"You know, if I were to say on my 530 radio stations or right here on the FOX News Channel half the stuff that liberals say about me, lies told on a regular basis — and I don't really pay attention to it because I don't care — I would be probably thrown off the air, targeted for boycotts." - Sean Hannity
The most amazing (and disturbing) thing about Sean Hannity's belief that there is a double standard in the media which allows "liberals" to say mean and horrible things about pseudo-conservatives like himself is that it is a complete and utter inversion of reality. The reality is that Sean Hannity's career is based specifically on his ability to say mean and horrible things about "liberals" without conscience; he is paid lucratively precisely because of his ability to spread lies and misinformation on a regular and systematic basis.
The clearest indication of the real double standard is Ann Coulter: there is simply no "liberal" equivelent to her. Coulter's career suffered not a bit from her absolutely inexcusable derogatory comments about the "Jersey Girls". Indeed, a Google search will reveal that she was lauded for telling 9/11 widows that they gloried in the death of their husbands (she received an ovation from from Sean Hannity's audience for them at the end of this clip.)
Hannity's latest defamation campaign involves his relentless promotion of the Liars for Jesus propaganda that Obama favors infanticide. It is a sad irony that people who are so determined to plaster the Ten Commandments in public schools and courtrooms can't see fit to abide by the 9th commandment's injunction to Not Bear False Witness against others. And the thing to remember is that the so-called "born alive" legislation that sparked all this was designed as heads we win, tails you lose political legislation. The lives of live infants were already protected under Illinois law; the purpose of the legislation was to create backdoor precedent for making abortion illegal and to demonize anyone who didn't vote for it as a proponent of infanticide.
If you read the above link you will see that there is grounds for criticism in regards to Obama's explanation about his voting record on the matter, but there is nothing that remotely comes close to justifying the frenzy of accusation that Obama favors killing children.
Update: Media Matters has some background on Hannity's newest favorite Liar for Jesus relating to her credibility.
I listened to about ten minutes of Michael Savage's radio show yesterday. The gist of the message was thus: the homosexual/liberal vermin must be killed.
I think he meant that metaphorically, but the metaphor sort of dropped out at the end. He had been talking about how the "vermin," i.e. liberals/hippies, homosexuals, and the media are trying to stab a knife into the heart of America in order to kill America and that he wants to fight and kill Americas enemies in response. Notice how that shifts from a metaphorical death to one that just sounds like plain old death.
HANNITY: I think — I think they think we're evil. You know, I mean, if you read, you know, the things — it's funny because there is this double standard out there in both radio and television.
You know, if I were to say on my 530 radio stations or right here on the FOX News Channel half the stuff that liberals say about me, lies told on a regular basis — and I don't really pay attention to it because I don't care — I would be probably thrown off the air, targeted for boycotts.
It's like this is how they let the liberals — they say they like free speech, but they want to silence anybody, Fairness Doctrine included. Anybody they disagree with.
Right, so says the author of a book which says that liberalism is an evil that America needs to be delivered from. So says the guy that promotes conspiracy theory that Vince Foster was murdered by the Clintons, that Michael Schiavo put his wife in a persistent vegetative state so that he could claim the insurance money, etc. So says the guy who works at a network that spends a good deal of time promoting the message that the entertainment industry should "shut up and sing."
Gee, look at the image and see if you can see any sort of aysemmetry there. Mr. Hannity is correct about one thing, though. I sure as hell do think that propaganda tactics like naming individuals with political views you disagree with "Enemy of the State" and equating them with dictators is pretty god damn evil.*
*It should be noted that while Hannity may think Hugo Chavez is a dictator, he is not (although he has been attempting to aggregate power for himself.) The image should also be considered in relation to Hannity's book Deliver us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism. Hannity considers (left-wing) dictators, terrorists and liberals to be a sort of Satanic axis of Evil that must be defeated.
This had escaped my attention until the other day.
Kent Hovind has an offer of $250,000 for anyone who can give a scientific proof of evolution. Now Steve Milloy is following in Hovind's footsteps with the Ultimate Global Warming Challenge: $100,000 if you can provide a scientific proof of harmful man-made warming.
A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.
What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it.
Let us alter the case a little, and suppose that the ship was not unsound after all; that she made her voyage safely, and many others after it. Will that diminish the guilt of her owner? Not one jot. When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that. The man would not have been innocent, he would only have been not found out. The question of right or wrong has to do with the origin of his belief, not the matter of it; not what it was, but how he got it; not whether it turned out to be true or false, but whether he had a right to believe on such evidence as was before him.
Or what if someone convinced himself an United States invasion of Iraq would finance itself. That the United States would be greeted as liberators. That Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" and ties to al Qaeda. What if people who were actually planning an occupation were dismissed for ideological reasons? If before the invasion generals warning that it would require a greater number of troops were ignored and after the invasion what if he ignored critical reports warning of a growing insurgency? Etc.
I noted this in an update to my previous post about Jerome Corsi having been scheduled to appear on a white supremacist radio program which is syndicated at the white nationalist web forum Stormfront, but Corsi failed to appear on the radio show, supposedly because of a change in travel plans.
A LA Times review of Corsi's book that Digby spotted demonstrates why Corsi's message would be so well received by such bigots.
You can pretty well sum the whole thing up this way: The Democratic candidate is a deceitful jihadist drug addict who, if elected, plans to impose a black supremacist, socialist regime.
That's the same sort of thing that the racists at Stormfront say on a regular basis. When they say it, we know its bigotry. Yet Corsi gets to go on Fox News and say it and get published by a major book publisher and pretend its not the extremist cant that it is.
At least one Stormfronter know white nationalism when he sees it
Lovely, far right wing White books like The Obama Nation are beoming number one according to the New York Times. And the so called White Hate group writings are becomng respectable in America.
The jews and blacks must be having convulsions over this.
Digby points out that Dave Neiwert has written extensively about the way that media transmitters within the conservative movement help to inject extremist views into the mainstream.
Not only do they inject the extremist meme into mainstream conservatism, they also condition the mainstream to think of extremists in a generous and even collegial light. Simultaneously, they persuade extremists who might otherwise align themselves with marginal and powerless fringe groups to instead perceive that mainstream conservatives are capable of addressing their issues, thereby drawing them into the political ranks of mainstream conservatism.
Jerome Corsi is a perfect example of that.
One day he's appearing on a white supremacist radio show. Another day he's on Fox News promoting a book he had published by a publishing imprint run by a Republican political operative.* Corsi walks in both worlds, making the extreme, as the quoted Stormfronter puts it, "respectable."
Digby makes this same point, and observes the asymmetry in the nature of the way what is "extreme" is defined in mainstream American political discourse.
Dave Neiwert has, as you all undoubtedly know, written reams about how the right mainstreams its extremists. And this is one case where I think it's come fully to fruition, right out in the open. Corsi is not just a right wing ideologue. He's a full fledged nutcase, and yet he was hired by a major publisher, "edited" by a star GOP villager, to write an incendiary book of lies about the Democratic presidential candidate. They aren't even trying to keep their fingerprints off this thing.
In fact, the default position among Democrats, Republicans and the media is that the only kooks in the country with whom it is unacceptable to be professionally or financially involved are on the left. And "the left" is defined so broadly that it includes groups like MoveOn and Vote Vets. The right, in contrast, has fully integrated even their extremist fringe into the mainstream and everyone accepts it.
The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, is publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog. From 9th August 2008, Orwell’s domestic and political diaries (from 9th August 1938 until October 1942) will be posted in real-time, exactly 70 years after the entries were written.
Orwell’s ‘domestic’ diaries begin on 9th August 1938/2008; his ‘political’ diaries (which are further categorised as ‘Morocco’, ‘Pre-war’ and ‘Wartime’) begin on 7th September 1938/2008.
The diaries are exactly as Orwell wrote them. Where there are original spelling errors, they are indicated by a ° following the offending word.
George Orwell is one of the 20th century's most acute critics of totalitarianism. I have a friend who previously had ridiculed me over my concerns regarding the Patriot Act and the treatment of individuals such as Padilla and Hamdan. A while ago he finished reading 1984 for the first time and he e-mailed me to let me know he had begun questioning and re-thinking such things.
In Orwell's political diaries - written as the world descended into hellish world war - we get to see the personal insights that allowed Orwell to write such powerful anti-totalitarian allegory.
Update: Jean Seaton of The Orwell Prize talked to NPR about the release of these previously unreleased diaries.
As it so happens, I've been reading Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens provides another example of the lasting anti-totalitarian power of Orwell's writing that I had not been aware of: that the people of Zimbabwe considered their dictator Robert Mugabe to be the equivalent of Napoleon from Animal Farm.
THE exploits of Napoleon, Snowball and Squealer in Animal Farm have been gripping readers of Zimbabwe's most popular newspaper as they revel in its striking parallels with the autocratic President Robert Mugabe.
The Daily News, the biggest selling independent newspaper, has criticised Mr Mugabe and suffered two bomb attacks and numerous violent demonstrations.
Yet its serialisation of Animal Farm, in which George Orwell sought to parody the communism which swept Russia and was spreading to Europe, has marked its most effective attack on his government.
Kingston's bookshop, the largest in Harare, sold out of copies of Orwell's book within days of the serialisation beginning last month.
In the daily instalments Napoleon, the greedy and brutal pig who leads the revolution, is depicted in the black thick-rimmed spectacles favoured by Mr Mugabe.
Gary Wills' op-ed "Christ Among the Partisans" is a couple of years old, but is worth re-reading in this election year.
Money quote: "The institutional Jesus of the Republicans has no similarity to the Gospel figure. Neither will any institutional Jesus of the Democrats."
Thanks, in no small part, to people like Jerome Corsi promoting the vile and evil lie that Obama favors legalized murder of babies to the White Nationalist website Stormfront (founded by a former KKK member) and people like Rush Limbaugh telling his audience of millions that
But what's fascinating to me is that the drive-bys are spending 10 times the amount of energy trying to get who -- the background on Corsi than they are on Obama. They have spent no time working on the background of Obama. It is other people having to come up with the fact that this guy, numerous times, three times in Illinois voted for legislation that would allow doctors and patients to murder babies who survived abortions and were out of the womb. Radical stuff. Three times he voted for this.
Meanwhile, Bill O'Reilly is so very worried that someone is going to get killed because of the supposed Nazi style hatred of conservatives being cultivated in a fraction of a percentage point of the comments posted in response to the articles at Daily Kos.
I will adress the rest of this post to O'Reilly:
Mr. O'Reilly, Jerome Corsi is telling white nationalist, Nazi worshipping racists that Barack Obama favors killing babies. He is doing so with the help of Fox News star Sean Hannity. If you want to at least pretend to be anything other than a delusional, ego-maniacal generic Joe McCarthy out to demonize anyone and everyone that ever says a critical word about you, then you should speak out and denounce these evil smears from your Fox News family.
Bill O'Reilly has taken his war on the blogs to the next level, engaging an "Internet Cop" who regularly appears on his show to provide examples of just how over-the-top outrageous those potty-mouth liberal bloggers are. The argument is that while conservative blogs may be rough-and-tumble, they're nothing like those liberal blogs, where commenters routinely make death threats against conservatives. (I know. I know. Conservative projection in action, once again. When Ann Coulter calls for us to be executed as traitors on national TV, that's just incisive commentary in Bill's World. When some hothead with issues corks off on our pages -- even when the rest of us cut him off or shut him down -- it's a cardinal sign that liberal blogs have become a danger to the nation.)
The really funny part of this is that his "cop" is Amanda Carpenter of Townhall.com, a site that recently called Michelle Obama a "race pimp" and said that congressmen who "damage the morale and undermine the military" should be executed as saboteurs. And no, those weren't comments -- those calls came on the front page. You'd think that would pretty much disqualify her as the Amy Vanderbilt in charge of enforcing good manners on blogs -- but, y'no, it's Fox, and reality is what they say it is.
The not-so-funny (and not-so-surprising) part is that Carpenter's own comments threads contain their fair share of precisely the same kind of ugly speech she purports to be digging up on the threads at liberal blogs -- and, in fact, much worse. Brad Friedman went out and found a choice series of eliminationist screeds that should give all of us pause
Read the rest at the link. One thing, however, that bothered me is that Robinson suggests that reading the comments linked would perhaps give one reason to go out and purchase a gun (for self-defense purposes.) While I can understand the sentiment given the nature of the comments, I think that kind of rhetoric is counter-productive.
I flipped by the O'Reilly Factor last night or the night before (I forget which) and saw O'Reilly doing the old Daily Kos are Nazis routine with Amanda Carpenter from Townhall.com - a site which features Pat Buchanan's quasi-white supremacist articles (see here and here.)
Look, the comments -rejoicing in the death of Robert Novak - O'Reilly and Carpenter were talking about are attrocious. I saw similar comments at The Secular Web, a site which is in my Link section, and found them to be highly objectionable. But, again, these are individual commenters with little to no influence.
Meanwhile, Jerome Corsi, who has become a regular fixture on Fox News promoting his new anti-Obama book which smears Obama as an infanticidal radical communist Manchurian candidate secret Muslim is going to go on a white nationalist radio show that will also be broadcast on a New World Order conspiracy network to promote that narrative.
Anonymous commenters at web forums versus best selling authors. Were O'Reilly's mind not hermetically sealed, this might indicate to him an asymmetry in the nature of "liberal" and "conservative" hate.
O'Reilly's mind is sealed, however, and he is fine with Corsi's book. What's more, he's fine with having Ann Coulter on his show despite her having previously expressed her regret that Timothy McVeigh did not blow up the New York Times building.
Update: I didn't notice until I read Jeffrey Feldman's post about this, but this won't be Corsi's first appearance on the white supremacist radio show.
While it should go without saying, the ramifications this holds for the broadcast and print media are profound. While the media has widely reported that Corsi was the author of a previous 'Swift Boat' smear campaigns against John Kerry, major media outlets have yet to report Corsi's affiliation with white supremacist radio.
News of white supremacist ties to an author of a book maligning Senator Barack Obama's candidacy for President should be a top story within hours of its being reported.
Update II: Corsi decided not to go on the radio show minutes before air time because of changing "travel plans."
Historian of science Naomi Oreskes explains the tactics the Western Fuel Association uses to confuse the public about the science of global warming and how this strategy parallels the way that the tobacco industry lied to the public about the health effects of smoking for decades in this lecture.
If you find yourself confronted by one of Bill O'Reilly's stalker-producers demanding to know why you won't answer Factor questions, explain to him that you refuse to answer questions from a program that dishonors the service of military veterans by attempting to minimize the plight and existence of homeless veterans.
In about the middle portion of this segment, Olbermann explains O'Reilly's latest attempt to bend reality to his will in an effort to discredit the economic message of John Edwards.*
*In the final bit of this clip, Olbermann attacks O'Reilly over his sexual harassment law suit. While this may generate ratings, it isn't all that intellectually honest. O'Reilly had raised the issue of potential Edwards campaign funds being used as hush money and Olbermann used that as an opportunity to bring up O'Reilly's settlement. This is non sequitur.
'Those in the [Christian nationalist] movement speak of "liberty," but they do not speak about the traditional concepts of American liberty - the liberty to express divergent opinions, to respect other ways of believing and being, the liberty of individuals to seek and pursue their own goals and forms of happiness. When used by the Christian Right, the term "liberty" means the liberty that comes with accepting a very narrowly conceived Christ and the binary worldview that acceptance promotes.' - Chris Hedges, American Fascists
Today, the AP reports on new draft rules being proposed by the Bush administration to gut the Endangered Species Act. This would be the biggest change to the groundbreaking legislation since 1988, and would not require the approval of Congress.
Currently, federal agencies are required to consult with an independent agency — the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) or the National Marine Fisheries Service — to determine whether a project would harm an endangered species. The AP reports that under the new rules, agencies would simply be able to “decide for themselves”
I have long said that you can see in microcosm everything wrong with the Bush administration by looking at its approach to the environment. This is still the case. The White House wants to cut independent scientific analysis out of the process because the White House does not believe that there should be any such thing as a non-political truth or reality; that, and then there's the desire of the White House to find a way to circumvent laws it does not like.
It's the same reason that the White House was able to never learn that Iraq did not have WMDs. This kind of governance by ideology inspite of factual evidence is excellent at putting ideological beliefs into practice. It is terrible at yielding competent, non-corrupt government that can deal with and respond to reality.
'In terms of the conservative constituency of the Republican Party, Sen. McCain is an opportunistic infection that threatens to ravage and destroy its defenseless body. Tragically for America, in the larger context of our national political life he still plays the role of the AIDS virus, masquerading as a republican while opening the way for Barack Obama, the opportunistic infection that will ravage the defenseless body of our republic. If we accept the McCain/Obama choice, we resign the republic to its demise. I guess the "lesser of evils" crowd will take comfort in the notion that though infected with HIV, the patient actually died of pneumonia. Unfortunately, this is false comfort, since the choice they make increases the virulence of the opportunistic infection.' - Alan Keyes
In today's New York Times, in an op-ed that seems to suggest we should be going to war with Russia, William Kristol wrote: "In Iraq, we and our Iraqi allies are on the verge of a strategic victory over the jihadists in what they have called the central front of their struggle."
No matter how many times one of these breezy statements that Kristol routinely tosses out turns out to be catastrophically wrong, he continues making them. With no sense of remorse, contrition, or the apparent consideration that he should maybe retire and go take a time out somewhere where his dead wrong pronouncements can't translate into dead people.
The United States committed itself to defeating terror around the world. We committed ourselves to reshaping the Middle East, so the region would no longer be a hotbed of terrorism, extremism, anti-Americanism, and weapons of mass destruction. The first two battles of this new era are now over. The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably. But these are only two battles. We are only at the end of the beginning in the war on terror and terrorist states.
It is absolutely bizarre seeing someone who has been so absolutely wrong about the most important issues of the day on one of the largest news channels in the country and in one of the most influential newspapers. I find this sickening.
Given that the quality of Kristol's opinion is so poor, the only purpose it serves is as propaganda.
In this post I wrote that the McCain ad with allusions to the Left Behind books conception of Antichrist were not merely unethical, but irresponsible and dangerous given that New World Order conspiracy beliefs had been a prime motivation for Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing. What I forgot to mention is that the Left Behind books are explicitly New World Order conspiracy books. The Antichrist character in the book plainly states that he is forging a "new world order."
As I mentioned before, I've been reading (and am now a few pages short of finishing) Tim LaHaye's first Left Behind novel. The most impressive thing about the book is that the quality of writing gets progressively worse, page by page.
My having read the Left Behind book is one of the reasons I could state with confidence after watching McCain's ad depicting Obama as Antchrist that "there will be many a Tim LaHaye reading 'liberal' hating Christian Nationalist who sees this commercial and will have the circuitry in his brain light up to say: Danger, AntiChrist coming!" If you've read the book, the way the ad draws upon the characterization of Carpathia (the Antichrist) to characterize Obama is obvious.
Well, Slactivist - who has been doing truly excellent and informative page by page analysis of the Left Behind series* - points out that Tim LaHaye noticed the ad borrowing from his books, too.
That steaming pile of spin from Brian Rogers is quoted in a Wall Street Journal article that also includes commentary from Tim LaHaye himself:
The End Times, a New Testament reference to the period surrounding the return of Christ, were popularized in recent years by the "Left Behind" series of books that sold more than 63 million copies. The Rev. Tim LaHaye, co-author of the series, said in an interview that he recognized allusions to his work in the ad but comparisons between Sen. Obama and the Antichrist are incorrect.
"The Antichrist isn't going to be an American, so it can't possibly be Obama. The Bible makes it clear he will be from an obscure place, like Romania," the 82-year-old author said.
Let me repeat the key part of that:
"LaHaye ... recognized allusions to his work in the ad."
LaHaye recognized those allusions in the ad because those allusions are in the ad. They were put in the ad.
The whole post is worth reading, but this part will help makes sense of something else I wrote in my previous post:
LaHaye is talking about what we have repeatedly seen as a recurring, emphatic theme in Left Behind and throughout the entire premillennial dispensationalist sect: Those who seek peace and pursue it might be the Antichrist; those who speak of love, peace, unity and brotherhood might be the Antichrist.
So beware the peacemakers, recoil in horror from Middle East peace talks, fear the United Nations, wet the bed over nightmares of a One World Government and keep a terrified, watchful eye on anyone who suggests that international relations might consist of anything other than hot and cold war.
With that in mind, it's also fairly obvious why Gerard Baker's satire about Obama touring Europe and the Middle East, magically bringing peace as he goes, is a dog whistle. Indeed, I consider it to be a more effective whistle than the McCain ad, which Slactivist says is:
It's a very clumsy kind of dogwhistle, though. When torture-apologist Michael Gerson inserted evangelicalisms into President Bush's speeches he did so seamlessly. The intended evangelical audience understood the dogwhistle message, but it was embedded within a coherent message addressed to the larger audience. McCain's ad works as a dogwhistle, but there's no larger message for the larger audience. The Left Behind readers will understand his coded message, but the larger audience will just see him standing there, growing red-faced from blowing into a whistle that appears not to work.
The Baker piece, however, will make sense to a secular audience, who will get it as using a Biblical tone to mock expectations of what Obama presidency will accomplish; and yet it is also less obviously an appeal to the Left Behind novels.
Update: Time magazine explores the Left Behind evoking appearance of the ad. (h/t Framing Science)
*If you have or haven't read the books, his archives on it are a fantastic resource. I plan on using them in several future posts, as I've already done in this post and this post.
First, remember (i.e. re-read) what I said about scape-goating. Then read Chet Scoville's post about Straw Liberals. Ok, now here's a portion of an e-mail I sent to another blogger:
Another issue that this brings to light: Thomas Frank has a new book coming out in a few days called The Wrecking Crew about how the conservative movement in power yields incompetent and ruinous government. Yet, whether in power or not, the noise machine figures spend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week blaming "liberals" for all problems in America.
For example, they say vote for Republicans as a solution to fiscally irresponsible Democrats. They get in power and bankrupt the country and then say vote for Republicans as a solution to fiscally irresponsible Democrats. You get the idea ... they're very good at scapegoating, not so good at governing.
This guy Adkisson felt down and out. And he scapegoated "liberals" in the same terms that the authors of the books found in his home scapegoat "liberals" on a daily basis. I turned to Hannity's radio show yesterday - no lie - randomly and the instant I flipped it on I heard Hannity telling me "liberals" are to blame for high gas prices and that if Obama becomes president his tax policy will cause another Great Depression.
Kevin Phillips - a disenchanted Republican - had a chapter in his 1993 book Boiling Point about how middle class frustration after a decade of Reaganomics gave rise to "the politics of resentment" during the '92 presidential campaign which resembled the dynamic by which national socialism began to flourish in the Weimar Republic (remember that David Duke was making his runs for office back then.)
Fascism's violent populism tends to prey upon people feeling down and out like Adkisson - who read Michael Savage who pretty much is a fascist - and gives them a Demon to hate. This review of Boiling Point touches on the subject
While today's middle-class revolt is just the latest manifestation of a populist thread that has run through American history, a hidden danger exists. Not all populist movements were inclusive. As John Judis points out in the summer 1993 issue of The American Prospect, while some populists in the late 1800s unwaveringly supported a movement of black and white, many southern populists, particularly after 1892, sought to exclude blacks. Similarly, while many populists during that era and in the 1930s identified the privileged elite as business tycoons or financiers, others identified the members of the elite as Easterners and even as Jews.
In other words, one current of populism has always sought to unite the middle with the bottom of society, including whites and blacks, small business owners and labor, tenants and homeowners – against uncaring big business and the wealthy. The other tendency pitted the people against both the top of society and the bottom including blacks and immigrants. The more inclusive populism formed the underlying rhetoric of progressive populism. The more exclusive populism underlaid the appeal of modern conservatism represented by people like George Wallace, David Duke and Pat Buchanan.
Allright, now listen to what Rev. Chris Bruice, pastor of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, has to say about Jim Adkisson.
"It is imposisble for us to reach these people, but we can rest completely assured that we must stop them from gaining power - the plans they have, the lunatic assumptions they hold, are the stuff with which civil wars are made. Essentially, the left wishes to criminalise non-leftist actions and ideas, and as we on the right won’t ever agree to that, push may very well come to shove if the left gains power and seeks to prosecute us for what they consider to be crimes. I wish never to see anyone who is a fellow citizen of the United States as an enemy - but anyone who thinks putting President Bush et al up on war crimes charges - or even attempting to set up a truth commission - is someone who has definitively set themselves up as my enemy. Not a fellow citizen with ideas I think wrong, but an enemy I’ll fight." - Mark Noonan
Ok, let me get this straight. If "the left" - which now includes arch-communists like Bob Barr and Bruce Fein - sets up a commission to investigate the Bush administration for violations of American law Mark Noonan will be prepared to wage war - indeed Civil War II - against "the left."
Of course, Dahlia Lithwick is not suggesting that the Bush administration be investigated for holding "non-leftist ideas" or committing "non-leftist actions," nor is she suggesting the Bush regime has committed crimes equivalent to that of the Nazis. She is suggesting that if American laws have been broken - and in at least the instance of domestic surveillance they have been by admission of the Bush administration - we should find out about it and then hold the law-breakers accountable. What Lithwick (and I for that matter) "consider to be crimes" are, um, crimes.
There's not much dispute that domestic and international laws were broken in pursuit of the war on terror (see our monster Venn diagram). A federal judge recently ruled that President Bush violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in ordering the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants. Jane Mayer reports in her superb new book, The Dark Side, on a classified report from the International Red Cross finding that Bush administration officials authorized interrogation tactics that were "categorically" torture. And today we learn, from government memos released by the ACLU, that the Department of Justice authorized the use of "enhanced" interrogation techniques, including "the waterboard," on specific detainees. A handful of Bush administration officials continue to insist that water-boarding and eavesdropping are legal. Of course, they tend to be the same people who refuse to say that being buried alive or boiled in hot oil is illegal, so long as the president orders it.
Such contortionism aside, the question for most of us now is not whether laws were broken, but what to do about it. The War Crimes Act of 1996 makes it a federal crime for any American—military or civilian—to cause a "grave breach" of the Geneva Conventions' ban on inhumane treatment for prisoners. U.S. interrogators have been inhumane. Some of them have not only tortured but, in at least 100 cases, killed prisoners. A smattering of relatively low-ranking soldiers have been prosecuted, but in most instances there has been little or no accountability and none whatsoever at the top.
What this means is that Noonan believes that any attempt to hold "conservatives" accountable to the rule of law is grounds for civil war. Or to put it another way: not allowing Bush administration officials to break American laws with impunity amounts in Noonan's mind to ideological persecution!* This seems to be a psychological phenomena related to the way that movement conservatives consider any news that reflects poorly on a Republican to be evidence of liberal bias: not only is reality liberally biased, but so are our laws, it would seem.
Noonan considers this to be "the stuff with which civil wars are made." But what this "stuff" is is they way that our system of government is supposed to function. We are a country of laws, not of men. Our public servants are expected to serve the law, not vice versa. It is the rule of law which is the backbone of our civic body. It is the glue that holds our society together, and contrary to what Noonan believes, it is in reality the abandonment and atrophy of the rule of law which threatens to unravel the fabric of our system of government.
As it so happens, I started drafting a post the other day which argues the need for another entity like the Church commission to investigate the damage to democracy that has been done over the course of the Bush administration. Apparently, I should be worried that Noonan sees me as an enemy that he needs to fight a civil war against.
Do you think Jim Adkisson considered he was striking the first blow of Civil War II?
*Yet expelling a Democrat from the Senate for proposing the President be censured for admitted law breaking is fine by Noonan.
Are you kidding me? This sounds like the sort of thing you'd expect in some banana republic.
Let me just go on record saying I'm terribly uncomfortable with the notion of my country's president being able to have people interrogated in his basement.
Last month, author Andrew Klavan wrote that the new Batman film is a “paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war.” CNN’s Glenn Beck agreed today, listing off controversial Bush policies he claims were vindicated by the film’s showcase of “conservative values on the war on terror”:
But Batman goes into another country and with a C-130 snatches a guy out, and then throws him back here into Gotham. So there’s rendition. At one point the Morgan Freeman character says to Batman, wait a minute, hang on, you’re eavesdropping on everyone in Gotham? And Batman says, yes, to stop this terrorist. Morgan Freeman says, I can’t be a part of it. And yet Morgan Freeman does become a part of it, and they find the Joker. One of the ways they find the Joker is through eavesdropping. I mean the parallels here of what’s going on is to me stunning.
Could someone at CNN or CNN HN- supposedly news networks - inform Beck that the Batman movie is a fictional adaptation of a comic book, not a documentary of actual events.
Rant & Reason notices some striking similarity in the methodology of animal rights extremists and anti-abortion extremists:
"The causes might be different, but fanaticism brings the methods closer and closer together. And along the way, the message of the fanatics is lost in the hatred and the fire, until only the violence remains."
If you haven't been reading Glenn Greenwald's series of posts about the 2001 anthrax attacks then I highly recommend you take the time to read through them. Here are the first three:
After pointing out that these anthrax attacks were purposefully designed to create the impression they were part of additional attacks from the 9/11 terrorists, Greenwald reminds us about the role that ABC News had in creating the false perception in the public's mind that Iraq was responsible for the attacks - which played a major role in generating the public perception that Iraq was linked to the 9/11 attacks. If it had not been for this perception, the Iraq invasion may not have happened.
Much more important than the general attempt to link the anthrax to Islamic terrorists, there was a specific intent -- indispensably aided by ABC News -- to link the anthrax attacks to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. In my view, and I've written about this several times and in great detail to no avail, the role played by ABC News in this episode is the single greatest, unresolved media scandal of this decade. News of Ivins' suicide, which means (presumably) that the anthrax attacks originated from Ft. Detrick, adds critical new facts and heightens how scandalous ABC News' conduct continues to be in this matter.
During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax -- tests conducted at Ft. Detrick -- revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since -- as ABC variously claimed -- bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."
ABC News' claim -- which they said came at first from "three well-placed but separate sources," followed by "four well-placed and separate sources" -- was completely false from the beginning. There never was any bentonite detected in the anthrax (a fact ABC News acknowledged for the first time in 2007 only as a result of my badgering them about this issue). It's critical to note that it isn't the case that preliminary tests really did detect bentonite and then subsequent tests found there was none. No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.
That means that ABC News' "four well-placed and separate sources" fed them information that was completely false -- false information that created a very significant link in the public mind between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein.
It is difficult to overstate the significance of this. And, yet, as Greenwald points in the rest of this and the other posts, Brian Ross and ABC News have not revealed who those sources were!
That is simply unacceptable. The point of protecting sources is to protect whistle-blowers and to uncover malfeasance and what not. The point is not to help anonymous entities mislead the public and disseminate propaganda lies that now run with the blood of hundreds of thousands of people and which have been used to roll back the Bill of Rights.
A grueling survey of vast tracts of forest and swamp in the northern Congo Republic has revealed the presence of more than 125,000 western lowland gorillas, a rare example of abundance in a world of rapidly vanishing primate populations.
As recently as last year, this subspecies of the world’s largest primate was listed as critically endangered by international wildlife organizations because known populations — estimated at less than 100,000 in the 1980s — had been devastated by hunting and outbreaks of Ebola virus. The three other subspecies are either critically endangered or endangered.
Read the rest of the article to see that the gorillas - and many other of our primate cousins - aren't out of the woods yet. (And, yes, I mean that in both sense.)
As I mentioned, I've been reading the first Left Behind book. Just the other day I read a passage that left me wondering the question in the post title. The section is about a conversation between one of the main characters and someone who has a sister that works at a family planning clinic. The sister is depressed because she no longer has work to do since all "unborn children" have been raptured. (Slacktivist points out everything wrong with the coversation). In other words, apparently every single pregnant woman on the planet had the human life growing inside her raptured, regardless of what stage of development it was in. Including the newly implanted blastocyst.
(image of blastocyst shortly before implantation from here) So, um, what exactly are these tiny balls of cells going to be doing for all of eternity?*
*Obviously, the question is facetious. But I'm simply pointing out how incoherent these beliefs are. Some believe that the unborn will be magically fast fowarded to their "ideal" age. In which case, where does the personality come from? Ech ... all gibberish.
Crooks and Liars reports that in Pulitzer winning journalist Ron Suskind's new book he alleges that the Bush administration ordered the fabrication of evidence linking al Qaeda and Iraq.
In the months before the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq, British intelligence had secret meetings in Amman, Jordan, with Habbush, chief of Saddam’s intelligence network. Habbush demanded a safe way out, if-and-when the U.S. invaded. Habbush repeatedly told the British that Saddam had no WMD; all programs had ended in the 1990’s; and the book says the Bush White House didn’t want to hear it - and didn’t want to hear more reports on what Habbush was saying.
The U.S. invaded in March ‘03. Habbush was ready. He slipped out of Baghdad with the help of U.S. intelligence and into Amman…
In October ‘03, CIA paid Habbush $5 million as part of his resettlement. By then, the White House had finally thought of a way to use Habbush. … The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001. It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq — thus showing, finally that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda… The letter also mentioned suspicious shipments to Iraq from Niger set up with al Qaeda’s assistance. The idea was to take the letter to Habbush and have him transcribe it in his own neat handwriting on a piece of Iraqi government stationery, to make it look legitimate. CIA would then take the finished product to Baghdad and have someone release it to the media.
If Suskind's account of this can be corroborated - and there must be a full investigation from Congress - there is no option but to impeach.
Suskind says he spoke on the record with U.S. intelligence officials who stated that Bush was informed unequivocally in January 2003 that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. Nonetheless, his book relates, Bush decided to invade Iraq three months later — with the forged letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam bolstering the U.S. rationale to go into war.
Update: May as well count this towards that slam dunk case (h/t Think Progress)
By the end of 2005, those defending the regime of torture were no longer seeking primarily to protect the search for valuable intelligence. They were fighting for its survival, in the face of considerable evidence of the failure of SERE and other programs, because they feared being prosecuted should the program be halted and exposed. Even releasing detainees whom they knew to be entirely innocent was dangerous, since once released they could talk. “People will ask where they’ve been and ‘What have you been doing with them?’” Cheney said in a White House meeting. “They’ll all get lawyers.”
Update II: I was planning on writing a seperate post today commenting on Glenn Greenwald's recent post 9/11 anthrax attacks posts, but this one is relevant to the Suskind allegation.
Given everything that has happened over the last seven years -- not just with the anthrax attacks but with countless episodes of Government deceit and corruption -- it's astonishing (and more than a little disturbing) how many people are willing, even eager, to assume that the Government's accusations against Ivins are accurate even without seeing a shred of evidence to support those claims.
When you add on to that the magnitude of this case and the ample reasons for error and deceit -- it's the first lethal bioterrorism attack on the U.S., one which, according to the Government itself, originated at a U.S. Government facility, perpetrated by a U.S. Army scientist, that was then used by numerous factions inside the Government and out to ratchet up fear levels and falsely blame Iraq and/or Al Qaeda for the attacks and, thereafter, was blamed on someone who appears to have been completely innocent -- what minimally rational person would be willing to assume that the Government's uncorroborated,unexamined, untested claims are accurate?
When it comes to finding out how it came to be that domestic anthrax attacks - mailed to "liberal" figures - which originated from a military lab were used to help sell an invasion of Iraq despite those anthrax letters having nothing to do with Iraq; and when it comes to investigating whether or not the White House attempted to retroactively fabricate evidence linking al Qaeda and Iraq - is it possible that as a nation we might take an interest in such matters that is equal to, at least, that which we take in Britney Spears or the children of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt?
The anthrax letters thing is just disturbing that we still don't know what happened. And this is in relation to an event that hints at the possibility that it wouldn't be all that difficult to generate our own Reichstag fire like event, especially since the President already effectively asserted a lower threshold for the abrogation of the rule of law than the Weimar Republic had.*
Take note: I am not implying any sort of conspiracy, I am merely pointing out what is obvious from the above stories - if such an event as the anthrax attacks (which were taken advantage of to garner public approval for a war with a country that had nothing to do with the anthrax) or the Suskind charge of retroactive intelligence fabrication can occur without the press, Congress, and the public bothering to get to the bottom of it; then it is possible that such events can be utilized towards achieving undemocratic ends.
Update III: Ron Suskind reveals that a research assistant for the book was detained and interrogated by federal agents, and his notes for the book were confiscated. Who wants to take bets on whether or not Suskind is a target of the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" that Democrats recently voted to expand the powers of?
Update IV:
I neglected to point this out in my previous update, but in regards to Suskind's research assistant being interrogated and my remark about Suskind being a potential surveillance target, it's worth remembering that after Suskind published his first book about the Bush administration - The Price of Loyalty - the central character of the book, Paul O'Neal, who provided Suskind with his material (thousands of pages of documents) was federally investigated (and subsequently cleared) for illegally leaking information; it's also worth remembering that this administration has already stepped up its surveillance of journalistsin relation to leaks.
Update V: In Seymour Hersch's latest article he writes that Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials have been brainstorming ways to create another Gulk of Tonkin type incident to start a war with Iran.
*[Edited 6-5-08] I had written "we've already got a lower threshold ..." but I revised the sentence. I do not want to grant legitimacy to this administration's conception of a Unitary Executive or to its presidential directive decreeing the president to be the head of the entire government in the case of an emergency.
In my post about the Obama as Antichrist meme I had written that Hal Lindsey wrote that the Antichrist will be a Jew in The Late Great Planet Earth. It turns out that I had confused the "False Prophet" (who will be an evil Jew analogue of John the Baptist, according to the book) with the actual Antichrist. The actual Antichrist will be a Roman dictator
Our interest here is the revelation that Egypt will attack the revived state of Israel, which will them be under the control of a false Messiah. This man will probably be a Jew who works closely with the world dictator who will them come to power in Rome.
I got the quote at this site, which has numerous other excerpted quotes from the book. As I noted in the edit I made to the previous post, given that Lindsey has been proven wrong about his predictions for 30 years now, he may have revised his views somewhat since having written this.
It just so happens that I've been slowly reading the first Left Behind novel (in between reading other stuff) and see that LaHaye has his Antichrist as a Roman, too. In a feeble and comical way, that is.
The host, "Wallace Theodore," begins by saying that the live broadcasts of both of Carpathia's press conferences and his speech were replayed throughout the evening on all the news channels. "You've become a popular man in this country seemingly all at once," he says.
Carpathia smiled. "Like anyone from Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, I am amazed at your technology. I --"
"But isn't it true, sir, that your roots are actually in Western Europe? Though you were born in Romania, are you not by heritage actually Italian?"
"That is true, as it is true of many native Romanians. Thus the name of our country. But as I was saying about your technology. It is amazing, but I confess I did not come to your country to become or to be made into a celebrity. ..."
The Romanian = Roman bit might work a little better if Nicolae's surname were not taken from a mountain range that's nowhere near Italy, or if there were any truth to the idea that many Romanians are ethnically Italian, but such inconvenient facts don't matter as much as the requirements of the Bible Prophecy Antichrist Identification System, which calls for a Roman Antichrist.
Since the begginning of this decade, population policy as been hijacked by shortsighted ideology. Leaders of the U.S. religious right have called for ending U.S. support for family planning. While that has not happened entirely, the Bush administration has slashed aid to the U.N. Population Fund and recommended large cuts in direct U.S. funding of family planning services. It's hard to think of a single more misguided policy; it runs directly against American interests in the reduction of conflict and terror, as well as against the support of economic development and environmental sustainability more generally.
Not to mention it is an effort by a patriarchal authoritarian faction to reduce the reproductive rights of women; which itself tends to be part of a larger pattern of restricting the rights of women in general. (See The Fundamentals of Extremism for an extended discussion of the subject.)
One of the things about the Bush administration's approach to international family planning that has most bothered me is that President Bush has abused the power of the Executive office in order to promote his personal religious beliefs in an effort to restrict and prohibit services that are legal in America.
Of course, we know that such an experiment on fundamental rights abroad is indicative of the religious right's desire to experiment on those same rights at home. And here is the latest example.
This morning, I heard an astonishing interview on WNYC that discussed a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) draft document that was just leaked. This document proposes to redefine nearly all forms of birth control, especially birth control pills, as a form of abortion and allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman's access to contraception [PDF]. Considering that roughly half of all American women use birth control pills, I think this is a shocking proposal that, if enacted, will change modern American society as we know it.
[snip]
Since it is impossible to determine whether an egg has been fertilized, this means that a woman can never prove that she is not pregnant. As a result, it will be legal to block women's access to a tremendous variety of health services, treatments and medications under the guise that they "might possibly cause abortion." Not only that, but this will shut down access to family planning, will remove contraceptive equity from health insurance plans, and will allow pharmacists to refuse to fill women's birth control prescriptions. Further, this also blocks rape survivors from being provided with emergency contraception to prevent an unwanted pregnancy.
This HHS proposal will penalize the more than 500,000 medical institutions that rely on federal medicaid funds, and even entire states, if even one woman is provided with birth control pills or access to medical treatments, such as treatment for cancer and other life-threatening illnesses, that might potentially cause "abortion" to occur.
I just came across this video from 6-15-06 or I would have commented on it long before.
Hey, Bill O'Reilly. Did you know that the racist madman above advocating infanticide (and tacit genocide) is a columnist at Townhall.com? You know, the place that Mary Katherine Ham - the guest you bring on, when ever you're calling someone you don't like a Nazi or the KKK, to say how mean and nasty "liberals" are while also saying how the folks at Townhall don't tolerate hate like Daily Kos does - works? And guess what else - he's been a guest at various Fox News programs on more than a few occasions.
You know, I have pretty low expectations for the sort of rhetoric that I expect to hear from AM pundits like Reagan, but this is one of the most frankly disturbing and horrific things I've ever heard uttered by any of them. I am so dismayed that someone can go on the air and say things like this to an audience of millions and get paid very well to do so. Shame on Townhall, Fox News, Human Events, News Max and whatever other organizations provide this eliminationist bigot a forum to spread such disgusting hate.
Sci-fi geeks will already be familiar with Whedon's work, but for those not in the know, Whedon is the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, and the upcoming Dollhouse.
The feature is a quirky musical about the aspiring super-villian Dr. Horrible (Neal Patrick Harris of Doogie Howser, M.D. fame) trying to win the heart of Penny (Felicia Day from Buffy), a girl from his laundrymat, and defeat his rival Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion from Buffy and Firefly). It was created during the writer's strike last year and was shot in 6 days.
A few days ago I asked rhetorically in response to a KSFO radio host saying Obama is campaigning as Anti-Christ and that New World Order Anti-Christ conspiracy e-mails about Obama are starting to circulate:
So how long do you think it will be before this sort of conspiratorial extremism becomes regular mainstream fodder? This may originate with extremists, but it is only a matter of time before Rush Limbaugh, Neal Boortz, and Sean Hannity are speculating about the mysterious deaths surrounding Obama like they still do with the Clintons.
Well, it's still up in the air on how long it will be before the AM dial is buzzing with speculation about deaths surrounding Obama, but the mainstreaming of Obama as Anti-Christ seems to be in full gear.
Last Friday I heard Rush Limbaugh playing this satire from Gerard Baker which is written in a Biblical style and has the effect of depicting Obama as a false Messiah. That night I heard Sean Hannity playing it on The Sean Hannity Show (featuring Colmes).
Ok, this is par for the course. It's what I expected. What I did not expect, was for the McCain campaign to make one of the most despicable dog whistle appeals to the most extremist religious element in America. Apparently, I'm not yet cynical enough.
Get it? Obama is portraying himself as "The One," the bringer of light, Moses who will part the Red Sea, blah blah. Again, this works to depict Obama as a false Messiah. It is a dog whistle for the millions of people who believe in this dangerous codswallop. Combine this with all the nonsense buzz about Obama having a "fascistic" appeal because of his ability to speak charismatically to large crowds - from such decidely non-extremist publications as Slate, no less - and there will be many a Tim LaHaye reading "liberal" hating Christian Nationalist who sees this commercial and will have the circuitry in his brain light up to say: Danger, AntiChrist coming!
A blogger at Daily Kos points out that on the same day that this ad came out Hal Lindsey - author of the seminal (for dispensationalist Christian fundamentalists that is) The Late Great Planet Earth which kick started the modern Second Coming theology stuff - wrote an article for WorldNetDaily saying that Obama is preparing the way for the AntiChrist
Obama's world tour provided a foretaste of the reception he can expect to receive. He will probably also stand in some European capital, addressing the people of the world and telling them that he is the one that they have been waiting for. And he can expect as wildly enthusiastic a greeting as Obama got in Berlin.
The Bible calls that leader the Antichrist. And it seems apparent that the world is now ready to make his acquaintance.
You'll notice that Lindsey doesn't think Obama is the Anti-Christ, which, like Hagee, seems to be a quirk of his bigotry. He thinks the "False Prophet" of the Anti-Christ will be a Jew (or at least he did in the book)**
"This person (The False Prophet), who is called the second beast, is going to be a Jew. Many believe he will be from the tribe of Dan, which is one of the tribes of the original progenitors of the nation of Israel" - Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth
And he wrote that the actual Anti-Christ will be the head of a new Roman Empire. (It could be the case that Lindsey's views have been tweaked since then, given that I would assume constantly being wrong for 30 years about his Armageddon predictions must require some form of revision)
"The False Prophet (he is called that in Revelation 19:20 and 20:10) will be a master of Satanic magic. This future False Prophet is going to be a devilish John the Baptist. He will aid and glorify the Roman Dictator; he will proclaim him the savior of the world and make people worship him as God." - Hal Lindsey, The Late Great Planet Earth
Madill doesn't think it's coincidence, but I don't think its coincidence or coordination (I'm not sure if that is what he's implying.) As you can see, if you look at the article Lindsey cites the same Baker piece that Limbaugh and Hannity were playing as evidence that Obama is acting Anti-Christ like. What this is is the fruit of transmission (also see here) - the process by which extremist ideas make their way mainstream.
Figures like Limbaugh and Hannity promote the more plainly extremist ideas of "right-wing" conspiracists in a palatable form (e.g. the Baker piece which does not explicitly say Obama has something to do with the Anti-Christ.) A venue like WorldNetDaily serves as a sort of nexus point - a place where the extreme and the mainstream blur. At WND you can find mainstream figures like Bill O'Reilly along with more fringe figures like David Kupelian. Hal Lindsey's article there ties together the extreme (his End of Days beliefs) with the mainstream (the Baker satire.) This is demonstrative of the morphing of the secular/mainstream form of this meme with the religious/fringe version: this process is what allows McCain's ad to function as a kind of amphibian vehicle that works on both levels (as simple mockery of Obama's popularity and as a warning that he may be the AntiChrist.) But if you aren't plugged into the noise machine or the Christian nationalist media you're likely to not get the double message.
That the McCain campaign is playing upon the same sort of conspiratorial End Days fears that fanned the flames of extremism during the Clinton years is beyond defensible. One of the prime motivations of Timothy McVeigh was that he thought he was striking a blow at the coming New World Order.
At this point the religious framework of the radical right intersects with its conspiratorial view of politics. The tribulation will be the era of the Antichrist, Satan's final instrument in his struggle to defeat God in the battle for control of the world. Rightists see the federal government falling more and more under the control of malevolent forces. In this context one can understand why George Bush's popularization of the phrase "new world order" at the time of the gulf war was a political gaffe. He meant, of course, a reinvigoration of the system of collective security envisioned by the drafters of the United Nations Charter. But to some, the phrase "new world order" refers to the imposition of the Antichrist's rule. Important segments of the evangelical mainstream have endorsed this view. Pat Robertson in his 1991 book The New World Order uses the phrase as a code word for a diabolical plot, which he describes with anti-Semitic over-tones. The fact that "new world order" has taken on conspiratorial associations for Protestants outside the radical right is seen by rightists as a validation of their own worldview.
For the radical right, the "new world order" involves a conspiracy in which the United Nations plays a central role. While it may seem odd to attribute great power to so ineffectual an organization, the right regards the UN as the instrument through which national governments will be destroyed, enabling the Antichrist to gain control of the world. Since any government associated with the UN is deemed to be part of the Antichrist plot, the national government is illegitimate. The right concludes, finally, that groups and localities must defend themselves militarily against an alien, hostile state which is seeking to uproot the Constitution in favor of "one-world government."
This McCain ad is downright irresponsible and dangerous.
*To see that Corsi's NAU conspiracy is a subset of NWO conspiracy, witness this Google search for 'North American Union Antichrist'. **[Edited 6-5-08] - I had originally written that Lindsey expects the Antchrist to be a Jew, but I misunderstood the quote about the False Prophet, who is apparently the evil analogue to John the Baptist. I regret the error (although I'm still right about the bigotry.)
I just noticed that my pick for greatest fight scene ever in the history of cinema made it as a nomination for Best Fight Scene Ever at The Geek blog of the BrisbaneTimes. Go ahead and nominate your favorite fight scene.
This morning, Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) held a press conference to express their “pleasure” about President Bush’s statement this morning regarding what he described as “encouraging news from Iraq” and “the success of the surge.”
Lieberman then announced that he and Graham would do their part in celebrating the surge by introducing a resolution in the Senate “recognizing” its “strategic success” in “the central front in the war on terror.” Then, Lieberman went slightly off course, not seeming to recognize just who attacked the United States on 9/11 and from where:
LIEBERMAN: That’s why Senator Graham and I are introducing a resolution recognizing the strategic success that the surge has achieved in a central front — the central front of the war on terror against the enemies who attacked America on 9/11/01, and expressing our thanks to our troops who’ve made that success possible.
America was not attacked by Iraqi insurgents on 9/11/01. Lieberman is echoing the same propaganda of the White House front group Freedom's Watch.
Iran gives fuel to the Manichean and paranoid world view: if the mighty United States is losing in Iraq it must be because we haven't gone to war with the meddling Iranians who can be blamed for our failures in Iraq. Since we are fighting in Iraq against the Evil of "Islamofascist" terrorists ("they attacked us" on 9/11, says White House front group Freedom's Watch) then we must go to war with Iran as a necessary part of the War on Terror and anyone who says otherwise has forgotten 9/11 or doesn't want the United States to win the "war on terror." Manichean warriors cannot or do not distinguish between al Qaeda, Iraqi insurgents, Baathists, Shia, Sunni, Iranian mullahs, etc. - they are all the Terrorists. They are all "Islamofascists" and we are in a world war against Them because "they" attacked us on 9/11.
Anxious about paying for the health care you need? No wonder. Health care costs continue to climb, and most companies are requiring employees to pay a larger and larger share. Many of us worry that we won't be able to pay all our medical bills following a major illness or injury.
The Cover America Tour, sponsored by Consumer Reports Health, will roam the country this summer, putting faces on the flaws in our broken health care system. At every stop, we'll videotape Americans talking about the challenges they've experienced getting the affordable, high quality health care they need.
We want to make sure that politicians promoting solutions listen to your voice, not just the voices of the big money lobbyists representing the health care industry.
This has already been a quote of the day, but given Sam Brownback's inability to see a similarity between the Chinese government paying telecom companies to spy on citizens and the American government paying telecom companies to spy on citizens, I'm quoting it again.
"All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side ... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them." - George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism
[Edited 8-01-08]: Originally I had written "Brownback's inability to see a difference ..." which is the opposite of what I meant to say.
