Did They Use Color-Blind Nooses in Jena?

COLOR-BLIND NOOSES. Somewhere between 30-60 thousand marchers went to Jena, Louisiana on Thursday to protest the treatment of six young black men accused of beating a white teenager. Racial tension had been developing at the local high school for a year after some white students hung nooses by their favorite tree to show their opinion of the black kids who also started sitting by the "white tree."

There's been an analogous problem at our local high school in Morehead, KY where white students brought guns to the school recently after a dispute with the very few black students at the school.

Funny though, all the white residents of Jena seem to think there's no racial tension in the town.

They have the freedom to march and freedom of speech, but our town is not racist like this is being depicted," said a white resident who would identify himself only as Jay. "The nooses were just a joke."

No officials of the town, which is 85 percent white, offered any comments about Thursday's march. In the past, they have angrily insisted that Jena suffers from no racial tensions.

Those must have been color-blind nooses.

SPEAKING OF NOOSES. It seems that nooses have become the symbol du jour for white racial hatred since the Michael Richards incident. A Waverly, Ohio student at Morehead State University told me that somebody put a noose up on the entrace to her town last December.

Perhaps Confederate flags are no longer an adequate expression for racist sentiment--not that the Confederate flags weren't symbolizing lynching among others.

NEW DIRECTIONS/OLD DIRECTIONS. The prosecutor abuse in Jena represented a reversion back to the traditional kinds of abuses that target the black population. Conservative critics of Michael Nifong's abuses during the Durham rape case must be relieved to see the Jena prosecutor go back to tradition.

However, the march on Jena manifested a new level of strength and influence among African-American bloggers who worked outside the traditional civil rights institutions to publicize the problems in Jena and get the march going.

If only there were more overlap between African-American bloggers and white progressive bloggers.

Reply From Bronze Trinity on BET and gansta rap

Below is Bronze Trinity's reply to a question I asked about the most important factors determining whether the Afro-Sphere's Accurate Images Campaign against BET and gansta rap will be a success:

The most important factors? Well, we are trying something new by appealing to bloggers and individuals to use their buying dollars to stop supporting gangsta rap because there are other forms of music (including hip hop) that does not portray harmful stereotypes in a way that can be construed as glorification. We want consumers to raise their voices by demanding more radio play for alternative music and less for gangsta rap. Gangsta rappers get a lot of media exposure and advertising because they have money. Positive artists do not have as much money or promotion. So to even the playing field we are asking bloggers to promote positive artists for free. Word-of mouth advertising could really help. Many people don't know that there are alternatives or that music executives give preference to gangsta rap (that is very racist and sexist) over music of the same style that is not racist and sexist.

We want them to call BET and request particular artists and types of programming. We want people to watch BET shows for the commercials and then contact the advertising companies telling them that they are sponsoring sexist and racist content. They may decide to advertise somewhere else. This was something that seems to have worked against the Hot Ghetto Mess TV show.

So we think that this will only be as big as people make it. It will be successful if people email the release, make blog entries, post Youtube commentaries on the issue, and actually take some of the recommended actions. We also think that getting sponsors to remove their advertisements from BET, BET websites, and gangsta rappers websites will pressure them to change. This is a new approach because instead of going to the channel or artists themselves (who tend to ignore our requests) we are threatening their source of income.

#1 album sales for Common and Kanye West outselling 50cent are signs that positive/conscious artists are bankable and that there could be a profitable shift in the music industry away from the stereotypes and sexism that is rampant in mainstream hip hop.

Giuliani's Tactical Stupidity on Israel

Visiting in London to be seen with Margaret Thatcher, Rudy Giuliani proposes to promote Israel for NATO membership. Giuliani has a rationale for this proposal in that Israel is a democracy and NATO is an association that includes a lot of democracies.

But the underlying logic of Giuliani's position is that he's trying to be provocatively stupid so that people on the right will think of him as a "true conservative" despite his support for abortion rights and gay rights.

Glenn Greenwald argues that Giuliani's proposal is "extremist" and irrational because it commits the United States to treat all of Israel's wars as American wars and would be yet another way to commit the United States to endless war against our own interest.

Greenwald believes that other presidential candidates would pounce on Giuliani for this kind of fringe position if we lived "in a rational world." However, nobody has objected because of what Greenwald sees as the exaggerated significance of Israeli lobbies and Jewish money in American politics.

These factors might explain the silence from Democratic candidates and the mainstream media, but why is Giuliani articulating a point of view that's so contrary to American interests in the first place?

Obviously, Giuliani's "Israel in NATO" proposal is designed as an "almost-new" way (actually the proposal has been around for awhile) for Giuliani to promote himself as a friend of Israel and enemy of Israel's enemies. In that sense, Giuliani is just trying to differentiate himself from the intensely pro-Israeli positions of Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Fred Thompson.

But Giuliani is also making a finer political calculation here. He's betting that Fox, conservative talk show hosts, the right-wing blogosphere and their audiences will absolutely love the "Israel in NATO." It's apparently new. It's provocative. It provides an occasion for the right-wing media to accuse anybody who disagrees with being anti-Semitic. Above all, the right likes the flamboyant stupidity of the idea--the way that Giuliani is brushing aside any notion of patiently or cautiously pursuing American interests and just throwing all our weight behind Israel.

In the comic book world of the American right, this kind of weenie-ish macho posturing trumps rational self-interest every time. That's a lot of the reason the right used to love George Bush.

I don't know if "Israel in NATO" is going to make a big splash on the right. But Giuliani and his campaign team have shown that they can find their way to the hearts of the GOP right.

Giuliani might be able to survive hard-working Fred Thompson after all.

The Day I Stood Up To NPR

There's an article in Time about bomb-throwing Republican senators Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint who take a lot of symbolic stands against spending. What makes them particularly annoying to other senators is that hold up legislation by refusing to join in the "unanimous consent" resolutions that allow a lot of routing legislation to get passed.

I'm sure they'll both be heroes to the right-wing because the Bush administration has shown that the right would rather throw impotent bombs than actually grow up and govern.

But I won't be too hard on Cobern and DeMint.

I've done the same thing.

When I was in faculty senate long ago, the chair was trying to get a motion passed unanimously to re-authorize $100,000 in funding to get NPR for our campus radio station.

But I can't stand NPR and thought that the campus radio station was pointless for students because it played classical music all day.

So I stonewalled, making several medium-length speeches characterizing NPR reporting as mass media "cliches in depth" and the general NPR approach as "popular culture for people who are too good for popular culture." The university had just downgraded it's football program from scholarship to non-scholarship because of lack of student interest. I argued that students were just as uninterested in NPR. I should have said that students were even less interested.

But the vote was 33-1 and I was the one. Even the token right-wingers supported the resolution because they didn't want to make tenured faculty mad at them. They were certainly mad at me and I was very much untenured.

But they didn't get their unanimous vote either.

Actually, the Senate Democrats could use a few bomb throwers besides Russ Feingold.

African-American Bloggers Against Stereotypes

The Afro-Sphere Bloggers Association has condemned BET and a number of famous rappers for purveying stereotypes of African-Americans.

According to Afro-Spear:

Gangsta rap regularly glorifies sexism, the n-word, profanities, violence, drug use and dealing, sexism, and the dehumanization of Black men and women. Gangsta rap videos and stereotype-filled shows are the programming staples of BET. “BET and hip hop have gone down hill. They were once inspirations. Now they purvey some of the most harmful anti-Black sentiments you will ever see or hear, and this has become a representation of mainstream Black culture,” says Bronze Trinity of the Afrosphere Bloggers Association (ABA). ABA is coordinating the Afrosphere Accurate Images campaign against BET and gangsta rap.

One of the students in my senior seminar last spring on African-American political thought emphasized his belief that African-Americans should take white conservative criticisms of black culture more seriously.

My thought, somewhat illustrated by the statement above, tends to be the opposite--that African-Americans writers are so brutally critical of every dimension of their own culture that white conservatives are superfluous.

The Blackwater Scandal: A New Round of Demoralization Begins

As everybody knows, the primary effect of Gen. Petraeus' testimony was to make Republicans and the right-wing feel better about the failed occupation in Iraq.

But that won't last long.

The unfolding scandal over the conduct of the Blackwater Security company in Iraq is a good bet to restart the process of Republican demoralization. According to Spencer Ackerman of TPM, the State Department has allowed Blackwater to operate with impunity beyond the reach of both Iraqi and American law. Last weekend, trigger happy Blackwater gunmen killed at least nine Iraqis and that might be only the tip of the iceberg.

If this scandal has legs, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice will eventually have to answer for it. But the right is the only part of the American public that's going to be surprised.

Everybody else already knows how bad it is.

Update: Hearings on Blackwater begin on Oct. 2.

Yglesias on Politicizing Petraeus

This a comment by Matthew Yglesias that I can endorse:

Meanwhile, Bush's disingenuousness in saying "It is one thing to attack me — which is fine" is just staggering. For years, the man took the view that criticism of his policies amount to criticism of the idea of freedom, that to disagree with his Iraq policy was racist and unpatriotic, and all the rest. Eventually, years and years of fruitless, bungled, unnecessary warfare caused him to become so unpopular that this line of counterattack became unviable. Thus, he hit on the strategy of finding a well-regarded media-savvy general and, in essence, appointing him front man for administration. For months and months and months the administration indicated that to question its policy was to question the Great Man Petraeus. So, naturally, people came to criticize Petraeus. If he doesn't like seeing a politicized officer's corps, he shouldn't have been hiding behind the generals in the first place.

The Bush administration is like an infectious disease. Because of their relentless dishonesty and mind-numbing incompetence, Bush and his people lost all their credibility. As a result, they set up Gen. Petraeus as the spokesperson for their failed war in Iraq. But in the process, the Bush people managed to infect Petraeus with their brand of dishonesty (not that he was unwilling) and destroy his credibility just as surely as they destroyed their own.

MoveOn was right to claim that Gen. Petraeus betrayed our country with his convuluted testimony before Congress. But he's only a pawn in the larger betrayal engineered by his bosses in Washington.

What the War Costs the Right

Right-wingers like Rush Limbaugh and Judge (and prolific author) Richard Posner are fond of saying that the Constitution is not a "suicide pact."

It's a cute phrase that's only meaningful to those who buy into the "be afraid, be very afraid" message of the American right on the war on terror, the Iraq War, Iran, health care, gay marriage, and other national issues.

But, it's the war in Iraq itself which has become a suicide pact for Bush administration, the Republican Party, and the right-wing. And they're suffering on a wide variety of fronts.

THE END OF THE AFFAIR WITH THE RIGHT. The war has already stripped the Bush administration and conservatism more broadly of its reputation. The main words people use to describe President Bush are insults like moron, idiot, and buffoon. My wife and I get regular congratulations for our bright yellow "W: Worst President Ever" bumper stickers. Conservativism in general seems to be sufferiong the same fate. The thirty years of hard-work that the right-wing put into building up the "conservative" brand is going down the drain as majorities of the American population as a whole and big majorities of African-Americans, Hispanics, women, young people, and gays identify themselves as Democrats.

It might not be that long before the only people who identify themselves as conservatives are folks with Confederate flag bumper stickers.

THE HARD AND SOFT MATH OF IT. The war has already cost the Republicans control over Congress and will probably ensure that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is sworn in as the next president. If it's a Hillary/Obama ticket, there's a decent chance that the Democrats will control the presidency for the next 16 years before the country finally gets over its "Iraq Syndrome" and begins taking the Republicans seriously again. At the very least, the Iraq War will be an albatross around the neck of whoever is unlucky enough to be the Republican candidate. That's because the numbers are very tough for the Republicans and the right. According to recent polling, people are somewhat more optimistic about conditions in Iraq but that a large majority disapproves of President Bush and a majority want the Democrats to expedite withdrawal. According to the Pew Research Center, these conclusions have been locked in since last January or February. As a result, war-mongering Republican candidates are going to have a hard time convincing anybody other than partisan Republicans of the wisdom of continuing high levels of troop deployments.

But there's also a "fuzzy math" at work here. There is no good option for the war. If the war in Iraq goes on as it has for the last year, many of the politicians associated with the war are going to have a lot to worry about. But, if the Bush administration caves on the war and accepts withdrawal, it will be even worse for conservative politicians because they'll be left holding the bag of a failed war. They won't have a war to defend. They won't have a policy to advance. They'll be stuck without a readily identifiable agenda outside well-practiced right-wing smearing tactics on gay marriage, abortion, and pedophilia. It's "soft" math because it's hard to translate lack of an agenda into the hard numbers of polling and election results. But a Bush administration "surrender" to the Democrats would be very bad for the Republicans.

EXPANDING DOMESTIC GOVERNMENT. Rich Lowry cautions conservatives to "be afraid" of Hillary Clinton's health care proposal. According to Lowry, HillaryCare 2.0 is different from Hillary's 1993 proposal in that it's merely the logical next step in government involvement in health care rather than a radical overhaul. Government already pays half of the cost of health insurance; government mandates on individual coverage aren't much of a step beyond that. And it's likely that a Hillary administration would take further incremental steps. According to Michael Cannon, "Clinton proposes widening the availability of every government health-care program at hand -- Medicare would be extended to the nonelderly; the S-Chip program for poor children would be extended to the middle class; and the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan would be extended to all."

If Hillary or Obama are elected president, they'll carry enhanced Democratic Congressional majorities with them and find a friendly legislative environment for these kinds of incremental proposals. The involvement of the federal government in the domestic economy will grow more extensive and most people who aren't right-wingers won't mind. Combined with the increased visibility of minority groups, feminists, and immigrants, and a general atmosphere of multi-culturalism and negotiated solutions, the election of a Democratic administration will make the country as a whole will be a less congenial place for conservatives. Conservatives had hoped that a long-term Republican domination would result in a radical re-orientation toward a market economy, an America First attitude, and a muscular, confrontational foreign policy.

But all of that might be lost and it might be lost for several electoral cycles.

And it will primarily be the result of the Iraq War.

NOT JUST ISOLATIONISM--ISOLATION. The creativity of the right-wing has been manifested in the formation of a series of alternative institutions ranging from conservative talk radio to Fox News, suburban mega-churches, and the proliferating Christian schools. However, a number of the political institutions and figures that served as bridges between conservative constituencies and the rest of the country are falling by the wayside. The Democratic Leadership Council, the mainstream media, and the New Republic are all good examples. All of these institutions used to take conservative ideas seriously, recast many of those ideas in liberal language, and show how conservative ideas could speak to liberal values. The war has both weakened these institutions and pretty much ended their bridging function.

The looming retirement of John Warner and Chuck Hagel, the rightward march of John McCain, and the electoral defeat of moderate Republicans like Lincoln Chaffee has reduced the number of electoral officials who could speak both conservative and liberal. These kinds of figures won't be replaced and moderate Republicans like Susan Collins are likely candidates for defeat in 2008.

The overall outcome is that conservatives are edging towards greater individual and group isolation within an American society that might explicitly reject them.

Once again, the main cause of this isolation will be the war they've cherished so much.

A Brokered Convention?

Michael Barone argues against the possibility of a brokered political party conventions on historical grounds. For Barone, brokered conventions like the Democratic convention that nominated segregationist John Davis in 1924 are relics of a pre-electronic era in which political operatives had to meet personally at conventions in order to iron out agreements.

Like a lot of these kinds of historical arguments, Barone's take on brokered conventions falls well short of being convincing. The problem concerns the failures of particular political systems. In 1924, the Democrats couldn't come to agreement between the urban machines and the Southern segregationists. That's why the convention needed 123 ballots to come up with a nominee.

In general, the American political system is not functioning very well at present. The hijacking of the Republican Party by the extreme right wing has introduced a destabilizing rigidity into every American political institution. Because the conservative movement has succeeded in making refusal to compromise or accommodate into a test of political manhood, everybody else has had to follow suit. As a result, getting anything done through the American political system has become a tremendous ordeal for everyone involved.

In this context, it's easy to see a day when a number of still viable candidates emerge from the primary electoral seasons of one or both parties. Such an outcome would result in a brokered convention of one kind of another. In fact, it might happen to the Republicans in 2008.

Of course, it's not written into stone that a brokered convention would come to agreement either.

Smearkrieg No. 6--"I've Not Yet Begun to Smear"

It looks like Ernie Fletcher wants to be the John Paul Jones of smearing.

Although Kentucky's Republican governor is running 19 points behind in the latest polling, he's extremely confident about his chances.

Just as John Paul Jones dismissed demands for his surrender by crying "I've not yet begun to fight," Fletcher dismisses the polls with a "we've yet to define our opponent."

In other words, Fletcher has "not yet begun to smear."

The usual formula for Republican candidates is to pile up an enormous amount of money and then spend it on negative ads the last two or three weeks before the election.

Unfortunately for Fletcher, it might not be possible to smear his problems away. Widely perceived as incompetent and corrupt, Fletcher has a lot of smearing to do before the public has as much contempt for Beshear as they have for Fletcher himself.

It will be interesting to see if Fletcher engages in creative smearing or decides to go with the old stand-by's of abortion, school prayer, and pedophilia.

Democrats: Suspend Your Campaigns!!

All the talk about Iraq last week boiled down to this: We're trapped in a h ydra-headed religious, ethnic civil war until Congress musters the will to change course.

The Sunday editorial of my local paper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, says it all. The Iraq war is going to go on its pointless way unless "Congress musters the will to change course."

And there's almost no confidence that Congress will muster that will.

The Democratic leadership in the House and the Senate might have enough confidence to pass more legislation with withdrawal deadlines. But neither Nancy Pelosi nor Harry Reid have shown any inclination to defy a Bush veto and cut off funding for the war.

However, continuing the war is bad policy, bad morality and bad politics wrapped into one. The Democrats should move to cut off funding and they shouldn't wait for a Bush veto to begin publicaly promoting their cause.

But the Democrats need to concentrate all of their energies if they are going to succeed in ending the war.

And that means temporarily calling off all the presidential campaigns. I mean it. The Democrats should suspend presidential campaigns.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards are three of the best known figures in the Democratic Party and they're all running hard-charging presidential campaigns. But the fact that they're all running to be elected president in November 2008 is draining the Democrats of a lot of their leadership ability, imagination, and firepower in the here and now.

Given the stakes of the upcoming fight over war funding, that's not an appropriate use of Democratic Party resources.

Instead of running for president, Clinton, Obama, and the rest should commit themselves to ending the war. There's no need for the candidates to cancel scheduled events. They should just stop treating those events as campaign events and begin to treat them as anti-war speeches and rallies. Their staffs should stop developing health care initiatives, education plans, and anti-poverty proposals and focus instead on proposals for troop withdrawals and post-withdrawal plans. Their campaigns should stop generating subtle little digs at each other and start cutting through the Bush administration's weak arguments for continuing the war.

In fact, the Democratic presidential campaigns should start cooperating with each other. The Hillary, Obama, and Edwards organizations should be organizing shows of unity among the candidates, coordinating their daily themes about the war, and sharing their ideas. They should be coordinating everything they do with the Democratic leadership.

Suspending their presidential campaigns would be a tremendously innovative political idea that would generate a lot of media buzz. It would jump-start the Democratic base and potentially turn popular anti-war sentiment into anti-war excitement. The Democrats would probably start drawing bigger crowds, raising more money, and getting better media coverage as well.

Suspending presidential campaigns would give everyone more confidence that the Democrats have the backbone to lead the country through difficult times.

People have felt good about the Democratic candidates. People would feel even better if the Democrats stopped campaigning.

But most importantly, the suspension of presidential campaigns would increase the chances that the Democrats could actually cut off funding for the war.

That means that suspending campaigns would be good policy, good morality, and good politics.

The Failed War for Oil

Alan Greenspan is going to claim in his memoir that the U. S. invaded Iraq because of oil. If that's the case, then the war for Mideast oil has also failed. The U. S. invasion of Iraq did not lead to increased Iraqi oil production, has partially destabilized Saudi Arabia, and seemingly put Iran and the U. S. on the road to a military collision.

Middle Eastern oil supplies are less stable than ever.

But perhaps the Bush administration wanted the Middle East to be less stable and wanted lower oil production as a way to jack up oil prices.

Yeah, that's the ticket.

The King of Kentucky

Hats off to Rich Brooks, football coach at the University of Kentucky. Last night's 40-34 win over no. 9 Louisville is yet more evidence that Brooks has done things the right way. Coming into a program that was on probation, Brooks has made gradual progress. Brooks hasn't been getting the 5 star recruits, but he's found 2 and 3 star guys who can make plays. Brooks has caught a couple of breaks. High School football has gotten a lot better in Kentucky since spring practice was instituted several years ago. As a result, UK has a better pool of players to draw from. Brooks was also lucky to have UK alum Joker Phillips on his initial staff. Now offensive coordinator, Phillips is a great recruiter who has a terrific knack for designing plays that work for his kind of players.

But it's Rich Brooks who defines success at UK. Willing to settle for measured progress instead of going for the home run, Brooks was patient with the program, realistic about the short-term prospects, and willing to make adjustments as he went along.

In other words, Brooks did things the right way.

As a result, UK football has gone from being a perennial sad sack to strong wannabe. Kentucky's still well behind top powerhouses like Florida, but they're on a level with Tennessee, Arkansas, and Georgia and deserve to be ranked in the top 20.

That makes Rich Brooks the King of Kentucky.

Smearkrieg No. 5--Faith in the Perfect Smear

Ron Brownstein has a useful column in the LA Times about GOP electoral confidence. What interests Brownstein is the failure of Republican candidates to tack back to the middle.

The fact that moderates voted overwhelmingly for Democrats (57%-39% according to exit polls) was a big factor in GOP setbacks in 2006. However, Republican presidential candidates are just as emphastic about conservative orthodoxy as ever. First tier Republican candidates Giuliani and Thompson are just as unbending in their support of the war as ever. So is the second tier of John McCain and Mitt Romney. Republican candidates also support Bush on privatizing social security, deregulating the insurance industry, health reform, and tax cuts for the wealthy. According to Brownstein, the only place where Republican candidates deviate from Bush is on immigration issues where Bush deviated from conservative ideology.

Brownstein also notices that Republican candidates have wratched up their rhetoric concerning the Democrats, with Republican candidates routinely calling Hillary Clinton's health proposals "socialized medicine." Second-tier warrior Mitt Romney even views Hillary Clinton's "economic agenda amounts to "out with Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx.'" Brownstein expects that "these early volleys will, in fact, echo through the 2008 election and produce a dynamic in which the Republican nominee consistently tries to ignite ideological firefights and the Democrat tries to extinguish them."

In other words, the Republican candidate is going to devote a great deal of his energy to an ideological smear campagin.

But Brownstein doesn't quite understand the relative weight of conservative orthodoxy and ideological smear tactics in Republican campaign plans. GOP consultants and strategists talk about their confidence in the popularity of conservative orthodoxy. But Brownstein seems to be mesmerized by the displays of confidence.

He shouldn't be. Republican leaders can read the polls indicating a leftward shift in the American public just as well as the Democrats. They know that the public supports abortion rights, wants national health care reform, opposes the war in Iraq, and wants more government regulation of the economy rather than less.

So why are the Republicans projecting so much confidence in conservative orthodoxy. There are a lot of reasons. First, there's the matter of habit. The Republican leadership has responded to all their setbacks of the last 15 years by moving farther to the right. If moving to the right worked in 1992 and 1998, why wouldn't it work now?

The Republican base has also moved much farther to the right and the Republican leadership needs to keep the base happy in order to succeed.

Given the overall incompetence of the Bush administration (FEMA, NASA, Gonzales, etc.) and the various on-going Republican scandals, there's also a sense in which conservative ideology is the only card the Republicans have to play.

In the final analysis though, what drives Republican confidence is not faith in ideology; it's faith in their ability to smear the Democratic presidential candidate into being so personally unpopular that people will vote for the Republican despite everything. If anything characterizes the Republican base, the right-wing attack media, and GOP consultants and media types, it's their love for the language of insult, innuendo, put-downs, and name-calling. Conservatives have an abiding faith in their ability to find the "perfect smear" that will "raise questions" about the Democratic candidate and get people to doubt policy ideas that they would favor in public opinion polls.

For the right, faith in smearing far outweighs their faith in conservatism and its that faith in smearing that gives them confidence going into 2008.

Faludi, Comic Book Styles, and Hillary Toughness

A Kentucky blogger (via BookerRising) from the comfortable college town of Danville flags a Glamour review of Susan Faludi's new book.

The 2001 attacks, she claims, made American feel vulnerable and created a longing for the good old days of 'manly men. As a result ...Female heroes were ignored ...Women vanished from TV talk shows ...Grieving widows became the feminine ideal ...June Cleaver replaced Carrie Bradshaw ...The national 'bump watch' began.

It will be interesting to see the book, but my initial reaction is that Faludi's at best simplistic and at worst just wrong.

There may have been an initial "longing for manly men," but nobody wanted the "good old days of manly men." There's no going back to the good old days of John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Clark Gable. It's a lot more exaggerated now--Wolverine, Rambo, Grand Theft Auto, wrestlers, and the thug universe. No more of that strong, silent type anymore. Any man who wants to be a man has to be big and loud or be fans of someone big and loud. There's no safety in current manhood styles. Because it's all about "taking names" and "kicking ass," there's a sense in which instability is needed and desired as the only way to prove your manhood. Far from being a cause of insecurity, 9-11 was seen more as an opportunity to assert manliness. We were going to kick their ass and grind them into the dust.

The longing for a reason for a lot of American men to kick ass was a good chunk of the predisposition in American culture to accept the Bush administration's campaign to promote the invasion of Iraq.

But the administration might also be killing the comic book versions of masculinity. As we draw to the end of the 9-11 decade, big talking guys like George Bush and Dick Cheney have become legendary as failures. The big-talking guys of the right couldn't cut it in the war, couldn't cut it on the home front, couldn't avoid corruption, and couldn't keep away from Congressional pages, prostitutes, and undercover cops. In the end, the only kind of manhood that the big-talking guys of the right had was talk.

That's why it looks like the decade is going to end with Hillary Clinton as our first female president.

Because of their pathetic failures, the Bush, Cheney, and the Limbaugh/Hannity posers on the right have de-legitimated the whole trend toward comic book masculinity that fueled the initial reaction to 9-11. If Hillary Clinton is elected, what the country is going to get is a different kind of toughness, a patient kind of aggressiveness that's capable of cleaning up the messes left by the Bush incompetents and making policies work. Hillary-brand toughness is something that men and women can both have. Therefore, it's not really a kind of masculinity at all.

For my money, the Bush administration has been such a spectacular failure that one of the promising outcomes of the 9-11 decade is a general disconnection of manliness from political toughness.

That's a good thing and we have the Bush administration and the right to thank for it.

Maybe I should write a thank you note to the president.

Boehner and the Big Price

Yesterday, John Boehner claimed in relation to Iraq that

We need to continue our effort here because . . . long term, the investment that we’re making today will be a small price if we’re able to stop al Qaeda here, if we’re able to stabilize the Middle East, it’s not only going to be a small price for the near future, but think about the future for our kids and their kids.

Predictably, Democrats like John Kerry and Howard Dean came up with the weak response of being "outraged" and demanding apologies. Other Democrats haven't responded at all. Among liberal bloggers, Greg Sergent of TPM does better than the politicians but still comes up short.

Boehner, like the White House and most Republicans, is willing to sink an untold number of American lives into the pursuit of the fantasy of a stable Middle East and into the illusion that civilization as we know it will come to an end if we don't defeat the ever omnipotent Al Qaeda.

Like Glenn Greenwald of Salon, Sargent gives the Republicans and the right too much credit for believing the delusions they promote concerning a stable Middle East, a free Iraq, the Muslim threat, or the omnipotence of al-Qaeda. Everyday conservatives may believe these things, but people like Boehner, Karl Rove, and Rush Limbaugh don't believe them any more than Nancy Pelosi or Cindy Sheehan believe them. What Boehner and the Republicans really can't stomach is the idea of caving in to the left on the war and they think that it's worthwhile to sacrifice "untold number[s] of American lives" as long as they have a hope of winning the presidency again in 2009. For the Republicans, carrying on with the pointless war is a "small price to pay" in the hope of avoiding defeat at the hands of their domestic enemies.

Apologies are really not enough.

George Will's Doubts About Hard-Working Fred

George Will seems to think that Fred Thompson is ignorant as well as lazy. I don't know why--just because Thompson doesn't understand campaign finance legislation he sponsored while in the Senate.

In other Fred news, Thompson's recent surge in the polls has come largely at the expense of Mitt Romney. Romney's fell back behind John McCain in the most recent RCP average and Mitt's at 9% (all in Iowa and New Hampshire) in an ARG poll out today.

Confronted with the choice between laziness and phoniness, Republican voters seem to be choosing lazy.

But it is a tough choice.

Torturing Women vs Torturing Dogs

George Cook of African-AmericanOpinion.com wonders whether there's going to be as much outrage over the kidnapping and torture of a 20 year old black woman in West Virginia than there is over Michael Vick's treatment of dogs.

Sadly, Cook already knows that the answer is no.

Part of the reason is racism. Black feminist writers like bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins have long argued that the stereotyping of black women in the mainstream mass media makes it more difficult to view black human as valuable and fully human beings. That will probably make it harder to sympathize with the victim.

Just as depressing is the role of the sheer volume of violent crimes against women in possibly militating against outrage. In some ways, the torture of dogs is a bit of a "man bites dog" story because violent crimes against dogs are (relatively) rare. But violent crimes against women are so pervasive that it may be more difficult for people to get outraged about these cases. I've even some some feminist writers pooh-pooh violence against women.

And, of course, there's no celebrity involvement. Reckless driving was a national crisis when Paris Hilton was the driver. The same with dogfighting when Michael Vick was bankrolling the action.

Much of the weight of American culture would militate against there much focus on this crime.

The Thompson Buzz: Giuliani in Better Position than Romney

There are a couple of comments on Yglesias and Talking Points Memo about Rudy Giuliani slipping in the polls and his campaign being in trouble.

But I don't believe it.

Right now, Giuliani's lead is slipping because of Fred Thompson's roll out. However, Giuliani had maintained his initial lead for months despite an enormous amount of adverse publicity about his ignorance of foreign policy, multiple marriages, and management of emergency policy in NY.

And it's not like Fred Thompson isn't going to slide himself after more comes out about his own laziness, lack of morality, and wayward thinking on hot-button issues for conservatives.

So, Giuliani is in strong over-all position even if he is weak in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

The person who should be worried is Mitt Romney. Right now, he's leading in Iowa and New Hampshire and has a ton of money. But Romney has a very thin regional base (Utah, Michigan, and parts of New England) and fairly weak personal appeal because of the widespread opinion that he's a phony. To the contrary, Thompson comes off to conservatives as authentic even though he's an archetypical Southern bullshit artist (thanks to Todd Mayo for the heads-up here) .

As a result, it's even harder to see Romney moving up to the first tier than it was before Thompson entered the race.

The Republican nomination might end up as a blue state/red state showdown between Giuliani and Thompson.

The odds might favor Thompson because of his broader Southern base, but Giuliani still has a very real shot at it.

Moving On From Petraeus

General Who? Well, Gen. David Petraeus is done with his second day of testimony and he's still had no effect on the debate. Because Petraeus could not project anything like "victory," the right-wing media apparatus is reduced to claims that the anti-war movement embarrassed itself. As if anybody really cared! The crucial thing is that the main question in the debate on Iraq remains "when are we going to leave?" Because the question hasn't changed, the Petraeus gambit has to be considered a defeat for the Bush administration, Republicans in Congress, and the right-wing. Of course, things will get even worse for them when Bush decides not to draw down the number of troops before the 2008 election.

Fred Breaks the Mold. Fred Thompson's response to the PhonyFred web site was a breath of fresh air for both the Republican and Democratic primary campaigns. There are a lot of good reasons why candidates on both sides have been avoiding the whispering campaigns, rumor-mongering, and lying that characterizes the KarlRovian "politics of repulsion." Well, it's repulsive and, even worse, it's not working any more.

As a result, however, the campaigns on both sides have been unnecessarily tame. Because no 2 candidates like Barack Obama and Mitt Romney (or John McCain) haven't been willing to go after the leaders, Hillary and Giuliani have gotten inappropriately easy rides for a crucial presidential election.

But the Thompson campaign's response indicates that the good times might be over. Thompson's spokesman Tod Harris not only criticized the PhonyFred site as "high-tech gutter politics" but he then went on to aim a stake at the heart of the Romney campaign.

This latest episode only serves to prove what many voters are already figuring out: Mitt Romney will do anything, say anything, smear any opponent and flip flop on any position in order to win.

It will be great to see what the Thompson guys have to say about Giuliani when they get a chance.

Two Steps Backwards. Of course, it wasn't a totally good day for Fred. Thompson also admitted today that he wasn't a churchgoer. No surprise there. Why would a good-timing, skirt-chasing, divorced, former lobbyist be wasting his time in church when he could spend his hangover time watching "NFL Game Day?"

And as an atheist myself, I have to emphasize that I have no problem with Fred's choices for Sunday activities. But that's not going to fly with the people on the religious right and Fred's going to score lots of hypocrisy points by saying that he's "right with God" anyway. It's hard to believe that there's going to be much excitement on the religious right for a Fred Thompson general election campaign.

But maybe they hate Hillary t-h-a-t much.

Altogether, another bad day to be a Republican.

The Petraeus Yadda Yadda

The Petraeus Disappointment. As RSI has been predicting, the testimony of Gen. Petraeus is the most widely hyped non-event since Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone's Vault. Petraeus didn't say anything significantly new to hype the surge. He didn't say what the Bush administration had been hyping in a dramatic way. He didn't humiliate the Democrats as they asked their questions and didn't do anything to antagonize war opponents. In other words, Petraeus was dull and plodding as well as unconvincing.

Perhaps the best way to measure the political failure of the general's testimony is to consult the conservative blogs that are most enthusiastic about promoting the war. Almost all of the right-wing commentary focused on nitpicking the Democrats rather than proclaiming Petraeus. Hugh Hewitt's blog dumped on obscure Congressional Democrats like Loretta Sanchez and Bob Wexler. Meanwhile, unexcited about what Petraeus had to say, Protein Wisdom and Ace of Spades felt compelled to defend the extremely minor point that Petraeus was making his own report rather than reading from a White House draft. In fact, Petraeus was so boring to Instapundit that Glenn Reynolds put up a link to Michael Yon saying that battalion commanders were the real guys to interview.

Perhaps more telling, the mainstream media highlighted Petraeus' promises to draw down the surge next spring (a promise I don't think he'll keep).

Petraeus yadda yadda. In fact, Gen. Petraeus did not claim much for the surge. As expected, he argued that things were great in Anbar, that violence was down in Baghdad, and that the Iraqi Army was more involved than it used to be. But those claims are all old news and they don't sound any more convincing coming from Petraeus than they would from Dick Cheney. As little buzz as Fred Thompson generated with the announcement of his candidacy, he still did better than Petraeus.

Even worse for the warmongers, what Petraeus claimed was not nearly as significant as what he could not claim. Petraeus could not claim that al-Qaeda was broken for good, that Baghdad was secure, that the Iraqi Army was an effective military force, or that the Baghdad government was an effective partner. Without being able to say any of those things, Petraeus' testimony was just a lot of yadda yadda that everybody's heard before.

The String Will Play Out. Unless Petraeus has a couple of dramatic cards up his sleeve, his testimony is already a dud and the string will play out concerning on the pseudo-battle between Congress and the President over Iraq funding. The only way Bush is going to get more funding for the war in Iraq is to once again play chicken with the lives of American troops and against the will of both Congress and the American public. Bush will win that battle again but it will be more an outcome of the disfunctional character of American government than anything else.

Petraeus Gets What He Wants--Republicans and Iran Pay Price

What Petraeus Reports. The slow-boring of bottom-up progress in Anbar. Shaky stats on violence in Baghdad. Unstable Iraqi government. Iraqi military, police, and hookers all making "progress," but only the hookers are expected to meet objectives within next decade. American assistance will be crucial to their success.

What Petraeus Wants. To keep his 160,000 troops until April. Get the American public to buy into "strategic patience." All he'll get is the troops

How the Dems will Respond. Treat Petraeus with exaggerated deference. Ask gentle questions about statistics. Rely on liberal bloggers to attack. Bloggers attack cowardice of Dems as well as Petraeus.

The Dems Want. Keep Petraeus from becoming a lightning rod for pro-war sentiment.

What Dems will do. The Dems will forget Petraeus as soon as he returns to Iraq. Then they will pass war appropriations measures that Bush will veto. They'll fight veto a little harder than last time. Then cave at the last moment. Again.

The Outcome. Another six-month wait until April 2008 when surge is supposed to end. But the surge won't end because Petraeus will recommend that units be extended again. That's a recipe for a Democratic landslide but all the Republicans think about is launching a new war against Iran.

Are Weenie Boys Advising Bin Laden?

Think Progress is insulted by the attempts of David Brooks and conservative bloggers to associate Osama bin Laden's latest video with the progressive blogosphere.

Much as I like Think Progress, I couldn't disagree more.


It's almost always a mistake for people on the left to be "outraged," "denigrated," or "insulted" by conservatives. When conservatives write or say racist, misogynist, homophobic stuff or accuse people on the left of pedophilia, treason, or effeminacy, they're usually trying to stimulate exactly that kind of emotional response. When liberals and those on the left fall into the "outrage" trap, it traps liberals into a narrow moralism that loses sight of the big social and political pictures. Really, what more can a person say after they've accused someone of insulting them. It also confirms the conservative view of people on the left as "wimpy," "emotional," "soft," and easily manipulated, and gives them an unearned sense of superiority.


Ann Coulter is the master of the "outrage the left" rhetorical game but the whole right loves to play it. It makes conservatives feel powerful and effective in their sophomoric kind of way and should be pitied more than anything else. Given the disastrous failures of their Bush administration, their Republican Party, and their war, it's easy to see that "outraging" liberals is pretty much the only thing conservatives can do to feel superior.


There are lots of better responses to conservative "outrages" than outrage. It's important to tie conservative race-baiting back to their racial bigotry, to emphasize the racism in color-blind rhetoric about race, and point out all the ways that the Republicans play the racism card like Bob Corker did in his Senate campaign against Harold Ford in 2006. As racist as most right-wingers are, they are still "very sensitive" at being called racists and even more sensitive about being tied to the virulent racism of so many Republican voters. Who knew?


Like Glenn Greenwald and Digby, I also enjoy picking on the comic-book masculinity of right-wing figures from George ("we're kicking ass") Bush, to Karl Rove, the helium-sucking twerps over at the Department of Justice, and macho blowhards like John Bolton. The most recent example is NRO's Mark Hemingway, a super wimpy-looking guy who writes Terminator-tough. Having failed at traditional masculine athletics and (one suspects) dating activities, right-wingers now project the biggest macho gestures they can imagine. Greenwald treats these guys as hypocrites. I call them "weenie-boys." Let history decide which one of us is right.

That brings us back to bin Laden. Instead of being insulted, Think Progress could have mentioned that 9-11 happened on Bush's watch, that the search for bin Laden was called off due to the invasion of Iraq, and that bin Laden is currently staying in the territory of Pakistan, one of the Bush administration's allies. Given that bin Laden owes his fame and continued existence to George Bush, Dick Cheney, and friends, he probably includes them in his prayers.

Ther's also reason to think that bin Laden is getting more practical assistance from current or former Bush personnel. Just as Karl Rove tried to promote John Kerry's candidacy by attacking John Kerry, it looks like bin Laden is trying to promote the Bush administration by releasing a video just before the crucial testimony of Gen. David Petraeus. Bin Laden's interest in helping Bush is obvious. If the war in Iraq winds down, there's going to be less business at the bin Laden terrorism store. Bin Laden's counter-intuitive manuevering here is such an obvious Karl Rove manuever, that it's tempting to think that the "boy genius" himself is responsible.

But, I think it's more likely that one of Rove's protege's is consulting with bin Laden on his current publicity campaign. Maybe Dick Wadhams is trying to get his mojo back after the failed George Allen re-election campaign.

Whoever is consulting bin Laden, we can be sure that neither Rove nor his proteges would have any ethical objections to helping bin Laden out.

Petraeus: Intent and Effect

Into a Stagnant Cauldron: When Gen. Petraeus comes to Washington next week, he'll be trying to jump start a stagnant American political milieu. But he is likely to fail. President Bush is determined to carry on the war despite strong public opposition. Constant failure, Democratic victories, and the increased isolation of the White House have not convinced the president to draw down American involvement in Iraq. At the same time, White House promotional efforts have had no effect on public opinion or the opposition of Democratic majorities in Congess.

The American political system is deadlocked.

It is interesting to think about what Gen. Petraeus will be trying to accomplish in his media events and appearances before Congress. There will be enormous media attention and public interest in Petraeus. So what's he going to do? Will Petraeus be attempting to shore up President Bush's and the right-wing's position in a way that allows current troop levels to be maintained until next April and provides a basis for hoping that American combat operations will continue indefinitely. In that case, Petraeus might try for a relatively low-key "just the facts ma'am" approach to justifying the American military commitment in Iraq. Or will Petraeus be attempting to break the political logjam and change public sentiment on the war in a dramatic way?

What to do? There's precedent for the latter. After all, Ollie North's testimony changed the dynamic of the debate over the Iran-Contra scandal way back in the dark ages. But to have such a powerful effect, Gen. Petraeus would have to go for something pretty dramatic.

One thing Petraeus could do would be to claim stunning military and political progress. But is there enough progress on the ground to make that plausible.

Gen. Petraeus could also make emotional appeals to American pride and patriotism. The difficulty there is that Petraeus would have to make appeals that are strikingly different from those already made by Pres. Bush and Cheney. I don't think that will work either.

Petraeus could also try to scare the American public concerning the consequences of withdrawal in Iraq. That seems to be the strategy that Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker take with official visitors to Iraq. But the Bush administration has probably worn out that rhetorical vein as well.

As a result, my guess is that Gen. Petraeus is going to focus on shoring up enough conservative support enough to ensure that any presidencial veto is sustained, and then return to Iraq.

And I wouldn't be surprised if the Democrats low-keyed their treatment of Petraeus in a way that ensured that Petraeus did not become another Ollie North.

The Petraeus Non-Effect. In other words, it's unlikely that the visit of Gen. Petraeus will have much effect. The morale of right-wing bloggers, conservative talk show hosts, Fox, and Republican politicians will temporarily improve. However, Congressional Republicans were never going to defy President Bush and shut down the war anyway.

Petraeus isn't having that much of an effect in Iraq. He won't have much of an effect in the United States either.

Gitlin is a "Git"

White Liberals can be extremely annoying and Todd Gitlin seems to be one of the more annoying of those white liberals. In a TPM Cafe plug for his evidently annoying new book The Bulldozer and the Big Tent, Gitlin develops a tepid-looking account of the rise of the new progressivism of Move.On and the left blogosphere, and argues for a "big tent" concept of the Democratic Party.

But it's all risk-free consensus politics.

Here's the core of the Gitlin program in talking point style.

• Universal provision of the fundamental requisites of a decent life, starting with universal health care, rock-bottom income supports, and more equality.
• Public incentives for the development of sound alternatives to fossil-fuel energy.
• The restoration of government encouragement to unions.
• Smart counterterrorism, which entails providing security without swelling abuses of executive power.
• The right to abortion and contraception. The democratic social-market contract is neither a suicide pact, a penury pact, nor an invasion of bedrooms.
• A rapid and orderly phase-out from Iraq is the quid pro quo for improving America's ability to diminish jihadi potential. And crucially, given the damage that a benighted war has done to Iraq, we are obliged to make decent provision for Iraqis who will be further jeopardized as we leave.
• America should move heaven and earth to bring Israelis and Palestinians into
negotiations that achieve peace and security for two states.
• Humanitarian intervention ought to be multinational, regional where possible, proportionate to the danger, self-limiting, and rare.
• America ought to promote democracy and freedom in other countries with an eye to helping, not endangering, human-rights activists.
• Finally, both for its own sake and to help the cause of nonproliferation, we ought to help restrain the possession of, and the threat to use, nuclear weapons.

I don't object to any of this, but this was about as white, male, and heterosexual an agenda as a Democrat can be given that the voting base of the Democratic Party is about 20% black, more than 50% female, and the Democratic Party attracts 80-90% of the gay vote outside Mark Foley and Larry Craig.

But it turns out that while Gitlin wants blacks, women, gays, feminists, and gay rights activists in the tent, he would prefer that they keep their mouths shut and watch the show. The "real people" Gitlin wants to bring into the "big tent" are (white) moderates of the Mark Warner/ NPR/ New York Times corporate bent.

At least that's what I gather from Gitlin's response to a bunch of questions I raised about issues that blacks, women, gays, and anti-corporate activists might care about. Agreeing with another commenter who viewed the interests of those groups as too liberal to be reconcilable with moderates, Gitlin indicated that he was looking for an agenda that could speak to the needs of both white male liberals and white male moderates.

Talk about narrowly pitching your proposals! Talk about risk averse! Talk about non-inclusive! Gitlin doesn't even have any backbone or imagination as a writer.

Apologies to J. K. Rowling, but what a git!

Here's my questions below.

What about correcting the tremendous income disparities between the super-rich and the rest of us?
What about penalizing the takeovers that line the pockets of Wall Street and corporate hierarchies while eliminating jobs for the rest of us?
What about taxing the crap out of the golden parachutes for failed CEOs?
What about articulating strategies for addressing inner-city poverty?
What about reviving the Civil Rights section of the Justice Department?
What about developing a bully pulpit to combat the relentless stereotyping of African-Americans in the media?
When is something going to be done about sexual violence?
What about immigration policy?
What about language teaching to the children of immigrants?
What about articulating a more muscular ethic of multi-culturalism to combat the assimilationism of the right?
What about gay rights?

Ann Coulter and Kittens

Ooh! Ann Coulter has a new book coming out. Should be exciting. But topping Couter's previous "outrages" will be tough. Maybe she'll have a picture of herself biting the head off a kitten or something like that.

Fred Thompson: Bad Ideas Whose Time Hasn't Come

Fred's In
Will He Win?
I Used to Think So
But His Chances Look Slim

Fred Thompson announced his candidacy for president on Jay Leno last night.

And America yawns!

I used to think Thompson could parlay his Southern regional identity, red-meat conservatism, and actor's charisma into the GOP nomination.

And maybe he still can.

But there's a lot going against him.

First, Thompson is highlighting the name "Fred" as though his name were an important part of his appeal.

Talk about a bad idea.

Also, Thompson looks old in a skin stretched over skull way that reminds me of the 1996 version of Bob Dole.

That's not good either.

Finally, Thompson's basic campaign theme is "be scared, be very scared" on the war on terror, social security, and everything else (except global warming).

But Thompson's not the man for that particular message. If things are that bad, we would want somebody tough, determined, and policy-oriented like Hillary instead of a guy who spent much of their career as a skirt-chasing lobbyist and wasted his time in the Senate.

Since advisers, consultants, and communications people generally run campaigns, I'd normally say that Thompson's getting bad advice.

But given that his advisers and communications people keep quitting, it's hard not to conclude that Thompson just has bad ideas.

A lot of bad ideas.

Glenn Greenwald Outs Likely Weenie-Boy

The epidemic of conservative weenie-boys continues. This time Glenn Greenwald "outs" a weenie-boy, or to be more respecting a weenie "young man," named Mark Hemingway who's now writing for National Review Online.

Like a lot of weenie boys, Hemingway bristles with tough-guy comments about other men.

When Larry Craig got busted for his bathroom come-on, Hemingway wasn't surprised because Craig was in the United States Senate barbershop quartet.

The arrest of Idaho Senator Larry Craig is largely baffling — but not because it’s hard to believe that a member of “The Singing Senators” barbershop quartet might be gay despite a lifetime 96-percent American Conservative Union rating.

Trent Lott is the last member of "The Singing Senators" who is in the Senate (without announcing an "intent" to resign). Hemingway would probably recommend that Lott be tailed.

Today, Hemingway goes after David Souter:

Did Souter cry over 2000 recount vote? [Mark Hemingway] Of all the Supreme Court justices, I always suspected he was the sissy mary. Scalia probably waits outside his chamber to steal his lunch money.

So who is Mr. Tough-Guy Mark Hemingway? Here's a picture.

And that was after eating a bucket of nails.

And here's a picture of Mark Hemingway on his way out to break a couple of wild mustangs. Or was he going to land a record marlin instead?

But Greenwald's analysis of Hemingway is mistaken. Greenwald argues that figures like Mark Hemingway, Rush Limbaugh, George Bush, Sean Hannity, and Newt Gingrich are projecting an identification with "traditional masculinity" that they don't live up to in their own lives.

Virtually the entire top layer of Republican leaders, both political and media figures, are the very opposite of the virtues this movement claims to embody. From Fred Thompson, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the rest of the right-wing noise machine, along with our brave neoconservative warmongers -- to say nothing of the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney -- it is virtually impossible to locate genuine acts of strength, bravery, regular-guy wholesomeness, or any of the warrior attributes and virtues of traditional masculinity they claim to exude.

Greenwald treats them as hypocrites and liars and offers somewhat of a moral condemnation of the "fictional character" or hypocrisy of right-wing masculinity. Of course, Greenwald is correct in claiming that conservative figures do not embody the virtues of "traditional masculinity." But, Greenwald is mistaken to think that guys like Hemingway are hold traditional masculinity as a standard. What's Hemingway defines as "masculine"has nothing to do with the "regular-guy wholesomeness," dating prowess, Boy Scout accomplishments, or athleticism associated with conventional masculinity. He spills the beans when he fantasizes about Antonin Scalia stealing David Souter's lunch money. For Hemingway, it's bullying, thuggishness, and taking advantage of smaller and weaker people that defines masculinity instead. In general, the right-wing interprets masculinity in terms of movie, video game, and comic book images of exaggerated power, viciousness, and domination. These kinds of images are so exaggerated that it's farcical to think of anyone but the bizarre, fanatical, and obsessive actually trying to meet them. That's why right-wing images of masculinity have a "weenie" quality to them. When one thinks about it, they're just too exaggerated for most people to take seriously.

But right-wingers take their comic book masculinity seriously indeed. Contrary to Greenwald, right-wingers like Mark Hemingway are determined to substitute a farcical weenie-boy standard of masculinity for the traditional standards they can't meet. And it's important to emphasize that the right has been extremely successful in their campaign to legitimize "weenie-boy" masculinity against the more conventional masculinity of guys like Al Gore or John Kerry.

Indeed, even as sharp a critic as Glenn Greenwald can be fooled into taking the right-wing brand of masculinity as a version of traditional male virtue.

Will the Bush Administration Assassinate Larry Craig?

It looks like Larry Craig might be deciding to leave some wiggle room in his resignation from the Senate which means that the "Larry Craig Sex Scandal Show" might still be running as Gen. Petraeus pulls into Washington for his "Save the Surge" Campaign.

So, what will the Bush administration do about it?

The Larry Craig scandal serves as a constant reminder of the incompetence and hypocrisy of the Bush administration and Republican leadership at what everyone views as a crucial moment in the Iraq War.

As a result, a Bush administration assassination plot to eliminate Craig can't be ruled out.

There are lots of reasons why is this the case?

One can't say that the Bush administration respects human life. After 9-11, Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff David Addington was mooning over the prospect of one more terrorist bomb making it possible to eliminate the FISA restrictions on administration wiretapping altogether.

Lovely guy. But if Addington was hoping for more terrorist attacks on American soil, what's to keep him from advocating murder on American soil?

What about respect for the law?

If there's anything that's obvious in the world, it's that the Bush administration has no respect for any body of law. Not only did the Bush administration violate American and/or international law to torture terror suspects in American facilities, send terror suspects to other countries to be tortured, and engage in warrantless wiretapping, but they gloried in it.

If the Bush administration has no concern about torturing and killing foreigners, what about the various taboos on official murder and political assassination in the United States.

Perhaps those taboos would hold in the case of Larry Craig, but I don't see any reason why anyone would consider that to be a sure thing. Here's an example of a Karl Rove campaign tactic from an Alabama judicial race.

"We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. "It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information," the staffer went on. "That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that's one of the ways that Karl got the information out—he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out." This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. "What Rove does," says Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin', tobacco-chewin', pickup-drivin' kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take."

A lot of Karl Rove's repulsion as a political operative lies in his willingness to break social taboos about truth-telling, bigotry-mongering, and attempting to personally destroy people in order to pursue his political objectives. Of course, Rove himself has resigned, but all of his proteges have been trained in the same school of political repulsion.

If that's the case, one wonders by what moral principle, strategic conviction, or tactical consideration the Rove disciples in the White House political operation would stop short of killing someone who was upsetting their plans.

I'm not saying that the White House is going to assassinate Craig, but I can't honestly think of any principle or consideration that would prevent them from doing so.

Maybe Larry Craig should peak over his shoulder once in a while.

Michael O'Hanlon: The Clown Prince of War Mongering

The debate over Iraq funding is beginning even if everybody knows that the Bush administration is going to get Iraq funding in the end.

Bush is going to win the struggle over funding because he is more than cynical enough to play chicken with the lives of American troops. The Democratic leadership has enough backbone to pursue some kind of legislation tying war funding to withdrawal from Iraq. But Bush would veto any withdrawal legislation and the Democrats are not determined enough and don't have enough support in their own caucus to respond effectively to a veto.

Meanwhile the debate over the war goes on.

Clown Commentator Michael O'Hanlon and co-authors have an op-ed in the New York Times trying to document the progress of the surge.

But there's been almost no bang for the surge buck.

There aren't even that many more foreign troops in Iraq. Right now, there are 174,000 American troops and allied troops. That sounds like a lot, but it's not much more than the the U. S. and allies had from 2003-2005 when troop numbers ranged from 161,000-164,000.

Certainly, the effort by American troops is there. Daily patrols have gone up from 1,500 to 4,000 and the number of Iraqi prisoners in American facilities has gone up to 60,000.

But all the work has had minimal impact. Daily attacks by Sunni insurgents, al-Qaeda, and Shiite militiamen have declined from 160 to 120 (all statistics from chart accompanying O'Hanlon article). But the drop isn't attributable to the surge at all and actually obscures some disappointing news. The decrease in daily attacks occurred because Sunni insurgents switched from al-Qaeda to the American side. Attacks in the former insurgent strongholds of Ramadi have dropped 90%. The same has been the case throughout Anbar province as a whole.

However, the number of daily insurgent attacks remains high despite dropping so precipitously in Anbar. That means the surge has had a negligible impact on its main target of Baghdad and that al-Qaeda remains a very potent force despite losing their Sunni allies.

In other words, the U. S. military have not been able to capitalize on the enormous break they caught when Sunni insurgents switched sides. The failure to reduce the number of attacks even further has to considered a disappointment.

More evidence of the disappointing failure to improve security can be seen in the economic statistics. O'Hanlon, et. al, claim that "roughly six of Iraq’s 18 provinces are making significant economic and security gains, up from three a year ago."

However, this is a place where their clownishness comes out. Their own chart shows that economic measures for Iraq as a whole have been regressing over the last year. Oil production, electricity production, and household fuel production are all down for Iraq as a whole while unemployment has stayed steady at 33%. Given that the economic situation is worsening as a whole, that means that progress in six provinces is being more than compensated for by economic regression in other provinces.

There's a general consensus that the economic situation is not going to improve significantly until security improves. The fact that the Iraqi economy is still declining after 8 months of the surge is another indication that the additional American troops have not meaningfully improved security.

So what's happened?

To think about what happened, it is necessary to divide Iraqi violence into al-Qaeda and Shiite components.

The surge has not had a very meaningful effect on al-Qaeda capacities. Al-Qaeda might have gone into hiding, but it appears that they are still a potent force.

Meanwhile, things have actually gotten worse in relation to the Shiite militias. Sadr has lost control over the Mahdi Army and the militia has fractured into a number of violent sub-units attacking American troops and other Shiite militias on their own. Given the intense conflicts among the Shiite militias in Basra and Karbala, there's a chance that Shiite areas could descend into the same anarchy that has plagued Baghdad for the last eighteen months.

And the American military isn't even relevant to the growing civil war among Shiites.

This is the problem in a nutshell. The American military caught a big break with the "Anbar Awakening" but hasn't been able to capitalize. Despite the intensity of American effort, the thirty thousand additional troops and thousands of daily patrols have had little impact on al-Qaeda capabilities and aren't even relevant to the Shiite meltdown.

Given that we're accomplishing so little, I wonder why we're there at all.

Rove and Repulsion

Within a longer post on media reverence for Karl Rove, Glenn Greenwald includes a quote from a Jay Rosen post about Rove and the media cult of "savviness."

Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain.

For Greenwald, media reverence for Rove is outdated because Rove didn't prove to be so savvy after all. Why would anyone consider Rove to be very savvy considering the disastrous way that Rove's initiatives on the war, social security privatization, and immigration have worked out for Bush administration? Why would media stars like Gloria Borger and David Broder still view Rove as the ultimate authority on practical politics given that Rove's client George Bush is one of the most unpopular presidents in American history and the Republican Party is dispirited, demoralized, and worried about a major defeat in 2008?

Part of the answer is simple. Rove returns the phone calls of people like Broder and Borger and feeds them little nuggets of information they can use in their columns and reports. Rove has an encyclopedic knowledge of red-state places like Texas and Alabama that media members are ignorant about and he is more than willing to share that information. "For our pundit class, Karl Rove is the North Star of what they do -- he provides their instructions, their leaks, their scoops, their access . . ." Partly because he helps them with their work in this way, media people think of Rove as a good guy who helps them get their jobs done. Like most people, media people appreciate this kind of thing.

Hillary media people should take note.

As Rosen claims, media people like and identify with Rove's political shrewdness. But Rove is not just shrewd, he is a repulsive person who has a fantastic amount of energy and enormous talent for exploiting people's weaknesses and prejudices. The Beltway media don't adore Rove just because he's smart and successful. James Carville and Mary Matalin are both smart and successful but nobody adores either one of them. The media adores Rove because they are tremendously fascinated by the Rasputin-like repulsiveness that inhabits everything Rove does. In fact, Borger and other Beltway media types have been so fascinated by Rove that they've decided to represent the full range of Rove's political immorality as a kind of innocence and save their contempt for Rove's critics rather than Rove himself.

There is no doubt that Rove is repulsive. From his earliest days as a campaign consultant, Rove campaigns have been dominated by vicious and dishonest attack ads, playing up the bigotries that potential Republican voters have about gays and blacks whispering campaigns about opponents, and phony prosecutions for voter fraud. According to a 2004 Atlantic article, Rove's approach is to be so brazenly unethical that both the media and opponents are left confused and unsure how to respond. Rove's mendaciousness has been so pervasive that it's difficult to identify any particular manuever as "the quintessential Rove." However, I'll mention two examples--Rove's successful effort to whip up anti-gay sentiment during the 2004 presidential campaign and his equally successful whispering campaign about John McCain's sanity during the 2000 South Carolina primary.

For the political media, Rove's combination of smarts, success, and repulsiveness is irresistible. It's an odd symbiosis. From the media's perspective, the unethical repulsiveness of someone like Rove makes his smarts and success particularly compelling. At the same time, the fact that Rove has been successful on a large scale provides the media with a post hoc justification for Rove's repulsiveness and in fact transforms it into a form of grand beauty and innocence. For the media, Rove's successes from 2000-2004 not only made him smarter, they made him more attractive and even more innocent than his critics.

Ironically enough, Karl Rove remained a media icon even as he was becoming an albatross around the necks of the Republican Party. The media might not notice it, but that wasn't the case with Congressional Republicans.
















been such disastrous political mistakes that Greenwald wonders how anyone could consider Rove to be particularly savvy at this date.

Back to RSI

Zinya's visit appears to be over. So it's back to Red State Impressions. I think I'll leave the blue background though.

It Must Be Love

Mrs. RSI is recovered enough from her carpal tunnel surgery that she went into her office to do some charting. There's a sort of magic about recovery capacities. One minute Mrs. RSI can't make her hand comfortable at all. The next she's back to work.

There's also a magic about Mrs. RSI. I've been pretty much enveloped by a heavy sadness ever since I found out that my friend Greg had a bad form of stomach cancer.

But just watching a movie with Mrs. RSI dispelled the gloom. It was like I'd been sprinkled with fairy dust. I felt fifty pounds lighter when the movie was over.

Notting Hill is okay but not that great of a movie.

It must be love.

Why Petraeus is Losing the PR Battle

I usually like what I read from Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly. For some reason, however, Drum thinks that Gen. Petraeus is winning the public relations battle over the surge.

For months the military transports to Baghdad have been stuffed with analysts and congress members, and every one of them has gotten a full court press of carefully planned and scripted presentations, tightly controlled visits to favored units, and assorted dollops of "classified" information designed to flatter his guests and substantiate his rosy assessments without the inconvenience of having to defend them in public. And it's worked. Even though there's been no discernable political progress, minimal reconstruction progress, and apparently no genuine decrease in violence, he's managed to convince an awful lot of people that the first doesn't matter, the second is far more widespread than it really is, and the third is the opposite of reality.

Talking Points Memo agrees with this analysis, but who's really changed their mind? As far as I know, the only people who've been influenced by the Petraus propoganda effort have been a couple of Democratic congressmen like Brian Baird of Washington state who didn't support timelines for withdrawal anyway. Figures like Carl Levin and Hillary Clinton have made token acknowledgements of the "Anbar Awakening," but Democratic politicians have also shown a lot of irritation over the heavy handed manipulation of the Petraeus apparatus. There hasn't been any movement among the moderate and liberal punditocracy either. I remember a little David Ignatius hand-wringing about partisanship, but neither Bush-sympathetic columnists like David Broder nor moderately liberal types like Clarence Page have come out in favor of the surge. In the final analysis, Petraeus' effort to influence opinion makers to support the surge has been just as much a failure as the surge policy itself.

And public opinion hasn't changed either. That's not surprising. Having had so little effect on opinion-makers, it was unlikely that Petraeus would have much impact on broader public opinion either. The American public still disapproves of Bush's conduct of the war, disapproves of the President's overall performance, and believes that the U. S. should start withdrawing troops by April, 2008. In fact, the most notable feature of current public opinion is the disgust of ordinary Democrats with Democratic politicians for their failure to end the war. When Pelosi and Reid caved into the President over supplemental war funding last May, they left a lot of voters (and bloggers) extremely frustrated. Now, even consistently anti-war senators like Ron Wyden of Oregen are getting roughed up in town hall meetings over their failures of leadership. The Petraeus public relations campaign has had a negligible impact on the public as opposition to the war has hardened into contempt for any politician even vaguely connected to the war effort.

Has anything changed at all as a result of the propoganda effort in favor of the Iraq War? I would say yes. The morale of the Bush administration, Republican politicians, and the right-wing attack media have all improved as a result of the O'Hanlon/Pollack editorial and President Bush's speech on Iraq and the Vietnam analogy. There never was any real chance that Congress could override presidential vetoes on Iraq war funding, but the pro-surge campaign has ensured that the President will have nearly unanimous Republican support.

Perhaps that's all that General Petraeus wanted out of his propoganda efforts, reassurance that he would be able to continue the current levels of American troop commitments through spring and summer 2008.

But nothing's changed. The U. S. is still an anti-war nation that's fighting a disastrous war because of the arrogance and stupidity of a shrinking minority.

Petraeus, Allawi, Irrelevance, and Other Surge Notes

ARE WE RELEVANT IN IRAQ? One of the major questions before the surge was whether the increase in American troops would once again make the U. S. military relevant in Iraq. It's still an open question. In Anbar province, many of the Sunni tribes have switched allegiance from al-Qaeda in Iraq to the American side with the American military now serving as the weight that gives tribal forces the advantage of al-Qaeda. But the ethnic cleansing of the Baghdad region and struggles among Shiite factions in the south of Iraq continue as if the American military weren't there. McClatchy quotes a British analyst as questioning whether the number of U. S. casualties has declined because the American military isn't very relevant.

One British analyst, using the example of the British drawdown of forces in southern Iraq, suggested that the lower numbers may mean that American troops are irrelevant to the many conflicts racking Iraq: ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods in Baghdad, massive bombings of religious minorities by Sunni Muslim extremists in northern Iraq and Shiite-on-Shiite-Muslim violence in southern Iraq. Instead, he suggested, Iraq’s armed factions and politicians already are thinking beyond the troop buildup.

"Everyone is preparing for what happens" after U.S. forces leave, said James Denselow, an Iraq specialist at the London-based Chatham House, a foreign affairs research institute.

THE DECLINING RELEVANCE OF PETRAEUS. I'm beginning to wonder if "the Petraeus Report"the White House is writing is going to be relevant at all. That's partly because the political "market" has already absorbed the Petraeus argument that the surge is making "measurable" but not earth-shaking progress and that withdrawal will have horrible consequences. The right has promoted Petraeus to the hilt, but the left has developed counter-arguments and public opinion is still firmly against the war. What difference is the actual appearance of Petraeus going to make?

Another reason to think the views of Petraeus won't be particularly relevant is that the country might still absorbing the rapid fire succession of Rove's departure, the resignation of Gonzales, and the Larry Craig scandal. That particular trio represents three of the four horsemen of the Bush/Republican apocalypse--Repulsion, Incompetence, and Hypocrisy. Even though Dick Cheney and Arrogance were missing, recent events have undermined Petraeus by providing such strong reminders of why people dislike and distrust the Republicans.

THE TICKING BOMB. That's not the worst of it. Petraeus will be completely overshadowed if Ayad Allawi is able to pull off his parliamentary "coup," dislodge the al-Maliki government in Iraq, and declare a state of emergency in Iraq. Liberal blogger Digby portrays the Allawi coup as something that has been so widely anticipated that it's now a form of entertainment. But that is only true for political junkies.

Removing al-Maliki would not be a coup in the same sense as a military coup. In parliamentary forms of government, a prime minister can be removed if he or she does not maintain the support of a parliamentary majority and replaced by someone who can. Nevertheless replacing al-Maliki with Allawi would be the equivalent of nuking the Iraqi political system because it would change the basis for Iraqi government. Since the first elections in 2005, a Shiite religious coalition has been the core of Iraqi government because the Shiite religious parties represent a large majority of the Shiite population which is a majority of the Iraqi population. If Iraq had any democratic progress, it was the transformation of the Shiite population from a target of brutal political oppression to the core of the governing coalition.

The Shiite-led governments of al-Jafaari and al-Maliki have been unacceptable to the Sunnis. An Allawi government would put the shoe on the other foot. According to the Chicago Tribune, Allawi (a secular Shiite) would get his support from the Sunni population with Kurdish and secular Shiite support mixed in. Allawi's support from former Baath officials and former Sunni insurgents would make him just as unacceptable to Shiites as the current government is to Sunnis.

As a secularist, Allawi has pledged to end the politics of sectarianism that have plagued Iraq. He is pro-Western, an old Washington ally, who would seek to prise Iraq away from Iran's sphere of influence. He also has the support of former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and most Iraqi Sunni insurgent groups, excluding Al Qaeda in Iraq, which have indicated they would stop fighting if Allawi were installed.But those features also make him unpalatable to the Shiite majority, who suffered most under Baathist rule and who have borne the brunt of the insurgency's wrath.

Therefore, if Allawi became prime minister, he would be on a collision course with the Sadr bloc, SCIRI, Dawa, the other Shiite religious parties and the many Shiite militias. And it would be quite a collision. Currently, the Shiite parties and their militias run most government ministries, are well integrated into the army and national police, and control Basra and Shiite holy sites like Karbala and Najaf. If an Allawi government wanted to control more than a couple of rooms in the Green Zone, they would have to confront the whole Shiite political and military structure.

And it looks like the Allawi government will be seeking that confrontation because part of "their published program" is to "not only appoint a new government but also suspend the new constitution, declare a state of emergency and make the restoration of security its priority."

Given that the al-Qaeda has been contained and that Baathists and Sunni insurgents would be supporting an Allawi government, the main target of the "state of emergency" would be the Shiite militias and militia control over government ministries, Shiite holy sites, and Basra.

And the main weapon in an Allawi government's hands would be the American military.

If Allawi takes over the Iraqi government, the Petraeus report would be irrelevant because the focus of the on-going Iraqi civil war, and American involvement in that civil war, would shift to battles over the Shiite heartland.