When Sock Puppets Rule Our Media

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

Everyone is already buzzing with early word of tomorrow’s New York Times report about the Pentagon sock puppets who have been posing as "military experts" on the nation’s national news and political-talk broadcasts:

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

It’s a thorough and devastating portrait, and every word deserves reading, largely because it lays bare the machinations that went into selling the war to the public. Yet in some ways, none of this is particularly new for anyone with eyes and ears beforehand. Did anyone watch these guys perform on TV and not intuit immediately that they were in the tank for Rumsfeld and Co.?


A crystalline example of this came during what was known as "the Generals’ Revolt":

The full dimensions of this mutual embrace were perhaps never clearer than in April 2006, after several of Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals — none of them network military analysts — went public with devastating critiques of his wartime performance. Some called for his resignation.

On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the “Generals’ Revolt” dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. When an aide urged a short delay to “give our big guys on the West Coast a little more time to buy a ticket and get here,” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office insisted that “the boss” wanted the meeting fast “for impact on the current story.”

That same day, Pentagon officials helped two Fox analysts, General McInerney and General Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal defending Mr. Rumsfeld.

“Starting to write it now,” General Vallely wrote to the Pentagon that afternoon. “Any input for the article,” he added a little later, “will be much appreciated.” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office quickly forwarded talking points and statistics to rebut the notion of a spreading revolt.

“Vallely is going to use the numbers,” a Pentagon official reported that afternoon.

The standard secrecy notwithstanding, plans for this session leaked, producing a front-page story in The Times that Sunday. In damage-control mode, Pentagon officials scrambled to present the meeting as routine and directed that communications with analysts be kept “very formal,” records show. “This is very, very sensitive now,” a Pentagon official warned subordinates.

On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.

“I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers’ names.) “And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, ‘Oh my God, they’re trying to brainwash.’ ”
“What are you, some kind of a nut?” Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. “You don’t believe in the Constitution?”

There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration’s overall war strategy, they counseled, was “brilliant” and “very successful.”

Of course, fairly early on in this conflict, there were in fact questions raised about whether the Pentagon was engaging in Psyops tactics, with the American public as the target; some of us even pondered the effects this program might have on democratic discourse.

But then, those concerns were either largely ignored or dismissed as paranoid alarmism. Now it’s clear that there were reasons for that. After all, the media were too busy giving airtime to "serious" folks.

Rick Perlstein has more.

The Secret Lives of Saints

-- by Sara

For most watchers of the religious right, the definitive book on fundamentalist Mormonism has been Jon Krakauer's 2003 bestseller, Under the Banner of Heaven. That book centered on the murder of a woman, along with her child, who dared to defy her husband's involvement with that polygamous sect. It also introduced America to Warren Jeffs, long before he became a fugitive and eventually a convicted felon; and put Colorado City, AZ and Hildale, UT on America's cultural map.

A lot has gone down in the FLDS world in five years since the book came out -- and much of it has occurred in locations far afield from those dusty twin cities straddling a southwestern state line. The FLDS has dealt with the increased scrutiny by diffusing its 40,000 or so members (some counts put the number as high as 100,000) across North America. The sect has always been strategic in using state and national borders to shield both its money and any "persons of interest" in their midst, which is why they built compounds in British Columbia and Mexico as far back as the late 1940s.

But that strategy has gone into overdrive in the past decade, as governments have grown increasingly interested and the group's population has continued to explode (as tends to happen wherever women average seven to ten kids apiece). The compound at Eldorado is only one of these expansion efforts: others are afoot in Idaho, South Dakota, and suburban Las Vegas. Beware of Mormons claiming to build "hunting lodges for wealthy businessmen." That seems to be the usual cover story whenever they go land shopping.

One of the most perceptive and tenacious reporters covering these developments as been Daphne Bramham of the Vancouver Sun. (A collection of her reporting on the FLDS over the past several years can be found online here.) Bramham's focus has been on the remote 2500-member Bountiful compound just outside Creston, BC, which was founded in 1947 by Roy Blackmore and a group from one of Canada's largest historical Mormon settlements in Cardston, AB. Roy's son Winston Blackmore inherited the role of patriarch for the community until Warren Jeffs cheated him out of control in 2002.

Bramham's take on the story has been different -- and in some ways, both broader and deeper -- than Krakauer's. For one thing, she's spent a lot more time with the women of the community, and has become good friends with several of the better-known escapees like Debbie Palmer and Carole Jessup. That friendship gives her an insider's sensitivity to the emotional and social dynamics of these families -- the interior lives of the women as they deal with their husbands, their children, each other, and the outside world.

For another, while Krakauer's book focused tightly on Colorado City/Hildale, Bramham's northern perch gives her a much broader view of the far-flung geography of the FLDS nation -- and a much keener sense of the way the sect has used that geography to escape government interference to date.

Over the past four years, I've been fortunate to be able to follow the vagaries of the international FLDS through Bramham's articles in my local paper. And now I'm delighted to be able to recommend her new book, The Secret Lives of Saints, released in Canada just a few weeks ago -- barely ahead of the Texas raid. (Amazon will be filling US pre-orders starting in May.)

The book provides the best available backstory and context for anyone trying to make sense out of what's happening now in Eldorado. It also fills in the details of the past five years, picking up where Under the Banner of Heaven left off and bringing us up to date. Most importantly, it explains precisely why this group has been left to go on as it has for as long as it has -- even when local and state-level authorities were well aware that laws were being violated.

Ghosts in the Machine
The problem, as Bramham portrays it, comes down to one issue. Nobody -- not in Utah, nor Arizona, nor British Columbia -- has yet dared to challenge the FLDS on the basic legality of polygamy itself. Where prosecutions have succeeded, they've been on other charges: Brenda Lafferty's murder, Warren Jeffs' role in facilitating statutory rape, and the more general economic exploitation of the church's members. These efforts have done much to undermine the church's functioning (especially the latter one, which I'll get to in an upcoming post). But they've all been criminal and financial assaults that dance around the deepest question at the heart of this church's existence: Is polygamy acceptable in modern North American culture?

That's a debate that can be had all kinds of ways -- and will be had in the months ahead. (Bramham, personally, thinks the answer is a firm "no"). So it's striking to realize just how far out of their way prosecutors from BC to AZ have gone through the decades to avoid putting polygamy itself on trial. And the reasons for this have to do with the ghosts that seem to haunt the political machines everywhere the FLDS has sunk roots.

In BC, they've shied away because Canada's religious freedom laws have only been in place since 1982. They're still new enough that the country hasn't really had enough time to establish the conditions under which they shouldn't apply -- and prosecutors are terrified that if they bring a challenge, Canada's supreme court will rule all existing anti-polygamy laws unconsitutional. It's a Catch-22: there are laws on the books that nobody dares to enforce, because they're afraid that if they do, the courts will void those laws entirely. Which means, of course, that they might as well not exist at all.

Bramham points out, however, that the BC attorneys may be misreading the mood of the justices in Ottawa. Immigration Canada routinely rejects Muslim immigrants with plural wives. Ontario courts have also recently decided that allowing Muslims to deal with divorce using Sharia law is a violation of Muslim women's civil rights, thus establishing the principle that religious freedom does not apply when the religion in question is depriving people of their basic liberties. These two precedents suggest that Canada's Supreme Court might well rule that polygamy doesn't merit religious freedom protection -- and BC now has a new AG who seems a bit more inclined to push the issue.

Similar ghosts haunt both Utah and Arizona. In Arizona, the state government still cringes at the memory of the 1953 Short Creek raid -- an earlier attempt to disband the FLDS community that backfired badly on every politician involved. (The memory of Short Creek is everywhere in this story, and I'll come back to it later, too.) In Utah, prosecution is hobbled by the fact that many of the state officials involved are themselves descendants of polygamous Mormon pioneers. They want very much to get rid of the FLDS, which they regard as a PR blight on their faith, But at the same time, it feels much too much like they're prosecuting Grandpa and Grandma. The ghosts of their own ancestors stay their hand.

What's remarkable about Eldorado is that the Texas authorities have had no such qualms. For the first time in the 60-year history of the FLDS, a state government appears to be carefully building a case that polygamy (at least, as practiced within this community) is so harmful to the women and children involved that it does not deserve First Amendment religious freedom protections. It's hard to overstate how audacious and unprecendented this is: it's the very first time anywhere in the 60 years of the FLDS that anyone has dared to say this right out loud. But it's an effort whose time has clearly come -- and it's probably no coincidence that Texas was the state to finally take it on.

Don't Mess With Texas
In choosing Eldorado, Jeffs may have, at long last, picked the wrong place to hide. Texas doesn't harbor the ghosts of Mormon pioneers or FLDS martyrs. Any liberal Texan will tell you that the Lone Star State is not cursed, as BC is, with an overbroad sense of religious freedom. What does lurk in its memetic closet is the memory of Waco -- another closed, secretive, sexually abusive cult that was left to fester unattended too long, with horrific consequences. Many of the people who are dealing with the FLDS had enough of an up-close-and-personal view of the 1993 disaster with the Branch Davidians to know what they're dealing with here.

There's no shortage of people in the media trying to make this a debate about religious freedom, which is fair enough. But the question they're not asking -- and the one that is central to that debate, in my mind -- is how we can reasonably and justly incorporate America's historical ideas about religious freedom with what we know now about how to identify and chart the prognosis of dangerous cults. As I've written before, governments in both Canada and the US are well aware of the signs that indicate a community headed toward violence. The FLDS exhibits almost all of those signs. As a society, it's time to figure out where the line gets crossed, and when government intervention becomes justified.

In an upcoming post, I'll discuss the specific ways the FLDS is following that well-understood path -- and how current events could conspire to either pull them back from that fate, or push them farther toward it. In the meantime, go over and put in your pre-order for Daphne Bramham's The Secret Lives of Saints. It's essential for anyone seeking a broader context and a deeper understanding of the events of the past two weeks.

A Modest Proposal for the NBA

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

When the NBA Board of Governors meets tomorrow to vote — as we know they will — to move the Sonics out of Seattle and on to Oklahoma City, I’d like to suggest they take another vote alongside it: Drop the names of the cities where your teams currently reside from the teams’ names. Adopt the system used by the Japanese: Just name them after the corporations that own them.

That way you could have teams like the Target Timberwolves and the Vulcan TrailBlazers and the Cablevision Knicks and, now, the Chesapeake Rustlers.

At least then it would be more honest. Fans then would know they are in fact rooting for the company that owns the team, not for their communities.

As it is, the NBA looks more and more like a bunch of slick-talking grifters who come to the little burgs and offer to sell them a fine bronze statue of the town’s founder but instead sell them a cheap thing made out of pot metal with the face melted off.

And that way, when owners want to pack up and leave, they can just go ahead and do so, no hard feelings. That’s what this vote is all about, after all: David Stern wants the owners to be able to move at will, especially if the local community isn’t all hot and bothered to ante up hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade their facilities only so that they can keep up with insane NBA salaries. And so the owners, being owners, of course will gladly approve this move.

The communities? Screw them. What have they done for us lately?

Now I’ll admit that I was one of those poor saps who fell for the NBA’s little grift for many years. Back when I was a kid growing up in the rural Northwest and you had to choose between California teams and the rest of the country for teams to root for — regardless of sport — the arrival of the Sonics in 1967 was a real godsend. Even in remote Idaho, they were the hometown team. I followed them in boxscores each day and was ecstatic when Bill Russell finally coached them into the playoffs in ’74-75; delirious when they nearly won the title in ’78, and out of my mind when they won it outright in ’79.

Since then, I’ve rooted for them every year, through thick and thin — mostly a lot of thin. After I moved to Seattle in ’89, I attended as many games as I could and covered a number of them for the newspapers where I worked. I was a season ticket holder from 1995 through 2006 and attended more games than I can count.

I’m a basketball nut – tried hard to play it when I was young, and gym ratted a lot in my 20s, but I was never any good, and a knee injury in my early 30s ended my playing career, such as it was. But I love watching the game. In my mind, basketball players are the world’s finest athletes; and I loved watching the NBA because it was home to the world’s finest basketball players.

But most of all, I loved to root for the Sonics because they represented my community, and I mean the larger community of the Northwest. They were my hometown team and rooting for them was all about standing up and taking pride in the place you lived. Sports are kind of silly entertainments, but they’re also more; much of the larger cultural value of sports, especially as a kind of secular religion that everyone could coalesce around, lay in the way they were real repositories of the hopes and aspirations of their community.

Now over the years, especially as the season tickets mounted, there was a lot not to like. The gross commercialization at NBA games is just overwhelming, and you have to learn to shut out the constant bombardment if you’re there to enjoy the game.

And the officiating: a travesty. It became increasingly clear over the years that NBA officials were corrupt, but not in the usual way; they called games badly at times that were convenient most of all for the NBA, when it wanted certain marketable matchups in the playoffs. They were also corrupt in that they clearly made calls based on grudges they held, and their egos became the most dominating force on the court. The "superstar call" is a staple of modern NBA games. So when confirmation of the usual kind of corruption as well arrived in the person of Tim Donaghy — well, no one was exactly surprised.

But the officials were just symptomatic of the larger problem of the NBA game generally: team play — which is really where the beauty of the game emerges — has for years been sublimated to talent. Michael Jordan in effect ruined the NBA, so that now all that fans root for is that somehow their team can draft or somehow nab the league’s next great talent. Defense is an afterthought in the NBA, and the pick-and-roll is about as team-oriented as you get on offense. The college game — though its players are inferior — is far superior from the standpoint of the game itself.

Meanwhile, the salaries for that talent have gone through the roof, so that perfectly good basketball stadiums like Seattle’s Key Arena no longer can be profitable in today’s NBA, because revenue demands are so high that all NBA facilities require high-revenue-stream offerings.

This has all occurred on the watch of David Stern, whose every move has been about promoting the league’s superstar mentality and sublimating not just the teams but the communities themselves. NBA teams are no longer community assets — they’re marketing platforms for athletic superstars.

Now, there have been a number of team moves previously, but the history of those moves — from the Lakers’ departure from Minneapolis to the Grizzlies from Vancouver — has always involved teams that had only been in their communities for a relatively short length of time, had always had trouble drawing fans; the majority have taken place in the era of mass expansion.

The Sonics, in contrast, have been in Seattle for over 40 years. They’ve never had trouble drawing fans, even in down years. The only problem we’ve had has been with idiot owners making boneheads moves, like the time they fired George Karl because he chafed some front-office types. Or selling the team to con artists from Oklahoma.

But that matters not to the poobahs of the NBA. What matters is making the wealthy team owners wealthier and wealthier, along with their players. All that money has to come from somewhere, and if some of the suckers get tired of being played, well, there are always new ones to be found.

So of course Stern not only has no compunction about moving the Sonics to Oklahoma, he’s been content to bash Seattle and warn us that we’ll never get another team here for years and years.




Nevermind, of course, that the new Sonics’ owners not only lied outrageously to the community when they bought the team. Well, it’s true that Clay Bennett put on an elaborate show to convince folks he had done his best to convince the politicians to finance a new stadium. Thing was, he wanted to move the stadium far south to Renton — where hardly anyone in Seattle would travel to see a Sonics game — near the worst traffic intersection in the state. And the bill was a mere $500 million, out of which Bennett and Friends were only, haltingly, willing to commit $100 million. The taxpayers were to pay the rest. It’s no wonder it died in the legislature.

But all that time, in turns out, Bennett was assuring his co-owners that "the game" had only begun, and that they could count on having the Sonics in Oklahoma City eventually — sooner if not later. Bennett was also lying through his teeth to Stern, who he was assuring all along that he was working in good faith to try to keep the team in Seattle.

And it probably tells us everything we need to know about the NBA that it didn’t bother Stern one iota. What’s a little lying among fellow thieves, after all?

So really, fellas, when you vote today to swap your presence in the nation’s 14th-largest media market for one in the 49th — we know, you just can’t help but shoot yourselves in the foot when there’s money to be made from it — go right on ahead. Because even longtime NBA fans in Seattle have been given a front-row view of your scam, and we’d probably just as soon be shut of it.

Sure, I know that in a few years NBA execs will start hinting that something can be done about getting a team back here. It’s too big a media market for them not to be in. But that will probably mean ripping the heart out of some other community, and frankly, having been there, most of us want nothing to do with that. Overexpansion has already made the NBA a joke, so please don’t bother us with the idea of putting an expansion team here.

No, I figure if you move, you’ll be gone for good. And ya know what? Don’t let the door hit ya on the way out.

Now, in the meantime, we will get our little revenge. When you lose your lawsuit to enable the Sonics to breach their contract with the City of Seattle two years early, as you almost certainly will, you’ll be stuck keeping the Sonics here through two more years. And as you may have already figured out, Seattleites are not so generally stupid as to give their money to people who intend to abscond with their team. The seats will be empty (Kevin Durant notwithstanding), and Clay Bennett and his pals will suffer.

I’m sure there’ll be offers to pay us off to escape those final two years. I say no way. Make them suffer. And not just out of spite, but because we really would have nothing to gain from taking their money.

After all, why would Seattle want to have anything to do with the NBA in the future? Why would we take yet another team in, just to have them turn around in seven years and begin demanding tax packages to underwrite their newest state-of-the-art money-sucking devices? Eh?

I’m sure the folks in Oklahoma City will get to see that side of the NBA soon enough. Indeed, they just voted to pass a tax to pay for an improvement of their local stadium. Good on’ em. Enjoy it while you can.

In the meantime, I suspect that there will be other cities who wake up to your grift, fellas. Because there’s a whole city up here willing to tell everyone all about it. There will be other threats, and other removals for the insufficiently obsequious.

So just spare us the histrionics and change the way you name your teams. Name them after the companies you fellow represent. Or maybe you can even name them after yourselves. After all, hey, the NBA is where the egos come to play. Just quit conning people into thinking that these teams represent their communities. Because we know now that that’s just a scam.

Why We Boo

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

It’s been building over the past couple of months, as we waded through endless cable talk shows about Obama’s "pastor problem" and his "bitter" remarks and Hillary’s Kosovo claims. Gradually, it’s become clear to just about everyone that the American media aren’t informing them or helping to sort through difficult issues in the course of this presidential campaign, and are instead focusing on the trivial, the silly, the truly insignificant, as though these kinds of effluvia constitute the reasons why we vote.

And we’ve had enough.

This trivialization of American political discourse reached a real nadir last night with ABC’s handling of the Democratic presidential debate. The gossipy, absurd nature of the questions in the first hour were so obvious that the audience reacted loudly — not to the candidates themselves, but to the questioners.

That booing you heard last night, ABC? It was for you.

Bad enough that the questions were trivial — even more notable was that it seemed as though they had been concocted by right-wing talk-show hosts, since they all were built out of right-wing talking points. And well, whaddya know?

Hannity asked George what kinds of questions they’ll be asking at the debate tomorrow and they discussed a few things. When Hannity asked about the first question below about Ayers and whether George had plans to ask such a question, George replied, "Well, I’m taking notes now Sean." It did actually sound like he was pausing to take notes.

There’s no small irony in Sean Hannity demanding to know about Obama’s supposed unsavory connections to people who once were radical terrorists. Sean Hannity, the onetime friend of Hal Turner.

Turner, you’ll recall, has made something of an ugly name for himself in recent years with his frequent calls for the assassination of various figures, including judges overseeing the cases of white supremacists and various members of Congress. Max Blumenthal has all the details. And of course, it’s always fun to watch Hannity lie and scramble for cover whenever Turner’s name gets brought up on his show.

But Hannity is only one of many serial prevaricators working the dark mines of TV broadcasting these days. Indeed, it’s become clear that they’re all just one big circle-jerk, handling tips from one another and passing them along like they were nectar from heaven itself.

The rest of us, however, have a decidedly different view of the proceedings. And until it improves, we’re going to keep booing.

Are FLDS women brainwashed?

The FLDS's first consecrated Mormon Temple at the YFZ Ranch in Eldorado, TX.
It was built by the order of Warren Jeffs, and consecrated by him
while he was a fugitive on the FBI's Most Wanted List.

-- by Sara

I've spent the day wrangling with a post (which will probably turn into several posts) about the FLDS raid in Eldorado, TX. Oddly, last week's events occured while I had my nose buried in the best new book on the subject of the FLDS since Jon Krakauer's bestselling Under the Banner of Heaven came out in 2003, so I've got a lot of fresh and deep perspective on the matter -- too much, in fact, to be wrestled down into one coherent post.

Over dinner, I'd just about decided that the only way to deal with the overload was to chip away at the story in short blats over the next few days, which will attempt to put some new context to these events. And then I got an e-mail from Pastor Dan Schultz of Street Prophets, containing ample proof of just how badly that context is needed now that the media talking heads are all holding forth on this story.

Dan pointed me to the second most inane thing ABC News has produced today (the first, of course, being Charlie Gibson's and George Stephanopoulos' performance at the Pennsylvania debates) -- an odd little story by Emily Friedman asking "experts" whether or not FLDS wives are "brainwashed."

Between hysterical sobs, the women of the Yearning for Zion Ranch in rural Texas tearily pleaded Monday for the return of their children from state custody, but at the mere turn of a phrase, those tears mysteriously, uniformly stopped.

When conversations with reporters shifted away from the 416 children in state custody toward touchier subjects surrounding the mysterious religious sect, the overflowing emotions were quickly replaced with blank stares and terse replies.

Clad in conservative prairie dresses, hair back in buns and tight braids, the women stuck to monotone, emotionless responses in declining to answer reporters' questions concerning allegations of plural marriages and sexual assault within the sect.

Asked whether 14- and 15-year-old girls get married on the compound, a tight-lipped woman who would only give her first name, Marilyn, gave what appeared to be a rehearsed response.

"We are talking about our children now," she said, shaking her head, unwilling to stray from the subject of her children.

The shift to blank-faced denial was jarring in both its immediacy and consistency. Not a single one strayed from the script, an impressive display of solidarity, if a bit peculiar to the outsiders granted unprecedented access to the members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

To outsiders, everything about these people is strange — from the way they dress to the way they talk and especially the way they live. To the uninitiated, it may even appear that these women must be brainwashed to live within the confines of the isolated, controlled sect.

Questions about rumored child brides, teen pregnancies and men assigned multiple wives garnered stoic expressions and a relentless determination to defend the sect's lifestyle.

"Do you know the definition of Zion?" responded Marie, when asked by a reporter what life within the sect's gate is really like. "Heaven on Earth."

It's an extreme statement, and the women of the sect have begun to realize that their devotion to their lifestyle is unusual to those on the outside.

So, are these women just fanatically, independently religious, or are they victims of something more sinister, like mind control?....

Mental health professionals told ABCNEWS.com that it may all depend on how you define brainwashing.

The piece goes on to interview several mental health professionals, who (except for one outlier) ome to the consensus that no, probably, these women aren't brainwashed -- just weirdly socialized. Brainwashing, after all, would require real coercion:

"Just because they are different doesn't mean they've been brainwashed," said H. Newton Malony, a senior professor of psychology at the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. "Brainwashing occurs when a person is physically incarcerated in order to believe something."

As far as we know, said Malony, these women and children — and even men, for that matter — have not been held against their will, but rather, have grown up in the sect and have become socialized to its customs.

"Are these woman just parroting strong pleasure or is this a strong religious conviction?" asked Malony. "I doubt it; they grew up in this [environment].

"This is just an example of a different culture," added Malony....

Nancy Ammerman, professor of the sociology of religion at Boston University and author of "Bible Believers: Fundamentalists in the Modern World," also discourages the labeling of the West Texas polygamists as victims of brainwashing.

"Brainwashing is actually extraordinarily rare," said Ammerman. "It implies that the person has literally lost the ability to think independently and to make choices.

"We really don't have any evidence that anything even vaguely resembling that is going on with this particular group or with most religious groups," Ammerman told ABCNEWS.com.

....Most of these experts sided with Maloney, who said, "It only becomes brainwashing when a person is physically held against their will."

The problem, as it so often is with the mainstream media, is that absolutely everybody involved with reporting or commenting on this story has been airlifted into it in the past few days. (You'd think somebody would have at least taken the time on the plane flight to skim Krakauer's book and get up to speed. You'd be wrong.) And this is just one example of the ways that ignorance of the backstory cheats the rest of us out of a real understanding of what's going on here.

Because, by the definition offered by these experts, the FLDS is very coercive indeed.

Almost every feature of these women's lives is determined by someone else. They do not choose what they wear, whom they live with, when and whom they marry, or when and with whom they have sex. From the day they're born, they can be reassigned at a moment's notice to another father or husband, another household, or another community. Most will have no educational choices (FLDS kids are taught in church-run schools, usually only through about tenth grade -- by which point they girls are usually married and pregnant). Everything they produce goes into a trust controlled by the patriarch: they do not even own their own labor. If they object to any of this, they're subject to losing access to the resources they need to raise their kids: they can be moved to a trailer with no heat, and given less food than more compliant wives, until they learn to "keep sweet."

At the very least, women who do decide to leave the sect leave without money, skills, or a friend in the world. Most of them have no choice but to leave large numbers of children behind -- children who are the property of the patriarch, and whom many of them will never see again. If a woman is even suspected of wanting to leave, she's likely to be sent away from her kids to another compound far yonder as punishment for her rebelliousness. For a woman who's been taught all her life that motherhood is her only destiny and has no real intimacy with her husband, being separated from her children this way is a sacrifice akin to death.

At the very worst, death is indeed what awaits them. The FLDS preaches "blood atonement" -- the right of the patriarchs to kill apostates who dare to defy them, usually by slitting their throats. And they've done it: Krakauer hung his entire book on the murder of Brenda Lafferty and her year-old daughter, who were both killed by her husband's brothers because Brenda rejected (and mocked) her husband's desire to take plural wives. (Warren Jeffs also liked to rouse people out of their beds in the middle of the night for dramatic mass meetings testing their readiness for the Final Judgment -- meetings that had dark shades of Jonestown.) Brenda is the only one known to have been killed, but others who've left report being threatened with the same fate.

So ABC's reporters blather on about how these women aren't really brainwashed, because that would require coercion and being held physically against their will. One hopes that if they understood that they're holding forth about a group that routinely controls women by threatening to take away their kids -- and tells them that God justifies the slaying of wayward brides and their babies -- they'd change their minds and admit that this isn't just another odd, quaint sect on the American religious scene. Without that information, though, everything else that's going on in Texas loses much of its context.

There's a whole lot more depth and nuance to this story, and I'll try to get at some of it over the next several days. But let's start with the premise that almost nothing you're hearing in the mainstream media about this group can or should be taken at face value. Stand by for more.

How to Kill an Army

-- by Sara

It's Tuesday, which means I've committed my weekly act of bloggage over at Blog for Our Future.

This week, I picked at John McCain's refusal to back Jim Webb on his attempt to update the GI Bill. McCain says he's against it because paying for our troops' college educations would create retention problems -- he thinks it's a bad idea to give people an incentive to leave the service and get on with their lives. (Of course, not offering college benefits presents other retention problems; ask any recruiter.)

I point out that this logic, extended and put up against some other current trends (like the declining quality of new recruits -- when you're issuing conduct waivers for felons, druggies, racists, and gang members, the bottom of the barrel is well in sight), takes us to some very ugly and dark places if it becomes enshrined in policy. It's a new vision of our relationship to the troops that abrogates all the old bargains great nations have always made with their soldiers. And it's a debt we owe that we default on at our own peril.

Eliminationism at the New York Times

-- by Dave

There's something deeply wrong with our public discourse when a reviewer like Niall Ferguson can pen a piece at the New York Times Book Review that contains, almost glibly, language like this:

The terrorists are at once parasitical on, and at the same time hostile toward, the globalized economy, the Internet and the technological revolution in military affairs. Just as the plagues in the 14th century were unintended consequences of increased trade and urbanization, so terrorism is a negative externality of our borderless world.

The difference, of course, is one of intent. The rats that transported the lethal fleas that transported the lethal enterobacteria Yersinia pestis did not mean to devastate the populations of Eurasia and Africa. The Black Death was a natural disaster. Al Qaeda is different. Its members seek to undermine the market-state by turning its own technological achievements against it in a protracted worldwide war, the ultimate goal of which is to create a Sharia-based “terror-state” in the form of a new caliphate.

I know, of course, that we're talking about the Enemy: terrorists. But it doesn't take a Dalai Lama to recognize that this kind of dehumanization is part of what brought us to this pass in the first place. And it only takes a historian to point out where it is likely to take us.

This is, in fact, classic eliminationist rhetoric: speech designed not merely to dehumanize and demonize other human beings, but to create the conditions for, and ultimately provide permission for, the actual elimination of those elements from society. As Kalkaino points out, Ferguson's description of Middle Eastern terrorists is nearly indistinguishable from from Nazi prewar propaganda about the "filthy Jewish vermin."

Blowing the dog whistle

-- by Dave

We've been saying all along that Barack Obama's candidacy is going to bring out the ugliest face of the Republican Party before long.

But today's Republicans know that they can't engage in the open race-baiting of the Strom Thurmond era without endangering their party's image as "inclusive" -- an image intended not so much to appeal to minorities but to moderate voters repelled by overt racism. So they talk in a lot of code about "preserving white culture" and other well-worn tropes, often hinting and nudging at the old race-baiting vocabulary (such as the time Karl Rove talked about that "trash-talking" and "lazy" Obama fellow).

It's called "dog whistle politics," and Republicans -- including John McCain -- are its past and present masters.

So it's kind of funny that everyone's pretending that the most noteworthy recent example of it -- from Rep. Geoff Davis, a Republican from Kentucky -- is no big deal (at least, so far, it seems to be getting a pass from the media). Davis told an audience at a Republican fund-raiser:

"I'm going to tell you something: That boy's finger does not need to be on the button," Davis said. "He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country."

Wheeeewit!! Here boy!! C'mere an' get some good ole red meat! And of course [shpittoo], nobody hearing someone call a grown black man "boy" would have any cause to think it meant anything racist, right? [Wink nudge wink]

Davis himself was quick to disclaim that there was any subtext intended:

But Davis campaign spokesman said Davis misspoke and was not directing a racist statement at Obama but instead calling into question his qualifications for office.

"He simply misspoke," said Jeremy Hughes, Davis' campaign spokesman.

This is, to put it kindly, unadulterated horseshit. We all know that Davis was giving voice to a certain set of racial attitudes, and that he did it as part of a talk before a banquet audience indicates it was clearly intentional. And no one but the most blinkered and gullible Republican (though there are plenty of those, it's true) should be willing to buy it.

Tortured news judgment

-- by Dave

You may have noticed that the blogosphere is abuzz with the ABC reportage revearling, as Marcy puts it, "what we already knew: the torture was approved--in excruciating detail--by the most senior members of the Bush Administration." And as Eli points out, this flies in the face of everything the Bush administration was telling the public at the time.

They were lying to us. And it tells us just how degraded our public discourse has become both at the hands of the conservative movement, embodied in the Bush administration, and of the mainstream media -- particularly the Village Idiots -- that this apparently is no big deal.

As usual, Digby puts it best:

There was a time when the Village clucked and screeched about "defiling the white house" with an extra marital affair or hosting fund raising coffees. I would say this leaves a far greater stain on that institution than any sexual act could ever do. They did this in your name, Americans.

The vice president, national security advisor and members of the president's cabinet sat around the white house "choreographing" the torture and the president approved it. I have to say that even in my most vivid imaginings about this torture scheme it didn't occur to me that the highest levels of the cabinet were personally involved (except Cheney and Rumsfeld, of course) much less that we would reach a point where the president of the United States would shrug his shoulders and say he approved. I assumed they were all vaguely knowledgeable, some more than others, but that they would have done everything in their power to keep their own fingerprints off of it. But no. It sounds as though they were eagerly involved, they all signed off unanimously and thought nothing of it.

And most of all, as she later points out:

This news was buried in a Friday news dump, but even so you would think news organizations would highlight this amazing story on the front page of their web site and mention it in their newscasts. Who would have ever thought you'd have a president casually say something like this?

He was willing to say it because he knows full well by now that the Washington press corps, fearful of being accused of insufficient patriotism, won't call him on it -- won't make it what, in a world in which traditional news judgment held sway, should be the one of the most pressing and discussed issues on the lips of the Beltway poobahs. Instead we get phony controversies, whipped up by right-wing talkers but fully embraced by every mainstream media outlet, like the Obama "pastor problem" and -- oooh! look! -- this week we'll all talk about how Obama dissed the rural folk!

Pfheh. Pardon me while I fwow up.

This is has been an increasing problem with the mainstream media for the past decade and more, and it's been acute since 9/11 -- the abject willingness to play propaganda organ for the right-wing Wurlitzer is not only one of the main reasons we invaded Iraq in the first damned place, it's also a large part of the reason we're enmeshed in such a quagmire there even today. It was obvious to a handful of dirty hippie bloggers back in 2003 that the Bush administration had neither any occupation strategy nor any exit strategy in place when we invaded, but you would be hard-pressed to find any mainstream pundits who thought that such shortsighted planning might be a long-term problem.

And of course, it's why we now stand alone in the world as the one supposedly "First World" nation that condones, and sponsors, the use of torture on detainees. The likelihood in fact that the Bush administration was in the process of committing war crimes was raised as early as March 2003, before the invasion of Iraq. It came front and center briefly during the uproar over Abu Ghraib -- at which time, as we noted here, there was plenty of evidence that the support for torture came from high up the chain of command.

Recall that at the time, Human Rights Watch insisted:

The promised U.S. investigation into the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners should not stop with the lower-level soldiers who were immediately involved, Human Rights Watch said today. The United States should also investigate the superiors of these soldiers to see whether they ordered or knowingly tolerated these abuses.

Yet in fact, what happened was that the media largely swallowed the administration's line:

U.S. President George W. Bush claimed the acts were in no way indicative of normal or acceptable practices in the United States Army.

The public denunciation of torture of prisoners by the president and other US officials contradicted the fact that Vice President Dick Cheney and his allies, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, created a distinction between forbidden "torture" and the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" methods of questioning which they advanced as permissible. The vice president's office played a central role in eliminating limits on coercion in U.S. custody, commissioning and defending legal opinions that the Bush administration later described as the initiatives, months later, of lower-ranking officials. The Geneva Convention, which has been ratified by the U.S. and is therefore the law of the land, is explicit and categorical in banning torture, the use of "violence," "cruel treatment" or "humiliating and degrading treatment" against a detainee "at any time and in any place whatsoever." The War Crimes Act of 1996 made any grave breach of those restrictions a U.S. felony.

Initially, the media responded with some vigor -- several major outlets, notably the New York Times, called for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. Nonetheless, Rumsfeld remained -- in no small part because the rest of the media, particularly the broadcast crowd, stayed largely mum or "neutral."

Of course, then there was Rush Limbaugh:

"This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we're going to ruin people's lives over it and we're going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I'm talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of emotional release?"

In the end, no one beyond the low-level soldiers involved in the actual abuse suffered any kind of serious consequences. So much for going up the chain of command.

The matter gradually receded from public view, especially as the debate over torture was increasingly polluted by 24-inspired terrorist fantasies, culminating in Antonin Scalia's bizarre disquisition defending torture under such scenario.

And of course, the media yawned.

Meanwhile, talking about angry, discontented rural Americans with guns -- you know, like the Minutemen you find Lou Dobbs plumping every other week or so -- somehow ranks as the most important issue in the news.

Do any of these people know what the hell news judgment is supposed to be? If not, why are they running the news?

My new job

-- by Dave

Some of you may have noticed it's been a bit quiet here this past week or so. Some of that's due to some travel I did last week (went to Arizona), but a lot more of it has to do with my new job -- as of Monday, I'm now doubling as the managing editor at Firedoglake.

It's a challenge of the kind I've been looking for the past year or so and it's exciting to get this kind of opportunity. I'm very much enjoying working with the amazing array of talent Jane has assembled there, and I'm humbled that Jane has entrusted me with them.

I'm sure many of you are wondering what will happen to Orcinus. Here's what: Not a lot will change. This past week has been tough, but things should get on an even keel soon (I hope) and I'll be posting here daily and more again. Sometimes there will be crossposts, but a lot of what I do here doesn't mesh with what FDL does, and my reasons for doing them here haven't changed significantly: I still want this blog to be an important informational resource for people dealing with the far right and the other issues I write about here. Also, FDL does better with short, snappy posts, and as most of you know, I tend to indulge the long form at this blog, since the purpose is different.

Hope you all read me at both places, but most of all, you can still count on Orcinus doing what it's always done for the foreseeable future. I may be a little diverted at times, but that will be a tradeoff I hope everyone can live with.

The Real McCain on Immigration and Race

-- by Sara

Our buddy Cliff Schecter has been hard to miss the past couple days. The buzz over his forthcoming book, The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him and Why Independents Shouldn't, has been heard even beyond the sheltered garden of liberal blogdom, and is now hitting the mainstream media with the thunder of an oncoming B-52.

And well it should. Cliff's got a hell of a tale to tell. Actually, perusing my advance copy, he's got several of them. His indelicacy in chewing out his wife -- you know, the one whose large personal fortune has made McCain's career possible -- and calling her the c-word in front of reporters is the story all over the front pages right now. But there's more. Much more.

The larger point that runs throughout Cliff's book is that Senator Straight Talk has a long record of being anything but. On any issue you can name, he's hemmed and hawed and twisted himself around to fit whatever group he was currying favor with (or taking funding from) on any given day. (That, in the end, is why conservatives don't trust him, and nobody else should, either.) And that habit absolutely extends to his record where issues like race and immigration are concerned.

McCain on Immigration: Way out front -- then nowhere to be seen
McCain's home state of Arizona has been ground zero in the immigration wars, so you'd expect the state's most visible national politician would have a strong voice and a well-considered and consistent point of view on this issue. And so he has -- right up until he started running for president.

On the plus side, he seems to clearly understand that the GOP's obsession with the issue is devastating its future prospects with the growing pool of Hispanic voters. He knows that building fences is futile. He came out against a draconian 2004 state initiative in Arizona that would have denied all public services to undocumented immigrant. The state's conservatives returned the favor by trying to pass a state resolution censuring McCain for refusing to cave into their racist demands.

Two years ago, he even went so far as to co-sponsor an immigration reform bill with Ted Kennedy. But as soon as he put himself in the running for the 2008 nomination, McCain suddenly was nowhere to be seen when immigration -- an issue he could have owned, and been the country's leading voice of sanity on -- was being discussed. By late 2006, he began to back away -- from the negotiations, from Kennedy, from any relationship to his bill at all. By May 2007, the Washington Post noticed that he'd taken his name off the bill, and wasn't making the meetings any more. A "top Senate Democrat" told the Post that McCain withdrew because "he knows it's killing him in the primary."

McCain on Race: Is it "offensive," or just "heritage"?
That same lack of moral center can be seen on his mushy handling of race issues. Cliff points out that McCain's ancestors were slaveowners and fought on the side of the Confederacy -- a piece of his personal history you can be quite sure wasn't prominently highlighted on last week's "Biography Tour." Perhaps because of this -- and because he's done almost nothing to stake out a strong stance for equality at any point in his career -- his record through the years has been all over the place.

One example, which was originally reported by Steve Benen in an August 2006 post at The Carpetbagger Report, regards McCain's attitude toward Bob Jones University and its student conduct policies, which McCain attacked in the 2000 primaries as "racist and cruel" and declared belonged in the 16th century, not the 21st. At that point, he was trying to draw a favorable contrast with George Bush, who had recently spoken at BJU. According to Benen:

McCain assailed the appearance, arguing that Bush's uncritical speech at BJU was tantamount to an endorsement of the school's policies. John McCain told reporters, "If I were there, I would condemn openly the policies of Bob Jones, because I would want to make sure that everybody knew that this kind of thing is not American."

It was hard to disagree. BJU, of course, is a rigidly Christian fundamentalist school with a record of virulent racism and anti-Catholic policies. (The school, for example, used to ban interracial dating among its students and school officials have repeatedly attacked the Roman Catholic Church, referring to the pope as the "Antichrist" and calling Catholicism a "satanic cult.")

But McCain changed his tune six years later, as his current bid for the nomination began to get underway. When asked if he'd accept an invitation from BJU in 2006, he left the door open, saying he'd have to look at the school's latest policies. "I understand they have made considerable progress," he said. "I can't remember when I've turned down a speaking invitation. I think I'd have to look at it."

To be fair: the school had lifted it interracial dating ban in the meantime. But it also sent Bush an effusively creepy note affirming his status as God's hand-picked gift to America -- follow the link to read it all. It's not an improvement. Really.

McCain on the Confederacy: Flapping in the breeze
On the issue of the Confederate flag, McCain also seems to wave with the slightest breeze -- and changes direction faster than the weather of a southern summer. Here's Cliff:

Nothing reveals McCain's contortionism better than his various positions on the Confederate flag. In September 1999, McCain said that choosing whether to fly the Confederate flag "should be left to the states." In January 2000, he proclaimed, "The Confederate flag is offensive in many, many ways, as we all know. It's a symbol of racism and slavery." Three days later, he said, "Personally I the flag as a symbol of heritage."

It's a long journey from "racism and slavery" to "heritage" in only three days. So it wasn't surprising to learn that it was a journey McCain never actually took. He made this clear in an April 2000 speech in South Carolina. McCain told the mostly supportive crowd, "I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary...So I chose to compromise my principles. I broke my promise to always tell the truth."

About the only thing McCain been absolutely consistent on through the years has been his unwavering opposition to making Martin Luther King's birthday a federal holiday -- although he recently tried to back away from that record, too. According to a recent post at the Democratic Party's website:

John McCain today brought his effort to reinvent himself for the general election to a new low by misleading the voters on his full record on a holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King. McCain tried to suggest that his opposition to a holiday honoring Dr. King was limited to his 1983 vote against a federal holiday. In reality, McCain maintained his opposition to it until at least 1989, voted against funding for the commission working to promote the King Holiday in 1994, and used divisive language about state's rights to defend himself. McCain even supported Republican efforts to repeal a holiday in his state in 1987.

"It's frankly disingenuous for John McCain to try and reinvent himself for the general election by distorting his record of opposing a holiday honoring Dr. King," said Democratic National Committee Communications Director Karen Finney. "John McCain should be honest about his full record of opposing the federal holiday, opposing a state holiday four years later, using divisive language to defend himself, and voting to cut off funding for the commission working to promote the King holiday as recently as 1994."

The website goes on to list five votes between 1983 and 1994 in which McCain consistently voted against the holiday. Way to stand tall there, John.

McCain on Racists: Some of his best friends are
Finally, notes Cliff, McCain doesn't seem to mind consorting with the GOP's known racists. He campaigned heavily for George "Macaca" Allen in 2006. That same year, he hired Terry Nelson -- the guy who approved the notoriously racist "Call me, Harold," ads that tanked Harold Ford, Jr.'s senatorial bid in Tennessee -- as his first national campaign manager. In Florida, McCain's campaign co-chair was Bob Allen, who was arrested for soliciting sex from a police officer in the men's room at a Titusville city park. Allen blamed the event on the African-American police officer, who was "a pretty stocky black guy" and therefore somehow scared Allen in to propositioning him.

The overall picture here doesn't suggest that McCain is overtly or even covertly racist. In fact, it's clear that he has at least a cursory understanding of the logic of civil rights, and can speak to it when called to do so. But the record does reveal a distinct lack of conviction where racial equality is concerned. It's just not that important to him -- certainly not a matter of deeply-held principle. As far as McCain is concerned, this issue is infinitely negotiable: he'll sing whatever song the crowd wants to hear, whether it's a traditional tune of white "heritage" or a manly declaration that racism is "offensive."

That same flexibility is evident in his choice of friends: obviously, in the good-ol'-boy network of the GOP, there are any number of qualifications that will overcome a truly ugly record on the issue of race. And, given his persistent limpness on one of the country's core issues, we shouldn't doubt that those friends will push him to play the race card, over and over, starting the very moment Obama clinches the nomination. This wandering moral maverick has proven he doesn't have the will or the guts to stop them.

It's like Barack Obama said last month in Philadelphia:

We have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

McCain's flaccid record on race will guarantee that, if Obama's the man, the GOP's side of the 2008 campaign will fit this exactly. We're going to see race as spectacle, as tragedy, as media fodder, as a smear tactic. We're going to see the GOP hitch the demons unleashed by Hillary to the deepest racist fears of the party's base. And we can be sure that McCain, fearful for every vote, will try to say all the right things to everyone -- but, in the end, will not lift a finger to stop it.

And if he wins, nothing will change.

-------------------------

Cliff Schecter's book, The Real McCain, is available for just $10 at Amazon.com. You're going to need these talking points between now and November.

A little race with your stocks

-- by Dave

Investors Business Daily has always been prone to running with bizarre far-right crap -- during the 1990s there wasn't a Clinton conspiracy they wouldn't promote, including some New World Order and Y2K fearmongering. It's a handy place for stocks news, but you wouldn't want to bet the farm on the accuracy of their news.

This week, though, Hatewatch reports that they've finally leapt off the cliff and into outright promotion of white-supremacist kookery:

Last Friday, a highly conservative publication called Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) published an editorial on its website called "The Real Cost of Immigration" that previewed a report to be released [Tuesday] at the National Press Club -- an analysis, as IBD noted, by one Edwin S. Rubenstein that is being published by The Social Contract journal. What IBD didn't bother to tell its readers was the troubling truth about Rubenstein's politics and those of his Michigan publisher.

According to IBD, Rubenstein’s report, “The Fiscal Impact of Immigration: An Analysis of the Costs to 15 Federal Departments and Agencies,” concludes that every immigrant to the United States costs taxpayers more than $9,000. That’s vastly more than other analyses have concluded, and no mention whatsoever is made of what most economists agree on —that immigrants, legal and otherwise, help grow the economy in ways that actually increase jobs for native Americans. But that's no surprise, given where Rubenstein and his publisher are coming from.

The truth is that Rubenstein is a man who has written for years for a racist anti-immigration website called VDARE -- short for Virginia Dare, said to be the first white child born in the New World. He also writes for the white supremacist National Policy Institute. Last spring, the institute released a report, prepared with Rubenstein’s help, that paints “a statistical and narrative portrait of the war on white America,” in the website’s words. Nicholas Stix’s introduction to the article describes the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling outlawing school segregation as “arguably the worse decision in the Court’s 216 year history.” He claims later civil rights legislation was unconstitutional. “[I]ntegration and the civil rights movement led directly to the destruction of great cities,” he concludes.

The other day, Paul Rosenberg at OpenLeft, in reviewing Glenn Greenwald's excellent new book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling The Big Myths of Republican Politics,, observed that this is how garbage from all quadrants -- including the far racist right -- makes its way into mainstream-conservative media. This is, of course, a live and current example, which has been the case for the immigration debate generally.

Trust me: Before long, you're going to hear folks like Lou Dobbs and Michael Savage citing the IBD report as accurate.

Because Nobody Wants To End The War More Than Joe

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]

 Wow. Holy Joe now sees Americans’ continuing disagreement with him and the White House over their intransigence on ending the war as comparable to the violent extremism that’s currently awash in Iraq.

That was the message today in his testimony before the Petraeus/Crocker hearing, when he told us that Iraq has made more political progress since the surge than Americans have:

What I’m about to say, with respect to my colleagues who have consistently opposed our presence in Iraq, as I hear the questions and the statements today, it seems to me that there’s a kind of hear no progress in Iraq, see no progress in Iraq, and most of all, speak of no progress in Iraq.

The fact is, there has been progress in Iraq, thanks to extraordinary effort by the two of you and all those who serve under you on our behalf.

I wish we could come to a point where we could have an agreement on the facts that you are presenting to us, the charts you’ve shown, the military progress, the extraordinary drop in ethno-sectarian violence, the drop in civilian deaths, the drop in American deaths, and the very impressive political progress in Iraq since last September.

Hey, let’s be honest about this: The Iraqi political leadership has achieved a lot more political reconciliation and progress since September than the American political leadership has. So we’ve got to give credit for that.

Yep, the violent extremism in Washington these days is just intolerable. Quoth Scarecrow: "Lieberman is correct. Petraeus should take 30,000 troops and liberate Washington from the threat of extremists. And they shouldn’t leave until we have victory. The consequences of losing America to extremists would be catastrophic."


As Josh Marshall observes, Lieberman obviously "sees no harm in overstating the progress in Iraq."
Matt Yglesias says what needs saying:

To state the obvious, America has a heated political debate, but liberals and conservatives aren’t shooting mortars at each other and we don’t have pitched battles in the streets. To compare the situation in Iraq to the persistence of strong partisan disagreement in the United States is idiotic.

But that’s only half the idiocy. While Joe is busy accusing his fellow Democrats of refusing to face reality, he and his fellow Surge Sycophants refuse to even acknowledge, let alone confront, the hard realities on the ground in Iraq. As Scarecrow observed yesterday:

Even if we credit the surge with temporarily neutralizing Sunni forces (while creating further risks of civil war) that only set the stage for competing Shia factions to fight each other for control of Badghdad and Southern Iraq — with Bush using the fighting as an excuse to keep US forces bogged down in Iraq indefinitely. Fighting one side’s grab for power by laying siege to Sadr City’s million people risks hundreds of civilian deaths.

Of course, Joe also insists we have to "win" before we leave. And like Cokie Roberts, Lieberman has a, um, flexible definition of "victory" in Iraq — so flexible, it’s now entirely ass-backwards. Up is down. War is peace. Quagmire is victory.

In the real world, today’s appearance at the hearing was just all about Lieberman’s continuing Zell Millerization, using his "bipartisan" credentials to bash Democrats. We all know when he gets in front of the mikes that he’s going to attack liberal critics of the war with whatever Bizarro World version of reality he’s adopted that day.

Yet in spite of that, Harry Reid says Lieberman is going to be keeping all his committee assignments next year, including his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The Courant story includes the usual attempt by Lieberman to relegate his critics to the fringes:

In a telephone interview from Washington, Lieberman said he went on the air expecting to discuss Iraq or the presidential campaign, not his place in politics.

Lieberman said his critique against the "small group on the left" was directed at the online advocacy group MoveOn.org and liberal bloggers like Daily Kos, not any colleagues.

He said he was struck by how the leading Democratic presidential candidates attended the Yearly Kos convention of liberal bloggers, skipping the annual meeting of the moderate and once influential Democratic Leadership Council.

Hmmm. I don’t suppose it could be that the candidates appeared at YearlyKos because poll after poll has shown that Americans, by substantial majorities, agree with those dirty fucking hippies and not Joe (and his fellow war apologists in the DLC) about ending the war, could it? In the old days, we used to call that "democracy."

Ah well. We’ve become accustomed to such gum-flapping from Lieberman. As the story notes:

[W]hen he raises alarms over hyper-partisanship, a term he used in a foreign-policy speech last year, Lieberman focuses on Democrats.

But wait! Joe says that there have been Republican hyper-partisans — but only back in the ’90s:

"I will certify to the fact that the hyper-partisanship has been on both sides," Lieberman said. "There were a lot of Republicans who had a similarly hyper-partisan reaction to anything — literally, anything — that Bill Clinton did during the ’90s."

And of course, back then, Lieberman made sure pandered to them, too. It’s what he’s always done.

Bolder by the day

-- by Dave

So now the skinhead set is trying to gain recruits in Pennsylvania (specifically, Wilkes-Barre) by hanging banners near public throughways:

The banner on the Market Street Bridge, which promotes the Keystone State Skinheads organization, reads, “Preserve Our Heritage,” on a white bed sheet with black spray paint. The sign was hung on the west side of the bridge and also promotes the organization’s Web site, www.keystoneunited.com.

It comes just a day after similar fliers were posted in Shickshinny and earlier last week in Pittston, and days after police arrested two teenage girls – one a self-proclaimed Nazi – on charges of spray-painting anti-Semitic words and symbols on two buildings, the Ohav Zedek Synagogue and the vacant Mertz Building on Conyngham Avenue.

According to the Keystone State Skinheads Web site, the KSS was formed in September 2001 by a “small group of skinheads” residing in Harrisburg, with the goal of uniting all racially aware skinheads in Pennsylvania. The organization has a local branch in Dunmore with a P.O. Box address.

“They seem to keep putting (banners up) under the disguise of nightfall,” said Ron Felton, president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “Obviously they don’t want to be detected, but want to promote their cause by defacing public property.”

You'll note that the message of the banner is intended to resonate with whites resentful about Latino immigration.

Left Behind: Waaaah!

-- by Dave

Dude: Did you know that the Rapture has already happened?

When House Majority Leader Tom DeLay delivered a moving speech from the halls of Congress last week, in which he argued that his political enemies are persecuting him because of his religious faith, there was just one problem: he wasn't supposed to be there. Earlier this month, say observers, the 'Rapture,' the much-anticipated event in which God summons his faithful to the heavens, finally happened.

But instead of Mr. DeLay and millions of other believers making the skyward trek, the biblical bash appears to have been an exclusive, invitation-only affair. As of today, fewer than three dozen Christians are confirmed to have been 'raptured,' leaving their rejected brethren to deal with seven years of Tribulation, a turbulent period marked by the return of the anti-Christ.

For those who had hoped to be cashing in on their heavenly rewards, these are days of soul searching and regret. From Capitol Hill to the mega-churches of the south, disappointed travelers are asking the same questions: 'Why not me?' 'What did I do wrong?' and 'Was it something I said?'

Ooops, well, maybe not:

Saying that it can no longer stand by its story that the Rapture may have happened earlier this month, the Swift Report, a popular conservative weblog, is officially retracting its account of the much-anticipated event in which God summons his faithful to the heavens. After receiving hundreds of complaints from outraged readers who'd been 'left behind,' an editorial investigation determined that the Swift Report had failed to follow basic journalistic principles in the preparation and reporting of the piece.

One of the more important of these principles, of course, was to check and see whether the persons they reported as having been "raptured" even existed in the first place:

"As the current pastor of Spring Hill Baptist Church for the past three years, I hate to tell you but we have never had a Pastor DeLong here, not even as a visitor and we do not know anything about a Mr. Dumé. If we find any evidence of the rapture occurring we will let you know. I am going to ask the janitor if she found any jewelry or clothing."

But of course, when called on the carpet, the author of the piece retreated to the good ol' right-wing way of accepting responsibility for her shoddy work -- blame it on a subordinate:

While Ms. Swift initially stood by her reporting, she has since acknowledged that the story was flawed, attributing its many errors and inaccuracies to a Swift Report intern who was responsible for researching the article. "This has been a difficult but important period for us. It represents a unique opportunity for all of us at the Swift Report to learn from the mistakes surrounding the flawed Rapture article and reaffirm our commitment to the American public to practice journalism of the highest standard,'' said Ms. Swift.

You may also want to note that "The Swift Report" is in fact named for Deanna Swift, whose bio describes her as a "season professional journalist" who "found herself all but blacklisted during the Clinton years." This is hard to imagine, since Swift's standards of journalism are obviously the kind that, during the Clinton years, would have guaranteed her success.

Maybe she was too busy getting ready for the Rapture herself.

Whiny McSame

-- by Sara

With only seven months left in the Longest Election Season Ever, it's not too early to start pointing out how entirely unsuitable for office John McCain is -- and how far the mainstream media will go to defend his tender ego and quick temper from the slightest bruising.

Crooks & Liars has today's story, which involves a McCain appearance earlier this week that devolved into a life-threatening free-fire situation on a par with....well, maybe Hillary's daring escape from a fusillade of eight-year-olds with poems:

At an appearance at an Episcopal high school in Alexandria, Virginia during his Biography tour, a student calmly and rationally pointed out the rather obvious political overtones to the assembly (despite it not being portrayed as such to the student body, evidently) and asked what McCain's intent was being at her school.

STUDENT: We can see that this isn't completely absent, uh, political motivation isn't completely absent, yet we were told this isn't a political event. So, what exactly is your purpose in being here, not that I don't appreciate the opportunity, but I'd just like some clarification.

MCCAIN: I knew I should have cut this thing off. [laughter] This meeting is over. [laughter] Um, this is an opportunity and part of a series of visits that I'm playing…paying…we started in Mississippi, uh, where my family's roots are back to the middle of the 19th century, to here. We're going from here to Pensacola, Florida, to Jacksonville, Florida, and a couple of other places where…we're going to Annapolis, where I obviously attended the Naval Academy.

And it's sort of a tour where we try to not only emphasize the values and principles that guided me and I think a lot of this country in the past, but also portray a vision of how I think we need to address the challenges of the future, and a lot of that is in retrospect, but a lot of it is also advocacy and addressing certain challenges that face the nation. I hope that attendance here was not compulsory.

CNN reporter/McCain acolyte rushed to report on Our Hero's breathless escape from the threat of this Raging Student Heckler:

ACOSTA: So there you have it, John McCain, who is no stranger to incoming fire, able to handle that heckler there...

As Nicole Belle at C&L put it: "It is such an indictment on the pathetic notions of journalism from a journalist–especially when it comes to dealing with media darling John McCain–that CNN reporter Jim Acosta can't even recognize a legitimate question being asked of a presidential candidate and characterized it as being under fire from a heckler."

The story took me back to last July, and what 1500 bloggers put seven Democratic wannabe-candidates through at the debate held at Yearly Kos. We were polite (mostly) -- but those seven (Hillary and Obama, plus Edwards, Dodd, Kucinich, Richardson, and Gravel) spent an entire afternoon fielding questions that were several orders of magnitude more challenging than "Why are you here?"

If the mainstream media had any sense of proportion at all, McCain's apologists would have to liken what Obama and Hillary endured at our hands to...well, maybe surviving Hiroshima would qualify.

The funny thing is, though: all seven came through the grilling at the hands of Those Nasty Bloggers without a scratch. (In fact, several of them looked like they were having a pretty good time.) We can only conclude from this that every last one of those early Democrats would have made a tougher, better, less whiny-ass candidate than McKleenex.

If enduring the "threat" from a high school student with a softball question is what passes for "tough" in McCainland, he doesn't have the grit to be president of the local AARP chapter (those old gals can play rough), let alone the country.

That dialogue on race: The hard part

-- by Dave

Well, it's become painfully self-evident by now that when it comes to having that actual "dialogue on race" Barack Obama tried to help inspire a couple of weeks ago, sincere people of good will are just going to have to go it alone.

The media aren't going to be helping much -- they're obviously only interested in the issue as a means for bashing liberals, and Obama in particular.

And conservatives, even more obviously, not only intend not to join in, they're only going to head in the opposite direction.

Which leaves those of us actually interested in a real dialogue hanging alone out there by ourselves. And that, really, may prove to be the most difficult part.

A crystalline example of the obstacles ahead can be found on the Kent State University campus in Ohio, where a debate has been raging about black-white relations since the publication of an interesting column in the student paper by a young white woman named Beth Rankin wrote a provocative column about her own difficulties in trying to overcome the racial gap in her own community, particularly in her dealings with the Black United Students organization, beginning with her attendance at a BUS-sponsored concert when she was a freshman:

From the moment Justin and I entered the ballroom, the tension was palpable. We received puzzled stares from students sitting around us, and though we couldn't put a finger on why, we felt incredibly unwelcome. I left feeling uncomfortable and unable to make sense of what had happened.

Back in Tri-Towers, when I told my dorm mates where I'd been, I received similar puzzled looks. You went to a BUS event? Hasn't anyone told you about BUS? They don't want white people attending their functions.

I didn't believe it. Even as I heard the exact same dialog from every non-black student and coworker I discussed BUS with, I had a hard time believing that a group fighting for equal rights would covertly push away other people fighting for the same cause.

A couple months later, as a member of the Stater editorial board, the forum editor and I had a small meeting with BUS leaders. The Stater and BUS have always had a notoriously rocky relationship, and my editor thought that by hearing from BUS itself about the group's goals, we could help bridge the gap.

Boy were we surprised when we were informed by then-leaders Teddy Harris and Demareo Cooper that BUS's goal was not equality, but to advance blacks beyond that of whites. The goal was black-owned, black-operated businesses and universities. When we said,

"... but that's racism ..." we were told that as the majority, we were unable to feel racism. We just couldn't understand.

Indeed, it is not just hard, it's practically impossible for a white person to understand the resentment that young African Americans feel after a lifetime of having doors slammed in their faces and being treated as second-class citizens. Even seemingly sincere efforts by other whites to reach out are often seen (and not always incorrectly) as self-serving attempts to make themselves feel superior, to other whites, if nothing else.

It's not clear that Rankin understands this. But it's also obvious that she's very sincere about wanting to overcome the obstacles, and so she issues a challenge worth making:

So this is what I say to you, current members and leaders of BUS: Tell me again. Tell me again what your goals are. I certainly hope they differ from those expressed to me in 2004.

Tell me what you are doing to reach out to non-black students who support your cause. As a straight girl, PRIDE!Kent has always welcomed me to their meetings and functions because they knew I supported their cause. I want to be able to attend BUS functions and feel the same love.

Racism is still a problem in this country, and it will never be solved if we continue to divide black from white. I have been called names and ostracized for the color of my skin, and I have been ridiculed for sharing my life with a man who is not white.

I am not a white bitch. I am a straight, white girl who will always do everything in her power to support the plight of all minorities.

I don't use the color of your skin against you, so please do not use mine against me.

Please, BUS: Tell me how you plan to use your powers for good. I want to hear your voice, and I want to become a united front in the fight against prejudice.

I am not a white bitch. I am not whitey. I am not a cracker. I am not the man.

And I never want to feel ostracized because of my race ever again. Don't you feel the same?

If nothing else, Rankin's efforts spurred a real dialogue on the Kent State campus in which both sides were able to clear the air:

Carla Smith, a former BUS executive board member, said students need to challenge themselves and step outside their comfort zone. They should not be afraid to be different.

"Take it beyond a conversation," she said. "You're responsible for yourself."

As blacks, Smith said, it's natural instinct to stick together. She asked people not to hold blacks accountable for not recognizing other races who attend their events if the person him or herself does not take the initiative to talk.

And just as a reminder to everyone that taking these kinds of steps produce difficulties on all sides, some white supremacists chimed in as well:

But her March 13 column found its way to a white supremacists' Web site, where some readers posted comments that she was ''groveling'' at the feet of blacks, and worse, she said.

''A couple of them said they wanted to kill my family in front of me and then me,'' said Rankin, a former student correspondent for the Beacon Journal. ''They thought I deserved to be punished.''

An FBI officer in Cleveland notified Rankin on Wednesday that her column — headlined ''I am not a white bitch'' — had attracted the attention of white supremacists.

She called KSU police, who turned out for a previously scheduled meeting on Wednesday with Black United Students, or BUS.

I recently read Randall Kennedy's excellent new book, Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal, which focuses on the difficulties black people face when they adopt political positions seen as inimical to black-community interests. As someone who also has been accused of being a "race traitor" by white supremacists, I pondered chiming in at the Firedoglake book salon with the perspective of a white person who deals with similar issues, but decided not to, since I wasn't sure it would be constructive.

But now I wish I had.