Seems there’s word on the street that the Clintons are pushing Joe Lockhart for DNC chair.
I dunno. I have a soft spot for Lockhart from the Starr Wars, but isn’t he primarily a defensive player? I think we’re looking for some offense in this position.
Even though I was not a Deaniac, I came out way back in June for Dean as DNC chair mostly because I believe that the next chairman has to be able to harness some of this grassroots energy. And frankly, I think the party would be well served by a reformer who simultaneously represents the party. The activists have to take ownership of the party label and start to defend it against the GOP or we aren’t going to get anywhere. As long as Democrats berate themselves more than the Republicans we’re in trouble.
Still, I don’t have a real dog in this fight. I’m worn out with this stuff. Lockhart’s a good guy. I don’t hate the Clintons or the Deaniacs or the Kerry people. I don’t even know if this position is really as crucial as some think. Were Jim Nichols or Jim Gilmore or Ed Gillespie crucial to the GOP’s success? Not really.
The Belmont Club has an interesting post up about the reason for the Franco American “troubles.” Seems they think the French are still fuming about a slight from 50 years ago:
Some readers have argued that French intriguing against the US in Iraq is payback for the “abandonment” of the French Army at Dien Bien Phu by the US in 1954 when all they expected was “some air cover”.
This is, of course, nonsense. The French intriguing is clearly payback for John Adams’ dispatches to congress before the Quasi-War of 1798-1800 in which he said:
“I will never send another minister to France without assurances that he will be received, respected, and honored, as the representative of a great, free, powerful, and independent nation.”
Ohh lala, they were very upset and they obviously still are.
Certainly, their “intriguing” couldn’t possibly have anything to do with current events because U.S. actions have been nothing short of perfect. They just can’t let go of the past. That’s why we call it old Europe.
First, I’d like to apologise for the dearth of posting this last week. I’ve been unusually busy, but I’m also pretty burned out. Sometimes my muse (who I think may have voted for Schwarzenegger) just decides to take a vacation at club med and leave me sitting at the terminal unable to write anything but rude defenses of my spelling errors.
Hopefully, I’ll be back at it in force before too long.
Meanwhile, there is always the daily atrocity of the morals police:
US distributors of the film Merchant of Venice, which premiered in London this week, have asked the director to cut out a background fresco by a Venetian old master so it is fit for American television viewers.
US networks have been embroiled in controversy over naked flesh since Janet Jackson exposed a breast during a half-time performance during the Superbowl. A lesser fuss has blown up about a trailer for the hit television series Desperate Housewives on Monday Night football, in which an actress with her back to the camera drops her towel in a locker room.
Distributors regularly ask for cuts in films so that they can be shown on US tele-vision and by airlines. The request to “paint-box the wallpaper” – cover over the fresco – was contained in a letter from the US distrib-utors, Sony, to Michael Radford.
The director had already anticipated one request by shooting extra scenes for television in which bare-breasted prostitutes are fully clothed.
He was also asked to remove scenes of male kissing, a brief female kissing scene – and simulated slaughtering of goats.
The fifth request was to cut out footage showing meat carcasses.
Finally, according to Mr Radford, there was “a very curious request which said ‘Could you please paint-box out the wallpaper?’. I said wallpaper, what wallpaper? This is the 16th century, people didn’t have wall-paper.”
When he examined the scenes, he realised the letter was referring to frescoes by Paolo Veronese, the acclaimed Venetian 16th-century artist, which, when examined closely, showed a naked cupid.
“A billion dollars worth of Veronese great master’s frescoes they want paint-boxed out because of this cupid’s willy. It is absolutely absurd,” he said.
Here is some more filthy trash by this 16th century pornographer:
In Hollywood some nobody gets the word to crack down on sexual images because “people” are up in arms about morality and the children. The nobody who makes the decision about what is morally acceptable is completely clueless about everything. This is the result.
Get ready. We are going to see more and more of this. The only thing worse than putting the cops or the preachers in charge of deciding what is acceptable for people to watch is letting some nameless loser bureaucrat do it.
I’d love to hear the rationale for censoring meat carcasses. Either somebody is very kinky or we are going beyond self-censorship of sexuality and violence to include general ickiness. The good news is that if icky meat carcasses are out of line then we can expect that Jerry Falwell’s continuous television appearances will soon be severely curtailed. There’s a silver lining to everything.
“Because this commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples and other minority groups by other individuals and organizations,” reads an explanation from CBS, “and the fact the Executive Branch has recently proposed a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast on the [CBS and UPN] networks.”
All the hoopla about Monday Night Football is a misdirection from bullshit like this. If there is a problem with television, I would suggest that this is by far the most important problem that we face — the voluntary censorship of certain political speech by the networks. Remember, most people get all their information from television.
If anybody wants to burn up the switchboards of a television network, this might be the one that should get those fingers walking.
Apparently, some people are still upset that certain liberals have the temerity to suggest that the moral values voters the media believe decided the election might just be the teeniest bit hypocrital. We are petty elitists, and intellectual lightweights to boot.
I have to say that this critique is driving me nuts coming from sophisticated thinkers like Somerby. He claims, ridiculously, that Frank Rich was misleading when he said that nobody complained about the “Desperate Housewives” skit until political groups got them all riled up, using the fact that a spokesman says he didn’t get any calls at home. Clearly the spokesman means that nobody from the network called him to let him know there was an uproar, which is what would normally happen. This argument is beneath Somerby. Rich made a very good case that this was a ginned up controversy.
The bigger issue is that Somerby and others claim that those of us who find all this moralizing a bit suspect are using the fallacy of composition — we are applying the hypocrisy of some moralizers to all red state morals voters. But that criticism ignores the fact that this entire discussion is taking place within a broader “culture war” as defined by those who have decided to wage it. The “Desperate Housewives” flap didn’t happen in a vacuum. Of course voters are individuals and there are certainly some who sincerely believe that the skit in question crossed the line. But the real subject of this conversation is this false construct of the Republican Real Americans appalled at the horrible values of the Democratic libertine cosmopolitans. It is not a stretch to use the “Desperate Housewives” flap as an example of hypocrisy on the part of the moralizers considering that it is an immensely popular mass market television show among the very Real Americans who are alleged to be so moral.
Via Sommerby (who takes a different lesson from these quotes) here’s an example of what we are dealing with:
MR. RUSSERT: Two interesting developments over the last month or so. A report came out that the state with the lowest level of divorce is Massachusetts. The states with the highest level are the so-called Bible Belt in the South.
DR. FALWELL: Yes.
REV. SHARPTON: That’s because they watch “Desperate Housewives.”
MR. RUSSERT: Also “Desperate Housewives”…
REV. SHARPTON: That’s right.
MR. RUSSERT: …a widely viewed television series, particularly in the South.
REV. SHARPTON: Because…
MR. RUSSERT: Why is it that the red states…
DR. FALWELL: Because the South doesn’t belong to the New Testament Church anymore than the North.
MR. RUSSERT: Right.
DR. FALWELL: We have a responsibility to preach the Gospel. But I would take that poll a little further. Among born-again, Bible-believing Christians who take the Bible as the word of God, you’ll find those stats are non…
MR. RUSSERT: They don’t watch “Desperate Housewives”?
DR. FALWELL: I hope they don’t.
REV. SHARPTON: You don’t know. Look, Brother Russert, Brother Russert…
DR. LAND: I don’t…
DR. FALWELL: I have never watched it and I’ve…
DR. FALWELL: I have never watched it and I’ve…
DR. LAND: We’re in church on Sunday night. The point is–you know, look. He said we shouldn’t impose values on others. Look, when a mother has an abortion, she is imposing her values on an unborn child. And it is always a fatal imposition because the baby dies.
DR. FALWELL: Amen. Amen.
REV. SHARPTON: Brother Russert, I’ll tell you that people…
MR. RUSSERT: On “Desperate Housewives,” Newsweek says that the creator of “Desperate Housewives” is a conservative, gay Republican.
REV. SHARPTON: That’s what I was going to say. Do you find that…
DR. FALWELL: Well, the fact that he’s a gay Republican means he should join the Democratic Party.
What I would give to be able to sit down in a living room somewhere and watch that unbelievable Sunday sideshow with Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, John O’Hara, Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Erskine Caldwell, Flannery O’Connor and about a dozen other great American writers. If there is a greater All American, mom and apple pie, flagwaving tradition in the great country of ours than deflating pompous gasbags like those guys, I don’t know what is.
Exposing the phony piety of middle American life goes back a long, long way. In fact we could say that our earliest literary superstar, Nathaniel Hawthorne, made his name with the subject of the preacher and small town sin. The greatest American writer ever (imo) Mark Twain, wrote:
We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one – the one we use – which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it.
The progressive movement was inspired and energized by novels and stories that laid bare the twofaced nature of bourgouis American morality. Sinclair Lewis wrote “Main Street” in 1920:
The doctor asserted, ‘Sure religion is a fine influence – got to have it to keep the lower classes in order – fact, it’s the only thing that appeals to a lot of these fellows and makes ’em respect the rights of property. And I guess this theology is O.K.; lot of wise old coots figured it out, and they knew more about it than we do. He believed in the Christian religion, and never thought about it; he believed in the church, and seldom went near it; he was shocked by Carol’s lack of faith, and wasn’t quite sure what was the nature of the faith that she lacked.
In 1927 he wroteElmer Gantry:
“He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.”
Just last year, Rick Perlstein visited Ronald Reagan’s home town and found, you guessed it, quite a bit of shall we say … cultural dissonance among the pillars of the community.
I could go on and on. There is nothing new about questioning the sincerity of public people who preach private morality. Politicians may believe that they need to preach morality for strategic reasons. Fine. But that does not require writers and social observers to pretend that we live in a country in which the natural course of human nature has been suspended in certain more “moral” regions or that it is disrespectful to question why Viagra commercials and close-up Cheerleader crotch shots do not elicit the same shocked moral outrage from NFL fans like Rush Limbaugh as the blond’s naked back in the arms of a leering black football player.
I do not watch “Desperate Housewives.” In fact I watch almost no network television at all. I don’t defend any of popular culture on aesthetic or moral grounds. I’m sure that traversing the shoals of modern life is very difficult for those with young children. If I had young kids I probably would severely restrict their viewing. But, I’m not going to listen to anyone tell me that that “Hollywood” and “New York” values are infecting any region of this country against its will because every corner of this land is filled with people who eat that stuff up.
Parents should probably use the V-Chip that Clinton pushed through to give parents a tool to keep their kids from seeing things they don’t want them to see, use TiVo to screen programs or better yet, turn off the TV. I have a feeling that as unpopular as that might be, it might just be for the best. Having TV executives hold a seance to figure out what Michael Powell and his cronies believe should be on television just doesn’t seem to me to be much of a solution in a free society.
And one more thing: Somerby approvingly quotes President Clinton numerous times saying that the Pentecostals deserved respect because even though they didn’t believe in a right to abortion they took in unwanted babies and gave them a home. He uses this as an example of how liberals should talk about fundamentalist Christians. Falwell repeated on Press the Meat that his church sponsored adoptions.
African-American babies are going to parents overseas even as US couples adopt children from other countries
Adrian, Emma, and Elisa have more in common than their charm and being the apple of their parents’ eyes. All are black children born in the United States and adopted as infants by parents in other countries.
They also are representatives of a little-known trend: At the same time the US is “importing” increasing numbers of adoptive children from Russia, China, and Guatemala, it is “exporting” black babies to be adopted in other countries.
[…]
The majority of [american] couples seeking to adopt are white, but there aren’t nearly enough Caucasian babies available in the US to meet the demand. Although exceptions certainly exist, American parents generally prefer babies to toddlers, girls to boys, and Caucasians to African-Americans, adoption professionals report. Other ethnicities fall in between, depending on their skin color. African-American boys are at the bottom of this “ranking” system, they say, which is why they’re harder to place.
“We have to work much harder to find homes for our African-American babies,” says Robert Springer of Christian Homes, an adoption agency in Texas.
No one is equating babies with commodities, but the principles of supply and demand apply. Adoption costs and waiting times in the US vary depending on a baby’s ranking in the “desirability list.”
The children who are in the greatest demand are also in the shortest supply. Those who want to adopt healthy white babies in the US may wait as long as five years, agencies say. In contrast, they add, the waiting for African-Americans is often measured in weeks and months, especially for baby boys.
Now I realize that not every pentecostal who opposes abortion would refuse to adopt a black child. But, the evidence shows that while the fundamentalists may be willing to adopt unwanted babies in theory, in practice they only want to adopt certain unwanted babies. I don’t know why that deserves any special respect.
I have to agree with Boarshead Tavern that this WorldNet Daily story about kids wearing Commie Che shirts is chilling. The man, after all, justified many horrible actions in the name of his revolution with no regard for universal ethics or morals:
Guevara was proud of the fact that he personally put bullets in the backs of the heads of many he considered counter-revolutionary.
Once again, in rallying his guerrillas in Angola, he wrote: “Blind hate against the enemy creates a forceful impulse that cracks the boundaries of natural human limitations, transforming the soldier in an effective, selective and cold killing machine. A people without hate cannot triumph against the adversary.”
Yikes
Now this on the other hand is a stocking stuffer for the whole family:
Support our Marine $17.99
The Marine who killed the wounded insurgent in Fallujah deserves our praise and admiration. In a split second decision, he acted valiantly.
On the otherhand, Kevin Sites of NBC is a traitor. Beheading civilians, booby-trapped bodies, suicide bombers?? Sorry hippie, American lives come first. Terrorists don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. This Marine deserves a medal and Kevin Sites, you deserve a punch in the mouth.
Printed on high quality superheavyweight, preshrunk cotton (6.1oz)
Some people need to read some history before they get snippy:
Here’s my post, from Polipundit.com, on the jaw-dropping liberal self-parody of the day. What planet, exactly, are these people from?
Far-left Democratic Congresswoman, Zoe Lofgren, of the San Francisco Bay Area, plans to introduce a prospective Constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College.
Cute, huh?
Incidentally, this will not be Ms. Lofgren’s “15 minutes,” so to speak.
Last March, a woman who had worked for Lofgren as a Congressional aide, back in 2002, was arrested by the F.B.I., on charges that she had served as a “paid agent” for the Iraqi Intelligence Services, both prior, and subsequent, to the U.S.-led military assault to take down Saddam Hussein’s government.
And in a final bit of liberal irony, Congresswoman Lofgren’s former aide began her political career as a reporter for the Pravda-like Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Um, could you have scripted all that for an uproarious political satire?
Um, not intentionally. You see, there have been many, many calls to abolish the electoral college, going back to James Madison and Andrew Jackson. In the last 35 years alone there have been dozens of proposals to eliminate it or change it, many of them coming from Republicans. Yep, even Republican president Nixon and Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole and respected Republican senator (and Reagan chief of staff) Howard Baker were in favor of abolishing it. And guess what? Public opinion polls have repeatedly shown that the public favors abolition of the electoral college too.
Imagine that:: In a 1968 Gallup survey, 81% of Americans favored a direct popular vote, 12% favored retention, and 7% had no opinion. In 1992, pollsters asked Americans this question, ‘If Perot runs, there is a chance that no presidential candidate will get enough electoral votes to win. If that happens, the Constitution gives the House of Representatives the power to decide who will be the next President. Do you think that is a fair way to choose the President, or should the Constitution be changed?’ 31% said it was a fair way, and 61% said the Constitution should be changed.
By some counts, there have been over seven hundred proposed amendments to the Constitution to change, or abolish, the electoral college. In 1969, in the wake of an election where a third party candidate almost sent the election to the House of Representatives, an amendment to do away with the electoral college passed the House of Representatives with 83% of the vote, 338-70. Richard Nixon favored the amendment, and so did three-quarters of state legislatures, Republican Senator Howard Baker denounced the electoral college with ‘Any system which favors one citizen over another or one state over another is … inconsistent with the most fundamental concept of a democratic society.’ Predictably, the amendment failed in the Senate; however, it was not small states who blocked the reform but rather Southern states, who saw the electoral college as part of states’ rights. Also, because the Senate itself is an institution which gives each state an equal say in the formation of laws; a body which helps to protect the small states from their more populous analogues.
I know it’s great fun for people to get all snotty and snide over things about which they apparently know nothing. But it’s also a good way to make a fool of yourself on the internets.
In responding to my post below Kidding On The Square writes a very nice treatise on the life of the Puritans, a subject so relevant today….for so many reasons. He quotes from Richard Bushman’s book From Puritan to Yankee
No attempt to trace the history of liberty can deal with the detached individual in isolation. Freedom is a condition not of the single man alone but of man in relationship to a community. The group protects him against the misuse of the power of others and provides the setting within which he can advantageously exercise his own powers. Therefore, changes in the nature of the community, which necessarily either increase or restrain the capacity of the individual to act, affect his liberty.
…
Particulary significant in the analysis of the process by which the Puritans became Yankeees is the light it throws on the relationship between society and individual personality. The description of the forces in the community that gave birth to the wish to be free, among men brought up in a closed order, illuminates an important, and neglected, facet of the history of liberty in the United States.
Via Peter Daou I see that the right wing bloggers are all atwitter about this article in which a teacher is reported to be suing his principal for allegedly refusing to let him teach the Declaration of Independence because it mentions God.(Well, technically it mentions a Creator.) According to these furious Republicans, the founders are rolling in their graves:
Steven Williams, a fifth-grade teacher at Stevens Creek School in the San Francisco Bay area suburb of Cupertino, sued for discrimination on Monday, claiming he had been singled out for censorship by principal Patricia Vidmar because he is a Christian.
“It’s a fact of American history that our founders were religious men, and to hide this fact from young fifth-graders in the name of political correctness is outrageous and shameful,” said Williams’ attorney, Terry Thompson.
“Williams wants to teach his students the true history of our country,” he said. “There is nothing in the Establishment Clause (of the U.S. Constitution) that prohibits a teacher from showing students the Declaration of Independence.”
Vidmar could not be reached for comment on the lawsuit, which was filed on Monday in U.S. District Court in San Jose and claims violations of Williams rights to free speech under the First Amendment.
Phyllis Vogel, assistant superintendent for Cupertino Unified School District, said the lawsuit had been forwarded to a staff attorney. She declined to comment further.
Perhaps the facts are just as the lawsuit alleges in which case the principal has some explaining to do. But before we make that judgment it might be worth our while to find out if what this teacher is saying IS ACTUALLY TRUE. Nobody from the other side has commented and nobody knows the whole story. Anybody can file a lawsuit and call the press. It doesn’t make it a fact. Indeed, somebody really ought to ask themselves if an attorney making the statement “there is nothing in the Establishment Clause (of the U.S. Constitution) that prohibits a teacher from showing students the Declaration of Independence,” isn’t just a little bit too cute.
Certainly, it’s a stretch to evoke the founding fathers on this religiosity issue, particularly Jefferson. He wasn’t a Christian, he was a Deist. I know that’s inconvenient, but it’s true. Back in those days you didn’t have to pass a religious test to be in government like you do today. Why, they even put it in the constitution.
“. . . Some books against Deism fell into my hands. . . It happened that they wrought an effect on my quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations; in short, I soon became a thorough Deist.”
Franklin
“… I am not afraid of priests. They have tried upon me all their various batteries of pious whining, hypocritical canting, lying and slandering. I have contemplated their order from the Magi of the East to the Saints of the West and I have found no difference of character, but of more or less caution, in proportion to their information or ignorance on whom their interested duperies were to be played off. Their sway in New England is indeed formidable. No mind beyond mediocrity dares there to develop itself.”
Jefferson
What influence, in fact, have ecclesiastical establishments had on society? In some instances they have been seen to erect a spiritual tyranny on the ruins of the civil authority; on many instances they have been seen upholding the thrones of political tyranny; in no instance have they been the guardians of the liberties of the people. Rulers who wish to subvert the public liberty may have found an established clergy convenient auxiliaries. A just government, instituted to secure and perpetuate it, needs them not.”
Madison
. . . Thirteen governments [of the original states] thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind.”
Adams
The 1796 treaty with Tripoli, negotiations begun under Washington and signed by Adams states:
[As] the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion
Please spare us the rewiting of history. There were Christians, Deists and atheists among the founders. But they were all products of the Enlightenment which the current Christians seem determined to reject. The founders are rolling in their graves, all right.
Larry Burkett, founder of Christian Financial Concepts
Rev. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family
Rev. D. James Kennedy, founder of Coral Ridge Ministries
Marlin Maddoux, President of International Christian Media
Don Wildmon, founder of American Family Association
(And 25+ other ministries)
That’s the best case for lawsuit reform I’ve ever heard, right there.
STF points out that this is coordinated to come out the day before Thanksgiving so that they can pound it over the holiday week-end without anybody being able to properly respond. These precious little stories are becoming commonplace these days. I remember the one about the teacher who was allegedly discriminated against because she put a picture of Bush on the bulletin board. It turned out that she had a fucking shrine up there and was insulting 12 year old kids whose parents were voting for Kerry. All the wingnuts keened and wailed about the unfairness of it all, always being the first to claim victimhood. As each tale is debunked they just move to the next.
These little personal stories are a very effective way to spread propaganda. We need to figure out a way to deal with this stuff.
