Category Archives: Wingnuts Being Wingnuts

Deranged and Confused

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Somewhere, I read that stress can be measured as the distance between your expectations and your reality. I thought of this when I read the “manifesto” left behind by Joe Stack, the fellow who flew a plane into an Austin IRS building. My impression is of a man who expected something else entirely from his life than what he got, and he was stressed, and angry, about it.

Stack had issues with taxes going back to the early 1980s. He refers to particular parts of the tax code that were changed then, but he doesn’t make clear what was bad about them. Then in 1994 he and his wife did not file tax returns. The reason for this is murky, but my suspicion is that he came to believe he did not have to pay taxes. About that time there was a small movement of anti-government extremists who, through creative reading of the tax codes, had come to the conclusion that there was no law that actually compelled anyone to pay taxes. These people were active on the old USENET newsgroups, which is how I came in contact with them. Note that several of these same people believed the U.S. had been under martial law since the Civil War, and this was somehow connected to American flags with gold fringe around them.

Apparently Stack’s wife divorced him and filed for bankruptcy to get out from under her tax debt, but Stack seems to have stubbornly refused to acknowledge he had done anything wrong. And it appears this act of defiance wrecked the rest of his life. He had considerable financial problems, but he also owned a couple of small planes, which suggests he was far from destitute. Lots of people are worse off, in other words.

The diatribe Stack left behind doesn’t fit neatly into any one ideological cubbyhole. He was angry with government, politicians of both parties, corporations, unions, health insurance companies, the Catholic church and organized religion generally. We can only guess if the “tea party” movement had any impact on him. My impression is that he had been on a self-destructive course for a great many years.

However, it appears some current anti-government extremists are claiming Stack as a martyr to their cause. Frank Rich writes about this in his column today. Although whatever it is that passes for “leadership” among the tea partiers has not publicly embraced Stack, apparently Facebook and many right-wing sites are bursting with praise for him.

On the other hand, the crew at Free Republic is certain he was a leftie. See, for example, Joe Stack’s “manifesto” ends by bashing Capitalism and quoting Marx! (Comment: “This guy sound like a ‘right-wing extremist’ to you? He sounds more like Obama or one of his many revolutionary-left associates!”) (Note: Stack appears to have been mocking Marx more than approving of him, but again, Stack’s political beliefs seem to have been all over the map. Stack’s real beef with capitalism may have been that he failed at it.)

However, I suspect Rich is right about a connection between the Clinton-era right-wing fringe obsessed with black helicopters, citizen militias, Ruby Ridge, and the destruction of David Koresh’s compound in Waco and the current right-wing fringe who are rallying around “tea parties” and threatening secession.

And I think it’s also true that the Republican Party has little control over the tea partiers. Rich writes,

The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is real, and we ignore it at our peril. While Washington is fixated on the natterings of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Michael Steele and the presumed 2012 Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, these and the other leaders of the Party of No are anathema or irrelevant to most Tea Partiers. Indeed, McConnell, Romney and company may prove largely irrelevant to the overall political dynamic taking hold in America right now. The old G.O.P. guard has no discernible national constituency beyond the scattered, often impotent remnants of aging country club Republicanism. The passion on the right has migrated almost entirely to the Tea Party’s counterconservatism.

I was also struck by this:

A co-sponsor of CPAC was the John Birch Society, another far-right organization that has re-emerged after years of hibernation. Its views, which William F. Buckley Jr. decried in the 1960s as an “idiotic” and “irrational” threat to true conservatism, remain unchanged. At the conference’s conclusion, a presidential straw poll was won by Congressman Paul, ending a three-year Romney winning streak. No less an establishment conservative observer than the Wall Street Journal editorialist Dorothy Rabinowitz describes Paul’s followers as “conspiracy theorists, anti-government zealots, 9/11 truthers, and assorted other cadres of the obsessed and deranged.”

Interesting that the truthers have migrated to the Right. They used to be associated only with the Left.

Anyway — recent polling suggests that the tea partiers are disproportionately white, but have average income and education. I remember reading recently that they tended to be middle aged or older, but I can’t find a reference to that now.

What does this tell us? The “tea partiers” on the whole are not the most oppressed and downtrodden among us, just the most pissed off. They’ve got more distance between their expectations and their reality than most of the rest of us.

What are their expectations? What are they pissed off about, really? Because for all their screaming about taxes, most of ’em are not paying more taxes now than they were last year or five years ago. Certainly racism is a factor in much of their animosity to President Obama, but that’s far from the whole story.

According to the “Tea Party Patriots” website, their core values are “Fiscal Responsibility, Constitutionally Limited Government, Free Markets.” On the surface, not the stuff of angry mobs.

But I don’t think you have to be a psychologist to understand that the anger is being fueled by something else entirely, some horrific chasm between their expectations and their reality. Essentially, you’ve got a lump of middle-class white people who have hit mid-life or older, and their lives haven’t worked out the way they expected. In that way, at least, Joe Stack was one of them. And hey, folks, join the club.

The problem is that when they look for the cause of their problems, they see black helicopters and Big Gubmint, whereas the rest of us see financial sector oligarchy and disaster capitalism. I think I’ve used this analogy before, but they make me think of panicked horses who run back into the burning barn. We laugh at their weird conspiracy theories, but the truth is that the real “conspiracy” is so much bigger and so much scarier than what they imagine.

How Stupid Do You Have to Be to Work for Cato?

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Yesterday I linked to a Paul Krugman column titled “California Death Spiral,” in which Krugman explains succinctly how insurance markets collapse. In short, “If too many healthy people decide that they’d rather take their chances and remain uninsured, the risk pool deteriorates, forcing insurers to raise premiums. This, in turn, leads more healthy people to drop coverage, worsening the risk pool even further, and so on.” If you’ve been paying attention to the health insurance issue, this is fairly self-evident.

Now Michael F. Cannon, the Cato Institute’s director of health policy studies, responds by saying that Krugman doesn’t understand insurance markets.

Cannon’s argument — First, he says that Krugman is unfamiliar with the work of University of Pennsylvania economist Mark Pauly. According to Cannon, Pauly has shown that “health insurance markets are way ahead of politicians — and way ahead of economists — in solving the problems that bedevil health insurance markets.” As proof of Pauly’s genius, Cannon links to an abstract of an article Pauly wrote in 1995 about “Guaranteed Renewability in Insurance” and to a description of a book on risk pooling that Pauly co-authored and which was published by the American Enterprise Institute.

Yes, I’m … so not persuaded. But this is a common trick of rightie think-tank fellows. If they don’t have an actual argument, they pull the name of some Authority Figure out of their butts and claim he has an argument. We don’t know what that argument is, but we’re assured it exists.

From here, Cannon goes on to say a colossally stupid thing:

Healthy people dropping coverage would not lead to across-the-board premium increases in California, because California allows markets to set premiums. Only when the government imposes the kind of price controls that Krugman wants does an “adverse selection death spiral” follow.

This entire debate came about because Anthem Blue Cross and other insurers in California are imposing huge premium increases on their customers, and they are doing this in spite of the fact these companies are making substantial profits. As Cannon says, state regulators in California have very limited power to control rates, so insurers can pretty much charge whatever they feel like charging.

There’s your “free markets,” Mr. Cannon.

Note that Krugman did not argue that the premium increases are being caused by a “death spiral,” but that Anthem Blue Cross claims that’s why it’s raising its rates. So either there is such a death spiral in spite of the lack of regulation in California’s insurance markets, or Anthem is price gouging. Take your pick. Either way, the free market ain’t doing squat for the consumer.

You might remember that Cato is the same pool of geniuses who endorsed the idea of insurance insurance as the solution to the health insurance crisis. If you missed it, the plan is to give insurance companies a completely free hand to risk-rate premiums, so that as people get older and/or sicker their premiums would go up. And to keep you from being priced out of health insurance if you get sick, you’re supposed to take out a separate policy of “health status insurance” that will insure you against catastrophic increases in your health insurance. (No, I’m not making this up. Read Cato’s insurance insurance manifesto here.)

This brings me to the question asked in the title of this post — how stupid do you have to be to work for Cato? Because, based on his own arguments, I conclude that Michael F. Cannon is either (a) a complete idiot, or (b) paid to churn out verbiage that has the approximate look and feel of reasoned arguments to defend positions that are really matters of religious faith (i.e., “free markets” fix everything).

I’m leaning toward (b), because Cannon’s invocation of the economist Mark Pauly is a classic example of the “appeal to authority” logical fallacy. We have no way to know how Pauly concludes (assuming that he does) that health insurance markets are already at work solving the problems of the health insurance markets, and apparently have been doing so since 1995. And to pull this trick to discredit a Nobel Prize-winning economist takes cojones.

It’s also a signal to anyone with a brain that Cannon doesn’t have a real argument. But I’m sure he’s very persuasive to people who want to remain loyal to the Magical Free Market doctrine. This is Cannon’s real role — not to provide a real argument, because there isn’t one, but to provide something that looks and feels like an argument to give the True Believers something to hang on to.

On the “Mount Vernon Statement”

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The conservative “old guard” has released a political manifesto called the “Mount Vernon Statement,” which to me is a textbook example of what happens when people ignorant of history attempt to interpret a historical document. Or, in this case, it’s possibly not so much that they are ignorant of history but that they are incapable of thinking outside their ideology box.

This ideological myopia creates howlers such as the claim the Founding Fathers were vitally concerned with “economic reforms grounded in market solutions.” I don’t think so. The Founders lived in the dawn of the age of industrial capitalism, but I’ve never noticed that they were much influenced by industrial-capitalist thought. Most of them were old-money Agrarian Age aristocrats, remember.

Indeed, if you think about it, the whole idea of naming a [free-market] manifesto after Mount Vernon — a bleeping slave plantation when George Washington lived there — reveals their aversion to actual history as opposed to symbolism and allegory (see the previous Mahablog post).

Another oddity noted by Jack Balkin — the word equality does not appear anywhere in the Mount Vernon statement. “It is hard to speak of fidelity to the Declaration and to the Constitution without once mentioning equality as a central value behind the Declaration and the Constitution,” he says, with profound understatement. “The Declaration’s most famous passage announces the self-evident truth is that all men are created equal.” Today’s Mount Vernon crew do bring up the Declaration, but only so they could work in a mention of God, who is inconveniently missing from the Constitution itself (courtesy of the “godless liberals” who wrote it).

Another anachronism — the Mount Vernon crew claims the Constitution “supports America’s national interest in advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world and prudently considers what we can and should do to that end.” Um, where is the “opposing tyranny in the world” clause?

The first statement in the document that set off alarm bells for me came in the first paragraph —

We recommit ourselves to the ideas of the American Founding. Through the Constitution, the Founders created an enduring framework of limited government based on the rule of law. They sought to secure national independence, provide for economic opportunity, establish true religious liberty and maintain a flourishing society of republican self-government.

The Constitution was indeed created to maintain a flourishing society of republican self-government. However, today’s movement conservatism does not believe in “republican self-government.” In the article by Michael Lind I discussed in the previous post, Lind wrote,

Likewise, the idea of popular sovereignty, though it dates back to John Locke in the 17th century, need not inspire reactionary reverence for existing institutions, much less a desire to restore an alleged golden age. On the contrary, the sovereign people have the right to remake their political and social order every generation or two, in order to achieve their perennial goals in changing conditions.

This was the view of Abraham Lincoln, who said in his Second Annual Message to Congress: “As our case is new, we must think anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.” And it was the view of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 in his Commonwealth Club Address: “Faith in America, faith in our tradition of personal responsibility, faith in our institutions, faith in ourselves demand that we recognize the new terms of the old social contract.”

At the high level of public philosophy, the debate between the tea party right and progressives boils down to this: Do we think that fidelity to our predecessors means mindlessly doing what they did in their own time, even though times have changed? Or do we think that we should act as they would act, if they lived in the 21st century and had learned from everything that has happened in America and the world in the past 200 years?

To put it another way: The American Revolution was a beginning, not an end. The real equivalents today of the American revolutionaries are those who view the republic, not as an 18th-century utopia to be restored with archaeological exactitude, but as a work in progress to which every generation of Americans can contribute.

The conservative idea of “republican self-government” makes the Constitution into a straightjacket, taking away the ability of We, the People to use government to address our concerns, as opposed to the concerns of 1787. Government is an active thing. Government in any form is assessing changing conditions and making decisions based on current needs and available resources.

Since Reagan, however, conservatives have slapped the hands of anyone who actually wants to practice “republican self-government.” Government is supposed to be drowned in the bathtub and replaced by corporate oligarchy.

Come to think of it, maybe they hadn’t forgotten Mount Vernon was a slave plantation.

Anyway, it should be noted that the tea partiers are way underwhelmed. “Old school movement conservative leaders have ceased to be relevant in any meaningful way,” one wrote. The tea partiers are writing their own manifesto, called the “Contract From America.” And yes, that old school movement conservative and old whore Newt Gingrich saw this movement and managed to position himself in front of it. (This is all linked on the tea partier site, which is set up so that you can’t link to individual items on it. Not user-friendly.)

The tea partiers want specifics, apparently, and not mushy bromides, which suggests they haven’t entirely given up on “republican self-government” even if the solutions they favor are grotesquely wrong-headed. Credit where credit is due.

Why Sarah Palin Is a Goddess

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Michael Lind writes about mythological politics and the tea partiers, saying,

This is the key to understanding the otherwise inexplicable accusations by the populist right that Barack Obama is a socialist or fascist or whatever, as well as fantasies about a global secular humanist conspiracy. We are dealing with a mythological mentality, based on simple and powerful archetypes. Contemporary figures and current events are plugged into a framework that never changes. “King Charles (or King George) is threatening the rights of Englishmen” becomes “Barack Obama is promoting socialism” — or fascism, or monarchism, or daylight saving time.

As in other cases of mythological politics, like messianic Marxism, this kind of thinking is resistant to argument. If you disagree, then that simply proves that you are part of the conspiracy. Inconvenient facts can be explained away by the true believers. It’s hard to come up with arguments that would persuade people who think that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are totalitarians to change their mind.

This is something I’ve written about in the past. It’s important to understand that the political “thinking” of the True Believers on the Right is a thick soup of myth, allegory, and archetype. Stuff like, you know, facts, are irrelevant to them.

Lind traces the major themes of rightie mythology back to 18th century Britain, but in some ways I think you have to go back even further. The ur-myth that under-girds all the other myths is the old Zoroastrian struggle between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil. However, [with righties] “good” and “evil” are matters of intrinsic identity, not actions.

I remember Sunday School literature from the 1950s that showed images of Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev standing with Satan, while Jesus bestrode the United States, his arms wrapped protectively around a couple of innocent white American children. Even many who aren’t old enough (or Bible Belt enough) to have seen images like that have been influenced by the mythology such images represented.

If one believes America the Pure and Righteous is protected by Jesus, and America’s enemies are minions of Satan, then a great many other assumptions flow from that. Among these is the belief that public display of religious totems like Ten Commandments monuments is essential to keeping America “strong,” e.g., armored against demon enemies.

It also explains why the Christian Right wants obeisance to Jesus to be made compulsory. For them, religion is not about personal devotion or worship; it’s war. And you’re either with ’em or agin’ ’em.

Further, as I’ve said, “good” and “evil” are understood to be intrinsic qualities that reside in certain individuals and groups regardless of what they do. One chooses to take the side of “good” by being loyal to the “good” tribe, a.k.a., “us.”

An example of the importance of archetypes in rightie thought can be found in the blogosphere’s reaction to homicides allegedly (she hasn’t been tried yet) committed by Alabama University professor Amy Bishop. Like most leftie bloggers I haven’t written about Bishop because, to me, it’s a crime story, and I rarely comment on crime stories.

But a number of rightie bloggers have blown Bishop up into a Big Bleeping Political Deal, pointedly calling her a “leftist” or a “socialist.” How so? Apparently someone called Bishop a “socialist” on her RateMyProfessors page, so it must be true. Also, she went to Harvard.

In other words, we in Rational World have no way to know anything about Bishop’s political beliefs, or even if she has any. Further, there is nothing about the homicides that suggests a political motive, so a rational person wouldn’t think of the homicides in political terms. Some are claiming a racial motive, because the three individuals killed were non-white, but one of the people she shot who survived is very obviously white. Since these were people Bishop knew, it’s not unreasonable to assume her motives were personal.

But bloggers who have pointed out there is no obvious political component to the Bishop homicides, notably Steve M and Steven Taylor, have been subject to vile counter-attacks from the Right for suggesting the homicides were not political.

The weird truth is, I don’t think the rightie bloggers calling Bishop a “leftist” have said she had a political motive. So why are rightie bloggers making such a Big Bleeping Deal about her alleged politics? Because it so neatly fits the mythological archetype of “leftist” and “socialist” that lives in their heads, that’s why. As the “American Power” blogger explained, “I have never hypothesized on Bishop’s motives. It’s enough fascination at the simple truth of a Harvard leftist in league with some of our worst criminal murderers and jihadi terrorists.”

Criminal murderers and jihadi terrorists? She went to Harvard. What more do you need to know? People who go to Harvard are like that. And there need be no political motives, or any motives at all, for a “leftist” to be a violent, murdering criminal, because that’s just the way “leftists” are. See how it works?

In fact, suggesting any motivation at all to Bishop, even an evil and irrational motive, seems to enrage some righties, who equate understanding motive with making excuses for the murders. Rational people don’t think that way, of course, but we’re not talking about rational people. We’re talking about people whose worldview is entirely shaped by myth and archetype, not by reason.

Which brings me to why Sarah Palin is a goddess. By that I don’t mean she has actual godlike powers. I’m talking about her role in the rightie mythological cosmos, and why pointing out her obvious shortcomings will put no dents in the tea partiers’ loyalty to her.

By “goddess” I mean a goddess in something like (but not exactly) the tantric sense, in which a deity becomes an archetype for one’s own deepest nature. Palin, by contrast, is a near-perfect embodiment of an ideal. She is (to a rightie) beautiful, sexual, and maternal; she is powerful enough that the Evil Ones who live in Washington and who speak seditious things on the Teevee must kowtow to her. Through her folksy speech and shooting skills she evokes other American archetypes from more wholesome, earlier times, like Daniel Boone. But she also wears modern clothes and has a Facebook page.

Like most tantric deities, Palin has has both benevolent and wrathful aspects. As a wrathful goddess she gives voice to her followers’ deepest fears and hates and resentments. But she also has a bright smile and sometimes carries a baby, showing a benevolent side. Her followers both love her and identify with her; she is an archetype representing their own deepest selves, or at least the selves they’d like to be.

She’s a goddess, I tell you. And because she is a goddess is makes no difference to her devotees that she has few real accomplishments, no coherent ideas, and probably doesn’t know Bern from Budapest. It does not matter if she writes crib notes on her hand and needs several months to think of a name of a newspaper she actually reads. In fact, it does not matter to them if she reads at all. Whatever she does is exactly right, because it is her doing it, and she is a goddess.

It’s important to understand this, because it shows us why it’s futile to treat Palin as just another politician or media star. It was pointless to make fun of the crib notes, for example. I doubt anyone could bring Palin down but Palin herself. If she somehow grossly and blatantly violated the ideal she represents, her followers could turn on her. But until she does that, she is invincible in the eyes of the devoted.

There’s a long analysis of the tea party movement in today’s New York Times that’s worth a read. Essentially, the “movement” is a collection of fearful people grasping at incoherent ideas the way drowning people grasp at lifebuoys. It brings to mind what Eric Hoffer wrote in The True Believer (pp. 59-60)–

The power of a mass movement stems from the propensity of its followers for united action and self-sacrifice. … whether or not [organizations] develop into mass movements depends less on the doctrine they preach and the program they project than on the degree of their preoccupation with unity and the readiness for self-sacrifice. … Such diverse phenomena as a deprecation of the present, a facility for make-believe, a proneness to hate, a readiness to imitate, credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible, and many others which crowd the minds of the intensely frustrated are, as we shall see, unifying agents and prompters of recklessness.

Because the incoherent ideas the tea partiers grasp are plucked from the American psyche, those ideas can be traced back through earlier times in American history, as Lind says. But the ideas themselves are not the point, and so I disagree with Lind that understanding where ideas come from is key to understanding the tea party movement. What unifies the tea partiers is something primitive, pre-cognitive. As Hoffer says elsewhere in The True Believer, fearful people give up individual autonomy to become part of a movement, and within the movement they find the freedom to hate, bully, torment, and torture with impunity — and with the blessings of the goddess Sarah.

Onward Christian Kidnappers

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Here’s an update on the crew of evangelicals who got caught trying to smuggle stray children out of Haiti.

First, the lawyer who has been representing the evangelicals in Haiti courts faces sex trafficking charges that pre-date the Haiti kidnapping episode. He also has no license to practice law in Haiti. Make of that what you will.

It appears the accused kidnappers for Christ have yet to be released. But never fear; their cause has been taken up by U.S. righties, who are outraged at how the kidnap crew is being treated. Glenn Greenwald points out that U.S. righties have, um, a double standard.

In other news — there’s a long article from the New York Times Sunday magazine on the ongoing efforts of conservative Christians to use public schools to indoctrinate children. Highly recommended.

Farce Mode

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Speaking of Karl Marx — among other things, he is said to have said, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” I think we’re well into farce mode.

For example, the Manhattan Institute lets us know it has been “probing” the “trial lawyer lobby.” Manhattan fellow James Copland has an op ed in the Washington Examiner explaining how the trial lawyer lobby is a “money machine” for Democrats, because they send generous campaign contributions to Democrats and get favorable legislation in return. What makes this farce is that the Manhattan Institute itself is one of those phony “think tanks” through which big corporations and other vested interests spread propaganda that suits their financial purposes.

It gets better. Fox News, the propaganda arm of the conservative movement, has discovered that what appears to be a very small group called the American Public Policy Committee had the nerve to set up an anti-tea party website called The Tea Party Is Over. Fox says the APPC is part of something called the American Public Policy Center, which is so small it doesn’t show up in google searches.

Anyway, Fox says, this APPC is part of a “complex network of money flowing from the mountainous coffers of the country’s biggest labor unions into political slush funds for Democratic activists.” According to OpenSecrets.org, in 2008 APPC’s contributions totaled $861. Yeah, them’s some mountainous coffers.

And this is coming from Fox News, whose relationships with corporate-funded astroturf organizations is well documented.

BTW, Faux may be in trouble with some parts of the Right — it has been revealed that Faux’s biggest shareholder outside the Rupert Murdoch family is Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal.

A Sweet Spot

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Something to cheer us up in an otherwise gloomy week —

Alleging a plot to tamper with phones in Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in downtown New Orleans, the FBI arrested four people Monday, including James O’Keefe, 25, a conservative filmmaker whose undercover videos at ACORN field offices severely damaged the advocacy group’s credibility.

Also arrested were Joseph Basel, Stan Dai and Robert Flanagan, all 24. Flanagan is the son of William Flanagan, who is the acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, the office confirmed. All four were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.

Yeah, O’Keefe was the guy who played the pimp in the infamous ACORN sting videos. I’m getting read to go out and don’t have time to see what excuses the wingnuts are cooking up for O’Keefe et al. They should be good.

Update: Fox News is looking for “context.” Snort.

Memory Lapses

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The ever mildly annoying Ann Althouse criticizes President Obama for being on vacation in Hawaii while the nation suffered a terrorist attack. And even as you read this, I’m sure some of you are thinking of the last President, who was nearly always on vacation when anything significant happened. Well, Bush was nearly always on vacation, in Washington or out of it.

But that’s not what really inspired me to write. One of the commenters wrote,

Being President of democratic republic isn’t much fun.

Insty linked to a NY Post story citing how dissatisfying Obama finds our form of government, when tyrannies clearly make the trains run so much better.

In a similar vein, FDR’s acolytes thought wistfully of Hitler and Mussolini, at least until the bullets and ashes started to fill the sky.

The link goes to a Charles Hurt column in the New York Post titled “O Rips the American Way.” Wow, it’s hard to imagine an American president expressing a preference for a dictatorship, huh? Oh, wait …

In fact, Hurt doesn’t quote President Obama saying anything bad about our great Republic. The President was discussing the current malfunction in the Senate, which is a genuine concern outside of Wingnuttia.

But what really astonished me was the bit about “FDR’s acolytes thought wistfully of Hitler and Mussolini, at least until the bullets and ashes started to fill the sky.” Here in the Matrix of Objectively Verifiable Facts, Franklin Roosevelt’s administration did its best to oppose fascism in Europe in spite of much public sentiment to the contrary. FDR opposed Hitler from the beginning of his administration. Before Pearl Harbor he already was doing as much as he could for America’s future allies, in particular Britain. He pushed through the lend-lease program, for example.

No, it was the conservatives of the 1930s who thought Hitler and Mussolini were swell guys with whom America could do business.

Yet we are not quite done in the memory lapse department. Another blogger — I’m guessing he’s a libertarian, but his blogroll doesn’t give away a partisan orientation — defended President Obama and said it was silly to think the President’s being in Hawaii instead of DC while some guy tried to blow up a plane flying over Michigan made any difference to anything. Of course not. But then he said,

The greatest President in American history was inaugurated on August 2, 1923. He was woken up after the death of his predecessor, strolled downstairs, took the oath of office, and went back to bed. Would that we understood today how to behave as the chief bureaucrat of the central public goods administration.

To which I had two reactions — one, what the hell is the “central goods administration”? And two, — OMG, he’s talking about Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge let the country rot and prepared the way for the Great Depression.

If it’s true that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (George Santayana), we’re in trouble.

This Way to the Egress

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P.T. Barnum used to post signs in his New York “museum” that said “This way to the egress.” People who didn’t know “egress” means “exit” were tricked into exiting. But sometimes the freak show gets too freaky. So — don’t click on this link. You’re better off with the egress. Or, read this commentery by Thers that describes the specimen behind the link.

More signs and wonders — thousands of people demonstrated in Copenhagen, demanding that the climate change conference actually accomplish something that might slow global warming. Of course, in WingnutWorld this is explained away as “astroturf.” John at Power Tools has brilliantly concluded the protests must be the products of astroturf, because so many protesters were carrying identical printed signs.

Note the identical, professionally printed, color-coordinated yellow and black signs. This is what Astroturf–fake grass roots–looks like. The signs use the same colors as the International ANSWER signs that are ubiquitous at far-left rallies here in the U.S., but carry no identifier. It would be interesting to know who paid for the signs, and whether the same organization that bought the signs also paid for the demonstrators.

By the Big Tool’s logic, the 1963 civil rights march on Washington was astroturf:

Here’s a close up view of some of the signs:

Library of Congress

Library of Congress

“This is what Astroturf–fake grass roots–looks like,” says the Tool. They are carrying identical printed signs. Apparently people who are capable of organizing themselves for a cause cannot find their way to a print shop. Only corporate sponsors can print signs. Makes you wonder who paid for the signs back in 1963, and if the same organization that bought the signs also paid the demonstrators. Because you know a lot of highly motivated African American persons would not have demonstrated for civil rights in 1963 unless they were paid, according to the Tool.

As for International ANSWER — I have no use for ANSWER, which is no more a grassroots organization than I’m Brad Pitt. Sometimes they do carry yellow signs with black print, and sometimes they carry signs that are other colors. But if carrying yellow signs with black print is proof one is part of the International Communist Conspiracy (ANSWER actually is, which seems to me to be proof that one needn’t be much worried about it any more), then one wonders what this crew is up to.

In another exhibit of the Stupid Museum — the American Un-thinker wonders about rich people like Michael Moore and George Soros. “How can someone preach socialism while being the most rapacious “capitalist” imaginable?” he asks.

It’s simple, genius. Moore and Soros are not socialists, and they do not preach socialism. Oh, and this way to the egress.

Update: Just to show that not everyone protesting climate change in Copenhagen is a Communist — here are a couple of protesters dressed as Republicans.