Suppressing democracy

Ask yourself which is the more important principle:

-- the right of American citizens to vote, or

-- preventing those who are ineligible to vote from doing so.

Now, think of this as a kind of Rohrschach test: The answer you give is neither right nor wrong. But it does tell us a great deal -- about your politics, about your priorities, and about what kind of American you are.

I think a strong case can be made that without the latter principle, the former is rendered meaningless. There are legitimate reasons to exclude some from voting -- particularly non-citizens, felons, and those who have already voted once -- and that failing to protect adequately from fraud dilutes and pollutes the meaning of every legitimate voter's ballot.

But there's little doubt, in my mind at least, that the former principle is far more significant; without it, the latter is not just meaningless, it's inoperative.

The right of Americans to vote, and the need to encourage citizens to participate in the voting process, is one of the real bedrock principles of our Republic and its democratic institutions. So while the need to protect against fraud is obviously fundamental, the pursuit of it must never come at the expense of the right of citizens to legitimately participate.

Better, in my mind, to let a hundred felons vote than to prevent a single citizen from legitimately casting their ballot.

Today's Republicans, obviously, disagree with me.

In the wake of the hotly contested Washington governor's race that saw the GOP's well-noted anti-democratic tendencies come rushing to the fore, we now face the prospect of an outrageous attempt by Republicans at intimidating voters by threatening to disqualify them -- often without any real evidence for doing so:

GOP challenges rights of hundreds of voters
Republican claims in King County draw angry denial

By GREGORY ROBERTS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Hundreds of worried and angry voters deluged the King County elections department Friday with calls questioning a Republican-backed effort challenging their right to vote in Tuesday's election, elections officials said.

Several voters said that King County GOP Vice Chairman Lori Sotelo was dead wrong in her claim that their voter registration addresses are not those of legitimate residences. And Democratic politicians denounced the Republican initiative as a blatant attempt to intimidate voters.

State GOP Chairman Chris Vance acknowledged some challenges were brought in error and would be withdrawn. But he vigorously defended the undertaking overall and promised more of the same.

The spark for the political firestorm was the delivery of certified letters Thursday from the county elections department to voters on the GOP hit list, which totaled 1,774 names after duplicates were eliminated. The letters informed the voters of the challenge and cited the state law requiring voters to register at a valid residence address.

"I'm extremely disappointed and angry at the audacity of this woman and the party she represents," said Demene Hall, who got one of the letters. Hall has lived for 16 years at the Watermarke apartment building at 320 Cedar St. in Seattle, her registration address.

Hall, who said she is "too African American" not to be a regular voter, said Friday she came of age in the civil rights era and watched her parents hand out political fliers outside polling places they were not allowed to enter.

"We just buried Rosa Parks on Wednesday, I got the letter on Thursday and today is my 57th birthday," she said. "And they're challenging my validity?"

Vance acknowledged that the inclusion of the Watermarke on the list was a mistake. Elections officials late Friday said Sotelo had rescinded 140 of the challenges.

But, Vance said, "The overwhelming majority of our challenges are valid."

Right. Actually, there's no proof of that, and plenty of evidence that the majority are in fact mistaken.

The Daily Kos diary entry by Andrew Villeneuve of the Northwest Progressive Institute lays out what has been happening:

And here's what's really clever: the filing of the registrations was timed to be right on the eve of the November 8th election, so that hearings have to be scheduled after the election. The GOP is hoping that voters whose registrations are being challenged will get discouraged and just not even bother to vote at all.

After the letters began arriving, the news media and progressive NW bloggers quickly jumped on the story.

The story first appeared on The Stranger's website, where one of the voters whose address was challenged posted to the site's forum:

So I get this certified letter from King County today informing me that my voter registration has been challenged.

Attached is a form signed by some woman named Lori D. Sotelo saying that "under penalty of perjury" she has "personal knowledge and believe that this person ... does nto reside at the address given on his or her voter registration..."

Under the section where she is asked to provide factual basis for the challenge, she writes "Voter is registered to vote at an address that is not a physical residence."

WTF? I live in a vintage apartment building in Belltown [the Watermarke] with about 60 other people. Then I talked to my neighbors - EVERYONE I talked to also received the letter.

Yep -- that's right. The Republicans challenged the voter registrations of EVERY SINGLE PERSON in THIS apartment building:

[Shot of Watermarke building]

Others being harassed are people who have lived in the same house for decades, and still others whose residence is also where they operate their business.

Vance and the GOP later admitted that the Watermarke residents were included by mistake and rescinded their challenges. However, the Seattle Times reported on others who were not so fortunate, though their challenges were every bit as bogus:

Jeff Weber, another voter whose registration was challenged, said he lives and is registered at his home in West Seattle, and is mystified about how he ended up on the Republicans' list.

"I think it's outrageous," he said. "It's a bungalow in West Seattle. ... It's a single-family house on a 5,000-square-foot lot. If they had done any investigating at all, they would have known."

Annette Fallin of Belltown said she was notified her registration had been challenged the same day she mailed in her absentee ballot.

"I'm very irate over it," she said. "I get this piece of mail telling me they're not even counting it like a normal ballot."

The challenge to Fallin's registration was one of the 140 the GOP dropped Friday. More than 50 of the 140 were registered at her apartment building, the Watermarke on Cedar Street.

The challenges to Thoma's, Taylor's, Blodgett's and Weber's registrations were not rescinded.

What is the GOP doing here? Can you imagine being one of these voters -- a legitimate, long-time voter who expects to cast their ballot as they always have, and suddenly you get a letter from a Republican official who says she's going to challenge your right to vote? That's not just Orwellian: it's Kafkaesque.

But then, it's what we've come to expect from today's Republican Party. It well knows that its grip on power is either maintained, in many places, or obtained, in places like Seattle where it struggles, by the slimmest margins -- and that its interests are more often served by suppressing voter turnout.

After all, it was a similar vote-suppression effort in Florida in 2000 that likely delivered that state to George W. Bush and with it the presidency. Many will recall Greg Palast's reporting on the effort, which has always struck me as a little shaky, particularly his assertions -- which he admits are simply estimations -- that 90 percent of the ChoicePoint voter-roll eliminations were incorrect. But there's little doubt that there was an extremely high rate of error in the purges, certainly in excess of 50 percent.

That's simply unacceptable. If you accept the primacy of the right of citizens to vote, then these attempts at preventing ineligible votes have to be as close to perfect as possible; an error rate of even more than 1 percent is too great. Because anything more than that means you're violating the inviolable.

[There's also a notable hypocrisy in all this for those of us who were observers in the Gregoire-Rossi tussle, because Republicans have made it a constant subsequent talking point -- no, a screaming point, really -- that King County elections officials proved themselves hopelessly corrupt and incompetent in this election, notably by their inability to reify a relatively small number of ballots with the numbers of votes (it was around .3 percent).]

But then, these kinds of vote-suppression effort have become commonplace in the GOP, particularly in areas where there are strong Democratic voting blocs, which are always what Republicans target. Recall, for instance, that there have been broader voter-suppression efforts, including those in Ohio in 2004.

To Republicans, elections no longer are sacred exercises in democracy. They are just another game that they can rig. All in the name of power.

And that's what the Rohrschach test reveals: If you prioritize the rights of voters, you will oppose vote-suppression efforts, particularly those that would intimidate legitimate voters. If you prioritize fraud prevention, then in the end you're placing process before participation -- the cart before the horse, as it were -- and, if you approve of the techniques currently in vogue with the GOP, you ultimately are willing to discard the rights of legitimate voters. The latter reveals a profound anti-democratic impulse, while the former indicates a healthy respect for democracy.

The latter also reveals, I think, the disposable ethics of the conservative movement: In the end, all that matters is winning. If democratic principles are trampled upon a bit, well, we can just pick them up and dust them off afterward, can't we?

Or, as long as they're laying there in the dirt, maybe we can just trample on them a little more.

UPDATE: David Goldstein at HorsesAss.org runs down the preliminary numbers, and it looks grim for Chris Vance and Washington State GOP. It appears their error rate may be in the 30 percent range or higher. That's literally hundreds of bogus challenges.

Fact check: Malkin and O'Reilly

Well, I'm still awaiting my copy of Michelle Malkin's new book, Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild. So in lieu of any new data, I checked out her appearance on Bill O'Reilly's show [via Crooks and Liars] the other night, promoting her new smear job on the left. A couple of things she said were noteworthy:

What I do argue is that a lot of the violence, a lot of the paranoia, a lot of the conspiracy theories, a lot of this hatred that I talk about is not relegated to the fringes of the left, we are talking about, um, something that is permeating, a disease that is permeating the leadership, up to the top. You know, it wasn't just some fringe crackpot on some college campus who was suggesting on a radio station, for example, that President Bush was tipped off to 9/11. That was the head of the Democratic National Committee: Howard Dean.

Hm. The remarks she's referring to, evidently, are these, made by Dean on Dec. 9, 2003, in an exchange with radio host Diane Rehm:

Caller: "Once we get you in the White House, would you please make sure that there is a thorough investigation of 9/11 and not stonewalling?"

Dean: "Yes, there is a report which the president is suppressing evidence for, which is a thorough investigation of 9/11."

Rehm: "Why do you think he is suppressing that report?"

Dean: "I don't know. There are many theories about it. The most interesting theory that I've heard so far -- which is nothing more than a theory, it can't be proved -- is that he was warned ahead of time by the Saudis.

"Now, who knows what the real situation is? But the trouble is, by suppressing that kind of information, you lead to those kind of theories, whether or not they have any truth to them or not, and eventually, they get repeated as fact. So I think the president is taking a great risk by suppressing the key information that needs to go to the Kean Commission."

Now, you can interpret these remark any number of ways -- it's worth noting, at least, that he does not openly endorse the theory, but you can probably say, quite fairly, that it was irresponsible to bring the theory up without clearly disavowing it. Still, any fair reading of the entirety of his remarks has to recognize that what Dean was talking about was the way speculation runs rampant when the government doesn't properly investigate catastrophic events like 9/11 -- and when the administration stonewalls, as it was doing at the time. It was a valid point, badly put.

Six days later, Dean was asked on Fox News Sunday about this exchange:

WALLACE: The most interesting theory is that the president was warned ahead of time by the Saudis. Why would you say that, Governor?

DEAN: Because there are people who believe that. We don't know what happened in 9/11. Tom Kean is trying to get some information from the president...

WALLACE: Do you believe that?

DEAN: ... which doesn't -- no, I don't believe that. I can't imagine the president of the United States doing that. But we don't know, and it'd be a nice thing to know.

WALLACE: I'm just curious why you would call that the most interesting theory.

DEAN: Because it's a pretty odd theory. What we do believe is that there was a lot of chatter that somehow was missed by the CIA and the FBI about this, and that for some reason we were unable to decide and get clear indications of what the attacks what were going to be. Because the president won't give the information to the Kean commission we really don't know what the explanation is.

Dean clearly said what he neglected to say, clearly at least, the first time: that he did not subscribe to this theory. He was asked about it at again a subsequent presidential debate in Durham, N.C.:

DEAN: Well, in all due respect, I did not exactly state that. I was asked on Fox fair and balanced news that... (laughter) I was asked why I thought the president was withholding information, I think it was, or 9/11 or something like that. And I said, well, the most interesting theory that I heard, which I did not believe, was that the Saudis had tipped him off.

We don't know why the president is not giving information to the Kean commission. I think that is supposed to be investigated by Congress. I think it's a serious matter. I agree with Wes Clark, the president is not fighting terrorism. And we need to know what went wrong before 9/11.

I did not believe, and I made it clear on the Fox News show that I didn't believe that theory, but I had heard that. And there are going to be a lot of crazy theories that come out if the information is not given to the Kean commission as it should be.

Now, these remarks garnered a lot of attention at the time -- he was, after all, asked about it on a televised debate -- and a lot of condemnation from mainstream Democrats, not to mention such "liberal" media outlets as Slate and Spinsanity.

So what was that about liberals never condemning any signs of kookery within their own ranks? Had Dean made clear at the outset what he evidently believed -- that this was an example of the kind of groundless conspiracy theories that harm the broader societal and national interests -- no one would have uttered a peep. He was criticized, fairly, for bringing such a theory up so neutrally, since doing so is irresponsible. And he was loudly and publicly spanked for it. But every politician commits gaffes, and Dean certainly was no exception; he corrected himself rather quickly in this case, and was thoroughly excoriated for it anyway.

Trying to suggest, as Malkin does now, that Dean actually believed this theory (and perhaps continues to do so) is simply false, and a smear. As is Malkin's claim that this case is more evidence that liberals tolerate conspiracy-theory mongering, when the broader liberal reaction in this case actually indicates the opposite.

Of course, rapping with O'Reilly, she had a sympathetic audience when it came to the subject of Howard Dean.

And, speaking of conspiracy theories, O'Reilly says this of Dean's assumption of the DNC chairmanship:

That was a backdoor deal.

Oh really? Last I checked, Howard Dean won the chairmanship because he picked up a large majority of votes of DNC members. What backroom deal was that, Bill? Or do you know some secret, blockbuster insider info about a ... conspiracy ... that none of the rest of us know?

Funny that Michelle, in the spirit of denouncing conservative extemism and wackery -- which she claims conservatives do -- neglects to denounce this bizarre conspiracy theory.

But then O'Reilly asks the million-dollar question:

O'Reilly: Do you see mainstream conservatives condemning Michael Savage?

Malkin: All the time.

O'Reilly: You do?

Malkin: Of course you do. In fact -- again, I think that this is something that the mainstream media does not recognize. It is in fact conservatives who are very outspoken in condemning fringe people, and people who are extremists on the right side of the aisle.

Malkin goes on to tout the Trent Lott case -- which was, if anything, the exception that proved the rule. Not to mention that the motives of many conservatives in dumping on Lott had more to do with internecine warfare within the GOP than any pure or enlightened motives. At the same time, Malkin seems oblivious to the significant role that liberals -- especially the liberal bloggers Josh Marshall and Atrios -- played in keeping the Lott story alive. It's not as if conservatives alone deserve credit for bringing Lott down.

But in the meantime, back to O'Reilly's question (and Malkin's response): People on the right condemn Michael Savage? Really? Who?

Please, Michelle, name one. And I mean one conservative of any significant standing who condemns Savage, not just meekly criticizes him.

How about you, Michelle?

A quick Google of your site reveals only four posts that include any mention of Savage, and most of those are in your comments (and those are all favorable mentions).

The one post you did write about Savage is actually in his defense.

Speaking of "unique levels of hypocrisy."

UPDATE: TBogg points out that Malkin also has a history of publicly discussing speculative theories (which turned out to be groundless) and giving them credence.

Joe the Fixer

I always get these little flashbacks when I see Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova back making their presences felt in the national media.

Because I used to see them on MSNBC a lot, back during the Clinton impeachment, where they were busy pounding home that day's GOP talking points. I downloaded a lot of sound bytes from them (among many others) for the MSNBC.com site, because that was my job.

What I noticed was that they tended, well, to prevaricate, hedge, and distort. A lot.

Actually, as Atrios notes, the Toensing/diGenova team has quite a bit of history in this regard. TV producers like to bill diGeenova in particular as a "legal expert" of various shades, but what he really made his career as was a political fixer.

The text from Toensing's recent Wall Street Journal piece was right in line with this: a classic piece of misdirection, encapsulating of Republican talking points on the Plame scandal, but spun to pin the blame on the CIA. And, on the truth meter, she doesn't disappoint.

Take, for instance, the first graf of her rundown of talking points:

First: The CIA sent her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to Niger on a sensitive mission regarding WMD. He was to determine whether Iraq had attempted to purchase yellowcake, an essential ingredient for nonconventional weapons. However, it was Ms. Plame, not Mr. Wilson, who was the WMD expert. Moreover, Mr. Wilson had no intelligence background, was never a senior person in Niger when he was in the State Department, and was opposed to the administration's Iraq policy. The assignment was given, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, at Ms. Plame's suggestion.

Actually, the facts are this: Mr. Wilson went to Niger because he had the necessary diplomatic contacts there to obtain the information; the CIA did not need a WMD expert to gather it. The Senate Intelligence Committee's charge that he was given the assignment at Plame's suggestion has been proven false.

And that's just the first. The rest are either as badly grounded factually or are complete non-sequiturs.

In other words, disinformation in the guise of propaganda. Clouding the discourse by intentionally repeating falsehoods.

Par for the Toensing/diGenova course. They've been at this a long time.

DiGenova's history as a fixer well precedes even the impeachment brouhaha. He will probably, in fact, go down in history as the last independent counsel ever appointed to investigate an administration of the same party to which he belonged. Two years later, of course, the Calvinball standard was put into effect.

Robert Parry reported all this some time back:

After the Bush interviews, diGenova began work on his final report. Despite the evidence that Clinton's files had been exploited to influence the outcome of a presidential election, diGenova concluded that there was no wrongdoing by anyone in the Bush administration.

DiGenova added only "that certain White House personnel may have indirectly encouraged the search for Clinton's passport files by making inquiry about the status of responses to [FOIA] requests." As for the Oval Office, diGenova "found no evidence that President Bush was involved in this matter."

DiGenova reserved his toughest criticism for State Department Inspector General Sherman Funk for suspecting that a crime had been committed in the first place. DiGenova castigated Funk for "a woefully inadequate understanding of the facts."

John Duncan, a senior lawyer in Funk's office, protested diGenova's findings of no criminal wrongdoing.

"Astoundingly, [diGenova] has also concluded that no senior-level party to the search did anything improper whatever," Duncan wrote. "The Independent Counsel has provided his personal absolution to individuals who we found had attempted to use their U.S. Government positions to manipulate the election of President of the United States."

DiGenova was such a naked partisan that when he issued his report, he apologized to Bush Administration officials on behalf of the American people for putting them through the ordeal of an independent counsel investigation -- an investigation that, in fact, was more grounded in potential criminal behavior than Whitewater.

It was the last bit of business from the old Bush administration that needed tending to, and Joe -- well, he fixed it.

Nice to see some things never change, I suppose.

Friday whale blogging

This is a female orca and calf I photographed near Lime Kiln State Park on July 28.

Unhinged indeed

One of the reasons Michelle Malkin fails the test of being an actual journalist lies in the way she conducts her work: There is simply no evidence of any attempt at fairness.

A serious journalist -- theoretically, at least -- tries to operate with an open mind. It's essential when approaching a subject to gather the available evidence first, and if a conclusion is to be reached, it is only done so when all the evidence is in and weighed. Typically, this means when a reporter is assigned a story, he or she looks first to gather as much information about it as possible.

This doesn't mean the journalist is necessarily "objective," or that bias can't creep in. The very selection of a subject of inquiry may represent a certain bias; and the interpretation and presentation of the data may also be slanted. But the core of the journalistic enterprise revolves around honest inquiry.

Malkin forgoes all this. Throughout her career, her approach has been thesis-driven: She latches onto a potential story or scandal, settles on an angle to pursue, then sets out from the start to prove her thesis, ignoring or tossing aside all contradictory evidence along the way. This was the trend in her column-writing career at the Seattle Times, and it came to full fruition in her execrable In Defense of Internment, which ignored a mountain of evidence contradicting her thesis, and in the process became nothing less than a historical fraud.

Now her latest book is out, and the trend not only continues, it evidently intensifies, if the preliminary material she has made available on her Web site is any indication. [My copy is supposed to be arriving in the mail soon. Yes, dear readers, I'll be reading Malkin so you won't have to. It's a sacrifice, but someone has to make it.]

Titled Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild, it's supposedly an expose of those angry lunatics of the left. Malkin says:

I'll probably have to say this a million times, and those predisposed to attack the book (without reading it, natch) will ignore it, but I do not argue that we on the Right have never gone overboard in political word or deed. The book is about turning MSM conventional wisdom on its head and showing that the standard caricature of conservatives as angry/racist/bigoted/violence-prone crackpots is a much better description of today's unhinged liberals than of us.

Fair enough. But just a little later, she writes this:

It's not Republicans taking chainsaws to Democrat campaign signs and running down political opponents with their cars. It's not conservatives burning Democrats in effigy, defacing war memorials, and supporting the fragging of American troops. And it's not conservatives producing a bullet-riddled bumper crop of assassination-themed musicals, books and collectible stamps.

It's not a Republican who invoked Pol Pot and Nazis and Soviet gulag operators when discussing American troops at Guantanamo Bay. That was Democrat Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, who kept his Senate Minority Whip position and who continues to blame an “orchestrated right-wing attack” for what came out of his mouth.

It's not Republicans who suggested that President Bush had advance knowledge of the September 11th attacks or that Osama bin Laden has already been captured. Those notions were advanced by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright and current Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean.

And it wasn't a Republican who asserted that the war Iraq was "just as bad as six million Jews being killed." That was Democrat Rep. Charlie Rangel, who has refused to apologize and whom no Democrat leader has denounced.

So, you see, despite her earlier disavowal, Malkin does intend to show that it isn't Republicans who have gone overboard in stoking the current political fires. It's just Democrats and the "wacky left."

This is reminiscent of Malkin's disclaimer, with her last book, that she wasn't arguing in favor of race-based internment of Arab Americans -- she was simply justifying the race-based internment of Japanese Americans.

Well, Michelle ...

It isn't Democrats who sprayed racist, pro-Bush graffiti on Democratic campaign HQ in Sacramento, or stole computers from Democrats in Ohio, or set campaign signs afire in Louisiana, or spread blood and innards around the front door of Bush critics. It isn't Democrats firing workers for their presidential choices.

[In fact, I tried keeping a running tally during the election of reports of thuggery from both right and left, and tracked it at a post called Thug Watch. Though I'm sure there were some reports that I missed on both sides, the reports of thuggery from the right, as you can see, outnumber those from the left by a factor of more than 2-to-1.]

It isn't Democrats, Michelle, who have denigrated the service of war heroes; it's people like you. And it isn't Democrats who are delivering a steady stream of "bestselling" books attacking liberals as subhuman scum: calling them innately treasonous, identifying them with terrorists, the "enemy within" with a "mental illness." Going on talk shows and saying that the best way to talk to a Republican is "with a baseball bat, preferably."

As for the "assassination" themes, Michelle, it wasn't a left-wing blogger who posted the following remark at the height of the 2004 campaign:

Rope. Tree. Justice. The only three things that Qerry deserves for his "service".

No, as a matter of fact, that was a blogger who resides on your blogroll.

It was that same blog, in fact, that earlier urged the use of violence against another blogger and even provided directions to that person's home on his blog. I'm not aware of any left-wing bloggers having done that.

Indeed, for all the left-wing wackery out there -- and there's no doubt plenty of it -- what you don't see is this kind of eliminationist rhetoric.

After all, Michelle, it wasn't a prominent Democrat who publicly hypothesized about what would happen to the crime rate if all black babies were aborted. It wasn't a prominent Democratic radio talk-show host in Seattle who said of a U.S. Senator -- yes, the same Dick Durbin whose remarks you find completely out of line: "This man is simply a piece of excrement, a piece of waste that needs to be scraped off the sidewalk and eliminated."

It isn't the most prominent liberal talk-show host in the country who jokes that we shouldn't "kill all the liberals" -- instead, we should "leave enough so we can have two on every campus -- living fossils -- so we will never forget what these people stood for."

It wasn't a prominent member of the "liberal" media who opined that we ought to incarcerate everyone who works for Air America.

It wasn't a Democratic congressman who opined that we ought to ship liberal dissenters to Iraq to serve as "human shields."

It wasn't left-wing letter writers who attacked former USA Today editor Al Neuharth and recommended he face execution for treason. Al Neuharth, mind you -- not exactly Mr. Liberal.

And kooky theories? Well, Michelle, what about the forthcoming tome from a well-known conservative postulating -- against all known historical fact -- that fascism is a liberal phenomenon. Of course, you know all about ignoring the weight of historical evidence, don't you?

It isn't liberal bloggers, Michelle, who have waxed wroth at the General Ripperesque notion that the Flight 94 memorial is actually a tribute to the terrorists, or who have whipped up groundless fears about Islamist terrorists in Oklahoma and elsewhere; no left-wing moonbats groundlessly attacked the Pulitzer winner in photography or attacked USA Today with conspiratorial accusations for a badly retouched photo.

No, Michelle, that would be you and yours. Moonbats, wingnuts, take your pick: The shoe fits -- you.

Look, there's no use in pretending that there isn't excess on the left as well. Unlike Malkin, I probably would be more than willing to acknowledge its presence and denounce it when it occurs if people like Malkin and Co. weren't so ready to spring into action at the first imagined slight (and more often than not, they are imagined) -- and yet so consistently fail to acknowledge similar behavior on the right.

Indeed, the pattern has been rather the opposite: When the acts of violence that the right wants to link to liberals turns out, in fact, to be the work of right-wing extremists, there's no acknowledgement made, much less apologies issued. Witness, for instance, Malkin's handling of an arson case in Maryland which she and other prominent bloggers presumed to be the work of eco-terrorists; but when it turned out that these were race-related arsons, the subject went away quickly with a brief semi-acknowledgement of error. Likewise, Malkin waved all kinds of accusations about regarding a murder of a Coptic Christian family in New Jersey, and then quietly shut it down when it turned out not to be the work of Islamist radicals after all.

And that's the problem, isn't it? It would be nice to have pleasant, reasonable debate in which facts and evidence and reason all play a role and are all respected -- but in recent years, the right hasn't been playing by those rules. Not since the Republican Congress ignored the popular will and proceeded to impeach Bill Clinton. Not since Republicans quite literally stole the 2000 election. Not since their incompetence left us exposed to the worst terrorist attack on American soil. Not since they subsequently shoved a misbegotten war in Iraq down our collective throats.

Because in the pursuit of that agenda, the conservative movement has become a take-no-prisoners, scorched-earth entity, whence so much of the ugliness in our current discourse arises. A lot of it, as I've examined at length previously, is deeply personal stuff, and the effect on our personal lives has been lasting and profound.

The chief, overarching argument of the conservative movement, in essence, has been that liberals are the sole and primary cause of everything that is wrong both with America and with the world at large. What kind of reasonable discourse is possible, really, when that is the starting point of the conversation?

Malkin's book, it's clear, is simply going to be another contribution to that liberal-bashing trend, even as it pretends to shame liberals for behavior that is rampant within the ranks of conservatives -- behavior, indeed, encouraged from the very top. After all, it wasn't a Democratic vice president who pointedly, and publicly, told a prominent U.S. Senator to go fuck himself.

A serious journalist would have examined the ugliness in the discourse and recognized that it's rampant on both sides. I also think an honest accounting would find that, if anything, it's more pronounced and far more aggressive from the right. Much of the ugliness from the left seems, if anything, largely reactive to the nasty provocations and threats of elimination coming from the right.

But Malkin, as we know already, is not a serious journalist. As with her last book, she has simply chosen snippets of evidence that support her thesis and ignored substantial contravening evidence -- which is never mentioned, let alone confronted. The result is a blinkered and ultimately false version of reality.

There's only one thing to call that: propaganda. Malkin's book not only is unlikely to end the ugliness in discourse -- it virtually guarantees that it will get worse.

When to ignore them

I've known for some time about the white-supremacist twin singing duo known as "Prussian Blue." They've performed at Aryan Congresses at Hayden Lake and are prominently touted at a number of hate sites, particularly Stormfront and National Alliance. If you monitor the far right, you know about them.

So, in some ways, the recent ABC News report on them really wasn't anything new. Though I did note that they intend to leave Bakersfield and move up to these parts. We're just thrilled.

What it did highlight, of course, was a noteworthy facet of white-supremacist culture: the way it imitates "secular" society with its own, parallel forms, particularly in the entertainment field.

They've been doing this for some time now. The biggest arena for this is in hardcore metal music, where skinheads and white-power types have been churning out records and CDs for years. The most prominent of these operations is Resistance Records, which is nowadays operated by the National Alliance. [For a complete rundown on this, read the Center for New Community's report [PDF file] on the white-supremacist manipulation of youth music subculture.]

What the ABC report did, unfortunately, was give the Gaede twins national exposure -- exactly the kind they were hoping for. And besides Cynthia McFadden's horrified tut-tutting and moral indignation, the report didn't shed much light on the subject. Certainly there was little discussion of the larger context of this phenomenon, and there was only a brief attempt to examine just how successful the twins actually are in recruiting people into their belief system.

Predictably, the girls' defenders and promoters on the far right used the ABC report for their own ends: to depict themselves as victims of an arrogant, out-of-control media, and to burnish their persecution complex. You also had neo-Nazi figures like Edgar Steele leveraging the moral-outrage line: How could these horrible people abuse two sweet girls like Lynx and Lamb?

You even had mainstream conservatives offering knee-jerk apologias for the twins -- this from a writer for a Web site dedicated to "exposing" left-wing extremists. (The post, which was pulled, was so well researched that the writer couldn't even bother to read the entirety of the ABC News report.)

This is a common problem with reportage on white supremacists: All such reportage, even if largely negative, is seen by them as (and in fact is) a way of getting the word out to the public, much of which is already skeptical of the innate perspectives offered by mainstream media reporters anyway. If the reporter fails to explain to the audience the larger significance beyond the moral horror of these belief systems, then these reports become helpful ways to recruit.

Thus it's incumbent on any reporter filing such stories to get the larger perspective: to explain, in this case, how musical acts play a role in white-supremacist recruitment (there was a brief stab at this), and to discuss whether recruitment like this is actually working (they really needed to talk to someone who monitors the numbers of people actually joining white-power movements). It might not have hurt to have shown the girls performing at an Aryan Congress, so viewers could see what their audience is.

The reality, though, is that acts like the Gaede twins and the Resistance Records hatemongers are of concern almost solely because of their power to recruit -- and that power is questionable at best. Thus, in the bigger picture of the movement, they are an interesting sideshow, but not a lot more. That's why it's questionable to run a report on them, other than its freak-show quality.

I often hear from people who despise the far right that the best thing to do is just ignore them. Of course, my own experience has been that this is a horrible mistake: Movements like this flourish in an environment of public ignorance and silence from the opposition. Pretending that they don't exist and hoping that they go away is a virtual guarantee that they will stay and prosper.

But standing up to them has to entail knowing when and how to stand up to them. This means recognizing the leaders and their strategies and exposing them, as well as publicly opposing them.

And there are, indeed, times to simply ignore them. When they put little girls up onstage to spout their hate -- well, the contempt such a thing inspires is understandable. But the whole point of their schtick is to provoke outrage that they can then claim is left-wing menace directed at two harmless little girls. So it may be best just to deny them the attention they seek.