Those 'traditional' Democrats

It is, perhaps, symbolic of just how deeply right-wing extremism has invaded the mainstream discourse -- primarily through the immigration debate -- that now there are people running as anti-immigration Democrats who have backgrounds involving various kinds of far-right extremism.

The most recent of these, via Blog for Arizona, is William "Bill" Johnson, who's running in the Democratic primary in Arizona's 8th congressional district. On the surface, Johnson is just another conservative anti-immigration Democrat, who, as Mike notes, are now being referred to as "traditional Democrats."

These people are "traditional Democrats" only in the sense that, for much of its history, the Democratic Party was in fact the "white man's party" -- home of the Ku Klux Klan and a long line of racial demagogues (see, e.g., the notorious Theodore Bilbo), as well as a clearly racist voting base, not just in the South but in the rural and suburban Midwest as well. It was not until the 1960s and '70s that the bulk of these racists -- politicos and voters alike -- largely migrated to the Republican Party under the aegeis of the "Southern Strategy."

In any event, as Blog for Arizona goes on to detail, Johnson's background -- beyond merely his support for the Minutemen -- is ripe with associations with the far-right militia movement:

Here is where things start to get, well, odd. American Democrats for a Secure Borders is the brainchild of Mr. Russ Dove, the man who does 'U.S. Constitutional Enforcement' polling place patrols looking for illegal aliens trying to vote and runs Truth in Action News. Russ hangs out with such folks as Tom Tancredo, Randy Graf and his just-fired manager Steve Aiken, perennial candidate and avowed racist Joe Sweeney, and Mexican flag burning, public official threatening Roy Warden. Billionaires for Bush even gave Dove a card in their Deck of Block the Vote Heroes: he's the three of diamonds.

Those who concern themselves with the underground politics of the militia movement provide a capsule biography of Mr. Dove:

Unlike Vanderboegh and Wright, who head state organizations of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, Russ Dove's role in the MCDC is more circumspect. A member of the militia umbrella group the Third Continental Congress, Dove managed to escape association with that militia's most notorious criminal action-- Bradly Glover's planned attack on the US Army base at Fort Hood in 1997, which eventually sent seven members of the militia group to prison.

Based in Tucson, Dove has long been involved with the Sovereign Citizen Movement in Arizona, calls himself "Russ 'Sovereign' Dove," and styles himself a "biblical constitutionalist." His hatred of government was no doubt stroked by his 1980 felony conviction in California for attempted grand theft (two first degree burglary charges were dismissed).

Dove's current principal role in the MCDC is as a propagandist. He produces video tapes for the Minutemen, filming interviews with many MCDC participants during their border patrol operations and authoring frequent reports on immigration issues on his Web site and 'Truth In Action News' radio show."

Why dwell so thoroughly on the association with Dove? One might think this is just a second-hand association though a single organization and can have no real import for Mr. Johnson's candidacy. But Mr. Russell Dove is listed on Mr. Johnson's FEC filing as Johnson's Custodian of Records with the title 'Acting Manager'. So why is someone so clearly aligned with and active in GOP politics, engaged in race-based voter intimidation, deeply implicated in the racist militia underground, and a convicted felon, the 'Acting Manager' of a Democratic candidate's campaign?

As Mike goes on to say:

We need to call bullshit on this candidate. Bill Johnson isn't a Democratic candidate at all. He's a ploy by extremist racists to inject their hateful invective into the Democratic Primary process to make their xenophobic ranting seem bi-partisan, and thus mainstream. They seek to force the media to frame racial hatred as a force in both party's politics, and not just the shameful underbelly of the GOP. They seek to silence critics in the Democratic Party by rebutting us with the rantings of 'one of our own'.

It's worth noting that Johnson is hardly the first such Democrat to surface this year. That honor belongs to Larry Darby of Alabama, who ran as a Democrat for state Attorney General on a platform of "reawakening white racial awarenessm," with a dose of Holocaust denial tossed in for good measure:

Larry Darby, the founder of the Atheist Law Center, made an abortive bid for the attorney general job as a Libertarian in 2002, but only recently have his views on race and the Holocaust come to light.

... In an interview Friday with The Associated Press, Darby said he believes no more than 140,000 Jewish people died in Europe during World War II, and most of them succumbed to typhus.

Historians say about 6 million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis, but Darby said the figure is a false claim of the "Holocaust industry."

Darby said he will speak Saturday near Newark, N.J., at a meeting of National Vanguard, which bills itself as an advocate for the white race. Some of his campaign materials are posted on the group's Internet site.

"It's time to stop pushing down the white man. We've been discriminated against too long," Darby said in the interview.

Indeed, the National Vanguard not only pushed Darby's candidacy, but it gave him room to issue threats against the Southern Poverty Law Center for having exposed his racist activities. (Incidentally, I noted these last year myself when Darby hosted an appearance in Alabama year by David Irving, the noted Holocaust denier.)

Most disturbingly, Darby came awfully close to winning, and it's probably not hard to divine the reasons why. But most appallingly, both the Alabama Democratic Party and the national party did almost nothing to distance itself from Darby.

That of course, leaves Republicans free to point out:

"I think it is noteworthy that the Democratic Party had an atheist candidate and avowed Holocaust denier get so many votes in their primary," said Tim Howe, executive director of the Alabama Republican Party.

I keep hearing Democrats like Marshall Wittmann talk about the need to make the Democratic Party open to "more traditional" voters in order to win votes in rural America. When I hear that, I wonder if this is what they have in mind.

Because if it is, they're dead wrong.

An open letter to my fellow journalists

Look, I know a lot of you look upon bloggers with a great deal of suspicion because it seems like many of them are eager to displace our positions as public scribes and the arbiters of public discourse.

I understand a little of the resentment. A lot of bloggers seem to want to take short-cuts, touting information without double-checking it first. They want to claim they do what we do, but they don't adhere to basic journalistic rules at times. It feels like they haven't paid their journalistic dues.

Some of it also has to do with the realization, I think, that most bloggers are also our most avid consumers; they're the people who actually read what we write. There are fewer and fewer of them these days, and so we ought to appreciate their input.

But it turns out that our readers aren't the docile recipients of our collected wisdom that we long assumed they were. It turns out that they examine what we write critically, and now are capable of letting us know it; sometimes even rudely so. Who'da thunk?

There's good reason to be disquieted, because the ground is literally shifting under our feet; and while it's tempting to stand your ground, it's smarter to be nimble. As I've argued before, the old, elitist model of top-down communications is breaking down before our eyes, and it's happening at a fortuitous time: just as that old model is creaking toward its anti-democratic apotheosis.

Instead of fearing it, though, journalists -- real journalists, who eschew ideology for truth and humanity -- should be welcoming it. I grew up in an era when journalists' credo was to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted," and while that may seem presumptuous (and maybe even wrong-headed) now, it had a human quality to it that is lacking in so much of our current journalism.

The Cursor Manifesto has it just about right:

We believe that the tired old saw about the journalist¹s responsibility being to "Afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted," is increasingly irrelevant when members of the media are so often accorded a celebrity status that places them in the upper echelons of the comfortable; and where what is passed off as comfort is too often purely manipulative and exploitative and what passes for affliction is usually little more than the sniping of dimwits and morons.

Nonetheless, I grew up in newspapering believing that we played a critical role in the functioning of a democratic society, because we were the source of so much public information and, in many ways, guided the public discourse.

I don't believe that has changed. What has changed is how well we live up that responsibility.

This is the main reason that I, for one, welcome the breakdown of the old model, though that's hardly a surprise, since for the past three and a half years I've been over here on the dark side, busily blogging away while publishing relatively little in the way of regular journalism during that time. I'm now officially one of them.

But remember that it wasn't so long ago that I was one of you -- just another newsroom schmoo trying to do his job and swim in currents that often seem counter to everything we've been taught that journalism is about. I edited copy, wrote headlines, laid out pages, set news budgets, met deadlines, tried to do reporting that made a difference. The things we all do at one time or another.

All that really changed for me was that I decided to take a hiatus from my newsroom work and become a stay-at-home father. The original plan was to build up a nice freelance clientele before the baby was born so that I could work from home after she was born. Seemed to be working, too; I was writing for Salon and stringing for the Washington Post and building a nice list of clients.

But then my daughter was born and it all went out the window; I discovered that it's impossible to juggle feeding and nap schedules along with interviews and story deadlines. So after a few months, I decided to switch to focusing on writing books, which I could do in the evenings and on weekends and in whatever snatches of free time I could manage.

As it happened, I also discovered in due time that I could blog with that kind of schedule too. And I was entranced with the idea of blogging, especially since it could provide an outlet for writing about subjects that I'd found most editors were too reluctant to tackle.

But working outside of a newsroom, for the first time, I began to realize just how timid most of us had become in the past decade, especially when it came to dealing with the American right. I had been disturbed, during the run-up to Clinton's impeachment and then in its aftermath, by the press' abject willingness to present conservative propaganda as factual -- just the "other side" of the story -- even when it was plainly, and often outrageously, false. And it came home during the 2000 election campaign, when the press clearly aligned itself behind George W. Bush and the Republicans. As I noted in a piece for MSNBC.com about the myths regarding Al Gore:

Combined with the evolution of the "Liar Al" story and the rise of plainly right-biased news organizations like Fox News and the Washington Times, the evidence suggests that many newsrooms have responded to the charges of a "liberal" bias by instituting a de facto conservative bias. But the problem with either bias is that it overlooks factuality -- the basis of all credible journalism -- in the pursuit of partisan agendas. Stories become highly selective prosecutions instead of thorough and balanced news accounts.

The "liberal media bias" charge played a fundamental role in transforming American newsrooms, at a time when most were already facing shrinking budgets and tighter newsholes. What was most disappointing, really, was the way that the people running those newsrooms failed to realize that they were being played for fools the whole time.

It was more than apparent to many of us that the charge of "liberal media bias" was being made by people for whom any deviation from their political agenda constituted "liberalism" -- including simple critiques that demonstrated the factual falsity of their claims. Yet pieces like my analysis of the media storyline about Al Gore were generally ignored; writers who undermined the accepted script were treated as though we were the ones with a bias problem.

Conservatives, as their own work has made plain, have no interest in facts if they run counter to their own arguments; their idea of "journalism" is simply right-wing propaganda, pure and simple. Anything else is evidence of "liberal bias." This tendency to ignore and occlude opposing arguments reveals an important trait in the ideological makeup of movement conservatives: they assume that because their own approach to "journalism" is so grotesquely unbalanced that, of course, everyone else must operate the same way too. They can't understand journalistic balance because they're to busy projecting their own ideological bias onto everyone else.

In the ensuing years, the substitute conservative bias has become virtually institutionalized, a major cog in the always-churning right-wing propaganda machine. As Eric Boehlert explains in his marvelous new book, Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush ), in describing the relentless "press haters" who trot out a ceaseless parade of right-wing propaganda disguised as media criticism [p. 98]:

The new generation, often peddling questionable "evidence" of liberal bias and with disregard for the facts, has no interest in simply "working the refs"; trying to get journalists to think twice next time they have to make a tough newsroom call on a sensitive political story. Press haters want to mug the refs, drag them in the alley and pummel them. Al Gore called the haters "digital brownshirts," on orders "to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President." Indeed, the press haters don't simply portray offending journalists as misguided or deceitful. They hold up MSM members of objects of scorn and vilify them as unpatriotic, or even treasonous.

I've spent the last couple of weeks reading Lapdogs carefully, and I think every working journalist, regardless of their political skew, ought to as well. Because it is a damning compilation of a reality that professionals in the press are now coming around to comprehending: Since George W. Bush's election campaign began, and even before, the press has utterly failed to live up to its responsibility to accurately and aggressively keep the public informed on the government and its actions.

Nearly any chapter alone stands as a sufficient indictment, but Chapter 6, "First Lieutenant Bush," has a special resonance for me, because it details the utter failure of the press to adequately examine Bush's military record, even as it simultaneously played up and treated credibly the laughably afactual Swift Boat Veterans attack on John Kerry. (Boehlert's reportage on the matter for Salon was first-rate as well.)

I became aware of the Bush-AWOL story back in the summer of 2000 and, having checked it out and concluded there was a there there, brought it to the attention of the editors at MSNBC.com in October -- but was told that, because it was so late in coming out, there was no interest in pursuing it.

Once I started up my blog, however, and was free from those constraints, I began publishing info about the matter as early as summer of 2003. The story picked up steam in January 2004, thanks to Michael Moore's controversial description of Bush as a "deserter." As it rolled along, I continued to post on it (here, here, here, here, here, and here, just for a sampling). And I was stunned to watch as the press ran away from it after the notorious CBS documents poisoned the well -- even though, as Boehlert puts it [p. 155]:

Not one of the key facts, all established thourgh Bush's own military records, were altered by CBS's botched National Guard report. But the MSM, having already displayed little initiative on the story, took the 2004 CBS controversy as confirmation that they had been right in 2000 to wave off the issue of Bush's Guard duty; that there was nothing there. Spooked by the angry conservative mob assembled online and that had been taking aim at CBS and its anchor Dan Rather, the MSM in 2004 quickly sprinted away from questions about Bush's service and focused its attention solely on CBS's sins.

This wasn't the only story I pursued, as a blogger, critical of key figures on the right, and the conservative movement generally. Probably above all, I also have continually reported on the ways right-wing extremism has been insinuating itself in the mainstream through movement conservatism. These efforts have been well-received in the blogosphere, but have been largely ignored elsewhere, which doesn't surprise me in the least; it is, after all, a sensitive and difficult subject, and broaching it in the current media environment is akin to dropping a turd into the punchbowl. I wrote about it for my blog precisely because I knew the mainstream press was too timid to consider approaching it.

My perspective in doing this, all along, has been a reporter's; I've simply been honestly trying to report what I know and what I observe as an eyewitness to events. My experience with right-wing extremists of the militia/Patriot movement in the 1990s -- I interviewed large numbers of them and spent a lot of time among them -- lent me a particular insight about their nature, namely, that the stereotype of them as mouth-breathing louts is grossly out of whack with the reality. Most of them lead seemingly normal lives, are well-educated, have thoroughly thought-out belief systems, and are not likely to stand out at a Wal-Mart.

Perhaps more to the point, I also could see, even in the 1990s, that the difference between them and any number of fire-breathing movement conservatives was in many ways only a difference of degree and, perhaps, honesty (that is, the "extremists" were actually more honest in that they were willing to express openly what many supposedly mainstream right-wingers will say privately). And, as we progressed through the Bush election and 9/11 and the Iraq invasion, it became clear to me that those differences were gradually vanishing. So I wrote about it.

Of course, for these efforts I think I've been somewhat marginalized outside of the blogosphere. My term as a stay-at-home dad is ending this autumn, and I've been putting out feelers for newsroom work in preparation, and so far it's been largely a cold shoulder. It seems being labeled a barking moonbat is a bad career move.

What I hear from the right, a lot, is that I'm a conspiracy theorist -- which is kind of ironic, since I devoted so much of my time in the 1990s to examining, and largely debunking, a large number of conspiracy theories, and I understand their nature a little better than most. More to the point, what I posit in my arguments is not the existence of anything like a conspiracy; rather, what I'm arguing from is a normative understanding of the way ideas migrate among political sectors.

Still, I knew that this was a likelihood when I embarked on this adventure, though, and I have no regrets about it. I knew back in 2000 that being accused of "liberal" bias was more an indication of effectiveness in confronting the endless stream of afactual propaganda that was the right's most effective weapon in it assault on journalistic integrity. Today -- even though, as I've explained before, I'm truthfully more conservative than most of my readers suspect -- I proudly wear the label of "liberal". Go ahead, call me a moonbat. It just means I'm still doing my job.

You know, one of those other hoary old journalistic adages I've always tried to adhere to is Lars-Erik Nelson's warning:

"The enemy isn't conservatism. The enemy isn't liberalism. The enemy is bullshit."

At some point, journalists are going to have to come to terms with the reality that the bullshit, in the past 10 years and more, has not been an even-steven thing, where liberals are just as prone to it as conservatives -- though most "fair and balanced" journalists like to pretend that this is so.

No, the reality is that in that time, the levels of unmitigated bullshit flowing from the many founts of, er, wisdom on the right has been ceaseless, programmatic, and deliberately aimed at overwhelming the press. That's not to say that the left doesn't peddle bullshit still, nor that every jot and tittle emanating from the right is a falsehoood. But the proportionate level of bullshit from the right is so overwhelming as to render any quibbles almost negligible.

The press is drowning in it, as Lapdogs demonstrates on every page. And the blogosphere, believe it or not, has the potential to be a lifeline.

If reporters can overcome their initial defensiveness, they will discover that bloggers' critiques can actually be helpful and insightful. Perhaps more to the point, they'll discover that there is a wealth of real information available on blogs that often was tucked away into obscure corners, particularly expertise from the likes of Juan Cole and P.Z. Myers.

Cultivating a working relationship with bloggers, instead of viewing them as adversaries, would be in every journalist's best interests. They can be useful resources as sounding boards, and they can also be helpful in disseminating those news bits that don't quite make it into your stories.

We'll see, over the coming year, whether or not I wind up rejoining your ranks. Even if I don't, I'm still holding out hope that there are still enough of you out there who remember what journalism is supposed to be about. People who have had enough, have seen the credibility of their industry reach record lows, and want to do something about it. People ready to stand up, call bullshit what it is and damn the consequences.

In the end, it's what this work has always been about. Time to get back to it.

[Be sure to check out the excellent discussions of Lapdogs at Firedoglake, including last week's installment from Peter Daou, and this week's from Jane Hamsher, for which Boehlert himself showed up.]

Al Gore myths

[Note: This piece was originally published Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2000, at MSNBC.com, and remained on the site for about a month. Because there are no archives at MSNBC available, I'm reproducing it here to complement the above post, so that readers can see the piece being referenced. The version here is the one submitted for publication, which was then edited slightly in the final version.]

Liar, liar, pants on fire

Who's got a problem with the truth?
The press should look in the mirror

By David Neiwert
Special to MSNBC

Al Gore is a liar, and George Bush is dumb: That seems to be the script about the two men running for the presidency handed to us by the national press. Bush demonstrated in the first two debates that the legend of his stupidity is nonsense, despite a couple of stumbles. Contrarily, Al Gore seemed to provide grist for the mill of stories about his "truthfulness." But that story, too, is mostly a myth -- as is nearly the entire scenario about Gore’s alleged lies.

THE "GORE IS A LIAR" tale is widely presented to the public as a reminder that personal character remains an issue for many voters. And it's supposed to represent a deep-seated problem, possibly a psychological malfunction, of the vice-president's -- as though journalists and TV talking heads had suddenly sprouted psychology degrees on their résumés.

But in fact, what the case represents is a breakdown in basic standards of journalism -- simple factual accuracy -- on a massive scale, signaling deep-seated problems in the profession that are reflected in the public's growing skepticism about our fairness.

Nearly the entire array of supposed "lies" uttered by Al Gore are gross distortions of what the vice president actually uttered. Almost all of them are partisan renderings of otherwise innocent remarks, and calling them "lies" or "fabrications" is at best a gross overstatement:

-- Gore claims he 'invented the Internet.' Actually, Gore never laid any kind of claim to invention. What he in fact said, during a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer on March 9, 1999, was this: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." This is a clumsy rendition of a factual event: Gore was a key player in Congress in moving the network that became the Internet from the realm of the military and academia, where it originally was devised, and into the public realm, where it became the mass phenomenon it is today.

Vincent Cerf, the man widely credited as the actual "father of the Internet," in fact argues that Gore should get a great deal of credit for his seminal role in creating the legal foundation for the Internet. And even former House Speaker Newt Gingrich -- no ally of the vice president -- agrees: "In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time," he recently told a Washington gathering. "Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet."

-- Gore claims he was the role model for 'Love Story.' This tale originated with a 1997 story in the Nashville Tennessean -- an interview with the book's author, Erich Segal, in which the reporter wrote that Segal indicated that Gore and his wife, Tipper, were the role models for the book's main characters. Then, in December 1997, in a light, late-night conversation about favorite movies with a pair of reporters from Time magazine and the New York Times, Gore briefly mentioned the story, accurately, as a humorous aside.

Later, after the tale had blown up and was distorted into one of Gore's "fabrications," the Times contacted Segal, and he told them the Tennessean was wrong: Gore in fact was one of the models for the Oliver Barrett character -- along with his roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones -- but Tipper had nothing to do with it. Nonetheless, despite the Times' correction and the insistence of the original Time reporter, Karen Tumulty, that the remark wasn’t a boast of any sort, and was factually correct -- "He said all I know is that's what he [Segal] told reporters in Tennessee" -- the fabricated "fabrication" remains a standard of TV and newspaper pundits.

-- Gore was never a farm boy -- he grew up in a posh Washington hotel. A number of critics, both in print and on TV, have castigated Gore for making remarks on the stump about the chores he performed on his family farm in Tennessee. They point to his youth as a senator's son, attending private school and living in a Washington hotel. But that's only a half-truth; though his school years were spent in D.C., Gore in fact spent his summers working on the Gores' farm in Carthage. Every biographer of Gore -- including those critical of Gore, such as Bob Zelnick -- has detailed the fact that he performed strenuous daily chores every summer of his youth. And the summers on the farm have likewise been detailed in a number of in-depth Gore profiles in The Washington Post, the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair.

-- Gore claims to have 'started it all' at Love Canal. This legend began with a gross misquote that appeared simultaneously in the New York Times and the Washington Post, reporting that Gore had told a group of students that he had discovered the Love Canal toxic waste dump as an issue, adding: "I was the one that started it all." In fact, Gore didn't claim he discovered the Love Canal issue; he said instead that it had supplemented his crusade against toxic wastes, inspired by an incident in Toone, Tenn., after a teenager there had written him a letter alerting him to problems in the town: "I called for a congressional investigation and a hearing. I looked around the country for other sites like that. I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. Had the first hearing on that issue and Toone, Tennessee -- that was the one that you didn't hear of. But that was the one that started it all."

Clearly, Gore hadn't said, "I was the one that started it all." And the "one" that started it all was Toone, not Love Canal. What Gore was describing was factually correct in every respect -- he had written about it in detail in his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance, and his role as a prime mover in creating the toxic-waste cleanup Superfund has been amply documented by his biographers, including Zelnick. Both the Times and the Post ran corrections. But that fact has escaped the numerous pundits and partisans who bandy about the phrase "Love Canal" as yet another sound bite implying that Gore is a liar.

-- Gore claims his mother sang to him as a lullaby a union song written when he was 27. Gore didn’t make this claim seriously. As video tapes of the remark Gore made to an audience of Teamsters on Sept. 18, Gore was trying to make a joke when he said, "I still remember the lullabies I heard as a child," then sang a few bars of the ad jingle, "Look for the Union Label." Gore laughs, and the audience laughs. When dumb jokes are construed as falsehoods, the question needs to be asked: Is someone lacking a sense of humor?

After the debate

In each case, the factual basis of these tales is simply nonexistent, and in some cases their misreporting is simple malfeasance by the journalists responsible. Nonetheless, each of these tales has woven its way into the national discourse in such a way that the truth about them isn’t even questioned. And around the bones of these legends, a dozen or more supplemental incidents have been added to the story -- mostly cases in which Gore's interpretation of events might be open to question, and the dispute is then elevated to the level of proof that Gore is a liar.

This happened immediately after the first debate between Gore and Bush in Boston on Oct. 3. Two points raised by Gore caught the press' attention:

-- Gore mentioned the case of a young student in Florida forced to stand in her class because of overcrowding at the school. Gore relied on an outdated news account -- the girl had in the interim managed to get a seat at a desk -- and officials at the school leapt to their own defense and branded Gore a liar, with those accounts receiving wide play. Receiving lesser play was the fact that the newspaper that provided the original account re-examined the case and found the basic facts of Gore's story intact: the school remained overcrowded, and several students had in fact been forced to stand for several weeks when school opened.

-- Gore mentioned that he had visited Texas in the wake of a series of disastrous fires with FEMA Director James Witt. It turned out that, though Gore in fact had made dozens of trips with Witt to various disaster scenes, Witt hadn’t been along on the trip Gore mentioned. Gore apologized for the mistake the next day. But again, pundits pointed to the misstep as further proof of Gore's dishonesty.

Unlike the previous cases, in both of these instances Gore was guilty of minor factual inaccuracy and thus shares some of the blame for them. But if relying on outdated news accounts for illustrative anecdotes and misremembering the details of your many duties as an official functionary stand as proof of dishonesty, then Ronald Reagan was a liar of colossal proportions.

How legends grow

These myths don't originate by osmosis or accident. In fact, nearly all of them can be directly traced to the Republican National Committee, which has developed a zeal for faxing attacks on Gore's credibility as part of a general strategy to attach him in voters' minds to a Clinton administration they regularly portray as "corrupt."

Such tactics shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with political campaigns. Convincing voters of an opponent's perfidousness is a time-honored electoral strategy. What is disturbing, though, is the clear picture of a credulous press simply accepting that particular spin on events and running it whole, devoid of any factual counterbalance. (Of particular note is the shared misquote of Gore's "Love Canal" remark in both the Times and the Post, which bears an uncanny resemblance to a similar alteration of Gore's remarks in an RNC fax.)

The independence and veracity of the press has been called into question increasingly in the past decade. Cries against a perceived "liberal media bias" -- some of them well-grounded, some of them mere partisan ax-grinding based on skewed data -- were heard loudly in the early 1990s and continue today.

But in the past couple of years, the tide seems to have reversed itself. Of particular note was a survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press analyzing press coverage of the presidential race between April and June 2000. It found that 76 percent of the coverage of Gore focused on two negative themes: his "lies," and exaggerations and his alleged fund-raising scandals. Meanwhile, the survey found, coverage of George W. Bush largely involved warm accounts of "compassionate conservatism" and Bush's purported move to the political center.

Combined with the evolution of the "Liar Al" story and the rise of plainly right-biased news organizations like Fox News and the Washington Times, the evidence suggests that many newsrooms have responded to the charges of a "liberal" bias by instituting a de facto conservative bias. But the problem with either bias is that it overlooks factuality -- the basis of all credible journalism -- in the pursuit of partisan agendas. Stories become highly selective prosecutions instead of thorough and balanced news accounts.

If the press is serious about responding to a rising tide of reader and audience surveys indicating a steadily eroding trust in the value of their work, it needs to begin by making factual accuracy and basic balance and fairness its hallmarks and not mere afterthoughts. And it wouldn't hurt if it dropped the half-baked armchair psychoanalysis from its repertoire, either.

IWC update

Dr. Paul Spong, who I interviewed last summer, steadily filed reports all last week from the International Whaling Commission's annual meeting at St. Kitts and Nevis, where the Japanese, as expected, took control of the IWC's agenda for the first time.

Dr. Spong's June 17 report contained a disturbing tidbit of informationL

Very unfortunately, the US is giving signals that it is willing to make a deal with Japan, apparently without regard to the danger to whales that it involves. Though couched in terms of defending whales, today's US interventions included language like "compromise" and "the need to move forward", quite enough, as things turned out, for Japan to praise the US in its concluding remarks on the RMS issue. No one seems to know precisely what Japan and the US are hatching, but some kind of deal seems to be in the works, and it's certain to be bad for whales.

That ominous continued with what occurred the next day, when Japan rammed through its only victory of the meeting: approvals of the "St. Kitts Declaration," which opened the door for a return to industrial whaling under the aegeis of the IWC, as Spong explained in his June 18 report:

Something akin to pandemonium broke out at the St. Kitts meeting of the International Whaling Commission today, with pro-whaling delegates cheering and applauding even before Japan’s first victory was announced. The late afternoon vote was on the "St. Kitts Declaration", a document from the host nation originally described to Commissioners as a consensus- building device. It was first produced yesterday (after a long delay) with another slightly revised version coming out this morning. The Declaration is very clearly a proposal to take the IWC back to its 1946 beginnings, i.e. to solely concentrate its efforts on commercial whaling. Though the document was voted on as if it was a Resolution, it was not. Rather, it was a statement of opinion by 30 nations, 26 of which Japan has brought into the IWC under its votes-for-aid scheme. Be that as it may, the 33-32-1 result was truly a breakthrough for Japan's delegation, which had been defeated on every previous vote in the meeting. One can only imagine their relief, perhaps especially because two members of Japan's Diet had come to St. Kitts with the delegation.

A press release from the International Fund for Animal Welfare explored similarly the row over the "declaration," with the following reponse from IFAW officials:

"This amounts to a sneak attack on the IWC. After losing on every single proposal they brought to this meeting, the whaling countries and their supporters cooked up a non-binding statement, sprang it on the commission and pushed it to a vote. They want to kill whales, and they're willing to kill the Commission to do it. But this is no death blow, just a stinging flesh wound.

"We are gravely concerned, but not disheartened. The moratorium on commercial whaling remains and we may see further shifts in voting at this very meeting later this week. Whatever happens here in the coming days, we will continue working inside and outside the IWC to build a better world for animals and people and to protect whales for future generations to see."

As Spong's June 19 report makes clear, though, the Japanese victory carried little momentum, with an interesting attempt to crate a coalition between whale-watching organizations and whalers:

The report on whale watching brought mixed news. Impacts of whale watching vessels on several cetacean species have now been demonstrated, as have impacts from other vessel traffic. At the same time, there are huge economic benefits to whale watching, which is now growing at 45% annually in some small Pacific island communities. It is very clear that the economic benefits of whale watching far outweigh those of whaling. Not to be outdone, Iceland, Japan and St. Lucia stated that whaling and whale watching are not incompatible, and can exist side by side. How that could happen in practice is a little unclear, but the issue was not pursued.

This brings to mind a passage from Jim Nollman's excellent book The Charged Border: Where Whales and Humans Meet, which describes the growth of whale watching within the tourist industry, including Japan's [p. 110]:

As the brand-new road winding up to the whale-watching platform at Chichi-jima verifies, within Japan living whales now provide a viable commercial alternative to killing whales. Worldwide, whale watching probably earns as much money today as whaling ever did. A 1992 study disclosed that 3.4 million Americans and 4.4 million people worldwide partook that year, spending over $46 million on tickets and $225 million on related travel expenses, excluding food and lodging. While the industry generally promotes preservation, in a few places its actions flagrantly disregard that message. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a Japanese entrepreneur who owns both a whale-watching boat and a whaling boat. If his whale-watching skipper sights pilots whales in the morning, there is a fair chance his whaling skipper will be dispatched in the afternoon.

The meeting closed inconclusively but ominously. Though the Japanese had only one real victory at the meeting -- despite their best efforts to stack the vote -- the situation long-term does not look promising. They will be in charge of setting the IWC agenda now, which means the assault on the whaling ban is about to begin.

And it appears the Bush administration will serve as a willing enabler. As Spong observed in his June 20 report:

The 58th meeting of the IWC came to an end with consensus (twice) at last. The next meeting is to be in Anchorage, Alaska, and the one after that in Yokohama, Japan. Possibly not coincidentally, the next Chair of the IWC is the US, and the Vice-Chair Japan.

Does this smell of something unpleasant for whales? Probably.

[Be sure to read Spong's wrapup report on the meeting, as well as a CBC interview with him.]

The possibility of a U.S. Japan alliance remains somewhat murky right now, but Carol J. Williams in the Los Angeles Times reports that U.S. officials are using the language of "compromise" and appear to view the "St. Kitts Declaration" as an acceptable framework:

"We've gotten to an impasse," Hogarth said, alluding to the polarization between opponents of commercial whaling and those supporting Japan, Norway and Iceland in the killing of more than 2,000 whales a year in the name of scientific research or tradition.

"What the United States wants to do is try to find a way to protect whales but at the same time recognize some harvest," he said, proposing a negotiated quota for hunting of whales no longer endangered in exchange for closing the "scientific whaling" loophole in the commercial ban. If Japan wants to hunt whales in the name of culture or science, those killings would come off its quota, he said.

... Hogarth said moratorium supporters wouldn't be "held hostage." But he said a spirit of compromise was needed to break the institutional gridlock.

He said he was keenly aware that the American public would never endorse commercial whaling, but he said the IWC impasse had rendered the body dysfunctional and unable to protect even endangered species.

As the story also explores, the Bush administration already has a questionable record when it comes to whales; its insistence on defending deep-sonar testing by the military and blasting noise from air guns used in oil exploration:

U.S. officials have been fighting efforts to address the effect on marine life of noise pollution, probably fearing it could have consequences for military sonar, said Joel Reynolds, a lawyer in charge of marine mammal protection for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

"There's a pattern of denying scientific fact for reasons of ideological perspective," Reynolds said of the Bush administration's environmental positions. "We've seen it with climate, on military sonar, on mercury, on seismic surveys. And it's a pattern that is really troubling because they are denying facts about problems that require action."

Reynolds described the administration as "the most anti-environmental this country has ever had" and blamed a tuned-out American public for taking for granted the whaling ban, which he called the "greatest conservation success of the 20th century."

Evidently, it may prove short-lived in the 21st century.

Morans indeed

I think I may have finally figured out who this guy was talking about.

Seems that Rick Moran at RightWingNuthouse is now claiming he "debunked" my work on fascism and mainstream conservatism back in this post.

Problem is, I responded rather pointedly, making clear that Moran didn't even scratch the surface of the subject. Moran never responded publicly (though we did have a brief and rancorouos e-mail exchange that went nowhere).

Moreover, as he makes clear again, he misses the entire point of my thesis. This is obvious when he says:

The author of a post skewering conservatives for name calling has approvingly linked to a post that refers to conservatives as fascists.

Actually, what Hume's Ghost at Unclaimed Territory links to is a series of posts, and what I say in that series specifically is this:

It seems clear to me that by any reasonable definition, George W. Bush is a corporatist, not a fascist. It seems unlikely, of course, that he or his family are the kinds of corporatists who would financially underwrite far-right organizations today, given that the discovery of such would doom any political legitimacy for the Bushes.

I later say this:

While the Bush regime is devotedly corporatist, it is only in the way it circulates and traffics in fascist memes and Newspeak that it resembles anything fascist. There is so far none of the strict and brutal authoritarianism or police-state tactics that also typify fascist regimes. Perhaps most telling at this stage of things is the extent to which it resorts to thuggery and street violence, or any of the other tactics of threatening intimidation that are associated with genuine fascism -- which so far is not to any great or really appreciable degree. That may, however, be changing.

Of course, the identifiable proto-fascist element in America -- the Patriot/militia movement and associated manifestations of right-wing extremism, especially anti-abortion extremists -- often favors such tactics. And unfortunately, the Bush campaign's apparent alliance with some of these thuggish elements in the Florida debacle indicates that, when push comes to shove, they may be precisely the kind of corporatists who wouldn't hesitate a moment to form an alliance with, and unleash the latent violence of, the Patriots and their ilk. When that occurs, real fascism will have arrived.

And finally, this:

In today's context, Nazism specifically and fascism generally are most often cited by partisans of both sides not with any reference to its actual content but merely as the essence of totalitarian evil itself. This is knee-jerk half-thought. Obviously, I don't agree that the mere reference to fascism, let alone a serious discussion of it, automatically renders a point moot. But a reflexive, ill-informed or inappropriate reference -- which describes the bulk of them -- should suffice to invalidate any argument.

Without question the worst offenders are those on the left. It began back in the 1960s, when antiwar radicals came to refer to anyone from the Establishment as "fascist," particularly if they were from the police. This bled over into the later view that identified fascism with a police state. The confusion is alive and well today with peace marchers who blithely identify Bush with Hitler and compare Republicans to Nazis. The purpose of these analogies is to shame conservatives, but they instead only give their accusers the appearance of shrill harpies willing to abuse the memory of the Holocaust for cheap political theater.

Most of all, such comparisons obscure the reality of what's taking place. The genuine proto-fascists -- namely, the anti-democratic extremists of the Patriot movement, and their thuggish cohorts among the 'Freeper' crowd -- are identified with mainstream conservatives instead of being distinguished from them. That in turn gives their coalescence a kind of cover instead of exposing it.

A strategically astute left would try to drive a wedge between the two factions by raising awareness of their growing intersection, particularly in the growing phenomenon of agitation against antiwar protests. Instead, we have a liberalism that thoughtlessly identifies the conservative movement of the early 21st century with mature fascism of the 1930s, thereby only revealing how little aware it is itself of the eternal and mutative nature of fascism, and how little it can recognize it in action today.

Moreover, as I went on later to explore in depth, mainstream conservatism is not fascist in the classic sense; what it has done, instead, is gradually adopt a series of appeals and memes that are classically fascist, but overall it lacks certain major traits, especially the violent thuggishness that really is the beating heart of fascism.

Note, also, that while Moran is grossly mischaracterizing what I wrote, he neglects to provide his readers any link to the work in question so that they may judge for themselves the accuracy of his charge. This kind of brain-dead dishonesty is something I've encountered before with right-wing bloggers, and again lays waste to the rosy-lensed notion that the blogosphere is "self-correcting."

But the most dishonest thing that Moran wrote in this post, really, doesn't directly relate to my work in that he isn't referencing it specifically. Nonetheless, it does relate:

And while "eliminationist" rhetoric is vile and disgusting, only certain types of polemicists use it – those without the intellectual gifts to form complete sentences or close their mouths when breathing.

He then goes on to characterize Ann Coulter's work -- one of the larger topics of the post -- as simply "vile 'jokes'," evidently to be distinguished from eliminationist rhetoric. It's clear, indeed, from his ardent admiration for Coulter's intellect (which in itself raises the question: What kind of intellect, exactly, relies on ugly sensationalism and gross factual distortion to make its point?) that he does not include Coulter among the mouth-breathers.

Actually, as I've demonstrated time and again, not only is Ann Coulter one of the leading progenitors of eliminationist rhetoric, the entire right-wing pundit class is infected with it, ranging from Fox News anchors to prominent right-wing radio talk-show hosts (and to their local imitators) to leading right-wing bloggers.

There is a whole segment of the right wing devoted to what Moran is doing here. While claiming to be all about "civility" as they gently denounce figures like Ann Coulter, they simultaneously defend them as "superior" intellects who have, sadly, stumbled a bit. (Meanwhile, of course, Michael Moore is fat.)

And eliminationist rhetoric? Whazzat? (Indeed, when you raise this specific argument with the "unhinged" Malkinite right, the response universally is a blank stare.)

The upshot, in the right-wing narrative, is that "uncivil" behavior is really only a problem on the left, though naturally there are a few outbreaks on the right that we can condemn even as we continue to support those responsible for the outbreaks. This is that Bizarro World mentality that Hume's Ghost was talking about in action.

Now, note that Moran is the brother of Terry Moran, the ABC News correspondent whose name keeps cropping up in Eric Boehlert's marvelous book Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush. Terry Moran operates in a similar fashion, with a bizarre double standard in which conservatives receive all the benefit of the doubt and "liberals" -- who, in reality, are simply non-conservatives -- none: Asking tough questions about the Bush administration's connections to the Enron scandal is inappropriate for the press because we've invaded Afghanistan (p. 234); Jeff Gannon's briefing-room contributions at the White House were "valuable and necessary," though coverage of questions about Gannon's credentials, as well as his past occupations, was unnecessary (p. 37). Perhaps most remarkably, Moran -- anchoring a discussion on ABC World News Tonight Sunday -- brushed off questions about the credibility of the Swift Boat Veterans and insisted, instead, on focusing on whether the charges were hurting John Kerry (p. 190).

I guess it must be a familial thing. Which finally explains that sign.

Orca chorale

I spent the past four days camping on the west side of San Juan Island, enjoying the warming weather and watching for killer whales. They had been no-shows on Thursday, and for most of Friday and Saturday that trend continued.

Camping next to us was a group of musicians who had come to the island that weekend as part of a symposium at Lime Kiln State Park on killer whales sponsored by the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor. The choral group, the City Cantabile Choir, was capping off the day by presenting a special requiem in honor of Luna, the young L-pod orca who was killed in a tragic accident this spring. The singers planned to gather in front of the lighthouse that evening and sing out to the whales.

This was the sixth year for the Orca Sing concert, and in past years the whales had come by during the performance, though not in 2005. It wasn't looking particularly promising that they would do so this year.

I had listened to the choir rehearsing that afternoon at the county park, and was struck by the immense beauty of the music. I decided I wanted to listen to them from the water, so at 7 I headed out in my kayak for the half-hour trip to Lime Kiln.

Just as I approached the lighthouse from the north, though, who should appear but a sizeable contingent of J pod, led by J1, or "Ruffles" as he's called (for the shape of his fin), possibly the most impressive (and certainly one of the most recognizable) of all the southern resident orcas. Ruffles is about 55 years old, near the upper limit of life expectancy for male orcas in the wild, so just seeing him each summer is considered a good sign. He's also immense and imposing.

I was fighting a northbound current, struggling just to get to the lighthouse, so simply staying in place so the whales could come by me took some work. Ruffles passed by far to my right, but others in the pod were swimming in the current closer to my kayak, so I did my best to stay in place while pulling out both my camera and my latest piece of equipment: a hydrophone I bought last month from Cetacean Research Technology.

I'd tested the hydrophone out previously but all I'd been able to listen to was boat noise. (Large ships, incidentally, produce tremendous amounts of noise underwater.) This was my first chance to listen killer whales.

No sooner had I dropped the mike into the water and slipped on the headphones than I was rewarded with a sound I'd heard before in recordings, but never in the wild: the rising and falling call of a killer whale, sounding distant and mysterious and haunting.

A few moments later, though, the calls came much clearer -- sharp, plaintive and distinct. Along with them came a series of buzzes and clicks, sounds I knew were the orcas' echolocation. (Some sample calls from J, K and L pods are available here.)

I scanned the waters and saw, shortly, that there were about six or seven whales moving past me about 150 yards away, mostly young males or females. They seemed to be moving in two clusters, three or four orcas in each group, and they were moving, it seemed, in a circle as they submerged and resurfaced around a large swell pattern in the strait's mildly roiling waters. They were lightly playing: rolling, making pectoral slaps, occasionally tail lobbing, and their contact with each other as they did almost looked like rubbing.



This was interesting, but even more interesting was what I was hearing through the hydrophone. Most orca calls sound like a rolling wave, rising and falling within a single call. I began hearing calls, though, that sounded more like a single note: a plaintive, almost melancholy note that lasted about a second and a half. And what was intriguing was that they came in succession: one note followed by another and another, slightly overlapping: one orca after another, in a series of four to six calls, all making the same note, like an undersea chorale. These were surrounded by the usual longer calls and the background buzzes and clicks.

Of course, I'm not really that experienced with orca calls -- especially not in a live setting -- and I expect that researchers hear this kind of thing all the time. Still, the raw experience felt as though I was being treated to a strange and haunting choral performance, and extended concert of sound.

I was so fascinated by all this that I just drifted with the whales, letting the current carry me back northward as I listened. When the whales began moving faster away, I stopped amd realized I had come almost parallel with the county park campsite where I was staying. Looking at my watch, I realized I'd never make even the tail end of the lighthouse concert, and I headed to shore. The next day, I apologized to Fred West, the conductor, for missing the show, but he seemed to understand, given the circumstances.

We saw more of Ruffles and his subpod that weekend; they came through late Sunday morning -- Fiona and I paddled out to see them, but they seemed to be passing by silently this time -- and again Monday in the early afternoon. They passed by, quickly, a ways from shore at the county park, so Fiona and I hopped in the car and headed down to see if we could get a look at them at the Lime Kiln lighthouse, and they did.



Watching them from shore in the clear light of day, moving efficiently past us as they drove out to the southern end of the island, it struck me that how we experience wild, mysterious creatures like killer whales has a lot to do with our own expectations of them.

You know -- we want to believe that the whales came by, for the first time in three days, to greet the singers on shore. We want to believe that they can somehow divine what we're doing and interact with it. And people experienced with orcas will tell you that these kinds of small coincidences, in fact, just keep mounting up with them: appearing or behaving in a striking way at a striking time. As though they can read our minds, or sing a chorale in imitation of one onshore.

Scientists know this is illogical, and in the end it's just another kind of anthropomorphism, projecting our own wishes onto a creature that in reality is perfectly neutral and oblivious to us. In our eagerness to embrace what we might share in common with these creatures, we too readily dispose of what makes them unique. We fail to respect the whales for their whaleness.

Still, none of that can change the reality of the actual experience and how it felt. It sounded like a chorus of angels, and I was blessed to hear them.

The summer of the whales

Summer is rapidly approaching, and I'm making preparations to be spending large chunks of time watching killer whales in the Puget Sound, as I have in the past. For longtime readers, this is not anything particularly new, since I've filed a number of reports from these ventures (see here, here, and here,), not to mention some of my recent reporting work.

But this summer's work will be somewhat different in that it will be more detailed and focused. More to the point, it will be part of a larger shift of this blog into much more frequent discussion of environmental issues -- and particularly whales.

If my previous jaunts have been a little jarring for an audience somewhat accustomed to a focus on right-wing extremism and its various expressions in the mainstream, well, I expect this shift to be more in the way of a tectonic shift. I'll see if I can explain why it's occurring.

It might help to point out that, when I began writing about militias and far-right groups in the 1990s, it was only partly because I had a background in reporting on these groups and their activities in my background as a newspaperman. The larger part -- my chief angle as a freelance journalist -- was that I was an environmental reporter looking at militias specifically as a backlash phenomenon.

It all took on kind of a life of its own, however, especially after Oklahoma City, and that took me more or less to where I am today. It's important to understand why this happened: As I spent more time with the militias, it became clear to me that environmental and land-use policy was only one of many fronts through which they recruited. They also found openings on education, taxes, religious issues like abortion and homosexuality, immigration, and the whole right-wing "culture war" generally.

Much of the reason I've remained focused on the extremist right for these past several years is because they remain such a potent destructive force on so many fronts. This is why, I think, my work is valuable to people dealing with the toxic right in different areas, from the broadly political to scientific, religious, sociological, and civil-rights concerns. It's why I've kept at it.

Much of what has transpired in the past couple of decades to undermine the opposition from the left to this toxicity has been an unfortunate kind of balkanization among progressive factions: environmentalists do their thing, economists theirs, and political activists theirs, and only coincidentally do their interests intersect. I think what's needed is more of a pan-progressivism that unites, through networking and a recognition of mutual interests, the various factions into a potent whole.

A simple way of illustrating the problem is to observe that environmentalists are unusually obtuse about the threat to their interests created by the extremist religious right, and pay it, unfortunately, scant attention, except when they cross immediate paths. But generally, they leave that up to the civil-rights folks to deal with.

Likewise, it's been my observation that serious environmental concerns have mostly been the recipient of lip service from the political activist component of the progressive faction, with scant real action -- until, perhaps, recently, that is.

The growing realization of the real significance of global warming -- thanks in no small part to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth -- is bridging the gap. The political activists are realizing that environmental issues possess a transcendent quality that positively mandates action; and environmentalists, whose Beltway political pull has been on the ropes since 2000, are recognizing the political role they must play as well.

What they all have to confront, I think, is a political environment in which right-wing extremism's influence is mounting, sometimes subtly, but particularly in the knee-jerk rejection of the data on global warming from the mainstream right. Not only are mainstream media propagating nonsensical talking points, and talk-show hosts comparing Al Gore to Hitler, but of course Rush Limbaugh is piling on. Meanwhile, Republican students were hosting a fundraising party celebrating the onset of global warming. Bring it on, dudes!

Global warming is something of a pan-environmental issue itself: it affects air and water-pollution policy, it affects forest-preservation issues, it affects fisheries and marine-life issues -- including, most notably, whaling.

Whales are an especially powerful symbol of the environmental health of the planet, in part because they are simultaneously immense and enormously sentient, not to mention evolutionarily ancient compared to we humans. Global warming depresses and shifts their food sources, and so it affects them quite directly.

But in the case of whales, there are other, more immediate threats to their well-being. Specifically, there is the looming likelihood that the longtime moratorium on whaling by the International Whaling Commission is about to be overturned:

Japan and Norway, two nations that have refused to give up large-scale whaling despite widespread condemnation, are on the cusp of gaining control of the international commission that since 1986 has strictly limited whale hunting in an effort to rebuild the population of the world's largest creatures.

The impending shift, which will be on display when the International Whaling Commission convenes on the island of St. Kitts for its annual meeting June 16, has alarmed environmentalists and officials from countries that oppose commercial whaling, including the United States, Australia and New Zealand. They note that in recent years, Japan has recruited at least 19 countries -- many from West Africa and the Caribbean -- to support more whaling.

"Most Americans think the whales have been saved," said Gregory Wetstone, director of U.S. operations for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, an advocacy group. "These populations cannot sustain the kind of pressure that industrial-scale whaling can bring."

With 66 or so members -- the number shifts depending on which countries show up and pay their dues -- the commission has regulated whaling for more than 50 years. But for the first time, it may be narrowly dominated by countries that support greater whale hunts. Although it would take a three-quarters vote to end the 20-year-old international moratorium, a simple majority could push for actions that could strengthen the hand of whaling nations.

The real leaders in this are the Japanese. As greenboy at Needlenose explains:

The arrogant pricks are already acting as if the ban is already gone as it is, doubling (from last year) their so-called 'scientific' kill of whales while at the same time mocking the rest of the world by serving up the 'tissue samples' at Public Relations gourmet feasts.

One noteworthy aspect of Japanese whaling -- which has been increasing steadily in recent years -- is that its use of the "scientific kill" ruse mirrors, in an ugly fashion, the Republican right's tendency to distort science to support their preferred policies. And of course, one can expect little in the way of substantive American opposition to the Japanese effort to overturn the whaling ban under the Bush administration.

I expect we can look forward to a revival of the Greenpeace-style intervention tactics, which make for great drama but also have a polarizing effect that solidifies the internal political positions of the respective pro-whaling factions.

It's time, I think, to look at other ways of effecting political change beyond media stunts and dramas at sea. One of these is the power of political networking in creating cultural shifts.

It's important to understand that Japan's cultural resistance to the ban whaling, while still strong, has been eroding rapidly in recent years. As Jim Nollman notes in his excellent The Charged Border, whale watching is rapidly growing component of the Japanese tourism industry, and attitudes about whaling are starting to perceptibly change.

When I visited Paul Spong last summer at his OrcaLab on Hanson Island, I noted that three of his volunteers were Japanese. We befriended one of them, who was on her way home after a month on the island, and we gave her a ride south for a ways and chatter her up. I asked her about this, and she said that she believed that attitudes, especially among younger Japanese, about whaling were changing very rapidly.

Maybe, instead of ramming Japanese whale boats, someone should convince Hayao Miyazaki to make a film about whales. It would probably be vastly more effective.

But even more effectively (not to mention realistically) we can begin building networks based on a recognition of our mutual interests. This is true not just with regard to the whaling issue, but environmental issue generally. Those concerned about right-wing politics need to recognize that environmental issues are a central battleground, and environmentalists need to become wise about what they're up against. Where cultural gaps exist, building bridges may prove more effective than smashing hulls.

What we do know is that, if the IWC overturns the moratorium as expected, we can expect to see a return to mass slaughters of whales for sale on the Japanese and Norwegian markets, including any number of endangered species.

Recall, too, that there really is no humane way of killing them, either. Recall the description written by Dr. Harry Lillie, "a ship's physician on an Antarctic whaling trip in the 1940s":

Dr Lillie wrote: "If we can imagine a horse having two or three explosive spears stuck in its stomach and being made to pull a butcher's truck through the streets of London while it pours blood into the gutter, we shall have an idea of the method of killing.

"The gunners themselves admit that if whales could scream the industry would stop, for nobody would be able to stand it."

It is the looming threat of the lifting of the moratorium -- and it appears, frankly, to be a fait accompli at this point -- that has spurred me to shift, somewhat, the focus of Orcinus.

The idea isn't so much to stop reporting on the far right as it is to broaden the mission of the blog, in line, really, with my intent for it all along. There will probably be some reportage on right-wing extremism that will get pushed out in the process. Just in the past week, for instance, there have been a number of far-right-related news events that I haven't had time to comment upon: the anti-abortion extremist in the D.C. area arrested in a bomb-building plot; the leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance being arrested on civil-rights charges in Utah; the continuing spread of racial hatemongering associated with the immigration debate.

A large part of the problem is that, even as the evidence of right-wing extremism manifesting itself in the mainstream discourse mounts daily, it's starting to feel as though I'm just repeating myself. How many more ways can I point out, really, that the expansion of the extremist right's influence in the mainstream has had the predictable effect of empowering and emboldening them? (Fortunately, it helps that there are plenty of others out there bomb.html>who are picking up on the themes frequently explored here.)

It's also starting to feel as though the continued focus has become stale; the discussion is a lot less energetic these days, and the links are fewer and farther between. And frankly, it also feels like the focus is being mistaken for an obsession. I know it comes with the territory, but I'm a little tired of being thought of, even if ever so generously, as a bit of a crank.

Obviously, as the far right insinuates itself more and more in the mainstream, I'll continue to report on it, though I'll probably be more selective in how often I point it out. It's too important a trend not to stay on top of.

Still, you should expect to see a lot more reporting here on environmental issues, with a particular emphasis on whales and their plight, and a specific focus on killer whales. A large part of the purpose will be to encourage and implement communications and networking between and among environmental advocates and political activists.

With that in mind, I'd like to introduce you to Cetacean Action-Alert, a new Web site designed to facilitate networking among the various factions of whale activists and researchers, and the larger environmental movement as a whole. I'm hoping to cultivate the interest of the broader progressive community as well, because the issues being discussed, and the networking that's taking place there, have real importance in the broader perspective of combating the right on a broader scale.

I'll be posting at the Action-Alert and picking up news tidbits there. If it's something that interests you, sign up and join in. It's an experiment in the effectiveness of Web-based networking, and I'm hoping that it proves as rewarding as it is promising. [Full disclosure: The site administrator is my sister.]

Also note that I've created a new "Orca links" section to my blogroll.

I'm sure I'll lose some regular readers in this shift, though I'm hoping that most of you are coming not just for the right-wing loonies but the writing, too. I may not always write about topics you're interested in, but I hope, at least, to keep writing interestingly. Hope you all stick around for the ride.

Here comes the flood

I suppose that we shouldn't be surprised that people whose livelihoods depend on sustaining the old model of mass communications are so quick to misapprehend what's happening as that model crumbles around them.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd [subscription req'd], reporting from the YearlyKos gathering in Las Vegas, is only the most visible recent example of those from the punditry class who are teetering atop their crumbling heap and sneering at the waves lapping away at it:

As I wandered around workshops, I began to wonder if the outsiders just wanted to get in. One was devoted to training bloggers, who had heretofore not given much thought to grooming and glossy presentation, on how to be TV pundits and avoid the stereotype of nutty radical kids.

Mr. Moulitsas said he had a media coach who taught him how to stand, dress, speak, breathe and even get up from his chair. Another workshop coached Kossacks on how to talk back to Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. "One of my favorite points," the workshop leader said, "is that the French were right."

Even as Old Media is cowed by New Media, New Media is trying to become, rather than upend, Old Media….

Were the revolutionaries simply eager to be co-opted? Mr. Moulitsas grinned. "Traditionally it was hard to get your job," he said. "Now regular people can score your job."

What really aggravates pundits like Dowd -- who often earn their astonishingly powerful chunks of media real estate not so much through actual journalistic or writing merit but through a combination of luck and deviousness -- is that their influence is being diminished by people who, for heaven's sake, have no more qualifications than they do. And their evident success as opinion-makers based on their merits as writers and analysts, rather than their elite positioning atop the media heap, undermines everything that the pundit class is all about.

What Dowd doesn't get -- and which precludes her from comprehending what the hell this blogging thing is all about -- is why these bloggers exist in the first place.

And it's because of people like her.

Dowd is an examplar of the old Laswell/Lippmann model of communications, in which an elite class of "wise men" atop the media heap dispense wisdom -- and set the agenda for -- the masses from on high, and the rest of the media more or less fall into line. It was a model that more or less worked as long as (a) the elite institutions maintained their independence, both politically and economically, and (b) there was a broad diversity of mainstream media voices that could provide a conduit for information that was not disseminated from the elite towers.

Unfortunately, as media consolidation has shut down the diversity of voices, and empowered media ownership that increasingly began insisting on its own preference for a conservative bias in reporting and editorialization. As I explained awhile back:

Editors in particular played a crucial role in this, because editors directly affect not only how stories are covered, but which stories are covered. Traditionally, they also have acted as filters for bad information. And as long as there was diversity in the ranks of editors, they performed this function well.

But by the early 1990s, with diversity lessened and career tracks clearly geared for conservative yes-men, it became clear to me then that the "filtering" function of the mainstream media had become increasingly a bottleneck for information -- which was creating a real demand for the information the media failed to consistently report or emphasize.

There's a reality about this that I think most people in the mainstream media find upsetting: Information -- particularly good information, which is to say, it has factual integrity and real significance -- wants to get out; it creates its own demand for dissemination. If it's suppressed or ignored, in a democratic system, it will still find its way to the surface.

Blogging, in this sense, represents a kind of market response (that is, in the market of ideas) to the demand created by the information that wants to be disseminated. It's a way for information to get around the bottleneck. Obviously, this is as true for people on the right as for those on the left.

So really, blogs are just another communications medium, a way for information to be transmitted. Like any other medium, it has great potential for both bettering and worsening the national discourse.

What's special about blogs is their egalitarian nature: anybody can be a blogger. It represents a kind of democratization of the dissemination of information.

This is, I think, profoundly disorienting to traditional journalists, because it means their old model of the way communications is supposed to work has been upset.

That old model identifies communication with domination, as I went on to explain. The antithesis of this model -- networked person-to-person communication -- is in fact embodied, as close as possible, by the Internet.

So of course, bloggers depend on regular working journalists. So, for that matter, do editors -- and columnists. The difference with the Internet is in how the information moves -- laterally, rather than downward from on high.

Actually, the function in the old communications model that bloggers come closest to replicating is that of the editor -- not in the sense of being an overseer of writing and reportorial quality, but in setting priorities: deciding which stories are important and deserve greater attention, ascertaining which stories are reported upon.

A good blogger is not so much a journalist as a good editor (and remember, most editors are writers too). A blog is thus a kind of publication, and it attracts readers according to the quality of insight its editor brings to it.

But instead of a situation where increasingly we had only a handful of carefully selected editors who worked their way up the ranks by remaining loyal corporate yes-men, now anyone with a good news sense and a way with words can influence the course of our discourse. The Internet has shattered the old bottleneck. It has democratized how information flows in modern society.

What sparked the rise of Web-based political communication like the blogosphere was the behavior of people like Dowd. When she was named to one of the Times' cherished columnist slots, she replaced the estimable Anna Quindlen, a dependably thoughtful voice of liberalism. Dowd, in contrast, has operated more in the mode of a gossip columnist with snippy, personality-driven journalism that often becomes simply trite; while the Times' conservative columnists in the late '90s were singleminded in their pursuit of Clinton's impeachment, Dowd chose more often than not to chime in on their side, and likewise was a happy participant in the "Al Gore is a weakminded liar" theme that played out in 2000.

With that kind of voice representing "liberals" in the New York Times -- and folks like Joe Klein and Pat Caddell showing up on cable TV to represent the "liberal" side -- it's not the least surprising that genuine liberals felt the need to begin speaking up. Otherwise, their voices were not going to be heard. The blogosphere and Webzines became an effective way for that to happen.

Mind you, in some respects the blogosphere is replicating, almost out of necessity, some of the structural aspects of mainstream media: folks like Kos, Atrios, Instapundit, Malkin, and Josh Marshall all represent a kind of elite substructure within the blogosphere, built in some cases around their large communities, which function as the NYTs and WaPos of the blogosphere. But they in turn depend not just on regular journalists but on a broad network of fellow bloggers, some of whom -- like myself -- specialize in providing alternative reporting and analysis.

The effect is a real broadening of voices in our media, because the old media -- having choked itself off -- created the need for it. And those still toiling away atop their crumbling towers of influence are of course preoccupied with those egalitarian waves lapping away at them. Which is why they devote so much energy to dismissing them.

'Scoop' and the internment camps

Atrios directs us to Mark Schmitt's recent take on Peter Beinart's lionization of Henry "Scoop" Jackson -- the Washington senator (or, as he was known in these parts, "the senator from Boeing") who ran for the presidency in 1972 and 1976 -- in his recent book, The Good Fight:

There are perhaps several bits of Beinart's history that I'm tempted to challenge, but I'll pick on just one of them here because it's been bugging me for years. It's a fairly small thing, just a few pages in the book, but it is an essential pivot point for the argument and, frankly, for the New Republic view of the world. And that is the counterfactual proposition that if only, if only Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson had been the Democratic presidential nominee in 1972 or 1976, all would be right with the world.

This is an essential myth to many of the liberal hawks, to the neocons when they still considered themselves Democrats, and to some extent to the predecessors of the Democratic Leadership Council. (the Schachtmanite Committee for a Democratic Majority). And it's central to Beinart's argument. But it's not just wrong, it's ridiculous. If I went around arguing that if only Bill Bradley, who I worked for, had been the Democratic nominee in 2000, the world would be better, I might -- in some unprovable sense -- be correct, but people would still laugh at me. Because he didn't get many votes. (And that was only six years ago, not 30.) Scoop Jackson wasn't robbed of a nomination that was rightly his, or shot to death after winning the California primary. He just didn't get many votes. He fell completely flat in 1972. And in 1976, he botched the tactics, unwisely skipping Iowa and New Hampshire and so by the time he won two primaries, Jimmy Carter had already consolidated the support of conservative Democrats while the liberals were split. Scoop Jackson's not the great lost hope; he's merely one of about two dozen capable, non-brilliant Senators since 1972 who saw a president in the mirror each morning, but couldn't persuade anyone else to see the same thing. Would he have won those elections, if nominated? Who knows? Nor was Jackson some sort of foreign-policy visionary. He was a classic Western New Dealer (the really, really big spenders), who also happened to represent the biggest defense contractor of his era. The unsustainability of his pork-barrel "Guns AND Butter" policy would have tripped him up in the 1970s as surely as it did LBJ in the 1960s. If there is a deeper legacy that Jackson represents, it is uniformly a despicable one, in the form of people like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz who used him as a vehicle for their emerging theories, and if their later careers are an indication of what a Jacksonian America would have been like, then we should be thankful he was a dud as a candidate. His dud candidacy deserves no more attention than those of Lloyd Bentsen, John Glenn, Fritz Hollings, and many others.

The "liberal hawk" fondness for Henry Jackson is terribly revealing, because it displays a kind of corruption of the values they supposedly espouse. Not only did so much of the neoconservative power cadre emanate from the Scoop Jackson worldview, but so did the entire prowar faction's predilection for indulging in grotesque historical mistakes and then refusing to either acknowledge them later or admit to any accountability afterward.

Consider, if you will, Jackson's history as a congressman from Everett in the 1940s, when he not only strongly advocated the internment of Japanese Americans, but actually agitated in Congress for worsening conditions in the camps and placing greater restrictions on internees.

While researching my book Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community, I spent considerable time poring through the archives of Miller Freeman, president of the Anti-Japanese League of Washington and one of the most powerful men in the state at the time. It included a file of his correspondence with Jackson, with whom he shared a friendly relationship, though Freeman was a Republican and Jackson a Democrat. Most of all, there was a great deal of correspondence on an issue about which the men were clearly like-minded: the "Japanese problem."

As I described in Chapter 6:

The absence of the Japanese from their longtime communities during the war had not necessarily made hearts grow fonder for them. Indeed, though the frequency of the hysteria was certainly lessened by the fact the Japanese were no longer present and visible, the war-born hatred of all things "Jap" had transformed them into demon-things in the popular mind, and the dearth of daily, real-life examples to the contrary only made things worse.

Headlines reporting on the war front regularly referred to the enemy "Japs" -- as did headlines reporting on events in the WRA's relocation centers. Consistent with popular sentiments prior to the war and during the evacuation debate, letters to the editor as well as political pronouncements made no differentiation between the citizens who once had been their neighbors and the foreign enemies their sons were fighting.

Washington's congressional delegation had a particular propensity in this regard. In addition to the damage already wrought by Democratic Senator Mon Wallgren, who had chaired one of the early congressional committees recommending evacuation in 1942, then-Rep. Henry Jackson, a respected Everett Democrat, took up the anti-Japanese cause with particular relish for the war's duration. Not only was he an enthusiast of the evacuation, he was a stern advocate of the campaign to keep the Japanese from returning to the Pacific Coast -- both during and after the war. He was often seconded in this regard by his Seattle colleague, then-Rep. Warren Magnuson, who had a habit of raising groundless alarms about an imminent invasion of the Pacific Coast by the Japanese.

But it was otherwise anonymous men like Joe Matsuzawa who spurred Jackson to headline-grabbing action. In May 1943, Jackson began protesting in Congress against the Army's policy of allowing Japanese-American soldiers to visit the Pacific Coast on furlough; apparently, wearing an American uniform wasn't assurance enough of Nisei loyalty. Jackson sponsored a resolution calling for a complete investigation of "the Japanese situation," and his congressional colleagues were critical of the use of any Japanese-Americans in combat. Rep. John Costello of California sounded the familiar refrain that "you can't tell a good Jap from a bad Jap."

Jackson penned a speech that he never delivered on the subject, but it was clear he was opposed to Japanese-Americans ever returning to his home district:

What is to be the eventual disposition of the Japanese alien and native ... is the second aspect of this problem of the Pacific. Are we to return them to their former homes and businesses on the Pacific Coast to face the active antagonism of their neighbors? Shall they again, as happened in World War I, compete economically for jobs and businesses with returning war veterans?

The House Committee On Un-American Activities chaired by Texas Democrat Martin Dies also joined in on the action, partly at the urging of Jackson and others. A New Jersey Republican named J. Parnell Thomas flew out to Los Angeles and, without visiting a camp, declared that the WRA was pampering the internees. Thomas also demanded the agency halt its policy of "releasing disloyal Japs" -- that is, end its policy of relocating evacuees in jobs outside the camps.

The Dies Committee hearings provided a steady stream of scandalous headlines for a few months, bolstered by the reports of the unrest at Manzanar and Tule Lake. The most sensational of these reports involved a former motor-pool driver named Harold H. Townsend -- described in press reports as "a former official of the Poston, Ariz., relocation center" -- who told the credulous congressmen that Japanese subversives were secretly conducting Army training drills inside the relocation centers so that evacuees could spring to the aid of an invading Japanese army when it attacked the coast. What the reports also neglected to mention -- besides the lack of a shred of evidence -- was that not only had Townsend been present at the violence in Poston, but had been fired for panicking and fleeing the scene.

Dies himself held press conferences demanding that the WRA bring back all the Japanese it had relocated out of the camps and keep them interned for the duration of the war, claiming he had evidence that race riots in Detroit the week before had been the secret handiwork of an officer in the Japanese Army. Subsequent headlines detailed more wild allegations, including tales of elderly Issei secretly plotting a kamikaze attack on local forests, setting the West ablaze; caches of food being buried in the desert in a plot to aid the invading Japanese; and claims that the Japanese internees were being fed better in the camps than were American G.I.s (which may have been true, since much of the camps' food source was the farms that were operated at each of the camps by evacuees). Dies wrapped up his exploration of the "Japanese question" later that summer by reiterating its demands the WRA alter its policies -- but besides making headlines in the press, these pronouncements had little apparent effect on the changes that were already in motion at the WRA. And the Dies Committee would soon be more stridently focused on the looming "Red Menace."

The interest groups chimed in as well. The American Legion joined in on the rising anti-Japanese sentiments with its denunciation of the WRA's policy of "coddling the Japs," and longtime anti-Asian groups like the Native Sons of the Golden West (whose demeanor historically suggested vigilantism) became active in agitating alongside newer groups like the Pearl Harbor League. Some of these groups distributed signs proclaiming: "We don't want any Japs back here -- EVER!" These signs gained prominence in places like Kent, in the heart of what had been a thriving Japanese community in the White River Valley; the town's mayor, a barber, displayed the warning prominently in his shop, and earned a Time magazine appearance for it, pointing at the sign.

Jackson's definitive biography, Robert G. Kaufman's Henry M. Jackson: A Life in Politics, discusses this, noting that Jackson's senatorial colleague Daniel M. Inouye -- a decorated Japanese American veteran -- took a generous view of Jackson's wartime attitudes, noting that they were widespread and common. But Kaufman says [p.36]:

He is, however, too magnanimous. Jackson was not just an advocate of the internment, but an enthusiast, and he justified his attitude with a logic and rhetoric that still makes chilling reading:

We first heard much of Japanese infiltration tactics on Bataan and in the Philippines, but the Japanese had for many years practiced a different kind of infiltration -- infiltration into the vitals of our economic, political, and domestic structure. The principles of Bushido, by insidious and indirect means inserted themselves in a great many organizations in much the same fashion as the Nazis utilized their front organizations. In our great Pacific coast cities, they controlled much of the hotel and restaurant business although there was always a white manager who would front for them with the general public. They lowered the prices to their own countrymen in the fresh produce and vegetable field, ofrcing our their white competition, only to raise prices as soon as they had monopolized that sphere of business. Always they had prominent civic leaders as their attorneys, paying them on a retainer basis. Whenever a situation came up in which they were interested, they had only to contact these individuals with their specious reasons to have them immediately come forward in their interest. Investigations will show that the Japanese counsels in our large cities lavished expensive and sumptuous gifts on a great number of prominent citizens at Christmas and other appropriate occasions.

It's clear that Jackson's enthusiasm for the internment, as with so many of its advocates on the Pacific Coast, was directly predicated on the "Yellow Peril" mythology and its attendant propaganda. This isn't terribly surprising -- after all, FDR, whose administration was responsible for the internment, held similar views.

In all my research, I could, however, find no evidence that Jackson ever expressed any regret for his wartime activism against Japanese Americans, even as reparations were being discussed late in his career. He remained mum, hoping no one would remember his own role in the affair.

It is this propensity -- this refusal to acknowledge, or be held accountable for, the wrongs they've inflicted -- that sets the Jacksonites apart. Everyone can make mistakes, and Jackson's guilt would at least have been ameliorated later if he had simply acknowledged it. But he couldn't, which reveals a real blindness to the misery and suffering that politicians can intentionally inflict, and a gaping hole in their humanity.

Henry Jackson's politics represented a strain in the Democratic Party that has never gone away: a willingness to sacrifice core principles in the pursuit of an ephemeral vision of America as a benign global superpower. Because of that corruption, it's a vision doomed to collapse in a heap of hubris.

What's strangest, I suppose, is that these same people are the first ones to start talking about driving out the very factions of their own party who were right about their fearmongering all along.

Maybe they just hate being reminded of their mistakes. Or maybe they're just hoping it makes everyone else forget.