So a Big New Thing comes out, this time the Inspector General Torture Report, and immediately the Right and Left blogosphere read it entirely differently. You’d think there were two IG Torture Reports.

According to the righties, the documents prove that Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs) “work.” The problem with this theory is that the documents, in particular the ones that former Veep Dick “the Dick” Cheney said would vindicate him, don’t exactly say that. I read them last night — or what you could see that wasn’t blacked out — and they didn’t specifically say what techniques were used to obtain what particular information that might have thwarted an actual terrorist plot, as opposed to taking apart the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch. The righties are just seeing in it what they want to see, not what the document actually reveals.

And, anyway, I think my version is better.

Spencer Ackerman has read the documents more closely than I did. And Ackerman argues that the documents reveal that what usable information that was obtained from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed came from traditional interrogation and intelligence work, not “EITs.”

And if you haven’t seen it already, be sure to read Glenn Greenwald’s “What every American should be made to learn about the IG Torture Report.”

I have these little moments of clarity in which I think I understand everything. I’m having one now, so I have to keyboard fast before it fades.

In an essay at The Guardian, Madeleine Bunting writes,

This humbling evidence of our hopeless decision-making exposes consumer capitalism as not being about millions of independent decisions of individuals expressing unique identities, but about how social norms can be manipulated to create eager shoppers.

In a nutshell, why “libertarianism” doesn’t work.

I’ve long had a kind of anthropological interest in Reason magazine. Reason is a libertarian publication that has as its motto “Free Minds and Free Markets.” I had a free subscription for a while, and reading it always gave me an urge to put the lot of the staff on a couch, à la Freud, and ask them how they felt about their mothers.

The issue with the Reasonites is not intelligence. Some righties are just bag-of-hammers stupid, yes, but the writers of Reason are articulate and capable of showing insight as long as they aren’t writing about, you know, politics. Or economies. In those contexts, “free market” ideology has so shackled their brains that they can’t critically think their way out of a wet paper bag.

Take this article by Damon W. Root, which is one of the most stunningly wrong-headed things I’ve read on the Web in quite some time:

Chip Berlet, a senior researcher at the liberal think tank Political Research Associates, went even further than that, telling New America Media: “For over 100 years—more like 150, you’ve had these movements, and they came out of the Civil War. It is a backlash against social liberalism and it’s rooted in libertarian support for unregulated capitalism and white people holding onto power, and, if they see themselves losing it, trying to get it back.” …

… Perhaps Berlet should consider the career of South Carolina’s Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman (1847-1914), a leading progressive who railed against the sins of “unregulated capitalism” while preaching the salvation of white supremacy. An ally of the agrarian populist William Jennings Bryan, Tillman supported antitrust laws, railroad regulations, the free coinage of silver, and a host of other progressive panaceas. He first entered politics as a member of the Red Shirts, a Klan-like terror group that “came out of the Civil War” to menace African Americans during the early years of Reconstruction. When President Theodore Roosevelt entertained the black leader Booker T. Washington at the White House in 1901, Tillman served as a de facto spokesman for the Southern opposition, declaring: “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.” It’s hard to imagine a nastier threat of political violence than that—and Tillman is obviously nobody’s idea of a libertarian.

Jeez, where do I start — I’m not even going to address the crass intellectual dishonesty of defining “progressivism” purely in terms of regulation of capitalism, except that it’s a standard lie righties tell themselves to make the world a simpler place to understand. Sorting everything in into simple binary piles of good-bad, us-them, capitalists-everybody else, is a grand way to conserve cognitive resources, although it doesn’t tell you much about the real world.

Second, if you know anything at all about the antebellum South and the passions and ideas that inflamed into the American Civil War, you should know that 19th century southern whites were anti-capitalists. Indeed, you could define the secession movement of 1860 and 1861 as a libertarian revolt against capitalism. It would be a stretch, but not nearly as big a stretch as defining Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman as a “progressive.

By 1860, the northern states were well into the industrial revolution, while the South remained stuck in pre-industrial agrarian mode. More and more damnyankees were leaving the farms and making a living either by getting jobs in industry or starting a business. But the slave economy of the South did not allow capitalism to gain a foothold, because goods and services were either imported or performed by slaves.

The enormous majority of southern whites were illiterate dirt farmers (or “yeoman” farmers, in the vernacular of social historians), not plantation owners or slave owners. But these fellows largely bought into the southern ideal of being one’s own man (women not being full citizens yet) on one’s own property. The northern proclivity for getting jobs and working for someone else was sneered at as “wage slavery.”

So, 19th century Southern culture was thoroughly anti-capitalist. However, you could argue that it was very “libertarian” in that it also was anti-Big Government. The Confederate Constitution is one of the most libertarian political documents America every produced. The Confederate ideal was all about weakening the federal government in favor of states’ rights and neutering the power of government generally to interfere with what a man did on, and with, his own property. The election of Abraham Lincoln represented, to them, the ascendancy of big-government tyranny that would interfere with their freedom to live as they wished.

The hot issue of the 1860 wasn’t just slavery; it was slavery in the territories. The popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin notwithstanding, most white northerners really didn’t care if the southerners kept slaves, so long as slavery was kept out of their neighborhoods (which was an issue in the Dred Scott decision, which determined that a slave remained a slave even if he was taken into free territory). But northerners were passionate about keeping slavery out of the territories, which at that point was most of the country west of the Mississippi, because if slavery moved in, the possibilities of entrepreneurship would be canceled out.

Plantation owners, on the other hand, came to believe that if slavery couldn’t be spread into the territories it eventually would die out. So every time a new state was admitted into the Union, the whole nation would get into an uproar over whether the state would be “slave” or “free.” A very bloody mini-Civil War was fought over the admission of Kansas as a free state (finalized in January 1861), for example. There had been several compromises over the years that postponed civil war, but by 1860 the population of the U.S. was poised to spill over into the vast western plains and mountains in a big way, and a decision had to be made. Clearly, the country could not survive divided against itself, half slave and half free.

So the Civil War was fought, and two of the reasons the South lost was (1) lack of industrial resources, and (2) states’ rights. Jefferson Davis couldn’t get the state governments to work together to maximize federal resources as well as Lincoln could.

The bottom line is that for an old Confederate — and, later, a leading proponent of Jim Crow — like Tillman to be defined as a “progressive” because he didn’t mind some regulation of capitalism is beyond bag-of-hammers stupid. It reveals a deep delusion brought on by seeing everything through a thick fog of ideology. There are no “free minds” at Reason magazine.

The very fact that Tillman opposed Theodore Roosevelt should have been a clue, because in his domestic policy ideas TR was one of the most progressive presidents we ever had. Indeed, some of us see TR’s New Nationalism speech, delivered after he left the White House, as the foundation of American liberalism.

OK, so I got into the Civil War and almost forgot where I started. Going back to Madeleine Bunting, who is one of my favorite writers at Comment Is Free — she writes about new trends in psychological and sociological scholarship, which argue that we are not the free thinkers we think we are. We are all, in fact, programed by our culture and upbringing and easily manipulated by many forces within our societies. Intellectual autonomy is a delusion.

(In short, what the Buddha taught 25 centuries ago. Nice to see the West catching up.)

The libertarian/Randian argument that free people making independent and rational decisions about their own economic self-interest will naturally create self-sustaining, healthy market and community systems that need a minimal amount of government regulation. The empirical fact that such an ideal doesn’t work in the real world never sinks in. The fact is that few of us make genuinely independent and rational decisions, but rather stumble through life in a semi-awake state, being jerked around like puppets by many forces within and without. And it takes enormous effort to break through the fog and see that.

It’s so much more comfortable to cocoon yourself in a place where you are always right, because your ideological interface allows you to manipulate reality any way you like. But some of us don’t call that “freedom.”

Some links I want to share —

Los Angeles Times: “Doing nothing is not an option.” What the critics of reform fail to mention is that the system will collapse without crucial changes.

Malcolm Potts, “The war for Afghanistan’s women.” It’s not worth risking U.S. lives unless we raise the status of Afghan women.

Paul Krugman, “All the President’s Zombies.” It’s Krugman. Read it.

Through my network of contacts in the CIA, I have obtained one of the two CIA documents that former Vice President Dick Cheney says coroborate his longstanding arguments that torture was an effective interrogation and counterterrorism tool.

Well, OK, it’s not exactly the same document. But it’s about the same thing.

Glenn Greenwald has a serious commentary on the CIA documents released today. A federal prosecutor has been named.

You’ll love this.

The Obama White House is behind a cynical, coldly calculated political effort to erase the meaning of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks from the American psyche and convert Sept. 11 into a day of leftist celebration and statist idolatry.

What is this dastardly plan, you ask?

The plan is to turn a “day of fear” that helps Republicans into a day of activism called the National Day of Service that helps the left. In other words, nihilistic liberals are planning to drain 9/11 of all meaning.

The writer, Mathew Vadum, is not joking. He actually thinks there is something “nihilistic” and “leftist” about a national day of service. And I especially like the “statist” part, after Bush’s shameless politicization of 9/11, which turned that day into an excuse for the Bush White House to use the Constitution as toilet paper.

If you read the article in its entirety, you pick up another important fact — many of the people behind the plot to turn the commemoration of 9/11 into “a day of activism, food banks, and community gardens” are black. Wow.

So instead of commemorating false bravado, panic, propaganda, foreign policy blunders and jingoism, we’re supposed to remember the day and honor the memory of those we lost by doing something positive to help each other. Yes, it’s an outrage.

If you read only one thing today (after this blog post, of course) make it “‘Truth’ vs. ‘facts’ from America’s media” by Neal Gabler at the Los Angeles Times. I don’t want to excerpt big chunks of it, because I hope you read the whole piece. But here’s the critical point:

According to the Pew Research Center, 16% of the stories in its media sample last week were devoted to healthcare, but three-quarters of that coverage was either about legislative politics or the town halls. …

…To look at this in a larger context, journalists would no doubt say that it isn’t really their job to ferret out the “truth.” It is their job to report “facts.” If Palin says that Obama intends to euthanize her child, they report it. If Limbaugh says that Obama’s healthcare plan smacks of Nazism, they report it. And if riled citizens begin shouting down their representatives, they report it, and report it, and report it. The more noise and the bigger the controversy, the greater the coverage. This creates a situation in which not only is the truth subordinate to lies, but one in which shameless lies are actually privileged over reasoned debate.

Don’t think the militants don’t know this and take full advantage of it.

I dimly remember way-back-when, whatever Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon spun about Vietnam was quickly shredded by the press. Indeed, the Washington press corps was so hard on LBJ I actually felt sorry for him sometimes, even though I didn’t especially like him. Nixon, of course, waged war on media. The whole business about “liberal media bias” comes from the Nixon propaganda machine, and “facts” about the voting habits of journalists, manufactured and promoted by the Nixon White House almost 40 years ago, still turn up in rightie rhetoric.

Even though investigative reporting was glamorized by the Watergate reporting team of Woodward-and-Bernstein (one word, back then), post-Nixon Washington political reporters were a defanged and neutered lot compared to the pre-Nixon pack. By the mid-1970s many of the right-wing “think tanks” that bulldoze right-wing propaganda through news media and into the heads of American citizens were being established by a group of moneyed family trusts — Koch, Scaife, Bradley, Coors, etc. The Heritage Foundation, for example, was established in 1973.

Out of post-Nixon journalism ethics came the idea that “objectivity” means journalists and editorialists stopped calling out politicians and political hacks for lying. As Paul Krugman once famously said, “if liberals said the Earth was round, while conservatives said it was flat, the news headlines would read ‘Shape of the planet: both sides have a point.'”

And we also saw the “Jerry Springerization” of political discourse. Right-wing party hacks and spokespeople were coached to keep talking, loudly, over everyone else and not allow people with other points of view to finish a sentence. You rarely saw anything like that on television in the 1950s and 1960s; by the 1980s it had become the norm. (See this post, “Where Have You Gone, Edward R. Murrow?” touching on this phenomenon that I wrote back in 2003, and which I think holds up pretty well.)

News show producers no doubt encouraged the mayhem because it made for more entertaining television; in the old days, a political talk show consisted of a bunch of gray-haired white guys in suits speaking politely and soberly to each other. Informative, but dull. If you see old black-and-white clips of the pre-1970s Meet the Press, you might notice the guests even spoke much more slowly and at more length than they do now, never mind one at a time.

The critical point is that U.S. journalists pretty much stopped offering truthful analysis of what politicians and spokespeople were saying. Instead, we get “he said, she said,” and the readers and viewers have to sort our for themselves what the truth is. Reporters like to see themselves as “in the middle” between two equal opposing forces, but Jay Rosen says this is a coward’s way out.

Like the “straight down the middle” impulse that Taylor writes about, he said, she said is not so much a truth-telling strategy as refuge-seeking behavior that fits well into newsroom production demands. “Taking a pass” on the tougher calls (like who’s blowing more smoke) is economical. It’s seen as risk-reduction, as well, because the account declines to explicitly endorse or actively mistrust any claim that is made in the account. Isn’t it safer to report, “Rumsfeld said”– letting Democrats in Congress howl at him (and report that) than it would be to report, “Rumsfeld said, erroneously”– and try to debunk the claim yourself? The first strategy doesn’t put your own authority at risk, the second does, but for a reason.

Going back to Neal Gabler, he reminds us of the months before the invasion of Iraq in which U.S. news media “reported the administration’s rationale without devoting more than a few sentences or minutes to dissenting voices, much less doing their own analysis.” After 9/11 and through the rest of Bush’s first term, to cast a shadow on Dear Leader — and especially to displease the Right — was a perilous thing that could (and sometimes did) cost a reporter his job.

The health care crisis has been building up for many years, and many of us saw it and realized our refusal to deal with it was dragging us off a cliff. But in all those years there was rarely a substantive discussion of this issue in mass media, and never on television or radio. Occasionally it would be addressed on a talk show, but the “addressing” inevitably consisted of a rightie hack screaming about socialized medicine and a slightly-less-to-the-right media personality allegedly speaking for progressivism who more or less agreed. All this would be encapsulated into a ten-minute segment that said absolutely nothing about the issue.

Gabler concludes,

What it comes down to is that sometimes the media have to tell the truth not because anyone really wants them to but because it is the right thing to do — the essential thing to do — for the sake of our democracy.

Taking refuge in the “middle” is not going to make journalism any safer going forward. The more journalists give in to the goons, the more they control you. And the goons are coming around to the idea that they are entitled to take a lot more than journalists’ jobs.

If there are people on your email list who think health care reform will erode the quality of health care in America, email this list of links to them.

T.R. Reid, “5 Myths About Health Care Around the World”

Ed Pilkington, “Dying for affordable healthcare — the uninsured speak”

Stephen Amidon, “Why I love Britain’s socialized healthcare system”

Paul E. Barber, “My Brain and the Ontario Health-Care System“

First, you should know that the FreedomWorks special ops unit that kidnapped invited me to an undisclosed location for discussion has treated me very well. I must say, that sodium pentathol stuff does clear your mind! And now that I’ve agreed to tell the truth about Obamacare, my hosts have turned off the Christian rock music they had been playing for me nonstop for several hours through concert-size speakers. I really appreciate that.

OK, so they caught us on the death panels. We might as well come clean. I know H.R.3200 doesn’t say anything about death panels, but it’s written in invisible ink between the lines in section 805, “TERMINATION OF ELECTION IN CASES OF SUBSTANTIAL NONCOMPLIANCE.” We liberals were coached to tell you that provision is about employers who don’t offer health benefits, but if you hold the paper under the right kind of lamp you see what it really says — If you don’t comply, you will be terminated.

In fact, the death panels have already met and made their determinations, and the death panel squads are ready to deploy as soon as they get the go-ahead from Kathleen Sebelius. But here’s another hint: If the death panel squads surround your house and ask you to surrender, all is not lost. You can invoke section 202, “EXCHANGE-ELIGIBLE INDIVIDUALS AND EMPLOYERS.” That means if you are on the death list, you may be eligible to be exchanged for someone else. If they accept your petition for review, that should give you at least six weeks to pack up and get out of the country. See? It’s not so bad.

I know the death panel thing sounds harsh, but you may be reassured to know they are faith-based death panels. The President has even been working with a group of rabbis to be sure that death panel determinations do not reflect anti-Jewish bias.

Of course, the ultimate goal is to get people to worship government as their religion. Oops, I wasn’t supposed to say that. But, y’know, once everyone realizes that Government Is God, they’ll accept the death panels. God’s will, and all that.

You’ll notice that several sections of H.R.3200 refer to “Medicare Part A.” What you don’t know is that the “A” stands for “Amabo,” which is “Obama” spelled backward. Medicare Part Amabo refers to a program in which older people will be bused to Canada, where the Canadian government has agreed to set them adrift on ice floes. This will not only lower health care costs, but will also save Social Security! Win-win!

You might argue that there has been a “Medicare Part A” for many years, but that just shows you how organized we liberals are. We’ve had this program secretly in place even before Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare bill. The same operatives who planted Obama’s birth announcement in those Hawaiian newspapers in 1961 were already working out the deal with Canada. President Kennedy balked, but we took care of him, didn’t we?

As you know, we liberals were born with a genetic defect that gives us an uncontrollable urge to spend money and raise taxes. We claim we just want to have good government, but that’s just the excuse. We also want people to die on operating tables just so we can watch.

And once we get the health care/tax increase deal done, it’s on to the next project — changing the name of the country to “Union of Fascist-Socialist Republics.” It’s been the plan all along.

That’s all I know. Maybe there’s more, but since I’m a low-level operative there’s a lot they don’t tell me. And I’m sure I’ll see all of you soon, as soon as the nice man from United Health Care agrees to remove the electrodes.

Yesterday I quoted an article by Michael D. Shear and Ceci Connolly in the Washington Post that the White House is surprised the Left is insisting on the public option. Today the leftie blogosphere is looking at this in two ways.

First, the “we’ve been punked” argument, as expressed by Digby:

But on a political level, the left has been betrayed over and over again on the things that matter to us the most. …

…After 2000, what is it going to take for the Democrats to realize that constantly using their base as a doormat is not a good idea? It only takes a few defections or enough people staying home to make a difference. And there are people on the left who have proven they’re willing to do it. The Democrats are playing with fire if they think they don’t have to deliver anything at all to their liberal base — and abandoning the public option, particularly in light of what we already know about the bailouts and the side deals, may be what breaks the bond.

It’s really not too much to ask that they deliver at least one thing the left demands, it really isn’t. And it’s not going to take much more of this before their young base starts looking around for someone to deliver the hope and change they were promised.

Amen, Sister Digby. See also Scarecrow at FDL.

Marc Ambinder reports that the White House thinks liberals will get on board with a plan that drops the public option but includes a mandate to buy insurance … from private insurance companies?

White House: Bite me.

On the other hand, Marcy Wheeler thinks that much of this noise about selling out the public option is coming from people with their own agendas to promote and is not reflective of what President Obama really thinks.

See also Mike Lux at Open Left:

What I discovered when I worked in the White House was that there were plenty of people who work in that building whose primary loyalty is not to the President but to themselves. They leak things to reporters to cultivate them and make sure they write puff job articles about them. They help certain lobbyists because they might want a job in their firm someday. They empower certain powerful Senators or members of Congress because they are personally close to them, and/or because they might want to get paid big money to lobby them someday soon. Maybe they want to run for office themselves one day, and so they cultivate certain donors.

So while it is possible that all the back-tracking on the President’s bill from anonymous staffers is all a carefully laid-out strategy, since it’s a strategy that is really not working, I think it is also quite possible it is just classic disloyalty from self-interested staffers.

The President will be holding a video conference on health care this afternoon that I plan to “attend.” I will report if he says anything to give us a clear indication of where he is on the public option.

Update: If you can’t watch the video, Steve Benen has a transcript.