Oh, for Fuck’s Sake, Millbank

Twelve years of primary education at the hands of the Dominican sisterhood left me with a permanent tic against explicit vulgarity, but sometimes the truth can only be expressed rudely. Only an arsehole Media Village Idiot could have written “Barney the Bully“:

... The amiable [Savannah] Guthrie tried again. How does he feel about the worsening tone in Washington?

“Well, you exemplify what I think is a change in the tone,” Frank said. “You’ve managed to ask all sort of negative questions. . . . It’s ‘gotcha’ journalism. It’s ‘gotcha’ politics. And it does lessen our chances to get things done.”

The interviewer gave it a final attempt. Does Frank “feel any responsibility for your own role in, kind of, that tone that we do see in Washington?”

“Well, congratulations,” Frank said with derision. “You’re four-for-four in managing to find the negative approach.”

It was a chance for the nation to see what so many in the Capitol had seen up close over the years: That Barney Frank, liberal lion, gay pioneer and respected legislator, is also one mean and ornery S.O.B….

The Republican strategist Karl Rove, writing on FoxNews.com, welcomed the retirement of the “petulant, abrasive and downright nasty” Frank. Rove, who knows something about nastiness, wrote: “Brilliant, but acid tongued and generally unpleasant, Mr. Frank ruled with an iron gavel, ran over critics with delight and treated committee members and especially Republican colleagues as lesser forms of life.”

Congressman Frank is a smart, skillful legislator who’s spent his life working to pass the best laws possible, even when it meant compromising with proudly ignorant know-nothings, most of them registered as Republicans. Savannah Guthrie is a professional blonde talking head paid for her talents at mouthing partisan right-wing talking points while always remaining “amiable“. Karl Rove is a highly-paid thug who’s done his considerable best to degrade his own party’s standards—such as they ever were—during a career of lying, back-biting, ratfucking, theft, and every other form of white-collar criminality going back to his college days as a Young Republican at the end of the 1960s. Pretending that Frank’s inability to suffer fools gladly has been worse for public civility than Rove’s long campaign against honesty in politics, or embracing our major media’s craven pretense that calling someone a liar in front of a recording device is worse than being a liar, is gutless, dishonest, and behavior unworthy of a well-paid, well-educated individual with the distribution and readership of one of the national papers of record, Mr. Millbank.

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Open Thread

I feel like everything I write today is rambling and incoherent, more so than usual, so I am just going to sit back and watch the idiot box until Captain Kirk hangs out with Shawn and Guster tonight on Psych.

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Hard Working White Americans Hard at Work Making Life Miserable for Minorities

I’m cursing whoever brought up that damned phrase from election 2008 (I think it was Kay), but I think it is important to remember what was so god damned offensive about the phrase- the Clinton statements were made right before the primaries through a swath of Appalachia that included places like this:

A small Pike County church has voted not to accept interracial couples as members or let them take part in some worship activities.

The decision has caused sharp reaction and disapproval in the Eastern Kentucky county.

“It’s not the spirit of the community in any way, shape or form,” Randy Johnson, president of the Pike County Ministerial Association, said of the vote.

The issue came up at the Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church, said Dean Harville, a longtime member who serves as church secretary and clerk.

Clinton made those statements because she wanted to scare primary voters who weren’t racist to vote for her because racist scumbags would keep a Democrat out of the WH in 2008. That’s what was so damned offensive about the remarks.

Another point- I’m betting almost everyone here, when they read about this church, thought to themselves “You have to be fucking kidding me. It’s 2012.” That’s good- you should be horrified by this. But you know what? Change “interracial” to “gay” and this goes on every single day somewhere in America, and not just backwater shit holes in Kentucky.

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Policing Our Discourse

DougJ, Atrios, and Glenzilla have already said a lot about the sad spectacle of our establishment media rushing for the fainting couches when someone says fuck or is rude to someone in a position of power, but not batting an eye when someone like Tom Friedman says one of the reasons we went to Iraq was to basically kill brown people so the rest of the region would know who is the fucking boss. I could go on and on and on with examples about how this always seems to conveniently happen to only left-wing voices, as could you, but here’s a crystal clear one- Marcy Wheeler has been basically banned from cable tv because she dared to say the words “blow job” when talking about the Clinton/Lewinsky never-ending saga. On the other hand, Ann Coulter, with a history of saying vulgar and offensive things, was on MSNBC yesterday morning as a guest where she called people douche bags and spit on the corpse of Ted Kennedy. Rather than being shunned by the media, here was CNN’s response to Coulter’s behavior on MSNBC (via an email sent by one of their marketing flacks:

Ann Coulter tells HLN’s Joy Behar what she said about John McCain that caused censors at MSNBC’s Morning Joe to censor her.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2011/11/29/exp-behar-ann-coulter.hln

Please source: “HLN The Joy Behar Show”

The Joy Behar Show airs on HLN at 10 p.m. (ET) weeknights.

For press inquiries please contact Alison Rudnick 212/275-7987 or Karen Reynolds 212/275-8253

Follow Joy on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/JoyBeharHLN?ref=ts

Follow Joy on Twitter: http://twitter.com/JoyVBehar

Video of these interviews will be posted on http://joybehar.blogs.cnn.com/ after the show.

Karen Reynolds
HLN Public Relations
One Time Warner Center, 4th fl.
NYC 10019
212-275-8253-O
347-327-2473-BB

Rather than shunning Coulter like Wheeler was treated by all the networks, CNN’s response was “LET ME IN ON THAT ACTION, BITCHES” and then blasted out a spam email to make sure everyone knew Coulter would be on headline news talking about douchebags. Rock on, media.

On top of this bias, our media elites have decided that anything to the left of Susan Collins is just too controversial to even have the opinion aired. How many serious discussions of nationalizing the banks during the crisis do you remember? How many serious discussions about single-payer did we have during the health care debate? How many serious discussions have there been about just ending the drug war? When was the last time you remember someone on tv arguing “To hell with it, let’s just GTFO of Afghanistan?” And on and on. And on top of it all, you have stuff like this:

I’m not a regular reader of Andrew Sullivan, so I’m not familiar with all of his traditions, but it seems that Moore Award voting happens at the end of December. For those who are regular readers of Sullivan, please help me keep an eye out for when the Moore Award voting begins. You may recall that I was nominated in May, and I am in it to win it. Any idiot can shoot his mouth off on the internet, but it takes a special kind of idiot to win an award for it, and mama always said I’m special.

The offending statement that generated the nomination was made on the date of bin Laden’s death, and was the following:

So many awful things have happened in the battles to find this man, so many awful things have been “justified” in the name of responding to his attacks, that killing him won’t fix a damn thing. There is no justice here. He started it, but our leaders have continued it, and it will not stop.

Anything less than a victory dance on bin Laden’s corpse is just too vulgar to even enter into the public discourse. While Sullivan is babbling about political correctness and getting the vapors because a bunch of racist assholes are being called out for being racist assholes doing shitty research, he’s shunning people for having the audacity to reflect on all that has transpired since 9/11 rather than breaking out the foam fingers because we killed a terrorist.

I’d say this second aspect of the policing our discourse is even worse than the “OH MY GOD A BLOGGER SAID FUCK PUSSY SHIT COCK.”

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Siri and Apple: Abortion Madness

Really? can’t we all get a grip?

Look, I’m all for equality, and I’m as pro-choice as a woman can be. But this kerfuffle over Siri not providing abortion locations to iPhone 4s is a serious mountain/mole-hill situation.

Apparently, Apple has been catching flak from pro-choice advocates because Siri does not provide information (or fails to provide correct information) about abortion and other reproductive health services for women.

Some are disappointed that Siri doesn’t provide information about reproductive services while providing answers to such male-centric questions as “Where can I find Viagra?” and “Where can I get a decent blowjob?” and “Where can I look at some naked boobs?”

Alternet has a list of searches that Siri recognizes, and none of them include abortion services (and most of them seem to me to be the result of cheeky programmers): More »

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Just Rope and Throw and Grab ‘Em

Soon we’ll be living high and wide:

Patrick Sullivan was the kind of lawman Coloradoans loved: a straight-shooting, Republican sheriff who once crashed a Jeep through a fence to rescue two deputies from a deranged gun-toting man and pleaded with legislators to keep assault weapons off the street lest any more citizens get shot.

On Tuesday afternoon, though, investigators from the same sheriff’s department he oversaw for nearly two decades found themselves monitoring a home near Denver that Mr. Sullivan was seen entering.

Soon after, the police arrested Mr. Sullivan, now 68 and long retired from the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, on charges that he had been trying to exchange methamphetamines for sex with a man. He was booked that night at a local county jail that proudly bears his name.

What is it with meth and closeted gay right-wingers? Didn’t that one priest from a mega-church (I can’t remember his name, but he is blonde and also from Colorado) also have meth issues?

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That long black cloud is coming down

I think that reports of Mitt’s demise may be exaggerated (I just like the song this title comes from), but he’s 30 points down in Florida, is a piss-poor interviewee, and will eventually start getting hammered for Romneycare (saying that avoiding paying insurance is “not American” can’t go over well with the Teahadists).

I can’t wait for the next debate.

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Mission Accomplished, Michelle!

Remember when this was the great hope for the teahadists:

According to a tweet from NBC News’ Jamie Novogrod, Bachmann responded to the recent raiding of the British embassy in Iran, by saying that if she was President, she would close down the U.S. embassy there.

There’s just one problem: The U.S. has not had an embassy in Iran ever since the Iranian hostage crisis, when revolutionaries from the budding Islamic state held 52 Americans for 444 days.

Clowns.

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Worthless

Someone at CNN just wasted hundreds of words to state that Rick Perry called the NH primaries the NH caucuses by mistake.

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Absence of malice

In the comments to my post on establishment motivation, Steve writes:

There is a maxim that one should never ascribe to malice what can equally well be attributed to ignorance. That seems to apply here. A lot of these people just don’t have the faintest clue about Social Security.

That point is central to my argument. Establishment media types are innumerate. I doubt that more than a quarter could estimate the US GDP within 35%. The details of pro-Social Security versus anti-Social security arguments, or austerity versus expansionary arguments, are completely lost on them. (It’s possible that I am not as conversant with these arguments as I should be myself, though I think I am reasonably conversant, to be honest with you.)

So they gravitate towards whichever position is more in line with some fuzzier, more qualitative world view; that world view is often that the American middle-class is spoiled and needs tough love. They don’t want to starve the middle-class, they feel they owe it to them. This is about more than making money. I doubt Ruth Marcus or Joe Klein would lose their jobs or suffer a pay cut if they stopped fluffing Paul Ryan. I also think that they genuinely believe that the American middle-class needs to suffer. I am not attributing any malice to anyone here, quite the opposite.

It’s striking that so many economists—even conservative ones like Greg Mankiw and Martin Feldstein—supported the stimulus, albeit with caveats about how it wasn’t perfect and so on, while non-economist pundits were generally critical of it. This happened because economists were more likely to consider the quantitative details while punditubbies (EDIT: h/t) thought gubmint should tighten its belt when Real Murkins do.

I also don’t think establishment media types supported the Iraq War because they wanted to see Iraqis and American soldiers die (with some exceptions, Tom Friedman has explicitly stated that he wanted to tell Iraqi civilians to “suck on this”). They didn’t understand the complexities of a potential war, so they went with what felt good—spreading freedom, keeping America safe, showing the Muslim world some tough love, etc. In some cases, crass careerist or circus dog motivations came into play I am sure, but I bet some of these people honestly thought it was “the right thing to do”.

I wish that more people would understand that most of the journamlism we see from establishment pundits is baseless musing that only reflects their own world views and life circumstances, and that their world views and life circumstances are very different from those of most middle-class Americans.

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Can animals commit suicide?

A touching story sent to me a few days ago by reader JS, in response to an ongoing Sullivan meme.

Fletcher was dying, born with an enlarged heart my parents had been told. I’d driven home to my parents where he lived because I didn’t know what else to do.

I’d brought Fletcher home from my summer job in the OK oilfields where my boss had dumped him out after his kids had grown bored with him. He’d been there three days. He was just a puppy and all us were pretty sure he was going to die. He was too young and weak to hunt like the other dog who’s name that I can’t remember that Otho had dumped. I felt bad for him, but I was going back to school in a few weeks and being that I lived in the dorms a dog was out of the question, especially since my dad had made it clear that he didn’t want anymore dogs. Just get in the fucking car and leave I told myself everyday, except today he was laying underneath my front tire. I grabbed him and threw him into the car figuring I’d take him to the pound or something that getting put to sleep was better than starving to death. He laid up under the middle console of my Ford EXP the half hour drive to my parents never moving or making a sound.

What I expected would happened when I got home with him did. My dad was pissed, yelling at me that he didn’t want any goddamn dogs. I assured him that I’d be taking him to the pound and that he didn’t need to worry. He responded by telling me that if the dog made so much as sound that night he’d shoot him before I had the chance to. I finally got so sick of listening to him that I told him to go get the gun “toughguy” and I’ll shoot him now. Fletcher never made a peep that night.

The next morning as I was feeding him some leftover scraps before heading to work my dad was already on me to take him to the pound I assured him come Saturday I would. About that time my mom walked outside looked at Fletcher and said simply, the dog stays.

Seven years later I was lying on their garage floor next to him on the pile of blankets my parents had laid out to keep him comfortable as he gasped for breaths while I cried and waited for my dad to get home, so that we could take him to the vet and put him to sleep. At one point he got up and headed through the yard that had been his to the gate. I opened the gate and followed as he headed down the path towards the creek where we had always walked. I know he was just a dog, but all I could think was “he’s trying to make me feel better.” When we got to the creek he climbed into the water and looked up at me with a look that to my mind said goodbye. At that point I started screaming at him to get out, to come to me which he finally did albeit seemingly reluctantly. He didn’t stop as he passed me sobbing, he just headed back home. Finally when my dad got home, later than usual we took him to the vet. I insisted on staying with him as the vet searched for a vein that hadn’t collapsed yet until finally he found one and Fletcher went still. I kissed him and covered him up and then my dad and I carried him outside to the truck and drove home in silence.

When we got back we took him out of the truck and laid him in the grave in the backyard where his house had always set that my dad had dug the day before. Then we covered him up as my dad sobbed and my mom stood watching.

To this day I think I should have left him alone in that creek, but I was young and weak and goddamn I loved that dog.

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Where is my motivation?

I know nothing about psychology, but I’m guessing this proposition is hardly novel: people’s underlying motivations are often misunderstood, even (especially?) by themselves. This is why I can’t believe in rational markets, altruistic Galtians, or impartial pundits. Even if people believe they’re being rational, altruistic, or impartial, there’s a good chance that they’re not, and, to take it one step farther, their belief in their own rationality/altruism/impartiality may well indicate that they are merely delusional or narcissistic.

Atrios makes a good point apropos of the lock-out instigated by the mighty job-creators at the NBA:

Too often we assume that Homo Economicus is truly just motivated by the money, or more ridiculously the financial interests of the shareholders of the companies they run. The truth is, Our Galtian Overlords are frequently just assholes because they are assholes, not because being assholes will actually make them any richer.

Likewise, Charles Pierce translates Ruth Marcus’s cry of the wounded school-marm thusly:

“I are an actual journalist. Please note my concern for the First Amendment, a quaint notion that I believe applies to me and to the eight people I had dinner with last night, and not necessarily to potty-mouthed high-schoolers.”

Marcus most likely wants to silence “potty-mouthed” high-schoolers because their tweets in some way undermine her own her influence, whether she or not she admits it (or even knows it).

When I discuss the American political scene with tote-baggers, the notion they resist the most is that we should question our Galtian and Village overlords’ underlying motivations. When I tell them, for example, that the establishment wants to cut Social Security and Medicare simply because they enjoy fucking the middle-class over, they tell me I am insane. When I ask them what other motivation there could be for replacing a reasonably efficient government health-care system with a less efficient private health care system, they have no answer.

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Republican Anniversary of the Week: Iran-Contra

Now that reports of Iranians storming embassies indicate that our national newspapers of record have been permitted to shake up the normal somnolence of their readers, an optimist might wonder if any aspiring journo would dare to mention the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Iran-Contra scandal. Few Balloon-Juice readers are optimists, but it did surprise me slightly how much the whole disgraceful interlude seems to have passed from the national public memory. Peter Kornbluh, of the National Security Archives, published an excellent precis in Salon:

It has been 25 years since President Ronald Reagan stepped up to the microphone in the White House press room and made the announcement that launched one of the greatest scandals in modern American politics.

Reagan announced that his administration had sent “small amounts of defense weapons and spare parts to Iran” not to trade arms for hostages, but to improve relations and support moderate mullahs. There was “one aspect” of the operation that, the President said, he had been “unaware of.” His attorney general, Edwin Meese, then stepped forward to describe how “private benefactors” had transferred profits from those sales to counterrevolutionary forces, the contras, fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. No U.S. officials were involved, according to Meese, in this “diversion” of funds that linked two seemingly separate covert operations…

The list of the “other… more important ” aspects of the sordid story that became known as “Iran-contra” scandal is a long one but worth recalling 25 years later. The Reagan administration had been negotiating with terrorists (despite Reagan’s repeated public position that he would “never” do so). There were illegal arms transfers to Iran, flagrant lying to Congress, soliciting third country funding to circumvent the Congressional ban on financing the contra war in Nicaragua, White House bribes to various generals in Honduras, illegal propaganda and psychological operations directed by the CIA against the U.S. press and public, collaboration with drug kingpins such as Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, and violating the checks and balances of the constitution.

“If ever the constitutional democracy of the United States is overthrow,” the leading political analyst of the scandal, Theodore Draper wrote at the time, “we now have a better idea of how this is likely to be done.”...

Charles P. Pierce, in Esquire’s Political Blog, nicely summarizes the “lost opportunities of Iran-Contra“:

... Iran-Contra was a straightforward constitutional B&E. The Reagan people wanted to fight a war in Central America. Congress did its constitutional duty and shut off the money. The administration then broke the law by arranging private funding for its pet war. One of the ways it did that was to sell military hardware to the government of Iran, which sponsored not only terrorism, but also the kidnapping of various American citizens abroad. All of this was in service to a private foreign policy, devoid of checks and balances, and based on a fundamental contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law…

Iran-Contra was the moment when the country decided — or, alternatively, when it was decided for the country — that self-government was too damned hard, and that we’re all better off just not knowing. It was the moment when all the checks and balances failed, when our faith in the Constitution was most sorely tested, and when it was found most seriously wanting. Iran-Contra is how all the crimes of the subsequent years became possible. It is when the Constitution became a puppet show.

I was in my mid-20s then, old enough to understand the depths of Republican treason and dishonesty exposed by the Walsh investigation, and young enough to be outraged by the unseemly haste by which both wings of the Permanent Government Party and its media courtiers swept all evidence of global criminality out of the public eye. Mistakes were made! Honorable men—opinions differ! And yet even the truncated clown-show proceedings permitted to enter the official records established, to me, what prosecutors call “a pattern of misconduct”: One October Surprise might be dismissed as the abberation of a paranoid drunk misleading a band of well-meaning innocents, but repeating Nixon’s ‘mastercoup’—putting American lives at risk for nothing more valuable than a presidential campaign—made it clear that the Republican Party was deliberately degenerating from a political party into a criminal junta. I have always been a proud Democrat, but it was the whole sordid, murderous Iran-Contra scandal which convinced me that (to quote Driftglass and the Rude Pundit):

Anyone who votes for a modern Republican is voting for a Bad Person.

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In Which I Find Myself In Total (and Gobsmacked) Agreement With Jeffrey Goldberg

If you want to know why supporting Israel—in any meaningful sense of the term—has to be different from supporting Likud/Netanyahu, check this out from Goldberg.  (If you don’t think that supporting Israel in any context is a good idea—well, we disagree, but you can still marvel at the Netanyahu administration’s truly impressive, the-wheel-is-spinning-but-the-hamster’s-dead stupidity.)  Golberg’s concluding passage:

The idea, communicated in these ads [created by the Netanyahu govt. for American TV], that America is no place for a proper Jew, and that a Jew who is concerned about the Jewish future should live in Israel, is archaic, and also chutzpadik (if you don’t mind me resorting to the vernacular). The message is: Dear American Jews, thank you for lobbying for American defense aid (and what a great show you put on at the AIPAC convention every year!) but, please, stay away from our sons and daughters.

Let me go further:  not only is this latest absurdity proof that there is a vast gulf between a commitment to Israel and a defense of its current government—the two are actually in conflict.  Likud and Netanyahu and their further-right allies are doing lots of things that I think weigh down the long-term prospects for Israel’s survival.  But I have to say that if they want to make things worse much sooner, potentially alienating a significant  fraction of the most committed American supporters of Israel is a pretty good way to go about it.

To steal a term:  Morans!

Image: Jozef Israëls,A Jewish Wedding, 1903

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From the ground up

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. As usual, voters are way ahead of professional national opinion leaders. To borrow a phrase used in the article, the Tea Party is now “less an abstraction” to the people who actually live in Tea Party districts, as opposed to the national narrative creators who don’t live in these districts.

Support for the Tea Party — and with it, the Republican Party — has fallen sharply even in places considered Tea Party strongholds, according to an analysis of new polls.

In Congressional districts represented by Tea Party lawmakers, the number of people saying they disagree with the movement has risen significantly since it powered a Republican sweep in midterm elections; almost as many people disagree with it as agree with it, according to the analysis by the Pew Research Center.

The analysis suggests that the Tea Party may be dragging down the Republican Party heading into a presidential election year, even as it ushered in a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives just a year ago. Other polls have shown a decline in support for the Tea Party and its positions, particularly because its hard line during the debate over the debt ceiling and deficit reduction made it less an abstraction than it was a year ago. In earlier polls, most Americans did not know enough about the Tea Party to offer an opinion.

I’m just guessing here, but maybe people watching the insane debt limit fight from out here in the cheap seats thought it was stupid and counterproductive and reckless, rather than principled and worthwhile? Maybe they’re noticing that Tea Party House members never actually get any work done?

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