Right now, Mitt Romney is two people. Romney #1 is the Romney that nearly got the nomination sewed up and wants to start running against Obama. That Romney was the one that came out when he was asked about the Blunt amendment yesterday afternoon:

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Unfortunately, the journalist misrepresented the bill. The Blunt Amendment is about a lot more than contraception; it would allow an employer to deny an employee any coverage for any "moral or religious" reason through the health insurance after it's been relinquished to the employee as compensation. Functionally, it's no different than an employer denying you the right to spend your salary on beer or condoms, if they disapprove, and it's closing in on giving the employer the right to require you to tithe to their church as a condition of your employment. Remember, the insurance coverage being debated here is yours. You paid for it, with a combination of labor and often cash. Giving an employer a right to dictate what care is covered is like giving your employer a right to live in your house because you used money they gave you in exchange for work to buy it.

This is part of a long tradition on the American right of demanding the right to control others while characterizing it as "freedom". It goes right back to slave owners claiming that the federal government was encroaching on their freedom to own others, i.e. their freedom to deprive others of all freedom. Now the argument is that for employers to be "free", they should have the right to deprive their employees of the freedom to use earned benefits as we see fit. Once the right to continue controlling compensation after it's been relinquished to the employee is established, I fully expect them to run rampant and start eyeballing control of wages next. After all, they're claiming that it's still "their" money, even after they sign the check!

I suspect Romney realized the public at large doesn't want your boss trying to control your private medical decisions because he has a prurient interest in your sex life---an interest that, if expressed in other ways, would get you hit with a sexual harassment lawsuit---and so he answered this way. In fact, Romney framed his answer in the "keep your boss out of your bedroom" way:

I’m not for the bill. But, look, the idea of presidential candidates getting into questions about contraception within a relationship between a man and a woman, husband and wife, I’m not going there.

An hour later, the other Romney---the one who wants Santorum to quit collecting delegates and threatening his assurance of getting the nomination---came out. And that Romney said, "Well, the base thinks only women will be affected by this, and only women will have their boss in their bedroom and in their doctor's office, trying to make their decisions for them."  And the base really doesn't think women should be free, since they use that freedom to have the evil, evil sex. (Of course, the base doesn't realize that this law would give the boss the right to be in the bedrooms and doctor's offices of male employees, as well.) So that Romney, the one who wants to put Santorum away permanently, said this:

“Regarding the Blunt bill, the way the question was asked was confusing," a spokesman told TPM. "Governor Romney supports the Blunt Bill because he believes in a conscience exemption in health care for religious institutions and people of faith.”

I'm usually skeptical of the argument that a long primary hurts the candidate's general election prospects, but this year is special. In order to win the nomination, Romney has to be on the record supporting the idea that your boss gets a say in your medical decisions and you sex life when you're off the clock. That's probably not going to be a popular opinion.

Rick Perlstein has a wonderful article up at The Daily Beast about how voters turned out in the polls to register their disapproval of having their taxes raised, when actually, their taxes were cut.  He argues, correctly in my opinion, that governance is impossible in the current atmosphere, because what you actually do doesn’t matter a bit in terms of convincing people to vote for you.  What matters is what people think you do.  In a properly functioning democracy, what people think aligns more closely to what is actually true, but in our dysfunctional democracy, the voters actually are more likely to believe something that isn’t true than something that is.

This is for two reasons: 1) Republicans are shameless liars and 2) There are no checks on their shameless lying. 

On cable news, the belief that taxes were raised for most people is trotted out without correction, since everything is about what someone said, not what the actual facts are.  The most you’ll get most of the time is, “Republicans claim taxes went up.  Democrats claim taxes went down.  Let’s talk to this moron over here about what this means for the elections.”  Rarely do you get a report on what actually happened, and rarely do they make it as entertaining as the horse race coverage on the rare occasions they do report the facts.

But in recent years, it’s gotten even worse, since the coverage has gone from, “Republicans said (fill in uncorrected lie).  Democrats said (something closer to the truth).”  Now it’s “Republicans said (lie that’s so outrageous that it can be fact-checked in two seconds, not that anyone is going to do that).  Democrats said (mumble mumble civility).”  As Rick argues:

When one side breaks the social contract, and the other side makes a virtue of never calling them out on it, the liar always wins. When it becomes “uncivil” to call out liars, lying becomes free.

And dammit, the essence of Obamaism as an ideology is that it is Uncivil to Call Out Liars.

Which brings me back to the Rally To Restore Sanity, which was widely and correctly criticized for embodying Jon Stewart’s worst tendencies of making false equivalences.  But I want to commend them strongly for one thing they did do exactly right, which was to stake out territory where calling out lies and bullshit is not considered uncivil.  That’s basically what “The Daily Show” is all about, after all.  The definition of “civil” isn’t “never do anything that makes someone else uncomfortable or angry”, because that automatically means that you have to be complicit with people who exploit that to do actual bad things.  Indeed, bad people are drawn to those with a mistaken idea of what civility is, because they’re easy to exploit.  You don’t have to forget someone is a human being to call bullshit.  In fact, I would argue that the greater call towards civility is towards the public at large.  The only way to be civil to the voters is to speak the truth without shame.

Tim Wise’s angry, hopeful, realistic retort to what he calls the “white right” throwing a temper tantrum is something everyone who is despondent should read.  In it, he discusses the fear that is driving so much of the angry white freakout that resulted in the Tea Party—-what they like to call a “demographic winter”, but I like to call “the changing face of America”.  It’s the fact that white people are losing their majority, and white conservatives losing it even faster, baby by baby, death by death, liberal conversion by liberal conversion.  It’s a quiet, slow revolution, but it is real.  It is why Harris County became a battleground for voter suppression, because it was a formerly white majority area that his now what they call minority-majority, i.e. there is not dominant group.  But the changing face of America is also why the districts that intersect that area went blue, despite the widespread attempts to stop minority voters from voting.

But the changing face of America is more than about racial diversity, though that is part of it.  Wise also touches, in a particularly inspiring passage, on another aspect:

In forty years or so, maybe fewer, there won’t be any more white people around who actually remember that Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, Opie-Taylor-Down-at-the-Fishing Hole cornpone bullshit that you hold so near and dear to your heart.

There won’t be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won’t be any more white folks around who actually remember them, and so therefore, we’ll be able to teach about them accurately and honestly, without hurting your precious feelings, or those of the so-called “greatest generation” — a bunch of miscreants who saved the world from fascism only to return home and oppose the ending of it here, by doing nothing to lift a finger on behalf of the civil rights struggle.

I will say that “Leave It To Beaver” never really existed.  Insofar as the Fox News crowd “remembers” it, they remember it mostly as a fantasy they bought in to, a fantasy they reinforce to each other as their excuse for their stupid electoral choices.  And he’s right that this is just as much what is slipping away as the generation that dominated that world ages and dies off.  The children of those who believe this fantasy couldn’t inherit it in the same way that the older generations did.  Oh sure, some do.  I know many people my age who retreat into the nuclear family rural American white bread mentality.  But we are the generation who grew up eating the shit that this fantasy created.  We were the ones whose families were torn up by divorce.  We were the ones who discovered sexual liberation and aren’t really ever going back.  We grew up after abortion and the pill were legal.  Our reference point for the TV show that spooned out a ridiculous fantasy of idealistic white bread family life was “The Brady Bunch”, a show about a blended family.  And even then, most of us are way more ironic about it than previous generations were on average about their strange familial fantasies.  Even the white people of my generation are a harder sell than the ones of earlier generations.  We grew up in the age of irony.  We were taught in school that racism is bad.  Rock and roll has always been a part of our lives, even when we were babies. We don’t have a memory of time when segregation was considered acceptable public policy.  We’re the ones moving out of suburbs and back into the cities. And subsequently, we vote for the Democrats in much larger numbers.  And then the generation of white people behind mine is even more unmoored from this reactionary fantasy.  They grew up with communal values being emphasized over nuclear family individualism.  They grew up in a time when there were always gay characters on TV.  They grew up with a different cultural context.

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This election day, the great under-reported story is how much the same old culture war issues pushed out the right wing vote. There’s been a lot of useful attention paid to an issue people don’t like to talk about, which is how much racism still motivates the right, that the people who supported segregation are still around and still have foul attitudes, even if they express them differently.  Also, it was just impossible to ignore the racial resentments underpinning the suddenly “concern” for the deficit that only gets expressed when conservatives are afraid social spending will help people they don’t like get a leg up, and is never expressed when we’re pissing trillions down the toilet fighting imperialist wars.  The reason it was impossible to ignore these resentments were they were up front and center: the ACORN debacle, the attack on Van Jones, the name-calling and spitting on John Lewis, the attack on Shirley Sherrod, Dr. Laura losing her shit and yelling the n-word at a black caller, Birtherism, the resurgence of anti-immigration sentiment, the Arizona “papers please” law, the controversy over the community center near the WTC, the overtly racist ad campaigns, etc.  I could probably think of another 15 examples if I wanted, quickly.  This is an important story, and I’m super glad people are waking up to these realities.

Unfortunately, there’s only so many hours in the day, and so the war on women has gone largely unnoticed.  To make it worse, a handful of female Republicans have allowed the mainstream media to pretend that sexism is basically behind us, except as an occasional thing that comes into play when someone says something nasty about a female candidate. But the reality is that gender anxieties are pushing the right wing out there as much as racial ones. As I noted at RH Reality Check, the two stand-in issues for the whole right wing slate for wingnuts on the ground are guns-and-abortion, with gay rights bringing up the rear. (DOUBLE ENTENDRE NOTED.)  Guns is a racialized issue to a large extent—-gun nuts often imagine they live in a war zone and are about to be attacked at any minute, and we can guess what they imagine their soon-to-exist attackers look like.  But gender also plays a big role.  I’d say the same thing about abortion rights, as well.  It’s about gender, but it’s also an intersectional issue.  Right wingers who want abortion banned are basically begging for a haves and have-nots system.  Bans on abortion mostly affect the vulnerable—-the poor and the young—-because women of means and with connections can often pay to have safe, discreet abortions.  The fact that anti-choice forces successfully attack abortion funding through both federal and private insurance reinforces this.  They want a system where the already vulnerable are kept oppressed by unwanted child-bearing, whereas the wives and daughters of the well-to-do get all the medical care their male supervisors deem they deserve.  They’re halfway there already.

What few people in the mainstream and on the left, besides Rachel Maddow and RH Reality Check, are talking about is how much this election is about this.  The Tea Party candidates are seen as extreme for their views on taxes, repealing parts of the Constitution, social spending, and even masturbation.  But there’s been very little alarm about their views on reproductive rights.  I submit that most of them wouldn’t have won their primaries without taking a harsh anti-woman stance.  This worries me mostly because the anti-choice project of mainstreaming extreme anti-woman views is working.

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Update: A video from Media Matters showing right wing media promoting the myth of voter fraud.

An optimistic commenter named serious bette on my last post suggested that one under-reported aspect of the GOTV effort has been outreach to African-American communities.

The media reports on every single burp that limbaugh spews out into the airwaves and all but ignores urban radio stations which have spent countless hours since Labor Day working to get out the vote. I can’t count the number of times I have heard the president, first lady and any number of other democrats on urban radio getting out the vote. The goal being to get just as many African Americans to vote this year as we saw in 2008 and the effort is bearing fruit, particularly in places where early voting is allowed.

This is good news, and she’s right that it’s way under-reported.  But I want to say that while it’s absolutely true that the mainstream media isn’t reporting this story, the right wing media is all over it.  Granted, they do it in the most spintastic way possible, but they are all about making sure their racist listener base knows that racial minorities are voting, that there’s massive outreach to often underserved communities, and that this is likely to show up in the polling data.  And they’re determined to stop it.

When James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart promoted those fraudulent ACORN videos, I honestly doubt they thought they could bring an end to venerable organization.  I think the intention is the same as with Fox News pretending that the “New Black Panthers” are a widespread, dangerous organization.  All of this is aimed at getting the conservative base to believe one, very important myth: That black and Hispanic voters are out to get you, which means you’re justified in believing they don’t really have a right to vote.  It’s the Real American thing—-it’s about rationalizing the belief that black or Hispanic voters voting at all is fraudulent, because they aren’t what you the wingnut consider Real Americans.

Getting angry conservatives to grouse about people who they don’t consider Real Americans isn’t hard to do, but this election, it’s been way over the top. Roy collected a number of examples of right wing bloggers bringing in cases of “fraud” they’ve seen.  What’s interesting about each and every “fraud” is that nothing happened.  Except that someone the witness doesn’t want voting voted.  I’m not exaggerating.  The examples of “fraud” that Roy collects wingnuts complaining about are:

*A professor letting students out early to vote. 
*Union leaders giving union members rides to the polls, and waiting around for their fellows while they’re voting.  This was interpreted by the paranoid witness as “forcing” them to vote.
*Disabled voters getting help from poll workers, who were probably not white enough in the eyes of the angry witness.

The common theme is a) all are incidents of completely legal voting and b) are assumed to be fraud, because the complainers don’t think those people should have the right to vote that they actually do.

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As promised, I was a “mama grizzly” for Halloween.  Thought it would be a funny illustration for this post, which is otherwise very serious.

I really enjoyed reading the reports coming back from the Rally to Restore Sanity.  While some people took Jon Stewart’s cry to mean, “Having political beliefs and ideas makes you a bad person, and reasonableness is the same as being apolitical”, I think the general idea was well-communicated, which is that policy should be based on reality, and political debate should be reasonable. I don’t think this means that one should lose their sense of humor or not call bullshit when you see it—-on the contrary, and clearly the organizers agree.  Stewart is sucked into that “both sides” mentality, and personally I think it’s because he over-relates to some issues wingnuts have, even as he intellectually disagrees with them.  (Which is why talking about abortion makes him uncomfortable, and he’s willing to entertain the ludicrous notion that someone like Mike Huckabee—-who backs an entire slate of policy ideas designed to make women second class citizens and push gays out completely—-has “moral” reasons for supporting a ban on abortion that just so happens to fit neatly with his overall sexist agenda.)  Stewart’s weirdnesses aside, I think the whole thing was an overall success, and regardless of the non-partisan nature of it, it sent the signal loud and clear that the Democrats stand for “sanity”.  It’s kind of sad that it’s gotten to that point—-I wish they stood for liberal values alongside reason—-but it definitely makes an argument for why people that aren’t fired up about the elections need to be.

I wish they’d done it a week earlier, though.  Partially for selfish reasons, but also because the message—-that reason is a value—-needed to percolate in the electorate more.  As it stands, nutty is winning out, at least wingnutty is. 

Despite scandals that have non-stop rocked the campaigns of Joe Miller, Rand Paul, and Sharron Angle, all are likely to win. Some are in neck-and-neck races, but I fear extensive voter suppression tactics from the right, the fact that this is a midterm and a lot of first time voters aren’t going to vote again, and the sense that the world is going to hell amongst liberal-leaning voters might be that which cinches it for them.  (But you can turn out to vote and encourage others to do the same, and try to reverse that!)  A lot of voters are low information and have actually tuned all this shit out, and so may have no idea what kind of nuts they’re voting for. 

All that said, Republicans are doubling down on getting out the base over trying to win over the middle, and I’m sure they have very good reasons for it.  In many ways, this election was a test—-how far could they go in terms of provoking reactionary anxieties in their base voters before their base voters said, “Uh, that’s too far for me.”  The answer is that they have yet to find any real limits.  Overtly racist pandering? The base eats it up.  Demanding that women be forced to bear rapists’ children?  They love it.  Standing for laws that could be used to ban birth control?  Ken Buck and Rand Paul are two that I know do, and that doesn’t seem like it matters to the base.  Which makes sense, since a Daily Kos-commissioned poll of Republicans showed that 31% of them would ban contraception, and 34% would ban the birth control pill specifically.  (I really, really want to see the age breakdown of these numbers.)  Even Christine O’Donnell is closing the gap.  The big lesson that Republicans are learning is there is no natural cap to the nutty.  I imagine it might just get worse from here on out, as it appears that the vortex that sucks reasonable white people in and shoots them out as Birther-believing, gun-wielding wingnuts appears to be growing rapidly.  If you’re still a reasonable white person from the middle class, I highly suggest that you tie yourself to something substantial in your house until after Election Day, so that you can’t be sucked in, a la Poltergeist.

What’s weird is that the narrative shaping up is that the teabaggers hurt the Republicans.  Salon has an article about Joe Miller up that asks if he went too far, and the answer is in the polling data—-he’s points up from Murkowski and will almost surely win this.  The only reason Sarah Palin is pretending to be frantically campaigning to “save” him is so that she can take all the credit when he wins.  This writer seems to think Sharron Angle was saved by the media focus on Christine O’Donnell, but I disagree. I think a lot of the voters dig that gun nut, woman-hating, racist vibe she gives off.

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In tonight’s “too little, too late” department: Harry Reid is dropping some truth bombs about Sharron Angle.  Politico, being wingnutty, takes a skeptical tone towards Reid’s accusations that Angle speaks in code and wants to eliminate the vast majority of the federal government, with a special eye towards services that it actually provides people.  It is, of course, absolutely true.  Anyone who has been paying attention since before the primaries knows that Angle started off as a hard core Christian libertarian who wanted to eliminate Social Security, unemployment, the Department of Education, basically anything and everything that could conceivably call an “entitlement”.  And even after the Republican party got a hold of her and explained very carefully that while it was great that she believed those things, she needed to lie about her beliefs to get elected, she still had a tendency to slip up frequently in public. She called people who suffered from layoffs and had to collect unemployment “spoiled”, and implied they just didn’t want to work. 

What’s funny is Reid’s assertion that he’s never run against anyone who speaks in code before.  I don’t believe that.  Let’s hope that Reid is just fudging the truth for rhetorical purposes here, because I’d argue that speaking in code is the Republican code.  What Angle brings to the equation is a particularly weak ability to sell her code as anything but code.  Every time she says something like “privatize Social Security”, you can just tell that what’s going on in her brain is, “That’s the phrase, right?  The one that will get me elected?”

I’m glad Reid is impatient, and I know that he’s a busy man, but I’m just sad that we’re seeing this so late in the game.  If it had been a relentless drumbeat of this kind of thing—-explaining to the public that “privatize” means “destroy”, or better yet, explain that it means “take your hard earned money and give it Wall Street so they can flush it down the toilet”—-then it probably would have been able to dampen the damage of Angle’s “fear the immigrants” cascade of ads.  As it stands, once you get people into the irrational hate zone, getting them out is pretty damn hard.  This is reflected in the polls, where Angle is coming out ahead. 

But hey, it’s a few more days.  Maybe Gawker will publish a tell-all story accusing Angle of getting drunk and making out with dudes.  Certainly would have mattered more than doing it to Christine O’Donnell.

Bad news this morning: According to FiveThirtyEight, Sharron Angle is pulling ahead in Nevada.  Her strategy of blanketing the state with overtly racist ads is apparently working.  Here’s the Young Turks talking about the ads:

A description of a particularly egregious one:

Sharron Angle’s latest attack against Senate opponent Harry Reid features a group of white graduates celebrating and posing for pictures, presumably leaving high school for higher education.

That image is followed by a photo of three scowling Hispanic men, whom the ad suggests are trying to seize preferred college tuition rates from the students. A banner proclaiming the men “illegal aliens” accompanies the photo.

The ad copy basically accuses Reid of taking money from the cute white kids and giving it to the scowling Hispanic men, so they can go to college and presumably scowl at your adorable grandchildren there, too.  She’s now released a “board game” ad that also reinforces the message that voting for Sharron Angle is a way to express your displeasure at the existence of Hispanic immigrants. 

I wish I could be surprised this is working in Nevada, but I’m not.  The state has become something of a beacon for retirees, a population that’s more conservative on average than the general population, and more likely to fall for race-baiting tactics.  There are just a lot of people who don’t care that you’re nuts, as long as you hate the same people they do.  And that’s showing up in the polls in Nevada. 

The good news, what little there is, is that it’s only putting her 4 points up.  I despair that slightly more than half the population is like, “Is she racist? That’s enough for me!”, but that’s actually a lower percentage than you probably had in the past.  The bad news is that Nevada is 56% white non-Hispanic, which means that you still have most white people voting for racism.  Like, way way way more white people are eager pro-racism voters than anti-racism voters.  What’s frustrating especially is that the bigot vote is basically just a matter of self-expression.  Even if a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment puts Angle into office, it’s not like it’s going to matter much in terms of the policies the bigot voters want.  Republicans aren’t going to do anything to actually get rid of the Mexican immigrants that the voters hate so much.  They’ll probably just keep making it hard for immigrants to achieve citizenship or get fair wages for their work.

The curb stomping at the Rand Paul/Jack Conway debate has, with good reason, been capturing a lot of attention.  It’s one of those iconic moments that distills so much into one shocking image.  But it’s just one in an escalating tide of Tea Party-inspired right wing thuggery, some of which has been endorsed by the candidates. Digby has rounded up many examples: Joe Miller playing the part of the big man by hiring militia types for “security”, Allen West doing the same with a motorcycle gang, and of course various acts of right wing terrorism, including Dr. Tiller’s murder.  Our country’s been in worse shape in terms of political violence before, but I think that’s why this is all so scary—-we have a national myth that those days are behind us, and we’ve grown as a people.  And yet. 

In another post, Digby highlights the the double standards they establish.

It’s quite interesting that so many of the tea party candidates are having “unauthorized” people who ask them questions arrested (or restrained and assaulted by their followers) when it was just a year ago that this was how they instructed their own people to behave at political meetings:

This morning, Politico reported that Democratic members of Congress are increasingly being harassed by “angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior” at local town halls.

This double standard doesn’t surprise me at all.  They simply think they’re Real Americans, and the rest of us aren’t, therefore they get to do what they want and the rest of us are eligible to sit down and shut up, or take a beating. 

There’s a fetish right now for blaming this crazy level of right wing populist fury on the economy.  And while I think bad times are increasing tension, my feeling is the economy doesn’t have as much to do with this as people think.  If Obama was presiding over unprecedented prosperity, the wingnuts would still be out in droves, and at best their arguments would be slightly changed.  I would point out that political thuggery from modern movement conservatives is hardly new, and arguably helped swing the 2000 election, by giving the Supreme Court a reason to argue that they had to shut down the vote counting to keep the peace. At the time, they called it the “Brooks Brothers riot”, a cadre of young Republicans flown into Florida to intimidate poll workers and shut down the vote counting, lest it reveal Gore the winner.

Can’t point to the economy as a reason for it then. 

I have an alternate theory, that goes back to the “I want my country back” slogan.  Ever since Nixon, Republicans have run, in one way or another, on the grounds that they’re the party of Real Americans, in opposition to those hippies/queers/welfare queens/multiculturalists/feminazis/fill in your scare word.  And they’ve been unbelievably successful with this.  There isn’t an election since then that they couldn’t rationalize, often correctly, is proof that they have the controlling majority of the country.  Carter was a fluke, both because of Watergate and because he managed to capture the evangelical vote before it settled comfortably into its rather permanent Republican home.  Clinton won—-twice—-because Ross Perot split the wingnut vote.  But each subsequent election, the demographics of this country shifted—-growing numbers of non-white voters, single women, and urban white liberals meant this stranglehold on the majority could quite likely disappear.

And frankly, it did in 2000.  Gore actually won the popular vote in 2000, fair and square, even while being perceived as a stiff.  And the reaction you got was threats of violence, chaos, and a ridiculous Supreme Court decision that amounted to blatant theft.  Perhaps we’ve forgotten because it’s too painful to remember.  But I believe that’s what’s coming back, only this time it wasn’t subdued by a close call that could be handed unfairly to the Republican.  This time, it was a blow out.  And all the wingnut fears about losing “their” country have come to pass.

That’s what’s pissing them off.  Economic woes are just one of the bats they’re using to beat us with.

I will note that I said just recently that just because we’re so close to the elections doesn’t mean that we’re not going to get a steady stream of Tea Party candidates doing evil, headline-grabbing shit.  Granted, holding a woman down and stomping on her head isn’t something that Rand Paul did, but being a weasel about it (as evidenced in the video above, which also features an excellent interview with Lauren Valle, the stomping victim) is grade A wingnuttery.  I’m as annoyed as anyone by the routine calls for this to be condemned by a candidate or that, but I do make an exception when it comes to the actual followers of a candidate engaging in violence or hate speech.  In these cases, when a candidate issues a full-throated condemnation, it can go a long way towards dissuading violence.  Violent, hateful thugs believe that they have the quiet support of leaders and their community, and if you issue half-hearted condemnations, they read that as support. Which can incite more violence.

If you want a classic example, check out how the stomper himself is behaving.  Sure, he was dismissed from the campaign, but clearly he feels that his community has his back.  And that’s because they do.  Getting a solid dose of shaming early on from Paul would have probably squelched this, but now it’s out of control.  The stomper is now demanding an apology from his victim, which is the logical result of the wingnut “look what you made me do!” mentality.  Which, I would like to point out, is basically the standard issue mind fuck that wife beaters and child abusers play on their victims, issuing a beating and then demanding an apology from the victim for driving them to it.  If a group of big ass men who gang up on a much smaller woman and curb stomp her think that they’re so justified in their actions that she owes them an apology, that’s creating an environment conducive to further violence.

Today has been kind of a crazy day—-and I expect it will be that way all the way until the election—-so I thought I’d toss out a more fun post for those two things that go together like peanut butter and chocolate, or lube and condoms: Halloween in election years and political costumes.  Putting together a costume that’s basically a political joke is not only a way to relieve some election season tension, it’s also a great way to dodge the “wear your underwear and some cat ears” costume pressure for women.  If done properly, a funny political costume can be a subtle, non-annoying, totally fun way to remind people to vote the next week. In 2008, I did what all brunettes with bangs pretty much had to do, and went as Sarah Palin.  It was so much fun we ended up doing a comedy short video that exploited my costume and a friend’s GI Joe-inspired costume. 

This year, I thought it would be wrong not to do a similar political costume, so after kicking a few half-baked ideas around, I settled on being a “mama grizzly”: 50s era dress, apron, pearl earrings and necklace, and bear ears.  (I’ll probably also do a bear nose and mouth with make-up.)  I’ll probably write a slogan on the apron. I’m thinking “Ban Schools, Not Guns”. 

But if you want to use your costume as a political comment, to make fun of the right, or just to represent some major issue of the election season, there are a lot of options.

*Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: a military uniform with your mouth taped shut, or at least a big X over it.  (I’m not a fan of costumes that interfere with socializing.)  Attach a gay pride button to your uniform. 

*I’ll bet a tea bag could made out of burlap sack, some string, and a stiff piece of paper for the label.  This is something you could affix a sign to very easily.

*Aqua Buddha. This costume would be especially fun if you live in Kentucky.

*Kelly Baden on Twitter mentioned her Christine O’Donnell costume: “Suit, witch hat, sign that reads “I am You” , straight brown hair”

*“Second amendment remedies” begs to be a costume.  You can get a fake gun and some doctor/nurse costume, maybe with a clarifying sign. 

*You could combine a revolutionary war costume with a clown costume to represent the Tea Party: powdered wig and tricorn hat, clown suit and shoes, red clown nose.  Get a horn and honk at people, telling them to get the government out of your Medicare.

Offer your own in comments!

Say what you will about the midterm elections, but they’ve been a hell of a ride.  I’m a little sad to see that Sharron Angle’s handlers are beginning to just reduce her public appearances rather than risk her telling another Hispanic voter that he/she “looks Asian”, but one thing we’re learning is that no matter how much the GOP establishment cracks down, the renegade candidates are just hard to control.  Because of this, the usual metrics for understanding elections are getting all fucked up.  Usually the polling data two weeks out is nearly set in stone, but in a lot of races, that’s not as true as it usually is. 

Take, for instance, the beauty that is Joe Miller’s campaign. Miller is great because he’s an unrepentant asshole, and seems to have a real problem understanding why that’s a problem.  As Salon reports, Miller has decided that an imperious disdain for the press is a great electoral strategy, dodging debates so that he looks like a less legitimate candidate, and of course, having his goon squad detain a reporter because, at the end of the day, Miller thinks he’s just too good for ordinary politician stuff like talking to the press or even appearing to care about accountability.  Salon points out that Miller’s brilliant “fuck the press” strategy isn’t working out as well as planned, because just because you try to intimidate and shut out the press doesn’t mean they’re not going to write articles about you.  In fact, it’s a good way to make sure those articles are increasingly negative.

The Salon article, by Alexandra Gutierrez, ends with this thought:

Warring with the state media has clearly hurt Miller—but the damage may not be fatal.

Well, it’s true that Miller’s over-the-top assholery endears him to the wingnut base, for much the same reason that they like Carl Paladino.  Like attracts like, and the asshole base loves their assholes.  I’m sure more than a few right wing bloggers, for instance, get a little hard thinking about how donating to Miller quiets the relentless internal questions about if they’re man enough for an entire 3-4 minutes.  And it’s true that Miller is tied with Murkowski in the polls, even though he started off with a double digit lead.  So he could win this thing.

But there’s two weeks to go.  In ordinary political time, that’s not too long.  But in Tea Party time, that’s something like a billionity years.  Going two whole weeks without stirring up more shit is going to be the hardest thing Joe Miller has ever had to do in his life.  I’m sure that, given the choice between running a marathon with no training and having to go two whole weeks without having his goons rough up a member of the press, he’d probably pick the former.  But that’s far from the only thing he’ll have to refrain from doing.  There’s also keeping his big, fat mouth shut, and not beefing with Sarah Palin in the press, a beef that makes everyone involved look like children having a rock fight.  Except, when wingnuts do it, there’s way more misspelled and randomly capitalized press releases, Facebook posts, and leaked emails involved. 

Christine O’Donnell is toast already, so her continuing to open her big, fat mouth is just a matter of entertainment from here on out.  But Sharron Angle has two more weeks to lose this thing, and I think she can do a great job of it, if she really puts her mind to it.  Her campaign has taken a turn from the strictly nutty to the racist-and-nutty, which shows she’s not afraid to expand and grow as a public wingnut.  Plus, I think some people are beginning to see it’s totally unfair to go after Christine O’Donnell for saying stupid shit in public, and not going after Angle with the same ferocity for saying exactly the same stupid shit.  For instance, as Rachel Maddow pointed out, Angle said basically the same stupid shit about the separation of church and state a few months ago, and it didn’t get nearly the same press coverage.  There’s two whole weeks to continue to raise a stink about that.  I’d note that Nevada in particular would not do well economically under the theocracy proposed by Angle and O’Donnell.  Theocrats aren’t really known for smiling upon the various activities that make Las Vegas so much money, for instance. 

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The Name It, Change It campaign has been a big deal this election season, helped in no small part because feminist-minded folks are fed up with sexist attacks on female candidates.  But Amanda Hess has an interesting take on the whole issue today that’s worth discussing.  Not to get all “what about the menz?!” on you, but it’s an important question.  What about sexist attacks on men?

The WaPo has put together a compendium of sexist attacks on male candidates this election, some from female candidates happy to play the “mean girl” role, and some from male candidates channeling their own junior high school homosocial shaming tactics.  Male candidates and female candidates who get this kind of sexist shaming tend to be getting the same flavor—-apparently, a favorite way to attack both men and women is to feminize them.  Women are shamed for doing female-identified things like wearing high heels or having breasts, or they’re told to get back in the kitchen or they have their sexuality used against them.  Male candidates get feminized, too—-told to “man up”, that they don’t have “cojones”, or to “get your man pants on”. 

Amanda interviewed Siobhan “Sam” Bennett, the president of the Women’s Campaign Forum, and she said this:

What Bennett does know is that accusations of deficient manliness “are rooted in a tradition of sexism against women” in politics, she says, “whether a woman lobs it at a man, a man lobs it at a woman, or a man lobs it at a man.” When a candidate infers that manliness is a requirement for political office, female politicians everywhere suffer a hit. “It’s the same woman-bashing form of sexism, just sliced a different way,” Bennett says.

And when men are attacked in a misogynist way, more targeted sexist attacks against women are allowed to thrive. “It reinforces the normalization of this way of talking, and that’s our big enemy,” Bennett says. “It definitely hurts women candidates, no matter who’s throwing it around.”

It’s bad for the candidates that suffer it, bad for other candidates (especially female candidates), and frankly it’s just bad for our democracy.  This election is hardly an outlier.  For my entire lifetime, achieving some level of projected manliness has been considered an important attribute in a candidate.  It’s basically making all stupider every election season.  There is no reason that a man’s ability to wear a cowboy hat or a jumpsuit should make him a better leader.  And yes, the more that “manliness” is considered a critical character trait of politicians, the more women will be shut out.  Or to be more specific, it’s not that women can’t run or win, it’s just that they always have to walk this tightrope between appearing feminine but not too feminine, acting tough but not too tough, etc.  It’s too much of a balancing act.  Even right wing women pulling the “mama grizzlies” thing, where they get their girl points by dressing up but get their man points by being assholes mostly fail at this balancing act.

“Manliness” as a concept is mostly toxic in our culture, especially when someone’s trying to be a leader in a democratic society.  You get man points by being intolerant, ignorant, and unsympathetic, as well as by wearing a bunch of silly costumes.  The reason right wingers routinely attack Democrats for lack of manliness is that liberalism on any level is viewed as permanently unmanly—-having a heart, reading books, and getting along with others are all considered poisonous and feminine.  Having a political system that’s build around who can be the biggest dick and get away with it isn’t good for anyone.

This isn’t anti-man.  I think in general that the concepts of masculinity that permeate our culture are nearly as damaging to men as to women.  (I say “nearly”, because the women who get the worst brunt of men swimming in toxic masculinity are rape victims, sexual harassment victims, and domestic violence victims.)  Men are expected to shut off the best parts of themselves to prove themselves as men, and to make it worse, there’s never a point in the masculinity wars where you’ve proven yourself enough.  The only real option not to be constantly stressing is to let it go and feel comfortable in your own skin.  But there is non-stop pressure on men not to ever be comfortable, much less emotional and intellectual. 

And so yes, every time a candidate makes cracks about “cojones” or “man pants”, that’s a problem.  For female candidates, male candidates, the democratic system, and our larger culture.

Via Ezra, a great post by Joe Klein (!) about how vicious and cruel the wingnuts who are exploiting end-of-life counseling provisions written into some versions of the bill are.  For those who remember the Terri Schiavo nonsense—-and who doesn’t?—-this really should come as no surprise.  And frankly, I’m always glad when the anti-choicers’ opposition to you having the right to die as you wish comes up, because when they’re out there attacking just women’s rights, the mainstream media treats these terminally silly and mean-spirited assholes like they’re serious, nay moral people.  But everyone, including men, faces the possibility of a terminal illness that can be approached in different ways with different amounts of suffering.  When anti-choicers attack the basic rights and dignity of men, especially older men, it’s a different ballgame altogether.*

When anti-choicers fight the right of mostly-elderly people to be able to say no to extensive suffering, Their fundamental fucked-up-ness becomes obvious.  A lot of men have a Madonna/whore complex, but anti-choicers have a Pollyannaish/morbid complex.  On one hand, they’re incredibly morbid people who relish the possibility of forcing others to suffer for their beliefs.  During the Schiavo nastiness, they didn’t even try to hide that they thought that a young widower like Michael Schiavo should be forced not to move on and form other attachments.  The Dr. Tiller murder exposed, I hope, how anti-choicers relish the idea of forcing women to die for their beliefs, or at least forcing them to give birth to babies that suffer for two days and then die miserably.  But if that’s not clear enough, just look at the inroads they’re making in South America, where the Catholic church actively seeks out raped and pregnant 9-year-olds to make a big media stink to fight the abortion and show that the more horrible the situation, the more adamant they are that the suffering should be maximized.  This should surprise no one who has read Christopher Hitchens’ expose of Mother Teresa, who was such a fan of maximizing suffering that she denied people in her hospital painkillers, because she thought pain was good for them.

It’s easy for people to look away from this morbid bent of the anti-choice movement when they just attack women who want early term abortions.  Compared to forcing preteen rape victims to have babies or denying dying people painkillers, punishing the fornicating women with mandatory childbirth seems like small potatoes.  But it’s part of the bigger package.  They’ll maximize suffering wherever they can find a political toehold to do it, and in America, the way to do that is to push Pollyannaish fantasies that obscure the morbid agenda.

And that’s the flip side.  Anti-choicers basically live to deny that their ideas will cause that much suffering.  A ban on late-term abortion?  They deny that there’s any need for it, and focus strictly on babies with Down’s syndrome, as if to imply that women are aborting to avoid the mere inconvenience of a child that needs just a little more help.  That’s why the image of Sarah Palin cuddling Trig is anti-choice porn, because it’s a way for them to tell themselves that women who get medically indicated abortions are deluded about how easy it’ll be just to continue with pregnancy.  They conceal cases where fetuses have their organs on the outside, for instance, and outright deny that there’s such thing as a dangerous pregnancy.  Same story with elective abortions.  There’s huge amounts of anti-choice propaganda that’s basically young women who claim they considered abortion going through with their pregnancies and finding out that a baby makes everything so perfect and amazing.  Sure, there’s a hat tip to the idea that it’s hard—-which is minimized—-but the boyfriend marries you, your parents are thrilled, and life becomes pretty much perfect.  Follow the coverage of Bristol Palin—-who has clearly been instructed to dwell only on drawbacks like “I can’t go to the movies as much”, before she moves on to saying it’s the best thing that ever happened to her—-and you get the picture.  There’s no acknowledgment of the fact that most women who get abortions already have babies, and what little acknowledgment there is of the financial hardships center around pushing some diapers at women and suggesting that sort of charity will fix the problem. 

And that’s what you’re getting with this bizarre “death panels” lie.  They’re out there implying there’s no such thing as situations where prolonging life might be against a person’s own wishes.  That’s why I joke that anti-choicers think they’ll never die.  The only kind of death they’ll admit even happens in this discussion is murder, which they then stand against.  Convenient, that.  But the truth is that everyone is going to die, and because of technology, there’s a wide range of ways that could happen, and you do deserve the right to say how much suffering you should have to endure.

Bill Hicks did a routine in the 90s mocking “pro-lifers”. The joke was, if I may paraphrase: If you’re so pro-life, why don’t you protest graveyards.  Lock arms and don’t let people in.  “No, she can’t come in here!  We’re pro-life!”  “But she was 90 years old and died in a car accident!”  “No exceptions!”

When he made that joke, he was being hyperbolic.  Too bad his prediction basically came true. 

*This is why the “right to lifers” flocked around Terri Schiavo, I suspect.  They’ve had a lot of success stripping away the right to choose as long as their targets are young women, whose judgment and rights are held in very low regard in our society.  So they had a reason to believe that the hostility to letting young women control their own sex lives would translate into hostility to letting young women say, “If I’m ever a vegetable, pull the plug.”  But obviously, they miscalculated because long-suffering Michael Schiavo, who is a married man and allowed to make decisions, was understood by the public to be the one whose basic rights were under assault.  By his in-laws, no less.  Which changed the game immensely.