The Weeping Angels

Today's Daily Banter column looks at the collective freak-out the Christian right is having over gay marriage and how evangelicals and the like now want us to believe that they're the persecuted ones.

Here's the opening shot:

"It’s always entertaining to watch the right, particularly the Christian right, whine about victimization. As Steve Benen over at the Maddowblog says today, no one’s raised self-pity to a melodramatic art form the way America’s conservative Christians have, regardless of their particular political or denominational bent. To hear Pat Robertson, or William Donohue of the Catholic League, or Bill O’Reilly, or many, many others tell it, you’d think Christians were still being thrown to lions, maybe along the Capitol Mall, and a date with the cross awaited anybody who dared to slap a Jesus fish on the back of his car. If the Sodom-and-Gomorrah-esque anti-God dystopia Christians complain exists in American society really did exist, Tim Tebow would’ve been burned alive years ago rather than be allowed to become a guy who gets paid an obscene amount of money to be a shitty quarterback."

Read the Rest Here

Quote of the Day

"There's absolutely no pretense from any of these publications of giving a policy a sort of objective hearing. It's very clear that it comes from the same mindset as talk radio and Fox News. This is something that's by and for a particular kind of conservative. It’s a circle jerk, isn’t it?"

-- Daniel McCarthy, editor of The American Conservative, on the state of conservative media in the era of Breitbart, The Daily Caller, and Drudge

Michael Calderone over at the Huffington Post dissects the whole conservative entertainment complex and the problems it presents for the modern right pretty damn well in a piece he's just published. It's amusing to see quotes like the one above -- the kind of thing that goes on record with the fact that a major disservice is being done to conservatives by their own "news" organizations -- and then to watch idiot pretend-journalists like Matthew Boyle of Breitbart and pretend-thinkers like Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post defend the state of things on their end.

Think about the big "scoops" conservative media outlets have spit into the echo chamber lately: Chuck Hagel's disturbing connection to "Friends of Hamas," a story based on a joke, and Robert Menendez's affinity for Dominican hookers, a story that fell almost completely apart even as it was being shouted from the rooftops. And those are just the ones we've seen over the past month. Go back a bit and you truly see the pattern of inanity that's been allowed to develop.

I've said this on more than one occasion, mostly on the podcast, but I'm not actually one of those people who wants to see the Republican party and conservatives in general drown in a puddle of their own spit. Having at least two vital political parties is good for America and I didn't completely abandon the Republicans until after they lost their minds. The reason I find it almost impossible to side with anything the GOP or the conservative movement says or does these days is that they've willingly let themselves become dominated by the most stridently insane and anti-intellectual within their ranks. When the inmates completely overrun the asylum and no one even bothers to try to stop them, it's time to just cut your losses and bail before you become part of the madness.

A press that lives for actual news, regardless of whether it's left-leaning, right-leaning or straight down the middle -- one that isn't intent on using phony scandal to try to take down its political enemies -- naturally creates an atmosphere where common sense political compromise can flourish. That's because truth and a dedication to it fosters respect between the sides. That's good for the country. Period.

Quote of the Day

"I think it is a relevant point of conversation. If he is a skeet shooter, why have we not heard of this? Why have we not seen photos? Why has he not referenced it at any point in time as we have had this gun debate that is ongoing? You would have thought it would have been a point of reference."

-- Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, questioning whether President Obama was lying when he said that he occasionally goes skeet shooting at Camp David

My favorite part of the above quote is the first sentence: "I think it is a relevant point of conversation." You know what else the current crop of Republicans and conservatives have considered relevant points of conversations? Where Obama was born and whether his birth certificate is phony. Whether he faked his college transcripts. His use of teleprompters. Whether Obama's real father was a communist. If his family's Kenyan background trained him to hate America. Whether the president's speech to children was an attempt to secretly indoctrinate them with socialist propaganda. That Obama may have engineered a series of shooting sprees as a pretext to taking away Americans' guns. Whether the Obama administration faked the falling unemployment numbers in the lead-up to the 2012 election. Whether he ousted Gaddafi so that al Qaeda could take over in Libya. Whether he's at the top of a conspiracy of silence in Benghazi.

And that doesn't even include non-Obama-related conspiracy theories like the encroaching threat by Sharia law and the U.N. and, of course, the belief that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax.

And now this: A Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives is basically asking for proof that President Obama has gone skeet shooting.

Marsha Blackburn, you are sincerely a fucking idiot -- and your party is thoroughly devoid of even an ounce of intelligence or a single good idea. All you have is desperate nonsense.

Cesca wrote an entire piece on this today over at Banter. It's definitely worth reading.

Quote of the Day

"There's more in the message here with the presence of the camera, the obvious come hither posture and the aroused breasts and all the sexual components. The statue is sending a message to children."

-- Phillip Cosby, head of the American Family Association chapter covering Overland Park, Kansas, which is attempting to have that city's top officials indicted over their decision to allow an art exhibit by Chinese sculptors which features a statue of a nude woman to be displayed publicly

The statue in question is pictured at left. And yes, you read that right: The AFA wants to have city officials indicted on criminal charges, saying that by authorizing the exhibit, they're encouraging sexting among kids.

I've gone back and read the above quote several times now and I honestly chuckle a little out loud each time, particularly when I get to the words "aroused breasts." First of all, I get the feeling that this statue is pretty much the only place a guy like Phillip Cosby has seen aroused breasts in years, and second -- how utterly fucking terrified of sex are conservatives?

Tuesday Is Recycling Day

In honor of all the recent debate over the politics of The Dark Knight Rises.

"The Right Stuff" (Originally Published, 2.17.09)

Gotta thank Cesca for leading me to this little gem: the National Review Online's compilation of the supposed "25 Best Conservative Movies."

What exactly makes a movie "conservative" is apparently known only to the brain trust at NRO, which includes the decidedly un-brainy Rich Lowry -- editor of the National Review and the guy who essentially publicly admitted to masturbating during Sarah Palin's vice presidential debate performance (see column below). While the most interesting thing about the list in general is what it subtly says about the effort undertaken by the Review's conservative readers to avoid appearing stereotypically uncultured (obvious choices are avoided: Superman, Top Gun, Die Hard, Norris's The Octagon, the Rambo series, etc.), equally fascinating is what a few of the individual choices say about how conservatives view their role in relation to the U.S. power structure. Put simply, they still, even after the last eight years of oppressive abuses and astonishingly expansive spending by a Republican administration, see themselves as the rag-tag band of rebels fighting the evil empire of big government. How else to justify the appropriation of films like The Lives of Others, 300, or -- in the "also-rans" list and possibly most shocking -- my beloved Serenity.

While scanning the list, look for a couple of truly great "What the Fuck?" moments, like the fact that all three movies by hyper-WASP Whit Stillman are included, as well as The Dark Knight (still pitched as a paean to George W. Bush), United 93 (if you didn't see that one coming...) and, well, Team America (its inclusion proof that brilliant satire ultimately fools those it's targeting).

The National Review Online: The Best Conservative Movies/2.23.09 Issue

Now that I've perused NRO's choices a few times, I can't help but feel like there are quite a few movies that the magazine neglected to mention. Movies that I think should've made the list before, say, Ghostbusters.

How about:

Last Tango In Paris

Features a selfish white guy who delights in bending over complete strangers and screwing them in the ass.

Wall Street

A perfect movie right up until the last ten minutes.

Casablanca

A clever American outwits the Nazis and dumps his foreigner girlfriend.

The Transporter

A white guy in an expensive car lives by a strict code that includes doing what he's told while never asking questions and never bothering to look at what his job entails and whether it's hurting anyone.

Titanic

The uplifting story of an unstoppable white object that sinks a boat full of poor people while most of the rich manage to save themselves -- a fine allegory for either the U.S. government or Wall Street, depending on your perspective.

The Big Chill

Its main character is a dead hippie.

Signs

Mel Gibson defeats illegal aliens.

American Psycho

A Wall Street investment banker murders hookers, homeless people, and other undesirables.

Thelma and Louise

Ends with Susan Sarandon driving off a cliff.

Any more suggestions? Have at it.

Post-Mortem

Two more quick points to make about the killing of Osama bin Laden and the reaction we've seen to it -- and you might say that one comes from the left side of my brain and the other from the right.

Partisanship Over Patriotism

I've really come to the unfortunate conclusion -- and I'm not sure anyone would argue with this anymore -- that there's nothing that could bring the far ends of the political spectrum together in agreement, particularly those on the right. Watching and listening to the reaction of people like Rush Limbaugh (who barely let on just how sickeningly sarcastic he was being in his "congratulation" of President Obama) and Sarah Palin (who didn't mention Obama at all but thanked George W. Bush) to this event, you get the very distinct impression that it would literally take an alien invasion to get the supposedly hyper-patriotic right to discard its partisan pettiness and simply stand behind the leader of the United States as fellow Americans. It's depressing in ways I can't properly describe to believe that were 9/11 to have occurred, say, yesterday, as opposed to ten years ago, many on the right's blind, seething hatred of Barack Obama would countermand any urge to at least temporarily put our differences aside in the name of the greater good. If something really awful happened to this country again, I simply don't think we'd see the kind of unity we saw in the days, weeks and months following September 11th, 2001.

These people believe that, no matter what, they're right and Obama is wrong. That's the irony of all the hypocrisy and all the contradictory statements we've heard from conservatives over the past two years: They're not contradictory at all; there's always been one very steady underlying message, and that's that President Obama is wrong. No matter what -- he's wrong.

Plugging the Leaks

It's astonishing when you think how long U.S. intelligence managed to keep the possible location of Osama bin Laden and the raid that would eventually kill him a secret. Really -- astonishing. And what this does is blow a gaping hole in the argument by the servile sycophants of Wikileaks and Julian Assange that there should be no state secrets whatsoever. Imagine for a moment what would likely have happened were Assange to have somehow gotten word of either the location of Bin Laden's compound or the pending assault on it. Answer: the latter never would have happened and Bin Laden would probably still be on the run right now, just somewhere other than where he was shot dead. I've always been of the opinion that Wikileaks can do some unqualified good, but its very ethos -- its overriding raison d'etre -- involves the exposure of everything. Those who've vehemently defended the site and its founder's ongoing mission seem to also operate under the delusion that if all secrets are exposed, there will be no place to hide and therefore the world will be a safer place. (These same people also tend to believe that any entity that isn't telling you every single thing about it is, by nature of its secrecy, nefarious.) That's a wonderful little pipe dream, but while not everything left in the shadows is evil there are some secrets that can indeed be looked at as weapons: The person who has one puts everyone else at a disadvantage. Unless you can wipe out what everybody's hiding, you're always going to need to be hiding at least a few things yourself, for your own good.

The United States covers up a lot of really awful behavior, it's true. But not all of it is awful; some is absolutely necessary. The raid that killed Osama bin Laden just proved it.

Why So Seriously Stupid?

Just -- freaking speechless.

Media Matters: Conservative Media Assume Black Child Wearing Joker Makeup is "Obama Joker"/11.1.10

Fox and the Hounding

Here we go again.

There's a headline over at the Huffington Post right now that made me do a double take and immediately check to see if it was something that had been filed under the site's comedy banner; it just felt -- and feels -- too much like the kind of dead-on satire I'd expect from Andy Borowitz. Or maybe the staff of The Onion.

It reads: "Bob Scheiffer Defends Himself Against Fox News on New Black Panthers Story."

See what I mean?

I missed CNN's Reliable Sources over the weekend, mostly because I reached my yearly recommended dosage of Howie Kurtz somewhere back around mid-February, but apparently Scheiffer felt as if he needed to address accusations being hurled at him in the wake of a sit-down he did with Attorney General Eric Holder. At issue is the fact that at no point during that interview did he hammer Holder about a 2008 case in which a couple of members of the so-called New Black Panther Party, one carrying a nightstick, reportedly stood around a polling place in a predominantly black area of Philadelphia and eventually had to be escorted off the property by police. The DOJ went on to file a federal injunction against one of the two -- the guy with the stick -- but wound up dropping it because it determined that there wasn't enough to the case to make it worth pursuing.

And that's where things get sticky. And by sticky, I mean predictably dumb.

Conservative media, particularly Fox News, have finally picked up on the item and are trumpeting it as another example of President Obama's Machiavellian hand silently pulling strings behind the scenes to protect those groups who might have helped steer votes in his direction during the 2008 race for the White House. If this sounds familiar, that's because you've heard it before -- back when it was known as "The ACORN Scandal." If you can't immediately see what the members of the New Black Panther Party and the people who were generally helped out by ACORN have in common, you need to have your eyes checked.

For the record, the New Black Panther Party is a fringe group that's actually been denounced by the original Black Panthers. Its leader, the artist formerly known as Paris Lewis who now goes by the amusingly generic hyper-African moniker "Dr. Malik Zulu Shabazz," is the kind of clownish caricature Fox News loves to trot out at regular intervals. This is because he's guaranteed to say something mindlessly inflammatory that will scare the hell out of the network's demographic of lily-white, middle-American doofs, confirming all their worst fears about the encroaching negro threat. As former Washington Post columnist Dave Weigel beautifully put it, Shabazz is to Bill O'Reilly what the KKK or GG Allin was to Donahue: Somebody who makes for great TV and whom your core audience can feel comfortable disliking intensely.

If you haven't been watching Fox News lately -- and I can't in good conscience suggest that you do -- the Panthers "story" has been obsessively, breathlessly beaten into the ground by one network personality in particular: Megyn Kelly. She's taken it upon herself, bless her little heart, to be the avatar for every freaked-the-fuck-out white Christian soul convinced that he or she is losing this great country to minorities or illegal immigrants or whatever, and that it all started with the election of the Great Kenyan Socialist Usurper. She's like Elisabeth Hasselbeck with an actual associate's degree and a shit-ton more professional ambition. Kelly is Fox's rising star du jour, even going so far as to get an official canonization from none other than Sarah Palin via her overworked Twitter feed -- and the reason for this is that she knows exactly when to crinkle her face into that lemon-sucking look of smug skepticism, and just what buttons to press and what open-ended questions to ask of her viewers.

And so she's harped on the New Black Panthers meme with stalker-like intensity -- and with the full understanding that it's good for the network and therefore good for her career. Which is what caused her to "call out" Bob Scheiffer for supposedly shirking his journalistic duty by not asking the tough questions about the New Black Panthers bombshell when he had the chance.

Pay attention to enough partisan media these days -- particularly on the conservative side, only because it has the largest megaphone in Fox News and the most impressive bullpen of bullies -- and the patterns among the chaos really begin to stand out. As with ACORN, which was always a mostly bullshit story, the right created a controversy out of thin air, amplified and advanced that contrived controversy, and now is engaging in indignant political theater by pretending to give a damn that no one outside the echo chamber cares about the controversy it's made deafening inside the echo chamber. The problem, of course, is that thanks to its typical spinelessness in the face of any accusation of a liberal bias, the rest of the press is more than happy to let itself be suckered into the right's vortex of largely fact-free crazy. The mainstream media allow themselves to be talked into seeing the same ghosts that Fox News is trying to scare the hell out of its audience with.

That's what makes it so painful to watch Bob Scheiffer (a titan of the network news business whose reputation is just about bulletproof) feel like he has to answer to allegations made by Megyn Kelly (a yapping chihuahua who wouldn't know journalism if it came in a bottle of peroxide).

The New Black Panthers Party "story" isn't a story at all -- certainly not as Fox News is selling it. It's a Southern Strategy dog whistle designed to rile up more fear in an already angry and frightened white America. It's one racist tool with a nightstick being used to confirm the inflexibly entrenched suspicions of a good number of other racist tools.

But as long as credible guys like Bob Scheiffer allow Fox News and Megyn Kelly to set the narrative -- to browbeat them into submission, into having to defend their own news judgment -- this kind of thing is going to happen again and again. Kelly isn't pushing the Panthers meme because she believes it's an important story; she's doing it because she knows it's exactly what her viewers want to hear, believe anyway, and will never be convinced otherwise of.

Which means that any attempt by the media to indulge it will not only play directly into Fox and Kelly's hand, furthering each's goal, it won't win them one convert from the audience it's unnecessarily attempting to defer to.

They Eat Their Own

For some reason I didn't really bother getting into this, but right after the health care bill vote last Sunday, former Bush speech writer David Frum wrote a shockingly honest piece on how America's conservatives had just gotten their asses handed to them -- and how they had no one to blame but themselves.

If you haven't read it, I really suggest you take a look.

Well, suffice it to say that Frum's right-wing overseers and peers are responding to his self-criticism and examination with all the restraint, dignity and introspection you'd expect.

Mediaite: David Frum Says He Was Fired for Writing His "Waterloo" Column/3.26.10

Welcome To the Real World

As much as I occasionally disagree with Eric Boehlert's inexplicable willingness to engage in petty bickering on Twitter, there are plenty of times that I can't dispute the arguments he's making. Like right now.

He posted a piece over at Media Matters this morning that tries to deconstruct the right-wing "nervous breakdown" we've witnessed in the lead-up to the health care reform vote, and what might still be to come. Hidden within this lengthy column is a really good little point about how the conservative media feedback loop contributed to the absolute shock the right seems to be experiencing at the moment in the wake of its crushing defeat. I've mentioned before that we now live in a country in which each side of the political aisle can go about its business -- day after day after day -- never hearing an opinion that's contrary to the one it's already biased toward. Both the left and the right have their own respective sets of media bullhorns shouting their own respective sets of "facts," which means that the extreme on either side can often be blinded to the reality of what's happening outside the little fantasy realm it's constructed.

That said, I'm not going to play a game of false-equivalence; the right tends to stay on message infinitely better than the left, and that can often mean that the right is more susceptible to being deafened by its own echo chamber. Why are Fox News's ratings through the roof? Not because there are millions and millions of people out there who make Fox a part of their recommended daily allowance of assorted news and information, but because among those who consider themselves die-hard conservatives, Fox is the only news source. Fox is the McDonald's French Fries of news organizations: Nothing else tastes quite like it and, as such, it's its own separate and specific brand. If you love McDonald's fries, there's only one place to get them. From the beginning, FNC adopted a brilliant business model in which it would cater to the belief system of one select audience -- an audience that had always felt disenfranchised and which very much wanted to see its belief system catered to -- and it's reaped the rewards of that decision ever since.

The problem, of course, is that when you watch and listen to one view of the world -- with blinders on to anything that might contradict that strict position -- and you do it pretty much 24/7, you lose not only perspective but a handle on reality. For months now, all Fox viewers have seen -- and heard parroted by Rush Limbaugh, and read at Breitbart, Drudge or RedState -- is that health care reform was doomed to fail. That was never offered as a mere opinion, mind you. Fox News's audience had it presented to them as fact: The health care reform bill is socialism, therefore millions and millions of people are taking to the streets to stand against it, therefore it's destined to fail and fail miserably because this is America and in America the good guys always win -- and we're the good guys. Oh, and you can trust us because we speak for the entire country. Listen to this message every minute of every day, with no dissenting opinion or opposing facts, and what would you think if you were suddenly told that health care reform had actually passed? You'd think exactly what the right is thinking now -- that somehow the evil opposition must've stolen the vote or otherwise engaged in underhanded malfeasance on a grand scale and in defiance of the will of the American people. And you'd be very, very pissed.

These people see deception and corruption and treason because that's the only possible explanation for why they were wrong all this time. It's not because Fox and Rush told them only what they wanted to hear and what they'd hoped was true, and it certainly wasn't because there was an entirely alternate reality out there in which a majority of Americans didn't agree with their way of thinking -- a reality they never sought out because taking the blue pill and hooking into a world in which their personal biases were constantly stroked was much more comfortable. No, it's nothing like that; it's that Barack Obama -- a Muslim foreign national who palled around with terrorists and stole the White House through the dirty work of ACORN -- along with the Democratic Congress committed high crimes and misdemeanors by forcing an unpopular bill on the country, Third World dictatorship-style.

But just because you choose not to see the outside world doesn't mean it isn't there.

When you consistently only hear one side of the story, that wake up call's a brutal one. Conservative Americans just got it, and they're furious about it -- and from the way it looks, they're going to turn over and go right back to sleep.

Erick the Red

"I've joined the network. Starting next Monday, you'll be seeing a lot of me. I'm very excited by the opportunity. Thanks for the prayers and well wishes. This is the path God put me on and it was totally unexpected, but I go where the good Lord leads."

-- Redstate.com editor Erick Erickson, announcing to his readers that he's accepted a job as a paid regular contributor to CNN's new 7pm show John King, USA

CNN Political Director Sam Feist calls Erickson "a terrific new addition to the BPToTV" (that stands for "Best Political Team on Television," for those of you with lives); he goes on to refer to him as a guy who's "in touch with the very people" CNN wants to reach -- proving that CNN is still misguidedly assuming it can somehow put so much as a dent in Fox's coveted NASCAR demographic.

If you know anything at all about Erick Erickson's reputation, you know that word of his new paying gig at CNN immediately caused the left-wing blogosphere to lose its collective shit. Media Matters responded by quickly compiling what it sees as a damning list of ostensibly crude and hateful comments made by Erickson against favorite conservative targets on the left, like feminists (who he says need to "get in the kitchen and learn to cook"), liberal supreme court justices (he called the retiring David Souter a "goat fucking child molester") and, of course, Barack Obama (whose supporters he calls "brownshirts, goons and thugs"). Meanwhile, left-leaning Twitter uses have spent the past 18 hours inundating CNN political reporters' and managers' accounts with bloodthirsty outrage and a barrage of questions as to why CNN would allow itself to be so blatantly taken for a ride by the right, the implication seeming to be that somehow CNN wasn't fully aware of just who Erickson was when it hired him -- that the network hadn't properly vetted him.

Except that it was, and it did.

Make no mistake, CNN knows exactly what it's getting with Erickson -- and it wants just that. Sam Feist's a spectacular asshole, and his fingerprints are all over this hire; as much as I'd love to wind up eating my words, I can't imagine a scenario in which a blogger uprising from the left would make Feist and CNN reconsider putting Erickson on the air. In fact, they're probably enjoying the immediate rush of attention that they'd counted on all along. You don't give a forum to a guy who worships at the swollen feet of Rush Limbaugh and not expect him to draw controversy; on the contrary, it's why you hire him in the first place. What'll be interesting to see, though, is how strong CNN's backbone is should Erickson, in fact, get off his leash and begin spouting even mildly inflammatory rhetoric on national television. Yes, CNN knows what it's getting itself into, but the surprising flame-out of Lou Dobbs -- the credit for which can indeed be laid partially on bloggers who felt that he should be held accountable for his incendiary rhetoric -- proves that the situation is always fluid. Still, it's really Erickson's gig to lose; if he pulls a Michael Savage -- which is highly unlikely since even Erickson isn't that much of a spiteful prick -- he could find himself kicked back to the media underbelly before he's even on a first name basis with the driver of his free CNN Town Car.

The issue that I have with the Erickson hire isn't so much that it somehow validates his often ass-backward opinions or the way in which he voices them; it's that by putting someone so flagrantly partisan on the air under the auspices of CNN's generally respectable and trustworthy political department, the network will now have to balance out his analysis with a point of view that's equally extreme in the opposite direction. What this will lead to is simply more of what Jon Stewart once justly decried as "partisan hackery" from CNN's political analysts. But once again, make no mistake, the kind of ridiculous, entirely predictable conflict that's sure to arise from Erick Erickson and whatever liberal counterpart they put against him is just what CNN wants to see on television.

Feist and Company think it'll make for great TV -- and it probably will. But it'll make for really mind-numbing political discourse.

Texts from Last Century

A Selection of Chapter Titles from Texas's Newly Revamped, Conservative-Friendly High School Textbooks:

From Adam to Earl: The Real Story of the "Evolution" of Man (from the geography-science book 6,000 Years of World History)

The War of Northern Aggression: How the Arrogance of Invading Liberal Elitists Ruined Free Room and Board for Millions of Negroes

FDR and the Rise of Socialism in America

Great Presidents of the United States: From Reagan to Reagan

Joseph McCarthy: American Hero or Misunderstood Genius?

Remember the Alamo (edited by guest contributor Lou Dobbs)

Wall Street of Dreams: From Ben Stein to Lloyd Blankfein, Them Jews Sure are Good with Money

Why We Rule (from the history book America, Fuck Yeah!)

Fossil Fools: Debunking the Jurassic Myth (or "How To Train Your Dinosaur")

Vietnam: The Forgotten Victory

9/11: God's Wrath Against Secular-Humanist America or Just a Bunch of Murderous Muslims?

Philistines, Palestinians and the Inevitable Rapture: Why the U.S. Must Support Israel

Stonewall: The Tragic Legacy of the Sodomite Uprising of 1969

2 + 2 = Jesus!

"Don't do it." (single page of the book Sex Education: Everything You Need To Know)

Barack Hussein Obama and the End of America

What's Next?: Sarah Palin and Beyond

Quote of the Day

"We are adding balance. History has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left."

-- Don McLeroy, leader of the ultra-conservative faction on the Texas Board of Education, which last Friday approved a social studies curriculum for the nation's textbooks that's significantly skewed toward right-wing Christian principles

Wonder if this idiot realizes he's essentially agreeing with Stephen Colbert that reality has a well-known liberal bias.

Right on cue, here's Maddow with the excellent takedown:

The Latest Show on Earth

It must be exhausting being on the right these days. The near-constant unfocused rage, the endless paranoia, having every little fear that lurks as a mere shadow in your mind amplified by guys like Glenn Beck until it becomes positively paralyzing; it's gotta be a tough life.

I hate to keep harping on this, but if you once again need a reason why it's so difficult for me to align myself with the modern right in this country even for a few minutes, even when I happen to agree with some of the basic tenets of conservatism, look no further than the torrent of crazy-and-dumb that gushed out of last week's Conservative Political Action Conference in DC. So much of the damn thing served as a really tragic reminder of just how thoroughly the inmates have taken control of the asylum of Republican politics. Within the span of just a couple of days, you had Tim Pawlenty obligatorily invoking the Almighty and hitting the usual high note with the red meat crowd by suggesting that it hit the boogeyman of big government with a golf club, this coming the day after a guy crashed a plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas; Andrew Breitbart frothing at the mouth in one pissed-off tirade after another aimed at any ostensibly adversarial reporter who got within ten feet of him; and of course the aforementioned Beck, the belle of the ball, dragging out his chalkboard and going into full faux-Beale mode to the delight of the audience, who must've put it along the lines of finally seeing the Stones perform their greatest hits live.

Here's the thing, though: I'm not even inclined to give those guys a giant ration of crap anymore for their contrived Angry Everyman routines. That's because each of them has something to gain by being a professional shit-stirrer: Pawlenty wants to be president and knows he needs whack-job base-appeal to make it happen; Breitbart's readership is largely comprised of white college kids who love it when he snarls like a rabid pit bull at their perceived liberal wuss enemies; and Glenn Beck has made himself millions doing the best piece of living performance art since Andy Kaufman. It makes sense for them to give the audience what it wants because they get something in return. The problem, of course, is the audience. It's the fucking dimwits being used as stage props in this perpetual side show -- the ones who don't simply adopt the shallow opportunism of carnival barkers like Beck or even Sarah Palin as gospel, but who then act on those beliefs. The people who give standing ovations to Dick Cheney or hand conspiracy theorist Ron Paul a victory in the CPAC straw poll.

This isn't to imply that conservatives are dumb-asses by nature, since that's not the case at all, only that the movement is content to be based on stupidity and irresponsibility rather than cogent reality. And for those who would claim that the left indulges in the same kind of exploitation of its fringe, there's just no comparison, not these days; the truth is that most Democratic politicians run like scared little girls from the label of "liberal." Part of the reason the left is as divided as it is right now is that those who claim to carry the mantle of truly left-wing politics feel completely disenfranchised despite having had a supposedly friendly face in government for the past year. A byproduct of the right's admittedly impressive knack for sticking together and staying on message is that its fringe always has a voice; the left can't say the same.

There were of course a few real highlights at CPAC: unapologetic egghead George Will's speech was excellent, as was the round audience trouncing that homophobic fuckstick Ryan Sorba took when he went off on a rant against gays -- although a joke can easily be made that getting thrown offstage at CPAC for being anti-gay is like being Steven Adler, kicked out of Guns N' Roses for doing too many drugs.

Once again, though, the issue is the effect that some of the most virulent government-bashing and pissed-off-white-guy bloviating is having on a group of True Believers already suffering in a desolate economy and looking for someone to blame -- and the fact that the right continues to embrace the craziness of the fringe it's creating rather than denouncing it, because somewhere along the line the self-serving end of votes and money became a hell of a lot more important than what's good for the country. And who's being put at risk.

Read on:

Mother Jones: Oath Keepers and the Age of Treason/April 2010

Related:

DXM: Protecting America from Whatever/10.21.09

Partisan Crashers

If you've read this site long enough, you probably know that it hasn't always been this way.

I used to put a very high value on my ability to evaluate each issue on its own merits. Although I often tend to be center-left in my politics -- rarely if ever going the extreme liberal route -- I spent many years frequently siding with the right on a whole host of topics. I'm all for being strong on defense; I could care less about the political correctness that was a ridiculous liberal cause celebre for quite some time; I don't believe capitalism to be inherently evil; I want to see the poor and helpless in this country treated with dignity and everyone afforded good health care, but I think it requires a more efficient and vigilant government -- not a big one willing to just throw money around; I think that paying extra attention to certain ethnicities at airports is a natural concession to reality in this day and age and amounts to basic police work; I hate hippies; I can occasionally be as jingoistic as your average Toby Keith fan and freely admit that right after 9/11, I too had the knee-jerk reaction that wanted to see us annihilate a random city in the Middle East, just as an object lesson; I pretty much laughed out loud when those Navy snipers took out the Somali pirates who held an American captain hostage back in April.

Yes, sometimes I'm the first one to get all "America, fuck yeah."

For months and months on this site, I skewered Democrats in much the same way I skewered Republicans, believing that working backward in any argument to make the "facts" fit a predetermined point-of-view -- no matter that point-of-view -- was the most intellectually dishonest thing imaginable. I still think that I'm capable of sticking to that ideal, because if I don't, then my already somewhat inconsequential opinions are rendered utterly worthless since they're the product of nothing more than partisan prejudices.

But lately it's no secret that I have actually been more outraged by the actions of the right as a whole than those of the left. And I think the reason for that can be summed up in one simple question that may seem trite but which kind of needs to be asked: When did the primary voices of the American right become so shockingly dumb -- so shamelessly willing to jettison every last vestige of rational thought? True, during the Bush years stupid seemed to reign -- but the reality was always that those at the top were very smart people using very gullible people as stage props to further their agenda. I also get that this still happens regularly -- on both ends of the political spectrum.

But something has changed recently; maybe it started with the introduction of Sarah Palin to an already toxic mixture of paranoia and ignorance coming to a boil within certain segments of the population. Either way, over the last year it seems as if all logic and reason within the Republican party and its champions on talk radio and Fox News has gone completely out the window. It's like these people have lost their fucking minds. I'm not simply talking about their tendency to embrace and perpetuate half-baked conspiracy theories of the most mind-bogglingly outlandish variety; I mean their lack of shame at making arguments that not only don't hold up within the context of an extended timeline -- the kind of bewildering shit that can easily be proven hypocritical by comparing it to their comments of just one year ago -- but make no sense at face value.

Last night on Fox News, Sean "I Can Put You Into a Car Regardless of Your Credit History" Hannity made a comment and an implication so inflammatory and absurd that it's shocking his brain didn't rip the top of his head open to get some air. He pondered, "What does (it) say about Barack Obama and our government," that apparently the U.S. military knew that Major Nidal Nasan had contacted al Qaeda and was a growing threat yet did nothing to stop him? In other words, Hannity tried to link the fact that the military may have dropped the ball in devastating fashion on the Fort Hood shooting to the fact that Barack Obama is in the White House.

Do I need to remind you -- since reminding an obviously thick-headed ideologue like Hannity wouldn't do a damn bit of good -- that in the months leading up to 9/11, there were intelligence failures left and right within the CIA, the FBI and the Bush administration, including one in which Bush himself seemed to flat-out ignore the warnings of an intelligence report that all but spelled out the coming attack? I'm not saying that governmental agencies shouldn't be held responsible for their failures when a national tragedy happens that could have been prevented by them; I'm saying that you can't keep a straight face and castigate one president of the United States for an avoidable catastrophe that happened on his watch after singing the praises of another who was much closer to the fuck-ups that led to the avoidable catastrophe that happened on his. Well, you can't keep a straight face unless you're either a modern right-wing pundit or the lead character from Memento.

This is just another example of the kind of bald-faced, completely-detached-from-reality hypocrisy that the people who've hijacked the Republican party have trafficked in now for months into years -- the same people who spent almost eight years ranting and raving about how criticizing the president during a time of war amounted to treason, but who now conveniently add the caveat "Unless that President is Barack Obama -- That's Alright."

Crackpot conspiracy theories, circular reasoning, selective memory, insane arguments that go nowhere, the complete abandonment of logic and reason, the canonization of the craziest and most farcical among its lunatic fringe -- this is why it's become impossible to defend the GOP these days. It's gotten so bad that even taking an occasional stand for the ideals of conservatism, some of which I happen to agree with, makes me feel like I need a shower -- because those who are supposed to be advancing these ideals have instead allowed their party to meltdown from the inside out.

It's almost impossible to imagine that conservatism was once the domain of unapologetic intellectuals like William F. Buckley.

Now look at it -- it's the soapbox from which Michele Bachmann shouts gibberish.

Who with a brain wants to in any way be associated with that?