Tuesday is Recycling Day

"An Equal and Opposite Reaction" (Originally Published, 8.15.08 and Related to the Above Column)

Maybe I've been wrong all this time.

While a lot of the usual suspects on the left seemed to embrace victimhood at the hands of the Coulters, Limbaughs and Savages of the world, I always kind of dismissed the bellicose mouthpieces of the far-right as little more than Vaudevillian boobs. I looked at them as the media's equivalent of carnival barkers -- cut-rate provocateurs spouting amplified, affectedly shocking nonsense aimed at whipping their audience into a feeding frenzy while enticing new recruits into the tent by playing on their fears of liberal-agenda infestation. Sure, they were obnoxious as hell and probably deserved most of the blame for the complete erosion of civilized political discourse in this country, but in the end they were basically harmless; they'd simply stumbled upon a template for a brand of shtick sure to make them rich and it happened to involve, ironically, exploiting the lily-livered gullibility of Red State America better than anything their sworn enemies could've come up with. The best way to deal with their crap? Ignore it -- because anything else just emboldens the bullies and makes them not only increase the antagonism but laugh in your face for either not being able to "take a joke" or for failing to recognize just how powerless you are against them. Besides, I had always assumed that although plenty of people found these pompous loudmouths entertaining and bought wholly into the sentiment behind the saber-rattling, no one took them that seriously -- did they?

Somewhere along the line, I guess I forgot just who we were talking about here -- just what kind of people would listen intently to someone like Rush Limbaugh day after day and what they might be capable of. This is admittedly a huge oversight on the part of someone who considers himself an avowed misanthrope; I'll try not to make the same mistake again.

The question, though, is this: Would some on the American far-right -- who've had it psychically drilled into them that liberals are to blame for all their ills -- be capable of murder?

What started as a mere whisper has turned into an unrelenting drone throughout the blogosphere after the shooting death of Bill Gwatney, the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party. Gwatney was gunned down in his office at the Arkansas Democrats' HQ in Little Rock Wednesday by a man who had just been fired from his job at Target. Police say that after shooting Gwatney, 50-year-old Tim Dale Johnson led them on a high-speed chase for 30 miles; it ended with cops shooting and killing him. Although investigators are still trying to officially connect Bill Gwatney to the man who walked into a busy office and seemed to kill him in cold blood for no apparent reason, some are suggesting that the reason, in fact, is as obvious as it is disturbing -- that Johnson, a troubled loner, blamed liberal-leaning governmental politics for the loss of his job and exacted his revenge on the biggest target among Arkansas Democrats. They point to an arsenal of weapons found in Johnson's home after the shooting -- inarguably standard issue for right-wing psychopaths -- and, more disconcertingly, the fact that Wednesday's attack comes so soon after a deadly shooting inside a Tennessee church in which a gunman claimed to be out to kill the liberals who were supposedly controlling the country and preventing him from getting a job.

Is it irresponsible to question whether the two crimes are related? No. It's sort of a no-brainer to make the connection, as the shootings do seem similar and, like the police, most intellectually curious members of the public don't like coincidences. But are the crimes related? That remains to be seen; for now, absolutely not.

Which isn't stopping a vocal segment of the left from already jumping to the conclusion that these attacks on individuals whose politics take a liberal slant represent the inevitable next phase of a conservative "eliminationist" fantasy.

It's an agenda which has, admittedly, been proclaimed and perpetuated -- whether in jest or not -- by people like Limbaugh, Coulter and Savage for some time. These three and others like them have honed their talk of zero-tolerance for the people across the aisle to a knife's edge. For years, they've blanketed the airwaves, bookshelves and internet with ultra-nationalist agitprop which asserts that those who don't think like them are not simply to be argued with and voted down, they must be utterly crushed underfoot by any means necessary -- even if it involves, as Coulter once said, taking a baseball bat to them -- because they are nothing less than the enemy of the United States of America. In the words, if not actually the minds, of these seemingly fascist demagogues, liberals are as dangerous and absolute a threat to our way of life as the terrorists they supposedly coddle.

And there's no doubt that whatever their actual intentions may be -- no matter how much of it is just theater -- people are listening to the rhetoric and absorbing it. But are a few of those people now acting on it, and do the ones allegedly inciting the indignation through their bluster and bombast bear any responsibility for what it may be metastasizing into?

For almost a century, the litmus test for the lengths to which so-called free speech can legally be taken has come from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who famously ruled that "falsely shouting fire in a theater" was beyond protection; it's almost always been illegal to use a public forum to incite panic, violence or imminent lawless action. By that standard, there's just no way that any pundit at any time has crossed the line and broken the law. But legal doesn't always mean ethical, particularly not when you're refusing to take into consideration the fact that a substantial portion of your audience is made up of edgy, easily malleable "oppressed" white guys -- many of whom are now unemployed and looking for someone to blame for it. Although it's never a good idea to allow the potential misbehavior of the lowest common denominator to curb the right to free speech, it's equally inadvisable, not to mention irresponsible, to act as though you're operating in a vacuum -- as if what you say can't possibly have a negative impact, despite its incendiary nature. This was what made it such a pathetically insincere cop-out years ago when some lunatic from the Army of God would gun down an abortion doctor, leading Operation Rescue's Randall Terry to immediately get in front of a camera to offer an anemic and thoroughly horseshit disclaimer that he didn't advocate violence against abortion doctors. Terry set the wheels in motion and let nature take its course; today, the same thing could very easily be happening on an infinitely larger scale.

Once again, whether they mean it to or not, the invective of clowns like Limbaugh does have an impact. Listen long enough to right-wing propaganda and your eyes eventually glaze over, your brain shuts down and you begin to subscribe completely to the alternate reality that it's constructed out of thin air: an America where your new non-white neighbors are terrorists, immigrants are stealing your job, homosexuals want to lure your children into a life of sodomy, and treasonous liberals are plotting against you and your god at every turn. Believe this paranoid fantasy completely and who knows what you'll be capable of doing to defend your way of life.

It's no secret that the natural consequence of the fracturing of media -- of everyone having a voice and being able to put his or her opinions into writing and proffer them over the airwaves and internet -- is that there is no truth anymore. We have no common ground to anchor any argument. The left and right in this country live in completely separate worlds, each with its own set of facts. When we debate, we may as well be speaking foreign languages, so entirely have we allowed a single agreed-upon reality to become muddled by dishonesty on both sides. Rush Limbaugh lies his porcine ass off regularly and no one ever calls him on it; the ones who do are just dismissed by his acolytes as delusional or secretly trying to further the leftist agenda. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal launder George Bush's every sin until he comes out on the other end of the news cycle smelling fresh and clean.

And their listeners, viewers and readers believe every word of it. Their version of the truth, right or wrong, is why a man would shoot up a church in Tennessee, intransigent in the conviction that liberals are in control of the nation (when our president and half of our lawmakers are Republican) and that they've decimated the economy and taken away his job (when it could easily be argued Bush's policies, in fact, bear most if not all of the blame for the current dismal state of things).

For so long, the fire-and-brimstone of political division has been preached from every keyboard and microphone across our land; it was always just a matter of time before anger turned to action. All that rage had to go somewhere.

Maybe it just did.

The Speed of Lies

Once again, it's rare that I repost something originally published within the past couple of months, but I feel the unfortunate need to resurrect this piece simply because the story it concerns has once again reared its ugly head. Over the last couple of days, professional buffoons Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and Jerome Corsi have all alleged that Barack Obama's trip to Hawaii wasn't actually about visiting his ailing grandmother but was instead a stealth mission aimed at quietly dealing with the "ongoing rumors" that his Hawaiian birth certificate is phony and that he's not, in fact, a U.S. citizen. Here now, my column from August 28th of this year.

If you believe Philip Berg, Barack Obama is unfit to be President of the United States; his candidacy is nothing more than a dangerously specious house of cards that will almost surely collapse if allowed to continue.

According to Berg, Barack Obama harbors a secret which disqualifies him outright from running for the office of president -- and it's only a matter of time before the truth comes to light and the resulting embarrassing debacle leaves the entire Democratic Party in chaos.

See, If you believe Philip Berg, Barack Obama isn't a U.S. citizen.

Last Thursday, Berg -- a Philadelphia attorney who's something of a notorious presence within that city's legal community -- filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Eastern Pennsylvania demanding that an injunction be issued against the official nomination of Obama. The suit charges that the Illinois senator is constitutionally ineligible to become president on the grounds that he has yet to produce a valid U.S. birth certificate -- Berg claiming that the current one on file from Hawaii is a forgery, proven so by "three forensic experts" -- and that he maintains an unresolved dual-citizenship and owes allegiances to both Kenya and Indonesia, where his father was born and where he lived as a child, respectively. Berg says that he has access to copies of Obama's Jakartan school records which show the candidate registered under the surname of his mother's 2nd husband, Lolo Soetoro, and listed as an Indonesian citizen; as if to hedge his bet, he insists that even if Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate is indeed shown to be authentic, the school registry should be enough to keep the candidate out of the White House.

If these allegations sound familiar, they should; in one form or another, each of them has been bandied about the internet or bullhorned across conservative radio for months now in an ongoing effort to paint Barack Obama as "different."

Oh yeah, and they're all basically bullshit.

A couple of weeks back, the Annenberg Political Fact Check -- an organization whose credentials are pretty much bulletproof -- set out to settle once and for all the debate over Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate. The word "debate" deserves no small amount of qualification because, in reality, there never was a legitimate claim to be made that the document was phony -- simply a lot of fantastical conspiracy theorist innuendo, perpetuated and amplified at lightning speed by a million far-right dolts with computers and delusions of Sherlock Holmesian cleverness. Annenberg dispatched staffers to examine the birth certificate and ruled, to the surprise of no one with a modicum of common sense and two brain cells to rub together, that it's 100% legit; Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. As for the claim that Obama holds a dual citizenship or is in any other way beholden to a foreign country -- that was exposed as nonsense months ago.

And yet Philip Berg filed his lawsuit anyway. He filed it knowing full-well, one would have to imagine, that most of its claims are bogus -- that they already had been or easily could be debunked.

So why? What the hell would possess someone to willfully propagate claims that are tenuous at best and outright false at worst -- even going so far as to do it in court?

Because these days, when it comes to politics particularly, the truth is negotiable -- and there's value in the lie.

Whereas once there were a select few sources of information, and those sources were generally deemed credible by all but those on the furthest fringes of the public, now anyone can be his or her own news source. And while -- as this site, ironically, has advanced -- the rise of citizen journalism and hyper-connectivity has been good for the ethics of media as a whole, it's also created a treacherous wasteland of journalistic mini-fiefdoms, each spouting its own version of reality and together making it impossible, at times, to tell honest, well-researched fact from made-up crap conjured out of thin air to further an agenda. Whether the message comes in the form of an e-mail forwarded to your inbox by that paranoid uncle with the survival bunker in his basement who you're always hoping skips Thanksgiving, or as a bitter flamewar on every news aggregation outlet across the blogosphere, the internet has replaced television as the most effective and least regulated tool for political propaganda in America.

Which is why, ironically, it's now become the partial responsibility of television to help keep the corruption in check. It's too bad the good folks in the TV news media are usually unwilling to do it.

Mainstream media managers, as a whole, subscribe fully to the notion that bloggers and their internet realm are of an inferior journalistic stock; they see them as pests constantly circling the carrion of stories already broken by TV, radio and print; they condescend to them, dismissively painting their ilk as pasty, overweight losers, futilely raging against the machine from the comfort of a Middle-American basement, hopped up on Red Bull and basking in the post-orgasmic bliss of an afternoon spent masturbating to Asian porn. Those who adhere to the Mega-Media ethos believe that when a blogger does break a story, the quality of that piece of information can be judged by whether or not it rises to the level of inclusion in a mainstream broadcast, newspaper or magazine. In other words, only those above the radar can make the decision as to what's worth pulling up from under the radar. The problem is, the good stuff -- the powerful investigation, the sometimes penetrating insight -- gets passed over by the larger media outlets because it's, well, boring. It doesn't make for good TV or a quick, sharp read. Meanwhile, unfortunately, the garbage -- the rumor, conjecture, and misdirection -- is often picked up and elevated to the level of "real news" simply because it's so damn juicy and such a sure-fire ratings or circulation enhancer. A crap story thrown out by a few official-sounding blogs -- like the story of Obama's "phony" birth certificate -- can suddenly be granted validation simply by virtue of the fact that the "controversy" surrounding it is being discussed on national television. The lie is amplified inside the 24/7 cable news echo-chamber and, presto, it's suddenly palatable and worthy of serious consideration by 90% of the population.

It would be one thing if mainstream media outlets faced this kind of bullshit head-on and said, "No, this story isn't true, and if you believe it you're a lunatic." But it's better for ratings and revenue to instead ask, "A lot of folks are saying (insert spurious assertion here), but is it true?" (For the record, nobody does this vaguely referenced end-run on responsibility better than Fox News; see "Terrorist Fist Jab.") It goes without saying that this is how political propaganda is perpetuated; by reporting the rumor as its own story -- without sharply and decisively denouncing it -- you're validating it, giving new life to it, and ensuring that enough people will believe it that the very future of the country could wind up eventually hinging on it.

Ask yourself this: How many people still believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim?

Or this: How many people still believe that Iraq was connected to 9/11?

Very few within the mainstream media came right out and unequivocally shot down these ludicrous rumors before they could take root within the consciousness of the masses -- or at the very least, the minds of those who wanted nothing more than to have their preconceived biases confirmed.

There are thousands of Americans who will still claim that they "don't trust" Obama -- and yet they'll base this lack of trust on their willingness to trust an e-mail that got forwarded to them by a friend of a friend of a friend of some guy somewhere.

It's the responsibility of respectable news media everywhere to bring truth to propaganda and refute the fiction proffered for the sole purpose of sowing discord and confusing the electorate. It's incumbent upon the mainstream media, particularly if they value their stature as strongly as they claim, to shine a bright light on the lies, rather than fueling the fire by debating the merits of a story that they know perfectly well has no merits.

Should you believe Philip Berg?

It's a question that doesn't need to be asked, because it's already been answered.

An Equal and Opposite Reaction

Maybe I've been wrong all this time.

While a lot of the usual suspects on the left seemed to embrace victimhood at the hands of the Coulters, Limbaughs and Savages of the world, I always kind of dismissed the bellicose mouthpieces of the far-right as little more than Vaudevillian boobs. I looked at them as the media's equivalent of carnival barkers -- cut-rate provocateurs spouting amplified, affectedly shocking nonsense aimed at whipping their audience into a feeding frenzy while enticing new recruits into the tent by playing on their fears of liberal-agenda infestation. Sure, they were obnoxious as hell and probably deserved most of the blame for the complete erosion of civilized political discourse in this country, but in the end they were basically harmless; they'd simply stumbled upon a template for a brand of shtick sure to make them rich and it happened to involve, ironically, exploiting the lily-livered gullibility of Red State America better than anything their sworn enemies could've come up with. The best way to deal with their crap? Ignore it -- because anything else just emboldens the bullies and makes them not only increase the antagonism but laugh in your face for either not being able to "take a joke" or for failing to recognize just how powerless you are against them. Besides, I had always assumed that although plenty of people found these pompous loudmouths entertaining and bought wholly into the sentiment behind the saber-rattling, no one took them that seriously -- did they?

Somewhere along the line, I guess I forgot just who we were talking about here -- just what kind of people would listen intently to someone like Rush Limbaugh day after day and what they might be capable of. This is admittedly a huge oversight on the part of someone who considers himself an avowed misanthrope; I'll try not to make the same mistake again.

The question, though, is this: Would some on the American far-right -- who've had it psychically drilled into them that liberals are to blame for all their ills -- be capable of murder?

What started as a mere whisper has turned into an unrelenting drone throughout the blogosphere after the shooting death of Bill Gwatney, the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party. Gwatney was gunned down in his office at the Arkansas Democrats' HQ in Little Rock Wednesday by a man who had just been fired from his job at Target. Police say that after shooting Gwatney, 50-year-old Tim Dale Johnson led them on a high-speed chase for 30 miles; it ended with cops shooting and killing him. Although investigators are still trying to officially connect Bill Gwatney to the man who walked into a busy office and seemed to kill him in cold blood for no apparent reason, some are suggesting that the reason, in fact, is as obvious as it is disturbing -- that Johnson, a troubled loner, blamed liberal-leaning governmental politics for the loss of his job and exacted his revenge on the biggest target among Arkansas Democrats. They point to an arsenal of weapons found in Johnson's home after the shooting -- inarguably standard issue for right-wing psychopaths -- and, more disconcertingly, the fact that Wednesday's attack comes so soon after a deadly shooting inside a Tennessee church in which a gunman claimed to be out to kill the liberals who were supposedly controlling the country and preventing him from getting a job.

Is it irresponsible to question whether the two crimes are related? No. It's sort of a no-brainer to make the connection, as the shootings do seem similar and, like the police, most intellectually curious members of the public don't like coincidences. But are the crimes related? That remains to be seen; for now, absolutely not.

Which isn't stopping a vocal segment of the left from already jumping to the conclusion that these attacks on individuals whose politics take a liberal slant represent the inevitable next phase of a conservative "eliminationist" fantasy.

It's an agenda which has, admittedly, been proclaimed and perpetuated -- whether in jest or not -- by people like Limbaugh, Coulter and Savage for some time. These three and others like them have honed their talk of zero-tolerance for the people across the aisle to a knife's edge. For years, they've blanketed the airwaves, bookshelves and internet with ultra-nationalist agitprop which asserts that those who don't think like them are not simply to be argued with and voted down, they must be utterly crushed underfoot by any means necessary -- even if it involves, as Coulter once said, taking a baseball bat to them -- because they are nothing less than the enemy of the United States of America. In the words, if not actually the minds, of these seemingly fascist demagogues, liberals are as dangerous and absolute a threat to our way of life as the terrorists they supposedly coddle.

And there's no doubt that whatever their actual intentions may be -- no matter how much of it is just theater -- people are listening to the rhetoric and absorbing it. But are a few of those people now acting on it, and do the ones allegedly inciting the indignation through their bluster and bombast bear any responsibility for what it may be metastasizing into?

For almost a century, the litmus test for the lengths to which so-called free speech can legally be taken has come from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who famously ruled that "falsely shouting fire in a theater" was beyond protection; it's almost always been illegal to use a public forum to incite panic, violence or imminent lawless action. By that standard, there's just no way that any pundit at any time has crossed the line and broken the law. But legal doesn't always mean ethical, particularly not when you're refusing to take into consideration the fact that a substantial portion of your audience is made up of edgy, easily malleable "oppressed" white guys -- many of whom are now unemployed and looking for someone to blame for it. Although it's never a good idea to allow the potential misbehavior of the lowest common denominator to curb the right to free speech, it's equally inadvisable, not to mention irresponsible, to act as though you're operating in a vacuum -- as if what you say can't possibly have a negative impact, despite its incendiary nature. This was what made it such a pathetically insincere cop-out years ago when some lunatic from the Army of God would gun down an abortion doctor, leading Operation Rescue's Randall Terry to immediately get in front of a camera to offer an anemic and thoroughly horseshit disclaimer that he didn't advocate violence against abortion doctors. Terry set the wheels in motion and let nature take its course; today, the same thing could very easily be happening on an infinitely larger scale.

Once again, whether they mean it to or not, the invective of clowns like Limbaugh does have an impact. Listen long enough to right-wing propaganda and your eyes eventually glaze over, your brain shuts down and you begin to subscribe completely to the alternate reality that it's constructed out of thin air: an America where your new non-white neighbors are terrorists, immigrants are stealing your job, homosexuals want to lure your children into a life of sodomy, and treasonous liberals are plotting against you and your god at every turn. Believe this paranoid fantasy completely and who knows what you'll be capable of doing to defend your way of life.

It's no secret that the natural consequence of the fracturing of media -- of everyone having a voice and being able to put his or her opinions into writing and proffer them over the airwaves and internet -- is that there is no truth anymore. We have no common ground to anchor any argument. The left and right in this country live in completely separate worlds, each with its own set of facts. When we debate, we may as well be speaking foreign languages, so entirely have we allowed a single agreed-upon reality to become muddled by dishonesty on both sides. Rush Limbaugh lies his porcine ass off regularly and no one ever calls him on it; the ones who do are just dismissed by his acolytes as delusional or secretly trying to further the leftist agenda. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal launder George Bush's every sin until he comes out on the other end of the news cycle smelling fresh and clean.

And their listeners, viewers and readers believe every word of it. Their version of the truth, right or wrong, is why a man would shoot up a church in Tennessee, intransigent in the conviction that liberals are in control of the nation (when our president and half of our lawmakers are Republican) and that they've decimated the economy and taken away his job (when it could easily be argued Bush's policies, in fact, bear most if not all of the blame for the current dismal state of things).

For so long, the fire-and-brimstone of political division has been preached from every keyboard and microphone across our land; it was always just a matter of time before anger turned to action. All that rage had to go somewhere.

Maybe it just did.