Anglachel's Journal

Feeling Like a Zombie

2008-07-25T21:36:00.000-07:00

Nope, still not dead, though I'm feeling a bit like a zombie.

I've been inundated with technical support work the last few weeks (including conducting a 7 hour technical support call that wore out seven people on two continents before an elusive bug was finally cornered and exterminated) and have just wrapped up five straight days of repairing the damage of a malicious SQL injection attack on a site I support, plus armoring the place up against an expected second round.

In my spare hours, I've been working out my frustrations by digging up rocks in my yard. It becomes mindlessly soothing after a while, and make me nice and tired for a good night's sleep.

With John Edwards in the news these days, I have been reflecting on the theme of "Two Americas" and have applied a twist that more accurately reflects the two Americas within the Democratic Party - those whose bigotry and biases are excused because they are of the right class and those whose flaws are inexcusable, even when the flaws do not exist.

Let's just say it started with a friend who has gone from being a McCain supporter a year ago to being an Obamacan presently, and who uses very interesting Stevensonian coding to explain away his casual racism.

But at the moment, I'm tuckered out and need to get some sleep.

Anglachel

Dreams of Our Daughters

2008-07-14T20:42:00.000-07:00

Still not dead. I was planning and throwing a baby shower for a friend this last weekend (mucho fun!) plus wrestling the demons of stupidity at work (mucho annoying!). There's not been too much in the news compelling enough to get a post out of me.

Mostly I've been braining about the Democratic Party and the anti-Southern strategy it is relentlessly pursuing. I end up with disturbing conclusions. More on that over the next few months.

At the baby shower, one of my friends who is a high school teacher in a poor and working class district talked about the kids she teaches. She has two young women, Latinas, in her class who are doing a little better this year, getting Cs and trying to improve. One of them can't really afford the fees for the equipment and other extras to be a cheerleader, though she scrapes together the money from sponsors. She really likes the cheer squad. One of her parents is in prison on drug charges. The other she says is dead, but is actually suffering from a (too young, too short) life of drug abuse. An older sister, not long out of high school herself, is caring for her kid sister, which means providing a roof and food and hoping the kid follows her example and not that of their parents. Some might dump on this girl because she wants to be cute and sexy and have the crowd applaud. She should be applying herself! The other girl in the class lives with the first and the older sister. Some kind of family trouble. She's a little more studious. Not much else to say about her, except that she is trying to make the right decisions.

Who thinks about these kids? Where are the interests of the working poor being considered and protected? These girls need reliable, affordable contraception. They need some regular adult attention and guidance. They need decent jobs that can help them pay rent and buy the groceries while they get through their dizzy teen years and get a handle on life. They need to not be punished for having been born to shitty parents. They need to be respected for having enough discipline to get sponsors for cheer squad and to raise their grades, even as they are steadily pushed to do a bit more for their own sakes.

I contrast this to the recent rumors that the secrecy over Obama's birth certificate is not some nefarious secret, like he isn't a US citizen, but something far more ordinary - that his parents probably never married in the first place. I said this in private emails to a few bloggers several weeks ago. To me, it isn't something that is anyone's business. But what does bother me is the dreamy fantasy promulgated in his books, a fairy tale romance that he is able to spin out over years and continents, trying to craft a respectable ending for the family's honor if not exactly for the individuals involved. The truth, ironically enough, is more interesting, reflecting a tough minded, independent and determined woman with dreams of her own who may not have been the person her son wanted her to be.

Few of our parents ever manage that trick. Somehow they keep stubbornly being their own people.

The high school girls my friend talked about, one of them has created a story to explain away a parent who won't be there, preferring this person be dead to the fact of abandonment, betrayal, failure. It hurts to have a parent who fails you, and every one of us who has felt such a sting makes up a story to make sense of that unpalatable fact, make it more noble, less painful, displace its shame, deny its damage.

Isak Dineson said that any pain can be borne if you put it into a story or tell a story about it. What matters is what kind of story you tell. Is it a story of reclaiming what never was? Is it a story that acknowledges pain, but makes it a thing that is done and dealt with? Is it a tale that talks about dysfunction with clear-eyed honesty and compassion for all involved? Does it limn an unfulfillable wish, or instead create a foundation on which to build? I suspect most of us recount a mix of such things.

I'm interested in the dreams of our daughters, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and how they can frame a future that is not just drugs, gangs, babies, and relentless second-class status. Maybe one of the reasons the lady in the pantsuit connects with so many daughters is the story she can tell us about herself, and about us as well. Maybe what we need are better stories of the indignities and tragedies of ordinary life that don't have Daddy in another country, but permanently incarcerated, or a blow-hard abusive bastard, or wandering the streets as a bum looking for his next fix, and how you are not condemned to a similar fate.

A dream that looks forward, not back.

Anglachel

No Thinks

2008-07-07T18:54:00.000-07:00

Classification

2008-07-06T20:19:00.000-07:00

I'm reading the news reports as they come in about Obama's determined march right into the heart of conservative darkness and embracing what he finds there. It actually makes sense.

First, some background. I have two posts from April 17, discussing the Bittergate stupidity and citing Paul Krugman as he rustled up some actual facts and figures on white voting patterns:

I encourage you to re-read the posts in their entirety, especially the second one which quotes Krugman extensively, but the main thrust of them is that working class voters are not the socio-economic slice of the "white" vote that votes Republican. They are the least likely portion of white voters to do so, which is part of what made the constant slamming of this group so infuriating during the primaries. This was the slice of the white demographic most likely to vote for Hillary, and that was the reason they were being singled out for shaming and insults.

In partial answer to a comment on the last post, Clinton Democrats are not simply Reagan Democrats, though Reagan Democrats were brought back to the party by Bill and even more by Hillary, joining the majority of Democrats who support the Clintons. Clinton Democrats can be defined as people who understand and approve of using the powers of government to make ordinary lives better and to defend the citizenry from forces and powers outside their control - from catastrophic illness to economic crisis to attacks upon the nation. It is a mode of public service that is very bread-and-butter oriented, efficient rather than elegant.

Paul Krugman jumps right to the point (quote from the second link) when he says:

It’s true that Americans who attend church regularly are more likely to vote Republican. But contrary to the stereotype, this relationship is weak at low incomes but strong among high-income voters. That is, to the extent that religion helps the G.O.P., it’s not by convincing the working class to vote against its own interests, but by producing supermajorities among the evangelical affluent.

So why have Republicans won so many elections? In his book, “Unequal Democracy,” Mr. Bartels shows that “the shift of the Solid South from Democratic to Republican control in the wake of the civil rights movement” explains all — literally all — of the Republican success story. ...

Anyway, the important point is that working-class Americans do vote on economic issues — and can be swayed by a politician who offers real answers to their problems.

(My emphasis) So, the people responsible for shifting the political control of the nation from Democratic to Republican in the wake of the Civil Rights Act are the affluent whites, not the poor and working class whites. The affluent evangelicals who are the conservative counterparts of the Obamacan "creative class" voters who are disproportionately affluent whites.

So, returning to my recent post No Where Else to Go, I'm seeing a certain pattern here. Voters located down the socio-economic ladder are simply being dismissed, attached to a figure reviled by the Stevensonian elite and rejected as worthless, retrograde, dead-enders, racists, and political garbage. Obama is now turning a full charm offensive onto precisely those voters who have been most likely to reject Democrats since LBJ, the affluent evangelicals. The constituency that really is the rotten repository of revanchist racism, but they have money.

And if there is one thing we know about The Precious it's that he's all about the Benjamins.

If you don't have much of a political ideology other than vague "bipartisan" impulses, and you are panting after dollars, and you feel confident that it won't be your rights and freedoms that will be curtailed, your reproductive and marital freedoms that are endangered, your sons and daughters who are packed off to defend imperialist interests half a globe away, then it may not seem such a bad thing to suck up to these kinds of people and their theocratic desires.

Why throw your lot in with the working class when they're really not that into you anyway? If you make promises to them, you might have to stand for something.

Anglachel

No Where Else to Go

2008-07-01T23:01:00.000-07:00

First off, my thanks to everyone who has sent me good wishes. They are much appreciated! The last few weeks of personal ups and downs, now mostly on an upwards trend, has meant that I have had to step back from the particular issues and arguments being flung about in the political wrangling. It has allowed me to look at some of the larger trends and take stock of the peculiar behavior of various actors in the election season, most important to me the behavior of the Democratic Party. I mean this in the broadest sense, encompassing both elected officials and party office holders as well as the voting constituencies that provide the funding, the activists, the volunteers and (most important) the voters, for whose sake the party supposedly acts and with whose consent the party gains the legitimacy to govern.

The widespread and growing discontent with the campaign for the nomination should tell us something about the problems the party is being forced to face. This is not simply a contest between two very popular candidates with aggressive supporters as most would have it, reducing the post-primary tensions to merely a case of “getting over it”. These are problems that have to do with divergent views of party purpose, significant shifts in demographics and geographic distribution of traditional and prospective Democratic voters, and a fundamental divergence of the role of government in the lives of ordinary citizens – who are increasingly female, young, non-white and vulnerable to the vicissitudes of economy and environment. We could say that the Democrats are going global.

The split of the Democratic electorate itself has been followed by growing resistance to the designated nominee. This is not something I have seen before on the Democratic side, though it certainly begins to look more and more like the 1976 contest between Reagan and Ford, with the establishment candidate barely avoiding a convention floor upset by a rival with a new and energized coalition that is dedicated to the party but unhappy with the party direction. The party leadership, like their Republican counter-parts in 1976, appears determined to yield no ground for the cause of true unity, which would require compromise with their internal rivals and the constituencies these actors represent. Instead, what we hear is some variation on “You have nowhere else to go, so tough.”

It is this arrogance and incapacity to acknowledge legitimate claims and criticisms that has raised the hackles among Democrats who are not necessarily ardent Clinton supporters – though repetition of the dismissal clearly hardens resolve – and which points the way to the underlying problem of the Party, laid bare by this electoral contest. Perhaps it took this particular match up, one that undermines comfortable assumptions about what Democrats believe and are willing to fight for, to expose the fault line I have been discussing for the last few months. It helps to explain the reaction of Hillary supporters to the anointing of Obama as the presumptive nominee, but even more it illuminates the voting patterns observable in the exit polls.

Not only does the Party leadership and large swaths of the Stevensonian elite firmly believe that the Truman rank-and-file have nowhere else to go in a political sense, they have also abandoned any substantive commitment to socio-economic movement for this class. They no longer care to provide there voters anywhere else to go economically or culturally. The Truman wing is seen as an electoral dead end, and no more effort should be expended on their behalf.

Controlling for race, the results of the primary campaign were split between the haves and the have-nots. Exceptions can be found, such as my own household. We’re in the 90th percentile of incomes and hold advanced degrees, are secular humanist, are clearly “creative class” knowledge workers, etc. We should have been Obama supporters; indeed the spousal unit started the campaign as one. However, the overall trends were consistent – the working class and poor were strong Clinton Democrats and the Stevensonians clung to Obama. Look at the makeup of the Clinton Democrats – working class, especially the working poor, the elderly, less than college graduates, women and non-whites voted for Hillary. The missing constituency in this coalition was African American voters, for whom racial identification was a greater determining factor than any other. As I have said repeatedly, while an unfortunate electoral turn of events for Hillary and the only reason Obama won his large states, I see nothing pernicious in this fact, nor does anyone have to invoke racism on either side to explain the phenomenon. It is not “reverse racism”. For all the huffing and puffing from various partisans and pundits about how the Clintons allegedly destroyed their relationship with the AA community, what I remember reading in the paper were statements from ordinary AA voters who said they hated having to choose, and reading Gallup’s analysis that showed AA voters were the most likely of Obama’s supporters to vote for Hillary should she take the nomination.

A large portion of the constituents on both side have said they won’t support the other candidate, but polling shows that the Clinton Democrats who will not cross over are larger in number and stronger in their opinions than Obama supporters. The party leadership is threatened by this disaffection, yet they are consistently unwilling to regard this part of the party as part of the coalition they need to retain. The public relations campaign, insofar as there is one, revolves around threats (Roe! Roe! Roe our boat!), shaming (You’re just racists if you won’t vote Obama), but mostly dismissal - “You have nowhere else to go.” The opposition is dismissed as emotional, racist, low information, culturally backward, and republican dupes instead of driven by very concrete material interests.

What was Hillary offering that rallied this constituency behind her and which has remained an amazingly strong identification? She offered material improvements to ordinary lives, and an explicit commitment to use the power of the state to achieve those ends. The two most prominent examples are her lifelong commitment t health care and her current response to the mortgage crisis. It is a difference of political style, but also of political philosophy. Hillary has demonstrated that she believes a politician is someone who has to earn people’s votes by understanding where they are coming from and being on their side. “You are not invisible to me.” It is also a way of diffusing social grievances by substituting festering resentment which can be channeled into resentment-fueled backlash (the hallmark of movement conservatism) with amelioration of socio-economic threat through practical policy to stabilize conditions for the working class. In contrast, Obama has run as a conversion experience (You are not Democrat or Republican, you are an Obamacan.), calling people to their better selves, which inherently presupposes that what they currently are doing is wrong, corrupt, and unworthy. It substitutes morality for interests, focuses on the inner-life of the voter rather than on the material needs of the population, and individualizes broad social concerns. If only you racist hicks would improve yourselves we would have a wonderful nation. It is a top-down approach that dictates behavior rather than provides solutions, which is why it ends up sounding very conservative.

There are times when a nation does need to be called to something higher and to set aside particularity in service of a cause. With Obama, however, these are sacrifices with no specificity. It is not a bad message to whack complacent well-off liberals over the head with, mind you, because my class (yes, it is a class and I’m thoroughly a product of it) gets a little too enamored of its own wonderfulness, but even for the privileged in this country, you have to ask – Sacrifice on behalf of what? What is being relinquished and for what reason?

The historic answer for the modern Democratic Party is for the economic interests of the working class. High-income earners give up money for the cause of economic equity. Workers agree to collective bargaining and forswear revolution. The government acts in deliberate ways to socialize the risks of mere living through measures like education, insurance, public health and safety, regulation of industry and so forth. If the average Joe is secure, the party has done its job.

Symptomatic of the deep problem of the party as a whole is the turn by the leadership towards privatization of social risk. Health insurance is not a mandate, and thus a right, but a choice to be exercised if desired. This ignores power, especially the power of the state to defend the citizen against the encroachment of moneyed interests. The well-off Stevensonians are no longer interested in defending the material needs of those who are not a part of Whole Foods Nation, and they hide their abandonment under the guise of rejecting racism. If the problem is the state of your soul and not the condition of your medical care, then you must heal yourself, and they can smugly pat themselves on the back for having defended the right moral stance.

Obama appears to think of himself as a world-historic actor called upon to guide the people through the moral crises of the nation. This is the common intellectual deformation of a Stevensonian, imagining that social problems are simply a matter of will and right thinking. It’s a love affair with the beauty of the forms and contempt for an imperfect world, and its usual mode is a hunt for intellectual inconsistency cast as political hypocrisy.

And, yet, there is a need for “that vision thing” as Bush the Elder so eloquently put it, because even material interests carry within them a valuation – this interest and not that one is deserving of social resources. The interests of exploitative companies, though clearly of benefit to the owners and stockholders, should not be valued above the physical safety of coal miners, for example. Nations do face extreme crises, usually under conditions of war. JFK, the most successful of all Stevensonians, bent the powers of the nation to the cause of winning the Cold War. The single minded pursuit of this cause was also an implicit critique of the New Deal, a slightly scornful judgment that FDR had settled for mere interest group liberalism, whereas the New Frontier looked to a higher calling – beating the Russkies. The space race, the Peace Corps, advances in science and technology, containment of Communism in far flung corners of the globe, the origins of the Internet (though it took Al Gore to deliver that promise to the ordinary schmuck like me), all of the initiatives of the Best and the Brightest were in the service of the cause of the Cold War. We were going into the future.

But what Kennedy, like Stevenson before him, resisted was the road less exalted, less clear and pure, less prone to domestic upset and the messiness of particular lives, the present that needed to be addressed if the George Jetson futurama was to have substance, and that was civil rights. Had he lived, he would have had no choice except to address it. And the dream of the New Frontier was done in by the attempt to contain Communism in Vietnam, though the military industrial complex burbled merrily along. Those two events – the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War – created the fault lines breaking up beneath the party today.

The party may be unified on paper, as demonstrated by the bleating of the Blogistan useful fools like Kevin Drum and Big Tent Democrat, that there is “no difference” between the Democratic candidates, but the difference can be seen in the philosophical commitments of the final two contenders. One looks at Obama and there is no political substance. Nothing. There is no issue, no cause, no certain pledge that says he and his faction intend to do anything for the working class or any interest that might involve true political contestation. This is what Krugman has pointed out from the start. Everything is on the table to be negotiated away for the sake of “unifying the nation.” When pushed, there will be no shove back. He has nowhere he wants to go.

Bill Clinton, for all his faults, had a cause when he entered the White House, which was utterly political – it was to undo the self-inflicted damage of the party since Johnson and make liberalism credible again to the millions of ordinary citizens who had given up on it. He meant to be, and be seen to be, on the side of people who “worked hard and played by the rules.” He organized his administrations around this cause, which could succeed only by improving the material conditions of people who felt themselves abandoned by the post-Watergate Democrats yet no longer trusted the bluster and bullying of the Republicans. Debate its worth or whether it did enough, but he was effective in this cause. The foundations of the current Democratic revival were laid in the mid-90s, and Obama is running as the ghost of Clinton past, right down to the message of hope and “can do” optimism.

The Reagan Democrats are now Clinton Democrats and have come back to the party, but the party leadership is more interested in nursing its wounded pride than in actually cementing its coalition. It would rather moralize than act. And, given the moral equivocation their selected leader has been showing in the last few weeks, it is uncertain they have a moral leg to stand on.

The message of economic justice still resonates with the majority of Democrats, as shown by Hillary’s intense support, but that message is not accepted as true. When we talk about it, we’re met by screams of “Racist! Racist!”and sneers that we have nowhere else to go. How can Obama’s content-free message make contact with the real world? There is nothing to attach his rhetoric to, no central organizing principle. He talks about the “smallness of our politics,” so what is it precisely that is to be enlarged? He has always backed away from the hard choice of throwing the power of the state behind the cause of social justice. At every point, Obama backs away from requiring these efforts, while Hillary embraced them. The Stevensonians have forced their preferred candidate on the party on their own terms, paying no mind to where they stand and what they want to accomplish. They may be centrists, but they no longer have a center to hold.

For Clinton Democrats, there is nowhere else to go with Obama because there was never anything there to begin with.

Anglachel

Not Dead

2008-06-28T13:22:00.001-07:00

Not even locked out.

I've been dealing with a lot of real life issues the last two weeks, which hasn't given me much blogging time. Also, there hasn't been a lot to comment on. I know a number of pro-Hillary bloggers have been targeted for shut down by reporting them as spam sites. I don't know whether to feel relieved or insulted that the Obamacans haven't tried that on my blog, but I have already reserved my Wordpress blog, just in case.

Overall, the trend I am seeing is that, with Hillary out of contention, the Blogger Boyz have abruptly noticed The Precious is not what they have claimed him to be or, rather, they are finally having to acknowledge that we HRC supporters were right about the mendacious little bastard all along. Which simply points out that they were more interested in defeating Hillary than in supporting a progressive candidate. What a surprise! Not.

Then there are the fundraising issues dogging Democrats. The DNC is about ready to hold bakesales, Obama is seriously underperforming his targets, and support groups are not getting money by order of The Precious. Polls aren't looking too hot, either.

It's going to be a long summer.

Anglachel

Judging Cordelia

2008-06-24T19:32:00.000-07:00

Bob Somerby's post today is a must read. He discusses in detail two examples of the double standard the media used when "reporting" on Hillary vs. slobbering all over Barry's shoes. The first example shows how the press is trying to prevent considerations of foreign affairs from being used to Obama's detriment jusxtaposed with the blatent use of Bhutto's assassination as an attempt to damage Hillary.

The second example looks carefully at Obama's lie that he was going to use public financing in the general in order to use that "pledge" as a club on Hillary. The Blogger Boyz, naturally, lapped up the high-minded approach of their love object, just as they have on pretty much everything else The Precious has shoveled out of his bullshit bag into their mouths agape with wonder.

Somerby dispenses some judgment of his own. I have cut out the newspaper quotes, though I encourage you to give Bob traffic and read them:

JUDGING CORDELIA: Did Obama reverse his previous stand when it comes to public financing of the general election? In our view, it’s hard to argue that he didn’t. (On Sunday, we thought people looked fairly silly when they said he hadn’t reversed.) You have to slice the meat mighty fine to find escape hatches in Obama’s statements about this matter during 2007. We don’t think his change in stance is the end of the world. But for ourselves, we wouldn’t claim that he didn’t reverse on this matter.
In today’s column in the Post, E. J. Dionne states a similar view. (“Obama’s choice has been criticized by reformers such as Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), and even by normally sympathetic editorialists, because his new position contradicts his old one, which was that he would accept public funds...”) But Dionne also says that Obama made “the right call” last week when he eschewed public money. As a general matter, we agree with that too. But we disagree with Dionne’s use of the word “opportunistic:”

...

“Opportunistic?” Why get so hot and bothered? But for the record: If something like “opportunism” was ever present during this long-running financing drama, it was present during 2007, not in this recent decision.

Presumably, Obama will gain an advantage over McCain by making this decision. But in current discussions of this matter, an earlier fact has rarely been noted; Obama gained an advantage over Clinton during the primaries by taking his previous stand. All during 2007, those “normally sympathetic editorialists” compared Obama favorably to Clinton because he was taking a high-minded stand—and because she wouldn’t follow. Let us stress: This wasn’t a giant part of the coverage, but we think it’s worth noting.

....

No, this wasn’t a major part of the primary coverage. But the “Goneril and Regan” aspect of this episode was lightly echoed in other areas—in the press corps’ coverage of “no preconditions,” for example, or in the remarkably unbalanced treatment of the driver’s license issue. (Especially at MSNBC, whose working-class, lunch-bucket journalist heroes were devoted to unvarnished truth. By their own admission.)

Lear loved Goneril and Regan best, because they kept telling him things that weren’t true. Cordelia refused to follow suit. How would “editorialists” at the Post have treated Cordelia’s vile stand?

One of my favorite essays ever is Stanley Cavell's magnificent work on King Lear, "The Avoidance of Love". In it, one of his themes was that love, and those virtues that are related to love, such as honor, responsibility, respect, loyalty and honesty, are not things that can be claimed or spoken. They must be demonstrated. They are, to grab some graduate school lingo, performatives, made actual in the doing, and they bear a difficult relationship to language because they are difficult to represent in that way. Declarations of these virtues, most of which either are also political virtues or else have a political correlate, stand in tension with the actions of the one who declares - the act of declaration is an invitation to judge.

Cordelia was willing to suffer curses and abuse from Lear precisely because she loved him in a way that did not allow her to prostitute that love for gain, exactly in the way that her sisters did. Her love (and thus her integrity) was present in the enactment of it, obeying her father and king's unjust banishment but coming back to try to defend him from the treachery of her sisters, for whom a declaration of love was simply a way to seize power.

The avoidance of love (and it's been a few years since I read the essay), was Lear's downfall. He would not be content with the ordinary expression of this relationship - and the inevitable disappointments of it - avoiding the mundane claims this interaction laid upon him. He purposefully sought what could be counted out in gold, something that he could alienate from himself and thus avoid investing his emotions, and when that transaction was completed, found himself on the losing end of the political power struggle.

Cordelia's love was ordinary, quiet and steady. It did not change to suit the situation, even as she could see the fate that might befall her unless she submitted to her father's imperious demands. Lear was not the only person in the room passing judgment.

I think Bob picked his example very well.

Anglachel

The Heart of Their Culture

2008-06-22T07:11:00.000-07:00

Bob Somerby has never lost sight of the violence the media inflicts on our public life with its deeply disturbed game of "Who's in the club today?"

Alone among the political bloggers, he has no wish to be a member of the Village. Every other blogger above a certain visibility level wants to be part of the crowd, associated with a high-profile website, regurgitating the stories of the MSM, featured in celebrity interviews in papers and magazines, and appearing in the talking heads venues of cable, broadcast and radio.

Somerby knows that to have an independent and critical voice about the media you must be independent and unrelentlingly critical of that media. In order to do this, it also means criticizing the enablers of the media, the social and political insiders who hold the cocktail parties, pick up the phones, provide the spin, and, most of all, enforce their narrative of how the world works. The "creative class" on the left has never relinquished the fantasy that somehow the press is on "our" side, secretly harboring fantasies of being the next Woodward and Bernstein. It is all about catching someone in an act of wrong-doing, not about presenting a corrective context to the agendas presented to them. It's all about "gotchas". Their counter-parts on the right have never relinquished those fantasies, either, and they have been strikingly successful at taking over the media while asserting that the media is a hopelessly biased tool of the liberals. The chief difference between these two groups is that the right has used the media to consolidate its hold on power while the left has cheerfully assisted the right in achieving that goal. They both delight in playing "gotcha" with Democratic figures.

His five part (to date) response to Tim Russert's death is an incredible, blistering analysis of this self-serving relationship. While other people (myself included) have focused on Russert himself, either to lionize him or reject him, Bob has taken the occasion to use their own words to expose their solipsistic adulation of their own dishonest culture. The last paragraph of the first post lays it out succinctly:

The guy [Russert] who wrote those books about dads is the same guy who gave those embarrassing answers in that interview with Bill Moyers. (In fairness, we’re inclined to think that Moyers overstated one alleged problem.) Predictably enough, Tim’s colleagues told you about the books; that interview got disappeared—along with the (inevitable) human shortcomings behind it. And no, they didn’t necessarily do that out of respect; it’s what they do in every circumstance. The instinctive refusal to tell you the truth lies at the heart of their culture.

Let's repeat that: The instinctive refusal to tell the truth lies at the heart of their culture.

Read all five of Somerby's posts. They are somewhat repetitive, but they build to his ultimate criticism, which is of the netroots and those who claim to be liberal voices.

The way in which the allegedly oppositional netroots reporters have handed their credibility over to the MSM without a struggle is their unwillingness to tell the truth when it clashes with their desire for how the world should be. Like the MSM, they have picked sides based on a script handed to them by the movement conservatives, and now, when the dust clears, they are left backing someone very like themselves, someone with an instinctual refusal to tell the truth.

Anglachel

Compromising Our Rights

2008-06-21T17:07:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman blogged:

My biggest concern about an Obama administration is that, in the end, he won’t make universal health care a priority. My second biggest concern is that “Unity” means never having to say you’re sorry: that in the name of putting past partisanship behind us, the next administration will sweep the abuses of the past 8 years under the rug, the same way Bill Clinton did in 1993; the result of that decision was that the very same people responsible for Iran-Contra showed up subverting our democracy all over again.

Obama’s support for the FISA bill intensifies my second worry. He did say some of the right things, promising to work to get rid of telecom immunity and hold people accountable. But caving on this bill is nonetheless not a good sign.

FISA

(My emphasis) Paul Krugman distills what I have been trying to say for months, which is probably why he is a world renown and internationally respected professor at Princeton and I'm just a cranky blogger in the hinterlands.

The problem with Democratic compromises is that they are over things that should never be bargained away, such as privacy, a social safety net, transparent government responsive to the citizenry, and other fundamental principles of liberal democracy.

Compromises are for making choices between acceptable outcomes, but where one may be more to the liking of one party than the other choices. Our rights, such as freedom from unlawful search and seizure, are not on the table.

Anglachel

Privacy

2008-06-20T16:05:00.000-07:00

So the Democratic Congress could not resist sacrificing our 4th Amendment rights on the altar of FISA. Providing immunity for corporations to do the bidding of a corrupt and power mad Republican administration. Other bloggers have focused on the immediate effect of this craven legislation that gives tyrants carte blanche to intercept your communications and its chilling effect on freedom of expression and political opposition. For me, I am looking at the larger political fish being fried, which is the conservative assault upon a right to privacy as such.

The 4th Amendment doesn't quite cover the concept of personal privacy:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It is closer to property rights, placing physical security in the same bucket as security of personal possessions. Thus, in this way of thinking, the problem is not the government (or another entity) knowing what you have said, but taking possession of the mode of communication - letters, emails, stone tablets, etc. The content of these instruments is not protected. While you are free to say or think whatever you like, a right to free speech, you have no constitutional right to private communication of such thoughts.

The conservative assault on Roe v. Wade has virtually nothing to do with abortion and everything to do with privacy. People of means will always find ways to be rid of an unwanted pregnancy. I believe it was Bob Barr (~~someone please correct me~~ corrected) who, during the farcical attempt to impeach the Big Dog, was uncovered as not only having had an affair but also of paying for his ~~mistress~~ wife to have an abortion. The part about Roe that frightens the conservatives is the idea people may do as they wish without having to report to and get the consent of a (paternal) authority, making the intimate fabric of their lives a legitimate object of scrutiny and control.

Before Roe there was Griswold, declaring that birth control was not something subject to state control. The emphasis on reproduction and control of one's body is not an accident in the court battles over privacy. If privacy is the right to be free of intervention in how you conduct your life, and if you already have at least partial property rights in your body, then the wedge to use to undermine privacy - and ultimately related rights such as freedom of speech, worship and property rights - is to target those interactions where bodily integrity is argued to be compromised, most obviously in pregnancy but also in sexual acts, disease control (key in harassment of gays) and general medical procedures. In other words, they try to establish some kind of property right or material interest in your body that is defensible in court.

The invasion of modes of communication can be seen in this light, with the government claiming to have a material interest in communications as such, just as they claim a material interest in the pregnant or homosexual body as such, to legitimize intervention in the content of those communications. The approach is turning it into a property issue in which an external entity has some defined material interest. A Telco owns the transmission medium, an ISP owns the servers, etc.

Objection to universal health care must be examined from this perspective. If everyone, everywhere must be insured, then there is no longer such a need for the insurance and medical companies to know intimate details about you. It means they no longer have a property right in your personal data and thus lose claim on that part of your intimate life. They then lose the right to exchange and sell your data, making money by selling you out.

The same dynamic underlies the infuriating condition of identity information. People should not have to opt out of having their identity (name, sex, age, address, purchasing habits, travel itineraries, etc.) sold to the highest bidder. When identity and health information get combined, the individuals are the losers. You don't even need to posit a fascist government (though that is what movement conservatism aims for) to see how the lack of an explicit right to privacy is used to undermine the efficacy of other civil rights.

Hillary Clinton is a proponent of privacy rights, no doubt in part because of how profoundly her own have been violated over the last several decades, but I would wager even more so because of her life-long work in defense of the most vulnerable people in society. I cannot find the link now, but I know I have read about her support for constitutional amendment to enshrine a citizen's right to privacy. Reproductive rights, which are more than just abortion rights, would finally have a presumption of privacy instead of trying to make certain situations and procedures protected. Marriage would also fall under the protection of privacy. Your health records and your economic transactions would be yours, not the property of corporations. And so forth.

What I want to ask the Obamacans is why should we expect The Precious to defend any of our fundamental personal rights, let alone push for the unequivocal foundation of another, if he is the candidate of the same Democrats who are now flushing our civil rights down the toilet? Obama is the Establishment candidate. He is a member of the club that is failing to defend us now.

Where is his commitment to our right to privacy?

Anglachel

NOTE: A final sentence has been added to the paragraph beginning "Before Roe there was Griswold" to make the argument more clear. Several people have commented and emailed that they were uncertain what I mean in that paragraph.

National Fourth Amendment Defense Day

2008-06-19T20:58:00.000-07:00

June does not have enough proper holidays. This one sounds just right. From Lambert on Corrente:

The Fourth Amendment, along with the other amendments to the Constitution that form our Bill of Rights, came into effect on December 15, 1791.

The Framers of our Constitution — and the voters in the states that passed the Bill of Rights — understood how tyranny worked, and they took a dim view of King George breaking into their homes, rummaging through their desks, opening their mail, and reading whatever the Fuck he wanted, whenever the fuck he wanted to, without going to a judge for a warrant, and without having to explain what he expected to find when the warrant was executed. The Framers had already had a bellyful of kings.

The Framers understood tyranny, even though they didn’t have computers in 1791. And if the Framers had computers, it’s plain as day they wouldn’t have wanted King George breaking into their hard disks, rummaging through their desktops, or reading their data—whether the data was email, documents on your hard disk, your telephone calls, your Google searches, or the sites that you surf.

Tyranny is tyranny, no matter the technology.

So it’s simple and crystal clear: The Fourth Amendment means that the government doesn’t get to read your data—to the Framers, “paper” without a warrant.

It’s simple. And anybody who tries to make it complicated is trying to fuck you.

Read the whole thing.

Anglachel

Exercise in Logic

2008-06-19T06:07:00.000-07:00

Certain Blogger Boyz like Kevin Drum and Greg Sargent are absolutely, 100%, no doubt about it, yesirree Bob convinced that Hillary Clinton ran a racist campaign because.... well, because! Isn't that enough for you? Everybody says so! No one would keep saying this if it wasn't true, would they? Anyway, we all know poor white people are racist and they voted for her, therefore she obviously was making racist appeals to get their votes. If they say something different, they are lying. How could there not be racism if all the talking heads and Jesse Jackson Jr. said there was racism?

If that is so, then why is the Congressional Black Caucus trying to make Obama put her on the ticket as VP? Why are African American voters more likely to say they want her on the ticket than any other Democratic group? Could it be they know that the accusations of racism were untrue from the start, seeing as millions of Hillary voters saw, that this was a campaign tactic, and are actually perfectly happy to support Hillary?

Gee, do you think this could all have been a bunch of lies that the Clinton hating media was more than happy to babble over and over?

Anglachel

At Last

2008-06-17T22:53:00.000-07:00

It was a day to celebrate in San Diego today, home to one of the largest GLBT communities in America, as marriage was finally opened to all people. From the SD Union-Tribune:

For years, Peter Storniolo told himself it was just a piece of paper. It didn't mean anything.
That changed Tuesday morning after he traded marriage vows and shared a long embrace with his partner of 19 years, high school teacher Paul Esch, in front of about 30 friends and family members.

“We never thought we needed it, but these last few days thinking about it, it's kind of weird how important it's become,” said Storniolo, 43, a woodworker who lives in Golden Hill. “Nobody can take it away. Nobody can tell us it's not there.”

Scenes of gay couples exchanging vows, rings and kisses across the state marked a watershed moment in the battle for gay equality that many compared to a 1948 state ruling that lifted the ban on interracial marriage.

County's gay marriages go off without a hitch

Some counties, such as Kern County, in California refused to allow any weddings to be held rather than allow any gay or lesbian couples to be married.

Earlier in the year, one of my co-workers tried to get me to sign a sheet to get the anti-gay amendment to the state constitution on the June ballot to qualify it for the November ballot. She absolutely believes that gays being able to marry is an infringement of her civil rights. Sadly, the initiative did go through and will be up for a vote in the fall. This is a widespread attitude in California and will bring out the haters in November. It could turn the state red because of an otherwise apathetic electorate.

To keep California blue, the Democratic voices need to be unified and adamant that this right will not be overturned. We need "No" votes to defeat the haters. Who is going to be a strong voice in defense of this right?

Who will defend the civil rights of these couples?

Anglachel

Update: And more fun pictures, courtesy of the LA Times. Plus one of my dear friends is getting married next month!

Cash Cow

2008-06-16T20:14:00.000-07:00

Rendell, who plans to campaign on Obama's behalf and raise money for him, said tonight's event in Philadelphia is a joint fundraiser for Obama and the cash-strapped Democratic National Committee.

But in a sign of the urgency to raise campaign cash, Rendell said Obama didn't want to reschedule tonight's fundraiser, even though the governor warned him that many Philadelphia donors were headed to the New Jersey shore for the weekend. Rendell said Obama told him: "We don't need the people. We just need the checks."

And there, in a nutshell, is the Obama campaign. The Cash Cow has replaced the Unity Pony. Who needs people when you can just collect checks?

I'm reminded of the height of the housing bubble in California when real estate agents would have basket at an open house where would be buyers would deposit checks in the faint hopes of getting the house. The sight of the competition encouraged bidding wars to see who could hand over more money for a crappy and worthless abode.

How much of the money given to Obama is actually going to end up with the DNC? Not that much, I'll wager. Some people are going to get very wealthy this campaign season.

Anglachel

Paul Krugman Doesn't Drink Koolaide

2008-06-16T19:10:00.000-07:00

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur
I saw this phrase in Alan Furst’s new book The Spies of Warsaw; it means “The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived.” A good slogan for the Bush years - but not only in reference to Bush.

I just read Naomi Klein:
Barack Obama waited just three days after Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race to declare, on CNBC, “Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.”
followed by a rant against Jason Furman.

Look, Obama didn’t pose as a Nation-type progressive, then turn on his allies after the race was won. Throughout the campaign he was slightly less progressive than Hillary Clinton on domestic issues — and more than slightly on health care. If people like Ms. Klein are shocked, shocked that he isn’t the candidate of their fantasies, they have nobody but themselves to blame.

Oh, no, The Precious is just another lying politician, what ever shall we do?

Paul Krugman and the rest of us sane Democrats have been trying to tell you kool-aide swilling fools that Obama was further right than the rest of the Democratic field. Millions of voters tried to show you the error of your addled ways by voting their economic self-interest and choosing the lady with the concrete socio-economic policies. Hundreds of bloggers typed their fingers to the bone explaioning that you were projecting your fantasies onto this cypher, pointing out his economic team is not very progressive, that his major donors are all Wall Street financial people, and that he never met an economic measure favorable to the middle class that he didn't want to compromise on. You got snookered by your own irrational fantasies.

Hope you like kool-aide. Me, I drink Maker's Mark, just like Hillary.

Anglachel

Tim Russert - Good Riddance

2008-06-16T17:56:00.000-07:00

Bob Somerby offers what is probably the most honest statement about Tim Russert I have yet read:

Based on what we saw first-hand, we would guess that Brother Russert really was the nicest guy in the world.
Sometimes, though, “nicest guys in the world” are the last to challenge conventional wisdom—even when it desperately needs to be challenged, examined, hollered about. In Tim’s case, we think he showed poor judgment in various instances over the years, as we’re all inclined to do. Chris Matthews touched on one possible error in judgment in his comments from Paris on Friday’s Countdown (text below). For once, we think Chris’ lack of impulse control served the public understanding—although he’s getting beaten up for his comment at various spots on the web.
Over the weekend, other members of the mainstream press corps did the thing that comes natural inside their group; they went on the air and told Group Tales, tales which reflected quite wondrously on Tim’s journalistic work—and, of course, by extension, most importantly, on them. Telling the truth is pretty much the last thing that enters these people’s heads. And so, they handed out novelized tales about Tim’s always brilliant work—failing to make the slightest attempt to be balanced, objective or truthful.
For the record, we’re talking about the way they described Tim’s work—not the way they described his decency as a person, a person they loved.
This isn’t really the week for such topics, though Tim’s death—more precisely, the torrent of industry propaganda it unleashed—demands that such topics be discussed. We’ll plan to look at some of those issues next week. In the meantime, we’ll suggest that you ponder a real possibility: The possibility that a guy who showed a fair amount of bad judgment—as we all do—may also have been the nicest guy in the world, just as you’ve seen him described.

I'm glad Russert is gone, never to return. All I know about this man is what I could observe on TV, and it was revolting. He was one of the people who enabled the hunting of President Clinton, eagerly helped take down Al Gore, and urged our nation into a criminal and unjustifiable war against Iraq.

Whether he was "a nice guy" doesn't matter to me. What matters is the harm he inflicted upon this nation. Being nice in a private context does not counterbalance the violence he did to the world we have in common.

Anglachel

Personal notes in the comments

2008-06-16T14:02:00.000-07:00

Just a reminder to commenters that if you write me a personal note in comments, I have no way to reply privately because Blogger does not give me your email address.

There is a link in the right hand sidebar (you have to scroll) that leads to a "Contact Anglachel" form. Please use that if you would like a private reply. I don't promise to answer, but I will read your email and I will not publish or distribute your email.

Reminder: I have all comments on moderation. No exceptions. On weekdays, I try to review at lunch time, but may not get to them until after I'm home from work, such as today. Also, I do not publish all comments, so yours may not get shown.

Anglachel

Logistics

2008-06-15T19:48:00.000-07:00

If the DNC has already relocated to Chicago, as reported by the commenter Molly in the Hillary Clinton Forum, then the plan to move was approved months ago.

I've been involved in the merger of two good sized US corporations. It's not something that can be done at the drop of a hat. Costs have to be scoped, budgets established, plans made, landlords current and prospective contacted, vendors hired, bills paid, accounts closed in DC and opened in Chicago, equipment purchased, staff relocated, reassigned and/or terminated, letterhead and business cards printed, signage created, phone service changed, and that's just the stuff off the top of my head.

I'm not buying the claim that it was a recent decision, quickly executed. Who knew about the merger and when did they know it what remains to be unearthed. Not a word of this was out in the blogs or in the news before this week thatI am aware of. How did such a major logistical operation remain under wraps?

This casts the repeated insistence that Florida and Michigan not be allowed to change the outcome in a new light. If the DNC had agreed to relocate, but Obama lost the nomination, that would have made for a lot of explaining as to the DNC itself taking sides. It also makes the silence of top party leaders over the brutal treatment of Hillary by the press more explicable - they needed her to lose in order to give their own machinations some cover.

Over the last few months I have tried to express my concerns for what the Obama campaign is doing to the Democratic Party. While I am a dyed in the wool Hillary supporter, my objections to what Dean, Pelosi, Reid, Kennedy, Obama, et. al., are doing to the party are swiftly growing larger than whether or not Hillary was treated fairly in the campaign or even whether she was cheated out of the nomination. We are talking about a hostile takeover of the party.

Anglachel

Update: I've been getting some comments and emails that indicate people are confused about the DNC move. So am I. That's why I'm taking my time thinking about it. My first alert to it came from Riverdaughter's post on the Confluence, Hmmm, this is not a good way to achieve Unity, which references a Politico post on the matter. I've seen a few oblique references in new reports, and oddly enough a few political cartoons talking about the move. I read blog posts, most of which reference RD's post or the Politico post. What I'm trying to do is consider the behavior of DNC actors over the course of the campaign in light of the news that a merger has occurred.

Not everything has been or will be shut down in Washington - that was part of the Politico post. There is still staff in DC and the national phone number still works. There are probably legal reasons as well as organizational ones to maintain a formal headquarters. Referencing the merger I was part of, the original company was sold to an international firm which was in turn sold to an American industry competitor. There are still offices in the original location and at the international location, all the brand names are intact, most consumers have no clue that a merger took place, but the business is now run from the headquarters of the final purchaser.

My point here is that the political operations have been merged with a specific candidate's campaign (See post Representation) and that this merger cannot have been considered, agreed to and implemented in a single week's time. This is something that requires logistics, not to mention money and legal sign-offs. This points to two key issues: first, the party leaders have been intending to do this for some time (how far back is yet to be established), which casts their behavior towards *all* candidates in an uncertain light; second, it means that they have subsumed the party to the political objectives of a particular person who has been shown through his campaigning to be divisive and antagonistic to a significant portion of the party rank-and-file.

Through my writings going back before this campaign, I have repeatedly discussed the role of independent institutions in both creating power and defending people from the abuses of power. The behavior of the DNC in this electoral cycle indicates to me that it is not maintaining the party as an independent operator, which reduces its power. The antagonism shown to life-long Democratic voters, right up to the latest sneer that women should just get back to their knitting if they don't like what is being done, indicates to be that the DNC is not terribly interested in defending its constituents against abuses of power.

This is what concerns me and frankly it is more important than whether Hillary got the nomination, even as it is inextricable from her attempt to win it. Along with writing about institutions, I have been writing on the long time divide in the party. I think we are watching the Stevensonians trying to purge the Jacksonians. This is categorically different than simply trying to finagle votes while not really delivering the goods, which has been the behavior up until now. It's why I talk about Whole Foods Nation, the fantasy of a purified "Left" that has hobbled the party since Stevenson.

OINC

2008-06-15T09:15:00.000-07:00

The new name for the Democratic National Committee:

Obama Idolaters National Committee

All lined up at the trough, ready to scarf down whatever swill The Precious dumps in.

Anglachel

Representation

2008-06-14T21:35:00.000-07:00

The consolidation of Whole Foods Nation under The Dear Leader in Chicago has me and the spousal unit going "Hmm".

I've written before about the Obamacan demand that Democratic money be brought under the Chicago Combine's control, but subsuming the entire DNC to a single candidate's campaign is both horrifying and fascinating, kind of like watching decomposition. As there are more confirmed details, I'll be writing more, but one little gem stood out for me, which is the way the state operations, the ones that promote the downticket candidates, are being rolled up into the Obama operation.

In Mississippi, a candidate won a special congressional election this spring, but had to run at least one ad and do some talking to distance himself from Obama because of the Wright and bitter/cling comments. If Obama controls the purse strings and the operations people, he can probably enforce a demand that down ticket candidates shut their mouths and risk defeat rather than allow them to distance themselves from his questionable background and political behavior. Might he yank money and support from Democrats who backed Hillary, preferring to punish enemies than expand a majority? Will he write off down ticket campaigns, particularly for state and municipal offices, preferring to concentrate the money and the people hours on his own success?

One of the reasons to have an independent party operation, one that is not a wholly owned subsidiary of a particular candidate or faction, is its ability to deliver money and support to lower level, less sexy contests where the shift of a few seats might mean capturing a statehouse or taking over a city council of a large city. The interests of the party have to be wider than any particular candidate, and a diversity of voices prevents tunnel vision or a distorted view of the electoral landscape.

Does a downticket candidate represent the interests of her constituents, or does submission to the political ambitions of The Precious override obligations to the voters?

Anglachel

Watching

2008-06-14T12:01:00.000-07:00

I have been taking care of some family things lately, which is why I have not been blogging. This is not something that will end soon.

I am watching events, however. There are a lot of rumors flying about, a great deal of posturing and bloviating going on, but mostly a worried silence.

Fear and resentment dominate this campaign in a way I simply cannot remember happening before. The happy-happy face is a mask over something else entirely. The Stevensonians have received what they believed they wished for.

My political stance remains unchanged; I will not vote for either McCain or Obama in the general, and for much the same reason - they call upon ugly and destructive things in our nation to consolidate their power.

Anglachel

Plus Ca Change

2008-06-10T22:30:00.000-07:00

Jeralyn has a post up about Obama promising to make religious outreach a priority in his administration. The comment thread is long and has a bit of atheist ranting, but there are a good number of interesting and cogent comments. This Kmiec guy is very troubling.

The Precious really has a thing for extremist religious types who don't care much for liberal democratic government is all I can say.

Anglachel

We Get Letters

2008-06-10T19:27:00.000-07:00

The votes are in and the comments are closed.

55 opinions. 2 think this is just a run-of-the-mill whacko with no actual political affiliation, but in dire need of medication. 2 think it could be a McCain supporter, but are not certain. The 51 remaining voters think this is an Obama troll and cite the general graciousness of McCain supporters towards Hillary voters, the use of texting slang, the repeated use of the word "bitches" (Republicans prefer "cunt" after all), and the references to the campaign, which Obamacans are still obsessed with as they know they haven't actually won it.

"I sure hope you bitches doesn't vote for my Candidate McCain...U represent nothing..u are a bunch of loosers who can't handle the truth. I wonder how many of you have failed marriages uh...failed jobs uh...Us republicans don't want you bitches to corrupt our party. We have values and believes which you all don't have. Hillary was the bitch..she ran a terrible campaign...but as usual bitches stick together..can't handle the truth, then blame someone else...get over yourself. Our country was build on values, but apparently u all don't have any. Stay away from our party you bunch of loosers. " Sent by McCain08

Okay, is this an Obama troll or a delusional McCain supporter? Place your bets in the comments!

Anglachel

Sweet Little Lies

2008-06-10T18:21:00.000-07:00

Bob's been documenting the atrocities much longer than anyone else, so he knows who has cozied up to the main stream media:

Which brings us to the current problem—the problem of telling/not telling the truth. Do Broder and Toner believe that Clinton made that statement? Because two major journalists, in the past week, seemed to say that their colleagues have been lying when they make this claim.
First to expound was Richard Cohen, in the June 3 Washington Post. Cohen said this, explaining why he’d hated the Democratic campaign: “I hate that Clinton's observation that Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June ran on and on when everyone save some indigenous people in the Brazilian rain forest knew what she meant.” If Cohen is right, then Broder and Toner were simply lying in yesterday’s Times. (Neither scribe lives in Brazil.)
Second up was Michael Kinsley, who didn’t seem to hate the lying at all. On Sunday, he bravely said this in the New York Times, knowing that Kevin and Josh and Duncan and all good pseudo-liberal house-brokens have accepted this evil conduct for years: “[A]t the end, when her own clumsy comment about Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June was willfully misinterpreted to suggest that she was wishing that fate on her opponent, it served her right.” If Kinsley’s implication is right, then Broder and Toner were “willfully misinterpreting” what Clinton had said.
Do you see the problem that develops when people like Kinsley and Cohen start telling the truth about not telling the truth? Cohen said the dissembling was wrong; Kinsley seemed to approve of the lying. But both men are veteran journalists; they have lived for decades at the top of the mainstream press pack. And both men seemed to think it was obvious that people like Broder and Toner are lying—simply lying in your faces—when they write bullsh*t like that.
Were John Broder and Robin Toner lying on Monday? That’s what Cohen and Kinsley seem to believe. Needless to say, housebroken boys on the liberal web will know they mustn’t discuss such matters. But do you see the problem that quickly arises when major journalists start telling the truth about not telling the truth?
Next question: Did journalists really think something was wrong with Bill Clinton’s statement in South Carolina? Or was that just a “willful misrepresentation” too? Do you see the problem that quickly arises when we’re told, by two major scribes, that their colleagues tell you things they don’t believe? When John Judis tells you what he did about his colleagues’ view of Obama?
Housebroken pool boys will know not to speak. Despite their long-standing willful silence, can you see the problem involved here?

The problem is telling the truth.

A lot of people mistakenly thought my post yesterday was about Obama, but they have misunderstood the point. It is about the so-called left that has forgotten how to tell the truth about politics.

The atrocities, as Bob Somerby keeps pointing out with far greater patience than I could have thought possible, are the lies and the acceptance of them, the excuses made for them and the way in which public figures profit from them.

Blogswarming the few places left that are critical of the campaign and trying to scream and bully the authors into silence does not change the facts. Tying to counter a lie with a lie does not cancel out the first one, it simply reinforces the original need for the facts.

A significant the difficulty the left has when combatting the right is trying to combat the casual lies spread with the voice of certainty by the MSM who get it handed to them on a silver platter by the noise machine. This time around, the left eagerly lapped it up, those claiming to be the most progressive, the most radical, the most hard-core, unwilling to tolerate the bullshit lefties, the first and most eager to get the goods from Drudge.

Does anyone see the political problem when you ally yourself with a media unwilling to tell the truth? And if this media then turns on you with the same methods and brutality it used on your opponent? What happens when the lies that advanced your original cause are exposed as lies and are used to paint you as deceitful and dishonest?

Anglachel

Media Whores Online

2008-06-09T22:16:00.000-07:00

Whatever the benefits of a Democrat in the White House, this campaign is the furthest thing from a radical repudiation of what has become of the mainstream media I can imagine. A significant portion of the Left has wholly adopted not just the tactics but also the frames and content of the Right against itself.

The most radical part of the netroots has been its claim to oppose the media, both the right wing noise machine and the increasingly co-opted mainstream media. The Left was finally gaining the same critical distance from the major media as the Right had adopted years before, and with the advent of the Internet was also able to self-publish their alternative perspectives in a cost effective manner. This had always been a disadvantage vis-à-vis the Right because, until the Web, dissemination of information had been the difficulty. Now, anyone with access to a terminal at a public library and a willingness to experiment with these things called “blogs” could let their opinions be heard. I remember the thrill of discovering new blogs with great voices. Daily Howler and Media Whores Online were the cornerstones. On an old LJ page, I can still see other finds – Altercation, TPM, Opinions You Should Have, Common Dreams, Truthout. There still is no replacement for Bilmon and Whiskey Bar.

Looking back, there is a trajectory of the A list blogs starting in and around the advent of the Iraq War, rising to critical mass with the 2004 elections, hitting a golden period between 2004 and 2006, then starting to tilt away from “documenting the atrocities” to becoming participants in it. I really think the high point of the blogger influence has to be the battle against Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security, led by Josh Marshall. Since the 2006 Yearly Kos, however, anyone paying attention has been able to see where the big-name blogs were headed, and wasn’t to stay in opposition to the MSM.

One question that no one in the MSM or the “serious” blogosphere has tried to answer is why have so many hard-core Democrats, people in the party for decades, rallied so strongly to Hillary’s side, their support becoming stronger and more obdurate the more she was declared a failed candidate? In most political races, the perception of being a winner or a loser will usually sway the voters, emphasizing the upside – like Obama’s big bump after Iowa – or reinforcing the downside – like Edwards never recovering after losing in Iowa. Hillary’s support increased the more it was accepted by the media that she had already lost. Take this phenomenon seriously because it did happen. When else have we seen this pattern in the rank and file? When Bill was under impeachment. The regular Democrats evidently know when someone is being railroaded by the media and they push back.

The press did to her what it did to Al Gore in 2000, inventing faux scandals and alleging words and behaviors that never happened. The epistemological status of the “stories” spread in the news is exactly zero – they have no real, rational basis. It is interpretation based on flimsy (if any) evidence. It simply did not exist. The difference between the rightwing hunting of the president in the 90s and the wilding of Gore in 2000 is this time the allegedly opposition blogosphere and “left” media fell all over itself to lap up the sewage flowing out of the same sources that have been brutalizing the Democratic Party, the left, liberalism and, frankly, democracy, since Reagan’s ascendency in 1980. They have picked up the crap, eager gobbled it down, and have fully incorporated it into their perspectives, rhetorical methods, and standards of evidence.

The liberal opposition has disappeared, all too eager to do the Right’s work for it.

Why else is there no conception or acknowledgement that there is a crisis of legitimacy at the core of the Democratic Party right now? As long as the loser is a Clinton, who the hell cares? appears to be the rejoinder. Even today, in blogs, online magazines, print newspapers and TV shows that ostensibly have a liberal bent, the news of the day is how can be finally be rid of that bitch. That she exists at all is an affront to their sense of how the world should be - and that comes right out of Scaife's Arkansas Project.

So many of us who remember the 90s sit here, aghast, and watch the wholesale incorporation of the 90s rightwing narrative by the alleged left. Every last line of bullshit, right down to drug dealing in Arkansas and who killed Vince Foster. If this were a movie, it would be a comedy by Terry Gilliam, or maybe the Cohen brothers, one with a knife edge doing the tickling, and too many innocents destroyed. Why are these fiery liberal spirits so swift to join in the rightwing assault on their own side?

Part of the reason in the blogosphere is simply careerism. Josh Marshall, Matt Yglesias, Young Ezra, etc., are simply trying to jump in and get their careers going. I’ve written that up before. Bob Somerby does an even better job of this, documenting the eagerness of these Boyz to be agreeable and acceptable to the people who can pay their bills and give them celebrity. And thus you have WKJM shilling for a candidate whose chief economic advisor is comfortable with privatizing Social Security. I think that pretty much explains where Josh’s commitment to the left starts and ends. When WKJM is willingly taking his stories directly from Matt Drudge, where exactly is the line between the rightwing noise machine and the opposition?

But what of the people who aren’t careerists, at least in that way? Intra-party fighting can only explain so much, because there are some attack modes that they won’t jump into. There is something to it being class based, as I’ve discussed before and will continue to evaluate – a smug sense that somehow prejudice against lower class whites is justified, and thus you shouldn’t defend those kinds of people. It’s also not a mistake that the bulk of the people gulping this sewage are white and male. It would appear that the upper class white males of the Democratic Party have more in common with the upper class white male Republicans than they care to admit. It is not a mistake, I think, that the people on the left who responded best to the anti-Clinton spew of this round are socio-economically similar to those on the Right who share their taste in Drudge and sludge.

There was a time in the 90s and the early Uh-ohs that the left understood that the MSM had gone off the rails. The era of Murrow, Cronkite, Brinkley and Huntley (describing contrapuntally), John Chancellor, and other luminaries of post-war reportage was over, we knew it, and we knew that FOX was the enemy. It is a sad day when a lefty turns to FOX for news because at least you know the score with them. I remember the 1996 Republican convention (yes, I was there, it was in San Diego and I worked a booth there) when we were all giggling in anticipation of Pat Buchanan going off like a freak on national TV during prime time. It is weird now to think Pat Buchanan is the most sensible, rational person on the stage. Now, the more the media behaves in a way specifically designed to delegitimize our candidates, the more the left accepts and repeats what it hears. Bob Somerby and Paul Krugman are nearly alone in their insistence on telling the truth.

A few days ago I wrote up my disgust about the willingness of some people to go along with what seems a very clear ratfucking operation by the Republicans involving a tasty mix of misogyny, racism and anti-Muslim sentiments. What I also want to make clear is that should this particular attack continue – and it will – and should others of this kind surface and gain traction against Obama, then that part of the left that eagerly embraced a reprise of the MSM assault on the Clinton White House and the Gore presidential run have no ground to stand on. You whored your brains, your logic and your leftist credentials out to the bottom feeders of the right to try to gain a little advantage for your candidate and in the doing you have undermined him and every Democrat running for national office. You cried ”Yes, yes!” to painting millions of Americans as racists, you turned a blind eye to grotesque misogyny, you prostituted the corpse of a dead man to spread a lie, you eagerly defended nullifying votes of people in Michigan and denying full representation to Florida to rig the vote for your candidate, you continue to threaten to riot if anyone denies you what you want.

Here’s a little secret. If Obama has run an aboveboard campaign, if the Democratic Party leadership hauled off and slapped Chris Matthews et. al. silly for their Clinton Derangement Syndrome, had the Blogger Boyz been able to argue for their candidate without getting scoops from Matt Drudge, the chances are very good that he might have won in a squeaker. And then he would be poised to put together a Unity ticket, because the other candidate would not have been declared a monster and her supporters would, after the usual grumbling, have willingly thrown full support behind the ticket. At worst, he would have been second by a nose, and everyone would have been very happy to give him the VP slot.

Whatever one can say of Hillary, she was not and never has been the beneficiary of the rightwing noise machine. Obama has benefitted from the cooptation of the MSM and now the willing capitulation of the opposition netroots to that operation, behaving like extensions of Drudge, Scaife and Murdoch. If you support Obama, you are all right with that.

Well, are you?

Anglachel