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.

Thank you, Whiskey Fire, for digging up this piece of outstanding wingnuttery from Austin Hill at Townhall, who was apparently so shaken by Justin Bieber cutting through the crap* and describing Canada’s health services how Canadians usually do—-as if they were just common sense, which they are—-that he lost his mind and decided to argue against the existence of public services through the heavy use of scare quotes.

Here’s what Bieber said:

You guys are evil,” Bieber joked to the American magazine writers, “Canada’s the best country in the world….We go to the doctor and we don’t need to worry about paying him, but here (in the United States), your whole life, you’re broke because of medical bills.” He continued, “My bodyguard’s baby was premature, and now he has to pay for it. In Canada, if your baby’s premature, he stays in the hospital as long as he needs to, and then you go home.”

That’s quoted from Hill’s article, and he’s going to show his contempt for Rolling Stone and the kids these days with their filthy Rock and Roll music by refusing to name it.  This is Hill’s response, and it’s beautiful in its inanity:

What a wonderful little fantasy, wouldn’t you say? America is so “evil” that when one goes to “see the Doctor,” one has to fuss with something so trivial as “paying him.” How terrible it is that a highly trained professional like a Medical Doctor must be compensated for his or her work.

Yes, he just suggested that Canadian doctors don’t get paid, because anyone in a government-funded system must work for free.  He must be crapping his pants for real about Wisconsin.  “What is this ‘pay the teachers’ crap? I thought everyone who in the public sector did it for free!”  Actually, that would explain a lot of the wingnut reaction.

But this is where his piece gets really amazing:

Yet how beautiful it is that in Canada, “the Doctor” just provides services, the patient just receives those services – as much as he or she needs – and the Doctor apparently doesn’t need to be paid. Or at least the patient doesn’t have to worry about it, right? Isn’t that the way it goes in Canada? Somehow, because of the magic of government, Doctors and nurses and everyone “at the hospital” in Canada just simply perform their jobs, patients just simply “get” what they need, and everybody’s happy. And Canadians don’t have to face that devastating threat of long-term medical bills.

I expect such childlike silliness from, well, children.

Between the words “childlike” and “fantasy”, I get the strong impression that Hill thinks Canada, with its national health care system, isn’t a real place, but a fictional land in a sci-fi novel written by socialists as propaganda.  I hate to break it to him, but Bieber wasn’t talking about some mythical land he read about in a fantasy book, but an actual nation state called “Canada”, and they are really close to the U.S., so if you’re still skeptical, you can go visit and satisfy yourself that they really exist.  They’re as real as Obama’s birth certificate. 

But I think my favorite part of it is that he describes a system where everyone gets what they need and no one is ruined forever just because they get sick, and just assumes you’ll be horrified at the idea. Which is kind of amusing, like writing, “Boston is a land where people just walk by old ladies laying in the street in need of help, and instead of kicking them, they pick them up and get them help,” and expecting your audience to clutch their pearls and vow never to set foot in that dystopia Boston.  But I thought it would be fun to play his game with social services that Americans are more familiar and fond of, just to drive home how weird he’s being. 

Read All...

So, while going through Salon’s coverage of CPAC, the theme I really detected this year was gut-punching, overt racism. One of the most astounding examples—-besides everything that falls out of Andrew Breitbart’s mouth—-is one of the groups that manned a booth at CPAC, Youth for Western Civilization.  And by “Western civilization”, what they mean is “people who are currently considered white people in modern America”.  I know this, because his group vociferously opposes immigration, especially when it comes to people from South and Central America, and definitely from Mexico—-if you’re speaking Spanish, they’re against it.  Going to their blog confirms this; most of it is ranting about the evils of immigration reform that would make life easier on mostly-Hispanic immigrants who’ve come here illegally.

Here’s what I would like to point out to Kevin DeAnna and his friends in the art of defending “Western civilization”: Latin America is Western civilization.  Or, if you’re going to say that the United States is, you have to include Latin America.  DeAnna is quoted at Salon as describing Western civilization as, “a cultural compound of Christian, classical, and the folk traditions of Europe.”  Well, I have to point out that Spain is not only European, but it’s more European than England, which gave us our language, being on the actual continent and all.  Sure, former colonies all have unique cultures from the European nations that originally colonized them, but that’s equally true of the United States as anywhere else.  Using “Western civilization” as a cover to bash immigrants, but Mexican immigrants especially is not only racist, but fucking stupid beyond all belief. 

Let’s play a game I like to call “guess who’s the Klan?”  I’ve pulled mission-statement-type language off the website for YWC and the KKK.  See if you can guess who is who? Answers at the bottom of the post, so you can guess first.*

The hatred for our children and their future is growing and is being fueled every single day. Stay firm in your convictions. Keep loving your heritage and keep witnessing to others that there is a better way than a war torn, violent, wicked, socialist, new world order. That way is the Christian way - law and order - love of family - love of nation. These are the principles of western Christian civilization.

And:

Instead, [multiculturalism] is about learning politically correct slogans that are designed to denigrate Western heritage in general and American heritage in particular. Multiculturalism is really about destroying and dispossessing the people and culture of the West, not about an appropriate education about other peoples…...

There is no reason to believe that the advances of modernity and the political freedoms we enjoy will endure with the extinction of the civilization that allowed them to exist.  Western Civilization is our civilization and despite the bigotry and hatred of the radical left, we have no wish to see our civilization be sent to the graveyard of history.

I suppose, on one level, this is shooting fish in a barrel.  But on the other hand, it’s not like people like Andrew Breitbart aren’t mainstreamed in the conservative movement and therefore have a baffling pull on the mainstream media.  You know, even though Breitbart is a proven and known liar, who is probably going to be on the hook for a whole lot of money for it if there’s a sliver of justice in the world. YWC and Breitbart both are part of what Salon dubbed the Tom Tancredo wing of the Republican party.  Breitbart’s self-proclaimed newest obsession is trying to stifle a legal settlement that all people that aren’t crazy-racist see as basic justice in its most mundane form, which is Congress taking action to make sure that black farmers who won a large and settled class action lawsuit regarding years of discrimination at the hands of the Department of Agriculture get the money they’re owed. Breitbart heard that some black people are going to get some money, shit his pants, and tuned out the rest of the world to do everything in his power to make sure it doesn’t happen, using his usual tools of accusing everyone in sight of corruption and fraud. (When you’re an immoral liar, I guess you think everyone else is, too.)  He’s managed to get a single black farmer who the court didn’t give money he thought was his due as cover, but I think that’s a pretty transparent move to everyone but the dopiest conservatives, especially since the slams against the Pigford settlement from conservative corners are all about “slavery reparations” (which it’s not) and “milking the system” and the usual accusations of widespread fraud that crop up every time conservatives discover that black people can get Treasury checks mailed to them just like white people. For instance, take the woman who held the press conference with Breitbart, Michele Bachmann.  Like the people they’re denouncing who got money from this lawsuit, Bachmann has gotten federal money for agriculture.  I guess it’s not “fraud” or “milking the system” when you’re her. 

*The first quote is from the KKK.  The second is from the Youth for Western Civilization.

I’ve been told that Chris Christie is too imperious and too much of a bully to win the Republican nomination, and my feeling on that is that Republicans like imperious bullies (see: John McCain), so I don’t see how that could hurt him. I mean, it will in the general, but not so much in the primary.  But he hasn’t learned the most important lesson of being a Republican favorite, which is that no matter how sure of yourself you may be, if you refuse to pander to bigots, you’re screwed.  McCain knew this; he changed his position on immigration to the one that most appealed to people who flip out if they hear someone speaking in Spanish in public.  But Christie’s gone and appointed a Muslim to the state bench of New Jersey, and the wingnuts are freaking out, sure this is a sign that sharia law is imminent.  Adam Serwer:

The case against Mohammed—if you care to tumble down that rabbit hole—is that he’s represented people accused of ties to terrorism. The “stealth jihad” crew, despite ostensibly being concerned about the secular rule of law being subverted by Islamic fundamentalists, don’t actually believe in the presumption of innocence, or in providing legal representation to Muslims accused of crimes.

Sohail Mohammed defended some men who were caught up in post-9/11 secret sweeps looking for potential terrorists, and most of them were innocent of the accusation of having ties to terrorism.  “Innocent” is a key word here when understanding how completely ridiculous the wingnut reaction is, though grown-ups have to also point out that even if they’re not innocent, they have a right to a legal defense, like anyone else accused of a crime.  Basically, the tattered remains of the once-powerful 101st Fighting Keyboardists don’t believe that there is a difference between “Muslim” and “terrorist”. 

So now, according to the warbloggers, New Jersey is about to turn into Iran.

  – In a widely linked post, “Governor Christie’s Dirty Islamist Ties,” blogger Daniel Greenfield writes that “New Jersey, the Garden State, has just taken its first step toward becoming the Sharia State,” and criticized Christie for being “willing to stand up to the teacher’s union, but not to the terrorist’s union.”

  – Hate blogger Pamela Gellar, in a post titled “Governor Christie’s Hamas Pick for Superior Judgeship,” declared Christie’s political career over: “Governor Christie looked and sounded like he could be presidential. He’s not. He’s in bed with the enemy. All the other stuff doesn’t matter if you don’t have your freedom.”

  – At Commentary magazine, Jonathan S. Tobin wrote a post about Christie’s “troubling appointment,” and charged that Christie’s “appointment of Sohail Mohammed to the court shows that his judgment on the issue of support for terrorism is highly questionable.”

  – The Investigative Project on Terrorism warned Christie’s appointment of an “Islamist” to a judgeship “betrays either naivete or calculation. Either is troubling.”

  – PowerLine blog took extra pains to note that “The attorney’s name is Mohammed, first name Sohail — Sohail Mohammed.”

I, for one, cannot wait for the farmer’s market to have the crescents to indicate which tomatoes are sharia tomatoes.  All that radical juiciness!

I think it’s time to start a Republican nomination index.  Measure all the potential candidates against each other, see who is ahead which week, etc.  My money is still on Christie getting it, but this has weakened the case, and I feel Pawlenty is now ahead.  But watch out for dark horse Huckabee.

Who should be on such an index?  Maybe creating a graphic for it would be a good idea.

Once in awhile, I declare war on a word that’s become widespread because it carries a lot of assumptions with it that I think should be challenged instead of reinforced.  (Such as “problematic”, a word I’ve banished from my vocabulary because it’s lazy and allows the person using it to avoid explaining exactly why something is a problem.)  And today, that word is “politicize”, which is used to confuse instead of enlighten 90% of the time nowadays, and definitely ended its tenure as a useful word in the wake of the Arizona massacre. 

It’s too bad, because “politicize” used to be a useful word.  It was the go-to word to describe two very negative behaviors:

1) Making mountains out of molehills.

2) Making things that are not problems out to be problems. 

A good example of #1 is a lot of culture war nonsense, such as pretending that Michelle Obama is going to take away your smores or the American Life League declaring jihad on Krispy Kremes for suggesting that the word “choice” isn’t a taboo word that should never be uttered in any context.  (They probably then went right back to whining about being called “anti-choice”, even though they’re not literally against those six letters standing in a row.)  The latter is a little more tricky, because there are legitimate disagreements about what constitutes a problem, but again, culture war nonsense is a good example.  So, for instance, you have the wingnuts in this thread making their resentment of people who make healthier, happier choices than they did the driving force behind their politics.  They oppose the theory of global warming and urban planning to make more of the country dense and walkable, which are straight up political issues, because they resent the younger generation for their youthful hipness and wish to punish them, even though the young being young is not really a problem in the traditional sense. 

What these two situations have in common is that they presume that politics is about the important, life-and-death issues, and that government exists to govern, which is largely about solving social problems and preventing future ones. Real problems.  “Politicizing” then is trying to attach irrelevant nonsense to politics, and it downgrades the importance of it.

Nowadays, however, the verb “to politicize” is used, 90% of the time, to suggest that politics and government are silly little trifles that shouldn’t be involved when something really serious is on the table.  That’s how the word has been used in the past week, by right wingers trying to deflect criticism of their very serious actions by suggesting that this massacre is too serious to involve politics. But you see it a lot, and sadly not just from the right—-I’ve seen liberals argue things like health care reform and abortion policy shouldn’t be “politicized”, though literally the only way to leave politics out of it would be to take ourselves out of the game and lose completely.  But certainly, the right is eager to use the term in an attempt to bully liberals away from speaking up on important issues at the right times.  Thus, burying a politician is something where you should never be “political”—-though only if they’re liberal, of course—-because remembering a person’s life all of a sudden became the wrong thing to do when mourning that person.  And now, of course, we’re being told not to “politicize” the shooting of a politician.  We’re told that a huge social problem—-in this case, mass shootings that happen on average 20 times a year—-is simply too grave to be handled through politics.  You know, that attempting to stop mass shooting is an insult to the victims of them, because of the politicization.  (By the end of the decade, we will have right wingers take offense at the idea anyone who voted Democrat should be permitted to attend a funeral for a loved one.) 

Read All...

Update: For a more direct take on this whole issue of gun control, check out my latest at the Guardian’s Comment Is Free. But that isn’t to say there isn’t humor.  Wingnuts and their gun obsession always have a darkly comic value.

Every time there’s some horrible gun violence that catches the nation’s attention, there’s an inevitable call for gun control, and then the inevitable hysterical reaction from wingnuts who think that their penises will be taken away the second a mentally disturbed child molester on a terrorist watch list is prevented from buying a machine gun at a gun show.  And in these hysterics, there’s one word that’s used more than any other: “jackboot”.  Jackboots are, according to 99.9% of hysterical gun nuts, the most terrifying item humans have ever produced.  Jackboots are the weapons of choice of thugs kicking down your doors, looking to take your guns.  Liberals are usually portrayed as pacifist wimps by the right, but on this issue, suddenly we’re an army of fascists wielding this most terrifying of weapons, sturdy footwear.

Of course, the reason that wingnuts like to reference jackboots is that these were the preferred boots of the German military, before and during the Nazi era.  And wingnuts love nothing more than comparing criticisms of them and reasonable safety policy to the genocidal policies of Nazis.  Seriously, this “blood libel” and “pogrom” thing is just the next step after decades of “jackbooted thug” being second only to “welfare queen” in the wingnut cliche handbook.  This tendency is offensive to liberals, people with commonsense, Jews, anyone who was targeted by actual Nazis, the victims of gun crime, the soldiers who won WWII, and rationality itself, but it’s also really unfair to boots.  After all, the difference between the evil weapon of war called the “jackboot” and other, sturdy footwear suitable for heavy duty work, such as fighting in the military, is paper thin to non-existent.

I looked up the term “jackboot” online, and after wading through a bunch of right wing propaganda and historical wankery that is so specific that it’s not enlightening, I finally concluded that jackboots are basically just a really sturdy knee-high boot, probably one that is somewhat weather-proof so that you can march through mud and whatnot.  Steel-toes are probably involved in many of these kinds of boots, which do make them good for kicking the shit out of people.  Still, I find jackboots as weapons less terrifying than semiautomatic assault guns with extended magazines, machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. 

But, in the spirit of compromise and Jon Stewart’s metaphor of everyone taking turns getting on the freeway, I’m willing to consider a compromise where, in exchange for controlling what we liberals find terrifying (high tech weaponry that can kill a lot of people in short periods of time), we will allow the control of boots that could be used to kick you in the head really hard.  Of course, just like with guns, an all-out ban of the entire boot family is and should be off the table.  Seriously, since moving to a place that has for real winter and where you have to walk everywhere, you would have to pry my boots out of dead, cold hands.  Plus, a lot of boots are really far away from “jack” on the scale of boots-that-look-scary.  So, I thought I’d go through the collection of boots in my house (which, because of aforementioned cold and walking weenie-ness, is a large collection) and rate them on the “jackboot” scale, to get a better picture of what kind of boot control would be necessary to stave off tyranny.

Also, it gives me a chance to play with Instagram, which is not yet implicated as a threat to liberty from liberal fascists.

Boot #1: My rain boots

Jackboot qualities: Tall, ugly, weatherproof, worn for practical reasons.

Freedom-loving qualities: Kind of unwieldy, made of rubber and not leather, associated mostly with girls wearing skinny jeans or leggings in an effort to make these look more fashionable than they are.

Jackboot rating: 5.0

Read All...

Via Roy, I see Charlotte Hays of the National Review is really bringing it in the ongoing Wingnut Olympics, where competitors are judged by how many lies and non sequiturs they can cram into limited space.  Hays has only one paragraph’s worth of material, and yet the bullshit packed in there is astounding. 

The blizzard is definitely a force for conservatism, and not only because it has had the global-warming crowd scrambling for explanations.

There are many lies in this.  The most obvious is that anyone is “scrambling” for explanations.  People who actually understand the science know there’s a difference between weather and climate, in the same way we understand that a single traffic accident doesn’t mean that a town’s relatively low rates of traffic accidents are somehow disproved.  She’s basically fantasizing, and this demonstrates that wingnut audiences struggle with telling the difference between their fantasies (that a bunch of ignorant people who resent scientists for not being ignorant have made the scientists scramble) and the reality (that no one is scrambling, because the models that prove global warming allow for severe blizzards and even probably predict them).

But this is also based on an under-lying and nonsensical myth of wingnuttery, which is that the majority of the world, except for a few American conservatives who also are likelier to embrace creationism as a theory, wants to believe that our climate is going out of wack in such a way that it’s going to increase destructive weather events, starvation, and war.  Why they’re the only ones special enough not to get sucked into this pessimism—-and why hope-and-change liberals are supposedly now the sourpusses—-is never explained.  At best, they assume everyone else is as big a culture warrior as they are, and we actually want to deprive them of their Penis Mobiles because we’re somehow threatened by them (instead of amused at the overt overcompensation).  Also, this theory relies on, as I’ve noted before, an epic conspiracy theory that involves hundreds of thousands and probably millions of scientific experts.  They believe the vast majority of scientists and educators in the world are conspiring to hoodwink a gullible public about global warming, even though the motivations of these people are never established.  (The go-to explanation is “research grants”, but this is coming from people who deny that the exponentially larger oil profits could inspire oil companies to spend millions of dollars on anti-science propaganda. They also have to deny that people they claim are solely motivated by money suddenly wouldn’t abandon their underfunded university jobs to work in anti-environmental propaganda that pays way better.)  That’s a lot of bullshit, and that’s only her first sentence, which isn’t even really related to the rest of her nonsense paragraph!

The blizzard reveals something basic:  Liberals in government want to tell us what to eat, counsel us about how and when to die, and in general attempt to engineer our lives. But when reality knocks, they can’t do the basic stuff such as clearing the streets so that newborns don’t die in bloody apartment-building lobbies.

Let’s break this down into its various lies.  First is the notion that “liberals” are tyrannical because they try to publicize scientific information about nutrition.  They aren’t even forcing you to believe them!  If you want to believe that your chronic constipation is due to the global warming conspiracy instead of your stubborn unwillingness to ingest fiber, you retain the right to be a dumbass.  Second of all is this lie that Mayor Bloomberg is a “liberal”.  Actually, the irritatingly smug mayor of New York is an independent and former Republican.  He just happens to channel his fetish for controlling the bodies of poor people into food instead of into sex, like most Republicans.  But nothing he’s done as mayor in terms of nutrition proposals would actually control the choices of anyone that Hays cares about—-he’s mostly interested in making certain food items out of the price range of the poor.  And there’s no attempt to “tell you what to eat” by putting nutritional info up in chain restaurants.  You can cover your eyes if you feel overly controlled by knowing what you’re putting into your body, but I would say that people are actually less controlled if they have more information. 

Equating Mayor Bloomberg with the liberal Democrats who came up with subsidies for end-of-life counseling is another lie.  So is the notion that you’re being forced to be counseled by your doctor.  You don’t have to go to a doctor for end-of-life counseling if you don’t want to, but if you do want to, Medicare will pay for it now.  I’d like to see this whining about how being subject to voluntary access to advice taken to its logical level.  Conservatives really shouldn’t go to doctors if they’re so bothered by it.  How dare a doctor tell you what is happening to your body?  That’s an imposition on freedom.  People should never listen to scientific information ever before making a decision, since that’s basically fascism.  The only free decision is a completely uninformed one. 

Read All...

This rant by John McCain about the DADT repeal is something else:

Direct quote:

And you know, we’ll repeal it. And all over America, they’ll be gold stars put up in windows in the rural towns and communities all over America that don’t partake in the elite schools that bar military recruiters from campus, that don’t partake in the salons of Georgetown and the other liberal bastions here and around the country.

Seventy-seven percent of Americans support gays serving openly in the military.  Thus, we are forced to assume that McCain thinks 77% of Americans follow the path from an Ivy League school into a Georgetown cocktail party.  Which really calls into question this term “elite”.  If three quarters of Americans are going to Harvard, is that really an “elite” education?

He also claims that the people that will be celebrating this didn’t serve in the military or even know someone who did/does.  Which is funny, because that creates an interesting paradox.  If the only people who support repeal have no experience with the military, then why is there a law banning openly gay service members?  By definition, those people are interested in repeal, but in McCain’s formula, they don’t even exist.  Why ban something that doesn’t happen?  Granted, he used the term “most”, but seriously, he’s trying to create a dichotomy between Real Americans With Patriotic Family Values Who Only Have Missionary Heterosex In The Dark Before Praying and Perverted Liberals Who Eat Bon Bons And Screw Each Other In The Ass For Fun On Big Piles Of Money.  And I’m going to say there’s a lot more overlap there than you’d think.

But what’s really fascinating about this rant is how it’s total capitulation to the principle that anything that pisses off liberals is good.  Indeed, I’m thinking about 99% of what being a conservative is about right now is a combination of insecure masculinity issues and punishing liberals for thinking they’re so smart.  So much so that huge chunks of this country basically waste time and money or hurt themselves doing things that liberals don’t actually care about in order to piss us off (voting for Bristol Palin on “Dancing With The Stars” comes to mind, as does slurping down tons of fatty food that will eventually kill you to prove a point to people who actually wouldn’t know the difference if you switched to whole grains).  If you take this garbled rant from McCain and rebuild what he’s trying to say, it seems that his point is that gay service members should be deprived of their rights, because it will piss off liberals.  And pissing off liberals is important, because they drink better cocktails than you do, and they all went to Harvard, and so a little being pissed off evens the score somehow. 

For the record, I don’t think I even met anyone who went to Harvard until I was like at least 25.  I have still never been to a Georgetown cocktail party, though I have been to many tailgate parties.  I also sign off on what Scott said here:

What a bullet this country dodged in 2008. Frankly, I’m not sure he was even the best candidate on his party’s ticket at this point…

I swear to god, half my blogging (if not more) from here on out is going to have to be dedicated, once again, to examples of how Republicans claim they’re motivated by strong principles, but in fact they’re just straight up culture warriors who never take a pass at a pot shot. Here’s the latest example:

  In some post-election hardball between the Obama administration and newly-elected Republicans, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is threatening to take back stimulus funds from states if they do not follow through on proposed rail projects.

  CNN obtained copies of letters LaHood sent to incoming Republican governors in Ohio and Wisconsin who have stated their opposition to rail projects already underway in their states. In the letters, LaHood said a rail link between Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati in Ohio, and a high-speed rail connection between Chicago, Illinois, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, are vital to economic growth in both regions.

  Lahood wrote that he respects the power of governors to make decisions for their states, but, “There seems to be some confusion about how these high-speed rail dollars can be spent.”

  To Wisconsin’s Gov.-elect Scott Walker, LaHood said that none of the funds can be used for roads or any other projects. He went on to say, “Consequently, unless you change your position, we plan to engage in an orderly transition to wind down Wisconsin’s project so that we do not waste taxpayer’s money.” That letter was delivered on Monday.

To make this very clear, the Republicans—-who generally like to carry on about how they’re just against the stimulus, full stop—-are happy to take the stimulus funds.  They want the funds they claim are evil.  They just don’t want to spend them on trains. 

David Dayen has a theory:

These Republican governors are engaged in a little game. They want to decry “wasteful spending” without reducing that spending one bit. They just want to move the high speed rail money into fixing roads and bridges. I imagine this is because that will be completed faster and with a higher profile than the longer-term HSR projects.

Maybe that’s part of it.  But I wouldn’t discount the straight up Republican hostility towards trains, especially compared to cars.  When Republicans are pandering to their base, one of their most important pitches is to imply that evil liberals are trying to make you share breathing space with undesirables.  As I noted earlier, one of the biggest selling points on creating hostility to health care reform was to provoke anxieties in the base of having to share public spaces with (fill the group that any particular wingnut hates).  The RNC’s anti-health care website had a picture on it of a multi-racial line in an E.R.  They weren’t overly subtle about this.  This is political pandering to people who go into a red-eyed rage at having to dial “1” for English.

The symbol of modern conservatism is the SUV that pulls in and out of the garage of the front yard-free McMansion placed inside a gated community, a perfect little system that allows the conservative base voter to leave their home and run errands with an absolute minimum of contact with the outside world.  Trains are basically the opposite of that—-everyone buys a ticket (which may involve pressing “1” for English), and you sit down basically wherever, and anyone can sit in your car or even your aisle.  If SUVs are the symbols of everything wrong with conservative America to liberals, then trains are definitely a symbol of everything wrong with liberal America to conservatives—-the egalitarian nature of them, the prioritizing of fuel efficiency over living like a little pretend king in a little pretend castle, the lack of airs that are associated with train travel.  Once the trains come in, it becomes easier not to own a car, and next thing you know, people are walking more, which means even more shoulder-rubbing with the hoi polloi.  It’s all very disconcerting.  No wonder Republican politicians want nothing to do with it.

Like a good little liberal, I actually really love traveling by train, and access to nearby cities with a short trip on Amtrak is one of my favorite things about living out East.  I did like driving on long distance trips when I had a car—-at least, a 3 or 4 hour one, not the 6 or 7 or 10 hour ones I often had to make—-but trains are more comfortable, plus you can plug in your laptop and watch videos if you want.  Or, gasp, read a book.  And they’re safer.  I’m sure all of this is just making the culture war aspects of it worse, but I thought I’d just say. 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Rachel Maddow is right on in this clip, except about one major thing: The right wing mythology that takes Michelle Obama’s relatively mild healthy eating initiative and equates it with a Big Brother program where you’ll be reported for eating saturated fats isn’t going to be the next big thing.  By the time something like this percolates up to Glenn Beck, it’s already taken off with the paranoid right.  But other than that, she’s absolutely right that this is fixing to be a hardened right wing talking point, the next big panic button in the culture wars.

The “carrot eaters vs. Real American french fry eaters” is actually a perfect hot button for Beck and company to push repeatedly, for a number of reasons.  There’s the financial support they can expect from the fast food industry that is feeding right wing PR firms cash to spread this culture war freak out.  Just as importantly, workaday wingnuts are already all over this.  Healthy eating is equated with femininity, and eating crap with masculinity, and wingnuts are nothing if not masculinity worshipers.  But it’s not just masculinity, it’s an anxious masculinity that is always prowling around for threats to itself. Thus, anything that could be seen as nurturing, mothering, or construed as “nagging” is treated like an especially emasculating threat that has to be guarded against with an overreaction that is considered quite masculine despite being unbelievably childish.  Michelle Obama running a campaign where she’s in a position of reminding people that junk food, if consumed to excess (which it mostly is), is bad for your health? 

For the “above all, piss off the liberals” crowd, that’s an invitation to act like a 4-year-old who does something he didn’t even really want to do, just to defy his mother who told him not to do it.  You can see this in Beck’s rant, when he goes off on the how he’ll just get fat if he wants to.  What was amazing about that to me wasn’t the rights basis of his sentiment—-sure, you have a right to get fat if you want to, and the notion that anyone is actually trying to stop you through force is laughable—-but the general image Beck was painting.  The stigma against getting fat on purpose is practically unspeakable in our culture, so I just have trouble imagining that his audience could get past that.

And yet, I’m not going to make the mistake of thinking Beck doesn’t know his audience!  He gets them to fuck themselves over in many different ways, basically using “piss off the liberals” as the calling card.  In this, Rachel might be right that Beck is boundary-testing, seeing if people are willing to go this far with him.  And I think they will.  Maybe not with the “getting fat” thing, but definitely with the idea that the culture wars should involve tribalism over food choices.  And that healthy food should be disdained as liberal and junk food embraced as a sign of tribal loyalty to the wingnuts.  Again, we’ve already seen a lot of this going on, even if it’s restrained by the fact that even the “piss off the wingnuts” crowd isn’t too keen on the idea of being overweight, either.  I’ve definitely seen trolls show up at this blog just on posts about food politics and try, pathetically, to piss off the liberals by bragging about how much greasy, tasteless food they love to suck down.  (Really, it’s sad how desperately they need to piss off the liberals. Seriously, if you start putting clothespins all over your body, the flinching I’m doing is a natural human reaction to something that looks painful, not a sign that you’re winning by pissing me off.) 

To understand why this will really take off, you need to understand what is at the root of the so-called culture war.  Christine O’Donnell got right to the heart of it, when she made her speech claiming there are more of “us” than there are of “them”.  At the end of the day, the culture war is about creating an “us” to oppose the “them”: the masses of people condemned as “liberals” that are hated and opposed on tribal principles more than any actual policy disagreements.

Food is particularly well-suited to become a culture war issue.  After all, this is a culture war, and food is arguably far more a culturally significant practice than perhaps even sex.  Or at least, it’s equally significant.  As far as the culture wars go, the wingnuts have lost a lot of ground when it comes to sex.  Yes, it seems like they haven’t because they’re doubling down on gay rights and abortion, but in major ways the “moral majority” has given up ground.  There’s a lot, when it comes to public sexual choices, that they don’t spend as much time railing against as they used to—-premarital sex, cohabitation, and divorce.  Oh, those are still talking points, sure, but on the whole even the culture warriors realize those fights are over.  Most of them participate or at least have participated unapologetically in one or many themselves.  Religion as a unifying force has a lot of promise, but even that has its limits, because there are so many different denominations that they have to be vague or they threaten the coalition.  Whiteness is something that a lot of culture warriors invest a lot in, even as they deny that they’re racists, because skin color is a great way to separate “us” from “them”, for people who find this important.  The problem is that a lot of “them” are also white.  Geography works better, but there are “us” tribe members that, for employment reasons (and for cultural reasons they’ll never admit to the base) live in the big city. 

The category “us” is inherently unstable, so they collect a lot of cultural markers to determine who is and isn’t “us”, and food is bound to come up in that.  Food has, throughout human history, been used to determine us vs. them.  Because of the urban associations with liberals, they’re already associated with independent restaurants and foodie culture, and the cosmopolitanism links liberals to adventurousness in eating.  Because of the environmentalism and animal rights, organic food, and vegetarianism get associate with liberals.  As Glenn Beck makes clear, the health care reform bill means good health is becoming associated with liberalism, and with enough care and feeding, he clearly intends to turn this association to one where good health itself becomes morally suspect, evidence of secret compliance with the “nanny state”.  A little bit of PR money and it won’t be hard to get wingnuts to believe eating a lot of junk food is their patriotic duty.  I doubt, however, that actually getting fatter is suddenly going to be considered cool in some parts of the country, so what is probably going to happen is yo-yo dieting itself will become a tribal marker, particularly for women.

To be clear, I’m not supporting any stigmatizing of fat people.  I’m just noting the current situation as it stands in terms of how most people view the issue.

Yesterday at Double X, I blogged about Oklahoma Republican representative and gubernatorial candidate Mary Fallin, and how she’s an example of how she’s an example of how crazy right wing politics have gotten. She couldn’t be bothered to go back for the emergency session to get more funding to the states, because she was that against it, but she was enticed to rush back to DC to vote for a bill that put $600 million towards a pointless display of beefing up border security.  Since she bothered to show up, she voted against the state emergency funding bill.  In other words, for Republicans, there’s not enough money to pave roads and pay state employees, but there is no such thing as too much money spent on pointless showboating to pander to racists.  (Not that Democrats are off the hook—-the showboating waste of money wouldn’t have passed without them.)  Of course, at the end of the day, Fallin doesn’t have to pay a political price for her ideological stance against basic government services that her Tea Cracker base pretends they don’t use.  At the end of the day, the bill was passed and Oklahoma is going to get $300 million.

And knowing the way Republicans operate, I wouldn’t be surprised if Fallin shows up at some event where the money is being spent and takes credit for it.

I used to be adamant that it was morally wrong to leave out districts and even entire states for this kind of funding when they routinely elect representatives who vote against it.  Sure, it’s annoying when Republicans get to have it both ways, but not everyone voted for them, and it seems wrong to deny employment and services to innocent people who often did their best to vote for Democrats and were simply outnumbered.  But I’m beginning to have second thoughts.  The main reason is that the utter lack of consequences for Republican districts means that Republicans keep getting elected, and they are reducing the size of the pot.  Everyone loses out, even if Republicans are in the minority, because Republicans are able to use what power they do have to keep tax cuts for the very wealthiest and to reduce the size of relief bills and social spending.  And if it weren’t for Republicans simply making up problems—-like pretending violent hordes of illegal immigrants are raping and pillaging on the border, when no such thing is happening—-we wouldn’t be wasting precious resources on crap like this border security bill.  I’m beginning to wonder if the price we pay for shielding voters from what it means to vote Republican is simply too steep to be tolerated any longer.

I don’t know if there’s a legal way to create a system where, if your representative doesn’t vote for the bill, you get no funding from it.  But as a thought experiment, it would be interesting to think about what it would mean.  The first thing that occurred to me is that doing such a thing would dramatically exacerbate the already-existing wealth and living standard differences between red areas and blue areas in the country.  Initially, this would be devastating to the poorest people—-but I have to point out that in red states, those people tend to be fucked already, as the local governments do everything in their power to keep them from getting services.  Still, this is such a morally indefensible position, I have to think that maybe you carve out an exception for services that offer direct assistance to the poor, like Medicaid.

Read All...

I’m still boggled that right wingers have convinced themselves that they have a right to have a snit over the fact that some liberal journalists had a listserv.  The whole concocted controversy gets stranger by the minute, and not just because some wingnuts are using Journolist to replace the made-up Protocols of the Elders of Zion as the focal point of anti-Semitic propaganda.  For instance, Andrew Sullivan threw a hissy fit because some folks on Journolist made some fun of him because he pushes the “Sarah Palin faked her fifth pregnancy” nonsense.  I fully expect before the week is over for conservatives to take umbrage if it’s discovered that someone said something mildly critical of Richard Nixon on the listserv.

The fundamental argument justifying the fit is that liberal journalists don’t have a right to speak to each other in confidence, a right that conservatives apparently get to enjoy on the grounds that they’re specialer than us.  I imagine that if this all works out for them, they’ll be delighted to know they have a new line of attack on liberals.  It’s way more than listservs, after all.  Liberals communicate with each other in private in all sorts of ways.  Now that they’ve managed to make this fact controversial, there’s no end to the possible scandals.  I’ve made a list of what we can expect next, in terms of created controversy.

Scandal will erupt when it’s discovered:

*Many liberals are married to or dating other liberals, which often includes actual sexual congress going on behind closed doors.
*Liberal homes are often installed with telephones, and most phones made from them go unrecorded. 
*To make this worse, most liberals nowadays carry their phones with them. At any point in time, they have access to confidential conversations with other people who are often also liberal.  And just to add to the wickedness of it all, many also employ text messaging.
*Liberals are permitted to enter restaurants that serve dinner to people without recording their conversations.  No doubt many of these liberal take advantage of this to discuss politics over dinner with other liberals.
*Did you know there’s no law against liberals having cocktail parties?
*To make it even worse, many liberals working in media or politics have offices where they work with other liberals, and therefore have unfettered access to unrecorded conversations with each other. 
*But it turns out even those who don’t work in physical proximity with other liberals often use instant messaging services to conduct conversations with each other as if they worked together.  Not only does instant messaging create a scandalous veil of privacy over these communications, but it’s also rumored that they use improper grammar and spelling. 
*Liberals are permitted to both purchase books written by other liberals or check them out of the library.  Either way, they brazenly read those books quietly, and enjoy thoughts about them that they aren’t forced to share with other people. 

Taken to its logical conclusion, the only form of communication we’ll be allowed is blogging, but only if every reader reports their thoughts straightaway in comments.  Maybe also Facebook, but only if all the privacy controls are turned off.  And then they’ll have to create new rules to explain why it’s scandalous to allow us even this. 

We’re already getting the world-weary sighing about how we need to move on from the Rand Paul thing—-and don’t worry, it’s the weekend and we will—-but I do feel the obsession over it that sprouted up needs a defender.  Rachel Maddow did an excellent job on this front.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

But I’d also like to take the time to talk about Rand Paul, teabaggers, and why libertarianism matters despite being unbelievably childish as a philosophy.  I think a lot of media people tend to think of libertarians mostly as a tiny minority of overprivileged twits who are relatively harmless with the power fantasies of what unbelievable sci-fi badasses they would be if the government just got rid of OSHA.  But the folks who write for Reason and work for the Cato Institute aren’t really representative of libertarianism as it actually exists in most of the U.S. Because self-identified libertarians are a tiny minority doesn’t mean that libertarian thought doesn’t enjoy widespread popularity amongst conservative Republicans.  Indeed, libertarianism is the primary intellectual justification in this country for resistance to most social justice movements.  (I use the term “intellectual” loosely here, but you know what I mean.)  It is also the primary intellectual justification for unchecked corporate power that leads to disasters like our collapsed economy and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  And I would argue that the existence of the Republican party today depends largely on people who are invested in the latter exploiting people invested in the former for support and votes.  And that’s why libertarianism is extremely fucked up and concern about it isn’t a distraction.  Most people who spout libertarian arguments are self-identified Republicans, and most of them have extremely conservative views on race and gender.

I thought I’d break down my examination into some major points.

Values

One of the unfortunately unquestioned aspects of the argument that folks Paul aren’t racists so much as strict ideologues is it buys into the assumption that the ideologies we support and values we hold just exist, as if they were assigned to us randomly at birth.  This doesn’t actually comport well with reality.  Most people’s values derive from their ideas of what the world should be like.  A common exercise with activists in trying to get them to clarify what their values are and how to fight for them is to have them picture the world they want.  What they picture can be used to figure out what they value.  (For instance, I picture a world where people are unrestrained by prejudice to live full and meaningful lives.) Therefore, if their values just so happen to create a world marked by racial segregation and most wealth being held in the hands of the few, and most of the people who benefit from these values are people who look like those who hold them, then it’s a safe assumption that they chose their values to achieve these ends. 

Which isn’t to say that people can’t make mistakes, or incorrectly think that value X will lead to result Y.  However, when presented with historical evidence that their assumptions—-in this case that free enterprise would automatically desegregate—-are incorrect, if they persist in arguing otherwise, they are being willfully ignorant. 

The commerce clause

Read All...

Hullabaloo has been all over this excellent post by Dante Atkins, even though I have to disagree that we never see a positive argument for abortion rights.  (One of the chapters in my book is titled “Only One Side of the Abortion Debates Wants You to Get Laid”.)  But I do take Digby’s point seriously—-the treatment of abortion as a necessary evil doesn’t seem to me to do very much in shoring up abortion rights.  In my experience, the vast majority of pro-choice people are pro-choice because they buy into a larger cluster of beliefs about women’s basic value beyond being incubators, and because they think sexual liberation has been largely beneficial to the public.  Which is a belief that tailors nicely to reality, as I note below. 

Anyway, that’s not really the point of this post.  I just want to discuss something tristero noticed about the rhetoric that stems from social conservatives as of late, especially female ones.  It’s the “we’re the REAL feminists” gambit.

A fairly recent trend on the right has been a conscious effort to rebrand feminism and detach it from liberalism. I suppose their market research told them “feminism” has pretty robust positive connotations for most women…..

There’s now “feminism” and “Leftist Feminism.” That creepy accumulation of sibilants, so evocative of the hiss of snakes. And, of course, the SS. The term “Leftist feminism” is all of a piece with the efforts to rebrand the Great Alaskan Grifter (hereafter, GAG*) as some kind of female hero….

This is something that’s been going on since forever.  I get at least two-three link backs a week from some ranting two bit conservative blog about how I’m a typical “left feminist” who is actually out to get women by denying them their god-given right to do the only thing women really want to do, which involves being a supplicant to conservative male desires.  I don’t think it’s a talking point that came out of any market research.  It’s just another manifestation of the weird wingnut dance they do with the liberal elite in their heads—-they hate and envy the “liberal elite”, and vacillate between condemning them and aspiring to beat them at their own game.  It’s a lot like the “liberals are the REAL racists” crap, or the tendency to demonstrate pride in ignorance and then flip around and insist they’re the real smarty-pants.  It’s dizzying and really kind of pointless. 

The grabbiness at the feminist label is particularly amusing, since when conservatives aren’t insisting they’re the Real Feminists, they’re doing everything in their power to denigrate the label so that women fear adopting it.  But there’s basically two rationalizations in play that conservatives use to justify this nonsense.  Sometimes they work in conjunction, and sometimes separately. 

1) Misconceptions about who feminists are.  The word “feminist” literally means someone who buys into the belief that men and women should be socially, politically, and economically equal.  But the term “feminist” is often used to conjure up a very specific image of a very specific kind of woman—-picture someone in a suit with pearls, taking on the world with a nanny and a housekeeper at home, and a husband who indulges her ambitions.  Or a single woman who achieves because she’s not weighed down by familial obligations.  Either way, the suit and pearls are the key to the image. This image is usually used by conservatives to imply to each other that feminists are emasculation machines, but more and more often, they have a need to actually project this image as a positive one.  It’s not just because they have a sea of female politicians and pundits who fit it, but it’s also because they’ve discovered that these women are saleable.  Men like to look at them and imagine fucking them, and women like the reassurance that just because they’re anti-feminist doesn’t mean they’re wimps. 

Read All...

Via LGM, a new and kind of shocking wrinkle in wingnuttery: embracing Guy Fawkes as a hero.  Yep!  The legendary would-be terrorist Guy Fawkes, who wished to be the Timothy McVeigh of his time.  If I’m following all this correctly, the homage to Fawkes is being played in a traditional dog whistle style.  The Republican Governor’s Association no doubt wants the slogan of their new website “Remember November” to be taken as nothing but an innocent reminder to supports to vote in November.  But the slogan has its roots in celebrating Fawkes as a hero.  After the movie “V for Vendetta” came out, the pro-Fawkes narrative entered the American culture, and that in turn became a thing for Ron Paul supporters.

The Wachowski brothers’ retelling of the Fawkes’ story was later embraced by libertarian supporters of Ron Paul. During the 2008 campaign, “Remember, Remember The Fifth of November” became a rallying cry for Paul boosters, who shared at least some of the revolutionary fire of both Fawkes and the Wachowskis. On November 5, 2007, Guy Fawkes Day, Paul supporters raised more than $4 million online.

As an artistic statement, subverting the cultural meaning of Fawkes is kind of interesting, but decontextualized from that and rewritten as a political slogan?  I’m sorry, but I find that disturbing.  The cultural corollaries to Fawkes in our culture are right wing terrorists like McVeigh.  The rewriting of Fawkes in a sympathetic light in English culture makes a little more sense—-a historical embracing of responsibility for oppressing Catholics—-but it’s just incoherent in American culture, especially when you have highly privileged, non-oppressed folks like the teabaggers embracing him.  I can’t help but think it’s just another way that wingnuts have grown more comfortable sending coded signals to each other about the desirability of domestic terrorism to protest Obama being President.  If this happened independent of holding rallies to commemorate April 19th (teabaggers claim it’s because that’s the day the first shots were fired in the revolution, but it’s hard to ignore a bunch of militiamen marking a day that just so happened to be the anniversary of the Oklahoma federal building bombing), I probably wouldn’t think as much about it.  But once is a coincidence, twice is a trend.

Here’s the video:

I wonder if the person who decided to quote Abraham Lincoln in the video has any Confederate gear in his home or office.  I’m guessing yes.  It’s fascinating how incoherent teabaggers are, which makes sense because they’re basically the most privileged people in our society, but they care on like they’re suffering the worst oppression in history because they lost an election.  And so you get calls of patriotism mixed in with celebrating the treasonous Confederacy.  I’m sure many of them will soon insist that you can celebrate Lincoln while also calling the white supremacist Confederacy supporter who shot him a hero.