Apparently, we're supposed to panic & do as the wingnuts & grownups command (aren't we always?), but digby pushes back:
Disavowal Movement Resurgent
by digby
So, I'm hearing on the internets that liberals had better disavow Grayson's Taliban ad or risk being seen as hypocrites when we complain about the other side doing it. All I can say is, "Oh dear, not that." (And I have never been much for the bi-annual "disavowal ritual" in general. You can look it up.)
Ever since Jesse Helms ran this ad and Daddy Bush ran this one I've haven't given the moral dimension of attack ads much thought at all. They are part of American politics and you can rail against them all you want, but they aren't going anywhere. Fretting about such things is the province of very upright, highly moral liberals who believe that it is better to lose than to run ads which sink to the other side's level. I guess I just don't think ads are more important than keeping corporate sponsored theocrats from being in positions of power, so we will have to agree to disagree.
At this point in the United States it is permissible for Republicans to attack Democrats as treasonous, Godless/Muslim socialists and compare them to Hitler and Stalin but Democrats are only allowed to attack Republicans for their differences in policy. Can we see the asymmetry here? Is it any surprise that they have dominated politics for the past 30 years? Sure, every once in a while there are moments when their act gets old and the nation will look for hope and change rather than fear and loathing, but let's just say that their willingness (and institutional support) will give them the advantage most of the time.
As for Webster, whether you call him the "T" word or not he's a theocrat --- the real thing:...
Liberals, Democrats, progressives, whatever, are supposed to drop everything and condemn any liberal, Democrat or progressive who says anything the least bit disrespectful of people who supposedly don't fart, especially if it's true. That's part of the rules, the Ten Commandments of Versailles. So this attempt to ostracize Grayson is about as newsworthy as any other dog-bites-man story you'll read this year, or next, or the year after that.
But what is worth noting is the content of what Grayson was saying, to wit, that rightwing theocrats are the enemies of America, on the same side of the global culture war as the Taliban and al Qaeda.
This is not just a minor, idle or theoretical point. Theocratic religious fundamentalists are really dangerous people, in part because they are totally immune to reason, and in part because they feel commanded by God to kill everyone who gets in their way, if it comes to that.
They do not believe in checks and balances, much less in separation of church and state. They believe in holy war. Period. And the very best thing they get to help them out in that regard is other theocratic religious fundamentalists, who just happen to call God by a slightly different name. That gives them a official designated enemy that they can hate absolutely, and more importantly it gives them an excuse for attacking everyone else who uses the same name of God that they do, but who isn't stark raving mad.
All this is very simple, very elemental. So much so that I almost feel like an idiot repeating it. Except for the fact that it's completely taboo to say of any of this.
Which is why Alan Grayson is being attacked in the first place. Because he told the truth about who's on which side in this War To End All Peace.
And we can't have that. Because, you see, if we had that, then the War To End All Peace would last about ten minutes. Fifteen tops.
And so we absolutely must, must, must! continue believing something somewhat like this:
The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11
....
From Publishers Weekly
Conservative pundit D'Souza (Illiberal Education) roots the blame for the 9/11 attacks in the left wing's "aggressive global campaign to undermine the traditional patriarchal family" in this mostly lucid but unconvincing argument. Pointing to Hillary Clinton, Britney Spears and Noam Chomsky, he decries those who have teamed up with Hollywood and the U.N. to foist an irreligious, sexually licentious, antifamily liberal culture-epitomized by Eve Ensler's play The Vagina Monologues and gay marriage initiatives-on a Muslim world that rightly reviles it. By deliberately attacking Islamic values, the left tacitly allies itself with al- Qaeda in its effort to defeat Bush's war on terror and thus discredit conservatism at home, he asserts....
Of course, if you believe in "Liberal Fascism" and believe that Martin Luther King was a white conservative, then why the hell not?
I don't see any evidence that the particular apocalyptic "my enemies are totalitarian madmen" strain of Birch/Beck/Goldberg conservatism has helped anyone win any elections.
Tristero's piece is very good, very thoroush, and very worth reading. But it proceeds by basically saying, "Okay, even if that were true:"
Let's ignore all the obvious contradictory examples, like Bachmann and Coburn and Tancredo and DeLay and so on and so on and - solely for the sake of argument - go so far as to entirely concede Matt's point: no one gets elected by being a rightwing loon.
I want to take the opposite approach. I want to basically argue that movement conservatives would be nowhere without this sort of rhetoric. It's not always their dominant form of rhetoric--particularly in its crudest, most blatant form, but it's always somewhere in the mix. As I explained back in May, 2008, in "Fox's Faux Populism vs A Shadow Elite--Pt. 1", conservative elites have been playing this game for centuries now:
While the notion of Fox News as "populist" is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore--and that is, quite simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power--the ability to define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone else as the dreaded "elite".
This is a very old game, and it's way past time we got a better handle on it. Before getting into any sort of messy details, it's important to note--ala my diary two weeks ago, "The Ontology of Snark: A Prelude"--that there's a common ego defense mechanism in play here:
Displacement: Defence mechanism that shifts sexual or aggressive impulses to a more acceptable or less threatening target; redirecting emotion to a safer outlet; separation of emotion from its real object and redirection of the intense emotion toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in order to avoid dealing directly with what is frightening or threatening. For example, a mother may yell at her child because she is angry with her husband.
Real, actual conservative elites have been using displacement as a stock in trade for millenia, creating ghost elites for unwitting populists to misdirect their anger at. It was virtually inevitable that Obama's "new politics" of "change" would be targetted with this ancient charge....
Elites Create Their Demon Others It's relatively easy for an elite to create a "shadow" elite, meaning something akin "shadow" in the Jungian sense of the unacknowledged dark side of the self. The mass of people resent the elite for things the elite cannot admit or accept about itself--above all, the arbitrariness and injustice of its position in the world--and so it projects its shadow onto another group. Because this involves disowning something fundamental of itself, the mechanism involved for the elite is more projective identification than projection, per se:
Projective identification is used to project the bad object into (not onto) another person so it becomes a part of that person.
The person then identifies with that other person, and hence has means to control them.
The person projected into may consequently be pressured to behave congruently with the projective phantasy.
This description captures quite well the enormous investment of time, energy and money we see on behalf of conservatives pushing the meme of "liberal elites", and devising various ways of getting "liberals" to act out their appointed roles.
The more extreme forms of demonizing liberals work very well for conservatives, in large part because they resonate with this broader narrative framework that they have repeated and reinforced countless times over the centuries. Of course, that's not all there is to it. There are cognitive motivations and biases that predispose conservatives to see the world this way. And what Matt is doing is invoking a counter set of cognitive motivations and biases--ones that are generally much sounder and saner, but that totally mislead when one is trying to understand and respond effectively to conservative attacks.
Those biases are the foundations of the dominant 18th Century Enlightenment model of disembodied reason. And late 20th and early 21st century cognitive science has definitively shown those biases to be false. Facts do not persuade people apart from narrative frameworks. When the facts contradict the framework, the facts are rejected, not the frame. Indeed, that's why folks like Matt stubbornly hold onto their false models of reason.
Of course this is all very high-level stuff I'm arguing here. But it dovetails very well with the specific history of movement conservatism, particularly since the New Deal and WWII, as it consistently failed to develop any sort of positive, pragmatic framework for dealing with America's realworld problems, and only managed to win elections by promoting paranoid us-vs-them narratives of seemingly limitless scope--McCarthyism in the early 50s (based on Nixon's smear campaigns that first won him a seat in Congress), racial backlash and the culture wars beginning with Goldwater 1964 and Nixon in 1968, honed to perfection by Reagan in 1980, and systematized by Gingrich in 1994--but never, ever actually solving any of the problems that it promised to.
And yet, when it comes down to it, Yglesias is basically trying to argue that nothing conservatives have done along these lines has been politically successful.
Which is utterly, downright delusional.
Am I twising his argument beyond his meaning? First off, I'd say that if I am, then his argument doesn't hold much punch. But here's what he said in complete context:
Most of you probably know this one: A man is wandering around under a street light looking down at the ground. Another man comes up to him, and asks, "What's going on?" The first man says, "I lost my car keys, and I'm looking for them." The second man says, "Here, let me help you. Where did you lose them?" The first man points up the up the street a bit, "Over there," he says. The second man looks at him, puzzled. "But, if you lost your keys over there, why are you looking for them here?" he asks. The First man scoffs at him," It's dark over there. Can't see a thing. The light's much better over here."
I first read this in a book of Sufi stories by Idries Shah. Supposedly, it's ancient, much, much older than cars and modern street lamps. And I believe it. It speaks to an incredibly common foible: look for the solution that's easy to see, comfortable to look for, regardless of whether it relates to the problem. I thought of that story last weekend, as Vastleft did his best to hijack a comment thread in a global warming diary to once again bash Open Left for not fanatically supporting single-payer--even though all of us feel that it's the only practicable solution in the long run. It began with this comment by selise:
"not politically feasible" and "
The real problem, of course, is that--just like with health care reform--there's way too much money being made and to be made by those who are causing the problem in the first place. So actual solutions are not really wanted--so much so that they are simply dismissed as "not politically feasible."
i love this quote and plan to use it frequently, but i'm also reminded of something you, paul, wrote in your previous post:
...civility is not the answer. Civility would be just fine, if accountability were for the wealthy and powerful and not just exclusively for the rest of us, along with more than our fair share of blame.
Rather than civilly adjusting our public expenditures to the private penury of the post-1973 world, we should be quite rudely fighting to restore--and even improve upon--the broad prosperity of the pre-1973 era. Nothing less than that deserves to be called "progressive." Nothing less than that deserves to be "justice." Nothing less than that deserves to be "humane." Nothing less than that should be our bottom line.
these two quotes and what i think you are saying we need to do, seem, at least to me, directly at odds with what we are actually doing here... what i'm referring to is the recent banning of people who were insufficiently civil in demandinng a fight for just and humane healthcare.
how can you write:
Nothing less than that deserves to be called "progressive."
and then not defend the people who were saying EXACTLY that?
There's a big difference between disrupting your true enemies and disrupting those who would be your allies, if only you could stop demonizing them.
In this case, "those who would be your allies" refers specifically to other single-payer supporters who see that goal as something that--unfortunately--we can only achieve in stages. But the principle expressed is far broader than that.
In trying to paint Drum as a bigot, Lind was engaged in the age-old Southern strategem of misrepresenting northern disgust with Southern bigotry as itself constituting a kind of bigotry. Necessarily overlooked in this "clever" inversion is the fact that Southern bigotry is based on skin color and alleged group attributes that no individual can change. Northern criticism is based on Southern political culture, and individual behavior, which millions of White Southerns in fact have changed.
Bit of a difference there.
In fact, Lind has a multitude of problems thinking straight about individual and group attitudes, as revealed in his column--a characteristic that's quite typical of effects of white supremacy. This is not to say that Lind is a white supremacist. I don't believe that for millisecond. But as historical works such Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory have clearly demonstrated, whenever anyone tries to accommodate themselves to Southern white supremacist ideologies--whether actively or passively--the end result is inevitably a tangle of contradictions, and wholesale abandonment of reality. However innocently one begins--such as Walt Whitman's ministering to those wounded in battle--the end result of the attitudes and narratives that emerge are inevitably pernicious in the extreme, and they are as pernicious to logic and truth as they are to human dignity.
This is what we behold at work in Lind's arguably well-meaning attempt to focus on the need for building cross-racial, cross-regional solidarity for an economic populist agenda. My previous diary, "Michael Lind Secedes From Reality: Mixing Up Race, Class, And Party ID In The South", showed that Lind was mistaken in his very premise--the Birthers are not primarily representative of the White Southern working class base he wants us to reach out to. They primarily represent better-off White Southerners who want to buttress their higher socio-economic position with a veener of moral superiority as well. And Lind's "hands-off" admonitions would only help them in this quest.
But there are a multitude of other confusions as well, as indicated by the preceding diary on Lind's misrepresentation of Kevin Drum. In comments, Gray quickly pointed something I was saving for this diary as a sort of jumping-off point: Lind generalized wildly to "liberals" in general based on a single post by a single blogger. Even if he hadn't misrepresented Drum, that's a mighty small data set. But it's perfectly consistent with the imperative to defend "Southern honor." More fun and games along these lines on the flip.
Palin Calls Media Criticism of Her Smears of Obama A First Amendment Threat!
Of course it goes without saying that Palin is utterly clueless about the First Amendment. But what tickles me most about this is how utterly typical of the rightwing bully mentality it is. Everything's fine until someone dares lift so much as a pinky finger in response to her bottomless venom. ABC reports:
Palin Fears Media Threaten Her First Amendment Rights
October 31, 2008 11:25 AM
ABC News' Steven Portnoy reports: In a conservative radio interview that aired in Washington, D.C. Friday morning, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin said she fears her First Amendment rights may be threatened by "attacks" from reporters who suggest she is engaging in a negative campaign against Barack Obama.
Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama's associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks. Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate's free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.
You remember this from third grade, right? The way the schoolyard bully burst into tears when someone finally stood up to them and popped! them one in the old schnozzola?
My, my! John McCain, flip-flopping to engage in baseless character attacks! No one could have foreseen....
ACORN to McCain: Have You Lost That Loving Feeling?
Senator Allied with ACORN as Recently as 2006, Now Turns Cold Shoulder
October 13, 2008, Miami, FL - U.S. Senator John McCain's recent attacks on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), are puzzling given his historic support for the organization and its efforts on behalf of immigrant Americans. As recently as February 20, 2006, Senator McCain was the keynote speaker at an ACORN-sponsored Immigration Rally in Miami, Florida at Miami Dade College - Wolfson Campus....
Bertha Lewis, Chief Organizer of ACORN, said, "It has deeply saddened us to see Senator McCain abandon his historic support for ACORN and our efforts to support the goals of low-income Americans. Maybe it is out of desperation that Senator McCain has forgotten that he was for ACORN before he was against ACORN; he was for immigration reform before he was against immigration reform; and he was a maverick before he became erratic. We were thrilled to partner with him to help reform the outdated immigration laws in this country, and were pleased to work closely with him on this issue." [Emphasis added.]
The beauty part here, of course, is letting all the wingnuts know how close McCain has been to ACORN in the past.
We now have additional information about the McCain supporter at the McCain forum in Lakeville, MN who said "Obama is an Arab" ["terrorist" cut off], which McCain quickly corrected. Her name is Gayle Quinnel. Here's the video:
And on the flip is the transcript of a post-event interview from Noah Kunin, Senior Political Correspondent from The Uptake. Also participating are Adam Aigner of NBC News and Dana Bash of CNN. You can view the inverview here.
Earlier this week, my diary "Ayers Attack 'Ridiculous,' 'Nonsensical,' 'Silly'--Former GOP IL State Rep" highlighted an NPR story debunking the notion that William Ayers was some sort of sinister figure when Barack Obama first crossed paths with him politically. This morning, my previous diary, "The Discourse of 'Terrorism' - Thinking The Unthinkable", cut more deeply, questioning even the notion of casually labelling Ayers a "domestic terrorist" and the larger framework of "terrorist" discourse behind such labelling. I now want to take a similarly broad look at how ACORN and Ayers are both being used in building a demonizing narrative against Obama, which we should expect to be used to try to delegitimize him, just as the GOP worked feverishly to delegitimize Bill Clinton in the 1990s. I had hoped to do it in a single diary, but that's not really possible, so here's the first installment.
Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer, began blogging in October 2005, shortly before the New York Times revealed the program of illegal NSA wiretaps begun shortly after 9/11. He wrote about the program and the lawless philosophy behind it in his first book, the Times bestseller, How Would A Patriot Act. Shocked as he was at the Bush lawlessness, he became increasingly shocked at the media's indifference, and seeming inability to even grasp either significant details or the profound moral and political issues at stake. His ongoing analysis of Republican misrule and the complicity of the media in either ignoring or misreporting it has grown deeper, and drawn increasingly more attention, particularly since his blog moved to Salon in February 2007.
His focus in Great American Hypocrites is the national scene, where an adoring press lionizes one would-be conservative moral giant after another, following the template created by John Wayne--a thrice-married, alcoholic, drug-addicted draft-dodger, considered a heroic figure because of the roles he played, particularly during WWII when bigger stars than he were fighting overseas. In California, we have our own John Wayne knock-off as governor, and equally ga-ga press that never seems to notice the enormous plot-holes in his script, such as his continued alliances with polluting industries against the health and environmental welfare of harbor area communities. By illuminating the larger, national pattern, Greenwald's new book illuminates a great deal about state and local politics as well.
"Just as drag queens must use wildly exaggerated female costumes, makeup, and gestures to mask their masculinity, rightwing leaders must use increasingly flamboyant warrior disguises--and an increasingly war-hungry agenda--to obscure what really lurks behind those disguises."
--Glenn Greenald, Great American Hypocrites, p. 110
Note: This is a blogosphere review, written for folks with considerable online experience and refernece points. I also did a print review in Random Lengths News that's available for other alternative newspapers to run, here.)
Don't let the title fool you. Hypocrisy is not the point of this book, it's merely the hook. The point is the role of the hypocrisy, and the larger politics of dissembling and distraction that it is a part of. To understand it is to destroy it... or at least to start the process.
Greenwald begins by noting a striking disconnect--on the one hand, voters broadly favor Democratic Party positions over Republican ones across a wide range of issue, but on the other hand, Republicans have won more elections. The reason?
The most important factor, by far, is that the Republican Party has used the same set of personality smears and mythical psychological and cultural imagery to win elections. These myths and smears are amplified by the rightwing noise machine and mindlessly adopted by the establishment media. Right-wing leaders are inflated into heroic cultural icons, while Democrats are demonized as weak and hapless losers. These personality-based myths overwhelm substantive discussions and consideration of the issues.
For most of us deeply immersed in the blogosphere, who see examples of this pointed out and discussed virtually every day, this may not seem like such a striking revelation. But even seeing it on a daily basis doesn't mean that we fully appreciate its significance. To the contrary, we're so immersed in it that it's difficult to put into perspective. This is, to my knowledge, the first book to argue that character attacks on Democrats and contrasting idealization of Republicans constitute a core explanation for Republican electoral success over the past three decades. It's this central thesis that gives Greenwald's book a larger significance that deserves attention from everyone concerned about politics, including dedicated policy wonks.
The recent behavior of Congress approaches the level of clinical insanity. This is not snark. It's reality-based observation. And such observation is vitally necessary in order to not sucked into the insanity ourselves. I want to explain precisely what I mean, and I want to present some reference points, so we may appreciate how deep and long-standing this insanity is.
Otherwise, quite frankly, the French Revolution option starts to look mighty good. And we all know how badly that turned out. Just because we are ruled by an imbecilic, out-of-touch, gang of narcissistic twits does not mean we should kill them all. Actions have consequences. They may not know it, but damn sure better. And so it behooves us to find a place of sanity from which to observe, analyze, and start to correct this sea of madness that threatens to engulf us.
And make no mistake, it is a sea of madness. One that we have all been swimming in from at least 1995, when the GOP took over Congress. If we think it started with 9/11, we are deluding ourselves, and one consequence of that delusion is that we expect Beltway Democrats to recover their sanity mush faster than they are actually capable of. Of course, it's eminently reasonable to expect to be governed by people who are sane. But we have not been a reasonable nation for a very long time now.
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