Another bullying male

-- by Dave

One of the interesting aspects of the immigration debate is the way that authoritarianism is really the driving mindset underlying most of the nativist opposition to Latino immigration. It comes creeping out and reveals itself in odd moments, most typically when the nativists are challenged on the moral grounding of their crusade.

Probably the central example of this is the nativists' insistence on calling undocumented workers "illegal aliens", a phrase clearly intended to cast these immigrants both as The Other and, most especially, as lawbreakers. The phrase becomes a way of negating any recognition that perhaps the nation's dysfunctional immigration laws, which render millions of hardworking contributors to the national economy noncitizens, might actually be the problem.

The nativists are intent, of course, on the emphasis on the legal status of these immigrants because it becomes a club with which to bash them -- and moreover to justify all kinds of measures against them, most especially rounding them up, incarcerating and deporting them. So, for example, when someone points out the demonization and scapegoating inherent in this sort of approach to immigration -- a facet of their behavior that decidedly casts them as the ethical and moral reprobates they are -- they leap into full-fledged reflexive authoritarianism: intimidating, bullying, smearing, and generally shoving their opponents rhetorically to the ground.

We saw this recently in Lou Dobbs' reaction to being challenged by Air America talk-show host Laura Flanders last week over his frequent use of the term "illegal aliens" to describe undocumented immigrants. It occurred early the week before, on Dobbs' May 8 broadcast (about 1:40 remaining in the video above):

DOBBS: Well, I appreciate it. Thank you, Joe. Laura Flanders, let's talk about Mitt Romney at ...

LAURA FLANDERS, AIR AMERICA: I wanted to come back for a minute to the L.A. story, the last two stories. I think if Dr. King were alive today, he would be talking about what happened on L.A. on May 1st. When you talk about abuse, 240 rounds of rubber bullets and tear gas.

We've gone from legal punishment of illegal aliens to physical punishment, and it's not helped by language like yours, Lou, talking about these [marchers] as being illegal aliens...

DOBBS: Laura, Laura, Laura, that's ridiculous.

FLANDERS: They're not aliens, they're people. And the vast majority of people at these marches are utterly legal. They're not aliens, Lou. They're people, and you're dehumanizing them with that language.

DOBBS: And you're absurd to suggest such a thing.

FLANDERS: I don't think so.

DOBBS: You're being absolutely absurd.

FLANDERS: Let's talk about people. You said they're families ...

DOBBS: You talk about people.

FLANDERS: ... they're peaceful families, so why not introduce them that way.

DOBBS: You want to talk about 250 million Americans in this country and their families, people who actually support laws in this country and you're telling me illegal immigration should be condoned ...

FLANDERS: No. I'm saying when you use language like illegal aliens as opposed to families, many of them legal ...

DOBBS: What do you want to call them? Undocumented workers.

FLANDERS: You're dehumanizing people which is making it easier to fire batons at them ...

DOBBS: Laura ...

FLANDERS: Lou, I like you ...

DOBBS: You may like me, but you're being extraordinarily short-sighted and obfuscatory.

FLANDERS: Dr. King would be saying let's not call people aliens.

DOBBS: Dr. King, if you presume to speak for Dr. King, you are of greater intellect and spirit than me and I certainly would never presume to do so and I will leave that as your final comment because we have used up our time. Laura Flanders, thanks for being here ...

MCINTYRE: I'd like to speak for Gandhi, Lou.

DOBBS: Joe Madison, Doug McIntyre, thank you. Thank you very much, Laura, for being here. Doug, Joe.

MADISON: Thank you.

Note, first of all, that this occurred at the end of the same broadcast in which Dobbs castigated pastors who used their pulpits to weigh in on the immigration debate, and even went so far as to run an insta-poll asking viewers: "Should churches and religious institutions that engage in political activity have their federal tax exemption revoked? Yes, no." Of course, no one but Lou Dobbs or his staff (especially Casey Wians) has even remotely proposed taking such a step, since it would constitute an obvious infringement on pastors' free-speech rights. But even suggesting it is a kind of intimidation attempt, and it has produced a predictable outcry even from the fundamentalist right.

Moreover, note that Dobbs makes no attempt here to address the substance of Flanders' point. No, the problem is with her -- she's being "short-sighted and obfuscatory." Huh?

Anyone want to bet Dobbs' wife has heard that charge? It sounds like the old "you're just being a sentimental woman" line that was the stock in trade of men in the 1950s.

What brings that to mind is watching the video of this exchange; the transcript doesn't really give you the full sense of what Dobbs does to Flanders here -- the finger jabbing, the scowling intimidation, the furious impugning of her argument (equating it with "condoning illegal immigration").

But apparently, it all escalated when the cameras went off. Recall what Mark Potok told me yesterday:

The day after he went after me, which was last Monday, I saw him with this woman from Air America. I only saw a few minutes of it, but it was unbelievable. He was simply screaming at her. It looked like Rivera vs. O'Reilly on immigration. He was simply shouting her down. And this was over an extremely minor point -- she was trying to make the point that calling people 'illegal aliens' is a pejorative, and comes off that way, which I think is pretty undeniable. And Dobbs was just screaming at her.

Laura told me later, he followed her, first, into the dressing room, and then almost into the ladies' room, yelling at her! It was unbelievable.

Potok's characterization of the on-air confrontation with Flanders wasn't quite accurate; it's clear from the tape that although he's clearly trying to intimidate her, he doesn't scream at any time. Certainly, it's far from the O'Reilly-Rivera exchange, in which it appeared that O'Reilly was about to gouge Rivera's eyes out.

But as to the off-camera bullying -- with Dobbs following Flanders into the Green Room and then to the door of the ladies' room -- I e-mailed Flanders herself to confirm the story, and she answered: "Yeah, it's all true."

I'll be trying to obtain more details from Flanders about just what Dobbs was saying and how threatening she found it all, but for those of us who have worked around male authoritarians, none of this is particularly new. We've all known jerks like Dobbs who find women who undermine their authority particularly threatening, and their extreme overreactions to these women of course reveals a profound insecurity on their part.

It's also a common feature of right-wing authoritarians generally: a fetish for so-called "masculine virtues," including the ability to physically intimidate and "put women in their place," is innately part of these kinds of personalities.

And inevitably, it is reflected in the politics they pursue. Dobbs' anti-immigration diatribes are nothing if not fully loaded vehicles for a politics of fearfulness, a fear of change and a fear of disaster. That's how authoritarians rule: by fear. And women, it seems, are always among their first targets.

[Note: Laura Flanders will be at Firedoglake tomorrow at 10 am PDT for the book salon, talking about her new book, Blue Grit.]

UPDATE: Flanders, commenting at FDL, relates this:

I meant to say: he flipped. It was as if no one had ever challenged him on the use of the word "alien" before. He followed me into the make up room berating me, "How dare you ..." then down the hall and to the elevator. His point: it's a government term. My point. It's dehumanizing no matter what. Being a government term doesn't make it better. It was dehumanizing vs. Germans and Italians too and he has a megaphone he's using to beat immigrants with. He wouldn't give way, but neither would I. In the end to his credit, when I said "i guess i won't be back any time soon" he invited me right back, which he did.

One point of historical detail: The term "illegal aliens" was introduced as a "government term" in the 1920s, when it referred primarily to Asian immigrants, during the nakedly racist campaign to excluse immigrants from Asia, culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924.

'An astounding performance'

-- by Dave

I had a long chat earlier today with Mark Potok, the director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, about his recent appearance on Lou Dobbs' CNN newshour (along with SPLC President Richard Cohen) to confront Dobbs about his phony statistics regarding leprosy and immigration, as well as the larger tenor of Dobbs' coverage of the immigration debate. Here's a transcript:

DN: For starters, I noticed that at one point you were trying to point out to Dobbs that you weren't the only ones pointing out what shoddy journalism this was, that there were others pointing it out as well, and he didn't seem to want to let you make that point because he interrupted at that point and went blathering off on a tangent.

Potok: No, I just thought he talked right over me at several key points. I mean, look -- it was an astounding performance. It was a complete and utter bait and switch. He presented a completely new story before we were allowed on the air, and then he defended those numbers. He created a straw man which he then knocked down.

The fact is -- Dobbs tried to tell us at one point that we were working from the same official statistics. That is an outright falsehood. Lou Dobbs and his reporters never relied on the statistics. Their report was based 100 percent on the word of, as they say, the "respected" Dr. Madeleine Cosman, a fringe nut on the extreme right.

That was my biggest disappointment in the piece was that we could not get Cosman in there, because he, in my view, simply lied about that.

Really, I found it an amazing performance. Dobbs ultimately realizes that his numbers cannot be defended, so he creates another set of numbers and tries to portray himself as defending those.

And the whole leprosy debate is merely symbolic of Dobbs' reporting and propagandizing in general. And that's where we were never really allowed to go. The fact is that he makes claims like this fairly routinely, or allows others to make them on his air.

So I don't think Lou Dobbs is a member or a sympathizer of the Council of Conservative Citizens, but the fact that he used their map shows where his information comes from.

I kept wanting to say to him, 'Lou, if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas, and Madeleine Cosman is a flea.'

DN: The Council of Conservative Citizens report is a classic example of what goes on with Dobbs' reportage. You know, the whole Aztlan thing is basically something concocted by Glenn Spencer [a notorious white supremacist].

Potok: That's right -- cooked up by Spencer, pumped up by various hate groups, and then the larger anti-immigration movement. And Dobbs is -- it's not that he's a member of the CofCC, but when he sets out to illustrate an imaginary conspiracy, big surprise! He winds up taking a map from an openly white supremacist Web site. Because those are the kinds of lunatics that believe this garbage.

DN: And then the only thing he corrected, as it were, was using their information, rather than the entire thesis of the report, which was based on the same garbage.

Potok: It's not like you're going to find a legitimate Aztlan map.

DN: The entirety of the report on Aztlan was built out of this specious material, and he never corrected that.

Potok: No, no, and he won't face it at all. It's quite a performance.

I saw him last night talking about the immigration agreement, describing Washington as, you know, wholesale out of their mind and so on.

DN: And as Richard Cohen pointed out, one of the issues that in fact is coming out of the immigration debate is the effect that this kind of rhetoric is having on the ground, that is, in terms of the stark rise of hate crimes.

Potok: That's right. We weren't quite able to get this out, but look, federal hate crime statistics show anti-Latino hate crime up 23 percent between 2003 and 2005. California statistics, which are particularly well kept, show a rise of 43 percent of anti-Latino hate crimes in the same period.

Dobbs absolutely will not look at where this kind of rhetoric goes. Just a few days ago, an anti-immigrant zealot apparently tried to burn down the day labor center in Gaithersburg, Maryland. A couple of weeks ago a man was sentenced to life in prison in Arizona for murder because he and two relatives went out looking for a Mexican to kill and in fact were successful.

You know, the week before that, a militia in Alabama was busted, and the feds said they had a plot to machine-gun Mexicans in Alabama. This is stuff you will never, ever, ever hear on Dobbs' show.

We ran a search just for fun on the phrase "hate crime" for his show for the last two years, and it hasn't had a mention on his show in two years.

DN: And at the end of his show he asked you to find instances where he was bashing immigrants, and as I pointed out, there's really no shortage of those.

Potok: It's quite easy. You mentioned the Spencer stuff. Think about this guy: They've had Spencer on a number of times, at least two times I know of. You know, Spencer was arrested for shooting up his neighbor's garage in a paranoid midnight fantasy about immigrants coming to get him. That has never appeared on Lou Dobbs' show.

Chris Simcox has been on over twenty times at this point. This is a guy who has talked about the Chinese Army maneuvering on the Mexican border. A nutcase, like Madeleine Cosman, like Glenn Spencer.

DN: Look, we're both journalists -- we both worked as mainstream reporters and editors for many years. And I'm utterly baffled by this kind of behavior, and moreover, that somebody can actually get away with this with their reputations and careers intact. Basically publishing and then asserting that the falsehood was true.

Potok: Well, he looked for any kind of exit. He extremely disingenuously tried to say that they had never said there were 7,000 new cases. Then in a truly incredible television moment, he puts on the tape that shows definitively that that's precisely what they said. And then he tries to get us to agree that we're all talking about the same figures. It was like speaking from one dimension to another -- it was bizarre. Talk about aliens.

DN: This is something that bloggers are always on about -- that the reason for the existence of a demand for blogs is the public's growing awareness that their large, supposedly mainstream media are failing them, especially in terms of reporting truthfully and accurately.

Potok: I heard this from Leslie Stahl, and I've heard it from Dobbs directly on the phone -- Dobbs makes a big deal out of separating the hour into a half-hour of news and a half-hour of 'editorial'. That's the biggest bunch of hogwash I've ever heard. The separation is invisible to all but CNN employees, no doubt. It all looks the same to anyone else. And it was just last night, in his rant about the new immigration deal, that he went after everyone in Washington who was for this bill as a bunch of mindless lunatics -- in the news half of his show. The show is just propaganda from start to finish.

It is a weird situation that CNN would allow this, really. It really is disappointing that CNN says nothing about this, feels no obligation to the truth at all. What we said in the letter is really true -- this really is demonizing. It is not a nice thing to say about a group of people, that they are bringing leprosy to your doorstep, and it is certainly precisely the kind of statement that leads to hate crimes. These people are dirty, they're disgusting, they're coming to do you harm -- not to mention to ruin your economy and steal your job.

I wonder what's going on with Dobbs. I thought he had been somewhat wounded last week. The day after he went after me, which was last Monday, I saw him with this woman from Air America. I only saw a few minutes of it, but it was unbelievable. He was simply screaming at her. It looked like Rivera vs. O'Reilly on immigration. He was simply shouting her down. And this was over an extremely minor point -- she was trying to make the point that calling people 'illegal aliens' is a pejorative, and comes off that way, which I think is pretty undeniable. And Dobbs was just screaming at her.

Laura told me later, he followed her, first, into the dressing room, and then almost into the ladies' room, yelling at her! It was unbelievable.

One other thing you should know, because it's really quite something, is that the Family Research Council attacked him on Sunday. They sent a letter very similar in tone to ours -- the headline was, 'Tell Lou Dobbs: Pastors aren't second-class citizens.' They set up on their Web site a thing for followers to send e-mails. This was because Dobbs the prior week, after the back and forth with us, Dobbs said something to the effect that churches that make statements on immigration should lose their 501(c)3 status, their tax-exempt status. Which is an incredible statement -- I mean, this is probably the only time in my entire life I will ever agree with Tony Perkins, but he was right. Why shouldn't a pastor be able to speak on immigration? As long as that pastor is not endorsing this candidate or that one, they absolutely have the right to speak on that matter, just as I do.

But of course, Dobbs has been beating up on the Catholic Church for a long time. Last week he made the mistake, apparently, of generalizing that to all churches. So now he's getting it from the left and the right.

All these people had been in our office. Christine Romans was in our office, along with four other Dobbs staffers several years ago as we tried to explain to them what we saw in the anti-immigration movement.

You know, for a long time, we tried to work with rather than against Dobbs. An example of this was when Joe McCutchen was named to head up the Protect Arkansas Now initiative, the Prop 200 lookalike organization in Arkansas. And we pointed out all that stuff about his being part of the Council of Conservative Citizens and American Renaissance and had written all these anti-Semitic letters, and so on.

The point is, we called Dobbs and told them, 'Look, this McCutchen guy is an anti-Semite, and here's the evidence.' And what happened is that they did in fact cancel an appearance by McCutcheon. But do you think anything was ever said about any of this on Dobbs' show? They in other words used us to avoid looking stupid, but they did not take the greater point -- which was that quite a few people like this are in the leadership of this movement.

So really, we were aiding and abetting their whitewashing of the news, so that got old pretty quickly, and ultimately it came to a conflict.

___

More on all this soon.

Lou Dobbs vs. reality

-- by Dave

Lou Dobbs, who remains adamant that his phony numbers on leprosy were accurate, seems to be taking journalism into uncharted territory -- namely, reporting false and misleading information, and then asserting baldly afterward that it is perfectly accurate ... and seemingly getting away with it.

It's also important to understand this case as part of a larger narrative that scapegoats Latino immigrants, promulgated by Dobbs on his nightly CNN program. And when similarly called on that, Dobbs remains adamant that he's done nothing untoward.

We got a concentrated look at that on Wednesday's Dobbs show, when he invited Richard Cohen and Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, two of his fiercest critics in this matter, to appear. He then proceeded to bluster and blow smoke for twenty minutes or so, interrupting his guests when they began pressing him and responding with nonsequiturs. More to the point, when called on his phony numbers, he tried to claim that he hadn't reported what in fact he had quite plainly reported.

Now, note that Dobbs at no time ever addressed using Madeleine Cosman as the primary source for their claim that there had been a surge in leprosy cases to over 7,000 in recent years. Instead, they pointed to an earlier news report from Bill Tucker that included the following information:

DR. WILLIAM LEVIS, HANSEN'S DISEASE CLINIC: In the last 30, 40 years we've had 7,000 by registry figures that are maintained, but it's likely to be significantly more than that because not all states require, including New York State, are requiring reporting of the disease. So it's underreported. So that's a minimal figure.

Now, compare that to what Christine Romans said in the Dobbs report:

It's interesting because the woman in our piece told us that there were about 900 cases of leprosy for 40 years. There have been 7,000 in the past three years.

Levis, the respected figure that Dobbs later touted several times, in fact said something radically different than what Dobbs and Romans reported. It's hard to tell if they are mathematically and logically impaired, or just figuring that their audiences are.

Moreover, it's hard to read or hear this without getting the clear impression that suddenly, the number of cases of leprosy have risen to 7,000 in recent years. And yet Dobbs later says this:

Mark, Richard, gentlemen, you know we never said they were new cases. What we said in point of fact was that there are 7,000 cases on the active -- active leprosy register. You also ...

Which is, of course, a complete mischaracterization of what Romans actually said.

It's perhaps useful to understand that reporting that there are 7,000 names on the register does not mean that there are currently 7,000 active cases of leprosy. In fact, the number is not terribly meaningful in terms of the current levels of infection, because leprosy is in fact highly treatable with a Multi Drug Therapy (MDT) regime consisting of rifampicin, clofazimine, and dapsone:

MDT remains highly effective and patients are no longer infectious after the first monthly dose.] It is safe and easy to use under field conditions due to its presentation in calendar blister packs. Relapse rates remain low, and there is no known resistance to the combined drugs. The Seventh WHO Expert Committee on Leprosy, [22] reporting in 1997, concluded that the MB duration of treatment—then standing at 24 months—could safely be shortened to 12 months "without significantly compromising its efficacy."

Meanwhile, look at how Dobbs reports some other statistics:

DOBBS: Let me cite them for everybody one more time and if we've got that graphic I'd like to do that, which in, by the way, in your publication you said the cases have been declining. Since 2000, they have in fact been doubling, rising from 76 to 110, to 133 to 131, 166 and you just listened to one of the most foremost experts in Bill Tucker's report say to you that they are absolutely, absolutely understated and significantly so.

Did Dobbs say "doubling"? From 133 to 131? Really? What, did he graduate from Regent University or something?

Dobbs isn't simply obtuse about numbers; he's similarly thick about the very basic matter of factual accuracy. Witness, for instance, this exchange with Cohen:

DOBBS: Can I ask you gentlemen, we have just about four minutes left, have you ever once heard me say anything against immigration, failing to support higher immigration if it's a matter of public policy? Have you ever heard me be anti-immigrant even once or am I anti-illegal immigration?

COHEN: Lou, I think you've done it many times. I think that when you make false claims about immigrants that that's being anti-immigrant. I don't see any way around it. It's not the case that one-third of the persons in federal custody as you said are illegal immigrants to use your words. Twenty-seven percent of the persons in federal custody were born on foreign soil, some here lawfully, some not and only 12 percent of those were -- had committed violent crimes. So to suddenly say that 33 percent ...

DOBBS: I thought you said it was an unknowable statistic just a moment ago, Richard?

COHEN: No, I didn't say that.

DOBBS: I misunderstood you.

COHEN: You did. I said 27 percent of the persons in federal custody were born on foreign soil. We do not know how many are here lawfully and how many aren't but we do know that 12 percent of those ...

DOBBS: The federal prisons are not allowed to ask their country of either origin or their immigration status, correct?

COHEN: Right. That's right.

DOBBS: So those statistics you've just cited are rather interesting in light of that.

COHEN: Well, I don't know where you got the 33 percent of all -- everyone being an illegal immigrant, Lou.

DOBBS: Those are the estimates ...

COHEN: You were the one who made the claim.

DOBBS: Right. COHEN: You were the one who made the claim and I think it's a misleading claim, Lou.

DOBBS: Do you? To what end?

COHEN: The point is, Lou, that these are the kinds of claims we hear a lot. A few years ago one of your reporters also characterized the National Academy of Science's study of the effects of immigration on this country. Your reporter said with you, you know, nodding your sense, that what the report concluded was that there was an up to $10 billion annual cost -- I'm sorry, $100 billion and in fact what it showed on -- no, $10 billion, in fact what it showed is it was a $1 to $10 billion net positive.

DOBBS: Well, in point of fact your statistics are every bit ...

COHEN: These kinds of things outline the constant stream of misinformation. DOBBS: Please. First, Professor Jorge Borjas at Harvard University as you well know has done extensive research on the cost in terms of suppressed wages in this country of excessive immigration, both legal and illegal. And in point of fact. That number is $200 billion.

COHEN: That doesn't justify mischaracterizing a government report.

DOBBS: That's $200 billion a year. In point of fact, the four principle industries in this country that are hiring illegal aliens, the largest among them, construction followed by landscaping, leisure and hospitality, hotels and restaurants, all have experienced declines in wages. There is no shortage of labor.

And in point of fact or otherwise those wages would be rising, and it has declined as a result of exploitive employers. So I'm going ask this question. Do you believe I'm anti-immigrant or do you believe I'm anti-illegal immigration?

Dobbs' answer -- blowing smoke from a different study to justify misleading reportage, a classic nonsequitur -- is then capped by a diversion into a topic that's really all about him: Is he unfair to immigrants? The preceding babble is thus effectively buried, and we've moved on to the playground aspects of the matter. But Dobbs does say this:

DOBBS: I think that you can find perhaps in the record some basis for either declaring me either anti-immigrant or anti-illegal immigration, but I do think that using me and my name, frankly, as some sort of fund-raising tool is egregiously unworthy of both your tradition and your work in most areas and I do not for one moment comprehend it. I hope we can have further discussions.

Um, well, beyond those instances mentioned by Cohen and Potok on the show, Dobbs in fact has a long and well-documented record of demonizing Latino immigrants and promoting extremist views on his program.

For starters, there was the time he promoted commentary declaring illegal immigration a mortal threat to the nation itself:

Lou Dobbs Tonight - CNN - June 1

Dobbs: The issue, as you said, that the nation would cease to exist, what do you mean by that?

West: Well, the kind of provisions that are in the Senate... and it will be mainly Hispanic. It will be mainly Mexican. -- And so, what the question becomes is, do we want to become a northern section of Latin America? Do we cease to become literally an English- speaking people, become bilingual, and / or Spanish- speaking? And with these questions, you really begin to get at the heart of the matter, a demographic, a newer demographic.

There's also been his afactual reporting on the Minutemen, which he has described as a "neighborhood watch":

Perhaps no one has been more prominent in promoting the Minutemen's image as a group of law-abiding, concerned citizens than CNN's Lou Dobbs, who has made the Minutemen into the symbol of his ongoing campaign on behalf of immigration reform -- meaning he has adopted, essentially, far-right anti-immigrant nativism.

On several occasions, Dobbs' program has featured remarks from Minuteman organizer Chris Simcox, including an extended interview with Simcox that featured some genuinely noteworthy exchanges. Dobbs had reported on his program that the Minutemen were unarmed, and Simcox had to correct this:

DOBBS: And to be clear, you're not permitting any of your volunteers to be armed.

SIMCOX: No, that's not true. I can't do that. We have encouraged them, if you've read our standard operating procedure, that they are to be, again, aware of the laws of the state of Arizona. They're not to carry long arms, because that would make us an offensive -- that would give it an offensive-type attitude.

DOBBS: Well, Chris, let's...

SIMCOX: ... (UNINTELLIGIBLE), but...

DOBBS: ... be straight up, 1,500 volunteers, untrained, unorganized, and without drill, that is not a reassuring statement that you just made, if you're going to have people with weapons, whether they are sidearms or not.

SIMCOX: Well, Lou, we have -- most of our volunteers are retired law enforcement officers, military veterans, and professional people who -- and not all of them are going to be armed, but the ones that want to be have that right to be.

But we have interaccountability by grouping people together in teams, so that we have people watching each other and making sure that we hold each other accountable. Because this is a political protest, no matter what. We know that. And it would be hypocritical of us to want the government to enforce the laws if we were out there to break the laws.

Dobbs has also been an avid promoter of Pat Buchanan's nakedly racist screed on immigration:

Foremost among Buchanan's media boosters has been CNN's Lou Dobbs, whose proclivity for pushing extremist nonsense into the mainstream has beem previously noted:

"Congratulations on the response to your book," said Lou Dobbs, the CNN anchorman who has made a profession of attacking illegal immigration in story after story after story, as he introduced his old CNN colleague. Dobbs then offered up his own view that President Bush was carrying on an "outright war" against middle-class Americans by allowing illegal immigration. Wrapping up the interview, Dobbs concluded: "The book is State of Emergency. It's No. 3 on the best-selling list. ... I'm going to repeat it one more time. The book is State of Emergency. Pat Buchanan, always good to talk to you. ... [Y]ou've got a lot of readers, so keep it rolling."

Particularly telling is Buchanan's sourcing:

Once again, to make his case in State of Emergency, Buchanan relies on a trove of extreme-right sources. His urgent call for thwarting the "invasion" of non-European immigrants leans heavily on material written by hate group members or postings on hate sites, with citations to nearly every sector of the hate movement, from neo-Nazis to neo-Confederates. He cites the work of white supremacist James Lubinskas; Edward Rubinstein, of the white nationalist think tank National Policy Institute; Clyde Wilson, a board member of the racist and secessionist League of the South; and Wayne Lutton, a veteran immigrant- and gay-hater. Buchanan also quotes Lutton's anti-immigrant hate journal The Social Contract.

But unquestionably the most egregious example of Dobbs' use of extremist material was the time he lifted a graphic from the white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens -- a group that Dobbs had the gall to tell Cohen and Potok he finds "reprehensible" without mentioning that he had used their material. Shortly after the CCC graphic ran, Dobbs mumbled his "regrets" for using the CCC as a source. But the "regrets" didn't include reporting a far-right conspiracy theory about "reconquista" as fact. Indeed, note the wording of the "regrets":

A freelance field producer in Los Angeles searched the web for Aztlan maps and grabbed the Council of Conservative Citizens map without knowing the nature of the organization. The graphic was a late inclusion in the script and, regrettably, was missed in the vetting process.

At no point did Dobbs or his reporters ever issue a correction about the phony Aztlan nonsense. The only problem was that they had used an unpleasant source.

As I noted at the time:

[T]he obsession with "Aztlan" -- which, as far as Latinos are concerned, mostly appears in a few relatively obscure '60s-era documents and among a fringe hate group -- has for most of the past decade and longer been almost exclusively the purview of white supremacists: American Patrol, VDare, American Renaissance, the National Alliance, the CofCC, the Barnes Review, and the like.

So when you hear talk about "Reconquista" -- which has not appeared in any MEChA documents or speeches -- the chances are nearly certain that this is where the talk originates. That's who draws up these maps, and touts the claims of an "invasion" incessantly.

Nonetheless, pointing out that racists are the people promoting these hobgoblins just raises a predictable whine: "Can't we talk about immigration without being accused of racism?"

Indeed, that's exactly what Dobbs consistently does whenever he's called on this crap. At some point, you'd think someone -- executives at CNN, other journalists, maybe an advertiser or two -- would catch on.

As Alex Koppelman put it:

CNN is trying to play this off as an isolated mistake. Don't be fooled: it's not. The fact that Dobbs and reporter Casey Wian showed the CCC map only makes the subtle pattern of racist fantasies given voice on Dobbs' show more visible. (By the way, relatively unnoticed -- the same night Dobbs was citing the CCC, he was leaving unchallenged, even laughing along with, one guest's suggestion that in order to get rid of illegal Mexican immigrants New Yorkers should order pizza and then arrest the delivery person. Thanks, Lou. We'll get right on that.) For months now, Dobbs and Wian have been reporting on "reconquista" and "Aztlan" movements, movements that exist not in the minds of mainstream Mexicans but in the fever dreams of white supremacists. That Dobbs eventually aired material pulled directly from a white supremacist organization should surprise no one -- when you're subtly citing them on a regular basis, the unfiltered truth is bound to bubble up at some point.

It keeps bubbling up, all right. But Dobbs is trying to pretend that the odor emanating therefrom is something other than the racial sewer the rest of us smell.

Back to the Dark Ages

-- by Sara

Orcinus regular Ahistoricality has posted a remarkable piece of Falwell memorabilia over at Progressive Historians. It's a 1981 brochure, published by the North Carolina Moral Majority, that provides one of the best summaries I've ever seen of the educational messages fundamentalist high school kids get from their parents and elders. Here's the text:

Don'ts for students.

1. Don't get into science-fiction values discussions or trust a teacher who dwells on science fiction in his/her "teaching."

2. Don't discuss the future or future social arrangements or governments in class.

3. Don't discuss values.

4. Don't write a family history.

5. Don't answer personal questions or questions about members of your family.

6. Don't play blindfolded games in class.

7. Don't exchange "opinions" on political or social issues.

8. Don't write an autobiography.

9. Don't keep a journal of your opinions, activities and feelings.

10. Don't take intelligence tests. Write tests only on your lessons. Force others to judge you on your own personal achievement.

11. Don't discuss boy-girl or parent-child relationships in class.

12. Don't confide in teachers, particularly sociology or social studies and english teachers.

13. Don't judge a teacher by his/her appearance or personality, but on his/her competence as a teacher of solid knowledge.

14. Don't think a teacher is doing you a favor if he/she gives you a good grade for poor work or in useless subjects.

15. Don't join any social action or social work group.

16. Don't take "social studies" or "future studies." Demand course definition: history, geography, civics, French, English, etc.

17. Don't role-play or participate in socio-dramas.

18. Don't worry about the race or color of your classmates. Education is of the mind, not the body.

19. Don't get involved in school-sponsored or government-sponsored exchange or camping programs which place you in the homes of strangers.

20. Don't be afraid to say "no" to morally corrupting literature, games and activities.

21. Don't submit to psychological testing.

22. Don't fall for books like "Future Shock," which are intended to put readers in a state of panic about "change" so they will be willing to accept slavery. Advances in science and technology don't drive people into shock. It is government and vain-brain intrusions in private lives, which cause much of the unbalance in nature and in people.

23. Don't get into classroom discussions which being: What would you do if....? What if....? Should we....? Do you suppose....? Do you think....? What is your opinion of....? Who should....? What might happen if....? Do you value....? Is it moral to....?

24. Don't sell out important principles for money, a scholarship, a diploma, popularity or a feeling of importance.

25. Don't think you have to associate with morally corrupt people or sanction their corruption just because "society" now accepts such behavior.

26. Don't get discouraged. If you stick to firm principles, others will respect you for it and perhaps gain courage from your example.

There's a lot to comment on here -- and hope you all will -- regarding the ways in which these rules strictly limit self-awareness, imagination, and intellectual growth. (I'm surprised, frankly, that they weren't told to avoid art class altogether.)

But I'm most bemused by the fact that fully a third of these admonitions directly or indirectly tell kids to stay away from any kind of thinking about the future. The Evangelical movement went through a serious panic about futures studies in the 80s and 90s: in fact, the first series of readings my Regent professor threw at me last semester included a couple rather hysterical (in both the unhinged and funny senses of the word) screeds along these same lines.

Their concern goes to the heart of one of the biggest problems Christianity has had with the modern era, which is its total loss of hegemony over people's visions of the future. For 1500 years, people took it as gospel (so to speak) that the Biblical account of creation was a stone literal fact. It followed, quite logically, that the eschatology outlined in Revelation could also be relied on as an equally literal account of how history would end.

Early Christians were so convinced that Jesus was returning Any Day Now that they constructed their entire societies around that fact. It was built right into their calendars, which had the world ending sometime in the 400s. Jesus may have said that "no man knows the day or hour" -- but that didn't stop them from trying to reckon it out anyway. Augustine (who readjusted that calendar to buy the world another couple hundred years) wrote persuasively that they needed to knock off the guessing games, and focus on the world at hand rather than the one to come. But, from that day to this, there's never been a shortage of Christian true believers doing whatever they could to hasten the day.

Through the centuries, this conversation has turned (and, arguably, still turns) on two key questions: What is the essential nature of humanity? And how much influence can it really have over its own future? On the first question, Christianity has taken a dim view of our essential nature: humans are profoundly corrupt and flawed, and therefore morally incapable of doing anything positive in the world. If we try to meddle in the future, we're going to screw up God's plan. As to the second question: Since a deterministic God really runs the show anyway, there's no real point in trying to change anything, now, is there?

These two assumptions -- we can't change the future, and shouldn't try -- put much of the dark in the Dark Ages. These assumptions didn't really change until the Enlightenment turned the lights back on, by affirming that a) yes, humans -- through the use of science -- can indeed understand the world well enough to create positive and useful change; and b) we are intelligent, moral, and inherently worthy beings who are entitled to use our influence to create the world we want. (Looking back now, it's fair to ask: How do we deal with the world that this belief ultimately created? That's another post for another day -- but suffice to say, our accepted answers to those two questions are up for serious review about now.)

Many futurists think that "the future" as we now understand it was born with these two realizations, which formed the philosophical foundation of modernism. Together, they liberated Westerners from the inevitability of Armageddon -- freeing us to imagine other futures, while also endowing us with powerful new tools to achieve them. The Church no longer owned the historical narrative, from beginning to end. Now, we had new stories about the beginning -- and were free to write our own end.

Traditional Christianity has never really recovered from the hit. The enduring grief over this loss echoes through these wretched bits of advice, which are clearly aimed at insulating the young faithful from any kind of post-Enlightenment understanding of the world. But the ultimate irony here is this: By carefully forbidding their children to learn the lessons of science and history -- which is the central goal of these rules -- the so-called "Moral Majority" also deliberately cripples their ability to act from any kind of authentic moral sense.

Science and history, between them, provide nothing less than our cognitive map of how the entire world works. The power and glory and horror, the inner and outer workings of the universe, the grand attempts and spectacular failures, the possibilities and dangers -- these understandings are essential to our ability to explain and predict the things that happen in the world around us. Our moral judgment depends utterly on clear foresight, which allows us to accurately analyze situations and foresee their likely outcomes. Thus, rules like these -- which deny cause and effect and inhibit pattern-making skills -- actually interfere with the development of effective moral navigation equipment, permanently maiming these students' ability to choose right courses of action.

We're seeing this now, of course. One-sixth of America has voluntarily accepted some version of these rules; and their inability to assess the moral consequences of their choices have already cost us all more than we have even begun to reckon. And because they recognize no past or future, no cause or effect, other than the one in their Bible, it's likely that most of them will never really understand the ways in which they brought these disasters down on us all.

The New McCarthyism

-- by Sara

So here's Joe Scarborough on MSNBC this evening, braying that when people like Don Imus and Opie and Anthony are taken off the air because they cross the line and say offensive things on the air, they're actually victims of "the new McCarthyism."

This is the kind of foamy blather that rapidly congeals into stubborn, hard-to-get-out right-wing talking points, so it's important to wipe it up quickly before it sticks. (Last month, they tried to characterize what happened to Imus as a "lynching." What we have here is apparently a second-generation attempt to get traction on the same idea, using different language.)

For those of you who weren't there and didn't read about it: Back in the early 50s, Joe McCarthy went after people for exercising their Constitutional rights to freedom of thought, speech, association, peaceable assembly, and to petition the government for redress of grievances. Thousands of people (my father-in-law, a UCLA sociology professor, included) got hauled up before Congress and/or fired from their jobs because of nothing more than the magazines they read, the people they befriended, the clubs they joined. Most of these people were not public figures -- they were businesspeople, academics, artists, and professionals. Disproportionate numbers of them were immigrants and Jews. All of them were subject to levels of government investigation that nobody this side of Abu Gonzales could possibly construe as constitutional.

Note, however: Not one of those people got on the public airwaves and made ugly sexual comments about black women -- which is the common thread that connects Imus with Opie and Anthony. (That and the fact that, also like Imus, Opie and Anthony were repeat offenders -- CBS booted them in 2003 for similarly offensive remarks.) But, as Dave has already explained, when you're standing on a public platform that belongs to somebody else, you're subject to having the plug pulled on you if you say things that either the owners or the listeners find offensive.

Scarborough says that if we don't like shock jocks, we should change the channel. But he seems to ignore the fact that if enough people change the channel, those who own the channel are going to get the message. What happens next is not "McCarthyism," or "lynching" or "censorship." It's called the free market -- you know, the same one the right wing is always insisting is the ultimate solution to all our problems.

In this case, they're absolutely right. Opie and Anthony gleefully described the violent rape of Condi Rice. And the free market -- in the guise of their XM bosses -- rendered its judgment on their behavior.

Don't blame McCarthy for this one, Joe. The real culprit you're looking for is Adam Smith.

updated with corrections

That Old-Time Religion

-- by Sara

Well, Jerry Falwell's gone home to Jesus. It does mark the end of an era.

A bit of context is in order. It's important to note that Falwell was hardly a breakthrough phenomenon in the world of broadcast preachers. Oral Roberts and Jimmy Swaggart were already long on the scene when the Thomas Road Baptist Church began broadcasting its Old-Time Gospel Hour in 1968. Kathryn Kuhlman, radiant in her white gowns, was on TV calling in souls every week using a script lifted word for word from the one Sister Aimee Semple MacPherson used back in the 1920s. (The most recent heir to this lineage is Benny Hinn -- also in radiant white -- who still does Sister Aimee's schtick to perfection.). Falwell drew heavily on the same formula that broadcast preachers had used all the way back to Dwight Moody -- testimonies, healings, the big choir, individualized prayer, and the selling of blessed relics. Even the business of starting colleges was nothing new: Moody had done it in the 20s; and Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, OK graduated its first class the year before Falwell went on the air.

It wasn't the rather typical content of his show that made Falwell the defining TV preacher of his generation. It was his willingness to vault his big old bear-like self over the long-standing legal and theological line that kept preachers from openly engaging in politics. Evangelicals of that generation had been taught all their lives to eschew the things of this world -- to render unto Caesar the things that were Caesar's, and to God the things that were God's. That, very decidedly, meant no politicking. But as the 60s unraveled into the 70s, Falwell had the guts to look his growing (and increasingly terrified) flock in the eyes, and tell them that the only way they'd make an increasingly incomprehensible world right again was to get out into the streets and organize.

It was a message that they'd been waiting to hear. Falwell stepped up into the role of Moses, leading dispirited Evangelicals back to the promised land -- a road he insisted ran right through Washington, D.C. His political intentions were implicit in his design for Liberty University, which opened in Lynchburg, VA in 1971. Previous broadcast-preacher colleges were aimed at bringing up missionaries, choir directors, and local pastors; but Liberty soon established departments in law, business, accounting, and communications -- the skills required for the kind of political revolution Falwell had in mind. (It was a formula Pat Robertson would re-create 15 years later across the state at Regent University.)

During the 70s, Falwell -- using his massive direct-mail arm as a lab of sorts -- also narrowed in on gay rights and abortion as the two hot-button issues that would keep the religious right angry, mobilized, and writing those checks -- issues whose staying power led them to dominate the American political discourse for the next 30 years. These efforts eventually coalesced into the Moral Majority. Wikipedia notes that:

The Moral Majority was initiated as a result of a struggle for control of an American conservative Christian advocacy group known as Christian Voice during 1978. During a news conference by Christian Voice's founder, Robert Grant, he claimed that the Religious Right was a "sham... controlled by three Catholics and a Jew." Paul Weyrich, Terry Dolan, Richard Viguerie and Howard Phillips left Christian Voice. During a 1979 meeting, they urged televangelist Jerry Falwell to found Moral Majority. This was also the beginning of the New Christian Right.

Anyone who still wonders if there's racism at work in the religious right should ponder the fact that they had to throw "three Catholics and a Jew" overboard just to get the Moral Majority out of the dock.

The Moral Majority was the first overtly Evangelical political organization America had seen in over 50 years. It's remarkable now to look back and realize how fast it rose on the scene, mobilizing millions of Evangelicals and raising tens of millions of dollars for conservative Republican candidates. In two years flat, it got its preferred candidate into the White House -- and bought itself a front-line spot in the Reagan Revolution that followed.

But the glory faded through the 80s, as Falwell turned from churchbuilding and kingmaking to petty libel battles (most notably the one with Larry Flynt); as the press and the courts began to take notice of the ways in which he blurred the lines of church and state separation; and as politicians turned out to be very happy to take the Moral Majority's money, but less enthusiastic about enshrining its morality as federal law. His attempted turnaround of Jim Bakker's Heritage USA enterprises ended in bankruptcy court; and in 1989, the Moral Majority was absorbed into his friend and rival Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition.

Falwell himself was never much of a political or cultural force after that. But it's arguable that if there's one person without whom the religious right would never have risen -- and the GOP's hegemony would never have been possible -- Jerry Falwell was that guy. By organizing traditionally apolitical Evangelicals into the country's dominant political force, he provided the GOP with the essential base of support that's undergirded everything they've done in (and to) America over the past 27 years.

Jerry's gone. Pat Robertson is old and nuts. James Kennedy is in failing health. The old lions of the Christianist movement are heading off to their heavenly rewards -- leaving a new Evangelical generation to re-organize themselves for other battles, under other leaders who are ready to talk about other things besides gays and abortion --things, perhaps, like peace, justice, and the environment. Ironically, it seems that the same energy that fed the religious right is now toward flowing in a leftward direction. Falwell would definitely not approve, but I suspect Jesus would have been quite pleased.

Still, it was Falwell who gave American Evangelicals their first taste of political power -- and, having acquired that taste, it's doubtful they'll ever fully retreat into their quiet corner again.

My excuse

What I've been doing the last couple of days instead of blogging.



Sorry. Well, not really, but you know what I mean.

Flying the flag

That may look like a Confederate flag someone decided to fly at a community picnic down South somewhere. But it isn't.

It is in fact a special KKK edition of the Confederate flag -- replete with the words "White Power" and "Ku Klux Klan" -- that fluttered over a community picnic in Rapid City, Michigan:

At a May 6 barbecue, organizers served up a T-bone steak, baked potato and all the fixings for just $10. Overhead flapped a Confederate flag that bore white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan markings.

A Klan banner smack in the middle of a northern Michigan, small-town cookout sponsored by the Rapid City Businessmen's Association caused a stir among some who attended. The flag also focused unwanted attention on this spot-on-the-map about 20 miles northeast of Traverse City.

"When we drove into the parking lot and got out of the car, I was shocked and disgusted and wanted to get back in the car," said Dick Ault, of Alden, who said he stayed because a group of friends had gathered there. "Some thought it was a Confederate flag, which was bad enough, but then we saw it was a KKK flag."

The flag included a cross inside a circle, accompanied by the phrases "white power" and "Ku Klux Klan," but its message didn't bother everyone who attended.

"I didn't care one way or another about the flag being up. It's not a big deal," said Tom Tucker, of Rapid City, a cookout volunteer. "Should it have been up? No. I stood the pole up myself. Whoever put the flag up, I don't know, but I put the pole up. If anybody is going to holler at anyone, it should be me."

A tattered American flag arrived with the pole and they couldn't fly that, Tucker said, so someone retrieved another flag to run up the line.

Probably the most noteworthy aspect of the story is the way everyone in the community scrambles to cover for the person who raised the flag. They're all equally quick to deny that the flag's appearance meant anything racial.

The main characterization of the event by locals was that it was all just "funnin'," a joke, something not worth taking seriously since hey, it was one of them, and they're surely not racist.

Well, just so no one has any illusions about this case: This flag is produced for a very narrow constituency and probably was very expensive. Anyone who would own it, as well as fly it, would have to be very serious about the ideology it represents. The local townspeople who defend this person as harmless are covering up for an ugly racist in their midst. They have to be in serious denial about the meaning of this incident to blow it off.

If white people sometimes wonder why minorities sometimes view their protestations off innocence on racial issues with deep suspicion, they need only look at incidents like these for a simple explanation.

'Far better reporting'

I dunno about you, but I was really taken with Lou Dobbs' defense of the bogus leprosy numbers he has been broadcasting -- besides just the charming combination of self-absorbed cluelessness and sheer arrogance, there was this:

"And the fact that it [the number of leprosy cases] rose was because -- one assumes, because we don't know for sure -- but two basic influences: unscreened illegal immigrants coming into this country primarily from South Asia, and secondly, far better reporting."

Now, Dobbs is obviously trying to suggest that a sudden improvement in medical reporting of these cases will transform the 296 actual cases of leprosy on record at the Center for Disease Control over the most recent three-year period on record into some 7,000 cases. This would be a remarkable feat indeed, especially considering that there is no particular reason that medical reporting on leprosy or immigrant diseases in general would be significantly improved in recent years, particularly not by a factor of 200.

But then, in the defense he later erected on CNN, it became clear that he and Christine Romans, the reporter upon whom he depends for this information, have one single source for their claim: the late Madeleine Cosman. That's right: someone whose figures for the questionable (and non-peer-reviewed) journal article that Dobbs and Romans cite appear to have been made out of whole cloth, considering the scope of the actual statistics.

It's not enough to call Cosman a nutcase, though clearly that particular shoe fits like Cinderella's slipper. It's helpful, perhaps, to sample a full dose of the paranoiac fantasizing of which she was capable. Here's a sound bite from one of Cosman's speeches, this one on the sexual proclivities of male Mexican immigrants:



A transcript:

Recognize that most of these bastards molest girls under age 12, some as young as age 5, others age 3, although of course some specialize in boys, some specialize in nuns, some are exceedingly versatile, and rape little girls age 11, and women up to age 79. What is important here is the psychiatric defenses. Why do they do what they do? [Mockingly] They do not need a jail, they need a hospital. They are depraved because they were deprived in their home country. But more important is the cultural defense: they suffer from psychiatric cognitive disjuncture, for what does a poor man do if in his home country of Mexico, in his jurisdiction, if rape is ranked lower than cow-stealing? Of course he will not know how to behave here in strange America. This is thoroughly reprehensible.

This is the woman who is not just the primary but apparently the sole source of Dobbs' claim. Whatever "better reporting" she found appears to have been cooked up by her attempts to wade into medical statistics -- something inadvisable for PhD. in English.

In any event, it's hard to get across the full flavor of this rant without listening to it. Because there's something oddly ... familiar about all this.

The grotesque distortion. The obscene fantasization. The sneering mockery of the straw-man liberal she creates and immolates. The brittle, twitchy delivery. Where have we seen that before?

But of course:



We recall that Ann also enjoys a special place in the heart of Lou Dobbs and Christine Romans, who have similarly helped broadcast Ann's afactual fantasies.

Must be that "far better reporting."

Lou Dobbs: Making up racist shit

The eliminationist meme connecting immigrants to disease leapt forward about five quanta this week thanks to CNN's Lou Dobbs.

The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that Dobbs is spreading the tale that immigrants are bringing leprosy to America, and concocting numbers out of whole cloth in the process:

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) today urged CNN to acknowledge that anchor Lou Dobbs has been spreading false information about the prevalence of leprosy and its supposed links to undocumented immigrants.

"We're not talking about a newscaster who simply made a mistake — we're talking about someone with a national platform who cites wildly inaccurate data to demean an entire group of people and who, when confronted with the truth, simply repeats the lie," said SPLC President Richard Cohen. "It's outrageous, and CNN should do something about it immediately."

In a letter sent today, Cohen asked CNN/U.S. President Jonathan Klein to take prompt action to correct the misinformation.

On "Lou Dobbs Tonight" this past Monday, Dobbs said he stands "100 percent behind" his show's claim that there had been 7,000 new cases of leprosy in the United States over a recent three-year period, and he further suggested that an increase in leprosy was due in part to "unscreened illegal immigrants coming into this country."

Dobbs' endorsement of the claim came after CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl challenged the leprosy figure during a profile of Dobbs on "60 Minutes" this past Sunday. Stahl cited a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services document that reported 7,029 cases over the past 30 years -- not three.

... The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that the number of leprosy cases diagnosed in the United States peaked at 361 in 1985. The figure reported on Dobbs' show is easily refuted with just a few minutes of research on the Internet.

Where did Dobbs get his numbers? Unsurprisingly, from a far-right nutcase named Madeleine Cosman:

In addition to writing about the prevalence of leprosy, Cosman, who died in March 2006, told an anti-immigrant conference in 2005 that "most" Latino immigrant men "molest girls under 12, although some specialize in boys, and some in nuns," a variation on a speech she has given elsewhere. The Winter 2005 issue of the SPLC's quarterly magazine Intelligence Report also contained a profile of Cosman, a lawyer who advised wealthy doctors on how to sell their medical practices and a member of the far-right Jews for the Preservation of Firearms. The piece pointed out that Cosman had lied about having a 1976 book she wrote nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

... Madeleine Cosman's false claim that there were 7,000 cases of leprosy diagnosed in the United States from 2001 to 2004 was included in her article, "Illegal Aliens and American Medicine." More than once, "Lou Dobbs Tonight" reporter Romans repeated Cosman's statistic, saying, "Suddenly, in the past three years, America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy."

Cosman's piece was published in the Spring 2005 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, which represents private practice doctors. The journal is known as a right-wing periodical whose science has been the subject of harsh criticism.

Though the article notes her Ph.D., it does not say that the degree is in English and comparative literature. Cosman had no medical training other than as a medical lawyer.

In the article, Cosman provides no source for her claim of 7,000 cases of leprosy, also known as Hansen's Disease, in three years — presumably 2001 to 2004, given the article's publication date.

The claim has no basis in fact.

But is Dobbs at all apologetic about being called on his journalistic malfeasance? Um, no:

On Dobbs' show Monday, during a conversation with Romans, Dobbs said: "Following one of your reports, I told Lesley Stahl, we don't make up numbers, and I will tell everybody here again tonight, I stand 100 percent behind what you said." He later added, "And the fact that it [the number of leprosy cases] rose was because -- one assumes, because we don't know for sure -- but two basic influences: unscreened illegal immigrants coming into this country primarily from South Asia, and secondly, far better reporting."

... In the "60 Minutes" piece, Dobbs told Stahl, "Well, I can tell you this. If we report it, it's a fact."

"How can you guarantee that to me?" Stahl asked.

"Because I'm the managing editor, and that's the way we do business," Dobbs replied. "We don't make up numbers, Lesley. Do we?"

When it comes to Lou Dobbs -- yes, he does.

Not only does he make up numbers and "facts," he obtains those "facts" from extremist sources whose far-right agenda his "reporting" propagandizes. That is, in fact, his established track record.

The most infamous instance of this came when Dobbs ran a graphic about "Aztlan" that not only was pure fantasy, it was taken from the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens' Web site. And then there has been his ongoing promotion of the Minutemen, which has similarly indulged afactual bashing of immigrants.

Dobbs, in fact, is beginning to make Don Imus look positively benign. Unfortunately, it's increasingly clear that CNN is running hard right in the cable-news wars, so it's unlikely that Dobbs will be affected unless, once again, CNN is hurt where it counts: with the advertisers.

UPDATE: Video added atop post.

UPDATE II: Phoenix Woman points out that Dobbs is only one of many media fabricators.

UPDATE III: Media Matters has more.

That law-enforcement approach

The jihad-mongers of the right blogosphere have been so busy congratulating themselves for finally having proof -- proof, dammit! -- of their long-running thesis that Muslims are secretly plotting everywhere in America to engage in terrorist attacks, namely, the Fort Dix gang that purportedly was planning to attack an Army base.

The claims about the actual threat these fellows posed have reached quite a fever pitch, as have the claims about the role of citizen "John Does" -- heavily touted by Michelle Malkin -- in the arrests. Suffice to say that the evidence so far does not suggest that this gang was any more likely to actually succeed than the Tri States Militia, which planned a similar attack on Fort Hood, Texas, back in 1997.

But what does stand out about the case is that it was in fact predicated on a long and careful investigation by the FBI -- one that took, in fact, 16 months to put together.

That is to say: These arrests were based upon the law-enforcement approach to terrorism.

Funny that the chief cheerleaders for declaring this case a model of the Future of Terra in America haven't acknowledged that fact.

Malkin provides a nice, clear example. In previous posts, she has complained about "the limitations of the law enforcement approach to terrorism", and sneered at Democrats for supposedly adopting "the Clinton law enforcement approach to terrorism" (a sneer repeated here). She also has approvingly cited NRO's Andrew McCarthy saying that

the law enforcement approach to terrorism, where terrorists get the advantage of our generous due process standards (including discovery about informants), is nuts -- we have to tell the bad guys too much.

Well, we've said it many times:

The Bush approach has been to treat terrorism as though it were a phenomenon mostly related to unrest in the Middle East, the product of brown-skinned fanatics for whom the only adequate response is the full force of American military might. This approach largely treats terrorism as though it exists only in conjunction with a handful of states -- the "Axis of Evil" -- that support it, and containing it means bombing and killing its supporters out of existence.

This was, in essence, the rationale for invading both Afghanistan and Iraq. In the case of Afghanistan, certainly a military response is fully justified, since the state connection to terrorism is clear and unmistakable. In the case of Iraq, however, that connection remains far from clear; though at one time I thought evidence existed to suggest such a connection, it has become painfully clear since that any Iraqi sponsorship of terrorism, particularly al Qaeda, was thin at best.

More to the point, however, is the fact that by making the "War on Terror" primarily a military operation and only secondarily (at best) a matter for law enforcement and intelligence, the Bush administration is focusing on only a rather narrow part of the terrorism spectrum. (Even on those terms, as Matt Yglesias has ably demonstrated, Bush's execution of the "war on terror" has in fact largely consisted of smoke, mirrors, shock and awe.)

The reality: Terrorism is a global phenomenon. It takes the shape not of a singular or even related ideology, but the idiosyncratic form of whatever extremism gives it birth. It is amorphous, and highly corpuscular, sometimes effectively emanating from extremely small groups or even individuals. And it is every bit as alive and well in America as it is in the Middle East.

This has many ramifications, not the least of which is that emphasizing the military component to any effective assault on terrorism -- and there are instances, such as Afghanistan, when a military solution indeed is required -- has an extraordinarily negative effect, particularly if military operations are undertaken through fraudulent circumstances, as in the invasion of Iraq. ...

Any kind of serious War on Terror needs to have the flexibility to respond proportionately and nimbly to various terrorist threats as they manifest themselves, and in this respect a military emphasis is simply too musclebound to be effective. A comprehensive approach will emphasize intelligence and law enforcement -- especially global law enforcement, the very concept of which is anathema to the Bush administration -- while reserving its military options, fraught as they are with multiple collateral hazards, solely for the rare circumstances that warrant them.

You'd like to think the right-wing bloggers might at some point develop enough self-awareness to recognize this. But since we're talking about a right wing that is single-mindedly predicated around naming the Enemy and then scapegoating it, that doesn't seem likely.

A journalist in Kafka's court

The case of Bilal Hussein, the Iraqi photographer for the Associated Press who has been detained by military authorities -- whose captivity has been ardently promoted by Michelle Malkin as part of her ongoing campaign against reporters she suspects (on notably thin grounds) of being in cahoots with the insurgents -- is back in the news:

WASHINGTON -- Representatives of two journalists detained by the U.S. military said Tuesday the government should charge them or set them free.

The U.S. has been holding Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein in Iraq for a year. Sami al-Hajj, a cameraman for the Mideast news network Al-Jazeera, has been detained since late 2001 and is currently at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

While U.S. officials allege that Hussein took photographs synchronized with explosions, indicating he was at a location ahead of time, Kathleen Carroll, executive editor of the AP, said he was "simply the unlucky fellow who happened to be the photographer for the world's largest newsgathering organization in a difficult province."

Carroll said the AP had examined 900 of Hussein's photographs and there was no indication he was on the scene before attacks occurred.

Well, so much for Malkin's chief claim against Hussein -- that his photos indicated he was at the scene in advance of insurgent attacks, and that they displayed a general "coziness" with the terrorists. As I noted at the time, all they really indicated was that Hussein was very good at his job.

But note the Kafkaesque quality of the system into which he has become enmeshed:

Paul Gardephe, the lawyer handling the case for the AP, said the military recently acknowledged to him that it has no evidence to support earlier allegations that Hussein was involved in a plot to kidnap two other journalists.

Carroll said, "The sort of rolling set of allegations that arise and then disappear without the benefit of a trial ... or any kind of an official court proceeding is what is distressing to all of us here." She spoke during a panel discussion in connection with World Press Freedom Day.

Officials have what they believe to be information that links Hussein to insurgent activity, but most of the evidence is classified and cannot be released publicly, said Col. Gary Keck, a Pentagon spokesman.

Imagine being caught a system of justice in which you can be detained by the government on accusations of plotting against it, but they don't have to produce any evidence of that because it's secret. That's what has befallen Bilal Hussein.

Journalists -- real journalists -- everywhere should stand against this obscenity and raise a stink about it. As for Michelle Malkin, well ...

Domestic terror all around

The right-wing blogosphere needs to take a shower or something. They've been positively creaming their jeans over the arrest of five suspected Islamist terrorists who are charged with plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix. Malkin, of course, is leading the pack, but it's seen as Vindication Day throughout the whole "John Doe"/Jihad Watch right, including Little Green Footballs and Der Perfesser.

Funny how little attention any of them have paid to the mirror-image case down in Alabama involving the militiamen who were reportedly plotting to bomb and gun down Mexicans in a nearby town. In fact, the only place I could find mention of it was at Outside the Beltway, and that was a post questioning the need for the arrests.

Well, since they don't seem to be so interested, I'll try to keep you all up to date. Chellen Stevens at the Huntsville Times has a fascinating profile of the five suspects. Raymond Dillard, the apparent ringleader, is a classic case in which extremist beliefs spiral out of control along with their lives, as we see in his interactions with a neighbor:

Gunnin felt sorry for him.

"He was hungry a lot," Gunnin recalled. She began to feed him.

But a few months ago, when Dillard attempted to appoint Gunnin as the nurse for his militia, she had ceased feeling sorry for him. Gunnin grew annoyed when he dropped off medical manuals: She had been the director of nursing at Huntsville Hospital in the 1970s and didn't need his textbooks.

"I tried to get him to tell me the name of his organization. He said, 'We're just a group that will be here after the government falls apart,' " she said.

Eventually, Gunnin grew wary. Dillard often carried an old Army-issue 9 mm pistol. He could be persuasive, and she had heard him talk vaguely of weapons and organizing.

Then, a couple of months ago, he began speaking against Mexican immigrants. Gunnin banned him from her home. She wanted him off her property but didn't know what to do.

All along, the racial resentment played a central role in the simmering anger:

Things grew tense a couple months ago over a game of soccer.

Joanne Gunnin had given a group of Guatemalans permission to play soccer on an unused field she owned across from Dillard's camper. They began to tend the field.

According to neighbors, James McElroy, alleged to be a private in the militia, yanked a Hispanic man from a mower there. The player ran away.

Wayne Dunn, who lives behind the field, said his nephew called police. McElroy gave the lawn mower back to the soccer players before police arrived, according to Dunn and another neighbor.

But Dillard later delivered a message to Dunn's 16-year-old nephew.

"He needed to make up his mind whose side he wanted be on, the Mexicans or Americans," Dunn said. "The main thing (Dillard) always told me was there was going to a war between the Mexicans and whites."

What's disturbing about this group -- unlike, say, the militiamen who plotted to blow up a propane facility near Sacramento, who almost certainly were not competent enough to pull off the job -- is that their plan was easily within their rather limited reach: basically just mayhem and violence not far afield from what we saw recently at Virginia Tech.

But it's at least worth noting that the evidence of the alleged plot has so far been pretty thin:

The sergeant major turned out to be a government informant.

And the informant reported to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that the Free Militia was making and stockpiling grenades.

The indictment lists numerous other charges, including possession of a machine gun, a homemade silencer, a short-barreled shotgun, 68 homemade explosive projectiles and about 100 marijuana plants.

... The informant reported that Dillard tried to sell him some of the homemade hand grenades. He also reported that he and Dillard went to a military surplus store in Bynum to buy 12 grenade hulls and later packed them with powder and hid them under rocks by a dead tree in the woods.

The informant's affidavit does not mention plans to attack Hispanic groups.

But at a bail hearing Tuesday, ATF agent Adam Nesmith introduced the idea that the Free Militia was planning to gun down Mexicans in the small town of Remlap northeast of Birmingham.

All this will be played out in court, of course, as will the charges against the five alleged terrorists at Fort Dix. The veracity of the accusations remains an open question until then, though you will be hard-pressed to persuade any of the amateur sleuths of the right blogosphere of that in the latter case.

In the Alabama case, well, that appears to be a different story. It's evidently not even worth acknowledging. After all, we all know what real terrorists look like, right?

As for someone planning to shoot people who look like that, and who according to leading right-wing pundits might be terrorists -- well hell, that's a hero.

The immigrant plague

vpltz at DKos brings us the hair-raising account of a fine Texas Republican legislator who wants to blame illegal immigrants for everything from cancer to his bad hair day:

A Texas State Representative called for a "challenge" to the 14th Amendment and blamed illegal immigrants for increases in communicable diseases following debate on a border security bill in the Texas House of Representatives Monday night.

State Rep. Leo Berman (R-Tyler), who made national news late last year for introducing a slew of anti-immigrant legislation — including one bill which would strip legally born children of immigrants of rights to state services including public education — made the comments during a point of personal privilege following the passage of House Bill 13, a border security bill which passed to engrossment 140-5.

"This is probably the only time you are going to hear anyone talk about illegal aliens on the floor of the House of Representatives because we've been shut out of this bill at every turn," Berman said.

During his remarks, Berman railed against Rep. David Swinford (R-Dumas), chair of the House State Affairs Committee, and said that Swinford "unilaterally decided no illegal alien legislation would be heard on the floor of the House this year."

... Berman also waxed nostalgic about the olden days of immigration in America.

"In the early part of the century when my parents came through Ellis Island, they were given a physical examination. If anything wasn't right, they were put on the boat and sent back. Note I say 'immigrant,' because they are the people who...assimilate into our culture and pay their taxes and eventually raise their hands and become citizens."

Berman then proceeded to claim that illegal immigrants were bringing Polio, the plague, leprosy, tuberculosis, malaria, Chagas Disease and Dengue Fever to the United States in alarming numbers.

Well, it's not like we haven't heard that before. You may recall that the Washington Times and Michelle Malkin both propagated the notion that immigrants were responsible for bringing disease to America, as did anti-immigrant activists in Colorado a short while later.

It is, of course, a classic eliminationist gambit: link your target to disease and vermin and filth, thus rendering them ripe for elimination. As I noted at the time:

All this has a familiar ring to students of American history. The very same kind of associations -- equating immigrants with pestilence -- were part and parcel of previous nativist outbreaks in the United States, particularly those in which the targets were Asians. ... The same kind of charges of being spreaders of disease appeared early in the campaign against Japanese immigrants, at the turn of the century ...

In any event, Berman predictably proceeded to spout more eminently debunkable nonsense about the costs of immigration, with again a predictably eliminationist solution:

Berman also claimed that the El Paso Independent School District was being forced to hold a $290 million bond election all as a result of an influx in illegal aliens to the school district.

Berman also alluded to his bill which would have denied legally born children of illegal aliens any state benefits including education saying that the original legislative intent of the 14th Amendment was that it would not apply to "foreigners."

"I thought it was time for us to challenge the 14th amendment because we are creating more than 350,000 new U.S. Citizens a year and I believe they are being created erroneously."

Ah yes -- the nonexistent anchor baby problem, for which the nativists of the right want to amend the Constitution -- not to mention blame them for abortion. Nothing like scapegoating children for your lousy immigration policies.

But then, that's par for the course from this crowd.

Hiding our shame

While the creation of a concentration camp by the government to detain illegal immigrants -- a program already rife with consequences for immigrant families -- has resulted in very little fuss in either the media or the halls of officialdom, it has at least raised some eyebrows on the international level:

(AP) DALLAS -- A planned United Nations visit to a highly criticized central Texas center for detaining immigrant families was never approved by federal immigration officials, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman said Thursday.

ICE didn't immediately respond to questions of why the visit by Jorge Bustamante, the Human Rights Council's independent expert on migrant rights, wasn't approved.

Bustamante had been expected to tour the T. Don Hutto facility on Monday. The U.N. human rights office in Geneva announced late last month that he was going to tour the former prison in Taylor, as well as two border areas where U.S. officials say they will crack down on people illegally crossing the border.

ICE spokeswoman Ernestine Fobbs said no tours of Hutto are scheduled.

Bustamante still plans to discuss migrant issues with government officials, campaign groups and immigrants during a mission this month that includes stops in Tucson, Ariz.; Austin, Texas; Fort Myers, Fla.; New York; and Washington, D.C.

Bustamante, who is from Mexico, is expected to present his findings to the 47-nation rights council at its next session in June.

Civil liberties and immigration advocates sued federal officials in March on behalf of several children detained at Hutto, which typically houses about 400 non-criminal immigrants awaiting deportation or other outcomes to their immigration cases.

The groups contend families at Hutto are subjected to psychologically abusive guards, inadequate medical care and inhumane conditions in a facility run like a prison.

What, we have to ask, does the ICE have to hide?

If a preplanned visit by international migrant-rights experts is not permissible, why not? Doesn't the public have a right to know how this "detention center" is being run? Do they really expect us to take them at their word that everything is on the up and up?

The problem with centers like the Hutto facility, as I've explained previously, is that they remain ripe for all kinds of abuses. And their existence and expansion are almost guaranteed by the course we're taking:

So it seems almost inevitable that we will be seeing more of these mass detention centers, particularly as Bush's announced plan to arrest more illegal immigrants takes full effect. The almost certain byproduct will be that we will see more and more of them designed to accommodate whole families, including citizen children, and the record so far indicates that the conditions will once again be those of a concentration camp.

The law of unintended consequences is arising here. In their determination to arrest illegal immigrants, the government -- acting, in the end, at the behest of nativist agitators -- is potentially putting itself in the business of splitting up families, since many of these illegal immigrants are the parents of citizen children. So to avoid that outcome, the only solution available is to incarcerate those children alongside their parents. The end result: concentration camps -- euphemistically designated "family detention centers" as part of an effort to "secure our borders."

At some point, the public is going to have to start paying attention to what's going on in Texas. A travesty is in the making, and we're asleep at the switch.

[Hat tip to Jesse.]

Facing the shadows

Alex Spillius at the Telegraph has become the first mainstream journalist to raise the question (already raised here) about the role that white supremacists may play regarding Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency:

Barack Obama has been placed under round-the-clock protection at his own request, raising fears of a white supremacist plot to halt his bid to become America's first black head of state.

It is the earliest that the US secret service, which safeguards the president, vice-president and other dignitaries, has provided protection to a presidential candidate.

Usually guards are only allocated after the parties have selected their contenders, which will be early next year for the Nov 2008 election.

While Spilius couldn't confirm that such a threat existed, it's clear that something has been afoot:

It is not clear if a direct threat has been made to the charismatic 45-year-old Illinois senator, who has electrified the race for the Democrat party's nomination and is closing in on the favourite Hillary Clinton.

According to a senior law enforcement official, the extra security was prompted by general concerns about the safety of a prominent black candidate. Several factors raised concerns, including some racist talk on white supremacist web sites.

The New York Daily News quoted a contributor to a white power website: "Our world will become unbearable with him as President. Maybe there will be someone who would take [a] chance and do a Lincoln on him? Is that our only hope?"

Abraham Lincoln was shot in 1865 by John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate spy outraged at the president's plan to give blacks the vote.

Race remains an extremely divisive issue in America, and the Right-wing Insight magazine criticised the senator last week for his lack of security, accusing him of "almost courting this tragic and historically predictable result".

Yes, especially when that "result" is almost being invited by magazine articles emphasizing the lack of security around Obama.

I wouldn't be too fast to assume that a "conspiracy" exists against Obama, though if any sector of American society is likely to engage in one it would be the extremist right. What is far more likely is that some "lone wolf" will attempt to act out the murderous fantasies imbued in him by others.

In either event, Americans do need to be vigilant about the existence of this kind of lurking rage, especially given the levels of rhetorical bile that have been at flood stage in recent years. And not merely Obama may be affected, but probably every candidate, particularly those on the left side of the ledger.

The other kind of terror

Last week I discussed the case of the Alabama militiamen who were arrested on a variety of weapons charges, and suggested at the time that perhaps it wasn't that serious a case, since there was no indication at the time the men were planning anything amiss.

That all changed in the week since, as subsequent news reports made clear that not only were they planning a lethal attack, the intended victims were Mexican immigrants:

Five members of a self-styled militia were denied bail Tuesday after a federal agent testified they planned a machine gun attack on Mexicans, but a judge approved bail for a sixth man.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Armstrong said at a hearing in Birmingham federal court he could not grant bail to the five because of the agent's testimony and the amount of weapons - including about 200 homemade hand grenades - that were seized in raids Friday in DeKalb County.

"I'm going to be worried if I let these individuals go at this time," he said.

Adam Nesmith, an agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, testified that the five - Raymond Kirk Dillard, 46; Adam Lynn Cunningham, 41; Bonnell Hughes, 57; Randall Garrett Cole, 22; and James Ray McElroy, 20 - planned a machine-gun attack on Mexicans in Remlap, a town just north of Birmingham, and went there on a reconnaissance mission April 20. The agent provided no further details.

During the raids last week, agents recovered 130 homemade hand grenades, a grenade launcher, about 70 hand grenades rigged to be fired from a rifle, a machine gun, a short-barrel shotgun and 2,500 rounds of ammunition, authorities said.

According to at least one of their neighbors, they'd been feeding on a steady diet of immigrant-bashing that they readily regurgitated to everyone in sight:

James Craig, 63, of Collinsville, said Dillard visited him and his wife, Shelia, a few weeks ago and talked to them about how the Hispanics were taking over the country.

"I told him I didn't want to hear it, and I asked to leave and not to come back," he said. "He just respected me and walked off. If I had known he had all those explosives around his house, I might have been nicer to him. You never know who your neighbors are."

For the time being, it's probably best to be circumspect about this case; it'll be necessary to assess the FBI's evidence at trial and see to what extent these men had proceeded in their plans, and what the likelihood of their actually having pulled it off would have been, and whether the evidence in fact substantiates the FBI's claims. However, from outward appearances, the likelihood appears high that the case is solid.

If it does all pan out, then this case could prove to be a significant warning sign that the agitation against immigrants of the past several years, particularly the emphasis on vigilante action embodied by the Minutemen, is metastasizing into actual brownshirt thuggery to which the label "fascist" fully applies.

As I noted awhile back:

You see, vigilantism always claims to be about law and order and preserving "traditional values." And yet historically, real extremism has always expressed itself thus. This is because vigilantism is always, in the end, about the brutal imposition of mob rule without regard to the humanity of its targets. The proof, in the end, lies in the strange fruit it inevitably produces.

Fortunately, the authorities were able to nip this act of domestic terrorism in the bud, before anyone was harmed. The next time we may not be so lucky.