Partisan hypocrisy

The Bush administration then:

"What I want to say to my Democratic friends in the Congress is they need to be very cautious not to seek political advantage by making incendiary suggestions as were made by some today that the White House had advance information that would have prevented the tragic attacks of 9/11. (Applause) Such commentary is thoroughly irresponsible and totally unworthy of national leaders in a time of war. "

The GOP now:

"After months of sustained attacks against President Bush in Democratic primary debates and commercials, the Republican Party is responding this week with its first advertisement of the presidential race, portraying Mr. Bush as fighting terrorism while his potential challengers try to undermine him with their sniping."

Apparently it's only "political" if Democrats use concerns about the "War on Terror" for electoral advantage.

The shit deepens

It seems only fitting that this headline should appear in the right-wing Newsmax:

Gen. Franks Doubts Constitution Will Survive WMD Attack

Might this just set up the pretext for something many of us suspect has been coming since Sept. 11? Nothing like sending up the meme as a trial balloon first.

Franks says -- in, of all places, the magazine Cigar Aficionado -- that if terrorists obtain and use weapons of mass destruction, "... the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we’ve seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy."

He goes on:

It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important.

The problem is, Franks may well be right. Anyone who has studied the history of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II know well just how easily the public can be frightened into surrending constitutional rights in times of great national duress, especially if it is perceived that those rights mostly benefit "someone else," and if doing so will make the rest of us "safe" -- regardless of whether such claims are bogus. In reality, such an action will mean only one thing: The terrorists will have won.

Also worth observing is this concluding note:

"I doubt that we’ll ever have a time when the world will actually be at peace.”

Ah yes, that classic fascist theme: "Life is eternal warfare."

[Thanks to Patrick Purcell for the heads-up.]

The Brownshirt Barbie

By now, all the Kewl Kids on the conservative voting bloc are bound to have their own Ann Coulter Action Figure.

But wait! Now, by popular demand, there's the special Brownshirt Edition!



This incredibly lifelike stick-action figure looks just like the real-life anorexic Ann Coulter, and best of all . . . it sounds like Ann, too! [Though in reality we just went to the local methamphetamine-rehab center and found one of her many sound-alikes.]

Push the button on the figure, and you'll hear such "Coulterisms" as:

"My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."

"We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too."

"They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America’s self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. Fifty years of treason hasn’t slowed them down."

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

"I thought I was here to talk about my book. I thought I was here to talk about my book. I thought I was here to talk about my book. I thought I was here to talk about my book. My book has 35 pages of footnotes!"

"God said ... rape the planet -- it’s yours. That’s our job: drilling, mining and striping. Sweaters are the anti-Biblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars -- that’s the Biblical view."

"I have to say I’m all for public flogging."

"I think [women] should be armed but should not [be allowed to] vote."

"Liberals hate America, they hate flag-wavers, they hate abortion opponents, they hate all religions except Islam, post 9/11. Even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do. They don't have the energy. If they had that much energy, they'd have indoor plumbing by now."

"My libertarian friends are probably getting a little upset now but I think that's because they never appreciate the benefits of local fascism."

This highly disposable doll comes in a display box with information highlighting Ann's unique contributions to America's creeping fascism. It also features the lyrics to "The Horst Wessel Song," which plays whenever you raise her right arm in a salute.

Best of all, the new Brownshirt Edition features a lifelike vibrating feature that will bring hours of ecstacy, Ann-style, to her many female admirers. So don't forget to buy replacement batteries!

Coming soon: The Inflatable Edition!

Gay marriage, the Bible, and miscegenation

As I've noted previously, both the religious right and its political wing, the Republican Party, have made it clear that they intend to make gay marriage a major issue in the 2004 election, especially now that the Massachusetts high court has overturned the ban on such unions:

Last week, Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie, said for the first time that a federal marriage amendment may be "addressed in some form or fashion" in the GOP's 2004 platform, and he indicated that White House and Republican Party officials now are assessing the possible impact of a decision by the Massachusetts court. Gillespie asserted that gay advocates are practicing "religious bigotry" and "intolerance" by demanding Americans condone same-sex marriage.

... Gay marriage could emerge as an important wedge issue that Republicans could use in 2004 to woo traditional Democrats, particularly Roman Catholics. "I can write Bush's commercials right now, attacking Howard Dean for signing the civil-union bill," said John Green, director of the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron and a specialist in voting trends of religious groups.

And one of the primary arguments raised by these opponents is that God opposes such marriages, and that "it's in the Bible." Or, as the nice folks at Concerned Women for America put it:

Homosexual marriage will always be an abomination to God regardless of whether a clergyman performs the ceremony. When God calls something unholy, man cannot make it holy or bless it.

You can find similar arguments at Focus on the Family, Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, and particularly Baptist News, which provided the following commentary:

The gay agenda will never win biblically and theologically.

In Leviticus 18:22 and in Leviticus 20:13 homosexuality is referred to as being an abomination to God. An abomination is an outrage, a disgrace, and is detestable to God. This is what God says homosexuality is.

In Romans 1:26-28, the Bible says that "God gives them over," meaning that he lets sin run its course with the homosexuals. Their rejection of God's truth has now resulted in them being given over to their vile passions, letting it run its inevitable course toward the judgment of God. This debauchery exists when women are engaged sexually with women and men are engaged sexually with men. Then God gives them over to a debased mind, which means He gives them over to the depths of their degenerate mind and lifestyle, which is not fitting to God at all. In other words, God lets their sin run its course with them.

Of course, mainstream fundamentalists are not the only ones to cite these passages from Scripture to support their views. So, for that matter, do Christian Identity fundamentalists, who go on to argue (from these same passages) that the Bible demands that homosexuals be put to death. And as always, the Rev. Fred Phelps makes the same arguments.

The BP commentator goes on to say:

Upon the authority of God's Word, the Bible, due to its inspiration being of God alone, and its infallibility as pure as God, and its impression can be made upon all of the world and even in this culture, the Bible gives no sanction to homosexuality at all. Never does God approve of it at all. He never calls it an alternate lifestyle. God is against civil unions of homosexuals. God is against same-sex "marriage." God is against the ordination of homosexuals into the ministry. Never, never, and never does God give any credibility to any issue or act of the gay lifestyle. Therefore, same-sex "marriage" is an abomination to God and any matrimony ever performed to do it is unholy, ungodly and will receive the judgment of God. Same-sex "marriage" is nothing more than an attempt to redefine one of the holiest ordinances of God, marriage between male and female. It is an attack against marriage and family.

What's interesting about these arguments is that precisely the same arguments were raised for years by bigots who wished to prevent interracial marriage, otherwise known as "miscegenation."

"The Bible is against it" was a common argument favoring anti-miscegenation laws for much of the first half of the 20th century. This theme was a favorite at Ku Klux Klan rallies, and indeed the Bible was used to justify any number of lynchings of black people after the Civil War. As Philip Dray observes in At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America:

Sociologist Orlando Patterson has explained the obsessive, riualized killing of black males in the 1890s by suggesting that the South's dominant fundamentalist Christianity combined with its Lost Cause ideology to create a belief system in which the black man was perceived as an enemy within Southern society -- the cause of a humiliating defeat in war and an ever-expanding threat, via miscegenation, to its perpetuity and survival. The black man of the 1890s, particularly one who was sexually, physically, or intellectually threatening, became a logical sacrificial scapegoat in a region mournful of its past and anxious about its future. Patterson writes, "After the trauma of Appomatox, the Southern community had to be restored in the most extreme compact of blood, and its God propitiated in the most extreme form of sacrifice known to man. ... It takes little imagination, and almost no feeling for the workings of the religious mind, to understand how, as the flames devoured the flesh and soul of each Afro-American victim, every participant in these heinous rituals of human sacrifice must have felt the deepest and most gratifying sense of expiation and atonement."

Another classic example of the commingling of religious belief and bigotry to attack miscegenation was Charles Carroll's 1900 bestseller, The Negro a Beast, or "In the Image of God," which blended Biblical interpretations and the pseudo-science of race that was popular at the time to assert that blacks were not really human at all. Carroll asserted they were not part of the "Adamic family" that came from the Garden of Eden, an argument that was a precursor to the current Christian Identity belief system that blacks and other minorities are soulless "mud people." Carroll illustrated the book with provocative drawings, such as one depicting a virginal white bride accompanied at the altar by a gorilla-like black man in a tuxedo. Among its central passages was this:

Woman is the great stronghold, the vital point, of the Adamic Creation. Hence, as along as the marriage relations of the pure Adamic females of a nation, or continent, is confined to pure Adamic males, the pure Adamic stock of that nation, or continent, cannot be absorbed and destroyed by the amalgamation.

This Biblical mythology enjoyed a long life not only in American culture, but elsewhere. Adolf Hitler, in fact, also referred to scriptural passages in developing his own racial theories.

Notably, this reliance continues today among racist extremists. The white-supremacist Vanguard News Network, for instance, rather recently featured an essay titled "What Does the Bible Say About Racemixing?"

And it's probably worth noting that these beliefs float around the edges of even nominally "mainstream" fundamentalists.

Some conservatives, notably Jeff Jacoby, try to distinguish between the anti-miscegenation laws and the widespread ban on gay marriages by arguing that the former forbade marriages because of an immutable characteristic such as race, while the latter is based on a "choice." This is, of course, far from clear, since the scientific evidence of a hard-wiring component to homosexuality keeps mounting. But even if being gay is simply a matter of intention, society does not discriminate against the right to marry based on such decisions. After all, religion likewise is largely a "choice," but people are not forbidden to marry simply on the basis of that status.

Moreover, it is abundantly clear that scriptural passages are perhaps the poorest foundations on which public policy can be based, since (as the above examples demonstrate) they can easily be distorted to justify the most base kinds of prejudice.

Finally, it must be observed that not everyone agrees that the Scripture forbids gay marriage. But then, according to the fundamentalists who thump their Bibles to justify their hatred of gays, these kinds of folks aren't "real Christians" anyway.

Radio Free Orcinus

My interview with Ian Masters at Background Briefing on Los Angeles' KPFK-FM last Sunday is now available online at his site. It all went pretty well, I thought.

I appear at about the 42-minute mark of the broadcast. Be sure to stick around to listen to the thoughts of Bernard-Henri Levy, who is on for the better part of the hour after I'm on. He corroborates a number of my observations, and has a number of keen insights of his own.

Scaife Attack: The Mainstream Churches

Every close observer of the political right in the past decade is well aware that the ascension of the "conservative movement" has been largely fueled by a handful of billionaires who have poured large chunks of their fortunes into a bevy of right-wing think tanks, non-profit foundations and various "nonpartisan" organizations whose raison d'etre has been to promote various conservative causes.

For the most part, these groups' activities have confined themselves to the political and legal realms, pushing for everything from Bill Clinton's impeachment to the concept of the so-called "law and society" school of legal thought.

Now, however, they are moving into the churches.

Many non-churchgoing folks tend to lump all Christians in with fundamentalists, in no small part because the latter have a penchant for self-promotion and have come to dominate Christian faith in the popular realm, as well as a peculiar tendency to claim for themselves the mantle of "true Christianity." But the reality is that many mainstream churches, particularly Protestants, are overt advocates for progressive causes, and have been for generations.

The right-wing sugar daddies who fueled the rise of conservatism are now taking the same poisonous tactics of personal attacks and smear campaigns that have proved so effective in the political realm into these same churches -- with the clear intent of silencing their traditional liberalism.

The main instrument in this effort is the Institute of Religion and Democracy, which already has helped wreak havoc among Episcopalians by fueling the hysteria about the recent ordination of a gay bishop by the church.

That is only one facet of its campaign. In the United Methodist Church, the IRD is attempting similar tactics, fanatically persecuting a handful of open homosexual ministers for coming out of the closet. The most notorious instances of this have involved a couple of gay pastors at a Methodist church in Seattle roughly a half-mile from my home.

This is somewhat personal for me; I was baptized and raised United Methodist, and at one time came close to following the path of one of my chief role models, the pastor of my church, into the ministry. I attend a different United Methodist church in my neighborhood, but the fellowships of the two congregations are close. Everyone in the congregations knows the two ministers in question were both highly effectively and much beloved.

What's especially noteworthy about the IRD is where its money comes from. Media Transparency has the goods on their sources, which reads like a who's who of right-wing political foundations: the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Coors family's Castle Rock Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, and most of all, the ubiquitous Scaife Foundations, whose funding comes from the fortune of the biggest right-wing sugar daddy of them all, Richard Mellon Scaife. [More on Scaife below.]

Allen Brill at The Right Christians posted about this back in July, and the trend has not gone away. (Allen has also posted about the connection of this same cast of characters to the potential manipulation of voting technologies.) Furthermore, as Chip Berlet recently detailed in the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report, these same groups have a long habit of advocating not merely conservative causes but many that are in fact part of the extremist right.

Andrew J. Weaver's recent piece for the Martin Marty Center, "The Fighting Methodists," attempted to assess the reasons for this assault on the mainstream churches:

The answer is that, although the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, and the Episcopal Church total only about 14 million in membership, they have been and remain a powerful and influential voice for moderate and progressive social values in American society. Almost 30 percent of the members of the U.S. Congress belong to one of these three denominations as well as disproportionate numbers of well-educated and progressive leaders who advocate for the poor, civil and human rights, environmental protection, and a responsible foreign policy. The activities and leadership of mainline Protestant churches are linked to the social conscience of the nation and contribute to civil discourse.

The Methodists -- particularly those of us who are proud of the church's tradition of standing up for progressive causes as part of the ministry of Christ -- are beginning to fight back. Notably, a group of church members is raising the alarm about the threat to the church. They have compiled a text titled United Methodism At Risk: A Wake-Up Call, which observes:

Only now is the depth and scope of the threat emerging clearly. Those within the denomination who value and affirm diversity within the church have viewed these groups as simply having one perspective among many. They have trusted that all persons of good faith --liberal or conservative, evangelical or otherwise-- must be part of the dialogue as we seek to understand God's truth and to manifest that in our daily living.

We can no longer afford to think in such terms. To continue to view "conservative renewal groups" as but one voice among others is naively to risk waking up in a vastly different church one day soon.

The ultimate goal of these groups is to control The United Methodist Church. Their strategy is to attain top leadership positions in the denomination. One tactic they use is spreading misleading and inflammatory charges about groups and individuals to United Methodists across the country. They indulge in character assassination and seek to drive the church apart by the use of wedge issues, calculated to cause dissension and division. Their desire is to impose not to dialogue.

One of the more bizarre attacks on church progressives detailed in the book, by the way, is this cautionary tale of a pastor accused of contributing to occultism.

As Weaver observes:

It is time, in other words, for "fighting Methodists" to make a comeback lest their tolerance and Christian charity be turned against them and used to undermine their churches and further the social ends of the right wing's radical ideology.

The issue is one that should not merely raise concerns among Methodists, or Episcopalians, or any kind of churchgoers. It should raise major alarms among even secular folk with no attachment to any faith -- because it is a significant sign of just how far the right is willing to go to control our beliefs.

Freedom of religion affects every American. And politically driven attacks on it, funded by corporatists with no real interest in anything other than crushing liberalism -- especially in the guise of "faith-based" organizations who seek to turn religion in America into a monoculture -- is every bit as insidious as if the government itself attempted to control the churches.

More about Scaife

Richard Mellon Scaife is one of the more insidious characters to emerge on the American scene in generations, in no small part because he wields his fortune like a club. There is little doubt he bears a deep animus toward liberalism. More important, Scaife (along with the Bradley, Coors and Olin folks) has been one of the major players in the dominance of the conservative movement in America today.

Here are a few handy links for more info on Scaife:

Scaife's many foundations. The Washington Post also has a page devoted to stories about Scaife's activities.

A CNN profile of Scaife from the impeachment brouhaha.

Chip Berlet's earlier report on Scaife's activities.

A Southern Poverty Law Center report on Scaife's funding of the far-right, anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform.

Here's a Scaife Web page from the Religious Freedom Coalition.

An inside view of Scaife's operations, including the revelation that he was behind the so-called "Jesus freaks" of the early '70s.

Scaife is clearly prone to believing far-right conspiracy theories. For instance, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported this amusing tale:

Tribune-Review Publisher Richard Mellon Scaife ordered editors to keep coverage involving the Pittsburgh Pirates off the front page and once dispatched a reporter to northern Pennsylvania to follow up a tip that the Russian military had invaded Allegheny National Forest, according to a report in an upcoming issue of Brill's Content magazine.

… The reporter assigned to investigate reports of Russian troops was Joe Mandak. Mandak yesterday confirmed the Brill's Content account and said he spent a day traveling in the state's northern counties, asking local residents about Russian troops being stationed in the forest and the troops' family members being assigned to jobs at area Wal-Marts.

"Everybody looked at me with a blank stare," Mandak said yesterday.

Mandak said editors made it clear the assignment had come from Scaife.

Karen Rothmeyer wrote a profile of Scaife in Salon that thoroughly outlined his pursuit of Clinton. Rothmeyer a few years before had penned a thorough and devastating profile of Scaife for Columbia Journalism Review titled "Citizen Scaife, including this sidebar, which includes the following nugget:

A few minutes later he appeared at the top of the Club steps. At the bottom of the stairs, the following exchange occurred:

"Mr. Scaife, could you explain why you give so much money to the New Right?"

"You fucking Communist cunt, get out of here."

Obviously Scaife is a deeply religious fellow with a keen interest in Christian principles. His version of the Bible must somehow omit that line about the eye of the needle.

One other thing: People who criticize Scaife have a nasty habit of winding up dead. And so, interestingly, did the only person to successfully interview him: John F. Kennedy Jr.

Not that I'm paranoid or anything. Just observing.

[Thanks to Tamara Baker for bringing this to my attention.]

Helping out on 'Manifestly Unfit'

I'm in the process of writing Part 1 of "Manifestly Unfit: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush," which as I promised when starting out, is very much a reader-participation project.

[Big thanks, by the way, to JP the Great for getting me the URLs to the Saturday Night Live skits.]

As indicated at the end of the Intro, Part 1 is going to key off on George W. Bush's inauguration, since that seems like a logical place to start a review of his presidency. (I'm going to delve Bush's past in more detail in a couple of subsequent chapters, including the 2000 campaign, but the bulk of the essay is going to focus on his tenure as president.)

The next post is going to focus on the way Bush's high-handedness asserted itself from the outset -- his absolute refusal to even acknowledge the, er, unusual circumstances of his ascension to the Oval Office, and the distinct lack of any olive branch to the opposition. Simultaneously (and very much part of this), it will observe the initial appearances of what were to evolve into "First Amendment Zones," mainly through the strange herding of the thousands of protesters in Washington on the day of the event. I also plan to discuss the Bush v. Gore ruling that hung over the day.

So I've got a couple of requests of any readers who might want to contribute:

-- I'd like to hear from anyone who was in Washington to protest and can describe the handling of protesters there, especially if they were mistreated, abused, intimidated or silenced. (I'd also like amusing anecdotes about contact with Republicans.) I already have substantial information in this regard, but frankly (especially considering the atrocious way the story was handled in the press), there can never be too much information about this.

-- I'm planning to focus much of my discussion of Bush v. Gore on Vincent Bugliosi's The Betrayal of America, which was an expansion of his terrific essay in The Nation, "None Dare Call it Treason." I'm also familiar with Richard Posner's defense of the ruling and will briefly discuss it as well. I think Bugliosi's book is generally sound, and I also plan to refer to some good FindLaw articles as well; but if anyone else can point me to any further examinations of the ruling that raise additional points, I'd very much appreciate it. I'd also like to know if anyone has actually managed a better defense of the ruling than Posner's. I'd like to be fairly thorough and well grounded, at least at the research level, though of course not all of it will make its way into the piece.

Thanks! I hope everyone's enjoying the piece so far. I've been distracted by other issues for a bit, and haven't had a lot of blogging time anyway, so the project has begun more slowly than I intended. But I hope in the next few weeks to start building up a head of steam on it, so to speak.

Radio Free Orcinus

For those interested, I'm scheduled to be interviewed on the radio Sunday morning by Ian Masters of KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles. We'll be talking about the recent discussion of "Creeping Fascism".

Masters, whose Pacifica Radio show enjoys a broad listenership, is one of the best broadcasters in the business when it comes to examining media issues. I'm very flattered to be on the show.

If you want to hear it live, you can play the Webcast by going to KPFK's Web site. I'm scheduled to go on the air at about 11:40 PST.

Hatred, anger, and the 2004 election

All of the hand-wringing currently circulating among the pundit class about the rising tide of "Bush hatred" misunderstands the nature of what really is happening. They mistake anger for hatred -- though in the case of conservatives, it's fair to say that the confusion is intentional.

Anger, for the most part, is a righteous and largely rational thing -- it arises from genuine grievances, and is typically a response to outrages of some form or another. Hatred, on the other hand, is an irrational thing; it comes from deep in the soul, and is usually an expression of some deep-seated imbalance on the part of the hater. Naturally, if anger is allowed to fester unaddressed long enough, it can easily mutate into hatred. But they are distinctive in nature.

We can all recall the Clinton hatred of the 1990s: wild accusations that he planned to enslave America in a "New World Order," that he'd had Vince Foster murdered, that he ran drugs out of the Mena airport, that he had fathered a black "love child," and on and on and on. As Bob Somerby recently observed on the topic, this wasn't just emanating from the fringe elements of the right, though it certainly had a significant audience there; this was coming from supposedly mainstream conservatives inside the Beltway, and it was broadcast throughout mainstream media. This hatred was grotesquely irrational, especially considering that Clinton was a political moderate by any lights whose policies on many fronts (international trade, welfare reform, balancing the budget) presented victories for conservative ideals.

Of course, the same conservatives who engaged in this lunacy -- projectionists that they are -- have a habit of accusing liberals of the very behavior in which they themselves avidly participate and foment. Thus they have now invented the "Bush hatred" meme, suggesting that liberals who attack Bush are the moral equivalents of themselves. ("I know you are, but what am I?" is the essence of these charges.)

But, as I have argued at length previously, the majority of this "hatred" is predicated on real policies and real actions by both Bush and his administration. This is not hatred: it is anger -- real, righteous and well-grounded anger.

Anger can be a healthy thing, especially if it is based on solid reasons and real grievances. Anger over real injustices motivated the American Revolution, the anti-slavery and civil-rights movements, and women's suffrage. History is replete with righteous anger.

Anger only becomes unhealthy hatred if it festers. And one of the ways it can fester is if the grievances underlying them are dismissed out of hand as irrational -- not just by the perpetrators of the injustices, but by the supposed allies of the victims.

This is what is happening currently to the critics of the Bush administration who are angered over his war policies, his mishandling of the economy, his pillaging of the environment, his crass cronyism, his multitude of lies, his gross hypocrisy. Any one of these is reasonable cause for anger -- and when piled one on top of the other, it becomes a real mountain of anger. But to hear the hand-wringers of the pundit class chatter, you would think these causes are no different than New World Order conspiracy theories.

The most egregious case of this is Nick Kristoff's recent New York Times column:

Liberals have now become as intemperate as conservatives, and the result — everybody shouting at everybody else — corrodes the body politic and is counterproductive for Democrats themselves. My guess is that if the Democrats stay angry, then they'll offend Southern white guys, with or without pickups and flags, and lose again.

This nonsense has already been well-limned by Somerby, who points out the ludicrousness of Kristoff's comparisons. And Kristoff, nominally a liberal himself, is only one of many from the left side of the aisle wringing their hands in such fashion; another example is David Kusnet's attack on Howard Dean in Salon, in which he describes the kind of election-year blueprint now being tailored by the GOP:

This strategy serves four goals: portraying Bush as the unifying leader that he could have become after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Diverting attention from his own high-risk policies. Painting his eventual opponent -- especially if it's Dean -- as the real extremist and a hothead as well. And blaming Bush's lack of legislative accomplishments on the Democrats' refusal to work with a president they despise.

It is indeed apparent that conservatives are making "Bush hatred" the centerpiece of their 2004 election strategy. But what is especially silly about warnings like Kusnet's is that Republicans are going to attack any Democrat in similar fashion, regardless of who it is. The only productive counterstrategy is not to defuse or muffle the very real anger out there, but to emphasize its rational content -- and thereby help make it spread. As the bumper sticker says: "If you're not outraged, you haven't been paying attention."

Unsurprisingly, conservatives continue to play up the "Bush hatred" theme, including David Brooks' latest New York Times column, in which he attempts to advise liberal presidential candidates to chill out. Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I do find such advice from oh-so-thoughtful conservatives -- George Will likewise makes a habit of advising liberals how to behave -- extremely helpful. It's a very handy reverse barometer of exactly the kind of strategy that liberals should pursue.

In this case, muffling the anger and playing "nice" is effectively unilateral disarmament in the face of naked aggression. Liberals did not invent or even foment the nastiness of the current political climate -- it has been foisted upon them by a decade's worth of panting, raving, frothing conservatives whose power-mad agenda has become all too clear now that they control literally every component of the federal government. It is not far afield from the advice often given to Jews back in 1932-35 to lay low, play nice, and not upset the applecart in Germany.

I don't often use Holocaust analogies, but given the increasingly violent and hateful nature of the attacks on liberals -- and the increasingly apparent fascistic tendencies of the opposition -- it is becoming all too apt.

The most disturbing aspect of this trend, as I described in the above post, is the clear emergence of an eliminationist agenda aimed at liberals, replete with all kinds of rhetoric fomenting violence against them. (One example I failed to mention was this one.) The past few days have provided even more examples of this behavior.

One of the most noteworthy recent cases (as Jesse at Pandagon explored recently) was Mark Byron's bizarre Turner Diaries-like fantasy about running mass assassinations of liberal Democrats:

A paramilitary organization calling itself the Christian Liberation Front changed the balance of power in Washington by a pair of brutal attacks this afternoon. A force estimated at about 200 CLF commandos stormed the Supreme Court building, killing 35 people, including five Supreme Court Justices. At the same time, a contingent of 1,000 CLF paramilitaries attacked the Hart Senate Office Building, where a Senate Democratic Caucus meeting was being held. Approximately 50 people were killed in the attack. Once the commandos had seized the building, they systematically killed Democratic senators from states with Republican governors.

A similar fantasy recently appeared among the comments at Little Green Footballs, responding hysterically to Ted Rall's admittedly lame satirical column, whose purpose clearly flew right over the heads of the troglodytes who post there:

"Dear Recruit:

Thank you for joining the American resistance forces. You have been issued an illegal bolt-action rifle, a drum of improvised explosive material and an address where you can pick up supplies of ammunition and fuses. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the authoritarian left.

You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: freedom for America. Our leaders include generals of President Bush's secular government as well as fundamentalist Christians.

We are Christian and Jew and atheist, white and black, Anglo and Hispanic, native and immigrant, Democrat and Republican. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us resented Bush, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the People's Coalition Provisional Authority headed by the terror-apologist and traitor, Ramsey Clark or their Vichyite lapdogs in the media, the academic community, and the elitist corporate foundations.

Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against Iranian nuclear terrorism.

This was the Left's plan all along.

Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Leftists as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves."

And then there was this charming and oh-so-hilarious essay at IMAO:

So what do we do with these idiots who annoy us?

Mass slaughter you say?

No, though we can easily do that, we need to find solution more tolerant, such as showing them the errors of their ways. …

Carefully Explain the Errors in Their Logic: They think Bush is like Hitler, so show them the difference. Have them wear a sign in front of the Whitehouse saying, "I hate the government." and then have them wear the same sign in some country like Syria. Maybe they'll understand the difference in the moments before death.

The author goes on to explore other methods, such as forcing liberals' hands into a fire, administering shock therapy, breaking their kneecaps, and punching them in the face. Commenters at the site go on to recommend machine-gunning liberals and forcing them into slavery.

As I observed last time, this kind of violent eliminationism is a core component of fascism, especially in the context of Richard Falk's definition of the term as "an ultranationalist ideology that views its enemies -- internally and externally -- as evil and subject to extermination or extreme punishment."

These are not mere jokes. They describe an underlying attitude about the writers' fellow Americans that not only demonizes them, but reduces them to subhuman level, prime targets for violent elimination. The authors may think they are publishing mere jokes, and perhaps in their own minds, they are. But they have a concrete real-world effect -- because inevitably members of their audience (particularly the more hate-filled and mentally unstable types) will eventually act them out. Recall, if you will, that William Pierce often protested that The Turner Diaries was a mere work of fiction; but that did not prevent either Robert Mathews or Timothy McVeigh from attempting to enact its blueprint.

But as Falk also warns, this kind of rhetoric, and the resulting behavior, has a flip side: Hatred inspires hatred, violence inspires counterviolence. Eventually the provocations from conservatives will inspire a response in kind. This means we are treading into extremely dangerous territory.

Contrary to Kusnet's thesis, I think it's clear that Howard Dean's candidacy is an important sign of a healthy response. As Falk puts it:

[I]f the Democratic Party in the United States doesn't elect a candidate who will challenge these policies, I think it would lead an increasing number of people to become disenchanted with normal politics and be more inclined to feel that the only way change can come about is by more extreme political tactics, which in turn would lead the government to feel justified in expanding its powers of control over the citizenry.

Liberals' anger is mounting so rapidly that there is indeed a real danger of it teetering into irrational hatred. This is already beginning to bubble up, and it in fact can be found among commenters on left-leaning blogs (see, for instance, some of the vicious comments catalogued by Keith Berry in his comments after a post about Barbara Bush), though no liberal bloggers have yet waded into Mark Byron, Rottweiler or LGF territory.

Moreover, liberals are now so angry that they are itching for a fight, and will almost certainly pounce on any serious provocation. If violence comes their way, there is certain to be counterviolence.

Somehow, I expect, conservatives and hand-wringing pundits will find a way to blame it all on liberals. And that's all the pretext the Bushites will need.

Anger at Bush is a healthy sign. But liberals must find a way to continue to channel that anger in a constructive direction. If we become haters, like the conservatives who are fomenting violence against us, we ALL will be lost.

The hate-crimes fight

Via Talk Left, the Washington Times is reporting that Orrin Hatch has finally relented and is now on board with Sen. Ted Kennedy's federal hate-crimes bill, titled the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act.

I've previously discussed why this bill could and should play a key role in the 2004 campaign, partly because it serves as an effective counterpoint to the GOP plans to make gay marriage a "hot button" issue. The GOP's handling of the legislation to date comes down, at its core, to the argument that crimes are a form of free speech. Republicans contend that there is no need to crack down on people who commit crimes against gays -- and the reality is that most Americans no longer believe this.

The Times report lays out the opposition's familiar arguments:

Opposition remains strong among some Republicans, though several of those who have been the staunchest opponents in the past declined to speak on the record about the measure drawn up by Mr. Hatch and Mr. Kennedy.

They are concerned that the bill would violate free-speech rights and give the Department of Justice free rein to step over local authorities to prosecute many types of violent crimes.

Then perhaps they should read the language of the bill, which states explicitly:

No prosecution of any offense described in this subsection may be undertaken by the United States, except under the certification in writing of the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, the Associate Attorney General, or any Assistant Attorney General specially designated by the Attorney General that--

(1) he or she has reasonable cause to believe that the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or disability of any person was a motivating factor underlying the alleged conduct of the defendant; and

(2) he or his designee or she or her designee has consulted with State or local law enforcement officials regarding the prosecution and determined that--

(A) the State does not have jurisdiction or does not intend to exercise jurisdiction;

(B) the State has requested that the Federal Government assume jurisdiction;

(C) the State does not object to the Federal Government assuming jurisdiction; or

(D) the verdict or sentence obtained pursuant to State charges left demonstratively unvindicated the Federal interest in eradicating bias-motivated violence.

And then we get the familiar argument that the laws create "thought crimes":

"It actually punishes someone for what he thinks," said one Senate staffer whose boss opposes any form of the legislation. "That's pretty scary."

In reality, punishing a person more harshly for what is in their minds is a standard feature of criminal law, since it directly affects culpability. Bias-crimes statutes recognize, like a myriad criminal laws, that motive and intent can and should affect the kind of sentence needed to protect society adequately -- that is, after all, the difference between first-degree murder and manslaughter. Intent and motive can be the difference between a five-year sentence and the electric chair.

Attempting a sort of zero-sum analysis that makes the outcome (in the case of homicide, a dead person) the only significant issue in what kind of sentence a perpetrator should face (the death sentence vs. a prison term) would overthrow longstanding legal traditions of proportionality in setting punishment, effectively eliminating the role of culpability -- or mens rea, the mental state of the actor--as a major factor. Or, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously put it: "Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked."

Moreover, this particular Republican argument against the bill actually argues against any hate-crimes law whatsoever. Someone needs to ask these same Republicans if they wish to overturn all of the nation's hate-crime laws now.

The truth, however, is that Republicans oppose this bill for one reason only: Because it expands the categories of bias motivation to include sexual orientation. As one source told the Times:

"With this bill, the federal government officially condones [the homosexual] lifestyle," said another Senate staffer.

The hard fact is that homosexuals are not granted any kind of protected or "special" status by including sexual orientation in hate-crimes laws. The federal and state laws dealing with these acts all are built around a basic concept: providing longer and tougher sentences for crimes in which certain kinds of bias are the motive. Racial, religious, and ethnic biases are universally addressed in both federal and state laws; some states also include gender, sexual orientation, or disability.

The laws, as such, are universal for all citizens. Any race, any religion, any ethnicity, and any sexual orientation would be protected under this hate-crime law. There are no "designated groups" -- rather, there are only categories of bias. The laws are focused on the motive of the criminal, not on the group identity of victim. Their purpose is less to protect any "groups" than to focus approbation on a recognizable social pathology in its expression as a crime.

They arise out of a basic reality: Bias-motivated crimes create more harm than the parallel crimes that they resemble. They are not intended to victimize merely the actual subjects of the crime, but the entire community that is the object of the criminal's bias. A swastika scrawled on a synagogue wall is not mere graffiti -- it's intended to threaten and intimidate all Jews within its reach, to "send a message" and "keep them in their place." At the same time, studies have shown that hate crimes are more likely to cause great physical harm to their victim -- and the long-term psychological effects are far greater, resembling often the trauma associated with victims of rape.

In this sense, these are very like laws against terrorist acts -- they recognize that the motive underlying the crime can cause much greater damage beyond the mere crime itself, and so deserves stiffer punishment. For that matter, they are structured similarly to anti-terrorism laws as well. They don't create new crimes; instead, they give prosecutors, judges, and juries the ability to punish (with longer sentences) only those acts that are already crimes. In the case of terrorism, the requisite motive is the desire to force political or social change; in the case of hate crimes, it's a desire to harm anyone belonging to the group against which the criminal has a bias.

These kinds of laws simply guarantee that any citizen, regardless of sexual orientation -- straight, gay, lesbian, or transgender -- will see society able to bring the full force of the law against anyone who threatens violence against them merely for their sexual identity, perceived or otherwise.

The existence of laws against such crimes essentially recognizes their reality as a social pathology -- a reality underscored by the statistics showing that violence against gays and lesbians constitutes the second-most common kind of hate crime.

At least Orrin Hatch has, in his own words, finally "grown up" and recognized the reality that most Americans do not believe in refusing recognize violent gay-bashing as a kind of hate crime. It is unlikely, however, that many of his colleagues will -- particularly those in the House.

Look for history to repeat itself here: The bill will almost certainly pass out of the Senate. And then it will be poleaxed by Tom DeLay and Co.

[See my previous posts on hate crimes here and here.]

Creeping Fascism

It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid the conclusion that conservatives, subtly but unmistakably, are fomenting violence against liberals for the 2004 election. And if they succeed in doing so, America will be facing what has always been considered unthinkable here: a serious manifestation of fascism.

Regular readers, and those who've plowed through "Rush, Newspeak and Fascism", know that I've discussed at length the steady drumbeat of right-wing extremist memes that have increasingly pervaded mainstream conservatism for the past decade, and these constitute the main signs of the creep of fascism, all under the guise of "normal" politics. While the Republicans now running the country are clearly corporatist conservatives and not fascists, they also appear to be the kind who, if pressed, would align themselves with the thuggish and violent elements that are one of the real earmarks of fascism. Such an alliance would mean the real empowerment of these extremists -- and once empowered, they will be impossible to control.

I concluded previously that it seemed likely that any manifestation of fascism was some ways off, perhaps as long as a generation, if these trends were left unchecked. Now it appears that the timetable is moving much faster than that -- and countervailing forces are so far slow in coalescing, in no small part because of the utter, Stalinist ruthlessness of their opponents.

The most recent, and troubling, harbinger of this trend was reported yesterday in the Boston Globe, which detailed the Republican plans to demonize Democrats as essentially treasonous and disloyal in the 2004 election:

The strategy will involve the dismissal of Democrats as the party of "protests, pessimism and political hate speech," Ed Gillespie, Republican National Committee chairman, wrote in a recent memo to party officials -- a move designed to shift attention toward Bush's broader foreign policy objectives rather than the accounts of bloodshed. Republicans hope to convince voters that Democrats are too indecisive and faint-hearted -- and perhaps unpatriotic -- to protect US interests, arguing that inaction during the Clinton years led to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Of course, this meme has been floating in conservative circles since well before the Iraq War broke out -- it is, after all, the explicit thesis of Ann Coulter's fraudulent screed, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (for more on that, see this post). Coulter's book is itself clearly extremist in orientation, since much of its subtext is devoted to rehabilitating the deservedly broken reputation of Joe McCarthy. And like so much proto-fascist thinking, its worldview is decidedly dualistic, posing everything in black and white, good and evil, us and them. This is, as I have pointed out, a politics specifically designed to attract followers who are, in Erik Erikson's famous formulation, part of a "totalist" mindset -- which is to say, avid participants in a totalitarian society.

The same kind of dualism is explicit in the Bush team's strategy:

"The president didn't lay out a doctrine of preemption for political purposes," the senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said. But, the official added: "The reason you focus on [preemption] politically is because it is a clear distinction. There is no fuzziness. There is no place you can compromise on that: Either you're for it, or you're against it."

It is likewise clear that the core meme -- that liberals are disloyal to America and thus traitors -- is penetrating mainstream conservatism at all levels. It is now a commonplace of letters to the editor, such as this one [scroll down] in the Wednesday Post-Intelligencer, from a Puyallup resident named Dorothy Hyatt, ostensibly about the recent CBS movie about Ronald Reagan:

I hope Democrats and media Bush-haters will now get out of their rut of aiding the enemy by repetitive claims of Bush "lies" to get us into war and the imagined "failure" in carrying out reconstruction of Iraq.

… The frustrated outrage of the left-wingers in the Democratic Party, media and their Hollywood pals only confirms the cold-blooded heartlessness and hate-filled actions of this segment of our country. They feel no happiness at the liberation of Iraqi citizens. They have no conscience about encouraging the daily deaths of our service men and women by disparaging how this war is being carried out.

These accusations were common during the runup to the invasion of Iraq, particularly among counter-protesters drummed up by the Republican Party. But it has been a constant theme among prowar types in their attacks on critics of the administration, such as this piece in the Bay Area-based ChronWatch:

Now, the liberals are doing it again. In their desperation to show that Bush is ''bad,'' they are giving hope to the forces of evil. The Baathists are saying, ''Kill a few more American soldiers, guys, the liberals are rapidly losing heart and blasting Bush. Accelerate our campaign. It’s working. I knew we could count on the weak-kneed liberals to help us drive the Americans out.''

This is ludicrous, of course. Baathists or other insurgents in Iraq are likely paying little attention to Bush's critics, or much of anything in American media, since both their access and their interest is limited, as is the level of "inspiration" they are likely to get from such news in any event. What is far more likely to hearten the enemy in Iraq is the continued blundering by the Bush team, clearly in well over their heads, as the violence in Baghdad and elsewhere ratchets up incrementally and irrevocably, leaving our forces increasingly exposed to attack.

Arguments like those posed by conservatives have little or no real basis in reality. What they are about -- their sole purpose, in fact -- is to intimidate and silence the administration's critics.

Rhetoricians like Gillespie, Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and the rest like to believe that they are only playing hardball politics, hoping to knock out their opponents, without recognizing that this kind of rhetoric has real-life consequences when it is embraced by the populace at large. Just as Limbaugh fervently denied that he and the rest of the right-wing radio haters had anything to do with Oklahoma City, today's conservatives will piously pretend they are not inciting violence. But the reality is that this kind of hatred inevitably plays out in unpredictable ways, many of them violent indeed.

Consider, for instance, the recent offering from Kathleen Parker:

Miller is not alone, though some are more sanguine when it comes to evaluating the roster of contenders. Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot.

This is not mere hyperbole; it is an exercise in eliminationism. As Buzzflash recently observed, talk like this is part of an increasing trend in conservative rhetoric: Pat Robertson wishing to "nuke" the State Department, Bill O'Reilly saying Peter Arnett should be shot, Coulter wishing Tim McVeigh had set off his bomb at the New York Times Building, John Derbyshire wishing for Chelsea Clinton's demise. Unsurprisingly, the same kind of talk is now heard on the "street" level, and it often pops up on talk radio. As we learned in Oklahoma City, eventually this kind of "hot talk" translates into all-too-real tragedy.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that conservatives are less and less inclined to rely on "intellectual" or political exchanges, and are turning more to an eliminationist strategy that seeks to demonize liberals and make them social outcasts -- and concomitantly, acceptable targets for violence because of the "damage" they cause the nation through their ostensible treason.

Already, this eliminationism is manifesting itself in the nation's military, where anyone deemed insufficiently supportive of the Bush administration is likely to face recrimination. The most prominent example of this is the way Sgt. Robert Ferriol, a former Marine Corps intelligence analyst, was drummed out of his job recently for daring to dissent from the party line. Many more soldiers are quietly reporting that they are simply keeping their views completely under wraps, since the consequences are becoming plain for them. Here's how Ferriol described it:

I honorably served my country for eight years in the United States Marine Corps; providing honest intelligence analysis and collecting countless awards and promotions throughout my career. I was also a leader and mentor to scores of young men and women. In those eight years, I sacrificed more of myself for this country than most men and women ever will in their lifetime. But, thanks to the zeal and quick judgment of this individual, I am no longer serving our beloved country. His forecast was correct. Following his letter to DoD, I was brought up on charges of "Disloyal Statements" under Article 134 of the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice). Not because anything I wrote was disloyal, but because of my political views and how they differ from Mr. Simpson and others like him. The unfortunate aspect of this is not my demise, but their inability to understand or accept the opinions of others as different from their own. Nonetheless, I was forced to retain an attorney and undergo weeks of scrutiny before being cleared of the charges. I was, however, never allowed to work in Intelligence again; forced to separate the Marine Corps over threats that I would not be allowed to reenlist. Never mind the fact that there is not one single negative mark on my entire eight years of service (the letter incident was considered "hush-hush" so not even that made it on my record), or the fact that every one of my superiors stood up for me during this time, praising my abilities and loyalty to this country. None of that mattered; only my "liberal beliefs."

At the same time, the Republicans in power are proceeding to eliminate Democrats from any kind of hold on power in Washington, part of a transparent drive to make them at best a permanent minority party, if not obliterated altogether. The intent, it is clear, is to create essentially a "one-party state."

This is unprecedented in American history, of course -- and in fact, the Republicans' ruthlessness is delving all kinds of fresh depths. The most recent instance of this was the White House announcement that Democrats would no longer be able to inquire about how it spends our tax dollars:

The Bush White House, irritated by pesky questions from congressional Democrats about how the administration is using taxpayer money, has developed an efficient solution: It will not entertain any more questions from opposition lawmakers.

…"It's saying we're not going to allow the opposition party to ask questions about the way we use tax money," said R. Scott Lilly, Democratic staff director for the House committee. "As far as I know, this is without modern precedent."

Norman Ornstein, a congressional specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, agreed. "I have not heard of anything like that happening before," he said. "This is obviously an excuse to avoid providing information about some of the things the Democrats are asking for."

Just a few days before that, the House subcommittee that oversees the distribution of "pork" to congressional districts announced that Democrats would no longer be eligible to obtain funding for projects in their districts:

Rep. Ralph Regula (R-Ohio), who chairs the subcommittee that controls spending on education, health and jobs programs, recently stunned Democrats by announcing plans to reject every "earmarked" project they are seeking in the final, compromise version of the bill, which funds the departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Labor.

… Hoyer said: "To tell the 130 million people represented by Democrats that they are shut out from getting health and education projects is consistent with the undemocratic, autocratic, confrontational process that's being followed by House Republicans."

Thus the eliminationist strategy is both figurative and literal. On the political level, it means driving liberalism from the halls of power permanently. On the real-life level, it means driving liberals themselves from polite society.

The proto-fascist nature of this strategy could not be more clear, especially considering that eliminationism was a central feature of fascism's last major manifestation.

Ed Bishop at the St. Louis Journalism Review recently had an excellent piece remarking on this trend (since replaced, but Google's cache still works):

A frightened press: how ultra-conservative commentators intimidate mainstream media

Bishop reached largely the same conclusions:

I'm not saying the Bush Administration is fascist, far from it. I think it is operating well within the mainstream of small-"l" liberal democracy. But that's not the case for the administration's propagandists, for Limbaugh and other right-wing radio and television commentators. They are promoting a kind of American fascism. To put it bluntly, Limbaugh's rhetoric is fascist.

Limbaugh and his ilk have gone beyond the legitimate conservative arguments-that, in the long run, in most cases, individual effort is better than collective effort; that the marketplace foresees and adjusts to economic and social problems better than governments do; and that a weak federal government is best for the general welfare. They have become propagandists for much more, for things that can only be described as fascist.

To make sure we're on the same page here, I'm going to get pedantic for a minute: Fascism is a form of totalitarian government whose hallmarks are a leadership that cannot be questioned, aggressive nationalism, racism, close ties to capitalist elites and the absence of legal due process.

The hallmarks of fascist propaganda are half-truths, lies, appeals to patriotism, and verbal bombast and threats that seek to cut off debate and cower opponents. This propaganda counts on the acquiescence of good people in order to succeed.

I'm afraid there is a growing trend in America's mainstream press to give that acquiescence, to accept the narrow boundaries of debate set by people like Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, who recently wrote a book called "Treason," in which she said all liberal members of the Democratic Party were traitors.

To prove their patriotism-to prove they're "good Germans"-many people at mainstream news outlets have moved beyond the center in their analysis and news presentation to a kind of self-conscious, flag-waving, looking-over-their-shoulder conservatism.

It isn't only journalists who are observing this trend. Academics, particularly those with real working knowledge of the components of fascism, are seeing it too. Of particular note was this recent interview with former Princeton professor Richard Falk, who defines fascism as "the convergence of military and economic power on behalf of an ultranationalist ideology that views its enemies -- internally and externally -- as evil and subject to extermination or extreme punishment."

Falk explains:

Certainly the people who are the architects of these policies would reject my analysis, and probably sincerely so. They think they're doing something else: it will all be done in the name of democratization. It's a very deceptive and confusing style of political domination, because it pretends to be the opposite of what it is.

… It's very difficult, because the methods and the mentality of those who are controlling and developing this kind of politics of domination are such that they have no willingness to accommodate their adversaries. So there's no room for politics, in a way. And that makes it . . . it almost certainly drives the conflict toward a collision of extremes.

It is now appearing inevitable that this collision will occur in 2004 -- particularly if Democrats make a serious run at unseating Bush.

Manifestly Unfit: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush

[Beginning an extended series]

Introduction: Behind the Desk


On the weekend before Election Night 2000, Saturday Night Live opened its weekly broadcast with a remarkable skit -- remarkable, mostly, for its eerie prescience. Don Pardo explained to the audience, SNL hoped to provide "A Glimpse of our Possible Future":

Announcer: And now a Message From the President of the United States: George W. Bush.

[open on the Oval Office -- beer cans on desk, socks hung on the lamp, a barbecue grill burning on his desk ]

Voice of Advisor: Mr. President, get out there!

President George W. Bush [played by Will Ferrell]: [from under his desk ] No! No, you can't make me! You're gonna yell at me again!

Voice of Advisor: Mr. President!

President George W. Bush: [peeks out from under his desk] No! I don't want to go out, it's too hard!

Voice of Advisor: You're on, Sir!

President George W. Bush: Awww ... [jumps up and takes his seat] Hey, America! So, how we all doing out there, huh? Yeah, not so good. I broke the Hoover Dam. We had that war thing happen. But I mean, who ever heard of a Civil War, anyway? What is that? [grabs a pair of binoculars, unscrews the lens, then pours alcohol from it into his mouth] I have missed you, ol' buddy! [ pours it into his barbecue grill ] Whoo! I think we can agree, Americans, that these have been a difficult first two years of my presidency..

Voice of Advisor: You've been President for two weeks!

President George W. Bush: Really? Oh, man! I told you, this is hard! Okay, listen. I'm just gonna get this Address thing over with. As we assess the State of the American Union today, we have reason to hope, because ... [ takes out a map which shows California and Florida as islands, Texas in Communist Mexico, and the Great Lakes on fire ] Holy crap! When did all this happen?! Wow ... the Great Lakes are on fire -- even I know that's not good. [ laughs ] Okay, America, we got a lot of problems. I ain't gonna lie to you. But with the help of Vice-President Dick Cheney..

Voice of Advisor: You killed him in a hunting accident!

George W. Bush: Okay, fine! Not a problem. 'Cause I've been working hard, I got a plan that's gonna solve all of it -- from the deficit, to foreign relations, to that hole in the sun. Two words, America: Ostrich Meat.

Voice of Advisor: [ disgusted ] Oh, come on! [ exits Oval Office ]

President George W. Bush: No, no, wait, wait! Hear me out. You see, everyone gets an ostrich, and then you eat the ostrich, then you raise the ostrich. That way, no more ostriches! We are trying to get rid of all the ostriches, right? Anyone? [ ball of fire erupts outside ] Aw, screw! That big tit building is on fire again -- damn! Alright, sorry, folks ... I gotta take care of this ... [ stands up ] Come on, Blue! Here, boy! [ an ostrich ambles forward ] You all go on ahead without me. And, in the meantime, "Live, from New York, it's Saturday Night!"

Americans will be forgiven if, on reviewing that particular tape, they do not laugh. Barring its comic exaggerations, the skit's portrait of America under George W. Bush's rule has only differed in degree from the reality that has come to pass in the ensuing years:

-- A nation under attack from international and domestic terrorists, the threat of whom went blithely ignored by Bush, who was too eager to build a missile-defense system, and too eager to dismiss his predecessor's anti-terrorism work, to be bothered with the dire warnings that crossed his desk in the months and weeks before the attack.

Indeed, had the skit shown the Pentagon (rather than the Capitol) in flames and Bush hiding behind a desk, calling for his aides to get him aboard Air Force One on a flight to Nebraska … it would have been even more prophetic -- not to mention that it also would have been more accurate than the "official" version proffered by White House propagandists recently. (We'll discuss Bush's actions on Sept. 11 and afterward in detail later.)

-- An economy that has transformed, in the space of three short years, from the most robust in American history to one of the worst since the Depression, fueled in no small part by a federal budget that has gone from a historic surplus to record-breaking deficits. From an all-time low 3.9 percent unemployment, we have almost overnight created 9 million jobless Americans, sending the unemployment rate soaring to 6.4 percent by July 2003.

Bush's answer? No, not "ostrich meat," though it might as well be. Instead, the nation has been treated to the unending mantra: "Tax cuts for the rich." In fact, ostrich meat would have the distinct advantage of not actually deepening and prolonging the budget deficit and, by extension, the nation's economic malaise.

-- We have invaded a sovereign nation under false pretenses -- the most notable being that the war in Iraq is somehow an extension of the "war on terrorism", or a response to the attacks of Sept. 11, though the Bush administration's claims of an imminent threat posed by Iraq's supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction has proved the most damningly false. In the process, we have frittered away the widespread international sympathy and good will that followed Sept. 11, and have displaced it with widespread fear and loathing. Most notably, we have inflamed and deepened the radicalization of the Muslims world, where the hatred that inspired the attacks burns even brighter now.

The purpose of this war was not, as the administration sold it, part of the "war on terrorism"; nor was it, as some critics argue, about oil or electoral politics (though these factors undoubtedly enhanced the strategy). It was about establishing global American hegemony, or as the neo-conservatives who dreamed it put it, a "new American century." The formal name of this policy is the "Bush Doctrine," though what it really represents is a radical change in American foreign policy, a rejection of the diplomatic model built up through years of Cold War battles. And it was forced upon the nation by a president who lacked any kind of popular mandate (indeed, he had failed even to win the popular vote in the 2000 election) outside of the exigencies of Sept. 11, which the Bush administration gleefully wielded as a club for denouncing Democrats who questioned his actions.

The nation's reward for all this is a military caught up in a quagmire in Iraq that leaves them sitting ducks in a rapidly deteriorating and hostile environment. Whatever "exit strategy" the Bush administration may have had for departing Iraq was built on a fantasy of well-hailed conquering heroes whose sources turned out to be as reliable as the claims of nuclear capabilities. And of course, American taxpayers are being asked to foot the bill for this misadventure, to the tune of (at least) $87 billion -- while Bush's plans for a $100-billion plus tax cut for the rich remain intact.

-- Not only have we failed to capitalize on any of the opportunities presented by the attacks of Sept. 11, we have failed to address any of the serious challenges raised by the event. Instead of forging the kind of international unity that clearly is the only effective long-term response to terrorism, Bush's unilateralist arrogance has isolated the United States in the world community and made the environment for cultivating terrorism even more volatile. And at home, instead of leading the nation in making the kinds of real sacrifices that would reflect a thoughtful response to terrorism, he has proceeded as though the only costs Americans should expect to shoulder in the "War on Terror" are mounting national debts and the lives of our soldiers.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Bush's abysmal failure to mount a serious energy campaign that would reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil sources, particularly those in the Middle East. Bush's entire program in this direction has been to pus for opening the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge -- whose total resources would do little more than dent foreign demand for a few short years, none of them soon. In the meantime, Bush has done nothing to genuinely encourage alternative energy sources, and contravened efforts to reduce American consumption of oil, rising by the tankful as SUVs increasingly crowd the freeways. And what energy policy he has put forth has only contributed to the nation's problems, including last summer's massive power blackouts.

-- Not only have efforts to improve environmental values in America come to a screeching halt, but the quality of both the American and the global environment has been quantifiably degraded -- and the nation's ability to slow the long-term degradation of both has been significantly harmed. Bush's handling of the ANWR -- which typifies both his overt willingness to sacrifice our national treasures for a quick buck, and his gleeful exploitation of the Sept. 11 attacks in pursuit of his own agenda -- was only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. The litany of the Bush administration's attacks on the environment is both exhaustive and damning.

Perhaps the action -- or rather, inaction -- that most typifies Bush's disastrous approach to the environment has been his handling of the global-warming phenomenon. After spending most of his campaign and the first two years of his Oval Office tenure denying that the problem even existed (a la Rush Limbaugh's typically hallucinatory assertions), the administration did a stark about-face and admitted that global warming indeed is real. However, the Environmental Protection Agency's report said that -- even though the phenomenon is certain to destroy many of the nation's natural resources, particularly forested areas, alpine lakes, glaciers and wetlands -- no serious steps were warranted outside of "voluntary" efforts by corporations to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, and typified those looming disasters as requiring mere "adjustments" on the part of Americans. A couple of days later, Bush dismissed the report as the work of "the bureaucracy."

-- Americans' civil rights have come under steady attack, both from the Justice Department in its post-Sept. 11 response to terrorism, and from the White House's legal broadsides against a number of key components of the nation's system of civil and minority rights. Again, the administration has openly exploited the Sept. 11 attacks to pursue this right-wing agenda. The notorious Patriot Act has come under substantial scrutiny in this regard, but of equal if not greater concern has been the White House's assertion of "enemy combatant" status for terrorism suspects, and its use of military tribunals for American citizens suspected of terrorist activity.

While Bush's assaults on affirmative action have also been well observed, what has gone largely unremarked is the extent to which the Bush White House has pursued a number of initiatives seemingly aimed at overturning many of the gains in civil rights made in American society since the turn of the last century -- from attempting to overturn the Miranda Warning to appointing judges who are openly hostile to the concept of privacy rights. At the same time, Bush has demonstrated the deepest contempt for Americans' free-speech rights by creating "First Amendment zones" that have forced critics of his administration into fenced-off areas far removed from his appearances -- while Bush himself has studiously ignored any of the voices of protest raised against his war policies.

-- As a consequence of all these disasters, the nation, rather than being more united, is now more divided than it has been at any time since the Vietnam War. Bush's self-description as "a uniter, not a divider" has turned out precisely to be an inversion of reality. A recent poll found that the nation remains deeply polarized, even more than it was before Sept. 11.

Instead of using the role handed him by the 2000 election -- recognizing that he lacked a mandate, and reaching out to his opponents by stressing moderation in his politics and compromise in his policies -- Bush has veered sharply to the right in nearly every facet of his administration. Instead of using the tragedy of the Sept. 11 attacks to bring the nation together in a healing process, Bush has chosen to exploit nearly every aspect of his agenda under the aegis of his "war on terror," and at the same time has demonized any political opponent who has questioned his policies as treasonous and "un-American," sympathizers with the "evildoers."

The record is unmistakable: George W. Bush's presidency has been an unmitigated disaster from nearly the day he took office, and it has compounded exponentially with every week the man occupies it. Even if he is defeated in 2004, Americans will be paying the price for his spectacularly misbegotten ascension to the nation's highest office at one of the most critical junctures in history for years, perhaps even generations, to come. Which makes the thought of him winning election for the first time, thereby handing him another four years in which to deepen the problems beyond the point of recovery, even more chilling.

Bush's tenure to date has comprised three of the most tumultuous and divisive in American history, and his responsibility for the chaos is inescapable. The image of Bush ducking under his desk while the Capitol burns behind him may have been funny in November 2000, but in November 2003, it is all too real.

Viewers may remember that in contrast, the same Saturday Night Live skit also showed "our possible future" under President Al Gore: A schoolmarmish Gore lecturing Americans on economics, while Bill Clinton wanders in and out of the picture. Annoying, tedious, boring.

If only we had been so lucky.

Next: Inauguration Day and Illegitmacy

Quote of the day

Looks like the Bush Doctrine's pre-emptive invasion mindset is expanding its horizons:

Further, it could well be argued that we have done the Iraqi people a huge service. We have liberated them and are now showering them with new schools, hospitals, electrical grids and fresh drinking water. There are plenty of countries around the world that would welcome a U.S. invasion.

-- Mona Charen

Another view on the rural problem

Confirmation is always a nice thing.

Today, Paul Krugman weighs in with pretty much the same assessment of the Democratic candidates' shameful behavior on the Confederate flag issue, though of course from an economist's perspective:

Flags Versus Dollars

Krugman adroitly points out the ridiculousness of rural Americans supporting the Bush agenda, particularly from a fiscal point of view. And he agrees that the thrust of Dean's remark was exactly on the money:

Mr. Dean wasn't suggesting that his party adopt the G.O.P. strategy of coded racial signals, and by and large African-Americans — my wife included — understand that. What he meant by his flag remark was that Democrats must make the case to working Americans of all colors that the right's elitist agenda isn't in their interest. And he's right.

Dean and the Confederate flag

I know Howard Dean is supposed to be Web-savvy and tuned in to the blogosphere. But he would have saved himself some grief this week -- culminating in today's apology -- had he listened to the advice that a number of bloggers, myself included, offered when first he made allusions about courting "guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks."

I raised the issue back in March, when he first made the reference. As I argued then, the thrust of Dean's remark was uncannily accurate, since it indicates he understands why the Democratic Party has been losing ground to the GOP over the past 20 years. What was wildly off the mark was the way he couched the phrase, since it relied on a symbol that dredges up all kinds of poisonous beliefs and behaviors.

Even the official Dean campaign blog remarked on these concerns, and I commented further on the reasons for Dean to avoid using the Confederate flag. The discussion appeared to have an effect; Dean seemed to stop using the meme in his stump speeches. Then it popped up again, and this time his Democratic opponents were waiting to jump all over him for it.

What none of his opponents seemed to get, however, was that the thesis of the remark was precisely on the money, even if the terminology he used was inappropriate. None of them seemed prepared to tackle the issues Dean was raising.

As I argued back in March:

His core point is not only worth making, I happen to consider it an absolutely essential ingredient for the long-term success of any Democratic candidate: Namely, that the party needs to return to its agrarian roots, re-establish the needs of American family farmers as a priority, and draw back into the party those working-class rural dwellers whose interests are most naturally served by a progressive agenda.

One of the reason that Democrats have succumbed to Republicans in rural states -- where they enjoyed broad support for much of the better part of the 20th century -- is that the party has become increasingly urban-centric. Much of this is the natural outgrowth of relying heavily on raw numbers for political calculation; there is a much larger voting bloc in the cities than in the country, and it's much more easily reached. Thus the Democrats have in recent years focused much of their agenda on attracting urban and suburban votes. They have done so at the cost of their own soul, I believe.

The death of rural America -- a brutal, slow, painful death by suffocation, as corporate agribusiness displaces the family farm -- should be a major issue for Democrats. The Jeffersonian ideal, recall, was an America built as a nation of "citizen farmers." It may be something of a myth, but it is one that is deeply imbedded in our national psyche, and it is not one we can just hastily dispose of like some overripe cantaloupe.

Republicans have made great headway in these states by pretending to be on their side -- mostly by wrapping themselves in red-white-and-blue rhetoric, and especially by waving the bloody shirt of hating the gummint, who by the GOP's lights has been solely responsible for the entirety of rural dwellers' miseries (this was how they managed to fleece them with the misbegotten Freedom To Farm Act of 1996, which should have been more accurately named the Giant Hogtrough For Corporate Agribusiness). Indeed, it's clear this is one of the chief purposes of the proliferation of anti-government tropes by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and his conservative cohorts: to separate working-class people from the very political presence most capable of actually protecting their long-term interests from the Enronesque predators of unfettered corporatism -- namely, the gummint.

Meanwhile, the Democrats have treated these issues as empty afterthoughts at best (Al Gore actually had a reasonably intelligent agriculture program, but you'd never have known about it from either the "invented the Internet" Washington press corps or from Al Gore himself). They have essentially ceded the field to the GOP, and are now paying the price.

And while Dean has been foremost in recognizing this -- he has prepared a thoughtful and thorough outline of his farm policy -- he is not alone. John Kerry, Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards (who was also the only one among his opponents to put his finger on what was wrong with Dean's remark: "The people I grew up with, the vast majority of them, they don't drive around with Confederate flags on pickup trucks") all have excellent policy outlines. Dick Gephardt, who has a mixed track record on farm issues, actually has a fairly vague outline. But Joe Lieberman, Al Sharpton, Carol Moseley Braun and Wesley Clark are all behaving like typical urban-oriented Democrats and neglecting the matter altogether.

Unfortunately, none of them have raised agricultural issues to the level needed to make any headway combating the Democrats' national image as congenitally out to lunch on rural concerns. Dean has been trying to do so, but with the misbegotten "Confederate flag" remark as a talking point. And the way Dean's opponents forced him into retreat on the remark without addressing his underlying point only confirms the Democrats' clueless status further.

What is especially unfortunate about this scenario is the way it has forced Dean to back away from his plea to return the Democratic Party to its agrarian roots.

And what's really remarkable is that the Republican Party -- particularly because of the way it the election in Mississippi played out -- had just provided these same Democrats with a big fat target, one certain to give them significant impetus in exposing the GOP's congenital racism, what Dean referred to as the way "the Republicans have been dividing us by race since 1968 with their Southern race strategy."

The results from Tuesday's election were even more grist for the mill. While the incumbent Democratic governor, Ronnie Musgrove, ran a spectacularly dumb campaign (running away from your party cuts you off from your base), more than a few Mississipians observed that the way Haley Barbour and the Republicans manipulated the issue of the Confederate flag, and his dalliances with white supremacists, throughout the campaign contributed to the outcome elsewhere. Of particular note were the outcomes in the races for lieutenant governor and state treasurer, as this AP report from Jackson attests:

Rickey Cole, chairman of the Mississippi Democratic Party, said the GOP's tactics in this election season harked back to "Nixon's Southern Republican strategy to make subtle winks and nods to white racism in the South."

As another AP report points out, race almost certainly was a significant factor in the treasurer's race. The Democrat, Gary Anderson, 47, served in five gubernatorial administrations, worked in the banking industry and had previously served as the state's fiscal officer. The Republican, Tate Reeves, 29, has worked as a bank portfolio manager. That's it. He had no experience in state government or politics. But Reeves won by about the same percentage as Barbour, which suggests their voters closely tracked together:

Merle Black, professor of politics and government at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., said race seemed to be more of an issue in the state treasurer contest.

"It's not a high profile race, but if it comes down to the crunch, then the white voters may prefer the white Republican candidate, even though the white Republican candidate is less qualified," Black said. "That's where race could clearly be a factor."

Where was our Uniter-Not-a-Divider-in-Chief? Down campaigning for Barbour, of course. And winking and nudging at his tactics:

"I'm proud to stand with this man ... He's proud of this state, and that's the kind of governor you need — somebody who relates to people from all walks of life."

Meanwhile, did any of the Democratic presidential candidates who were eager to talk about the Confederate flag say a word about what was happening in Mississippi?

Well, no. They found it more convenient to beat up on their party's front-runner by distorting, and ignoring, the thrust of his remarks. And thereby losing another opportunity.

The GOP is ripe to be exploited for its behavior in Mississippi, though the issue could backfire if Democrats continue to behave as they have. What's more important is that the Democratic Party is long overdue to do the right thing and stand up for its base, including the African Americans who are the target of this brand of politics. It will be interesting to see which of the candidates is the first to figure this out.

[Update: John Nichols has an excellent piece in The Nation on the need for a cohesive rural strategy for Democrats.]