In Black Swan, Natalie Portman, a pristine and proper ballerina, must figure out how to go beyond her ability to dance the white swan in "Swan Lake." She must find the passion, a darker side if you will, to convincingly portray the seductress that is the black swan. Of course, as she takes this leap, Portman's character is drawn deeper and deeper into a hallucinatory psychosis, unable to distinguish between reality and delusion.
In the film, Portman must become the Black Swan to play it, there is no middle ground where she can inhabit the character, but not the character's life - which causes her to lose all the self-control and discipline she has gained on stage as well as off. Which would seem to work the same way as conservatism, at least with regard to social policy - as right wingers fear in their fevered and misfiring synapses that we'll all become black swans just like they would (and often still do), without authoritarian rigidity dictating every aspect of our personal lives.
In other words, much like in the film, in the conservative worldview there can also be no middle ground. Either we all become Pat Robertson - you know, before the newfound love of the pot plant - or you know where things are headed. To quote the great Dr. Venkman from Ghostbusters, "human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together...mass hysteria!"
This same dance has played out with policies relating to birth control, divorce, religion in schools and a variety of other issues. But most recently, it reared its Rovian head to spit venom on legislation that would make gay Americans equal to the rest of us under law and started a brawl among conservatives that is worthy of Camille and Kelsey Grammar.
The first of their two most recent Swan Lake moment happened during the vote in the recent lame-duck Congress to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. The Family Research Council, recently rewarded for all their hard work at being bigots with the designation of "hate group" by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, pulled some statistics out of a part of their body they're afraid to acknowledge to claim that "homosexual assault" would skyrocket if we let openly gay service members into our armed forces.
These happy - or gay if you will - protectors of our purity worried aloud about the "sleeping" and/or "intoxicated" victims of what would seem to be gay sexual Terminators not simply satisfied with converting foxholes into Liberace revivals, but forcing themselves on anyone and everyone within stone's throw of their tiaras.
As someone who has been involved somewhat in the punditry circuit (for lack of a better term), I have been asked by progressive friends what I think is needed for the Left to compete with the Right, not so much in the war of ideas, as idea distribution.
To begin with, we need people who can confidently promote progressive values on television and radio. While the last decade has seen the creation and expansion of progressive think tanks, Air America Radio (an incubator of such talent as Rachel Maddow and Sam Seder), and even primetime MSNBC's becoming a mini-progressive tv outpost, we still lack the funding of the Right, and the pipeline it creates.
A 24-hour conservative television station and talk radio both nationally and locally dominated by conservatives doesn't only get the message out and give cover to politicians and political ideas once considered slightly to the right of insane (make no mistake, they've used these and many print distribution channels to take Bircherism, or Hofstadter's "Paranoid Style," mainstream--something which was once looked at as absolute looniness by those who even controlled the Establishment on the Right).
It also has created everyone from Glenn Beck to Sean Hannity to Tucker Carlson (we can also thank The Weekly Standard and Swanson for this last honor, as in Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson). So we may not have that. Or Heritage Foundation Summer School (with balconies!) and, for the most part, the other think tanks that pay conservative "thinkers" real salaries just to think out loud during non-paid tv segments, in low-paying articles and columns, and to write books nobody buys--but reach the NY Times bestseller list because these think tanks bulk buy 20,000 of them the minute they come out.
But we are making progress in other areas. One project I'm involved with, The Progressive Talent Initiative, not only provides 3.5 days of media training including everything from performance critiques to messaging advice, but the relationship continues afterwards, as the program gives you a tune up when you need it and helps get you booked for appearances.
It is a great program, which I had the luck of attending, and now maybe it's your turn. If you're a political strategist, progressive activist, blogger, academic, non-profit dweller or the like, this could be a great program for you to earn the key messaging and media training skills the Left so critically needs. The training is free to participants so if you are selected, can take the time to participate and are eager and willing to be booked after the training, the PTI team will take care of everything else.
If this is something you've been thinking about, give it a shot, as we need progressives armed with not only the facts, but the ability to share them with persuadable audiences.
So what are you doing March 9th-12th? If you'd like to apply for media training, now's your chance. The training is limited to only 12 participants, so showcase your talents in your application for the review committee to see. Application is available here and is open until January 14. So get in the game my friends!
Note: First an appearance on Lawrence O'Donnell's The Last Word on this topic, below my weekly column at AJE
What does he want? Revenge. For what? Being born.
This is the way famous gunslinger Doc Holliday answers equally famous lawman and good friend Wyatt Earp's inquiry - in their depiction in the movie Tombstone - into why their sworn enemy, Johnny Ringo, is such a misanthrope.
Sadly, this description would be equally accurate in explaining the actions of another Arizona transplant filled with endless rage: Senator John McCain.
I first encountered the seething side of McCain when I was writing my 2008 book, The Real McCain, which was critical of him while pointing out a then-controversial fact, one no longer in dispute among those who lionised him back then. Namely, that the Led Zeppelin-groupie relationship he then enjoyed with many in the media was based on a faulty premise.
John McCain was not a maverick (which he has since admitted after long identifying with the title), but a man driven by a need to fight. To fight for his own redemption, to fight with those who dared disagree with him, and most particularly, to fight with anyone who had delivered him a perceived humiliation of any sort. Think Yosemite Sam on a bender, or Vladamir Putin in those half-naked martial arts pictures.
Sure, McCain was also motivated by the very same political expediency which drives too many politicos, as well as coveting an appearance on the Sunday morning talk circuit the way a twenty-something blonde does meeting Edward Pattinson, or marrying Hugh Hefner.
But the driving force for McCain has been pure vitriol and spite. When I first pointed out this inconvenient truth in my book, that many Republicans, including some willing to go on the record, were sure McCain was motivated by demons and not decency, I was criticised or dismissed in many quarters. Yet, it was obvious to me back then that his battles with fellow Republicans and Democrats had become personal, crusades for the eternally perturbed Abe Simpson stand-in.
I broke two stories in my book that spoke to McCain's temperament, that he had physically assaulted a member of his own party after taunting him (Republican Representative Rick Renzi) and had called his wife a very not-safe-for-work term of non-endearment. In perhaps an emblematic McCain moment, during a policy meeting with a fellow Republican, McCain "called the guy a 'sh-head.' The senator demanded an apology. McCain stood up and said, 'I apologise, but you're still a sh-head.'"
There's a reason the dude was nicknamed "McNasty" in high school.
Sometimes there are simply no words to describe the behaviour of Mitch McConnell's band of merry misanthropes - also known as much of the US Senate Republican Caucus. The level of pathological callousness, a nihilistic streak that would make Friedrich Nietzsche blush, the willingness to put an AR-15 to the head of the nearest vulnerable group if they don't get every last dime of the mud-bath tax credit for the likes of Kim Kardashian.
You've seen these clowns in action. You know what I'm talking about.
They diagnose patients via Youtube. They block votes on everything that doesn't involve water boarding someone or gutting mine safety standards. They turn bathroom stalls in Minnesota airports into tourist destinations.
Yet, this latest stunt, well, this one even shocked me. Senator McConnell's boisterous brood decided that it was too expensive to fund healthcare for 9/11 first responders. That's right, the guys and gals who ran into cascading buildings, brick bonfires and smoldering ash, many of whom - the ones lucky enough to get out alive - developed respiratory illness and cancer for their troubles.
Sicknesses no doubt brought about by their sloth, atheism and at least occasional voting for Democrats.
So "offsets" had to be found to pay for $6 to $7 bn in life-saving funds. Yes, we just added $858 bn in red ink to our budget because somewhere a campaign contributor needed pocket change for the latest yacht shoe, but those in need of less than 1 per cent of that amount for the deleterious results of heroism?
In the wake of President Barack Obama's premature capitulation to the Republicans in the tax wars, a party who I might remind you controls neither congressional chamber at this moment (they will take over the House in January), once muted criticism of the Commander-in-Chief on the Left has suddenly erupted into a full scale flurry of condemnation.
There have been calls for other Democrats to primary him in 2012, jeremiads that Progressives should have been treating him as an adversary, and a feeling on the Left, put into words by a Congressman (Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York), that Democrats "can't trust him."
So you could say it's been a somewhat bad month for the president - although that might be akin to saying the guys attending South Carolina's "Secession Ball" will only be missing some of their teeth. The president has not only caved on eliminating budget-busting tax cuts for people who have toilet plungers more expensive than your house, but has backed off long-delayed (but promised) environmental regulations to govern smog and toxic emissions from industrial boilers.
He also negotiated a new Korea Free Trade Agreement that isn't free from deleterious affects on American workers, enacted a freeze in pay for federal employees for reasons nobody can figure out, and was ready to listen to recommendations to cut Social Security from a committee of rich, irrelevant Beltway primates so old they look like they should be starring in Weekend at Bernie's 3.
But in fact, McCain was a deeply psychologically damaged man, who legislated based upon 3 simple principles: 1) Who John McCain hates at any given time and how he can try and screw that person 2) What gets John McCain the most press 3) What is in John McCain's political interest.
Most of McCain's brief period of sanity, which extended from about 1999-2003, saw him join Democrats on everything from campaign finance reform to a patient's bill of rights, opposing Bush's tax cuts to opposing the Christian Right, supporting CAFE standards to supporting closing the gun-show loophole. But the reasons behind this transformation, as I laid out in my book, had little to do with his being a responsible man of the people, as he was portrayedvirtually everywhere.
Two years ago, a post-Bush Republican Party that couldn't find itself on Google Maps was thoroughly thrashed for the second time in as many elections. The GOP had lost over 50 House seats over two election cycles, scores of state legislative chambers, governorships, US Senate seats, and the presidency to a guy named Barack Hussein Obama.
The latter, something most observers thought wouldn't happen in the United States until some time between the next arrival of Haley's Comet and when Kevin Costner evolves into a fish-humanoid hybrid to live on an Earth covered by H20.
It's amazing what can happen, however, when you have a Democratic president who doesn't live up to many of his core progressive promises, who blames his base for asking him to, and whose communications people, to quote Democratic National Committeeman and CNN Contributor Robert Zimmerman, "... couldn't sell cocaine to Charlie Sheen."
The results were on display this past Tuesday, when an American public tired of being unemployed, scared about their future, and looking for some kind of leadership, handed over the US House - in stunning fashion - to a coterie of cranks who have to put corks on the end of their forks not to jab their own eyes while eating. Think Steve Martin's Ruprecht from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and you get the basic picture of some of the Tea Party proxies we elected to Congress last week.
Hey folks - this is Adam Green with MoveOn. Chris and Matt have graciously opened up the front page of OpenLeft this Sunday morning from 10am to 11am EST for me to liveblog ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
I wanted to invite you to join me here for active discussion, and to suggest in the comments below any thoughts you have on things to look for. Be they big issues or small nuances...or questions you think should be asked to McCain...I'm all ears.
As many of you probably know, MoveOn launched a petition this week to ABC and other networks in reaction to this week's travesty of a debate. If you haven't seen it yet, it says:
"Debate moderators abuse the public trust every time they ask trivial questions about gaffes and 'gotchas' that only political insiders care about. Enough with the distractions--ABC and other networks must focus on issues that affect people's daily lives."
There was a ton of energy behind this media critique. A quarter-million people signed MoveOn's petition within 3 days -- thousands of them not prior MoveOn members. (If you haven't signed yet, click here.) And the sentiment was equally strong on many blogs, and even on the pages of the Washington Post, Editor & Publisherr, and other places.
When it comes to what questions should be asked to McCain tomorrow, I have to admit, I'm a little torn--and I'd really value other people's thoughts. (More below...)
Cliff Schecter's The Real McCain has gone as high as #2 on the political best-seller list, and #15 on the non-fiction list, so the progressive media machine is having some success in getting the word out on how good and important this book is. The only thing that really pisses me off is that Cliff, and other great authors like Glenn Greenwald and David Sirota, just aren't getting asked on TV at all. You know that if some right-wing author like Jonah Goldberg had a book out with stories doing damage to Obama's or Clinton's reputation like Cliff has with this book on McCain, the media would be all over them with the hype.
So keep the pressure on big media. If you haven't bought Cliff's book, buy it, and if you have, buy some copies for your swing voter friends. We need to get the word out on this, and keep the momentum going, so that his stories about McCain get more attention.
Cliff Schecter is one of my favorite people- razor sharp, funny as hell, takes no shit from the right-wingers he debates frequently on TV, and is a brilliant researcher to boot. He has an extremely important new book coming out, The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him and Why Independents Shouldn't.
Cliff spent a lot of time doing some really deep digging for the stories in this book, and came up with some dramatic material, including this excerpt that Raw Story had yesterday:
John McCain's temper is well documented. He's called opponents and colleagues "shitheads," "assholes" and in at least one case "a fucking jerk."
But a new book on the presumptive Republican nominee will air perhaps the most shocking angry exchange to date.
The Real McCain by Cliff Schecter, which will arrive in bookstores next month, reports an angry exchange between McCain and his wife that happened in full view of aides and reporters during a 1992 campaign stop. An advance copy of the book was obtained by RAW STORY.
Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain's intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, "You're getting a little thin up there."
McCain's face reddened, and he responded, "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.
If progressives can help get this book to the top of the political best sellers list, it's going to get a lot more attention, and Cliff will get to do a lot more TV appearances, which would be a very good thing for all of us. And it's only ten bucks- a hell of a deal! Please order it now.
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