Well, I think we're on the next and final phase of conservatives trying to find a narrative that allows them to conduct all-out war on women while denying that's what they're doing: I'm rubber and you're glue. I'm a bit surprised they didn't latch on to this strategy sooner, honestly, since the ways of the petulant 5-year-old have always had tremendous appeal for those who classify themselves as "real Americans". That the strategy requires heavy use of the non sequitur is considered no bar to using it.

Example #1:

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh on Monday pushed back against claims that Republicans were attacking women's rights and insisted that the "real war on women" was being directed by President Barack Obama.

"The real war on women is being conducted by the regime, by the Obama administration," he explained. "Since Barack Obama took office, the unemployment rate for women has gone up from 7 to 8.1 percent. ... The poverty rate among women rose to 14.5 percent last year, up from 13.9 percent when Obama was immaculated."

Since this attack is being directed by someone who appears to believe that Obama was "immaculated" instead of what really happened---he won a national election with a stunningly high percentage of the vote for these polarizing times---I suppose it will have traction with those who are as delusional as he. But even then, this is all a garbled mess. Let's not even deal with the factual error, which of course is blaming the economic problems of the Bush administration on Obama. Let's deal with the fact that in order to rationalize a war on women that's being conducted in large part to keep women from competing economically with men, conservatives have resorted to pretending they give a shit about women's economic wellbeing. The two major planks of the war on women are ultimately about keeping women economically dependent on men, which in turn conservatives hope will keep the power balance at home in favor of men. First, there's the attempts to take away a woman's right to control when she gives birth, which is ultimately about economics. Women who lose that control fare poorly in the job market, unable to structure their career in a way that allows them to move up like a man can, which in turn can allow women to exercise more power in the home, with men losing the "but I make  more money, so I'm owed more service and decision-making power" excuse. Additionally, women hobbled by unwanted child-bearing can't compete economically with men, which means people who are uncomfortable with female power in the workplace are going to support forced child-bearing. 

The second plank of the war on women is to directly attack women's right to equal pay for equal work. That's why the Supreme Court ruled against Lilly Ledbetter, and that's why Gov. Scott Walker just repealed equal pay protections in his state. In order of the high unemployment gambit to work, two things have to happen: 1) The facts have to be shoved aside. (The fact is that the unemployment crisis is on President Bush, and Obama's efforts blunted it.) 2) The listener has to simulataneously get angry that women are unemployed while eagerly supporting policies that hurt women economically on purpose, because they don't want women to do well. Now, wingnuts are perfectly capable of that level of cognitive dissonance, but I don't see how that attack crosses the barrier into the mainstream. Functionally, Limbaugh is saying, "Don't look at those of us trying to destroy women economically because women aren't doing well economically, though better than they would if we were in charge, so if you support women, support those of us who are actively out to destroy them." 

In contrast, the claim that the "real racists" are people who oppose racism because they notice racism seems like it nearly makes sense. 

Because of the tortured logic of the "I'm rubber, you're glue" strategy, Fox decided just to skip even trying to make an argument. This the headline of example #2:

But if you read the actual article---which is about as hysterical and pointless as the headline would suggest---there is literally not a single word about the supposed war on women that Obama is suddenly conducting. No mention of wage equality, reproductive rights, women's wellbeing at all. In fact, there's no mention in the text of the article of women. The word "women" doesn't appear in the text. Nor "woman", nor "female". Not even "girl". The comments suggest that super wingnuts are making connections---they believe Muslims hate women, and they believe Obama is a secret Muslim, and that therefore that's all you need to know---but again, not enough there to jump the mainstream media line. 

Ironically, there is something the Obama administration has done that conservatives could howl about if they wanted to score some "both sides" points that would be embraced by a mainstream media eager to embrace that narrative regardless of the facts. Conservatives could point to the preposterous Plan B decision. Of course, doing so would be a tacit embrace of the notion that women have reproductive rights, even after a man has "claimed" their body by ejaculating in it. However, that women lose their human rights once they have sex with a man is the fundamental belief they're pushing here, so I'm guessing they're going to sidestep that easy hit.

Atrios and Digby both commented on Cass Sunstein engaging in a light bout of hippie-punching in order to justify the Obama administration once again caving to Republicans, this time on environmental regulations that would have created jobs. Both cleaning up the environment and creating jobs are things that Republicans oppose---the latter so they can make frowny faces about unemployment and get elected, while also achieving the larger goal of increasing the gap between the haves and the have nots---so it was caving time.  And when caving happens, justification happens.  When justification happens, liberals on the internet get angry. Here's the rationalization quote:

“My view is that the Republican claim that ‘job-killing regulation’ is a redundancy is as ridiculous as the left-wing view that ‘job-killing regulation’ is an oxymoron,” said Cass Sunstein, head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “Both are silly political claims that have no place in a serious discussion.”

This is irritating to me not so much because of the tedious hippie-punching so much as its total irrelevance.  The argument for increasing environmental regulations such as the ozone protections regulations Obama abandoned is that it actually creates jobs, not that regulations somehow are always job-neutral.  Sunstein is using the moron contingent that exists in any coalition as cover for this irrevelant puffery.  

I'm not really a fan of the "no one says that" retort when Democrats hippie-punch, however.  I'm just a lowly writer and I get TONS of emails, tweets, etc. from braindead leftists who think politics is about proving how your pure your ideology is more than making evidence-based arguments, so I can just imagine what the Obama administration is getting.  You try to tell yourself under such a barrage that said people are just cranks who don't matter, subh sometimes they do get under your skin, and there they wait for a moment of emotional weakness, such as when you desire to rationalize your bad choices.  Politicians are human beings, and being human beings, they latch onto rationalizations for their choices like this.  It's a lot easier to imagine yourself as someone who rises about the powerless leftist morons who write you letters every day than to admit you caved into conservatives.  The former makes you look strong and nuanced, the latter makes you look weak. I strongly suspect the majority of people who get bent at these rationalizations would do the same in Sunstein's shoes.  Few of us just want to say, "I caved to pressure from my political opponents." 

Which is, of course, what they did.  And have done and will continue to do because we're---as I've noted before---in a cycle where conservatives still have the rhetorical upper hand, though that is thankfully fading.  We all know that these ozone regulations would have created jobs, but that wouldn't have mattered much in the field of politics.  There will still be high unemployment after these regulations, and Republicans will blame the regulations, and the public---even non-conservatives---will buy it, because the myth that labor and the environment are opposed to each other was lodged into the American brain during the spotted owl crisis.  There's a lot of hard work we have to do to erase this myth, and that's all there is to it.  People believe explanations not because they fit the evidence at hand, but because they fit into preconceived models they have of understanding, no matter how foolish.  For instance, no matter how much you can get people to listen to germ theory and even agree to the scientific reality of it, the eagerness to assign moral causes to people's infections is still strong (and had a big influence on hostility to health care reform), which is why STDs are still spoken about in whispers and people still pray for someone's recovery, even though we can prove that being right with supernatural beings has no impact whatsoever on your health.  Which is why Dick Cheney is alive and Kurt Cobain is dead, but I digress.  Point is, the Obama adminstration's caving, while irritating as fuck, needs to be understood in the context of America's incredibly reactionary political environment. 

I'm just not really a fan of individual, personality-based explanations for systemic problems like "Democrats caving".  We as a country would be better off if we stopped seeing politicians as leaders so much as ciphers.  Liberals could let go of the fantasy of a bold leader who will stomp Republicans into the ground and conservatives could perhaps start treating politics with the same empathy and nuance they tend to apply to their own lives.  You know, for example, the way they forgive themselves for their own abortions and have sex without apologizing.  They could maybe start giving others that thoughtfulness as well, instead of demanding leaders who "prove" how strong they are by kicking the crap out of the vulnerable.

Atrios has a question about Sunstein's comments:

With stuff like this the question is...who is the intended audience? Or, more specifically, which people are the people they imagine to be complete idiots, because they're the intended audience? Or is the speaker the idiot? Mysteries.

I feel I can answer this one.  It's twofold.  The most immediate audience is the administration themselves, which is deep in rationalization mode.  There are a handful of extraordinary human beings who, under immense psychological pressure to put up a front, can describe themselves as someone who caves to the sorts of assholes who make up the leadership of the Republican party. But those kind of searingly honest people who never rationalize are far too rare to be the entire staff of a bobsled team, much less a presidential administration.  The other intended audience is the Beltway media, who eats this shit up.  I can understand why it's beyond most people to tell the people who shape the narrative of politics to take a long walk off a short pier, and instead much easier to pander to their prejudices so they like you. 

Of course, I'm writing all this assuming that the wisdom inside the administration was that the regulations were a good idea.  I think that's a safe assumption, since they did initially offer them up.  If they were opposed from the get-go, I don't imagine they'd even put them on the table. 

I'm sure what you're intending to ask me now is that if we don't get hepped up about the Obama administration's hippie-punching, what should we get hepped up about?  I think I've really answered that before---the conservative leanings and myths of our country.  Granted, undoing the systems that create these problems is a lot more effort than getting pissed at the symptom of Democrats caving, but I do think it's the only chance we even have at all. 

Jeff at Alas, A Blog blogged about this irritating, smug idiocy from Firedoglake's Janet Rhodes, who blogs about how she is completely willing to destroy this country in order to punish Barack Obama for not running the debt ceiling discussions in the way she believes he should have.  She claims to have told a representative from the DNC that she's so mad at Obama for "caving" that she'll be voting for the Republican in November, even if that Republican is Michele Bachmann. 

Now, I personallly have little patience for people trying to prove how hard they are generally speaking, and especially when said people are highly privileged liberals preening like they're tough because they'll "punish" the Democrats with their precious, precious votes---didn't you know their votes count five times as much as yours?  Well, they should anyway.  The belief that the choice is to do things 100% your way or to give up altogether is what drives the Tea Party, which is why Rhodes has functionally become a Tea Partier, who will give the resentment vote to whatever asshole the GOP runs.  I'm not going to argue the relative merits of Obama over fucking Bachmann, or Perry, or Romney.  That just creates more opportunity for idiots and assholes to preen about how they're lefter-than-thou, so left that they're willing to destroy this country in order to make a point about how superior they are to everyone else. 

Instead I'm going to talk about the illusion of control, which also feeds this ridiculousness.  The illusion of control is the belief that you (or one of your allies) personally has the power to make everything go your way, and having complete control of the eventual outcome is just a matter of making the right move.  In this case, Rhodes has convinced herself we can elect Republicans until Democrats, chastised for being too conservative, start acting right, even though the whole of history tells us that Democrats look at Republicans winning elections and think, "What I need to do is move to the right, because that's where winning happens."  But in reality, you don't have control.  You have power and you have influence and you have hard work, and these can affect outcomes, but some times shit is out of your control.  Refusing to believe this can drive a person around the bend, as demonstrated by Rhodes, as they become increasingly irrational, looking for that magic bullet that's going to make everyone else start behaving the way they want them to.  If you let go of the illusion that you can, if you play your cards right, determine the outcome with certainty, you can actually be more effective.  You can shift your attention from trying to control the outcome to trying to exert influence and accumulate power.  But in order to do this, you must be willing to lose.

I would recommend a little memento mori to rid yourself of this toxic illusion of control.  if you start thinking, "If I could just make him realize how mad I am at him, Obama would suddenly turn into a superhero who could get Republicans who literally believe he's Satan to cow before his mighty powers and his newly invigorated progressive agenda," it's time to step down, and think about the fact that one day, you will be dead.  Not just in the abstract---I recommend thinking about how your death will come with a lot of suffering.  Most of us don't just get to pass away gently in our sleep.  You might be crushed in a car accident or come down with cancer that causes you to be so mangled by pain that death starts to look like sweet release.  Now that you've pictured one of the many horrible possibilities that is the end of your life, remind yourself there's nothing you can do to stop it.  You can take measures minimizing how bad it's going to be: you can eat right and wear a seatbelt and go to the doctor regularly.  But one day, crushing pain will overcome you, your heart will stop, your bowels will release, and the people who loved you will be torn with grief.  And there's nothing---nothing---you can do to change that outcome.

If that doesn't work, then I recommend you thinking about how the human race will eventually die out, and at best, we can delay this outcome, but one way or another, all species go extinct eventually, and that also means our species.  And there's nothing you can do to stop it.  Influence it, sure.  Accumulate power that will increase your influence, sure.  But control it?  Nope.

I find this personally allows me to let go of the illusion that the only thing between me and the way I wish things would be is taking the right measures.  If you're going to lose the same battle with death that everyone else loses, then it makes it a lot easier to grasp that the reason that government isn't working the way you wish, it's because there are too many factors in play to give you control.  And that you cannot gain that control by preening like you're so hard core you're willing to vote for the Republican rather than allow a Democrat to make decisions that you disagree with, especially when it's based in having knowledge you may not have.  

I'm personally becoming more convinced every day that our political culture is so toxic in this country because suffering from the illusion of control. I notice, too, that people who fall into illusion-of-control thinking---the Nader constiuency on the left, the Tea Party on the right---tend to have relatively high levels of privilege.  I'm not "calling out" their privilege, which is a useless exercise in guilt-tripping to no avail.  It's more that I think people who are used to things working out for them get easily frustrated in politics, where almost nothing ever goes completely your way, because there's so many groups of people with different agendas influencing the outcome.  The notion that there's some way to just get your way in a hot hurry is widespread on the left and the right.

*It's created the Tea Party, people who are sincerely convinced that being big enough assholes will somehow make the country go back to being completely controlled by white Christians, preferably conservative ones.

*Many of the more irritating tendencies on the left also go back to this.  For instance,the belief that changing the language around a concept will have a dramatic effect on meaning, even though, for instance, replacing "liberal" with "progressive" simply made right wingers start bashing progressives like they did liberals.

*God knows on the right you see this with sex.  One reason the culture wars are so out of hand is that right wingers just continue to insist that by withdrawing education and access, you can actually bring an end to fucking for pleasure.  Talk about illusion of control!  

*It also causes liberal tendencies to misread who the Tea Party is.  No matter how much evidence you pile up to show that Tea Partiers tend to be wealthier than average Americans, liberals continue on portraying them as economically stressed people.  The reason is that it feeds the illusion of control---if Tea Partiers are under-privileged somehow, then we can write off their anger as an irrational response to real stress.  And that therefore the removal of that stress will shut them up and get this country back on track.  But if we look at the facts, we realize these people aren't being driven to be douchebags, but that's their natural state.  And we have to accept that there's nothing we can actually do to change their minds or shut them up, and that therefore the possibility remains that we can lose. 

I could go on, but this post is getting long enough.  I just want to point out that the illusion of control ironically diminishes your power in the world.  Time spent chasing phantoms is time not spent doing the hard work of trying to exert influence.  I realize that working with the ultimate understanding that you can easily fail no matter what you do can be demoralizing.  The cure for that is, in my experience, to give yourself  permission to enjoy small victories even if they fall short of perfection.  So, for instance, someone who has relinquished the illusion of control can look at the HHS requiring full coverage of contraception and say, "Hurrah! We got one!"  And someone who is still stuck in the illusion of control says, "Sure, that's good, but the Christian right is still out there and as long as we haven't wiped them out completely, it's not time to break out the champagne."  The latter person no doubt styles themselves as a cynic and a hardcore progressive, but in reality, they are someone who retains the illusion that perfection is achievable, and that therefore being happy with "good" is selling out.  They, in other words, are an idealist trapped in the illusion of control, and their inability to accept incremental victories is demoralizing to the people around them who are willing to fight through many losses and enjoy even minor victories. Meanwhile, the person who allows themselves to feel good about achieving something, even if it fell short of perfection, is someone who can get up the next day and fight for the next incremental change. 

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. 

So, I posted earlier today about what jackass crazy fuckwits run the Republican party and that's why we're in this current crisis, I suppose the inevitable thing happened in comments: I got scolded about my priorities.  Apparently, I'm supposed to be focusing like a laser on how Obama is actually a double agent for the GOP and this was his evil plan all along to gut important social programs.  Okay.  I can actually sympathize with that point of view, since I remember being a newly minted lefist in college and feeling the allure of "rah rah Nader, Bush and Gore are no different".  It was a fairly useless point of view, but it made me feel self-righteous, and at 21, that felt really fucking good.  Now I'm older and tired and I look back at Clinton and realize I was being unfair, because while he's far from perfect, suggesting he was the problem is like having cancer and suggesting your hair falling out is your major problem. I was thoroughly cured by 8 years of Bush of this kind of thinking, and am mildly surprised to see how quickly everyone forgot about all that.  

Either way, I reject the notion that the complete batshit craziness of the Republicans is merely a distraction from the Real Problem that our who-knew dictator Obama isn't so benevolent.  For one thing, I seriously don't think he has as much power, due to the constitutional republic thing, as his angry critics are attributing to him and therefore the theory that he's selling the farm in a desperate bid to stop the crazies from driving this country over the cliff remains a persuasive theory.  But more importantly, I don't think it matters. 

Yes, I'm saying it right here: whether Obama is a secret Republican or whether he's a well-meaning Democrat who is simply being blackmailed is irrelevant.  The problem, either way, is Republicans.

Let's look at the competing theories to see what I mean. 

Theory #1: Benevolent Obama Theory.

This theory holds that Obama is a moderate Democrat who, while made uncomfortable by deficits (which isn't unreasonable, per se, but should be a secondary concern in an economic crisis) , still believes in a more liberal economic theory when it comes to recessions, due to the fact that history proves those theories correct.  In this theory, he's offering deep cuts to beloved and necessary programs because the Republicans are holding the very state of the world economy hostage, willing to plunge us into a Depression if he doesn't start giving away the farm.  

The problem: Well, basically the Republicans.  If it wasn't for the batshit crazy Republicans willing to destroy our economy to get their way, none of this would be happening.  

Theory #2: Evil Obama Theory.

This theory holds that Obama passed himself off as a moderate Democrat to get elected, but is in fact a secret conservative who has been aching for a chance to destroy Social Security, amongst other programs.  I found this theory a little confusing at first, because it seemed to me that his secret plan would have been easier to enact when he had a majority party in Congress, so I asked around on Twitter, and this is the explanation I got: he couldn't destroy Social Security then, because there's enough liberals in the Democratic Party that they could have stopped him.  It was only after Republicans got control of the House and went crazy that he had enough cover to do what he always hoped he could do.

The problem: Well, basically the Republicans.  If the batshit crazy Republicans weren't there giving secretly conservative Obama cover, none of this would be happening. 

So, from my point of view, no matter what evil or non-evil lurks in Obama's heart, the problem is that this country keeps electing frothing-at-the-mouth crazy Republicans, and if voters would stop doing that, we wouldn't be having one politically provoked crisis after another.  Sure, if Obama is a secret conservative, that is a problem.  But we can't actually know that.  But what we do know for a fact is that no matter what lurks in Obama's hearts, none of this would be happening if Republicans didn't win the House.  So I think that my priorities are just fine, thank you very much. 

And because I'm going to be accused of being a partisan shill for Obama, I just want to say that I'm really not.  If he's a secret conservative, that concerns me greatly.  But even if he's not, I do think he's failed repeatedly to present his best game in negotiations with Republicans.  But at the end of the day, I'm unconvinced that the greatest negotiator on the planet could beat people who are willing to pull the trigger on the entire world economy.  

Also, I'm just generally trying to let go of the intoxicating illusion of control.  Quick fix solutions that will roll back decades of this country moving to the right appeal to that illusion, but don't actually do much good.  So I'm trying to let go of that and start thinking more broadly about what good can actually be done with the tools that are actually at hand, with the full realization that some times, the bad guys do win. 

Okay, I'm so incredibly sick of this stupid Anthony Weiner thing, but feminism has been sucked into it, and bigger issues are being attached to it, so what are you going to do?  I can't pray for this country to grow up, since there is no god and prayer doesn't work.  But this morning I wrote about women, feminists even, taking on the schoolmarm role, and I forgot to load it down with caveats about how sex needs to be consensual, and so concerns about consent naturally came up.  I honestly hoped that my long track record of being all for consent would spare me the need to write a few hundred more words, but alas.  

Dana Goldstein and I are on Bloggingheads today rehashing our debate about Weiner and whether or not politicians should be held to a sexual standard.

In it, she raises the same concerns about consent, as did Ta-Nehisi.  It appears that one of the women involved has been clear that she did not engage with Weiner in any sexy talk prior to the penis picture.  And while she's not accusing him of harassment, I think that likely rises to the level of it.  I hope it's obvious that this is a much different kettle of fish.

But I still think most of my concerns are firmly in place.  This isn't a consent scandal.  To be fair, we do have consent scandals in our media.  Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a consent scandal, for instance.  But can anyone look deep into their heart and say that this would be going down any differently if every single woman involved was saying, "I was completely into it.  Cock pictures, yum!" No, we cannot.  Hell, if anything, that would probably just make it worse.  

I think what I'm getting at here is that this isn't about defending Anthony Weiner. This is about how much power we give to right wing fucktards like Andrew Breitbart who are completely unconcerned with consent, and whose sole purpose is to start up sexual witch hunts.  One of the reasons that I wasn't completely aware of the compromised consent issues is that it's been treated like an irrelevant aspect in the media.  Weiner's completely consensual chat logs are being given even more attention than the single picture we know was non-consensual, and the reason is there's more there to feed the prurient interest.  I think it's important to tease out these various issues, as complicated as it is.  The next target for a witch hunt is probably going to be 100% consensual stuff that simply is humiliating if put in the public square, because consent has no impact on why this particular scandal is a scandal. 

For instance, in my post this morning, I was addressing two separate situations that had zero to do with the consent concerns.  The Jezebel piece was about cheating and lying, and the Democratic women are playing up the female-judges-of-philanderers angle.  I've seen more ink spilled on the question of whether or not there's an angle with the fact that he did this in his office and at the gym than the consent question.  (As I noted in the video, I don't really see a gaping difference between using your down time at work to send sexy messages to people and using it to play Angry Birds, so long as you're careful not to involve coworkers.)  Since the media is making this about sex, I'm addressing my media critiques to the sex angle.  If we're having a conversation about consent, that's a much different conversation.

My concern that I've been on about is bigger than a single politician who is probably going to be redistricted away anyway.  It's about the future of politics and placing such prudish standards on private behavior that no one will actually be able to meet them. And it's women, I believe, who will pay more.  At Double X, I wrote about this piece in the NY Times, and one thing that was noted was that women are easily discouraged from running for office because they're afraid of being picked to death by an often-misogynist media and their political opposition. This is a legitimate fear!  And in our new post-Weiner era, when your bedroom doors are being flung open and your truly personal behavior is being considered part of your job qualifications, women will get it way worse. There are many people who will feign outrage if a woman simply sleeps with a man she's not married to, and who wants to deal with that? If we want more gender equality in politics, this is not going to help in the slightest.  

How appropriate.  At the Guardian's CIF, I put up a piece about what it means to lose John Edwards as a figurehead of populist liberalism in the wake of his scandals.  I don't write much at all about Edwards, because invariably it means people project a lot of their more personal feelings about him and his campaign onto me because of the whole situation where I got a job with his campaign and then resigned because of attacks from the pedophila-excusing Bill Donohue.  (Who I just saw quoted in another piece in the New York Times recently!  He could rape a bunny on live TV and then eat it while its heart slowly stopped beating and people would still call him up to comment on various Catholicism-related stories.)  Please check it out; it's mostly about how Edwards had an opportunity to be the pro-labor conscience of the Obama era, and he screwed the pooch and there's not been another person who can really step into his shoes. 

In more ways than one, it turns out.  Because one reason I was eager to back Edwards was there was no conflict in his campaign between the three tiers of modern liberalism, which often do fight each other.  I see the three as:

1) Economic justice. This is labor movements, anti-poverty initiatives, fair taxation, health care reform, social services, government that is functional, etc.  Anything that helps secure the middle class, bolsters the economy, and lifts people out of poverty.

2) Social justice. Feminism, anti-racism, gay rights, anti-colonialism, things like that---anything that divides people against each other on the basis of identity hierarchies.

3) Environmentalism and rationalism.  Preserving the planet, promoting science, basically using the now to work towards a better tomorrow.

Obviously, a smart person sees how these are interrelated and that you really fail at anti-racism if you don't think about poverty and that you're not a good environmentalist if economic justice isn't part of your worldview, and you're not an effective feminist if you treat science like it's a lark.  I can think of a million other examples, but sadly all of them tend to happen over and over again.  Edwards was smart about weaving social justice issues in with economic justice issues. So I liked that.  And I fear that there's just not enough prominent leadership out there doing that anymore, even though I can think of many people who aren't that prominent who do so effortlessly.

Instead, we get Ed Schultz calling Laura Ingraham a "slut".  Now, Laura Ingraham is a racist piece of shit, sure.  She's the wart that fell off a toad. Listening to her talk is like trying to bring santorum-stained sheets in to your dry cleaner and look him in the eye, except worse somehow.  She makes the world a worse place every time she talks.  But she is not a "slut", because a "slut" is a woman who is immoral because she enjoys sex too much or has many partners.  And "sluts" do not exist, because there is nothing wrong with women liking sex or liking sex with lots of people.  

You can, then, why the high hopes have been dashed.  Is it so hard to have leaders who can speak out on economic justice while not making rookie mistakes like that?

Jill has a great post up about the double standard for showing off your body if you're a politician, in response to this cover of Men's Health. Yes, that's Aaron Schock, a Republican congressman from Illinois, and those are his abs.  Jill points out that this would be the scandal of the fucking year if that was a female congresswoman.  Not to defend Sarah Palin, but think of all the crap she got when she posed for Runner's World fully dressed.

Of course, the irony is that both Palin and Schock are being sexually provocative, but he's just outdoing her by a mile, because he's a conservative man and he can.  And she got away with it as far as she did because she's also Republican.  Jill says: "Now try to picture Erin Schock, newly elected to Congress, single and a conservative Baptist with some sick abs, on the cover of Women’s Health. Just sayin’."  And to that I say, that could be a problem.  A national scandal, however, would be Erin Schock, pro-choice Democratic congresswoman from Illinois.  The double standard is a male/female one, but that gets projected onto the Republican/Democratic divide. 

I've always been mildly fascinated by how Republicans are permitted far more space to be fitness dorks than Democrats in our culture.  Bush and Clinton had similar workout routines, in terms of going jogging in public, but Clinton was mocked ruthlessly for it and Bush was mostly ignored.  (Turned out that Clinton probably needed it more, what with his heart problems.)  Obama's dedication to playing sports is less of an issue in the mainstream media than Clinton's jogging, but right wingers still make hay of it in a way that liberals wouldn't if the shoe was on the other foot.  Maybe part of it is that health and fitness are turning into culture war issues, and liberals are generally going to fall on the pro-health side.  We feel the sting of hypocrisy in a way conservatives don't, and so seeing someone on the Other Side do something we approve of isn't going to cause us to waste energy trying to make an issue out of it. 

But the elephant in the room on this issue is gender and sexuality, and that's why I think Republicans have a lot more space not only to be fit but to make a fuss over it, as Palin, Schock, and Paul Ryan all do.  Trying to untangle working out as a health practice and as a hobby from the perceived sexual benefits is impossible in our cultural landscape (though obviously individuals do fine, so I don't necessarily see the value of commenters saying because some individuals do it, my cultural observations are invalidated).  So what you have when someone is a workout fanatic and a cultural conservative is the conservative trope of the Sexy Virgin.  By "Sexy Virgin", I don't mean a literal virgin, but someone who is assumed to be sexually conservative and properly judgmental of others, but who plays up their own sexual appeal. The right loves them some Sexy Virgins.  Sexy Virgins exist to reassure people on the right that just because they're anti-sex means they aren't sexy people.  (Much in the same way that black conservatives work to reassure the racists in the Republican party that they're not racist even if they really don't think the President was born here.)  One of the most amusing things about anti-choicers is that they're always trying to claim the pro-choice side is a bunch of sexless hags, and on the occasion they can get a pretty young woman to be a spokesperson (see: Lila Rose, who knows she's a Sexy Virgin and who uses the poses of ingenue starlets in her publicity photos), they're all over it.  The sexless part of being anti-sex is their Achilles' heel, and Sexy Virgins work to counteract that problem.  Leaving me in a constant state of amusement, since the two attacks I frequently get in tandem from antis are: a) you're a slutty slut slut and b) you're a dried-out hag. 

Here's an amusing story of the Sexy Virgin vs. people who perhaps are less interested in the internal politics of right wingers reassuring themselves.  Needless to say, if you haven't encountered the Sexy Virgin much, perhaps it's a little harder to realize that her sexiness is supposed to denote chastity within the circles of Bible-thumpers. You might just think that sexy is supposed to be about sex and not about not-sex. 

Anyway.  There's a strong strain in our culture of allowing people to be sexy if there's heavy reassurance that their actual sexuality is controlled.  Democrats, who are mostly pro-choice, perversely don't get to be sexy because that provokes anxieties that their support for sexual rights means, gasp, lurking affection for bona fide sexual freedom and we can't have that.  So that's where we're at when it comes to the national image-making process around the partisan divide.  Anti-sex views being sold with sexiness while pro-sex folks are, believe me, often deeply worried about making sure their collars are high enough when they go on TV to talk about abortion rights. 

Of course, that's on the national level.  On the local and in-group media level, things are way different. Lila Rose is put forth as the national face of anti-choicers as much as possible on their side, so she can pout and flutter her eyelashes and try to sell you not-sex with sex.  Paul Ryan and Aaron Schock are feeding the press stories and now photos of their sex-ay bodies.  Let's not talk about Sarah Palin.  But on the local and in-group level, right wing media still mostly features a bunch of angry old dudes and church lady sorts hollering about girls these days with their birth control pills and low moral standards.  Meanwhile, the pro-choice movement tries to be attractive-but-not-sexy when putting ourselves in front of the national media, but on the local and in-group level, you're much more likely to see sex-positive feminism being promoted by women who are happy to wear whatever the fuck they like. 

I have more thoughts on gender, working out, and modesty, but that's another post since this one is long enough.  Maybe tonight.

So, that speech sucked.  The prior sentence could refer to all of the speeches last night, but obviously the one in question is Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.  Last night, the emptiness of it pissed me off, particularly how he talked a big game about innovation and moving forward and education, and then proceeded to concede the argument to Republicans that we really shouldn’t do any of those things because they cost money.  But this morning, I’ve mellowed out on it a bit and basically feel like I saw a man who has given up.  And I can respect that; it’s not like anything can be done with the den of wingnut weasels the country just elected to Congress.  All he’s got left is admonishing us to try harder, while knowing we totally plan to fail and fail hard.  Until people who care more about the possibility that women are having unauthorized orgasms than about the state of our economy and our future, we’re going to continue this slide downhill, and that’s basically all there is to it. 

We are a country that’s basically given up.  The Republican rebuttals just drove this home.  The theme of Paul Ryan’s was “I have a Bible and can talk shit like a motherfucker” and Bachmann’s was “I think my audience is really stupid, though I enjoy the hell out of taking them for everything they’re worth”.  Even wingnuts seem to be going through the motions lately.  I see conservatives dutifully ranting online about the latest villain they’ve been instructed to hate—-government workers—-but you can tell they long for the days when they could rail about “welfare queens” driving Cadillacs.  The country’s lost its spark.  The President mentioned Facebook in his speech, and we had to admit that it was the best thing that’s happened to us in a long time. 

Just one example of how we as a nation have given up is this story in the NY Times about how legislators have decided to go after pedestrians who use headphones. This is in response to a slight uptick in pedestrian deaths, one that strikes me as small enough to be statistically insignificant.  This is after there was an attempt to use some really silly quotes from the Governors Highway Safety Association to blame Michelle Obama for pedestrian deaths because of her evil plot to get people moving.  The common theme here is to focus all attention on pedestrians, and none on the people who are actually doing the killing, the drivers who run over them. In some cases, pedestrians are the parties at fault in these accidents, but anyone who actually walks around can tell you from experience how much drivers can act like you have no right to the road, and thereby will speed, pull into intersections without looking, treat traffic lights geared at pedestrian safety as suggestions that are safe to reject, etc.  But doing something about that would be hard work, and it would also offend drivers by suggesting, gasp, they have to share the road.  And god forbid we do that.  Next thing you know, we’ll be suggesting they perhaps cut down on gasoline usage so that we don’t burn our planet up with global warming. 

This is just the essence of giving up.  Everyone knows that it would be better if more people walked, and that in total, it would save more lives—-there are way more traffic accidents involving one or two or more cars than involving pedestrians.  Plus, just increasing the amount of exercise people got would improve the health of this country, saving money and lives.  Knowing all this, we should prioritize making it easier and more appealing to walk whenever we can, even if that means we burden car drivers more with things like—-horrors—-having to pay more attention or concede more of the road to pedestrians.  But we’re a nation that’s given up.  At the end of the day, we’re a country where people will circle a parking lot for 15 minutes to avoid 2 more minutes of walking.  Facing up to that sort of thing while making public policy requires spine, and that’s something we’ve got on short supply.  So, instead we concede the argument and let the worst instincts of the country take over, while kicking the hippies that have the nerve to want something better. 

Sometimes I feel like America is just in a holding pattern.  We’re basically waiting for all the people who are still bitter about modernity to pass away in large enough numbers that those of us willing to move into the future can actually capture the electorate.  I never felt that so keenly as listening to Obama speak last night.  It’s like living in a house where a cantankerous patriarch won’t let you fix anything up or clean anything, and you’re sitting around watching the house fall apart while waiting for him to die.  (Vague memories of “The Secret Garden” surface.)  And that’s pretty much exactly what’s going on, right down to our crumbling infrastructure and cannibalistic economy.  The problem with this is that not cleaning up the house means that we’re seeping poison into the air, and that may not be something we can clean up when we get the signal to go ahead and actually start fixing things.

I’ve been angry for days about what we won’t hear from the President tonight. Together, Talib Kweli and Thom Yorke say everything he won’t:

You can download the mashup by popping the little down arrow at Soundcloud.

Update: Now they’re denying it.

One of the ways the Republicans were able to regain power—-besides the most important tactic, the traditional suppressed voter turnout at the midterms—-was to be completely uncompromising.  In fact, they were so uncompromising that it was ridiculous.  If a liberal said the sky was blue, they’d say, “Nuh-uh, hot pink!”, and then run to Fox News to complain that the liberal elitists were bashing their religious beliefs. 

There are many lessons you could learn from this, but the most important one is that these aren’t people for whom concessions will ever come.  Not when they’re in power, and not when they’re out of it.  They won’t be seen by their base as agreeing on anything with the man they’ve painted a Muslim Kenyan who stole the Presidency so that he can have a steady flow of infant blood to drink.  Which is why this news story is me giving up on the Obama administration and using the precious minutes saved from the day to work on other things, read novels, and play Rock Band.

President Barack Obama’s top adviser suggested to The Huffington Post late Wednesday that the administration is ready to accept an across-the-board, temporary continuation of steep Bush-era tax cuts, including those for the wealthiest taxpayers.

That appears to be the only way, said David Axelrod, that middle-class taxpayers can keep their tax cuts, given the legislative and political realities facing Obama in the aftermath of last week’s electoral defeat.

“We have to deal with the world as we find it,” Axelrod said during an unusually candid and reflective 90-minute interview in his office, steps away from the Oval Office.

When will they learn that you don’t deal with bullies by acting like bullies are people who can be reasoned with.  What the Democrats need is Jack Donaghy on hand to explain the world to them.

To modify Jack’s point for the situation at hand: “The Republicans are being irrational, and irrational behavior doesn’t respond to rationality.  It responds to fear.” 

Though I suppose you could point out that the Republicans are being entirely rational with their over-the-top assholery, promotion of irrationality, and grand-standing.  It’s basically bullying, and they have correctly assessed that their targets give in to bullies.  The lunch money will be handed over every single time.  In this case, the lunch money is our nation’s viability as a proper Western democracy with a substantial middle class.  The Republicans made a threatening gesture at Democrats, and Democrats caved immediately and gave Republicans the banana republic they want.

There are no political gains to be made from this.  None.  The Republicans will always find a way to cater to corporate interests and the rich more than Democrats, so believing that you can win over those folks to support you more than Republicans—-something that’s bound to be haunting Democrats after Citizens United—-is an utter fantasy.  And you have to ask yourself, what’s the point of winning elections if you let the losers dictate your choices for you?  Might as well stay home and play Rock Band.  At least you’re using fewer of the planet’s resources, and by letting the situation go to hell the easy way, you have less stress and might live longer.  Long enough to watch all the horrible consequences for our once great nation when you take all our economic resources and put the hands of a tiny, ego-crazed minority of people.

Jamelle and John are caught up in the question that, if dwelt upon too long, can kick start an existential crisis in just about anyone to the left of Ben Nelson: Why do Blue Dog Democrats insist on losing?  Why do they sabotage their own party at every turn?  Why do they have a knee jerk reaction of opposition to everything decent President Obama wants to do? 

John:

Is there ANYTHING that centrists and moderates will not do to hurt themselves? Anything? The public is livid about jobs, centrists oppose job creation efforts. The public wants the middle class tax cuts extended while the taxes on the rich ended, the centrists oppose that. And on and on and on.

And who is it that is going to get wiped out in the upcoming election? The centrists. Nancy Pelosi isn’t going to lose her seat. Maxine Waters ain’t going anywhere.

Are they just masochists? Could we just get all the centrists to wear a cilice? Would that be enough self-inflicted pain that maybe they would go along with some decent legislation that might save them?

Jamelle:

Democrats were bound to lose seats this fall; the president’s party almost always loses seats in a midterm election, and with a large majority, Democrats were bound to lose more than usual. But no one prophesied a GOP House in 2010, and it will happen—in part—because Blue Dogs are too cowardly to help themselves.

At the end of the day, we have to assume they behave this way because they believe this way.  They have come to see the world as Republicans do.  They think Obama is some crazy liberal and mindlessly oppose everything he does.  The reason this will kick start an existential crisis is that it’s hard to understand why people who are clearly conservative aren’t Republicans.  Why not just be a fucking Republican?

Beats me.  It must be a Beltway thing, where they start off as Democrats but then spend so much time hanging around Republicans that they lose their minds. There’s another factor, which is what I was kind of jokingly stabbing at when making fun of Blanche Lincoln for being a terminal dork.  A lot of Blue Dogs really do live in complete bubbles, with no exposure to the world as the rest of their fellow Americans understand it.  If you can live in a bubble that shields you from the fact that Pete Townsend is a rock star, then you can easily live in a bubble where your idea of what a party identification should mean has no attachment to what the voters think it should mean.  You can drift for years, even decades, to the right and never stop to think that your political beliefs violate the Democratic brand, because you have no concern for the real world outside of your bubble.  If you get deep enough into the shit, being a Democrat has roughly no more meaning than being a supporter of a certain sports team.  You back them because you always have, and call yourself a fan even if you disagree with absolutely everything they do.  Because you are insulated from the consequences, and have ceased to remember that politics isn’t a sporting event, but has real consequences for real people.

Why Republicans don’t have this problem, I have no idea.  Maybe it’s because their brand as the Party For Assholes is so clear that you either conform or move on.

I agree with Atrios that the possibility of “bipartisanship” after a Republican victory in November is not exactly something to hope for.  All that really means is that the Republicans will be able to get more concessions out of Obama than they already have, so really there’s no reason to think there’s a bright side.  Bipartisanship is basically code for “conservatives pull the nation rightward”. 

That said, I think that Atrios is probably wrong about this:

They’d have some power to set the agenda and therefore take credit for things unlike now where they aren’t in charge, don’t get credit, and therefore have a rational interest in just opposing everything.

The notion that they’re going to stop milking the position of being in the opposition just because they technically have the majority depends on believing Republicans are beholden to reality or truth in any way, shape, or form.  And they’re simply not.  If they perceive being the party of no as their main source of power, they will continue to do that when they have power.  They depend on a base that isn’t particularly nuanced in its thinking, but is currently focused single-mindedly on hating Obama.  And Republicans like to keep their base well-fed.

In theory, it should be in their own best interests not to orchestrate a government shutdown by basically refusing to work with the White House on anything.  But I suspect that they think this is the best idea in the world, because they’re pretty convinced that the nation will blame Obama.  So while they should, in a rational world, be the ones who suffer the consequences in 2012 by shutting down the government, the hope is that the voters won’t act rationally.  I’m pretty sure this strategy is going to play out exactly how they want it to.  Step 1: turn the nation into even more a shithole than it is.  Step 2: blame Obama.  Step 3: reap the electoral benefits, especially in light of a mainstream media eager to play along with their narratives. 

But hey, maybe I’m too cynical about this.  I’m just not really convinced most voters pay enough attention to hand out blame to those who deserve it the most.

Via Digby, I see Michael Tomasky has a theory as to why the Democrats let the Republicans set the media agenda, lie like motherfuckers, and basically act like they do without Democrats fighting back sufficiently. 

But the bottom line is this: the Democrats are afraid of the Republicans. They – all of them, from Obama on down – are afraid of Rush Limbaugh and Michele Bachmann and you name it. You hear Democratic operatives talk strategy, and there’s always a “logical” reason why this or that aggressive attack might not work. But it’s nothing to do with logic. They’re just afraid. Bachmann, the Minnesota congresswoman who wants the government out of everything, is a good case in point. It’s been revealed that her family farm has received $250,000 in federal subsidies. If she were a Democrat, the Republicans would make sure the entire country knew it.

It’s tempting to believe this, but it does make you ask, “Why?” Really, what is the basis of the fear?  Michael chalks up to irrationality, but I don’t think that’s sufficient.  After all, some Democrats are less afraid, and it’s usually because they’re in such safe seats that a media that panders to the right wing can’t touch them.  I think the fear is that they don’t have sufficient whatever it takes to get the media to treat them fairly whenever these right wing attacks come out.  I think, at the end of the day, they’re afraid they don’t have what it takes to fight back because of an inherent personality difference between typical liberals and typical conservatives.

Conservatives basically have no compunction about the use of force, dishonesty, or lies.  This is incredibly hard to fight back against when your toolbox won’t allow you to access any of these.  And liberals can’t really just devolve into mean-spirited lying bullies, because it’s illiberal.  In fact, it’s so illiberal that it creates a double standard, where those who do cross the line are held accountable in a way that conservatives just aren’t.  No one gets upset when conservatives are villains—-they’re supposed to be!  That’s their main appeal to their bully-loving base.  They like to think they’re showing those stupid liberals what for.  Like Sarah Palin likes to imagine, they want always to be reloading. 

Meanwhile, for liberals, even if you play by all the rules, you’re still in for a world of hurt if you dare speak the truth too forcefully or call an asshole an asshole.  Why so mean?  Shouldn’t you always be giving them a chance? Sure, Andrew Breitbart is a proven liar, but is that really a reason not to take his next shit storm seriously?  Isn’t it less than nice and liberal to believe that some people in this world are simply full of shit?

The problem is that liberals often conflate softness and endless forgiveness with justice.  The problem, of course, is in the endless attempts to be generous and giving to conservatives, we allow the truly vulnerable, the people who really need generosity, to go wanting.  For instance, to draw from the wellspring that is the abortion example, the harder we try to be accommodating towards conservatives’ “moral” qualms about abortions, the more women who actually need some real help go without it.  But those who need justice tend to be invisible, whereas loud-mouthed angry conservatives tend to be up in everyone’s face. 

I don’t know what to do about it.  The blogs have helped some, since bloggers often come to this because we’re sick of it all and want to fight back.  But we’re often the example of “bad” liberals who get all noisy and act like our agenda actually matters.  Until Democrats start learning to tell the difference between being soft and being good, we’re going to have this problem.

There’s a lot of talk during this never-ending faux controversy over the Park 51 community center about how it’s the lack of Republican leaders willing to take even a nominal stand against anti-Muslim bigotry that’s the problem.  George Bush is getting a lot of credit for holding back the flying monkeys.  “Bush always told his minions not to take out their crap on Muslims,” the argument goes, “And that’s why all this is happening now.”

I disagree. Not that Bush tried to keep the bigotry in check—-he did, and I think in large part to justify the Iraq invasion.  If you don’t think Muslims are people worthy of respect, arguing for their liberation is a little silly, and so he staked out the territory of the rescuer (though there was a willingness to exploit “they’re all the same” prejudices in order to convince people that Iraq had something to do with 9/11).  But I don’t think that the lack of Bush is what’s causing the current uproar.  I think it’s the presence of Obama. 

Specifically, this is about a narrative that’s really taken off since Obama took office, which is that this country is under attack from subversive Muslim elements that are trying to take over our “Christian” nation by stealth.  It’s basically the McCarthy narrative about communism, rinsed off and varnished with a Muslim veneer.  The narrative has many tentacles, with the most important one being that Obama pretends to be a Christian, but he’s actually a secret Muslim and only the Birthers see the truth.  But this freak-out is also visible in the panicked claims that we’re going to start following sharia law instead of our nation’s secular laws (to be fair, many to most of the people freaking out probably don’t think we have a secular legal system so much as a Christian one, though they think “activist judges” pervert the theocracy our Founders intended with misreadings of the Constitution that involve reading the words as written).  And now, you have this Park 51 blow-up.

Make no mistake—-all soft language about how it’s just too close to the WTC or how this is an assault on 9/11 victims is just crap to keep this whole controversy going, and to gin up more paranoia about Muslims in America.  This is very classic behavior for conspiracy theorists, to roll up what they’re really trying to say and put it in softer terms.  They feel that most people aren’t “ready” for the real truth, and so dishonesty is an acceptable ploy to warm people up.  The hope is that you first buy into the opening gambit—-that the Cordoba House is “too close”, that the issue is Obama won’t release his birth certificate, that there are “questions” about how the Twin Towers actually fell, etc.—-and once your foot is in the door, you’re opening to going down the rabbit hole. 

This is why it’s fucking stupid of Democratic politicians like Howard Dean to play this “both sides” crap and try to please everyone.  You’re feeding the beast.  You’re adding more doors for people to enter so they can go down the rabbit hole.  The only response to conspiracy theories is to come down on them like a sack of hammers, and brook no nonsense.  That’s what Mayor Bloomberg did, and for a brief period of time, there seemed to be a chance that it would work.  It was only when hedging and door-opening entered the equation—-like Obama back-pedaling even a little on his statements about religious freedom—-that this started to spin, once again, out of control.