Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Urban Legends

Reggie Graves, a student at Red Lake High School, said he was watching a movie about Shakespeare in class Monday when he heard the gunman blast his way past the metal detector at the school’s entrance, killing a guard.

Then, in a nearby classroom, he heard the gunman say something to his friend Ryan: “He asked Ryan if he believed in God,” Graves said. “And then he shot him.”

*sigh*

Teresa Nielsen Hayden explains:

Thing is, Jeff Weise wasn’t imitating the actual Columbine shooters. He was imitating a pious urban legend (what back home we used to call a faith-promoting rumor) that sprang up in the wake of the Columbine shootings: that shooter Dylan Klebold asked Cassie Bernall whether she believed in God, and shot her when she said she did.

This story, in many variant versions, spread as fast as the internet would carry it. Cassie Bernall—a cute blonde who had a classic conversion-narrative history of turning to religion after dabbling in bush-league wickedness—was hailed as a martyr, and her story has since been repeatedly invoked to push the usual religious agendas. It’s been especially useful for WASP Chinos who want to think of themselves as being cruelly persecuted for their faith, but who are inconveniently short on evidence that this has ever happened.

Trouble is, the Cassie Bernall incident didn’t happen anything like the stories describe it, and the shooters weren’t targeting Christians. As has gradually become clear, the media coverage of Columbine was notably bad, and the Cassie Bernall story was the single most egregious example of slovenly journalism in the whole mess.

[…]

I’m sure Jeff Weise’s behavior will be trotted out as further proof that Christians are coming in for persecution. If I’m right, that claim will be purest codswallop. What this tragic incident really teaches us is that kids who are exposed to non-reality-based right-wing Christian propaganda may subsequently commit horrid acts of violence.

Yes. Despite the fact that Weise was evidently imitating an urban legend, I doubt very seriously that the press will report it that way or that the religious zealots will take the proper lesson from it. They are too busy trying to keep a dead woman’s body alive right now to notice this latest example of their horrible persecution at the hands of liberals, but they will eventually. They must continually gather evidence that liberals are satanically omnipotent or they lose their raison d’etre.

This reminds me of an e-mail I got from one of my trolls:

Michael Jackson is a special case to be sure, but so are the 90 million in Africa who are expected to get AIDS. What is special is that both are, in large part, victims of liberal Democrats. It seems that neither was taught Republican family values and so both embarked into the brave new sexual world that conservatives had long warned against.

Yes, Jackson was born into a very odd and abusive family, and with incredible talent. He was given neither education, love, nor sensible religious values. And, lastly, he apparently was also born with a tendency to be an effeminate, homosexual, pedophile. But perhaps most importantly, he was born into a feminist, homosexual, liberal, tolerant culture which wanted to make room for the entire rich and sophisticated panoply of diverse lifestyles that the liberal mind could cook up. Johnny had two dads, Suzy had two Moms, Michael was boldly liberal androgynous, and it was ok that 10,000 years of human history had been instantly reversed, or so it seemed.

In fact, Mr. Jackson at one point was on the cover of Time Magazine where he was hailed as the liberal symbol of the “New Androgyny”. None other than Elizabeth Taylor testified to his glorious combination of male and female qualities. A raft of feminists chimed in that he represented the death of traditional macho men and the dawn of a glorious, liberated new sexual future. Some men did seem to cringe, but mostly in intimidated silence, at the thought of lipstick and makeup. Ok, so the liberal attempt to rewrite human cultural history in an instant didn’t quite work out as expected, and even liberals seem to have drawn the line at pedophilia, but other aspects of the attack on the traditional Republican family continued unabated. The American divorce rate is 50%, nearly 50% of all American children grow up in broken homes, and we are paralyzed on the world stage about seeming intolerant toward even Africa’s genocidal sexual culture.

But now it may be time for liberals to punish Mr. Jackson for his excessive liberalism. It is hard though. When a priest in Boston (Father John Geoghan) was send to prison for pedophilia, guards noticed that other inmates developed a predilection for urinating on his bed. In time he was then transferred to another prison, for his own safety, whereupon he was promptly stomped to death by another group of very intolerant fellow inmates. Very sadly, there was almost no reaction anywhere to our inability to make the proscribed punishment fit the crime. If Mr. Jackson does go to jail we can only hope the state’s proscribed punishment will be administered, and not usurped by an insane, blood thirsty, liberal mob.

A liberal mob? Yes, a liberal mob indeed, and Hillary Clinton knows this grotesque truth all to well and seems quite happy to exploit it. Convicts are liberal Democrats as certainly as soldiers are Republicans. Her very recent “make every vote count” legislation seeks to enfranchise ex-cons because she knows the concentration of liberalism among ex-cons is as great as it is on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It seems liberalism is everywhere: in Michael Jackson, Africa, Hillary Clinton, and in prison. And everywhere it is a horror.

I don’t have the energy to deconstruct this incomprehensible mish mash. (I’m intrigued by the fact that liberals are responsible for the fact that Africans are not taught Republican family values, but whatever.) I think this is a pretty good representation of the cognitive ability of many of the right wing, so it’s pretty clear that we are up against something that appeals to reason are not going to affect. It would be really nice, however, if the media could refrain from enabling their persecution fantasies as they did with the Cassie Bernal story and this Terry Schiavo circus. I’m not holding my breath.

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Whose Family Is It Anyway?

One of my favorite readers (you know who you are) posited an interesting supposition in an e-mail last night that has been obliquely addressed today by Charles Krauthamer. My friend wondered if some of the lizard brain activity on the right surrounding this Schiavo issue might be wingnut parental reaction to seeing their children reject their conservative views. I know that it has been a bone of contention in my family for decades.

Krauthamer says this:

In this case, the loved ones disagree. The husband wants Terri to die; the parents do not. The Florida court gave the surrogacy to her husband, under the generally useful rule that your spouse is the most reliable diviner of your wishes: You pick your spouse and not your parents, and you have spent most of your recent years with your spouse and not your parents.

The problem is that although your spouse probably knows you best, there is no guarantee that he will not confuse his wishes with yours. Terri’s spouse presents complications. He has a girlfriend, and has two kids with her. He clearly wants to marry again. And a living Terri stands in the way.

Now, all of this may be irrelevant in his mind. He may actually be acting entirely based on his understanding of his wife’s wishes. And as she left nothing behind, the courts have been forced to conclude, on the basis of his testimony, that she would prefer to be dead.

That is why this is a terrible case. The general rule of spousal supremacy leads you here to a thoroughly repulsive conclusion. Repulsive because in a case where there is no consensus among the loved ones, one’s natural human sympathies suggest giving custody to the party committed to her staying alive and pledging to carry the burden themselves.

First of all, a living Terri doesn’t stand in the way. Michael Schiavo could have divorced her years ago if he just wanted to move on. He says that he believes he is carrying out his wife’s wishes and will not abandon her to live as she said she would never have wanted to live. The rule of spousal “supremacy” does not lead to a repulsive conclusion at all, even to Krauthamer, who like 87% of the country says he would want his feeding tube removed if he were in Schiavo’s position. In many people’s minds the repulsive outcome is this ghoulish need to force this poor woman’s body to carry on when it is clear that it is nothing more than an emotional crutch for her parents.

More importantly, I think that Krauthamer may be expressing the views of plenty of “conservative” people who want to control their children’s lives long past the time they are legally and morally allowed to do so. That particular kind of control is often the default temperamental style of right wingers. They wish to control everything, particularly the people around them.

Krauthamer goes on to conclude that we have no way of knowing if Schiavo is really braindead (which puts him the same camp as the other Republican doctors who have discarded their fealty to reason for political reasons) but he also rightly says that the Florida courts upheld the law as we know it. His solution is to change the law:

There is no good outcome to this case. Except perhaps if Florida and the other states were to amend their laws and resolve conflicts among loved ones differently — by granting authority not necessarily to the spouse but to whatever first-degree relative (even if in the minority) chooses life and is committed to support it. Call it Terri’s law. It would help prevent our having to choose in the future between travesty and tragedy.

Essentially, he’s saying that parents should have a veto over the spouse in these issues. (If it were the spouse who wanted to use extraordinary measure to keep the patient alive, current law would already suffice.) Therefore, he’s promoting the idea that there are cases in which your “first degree relatives” have the power of life and death over you in circumstances where your spouse disagrees. What a concept.

I had a colleague years ago who was in a terrible car accident and severely brain damaged at the age of 33. He had been estranged for years from his abusive family and had been more or less raised by others to whom he was very close. He was quite wealthy and had left his surrogate family all of his money in his will. He was also unmarried and did not have a living will, although those who knew him said that he had expressed many times that he would not want to be kept alive by extraordinary measures. His estranged family were extremely religious and insisted that he be kept alive at all costs. Being “first degree” relatives they had the right to make that decision. I lost track of the situation after five years or so, but at that time he was still living in a persistent vegetative state. The money ran out and he was put on medicaid. I heard that his family rarely visited.

I know that this doesn’t track exactly with the Schiavo case and that there could have been no legal rights conferred on the adopted family short of a durable power of attorney. It does, however, illustrate why it is important that adults be allowed to create their own families through marriage. For some people their experience with their parents is a joyful, lifelong relationship. But for others, adulthood marks the beginning of their freedom and separation from people who do not share their values. When they marry, their choice of spouse is often in conflict with their parent’s wishes. If people truly value marriage they must also honor the fact that the people involved made a decision to create a new family when they did it. That new family is the one that must take precedence in situations like this.

My right wing dad doesn’t come from the religious end of the spectrum; he’s more of the old fashioned John Birch and racist variety. He doesn’t go along with this Schiavo thing largely because he’s had to face these decisions with my mother (who died of cancer) and now himself. Like many Republicans, he’s remarkably pragmatic about these things. However, if I had married someone of another race or were gay, I think it is entirely possible that he would have easily stepped into a situation like this and demanded that he be allowed to make the decision. He would never have acknowledged that a person of whom he disapproved had the right to make decisions on his child’s behalf. He’s just that kind of man.

I would hate to think that my Dad (who, while he is a political abomination it should also be said has his good points) would have been given any legal standing to interfere in my family for any reason. That would go against my family values in the most important ways I can imagine.

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Just A Bunch Of Numbers

“Just last week, DeLay marshaled a budget resolution through the House of Representatives that would cut funding for Medicaid by at least $15 billion, threatening the quality of care for people like Terri Schiavo.”

DeLay spokesman Dan Allen fired back: “The fact that they’re tying a life issue to the budget process shows just how disconnected Democrats are to reality.”

Yes, the medicaid budget has nothing at all to do with reality. It’s not a “life issue” It’s a process. Sorry. Carry on.

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Vomito

Via TBOGG

I’ve been waiting for this:

THE AGONY OF HOLY WEEK [Peter Robinson]
As Terri Schiavo is being starved to death, reports indicate, the successor of St. Peter is finding it impossible to hold down his food. A young woman, martyred by the culture of death. An old man who has poured out his life combatting it.

Sitio. I thirst.

Posted at 10:24 AM

TBOGG notes

Meanwhile, the Brides of Jesus ponder whether the the Little Black Cocktail Dress will be appropriate for both mourning and wake binge drinking.

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Living Forever

There are many fine articles all over the left blosphere about the social security trustee report written by people far more conversant with the details than I. So I’m not going to weigh in on the particulars except to note that I think I understand why the projected death rates have inexplicably gone down precipitously from last year to this.

Now that we are learning to respect the culture ‘o life (as Dear Leader so endearingly puts it) we can expect that in the future no one will be allowed to have life support removed. The actuaries are simply factoring in the probability that many of the people who could be expected to shuffle off their mortal coil when their brains have liquified will be kept alive by artificial means for decades longer than expected just last year.

Let’s just keep our fingers crossed that their private accounts do well in the market …

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The Poor Dears

Atrios has already issued the call to action on the sensitive, delicate Democrats of the NDN who were swooning over the coarse, indecorous criticism they received for voting for the Bankruptcy bill, so I’ll just send you there for the information.

However, I’d like to make one little suggestion. When you obstreperous partisans write your e-mails you might want to ask them what exactly they mean by this:

“The center [CAP] could have made the argument on the merits, but it chose to do so in a personal way,” said Schiff, one of roughly a dozen lawmakers who attended the meeting.

“The [NDC] wanted to say, ‘We’re all under the same flag here, and let’s not forget that,’” he said

[…]

“The unfortunate thing about the e-mail is that it questioned the good faith of the Democrats who support the bankruptcy bill. Whenever you question the good faith, that’s problematic,” he [Artur Davis(D-Ala)] said. “But I certainly don’t blame John for that e-mail. I don’t think it was authorized.”

“Certainly there is a disagreement over the bankruptcy bill,” he said.

(Oh my stars, it was rude to get so personal and all, wasn’t it? How ill-bred.)

Without upsetting their fragile nerves, when you send your e-mails you might want to ask politely why any Democrat would think that the bankruptcy bill would be good for their constituents who are, after all, who they actually represent. Are they creating jobs by doing this? Are they creating a more dynamic economy? Why would it be “pro-business”, as Democrats define that term, to enable just one business — the credit card companies — to reap ever higher profits while they charge usurious interest rates to average Americans?

If it isn’t that they’ve whored themselves out to such an extent that they are now the credit card companies’ bitches, (pardon my french!) what exactly is the reason they support it?

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Idle Hands

The Poorman has a copy of the House agenda for Wednesday. Our representatives are very busy these days.

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Visual Aids

Via Media Matters, here is a CNN chart showing the partisan differences in the Schiavo case.

WTF? Did Daryn Kagan have her boyfriend design that for her last night while she was changing into something more comfortable?

This isn’t really surprising. Here is one issue about which the media seem to have absolutely no interest in what the public thinks. Usually, they’d be pulling polls out of every orifice to try to explain things. Not this time. Eric Boehlert discusses this in Salon:

Imagine how differently the televised debate would have unfolded over the past few days if journalists had simply done their job and asked Terri Schiavo’s pro-life proponents why an overwhelming percentage of Americans disagree with them about this case. Indeed, polls taken over the past two years show that Americans are adamant that the spouse, and not the parents, should decide on a loved one’s right to die. And in the past week, an overwhelming majority — 87 percent — of Americans polled by ABC News and the Washington Post said that if they were in the same state as Terri Schiavo, they too would want their feeding tube removed.

Just as every judge who has heard the Schiavo case so far has ruled in Michael’s favor, so has every poll taken shown that the majority of the public supports the husband’s position. In survey after survey dating from 2003 to the present, asked who should have the final right-to-die decision, the majority of Americans have answered: the spouse. From national polls (e.g., ABC News/Washington Post, 65-25; and Fox News, 50-31) to statewide polls (e.g., KING-TV in Washington, 67-19; and St. Petersburg Times in Florida, 75-13) to unscientific, interactive polls (e.g., CNN, 65-26; and MSNBC, 63-37), the response has always been the same. A 2003 poll by CNN/USA Today had a similar result: Eighty percent agreed that a spouse should be allowed to decide whether to end the life of a person in a persistent vegetative state.

Which is why it has been so startling to find so few mentions by major news outlets of the recent polls regarding the Schiavo controversy. For instance, last Friday at 11 a.m., a Fox News reporter referenced a poll from earlier this month conducted by Fox that found that a strong majority — 59 to 24 percent — would remove Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube if they were her guardian. According to TVeyes, a digital, around-the-clock television monitoring service, that was the last time a Fox News reporter mentioned Fox’s own poll. Then again, that’s typical of Fox, which on Friday night’s “Hannity and Colmes” invited six strident pro-life advocates to argue why Congress should intervene on Schiavo’s behalf. No guests were booked to appear on the show and argue Michael Schiavo’s side.

But perhaps even more peculiar are ABC News and the Washington Post, which, like Fox News, commissioned their own poll regarding the matter, and yet, again like Fox, seemed to downplay the findings once the story became a political one. On March 15, when ABC devoted its “Nightline” program to the Schiavo story, host Chris Bury informed the audience, “A new ABC News poll suggests that a clear majority of Americans, 65 percent, believe that husbands and wives should have the final say in family disputes over life support. Only 25 percent say parents should make that decision. And when asked, ‘Would you want to be kept alive in Terri Schiavo’s condition?’ an overwhelming number, 87 percent, said no.”

The article goes on to show how the papers have ignored this finding as well. It might have been helpful, however, if certain pundits had their assistants and interns google the question because they might not sound so dumb. Here’s what passes for insight on this issue from the media sages, Chris Matthews and Tim Russert last night:

RUSSERT: It becomes this symbol that becomes irresistible to the politicians and then irresistible to the media. And I‘m quite interested to see how this plays out with the voters, with the public. What are they thinking?

And, again, I go back to the point of, I‘m so intrigued as to why a Democratic senator wouldn‘t stand up and say, I don‘t know the specific details of Terri Schiavo. I do know it was heard in court after court, judge after judge in the state of Florida. But I also know that these kinds of issues and these kinds of decisions are being made every day in practically every hospital in every state in the union.

And all of us in our own families have probably been affected by this in one way, shape or form.

MATTHEWS: I can tell you, when you have an Alzheimer‘s victim in your family, like my mom, you know all about this territory. It‘s terrible territory. It‘s murky, morally murky in terms of medical science, and yet, in the end, in many of these cases, where there is a supreme almost diminution of human life, that eventually, you stop feeding, you stop hydrating. These cases happen all the time, as you said.

Let me ask you a question. This is a tough one. Are we living in an era where there is no middle ground?

RUSSERT: That is a great question, because life is filled with complexity and contradiction. We live in middle ground.

MATTHEWS: But these parties don‘t seem to operate in middle ground.

I was thinking, if somebody came on the floor last night and said, let‘s use some common sense here. If this woman is a vegetable, let‘s leave it up to her husband. If she is not, if she has emotional life, let‘s hold back and restrict it. But nobody seemed to be talking about the clinical questions.

RUSSERT: Yes. The phrase we all grew up with, middle America.

MATTHEWS: Yes.

RUSSERT: That represents to me where most Americans really are. They live in the middle. And, on some issues, they‘re conservative, right of center, some left of center. They‘re not rabid ideologues.

Russert wonders what people are thinking even though there have been numerous polls taken in just the last few days telling him that a vast majority oppose the Republican right wing on this issue. There’s no splitting the difference. It’s clear. Even a majority of Republicans oppose it, for gawds sake.

Matthews wonders why nobody makes the common sense argument in this case. But the majority of the AMERICAN PEOPLE already hold the common sense position that Tim and Chris are advocating and the Democrats clearly are on the side of that common sense position. And who is backing this macabre sideshow? The Religious Right and the craven Republican leadership.

Don’t expect these bozos to know that, however. Or care. They are too busy toasting each other’s pumpkinheaded faux-populism to even look into it. Convinced of their intimate connection with the common man, these millionaire pundits proclaim from on high that this is a fiery partisan issue and then bemoan the loss of comaraderie in the senate cloakroom. Apparently, they just don’t realize that the common men and women on both sides of the political aisle hold them both in utter contempt. You want common ground? I think I’ve found one issue even Hinderocket and I can agree upon. Kumbaya.

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Competing Realities

Responding to Kevin Drum’s post of the other night and mine which followed, Michael over at Reading A1 has posted an interesting piece extolling the virtues of partisan media and reminding us that this idea of a “objective media” is fairly new:

… to Kevin and Digby I say, stop worrying. A little historical perspective works wonders here. The simple truth is that, for most of its proper existence—from the beginnings of mass-distribution journalism in the mid-nineteenth century to roughly the start of World War II—the American press has been explicitly partisan. Newspapers were often the overt organs of political machines; when they weren’t, they differentiated themselves for their audiences based on ideology and partisan identification. Competition was fierce, and was very often a competition over what facts were actually facts, and over what sorts of things ought to be reported. (Strangely enough, this situation was understood by no one during the period as some sort of “postmodern” hell. Nor was it considered a challenge to the very possibility of democratic self-government.) The neutral, “objective” press that we now think of as a natural property of democratic civil society is, broadly speaking, an invention of the corporate, managerial capitalism of the twentieth century, and tracks its growth.

As I’ve written previously, the elevation of the “objective” press to almost an institution of state, a semi-official fourth branch in the American constitutional system, is a phenomenon of the post-World War II period. Like so much of what we regard now as the natural order of political things, in other words, the constitutional place of our so-called mainstream press is an artifact of the Cold War. In its pose of objectivity, the corporate press had a central role to play during that struggle: both in the maintenance of the internal consensus necessary to confront the Soviet Union over a long period, and as a support for, and embodiment of, the claim of Western liberal democracy (over against Communism) to represent a universal, historically unconditioned solution to the question of political and social freedom.

I think this is largely true but I would take issue with a couple of things. I’m no expert, but my understanding is that the partisan press began to die out around the turn of the last century with the commercialization of the press and the big media barons (along with the general revulsion amongst the population at the corruption of the parties.) And I think that journalism reacted strongly to the new field of public relations in the 20’s and 30’s by developing this professional code of objectivity quite a while before the cold war. However, there is no doubt that there was a general disgust at the propaganda of both the fascist movement in Europe and the Soviet regime that propelled this new fetish for objectivity in the American press into the cold war consensus. And certainly our current lame definition of objectivity as “he said/she said” is thoroughly modern.

It appears to me that some of the conditions that created the concept of “Objective Journalism” in the first place have strongly re-emerged. The right is not running a partisan press. It is running a corrupt partisan propaganda machine based on the techniques of public relations and paid for by big money interests. That’s why I was a bit rueful in my piece the other day. I don’t particularly want to be part of a propaganda machine. I have no problem being a fiery partisan and working hard to persuade people to my side. But outright lying for the cause turns my stomach. And that’s what the other side does.

But at this point I am resigned to the idea that we are going to have a partisan media battle for the forseeeable future so I’m not fighting it. It may, as Michael suggests, turn out to be a good thing in the long run, revitalizing our political system and getting people engaged. In the meantime, however, I would very much like the allegedly non-aligned media to come out from behind their absurd notion that they are objective because “both sides complain so they must be doing something right” and simply report when people are not presenting the facts accurately. That’s all I want. When you have the government, business and the radical right consistently cooking the truth you really need somebody, somewhere who can be an honest broker of the facts. The mainstream press is the logical institution to do that, but they seem to have lost their ability to sort through the right’s sophisticated propaganda.

Perhaps if they just concentrated on the simple reporting of the who, what, when where and get that right, we partisans could fill in the “why.” Without that, I doubt very seriously that our modern society can rationally cope with what is shaping up not as competing political visions but competing realities. If that continues I think we are paving the way for demagoguery to become the default mode of political persuasion.

Update: Booyah. Read this superb post by Avedon Carol on this subject. I think she needs to be put on the rolodex for one of these media panels, stat.

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The Big Baby

Tom Delay breaks down and has a good old fashioned cry:

One thing that God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America,” Mr. DeLay told a conference organized by the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian group. A recording of the event was provided by the advocacy organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

“This is exactly the issue that is going on in America, of attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others,” Mr. DeLay said.

Mr. DeLay complained that “the other side” had figured out how “to defeat the conservative movement,” by waging personal attacks, linking with liberal organizations and persuading the national news media to report the story. He charged that “the whole syndicate” was “a huge nationwide concerted effort to destroy everything we believe in.”

Oh, boo fucking hoo. He’s crawled into bed with a severely disabled woman for the sole purpose of soaking up some of the sympathy people naturally feel toward her. In fact, her whole purpose in this is to show how the liberals are trying to destroy Tom Delay.

These radical Republicans are the tough guys who are the only ones with the guts to protect our country from the bad guys? People like this whining little baby of a man who is openly using a braindead woman as cover for his massive corruption and misdeeds? Gawd help us.

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