The Long, Dark, Summer

Now that the NBA playoffs are over, Matthew Yglesias writes that "the long, dark summer of no interesting sporting events begins."

What he means is that the American sports world is now focused on baseball.

Here I have to admit to being a bad father. I so much dreaded the hour after tedious hour of watching t-ball games that I never introduced my daughters to softball.

If there's a hell, I'm sure I'll pay for it.

What if Cheney Were Being Waterboarded?

One of the significant issues of the post-Bush era is whether bitter dead enders like Dick Cheney actually want to see another big terrorist attack on the U. S.

After Cheney's inflammatory speech at the American Enterprise Institute, I was quick to write that Cheney "might as well be hanging out a sign saying "We're weak. Please attack us" and "one wonders if Cheney's well of bitterness doesn't run so deep that he wouldn't welcome a major terrorist attack as sweet vindication."

Apparently, CIA director Leon Panetta was thinking along the same lines and told Jane Mayer in a straight-forward way that:

"I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue. It's almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that's dangerous politics."

Cheney denies it all and acts surprised.

"I hope my old friend Leon was misquoted," said Cheney in a terse statement (put out by his office. "The important thing is whether or not the Obama administration will continue the policies that have kept us safe for the last eight years."

Of course, I bet Cheney would change that story if he were being waterboarded.

Wishing Bill Kristol Well

Bill Kristol urges conservatives not to be stupid about Iran. I doubt he'll have much luck with that though.

Here's the full quote from his blog entry:

There have been very good grounds to criticize President Obama's foreign policy so far. There will be much more to criticize over the next three and a half years.

But he is our president. We could be at an historical inflection point in Iran. The United States may be able to play an important role. The task now is to explain what the Obama administration (and Congress) should be saying and doing, and to urge them to do what they should be doing. Presuming ahead of time that Obama will fail to exercise leadership, and cataloguing this episode pre-emptively as another in a list of Obama failures, would be a mistake. The U.S. has a huge stake in the possible transformation, or at least reformation, of the Iranian regime. If there's some chance of that happening, and some chance of U.S. policy contributing to that outcome, we should hope Obama does the right thing, and urge and pressure him to do so--because then the United States will be doing the right thing, and the United States, and the world, will benefit.

This too is the role of a loyal opposition.

Iranian Investigation into Vote Fraud: Probably Not as Hopeful as It Sounds

HuffPost put up a report that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khomeini has ordered an investigation into allegations of electoral fraud in last week's election:

Iran's supreme leader ordered Monday an investigation into allegations of election fraud, marking a stunning turnaround by the country's most powerful figure and offering hope to opposition forces who have waged street clashes to protest the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

HuffPost calls this investigation a "huge development," but it sounds a lot like the appointment of high-level investigatory commissions in the U. S. The idea is to distract, delay, and obfuscate until everybody forgets the issue.

Still, internal pressure to reverse the election results may be having an effect.

Rigging the election in such a massive way was tantamount to a coup by the clerical establishment and Ahmadinejad. Maybe they're starting to lose their nerve.

Cheney Invites Attacks

It's a little bit late for Jane Mayer to be quoting Leon Panetta as saying that Dick Cheney is inviting terrorist attacks. Cheney's inflammatory speech at the American Enterprise speech was almost three weeks ago and it was obvious then that he was practically inviting another 9-11. My reaction to the speech was that Cheney "might as well be hanging out a sign saying "We're weak. Please attack us." Also, "one wonders if Cheney's well of bitterness doesn't run so deep that he wouldn't welcome a major terrorist attack as sweet vindication."

Anyway, here's the money quote from Mayer's article on Panetta:

“I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue,” he told me. “It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.”Next time, the heavy hitters need to be quicker on the mark.

Better late than never I guess.

Netanyahu's "War Forever" Speech

Today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accepted the idea of a two-state solution for the Palestinians but added enough poison pills to kill a herd of elephants.

Here's some of the worst aspects of Netanyahu's speech.

The Palestinian state would be demilitarized to the nth degree. It would have "no army, no rockets or missiles, no control of airspace."

Netanyahu claims he wants demilitarization so the Palestinians don't pose a threat to Israel. Talk about an obvious lie. What Netanyahu wants is a Palestianian government that only governs during brief periods between Israeli incursions.

Given that no demilitarized Palestinian government would be able to stop terrorist attacks on Israel, demilitarization means repeated Israeli operations against the unarmed Palestinians.

It would be a state of war until the end of time which Netanyahu wants because the Israelis would be guaranteed to win.

Needless to say, none of this makes the Palestinians very happy. Mustafa Barghouti of the Palestinian parliament responded by claiming that "Netanyahu was calling for creation of a ghetto state." Barghouti should have added "with frequent pograms against the Palestinians."

Other lovely items.

Netanyahu doesn't want the Palestinian government to have control over their foreign policy--no treaties with Iran or Lebanon (i.e., Hezbollah), or anybody else the Israelis don't like.

But would he allow the Palestinians to make their own treaties with the Obama administration?
One doubts that as well.

Netanyahu also indicated that there would be no more withdrawals from the settlement expansion of the last forty years.

We tried withdrawal by agreement, withdrawal without an agreement, we tried partial withdrawal and full withdrawal. In 2000, and once again last year, the government of Israel, based on good will, tried a nearly complete withdrawal, in exchange for the end of the conflict, and were twice refused.

The Israeli settlement movement is just as much an impediment to peace as Hamas terrorism. In fact, it would probably be best to view the Israeli settlers and Hamas terrorists as allies in the effort to prevent peace.

Who knows! Maybe the Israeli settlers and Hamas terrorists have regular meetings to work out how the latest peace initiative is going to be scuttled.

But Netanyahu how little he's committed to peace by stressing his alliance with the settlers: "The settlers are not enemies of peace. They are our brothers and sisters."

Netanyahu also rejected any Palestinian right of return, any Palestinian claim to Jerusalem, and really any Palestianian claim to anything.

Obviously, Netanyahu doesn't want peace or anything like it.But you can bet that Netanyahu's stupendously conditional acceptance of a two-state solution will be disputed on the American right.

In fact, I'm waiting with baited breath for the first viagra-pumped, fantasy-driven neo-con to accuse Netanyahu of "appeasement."

Hoping for a Do-Over in Iran

Andrew Sullivan reports that "Iran's own election monitoring commission has declared the result invalid and called for a do-over."

I can't say whether Sullivan's sources are valid, but I could definitely live with that.

Eat your heart out Norm Coleman.

The Beginning of the End of Iran as We Know It

The Madoff Approach to Elections. The electoral fraud in the Iranian was massive and crude. In 2004, the clerical regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rigged the election by declaring hundreds of reformist candidates ineligible to run. This time, they assigned very similar vote totals for incumbent hard-liner president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad across provinces which had previously been distinct in their voting. It was as if the Republicans had said that Massachusetts voted the same as Texas. The biggest tip off to Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme was that he announced the same results every quarter without fail. Giving similarly huge majorities for the conservative Ahmadinejad across the board is a fraud as well.

Another fraud indication was that the regime improbably gave Ahmadinejad majorities in the home towns of his opponents and even showed him winning Tehran where he was very unpopular.

The Question of a Coup. There has been considerable talk from the camp of reformist presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi that the electoral fraud is a "coup" on the part of the conservative Iranian establishment. What Mousavi means is that Iranian conservatives have overthrown what he calls the "sacred system" system of balancing the ultimate power of the clerical establishment with a democratically elected president and parliament.

By rigging the election, the clerical establishment is in essence overthrowing the Iranian people as an element in the political system and eliminating the popular vote as an element in distributing political power.

There might be another coup element as well. Steve Clemons writes that there are powerful clerics such as Hashemi Rafsanjani who oppose the electoral fraud and that they might attempt to remove Ayatollah Khamenei as Supreme Leader. Given Ahmadinejad's denunciation of Rafsanjani during the final days of the campaign, it seems more likely that conservatives have decided to eliminate Rafsanjani and other reformist clerics like former President Khatami as independent centers of power. The conservative power play might be a coup within the clerical leadership as well.

Clemons also summarizes this idea well:

Ahmadinejad is now genuinely scared of Iranian society and of Mousavi and Rafsanjani. The level of tension between them has gone beyond civil limits --and my contact said that Ahmadinejad will try to have them imprisoned and killed.

The outcome of such a leadership coup would be the boiling of the Iranian regime down to a form in which a hard-line conservative religious establishment holds ultimate political power with the Ahmadinejad government acting as its agent in formulating economic and foreign policy. This kind of regime would have the support of about 20% of the population (according to Juan Cole) and would keep the opposition off-balance through a combination of political marginalization, using the police and militia as agents for repressing dissent, and engaging in constant foreign policy confrontation with Israel and the U. S.

The Shape of Things to Come. I have to admit that I have a really boring triangulating kind of opinion here. The BBC assumes that Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have won and that the situation in Tehran and other cities will calm down. To the contrary, Andrew Sullivan is more excited about the events in Iran than he's been anytime since the fall of the Soviet Union. My opinion is that the current coup will work temporarily but that the Iranian government will have a hard time sustaining itself over the long term. The Ahmadinejad government is too much like the Bush administration to survive for the long term. Like the Bush administration, the Ahmadinejad government is incompetent at managing the economy and domestic policy but in a country that doesn't not have nearly the cushion of wealth as we have in the United States. Now that the Iranian regime has shrunk to an authoritarian core, economic protest will inevitably gratitate toward overthrowing the regime. The Iran regime will counter domestic unrest by stirring up conflict with Israel and the United States and making patriot appeals to the Iranian public to support the government. But that strategy has already played itself out. Observers wonder whether the Iranian situation is more like the successful revolutions of 1990-1991 or the failed revolution of Tiananmen Square. My opinion is that the best analogy for the Iranian situation is the American election of 2004. The Bush administration won, but it was already on borrowed time.

Lebron James to the Clips?

Michael Wilbon thinks the Los Angeles Clippers are a better destination for Lebron James than the Knicks. Now, I have a soft spot for the Clips and agree with Wilbon that Eric Gordon, Chris Kaman, and Blake Griffin are a better supporting cast than Lebron will ever see in Cleveland.

It's also possible to see the merely dysfunctional Clips as a better destination than the "super, ultra, lightning" (to quote The Incredibles) dysfunctionality of the Knicks.

Certainly, there's the argument that James could sign with a team that has really good pieces like New Orleans, the Hawks, or Oklahoma City.

And the Clippers have young talent that's as good as anybody's.

But, there's a big "BUT" to all of this thinking. Now matter how one slices it, neither James nor anyone else can see Donald Sterling as a championship owner. They probably won't make a serious offer either.

Lebron James is not going to be a Clipper.

The same thing can be said for the ownership in New Orleans. I doubt that James will look at the Oklahoma City Thunder (too new) or Atlanta Hawk (too fractured) ownership as being very credible either.

Unless Lebron can figure out a way to go to Boston, the Lakers, or the Spurs, he will probably end up staying in Cleveland. The Cavs have strong ownership, an effective general manager in Danny Ferry, and a track record of making good moves like trading for Mo Williams. Mike Brown is a decent coach who's getting better all the time.

Even Lebron James lives in a world of limited options and the Cavs are probably the best option he'll find out there.

Ahmadinejad: Is He Iran's Rush Limbaugh or Iran's Newt Gingrich

It looks like Iran is in for a spell of instability as power-broking clerics like Ayatollah Khamenei and Hashemi Rafsanjani decide what to do in the aftermath of the rigged presidential election.

Actually, incumbent President Ahmadinejad should have considered seeking endorsements from Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. His "economic populism, social conservatism, and hard-line foreign policy" sound like Republican Party boilerplate.

RSI Bothered by Krugman

I have a lot of qualms about doing this because of the possibility of my opinion being picked up by the right as "even progressive bloggers like Red State Impressions . . ." Having been equated with Bill O'Reilly a couple of weeks ago by Ann Althouse (thanks Ann!), I'm a bit leery about the intentions of conservative appropriators.

Still, I have to object to Paul Krugman's op-ed on "The Big Hate." There are two passages that I find especially objectionable.

Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

and

And at this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.

Starting with the second passage first, Krugman just doesn't seem to recognize the extent to which the distinction between "mainstream conservativism" and the "black-helicopter crowd" began to blur during the Bush years. Conservatives all over the country moved out of "liberal neighborhoods" and towns (See Bill Bishop, The Big Sort) In Bible-belt areas like Eastern Kentucky, conservatives have been taking their kids out of public schools and withdrawing into all-encompassing mega-church environments. Likewise, rural gun owners just assumed that any Democratic president would be "coming to take their guns." That's why the first reaction to Obama's election was a run on guns and ammunition at local gun shops. The same is the case with Muslim rumors about Obama. Nobody in the popular right needed The Washington Times to tell them Obama was a Muslim. It was all over conservative list serves well before the election. The same is the case with the stuff about liberal economic policies being socialism or Marxism. Mainstream popular conservatism has been moving toward the fringes for years.

In my opinion, conservatism is evolving rapidly in a rightward direction even as it is shrinking as a popular phenomenon. Right now, Rush Limbaugh represents the middle of the conservative spectrum with country-club Republicans and what Krugman would call "mainstream conservatives" on his left with a "near fringe" of really small government zealots, survivalists, Ann-Randians, and neo-Confederates on Limbaugh's right and then a farther fringe of secessionists, survivalists, neo-Nazis, and other wackos daydreaming about living in their cellars, making citizens arrests of Fed officials, and the like.

Yes, in the conservative universe, Rush Limbaugh is a relatively moderate figure. I would view Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly as either in the same spot as Limbaugh or somewhat to his left. For his part, Glenn Beck would be a couple of ticks to the right because of his flirting with integrating far fringe black helicopter themes into the Limbaugh mainstream.

All of these figures are revolting to progressives and I'm just as revolted as Paul Krugman. I can't say how many times I've referred to "Limbaugh mainstream conservatives" as "repulsive" and repugnant and I think they're also becoming such to the country as a whole.

However, I also think it's important to view the problem from their point of view as we attempt to sort out what is happening with the Rich Poplawski, George Tiller, and Holocaust Museum murders.

I believe the conservative view goes like this. Given that "conservatism" is moving farther to the right. the big names in the conservative media establishment are going to have to move farther right if they want to continue to appeal to what they (rather than Paul Krugman) see as the "conservative mainstream." Sarah Palin is enormously popular with the conservative base because conservatives view her as speaking to their increasingly fringe views. Glenn Beck's experiments with conspiratorial themes like "Obama re-education camps" get a response because Becks's audience already agrees with those conspiratorial themes. The increasing "extremism" of people like Beck is driven more by audience demand than it is by the "conservative media and political establishment."

For people who don't believe this, stop and think of the last time you heard something from Ann Coulter. Like O'Reilly, Hannity and some others, Ann Coulter is sticking with her old schtick rather than going along with the "far fringe themes" of Glenn Beck. And that's made her less prominent on the right as a result.

My suspicion is that Krugman doesn't get out of the BosWash urban belt often enough to fully understand that. Who can blame him? Who in the progressive movement really wants to spend a lot of quality time with people to the right of Rush Limbaugh. I know I don't. I feel a hell of a lot more at home in Philly than I do in Eastern Kentucky.

But the various fringes of the American right are out there and we need to think more about them if we're going to remain a "reality-based" political constituency.

What are the dangers in the current situation with conservatives? The first danger we see is far fringe people like James von Brunn, Scott Roeder, and Rich Poplawski launching suicide attacks at their various hate targers. These are horrifying events, a number of worthy people are dead, and it's tempting for progressives like Krugman to blame conservative media and political people because of their prominence and because conservative media and political figures are the furthest people on the right that most progressives know. But it's just highly unlikely that von Brunn, Roeder, and Poplawski were stimulated by anything in the mainstream conservative media. They were all versed in far fringe discourses much farther to the right than Limbaugh and launched their attacks out of "martyrdom" motivations more familiar to Osama bin Laden than Bill O'Reilly.

But Fox does come into play with the second danger. That's the danger of the increasingly right-wing "base" of the Republican Party drifting out to the far fringe and becoming real dangers. Right after Obama won the election, I heard a lot of stories from my students about racist guys in Eastern Kentucky gloating over the prospect of Obama's assassination or bragging that they'd "do it themselves" if nobody else did. What about is the possibility of those guys and the most committed anti-abortion activists, anti-tax zealots, Christianists, and others moving out to a "farther fringe" in which they adopt insurrectionist views and become a threat. There's a good chunk of the Republican Party there--maybe 25-33%. If such a large section of the American public switches from the "near fringe" extreme to the "far fringe extreme," we would move from the relatively frequent political assassinations we have now to real political instability.

That's a problem worth avoiding.

So the question then is whether Limbaugh, Fox, Sarah Palin, and other conservative media and political figures are guilty of contributing to a destructive shift of conservativism toward the far fringes of neo-Nazism, survivalism, and secession.

The answer here has to be a resounding NO! The conservative media establishment isn't doing any favors to the Republican Party by doing this, but they (probably unintentionally) are doing the whole country a favor by providing a "mainstream" conservative anchor that functions to slow down, mitigate, and render the conservative rightward drift less dangerous. Because Limbaugh, Hannity, Palin, Huckabee, and other conservative media and political figures are powerful forces, they tend to keep attention of everybody riveted on "mainstream conservatism" and keep large numbers of people from being more attracted to the far fringes.

Conservative media figures aren't quite sitting on dynamite, but they are sitting on an audience that could become dynamite under the right conditions. Krugman seems to want the conservative media to be "more careful" about their right-wing advocacy and their criticisms of Obama. To the contrary, I think the conservative media would make a real contribution by giving more attention to "far fringe" ideas and why they disagree with them. In this sense, I think the conservtive media should engage in a kind of triangulation in which they disagree the fringe right types on the right at the same time that they continue to focus most of their fire on the Obama administration and progressives like Krugman. In my opinion, airing out all of the conspiracy theories and providing them with a hearing in comparison to other views is a better approach than either maintaining silence or just condemning them as the work of "wackos."

Open political communication has been a liberal ideal since the attempts of lynch mobs to suppress the abolitionist movement in the 1830's. That counts for conservative ideas as well. In my opinion, the conservative media serves as a stabilizing force in the rightward drifting conservative movement. They should be encouraged to continue doing so.

Republican Extinction

While agreeing with most progressives about the mainstream media's sympathy toward conservative views, there are times when conservatives really do get sandbagged. The Katie Couric interview with Sarah Palin was a good example. Producers must have known in advance that the somber lighting of the set and the slow, uber serious tone of Couric's questions would all work against Palin's perky strengths and accentuate her lack of policy knowledge. Taping the show must have felt like moving in for the kill.

There's another little dig on Time's Mike Murphy article on the problems of the Republican Party. Time editors accentuate Murphy's theme of the "GOP Ice Age" by changing the Republican symbol of the elephant into a woolly mammoth, an ice age behemoth . . . .

Which just happens to be extinct.

Murphy, a top Republican consultant, puts a familiar argument into an attractive package. He believes that the power of demographics means that the Republicans need to change. He focuses on the Hispanic and youth vote. The Hispanic vote has increased from 2% of the electorate in 1980 to 9% in 2008, went to Obama by 36%, and delivered Indiana to the Democrats. Given that the most popular name for male babies in Texas is "Jose," the Republicans will have to change their stance on immigration if they want to become even remotely competitive for the Hispanic vote.

Likewise, Murphy argues that the Republicans need to relax their opposition to gay marriage and abortion rights if they want to start being competitive for the 18-29 vote.

Murphy knows that all of this is bitter medicine. Republican Senators and House members come from safe districts that really want the GOP to stick with Reagan. He also ould have mentioned that GOP voters are becoming even more rigid in their conservatism and thus are unlikely to change their approach.

Ultimately, the Republicans probably are on the road to extinction and they would need more bitter medicine still if they want to change course.

Top of the GOP list should be shutting down Fox News.

The function of Fox News is to amplify conservative views on abortion rights, gay rights, race, immigration, health care, and Obama. Conservative views on all of these topics range from unpopular to offensive with the rest of the country. With the television megaphone in the hands of right-wing provocateurs like Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, Fox provides decisive affirmation for both sides of all these debates in a way that disadvantages conservatism.

For conservatives 33% of the electorate, Fox affirms all of their views as being the right views and portrays them positively as an embattled minority. Largely because of Fox (and talk radio), conservative constituencies are always inflamed about immigration, abortion, gay rights, and religion. As a result, the Republican Party has none of the wiggle room on social issues that consultants like Mike Murphy would like to see.

Even worse, Fox also manifests conservative hostility toward African-Americans, hispanics, gay people, and secular culture. That hostility gets further amplified through the emerging left-wing media of the Daily Show, Colbert Report, Huffington Post, and Media Matters. To the Republican Party, Ann Coulter's homophobic comments about John Edwards are an embarrassment best forgotten. However, the rise of the left-wing media means that the provocations of Coulter are never forgotten. Material from Coulter, O'Reilly, Beck, and the other Fox worthies become left-wing news, fodder for comic put-downs of conservatives, and affirmations of progressive views concerning the right. The ultimate result is to lock in the majority view of conservatives as old white people who are bigots, homophobes, and religious zealots who are generally out of touch with modern America.

For Republicans, "The Fox Effect" is to shrink the GOP down to a very committed 33% minority that is poorly thought of by the large majority of their fellow Americans.

And it's not just Hispanics and young people who see conservatism this way either. So are white moderates and independents. Murphy doesn't mention this because he probably sees the Republicans as no longer having a chance with these constituencies, but the "liberalization" of the New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. suburbs has destroyed the Republican Party in the Northeast and given the Democrats an advantage in Virginia.

If the GOP wants to once again become competitive with the white moderates, independents, and weak Democrats who dominate the suburban vote, the best thing they can do is close down Fox.

Of course, that's not going to happen. One way or another, the Republicans probably will become extinct.

Alabama Football on Probation for 1,000th Time

Well, it does seem that way. The University of Alabama football program was placed on another three years probation and forced to vacate 21 wins because of a textbook scandal. Given that Crimson Tide boosters weren't caught giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to steer recruits to Tuscaloosa, that probably seems like progress.

But only if you think committing burglary is proress over robbing banks.

Who's No. 1 Among Conservative Bloggers?

John Hawkins of Right Wing News ranks Hot Air as the top conservative blog. No problem there. I also enjoyed the irony of Mickey Kaus' Kausfiles being listed at No. 21. Kaus might be the only person in the world who still counts himself as a Democrat.

But I was disappointed not to see my amigos at Protein Wisdom on the list. Evidently, Hawkins hasn't been surprised with Jeff Goldstein's campaign on behalf of (yawn) intentionalist theories of textual interpretation.

Jeremiah Wright Needs Nice Warm Cave

Jeremiah Wright needs to find a nice warm cave someplace for hiding out the rest of the Obama presidency. Wrights claims that first Jews and then Zionists are keeping him from Obama rank extremely high on the "clown" poll.

That's especially the case after the Holocaust Museum shootings.

Frankly, I imagine that Obama would rather have another frank little chat with Joe the Plumber than Jeremiah Wright.

And rightfully so.

Wing-Nut Blames Von Brunn on Muslims

My own instinct is to resist the urge to blame James von Brunn's attack on the Holocaust Museum on the right-wing media.

But it's not like the right is trying to avoid being stupid.

Here's Debbie Schlussel blaming Muslims for Von Brunn's attack.

In fact, it is because of Muslims--who are the biggest contributor to the worldwide rise in anti-Semitism to Holocaust-eve levels--that neo-Nazis feel comfortable--far more comfortable!--manifesting their views about Jews. Until 9/11 and our resulting new tolerance for Islam, the neo-Nazi types were marginalized and howling at the wind. We know who has been targeting Jewish museums and centers affiliated with Jews in recent years. And it hasn't been, in general, 89-year-old White guys.

Ugly stuff. Schlussel makes every Muslim in the world into an Islamist extremist. She might as well say that every guy with a German sounding name is a Nazi.

Brief Theses on Holocaust Memorial Murderer

Yesterday, an elderly white supremacist and neo-Nazi named James von Brunn walked into the Holocaust Museum and shot a security guard before being wounded himself and subdued.

Some quick thoughts:

1. James von Brunn is a typical American time bomb. One characteristic of American life is the bad chemistry of explosive rage, the easy availability of guns, and social failure. The result is that there's thousands of potential mass murderers walking around burning with anger, armed to the teeth, and waiting for one last trigger before they go off. One of the things that James von Brunn has in common with Michael McLendon, Jiverly Wong, and Scott Roeder is that he is part of an extremely destructive pattern in American life.

2. Too extreme for the "extremist right." People on the left often think of Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck as "the exteme right" and these guys as having an influence on shooters like James von Brunn and Scott Roeder. But they're wrong. Von Brunn is a long-time, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, anti-semite, and Obama conspiracy theorist who has already served time for an attack on the Federal Reserve Board. Members of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups are often cut off from their families, have few friends outside their groups, and live within the fantasy of their tight-knit circles. Von Brunn is so extreme that he might see Fox News as part of the "liberal media."

3. Who's Influencing Who? The problem with the right-wing media is that it appears that Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and some other members of the conservative media establishment are feeling their way toward fringe views. It's more likely that people like James von Brunn are exercising an influence on Beck and Limbaugh than the other way around.

4. Why Now? Why the explosion of mass murder within the first six months of the Obama administration? In a society as large as the U. S., it's likely that there's many causes coming together to cause this kind of wave of mass murder.

Here's three ideas.

First, the recession is significant. Michael McClendon, Rich Poplawski, and Jiverly Wong had all lost factory jobs before they went on their killing sprees.

Second, the Obama administration seems like the "end of days" to many on the far fringes of right-wing extremism. Obama is an African-American with an African father who was especially strong among college-educated, urban, whites and minority groups like blacks, hispanics, gays, and Jews. Given that the far fringes of the right are highly committed to their fantasies about all of these populations, the Obama administration represents an apolcalypse in which all of their hate targets have come to power. As Shepherd Smith said on Fox yesterday, some of them are responding by reaching for their guns.

Third, there's the fantasy of power. One of the primary fantasies on the fringe right is that they are strong and that everybody else is weak. One way to hang on to that fantasy in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is to plan a mass murder.

McAuliffe Loses in Virginia

Democratic Party mover and shaker Terry McAuliffe lost the Democratic primary for governor of Virginia today. The transition from hack to statesman is always tough.

A Great Philly Night

What a great, cool, fall night in Center City Philadelphia. The fact that it's June makes it even better.

Conservatives: Wrong for Every Occasion

The Detroit Lions went 0-16 in 2008 but it seems like conservatives have been zero for the last decade. I just looked at an essay by Victor Davis Hanson on how Obama supposedly is violating the laws of human nature. It's unbelievable. Everything he says about Obama, human nature, and academics is wrong, wrong, wrong. Even Hanson's personal anecdote about life as a farmer is formulated so badly it sounds like a lie. How does he do it?

The Discovery of the Day

Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan discovers that Barack Obama is not Ronald Reagan. Pat must have had an industrial strength case of the vapors when he finally figured that out.

Gay Rights: A Profoundly Democratic Cause

Quick!

Name a gay rights leader.

Ok. There's Harvey Milk but he had been dead for 30 years before you heard of him.

Now name a living gay rights leader.

I'm waiting. Cmon . . . Cmon. We haven't got all day. The gay rights movement has made enormous strides over the last six months and the last six years. Where are the transcendent moral figures of contemporary gay rights. Who's the Martin Luther King making the closet disappear? Where are his or her famous lieutenants--the Ralph Abernethy's, Joseph Lowry's and Jesse Jackson's of the gay rights struggle. What about the Malcolm X's, Stokely Carmichaels, and H. Rap Browns of gay rights. What about the famous gay rights writers in the vein of James Baldwin? Who's the gay rights version of Thurgood Marshall?

That's all right. I'm waiting for myself to find out as well. As a rural kid whose only news access to news was a small town newspaper and the CBS Evening News, I was aware of everybody named in the previous paragraph except Lowry and Jackson. Even though I'm a much better informed person today, I still couldn't name any of the leaders of the gay rights movement outside Harvey Milk and Randy Shilts and both of them have been dead for a long time. A lot of that's my fault, but the fault doesn't lie in me alone. In an age where practically everybody gets the celebrity treatment, gay rights leaders haven't gotten the celebrity treatment. People know Joe the Plumber infinitely better than they know the leaders of gay rights organizations or the lawyers mapping out the legal strategies for promoting gay marriage.

But the gay rights movement is winning anyway. Gay rights organizations have effective leadership and there's lots of excellent gay rights lawyers, and gay rights writers. And they all deserve a great deal of credit for their effective work. But I'm not sure that the moral weight of the gay rights movement--the main thing that keeps driving the gay rights movement forward-- the leadership. Rather, I think that the moral giants of gay rights are the millions of gay people who have come out to their parents, friends, and communities and are living openly as gay people despite often paying an awful price for their courage.

Celebrity leadership is generally over-rated and somebody like Martin Luther King did not direct the civil rights movement so much as he symbolized the broad activism of the African-American population. But the profoundly democratic character of the gay rights movement is especially evident in the fact that it's succeeding without celebrity leadership.

Rush Provides Another Reason to "Buy GM"

After years of giving the American public more reasons to vote Democratic, Rush Limbaugh is now beginning a new campaign to get Americans to buy GM cars.

The people saying they don't want to buy anything at General Motors are not mad at General Motors. They don't want to patronize Obama. They don't want to do anything to make Obama's policies work! This is an untold story, by the way. Of course, the government-controlled media is not gonna report anything like this but there are a lot of people who are not going to buy from Chrysler or General Motors as long as it is perceived Barack Obama is running it, because people do not want his policy to work here because this is antithetical to the American economic way of life. The government does not own car companies; the government does not design cars, not in a country that works. So people aren't going to buy products from companies that Obama runs.

That's right. The new slogan for General Motors should be "Screw Rush--Buy GM."

George Will's Favorite Grammatical Device

George Will thinks that President Obama "is inordinately fond of the first-person singular pronoun." As a monarchist who still hasn't gotten over his preference for the British side in the American Reveolution, Will would much prefer that Obama use the royal "we."

Newt Gingrich: a Powerful Force for Paganism

Today, at a speech in Virginia, Newtie complained about paganism.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee urged Christians to get involved in politics to preserve the presence of religion in American life.

"I think this is one of the most critical moments in American history," Gingrich said. "We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism."

Newt Gingrich has a Ph.D. in history from Tulane, but is as terrible a historian as he is skilled at politics. Paganism has lots of divine personalities like Zeus, Hera, and Apollo from the religion of classic Greece and the religious practice of paganism involves sacrificing animals (and the occasional human) to those divinities. Paganism also associates divinity with natural phenomena like thunder and specific places like groves and river. And sacrifices animals to them as well. If I remember right, Achilles was almost killed by a river god in the Iliad. But what anchored paganism was ancestor worship where the primary religious practice was within families and revolved around songs, prayers, and other forms of worshipping deceased male heads of household. Ancestor worship involves constant animal sacrifice.

In other words, paganism is a bloody mess. Even the few people I know who would claim themselves as pagans (including one of my wife's cousins) are too genteel to practice any form of animal sacrifice.

Likewise, most people who think of themselves as pagans are thumbing their noses at their families. As a result, the last thing they would undertake is ancestor worship.

So, rest easy Newt.

You're not surrounded by pagans.

But I can see where Newt Gingrich and other paragons of the right could see themselves as surrounded by people who reject the agenda of religious conservatism. At least two thirds of American rejects Protestant fundamentalism, Catholic traditionalism, conventional Mormonism, and Orthodox Judaism. About 15% of the American population is now either atheistic, agnostic, or vaguely spiritual as well. Perhaps what Gingrich means by "paganism" is the rejection of religious conservatism and he's certainly right that most Americans reject religious conservatism. Religious conservatism isn't even all that popular in Bible Belt areas like Eastern Kentucky.

But why is that the case?

Here I think Newt Gingrich should look in the mirror. Now that Newt is one of the premier voices for the conservative effort to claim the U. S. as a Christian nation, he's also become a powerful force for the rejection of religious conservatism. Newt's Gingrich is legendary for his relentless self-centereded, sanctimoniousness, hypocrysy, and inhumanity toward his fellow human beings. How could he not be. Gingrich is a prominent public figure who is extremely aggressive about all his bad character traits. Everything that anybody needs to know about Newt Gingrich can be summed up by the fact that he informed his first wife that he was divorcing her while she was in the hospital for cancer treatment.

As a spokesperson for the Republican Party, Gingrich drives people away from the Republican Party. Now that Gingrich is a spokesperson for religious conservatism, he's driving people away from religious conservatism. As some evangelicals like Michael Spencer are beginning to realise, the association of Protestant evangelicism and Christianity with political conservatism and the religious right is undermining Christianity. Now that moderates and liberals are starting to identify Christianity with people like Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and the guy who murdered George Tiller, they're also starting to reject Christianity.

If Newt Gingrich lives to be 100, we might be going back to ancestor worship and animal sacrifice after all.

Not Bad for Someone With an Allergy

Last night, I was drinking very liberally for a guy with an allergy to booze.

Big Day in New Hampshire

It gives me enormous pleasure to put the gay pride flag over this post. The expansion of gay marriage rights--really the expansion of gay rights in general--is one of the most inspiring trends in American life over the last 25 years. Why last 25 years! My own thinking is that the movement for gay marriage grew out of the surge in gay rights activism in the early 1980's around the AIDS epidemic. I was working as a cook and bus boy in a gay bar in Philadelphia as AIDS was really taking hold, have made many gay friends and acquaintances since then, and have always felt a great deal of happiness for them as the cause of gay marriage has moved forward.

Yesterday, the cause moved forward again as New Hampshire Governor John Lynch signed a bill legalizing gay marriage in New Hampshire. That makes six states that now recognize gay marriage rights with more states like New York likely to come in the near future. It's probably too much to hope for at this point, but I'd really like to see the federal government rescind the pernicious Defense of Marriage Act from the Clinton years.

Anyway, congratulations to everyone who supports gay rights. It was another good day.

The GOP Is Already Losing the 2010 Elections

This should be filed under the "Duh! What did you think was going to happen?" file. Andy McCarthy of National Review Online is in a blather because the Obama administration has withdrawn approval for the state of Georgia's vote suppression policies.

In the heated imaginations of people like Andy McCarthy, vote suppression was one of the Rove-era tactics that was going to bring about 1,000 years of conservative political domination. The general idea of vote suppression was to use the immigration issue as a wedge to lower the voting rates of less affluent Democratic constituencies like African-Americans, legal Hispanics, and poor whites. Under the cover of keeping illegal immigrants out of the voting booth, vote suppression gurus like Hans von Spakovsky sought to load up poorer Democratic constituencies with identification requirements that a certain percentage of them would not be able to meet. Lower voting rates among these groups means fewer votes for Democrats, more victories for Republicans, and a better life for the Andy McCarthy's and Michelle Malkins of the world.

Georgia was the state that bought into vote suppression in a big way and enacted a voter ID policy that withstood a number of court challenges. But it looks like the Georgia system is going to go the way of the dinosaurs, slavery, and segregation because the Obama administration is reversing the Bush administration's vote surpression policies. No surprise here! The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed precisley to end vote suppression in Southern states like Georgia. Andy McCarthy calls the Voting Rights Act an "anachronism," but the fact that Georgia was pursuing an onerous voter ID policy is strong evidence that the state still needs to be supervised under the Voting Rights Act. As a result, the Obama Department of Justice has withdrawn approval for Georgia's voter ID requirement. Hopefully, the Obama DOJ will be promoting policies that make it easier for minorities and poor people to vote.

Andy McCarthy claims that the end of the vote suppression era means that the Democrats are "already winning the elections of 2010." That's absurd. If McCarthy wants to know why the Democrats are going to win in 2010, all he has to do is look at Republican behavior in states like Pennsylvania and Kentucky. Whether it's pushing Republican senators like Arlen Specter into switching parties or ruining the chances of Republican incumbents like Jim Bunning to win re-election, the Republican Party is acting like its no.1 priority is electing more Democrats.

The Shorter Mark Sanford

State Sen. Joel Lourie (D-Richland) nails Mark Sanford, South Carolina's right-wing zealot of a governor, after Sanford's veto of legislation regulating payday loan-sharking.

[Sanford's] vision for South Carolina is for ineffective, underfunded schools, for kids buying cheap cigarettes and for unprotected consumers."

As always, the key to understanding conservatives is that they frankly don't give a damn about the welfare of their villages, towns, states . . . or country.

Kentucky Not Least Great After All

As a citizen of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, I almost instinctively flinch whenever I see a headline like "Which State Was Least Great in 2008?" on the Atlantic site. Kentucky is near the bottom of so many things that it used to be a joke that everybody in Kentucky said a prayer of thanks for Mississippi so we could be 49th rather than 50th.

But this measure of the recession wasn't so bad for Kentucky. We've lost .1% of our GDP (39th), 2.6% on our unemployment rate (31st), and another 1.3% (tied for 8th) on our home prices. Given that the recession has taken a bite out of the economy and unemployment has risen (it's about 10% in my county), we not exactly doing well. But we're not really that close to being a big recession state like Florida or Alaska either. In particular, people in Kentucky have hardly lost anything on their homes.

Kentucky might not have the "Unbridled Spirit" emblazoned on our license plates, but we're not the "Least Great in 2008" either.

Brian Williams Still Sucking Up to Power

It's reassuring to know that guys like NBC's Brian Williams know how to suck up to power even though President Obama is a Democrat.

Williams talks of "walking through the West Wing and Secretary [Hillary] Clinton drops by to see the president. To be in the hallway when the president walks by with a handful of M&Ms, popping them in his mouth as he goes to visit his chief of staff — it was unbelievable."

Talk about nauseating. All the same, I was pleasantly nauseated because Williams was sucking up to Obama rather than Bush.

Sotomayor Loses the Arrogant Prick Vote

But to Rick Santorum's credit, he did manage to get through his rejection article without saying anything particularly racist, misogynist, or homophobic. Good for him.

What Pro-Lifers Really Hate is Our Freedom

William Saletan of Slate keeps up his "abortion is tragedy" blather but undercuts his own argument when he points out that pro-life advocates don't propose to punish the women who get abortions as murderers.

The reason these pro-life groups have held their fire, both rhetorically and literally, is that they don't really equate fetuses with old or disabled people. They oppose abortion, as most of us do. But they don't treat abortionists the way they'd treat mass murderers of the old or disabled. And this self-restraint can't simply be chalked up to nonviolence or respect for the law. Look up the bills these organizations have written, pushed, or passed to restrict abortions. I challenge you to find a single bill that treats a woman who procures an abortion as a murderer. They don't even propose that she go to jail.

Why? If they really think abortion is murder, pro-life groups should be proposing that every woman who gets an abortion should either get a life sentence in a maximum security jail or the death sentence. The doctors, nurses, attendants, clerks, and anybody else who works at an abortion clinic or a hospital that provides abortion services should also be going to jail. So should anyone connected to dumping the spare embryos that will never be brought to term but are still "babies" in the mental world of pro-life activism.

For all their belligerent posturing, the pro-life side doesn't believe their own claim that abortion is murder. Here's a case where I think that Bush administration anti-terrorism rhetoric applies well. What the pro-life right really hates is freedom--the freedom of women (and men) to live our own sexual lives without the sword of pregnancy hanging over their heads to punish women and couples for any missteps. The right wants to make sure that sex is more feared than enjoyed, seen more as temptation than pleasure, and anticipated more with dread than joy.

It's all B.S. They might as well carry signs claiming "Freedom is Murder!"

The reason that abortions--the termination of pregnancies--are a right under Roe v Wade is that women can not be free beings if the existence of an embryo can determine how they are going to live the next 20 plus years of their lives. The pro-life movement does not want women to have that fundamental freedom of determining their own lives according to their own ambitions, plans, whims, or meanderings. But that's why abortion rights need to be defended and extended as part of the right of women to negotiate their way through their own lives. In this light, abortion rights are an extension of the right of women to manage their own lives that also include dating, marrying the person of their choice, and divorce rights. They're also an extension of the contraception, adaption, and fertility strategies that allow women to space out children as they see fit and allow women to be gay and still have children.

The right-wing opposes almost all of this freedom. They're just as opposed to the contraception, divorce, non-marital sex, gay people, homosexual adaption, and other elements of sexual freedom. Some Christian schools don't even allow dancing, hand-holding, and kissing--all because they're seen as "gateways" to unmarital sex. Actually, I'm kind of surprised that I haven't seen any defenses of arranged marriages coming out of the pro-life movement.

But just as bin Laden is ultimately going to lose his terror war, the American right will ultimately lose its war on freedom.

Tom Tancredo's Dangerously Racist Aide

A couple of years ago, Marcus Epstein, formerly a speechwriter for anti-immigration zealot Tom Tancredo (R-Co) and now the executive director of Tancredo's political action committee, was convicted of an attack on an African-American woman in D.C.

On July 7, 2007, at approximately 7:15 p.m. at Jefferson and M Street, Northwest, in Washington, D.C., defendant was walking down the street making offensive remarks when he encountered the complainant, Ms. [REDACTED], who is African-American. The defendant uttered, "Nigger," as he delivered a karate chop to Ms. [REDACTED]'s head.

The Talking Points Memo headline focuses more on the "n-word" than anything else. But Epstein also gets out some of the meaning of the n-word and what makes it so offensive. What's particularly interesting about Epstein's assault is that he uses the n-word as he is "delivering a karate chop to the head" of the poor African-American woman. Here, Epstein didn't just use the n-word as a pejorative that demeans African-Americans. What the "n-word" meant to Epstein was that he had a "right" to attack the woman without any other provocation than the fact that she was African-American. In Epstein's view, his status as a white man gives him such superior human status that he is free to assault an unknown black woman just for being black. If the laws had not changed to the disadvantage of racist murderers, Epstein probably would have contended that he had a right to killer her as well. This is what the whites in the Algiers Point neighborhood in New Orleans thought during the chaos of Hurricane Katrina. They thought the "n-word" meant open season on black people--"like pheasant season in South Dakota."

Epstein was also walking down the street "making offensive comments" before he delivered his karate chop. This is slightly different because it raises the chicken and egg of what comes first--the general belligerence or the specific racism. My own argument would be that racism and a generalized belligerence and aggression are mutually reinforcing. But how does this work as a young conservative activist walks down the street calling out "racial epithets." What are black people doing to offend him. Mostly, they're enraging Epstein by walking down the street as though they had rights and felt secure in those rights because they were enforced by both law and social opinion. Near the end of The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois' portrays a fictional white judge threaten to lynch every black person within his reach if African-Americans started thinking they had a right to enter his front door. Like the judge, Epstein claims a general right of superiority over black people grounded in nature and seems enraged that blacks can now claim a right over their own persons. That's part of why he lashes out at this one woman.

Epstein was convicted for hitting an unnamed African-American woman instead of believing he had a right to do so, being enraged that African-Americans could claim rights of their own, and using the "n-word" to signify all of this. However, the fact that Tom Tancredo hired Epstein over other qualified people, put Epstein in positions of responsibility, and didn't even remove Epstein over his attack on the black woman is a strong indication that Tancredo holds the same blatantly racist opinions as Epstein. It doesn't take much imagination to think that a really big chunk of the population of conservative staff apparatchiks holds the same kind of views as well. People on the left generally view conservatives as covering their racism with a very thin veneer of political correctness. The case of a dangerous racist like Marcus Epstein confirms that view.

Red State PHILLY Impressions

I'm back in Philadelphia for five weeks of glorious research and writing. To honor the occasion, I'm once again changing the title of the blog to Red State Philly Impressions.

George Tiller: Abortion Doctor and Credit to Humanity

Dr. George Tiller, a physician who performed abortions, was murdered in Kansas today by "an all-purpose right-wing nut" named Scott Roeder. Dr. Tiller's been a special target of right-wing figures like Bill O'Reilly because he's one of the few physicians who is willing to perform late-term abortions and Tiller had already been shot once by right-wing activists. Consequently, a lot of the commentary has been on the role of the right-wing media in tipping unbalanced people like Roeder into becoming murderers. For example, Jim D. Adkisson, who killed two people at a progressive Tennessee church, read books by Michael Savage and wrote in an apparent suicide note about the need to kill as many liberals as possible.

But I think it's more important to take an opportunity to give credit to George Tiller for being a courageous man and making an important contribution to human welfare. Abortion is a crucially important social asset as well as a legal right in American society. The fact that women are not forced to carry pregnancies to term has helped open up tremendous new vistas of freedom for American women and has been an incalculable benefit to our society as a result. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have always been mistaken in the idea that the number of abortions should be reduced to some "rare" minimum. Given that the material in a pregnant woman's uterus is a "fetus," a woman has as much right to control and/or dispose of that material as she has a right to contraception, regulating her periods, or anything else to do with gynecological health. As a result, there should be more abortions in this country rather than less. Abortions should be much more available in red-state areas like Kansas, Kentucky, South Dakota, and Mississippi. Those are the states that have the highest percentages of unwanted pregnancies. Abortions should be more available as a normal medical service to poor women and other women shouldn't feel so guilt-ridden about abortions that they choose to forego abortions that they would otherwise have done.

George Tiller deserves a lot of credit for performing abortions at all. I'm sure he could have made more money and had a more peaceful life doing some other kind of medicine. But he especially deserves credit for continuing to perform abortions and late-term abortions after the first armed attack on him by a pro-life activist named Shelley Shannon in 1993. I'm sure Tiller knew that he could be murdered at any time. But he kept providing abortion services to women in Kansas despite the vigilante death sentence hanging over his head. It's significant that Tiller died while attending a Christian church, the Reformation Lutheran Church of Wichita, Kansas. Not unlike Jesus, he died for the benefit of others.

Nuggets in Six; Lakers if its Seven

It's Sonia Sotomayor

Obama's nominating Appeals Court judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. I wanted to say "let the viciousness begin," but in Sotomayor's case, the viciousness started with a New Republic hit piece as soon as Souter announced his retirement.

Just as Over-Rated: Colin Powell

When the later histories of the Bush administration are written, Colin Powell is going to come off looking even worse than Bush, Cheney, or David Addington. Well, maybe not Addington. Few figures in American political life have had as much credit for integrity as Colin Powell. But how did Powell use his massive credibility while he was Secretary of State--to bring Bush and Cheney's dreams of invading Iraq to live. Although the machinery for the invasion was in place before the famous UN speech, overthrowing Saddam Hussein was not a popular idea until Colin Powell used his credibility to promote Bush administration's lies about mobile bio-labs and other pseudo-threats. If Bush neo-cons are the North Koreans in white face, Colin Powell was the useful idiot who made them look credible and convincing.

Over-Rated: North Korea

Kim Jong-il's government practices the Asian version of neo-conservative buffoonery. Far more attracted to theatrical belligerence, in-your-face gestures, and the politics of brinksmanship than the boring details of managing their affairs, the North Koreans have turned their whole country into post-Katrina New Orleans and can barely keep their huge army fed. Just as American conservatives are more interested in "outraging" liberals than anything else in political life, the North Koreans devote themselves to thinking of new ways to "thumb their noses" at South Korea, Japan, and the U. S. If North Korea is a threat at all, they're a threat to do something incredibly stupid just to show their audacity. That makes the North Koreans more over-rated than Journey, the LA Lakers, and John Wayne combined.

Last Night's P-Galore Tempest

It looks like we on the left are going to get the privilege of this week's hissy fit. On Saturday, the Republican National Committee put out a video that attacked Nancy Pelosi by representing her as "Pussy Galore," the villainess from the Bond movie Goldfinger. The big play here was to portray Pelosi in terms of the P-word as a term for female genitals and in case anybody missed the point, they put the label "Democrats Galore" at the end.

Having published a post entitled the "Deep Depths of Dick" last night in relation to Dick Cheney, I'm not in much of a position this morning to be self-righteous about reducing anyone to their genitals.

But here's what Taylor Marsh says:

At the end it says “Democrats Galore.” Imposed with a naked woman behind the tag line. Get it? Subtle it is not. But check out the video at around :40 seconds; a split screen that says it all. “Pussy Galore” is shown with “Starring Nancy Pelosi the Speaker” over “Pussy’s” image.

But hey, it’s good to have a sense of humor about these things right? And who doesn’t love the Bond films, especially those Sean Connery classics?

The RNC, however, is not celebrating the women in these classic movies, even by 1960’s standards. Nor are they empowering women through utilizing one of the the cunning female villains who parade around in them by equating her with Speaker Pelosi. I shouldn’t have to spell it out any further, though if the RNC doesn’t have women in their leadership ranks or men who get this stuff and know bad taste when they see it, the Rush, Newt and Cheney Party (as they were aptly called on "Hardball” yesterday) is truly nothing more than a frat boy institution. No offense to
fraternities meant.

That a woman, let alone Speaker of the House, should never be hinted to in any public way through the use of “Pussy” insinuations should be obvious. That this is being used by a once major political party in the 21st century is stunning.

Still laughing smugly to myself about my Dick Cheney post, I can't quite agree that making female genital insinuations is degrading at all times--just in male-dominated societies like our own. The problem of living in a male-supremacist society isn't so much that female genitals are degraded but that female genitals are so rarely exalted. Going back through the history of Western literature and popular culture, male genitals have been subject to a constant outpouring of exaltation and a steady stream of degradation as well. Jon Stewart can refer to Stephen Colbert as having "titanium balls" for sending up George Bush to his face and liberal bloggers like myself can demean Dick Cheney for being such a "dick."

But it's still so rare for female genitals to be exalted in any way that there's good reason to think that any insinuation concerning female genitals is demeaning. In the Renaissance classic Gargantua, Rabelais gives Gargantua a legendary penis, but his wife Gargamelle's vagina, clitoris, and ovaries must also have been enormous and had their own outsized qualities. But Rabelais limited her to giving birth and dying. That's pretty much still the case today. I saw a reference on Open Salon yesterday to a female blogger having "steel ovaries," but there's still little in the way of imagery, metaphor, mythology, and hype that represent the "parts" of women in terms of valued qualities, like energy, drive, determination, and toughness. If anything, the situation has gotten worse over the last couple of decades as the tentative efforts to represent women as full human beings have been overwhelmed by the explosion of pornography.

So yeah, the RNC video on Nancy Pelosi is degrading to Pelosi as a woman and degrading to all women. Even though I've degraded Dick Cheney through a reference to his genitals (Sorry Dick), I wasn't males in a bigoted way because I'm just as prone to exalt masculinity in other places. Exalting and degrading people in sexual terms is a lot of what popular culture and popular politics is about. But until women's sexuality is much more exalted than it is now, insinuations concerning women's genitals are going to be rightfully seen as degrading.

The Deep Depths of Dick

Prolegomena. I'm all in favor of Dick Cheney speaking out and there's good reasons why that is the case. People like Martin Luther King and Betty Friedan fought their whole lives for the right of everybody to speak their mind on politics, including failed former vice-presidents. The tradition of former leaders pledging omerta was always a bad thing for American politics. The European system of former leaders becoming opposition leaders works because it makes the opposition more effective. Some of the reason why the Democrats were so incoherent in the run-up to the Iraq War is that people like Bill Clinton were observing a polite and misguided silence. In fact, Cheney is the most effective spokesperson for the conservative view on terrorism policy and he is serving a useful function in giving the Republican Party more coherence as an opposition force.

Certainly, the Republicans need the help.

My interest as a person of the left also makes me glad to see Cheney speak. Keeping the leading figures of the Bush administration before the public eye is a great way to remind people of the maliciousness and venality of the American right. Given that Dick Cheney embodies the worst of the Bush administration, seeing him on television is a continual reminder of why the American public repudiated the Bush presidency and everything it stood for.

As far as I'm concerned, America can't get enough of Dick Cheney.

Dick Cheney is Shocked! Shocked! Actually, Dick Cheney is shocked that President Obama is doing exactly what he said he would do during the campaign. It's important to remember the conservative commitment to delusion. Just as shock jock Mancow was surprised to find that waterboarding is torture, many people on the right have been shocked, shocked that Barack Obama is withdrawing from Iraq, closing down Guantanamo, and ending the torture of terrorist suspects. To be sure, Cheney's more genuine than Claude Rains in Casablanca. The Bush people thought they had rigged the system so Obama couldn't change their policies on terror. They also couldn't believe Obama was serious about his campaign claims that the Bush administration didn't live up to American values or that the Bush administration's approach to terror made the country less safe. For Dick Cheney in particular, all of that was just "campaign rhetoric." As a result, Cheney was genuinely shocked to find out that Barack Obama wasn't Joe Lieberman and it's out of his wounded pride and outrage that Dick Cheney launched his little public relations war against the Obama administration.

It's About Values. Cheney is also shocked by the realization that his side is losing all the on-going cultural wars. Conservatives are losing all sorts of little cultural wars. They're losing their wars for small government and Victorian sexual values and against feminism, gay rights, drugs, and multi-culturalism. Even worse, they're losing the "war on socialism" even though no one's fighting them. Finally, conservatives are losing the "war over the war" to liberal politicians, civil libertarians, and anti-war activists. Conservatives experience their losses on all these fronts as devastating because of their disgust for everybody on the other side. Gay people have been the particular target of conservative disgust since gay marriage emerged as an issue. But right-wing bigotry toward African-Americans, working women, and popular culture still emerges on a regular basis.

It's the same with Cheney and his enemies. Cheney is a member of the right-wing of the conservative defense establishment that's shaped by two ideas--that this country should always be at war or pointed toward war (or both) and that the president should have absolute power when America is at war. Keeping America at war keeps the right in power and gives practically unlimited resources to conservative constituencies in the military and defense industry. For Cheney, keeping America at war means that the "right people"--people he respects--will always be in charge instead of the liberals, civil libertarians, minority activists, and union leaders he views as the "wrong sort of people." From Cheney's point of view, the absolute power of the president (supposedly justified by Article II of the Constitution) makes it possible for the right people to conduct their wars without interference from their opponents and the constitutional guarantees, domestic law, and international law that were created by liberals. In other words, the underlying foreign policy "value" for Dick Cheney is the "freedom" of the right people to start wars and conduct as they see fit according to the "natural order."

A lot of Cheney's anger toward Barack Obama lies in his shock over the thought that Barack Obama is one of the "wrong people" and that the "wrong people" seem close to being totally in charge. Maybe Cheney thinks Obama is close to giving Glenn Greenwald a job as a Pentagon watchdog (a good idea by the way). This righteous conservative anger informs a great deal of the sneering rhetoric of Cheney's AEI speech. Cheney sneeringly refers to the release of the torture memos as intended to be "a bold exercise in open government, honoring the public's right to know. We're informed, as well, that there was much agonizing over this decision." "Open government" and "the public's right to know" are both anathema to Cheney's own values of reserving real power for people like him and Cheney's sneering at the Obama administration for advertising those values is a most sincere moment of disgust.

Cheney expresses a more general disgust toward liberalism in discussing the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed:

Maybe you've heard that when we captured KSM, he said he would talk as soon as he got to New York City and saw his lawyer. But like many critics of interrogations, he clearly misunderstood the business at hand. American personnel were not there to commence an elaborate legal proceeding, but to extract information from him before al-Qaeda could strike again and kill more of our people.

Obviously, Cheney's trick here is to associate liberal "critics of interrogations" with vicious terrorists like KSM. But underlying the rhetorical linkage is a very real disgust with the U. S. legal system and the protections that it has provided for accused criminals since the Warren Court. For American conservatives, the natural order is for the dominant white and wealthy groups to be free--that's what conservatives mean by "our values"--and for the dominant groups to have a "free hand" to act violently toward "outsider" groups like African-Americans, immigrants, and gay people. The natural order was upset by the campaigns of liberal jurists, Democratic politicians, and minority group leaders to recognize what conservatives think of as "marginal" groups as having the same rights as "real Americans." In this light, the big Warren Court decisions shackled the ability of the "right people" to "do what needs to be done" and let the riff-raff bring chaos into society.

Informed by their antipathy toward the American legal system and its "misguided" stress on rights, procedures, and "elaborate legal proceedings," the Bush people created an "extra-judicial" system of prisons, interrogration units, and extraordinary rendition to other countries in the name of unlimited presidential power. That system was designed not only to "extract information" in Cheney's phrase, it was designed to give terrorist suspects "what they deserved" in a way that couldn't be achieved by the "permissive" American legal system.

As he defends torture, Cheney also manages to express his loathing toward liberal critics:

Yet for all these exacting efforts to do a hard and necessary job and to do it right, we hear from some quarters nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative. In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists. I might add that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about "values." (my emphasis)

Cheney's critique of liberal criticism of torture is the same criticism conservatives have been making of liberal activists and minority leaders since at least the sixties. They always saw people like Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy as motivated by feigned outrage, contrived indignation, phony moralizing and other dishonest motivations. By the fact of their being leaders (let alone being born into the elite), people like King and Kennedy either participated in the privileges of the elite or wanted to participate in the privileges of the elite. From the conservative point of view, that gives an inherent phoniness to minority and liberal criticism of American society for not extending constitutional rights to all groups. The other element of conservative revulsion toward white liberals in particular is that white liberals identify with the politics of "outsider" groups like poor people and minorities. From the conservative point of view, white liberals are either "feigning outrage" as they pursue power for themselves or, even worse, traitorously identifying with marginal populations over the dominant groups. Whichever motivation they attribute to liberals and minority leaders, conservatives like Dick Cheney have never acknowledged that their critics are honest.

Disappointment to the Point of Treason. The disappointment of Dick Cheney and other Bush enthusiasts has a particularly sharp edge because they thought the moment of permanent conservative ascendancy had arrived. With the 9-11 attacks, the conservative defense and political establishment thought they had an opportunity to do exactly what they wanted. In relation to foreign policy, conservatives talked a great deal about U. S. military omnipotence, compared America to the Roman Empire, and projected an easy conquest and restructuring of Iraq. Far from feeling weak and vulnerable as Cheney claimed in his AEI speech, conservatives thought they had no limits. They didn't have to worry about human rights because international law was for tin pot guys like Charles Taylor and Slobodan Milosevic. They didn't have to worry about the reactions of other countries because the U. S. was so much more powerful than anyone else. They didn't have to worry about American interests in the manner of Brent Scowcroft and other timic "realists" because the U. S. was finally in a position to enforce its will. Conservatives ultimately thought they could leverage fear of another 9-11 attack into permanent support for the American power agenda laid out by the Project for a New American Century. From Sept. 12, 2001 to the end of 2004, conservatives thought their moment in the sun would go on forever.

But the whole post 9-11 conservative project was a village of sand castles that has been swept away and Dick Cheney's whole world is in danger of being swept away with it. The occupation of Iraq has been costly, the lies have been exposed, the edifice for evading legal structures has crumbled, the war crimes revealed, and the whole conservative establishment is tainted with incompetence and criminality. Where the conservative establishment once expected to enjoy a permanent majority, they now have to worry about the very real prospect of the Republican Party never returning to power. Where the conservative establishment once contemplated global domination, they now have to worry about being hauled before a truth commission or prosecuted for war crimes. For Dick Cheney, these prospects are so palpable that he has to introduce himself even to am elite conservative audience as "a-political" and actually address himself to the arguments for war crimes trials from the Democratic left. For Dick Cheney, having to acknowledge the influence of minority politicians, liberal bloggers, anti-war activists, and media powerhouses like Arianna Huffington, Josh Marshall, Stephen Colbert, and Jon Stewart is almost as humiliating as being put on trial. Having assumed for his whole career that people like himself would naturally dominate, Dick Cheney is now finding that his enemies are in charge and that he and his colleagues are the ones who are reviled, marginalized, and convicted of crimes in the case of Scooter Libby.

And it's driving him to treason.

At least in Cheney's own terms.

According to Dick Cheney, the whole debate over torture serves to weaken America and encourage our enemies. In other words, it's a form of "aiding and abetting our enemies" in the way that the right thinks the Constitution defined treason.

If fine speech-making, appeals to reason, or pleas for compassion had the power to move them, the terrorists would long ago have abandoned the field. And when they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don't stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along. Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for - our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity.

But Dick Cheney is the guy driving the debate on interrogation, torture, and terror policy not Obama's critics on the left. Cheney is the guy who is using his access to the media to push claims that the Obama administration is making our country "less safe." If al-Qaeda looks at the United States and decides that "our unity [is] gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted," it's because Dick Cheney is doing his best to undercut the national unity that has coalesced around Barack Obama, shake Obama's resolve concerning his policies, and distract Obama's leadership. Dick Cheney might as well be hanging out a sign saying "We're weak. Please attack us." As everybody in the anti-war movement knows from painful experience, that's the kind of thing the right calls treason because they view it as encouraging the enemy.

But for Dick Cheney, vindicating himself, the conservative establishment, and the "natural order" seems to be more important than American security. In fact, one wonders if Cheney's well of bitterness doesn't run so deep that he wouldn't welcome a major terrorist attack as sweet vindication.

Bush's Team of Super Assholes

The buzz about Robert Draper's GQ article on Donald Rumsfeld has been that Draper found material indicating that Rumsfeld viewed the Iraq War through Old Testament references.

Draper's biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

But that's not the way the articles poses the Bible porn on the Worldwide Intelligence Update. But Maj. Gen. Glenn Schaffer was the one who took the initiative to include the Biblical imagery packaging. He was the religious zealot not Rumsfeld. According to Draper, Rumsfeld allowed Schaffer to go ahead because he thought of the Bible packaging as a good way to suck up to President Bush who seemed to appreciate any manifestation of religious zealotry.

" . . . publicly flaunting his own religious views was not at all the SecDef’s style—“Rumsfeld was old-fashioned that way,” Shaffer acknowledged when I contacted him about the briefings—but it was decidedly Bush’s style, and Rumsfeld likely saw the Scriptures as a way of making a personal connection with a president who frequently quoted the Bible.

And Bush liked the idea.

But the Pentagon’s top officials were apparently unconcerned about the effect such a disclosure might have on the conduct of the war or on Bush’s public standing. When colleagues complained to Shaffer that including a religious message with an intelligence briefing seemed inappropriate, Shaffer politely informed them that the practice would continue, because “my seniors”—JCS chairman Richard Myers, Rumsfeld, and the commander in chief himself—appreciated the cover pages.

Bush also liked the way that Rumsfeld obstructed, delayed, undercut, and otherwise threw sand into the operation of the Bush administration on defense issues. For Draper, Bush appreciated Rumsfeld's orneriness.

Bush also enjoyed Rumsfeld’s cussedness, his alpha-dog behavior toward the media. That same behavior toward his colleagues did not seem to bother the president. To Bush, rivalry was healthy, and the full extent of Rumsfeld’s conduct was not known to him for the simple reason, say aides, that they did not wish to trouble the leader of the Free World every time Rumsfeld jerked them around.

In other words, what Bush liked was that Rumsfeld was a super-asshole, that Rummy's self-centeredness, aggression, pettiness, and other negative qualities went so far beyond the normal definition of an asshole. Other Bush favorites like Dick Cheney, David Addington, and John Bolton were super-assholes as well. One has to wonder if Bush appreciated any other kinds of qualities in his subordinates.

Where Obama created what historical plagiarizer Doris Kearns Goodwin calls a "Team of Rivals," George Bush recruited America's first team of Super-Assholes.

It would have made a great comic book.

The Talking Corpse and a Man of No Known Color

Letter to John Yoo

Here's a letter I sent to John Yoo concerning the use of torture to elicit (false) information on the purported Saddam/al-Qaeda link.

Dear Professor Yoo,

I am a government professor at Morehead State University in Kentucky and a blogger at Open Salon and my own blog Red State Impressions.

I have several questions for you.

In April, McClatchy newspapers reported that Bush administration officials pressed the CIA and American military as early as 2002 to engage in torture (or "enhanced interrogations" if you will) for the purpose of establishing a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and thus justifying the upcoming invasion of Iraq.

Other reports on this topic--specifically by Lawrence Wilkerson--have emerged this week.

My first question is whether you knew that interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, confinement in coffins, sensory deprivation, or stress positions would be used to coerce prisoners into making the Saddam/al-Qaeda connection. Alllied to that first question is the question of whether you, or those with whom you worked, knew that were no major connections between Saddam and al-Qaeda and knowingly viewed the interrogations as seeking to elicit falsehoods.

My second question is how you would evaluate using torture/enhanced interrogations to provide justifications for a projected invasion of another country fits as an exercise of presidential power. Is this a legitimate exercise of presidential power? Is it a betrayal of the oath of office, the interest of the nation, or some other fundamental responsibility of the president? Is it a form of treason? Or do you see some other significance to these practices? My own opinion is that the Bush administration use of torture to elicit coerce prisoners into making the Saddam/al-Qaeda connection constitutes a betrayal of the Constitution that is unprecedented in American history.

But, I'm also interested in your opinion on these matters as a former Bush administration official and defender of Bush administration policies on these matters. If you choose to respond, I would publish your response on my quite modest little outlets and do my best to ensure wider coverage.

Yours,
Ric Caric

55 and Still Alive

Today's my birthday. Every day is a good day to be alive but birthdays are special reminders of that fundamental truth. Having recovered from brain surgery as an infant, I've long had a sense that I was living on some kind of stolen time.

And am glad of it.

Dennis Praeger Hates Europe

In his Townhall column for today, right-wing columnist Dennis Praeger continues the endless conservative rant against Europe.

Today's theme is the decline of European "greatness."

Outside of politics, sports, and popular entertainment, how many living Germans, or French, or Austrians, or even Brits can you name?

Even well-informed people who love art and literature and who follow developments in science and medicine would be hard pressed to come up with many, more often any, names. In terms of greatness in literature, art, music, the sciences, philosophy, and medical breakthroughs, Europe has virtually fallen off the radar screen.

As is usually the case with conservative claims about Europe, the United States or anything else come to think of it, this is simply not true.

Most of my training comes in the field of "social theory," an intellectual enterprise that involves an enormously wide range of theorizing about society, capitalism, psychology, power, language, gender, sexuality, literature, architecture, and other topic. Given that most social theorists have egalitarian world views, they tend to revolt against the kind of intellectual ranking that Praeger wants here. But the field has such an extensive intellectual root system with ancient sources going back to Plato and Aristotle, modern roots in Hobbes, Kant, Marx, and Nietzsche, and 20th century roots in Durkheim, Weber, Freud, Gramsci, the Frankfurt School Marxism of Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, and the Annales School of historical writing in France. So, certain comparisons can be made between contemporary social theorists and their sources even if those comparisons go against the spirit of the social theory enterprise.

Getting to the point, contemporary work in social theory stands up very well. So do European efforts. The most important dimension of social theory to consider in relation to Praeger's concerns is European post-structuralism and post-modernism. The European generation that pioneered post-structuralism and post-modernism is still passing from the scene. As someone who has read extensively in all of these authors, its sad to list those who have died, but Jacque Lacan died in 1981, Michel Foucault in 1984, Jean-Francois Lyotard in 1998, Jacque Derrida in 2004, and Jean Baudrillard in 2007. But big-time post-structuralism is far from dead. Among the pioneering European post-structuralists who are still alive are the feminists Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig.

As a generation of social theory that is still partially with us, this group of European social theorists stands up to any generation before it in terms of pioneering spirit, originality, and the profundity of its impact. I focused on Europeans here but there have been Americans like Judith Butler and Frederic Jameson who have contributed in fundamental ways to the post-structural movement as well. Ultimately, I think that the advent of post-structuralism will be seen as a bright clear marker in the development of a "global" social theory out of the various roots in "Western" social thought. At least that's the direction that post-colonialism and other developments in global social thinking are moving. Just like there was no going back from Plato and Hobbes (although many tried), there is no going back to "modern" Kantian, Marxist, and Weberian modes of thinking after forty years of post-structural critique and re-imagination.

Some other European thinkers who are "major," "great," and "big, really big" would include the German social philosopher Jurgen Habermas, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and the Italian novelist and language philosopher Umberto Eco. Habermas and Bourdieu have both been prolific authors whose work ethics would be the envy of any American conservative. Habermas' work on the public sphere from the 1960's is more influential than ever. For his part, Bourdieu writes classic books like Distinction more quickly than most people can read them.

European social theory is very much alive and well, much more so than American conservatism.

By the way, when has an American conservative ever written anything particularly great or memorable?

Dick Cheney to al-Qaeda: Attack the U. S.

Talking Points Memo argues that Dick Cheney is inviting the formation of a Truth Commission in relation to torture.

But isn't he practially inviting an al-Qaeda attack on the U. S. with his constant criticism that the U. S. is less well defended now that we're out of the torture business?