Third blogiversary

I just mentioned that I'm really not very good at this blogging thing, and it just came to my attention that last Sunday, I passed my third blogiversary. It was three years ago that I filed my first post -- about border militias. Three years later, I'm still writing about them.

Along the way, I've picked up nearly a million hits a year, which is still mind-boggling to me.

I've been working on a post with my deep inner thoughts about the nature of blogging for nearly a year now. They're so deep and inner that I can't seem to find the will (or energy) to put them down in print. Maybe because I think bloggers blogging about blogging is ... boring. Well, anyway, I'll see if I can't finally wrap it up soon, though. Honest.

In the meantime, let me give a quick general thanks to all the readers, regular and irregular, who have taken some of their time over the past three years to read my work and contribute to those 3 million hits. Many thanks, too, to the people who spend enough time to contribute to my comments as well. And many more thanks to the many other bloggers who have linked here over the years. I'll have more details in that longer post.

In the meantime, let me observe my third anniversary with some annual upkeep, which includes some new names in my blogroll. Please welcome:

Chip Berlet

Talk 2 Action

Norwegianity

The Mighty Corrente Building

Sadly, No!

Mahablog

Skookum Geoduck [Jay Taber]

BlatherWatch

WashBlog

McCrainium

Hominid Views

Red State Rebels

43rd State Blues

Blue Oregon

Seattlest

Nikki's Nest

A Chicken Is Not Pillage

Creek Running North

Blame India Watch

History Mike's Musings

Some of these, as you can see, are blogs I should have had up for some time and somehow overlooked through neglect. Others are some of the regional bloggers from the Northwest who I've been getting to know better recently. And others are just new blogs that deserve a good look. They're scattered throughout the blogroll, and I've also deleted some of the now-extinct members of the blogroll, too.

Give 'em all a good look, if you have the time.

Paging Michelle Malkin

You know how Michelle Malkin claims in her book Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild that "it's conservatives themselves who blow the whistle on their bad boys and go after the real extremism on their side of the aisle" and that "conservatives zealously police their own ranks to exclude extremists and conspiracy theories"?

Well, Michelle, here's an opportunity to step up and prove it:


The person selling this item at CafePress is offering this design on coffee cups, T-shirts, baseball caps, camasoles, spaghetti tanks ... you name it. Personally, I think the toddler T is the most charming.

Chris Clarke has more.

I know, I know. It's only another CafePress item.

But then again, Malkin devotes two whole pages of Unhinged to a CafePress item devoted to a line of "KillBush" wear (a parody of "KillBill") -- pp. 163-164. Surely this is equally "unhinged" -- not to mention much more nakedly eliminationist.

Scaping the goat

Four weekends ago I was in Bellingham, a college town near the Canadian border up in Whatcom County, taking part in a researchers' workshop and subsequent panel discussion about the Minutemen. The local organizers assembled a pretty impressive panel, including my old friend Devin Burghart of the Center for New Community's Building Democracy Initiative, who has become a national expert on the Minutemen; as well as Marc Brenman, director of the state human rights commission.

Opinions were many and diverse, but one thing I think every panelist agreed on was this: The Minutemen represent the spear point -- the opening public-relations foray, as it were -- in a larger effort by right-wing extremists to scapegoat and demonize Latino immigrants, legal and otherwise.

The unspoken question that hovered over all the discussions was one I don't think any of us could answer: Where is that campaign taking us as a nation?

Half a world away, events were occurring that same weekend that illustrated, in disturbing fashion, just where things could go:



As I discussed previously, the anti-immigrant riots in Australia were fomented by the white-nationalist Australia First Party, which presents itself in mainstream guise (it has numerous members both in Parliament and various local and regional councils) while promoting a nakedly racist "programme." They fired up the Cronulla Beach riots in conjunction with a loose network of neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

A New York Times piece provided one of the best explanations I've read on how the situation in Australia came to pass, particularly the context of growing racial agitation aimed at immigrants:

Several recent events have made this latest eruption of racism and xenophobia different from those of the past. While denying even that racism exists, our leaders have given tacit approval and support for it through policy, whether this is policy on refugees, security or Indigenous affairs. The policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers was strongly linked with border protection from 2001, and, as most asylum seekers of recent years have been from the Middle East and Muslim South Asia, "border protection" has become protection from Muslim refugees in the popular imagination.

Like the United States, Australia has new anti-terrorism legislation, first passed in 2002 and significantly strengthened just recently. Such laws have helped to validate broader community mistrust of Arab and Muslim Australians.

Our government has done little to substantively allay fear of Muslim and Middle Eastern Australians generally or to increase public understanding and appreciation of their culture and contribution to Australian life. Arabic is the fourth most commonly used language after English in Australia, and the most commonly used language after English in New South Wales, Sydney's home state, yet it is taught in only a handful of schools and universities.

In the last five years there has also been evidence of an increase in violence toward people of Arab appearance. An Iraqi writer I know begged his wife and daughter to stop wearing the hijab because of the potential of violence on the street. An Afghan refugee taxi driver in Adelaide said to my partner last night that he thought he would have to quit because his younger passengers were so nasty. In recent years high-profile cases in which Arab-Australian youths were charged with violent crimes generated a storm in the news media, as well as unchecked vilification on talk radio.

Prejudice creates what it fears by curtailing young people's prospects. Young Arab-Australians are increasingly ghettoized in Sydney's poor suburbs, where they struggle for education and jobs. Their families are often prejudiced against non-Arab Australians; the racism of the minority and that of the broader society reinforce each other.

I have Muslim friends who used to feel that they were Australians, but now cannot identify themselves in the negative space created for them in our community. I have non-Muslim friends who are furious at being mistaken for Muslims because of their Middle Eastern background; they are doing all they can to differentiate themselves from people they too are starting to openly dismiss. It has become fashionable, perhaps, to be racist, although none of us, not even our prime minister, is willing to call it what it is.

We can readily see a similar pattern of anti-immigrant sentiment growing in the United States -- not quite as much toward Arabs and Muslims -- though that, of course, is also a significant component, particularly among the "war on terror" set -- but more toward Latinos, particularly under the guise of being against illegal immigration. The vilification of immigrants is especially notable on right-wing talk radio, with Michael Savage, as always, leading the way. The LGF/Malkin component of the blogosphere, naturally, has been similarly eager to make scapegoats of brown people.

The Australian press later reported that the bulk of the neo-Nazis who were involved in the Cronulla Beach riots had been festering and growing, under cover of whiteness, in the Sydney suburbs, which appears to be their base nationally as well. In the USA, the same precursor can be found in the suburbs and exurbs where, quietly, white supremacists increasingly are just blending in and spreading their agenda.

We also know that, in the 21st century, the leading edge of white-supremacist agitation has focused on immigrant bashing. Not only do they see it as the most fertile ground for recruitment, it also has proved -- via the Minutemen -- a significant means of repositioning themselves and their agenda out of the fringe and into the mainstream.

There was already abundant evidence that the Minutemen were primarily a public-relations stunt aimed at planting the idea in the public's mind that Latino immigrants crossing the border were the source of a broad range of social ills, particularly crime and "cultural pollution." But this fact became unmistakable when the Minutemen brought their campaign to Washington state this fall -- an event that precipitated the gathering of researchers and activists in Bellingham last month.

After all, there isn't exactly a problem on the Canadian border with illegal immigrants. The only border-security issue there of any note is one of drug runners bringing goods over the border -- and most of those crossings occur either at official ports of entry through surreptitious means, or in the stretches of mountainous wilderness well to the east of where the Whatcom Minutemen were doing their thing.

As the continuing fluff pieces in the Bellingham Herald -- a clueless and hapless news organization that couldn't even see fit to run notice of the anti-Minuteman gathering, let alone send a reporter to it -- inadvertently demonstrate, not a single would-be illegal border crossing has been prevented by the Minutemen. However, it's become obvious to local retailers in Whatcom County that the traditional traffic they get from Canadian shoppers -- many of them brown-skinned -- who cross the border to sample the wares at places like Bellis Fair Mall has been radically curtailed since the Minutemen began toting guns along the border. (Hate, as always, is bad for business -- even if Chamber organs like the Herald are a little slow to recognize that fact.)

What was clear to those of us on the panel was that Minutemen were revealed primarily as a publicity stunt whose chief purpose is to pave the way for a larger political campaign aimed primarily at demonizing Latinos and using them as a wedge issue to push the public into supporting a wide range of planned anti-immigrant policy measures. In Washington state, for instance, a "Protect Washington Now" initiative -- modeled directly after the successful "Protect Arizona Now" measure -- is reportedly in the works for the coming election year.

It's happening everywhere -- in the Northwest, in California, in the Midwest, in the South, even in pockets in the Northeast. What's important to understand is that much of this agitation is taking place under the radar, by well-financed organizations who operate through focus groups and "think tanks." Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist Nick Coleman described just such an operation taking place recently in Minnesota under less-than-upfront circumstances:

The woman moderator, who said she was from Maryland, wanted very much to talk about immigrants. The participants already had discussed any issues they were concerned about, except the war in Iraq. There would be no talk about Iraq, the woman said. But up to that point, no one had mentioned immigration, much to the annoyance of the moderator. So she prodded the group to complain about immigrants.

"I haven't heard anybody talk about immigration," Peoples, an independent, recalls her saying. "Anybody have a problem with the illegal aliens coming in?"

The group's response to the question was "a deafening silence," Peoples says. But the woman pushed harder, listing some of the complaints she said she had heard in other states where she had conducted focus groups. Still, no one obliged her. Instead, Peoples mentioned the immigrant workers in a nearby town, praising them for how hard they seem to work.

Not the correct answer. Someone was paying money for this. They wanted problems.

"She shut me off," Peoples recalls. "Then she said, 'Aren't you having problems here?' "

The state Republican and DFL parties each deny having sponsored the mystery focus group, as does the Republican congressman for the area, Gil Gutknecht, and his DFL challenger, Tim Walz. Also in denial mode was the office of Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who recently poured gasoline on the immigrant issue with the release of a crudely overstated report designed to inflame opinion and make immigration into a wedge issue.

That last bit was opinion. But this is fact: Anti-immigration forces are working hard to raise resentment and to exploit immigration for political gain, cozying up to politicians who will help them fence the borders.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the big picture: the anti-immigrant push really represents a significant incursion of right-wing extremism into mainstream conservatism. Each is busy empowering the other, with the end result being an American right pushed even farther to the right.

Take it from D.A. Kodolenko at San Diego CityBeat:

What’s in a name? Sometimes a hell of a lot. Simcox and Gilchrist claim that their Minutemen “have no affiliation with, nor… accept any assistance by or interference from separatists, racists or supremacy groups or individuals,” but that’s lip service, public relations, a scam—and some mainstream media and right-wing politicians have fallen for it. They quote Sam Adams and paste illustrations of American revolutionaries on their website, sidestepping nearly a century of border-patrolling, immigrant-bashing, like-minded, bloodthirsty Nazis calling themselves Minutemen, as if they could start over fresh with the same name -- not to mention tactics -- and supposedly expunge it of its racist heritage.

But names gain their meaning in real, not ideal, contexts. Nobody would believe your swastika tattoo represented a lucky Indian sun sign if you were a white, jack-booted, skinhead leader of an Oi! band. Think a Muslim political party could call itself “Al-Qaeda, but not that Al-Qaeda?” It just means “foundation,” right? Wrong. It means flying planes into buildings in the same way Minutemen means harassing and attacking people at the border. Names, words, symbols and signs get wrecked. Ignoring their history is disingenuous.

Arvin Hill seems to have noticed that as well:



Hill was among the many counter-protesters who recently took to the streets to oppose one of the recent forays in the anti-immigrant campaign, namely, their attempt to organize "Stop the Invasion" protests at various locales around the country. As it turned out, those protests actually drew very few participants:

The so-called "Stop the Invasion" protests were organized in 19 states, demanding the government increase border security and penalize employers who hire illegal workers.

"We are keeping the debate on illegal immigration in the forefront of the American consciousness," said Joseph Turner of Save Our State, who was among about two dozen protesters who waved American flags outside a home-supply store in a Los Angeles suburb.

But Turner's group in Glendale was surrounded by more than 100 drum-beating supporters who chanted, "Racists go home." The two groups traded shouts and obscene gestures for more than an hour. One man was arrested for assault, police said.

In Farmingville, N.Y., where immigration-related violence erupted several times in recent years, only about a dozen protesters showed up and argued against the growing number of day laborers on eastern Long Island.

From the presence of these voices, I think, we can draw heart that scenes like what we saw in Australia may yet be avoided here in America. But in the coming months, we will need many more of them.

[Note: At the Bellingham conference, I presented a long informational paper on the Minutemen. I'm going to be posting that paper -- which features a lot of information already published here -- in a series of posts here at Orcinus over the coming week.]

The eliminationist chorus

As if to underscore my recent discussion of eliminationist rhetoric, all kinds of figures on the right have been providing me with a fresh bounty of examples. The right-wing cup, as it were, runneth over.

First we had a fifth-tier online columnist attacking Rep. John Murtha as "vermin" and a "traitor".

This kind of talk, of course, has become quite common in recent years, almost to the point that it is unremarkable. But to understand why it's noteworthy, we can leave it to Dean Esmay to explain what should be done with such "vermin" (via Glenn Greenwald at Hullabaloo):

When I say "treason" I don't mean it in an insulting or hyperbolic way. I mean in a literal way: we need to find these 21st century Julius Rosenbergs, these modern day reincarnations of Alger Hiss, put them on trial before a jury of their peers, with defense counsel. When they are found guilty, we should then hang them by the neck until the are dead, dead, dead.

No sympathy. No mercy.Am I angry? You bet I am. But not in an explosive way. Just in the same seething way I was angry on 9/11.

These people have endangered American lives and American security. They need to be found, tried, and executed.

Unsurprisingly, when Gavin at Sadly, No! decided to turn the tables on Esmay to see how he liked someone harboring execution fantasies about him, the result was rather predictable shrieking on Esmay's part. [Longtime readers will recall my encounter with the mendacious Mr. Esmay.]

Meanwhile, Brad R. at Sadly, No! took note of another right-wing blogger's execution fantasies, this time Dean Franks:

I'll make a deal with the Left: You wanna impeach President Bush? Go ahead. Knock yourself out. In fact, let's just go to the polls and turn the whole government over to the Democrats. You wanna run the whole show? Fine. Elect Howard Dean President. End all surveillance against possible enemy combatants, unless you can get a warrant based on probable cause. Withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan immediately. Permanently kill the PATRIOT Act. Do whatever you want to do. I'm perfectly willing, at this point, to do it your way.

I mean, really, what's the worst that can happen? An American city goes up in nuclear fire? Well, it’ll probably be New York, Chicago, or LA. You know, a major city. I don't live there, nor do most Americans. So we'll be fine.

But here's the other half of the deal: If that happens, we get to march on Washington, drag you naked and screaming from your offices, and hang you from the ornate lampposts that line The Mall. Then, free from roadblocks thrown up by infantile political fools, maybe we'll get serious about defending the United States, her people, her freedoms, and her values, in an increasingly hostile world.

Hanging traitors from lampposts? Wasn't that the central fantasy of The Turner Diaries?

Anyway, Esmay, Franks and Co. aren't the only right-wingers giving voice to that old lynch-'em-high impulse: so is Bill O'Reilly:

Where does George Soros have all his money? Do you know? Do you know where George Soros, the big left-wing loon who's financing all these smear [web]sites, do you know where his money is? Curaçao. Curaçao. They ought to hang this Soros guy.

Yessiree, it's a regular ol' necktie party in the Conservative Corral these days. But lest we think the rhetoric extends only to lynch-mob violence, you can look elsewhere for right-wingers ready for all-out, eliminationist war, like the Shot in the Dark commenter "DLG":

The only "common ground" we'll ever find with the blue state scum is the battleground, when we finally cut the shit and put all the enemies of this nation to the pike. It can not come too soon.

... Have fun spending your vast wealth when you are dead. Other countries will be happy to sell you potash and soybeans. But you'll all be dead, so they might balk at the terms.

Heads on pikes, traitors hanging from lampposts ...can't you just feel the love?

Enemies of the state

You know how conservatives have been falling all over themselves to assure us that measures like President Bush's illegal wiretapping of citizens are only being undertaken with the purest ethics. Only real terrorist threats need worry that they are being monitored, we're told.

Just like with the Patriot Act and all the national-security measures installed afterward, like the No-Fly List. Right?

Trust Bush, we're told. He would never abuse such immense power.

So how is it that a guy like James Moore -- author of Bush's Brain and one of the original reporters on the Bush AWOL story -- wound up on the No-Fly Watch List?

I made it a point to arrive very early at the airport. My reservation was confirmed before I left home. I went to the electronic kiosk and punched in my confirmation number to print out my boarding pass and luggage tags. Another error message appeared, "Please see agent."

I did. She took my Texas driver's license and punched in the relevant information to her computer system.

"I'm sorry, sir," she said. "There seems to be a problem. You've been placed on the No Fly Watch List."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm afraid there isn't much more that I can tell you," she explained. "It's just the list that's maintained by TSA to check for people who might have terrorist connections."

"You're serious?"

"I'm afraid so, sir. Here's an 800 number in Washington. You need to call them before I can clear you for the flight."

Exasperated, I dialed the number from my cell, determined to clear up what I was sure was a clerical error. The woman who answered offered me no more information than the ticket agent.

"Mam, I'd like to know how I got on the No Fly Watch List."

"I'm not really authorized to tell you that, sir," she explained after taking down my social security and Texas driver's license numbers.

"What can you tell me?"

"All I can tell you is that there is something in your background that in some way is similar to someone they are looking for."

"Well, let me get this straight then," I said. "Our government is looking for a guy who may have a mundane Anglo name, who pays tens of thousands of dollars every year in taxes, has never been arrested or even late on a credit card payment, is more uninteresting than a Tupperware party, and cries after the first two notes of the national anthem? We need to find this guy. He sounds dangerous to me."

"I'm sorry, sir, I've already told you everything I can."

"Oh, wait," I said. "One last thing: this guy they are looking for? Did he write books critical of the Bush administration, too?"

I have been on the No Fly Watch List for a year. I will never be told the official reason. No one ever is. You cannot sue to get the information. Nothing I have done has moved me any closer to getting off the list. There were 35,000 Americans in that database last year. According to a European government that screens hundreds of thousands of American travelers every year, the list they have been given to work from has since grown to 80,000.

Somehow, I don't think this will be last such case.

Cold justice

My friend Jerry Mitchell of the Jackson, Miss., Clarion Ledger continues to demonstrate what real journalism is all about:

Farmer innocent in 1960 burglary, witness declares

Investigation shows decorated Army war veteran imprisoned on false charges

HATTIESBURG — When Clyde Kennard refused to give up his quest to become the first black student to enroll at the University of Southern Mississippi, authorities sent him to state prison in 1960 for seven years.

Now a three-month investigation by The Clarion-Ledger has revealed the decorated Army veteran was locked up for a crime he never committed.

In the 1960 trial, 19-year-old Johnny Lee Roberts testified Kennard, a 33-year-old devout Baptist and farmer, put him up to breaking into Forrest County Co-op to steal $25 in feed, even describing how he should leave the warehouse door unlocked.

Now, 45 years later, Roberts said none of that is true. Approached by The Clarion-Ledger, he said he's willing to swear under oath Kennard never put him up to burglary, never asked him to steal, never asked him to do anything illegal: "He wasn't guilty of nothing."

An amazing story, really. Go read the whole thing.

Jerry, incidentally, was recently awarded the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism from Columbia University for his body of work. Jerry's the youngest ever to receive the award. When you look at what he's done, though, it's easy to see he's easily earned it. And is still doing so.

Awards and honors

Sometimes I get clocked over the head with the realization that, while I generally do OK with the writing part of blogging, I'm really pretty lousy at the whole blogging part -- you know, the linking and networking and community building and that sort of thing.

I was especially reminded of this recently when I realized that I had utterly neglected to acknowledge a real honor I was given recently: Tony G of milkriverblog decided to name Orcinus the winner of his annual Worthy Award.

I'l let Tony explain:

I began these awards out of poverty. Daily there are movements, organizations, efforts to which i want to donate in order to further their work. Unfortunately i remain rather poor and feel like my contributions are a pittance. So, in an effort to help folks get some real donations i have chosen to highlight one or two groups/individuals a year and ask my readers, whether in the holiday spirit, or just out of humanly gesture, to help the world become a better place by making a donation.

I call these the Worthy Awards because the recipients are doing worthy work, and are worthy of your attention. While i have no real limitations for myself on who may be designated, i have a special fondness for preservers and encouragers of Native American cultures and arts, and for folks working against bigotry and hatred, especially in the realms of culture, race and gender.

It's not a Koufax, but awards like this mean a lot to me, because they indicate the blog is succeeding at what I hope for it -- namely, it's providing useful information to the people and communities who are fighting against the hate and bigotry that continues to plague the nation. Thanks to honors like this, I don't need high rates of hits on my counter to know that the blog is doing its job.

But of course, it took me a couple of weeks to put up anything about it. Talk about a half-assed blogger. If it weren't for my writing, this blog would be a real wasteland.

That was driven home to me this week when the folks at the progressive Pacific Northwest Portal wrote and told me that they had decided to name their annual "best of the Northwest" awards after me. They said it was because they wanted to recognize both my achievements in blogging and my career as an author and journalist as well. I was very flattered, of course, but ...

Wait, I said. Most awards are named for dead people. I'm not dead yet, last I checked.

Besides, I don't know that I've really accomplished all that much. I mean, my blog these days is averaging less than 2,000 hits a day each week, which in today's blogosphere is a mere pittance.

No problem, they said. Blogs are so new it makes no sense to find a dead person to name them after. And I've accomplished plenty, they assured me.

We went round and round. After awhile it felt like I'd have to be a really ungrateful jerk to say no. So I said yes.

Thus, without further adieu, let me announce ...

The first annual David Neiwert Awards:

Best Monitoring of Right Wing Media
Michael Hood of BlatherWatch

Best Humor/Satire
General J.C. Christian of Jesus' General

Best In-State Political Coverage from Out of the State
Carla at Preemptive Karma and T.J. at Also Also

Best Interviews
Lynn Allen of Evergreen Politics

Best Series
Daniel Kirkdorffer of On the Road to 2008

Best Muckraking Award
David Goldstein of HorsesAss

Best News Digest
Carl Ballard of Washington State Political Report

Best Legislative Coverage
Olyscoop

Best Community Driven Blogs
BlueOregon, 43rd State Blues, and Washblog.

Most Valuable Local Coverage
Julie Fanselow of Red State Rebels and Jimmy McCabe of McCranium

I hope to be meeting a lot of these folks at this weekend's upcoming Pacific Northwest Bloggers Conference in Olympia. I just hope they don't start asking me questions about how to be a good blogger. As if I could tell them.

UPDATE: Edited to correct the wording on my hit rate.

Unhinged: The broken wheel

As I've already noted, while I've yet to see any response from Michelle Malkin regarding my six-part critique of her book Unhinged, at least Boston Globe columnist Cathy Young has posted a response to the series, as well as a followup post.

Young's posts are reasoned and thoughtful -- and they raise important issues that I really want to explore more fully. So I've been taking some time to respond because I want to make those points as succinctly and clearly as possible.

The main point is that I think Young misapprehends my actual argument, and looking back over the posts, I can see I didn't draw it out as clearly as I'd have liked. So her response offers an opportunity to do so.

Of course, the bulk of Young's response is that she agrees with my essential point regarding the inherent dishonesty of Malkin's thesis, particularly her claim that conservatives keep a short leash on the extremists within their own ranks. However, she also has some differences with my point of view:

The problem is, while Neiwert clearly strives to be fair-minded and acknowledges that there is a lot of ugly behavior on the left, he can't resist the partisan temptation to argue that right-wing nastiness is a lot worse.

So what's the bottom line? There's a lot of ugliness, extremism, and "unhinged" behavior across the spectrum of American politics right now. And there is a regrettable tendency, across the spectrum, to ignore, downplay or excuse it when coming from one's own side. Michelle Malkin doesn't even try to rise above this partisanship. Dave Neiwert tries, but doesn't, in my opinion, quite succeed.

Young also encapsulates her view in her comments:

What I take issue with is his assertion that (1) right-wing nastiness is substantially worse and (2) left-wing nastiness is primarily reactive.

But to rebut these assertions, she has to counter my point about the specifically eliminationist nature of so much right-wing rhetoric, which I believe is the source of so much reactive anger on the left. To do so, she tries to find equal counterexamples of left-wing rhetorical ugliness.

Look at the examples Young proffers:

-- Some Democratic Underground commenters who intentionally chose not to stop and help a Bush supporter with auto trouble by the roadside.

-- Markos' "screw them" comment regarding the four contractors killed at Fallujah.

-- Some Manichean "us and them" rhetoric from Howard Dean.

-- Some remarks from Michael Moore and Garrison Keillor that even Young admits are not really all that ugly.

Notice something missing? How about the fact that none of these people on the left come even close to having the kind of mass audience that Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh enjoy?

But the main element lacking in these examples is pretty self-evident: None of these remarks are eliminationist. None of them describes a desire to simply eliminate a significant bloc of one's opposition, let alone its entirety (though Keillor's, which wishes for the disenfranchisement of born-again Christians, comes close).

It might help, of course, if we made clear the terms of the debate, especially "eliminationism," whose meaning I've explored in previous discussions:

What, really, is eliminationism?

It's a fairly self-explanatory term: it describes a kind of politics and culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas for the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through complete suppression, exile and ejection, or extermination.

... Rhetorically, it takes on some distinctive shapes. It always depicts its opposition as simply beyond the pale, and in the end the embodiment of evil itself -- unfit for participation in their vision of society, and thus in need of elimination. It often depicts its designated "enemy" as vermin (especially rats and cockroaches) or diseases, and loves to incessantly suggest that its targets are themselves disease carriers. A close corollary -- but not as nakedly eliminationist -- are claims that the opponents are traitors or criminals, or gross liabilities for our national security, and thus inherently fit for elimination or at least incarceration.

And yes, it's often voiced as crude "jokes", the humor of which, when analyzed, is inevitably predicated on a venomous hatred.

But what we also know about this rhetoric is that, as surely as night follows day, this kind of talk eventually begets action, with inevitably tragic results.

I think the overriding problem is the inherent threat of violence latent within this kind of rhetoric. As I explained in the series, it's the equivalent of a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Young clearly misses this point. After comparing the above left-wing remarks -- some ugly, some merely partisan, but none genuinely eliminationist (except, perhaps, Garrison Keillor's joke about disenfranchising right-wing Christians) -- to those on the right, she goes on to make an astonishing assertion:

But is it that qualitatively different? Dave Neiwert, after all, cites as one of his examples of Ann Coulter's out-of-bounds rhetoric her suggestion that women shouldn't vote (because they tend to vote the "wrong" way).

No one really thinks (I hope) that Limbaugh, Coulter, and O'Reilly are seriously advocating the murder and incarceration of millions of liberals. What makes their rhetoric so poisonous is that (a) as Neiwert points out, it amounts to "a declaration of enmity" rather than a desire to debate, and (b) certain ideas, such as killing or rounding up one's political opponents, are too vile to be broached even as a "joke."

Viewed that way, there isn't that much distance between urging deportation and urging secession.

Perhaps Young finds this distance so short because her description elides the most significant component of this: the desire to inflict harm. If you go back and read the post that Young cites, you'll see that I describe the problem with eliminationism thus: "It's simply a declaration of enmity and the intent to cause harm."

Viewed this way -- that is, as reality -- there is a significant distance between deportation and secession. The former indeed wishes serious harm upon its victims, including deprivation of their rights, their livelihoods, and their property; while the latter wishes not to be politically obligated or connected to their opponents any longer -- it merely severs the relationship, instead of inflicting actual harm.

It's also worth remembering, of course, that secession talk not only surfaced on the right during the election too, it has been a staple of the extremist right for many years now, and continues to this day with neo-Confederate organizations like the League of the South. If you went to places like Idaho and Wyoming during the Clinton years, you heard a lot of talk about it then, too.

Indeed, one has to wonder where Young was during most of the 1990s, when the right was frothing over with hatred of Bill Clinton and the mainstream left. Much of the eliminationist right-wing rhetoric that flourishes today, as well as the utter lack of civility and decorum on both sides, originated in those years.

For the bulk of my journalistic career, I probably saw the world in terms similar to Young's: the left and right, both for their virtues and their flaws, tended to balance each other out. For every bit of ugliness on the right, you could often find a counterpart on the left. This leaves those of us in the middle to balance things out. I think this view dominated in most of the newsrooms where I worked as well.

But I also studied logic and ethics back in the day (philosophy was a second major) and after awhile came to see that what many of us were doing in "balancing" our stories was in fact the antithesis of seeking out the truth, which is what journalism is supposed to be about. Specifically, many of us -- not just journalists -- were indulging in a classic logical fallacy, namely, the "false middle," or the argumentum ad temperantiam: "If two groups are locked in argument, one maintaining that 2+2=4, and the other claiming that 2+2=6, sure enough, an Englishman will walk in and settle on 2+2=5, denouncing both groups as extremists."

I don't know if the balance that I used to see ever existed. But in the 1990s, when it became clear that a lot of people on the right were declaring that 2+2=6, and a lot of people in the media were reporting their claims without batting an eye, any balance I had seen before began to vanish -- and it has not returned.

For Young to suggest that the vicious rhetoric that sprung from the right during those years had any kind of counterpart on the left is simply absurd. While we were being regularly regaled with Vince Foster and Mena Airport and Black Love Child conspiracy theories from mainstream right-wing pundits ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Rush Limbaugh to Fox News, as well as assassination talk from the likes of Ann Coulter, there simply was no counterpart for this kind of talk on the left during those years. The left, indeed, remained remarkably subdued during the Clinton years, except for those more liberal than Clinton who criticized him for being too conservative.

This silence has both positive and negative aspects. The problem with this silence is that the left has done little to actually counter right-wing hatemongers like Limbaugh and Michael Savage and their thousand little imitators, giving them an open field in which to demonize mainstream liberalism -- which, if you listen to them at all, is what they do. As I've remarked previously, the effect of this sustained attack is most pronounced in rural America, where these radio talkers simply assail urban liberals on the air 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Much of this, as I've also explained, is deeply personal stuff. Liberals, over the past 15 years, have been regularly portrayed as being out to lunch, uncaring and hostile to mainstream and rural values, and unpatriotic traitors. Deeply patriotic, hard-working, family-oriented liberals have been having their characters assaulted relentlessly before their neighbors and friends. It affects family relationships, old friendships, and our deeper ties to our communities in profoundly harmful ways. And it has been creating a real reservoir of anger among those mainstream liberals who have been subjected to it.

This ugly rhetoric, in contrast to that on the left, has in fact been of much greater duration, as well as more sustained, and substantially eliminationist in nature. It's also clear that this kind of demonization and nasty rhetoric indeed played a significant role in Republicans' consolidation of the reins of power since 2000. Not only did it make the so-called rural "red states" even redder, it became a tool in the actual seizure of power that occurred in the November election and its aftermath. The old rules of fair play, it was clear, were now defunct.

On the other hand, considering that ugliness of this kind is precisely what needs ending, the relative rhetorical silence of liberals in the 1990s was probably a good thing, since responding in kind would have simply meant more sewage for us all to wade in. But it wasn't going to last forever, and when it became clear in November and December of 2000 that this kind of ugly rhetoric and open demonization was not only going to be a permanent part of Republican hardball politics, but that it was successful, then it was only a matter of time before you started hearing similarly ugly talk from the left.

To their credit, most liberals have understood that fighting back is more a matter of backbone than bitching, and that ugly rhetoric is sometimes best confronted not with more ugliness but with good humor. But that hasn't been true of everyone, either, and the result has been a predictable flow of fodder for books like Malkin's.

But to pretend that much of it is not reactive is missing reality, I think. Read, for instance, the "Fuck the South" essay that both Young and I found execrable, and you'll see that what inspired the authors was not simply the failure of their politics electorally, but the ugliness of the winners in their victories, and the sustained demonization of "blue state" voters and liberal politics by those on the right that led to their victory.

As the history of secession talk suggests, though, it is perhaps significant as a precursor to more violent, eliminationist rhetoric, and in that sense, its appearance among liberals is disturbing as well. It may indicate that we are reaching a point of no return when it comes to the boiling levels of political division in America.

What can we do about that?

I think this is where Young and I have some real common ground. Young also posted a follow-up to her original post in which she says this:

So, all in all, I stand by my earlier point. There is nastiness and ugliness aplenty on both sides, regardless of the exact forms it takes. To some extent, of course, perceptions of "ugliness," "nastiness" and "unhingedness" (so to speak) are subjective. To me, saying that Bush didn't lift a finger to help the victims of Katrina because he doesn't give a damn about blacks is obviously unhinged. To someone to the left of me, that might not be so obvious. Likewise, to me, saying that any mainstream Democrats are sympathetic to America's enemies is obviously unhinged. Others may differ. So, in the end, when approaching this issue, we are all to some extent captives of our own biases and perceptions; and I do not exempt myself from this general rule, as someone more "right" than "left" but deeply disenchanted, and troubled by, many aspects of conservative politics.

Trying to figure out who started it is fruitless, as well. Each side regards its own nastiness as reactive, and has examples to point to. And, for each side, "they started it" and "they're worse" serves as an excuse to condone or even encourage nastiness in its own ranks. (A liberal friend of mine who had always despised Michael Moore, and prided himself on the fact that mainstream liberalism has not embraced Moore the way mainstream conservatism has embraced Coulter, concluded upon the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 that if this movie helps defeat Bush, then maybe Moore is exactly what we need in today's political climate.)

Remember the proverb, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind"? That's what's happening here. Eye-for-an-eye political debate is leaving us blind.

I think we're both concerned about the state of political discourse in America, and I agree, in fact, that so much water has already gone under the bridge that it now is almost pointless to point out who's been worse, or who's been doing it longer. When both sides are doing it, the starting point -- or the question of who holds moral superiority in the equation -- becomes rather moot. What matters is how we stop it.

Yet this is precisely where the reality of how we got to this point in the first place -- that is, that the right-wing demonization of the left, including substantial eliminationism, has been a sustained and pronounced feature of mainstream conservatism for over a decade now -- becomes relevant.

Let's just suppose, for a moment, what would happen if liberals decided to start policing their own? That is, if significant blocs, particularly those in power, started denouncing the "Michael Moore wing" of their party, and trying to limit the influence of these supposed "fringe" players? What if they denounced Howard Dean's rhetorical excesses, and relegated Ted Rall to the actual fringes?

How, exactly, would that be different from what they do today?

Now, suppose there were even more: That liberal bloggers, for instance, started watching and denouncing the rhetorical excesses of their commenters, as well as "unhinged" behavior within their own ranks. What would happen then?

The right would smirk, chalk it up to liberal weakness, and proceed to take no prisoners, just as they have been doing for a decade now. Because that has been what's worked for them all this time. Why stop now?

The stark reality on the ground is that, as much as we all might deplore ugly rhetoric in theory regardless which side of the aisle it comes from, the right in particular has become not merely wedded to it but absolutely dependent upon it.

Thus, there will be no change in the state of political discourse in America until genuine conservatives on the right -- as well as any centrists out there, including those in the media -- decide to police the behavior of the conservative movement and to reel in its excesses.

This, of course, is what Malkin claims the right already does -- and this is what I demonstrated, beyond any serious doubt, that it simply does not do. Malkin herself is the embodiment of the source of the problem: she is herself so deeply beholden to real far-right extremists that she is incapable of seeing their extremism, let alone evincing any concern about it.

Unhinged in its way is an open declaration that the right has no intention whatsoever of reeling in its extremists, because, like Malkin, they will simply pretend that there's nothing extraordinary about their behavior.

Indeed, books like Unhinged actually serve a specific purpose: to provide epistemological cover for conservatives' own behavior. If those wackos on the left are wrecking America with their unhinged bombast, well, a little return fire is well earned, isn't it?

This is why, in the weeks after her book's release, we were subjected to so many instances of truly unhinged rhetoric from the right, Bill O'Reilly in particular. Within a week of Malkin's appearance on his show, O'Reilly was suggesting that San Francisco deserved to be attacked by terrorists, compared anti-Iraq war protesters to Hitler sympathizers, called all Europeans cowards, and promised to "bring horror" to his ephemeral foes in the "war on Christmas."

Did anyone on the right utter a peep? Well, no. Not even Michelle Malkin.

I have to say that I have seen at least one encouraging sign: Dan Borchers' CoulterWatch project, which will soon include a documentary and book on the subject of the harm that Ann Coulter is inflicting not just on the body politic but among conservatives as well. Borchers is himself a conservative with sterling credentials.

But then, as the MoJo story notes, Borchers' reward has been to be shunned by all those mainstream Republicans who have been feasting at Coulter's table these many years. It's not exactly a promising start, on the right-wing side at least.

But then, we're talking about an ideological cult that can't even see fit to extract Michael "The tsunami wasn't a tragedy" Savage from their ranks. What, exactly, should we expect?

If we want to change the state of our discourse, it is the right, above all, that has to change. And if Malkin and her cohorts are any indicator, that's never going to happen.

I agree that people on the left should work harder to encourage greater civility in discourse, and to discourage ugliness within their own ranks. But I don't think for a moment that it will do a damned bit of good, other than for their own souls.

[See Mahablog for more.]

Korematsu, Coulter, and Bush

Back when Ann Coulter worked at MSNBC -- about the same time that I worked at MSNBC.com capturing and producing the Web outtakes of her and other pundits' on-air pronouncements -- I remember that we often used to identify her in the ID line as a "Constitutional Law Expert" or "Constitutional Attorney."

I'm not sure why we did that: She has no known scholarly expertise in constitutional law, having never published anything in the way of a serious or academic exposition on the subject. She did once work as a litigator at the right-wing Center For Individual Rights in Washington, which has old connections to the white-supremacist Pioneer Fund, and whose racial goals raise disturbing questions about Coulter's background. But it remains an open question whether she ever dealt with constitutional-law issues in the courts. In any event, usually the "consitutional expert" description applies to folks like Richard Posner or Laurence Tribe, people who actually have the background and experience, and thus the expertise.

However, I've observed during Coulter's ascent that it doesn't really matter what label she uses, because her role in the conservative movement is pretty well-defined by now, even as it was back then: Chief Firebomb Thrower. She's at the cutting edge of the movement, and as such is an uncannily accurate predictor of the direction the entire American right is about to take.

Now, I first noticed this during the runup to the Clinton impeachment brouhaha: behind the reasonable moniker of "constitutional law expert," Coulter was twitching and foaming at the mouth about the president's supposed abrogations of the law. It wasn't the blow jobs, she insisted, it was the lawbreaking. Funny how that standard changes with the times, isn't it?

Anyway, her "constitutional attorney" pose was purely for the purpose of fomenting impeachment. Skip forward seven or eight years, and it's clear that she's still using the same schtick, but the apparent purpose is profoundly disturbing.

Check out this passage from her most recent column extolling the virtues of George W. Bush's domestic-spying program:

In previous wars, the country has done far worse than monitor telephone calls placed to jihad headquarters. FDR rounded up Japanese -- many of them loyal American citizens -- and threw them in internment camps. Most appallingly, at the same time, he let New York Times editors wander free.

Note the following about the Japanese internment:

1) The Supreme Court upheld the president's authority to intern the Japanese during wartime;

2) That case, Korematsu v. United States, is still good law;

3) There are no Japanese internment camps today. (Although the no-limit blackjack section at Caesar's Palace on a Saturday night comes pretty close.)

It's one or the other: Either we take the politically correct, scattershot approach and violate everyone's civil liberties, or we focus on the group threatening us and -- in the worst-case scenario -- run the risk of briefly violating the civil liberties of 1,000 people in a country of 300 million.

Other than the gratuitous and crude racial stereotype, and the eliminationist "humor" that is not merely a recurring feature but a defining obsession of Coulter's schtick, the most remarkable aspect of this analysis is her claim that Korematsu v. United States is "good law."

A lot depends, of course, on your definition of "good law." If it simply means that the ruling in question has never been overturned and is, in at least a technical sense, in force, then Coulter is right.

But if, by "good law," you mean rulings a court would uphold today as valid, then that's another matter altogether.

It is in fact something of an article of faith in legal circles that Korematsu is one of the Supreme Court's three great historical mistakes, ranking alongside Dred Scot and Plessy v. Ferguson in the annals of bad law.

In fact, every single member of the current Supreme Court has indicated that they consider Korematsu to have been improperly decided, including Antonin Scalia. Any attorney bringing a case before the current Supreme Court and arguing with Korematsu as their foundation would certainly lose.

Recall, if you will, the questioning about Korematsu that Supreme Court nominee John Roberts underwent during his confirmation hearings:

FEINGOLD: Do you believe that Korematsu was wrongly decided?

ROBERTS: It's one of those cases that I don't think it's technically been overruled yet. But I think it's widely recognized as not having precedential value. I do think the result in that case -- Korematsu was actually considered the exclusion, not the actual detention, but the exclusion of individuals based on their ethnic and racial background from vast areas.

And it's hard for me to comprehend the argument that that would be acceptable these days.

FEINGOLD: It's often included, if you list decisions that are sort of considered some of the worst decisions in the history of the Supreme Court with Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott and others. Is that a fair characterization of your view of Korematsu?

ROBERTS: Yes.

Of course, Eric Muller has written often and lucidly on the Korematsu matter, including his commentary on the Roberts hearings. Greg Robinson, writing at Muller's blog, elucidated what I think is final word on Korematsu:

Finally, the nicest thing that can be said about the Korematsu decision is that it reflects the Court's historic deference to the Army and Executive in times of war, and not a reasoned agreement with the government’s evidence. Indeed, during the 1980s federal judges overturned the convictions of Korematsu and the other Japanese American defendants because of a pattern of government misconduct and tampering with evidence during the trials. As was discovered in the early 1980s, when West Coast Defense Commander General DeWitt drafted his Final Report, he explained that his reasons for instituting mass removal was the alleged impossibility of telling a loyal Japanese American from a disloyal one. This draft, which set forth DeWitt's authentic recital of the reasoning underlying his policy of mass removal, was suppressed by Assistant Secretary of War McCloy. McCloy ordered DeWitt to destroy all copies of his draft and to prepare a new one which would present the claim that evacuation was necessary only because there was otherwise insufficient time to determine the loyalty of individuals. Similarly, the FCC and other government bodies had informed the Justice Department that General DeWitt's claims that Japanese Americans had engaged in shore-to-ship signalling, which lay at the center of his case for evacuation, were unfounded. Rather than report this to the Court, the Justice Department concealed this evidence from the Justices.

Put simply, the deference of the Court to the executive branch in wartime that Korematsu exhibited was predicated on deceptiveness from the Justice and War departments that in turn sought to obscure the nakedly racist nature of the claim of "military necessity." That is to say, when the Courts so abjectly defer to such wartime powers, the executive can expand all its powers to unimaginable heights simply on its say-so, whether truthful or not.

And it's important to remember that there were those at the time who saw through this deception, as Muller explained awhile back [see the Aug. 24 entry, "Ditching the "Hindsight" Justification"]:

Hindsight, as we know, is the perception of the nature of an event only after it has happened. Underlying the hindsight critique is an implicit assertion that the judgment we form today they could not have formed back then.

But this is so obviously wrong in the case of Korematsu that one wonders why Posner even bothers. At least two of the nine Justices on the Korematsu (Murphy and Roberts), and very arguably a third (Jackson), saw that the order removing Japanese Americans from the West Coast was racist in 1944. J. Edgar Hoover saw it as unnecessary and U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle saw it as illegal (as applied to U.S. citizens) in January of 1941, when it was being considered. Prominent syndicated columnists, most notably the Washington Post's Merlo Pusey, publicly condemned the internment while it was ongoing.

To say that the racism in the exclusion program is visible only to us today is false. Plenty of people -- including people very close to FDR himself, and a third of the Supreme Court -- saw it back then. Hindsight may be 20/20, but some people had damn good vision back then too.

Indeed, let's remember exactly what it was they saw, because those dissenting views actually reflect the bulk of the thinking of today's judiciary. First, there was Justice Murphy's dissent:

That this forced exclusion was the result in good measure of this erroneous assumption of racial guilt rather than bona fide military necessity is evidenced by the Commanding General's Final Report on the evacuation from the Pacific Coast area. In it he refers to all individuals of Japanese descent as "subversive," as belonging to "an enemy race" whose "racial strains are undiluted," and as constituting "over 112,000 potential enemies at large today" along the Pacific Coast. In support of this blanket condemnation of all persons of Japanese descent, however, no reliable evidence is cited to show that such individuals were generally disloyal, or had generally so conducted themselves in this area as to constitute a special menace to defense installations or war industries, or had otherwise by their behavior furnished reasonable ground for their exclusion as a group.

Perhaps even more prescient was Justice Robert Jackson's dissent:

But if we cannot confine military expedients by the Constitution, neither would I distort the Constitution to approve all that the military may deem expedient. That is what the Court appears to be doing, whether consciously or not. I cannot say, from any evidence before me, that the orders of General DeWitt were not reasonably expedient military precautions, nor could I say that they were. But even if they were permissible military procedures, I deny that it follows that they are constitutional. If, as the Court holds, it does follow, then we may as well say that any military order will be constitutional and have done with it.

The limitation under which courts always will labor in examining the necessity for a military order are illustrated by this case. How does the Court know that these orders have a reasonable basis in necessity? No evidence whatever on that subject has been taken by this or any other court. There is sharp controversy as to the credibility of the DeWitt report. So the Court, having no real evidence before it, has no choice but to accept General DeWitt's own unsworn, self-serving statement, untested by any cross-examination, that what he did was reasonable. And thus it will always be when courts try to look into the reasonableness of a military order.

In the very nature of things, military decisions are not susceptible of intelligent judicial appraisal. They do not pretend to rest on evidence, but are made on information that often would not be admissible and on assumptions that could not be proved. Information in support of an order could not be disclosed to courts without danger that it would reach the enemy. Neither can courts act on communications made in confidence. Hence courts can never have any real alternative to accepting the mere declaration of the authority that issued the order that it was reasonably necessary from a military viewpoint.

Much is said of the danger to liberty from the Army program for deporting and detaining these citizens of Japanese extraction. But a judicial construction of the due process clause that will sustain this order is a far more subtle blow to liberty than the promulgation of the order itself. A military order, however unconstitutional, is not apt to last longer than the military emergency. Even during that period a succeeding commander may revoke it all. But once a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution, or rather rationalizes the Constitution to show that the Constitution sanctions such an order, the Court for all time has validated the principle of racial discrimination in criminal procedure and of transplanting American citizens. The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.

For more on the background of the Korematsu case, see this brief history.

As I've previously explained, the World War II internment-camp rulings continue to play an important role in the actions of the Bush administration after 9/11:

What the Japanese-American internment revealed for the first time was a hole in the traditional checks and balances of constitutional powers. In wartime, the total deference to the executive branch would lend it nearly comprehensive powers. The post-Sept. 11 response has opened another dimension to this: If wartime -- as in the "War on Terror" -- becomes itself a never-ending enterprise, then the executive branch's power becomes potentially illimitable.

... Legal scholar Anita Ramasastry explored the dangers posed by the Bush policies last year in a FindLaw commentary that pointed out that while the White House so far has relied on another Supreme Court precedent, Ex parte Quirin -- which dealt with German military operatives arrested on American shores -- to justify its actions, these also closely resemble the Korematsu matter: "[In] both cases, the government arrogated itself the right to detain -- and detain indefinitely -- without court review of its decisions as to who should be detained."

It's understandable why the administration would avoid raising Korematsu in its defense. Its historical standing and the near-certainty of its being overturned should it come before the court again should be enough to steer most attorneys clear of leaning upon it for any kind of support.

On the other hand, as the Center for Constitutional Rights’ legal scholars have argued (in a report titled "American Justice on Trial: Who Loses in the Case of Military Tribunals?"), the Ex parte Quirin decision upon which the government is relying "simply cannot be credibly stretched to cover the present circumstances given current facts and the clear principles of the international law of war" -- and pointed out that it, like Korematsu, is now "widely recognized as an abysmal model of fairness and justice."

That hasn't stopped the right from citing Quirin in defense of the Bush administration's initiatives, as Cass Sunstein has done continuously. But as Armando points out, not even Quirin can be credibly stretched to cover the gross expansion of presidential powers represented by the NSA domestic spying that Coulter and the rest of the right is now leaping to defend. In fact, it specifically prohibits it.

No, as Coulter evidently recognizes, the only ruling that does that -- the one that accedes powers so sweeping that in fact it grants the executive branch the ability to ignore 14th-Amendment requirements for equal protection under the law -- is Korematsu.

Which, evidently, is the reason that Coulter hopes to resurrect its legacy today, much as she has attempted to resuscitate the reputation of Joe McCarthy. Just as defenders of the internment plans did in early 1942, before it became reality, Coulter suggests that any such program that so grossly violates the civil rights of citizens would only involve a mere handful, "1,000 people in a country of 300 million."

But then the reality was that the Korematsu ruling imposed no such limits, which is why it wound up involving 120,000 people in a population of 132 million.

ReddHedd at firedoglake sums up the situation neatly:

The President has made an extraordinary power grab with all of this, using war powers arguments as justification for stepping well outside the standards of legal precedent in national security matters built up over years and years. This Presidential Activism (hat tip to Jeralyn for the term)is something that must be either reconciled or condemned by members of Congress over the course of oversight hearings -- but members of Congress should know that we will be watching what they do, or don't do, as will the ghosts of the patriots who fought so hard to make this nation free in the first place.

Of course, with people like Coulter leading the charge from the right, those patriots will continue to be cast as "traitors" and "appeasers." That's part of the price.

But if the right's bottom line is making Korematsu "good law," then it should be clear that their aim is nothing short of a dictatorial presidency with the limitless powers granted him during "wartime."

Returns and correctives

Sorry for dropping out for the past week. I was traveling and thought I'd be better able to get online than it turned out I actually was. I've got a lot of material in the pipeline, so expect me to kind of make up for it in the next week or two.

While I was out, I found out that not only had I filed one post last week predicated on what turned out to be false information -- not exactly a common occurrence here -- but evidently two such posts. Even though in both cases I was working on ostensibly reliable information from credible mainstream sources, I'd like to give my readers a heartfelt apology. I certainly expect better of myself.

The first case is particularly aggravating: it turns out that the student who claimed he'd been visited by Homeland Security investigators after checking out Mao's Little Red Book was a complete hoax. The reason it's aggravating is that the larger point I made in the post -- that not only is it easy for rogue surveillance lacking any kind of oversight to morph into an actual assault on the civil liberties of ordinary citizens -- remains valid, as other evidence continues to demonstrate. Digby has a lot more on this. As ReddHedd at firedoglake points out, the evidence keeps coming in from sources like James Bamford at the New York Times and William Arkin's blog in the Washington Post, as well as my hometown paper, the P-I, "all detailing ways in which the NSA is said to have been deployed far beyond what its mission has traditionally been, and all without any third party oversight because the Bush Administration deliberately chose to move forward without it."

This is an important thing for the public to understand, and the evidence for it doesn't need to be tainted by hoaxes. The "Little Red Book" fit in so neatly with everything else we're discovering about this expansion of executive power that I didn't treat it with the skepticism it probably deserved.

Then there's the matter of the Washington Times' purported link to bin Laden's decision in 1998 to stop using his cell phone, cited by President Bush and the 9/11 commission. The Washington Post and Jack Shafer at Slate pretty thoroughly debunk this story, though as Shafer notes, the facts they raise don't necessarily disprove whether such a connection existed: it remains entirely possible that bin Laden's decision to drop the use of the phone was sparked by the publication of the information in the Washington Times. On the other hand, the internal NSC assumption that this was the case, according to Daniel Benjamin, may not have been accurate either. It's clear, in any event, that the release of the information was not the product of a leak.

My mistake was reasonable enough, having originated from an otherwise largely credible work by a couple of well-regarded counterterrorism experts. And I obviously wasn't alone in doing so: even the Washington Post itself had referred to the 1998 Times story as the source of what was termed "a major intelligence setback" -- though, as Shafer explains, the information had already been made public a couple of years before that.

Mea culpa. Now, on to the good stuff. Hopefully hoax- and urban-myth-free.

How revealing

As predictable as ever, right-wingnuttia is all aflutter with charges that the New York Times damaged national security by revealing that the Bush administration, in defiance of federal statutes, has been spying on American citizens without warrants.

It always helps, of course, when President Bush himself makes that charge on national television:

My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. You've got to understand -- and I hope the American people understand -- there is still an enemy that would like to strike the United States of America, and they're very dangerous. And the discussion about how we try to find them will enable them to adjust.

Acting on cue, the right-wing Wurlitzer is rumbling into action. Helping lead the charge, as always, is the Washington Times, which headlined its lead story today: "Bush calls leak 'shameful'".

Even before Bush spoke, right-wing blognuttia was pushing this line, including such luminaries as PowerLine and Michelle Malkin, plus the usual cast of thousands. Similarly, right-wing columnists like NRO's James S. Robbins weighed in along identical lines.

But then, remember the incident that Bush used to illustrate the problem in his press conference:

Let me give you an example about my concerns about letting the enemy know what may or may not be happening. In the late 1990s, our government was following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone. And then the fact that we were following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone made it into the press as the result of a leak. And guess what happened? Saddam -- Osama bin Laden changed his behavior. He began to change how he communicated.

... And again, I want to repeat what I said about Osama bin Laden, the man who ordered the attack that killed 3,000 Americans. We were listening to him. He was using a type of cell phone, or a type of phone, and we put it in the newspaper -- somebody put it in the newspaper that this was the type of device he was using to communicate with his team, and he changed. I don't know how I can make the point more clear that any time we give up -- and this is before they attacked us, by the way -- revealing sources, methods, and what we use the information for simply says to the enemy: change.

What Bush conveniently neglected to mention to his audience was that it wasn't the New York Times, nor any other organ of the "mainstream media," that published this information.

It was the Washington Times.

As I have pointed out several times, this incident was described in some detail in Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's The Age of Sacred Terror, both having worked on counterterrorism in the Clinton administration.

According to Benjamin and Simon, the turning point when al-Qaeda became America's greatest enemy was not on Sept. 11, 2001, but rather on Aug. 20, 1998 -- the day President Clinton launched missile strikes against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda operations in Afghanistan and the Sudan, the latter being a pharmaceutical plant at al-Shifa that was being used to develop chemical weapons. From pp. 260-261:

For a brief moment, the operation appeared to be a qualified success. Al-Shifa was destroyed. Six terrorist camps were hit and about sixty people were killed, many of them Pakistani militants training for action in Kashmir. The Tomahawks missed bin Laden and the other senior al-Qaeda leaders by a couple of hours. This in itself was not a great surprise: no one involved has any illusions about the chances of hitting the target at exactly the right time. The White House recognized that the strike would not stop any attacks that were in the pipeline, but it might forestall the initiation of new operations as the organization's leaders went to ground.

The months that followed, however, were a nightmare. The press picked apart the administration's case for striking al-Shifa, and controversy erupted over whether Clinton was trying to "wag the dog," that is, distract the public from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The Washington Times -- the capital's unabashed right-wing newspaper, which consistently has the best sources in the intelligence world and the least compunction about leaking -- ran a story mentioning that bin Laden "keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones." Bin Laden stopped using the satellite phone instantly. The al-Qaeda leader was not eager to court the fate of Djokar Dudayev, the Chechen insurgent leader who was killed by a Russian air defense suppression missile that homed in on its target using his satellite phone signal. When bin Laden stopped using the phone and let his aides do the calling, the United States lost its best chance to find him.

According to a later Washington Post report, the Washington Times piece was in fact later determined to be "a major intelligence setback."

But did any of you hear any of these right-wing pundits now braying "treason" at the New York Times complaining back in 1998, when the Washington Times in fact genuinely harmed our national security interests, in a way that later contributed to thousands of American deaths?

Er, no. They were all too busy playing the same damned "wag the dog" game.

Funny how things work over there in Conservative Land. If a conservative mouthpiece actually harms national security in the pursuit of attacking a liberal president or policy, well, then, that's just good old hardball politics. Just ask Valerie Plame.

And besides, you can always just give it a few years. Then, when everyone's forgotten who actually caused this security breach and why, a smart, Orwellian conservative figurehead can always use the incident later to bash the "mainstream media" for doing its job.

On the other hand, if the mainstream media catches a conservative president breaking the law by spying on American citizens, then suddenly the alarms are being sounded about the press harming national security (mostly under a bunch of scenarios stolen from bad TV scripts).

Nice racket.

Killing the message

One of the real signs of Republicans' growing extremism is what Chris Mooney calls their "War on Science," because it reveals a mindset in which factual reality is discarded and replaced with one constructed out of whole cloth.

As always, this constructed reality comes into conflict with the real world, at which point its adherents typically try to assert themselves by outshouting the messengers or shutting them up.

In the case of the attacks on science, we know what happens next, inexorably: a slow-motion disaster for the public. In some cases, as with stem-cell research, real advances in medicine are forestalled. In others, as with the intended imposition of "intelligent design" curriculum in our schools, it means a serious degradation of the sciences in public education. In yet others, as with the management of endangered species like salmon, it results in massive degradation of our national resources and natural heritage.

Exhibit No. 25846 in this ongoing debacle is the recent decision by Sen. Larry Craig, the Idaho Republican, to cut funding for one of the major sources of data that is currently available on Columbia River salmon.

You've got to love Craig's explanation, which is a classic case of projection:

"Data cloaked in advocacy create confusion," Craig said on the Senate floor this month, after successfully inserting language in an energy and water appropriations bill that bans all future funding for the Fish Passage Center. "False science leads people to false choices."

It sure does. And it's quite clear that Craig's definition of "false science" is "any science that runs counter the policies I wish to promote."

"Idaho's water should not be flushed away on experimental policies based on cloudy, inexact assumption," Craig said in a news release.

Nor should taxpayers' dollars be flushed away on ridiculously expensive, and plainly ineffective, measures like the barging of salmon smolt currently favored by the Bush administration.

And, like all good Republicans these days, Craig distorted and falsified the record while justifying the line cut:

On the Senate floor this month, he justified elimination of the Fish Passage Center on the grounds that "many questions have arisen regarding the reliability of the technical data" it publishes. Craig quoted from the report of an independent scientific advisory board that in 2003 reviewed work done by the Fish Passage Center.

But one of the report's authors, Charles C. Coutant, a fishery ecologist who retired this year from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said Craig neglected to mention that the board found the work of the center to be "of high technical quality."

"Craig was very selective in reflecting just the critical part of a quotation from the report," said Coutant, who has worked on Columbia River salmon issues for 16 years. "It did give a misleading impression about our board's view of the Fish Passage Center."

Craig also said on the Senate floor that "other institutions" in the Northwest now do "most" of the data collection work done by center. He said getting rid of the center would reduce redundancy and increase the efficiency of regional fish programs.

But according to another recent independent scientific assessment of the work of the center, there was little duplication of data collection between the center and other organizations; it recommended that the center continue to receive funding to meet a substantial need in the Northwest for information on salmon survival.

Fish and game agencies in Oregon, Washington and Idaho, Indian tribes with fishing rights on the river and the governors of Oregon and Washington have all said that eliminating the Fish Passage Center is a bad idea that would reduce the quality of information on endangered salmon.

As Chris Mooney points out:

Craig's "scientific" rationales for killing this scientific agency don't add up. It's clear that this was about politics -- and about appeasing Craig's political allies in the hydropower industry.

Paul Vandevelder explained in the P-I the other day just how grotesque a piece of bad government this move by Craig really is. The significant point is that cutting out the center means silencing one of the real sources of actual data that proved, beyond any question, that the Bush salmon recovery efforts were failing. It's an effective way of silencing your critics:

Scientific data gathered by an independent agency, the Fish Passage Center, showed that the BPA's strategy of trucking and barging fish around dams has been a $3 billion boondoggle. Under the care of BPA hydrologists, fish survival rates have plummeted. In June, the judge set aside the projected loss and ruled in favor of the fish. Within days, Idaho Sen. Larry E. Craig (named "Legislator of the Year" by the National Hydropower Association) inserted language into a Senate energy bill that would "zero out" funding for the Fish Passage Center.

The FPC, as it is known, was established in 1984 after Congress passed the Northwest Power Act, a toothsome law that put salmon protection on an "equal footing" with power generators, barge operators, ratepayers and irrigators. For more than 20 years, the FPC has collected and distributed scientific data to state, tribal and federal fisheries biologists and the courts. The center's longtime manager, Michele DeHart, admits that data has put politicians between a rock and a wet place by proving, conclusively, that the hydro-power infrastructure kill fish.

Nevertheless, "I guess I am flabbergasted," says DeHart, whose agency is now scheduled to vanish in March. "We are biologists and computer scientists, and what we do is just math."

The rider that Craig attached to the Senate energy bill is a shot across Redden's bow. As the man responsible for enforcing the Endangered Species Act on the Columbia and Snake rivers, Redden relies on scientific data to make sound decisions. "I think it would be a drastic mistake for them (Congress) to yank the subsidy from the center (FPC) which has been giving out neutral information for many years," said Redden at a hearing on Sept. 30. "I hope that does not happen."

Craig attempted to explain his action in a speech to the Senate, in November, by claiming that data gathered by the FPC is "cloaked in advocacy" and that "false science leads people to false choices." Inexplicably, neither Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden or Washington Sens. Patty Murray nor Maria Cantwell, challenged Craig's nonsensical assertions.

Two decades of scientific data supports neither the BPA's recovery strategy nor the senator's make-believe world. When the spill concluded last September, the FPC announced that smolt survival rates in the lower Snake River were the "highest recorded in recent years," a year-over year jump from 30 percent to 74 percent. Craig finessed that embarrassing detail in his speech to the Senate. Nor did he mention that the BPA actually reduced its late summer wholesale rates by 1.6 percent thanks to surplus power sales that exceeded forecasts by $20 million.

No wonder they want to kill the messenger: they want to kill the message. That's how you maintain that constructed version of reality.

But the real version of reality, as always, has its own way of asserting itself. And it can be very, very painful when it does.

The action-hero presidency

I used to wonder, back when George W. Bush was doing things like flying in a fighter jet onto aircraft carriers while wearing well-endowed jumpsuits, and then getting action figures made to commemorate the event, how many times he had been watching Air Force One. Because it was self-evident that Bush was going to model his presidency not after his famously wimpy father, but after Harrison Ford.

You've seen Air Force One, right? I thought the movie was a clever idea: the president as action hero. Personally, I most liked the climactic scene where a really pissed-off Ford finally shoves the evil terrorist Gary Oldman out the back end of a plane. Boy, talk about satisfying.

And then there was the speech he gave:

Never again will I allow our political self-interest to deter us from doing what we know to be morally right. Atrocity and terror are not political weapons. And to those who would use them, your day is over. We will never negotiate. We will no longer tolerate and we will no longer be afraid. It's your turn to be afraid.

Sounds like ... a George W. Bush speech.

Of course, like all action films, Air Force One is terribly cheesy in execution, and all slathered with the usual moral fable: the instinctive action of the hero is always superior to the overwrought intellectualism of his enemies, not to mention their morally feeble enablers.

It's the same in every action film: In addition to the actual enemy, the hero must also overcome the limp-wristed hang-wringers who think too much: they worry about things like constitutional rights and whether or not the enemy is being mistreated. Sometimes these people are politicians or law-enforcement officials; sometimes they're members of the media. But it's always the same: They're nearly as noxious as (and sometimes share the fate of) the enemy himself.

Clint Eastwood was especially good at films like this: Dirty Harry is a classic of the genre, replete with an interfering DA who handcuffs our hero at every turn. Bruce Willis also made a lot of flicks like this; the first two Die Hard films featured both FBI agents and local reporters who cause trouble for our hero.

Then there are more recent permutations, particularly on network TV (think action shows like 24) in which the hero is forced to push the boundaries of what's legal in order to achieve results -- especially when it comes to saving thousands of lives from a terrorist attack.

Now, to hear folks on the right talk, you'd think that George W. Bush was indeed cut in the mold of Harrison Ford and Kiefer Sutherland, with a dash of Bruce on the side. Don't these wimps complaining about his surveillance of American citizens without warrant or oversight know we're in a war on terror?

I mean, what good is the Constitution if all it does is enable evil terrorists to endanger the lives of us all? Right? We should be able to pick and choose whose rights we protect, because you never know when someone is gonna set off a nuke in your kids' playground.

It's too easy to say that George W. Bush and his cult of defenders on the right have watched too many of these action films. Rather, what is more noteworthy is that this public response taps directly into those well-established sentiments about heroic action. It's actually rather a brilliant stroke: Republicans are appealing to an American public already profoundly propagandized by a steady diet of Hollywood-produced action flicks and revenge melodramas. Movies in which such niceties as civil rights are readily discarded in the pursuit of justice.

Mind you, it matters little that the reality is that 24-type situations, in which life-and-death issues hang on questions of torture and surveillance, are so extremely rare that their likelihood is nearly nil. Moreover, the system of justice is designed so that considerations like preventing the deaths of innocents can be readily taken into account later.

These "annoying" laws exist for a reason fundamental to the very foundations of modern society: This is a nation of laws, not men. And while it's easy and convenient to discard those principles in the flimsy context of a movie, doing so in real life has profound and lasting complications.

I think what you can say is that the Bush team is cynically manipulating public sentiment for the sake of pushing the limits of presidential power. It's a brilliant move, really, tapping into an aspect of the psyche that has been preconditioned by a hoary myth that has been perpetuated over the years by Hollywood: the notion that the action-driven hero's instincts for "saving lives" are superior to careful reasoning and principled restraint.

But it sure is weird for a bunch of people who make a living out of deriding "Hollywood values."