Baleful quote of the day

"Gitmo detainees have now lost virtually every avenue—other than dying in detention—for leaving the detention camp." - Adam Serwer

Dewey on the corrosive effects of fear and hatred

Via Jeffrey Feldman in Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy:

"Intolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences of race, color, wealth or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life. For everything which bars freedom and fullness of communication sets up barriers that divide human beings into sets and cliques, into antagonistic sects and factions, and thereby undermines the democratic way of life. Merely legal guarantees of civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail if in daily freedom of communication, the give and take of ideas, facts, experiences, is choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred. These things destroy the essential condition of the democratic way of living even more effectually than open coercion." - John Dewey, "Creative Democracy - The Task Before Us"

This is an excellent quote to keep in mind while reading Arthur Goldwag's The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right, for, as Goldwag succinctly put it himself, "the New Hate poisons our political discourse and divides us even more than we are already."

Something you may not have known about Marilyn Monroe

I just finished Myra MacPherson's I.F. Stone biography All Governments Lie (which was excellent; highly recommended for anyone interested in the life story of one of the 20th century's most important and pioneering journalists) and found the following tidbit from the book quite fascinating: Marilyn Monroe, who knew I.F. Stone through her husband playwright Arthur Miller, sent a subscription of Stone's independent newsletter the Weekly to every House member.*

I think that was a quite admirable act, on Monroe's part. (Stone was a fierce critic of McCarthyism, a problem Miller was himself familiar with.)

*DD Guttenplan, author of another Stone bio, says that it was a subscription for every member of Congress; and  Peter Osnos, editor of a collected edition of Stone articles, is also credited with saying it was for every member.

Schoolhouse Rock, post 9/11

This This Modern World strip by Tom Tomorrow has to be my all-time favorite one, as it so simply depicts the perverted conception of "justice" that has become normalized for a generation of Americans coming of age after September 11, 2011.

What you won't be hearing on Fox News

Fox News routinely pushes the myth that a large percentage of poor people pay no taxes (because they are exempt from federal income tax) and therefore need to have their taxes raised.



Here is something you will never hear from the Fox News voices who, in the name of opposing "class warfare," want to reduce the tax burden of the wealthy and increase it for the poor.

A recent IRS report showed that 20,752 households that reported earning more than $200,000 in 2009 paid no federal income taxes. About 1,500 of those tax-free Americans were millionaires.

Baleful quote of the day

From Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Obama administration considers any military-age male in the vicinity of a bombing to be a combatant. That is an amazing standard that shares an ugly synergy with the sort of broad-swath logic that we see employed in Stop and Frisk, with NYPD national spy network, with the killer of Trayvon Martin.

Policy is informed by the morality of a country. I think the repercussions of this unending era of death by silver bird will be profound.

For more background on this truly vile, reprehensible and heinous policy of defining "militant" to include any of-age males killed by a drone strike, see Glenn Greenwald (here and here).

I can't help but recall something Noam Chomsky wrote in response to Israel's attacks in Gaza a few years back

The claim that "our side" never targets civilians is familiar doctrine among those who monopolize the means of violence. And there is some truth to it. We do not generally try to kill particular civilians. Rather, we carry out murderous actions that we know will slaughter many civilians, but without specific intent to kill particular ones. In law, the routine practices might fall under the category of depraved indifference, but that is not an adequate designation for standard imperial practice and doctrine. It is more similar to walking down a street knowing that we might kill ants, but without intent to do so, because they rank so low that it just doesn't matter.

Quote of the day

"One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting." - George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

Via Lawyers, Guns, and Money

Quote of the day

"Was the United States founded as a Christian nation, meaning that the framers of the Constitution established a government whose laws would not only reflect but also enforce the rules of a particular brand of Christianity? No, period." - Susan Jacoby, "The Christian Nation Fiction, Then and Now"

Quote of the day

"I do not hold the liberties I enjoy as an American in so little esteem that I am prepared to run from them like a rabbit." - I.F. Stone

Via All Governments Lie: The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson

Quote of the day

"One has to wonder at the size of the egos of ... people who would readily put their own ideological opinions above the constitutional guarantees of an entire nation." - Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense on Stilts

Today's discount book buy

Foundation and Earth (hc) by Isaac Asimov for one dollar.

I've already read this, but am happy to have a copy by making a contribution to a library; something I believe would have pleased Asimov.

Quote of the day

"I suspect that the world would not benefit from more cruelty and less kindness." - Alonzo Fyfe, commenting on the pro-torture argument of Sam Harris

Quote of the day

"To me, bombastic odes to traditional maternity have a sinister ring, especially when they come from people who want to curtail women’s rights." - Michelle Goldberg

Quote of the day

"[Lenin], your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold ... you have no right to soil the ideas you defend by shameful methods." - Kropotkin, letter (1920)

Via "All Governments Lie" by Myra MacPherson

Quote of the day

"[E]verything we know of Hitler suggests that, once finished with the Jews, he would have targeted for elimination, one way or another, those whose loyalty to Jesus competed with loyalty to the Third Reich. But the absolute priority given to Jews in Hitler's scheme; their place as the extreme negative in volk mythology, standing against everything the Third Reich was meant to be; their place, therefore, as the embodiment of an evil to be elimatinated at all costs - all of this built upon the Jew hatred ... that has been an unbroken thread of Christian history, not just since the Crusades, but beyond Constantine, almost back to the time of the crucifixion itself." - James Carroll, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews -- A History

Quote of the day

'The Master said, "Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous."' - The Analects of Confucius

Quote of the day

"Your job description as a journalist is to question and scrutinize critically - never to repeat claims uncritically, no matter how highly placed the sources in the bureaucracy. Don't ever forget that." - Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

Quote of the day

"That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this earth." - Friedrich Nietzsche, praising Montaigne

Via How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer by Sarah Bakewell

Living in fear

In the home of the brave, where the Bill of Rights supposedly guarantees inviolable rights that the government can not abrogate, the national security state continues to eat those very liberties.

In sum, Poitras produces some of the best, bravest and most important filmmaking and journalism of the past decade, often exposing truths that are adverse to U.S. government policy, concerning the most sensitive and consequential matters (a 2004 film she produced for PBS on gentrification of an Ohio town won the Peabody Award and was nominated for an Emmy).

But Poitras’ work has been hampered, and continues to be hampered, by the constant harassment, invasive searches, and intimidation tactics to which she is routinely subjected whenever she re-enters her own country. Since the 2006 release of “My Country, My Country,” Poitras has left and re-entered the U.S. roughly 40 times. Virtually every time during that six-year-period that she has returned to the U.S., her plane has been met by DHS agents who stand at the airplane door or tarmac and inspect the passports of every de-planing passenger until they find her (on the handful of occasions where they did not meet her at the plane, agents were called when she arrived at immigration). Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke.

Yes, I am so very proud to live in such a "brave" country.

Terrorists flew planes into building in 2001, and the fear of that is used in 2012 to justify the oppressive harassment of citizens and violation of rights that those terrorists themselves would never be able to take from us.

Previous Doubter book-of-the-year on sale

Inaugural Daily Doubter Book of the Year Doubt: A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht is currently available for $2 in Kindle edition (h/t Mark Vuletic).

Not only is this a great, magisterial book (it inspired the title of this blog) but it's also a great value, as that's a lot of book (over 500 pages) for two dollars.

Quote of the day

"There's always someone willing to believe malicious rumours." - Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Bill O'Reilly: man of Christian principle

Given that Bill O'Reilly has previously said that there is "no difference between what [Arianna] Huffington and Nazis do" and that Daily Kos is a hate site no different that the KKK because of distasteful comments left in response to posts on those sites I expect that he will soon be resigning from Fox News, only after passionately denouncing the organization on-air as a hate network no different than Nazis and the KKK, as a result of these hateful and racist comments that were left in response to an article at Fox News about Trayvon Martin.

I am sure this will happen, because if there is one thing I have learned after years of watching Bill O'Reilly's program, it is that he is a man of integrity and intellectual honesty; a good Christian "T-warrior" who leads by example.

"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." - Matthew 7:1-5

Quote of the day

"[Ayn Rand's] acolytes, not fully comprehending the nature of her dogma, blithely accepted her vision of an American Gulag archipelago. Then they used it to rationalize another kind of oppression: the economic subjugation of the poor by large corporations." - Gary Weiss, Ayn Rand Nation

It did what?

Flipped on the Glenn Beck radio show today be be greeted by Beck telling me that "the progressive movement killed my country." After a few minutes of rambling about progressives and the 1oo year path of destruction that they wrought Beck said that he's rectified their damage on a personal level by educating himself about American history.

I went through a full public education and never heard of who Robert Green Ingersoll is, nor did I know of Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, so I guess that was part of the progressive plan to install One World totalitarian tyranny, too.

Excerpt of the day

From Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America's Soul by Gary Weiss

In 1975, Stanley Marcus, chairman of Neiman Marcus in Dallas, decried corporate obstruction of social legislation. "Who among the business community today," he asked, "would seriously propose that Congress repeal our child-labor laws - or the Sherman Antitrust Act? The Federal Reserve Act, the Securities Exchange Act? Or workmen's compensation? Or Social Security? Or minimum wage? Or Medicare? Or civil rights legislation?

"All of us today" he said, "recognize that such legislation is an integral part of our system; that it has made us stronger."

That may have been true in 1975, but not today. The credit, or blame, lies squarely with Ayn Rand.

Baleful quote of the day

'[Attorney General Eric] Holder was referring specifically to Executive Order 13222, issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, which says, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” But as with so much U.S. national-security legislation, this order turns out to be far less than meets the eye. Simplified, the present law of EO 13222 could be summarized this way: “No one shall be assassinated—unless the president authorizes it, in which case we will refrain from calling it an assassination.”' - Scott Horton

Quote of the day

"This idea - writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity - has not existed forever. It had to be invented. And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person: Michael Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, government official, and winegrower who lived in the Perigord area of southwestern France from 1533 to 1592." - Sarah Bakewell, How to Live or: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

I can say to anyone that obtains a copy of Bakewell's Montaigne biography: reader, you have here a great book.

Quote of the day

"Our current wingnuts are truly some of the dumbest fucking people on the planet." - John Cole

It truly is bewildering the level of stupidity and ignorance that Rush Limbaugh and apologists have displayed in service of misogyny.

This is the intellectual leader - and exemplar of the rot - of the conservative movement

Last week House Republicans held a hearing on contraception as it relates to President Obama's health care plan that featured an all-male panel. House Democrats responded with a hearing of their own, featuring a female Georgetown law student who was not allowed to testify in the Republican hearing. NPR described her testimony thus

"Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school," she said. "For a lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that's practically an entire summer's salary."

And the policy has hurt not just those who want the pill to prevent pregnancy, she said. One friend — a lesbian — needed oral contraception to control ovarian cysts.

But while the Georgetown plan includes a medical exception, her friend never got the medication. "Despite verification of her illness from her doctor, her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted birth control to prevent pregnancy," she said.

She eventually stopped taking the medication when it became too expensive, grew a cyst "the size of a tennis ball," and "had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary as a result," Fluke testified.

And when others ask what she expected when she chose to attend a Jesuit university, Fluke replied that she and her fellow women law students:

"[R]efused to pick between a quality education and our health, and we resent that in the 21st century anyone thinks it's acceptable to ask us to make this choice simply because we are women."

Here is what Rush Limbaugh, the radio demagogue that Republican officials bow down before, had to say in response.

What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.

She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.

Right. Isn't that exactly what you heard when you saw her testimony? That she's a whore who expects the US taxpayer to pay her for sex? - not that she's suggesting that access to contraception is an important means to providing equal career/educational opportunity for women and also protecting their health.

Rush Limbaugh is a terrible, horrible human being who traffics in incoherent, hate-filled rants like these, that only can sway his audience because they appeal to prejudices that short-circuit rational thought.

And what really disgusts me is people like Brian Williams who think that they can demonstrate what good journalists they are by pretending that Limbaugh is something other than the hate-filled idiot that he is.

As an aside: It's stuff like this that has had me place Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind towards the top of my list of books to read. (See here for a typically interesting example of Robin's work on the subject.)

Post Script: I almost forgot: The Rush Limbaugh with the nerve to call a female law student who testified about the difficulty of affording both education and contraception a "slut" is this same Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh was traveling with four other men--including the producers of the hit show '24'--when he was detained over a mislabeled bottle of Viagra found in his luggage during a Customs search. A Department of Homeland security passenger manifest shows that Limbaugh and his four buddies flew from the Dominican Republic on a Gulfstream IV jet owned by Premiere Radio Networks, which syndicates his radio program. Limbaugh returned to Palm Beach, Florida on June 26 with Joel Surnow, '24''s co-creator and executive producer and Howard Gordon, another of the Fox hit's executive producers (Hollywood agent Jeffrey Benson was also part of the Limbaugh quintet). With all those guys in tow, it is unclear what Limbaugh needed with those 29 100mg Viagra pills.

Yes, what would he be doing with Viagra pills in a location notorious for sexual tourism.

JFK should have promised to follow orders from the Vatican

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has stated that his initial reaction to JFK's famous speech assuring a largely Protestant America that Kennedy, as a Catholic, would not put his religious views and the dictates of the Catholic Church hierarchy above his duties and responsibilities as America's chief constitutional officer is that he "almost threw up."

Perhaps this judge who threw out an harassment charge against a Muslim who attacked an atheist for dressing up like Muhammed on the grounds that the atheist's actions are not protected by the First Amendment would agree with Santorum. I am sure that Afghan president Hamid Karzai who has called for a trial against those who burned copies of the Koran would agree; it goes without saying that the violent protestors would, too.*

*Although one should note that the protests likely have other roots, as well.

What George Washington might have to say about Koran burning

Rioting and violence has broken out in response to reports that Korans were recently disposed of by burning in Afghanistan by NATO troops. President Obama has apologized to Afghan President Hamid Karza, for which I expect he will receive criticism from the sorts of individuals who believe that America should never apologize for anything - and who have already created a false narrative around the fictitious notion that that is all that President Obama does.

I would further suspect that there will be overlap between those who are critical of an apology for Koran burning and those who think that US marines urinating on corpses is a laudatory act.

The following passage from The New Hate: Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right, by Arthur Goldwag, seems particularly relevant, in light of these events

On November 5, 1775, General Washington issued orders forbidding soldiers in the Continental army to observe that "ridiculous and childish custom of burning the Effigy of the Pope" - an act that could only insult and alienate the ex-colonies' potential allies in Franco-phone Canada. "At such a juncture, and in such Circumstances, to be insulting their Religion, is so monstrous, as not to be suffered or excused," he expostulated."

Book watch: Enemies

Tim Weiner has written a history of the FBI - FBI - Enemies: A History of the FBI - based upon his access to FBI documents as a follow up to his history of the CIA.

Civil libertarians will want to read this book.

Justice

I'm not sure how it escaped my attention, but it wasn't until a few weeks ago that I realized that Michael Sandel's Harvard introductory philosophy "Justice" course lectures are freely available for online viewing and via iTunes U.

Having so far watched 7 of the 12 hour long lectures (each broken into two parts) I can not highly enough recommend these lecture to anyone interested in philosophy or, more precisely, anyone who wishes to be interested in philosophy. Sandel manages to bring philosophy to life by presenting concise and easily understood (but not dumbed down) descriptions of philosophical ideas and then demonstrating with thought experiments and examples how they relate to the real world and our everyday lives.

The course has also been converted by Sandel into a book - Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? - which I have added to my exponentially expanding to-read book queue.

Latest discount book buys

Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (hc) by Garry Wills for 4 dollars.

An American Album: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Harper's Magazine (hc) edited by Lewis Lapham for 10 dollars and fifty cents.

Quote of the day

"Who the [expletive] is Saul Alinsky?" - Bill Maher



See also the Media Matters comparison of Saul Alinsky and the bogeyman "Saul Alinsky" who only exists in the imaginations of movement conservative media figures.

Trivia of the day

Question: How many times has The Daily Doubter been cited in print?

Answer: Twice.

Once in Zay Smith's Quick Takes column for the Chicago Sun-Times and a second time in The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right by Arthur Goldwag which was released today. (The email quoted in this post is the one that made it into the book.)

To give one a flavor of the book, a great excerpt of The New Hate can be read at the Atlantic.

Possibly my favorite line in a book review ever

David Frum has written a critical response to the latest effort of David Brooks to promote the work of Charles Murray.

Murray is baffled that a collapse in the pay and conditions of work should have led to a decline in a workforce's commitment to the labor market.

His book wants to lead readers to the conclusion that the white working class has suffered a moral collapse attributable to vaguely hinted at cultural forces. Yet he never specifies what those cultural forces might be, and he presents no evidence at all for a link between those forces and the moral collapse he sees.

In an interview with the New York Times, Murray is more specific—but no more precise—in his analysis:

The ’60s were a disaster in terms of social policy. The elites put in place a whole set of reforms which I think fundamentally changed the signals and the incentives facing low-income people and encouraged a variety of trends that soon became self-reinforcing.

The '60s. Of course. But which reforms are the ones that Murray has in mind? He does not say, and I think I can understand why he does not say: because once you spell out the implied case here, it collapses of its own obvious ludicrousness.

Let me try my hand:

You are a white man aged 30 without a college degree. Your grandfather returned from World War II, got a cheap mortgage courtesy of the GI bill, married his sweetheart and went to work in a factory job that paid him something like $50,000 in today's money plus health benefits and pension. Your father started at that same factory in 1972. He was laid off in 1981, and has never had anything like as good a job ever since. He's working now at a big-box store, making $40,000 a year, and waiting for his Medicare to kick in.

Now look at you. Yes, unemployment is high right now. But if you keep pounding the pavements, you'll eventually find a job that pays $28,000 a year. That's not poverty! Yet you seem to waste a lot of time playing video games, watching porn, and sleeping in. You aren't married, and you don't go to church. I blame Frances Fox Piven.

That last line perfectly captures how absurd this focusing on Piven or Alinsky or ACORN as the root of all evil in America has been.

Quote of the day

"Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian." - Diderot, The Encyplopedie

Allen West's eliminationist message

Via Hullabaloo

This is a battlefield that we must stand upon and we need to let president Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and my dear friend, the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain't on the table. Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, and take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America.

What really demonstrates just how demented the Republican party has become is that this belief in how un-American the Obama administration and Democrats is is a reaction to a Democratic party which has implemented what a few decades ago were Republican ideas (e.g. a health care plan which was previously advocated by the conservative Heritage Foundation.)

Don't mess with the Muppets

Via Media Matters

Despondent

A couple of days ago the manager of one of the local tv news stations gave an editorial (he's the only one who ever gives editorials, almost always some rant derivative from the bowels of AM radio) excusing marines urinating on dead corpses, saying that they deserve a slap on the wrist at best and that everyone who hasn't fought in a war needs to shut up about it.

It really pains me that this is what is being broadcast to my community as news - and I just haven't felt like blogging much lately.

Excerpt of the day

From Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges

"The opponents of the New Deal, backed and funded by the business elite, announced that President Roosevelt had permitted communists to infiltrate the government and government-funded programs, such as the Federal Theatre Project. And that project was the first target of the Dies Committee, led by Texas Democrat Martin Dies. The theatre project was denounced in a series of hearings in August and November 1938. The Dies committee eventually became HUAC. [Hallie] Flanagan [head of the Federal Theatre Project] was asked about an article she had written titled "A Theatre is Born," in which she described the enthusiasm of the federal theaters as having "a certain Marlowesque madness."

"You are quoting from this Marlowe," observed Alabama representative Joseph Starnes from the committee. "Is he a Communist?"

The room rocked with laughter, but I did not laugh," Flanagan remembered. "Eight thousand people might lose their jobs because a Congressional Committee had so prejudged us that even the classics were 'communistic.' I said, 'I was quoting from Christopher Marlowe.'"

"Tell us who this Marlowe is, so we can get the proper references, because that is all we want to do," Starnes said.

"Put in the record that he was the greatest dramatist in the period of Shakespeare, immediately preceding Shakespeare," Flanagan answered.

By 1939 the theatre project was killed.

Republican audience boos the Golden Rule

During a Republican presidential candidate debate last night in South Carolina, Ron Paul (R-Texas) got boos from the audience when he suggested that the United States should apply the Golden Rule to its foreign policy.



The Guardian provides fuller context with an extended clip and notes that this comment from Paul was a follow-up to his belief that the U.S. could have (and should have if possible) captured Osama bin Laden rather than assassinate him.

Ron Paul was also booed when he attempted to explain why the US did not need secretly to enter Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Paul pointed out that the US had managed to capture Saddam Hussein alive, and that the Iraqi government had put him on trial. The line did not go down well with the audience or his Republican rivals.

and

Here's the transcript of Ron Paul's comments, after being asked about his opposition to the US assassination of Osama bin Laden:

There is proper procedures rather than digging bigger holes for ourselves. That's what we have been doing in the Middle East, digging bigger and bigger holes for ourselves and it's so hard for us to get out of that mess. And we have a long ways to go. We are still in Iraq and that's getting worse and we are not leaving Afghanistan and the American people are sick and tired of it, 80% of the American people want us out of there. I am just suggesting that we work within the rule of law. Like only going to war when you declare the law.

Given the probability that many of those Republican voters who booed identify themselves as Christians, one might wonder if they experience any cognitive dissonance at booing what is supposed to be one of their bedrock moral precepts.

Three hours with Chris Hedges

Pulitzer prise winning journalist Chris Hedges has become one of the most acute critics of America's corporate and imperial state, writing fiery and blistering columns that express the indignation and outrage at the dismantlement of our democratic institutions that is almost entirely absent from mainstream media discourse.

Which I why I would recommend taking advantage of the opportunity presented by C-Span2's BookTV to watch and listen to his three hour discussion of his books for In Depth, which can be viewed online at the link.

[Blogger's Note: I haven't gotten far enough into the video to see what Hedges has to say about his book I Don't Believe in Atheists, but would note that I had some issues with that particular work.]

Say what?

"I don’t get involved in politics." - Glenn Beck

Heard this self-delusional statement today while listening to Thomas Frank talk to Amy Goodman for Democracy Now. The following exchange takes place after Goodman plays audio of Beck saying he's not into politics, into endorsing candidates, but that Rick Santorum may be the next George Washington and will be able to resist the great urge to become a dictator. An urge, apparently, that only Santorum can resist.

AMY GOODMAN: And that is Glenn Beck. Talk about the significance of Glenn Beck, forced off of Fox. You’re talking about the comeback of the right and the significance of the role he plays, the role the Koch brothers play.

THOMAS FRANK: Well, those are some of the biggest actors in what I’m talking about here. But I just wanted—I was struck by what Glenn Beck was saying there, that whenever you listen to him, even if it’s a short snippet like that, there’s always this incredible sense of dread that hangs over every sentence he utters. He said that, you know, the temptation for the next president to not turn over the reins of power back to the public is going to be great? What is he talking about? Dictatorship? That’s like—that’s—and Santorum is the one guy in America that can resist the urge to become a dictator? I don’t—I don’t get things like that. I mean, I do get it. I just finished writing a whole book about it.

There is a way that Glenn Beck really caught the cultural sensibility of 2009 and 2010, you know, this very unlikely—the first time I ever tuned him in, in 2008, he was on CNN at the time, and I was—you know, I had the same reaction to him that I just had when you brought up Rick Santorum. It’s like, how could this be? You know? Who would hire this man to be on television? It just seemed preposterous to me. And he really caught the wave in 2009, that when the—after the thing that really—you know, the economy fell apart in 2008, and you had the government stepping in with the enormous bailouts, you know, this completely unaccountable just spending of taxpayers’ money to get their Wall Street buddies off the hook, you know, stand the banks back up and let them go back to their—and this was—this was a shocking moment. You know, it’s the kind—I say in the book that it was the sort of moment that crushes the faith of a nation, you know? And Glenn Beck was there with this very dark vision that he has where things are always, you know, we’re on the verge of tyranny, there’s conspiracies everywhere. And there he was with this trademark vision of his, and it really seemed to catch the public mood in those days. And so, in my mind, he was one of the most important figures in the comeback of the right, because he really gave the—you know, if you would go to Tea Party rallies in those days, and I went to a bunch of them in order to write the book, the language you would always hear from the podium and the theories you would hear from the podium, the peculiar ideas, the visions of history that you would hear from the podium, were all recycled stuff from the Glenn Beck program. He was really the—he was really the one with the ideas.

Will Bunch noticed the same thing, with Beck being the backbone of the conservative backlash, in his own book on the subject.

Indeed, if you've read Beck books, listened to his radio show and watched his tv show the last couple of years, you'll know that he's dedicated his media fiefdom to being a political activist with the dedicated goal of mainstreaming the fringes of American paranoia. Presumably, if you're a critic of Beck and have followed him you're aware of that; if you're a fan then you apparently have a tremendous capacity to compartmentalize: to take him seriously when he says he's not involved in politics yet to show up at his 9/12 rallies with the plan of taking back your country from "them."

To think of Beck as someone who doesn't get involved in politics requires to forget the role he has played in politics the last couple of years.

Baleful quote of the day

"We live in a country where law professors advocate torturing and murdering people ... people are then duly tortured and murdered per their official and unofficial recommendations, and there are no subsequent legal or even professional consequences to anyone involved in any aspect of these proceedings." - Paul Campos

Remember the good old days of wage slavery?

Historian Rick Pearlstein noticed the other day Rick Santorum waxing nostalgic for those halcyon days when his own grandfather was a wage slave:

Rick Santorum got high marks for his near-victory speech in Iowa. In the Washington Post, E.J. Dionne called it "by far the best speech Tuesday night." Santorum's address impressed me, too, but for a different reason: his astonishing endorsement of feudalism, wrapped up in a soaring tribute to something he called "freedom." A sharper illustration of the bad faith of at the heart of conservative rhetoric I never have seen in all my life.

He began by doing what conservative presidential candidates always do in this season of economic privation: talked about his family's one-time economic privation. It wasn't off the cuff. "As you know," he said, "I do not speak from notes, but there's a couple of things I want to say that are a little more emotional, so I'm going to read them as I wrote them." And what were the words he so carefully wrote to read at this, his moment of triumph? That his grandfather came to the United States from Italy in 1925: "because Mussolini had been in power now three years, and he had figured out that fascism was something that would crush his spirit and freedom and give his children something less than he wanted for them." He came because—why else?—he loved freedom.

[...]

"He left to the coal fields of Southern Pennsylvania. He worked in the mine at a company town, got paid with coupons, he used to call them."

Let us dwell on that. Grandpa Santorum lived in a company town where he was paid in "scrip" in lieu of cash. That means what his grandson calls "freedom" was, well and truly, something more like slavery.

Pearlstein goes on to note the irony of Santorum relating a story of his grandfather becoming a wage slave in order to sell free market fundamentalism to voters when it was government regulation that did more to give workers like his grandfather freedom than the "free reign of property."

The key point, and one that is not likely to find an effective messenger in Democrats beholden to the same wealth that Republicans are, is "that sometimes—frequently—it takes government to establish liberty where none existed before."

Beck still has Nazi Tourette's

Yesterday I did a little intermural travel and visited AM radio world, particularly the Glenn Beck radio show. I was met by Beck informing me that President Obama is a dictator and is installing a dictatorship. Enough of that. I turned the radio off.

A hour or so later I tuned back in. Beck was describing his family Christmas in which he and family gave each other books about the Holocaust. Apparently, in the universe that Beck inhabits - some kind of Philip K. Dick if-he-was-a-member-of-the-John-Birch-Society type universe - reading books about what the Nazis did to Jews prepares one to understand what is currently happening in America because of progressives.

In fact, Beck was particularly enthusiastic about How Do You Kill a Million People? because it is "one of the best explanations of what we're facing right now in the country."

Beck then did his trademark incoherent denial of what he just said, claiming that he's not calling Obama a Nazi, just that progressivism is the disease and that Newt Gingrich is just as bad. (FYI, in Beck-world, Newt Gingrich is a leftist).

Whether or not Beck believes his own nonsense, I can not tell. But what I wonder is: does his audience have some sort of memory deficit? Surely I'm not the only one who can hear such a denial and recall, say, this

The "Final Chapter" of Glenn Beck's Fox News run kicked off Friday with Beck warning that a plot to "collapse the system," "redistribute the wealth," and create an Obama-centered empire was based on a willingness to kill "25 million Americans."

Like Lewis Black said, Beck has Nazi Tourette's.

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Quote of the day

"I applied mine heart to know, and to search, and to seek out wisdom, and the reason of things" - Ecclesiastes 7:25

This quote appears on the back cover of the hard cover edition of A.C. Grayling's The Reason of Things: Living With Philosophy.

How I'm starting 2012

[Blogger's Note: I posted this exact message last year, but I see no reason to change it.]

I took The Life You Can Save pledge to donate an appropriate amount - the site has a built in calculator that considers your income and provides you with a target figure - to charity.

I dare you to watch Peter Singer's lecture on his book The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty - and see if you can resist the urge to donate, too.

Here is a clip: