Josh Marshall calls this the first live-on-cable castration.
Monthly Archives: October 2007
Support SCHIP
John Amato explains how. See also Christy and Digby.
Legacies
Yesterday in the Washington Post, Bill Kristol expressed frustration that the U.S. didn’t do more to help Burma.
What about using our national power to help the Burmese people against their tyrannical rulers? Burma’s regime lost what little legitimacy it had with its bloody crackdown. Parts of the ruling elite must be nervous. Couldn’t we give at least some of Burma’s generals and soldiers reason to doubt the wisdom of slaughtering political opponents? Couldn’t we turn our intelligence-gathering capabilities on Burma to monitor, document and publicize what is happening? Couldn’t we tell the generals who are ordering and the soldiers who are carrying out this crackdown that they are being watched, that their names are being recorded — and that the day will come when there will be plenty of evidence to hold them personally accountable for their deeds?
I believe that day comes for us all, Bill, but let me address your questions anyway.
As I explained last week, a critical fact about Burma is that it shares a 2,000 kilometer border with China. Burma also supplies natural gas and other vital resources to China. Therefore, any messing around with Burma by a western power is likely to be of keen interest to China.
And there are two key facts to keep in mind about China:
1. China has the largest standing army in the world.
2. China is holding a big honking chunk of U.S. debt.
Niall Ferguson, of all people, has noticed this second fact, and it bothers him. He writes in today’s Los Angeles Times:
France, Britain, America: They each have had their era of hegemony. Now, however, they all belong to the club of developed debtors, with combined current account deficits of $970 billion last year. Other members of this club are Australia, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain. Apart from Iceland, it reads like a list of ex-empires, with the former members of the British Empire (energy-rich Canada excepted) in the lead.
Collectively, the developed debtors had to borrow about $1.3 trillion last year. On the other side of this great global equation is the club of emerging exporters. According to the International Monetary Fund, more than 40% of the developed debtors’ funding requirement last year was met by China, Russia and the Middle East.
The problem for the deficit countries is essentially that their people think the world owes them a living. Their politicians pander to this assumption by making a series of more or less incompatible promises: that expenditure on healthcare and education will always go up; that direct taxation will never go up; and that the assets against which voters borrow will never go down. The only way to fulfill these promises is to pump out ever more printed paper: bank notes, bills, bonds, stocks and the rest. The emerging exporters buy these. The net result must be a creeping transfer of financial ownership from West to East.
This process is about to enter a new phase as China establishes its own sovereign wealth fund to join those operated by the likes of Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and Singapore. According to Morgan Stanley, these funds manage about $2.6 trillion. In 15 years, their assets could reach $27 trillion, giving them control of nearly 10% of total global financial assets.
Bottom line, the more in debt we become to China, Russia, and the Middle East, the less power we have to influence anything they do. Ferguson thinks this is bad. Frankly, so do I. So let’s talk about why this is happening.
Furguson writes, The problem for the deficit countries is essentially that their people think the world owes them a living. Their politicians pander to this assumption by making a series of more or less incompatible promises: that expenditure on healthcare and education will always go up; that direct taxation will never go up; and that the assets against which voters borrow will never go down. Oh, those greedy people who want education and health care!
Ferguson didn’t mention the tab we’re running on the war in Iraq, currently estimated at $600 billion and climbing. The Congressional Budget Office says Bush’s long-term plans in Iraq will cost trillions. Even better, appropriations for the war in Iraq are supplemental rather than regular, which means that our military costs in Iraq are off-budget. That makes it easier for the Bush Administration to lie to the American people about the effect of the war on our national debt.
And for the most part it’s not American citizens who dissolve into twitches of apoplexy at the mention of raising taxes. It’s the Bush Administration. And why is that, you ask? Paul Krugman dropped a hint in his column today:
Here’s how Irving Kristol, then the editor of The Public Interest, explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: He had a “rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems†because “the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.â€
So Bill Kristol’s daddy, Irving, helped to sell voodoo economics to a gullible public in order to buy power — a conservative majority; a Republican majority. And now after 30 years of right-wing propaganda it has become political suicide — conventional wisdom says — for any politician to even think about raising taxes. So, we raise debt. Meanwhile, our military and intelligence resources are being depleted in Iraq, so that we are hurting to cover our real national security needs, never mind mess around with Burma.
And now Bill Kristol — a major supporter of the Iraq War, as is Niall Ferguson — wonders why the Bush Administration has no way to apply pressure to help Burma. Maybe he should ask his daddy.
Killer Law
Last November, Nicaragua became the third country in the world, after Chile and El Salvador, to criminalize all abortions. There are no exceptions; not for rape, not for incest, not for threats to the life of the mother.
So far, this law has resulted in the deaths of at least 82 women. Rory Carroll reports for The Guardian:
Abortion has long been illegal in Nicaragua but there had been exceptions for “therapeutic” reasons if three doctors agreed there was a risk to the woman’s life. Those exceptions were no longer necessary, said the Nicaraguan Pro-Life Association, because medical advances obviated the need to terminate pregnancies. “The conditions that justified therapeutic abortion now have medical solutions,” says a spokesman. Pope Benedict XVI welcomed the ban but added that women should not suffer or die as a result. “In this regard, it is essential to increase the assistance of the state and of society itself to women who have serious problems during pregnancy.”
The “assistance” the state offers is to let women die. The article focuses on a young woman named MarÃa de Jesús González who was denied medical help for an ectopic pregnancy. These occur when the fertlized egg implants somewhere other than in the uturus, usually the fallopian tube. Ectopic pregnancies occur from 1 in every 40 to 1 in every 100 pregnancies. Ectopic pregnancies have no chance of ending in a live birth. Eventually the growing fetus will cause an internal rupture in the mother, leading to bleeding, shock, and death. The developing cells must be removed to save the mother’s life.
González was told at the hospital that any doctor who terminated her pregnancy would face two to three years in jail and she, for consenting, would face one to two years. … What González did next was – when you understand what life in Nicaragua is like these days – utterly rational. She walked out of the hospital, past the obstetrics and gynaecological ward, past the clinics and pharmacies lining the avenues, packed her bag, kissed her aunts goodbye, and caught a bus back to her village. She summoned two neighbouring women – traditional healers – and requested that they terminate the pregnancy in her shack. Without anaesthetic or proper instruments it was more akin to mutilation than surgery, but González insisted. The haemhorraging was intense, and the agony can only be imagined. It was in vain. Maria died. “We heard there was a lot of blood, a lot of pain,” says Esperanza Zeledon, 52, one of the Managua aunts.
According to the Nicaraguan health ministry it would have been legal for the doctors to remove the embryo growing in González.
But such is the climate of fear and confusion that the protocols are widely ignored and misunderstood. The doctors who turned González away from the hospital in Managua thought it was illegal, as did medical staff the Guardian interviewed in Ocotal, González’s home town.
“The ban has people frightened. You could lose everything – that’s the first thing on your mind,” says Dr Arguello, a leading critic of the ban. So far there have been no prosecutions but many doctors are unwilling to take the risk on behalf of women who are often poor, uneducated and from a lower social class.
No one knows how many other women have died.
The Pope seemed to acknowledge an increased risk to women’s health but Nicaragua’s government has made no formal study of the law’s impact. Women’s rights organisations say their 82 documented deaths are the tip of the iceberg. The Pan-American Health Organisation estimates one woman per day suffers from an ectopic pregnancy, and that every two days a woman suffers a miscarriage from a molar pregnancy. That adds up to hundreds of obstetric emergencies per year.
Human Rights Watch, in a recent report titled Over Their Dead Bodies, cited one woman who urgently needed medical help, but was left untreated at a public hospital for two days because the foetus was still alive and so a therapeutic abortion would be illegal. Eventually she expelled the foetus on her own. “By then she was already in septic shock and died five days later,” said the doctor.
The Catholic News Agency reports that last month Pope Benedict XVI praised Nicaragua for its policies “respecting” human life.
During his remarks the Pope praised Nicaragua for “the position it takes on social questions in the international arena, especially as regards the theme of life, and in the face of no small amount of domestic and international pressure.”
The Holy Father said it was very “positive that last year the national assembly approved the revocation of therapeutic abortion,” and he affirmed the “need to increase the aid that state and society provide to women who have serious problems during pregnancy.”
American “pro life” organizations like Concerned Women for America also support the Nicaraguan abortion ban.
Shortly after the law was passed in November 2006, N.C. Aizenman wrote for the Washington Post:
Jazmina Bojorge arrived at Managua’s Fernando Vélez Paiz Hospital on a Tuesday evening, nearly five months pregnant and racked with fever and abdominal pain. By the following Thursday morning, both the pretty 18-year-old and the female fetus in her womb were dead.
The mystery of what happened during the intervening 36 hours might not ordinarily have catapulted Bojorge into the headlines of a nation with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the Western Hemisphere.
But a week before her death on Nov. 2, Nicaragua’s legislature had voted to ban all abortions, eliminating long-standing exceptions for rape, malformation of the fetus and risk to the life or health of the mother. Now, outraged opponents of the legislation have declared Bojorge its first victim.
“It’s clear that fear of punishment kept the doctors from doing what they needed to do to save her — which was to abort the pregnancy immediately,” said Juanita Jiménez of the Women’s Autonomous Movement, an advocacy group that is leading the campaign to reverse the ban. “This is exactly what we warned would happen if this law was passed. We’ve been taken back to the Middle Ages.”
So-called “right to life” advocates in the U.S. will tell you categorically that “There is no such thing as an abortion to save the life of the mother.” “Life of the mother” is not a valid exception, they say.
Of course, if ever their own sorry carcasses were about to be opened up by a couple of “traditional healers” without anesthesia in a last-ditch effort to avoid death by internal rupture and hemorrhage they might feel a bit differently.
Pennies From Heaven
What’s gotten into Tom Friedman? He’s written good columns two Sundays in a row.
Here’s last week’s, in case you missed it. Now, on to this week’s.
Every so often a quote comes out of the Bush administration that leaves you asking: Am I crazy or are they? I had one of those moments last week when Dana Perino, the White House press secretary, was asked about a proposal by some Congressional Democrats to levy a surtax to pay for the Iraq war, and she responded, “We’ve always known that Democrats seem to revert to type, and they are willing to raise taxes on just about anything.â€
Yes, those silly Democrats. They’ll raise taxes for anything, even — get this — to pay for a war!
And if we did raise taxes to pay for our war to bring a measure of democracy to the Arab world, “does anyone seriously believe that the Democrats are going to end these new taxes that they’re asking the American people to pay at a time when it’s not necessary to pay them?†added Ms. Perino. “I just think it’s completely fiscally irresponsible.â€
Friends, we are through the looking glass. It is now “fiscally irresponsible†to want to pay for a war with a tax. These democrats just don’t understand: the tooth fairy pays for wars. Of course she does — the tooth fairy leaves the money at the end of every month under Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s pillow. And what a big pillow it is! My God, what will the Democrats come up with next? Taxes to rebuild bridges or schools or high-speed rail or our lagging broadband networks? No, no, the tooth fairy covers all that. She borrows the money from China and leaves it under Paulson’s pillow.
Is it me, or is Friedman sounding a tad shrill?
Of course, we can pay for the Iraq war without a tax increase. The question is, can we pay for it and be making the investments in infrastructure, science and education needed to propel our country into the 21st century? Visit Singapore, Japan, Korea, China or parts of Europe today and you’ll discover that the infrastructure in our country is not keeping pace with our peers’.
We can pay for anything today if we want to stop investing in tomorrow. The president has already slashed the National Institutes of Health research funding the past two years. His 2008 budget wants us to cut money for vocational training, infrastructure and many student aid programs.
Not to mention providing health insurance for children.
Of course, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, the Democrat David Obey, in proposing an Iraq war tax to help balance the budget was expressing his displeasure with the war. But he was also making a very important point when he said, “If this war is important enough to fight, then it ought to be important enough to pay for.â€
Our bridges are falling down, too many of our children go without health care, we’re in debt up to our eyeballs to Japan and China, and the Right wants perpetual war in the Middle East, but by gawd we won’t raise taxes!
And why not? Because then we’d be going down the same road as sick ol’ socialist Europe, and we all know how badly they’ve …. wait a minute … um, actually Europe is doing pretty well these days. See also Ezra.
An Easy Choice
X-tians: The Last Stand
Tim Watkin says the Republicans are hoisted by their own values. James Dobson’s announcement that the religious Right will not support a pro-choice candidate is more than a blow to Rudy Giuliani’s candidacy, he says. The statement also “shows just how the Republicans have gotten themselves tangled in knots over all things moral and signals a turning point for the religious right in America.”
But for the religious Right, the only “value” that seems to matter is sexual purity, rigidly defined. Is that to be the sole measure of a leader?
Studies over the years have repeatedly shown that integrity is core to successful leadership; the hard part is deciding what integrity means to us as voters. A lack of hypocrisy seems to be the gold standard these days. But what about a willingness to admit and apologize for mistakes? Or simple honesty? Is an entirely untainted virtue now required? I’ve spoken to university students whose wanna-be politician friends even in their early twenties abstain from anything with even a whiff of controversy. Is that really the best preparation for wise leadership? In political terms, is it worse to tap your foot under a bathroom door, cheat on your spouse or start illegal wars? These are all moral judgments.
The left tends to scoff at the right’s emphasis on morality, but it has its own set of moral no-goes – just look at their criticism of presidential lies, illegal wars and torture, and politicians denying women the right to choose an abortion.
Still, it’s true that those on the religious right have made “character” a core issue in US elections and placed a disproportionate weight on “values” over policy. Their stands on candidate morality are now so entrenched, and their obsession with sexual purity so deeply embedded, that it seems no one among them has the ability to step back and see how insignificant those demands may be in terms of leadership performance.
The great leaders in US history would all trip over one moral hurdle or another. Washington had slaves, Roosevelt had a mistress and Jefferson had both.
I disagree that we lefties “scoff” at morality. Rather, we prioritize morality differently. Starting illegal wars is a serious offense against humanity; consensual sexual acts ain’t nobody else’s business. In any event, Watkin says, the religious Right’s quest for absolute purity has reached a dead end.
They elected a president who ticked all the right boxes but turned out to be an inept leader, while the candidates who tick the boxes this time are proving to be too bland, too lightweight or too out of touch with modern life. They have chosen sexual morality as their defining issue. Politically, they’ve painted themselves into a corner.
The truth is that other values are going to win next year’s election – sound judgment, competence, team-building, compassion. After dominating American politics for a generation, the religious right finds itself out of step with mainstream American, and even with many of its conservative pals.
I’ll take compassion over morality any day. In fact, I’d say that a person without compassion cannot be genuinely moral, no matter what rules of conduct he follows. But a compassionate person generally will do the right thing by his fellow human beings, rules or no rules. Sound judgment and competence sound pretty good to me, too.
Steven Thomma of McClatchy Newspapers says the power of the religious Right within the GOP is on the wane.
Today, their nearly three-decade-long ascendance in the Republican Party is over. Their loyalties and priorities are in flux, the organizations that gave them political muscle are in disarray, the high-profile preachers who led them to influence through the 1980s and 1990s are being replaced by a new generation that’s less interested in their agenda and their hold on politics and the 2008 Republican presidential nomination is in doubt.
“Less than four years after declarations that the Religious Right had taken over the Republican Party, these social conservatives seem almost powerless to influence its nomination process,” said W. James Antle III, an editor at the American Spectator magazine who’s written extensively about religious conservatives.
“They have the numbers. They have the capability. What they don’t have is unity or any institutional leverage.”
The Religious Right never had absolute power in the Republican Party. It never got the Republican president and Republican Congress to pursue a constitutional amendment banning abortion, for example.
But it did have enormous clout in party politics and a big voice in policy, and it’s lost much of both heading into 2008.
Worse for the religious Right, there may be an anti-Christian backlash brewing. David Van Biema writes for Time:
Back in 1996, a poll taken by Kinnaman’s organization, the Barna Group, found that 83% of Americans identified themselves as Christians, and that fewer than 20% of non-Christians held an unfavorable view of Christianity. But, as Kinnaman puts it in his new book (co-authored with Gabe Lyons) UnChristian, “That was then.”
Barna polls conducted between 2004 and this year, sampling 440 non-Christians (and a similar number of Christians) aged 16 to 29, found that 38% had a “bad impression” of present-day Christianity. “It’s not a pretty picture” the authors write. Barna’s clientele is made up primarily of evangelical groups.
Kinnaman says non-Christians’ biggest complaints about the faith are not immediately theological: Jesus and the Bible get relatively good marks. Rather, he sees resentment as focused on perceived Christian attitudes. Nine out of ten outsiders found Christians too “anti-homosexual,” and nearly as many perceived it as “hypocritical” and “judgmental.” Seventy-five percent found it “too involved in politics.”
Not only has the decline in non-Christians’ regard for Christianity been severe, but Barna results also show a rapid increase in the number of people describing themselves as non-Christian. One reason may be that the study used a stricter definition of “Christian” that applied to only 73% of Americans. Still, Kinnaman claims that however defined, the number of non-Christians is growing with each succeeding generation: His study found that 23% of Americans over 61 were non-Christians; 27% among people ages 42-60; and 40% among 16-29 year olds. Younger Christians, he concludes, are therefore likely to live in an environment where two out of every five of their peers is not a Christian.
This is a healthy development for all of us. For example, at some point in the future the Republican Party might be forced to campaign on issues that actually matter to the running of government instead of by stirring up fear and resentment among various factions of whackjobs. This might bring the GOP back to some semblance of sanity and increase the number of politicians in Washington who give a bleep about good government.
And it might also be a good thing for Christianity. I dimly remember that there’s more to Christianity than stoning transgressors for unauthorized sexual practices. Maybe someone will look into that.
Update: See also “A Nation of Christians Is Not a Christian Nation.”
Update 2: “Militant Atheists Are Wrong.” Clever.
“I never compromised my humanity.”
You must read this Washington Post article about a group of World War II veterans who were interrogators of Nazi prisoners. Petula Dvorak writes,
When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.
Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners’ cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.
“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess.
Blunt criticism of modern enemy interrogations was a common refrain at the ceremonies held beside the Potomac River near Alexandria. Across the river, President Bush defended his administration’s methods of detaining and questioning terrorism suspects during an Oval Office appearance.
Several of the veterans, all men in their 80s and 90s, denounced the controversial techniques. And when the time came for them to accept honors from the Army’s Freedom Team Salute, one veteran refused, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq and procedures that have been used at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
“I feel like the military is using us to say, ‘We did spooky stuff then, so it’s okay to do it now,’ ” said Arno Mayer, 81, a professor of European history at Princeton University.
When Peter Weiss, 82, went up to receive his award, he commandeered the microphone and gave his piece.
“I am deeply honored to be here, but I want to make it clear that my presence here is not in support of the current war,” said Weiss, chairman of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy and a human rights and trademark lawyer in New York City. …
…”We did it with a certain amount of respect and justice,” said John Gunther Dean, 81, who became a career Foreign Service officer and ambassador to Denmark.
“During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone,” said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. “We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”
If you’re a history buff, you’ll want to read the whole thing. Fascinating stuff. And you’d think any supporter of Bush’s interrogation “methods” would feel ashamed, wouldn’t you?
Well, forget that. Apparently the World War II guys didn’t have to rely on torture because they were dealing with a better class of people than interrogators must handle today.
That’s right. Nazis were nicer. Captain Ed explains,
It must be said, however, that they faced a different enemy in a different war. The Germans fought to expand territory through traditional warfare, at least as arrayed against the US and the West. While they conducted sabotage missions in the US through espionage, they did not use terrorist infiltrators to attempt to kill thousands of American civilians. They also did not face religious extremists who believed that death brought them to Allah and 72 waiting virgins for taking out women and children. One can make a case that the civilized techniques of PO Box 1142 worked because their detainees also believed themselves civilized and members of the Western culture.
More civilized? Um, the Holocaust? Ring any bells?
The eternally dim Sister Toldjah asked,
Does the Post believe interrogators would have gotten the same information from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed by taking him out to a steak dinner and/or playing games with him instead of waterboarding him (an aggressive interrogation tactic which, btw, saved lives)?
Of course, it’s possible interrogators would have gotten different information had KSM not been tortured. They might have, for example, gotten accurate information.
Yesterday on Countdown, Keith Olbermann interviewed former CIA Case Officer Robert Baer about this New York Times article on secret “interrogation” methods. I can’t figure out how to link to the MSNBC video directly, but you can find it on the Countdown page; click on “Bush’s Torture Woes.” Here’s a transcript I made from the video:
BAER: Keith, I’ve spent 21 years in the Middle East working for the CIA, I’ve seen the results of torture, in countries from Egypt to Syria to Saudi Arabia, and the intelligence is dribble. It leads to false leads. People will say anything if the pain is bad enough. It is useless, and I reiterate it is useless. I’ve spent three years now visiting Israeli jails talking to Hamas prisoners, talking to Shin Bet, their intelligence service, and they agree it’s useless. They use traditional police techniques, interrogations, legal interrogations, and they get more out of an investigation than torture.
OLBERMANN: As a professional and an experienced researcher now, I imagine something in the Times story yesterday might have been the most disturbing thing here, just on a professional, what in the world are they doing level, to you, the case of Mohammed, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was severely interrogated over a period of about two weeks, but the problem was as the Times put it, the initial interrogators were not experts on Mr. Mohammed’s background or al Qaeda. Instead of beating him up, does it shock you that the agency could have been much more easily served by having some guy who knew what the hell he was talking about and ask him questions? Because, obviously, a lot of these statements proved to be wildly false, and as you said produced extraordinarily misleading lines of inquiry and perhaps, who knows what else, besides inquiry.
BAER: We know that he lied about his participation in the murder of Danny Pearl, the Wall Street Journal journalist who was killed in Pakistan, his head cut off. He just made that up, that he wielded the knife. He did that under torture. The problem I have is that if he’s our main source of information on what happened on 9/11, and it was extracted by torture, which everyone will tell you is unreliable, I’m not quite sure what happened on 9/11. We’re just adding conspiracy theories when we get information like this, and that’s not to mention that we’re trying to win the hearts and minds of people in the Middle East, but that’s a moral question that someone should answer.
Once the Bushies are pried out of the White House it may take us years to unravel what’s real and what isn’t.
Finally, that wart on the buttocks of humanity known as Jules Crittendon doesn’t even bother making excuses. He just goes right into ridicule mode. But adds —
[T]he apparently genteel program at Fort Hood doesn’t represent the totality of Allied practices re captured enemies in World War II, which though famously a “good war†also included summary executions of Japanese prisoners. After they and/or their comrades were found to have tortured Americans to death.
— which exemplifies the problem, I think. Righties cannot separate vengeance from interrogation. They defend torture not because it’s useful, but because it’s gratifying.
Update: This is sortakinda related — “I Survived Blackwater.”
Conformity Nation
I grew up in a very small and very homogeneous town in which everybody knew everybody. And worse, I grew up in the 1950s, the most conformist decade in American history. It was a time and place in which the least deviation from a narrowly rigid norm was a scandal. Believe me, if the length of a skirt hem was off by so much as an inch, the wearer would feel repercussions. In the early 1960s I rebelled and took to wearing multicolor knee socks instead of the de rigueur white bobbie socks. It was an act of courage, I tell you.
So you’ll understand when I say that the “scandal” over Barack Obama’s lack of a flag lapel pin feels very familiar. We’re seeing the most suffocating, small-minded, über-conformist impulses of America writ large.
I don’t have a thing against flag lapel pins, especially in commemoration of 9/11. On the morning of September 13, 2001, I returned to Manhattan for the first time since the attacks, and I will never forget the flags I saw then, flying all along Madison Avenue and on the scaffolding in Times Square. It was a beautiful thing.
But the flag stands for freedom, and enforced conformity isn’t freedom. I say it’s a gross disrespect of the flag and everything it stands for to require lapel pin wearing as socially mandated proof of patriotism.
This “issue” is symptomatic of our national dysfunction. We can’t have honest discussions about our real critical issues — Iraq, health care, the economy — so we have symbolic squabbles over non-issues like lapel pins and MoveOn.org. Please, people, get a grip.
Bob Herbert writes in today’s New York Times:
The U.S. is going through a transitional period at least as important as the early post-World War II years. New worlds in energy, technology, the economy and global interdependence are either upon us or coming fast.
Yet much of the nation’s top leadership is either wasting its time on complete nonsense or trying with great determination to push us back to the era of top hat and tails.
Among other things, Republicans are trying to figure out what to do about Larry Craig, the loony senator from Idaho who got caught in a public toilet behaving as if he thought the promised land was just one stall away.
Democrats, unable to do anything about George W. Bush’s policy of eternal war in Iraq, found themselves reduced to fulminating in official Congressional proceedings about the latest wackiness from Rush Limbaugh.
Meanwhile, the president and his priceless band of can’t-get-it-right-wingers, are busy vetoing health insurance for children, dreaming up secret torture protocols, funneling lucrative federal contracts to friends and cronies and fulfilling their paramount mission — making the very rich richer.
So much for leadership.
And so much for Conservative Correctness. Righties can take their flag lapel pins and white bobbie socks and whatever else the “CC” police want to enforce and shove ’em where the sun don’t shine.
Update: See also Republican Attack Schtick Entering Backfire Realm.
Still Crazy After All These Years
Where to begin. Perhaps with Paul Krugman, who says right wingers have some sense of humor.
What’s happening, presumably, is that modern movement conservatism attracts a certain personality type. If you identify with the downtrodden, even a little, you don’t belong. If you think ridicule is an appropriate response to other peoples’ woes, you fit right in.
And Republican disillusionment with Mr. Bush does not appear to signal any change in that regard. On the contrary, the leading candidates for the Republican nomination have gone out of their way to condemn “socialism,” which is G.O.P.-speak for any attempt to help the less fortunate.
So once again, if you’re poor or you’re sick or you don’t have health insurance, remember this: these people think your problems are funny.
Over the long years I’ve observed some consistent traits among righties. One is that they sincerely believe most people think the way they do, even when polls say otherwise. In fact, “most people agree with me” is a common fallback debate tactic. Some have an almost frantic need to believe they belong to a majority, possibly because it makes them feel powerful. Erich Fromm wrote that people who find autonomy isolating and bewildering often will submerge themselves in an authoritarian group. Such people often have a strong sado-masochistic streak, Fromm said. They derive pleasure both from submission to a higher authority and from aggressively dominating people who fall below them in the social/power strata. “Humor” is often a socially acceptable form of hate speech used to keep less desirable people in their place.
Naturally, people who submerge their individuality into an authoritarian group place much importance on the trappings of conformity. Today much of the Right Blogosphere is in a tizzy because Barack Obama has stopped wearing a flag pin in his lapel. From right-wing reaction you’d think Obama had announced his engagement to Osama bin Laden.
Beyond parody, isn’t it? The wingers won’t volunteer for the war, their kids don’t serve in the war, they won’t pay taxes for the war, but by God they’ll wear their lapel pins!
No wonder this country is dysfunctional. We’re one big dysfunctional family now. We don’t have political factions; we have political pathologies.
Of course, they think we’re crazy. John Hawkins, a “mainstream” blogger of the Right, today explains what would happen if liberals ran America:
If the left were able to totally dominate American politics starting tomorrow, all 50 governors, every seat in Congress, the presidency, and all 9 Supreme Court Justices, my guess is that they’d immediately start implementing the worst aspects of European socialism wholesale.
In other words, you’d see socialized medicine, government takeovers of industry, reams of new regulations on businesses, sky high tax rates, the military would be gutted, the national debt would grow to unimaginable levels, drugs, prostitution, gay marriage, and polygamy would be legalized, penalties for committing crimes would be greatly reduced, and draconian speech codes would be put into place.
This would of course have disastrous consequences for the country and the world. The US economy would start to fall apart, crime would explode, and conflicts would break out all over the globe as terrorists were given free reign, other nations rapidly escalated their conventional military spending, and dozens of nations built nuclear weapons. Within a couple of decades, multiple “small” nuclear wars would probably break out in Asia, South America, and the Middle-East even as the global economy started to tank.
Now, you might think that if this were to happen, the libs would see the error of their ways and move back to the right — but, that doesn’t take into account the nature of the left.
When liberal idea fail miserably in practice, which is most of the time, their response isn’t to go in the other direction, it’s to go FURTHER in the direction that they were already moving. This is exactly what the left did in countries like China and the Soviet Union and it’s what it seems likely that they would do in the US as well when it became clear that turning the United States into a giant version of Belgium/Amsterdam wasn’t working out so well.
What you’d probably get then would be madcap combination of the world in George Orwell’s 1984 mixed with the dictates of Stalin. Religion would be banned, conservatism would be illegal, the state would take over ever larger portions of industry, and the Constitution would be scrapped and replaced with a 500 page tangle of bureaucrat speak that spelled out everything from what political ideas were to be made “thought crimes” to what sort of lightbulbs people were allowed to use.
Does that sound too fantastic to be true? Maybe it is. But, if people like Ted Kennedy, Rosie O’Donnell, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Michael Moore were allowed to actually implement their ideas without having to worry about the voters, the wildest excesses of liberalism that you could imagine would probably pale in comparison to what they’d actually end up implementing.
Jaw-dropping, isn’t it? Never mind that little of this nightmare scenario has anything whatsoever to do with liberalism. Never mind that much of it — the gutting of the military, runaway national debt, free speech restrictions, rising crime rates, escalating global conflict, a deteriorating economy — is happening now. I want to know what’s up with their obsession with Rosie O’Donnell.
It’s a pathology, I tell you. They refuse to believe there’s a problem with climate change, health care, or habeas corpus. But Rosie O’Donnell gives them hives.
We’re all cartoons now. I swear, America is Loony Tune Nation.
See also: Right-Wing Cartoon Watch.
And is Ann Coulter a walking freak show, or what?