Via GOOD, the New York Observer had an awesome exclusive. A producer for Greta Van Sustern's show on FOX News was down at Occupy Wall St., trying to get some rambling stoners on tape to embarrass the protesters, and instead ended up interviewing Jesse LaGreca. LaGreca proceeded to dress down FOX news for being a propaganda outlet instead of a news organization, and then basically wiped the pavement with this guy. At the end, trying to salvage the segment, the producer concedes the point about FOX, but then asks what role Obama plays in all this.
The obvious objective here is to get a protester putting all the blame on Obama, so that can be aired on FOX, but LaGreca wisely doesn't take the bait and instead uses the question to call out the question for being disingenuous by noting that the conservative opposition to Obama is trying to stop him from doing any good in the world. I just wanted to stand up and applaud at that part. The left is getting to a point of Obama-obsession that rivals the right. It's not just the leftists who have convinced themselves the man can't do anything right, though they are a problem. Even the most stalwart Obama supporters have made the situation All About Obama, when in fact there's a much larger problem at hand than the fact that our President is oft-times a weenie. I have many of the same criticisms of Occupy Wall St. as others---while the hippie thing is overblown, I really do wish that there wasn't so much hostility to fellow travelers who look "straight"---but I'm a strong supporter of it for one reason above all other things. It's focusing people's attention where it belongs, on the banks and widespread social inequities. This is a problem that's expanded beyond just the electoral cycles and goes straight back to a larger trend towards the right in this country, a trend that's pushing Republicans to the far right and Democrats to the center. Focusing like a laser on Obama and making this about whether or not he's "betrayed" us fails to shed any real light on the problem. For good reason, i.e. Americans continue to elect Republicans in large numbers, both parties believe that Americans like the status quo of increasing inequities and corporate control of everything, and so neither party has a reason to change their approach.
Occupy Wall St. is blaming the right people, and pointing out the real problems in our society. It's a start. And LeGreca models the best way to keep our eyes on the prize, by making it about addressing underlying values and systems and not seeing a single politician as the force that will save us all, and then plunging into despair when he makes the rather inevitable compromised decisions that come with the territory of being a politician.
Did you hear that Michelle Obama ordered a single meal that was unhealthy? I know! This is quite possibly the worst bout of hypocrisy ever from a major political figure and certainly reason for her to shut up forever about how kids should eat their vegetables. By the way, telling kids to eat their vegetables has magically, throw the magical corrupting power of touching the Obamas, gone from something that was about as uncontroversial as telling kids to pick up their room to quite possibly the worst thing a human being could ever do. I suppose now patriotic Americans should not let their kids eat anything that comes directly from the ground at all, just to be safe. Yeah, that zucchini looks harmless enough on the plate, but I've heard that consuming that shit will turn you into a liberal, and better dead than red and all that.
Sure, some may say that Obama has, in the past, never once suggested that occasional treats are forbidden to herself or her family, or even that occasional treats are bad for you. In fact, some might point out that her "everything in moderation" attitude closely resembles the advice offered by medical professionals when it comes to eating healthy. Some even suggest that the occasional treat keeps you from feeling deprived, and allows you to maintain a most-of-the-time healthy diet.
But those people are nuts! Everyone knows that this is America, and in America, it's all or nothing. Your weight should be either ballooning rapidly or you should be losing dramatic amounts of weight in short periods of time, a la "The Biggest Loser". Screw this "healthy lifestyle" crap. Only hippies do that. You should either be eating the typical American diet of junk food all the time, until one day you vow to lose weight, go on a fad diet, lose a bunch of weight while being angry and undernourished and deprived, slip up one day and eat a donut, decide you're a terrible sinner and give up completely on eating well and instead go right back to eating crap three meals a day. Anything else is un-American.
Which is why all these wingnuts are up in arms. Michelle Obama is breaking the rules! The only way to feel after you eat a treat is to beat yourself up, decide that you're a sinner beyond redemption, and give up trying to eat healthy forevermore. But Obama doesn't seem to play that game. She occasionally has a treat and then goes right back to promoting healthy eating. She planted a vegetable garden at the White House, and the White House chef uses it for all the big state dinners and what not they have going on there. It was fun reading some of the menus! I read about potato and eggplant salad, red lentil soup,chopped salad, tuna tartare, petite filet, pea salad, ravioli, wild ramp puree, pear salad, orange glaze carrots with mushrooms, roasted potato dumplings (what a good way to reduce the fat in them!), chick peas and okra, green curry prawns, jicama with oranges, herb green ceviche, and beef with mole. All very tasty sounding, but alas, not a chocolate shake or French fry to be seen.
It was actually kind of fun for me, would-be foodie that I am, to watch some of the videos of White House chef Cris Comerford prepare state dinners. This one was cool:
I have a sneaking suspicion that Michelle Obama is who she says she is: someone who takes exercise and nutrition seriously, and because she takes it seriously, allows herself the occasional treat and shuns the binge-and-purge norm that's foisted on us by the junk food and diet industries. I suspect she doesn't eat hamburgers every day. I suspect all this because as a member in good standing of the liberal elite, I know my people. And that's just how we are. I'm not only like that, but a whole bunch of my friends are, too. We eat crap on occasion, and it's okay, because we mostly eat well. I also suspect it because, let's face it, Michelle Obama looks like she's a frequent gym attendee. In theory, one could be hitting the gym as much as she clearly does while eating like crap. But I'm really hard-pressed to see how, especially at her age. I'm a lot younger than her, and I've eaten junk food for three meals a day for even just two to three days, and even that was enough to make the return to the gym less than ideal.
In fact, I'd argue that Obama is a really good model for getting out of the toxic American binge-and-purge approach to food. She's modeling what non-disordered eating looks like. I think the reason it's so shocking is that Americans have such a disordered approach to food that we can't even deal with it when we see someone who lives the "healthy most of the time, treats occasionally" lifestyle recommended by, oh, every science-based nutrition program imaginable.
Monitoring right wing rhetoric and skeptical debunking of conspiracy theories and woo are two of my major areas of interest, so hopefully you'll forgive me for being a little giddy when Barack Obama decided to take the birthers head on this morning by releasing the long form birth certificate they've been claiming they want so badly to see. As soon as it happened, I knew two things were inevitable: 1) The birthers would not accept the evidence in front of them and their claims that he's not a citizen would just get more baroque and 2) There would be harumphing from the people who are convinced that this kind of silliness can be ignored until it goes away.
On the second point, I want to come right out and say that Obama did the right thing here. The only real objections I have are with regards to timing---he probably should have just taken advantage of the situation by waiting until a politically opportune time to release his birth certificate. Jesse, in chat, suggested that right before the first GOP debate would have been awesome. But as it is, I think he had to deal with it and deal with it head on. I was skeptical initially, but upon thinking about it, it's clear that dealing with it was the only option.
We've tried the "ignore the liars and they'll go away" thing and it's failed. Time and time again, people on the left try to ignore some right wing nuttery in hopes that it just disappears from lack of oxygen, and it sneaks up to bite us in the ass. An unwillingness to fight back hard is why ACORN was dissolved. It's probably why John Kerry was swiftboated out of winning in 2004. It's how Terri Schiavo suddenly became a national story. It's why health care reform turned into such a clusterfuck, and why the Democrats are acquiesing on budget-cutting instead of demanding more stimulus. Acting like we're too good to even acknowledge people screeching about death panels and conspiracy theories involving John Kerry's war wounds has proven a failed strategy.
Punching back and setting the record straight, on the other hand, has shown promising signs of working. Case in point: It saved Planned Parenthood's ass. As soon as Lila Rose started going on TV and telling straight up lies about Planned Parenthood, Planned Parenthood put forward an aggressive defense. Every lie floated about them was smacked down with haste. The result was that when Republicans tried to defund Planned Parenthood, Democrats were able to stand firm and feel supported. Contrast this with the reaction to ACORN---Democrats folded, allowing the vicious lies about the organization to dictate their choices because, in part, there wasn't a well-publicized truth they could cling to in order to defend themselves.
Does setting the record straight stop the lies and bullshit? Absolutely not, and I'm hoping that the Obama administration isn't surprised when it turns out the birthers won't shut up, and that probably will include Donald Trump. But hitting back hard with the facts does create polarization, and that's what needs to happen here. The biggest danger conspiracy theorists pose is not that the public will just simply start buying their nutty ideas wholesale, but the perception that where there's smoke, there's fire. Again, with the Planned Parenthood example, what we saw was that Planned Parenthood's willingness to aggressively contradict lies about what services they provide and how much they do work with law enforcement when it comes to sex trafficking seriously limited how much the right was able to imply that something fishy was going on at Planned Parenthood.
And so it goes with this birth certificate thing. Full blown birthers won't be moved one bit on this. But I fear that a growing number of people were beginning to suspect that Obama was hiding something, because they can't think of another reason you would avoid talking about it. By showing that he wasn't afraid to engage and denounce the birthers, Obama has done a lot to clear the air of smoke. Now we can see that there isn't a fire, but a bunch of right wing nuts pumping smoke machines.
I'm increasingly convinced that the way to deal with right wing lies is to spend less time worrying about the drawbacks to thorough rebuttals, and just issue the rebuttals. I understand the fear of giving credence to lies by attending to them. I definitely get why you don't want to validate some underlying narratives by correcting the record. For instance, there is a very valid concern that by saying 97% of what Planned Parenthood does is not abortion, you're validating the taboo against abortion, or by demonstrating that it's false that feminists are ugly/humorless, you're throwing the ugly and the humorless under the bus. But it's also possible to overthink this. Lies are a lot like fires that have gotten out of control. You need to put the fire out before you start to fix the damage it's done. And with lies, you're not even going to begin to counteract the damaging implications of them until you actually get the facts out in the first place.
With this birth certificate thing, I think we're going to see the refreshing effect that a little truth-telling can have on a debate. Within just the course of the day, I've seen a dramatic uptick in the number of people willing to say directly that birthers are just straight up racists, for instance. Part of the reason was that as long as birthers could hide behind the claim that all they needed was to see the long form birth certificate, there was plausible deniability. Now that they've seen it and they're still squawking, it's become undeniable that they just don't like seeing a black man representing the nation, and they're willing to say any crazy thing that occurs to them to deny that he's a legitimate leader. Hopefully, being a birther will soon be seen as being just as obviously racist as being a segregationist is (and let's be clear, segregationists have tried in the past to claim they're not racist). I don't think that we were going to get any movement in that direction without the White House dealing directly with this problem.
You know how, when it’s a special occasion like a vacation, your birthday, or Christmas, you often figure it’s okay to be a little self-indulgent? You overeat, lay on your ass, do something pointless and unproductive on the theory that it’s your special day and that’s what you get to do. Well, since 9/11 has become the Wingnut Christmas, I think wingnuts are getting into that exact spirit. But instead of overeating—-or perhaps in addition to it—-the normally forbidden behavior they give in to is saying exactly what they mean instead of just hinting at it. Most of the time they’d argue that they’re all for religious freedom and tolerance, but engage in special pleading for why Muslims should be the exception in some circumstances. But on Wingnut Christmas, John Bolton decries the Park51 center by saying that it’s about telling the American people “we’re going to increase religious tolerance and understanding whether you like it or not.” And they most certainly do not like! But god forbid you tell them that they sound like a bunch of bigots ready to burn up the First Amendment because of a manufactured controversy over a building they didn’t give a shit about a month ago. That’s like telling someone to stick to their diet on Christmas.
The most peculiar example of this strain of wingnut self-indulgence had to be the much-discussed teaming up of Newt Gingrich and Dinesh “The Taliban Is Right About America” D’Souza to push D’Souza’s unreadable article in Forbes diagnosing Obama’s behavior as “bizarre” and ascribing it to what Gingrich described as a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” worldview. As I noted on Twitter, you could probably give D’Souza and Gingrich a quiz on the first paragraph on Kenya on Wikipedia, and they’d flunk it, but they nonetheless feel free to spin academic-sounding bullshit about what Kenyans supposedly believe, why it’s supposedly so wrong, and how that’s what Obama secretly believes. You know, despite the fact that he was neither raised in Kenya nor had a whole lot of contact with is father growing up. The implication that D’Souza and Gingrich are forwarding is that either Obama is lying about where he was born and raised, or that the “anti-colonial” worldview they ascribe to Kenyans is genetic. I don’t imagine they care which one you choose; the important thing is Othering the President and implying that he’s illegitimate and not really American.
What’s interesting to me is that Gingrich and D’Souza are clearly filling a need in the wingnut masses for this pseudo-intellectual nonsense. It’s an article of faith in the wingnutteria that pointy-headed college professors don’t have common sense and aren’t worth listening to. And yet, despite this stereotype, they still have this strong need to have even their craziest beliefs (in this case, Birtherism) validated by something that they can convince themselves is pointy-headed academic analysis. D’Souza’s whole purpose in life is to give an elitist gloss to right wing populism and racism, and that’s basically all this is. It’s about giving the wild-eyed Birthers reassurance that their particular brand of nuttiness is acceptable in the halls of academia, and therefore not nutty at all. Of course, they’re lying to their people about this, but illusions, as I’m sure you know, matter more than facts ever could.
In Rick Perlstein’s book Nixonland, he describes the wingnut struggle with what they call “elites” with the Nixon-derived nicknames the Franklins (elites) and the Orthogonians (wingnut populists). Orthogonians decry the Franklins, but they envy them at the same time. They dismiss their intelligence but crave their approval. They swear they’re superior to the Franklins, but never really believe it. And you really see this dynamic at play when it comes to Birtherism. The Birthers want badly to say both that they don’t care for the opinions of academic, facts-bound elitists who dismiss their theories are nuts, and they want some pointy-headed college professor to agree with them so they can say, “Even the smarty-pants think Obama is a Kenyan-born secret Muslim!” And D’Souza and Gingrich are happy to provide the illusion in exchange for voting Republicans into power.
Once again, I’m forced to question if conservatives are capable of remembering that they gave women the vote nearly a century ago. The new faux scandal on the right is that President Obama is going on “The View”, and the reason that this is supposedly a disgrace is pretty blatantly argued as “bitches ain’t shit”. For all the right wing romanticizing of housewives, it’s pretty fucking interesting that they object so strenuously to the President taking time out of his schedule to speak directly to housewives, who, last I checked, have the right to vote. But to make the whole thing even more obviously about straight-up sexism, the way the “scandal” is being debated involves pitching a show aimed at a female audience against the Boy Scouts. Glenn Beck, CNS, Fox News, Laura Inagraham, etc.—-they’re all faux angry because the President is speaking to adult women about politics instead of to male children.
I honestly can’t think of a better example of the conservative attitudes towards women than anger that the President appears to believe that adult women are more adult than minor children who happen to be male.
It’s an interesting sign of modern conservatism that some of the people are themselves women that are pushing this idea that boys are a more important audience than grown women. S.E. Cupp and Laura Inagraham are mentioned on Media Matters. Broadsheet quotes Antoinette Kuritz using female names to emphasize how silly “The View” is:
“Being on ‘The View’ trivializes the President and the office. Does he go on before or after Brittany, Paris, or Lindsay? Or even Julia? Does he sit between Joy and Elizabeth and bait one while pandering to the other?”
Did I mention that there are people named Sally, Mary, and Ann in the audience? Do you detect a theme of unseriousness here? Do we need to spell it out for you? (V-A-G-I-N-A-S.)
This is why I can’t take conservative “feminism” seriously in the slightest. The main theme of conservative “feminism” is, “Most women are too stupid to breathe, much less have rights. And you can trust me when I say this, because I’m a woman.” As logic, it’s self-contradictory, but it’s emotionally satisfying. It says that the truth of female inferiority is so obvious that even some women have to admit it. And the women who argue this get to feel good about themselves because they’re at least smart….for women.
“The View” can be a very silly show, but no more so than any other political talk show that encourages “fair-and-balanced” over smart and factual. That they do celebrity coverage shouldn’t change this—-so do all the supposed hard news networks. Fox is particularly egregious in calling the kettle black on this one, since they openly reject real news for scandal-mongering and stories about how sexy ladies are bringing down society. “The View” has different segments, some which don’t even pretend to be hard news. So what? The NY Times has a Style section. At least “The View” doesn’t do what the NY Times does, and relegate important political stories about feminist issues to the Style section. A lot of the ongoing outrage over “The View” is that it dare exist at all, since the premise of the show is that its intended audience—-mostly female, mostly staying at home (at least during the day)—-is interested in political talk and actual debate and even sometimes analysis. Hell, I think if Obama decided to come on to a show purely about homemaking so that he could condescend about his wife’s decorating preferences while avoiding all political talk the squawkers wouldn’t be raising a peep.
Once you set out, as a president or a party, to propagate a message that the government has (or is) the panacea for all ills, then failure to deal with an ill leads to your being hoist with your own panacea-petard. If the entire range of your political program rests on the message that the government is the problem-solver, the deliverer from evil, the Messiah, the curative current that runs through our civitas, then a failure to solve a problem, to deliver from evil—or from an evil oil spill—leads to consternation, bafflement, and profound disillusion in the ranks of the faithful.
Actually, the thing that’s lumping responsibility onto Obama isn’t the belief that government can solve all ills; it’s his embrace of offshore drilling and his sorta but not quite “moratorium” on drilling. Yes, there are some people who think Obama should rush in and…do…something? Use his supernatural powers over black gold, maybe? The problem isn’t a belief that the regulatory state can solve all ills and it hasn’t; the problem is that the actual role the regulatory state has is being approached in a half-hearted manner.
There’s also the nontrivial matter of what happens going forward: it’s almost certain that there will be massive legislative and judicial fights over BP’s liability, and the same people who’ve spent years saying that legitimate, undeniable corporate malfeasance has to be balanced against all the shiny things corporations make will pile on Obama, saying simultaneously that he has to crack down, but in a way that still sends a positive message to the oil industry, but in a way that punishes BP, but in a way that takes into account their efforts, but in a way that…
Obama’s main problem is not big government versus small government or statism versus corporatism, it’s his political willingness to stay in yet another fight with the same political opposition that will fight anything he does.
You see, a few weeks ago, some Teabaggers screamed some racial slurs at some black congressmen. One of them was John Lewis, who’s kind of a big deal, and the other two were black, which was relevant. Now, there were two ways to respond to this from the Breitbart/Tea Party perspective. The first was to blow it off, use it as yet another in the long list of bizarre and often inscrutable outrages that makes up the Tea Party Gospel, and go thumb through Liberal Fascism again. The other was to go completely apeshit and offer up a massive reward for video proof of the racial slurs, proof which almost certainly resides only in the sweaty hands of some Tea Partier who’s been spending the past month learning iMovie so that they can make a totally awesome music video using Josh Groban’s version of On Eagle’s Wings.
Guess which option Breitbart chose.
When I offered a reward of $100,000 to be donated to the United Negro College Fund if anyone produced video and audio evidence that this occurred, I was accused of a publicity stunt (because everyone knows that the best way to get publicity in America is to accuse a civil rights icon of lying about racism). Rep. Carson himself suggested that my challenge was “a veiled attempt to justify actions that are simply unjustifiable.” Get it? He calls protesters racist and if you ask him to prove it, you’re a racist, too.
Needless to say, no one has claimed the $100,000.
Well, when your entire persona is dependent on people who feel victimized by haircuts because some communist scissor-whore took the hair they’d worked so hard to grow…yes, the best way to get publicity is to accuse famous and powerful black people of brandishing their race against innocent, God-fearing white people.
I’m not here to argue (yet again) against Andrew Breitbart. It’s like arguing against a brick wall. A brick wall with borderline personality disorder.
Instead, I want to use this as an opportunity to point out something to, well, everyone. The Tea Party, such as it is, is an ever-growing collecting of submorons and malcontents who protest fantasies because they’re too caught up in their anger as a protective shield to face reality. There are people out there, shockingly, who are protesting actual things that are happening to actual people: the groups protesting Arizona’s new anti-immigration laws. Thousands of people have already protested across the country, and it’s going to build.
Unlike the Tea Parties, this is a.) about an issue that actually exists and b.) composed of people who don’t worship blubbery, self-obsessed demagogues with chalkboards. It’s an actual example of vast government overreach that is going to affect thousands of Americans and provoke numerous birth certificate-related Constitutional violations that don’t involve the President having four fathers and being born in three countries simultaneously.
It would sure be nice if it got half the coverage. I won’t hold my breath, though.
If you haven’t heard about this newest scandal about to blow the doors off this administration and finally begin the impeachment proceedings that should have started on January 21st, 2009, well, I don’t know what rock you’ve been hiding under. It all started when Cat Corben of American Thinker accused Obama of making up his daughter’s soccer game so he could sneak off to do god only knows what—-probably make up some birth certificates—-and it was immediately picked up by a host of conservative bloggers and Rush Limbaugh himself. Scandal!
True,the three pieces of evidence Corben offered were immediately shown to be 100% horseshit. Contrary to his claims, there was a game scheduled, the neighborhood it was in is considered plenty safe enough for soccer games, and members of the press saw Obama at the game. However, as we all know, this should settle nothing. Many questions remain, and no one is addressing the biggest one of all:
What is this game “soccer”? Can we be sure there is such a thing?
Let’s look at the evidence that there is a game called “soccer”, and show why these claims are fishy.
Claim #1: People play this game all over the world. Oh sure, we hear all about this game that’s played all over the world, and how there’s even big tournaments with fancy names like “World Cup” watched by gazillions of fans. But how can we be so sure? Has anyone ever been to these exotic lands to see this game being played? Of course not.
Worse, the claim is made that the rest of the world calls the game “football” and not “soccer”. Look, the people claiming that this game exists can’t even get the name of the game straight! How are we supposed to believe there is such a game?
Claim #2: The game has rules. All games have rules, right? The soccer pushers claim their imaginary game does, too. But these rules are so silly that you have to believe they’re making them up. What kind of ball game doesn’t permit the players to touch the ball with their hands? Balls were designed with hands in mind, morons. Balls are for touching with your hands. And that’s what she said.
And if you think I’m crazy, just ask someone who claims that soccer exists to explain the offsides rule to you. And laugh as they try to get their story straight.
Claim #3: Both girls and boys play it. You see the pictures that believers whip out to “prove” that soccer exists, and you’ll see men and women, boys and girls—-all playing this “soccer”. Do they really expect us to believe there’s a sport like that? In the real world, there’s sports for men/boys and sports for women/girls. Men have football, basketball, and golf. Women have volleyball, ice skating, and getting their periods. And never the two shall meet.
Claim #4: This game has equipment. Okay, the ball they claim to play with looks real enough, but the shoes?
Give me a break. That doesn’t look like a shoe. You’d just get stuck in the ground and not be able to move, like a golf peg or something. Proof positive that this is not only a conspiracy, but that they’re mocking us by leaving giant clues around.
The President can’t go to his daughter’s soccer game if there’s no such thing as soccer. Obviously, this conspiracy goes much deeper than Corben or Limbaugh even realized.
You remember when Gandhi fought against the British occupation of India through a systematic program of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience? Of course you do, you got the Facebook invite.
Well, a moderately transformative health care bill takes effect in 2014, a full two electoral cycles after passage and during which its opponents have more than enough time to mobilize against it in a full and fair democratic process. Obviously, it’s time for some Gandhi shit.
It is hardly surprising then that Americans are feeling a growing panic as they watch their constitutional republic descend into a banana republic. President Obama is fond of quoting Mahatma Gandhi’s line that “we should be the change we want to see.” But Gandhi also said that “civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state has become lawless and corrupt.” Americans instinctively understand this which is why pockets of resistance to ObamaCare are already emerging. The question is only whether they can be constructively harnessed into a grassroots, Gandhi-style civil disobedience movement powerful enough to undo this monstrosity.
So, to be clear: between 2001 and 2009, to cite one example, the executive branch of the country declared the power to unilaterally declare captives of the state “enemy combatants” and hold them without any available recourse to the Constitution or international treaties; in 2010, we passed a healthcare bill which requires you to purchase health insurance from any of hundreds of private insurers (maybe). As bad an idea as I think the mandate is, for a variety of reasons, this is like getting pissed at someone for bringing food in the bed when the house is on fire.
But let’s look at the shape this nonviolent civil disobedience takes:
Any strategy of nonviolent civil resistance has to first make a good faith effort to achieve its end through the available political and legal means. But there comes a time when changing the law requires acts of conscience.
For opponents of ObamaCare that time is Dec. 31, 2013. That’s when the individual mandate will go into effect. If ObamaCare hasn’t been repealed by Congress or nullified in court by then, its opponents would be justified in urging Americans to refuse to buy coverage or pay fines and dare authorities to come after them.
By some estimates, Uncle Sam will need to hire an additional 17,000 IRS agents or so just to enforce the coverage mandate. But even if a few million Americans simultaneously refuse to abide by it, they could easily overwhelm the system. Self-rule or swaraj, Gandhi said, requires a collective understanding of the immense capacity of citizens to “regulate and control” the coercive apparatus of the state through mass nonviolent resistance.
Let’s set something straight right now. Nonviolent civil disobedience is a powerful tool used to show that an oppressed people are mobilized and motivated to stand for their freedom against an oppressive and illegitimate power which is otherwise denying them the rights for which they are fighting. Its most famous applications are in colonial India, the Jim Crow South and apartheid-era South Africa. Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi and Nelson Mandela all understood that lawbreaking isn’t something you engage in simply because you don’t think the law is a good idea.
In other words, in the Olympics of Oppression, Tea Partiers are Malta. Twenty-first century America’s answer to the Indian subclass of the 1910s and 1920s consists of middle to upper-class members of the dominant racial and religious groups with an inordinate amount of political power, media coverage and one of the two major political parties in the most powerful country in the world begging at their feet. I now feel dumber for having written that. Not Liberal Fascism stupid or John Boehner stupid…but stupid.
If Teabaggers wonder why we think they’re crazy, or why they’re called Teabaggers, or why the going narrative is that they’re barely hinged loons who are dangerous ignorant about life, the universe and the meaning of everything, it’s this. The Tea Party may constitute the most privileged set of rebels in human existence. There is nothing they have to give up (except their weekends), no travails through which they must suffer; it’s like Star Wars, except Darth Vader gave Alderaan a series of tax credits and then revealed that his father was from Kenya.
Yes, the color-aroused yahoos are already off to a nice start in 2010. (WALB):
A doll found hanging off of a building in Plains is causing controversy. Controversial enough to get the United States Secret Service involved.
Witnesses say it was an image of President Barack Obama with a rope around his neck and the display was found hanging in one of the city’s most recognizable sites dedicated to former President Jimmy Carter.
A few people were able to snap pictures of the black doll with the rope hanging off that building right in the center of town before it was taken down.
...Store owners we asked for comment said this shines a bad light on the home of the nations’ 39th president.
And they would rather not say a word, but one did say off camera she hopes whoever did it is caught. “I don’t think it’s right I don’t know if it’s someone horse playing or what,” said Davis.
So, one day, the President of These United States was talking to the Vice President of same. A photographer of said President’s court took a photograph of them talking, and it was posted to the Presidential Internet. Here is the picture.
This picture communicates many things to me. It communicates that Barack Obama believes that walls are a vital part of his leaning strategy. It also communicates that he is a couple of inches taller than Joe Biden. Both men also own tuxedos.
However, I am missing something vital in my analysis. It is apparently because I don’t see what others see, which is never quite said outright. Ann Althouse, however, is not afraid to say it, and I trust her interpretation of pictures like I trust Chris Farley’s interpretation of cocaine and morphine.
People who like Obama are blinded to the way other people see him. This picture strongly says cool to people who love him, but it doesn’t read that way to others… including the many, many people who don’t even want a cool President.
Photo via Instapundit, who has a closeup of the facial expression. The main thing I see when I look at that face is: He’s tired.
Wouldn’t it be funny, Barack, if, after all of this, you wake up one morning, and you think: I hate my job?
What’s he thinking now? Oh, my God, I’m only one-quarter through this thing. And they’re going to expect me to campaign again too? Bleh!
Prediction (longshot): Obama will not run for reelection. How can he do it?
You see? He looks cool. And tired. And maybe like he’s checking Joe Biden’s tie to make sure it’s straight, because Joe Biden is a blubbering manboy who is currently asking Barack Obama for a corn dog, which Barack Obama is tired of hearing, because the place they’re going doesn’t have corn dogs.
Now, it might be that people who don’t like Barack Obama are inclined to believe that a neutral facial expression and a wall lean are signs of his deep and abiding contempt not just for Biden, but for his job itself and perhaps even his own life (Muslims are suiciders, after all). Other people will look at this and believe that Barack Obama licked his thumb, wiped a smudge off of Joe Biden’s face, and told him that he loved him like a brother immediately after this picture was taken, and then they rode wish-powered unicorns into the dinner hall to thunderous applause from all of the forest elves in their kingdom.
There are no other options, by the way. Just those two.
Let’s test out a theory here. I contend that Professors Reynolds and Althouse are disingenuous hacks who lack anything even resembling a rational context through which they could interpret a picture of Barack Obama, and that the picture above was an effort by the White House to show some legitimate downtime between the two most powerful people in America where they weren’t gladhanding and making small talk. We shall test this…by looking at another picture.
When someone “goes birther”, that means they have given up their last thread attaching themselves to reality, and flinging themselves into full-on wingnut mode. You can usually tell when someone has gone birther because they literally start spouting nonsense about how Obama’s birth certificate isn’t real, though many think they’re clever and employ euphemism to give themselves plausible deniability. Until yesterday, most of the sane world would note that Sarah Palin wasn’t a full-blown lunatic because she still hadn’t gone birther. Well, that day has now come.
As you will note, Palin maintained plausible deniability, suggesting that it should be looked into, without committing to a stance. But looking into it is committing to a stance, because it’s been exhaustively examined, and proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Obama was born in a genuine American state. Refusing to accept this is being a birther. When a question has been answered so fully, way beyond the satisfaction of all non-nutty people, then to say there is a question at all is to side with the nuts.
That Palin attempted to be dodgy does bring up a question, however: how much of a true believer is she? I detected a note of genuine impatience in her voice. Perhaps as a denizen of Alaska, it occurs to her that she’s as much a citizen “in question” as Obama is. (Which is to say not at all, but believe me, liberals should not refrain from pointing this out when wingnuts go birther on you.) Perhaps she knows it’s bullshit, but she also knows that she’s the Queen of Bullshit, and so she has to represent on this issue. Certainly, she’s trying to find a way to make her base of birthers happy while not excluding herself from the mainstream. Good luck with that—-like creationists, you either are or aren’t a birther.
The other thing that struck me about her interview was her contention that she didn’t go after Obama enough during the election, and namely, that avoiding the birther thing was a mistake. I suppose she could have gone completely off the deep end during the campaign, and certainly it seems she wanted to but was held back by McCain, but good god, who in their right mind thinks she wasn’t enough on the attack? She accused Obama, through implication, of being a terrorist. She did so in a way that maximized the anti-Muslim insinuation, even though neither Barack Obama nor Bill Ayers (who is the excuse for this rumor-mongering) is Muslim, making the whole thing not only racist but incoherent. She went out of her way to imply that anyone who was not white or lived in a city was not a Real American. She red-baited Obama. She did everything but tell jokes about his mom. Her entire campaign strategy was to attack Obama. I fail to see how she could have done more, honestly. There aren’t enough hours in the day.
Bonnie Erbe is convinced that Barack Obama hates women. This is mainly because despite all the women he’s hired, he’s actually Jesse Helms:
President Obama could invite Chamique Holdsclaw to the private White House basketball court and Billie Jean King to play tennis with him. I still wouldn’t believe he’s any more comfortable dealing with women or concerned about “women’s” issues than the dearly departed former Sen. Jesse Helms. President Obama talks the talk a lot better and a lot louder than Helms. But Jesse Helms was so rooted in his atavist traditions, he chose to remain true to his misogyny rather than pose for cameras with faux female golfing partners. President Obama must hide the side of his personality that is clearly uncomfortable with women because he needs their votes much more than Helms ever did.
Whether it was his treatment of Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail (as in his condescending remark that she was “likeable enough”) or his clearly career-oriented mate who has been toned down and remorphed into a Stepford Wife, I just don’t get the impression this man is comfortable with women. Nor do I believe he cares about them beyond needing women’s votes. It’s an act and a thoroughly see-through, amateur one at that.
I’d sort of hoped we were past the residual PUMA bullshit, but apparently not. Besides getting into the bizarre culture of workplace sports and gender dynamics which are far bigger than President Obama, it behooves us to point out that Bonnie Erbe is a giant, disingenuous asshole. How patronizingly sexist is it to say that Michelle Obama, who I’m pretty sure has kicked Barack’s figurative ass more than once over the course of their relationship, was cowed into being a mewling housewife by this terrible sexist beast? How little must she think of the numerous women Obama has appointed in his administration who apparently sold out their feminist and progressive ideals to go work for the black Jesse Helms?
The problem isn’t just the asinine criticism of Obama. It’s the implicit criticism of the dozens of women he trusts that they’ve sold out for their thirty pieces of phallic-shaped silver. Obama listened to (and acted on) the criticism. He got flack over the summer, repeatedly, for appointing Sotomayor “just because she was a woman”. Commentators worried ad nauseum if he’d be able to deal with Hillary Clinton, who eats mens’ souls as appetizers, in her role as Secretary of State. He signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law. There’s substance to his support of women, but it is apparently all for naught (as are all the women who’ve been working in and with the Obama administration) because it’s obvious that this fucker hates women as much as he also hates Christians, white people and the hardworking employees of Fox News.
For an added bonus, read the comments, which oh-so-unpredictably morph into comments about how black Muslims hate women.
Did you hear that Michelle Obama 
Monitoring right wing rhetoric and skeptical debunking of conspiracy theories and woo are two of my major areas of interest, so hopefully you'll forgive me for being a little giddy when Barack Obama decided to take the birthers head on this morning by releasing the long form birth certificate they've been claiming they want so badly to see. As soon as it happened, I knew two things were inevitable: 1) The birthers would not accept the evidence in front of them and their claims that he's not a citizen would just get more baroque and 2) There would be harumphing from the people who are convinced that this kind of silliness can be ignored until it goes away. 
Once again, I’m forced to question if conservatives are capable of remembering that they gave women the vote nearly a century ago. The
If you haven’t heard about this newest scandal about to blow the doors off this administration and finally begin the impeachment proceedings that should have started on January 21st, 2009, well, I don’t know what rock you’ve been hiding under. It all started when 
You remember when Gandhi fought against the British occupation of India through a systematic program of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience? Of course you do, you got the Facebook invite. 
Yes, the color-aroused yahoos are already off to a nice start in 2010. (