I can't even blog about the heavy levels of wingnuttery in the Republican debate, since right now it's a game of "what's going to piss off the liberals the most?", and that makes me profoundly sad not just for the fate of our nation but for the mental health of conservatives.  It just can't be good stewing non-stop in hate of a largely mythical "liberal elite", hate so profound that you will gladly destroy the nation just to piss them off.  One thing that's increasing my sadness about this situation is the constant stream of clips from Greg Gutfeld's Fox News show. The primary purpose of his show appears to be telling his conservative audience how much better they are than those silly liberals, but the effect is not one of feeling like they actually are better than silly liberals.  It actually causes that same feeling you get when you read some Nice Guy® on an anti-feminist forum ranting about how stupid bitches don't know what they're missing by passing him over in favor of men who shower regularly and don't wax poetic about Ayn Rand on dates.  The delusional myths that Gutfeld and his friends feed their audience tell you nothing about liberals, but are an excellent demonstration of what kind of anxieties Gutfeld thinks are fueling the folks in Wingnutia. Like this rant:

There's so much irrationality here that it's amazing.  Gutfeld denies that science has any value, but then says, "Listen to your doctor."  But your doctor knows what she knows because of science.  It's not actually the white coat.  I'm also guessing there's more to that study than he's saying, stuff that could actually negate the conclusions he's drawing.  The entire segment is dedicated to exploiting the audience's resentments of people that are smarter than them in order to argue that we should basically shut down any kind of non-corporate-funded research, i.e. bring an end to science conducted for the good of humanity instead of some corporation's bottom line. But the to get the buy-in from the audience for this argument, the strategy is to drum up resentment against others for being smarter than you and having better health habits.  Specifically, Gutfeld says, "Why are health food freaks always so sickly looking?"

Now, this comment is just sad-making.  It's supposed to be "funny", but unlike real humor, it has no grounding in reality.  Instead, it causes the non-wingnut audience to feel bad for the people laughing at this, trying desperately to convince themselves that while they get winded climbing a single staircase and they haven't lifted their hands over their heads in a decade, that it's those other people who look "sickly".  Now, it's true that there's no one-on-one correlation between being healthy and looking healthy, and of course "lookingly sickly" is a subjective statement, but this comment is just plain delusional, and in the most obvious sort of way.  Someone who laughs at this is so sad that I can't even be angry at them.  Their need to believe makes me profoundly uneasy, especially since I can see with my own eyes the evidence that the same people laughing at this joke don't really believe it.  After all, one of the reasons Sarah Palin is idolized is because she's youthful and healthy-looking---she's a runner!---and she can be paraded around as another balm for widespread insecurities.  According to Gutfeld's joke, she looks "sickly", but obviously the people out in Wingnutia don't actually think that.

Then there was this whole situation on his show:

Even within this screed, there's a contradiction.  Andrea Tantaros claims both that feminists have sex "like men", i.e. for pleasure, and that we're sexually unsatisfied because we're not getting any.  But it's an even more profoundly stupid statement if taken in the larger context of Fox News and the conservative movement.  After all, the number one priority of the Republican party after the 2010 elections was punishing "feminists" for getting some by defunding Planned Parenthood, restricting abortion out of existence, and just generally expanding the angry rhetoric around female sexuality.  Overall, the tone of the conservative movement regarding female sexuality is one of being furious at anyone else, especially anyone female, who might actually be having fun....with someone else.  "Keep your legs shut!" is the conservative mantra these days.  The concern is actually that feminists are getting some. 

This is in the same category as "health freaks look sickly".  It's a bit of self-delusion fed to a gullible audience who is consumed with jealousy and hatred and who are being instructed to channel those feelings towards "liberals", who are portrayed as an undifferientiated mass of people that are a cross between Rob Lowe's character on "Parks and Recreation" and kinksters who have completely fresh and unique sexual experiences every night.  And the instructions for sticking it to these people for thinking they're so cool is to vote Republican, because it's better to burn this country down than share it with people who make you feel so insecure.

I hate giving attention to Ron Paul, who is a familiar type in Texas: equal parts racist old crank that obsesses over conspiracy theories that have their historical roots in anti-Semiticism and vicious misogynist who thinks women's sexual liberation is the worst thing that's ever happened in history.  Unfortunately, Paul has managed to snag the affections of a collection of white men who imagine themselves to be "liberal", because they hear he supports legalizing marijuana, though they hide behind his opposition to the war because even they know that it's fucking disgusting to believe it's more important for dudes to have legal rights to joints than women to have legal rights to abortion.  Paulbots are literally the most annoying people on Earth, because there is literally nothing their hero can do that they won't vociferously defend, sometimes even while claiming not to support his point of view.  After all, they aren't prepared yet to follow their hero's prescribed lifestyle of marrying a church lady and giving up on the hope of interesting sex for the rest of their lives, but they know that keeping their already dim hopes of sex with live, consenting women alive means at least pretending like they are also repulsed by statements like, "order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks," and "the federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS".  Being Paulbots, they actually claim that these prior statements by Paul are fine, because they claim to believe his transparent lie that someone else wrote them for a newsletter and he just happened to sign his name to them without knowing what was in them.  This, even though in many of the offensive statements, he took great pains to make it clear that he was the one writing them.  For instance, in the rant about the "federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS", Paul wrote, "my training as a physician helps me see through this one."  But Paulbots are so dedicated to seeing this Bible-thumping, racist, misogynist piece of shit as their hero that they'll claim with straight faces that somehow all those first person statements in newsletters Ron Paul signed his name to were not written by him.  The man could eat a live kitten on TV, and while it was still squeaking in pain and terror as life seeped out of it and its blood ran down his face, they would say, "CNN is only telling you that's a kitten because they're part of the oligarchy, dude," before taking another puff on the joint. 

So I wasn't surprised to have angry Paulbots defend their hero on Twitter when I posted a link to Ron Paul suggesting that the Galveston hurricane of 1900 was the gold standard in how our country should respond to hurricanes, and that we shouldn't have FEMA coordinating rescue efforts that would prevent horrors like that hurricane, which killed three times as many people as the attacks on 9/11.  (Galveston is in his district, too, so Paul isn't fucking around when he idealizes the drowning deaths of thousands of people.)  Paul helpfully added that drowned bodies are good for our national character, adding, "FEMA creates many of our problems because they sell the insurance because you can't buy it from a private company, which means there's a lot of danger, so we pay people to build on beaches, and then we have to go and rescue them."  Angry Paulbots responded to my disapproval of this by sending things like old articles praising Galveston for being able to recover from a hurricane completely destroying their town.  Of course, this was nonsensical, because as admirable as the rebuilding efforts may have been, they had nothing to do with the point at hand, which is that it's important to have a federal agency to organize and run efforts to prevent people from drowning in the first place.  One Paulbot actually had the nerve to cite Hurricane Katrina as a reason we don't need FEMA.  When I pointed out that FEMA was being run in 2005 exactly as Paul wants---which is to say, not at all---the Paulbot had no response.  

In a sense, Ron Paul is just a sideshow, and his hateful desire to have people drown as some sort of lesson to people who might live on the coast (as if they do that for the hell of it and not because that's where their jobs are, or as if there's really huge parts of the country where there are never any natural dangers---by the way, Paul is breaking his own moral code by living in D.C.) is just another nasty thing he said to appeal to cranks who just enjoy being assholes, no matter how "progressive" they claim to be. But it's also important to pay attention to these narratives, because a lot of them are tried out by fringe sorts like Paul and then mainstreamed in right wing channels.  One of the biggest problems is that when things go right, as they largely did with the response to Irene, the minimal damage perversely gets people to believe that we don't need massive response efforts.  "That wasn't so bad," people think, "so I don't know why we need building codes, infrastructure spending, and coordinated government responses to natural disasters."  You know, even though these are the reasons that it wasn't so bad.  It's a lot like someone who eats right and exercises their whole life, and when they don't develop heart disease, saying, "Man, I guess I wasted all that effort."  

Paul's function in the conservative movement is to pull it to the right.  He comes out and says something outlandish like claiming that we don't need FEMA or that desegregation actually worsened race relations (the insinuation being that white people can only deal with black people if they have formal legal superiority  over them), and that helps make crazy wingnuttery that falls just short that sound more moderate. He runs out and denounces efforts to keep people alive and idealizes a situation where 8,000 people died.  That gives other conservatives space to demand a defunding of FEMA and National Weather Services, because hey, at least they aren't opening praising a situation where thousands drown to death.  Also, by focusing attention on 1900, Paul can distract from people comparing the excellent government response to Irene with the piss-poor government response to Katrina.  

As I noted yesterday, Democrats need to loudly resist this.  Not only denounce Paul's statements, but go the next step and hang him on Republicans in general.  Irene is a great occasion to show how effective government can be if being run by people who believe in government.  It's often hard to show how that works, because as noted before, when things are going well, people tend not to notice them.  But one opportunity is to highlight ignorant statements like Paul's and contrast them with our realities.  

I love most of this review of the double episode of "Louie" by Alyssa Rosenberg, but I have to object to this:

I should note that I tend to hold jokes made by liberals about evangelical Christians to a higher standard. If you’re going to venture into an arena of humor where it’s easy to take low roads and cheap shots and still be rewarded fairly handsomely for it by your audience.

Now maybe Alyssa objects generally to low roads, and expects all humor to be on a higher plane, but I see this attitude a lot coming from liberals, and I think it's coming from the wrong place.  It's generally coming from a mistaken belief that mocking evangelicals (really, fundamentalists) is punching down.  Liberals who don't get a lot of direct exposure to fundamentalists, in other words, buy fundamentalist myths about themselves: that they're outcast, that they lack social power and wealth, that they're somehow underpriivileged as a group.  Which goes back to what I was saying yesterday, about the illusion that the Tea Party is predominantly economically stressed people.  In reality, Tea Partiers tend to be wealthier than average.  

And for all their posturing, fundamentalists are not oppressed.  On the contrary!  Their political power outstrips their numbers, to begin with.  But more importantly, they hold often unchecked power in red state communities.  Actually walking through a parking lot of a megachurch on a Sunday morning will do a lot to quell any misconceptions that they're just earnest, beleaguered, underprivileged people who happen to have kooky beliefs.  Far from being the oppressed class, they are they are the oppressors.  In their communities, they terrorize queer people, atheists, anyone perceived as outside their norms, and sexually active women, even those sexually active women sitting in their pews.  In the South, Bible-thumping is also intertwined with racism and the continued devotion to segregation in many communities.  I think a lot of liberals who haven't done much time in these areas think of fundamentalists as ruling the trailer parks, but in reality, they rule the suburbs that are stuffed with McMansions. Believe me; for a lot of us when I was living  in Austin who are definitely on the outs with that community, if we found ourselves stepping outside of the city limits into the suburbs that are ruled by Bible-thumpers, we made damn sure to minimize our time there.  For much of the audience of any TV show or comedian that mocks fundies, a shot across the chin to fundamentalists is big time punching up.  What outsiders might perceive as a low road could save the life of young people stuck in these communities who question evangelical beliefs. 

They have social, political, and economic weight.  The only thing fundamentalists don't have is cool.  Of course, the social capital of cool is often complicated, since so much of cool comes from subcultures that have no social capital outside of cool.  Cool is a very real threat to fundamentalist communities and their ability to pass on their beliefs to their young, which is why they spend so much time trying to keep their young separated from pop music and youth fashion.  But so what?  Cool is really the only weapon we have against a group of people that actively and gleefully oppresses other classes.  Fuck 'em.  A sneering, mocking low road can actually be the road out for those ensnared in the culture who are having their doubts.  We shouldn't tear up that road on the grounds that it's a low road. Some times just pointing and laughing at someone can deprive them of a lot of power to do harm to others.  

Which isn't to say that I objected to that episode of "Louie".  But I don't think he was taking the high road so much as he had to have the fundamentalist Christian be a certain way for the events of the episode to unfold the way they did, since the episode was more about him and not really about her.  

If you're anything like me, you probably spend a lot of your time fretting because right wingers have grown incredibly bold about bald-faced lying, and so far it seems there's literally nothing that can be done about it.  We have extensive freedom of speech protections, which is a good thing of course, but leaves us with few options to stem the ever-growing tide of lies emanating from a right wing that knows that it can't make an honest argument.  The mainstream media has basically abandoned its mission to correct lies with the truth.  Some publications continue to fact check claims made by pundits, activists, and politicians, but it's just not enough to counter the endless stream of lies and misinformation coming from the right. That's why Fox News hates Media Matters so much---they have a machine-like approach to the lies, just debunking them in real time.  Media Matters can't get 'em all---that's a super-human feat---but they're the only people out there even approaching success with this.

Well, there is one door that is available, but not used especially often: lawsuits.  Part of that is that it's difficult to show damages with some of the lies that right wingers float, but not always.  Some lies are actionable.  Which is why I'm glad someone fought back against the aneurysm-causing lie that was in non-stop rotation during the health care debate, which is that health care reform somehow meant taxpayer-funded abortions.

A judge is allowing former Ohio congressman Steve Driehaus to sue the anti-choice Susan B. Anthony List for defamation, because as he sensibly pointed out, they were lying about whether abortion is "taxpayer-funded" under the Affordable Care Act.

The irony is that Driehaus is anti-choice. He did, however, vote for health insurance reform, which meant that SBA decided to run the above billboards against him. Despite the fact that abortion is never paid for by federal funds (except extremely limited cases of rape and incest victims on Medicaid) and the ACA didn't change the status quo, anti-choicers have been obsessed with insisting that it does by focusing on federal subsidies to private plans. In fact, after the fight over Stupak-Pitts and abortion nearly derailed the entire proceedings, pro-choicers were the ones wringing their hands over what Planned Parenthood called "unacceptable provisions on abortion." Those were the ones outlined in an executive order affirming the Hyde Amendment and emphasizing enforcement of existing separation of federal funds and abortion services.

Granted, in a perfect world, the guy who fights back wouldn't actually be a fellow misogynist, but I also suspect a defamation suit will be easier to prove when the victim of this particular lie is himself anti-choice.  It would be weird for a pro-choicer to sue because they were "defamed" by false claims that they did what they actually wished they could.  It'd be like me suing because people were out there spreading rumors that I slept with Jon Hamm.  On one hand, it is false.  On the other hand, the defense attorneys could argue that it was only because of lack of opportunity.

So, it's far from perfect.  I may still, should I meet Driehaus, ask him how he came to be a Democrat when he's such an asshole about women's basic rights.  But the SBA List was flagrantly violating election laws that require some kind of tentacle of truth to touch your claims, and they need to be held accountable for that.  I'll take it.  Anything that might put the fear of consequences into right wingers who believe their god has given them free moral license to lie whenever they damn well please. 

There's been a lot of attention paid, rightly, to the Citizens United decision and the role money plays in politics. I think we should also think long and hard about the impact that all this free-wheeling lying has on our discourse.  I honestly think it's just as toxic a problem as money.  You can spend and spend but if people aren't ready to hear what you're saying, it's hard to get through to them. But stoking paranoia throw shiny-sounding lies is pretty much free, and right wingers never leave that trough for it.  I bet you could clock the lies-per-minute rate on Fox News at around 2-3 per, easily.  A well-placed lie can do an amazing amount of damage, as was demonstrated by the "taxpayer funding for abortion" lie that nearly derailed health care reform.  What's frustrating is the Democrats, knowing that taxpayer funding for abortion is a toxic issue in the current political climate, didn't even consider putting it in, and it didn't matter.  Who cares what you do if you can't get credit for it because the opposition claims you're doing the opposite?  The media basically abandoned its duty to vigorously correct the lie, pulling a lot of that "both sides" crap.  Without a reasonable handle on what is actually true, we can't even begin to have real political discourse in this country.

Obviously, just suing the hell out of all the liars isn't an option for various reasons.  But I would like to see more well-placed lawsuits like this, hopefully causing groups like SBA List to slow their roll when they're thinking of lying again.  Of course, their very name is an act of dishonesty (they pretend Susan B. Anthony shared their view of women as ambulatory baby factories who don't deserve basic rights, which is kind of like saying MLK was pro-segregation), so it's possible they wouldn't know how to tell the truth if they ever vowed to start doing so. 

I opened up Michael Lind's article at Salon titled "The Tea Party and white Southern extremism" with a sigh.  I'm sure it will be astute, I told myself, but at the end of the day it doesn't seem to matter.  No matter how many writers and historians point out that the Tea Party is just the same old race-baited Bible-thumping white Southern fools that have been a pain in the ass of this country since its inception, the mainstream media won't listen, instead characterizing them as some bold new political force.

Makes you wonder if they all think Old Spice smells better now that it has better advertising. 

But I tell you now, drop what you're doing and read this piece.  In fact, bookmark it.  Because while our mainstream media may have short memories that make them impervious to history*, they have a somewhat harder time trying to wiggle out of cold, hard statistical facts.  And Lind has really marshalled the evidence to show that this "Tea Party" is basically the same old angry Southern right wing nuts who were so pissed about desegregation that they switched to the Republican Party (after begruding Republicans their votes for 100 years to punish them for the Emancipation Proclamation), and who have spent most of the post-Civil War period nurturing a culture where fundamentalist Christianity is wed to a general hostility towards the nation as a whole, which they disguise as "patriotism", though the cracks often show with their tendency to fly the U.S. flag next to the Confederate flag.  In other words, the Tea Party Caucus in Congress, far from being some sparkly new nationwide phenomenon, is the same group of Dixiecrats that would rather burn this country to the ground rather than see it move into a more modern, progressive era. 

But even these numbers understate how much the Tea Party is just a new name for the same old bullshit.  After all, there has been a Southern diaspora, which is why you see Confederate flags and Bible-thumping Baptists popping up frequently in rural areas of the Midwest and the Northwest.  As Lind recounts, many of the people classified as non-Southern hail, unsurprisingly, from districts that are heavy on the descendents of this diaspora.

Many of the other states with Tea Party representatives are border states with significant Southern populations and Southern ties. One is Maryland, a state with Confederate sympathies during the Civil War, which, because the Census Bureau defines it as "Northeastern," is responsible for the only Northeastern member of the Tea Party caucus, Roscoe Bartlett. The four Californian representatives come from the Orange County area or inland California, both regions whose political culture was shaped by Southern political culture, in the form of the "Okie" diaspora that settled there during the Depression.

I can hear the pissing and moaning and tantrum-throwing of conservatives thus exposed by these statistics, which will center heavily around "Nuh-uh!", as in, "How dare you suggest that just because Southern whites have disproportionately tried to fuck up everything great about this country, all because of their racial resentments and backasswards views on gender, that this could still be going on?"

 To which I say, as always, dudes, I'm from Texas.  Trying to pass off Southern white culture as more tolerant and less superstitious than it is might work on people who haven't spent a lot of time around the very people we're talking about---thus the baffling refusal to get it in the mainstream media---but it doesn't fly with me.  I have a lot of years under my belt of trying to get through conversaations with your average Southern Joes without some offensive shit coming out of their mouths, and I can attest to what a Herculean task that really is.  And while part of my reason for living in Austin was to minimize that kind of thing, it's not like we had a law banning assholes from living inside the city limits, as demonstrated by this picture I took during the 2008 elections of a house in my neighborhood.

Needless to say,  I'm not fooled by lip-smacking denials about what it's actually like. 

I think perhaps the problem was there wasn't a catchy name for this voting bloc before, and so now we're stuck with "Tea Party", even though, as Lind pointed out, the Tea Party caucus presence from the states that conducted the American Revolution is basically nil. 

*Seriously, I saw the usually astute Eugene Robinson on MSNBC scoffing at the idea that Republicans might be looking for an angle to impeach Obama.  His argument seemed to be, "Nah, why would we think Republicans would be extremist enough to concoct a bullshit reason to impeach a Democratic President simply because they can't stand the idea of him in office?"  I suppose it has been a whole 13 years, and so it may as well have not happened.  There's some kind of "Logan's Run" system going on with the memories of the Beltway media, except the lifespan of a memory we're allowed to acknowledge isn't 30 years, but somewhere closer to 3. 

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There's so much to comment on from this clip, but what really struck me about this report on Boehner's visible loss of control over the Tea Party idiots in his party is that the teabaggers, as an act of aggression against him, started praying.  Being from Texas, I'm really familiar with praying as a form of passive aggressive emotional warfare, but even I was mildly surprised to see a bunch of grown men doing it to other grown men who they claim to be on the same team as.  As a psychological weapon, it's really grown past the pinched mouth "i'll pray for you" disapprovals I grew up witnessing. 

I think this whole situation should put to rest all the hand-wringing about what the "Tea Party" is.  Whatever diverse shit people are saying on the ground, people who are taking leadership roles are religious fanatics with very small minds who would rather burn this country down to the ground rather than share power with the kind of folks who would vote for Barack Obama.  Or, to put it another way, the teabagger relationship to the country is like a wife-beater to his wife: what they call "love" is actually a desire to exert control and complete ownership.  And now the wife-country has run off with a handsome and charming black man.  

Of course they're going to pull the trigger.  

The religious fanaticism angle is fascinating to me, and I think goes a long way towards explaining why the Tea Party types are going to tank any deal.  Basically, once you start saying that god is telling you what to do, what you mean is you're making 100% of your decisions based on knee-jerk emotions. And not just any emotions, but fundamentalist Christian ones---i.e. paranoia, grandiosity, etc.  A lot of these folks probably believe Obama is the Antichrist.  But even if they don't, they definitely believe that anyone who isn't their version of right wing conservative is in thrall to Satan.  What this makes them is impervious to reason.  That's why I think they really, seriously do believe that Obama, Boehner, the pundits, etc. are lying when they say the shit hits the fan if we don't raise the debt celing.  That is, in the fundie eye, a lie fueled by Satan to keep this country away from the path of the Lord.  Everything the demonized mainstream media and the Democrats say is, in their view.

This is what religious fanaticism does to the body politic.  I think a lot of people have, for a long time, imagined that the fundie right wasn't that big a deal, because hey, they just want to ban abortion and gay rights, right?  As long as people considered these second tier issues, the fundies could grow their power unchecked.  The mainstream Republican party thought they could use the Bible thumpers to get a caucus together, throw them some abortion bones, and then use their warm bodies to get votes for the stuff Wall Street really cares about.  But what they've found is they've created a monster.  

Increasing numbers of Republicans are making it clear that they think that concerns about the U.S. going into default on August 2nd are just a hoax being played on the public in order to convince Congress to borrow more money to pay for abortion parties and caviar for welfare recipients.  I was deeply alarmed by how widespread this narrative is getting, according to Rachel Maddow's coverage.  

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It's hard to single out the most moronic Republican moron in all this, but I think MVP in the Stupid Olympics should go to Louie Gohmert, one of the many representatives in Congress whose sole purpose in life is to make those of us from Texas wonder when the state turned into Oklahoma. Gohmert's reaction to all this is, well, special.

Max Read at Gawker described the situation:

"[W]e find out the president has a big birthday bash scheduled for August the 3rd, celebrities flying in from all over," Gohmert told Newsmax TV yesterday. "And lo and behold, August 2nd is the deadline for getting something done so he can have this massive, the biggest fundraising dinner in history for a birthday celebration." That's right: This whole "idiot Republicans are taking the world economy to the brink of financial ruin" ferrago is just a way for Obama to raise money... from celebrities. "Isn't that amazing?" Gohmert wonders. "The timing of this?"

Let's think about what Gohmert is saying about the President by saying this.  First of all, he's claiming the President is stupid and doesn't understand the economics of this.  Second, he's claiming the President is deceitful, a casual liar who will bring the nation to a crisis situation with his casual inability to ever speak the truth.  (Sounds like projection to me.)  But most of all, Gohmert is portraying the President as an irresponsible, self-indulgent layabout who tricked the public into electing him so he could have big parties on the government dime.  That move right there is out of the ex-Confederate-responding-to-the-Reconstruction playbook.  Remember, Republican expressions of blatant idiocy, misogyny, and racism are like cockroaches: for every one you see out in public, there are hundreds, even thousands behind closed doors.  

In all the coverage over this, I think one thing that's really being neglected is how much of what's motivating Republicans is culture war. There's a tendency to think this is only about slashing taxes for the rich and pushing the have-nots deeper into economic deprivation, but there's more than that going on.  (As if that wasn't enough, I know.)  The voices of sense continue to point out that if we default on our loans, this will cause economic collapse, and we wonder if Republicans really are being serious when they act cavalier about raining destruction on the country they claim to love.  And the answer is yes.  It's clear their "love" of their country is similar to the love a man has for the wife he murders for leaving him.  As I noted before, the belief appears to be that if they---they being white Christian conservatives---can't have complete control of the U.S., then the U.S. as we know it doesn't deserve to exist. 

Via Crooks and Liars, there's been some illuminating research from Cornell on public perceptions of what constitutes a "government social program".  Turns out that whether or not you identify as someone who has used a government social program doesn't really depend on things like having used a government social program.  

Levels are shockingly high across the board, but the data suggests that it's middle class people who don't identify as someone who has used a government program, even when they get a check in the mail from the U.S. Treasury.  I highlight that, because the obvious dodge away from seeing what's going on here is to claim that people don't perceive tax credits or deductions as government programs, because they think of government programs as things where you go directly for services or money.  But Social Security and VA benefits look like a government program just as much as food stamps.  Also, the aesthetic difference between Head Start and student loans isn't enough to justify the gap in perception, and interestingly, Medicare and Medicaid are very similar, and yet there's more than a 10 point gap in perception of yourself as being on a "government program" if you use it.  

These numbers only make sense if you assume that whether or not one identifies as someone who uses a government social program depends on irrelevant things like class status.  This table demonstrates the effectiveness of decades of Republican propaganda equating "social program" with deragatory stereotypes of poor people and non-white people.  When you call someone up and say, "Are you in a government social program?", you're going to get a lot of white, middle or upper class conservatives thinking, "I'm not some low rent welfare queen," and they're going to answer no without really connecting the dots.  

The obvious result of this is that Republican voters are supporting ideas they clearly don't understand, because their prejudices are preventing them from thinking clearly.  So you see a lot of conservatives raving online about how we don't need to raise the debt ceiling, and they're thinking, "We've borrowed enough money to pay for the liquor and cigarettes for an undifferientiated hoarde of dark-skinned layabouts. Screw 'em. They should get a job and spend their own money."  This is wrong on many levels, and liberals tend to focus on the most obvious wrongness of it---the classism and the racism and the total lack of empathy and the broad stereotyping that has no basis in people's realities---but there's another level of wrongness here that is driving this entire debt ceiling fiasco.  And that's the assumption that the main role of government is to tax well-off people and hand it out to people who have less.  The government actually does very little of this.  If anything, they tax well-off people and then give it right back to them in credits, deductions, subsidized loans, etc. in order to to make their lives easier and more secure.  And that's after all the money that's spent just running the country and of course the untouchable defense program.  The amount of taxation that goes to redistribution of wealth is measely.  It's certainly not enough to get the people who depend on it on a road out of poverty, unlike middle class subsidies that really do help middle class people start accumulating social capital and wealth at an early age that pays off their entire lives.  

One of the great mysteries of Tea Party politics has been the place of female leaders in their pantheon, from the whole coinage of "Mama Grizzly" to the baffling enthusiasm for Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin.  It's not that Tea Partiers have suddenly decided their lifelong hostility towards feminism was misguided; Palin and Bachmann's prominence has been accompanied by a dramatic turning up of the volume of anti-feminist hysteria.  Of course, that anti-feminist hysteria has been focused mainly on controlling and punishing female sexuality, which I think gives us a path to understanding what seems contradictory on its surface.  

But when I started to read Roy's column about rightbloggers trying to pretend the latest propaganda film about Palin is some nationwide hit, something clicked.  I realized that Palin's main role is to be a saint and a martyr in the civic religion of Tea Partyism.  Think about it: while the Tea Party is incoherent enough that a lot of people with diverse approaches to being resentful wingnuts feel welcome, the language of Biblical literalism has been amply applied to their illiterate readings of the Constitution and the Founding Fathers.  (It's why I blanch at the word "literalism", which implies having actually read and attempted to understand the text, when what it means is coming to a text with authoritarian leanings and claiming, regardless of the evidence, that an immoveable object or deceased authority supports your contentions. There's nothing literal about it.)  Because fundamentalist Christianity is being wound up into it, the distinction between religious figures and political figures has collapsed. And that explains how women can somehow rise to prominence in a world that quite literally depends on a hyper-chauvinist take on patriarchy as the source of virtue, where a comic book masculinity takes the place of the garments of priesthood. Even in societies where women have almost no real life outside of the home, female figures can be prominent in faith.  In fact, often prominent female figures exist to shore up misogyny---the figures are idealized women who are used to punish other women for being merely human.

Fundamentalist Christianity has mostly missed the train on this, until somewhat recently.  Catholics have it down cold.  I mean, their most prominent female figure is a woman who managed to be both a virgin and a mother---the two ideals of woman a misogynist society holds up above others.  But of course, the two roles contradict each other, so if you're one, you're failing at the other, because the first rule of patriarchy is Women Are Always Failing.  The Virgin's role is to drive home how every other woman who has ever lived is an utter failure.  But Catholicism also has a role for prominent female martyrs, and yeah, virginity is practically a requirement---some died so they could stay virgins.  

Obviously, what's required of female ideals and martyrs changes from culture to culture depending on their needs.  But I'd say that Palin and Bachmann are, for the Tea Party faithful, playing the role of both idealized women and martyrs.  Their popularity depends on using them as a weapon.  They're packaged as hyper-fertile but chaste, sexy without having sexual demands.  So as the Virgin can be used to bash women who can't be both a virgin and a mother, Palin/Bachmann are there to bash women who can't be sexy but chaste, submissive without losing that appealing spark, and able to raise huge herds of children without losing their waistlines or two hours in the morning to get beautiful for their husbands and the world.  Right wingers try to bash feminists with them, but suddenly it occurs to me that they're being venerated for the effect on the ordinary women of the Tea Party faith as much as anyone else.  When right wingers solemnly intone that feminists are jealous, we can laugh because hey, most of us don't see any virtue in the sexy-but-chaste thing, much less the huge herd of kids thing.  (The fertility goddess thing is particularly important during a stampede to force women to link childbirth and being sexual, no matter how unwilling or unable they are to have more children.)  But for women who are involved in that values system and having to traverse the impossible contradictions every day, well.... And hearing the line that "feminists are jealous" would be remarkably effective at tamping down your resentments if you were a female conservative.  You can't point out that Palin/Bachmann are promoting an impossible myth, because next thing you know, you're going to be called a feminist.  And you can't have that. 

And of course, they're also martyr in the Tea Party eye---sacrificed for their devotion to chaste motherhood, just as the virgins of old were forced to commit suicide instead of allow rapists to take your virginity.  Which also means you can't complain, if you're an ordinary woman.  After all, you aren't as brave as the saints and martyrs, right? 

Of course, the question remains, "Why do they give them leadership roles, if they're more idealized women in this civic faith?"  And the answer is, because they have to.  I mean, how else do they show support?  Palin is trying to make it as a more media/commercial figure, but that requires some coverage from the political media, and they aren't going to give it to her if she's not considered, you know, an actual politician.  Bachmann's position is even more precarious.  They need media to feed the faithful, but the media needs politics to consider them relevant.  But also, their ability to be politicians while still playing the submissive wives is just one more contradiction that makes emulating them impossible for ordinary women, and after all, isn't that the point? 

One of the markers of conservatism in our modern democracy is a routine willingness to say one thing privately and another publicly.  The reason for this is that our national consensus has turned towards justice, which causes defenders of the old order into a bad situation where they either say what they mean and sound like monsters, or they try to reframe their authoritarian views in liberal terms to confuse the issue.   Historically, this has mostly been a stalling tactic, if in results if not in intention.  Slave owners bought a little more time owning slaves by claiming slavery was good for slaves, because they weren't smart enough for freedom.  (This argument never actually went away entirely, as was demonstrated by Michele Bachmann signing a pledge that was based on the assumption that African-Americans needed to be enslaved to make them act right, by social conservative standards.)  In the early days of segregation, what was privately expressed as an explicit desire to keep black people as second class citizens was cleaned up and publicly presented as "separate but equal".  When that stopped working, private support for segregation as segregation was cleaned up and presented to the public as "states' rights" or "private property rights".  After desegregation, private anger at black people for demanding equality was cleaned up and presented as "law and order" in public.  You know this history.  

I believe that racism is what developed the strategy, but now it's endemic.  Abortion is privately about sluts who can't keep their legs shut, publicly about "life".  Economic policies that that are designed to grow the gap between the haves and have-nots are publicly supported because they supposed grow the economy and do the opposite.  (This facade was falling apart on a lot of Twitter accounts yesterday when I put up a link explaining how the wealthiest 400 families in America could pay off everyone else's credit card debt or student loan debt, and instead of trotting out "trickle down" like good propagandists, the wingnut tweeps started screaming "jealous!" at me. I honestly think some of them believe their check is coming in the mail any day now.)  Anti-gay bigotry is blatant in private spaces, but about "traditional marriage" in public spaces.  And, as I've noted before, being a white person who routinely is injected into conservative-heavy all-white spaces, I can assure you that the private willingness to just be blatantly racist hasn't gone away at all. However, because of my career, it is becoming more hidden to me.

The problem with this strategy is it actually takes a lot of effort to maintain elaborate facades.  And really, only people who are out in public are expected to maintain the facade.  The blatant nastiness is freely expressed in private spaces, which is why, as I've pointed out before, elaborate email chains are one of those things that help create conservative solidarity largely out of the view of liberals.  The Republican infrastructure has been remarkably good at sorting people and aiming the more honest messages into spaces where their messages won't reach liberal ears.  (It's not a coincidence that Limbaugh is on AM radio, which just so happens to be---as Air America learned---a medium that liberals largely don't give a shit about, especially when it comes to the mid-morning hours when most of us are at work and not listening to the radio.  And even then, Limbaugh attempts to be more measured than the teeming masses he speaks to.)  Getting on TV, publishing in widely available spaces or moving into national politics used to mean getting potty trained in saying things in code and not talking like you would to your friends.  Now, most of us do this to one extent or another, but with liberals I rarely hear a direct conflict between their private values and their public ones, but with conservatives, there's often a direct conflict, or at least mismatch, between private values and public ones.

I think there's been cracking lately, is my point.  There's a number of reasons for this, but one of them is the rapid expansion of the internet means that conservatives who aren't potty trained have more access to a national platform, simply because it's that much harder for the party leaders to filter them out.  That, and as we all know, this Tea Party stuff is emboldening to the non-potty-trained.  They've been trained to hate "political correctness" that keeps them from saying what they really think, and by god, they're not going to take it any more.  

A couple of examples come to mind.  First off, you have the situation in New Hampshire, where state Republicans basically forced Planned Parenthood to stop dispensing contraception.  Two different stories about it have quotes from Raymond Wieczorek, one of the council members who blocked the funding.  

"If they want to have a good time, why not let them pay for it?" he said.

Or:

"I am opposed to providing condoms to someone. If you want to have a party, have a party but don't ask me to pay for it."

There are two possible explanations for this.  One is that he spoke off the cuff to a group of reporters, and they quoted him differently.  I reject this possibility, for a number of reasons, but the most prominent one is that the comments aren't slightly different, but dramatically different in imagery and wording.  Reporters are unlikely to get it that wrong. My theory is that Wieczorek didn't just slip up and go off message (the official anti-choice message is to claim this has nothing to do with punishing women, but is about "life"), but that he thinks this stuff about not having to pay for women's good time is fucking Pulitzer Prize MacArthur Grant genius shit.  And that the second quote demonstrates he's working on the message, trying to make it more vivid.  He's not ashamed.  He's willing to put that behind closed doors stuff right out in public.  

Example #2 is from Roy Edroso, who collected a number of examples of how prominent right wing bloggers have cracked under the pressure of trying to appear non-racist and are just going all out.  They're all in a snit about a supposed black-on-white crime wave that's erupted in the wake of Obama's election, a panic that uses similar logic to the pro-slavery sentiments in the pledge Bachmann signed, i.e. that black people really can't have power or equality because they don't act right.  In reality, as Roy chronicles, crime is continuing to go down and, as has been true through most of history, most violent crime is still wife-beating and drug war nonsense and bar-fighting and stabbing your relatives at a holiday party when family disagreements boil over.  Some choice quotes:

"I knew before I saw the video 'who' those rioting punks were going to be" in the Christopher Street incident, said Urban Grounds. "And so did you. And... yep...they're a bunch of black kids, acting like animals and criminals while terrorizing the public... That's because in Black Run America, there are no rules of civility or decency."....

"America consigns itself to a slide toward savagery in the name of Hope & Change," said Moonbattery -- the "Hope & Change" presumably included in case readers hadn't yet realized who's the real Head Negro in Charge of this imaginary black crime wave......

Coming to Day's pre-emptive defense was Robert Stacy McCain: "Writing something like that should elicit accusations of 'raaaaacism' -- from white liberals who wouldn't dare set foot in Milwaukee after dark," said McCain, who clearly thinks the post-sundown population of Brew City consists exclusively of black people and gutsy white right-wingers intent on bucking unfortunate stereotypes. (By the way, Milwaukee's crime rate is also dropping. Soon maybe even liberals will hang out there!)

Milwaukee? Some times I really don't get some of the rhetorical flourishes used by wingnuts. 

The point of all this is that the mechanisms that kept this stuff out of the public view have broken down.  At this point, I suppose I should issue a call to action, but I'm unsure what that would look like.  I suppose the one thing you could do is keep a file of this stuff and label it the "Told Ya So" file when arguing either with conservatives who are still toeing the line or liberals who believe right wingers are as well-meaning as they pretend to be.  

I'm somewhat reluctant to feed the beast on this. Every story based around "Michele Bachmann doesn't know her history/the meaning of words/how to work door knobs!" is a story where we're not talking about how Michele Bachmann is a fire-breathing Bible thumper who can't wait for her husband to have a handmaid of his own so they can keep having babies.  While I think folks like Matt Taibbi overrate the damage of making fun of Bachmann for being stupid---yes, it makes stupid people like her more, but it does help her lose support amongst those who still have functioning brain cells, which was why Sarah Palin so dramatically damaged John McCain's campaign----mixing some other narratives (Iranian-style theocracy supporter comes to mind) into the mix will help hurt her chances even more.  

Anyway, despite all this, I want to point out that Bachmann is pulling a Palin, i.e. when she got history wrong, her supporters (with her blessing) decided to rewrite history rather than let Dear Leader be wrong.  "We've always been at war with Eurasia" is no longer hyperbole!  Her supporters changed John Wayne's birthplace on Wikipedia in order to bring it in line with her erroneous statements, which I found especially amusing, because I'd bet a large sum of money that whoever did that believes that Obama faked his birth certificate to become President. And now her supporters are claiming that John Quincy Adams was a "Founding Father", even though he was a small child when the Declaration of Independence was signed.  

The reason they're doing this goes back to---as it often does with this crew---this nation's ugly history of racism and their inability to deal with it that stems from their role as people who are continuing it.  Bachmann was trying to find a way to justify her ridiculous claim that the Founding Fathers "fought tirelessly" to end slavery, and what she happened upon was to put all that statement on one guy who wasn't actually a Founding Father, though he was the son of one.  

By this line of argument, I'm going to say that the citizens of West Texas in the 1970s work tirelessly to keep my cats' water bowl full in the summer. Hey, if your parents and all the people around them get to take credit for the work you do, then the possibilities are endless.  As are the Wikipedia rewrites. 

I think at this point it's worth pre-locking certain Wikipedia pages every time a Republican says something blatantly wrong on the topic.  Clearly, shame isn't going to prevent the volunteer propagandists from rewriting history, but access could stop them. 

Also, with regards to the manufactured flap over the word "flake", I will say this: probably in the future it would be wise, when using accurate descriptors for Michele Bachmann, stick to ones that tend to be used mostly or only to describe men.  "Flake" is applied to men and women, which is enough for the wingnuts to round that up to "sexist", since they don't actually give a flying fuck about real sexism.  I recommend "lunkhead" and "asshole" for future use. 

Philip Klein at the Washington Times writes today about a minor issue cropping up for Michele Bachmann, which is that she, her family, and her constituents have directly benefited from copious amounts of government aid, to the point where she wrote a sloppy love letter to to Tom Vilsack asking for more:

Just a year later, however, Bachmann wrote to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, praising the federal government for helping prop up the prices of pig products and dairy by directly buying the commodities, a move that benefited her constituents.

"I would encourage you to take any additional steps necessary to prevent further deterioration of these critical industries, such as making additional commodity purchases," she wrote on Oct. 5, 2009. The Los Angeles Times/Tribune Washington Bureau obtained the letter through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The interesting part, though, is that Klein is arguing that her blatant hypocrisy doesn't and shouldn't matter.  

It’s been a popular theme of liberals for some time, particularly over the past few years, to raise alarms every time any conservative accepts any form of government aid. The problem with this line of argument is that no matter how conservative or even libertarian people are, they still have to live in the world of big government and pay taxes to support it. Therefore, it would be absurd for them to unilaterally decide not to receive any benefits that are going to exist – and that they’ll help pay for – regardless of whether or not they accept them.

And yeah, if you're talking about, say, a candidate who abhors Social Security paying into it and accepting benefits, then that makes some sense.  You'd be violating a law if you didn't pay in, and the payment is simply distributing your dollars back to you.  However, what we're talking about here isn't Social Security.  It's a form of discretionary government subsidy that Bachmann, as an elected representative, is in a unique position to go Galt on.  

Even if she wasn't able to stop it, there's no requirement in federal government subsidies that you write back to the executive branch and tell them just how much you want to be their BFF, and how you hope they don't forget you after the summer is over.  That's the weird part here - the reluctant acceptance of government aid usually doesn't come coupled with a plaintive request for as much gubmint cheese as possible.

Klein has an alternative standard for how we should judge hypocrisy, which is basically that it's only hypocrisy when Bachmann isn't doing it:

The better gauge of hypocrisy is whether your policy preferences start varying based on whether certain policies benefit you personally.

For the sake of argument, we'll let Klein off from the terrible duty of having to read the LA Times piece that demonstrates just how much she personally benefitted from policies she opposed.  (It's hard in this workaday world to have to read several paragraphs before you comment on them, hence why I'm just going to talk about the blatant underuse of whipped cream in porn these days for the rest of this post.)

The problem with this argument is that when you're an elected official, particularly an elected Congressperson of whom there are only 535 in the entire country, you're not only in a unique position to effectuate your policy preferences, but you're one of the few people whose consistent voice on the issue truly matters.  You do personally benefit from the positions you take and the policies you support, because your entire job is spent making decisions to justify keeping your job.  When you're a small-government warrior who suddenly endorses government spending because it helps your constituents, that endorsement's purpose is to keep your constitutents - i.e., your employers - happy.  When they're happy, you get reelected.  When you get reelected, you keep your paycheck, your power, and your platform to do things like run for President.

There's a common thread among conservative ideologues that pointing out the hypocrisy of conservative elected officials on deep matters of policy is an ineffective and lazy critique.  The point isn't whether that ideology is followed, but instead whether it's a good idea to begin with (an argument that generally leads back to you being called a big-government statist).  The inability of conservative proponents to follow the ideology they adhere to, even when they have the power to do it, isn't really hypocrisy - it's just big government's fault for making them do it.  In the real world, though, that hypocrisy has weight to it, because those ideologues aren't passive watchers, they're active participants in a process they simultaneously promote and demonize.

(Image via)

Matt Taibbi has an excellent profile up about Michele Bachmann, and why she's no laughing matter (not that this has ever stopped me).  It's tempting to quote it at length, but then that would imply I had just the best parts, and really you should read the whole thing.  Just read it for the part where Taibbi describes Bachmann fancying herself a spy and hiding in the bushes at a gay rights rally.  

But I will quote a couple of relevant parts:

Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can't tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don't learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you're a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they're even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies......

Given how Bachmann's stature rises every time she does something we laugh at, it's no wonder she's set her strangely unfocused eyes on the White House. Since arriving in Congress, she has been a human tabloid-copy machine, spouting one copy-worthy lunacy after another. She launched a fierce campaign against compact fluorescent lights, claiming that the energy-saving bulbs contain mercury and pose a "very real threat to children, disabled people, pets, senior citizens." She blasted the 2010 census as a government plot and told people not to comply because the U.S. Constitution doesn't require citizens to participate, when in fact it does. She told her constituents to be "armed and dangerous" in their resistance to cap-and-trade limits on climate-warming pollution. She insisted that Obama's trip to India cost taxpayers $200 million a day, and claimed that Nancy Pelosi had spent $100,000 on booze on state-paid flights aboard military jets.

She has a real knack for self-mythologizing that far exceeds Sarah Palin's, as well.  I think it's because she hasn't ever really tried to put some air between herself and the Bible-thumping shit, but Palin has her eye on mainstream fame and that tends to compromise her.  You can't be stitching crosses onto Bristol's "Dancing With The Stars" costumes, you know.  As I noted yesterday at Double X, Bachmann has at least  half a dozen origin stories, which are manipulated to suit different audiences.  Taibbi discovered a few more.  I blamed evangelical culture for it, because it's a culture that encourages repeated "conversions" and other blatant lies in order to heighten emotion; I'm sure they justify it as a "higher truth" sort of thing.  But I'm stubbornly stuck on that "real truth comes first" thing myself.  

Anyway, the one quarrel I have with Taibbi is he believes Bachmann's appeal is strictly towards the overtly religious fanatics, or at least the people who still think the commies put mind control substances in the drinking water.  I think there's a possibility that she pulls in some of the cultural resentment vote, too.  It's that light bulbs thing.  When I first heard Bachmann screeching about the evils of fluorescent light bulbs, I thought, "That there is the stupidest thing I've ever heard."  And it is!  I think it's the combination of paranoia plus resentment plus the smallness of it---we're in two wars and the economy is in tatters, but Republicans like  her and Rand Paul can't get over the fact that their light bulbs are twisty now, like some kind of queer weirdo  hippie light bulbs. 

But what I've since found is pretty much every conservative in the country, whether they're a social conservative or a get-off-my-lawn-and-go-to-jail-hippie conservative (or some combination), is full blown pissed off about those fucking light bulbs.  The theme that unites right wing populists is that they all imagine themselves to be mini-Attila the Huns, and their god-given right as Americans is to suck up resources and lay waste to the planet, just to show that they're the kings of the world.  Which goes a long way to explaining the surge of purchases of gas guzzlers during the early days of the war.  The signal was, "Hey, we should poach other country's resources so my car can be the size of a house.  This will make us feel powerful, and will go a long way towards making up for the fact that we can't, as a nation, cross a parking lot without wheezing or remember the last time we had mind-blowing sex."  Just a guess, anyway. But Bachmann really appeals to that.

Plus, while she's scary and has a past of doing shit like obsessing over gay people so much she gazes at them from behind bushes,  she's really learned some poise in the past few years.  At Right Online, she was glitter-bombed, and she reacted in the most smooth, appropriate way possible. 

She walked right through it and acted like it didn't happen.  That's basically the best and only way to deal with this, is to treat it like the harmless prank it basically is.  The way not to react is to make like Mike Huckabee and act like the gays are raping you with their glitter.  You can just imagine what would happen if Sarah Palin got glitter bombed: a five week freak out across Twitter and Facebook where she accused LGBT radicals of stealing her children with their glittery weapons of mass destruction.  

But Bachmann?  She's acting like someone who's got this.  We should be scared.

Back from Netroots Nation, and while I'm still a little tired, I'm energized as usual after the conference.  As many of you no doubt know, the pathetic shadow conference Right Online was closer than ever this year.  And by "pathetic shadow conference", I mean it.  Every year, Right Online finds out where Netroots Nation is and schedules near there, because there's something about being conservative that requires being childish and petulant.  This year, it was especially ugly, because the Right Online was closer than ever to Netroots Nation, and they were in fact in the Hilton that many of us---including myself---were staying at.  Which means that the childish, petulant behavior kept spilling over.  And also that I ran into Andrew Breitbart downtown and took a picture of him standing with a friend (with his permission, of course!).  Breitbart showed up at Netroots Nation, which is irritating because while the vast majority of attendees react to such behavior the way you should---with scorn bordering on indifference---a handful of people got provoked and taped themselves yelling stupid shit at him.  Which is what he no doubt hoped would happen, and leave media with the assumption that "both sides" are bad, even though only one side schedules an entire conference for the sole purpose of irritating their opponents.  

False equivalence is particularly a problem when you consider that the one incident that everyone heard about was a Right Online attendee harassing some Netroots attendees.  The main victim of the harassment told her story in a panel about fighting Islamaphobia (which was, by the way, a great panel that I learned a lot from). She was wearing a hijab  while standing outside a bar that was having a Netroots event, talking to some friends, and at least one of her friends was also wearing a hijab, and some dude from a shitty right wing blog rolled up and started to harass her and her friend.  When they told him to kindly fuck off, he started taking their pictures.  (For what purpose, I'm not sure---he seemed to be under the impression that someone could use the photos as some sort of expose of Netroots Nation, or maybe he thought the police would somehow stop free Americans from wearing what they like as they stand around on the streets of Minneapolis.)  At this point, a number of people at the party came to the women's defense, and he was arrested.  Marc and I walked up to the club right as the man was being shoved into a cop car, and I said something about it, since something about the situation seemed like it was more than a drunk-asshole-getting-arrested situation.  Indeed, it was.  And of course, someone got video of much of the confrontation between the man who was harassing the women and the Netroots folks who pushed back. You can see the confrontation (with my Texas buddy Matt Glazer!) starting at 4:30. 

Here is a first person account.  Here's the harasser's online profile, and here is his arrest record. 

I want to highlight that the guy in question is threatening to call Andrew Breitbart, which again I don't completely understand.  Does he think Breitbart has some legal authority to stop people from standing in the streets wearing clothing items he disapproves of?  I suppose I can see how you'd get confused, since all this happened the day Anthony Weiner resigned.  But it's unsettling to see how at least one of Breitbart's fans imbues the man with nearly god-like powers.  I'm inclined to think the guy is bluffing, by the way, and was just hoping the threat of calling the Breitbart cops who would make the women pay for wearing hijabs would make them, I don't know, stop or something. 

Anyway, the incident was understandably upsetting, and some people reacted by organizing a flash mob at the Hilton.  I stood on the second floor and watched it; it was mainly a bunch of people milling around, many in hijabs.  But it worked as intended, getting coverage for the incident and giving the protestors a chance to explain their point of view:

Jesse and I got in the elevator with some protestors after the incident and spoke briefly to them; they were excited and a little scared about everything that happened, but felt like they had made their point. 

Of course, you can predict the right wing reaction, considering that what happened was a woman claiming a man harassed her: immediately hide behind claims that women are liars and not to be believed.  John Hawkins of Right Wing News went straight to that strategy.  Believe it or  not, I was one of the liberal bloggers he was talking to, as was Jesse.  I don't recall if I explained to him that I had seen the guy getting arrested, but you know, if he was so skeptical, he could have asked if we knew anything. By the way, the characterization of Netroots as "90-95% white" is really laughable from someone who was there with Right Online, since when we were talking to him the entire conference was moving from one location to another.  But I wouldn't characterize them as 90-95% white, since that figure is way too low. 

Hopefully, the right wingers won't be as close next year.  While it did provide from some really amusing encounters (liberals are apparently very frightening to ride elevators with!), it's also scary, since there is the unhinged element of conservative activists, and a willingness to make casual death threats, as Melissa Clouthier did on Twitter, when she said, "Bunch of #nn11 folks in the elevator called me the enemy. I reminded that folks on the right pack heat. #ro11."

The main problem with Sarah Palin isn't her, per se.  It's the creepy cult-like following she inspires, from the editing of Wikipedia pages to match her version of history to this insane rant by John Ziegler.  John, you see, has dedicated his life to protecting the reputation of this multimillionaire celebrity from the slings and arrows of people accurately describing what she does.  

For many reasons, the first week of January 2009 was clearly the longest and most difficult of my life. By late Sunday morning, exhausted and now preparing to cross the country for my grandfather’s funeral, I staggered out of the shower and my then fiancée told me someone had called.

“Hi, John Ziegler, this is Governor Sarah Palin,” said the familiar voice on my phone message. There was a pause. “From Alaska,” she added. It’s typical of Sarah’s underappreciated sense of humor to pretend this needed to be clarified. “I just sat down and watched your movie about 9/11,” she went on, “and it’s unflippin’ believable”—”flippin’” is one of her favorite expressions—”I would like to talk with you about this next documentary. Could you give me a call?”

He then promptly dumped the fiancee and got back into the shower for fifteen minutes of American Beauty-style self-pleasure, muttering "from flippin' Alaska" over and over and over again.  

As you can see, John Ziegler has a very special relationship with Sarah Palin, the same relationship that an unhinged college student has with the cute girl in his intro Bio class who asked if he was coming to Open Mic night tomorrow.  And now that Sarah Palin has disappointed him, she has him to answer to.  And answer she will.  Oh, you'll see.

However you’d describe our dealings with each other, though, one thing is undeniable: the most controversial figure in American politics ended up dominating my life in ways I could have never imagined, until I finally reached my breaking point, days before she made her way up the east coast on a bus, stopping along the way to have public pizza with Donald Trump. The whole strange spectacle made pretty much the entire planet conclude that she’s probably running for president.

However, what she appears to be currently doing is almost certainly destructive to her cause and her country. I say this as the guy who risked $300,000 of his life savings to produce the very first pro-Sarah documentary back in 2009 (and the only one with her participation), while putting everything on the line to fight countless battles on her behalf—such as demonstrating outside David Letterman’s studios in New Yorkafter the late night talk show host made a joke about 14-year-old Willow Palin getting “knocked up,” being dragged away in handcuffs from a laughable awards ceremony for the liberal ‘news’ anchor Katie Couric, getting regularly attacked as a guest by liberal hosts on MSNBC, and responding with $100,000 offers to charity to debate them on her behalf.

I’ve fought so hard for Sarah, I’m almost unemployable.

As sad as we all are that you've been wasting your fucking time for the past few years, that's really not Sarah Palin's problem.  It's between you and the hair doll you keep in your dresser drawer.  

Ziegler goes on to talk for four interminable pages about how after everything he's done, Sarah Palin has the gall - the gall! - to be ungrateful to him, and to do things that he doesn't approve of.  It quickly goes beyond a strategy critique into something far more disturbing, a bitter rant at her rendering him impotent despite everything he's done for her.

This is the underbelly of Palinism.  She's a woman fetishized as strong and independent, but secretly beholden to all the strong men who are secure enough to admit that they wouldn't mind being hunted from her helicopter.  (But only in missionary.)  She benefits from it at the same time she suffers from it; the same people who are willing to literally rewrite history for her will one day turn on her if she makes too significant of a misstep.  I look forward to each time Palin is embarrassed, because it means that there's still some space in American politics to realize that some people are actually just idiots, and not just conservative savants who speak the language of the common man.  But her best hope is to play the Ann Coulter card and keep performing the same song and dance until she shuffles into irrelevance; her breaking with the people she's kowtowed to since becoming a national player will lead to this sort of entitled, angry whining about how much she owes them, and the sham of her appeal to the conservative base as anything more than a useful prop will end.

I do hope she runs for President, because it'll hopelessly screw over the GOP.  But as she becomes exposed, I don't look forward to how she'll be treated by her former allies.