Glenn Greenwald Wrong on Dynamics of Freak Show

Glenn Greenwald's position is that the right-wing hasn't changed much over the last twenty years and is doing pretty much the same stuff to Obama that it did to Clinton:

But when was it different? Rush Limbaugh didn't just magically appear in the last twelve months. He -- along with people like James Dobson, Pat Robertson, Bill Kristol and Jesse Helms -- have been leaders of that party for decades. Republicans spent the 1990s wallowing in Ken Starr's sex report, "Angry White Male" militias, black U.N. helicopters, Vince Foster's murder, Clinton's Mena drug runway, Monica's
semen-stained dress, Hillary's lesbianism, "wag the dog" theories, and all sorts of efforts to personally humiliate Clinton and destroy the legitimacy of his presidency using the most paranoid, reality-detached, and scurrilous attacks.

I see things differently. Things are worse with the right. It wasn't until the George W. Bush years that the Republican elite coalesced arbitrary imprisonment, torture, and endless war, that establishment figures like Frank Gaffney were calling for the imprisonment of members of Congress, and prominent conservative intellectuals and Harvey Mansfield were calling for military coups or one-man rule. Where Rush Limbaugh used to represent the "right" of the Republican Party without advocating a lot of survivalist, conspiratorial, neo-Nazi junk, the "right" is now best represented by people like Glenn Beck who are eager to see the country descend into chaos. During the Clinton years, mainstream conservatives were looking to George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" as a way for the Republicans to appeal to people who were fed up with Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and the confrontationalism of the Republican Revolutionaries of 1994. Now, mainstream conservatives view the "Revolutionaries" of 1994 as wimps and sell-outs. In 2000, the "radical right" was mostly a collection of single-issue movements like the "Right to Life" movement and the NRA. In 2009, all of those single issue movements seem to have coalesced around the cause of opposing Obama.

Forces of Evil Lose to Wolverines

I was glad to see the Notre Dame Forces of Evil lose 38-34 to Michigan. Having rooted against Notre Dame ever since they hired Jesse Helms supporter Lou Holtz as coach in the 80's, I hope this year's team falls on its face again.

Richard Wolffe: A Pimple in the Acne of American Politics

It was disappointing to see Richard Wolffe getting a bye-line from the Daily Beast for a pointless article on Obama administration's health care strategy for the fall. As bad a representative of mainstream media whoring as this country has to offer, Richard Wolffe has been able to keep his journalistic gigs with the Daily Beast and MSNBC while also raking in big bucks as a partner in the lobbying firm Public Strategies. The bottom line for Wolffe is that he can maintain some liberal credibility while undermining the public interest on behalf of his corporate clients. It's a win-win strategy for Wolffe and a lose-lose proposition for the public interest.

Speaking of interest, Wolffe's article has no interest outside a "senior administration official" giving him a spicy quote about instant "you lie" celebrity Joe Wilson (R-SC) being a "pimple on the ass of progress."

In fact, the White House is more than ready to brush aside the now-infamous protest of Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who yelled at the President during his televised address. “I think this is a pimple on the ass of progress,” said the senior adviser.

Predictably, the rest of the piece is filler that anybody could have gotten from CNN and which Wolffe probably did get from CNN. Wolffe might try to do some real research or real thinking. That way, he could earn his six or seven figure income.

But that would probably interfere with making money.

Come to think of it, the "senior administration official's" characterization of Joe Wilson applies to Richard Wolffe as well. Wolffe is just another "pimple on the ass" in the acne of American political life.

Comedian World Domination

The comedian plot to take over the world continues to gain steam. First the evil comics made Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert into America's two most trusted newsmen. After their success in taking over the news business, the comedians gained more momentum when the producers of Saturday Night Live ran Al Franken for the United States Senate. Saturday Night Live didn't just corrupt the Democratic Party either. They also convinced the Republican Party to nominate a Tina Fey impersonator for Vice-President. When Franken finally won, the plotters at Comedian Central (not to be confused with "Comedy Central") were almost as happy as Obama bin Laden was on 9-11.

But the news keeps getting worse. Not satisfied with taking over the news media and politics, the comedians have set their sights on a really important target. That's right, folks. The comedians are taking over one of the spiritual centers of American society--"American Idol." Operatives from Comedian Central have succeeded in placing Ellen Degeneres as a fourth judge on the most revered program on television. What does Ellen Degeneres know about music . . . or anything else for that matter. Is nothing sacred? Have the comedians no shame? How long do the other judges have to live before the comedians kill them?

Outside the National Football League, "American Idol" is the most important center of religious experience in the United States. Now that comedians have extended their influence from comedy shows to news, politics, and the world of religion, there's probably no stopping them. America has survived two invasions by the British, the slave conspiracy, two world wars, the Cold War and the War on Terror, but it looks we'll at long last lose our country to the laugh merchants at Comedian Central.

This may be my last post. I think I hear the goose-stepping myrmidons of Comedian Central coming up my driveway now, tasers in hand.

The Progressive Media Fails on Obama's Speech

This is another in what looks like a series of posts complaining about the problems of the progressive media in covering the Obama administration.

I'm going to start with a quote from HuffPost's Dan Froomkin worrying about upcoming coverage of the health reform debate from the mainstream media.

The biggest challenge for Obama at this point, however, is the press. Will his speech be a game-changer as far as the coverage is concerned? Last night's triumphant visuals, including wildly cheering Democrats, and the resulting instapolls certainly proved a change of pace from the angry town-halls and barrage of lunacy that so transfixed our elite reporters during August. But the question is actually less whether the tenor of the coverage will change than whether the media will take this occasion to engage -- even just a little bit -- in a serious examination of the issues. Chances are, of course, that the vast majority of the coverage will continue to focus obsessively on politics and process -- and on the next conflict, the next gun-toting whacko, and the next spectacular bit of disinformation. That wouldn't be good for Obama -- or for the nation.

But where is the mainstream media going to go for their stories about Rep. Joseph Wilson yelling at Obama, the "next gun-toting whacko," or the next set of bizarre comments from Michael Steele--Instapundit? Rush Limbaugh? Fox News? Why bother. Such conservative sources will have at least some discussion of whether yelling "liar" at President Obama is a reasonable thing to do or carrying guns to Obama rallies is a good way for conservatives to dissent. Translating all of that into the desired "food fight" between the Obama administration and the right wing would be too much work for the mainstream media. Why should intellectually lazy mainstream media types bother.

That's especially the case because the mainstream media can draw its stories on right-wing antics from HuffPost. It's 10:58pm Eastern Standard time. Let's see what HuffPost has up right now. For their headline, they have a picture of Rep. Joseph Wilson of "you lie" fame along with four articles on the Joe Wilson story. Anybody reading HuffPost tonight--including the sheep-like mainstream media--would reasonably conclude that the most important thing about President Obama's speech as a political event was Joe Wilson's outburst. Not Obama's arguments concerning why health reform is necessary, his criticism of skyrocketing medical costs, Obama's attempt to pose himself as a moderate manuevering between "progressives" and "conservatives," or even his stories about seriously ill patients having their health insurance pulled. Instead of following up on the poor people who have died because of the inhumanity of the insurance companies, HuffPost decided to make Rep. Joe Wilson just as famous as Joe the Plumber.

It gets worse. Almost immediately below the headline is a story about Glenn Beck--I'm sorry two stories about Glenn Beck right below a picture of Glenn Beck. So far, we have pictures of Joe Wilson and Glenn Beck on what might have been considered a big day for Barack Obama and the health care debate. I had to push my "PgDn" button three times before I got to a picture of Obama and the picture of Obama makes him look thin and small compared to the full exposure given Joe Wilson. Progressives at HuffPost and TPM have been complaining all day that Republicans like Joe Wilson did not show proper respect for Obama and intimated that they were at least partly motivated by racism. And I think they're right. But treating Joe Wilson as though he's more important than Obama isn't much of a way to show respect for Obama either.

Scrolling down on Huffpost, there's at least three more stories about Joe Wilson, another story about the California politician who resigned after some pornographic bragging about his (alleged) affairs, and Jane Hamsher criticizing Obama. Compared to the wall coverage of Joe Wilson, the progressive HuffPost only has three articles by Froomkin, Maxine Waters, and Paul Begala praising Obama and commenting a little on the substance of his views. In other words, HuffPost is practically a warehouse for stories on the state of the right-wing antics and relatively little coverage to the speech itself. And even then, a considerable amount of HuffPost's coverage of the speech is about polling and the politics of the moderate, progressive split among congressional Democrats. Dan Froomkin complains about the lack of policy substance in the mainstream media, but it's not like HuffPost is any better. And given that HuffPost "rules the world" of the mainstream media more than Drudge, HuffPost has become a significant source of the problem for the mainstream media as well.

And it's not just HuffPost. Talking Points Media features a big picture of Joe Wilson with smaller pictures of Dick Armey and John Boehner. Altogether I count eight stories on Joe Wilson and only three stories on Obama's speech (concerning Tom Harkin, Ron Wyden, and Joe Biden). And even those stories are more than balanced by other stories about Michael Steele, Mark Sanford, and California sex-bragger Mark Duvall. If a Democratic politician really wanted to be featured on TPM or HuffPost, the best thing they could do would be to start seeing prostitutes or go one better than Mark Sanford and have an affair with an exotic Brazilian beauty. Maybe President Obama could get more coverage in the progressive media if he filed for divorce.

To be fair, Salon featured a positive column about Obama's speech from Joan Walsh even though it still ran more articles about the Republican reaction.

All in all, the big-time progressive media has its head firmly up its butt about Obama's speech, the health care debate, and health care policy. As bad as the mainstream media is, the progressive media doesn't have a lot of room to criticize.

Steeling the Jelly-Spines of Moderate Democrats

Marc Ambinder writes for his Atlantic blog that President Obama survived the teabagging offensive by offering the "public option" as a bargaining chip to conservative Democrats.

Initially, given the GOP success . . . in framing the option as essential to health care, its putative failure and demagoguery seemed to be a significant blow to the White House. But -- and here is the key point -- it became something for the Blue Dogs to "oppose" and thus satisfy their constituents' concerns about reform in general. Sen. Max Baucus's health care plan has been derided by many liberal activists because it seems to be a compromise upon a compromise.

This is about right. Republican senators Charles Grassley of Iowa and Mike Enzi of Wyoming might be the only two people in the country who changed their minds as a result of the townhall eruptions. Obama stuck to his guns and progressives stuck to their guns. So did moderate Democrats from conservative districts in the South. If anything, teabagger rudeness and intimidation might have put some steel into the jelly-spines of moderates.

Ambinder didn't see a single Democrat in Congress changing their mind as a result of aggressive conservative tactics. I didn't see any either.

Actually, the political process has now been simplified. There are only four real players right now: Obama administration, the Democratic leadership, Democratic moderates like Max Baucus, and Maine Republican Olympia Snowe. The Democratic players will try to work out a compromise and they'll try to keep Snowe on board. But Snowe representing herself, her policy interests, and her Maine constituents. The Republican Party has rejected health reform so completely that they're not going to be a party to any negotiations.

And the legislation is going to pass one way or another. If the Democratic leadership can't get 60 votes, they'll pass a bill on budget reconciliation with 50 votes.

It's really that simple at this point.

Concerning the public option. Ambinder thinks it's dead, but I'm not so sure. Today it looks like the wind is blowing toward some sort of "trigger." But what happens when conservatives demagogue the "trigger" for the public option. Obama and the Democratic leadership might decide that they won't lose any more votes by keeping the public option than they would by compromising it away.

What's going to be the political fall-out of the health reform debate. In my thinking, health reform is one more item that's killing the Republican Party. Obama's popularity might be down but the Republicans have sunk much further. Republican strategists think they have an opportunity for big gains in 2010, but my impression is that the Republicans still don't have the candidates, message, or money needed to win hard-fought campaigns.

So, I wouldn't be surprised if the Republicans didn't lose a couple more Senate seats while only scoring minor gains by defeating a few Blue Dogs in the House.

In other words, Republicans are still on the path to being displaced as a major political party.

An Urban Legend Grows: My Daughter "Stood" for Obama

While I was conducting an event at the Honors House tonight, I heard from a colleague that Miss Teen RSI had stood up during a high school class and said that it was time to listen to President Obama's speech. I was also told that the teacher had told her to sit down and that the class wasn't going to hear the speech.

Yes, I had a brave daughter who was willing to stand up to authority in the name of all that was good and true.

But it turned out to be an urban legend.

When I got home, the daughter in question said that she had sort of stood to make her hand visible but that she forgot what the teacher said and that it hadn't been any kind of put down or anything like that anyway.

All very mundane.

It turned out that about half of the high school teachers didn't show Obama's speech in their classes.

Not much of a surprise.

High school teachers are pretty conservative--especially in a Bible-belt area like this.

I'm just glad that they're not teaching the "Answers in Genesis" line in the science classes.

A New Perspective on Glenn Beck

Doesn't the new species of giant rat in this picture remind you of Glenn Beck?

Obama's "I Walked Through Five Feet of Snow" Moment

In a way, conservatives are right about President Obama's speech to the nation's schoolchildren being indoctrination. It's indoctrination into the dominant ideology of individualism. But it's hard to see why conservatives object. They believe in individualism just as much as Obama.

What I found charming about Obama's speech was this "standard parent moment of telling kids how tough he had it when he was a kid. Every parent gives this speech hundreds of times while their kids are growing up and every kid ignores this speech every time their parents give it. In our house, it's called the "I Walked Through Five Feet of Snow" Speech.

I know that feeling. When I was young, my family lived in Indonesia for a few years, and my mother didn't have the money to send me where all the American kids went to school. So she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday - at 4:30 in the morning. Now I wasn't too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I'd fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I'd complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, "This is no picnic for me either, buster."

For that matter, I did walk through five feet of snow to go to dances in a neighboring town while I was in high school. Or was it "I walked five miles through the snow?" I forget now. And maybe Obama didn't really take classes at 4:30 in the morning. Maybe it was 3:30 in the morning before he went out for his pre-school job in the oil fields.

Whatever it was, I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps just like President Obama. See, I still have the bootstrap scars to show for it.

Sympathy for Legarrette Blount

After yesterday's Boise State win over Oregon, Oregon senior tailback Legarrette Blount sucker-punched a Boise State player and then went beserk before being pushed into the Oregon locker room. Here's the video. There was some provocation. The Boise State player taunted Blount and slapped Blount's shoulder pads. But the provocation was nothing compared to what Blount did. Upon seeing the incident on video, University of Oregon officials quickly decided to suspend Blount for the rest of the 2009 season and effectively end his college football career.

It appears that they are going to keep him on scholarship though.

I agree with the punishment.

For his own good, Legarrette Blount needs to get out of big-time football for awhile.

But I also have some sympathy for Blount. High level athletes are expected to play with enormous intensity, reckless abandon, and testosterone-fueled aggression. But athletes are also expected to keep their emotions under rigid control at all times when they're not playing football and serve as role models for good citizenship.

It's an impossible demand and I'm surprised more athletes don't just go berserk like Blount did yesterday.

Anyway, I hope Legarrette Blount gets things worked out.

He certainly has my good wishes.

Where Have You Gone, Marion Motley?

I was shocked by this report on Shawne Merriman of the San Diego Chargers being arrested for choking his girlfriend. I always kind of hope these things aren't true, but they almost always are.

Who Was More Obsessed with Tea-Baggers?

E. J. Dionne argues that the mainstream media was obsessed with loud-mouthed teabaggers at the health care townhalls during August.

But what if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong? What if the highly publicized screamers represented only a fraction of public opinion? What if most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt?

There is an overwhelming case that the electronic media went out of their way to cover the noise and ignored the calmer (and from television's point of view "boring") encounters between elected representatives and their constituents.

But it's hard to believe that CBS, NBC, and ABC were any more focused on townhall disruptions than HuffPost or TalkingPointsMemo. The progressive media might have had a different agenda in covering the townhall protesters, but progressive outlets were just as obsessed as the mainstream media.

More Like "Heck" than Hell

An Alternet headline screams that "Obama Is Leading the U.S. Into a Hellish Quagmire." I'd say Afghanistan is more like "heck" than hell right now.

Olympia Snowe: Most Important Woman in the World

According to Ezra Klein, the White House has decided to make a deal with Republican senator from Maine Senator Olympia Snowe. In effect, that makes Snowe has become the new health reform czar. Back in the 1920's, there was a saying that "as goes Maine, so goes the nation." Now, it's really true.

Pat Buchanan and the Facts of Conservative Life

Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland and Hitler apologist Pat Buchanan is in full "Sympathy to Our Pal Adolf" mode. According to TPM:

According to Buchanan, Hitler's invasion of Poland -- which led to Britain's declaration of war on Germany, and the start of World War II -- was motivated merely by Germany's desire to regain the city of Danzig, which had been given to Poland in the Versailles Treaty. Had Poland simply negotiated with Hitler, war could have been averted. In fact, Hitler wasn't bent on world, or even European, domination. He would have been happy with just Danzig, Austria, and the Sudetenland, you see. Hitler "wanted to end the war in 1940, almost two years before the trains began to roll to the camps." It was only thanks to the aggression of Britain, Russia, and the U.S. that the conflict was expanded. So, goes the implication, any deaths that occurred after 1940 -- including the 6 million that comprised the Holocaust -- are on the Allies' heads.

But Buchanan is just being an honest conservative here. Every conservative defense of tyranny, domination, cruelty, or oppression begins with the premise that the stronger party is provoked into aggression by their targets. That's true of wife-beating husbands and rapists. It was also the case with conservative justifications of slaveholders and segregationist lynch mobs. The Bush administration used the fact of Iraqi resistance as a justification for the destruction of Iraqi cities like Fallujah. The only thing that Pat Buchanan is doing here is extending a core conservative view to a previously taboo subject in the form of Adolf Hitler.

Otherwise, defending the cruelty of the stronger party is just a fact of conservative life.

Good News on the Book Proposal Front

Moving one step forward--I got a very favorable reaction from a series editor at a very good academic press. Now, I just have to avoid the two steps back thing.

Jenna Bush as Royalty

Glenn Greenwald criticizes NBC's selection of George W. Bush's daughter Jenna Bush Hager as a Today Show correspondent as an example of the media stockpiling "American royalty."

Greenwald points to plenty of other examples as well.

They should convene a panel for the next Meet the Press with Jenna Bush Hager, Luke Russert, Liz Cheney, Megan McCain and Jonah Goldberg, and they should have Chris Wallace moderate it. They can all bash affirmative action and talk about how vitally important it is that the U.S. remain a Great Meritocracy because it's really unfair for anything other than merit to determine position and employment.

He could have mentioned Maria Shriver and just about any Kennedy as examples of royalty on the Democratic side as well, although there's still the conundrum of why the Kennedy's are the only Democratic side accepted as American royalty.

Which brings us to Jenna Bush.

It's curious to me that NBC is bringing Jenna Bush on board as a royalty hire. Given that George W. Bush has just about as much clout after leaving office as Richard II, the hiring of his daughter has to be seen more as an act of "royalty defiance" than anything else.

For her sake, I hope Jenna Bush is better at being a reporter than dad was at being president.

Ted's Replacement?

Victoria Kennedy sounds almost as good for the Senate in Massachusetts as Caroline Kennedy sounded for the Senate in New York.

Conservatives Should Give Up on Christianity

I've always been surprised that more conservatives don't convert to some sort of "Looking Out for Number One"--"God Wants You To Make Tons of Money"--"Screw People Over As Much as You Can"--"Torture Anybody You Please"--kind of religion.

Wait a minute. That's what conservatives have made of Christianity.

But Jesus objects.

Even an atheist like myself can see from the New Testament that Jesus and the authors of the New Testament gospels had enormous contempt for the wealthy and powerful and he hated the Pharisees mostly because he saw them as self-righteous pricks.

People like James Dobson.

Jesus thought of the poor as blessed and headed for heaven. In the Luke version of the Sermon on the Mount from Luke 6:20-24, Jesus proclaims "Blessed be ye poor for yours is the kingdom of God." That sounds nice and well-intentioned. But it's also part of the core of Jesus' theology. The poor are "blessed" and are saved whether they believe in Jesus or not because the human condition of being poor, abused, deprived, and suffering prefigures the sacrifice of Jesus himself. In other words, the poor are like Jesus while the wealthy and powerful are cursed and condemned to eternal suffering because they're a lot like the people who end up crucifying Jesus. Also in Luke 6:2024: "But woe unto you that are rich! For ye have received your consolation. (quotes from King James Version)

But where Jesus really nails the analogy between the poor and suffering and himself was in Matthew 25:31-46. I'll quote this at length.

"Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me. Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels: for I was hungry, and ye did not give me to eat; I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me not in; naked, and ye clothed me not; sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer, saying, Lord, when saw we thee hungry, or a thirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these least, ye did it not unto me. And these shall go away into eternal punishment: but the righteous into eternal life."

Jesus is already in those who are hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, imprisoned, and living in strange lands. That's why those who minister to the "truly disadvantaged" are blessed and welcome in heavy and those who refuse aid are damned and "shall go away into eternal punishment."

What the religious right is doing in the health care debate is "refusing aid" to the working poor, uninsured people, and illegal immigrants in the United States who need help assistance the most. People on the right could say that they just don't want "government" to provide that aid. Given the ferociousness with which Jesus damns those who refuse such aid, it's hard to imagine that he would accept such a lame excuse.

That's why it's hard for me to see why conservatives remain Christians. Who would want to be part of a religion that condemns people like themselves to eternal punishment?

An End to State Funerals

I have to admit that I just hate the kind of "state funeral" that's been mounted for Ted Kennedy today. The monumentality of the wrongfulness and absurdity of this kind of event is beyond my literary ability to conceive and describe. But let's call it depressing, ugly, morally sick, bad democratic theory, bad politics, and bad history for starters.

A state funeral is also a horrifying way to honor Ted Kennedy's real accomplishments.

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For the purposes of this post, I'm just going to stick with emphasizing the depressing character of it all though.

Starting with the church in the above picture--the "Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help." In the picture taken from the high angle, the basilica itself looks like a tomb just as much as Ted Kennedy's casket. I'm not a religious person and have not been in a church for a religous purpose for 34 years. But I know enough church language to know that the room where the service was being held is called a "sanctuary." At Kennedy's funeral, the sanctuary looks like a mass grave and the participants look like they're already dead but still under the illusion that they're alive. What happens when Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and the Clintons leave the basilica. Are they going to spring back to life? I doubt it. There are enough images in our culture of the dead having a kind of life as vampires, werewolves, the undead, or whatever Bruce Willis was in the "Sixth Sense" that we can't really tell who's living and dead anymore. The people at Ted Kennedy's funeral look like they're already navigating the line of being dead but not really knowing it.

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The effect of living death is enhanced by the fact that the men at Ted Kennedy's funeral are dressed almost uniformly in shades of blue and charcoal-gray. The surface thought is that the "somber" colors are appropriate for a funeral and don't have any significance beyond that. But the thought is mistaken. These are the suits that elite men wear every day of their working lives. What the suits represent in the basilica is what they represent at the White House, in Congress, in business, and in the media. And what they look like to me is little blue and gray caskets for the ashen-faced men within them. Like Diogenes carrying around his coffin with him, all of the important men at the funeral look like they're encased in coffins. But where Diogenes was joking (at least I think he was), the men at Ted Kennedy's funeral look like they live their "undeath" every day. Or maybe they view their everyday lives as an on-going funeral.

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What makes this depressing is to think that these men (and women) are the cream of "our" elite, the Democratic, liberal, progressive, socially conscious, rational, caring, thoughtful elite, and that they are just as much the undead as the Dick Cheney's and Rupert Murdoch's of the world. Even if Barack Obama isn't as fully committed to being a war criminal as Dick Cheney, he's still cut from the same blue and grey cloth, still pulled to the undead existence that characterizes the elite, and still pulling the rest of us into the sphere of the undead ourselves.