Fox whines that White House 'attacks' confuse news with opinion -- in a 'news story' that gives only one side

-- by Dave

As we mentioned elsewhere, the folks at Fox News were all up in arms Monday about Anita Dunn's scathing commentary in which she pointed out the cold truth: Fox News has become a propaganda arm of the Republican Party. In fact, the outraged howls could be heard on every Fox program yesterday (except Shep Smith's).

Fox's chief defense is that the White House is confusing its opinion shows with its news coverage. It ran one such "news story" outlining the "attacks" by the White House on Fox, which included the following fine whine from Fox News Senior Vice President Michael Clemente:

"It's astounding the White House cannot distinguish between news and opinion programming. It seems self-serving on their part."

Actually, the White House is not alone. Indeed, anyone watching Fox News throughout the day will suffer much of the same confusion.

Fox is trying to pretend that only on its "opinion shows" such as Glenn Beck, The O'Reilly Factor, and Hannity is there free-ranging criticism of President Obama and his administration. But that's a load of hooey.

If you watch Fox's daytime "news" programs -- from Fox & Friends to Happening Now to Special Report with Bret Baier (where this report aired) -- you'll find that, while they lack the viciousness of the "opinion" programs, they nonetheless are heavily slanted with an anti-administration bias. "Reporters" like Carl Cameron and James Rosen constantly bring on Republican spokespeople and reliably transmit GOP talking points as though they represent fact (when in reality they usually have an estranged relationship with the truth). Anchors like Gretchen Carlson and Trace Gallagher regularly comment on the news they're reporting with an unmistakable right-wing slant.

A classic case, in fact, is this very "news" story that ran both on Baier's segment and earlier on Happening Now: It is wholly a defensive piece of propaganda that reliably gives the Fox News line -- comparing Obama's recognition of cold reality with Richard Nixon's paranoid "enemies list" -- with no attempt whatsoever to explain the White House's point of view.

If you wanted to see why the White House might confuse Fox's "news" programming with its "opinion" shows, one need look no further than this "news report" itself. Speaking of "self-serving."

Of course, there is a mountain of such examples already plunked in the middle of our national discourse. The most notorious recent such case was Fox's ardent promotion of the anti-Obama Tea Parties, beginning back in April and continuing through the "Tea Party Express, which produced such "news" segments as the one where Griff Jenkins was openly cheerleading the tea parties, and a Fox producer was caught working up the crowd to cheer. Then, of course, there was the whole 9-12 event, which Fox not only avidly promoted (it was, after all, wholly the creation of Fox's Glenn Beck) but actually attacked other networks for ostensibly failing to cover it as avidly as they did.

But that's just scratching the surface. Everyone knows it -- and Fox just wants to pretend it all away.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Delusions of grandeur: Militia video warns President Obama to leave the country by Oct. 15

-- by Dave

Rob Waters at Hatewatch happened to catch the above short-lived video the other day:

It advises President Obama and other prominent people (“Our Dear Leader and co.”) to “leave now and give us our country back” and to do so by next week.

“If you stay,” the silent video message continues, “ ‘We, The People’ will systematically dismantle you, destroy you and reclaim what is rightfully ours. …

“We are angry and we are ready to take back the rights of the people. We will fight and We will win. …

“Dead line [sic] for your national response: October 15, 2009

“Thank you to all patriots who support our cause. … Be prepared for when the fateful day of the declaration of war is nationally announced.”

As the post notes in an update, the video was taken down shortly after it appeared on the SPLC site with no explanation. However, we managed to capture it before then and have reproduced it here in its original form, with a C&L tag at the end.

The "National Militia, Soldiers of Freedom" is not a known organization of any kind. Most likely it is some guy sitting in his basement.

This is about 99.99999999 percent certain to be just so much hot air from the "Patriot" movement and its attendant lunatic fringe. It reminds me of the threat to organize a "Million Man Militia" march back in July that never came close to materializing.

These kinds of delusions of grandeur are endemic to the Patriot movement, and are part and parcel of the grand paranoia about a looming New World Order planning to imprison conservatives and the radical communist regime of Barack Obama. That is, not only do they wildly imagine the nefarious conspiracy out to destroy America, but their imaginations similarly run riot when assessing their own breadth and strength -- not mention their abilities to act on their fantasies.

Still, the spread of this kind of rhetoric underscores the violent mindset of the militia units we now see forming at various locales around the country. Eventually, someone competent is going to act on it. And it's clearly being abetted by the wild fearmongering being promulgated by the likes of Glenn Beck and other right-wing pundits.

Indeed, you have to wonder if this is the kind of thing Glenn Beck had in mind in his recent interview with Newsmax:

"I fear a Reichstag moment," he said, referring to the 1933 burning of Germany's parliament building in Berlin that the Nazis blamed on communists and Hitler used as an excuse to suspend constitutional liberties and consolidate power.

"God forbid, another 9/11. Something that will turn this machine on, and power will be seized and voices will be silenced."

Of course, I think we can predict now that if there is another Oklahoma City -- rather than a 9/11 -- Glenn Beck will also be calling it a "Reichstag moment" and claiming it's the product of a government conspiracy to clamp down on civil rights.

This is why he and the rest of the right-wing chorus have been so eager to dismiss the existence of right-wing extremists -- even in the face of obvious evidence that the violent crazies are coming out of the woodwork. We can thank the tea parties for providing the fertile ground for much of this rhetoric.

If you want a sampling of how bad it's getting, check out the video below, which I captured from the same YouTube site as the one that hosted the "warning" video. The owner stocks it up with Alex Jones conspiracy videos, but this profile of the militias caught my eye:



The main militiaman featured in this is a fellow, evidently from Oklahoma, who calls himself "July4Patriot" and is one of the key players in an outfit of veterans who call themselves the "Oath Keepers". They're organized around a batch of wild conspiracy theories involving supposed plans to use the military to begin rounding up American citizens and placing them in concentration camps.

Indeed, you can see "July4Patriot" -- whose real name is Marine Sgt. Charles Dyer -- in action at a July 4 "Tea Party" in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, in the video we snagged earlier this summer. At that event, Dyer ranted at length about the supposed roundup conspiracy.

There's a growing contingent of people out there on the fringes who not only really believe Glenn Beck when he warns that the government wants to destroy America, but think he's being too tame. And of course, the crazier his claims become, the farther out to sea they all go.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Glenn Beck thinks non-citizens shouldn't be counted in the Census

-- by Dave

Glenn Beck devoted a long rant last night to his contention that the U.S. Census Bureau shouldn't be counting what he blithely calls "illegal aliens" -- i.e., undocumented immigrants.

But his argument -- that we shouldn't be counting people who can't vote -- doesn't merely cut against the undocumented. It cuts against all immigrants -- who, by definition, are also already non-citizens.

Moreover, the Census Bureau isn't charged with accurately counting the number of citizens living within the United States -- it's charged with counting the entire population.

What Beck wants Census to do -- that is, to exclude non-citizens from its count -- is in direct violation of its charter, which is to count the population whole:

The Census Bureau does not ask about legal (migrant) status of respondents in any of its survey and census programs. As examples, in the decennial census, the American Community Survey, and Current Population Survey as there is no legislative mandate to collect this information. Given the success of Census 2000 in counting nearly every person residing in the United States, we expect that unauthorized migrants were included among people who indicated that the United States was their usual place of residence on the survey date. The foreign-born population includes naturalized U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, temporary migrants (e.g., foreign students), humanitarian migrants (e.g., refugees), and unauthorized migrants (people illegally present in the United States).

Beck would have the Census omit not just unauthorized migrants, but also lawful permanent residents, humanitarian migrants, and foreign-born residents here legally.

Of course, he's arguing for this because he believes counting the undocumented will give the eeeeevil SEIU more power in its quest for total global domination or something like that. You have to watch the video to get it all, and even then it never quite holds together, much less make sense.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Michael Moore makes mincemeat out of Hannity's fake 'hospital' video footage from Cuba

-- by Dave

Someone really should have thought twice before letting Sean Hannity embarrass himself with the failed stunt he tried in his interview with Michael Moore, the second half of which aired last night on Fox.

Hannity wanted to make a point about how health care in Cuba is so much worse than it is in the YooEssAy -- in contradistinction to Moore's own reportage -- so he offered what he called special video footage he had been provided of a "hospital" in Cuba.

What we then see is a rattletrap mess with old beds and rotting toilets, etc. But Moore notices what should be obvious: There are no patients, either.

Ah, but wait! We shortly see footage of patients in a hospital. But they're in an obviously different building (or at least wing), because this room is clean and the beds and equipment sanitary and well-tended. But we only get to see them for a few seconds before -- swoop! -- off we go back to the rat's nest.

Which is obviously an abandoned hospital or wing, which is certainly not unheard of, even in the YooEssAy.

Moore, of course, laughs at all of this with glee. Hannity quickly changes the subject, since his oh-so-convincing video evidence just makes him look as bad as he has recently in his Jennings Jihad.

You'd think Hannity & Co. would know better than to try to run such hamhandedly edited footage past an experienced filmmaker like Moore. This was so amateurish that they all should just be embarrassed.

But they're too arrogant and too stupid to be so.


Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Disturbing explosives case: Family ran a day care with bomb-making material and neo-Nazi lit in the back

-- by Dave

Fox News' Trace Gallagher got all excited Thursday reporting some news out of California:

Gallagher: We're told that a man has been injured in an explosion. Reportedly he injured his hand. Now here's the key: You'd think a guy injuring his hand in an explosion -- this is in Lake Elsinore, which is about 45 miles northeast of San Diego -- the man apparently was handling explosives including, ah, triacetone triperoxide. The FBI is now involved in this. This is the same type of explosive that Najibulah Zazi is accused of trying to build. It is highly unstable and highly powerful. And remember those chemicals that Najibulah Zazi is accused of having? They're still missing. So now in San Diego, or just north of San Diego, someone blows up his hand, using similar chemicals in a powerful, highly unstable bomb. The FBI is now on it. We'll bring you more information on that as it comes in here to the Live Desk. This could be key.

Yep, they were hoping it would be part of their favorite new storyline about radical Islamists hiding out in American suburbs and preparing to strike with a fresh round of terrorist acts.

But then the next day, Jane Skinner had the follow-up on Happening Now: It had nothing to do with Najibullah Zazi or his terrorist cells. This was a project undertaken by a young white man, working out of the garage of his mother's place there in Lake Elsinore.

Oh, and his mother's place was a licensed day-care facility. So while Mom was taking care of a houseful of kids, Junior was in the garage whipping up a fresh batch of bombs. From the L.A. Times:

Benjamin Kuzelka allegedly was making an explosive device when it accidentally detonated about 11:30 p.m. Wednesday, deputies said. He suffered an injury to one hand. About 20 minutes later, deputies said, he showed up at a local hospital saying that he had accidentally shot himself with a gun.

"His injuries were inconsistent with a gunshot wound and doctors called the police," said Deputy Melissa Nieburger, a Sheriff's Department spokeswoman.

Deputies went to the Kuzelka home on a cul-de-sac in the 30500 block of Audelo Street. Property records list Rebecca Kuzelka as the sole owner of the house, which was built in 1983.

Inside the home, Nieburger said, deputies found materials used to make explosives, as well as a sophisticated indoor marijuana growing room.

Authorities did not say how many marijuana plants allegedly were found in the home or disclose the type of explosive materials that were uncovered. A law enforcement source told The Times that substances found at the home were similar to acetone peroxide, or TATP, the same type of powerful explosive used in the 2007 London subway terrorist bombings. There was no evidence that the Lake Elsinore incident was related to terrorism, the source said.

Nieburger said deputies had not determined how many children Rebecca Kuzelka cared for at her home. No children were present at the time of the explosion, authorities said.

And that wasn't all. According to a couple of local reports:

Nazi paraphenalia was also found inside the home.

Everyone's mum about the possibility that the explosives were connected to terrorist activity. But with that kind of background and given the nature of TATP manufacture -- it tends to be a project only for people serious about blowing things up -- that shouldn't be ruled out.

All of which puts some perspective on Gallagher's speculation of the day before. Yes, it was connected to terrorism -- just not the kind of terrorism he was thinking about.

Which likewise underscores the nature of the terrorist beast: He's not always a brown-skinned guy from another country. Sometimes he's the strange right-wing white family that lives next door. But then, Fox never concerns itself with that kind of terrorism.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Obama's Nobel makes wingnut heads explode. So why do right-wingers hate America?

-- by Dave

You all remember how the wingnuts exploded in joy at the news that Chicago had been denied its bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics. Rather typically, our RedState pal Erick Erickson crowed:

So much for improving America’s standing in the world, Barry O. Maybe now perhaps we can hope he will mature a bit on the issues of foreign affairs. But I doubt it.

Well, now their heads are exploding at the news that President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Here's what Erickson tweeted in response:



(Via ThinkProgress.)

Then there was Fox News. As you can see from the video above, it was like Scanners on steroids on Fox & Friends this morning, with Brian Kilmeade noting that this was the third honoree whose name was not George W. Bush. (Maybe those Swedes' "pure genes" got the better of them, eh?)

Even Michael Steele and the Republican National Committee got into the act:

“The real question Americans are asking is, ‘What has President Obama actually accomplished?’ It is unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights. One thing is certain – President Obama won’t be receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.”

Congratulations? Perish the thought!

Blue Texan at Firedoglake has a nice roundup from around the wingnutosphere.

Meanwhile, Media Matters has compiled a handy video of the early reaction:



Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Gun show dealers caught on video selling to people who tell them they'd fail a background check

-- by Dave

Right-wingers have been having fun in recent weeks with the ACORN "gotcha" videos supposedly showing community organizers indulging in illicit behavior. But they're about to discover that the undercover video can be a two-edged sword.

Over the past year, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been sending out private investigators to gun shows around the country, focusing on locales where NYPD and other local law enforcement are seeing guns arriving from. And what they showed was incredibly revealing.

It shows the dirty little secret that everyone who attends gun shows with any kind of discerning eye can tell you: There are a lot of illegitimate transactions taking place at them -- and particularly a lot of sales of guns to people who could never pass a background check.

The videos are now available for public viewing. We've provided a couple of them here, but go see the full set of them -- along with the accompanying report -- visit the NYC.gov website Gun Show Undercover.

There seems to be some confusion whether they're watching something illegal. They are. As the mayor's office explained in its press release:

Even though private unlicensed sellers are not required to run background checks using the FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check system, it is a federal felony for them to sell guns to people they have reason to believe are prohibited purchasers (such as felons or the mentally ill). In purchases attempted on 30 private sellers, the undercover investigator showed interest in buying a gun by asking about stopping power or by dry-firing the weapon. After agreeing on a price, the undercover would indicate that he probably couldn’t pass a background check. At that point, the seller is required by law to refuse the sale – but only 11 out of 30 sellers did so. Investigators found private dealers who failed these integrity tests at every show, including two sellers who failed at multiple shows. In total, 19 of the 30 private sellers approached failed the integrity test.

The 11 sellers who terminated the sale confirmed that private sellers know the law. As one seller in Columbus, Ohio, explained “I mean even as a private citizen, I’m kind of allowed a certain latitude, but once you say that [you can’t pass the background check], I’m kind of obligated not to….I think that’s what the rules are.”

The investigation also revealed that some private sellers are in fact apparently “engaged in the business” of selling firearms without a federal license, in violation of the law. For example, one seller sold to investigators at three different gun shows and acknowledged selling 348 assault rifles in less than one year.

So when you see characters like this, you're seeing the kind of people who willingly, knowingly, and intentionally flout the law because there's no way -- outside of investigations like this -- they'll ever get caught:

"I don't need your address."

"No background check?"

"Nothing. Just show me that you're from Ohio."

"That's good about the background check because I probably couldn’t pass one."

"I don't care. All's I got to do is demand you show me your license."

"You don’t care about the background check, right?"

"Nope. Nope. I wouldn't pass either, bud." [grin]

The NRA likes to claim that "the gun show loophole is a myth." These videos -- and the broader results of the investigation -- pretty definitively demonstrate that it does indeed exist.

Americans For Gun Safety has a complete rundown on the gun-show loophole and why it needs to be closed.

The NRA and its enablers will claim this is a radical-left agenda item. But the legislation to close this loophole is sponsored by those radical leftists John McCain and Joe Lieberman. The office conducting this investigation is the Republican New York Mayor's. That's some radical left agenda indeed.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Jonah Goldberg is a very sad case who thinks that ignoring an argument makes you smarter

That heavyweight intellectual, Jonah Goldberg, loves to tell his audiences that no one on the left took his masterpiece, Liberal Fascism, seriously -- they just made fun of it!

So this is how Goldberg responds to an actually serious critique.

Evidently, Goldberg thinks that ignoring a sound argument lets you declare victory over it.

Now, just to be clear: Goldberg has never responded to the core of my critique. He's tossed off side issues, but what I have said about Liberal Fascism from the get-go is that its central thesis -- that "properly understood, fascism is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left" -- simply does not have any grounding in, and is indeed refuted by, the actual historical facts about the "political space" which fascism historically occupied.

I laid it all out again not too long ago:

This is, in fact, the argument that Goldberg attempts to make in his book as well: That the fascists occupied the "political space" on the Left, and thus were simply out to compete against their fellow leftists. But this is where Goldberg most deeply portrays a lack of respect for the historical material available to him, because any careful study of the actual details of how the fascists came to power in both Italy and Germany makes abundantly clear that they were occupying the available political space on the right -- and had charged hard in that direction from early on in their drive to power.

I discussed this in some detail, citing particularly Robert O. Paxton's work in The Anatomy of Fascism. Paxton, for instance, debunks the fascists' ostensible "anticapitalism":

It turned out in practice that fascists' anticapitalism was highly selective. Even at their most radical, the socialism that the fascists wanted was a "national socialism": one that denied only foreign or enemy property rights (including that of internal enemies). They cherished national producers. Above all, it was by offering an effective remedy against socialist revolution that fascism turned out in practice to find a space. If Mussolini retained some lingering hopes in 1919 of founding an alternative socialism rather than an antisocialism, he was soon disabused of those notions by observing what worked and what didn't work in Italian politics. His dismal electoral results with a Left-nationalist program in Milan in November 1919 surely hammered that lesson home.

The pragmatic choices of Mussolini and Hitler were driven by their urge for success and power. Not all fascist leaders had such ambitions. Some of them preferred to keep their movements "pure," even at the cost of remaining marginal.

Paxton makes abundantly clear that the political space the fascists, in obtaining power, chose to occupy was clearly on the right. Goldberg, in contrast, insists that "fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all" because, he explains, fascism and communism "are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to dominate and control the same social space." He claims throughout the book and elsewhere that fascists didn't seek out their political space on the right -- rather, they were doing so on the left.

He actually addresses Paxton's characterization with what can most kindly be characterized as a lame rebuttal (p. 47):

In November the newly named explicitly left-wing Fascists ran a slate of candidates in the national elections. They got trounced at the hands of the Socialists. Most historians claim this is what taught Mussolini to move to the "right." Robert O. Paxton writes that Mussolini realized "there was no space in Italian politics for a party that was both nationalist and Left."

This, I think, distorts the picture. Mussolini did not move fascism from left to right; he moved it from socialist to populist.

Yet if Goldberg had actually bothered to read Paxton's account of how the move occurred -- or for that matter, any other historical account of these events -- he would know that the ideological shift by Mussolini had not even the remotest thing to do with populism. Rather, it all occurred in the defense of wealthy landowners and the established economic and cultural powers, and it entailed a wave of murderous violence against socialists, leftists, and any form of progressive.

From Paxton, pp. 60-64:

Above all Mussolini bested D'Annunzio by serving economic and social interests as well as nationalist sentiment. He made his Blackshirts available for action against socialists as well as against the South Slavs of Fiume and Trieste. War veterans had hated the socialists since 1915 for their "antinational" stance during the war. Big planters in the Po Valley, Tuscany, Apulia, and other regions of large estates hated and feared the socialists for their success at the end of the war in organizing the bracianti, or landless laborers, to press for higher wages and better working conditions. Squadrismo was the conjunction of these two hatreds.

Following their victory in the first postwar election (November 1919) the Italian socialists had used their new power in local government to establish de facto control over the agricultural wage-labor market. In the Po Valley in 1920, every farmer who needed workmen for planting or harvesting had to visit the socialist Labor Exchange. The Labor Exchanges made the most of their new leverage. They forced the farmers to hire workers year-round rather than only seasonally, and with better wages and working conditions. The farmers were financially squeezed. They had invested considerable sums in transforming Po Valley marshlands in cultivable farms; their cash crops earned little money in the difficult conditions of the Italian postwar economy. The socialist unions also undermined the farmers' personal status as masters of their domains.

Frightened and humiliated, the Po Valley landowners looked frantically for help. They did not find it in the Italian state. Local officials were either socialists themselves, or little inclined to do battle with them. Prime Minister Giolitti, a true practitioner of laissez-faire liberalism, declined to use national forces to break strikes. The big farmers felt abandoned by the Italian liberal state.

In the absence of help from the public authorities, the large landowners of the Po Valley turned to the Blackshirts for protection. Glad for an excuse to attack their old pacifist enemies, fascist squadristi invaded the city hall in Bologna, where socialist officials had hung up a red banner, on November 21, 1920. Six were killed. From there, the movement quickly spread through the rich agricultural country in the lower Po River delta. Black-shirted squadristi mounted nightly expeditions to sack and burn Labor Exchanges and local socialist offices, and beat and intimidate socialist organizers. Their favorite forms of humiliation were administering uncontainable doses of castor oil and shaving off half of a proud Latin moustache. In the first six months of 1921, the squads destroyed 17 newspapers and printing works, 59 Peoples' Houses (socialist headquarters), 119 Chambers of Labor (socialist employment offices), 107 cooperatives, 83 Peasants' Leagues, 151 socialist clubs, and 151 cultural organizations. Between January 1 and April 7, 1921, 102 people were killed: 25 fascists, 41 socialists, 20 police, and 16 others.

... Long after his regime had settled into routine, Mussolini still liked to refer to the "Fascist revolution." But he meant a revolution against socialism and flabby liberalism, a new way of uniting and motivating Italians, and a new kind of governmental authority capable of subordinating private liberties to the needs of the national community and of organizing mass assent while leaving property intact. The major point is that the Fascist movement was reshaped in the process of growing into the available space. The antisocialism already present in the initial movement became central, and many antibourgeois idealists left or were pushed out. The radical anticapitalist idealism of early Fascism was watered down, and we must not let its conspicuous presence in early texts confuse us about what Fascism later became in action.

Paxton, p. 83:

The Italian Fascist Party, having discovered that in its first identity as a Left-nationalist movement the space it coveted was already occupied by the Left, underwent the necessary transformations to become a local power in the Po Valley. The Nazi Party broadened its appeal after 1928 to court farmers desperate over going broke and losing their farms. Both Mussolini and Hitler could perceive the space available, and were willing to trim their movements to fit.

The space was partly symbolic. The Nazi Party early shaped its identity by staking a claim to the street and fought with communist gangs for control of working-class neighborhoods of Berlin. At issue was not merely a few meters of urban "turf." The Nazis sought to portray themselves as the most vigorous and effective force against the communists -- and, at the same time, to portray the liberal state as incapable of preserving public security. The communists, at the same time, were showing that the Social Democrats were unequipped to deal with an incipient revolutionary situation that needed a fighting vanguard. Polarization was in the interest of both.

Fascist violence was neither random nor indiscriminate. It carried a well-calculated set of coded messages: that communist violence was rising, that the democratic state was responding to it ineptly, and that only the fascists were tough enough to save the nation from antinational terrorists. An essential step in the fascist march to acceptance and power was to persuade law-and-order conservatives and members of the middle class to tolerate fascist violence as a harsh necessity in the face of Left provocation. It helped, of course, that many ordinary citizens never feared fascist violence against themselves, because they were reassured that it was reserved for national enemies and "terrorists" who deserved it.

The path to power for both Italian Fascists and German Nazis was essentially the same: They presented themselves as "revolutionary socialists" in their initial appeals but, finding the political space for such a movement already well occupied on the left by socialists and communists, shifted their appeals and their alliances to the right and center, particularly with business capitalists who financed them, sponsored their activities, and essentially contracted with them to engage in systematic violence against the Left. For the Nazis, Fritz Thyssen, head of the nation's largest steel producer, was only the most prominent example of business capitalists who funneled money to the Nazis both as they rose to power and once they gained it.

Now, going simply from Goldberg's own inadequate definition above -- which stipulates that the Right is "respectful of religion and tradition" (in fact, a more accurate definition would stipulate that the Right "ardently defends traditional values, mores, and institutions") -- the fascists in their rise to power clearly fit the definition of being "a phenomenon of the Right" -- and not the Left.

Of course, we can also rest assured that Goldberg will never even noddingly acknowledge that the chief leg of his argument has in fact been thoroughly knocked down. Because who knows how that might affect book sales.

Now, if you look at Goldberg's actual responses to my critiques -- you can see them here, here, here and here -- you will find that he has not even attempted to address these issues. Instead, he's chosen to indulge side issues (was the Klan proto-fascist? Actually, it was.), including a feeble attack on my own work on fascism that did not address a single point that I had raised in my critique. My final smackdown of this nonsense can be read here. Jonah has never responded to it nor acknowledged it.

So Goldberg thinks he can sneer his way around historical fact with clever putdowns. Well, we'll see about that. There's more coming down the pike from serious historians who are finally ready to take seriously the toxic effects of Goldberg's fraud. We'll have more info on that soon, I hope.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Sean Hannity's scalp-hunting desperation descends into fabricating NAMBLA connections to Jennings

-- by Dave

Sean Hannity still wants Kevin Jennings' scalp so he can keep up with Glenn Beck.

But since his smear has been debunked about as thoroughly as a right-wing smear job ever can be, he's getting a bit, ah, desperate.

Last night he not only was still clinging desperately to the false notion that Jennings should have reported a teenager's sexual affair to authorities, but he came up with a new line of attack -- borrowed directly from the fine fools at Powerline -- claiming that Jennings, in "a 1977 speech," had praised "one of the founders of NAMBLA," a gay-rights pioneer named Harry Hay. Hannity calls him a "big supporter of NAMBLA."

As usual, the fine researchers at Media Matters have the whole story:

Power Line's Hinderaker cited Jennings' speech, NAMBLA. In an October 1 post, Power Line's John Hinderaker noted Jennings' 1997 speech and wrote: "Obama nominee Kevin Jennings actually said that the founder of NAMBLA -- the North American Man-Boy Love Association -- Harry Hay, is '[o]ne of the people that's always inspired me,' " ... Hinderaker's claim that Hay founded NAMBLA is false. As the Associated Press noted in 2002, Hay "in 1950 founded the secret network of support groups for gays known as the Mattachine Society." Hay wrote in the Gay Community News (retrieved from Nexis) in 1994, "I am not a member of NAMBLA, nor would it ever have been my inclination to be one."

Moreover, as the piece explains, Jennings' speech was part of a eulogy to Hay upon the occasion of his death, and specifically praised him for his work in the 1950s in organizing gay activists -- not for any of his later views.

Hannity must really be looking over his shoulder these days to be getting this desperate. Hey Sean, how are those ratings looking these days?


Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Gee, we wonder why Glenn Beck is so touchy about examinations of his past

-- by Dave

Glenn Beck seems to be irked at the people digging into his past. But then, that's because his past is truly a disgusting thing to behold. I wouldn't want people looking at it either, if mine were anything remotely like Beck's.

He ranted about it last night on his Fox News show. He thinks we should be paying more attention to his phony "scandals" than to just what kind of character we're watching implore us to seek greater moral goods (as he sees them) every night.

He's no doubt thinking of Alexander Zaitchik's impressive three part series in Salon, the first of which does indeed point out that his mother's death remains a mystery -- and that Beck's own later assertion that it was a suicide was a peculiar event.

It was an incredibly revealing series -- particularly this nugget from the second part, describing Beck's antics when he had a falling out with a former radio-show partner named Bruce Kelly, who became a competitor in the Phoenix market. Beck was known as "the king of dirty tricks," including an invasion of Kelly's wedding.

The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

You have to wonder if Kelly contemplated returning the favor when Beck's second daughter was born with cerebral palsy.

But then, he'd have been forced to sink to the level of Glenn Beck to have done something like that.


Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

'Is Conservatism Brain Dead?' If Jonah and Glenn are the best they've got, the answer is yes

-- by Dave

Steven Hayward asked a key question this weekend: "Is Conservatism Brain Dead?" The key paragraph was this:

About the only recent successful title that harkens back to the older intellectual style is Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism," which argues that modern liberalism has much more in common with European fascism than conservatism has ever had. But because it deployed the incendiary f-word, the book was perceived as a mood-of-the-moment populist work, even though I predict that it will have a long shelf life as a serious work. Had Goldberg called the book "Aspects of Illiberal Policymaking: 1914 to the Present," it might have been received differently by its critics. And sold about 200 copies.

There's one little problem with this: The entire thesis of Goldberg's book is a fraud. Goldberg not only deployed the F-word, he built the entire book on a false, historically untenable, claim: that "fascism, properly understood," is not a right-wing phenomenon but a left-wing one.

Indeed, the spread of Goldberg's thesis into conventional wisdom on the right is one of the main drivers in the transformation of conservatism into a pack of mouth-foaming pseudo-populists:

One of the most persistent components of this is the right's ardent embrace of the fraudulent thesis of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism -- to wit, that "properly understood, fascism is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left." The embrace of this fraud as somehow truthful has produced those teabaggers' signs bearing swastikas (suggesting that health-care reform is fascist) and signs showing Barack Obama as Hitler and, moreover, the claims that Obama is marching the nation down the road to fascism.

It's been particularly embraced by movement conservatives in their efforts to whitewash from public view the existence of right-wing extremists among their ranks.

The impact of this embrace on our national discourse has been deeper than probably anyone suspected when the book was first published last year. Not only is Goldberg's thesis now taken as an article of faith by such right-wing talkers as Rush Limbaugh (who probably helped inspire Goldberg's thesis in any event), Glenn Beck, Michael Savage,, but also among the teabagging protesters whose ranks are increasingly filled by real right-wing extremists.

What's most noteworthy, perhaps, is that Goldberg's thesis is being used to attack anyone who points out the frequently violent and intimidating behavior of these extremists. It's not the right-wing protesters carrying open weapons, Obama=Hitler signs, and openly disrupting the discussion of health-care reform at town-hall sessions who are behaving like Brownshirts, they insist -- it's the liberals who show enough nerve to stand up to them!

You can trace a lot of the popularization of Goldberg's thesis to Beck's open promotion of it, as in the video above from earlier this year. And when you're talking about brain-dead conservatives, Beck is safely Subject No. 1.

Oddly enough, though, Hayward then goes on to suggest that perhaps Beck himself is the chief hope for ending conservatism's intellectual drought. Oy.

If Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck are the leading intellectual lights of this generation of conservatives, there can be no other answer to Hayward's question than an affirmative one.

[H/t to Mitch.]

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Glenn Beck's sobbing secrets revealed: A little Vicks Vaporub gets the tears flowing

-- by Dave

[media=10144 embeddl]

[YouTube here, via MisterMovies.]

This was too funny to pass up. We've known all along that Glenn Beck is a two-bit phony. Now we see how Glenn Beck gets himself properly weepy for the cameras: A little Vicks Vaporub.

One might dismiss this as merely a one-off for this shoot. But you can hear Beck himself say:

Beck: I think it's getting used to it -- my eyes are getting used to it.

From regular and continuous use, mayhaps?

The whole scene reminds us that Beck practices his schtick over and over before he performs. Which means he's gotten real good at working up those tears and choking up to say, "I love my country -- but I fear for it!"

This may be what Sen. Lindsey Graham had in mind the other day:



Via Sam Stein:

"Only in America can you make that much money crying," Graham said of Beck. "Glenn Beck is not aligned with any party. He is aligned with cynicism and there has always been a market for cynics. But we became a great nation not because we are a nation of cynics. We became a great nation because we are a nation of believers."

In other Beck news:

-- Media Matters has an excellent followup to the Salon piece about Beck's disciplehood at the feet of W. Cleon Skousen -- which in turn illustrated Beck's long history of promoting extremist beliefs -- pointing out that Skousen was not exactly what you would call ... enlightened on matters of race:

Fox News' Glenn Beck has heavily promoted the writings of far-right activist W. Cleon Skousen, even making Skousen's book, The 5000 Year Leap, a central part of his 9-12 Project. Skousen is the author of several controversial works, including The Making of America: The Substance and Meaning of the Constitution, which presented as "the story of slavery in America" a passage from a book that attacked abolitionists for delaying emancipation; cast slave owners as "the worst victims of the system"; claimed white schoolchildren "were likely to envy the freedom of their colored playmates"; and claimed that "[s]lavery did not make white labor unrespectable, but merely inefficient," because "the slave had a deliberateness of motion which no amount of supervision could quicken."

This continues to remind me of last week's interview with Katie Couric, when he refused to explain what he meant by white culture.



[Via ThinkProgress.]

-- Beck is having a little difficulty dealing with Internet memes. Especially when dealing with charges that, by golly, we haven't been able to disprove yet!

-- Finally, has anyone else noticed that, on the cover of his new book, Beck looks exactly like the illegitimate love child of Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz? Just wondering.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Saying what needs saying: Fox News is not a news entity, it's a political creature

-- by Dave

I hadn't seen Eric Burns, the president of Media Matters, on TV previously, but he appeared on Countdown with David Shuster yesterday, and finally said what has needed saying for some time:

Fox News is not a news source. It's a political propaganda operation. And it needs to be treated that way.

Shuster and Burns were launching off Fox's most ludicrous recent endeavor to smear the Obama administration, by using videos of schoolchildren to charge that Obama wants to "indoctrinate" them. As they discuss, this is so hypocritical and absurd that it's hard to believe anyone actually is buying it:

SHUSTER: So explain to me, why is it indoctrination when kids sing about President Obama, but it's patriotism when kids sing about President Bush and FEMA?

BURNS: Well, David, it's not indoctrination to anybody except Karl Rove, Josh Bolten, Roger Ailes -- the rest of the Bush administration in exile over at Fox News, because they are trying to push a political agenda. And they're trying to destroy this administration, and they'll use any means necessary to do it.

And just to give you a little example of this, James O'Keefe, who is the author of one of the suspect ACORN videos that there have been a lot of questions surrounding, told Chris Wallace recently on Fox News that he was employing tactics that would, quote, "destroy his political enemies." So that's what this is about.

There's nothing abnormal about folks talking and children learning about their president and learning to be -- learning about their democracy through talking about the president. I did it when I was a kid.

Then they got to what this is really all about:

SHUSTER: And is that the general theme here with the right-wing media, I mean, undermining the president by manufacturing controversies, because many of the actual Obama policies are favored by the majority of Americans?

BURNS: Absolutely. We've seen it day after day. You know, Glenn Beck is the smearer in chief over at Fox News. And we see new charts, you know, documenting some new vast conspiracy theory every day, new attacks, and it's a constant barrage.

And I'll tell you, this right-wing noise machine has been ginned up. It's never been more ferocious, and their goal is simple -- as Rush Limbaugh stated at the beginning of the year -- they want Obama to fail. Roger Ailes said that this is the Alamo for conservatives and that Fox is the voice of the opposition.

So, this is no longer a news organization. This is a political organization, and their aim is to destroy a progressive policy agenda. They'd rather win in the ballot box than see any sort of real debate on health care. It's a real shame.

Every liberal who even considers going on Fox to act as props for their propaganda machine should stop and think again.

Moreover, every consumer of the news -- conservative, centrist, or liberal -- needs to understand that Fox is not a reliable source of information.

Mainstream media in general have become less reliable, but most of them strive to be factually accurate, even if they skew ideologically somewhat. But this skew has more to do with framing and news selection than the actual reporting.

This is not the case at Fox. It deliberately broadcasts falsehoods and fake information to serve its ideological agenda.

No doubt this makes the Kool-Aid drinkers of the right happy. But for anyone else -- particularly anyone who relies on accurate information for their business or occupation or the livelihoods -- Fox News is a wasteland or outright disinformation that anyone with smidgen of intelligence will avoid.

We need more people like Eric Burns making this point.


Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Lyin' Glenn Beck fabricates "bombs" to smear the Left

-- by Dave

Yes, Virginia, Glenn Beck lies.

Like a rug.

Last weekend at the Beck rally in Seattle, one of his supporters (you can see him in the video) was upset that one of the protesters carried a sign proclaiming, "Glenn Beck Lies". He wanted to know when Beck had ever lied.

Answer: Oh, about nightly.

Case in point: His program Tuesday night.

In his opening rant, Beck talked about his Seattle appearances, and opened up by pointing out that there were only "about 40" protesters outside his Safeco Field shindig. And this was true. But what Beck didn't bother to explain to his viewers was that up in Mount Vernon, at his main event, there were more than 500 who showed up to protest him.

Then he said this:

Beck: Now they're worried about bombings taking place. Well, let me show you some new footage. A bombing did take place this past week in a town just north of Seattle called Everett. The only reason why I know this story is 'cause I was there. Radio station KRKO, their towers were blown up. When freedom of speech is being squelched, the left usually says, "That's fascist!" But in this case the left doesn't even call them anything!

But in reality, there were no bombs in this incident at all. All Beck and his staff had to do was read the actual news reports -- you know, the same ones from which they obtained their ELF quote:

"What they used was a machine called an excavator, it has a front arm off the front end of the machine. They stole it out of the yard," Andy Skotdal, president and general manager of KRKO. "They went and attached it to the tower and pushed one of them over and pulled the other one down."

Moreover, the vandalism had nothing to do with "free speech" and everything to do with the towers being a public nuisance:

The towers have been at the center of controversy for years. There are four towers currently at the location and there have been plans to build two more towers. Opponents have claimed that AM radio waves can harm people and wildlife.

More recently, nearby residents claim radio signals coming over home phone and intercom lines have increased since KRKO recently boosted its broadcasting power.

Just to be clear: Eco-terrorism, even without bombs, is a despicable act that deserves to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The people who brought these towers down need to be caught and jailed.

But the threat they pose, at least so far, is strictly to property, not to people. The same cannot be said of the right-wing extremists who Beck is calling out of the woodwork now.

Someone needs to ask Beck: When, exactly, was the last time a left-wing activist walked into a church or a museum and opened fire with a gun? When was the last time an eco-terrorist gunned down police officers because he feared the President and his New World Order were trying to take his guns away?

Because just in the past year alone, there have been five such incidents involving right-wing extremists. Nancy Pelosi is right to be concerned about the potential for extremist violence from the right -- because it's already happening. And when we talk about right-wing violence, we're not talking about damage to property or facilities -- we're talking about terrorists who kill people.

Moreover, we can thank Glenn Beck for his share of fomenting it.

This wasn't the only case of Beck lying on Fox last night. He also went on The O'Reilly Factor and lied about the size of the crowds that came out to protest him:



You'll note he repeats the bit about how "only 40" showed up to protest him in Seattle. But then he claims that there were "about 400" among both the anti-Beck and the pro-Beck protesters in Mount Vernon.

That's simply a baldfaced falsehood. I was there, and can tell you that the anti-Beck protesters outnumbered the pro-Beck side by about a three-to-one margin. By my count, there were about 600 anti-Beck marchers, and less than 200 who supported.

I also asked people where they were from. I couldn't find a single pro-Beck protester who was actually from Mount Vernon; most of them came from the Seattle area, particularly from the Eastside suburbs. Most of the anti-Beck protesters came from Skagit and Island counties.

And yes, there was a single busful of protesters who arrived, though there was no indication they were brought in by SEIU, as Beck claimed. Rather, these were farm workers who came down from the nearby town of Linden, a conservative farming community a little to the north, in Whatcom County.

The way Beck described it to O'Reilly, SEIU was busing in inner-city protesters to Mount Vernon. But there were no such creatures there. Again, Beck lied. It's what he does -- practically every time he opens his mouth.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Lou Dobbs doubles down on gun paranoia by claiming Sunstein will be 'gun czar'

-- by Dave

From the very moment he was elected, right-wingers have been waiting, hoping, and watching anxiously for President Obama to take some kind of action -- any kind of action -- relating to guns. Just so they can start screaming, "He's trying to take away our guns!!!! Lock and load!!! Molon labe!!!"

Of course, he's done nothing. Nada. Zippo.

Which means they're now forced to just make stuff up.

This is never a problem for the paranoid, gun-toting right anyway. It's what they do.

Lou Dobbs was out leading the parade last night:

DOBBS: A record 1 million background checks on gun sales were completed by the FBI in the month of August alone. Those numbers show that gun owners are increasingly concerned that the Obama administration is on a mission to restrict Second Amendment rights in this country.

Supporters of those rights gathered in St. Louis over this weekend to fight attempts to strip Americans of their right to keep and to bear arms. Bill Tucker with our report.

And what exactly is the source of that fear? Um, well ...

TUCKER: Ask them why, and they recall the words of Attorney General Eric Holder on the need to ban assault weapons to help reduce drug violence in Mexico.

They point to the president's regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein, who personally is not just opposed to hunting, but said back in 2007 it should be banned. Or they will point to the president's consistent voting record for gun control, both in the Senate and back in Illinois.

Nor do these gun rights enthusiasts trust the newest Supreme Court justice, who in her only ruling on gun rights said the Second Amendment could only be applied to the federal government.

Hmmm. This sounds like almost exactly the same charges the NRA has been peddling since January, and yet the Obama administration has not acted on guns in any fashion.

The only new thing is the bit about Cass Sunstein, the demonization of whom began with Glenn Beck and has now spread to Dobbs' show. Dobbs and Tucker delve this in more detail:

TUCKER: All of them, of course, united under the banner of securing their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. For his part, the president does say he respects the constitutional right and promised that he will "protect the rights of hunters and other law- abiding Americans to purchase, own, and transport, and use guns."

But gun activists remain skeptical -- Lou?

DOBBS: I mean, the attorney general, Eric Holder, has said "They just want to do a few things with the Second Amendment." And the czar here, Cass Sunstein -- I mean, what's his deal?

TUCKER: He's a vegetarian, and he believes that hunting ought to be banned.

DOBBS: So, he's not big on hunting.

TUCKER: He's not big on hunting at all. But he has openly supported the right of animals to sue. He believes animals ought to have rights...

DOBBS: I'm sorry, repeat that again?

TUCKER: He believes animals should have rights, which would include the right to sue if they have been mistreated.

DOBBS: If they were hunted.

TUCKER: Or I guess hunted.

DOBBS: If they were hunted -- really?

TUCKER: I can't explain it, Lou, I'm just telling you.

DOBBS: I just think we should let this sort of percolate, because, presumably, the president knows this man, knows who he put there...

TUCKER: Yes.

DOBBS: ... as the regulatory czar over guns. That's truly, truly interesting.

Thank you very much, Bill Tucker.

TUCKER: You're welcome.

Cass Sunstein, the regulatory czar over guns? Not exactly. And by "not exactly," we mean, "not even remotely related to the truth."

Sunstein has been nominated to head up the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, whose role it is to review draft regulations under Executive Order 12866; additionally, "OIRA reviews collections of information under the Paperwork Reduction Act, and also develops and oversees the implementation of government-wide policies in the areas of information technology, information policy, privacy, and statistical policy."

Guns are nowhere near this picture, except hypothetically (it would be possible, as a matter of conjecture, that Sunstein's office would review the efficacy of proposed gun regs coming out of the ATF). And that's it. That's the entire "connection" here.

But hey, don't worry, Lou. When the next Richard Poplawski kills three cops because he was afraid Obama was gonna take his guns away, we'll know who to thank.



Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Dave on 'Countdown': Did Clinton have it worse than Obama?

-- by Dave

I went on Countdown last night to chat with Lawrence O'Donnell -- who was filling in for Keith Olbermann -- about Bill Clinton's remarks the other day about the never-ending bloodlust of the "vast right-wing conspiracy".

O'Donnell was critical of Clinton for suggesting that the power of the conspiracy was less today than what he faced -- and regarding that aspect of Clinton's remarks, I agree with him. The reality, as I explained in the segment, is that the spread and reach of the really virulent wingnuttery that plagued Clinton -- the black-helicopter conspiracy theories like Mena, or the Vince Foster suicide, or the Clinton Body Count -- was largely relegated, until later in his tenure, to the fringes of the militia movement.

Obama, by contrast, is not even through his first year as president and he's already being plagued by Birthers and Tenthers and Teabaggers and Death Panels (along with, of course, the obligatory "He's Going To Grab Our Guns" conspiracies).

And it's true, moreover, the Clinton is right that the country has changed demographically since he was president, which means they do not possess the actual political power they held during much of his tenure. But they've made up for the lack of power with a much deeper reach into the mainstream. I dunno about you, but it sure looks to me like the Teabaggers are the new Patriots -- and there's a hell of a lot more of them.

Perhaps more to the point, they've already demonstrated -- by at least temporarily derailing the debate over health-care reform with wingnutty distractions like the "death panels" and the gun-brandishing nutcases showing up at health-care town hall forums -- that they continue to have an outsize influence on the national discourse. Especially because of Fox News and the rest of the mainstream media's willingness to be bullied by them -- led, as always, by the wise media poobahs of the Beltway Village.

That is -- and you can file this under the L'esprit de l'escalier Dept., since I meant to say it in this segment -- what they lack in power they've more than made up for by continuing to pull the media reins and shape the national discourse. They're able to move the media needles still -- which is, of course, the problem. The Village gives movement conservatives far more respect than they deserve, especially at this juncture, with the movement fully in the hands of nutty populist demagogues.

Glenn Beck is as popular as he is because everyone in the "mainstream" is too busy running fawning puff pieces to point out his actual extremism. No one has the guts to explain that these people are driving the Republicans over a cliff into political oblivion.

In The Eliminationists, I do talk a lot about how vicious the campaign against Clinton got to be -- and how many bridges and alliances were built between the far right and mainstream conservatives during those years as a result, particularly in the way right-wing talkers started picking up and transmitting memes from the far right.

Finally, I should add that, while I disagree with Clinton on this point, I generally agreed with the overall thrust of his recent comments, particularly his warning that the "conspiracy" (as it were) remains a potent force, capable of undermining Obama's presidency in unexpected ways. One can't help but suspect that Obama has been naive on this front -- how many times does he have to reach out to Republicans and come back with a chewed-up hand to get it? -- and I suspect Clinton intended to point out the cold reality. To which I can only add: Hear! Hear!


Cross-posted at Crooks and LiarsM.

Why does Fox insist on calling human beings 'illegals'?

-- by Dave Fox News' morning crews -- both Fox and Friends and the regular newsroom -- were going ape about the Moonie Times' report on the pushback by liberal Democrats on including undocumented immigrants in the current health-care reform effort:

Fearful that they're losing ground on immigration and health care, a group of House Democrats is pushing back and arguing that any health care bill should extend to all legal immigrants and allow illegal immigrants some access. The Democrats, trying to stiffen their party's spines on the contentious issue, say it's unfair to bar illegal immigrants from paying their own way in a government-sponsored exchange. Legal immigrants, they say, regardless of how long they've been in the United States, should be able to get government-subsidized health care if they meet the other eligibility requirements. "Legal permanent residents should be able to purchase their plans, and they should also be eligible for subsidies if they need it. Undocumented, if they can afford it, should be able to buy their own private plans. It keeps them out of the emergency room," said Rep. Michael M. Honda, California Democrat and chairman of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.

Of course, this really is only common sense, especially from a public-health perspective; do we really want people not getting treated for contagious diseases simply because they can't prove they're here legally? However, as sensible as it may be, these efforts realistically have little chance of succeeding, given the toxic political environment about immigration and health-care reform that's been floating about us ever since Joe Wilson shouted out, "You lie!" Nonetheless, this set wingnut gums a-flapping about the horrid prospect of actually using taxpayer dollars for something they're already required by law to pay for anyway. And the folks at Fox were all over this angle. Notably, they kept referring to these immigrants as "illegals". Illegals, illegals, illegals -- it was running on the chryon and out of their mouths. There's a reason the National Association of Hispanic Journalists urges their colleagues to avoid dehumanizing terms like "illegals":

The term criminalizes the person rather than the actual act of illegally entering or residing in the United States without federal documents. Terms such as illegal alien or illegal immigrant can often be used pejoratively in common parlance and can pack a powerful emotional wallop for those on the receiving end.

Moreover, as Eric Haas at the Rockridge Institute points out, it's a grossly misleading phrase -- and one that reveals a powerful xenophobia:

But the phrase "illegal immigrant" is misleading. There's a grain of truth, but the emphasis is only selectively applied -- it's misapplied -- we don't call speeders "illegal drivers" or people who jaywalk "illegals." And that selective application to immigrants is harmful.

Most people don't understand that "illegal immigration" is in fact only a civil misdemeanor -- which, as legal infractions go, places it on the same scale as speeding or illegal parking. Instead, we've managed to work it up in our minds that being undocumented in the United States is a big-time crime, and thus the undocumented are criminals. Thus we get Rep. Steve King saying this in response to the Democrats' common-sense efforts:

"If anybody can, with a straight face, advocate that we should provide health insurance for people who broke into our country, broke our law and for the most part are criminals, I don't know where they ever would draw the line," he said.

I wonder if Steve King has ever exceeded the speed limit while driving on the freeway. Because, applying his own logic, he would himself also be "a criminal." Moreover, nearly half of the undocumented workers in this country didn't "break into" the country -- they came here on legal visas that then expired, and they simply didn't leave. Calling them "illegals" and "illegal immigrants" is a noxiously dehumanizing habit -- one that only encourages hatefulness and violence against Latinos. It would always help, as Marisa Trevino at Latina Lista points out, if President Obama himself would stop using it. Because the logic of "illegals" eventually leads to a mindset like that noted by Albor Ruiz at the New York Daily News, describing the kind of commentary that usually accompanies discussions of immigration:

"Save the taxpayers of this country a great deal of money and kill them [the undocumented immigrants] on the spot, along with those who think [they] deserve anything better," he said as a reaction to "Immigration's self-deportation program is a real government gem," a column that ran in this space on Aug. 6. Ironically, the writer used the case of an illegal immigrant who committed murder in Texas to justify calling - patriotically, I guess - for a much more horrible crime, an "ethnic cleansing" of sorts against all immigrants and - why stop there? - thousands of people "who think these pieces of (I'll spare the reader the disgusting epithet) deserve anything better." If this guy and others like him had their choice, I and others like me would be well advised to "go back to where we came from." Or else.

That, of course, is classic eliminationism. It underlies the use of "illegals." And that alone is reason for major-network TV anchors to stop using it. Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Question of the day for Glenn Beck fans in Seattle: Does President Obama hate white people?

-- by Dave

[media=10072 embeddl]

I have to give Max Blumenthal, who I had the pleasure of hosting here in Seattle this past week, credit for coming up with the ideal question to ask the fans of Glenn Beck who showed up Saturday in the Seattle area to root for their favorite right-wing fearmonger:

Do you think President Obama hates white people?

The first person I asked was Sean Salazar, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate -- he wants to take on Sen. Patty Murray, and so far appears to be leading the GOP field -- standing outside Safeco Field, where Beck's Seattle event was held.

Salazar, as you can see, hedged and stammered and then quickly found someone else to talk to. But he typified the response in Seattle: "When did Glenn Beck say that? Really? He said that? Well, I need to see the context." One woman said that "Beck explained that," but I pointed out to her that all he said was that he was sorry how it was worded, but that it's still a "serious" question Americans need to be asking. So I was asking them.

I also asked the man who was carrying the big sign making fun of Beck. He pointed out how white the crowd was. And it was true, particularly inside the stadium (more on that shortly). Eventually, I did manage to find an African-American man who was outside gathering signatures on behalf of Ron Paul's "Campaign for Liberty." He said he wasn't going in to see Beck.

Finally, right at the end, I did encounter one honest soul. As you can see.

I met many, many more of these folks at the Beck rally in Mount Vernon later that afternoon and into the evening. Unfortunately, I didn't manage to capture most of them on video (a camera burp) -- just one couple towards the end of the evening. But I had at least five different people at Mount Vernon, supporters of Beck's, tell me they firmly believed Obama was a racist who hated white people.



The scene at Mount Vernon was radically different from the one in Seattle. Outside Safeco, there were only 30 or so anti-Beck protesters. Everyone evidently saved their energies for Mount Vernon, where the mayor, a Republican named Bud Norris, unwisely decided to give the hometown-boy-gone-bigtime the keys to the city.

Locals chanted: "Change the locks! Change the locks!" And there were hundreds of them; the crowd estimate was at about a thousand, including several hundred pro-Beck counter-protesters. Those were the folks I talked to the most, and the toxic Obama-hatred was far stronger among this group than it was with the attendees in Seattle.

Fortunately, they were badly outnumbered.

And they were also, it need be said, uniformly white. The only whiter bunch I saw all day was the reported 7,000 who paid to hear Beck speak at Safeco (actually, it was Beck who reported that number, which makes it dubious on its face).

The only nonwhite face I saw inside at Safeco was that of the actor James McEachin, who was there to open up the event with a stirring tribute to veterans. Which was a big part of the whole spiel -- a Beckian appeal to the virtues of wrapping one's self in the flag and imputing unpatriotic motives to your opponents.

It was actually a pretty tedious affair, including Beck's speech, which really was just a kind of standard Beckian thesis bashing progressives and "big government" and touting the virtue of "real Americans" like the folks gathered that day. Real white Americans, that is. The ones President Obama hates.



The best part was getting to watch Beck pull his weeping schtick. You can watch him getting himself all worked up to do the choked-up thing, because, you know, he just loves him some real Westerners who made it over the mountains. Sniffle. He pulled the choke-up routine a couple times later in the talk too.

Wonder if he gets all choked up thinking about those "real Americans" who now agree with him that the President of the United States is a radical black who hates white people.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

'Indoctrinating' children? There go conservatives, projecting again

-- by Dave

Without a doubt the silliest "scandal" raised by right-wingers in many weeks has been the foofara over the supposed video showing schoolkids being "indoctrinated" with pro-Obama "propaganda" -- which is, of course, actually an innocuous video of a class of schoolkids singing as part of a Black History Month program.

The silliness would be funny, in fact, if the right-wing media's (particularly Fox's) coverage hadn't inspired death threats, whose existence were quickly airbrushed out of Fox News accounts.

But evidently these people weren't around during the Reagan or Bush years, when such encomia to the sitting president were fairly common. Indeed, as Blue Texan pointed out, they even named schools after Bush when he was president.

And you want to talk about indoctrination? How about the Texas schoolchildren whose curricula have now been revised to be explicitly creationist and anti-evolutionist?

Mike Stark brought this up on MSNBC Thursday, debating the issue with Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner, who was more interested in playing "gotcha" with Stark than actually, you know, discussing the issue. Like all good Republicans. This, of course, was because he really didn't have a good answer.



Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.