Lance Mannion

Unbalanced. Episode II: The Separation of Art and State

Lots of excellent comments on my post on Orson Scott Card's absurd Right Wing religious condemnation of Revenge of the Sith, and I hope you'll take some time to read them.  Here are a couple of my favorites:

harry near indy wrote:

i try to do two things in my life.

one, i don't read, let alone follow, the political viewpoints of artists.

two, i don't read/see/hear the artistic products of politicians and government officials.

And N.H. followed up with:

Ah, the separation of Art and State! A wise division.

Even though I hear Churchill was a talented painter and at least one of Disraeli's novels was actually pretty good, these are sentiments I heartily endorse, and I would like to see liberals as well as Right Wing intellectual types take it to heart.

But a part of me is getting a real kick out of the Right Wing intellectual types like John Podhorertz and Orson Scott Card declaring Revenge of the Sith a counter-revolutionary film.

I am imagining a whole generation of high school age young conservative boys being told that they must choose between the Absolute Good represented by George Bush or the unmanly, elitist, peackenikky relativism of George Lucas.

You're either with us or against us, Podhorertz and the comintern declare.  Pick.  Us or them.  Vader or Obi-wan.  Sidious or Yoda.   Subscribe to the National Review or go watch Episode III.

And a whole generation of potential Right Wingers is lost in the flash of a light saber.

Some nitwit is even calling for a boycott of the movie.

Oooooh.  Lucas is so scared!

It's funny.  Their arguments are silly, simplistic, and so easy to refute, it's almost not worth the trouble.

Just start with Podhorertz's expressed horror at Lucas' supposedly betraying the spirit of the originals by suddenly adopting an anti-war theme in the prequels.

You didn't know that the originals were pro-war, did you?

Of course they were.  We're supposed to root for the Rebellion to defeat the Empire, root for Luke to blow up the Death Star, root for the Ewoks to give those mean old uncuddly Stormtroopers a whupping.   The outcome of those battles is good, therefore the war in which those battles are fought is good.  War in all the original Star Wars movies is a positive, manly, virtuous enterprise, worthy of celebration in story and song.

James Wolcott, Roy Edroso, and TBogg have each explored the comedy of that tubby little chickenhawk cheering the manly art of war from his desk at the National Review.

The flaw---well, one of the flaws, there are just so many, but the main flaw---is Podhorertz's failure to recognize that it is possible to hate a war and still want to win it and to celebrate victory when it's over.

There are a few examples from our own history.

All decent people hate war.  They always have.  The Iliad is an anti-war poem.  The story of King Arthur as told by Mallory is an anti-war romance.  (Mallory was writing in horror of the Wars of the Roses.) Washington hated his war.  Lincoln hated his.  Roosevelt hated his.

Being determined and courageous in the fighting of a war is not the same as being pro-war.

In Star Wars, the Emperor started the war by imposing his evil rule on the galaxy.  The Rebels are fighting back.  We want them to win because we want good to triumph over evil.  It's that wish that makes us cheer when the Death Star explodes, not a collective glee at the beauties and glories of war itself.

The Rebellion is a war that should never have had to be fought.  The littlest fans of the movies understand this intiutively.  Depending on where you came in, the saga started with a great big Imperial cruiser attacking a tiny and nearly defenseless Rebel blockade runner and then, on the orders of Darth Vader, slaughtering its crew. or it starts with the minions of Darth Sidious blowing up an unarmed transport and its crew and attempting to murder Qui-gon Jinn and Obi-wan Kenobi, who are there on a mission of peace.

All wars should never have had to be fought.  The Trojan War, the Wars of the Roses, the Civil War, World War II were all started by acts of stupidity and naked aggression by bad men.

Even the American Revolution should not have had to be fought.  The Americans asked repeatedly for "a peaceful redress of grievences," and they meant it.  The king and his ministers stupidly and aggressively rebuffed them and the shot heard round the world was fired by the British.

Bad guys start wars.  Good guys, forced to fight back, finish them off as fast as they can.

Podhorertz almost certainly knows this in his heart of hearts, which I grant you is probably smaller than the Grinch's at the start of the story, but still a heart.  Which is why his whining about Episode III is ridiculous and ought to be hardly worth discussing.

Except of course that Podhorertz is only using Episode III to advance an argument that is not ridiculous---or not ridiculous in the same childish, inconsequential way.

Podhorertz isn't arguing that war is good and that being against it is bad.  He is arguing that a particular war is good and being against it is bad.

He is talking about the war Bush started in Iraq.

This is why he is trying to rewrite the original movies in his head and in the heads of other Right Wingers in such a way that the Rebels started their war.

Starting wars is always bad.  George Bush started a war.  George Bush is bad.

This is not a syllogism the Right can accept at the moment.  They've put too much faith and trust in George Bush.  Too much of their own intellectual vanity is at stake.

Again, this is so obvious and silly as to be almost not worth discussing.

Except.  There's always an except.

The Right Wing's attempt to politicize the movies didn't begin with Revenge of the Sith and it's not going to end with it.  It's been going on for a long time now.

Scott Lemieux spots the next big argument on the horizon.  Cinderella Man.

As Roy Edroso has argued many times, the Right wants to manage art, the same as it wants to manage the news and manage academia.  Despairing of take over from within---or too impatient to wait for their infiltrators to rise to positions of power---Right Wing intellectual types and politicans have been trying to browbeat journalists, college professors, and artists---particularly popular artists into censoring themselves.

The Right Wingers know, as do authoritarians of every stripe, that the free flow of ideas works against them and that art is particularly dangerous to them because it both passes along ideas and encourages the opening of people's imagination to the possibilities of alternative worlds, to inspire them to think "You mean it doesn't always have to be like this?" and then start dreaming up ways to bring about those alternatives.

This is of course more proof that the only students paying close attention to the po-mo Marxist/Feminist/Deconstructionist/ist-istish professors of the 80s and 90s were their most conservative students.  It was the conservative kids who came out of college convinced that all art is and ought to be propaganda.

An amusing irony, as teratologist notes:

I'm just snickering at this because I seem to recall that a decade or so ago, there was one side of the 'culture wars' that reacted with shock and tongue-clicking dismay to this new-fangled notion of interpreting texts from 'evil' perspectives, and decried such interpretations as evidence of rampant and/or creeping moral relativism on the part of the other side.

And it would be funnier if the Right Wing intellectual types were just a bunch of quack college professors.

But they are part of a large-scale and well-financed and increasingly powerful authoritarian movement that wants to break down the walls between art and state, church and state, business and state, the military and state, and individuals and state in order to control all aspects of people's lives.

Just because a lot of Right Wing politicians, preachers, and intellectual types don't know they're fascists and can therefore express sincere outrage at being called fascists, that does't mean that their methods and goals aren't fascistic.

After all, one of the first teachings of fascist movements is that War is as beautiful and glorious as blowing up a Death Star.

Coming soon!  Unbalanced.  Episode III: The Liberal Menace!

The bullies win

So, was the fight really only about preserving a cherished rule?

I thought it was about keeping extremist judges like Priscilla Owen off the bench.

Judicial nominee Priscilla Owen gets the vote she's been awaiting for more than four years, the most immediate beneficiary of a deal worked out by Senate moderates to avoid a debilitating fight over filibusters.

U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals based in New Orleans. With the threat of a filibuster by Democrats removed, she was nearly certain then to get the simple majority vote needed to give her the seat that long has eluded her, perhaps as early as Tuesday.

The agreement, crafted over the past several weeks by seven Republicans and seven Democrats, also opened the way for yes-or-no votes on two other of President Bush's judicial picks who have been in nomination limbo for more than two years — William H. Pryor Jr. for the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Janice Rogers Brown for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Which means that Bush gets every single judge he wants appointed appointed.  Two nominees are staying in "limbo," but Bush will probably give them pocket appointments as soon as he gets the chance.

And what did the Democrats get out of this "compromise?"

The agreement, which applies to Supreme Court nominees, said future judicial nominations should "only be filibustered under extraordinary circumstances," with each Democratic senator holding the discretion to decide when those conditions had been met...

"In light of the spirit and continuing commitments made in this agreement," Republicans said they would oppose any attempt to make changes in the application of filibuster rules. But Sen. Mike DeWine (news, bio, voting record), R-Ohio, said the agreement was conditional on Democrats upholding their end of the deal.

Which sounds to me as though the Republicans think the deal is that the right to filibuster will be preserved only as long as the Democrats promise never to use it.  What do you want to bet that the Republicans will never agree that any extraordinary circumstances have arrived?

But I don't just mean the Democratic Senators.  I mean all Democrats.  What good did this do us?  They might just as well have lost the fight for all the good it does.

Does anybody believe that when Bush makes his first appointment to the Supreme Court he will choose a moderate now?  Does anybody believe if the Democrats try to block that nominee Bill Frist will abide by this compromise?

Frist, who had joined with party conservatives in pressing for an end to judicial filibusters, stressed that he was not a party to the agreement. He said he hoped it would end a "miserable chapter in the history of the Senate," but said that what he called the "constitutional option" was still on the table. He said he "will monitor this agreement closely."

As far as I can tell this "compromise" lets George Bush and Bill Frist have everything they want and they don't even have to promise to play nice in the future.  The Democrats have to rely on John Warner and John McCain to get mad on their behalf the next time Frist tries to castrate them.

All we need to know is that the leader of the Democratic Centrists on this one was Jumping Joe Lieberman.

When will the word Lieberman replace Quisling in the dictionary?

Jack Shannon had it right.

...I have concluded that I am opposed to a compromise on this one.  This filibuster debate is not about rational discussion or debate or informed disagreement.  It is not about agreeing to disagree the way reasonable, thinking people often do.

It is about whether we believe that extremism is acceptable.  It is about whether it is appropriate to continue to believe that the behaviors that the majority of us have found more or less acceptable in years past are still normative.  The belief that those behaviors should continue to influence the public discourse.  That reasoned discussion and compromise that leads to consensus and shared belief is a more effective way to lead, govern and protect the interests of our great republic.

It is past time to challenge the belief that the kind of increasingly belligerent behavior exhibited these past weeks, months and years by certain of the leadership of our public institutions and organizations is not only permissible but also acceptable.

I, for one, do not think any of it is acceptable.  Nor should it be permissible.  I am not talking about free speech.  I am talking about abuse.  The tyranny of the majority...

The alternative is to continue to appease the extremists.  Appeasement never works.  A bully is a bully is a bully.  We have been afflicted with more bullies than any rational being should have to tolerate.  DeLay, Santorum, Dobson and their ilk are all bullies.  They depend on fear and intimidation.  You always reach a point with a bully where you stand up and say no more.  If you blink when that point comes you will forever regret the blink.  We all know in our hearts that that time has now come.

When he was a little kid, Joe Lieberman probably wasn't the type to stand up to bullies.  He was the type who went looking for the bullies to volunatarily give them all his lunch money and snitch on the other little kids who were thinking about standing up to the bullies.

He was the type of little weasel who didn't just want the bullies to leave him alone.  He wanted the bullies to like him.

When Lieberman stood up on the Senate floor to denounce Bill Clinton back during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he wasn't speaking as a moral man outraged at the President's bad behavior.

He was speaking as that sniveling little kid.  He was saying to the bullies in Congress, "Here's my lunch money!   Now please don't hurt me!  Go get Billy.  He's doesn't like you!"

And when he helped broker this deal he was doing the same thing.

McCain and Warner and the other Republican "centrists" aren't much better.  The compromise lets them off the hook.  They avoid having to stand up for principle at the risk of earning the wrath of the Right Wingers.

The bullies get their way and Joe Lieberman feels like he's part of the bullies' club and the media go away and the rest of us get jumped on our way home.

People were made for government

Happened to be in Sears yesterday, hunting for some new tools, trying to talk myself into picking up a weed wacker and out of the temptation to buy a chain saw---"Be not afraid of the chain saw," says Neddie Jingo.  "Fear not the chain saw."

I heard Neddie's voice intoning in my head like Obi-wan's telling Luke to trust the Force.  "I once was, like you, afraid of the chain saw. I am no longer so afflicted. The chain saw rocks. I use the chain saw to mow the lawn. I use the chain saw to carve turkey. Yea, I use it to shave. For the chain saw ROCKS. Fear it not."

On my way to the hardware department I passed by electronics.  Forty-eight television screens were tuned in to the news, and for a moment I thought something momentous must have occured.  Why else would the news be on in the middle of the afternoon, I asked myself, naively.  There must have been an earthquake, an assassination, or a verdict in the Michael Jackson trial!

Yes, I know. I'm still living in the days before CNN.

Last week I wrote that the reason I am, marginally---I repeat, marginally.  A lot of people missed that modifier in my post---more hopeful about the survival of the Republic (this one, not the one falling apart in Return of the Sith) is my belief that people are no damn good.

But another reason I am, marginally, more optimistic and cheerful than your average blogger is that I don't watch TV news.

No CNN.  No Fox.  No 60 Minutes.  No Jennings, Rather, or Brokow, when it was Jennings, Rather, and Brokow---I don't even know who has replaced Rather or Brokow.  No Nightline.  No Sunday morning shout fests and clown shows.

I don't even watch the local news.

All I know is what I read in the newspapers.

And on the web.

I recommend this.  Stop watching the news.  You'll feel better almost instantly.  It's like giving up smoking or red meat but without the resulting urge to go around bragging to your friends about how much healthier you are now.  Because unlike cigarettes and hamburgers, once you give it up you never miss it.

A lot of people have made the same decision.  Even Fox News' ratings are down, reports Ron Beasley.

(Link via the indispensible Jack Shannon.)

On the other hand, newspapers aren't in such good shape either.

(Update:  Bob Somerby doesn't think highly of the Kevin Drum post l linked to there.  In fact, he doesn't think that highly of Drum, period.  I come in for some justified cricitism too.)

At any rate, because I was dumbfounded to see the news on at a time I still think of as prime soap opera time, I didn't catch which network I was watching.  Probably didn't matter.  They all look the same, I think.  Screens splits three ways from Sunday, crawls, a well-coiffed female bobblehead frowning earnestly, a couple of not so well-coiffed male bobbleheads smiling in a way meant to be earnest and folksy and which immediately identifies them as politicians, one Democrat and one Republican.

I was too far away to read their names.  One of the politicians looked like a graying Ray Bolger when he was out of his scarecrow makeup and playing the farmhand in Wizard of Oz.  I think that was Henry Reid.  The other pol had white hair slicked down and parted in the middle like Herbert Hoover, ears that stuck straight out from the sides of his head like Alfred E. Newman, a lean, square-jawed but still boyishly handsome face that when he was younger probably earned him a lot of compliments of the you look just like Tom Cruise variety, and a pleased with himself smile that suggested he agreed with the comparison.  I have no idea who he was.

I couldn't read the captions, the crawls, or the network logo, but the big title letters were clear.

SENATE SHOWDOWN.

Oh, right.  The filibuster debate.

The sound on the nearest TV was turned up just enough for me to hear the female bobblehead ask Reid and Tom Cruise there something very close to, "What do you say to people who say this is all just poltics?"

She spoke in the hectoring tone of a high school principal who's caught her least favorite members of the student council embezzling from the funds for the senior class trip.

How dare you two politicians engage in politics when you're supposed to be doing your jobs running the country and taking care of the people's business and, well, um, engaging in politics?

There's no point in inquiring into the motives of that particular bobblehead for asking that question.  It's a reflexive cliche of the news business.   It's asked the same way local TV reporters, sticking their mics into the faces of victims of train crashes or winners of lotteries,  ask, "How does it feel?"

But the question itself arises out of the assumption that the American people on the whole are disgusted by the very idea of politics and if they had their way there'd be no more politics or politicians, which may be what people think they think.

Implicit in the question, too, though, is the idea that there is or ought to be some way for us to govern ourselves without politics coming into it and if only the damn politicians would do something about it we wouldn't have to worry about it.

We are social animals, Jefferson said.  We are made to be governed.

He meant that we want to, have to, live in society, that is, with each other, and if we're going to get along, then we have to put restraints on ourselves and on each other---we have to negoitiate and compromise---play politics---and come to decisions about how our society will manage itself and then see that it does it---we must govern ourselves.

Jefferson had misgivings about how much governing should be done and where the center of the power to govern should reside, but he was no Libertarian.  If anything he was a conservative Democrat.

People are made to be governed.  Which means people are made for politics, and fortunately, people like politics.

We don't like partisanship because it gets in the way of our own brand of politics carrying the day.  But we like to politic among ourselves and we are naturals at it and when left to our own devices, without professional politicians around to get in our way, we go at it with gusto and are, I can state without fear of contradiction, mean, nasty, petty, vicious, and thorough-going scoundrels and cads when we go about it, as any one who has had to deal in office politics, parish politics, school board politics, drama club politics, academic politics, Little Leauge politics, and Girl Scout politics can attest to.

To be good at politics takes a certain callousness, a certain hardness of heart, and a certain vulgarity that most of us aren't capable of sustaining for the long periods necessary to get the business of governing ourselves done.  We tucker out.

This leaves us with two choices.   Soceity won't run itself.  We will be governed.  But either we leave it up to professional politicians or we leave it to people who won't bother with politics, who won't govern us---they'll just rule.  Despots.

And Plato was wrong about despots of any kind.  Their benevolence extends only as far as themselves and, maybe, their family and a few trustworthy (that is, weak and frightened) friends.

It turns out that the choice between government by politicians and government by despots pretty much sums up the divide between Democrats and Republicans.

Republicans want the country run by as few people as possible.  When they say they want limited government, they mean they want its power limited to themselves.  Traditional Republicans, of the kind that has absolutely no more power in the Party these days, want to put the government in the hands of an aristocracy made up of rich businessmen and their heirs, whom they assume will act benevolently.  Right Wing Christian Republicans want it run by the Preachers who will leave all questions of benevelonce up to God to take care of.  Neo-cons want it run by intellectual militarists with the help of compliant generals.  And the Bush Leaguers want to run it all by themselves, bankrolled by a few Texas oil millionaires, and have no interest in benevolence.

They all want to limit the involvement and the say of the People, which is to say they want to govern us without having to play politics.

Ronald Reagan's "Government is the problem" is a foolish and self-hating principle for a democratic people who supposedly revere Abraham Lincoln to embrace.

If we have government of the people, by the people, for the people, and we decide government is the problem, we are deciding we the people are the problem.

Which plays right into the hands of the Right wing Republicans and Bush Leaguers.  Their contempt for the Constitution begins with its opening three words.

"Senator, what do you say to people who say this all just politics?"

"I say, damn straight!  And a good thing.  Considering the alternative."

Spitting on the Koran

Updated.

Gitmo is a horror.  We torture the prisoners there.  We torture prisoners in Iraq and we torture them in Afghanistan.  Our main method of torture is psychological.  We humiliate prisoners in every and any way that the sadists in charge can think of.  We insult them, we insult their religion, we attack their pride and their very sense of self.

This has meant treating Islam as a joke and debasing and degrading its beliefs, practices, and its adherents.

It has meant shaving their beards, refusing to let them pray, and subjecting them to all kinds of abuses designed to crush their pride, their egos, their souls.

Did somebody flush a Koran?

Sure, they did.

That's been reported all over the world by journalists who still do their jobs and aren't terrified by Karl Rove.

It happened.  Newsweek's "retraction" doesn't deny it happened.  All it says is that a government report that it reported says it happened doesn't say that.  Some other report does!

But the people of the Middle East don't need that as a reason to hate us and riot in protest.  They know we hate and despise Islam.  They know we torture prisoners.  They know we are killing Iraqi citizens every day and telling their widows, orphans, and suriviving relatives and friends that the dead are better off than they would have been under Saddam.  We freed them.  They've been democraticized to death.

They know we have a "Christian" president who despite his weak denials that we are not at war against Islam allows to flourish and even encourages a vociferous right wing "Christian" wing in his own party, none of whom are at all shy about proclaiming their hatred of Islam and their belief that we are in fact at war with Islam.

They know we have a general who has declared that Islam is a false religion.

They know we have a loud, incessantly chattering, angry, racist, bigoted and ubiquitious Right Wing propaganda machine that controls the radio, several major newspapers' op-ed pages, a bunch of magazines, an entire television network, and a good chunk of the Internet, and is energetically working to control as much of the rest of the media as it can and bullying into surrender what it can't take control of.

They know that the mouthpieces for this propaganda machine regard torture as fun, think nothing of the deaths of even our own soldiers nevermind Iraqi and Afghani women and children, and can't go a day without insulting, condemning, and, when their guard drops, advocating the eradication of Islam, even if that means killing thousands and thousands of Muslims---conversion by death.

They know that the blowhards are quick to brand any of their fellow Americans who speak out against the torture and the killing and the stupidity and viciousness of the war traitors and recommend, sometimes in code, but often explicitly, violence to shut them up.

They know that one of the most visible and celebrated of the blowhards has been arguing for rounding up and putting into concentration camps American Muslims.

They know what the White House's plans are for Iran.

Did some sadistic cretin flush a Koran down the toilet?

Sure, but it doesn't matter.

We've been spitting on it as a nation for three years now.

The Islamic peoples of the Middle East know this.  They've been paying attention to us in a way we are too arrogant to pay attention to them.

They hear President Bush express more anger and outrage at the temerity of Newsweek for reporting facts that make him look bad than he was able to muster at the news that his soldiers had become torturers.

They hear him being more passionate about the black eye to his administration than he was about the death and destruction caused by the tsunami, many of the victims of which were Muslims.

They hear him and his lackeys go on and on about those 16 deaths in the Afghanistan riots and yet say nothing about the hundreds who are dying in Uzbekistan on the orders of one of his few friends.

They know the story is true.  That it is true in fact and that, even more damning, it is true symbolically.

As Juan Cole reports,  even if the story wasn't true---and, as Cole shows, it is.  It's not even news.  It's an old story.---the Islamic people of the Middle East don't need this story in order to hate us, fear us, and riot against us.

They know that President Bush doesn't care about the 16 people who died in the riots any more than he cares about the tens of thousands of people who have died in his personal crusade in Iraq.  He doesn't care about the Americans who have died.  Why would he care about 16 more Muslims?

They know that the President's first instinct upon hearing the story wasn't to apologize or even to look into the incident.  It was to set his henchmen the task of discrediting the story, demonizing Newsweek, and bullying the rest of the media into running away from the story.  As Arthur Silber makes clear, all the President's men aren't going to stop there.

They are going to use it as a weapon in their campaign to impose censorship on the American press.  They are going to try to make sure that no more stories about our despicable war against Islam---the Administration has never been serious about our war against terra; Islam is their enemy---make sure that no more stories like that are heard by the American people so that the Bush Leaguers can continue to do what they've been doing without any more fear of discovery.

Not that they are that afraid.  They just don't like the extra work of having to lie to the American people every time the truth threatens to get out.

(Links to Silber and Common Dreams courtesy of Avedon Carol.  Link to Steve Clemons via Wolcott.

Update that dares to be skeptical of a fellow blogger's claims of outrage-fatigue:  Shakespeare's Sister swears she just can't bring herself to care about this story.  Too much of a muchness, as it were.  Same old, same old, she explains.  I don't know.  She sounds angry to me.   At any rate, she provides this link to TBogg who provides this link to Keith Olbermann who provides this link to a Dept. of Defense transcript that shows that during the riots General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, didn't think they were caused by Newsweek's story.

Nico at Think Progress explains the "mistake" that wasn't a mistake:

Newsweek and its source stand by their stories regarding the use of the Quran during interrogations. The source “clearly recalled reading investigative reports about mishandling the Qur’an, including a toilet incident,” Newsweek says. Indeed, variou s other reports in the media and by NGOs suggest that U.S. interrogators have desecrated the Quran on multiple occassions. The “error” in the Newsweek story is not in whether the desecration happened but in whether or not details about it are included in a new SouthCom report on Guantanamo.

See also Riggsveda at Corrente for links to stories about our methods of torture.  Also at Corrente, the Farmer lists a bunch of other news outlets who reported on the desecration of the Koran before Newsweek got around to it.

And then there's this from Riverbend:

Now Newsweek have retracted the story- obviously under pressure from the White House. Is it true? Probably… We've seen enough blatant disregard and disrespect for Islam in Iraq the last two years to make this story sound very plausible. On a daily basis, mosques are raided, clerics are dragged away with bags over their heads… Several months ago the world witnessed the execution of an unarmed Iraqi prisoner inside a mosque. Is this latest so very surprising?

Detainees coming back after weeks or months in prison talk of being forced to eat pork, not being allowed to pray, being exposed to dogs, having Islam insulted and generally being treated like animals trapped in a small cage. At the end of the day, it's not about words or holy books or pork or dogs or any of that. It's about what these things symbolize on a personal level. It is infuriating to see objects that we hold sacred degraded and debased by foreigners who felt the need to travel thousands of kilometers to do this. That's not to say that all troops disrespect Islam- some of them seem to genuinely want to understand our beliefs. It does seem like the people in charge have decided to make degradation and humiliation a policy.)

Oedipus wrecks

Joseph Britt writing over at the Belgravia Dispatch:

I have nothing but praise for President Bush's visits to Latvia, Russia and Georgia this week and the statements he has made in each place -- especially for stating so forthrightly the truth about the postwar occupation of Eastern Europe by the Red Army -- with one exception.

Was the reference to Yalta, in Riga of all places, really necessary? An argument could be made -- not one I'm persuaded by at all, just a plausible argument -- that Roosevelt at Yalta and Truman afterward could have pressed Stalin harder, and successfully, to prevent the absorption of Poland into the Communist bloc. But the Baltic states? How exactly was Roosevelt supposed to prevent Stalin from keeping his armies in countries that far behind the lines and hundreds of miles from the nearest American army?

I dislike bad history, but frankly what bothers me more is this President's tendency to casually trash decisions made by his predecessors.

Britt's words, my italics.  (Link via David Greenberg filling in for Daniel Drezner.  Link to Greenberg via Jack O'Toole.)  Trashing his predecessors has certainly been characteristic of George W. Bush.   He's been especially keen on insulting the legacy of the guy who held the job immediately before him.

The "It's all Clinton's fault" refrain has quieted down over the last couple of years, but it's still there, and it's still driving policy.  Whatever Clinton did, was wrong, an idea that has taken us to the brink of a nuclear showdown with North Korea.

I'm not sure how much of this is Bush himself and how much of it is Cheney and Rove.  Bush actually seems to like Clinton when they get together.  It was admirable of him to ask Bill to head the tsunami relief effort along with his father and I suspect he did it over the objections of not a few members of his own administration.   But he sure is amenable to criticizing Bill and any and every other President---except Reagan---when his speechwriters give him the lines.

Of course it is politically necessarily for the Republicans to make the case that Clinton was a bad man and a bad president.  Al Gore was running pretty much as Clinton II, hard as he tried to pretend he wasn't.  (He pretended too hard and too well and helped make Bush's case that it was time for a change and defeated himself in the process, but that's another story.)  And after four years of screwing up the economy and ending 8 years of peace in order to lose a war in Iraq Bush needed to explain why it would be worse to let another Democrat back into the White House.

And we know how much in money and votes from a riled up base Clinton-bashing is worth to the GOP.

Smarter, more gracious, and more astute Presidents have found ways to criticize their immediate predecessors without out and out insulting them and without abandoning policies that were working when they took over.

Eisenhower did it with Truman.  Ike was elected on the feeling that Truman had lost us ground everywhere to the commies and then pretty much continued George Kennan's policy of containment which Truman and Dean Acheson and George Marshall had been using against the Soviets.

JFK defeated Eisenhower's vice-president but did not radically change the course Ike had set.

Nixon reined in some of the programs of LBJ's Great Society but he did not end them and he accelerated others, even earning himself a reputation among some historians as the last liberal President.

Reagan relaxed Carter's energy conservation measures and he tried his darndest to get us into a war in Central America.  But elsewhere, particularly in dealing with the Soviets, he picked up where Carter left off, hardly varying Carter's rhetoric---he said things Carter said, he just said it while being six foot two, broad-shouldered, dark-haired, and looking like a movie star playing a cowboy.

Clinton defeated Bush I on the refrain, "It's the economy, stupid," but when he took office he gave up his own plans for a more traditionally liberal, free-spending approach to government, continued his predecessor's budget balancing moves---moves, like the tax increases, that had helped cost George H.W. Bush the election---and stayed the course in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, and, unfortunately, Somalia.

And, I think, that helps explain George W.'s hostility to everything Clinton.

The Republicans hate Clinton, but they hate Roosevelt even more, which would be pathetic if it weren't so destructive---few of them were even alive when FDR came to office; almost all their leadership wasn't even born when World War II started, and George W. Bush was born two years after FDR died.  These people are like the foolish barons at the end of the Wars of the Roses, fighting their grandparents' bitter battles, sacrificing themselves to a cause they only dimly understand.

Of course, since so many of them are Southerners, they are used to refighting ancient lost wars.

I don't think George W. has any particular animus towards Roosevelt or Clinton.  I think he's temperamentally comfortable with blaming other people for things that go wrong around him and inclined to self-aggrandizement.  ("I've done more for civil rights than any other President."  How he'll explain that one to Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson when he gets to heaven, I don't know.)   A friend of mine, a former bartender with a long and varied experience dealing with drunks, says those are character flaws typical of alcoholics that they don't lose when they give up drinking.

So I believe Bush's Clinton bashing is reflexive more than anything.

The President he really hates isn't his immediate predecessor.

Britt writes of Bush's bizarre and unnecesary tangent in his speech in Riga:

If he were going to apologize for anything a former President has done, he ought to have apologized for his father's historic loss of nerve and wretched judgment in unilaterally declaring an end to the Gulf War in 1991. So many of the problems we are having in Iraq now are traceable to what the elder Bush did then.

Britt is assuming that invading Bagdad to overthrow Saddam wouldn't have been the devil's bargain in 1991 it turned out to be in 2002.  But he is also missing the fact that George W.'s misadventure in Iraq is an implicit apology for his George H.W.'s "failure" there.

Apology, hell.  It's a blatant condemnation!

"You fucked up, Dad, and I'm going to make it right!"

But then everything George W. has done as President has been a slap in his father's face.  It's even likely that the only reason he has for being President is to show his father up.

Bush II is on record as blaming Bush I's defeat in 1992 on his father's overall failure to advance the Reagan Revolution.  That's part of why Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rove chose him to be their puppet over the more intelligent and competent Jeb.  Jeb Bush wasn't just more like his father in his abilities and ambitions.  He was, or used to be, a true moderate and a pragmatist.  If either Bush brother had the capacity to be a truly compassionate conservative, it was Jeb.

Remember that Cheney and Rumsfeld had been run out of Bush I's administration for being too hard line, on Iraq especially, but on pretty much everything else.

Rove probably didn't care beans about the Reagan Revolution.  He just knew that George was the more manipulable brother.

George W. is his momma's boy.  Always has been.  The salient moment in his biography up until he became President was when he challenged his father to a fistfight.

George Herbert Walker Bush was far from being a great president.  Nor is he a particularly good man.  But he is smart and he is responsible and it cannot have been easy for him to have an eldest son who was neither.  As the successful son of a successful man he was probably not prepared to love and nurture a son who did not have the talent or the temperament to follow in his and his father's footsteps.  I think all fathers are surprised and baffled when one of their sons turns out not to be a chip off the old block.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that George W. grew up feeling, if not unloved by his dad, then looked down upon by him, that he grew up thinking of himself as a continual disappointment to the old man.  A wiser, more generous-hearted dad would have made an effort to encourage his son to go his own way, to be himself, to make use of the talents he did have.  Maybe George H.W. tried, but I think if he had, George W. wouldn't have spent all his life struggling to recreate himself in his father's image.  Going to Yale, where he says he was miserable, trying to become a fighter pilot, going into the oil business, running for Congress---that's his father's resume.

People who try to be what they are not, usually fail at being what they are not.  It is self-destructive to try to become another person.

I think the two Bushes love each other but uneasily.

The speech in Riga criticizing FDR can also be read as a criticism of his old man.  The best moment of George H.W.'s presidency was when the Berlin Wall came down.  George W. as good as said that the whole Cold War was a mistake and that the actions taken by all the Presidents who waged it, from Truman through his own father, weren't achievements but merely drudge work that continued and re-enforced the failure at Yalta.

Seen that way, the Wall's coming down wasn't a moment of joy and triumph but the sad end of a long, sad series of unnecessary, and cowardly, blunders.

Sorry, Dad, you were just carrying Roosevelt's water and it was drawn from a poisoned well.

The irony is that the more W. tries to outdo his old man, the better the old man's Presidency looks in the national memory.

Why Hillary Clinton will be elected President in 2008

Because Joe Klein thinks she's unelectable.

This morning I was writing about Adam Cohen's editorial in the NYT and how ridiculous it is for someone who works for the same newspaper as Judy Miller, Jeff Gerth, John Tierney, and David Brooks to be lecturing bloggers on journalistic standards and practices.

I should correct that.

It's ridiculous for anyone who works in the same profession as Joe Klein to be lecturing bloggers on standards.

Now, I don't want Hillary to run.  I don't think she can win if she runs.  I think that all the speculation about her strength as a potential candidate is mistaking her celebrity for popularity.  But mainly I don't think she should be President because her sole claim on the job and her major qualification for it is that her husband was President.

But Joe Klein thinks that the reason she can't win is the reason so many people expect her to run and win.

Klein thinks that Bill will be an albatross around her neck.

And then there is her husband, a one-man supermarket tabloid. A few weeks ago, the New York Post ran a photo of Bill Clinton leaving a local restaurant with an attractive woman, and the political-elite gossip hounds went berserk. Prominent Democrats—friends of the Clintons—were wringing their hands. "Do we really want to go through all that again?" one asked me. I don't know—should the sins of the husband be visited upon the wife? Absent any evidence, the former President should be considered guilty until proved really guilty.

The Moose takes care of Klein's other ideas as well, but he deals with this one most effectively.

As for as Bill being a liability, Klein should read the latest Democracy Corps poll which shows that in a hypothetical 2008 George W. Bush v. Bill Clinton matchup- old Bubba would prevail over W. - 53-43. In '08, the eight years of Clinton peace and prosperity might look mighty fine.

(Thanks to Jack Shannon at CommonSenseDesk for the link.)

I doubt that Bill would be enough of an asset to get Hillary through the primaries, let alone the election, but it is borderline delusional to suggest that the most popular president of the last 50 years---and, yes, he was more popular than Reagan by the time he left office---would drag down his wife's candidacy, unless it happened because Hillary suffered by the comparison.

But Klein lives in a dreamworld.  It's called Washington D.C.  And in that land of hallucination and vaporous illusion George Bush is wildly popular and Bill Clinton never was, Karl Rove can do no wrong, the Republicans are the party of ideas, the Democrats are always out of the mainstream, and everything that is wrong with politics in America is equally the fault of Republicans and Democrats but it is the Democrats who need to clean up their act.

Before this one, Klein's most recent transcription of one of his dreams was his argument that the while polls were showing that close to 80 per cent of Americans thought the Republicans had gone stark raving mad on the Terri Schiavo question, the Democrats had blundered badly and been totally outfoxed by the Republicans and would suffer for it at the hands of the voters.

To which Digby said, Excuse me?

Klein also thought that Clinton would be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail back in 1998, a fact he seems to have forgotten about himself.

You'll notice in his Time column that when he calls Clinton a one-man tabloid he doesn't mention his own book, Primary Colors, which did a lot to convince Washington insiders that Bill was as slick a Willy as his Republican enemies in Arkansas said he was, but which ultimately had no effect on the voters' opinion of Bill, except maybe to make them like him more.

It's not just that Klein apparently doesn't hold himself accountable for his woeful judgment, lazy reporting, stubborn disregard for facts that contradict his theory du jour, and his habit of putting his own opinions forward as if they were other people's objective analysis.

It's that nobody in the national press corps seems to have noticed that Klein is incompetent.

Why not?

Because in the eyes of his fellow "real journalists" Klein is doing not just a good job but an exemplary one.  Klein is the journalist they all want to be---a celebrity with a bestselling book under his belt, regular TV appearances, and a gig at one of the top magazines in the country.

All of what objectively look like Klein's disqualifications for the position he holds in the public eye are intrinsic to the skill set of most "real journalists."

But it's bloggers who need to straighten up, fly right, and start conducting themselves like real journalists...

like Joe Klein.

(A quibble:  In his post, the Moose, pointing out that it really is too early to make predictions about who will turn out to be either party's nominee in 2008, asks who would have predicted in 1989 that Bill Clinton would be the Democratic nominee in 1992.

Well, my father, for one.  But also most of the other Democratic governors, the leaders of the DLC, and just about everybody who'd watched Clinton at the 1988 Democratic National Convention.  Clinton had been a rising star in the party for a long time by that point and the reason he wasn't seen as the inevitable next nominee as soon as Dukakis got into that tank is that most people thought that Mario Cuomo would run and the nomination was his for the easy picking and the still very young Clinton would have to wait until 1996 or 2000.)

Next bus to the re-education camp leaves in five minutes

It's always nice when you have an opinion and find out that people who are smarter than you, better informed, and generally superior all around turn out to have a similar opinion.

I wrote this during the week after the Oscars:

Everything is a political litmus test for [the Right] now.  The movies you like, the TV shows you watch.  The way you raise your children, how you handle your checkbook, the church you go to, the jokes you laugh at, the car you drive, the sports you follow, who you're glad to see is dead.

I used to teach college and I thought I knew what Politically Correct was.

Apparently, though, the post-modernists, deconstructionists, historicisits, feminists, and queer studies profs of the mid 90s can't hold a candle to the frat brothers of the wingnut faction of the blogosphere when it comes to being PC.

These guys can't make a move, think a thought, buy a book, see a movie, or sing a song that hasn't been thoroughly vetted by the elders of the Church of the Republican Jesus and stamped with the imprimatur of Pope Karl Rove.

They don't even use hot water when they wash their hands because it comes out of the left side of the tap.

And, you know what?  Liberals started it.  We did.  Those of us who were overly-influenced by the Marxists among us.  Those of us who still are, still do it.

But they've gone farther and done it better.  No surprise when you look at how many former Marxists there are among the neo-cons.  Marxists, hell.  Stalinists.

It's also turned out that the students who learned the most from all the -ist professors in the 70s, 80s, and 90s were their most conservative students.

All those kids who whined about how they couldn't get a fair shake from their liberal profs grew up to think exactly like them, at least when it came to methodology.

Which makes sense.  The best students would have been the ones who loved their subjects.  In the literature classes, that meant that the best students were paying much closer attention to the books they were reading than to the rhetorical tricks their professors were using as ways of stimulating discussion of those books.

The smart kids who didn't care about the subject paid attention to the prof.

So the other day I came across this by Ian Reifowitz in the New Republic, which I'm sorry to report is subscriber only.  But here's the key graf:

Today, the appeal of radical multiculturalism has faded, and a new challenge to American pluralism has arisen: the political philosophy of the Christian right. On the surface an analogy between the two movements seems imperfect; after all, radical multiculturalism never exercised even half the political power during the 1990s that the Christian right exercises today. And yet the two movements share one crucial attribute: Both reject the need to build a common national identity with which Americans of different backgrounds and belief systems can identify. In other words, like the radical multiculturalists of ten years ago, today’s Christian conservatives reject the central project of American pluralism. They merely come to that rejection from the opposite direction. . . .

Then the Moose the other day makes this point:

The right has become the mirror image of all they dislike about the left. Both the secular and the religious right kvetch about their victimization while they control at least two branches of government and their penetration of the media is thorough and growing. They are crybabies who patrol the halls of power.

Learning how to whine was one of the main lessons on the leftist academics' syllabus back in the '80s and early '90s.  As I was saying, it was only the conservative kids who were paying attention.  Think it over though.  What's the distinguishing characteristic of Right Wing intellectual types these days?  Power worship.  They love to grovel before the big tough daddy figures who run things in Washington.  It makes sense then that back in college, when the people who had power in their world were their professors, they'd have worshipped their profs.

Would have been a love-hate thing for them, of course, since they actually despised academics and everything they stood for.  Imagine adoring someone you hate.  I was crazy for a conservative little greedhead once back in college and she was nuts for me and all we did was fight and try to torture each other.  It's a weird and kinky thing, masochistic and sadistic, and offering no fullfillment, no release, with all sorts of roads to self-hatred.

Another time I was smart before somebody else smarter said what I'd said only more smartly, was when, implying that the reason Right Wing intellectual types act so much like ultra-left intellectual types, which is to say, like Stalinists and Maoists, is that a lot of them are in fact former ultra-left intellectual types who've turned their coats but not changed their m.o.'s.  People like David Horowitz.  I wrote here that:

For two decades now David Horowitz has been pushing the idea that colleges and universities actively discriminate against conservatives, as though taxis all over America were being driven by and bookstores up and down both coasts were staffed by conservative ABDs and Ph.Ds who just couldn't find work in their fields because of their politics.

Horowitz is a bomb thrower.  He was a bomb thrower when he was a leftist and he's a bomb thrower now that he's a neo-fascist.  He was of the Left because at that time that was the best direction from which to throw bombs, and he's on the Right now because the Right provides an even better launching pad and pays for his bombs and provides him with fur-lined foxholes with comped mini-bars.

When he threw bombs with his left hand he aimed them at academia, and now that he's chucking with his right his target hasn't changed.

That was me.  This is Matt Welch, writing a couple weeks later:

How bizarre and distasteful is it, that the same people who -- unlike almost all of my liberal friends -- actually *did* believe in Marxism and apologize for dictators, are the most vocal in their blanket condemnations of people who never did any such thing? If I had ever been a Trotskyite, I'd spend one hell of a long time dwelling privately on my own character defects and terrible judgment, instead of immediately joining some other troupe & screeching out the same old insults to an appreciative (and forgetful) new audience.

And I'm not just talking about Horowitz here, or of people who made, in the paraphrased words of Martha Gellhorn "that dreary and predictable late-life journey from left to right." I'm talking about pacifists who became warhawks, Weekly Standard socialites who became Brentwood socialists, Castro apologists who became Iran liberators, college potheads who became parental drug-warriors, right-wing bagmen who became left-wing "truth-tellers," earnest Naderites who became earnest Wolfowitzians. People who confuse their own team-changing with some kind of "new politics" that they can't stop yammering about.

These people, in one direction or another (and frequently both) have made grave errors of judgment in the past. And yet many apparently believe that the best way of paying penance is not to quietly look inward, but to noisily accuse most anyone on the chunk of spectrum they just vacated of being anti-American, objectively pro-whateverist, and worse. Well, excuse me for ignoring morality lessons from former Fellow Travelers.

So, either they learned to be PC from their PC professors or they've learned it from following the example of the old Marxists in their ranks.

A third possibility, which someone else will no doubt express more cogently soon, is that they are victims of the old adage that you become the thing you hate.  After 40 years of hating the Commies, they turned into mirror images of them.  They seem to be working more efficiently at becoming like their new enemies, the radical Islamic terrorists, theocratic, anti-Western, violent, sadistic, and self-destructive.

However they've gotten there, they are all Marxist now.  Everything is political---art, literature, career choices, what car you drive, what church you join, how you worship at that church.  What used to be thought of as facts, that is science, and boy, howdy, how they've become like the Soviets on this one.  There is a party line on everything, from evolution to global warming to sex.  Whatever advances the revolution is deemed worthy.  Whatever does not advance it is condemned as counter-revolutionary and must be eradicated.

As Roy Edroso reports, the first seat on the next bus to the re-education camp is now ticketed for---wait for it...

George Lucas.

That plot with the evil genius lurking behind a benign front starting a war as a way of consolidating power, discrediting and eliminating all his political enemies, and establishing an imperial dictatorship based on the ruthless exercise of power?

Turns out it's not a Republican campaign commercial.

(Roy has a follow up here.  The link to the Bull Moose is courtesy of Jack Shannon of Common Sense Desk, which, you will please note, is listed over in the right column under the heading To Be Read First Thing in the Morning.  I give you nothing but good advice.

And the link to Reifowicz's New Republic piece comes from Jack O'Toole.  Jack was away from the keyboard for most of March and all of April but he's back now and the world is a better, saner place for it.)

Thin red line

Newburgh – They came from down the street and around the corner, from way upstate and from Idaho and Oregon.

They wore the high collars of the Marine dress blues, and the black leather biker jackets of the Rolling Thunder veterans' support group.

Many of the young men, high school friends of Marine Cpl. Joseph Tremblay, walked a little stiffly in their seldom-worn best shoes, seemed a little uncomfortable in their dress suits...

Tremblay, of New Windsor, was killed last Tuesday when the Humvee he was riding in was blown up by a mine near the town of Hit in the Al Anbar province of Iraq, 90 miles west of Baghdad.

He was the eighth local soldier to die in the Iraq war.

That's from John Doherty's lead story in this morning's Times Herald-Record.

Tremblay was 23. 

He was gung ho.  He was a marksman.  He was intellectually curious.  He was shy with strangers but had a razor wit when he was with friends.  He was engaged to be married.

He took his fiancee to see The Control Room and Fahrenheit 9/11.

He was in Iraq because he had re-upped.

He'd finished a four year tour with the Marines but he hadn't seen any combat. 

I went into a public-'ouse to get a pint o' beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, "We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
    O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, go away";
    But it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play,
    The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
    O it's "Thank you, Mister Atkins", when the band begins to play.

The 11 year old's sixth grade class is studying India in Social Studies.  The other night he came home with an assignment, compare the caste system in India to our class system here.  Kids had to fill in a chart that had the castes on the left and "our society" on the right.  I remember a similar assignment from when I was in the 6th grade.  When I looked over his homework, I wondered if India hadn't changed in the time since I'd had to figure out who were our Brahmins.

Of course the object isn't just to teach the kids about India.  It's to make them think about life here.  For the first time, for a lot of them, they have to face the fact that America in fact has classes, if not castes.

They had to consider what people "our society" truly respects and rewards and who we treat as deserving of less respect and how we show that lack of respect.

They had to come to conclusions about just what "our society" values.

I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls,
But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!
    For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, wait outside";
    But it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide,
    The troopship's on the tide, my boys, the troopship's on the tide,
    O it's "Special train for Atkins" when the trooper's on the tide.

But the assignment asks the kids to consider what they value.  Who they put into the upper classes, who they regard as the leaders of "our society," and who they don't, reveals to them---or it reveals to their parents---how they are coming to see the way the world works and their own place in it and their hopes and plans for their lives.

Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap;
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
    Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, 'ow's yer soul?"
    But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll,
    The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
    O it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll.

Our 11 year old put lawyers, judges, senators, mayors, and doctors in the upper class.  No celebrities.  No businessmen.  But no scientists or artists, either.

He had an interesting definition of the middle class.  The middle classes are the people who make the country work, he said.

My son, George Bailey.

"Just remember this, Mr. Potter: that this rabble you're talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?"

He had a pretty good and extensive list that began with firefighters, cops, and teachers, and included engineers, plumbers, and farmers.

It also included soldiers.

I didn't have the heart to tell him.

It's a subject that's been beaten to death everywhere but in the national media, the halls of Congress, and the White House.  We know what the ruling classes think of soldiers.

The stop loss orders, the benefit cuts, the bankruptcy laws that penalize every working stiff in the country but especially the families of the Marines and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fact that the families and friends of troops over there have to take up collections to buy them body armor, the cavalier attitude of the Secretary of Defense answering a soldier's question about when he and his buddies can expect to have some armor in their Humvees.

Michael Hussey, filling in for Roxanne, posted a list of the 38 Republican Senators who voted against buying a bunch of new, well-armored Humvees for the troops in Iraq.

One Democratic Senator voted against the money too. Daniel Inouye.  Which I don't understand.  Inouye lost his arm fighting in World War II.  He should know better.

We know from the way they hide the coffins and sneak the wounded back into the country in the dead of night.  We know from the way the President is only interested in men and women in uniform when he can put on a uniform himself and use them as background for campaign commercials.

The archbishop attended Corporal Tremblay's funeral mass.  He's gone to the funerals of all the soldiers and Marines from the archdiocese who've died overseas.

The President hasn't even held a memorial service.

If you haven't read Tom Watson's series Why We Don't Mourn, now would be a good time to fix that.  Here are the links to Part I, Part II, and Part III.

We learned from Jonah Goldberg's humiliating intellectual duel with Juan Cole---Goldberg showed up with his pea shooter, Cole blew him away with an AK-47 he fired over his shoulder, with his back turned, blindfolded---what the Right Wing intelligentsia--what passes for an intelligentsia---think of soldiers.

Servants.

Hired goons paid to do the shit work of exporting Democracy who knew what they were getting into when they signed up, the ungrateful bums, and whose deaths are just the price of Freedom the Jonah Goldbergs of the world are bravely and tough-mindedly willing to pay.

Pocket change.

But come Memorial Day we'll make it up to them by giving them nice parades, and having the President pose with a few medal winners, and writing mawkish think pieces about their "sacrifices" and what cowards Liberals are because they aren't willing to send the grunts to their deaths.   Perhaps we'll even quote at length from Kipling's Tommy.

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
    While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall be'ind",
    But it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind,
    There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
    O it's "Please to walk in front, sir", when there's trouble in the wind.

But it's not just the Right Wing brahmins in Washington.

There's been no rush of young Liberal intellectuals to sign up.

No rush anywhere of anyone.

All those yellow ribbon magnets on the backs of cars might as well be Vote Republican bumper stickers for all they really mean support for the troops.

My guess is that there are a lot of people here at home who thank God every night for the flypaper theory.

Better you and yours than me and mine, they say, thanking the troops in their nightly prayers.

Better my tax cut than your flak jacket.

Better all the options in my Hummer than armor in your Humvee.

Couple weeks ago Blue Girl posted about a soldier who is missing in action, Matt Maupin of Batavia, Ohio.

Matt is married and has a young child.  His high school issued a statement that read, “He is a "great kid" and "an excellent student" who won the Scholar Athlete Award for maintaining a 3.5 GPA while playing football.”  He loved Superman and Star Wars.  Like a lot of kids, his grew up with a basketball hoop in the driveway and unlike most, had a '98 red Mustang that he cherished.  He was also shy around girls.  He is good looking and friends say he is “laid-back.”

Matt shocked his parents by coming home one day and announcing he had joined the Army Reserve.  Studying nutritional science, he needed money to continue his college education.   His father, an ex-Marine, was not happy about Matt’s decision.  The war was still going on in Afghanistan and everyone knew Iraq was next.

Maupin's been missing for over a year.  The Army considered changing his status, probably to presumed dead, but changed its mind.  This way his family still receives his pay and he is eligble for promotions.  In fact he was just promoted to sergeant.

Maupin's parents have a real yellow ribbon campaign going.   They send care packages of candy, cookies, games, toothbrushes, underwear, and other little necessaries to the troops.  You can donate.  They have a wish list.

The item at the top of the Maupins' personal wish list you can't help them with.

Now each [care package they send to Iraq] contains a plastic bag with 10 small pin-on badges showing a photo of Maupin and a slip of paper that says: “These are pictures of our captured soldier Spc. Keith ‘Matt’ Maupin, please help us find him.”

According to the Foundation’s website, Matt’s parents are getting frustrated with the Army.  “They call and tell us there’s no update,” Matt’s father, Keith says. “We’re not getting bummed out. We’re actually getting pissed.” 

Every so often Matt’s mom Carolyn, gets the urge to find her son herself. “But then I realize that’s just the anger of a parent,” she says. “They tell me Iraq is as big as California. Where would I start looking?”

President Bush has called Maupin's parents four times.

All four times before the election last November.

Props.

Background.

Pocket change.

You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
    For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck him out, the brute!"
    But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot;
    An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
    An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool -- you bet that Tommy sees!

Shadow boxing

Real men don't care if other men are gay.  They don't think about it much, don't worry about it.

A real man may, however, on occasion, worry that other men will think he's gay.

Or, as the great moralist and philosopher Sam Malone would put it, a real man doesn't care if other men think he's graceful.  He just doesn't want to get a reputation for being too graceful.

The fear here isn't that other guys will think he's queer but that they'll think he's a sissy.  The two terms get mixed up in a lot of people's heads but they really don't mean the same to men.  A sissy isn't a guy who likes guy.  A sissy is a guy who is afraid.  Sissies are weaklings and cowards, and weaklings and cowards are dangerous to other men.  You can't bring down a mastadon, storm a castle, hit a beach, or rush into a burning building with a weakling and a coward by your side.

If you're a sissy, or if the guys think you're a sissy, other men won't trust you.  They won't want to have you around because they can't depend on you.

Worse, if they think you're a sissy, some of those other men will decide you are easy prey.

But by and large men are easy-going characters, inclined to give each other the benefit of the doubt, especially since we all want to be given the benefit of the same doubt, and so the topic of other men's sexual proclivities almost never crosses our minds.

Because of this, most men know to be suspicious when another man starts carrying on about the fags.

Since it's a topic most of us would rather avoid---a game of quien es muy macho all of us can't afford to lose---anybody who starts it is going against the code.  Going against the code is not something we like to do.  It feels, well, unmanly.  You have to wonder, then, about another guy who goes against it.  What's his problem?

Well, it's easy enough to guess.

Gay bashing is, in addition to being a hate crime, quite often a self-hate crime as well. 

These are things we know about each other.  Guys who talk a lot about sex aren't getting any.  Guys who brag about how tough they are, are scared.  Guys who talk obsessively about money aren't movers and shakers, they're thieves and suckers.  Guys who boast about what great athletes they are, you don't want on your team.  Guys who hate women feel whipped and castrated.  And guys who go and on about the fags are probably fags themselves.

If they're not, then they're really, really, really scared that they are.

These are guys who have mixed up sissy with queer, and since they probably know whether or not "it" moves when they are around men and so shouldn't have any worries on that score, then what worries them is something else they must know about themselves---they're sissies.  Weak, scared, and not to be counted on when the going gets tough.

The raging homophobia of the Right these days is so obviously a cover for fears of latency and inadequacy that it's laughable.  Or it would be laughable except that apparently there are enough closet cases and enough cowards out there that the Republicans can induce mobs of them to go to the polls and vote their self-loathing.

And that it's a national movement to teach thousands and thousands of teenage boys and girls to hate themselves.

Which brings us to this guy, Alabama State Representative Gerald Allen.

Allen has introduced a bill to ban books written by gay authors or that contain gay characters from the state's schools and libraries.

Amanda Marcotte over at Pandagon has no trouble laughing Allen off the stage for being an illiterate know-nothing.

[T]he "homosexual agenda" to destroy America book by book goes back a long, long way. Shakespeare's love sonnets may seem like simple poems written to a young man, but we all know his real intent was tearing down a nation that didn't exist yet. Even Sappho's seemingly innocent love poetry to women is part of the long-standing homosexual agenda to destroy America, even though she had no way of even knowing the landmass it would exist on was there. And of course, she was out to get Christianity, too, even though that didn't exist yet, either.

But I'm too astounded to laugh.  It's just stunning to watch another man boldy demonstrating to the whole world that he's a raging closet case and a complete sissy.

It appears that plenty of Allen's fellow legislators have him figured out too and want nothing to do with his weirdness.  Amanda reports:

Luckily, it seems like Alabama legislators realized that they didn't want to even be present at a debate that might feature an argument about whether or not cross-dressing to avoid harassment like Viola was just too gay or what have you, since most of them refused to even show up and vote on this turd of a bill.

I'm inclined to think that what most of them refused to show up to do was stand next to a man this confused about himself.

(Mac Thomason blogged about Allen back in December when Allen first began peeking out his closet door.  Shakespeare's Sister has found a county commissioner in North Carolina who has even more complicated issues with his own sexuality.  And, an update correcting an omission caused by a bout of amnesia, Coturnix has a series of posts on the femiphobia he sees behind the Right's many pathologies, including their gay bashing, power worship, and hysterical desire to dominate.)

Like I said, real men don't worry about homosexuality, let alone obsess so much over it that they can't even stand the thought that other people are reading about it.

There are, however, one class of real men who do worry about it.  Athletes.

Athletes are and have to be terrified of being weak.  In some sports---boxing, football, basketball, hockey---just the appearance of weakness can be devastating.  It marks you as easy prey.  In team sports a guy who is weak and cowardly is dangerous.  Imagine being a running back having to depend for protection from angry linebackers on a blocker who is afraid of taking a hit.

Most athletes are neither well-educated nor particularly sensitive.  So of course they confuse queer with sissy.

Now imagine being a gay athlete.

A particular kind of athlete.

A boxer, say.

A gay boxer.

You're a gay boxer, in the late 1950s, early 1960s, and you're opponent starts calling you queer.  In front of the whole world.  You're a good boxer.  No, you're a very good boxer.  You're one of the best of your time, one of the toughest, one of the most successful.  A guy all the other fighters have to beat if they want to get anywhere.

Those guys are coming after you hard already.  It's dangerous to be a fighter as it is.  More dangerous to be a champ with everybody out to take you down.

Imagine now that all those guys coming after you think you're a sissy.  Weak.  A coward.  How scared of you are they going to be?  You need them to be scared.  You need them to worry every time they get in the ring with you.  Their fear is your protection.  If they stop being afraid of you, you're in trouble.

On top of this, like everybody else around you, you confuse queer with sissy too.  You can't admit you're gay because it would be admitting you're a coward, you're a weakling.  How are you going to stand in the ring with all those guys looking to clobber you, thinking to yourself, I'm weak, I'm scared?

So this opponent of yours, calling you queer at the weigh in, taunting you in the ring, you can't let him get away with it, you can't let him expose your weakness like that.

You got to shut him up.

Which is what you do if you're Emile Griffith, it's 1962, you're fighting Kid Paret, and Paret keeps calling you maricon.

You shut him up, do it the best way you know how.  You hit him hard.  You hit him a lot.  You got him up against the ropes, he's done for, but you keep hitting him.  You hit him 29 times, fast and hard, without him being able to throw a single punch back.

You hit him until you scramble his brains and kill him.

Midway through the 12th, Emile stuns Benny with a short right. Benny reels into a corner, eats another hammer, then another. His head and shoulders slump. The only way to nail his jaw now is with uppercuts, and so that's what Emile begins to hurl -- or rather, that's what hurls out of Emile, an eruption of fury so mechanically precise that it seems to come from an engine house in hell rather than from the realm of human kinetics. At last Benny tilts, but the turnbuckle keeps him from collapsing, from saving himself, and now begins the terrible tick-tock of his cranium, left-right-left-right-left-right, combinations bursting from Emile faster than eye and brain can process.

The ref! Where's the ref? Who's the ref? Ruby Goldstein, a victim of his own expertise, a respected pro who knows this sport so well that he knows Emile's not a big finisher, knows Paret's a chronic possum, knows the Hispanics in the house will riot if he stops this fight just as their possum's about to pounce. Goldstein is caught flat-footed as 18 punches land in six seconds -- 29 consecutive unanswered punches in all -- bouncing brain against skull again and again. Eyes puffed shut, blood oozing from his nose and his cheek, Benny slithers down the ropes, at last, as Goldstein grabs Emile and his cornermen run to wrap him too.

That's from an article in Sports Illustrated, Shadow Boxer, by Gary Smith.  I'd call Smith my favorite living short story writer except that short stories are presumed to be fiction and Smith is a journalist.  But read Shadow Boxer and tell me you didn't read a short story better than any that's won an O.Henry lately.

But they seem like such nice guys

At Hullabaloo, Digby, whom I'd call our Tom Paine if the folks at Tom Paine weren't already channeling for Tom Paine, writes with his usual fire and dash about Republican staffers on the House Rules Committee "rewriting Democratic amendments to make them sound as if Democrats are trying to protect sexual predators."

Yeah, I know.  More Republican limbo dancing.  How low can they go?  How low can they go?

Children, Digby calls them, juvenile deliquents.  Babies.

The Republicans' excuse for what they're doing is that Democrats have said mean things about legislation the Republicans have proposed.  Republicans need to be mean, sneaky, vicious, dishonest cheats because Democrats have this nasty habit of hurting Republican feelings by telling the truth about what Republicans are up to.  The Rules Committee chairman flat out sniffled, probably wiping his runny nose on his sleeve as the tears rolled down his cheeks, "We don't like what you said about our bill." 

Digby isn't sympathetic.

Oh boo fucking hoo. The Republicans are in total control. The Democrats can sit around all day long and call them a bunch of fascist nazi bastards and it doesn't mean anything. And they still can't stop whining.

The problem is that these people don't really want to achieve anything. They are both in love with being victims and insist on being right. And they want everyone to acknowledge they are both right and victimized. What a bunch of big babies. It's not enough to win, the other side must completely capitulate --- and apologize.

While catching them in the act of throwing bricks through the school windows and spray painting "Nancy Pelosi is a s----" on the walls, to get even with the goody goody Democrats who tattled on them to the voters, Digby quotes Slate's Timothy Noah:

The fact is that the GOP doesn't have an agenda. It has impulses: to cut taxes, to increase Pentagon spending, and to mollify the Christian right wherever possible. Does it act on these impulses? Of course. But what mostly gives the party appeal to the electorate is its ability to scream and yell while seldom being granted the opportunity to ban abortion or eliminate the Securities and Exchange Commission or declare war on France. It stirs things up satisfyingly, while never requiring anybody to pay the price.

I snatched this quote for my notebook right away, pocketing it for the day when I get around to writing a post on how ridiculous it is that the Republicans have the reputation as "the party of ideas."   They've had two ideas for 60 years.  Death to all enemies abroad.  Death to the New Deal at home.

But I was dismayed when I read all of Noah's column and discovered that he wasn't really criticizing the Republicans.  He was only acknowledging a few of their faults because it's a rhetorical trick he's been well schooled in.  Admit one side isn't a choir of angels to lessen the blow when you accuse the other side of being a legion of devils.

What Noah's all hot and bothered about is that the Democrats persist in defending the filibuster.

I have a problem with the "nuclear option," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's threatened alteration of Senate rules to prevent filibusters against judicial candidates. I believe it doesn't go far enough...

As Norman Ornstein has pointed out, the filibuster is fundamentally a "conservative instrument," because it's usually liberals who want the government to do things and conservatives who want it not to do things. More recently, Jonathan Cohn observed in the New Republic that the Democratic fixation on saving the filibuster is a poor substitute for selling the party's policies to a voting majority...

Noah doesn't quite fail to notice that the Democrats have already sold their ideas to a majority.  More people voted for Democratic senators in 2004 than voted for Republican ones.  The Republicans increased their majority in the Senate despite this, because little Southern States each get as many Senators as big Northeastern and West Coast states.

(They increased their majority in the House because Tom DeLay got Texas to cheat.)

Noah acknowledges this fact by quoting from a column in the New Yorker by Hendrik Hertzberg in which Hertzberg lays it out: 

[T]he present Senate is the product of three elections, those of 2000, 2002, and 2004. [That's because one-third of the Senate faces re-election every two years.] In those elections, the total vote for Democratic senatorial candidates, winning and losing, was 99.7 million; for Republicans it was 97.3 million. The forty-four person Senate Democratic minority, therefore, represents a two-million-plus popular majority—a circumstance that, unless acres trump people, is at variance with common-sense notions of democracy.

The Democrats are right, the people agree, and the Republicans don't care!

They're not about to let the voice of the People stop them from doing anything.  The filubuster is one of the few means the Democrats have of actually enforcing the will of the People.

But to Noah such a defense of democracy is undemocratic and it has to stop, in the name of democracy.

It's a clever argument—the antidemocratic nature of Senate representation creates a phony Republican majority that Democrats are justified in thwarting. But the perfect is the enemy of the good. The Senate ought to be eliminated, but it's a pretty good bet that it isn't going to be. That being the case, why not reach for the low-hanging fruit? I feel confident that if the Democrats had a Senate majority, Hertzberg would agree with me that it's time to democratize the Senate as best we know how.

This is the kind of high minded wonkery that values an ideal over a practical necessity. 

The ideal being defended, though, is not really democratic processes that filibusters thwart.  The principle Noah wants Democrats to go to the wall for is the reasonableness and bipartainship of liberal pundits.

More than they care what is really going on, the liberal pundits care about appearing to be good men and good women, who by their definition are people who are open to persuasion from all sides.

They go about their business of sounding reasonable and open-minded to themselves as if the country was not being run by the likes of Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush.

They continue to write their reasonable and open-minded thumbsuckers as if the base of the Republican Party was still composed of small government, fiscally conservative libertarains instead of the Radical Reactionary Christianists, unreconstructed Southerners, white supremicists, and greedy plutocrats.

They persist in their open-minded, reasonable advocacy of appeasement and surrender as if Lincoln Chaffee, Chuck Hagel, and John McCain were in charge of the Senate

Their only politics is that of a schoolteacher lecturing a kid who has just been beat up by a bunch of bullies on the playground.  "If you play nice, they'll play nice."

Noah writes:

There's no denying that if we abolished the filibuster now, Republicans would have an easier time winning legislative victories. As things stand now, Democrats hold three more than the necessary 41 votes to block foolhardy legislation proposed by Republicans. Without the filibuster, they'd be seven votes short. The GOP agenda would become the law of the land.

But what agenda would that be? Privatizing Social Security? That's opposed by a significant proportion of the president's own party. Establishing a flat tax? Never going to happen.

Never?

Why?

Because the People are agin it?

The Republicans running the country now are pretty much the same crowd who impeached Bill Clinton even though 60 per cent of the country thought they were out of their minds for doing it!

Henry Hyde, leaving Congress not in disgrace as he should have seven years ago, but elegized as a beloved elder statesman, remembers his own part in that attempted coup with pride.  Even though the impeachment revealed him to be as egregious an adulterer as Clinton and a bigger hypocrite---"A youthful indiscretion," he called his long running affair with a younger, married woman, which he carried on when he was older than Clinton was when Monica flashed her thong.---Hyde implied in his swan song that he thinks that all that was wrong with the Impeachment was that Clinton survived it.

These people do not care about the will of the People!

They have no respect for the democratic processs or even the Republican process.  When they admit that the People aren't on their side on an issue, they dismiss the People as corrupt, stupid cattle who have been brainwashed by the liberal media and too many video games and claim that the people's failure to recognize the rightness of the Republicans is justification for the Republicans shoving what's good for them down their throats.

They don't care that most Americans don't want George W. Bush screwing with their Social Security.  They're convinced that if they keep spinning it enough ways they'll be able to fool enough of us eventually.  But even if they don't, hey, they have 55 Senators.  They control the House.  They can do whatever they want.

As Digby's post shows, they already do.

It's over a year until the next election.  The People's memories are short.  The Republicans learned an important lesson from 2004.

They can screw everything up royally and still increase their majorities.

Noah doesn't see the Republicans' government by impulse, while exhibiting all the impulse-control of two year olds, as being as big a problem as the Democrats reliance on filibusters to keep the GOP toddlers' impulses in check.

Let them throw a few temper tantrums, Noah advises.  What's the cost?

A few radical judges who will overturn Roe v. Wade, cripple the government's ability to protect the environment from industries made reckless by greed, overturn the Voting Rights' acts?

Piffle.

The mugging and eventual murder of Social Security?

So much bother.

The important thing is to be fair.

The filibuster is one of three significant obstacles to the principle of "one man, one vote" imposed by the Supreme Court on state governments but strangely absent at the federal level. The other two are the Electoral College and the representation scheme of the Senate itself, both of which grant power to the states as political entities at the expense of the national electorate. Of the three, ridding ourselves of the filibuster ought to be the easiest, because it isn't written into the Constitution. All it takes is a Senate vote on a rule change.

Good.  We can have the satisfaction of knowing what fair-minded, reasonable geeks we are as the bullies sit on our chests and pummel us bloody, consoled by the knowledge that when they finally let us up we can run to teacher and tell on them.

After which, of course, they'll feel really, really bad.

That'll show 'em.

The Big Fix

This is my favorite passage from the TMFTML post I linked to yesterday:

Every article you've seen in the news lately about bloggers refers specifically to a certain subset of bloggers: Let's call them polibloggers. These are the angry white guys who crapped their pants in fear when the Twin Towers came down and decided that the new climate of intolerance-masquerading-as-patriotism would allow them to give voice to the blatant racism and hatred of the lower classes that they were previously forced to keep in check due to societal norms and basic politeness.

It's a given that the people most terrorized by the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were right wing columnists, pundits, and bloggers.  Children who lost parents in the attacks have faced life since that day with more courage, hope, mercy, charity, and forebearance than these cowardly lions who have been scaring themselves witless every day since by pulling their own tails.

"Oh, it's hard believe me, missy,

When you're born a Right Wing sissy..."

Wait.  Where was I?  Oh yeah.

It wasn't hard to terrorize them, since I'm afraid there's no denyin', they were just some dandy lions to begin with.  That's why they are attracted to the Right.  They love the love of power and the willingness to rain down, at least the willingness to wish out loud for, death on all enemies that has become the hallmark of Right Wing rhetoric.

Enemies being anyone who scares them, which is to say anyone who is not them.

Their basic cowardice has been exposed day in and day out since 9/11.  Most of them are young and none of them have enlisted to go fight the enemies they want dead, dead, dead.  And although many of them are working journalists---Jonah Goldberg, Michelle Malkin, for example---you don't see them rushing off to Bagdad to report on the war like the man who ought to have been their hero and role model Michael Kelly, the editor of the Atlantic who died covering the early days of the invasion.  You'd think that even if they're too chicken to fight, the least they could do would be to spend a month or so in Iraq to bring back all the good news they claim the rest of the media is failing to tell us about.

But it wasn't just the already yellow-bellied young conservative types who were so frightened by 9/11.  Some liberals, many moderates, a whole slew of people who espoused no particular politics on September 10, 2001, became unhinged by fright.  Dennis Miller is one example.  Roger L. Simon is another.

Simon is the writer of an enjoyable series of detective novels starring the ex-60s activist Moses Wine.  The first book in the series, The Big Fix, was made into a movie starring Richard Dreyfuss and it was, like the book, not great, but pretty darn good.  I liked both.  I've liked the other Moses Wine books I've read too.  They're lighthearted, funny, smartly written, and full of interesting characters.  I think only two things have kept Moses Wine from being as popular as Robert Parker's Spenser or Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware.

When I say Simon's mysteries are smartly written I mean that the story proceeds from paragraph to paragraph in a logical and coherent way, with no glaring inconsistencies in characters' behavior and no outrageous plot devices suddenly being dragged in to save the writer from himself---that is, unlike a lot of thriller and mystery novelists, Simon avoids over-plotting himself into corners he can only get out of by writing in previously non-existant windows, doors, and convenient air shafts to escape through.

The commas and periods are all in ther right places and the sentences parse.

But the prose doesn't sing.

Bad writing, of either kind---pedestrian or ungrammatical---doesn't disqualify genre novels from popular or even critical success.  In fact, many thrillers and mysteries seem to succeed because they are badly written.  These are the books readers and critics usually refer to as "great reads."  They mean books that they can skim without missing anything.

But Simon's prose isn't bad.  It's just a bit bland and that is a failure in the kind of mysteries he writes which are aimed at readers who admire Parker, Chandler, the various MacDonalds---Ross, John D., and Gregory, who for some reason left the first "a" out of McDonald---which is to say readers who read mysteries along with all kinds of other books, as opposed to most genre fans who know what they love and stick with it exclusively.   Readers who put down a history, a biography, a book of poetry, or a novel by Dickens to pick up The Long Goodbye know what good writing sounds like, music, and they want to hum along.

Like I said, Simon's prose doesn't sing.

Well, mabye it would be better to say that it does, but it's Vic Damone.  Parker's Dean Martin, Chandler's Joe Williams, and MacDonald, John D., is, needless to say, Sinatra.

Elmore Leonard's Lou Rawls.

The other problem Simon has had in breaking into the top tier is taste---he has too much of it.  Tact, too.  He can't be vulgar enough.  He holds back on the kinky sex and graphic violence.  But he's not writing Agatha Christie style Murder Among Nice, Staid Dull People Living in Cozy Little Villages Where Just the Mention of Sex Causes Grown Men to Blush and Women to Feel a Little Faint Who Done Its.  He's writing Tough Guy Working the Mean Streets and Getting Laid A Lot When They're Not Getting Beaten to A Pulp pulp style murder mysteries/thrillers.  There are rules, and Simon doesn't follow them.

There could be a third problem getting in the way of increased popularity.  He doesn't write often enough.  I've been pleased to see that he's picked up the pace over the last ten years, but genre fans demand a least once yearly fixes from their favorites and Simon hasn't delivered consistently.  Which might be a vicious circle problem for him.  If he was more popular he would be moved to write more often and if he wrote more often he'd be more popular.

Which brings me to the point of this post.

I believe Simon started his blog as a fairly standard writer's blog.  He posted about writing, his books, the problems and tricks of the trade.  That's how I remember his blog anyway.  That's why I used to read it.   I don't remember much politics creeping into it, before 9/11.

I can't tell from his books what Simon's politics were before 2001.  He was disenchanted enough with 1960s style radicalism to satirize it angrily.  But he also satirized capitalists, yuppies, suburbanites, and other members of what constituted the Republican base before the election of Bill Clinton radicalized the Party.

I'd guess that Simon himself was experiencing the all too typical drift from youthful idealism to middle age premature old fogeyism that his hero, Moses Wine, seemed to be suffering, with the same sense of self-disenchantment and regret that Wine has.   I don't know if he'd moved so far right that he was actually voting Republican, but he was definitely more sympathetic to conservative values than he had been and I wouldn't be surprised to find out that he was a Republican.

I wouldn't be surprised if he'd stayed a loyal Democrat either.

Whatever he was, he sure didn't seem to be the hysterical looney he's shown himself to be since 9/11.

But up until just before I began writing this post I would have said that all that had happened to Simon was that he got an awful fright on 9/11 and came unglued.

I think that's true.  But a lot of people did.  It took many of us a while to calm down enough to start thinking clealy about what needed to be done, and it was in that period that the Bush Leaguers made their big move.  But people like Simon never calmed down, never came to their senses.  In fact, they grow more and more hysterical by the day.

Not surprising as they've had to watch as their hero President botches the war that was supposed to save us all and makes a hash out of everything else he puts his hand to.  If you are scared to death it can't be much of a comfort to have to rely on George W. Bush to protect you.   And if you are so scared that like a terrified sailor in a storm at sea you can't bring yourself to let go of the mast even though you can hear it cracking and splintering and you know your best chance is to run for the lifeboats now you will start screaming at everybody trying to pry you away and drag you to safety that No, the mast is strong, the lifeboats are leaky, the first mate manning the nearest boat doesn't know what he's doing, he's an effete crypto-French snob who didn't really win those medals he got for navigation and seamanship and bravery!  Only the Captain can save us, and you're all wrong about him being incompetent and the one who ran us aground on these rocks, mutiny, mutiny, mutiny!  You will all drown and you deserve it, now leave me alone, dear God, leave me alone, I don't want to die, I don't want to die!

But now I wonder if something else hasn't happened to Simon.

Popularity.

Simon's right wing ravings have won him the audience and the fandom his mysteries never could.

He's famous.

He's more famous than Robert Parker, or so it must appear to him every morning when he reads his comments and emails.

But popularity has its drawbacks.

It's addictive, for one thing.  It's awful to feel it slipping, even a little bit.  You experience withdrawl symptoms.  You get desperate to get it back and then increase it so that you won't have to worry about any slips in the future---except that it's the fact of the slip, not the amount or the meaning, that tortures you.  You can have had a million fans yesterday, but if today you discover you are down to only 999, 900, those hundred lost fans suddenly become the most important people in the world to you.

People are this way about most everything they prize---money, love, fame, sex.  Once addicted, you can never have enough.

Along with his new popularity, Simon has to deal with the exact same temptation he'd have faced if he'd continued with his novels and won as big an audience through his writing as he has through screaming for the blood of liberals and Muslims.

Fans---as opposed to mere appreciators and likers and enjoyers.  Fans aren't even merely lovers.  They are obsessives.---Fans of anything like what they like and that's all that they like and woe be to the object of their devotion should that object attempt anything new or different.

Fans of genre writing are even more demanding of the same old thing.  They want each new book to be just like the last one, only more so.  It's very hard to slip something different by them.  It takes great strength of will and seriousness of purpose and very few genre writers possess either.  This is why over time even the best of them sometimes devolve into parodists of themselves.  (Read The Green Ripper by John D. MacDonald, if you can stomach it.)  They try harder and harder to give their audience what it wants and at the same time top their last trick, and then one day, they attempt the quadruple back flip without a net and they fall.

They become hacks.

Simon found himself with an audience all of a sudden, an audience he enjoyed having and which he became desperate to keep.  Trouble was it was an audience of frightened, bloodthirsty Right Wing loons and what they liked about him was the fear, bloodiness, and Right Wing lunacy that 9/11 had brought out in him.

To keep his new fans happy and coming back, Simon has had to deliver the same goods over and over again while at the same time keeping it fresh and exciting.  So he's done what desperate genre writers do all the time.  Whatever worked well the last time out, they do again only they double it.  The explosions get bigger, the body counts get higher, the sex turns kinky and then kinkier.

Simon could not achieve the popularity he'd have liked with his mysteries partly because he could not give in to readers' expectations of blood, gore, sex, and violence.  He had too much artistic integrity.

But now as a blogger he's become what he steadily resisted being as a novelist.

A hack.

Related blogging: Scott Lemieux, riffing on a post by Matt Welch, finds Simon and Dennis Miller, among others, guilty of "The Horowitz Fallacy." 

These are types, sez Scott, "who believed a lot of indefensible things when they were leftists [who since] becoming right-wingers [have been] projecting their old beliefs on something called 'the left' and trying to beat the strawman constructed from their ex-selves to death."

And James Wolcott catches Simon suffering from incontintence in more than just his rhetoric.

Oh ye people of faith of little faith

April 24th is Justice Sunday.

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council [which is organizing Justice Sunday], said the goal of the event is to get the "Christian community" to help rein in "the last bastion of liberalism, the federal courts" and put an end to filibusters of conservative judicial candidates.

The feature attraction will be a videotaped speech by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist "rallying churchgoers to protest the filibuster tactic."

As you've heard often enough, Frist thinks that the filibuster has to be banned so that Democrats don't use it to discriminate against "people of faith."

This is true.

The Democrats want to discriminate against people of faith.

People whose faith tells them that gay people are perverts and sinners who should not be allowed to marry, adopt children, teach in schools, join the military, hold jobs at companies at which work other "people of faith" who might be offended by having their own prurient curiosity about other people's sex lives stimulated by daily association with fags and dykes.

Whose faith tells them that women have no useful contribution to make to the world except for the ones they can make with their wombs or at the stove or behind a vacuum cleaner or the wheel of a minivan.

Whose faith tells them that torture is wrong except when it's used by Americans against brown people or when brown people hired by Americans torture other brown people.

People whose faith tells them that brown people here have gotten uppity and need to learn to develop "character" and stop depending on the Federal government for such Unconstitutional handouts as voting rights and anti-discrimination laws and other protections imposed upon an unsuspecting and innocent nation by traitorous "activist judges."  And every time conservatives use that phrase it should be pointed out (Mr Brooks!) that it was not invented after Roe v. Wade.  This is Tom DeLay on judicial activism.

I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that's nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn't stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn't stop them.

50 to 100 years?  Roe v. Wade was decided 32 years ago.  Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the right to privacy DeLay derides came down in 1965.  Prayer was banned from the public schools 40 odd years ago.  Go back 50 years and what are we talking about?

Brown v. Board of Education.

Railing against activist judges came into common parlance as a favorite circumlocution of the Segregationists during the Civil Rights Movement.  It was re-invigorated by the Boston busing crisis.  It is code for The damn liberals want to force us to associate with the Negroes! and it is a battle cry for racists as well as anti-abortion types, who, the trial of Eric Rudolph should have made clear, are not always different people, as David Neiwert explains in his in-depth look at Rudolph's Manifesto.

Democrats want to use the filibuster to discriminate against people whose faith tells them that whenever science contradicts the superstitions and Biblically inspired nonsense of their faith, science should leave the building.

Against people whose faith tells them that whenever any facts taught in schools contradict the nonsensical teachings of their faith, facts should leave the building.  Abstinence education, anyone?

Against people whose faith tells them that not only is their faith the one and only true faith but that it is the American faith, that America is a faith-based organization, and that a group of 18th Century liberal rationalists who barely believed in a Diety and who distrusted organized religions and despised what they called Methodism by which they meant what we call Evangelicalism and wrote into the Constitution a ban against any state establishment of religion still somehow managed to create a Right Wing Christianist theocracy.

And against people whose faith tells them that the faiths of other people who don't believe exactly what they believe do not count and that Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics, and liberal Protestants should say Evangelical prayers in their schools, and accept Evangelical religious symbols on their courthouse lawns, and live without complaint in a country where Right Wing Evangelical prejudices, follies, and heresies are not just spouted by their politicians but are written into the laws of the land, and whose faith tells them that people who have no particular faith might as well be Martians for all they should expect to feel at home in this country.

There is, of course, no good reason to get rid of the filibuster.  The Republicans in the Senate pretty much do whatever they want already, filibusters are hard to organize and keep going, the number of judicial appointees who have been rejected is embarrassingly small (if you're a Democrat, but it even embarrasses some Republicans), and on top of that getting rid of the filibuster is in the long run self-defeating, for besides the fact that the intellectual and legal qualifications of  judges who are appointed only because their nominations didn't have to risk a filibuster will be suspect in the minds of lawyers and other judges, the Republicans, as John McCain has pointed out, will not be in the majority forever, and when the Democrats take back control it will be by a small enough margin that a liberal Democratic president who doesn't have to worry about filibusters can appoint the hated activist judges with 51 vote majorities.  (See Billmon.)

There are only two reasons for persisting.  One is spite, which should not be underestimated as a motivating force in a Party controlled by Tom DeLay and George W. Bush---where Bush got his reputation as a nice guy, I have no idea, since anger and spite seem to be his predominate emotions even in dealings with his own father and daughters.

The other is that Frist knows that Bush is planning to nominate someone for a judgeship who is so unqualified, so reprehensible, so divisive that he, as Majority Leader, will have a desperate enough time mustering a bare majority nevermind the votes necessary to break a filibuster, some person of "faith" whose faith is in a vengeful, spiteful, discriminatory, small-minded, merciless god that will only "save" those people of faith who best match him in vengefulness, spite, discrimination, small-mindedness, and lack of mercy.

Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore anyone?

There is what could be called a third reason, but I think it's a sub-set of the second reason---a judicial appointee of the likes of Moore would be nominated only to placate the Religious Right, or energize it if the Democrats put up enough of a fight, and Frist needs the Right Wing Christian vote to make it through the primaries if he runs for President in 2008, which he appears to be planning to do, so he will have to champion that nominee whoever he is.

I'm not predicting it will be Moore---another possibility for an appalling nomination, even more appalling than Antonin Scalia to Chief Justice, would be Clarence Thomas to Chief Justice.  Nominating Thomas would be wonderfully almost beautifully cynical because then the Republicans could paint the Democrats as both racist and anti-Christian and Scalia would still be Chief Justice since Thomas is basically a ventriloquist's dummy perched on Scalia's knee.  Scalia's ego would rebel against this, but Karl Rove's ego is bigger.  But I think the fight Frist is anticipating is over someone more like Moore and there are good, cynical reasons for nominating Moore.

St Roy, as Mac Thomason likes to call him, is a hero to the Radical Religious Right for the reason he is totally unacceptable as a Supreme Court Justice, he is a person of faith who believes his faith trumps the Constitution and the authority of the Federal Government; and Moore stands a good chance of becoming Governor of Alabama and as Governor he would be in a good postition to make a run for the Presidency.   He couldn't win the nomination, let alone the White House, but his being in the fight would take lots of necessary Right Wing Christian votes from candidates like Frist and Rick Santorum, probably throwing the nomination to John McCain or Chuck Hagel.  (More likely McCain, if Erik Loomis is right.  Erik thinks Hagel has no chance of winning the nomination.)

If Frist's reason for eliminating the fillibuster is the second one, then it is as Richard Cohen says, cynical, unprincipled, hypocritical, and pretty damn cowardly of him, .

Whatever the reason, equally cynical, hypocritical, and unprincipled has been the rhetoric of the Republicans pushing with Frist to get rid of the filibuster.  It's almost awe-inspiring to listen to them condemn the filibuster because in the past it was used by racists to thwart Civil Rights legislation---these are people of faith whose "faith" would have had them joining in those filibusters against Civil Rights, who have inherited their "faith" from the Segregationists, who are carrying on their fight under the cover of opposing judicial activism, as John Perr's graphic charting of The Conservative Theory of Evolution makes clear.

Note the key position of "Hillary precurser" Eleanor Roosevelt in the chain.  Remember when people were making fun of Hillary for her supposed communing with the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt?  Well, it's not Hillary who was seeing ghosts.  If you want to understand Right Wingers' automatic loathing of Hillary, don't stop with examining their sexism and reactionary hatred of 1960s style liberalism.

They look at Hillary and they see a ghost.

They are haunted by Eleanor Roosevelt, as they deserve to be.

Acknowledgements and recommendations for further reading:   Thanks to Coturnix and Pam for the link to PERRspectives and thanks to Nance for the link to Cohen's column.  Thanks, also, to Scott Lemieux for the heads up on the David Brooks column on Roe v. Wade, which, by the way, Scott demolished, probably while watching TV, eating a sandwich, folding laundry, and talking on the phone to his mother all at the same time, it's become that easy to demolish a Brooks column.  For liberal bloggers it's the equivalent of playing scales, a useful warm-up exercise.)

Mac Thomason followed the Rudolph trial closely and is enjoying keeping tabs on the miracles, preachings, and pilgrimages of St Roy as he works his way toward official canonization.

Jason Chervokas lays out the egregiously anti-democratic and anti-Constituional nature of the tactics, plans, and goals of Frist and the man for whom Frist is fronting, George W. Bush.

The Heretik has been keeping track of Frist's efforts to blow up the Senate in a series of posts under the heading Armageddon on the Potomac.  Pam, in keeping with the same apocalyptic spirit, has a wild post called Are the political Endtimes near?, which is where I swiped the DeLay quote from. Thanks again, Pam.

Pessimist at the Left Coaster also covers the anti-filibuster movement. Mucho gracias, Avedon Carol, for the link, who also points the way to this post by Chuck Currie on real People of Faith who aren't happy with Frist and his small-minded and exclusionary definition of faith.

Colbert King has a column in today's Washington Post fuming at the attempt by Right Wing people of faith to hijack Christianity, while Shakespeare's Sister argues that the hijackers should not be called Christians but Dominionists and points out that they have a "long history a history of sexuality and gender oppression".

As well as not calling them Christians, we should not even call them Evangelicals either, since they do not represent all Evangelicals, many of whom are liberals in their politics and theology, as you can see by browsing through the magazine Sojourners or by reading Editor-in-chief Jim Wallis' column, Filibustering People of Faith.  Registration required, but it's quick.

Shakespeare's Sister also has a post relating how Senate Democratic Minority Leader, Henry Reid, has called President Bush on fibbing about not supporting Frist's attempt to go nuclear.

And you should visit the Park Service's webpage for the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site.

Rendering unto Caesar

I'm surprised the the Republicans in the House didn't wait until today to make their repeal of the estate tax permanent.

(Susan has plucked all the gory details from the Washington Post.  Shakespeare's Sister expresses the appropriate indignation over at the Big Brass Blog.)

What a symbolic gesture that would have been.  While the rest of us are treating today as a day of mourning, trust fund babies could be dancing in the street.  You'd think the GOP leadership would have enjoyed the spectacle, given the amount of pleasure they seem to take in sticking it to the poor and the middle class these days.

(See bankruptcy bill.  See Shakespeare's Sister spit nails again.)

You know, I understand why the rich hate the poor.  I don't sympathize with it, I despise them for it, but I understand it.  The poor by their mere existence are a living reminder that the rich have for the most part neither earned all their money nor spent it wisely nor used much of it to do the world any good.

The idea of a baby going hungry makes it awful hard to enjoy that drive down to the Hamptons in the beamer with the top down.  But it's easier to hate that baby for having had the gall to have been born to poor parents than to feel a little bit of guilt, compassion, or obligation to help that baby.

But why do they hate the middle class too?

Is it a problem of perspective?  Do we just look like more poor people to them?

Sometimes I wonder if it's not a matter of hate or contempt, it's just that same lazy solipsism that had the aristocrats standing before the guillotine turning to the crowd and asking, "Just what is your people's problem?"

But the sad fact is that many members of the middle class, and the working class, and even many poor people do not feel at all screwed by what the Republicans have been doing.

They think---they really do think---that the GOP has been looking out for their interests.

All across America there are people who aren't rich, who have never been rich, who will never be rich unless they hit the lottery and then they probably won't stay rich because they will piss all that money away, who in their hearts think of themselves as rich.  They identify with the rich, they imagine that the rich are just friends they haven't met yet.  They love the rich as surrogate selves.  They look at the rich and they're looking in the mirror.

We live in a nation full of people who seriously expect to wake up tomorrow morning rich as Croesus.  People who know all the angles, who've got big dreams and big plans, who just need a little luck or an extra edge, who've got it all figured out, if only...If only.

In other words, we live in a nation full of suckers.

Which explains why our history's full of gold rushes, stock market bubbles, Ponzi schemes, and Republican Congresses.

The rich don't think they should pay any taxes, but regular Americans don't despise them for that.  They agree with the sentiment.

Americans' hatred of the tax man is said to be one of our inheritances from the Founders.    The United States was born of a tax revolt and so no wonder we all rebel against paying taxes.

Nonsense.

We don't hate taxes because of some noble streak of American independence.

We hate it becuase we are afflicted with the human desire for a free lunch.

And generations of politicians, from both parties, have been happy to tell us that if we vote for them we can have it.  Free lunches for all!

Anti-tax types, often calling themselves Libertarians, but who are really just Free Lunchers, like to say that the People know better how to spend their money than the government does.

If that were true, nobody outside of Bagdad would be driving a Hummer.

Andrew Tobias puts it more eloquently and more responsibly.

One of his readers wrote in to ask him, "Why do you think the Government will spend [the money] more productively than the earner?"

Tobias replied, "Because I don't think the earner will spend it to build roads, control air traffic, fund college scholarships, subsidize scientific research, provide health care to the old and the poor... and on and on."

That said, I hope you are due a whopping big refund and that somebody whose company you enjoy takes you out to lunch...and picks up the check.

There is no Terri to save

Priest saying the mass Easter Sunday at Old Mother and Father Blonde's church was giving a pretty decent sermon. Nothing grand. It wasn't a rhetorical masterpiece and it contained no original ideas or even complex ones. But it was thoughtful, well-written, coherent, and he delivered it well. But just at the point where I thought and all the parents of squirmy little kids prayed he was wrapping up he got a second wind and began to tell a story he called The Miracle of Lanciano.

Seems that a ways back, thirteen hundred years ago or so, a priest in the Italian town of Lanciano was having a crisis of faith. But he went about performing his priestly duties out of loyalty to his congregation and a sense of obligation to be true to his vows. Then one day, as he was saying mass, he looked down at the host on the altar and saw that it had become ringed with real human flesh! And then he looked down into the chalice and saw that the wine had turned to real human blood!

A miracle!  His faith was restored. (The priest saying our mass didn't say whether or not that priest had ever heard the story of Doubting Thomas.)  But God wasn't done.

The host and the blood never changed back into mere bread and wine. Never. For centuries they have preserved themselves in that church and if you go there today you can see them.

This is a new one on me.

I was an enthusiastic consumer of miracle stories and tales of the saints when I was a little kid, but I missed hearing about Lanciano until the other day.

It gets better.  Our priest told us that the blood and that slice of miraculous cold cuts were examined by scientists in 1970.  "Real scientists, including non-Catholics and non-believers."  Their tests proved that the flesh was real human tissue---heart tissue!---and the blood was real human blood, type AB in fact, the same type as found in the Shroud of Turin!

(The priest didn't mention that other scientists have since examined the Shoud and concluded it's a fake.)

I swear, in all the years of church going I've put in, and I was an altar boy, I'd never heard a priest tell one of those fairy tales from the pulpit.

I know it happens. I've known priests who believe this stuff.  But this was the first time I remember hearing a priest talk like this to an audience that wasn't made up of children.

The nuns told us these stories all the time. The nun I had in first grade specialized in the grisliest tales of the martyrs. But the priests at our church aimed their sermons at an audience of adults, many of whom, they knew, were scientists at General Electric. When they wanted a laugh they told a joke or talked about money.

I guess I'd just been lucky at all the other churches I attended since and with all the other priests whose sermons I've sat through. (Mother and Father Blonde tell me that I wasn't happy with this guy's sermon last Easter either, but I don't remember it and they say I only complained that he spoke too long.)  But somehow I managed to get through until this Sunday thinking, not that all priests themselves were smarter than this but they were at least smart enough to know that most of their congregations live in the 21st century and so they should leave the medieval hocus pocus out of their homilies if they want to be taken seriously.

Obviously this guy, who, my Mother Blonde tells me, had his own crisis of faith when he was young and was brought back to the church by his experiences working with Mother Teresa, doesn't worry about that, and his fairy tale wouldn't have bothered me so much except that I was pretty sure where he was headed with this talk about miracles.

Terri Schiavo.

I decided it was a good time to go outside to stretch my legs.

I walked around the church parking lot for a good 10 minutes, enough time I thought for him to finish up and get on with the mass.  Turned out to be just enough time as he had just wrapped up when I returned to our pew.

But I was wrong about him bringing up Terri Schiavo in his sermon.

He saved her for the Prayer of the Faithful.

He stepped on the lecter's lines in order to ask us all to pray for Terri who "today is being denied the Eucharist."

I don't have much useful to add to the argument.  Probably you've read more than I have and know more I do.  If you need to read more or want to catch up, Lindsay Beyerstein has been on a mission and you can't do better than to start with her efforts at Majikthise and work your way out from there.   Mark Kleinman has also been prolific on the subect, taking a slightly different tack, but heading for the same port, and you can start almost anywhere on his page, here, for instance.

All I've got to offer is my anger and my two cents worth of opinion.

Everybody is creeped out by different things in this horror show.  My particular disgust is triggered by the sight of all the priests who have gathered about Terri Schiavo's parents.

I'm not going to get into here my contempt for the men in dresses.  I'll just say that most of these guys had their chance to defend a whole lot of innocent lives in the past and they failed to do it and it's stomach-turning to see them out there trying to make up for their sins by encouraging the Schindlers in their hopeless and wrong-headed attempts to "save" their daughter.

"We are Terri's voice. Right now, Terri is fighting for her life," the Rev. Patrick Mahoney angrily shouted Sunday, his face reddening. He pledged to protest outside the White House on Monday.

"Everyone is willing to write this woman's obituary except one person. And that's Terri Schiavo herself," Paul O'Donnell, a Roman Catholic Franciscan monk and a family spokesman, said outside the hospice Monday.

The Schindlers are routinely described as devout Catholics. I've known a lot of devout Catholics. I used to be one. And I can tell you the Schindlers aren't devout. They're way beyond devout. They're not devout Catholics. They're crazy Catholics.

I don't know if they've been driven crazy by their grief and their desperation or if they were crazy in their Catholicism before they lost their daughter.  Maybe a story has been done about this, but I doubt it.  As Wolcott has pointed out, the news media refuses to examine the pathologies of the religious and because they prefer the dramatic to the quiet and thoughtful, and modest, they routinely portray the self-dramatizing crazies and loonies as the real believers while ignoring all the rest of us.

The Schindlers look to me like the kind of family who causes trouble in every parish---the gung holier than thou types who are never satisfied with the pastor's orthodoxy and who are always trying to present themselves as the hearts and souls of the church and who think that everybody else in the parish ought to defer to them because they have the bishop's and God's ears.  These families come in two forms of dysfunction, mother-crazy and father-crazy.

There are the families who have arranged themselves to defer to and humor the mother's neuroses. Imagine if you had Peggy Noonan for a mother.

And there are families who have been arranged in such a way by the father to give him complete control over everybody's thinking. The Schindlers look to me like this kind of family, but I don't know if they always were or if it's a result of the crisis they've been suffering (and prolonging for themselves) for 14 years.

However it came about, the Schindlers' beliefs are not Catholic anymore.  They've invented their own little religion.  It's the cult of Terri, and if they had honest spiritual advisors they'd have been told that they long ago left the Church behind and had entered the territory of hersey and blasphemy.

They'd also have been told that their daughter died 14 years ago.

Brain dead is a legalistic term. Persistent vegetative state is a medical term. Neither term describes what has really happened to Terri Schiavo.

She died.

Fourteen years ago when she collapsed and the part of her brain that contained her mind turned to mush.

Without a brain a body is not a person. Without a brain the body ceases to contain a person. Without a brain the person is not in a persistent vegetative state.  The person is not brain dead.  The person is dead.  Terri Schavio does not exist.  What is in that bed, what is being kept animated or what will be starved to death is something Terri Schavio walked around in for a while.  The part of that thing that used to contain her, that used to be her, was turned to pudding and has been pudding for 14 years.  It has shown no sign of miraculously reassembling itself.  If you believe in an immortal soul, you still have to accept that the soul needs the brain in order to be a part of this life. If a bullet had done to her brain what her heart failure did, the rest of her body would probably have died of shock, but even if it hadn't nobody looking at the wound would doubt that Terri had been killed.

Terri Schiavo's body is as effectively not her as if she had been decapitated.

I understand why her parents can't face this fact. (Although my sympathy for the Schindlers goes only so far. Shakespeare's Sister, bringing together posts from The Mahablog and Emma at The American Street, explains how Terri's parents can inspire "compassion fatigue." ) I can understand why lots of other people don't want to face it either.  None of us wants to admit that our lives are that fragile.  That our minds, our selves, are dependent on a whole lot of little biological machines haphazardly and imperfectly working together and that one little misfire can trigger the end of us.

None of us wants to die, all of us want to believe in miracles, it's human to hope that we can conquer death.  Taking out the feeding tube, letting that body die, is admitting that death triumphs and miracles don't happen.

So I can understand why people, even people who think that Michael Schiavo is in the right here and it is time to let Terri's body join the rest of her, speak as though there is still a Terri inside that body.  It's not Terri we're all trying to save, it's ourselves.

I do not, however, understand how anybody looking at the body in that bed sees a live human being, let alone sees Terri Schiavo.

To me what is in that bed looks less sentient than the animatronic figures at Disney World.  Whatever "intelligence" there is to be found in the eyes, in the smile---that ghastly grimace---appears less than can be found in a doll's.  What it looks like to me is a corpse.  Every still photograph of her looks like an autopsy photo. 

I haven't seen any of the videos, fortunately, but I suspect that if I did what I would see would look like a body on a mortuary slab hooked up to a car battery and irregularly jolted with electricity---which is essentially what's happening, except that the battery happens to be within the body.

I don't understand how anybody calling themselves a doctor could look at those pictures or videos and not be reminded of their first days in gross anatomy class.

I don't even understand how her family can look down at that bed and see Terri.

This was Terri Schiavo.

Anyone who sees that vital and intelligent woman in that bed is imagining things.

I suspect that what people who aren't her family are looking at is not the body in the bed but the loving mother bending over it, and their sympathy is not with Terri Schiavo so much as with the heartbroken Mrs Schindler.

Someone should have saved Mrs Schindler.

The best someones to have done that were the priests she trusted. Maybe some of them tried, and that's why the Schindlers have turned for help to secular kooks and con artists like Randall Terry.

But I know that there are a lot of priests down there like the one I heard Easter Sunday and they've been filling the Schindlers' heads with thoughts of miracles.

I am not a good Catholic. But I am still just enough of one that I can't stop believing, if only a little bit.

But just a little bit.

And I certainly don't believe in an omnipotent and all-knowing God.

There's an old argument that begins with the question, "If God can do anything, can he make a rock that's too big for him to lift?"

My answer is, "Yes, and in fact he did.  We call it the universe."

God appears to have created a world in which he has no power.

All the power to change things, fix things, save things resides in us.

Wherever God is, however God goes about the business of being God, he/she/it/they can only do it through us. Some people say that through us God performs miracles.  I believe that working through us God is limited to being able to do only what we can do. He has only human hands and a human brain as his tools. What we can't do, he can't do.

If God could have saved Terri he'd have done it by now.  For eight years, Michael Schiavo let him try through the only means God has, the hands of Terri's doctors.  Eight years!

The Right is lying again about what Liberals believe. That's what they do best. Lie. And they know they're lying. They know that Liberals don't want to "kill" Terri Schiavo. They know we are defending her right to have made decisions about her own medical care and defending her husband's rights to act as her husband. They know that if Liberals ran the Government we wouldn't have convened a special session to pass unconstitutional legislation "for the relief of Terri Schiavo's parents."  We'd be passing legislation to undo all the damage they've done to health care for everybody.

They know that they're the ones who want to make it impossible for the families of future Terri Schiavos to sue so that they can obtain the money to keep their Terris alive for 14 years while doctors do everything they can to bring them back.  They know they're the ones voting for cuts in Medicare so that people with diseases that will kill them but which could be cured or ameliorated can't afford treatment and so even if they wish to struggle on they have no choice but to die. They know that their president signed legislation that allows hospitals to decide to pull the plugs on patients who are, unlike Terri, conscious, still alive, but dying, because they're families can't afford to pay for any more treatment.

They know they're the ones voting to cut funding for treatment of brain-injured soldiers returning from Iraq!

They know, and they still lie.

They should be hit over the heads with their lies all the time and it's disgusting how the Congressional Democratic leadership has surrendered so completely on the issue.

(Update:  Susan at Suburban Guerrilla has  posted a cartoon by Scott Bateman that makes the above points beautifully clear.  Everybody should memorize what it says.)

But I am still most disgusted with the priests who are preaching a belief in miracles.

This seems to me a great heresy or blasphemy. God does not do conjuring tricks. He gave human beings brains and opposable thumbs and he set us to work on the job of saving and caring for ourselves.

God's greatest gift to us is science.

And rather than put our faith in science, which is to say, in God, the priests want us to put our faith in magic.

By the way, Terri Shiavo was not denied communion on Sunday.

Like mother, like son

The other day, down in Florida, the President was out on the phony campaign trail, lying about his plans for Social Security to an audience of  chosen lackeys, flunkeys, and stooges when all of a sudden his dear old mother appeared on the stage with him.

Mom, the president exclaimed, what are you doing here? as surprised as David Letterman when Regis Philbin makes a "surprise" visit to the set.

The President and Barbara Bush exchanged a little bit of banter and as cheap political theater goes it was almost charming.  Would have been more charming if the President hadn't muffed his lines.

MRS. BUSH: You're supposed to ask me why I'm here.

THE PRESIDENT: Okay. First of all, I now know why I'm getting white hair. (Laughter.)

MRS. BUSH: I'm here because when else can I see my two oldest boys? (Laughter and applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: How about a little better answer than that, will you?

MRS. BUSH: That's reason number one.

THE PRESIDENT: Now, wait, it's not, how can I see my two better boys, it's how can I tell my two better boys in person what to do, is what you're really trying to say.

The President blew his cue and had to be prompted by his mother and he said better boys when he probably meant to say oldest boys, but that's the beauty of live theater.

Now both Eli of Left I on the News and Holden at First Draft see in the President's lines evidence of his essential creepiness.  Holden thinks Bush was making fun of his dear old white-haired mother's white hair and both think that refering to himself and Jeb as Barbara's better boys shows a unforgivable lack of brotherly love and proves what a vicious megalomaniac he is.

(Thanks to Avedon Carol for the link to Eli and thanks to Eli for the link to Holden.)

But they're treating the moment as if it was what it pretended to be, spontaneous and unscripted.  It was a carefully staged comedy routine written by the President's speech writers and approved by Karl Rove.  It was hokey and it was, because it was part of a general effort to mislead, a bit of staged lying, but it was standard political theater and all that happened was that Bush muffed his lines.  The word better got in there from his use of it in his previous line, "How about a better answer than that?"

It's not as if we've never heard him get tongue tied, lose track of a thought in mid-sentence, and malaprop his way into political comedy immortality.  Glib, the man is not.

Holden and Eli think Bush was deliberately badmouthing his two younger brothers, Neil and Marvin.  I think he just went up in his lines, but if it was something else it was a simple Freudian slip and, face it, you can't fault the President of the United States of America for thinking that he and his brother the Governor of Florida are the better brothers compared to those two screw-ups and thieves, and, in Neil's case, sexual predator.

And I think the white hair line was meant to imply that the President is scared of his mother.

There's plenty of evidence that Bush is not as nice a fella as his devoted fans think he is.  We don't have to go psychoanalyzing every word that comes out of his mouth to add to it.  This is what the Right does, assume bad behavior and bad faith on all our parts and then see evidence of it in every little thing we do.  Oh, look, he ordered swiss cheese on his sandwich!  What an effete snob!  Oh, they liked Million Dollar Baby!  They're for euthenasia as well as baby killing!

While we're at it, I like to take cheap shots at the President too, but again he gives us enough ammo without our having to make fun of his looks and call him things like "Chimpy."  First off, he doesn't look like a chimp, not any more than the rest of us do, which is to say we all look like what we are, hairless apes.  From time to time, a photograph emphasizes Bush's resemblance to our primate cousins and it's funny, but I think you'd better be a whole lot more photogenic before you even think about ridiculing him on that score.

Second off, most of his fans and even a lot of people who don't particularly care for him think he's a good looking guy.  In fact, I think his looks are why he's president and not his brother...or John Kerry.

Third, making fun of somebody's looks as if their physiognomy reveals their assumed bad character is what they do.  Remember who called whom Lurch?

But all that is an aside.  The real travesty that happened on that stage wasn't that Bush picked on his no good little brothers, or even poked fun at his mother.

It was what Barbara Bush was there to do, help her son pretend to be jess folks in order to sell the real jess folks their own economic ruin.

Bush the uniter is out there trying to sell his plan to destroy Social Security by dividing.  He's trying to turn the old against the young by assuring people in retirement now or entering it soon he's not going to cut anybody's benefits in the short run.  That's a long term goal.  This isn't working.   America's old people don't want to save themselves at the expense of their children and grandchildren.  But Bush began this sideshow by declaring that people born before 1950 didn't have anything to fear but fear itself, as long as they didn't care about anybody but themselves.

Barbara Bush stood up to pretend to be an average grandmother who did care about others.

"Your father and I have 17 grandchildren," she told the President, "All born after 1950. And we want to know, is someone going to do something about it?"  Who's worrying about their retirement benefits, she made believe she wanted to know.

Is there a Bush grandchild who doesn't have a trust fund?

If the President was a honest man he would have said---well, if he was an honest man he wouldn't be out there trying to destroy Social Security, but if he was honest about what he was up to, he'd have said, Mom, your grandchildren wouldn't be collecting a dime of Social Security even if the system was raking in the dough like a Las Vegas casino or Microsoft.   We're rich!  Who are you planning to disinherit?

He might have also pointed out that all her grandchildren were born well after 1950.  Twenty five years and more.  Her grandchildren won't be retiring for a good 30 or 40 years yet, after the Baby Boomers---her sons' generation---has started dying off and the "crisis" caused by their retiring has begun to abate because as dead people the Boomers won't be collecting benefits.

And he might have added that a very simple way of saving Social Security would be to raise taxes on rich folks like her grandchildren instead of trying to fix it so that they and all the other trust fund babies in America never have to kick in a penny for the privilege of living here and profiting off the hard work of everybody else.

He might have, but there was no chance that he would.  So it would have been nice if the media covering this charade had done it.

The New York Times hinted at it.   "In doing her part, Mrs. Bush left out any mention of whether Social Security figured in the family's monthly finances."

The AP story that ran in our paper didn't even hint.  It didn't report that the President goofed up his lines either.

“How about a little better answer than that, will you?” said Bush, following with a joke that she agreed to come only to tell her boys what to do in person.

But AP did report something more important and they did it pretty high up in the story too.  The italics are mine:

The emphasis on addressing seniors’ worries reflects a clear concern in the White House about the president’s six-week sales campaign. Polls show growing opposition to – and thus, continued wariness among congressional Republicans about – Bush’s plans even as he travels the country pitching them.

With luck this is a trend.  The media will start reporting the facts at the beginnings of stories before they report Bush's lies and fantasies and Americans might start getting the news instead of propaganda.

Everybody's entitled to an opinion

Hitler:  The trouble with those Poles is they want to rule the whole world.

Salieri:  What I can't stand about Mozart is his whining jealousy.

Cotton Mather:  We would love to have the Quakers live among us, but they are so darn intolerant and holier than thou you just want to whip them naked through the streets.

Eve Harrington:  Margo pretends to be such a goody goody and your friend and all, but you just know that behind your back she's scheming to take over your part and have you fired from the show.

Pope Urban VIII:  You can't have a reasonable argument with Galileo because he's so close-minded and backward in his thinking.

Kristinn Taylor of FreeRepublic:  Liberal bloggers have to give up all their hate-mongering and conspiracy theories and come to terms with reality.

Jonathan D. Glater of the New York Times:  The great weakness of supposedly real reporters for other newspapers is that they go out of their way to coddle their conservative sources, never question anything they say, and quote them as if they were credible authorities on what's the matter with liberals.

Thanks to hilzoy at Obsidian Wings and Jeanne D'Arc.

Does the name Sacheen Littlefeather ring any bells?

I made no Oscar predictions, placed no bets, nor rooted for any particular movie, actor, techie, designer, or song to win.  I couldn't.  I didn't see a single one of the movies nominated for Best Picture and precious few of any of the others that produced nominees in other categories.

This is due to two things.

We still haven't found a reliable babysitter down here after a whole year!  (Any of you living in Maurice Hinchey's district have teenage daughters who want to pick up some cash?  We pay well and the boys are very well-behaved.)  Consequently almost the only movies we see in the theaters are movies Matt and Jack want to see too.  Which is why I can assure you that Hellboy is a lot better than you might think.

The other reason though is that even if we had a babysitter we would have had to go out to the movies every other night in December in order to see all the nominated movies.   It's been a long time since the Oscars rewarded the best films of the year.  The Oscars reward the Best Movies Released Between November 1 and Christmas Day.  Look at the list of Best Picture nominatees.  Was there a single one you could have gone to in the summer, let alone last spring?

I'm sure that if the movie that I have no doubt was truly the best movie of 2004, Spider-man 2, had been released at Thanksgiving it would have swept the awards.  Alfred Molina and J.K. Simmons would have had their best actor in a supporting role nominations.  Morgan Freeman probably still would have won, for the usual Oscar reasons.  Scott Lemieux calls it The Body of Work Award.

And if Sideways had been released in the spring, like Alexander Payne's masterpiece, Election, or even in the summer or early fall, like Garden State this year or The Station Agent last year, we wouldn't be talking about whether or not Virginia Madsen and Paul Giamatti make a plausible couple.  A stupid debate anyway, more revelatory of female insecurity and frustrated male vanity than anything.  Virginia Madsen wasn't playing a woman who looks like Virginia Madsen.  She was playing an actual human being.  It's either a failure of her acting ability or a mistake by the cinematographer and make up people that she came out looking like Virginia Madsen.  A better actress would have made us forget she looked like a movie star.

Sandra Bullock used to be very good at this.

But that's a discussion that might have been dealt with quickly over coffee after the movie and forgotten.  What we'd be talking about is what a rip it was that that movie about the guys who go wine tasting, what was it called, oh yeah, Sideways, what a rip Sideways wasn't nominated and how the Oscars continually overlook great movies about grown-ups made for grown-ups.

(Scott Lemieux's post Backlash will make you wish you'd had coffee with him after seeing the movie.)

The Oscars didn't used to have a long-term memory problem.   Somebody in marketing somewhere changed that.

At any rate, it would have been hard for me to get to see all the Oscar nominees, even if I'd wanted to.  Sideways we'll see, but we've always been meaning to.  The Aviator?  I'm not sure.  Million Dollar Baby---well, I sort of feel obligated now.

When I said I had no rooting interest in any of the nominees, I meant that the part of me that loves movies didn't care who won because I didn't know who I would have thought deserved to win.

But the part of me that is partisanly political was rooting hard for Clint and his Million Dollar Baby.

I hate this.  I hate that it's become nearly impossible to have a non-political reaction to the movies.

They're trying to poison everything, aren't they?  The Right.

Everything is a political litmus test for them now.  The movies you like, the TV shows you watch.  The way you raise your children, how you handle your checkbook, the church you go to, the jokes you laugh at, the car you drive, the sports you follow, who you're glad to see is dead.

I used to teach college and I thought I knew what Politically Correct was.

Apparently, though, the post-modernists, deconstructionists, historicisits, feminists, and queer studies profs of the mid 90s can't hold a candle to the frat brothers of the wingnut faction of the blogosphere when it comes to being PC.

These guys can't make a move, think a thought, buy a book, see a movie, or sing a song that hasn't been thoroughly vetted by the elders of the Church of the Republican Jesus and stamped with the imprimatur of Pope Karl Rove.

They don't even use hot water when they wash their hands because it comes out of the left side of the tap.

And, you know what?  Liberals started it.  We did.  Those of us who were overly-influenced by the Marxists among us.  Those of us who still are, still do it.

But they've gone farther and done it better.  No surprise when you look at how many former Marxists there are among the neo-cons.  Marxists, hell.  Stalinists.

It's also turned out that the students who learned the most from all the -ist professors in the 70s, 80s, and 90s were their most conservative students.

All those kids who whined about how they couldn't get a fair shake from their liberal profs grew up to think exactly like them, at least when it came to methodology.

Which makes sense.  The best students would have been the ones who loved their subjects.  In the literature classes, that meant that the best students were paying much closer attention to the books they were reading than to the rhetorical tricks their professors were using as ways of stimulating discussion of those books.

The smart kids who didn't care about the subject paid attention to the prof.

And just as the professors used the racism in Heart of Darkness or the sexism in Taming of the Shrew to attack Conrad and Shakespeare as writers, the winger PC police use Eastwood's supposed support for euthenasia to attack Million Dollar Baby.

Just like a lot of their professors they have no clue as to how art works and can't differentiate characters from their creators.  And just like a lot of their professors they think it is not the job of art to represent life but to argue a political point.

Michael Medved doesn't count.  He's just a hack who figured out that there was more money to be made flattering the prejudices of a right wing audience of philistines than in being a poor man's Roger Ebert and writing mediocre movie reviews for people who really like movies.

But Medved is a useful tool and he does make a lot of money as a hack, which means he has a lot of customers.

It's ok if they want to play these games alone.  But they're intent on ruining the movies for the rest of us.

The wingers aren't satisfied with being PC themselves.  They need liberals and leftists to be PC in everything too.  And they're willing to tell us exactly how we are to go about this.

For instance, as Roy Edroso reported the week the Oscar nominations were announced, the Left was supposed to be having conniptions over the fact that Fahrenheit 9/11 didn't get a nod.

Roy reported that Roger Simon and Glenn Reynolds, helpfully, even offered us reasons for being upset.  According to them, by not nominating Michael Moore for anything, Hollywood had shown it had collectively decided that the fight for the right to torture and sponsor death squads in the name of saving the President's reputation---whoops, I mean, the fight for democracy in Iraq---is a good and noble cause.

By that logic, the fact that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ got snubbed up and down the board means that while embracing the cause of democracy Hollywood has rejected the divinity of Jesus and the notion that through his suffering and dying on the cross we were all guaranteed our salvation.

Does the Pope know?

Turns out though that Hollywood's neo-conservativism on Iraq isn't enough to save its collective soul.  You can't get saved just by skunking Michael Moore, not while embracing the Culture of Death celebrated in Million Dollar Baby and whatever the heck it was that made them condemn Sideways.  Can someone tell me what it is they object to?  The cultural elitism represented by oenology?   Would it have been a more politically acceptable movie if instead of embarking on a wine tasting tour of California the main characters had gone on a bar crawl in Dallas?

Now, back in this universe, where the sky is blue, we're pretty much used to the idea by now that our favorite movies often get overlooked by the Academy at Oscar time.

We've also watched enough Oscar ceremonies to have figured out how the Academy thinks and to know that Michael Moore lost his chance for another Oscar any time soon with his speech when he won for Bowling for Columbine.

This should be known as The Sacheen Littlefeather Factor.  (Follow the link, you'll be pleasantly surprised.)  It could also be called the George C. Scott Effect.  The Academy never forgave Scott for not bothering to show up to accept his Oscar for Patton. 

It's possible that the Academy deliberately overlooked Fahrenheit 9/11 to give it cover for rejecting The Passion of the Christ.  But it's even more probable that everybody out there said to themselves, Hey, Michael's already got his Oscar, why stir up trouble?

What the Motion Picture Academy is, more than it is liberal or political in any way, is full of itself.   And what it cares about more than anything, more than whether or not a movie was any good, or if it made money, or if it has a political messge, is that when the time comes, all the nominees act as if an Oscar is as important as the Nobel Peace Prize.

Pomposity, fake humility, and a groveling gratitude at having been blessed by such a high honor are the correct emotions for all winners.   Anyone who stands up there with Oscar in hand and makes a political statement is telling the world that there are more important things in life than movies.

I can't remember every Oscar show I ever watched, but I'm pretty sure that it's only been in last decade or so that every show has either begun or included at a critical moment a long, dully and pompously narrated montage of film clips meant to remind us that AMERICA IS THE MOVIES.

Snore.

The last few ceremonies have reminded me of nothing more than a wake.  And not an Irish wake.

This is why even though they're fixed The Golden Globes are a whole lot more interesting and fun to watch.

They're a whole lot more fun to attend.

Halle Berry did a beautiful thing, showing up to accept her Razzie for Catwoman, but I'll bet she had a blast at their party too.  (Link thanks to thorswitch at Different Strings.)

Fahrenheit 9/11 was a great piece of journalism, and if it had appeared on television it would have gone down in the annals of great broadcast journalism alongside Harvest of Shame.  And if it had and then been shut out by the Emmys, I'd have been ticked.

Bryant at Population:One makes some similar points, a lot more succinctly, and he sums up nicely, saying of Jim Geraghty of the National Review, who was helping to push the Political Correctifying of the movies:

I think it’s really sad that a guy who writes for a fairly important conservative national magazine doesn’t understand the difference between appreciating someone’s ideology and appreciating their artistic talent.

Exactly.  It's possible to share an artist's politics and still think his work is lacking and that that lack is not more and more strident politics but more art.   Steven Speilberg is a good liberal and The Terminal has a political message that is basically liberal---although it has a moral message that some people would call conservative that trumps its politics.  Still neither the political message nor the moral message matter as much as the art.  The dialogue is not as sharp as it could have been and the pace could have been picked up and so while I enjoyed the movie, it was mostly for the actors' performances, and I don't think it was unfairly overlooked by the Academy.

Except those weren't the reasons it was overlooked.

You know why The Terminal wasn't nominated?

It was released in June.

Grumpy

Bob at Unfogged has a good observation about the self-absorbtion of movie folk and how the Oscars are often an exercise in how to turn virtue into vice---to wit:  the effusive acceptance speeches thanking everybody in the world for making it possible for ME to be the WONDERFUL PERSON you know and LOVE!   Bob's Exhibit A is Hillary Swank, but most of the people who win give some version of the same speech.

But let me say a word in defense of the narcissistic and solipsistic.

There's a reason so many American actors, heck, so many American artists of any kind, are self-absorbed, self-centered, and selfish jerks.

It's not as though talent, bad manners, and rampaging egos are a package deal.

Just for a quick for instance, compare American Oscar winners to any of the Brits who pick up awards from time to time.  Not only are the Brits more eloquent and succinct---British actors are much smarter than their American colleagues, but that's another post---they can keep their egos in check.

This is because in America it's only the selfish, self-centered, and obscenely driven who get to be artists.

There are too many roadblocks in the way of any talented but well-adjusted and commonly decent kid who wants to be an artist.

And I don't mean the financial ones or the opposition of parents to their dreams, though those are big.

I mean that to be an artist you have to have time.  Lots of time to yourself in which to think and practice and work at your craft.  And here in America we will not allow each other any time alone!

From what I hear and read, it seems that over in England people go for hours and hours in each other's company without saying a word.  They think it's rude to stop a stranger on the street and ask for directions.  Sherlock Holmes went years without thinking to mention to Watson that he had a brother and Watson found this only a mildly eccentric failing on Holmes' part and Conan Doyle's readers accepted it as entirely plausible, and that typical English reticence continues to this day.

John Cleese has a wonderful speech about it in A Fish Called Wanda.

Wanda, do you have any idea what it's like being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of, of doing the wrong thing, of saying to someone "Are you married?" and hearing "My wife left me this morning," or saying, uh, "Do you have children?" and being told they all burned to death on Wednesday. You see, Wanda, we'll all terrified of embarrassment.

His character's lamenting that reticence, but every time I watch the movie I think, you know, that idea, everybody keeping their feelings to themselves, that sounds kind of relaxing.

There is nothing an American hates more than the sight of another American sitting happily alone with his thoughts.

Parents and siblings and friends are the main reason that good kids do not grow up to be artists.

What are you doing, dear?

Drawing.

Drawing what?

A picture.

A picture of what?

Nothing.

Oh it must be something.

Not really.  (Meaning not yet.)

Can I see it.

Maybe.  When I'm done.  (Meaning, it's probably not going to work the way I want it to so I'd rather not show it to you.)

Oh can't I take a peek?

I guess.  (Meaning, If I show it to you will you shut up and go away?)

Oh how pretty!

It's not pretty.

It is.  It's beautiful.  You're so creative.  I don't know where you get your talent from.  I can't draw a circle.  I remember when I was your age I tried to make a poster for....

At this point the kid who will go on to be an artist has either walked out of the room or told the loving parent to shut the hell up and leave me alone!

The good kid sits there and listens and nods and gives into the conversation and then finally, when the parent gets a clue and leaves, there's a knock on the door or the phone rings or the other parent comes into the room or a brother or sister.  You get the point.  The good kid will never finish that drawing.

I knew a guy, talented, smart, good writer, who knew he would never become a great writer the day his new wife decided she needed to water the plants on his desk while he was sitting there writing.

He knew at that moment he had to decide.  He had to choose between writing and divorce.

He was a decent guy.

He got up so she could get at the plants with her spray bottle.

I'll bet there were at least five other women in whatever theater department produced Hillary Swank who were as talented as she was, but none of them had the heart---or heartlessness---to throw their friends out of their dorm rooms when they needed to go over their lines or break up with their boyfriends the first time they tried to fuck them when they were on their way out the door to rehearsal.

You can't be creative even in the most gregarious art forms, dance, theater, music, without silence and time alone.

And Americans just won't leave each other alone.

This was not the post I wanted to write this morning.

Guess how many times the phone has rung today.

(Uplifting and inspiring update:  There are some times when I despair.  I think to myself, accusingly, Lance, what good are you doing with this page?  How are you doing anything to improve the world and cure it of its ills and sorrow?  Well, this morning I found out that I have done something beneficial to mankind or at least to one kind of man.  Lex Alexander reports on his site Blog on the Run that this post has helped him come to terms with who he really is.  For years he's been in denial.  He has thought that his desire to be left alone in peace of quiet meant only that he was jerk.  Now he knows the truth.  He's an artist!

Note:  This post is over and done with.  Ignore the continue reading link.  That's just Typepad being cute again.)

The last fighting Democrat

Avedon Carol answered my question about why the wingnuts and dittoheads were all spitting red hot nails over Congressman Maurice Hinchey stating his opinion that Karl Rove had something to do with those Rathergate memos.  I didn't understand the fuss.  Seemed to me that speculating that Rove had a hand in a political dirty trick was like speculating that Paris Hilton likes to be on TV, Barry Bonds has sampled a few steroids, Bill Clinton was not the most faithful of husbands, that guy at the Toyota dealership wants to sell you a car, your pastor wants to increase the take at the Sunday collection, and one of your teenage daughter's friends will try to sneak a bottle of Stolli into the party she's throwing this weekend.  In other words, it's speculating that Rove was just being himself and doing his job.

Why, I wondered, were they all so concerned about Rove's reputation and tender feelings?

Avedon explained it succinctly.  Rove is behind their anger as surely as he is behind every thing they think and do.  And what he wants to do is not defend himself as a paragon of decency and fair play.  He wants to destroy Maurice Hinchey's credibility. 

"Rove," she said,"has to poison the messenger: because if he doesn't taint the messenger, he can't taint the message as easily. And he wants to taint the message because it's true."

And the sky is blue, Lance.

The wingers and their minions haven't succeeded in scaring or flustering Hinchey a bit.  What's more, they have managed to focus media attention on a breed that had seemed to have died out, a Democrat who is really good in front of a microphone.

This is from Michael Kruse's story in today's Times Herald-Record:

Since letting loose with them fightin' words last Saturday in a speech in Ithaca, Maurice Hinchey has canceled a business trip to Europe because of a bit of the flu, has managed to find some time to appear on a number of national TV and radio shows and has quickly become the whipping boy at the white-hot center of the conservative blogosphere.

So does he regret having suggested that ace presidential strategist Karl Rove is behind those phony documents that ultimately felled longtime CBS anchor Dan Rather and several top network execs?

"Hell, no," the Democratic congressman said yesterday from his home in the Ulster County hamlet of Hurley.

"Frankly, I'm happy about it, that it's gotten so much attention."

Long-overdue attention, Hinchey said yesterday, because it's an issue that more people need to be made aware of here in the 22nd Congressional District and across the country.

That issue?

"The manipulation of the American information distribution system – the American media – and how they've been manipulated by the White House over the last few years," he said. "Are the American people going to continue to have faith in the integrity and veracity of the American media, or are they going to ask themselves: 'Am I being manipulated by this administration?' So what it means is, we're talking about the basic elements of our democratic republic."

That's my Congressman!

And his point has to be repeated over and over.  It doesn't matter if Rove managed this particular dirty trick.  He's managed plenty of others.  He'll attempt many more.  And he does it for a reason.  To control the media.  To make sure that the American people don't learn anything that Rove and the Bush Leaguers don't want them to.  They want to deny us the ability to take an intelligent and informed role in our own government.

Rebel yells

This ought to move me up on the Google Hit Parade.

Just got my first link from the right side of the virtual aisle.  Fellow calling himself ConfederateYankee, which I first took as a play on Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee and therefore kind of liked.  But thinking it over, I'm wondering if it isn't just a statement of his geographic history, his way of saying he's a Southerner transplated to the North.   I hope that's all it is.  I'd hate to think it represents his personal feeling that slavery and Secession were good ideas.

However you come by your nom de blog, CY, (Do you mind if I call you Cy as in Young?) thanks for the link, and thanks also for the gentlemanly laconic way you did it.  Welcome to Lance Mannion Import Exports Inc. and hello and howdy to anyone crossing the virtual Mason-Dixon line over from his site.  I'm glad you're here, because maybe you can answer a question that's been bugging me since yesterday.

CY and a lot of his homeboys are fightin' mad at CY's and my congressman Maurice Hinchey because Hinchey said he thinks Karl Rove might have had something to do with the Rathergate memos.

Now let me ask you.   Why does this have you all so riled up?  Do you really think this is a scurrilous affront to Karl Rove's integrity and reputation?  What is it you think he's paid to do?  The man apprenticed with Lee Atwater, after all, and Atwater made no bones about what he was up to.  If Rove wasn't behind this one, and I don't think he was, he's been behind plenty of similar tricks.

(By the way, CY, what Hinchey said is not the least bit slanderous, because you can't slander a public figure by stating an honest opinion.  Nor can you libel them, which is lucky for all you guys.  This how you can get away with stating your honest opinion that Hinchey is crazy without having to worry that his lawyers will come knocking on your doors.  At worst what Hinchey said was an insult, and I'm pretty sure Rove's had meaner things said about him and his feelings weren't too hurt by this one.)

I'd also be interested to know why you think Hinchey's opinion that Rove might have done something that would have made his mentor proud is such a weird, bizarre, from-way-out-in-outer space conspiracy theory that Hinchey should be wearing a tin foil hat.  I mean, isn't your side's take on the memos that they were forged by people in the Kerry campaign?  That's a conspiracy theory if ever I heard one.  You don't have any proof of that and not only that you can't identify anybody in Kerry's campaign with the same history of dirty tricks and general ratfucking as Rove has.   Rove is the guy who once bugged his own office so he could blame it on his candidate's opponent.  So why is your conspiracy theory less crazy than Hinchey's?

I'm just asking.

Anyway, it's good to have y'all here.  Feel free to poke around.  You'll probably be disappointed to discover this isn't really a political blog and there isn't something in every post to make your blood boil.  But keep plugging.  You'll find something that'll drive you berserk.

By the way, regular readers, CY's got a pretty thorough list of links to media coverage of this story.  Worth checking out.

(Thursday morning update:  Looks as though I got linked to by the one wingnut blogger who doesn't have an army of trolls to command forth.  Hardly any traffic coming over from CY's place.   It's like being threatened by Sauruman after the fall of Isengard and discovering he can't even get Grima Wormtongue interested in the fight.

But!

I've been linked to by the Daou Report.  Much, much, much better.  And by my local newspaper, The Times Herald-Record.  Welcome to all of you coming over from both places.  First thing you might want to know is that this post is a follow up to this one and then this one.  Second thing is that this is not primarily a political blog.  I post on a variety of topics and I hope you'll stick around and do some exploring.  Best place to start is with the posts listed over to your right under Re-runs.  Also browsing through any of the categories will give you a good idea of what's going on here.

Thanks to you all for stopping by.  Come back anytime.  Light's always on.  Clerk's always on duty.  Night owls and tour buses welcome.)