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Monthly Archives: July 2009

And the Morons Shall Inherit the Earth

“Of course we could make things more challenging, Lisa.  But then the stupider students would be in here complaining, furrowing their brows in a vain attempt to understand the situation.” – Principal Skinner

Note: The posts for today and Sunday are a two part review of Charles Pierce’s “Idiot America” and David Neiwert’s “The Eliminationists”.  The two books are very different, but there’s enough overlap that a two part review made more sense than two completely distinct posts.  Today is more “Idiot America” and Sunday is more “The Eliminationists”, but there’s discussion of both books in each post.

One of the most profound and, after the last Administration, indisputably destructive elements of American politics the past few decades has been the gradual devolution of the Republican Party from a conservative one into a hard right one.  This did not happen overnight, nor was it inevitable, but it did happen.  One of the results of this transformation was an absurdity that Charles Pierce describes near the end of Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.  At a Republican primary debate in New Hampshire one third of the nine men on stage said that they did not “believe” in the Theory of Evolution.  Pierce describes this patently insane scene with typically wry prose, “However, since admitting that you don’t believe in evolution is tantamount to admitting that you plan to eradicate the national debt by spinning straw into gold, it should have disqualified the lot of them.  In fact, it should give people pause about the entire Republican party that a third of its presidential field was willing to admit that their view of the life sciences had stalled in the 1840s.”  One of the three was Mike Huckabee, who would eventually finish second to John McCain.

How did we reach this bizarro state of affairs?  Dave Neiwert has a pretty simple theory and, helpfully, it’s right in his subtitle, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right.  Neiwert documents, with painstaking detail, how positions that used to occupy the far right of American political discourse, epitomized in the John Birch Society, came instead to dominate the highest levels of the Republican Party.  It was a gradual process, one that could’ve been checked at any time had the elites of the Republican Party been willing to stand up and say “No” to the most radical of their supporters.  But they weren’t willing to do that, the votes were needed and the money was too good.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

That both men have the word “How” in their subtitles is not a coincidence.  They are both trying to explain how radical, almost revolutionary, right wing positions, which have long been a part of America, came to be so acceptable, so mainstream.  Both were born in the 1950s and so they have seen this transformation first hand.  Neither is happy about it, and nor should they be.  Of the two, Neiwert has dug deeper, and as a result has the confidence to explicitly state the conclusion to which Pierce only alludes.

Which is not to say that Pierce has written a bad book.  He has written an excellent book (it’s the book Rick Shenkman could’ve written if he’d been more enamored of his research than his ego).  In fact there is one element where Pierce’s far surpasses Neiwert’s and that is in humor.  Idiot America is genuinely funny (laugh out loud in a few places), and it treats right wing absurdities with the caustic scorn they deserve.  Pierce begins with the eminently mockable Creation Museum in Kentucky, here and perhaps only here, you can see a dinosaur with a saddle.  Why does the dinosaur have a saddle?  Because the planet is only 6,000 years old and man and dinosaur coexisted, don’t cha know!  But wait, isn’t that insane, like, provably so?  Well, yeah, it is, but as Pierce moves through the Creation Museum it becomes hilariously apparent that the people behind the place have pre-answered any objection anyone may care to voice, including asking how Noah got those big ass dinosaurs on his teeny little ark.

Pierce takes the long view of American cranks, going back to the 19th century, and holding up a man named Ignatius Donnelly as a paragon of what a good crazy person is supposed to be.  Donnelly wrote a bestseller called Atlantis which postulated that all civilizations sprang from that lost city; he became an international sensation.  (Before this he was elected to Congress, Michelle Bachman take note.)  Of course, Donnelly didn’t know he was crazy and as he kept acting crazy he became a laughingstock.  What Pierce wants to know is why that mechanism has broken down.  Why hasn’t Ann Coulter been laughed into a corner for claiming that Joseph McCarthy knew what he was talking about?  Why hasn’t Rush Limbaugh been ignored off the airwaves for his bizarre and inconsistent antics?  And, though Pierce doesn’t mention it, why hasn’t the lunatic anti-vaccination crowd been shamed into silence by the re-emergence of preventable diseases like the mumps?

To explain these things Pierce has formulated Three Great Premises of Idiot America which basically boil down to the idea that anything can be true if it sells, it’s popular and people really believe it.  Any notion, no matter how easily disproved, no matter how relentlessly stupid, no matter how galactically insane, can become legitimate if it fulfills those three criteria.

To illustrate his point, Pierce takes some trips and tells well reported stories about what happens when real people start thinking that they live in a magical fantasy land.  This includes a trip to Dover, Pennsylvania for the federal court case that demolished “Intelligent Design” and exposed it as merely the latest attempt by religious fundamentalists to undermine science education.  He then goes to Florida, to the hospice that became a national embarrassment as right wing lunatics fought a public war over Terri Schiavo.  This is maybe the best chapter in the book, as Neiwert interviews the police and hospice workers who had to live through a media nightmare that had no more basis in reality than the Boogie Man.  Their stories tell the true cost of rampant stupidity, of death threats and intimidation caused by religious belief twisted toward political goals.

To explain why his three premises are effective now when they weren’t in the past, Pierce says basically that we have become complacent.  We live in a society so prosperous and secure that there is no longer any real punishment for being horribly, spectacularly wrong.  Too many, especially near the top of society, are so well insulated from the consequences of their actions that they can operate in a world of make believe.

Why listen to real experts on terrorism, who were uniformly certain that Iraq had nothing to do with the 2001 attacks, when the President already knows, with his Gut, who the real Bad Guys are?  Isn’t he the President?  Isn’t that enough?  Well, no, it isn’t, but with so many resources at the government’s disposal the fantasy could be sustained for years.  As Pierce writes near the beginning, “There is nothing more worthless to the cultural imagination that a persistently wrong idea that succeeds despite itself.”  There is now a great lag between genuine failure and the recognition of failure, and in that gap Idiot America thrives.  Success can be generated from thin air (think “Mission Accomplished”), and it can be made to last awhile, but it cannot be made permanent.

This is about where Pierce leaves off, and where to get to the deeper causes and uglier realities of persistently bad ideas we must turn to Neiwert.  Because while Pierce is on the same track as Neiwert, he is only willing to hint at the implications of his conclusion.  Writing in his penultimate chapter about the overtly creepy and utterly stupid tendency towards Great Man Worship that is engendered by Idiot America, he writes:

That’s how Andrew Card, George W. Bush’s chief of staff, could get up in front of a group of delegates from Maine during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York and tell them that the president looked upon the people of the United States – his nominal employers, after all – the way all of “us” looked at our children, sleeping in the night, and nobody mentioned to Card that there isn’t a single sentence proceeding logically from what he said that doesn’t include the word “Fatherland.”

That’s a very funny way to put it, not least because of the fact that it’s very true.  Neiwert explores the implications.

Barack Obama in Black and White

“My opinions are as valid as the next man’s!” – Sideshow Mel

Warning: The following is an exercise in half-assed craigslist sociology.

Recently I had occasion to make two purchases from craigslist.  This required me to drive about 20-30 minutes from home, to two very different places, to pick up my new stuff from the homes of two strangers.  Last Friday I went to a black man’s house in a poorer neighborhood; yesterday I went to a white guy’s house in a richer neighborhood.  It’s not the world’s most exciting story, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth telling because the two couldn’t have been more stereotypical and visiting their houses on back to back weekends was interesting.

My first stop was in mixed race, working class neighborhood.  It’s a nice place, with kids on bikes and people talking on sidewalks, but the houses are small, close together, and maintained with utility more in mind than appearance.  So while one would feel perfectly safe there after dark it’s also the kind of place where few are more than a missed paycheck away from serious trouble.  The house I went to was a single story, single family affair that had a small front lawn that looked like it hadn’t seen a mower in a while.  A short chain link fence wrapped around the side and the front, but was completely open to the driveway such that it was useless for retaining dogs or children.

As I walked up to the porch John walked out his front door and said a friendly hello.  He was wearing only a pair of jean shorts and there were a couple of low budget tattoos on his, shall we say, ample frame.  (When I was walking behind him I was treated to several inches of ass crack.)  I’m not disparaging the guy, he was very nice, had a good strong handshake, and was happy to joke around a little as we loaded my car.  But it’s not the kind of front door appearance one makes if one’s had the status consciousness indoctrination of a middle class upbringing.*

The second neighborhood, in a former “sundown town” that still has scarcely any non-white residents, was equally unremarkable.  The streets and sidewalks are in better shape and the cars are newer, but it was just as typically American as it’s less prosperous counterpart.  The second home was also a single story, single family house.  The lawn was slightly larger and had the uniform context of frequently maintained grass.  The house itself was probably 50% bigger and much more prosperous looking in general (fresher paint, more shrubbery, etcetera).  The lady of the house answered the door in one of those t-shirts NPR gives to donors and there was an Obama-Biden magnet on the fridge.

Mike greeted me in his kitchen.  Just like John he was easy going and had a firm handshake, but he was dressed in standard middle class issue GAP-style apparel.  Also like John he was on the heavy side and seemed affable and easy going.  So while they’re similar in a lot of ways, they’re also worlds apart in others.

Their differences are perhaps best illustrated in how they carried themselves on-line.  John, the first guy, had a text only ad and wrote that pictures were available only by e-mail because he couldn’t get craigslist to upload them.  When I e-mailed him and he sent me the pictures it was instantly clear why he’d had trouble posting them, each jpg file was a whopping three megabytes.  That craigslist wouldn’t want to upload twelve megabytes every time someone clicked on this add is at least one level above his technical understanding.  To complete the profile he even had an @comcast e-mail address with one of those simple name and number combinations used by the technically unsavvy.

Compare that with the second guy, whose e-mail URL was one he’d set up himself for a personal home page and blog.  Needless to say he had no trouble uploading his pictures to craigslist and even had inserted a few hyperlinks for good measure.  If you were creating these two as fictional characters you might need to tone down these kinds of details for fear of having them seem like clichés.

Now, I’m not doing this only to traffic in cheap stereotype confirmation (though, admittedly, that’s fun), and I make no claim that these two little anecdotes constitute data in any meaningful way.  I’m doing this because meeting these two guys in such quick succession was a very visceral reminder of just how varied Americans are.  I think it’s far too easy, even if you live in a place with a pretty healthy cross section of people, to keep your head down and not really think about all those other people out there.  It is an almost trivially saccharine point (think of other people!), but it feels rare to have it so vividly illustrated.

None of this is exactly news.  There will be no newspaper headlines that scream in giant type “Shocking Development: White Guy Lives in Ritzier Neighborhood Than Black Guy”.  But the two experiences were useful reminders, requiring the participation of no Harvard professors or police officers, of just how vast a menagerie Barack Obama is attempting to govern and that yes, race still matters and, yes, it will still matter long after Obama has handed his job off to someone else.  The term “post-racial” was bullshit when media people started echoing it last year and it’s bullshit now.  It was never one of Obama’s themes for precisely that reason.

I highly doubt this will be the last time such a goofy, byline brigade fueled, racial incident takes place.  Oh well, we’ve still got craigslist.

*As I was driving out I passed a skinny white guy in a red convertible (probably a Trans Am), baseball hat backwards, gold chain, also with no shirt on.  Stereotypes have abounded these last few weeks.

Fuck? Yes!

“We need rest.  The spirit is willing, but the flesh is spongy and bruised.” – Zapp Brannigan

There isn’t anything earth shattering about the excellent anthology of feminist sex essays “Yes Means Yes”.  Anyone even vaguely familiar with the twisted and illogical ways our society handles sex isn’t going to find too many new ideas here.  The pernicious virgin/whore double standard comes in for a lot of well justified criticism.  The more or less global obsession with the almost meaningless concept of “virginity” is held up to the complete ridicule it deserves.  The dizzying array of problems faced by transgender people are once again shown to be motivated by little more than ignorance and fear.  But where the book undeniably triumphs is in relating complicated concepts in simple human terms and outlining a vision of what life could be like if we let our crusty old assumptions and prejudices fall away.

Conservative opposition to what used to simply be called the “sexual revolution” can be distilled into two fundamentals.  First, that women cannot be trusted to look after themselves and therefore must be watched over by good, moral men.  (That this comes with self serving bonuses like laundry service is often unspoken.)  And second, that allowing strict gender roles to dissolve will result in chaos and anarchy of Biblical proportions.  (Again, the self interested bonus, that the old system may be orderly but it certainly isn’t fair, is not usually voiced aloud.)  Feminist rejoinders more often focus on the first one (like this famous bumper sticker); “Yes Means Yes” takes square aim at the second by positing what things could be like (hint: it isn’t chaos and anarchy).

All of the essays function from a shared assumption: that sex, in all its varieties, should be fun, pleasurable and enthusiastic for everyone involved.  None of those are radical concepts (at least outside of very conservative circles), but they fly in the face of a lot of, often unspoken, conventional wisdom.  One need look no further than the local googolplex, dating books or magazine racks to see plenty of examples of this but, as is often the case, comedy does the best explaining:

(found via)

What’s so encouraging about “Yes Means Yes” is the completeness of the worldview it describes, a worldview largely in opposition to the things the above video lampoons.  The authors are male, female and transgender and they come from an enormous variety of situations and backgrounds.  This is as diverse a group of people as one is likely to find, worlds away from a top down monochrome where no one is allowed to fuck until they’re properly wed and even then it’s kinda frowned upon.  But all their differences don’t preclude them from agreeing on a fundamental conception of sex (though, of course, the details are a little hazy) that looks nothing like, say, the cover of Cosmo.

Like all anthologies by many different writers, “Yes Means Yes” is uneven.  One high point is a round table discussion between three women who’ve done various kinds of sex work:

Because I was a stripper, and was one for so long, you learn men: You learn their mentality, their ways, and their motives.  And when you know this stuff, you negotiate so much better for yourself in the civilian world, because you no longer fear the unknown: men.

That statement is a devastating indictment of the shame we frequently cast not only on sex work, but on sex in general.  A culture in which it takes years of stripping for a woman to feel she understands male sexuality in general (as opposed to the sexuality of a specific man) can only be described as “fucked up”.  But it makes perfect sense when you think about it because, really, where else is that kind of knowledge and experience safely available?  That information shouldn’t be difficult to obtain, but it is, and there’s really no good reason why.

Perhaps the best piece in the book, though there are several contenders, comes at the very end with co-editor Jaclyn Friedman’s essay, “In Defense of Going Wild”.  It is the most cogent, honest and utterly bullshit-less explanation I’ve ever encountered about what it takes and what it means for a female to embrace sex in our sexist culture.  It ought to be enthusiastically recommended to every fourteen year old, male and female.  Without pulling any punches or papering over any dangers it embraces all the best parts about fucking and states, without equivocation, that it’s worth it.

Low points include Kate Harding’s “How Do You Fuck a Fat Woman?. . .” and Cristina Meztli Tzintzún’s “Killing Misogyny”.  Both are extremely admirable in their willingness to disclose personally painful events in order to advance an understanding of subjects which are often ignored (that is brave and honest and shouldn’t be minimized).  Unfortunately, neither gives as much care and attention to using their stories to illuminate their larger point as they do to the blow-by-blow recounting.  Personal accounts like these are, of course, important and informational (and the book is rightly full of them), but some of the essays are better than others at using them to illustrate greater things.

Those relatively small criticisms aside, the book is remarkable.  It amounts to a simple and easily grasped conception of what our lives would be like if there was less stigma and more orgasms.  Which is to say, a place that’d be a hell of a lot more fun and free than the current one.  It’s a simple idea: drop the pettiness, the competitiveness and, above all, the fear, and get it on.  Sounds good, doesn’t it?

End Note:  “Yes Means Yes” has a lot of authors who are also bloggers and the official website is, in fact, a blog.  This hyperlink mentality can be seen in an attempt to make the book itself a little more information age friendly.  Primarily this consists of tagging each piece with a few themes (e.g. “Electric Youth”, “Is Consent Complicated?”, “Fight the Power”) and then suggesting related articles at the end of each piece.  This “Choose Your Own Adventure” ethic falls a little flat in execution because the related articles aren’t accompanied by page or chapter numbers.  Counting the introduction there are 28 chapters in the book and the table of contents is five pages long.  (At the back there’s a second table of contents, this one by theme, that’s even longer.)  So if you’ve just completed an essay, and you see a related one you want to skip to, you need to flip to the front or back and find the chapter and page number.  You don’t have the information to just go directly to the page you want.  It’s a minor complaint, but the simple addition of page numbers would’ve made the book much easier to read thematically.

Six Months

“‘Where’s my spy camera?’  Every day for the last six months, ‘where’s my spy camera?’, ‘where’s my spy camera?’, ‘where’s my spy camera?’.  Here’s your stupid spy camera!” – Fe-mail Carrier

Tomorrow is exactly six months since Barack Obama moved into 1600 Pennsylvania.  As an intellectual exercise I recently went back and watched three of his speeches, his victory speech from November, his inaugural address, and the not-State of the Union he gave to Congress.  The first thing one notices is how much the presidency has already aged him, but beyond that he’s been remarkable consistent.  With the big exception of civil liberties he’s largely done what he said he was going to do.

I figured it would be a good way to take stock of things, to put his still young Administration into some larger context, but I was wrong.  The basic political situation in this country remains the same: health care, health care, health care.  If he successfully reforms the way we pay for medicine there’s almost no limit to what he might accomplish.  A simple as that formulation is it’s basically accurate and that makes it a frustrating time to be a casual political observer in this country.

Keeping tabs on the ins and outs of the health care debate would be almost a full time job, so gauging Obama’s actual chances is almost impossible.  I don’t know whether or not he’s going to be able to pull this off, and neither does anyone else.  We’ll just have to watch and see.

So here we are, six months in, and everything else is subsumed by the health care war.   Financial regulation, for example, got a standing (bi-partisan) ovation when Obama spoke to Congress, but other than putting Goldman Sachs back in the black not much seems to have been done on that score.  The energy bill, which realistically may be one of the most important things to ever come before Congress, is playing second fiddle and both of the wars are still killing Americans.

There isn’t anything really interesting to say and there’s no intelligent analysis to do so this post ended up being a hell of a lot shorter than I’d originally figured it would be.  Obama’s presidency is pretty well understood, he’s been a tremendous improvement but there are still a lot of problems.  Everything hinges on whether or not health care works and whether one chooses to look at things as glass-half-full or glass-half-empty is irrelevant.  There is one thing that’s worth bearing in mind though, and that’s the fact that six months from now, the same span of time that’s passed so quickly, we’ll already be in an election year.  Delaying the health care bill may or may not be necessary to get it passed, but it’s certainly necessary to get it defeated and six months can go by very fast.

The Beast Must Die

“Sir, we’ll need a new Dangerous Emissions Supervisor.” – Mr. Smithers
“Yes, well find someone cheap.  It’s been a very lean year for us.” – C.M. Burns
“Money fight!” – C.M. Burns & Mr. Smithers

Between the kabuki of Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings and the banging of the drums on health care reform the lords of money at Goldman Sachs picked an opportune moment to slink back to massive profitability: $3.44 billion dollars net in the second quarter alone.  This is a firm that, along with so many others, was saved from extinction less than a year ago by the federal government.  Their own epic failures put them into such a perilous state and now, as the damage they wrought has virtually every other part of the economy reeling, they’ve returned record profits.  This is like a drunk driver walking out of the hospital and heading to the nearest watering hole in a car on loan from his doctors while the kids who were in the school bus he hit are connected to ventilators and struggling to breathe.  It’s an affront to anything that even vaguely passes for decency.

That it is Goldman Sachs posting such numbers will come as no surprise to readers of Matt Taibbi’s thoroughly reported and brutal takedown in Rolling Stone.  The firm has long been the toast and envy of Wall Street for exceeding all of its competitors in creating money from nothing and skating away when bubble after bubble bursts in its wake.  Taibbi counts five popped bubbles which Goldman not only played a major role in inflating but also managed to escape most of the fallout when they inevitably burst.  It’s a vital read for any layman who wants to understand how the finance clergy have been molesting us all.

(In the nearly two months since the article was first published Taibbi has all but gone to war, rebutting silly counter charges all while mirthfully pointing out that no one from Goldman or any of its apologists has even so much as quibbled with any of his facts.)

Writing more recently in Vanity Fair, Michael Lewis corroborates much of the context of Taibbi’s article.  (Though he’s awfully gentle on ex-AIG stooge Jake DeSantis.)  The point of Lewis’s article isn’t so much to damn AIG as the enabler that allowed firms like Goldman to run amok and destroy the world, but to point out that if it hadn’t been AIG it would’ve been someone else.  As the financial game was constructed it would’ve almost certainly lead to this disaster even if Joseph Cassano, the biggest fool (and that’s saying something) at AIG Financial Products, had never existed.

Then there’s Donald MacKenzie’s almost anthropological portrait of the culture of banking in The London Review of Books.  The article is a review of a new book called “Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophe” by Gillian Tett, an editor at The Financial Times and it is here that we really begin to see Goldman and its less successful imitators in not just their monetary context, but in their larger social context as well.  The highest heights of banking and finance were, and are, a tiny little slice of society that appears to have very little use for the rest of us (until, that is, they get in over their heads):

Fool’s Gold begins in a conference room in Nice in spring 2005. Tett admits that at that point she was baffled by the technical language – ‘Gaussian copula’, ‘attachment point’, ‘delta hedging’ – used by the participants. However, before joining the FT she had conducted fieldwork in Soviet Tajikistan for a PhD in social anthropology, and the ethnographer in her was now reawakened. The conference reminded her of a Tajik wedding. Those attending it were forging social links and celebrating a tacit world-view – in this case, one in which ‘it was perfectly valid to discuss money in abstract, mathematical, ultra-complex terms, without any reference to tangible human beings.’

That is about as succinct an explanation as is possible of just how these fucking people conned themselves into thinking they’d found the Fountain of Money: a “world-view” that says that money isn’t really real.  That’s so unbelievably obtuse, callous and downright stupid that there isn’t a metaphor for it.  Alcohol fueled bar stories have more connection to reality.

If you combine the economic ruin all around us with those three articles, MacKenzie’s description of a blind culture gone mad, Lewis’ demonstration of the inevitability of collapse, and Taibbi’s history of the lucre and destruction wrought by Goldman Sachs, only one conclusion is possible.  The beast must die.

It won’t be easy, but there is hope.  Taibbi’s article, perhaps unintentionally, has one very heartening section.  Just after describing Goldman’s involvement in the schemes that helped lead to the Great Depression, there is this:

Fast-forward about 65 years.

65 years, from the depths of the Depression to the IPO madness of the tech crazed 1990s Goldman Sachs, the most violent and vicious of the money beasts, the most warlike of the finance tribes, was quietly profitable.  It was, by its own mantra, “longterm greedy”.  No psychotic short term gambles, no limitless capacity for ripping off even its own customers, just quiet efficiency and steady money.

After Sotomayor takes her seat on the court, after the heath care fracas ends, when Washington and London and all the other centers of regulation turn their attention to preventing this type of thing from happening again, that should be their model.  Lending with interest has long been known as a dangerous necessity, and while it’s been out of control for two decades or so there no reason that it cannot be done safely.  But doing so means not seeing it as a game, not treating it as a source of limitless wealth with little to no connection to the real world.  We’ve done it before, we can do it again, hopefully without another disaster in the interim.

16 July Update: Taibbi’s got a new blog post up today detailing just how outrageous these Goldman profit numbers are.  The flak he’s taken for this feels quite similar to the kind anti-war people were getting pre-2005.  No one in a position of real media respectability and prominence can quite bring themselves to believe how incredibly fucked up this is, but that doesn’t change the reality that it’s still incredibly fucked up.  Read it and weep.

The Criminal Elephant in the Room

“I guess saying goodbye wasn’t enough.” – Butters Stotch
“What else do I have to do?” – Eric Cartman
“Well, well you know preacher says that before your soul can be at peace sometimes you have to atone for something bad you did.” – Butters Stotch
“Atone?” – Eric Cartman
“Did you ever do anything really bad?” – Butters Stotch
“Not really.” – Eric Cartman

The last few days have seen some limited but nevertheless remarkable progress in the ongoing effort to expose and rectify some of our government’s 2001-2009 illegality.  Not only did we learn that they started breaking the law almost immediately after the 2001 attacks, but that it went beyond merely illegally wiretapping American citizens.  (What were they doing?  My money’s on massive, indiscriminate e-mail surveillance.  Remember these people actually announced something called the “Total Information Awareness” program.)  As if that weren’t enough, the orders to break all sorts of laws, including those about informing a few members of Congress about what the CIA is up to, came from Bush the Younger or Dick Cheney himself.

Now comes word from Harper’s Scott Horton (via yet another excellent Glenn Greenwald post) that Eric Holder, our hitherto very quiet Attorney General, may be taking the prestige of his department seriously:

A major consideration for Holder, my sources told me, was the Justice Department reputation for independence—badly tarnished during the Bush administration and perhaps set to face further embarrassments as the U.S. attorneys scandal probes—by Congress and by a special prosecutor—finish up.

In the days after Obama’s speech at the CIA, both Axelrod and Emanuel insisted that the White House had made the decision that there would be no prosecutions. According to reliable sources, that incensed Holder, who felt that the remarks had compromised the integrity both of the White House and Justice Department by suggesting that political advisers made the call on who would or would not be criminally investigated.

The piece is worth reading in its entirety, but perhaps the important development here is that the Justice Department is remembering that it’s supposed to be separate from politics.  Barack Obama has short term political reasons for wanting the lawbreaking of the previous Administration to disappear down the memory hole.  But Eric Holder isn’t supposed to care about that.  All he’s supposed to care about are prosecuting crimes; and, while many of the doubtlessly horrifying facts of just what Bush, Cheney, et al did when nobody was looking remain concealed, there is no longer any serious dispute about whether or not laws (lots of ‘em) were broken.

Obama’s look-forward-not-backward approach has always been long term inoperable for the simple reason that the laws about torture, surveillance and all the rest were so openly disregarded.  There is simply too much evidence already public to keep things under the rug.  Holder’s got to know that whitewashing the crimes committed over the last eight years makes any effort to rebuild his department’s disintegrated reputation impossible.  If he’s serious about that rebuilding then he’s got no choice but to investigate seriously.

Oh, and that lying to Congress thing?  It turns out they don’t like that, even if you are doing it under direct orders from the President or Vice-President.  Now there’s probably going to be another Congressional investigation.  Further disturbing disclosures are almost inevitable, either as a direct result of investigation or from work done by bloggers and journalists.  Sooner or later this thing is going to come to a head; health care, energy and the economy be damned.

Robert McNamara and the Immortality of American Exceptionalism

“There’s a line in Othello about a drinker, ‘Now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast.’  That pretty well covers it.” – Barney Gumble

In “East of Eden” John Steinbeck wrote:

A war comes always to someone else. In Salinas we were aware that the United States was the greatest and most powerful nation in the world. Every American was a rifleman by birth, and one American was worth ten or twenty foreigners in a fight.

Pershing’s expedition into Mexico after Villa had exploded one of our myths for a little while. We had truly believed that Mexicans can’t shoot straight and besides were lazy and stupid. When our own Troop C came wearily back from the border they said that none of this was true. Mexicans could shoot straight, goddam it! And Villa’s horsemen had outridden and outlasted our town boys. The two evenings a month of training had not toughened them very much. And last, the Mexicans seemed to have outthought and outambushed Black Jack Pershing. When the Mexicans were joined by their ally, dysentery, it was godawful. Some of our boys didn’t really feel good again for years.

Somehow we didn’t connect Germans with Mexicans. We went right back to our myths. One American was as good as twenty Germans. This being true, we had only to act in a stern manner to bring the Kaiser to heel. He wouldn’t dare interfere with our trade—but he did. He wouldn’t stick out his neck and sink our ships—and he did. It was stupid, but he did, and so there was nothing for it but to fight him.

The illusion Steinbeck so expertly described lives on today.  We still believe that our troops are tougher and better than any other fighting men on the planet.  We’ve since added to it by deluding ourselves about our technology, believing that it increases our innate superiority.  In short, then as now, we believe ourselves to be masters of war.

In the early 1960s Robert McNamara believed that very same thing.  He might have blanched at putting it quite that way, but he did believe it.  He believed that with the proper application of mathematics, logic and technology even a thing so fundamentally chaotic and unpredictable as war could be tamed.  That earnestly misguided hubris was at least partially responsible for the deaths of millions of people.  We most often mourn the 58,000 Americans killed because they are our closest kin.  But many times that number died on the receiving end of American arms and American actions in Southeast Asia.  And even that ghastly butcher’s bill doesn’t account for the unknowable number who never fully recovered and the lives that were shattered both here in America and over there.  By the end of the 1960s McNamara knew how foolish he’d been; he spent the rest of his life, which ended on Monday, dealing with it.

He was an ambivalent figure, as many commentators have tried to articulate since his death: an indisputably nice, intelligent and well meaning man, who nevertheless was up to his eyeballs in blood.  Contemplating his monstrous actions in the 1960s, and, for those of a certain age, remembering them, isn’t an easy exercise, especially in light of the fact that McNamara himself later called the war a mistake and more or less admitted that he was a war criminal.

Part of what makes McNamara so frustrating is that there is so little to be learned from him.  We’ve known since the time of the Greeks that hubris can be fatal and that it comes in new disguises and with different trappings each time.  That his mistakes, if not his methodology, have been repeated so recently in Iraq (and possibly Afghanistan) makes it all the more maddening.  While he was still alive we ignored every mistake he made and crashed into two wars where we have only the barest of understandings of what we’re doing and who we’re fighting.

The fundamental foolishness that blinded McNamara, that belief that the very nature of who we are as Americans can make wars clean and winnable, lives on to this day.  It seems unlikely that we’ll ever get an honest, albeit late, mea culpa from the architects of our more recent wars.  So we’ll have to make do by remembering McNamara’s.

Bloggers in a Book

“What is this place?” – Bart Simpson
“The refuge of the damned.” – Indian Nerd
“A place where we can work on our extra credit assignments without fear of reprisal.” – Martin Prince

There is an old newsroom proverb: journalism is the first draft of history.  It’s only partly true (and even that only some of the time), but it makes journalists feel good about themselves and lends a sheen of importance to a job that often amounts to little more than mobile clerical work.  This is particularly true when it comes to the stenography that often passes for political campaign journalism: Step 1: Get press pass, Step 2: follow candidate around, Step 3: write down what candidate says, Step 4: write down what people other than candidate say, Step 5: complain, Step 6: file story, Step 7: eat and drink on someone else’s dime, repeat.

The formula for this type of coverage was laid down almost forty years ago in Timothy Crouse’s now classic “The Boys on the Bus”, his account of the pack of reporters on the 1972 presidential campaign trail.  A more recent example is Alexandra Pelosi’s “Journeys with George”, her documentary about Bush the Younger’s 2000 campaign.  The issues and the proper nouns changed somewhat from ’72 to ’00, but the style of campaign coverage (see preceding paragraph) largely did not.

Now we have Eric Boehlert’s new book, “Bloggers on the Bus”.  He’s quite intentionally cribbed his title from Crouse and it’s a fitting choice because Boehlert, like Crouse before him, is explaining a new group of politically influential people to a general audience.  The lefty bloggers Boehlert profiles will never have the kind of influence that the boys on Crouse’s bus once did, but nobody’s going to have that again.  Instead, Boehlert documents how these people, variously referred to here and elsewhere as the “progressive blogosphere” or the “netroots”, carved out their own slice of the influence pie.

“Bloggers on the Bus” begins with left wing bloggers successful 2007 effort to force the Nevada Democratic Party to drop its plans for a primary debate on Fox News.  It keeps going from there.  Here we see the bloggers humiliate Chris Matthews (aka Tweety) for being a misogynist weirdo, here they hound Barack Obama over his reversal on FISA, here they own the Valerie Plame story in way that should shame regular journalists, and on and on.

Along the way Boehlert pens short, suspense novel-like, profiles of the people behind these various dustups.  So we can see how the world looked to the guy who made the Hillary 1984 video, what motivated him and what he’s like in real life.  These little profiles add context, but also make the various on-line sensations more human and relatable.  It’s one thing to know that the woman who captured Obama’s famous “bitter” remarks was traveling on her own dime, it’s another to see it from her point of view, to try and understand how bewildering it was to suddenly become one of the most talked about people in the country.

Of course, “Bloggers on the Bus” can only chronicle some of the events of the blogs and the Great Blue Waves of ’06 and ’08.  Tellingly, if you Google “Bloggers on the Bus” to find the book’s official website (which is surprisingly thin) the third link is to a Time article of the same title from February 2007.  It was written in the middle of the minor on-line contretemps that broke out when the John Edwards campaign hired Pandagon’s Amanda Marcotte to be their official blogger.  Long story (very) short: Bill Donohue, a conservative Catholic notorious for clutching his pearls and fainting at even the mildest criticism of his beloved Church, raised a big stink about some things Marcotte had previously written.  The whole thing ended a couple of days later when Marcotte and the Edwards campaign agreed to part ways.  The Edwards campaign folded up about a year later (and thanks to Edwards’ fickle pickle never had a chance anyway), Marcotte continues her excellent blogging over at Pandagon and Donohue remains a narcissistic asshole.

None of this is mentioned in Boehlert’s book and that’s not so much a criticism as it is an unavoidable reality.  Even though he limited his subject matter to popular lefty blogs and significant ways they interacted with the campaigns there is still far too much material for any book to wrap itself around.  This denies the book a coherent narrative, but that’s not a flaw, it’s a reflection of the subject material.  There is no one thing called the “blogosphere” or even “blogs”.  However useful those terms are as shorthand, they are grotesquely inaccurate catchalls.

Crouse covered less than a bus full of people, Boehlert has to contend with thousands of bloggers and their legions of faceless commenters.  He dedicates an entire chapter to the great Hillary vs Barack Blog War of 2008 but he’s assigned himself an impossible task.  Boehlert knows his subject and writes a decent summary, but how can any summary of what was essentially a months long conversation between tens of thousands of people be anything but the most basic of outlines?

Not to be too glib, but in this case the medium isn’t the message so much as the message is the medium.  Political blogging, in everything from loner sites like this one to great big communities like Daily Kos, arose in no small part because people felt ill served by what they were already reading and seeing.  The mere existence of all these sites is a devastating critique the world Crouse described.  The specifics, which Boehlert does such an excellent job of describing, almost don’t matter.

Which is not to say that “Bloggers on the Bus” isn’t worth reading.  Quite the opposite, it’s a great primer for anyone who wants to try and understand the way the political conversation in this country is conducted.  But even with its narrow focus it’s a hopelessly incomplete portrait that can never take its place along side “Boys on the Bus” due simply to the nature of its subject.  It’s not so much a first draft of history as it is a snapshot, a portrait of a time on the internet that has already passed and will never come again (some of the touchstone pieces the book cites, like the video that publicized John Hagee’s Hitler sermon, are no longer available).  It’s a neat book and an enjoyable read, but it can’t do anything more than show someone a little bit of how things work on-line.  To get the full effect all you can do is open a browser and start clicking.

Repetitive Stupidity Disorder

“I’m going to keep this Mary Worth phone right here.  Her stern but sensible face will remind me never to do anything so stupid again.” – Bart Simpson

There is a sickening déjà vu to President Obama’s plans for the prisoners that were bequeathed to him by his short sighted predecessor.  On Friday the Washington Post ran a story, quoting three anonymous “senior government officials”, that related the headaches the Obama team has had trying to close the prison at Guantanamo.  Specifically, there was this:

Three months into the Justice Department’s reviews, several officials involved said they have found themselves agreeing with conclusions reached years earlier by the Bush administration: As many as 90 detainees cannot be charged or released.

The strange legal world in which those 90 men find themselves is yet another of the political traps that Barack Obama and company knowingly walked into in January.  The government is convinced, rightly or wrongly, that these men are threats.  But they do not feel that they can adequately demonstrate that to a judge or a jury.  It’s the same problem Bush the Younger created for himself when he built the Guantanamo prison seven years ago.  He futzed and fiddled and was able to fend off the courts until his term expired.  Obama doesn’t have the same option.

Unfortunately one of the solutions he’s come up with, one he’s apparently thinking very seriously about, is the same dumb shit that caused the mess in the first place:

Under one White House draft that was being discussed this month, according to administration officials, detainees would be imprisoned at a military facility on U.S. soil, but their ongoing detention would be subject to annual presidential review. U.S. citizens would not be held in the system.

Now, as Glenn Greenwald rightly points out, this is only a trial balloon article.  It isn’t the plan yet.  And let’s hope it doesn’t end up being the plan because not only is it a base abandonment of longstanding American ideals but it’s also all but doomed to failure.  Indefinite detention is fundamentally an Executive power play and if the far more vicious Bush Administration was unable to pull it off, what chance does Obama have?

Does he have the stomach for the gut wrenching realities to which these policies inevitably lead?  After he’s given a few inches to the Terror Warriors, will he be able to stop them from taking a few miles?  And, is he prepared to hang his subordinates out to dry on the Hill in the face of angry and embarrassing questions from other Democrats?  Those are troubling questions because when it comes time to pay the political price for this, and that time will come, the people he’s pleasing now will not have his back.

I’ve said before that I think Obama’s capitulation to national security wackaloons is a cynical ploy designed to keep things like torture, Guantanamo and the like off the front page while he works on his domestic agenda; I stand by that reasoning.  I don’t like it, but I’m not the guy with the responsibility and they undoubtedly have a better understanding of the political landscape than I do.  But the Obama Administration is playing with fire here and, even worse, they’re being very cavalier about it.  Bush the Younger, Dick Cheney and the rest of their criminal gang did these things too.  But they, at least in part, did them because they sincerely believe the macho bullshit about “they hate us for our freedoms”.  When push came to shove they were always willing to push back harder because they were ideologues.  The further they slipped down the moral slope the more progress they thought they were making.

But Obama isn’t an ideologue, at least, not that we can tell; I’m just not sure if he realizes the depth of the shit bog he’s eagerly wading into.  There was some hope in that Post article though:

Two officials involved in a Justice Department review of possible prosecutions said the administration is strongly considering criminal charges in federal court for Khalid Sheik Mohammed and three other detainees accused of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Putting Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other men directly involved with the 2001 attacks in a federal courtroom in New York City would be a tremendously important step, for the rule of law and for America’s reputation abroad.  But the others cannot be squirreled away indefinitely, there are too many journalists, too many bloggers, too many watchers.  You can call it “prolonged detention” if you want to, but those are men with names and faces and in this day and age they cannot simply be made to disappear.  The Bush Administration tried that already, and look what happened to them.

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