Tracing Beck's intellectual lineage back to one of the most evil tracts in world history

Arthur Goldwag notes that you can draw a fairly straight line from Glenn Beck through his intellectual inspiration Cleon Skousen back to Boris Brasol, the man "who translated the [notoriously anti-Semitic hoax The] Protocols [of Zion] and brought them to America," where they were subsequently popularized by Beck's supposedly anti-fascist hero Henry Ford and went on to become part of the inspiration for the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.

This is consistent with what I've been writing about how about the parallel thinking and evolving hate memes of the pseudo-conservative mind which have transformed "progressives" into the bogeyman that Jews once were.

Goldwag additionally observes that, "if Beck could connect Obama to Lenin’s State and Revolution or for that matter to Bill Ayer’s Teaching Toward Freedom as neatly as I just connected him to the Protocols, he wouldn’t mince any words about it." The point being that Beck would see how ridiculous it is to link him to anti-Semitism using such tactics, yet he is perfectly willing to use even shoddier reasoning to smear Obama as an avatar of American armageddon.

My latest (and geekiest) discount book purchase

Men Of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book (hc) by Gerard Jones for two dollars.

Of course, I've been grabbing public domain books for my Kindle like crazy.

Quote of the day

'Imagine my surprise to see [Instapundit Glenn] Reynolds speculating that, “Possibly Obama just hates Israel and hates Jews. That’s plausible — certainly nothing in his actions suggests otherwise, really.” Obama’s crime is that he supposedly neglected to have a photo-op with Bibi Netanyahu, or something like that. I’m not sure what to say in response to that other than to note that Reynolds is apparently insane, which is to say that he is a rightwinger in the age of Obama.' - Clark Stooksbury

Barack Obama's double think

Glenn Greenwald observes that

President Obama gave an interview earlier this week to an Indonesian television station in lieu of the scheduled trip to that country which was canceled due to the health care vote. In 2008, Indonesia empowered a national commission to investigate human rights abuses committed by its own government under the U.S.-backed Suharto regime "in an attempt to finally bring the perpetrators to justice," and Obama was asked in this interview: "Is your administration satisfied with the resolution of the past human rights abuses in Indonesia?" He replied:

We have to acknowledge that those past human rights abuses existed. We can't go forward without looking backwards . . . .

When asked last year about whether the United States should use similar tribunals to investigate its own human rights abuses, as well his view of other countries' efforts (such as Spain) to investigate those abuses, Obama said:

I'm a strong believer that it's important to look forward and not backwards, and to remind ourselves that we do have very real security threats out there.

Another brilliant parody from Jon Stewart

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Conservative Libertarian
www.thedailyshow.com
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The sad thing is how accurate the impression is.

Isn't there anyone at Fox that has noticed Glenn Beck is insane?

Look: Beck's belief that the Obama administration is planning to kill him -literally murder him - is a flat out paranoid delusion. Even the worst of the partisan hacks working at Fox should be concerned that Beck is losing his grip on reality. This is absolutely surreal that someone can go on the air on a mainstream American television network and says such things on a daily basis.

I'm flabbergasted.

The Kindle is awesome (and a podcast recommendation)

Well, I finally got around to getting myself Amazon's Kindle e-reader since I could no longer resist the idea of being able to carry around 1,500 books in a single, small handheld device. That and the fact that I'm running out of space with the regular books I have piling up around the house.

I've been loading the device up with public domain material that you can get for free or a minimal price. For example, I got 27 books of pulp sci-fi innovator Edgar Rice Burroughs for the enormous sum of 1 dollar. It's also great for finding obscure books that I was previously unable to track down like the Tom Sawyer sequels Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer Detective.

The books download almost instantly and read - as promised - like regular book text. It's an extremely user friendly device which you'll be able to take straight out of the box and begin using without spending much (if any) time reading the instruction manual.

As for the podcast recommendation: Baggini's Philosophy Monthly.

As the title suggests, this is a podcast about philosophy, hosted by pop philosopher Julian Baggini, someone this blog has referenced more than once.

Still busy

I was hoping/expecting to be able to resume a more regular blogging pace, but it looks like my schedule won't open back up till mid or late April. This next week or so will be especially busy.

I have picked a Book of the Year for last year and that will be one of the first things I post when I get a chance; I also have a few book recommendations and what not that I'd like to make, as well as finally getting up the review of Dave Neiwert's The Eliminationsits that I've been promising for about a year.

Beck's selective stupidity

Fresh off of telling his audience that the United States is not a democracy but a republic, Glenn Beck had more to say about America supposedly not being a democracy on Monday.

Boy there are pesky phases that one that we should point out, social justice, shared community, and collective responsibility. Let’s not forget truly democratic society. Well, we’re not a democratic society. I think that was the Soviet Union. I believe it is the democratic socialist republic in China as well. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, everybody, all of the Founders repeatedly said because they knew democracies do not work, they never have, but Progressives, Marxists, really led by the Communists at the turn of the 1900s, they knew democracy was the way to get people to vote for dictators, and you hear it all of the time, how democratically elected Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin, the democratically elected leadership in Iran.

1. Beck is saying that "democratic" is communist because a communist country includes the word in its title. He fails to notice that by the same reasoning, we're not a republic, because China is a "republic" and the U.S.S.R. was a union of republics (so much for union, too, I suppose.)

2. China is not titled as a "democratic socialist republic." The title is People's Republic of China. Going back to point 1., it would seem that Beck the bullshit artist just invented a title for China in an attempt to make his incoherent point.

3. In the latter half, Beck conflates holding an election with democracy. By this reasoning, the United States is a democracy.

4. Progressives at the turn of the 20th century knew they could get people to vote for dictators?There's not even anyway to respond to that assertion, as it's too untethered from reality to know where to begin. As Thomas Jefferson put it, "ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them."

The only thing that Beck says here that makes any sense and is sort of accurate is the founders skepticism about democracy, but even here he is not entirely correct. The founders viewed Athenian democracy as flawed and wanted to create a government that would avoid those problems, but that does not mean that the end result was not democratic. The first amendment itself - allowing citizens a voice in their government and a press that can keep them informed and can act as a check on political power - is a democratic institution, for example.

For a nuanced and intelligent discussion of how democratic America is or is not (and how the founders might have been too hard on the Athenians), I highly recommend Paul Woodruff's First Democracy.

Dumb and eliminationist

"Progressives" are a disease "infecting America" says Beck. This radical disease is trying to ruin America by turning the country ... gasp ... into a democracy! Oh, the horror!

I'm sorry, but the "we're a republic, not a democracy" line is moronic. Constitutional republic and democracy are not mutually exclusive: constitutional republic is the form of democracy we are. "Democracy" as so-called "progressives" use the term refers to citizens having a say in their government and adherance to the rule of law; Beck uses it to mean the straw man notion of pure majority rules: a notion that virtually no one advocates.

For more on the subject, see Dr. Taylor's essays (1 and 2) on the subject

My fundamental point is that there is no logical or conceptual reason to, in the US context, separate the notion of the US being a republic from the US being a democracy. It especially doesn’t make sense to create a false dichotomy between the two.

While it is true that we do not govern solely via majority rule, there is nothing in the definition of democracy that dictates utter majority rule. Indeed, functional democracy requires protection of minority rights, else one can’t actually have democratic governance.

One thing is for sure: it has nothing to do with whether a given country has a federal structure or not and certainly has zero to do with arguments about state power in the US context.

Goldberg's rhetorical ruse

Jonah Goldberg, while promoting his ahistorical book redefining fascism as a form of liberalism Liberal Fascism, has noted that it's terribly significant that Hillary Clinton has said that she considers herself a progressive rather than a liberal.

A non-movement conservative ideologue might have simply viewed Clinton's choice to be indicative of the success of the decades long campaign of Goldberg's ideological predecessors (including his mommy, who got him his job) to turn liberal into an epithet that no politician wants to be labeled with (see Talking Right for an analysis of the topic.) But for an ideologue like Goldberg, inhabiting a Manichean world where movement conservatives are Good and everything else is Evil, Clinton's identification as progressive exemplifies the fact that she's really a totalitarian fascist like Mussolini and Hitler.

Over at Salon, Mike Madden writes about this rotten game

A generation after Ronald Reagan and his allies turned "liberal" into an epithet, conservatives are going after the term many Democrats adopted in its place. Glenn Beck and his paranoid Fox News Channel ranting is just at the forefront of what appears to be a movement to demonize the word "progressive," in hopes of scaring voters away from the left. "Progressivism is the cancer in America, and it is eating our Constitution," Beck told thousands of adoring fans at the conservative CPAC conference last month. "And it was designed to eat the Constitution. To 'progress' past the Constitution." The National Review ran a whole special issue on progressives in December; staff writer Jonah Goldberg even published a book on the subject, "Liberal Fascism," two years ago. The latest ad for Liz Cheney's new group, Keep America Safe, prominently features Attorney General Eric Holder declaring that progressives are about to run the nation -- before seguing, sharply, into asking whether Holder's pals share the values of al-Qaida.

Democrats could identify as Fraggles and I expect that Jonah Goldberg and his lunatic disciple Glenn Beck would start explaining how Jim Henson was fascist and/or communist who hated America and created Fraggle Rock as part of some sinister plot to rule the world or something.

Quote of the day

"Why haven't America's old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration -- a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?" - Howell Raines

That Raines raised this question in the pages of the Washington Post is a big deal, as this sort of criticism - as obvious and factual as it is - is usually confined to blogs which lack the audience and influence of the Post.

Democrats so far left that they resemble the Maoist Republicans of 1993

AM radio bizarro world beliefs about how super duper left-wing extremist Democrats have become is slightly at odds with the actual universe that we inhabit.

What values do we value?

Scott Horton, commenting on Liz Cheney's "Keep America Safe" organization depicting lawyers who represent clients accused of terrorism as being members of Al Qaeda in a commercial which asks "whose values do they share?"

[T]he question that Liz Cheney asks is an appropriate one. “Whose values do they share?” Perhaps it’s the values of John Adams. After the Boston Massacre, when revolutionary sentiment was flaring, Adams stood up to represent the British soldiers accused of slaughtering his fellow Bostonians in a criminal trial, and he helped them beat the rap. Most of his fellow citizens were dumbstruck by his decision, but at the end of a long life, looking back, Adams decided that this was “one of the best Pieces of Service I ever rendered my Country.” It’s the values of Kenneth Royall, the JAG colonel who defended a group of accused German saboteurs during World War II, bringing their appeal to the Supreme Court against the wishes of his commander-in-chief. Royall’s brilliant defense got him a promotion to brigadier general, and it later helped drive President Truman’s decision to name him the last American secretary of war. Vigorous defense of even the meanest person accused is an essential part of our democracy and our notions of justice—but it’s not a value that is shared by Liz Cheney.

Whose values does Liz Cheney share? Look at the nations around the world in which criminal defense counsel are harassed and persecuted. Look at Putin’s Russia and the case of Sergei Magnitsky, or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and the case of Beatrice Mtetwa. Perhaps it is in countries like Russia and Zimbabwe that Liz Cheney and her Weekly Standard friends might find governments that share their values.

The shadow of unreasonable doubt

From The Duck that Won the Lottery: 100 New Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher by Julian Baggini

The fact that it is possible science has got it wrong is also uninteresting: science is by its nature fallible and to demand infallibility from it is to disobey Aristotle's wise injunction to expect only as much precision as the subject matter allows. Like the connoisseur of good vodka, the truth seeker should not demand 100 percent proof. We have to live with a small measure of uncertainty. Proof requires us to move only beyond reasonable doubt. It cannot require us to remove all possibility of doubt whatsoever.

The shrinking gap between mainstream conservative rhetoric and extremist rhetoric

Media Matters notes that you can find this charming rhetoric at Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism website:

Mark Steyn is always right, whether he's writing about Andrew Lloyd Webber or, in this case, the suicide-bomber-in-chief, Barack Obama, who doesn't much care how many Democrats get sent to the electoral Elysian Fields -- or even whether he gets a second term -- as long as he can blow up the capitalist system from within. Excuse me -- effect "fundamental change." And what better way to get Hussein's camel's nose under your hospital gown than by taking over the American health-care system, all under the guise of "reform?"

That's quite a despicable achievement, being flatly defamatory and coyly racist while employing violent imagery to depict the president as being a foreign, terrorist enemy within.

That's the sort of rhetoric you might expect to be confined to the political fringes, but there it is on a mainstream conservative website.

This sort of mainstreaming and normalization both helps to close the gap between what is considered the extremist fringe and mainstream conservatism, but it also fuels and helps to legitimize the violent paranoia of genuine extremists. Extremists like the Oak Keepers who have received endorsement from such mainstream figures as Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs.

Oath Keepers is officially nonpartisan, in part to make it easier for active-duty soldiers to participate, but its rightward bent is undeniable, and liberals are viewed with suspicion. At lunch, when I questioned my tablemates about the Obama-Hitler comparisons I'd heard at the conference, I got a step-by-step tutorial on how the president's socialized medicine agenda would beget a Nazi-style regime.

I learned that bringing guns to Tea Party protests was a reminder of our constitutional rights, was introduced to the notion that the founding fathers modeled their governing documents on the Bible, and debated whether being Muslim meant an inability to believe in and abide by—and thus be protected by—the Constitution. I was schooled on the treachery of the Federal Reserve and why America needs a gold standard, and at dinner one night, Nighta Davis, national organizer for the National 912 Project, explained how abortion-rights advocates are part of a eugenics program targeting Christians.

See, when Glenn Beck calls himself a modern day Paul Revere warning that "the British are coming" or a modern day Thomas Paine trying to inspire resistance to the tyranny of a fascist/communist/black nationalist 100 year conspiracy to create an "economic holocaust" in order to destroy America, slaughter Americans, and install some form of one world totalitarian government, there are people who take him seriously.

The Oak Keepers is made up of former military who are preparing to wage war with the evil progressive nightmare state that Glenn Beck and writers like the one at Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism keep warning them about. Call me crazy, but I don't think democracy works too well if the mainstream base of one of the only two viable political parties in the country panders to violent and extremist paranoids contemplating civil/revolutionary war to "eradicate" the "progressive cancer" everytime the other party wins an election.

Oscar Wilde quipped that "when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers." Maybe the conservative mainstream might want to consider the implications of their rhetoric and consider if they really want their war prayers answered.

A book I had to add to my collection

Browsing through Barnes & Noble today to see if I could find anything worth using a recently received gift card on, I came across H.P. Lovecraft: The Fiction, a complete and unabridged hardcover collection of Lovecraft's sci-fi-ish Poeian type of horror fiction for 13 dollars. A relatively great price for a book this size.

No book geek's collection should go without.

Difficulty sourcing a quote

In my review of Blasphemy by Alan Dershowitz, I noted that Dershowitz attributes the following quote to Ralph Reed: ""[It is] the Jewish element of the ACLU which is trying to drive Christianity out of the public place ... because the ACLU is made up of a tremendous amount of Jewish attorneys."

A while ago I happened to notice that the particular section of Blasphemy that that quote comes from was recycled from the previous Dershowitz book The Vanishing Jew. Except in that book the quote is attributed to Billy McCormack of the Christian Coalition. Blasphemy does not offer a citation for the quote and I have not been able to find a copy of The Vanishing Jew to see if it sources the quote any better.

McCormack is the more likely source of the quote, as you can find it attributed to him through a google search (supposedly in a taped LA Times interview,) but not to Reed. Still, all of the links I have found have failed to source the quote to my satisfaction, so I would consider it dubious until further notice.

I wish I had posted this update when this first came to my attention, but I had intended to attempt to contact Dershowitz to ask about the quote and then forgot about it when I never got around to doing so.

Since the quote is a damning example of bigotry, it is fairly defamatory to attribute it to someone without having verified its veracity. I owe Ralph Reed an apology, regret the error and my neglect to resolve the matter sooner, and have removed the quote from the original post.

Glenn Beck spreading Christian nationalist lies to advance theocratic agenda

It shouldn't come as any surprise, since Beck has teamed up with infamous Christian nationalist liar for Jesus David Barton as part of his cultish sounding plan to create a 100 year map to save America from the "progressive" bogeyman, that Beck peddles fabricated history, but it is still infuriating to witness it in action.

On Friday's program Beck asserted that George Washington claimed, "It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible."

This is a popular bogus Christian nationalist quote.

The US Library Of Congress has a massive collection of Washington documents that can be searched by word or phrase. Here's the description of that collection:

The complete George Washington Papers collection from the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress consists of approximately 65,000 documents. This is the largest collection of original Washington documents in the world. Document types in the collection as a whole include correspondence, letterbooks, commonplace books, diaries, journals, financial account books, military records, reports, and notes accumulated by Washington from 1741 through 1799.

A search on the alleged Washington quote, and phrases from within the quote, produces no results.

Here's a favorite George Washington 'quote' of mine: "Glenn Beck is an intellectually dishonest loony toon character who shouldn't be taken seriously by anyone."

Beck not satisfied with destruction of American history, also thinks that Armenian genocide denial is a laughing matter

What a hero of human rights Beck is ... I sure can see why he compares himself to such human rights champions like Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine, and MLK. He is so ignorant and stupid that I still marvel that someone as ignorant and stupid as he is has the influence that he does.

Deborah Lipstadt and Peter Balakian previously explained the importance of recognizing the crimes of the past

[I]t is equally crucial that historical denial of genocide be addressed in an uncompromising fashion. While historians are taught to be skeptical, it is absurd to be skeptical or neutral about events of the magnitude of the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust, which are attested to by reams of documents and material evidence as well as testimonies by victims, perpetrators and bystanders.

Neutrality or skepticism in the case of these two tragedies constitutes denial, which is the final stage of genocide in that it seeks to demonize the victims and rehabilitate the perpetrators.

The broad and international record on the Armenian genocide has been created by an international body of dispassionate scholarship for decades, and notably, affirmed by The International Association of Genocide Scholars in repeated statements that note that this history is not controversial anywhere in the world but in Turkey.

Raphael Lemkin, the noted legal scholar who lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust, invented the concept of genocide, in part, on the basis of what happened to the Armenians in 1915.

The main actor here, however, is Turkey. It is time for Turkey to end its nine-decade campaign to erase the Armenian genocide. It is time to stop bullying and attempting to coerce states and organizations that engage history honestly. Such a campaign is immoral.

By passing the resolution (H.R. 106) before it, Congress must make it clear to Turkey that, even as we welcome its alliance with the United States in so many arenas, the time for this denial is over.

Turkey’s calls for a commission of historians to resolve this issue are disingenuous, especially for a country that has a law that makes it a crime to “insult Turkishness,” under which scholars and publishers who have spoken about the Armenian genocide have been prosecuted and even killed.

Also see here for a statement on Armenian genocide denial by a group of scholars.

"Quote" of the day

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"I need hooker boots and condoms" - Sean Hannity

Liz Cheney demonstrates the wisdom of Robert Kennedy

"What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents." - Robert Kennedy

Liz Cheney's organization Keep America Safe has taken to calling DOJ lawyers who represent Guantanamo detainees as the "Al Qaeda 7" as if they are members of Al Qaeda.

Speaking of extremists who are extreme because of what they say about their opponents, isn't it ironic how Glenn Beck* sees an inevitable road to fascism in a healthcare proposal but doesn't seem to manage to get worked up about what scholar of fascism Robert Paxton described as "enough" for fascism to take hold in a society: "seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national 'enemies'."

Glenn Greenwald has more on the vileness of Cheney's (and Bill Kristol's) attack on these lawyers

*Here's another one of Beck's smears of "progressives" as totalitarian monsters. I love this comment at the link

(Glenn's little into music)

"Hey, welcome to the show...and now,

PROGRESSIVE=NAZI
PROGRESSIVE=EVIL
PROGRESSIVE=LIBERAL
PROGRESSIVE=COMMUNIST
Etc., Etc., Etc.,"

Day after day after day after day...the same sh!t.

Feel the fear. Feel the hate.

The gist of this year's CPAC message

Shorter CPAC message: The nefarious Jew Progressive is destroying Germany America.

I think the last video is particularly revealing, as it gives some insight into why the anti-ACORN reality revision is so important to movement conservative mythology. For conservative supremacists, any election which is not won by "conservatives" is by definition illigitimate, a "hihack[ing]" of the country and the democratic process. Thus, the election must have been stolen by those dark skinned poor people at ACORN - part of the super secret sinister 100 year progressive commie atheist fascist one world government Freddy Krueger plot to destroy America.

Dave Niewert and David Sirota have more on Beck's eliminationist message.

The banality of the American news culture

As I've been rather busy and occupied for the last several months, I have not had the time to actively follow the news. But it has been quite illuminating to notice the "news" I still manage to pick up by a sort of process of cultural osmosis.

For instance, it has been impossible for me not to hear about the marital problems of Tiger Woods and the press conference that he held to discuss them. Call me crazy, but I was under the impression that the relevance of Tiger Woods was as a person capable of hitting a golf ball with great proficiency, not on his fidelity to his wife. Apparently, the sexual affairs of a professional golfer are of grave national importance.

Meanwhile, other than this post by Glenn Greenwald I have heard nothing about the UK inquiry into the legality of the invasion of Iraq. Obviously, the illegal invasion and destruction of another nation resulting in mass death and chaos, while creating a blackhole of financial loss and a perpetual source of anti-American global sentiment by comparison is insignificant to the Tiger Woods affair.

The rise of uncommon sense (and why that's a good thing)

From "The Mythbusters of Psychology" in eSkeptic

KARL POPPER WROTE: “SCIENCE MUST BEGIN WITH MYTHS and with the criticism of myths.” Popular psychology is a prolific source of myths. It has produced widely held beliefs that “everyone knows are true” but that are contradicted by psychological research. A new book does an excellent job of mythbusting: 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology by Scott O. Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio, and the late, great skeptic Barry L. Beyerstein ...

The authors start with a chapter explaining how myths and misconceptions arise.

1.Word of mouth. If we hear something repeated enough times, we tend to believe it.
2.Desire for easy answers and quick fixes.
3.Selective perception and memory. We remember our hits and forget our misses.
4.Inferring causation from correlation.
5.Post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning.
6.Exposure to a biased sample. Psychologists overestimate the difficulty of stopping smoking because they only see patients who come to them for help, not the many who stop on their own.
7.Reasoning by representativeness — evaluating the similarity between two things on the basis of superficial resemblance.
8.Misleading film and media portrayals.
9.Exaggeration of a kernel of truth.
10.Terminological confusion. Because of the etymology of the word schizophrenia, many people confuse it with multiple personality disorder.

The authors discuss our susceptibility to optical illusions and other cognitive illusions, our propensity to see patterns where they don’t exist, the unreliability of intuition, and the fact that common sense frequently misleads us. They characterize science as “uncommon sense” — it requires us to set aside our common sense preconceptions when evaluating evidence. They cover 50 myths in depth, explaining their origins, why people believe them, and what the published research has to say about the claims. Everything is meticulously documented with sources listed.

Why do "centrists" always need to find a false equivalency between "right" and "left?"

I walked into the current affairs section of the book store the other day to see this book featured prominently. Please take a moment and look at the cover ...

Ok, anyone see something that doesn't fit in the cover picture of the book titled Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America? That's correct: Keith Olbermann is not a left-wing fringe lunatic who is hijacking America. Olbermann is not as far "left" as Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are "right."

Keith Olbermann can be obnoxious and he can engage in hyperbole or go to far into over-the-top overhyped criticism (his freaking out over Hillary Clinton's remark about the Kennedy assasination comes to mind) but he is not an ideological left-winger who promotes bizarre, reality detached beliefs. Olbermann is, however, a vociferous critic of the former Bush administration, which I suppose makes him an evil, crazy, extremist by Beltway "centrist" logic.

Seeing this book reminded me of this book which lamented the silence of the "rational center." I had much the same feeling of frustration when I first noticed it in the book store as I flipped through it to come to a section where it said that the public was not serviced by a debate on Bush tax policies between Paul Krugman and Bill O'Reilly because both men are merely well-informed laypersons. Um, no. Bill O'Reilly is a sort of (mis)informed layperson. Paul Krugman is an expert in economics who has since won the Nobel Prize in economics.

The most laughable part of the book is the updated epilogue which celebrates how the Iraq Study Group represents the return of the "rational center" and the long arm of the George HW Bush administration reaching out to fix the Iraq debacle (how'd that work out?) Funny how the "centrist" position is only centrist by defining the acceptable spectrum as between those who are pro-war and those who are pro-war.

But the ultimate point I'm trying to make is exemplified by this post from Steve Benen about the latest crazy conspiracy theory from someone well positioned within the conservative movement

It's easy to laugh at the stupidity of all of this, but I think Max Bergmann's point is a good one: "Gaffney is a prominent member of the right wing security establishment. He writes a regular column for the Washington Times, is a frequent commentator on cable television, and runs his own right-wing defense organization. Just this past October, at Gaffney's Center for Security Policy 'Keeper of the Flame' annual award dinner, Vice President Cheney was the featured speaker and recipient of the reward. Other guest speakers included Sen. Jon Kyl and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld."

Right. It's tempting to think some paranoid nutjob with bizarre conspiracy theories is irrelevant in modern American politics. But prominent conservatives consider Frank Gaffney a credible figure.

The mainstream of fringe lunacy is one of the key differences between the left and right in contemporary politics. Both sides have their nutty fringe, but only side thinks its whackjobs are sane.

Quote of the day

From Democracy in America

[T]he BBC reporter asked [East Anglia climate scientist Phil] Jones whether he would concede that global warming since 1995 has not been statistically significant. Mr Jones replied: "Yes, but only just," and went on to note that there was a measured global warming of 0.12°C per decade since then, and that it tends to be harder to get statistical significance out of shorter time samples.

This led to a Daily Mail headline reading: "Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995."

Since I've advocated a more explicit use of the word "lie", I'll go ahead and follow my own advice: that Daily Mail headline is a lie. Phil Jones did not say there had been no global warming since 1995; he said the opposite. He said the world had been warming at 0.12°C per decade since 1995. However, over that time frame, he could not quite rule out at the traditional 95% confidence level that the warming since 1995 had not been a random fluke.

Anyone who has even a passing high-school familiarity with statistics should understand the difference between these two statements. At a longer time interval, say 30 or 50 or 100 years, Mr Jones could obviously demonstrate that global warming is a statistically significant trend. In the interview he stated that the warming since 1975 is statistically significant. Everyone, even climate-change sceptics, agrees that the earth has experienced a warming trend since the late 19th century. But if you take any short sample out of that trend (say, 1930-45 or 1960-75), you might not be able to guarantee that the particular warming observed in those years was not a statistical fluke. This is a simple truth about statistics: if you measure just ten children, the relationship between age and height might be a fluke. But obviously the fact remains that older children tend to be taller than younger ones, and if you measure 100 of them, you'll find the relationship quite statistically significant indeed.

What's truly infuriating about this episode of journalistic malpractice is that, once again, it illustrates the reasons why the East Anglia scientists adopted an adversarial attitude towards information management with regard to outsiders and the media. They were afraid that any data they allowed to be characterised by non-climate scientists would be vulnerable to propagandistic distortion. And they were right.

h/t Deltoid

A rule of thumb for tv news

If you're using footage from TMZ, there is a high probability (approaching 100%) that what you're running is not actual news.

Those old time commie Republicans

Take a look at the commie beliefs of the Republicans of 1956. Of course, the pseudo-conservatives of that era actually did consider those Republicans to be communists or communist dupes ... which is why the JBS was considered to be political extremists.

Now they're part of mainstream conservatism.

This comment from Dispatches gets it about right

There is something bizarre about listening to constant [Republican]* complaints that the Democrats are constantly moving ever further into the far left and comparing that to the reality that if Goldwater was still alive he would probably be classified as a liberal democrat.

*The commenter employed a common pejorative instead of "Republican" which I edited out since I don't approve of such usage.

Today's discount book purchase

The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (hc) for $5.44.

See here for a review.

"Justice" Department considers illegal torture "poor judgement"

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Today's discount book purchase

Head and Heart: American Christianities (hc) by Gary Wills for 6 dollars.

I already read this a few years ago when I checked it out from the library, but it's such an excellent resource that I couldn't resist getting a copy for my personal collection.

See below for Wills's Fora.tv discussion of his book (which is about the history and conflict of evangelical and enlightened Christianity in America.) You can click the little button on the bottom right to get to the whole program.

Glenn Beck is the most delusional man on tv

Beck thinks that Thomas Paine was the Glenn Beck of his day.

Let's see: Thomas Paine, child of the Enlightenment, secular deist, advocate of social democracy and scientific enthusiast; the greatest avatar of democracy in American history.

Yep, that's the equivalent of a nutty AM radio host who thinks that reading old John Birch Society literature makes him a polymath.

More on the bizarro backlash

I didn't have time yesterday to mention the "2" in Glenn Beck's 1-2 punch of bizarro populism. Namely: cutting spending.

So while the tax burden on the not rich increases while the tax burden on the rich decreases, the not rich will concomitantly get less out of their tax dollars as spending on public infrastructure, the welfare state, totalitarian* environmental and worker protections and such are reduced. Their money will instead go towards subsidizing the corporations that will get the lucrative contracts as a result of the privatization of government functions and the always increasing military budget.

That's the thing about Laffer's supply side economics. Despite their having failed disastrously time and again, they are quite proficient at siphoning wealth from the many to the very few.

It's why I keep going back to the following Thomas Frank quote from What's the Matter with Kansas? which I find so very perspicacious:

Like a French Revolution in reverse - one in which the sans-culottes pour down the streets demanding more power for the aristocracy - the backlash pushes the spectrum of the acceptable to the right, to the right, father to the right. It may never bring prayer back to the public schools, but it has rescued all manner of right-wing nostrums from history's dustbin. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson's estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt's antitrust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash might repeal the entire twentieth century.

Glenn Beck wants to return his audience to the days of Upton Sinclair's jungle.

Again: this is populism?

*Sarcasm.

This is populism?

I caught another one of Glenn Beck's zany, extended rants that open up his Fox tv show today. He was saying that to solve America's economic crisis taxes should be lowered. Specifically, that taxes on the rich should go down and taxes on the poor and lower working class should go up.

Then he brought on Arthur Laffer to explain how to fix the economy. That would be the same Arthur Laffer who inspired the economic policies of the Bush administration which transformed a large budget surplus into a large budget deficit and helped crash the economy.

Only in right-wing world

A scientist makes a statement completely consistent with the IPCC report on anthropogenic global warming, gets the statement distorted by a dishonest propaganda mag, and the usual idiots,* who have no understanding of science what-so-ever, yet speak authoritatively on the subject to their audience, proclaim that the scientist has admitted that there is no warming.

*As I type this I'm watching Glenn Beck in the background smugly repeating everyone of these falsehoods(plus more). I've never seen anyone so confidently stupid before in my life.

Quote of the day

"What prosecutor can look away when a perpetrator mocks the law itself and revels in his role in violating it? Such cases cry out for prosecution. Dick Cheney wants to be prosecuted. And prosecutors should give him what he wants." - Scott Horton, commenting on Dick Cheney bragging about his advocacy of torture

Funny because it's true

Quote of the day

"The very same people who have been demanding for years that Muslims be imprisoned for life, tortured and killed with no trials or charges of any kind suddenly become extremely sensitive to the nuances of due process and humane detention conditions -- they start sounding like Amnesty International civil liberties extremists -- the minute it's a Christian, rather than a Muslim, who is subjected to such treatment." - Glenn Greenwald

It really is quite a spectable watching people who champion the chargeless/trialless indefinite detention and torture of Muslims by Americans complain of lesser human rights abuses committed by other nations against Americans or Christians.

It's kind of like how Abraham Lincoln put it in his letter to Henry Pierce.

This is a world of compensations; and he who would be no slave, must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.

All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

In other words, if you don't want to be held without charges and tortured, you shouldn't consent to have others held without charges and tortured; furthermore, to do so violates the spirit of universal human rights which was the bedrock principle of the Declaration of Independence, i.e. "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

The hypocrites who believe in rights for some but not for others seem to prefer the maxim of the ruling pigs in Orwell's Animal Farm: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

A literal market place of ideas

From The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank

Like many winger ideas – anticommunism, for example – it sounds good at first. A “free market of ideas” sounds like “free inquiry,” or a "free exchange of ideas”; an environment in which hypothesis are tested and bad ones are weeded out while good ones go on to earn the respect of the community of scholars. But this is not what the phrase means at all. Markets do not determine the objective merit of things, only their price, which is to say, their merit in the eyes of capital or consumers. To cast intellectual life as a “market” is to set up a standard for measuring ideas quite different from the standard of truthfulness. Here ideas are bid up or down depending on how well they please those with the funds to underwrite inquiry – which effectively means, how well they please large corporations and the very wealthy.

From "The Lobbying-Media Complex" by Sebastian Jones in The Nation.

Since 2007 at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials--people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests--have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC and Fox Business Network with no disclosure of the corporate interests that had paid them. Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens--and in some cases hundreds--of appearances.

For lobbyists, PR firms and corporate officials, going on cable television is a chance to promote clients and their interests on the most widely cited source of news in the United States. These appearances also generate good will and access to major players inside the Democratic and Republican parties. For their part, the cable networks, eager to fill time and afraid of upsetting the political elite, have often looked the other way. At times, the networks have even disregarded their own written ethics guidelines. Just about everyone involved is heavily invested in maintaining the current system, with the exception of the viewer.

Was Abe Lincoln a communist?

"The only question is as to sustaining the change [an increase in taxation] before the people. I believe it can be sustained, because it does not increase the tax upon the 'many poor' but upon the 'wealthy few' by taxing the land that is worth $50 or $100 per acre, in proportion to its value, instead of, as heretofore, nor more than that which was worth but $5 per acre. This valuable land, as is well known, belongs, not to the poor, but to the wealthy citizen.

"On the other hand, the wealthy can not justly complain, because the change is equitable within itself, and also a sine qua non to a compliance with the Constitution." - Abraham Lincoln, letter to William S. Wait (March 2, 1839)

Lincoln goes on to cynically observe that even if the wealthy do complain, regardless of fairness, there aren't enough of them to carry an election. But that's beside the point: I bring this up as further evidence of how utterly stupid and ridiculous it is for Barack Obama to be called a communist, Marxist, or socialist simply because of his "spread the wealth" remark (which is almost always cited by critics out of context.)

A parsimonious argument for acknowledging the reality of global warming

Mark Vuletic explains why it is more absurd to deny the reality of global warming than to accept it. (And also provides a link to the humorous yet useful Global Warming Sceptic Bingo.)

A nice supplement to Vuletic's article is this post from Arthur Goldwag.

An age of American unreason

I really can't think of a more exemplary demonstration of the triumph of unreason in America than the sad fact that someone who runs a blog that features on a daily basis shrieking hysterical right-wing craziness that leaps off the page at you is asked to discuss politics on a major pretend news network on a pretend news show hosted by a comedian.

Update: To elaborate, here is a post where Geller says that President Obama is attempting to create a Nazi brownshirt youth movement which employs "thuggery and intimidation" to indoctrinate children into national socialism. That's insane, ok? Why is someone with no intellectual or academic accomplishments besides a demonstrated ability to say rabidly insane things about "liberals" and who wants to exterminate Muslims appearing on national tv? What's worse, what does it say about us as a society that someone who herself has an affinity for crypto-fascists and believes the absurd conspiracy theory that the President is a foreign agent (non-citizen)*, writes a book arguing that the Obama administration is waging "war on America" and gets a forward written by a former United States ambassador to the UN.

Are you kidding me? Is there anything short of flat-out white supremacism that would discredit a "conservative?" It's as if as long as you're saying terrible, horrible things about "liberals" - regardless of factuality or any kind of connection to reality - there is a place for you somewhere in the conservative movement.

*Here is a charming post where she suggests that the Obama administration is killing people to hide the fact that President Obama's birth certificate is a forgery.

The mobocratic spirit

"When men take it in their heads to day, to hang gamblers, to hang murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn some one, who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is; and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow, may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake. And not only so; the innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violations of law in every shape, alike with the guilty, fall victims to the ravages of mob law; and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defence of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded. But all this even, is not the full extent of the evil. By such examples, by instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to no restraint, but dread of punishment, they thus become, absolutely unrestrained." - Abraham Lincoln, "The Political Religion of the Nation" (Jan. 27, 1838)

Although Lincoln was speaking to citizen organized vigilante justice, I find the point equally applicable to government organized vigilante justice.

My latest discount book purchase

Flirting with Disaster: Why Accidents Are Rarely Accidental (hc) by Marc Gerstein (with Michael Ellsberg) for 2 dollars.

The book's website has some good resources, too.

Bizarro quote of the day

"I think - for justice and for the sheer fun of it - that once we gain a commanding majority in the Senate, we should void the censure of Joe McCarthy (arguably liberal fascism’s most prominent American victim) and have him set up with a Presidential Medal of Freedom." - Mark Noonan

It's like a dispatch from some Twilight Zone-like alternate dimension.

What scientists know but the public doesn't know they know

Via Island of Doubt: 96% of climate scientists say the planet is getting hotter, but only 34% of the public think that climate scientists acknowledge that global warming is real.

Looks like I'm going to have to bump up Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming on my reading queue.

Bias at NPR

One of the most curious arguments that I ever hear in relation to "liberal bias" is that AM radio is just an answer to the "liberally biased" or "left-wing" NPR. It's one of the things that I find so outlandish that I'm not quite sure what to say to anyone who believes such. Listening to ten minutes of AM radio and then ten minutes of NPR ought to be enough to demonstrate that there is no such equivalency: NPR is a well rounded news source which provides diverse views and intelligent, open discussion, while AM radio is a cesspool of vitriolic, fire-breathing one-sided/close-minded partisan propaganda.

A few years back when Milton Friedman died, I remember thinking to myself while listening to NPR's respectful and laudatory obituary of him, that were NPR actually as biased as its movement conservative critics accuse it of being, I'd have been instead hearing fiery denunciations of Friedman's economics. And conversely, I thought to myself, if it was a Howard Zinn or a Noam Chomsky who had died, there is about a zero percent chance you'd be hearing praising obits in AM radio world.

Well, that little thought experiment is now a reality, as leftist icon Howard Zinn died on Wednesday. FAIR noticed (h/t CMD) that NPR didn't have exactly the same standard for discussing the death of Zinn as it did for conservative icon William Buckley.

When progressive historian Howard Zinn died on January 27, NPR's All Things Considered (1/28/10) marked his passing with something you don't often see in an obituary: a rebuttal.

After quoting Noam Chomsky and Julian Bond, NPR's Allison Keyes turned to far-right activist David Horowitz to symbolically spit on Zinn's grave. "There is absolutely nothing in Howard Zinn's intellectual output that is worthy of any kind of respect," Horowitz declared. "Zinn represents a fringe mentality which has unfortunately seduced millions of people at this point in time. So he did certainly alter the consciousness of millions of younger people for the worse."

Horowitz's substance-free attack contributed nothing to an understanding of Zinn's life or work, other than conveying that he's disliked by cranky right-wingers. (Horowitz has been best known in recent years for his race-baiting and Muslim-bashing--Extra!, 5-6/02; FAIR report, 10/1/08.) He seems to have been included merely to demonstrate that NPR will not allow praise for a leftist to go unaccompanied by conservative contempt.

Needless to say, it is not the case that NPR has a consistent principle that all its obituaries be thus "balanced." Take its coverage of the death of William F. Buckley, a figure as admired by the right as much as Zinn was on the left. Upon his death in February 2008, NPR aired six segments commemorating him, none of which included a non-admiring guest.

I'm not the only one

I see that Media Matters also recognizes that Beck keeps saying the same nonsense over and over again like a broken record.

Who is it again that's supposed to be the criminal?

James O'Keefe, one of the conservative supremacists responsible for the anti-ACORN propaganda videos that were supposed to demonstrate how super duper evil and nefarious ACORN is, has been arrested.

History repeats itself today as the FBI arrests four people attempting to bug the district office of Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA). David Hammer of The Times-Picayune is reporting that the the right-wing "gotcha" man, James O'Keefe, who orchestrated the effort to discredit ACORN via spliced video footage last year, is one of those who were arrested in the plot against a sitting U.S. Senator who is up for election later this year.

The FBI believes O'Keefe aided and abetted Joseph Basel and Robert Flanagan, "who dressed up as employees of a telephone company and attempted to interfere with the office's telephone system," thus entering federal property under false pretenses, at a minimum. O'Keefe was purportedly present for the attempting bugging and claimed to be waiting for someone.