Why Global Sovereignty Matters

-- by Sara

Dave's discussion of the Utah Republican Party's resolution "warning that Satan's minions want to eliminate national borders and do away with sovereignty" brings up a perennial right-wing boogeyman that hasn't seen a lot of time out of the barn lately. But, since we're likely to hear more wingnut railing against "one world government," let me explain why that idea deserves a strong liberal counter.

One of the principles of systems theory is that we should avoid the tragedy of the commons. Wherever you have a resource that's unregulated by either a market or a government, people will inevitably wander into it and start taking as much of it as they can physically carry away. Eventually, the resource -- a pastureland, a forest, a watershed, whatever -- will be depleted to the point where the use of it is lost to everyone. The only solution to the commons tragedy, in all times and places and at whatever scale, is to set up some kind of regulatory boundary around the resource that limits and allocates shares, controls access, and manages it with an eye toward future sustainability.

All of us -- even conservatives -- are pretty clear on this concept where small, localized resources are concerned. Though we may have philosophical disagreements over whether the county government or a private company will do a better job of maintaining the common roads and water reservoir, most of us recognize that there needs to be an authority in charge -- one with boundaries of influence large enough to fully control and sustain the domain, and sufficient clout to enforce its will in the face of powerful people who may want game the rules and take more than their fair share.

Looking back over the course of US history, one lasting mark left on our body politic by WWII was that the scale of our commons management domains took a quantum leap. Before the war, "state's rights" had been an article of faith, because most of our common wealth was managed at the state level (as it still is in Canada). The Roaring 20s happened in no small part because the newly-emerging corporate order could profit handsomely by taking undue advantage of a virtually unregulated interstate commons. It had gotten to the point where the largest corporations were rich enough to bully state governments into giving them whatever they wanted, or threaten to go elsewhere -- a clear sign that business was now operating at a scale where state government wasn't big enough, strong enough, or organized to put a meaningful boundary around corporate behavior. Structurally, this was an underlying cause of the "tragedy of the commons" we now recall as the Great Depression.

FDR put an end to that, through policies and programs that transferred important state business-regulation functions into federal hands -- first in the name of ending the Depression, and then in the name of ending the war. This new regulatory infrastructure, designed specifically to create a government power boundary big and strong enough to manage and control the newly-expanded business commons, is the main reason that conservatives despise Roosevelt to this day. (Whenever you hear a conservative hollering about "small government," odds are good that they're really advocating the disregulation of a commons so they can exploit it for personal profit.)

Over the past four decades, we've begun to struggle with another quantum shift in scale. We've come to realize that oceans, arable land, aquifers and watersheds, and the entire atmosphere represent a global commons that every one of us depends on. At the same time, business roams the planet taking what it wants -- just as it roamed America in the 20s -- making unimaginable profits and creating irreversible damage (global warming, anyone?) because there's no one entity big and powerful enough to put a boundary around its activities and regulate its behavior.

National governments, like the state governments before them, are now simply too small and too corruptible to effectively manage the problems that we're facing. Which means that, in the decades ahead, our survival will almost certainly depend on creating global authorities to oversee the commons at a global scale -- in other words, the conservatives' dreaded "one world government."

One of the (often legitimate) complaints against FDR's government was that it was often very hierarchical and hence heavy-handed in implementing its edicts. Back in that generation, people still had very Victorian ideas of how power flowed; and military-style hierarchy was all they really knew. And because the anti-one-world-government grognards still understand power and hierarchy this way, it's fair to guess that much of their fear stems from the thought that they'll be subordinated to leaders who don't meet their specific criteria for legitimacy -- always a hot-button issue for authoritarians. For ideological conservatives, the only way to have a world government is to subjugate nations (and nationalism, which is the right-wing religion) to a world dictator -- an anti-Christ who will present a clear and present danger to their sense of freedom. For economic conservatives, a world government will once again restrict their "right" to make profit whenever and wherever they will.

In moving toward global governance, we need to be aware of these fears -- and resist the vision that they represent. All of us should be concerned about the potential loss of local sovereignty -- democracy depends on us being able to choose who leads us, and where -- but we shouldn't buy into the conservative vision that this will be inevitable.

Liberals, after all, know better. Since the Sixties, we've come to a more organic understanding of how things in the world are naturally organized. We understand that power can be decentralized in webs and networks; and that people can be effective in loosely-organized, self-determining cells; and that these cells, in turn, can be integrated into much larger and more effective systems than anything a hierarchy can handle. Organizationally, what works for bacteria colonies also works for Al-Qaeda -- and will almost certainly work as a system for managing our global commons as well.

Some kind of global network government is coming. It is as inevitable as global warming, the loss of the fisheries, and the destruction of the topsoil -- the problems it will first be organized to put boundaries around and manage for the common good of all humanity. It does not have to involve pushing all authority for everything up to the highest levels -- just the tasks that are required to sustain the things we truly hold in common. The right wing will resist it mightly (those who derive emotional or financial sustenance from the status quo will always resist the future); though there's also no shortage of people who also want to explode the national boundaries around these commons so they can profit off of them in private markets (a bad idea, but a post for another day). But we on the progressive side need to understand exactly what's at stake, and why -- and refuse to join them in their fear.

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Oh, and by the way: I'm back.

Those satanic liberals

-- by Dave

One of the exigencies of eliminationist rhetoric is that ineluctably, by its nature, it is woven out of whole cloth -- it is almost purely fantasy, though sometimes it is wrapped around tiny grains of "fact" that, on closer examination, are mostly perceptions rather than truths.

Witness, for instance, the case of the Utah Republican Party poobah who wentr for the Grand Twofer: casting both illegal immigrants and liberals as the veritable Spawn of Satan his own bad self:

Utah County Republicans ended their convention on Saturday by debating Satan's influence on illegal immigrants.

The group was unable to take official action because not enough members stuck around long enough to vote, despite the pleadings of party officials. The convention was held at Canyon View Junior High School.

Don Larsen, chairman of legislative District 65 for the Utah County Republican Party, had submitted a resolution warning that Satan's minions want to eliminate national borders and do away with sovereignty.

In a speech at the convention, Larsen told those gathered that illegal immigrants "hate American people" and "are determined to destroy this country, and there is nothing they won't do."

Illegal aliens are in control of the media, and working in tandem with Democrats, are trying to "destroy Christian America" and replace it with "a godless new world order -- and that is not extremism, that is fact," Larsen said.

At the end of his speech, Larsen began to cry, saying illegal immigrants were trying to bring about the destruction of the U.S. "by self invasion."

Republican officials then allowed speakers to defend and refute the resolution. One speaker, who was identified as "Joe," said illegal immigrants were Marxist and under the influence of the devil. Another, who declined to give her name to the Daily Herald, said illegal immigrants should not be allowed because "they are not going to become Republicans and stop flying the flag upside down. ... If they want to be Americans, they should learn to speak English and fly their flag like we do."

Senator Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, spoke against the resolution, saying Larsen, whom he called a "true patriot and a close friend," was embarrassing the Republican Party.

"I agree with 95 percent of this resolution but it has some language that is divisive and not inspiring other people to its vision," he said. "This only gives fodder to the liberal media to give negative attention to the Republican Party."

... Larsen was allowed to finish the debate with a one-minute speech.

"If the Democrats take over the country, we will be dead, and we will have abortion and partial-birth abortion and the Republican Party will go into extinction," he said. "Nancy Pelosi and the ACLU would oppose this (resolution)."

As we saw in Montana last week, the spread of vile, hateful rhetoric specifically intended to dehumanize liberals, illegal immigrants and Muslims is hardly relegated to the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. That's just where it starts.

[Hat tip to Hartmut in comments.]

The other kind of terror

-- by Dave

An arrest was made yesterday in the apparent attempt by an Austin man to terrorize a local abortion clinic by placing a nearly complete bomb outside its doors earlier this week:

A 27-year-old Austin man was arrested on Friday and charged with placing an unexploded bomb containing some 2,000 nails outside an abortion clinic in the state's capital.

The explosive device also included a propane tank and a mechanism "akin to a rocket," Austin Police Commander David Carter said.

The device was discovered on Wednesday in the parking lot of the Austin Women's Health Center, police said.

The Texas Joint Terrorism Task Force -- made up of federal, state and local law enforcement authorities -- arrested Paul Ross Evans, who authorities said was on parole for an unspecified crime.

As both zuzu at Feministe and Carpetbagger Report observe, this is a fairly clear-cut case of domestic terrorism. (Kevins Woodshed also has more.) Certainly, it's well within the tradition of domestic terrorists like Eric Rudolph and various other abortion-clinic bombers.

But remember: The FBI has de-emphasized right-wing extremist crimes and displaced them with an emphasis on "eco terror" as far as its chief domestic-terror concern. This is in no small part because this administration is being run by people who don't consider bombings and arson against abortion clinics to be terrorism.

Because of the nature of the ordnance in this case, there's also a connection to previous acts of terrorism -- particularly the appearance both of a nail bomb and a propane-tank device. These same devices appeared in the case of the Spokane-based "Phineas Priests" who believed they were avengers of God who engaged in a six-month spree of bank robberies in the Northwest in 1996.

I describe this gang in some detail in Chapter 6 of my book In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest, and was struck by the similarity of the devices in the Austin case to those used by this gang, particularly in their second attack:

The bomb went off again in Spokane, just a little more than a hundred days after the first explosion: on July 12. It was a duplicate of the first crime: set off a pipe bomb, then rob a bank. In fact, it was even the same bank.

The bomb went off at a new target this time, one nearly as logical as the newspaper: the Planned Parenthood clinic out in the Spokane Valley. What didn't make it quite logical is that, unlike other PP facilities, only birth control and advice are dispensed there -- no abortions are performed. And the clinic was closed at the time.

Still, two men wearing black ski masks and camouflage ponchos drove up in a white Chevy van at about 1:30 in the afternoon, broke out a glass door, tossed in a pipe bomb, ran to the van and screeched away. A witness saw a driver with a white beard, as in the first attack. Moments later, the blast rocked the neighborhood. It blew out the clinic’s windows and ripped up its interior. A piece of the pipe from the device flew out of the clinic, over a two-story building and four busy lanes of traffic, and finally landed harmlessly in a restaurant parking lot.

Within minutes the bombers were in familiar territory: back at the U.S. Bank on East Sprague Street, a few miles away from the clinic. This time, three men with masks and ponchos walked in with automatic weapons raised and demanded money. One of them carried what appeared to be a propane tank with some wires rigged to its top, perhaps a large bomb, and set it down on the floor while the other two collected cash.

Bank employees knew the drill. They kept their hands up and handed over the money. Even the customers were familiar with the scene. One of them, Dale McElliott, had been at the bank when it was robbed the first time, and when he pulled into the space at the drive-up window and looked inside and saw arms raised in the air, he knew what was up again. He crept out of his car on his hands and knees and up the line to the other drivers waiting behind him, asking them for a cellular phone to call the police with. One of them did. Another witness, meanwhile, dialed 911 from a nearby pay phone.

It was too late. The bandits shortly emerged from the bank, cool as cucumbers, with the propane tank-bomb and jumped into the car. One witness saw a second car pull up behind the van and follow it away down the arterial, its driver speaking into a cellular phone. The van was found later, abandoned this time in the parking garage of a mall. Again, it was loaded with a device that appeared to be meant to detonate and destroy the van, but which the Spokane bomb squad, thanks to a robot, soon found was not functioning. When police moved inside, they found the other propane device the men had carried into the bank as well.

The target, a women's clinic the bombers apparently believed was committing abortion, was a new twist. There were other differences: Three men instead of two rushed the bank. There was no bomb set off at the bank this time. And, it appeared, there was no note left behind at either location.

Or so it seemed. As they scoured through the rubble of the Planned Parenthood clinic's doorway, where a two-foot crater had been blasted into the concrete and sheetrock was scattered like paper and beebees from the bomb itself rolled around on the floor, investigators found a matchbook with some words scrawled on it in pen, adapted from Psalms 139: "Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God: depart from me therefore, ye bloody men. For they speak against thee wickedly, and thine enemies take thy name in vain. Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? And am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee?"

One of this gang's other bomb devices featured nails rather than beebees as the intended shrapnel material. They were eventually busted outside of Yakima after attempting to rob a Portland bank.

You have to be struck by the recent reappearance of the Phineas myth [Phineas was an Old Testament figure who slew an intertribal couple, an example cited by white supremacists as evidence of God's disapproval of race-mixing] in a speech by Tony Perkins of the Family Resource Council, a thinly disguised Reconstructionist operation opposed to abortion, and wonder about its influence in the recent Austin case. It's not terribly likely that Paul Ross Evans was acting on Perkins' signal, but the resemblance may prove more than coincidental.

But even more disturbing is how the case has been treated in the media -- which is to say, it's essentially been buried. Moreover, as zuzu notes, no one is calling it what it clearly is: domestic terrorism.

That similarly was the case with the recent arrests of six militiamen in Alabama for building an armament of pipe bombs and other devices:

Federal and state agents arrested six men and seized an arsenal of homemade hand grenades and firearms in raids Thursday, including one that forced the shutdown of a school.

The men, members of the self-styled "Alabama Free Militia," had no apparent plans to use the weapons, but the leader was described as a federal fugitive, federal authorities said.

"They just have a beef with the government, and they stockpile munitions," U.S. Attorney Alice Martin said at a news conference in Fort Payne.

Agents recovered 130 hand grenades, a grenade launcher, about 70 hand grenades rigged to be fired from a rifle, a machine gun, a short-barrel shotgun, 2,500 rounds of ammunition, explosives components, stolen fireworks and other items, said Jim Cavanaugh, regional head of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Charged in federal court with conspiracy to make a firearm were Raymond Kirk Dillard, 46; believed to be the group's leader; Adam Lynn Cunningham, 41; Bonnell Hughes, 57; Randall Garrett Cole, 22; and James Ray McElroy, 20. Michael Wayne Bobo, 30, was charged with being a drug user in possession of a firearm.

I might have some sympathy for the defense attorneys' contention that these arrests were overblown, given that there is no clear evidence that they actually had formulated any kind of plan to use them.

But the evidence is pretty unassailable that these men, at least some of them, were building bombs. It's difficult to believe that one would build such a device without the intent of eventually putting it to some kind of use. That's why there's a federal law against building them.

It's not as egregious a case as the Austin bomber, but what both of them suggest is a trend toward more domestic terrorism. And despite the misguided rantings of the Debbie Schlussels and Michelle Malkins of the world, the hard reality is that you are far more likely to be blown up by a homegrown terrorist than one from the Middle East.

Of course, acknowledging that this is the case would require a major readjustment of the media's constructed narrative about the "war on terror." So it continues to turn a blind eye, and in the process it profoundly misinforms the public.

Who would Jesus bash?

-- by Dave

Melissa at Shakesville brings a horrific case in Indiana to our attention:

Court documents show the suspects severely beat 35-year-old Aaron Hall, then dumped his body in a ditch. The victim's family now calls the murder a hate crime.

When Thomas Hall read court documents describing his brother's death, he was stunned. "It was a brutal crime against my brother and I feel this is a hate crime," said Thomas Hall. Police found Aaron Hall's badly beaten body hidden inside a garage on Sunday. Charged in connection with the murder were 19-year-old Garrett Gray, 18-year-old Coleman King and 21-year-old Robert Hendricks. Police made the arrests after receiving a tip from Garrett Gray's friend.

The tipster got a multi-media text message on his cell phone from the suspects. In the photo, Aaron Hall appeared with the suspects' arms around him. Hall had a swollen lip, a black eye, and appeared badly beaten.

Police say on April 12th, Hall and the three suspects were drinking at Gray's house. The suspects told police Hall grabbed Coleman King and questioned his sexuality. That set off the deadly beating.

"And they're saying what's why they killed him. Because he was gay. And he wasn't gay," said Thomas Hall. "I don't know any crime on the planet that deserves that type of punishment." Court papers show Gray and King brutally attacked, then photographed Hall. King hit him with his boots at least 75 times. The suspects told police they dragged Hall down the steps, loaded him into Robert Hendricks' truck, and dumped his body in a ditch. They say they went back two days later, and found Hall in a nearby field. That's when they tell police they wrapped the body in a tarp and hid it in Gray's garage.

As Melissa emphasizes:

This shit doesn't happen in a void.

Indeed it doesn't. It's happening in a context in which the leading figures of the religious right, empowered and seconded by movement conservatives, are constantly proclaiming that laws against hate crimes are a form of discrimination against their religious beliefs.

If you roll this argument around long enough, its underlying message comes down to this: Jesus wants you to bash fags. It becomes a form of permission -- permission transmitted to the people most likely to act on the suggestion.

Hate-crime laws are never about hate speech per se. They are only about acts that are already crimes. Now, certain acts of speech -- particularly threats and intimidation -- are the subject of criminal sanction already in the law, so if these crimes are committed with a racial, religious, or gay-bashing motive, then it is possible for some speech to be considered a hate crime.

But the core principle is this: The First Amendment has never covered criminal acts, because crimes are never a form of free speech. You can't kill someone and claim it was an act of political protest, at least not under Western law as we know it.

When fundamentalist fronts like the Traditional Values Coalition sends out fliers like the one above, and advances a similarly distorted and false line of propaganda against hate-crime laws, as Pam Spaulding just observed (crossposted at Pandagon), they're simultaneously sending a signal that bashing gays and lesbians is something that ought to be permissible under the law.

Certainly every aspect of the campaign is a gross distortion. Jesus never referenced homosexuality in his teachings, pro or con. Most importantly, no aspect of any hate-crime law, current or proposed, would prohibit people speaking out against homosexuality, particularly not in the context of religious belief. It may be actual hate speech, but hate speech is also protected speech under most circumstances.

Christian Americans talk a lot about preserving their freedoms. Now, over the centuries in America, more than a few of them have declared that the mere existence of other beliefs infringes on their freedom -- that is, their freedom to inflict violence and terror on the "unbelievers." Somewhat sensibly, however, the law has generally recognized that our freedoms do not include the right to take away others' freedoms at will.

And that is what hate crimes, in the end, are all about: Taking away the rights and freedom of our fellow citizens, denying them the right to participate in the community where they reside and forcing them to live as shadow citizens. People opposed to hate-crimes laws are, at rock bottom, profoundly anti-freedom.

Besides, I'm not all that certain Jesus would be opposed to hate-crimes laws. What was that he said about "the mote in your own eye" and "cast the first stone"?

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Note: I've noticed the debate at the above-linked sites regarding hate crimes has invariably wandered into the standard disinformation being peddled. As something of an antidote, I'd like to offer these links for deeper background on hate crimes, the laws against them, and the rationale for those laws.

Letter to the L.A. Times

When hate hits home

Bigotry and freedom

Hate crimes: The big picture

Failing in the present

Should we repeal hate-crimes laws?

The GOP, gays, and hate crimes

Hate crimes, democracy, and freedom

Hate crimes: A response

Who needs hate-crime laws?

The death of parody

After I picked myself up off the floor and contained my gales of laughter, I briefly considered creating a parody of Michelle Malkin's bizarre performance as a cheerleader, but then I realized that (a) nobody really wants to see me in a cheer outfit, and (b) why parodize something that's already a complete parody of itself?

Really, as conservatives begin to see the doom of their looming irrelevance descending upon them, they're getting more and more frantic, further and further extreme, weirder and more absurd by the day. It's kind of pathetic, but it is also well deserved.

Now comes a report that Fox News picked up a parody story and ran it as news:

On Tuesday, Fox News morning show "Fox & Friends" aired at least eight segments on a purported "news" story that was actually a parody article written by a publication similar to The Onion.

The original news report also demonstrated the way Fox's audience of flying monkeys is trained to descend upon command:

Following the Fox broadcast, Levesque's office received dozens of angry phone calls and profanity-laced e-mails, made and sent by people all over the country, who charge the school district overreacted to what they believed from news reports to be a ham sandwich tossed at a Somali student. […]

"Fox has figured out, from the calls we've gotten, that they’ve made a big mistake," Wessler said.

"This is a wake-up call that the level of hate and anger, among a small population, is vibrant," he added.

Levesque said he was bothered not only that the parody took aim at a sensitive issue in Lewiston, but also that Fox and others reported the information as fact without checking. The national media, Levesque said, sees information posted online and "uses it as gospel."

Unless, of course, it is written by a dirty fucking hippie.

There's no further need for parody with the conservative movement. It's becoming one all of its own.

Conservative civility

-- by Dave

David Sirota asks a simple question: "Has the GOP officially gone insane?"

In the spirit of Atrios, there is a simple answer:

Yes.

Simple answers to simple questions. But in this case, it's worth gawking at, just for the awful car-wreck quality of it all. The full video footage of the Montana House Speaker, Mike Lange, trying to rouse the Republican caucus troops by erupting in an obscene rant against Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer, can be seen here.

Here's a transcript of some of the rant:

Today's the day I'm pissed off, at that SOB on the second floor who thinks he’s gonna run this state like a dictator. So I want each and every one of you to get pissed off today, because your way of lifestyle is under threat.

... So my message to the governor is, 'Stick it up your ass.' That’s my message to him: 'Stick it up your ass!'

[Loud applause]

... He can veto every bill I have, I don't give a shit. Every bill.

What inspired this rant? Well, as Matt Singer explains, Schweitzer had simply engaged in some standard tit-for-tat horse trading in the hopes of breaking a budget standoff, and Lange had gone off on him afterwards, accusing him of attempting to "bribe" him:

I mean, let's be clear here -- the Governor asked if Lange would give the all-clear for a Dem bill in exchange for the all-clear on a GOP bill. That's horse-trading, negotiations, compromise. Call it whatever the Hell you want. It's not bribery. Bribery would be the Governor saying, "Hey, Mikey, we'll give you $10 and some gummy bears if you just go back and pass our agenda."

It's really not shocking to find out that this guy doesn't grasp the English language or ethics. That's been damn clear from early on. What's startling is that his team is rallying behind him.

Yes, that loud round of applause was not exactly evidence of conservatives' vaunted civility. Cursing bloggers scandalize them, but hey, nothing like a rousing pep talk from the coach, I guess.

What's well worth noting is that the key figure in all this, Lange (who, it should be noted, offered an apology the next day), represents an ugly hard-right turn for Republicans in Montana that has in fact led to their increasing disempowerment in the state. Lange was also, before this, considered the leading candidate to take on longtime incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Baucus.

Lange's hard-right, Limbaughesque approach to politics has led him to form some interesting alliances. Longtime readers here will recall the case of Rick Jore, the Flathead-area conservative legislator who left the GOP in 2000 and ran on the Constitution Party ticket. The Constitution Party, you'll also recall, is the ultraright home to many of Montana's militia faction, and the party most associated with the "Patriot" movement.

Well, last year Lange installed Jore, who is not even a Republican still, as chairman of the House Education Committee:

Republican leaders are giving the House Education Committee chairmanship to the Legislature's only third-party member, a Constitution Party lawmaker who opposes more money for public schools.

The rare appointment of a third-party member to chair a committee - especially in his first session after a six-year hiatus from politics - comes as the GOP courts Rick Jore and his swing vote. Republicans control the chamber by a slim 50-49 margin.

Jore said he never specifically asked for the chairmanship.

"Quite frankly, I was surprised," said Jore, a Ronan resident who served as a Republican legislator in the 1990s before switching parties.

Jore, who wants to abolish compulsory school attendance, promised to be "respectful of every viewpoint and all witnesses that come before" his committee.

... Republican leaders dismissed the criticism, saying the education community opposed Sales and other Republicans in elections.

"I don't recall the education community supporting the speaker, or myself either," said House Republican leader Mike Lange of Billings. "They didn't win. That's the bottom line. If they want to control the committee, my recommendation to them is to be better at campaigning than they were.

"We owe them no explanation whatsoever."

The Constitution Party platform seeks to abolish the federal Department of Education, and Jore is critical of education standards being set at the state level.

And as Singer previously noted, Lange evevn went so far to maintain his alliance with Jore as to proposed turning down $2 billion in federal money in order to gain his support for passing of the state's budget bills.

Lange also has an inimitable -- cough eliminationism cough -- debating style, as 4&20 blackbirds noted:

Furious after the Senate panel tabled his bill Wednesday, Lange stormed into Democratic leadership offices in both houses and threatened retaliatory action against Democratic bills in the House unless his bill is resurrected.

Senate President Pro Tempore Dan Harrington, D-Butte, said Lange came into his office Wednesday and said, "It's war. The bloodletting has started." Witnesses said he formed each hand into a pistol and pretended as if he were firing shots.

It would be comforting to say this could only happen in Montana. But it would not be true.

Soft-pedaling racism

-- by Dave

It really wasn't surprising, I suppose, that a progressive like Alexander Konetzki would eventually have to part ways with an employer like The American Conservative. Certainly, my experience over the years has been that ideological absolutism eventually destroys otherwise healthy personal and professional relationships, and that's clearly what happened in this case.

But what was really noteworthy about the incident was what the response to the incident from the right revealed about them, in stark outlines.

The Editors have a rundown, and it largely goes like this:

Well of course he left! He just couldn't take the conservatism!

Probably Russ Douthat epitomizes the response:

If you're not at least somewhat conservative, you probably shouldn’t go to work for a magazine called, um, The American Conservative. And if you do, you probably shouldn’t get all outraged and resign in protest when they turned out to be, um, conservative.

So does, um, conservative now also mean, um, racist?

Because the reason he left, as Konetzki explained in some detail, was that American Conservative chose to publish an almost nakedly racist screed by a writer widely regarded as someone skilled at selling a soft-pedaled version of racism with a phony academic veneer, and it did so with callous disregard for its factual truthfulness.

A couple of years ago Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting put together a report on Sailer (discussed in greater detail here) that placed him firmly in the center of the "academic" racists who have been prospering on the far right for the past decade:

As American Prospect Online found (12/7/04), a little research reveals Sailer as a leading promoter of racist pseudoscience. As a principal columnist on the white nationalist website VDare.com, named for Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the "New World," Sailer (e.g., 2/23/03; 12/12/01) extols the work of academic racists who say Africans as a group are innately less intelligent than whites or Asians. He is also a staunch defender of the Pioneer Fund, a primary funder for such racist research (as well as of VDare.com).

On the rare occasion Sailer gives race a rest, it's usually to make some other mock-Darwinian argument, as when he ruled out the possibility of a gay gene, suggesting instead that homosexuality is a disease, possibly caused by a germ (VDare.com, 8/17/03): "An infectious disease itself could cause homosexuality. It's probably not a venereal germ, but maybe an intestinal or respiratory germ."

Sailer also produced this noteworthy observation in the wake of Hurricane Katrina:

It also should have been expected that a large fraction of New Orleans's lower class blacks would not evacuate before a disaster. Many are too poor to own a car, or too untrustworthy to get a ride with neighbors, or too shortsighted to worry...

In contrast to New Orleans, there was only minimal looting after the horrendous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan—because, when you get down to it, Japanese aren't blacks.

The American Conservative hit piece attempts to paint a portrait of Barack Obama as a black militant in the tradition of Huey Newton:

From adolescence onward, Obama wanted a race to belong to, a team whose accomplishments would reflect well upon him. Of course, it was unthinkable in his liberal white family to take pride in the achievements of his mother's race, so Obama gloried in being part of his absent father's race.

Obama was accepted into posh Occidental College in Los Angeles, which then had a black mayor, Tom Bradley. But Oxy wasn't black enough, so in search of a community to belong to, he transferred to Harlem ... well, to be precise, to that prestigious university on the edge of Harlem, Columbia. (A recurrent theme in Obama's career is Power to the People gestures and Ivy League results.)

The piece goes on endlessly in this mode. And as Konetzki tried to explain to his bosses at the magazine, in doing so it also violated basic editorial norms of factuality and accuracy:

But it was the Obama piece that revealed the office's political divisions to be unworkable. The weekend after Kara and Scott dismissed my objections to Sailer's essay, I read Dreams From My Father. I realized that, in addition to the racist associations he employs, Sailer frequently quotes Obama out of context and makes assertions about Obama's racial identity that the book flatly contradicts.

For example, Sailer relates an anecdote from the book in which Obama's white grandmother wants a ride to work because she had been threatened by a black panhandler while waiting for the bus the day before. Obama "is outraged -- at his grandparents," according to Sailer, who offers the story as further evidence of Obama's anger toward his white family. But in the book the situation is far more nuanced than Sailer lets on. In fact, it's Obama's grandfather who's outraged that his wife was scared because, in her words, "the fella was black." Obama describes these words as "a fist in my stomach." But he tells his grandfather that although his grandmother's attitude bothered him, "Toot's fears would ... pass and we should give her a ride in the meantime." Putting his hand on his grandfather's shoulder, he says it's all right, that he understands.

In a further attempt to document Obama's alleged black nationalism, Sailer claims that "The happy ending to Dreams is that Obama's hard-drinking half-brother Roy -- 'Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage' -- converts to teetotaling Islam." Roy does do these things, but the book's happy ending is the wedding of Barack and Michelle, which brings Obama's black and white relatives together in celebration on Chicago's South Side -- a poignant symbol with which to end a story about "race and inheritance." Dreams is not at all about Obama's "rejection of his white maternal family in favor of his unknown black paternal family," as Sailer asserts. It's about the loving bond Obama forms with the African paternal family he never knew, and how that not only helps him discover who he is, but also allows him to reconcile the tension between black and white he'd always felt within himself.

I arrived at the office on Monday prepared to make these points and many more -- not as a progressive who admired Obama, but as an assistant editor responsible for fact-checking. I sent an e-mail to Kara requesting a meeting that was never answered. And when I went to her office with Obama's book in hand, asking again whether we could discuss things, she called across the hall to Scott, who said, "Yeah, look, Alexander, this matter has already been decided. The piece is being published as it is." I pointed out that I had read the book, and Sailer's characterization of Obama was factually incorrect. "I have too many other things to worry about," Scott said coldly. "Steve Sailer is a longtime friend of the magazine, and if you and he read a book differently, well, I'll take his reading over yours any day."

Konetzki, unsurprisingly, cleared out his desk that day. The abiding issue for him, as it would be for any serious journalist, was that not only was the magazine about to publish a profoundly nasty and racist hit piece, but that it was willing to publish brazenly false information in order to do so.

Konetzki discovered what so many of us have found over the years in dealing in good faith with movement conservatives: lying is not only something they blithely do for the sake of the "cause," but it is in fact an essential component of their behavior and agenda.

It's not a bug, it's a feature. Ideologues are always innately untrustworthy, but right-wing ideologues come predisposed for dispensing falsehoods. Eventually, those of us who might otherwise find common ground with them are forced to choose between these relationships and their own integrity. It's not a hard choice to make.

But in the process, we can also watch the spectacle of movement conservatives, all too willing to unmoor themselves in the name of their "cause," drifting off into a Sargassan sea of old-fashioned racial and ethnic bigotry. It isn't a pretty sight.

Something to chew on

-- by Dave

Eric Muller was kind enough to include me on his list of "Five Blogs That Make Me Think", after he was listed himself by Sally Greene.

I don't often participate in these "memes" (this one originated here), but this one struck me as a great way of shouting out some blogs that probably deserve more attention.

Now, there are a good number of blogs out there that make me think, and some of them are well known. Any list I'd compile along these lines would be incomplete without acknowledging that people like Digby and Glenn Greenwald help spur my own thoughts tremendously, as do some lesser-known but still prominent blogs like Mahablog, not to mention Is That Legal?, which under the rules of the meme can't be listed anyway.

But I'd like to point out five blogs that aren't so much in the spotlight, blogs that help provide grist for my daily mills, even though they may post as irregularly as I sometimes do:

Pacific Views: Natasha and Mary and their gang of irregulars have been blogging away for some years now, and I always find their takes intriguing and enlightening.

Emphasis Added: Rob Salkowitz is a Seattle guy, and he's often even more irregular than I about posting, but what he does post is of the highest quality. Rob consistently offers intriguing and useful frames of thought.

Creek Running North: Chris needs no introduction to many blog readers, but I'm always struck by the combination of terrific writing and sound judgment and keen insight at his blog. Always worth a stop.

A Chicken is Not Pillage: Wulfgar is a real Montana kind of fellow, which means his take on many issues can be complicated, but always reality-based.

archy: John McKay is one of my oldest friends -- we knew each other in elementary school -- and that may have a lot to do with why I trust his insight and judgment as much as I do. Certainly we think a lot alike. But John always has an interesting angle, and lots of interesting fresh material.

Now, I've always thought that it's important to not trap yourself in an echo chamber. So I do read a lot of conservative blogs, but they are all so comically reactionary and propagandistic that it is difficult to take any of them seriously. Over the years I've been reading them, only one has managed not to descend into the Pits of Dogmatism for anything more than an occasional dip: John Cole's Balloon Juice. John still occasionally writes churlish things about me, but that's OK; I still find him informative and refreshing. So he earns an honorable mention for this list.

UPDATE: Dunno how I missed this, but Ahistoricality also picked Orcinus, but for Sara's writing -- a kudo well earned.

My favorite all-star

-- by Dave


So the fine folks at Democracy for America are holding a vote to determine which candidate out there will be selected for DFA's first endorsement of the election cycle. Among the three finalists -- all of whom seem to be superb choices -- is Darcy Burner, who nearly unseated Republican Rep. Dave Reichert in 2006 in Washington's 8th CD, a seat held for several eternities by the GOP.

It might be enough, of course, that Burner is taking aim at unseating Reichert, whose marked incompetence is already something of an embarrassment to the state's congressional delegation. Moreover, Reichert is not only a Bushoid who votes the White House line almost robotically, but he's managed to groom a local media image as a "moderate" Republican while in fact embracing extremist policies.

But Burner not only ran a fairly smart and effective campaign in 2006, thereby establishing her political chops, she also has a clear idea how to win and is willing to put in the hard work to do it. Most of all, she is a clear-eyed and committed progressive to her roots, and possesses the kind of vision that will serve Democrats well.

I already was impressed by Burner during and after the 2006 race, and have had the good fortune to work with her closely in recent months on a nonpolitical media project (details of which will be eventually forthcoming). My vague impressions of her were sharpened a great deal in that time: Burner not only is smart as a whip and extraordinarily capable, she's also a deeply decent person with a great drive to make a difference.

As I say, I know very little about Charlie Brown and Eric Massa. But what I can say is that Darcy Burner very much deserves every vote she can muster on this; she would be a superb choice and an excellent example of how the netroots can change our politics.

Also, be sure to follow the results at Blog For America. Darcy's currently in second place, and voting closes tomorrow morning.

[Darcy is also one of the leading candidates at the Eschaton Act Blue site, for those wishing to chip in monetarily as well.]

On Hiatus

-- Sara

I've gotten a few e-mails from people wondering where I went. (It's lovely to know I've been missed.)

Life has intervened. Last week, I was at a conference; this week, I'm in the last throes of finals (and yes, that's the Cheneyesque defintion of "last throes," which means that they're coming at you faster and harder now). As a result, there's been too little time for the kind of reading, research, and contemplation that leads to thoughtful blogging.

I'll be back at Orcinus early next week, primed for a summer vacation full of new blogging journeys. See you then.

Not just for theaters

We long ago entered the Bizarro Universe that is Rush Limbaugh's version of reality, but it remains informative to observe it in action. For instance, take Limbaugh's proclamation that the Virginia Tech killer, Seung-Hui Cho, "had to be liberal."

Reasoning: Cho evidently hated rich kids, which in LimbaughLand is the purview only of liberals. Limbaugh evidently has never been much exposed to poor or working-class kids, many of whom are decidedly not liberal, and who also decidedly hate rich kids.

Moreover, if he was a liberal, he didn't much seem to care that many of the people he was murdering in cold blood were also liberals. As my commenter mjfgates points out:

Well, now I've heard about a heroic Muslim, a heroic Jew, and a couple of heroic liberal ivory-tower academics.

Haven't heard about any Rush Limbaugh fans, though. Funny.

Along the same lines was Newt Gingrich bloviating that liberals were to blame for the Virginia Tech shooting because of their invidious cultural influence. But then, as Cliff Schechter notes, Newt has something of a history of blaming every spectacular crime or ugly event on liberals.

Perhaps the most instructive of these was the time he blamed liberals for the Susan Smith affair -- you know, the case of the South Carolina woman who drowned her children in her car and tried to fob it off on a mysterious one-armed black man. At the time, Gingrich said, mere days before the 1994 election: "I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. The only way you get change is to vote Republican."

As Norman Solomon observed a little later:

Journalists might also ask Gingrich about Smith's stepfather, Beverly Russell. Prior to the kids' disappearance, Russell was busily campaigning not for the depraved Democrats, but for Newt Gingrich and his minions. Russell was a Republican leader in South Carolina and local organizer of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition.

During the nine days that Susan Smith had the country hunting for a nonexistent black carjacker, Russell urged nationwide prayer for the two missing kids: "All we can do is pray. This is a nightmare."

A prominent businessman and stockbroker, Russell married Smith's mom after she divorced Smith's dad (who later committed suicide). From the age of six, Russell raised Susan Smith in an upper-middle-class, church-going home. Gingrich's campaign comments notwithstanding, the home was free of counterculture and welfare-state influences.

But Susan Smith attempted suicide at age 13, and at age 15 told authorities that her stepdad had been sexually molesting her for at least a year. Her mother helped talk her out of pursuing charges against Russell. (At age 18, she attempted suicide again.)

The child-abuse case against the well-connected businessman smells of a cover-up. It's not known exactly how long the molestation went on, because the case file mysteriously vanished. And Susan Smith was not even represented in court by a lawyer or guardian, as required for minors.

The social-service worker who investigated the molestation testified at the murder trial that although Russell admitted the abuse and agreed to seek counseling, she was "concerned" that law enforcement closed the case so quickly.

Whatever counseling Russell underwent had little impact. The murder trial revealed that he was still having sex with his stepdaughter as recently as two months before she killed her kids.

While nothing can begin to excuse the horrendous act of drowning children in a lake, it's clear that Susan Smith suffered far more trauma in her youth than any girl should have to endure.

And most of the trauma was inflicted -- not by McGovernik Democrats or welfare bureaucrats -- but by an abusive stepfather who publicly championed "family values" and "school prayer" as partisan Republican issues.

Ah, projection everywhere. You remember projection. It's a strategy -- a rather brilliant conservative-movement strategy to simultaneously attack liberals and to clear the playing field for whatever behavior you want to indulge:

Whether it's sexual improprieties, slander, treason, or unhinged behavior, it doesn't matter: if the right is jumping up and down accusing the left of it, you can bet they're busy engaging in it themselves by an exponential factor of a hundred.

... For a long time, I really believed that this was simply the right acting out on its own psychological predisposition. But as it's gathered volume and momentum -- especially as the right has avidly accused the left of the very thuggishness, both rhetorical and real, in which it is increasingly indulging -- a disturbing trend began to emerge:

What is particularly interesting about this kind of projection by conservatives is that it then (as the comments indicate) becomes a pretext for even further eliminationist rhetoric against liberals -- and eventually, for exactly the kind of "acting out" of rhetoric that Van Der Leun foresees from liberals.

In other words, for a number of the right's leading rhetoricians, the projection appears to be perfectly conscious: it is a strategy, designed to marginalize their opposition and open the field to nearly any behavior it chooses.

Shockingly (I know), Gingrich and Limbaugh aren't the only Republicans identifying liberals with the Virginia Tech killer. In fact, somehow, every little movement-cnservative frother out in the hinterlands began picking it up and running with it. Funny how that happens, too.

The most prominent of these was Melanie Morgan at KSFO, whose exploits transmitting hateful, violent, and eliminationist rhetoric over the public airwaves have already been duly noted.

Morgan, in a WorldNetDaily column [Note to Morgan: If you're hoping to establish some vestige of credibility, WND is not exactly the place to publish], took the liberals=Cho meme and turned it into the world's most inappropriate metaphor:

I have lived on the other side of the gun barrel pointed by Media Matters for America for the better part of three years, and I know what it feels like when a bunch of crackpots with keyboards pull the trigger, backed by millions upon millions of dollars in funding from George Soros.

I co-host "The Lee Rodgers & Melanie Morgan Show," a conservative news/talk program on KSFO 560 AM in San Francisco, every weekday morning for four hours. Liberals are disgusted that our conservative program is one of the most-listened to radio programs in the notoriously liberal San Francisco Bay Area. We've endured several vicious campaigns waged against us by liberal activists with the backing of Media Matters for America, as they worked ruthlessly to have us silenced.

Several times these left-wing free speech Nazi's have almost succeeded.

The transcripts and audio files of my comments have been excerpted, misrepresented and reconfigured to take statements out of context, reprinted with lies and distortions, and then disseminated to other liberal media outlets with fierce resolve.

The Democratic Party wants to silence us, and they use Media Matters for America to wage a war against us replete with character assassination, personal threats, lawsuits and efforts to have us fired or suspended.

I can live with being targeted by these "vile, despicable ankle-biters," as Bill O'Reilly calls Media Matters. In an odd way, the attacks against me have energized me to fight even harder for the conservative causes I believe in. One of those causes includes the right to bear arms, a right that had been denied to the students and professors at Virginia Tech University who were unable to defend themselves from a deranged murderer who took no notice of the school's status as a "Gun Free Zone."

But make no mistake – the campaign by Media Matters for America against Don Imus is part of their way to send a message to conservatives on the airwaves and in print: "We're comin' to get you. We got Imus. And we'll get you, too." It is a chilling threat to our free speech rights in this country.

Now, with their current crusade in support of the gun control lobby, Media Matters is targeting our Second Amendment rights as well.

Like that mentally unbalanced and angry gunman at Virginia Tech, they'll methodically march through the domiciles of the conservative movement, targeting the movement's leaders for career elimination – until and unless we stand up and fight back against their campaign of mayhem against conservative leaders and causes.

Now, in the good ol' days some editor would have gotten ahold of this column beforehand and explained to Morgan that making a metaphor comparing a murderous rampage, in which many people died and many more suffered, to a relatively mainstream organization's sedate, factual, accurate, and reasoned criticism of someone's work is, well, a bit over-the-top.

It is, in fact, in the very poorest of taste, because it trivializes the very real death, bloodshed, and suffering of Cho's victims, as if Morgan's discomfort and concern about being called to task for her own words and actions could somehow rise to the level of moral consequence as the horror that befell those innocent victims.

But there are no editors of note these days in publications like WND and other right-wing meme dispensaries. Certainly, as Media Matters itself notes, factuality has a long tradition of being not merely an afterthought but a purposeful stranger to Morgan's operation. Not only does MM have no connection, financial or otherwise, to George Soros, but Morgan has engaged in the lowest of smears against him:

Morgan has smeared Soros in the past, agreeing with co-host Lee Rodgers' assertion that Soros "apparently very cheerfully and willingly went to work for the Nazis" as a young boy, and adding that Soros did so to "further his own career." KSFO's program director announced in a subsequent show that Rodgers' and Morgan's comments about Soros "are not accurate, and KSFO regrets that they were broadcast."

Outsize, absurd, nonsensical and illogical metaphors are the hallmark of right-wing projection in action. Which leaves us only to deduce that, once again, the eliminationists are busy hankering for liberals' elimination and wishing they could be taken out by a brave and heroic John Derbyshire (as Bruce Willis).

Not that anything resembling real action is likely to emerge from this pathetic pack of fantasists, trapped in their own little Bizarro Universe. The problem, as always, is the poor kook they manage to eventually work up into another fine murderous froth. And then they'll find a way to blame it, as always, on liberals. Works every time.

We heart scapegoating

What's a predictable result of the nonstop wall-to-wall coverage of the Virginia Tech shooting rampage? Well, unsurprisingly, a lot of people are angry.

And with xenophobes like Peter Brimelow and VDare (Michelle Malkin's fave mag) taking the opportunity to exploit the tragedy for their own political agendas -- in this case, bashing Asian immigrants -- it isn't hard to figure out who people will take their anger out on: namely, innocent Koreans. After all, scapegoating is one of our favorite American pastimes.

Sure enough, down in Alabama, an Auburn student was assaulted by a pack of rednecks for the crime of being Asian:

Auburn police are investigating a campus assault last week that targeted an 18-year-old Auburn University student because he is Asian, according to the police report.

The man was standing outside Lane Residence Hall about 11:30 p.m. Thursday when he was attacked by four men, according to the report. The assault lasted for about two minutes and the victim suffered cuts to his lips, a swollen right cheek and a knot on the right side of his head.

The victim's cousin, a part-time graduate at Auburn, said he believes the attack was a reaction to last week's massacre at Virginia Tech which left 33 people dead. The gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, was Korean-American.

"During the attack, one of the assailants actually said it was because my cousin is Asian," said the cousin. He said both men are Korean. He asked their names not be used because he fears retaliation.

When Korean officials last week urged Americans not to take out their anger on other Korean nationals and immigrants, it wasn't clear that Korean-bashing crimes would follow, and many of us were hopeful that would not be the case. Obviously, it was -- and thus the chill felt by many foreign students here was, perhaps, for good reason.

A brief reminder

To Michelle Malkin:

When you bandy about the term "Reconquista," you are in fact regurgitating a phrase created by white supremacists in support of a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory.

Oh, wait. I see you've been doing likewise on other fronts as well.

Ah well. Par for the course.

We have met the enemy ...

... and he is us. -- Pogo

Hey everyone. You heroic right-wing bloggers especially. I want you to meet a real hero.

This man's name is Waleed Shaalan, and he was one of the 32 victims of Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech gunman who seems to have provoked so much "well I woulda given him the ol' kung-foo fighting cuz these hands are fast as lightning" fantasizing on the parts of so many arnchair critics of the victims' response to the rampage. Not to mention, of course, the ongoing speculation that Cho might secretly be a Muslim engaging in that jihad that Michelle Malkin swears is gonna swoop down on us any day now.

The case of Waleed Shaalan offers them a little bit of a reality check. There weren't many heroes that day, but he was one of them. And oh yes: He's Muslim.

He was gunned down on Monday while he was studying in Norris Hall, but witnesses say he died a hero.

According to Randy Dymond, a civil engineering professor at Virginia Tech, Mr. Shaalan was in a classroom with another student when the gunman entered and opened fire.

Mr. Shaalan was badly wounded and lay beside the other student, who was not shot but played dead, as the gunman returned two times searching for signs of life. Just as the gunman noticed the student, Mr. Shaalan made a move to distract him, at which point he was shot a second time and died. The student believed that Mr. Shaalan purposefully distracted the shooter to save him, Mr. Dymond said.

Muslim Matters has plenty more, including an extended original post on the subject.

Mr. Shaalan's case serves as a potent antidote to the machismo from the blogospheric right, notably the execrable John Derbyshire and Mark Steyn, whose fantasies about their own comportment under the threat of gunfire are clearly constructed out of the whole cloth of their sturdy Doom skills and multiple Die Hard viewings, when the reality is that they, like nearly everyone else, would be finding a dark corner to hide in and thinking about their loved ones when the bullets started flying and people around them were being killed.

Yes, it is possible to be a hero in these situations, but the greatest likelihood is that if you do, you will die. Everyone who acted heroically at Virginia Tech died, including Mr. Shaalan. We have to honor them for their sacrifice and their bravery. But don't ask me to second-guess the people who chose to try to find a way to stay alive first.

His case is also a potent reminder to the Michelle Malkins and Debbie Schlussels and Glenn Becks out there, the hapless halfwits who see the Enemy in the "war on terror" as Muslims almost en masse, and are constantly on the lookout for campus "jihads" (remember, if you will, how Malkin pounced all over that Oklahoma suicide bomber as just such a case). They were drooling all over themselves the day of the massacre, posting constantly in the hope that the shooter would turn out to be Muslim, and were palpably disappointed when this clearly turned out not to be the case. (In Schlussel's case, it didn't even slow her down.)

The reality is that mass killers come in all shapes, races, and ethnicities, all driven by different demons. With examples ranging from the Amish schoolgirl killer to the Columbine shooters to Tim McVeigh and Buford Furrow to the Washington snipers to Al Qaeda, you'd think the public would understand by now that these outbreaks of murderousness aren't the product of whatever characteristics might be imparted by one's race or ethnicity or faith.

This is why demonizing Muslims, as is the American right's increasing wont, is such a misbegotten misconception of the reality we face. Mainstream Muslims are every bit as threatened by Al Qaeda as mainstream Christians are threatened by the Aryan Nations types of "Christians". Leaping to the assumption that they share much at all in the way of interests is simply a grotesque leap away from the real world.

Moreover, if we are to win against terrorists, we're going to need as many friends as we need, including the world's 1.4 billion Muslims. People like Waleed Shaalan. Because we should know that they, too, are fully capable of doing the right and heroic thing.

Unlike, in stark contrast, the multiple Yellow Elephants of the right. You'll notice that none of them has managed to recognize, discuss, or even mention his heroism so far.

Immigration and the family

Many right-wing critics of American immigration policy are fond of saying that current policies would work just fine if only the government would "just enforce the laws that are on the books."

It seems never to occur to them that the main reason the government doesn't do so is simply that the laws as written are largely unenforcable -- or perhaps more to the point, that enforcing them actually creates larger problems, to the point of atrocities, than those they were intended to address.

The chief problem with immigration law in America is the misbegotten nature of the laws themselves. Much of this has to do with their nakedly racist origins, the legacy of which has never been erased.

This is especially the case regarding the effects of current immigration law on families. Those laws, seemingly designed to actually discourage immigration rather than deal with it both thoughtfully and helpfully, have for many years now had a devastating effect on immigrant families.

First and foremost, legal immigrants are not permitted to bring their families with them as fellow green-card holders; this has the fairly obvious effect of separating and dividing families, and in the end encouraging these immigrants to return to their home countries. And if they try to bring their families to America legally, they face a mountain of red tape and interminable waits. As a 2006 study of the issue notes:

A spouse or minor child of a legal resident (green card holder) from Mexico has a 7 year wait (a 5 year wait from other countries). A married child of a U.S. citizen must wait 7 years to immigrate (11 and 15 years, respectively, if from Mexico or the Philippines).

Moreover, as Celeste Fremon at Witness L.A. observes, the immigration law passed 10 years ago, supposedly intended to force officials to deport criminals, has had a widespread and devastating effect on immigrant families:

The new law was a doozy.

It subjected every non-citizen to mandatory deportation for committing an "aggravated felony" -- which the IIRIRA, defined so broadly that convictions ranging from murder to minor, one time drug possession all qualified. Even the theft of a $10 video game, with a one-year suspended sentence, met the definition. Worse, the law was retroactive. This meant that old convictions that had been legally expunged were suddenly treated as "active" under the new law.

The very worst thing about the IIRIRA was that removed all judicial discretion. In other words, even if a judge found that an immigrant father had extreme extenuating circumstances and there was every practical reason to allow him to stay in the country, it was impossible. There was no legal recourse. No due process. The law couldn’t distinguish between those who deserved deportation and those whose removal would do far more harm than good. And the banning from the US was forever.

Immediately upon the law's passage, horror stories of lives ruined and families destroyed began to surface There was the Vietnam Vet with three medals who was deported for an 11-year-old burglary conviction, leaving behind a wife and seven children, all U.S. citizens. People adopted as children by American couples were deported. One former child refugee from the genocidal Pol Pot regime was deported back to Cambodia for urinating in public on the construction site where he was employed. Hard working little league dads who’d been caught with a few ounces of weed in their youth were deported.

And these examples aren't anomalies. When I was researching an article on the subject for the LA Times Magazine a few years ago, I ran across scores of such cases—some exotic, most ordinary. All sad.

Fremon notes that legislation -- dubbed "the Anchor Baby bill" by the nativist right which opposes it -- has been proposed giving judges the discretion to consider the effect of a deportation on American citizen children. It's currently working its way through Congress.

Even more significant, though, has been the significant increase in raids on employers of illegal immigrants in the past year by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. What's happened, of course, is that many of these undocumented workers have spouses and children who are either citizens or legal immigrants. In rounding up massive numbers of these immigrants, and ostensibly concerned about keeping families together, ICE has been sweeping up entire families and placing them in euphemistically titled "family detention centers" that are really nothing less than modern concentration camps. And in doing so, they effects of the incarceration on families has been predictably awful:

The report lauded the goal of keeping families together but urged DHS to close the Hutto facility, saying that "prison-like institutions" are not appropriate for families. "Family detention is not one that has any precedent in the United States, therefore no appropriate licensing requirements exist," the report said.

... The report recommended that ICE parole asylum-seekers while they await the outcome of their hearings. It also said that immigrant families not eligible for parole should be released to special shelters or other homelike settings run by nonprofit groups and be required to participate in electronic monitoring or an intensive supervision program that would use a combination of electronic ankle bracelets, home visits and telephone reporting.

The 72-page report also criticized the educational services for children; the food service and rushed feeding times for children; the health care, especially for vulnerable children and pregnant women; the therapeutic mental health care as insufficient or culturally inappropriate; and the recreation time as inadequate for children. The review said that families were being held for months in Hutto and for years in the case of the longer-established Berks facility.

The report also cited inappropriate disciplinary practices used against adults and children, including threats of separation, verbal abuse and withholding recreation or using temperature control, particularly extremely cold conditions, as punishment.

Moreover, in many of the sweeps being conducted by the ICE, families are also being torn apart as parents are sent off to be deported while their children are left behind. This was pronouncedly the case last month in an immigration raid in Massachusetts:

Massachusetts social workers will travel to a Texas detention center to check on scores of workers from New Bedford accused of being in the country illegally. They were flown there before Massachusetts authorities determined whether all their children were receiving adequate care.

Patrick, at a press conference, and later in a private conference call with Homeland Security officials, protested the decision to fly 90 of the detained workers from Massachusetts to Harlingen, Texas, before state social workers had a chance to inquire about their child-care needs, potentially leaving many children with inadequate care. Two young children were hospitalized yesterday for dehydration after their nursing mothers were taken away, state officials said. Another 7-year-old girl called a state hot line seeking her detained mother. It was unclear last night where their mothers were.

"What we have never understood about this process is why it turned into a race to the airport," Patrick said. "We understand about the importance of processing; we get that. But there are families affected. There are children affected."

The two sides spent the day arguing with each other over the treatment of the detained women and their families, with Patrick's comments prompting a sharp rejoinder from a top Bush administration official.

Immigration agents "worked closely with DSS both before the operation commenced and at every stage of the operation, to be sure that no child would be without a sole caregiver," Julie L. Myers , the assistant secretary of homeland security, wrote in a letter to Patrick.

Myers, as well as a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that each of the 361 detainees was asked about child-care needs several times. They pointed out that 60 women who were found to be the sole caregivers to their children have since been released, though they will still face a court hearing.

But Massachusetts officials said some of the women -- most of whom were from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Portugal, and Brazil -- may not have been as forthcoming with federal agents as they might have been with state social workers.

"When you come from nations that have a history of violence against women and a history of a government being repressive, what can you expect?," said US Representative William D. Delahunt, Democrat of Quincy. "You have to have people with the ability to connect with these detainees."

State social workers who arrived late Wednesday at the interim detention site at the former Fort Devens army base in Ayer found 20 detainees, whom federal agents had not identified, and who they determined should be returned to New Bedford: four pregnant or nursing mothers, nine single mothers, and seven detainees who were minors under age 17. But by the time they were given access to the detainees, the 90 others who were sent to Texas had already left on a plane.

DSS Commissioner Harry Spence said he expected a team of social workers to be en route today to Harlingen.

"We expect to find some number of pregnant women, minors, and sole caregivers," said Spence.

Of the detainees who have not been returned to New Bedford or sent to Texas, 116 were flown yesterday to a detention center in Albuquerque, with the other 75 placed in various New England jails.

The debate and logistical issues underscored the complexities of the politically charged immigration issue, with tensions emerging between social service and law enforcement needs. Adding confusion was that most children left behind are US citizens because they were born here, and reuniting them with parents sent back to their native countries may be difficult, state officials said.

... Patrick arrived at the church in the early evening, meeting with several emotional families and advocates. "What you see in this room is a human tragedy, where policy touches people," he said. "There were stories of humiliation, fear, anxiety, uncertainty. It reflects , for me, not what this country is about."

South Coast Today has been maintaining a section front on the raids, in no small part because of the devastating local effects of the raid. Among the stories it features is one explaining what befell a local family because of the raid:

Lilo and Maria, illegal immigrants, were working at the factory the day of the raid. According to Lilo, by the time federal agents recognized the couple was married and had children at home, Maria had already been fingerprinted. So they released Lilo to care for the children and gave him an order to appear before an immigration judge May 16 in Boston.

Maria was detained and sent to the Bristol County House of Corrections in Dartmouth, where she awaits her release.

"Minute to minute she is thinking about the children," Lilo, who speaks Spanish, told a reporter through an interpreter.

Lilo has spoken to his wife on the telephone, but he has yet to visit her at the jail that is less than 8 miles from their home.

Lilo, Maria and their children are one of 98 families who were divided during this month's raid at the South End factory, according to data collected by Ondine Galvez Sniffin, an immigration attorney with Catholic Social Services. She said the number may be higher since some detainees might be afraid to tell federal officials that they have children or spouses.

Ms. Sniffin estimated that 21 of the 98 families remain separated, while 70 families have been temporarily reunited. Parents who were reunited with their children must still appear in court for deportation hearings. If the court rules in favor of deportation, families will face a difficult decision: Should the family leave the United States together or should family members, including children, who are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents stay behind?
Fortunately, there is at least an investigation into the ICE's behavior in this case:

A federal judge has agreed to allow a team of immigration lawyers to continue investigating whether flying more than 200 illegal immigrants to Texas denied them due process under the law.

But U.S. District Court Judge Richard G. Stearns stopped short of the main demand of the federal lawsuit filed by the Guatemalan consul and the lawyers, which was to return those detainees to Massachusetts.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided the Michael Bianco Inc. factory two weeks ago, arresting 361 illegal immigrants as well as the owner and several managers. The owner and manager were released on bail the next day, whereas the immigrants were bused to Fort Devens in Ayer. A total of 206 were flown on two separate flights to detention facilities in Texas, where 178 remain in custody.
“The recent ICE actions against hundreds of people in New Bedford, many of whom were sent out of state without due process, raises serious questions about U.S. support for human rights and access to civil legal services,” according to a statement from the attorneys, which includes Greater Boston Legal Services and a number of other private lawyers, all working on the case for free.

But ICE, in declarations made to the court and through its spokesman, asserts that the agency has treated its detainees fairly.

"ICE is fully committed to the legal process for detainees in our custody," said ICE spokesman Marc Raimondi. According to court documents, about 30 detainees have been released after posting bonds, and as many as 60 other detainees have had bond hearings in court. While a number of detainees held in Massachusetts have posted bail and been released, bail has been denied to all but two or three detainees in Texas.

The lawyers claimed that from the day of the raid, ICE has done everything in its power to move the detainees away from their support networks and have denied them access to attorneys, the right to due process and the right to a fair hearing.

"We have very serious concerns about how they went about this," said Harvey Kaplan of the Boston law firm Kaplan, O’Sullivan & Friedman, one of the lead attorneys in the lawsuit. ICE "has done everything they can to rush these people out of the country, everything they can to deny them access (to attorneys)."

Even more disturbing is that the ICE is applying Guantanamo-style tactics to interrogate the detainees:

John Wilshire Carrera, an immigration lawyer with Greater Boston Legal Services, said that in the initial days after the raid, detainees were denied sleep and interviewed in the middle of the night by ICE agents.

He said ICE agents tried on several occasions to get the detainees to sign a form agreeing to be deported.

"They're being pressured into signing documents. That's something I believe is going on," he said. "They have papers where a box is prechecked to waive your rights, and they’ve been asking them to sign it."

Mr. Raimondi, the ICE spokesman, said detainees have been asked to sign voluntary removal orders.

"I stress the word voluntary," he said. As to the other document alleged to exist by Mr. Wilshire Carrera, Mr. Raimondi said he would need more specific information before he could comment.

This was followed by a hearing in Boston in which it became clear that the ICE's behavior resembled nothing so much as a rogue elephant:

The "humanitarian crisis" of families being torn apart because of a federal immigration raid could have been avoided, officials testified at the Statehouse yesterday, if federal authorities had taken the state's concerns seriously from the beginning.

The heads of three state agencies appeared before the Joint Committee on Children, Families and Persons with Disabilities to discuss the impact of the March 6 raid on New Bedford's children.

"Children were placed in significant jeopardy as a result of the decision not to allow us access," said Harry Spence, commissioner of the Department of Social Services. "All we were asking was that the law be enforced in a way that ensured the safety of the children."

... Gov. Deval Patrick has called the raid's impact on families a "humanitarian crisis."

And the trauma is continuing, according to Dennis Gauthier, head of the DSS office in New Bedford.

His agency discovered two days ago that a 16-year-old girl, "living in fear," had been cared for by a landlord for the past two weeks.

DSS has also placed three teenagers who were swept up in the raid in foster care, he said, because ICE would not allow them to be released to parents who are illegal immigrants.

DSS is still pressing ICE to release 10 parents to care for children, including the mother of a 4-year old boy who is not eating and is severely underweight.

"This child needs his mother back," said Mr. Spence, noting that the child is living with his father. "This child is not safe. This child is at risk. Release the mother with a monitoring bracelet, that's what we've asked."

In the days and weeks before the raid, ICE agents met with state officials. ICE wanted help with traffic, namely a state police escort from the factory to Fort Devens in Ayer with bus loads of detainees. ICE also wanted New Bedford police to shut down the roads around the Rodney French Boulevard factory.

What ICE did not want, according to state officials, was any help or advice in dealing with the families of those arrested.

"The impact on the children and families was an issue that was constantly raised," said Kevin Burke, secretary of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety. "ICE assured us they had policies and procedures in place, that they had done this many times before . . . We kept asking how they were going to deal with all the children."

ICE turned down two requests from the state for access to those arrested before the raid, and numerous requests afterwards, Mr. Burke said. Only when Gov. Deval Patrick, and U.S. Reps. William Delahunt and Barney Frank began making demands of ICE the day after the raid were state social workers allowed to interview detainees.

When asked by state officials for ICE's written policy on what constituted a "humanitarian release," ICE agents responded that they have no written policy, Mr. Burke said.

Recently, Judge Stearns ordered a hold placed on the ICE's deportation plans, at least until the status of these detainees and their families has been determined. Today, he ruled that those who signed the pressured papers cannot be deported.

What's clear is that these effects are the clear result of anti-immigrant agitation that has placed increasing pressure on the Bush administration to act. And when they have acted, the results have been predictably atrocious, especially for families:

Arrests of undocumented immigrants have grown 750 percent between 2002 and 2006, going from 485 arrests to 3,667. That dramatic increase in scale and frequency has produced far more visible humanitarian consequences than ever before, an immigrants' advocate said .

"This is the hidden underbelly of immigration enforcement," said Christopher Nugent, a Washington-based immigration attorney. "This is nothing new. It happens all the time."

Nugent and others said families are separated and children left with friends or relatives every day in the course of normal ICE immigration detentions. But the welfare of children affected by immigration raids has become a bigger issue in recent months as the scope of the immigration raids has expanded.

... "America is going to see more and more of this," said John Keller, a Minneapolis immigration attorney who represented some of the 239 Swift & Co. workers detained in Worthington. The raids are "a very blunt tool that is being applied to family situations."

Children can be separated from detained parents for months, while parents await bond hearings, or deportation. Parents who leave the United States face the choice of taking US citizen children with them, or being separated from them permanently in the hope of giving those children better opportunities here. Social service workers in other cities where raids took place told of scrambling to try to get passports for the US citizen children whose parents chose to take them back to the countries they left.

ICE is not obligated to provide for the children of undocumented workers they arrest, or to go easier on those with children, said Victor Cerda, a former ICE general counsel and a 10-year veteran of immigration enforcement.

And as Mark Silva observes, Bush's own proposed immigration reforms will actually have even more devastating effects on immigrant families:

Under the "guest worker" program that Bush proposes to allow employers to temporarily bring workers into the country, [Sen. Rober] Menendez maintains that workers "would be separated from their children and spouses as they will not be allowed to enter lawfully with the worker."

And under a "temporary worker" plan that Bush proposes to allow millions of undocumented immigrants already here to remain and work, provided they pay fines and learn English, and eventually seek citizenship, Menendez complains that the fines which the president proposes are onerous -- "Under this scheme, a typical family of five would have to pay up to $64,000 in fees and would have to wait up to 30 years in order to finally become U.S. citizens."

The American conservative movement has made an outright fetish in the past 20 years or so of pretending to stand for "family values", wielding such supposed values as a political club to bully their position on everything from abortion to gay marriage.

But while no one has ever adequately explained how allowing gays and lesbians to marry actually undermines families (logically, one would assume that it actually would help families), these same rabid right-wingers have been foaming at the mouth about illegal immigrants and the need to deport them immediately -- with the clear-cut effect of actually devastating many millions of real-life families.

What's become obvious, of course, is that conservatives care no more about real family values than they do "patriotic" values. They just like to wrap themselves in the symbolism and words, while their actions speak much, much louder.