Category Archives: Wingnuts Being Wingnuts
As Governor, Huckabee Found Some Prisoners More Pardonable Than Others
I’ve just learned the man being sought in connection with gunning down four Lakewood, Washington, police officers is an ex-convict who was freed by then Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.
Maurice Clemmons, the 37-year-old Tacoma man being sought for questioning in the killing this morning of four Lakewood police officers, has a long criminal record punctuated by violence, erratic behavior and concerns about his mental health.
Nine years ago, then-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee granted clemency to Clemmons, commuting his lengthy prison sentence over the protests of prosecutors.
Several people have noted that Clemmons didn’t have a record of homicides; his convictions were for burglaries and aggravated assaults. Even so, why would a governor go out of his way to give clemency to a convict over the protests of prosecutors? (I have a theory, which I’ll get to in a minute.)
Those with long memories will remember that this is not the first Huckabee commutation with a bad ending. The case of Wayne Dumond got a good deal of attention in the 2008 presidential campaign.
Wayne Dumond was a convicted serial rapist whom Huckabee arranged to be released. After his release, Dumond raped and murdered at least one other woman and possibly others.
I wrote about Dumond and another Arkansas convict, Frankie Parker, almost two years ago in “A Tale of Two Prisoners.” For reasons explained in the earlier post, Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, was pressured by the Christian Right into pardoning Dumond.
But the Christian Right kept silence on Frankie Parker, who was executed in 1996 over the objections of Mother Theresa and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In fact, Governor Huckabee was so keen to execute Frankie Parker that he intervened to move the execution date up by six weeks so that Parker could be executed sooner. He was so keen to execute Parker that moving up the execution date was Huckabee’s first official proclamation as Governor of Arkansas. Clearly, this was an itch that Huckabee was rarin’ to scratch.
It is true that Parker was convicted of committing two murders while under the influence of drugs. He admitted he had done this. He wasn’t asking for a pardon; just life.
What made Frankie Parker’s life so untenable? In prison, he had acquired a copy of the Dhammapada, which inspired him to convert to Buddhism. He corresponded with a Zen priest and also worked with a Little Rock Buddhist group to learn the practice. He became a spiritual leader within the prison. A Buddhist spiritual leader. Can’t have that.
So if people are wondering why Mike Huckabee took it upon himself to grant clemency to Maurice Clemmons, look for a religious angle. I don’t know that there is one, but I’ll be surprised if there isn’t.
Domestic Terrorists Don’t Count
Dave Neiwert wants to know why national news media aren’t jumping all over the story of an Ohio man named Mark Campano who turned his apartment into a bomb factory.
Police found 30 completed pipe bombs in his apartment along with components to make more, plus 17 guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
Campano is in an Akron hospital with injuries received when one of the bombs exploded.
Neighbors called Campano an anti-government whackjob, so it’s not much of a leap to suspect Campano might have been planning domestic terrorism. But you know the drill — terrorists don’t make the news unless they’re named Mohammed.
The predictably stupid R.S. McCain writes about this incident, titling his blog post “Incompetent dopehead pipe-bomber as dangerous as al-Qaeda, lefty implies.” That wasn’t Dave’s point, but let’s run with it.
Who is more dangerous — Mark Campano, a whackjob with an apartment full of real pipe bombs and guns, or —
- Iyman Faris, the loser who planned to take apart the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch;
- The conspirators planning to bomb the Sears Tower, who never managed to get their hands on bombs or create a workable plan.
- Jose Padilla, the so-called “dirty bomber,” who didn’t actually have any bombs, dirty or otherwise, and was not thought to be bright enough to make one.
- The five genius pizza delivery guys who planned to attack Fort Dix
- The other geniuses who planned to blow up JFK airport through a plot that was never operational and which most experts said would never have worked.
Each of those cases were taken very seriously, and the plotters pretty much were all convicted of something. But a guy with 30 pipebombs doesn’t need to be taken seriously, according to R.S. McCain. To R.S., a right-wing whackjob with thirty real pipebombs is less dangerous than jihadist whackjobs with lots of non-operational plots but no bombs.
Note to R.S.M., if he drops by here: I was in lower Manhattan on 9/11, so don’t you dare tell me I don’t understand terrorism or appreciate how awful it is. I suspect I appreciate how awful it is better than you do. That’s why I take someone with pipe bombs very seriously.
There Is No Climategate
As you know, when it comes to facts righties operate with the mother of all double standards. A rightie can pull completely fabricated “facts” out of his (and her) ass with impunity, but if anyone they don’t like is even a tad imprecise, the Right flames it into a scandal that never dies.
So it is with “Climategate.” As you probably have heard, a few days ago more than 3,000 private emails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) were published on the Internet, allegedly by hackers. (I read an argument yesterday that CRU wasn’t necessarily hacked, but in any event emails that were meant to be private were made public.)
By misconstruing scientific colloquialisms — for example, the use of the word “trick” — and seizing upon peer-review type criticism of a few research papers, the Right has managed to misinterpret the emails into “proof” that global climate change is not just a mistaken idea, but a deliberate hoax — a conspiracy so immense it includes most of the world’s earth scientists, including 97 percent of climatologists. Amazing.
The reason this non-scandal will not go away anytime soon is revealed in a Wall Street Journal headline: “Cap and Trade Is Dead.” In other words, vested interests are involved. Vested interests trump truth every day of the week and twice on Tuesday.
A blogger at RealClimate grumbles,
More interesting is what is not contained in the emails. There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research, no grand plan to ‘get rid of the MWP’, no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist/communist/vegetarian overlords. The truly paranoid will put this down to the hackers also being in on the plot though.
At The Guardian, George Monbiot calls on scientists to stop waiting for the screeching righties to shut up and move on to the next non-issue. Monbiot has been on the front lines battling climate-change deniers and knows how crazy — and how obsessed — they are. But, he says, it is true that a few sloppily researched papers were published that should not have been published, a point that was the topic of many of the emails. The fact that this happened is genuinely damaging. The deniers have lied with impunity for years, Monbiot says, but that is all the more reason for science to be much more careful.
Of course, in Rightieworld Monbiot’s article was interpreted to be an admission that climate change might be a hoax. Never forget that these people have the reading comprehension level of turnips.
I know it can be exhausting to deal with righties; while you are correcting one lie, they’ve thought of ten more. There is no more point in “debating” issues with them than in explaining physics to an anthill. But I think it is important to get facts out for the public record, if only because the world is full of lazy hack journalists who don’t bother to check facts, either, unless you do it for them and then rub their noses in the facts so they notice.
I also think Monbiot is right in that care must be taken not to give whackjobs any molehills they can turn into a mountain. For example, one of the several reasons I stopped giving money to the National Abortion Rights Action League several years ago, in spite of my being adamantly pro-choice, is that sometime in the mid-1990s I observed NARAL spokespeople stupidly and unnecessarily handing ammunition to the troglodytes.
This was in the 1990s, when the fetus people seized upon so-called “partial birth” abortions (more accurately called a “D&X” procedure) as an issue to crusade against. NARAL released some figures on the number of such procedures done in the U.S. each year. Unfortunately, the NARAL numbers were only of third-trimester procedures, and the spokespeople didn’t make that clear. Since D&X was mostly performed in the second trimester, the actual number of D&X procedures in total was at least three times higher (the total was between 1,500 and 3,000, depending on who you asked, so it still was a small number). Further, NARAL spokespeople said the D&X was only performed when medically necessary, which was true of third trimester procedures but not always of second-trimester procedures.
I realize the NARAL people probably were taken in by the Right’s incessant yapping about “late-term abortion” and conflation of “late-term abortion” and “partial birth abortion” to be the same thing. To most sane people, a second-trimester abortion is not late term. Still, there is no excuse for being sloppy when presenting data.
Not surprisingly, the abortion criminializers seized upon this discrepancy, and for several months after the opinion section of nearly every newspaper in America was given over to denouncements of the lies of NARAL. And it became an article of faith among “pundits” that pro-rights activists were just as likely to lie as anti-rights activists, never mind that the criminalizers couldn’t string together two truthful statements in a row if they tried. Not that they ever try. From “rapes don’t cause pregnancies” to “abortions cause breast cancer” (they don’t, btw) it would take encyclopedias to catalog all of the misinformation that has come out of the Right on abortion. But NARAL trips up just once, and we never hear the end of it.
So it is with “climategate”; we’ll never hear the end of it. Unfortunately, this will likely slow our response — already too slow — to global climate change.
Update: Talk about a tool — this guy goes on and on about the glory of truth and the wonders of science, then sides with the liars. Amazing. But to really plum the depths of this guy’s critical thinking skills, check this out:
The concept of honor comes from the base of truth and is why it is so prominent in the military and also explains why the vast majority of people in the military come from Judeo/Christian backgrounds.
Yes, in nations in which the vast majority of people are either Christian or Jewish to one degree or another, it’s a safe bet that most people in the military come from Judeo-Christian backgrounds. Hysterical. And the idea that the concept of “honor” is unique to the Abrahamic religions reveals a grotesque ignorance of other religions and cultures. (See, for example, the Code of Bushido).
The phony climategate non-scandal does reveal a divide, but it’s not so much a cultural divide as a social-psychological divide. But we’ve had this discussion before, so I’ll stop now.
Update: The Economist has a good backgrounder on the “Climategate” mess.
Terminal Whining
From yesterday’s Watertown Daily Times:
With his prospect of winning the 23rd Congressional District race now almost zero, Conservative Party candidate Douglas L. Hoffman suggested Wednesday in a letter that “ACORN, the unions and the Democratic Party†“tampered†with results to deny him victory.
A few days ago Hoffman “unconceded” after he was told counting of absentee ballots showed him trailing by only 3,000 or so votes instead of 5,000. Hoffman provided no evidence for his claims, and the Republican county chairman says Hoffman is all wet. He observed the election closely, the chairman said, and saw no evidence of tampering.
Update: George J. Williams, Oswego County Republican chairman, said Mr. Hoffman’s assertion “is not accurate.†The chairman said he roamed the county on Election Day and saw no evidence of tampering.
Update: Alex Koppelman reports that a majority of Republicans think ACORN stole the election for Obama. Steve Benen is skeptical about the poll numbers Koppelman sites, but adds,
One in four Americans — and a majority of self-identified Republicans — believes this was made possible due to the secret, carefully-executed, coordinated national efforts of a community group that can’t recognize fake pimps?
In the Republican brain, ACORN is morphing into a cross between the Illuminati and the bogyman.
Richard Cohen Gets a Clue
I wasn’t going to write about Moosewoman again, but the event of Richard Cohen writing a good column was too remarkable to ignore. Today Cohen writes,
The Institute for the Study of Sarah Palin might conclude that she represents the exact moment important Republicans gave up on democracy. She was clearly seen as an empty vessel who could be controlled by her intellectual betters. These include the editorial boards of the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal, neither of which would hire Palin to make an editorial judgment but both of which would be thrilled to see her as president of the United States. It does not bother these people in the least that the woman is a demagogue — remember “death panels”? — and not, on the face of it, very responsible. If she quit as governor of Alaska in the noble pursuit of money, might she quit as, say, vice president or president for the same reason? From what I hear, one can never be too rich.
My only quibble is with Cohen’s belief the Weekly Standard wouldn’t hire Palin to make editorial judgments. I mean, Bill Kristol. Please.
She has a phenomenal favorability rating among Republicans — 76 percent — who have a quite irrational belief that she would not make such a bad president. What they mean is that she will act out their resentments — take an ax to the people and institutions they hate.
Of course, if you honestly think government doesn’t do anything useful except bomb Iraqi weddings, if follows that you think the presidency is largely a symbolic office that anyone could do.
A Culture of Personal Crisis
Now that Moosewoman is all over the news these days — Max Blumenthal has an insightful piece about Why Wingnuts Love Her at TomDispatch.
The answer lies beyond the realm of polls and punditry in the political psychology of the movement that animates and, to a great degree, controls, the Republican grassroots — a uniquely evangelical subculture defined by the personal crises of its believers and their perceived persecution at the hands of cosmopolitan elites.
Last fall I wrote that “The Right has pinned on Sarah Palin its fantasies of vengeance on the Left. That’s why they love her.” I still think that, but I also agree with what Blumenthal says about “subculture defined by the personal crises of its believers.”
He brings up Bristol Palin’s pregnancy and why her supposedly conservative followers didn’t blink about it. In a logical world, people who consider out-of-wedlock sex to be evil would be appalled at an unmarried, pregnant teenage daughter. In fact, Bristol’s pregnancy just made cultural conservatives feel more bonded to Palin.
Palin’s daughter’s drama caught vividly a culture of personal crisis that defines so many evangelical communities across the country. That culture is described in a landmark congressionally funded study of adolescent behavior, Add Health, revealing that white evangelical women like Bristol Palin lose their virginity, on average, at age 16 — earlier, that is, than any group except black Protestants. … communities with the highest population of girls who attend so-called purity balls, where they vow chastity until marriage before their fathers in a prom-like religious ceremony, also have some of the country’s highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases. In Lubbock, Texas, where abstinence education has been mandated since 1995, the rate of gonorrhea is now double the national average, while teen pregnancy has spiked to the highest levels in the state.
Of course, in these same communities, the response to the crisis is to blame outside forces — media and liberals — and push harder for more of what doesn’t work — more purity balls, more “abstinence only.” Because, in a way, they aren’t really distressed about the pregnancies and STDs as much as by the imagined outside forces that they think are causing their problems. They see themselves besieged, and the pregnancies and STDs are reassuring “proof” that they are beseiged. And they wallow in that self-definition of being besieged, victimized, and ridiculed.
Palin is so well positioned as the darling of the movement that any criticism of her would be experienced by believers as a personal attack on them. In this way, their identification with her through the politics of personal crisis is complete. … The more she is attacked, the more the Republican base adores her.
Right now they’re working themselves up into a snit because of the photograph of Palin Newsweek chose for its cover — a photograph she posed for, of her own free will.
An editorial in today’s Boston Globe says of Palin’s book,
She claims victim status for herself. Her narrative requires that she be a neophyte in perpetual war with the political pros. Kicked around by the vicious media (for her family!), straitjacketed by the McCain campaign, forced to wear fancy duds, Palin is the Pitiful Pearl of her tale.
Remember “true confession” magazines? It’s been years since I’ve seen one, but years ago they were hugely popular. They were full of “first-person” accounts of various personal crises. Most of these were written by freelance writers who just made stuff up, but it was a well-established genre. Palin is starting to remind of of a walking true confession saga.
For most people, Palin’s incessant whining, excuses, blaming, and palpable resentments are a huge turn-off in a national leader, but not to the culturally conservative evangelical subculture. It is the very stuff they are made of.
The Difference Between Free People and Weenies
Been away for a couple of days, and I see Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9/11 suspects are to be tried in a New York City court. And I can think of nothing more just, more perfect, than to let these trials go forward in the city that has waited so long for justice.
And naturally righties don’t like it, because deep down, they are all weenies. Glenn Greenwald is exactly right:
This is literally true: the Right’s reaction to yesterday’s announcement — we’re too afraid to allow trials and due process in our country — is the textbook definition of “surrendering to terrorists.” It’s the same fear they’ve been spewing for years. As always, the Right’s tough-guy leaders wallow in a combination of pitiful fear and cynical manipulation of the fear of their followers. Indeed, it’s hard to find any group of people on the globe who exude this sort of weakness and fear more than the American Right.
These same pathetic cowards scream perpetually about “freedom” but don’t know what it means. They’ve supported torture, suspension of habeas corpus for American citizens, warrantless surveillance, “black sites,” all because these atrocities are supposed to make us safer. But bring four suspects to New York for trial and they whine like this:
The Obama Administration’s irresponsible decision to prosecute the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks in New York City puts the interests of liberal special interest groups before the safety and security of the American people.
As an eyewitness to the collapse of the towers, I sincerely believe I speak for the enormous majority of people who were present at the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when I say to the sniveling righties — please stop being so pathetic. You’re embarrassing yourselves. Thanks much.
Genuinely Twisted
Here’s a blogger definitely living in an alternative universe, and her commenters likewise. I started to leave a comment, then decided it was futile.
How Dangerous Is the Wingnut Right?
Paul Krugman brings up Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” in his column today, noting that much of what Hofstadter wrote about the far Right in 1964 sounds just like the far Right of 2009. The biggest difference, Krugman says, is that in 1964 both parties rejected the wingnuts. It was Ronald Reagan who began to cater to them and gave them a foot in the door, and Republican politicians began to win elections by stirring up the wingnuts. I have some quibbles with that analysis, but let’s skip that for now.
Until recently, however, that catering mostly took the form of empty symbolism. Once elections were won, the issues that fired up the base almost always took a back seat to the economic concerns of the elite. Thus in 2004 George W. Bush ran on antiterrorism and “values,” only to announce, as soon as the election was behind him, that his first priority was changing Social Security.
Pretty much what Thomas Franks wrote in What’s the Matter With Kansas?
But something snapped last year. Conservatives had long believed that history was on their side, so the G.O.P. establishment could, in effect, urge hard-right activists to wait just a little longer: once the party consolidated its hold on power, they’d get what they wanted. After the Democratic sweep, however, extremists could no longer be fobbed off with promises of future glory.
In Wingnut Lore, “Republican elites” have joined the ranks of the “Liberal Elite” as betrayers of American values.
Furthermore, the loss of both Congress and the White House left a power vacuum in a party accustomed to top-down management. At this point Newt Gingrich is what passes for a sober, reasonable elder statesman of the G.O.P. And he has no authority: Republican voters ignored his call to support a relatively moderate, electable candidate in New York’s special Congressional election.
Newt’s political career is long over; only he and Big Media don’t seem to know that. He still has some uses as a shill for corporate interests, which makes corporate media take him seriously. But he has no actual following among the plebes that I can see.
But I want to go back to the history of the Republican Party and its relationship to right-wing whackjobs. It’s not entirely accurate to say that the GOP rejected wingnuts until Reagan. Much of the Red-baiting of the 1950s and 1960s amounted to a shout-out to wingnuts. During the height of Joe McCarthy’s Reign of Terror, for example, ca. 1952, many GOP leaders publicly supported and encouraged him. However, it was also a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, who helped orchestrate his demise.
A great deal of today’s political landscape also was determined by the struggle for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Every facet of conservatism was opposed to civil rights for racial minorities in those days, and part of the pushback came in the form of connecting civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King to the Communist Conspiracy. Some libertarians today still try to make that connection.
Barry Goldwater flirted with the whackjobs in his failed presidential bid in 1964. Richard Nixon, a master Red-Baiter in his prime, also played a role. To counteract news stories that made Tricky Dick look bad, the Nixon Administration created the myth of the liberal media that gave wingnuts permission to ignore any news they don’t like as “media bias.” This in turn paved the way for manufactured news from the Wingnut Alternative Reality to be given the same weight and respect as accounts of stuff that actually happened.
So what we saw from the end of World War II to today was a process by which the extreme Right created its own mythical narrative (beginning with “stabbed n the back” at Yalta). At the same time, the authority of news media — an Edward R. Murrow; a Walter Cronkite — to set the record straight was undermined. And a big chunk of the American public became putty in the hands of unscrupulous demagogues.
Krugman continues,
Real power in the party rests, instead, with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (who at this point is more a media figure than a conventional politician). Because these people aren’t interested in actually governing, they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it. So all the old restraints are gone.
This is essentially true, although we could argue how much anyone in the Bush II administration cared about governing, as opposed to looking out for the interests of the financial and defense industry sectors.
Krugman’s concern is that the poor economy and high unemployment could help Republicans take back many seats in Congress next year. Republicans can stomp around staying that President Obama’s big-spending stimulus failed. The irony is that it fell short largely because Obama watered it down to please Republicans, but good luck getting that message out past the Wingnut Noise Machine.
Krugman concludes,
And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.
The U.S. has been nearly ungovernable for some time, thanks to the Right, but I agree there is some room for matters to get worse.