Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Pandering To Hypocrisy

There seems to be something of a scold mentality emerging about those of us who question the sincerity of those who are up in arms about the libertine ways of the liberal elite. I had perceived this as saying that the Red States are just as “immoral” as the Blue States. But some, like Bob Sommerby, see it as a case of liberals claiming moral superiority. To the extent that honesty is more moral than hypocrisy, then I suppose he may be right.

We could argue this all day, but the crux of this is Sommerby’s assertion that Democrats would win if we used Bill Clinton’s formula and respected the views of these citizens with whom we disagree. Well, yes. As a general rule we should always be respectful of others. But, that does not necessarily mean that those who disagree with us are sincere or that we will win by being respectful of them.

The problem is that the evidence suggests that those who are sincerely shocked by what they saw on MNF are not representative of the vast majority of the so-called Real American voter. How can we explain, for instance, how those NFL fans who complained about the “Desperate Housewives” skit on MNF were shocked by the brazen sexuality of it but have never before raised hell about the tittilating beer commercials that have been shown on that same broadcast for years? And, we can pretend that the sexy show the skit was was advertising isn’t hugely popular in the states that voted en masse for George Bush, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is:

Many Who Voted for ‘Values’ Still Like Their Television Sin

The results of the presidential election are still being parsed for what they say about the electorate’s supposed closer embrace of traditional cultural values, but for the network television executives charged with finding programs that speak to tastes across the nation, one lesson is clear.

The supposed cultural divide is more like a cultural mind meld.

In interviews, representatives of the four big broadcast networks as well as Hollywood production studios said the nightly television ratings bore little relation to the message apparently sent by a significant percentage of voters.

The choices of viewers, whether in Los Angeles or Salt Lake City, New York or Birmingham, Ala., are remarkably similar. And that means the election will have little impact on which shows they decide to put on television, these executives say.

[…]

“Desperate Housewives” on ABC is the big new hit of the television season, ranked second over all in the country, behind only “C.S.I.” on CBS. This satire of suburbia and modern relationships features, among other morally challenged characters, a married woman in her 30’s having an affair with a high-school-age gardener, and has prompted several advertisers, including Lowe’s, to pull their advertisements.

In the greater Atlanta market, reaching more than two million households, “Desperate Housewives” is the top-rated show. Nearly 58 percent of the voters in those counties voted for President Bush.

And in the Salt Lake City market, which takes in the whole state of Utah and parts of Nevada, Idaho and Wyoming, “Desperate Housewives” is fourth, after two editions of “C.S.I.” and NBC’s “E.R.”; Mr. Bush rolled up 72.6 percent of the vote there.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that those fans who complained about the MNF sketch watch “Desperate Housewives.” (It’s that the blatantly sexy beer commercials and close-up crotch shots and cleavage of the cheerleaders on MNF for years have not provoked a similar outcry from fans that speaks to their hypocrisy.) But these ratings do suggest that contrary to the emerging myth about Bush voter outrage at libertine Blue State immorality, somebody isn’t being entirely truthful about their attitudes toward popular culture. After all, according to E&P the

“top three states for readership of Playboy magazine are Iowa, Wyoming, North Dakota … and they all top heathen New York by 2-1 margins.” Of course, they read it for the same reasons. The articles on stereo equipment.

Sommerby complains about Jeff Greenfield saying that the NFL fans who complained were the same ones who lied to their wives and went to strip clubs. A correspondent wrote in:

And to make sure the shocked fathers and mothers associate the descent of sexual morality with liberal Democrats, you tell me that Jeff Greenfield thinks that we fathers who complain about TV trash are hypocrites who “lie to their wives and drive to a topless bar”. He’s been watching The Sopranos too much; most of us family men don’t do that. Chances are, those who do that would agree with Jeff that everyone complaining about Hollywood and TV immorality is a lying hypocrite.

By the way, I’m a long-time Democrat living in the Philadelphia suburbs, and I was shocked by that sexual introduction to a football game. And we wonder why more middle class Catholic and Evangelical voters keep shifting from Democratic to Republican.

I’m not going to defend Greenfield’s comment because I have no way of knowing who is going to strip clubs and neither does this guy. It’s possible that married football fans are not primary among those who frequent these places. There are an awful lot of them, however, all through the country, many in the heartland. Somebody’s going to them.

But, what is relevant in his comment isn’t family men going to strip clubs, anyway. It’s family men who obviously watch the Sopranos complaining about the so-called immorality coming from Hollywood and implying that the Democratic party is responsible for it.

Does that guy in the Philly suburbs use the V-Chip? I don’t know. But I do know that Democrat Bill Clinton championed them and pushed through legislation that mandated them but only 7% or so of family men who have them use them. Evidently, he watches the NFL with all those sexy beer commercials and big pom pom waving babes. Does he shoo his kids away from the TV when they come on? Maybe. Does he keep his kids from watching “The Sopranos?” I certainly hope so. But hewatches it, that’s clear. (He sure seems to know about the Bada-Bing.) So, it’s a complicated situation, isn’t it? Lots and lots of things for parents to be concerned with. I understand that. But, considering what we can surmise about his viewing habits, you’ll have to excuse me if I’m not entirely moved by his Claude Raines act.

Yes, we may be in different tribes. But vast numbers of people from both tribes are watching the same “trash” on television and getting divorced and having children out of wedlock and all the other horrible outgrowths of a society that is evidently in horrible decline. The difference is that one of the tribes seems to like to consume this crap and then pretend not only that they don’t, but that the other tribe is forcing it on them.

Perhaps pandering to this is the way to win votes. Our politicians have certainly made an effort to do it now for years. But as I have discussed elsewhere, it doesn’t seem to be working. But sure, we can keep pretending that that swathe of red America is really offended by the popular culture that we blues evidently represent, even though most Americans are the same consumerist purple from sea to shining sea.

It just seems to me that if you incorrectly diagnose the problem, you probably won’t prescribe the right cure. But, hey, words are cheap. Phony moralists have proved that from time immemorial. Except for the non-stop character assasination, Monica’s big mouth and impeachment, being respectful of conservative values (and Ross Perot)worked like a charm for Bill Clinton.

So, by all means let’s pander till we can’t stand up. We’ll all pretend to be duly chastised by our libertine ways and pay obeisance to those good heartland values that neither they nor we actually live by. Whatever. But, don’t expect me to actually believe that George W. Bush’s majority represents those things any more than we depraved liberals do. Politicians and preachers lie. Neilson ratings and product sales don’t.

Pop Goes The Populism

David Niewert has written a very important post about Democrats and rural America that is worth reading and thinking about as we work out how we need to go forward. Ezra homes in on the point that young Democrats tend to leave rural America because there aren’t many opportunities for those who are interested in progressive politics because the national party is concentrated in the urban areas. This is an important point and one that I hope party activists and organizers are thinking long and hard about. It isn’t just the lack of direct political opportunity it’s the lack of local opinion leaders in the media as well. Everybody listens better to their neighbors than to strangers. They have the better hand.

But, I think that Niewert has hit upon the essence of the problem when he says:

People listen to their radios a lot in rural America. Maybe it has something to do with the silence of the vast landscapes where many of them live; radios break that silence, and provide the succor of human voices.

If you drive through these landscapes, getting radio reception can sometimes be iffy at best, especially in the rural West. Often the best you can find on the dial are only one or two stations.

And the chances are that what you’ll hear, at nearly any hour, in nearly any locale, is Rush Limbaugh. Or Michael Savage. Or maybe some Sean Hannity. Or maybe some more Limbaugh. Or, if you’re really desperate, you can catch one of the many local mini-Limbaughs who populate what remains of the rural dial. In between, of course, there will be a country music station or two.

That’s what people in rural areas have been listening to for the past 10 years and more. And nothing has been countering it.

[…]

It has to be understood that rural America is hurting, and has been for a couple of decades now. Visit any rural community now and it’s palpable: The schools are run down, the roads are falling apart, the former downtowns have been gutted by the destruction of the local economies and their displacement by the new Wal-Mart economy.

People living in rural areas increasingly feel that they have become mere colonies of urban society, treated dismissively and ignored at best, the victims of an evil plot by wealthy liberal elites at worst.

Liberals, largely due to their increasing urban-centric approach to politics, have mostly ignored the problem. And conservatives have been busy exploiting it.

It’s important to understand that they have been doing so not by offering any actual solutions. Indeed, Republican “solutions” like the 1995 “Freedom to Farm Act” have actually turned out to be real disasters for the nation’s family farmers; the only people who have benefited from it have been in the boardrooms of corporate agribusiness, which of course bellied up first to the big federal trough offered by the law. Even conservatives admit it has been a disaster.

No, conservatives have instead employed a strategy of scapegoating. It isn’t bad policy or the conservative captivity to agribusiness interests that has made life miserable in rural America — it’s liberals. Their lack of morals (especially embodied by Bill Clinton), their contempt for real, hard-working Americans, their selfish arrogance — those are the reasons things are so bad.

These audiences are feeding on a steady diet of hate. And as with all such feedings, they never are sated, but only have their appetites whetted for more. So each day, people come back to get a fresh fill-up of hate.

People are hurting and they are told relentlessly day in and day out that liberals from big cities are the ones inflicting the pain. This would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. This is the new American nativism. Minorities and immigrants have been joined by a blurry, indistinct non-American urbanite. (I suppose this is progress of a sort.)

I hear a lot about how Democrats need to stop with the so-called identity and rights based politics in favor of a populist message. It would certainly seem that that would be the way to reach these folks. They are getting the shaft from the very people for whom they are voting with a classic misdirection. It may be true that the liberal elites in the big cities don’t care much about rural America, but it’s the conservative elites who are actively and vigorously screwing them. But the Republicans have a way of dealing with that.

Via temple of democracy here’s a classic dodge from Haley Barbour, good ole boy gazillionare lobbyist:

One of the most extensive national reports has been a New York Times Magazine piece headlined, “Mr. Washington goes to Mississippi.” The story opens with Barbour getting kicked out of a cow auction, and quotes people who portray him as race-baiter, an expert schmoozer and a shrewd fund-raiser with “despicable clients.”

Barbour, a Washington, D.C. lobbyist, quickly denounced the story.

“I am certainly never surprised when The New York Times attacks a Southern, conservative, pro-life, Christian Republican. Ask Charles Pickering,” he said, referring to the Mississippi judge whose nomination to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was held up by Democrats who questioned the judge’s record on civil rights.

“It’s what I expected from The New York Times because they don’t like guys like me.”

And, therefore, they don’t like guys like you.

Democrats will say that we need to let the red state voters know who the enemy really is. We need to stop talking about guns, god and gays (and race) and get to the meat of the matter. As Max Sawicky wrote in his article “Why a Right Winger can’t be a populist,”

Culture and values, among other things, are highly contested. For the sake of this essay I put them aside to focus on Money.

The problem is that we can’t put them aside and concentrate on money because culture and values dictate what people think about money. And the culture and values of a large part of this country says that when it comes to money the government always gives it to the wrong people. We have a much more complicated problem on our hands than just moral values vs economics. And it goes all the way back to the beginning.

I wrote some things before (in response to the Dean campaign’s insistence that you could appeal to guys with confederate flags on their pick-ups because they need health care too) about studies that show that Americans rejected the European style welfare state largely because a fair portion of our people have always believed that the government only helps the undeserving. This stems from the fact that most social programs were traditionally handled through churches and immigrant organizations which meant that the government mostly funded African American welfare programs because they didn’t have the institutions or the money to do it for themselves. This led to a widely held belief in rural America that the government doesn’t help the white working man and woman, it instead takes their tax dollars and gives it to blacks.

It is from this basis that modern Republicans have built their case against the liberal elites who allegedly hold Real Americans in contempt. It is the essence of the Southern Strategy and it’s been highly successful for decades.

It’s worth repeating that despite what Dean said in the primaries about putting the FDR coalition back together, there has never been a time when a majority of southern whites and blacks in the south voted for the same party. Blacks were not allowed to vote in the south in the 1930’s. Indeed, it was only during the recent party realignment process that they overlapped at all. Let’s not kid ourselves about why this is.

We cannot make a populist case to rural America as long as rural America continues to believe, as it has for centuries, that the government only takes their money and gives it to people they don’t like. This belief is why people who should naturally support our programs instead vote for tax cuts. In the past, populists often shrewdly coupled their argument with nativist causes and were able to scapegoat either immigrants or blacks as part of their argument, thus partially nullifying this cultural resistence. Even FDR agreed to set aside the issue of civil rights for the duration. Needless to say, we aren’t going to go down that path.

So, Democrats are left with a difficult problem of how to deal with a region that is in economic distress but whose culture traditionally believes that government only helps people unlike themselves.

Now, we could, of course, make a fetish of pointing out the awful truth — that most federal transfers come from the blue states to the red states. But, that doesn’t really address the problem, which comes down to attitudes about the big city poor (blacks) vs the rural poor (whites.) And all that is tied up with the monumental social changes of the last fifty years, which mostly benefit them but which Rush and Sean tell them is the cause of all their problems. Every day, all day, with relentless precision. The message is that liberals are taking their money, giving it to people they don’t like and then forcing their decadent culture on them to the point where they … cannot … resist.

Yes, if people were rational about these things you could sit down and have a nice discussion with spreadsheets and diagrams showing that the rural red states benefit far more from federal redistributon of wealth than the metropolitan blue states. You could explain that many of the social changes that have happened have benefitted them in their own lives while acknowledging that there has been a cost and that changes of this magnitude can be frightening and destabilizing. You could show that the massive New Deal programs and the post war expansion benefitted primarily the middle class, not the poor. You could rally the people to the side of their own class instead of the corporations who benefit from the policies currently in place.

But, as we’ve seen, people are not rational. In fact, when it comes to modern American politics there seems to be a conscious embrace of the irrational, an epistomological relativism that renders such reasoned arguments completely inneffectual. People who listen to Rush or absorb his message through osmosis in their social group are operating on the basis of some very long standing tribal hueristics that have been very sophisticatedly manipulated by the real elites in this country. It will take more than fiery speeeches about sticking it to the man to penetrate this mindset.

Certainly, a populist message should work for the Democratic party. But, our populist message cannot obscure the fact that we represent blacks, urban dwellers and those who appear to be agents of rapid social change. And even if it could, the Republicans are hardly going to sit back and be quiet about it.

This problem needs some fresh thinking and I think that the article I posted about earlier about undecided voters provides us with some clues. The first is that we have to stop thinking in terms of issues or a combination of issues. People think in terms of worldview and tribal identity.

The next thing we need to recognise is that we are living in a post modern environment in which straight appeals to reason are not very effective. We have to begin to use symbols and semiotics more effectively. This means that we have to be more stylistic and sophisticated in our presentation. TV with the sound turned off.

But that won’t be enough. We need to consider the American character and use it to shape our message. There is tremendous complexity in our national character and racial or social resentment is only a part of it. And there is a lot of tension, for instance between Equality/freedom — Community/individualism. This tension has always been present and the line isn’t drawn by region — it’s drawn within each person. We have to use some of these commonly understood and believed American values to illustrate our wordview in ways that people can understand hueristically instead of intellectually. We do this with a certain kind of candidate, a certain message and a certain kind of presentation. But we have to embrace this way of communicating before we can possible hope to use it to relate to Americans who are conditioned to buy and consume on the basis of their feelings not on the basis of their reason.

This is the world in which we live whether we like it or not. The Republicans are selling a vision and a sense of belonging to a certain tribe. We are selling an argument and a program. They are using 21st century tools to manipulate primal human needs and simplify the world. We are using 20th century methods to appeal to reason in a complicated way. They have the better hand.

Note: Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve written a few posts on this subject and others sort of tangentially related. A couple of readers asked me to put them all together in one place. Here they are.

TV With the Sound Turned Off

Heartland Values

A Very Old Story

It Won’t Work

More Culture War

Ohferchristsake

It’s a Small Story…but it illustrates why so many of us not only support President Bush as a politician with whom we agree most of the time, but love and respect him as a man:

President Bush stepped into the middle of a confrontation and pulled his lead Secret Service agent away from Chilean security officials who barred his bodyguards from entering an elegant dinner for 21 world leaders Saturday night.”

That’s why everybody loves and respects him. He’s a natural born hero. If the Democrats could find one of those, maybe they’d get some respect too.

On July 12, 1988, Hecht was attending a weekly Republican luncheon when a piece of apple lodged firmly in his throat.

Hecht stumbled out of the room, thinking he might vomit but not wanting to do it in front of his colleagues. Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., thumped his back, but Hecht quickly passed out in the hallway.

Just then, Kerry stepped off an elevator, rushed to Hecht’s side and gave him the Heimlich maneuver — four times.

The lifesaving incident made international news, and Dr. Henry Heimlich, who invented the maneuver in 1974, called Hecht to say that had Kerry intervened just 30 seconds later Hecht might have been in a vegetative state for life.

“This man gave me my life,” the 75-year-old Hecht said Thursday.

Yeah. A man who grabs his secret service guy’s arm in a melee is worthy of your love and respect. A man who won the silver and bronze stars in combat and later saved a man’s life with quick thinking while all around him were quaking with indecision is worthy of nothing but the most vile, personal contempt.

Oh, but I understand that Junior once said he felt bad for calling Al Hunt a fucking son of a bitch in front of his four year old. He is worthy of love and respect as a man in so many ways.

The Captain Of The Ship

“I’m very proud of the fact that we held the line and made Congress make choices and set priorities, because it follows our philosophy,” Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said in House debate.

[…]

Also enacted during the postelection session was an $800 billion increase in the government’s borrowing limit. The measure was yet another testament to record annual deficits, which reached $413 billion last year and are expected to climb indefinitely.

While the spending bill was one of the most austere in years, it had something for everybody…[including] a potential boon for Bush himself, $2 million for the government to try buying back the presidential yacht Sequoia. The boat was sold three decades ago, though its current owners say the yacht is not for sale.

Well, Junior is the true heir to Nixon and proud of it. Why shouldn’t he asssociate himself with Nixon’s iconic imperial toys. It’s only fitting.

Brazen

Via The Daou Report, I see that those wacky Republicans are boldly trying to stick their noses into people’s private business again. According to kd4dean over on Kos the Republicans tried to slip in another provision into the spending bill that would have allowed acouple of committee chairmen or their henchmen access to any American’s tax returns for any reason. Somebody noticed.

“This is a serious situation,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. “Neither of us were aware that this had been inserted in this bill,” he said, referring to himself and House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bill Young, R-Florida.

Questioned sharply by fellow Republicans as well as Democrats, Stevens pleaded with the Senate to approve the overall spending bill despite the tax returns language.

But Sen. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota, said that wasn’t good enough. “It becomes the law of the land on the signature of the president of the United States. That’s wrong.”

Conrad said the measure’s presence in the spending bill was symptomatic of a broader problem — Congress writing legislation hundreds of pages long and then giving lawmakers only a few hours to review it before having to vote on it.

Stevens, who repeatedly apologized for what he characterized as an error, took offense at Conrad’s statement. “It’s contrary to anything that I have seen happen in more than 30 years on this committee,” he said.

Pounding on his desk, Stevens said he had given his word and so had Young that neither would use the authority to require the IRS to turn over individual or corporate tax returns to them. “I would hope that the Senate would take my word. I don’t think I have ever broken my word to any member of the Senate.”

“… Do I have to get down on my knees and beg,” he said.

Both Young and Stevens will cede their chairmanships when the new Congress elected earlier this month takes office in January.

Some Democrats didn’t accept the assertion that the provision was a mistake and demanded an investigation.

“We weren’t born yesterday, we didn’t come down with the first snow,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California. “This isn’t poorly thought out, this was very deliberately thought out and it was done in the dead of night.”

Members of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee and House Ways and Means Committee now have limited access to tax returns, but there are severe criminal and civil penalties if the information is disclosed or misused.

Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said the measure will “bring us back to the doorstep to the days of President Nixon, President Truman and other dark days in our history when taxpayer information was used against political enemies.”

We crossed that threshold some time ago, I’m afraid.

I do enjoy the fact that the guy who made the “error” was offended that nobody would take his word. That’s what happens when your leadership tells people to go fuck themselves over and over again, Ted. It tends to erode trust.

Liberals

Here’s a nice personal piece about what it means to be a moderate liberal on ThatColoredFellasweblog. At the end of his post, he links to a number of online political quizzes, one of which defined my philosophy quite succinctly, and correctly I thought, the following way:

LIBERALS usually embrace freedom of choice in personal matters, but tend to support significant government control of the economy. They generally support a government-funded “safety net” to help the disadvantaged, and advocate strict regulation of business. Liberals tend to favor environmental regulations,defend civil liberties and free expression, support government action to promote equality, and tolerate diverse lifestyles.

Got a problem with that?

Huh?

At the Republican governors’ conference in New Orleans, Ken Mehlman, the Bush campaign manager, answered the question, Who’s your daddy party? “If you drive a Volvo and you do yoga, you are pretty much a Democrat,” he said. “If you drive a Lincoln or a BMW and you own a gun, you’re voting for George Bush.”

Those BMW driving gun owners are just fabulous.

Semper Falafel

O’Reilly understands that war is hell:

Having survived a combat situation in Argentina during the Falklands War, I know that life-and-death decisions are made in a flash. If that wounded insurgent had a grenade or other explosive device, the entire marine squad and the photographer could be dead right now. In a killing zone, one cannot afford the luxury of knowing what is certain.

As with all literary greats like Mailer, Jones and Heller, O’Reilly has memorialized his scorching experiences in his novel, “Those Who Trespass” a murder mystery set in Argentina during the hell on earth that was the Falklands war:

The policemen were clearly frightened. Their fascist powers were being brazenly challenged. Standing directly in front of the police were nearly ten thousand very angry Argentine citizens screaming curses and revolutionary slogans:

ALa gente unida venceramos!

AMuera la Junta!

AMuera Galtieri!

GNN News Correspondent Shannon Michaels translated the chant and wrote it into his notebook: “The people, united, will never be defeated! Death to the Junta! Death to the dictator Galtieri!” Shannon and his video crew stood behind the police, five hundred strong crowded together in a massive show of force. Their assignment was to guard the presidential palace, called the Casa Rosada–the Pink House–and to protect President General Leopoldo Galtieri. But the crowd was getting more and more aggressive, pushing toward the large metal gate that provided access to the palatial grounds. Shannon saw that The Plaza de Mayo, the huge square in front of the Casa Rosada, was now filled to capacity. Something very ugly was going to happen, Shannon thought, and happen soon.

The sky was clear, but clouds were assembling in the west. Shannon ran his fingers through his thick mane of wavy brown hair. His teal blue eyes were locked on the agitated crowd. It was his eyes that most people noticed first–a very unusual color that some thought materialized from a contact lens case. But Shannon, the product of two Celtic parents, didn’t go in for cosmetic enhancements. His 6′ 4 frame was well toned by constant athletics, and his pale white skin was flawless–another genetic gift. Shannon’s looks, which he thoroughly capitalized on, made him a natural for television.

As the mob continued its boisterous serenade, Shannon slowly shook his head. Most wars were foolish, he thought, but this one was unusually idiotic. The Argentine Junta, a group of military thugs led by General Galtieri, had ordered an invasion of the British-administered Falkland Islands on April Fool’s Day, 1982. The government claim was that the islands, which the Argentines called the Malvinas, became a part of Argentina through a Papal declaration in 1493. The British disagreed. So, nearly five hundred years after the grant of land, the Argentine Army swarmed ashore, startling eighteen hundred British subjects and tens of thousands of bewildered sheep.

[…]

During his seven-year career as a TV news correspondent, Michaels had seen rank stupidity, but this moronic government strategy boggled the mind. Anyone who read a newspaper knew that the British Parliament, and especially Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, would never allow British honor to be besmirched. It took the Brits just three months to thoroughly humiliate the Junta, further angering the Argentine citizenry. No wonder they were now filling the streets in passionate demonstration against the Galtieri government.

Sends chills down your spine, doesn’t it? Has anyone matched this kind of searing prose in the Falklands chronicles? I don’t want to ruin the story by revealing the fiery hell that our blue eyed Celtic hero had to endure. Let’s just say that that marine in Fallouja won’t know what hell is until he’s had to film a news story with his flawless white skin covered in dust and dirt. It just makes you sick to even think about it. The horror…

Via: BCF

Frame Up

Here’s a re-frame for you, from a passionate young Deaniac in a libertarian Red State, Matthew Whitmyre:

Abolish the FCC

Why do we need a government censorship and moral regulation department? Sounds like those pointy-headed Washington types are trying to force their values on me. Damn conservative intelligentisia, living in their ivory towers, trying to impose their twisted values on a hard working Amurican like me. Shut those Washington Bureaucrats down!

Two can play at this game, you know.

Update: Jeff Jarvis has the same idea. And James Wolcott endorses it.

Damn Guvmint bureaucRATS.

Oliver Willis is a genius.

This is what I’m talking about. And here’s why.

I don’t know how many of you elitist limousine liberals listen to country music, but if you do, you know that all this disgust with blue state morality is something of a crock. Popular culture is much more indicative of what people do than what they say they do.

Check out this ditty by the king of country music, Bush supporter extraordinaire, Toby Keith:

His name was Steve, her name was Gina (You’ve never been here before have you?)

They met at a bar called the Cabo Wabo Cantina

He was an insurance salesman, from South Dakota

She was a 1st grade school teacher, Phoenix, Arizona

(No, my first time here)

They started dancin’ and it got real hot, then it spilled over to the parkin’ lot

One more tequilla, they were fallin’ in love

One more’s never enough

Don’t bite off, more than you can chew

There’s things down here the Devil himself wouldn’t do

Just remember when you let it all go

What happens down in Mexico, stays in Mexico

He woke up in the mornin’ and he made a little telephone call

To check on his wife and his kids back at home in Souix Falls (Hey babe, everything ok?)

She hopped right in the shower with a heavy, heavy mind (What am i doing?)

He knew it was the first time Gina’d ever crossed that line

They walked down to the beach and started drinkin’ again

Jumped into the ocean for a dirty swim

One more margarita, they were fallin’ in love

One more’s never enough

Don’t bite off, more than you can chew

There’s things down here the Devil himself wouldn’t do

Just remember when you let it all go

What happens down in Mexico, stays in Mexico

Oh, Mexico

Waitin’ at the bar at the terminal gate

She said Steve i gotta go, i’m gonna miss my plane

He said one more tequilla ‘fore you climb on up

She said one more’s never enough

Don’t bite off, more than you can chew

There’s things down here the Devil himself wouldn’t do

Just remember when you let it all go

What happens down in Mexico, stays in Mexico

Stays in Mexico, Stays in Mexico

Oh, Mexico

Whatever will we tell the children?

That song has been in the top five of the Country Billboard charts for 12 weeks. It’s at number 5 right now.

Or how about this one:

Well I’m an eight ball shooting double fisted drinking son of a gun

I wear My jeans a little tight

Just to watch the little boys come undone

Im here for the beer and the ball busting band

Gonna get a little crazy just because I can

You know im here for the party

And I aint leavin til they throw me out

Gonna have a little fun

gonna get me some

I may not be a ten but the boys say I clean up good

And if I gave em half a chance for some rowdy romance you know they would

I’ve been waiting all week just to have a good time

So bring on them cowboys and their pick up lines

Dont want no purple hooter shooter just some jack on the rocks

Dont mind me if i start that trashy talk

You know im here for the party

And I aint leavin til they throw me out

Gonna have a little fun

gonna get me some

You know I’m here, I’m here for the party

That song by Gretchen Wilson’s been on the top 100 country radio playlist for 17 weeks. It’s been in the top 10 Billboard country charts for the same amount of time, spending several weeks at number 1. It’s at number 5 this week.

The last I heard, the country music capital of the United States isn’t Hollywierd or New York City. It’s Nashville, Tennessee. And a vast number of country radio stations that play this stuff are owned by Clear Channel. Are they getting complaints from the same distraught parents whose children saw the opening credits of Monday Night Football? I don’t think so.

Country music dominates rural America. This stuff is everywhere and everybody is listening and singing along. You cannot tell me that Americans, both Real and Unreal don’t share modern sexual attitudes because it’s obvious that they do. (Gay rights is another thing and it’s going to take some time. But, we’re getting there too. Garth Brooks stood up for his gay sister and it didn’t cost him any record sales.)

What we are dealing with is hypocrisy on the one hand and deft exploitation on the part of the Republicans to cast differences in style as differences of “values.” It’s not true and we should try to make that argument.

Democrats are known as the party of tolerance. And that has become a pejorative term. But, it’s just a small step from tolerance to freedom. We are tolerant because we believe in freedom.

Let them have their crusade against freedom. They are swimming against the tide even amongst their own. Maybe we should suggest that they begin their crusade a little closer to home, though. Maybe they need to start by telling Toby Keith and Gretchen Wilson and Clear Channel that they don’t want any more of their music on the public airwaves. Let’s see how that works out in Real America, shall we?