From the outset, I have been very critical of Trump on the birther questions and have repeatedly called him a buffoon. Yet calling Trump a racial provocateur is a sure sign of intellectual laziness and descends the depths of disingenuousness. Trump has been a prominent public figure for decades. If he bore racial animus it would showed itself long ago. As misguided as Trump was to focus his attention on Obama's birth certificate, liberals are making the mistake of assuming that his criticism of President Obama is motivated solely by race.
Nobody is saying that Donald Trump is motivated solely by race. He's also motivated by being an overly ambitious, attention-seeking bastard, by the body of slavering lunatics that make up a significant portion of the Republican base, and by the fact that he keeps getting nuzzled behind the ears and told to do the trick over again by reporters.
But yeah, a huge part of the motivation behind Trump's birtherism is race. If you're being charitable, you could potentially argue that Trump's birtherism is something akin to his anti-choice views: a position he's taken out of total ignorance of what the position actually entails. He's not racist, he's just so blisteringly stupid that he's just saying things because they're popular, like a first grader who goes around saying curse words because older kids do.
What makes me think that Trump is either directly racist or presuming racism on the part of his audience are his demands for Obama's college records. He claims he just wants to make sure Obama got good enough grades to get into Harvard, which seems like a bizarre demand - it's not clear who Obama would have known that would have gotten him into the second most prestigious law school in the nation with terrible grades. However, the basis for the birther inquiry into Obama's college records isn't the belief that he's stupid, it's the belief that he claimed to be a foreign student to get into the Ivies (and, presumably, gain preferential admissions treatment).
Coupled with his belief that Bill Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father, the Trump narrative becomes clear: not only is Barack Obama not one of us, but he's not even wily enough to infiltrate America on his own. It took some misguided and fooled white liberals at Obama's colleges to let him in, it took a white radical to write his book for him, Obama was only on Harvard Law Review because of white liberals (and apparently didn't have to do any work while on the Law Review, which, having done the work of a Managing Editor and Editor-in-Chief this year, makes me wonder how that thing got published).
The narrative that the birther brigade has adopted is simple: Barack Obama is alien. Because he is alien, both in terms of his nationality and his race, his accomplishments cannot be his, and must be the result of a vast conspiracy of white Americans who wanted to use him (in the most contrived scheme of all time) to do...something. At some point. The reason this smacks of racism to so many minorities is because it's the same thing that every minority goes through when they succeed. If you're young and black, you're sent the message that you have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and succeed, and stop whining about how you're such a victim. If you do succeed, however, you've inherently victimized some cohort of white person, probably because someone gave you a leg up that they didn't have. You can never win and never succeed on your own merits, unless you happen to pull a Bill Cosby and savage your brethren for not having your success. Merit, particularly for blacks, is not a matter of what you've done, but a matter of what you're willing to let your success say about the unwashed hordes who trail behind you.
Barack Obama is suspect in the eyes of birthers because he is a prominent minority who refuses to burn the bridge behind him. Whatever his failures as a President and as a leader, he is not willing to turn his race into a badge of shame in order to curry favor. And because of that, we'll be talking about the Photoshop layers on his birth certificate until January of 2017.
Monitoring right wing rhetoric and skeptical debunking of conspiracy theories and woo are two of my major areas of interest, so hopefully you'll forgive me for being a little giddy when Barack Obama decided to take the birthers head on this morning by releasing the long form birth certificate they've been claiming they want so badly to see. As soon as it happened, I knew two things were inevitable: 1) The birthers would not accept the evidence in front of them and their claims that he's not a citizen would just get more baroque and 2) There would be harumphing from the people who are convinced that this kind of silliness can be ignored until it goes away.
On the second point, I want to come right out and say that Obama did the right thing here. The only real objections I have are with regards to timing---he probably should have just taken advantage of the situation by waiting until a politically opportune time to release his birth certificate. Jesse, in chat, suggested that right before the first GOP debate would have been awesome. But as it is, I think he had to deal with it and deal with it head on. I was skeptical initially, but upon thinking about it, it's clear that dealing with it was the only option.
We've tried the "ignore the liars and they'll go away" thing and it's failed. Time and time again, people on the left try to ignore some right wing nuttery in hopes that it just disappears from lack of oxygen, and it sneaks up to bite us in the ass. An unwillingness to fight back hard is why ACORN was dissolved. It's probably why John Kerry was swiftboated out of winning in 2004. It's how Terri Schiavo suddenly became a national story. It's why health care reform turned into such a clusterfuck, and why the Democrats are acquiesing on budget-cutting instead of demanding more stimulus. Acting like we're too good to even acknowledge people screeching about death panels and conspiracy theories involving John Kerry's war wounds has proven a failed strategy.
Punching back and setting the record straight, on the other hand, has shown promising signs of working. Case in point: It saved Planned Parenthood's ass. As soon as Lila Rose started going on TV and telling straight up lies about Planned Parenthood, Planned Parenthood put forward an aggressive defense. Every lie floated about them was smacked down with haste. The result was that when Republicans tried to defund Planned Parenthood, Democrats were able to stand firm and feel supported. Contrast this with the reaction to ACORN---Democrats folded, allowing the vicious lies about the organization to dictate their choices because, in part, there wasn't a well-publicized truth they could cling to in order to defend themselves.
Does setting the record straight stop the lies and bullshit? Absolutely not, and I'm hoping that the Obama administration isn't surprised when it turns out the birthers won't shut up, and that probably will include Donald Trump. But hitting back hard with the facts does create polarization, and that's what needs to happen here. The biggest danger conspiracy theorists pose is not that the public will just simply start buying their nutty ideas wholesale, but the perception that where there's smoke, there's fire. Again, with the Planned Parenthood example, what we saw was that Planned Parenthood's willingness to aggressively contradict lies about what services they provide and how much they do work with law enforcement when it comes to sex trafficking seriously limited how much the right was able to imply that something fishy was going on at Planned Parenthood.
And so it goes with this birth certificate thing. Full blown birthers won't be moved one bit on this. But I fear that a growing number of people were beginning to suspect that Obama was hiding something, because they can't think of another reason you would avoid talking about it. By showing that he wasn't afraid to engage and denounce the birthers, Obama has done a lot to clear the air of smoke. Now we can see that there isn't a fire, but a bunch of right wing nuts pumping smoke machines.
I'm increasingly convinced that the way to deal with right wing lies is to spend less time worrying about the drawbacks to thorough rebuttals, and just issue the rebuttals. I understand the fear of giving credence to lies by attending to them. I definitely get why you don't want to validate some underlying narratives by correcting the record. For instance, there is a very valid concern that by saying 97% of what Planned Parenthood does is not abortion, you're validating the taboo against abortion, or by demonstrating that it's false that feminists are ugly/humorless, you're throwing the ugly and the humorless under the bus. But it's also possible to overthink this. Lies are a lot like fires that have gotten out of control. You need to put the fire out before you start to fix the damage it's done. And with lies, you're not even going to begin to counteract the damaging implications of them until you actually get the facts out in the first place.
With this birth certificate thing, I think we're going to see the refreshing effect that a little truth-telling can have on a debate. Within just the course of the day, I've seen a dramatic uptick in the number of people willing to say directly that birthers are just straight up racists, for instance. Part of the reason was that as long as birthers could hide behind the claim that all they needed was to see the long form birth certificate, there was plausible deniability. Now that they've seen it and they're still squawking, it's become undeniable that they just don't like seeing a black man representing the nation, and they're willing to say any crazy thing that occurs to them to deny that he's a legitimate leader. Hopefully, being a birther will soon be seen as being just as obviously racist as being a segregationist is (and let's be clear, segregationists have tried in the past to claim they're not racist). I don't think that we were going to get any movement in that direction without the White House dealing directly with this problem.
So this year I was molested more than ever before. Hooray for success!
I’ve got two sources of income. By day, I’m the finance manager for a defense contractor. Like most of you I do the whole withholding thing where they, oh so very subtly, yank a small portion of my paycheck. (more on that later) By night, I’m a professional novelist, which means that I’m an independent contractor who has to calculate and send quarterly withholding payments myself. The last one I sent for the year literally made me tear up. I had to send the government a check for more money than my total income for any year of my life up until the age of twenty-three. (for one quarter) Oh, but my calculations were a teensy bit off, so this week, I had the opportunity to send them enough money to purchase a decent used car.
Well, let’s think about a few things here.
Larry, who works for a defense contractor, is angry about how much money the government spends on things like defense contractors. He is also publishing four (yes, four) novels this year, which one hopes are edited for the sake of the English language. He is deeply and truly angry about the fact that the financial success gained from his science fiction novels causes him to pay the government money. Probably because the money goes to pay finance managers for defense contractors who spend their time writing science fiction novels.
The man is a Moebius strip of loathing.
The government almost shut down last week over cutting 38 billion dollars… That may sound like a lot, but comparatively speaking, that’s like a 600 pound man who’s heart is about to explode congratulating himself that he got a hamburger instead of a cheeseburger… for his fifty-seventh meal of the day. Republicans backed off because they didn’t think they could win the PR battle. Let’s see… the Democrats were willing to not pay soldiers, currently fighting three wars, in order to ensure funding for abortion clinics… And you didn’t think you could win that PR fight? Seriously? Have you ever thought about maybe hiring a marketing major? I know a guy….
Please tell me that this man hires a ghost writer. Please.
After another thirteen or so paragraphs talking about how the government essentially needs to be treated like a hostage in a Quentin Tarantino movie, he starts proposing what should be cut in government (hint: none of his suggestions rhyme with “re-fence protractor”). This is just awesome:
You know what happens when a regular company runs out of money? We have to lay people off. Why is it when our economy sucks and everybody is hurting that our government grows? Obama raised government salaries to the highest level in our history, and then to show that he understood our pain, he froze salaries… Let me see if I’ve got this right? You raised your salary super high, and FROZE it THERE and now you’re telling me that’s somehow a good thing. Screw you.
Corporate welfare? Gone. We shouldn’t have to pay $10,000 in subsidies for the ridiculous Chevy Volt so that rich urban liberals can assuage their guilt. There is no Too Big To Fail, because somebody smarter than you will come along and buy your assets. Does that hurt your union pension? Cry me a friggin’ river.
I’m pretty sure Larry doesn’t know what happens when a regular company runs out of money, because he works for a motherfucking defense contractor. Keep the government off of his Medicare and off of his paycheck, folks. But also, end corporate welfare and such, and let viable private market enterprises like defense contractors stand unfettered from government intervention or regulation. BECAUSE OF FREEDOM.
But this post has nothing to do with abortion. I just want to highlight, with amusement, Adam Serwer reporting for the WaPo on the conflict between the Fox News-backed birthers and the Republican party elite, who really want this birther thing to go away.
As the 2012 presidential campaign approaches, a birther backlash is emerging among Republican elites. This backlash provides an example of a dynamic we’re likely to see more of during the campaign, as the interests of the Republican Party and Fox News being to diverge. While Fox News and the GOP normally have a symbiotic relationship, the interest Republican politicians have in not looking like cranks is in conflict with Fox News’s interest in promoting cranks to get ratings.
Read the whole thing for the details of the conflict. The problem is that birtherism is so racist, and the longer this whole conspiracy theory drags on, the more obvious it is that it’s a bunch of white conservatives casting around for newer, weirder ways to object to a black man being President. And it doesn’t play so well to some of the swing voters Republicans want to get. The odds go up every day that the issue will have to be something that would-be presidential candidates have to respond to. The odds of avoiding a situation where a debate moderator or a person at a town hall asks a candidate about Obama’s citizenship go down precipitously every news cycle. Plus, you have Arizona passing a completely silly birther law, which means there’s going to be court bullshit that draws more attention to this problem, further alienating swing voters.
I just want to highlight this paragraph at the end:
This is a problem of Republicans’ own creation, and it’s one that illustrates what is likely to be one of the more odder elements of the 2012 presidential race — the distinction between what helps the GOP win elections, and what helps Fox get ratings.
I just want to add that this is a problem of the Republicans’ own creation in more ways than their reliance on Fox News and cultivating cranks as their base, though that’s a large part of it. It’s also that Republicans have been making this bed for decades with their War on Reality. From Ronald Reagan making up war experiences he didn’t have and “welfare queens” to George Bush lying us into the war on Iraq to “death panels” to claiming global warming is a hoax to claiming that they’re not trying to destroy Social Security and Medicare—-Republicans have made lying such a massive habit that it’s kind of silly of them not to expect their base to discard the notion that truth has any value whatsoever. After all, what makes a lie about WMDs in Iraq more acceptable than fantastical stories about Obama’s birth?
Really, the whole conflict on birtherism is about elitism. It’s about the elites telling their populist base, “Hey, we make up the bullshit and you repeat it! Don’t go freelancing bullshit on your own! You don’t know what you’re doing.” Which, in turn, is part of the reason that Donald Trump embracing this is making it more acceptable, since he’s blessing this bullshit with his elite credentials. Obviously, I’m not rooting for any sides in this fight. Birtherism is just racism in really strange clothes, and the elite Republicans are a bunch of blowhards who have it coming. What I will say is that I don’t mind it if this fight spirals out of control. I’m disinclined to think that birtherism actually raises racial tensions, since it’s so weird and insular. But I do think it outs a lot of people who might otherwise have escaped notice as the Republican base, and I’m all for that.
Like Atrios said, you folks out there owe yourselves a hand for getting the mendacious fool off the air. His slipping ratings weren’t good, but he was also on during a really poor time slot, so I imagine that can’t have been all there was to it. The pressure campaign on advertisers, on the other hand, made it really hard for Fox News to make money off the ratings he was getting. Murdoch is willing to lose money to promote right wing ideology, but even he has limits. I suspect that the slipping quality of advertisements was hurting ratings, too. It’s subconscious, but really poor quality advertising tends to make the programming seem more suspect. If you’re watching some guy rant about whatever right wing conspiracy Beck was on about that day, but the advertising is high-quality stuff, you’re likelier to think there’s value to what he’s saying. But if the ads are mostly cheap crap “as seen on TV” and obvious scams, it imbues the whole thing with an access channel/2AM on a forgotten cable channel vibe, and it will be treated with more disdain by the audience. So, I think that helped lower ratings. His show always looked cheap anyway, and the ads didn’t help. I know that sounds shallow, but these things matter.
I realize the immediate liberal instinct is to piss all over any victory. I expect the objections to be:
*We don’t know that he was actually fired.
*Meh, I’m more worried about conservatives who present themselves as moderates. He was just a sideshow anyway.
*It’s not like Fox News is gone.
But I think we should enjoy this moment. Beck was, in all his nuttiness, a real problem. He pulled the discourse to the right. In his role as the “out there” conservative, he managed to make people like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly look less nutty. That’s incredibly dangerous. He was also a major factor in the increased speed with which conservatives have run away from empirical reality and towards conspiracy-mongering. I don’t know if we can reverse the trend, but this is a good first step.
One of the great questions when dealing with conservative pundits and leaders is wondering how disingenuous they’re being. One of the biggest problems with conservatives is that they tend to see each other as marks—-which is how things like “post-birtherism” develop and why Glenn Beck thumps the Bible but not the Book of Mormon—-so it’s tempting to write off a whole lot of crazy shit leaders say as just pandering to the crowds. But, on the flip side, I’m wary of giving conservative leaders too much credit. There is some for-real stupidity up in those hills. Some would argue that it’s pointless to wonder who is being sincere and who is simply pandering, because there’s no sure way of knowing, but I disagree. I think how you respond to a wingnut does depend in large part on if you believe he’s bullshitting on purpose or not.
But it’s admittedly hard. For instance, Paul Krugman called George Will out a few weeks ago for railing against trains as being some kind of liberal fascist attempt to force you off the roads and to take away the free-spirited manhood that can only be achieved by sitting in traffic. Now, if I were a betting woman (at least on this), I would have thought that crazy as Will was being, this was still sincere. He strikes me as the sort to be paranoid about the trains and refuse to deliver himself to an Amtrak station where he has to sit around with people who he doesn’t believe have a right to breathe the same air as him. That he doesn’t see planes that way is probably because he gets to stand in different security lines and sit in first class lounges where they bring you free drinks.
Or that’s what I thought, anyway. Actually, it turns out he’s just full of shit, since Paul Krugman saw him on the train. Sure, it was the business class car, but still, Will’s whole “cars are better because of INDIVIDUALISM” stance was just a full-blown lie, and he was probably doing what many of us do, which is taking the train up the East Coast because it’s just easier than driving, full stop. So, chalk this one up to pandering bullshit.
Which brings me to Donald Trump, birther extraordinaire. It’s tempting to dismiss Trump’s birtherism as mere pandering, and find it implausible that he believes this shit. But I think we should resist that temptation, since it’s rooted in classism. It’s based on the incorrect assumption that wealthy people are smarter or less paranoid or more worldly or less racist than less wealthy conservatives. But I haven’t ever seen a scrap of evidence to back up this assumption. On the contrary, I think rich conservatives are often paranoid, racist, and ignorant because it’s an emotional crutch that allows them to pretend they really deserve to have way more than everyone else, even though they never really do deserve that much. Plus, someone like Trump has so much money that it actually can work to shield him from reality, making paranoid delusions more, not less likely to happen.
So, I’m taking him at his word. Thoughts? What conservative leaders do you think are bullshitting and which ones do you think really believe the crazy?
The Terri Schiavo case should have put to rest, I hope, any objections to paying attention to right wing stunt-stories that are flying through right wing media but not getting much mainstream attention. I’ve never been a fan of the “ignore it and they’ll go away” philosophy when it comes to these things. On the contrary, the fact that there are stories and theories known to pretty much everyone on the right but are rarely examined or even acknowledged by anyone else should trouble us. The urge is to ignore this stuff because it’s so clearly wrong/sadistic/morbid/stupid that you can’t take seriously the people who invest in it. Also, I think it’s painful to believe that your fellow Americans can be so incredibly mean-spirited, stupid, and nosy. (Certainly, an unwillingness to accept this has fed the mainstream tendency to ignore the anti-contraception beliefs of the anti-choice movement.) But millions of people are making their voting decisions based on these lies and myths. I do think increased media attention to birtherism and Glenn Beck’s ravings is helping wake everyone up to the fact that ignoring the right wing media and social media that flies under the radar of thinking people is just a poor idea.
With that disclaimer out of the way, I want to talk about a case that I doubt ignoring will make it go away: the baby Joseph situation. Kevin Keith has a rundown of the situation, and one of the most critical things to understand is most of the information coming out about it is coming through the anti-choice movement, and so it should be assumed up front that it’s full of lies, holes, and distortions. If you have questions about why anti-choicers lost the benefit of the doubt, please go do some reading and come back here. And remember in the Schiavo case that the right wingers painted Terri Schiavo as practically walking and talking, and it was only when the brain scans that showed how little brain she had left came out that it became clear how much they were lying about her condition.
So what’s going on is more a rough guess than anything else, but piecing together the right wing hysteria, the best guess is this: A bay in Canada was born with a disease that it seems likely put him in a vegetative state from birth on. As Keith explains, the odds are high that right wingers are downplaying the severity of this baby’s condition, but we don’t know the exact diagnosis. What we can be reasonably sure of is that baby Joseph is terminal, and the fight between his parents and the hospital is over whether or not to take him off the ventilator now or administer a tracheotomy and a home ventilator so that he can be taken home to undergo a much longer but just as certain death. As far as I can tell, once you peel away all the right wing hysterics, this is the crux of the fight. The right is painting the “die at home” side as “Save Baby Joseph”, but this is a lie. There is no saving baby Joseph. It’s all very sad, and worse, it seems this is the second child that this has happened to with these parents.
The problem is that Frank Pavone of Priests for Life—-a truly wretched and ghoulish man who was practically dancing on Dr. George Tiller’s grave within hours of the announcement of his murder—-has involved himself. (If the pedophilia scandals didn’t terminate any faith you have in the judgment of the leadership of the Catholic church, then spending some time with Pavone’s videos and writings should do it. That they gave this man a collar should indicate that they have no standards whatsoever when it comes to hiring people who are supposed to be ministering others.) Oh yeah, and so has Terri Schiavo’s brother. So we’re talking a three ring circus of lies and bullshit, and the people whose hard choices about their son are at stake are being swiftly reduced to pawns to use to score points.
And the people that are being scored on are, ultimately, Democrats. Even though Democrats have nothing to do with this. Not just because it’s a matter of a family versus a hospital bureaucracy (that may be in the right—-read Keith’s post for more), but because this is happening in Canada. But for right wingers opposed to health care reform, Canada is a stand-in for Democrats. Bashing Canada is a way to bash Democrats. At least, it is when you’re talking about health care. Even though Democrats actually pushed for a system that preserves private health insurance, a high percentage of right wingers believe that we’ve got a Canadian-style single payer system coming down the pike. They also believe that this means that the government will be doing things like executing old people or retarded people in order to save money. That’s what the whole “death panels” thing was about. And so if they can find a story that “proves”—-even through lies and distortion—-that Canada is willing to kill babies that have a chance to live, they can score some points on the Democrats. That this is not what Canada is doing is beside the point. The truth never matters one bit. (What appears to be going on is that baby Joseph has been declared a futile situation, which is something that goes on in all sorts of medical settings, both private and public, and is more about medical ethics than funding sources.)
Even The Liberals: it’s a nickname I’ve now made up to describe a particular kind of writer/pundit. This is a person whose inadequacies as a thinker and writer prevents him/her from making it in the business as a straight liberal, but who has discovered that pretending to be a liberal while mouthing right wing arguments for right wing media outlets provides steady work and attention. And they don’t care if you’re a hack! In fact, so much the better, because that means you’re drawn to the easy, but well-compensated work of trying to mainstream hard right arguments by pretending that you, Even The Liberal, agrees with them.
ETLs are a breed I usually ignore; their hackery is so obvious that it’s not even fun anymore. But I did pay mind to Kirsten Powers, who mouths right wing arguments while pretending to be a liberal on Fox News most of the time, recently, because she was trying advance really fringe anti-contraception arguments in The Daily Beast recently. In my piece at RH Reality Check, I linked other people refuting her argument, but it was honestly so obvious that Powers was cherry-picking and misrepresenting statistics to argue that contraception doesn’t prevent abortion that I didn’t really think it required much more than being intellectually honest to see what she was up to. Yes, she maintains that she’s pro-contraception, but that’s part of the ETL schtick. In reality, she argued that Planned Parenthood should be defunded because they can’t prove that their services prevent abortion. (Never mind that family planning services are a good in and of themselves, regardless of abortion.) My main argument was that Powers is a privilege-blind twit, whose ready assumption that everyone else in the world shares her ability to pay for contraception, find endless amounts of time to pursue it, etc. is just wrong.
Much to my chagrin, I was reminded that Powers has remarkably thin skin, because she flooded my reply column on Twitter with screeching demands that I “retract” my honest, fact-based assessment of her hackery. Really, she should develop a thicker skin; there’s no reason to think that a single person calling bullshit on her “I’m a liberal, but I agree with radical right wing arguments” act is going to bring an end to the gravy train. There’s just too much demand for faux liberals trying to give fringe right arguments a veneer of moderation for Powers to really worry about that, I’d think. Still, if she’s going to basely accuse me of misrepresenting an article she has already had to retract for factual errors, I feel bound to respond. Not by retraction! Unlike Powers, I’m in the right and not a liar. But I will perform the close reading she demands of her piece to demonstrate that it is not a matter of a liberal coming around to the idea of defunding federally subsidized contraception for millions of women because of the facts. I will instead argue that she is taking fringe right wing arguments, polishing those turds up, and pretending that they’re moderate instead of radical anti-contraception arguments.
Though I will happily grant, and have granted on Twitter and on RH Reality Check, that Powers supports legal contraception. I imagine she and her friends find a lot of use for it! Her article was merely an attack on contraception access for women who don’t share her privileges. She’s a soft anti-contraception person, not a hard line one, though I imagine that she borrowed these hack arguments from hard line anti-choice sources, and hard line anti-choice sources are linking her argument all over, agreeing with the obvious fact that she’s pushing for reduced access to contraception.
Let’s start our close reading from the top of her article:
During the recent debate over whether to cut off government funding to Planned Parenthood, the organization claimed that its contraceptive services prevent a half-million abortions a year. Without their services, the group’s officials insist, more women will get abortions.
I’ll admit I bought the argument—it makes intuitive sense—and initially opposed cutting off funding for precisely that reason.
Then I did a little research.
The “I used to believe X, until I saw the evidence, and then” rhetorical device is about setting the audience up for an argument about why you don’t believe X anymore. In this case, X is the contention that contraception services prevent abortion. Indeed, this is an intuitive argument, as most people take contraception precisely so they don’t get pregnant on accident and require abortion services. It’s so intuitive, in fact, that the only people who argue that contraception doesn’t prevent abortion are anti-choice nuts, who have elaborate conspiracy theories to explain their belief that contraception causes abortion. Part of the process of being an ETL is learning to take these wild-eyed conspiracy theories and put a moderate-sounding spin on them so that they don’t sound like nut-brained screech-a-thons, and that’s what Powers is trying to do here. She took great pains to demand that I pay attention to the rhetorical flourishes that make her seem moderate, but I’m more interested in the fact that she thinks it’s appropriate to try to take truly fringe ideas and make them mainstream.
And in this paragraph, she establishes that she intends to do that by making like she had a sober-minded, open-minded engagement with all the evidence, and was forced to conclude, more in sorrow than glee, that contraception doesn’t prevent abortion, so neener neener defund Planned Parenthood. I contend that someone actually looking at all the evidence would do that. And that someone who has determined to make an argument against widespread access to contraception would instead choose to cherry pick and distort evidence to support an anti-contraception claim.
So which does Powers do? Well, if you guessed “cherry picked and distorted”, give yourself a cookie.
Turns out, a 2009 study by the journal Contraception found, in a 10-year study of women in Spain, that as overall contraceptive use increased from around 49 percent to 80 percent, the elective abortion rate more than doubled. This doesn’t mean that access to contraception causes more abortion—though some believe that—but that it doesn’t necessarily reduce it.
Her plausible deniability line is to claim that she isn’t necessarily saying that contraception causes abortion, but hey, she’s not saying it doesn’t. It’s a mystery, but wow, look at that there correlation! (That she probably grabbed off an overtly anti-contraception source.) A reader would be forgiven for thinking more contraception caused that abortion rate to go up! It’s just such a mystery what else could have happened!
While most of the people involved in right wing attack on contraception are sticking to the talking points (claiming it’s “fiscal conservatism” and conflating contraception/cancer screening/STD testing at Planned Parenthood with abortion), the excitement of finally having a shot at parting some of the poorest and most vulnerable women in the country from reproductive health care is getting a few Republicans a little bit excited. And the cat is coming out of the bag.
Exhibit #1, Sean Hannity:
Sean Hannity, yelling at Juan Williams for suggesting it’s a good thing if women can choose when they give birth: “I’m pro-choice in this sense, Juan. If you choose to get in the back of the car with someone, if you choose to make out with them, if you choose to grab, grope and fondle, if you choose to take one article of clothing off after another, guess what? You made a series of choices, Juan.”
What I enjoyed was the realization that Hannity thinks people stop fucking when they get old enough to have apartments of their own, and don’t have to make out in the back seats of cars. Is this a widespread assumption on the right? It would certainly explain a lot, especially in terms of the drooling voyeurism they exhibit when it comes to this subject, the kind that all too often resembles that of 12-year-olds who just learned really what sex is all about.
But even Hannity can’t top Rep. Steve King, who just created a slogan that will spawn a million T-shirts that you probably only want to wear to feminist meet-ups.
Quote: “Planned Parenthood is invested in promiscuity.”
Well, fuck me with a pogo stick! I wasn’t aware that promiscuity was an investment opportunity. While I have zero doubt that King would describe my 33-year-old unmarried-but-not-a-virgin ass as “promiscuous”, so far I have not made a single red cent off this amazing investment opportunity. And neither, I would add, have the stockholders of Planned Parenthood. Though in their case, that’s because they don’t have any, being a non-profit and all.
Still, I figure that this is a democracy, and if promiscuity is an investment, then it should be up to the people to decide if that’s where we want our tax dollars going. Hey, the advantage is that economic stimulus is especially stimulating, amirite? Obama keeps talking about boring shit like roads and trains and insulation for buildings and better math grades. Personally, I think our investment in promiscuity is way too fucking low, because of it. But I thought I’d create a poll and find out what you, the public, think about our investments in promiscuity.
I think my favorite is how some conservatives have decided that a “clever” dodge when challenged about their beliefs on Obama’s religion is to say that his religion is “liberalism”. Which is a way of saying, “Look, I think he’s a Muslim, but I’m smart enough to know that I can’t say that in certain company, so I’m going to elide the issue.” Sean Hannity is really perturbed by the base’s unwillingness to stick to what he considers a safer way to use religion as a cover to float racist attacks, which is to drop the words “Reverend Wright” a lot. Any way you slice it, however, the Muslim/radical Christian/religion is “liberalism” thing is basically a way to express the belief that black Americans aren’t Real Americans®, though there’s a cultural equivalent of a green card offered for black conservatives.
But I think the panic in Hannity’s eyes is probably about more than just his concerns that his audience is visibly stupid (and therefore not really so great at launching suitably subtle racist attacks on the President) and that makes Republicans look bad. It’s also that this focus group demonstrates that Glenn Beck has hijacked the entire narrative, and the results are that it works to keep pushing the envelope further and further into conspiracy theory direction. Particularly with this Egypt stuff, Beck has decided the most fruitful way to exploit this is to ratchet up hysteria about Muslims. He basically decided, correctly I think, that conservative viewers don’t give a shit about the nuances of this situation. They want to hear that crazy Muslims are rising up and demanding that the world be turned into a Muslim theocracy and that Obama is in on it, and that the main reason this is alarming is that it’s a threat not to secularism (which vast swaths of conservatives, including Beck, object to), but to Christian dominance. And even Hannity can probably grasp that if there’s no limits on the conspiracy theory nuttiness, then that’s genuinely dangerous. And not just to liberals or Democrats anymore, but even to folks like him who have even just 5% of them that says, “Hey, there should be some kind of limit on this stuff.”
Luckily for him and for the rest of us, the one limit is that most Americans are lazy slobs. (I include myself in this.) The chance that people whipped up into a frenzy of paranoia are going to hit the streets in large numbers is pretty low. They’re mostly just going to stew at home, going down their rabbit hole of nuttiness. The real threat here is that the nuts are taking over the Republican party. Teh traditional business interests who control the party and simply exploit the nuts for votes are going to have an harder time keeping a lid on this shit. Paranoia is like The Blob; it just keeps growing and feeding on everything in sight until it completely takes over.
It’ll be interesting seeing how this battle plays out. As Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon today suggests, the only real consistent line throughout conservative reaction to the Egyptian protests has been a need to be loud and insistent that this is all about America without doing anything so quaint as educating yourself about the issues, but beyond that it’s been a struggle between the natural conservative inclination to support oppressive dictators and the occasional pro-democracy pose conservatives take to justify themselves to themselves (and their desire to wear tricorn hats). Plus, there’s the ugly fact of the matter that we don’t actually have any real idea how this is going to turn out, and that loss of control is somehting that’s hard for most Americans to accept, but especially for conservatives.
Egypt may be unpredictable, but I feel somewhat assured I can predict who is going to win in the battle between Team Beckian Paranoids and Team Let’s Not Sound Like We’re Stark Raving Mad, M’kay? My money’s on Beck, definitely. Sure, his theory that the protesters are in league with liberal America and the mainstream media to promote a sort of socialist hedonistic fundamentalist theocracy that features free abortions and orgies in the streets but also mandatory burquas and prayer five times a day sounds like the sort of thing that shouldn’t really catch on in the marketplace of ideas. But is it really more crazy than a lot of the crap that Beck and the rest of the right wing noise machine pumps out day in and day out? No, not really. The people who are complaining about Beck now were and are only too happy to lie the vast majority of the time for political gain. Bill Kristol, for instance, isn’t one to talk, since he backed every single paranoid lie imaginable to get us into war with Iraq. Plus, as Media Matters demonstrates, even some people complaining about Beck, such as John Fund, are too in love with the “sharia law” paranoia to give it up completely. They simply have the very silly, childish belief that they can lie and spread paranoia to keep their base fearful and voting as instructed, but that they can keep that paranoia under control once it’s been unleashed. And I don’t think you can do that.
See, Glenn Beck gets it. And, to an extent, he has a different motivation than a lot of conservative pundits who see themselves mainly as shills for the GOP and the right wing agenda. Beck’s down with that motivation, but making money and accumulating popularity matters more to him, and if the goals clash, he’ll pick money and popularity over shilling for the conservative agenda every time. Plus, he can shape the conservative agenda to fit his goals at this point. And he knows his audience isn’t interested in niceties like nuance or imagining that Egyptians are human beings who deserve to be listened to. He understands on a gut level that the images of a bunch of Egyptians in the street looking angry inspires fear in his audience, regardless of the context, and he’s going to stoke it, because fearful followers spend more and are more obedient. See, Kristol and Fund and company see racism as something that can be manipulated depending on their needs. Beck grasps that racism doesn’t respond to that kind of nuance, and chooses instead to feed it on the assumption that it will pay dividends down the road. Same story with paranoia. Beck grasps that balls-out paranoia is much better for him than moderated paranoia. Once you start telling people, “Hey, it’s cool to be paranoid, but don’t get all crazy about it,” you’ve already conceded that most of the shit you say is irrational. But if you’re paranoid all the time, you can make a clean break with reality. It ceases to be a reference point anymore, and the seed of an idea that one shouldn’t be a paranoid nut job won’t be planted. And that’s where he needs his audience: completely disconnected, constantly fearful, with no relationship to the real world outside of their homes.
I could write some about how the GOP is trying to use anti-choice nonsense to redefine rape so that simply saying “no” or being legally unable to consent isn’t enough, but it’s Friday, and I’m in a good mood and I don’t want to depress myself. So, instead I’m going to deliver to you a cheery tale of how to monetize right wing idiocy, brought to you by Tyler Cowen.
Moving to dispel claims that President Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii, his supporters in the state’s legislature have introduced a bill that would allow anyone to get a copy of his birth records for a $100 fee.
The idea behind the measure is to end skepticism over Obama’s birthplace while raising a little money for a government with a projected budget deficit exceeding $800 million over the next two years.
If they’d done this up front, when they were getting 10-20 requests a week, this would have netted them $78,000 a year. Not a lot, but not nothing. But there’s a little nugget that’s interesting in this story that doesn’t bode well for the Tea Party.
But the number of birther requests has been declining from the 10 to 20 weekly inquiries received early last year, according to the Department of Health.
“Requests have decreased significantly over the years. Currently we receive anywhere from zero to five per week,” said department spokeswoman Janice Okubo.
Are Birthers losing enthusiasm? It seems like it. There’s been a resurgence in right wing media over the past month or so in Birther nonsense, and Jesse’s been sending me near-daily links to places like WorldNetDaily that are really pumping this crap up. My initial feeling was that they’re bored and so going back to the well, but I was all wrong. They’re actually acting like someone in a relationship who feels the spark waning, and so starts buying new lingerie and proposing going out on date nights. They’re trying to win the Birthers back! And now it’s not just the usual crew of rabid internet goobers. Even Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who in the past have either ignored or even criticized Birther nonsense, are jumping on the train.
Top-rated talk radio host Rush Limbaugh on Friday questioned why new Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie has not gotten support from the White House in his efforts to resolve the doubts of so-called “birthers” about Barack Obama’s place of birth.
Limbaugh also says he finds it “stunning” that Abercrombie still can’t prove Obama was born in Hawaii as he maintains.
What’s great about being a Birther is you can be a Birther while pretending you’re not a Birther. I think it was Rick Perlstein who summed it up to me once, which is that all conservatives think everyone else in their movement is the sucker.
Glenn Beck, as is his custom, is putting his own spin on it.
For those who can’t click the link, Beck—-while holding a bunny he probably then decapitated so he could drink its blood as soon as they quit filming—-claimed that Obama referenced the five pillars of Islam in coded terms in his State of the Union speech, by having five platform points, or something like that. While not directly questioning the birth certificate, this is part of the general Birther tent, since the imagined lack of a birth certificate is part of a larger conspiracy theory about how Obama is a secret Kenyan Muslim that is out to turn the country into a socialist theocracy.
Remember, young Pandagonians: when Thomas Jefferson said “separation of church and state”, it was just some part of a letter that’s nowhere in the text of our Constitution.
Looks like the wingnuts have taken hold of New Mexico. Here’s the new head of the state’s Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department on Alex Jones’ show, ranting about how environmentalists are just undercover communists conspiring to create false alarm over the environment.
New Mexico is one of the most beautiful states in the country, but the leadership now will happily wipe their asses with it to show the imaginary commies in their minds who’s boss. That’s where we’re at as a country. What’s scary, too, is this sort of thing doesn’t even stick out anymore, since so much Republican leadership is engaged in hysterical rants against imaginary enemies, and spinning conspiracy theories so they don’t have to face reality. What makes this stick out from the herd is that it was done on Alex Jones’ show. I remember, in college, one of the ways we used to get cheap, adolescent laughs was call into Jones’ show and challenge him, just to watch him get even crazier. He was the leader of the black helicopter guys, and, if you can believe it, it’s gotten even uglier and weirder since then. It was always alarming to me how popular Jones was, but I rationalized that a lot of it was folks like me, who found his “nothing I believe in is real!” act to be amusing and, at times, endearing. But who fucking knows? It appears that a lot of people take this shit seriously, seriously enough to elect these folks to offices where they can do real damage.
In the many years since then, though, Jones has gone from an out-there kook to the role of a front runner in where the mainstream right is headed. He complains regularly that Glenn Beck steals his act, and he should, since Beck totally steals his act. Which means that we’re probably going to get some intimations that enemies are suffering from demon possession from Beck any day now. (Do Mormons believe that? I have no idea, but I don’t think Beck is constrained by something as simple as the actual teachings of his church.)
Fred Clark is a man of remarkable insight when it comes to the inner workings of the wacky right, since he’s basically made the transition from being in the thick of it to being a sensible person who lives in the real world. He recently wrote a post about anti-choicers, and their fantasy that they’re doing something important and noble and brave, when in fact they’re basically being petty little cowards. I think his thoughts are relevant when discussing the conspiracy theories of anti-environmentalists, as well.
Let’s pretend that our unremarkable lives of quiet desperation are actually epic quests in the service of something meaningful. Let’s pretend our lives are driven by some purpose. Let’s pretend we are engaged in the great moral struggle of our time—that we are opposing some massive and twisted evil. Let’s pretend that this struggle requires courage and commitment and let’s pretend that we possess those things. Let’s pretend that we are all that stands between this country and brutal chaos—that we and we alone are the ones keeping it all together.
Let’s pretend we are not who we actually are. Let’s pretend that our lives are not what they actually are. Let’s pretend.
It’s one of the best and most telling posts I’ve ever read, especially since Fred has lived it from the inside. I think his observations really apply here. Conspiracy theories and fantasies proliferate on the right because the right is basically about stalling progress, and putting up roadblocks to a better world. But saying out loud that you don’t want a better world is intolerable. The ego cannot handle admitting to itself that you oppose feminism and environmentalism because you’re petty, vindictive, or selfish. And so imaginary enemies are created. Fantasies like the ones Fred describes are lived in until reality feels less real than the fantasy. You don’t oppose abortion because you’re a petty person who can’t stand the idea that other people are living their lives without your control or even input. Oh no! You’re like an abolitionist! And you’re not an anti-environmentalist because you’re petty, hostile to change, and don’t want to be bothered to think about how wasteful you’ve been all your life and why that needs to change. You’re fighting a worldwide conspiracy of communism that just happens to involve the vast majority of scientists in the world!
Obviously, there’s liberal fantasists, as well. Anti-vaccination types and 9/11 Truthers come to mind, though it’s well worth pointing out that both subcultures have more than their fair share of right wingers, whereas most right wing conspiracy theory subcultures have few, if any liberals. And these folks have similar motivations—-there’s a truth they can’t handle for some reason (in my experience, they’re highly privileged people who cannot accept the basic reality of bad luck, and bad luck is both the main reason for autism and the Bush administration being poised to take political advantage of 9/11), and so fill in a fantasy where they’re noble, brave people speaking truth to power. But generally speaking, this stuff hasn’t taken off with liberals and I think it’s because we have real problems to deal with, and are familiar with how tedious and un-noble it can feel to grind at these on a day to day basis.
Monitoring right wing rhetoric and skeptical debunking of conspiracy theories and woo are two of my major areas of interest, so hopefully you'll forgive me for being a little giddy when Barack Obama decided to take the birthers head on this morning by releasing the long form birth certificate they've been claiming they want so badly to see. As soon as it happened, I knew two things were inevitable: 1) The birthers would not accept the evidence in front of them and their claims that he's not a citizen would just get more baroque and 2) There would be harumphing from the people who are convinced that this kind of silliness can be ignored until it goes away. 
One of the great questions when dealing with conservative pundits and leaders is wondering how disingenuous they’re being. One of the biggest problems with conservatives is that they tend to see each other as marks—-
The Terri Schiavo case should have put to rest, I hope, any objections to paying attention to right wing stunt-stories that are flying through right wing media but not getting much mainstream attention. I’ve never been a fan of the “ignore it and they’ll go away” philosophy when it comes to these things. On the contrary, the fact that there are stories and 
Even The Liberals: it’s a nickname I’ve now made up to describe a particular kind of writer/pundit. This is a person whose inadequacies as a thinker and writer prevents him/her from making it in the business as a straight liberal, but who has discovered that pretending to be a liberal while mouthing right wing arguments for right wing media outlets provides steady work and attention. And they don’t care if you’re a hack! In fact, so much the better, because that means you’re drawn to the easy, but well-compensated work of trying to mainstream hard right arguments by pretending that you, Even The Liberal, agrees with them. 
I could write some about how the GOP is trying to