or that woman who killed the pregnant woman and carved her baby out of her womb? An average person can be forgiven for wondering just why we must deal with warrants and grand juries and trials with our homegrown vicious killers when we don’t have to deal with such niceties with terrorists. Just what is the principle that guides this decision?
I’m truly wondering when someone will ask that question. Because when someone finally does we will begin to answer Professor Yoo’s startling question about whether there aren’t some things that fall outside the legal system.
The answer is, of course there aren’t. The reason, professor, is that the rules of due process were designed to ensure that the government cannot arbitrarily imprison innocent people. That principle is so basic and so clear cut that you wouldn’t think that a law professor would have to even think about it.
Even that ole puritan Increase Mather (Cotton’s daddy) spoke out on this after the Salem Witch trials saying, “It were better that 10 suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned.” Please don’t try to tell me that the Puritans in Massachusetts were any less assured that the Devil presented an existential threat than terrorism does today. These people lived in a stew of supernatural fear and they were able to work themselves out of hysteria enough to see that condemning innocent people was the worst evil of all.
As for torture, we can go all the way back to the English Bill of Rights in 1689 to find that civilization had evolved enough to outlaw cruel and unusual punishment. Certainly, if punishment that was cruel and unusual has been outlawed for more than 400 years, then cruel and unusual treatment of those who haven’t even been found guilty of a crime cannot be considered legal in the 21st century. How does one become a first tier legal scholar and not see the implications of what we are doing?
In the “war on terrorism” we are operating under a system in which Joe Bob Bumpkin from the Arkansas National Guard and Rambo McClean of Blackwater Consulting are serving as detective, prosecutor and judge when they “capture” a so-called terrorist. They then render the “convict” to a facility outside of American jurisdiction where they “interrogate” this convict for information about his fellow criminals — for years at a time. Then the convict might get a trial in a kangaroo court. We know, however, that even if found “innocent” they will likely not be released. Everyone agrees that these men are just too dangerous to be freed no matter what.
Unless, of course, an allied government like Britain puts the heat on and demands that their citizens be released, after which they are allowed to go home and are free to go back into society and live normally as before. Odd how that works isn’t it? It would seem that we are making some mistakes, since these men have all been released — but we only know about it if a powerful ally demands it. Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to happen to the Afghans or any of the other citizens of middle eastern countries who, like us, don’t really give a damn if innocent people are tortured and imprisoned forever.
And, some believe that we Americans have now sanctioned this entire immoral regime:
Yoo also argued that the Constitution granted the President plenary powers to override the U.N. Convention Against Torture when he is acting in the nation’s defense—a position that has drawn dissent from many scholars. As Yoo saw it, Congress doesn’t have the power to “tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique.” He continued, “It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.” If the President were to abuse his powers as Commander-in-Chief, Yoo said, the constitutional remedy was impeachment. He went on to suggest that President Bush’s victory in the 2004 election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was “proof that the debate is over.” He said, “The issue is dying out. The public has had its referendum.”
It is the very core of the Commander In Chief function to be above the law. And Americans are assumed to have approved this by electing George W. Bush to a second term. That’s what the president meant when he said, “We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections.”
So, tell me all you decent Republicans out there, the good conservative Christians and patriots and those who believe as Lynn Cheney does that this country is close to achieving perfection — tell me what you have to say about this:
Nadja Dizdarevic is a thirty-year-old mother of four who lives in Sarajevo. On October 21, 2001, her husband, Hadj Boudella, a Muslim of Algerian descent, and five other Algerians living in Bosnia were arrested after U.S. authorities tipped off the Bosnian government to an alleged plot by the group to blow up the American and British Embassies in Sarajevo. One of the suspects reportedly placed some seventy phone calls to the Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah in the days after September 11th. Boudella and his wife, however, maintain that neither he nor several of the other defendants knew the man who had allegedly contacted Zubaydah. And an investigation by the Bosnian government turned up no confirmation that the calls to Zubaydah were made at all, according to the men’s American lawyers, Rob Kirsch and Stephen Oleskey.
At the request of the U.S., the Bosnian government held all six men for three months, but was unable to substantiate any criminal charges against them. On January 17, 2002, the Bosnian Supreme Court ruled that they should be released. Instead, as the men left prison, they were handcuffed, forced to put on surgical masks with nose clips, covered in hoods, and herded into waiting unmarked cars by masked figures, some of whom appeared to be members of the Bosnian special forces. Boudella’s wife had come to the prison to meet her husband, and she recalled that she recognized him, despite the hood, because he was wearing a new suit that she had brought him the day before. “I will never forget that night,” she said. “It was snowing. I was screaming for someone to help.” A crowd gathered, and tried to block the convoy, but it sped off. The suspects were taken to a military airbase and kept in a freezing hangar for hours; one member of the group later claimed that he saw one of the abductors remove his Bosnian uniform, revealing that he was in fact American. The U.S. government has neither confirmed nor denied its role in the operation.
Six days after the abduction, Boudella’s wife received word that her husband and the other men had been sent to Guantánamo. One man in the group has alleged that two of his fingers were broken by U.S. soldiers. Little is publicly known about the welfare of the others.
Boudella’s wife said that she was astounded that her husband could be seized without charge or trial, at home during peacetime and after his own government had exonerated him. The term “enemy combatant” perplexed her. “He is an enemy of whom?” she asked. “In combat where?” She said that her view of America had changed. “I have not changed my opinion about its people, but unfortunately I have changed my opinion about its respect for human rights,” she said. “It is no longer the leader in the world. It has become the leader in the violation of human rights.”
In October, Boudella attempted to plead his innocence before the Pentagon’s Combatant Status Review Tribunal. The C.S.R.T. is the Pentagon’s answer to the Supreme Court’s ruling last year, over the Bush Administration’s objections, that detainees in Guantánamo had a right to challenge their imprisonment. Boudella was not allowed to bring a lawyer to the proceeding. And the tribunal said that it was “unable to locate” a copy of the Bosnian Supreme Court’s verdict freeing him, which he had requested that it read. Transcripts show that Boudella stated, “I am against any terrorist acts,” and asked, “How could I be part of an organization that I strongly believe has harmed my people?” The tribunal rejected his plea, as it has rejected three hundred and eighty-seven of the three hundred and ninety-three pleas it has heard. Upon learning this, Boudella’s wife sent the following letter to her husband’s American lawyers:
Dear Friends, I am so shocked by this information that it seems as if my blood froze in my veins, I can’t breathe and I wish I was dead. I can’t believe these things can happen, that they can come and take your husband away, overnight and without reason, destroy your family, ruin your dreams after three years of fight. . . . Please, tell me, what can I still do for him? . . . Is this decision final, what are the legal remedies? Help me to understand because, as far as I know the law, this is insane, contrary to all possible laws and human rights. Please help me, I don’t want to lose him.
I do not know if this woman’s husband is a terrorist. There certainly seems to be some question about it, however, and this man has been given no opportunity to defend himself. He was held for three months, freed by the Bosnian government due to lack of evidence and as he emerged from the court we kidnapped him like a scene in a cheap spy novel and made him legally invisible. There is every reason to believe that he will never be free again.
We are disappearing people, rendering them to friendly governments that aren’t afraid to put the electrode to genitals and threaten with dog rape. And we are building our own infrastructure of torture and extra legal imprisonment. It is a law of human nature that if you build it, they will come. This infrastructure will be expanded and bureaucratized. It’s already happening. And when they decide, as Professor Yoo has already decided, that an election is a sanctioning of anything the President chooses to do in the War on Terror, it is only a matter of time before internal political enemies become a threat.
And then it will be us.
I will not plead If I deny, I am condemned already, In courts where ghosts appear as witnesses And swear men’s lives away. If I confess, Then I confess a lie, to buy a life, Which is not life, but only death in life.
I’m busy today, but I did happen to just catch Howie Kurtz as he told Wolf Blitzer that the real Talon news story is that “liberal bloggers” went after “Jeff Gannon’s” personal life. (Jeff told Howie that he was being threatened and stalked.) Howie didn’t mention that it was the fact that “Jeff” wrote under an alias that led these bloggers to find his beefcake pics online and that he’d been registering domain names for gay escort services. Apparently, it’s impolite to reveal such things even when the person in question makes a living as a homophobic wingnut.
He and Wolf both agreed that the White House press corps is just full of fiery partisans and there is nothing wrong with them being allowed to ask the president questions. Furthermore, there is absolutely nothing wrong with someone who writes for a front group’s web site being allowed into the White House on a “day pass.” Howie said that in this day and age of blogging you don’t have to write for a newspaper or magazine to be a member of the white house press corps.
Ok. Any of you liberal bloggers in DC who would like to get into the White House and ask Scotty and Dubya some questions, feel free to just show up. According to Howie and Wolf there’s no general rule against it.
There’s growing buzz here in Washington, as well as over on the Internet, about a White House reporter some say was acting on behalf of a conservative group.
Howard Kurtz of CNN’s “RELIABLE SOURCES” and “The Washington Post” joining us from “The Washington Post” newsroom.
What’s going on here, Howie?
HOWARD KURTZ, “RELIABLE SOURCES”: Well, Jeff Gannon is his name. At least that’s the name he uses professionally. It’s not his real name.
And he’s a reporter for a couple of online sites. He’s a self- described conservative journalist. One of the Web sites his work appears on is called GOPUSA. And he pretty much operated below the radar until he got the chance to ask President Bush a question two weeks ago. Let’s take a look at that.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
QUESTION: Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. Harry Reid was talking about soup lines, and Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet, in the same breath, they say that Social Security is rock-solid and there’s no crisis there. How are you going to work — you said you’re going to reach out to these people — how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KURTZ: Now, that question, Wolf, kind of put a target on Jeff Gannon’s back. A lot of liberal bloggers began digging into his background. In the last 24 hours, they’ve exposed his real name. They’ve raised questions about some sexually provocative Web addresses that he registered on one of his companies, but never actually did anything with.
And Gannon has now resigned from the two Web sites that he was writing for.
BLITZER: Is there any evidence that there’s a connection, that the White House put him up to this to throw these kind of questions whether to Scott McClellan or to the president? Any evidence of wrongdoing, first of all, on the part of the White House?
KURTZ: No evidence whatsoever. I talked to Scott McClellan about this today, the White House spokesman. He said, first of all, President Bush didn’t know who Jeff Gannon was when he called on him at that news conference.
But McClellan knows who he is. He calls on him at White House briefings from time to time. He says that there are a lot of people in the White House press room who have strong opinions and sometimes put them into their questions and it’s not his job as the press secretary to be deciding who can get into the White House and who can’t based on their political views.
Gannon, by the way, says, sure, he’s very conservative. He makes no bones about that. But he thinks that a lot of the reporters in the White House press room are liberal, and he provides some balance.
BLITZER: What’s the name of the organization, the news organization, he reported for. And what political connections did you discover may or may not exist to that news organization?
KURTZ: Well, he writes for a site called Talon News, which appears to be kind of a straight news site. But all of the stories that he writes also appear on a site that’s called GOPUSA, which, as you might expect, is a conservative site. In fact, it’s motto is: We’re bringing the conservative message to America.
And both of those sites are owned by a man named Bobby Eberle, who is a Texas Republican activist in the state of Texas. So the issue here isn’t really Jeff Gannon’s ideology. He’s the first to tell you that he comes at journalism from a conservative perspective. The issue I think is, should some of his liberal critics, these liberal bloggers, have started investigating his personal life in an effort to discredit him?
It’s fine to disagree with his politics, but did they go too far, I think a lot of people are asking, in dragging in some of this personal stuff?
BLITZER: I used to be a White House correspondent for many years, sat through numerous briefings. There are plenty of journalists that wear their politics on their sleeve, liberals, conservatives. What’s wrong with journalists having these kind of views, being advocacy journalists, if you will?
KURTZ: I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, as long as they make clear what their views are, as Jeff Gannon clearly did.
A lot of people are questioning, well, why does this guy have White House press credentials? Because he doesn’t write for a newspaper or magazine. Everything he writes is simply online. But in the age of blogging, that’s hardly unusual. And he doesn’t have a permanent — what’s called a hard pass. He just gets cleared into the White House on a day-to-day basis, which is a privilege that is pretty much open to any journalist.
So I think it’s absolutely fair game to critique his stories, to argue with what he writes, to question his views. And he does that to other members of the press as well. But what precipitated his resignation is that he says that on behalf — out of concern for his family — and he told me last week that he had been threatened, that he had been stalked — this has gotten so personal that he felt he needed to step down as the White House correspondent for Talon News.
BLITZER: And it does come within the context of some of the other embarrassments, Armstrong Williams and some other issues, which we won’t get into right now.
But Howard Kurtz doing some digging, doing some reporting for us — thanks very much, Howard Kurtz.
KURTZ: Thank you.
Update II:
I hadn’t seen this earlier Kurtz Gannon apologia. He really doesn’t understand the implications of this whole panoply of payola skullduggery, does he? Or perhaps he does …
Campaign Desk points out that Joe Klein is pulling things out of the ether:
Finally, there was the boorish and possibly unprecedented hooting of the President by Democrats during the [State of the Union] speech.
“No! No! No!” they shouted, inaccurately, when Bush asserted that the Social Security trust fund would, in a decade or so, start paying out more money than it takes in. If nothing is done, it surely will.
Campaign Desk correctly notes:
Beyond the fact that such “hooting” was far from unprecedented, Klein’s short-term memory must be playing tricks on him. Democrats did not start crying out “No! No! No!” when the president asserted that the trust fund would soon start paying out more money than it takes in. Rather, the Democrats accurately started calling out “No! No! No!” when the president inaccurately asserted that “By the year 2042, the entire system would be exhausted and bankrupt.” You can hear for yourself on the White House video of the address (Real Media or Windows Media) — the moment in question is about 15 minutes into the speech.
You can also hear the boorish boos of Republicans when Clinton said in the 1997 address that we didn’t need to change the constitution to balance the budget. (Little did we know then that the 90’s GOP balanced budget amendment hobby horse was actually designed to stop themselves from bankrupting the country.)
Here’s a nice little reminder from way back in 1999 of what the country was like in the days when our un-boorish representatives practiced civility and decency:
Reps. Robert Schaffer (R-Colo.) and John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) sent a letter to colleagues last week arguing that they should skip the speech because Clinton “is demonstrating his lack of respect for the Congress and its legitimate role.”
But Schaffer had few illusions that his absence would be noticed: “What happens tonight is Congress and the president coming together to send a message there’s some semblance of normalcy in Washington, and the detestable conduct of the president is somehow tolerated,” he said. “The president doesn’t care and nobody cares. The theatrical production is going to go on unimpeded.”
Klein, no doubt, was sitting in front of a camera somewhere that night, hunched over the desk like a slobbering beast, so intensely focused on Clinton’s manly member that he simply didn’t hear a thing.
President Bush’s senior adviser, Karl Rove, will take on a wider role in developing and coordinating policy in the president’s second term, the White House announced on Tuesday.
Rove, who was Bush’s top political strategist during his 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns, will become a deputy White House chief of staff in charge of coordinating policy between the White House Domestic Policy Council, National Economic Council, National Security Council and Homeland Security Council.
I hate to bring this up because it’s so indelicate and all, but can someone explain to me again why we should rely on religion to restore the moral fabric of our nation and smite the pernicious influences of the kinky sex loving Hollywood liberals? I keep forgetting.
Matthew Yglesias points out the growing Putinization of the Republican Party as it again tries to shut down dissent with legal intimidation. That first amendment sure sticks in the craw of the people who are running our government.
The RNC letter reads:
“The advertisement in question falsely and maliciously makes reference to ‘George Bush’s planned Social Security benefit cuts of up to 46 percent to pay for private accounts …’ ”
In his State of the Union address, the president said that “Social Security will not change in any way” for Americans 55 and older.”
Yeah. He said a lot of things. And?
Apparently, at least one of the station owners said he would investigate the ad and if he determined it was false, he would pull it. (The indefatigable Josh Marshall proves that the Move-on ad in question is factually correct and deconstructs the RNC letter to expose the obfuscatory mumbo jumbo that actually proves the case. Jayzuz, these guys never give up.)
Might I suggest that the DNC lawyers send letters to the same stations asking them to issue a disclaimer every time President Bush says that social security is going “bankrupt” or “bust.” Otherwise, somebody might get the idea that these media outlets were in the business of falsely and maliciously spreading misinformation about the status of the social security system.
With their usual up-is-downism, these are the same guys who claim that frivolous lawsuits are killing America. Evidently, it’s only frivolous if somebody has been disabled for life. It’s perfectly acceptable to use the courts to quell dissent.
Matt calls it Putinization. Neiwert calls it psuedo-fascism. I call it Republican totalitarianism. Whatever you call it, it’s long past time that we started to speak out clearly about what is really happening here. Interestingly, some of the most pointed criticism of this nature is now coming from the right:
A reader alerted me to this fascinating article from this month’s American Conservative in which yet another conservative goes off the reservation and utters the F word.
Students of history inevitably think in terms of periods: the New Deal, McCarthyism, “the Sixties” (1964-1973), the NEP, the purge trials—all have their dates. Weimar, whose cultural excesses made effective propaganda for the Nazis, now seems like the antechamber to Nazism, though surely no Weimar figures perceived their time that way as they were living it. We may pretend to know what lies ahead, feigning certainty to score polemical points, but we never do.
Nonetheless, there are foreshadowings well worth noting. The last weeks of 2004 saw several explicit warnings from the antiwar Right about the coming of an American fascism. Paul Craig Roberts in these pages wrote of the “brownshirting” of American conservatism—a word that might not have surprised had it come from Michael Moore or Michael Lerner. But from a Hoover Institution senior fellow, former assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, and one-time Wall Street Journal editor, it was striking.
Several weeks later, Justin Raimondo, editor of the popular Antiwar.com website, wrote a column headlined, “Today’s Conservatives are Fascists.” Pointing to the justification of torture by conservative legal theorists, widespread support for a militaristic foreign policy, and a retrospective backing of Japanese internment during World War II, Raimondo raised the prospect of “fascism with a democratic face.” His fellow libertarian, Mises Institute president Lew Rockwell, wrote a year-end piece called “The Reality of Red State Fascism,” which claimed that “the most significant socio-political shift in our time has gone almost completely unremarked, and even unnoticed. It is the dramatic shift of the red-state bourgeoisie from leave-us-alone libertarianism, manifested in the Congressional elections of 1994, to almost totalitarian statist nationalism. Whereas the conservative middle class once cheered the circumscribing of the federal government, it now celebrates power and adores the central state, particularly its military wing.”
[…]
But Rockwell (and Roberts and Raimondo) is correct in drawing attention to a mood among some conservatives that is at least latently fascist. Rockwell describes a populist Right website that originally rallied for the impeachment of Bill Clinton as “hate-filled … advocating nuclear holocaust and mass bloodshed for more than a year now.” One of the biggest right-wing talk-radio hosts regularly calls for the mass destruction of Arab cities. Letters that come to this magazine from the pro-war Right leave no doubt that their writers would welcome the jailing of dissidents. And of course it’s not just us. When USA Today founder Al Neuharth wrote a column suggesting that American troops be brought home sooner rather than later, he was blown away by letters comparing him to Tokyo Rose and demanding that he be tried as a traitor. That mood, Rockwell notes, dwarfs anything that existed during the Cold War. “It celebrates the shedding of blood, and exhibits a maniacal love of the state. The new ideology of the red-state bourgeoisie seems to actually believe that the US is God marching on earth—not just godlike, but really serving as a proxy for God himself.”
[…]
The warnings from these three writers would have been significant even if they had not been complemented by what for me was the most striking straw in the wind. Earlier this month the New York Times published a profile of Fritz Stern, the now retired but still very active professor of history at Columbia University and one of my first and most significant mentors. I met Stern as an undergraduate in the spring of 1974. His lecture course on 20th-century Europe combined intellectual lucidity and passion in a way I had never imagined possible.
Stern is an expert on the rise of fascism in Europe. Here are some of his remarks upon receiving the Leo Baeck medal:
…the rise of National Socialism was neither inevitable nor accidental. It did have deep roots, but the most urgent lesson to remember is that it could have been stopped. This is but one of the many lessons contained in modern German history, lessons that should not be squandered in cheap and ignorant analogies. A key lesson is that civic passivity and willed blindness were the preconditions for the triumph of National Socialism, which many clearheaded Germans recognized at the time as a monstrous danger and ultimate nemesis.
We who were born at the end of the Weimar Republic and who witnessed the rise of National Socialism—left with that all-consuming, complex question: how could this horror have seized a nation and corrupted so much of Europe?—should remember that even in the darkest period there were individuals who showed active decency, who, defying intimidation and repression, opposed evil and tried to ease suffering. I wish these people would be given a proper European memorial—not to appease our conscience but to summon the courage of future generations. Churchmen, especially Protestant clergy, shared his hostility to the liberal-secular state and its defenders, and they, too, were filled with anti-Semitic doctrine.
Allow me a few remarks not about the banality of evil but about its triumph in a deeply civilized country. After the Great War and Germany’s defeat, conditions were harsh and Germans were deeply divided between moderates and democrats on the one hand and fanatic extremists of the right and the left on the other. National Socialists portrayed Germany as a nation that had been betrayed or stabbed in the back by socialists and Jews; they portrayed Weimar Germany as a moral-political swamp; they seized on the Bolshevik-Marxist danger, painted it in lurid colors, and stoked people’s fear in order to pose as saviors of the nation. In the late 1920s a group of intellectuals known as conservative revolutionaries demanded a new volkish authoritarianism, a Third Reich. Richly financed by corporate interests, they denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture. These conservative revolutionaries were proud of being prophets of the Third Reich—at least until some of them were exiled or murdered by the Nazis when the latter came to power. Throughout, the Nazis vilified liberalism as a semi-Marxist-Jewish conspiracy and, with Germany in the midst of unprecedented depression and immiseration, they promised a national rebirth.
Twenty years ago, I wrote about “National Socialism as Temptation,” about what it was that induced so many Germans to embrace the terrifying specter. There were many reasons, but at the top ranks Hitler himself, a brilliant populist manipulator who insisted and probably believed that Providence had chosen him as Germany’s savior, that he was the instrument of Providence, a leader who was charged with executing a divine mission. God had been drafted into national politics before, but Hitler’s success in fusing racial dogma with a Germanic Christianity was an immensely powerful element in his electoral campaigns. Some people recognized the moral perils of mixing religion and politics, but many more were seduced by it. It was the pseudo-religious transfiguration of politics that largely ensured his success, notably in Protestant areas.
German moderates and German elites underestimated Hitler, assuming that most people would not succumb to his Manichean unreason; they didn’t think that his hatred and mendacity could be taken seriously. They were proven wrong. People were enthralled by the Nazis’ cunning transposition of politics into carefully staged pageantry, into flag-waving martial mass. At solemn moments, the National Socialists would shift from the pseudo-religious invocation of Providence to traditional Christian forms: 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.”
Because the — all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculate, for example, is on the table; whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There’s a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be — or closer delivered to what has been promised.
‘Does that make any sense to you? It’s kind of muddled. Look, there’s a series of things that cause the — like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate — the benefits will rise based upon inflation, as opposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those — if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.
‘Okay, better? I’ll keep working on it.’
I’m sure the hand-picked audience broke into rapturous cheers and began drooling and speaking in tongues as they always do when in the presence of Dear Leader. However, those who are not members of the Codpiece Cult might be expected to stay implanted on the reservation if they see this “explanation.” If any ads are done, this might be a good little piece of political theatre to show to the non-indoctrinated.
I wrote a post a while back musing about Bush’s newfound confidence:
This is the big story of the second term. Bush himself is now completely in charge. He did what his old man couldn’t do. He has been freed of all constraints, all humility and all sense of proportion. Nobody can run him, not Cheney, not Condi, not Card. He has a sense of his power that he didn’t have before. You can see it. From now on nobody can tell him nothin. It makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, doesn’t it?
During the 2000 campaign, then-Texas Gov. Bush overruled his horrified political handlers and insisted on pressing for Social Security privatization – particularly when speaking to Florida’s millions of geriatric voters.
To this day, Bush adamantly believes the issue was a political plus for him in Florida – a contention considered pollyannaish by many of his closest aides.
Some, in fact, say if he had kept quiet about tinkering with the most sacred of all domestic political cows, Bush would have won the Sunshine State easily, instead of needing the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold his 537-vote victory.
“He still thinks it helped him then,” a senior Bush political adviser remembered. “We all still think he’s crazy.”
Bush keeps reassuring legislators that it’s safe for them to vote for privatization because he ran and “won” on the issue. This report explains why he thinks that. He made the call to talk about it in 2000 and he “won” despite his handlers advice that it was dangerous. Therefore, everyone can feel safe (if they can manage to get the Supreme Court to decide the election for them.)
We know that the butterfly ballots would have tipped that election and if Bush was pushing privatization in Palm Beach County Florida, it would have been right and fair if he’d lost it just for that reason. Nothing could be more stupid. Except, perhaps, trying to actually do it.
I had been giving a lot of thought as to why he thought he could get away with destroying social security after two such narrow wins and small majorities in congress. They own the real estate for sure, but they are far from having a mandate for massive change. Even Tom Delay has been reported to be nervous that this will derail their majority.
Certainly, the polls do not show the kind of support that is normally needed to affect such a huge change:
1. Bush receives a 34 percent approval rating on handling Social Security, with 52 percent diapproval. And among independents, his rating is markedly worse: a mere 23 percent approval and 59 percent disapproval.
2. A question on the seriousness of the problems with Social Security yields just 18 percent saying the system needs to be completely rebuilt (12 percent among independents), with 33 percent saying major changes are needed and 43 percent calling for only minor changes.
3. By 61-29 (66-21 among independents), voters say that keeping Social Security as a program with a guaranteed monthly benefit is more important than letting younger workers decide for themselves how some of their Social Security contributions are invested, with varying benefit levels depending on the success of their investments.
4. By 61-24 (66-16 among independents), voters say Bush’s November election victory does not mean the American people support his ideas on Social Security.
5. By 54-42 (61-33 among independents), voters say they would not be likely to invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in the stock market if they were allowed to do so.
6. By 50-33 (53-25 among independents), voters say they “disapprove of proposals to incorporate personal accounts into the Social Security program”. (Interestingly, despite the Republicans’ now-religious belief that saying “personal accounts” rather than “private accounts” somehow makes these accounts much more attractive, the half-sample that was asked this same question with private accounts substituted for personal accounts actually had a slightly less disapproving reaction.)
Those numbers put an absolute lie to Bush’s assertion that he “ran and won” on the SS privatization issue. Clearly, he did not.
But, his natural arrogance and tendency to listen to courtiers who flatter his ego means that he sees his narrow win in 2004 as a mandate to dismantle the New Deal. And it appears that he has completely misinterpreted the lessons of his “win” in 2000. He believes that defying the experts on the social security issue has already proven him to be a man of great courage and political instincts that far surpass those who would advise against it.
I suspect strongly that putting social security at the top of the agenda was Bush’s call. He really believes that he “won” on the issue and interprets that to mean that he has the support of the American people no matter what the polls, the experts or even other Republicans say.
Both Napoleon and Hitler thought they could invade Russia in the winter, too.
