Note: Here's one of those "few scattered new diaries" I told you about.
It's Christmas time, and as befits the season, Ross Douthat has seen the enemy, and just can't wait to tell us. Forget Islam, that's soooo Bush/Cheney! Douthat is all revved up for a war on pantheism:
It's fitting that James Cameron's "Avatar" arrived in theaters at Christmastime. Like the holiday season itself, the science fiction epic is a crass embodiment of capitalistic excess wrapped around a deeply felt religious message. It's at once the blockbuster to end all blockbusters, and the Gospel According to James.
But not the Christian Gospel. Instead, "Avatar" is Cameron's long apologia for pantheism -- a faith that equates God with Nature, and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.
Pantheism! It's the perfect target! There are no pantheist churches, and while some might see this as a problem, what with there being no actual enemy and all, those people just don't know their American history. It didn't take any actual witches in Salem, nor were the Bavarian Illuminati any less disbanded in America circa 1800 than they were in France a few years earlier--not to mention that neither France nor America was Bavaria. And, of course, Joe McCarthy's famous list of communists he waved in Wheeling West Virginia at the start of his anti-communist crusade was a blank piece of paper.
You see, this has always been the right's little secret--when there is no enemy, when no one is the enemy, then everyone is equally liable to be suspect. If there were a pantheist church, then one could point to it and say, "There they are, the enemy!" And everyone who wasn't there, inside that church, could breath a sigh of relief. It's much more effective--for the right's purposes, at least, to have an invisible enemy. An enemy that's nowhere, and therefore could be anywhere. But above all, an enemy that can't fight back! What better enemy could the source of all chickenhawks want?
Two weeks ago, I wrote a diary, "The Recovery Myth", warning about the risks of ignoring longer-term economic prospects for short term upticks. This diary continues that theme (and is fully in tune with Mike's recent diary, "We Need a Jobs Package, Not a Stimulus Package").
A rising tide of voices are warning that optimism over a coming recovery--the promise of "green shoots"--is looking increasingly questionable. Typical of these are Dean Baker's "The Green Shoots Are Dead", hence my diary title. The subhead to his article explains:
The latest jobless figures show America's economy is stuck in the doldrums. The US urgently needs a new stimulus injection
Krugman argues along similar lines in his July 9 column, "The Stimulus Trap"
As soon as the Obama administration-in-waiting announced its stimulus plan - this was before Inauguration Day - some of us worried that the plan would prove inadequate. And we also worried that it might be hard, as a political matter, to come back for another round.
Unfortunately, those worries have proved justified. The bad employment report for June made it clear that the stimulus was, indeed, too small. But it also damaged the credibility of the administration's economic stewardship. There's now a real risk that President Obama will find himself caught in a political-economic trap.
But Robert Reich is even more pessimistic, as noted by William Timberman in Quick hits. Reich writes:
When Will The Recovery Begin? Never.
The so-called "green shoots" of recovery are turning brown in the scorching summer sun. In fact, the whole debate about when and how a recovery will begin is wrongly framed....
In a recession this deep, recovery doesn't depend on investors. It depends on consumers who, after all, are 70 percent of the U.S. economy. And this time consumers got really whacked. Until consumers start spending again, you can forget any recovery....
This economy can't get back on track because the track we were on for years -- featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere -- simply cannot be sustained.
Meanwhile, Bonddad is on a counter-contrarian kick at DKos, writing "The Economic Free Fall is Over", which I believe is instructively mistaken. It's true in one sense, but it misses the point in a larger one (after all, FDR reversed the downward plunge of the GDP within his first two years, but unemployment remained crushing until WWII came along). More on all of these viewpoints--and more viewpoints as well--on the flip.
The fallout from the assassination of women's healthcare provider Dr. George Tiller continues. As Zack Roth of Talking Points Memo reports, the Justice Department will investigate whether Tiller's shooter, an anti-choice zealot, violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act or any other federal statutes. But little has been said about investigating the killing as an act of terrorism, a federal crime. The Oklahoma City bombers were investigated by the FBI and tried under a 1994 federal anti-terrorism statute, and that was before the PATRIOT ACT, which presumably makes it even easier to prosecute terrorism as a federal crime today.
The day after the April 15 "Tea Parties", rightwing enabler extraordinaire Ross Douthat wrote:
They resemble nothing so much as the anti-war protests during Bush's first term. The claim that they don't have an organizing premise strikes me as obviously wrong: They're anti-bailout, anti-stimulus, anti-deficit, and anti- the tax increases that will eventually be required to pay for the current spending spree, and complaining that they don't also have a ten-point plan for reforming Medicare and Social Security reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of protest marches, I think.
So many lies, so little time. But it's not the lies per se I'm concerned with-it's the misperception that there's really any difference in kind between Douthat and the Tea-Bagging yahoos with their "show me your REAL birth certificate" signs. They weren't out there protesting economic policy policy-as anyone reading their signs could plainly see.
They were out their in an identity politics rage, the bottom line of which was "Don't believe your lyin' eyes! Barack Obama is evil! Evil! Evil! And not a real 'Murican like us!
And Douthout was in there, in The Atlantic's august electronic tower, saying, "Don't believe your lyin' eyes! They're rational, salt-of-the-earth political actors. They're real 'Muricans same as you or me!"
The notion that this pathetic band of yahoos--drummed up by weeks of rants on Fox News and talk radio-had anything in common with the tens of millions who protested against Bush's war is just the sort of ludicrous lie that's intended to distract from the core fraud being perpetrated here-the fraud that Douthout and the mob are anything but the fingers and the opposable thumb of the same bloody fist. It's just like when William F. Buckley and Brent Bozell wrote their book defending Joe McCarthy while he was in full frothing-at-mouth-mode. They exist only to work together as one, and all their pretense to higher learning, critical analysis and sophistication is nothing but a sham.
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