Quote of the Day

"That is an obscene lie... You are misleading the American people because you want to make a political point. We have never in the history of this republic mounted a raid on the circumstance described here ever."

Geraldo Rivera, smacking down Fox News über-douche Eric Bolling, who was continuing to push the conservative talking point that what happened in Benghazi was a failure of leadership, that there's a cover-up at work, and that U.S. forces should've attacked the crowd of protesters that attacked our embassy

Between Geraldo and Chris Christie bucking the Fox News tide of histrionic idiocy, I'd normally say that it feels like Opposite Day or something. But the reality is that while he can certainly be a pompous tool, Geraldo generally tries to be as intellectually honest as possible, and I've always given him credit for that.

As for Benghazi, I got into a big debate with someone about it on Facebook yesterday -- one of the very rare occasions that I choose to argue politics on anyone's page besides my own. Here's the deal: As tragic as it is, and it is absolutely tragic, it's a relatively by-the-numbers incident. Over the past few decades, our embassies in Arab and North African countries have faced deadly attacks countless times, irrespective of who happens to be in the White House. We choose to undertake diplomacy in very dangerous places and -- while I certainly don't mean to diminish what happened in Libya -- violence against our very brave and dedicated men and women stationed in those areas is simply the cost of doing business. Should every single possible question be asked about what happened in Benghazi in an effort to determine whether it could've been prevented and to help ensure it doesn't happen again? Of course. Is there some nefarious plot to cover up institutional incompetence afoot at the highest levels of government. Not a fucking chance.

I wouldn't have blamed George W. Bush or any Republican president had it happened on his watch, untethered to any specific administrational act overseas, simply because when you're in an Arab country there's almost no way to prevent the kind of anger and violence we saw in Benghazi. Pretending that Obama could, or that he reacted the wrong way to it -- which neither he nor Panetta, nor the military officers in that region did -- is ludicrous. No one left anybody to die. Also, do I even need to add that should the roles have been reversed and we'd had a Republican in the White House, the same people who immediately began beating up on Obama -- while our embassy was still on fire, no less -- would be calling any public critic of the president during a crisis like that a traitor who's guilty of giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

Gerlado, by the way, went on to say that he talked to Charles Woods, whose son was killed in the attack, and that it bothered him to hear Woods's accusations against the Obama administration because they're based on little more than conspiracy theory perpetuated by outlets like Fox News, who are looking for something, anything to hang around the neck of Obama during an election year.

"He is being led down a primrose path of misinformation that is making it look as if President Obama went gambling in Las Vegas when he could've been saving people in Benghazi and that's a lie." Rivera said.

Related: The Daily Banter: The Right's Made-Up Benghazi Cover-Up/11.1.12

Adding: Cesca remains convinced that if Obama wins next week, the Republicans will almost immediately begin looking to impeach him over Benghazi. And he's apparently not the only one who thinks this.

Adding More: Suck it, Bolling. You bullying little turd.

The Age of Outrage (Complete)

The Full Text of Yesterday's Piece at the Daily Banter

All it took was one retweet for the wrath of God to rain down on me.

Last Friday morning I did what a lot of hacky self-proclaimed online pundits were doing in the wake of Geraldo Rivera’s galactically stupid claim that the choice to wear a hoodie is what got Trayvon Martin killed: I penned a quickie column on it for my blog. Like a lot of other ostensible progressives, however, I apparently had the bad form to not heap what I would soon learn was the universally agreed upon level of scornful indignation in Geraldo’s direction. On the contrary, while I said that Geraldo’s idiotic no-hoodie plea to American parents of brown kids was just that, idiotic, I argued that he did manage to touch on a larger issue that deserved at least some consideration. That issue is the role that someone’s wardrobe or style choices play in how that person is perceived by a large portion of the public. My point was that while I’m pretty sure Geraldo was wrong about Trayvon Martin’s hoodie having anything to do with George Zimmerman’s decision to confront and ultimately kill him, it’s common sense to note that what a person chooses to wear or adorn him or herself with influences how he or she is viewed. It may be unfair that people create preconceptions based on personal style, but that doesn’t matter one bit because that’s the way it is — and what this means is that while someone is free to wear whatever the hell he or she wants, that person has to understand that there may be unintended consequences to choosing to dress or look a certain way.

Now obviously I wasn’t saying that a kid in a hoodie deserves to be shot at for looking a little like the people Geraldo sees in stick-up surveillance videos all the time. Nor was I saying that a woman in a short skirt and high heels at a bar is asking to be sexually assaulted. I was simply arguing that while in a perfect world no one would jump to conclusions based on the way we choose to present ourselves — the key word is choice, as I’m not talking about physical characteristics that one is born with and which can’t be changed and therefore shouldn’t be judged at all on -- we don’t live in a perfect world. Shouting about how a black or brown guy in a hoodie, low-slung pants and a ball cap should be able to walk the streets and not worry that people will look at him like he’s a thug and a threat is a ridiculous conceit because if you argue almost anything from the point of what should be, the whole argument becomes moot. I should be able to fly -- but that’s not going to provide much consolation when I hit the sidewalk at 200 miles-an-hour. Until someone comes along and changes the reality of the situation and allows me to soar over the city, I’m gonna fall. Until someone changes perception — and I’m all for that — that perception will likely remain, and it borders on irresponsible not to be cognizant of it. Wanna buck convention? Have at it. Just understand that convention exists.

So, yeah, I dared to enter the Hysterical Indignation Vortex in the wake of the tragic and very likely criminal shooting of Trayvon Martin without expressing enough indignation to make the liberal masses happy. I know this because about ten seconds after my piece got tweeted out — admittedly by me, so I know that I get what I deserve — it was retweeted again and again and suddenly every friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend or nobody-in-particular with a Twitter account and a somewhat justifiable sense of outrage at the death of Trayvon was pounding on my digital door, ready to publicly flog me for my impertinence while basically misunderstanding every goddamned thing I’d said. Some of those raking me over the coals, in fact, admitted that they found my entire premise so “repellant” that they didn’t even bother to read the piece all the way through -- not surprising given both our 140-character attention spans and blinded-by-passion discourse these days, but still a lousy way to come out on top in a debate.

And it was all of this that got me thinking about Bill Maher. Namely, that he’s right.

Last week, Maher penned an op-ed in the New York Times taking aim at how we as a culture have elevated controversy -- the creation of it, often by the media, and instantaneous public response to it -- to almost slapstick-comical levels. It feels like we now live to be pissed off and offended -- at something, at everything, at anything —- and to voice that outrage in whichever direction the perceived slight is coming from until the cause of our collective torment is beaten into submission. We don’t just disagree anymore — we want to make the thing we disagree with go away. The fury comes from both sides of the political aisle and from every stripe within our society. Maher’s assertion is that we need to learn how to get the hell over things and get on with our lives -- to not immediately demand an apology every time we feel that someone has publicly offended us and to not be so quick to be offended in the first place. To those accused of saying or doing something that draws a coordinated public tantrum, his advice is simple: stop apologizing.

It pretty much goes without saying that, in a wonderfully ironic meta twist befitting the current fucked-up state of our culture, Maher’s column was debated at length in the media and throughout the social networking universe in the days after it was published. In other words, it drew controversy.

In the end, though, Maher’s right. Yes, there are a few notable exceptions to the Law of Unintended Controversy. There are times when someone can violate the standards of so many people so egregiously that a proportional public backlash is understandable. The problem is that it’s threatening to get to the point where it’s impossible to discern what is and isn’t a truly heinous and unacceptable affront because the machinery of indignation seems to wind up to the same deafening level for every perceived insult. As Jon Stewart once said brilliantly, “If we amplify everything, we hear nothing.” If we react -- or some large swath of us reacts -- with the same fervor each time we feel like we’ve been offended, the truly offensive crap gets lost in the echo chamber.

And who decides what’s truly offensive, anyway? I get that the democratization of the media means, in theory, that only the people who are pissed off at a given slight will react and make their voices heard, but have you listened to what it’s like out there lately? After a while it all gets Cuisinarted into one dull roar -- and it’s exhausting.

I’m certainly not whining about the fact that a lot of those who seem to be perpetually aggrieved unleashed their fury on me on Twitter. I put myself out there so I’m, ironically, given the nature of the subject I was writing about, asking for it. I’m also certainly not decrying social media like some antediluvian royal dismissing change from on-high. Far from it.

The point is simply that, as Bill Maher writes, if we constantly attempt to crucify those who offend our sensibilities, what we’ll inevitably be left with is a truly PC-beholden culture where no one ever says or does anything interesting. Where no one pushes boundaries. Where no one challenges us. In other words, a place where none of us, I would hope, wants to live.

We have to be able to debate and discuss without trying to decimate those who oppose us -- or those who we immediately assume oppose us.

Quote of the Day

"But I am urging the parents of black and Latino youngsters particularly to not let their children go out wearing hoodies. I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was."

-- Geraldo Rivera on Fox News

I don't need to tell you that this is, in classic Geraldo fashion, a shockingly dumb thing to say. It's cut-rate reductionism expressed in the most clumsy and artless way possible, and the Huffington Post, also as it's wont to do, is already tearing Geraldo apart for it through various headlines that feign outrage in the name of page hits.

But here's the thing: While putting the blame for the death of Trayvon Martin as much on his hoodie as on the bullet fired by George Zimmerman may be ridiculous at face value, the larger point that Geraldo is making is more sound than you might think. He's just making that point very, very badly.

It goes something like this: Like it or not, a book actually is judged by its cover. There's a calculated reason that the cover of a book looks the way it does -- it's designed to immediately impart a very specific sense of recognition in the potential reader and to be a fair advertisement for the book's contents. There are certain things about your personal "cover" that can't be changed: Your race, your age, your facial features (in theory anyway). Your physical characteristics generally are what they are and therefore it's thoroughly unfair and flat-out wrong for someone to judge you based solely on them.

But the way you choose to dress or otherwise adorn yourself is exactly that -- a choice. Your choice. And while in a perfect world no one would draw immediate conclusions about you based on your personal style, news flash: We don't live in a perfect world, and ignoring or defiantly thumbing your nose at the fact that there may be certain unintended consequences to the image you choose to project is both irresponsible and thick-headed.

Is it unfair that a lot of very dumb people immediately look at a kid in a hoodie, a ball cap and low-slung pants and think "thug?" Yes.

Is it unfair that a douchebag in a bar looks at a girl in a tiny skirt, a midriff-bearing top, minus a bra, with a pierced belly-button and a tramp stamp and thinks "she wants sex?" Yes.

But again -- life isn't fair.

I have tattoos. About 20 of them, at last count. At no point while I was inking the hell out of my body did I accept anything less than full responsibility for the image that I knew I might be projecting to the world. I understood what I was signing on for when I got the things and accepted the potential consequences.

Now before anyone shouts that I'm blaming the victims*, let me go ahead and shoot the hostage: I am -- to an extent. No, unlike Geraldo I don't think that wearing a hoodie is what got Trayvon Martin killed -- not by any stretch of the imagination. A lot of people wear hoodies besides the ones who, as Geraldo puts it, are seen on surveillance tapes sticking up 7-11s. But again, his larger point about "stylizing yourself as a gangster" and how it might very well lead people to "perceive you as a menace" makes a lot of sense. As he says, the "cover" that we present to the public is in fact what people will judge you on, at least at first.

And that first impression that George Zimmerman had of Trayvon Martin -- whether caused by the color of the kid's skin or some other factor -- wound up being his last. Because the conclusion that Zimmerman wrongly jumped to got Trayvon killed.

Adding: Alexandra Petri of the Washington Post feels quite a bit differently about this subject but articulates her points really well (and makes a pretty amusing argument for the idea that, by his logic, everyone Geraldo meets should automatically assume he's an aging 70s porn star). It's very much worth taking a look at what she has to say.

*Just wanted to say that I added an "s" to the end of "victim" because people are already assuming that when I said victim, I specifically meant that I was blaming Trayvon Martin. I wasn't and I'm not. I'm talking about in general -- that each of us bears some responsibility for how we choose to present ourselves to the general public.