| Greenwald Spots A 'Crypto-Racist'
Glenn is writing about a pair of op-eds by Kathleen Parker, the first a defense of white racist rejection of Barack Obama, the second--as already mentioned--a homophobic hit-piece on Edwards and Obama. one writes:
The first thing Parker does in her first piece is assure us that it's not racism she's talking about. Of course, racism is always based on lies, so no surprise there. No, it's not race, it's culture we are told. But, of course, biologically, race does not exist in the human species. Genetic differences between races are less than those within them. Among humans, "race" is a cultural construct, and who counts as what race can vary wildly from place to place and time to time-or even between two different individuals in the exact same place at the exact same time. And so it is that Parker's column, which purports to give an objective historical explanation is in fact articulating a very standard sort of racial construction, even though it purports to do nothing of the sort.
It's most disturbing, perhaps, because it appears on the website of the "Jewish World Report," and the language that Parker uses is at least as reminiscent of German anti-Semitism as it is of classical American racism. But listen to her words, beginnning with the title of her piece, "A full-blooded American." Nothing mattered more to German anti-Semites-including the Nazis-than the concept of blood: German blood or Jewish. One could not be both. And those who were Jewish could never be authentic Germans.
Paker speaks of this:
"Full-bloodedness," "heritage, core values, and made-in-America." "a cultural divide in this country," "a patriot divide," "Who 'gets' America? And who doesn't?" "blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots," "a very real sense that once-upon-a-time America is getting lost in the dash to diversity," "a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice," "forefathers [who] fought and died for an America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years," and "Clinton's own DNA [which] is cobbled with many of the same values that rural and small-town Americans cling to. She understands viscerally what Obama has to study."
Hilzoy Steps In
Those who have studied the language of racism, and the language fascism will immediately recognize such phrases as part of those lexicons. But another blogger, Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, does an excellent job of making them "perfectly clear".
First, here is Parker's column as Hilzoy excerpts it:
"A full-blooded American."
That's how 24-year-old Josh Fry of West Virginia described his preference for Sen. John McCain over Sen. Barack Obama. His feelings aren't racist, he explained. He would just be more comfortable with "someone who is a full-blooded American as president." Whether Mr. Fry was referring to Mr. McCain's military service or Mr. Obama's Kenyan father isn't clear [ed. note: hahahahahaha], but he may have hit upon something essential in this presidential race.
Full-bloodedness is an old coin that's gaining currency in the new American realm. Meaning: Politics may no longer be so much about race and gender as about heritage, core values and made-in-America. Just as we once had and still have a cultural divide in this country, we now have a patriot divide. (...)
It's about blood equity, heritage and commitment to hard-won American values. And roots. (...)
We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants - and we are. But there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice. (...)
The "guns, God and gays" trope has haunted Democrats, and Republicans have enjoyed dusting it off when needed to rile the locals. It's an easy play.
But so-called ordinary Americans aren't so easily manipulated, and they don't need interpreters. They can spot a poser a mile off, and they have a hound's nose for snootiness. They've got no truck with people who condescend or tolerance for that down-the-nose glance from people who don't know the things they know.
What they know is that their forefathers fought and died for an America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years. What they sense is that their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative. And they fear what else might get lost in the remodeling of America.
Republicans more than Democrats seem to get this, though Sen. Hillary Clinton has figured it out. And, the truth is, Mrs. Clinton's own DNA is cobbled with many of the same values that rural and small-town Americans cling to.
She understands viscerally what Mr. Obama has to study."
And here is Hilzoy putting it in context:
Forefathers? Bloodlines? DNA?
Here's a little experiment. I, like Barack Obama, am the child of one parent who was born in America, and one who came here from overseas; like Barack Obama, I was born and raised in this country. Do you think Kathleen Parker would have written this column about me -- about how, despite being born and raised here, I "have to study" American values, how I don't have sufficient "blood equity" in this country, how I don't have the right values 'in my DNA', and so forth -- because my mother is Swedish? I don't.
Here's another experiment: imagine this same column written about a candidate whose father was a Jew who had come here from Eastern Europe and married an American. Imagine that Kathleen Parker wrote that this candidate wasn't a "full-blooded American", that his DNA wasn't "cobbled with" the right values, that because only one of his parents was from this country, and only half his ancestors had fought and died for it, he just didn't have the right "bloodlines" to be President. Does anyone doubt for a moment that that would be antisemitic? I don't.
Hilzoy's examples should make it obvious to anyone how patently racist Parker's argument is. By extension, anyone who doesn't see this in the first place, who has to have it pointed out for them like this, is themselves at least partially infected with the everyday racial assumptions of our still imperfect culture. This does not make them racists per se. But it does make them in need of conscious anti-racist effort in order to live up to their own ideals as Americans committed to liberty, justice and equality for all.
I do not say this to place blame on anyone, but rather to indicate the pervasiveness of the problem. It is not simply located inside the skin of a few bad apples. It is a deep-rooted part of the very same heritage that Parker celebrates. After all, a good many of the "so-called ordinary Americans" whose "forefathers fought and died for an America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years" are the descendents of Confederate soldiers, who fought to preserve slavery.
A Critical Stance
This sort of stepping back, and critically exmining the culture we live in-the culture that lives in us as well-is a big no-no for the Parkers of the world. It is only done by those who are not authentic:
And, the truth is, Clinton's own DNA is cobbled with many of the same values that rural and small-town Americans cling to. She understands viscerally what Obama has to study.
This is how racists and fascists think. The true people are bound together by blood. The false people-the outsiders, the interlopers, the invaders, the corruptors, the race-mixers, the Jews,can never understand because it is not in their blood. They must try to pick things apart with reason. And reason is sterile. It is not of the blood. This is the sick logic of the racist mind, the fascist mind.
The very thing that makes us fully human-the capacity to think, and reason, to step outside of our own skin, and question ourselves about what we are doing, so that we can grow beyond what we were in the past-that is what the fascist and the racist hate. They hate the fully human. And they feel ashamed in the face of it. They call it "elitist" because it makes them feel inferior. And rather than struggle with themselves to overcome that inferiority, to banish their shame through their own hard-won redemption, they band together in an effort to drag everyone else down into the muck that they themselves are trapped in.
As is typical among racists and fascists, the picture Parker paints is that of a good and decent people being overwhelmed by fightening otherness. There is nothing new in this. The Germans killed six million Jews because they feared the Jews taking control over them. How? There was no answer, really. They made up fantasies. But the reality was that a people incapable of order their own lives needed someone else to blame for their own failure. Their failure was quite understandable. German society was deeply authoritarian, and their authorities had utterly failed them. Generations of authoritarianism had ill-prepared them for coping in the vacuum left when their authorities were displaced.
Superficially, at least, America is quite different. We have a history of democratic self-governance whose roots stretch back for centuries. And yet, authoritarianism in various guises pervades our culture. There are many still alive today whose grandparents were born as slaves. We are still that close to slavery. Women are supposed to defer to men. Men are supposed to defer to their bosses. Team players are supposed to sacrifice their independent judgement. We are not a free people. We are a people in constant struggle to claim our freedom.
The easy way is to blame our lack of total freedom on "them"-this is the racist way, the fascist way, the authoritarian way. Everything would be fine without them. This is what Parker says:
We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants - and we are. But there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice.
Meanwhile, immigration trends have shifted dramatically in the past 40 years, as growing percentages of Americans are foreign-born. In 1970, just 4.7 percent or 9.6 million people of the total population were foreign-born. By 2000, 11.1 percent or 31.1 million individuals were foreign-born, according to the Census.
Contributing to the growing unease among yesterday's Americans is the failure of the federal government to deal with the illegal-immigration fiasco. It isn't necessarily racist or nativist to worry about what these new demographics mean to the larger American story.
But there is nothing new about this. As one of Hilzoy's commentators, Russell, noted:
If you know your history, then you would know where you coming from.
As a percentage of total population, the foreign-born population rose from 9.7 percent in 1850 and fluctuated in the 13 percent to 15 percent range from 1860 to 1920 before dropping to 11.6 percent in 1930. The highest percentages foreign born were 14.4 percent in 1870, 14.8 percent in 1890 and 14.7 percent in 1910.
So, for seventy damned years straight the foreign born population of this nation was equal to or higher than the level that is making Kathleen Parker pee her pants. And, somehow, the Republic survived.
Parker is a xenophobic idiot. She brings nothing to the table other than her own bile.
Of course, Parker's defenders will claim it's different now, because of all the "illegals." But Pat Buchanan, at least, has been honest about this on occassion, saying the no one would be worried if all the "illegals" were white. And, indeed, it's true, because there are already a great number of such immigrants, who have either entered illegally or overstayed their visas. There is no panic over them. What's more, it's simply not the case that the earlier immigration was entirely legal-the slang for an Italian, "wop," was short for "without papers." Indeed the exact same panic Parker feels now has been felt before-and not just during the period Russell points to, as Martin Scorcese's film Gangs of New York reminds us.
Indeed, the irony here is that every generation of pestilential outsiders becomes, within a generation or two, the most vociferous of the deeply-rooted "true Americans" complaining about the next wave of pestilential outsiders. Parker's neat division between true Americans and immigrant freaks who have to study America to understand it is completely ahistorical. As a people, we are composed of countless sedimented layers of immigration-often within the same skin. Parker's neat, clean split into two radically opposite groups, "Who gets America and who doesn't," is a psychological construct, not an historical one. And the psychology it reflects is the psychology of racism.
The Pyschological Dimension
In "Racism: Projective Identification And Cultural Processes", Robert M. Young writes that "the price of admission into a culture is the acquiring of its projective identifications," which means identifying a common set of disowned attributes of the selt that are projected onto designated others:
The first appearance of the term 'race' in the English language occurred in 1508 and linked it with unconscious forces. It appeared in a poem on the seven deadly sins by a Scot named Dunbar who referred to those who followed envy as including 'bakbyttaris of sindry recis' (backbiters of sundry races (Banton, 1987, p. 1). If we look at treatises on racism, we find them full of very primitive, Kleinian language. Here is a list of terms I have extracted from a book on the psychoanalysis of racism which stresses the projection of intrapsychic phenomena into the political and treats them largely in terms of diseased or malignant internal objects: foreign bodies, germs, pollutants, contaminants, malignancies, poisonous infections, gangrenous limbs, dirty, suppurating, verminous (Koenigsberg, 1977). This brings to mind the representation of Jews as gutter rats in Nazi propaganda films and the rhetoric of competing political tendencies discussed by Martin Thom in an article on projection in left sectarian rhetoric, in which opponents were characterised as shitty, nauseating and their ideas as spew, vomit, etc. (Thom, l978).
Parker's language is quite gentile compared to all of this, which derives from early childhood, and the stuff of nightmares. But there have always been genteel racists among us, who leave it to the "lower orders" to do the dirty work. Indeed, Young writes about this racial bargain:
In Killers of the Dream, Lillian Smith offers a fantasy bargain between the rich owner and the white 'redneck' (sunburned from working with heads bowed down in the cotton fields). Let us exploit you, and we will give you the black to dominate, scapegoat, sexually exploit and murder. Mr. Rich White said to Mr. Poor White, 'If you ever get restless when you don't have a job or your roof leaks, or the children look puny and shoulder blades stick out more than natural, all you need to do is remember you're a sight better off than the black man... But if you get nervous sometimes anyway, and don't have much to do, and begin to get worried up inside and mad with folks, and you think it'll make you feel a little better to lynch a nigger occasionally, that's OK by me, too; and I'll fix it with the sheriff and the judge and the court and the newspapers so you won't have any trouble afterwards... If you once let yourself believe he's human, then you'd have to admit you'd done things to him you can't admit you've done to a human. You'd have to know you'd done things that God would send you to hell for doing... And sometimes it was like this: You just hated him. Hated and dreaded and feared him, for you could never forget, there was no way to forget, what you'd done to his women and to those women's children; there was no way of forgetting your dreams of those women... No way of forgetting...Yes... they thought they had a good bargain' (Smith, 1950, pp. 162-65). Once again, we are racist along lines laid down by economic and social stratifications. That's what makes it racism - stereotyping and scapegoating of people as members of groups, rather than treating people as individuals.
Lillian Smith's account is jarringly at odds with Parker's romanticization of the chronically impoverished racists of West Virginia:
Yet, white Americans primarily - and Southerners, rural and small-town folks especially - have been put on the defensive for their throwback concerns with "guns, God and gays," as Howard Dean put it in 2003. And more recently, for clinging to "guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them," as Obama described white, working-class Pennsylvanians who preferred his opponent.
The "guns, God and gays" trope has haunted Democrats, and Republicans have enjoyed dusting it off when needed to rile the locals. It's an easy play.
But so-called "ordinary Americans" aren't so easily manipulated and they don't need interpreters. They can spot a poser a mile off and they have a hound's nose for snootiness. They've got no truck with people who condescend nor tolerance for that down-the-nose glance from people who don't know the things they know.
What they know is that their forefathers fought and died for an America that has worked pretty well for more than 200 years. What they sense is that their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative. And they fear what else might get lost in the remodeling of America.
Now, what is that passage if not Parker re-stating the terms of the racial bargain? We get the wealth and power. You stay dirt poor and ignorant. But you get to project all your self-contempt onto the blacks and furriners. And the hatred you dare not feel for us? That you can heap onto the snooty Democrats like Barack Obama and Howard Dean. Don't let them manipulate you. That's our job, suckers.
Young continues:
Where I grew up in Texas in the 1950s, the Ku Klux Klan was still active as it is again. I unknowingly worked with members - sharecroppers whose farms were uneconomic and who had gone to work in Ford factory in order to hold onto their homes. They seemed decent people until one of them saw me in friendly conversation with a black janitor, a preacher with a Masters Degree who was trying to keep his church going, a situation parallel to the sharecroppers. The man who worked most closely with me carefully lowering car bodies onto chassis said, 'Don't never speak to me again. I don't want to have nothing to do with no nigger-lover'. And he never uttered another word to me.
These people, like racists everywhere, acquired their horrid social attitudes by a process of tacit social learning, whereby their infantile psychotic anxieties, feelings all babies have, got channelled into particular channels. I do not think that those rednecks working at the Ford factory were mad or psychopathic, any more than I think my racist father and (rather more genteel) racist mother and sister were evil. As Hannah Arendt has shown us in the case of Adolf Eichmann, it is more banal than that (Arendt, 1963). They were just socialised into the values of that part of the world - just as I was. Otherwise, how could so many young Irishmen, Serbians, Croatians, Kurds, Turks, Germans, Japanese, Russians, Afghans, Conquistadors kill and maim all those men, women and babies? What is horrible about racism is that it is normal in the cultures where it is sedimented.
In short, racism is a social and cultural problem. At this point in time, what most keeps it in place in our culture is the mis-diagnosis of it as a personal trait-if someone has racist thoughts or feelings, they are a bad person. And that, of course, means that no one talks very honestly about race, or about their struggles with their own prejudices, prejudices that are grounded in "infantile psychotic anxieties, feelings all babies have" which are older than our capacity to speak. How the hell are we supposed to undo that, if we can't talk about it honestly?
The people like Josh Fry are simply honest about how they feel. Their feelings are ubly and distorted by the culture they were raised in. But they are, all in all, decent people to the best of their abilities. And they have the capacity to be better. Indeed, most of them believe it is their moral duty to try to be better. It's in their Bible-Love they neighbor as thyself. Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do unto me. Whatever demons they carry in their breasts, they also carry a willingness to struggle with them-a willingness that only awaits a call to that struggle.
The real racists are the top dogs in the racial bargain, and their enforcers. They have names like Kathleen Parker and the people she writes for, like the Jewish World Review and the Washington Post
Parker Does The WaPo Girlie Man Thing
After his own discussion of Parker's white supremacist column, Glenn writes:
Today, The Washington Post has invited the very same Kathleen Parker onto its Op-Ed page to share her views on the Democratic candidates, and specifically to opine on the matter of John Edwards' endorsement this week of Obama. She abandons her White Pride argument today in favor of the important and Serious claim that Obama and Edwards are gay girls.
The Post promotes her Op-Ed on its front page this way: "Kathleen Parker: Two Democratic Pretty Boys." Here's how her Op-Ed begins: Well, at least they didn't kiss.
I was bracing myself for the lip lock Wednesday when John Edwards endorsed Barack Obama.
That appears under the Post headline: "The Democrats Hug It Out." We then learn that "the two men exchanged a manly air-hug" when they appeared together; that "Obama and Edwards make an attractive picture -- Ultra Brite cover boys of youth and glamour"; that Edwards has a "28,000-square-foot house and $400 haircuts"; and that "Obama and Edwards look and talk pretty, but Clinton, unflinching and steely, exudes pure brawn." All of that makes Obama and Edwards too girly "to sit across from the likes of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."
Those are some very Serious political arguments brought to us by The Washington Post from an important and Serious political commentator. As always, while everything to the Left of Marty Peretz's New Republic is too fringe and radical to be heard from, there simply is no such thing as being too far to the Right to fall off the mainstream spectrum. Is there any better proof of that than the appearance by Kathleen Parker on the Post's Op-Ed, fresh off her White Pride column, to write an Op-Ed that has little purpose other than to argue that Obama and Edwards are pretty, weak girls who wanted to hug and kiss each other?
All of which is completely true-and completely consistent with the argument of his new book, Great American Hypocrites
But there's something more going on in Parker's op-ed as well.
For one thing, as one of Hilzoy's commentator noted:
What struck me about the "Dems hug it out" column wasn't so much the pathetic gay baiting, but the projection. Parker felt compelled to call Obama and Edwards out for figuratively hugging, when she must be aware of Bush and McCain's famous hug.
Indeed! Projection is what it's all about, from the big picture of the famous hug, all the way down.
After opening up with her gender confusion attacks, Parker follows up with a potpouri of tired rightwing tropes, none of which stand up to any sort of serious rational scrutiny. But that's not the point-the point is to evoke primative rage and fuse it with those narrative tropes. Why? To recreate the same process by which racism is created in the first place, as Young succinctly described above:
These people, like racists everywhere, acquired their horrid social attitudes by a process of tacit social learning, whereby their infantile psychotic anxieties, feelings all babies have, got channelled into particular channels.
In her earlier column, Parker construed the hardworking poor white as salt-of-the-earth. But Edwards is one of them: son of millworker. Not only that, he rose to wealth and prominence by fighting on their behalf. Parker's task now is demolish what she just yesterday not merely praised, but construed as an unquestionable fact of nature: the virtue of the hardpressed white working class. She takes a few jabs at Obama along the way, but her primary target here is Edwards, and in this regard, the feminization attack leads directly into charges of narcissism:
As Edwards gave what amounted to a stump speech highlighting his favorite subject -- John Edwards -- Americans were reminded of why the North Carolina son-of-a-millworker won't be their presidential nominee.
Enraptured by his own message, Edwards seemed reluctant to hand over the microphone. He finally relinquished the stage, after describing, yet again, the "wall" that he says divides Americans: "There is one man who knows in his heart that it is time to create one America, not two. And that man is Barack Obama."
The "wall" refers to the one Edwards erected in the hearts and minds of Americans who hadn't yet realized they were miserable, disenfranchised and seething with rage -- not the wall that used to run through Berlin.
In the real world, of course, Edwards is recognized as a highly gifted speaker-even Parker admits as much later is this same column. And people who came to hear Obama were no doubt thrilled to hear both men speak, instead of just one. But it's Parker's job to project her narcissism onto Edwards, and so she does.
And when she snears at the "wall" that "Edwards erected in the hearts and minds of Americans who hadn't yet realized they were miserable, disenfranchised and seething with rage", are we all supposed to forget the record "wrong track" numbers that have been posted for months on end under Bush? This is the exact same form of denial that the French aristocracy and their supporters embraced when they blamed the French Revolution on the non-existent Bavarian Illuminati. There was nothing wrong with the French people starving until the non-existent Illumanit got them all riled up!
Parker continues, in the same vein:
But their message of unity gets lost in a din of cognitive dissonance. To succeed, they must first create a divide of resentment the size of Montana among the have-not-enoughs toward those perceived as having too much. No one has tried this more brazenly than Edwards with his "two Americas" campaign, which failed twice, by the way.
The question -- should this duo have its way -- isn't "When will the poor be wealthy enough?" but "When will the wealthy be poor enough?"
Again, in the real world, average wages have been flat since the 1970s, while the top 1% have more than doubled their take of the national income since 1979. What's more, since Bush took office through 2006, everyone below the 80th income percentile has lost income, on average.
John Edwards didn't do that. George Bush and his loyal Republicans did-including John McSame. And the record is equally clear that the wealthy do fine under Democrats. The real difference is how poorly everyone else does under Republicans, as Larry Bartels made quite clear in his 2004 paper, "Partisan Politics and the U.S. Income Distribution ":
But, again, facts do not matter. What matters is the shaping of the "process of tacit social learning, whereby their infantile psychotic anxieties, feelings all babies have, got channelled into particular channels." Even if the facts aren't really facts, they learn that Democrats should be attacked-especial poor whites who get too uppity.
While we're waiting to find out, Edwards's tortured Southern shtick is supposed to help Obama with the demographic of white, rural, working-class (non-college) Americans he's been having trouble with. Green room translation: poor, ignorant racists.
Why isn't Edwards eloquent? Because Parker says he's not! Never mind the fact that he made a fortune partly because of it. He does not speak with an authentic Southern voice-despite all the juries who felt otherwise. (Dumb hicks! What do they know?) Instead, he has a "tortured Southern shtick"-again, just because Parker says so.
What's going on her is a transparent case of projection. Parker is speaking for a centuries-long tradition that has played poor whites for racist fools, and she's projecting this very contempt onto Edwards in her own green room fantasy without even the pretence of a lick of evidence. She just makes shit up. And the shit she makes up about others? It's easy! She just looks inside herself! That's what projection and projective identification are all about!
The use of these powerful, deep-seated psychological processes is aimed primarily at one thing: it shapes the narrative landscape determining the kinds of stories that can be told-or even imagined, along with the kinds of protagonists and villians there can be.
And one way this has long played out has been the demonizaiton of trial lawyers. Which, of course, Parker cannot leave out of her account:
Presumably, Edwards knows how to relate to these folks, given his heritage and his years as a trial lawyer representing the little people against corporate America. Notwithstanding his 28,000-square-foot house and $400 haircuts. And ignoring the fact that one reason health insurance rates are so high -- and that so many poor rural folks lack high-quality medical care -- is the success Edwards and other trial lawyers have in convincing jurors that doctors owe the world always-perfect results.
Except, of course, once again, it's simply not so:
Rising doctors' premiums not due to lawsuit awards
Study suggests insurers raise rates to make up for investment declines
By Liz Kowalczyk, Globe Staff | June 1, 2005
Re-igniting the medical malpractice overhaul debate, a new study by Dartmouth College researchers suggests that huge jury awards and financial settlements for injured patients have not caused the explosive increase in doctors' insurance premiums.
The researchers said a more likely explanation for the escalation is that malpractice insurance companies have raised doctors' premiums to compensate for falling investment returns.
The Dartmouth economists studied actual payments made to patients between 1991 and 2003, the results of which were published yesterday in the journal Health Affairs. Some previous studies have examined jury awards, which often are reduced after trial to comply with doctors' insurance coverage maximums or because the plaintiff settles for less money to avoid an appeal. Researchers found that payments grew an average of 4 percent annually during the years covered by the study, or 52 percent overall since 1991, but only 1.6 percent a year since 2000. The increases are roughly equivalent to the overall rise in healthcare costs, said Amitabh Chandra, lead author and an assistant professor of economics at the New Hampshire college.
''One of the things we know about medical malpractice payments is that they're usually made when an injury occurred," he said. ''The injury has to be treated. And if it's more and more expensive to treat injuries, then that will be reflected in payments."
Meanwhile, malpractice insurance premiums for internists, general surgeons, and obstetricians have skyrocketed since 2000, jumping 20 to 25 percent in 2002 alone. In Massachusetts, ProMutual Group, which covers about one-third of the state's doctors, raised rates an average of 11 percent last year, 20 percent in 2003, and 12.5 percent in 2002. Some specialists, such as obstetricians, now pay almost $100,000 annually for their malpractice insurance. ProMutual executives said they will not raise premiums this July, primarily because increases in the number of claims have slowed.
''It's not payments that's causing this," Chandra said. ''The simple explanation that comes to mind is the underwriting cycle. If they're making less money from the investment side of things, it's going to cause [insurance companies] to raise rates."
Damn! It's not the trial lawyers, it's the investor class! Bush's base!
Backstory: Is Parker A Flat-Out Liar?
In early November, 2003, Parker wrote a op-ed,
Georgia Democrat Sen. Zell Miller explained his surprising early endorsement of George Bush for 2004 in terms of trust and the future.
The next five years will determine what kind of world his children and grandchildren inherit, he said. And he doesn't "trust" any of the nine Democratic presidential candidates to secure that future.
Miller is not alone, though some are more sanguine when it comes to evaluating the roster of contenders. Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot."
"All this carping and undercutting of our foreign policy - whatever happened to politics stops at the water's edge? - is giving strength and hope to our enemies. That makes them fight harder and longer and in the end costs the very lives they claim to care so much about."
OK, so he's a little emotional. We'll pardon him, given that earlier in the day he had learned of a pal's death in Afghanistan with whom he served several years. His friend was no kid, but a veteran of many wars. A Native American Indian, they called him "Chief," which he liked just fine so everybody in the ethnic sensitivity guard can relax.
My friend's disgust with the current climate of debate may be extreme but not uncommon, especially among military folks.
This version was quickly superceeded by a more temperate one in which "lined up and shot" was changed to "lined up and slapped," a curious locution, at the very least-and hardly a believable one. Rough tough Delta Force guys don't talk about slapping people. Slapping is for girls. Every gender stereotype-monger knows that!
But, if Parker's re-write strained credulity, her explanation was even more strained. Buzzflash tells the whole tortured tale at excruciating length here, in a piece titled, "Is Kathleen Parker an Ann Coulter Wannabe?" and subtritled "Did You Ever Hear Anyone Say, "They Should All Be Lined Up and Slapped'?"
A good question. It seems obvious that what really happened is that Parker got a little carried with herself, somehow fancying that she might be the next Ann Coulter, only to suddenly realize,not so much, and she'd better cover her ass, pronto!
But what about the whole backstory to this?
At one point the Buzzflash story says:
Okay, we don't want to say that Parker made up the "Chief" anecdote and Delta Force quote. We would never think that. We can't imagine that she would. But would the editors of the Orlando Sentinel like to check out whether any Americans answering to the nickname of "Chief" have been killed in the last few days in Afghanistan? There aren't, fortunately, many Americans killed in Afghanistan nowadays, so maybe, just to give Parker's anonymous source the credibility that he deserves, the editors might check that out and confirm it. Not that we doubt Parker's unnamed source's story. But when anonymous sources are quoted and curious changes in quotations occur, it might just help everyone breathe a sigh of relief to learn more about the actual death of the "Chief."
Well, it's been more than four long years. But what the heck! How hard is it to at least start looking into it. The DOD press release archives, including casualties reports are here. The column came out on November 1, so the death would have had to be in October, 2003, which is here . . I went through every Army casualty press release, and found just one for Afghanistan:
IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 809-03
October 31, 2003
DoD Identifies Army Casualty
The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.
Staff Sgt. Paul A. Sweeney, 32, of Lakeville, Pa., died Oct. 30 of wounds sustained during an ambush near Musa, Qalax, Afghanistan.
Sweeney was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group, Fort Bragg, N.C.
The incident is under investigation.
An October 30 death and a November 1 column is cutting it mighty close, but surely it's possible. There was no other Army death in Afghanistan that month.
There's ony two problems: Sweeney wasn't Native American, and his nick-name wasn't "Chief". It was "Pauly." You can see pictures of him here and here.
So, basically, what we know about Parker is that she lies about public policy, which is endemic on the right, and she passes on false information. Whether she knows it is false, or whether she actually makes it up herself, we cannot tell. Either way, she is a perfect poster girl for the rightwing noise machine-junior grade, of course.
And that is the state of play in the culture wars today. There is no leftwing counterpart to the rightwing infrastructure of multi-tiered cultural institutions organized for hegemonic struggle. But the right is in increasing disarray anyway.
It's time we got a move on. |
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