Kathleen Parker's Blood, Iron, and Soil

If I was king for the day in the liberal world, one of my first commands would be that all liberals "count to ten" before getting "outraged" over the latest conservative political or cultural stunt.

People on the left tend to hit the moral outrage button first whether it's Ann Couter referring to Democratic leaders as "faggots," George Bush talking about Barack Obama in terms of appeasement, or John Hagee's anti-Catholic bigotry.

And that's a big mistake.

In fact, "outrage" is such an emotional reaction that liberals often fail to investigate why conservative polemicists make these kinds of provocative statements. Conservatives are trying to sell books, market radio shows, pump up conservative candidates, and support right-wing causes. How does racist, religiously bigoted, and homophobic statements fit into the marketplace and political strategies of people on the right? How do these kinds of statements actually fit in the American cultural landscape? Because liberals are so quickly outraged by right-wing defiance of political morality, we often miss much of what's going on in the world of conservative polemics.

Perhaps the most important dimension of conservative polemics that liberals fail to understand is the significance of liberal outrage for conservatives. Conservatives make bigoted statements specifically with outraging liberals in mind. From the conservative point of view, Rush Limbaugh looked extremely clever when his "Barack the Magic Negro" caused so much outrage while they thought of the outraged liberals as "emotional," "effeminate" because they were so emotional, and gullible for falling into the outrage trap. Conservatives always see themselves as winning these kinds of controversies unless someone like Don Imus goes too far.

In this way, a clever conservative columnist like Kathleen Parker is neither surprised nor unhappy that a liberal blogger like Glenn Greenwald describes her "Getting Bubba" column with its testimony to the "blood equity" of rural whites as "one of the most repellant columns one would ever read" or a Chicago Tribune writer called it "shameful and insulting to Americans of every stripe in this country." Parker has written in defense of date rapists and mooned over George Bush's irresistible sexual attractiveness. So, she knows very well how to outrage liberals. She also knows that liberal outrage will increase her clout as a conservative and further her career as an op-ed columnist. For writers like Parker, there's career gold in outraging people on the left.

But Parker's "Getting Bubba" column is worth thinking and liberals would see the full depth of conservative cynicism if they looked closely.

Parker has two basic arguments. First, building on a remark by Josh Fry of West Virginia about wanting a "full-blooded American" as president, Parker argues that "white Americans primarily -- and Southerners, rural and small-town folks especially"-- should be seen as "full-blooded Americans" because they've built up a full "blood equity" in the United States through military service and agricultural labor. This is the point where liberals get outraged because Parker's rhetoric purposefully mirrors the "blood and soil" rhetoric that the Nazis used to promote the Third Reich.

But what was Parker trying to accomplish besides outraging liberals? By defining Southern, small-town, and rural whites as "full-blooded Americans," Parker is one of a long-line of polemicists who have been looking for a way to give white people a symbolic privilege as "real Americans" without using specifically racist language. Richard Nixon might have begun the trend when he used the term "silent majority" back in 1968. For the late Jerry Falwell, it was the "moral majority." "Mainstream," "normal," and "heartland," are among the many honorific terms have been used to characterize non-urban whites either.

None of the people who promote this kind of language will admite to being racist, but they all mean to convey that traditionalist rural whites are just more "special" than blacks, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans, and more "real" than urban whites or the white liberals in rural areas. According to Parker:

. . . so-called "ordinary Americans" aren't so easily manipulated and they don't need interpreters. They can spot a poser a mile off and they have a hound's nose for snootiness. They've got no truck with people who condescend nor tolerance for that down-the-nose glance from people who don't know the things they know.

Of course, this is all nonsense. People who live in small Southern towns like Morehead realize that an uncomfortable percentage of the "full-blooded Americans" in town are actually "full-blooded Confederates" who fly Confederate flags outside their homes, display Confederate flag bumper stickers, and refight the Civil War with any "Yankee" they see.

Those who live in small Southern towns also know that "heritage" often means isolation from the main paths of American progress. Whether it's isolation from transportation networks, isolation from large-scale industry and finance, or isolation from national trends, West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky and other rural areas in the South have often viewed themselves as separate from the rest of the United States. Kathleen Parker may represent whites in areas like Eastern Kentucky as "full-blooded Americans," but whites in this area are also painfully aware of the stereotypes of ignorant hillbillies, Elmer Gantry religious bigotry, and Deliverance-style deformity and violence that define rural Southerners as separate from the mainstream of American life.

Given the tenuous connections of this region to the rest of the country, the "American-ness" of Eastern Kentucky is always somewhat in doubt. In this context, Kathleen Parker's tribute to "full-blooded Americans" is not only a duplicitous play on racial bigotry, it's also a bitter irony to rural and Southern whites she's exploiting to make her point.

Parker's second argument is even more interesting. She claims that:

What they know is that their forefathers fought and died for an America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years. What they sense is that their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative. And they fear what else might get lost in the remodeling of America.

Here, Parker gets at real dangers with multicultural narratives because contemporary multiculturalism excludes Southern and rural whites. In multicultural narratives, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, the 180 languages in the Los Angeles School District, and global cities like Miami are the future while the traditions of Southern and rural whites are only seen as significant as sources of resistance to that future. Multi-cultural liberals have schooled themselves in recognizing the value of African-American, Islamic, and indigenous cultures while still engaging in condescension toward traditionalist white cultures in America.

Multi-cultural developments and the Obama candidacy in particular have the potential to create a much wider cultural mainstream in the United States. However, the fully potential of multi-cultural America will never be realized until the multi-culturalism and white rural America come to an accommodation.








through their hard work in clearing the forests, breaking the sod, tilling the soil, and growing the crops.

The Lost Empire of Caric

This was an interesting week for the Caric family. Currently owning about 16 acres of land within city limits of Morehead, KY, we were tantalized this week with the prospect of possessing much more land than we thought.

The circumstances were these. We got a call from some new neighbors on North Wilson Ave. about settling the boundary between our properties. Settling the boundary was the only way they would be able to close their mortgage and they were eager to wrap it up.

The usual problem with these kinds of situations is that people have conflicting claims about their land.

But our case was different and interesting because our neighbor's survey showed us owning 500 feet of land bounding their property that we didn't think we had.

What was tantalizing about this was that the people who sold us the property originally told us that we were getting 22 acres. Likewise, the old deeds to our property claimed that it was 35 acres "more or less."

Our empire was growing every time we looked at a new piece of paper.

But then we took our deed and walked our property with someone who knew something about surveying.

That's when our dreams of empire died. Their surveyor must have made a mistake in our favor.

We still have 16 acres.

But it was nice while it lasted.

John McCain's Quest: The Search for an Honest Republican

Today, Tom Loeffler was forced out of his position as John McCain's finance co-chair because of his on-going work as a lobbyist for the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Evidently, McCain posed Loeffler the choice of either resigning from his lobbying position or resigning from the McCain campaign.

[Loeffler] is the fifth person to sever ties with the campaign amid a growing concern about whether lobbyists have too great an influence over McCain and the campaign. Last week, campaign manager Rick Davis issued a new policy that requires all campaign personnel to either resign or sever ties with lobbying firms or outside political groups.

Like a lot of conservatives who prefer Israel to the U. S., Loeffler decided to cast his lot with the Saudis rather than McCain.

But that creates a problem for McCain. How does he replace the departed campaign staffers? How many potential Republican campaign officials are not compromised by their connections with the various parties who might offend McCain's sense of ethics? Are there any experienced and effective Republican campaign officials out there who aren't linked to foreign governments, 527 sleaze groups, right-wing hate churches, Exxon-Mobile, Ann Coulter or some other unsavory party?

I'm not so sure.

What's McCain going to do?

I think he can turn Republican lemons into campaign lemonade by searching for an honest Republican the way Diogenes searched for an honest man. McCain could visit the Republican National Committee and business-oriented think tanks with a lamp in his hand and search for an untainted man or woman to help him run his campaign. He could also visit the Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh.

I'm not suggesting that there are no honest Republicans. There must be a few men or women out there who could serve in McCain's campaign.

But he might have trouble finding them.

Hillary Shines in Kentucky

Today, I took my daughters with me to see Hillary Clinton speak at a rally at Kentucky State University in Frankfort, KY.


The rally was as interesting and impressive as the candidate. The RSI family arrived about an hour and fifteen minutes early after a ninety minute drive. All of the major Democratic presidential candidates have made appearances within driving distance of our home in Morehead and we've now seen John Edwards, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton.

There was very little notice for the rally in Frankfurt. As a result, it was no surprise that there were fewer than 100 people there when we arrived. The initial group was older, relatively downscale, and feisty. There were a lot of women there in their sixties wearing sneakers, t-shirts, and lots of Hillary paraphernalia. Actually, I was wearing sneakers too.

Where the Obama crowd last August was well-healed and wore "dress casual," the early crowd at the Hillary crowd was so casual that it would be fair to say that they were ostentatious in their lack of concern for taste. The Hillary crowd also seemed more relaxed.

The early crowd had 10 or 12 African-Americans out of a hundred. So it looked like a representative group. But as the audience swelled to it's final size of 500 plus, the new arrivals were overwhelmingly white and a lot more prosperous and stylish looking. It was like an LA sports event where the cool people always arrive fashionably late.

Compared to the Obama event, Hillary's rally had bare bones organization. Where Obama's rally featured speeches from starry-eyed local high school students and a killer rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner that brought the crowd to their feet, Hillary was introduced by a couple of the usual lackluster Kentucky Democrats--Jerry Lundergan and an African-American state senator whose name I forgot.

Lundergan mentioned that Hillary had raised a million dollars for the Kentucky Democratic Party when they were almost bankrupt. Given that the Kentucky Democrats are almost always floundering and that I'm a Kentucky Democrat, I very much appreciated the help.

As a candidate, Hillary Clinton is very impressive in a different way from Obama. The Obama crowd was so jazzed up by the time Obama hit the stage that all the candidate had to do was hit his applause lines and the crowd went wild. Hillary was impressive in the sophisticated approach she took to her hour-long speech. During the first ten to fifteen minutes of her speech, Hillary was essentially campaigning for Barack Obama by focusing entirely on John McCain's wrong-headed ideas about tax policy, social security, health policy, and the war in Iraq. Without any seeming effort or segwe's, Hillary then transitioned into her own policy ideas giving patient and well-done explanations of how she would approach health insurance, energy independence, withdrawing from Iraq, and caring for veterans.

It wasn't "blow you away" kind of stuff, but Hillary was energetic, engaging, and effective in a way that led one to see her enacting these ideas as President of the United States.

Hillary's supporters are supposed to be a "low information" group, but Hillary's speech assumed that her audience was interested in policy, able to follow policy arguments, and viewed those policy arguments as important for their own lives. To the contrary, Obama speaks as though he believes that his upscale and impressively educated audiences have as little toleration for public policy as Chris Matthews or Bill O'Reilly.

Hillary Clinton was also impressive in the way she carried herself after the speech. Starting on the other side of the gym, she posed for pictures, shook hands, and small-talked her way over to us. At the beginning of this process, Hillary was working the crowd in the sense that she was initiating communication as much as others were communicating with her. Evidently tiring by the time she got to our end, Hillary allowed the crowd to "work her" for pictures, autographs, and brief testimonials about how much they loved her.

Liking attention but only liking "so much attention," Hillary was still determined to be warm, friendly, and giving even as it was wearing her out. The stereotype on Hillary is that she's supposed to be manipulative and controlling. But she seemed as genuine as the artificial situation and superficiality of contact allowed.

I was impressed.

Over all, Hillary Clinton showed how good of a president she could be. I'm voting for her next Tuesday in the Kentucky Democratic Primary.

John McCain: Maverick, Narcissist, or StudMuffin

Maverick vs StudMuffin. Dan Collins at the right-wing blog Protein Wisdom has taken to referring to John McCain as "Maverick."

Of course, there's a little irony there.

Conservatives don't like the deviations from the Republican Party line that gave McCain a reputation as a maverick during the Clinton and early Bush years. But "maverick" also has connotations of individualism, rebelliousness, and masculinity that the right-wing likes to project. Ultimately, Collins means it as a compliment.

But this goes to show that conservatives don't have enough respect for the sanctity of marriage. As this blog has observed, his wife Cindy likes to refer to John McCain as her "StudMuffin." If Collins respected the institution of marriage, he would follow suit.

John the Narcissist. Actually, I think "StudMuffin" captures McCain well as a tough guy who likes the world to revolve around, feed, nurture, and stroke him. Sure McCain's a man's man but he's also Cindy's little studmuffin to be coddled and waited on. A lot of traditional guys are like that in showing off their domineering macho but insisting on being constantly mommied by their girlfriends and wives at the same time. What makes John McCain different is that he insists on being mommied in his work as a national-level politician and expects the media, his fellow Senators, and everybody else he's around to treat him with the same kind of worshipful subservience that he expects from his wife. And when anybody fails to treat him as their StudMuffin, McCain throws a hell of a temper tantrum.

This brings to the narcissistic core of John McCain's presidential campaign. What McCain proposes is a kind of symbolic exchange. For his part, McCain will devote his presidential campaign to showing what a really extraordinary great guy he is. McCain has already done a tour of all the places that were so successful in "molding" his character as a patriot, public servant, and all around wonderful human being. That was followed up with a poverty tour that had everything to do with demonstrating that he is "a different kind of Republican" and nothing to do with addressing the problems of poverty.

But none of those manuevers held a candle to the narcissism of McCain's "State of the Union, 2013" speech where he declared victory in the Iraq War, celebrated the death of bin Laden, and congratulated himself on the success of his health care policies.

“By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom,” Mr. McCain said at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. “The Iraq war has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced.”

Who says McCain's going to be another four years of Bush. His "State of the Union, 2013" speech is an even bigger exercise in political fantasy than Bush's "Mission Accomplished" event. McCain projected all of his proposals as being enacted, all his ideas being effective, and almost all of our problems being solved. That's because McCain's a good man who's right about everything.

So what's the electorate's part of the exchange? The American public gets to recognize John McCain's greatness by electing him president and expressing our gratitude for the wonderful qualities that make John McCain such an extraordinary and extraordinarily successful man. In other words, John McCain's presidential campaign is giving American voters an opportunity to show their full appreciation for John McCain.

What a great guy! He makes me proud to be an American.

Working on the Heavy Joe Klein Bag

Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald eviscerated Joe Klein . . . again. Klein is one of the favorite targets for left-wing bloggers but Greenwald takes the prize for sustained ferocity. In general, it's Greenwald's unsurpassed ferocity that makes him such a valuable blogger.

Birthday Odds and Ends

They Say It's My Birthday. I was 54 years old today--54 born in 54. As always, I'm mostly happy to be alive and in decent health. I've got a great family, a job I love, and I'm living in a beautiful part of the world. Altogether life is good.

Blasts From the Past. Two of my undergraduate mentors Lew and Sandy Hinchman retired from their teaching jobs last week. They arrived at St. Lawrence University my senior year and pointed me in the direction of Hegel and Frankfurt School Marxism and helping me set my sails for a degree in political theory. They were unbelievably generous to me and gave me a lot of good advice that I wasn't able to take when I was in grad school. But I have tried to follow their examples and have done my best to be as generous to my students as they were to me.

I also heard from Tom McNeilus, a teacher in Virginia who grew up on my street in Waverly, NY. He was a really nice kid when we were growing up and he still seems like a really nice guy at the age of 54. Fifty-four!!!

Collapse of the Republicans? I talked with a conservative guy today who seemed convinced that the Democrats could finish off the Republican Party once and for all if they nominated Hillary Clinton this year. What he sees is that Hillary has a strong appeal to the white working-class conservatives and Reagan Democrats who the Republicans need to be competitive.

I'm not sure about this. After all, I know a lot of Democrats who say they'll vote for McCain if Hillary is nominated.

But the Republicans are on very thin ice. The GOP almost extinct in New England and have lost their base in the Northern suburbs. They're not competitive in the coastal areas on the Pacific and even less competitive with African-Americans, Hispanics, gays, and Jewish voters. Republican safe areas in the South (Virginia, North Carolina), Southwest, and Mountain States have become battlegrounds and the party is having trouble attracting viable candidates and raising money. My right-wing friend thinks that the GOP would fall through the ice and drown if they were deserted by Reagan Democrats.

My own thought is that an Obama win would cause something like a Republican collapse because it would signal a general refusal of the public to continue listening to the right. Having supported Hillary's candidacy up to last week, I still see an Obama win as really shifting the balance to the left in American politics.

More Important Than Hillary/Obama

Perhaps more important than the Hillary/Obama race in West Virginia is the run-off between Democratic candidate Travis Childers and Republican Greg Davis for an open Congressional seat in Mississippi.

The fact that Childers won 53-47 in a heavily Republican district means that Congressional Republicans are going to be worried sick about a total collapse in November. Childers is the third straight Democrat to win a seat in a heavily Republican district. Congressional Republicans haven't been successful at raising money, recruiting strong candidates, or generating any kind of interesting policy agendas.

Likewise it appears that GOP smear tactics might not even work among staunchly Republican voters this year.

All this adds up to a lot of Democratic confidence. Now, Democratic candidates have to go out and win the elections.

Hillary and Those Hard-Working White People, Part II

It looks like Hillary Clinton has won over those hard-working white people of West Virginia. With 63 per cent of precincts in, she's beating Obama 65-28.

Jinchi left a strong comment on Pmy Hillary and Those Hard-Working White People" post:

I'll agree that Hillary wasn't being deliberately racist, but you're giving her too much credit here. Hillary's comment was simply a continuation of the foolish Mark Penn strategy of dividing the electorate into finer and finer demographic categories (working class white voters without a college education). It has nothing to do with her view of America as a diverse society.

It is entirely about campaign tactics (who do we focus on, who do we ignore).I think this has been the fundamental flaw of the Clinton campaign and it appears so deeply ingrained in the thinking of her team that they've repeatedly alienated large segments of the Democratic base by publicly discussing it. This is where "insignificant states" and "latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock wearing, trust fund babies" comes from. It's where Geraldine Ferraro's nonsensical "luck black man" statement originated. It's why she didn't bother with caucus states (too many party activists) and it's why she gave up completely on black voters. She conceded entire groups forgetting that in the end, all the votes count the same. Obama was able to win by 30, 40, 50 points in key races because she didn't contest them. Meanwhile he kept her wins small by drawing just enough of "her" voters.

There's a lot that I agree with there and the agreement starts with the failure of Hillary's campaign strategy. In my opinion, the failure lay in refusing to take Obama's challenge seriously rather than in Mark Penn's (really Karl Rove's) micro-targeting ideas. Unwilling to believe that Obama could beat them, the Hillary campaign did not put people and money into the caucus states, did not do any campaign planning beyond Feb. 5, and did not commit themselves wholeheartedly to internet campaigning and fund-raising until it was too late. The Hillary campaign both under-estimated Obama's strength and over-estimated the solidity of Hillary's own support. As a result, Hillary's campaign didn't have the infrastructure needed to regain support after her initial poll numbers nose-dived in the wake of her "driver's licenses for illegal immigrants" gaffe.

Actually, I think that micro-targeting is a good idea in many circumstances. In 2004, Rove and the Republicans used micro-targeting as a way to appeal to narrow constituencies in terms of the interests and values of those constituencies as well as the broader themes of the campaign. For example, the Republicans identified "security moms" and "anti-abortion black ministers" as possible Republican voters and targeted their appeals in terms of the interests and values of those groups. Obviously, Rove was selling an ugly mixture of gay bashing, fear mongering, and war mongering. But micro-targeting was a way for the Republicans to add little streams of voters onto their core constituencies.

I don't think Mark Penn was doing much micro-targeting in Rove's sense. He certainly divided up the electorate into smaller and smaller groups as he try to rationalize Hillary defeats, but Penn never tried to add to Hillary's coalition by trying to split off groups that might be seen as Obama constituencies. For example, I don't know why Hillary's campaign didn't work on appealing to "working class African-American voters without a college education" as long as she was making class appeals or why she didn't do more stuff on women in order to broaden her appeal among white women even further. If I were a Hillary consultant, I would have used more black women as surrogates. That kind of additive campaigning would have been "micro-targeting."

Ultimately though, none of this is connected to Hillary's reference to whites as "white Americans." I still see that as taking white people off their racial pedestal and making them (us) just another group of hyphenated Americans. I doubt that Hillary meant the comment to be particularly meaningful but it still resonated as a matter of fact extension of multi-culturalism to white people.

I view that as a very progressive thing.

Life Under The Obama Rules

Commenting on a Newsweek article, Rich Lowry of the National Review Online is worried about the "Obama Rules" that Democrats hope and Republicans fear will limit right-wing smearing during the presidential campaign.

"The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968," [Newsweek] says, through "innuendo and code." McCain "may not be able to resist casting doubt on Obama's patriotism," and there's a question whether he can or wants to "rein in the merchants of slime and sellers of hate."

Here are the Obama rules in detail: He can't be called a "liberal" ("the same names and labels they pin on everyone," as Obama puts it); his toughness on the war on terror can't be questioned ("attempts to play on our fears"); his extreme positions on social issues can't be exposed ("the same efforts to distract us from the issues that
affect our lives" and "turn us against each other"); and his Chicago background
too is off-limits ("pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy"). Besides that, it should be a freewheeling and spirited campaign.

Needless to say, the Obama campaign isn't going to be able to put a lid on smearing. People on the right have a lot of money and a lot of ingenuity and they're going to be putting everything they have into developing the next the next Willie Horton or Swift Boat ad campaign. The right is going to be as vicious as they can be and some of the smears are going to hit the mark. The Obama campaign should expect that.

The question is whether anybody is going to take the onslaught of right-wing smearing seriously or whether the public has already tuned the right-wing out as a serious voice on American politics.

As a conservative, Lowry is pretty pessimistic on this point. In a telling reflection on how little confidence the right has in the conservative brand, Lowry demands that Obama refrain from calling John McCain a "conservative" or [labeling] him in any other way.

If "conservatism" has become such a negative brand that calling someone a conservative is a smear, the "Obama Rules" are just a reflection of how little the public wants to hear from the right.

Obama's Hillary Problem

Over at Daily Kos, DemFromCT puts a worrisome stress on the "fundamentals" of the 2008 election.

The important numbers are Bush at 31 and wrong track at 82. McCain may run better than most other Republicans, but he still has to run against the fundamentals. In addition to right track/wrong track and Bush unpopularity, far more people (38%) are uncomfortable with McCain's age than an African-American President (12%) or a woman President (16%) - the explanation for the pushback against McCain 'losing his bearings'.

Obama will run as a fresh face, and do his best to highlight where McCain and Bush are inseparable (Iraq, health care and the economy). McCain will do the usual Republican shtick about "liberals and Pelosi and San Francisco values", all the things that didn't work in IL and LA special elections (there are new Dem congressmen as a
consequence).

I'm optimistic about the chances for Obama in the general election. I think he'll win by something like 57-43. Currently, the ABC/WashPost poll has Obama up by 7. Others have Obama by 9 or 11. That looks good given that Obama is probably in a trough as a result of the Jeremiah Wright and "bitter white people" comment.

McCain has all of those "fundamentals" going against him as well.

Interestingly enough, Hillary Clinton had a lot of fundamentals going for her at the beginning of the Democratic primaries. She had universal name recognition, nostalgia value from the Clinton years, an experienced campaign team, good poll numbers, and the prospect of being able to raise record amounts of money.

But she still lost because a good chunk of her support was never very solid and her campaign turned off a lot of undecided Democrats with its arrogance, clumsiness, and racially-tinged comments.

Unfortunately, Obama has the same problem. He's solid with upper-income white liberals and suburbanites, African-Americans, and young voters. But support from independents, moderates, hispanics, and blue-collar whites is hesitant and thin. In the final analysis, Obama is going to convince large constituencies of uncertain voters to vote for him over John McCain. The presidency isn't going to be handed to Obama as the default candidate of the Democratic Party. Obama is going to have to "win" it.

Phyllis Schafly: Still Supporting Really Dreary Marriage

One of the most fruitful things about anti-feminist, woman-hating icon Phyllis Schlafly is that she really let's you know what conservatism has in mind for women.

Here's Schlafly on marital rape, but it's really Schlafly's view of marriage (via Feministing).

Could you clarify some of the statements that you made in Maine last year about martial rape? I think that when you get married you have consented to sex. That's
what marriage is all about, I don't know if maybe these girls missed sex ed. That doesn't mean the husband can beat you up, we have plenty of laws against assault and battery. If there is any violence or mistreatment that can be dealt with by criminal prosecution, by divorce or in various ways. When it gets down to calling it rape though, it isn't rape, it's a he said-she said where it's just too easy to lie about it.

From Schlafly's point of view, "[t]hat's what marriage is all about" for women, being available for sex when they want it and when they don't want it. Husbands can legitimately force wives to have sex when they have headaches, when they're depressed, when they're thinking about something else, or when they've just given birth to babies. Marriage means that women have pre-consented to sex at any time at their husbands discretion.

It also means that women have pre-consented to being forced to have sex as long as that force doesn't result in bruises, cuts, bleeding, or other visible bodily damage that could be seen as evidence of "assault and battery."

As long as there's no visible evidence, Schlafly assumes that it's a "he said/she said" and that "she" is a lying feminist.

Unsurprisingly, Schlafly notes that feminists (and millions of othe women) find this kind of marriage to be a "dreary" prospect.

Herald-Leader Cheapens Billy's Happy Moments

John Clay of the Lexington Herald-Leader worries about Billie Gillespie's recruiting of 14 and 15 year olds in a sports column today.

Gillispie put up his best defense Saturday during a 30-minute news conference with local reporters. He said recruiting is "very, very competitive." He said evaluations have to be made earlier. He said there are no guarantees, just as there is no guarantee an 18-year-old senior will have his high school game translate to college competition. Asked if he thought this new trend was good or bad for the sport, Gillispie said, "It's just different."
Different in a negative way, I'd say. Many of Gillispie's points are valid, but you still can't shake the feeling that this somehow cheapens the game. It turns coaches into speculators, not recruiters. It turns kids into commodities instead of individuals. In a world in which we ask kids to grow up too fast, it accelerates the process.

That's tentative stuff, but it's understandable given that Clay is a local sports writer whose living depends significantly on scoring interviews with UK basketball coaches like Gillispie.

In fact, Billy Gillispie is not just getting commitments from 14 year-olds like Michael Avery of California and 15 year-olds like Vinnie Zollo of Ohio, he's a pioneer in getting these kinds of commitments.

The only other coach doing this is Tim Floyd of Southern California. In Clay's terms, Gillispie is not just cheapening the game, he's a leader in "cheapening the game."

Clay also neglects--politely I think--to mention the significance of signing young kids to Gillispie himself. Signing Zollo was not only a coup for Gillispie, it was "the happiest day of his life." The next thing you know Gillispie will be pulling a Pat Riley and stop coaching the games so he can focus on recruiting ever younger players.

Perhaps Gillispie finds signing these kids to be a little too meaningful.

Hillary and Those Hard-Working White People

"A" raises a strong point in the comments to the "Hillary EndGame" post about Hillary's "hard-working" white people comment.

I've hung with Hillary as long as I can, despite generally preferring Obama's thoughtful approach to politics and policy (see the race speech from Philly). I was willing to stick with her in spite of Bill's racial comments and her trainwreck of a campaign. But after her no-longer-subtle race-baiting last week ("working, hard-working Americans, white Americans"), I can't stomach her any more. She is not going to win, and these tactics aren't anything but spiteful and divisive.

But I have to respectfully disagree. I don't think the "hardworking white people" comment was a very apt thing to say for several reasons which I'll articulate later. However, I view the comment as a progressive step forward in racial politics. Here's Hillary's comment.

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

To refer to whites as "white Americans" is a very progressive thing in terms of American racial politics. For years, the media and whites in general have referred to whites in generic sounding but racially charged language as "normal Americans," "everyday Americans," the "mainstream," or just "Americans." In this language, to be white (middle-class, heterosexual, etc.) is to be mainstream, normal, and American. To be black, Hispanic, Asian, poor, or gay is to be exotic, outside the mainstream, and "not really" American. Americanism was for white people. Multi-culturalism was for everybody else.

There has been some comment about Hillary's "white Americans" remark reading non-whites out of America. Actually, it's the opposite. By referring to working-class whites as "white Americans," Hillary is reading white people into multi-cultural American. Just like there are African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and gay Americans, there are now white Americans. White people in general might be a majority but white people can be divided into many different groups and Hillary's comment treats working-class whites as a specific American subculture rather than generically American. Because Hillary's comment gets away from representing whites as generically "real" Americans, it represents a triumph of multi-culturalism and somewhat of a breakthrough in American political representation.

The real clumsiness in Hillary's formulation comes with the honorific "hard-working." To me, this is a class-oriented kind of remark in which Hillary is looking to praise working-class whites. So she calls them "working" or "hard-working." The comment comes off as exclusionary in the sense that Hillary can be seen as implying that either non-whites or Obama's highly educated white supporters in towns like Madison, Wisconsin, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and Iowa City, Iowa or Morehead, Kentucky are not hard-working.

But I don't think that's the case. Instead, I believe that Hillary was looking for a way to include white working-class and non-college educated people into a language of specific praise from which they're normally excluded because of their relative lack of education, relatively low incomes, and relatively low political profiles (unless they're unionized). She didn't want to treat working-class whites generically as "regular" people the way white people are usually described. She wanted to praise them but ended up with a formulation that made everybody else sound lazy.

What I'd like to suggest is that Hillary was not being racially provocative but was instead being awkward and unskilled because she is plowing new ground in terms of political rhetoric. I believe that was also the case with a lot of the "racially-tinged" comments made by Hillary, Andrew Cuomo, and Ed Rendell (the exception was Bill Clinton's obnoxious comments after the South Carolina primary). Interestingly enough, the Hillary campaign has done a lot for multi-cultural politics in the United States even if they haven't succeeded in getting Hillary elected.

Hillary Endgame

The Clark Gable Look. The local Hillary campaign set up a table on the Morehead State campus last week and I walked away with a Hillary sign. But I felt like Rhett Butler joining the Confederate Army after they lost the Battle of Atlanta. The big 14 point loss in North Carolina meant that Hillary can't get the nomination as long as Barack Obama stays alive, isn't arrested for a felony, or hasn't been messing around with Congressional pages. Hillary's best hope was that the Obama campaign would deflate when Obama was pressed by the combination of his own bitter people gaffe, the Jeremiah Wright issue, and Hillary's criticism.

But the collapse didn't happen. So, Obama is going to win barring unforeseen contingencies.

Having said that, I don't blame Hillary for continuing to campaign any more than I blame a top athlete like Michael Jordan or Sugar Ray Leonard for coming back too many times. If Hillary didn't have a huge ego and an irrational determination, she wouldn't haven't gotten where she and I don't see any reason for her to drop out until she herself sees that it's over. Likewise, I'm going to vote for Hillary in the Democratic primary here in Kentucky and probably will still post some Hillary-friendly blog items.

But it's pretty clear that the Democratic Primary has entered the end game with Barack Obama at an overwhelming advantage.

Why Did She Lose? I saw an item in Matthew Yglesias about Hillary losing because of her 2002 vote authorizing the war. I don't think that's the case. Hillary's initial support was always fragile and dropped dramatically as a result of her own illegal immigration misstep, her MLK gaffe, and Bill's idiotic comments after the South Carolina primary. The question was whether Hillary could have done anything to make her support more solid going into the Iowa caucuses. I'm not so sure. The Obama people ran a very effective campaign and Obama himself did an excellent job of dealing with crises as they came up. True, the Hillary campaign could have done things better, but Hillary's toughness and tenacity didn't come into focus until she fell behind decisively and had to start really fighting. Given all the mainstream media scepticism, her "Bill" baggage, and the doubts among Democratic elites, I'm not sure that even the best campaign could have solidified her support. In my opinion, Hillary's main weakness was that her initial support was only a couple of inches deep.

Hillary for VP. I don't think that Obama is going to nominate Hillary Clinton for VP but I would respect him a lot more if he did. Obama is not likely to nominate her because Hillary did run an aggressive campaign against him, it might be difficult to imagine Hillary as a member of the Obama team, and Vice-President Hillary Clinton would still be married to her undisciplined husband. But Hillary also brings several advantages to the vice-presidency. In fact, Hillary now connects with white women and white working-class guys whose votes Obama. Likely, she has already shown that she can be a team-player in someone else's administration. Hillary's also very knowledgeable of the federal bureaucracy, has a lot of connections among possible nominees for Supreme Court positions, and has a strong national defense profile. Finally, a Hillary nomination would create a surge of initial momentum for the general election campaign that might put John McCain permanently on the defensive.

An Obama/Hillary ticket would be the strongest ticket for the Democrats in terms of both electability and governance.

And if something happened to Obama, Hillary would be ready to step in on Day 1.

Well, anyway. She'd be ready.

Maybe Billy G. Should Start a Blog

UK basketball coach Billy Gillispie told Ohio freshman Vinnie Zollo that Zollo's decision to commit to Kentucky made Monday "the happiest day of [Gillispie's] life."

According to one recruiting service, Zollo was the seventh rated freshman player in Ohio.

Just think how happy Gillispie would have been if Zollo were rated third.

More on Waterboarding Cedric Benson

A couple of points in relation to the Cedric Benson story.

One of Benson's passengers, University of Texas senior Elizabeth Cartwright, corroborates that Benson's boat had been stopped for "random safety checks" all six times she had recently been on it.

It seems that the police on Lake Travis had a principle of "100% randomness" when it came to Benson's boat.

Benson's attorney Brian Carney is also bringing up waterboarding as an issue.

Carney added Benson did nothing "aggressive" until after he was pepper sprayed, when he started screaming for his mother and the boat. He said officers threw his client to the ground and poured water on him to wash away the spray, causing Benson to choke. "They might as well have been waterboarding him," Carney
said.

The Cedric Benson story isn't getting much play outside sports sites like Fox Sports. Perhaps that's because the police behavior toward Benson has become so normal.

Ouch!

Obama is crushing Hillary 62-38% in North Carolina. I don't think any of the polls saw that one coming even though Obama won by that margin in a lot of red states like N.C., Idaho, South Carolina, and South Dakota.

Getting into Line for Obliteration

I'm not sure why there's such a big brouhaha on the left about Hillary Clinton's comment that the U. S. could "obliterate" Iran if the Iranians launched a nuclear attack on Israel.

That's pretty much what any American administration would do if Iran nuked Israel.

Of course, I imagine that we'd have to get in line because the Israelis would want to obliterate Iran first.

Personally, I don't care all that much for the Israelis than I care for Iran. But Hillary is just stating the fact of American policy.

Cedric Benson: Waterboarded for Boating While Black

One of the most severely under-reported stories in America today is our hair-trigger police forces. Chicago Bears running back Cedric Benson, an African-American, was hosting a gathering on his boat in Texas when he was arrested for what the police call drunkenness and resisting arrest.

Here's Benson's own account as reported by "AFP:"

There was no resistance on my part," Benson said. "Was I drunk? No. . . They gave me a field sobriety test, told me to say my ABCs and told me to count from 1 to 4 up and down. I'm thinking I passed all the tests, did everything right . . . Then the officer told me we needed to go to land to take more tests. I politely asked him why we needed to go to land to take more tests when I took every test. Then he sprayed me with mace . . . I'm not handcuffed. I'm not under arrest. I'm not threatening him. I'm not pushing him. I'm not touching him. And he sprays me right in my eye . . . Nobody saw what he did to me. I started screaming for my mother to come. That's when they put me under arrest. And the officer threw a life jacket over my head.

Once we got to land, the Travis County police grabbed me and kicked my feet from under me. So I landed on my back while I was handcuffed. They held me down and held the water hose over my face. I couldn't breathe. I'm choking. I'm begging the cops, 'Please stop. Please stop.' Then they picked me up and dragged me backward toward their car. And I'm still being polite, asking them, 'Sir could you please allow me to walk like a man to your cop car?' They just kept dragging me on."

The police have a different account, but I'll believe Benson until proven wrong.

In some ways, it's typical police stuff.

There's questioning Benson away from his relatives and guests who might be witnesses:

". . . Nobody saw what he did to me."

Then the police officer took Benson's verbal objection to further testing as an opportunity to spray mace in his eyes:

"I politely asked him why we needed to go to land to take more tests when I took every test. Then he sprayed me with mace . . ."

If Benson's side of the story bears out, the officer was committing an assault and already engaged in a cover up.

Then, the officer took Benson completely away from witnesses so that he and other police could continue to abuse him. This brings us to what's innovative in the police abuse of Benson or at least what I haven't heard of before. Essentially what the cops did was waterboard him.

Once we got to land, the Travis County police grabbed me and kicked my feet from under me. So I landed on my back while I was handcuffed. They held me down and held the water hose over my face. I couldn't breathe. I'm choking. I'm begging the cops, 'Please stop. Please stop.' Then they picked me up and dragged me backward toward their car.

Holding a hose over Benson's face so that he was choking and couldn't breathe is waterboarding and is essentially a controlled form of drowning. That's why waterboarding is defined as torture in both American and international law. Not that being a form of torture would stop American cops. It appears that they're also coming more and more to use tasers as a form of recreational torture.

My question is whether the Texas cops who arbitrarily arrested, abused, and tortured Benson were waterboarding him as a kind of experiment or whether waterboarding had become part of their standard procedure.

The racial angle is also interesting. Hopefully, more of the facts will come out. But it appears at the outset that Benson's biggest crime was being a black millionaire holding a gathering on a nice boat that would fit fifteen people or more. It seems that this was the sixth time Benson's boat has been boarded by police this year.

In other words, Benson was "boating while black."

This kind of policing has its roots in the conduct of white police during the Reconstruction and segregation eras when the police were looking for opportunities to intimidate black men.

Police criminality still seems to be more directed at black people than other groups. Police shootings of African-American males have been an especially serious problem in Louisville, KY and Cincinnati, OH.

Over the last five years however, the cops have developed hair-trigger tempers towards everybody. One of my colleagues made a comment about the high number of police abuse incidents in Lexington, KY and I've heard some ominous stuff from the Morehead State campus. One police officer screamed at one of my colleagues for getting out of his car during a traffic stop. To put the icing on the cake, the officer then filed a complaint accusing my mild-mannered and very short colleague of doing exactly what the cop had done.

It's like the police are looking at the whole American population with the same kind of contempt and hostility they used to reserve for African-Americans. Perhaps the police think that equality means equal exposure to abuse and humiliation rather than equal respect and dignity. But that doesn't make it so.

Not Much Damage to Democrats

There's a CBS/NYT poll out today with Hillary up 12 over McCain and Obama up 11. It's an outlier compared to the other polls, but I think the dynamic is going to be between a big Democratic win and a small Democratic win.

This isn't to say that McCain won't poke his head in front in the polls while Obama and Hillary go at it. But McCain is a quadruple threat for political failure as a presidential candidate. McCain is advocating unpopular policies like continuing the war in Iraq, cutting corporate taxes, and privatizing social security. He's also gaffe-prone and paying for it with his "100 years in Iraq" comment. Third, McCain is a disorganized candidate who hasn't ever been effective at fund-raising. And finally, McCain does not have the support of conservative activists. I've never thought McCain had a real shot at winning and there's no reason to think he does now.

Obama and Hillary are still hammering on each other really hard and the effect of that is to muddle the picture in the sense that the eventual Democratic nominee doesn't have a big lead over McCain. Recently, Hillary's been going up in the polls while Obama's numbers have been temporarily hurt by the Jeremiah Wright story and the incredibly stupid "bitter people" gaffe. Both are rising and falling as the news cycles from Hillary's Bosnia mistatement and Obama's difficulties play out. But they're both still muddled in relation to McCain.

I don't think the muddled picture is a bad thing at all. Hillary's big lead from last fall was extremely fragile and she didn't have enough time to recover once the initial balloon was punctured. The same thing would happen if the Dems were 20-25 points up now. That number would crash as soon as Obama or Hillary goofed up something minor like immigrant driver's licences and the McCain-friendly mainstream media would be working overtime to make sure that such goofs happened.

The Democrats are in good shape now and it's easy to imagine a Democratic nominee stretching out his or her lead in October and winning big in November.

Against Billy Gillispie

Today, I was in Lexington for a celebration brunch for a nephew who was graduating from the University of Kentucky when the name of Coach Billy Gillispie came up.

I should have blogged on this before, but I'm so disturbed by Gillispie that I've switched my local basketball allegiance from the University of Kentucky to the University of Louisville. I still have loyalties to Syracuse and Penn State (the local powers where I grew up), North Carolina (from grad school), Michigan (post-doc), Penn (dissertation research), and the University of California from my time in Oakland. So, I'm always going to be interested in a lot of teams. But I've supported UK basketball and football ever since I moved to Morehead in 1990.

However, Billy Gillispie gives off such a general aura of creepiness that I can't root for Kentucky basketball anymore. The fanatic way he drives his players, the super-high level of piety about himself, and the fact that he has no life outside basketball are bad enough. But I remember a John Clay article for the Lexington Herald-Leader claiming that Gillispie took the same approach to college basketball as the most fanatical kinds of fans. That's the last thing that any sport needs--coaches modeling themselves on the most obsessive and twisted fans.

Somebody at the brunch chimed in that Gillispie was also an alcoholic who wasn't trusted even to drive his own car. I'm not sure about the drinking, but I readily believe that Gillispie doesn't have a basic skill like driving. He probably doesn't have a lot of other basic skills either.

Given that Gillespie seems like a time bomb waiting to go off, even a driven, Type A, domineering guy like Rick Pitino seems like a regular person in comparison. At least Pitino has a wife, kids, friends he pals, and some business interests on the side. All Gillispie has is the next game or the next recruit.

Anyway, I always liked cardinals. I'm rooting for Louisville.

Hillary: The Right Kind of Pandering

I like Hillary Clinton's position on the suspending the gas tax for the summer because she pays for the tax holiday by putting an excess profits tax on the oil companies.

“Senator Obama doesn’t want us to take down the gas tax this summer and Senator McCain wants us to, but he doesn’t want to pay for it. I believe we should impose an excess profits tax on the oil companies. They have record profits that they frankly are just sitting there counting because they are not doing anything new to earn it; they are just taking advantage of what is going on.

“We ought to say: Wait a minute, we’d rather have the oil companies pay the gas tax than the drivers of North Carolina, especially the truck drivers, or the farmers, or other people who have to commute long distances.”

Is the tax holiday pandering? You bet. But the gas tax holiday is the right kind of pandering because it targets the oil companies as the party that should really be carrying the burden of gas taxes. That's why the Hillary camp thinks her proposal is such a big winner despite the media consensus that she's wrong.

Too bad Hillary didn't connect the pandering gesture with more ideas on how the balance between corporate power and the lower 99% of the American population could be corrected. I'd like to hear some proposals on using federal leverage to curb exorbitant CEO salaries, re-establish product safety regulation, push corporate America to be more environmentally conscious, and revise NAFTA to make it easier for governments to regulate business.

Hillary should be pandering on those issues as well.

Iranian Domination: The Latest Right-Wing Strawman

I've long argued that one of the strengths of right-wing propoganda is that people on the right keep coming up with shiny new lies to bolster their policy initiatives. "Splatter-Boy" Dick Cheney was especially effective in deploying a wide variety of dishonest arguments to justify the invasion. One day, Cheney would accuse Saddam Hussein of being involved in 9-11 and the next he would claim that we needed to invade Iraq to prevent him from becoming allied with al-Qaeda. Then, Cheney might say something about mobile bio-labs and WMD's. When one argument got stale, Cheney would trot out another and he wasn't afraid to recycle old arguments that had been long been discredited because he knew that it would take a while to discredit them again.

That's why Cheney repeated the Saddam/9-11 lie so often after it had been debunked by everybody in the known universe, including George Bush. He knew it would work for awhile.
And the fact that all of these arguments were lies didn't deter Cheney a bit. "Truth" was something to be sorted out by other people.

Splattering out new right-wing arguments on Iraq is essentially what Bill O'Reilly's was doing in his interview with Hillary Clinton:

. . . Clinton stumbles on Iran. Both she and Obama want out of Iraq, but the unintended consequence of that would be a much bolder Iran. Those fanatics will spin a U.S. withdrawal as an "Islamic" victory. And then, most geo-political experts agree, Iran would attempt to dominate Southern Iraq.

The old right-wing shibboleths on Iraq withdrawal used to be that the majority Shiites would commite genocide against the Sunni population or that al-Qaeda would take-over or that Iraq would become a base for attacks against the United States.

But these arguments aren't working anymore. So O'Reilly cooked up Iranian domination as an "issue" to be tossed at Hillary Clinton and Dick Morris liked the idea so much that he featured it in his own column.

The argument is that Iran would seek to "dominate" Iraq or at least the Southern Iraq area around Basra.

Hillary Clinton responded not unreasonably that the Iraqis would reject Iranian efforts to dominate on ethnic Arab v Persian grounds.

She could have given 10 or 12 other objections as well, the most relevant being that Iran doesn't have the resources needed to dominate Iraq or any part of Iraq.

Despite spending $600 billion over the last five years, the U. S. still does not "dominate" Iraq enough to count on the Iraqi government, armed forces, or police as allies. Consequently, the Iranians would have to spend more than our paltry $120 billion a year in order to achieve real "domination."

However, Iran's actual defense/military budget is 6.2 billion dollars per year. That's not only not enough to militarily or diplomatically dominate Iraq, it's barely more than half of the $12 billion U. S. military expenditures in Iraq for the month of April 2008.

In my thumbnail estimate, the Iranians have enough resources to occupy Iraq for about one week per year if they decided to invade. Otherwise, they're going to be stuck in the same boat the U.S. is in, trying to help the Iraqis stabilize by encouraging negotiations among the various Iraqi Shiite groups. If the Iranians are going to have leverage, they're going to gain it through the kind of diplomacy they exercised to broker the cease-fire in Basra.

Otherwise, they're not really a problem.

Youth Will Be Served

Tonight, the Atlanta Hawks beat the heavily-favored Boston Celtics 103-100 to force a Game 7 in their first round playoff series.

I'm not surprised.

I've always admired Kevin Garnett and I liked Rajon Rondo when he was at Kentucky. But Atlanta's been able to use its youth and athleticism to considerable advantage against the Celtics and has a real shot at winning the deciding game in Boston.

Youth and athleticism is doing better these days. That's a big reason why Golden State beat the Mavs last year and an even bigger reason why the Yankees haven't been able to win it all lately in our former national pastime.

Maybe NBA teams should start giving the max contracts to rookies instead.

"Mission Accomplished"

Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of George Bush's flight onto the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier with the famous and famously stupid "Mission Accomplished" banner.

"Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," Bush said at the time. "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on Sept. 11, 2001, and still goes on."

But what has the Bush administration accomplished?

More than I'd like to admit. They've kept fighting the war in Iraq despite the opposition of Congress, public opinion, and their own generals. In this sense, the Bush administration is a renegade government but they succeeded in intimidating the Democratic leadership into continuing the war.

The Bush administration has also succeeded in turning the United States into a rogue super-power. With the Bush doctrine, the United States reserves the right to invade any country that might emerge as a competitor. McCain advisers like Robert Kagan are following the logic of the Bush doctrine when they call for treating Russia and China with the same relentless animosity that we now reserve for Iran and North Korea.

Given that the Bush administration refuses to negotiate as a matter of principle and demands that every other country either give us what we want or face retaliation, it wouldn't be going to far to claim that the United States has become a force for instability throughout the world.

Much of the "rogue" status of North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq is connected with their reflexive belligerence, indulgence in torture, and general refusal to follow international standards of behavior.

The same is the case with the United States under the Bush administration. President Bush, Dick Cheney, and other figures in the Bush administration have been so eager to exchange insult for insult with bin Laden, Ahmadinejad, and Kim that American pronouncements now have the same homoerotic feel as the put-downs and threats issues by professional wrestlers.

Much worse, the Bush administration has constructed a vast international network for illegally confining and torturing hundreds or thousands of innocent Afghans and Iraqis who have been taken up by the War on Terror dragnet. Whether it is exploring new vistas or sensory deprivation, developing tactics for tormenting Muslim prisoners, or elaborating a web or international institutions for torturing prisoners and hiding responsibility, the Bush administration has made a point of flouting international law and disdaining moral standards that the U. S. itself was active in creating.

If such practices continue into the next administration (and there's a good chance they will), the Bush administration will have succeeded in making the U. S. into a war criminal state.

The United States needs to turn away from the path defined by the Bush administration. But the first step in changing direction is acknowledging how successful the Bush administration has been in turning the United States into a rogue superpower and war criminal state.

Today's Hillary News

1. The Call. I finally got a call from some Hillary people asking for money. They weren't modest. They wanted $50 on top of the $100 I've already put in. I was glad to hear the pitch. I get a lot of calls from the Obama campaign. Still, the answer was "no."

2. Turning the Tide. There's been some good poll numbers coming out for Hillary. She's starting to kill Obama among white working-class voters. Likewise, there are a couple of polls out with her doing better than Obama among independents and she's lengthening her lead over McCain.

3. An Exercise in Tenacity. Fighting from behind, Hillary Clinton is showing just how tough she is. It's what I've wanted to see from a Democrat all along. And its helping her.

No Need for Enemies

With friends like Jeremiah Wright, it looks like Barack Obama is now out of the market for enemies.

In making his remarks yesterday, Wright decided that his need to take an "I'm About Me" moment took precedence over the campaign of his most famous parishioner, a long-time friend, and the first black presidential contender.

Wright seemed to relish the chance to speak out after weeks of being derided in the press. He reveled in his retorts, high-fiving an audience member, pointing and winking at his supporters and mocking descriptions of him as Obama's spiritual mentor.

But my impression about Wright is that he's just an "I'm about Me" kind of guy.

What a jerk!

Military Atheist Speculations

Spc. Jeremy Hall is suing the U. S. Army over the harassment he's received for his atheism while he's been serving in the military. Hall seemed to have developed his atheist convictions while in the Army and began to be harassed while serving in Iraq.

Robert Farley of Lawyers, Guns, and Money treats Hall's primarily as a matter of religious freedom:

I really can't imagine a better case than this for a strictly observed separation between church and state. Religious pluralism in the military forces of the United States in inevitable, and every soldier will have a particular understanding of the interaction between religious responsibility (often none) and patriotic duty. The identification of patriotism and military service with any specific understanding of faith is, for reasons that should be obvious, enormously destructive. The idea of browbeating atheists into compliance is appalling in its own right, but is particularly troubling in the context of the War on Terror, which even the President has stressed is not, primarily, a religious war.

Actually, the agenda of the officers who were threatening Spc Hall was broader than that. They were trying to define the United States as a "Christian nation" and Hall's atheism as a kind of dereliction of duty.


When Hall organized a meeting for military atheists in Iraq, Major Freddy J. Welborn started to threaten Hall and the other atheists with rejection for re-enlistment and other penalties. But he also viewed Hall and the others as failing to uphold the Constitution.

“People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.

Of course, liberals emphasize that the Constitution makes no mention of Christianity at all and that the authors of the Constitution were emphatic about not setting up an official American religion. What Major Welborn was doing was taking the right-wing/evangelical perspective in the national debate over whether idea of the American nation has a Christian base and thereby opposing liberal views on church/state relations. Welborn was not only violating the wall between church and state, he was using his position in the military to promote his right-wing view of religion and punish enlisted men who didn't share that view.


Moreover, there's a chance that Welborn's views are shared more generally within the military. First in Iraq and then back in the U. S., Spc Hall received a number of threats in relation to his views on religion and seemed to believe that he was the target of a general religious hostility.


But why the hostility? Why the threats? Why the warnings from officers? I haven't seen any studies of religious culture within the military, but would like to offer up some speculations.


1. A Bastian of Right-Wing Culture. One possibility is that the right has succeeded in converting the American military apparatus into a bastion of conservative religious culture and hostility to liberal secularism. Given the size and power of the American military, I view the prospect of an aggressively conservative military as a great deal more troubling than violations of the separation between church and state. The perspective of a Francoist American military is frightening in any case and especially frightening if the U. S. withdraws from Iraq.


2. Small Unit Loyalty. I also wonder if officers and enlisted men view religious uniformity as one of the lynchpins of the small unit loyalty that enables soldiers to maintain their morale in depressing and futile situations like Iraq. According to CNN, one commander thought the religious question was so important that he wanted to know Hall's religious views right after a firefight.

Hall was a gunner on a Humvee, which took several bullets in its protective shield. Afterward, his commander asked whether he believed in God, Hall said. "I said, 'No, but I believe in Plexiglas,' " Hall said. "I've never believed I was going to a happy place. You get one life. When I die, I'm worm food."

3. Religion as a Potential Control on Misbehavior. Perhaps officers believe that piety among American soldiers makes them more pliable to commanders. I've seen a lot of reports concerning how angry American soldiers get at Iraqi civilians. Perhaps religion is viewed one way to discourage soldiers from acting on that anger through either killing civilians or fragging officers. Conversely, officers might also think that religious soldiers would be less likely to be paralyzed with guilt over the things they do. If people know they're "right with god," they might not worry so much about the right or wrong of last night's patrol.

4. The Rightness of the Mission. Christianity is a very flexible religion in the sense that it's possible to identify with God the father, Jesus and his self-sacrifice, the forgiveness of sins, the Virgin Mary, any number of Saints, and various kinds of Italian, Irish, German, or Hispanic ethnicities. It's a potent brew. The military is just as loathe to associate itself with Jesus' demands that people "turn the other cheek" and "resist not evil" as the corporate world is to remind us that Jesus hated wealth. But Christianity provides a powerful and comforting rationalizations for "the mission" in relation to ideas of God's will, human rights, and forgiveness for sins. It appears that lower level commanders don't want to do without those rationalizations.

The Terrorist I Know

I was interested today in John McCain's demand that Barack Obama apologize for his friendly relations with William Ayers, an "unrepentant" former member of the Weather Underground.

Actually, I know and am "fairly" friendly with a member of the Weathermen myself. Cathy Wilkerson is the sister of a local friend of mine and I've met her three or four times at gatherings where we've talked about stuff like how her daughter was doing in college. Everybody really likes her partner Tip.

But does being friendly with someone mean you know anything about them. Not in the case of Cathy Wilkerson. I've never been interested in 60's radicalism and haven't read anything about the SDS or Weathermen since I went through Kirkpatrick Sale's SDS as an undergraduate. That also means that I haven't read our copy of Wilkerson's own book Flying Too Close to the Sun.

I imagine that Barack Obama wasn't too interested in the past of William Ayres either.

The Dangerous Freedom of the American Police

Today, a judge found three New York City cops not guilty in the massacre of a guy named Sean Bell outside his bachelor party at a strip club in Brooklyn. As often happens, three undercover cops precipitated an "incident," then pumped 51 bullets into Sean Bell's car, killing him and wounding a couple of his friends.

It was hardly a surprise that the cops were acquitted. The witnesses were Bell's friends but a lot of them had rap sheets and they didn't exactly conduct themselves as respectable citizens in the courtroom. That might not have been so damaging with a local jury of everybody's peers, but the lawyers for the cops moved to have the case heard before a judge.

As a result, there was no jury.

The cops might not have been credible either, but they didn't testify.

The issue underlying these kinds of cases is the higher level of aggressiveness that's developed among American police since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Since the early seventies, the dominant image of freedom in this country has become the freedom of the police to commit crimes with impunity while they're at work. Movies like LA Confidential, police dramas like NYPD Blue, and reality shows romanticize the hyper-aggressive cop who disobeys orders, breaks the law, and kills people to pursue "justice." The Clint Eastwood/Mel Gibson cop needs freedom from red tape, freedom from supervision, freedom from second guessing, and freedom from considering the costs of so much freedom in the hands of self-righteous, trigger-happy kinds of guys.

At the same time, other images of male freedom have withered on the vine. Who associates freedom with heading a family, working-class leisure, cowboys, or John Wayne anynore? As a result, the freedom of the police has become the pre-eminent image of freedom in our society.

And the invasion of Iraq gave the cops more license than ever. Now, almost any excuse can trigger a violent outburst by police officers. About five years ago, one of my colleagues got screamed at for getting out of his car after he was stopped for inadvertently running a new stop sign. According to the cop's rationalization, the fact that the guy got out of his car led the cop to assume that he was a danger. In my view, the police officer was looking for a reason to intimidate someone and got what he wanted when my colleague got out of his car.

It used to be that blacks and hispanics got all the righteous violence from cops. But they're starting to generalize their intimdation to "respectable white people" as well. To give a minor example, two of the students in my freshman honors class have been tasered and another one was thrown to the ground after a traffic stop just last weekend (without being charged with anything). In fact, reports indicate that police have adopted tasering as a kind of recreational form of torture.

In the current atmosphere of police license, there was no chance that Sean Bell's family would get justice. In fact, there's little chance that anyone would get justice in relation to the police.

Who knows, maybe Peggy Noonan will get tasered next.

Peggy Noonan Hates the War on Terror

One of the amusing things about journalism is the efforts of reporters to derive BIG INSIGHTS from getting on planes, getting off planes, and taking cabs to and from the airport.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed today, Peggy Noonan comes pretty close to hating the whole country because she has to go through a metal detector at the airport.

All the frisking, beeping and patting down is demoralizing to our society. It breeds resentment, encourages a sense that the normal are not in control, that common sense is yesterday. Another thing: It reduces the status of that ancestral arbiter and leader of society, the middle-aged woman. In the new fairness, she is treated like everyone, without respect, like the loud ruffian and the vulgar girl on the phone. The middle-aged woman is the one spread-eagled over there in the delicate shell beneath the removed jacket, praying nothing on her body goes beep and makes people look.

Noonan is so disturbed by a world in which "normal" white people like herself are subject to the same random searches that I'm surprised she doesn't pledge her faith to Osama bin Laden.

What's Noonan going to do if Obama gets elected.

The New New Democrat: The Process Warrior

Today, I'll acknowledge my affinity with the liberal blogger Digby on two fundamentals for 2008.


First, I agree with her the Democratic nominee is going to beat John McCain pretty handily and I've been predicting for months that it's going to be 57-43 and I don't as yet see any reason to change my mind.


Second, I the nomination fight between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is a good thing. Digby has a post today on how the nomination battle is giving Democrats in states like North Carolina a reason to get excited because their votes are going to have a meaningful impact on the nomination.


The same is true in my state of Kentucky.


There are a lot of other positive effects as well.


The biggest positive effect is that both campaigns are developing much better combinations of discipline and aggressiveness.


The Hillary campaign has put Bill on the Dan Quayle trail of small out of the way places like Morehead, KY and demoted Mark Penn. They've also learned how to hit hard at emerging Obama weak points without worrying about credibility. When Obama foolishly talked about bitter white people and their guns, Hillary shamelessly pandered about learning to shoot from her dad. That's what she needs to do now and it's what she needs to do if she becomes President.


For it's own part, the Obama campaign is learning the parry and thrust of fighting to win each news cycle and the candidate himself had one of his best moments responding to the Jeremiah Wright accusations.


And Michelle Obama was sidelined even more thoroughly than Bill.


More needs to be done. Joan Walsh of Salon correctly observes that Barack Obama needs to follow Hillary's example and start doing a better job of proposing solutions for the problems he would face as president.


But more important than that, Democratic voters need to toughen up and embrace the ups and downs of the political process. A lot of white Democrats out on the streets want harmony, high-minded ideas, and an idealistic focus on policy rather than personality and symbolism. That's great in theory, but it's a recipe for disaster in presidential campaigns and failure in office.


Even more than Democratic politicians, Democratic voters need to realize that most political fighting takes place in the gutter and be willing to see their candidates roll around in the gutter with the Karl Roves, Lee Atwaters, and Bill O'Reilly's of the world.


Scott Adams of Dilbert fame used to joke about engineers becoming "process warriors." But that's exactly what Democratic voters need to become. They need to become "process warriors" who fight with Democratic campaigns and officeholders until the process turns out some progressive sausage for a change.

The Downside of Atheism

I've always been pretty open about being an atheist. I even announced myself as a "stone atheist" at a public forum on Church v State at a forum in 2006.

But the downside of public atheism is that I find myself talking about religion a lot more than I ever thought would be necessary.

Or possible.

For Easter, a local minister was interested in my comments on why I didn't believe in the resurrection of Jesus.

I guess he wanted to spice up his sermon.

Yesterday, a couple of the honors students invited me to a "Questions of Faith" activity in which I was totally out of place.

If it turns out that Christians are right about god, Jesus, hell, and all that, I imagine that I'll be punished by being forced to talk about Jesus for the rest of eternity.

But I guess that why it's hell.

Hill By Ten in the Keystone State

The Margin. Hillary won by ten in Pennsylvania today. Ten was as far out as the polls were willing to take her. I was thinking 12 because the polls have been undercounting Hillary in the states she's won. But the Zogby and Suffolk were right and I was wrong.

Keeping On Keeping On. I think it's clear that Hillary should push on. It's evident that Barack Obama is just as capable of self-destructing under pressure as the next politician. So, there's no reason why Hillary shouldn't keep applying the pressure.

The Focus of the Battle. Still the question concerning Democrats now is whether Barack Obama is the guy we really want. Curiously enough, Hillary has finally crossed the presidential plausibility threshold. Even though she's seemingly on the verge of defeat, Hillary has emerged as the default candidate if Obama fails the still lengthy series of tests in front of him. But the nomination is Obama's to lose now.

Wishing for Wish Fulfillment. I'd like to see both Obama and Hillary focus more on what they're going to do as president and I'd like to see the media cover that story as well as the attacks on each other.

Well, I can always dream.

Freedom from Education, Sexy Guns, and Rockette Racism: Why Obama will lose Pennsylvania

Having grown up on the Pennsylvania border, travelled throughout the state, and spent a lot of time in Philadelphia, I know Pennsylvania fairly well.

So, here are my comments on tomorrow's Democratic primary.

1. Hillary by 12. My record as a primary prognosticator is terrible, but my gut feeling is that Hillary will be at the outer edge of the polls if not a little further out. A lot of Hillary's margin depends on how well she does in the Philly suburbs that should be Obama country.

2. Bitter People. Obama really blew it with his "people cling to God, guns, and racism out of their bitterness over the economy statement." Sure, there's bitterness over the economy. Two of my cousins couldn't make their dairy farms in Northeastern Pennsylvania profitable, had to start working in the local Sylvania factory, and died in their forties. But that doesn't have much to do with God, guns, and race.

3. Guns, Freedom, and Sex. Most of the Pennsylvania guys I knew weren't any more interested in God than they were in being gay. But there's a certain extent that the guns represent an element of freedom that's not enjoyed in the tonier Philadelphia suburbs. My Pennsylvania cousins all viewed themselves as having the freedom to reject education, college, and the 60 hour/week world for hunting, fishing, and otherwise focusing on their own enjoyment. There's a lot less of that freedom in the upper middle-class suburbs. I haven't been in contact with my cousins for a long time, but I imagine that guns have also acquired the same kind of huge autoerotic sexual charge in Pennsylvania that they now have in Kentucky. As my students say, a lot of guys are more interested in their guns than they are in women.

4. Multiple sources for Racism. People don't cling to racism out of economic bitterness either. Unlike the South where racism tends to have monolithic roots in regional grievance, family loyalty, and nostalgia for segregation, Northern racism is fed by little trickles of sentiment here and there. For older people like my mom, there's a kind of standing up for the racist past that is Southern-like in its nostalgic rejection of the present. There's also a tribalism of Irish, German, Polish, and Italian ethnic identification that defines blacks as outside their tribe or any tribe. It's easy to underestimate the extent to which ethnic tribalism permeates Pennsylvania families, neighborhoods, schools, and other institutions. Keeping blacks out has been a way to maintain the integrity of the tribe. There's also the Rockette aesthetic racism where white people who haven't been around many black people try to keep blacks from moving into their neighborhoods, workplaces, or families just like the Rockettes tried to maintain an all-white line. In Philadelphia, there was a class dimension to racism as well. White guys liked to vaunt their access to higher income working class jobs than the black guys they worked with. All these little streams of racial hostility add up to a tenacious racism that is unburdened by the horrors of pervasive police brutality, lynchings, and violent resistance to integration.

5. Black Working-Class. Actually, I think Obama's "bitter people" comments indicate that he has just as little awareness of theblack working class guys as he has of rural white people. Barack Obama is the political equivalent of Oprah, Michael Jordan, and Beyonce in the sense that he likes to pose his candidacy as "beyond category"--the Alpe du Huez of presidential candidates. But a lot of black life in an area like West Philadelphia is rooted in a sense of place just like a lot of white ethnic culture. Black life is not racially exclusive in the same way as white ethnic culture (people were nice to me even though I did get mugged once), but it's a kind of geographically, educationally, and ethnically bound life that Obama has little feel for.

If Hillary and Bill hadn't handed the black vote to Obama after South Carolina, she'd have won Pennsylvania by an even bigger margin than I'm predicting.

Rediscoveries

After buying an Eric Clapton compilation at the new Super Walmart in town, I realized that I'd forgotten just how good "Bell Bottom Blues" was.

Alien Gods, Intelligent Design Prophecies, and Those Little Cell Bits

Although I'm an atheist myself, I'm not a big fan of atheist perspectives like those of the well-marinated Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.

Not that the "Christian" side is any better.

Dinesh D'Souza argues in a column today that the famous biologist Richard Dawkins has been thoroughly tripped up by the complexity of cells.

Here's the gruesome details.

Dawkins argues that evolutionary theory refutes the intelligent design idea that there was a God creating either the universe 4.5 billion years ago or life on earth 3.5 billion years ago.

What makes Dawkins' argument reasonable is that the book of Genesis postulates that the world was created somewhere 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. If the universe is 4.5 billion years old and life on earth is 3.5 billion years old, then it is evident that Genesis is a fable and that the monotheistic religions have no authoritative account of the creation of life.

Evidently an "old earth" kind of guy himself, Dinesh D'Souza counters with the idea that there was an "intelligent designer" behind the formation of life on earth.

But that doesn't make sense religiously. Why makes the "intelligent design" idea better than the highly detailed six day creation plan of monotheism in the Book of Genesis? Perhaps D'Souza thinks that Genesis was a myth told to satisfy the curiosity of pre-literate peoples like the very ancient Hebrews. But if Genesis was all the feeble scientific minds of 10,000 years ago could handle, why haven't there been any prophecies of intelligent design. Joseph Smith came up with 600 pages of new revelations for Mormonism. Why hasn't there been an intelligent design version of the Book of Mormon?

In the final analysis, Dawkins and D'Souza end up in the same place. According to D'Souza, Dawkins thinks that single cells are too complex to be created spontaneously and postulates that some kind of "alien" brought the cells from another planet. That's also what God is for D'Souza, the alien presence that brings the fundamental biological unit of the cell into earth.

But why would cells have to be the fundamental biological unit?

It seems much more reasonable to postulate that cells themselves evolved from pre-cellular bits of matter that formed out of the primordial soup, flared briefly into life, and then died for lack of any kind of stable organization.

As a stable basis for organic development, cells themselves would have been the outcome of eons of evolutionary experiment.

Not unlike the Gods.

RSI Milestone

Yesterday, we did a little height comparison in the RSI household and it turned out that Miss Tween RSI had nosed ahead of her older sister.

That day was always going to come. Miss Teen RSI is barely over 5 feet tall.

Still, it was interesting to see it arrive.

The Marginal Effect of Military Analysts

The New York Times had a much cited article today on the retired generals who appear on the television networks as "military analysts."

It's not much of a surprise but analysts like Gen. Montgomery Meigs of MSNBC, Gen. Wayne Downing of NBC, and Maj. Gen. Bob Scales of Fox were all shilling for the Pentagon. They all got a series of special Pentagon briefings, were flown to Iraq, and received talking points for their broadcasts. Far from viewing themselves as objective expert commentators, several of the generals saw their broadcasts as part of a broader "psy-ops" operation by which the Pentagon was manipulating American public opinion to support the war.

What's more, several of the retired generals had huge conflicts of interest because of their financial involvement with defense contractors.

As Glenn Greenwald observes, none of this should be seen as much of a surprise. Greenwald likewise digs out an old NYT story making the same point.

But a couple of observations can still be made:

1. Bush's War Against America. The Bush administration saw the American population as a potential enemy in the war on terror from the beginning. Bush's "you're either with us or against us" rhetoric didn't just apply to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria. "Psy-ops" operations are directed against enemies and potential enemies. The potential enemies included us as well.

Some of this is hangover from the Vietnam syndrome of conservatives thinking that the Vietnam War was lost on the home front rather than in Vietnam. But there is a domestic angle as well. Activist Republicans have long seen their conflicts with liberals as war. Newt Gingrich used to say that politics was "war by other means."

In this way, the Bush administration was getting ready to extend the war metaphor to its relations with the American population as a whole.

Of course, the big question is whether Bush and his cronies saw themselves as being really at war with the American population after public opinion turned against the war.

My guess is that future revelations will show that the Bush administration and conservative activists did turn against the population as a whole after the 2006 elections. There was a lot of noise about eliminating rights and establishing dictatorships from conservative intellectuals like Harvey Mansfield, Thomas Sowell, Gingrich, and Frank Gaffney in 2007. What I think is that future revelations will show that this anti-democratic chatter was also going on in the White House.

Perhaps that noise would have turned into real pressure to curtail American democracy if the Democratic leadership had stood up to Bush on war funding.

At the same time, I think that much of the hostility to the Democratic leadership originated in the public sense of the high constitutional stakes in ending the war. Since summer 2007, the Bush administration has been governing as a rogue administration and the public has a much better sense of the dangers in this than the Democrats.

2. The Campaign Failed in its primary objective. Like so much about the Iraq War, the effort to corrupt the military analysts was a failure. The Bush people weren't able to bag the most important and prestigious of the retired military analysts, Anthony Cordesmann. None of the other guys made much of a mark and I bet most television viewers couldn't tell them apart without a program. The other thing is that the pressure of constant failure from the onset of the insurgency to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the revolt of the generals, and the post-Samarra collapse functioned to turn public opinion against the war despite the best "psy-ops" the Bush administration could muster.

In other words, the whole Bush media apparatus failed in its primary objective of maintaining public support for the war.

But I do think the media campaign from the Bush administration and the right-wing has had an effect. What it's accomplished is to create enough doubt about the consequences of withdrawal that the Democratic leadership decided not to pull the trigger on a confrontation with Bush. Most of that doubt was among elites, but it was still enough to give the Bush administration the opening they wanted to continue the war.

In this sense, the corrupt military analysts were part of a relatively successful effort to buy the Bush administration time to readjust their war strategy and give them some hope that a pro-war Republican would win the presidential election in 2008.

The Significance of the 2008 Election. This sets up the 2008 election as a big deal. I've thought all along that the Democratic candidate would win handily. But there's still a chance that McCain, the conservative media, or the Democratic nominee him or herself could sow enough doubt about the Democrats that McCain could squeak out a win. If that happens, a McCain administration would spend its four years fighting to keep anti-war governing majority from coalescing just as the Bush administration is now. But if a Democrat does win, there's a good chance that the whole pro-war apparatus will go up in smoke and that the Democrats will have a ruling majority and some momentum.

What they would do with that is another question.