George Will writes a column arguing for the importance of fathers in people's lives.
Actually, let me put it another way. George Will uses a man whose father was his mother's rapist (and also her father) to prove the importance of fathers in people's lives.
Jesus Christ, I need to boil my brain right now.
Like Atrios, I feel both surprised that Cal Thomas went there and sadly ashamed that I was surprised. And by “there”, I mean that Thomas has gone ahead and come out against the First Amendment.
We are doing a poor job of fighting the terrorists at home if we continue to allow Muslim immigrants, especially from Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, into America. We won’t win this war if we permit the uncontrolled construction of mosques, as well as Islamic schools, some of which already have sown the seeds from which future terrorists will be cultivated. We won’t win this war if we continue to permit the large-scale conversion to Islam of prison inmates, many of whom become radicalized and upon release enlist in al-Qaida’s army.
He then suggests that we model ourselves after Syria when it comes to monitoring imams and Muslim congregations. No word, of course, on whether or not we should extend that surveillance to Christians, even though Christian terrorists are an ongoing problem. Ask any abortion provider.
Of course, because some moron will inevitably accuse me of wanting to monitor all Christians, I am not saying that. It’s a violation of basic human rights and not a good use of limited resources to monitor everyone. Which is to say that Thomas manages, in a couple of paragraphs, to come out against the Fourth Amendment that protects against unwarranted search and seizure, as well as the First Amendment, that protects the freedom of religion. My point is simply to draw attention to the wild double standard here. Thomas would revolt if you proposed putting the same restrictions on Christians that he would have put on Muslims. Which means, once again, that he and people like him are motivated by delineating who is and isn’t a “real” American, and only extending rights to those people who pass their arbitrary, unconstitutional standards.
I also want to draw attention to how unabashedly fascist Thomas is, in his use of the term “purging” to describe his proposal to scrub Muslims and presumed Muslims out of our society through immigration restrictions, harassment, preventing prisoners to convert, and disallowing Muslims to build houses of worship. If you suggested that Muslims be pushed into ghettos and had their movements controlled through the use of a badge system, I have little doubt that Thomas and his buddies would be all over that, too. Of course, we had idiots showing up in comments here and claiming that Islam is an “ideology” and so the concerns about racism are misplaced, as if restricting people’s basic human rights based on a cultural/religious/ethnic identity is so easily bracketed off from previous and similar assaults on Jews, African-Americans, the Irish, etc. If you don’t think so, ask yourself this: How do you think Thomas and his buddies intend to tell who is Muslim and who isn’t? Do you think that someone who, like Barack Obama, had a Muslim parent but isn’t Muslim himself would count? What about someone who isn’t really faithful, but does participate in family occasions and holidays? What about people who hail from predominantly Muslim countries but aren’t Muslim? The haters have already made it clear that they don’t distinguish between Al Qaeda and a thoroughly integrated Muslim community center like Park 51, and if anything, they find the latter more threatening because it exposes the lie that is their black and white worldview. This is about creating an “us” and a “them”, and then scapegoating the “them”. Truth and basic decency get in the way of that project.
By the way, if it wasn’t true before, it’s now true that the word “balance” has come to mean “right wing propaganda”. A Maine newspaper ran a fairly pedestrian story about the end of Ramadan on September 11th, and the date gave the bigots their in for freaking out. And the paper apologized for not having “balance”. What do they mean by “balance”? If you show Muslims doing things that threaten to make readers ponder the possibility that they’re human beings, are you obliged to balance that with a story declaring that they aren’t human beings?
This just reinforces the theory that what is really sending wingnuts around the bend is the understanding that the vast majority of Muslims aren’t terrorists. They’re harder to scapegoat if the majority of Americans realize that they’re not scary, monstrous, or even particularly different. And it’s clear that it’s really, really important to wingnut America that Muslims are available as scapegoats. So any story that is humanizing or informative causes the wingnuts to lose their shit.
Since Muslims have decided to piss off conservatives by being Muslim on American soil, the inevitable response has finally come: an extended gay joke.
So, the Muslim investors championing the construction of the new mosque near Ground Zero claim it’s all about strengthening the relationship between the Muslim and non-Muslim world.
As an American, I believe they have every right to build the mosque - after all, if they buy the land and they follow the law - who can stop them?
Which is, why, in the spirit of outreach, I’ve decided to do the same thing.
I’m announcing tonight, that I am planning to build and open the first gay bar that caters not only to the west, but also Islamic gay men. To best express my sincere desire for dialogue, the bar will be situated next to the mosque Park51, in an available commercial space.
This is not a joke. I’ve already spoken to a number of investors, who have pledged their support in this bipartisan bid for understanding and tolerance.
As you know, the Muslim faith doesn’t look kindly upon homosexuality, which is why I’m building this bar. It is an effort to break down barriers and reduce deadly homophobia in the Islamic world.
It goes on, but you get the point.
You see? People are angry about something a group of Muslims did. Therefore, it is a perfect and totally proportionate response to do something that you think will totally piss Muslims off, except it’s actually just asinine and completely disingenuous. It’s like that time your neighbors dropped their leaves on your lawn, so you converted your house into an S&M-themed clothing store called “Fuck 908 Higgins Avenue”. Totally rational.
Of course, this has resulted in much glee and pun-based hilarity:
And of course, Twitter is getting into the swing of things by naming Greg’s gay bar. Here are some ideas:
Al Gayda — Chuck_Dizzle
The Velvet Sword, Jihard and/or Dome of the Cock — AceofSpades
United 69 — Iowahawkblog
Ba’ath House — DuchessRebecca
Now, I’m not particularly offended that these people are assembling to engage in the world’s biggest gay joke ever, or that they’re juvenile assholes. This is America - we were founded on the premise that everyone’s allowed to be a juvenile asshole! Megan McArdle is waiting for the outrage to arise:
I am hoping that at least one person will attempt to explain why we should support the mosque near Ground Zero, but not the gay bar next to the mosque near Ground Zero. I would find that very entertaining.
I’m sure she would.
Now, if there’s anything wrong with this plan, it’s not a gay bar qua gay bar next to a Muslim community center qua Muslim community center. It’s that it’s a gay bar qua people who are not gay and don’t particularly like gay people and don’t particularly like Muslims next to a Muslim community center qua Mohameddan obelisk of terror and jihadist victory.
The plan only works for the builders of the gay bar if they think that Park 51 is being built as a disingenuous effort to piss off specific sensitive groups of people, which makes this simply a mirror effort to (you guessed it) piss off specific sensitive groups of people. Oddly enough, this makes it eminently worthy of criticism if you believe that the community center is being built for one set of clearly stated reasons and the gay bar would be build for another set of clearly stated reasons that are based on a deliberate misunderstanding of the former set of reasons. (This isn’t even to mention the fact that another group, gays and lesbians, gets their identity appropriated for a cheap and insulting political stunt. If it works, the best that’s happened is that a bunch of straight Christian Republicans have made life harder for Muslims, gays and lesbians at no actual risk or harm to themselves. Well done!)
Personally, I just think if you can get together the money to build a fake gay bar just to piss off a bunch of people who are getting together to take Pilates classes, you’ve got enough money to start an actual business that would make actual money and employ actual employees. But fuck it, we’re not in a recession, and I know nothing about business. Fake gay bar it is.
UPDATE: Glenn Beck clip on this under the fold. Swear to God.
Kathleen Parker, author of the infamous “Obama is our first female president” column, followed up with a column declaring that she had no idea calling a black man a woman for not going apeshit in any way played on centuries of racial stereotypes. Of course, the column, in which she purports to be race blind and Obama’s eighth cousin (which immediately strips him of racial identity) was an edited draft. Below is the original.
The President is my nigga By Kathleen Parker
Black people wrote to me and told me some things after my last column. Apparently, there are some rhetorical themes that they believe are common, and I am thus offensive when I say that the President is a sweet little girl of a man in contrast to a Samuel L. Jackson or Don King.
Some of these blacks were polite, and admitted that I was correct, but just wanted me to see how their misperceptions could color my article. I want to rub these people’s heads and wish them the best on their path towards dunking and appearing on Def Comedy Jam. I’d even be happy to share grape soda with them on a hot day in Alabama. Others, however, were less civil.
Do I think people are too sensitive? Yes. Do I think I may have overstepped the line? No. How could I? Toni Morrison, a black, once called Bill Clinton our first black president, and nobody believed he was black except for Robert Mellon Scaife and three quarters of the conservative movement.
But I also recognize that my life experience is different from that of most African Americans. And that experience allows me both the luxury of seeing people without the lens of race, but also (sometimes) to fail to imagine how people of other backgrounds might interpret my words incorrectly. Of course, given my lack of racial focus, I don’t even know that these people are of different backgrounds. I often wonder why white people so often think their skin is dark like the eclipsed sun, but then I just figure they’re beat poets. Silly folk.
As my Post colleague Jonathan Capehart wrote on the PostPartisan blog—and explained to me in a telephone conversation—black men are held to a different standard than whites. They are practiced in keeping their emotions under wraps. They can’t “go off,” as some have urged Obama to do in response to the gulf oil spill.
I hadn’t thought of it this way, but I take Jonathan and others at their word that it’s a fact of life for African American men. I trust that their inability to evolve past race gives them credence to relay the thoughts and opinions of others who see race (or, as I call them, racists).
Barack Obama is not a black man. He is just a man. I can no more see him as black than I can see Jackie Chan as Asian or Arnold Schwarzenegger as Austrian. They are all white women in my book.
But I also don’t see Barack as black for a different and more personal reason. I had intended to save this nugget for a future column, but now seems as good a time as any to brag. The President is my nigga.
Barack Obama and I are eighth cousins, once removed. Spiritually, metaphysically, that gives us a bond that makes him as much Kathleen Parker as it does me Barack Obama. As kin, we share a bond that transcends race. We shared a figurative childhood together, playing double dutch on the corner with fatass little Pookie while Crackhead Joe tried to sell us ice cream he stole from the ice cream truck. We figured nobody would ever pay 75 cents for a bomb pop, but Pookie always found the money. Then Pookie got shot one day, just playing ghetto games with kids who had ghetto names.
We shared figurative experiences not just from Barack’s childhood, but also from mine; walking down by the lake and discussing our future hopes and dreams - being captain of the lacrosse team, owning a yacht, becoming president. We would take a boat out and idly lounge around, drinking secreted cans of Budweiser as our skin became red and shiny in the summer sun.
None of this has anything to do with race. I am proud that Barack Obama is my nigga, my homey from the wayback. As his cousin, and as his motherfuckin’ ride or die nigga myself, I am pulling for him to do better.
The solemnly protected First Amendment right of a conservative commentator to insult one of the world’s major faiths demands that said commentator not be criticized for speaking, but saying a word that pisses off Sarah Palin should be met with swift and exacting social criticism.
A little laugh for your AM.
Mr. Homo-Toms is back for more after my gentle spanking of him for his last essay a few weeks ago (”Kaufman at Huff Post: misguided race-based rant on LGBT rights—and ‘Homo-Toms’”). David Kaufman is the multi-racial proprietor of Transracial.net, and for some reason, he’s 1) fixated and confused about why LGBTs might draw
parallels to the black civil rights movement and 2) angry that the LGBT online community isn’t walking in lockstep and happy with the rollout of the Democratic/Obama agenda.
Kaufman takes a crack at several bloggers, movement commentators, including yours truly, for our
alleged cheering and crowing about Scott “Cosmo” Brown’s win in Massachusetts. I never supported Brown or cheered him on; in fact we ran fundraising links for Coakley. And note Kaufman links to nothing on my blog—he can’t find anything of the sort. From the Huff Post piece, “LGBT Leaders and Spokespeople Undermining the Cause.”
The schadenfreude surrounding Scott Brown’s Massachusetts Senate win is the final confirmation of the current LGBT leadership’s betrayal of 50 years of progressive politics. It began within minutes of Coakley’s concession speech: A volley of “I told you sos” by her haughty Carolina highness, Pam Spaulding. Mock-shock and caustic concern from the dirt-dishers over at Queerty. Dispassionate dispatches from those “just-the-facters” Towleroad, Joe.My.God and the AMERICAblog. And finally—a muddled, misanthropic, self-serving and—obvi!—Obama-bashing brief from David Mixner.
That Brown won should have come of little surprise to these LGBT “leaders” or their devoted fan base. After all, Spaulding, Queerty, Mixner and Co. practically cheer-led the former Cosmo-hunk to this critical triumph. Having officially turned on their president, these netrooters have conceded the greater good for their own shortsighted image-inflating. Well aware of the monumental consequences of a Republican win, Gay-stream media nevertheless continued their Dem-dissing and Obama-bashing with little concern for its election-day implications.
I like that I have earned yet another keen endorsement - “her haughty Carolina highness.” That’s NORTH Carolina highness if you’re nasty… 
Anyway I’d love to see where Kaufman could find any pro-Brown posts on here, but why bother when you can generate incoherent pablum like that. What’s even more outlandish is that our criticism of the slow-go, no-go, run-from-timetables strategy of this administration and Congress when it comes to LGBT civil rights, is seen by Kaufman as endangering the entire progressive agenda.
Health care is at risk following the loss of the Democratic Senate majority. Additional Democratic senate seats are vulnerable to attack by an emboldened Republican party. Progressive White House initiatives may now be scaled back as Obama is forced to downsize his populist platforms. And—most crucially—the very LGBT issues these leaders triumph have never been more threatened by political rollbacks and the potential for voter-led regressive propositions. Our very economic, civil and physical liberties are imperiled—and all Spaulding can dish up is an “I told you so”. All Mixner can muster is yet another MLK-mooching missive on HuffPost.
What are we homos, 3%-7% of the population? And how many of us are bloggers of note? What in blazes is Kaufman smoking, because we all needed that to get through the eight years of Bush.
I do love that I’ve been endowed with so much power that I can topple prospects for a Dem-controlled Congress. Might Obama, Rahm and Nancy and Harry have a little to do with the state of things right now, David? The essay is again, so misguided that it’s not hard to imagine that Kaufman is either: 1) on the payroll of the Obama admin (btw, that would be a raw deal) or 2) has extreme hostility issues that he needs to deal with unrelated to the topic at hand.
The one part of the essay that is actually worth addressing because of its offensiveness is Kaufman’s obsession with declaring that the LGBT community, which includes black gays, has no business even discussing the relevance, for instance, of Loving v. Virginia and how it will play a role when marriage equality goes before SCOTUS.
Unrepentantly racist and race-bating on the White side; complicit, silent and homo Tom-like on the Black. Steeped in anger whilst mired by impotence. And shamelessly borrowing from earlier civil rights movements with zero respect or understanding of what they were truly about.
In fact, it’s time to stop with the niceties and simply tell it like it is: Enough with the Loving v. Virginia references and its “Blacks got their rights too” reductivism. End the Mixner-styled “Gay Apartheid” hysterics and endless take-downs of the Black church. It’s boring, it’s tired, it’s obnoxious and it’s offensive.
Wake up, David - the homo-Tom jive is getting stale. Loving v. Virginia is relevant, and the homophobia of the black church is a political impediment that is worthy of discussion. Look no further than the loud, proud ignorance of carpetbagging NOM-tool Bishop Harry Jackson in his quest to stop marriage equality in DC as the black face of white fundamentalist groups like the Family Research Council.
There are mini-me Bishop Jacksons all around the country willing to shill bigotry from the pulpit with the backing of well-funded white evangelical organizations. And way too many of these pastors in the pulpit are not protecting the sanctity of their own marriages.
And as someone who is also a multiple minority, I nearly fell out of my chair laughing at this bold ego stroke:
I am American, mixed-race, Jewish and Gay. I am, you could say, an ultimate minority.
And this means what? That opposing White House strategy—after promises Candidate Obama made, not something that was extracted out of him—and calling out for accountability, is tantamount to revoking your black and progressive cards? Wow, if you want blind followers, file over to the other side of the aisle. Yawn.
You need better aim than that, David. Try again, with a little less mood-enhancement.
Maureen Dowd writes a lot of short sentences.
She wants to show strength.
And so she is using few words, but powerfully so.
Mainly, she is just angry that the President wasn’t angry with anger because of a botched terrorist attack. This is because Presidents should not think, they should simply yell crazy shit so that us layfolk can comfortable about the fact that the President is leading.
No Drama Obama is reticent about displays of emotion. The Spock in him needs to exert mental and emotional control. That is why he stubbornly insists on staying aloof and setting his own deliberate pace for responding — whether it’s in a debate or after a debacle. But it’s not O.K. to be cool about national security when Americans are scared.
Look. I live an hour from Detroit. I spend time in Detroit. People around here are not particularly scared. In fact, they’re more annoyed at the new ridiculous TSA guidelines than they are afraid that Barack Obama is going to let planes blow up out of a morbid and detached curiosity about the physics of concussive force in midair.
I’m not entirely sure what we’re supposed get from our President. There were screwups. Obama took an eminently reasonable amount of time to figure out what happened, and then talked to the nation about it. He didn’t attempt to turn a man wearing an explosive diaper into one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (War, Famine, Death and Pampers, apparently), he simply approached it like a rational human being.
It’s sickening how We the People are viewed by the commentariat - as scared little babies who expect our leaders to be pulled straight from the movies, able to insipid, buzzword-laden speeches that don’t communicate anything directly, but communicate to paid communicators that they’re communicating. And that, most of all, is what’s meaningful and effective for all of America. So get up there and start yelling, Obama. It’s the only way you’ll ever be good at anything.
While Andrew Sullivan has been hard to peg on some issues (and catches heat on all sides for many) , he’s been clear that he was searching for U.S. conservatism to reflourish. As he notes in his latest column, he’s supported Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Dole and Bush and Kerry and Obama, so for Sully, it must be painful, yet easy to write “Leaving the Right,” citing many of the same reasons Little Green Footballs founder Charles Johnson did for leaving a movement that is driving the comservative movement—and the GOP—over a cliff (see my earlier post). A sampling of Andrew’s kiss off to the whack job right wing:
I cannot support a movement that claims to believe in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal, extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced by the system to return to the rule of law.
I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.
I cannot support a movement that so abandoned government’s minimal and vital role to police markets and address natural disasters that it gave us Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008.
I cannot support a movement that holds torture as a core value.
I cannot support a movement that holds that purely religious doctrine should govern civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.
I cannot support a movement that is deeply homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.
...I cannot support a movement that would back a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified and duplicitous because of identity politics and electoral cynicism.
I cannot support a movement that regards gay people as threats to their own families.
I cannot support a movement that does not accept evolution as a fact.
I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy.
I cannot support a movement that refuses ever to raise taxes, while proposing no meaningful reductions in government spending.
I cannot support a movement that refuses to distance itself from a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.
Go read the rest. As I said in my post on Charles Johnson’s departure from the movement, I really don’t see an easy way back to the party of limited government with the disturbing stranglehold of the theocrats on the GOP and its fealty to the likes of Rush and his dittoheads. Not that I have any advice that the GOP would care to take, but where are all the country club Republicans and moderates? Why aren’t noted conservatives in a race to publicly call out the jackbooted thugs and bible beaters who are holding them hostage?
Part of the reason, of course, is that the movement’s political strategy that is now so beholden to a voter base that is rife with under-educated, easily massaged-by-messaging populace that spends way too much time believing and spreading conspiracy theories, irrationally fearing brown and black people, and trying to control private behavior they abhor, yet they often commit themselves because of their own tortured, hypocritical madness. The small-government traditional conservatives are far outnumbered by these know-nothings, but as long as the fundies and crazies just behaved like sheep, everything was fine. Naturally, when the fringe wing finally noticed that, aside from getting their SCOTUS picks, they weren’t receiving anything by lip service to its social agenda, there was going to be a move for a coup when the Republicans went down hard in defeat in 2006 and 2008.
Now the beast is awake, caterwauling and calling for hard-right “purity” in the movement; nothing will make it cease at this point, and thus it’s time to abandon ship—the beast has stepped on the auto-destruct sequence button. Other sane conservatives need to come to their senses, swallow their pride, and save their own movement.
And as I’ve said before, with an opposition party in such distress, why are our Dem leaders so obsessed with not offending the know-nothings, bigots and bible beaters? They will never get their votes, and the folks in the middle of the road are tired of the slacker-*ss behavior on the Hill—for instance, many of them want not just a public option, but single-payer health care (they live in the real world as opposed to Beltway world), and yet they see both sides caving to interests other than those who put them in office. I don’t know how much more weakened the GOP could be before some spines were grown by these Dems.
Related:
* Don’t pass out - Little Green Footballs post: Why I Parted Ways With the Right
I’m torn about whether this John F. Harris article is terrible. On the one hand, it’s like a hall of mirrors…of stupid. It’s a reporter discussing all the things that he and his ilk could be saying about Obama…but aren’t yet. Harris proposes 7 narratives that Obama hopes doesn’t catch on, which, technically makes sense - I certainly hope that one of seven largely contradictory and largely unsupported narratives based largely on insider gossip and what seems like random interactions with people who may or may not be in the Obama Administration. The narratives are:
1.) He thinks he’s playing with Monopoly money
2.) Too much Leonard Nimoy
3.) That’s the Chicago Way
4.) He’s a pushover
5.) He sees America as another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe
6.) President Pelosi
7.) He’s in love with the man in the mirror
So, Obama is a too-logical, frivolous narcissist who bullies people around as they push him over (particularly Nancy Pelosi), and he also hates America. QED.
What Harris wants this to demonstrate is the terrible position Obama has found himself in, having frittered away all of his goodwill with
the American people
the Washington press corps. What this actually demonstrates is that the Washington press corps literally makes shit up, and that covering the leader of the free world allows ample opportunity to take one interaction, one event, and spin it into the very definition of a presidency simply by focusing on it ad nauseum. The reason the media is so distrusted is precisely this - Harris has written what’s little more than an effective holdup note, letting Obama know that if he steps out of line there’s a myriad of ways in which he will be made to pay.
There should be some shame on Harris’ part for writing a story that’s basically admitting his job is sitting around throwing darts at a board, deciding what inane shit he wants to say today. However, I’m pretty sure he’ll be on MSNBC all day tomorrow, discussing the serious and deep import of all the ways in which Obama is losing at everything. And the best part is that it actually helps to cover up the actual issues with the Obama Administration, because Spock jokes are so much more fun to repeat for 16 hours a day on cable news.
I already took a small swipe at this piece by David Brooks, but I thought it deserved a longer examination, because it fits into the millenia-old tradition of sex panics inspired by new technology. Until I heard a lecture about it at the (where else?) Sex Tech conference, I had never realized how much a sex panic inevitably follows the development of a new technology, at least one that broadens people’s horizons through geography, art, or communication. It’s also funny to me how people forget so easily. Take this line, for instance:
Once upon a time — in what we might think of as the “Happy Days” era — courtship was governed by a set of guardrails.
Hey David, the kids these days are calling it the “Mad Men” era. But it’s funny, because the era he paints as so idyllic and peaceful, where kids did where they were told and no one had invented sex yet, was actually an era of extreme moral, sexual panic over rabid social and technological changes. If Brooks was living in that era, he’d be writing alarmist columns about the evils of “Negro music”, the electric guitar, jukeboxes and sock hops. He’d be bemoaning the promiscuity that comes once kids start dancing by themselves, instead of with partners. And the availability of privacy in cars, especially at drive-ins, would send him over the edge.
Brooks is upset over the explosion in popularity of text messaging on cell phones, which he links to promiscuity and the breakdown of Twue Wuv, which he argues can only be achieved by strongly limiting your options. And apparently, text messaging makes it easier (?) to have a number of potential partners on a string, so you can hedge your bets and sample the goods. As a number of Double X bloggers pointed out, comparing this negatively to the 50s is incoherent, since the 50s was an era where that kind of automatic monogamy after a date or two wasn’t expected at all, and both sexes were encouraged to hedge their bets by going on as many dates as possible with as many different people. And monogamy was only undertaken after you were “pinned”, which required having a formal discussion. Granted, people weren’t having sex with as many partners then, but other than that, we’re actually reverting to form.
But what teed me off was the way that Brooks contradicts himself. His thesis is that young people involved in these dating schemes of having first and second stringers, and using cell phones to organize your options, are scriptless and flailing.
There were certain accepted social scripts. The purpose of these scripts — dating, going steady, delaying sex — was to guide young people on the path from short-term desire to long-term commitment.
Over the past few decades, these social scripts became obsolete.
He blames feminism, technology, and a sliding regard for etiquette. But what he describes is a very rules-laden, etiquette-conscious script for modern dating, completely contradicting himself.
I headed over to Townhall this morning, in much the same way you go the long way to rubberneck at the accident you heard about on the radio. Wait, I’m the only one who does that? Well, it was theoretical anyway…not that I’d ever do it…gotta finish this post up, there’s something going down on 23!
Anyways, Walter Williams, who is black, is attempting to negate Jimmy Carter’s comments that much of the criticism Obama faces is based on racism by declaring - wait for it! - that Carter himself is racist!
Former president Jimmy Carter said, “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.” That’s from a man who earlier referred to Obama as “This black boy” on the Jim Lehrer “News Hour.”
WHAAAAAA? A former President demeaningly referred to a grown black man as a “boy”, and the librul legacy MSMedia covered it up? Despicable!
JIM LEHRER: And do you think that—if it happens that he is elected, or even just being nominated, is—will send positive ripple effects throughout the country on the race issue?
JIMMY CARTER: Around the world. Around the world. And I think it already has sent a wave of approbation and admiration in many countries around the world, just knowing that this black boy who grew up with just a loving mother and grandparents—and that was about all he had to start with—does now have a chance to become the nominee of the Democratic Party for president.
And that’s a transcript from Jammie Wearing Fool, who probably inserted in another three things he thought were racist but were actually just multisyllabic words. Jimmy Carter referred to Barack Obama as a “black boy” during the period in which Obama was a boy. And black, too. That was shortly after he renounced his Indonesiandom.
I can’t wait until conservative bloggers decide to protest a elementary school basketball game on the South Side of Chicago for engaging in racist stereotypes. And then claim they actually left the streets cleaner than when they got there, like tiny Roombas who claim they read Hayek on a regular basis.
Ross Douthat interviews Frank Luntz to get to the bottom of healthcare reform’s unpopularity, only four months after he warned that Republicans were going up against the tremendous popularity of healthcare reform, because he’s Frank Luntz and he’s just like that.
he long shadow of that 1994 drubbing helps explain why Democrats will probably end up passing something called “health care reform” before the year is out, the better to avoid their party’s Clinton-era fate.
But Frank Luntz, the pollster behind Gingrich’s Contract With America, thinks they may have the wrong early-1990s parallel in mind.
When I asked him about the lessons of 1994, Luntz — whose latest book, “What Americans Really Want ... Really,” is pitched to a bipartisan audience — happily rattled off the parallels between that era and this one: anxiety about deficits, furious distrust of Washington, growing doubts about a Democratic president.
But Luntz insisted that in the run-up to the ’94 election, “it wasn’t the health care debate that was driving the anger; it was the crime bill.”
Basically, what Luntz points out is that the insane response to Bill Clinton wasn’t just because of the health care bill, it was pretty much everything that Clinton was doing that was in the least bit identifiably liberal. The secret isn’t, as Douthat and Luntz try to argue - while shilling for Luntz’s book, because that’s an awesome perk of having unjustifiably been gifted an op-ed space on the NYT op-ed page - that the American public has an aversion to liberalism which must be averted as soon as possible before Obama dons his Che hat. The secret is that there is a core of the American public that America’s right wing has been radicalizing since FDR.
It’s often said that we shouldn’t dismiss the opposition to Obama as racists, or crazy, or potentially violent. And the thing is, we aren’t dismissing them. We’re accurately describing them, and taking their threat very seriously. There’s an assumption in our discourse that by describing someone as a paranoid bigot, we’re marginalizing them and saying they don’t have influence. This is largely because of a mainstream-media driven assumption that anyone who appeals to large numbers of people or makes their voice influential on the national stage must ergo be rational. I, for one, am totally willing to admit that crazy people such as Baron Weephausen can have a huge, even outsized effect on the political debate while still potentially needing a steady supply of adult diapers for what we call “rage leaks”.
The fact that a movement gains momentum does not make it rational or worthy of driving public discourse; it just means that far too many people are gullible enough to believe that Barack Obama is hunting down grandparents and harvesting their worn-out organs to mulch his organic garden with. They’re dangerous, they’re stupid, they’re angry, but what they are not is “dismissed”.
Ross Douthat finally got around to the column we all knew was coming - the embrace of Judd Apatow as the new film Jesus of conservatism.
I always find the lionization of Apatow as conservative standard-bearer puzzling. What Apatow did with The 40-Year-Old Virgin (and has hammered into the ground ever since) is simply take a genre that had been hammered into the ground since Animal House and Porky’s and freshen it up. It was the raunchy sex comedy in a different setting with a different age group. It was funny, timely and smart, but it wasn’t popular because Steve Carell didn’t get some until after he got married - it was popular because, among other things, it made a funny joke about how his first time lasted five seconds. Apatow’s conservative morality, which generally has a lot more to do with forced relationship engineering than larger attitudes about sexual activity, is always an undercurrent that sneaks its way into his films, from Knocked Up‘s inability to say “abortion” to Virgin‘s wedding. Ultimately, it’s better if things happen this way, so in Apatow’s world, they do.
Nominally, Douthat’s point is about how Apatow’s terribly awesome juju has been tempered a bit by the failure of Funny People, mainly because the American public wasn’t ready because it takes a more nuanced conservative view of the world. (The actual reason it’s done so poorly is because it’s an incredibly long drama starring a bunch of comedic actors making jokes once every few minutes, but sold as the mega-Apatow comedy.) In essence, Apatow struck the perfect blend of conservatism and entertainment for years, and then lapsed too far into his conservative leanings for America’s comfort. It’s a fundamental misreading of his film and of the audience, but it does provide a perfect excuse for the film’s failure: having conditioned audiences to years of a morality that’s easy to digest, Funny People was just too challenging. Matt Yglesias thinks this is a great point; I think it’s a predictable way of selling a political ideology as the hard right over the easy wrong (or in this case, the easier right).
It’s a way of saying something trite (it’s hard to get people to do hard things) in a way that sounds deep, taking credit for the good while bemoaning the heavy burden that comes with being so damn right about everything. It allows Douthat to take a poorly marketed and targeted film and convert it into another example of conservative martyrdom, the nobility of its message and self-evident righteousness of its sacrifice another indication of the struggle that conservatives face for being so damn right about everything. Apatow’s films are willfully misread as popular because of their easy conservatism rather than popular films with easy conservatism thrown in, and his latest again misread as a great conservative statement that simply challenges its audience too much.
The problem here isn’t whether conservatism failed or succeeded, it’s the adoption of everything meaningful by conservatism to the exclusion of all other schools of thought. While it’s nice that Douthat admits that the harder an ideology is to conform to, the less appealing it is, it’s not quite as great of a point when it’s couched in the idea that all the stuff people like is also a part of that same ideology.
I will put in context Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s word about the racial dynamics of Roe v. Wade by taking them wildly out of context.
I wish every conservative commentator had to spend a week working in a public defender’s office and another week in a public health clinic. Either they’d have a come-to-Jesus moment, or a series of anecdotes so terribly racist they couldn’t see an aspirin without referring to fried chicken.
David Broder is afraid of terrorism prosecutions because of the INSANE MEGA VENGEANCE that’s motivating the whole shebang.
But now Obama is being lobbied by politicians and voters who want something more—the humiliation and/or punishment of those responsible for the policies of the past. They are looking for individual scalps—or, at least, careers and reputations.
Their argument is that without identifying and punishing the perpetrators, there can be no accountability—and therefore no deterrent lesson for future administrations. It is a plausible-sounding rationale, but it cloaks an unworthy desire for vengeance.
Broder demonstrates just how worthy this is by pointing out other times that people were mad about things, and how proposed solutions to those instance of outrage were bad ideas, because nothing says “I really thought about this” like convenient and inapplicable analogies. But really, the reason that this is vengeance, and such a terrible idea, is that the Bush administration followed the time-honored tradition of breaking the law in a way that was proper and well-considered, which is why we let people off for highly contrived multi-hour bank heists - after all, they discussed them at length.
But having vowed to end the practices, Obama should use all the influence of his office to stop the retroactive search for scapegoats.
This is not another Sept. 11 situation, when nearly 3,000 Americans were killed. We had to investigate the flawed performances and gaps in the system and make the necessary repairs to reduce the chances of a deadly repetition.
The memos on torture represented a deliberate, and internally well-debated, policy decision, made in the proper places—the White House, the intelligence agencies and the Justice Department—by the proper officials.
Well, that assuages my need to yell at the heavens in a bloodthirsty rage. After all, if the people who committed a crime debated the crime among the people who were going to commit the crime at length, really, no crime was committed at all. It’s like they actually did society a favor; after all, we can always stop torturing people, but we’ll never get the chance back for respectful, considered debate.
Ergo, when I call David Broder a dickfaced soulless fuckhead shilling for the worst of “proper” society’s instincts, I do so after having consulted with literally dozens of people, having debated for hours the extent and nature of his fuckheadery as a policy matter. Fucking cockbag asshole. (This is all okay, right? Internally well-debated!)
