Roosting Chickens, Part I

It's not really a chicken. It's a golden eagle!

-- by Sara

Watching televangelists and other righteous public worthies spectacularly self-destruct hasn't been news since Sister Aimee wandered out of the Sonoran desert with lurid tales of kidnap and torture (she'd actually been off on holiday with her lover) all the way back in 1926. In fact, in the decades since, it's grown into an enduringly popular national sport, which really took off with the 1980s glory days of Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, and has really come into its own with the emergence of modern morality all-stars like Ted Haggard and Kent Hovind.

But, surprising as it may seem, there's always been a quieter handful of the breed who actually did manage to keep their houses in order and their noses reasonably clean -- whose consistent behavior through the years at least inspired confidence that they were guys who actually tried to walk their impossible talk. Jerry Falwell. Rex Humbard. And, before any of them, Oral Roberts -- who, arguably, was also the first national evangelist to exploit the TV medium, paving the way for Falwell, Robertson, and all the others who followed.

Others came and went in their various blazes of ignominy; but Roberts went on the TV air in 1952, and soldiered on through the decades. What his outfit lacked in flash, it made up for in sheer consistency. He didn't go in for politics in a big way; and his donors had the satisfaction of seeing the (sometimes literally) concrete results of their donations: new missions, new ministers, and over-the-top futuristic new buildings at Oral Roberts University campus (the aesthetic of which suggested that the Jetsons were expected to settle on the Oklahoma prairie). The Tulsa university got a sterling reputation for training capable pastors, many of whom (like Joel Osteen, Ron Luce, Ted Haggard, and Carleton Pearson) went on to lead some of the country's biggest megachurches and fundamentalist organizations.

Mindful of their working-class audience, the Roberts carefully avoided the ostentation that characterized the Bakkers and the more recent Prosperity Gospel preachers. Roberts had his moments of deliciously delirious promotional excess (God allegedly commissioned him to cure cancer in 1983; and returned in 1987 to hold him for $8 million in ransom money, which he raised with some to spare); but in the bizarro world of televangelism, he was actually a bit more down-to-earth than most.

One of Roberts' unique attributes was that he laid out plan for his own succession -- and then actually carried it off. His handsome and charismatic son, Richard, had grown up before the faithful's eyes singing as a teenager on Dad's TV show. It seemed comfortable and easy (as these things go) when Richard began stepping up in the early 90s to take over pieces of the empire. Now, Dad's retired to California, and Richard runs the whole show.

Given all that history, it's kind of sad, in a twisted schadenfreude sort of way, to note this item from the AP's Justin Juozapavicius:

Richard Roberts is accused of illegal involvement in a local political campaign and lavish spending at donors' expense, including numerous home remodeling projects, use of the university jet for his daughter's senior trip to the Bahamas, and a red Mercedes convertible and a Lexus SUV for his wife, Lindsay.

She is accused of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, awarding nonacademic scholarships to friends of her children and sending scores of text messages on university-issued cell phones to people described in the lawsuit as "underage males."....San Antonio televangelist John Hagee, a member of the ORU board of regents, said the university's executive board "is conducting a full and thorough investigation."

...The allegations are contained in a lawsuit filed Tuesday by three former professors. They sued ORU and Roberts, alleging they were wrongfully dismissed after reporting the school's involvement in a local political race.

Richard Roberts, according to the suit, asked a professor in 2005 to use his students and university resources to aid a county commissioner's bid for Tulsa mayor. Such involvement would violate state and federal law because of the university's nonprofit status. Up to 50 students are alleged to have worked on the campaign.

The professors also said their dismissals came after they turned over to the board of regents a copy of a report documenting moral and ethical lapses on the part of Roberts and his family. The internal document was prepared by Stephanie Cantese, Richard Roberts' sister-in-law, according to the lawsuit.

An ORU student repairing Cantese's laptop discovered the document and later provided a copy to one of the professors.

It details dozens of alleged instances of misconduct. Among them:

• Mrs. Roberts — who is a member of the board of regents and is referred to as ORU's "first lady" on the university's Web site — frequently had cell-phone bills of more than $800 per month, with hundreds of text messages sent between 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. to "underage males who had been provided phones at university expense."

• The university jet was used to take one daughter and several friends on a senior trip to Orlando, Fla., and the Bahamas. The $29,411 trip was billed to the ministry as an "evangelistic function of the president."

• Mrs. Roberts spent more than $39,000 at one Chico's clothing store alone in less than a year, and had other accounts in Texas and California. She also repeatedly said, "As long as I wear it once on TV, we can charge it off." The document cites inconsistencies in clothing purchases and actual usage on TV.

• Mrs. Roberts was given a white Lexus SUV and a red Mercedes convertible by ministry donors.

• University and ministry employees are regularly summoned to the Roberts' home to do the daughters' homework.

• The Roberts' home has been remodeled 11 times in the past 14 years.

This story's got it all. The corruption charge is almost small potatoes, when you consider the ways mega-churches all over the country routinely dance all over lines of the IRS's no-politicking rules. But Mrs. Roberts' extravagance (you have to wonder why she didn't just cut a promo deal with Chico's to provide her with a show wardrobe, like almost everybody else in TV does), plus that oh-so-discreet hint of improper behavior with male students (ORU's mascot is the golden eagle, not the cougar), plus the fact that this laundry list of sins against the family business was compiled by a family member, all point to a pile of tantalizing hints that the old man may soon live to see his empire go down in the biggest blaze of money, sex, and greed since Heritage USA. In the meantime, sports fans, stock up on popcorn.

As with the Bakkers' empire, the real tragedy here is that those eleven remodels and $30,000 vacations and fabulous shopping bills are financed by the Roberts clan's donors -- most of them working-class or retired people who live on macaroni and peanut butter and nick bits out of their retirement accounts so they can scrape together an extra $20 a month to help the good reverend in his Great Work. The Roberts family's entire fortune is built on the mites of widows who sent the money gladly, trusting in their stewardship and believing it would be used to reach loftier goals than private jet vacations and ponies for the kids.

These people, like the victims of televangelists all the way back to Aimee, were cheated, lied to, and swindled. Somewhere along the line, the Roberts clan apparently lost sight of the calluses on the hands that fed their sweet lives, and came to regard their supporters as simple marks to be taken for whatever they were worth. The only thing that wasn't contemptible about these people, it seems, was their money.

And maybe that was inevitable. As John Dean's been forcefully arguing lately, whenever you put conservatives in charge of government, you will very soon find your government mired in corruption and scandal. As the long history of imploding televangelists shows, there's probably a corollary to Dean's Law of Corruption that applies to the inevitable corruption of conservative-run religious enterprises as well.

My interview with Medved

-- by Dave

I did a phone interview with Michael Medved earlier this week about his column on slavery in America, and you can read the transcript today at Crosscut. There's a full set of links there to some of the other reaction in the blogosphere.

Some thoughts on the interview:

I'd researched the background on this and noticed that the slavery piece was the second part of a series beginning with an earlier piece about the "myth" of Native American genocide. (I've written recently on this topic myself,.) So I approached the matter curious to see what Medved's argument was based on, since I've heard similar arguments emanating from the neo-Confederate/home-schooling set based on purely spurious work.

Medved, at least, builds his case on facts taken from some serious historians, including David Brion Davis and Guenter Lewy. Mind you, his approach is highly selective, and his opening, and central, argument is dubious at best. But as he points out, he's not being just wacky.

And just for the record: Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" response left me scratching my head: "Ah, hey Mike -- you hear about Appomatox Courthouse? Jefferson Davis getting arrested? Michael, good God, go back to reviewing movies!" Well, I get it: He's suggesting Medved is a Confederate sympathizer unaware that his side lost. Still, Davis was never arrested that I'm aware of, and the surrender of the Confederate Army at Appomatox doesn't have anything to do with Medved's argument, which is about America's relative virtue when it comes to slavery. I'm not taking Medved's side, but we do need to argue honestly.

On that score, however, I think it's important to take stock of Medved's approach, which isn't quite Malkinesque but still something of an abuse of the historical record. Simultaneously, his argument is morally muddled at best.

See, for instance, this exchange:

Neiwert: I think the line that caught a lot of people’s attention was the following: “Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of these voyages involves the fact that no slave traders wanted to see this level of deadly suffering: they benefited only from delivering (and selling) live slaves, not from tossing corpses into the ocean.” It’s hard not to read that as saying that this was a horrible thing for the slave owners to go through.

Medved: No, that’s not what I meant at all, and obviously I’ll want to reword that. What I’m saying is that it is horrifying that they had the level of death that they did in the Middle Passage given the fact that they had every interest in keeping people alive. In other words, when you talk about estimates, and I acknowledge, in my piece, that up to one third of slaves in the Middle Passage perished – when you’re dealing with that kind of death when it is clearly not deliberate, then it is even more horrifying than it would have been if it had been deliberate. Because what it suggests is that the conditions were so abysmal and that the risks of oceangoing transport were so huge at that time, that even with every motivation in the world to keep people alive they were unable to do it.

I'm sorry, but I'd frankly have found it more horrifying if it had been intentional, but the callousness that wrought these inhumane conditions is indeed quite horrific as well. Moreover, these slave traders knew full well before embarking that many aboard were going to die and calculated the costs accordingly -- which is to say, there was a full measure of intention in these deaths regardless of the magic of the marketplace and profit motives. Medved's distinction is so fine and so dubious that you have to wonder why he bothers drawing it.

Then check the point in the interview where we start discussing Col. John Chivington (of "Nits make lice" infamy) and the Sand Creek Massacre, and he says:

OK, let’s break it down. Who was Col. Chivington?

DN: He was the commander of the Colorado Militia at the time.

MM: So then he was not a government – in other words, this is like, if you will, the 19th-century equivalent of the Minutemen. This is not official government policy. The Army had a very different attitude. And again, in that case, no one would ever claim that there weren’t cruelties and that there wasn’t mistreatment, but to suggest that there was a genocidal policy going all the way back to the early days of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Department of the Interior -- Carl Schurz was the Secretary of the Interior in the Hayes Administration and he was actually criticized because they said that he was too compassionate.

This description of the role of the Colorado Militia at Sand Creek borders on the nonsensical. In point of fact, militias were the main form of organized military force in America at the time and had been for most of its history up until (the United States did not create a standing army until after the turn of the 20th century). Suggesting that Chivington's fully armed and drilled militia unit was somehow comparable to the band of xenophobic vigilantes who call themselves the Minutemen is ludicrous to the point of dishonesty.

In point of fact, Chivington's militia was not only the representative of the local government -- and certainly the popular will in Colorado, avidly cheered on by the local press -- the Army officers involved played a dubious role in setting up the Sand Creek Massacre as well. I give a reasonably full description of the sequence of events here. As I note there:

Whatever sympathy some humanitarian whites may have had for the natives, they were utterly ineffectual in stopping the wave of murderous bigotry that swept away all their good intentions along with the Indians themselves, fueled by the prevailing view of Indians that equated them with the beasts they encountered in this wilderness.

These encounters increased, of course, because the "permanent Indian frontier" turned out to be a very flexible concept indeed. As the Americans' thirst for land and for gold grew, so did the borders of the frontier shift ever westward, consumed by treaties that often were mere ruses for outright land theft. A promise made to an Indian was innately nonbinding. The murder of an Indian was considered, if not a non-event, cause for celebration; but any retaliatory murder of whites provoked indiscriminate slaughter and justified the genocide of entire peoples.

... This pattern repeated itself almost endlessly. Rather than even endure contact with "savages" they fully expected to turn against them and murder them, the settlers moving westward in the end always chose to act preemptively and slaughter Indians as they found them. This was particularly the case wherever gold entered into the picture.

And always, this spasm of eliminationist violence was preceded by eliminationist rhetoric. Before there was action, there was talk. And the talk not only rationalized the violence that proceeded, but actually had the function of creating permission for it.

The Chivington case was particularly illustrative, because fueling the whole tragedy was the bloodlust for wiping out the Indians on the part of the large majority of settlers -- that is, they fully intended to commit genocide and had no compunction whatsoever about it:

Chivington and his men returned to Denver in triumph, claiming to have killed five hundred warriors -- instead of ninety-eight women and children and a handful of mostly old men. The Rocky Mountain News pronounced it a "brilliant feat of arms." "All did nobly," Chivington said, and one evening during intermission at the Denver opera house, one hundred Cheyenne scalps were put on display while the orchestra played patriotic airs and the audience stood to applaud the men who had taken them.

As word of these atrocities got out, there was a perhaps predictable outcry from white Americans with some vestige of human decency; but their outrage, as always, had no effect. The killers were downright gleeful about their "victory." David E. Stannard, in American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, notes that the Rocky Mountain News declared that "Cheyenne scalps are getting as thick here now as toads in Egypt. Everybody has got one and is anxious to get another to send east."

Still, there was an outcry in Congress, and a Senate report eventually declared Chivington's "battle" what it really was: "a foul and dastardly massacre which would have disgraced the veriest savage among those who were the victims of his cruelty." As Stannard notes [p. 134]:

One of them, a senator who visited the site of the massacre and "picked up the skulls of infants whose milk-teeth had not yet been shed," later reported that the concerned men of Congress had decided to confront Colorado's governor and Colonel Chivington openly on the matter, and so assembled their committee and the invited general public in the Denver Opera House. During the course of discussion and debate, someone raised a question: Would it be best, henceforward, to try to "civilize" the Indians or simply to exterminate them? Whereupon, the senator wrote in a letter to a friend, "there suddenly arose such a shout as is never heard unless upon some battlefield -- a shout almost loud enough to raise the roof of the opera house -- 'EXTERMINATE THEM! EXTERMINATE THEM!' "

The committee, apparently, was impressed. Nothing was ever done to Chivington, who took his fame and exploits on the road as an after-dinner speaker. After all, as President Theodore Roosevelt said later, the Sand Creek massacre was "as righteous and beneficial a deed as ever took place on the frontier."

It's important to understand that this was hardly isolated to Colorado -- in fact, these attitudes were extremely common among whites throughout the West, and they informed the government's actions nearly every step of the way. (Thus Teddy's avid approval.)

And where those steps took the United States was in fact the near-complete extermination of American Indians. The federal government's stated policy may never have been so bald as to outright advocate murder (this was not the case with local government officials, who often were quite upfront about it), but "plausible deniability" existed long before the term came along to describe it. What a detailed look at the record consistently reveals is that government officials, both federal and local, endorsed and undertook policies that directly, and often deliberately, led to armed confrontations with American Indians the latter could not win and which guaranteed their murder under the aegis of "war."

In other words, all the moral relativism innate in the notion that the lack of official evil intent and the presence of liberal good intentions (yes, Michael, the opponents of slavery and mistreatment of the Indians were all liberals in their time) somehow excused the actual outcome is washed away in the stark realities that slavery, with all its attendant inhumanity and death, was a significant founding institution of America, and that the conquest of American lands against its native inhabitants was infected throughout with a popular impulse to exterminate them with extreme prejudice -- an impulse that in fact won out.

And this is what's wrong with Medved's overarching argument: He wants to "normalize" these travesties so that those who want to tout the greatness of the American can do so unfettered. To wit:

Those who want to discredit the United States and to deny our role as history’s most powerful and pre-eminent force for freedom, goodness and human dignity invariably focus on America’s bloody past as a slave-holding nation. Along with the displacement and mistreatment of Native Americans, the enslavement of literally millions of Africans counts as one of our two founding crimes—and an obvious rebuttal to any claims that this Republic truly represents “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

Medved's argument seems clearly to be a defense of American exceptionalism, and his defense falls woefully short. Medved openly admits that slavery was a misbegotten institution, and that Native Americans were inhumanely mistreated, yet his argument basically is that it wasn't as bad as some critics would make it out to be. Perhaps not, but it's nonetheless quite bad; ethnic cleansing may not be as egregious a sin as genocide, yet if its outcome is the same, what exactly is the moral difference anyway? Good intentions that bring about mass death are a travesty regardless.

What most of the critics of this exceptionalism actually like to point out is not so much that we are hopelessly corrupt, but that we really aren't all that exceptional. Yes, we have great things to be proud of, but we also have ugly mistakes to be ashamed of. That makes us a lot more like everyone else.

The historical record -- the full record, and not just snippets -- simply demonstrates that the America's claims to moral greatness are more tenuous than we pretend. The notion that we are "history’s most powerful and pre-eminent force for freedom, goodness and human dignity" is complicated by the reality that at times we Americans have represented the opposites of freedom, goodness, and dignity.

Just ask the people of Iraq.

The GOP's wide stance

-- by Dave

From Colin McEnroe we get news of the Republican Party's new logo for its 2008 Convention.

Really. It's not a joke. And yes, it's just your filthy imagination that the elephant seems to be doing something to the 2008.

It does seem inspired by Larry Craig, for some reason. And since this convention is in Minneapolis, that only makes it doubly fitting.

You'll have to forgive us, however, if we get it confused with previous GOP logos. For instance:

The lonely haters

-- by Dave

Peter Rugg, a reporter for The Pitch, an alternative newsweekly in Kansas City, recently went undercover to report on a local Klan group.

This is not a reportorial technique I recommend. I know a lot of people question the ethics of deceptiveness in the course of fact gathering as a journalist, though I notice that most of the handwringing in these cases is done by people with all the investigative instincts God gave Elmer Fudd. Still, going undercover to check out Nazis can be bad for your health, so I don't recommend it. (Same with, say, Latin American drug cartels and Middle Eastern terrorist groups.) So I have to tip my hat to brave souls like Rugg.

It's an excellent and fairly clear-eyed portrait of what these groups -- which usually consist of a tiny handful of fairly pathetic souls -- are like in real life:

Turk was short and fat, and the black hat he wore was stitched with a skull and bones. The visible sides of his head had been shaved, but when he turned, I could see the end of a limp mohawk. He giggled when he said "nigger" or "Jew," like a little kid with a pornographic picture, not quite understanding what he sees but sure it's something naughty. His face swelled up like a bullfrog whenever this happened. He ordered a glass of beer.

"Independence used to be real Klan-friendly," he told me. "People would just pick up the phone book and randomly call people, asking them about joining the Klan or telling them about us. And they wouldn't hang up. I go down to the Apple Market there once a month or so and put up some literature on the community bulletin board. Most times when I go back, it's still there. Maybe people don't notice it."

"So how'd you decide to join up?" I asked.

"I used to live in San Antonio until five years ago, and we just had all these wetbacks moving in. And I couldn't get a parking spot on my own street, they'd bring so many of them to live with them," he said. "Then one day, I saw chickens in one of their yards. I think there was even a fucking goose. That was it for me."

"Wow, a goose?" I marveled that someone would join a hate group based on a lack of parking.

"A fucking goose. I couldn't take it anymore. So I joined up. My wife wasn't too happy about it. I'm divorced now. But then she'd tell me to take my Knights diploma down because I kept that up on the bedroom wall. And I have a bloodstained Confederate flag wallpaper on my computer, and she'd get nervous her parents would see that when they came to visit."

Turk worked occasionally as a substitute teacher. He planned to get a teaching degree and work in education full time. But his day job was in customer service at a drug company in downtown Kansas City.

That's just a snippet. The whole piece is worth reading.

Meanwhile, this weekend's Hammerfest gathering of skinheads in Portland -- at an as-yet-undisclosed location -- should be a pretty tiny little hatefest:

Portland State University sociology prof Randy Blazak, chair of the Portland-based Coalition Against Hate Crimes, would be surprised if Volksfront’s card-carrying members topped 50.

“They’re probably getting smaller all the time,” he says.

Blazak says Hammerskin Nation might have picked Portland for its event because groups like it have long looked to the region for the so-called “Northwest Imperative.” The imperative is the two-decade-old idea started by the white supremacist group Aryan Nations that Oregon, Washington and Idaho will someday secede to create an autonomous Aryan homeland.

It's probably the same little clutch of folks who brought us the Nazifest in Olympia last year. Plus or minus a few.

Of course, that's the thing about these characters: laugh all we like, it only takes a few of them to make a lot of trouble. Four years ago, a couple of Hammerskin concertgoers at a similar gig near Portland warmed up for the festivities by assaulting a young black man.

I've been busy

-- by Dave

Some of you may have noticed that I began guest-blogging this week at The Big Con, Rick Perlstein's blog for the Campaign for America's Future. I was pleased and honored when Rick asked if I'd like to be a regular contributor -- I'm a big fan of both his journalistic work and his blog. I'll be posting on Mondays, and it'll all be original content, so be sure to look for it there, though I'll be posting links here as well.

The first one went up yesterday: The Right's Base Behavior

Enjoy!

And while I'm at it, be sure to check out a piece I published last week at Crosscut examining how well Seattle police are handling bias-crime investigations. I put a lot of work into this one, and even though it's about local police work, I think you'll be able to see it has broader ramifications:

Crimes of hate: Sometimes justice is blind to the obvious

In the meantime, stay tuned for our regular postings ...

Oprah the Nazi

-- by Dave

As Sara just noted, there's a terrific post by Glenn Greenwald about the right's increasing tendency to call liberals (and anyone else it disagrees with) "Nazis" and similar epithets.

And if you want a crystal-clear example of this, Spocko once again caught a radio talk-show host -- in this case, Bryan Suits of Seattle's KVI-AM actually calling Oprah Winfrey a Nazi:

Does the fact that only Barak Obama is -- well, the only presidential candidate that will appear on Oprah's show, does that make her a Nazi racist? Is it mutually exclusive that a black woman can be a also a Nazi? I don't think so. I frankly think she is a Nazi.

... I think she has a right to do what she is going to do, I think it makes her a racist though. And I'm not goin' use any kind of coded language or whatever. Anyone can be a racist, we all understand that right? Anyone can be prejudiced and I think she's prejudiced. I I don't think that Barak Obama is anything except a guy who's capable of of well-delivered high sounding rhetoric, but when one asks him for specifics eh his depth suddenly shows itself.

So, the fact that Oprah not only, and I don't have, I throughly understand why a racist would support someone of their own race. I get that, but the fact that she's excluding other candidates first of all-- as someone with a talk show I'll tell you yeah it's her right but it means something, it is revealing something, it's revealing that you are close minded. So if somebody can take her side, and like I say, I know that none of you watch Oprah, certainly no men do, but your friends do, so if you can explain to me why your friends don't think that she's a racist Nazi fraud, I'm curious, but like I say, it is her right.

Good God, where to begin?

First, it has to be pointed out that Nazism is specifically a white-supremacist ideology. Unless Oprah is actually supporting someone who spouts that belief system and openly endorses it herself -- which would mean, roughly, that hell had become an arctic tundra -- it's not even remotely accurate to call her a Nazi.

As someone who reports on and deals with the activities of very real Nazis, this kind of nonsense is extremely aggravating, because as I've been arguing for some time, this kind of rhetorical laziness -- which also is not uncommon on the left, frankly -- not only is patently absurd, it actually distorts, disguises, and downplays the very real harm and social havoc wreaked by these kinds of hate groups. As Sara says, "it also drains the political meaning out of the words we use to analyze and describe fascism, opening the way to a total reversal of their historic meanings."

Real Nazis -- and real racists of all stripes -- do not merely indulge in coy alliances with people of their own race. They also constantly belittle people of other races, constantly depict them as vicious and diseased subhumans, constantly concoct bizarre "conspiracies" in which these "vermin" are engaged to destroy the superior race (namely, theirs).

Let's look at Bryan Suits' Bizarro Universe logic: He's claiming that Winfrey's open support of Obama is de facto evidence of her racism -- even though he will not be able to find a single show, or even a single line of transcript, indicating that she's doing so because he is black. No, according to Suits, we can presume that this is the case simply because Winfrey is black too.

So let's use a little Bryan Suits Logic here. If we can presume that Winfrey prefers Obama because he is black, can we similarly presume that Suits opposes him for the same reason? After all, he says: "I throughly understand why a racist would support someone of their own race."

Let's continue with the same logic: The Republican Party is only running white candidates -- candidates who can't even bring themselves to participate in a debate on minority issues -- and we all know the reasons why. I guess that must make the GOP the Nazi Party. Right, Bryan?

Well, forget all this nonsense. Here's the truth:

Oprah is neither a racist nor a Nazi, and there's nothing innately racist in her support of Obama, no more than Republicans' support of exclusively white candidates.

And Bryan Suits is a grotesquely irresponsible smear merchant who has no business being on the air.

If you feel like letting Suits' bosses at Fisher Communications know how you feel, here's their contact info:

FISHER COMMUNICATIONS, INC.
100 4th Ave North
Suite 510
Seattle, WA 98109
206.404.7000

Larry Roberts—Vice President and General Manager
140 4th Ave North
Seattle, WA 98109
206.404.4000

Or you can just contact the station itself.

Stealing Fascism

Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels

-- by Sara

Over at Salon this morning, Glenn Greenwald makes the case that the past several months have seen an escalation of right-wing rhetoric that's blatantly attempting to link words like "Nazi," "fascist," "Gestapo," and "holocaust" with the behavior of the left.

He documents this trend chapter and verse, from Bill O'Reilly blasting of Daily Kos as a Naziesque hate site to Tammy Bruce calling Jane Hamsher (of all people) out as a "fascist" and MoveOn.org as a "Gestapo" organization. Evidently, Fox News's commentators have seized on this meme with gusto, and are running with it as far as they can make it stretch.

What's especially interesting about this, says Glenn, is that there was a time not so long ago (as recently as last spring, in fact, as Dick Durbin could tell you), that groups like the Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League instantly set the dogs on anybody who engaged in this kind of rhetoric. They saw clearly that setting up these kinds of equivalencies could only trivialize the unspeakable horrors that the Nazis perpetrated, and dangerously dilute the serious denotations and connotations these words carry for us. But, says Glenn, that's not the case any more:

Now, however, "Nazi" and "Hitler" comparisons have become, by far, the most common political insult on the Right, and these same Jewish advocacy groups are defeaningly silent. It is not merely that every new country on which the Right's war-crazed faction wants to wage war is "Nazi Germany" and every new leader -- or even every political functionary -- that does not submit completely to America's will is "Hitler." That is true, and it provokes no protests. But the casual, indiscriminate use of "Hitler" and "Nazism" as political exploitation is much more pervasive even than that.

Just in the past few months alone, there is virtually no prominent anti-war or liberal group that has not been branded as Hitler and Nazis by the most influential factions on the Right. If one's goal were to trivialize Hitler and Nazism and the Holocaust, one would do exactly what the Right is doing -- brand every political opponent as Hitler and Nazis on a virtually daily basis. Yet the groups that have anointed themselves proprietors of those terms, and which have in the past expressed such righteous outrage when those terms were used against the Right, sit by meekly and silently.

Glenn's absolutely right -- as far as he goes. But since Orcinus' core mission, from the start, has been to analyze the appropriate use of these words and concepts in the modern American context -- and to exchange heat for light where their wrong-headed use is concerned -- I'd like to take Glenn's point another step further.

Letting the right get away with this doesn't just trivialize the horrors of Nazism. Worse, in the long run: it also drains the political meaning out of the words we use to analyze and describe fascism, opening the way to a total reversal of their historic meanings.

The bald historical truth is that fascism always comes out of the right wing. Its proponents are, on one hand, economic royalists working their will by merging their corporations with the government; and on the other, rural True Believers willing to commit violence to perpetuate their own serfdom. Dave's been making the point here for upwards of five years that America will not be a fascist state until the merging of these two factions takes place. Until then, the current right-wing government can best be described as "proto-fascist" -- a situation in which most of the ingredients of fascism are present, but the actual catalyst that pulls them into a coherent and functioning system of government has not yet occurred.

While leftists can certainly be totalitarians (as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao amply demonstrated), they're not fascist. The right wing is often confused on this point; but we should not be. The 20th-century communist experiments threw the corporations overboard, and relied on bureaucracy and urban-based secret police rather than rural thugs to keep people in line. It's the same authoritarian impulse -- and thus no less ugly in the end -- but it's not correct to call it fascist.

This is how fascism has been defined by political scientists and historians around the world for upwards of 80 years now -- and this is the definition that Fox News and its spittle-flecked minions are messing with. Trivializing the language of fascism, and thus severing it from its long-held meanings, is the first step.

But the deeper danger here is that it softens us up for the next step, which is to re-define those words in ways that they apply exclusively to the left.

If the right can pull off this semantic trick, they win in two ways. First, we will no longer be able to have serious conversations -- like the ones we've had here for the past four-plus years -- about the very real ways in which American conservatives are pulling us toward genuine fascism. They'll have stolen away the language that will allow us to convict them of their crimes against democracy. We won't be able to measure their deeds by holding them up against those of previous right-wing authoritarians -- the comparisons will be simply impossible, because the definitions of the terms will be too murky to be useful. Or worse: they'll now mean something else entirely.

(The seething motivation behind this attempt at re-definition becomes all too clear when you recall that Robert Paxton, the leading scholar on the history of fascism, believes that first fascist organization in history was the KKK -- which brought together the political (and sometimes blood) ancestors of the very same people who are trying to pull off this definitional double-shuffle now.)

Which brings us to the second threat. Having stolen these words, they will then be able to turn them back on us -- and we will be totally unable to answer their charges. We will be the new "Gestapo," trying to perpetrate a "holocaust" against Christians and conservatives and unborn Americans and anybody who feels threatened by fact and reason. And, as Dave has often argued, this is precisely the kind of rhetoric that always precedes eliminationist campaigns. If the right wing can convince the average American that liberals are the real "Nazis" who must be purged from their midst, they'll have scored a stunning propaganda coup -- one which will justify all manner of violence against anyone who disagrees with them.

The sobering thing about this is that this kind of semantic theft is a well-known stock-in-trade of real fascists. The very fact that they're even trying this is absolutely typical of the breed as historians and scholars understand it. We know they can do it: we've already watched them steal words like "freedom," "Christianity," "rights," "justice," and even "life" itself away from us. In stealing the very meaning out of our language, they are also stealing our voices -- which ensures that if the day comes when they'd rather act than talk, we will be rendered completely mute, unable to make people understand our protests no matter how loudly we scream.

One to watch for

-- by Dave

Here's a film I'm going to make sure I see. It's titled Banished:

It is not just historical accident that Boone County, which includes Harrison, has only 40 or so African-Americans among its 34,000 residents. Nor that Forsyth County, Ga., Washington County, Ind., Pierce City, Mo., and dozens of other counties and municipalities in the Midwest and South are nearly or totally all-white today. From the end of the Civil War through the 1920s, many rural communities systematically purged their black residents, driving them out with implicit or explicit threats of violence. Sometimes these blacks were allowed to sell their land, albeit under duress and at discount prices. Often they were simply driven off, forced to abandon homes and land and flee for their lives.

Hardly anyone now living witnessed these events, but as Williams' film forcefully demonstrates, the wounds have nowhere near healed. Descendants of displaced African-Americans have passed the stories down as formative family legend, and while whites are far more eager to bury the past, many remain uncomfortably aware that something unsavory lingers at the farthest edges of community memory.

Williams focuses on three areas with distinct and disparate histories: Forsyth County today is a bedroom community on the outer suburban fringe of Atlanta, anxious to present itself as part of the tolerant New South, unshackled from the past. Yet Forsyth was the site of one of the most extensive ethnic cleansing campaigns anywhere in the country; as recently as 1987, a multiracial Martin Luther King Day march was viciously attacked by an angry white mob. Meanwhile, the descendants of black landowners driven out in 1912 have begun to seek restitution or reparations for land that was apparently stolen from them, a movement vigorously resisted by white legal and political authorities.

... Back in Bob Scott's Arkansas town, the racism is more overt than in other communities. Williams has a surprisingly polite conversation with Thom Robb, head of the local Ku Klux Klan, who amiably tells him that cross burning is an ancient Scottish rite (not, of course, an act of racial hatred) but that on the whole he thinks Harrison is better off as a white town. At the same time, Harrison's white residents have done more to confront the problem than anyone in the other two areas: Local preachers have held days of prayer and atonement; volunteers helped renovate a black church in a neighboring county; a scholarship was established for African-American student-athletes from other towns.

"Banished" offers a startling tour into an unforgotten history that remains invisible to most Americans, with the erudite Williams, who is simultaneously polite and confrontational, as our host. It would be ludicrous to suggest that he doesn't take sides: Williams clearly believes that a major historical crime has been swept under the rug, and his film is loaded with moments of understated emotional power. When the black Strickland family of Atlanta find a neglected and overgrown family burial ground on white-owned land in Forsyth County, and kneel there in prayer not far from the current residents' Confederate-flag-bedecked pickup, all the legal questions and ethical quandaries fade into the background.

It sounds like the hidden history of 'sundown towns' is finally bubbling its way to the surface. And not a moment too soon.

Bias crimes: At the heart of the divide

-- by Dave

The Jena 6 marches and their aftermath took a lot of people by surprise, and not just liberal bloggers (myself included). I think the folks most taken aback were the wingnutosphere and their audience, i.e., comfortably smug white conservatives, the kind who think The Bell Curve "made sense" -- embodied by John Gibson and Bill O'Reilly -- who were all, "Wha? Huh? What racism? I thought racism didn't really exist anymore!"

Somewhat serendipitously, the marches took place just before the Senate made its historic vote passing a federal hate-crimes law that appears doomed to a George W. Bush veto -- typically, on the flimsiest of rationales. No one in the media or among the pundit class seemed to notice (indeed, the hate-crimes vote barely appeared on the radar), but there actually was a profound connection between the two events.

Most of the debate over this bill has focused so far on its addition of a bias against gays and lesbians to the categories of hate-crime motives. This is what has gotten the religious right into an uproar, claiming -- quite illogically and falsely, as Rick Perlstein has explained in some detail (as have I -- that somehow laws against bias crimes somehow create "thought crimes."

What's been obscured in this uproar is the reality of what the bill would actually accomplish -- namely, federalizing a broad range of bias crimes involving violence against not merely gays and lesbians but blacks, Jews, Muslims, even whites and Christians.

Mind you, the legislation is carefully written to emphasize helping local law enforcement do its job -- provide training, help identify bias crimes, provide funds for strapped prosecutors -- and it specifically defers to local jurisdictions. At the same time it makes it possible for federal authorities to move in when local law enforcement fails to do so, particularly in any of the seven states that have no bias-crime law.

What that means is that if the act were somehow to survive Bush's veto, travesties like the all-too-archetypical handling of the murder of Sasezly Richardson in Indiana a few years back -- Indiana has no hate-crimes law, and so his killers were not charged with that -- would not be as likely to occur. (The same is true in Wyoming, where Matthew Shepard, for whom the law is named, was murdered.) Prosecutors and cops would cease being quite so likely to dismiss crime scenes as potential bias crimes, and treat obvious hate crimes as just "boys being boys."

This is what was happening in Jena, where the prosecutor gave the following excuse for treating white kids involved in the escalating racial tensions differently than blacks:

District Attorney Reed Walters, who is prosecuting the case, said Wednesday that race had nothing to do with the charges.

He said he didn’t charge the white students accused of hanging the nooses because he could find no Louisiana law under which they could be charged. In the beating case, he said, four of the defendants were of adult age under Louisiana law and the only juvenile charged as an adult, Mychal Bell, had a prior criminal record.

“It is not and never has been about race,” Walters said. “It is about finding justice for an innocent victim and holding people accountable for their actions.”

Of course, as Steven D at Booman notes, this is a prosecutor who believes Jena was narrowly spared a horrific rampage by violent black thugs only by the grace of Jesus' hand. Sounds like he and Bill O'Reilly would have a great time together at a black restaurant.

But even presuming the best of intentions on the part of this prosecutor, there's really no escaping the fact, as Jeralyn at TalkLeft has detailed, that he absurdly overcharged the young black men involved in the beating that resulted in their arrest at the center of the controversy. Perhaps even more importantly, he turned a real blind eye to the criminal misbehavior of the town's young white men that played a real role in the escalating racial tension in Jena. As I already noted:

Actually, of course, the young white men who hung the noose could be charged with a number of crimes under Lousiana statute, particularly criminal intimidation and threatening with a bias motive, i.e., a hate crime. But like a lot of white prosecutors, it's easier to see such behavior as "boys will be boys" when the perps are white than when they're black.

Even giving Reed Walters the most generous benefit of the doubt, it's clear that both he and the law officers at the scene of the nooses slung over the "white tree," as well as subsequent confrontations (including one in which a young white man brandished a gun and had it wrested away from him by some of the black men he was pointing it at -- resulting in the arrest of the black men for "theft" of the gun), failed to identify or investigate these incidents as potential hate crimes.

But then, they're hardly singular in that regard. Indeed, the under-investigation and under-reportage of bias crimes is a widespread national problem. I published a piece earlier this week at Crosscut examining the extent to which Seattle police may be mishandling bias crimes when they encounter them, and as I explained then:

Crimes go unreported and uninvestigated all the time, of course, but when it happens with bias crimes, the result is especially poisonous for the larger community. Bias crimes are understood by experts to cause greater harm than ordinary crimes on three levels: the immediate victim, who typically sustains extraordinary psychological harm in addition to the extreme levels of violence that often occur in such cases; the minority community that is the larger target of the crimes, the underlying intent being to terrorize and drive them out; and the larger community, which then must wrestle with a blackened reputation and the internal animus and ethnic distrust created by the crimes.

So when police fail to respond adequately, the victim feels isolated, the target community believes it is not getting justice and can't trust authorities to provide it, and the larger community finds whatever bridges exist between ethnic communities are crumbling under the weight.

As the piece explains, even a progressive city like Seattle whose police officials publicly endorse the serious pursuit of bias crimes can have problems handling them appropriately:

The underreportage of bias crimes is a widespread national problem. Some of the experts who've studied the issue say that while FBI statistics report about 8,000 bias crimes annually, the actual number might be closer to 50,000 a year. The problem is most severe in rural areas, where bias-crime prosecutions are a genuine rarity, but even in urban areas like Seattle bias crimes go unreported and uninvestigated fairly routinely.

A 2000 Department of Justice study looked at the underreporting of bias crimes and identified some of the causes:

-- Fear of negative publicity, especially the kind that can damage a community's reputation, often motivates officers and prosecutors to quietly treat obvious hate crimes as their lesser "ordinary" counterparts.

-- Confusion about the definition of hate crimes and which acts need reporting, particularly arising from the many differences among various state laws and the murky federal statutes.

-- Miscommunication between local and state reporting agencies, with the latter often reporting a bias crime simply as its parallel crime.

-- "False zeroes," or the reporting of zero crimes within a jurisdiction that in fact failed to report at all, which further skews the data regarding the actual rate at which hate crimes occur.

-- The natural reluctance of victims (especially gays and lesbians who may fear being "outed," or immigrants who might fear deportation) to report hate crimes or pursue charges, and the common failure of law-enforcement officials to either recognize or deal appropriately with this reluctance.

-- A significant lack of training in identifying and investigating hate crimes, as well as in handling victims of the crimes. The smaller the department, the less likely it is to offer such training, which generally translates into severe undertraining in rural areas.

-- A hostility to, or ignorance about, the concept of hate-crime laws, and a general over-eagerness to dismiss the bias aspects of crimes as a mostly "political" determination.

This last factor is especially potent among beat officers whose choices at the scene of a crime can determine what evidence is gathered and what direction an investigation takes. There is a certain level of resistance to bias-crime laws among law-enforcement officers, largely fed by a lack of understanding and training. Because bias-crime laws are often portrayed — falsely, and usually by opponents — in the media as creating "special rights" and "protected categories," many police officers tend to see them as unnecessary genuflecting to the gods of political correctness and are reluctant to pursue evidence of them.

Prosecutors are vulnerable to similar biases and misconceptions as well. And in rural and suburban places -- places like Jena -- the problem is exponentially worse.

I examined this problem in some detail in my second book, Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crimes in America:

Perhaps the most significant feature of the DOJ's study's findings, from a larger cultural perspective, was that there was a close correlation between reporting of hate crimes and the level of training provided (some 75 percent of agencies that reported hate crimes also offered training, while less than 60 percent of the non-reporting and zero-reporting agencies offered any)—and simultaneously, found a correlation between hate-crime training and the size of the agency. The smaller the department, the less likely it is to provide such training—and likewise, less likely to report hate crimes.

Obscured by the numbers are their real-world ramifications for the American cultural landscape: the smaller the town, the smaller the department. This means in turn that, geographically speaking, the problem of hate crimes going not only underreported but uninvestigated and unprosecuted is most widespread in rural America. This coincides with the prevalence of anecdotes of unpursued bias crimes emanating from rural precincts. This in turn, makes the problem even more acute, since these same small towns may be the communities most vulnerable to suffering severe damage at the hands of hate-crime perpetrators.

Most significantly, this phenomenon in fact reflects the perceptions many minorities have of small, rural towns: that they are not safe for people of color or for gays. That if trouble were to erupt, there would be no one to help them, and law enforcement officers would be unsympathetic. That if someone were to commit a hate crime against them, there is a not unreasonable likelihood the perpetrator would get away with it.

The fear and suspicion with which rural denizens regard cities and their dwellers is a well-established American archetype. What is often less observed, but is equally true, is the sheer dread that rural America raises in the minds of those minorities whose populations are largely centered in urban areas. When they leave their familiar surroundings for the so-called heartland -- where some 83 percent of the population nationally is white -- it is often with real fear about what might befall them.

It is a mistrust bred partly of myth and partly of reality. Its consequences, whatever its cause, are profound on a broad scale, because its chief effect is to widen the already formidable cultural gap between white America and the rest of us.

I go on to describe an African American woman who is a Seattle Times columnist -- a brave and thoughtful person -- and her 2000 column detailing the abject fear she felt upon approaching the Idaho border. As I explain:

Perhaps of equal significance are the real-world ramifications of this fear for both minorities and the places they fear to visit: an impoverishment of the nation's democratic underpinnings. As expert Donald Green points out, hate crimes succeed in making the nation indeed a smaller place for people like Lynne Varner.

"I think if you had to kind of step back and ask, 'Does hate crime pay?,' you'd say yes," Green says. "If the point of hate crimes is to terrorize the population into maintaining boundaries between these perpetrators and the victimized populations, at least in some areas—certain parts of town, certain parts of the country, et cetera—you know, certain kinds of romantic relationships, whatever—then it does succeed in that. Because people really do feel that they have to constrain their behavior lest they open themselves up for attack. You know, gay men don't often hold hands in public. Black and white couples don't form spontaneously to the extent that you might expect based on their daily interactions.

"There are a lot of instances like that—and you know, we all probably have interactions with people who, when they're invited to a certain part of town, say, 'Oh, I better not go there.' From my standpoint, you tend not to attract much notice from policymakers, but I think of that as a massive dead-weight loss of freedom.

"Even if you say, 'Ah, well, they would have spent their money in this restaurant, maybe they'll spend their money in some other restaurant,' and so it's a wash, just the fact that people feel less than free in a free country is a tragedy."

Green also argues that even seemingly insignificant incidents—the kind police are prone to ignore or de-emphasize—can contribute to the cumulative effect. "If you see a swastika on an overpass, you say, 'Well, you know, it's just a bunch of kids blowing off steam, it doesn't really mean anything,' but when you start to think about the kind of cumulative effects that that would have on a variety of people, both perpetrators and victims, then the result is considerable.

"And that's why I think that, while there's a segment of the law-enforcement community -- and even people like me in an unguarded moment -- that will say that in some respects the hate crimes laws have been a flop, the laws in fact have a substantial basis in theory. And that theory is that if you could somehow put a value on that dead-weight loss in freedom, it actually would be a significant sum. And therefore it does pay society to deter this kind of activity."

Bias-crime laws are a way for society to make clear its condemnation of such acts, recognizing them as more heinous than simple crimes because they cause greater harm. Indeed, pretending as opponents do that a cross burned on the lawn is the same as being egged and toilet-papered, or that a gay-bashing rampage by young thugs is the same thing as a bar fight, simply tries to pretend away the truly hateful and terroristic element of the former of these, as though it doesn't exist. But it does exist, and its effects poison our society and make a joke out of our self-belief in ourselves as an "equal opportunity" society.

This, in the end, is the single clearest reason why progressives should avidly support a federal hate-crimes law: These are crimes whose primary purpose is to disenfranchise, to expel, to deny the most basic rights of association and opportunity to millions of Americans of all stripes. Civil libertarians need to come to grips with the fact that these crimes are real, their effects are real, and they represent, as Donald Green argues, a real "massive dead-weight loss of freedom" for those millions of Americans.

Americans lose their freedoms not just through government oppression; an honest appraisal of our history forces us to recognize that there is a substantial track record of Americans losing their freedoms (up to and including their lives) through the actions of their fellow citizens: the genocide of Native Americans; the long reign of terror of the "lynching era" and associated "sundown towns" that infected the entire nation; the expulsion and incarceration of Asian Americans; the long-running campaign of vicious hatred directed against gays and lesbians.

Hate crimes are an integral part of that history, and laws intended to punish their perpetrators with stiffer sentences are an important blow for the cause of very real and substantial freedoms for millions of Americans. Trying to argue that, in some esoteric sense, they constitute "thought crimes" that somehow deprive us of our freedoms (to what? commit crimes?) turns this reality on its head.

Yet progressives haven't yet figured out that framing hate-crime laws as a defense of people's civil liberties is precisely the argument that will instantly deflate the long-running "thought crime" argument. In all the debate over the legislation, I haven't seen the point raised once.

As long as small-town -- and even big-city -- law-enforcement officers labor under misconceptions about bias-crime laws and fail to properly identify, investigate, or prosecute them, places like Jena are going to fester. And this is where the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act comes in -- because its primary mission is to help local law cops and prosecutors do their job well -- by providing logistical and investigative support, grants, training, and other kinds of assistance.

It's important to fight for this law because it's a fundamental way of dealing with the racial divide in places like Jena -- and indeed, for the greater share of the American landscape. If the training available to small-town cops and prosecutors weren't enough to have helped them identify the bias crimes mounting in their midst, then at least the victims would have then had the option of seeking help from federal authorities, who could determine whether the case was properly handled by local authorities.

Without this kind of action, ethnic and other minorities are never going to trust that they will have access to equal justice in America. The already know, all too well, that racism and its ugly wounds continue to fester here, contrary to the comforting self-delusions of the O'Reillys and Gibsons of the world. Confronting bias crimes as the profoundly antidemocratic and unAmerican act they are is really only a decent first step in healing those wounds.

Hate-crime laws, as Death on the Fourth of July explains, are indeed relatively new insofar as they are now on the books. But attempts to pass laws like them date back to the anti-lynching laws of the 1920s and '30s.

And the reality is that they represent the kind of law that should have been on the books long ago, because they play a substantial role in protecting individual freedoms for all Americans. This isn't tinkering: It's righting an omission.

Keep in mind that hate crimes historically represent an unofficial attempt at oppressing minorities -- in the case of lynching, it in fact was a cornerstone of the Jim Crow system of racial oppression. They are clearly special "message" crimes whose primary intent is to deprive whole groups of Americans of their right to partake of democracy, and they clearly create substantially more harm across all sectors of society than ordinary crimes.

They are, as Ted Kennedy has forcefully argued this week, real acts of terrorism directed at American citizens. If 9/11 outrages us, then so must these smaller acts that spring from the same wellspring of unthinking hatred. It's time, finally, to take seriously the important job of standing up to them.

Bias crimes: The moment of truth

-- by Dave

Something momentous happened yesterday, but you'd never know it from reading the mainstream press or watching the cable news networks.

The U.S. Senate passed a federal hate-crimes bill, making it the first time in history that legislation placing bias crimes -- including lynching -- under federal purview has ever passed both houses of Congress.

Federal anti-lynching statutes, you may recall, never made it out of the U.S. Senate because of filibustering Southern Democrats and weak support from the White House. And while more recent Congresses have passed various hate-crime related legislation (specifically, the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990, which ordered the FBI to begin collecting bias-crime data, and the 1994 Hate Crimes Sentence Enhancement Act, which applied only to a narrow spectrum of federal crimes), Congress never has enacted a true federal hate-crimes bill.

So Thursday's news should have elicited some significant coverage, shouldn't it?

Well, you could only find the Washington Post's coverage on A4 of the print edition, and you had to comb through to the bottom of its political section Thursday to find the story. Likewise, MSNBC ran an AP dispatch, but it was likewise buried by midday and no longer even findable in its Politics or Race and Ethnicity sections. Likewise at Fox News. On CNN? Not a thing -- though the only peep seemingly to be found on the cable shows was a brief mention on CNN's American Morning broadcast.

At the same time, has anyone noticed how quiet and muted Democrats are about this achievement? What gives?

George W. Bush is what gives. As in, he gives veto.

We've known ever since the House passed this bill that Bush's veto was all but certain. And right now -- with only 60 votes for the bill in the Senate (as Craig Crain notes, it in fact barely made it past the Senate), and only 237 in the House -- Democrats are well short of the two-thirds they'll need to override the veto.

There's been a lot of good talk about the bill. Harry Reid's office issued a thorough and thoughtful statement about the reasons for Democratic support. Ted Kennedy made an especially telling point, based on the fact that Democrats attached the bill to anti-terrorism legislation:

"The defense authorization is about dealing with the challenges of terrorism overseas," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). "This is about terrorism in our neighborhood."

However, the AP report also gives us the press's obvious attitude about the bill:

But given Bush’s veto threat against the provision, it seemed headed for a familiar fate. The Senate in 2004 attached similar legislation to the same authorization bill, but it was stripped out in negotiations with the House.

This may explain why the debate has been so subdued. Indeed, Republicans haven't even bothered to trot out their standard "this law will impinge on free speech rights" or "all crimes are hate crimes" schticks. They know they don't need to:

Republicans were careful not to attack the intent of the legislation, focusing instead on what they said was the “non-germane” nature of the amendment to the overall spending bill.

“There may be a time and place for a hate crimes discussion, but it is certainly not now when national security legislation is being held up,” said Senate Republican Conference Chairman Jon Kyl of Arizona. “Forcing a vote on the so-called hate crimes amendment shows an utter lack of seriousness about our national defense.”

Retorted Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J.: “For some, it never seems to be the right time or the right place.”

No, it seems that regardless of the alignment, there will never be a right time or place to pass a federal bias-crimes law, because that's part of the kabuki game -- including for Democrats.

Frankly, they appear to be resigned to defeat. That's why there's no push to change some of those Republican votes (what about, f'r instance, those "moderate" Republicans like Chuck Hagel or Mike Crapo or Elizabeth Dole -- who all voted against it -- or John McCain, who sat out?). There's no push to make sure that politicians who vote against the bill pay for it at the polls -- even though doing so (painting the opponents as callous people who don't care about minority rights, gay bashings, and are otherwise soft on crime) is a simple no-brainer.

That's why they seem disinterested in overriding the veto, and making both it and Republicans' congressional support for it a campaign issue for the 2008 vote. But I think there are other reasons for the disinterest as well.

Too many Beltway consultant types love to depict bias-crimes laws as "special interest" and "politically correct" legislation that only serve a small band of the electorate. They play off the media stereotypes created by folks like Andrew Sullivan and try to discourage their political clients for pushing this kind of law too hard.

Of course, the reality is that bias-crime bills are designed to protect everyone. White people, Christians, males -- they're all victims of bias crimes as well, and the law is intended to step protection for them, too, by stiffening the sentences for perpetrators.

Perhaps more important, bias-crime laws (as this week's vote suggests) are a natural cause for progressives and moderates alike, because they are not only about defending minority rights, they're about defending law and order and getting tough on criminals who inflict real harm on us all -- especially on our communities in the efforts to heal the ethnic and religious divides within them.

Democrats are frequently accused, with good reason, of taking their minority votes for granted. They know that they can count on minorities to line up behind them in the election, even though when the right-wingers go to the mattresses, they can always be counted on keeping their powder dry and not firing a shot. So they can make grand but ultimately hollow gestures like this week's hate-crimes vote, but never make the real effort needed to make these bills actually succeed.

But this bill is about all of us, not just minorities. If congressional Democrats are not willing to fight for it, they can just add it to their list of mounting failures in asserting their agenda.

If they're smart, they'll take advantage of this unique political opportunity, handed to them once again by George W. Bush on a platter. Next, I want to talk about why it will be critical not to drop it.

Still bashing Matthew Shepard

-- by Dave

Roger Ailes notices that both Andrew Sullivan and the bathetic Andrew Breitbart, who opined in the Los Angeles Times that ABC's revisionist reportage of the Matthew Shepard case was the definitive end of the story and that it wasn't really a hate crime, are once again depicting bias-crime laws as mere "political correctness":

A street in West Hollywood still stands in his name despite ABC News reporting the story false: He was killed by crazed meth addicts for drugs and money -- not because he was gay. Isn't that tragic enough?

Chimes in Sullivan:

And he's right about the Matthew Shepard case, which, even now, is being misleadingly exploited by interest group politics to enact a completely symbolic and utterly irrelevant "hate crimes bill."

And yet Andrew must also know that the Shepard case was not devoid of homophobia, even if it was grotesquely distorted as a pure hate crime by the usual suspects.

Well, this is par for the course for Sullivan, at least, who's demonstrated on multiple occasions that he fundamentally misunderstands bias-crimes laws, and when called on it simply refuses to actually try to understand them. As for Breitbart, well, who knows -- but as I explained in some detail at the time of the report, ABC's reportage was some of the worst I've ever seen on the issue of bias crimes:

Indeed, the entire thrust of ABC's "revelations" -- that it was all a drug binge, not a hate crime -- reveals how little the reporters who worked on this understand not just bias crimes but criminal law generally. One factor, such as drug use, does not cancel out another, such as a bias motive. They often in fact appear together and work in conjunction.

There's an even more significant problem with the 20/20 report, however: It is signficantly factually flawed.

The flaw is not so much in what it reports, but what it intentionally omits. ... [I]t omits other central pieces of evidence which established clearly that it was no mere "theory" that McKinney had committed a gay hate crime.

I go into the Shepard case in moderate detail in my book Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crimes in America:

Shepard, a twenty-two-year-old student at the University of Wyoming, was openly gay, and was somewhat flamboyant about it, at least by Laramie standards. Hanging out in a local bar the night of October 6, he managed at least to attract the attention of two local rednecks, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, who were looking for someone to rob, and picked Shepard because he was gay. They told Shepard they too were gay and offered to give him a ride home in their pickup truck, and Shepard accepted.

McKinney later gave multiple, conflicting accounts of what happened that night. He told a police detective that Shepard had not made any advances toward him at the bar, but that Shepard put his hand on McKinney's leg inside the pickup, at which point McKinney told him: "Guess what? We're not gay. You're gonna get jacked." From prison, he wrote to a friend that he started beating Shepard in the car because of an even more naked advance:

"When we got out to where he was living, I got ready to draw down on his ass, and all of the sudden he said he was gay and wanted a piece of me. While he was 'comming out of the closet' he grabbed my nuts and licked my ear!! Being a verry drunk homofobic [sic] I flipped out and began to pistol whip the fag with my gun, ready at hand."

Later, at trial, McKinney attempted to claim that Shepard had in fact made an advance on him at the bar, whispering a sexual proposition into his ear and then licking his lips suggestively. The humiliation he felt at the advance, he claimed, spurred a violent rage that made him want to beat Shepard. (The judge, however, struck down this testimony.)

Whatever the sequence of events and motivations, the three men wound up southeast of town in a remote area near the Sherman Hills subdivision. McKinney and Henderson robbed Shepard and tied him up with rope. As Shepard begged for his life, McKinney proceeded to beat him severely, ultimately pulling out a gun and pistol-whipping him over the head. They left him to die, in the freezing night air, leaned up against a wooden rail fence.

Moreover, as I explained in the post on the ABC report:

[T]he 20/20 report substantially omits evidence that was produced at the time establishing McKinney's bias motivation. And indeed, McKinney not only did not deny the existence of this bias, he positively embraced it at trial by attempting a "gay panic" defense.

Incidentally, Fritzen was not the lead investigator in the case. That honor went to a fellow named Rob DeBree. And DeBree has significantly repudiated the "crystal meth" theory.

Here's what he told Beth Loffreda, author of Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of an Anti-Gay Murder, regarding the attempt by McKinney's defense team to paint him as being under the influence of crystal meth:

Rob DeBree too was unimpressed by the argument -- he told me quite forcefully that the murder didn't look like any meth crime he knew.

In his confession to DeBree, McKinney had denied using meth the day of the murder, and while McKinney had been arrested too late for the police to confirm this through blood testing, DeBree felt certain that for once he had told the truth. Obviously it's unsurprising that the lead investigator would disagree with the defense, but DeBree had some compelling reasons on his side. "There's no way" it was a meth crime, DeBree argued, still passionate about the issue when I met him nearly six months after the trial had ended. No evidence of recent drug use was "found in the search of their residences. There was no evidence in the truck. From everything we were able to investigate, the last time they would have done meth would have been up to two to three weeks previous to that night. What the defense attempted to do was a bluff." ...

There are other serious problems with the report. It omits the fact that McKinney has now changed his story at least three times, and probably more, raising serious doubts about his credibility anyway. It also omits the fact that other detectives in the case testified at trial that the victim was selected for violence, and was beaten especially severely, because he was gay. Their testimony was based on their actual conversations with McKinney and Henderson.

And the piece's later attempts to defend McKinney by tainting Shepard's reputation (claiming he also was a crystal-meth user) should be beneath even the lowliest cops-and-courts reporter, let alone a national news organization. Even if true, whatever Shepard's habits, he did not deserve to die for them.

Sullivan has a long and impressive (not in a good way) history of writing monumentally dumb things about bias-crimes laws, which he likes to bash as one of the ways he can hold up his self-appointed image as an "independent" thinker.

Sullivan, for instance, hopped into the journalistic bed with WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah in claiming the notorious Jesse Dirkhising case as an example of the media's left-wing bias/political correctness, doing so on the loftier pages of The New Republic. Comparing coverage of the Shepard and Dirkhising cases, Sullivan described the discrepancy as "staggering" and concluded that "the Shepard case was hyped for political reasons: to build support for inclusion of homosexuals in a federal hate-crimes law." Meanwhile, he contended, they buried the Dirkhising story because they feared they might excite anti-gay bigotry. "I think there is clearly evidence that many in the media decided we're not going to go there because we know it will feed anti-gay prejudice," Sullivan told ABC News.

However, as I pointed out in Death on the Fourth of July:

There was just one problem: the killing of Jesse Dirkhising was not a hate crime. ... There was, however, no evidence anywhere that the two gay men had acted out of a bias motivation against straight children, nor that Dirkhising had been intentionally selected because of his sexual preference. Neither Brown nor Carpenter had ever evidenced any animus toward straight people, and there was no indication of any desire to terrorize the straight community or "put them in their place."

In reality, Dirkhising's death was a relatively simple if appalling case of child murder -- and indeed, Brown was eventually convicted of, and Carpenter pleaded guilty to murder charges, and both were sentenced to life in prison without parole. There were 1,449 such murders committed in 1999 -- and though the media report such cases locally, they rarely make national headlines, largely because even though every child murder is by nature horrifying, there is no national debate over the wrongness of pedophilia or assaults on children, nor the propriety of stiffer penalties for them. These murders in fact are perpetrated by all kinds of people, though predominantly by heterosexuals who attack young girls. And while some are horrendous enough to catch national attention, there are too many of them to all receive splash coverage. Indeed, in the same month following Dirkhising’s killing, there were noteworthy murder/rape stories in Kansas and Wisconsin involving young girls that received about the same amount of media coverage.

The only conceivable reasons a national editor might have for calling out the case would be either a taste for salacious details or to deliberately portray gays in a grim light (as, indeed, did Farah and the religious right). Focusing on a case like Dirkhising's while comparatively ignoring a thousand other heterosexual child murders reflects a genuine bias, not an imagined one. Farah, Sullivan, and their cohorts essentially chastised their colleagues in the media for their failure to participate in their own rather spectacular display of gay-bashing (which, in the case of Sullivan, is also bizarre).

On another occasion, Sullivan devoted an extended essay in The New York Times Sunday Magazine to the issue of bias crimes without ever once evincing any understand whatsoever of the laws against them.

As I note in DOTFOJ, what Sullivan does is to either exploit or utterly succumb to the rather crude misunderstanding of the laws that arises from the term "hate crime" itself:

Confusion over the meaning of the term "hate crime" is probably the most obvious reason for this. Many advocates of the laws, in fact, argue strenuously for dropping any kind of reference to "hate" because of the tremendous confusion it creates. And legally speaking, they are probably right. While it is true that, almost without exception, any bias-driven crime has a kind of hatred at its core, many non-bias crimes—especially violent crimes such as murders, assaults, and rapes—unquestionably also can be driven by hatred. In other words, contrary to the popular aphorism, not every crime committed in hatred is a hate crime. Nor is hate necessarily a component of a bias crime, though it is rare that it is not; most such cases involve cold-blooded sociopathic or psychopathic personalities, though their acts were clearly bias-motivated. ...

[I]t is difficult to conclude that it is anything besides utter confusion that could drive someone like Andrew Sullivan to compose the following exercise in sheer nonsense, in the course of an exhaustive essay on hate crimes, for the New York Times Magazine (let alone for the Times to publish it):

For all our zeal to attack hate, we still have a remarkably vague idea of what it actually is. A single word, after all, tells us less, not more. For all its emotional punch, ''hate'' is far less nuanced an idea than prejudice, or bigotry, or bias [emphasis mine] or anger, or even mere aversion to others. Is it to stand in for all these varieties of human experience—and everything in between? If so, then the war against it will be so vast as to be quixotic. Or is ''hate'' to stand for a very specific idea or belief, or set of beliefs, with a very specific object or group of objects? Then waging war against it is almost certainly unconstitutional.

If hate-crime laws actually were an attempt to outlaw hate, then there might indeed be real cause to oppose them. As Sullivan suggests, it’s highly unlikely they’d have passed constitutional muster with the Supreme Court. However, the laws currently on the books certainly have done so, and the federal legislation proposed so far hews closely to them. More to the point, even though Sullivan mentions "bias" several times in the 7,657-word piece, nowhere does he evince any kind of awareness that the laws he is addressing deal solely with bias-motivated crimes.

Sullivan, of course, has jumped onto Breitbart's Shepard-bashing bandwagon because he wants yet another chance to demonstrate his ideological independence on what's traditionally a "gay" issue. It's all very contrived, and most of all, all it really demonstrates is his persistent willingness to sacrifice clear thinking for an image pose.

In the process, of course, he and Breitbart have once again -- following in the footsteps of ABC News' Elizabeth Vargas (who has a history of parroting right-wing talking points) a few years ago -- symbolically exhumed poor Matt Shepard's body, leaned it back up against that fence, and given it a few more whacks. But oh, they look good doing it.

UPDATE: Sisyphus Shrugged has more on Sully.

Why Dan Rather is right

-- by Dave

One of the reasons why Dan Rather's lawsuit against CBS over his reportage on George W. Bush's National Guard record is so interesting is that it promises to reveal whole new facets of the story that have yet to come to light.

One of the more interesting possibilities is that Bush himself could be drawn into the legal battle. Paddy at Cliff Schechter's blog reports that Rather is considering calling Bush himself as a witness at the trial. No doubt Bush would fight this tooth and nail -- but as it so happens, there's a recent Supreme Court precedent called Clinton v. Jones which stipulates that a sitting president can be called before a court in a civil case:

Although scheduling problems may arise, there is no reason to assume that the District Courts will be either unable to accommodate the President's needs or unfaithful to the tradition--especially in matters involving national security--of giving "the utmost deference to Presidential responsibilities."

No small irony there, is there?

But probably most interesting, for the sake of setting the larger historical record straight, is the possibility that new information could come forward both confirming, for the public record, the details of what we already know about Bush's service -- namely, that he used his family's influence not only to evade the draft but also the consequences for skipping out on the lesser military commitments he did make.

At the same time, we may learn important new facts about the way our major media networks operate at the top -- and how far backward they'll bend to accommodate the Bush administration and its bullying demands.

Eric Boehlert's must-read take on the lawsuit points out how atrocious the media's response to Rather's lawsuit has been:

Turns out, though, it wasn't the suits at CBS or the right-wing bloggers who busted the biggest vein over Rather's lawsuit. It was mainstream journalists who rushed in to denounce the former anchorman as dishonest, arrogant, bitter, and delusional, all the while making sure not to take up Rather's challenge of addressing the underlying facts of the story surrounding Bush's no-show military service.

As Boehlert later suggests, the eagerness to condemn Rather similarly reflects their eagerness to overlook their own disturbing failures to have adequately reported this story from the day it first began to surface (which is to say, in the summer of 2000).

Joan Walsh has some similar thoughts:

You can debate the wisdom of Rather's using a lawsuit to settle scores with his old network, but too many reporters are, unconscionably and wrongly, insisting that Rather's story about George W. Bush's missing time in the Texas Air National Guard was invalidated by questions about the memos it used to confirm some of the details. The story itself was well grounded: Rather confirmed that Bush had political help getting a coveted TANG slot and then disappeared from his military duties for months at a time. The problem was with the memos the "60 Minutes II" segment used to "prove" higher-ups had complained about Bush's disappearing act; they were never authenticated, and they shouldn't have been used. But that doesn't mean, as the Los Angeles Times has claimed, that the Rather report was "wholly unsubstantiated."

Boehlert goes into this point in more detail:

Keep in mind, I'm not defending CBS' work here. Years ago I detailed the many mistakes producer Mary Mapes and her team made in needlessly rushing their Texas Air National Guard story onto the air, and how holes in the story were not communicated up the CBS chain of command before the report aired. In fact, as somebody who in 2004 wrote extensively about Bush's missing years in the Guard, and who tried to lay out the facts in hopes that the mainstream media would take more interest in the story, I was furious when Memogate broke. Furious because I knew that the press, spooked by the right-wing pitchfork mob that had assembled online, was going to run -- not walk -- away from the story for fear of raising the same ire.

I'll admit that I had a similar reaction to first hearing of the lawsuit. I criticized both Rather and his producer, Mary Mapes, at the time -- and still do -- for their journalistic sloppiness in failing to ascertain the provenance of the Killian documents. As someone who had been carefully shepherding this story over the course of four years and was looking forward to the breakthrough it was finally getting (remember that the story was being discussed in other quarters than just CBS), it frankly angered me that their sloppiness led to the story
being tossed into the pit.

Gene Lyons, too, noted this at the time, saying:

Amazingly, the CBS team reporting on the president's lost year in the National Guard -- and do let's recall that the suspect memos made a neat fit with other signs that Bush took a powder -- never talked to the purported source of the documents even after Burkett changed his story about who it was. That’s incredible.

But if you give Rather's complaint a careful reading, you'll see that there's a fairly convincing explanation for this: Rather and others were being told that the vetting of the documents was being thoroughly handled by none other than the president of CBS News himself, Andrew Heyward.

And yes, this is the same Andrew Heyward who (according to Rather) attempted to suppress the Abu Ghraib prison story. And yes, it's also the same Andrew Heyward who -- unnoted by Rather in the lawsuit, but fully explored by Eric Boehlert -- who a couple of weeks later used the Killian memos debacle as the rather flimsy pretext for killing Ed Bradley's long-awaited report on the Niger documents hoax that played such a critical role in the justification for the Iraq war.

Eli at Firedoglake was one of the first to notice this, and it may prove important. As he notes, the Rather complaint has a lot of interesting details about this, including how Heyward kept Rather busy while he was supposed to be busy "vetting" the documents for the coming report on Bush's military record:

Mr. Heyward instructed Mr. Rather to concentrate on hurricane coverage, stating that he would personally supervise the vetting of the Bush TexANG story and Documents, as he had done with the Abu Ghraib story. Further, he assured Mr. Rather that he would assign other senior CBS News personnel to vet the story, including Betsy West.

And then, once the story had been aired, Heyward ordered Rather to stand behind the story, telling him the network would back him all the way -- even as they were preparing to screw him:

For several days [after the Killian memos were questioned], Mr. Heyward and CBS News determined to stand by the story. Mr. Heyward and CBS public relations executive Gil Schwartz directed Mr. Rather to defend the story in response to media queries, using “talking points” prepared by Ms. Mapes.

Mr. Heyward also directed Mr. Rather not to respond to the accusations of bias made against him personally, assuring Mr. Rather that CBS would defend and stand by him. Relying on these assurances, Mr. Rather complied and did not respond to personal attacks on his journalistic integrity.

(…)

On September 20, 2004, Mr. Heyward and Mr. Schwartz decided that CBS should completely change its position and issue an apology for the Broadcast. Although Mr. Heyward himself had undertaken personal responsibility for the vetting of the story, he instructed Mr. Rather to read a public apology, written by Mr. Schwartz, for both Mr. Rather and CBS’s handling of the story. Despite his own personal feelings that no apology from him was warranted, Mr. Rather read the apology as instructed. Mr. Rather also, as instructed, did not publicly defend the story.

From the outside, this has all the appearances of deliberate sabotage on Heyward's part -- and Heyward's closeness to CBS's Republican-loving owner, Sumner Redstone, may help explain why.

Sidney Blumenthal's authoritative piece in Salon also points to this facet of the case:

They heard from some researchers on the "60 Minutes II" staff that before they had been questioned, a CBS executive had told them that they should feel free to pin all blame on Rather and Mapes.

Like all ugly and revealing and truly damning stories about themselves that politicians always try to suppress, this story has taken on a second and third life because of the very efforts to keep it quiet. As Blumenthal concludes:

On one level, the Bush National Guard story is about Bush and the National Guard. On another, of course, it is about Rather's reputation. But on yet another it is about CBS's overwhelming desire to please the Bush White House and censor itself. The White House campaign against Rather has been so successful that many in the national press corps behave as though in mouthing its talking points they are demonstrating their own independent thought.

It's not just CBS whose appalling behavior and lack of journalistic integrity who is being exposed here. The same can be fully said of all those bandwagon jumpers eager to assure us that Rather's suit is just pathetic and lame.

Mebbe they ought to look in the mirror on that score.